‘Big names’ is demand at the box office
By Ernest Foster
…
Jap spy caught at China air base
Clerk’s forgetfulness leads to capture
…
Yanks hunting Japs get food, ‘grog’
…
Editorial: The Negro and the vote
The Supreme Court, reversing by 8–1 a decision of nine years ago, now holds that the Democratic Party of Texas cannot bar Negroes, if otherwise qualified, from voting in primaries.
In the earlier decision, now abandoned over the lone but biting dissent of Justice Roberts, the then conservative court had ruled (in Grovey v. Townsend) that to deny a vote in a primary was a mere refusal of party membership with which “the state need have no concern.”
In other words, the Democratic Party in Texas was in the nature of a private club, able like any club to limit its membership as it saw fit.
Now the 15th Amendment (1870) states:
The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The amendment doesn’t mention primaries. But, as everybody knows, in Texas as in other Southern states, the primary is usually the whole shooting match. The election is only a pro-forma ratification. Thus, exclusion from the primaries is actually exclusion from an effective vote.
Nevertheless, through various expedients – including the one sustained until yesterday by the Supreme Court – this exclusion has been successfully maintained.
The new ruling is a milestone in the long and arduous struggle to obtain for the Negro the civil rights accorded to him by the Constitution. He should exercise great vigilance – and temperateness – lest new expedients be devised to thwart this newly-won franchise.
Editorial: ‘NP’ discharges
The size of the problem presented by neuropsychiatric discharges from the armed services is indicated by Marjorie Van de Water, who says in a Science Service series now being published in The Press that some 25,000 men a month are being mustered out for mental or emotional unfitness.
Relatively few of these cases are a result of crackups in combat. Most of the “NPs” have not even been overseas. They usually are men who were either maladjusted to life before getting into uniform, or who have been unable to adjust themselves to a goldfish-bowl existence and to accept the bluntness of officers and noncoms as a substitute for motherly or wifely tenderness. There are many cases, also, of soldiers who break down emotionally because of worry over troubles back home.
The large number of such discharges, which must involve enormous expense to the government as well as distress to the men involved, suggests a need for closer psychiatric screening of inductees. But psychologists will tell you that while it is simple to spot some of the more obvious cases of unstable temperament, it is very difficult to identify others until after exposure to Army or Navy life.
What can and should be done, however, is to ease the way for these men back into productive and satisfactory lives. In that connection, Miss Van de Water gives employers this tip, among others:
The type of person who cracks up in military life is nearly always an overconscientious sort of person. The “gold-bricker” manages to escape strain; it is the man who won’t shirk and who faces the music that is the one to break.
All of us should be careful to avoid discomfiting such returning servicemen by crass questions about why they’re not in uniform, by gushing over-pity, or by adopting the attitude that an “NP” discharge brands a man as feebleminded or queer.
Roberts adds to his record as dissenter
Opposes granting Negro voting right
Washington (UP) –
Justice Owen J. Roberts, conservative Republican member of the Supreme Court, now ranks as the key figure in two of the greatest reversals in the high tribunal’s modern history.
He was the line dissenter yesterday when the court overruled its own decision of nine years ago and declared that Negroes have a constitutional right to vote in state primary elections. The opinion was written by Justice Stanley Reed.
Justice Roberts, reiterating criticism voiced earlier this year, charged that the court was breeding fresh doubt and confusion in the public mind by its about-face tactics.
Has changed own views
Observers recalled, however, that it was Justice Roberts who in 1937 changed his mind on minimum wage legislation for women and thereby permitted the court to reverse an earlier ruling holding the New York Minimum Wage Act unconstitutional.
That reversal, which came during the famous Supreme Court reorganization fight, has been hailed since as the turning point of President Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of many of his New Deal programs and policies.
Wage ruling reversed
The minimum wage law for women was originally rejected by the court in a 5–4 verdict in June 1936, but nine months later, it reversed this decision in upholding a Washington minimum wage statute. The split again was 5–4, on the basis of a change of viewpoint by Justice Roberts.
Thereafter, the tribunal held constitutional such programs of social and economic significance as the Railway Labor Act, the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act and the powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission – important phases of the New Deal program.
Stone changes mind
The court’s ruling yesterday was considered one of the tribunal’s most important stands in the field of civil liberties in the past decade. Justice Reed’s 8–1 majority opinion reversed a unanimous decision written in 1935 by Justice Roberts in the case of Grovey v. Townsend.
Justice Roberts and Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone are the only men now on the court who were also members when the 1935 case was decided. Justice Roberts stuck to his guns, but the Chief Justice changed his mind and agreed with Justice Reed.
New curb sought by Southerners
Washington (UP) –
The Supreme Court ruling that Negroes may vote in state primary elections raised the possibility today that some Southern states may abandon the primary system and return to the convention method of selecting political candidates.
The prospect of such action was seen by at least two Southern Senators, one of whom said that any Negro attempting to attend a Democratic convention in the South “will be thrown out by the seat of his pants.”
Senator John H. Overton (D-LA) mentioned the possibility of abandoning primaries and predicted at the same time that Southern reaction to the court ruling would be averse to a fourth term for President Roosevelt.
Mr. Overton said:
The South at all costs will maintain the rule of white supremacy. The Negro can be kept from the polls by educational qualification tests. This decision will add greatly to the difficulties of advocates of a fourth term in securing the support of the South,
Texas case involved
Southerners generally denounced the decision, in which the high court ruled that when primaries become part of the machinery for choosing state or national officials, a Negro has a constitutional right to vote.
The case arose in Texas where, as in other Southern states, the Democratic primary usually decides the winner of the general election.
Southerners in Congress predicted their states would find some other way, such as conventions or education tests, to prevent Negroes from participating in their primaries.
‘An abiding faith’
Rep. Nat Patton (D-TX) said:
I have an abiding faith that the Negroes aren’t going to vote in the white man’s Democratic primary. Our Democratic people in Texas will find some way to work out a Democratic primary for white folks. The Negroes don’t want to vote in an election that is not for them.
The high court’s ruling was broad enough to cover all primaries in which state and national candidates are nominated, but J. Lon Duckworth, chairman of the Georgia State Democratic Executive Committee, said in Atlanta that it should not qualify Negroes to participate in the Georgia Democratic primary.
Moffett: ‘Big Inch’ cost is $100 million
Challenges studies on value of line
…
Tax refunds of $60 million made by U.S.
Law proposed to drop interest on levies
…
Federal funds will construct gas pipeline
East to get supply from Texas fields
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
…
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
As tiny and shell-raked as our Anzio beachhead is, life in some respects is astonishingly normal. For example, the 5th Army runs a daily movie here. It started less than a month after our troops first landed.
They put on two shows a day, and we’ve had such recent pictures as Abbott and Costello in Hit the Ice, Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier, and Rosalind Russell in What a Woman.
I go occasionally, just to kill time at night, since the place where I write has no electricity, and I haven’t got enough Abe Lincoln in me to do any work by candlelight.
A funny thing happened at the movie the other night. I was standing outside the building with a big bunch of soldiers waiting for the first show to end. As we stopped there, a shell suddenly whipped in, scared us out of our wits, and exploded behind the building.
When the boys came out after the first show ended, they were laughing about the odd timing in the picture’s dialog. The exploding shell made a big boom inside the theater, and just as it went off there was a pause in the film’s dialog, and the heroine slowly turned her head to the audience and said: “What was that?”
‘Rest camp’ under fire
Also, our beachhead has a rest camp (ha, ha) for infantry troops. The camp is under artillery fire, as is everything else on the beachhead.
But still it serves its purpose by getting the men out of the foxholes, and as somebody said:
There’s a hell of a lot of difference getting shells spasmodically at long range, and in being right up under Jerry’s nose where he’s aiming at you personally.
Further, our beachhead has a big modern bakery, which has been working under fire for weeks, turning out luscious, crisp loaves of white bread from its portable ovens at a pace of around 27,000 pounds a day.
More than 80 soldiers work in this bakery. It is the first draftee baking outfit in our Army, and the company will be three years old in June. They’ve been overseas a year and a half, and have baked through half a dozen bitter campaigns.
They’ve had casualties right here on the beachhead, both physical and mental, from too much shelling.
Their orders are to keep right on baking though an artillery barrage, but when air-raiders come over, they turn out the fires and go to the air-raid shelter.
Life seemed very normal in the bakery when I visited them. The shift leader at the time was Sgt. Frank Zigon of 5643 Carnegie St., Pittsburgh, who showed me around. The boys were glad to have a visitor, and they gave me a pie to take home.
They said they’d had shells on this side of them and that side of them, and in front and behind. It was believable, but everything was running so smoothly that their stories of shells seemed quite academic, like some mathematical truth without reality.
Ernie hangs onto his pie
But when I left the bakery we hadn’t gone a hundred yards till an 88 smacked into the soft ground just the width of the road from our feet. If the ground hadn’t been muddy thus absorbing the fragments, we would have got some hot steel in our jeep and probably some in our persons, as the lawyers say.
The baker boys’ story of shelling ceased to be academic right then, but I still held onto my pie.
At the movie the other night, I ran onto one of the two soldiers who had so nicely volunteered to help lug my gear off the boat the day we hit the beachhead.
They were Cpl. Bert L. Hunter of Tonkawa, Oklahoma, and Pvt. Paul Norman of Des Moines, Iowa. Hunter is in the engineers and Norman is in a signal company, and works in the message center. The boys say they don’t mind it on the beachhead.
On the boat, they and some other soldiers had a frisky little brown puppy they’d bought in Naples for two packs of cigarettes and some gumdrops.
They couldn’t think what to name the dog, so I suggested they call him “Anzio.” So Anzio it is, and he’s still here with them, having the time of his young life.
OPEN: New frontiers
Wife helps scientist prove belief wrong on magnetic current
By Roger W. Stuart, Scripps-Howard staff writer
…
Unfit for fighting –
Battle crackups aren’t yellow; they’ve endured beyond limits
Relatively simple cure is rest, sleep and removal from combat strains
By Marjorie Van de Water
The man who cracks up in combat is not yellow. He is no more a weakling than a man who receives a bullet wound or who develops malaria.
Every man has his limit, mentally and physically. Modern combat puts a maximum strain on the fighters, so that if a man is in the fighting long enough, even the strongest may reach the limit of his endurance.
Fortunately, the cure for such cases is relatively simple. The principal needs are for rest, sleep and to be away from he strains of combat.
Shell shock incorrect
These cases were called “shell shock” in the last war. The term is no longer in use, because it was so loosely used and misused that it lost all real meaning. “Shell shock” was originally intended to describe the condition resulting from the nearby explosion of a shell. The force of the explosion sometimes will injure the body issue and may cause brain concussion. This true shell shock now is called “blast concussion.”
The nervous condition of men who have had more of war than their nervous systems can tolerate has gained new names in this war. The men now speak of combat fatigue, flying fatigue, gangplank jitters, destroyer stomach, war nerves and other such descriptive names. Medical officers prefer not to use any of these names. To do so would imply it is a new disease not known in peace; actually, it is not. It is the natural consequence of too much strain.
NPs don’t act wild
So, the medical officers lump all such conditions under the broad term neuropsychiatric disability, abbreviated as NP, which means simply the disability is a mental or nervous condition. As a label, it tells no more about the nature of the disability than would the term physical disability if that were applied to all wounds and physical illnesses.
You needn’t expect the NP to act wild. Too often, in fact, it is not noticeable that anything is wrong with him, so that he may be distressed needlessly by stupid strangers who ask “Why aren’t you in uniform?”
The first sign you have that he has been under terrible strain may be when he starts to light a cigarette. You may notice then how his fingers tremble. It is difficult, too, for him to control his emotions at times. If painful subjects are brought up, he may leave the room abruptly or possibly even burst into tears. It is well to be careful about questioning him on how he won his decorations. Too often they recall to him the horrors of friends killed and mangled – the awful sights and odors of the battlefields.
Battle nightmares
A chief difficulty that may persist for months is the torture of “battle dreams” in which the soldier relives the terrible experiences of combat over and over again. Sleepless nights and dream-filled slumber may deprive him of rest, so that when morning arrives, he is worn out to start the day.
He may drink in the hope that alcohol will put him to sleep or make him forget the things it is so painful to remember. He may take drug sedatives for the same reason.
Another conspicuous symptom is an oversensitiveness to noise. The dropping of a pan, the banging of a door, or even a sudden noisy movement may make the soldier leap from his chair and set him trembling.
Sympathy and understanding
When he first comes home, he feels like an utter stranger. He realizes no one around him has any conception of the meaning of what he has gone through. He feels it is useless to speak of what has happened to him, because none of these people could possibly understand. He may resent the fact that the folks at home are not suffering as he has suffered, that they are gay and apparently lighthearted. He feels cut off from friends and family.
He needs sympathy and understanding, but no oversentimental pity. Above all, he needs the feeling that he can still contribute in an important way toward winning the war. This he is well-fitted to do, for no one knows more than he the importance and urgency of war plant work.
NEXT: Home, not battlefield, may cause breakdown.