Army and Navy Journal: Japan may get Soviet warning
Russia may tell Tokyo to seek peace with Allies
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Farm region banks hit by U.S. competition
30 institutions close doors in past two years because of unprofitable operations
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Bride of Senator will keep U.S. job
St. Paul, Minnesota (UP) – (Feb. 12)
Doloris May Thauwald, who was married last night to Senator H. Styles Bridges (R-NH), said today she planned to return to her war job in the Intelligence Division of the State Department after a brief honeymoon at Hot Springs, Virginia.
The 29-year-old bride said:
My employers in the Intelligence Division have spent time and trouble training me and it would inconvenience them considerably for me to leave.
Government maps aid to state roads
State’s share eight times pre-war construction in program
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
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Editorial: The hardest way
By leaving it exclusively to the states to provide ways and means of enabling members of the Armed Forces to vote, as a majority in Congress seems determined to do, the statesmen in Washington are deciding that the hardest way is the right way.
The contrary is true. Voting is an inherent right, provided in the Constitution, the same Constitution which created Congress and details what it may and may not do.
Since voting is a basic right, it follows as a fundamental corollary that the qualifications for voting, the methods for voting and the rules for voting should be as simple as possible.
Democracy functions through free suffrage. If suffrage is not free, the functioning of democracy is restricted if not actually endangered.
Any obstacle thrown in the way of full opportunity for suffrage on the part of any group of free citizens is an interference with democracy.
The opponents of a uniform, simply ballot for use of the Armed Forces claim any regulation of voting, save the 48 different systems set by the states, is unconstitutional.
But the Constitution does not say so. It says laws governing the election of members of Congress shall be prescribed by the states, but it also says Congress may “at any time” alter such regulations.
It also says that neither Congress nor the states may abridge the right to vote because of race, color or “previous condition of servitude.” And in another amendment, it forbids abridgement of the right to vote because of sex.
In both articles, Congress is charged with the duty of enacting legislation which will make these prohibitions effective.
Isn’t it logical, then, that Congress also has the power to enact legislation which will prevent the abridgement of the right to vote for other reasons, such as the conglomeration of state regulations which will prevent hundreds of thousands of voters in the Armed Forces from exercising their franchise?
If the opposition Congressmen will read the instructions issued the other day by the Army for the benefit of voters in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nebraska and Louisiana, they will find an irrefragable example of how to keep the Armed Forces from voting.
Pennsylvania voters in the military and naval forces must apply for a military ballot within the 20-day period which occurs not more than 50 days before the election and not less than 30 days before the election. Election officials must then mail these ballots at least 15 days before the election “to the address furnished by the elector in his application.”
With Pennsylvania voters scattered in hundreds of places around the world, many of them bound to change addresses between the time they apply and the time ballots are mailed, it is manifestly impossible to provide more than a fraction of them with ballots, even if they were thoroughly acquainted with the law.
Nebraska is even worse, for the elector from that state also must apply for a form on which to apply for a ballot!
As the Army suggests:
It is not desirable to burden overseas airmail with applications for ballots where the time interval is manifestly too short to accomplish receipt, execution and return of the ballot.
There is nothing more constitutional than the right to vote. Let’s make the Constitution work by providing a simple, uniform method by which the Armed Forces may exercise their constitutional franchise. Let’s make it as easy as possible for them to vote, not as hard as possible.
Casey: Sneers and smut
By Lee Casey, the Rocky Mountain News
I am becoming excessively weary of listening to unfunny off-color anecdotes, most of them well-worn, about President and Mrs. Roosevelt.
To be sure, this is a campaign year, and in a campaign, we are told, everything goes. Such is the American way. We have always indulged in jesting and even sneering at those in high office.
It is true that some of the current anecdotes have survived the campaigns of 1932, of 1936 and 1940. But, as for these representing any kind of American tradition, even a bad one, I just don’t believe it.
That abuse that was heaped upon Abraham Lincoln offers no parallel. That abuse, unjustified as it proved to be, at least was done in the open. It came from newspapers, from ministers and from politicians speaking in public – in short, from individuals and publications that could be held accountable for their words and acts. It was all wrong, as we now know, but at least it was not speaking.
The lip-to-ear attacks upon President and Mrs. Roosevelt are both wrong and sneaking. They are especially offensive because, for the first time in American history so far as I can discover, these sneaking attacks are being made upon a woman.
Pegler’s duty
Let me try to be very clear upon one point. I’m not remotely suggesting that Mrs. Roosevelt’s activities, insofar as they have a public bearing, should not be subject to the closest scrutiny, examination and criticism. She is different from any other mistress of the White House in that she has deliberately made herself a political figure. Her words and deeds are, therefore, deserving of the same approval or disapproval as the words and deeds of any man or woman in public life.
Westbrook Pegler has been emphatic about this, in accord with his duty as a commentator upon national affairs. He has challenged, and properly challenged, Mrs. Roosevelt’s occupancy under a priority order of a place on a military transport plane. He has challenged, and properly challenged, her right to make distant journeys in military planes as a representative of the American Red Cross. He has challenged Mrs. Roosevelt’s partiality in labor disputes, has charged that her affiliation with groups sympathetic with communism has tended to give administrative sanction to the communist movement.
All this has been done directly, openly – and forcefully, Mr. Pegler has criticized and challenged Mrs. Roosevelt in her public capacity. That is not only his right but his duty. That is the business he is in.
Bogus wit
Mr. Pegler’s way and not the way of innuendo, is the true American way.
The slyness, the bogus wit – yes, and the smut – are not characteristic of this country. Those who use such methods are this country’s disgrace.
Some of the supposed witticisms designed to besmirch the President and his wife touch upon the interest both he and Mrs. Roosevelt have shown in protecting the rights of minority groups of citizens. The intended effect is to belittle and sneer at the fact that President and Mrs. Roosevelt are showing the same interest in the welfare of their fellow-citizens that is characteristic of any civilized human being.
The whispering campaign against Al Smith when he was a candidate was slimy enough. So was that against Warren G. Harding. This one is more pernicious than either because it carries smut along with slander. It is doubly despicable because it is hidden. As Edmund Burke asked, who can refute a sneer?
Approval or disapproval of the administration’s policies has nothing to do with one’s attitude toward this sniping from undercover. Decent people owe it to their own decency to refuse to listen to such pernicious chatter. It seems to me the campaign of falsehood and malice disguised as humor should come to a sudden end.
Craig Rice really stands by herself in ‘Who’s Who’ of detective fiction
She is baffling yet affords many chuckles
By Maxine Garrison
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Book blasts Democrats
Criticizes administration’s money spending
By Harry Hansen
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I DARE SAY —
Gung Ho forerunner of ‘tough’ war films
By Florence Fisher Parry
A remarkable motion picture is showing at the Fulton, Walter Wanger’s Gung Ho! It is as lean and hard as any war picture so far produced. It tells the story of the Marines landing on Makin Island in the Southwest Pacific. It shows their training and their ultimate assault. It is about as grim and painful a presentation of what war means as the human sensibilities can stand. I recommend it particularly to men. If there is a man remaining in your family, see that he sees this picture. It is the forerunner of a number of unsparing pictures which we can expect to see. For since the Hays Office lifted the ban on atrocity movies, all of our major studios have furiously entered loose on atrocity films. They have been handed the biggest propaganda plum ever to be given out by a government. The Office of War Information could ask for a better partner. Nothing could be devised that could offer sharper warning to the peace-table which will later sit in judgment upon the beaten enemy.
The motion picture industry has come a long way since the last war. It is hard for us to believe how infantile and clumsy the motion picture industry was in World War I. It made atrocity films but they were so grossly melodramatized that they became a caricature, and they defeated their purpose. The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin was, you will recall, the title of the favorite of all these films. Perhaps the most gruesome of all these World War I pictures was that little thriller called Behind the Door in which Hobart Bosworth, then a great screen favorite, enacted the role of a skipper of a U.S. submarine who, upon capturing a German submarine commander who had ravaged and then killed his (Bosworth’s) wife, locked him in his cabin and skinned him alive.
Nazi terror too
Now that the Japanese atrocity stories have broken, and the motion picture producers have been given the word by our government to proceed with their pictorial footnotes to this monstrous document, we can expect a flood of such horror pictures as will dry up forever any milk of human kindness that we may ever have had for our enemies!
So far, we have soft-pedaled, in the movies, Nazi sadism. Pictures like The Moon Is Down, Mrs. Miniver and others have confined themselves more to the MENTAL cruelties imposed upon the conquered countries of Europe. Only in one motion picture, The North Star, have deliberate physical tortures been exploited.
In this picture, we are shown the visitation of Nazi terrorism upon the inhabitants of a border-town Russian village. A woman is deliberately taken into a hastily-devised Nazi hospital and her legs and arms broken by the medical staff. The children of the village are shown lined up in the corridors of this hospital and taken one by one into the operating room to be subjected to blood transfusions which cost their lives. Nothing yet shown on the screen has been quite as unbearable as this terrible picturization of childish terror and suffering.
A foretaste
This is but a foretaste of what is in store for us. The motion picture studios have bought up practically all of the best-selling horror books that have been written about Nazi and Japanese atrocities. I predict that the picturization of Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure (not yet announced to my knowledge by any studio) will hit the all-time high in horror. It is significant that in Koestler’s report is to be found the greatest horror story of all atrocities so far reported. Nothing that the Japs have done to their captives can surpass the atrocities committed upon the Jews in Eastern Europe. Let us hope that we will be as relentless in expecting Prussian and Nazi sadism as we have been in revealing the Jap atrocities. There is little choice between our enemies. I hope that the motion pictures will make this plain to us and in a manner that we can never forget.
The motion pictures have been given an enormous responsibility and we can only hope that the whole home front audience will be deserving of the opportunity to see our enemy plain.
Imposing list
It has been feared that war pictures will reach the saturation point and that already motion picture audiences are wearying of them. This would be too bad; for while we can well understand the need for happier escape for our fighting forces, whether home on leave or in the combat areas, there is no excuse for the home front to bury its head and refuse to be informed, as only the movies can inform it, of what hell war is.
The war pictures have been growing better and better. Lillian Hellman protests that Samuel Goldwyn played fast and loose with her original story of The North Star (and indeed on seeing it, I strongly suspected that this very realistic and unsparing playwright would not have dwelt in such fond sentimentality upon the earlier scenes). But even so, The North Star is a magnificent picture.
Gung Ho! is a good example of what can be made of the facts of war, being as it is a glorified newsreel account.
The North Star shows us the vast panorama of the Russian battle reduced to a capsule of human anguish. And in the films to come, we may expect a steady improvement. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox is finishing a picture called The Purple Heart based on the execution by decapitation of our American fliers who took part in the Tokyo raid.
RKO have entrusted to Dudley Nichols, one of the best producers in Hollywood, a screen version of This Is My Brother, that excellent novel by Louis Paul, about five soldier captives. Jack Darrow’s I Was a Prisoner of Japan is being done by Monogram. Republic is producing The Death March with Curt Siodmak, one of the best horror specialists in Hollywood, doing the writing.
MGM is busy making Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with Spencer Tracy in the role of Gen. Doolittle. MGM is also starring Spencer Tracy in a motion picture version of that magnificent picture, The Seventh Cross. Twentieth Century-Fox will give the Battle of Midway in a picture called Wing and a Prayer. MGM will give us Hitler’s Madmen; and The Hitler Gang of Paramount can be counted upon to add to the atrocity list.
Hopper: Both an idealist and a practical fellow is Walt Disney, now making post-war plans for his cartoon ‘shorts’
He hopes to have jobs for all his big staff
By Hedda Hopper
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Monahan: The Negro entertainer and the current stage
By Kaspar Monahan
Two of the most popular theatrical entertainments in New York currently are Othello, in which the giant Negro actor-singer, Paul Robeson, is the star, and Carmen Jones, streamlined version of the opera Carmen, with an all-Negro cast. Last week, Porgy and Bess was revived at popular prices – and all but a few minor characters in it are colored.
This week in Pittsburgh, we have another all-colored divertissement, Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue. It was a hit in New York and would be there yet but for the shortage in theaters. Othello drew frenzied raves and Paul Robeson was lauded to the heavens for his portrayal of the Moor. Carmen Jones drew unrestrained critical praise and is a sellout for months to come. Porgy originally was ecstatically welcomed in New York and on the road.
Never before has the colored performer enjoyed such popularity. Artistically and financially, he is reaping a harvest in the theater, as well as the concert hall. The Jim Crow line and the footlights fringe, it would seem, no longer have anything in common. Colored people of talent are coming into their own in the entertainment field.
Wide attention
The national magazines, quick to note the trend, frequently feature articles on various topflight Negro personalities of the stage and screen, with copious “art layouts.” Lena Horne was recently the subject of a magazine article; last week it was Dooley Wilson, who for most of his 58 years remained obscure until his haunting rendition of “As Time Goes By” in the movie Casablanca catapulted him into the spotlight. Duke Ellington and his orchestra play for the elite at New York’s Carnegie Music Hall and at the local Syria Mosque. Last year, two all-colored filmusicals, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, made box-offices hum at movie houses all over the country.
Of course, the Negro on the stage is – and has been for years – no novelty; neither has the all-colored show. Oldsters can remember way back ‘yonder when the great colored team of Williams & Walker headed an all-Negro company. And down the years there were quite a number of shows with all-colored casts – but I don’t believe that any one year has seen so many shows, in which the sepia folks have dominated as marks the present year.
The reason? Well, your cash customer likes to be entertained. He is seldom one to quibble about the complexion of the folks up there on the stage or to fret himself about “prejudices.” Are they listed as singers? Well, white or black, or brown or red, it makes no difference. If they’re superior warblers, then that’s all that matters. Same goes for acting and dancing.
To the jungles!
And speaking of dancing, this brings us back to Katherine Dunham and her Tropical Revue, opening tomorrow night on the Nixon stage. Quite a girl in Miss Dunham, who some describe as a dancer-anthropologist, and the term is apt, for it was her studies in anthropology while a student at Chicago University which made her curious about the dances of primitive folk.
But “book learning” was not much help in her studies of the dance movements and the attendant emotions of the “uncivilized” of the jungles. Already a dancer – with a studio of her own in a drafty barn, where she and her pupils cavorted – she yearned to learn firsthand the dances of the colored brethren in the faraway tropics.
Her opportunity came when the Rosenwald Foundation lent sympathetic ear to her plea. The result was two fellowships which permitted her to spend a year and a half in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Martinique and Trinidad. There she mingled with the various peoples, won their confidence, watched their strange dances and took part in them.
The results the Nixon patrons will see in the Tropical Revue this week – and from all accounts, a sizzling session in the theater is in store for them. There were also academic fruits, among them a book on the little-known people, the Maroons of Jamaica, as well as many scientific articles for the highbrow journals. But the ordinary layman, the average theatergoer, will be more interested in the torrid terpsichorean gyrations of Miss Dinham and her assistants than in her literary accomplishments.
Boogie-woogie, too
But all of the Dunham repertoire is not exclusively devoted to the dances she brought back with her from the West Indies. There’ll be some of the steps from Harlem and various black belts of America’s big cities – so boogie-woogie, modern jiving, trucking and the like. Plantation dances, the shuffling and sliding of the field hands of the cotton regions, will be included. All in all, the program seems designed to please the arty as well as hep-cats.
Yes, the long-haired elite has also found the Dunham dancers acceptable – for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony called on them to appear for its opening concert of the season and the San Francisco Symphony when celebrating its 30th birthday featured the same troupe.
Naturally, the sort of dancing on the Nixon boards this week requires appropriate music – and the hot rhythms will be served up steaming by Bobby Capo and his “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” featuring the Dowdy Quartet and the Leonard Ware Trio. Their specialty is music “New Orleans style” – harking back to the Ballin’ de Jack days.
Everything considered, it’s just as well that the curtain at the Nixon is composed of asbestos.
Tune show coming
And more torrid entertainment for the week following when Mike Todd’s Something for the Boys will bring a cast of more than 100 performers, headed by Joan Blondell, to town.
It’s a huge show, about the biggest on tour since Lady in the Dark went on the road. Five baggage cars of scenery are required to haul the musical from town to town. Because of its size, the show will not start Monday night, but will bow at a Tuesday matinee.
Sorgen der Behörden in USA –
Die kommende Arbeitslosigkeit
dnb. Stockholm, 13. Februar –
Die amerikanischen Behörden sind nach einer Neuyorker Meldung von Svenska Dagbladet beunruhigt über die sich in Reihen der Arbeiter und Beamtenschaft stark geltend machen den Tendenz, sich einen sicheren Arbeitsplatz in der Zukunft zu beschaffen. Die Arbeitsplatzfrage in der Nachkriegszeit sei außerordentlich aktuell geworden, da das Arbeitslosengespenst nach dem Kriege erneut in der amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit auftauche.
Aus Briefen amerikanischer Soldaten aus Übersee gehe hervor, daß die Furcht, bei einer Heimkehr keine Arbeit zu finden, ständig wachse. Wie ernst das Problem sei, zeigen auch die Verhältnisse im größten Industriekonzern der USA in Detroit, wo man einerseits 75.000 weitere Arbeiter für die Vollendung der Arbeiten in der Rüstungsindustrie sucht, die Personalchefs der Fabriken sich jedoch gleichzeitig größte Sorgen machen, was sie mit den Männern und Frauen tun sollen, die sie nach dem Kriege entlassen müssen.
Feindliche Schiffsbewegungen bei Nettuno und Anzio bekämpft –
Verstärkter Feinddruck im Nordteil der Ostfront
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U.S. Navy Department (February 14, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 270
For Immediate Release
February 14, 1944
Pacific Fleet carrier‑based aircraft attacked Eniwetok Atoll on February 10, 11, and 12 (West Longitude Date). Airdrome and other ground Installations were heavily bombed. There was no fighter opposition, and no anti-aircraft fire was encountered.
Carrier planes attacked Ujae Atoll before dawn on February 12, damaging ground facilities.
On the same day, 7th Army Air Force Mitchell bombers, Dauntless dive bombers and Airacobra fighters attacked three enemy‑held atolls in the Marshall Islands dropping bombs and strafing with machine guns and cannon. Navy search planes made small-scale bombing attacks on Ujelang and Utirik Atolls.
Small force of enemy bombers raided Roi Island in the Kwajalein Atoll during the night of February 11 and 12. Our damage and casualties were moderate.
The New York Times (February 14, 1944)
Wilson’s daughter dies a recluse at 57 in religious colony in India
Margaret Woodrow Wilson, shown in this 1923 photo. (AP)
Los Angeles, California – (Feb. 13)
News of the death in India of Miss Margaret Woodrow Wilson, eldest of the former President’s three daughters, was received today by cable by her sister, Mrs. Eleanor Wilson McAdoo of West Los Angeles. The cablegram stated she died yesterday of uremia.
For the last four years, Miss Wilson, whose age was 57, had been studying the religious teachings of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India, where he and members of his organization live in solitude.
Miss McAdoo said arrangements for the return of her sister’s body to the United States for burial would probably have to wait until after the war.
Miss Wilson was born in Gainesville, Georgia, April 16, 1886, a daughter of President Wilson and his first wife, the former Ellen Axson of Savannah, Georgia. Her mother died on Aug. 6, 1914, and on Dec. 18, 1915, her father married Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt of Washington. President Wilson died on Feb. 3, 1924, leaving his entire estate to his widow for her life, except $2,500 a year to be paid to Margaret as long as she remained unmarried.
Until she was about 40 years old, the chief interests of Miss Wilson’s life were music and social welfare. She made a long and serious effort to find a professional career in music. After attending Goucher College in Baltimore, 1903-05, she spent a year at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, studying voice and piano; a like period as a voice pupil of Blanch Sylvana in Baltimore, then two years with Vivian Edwards at Princeton, New Jersey, and three with Mrs. David Gillespie in New York. From Ross David of New York, she received instruction from 1912 to 1919. Another teacher was Mrs. MacDonald Sheridan of New York.
Made singing debut in 1915
After making her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Central New York Music Festival at Syracuse in May 1915, Miss Wilson, a soprano, gave song recitals that autumn in Buffalo, Cleveland and Erie, Pennsylvania. Throughout the First World War period, she gave frequent recitals in many American cities and at Army camps, the former usually for the benefit of the Red Cross. In October 1918, she went to France where she sang at camps of the Allied armies until June 1919. A New York Times critic who heard her sing with a group of Ross David’s pupils at the Bandbox Theater in April 1915, wrote that her voice has “a sympathetic quality, which is its most commendable attribute;” that she sang “with intelligence and feeling and without affectation.”
During the years that her father’s position in the White House brought her a reflected prominence, Miss Wilson urged a universal American program of using schools for community centers. She made many speeches on this subject and appeared before a House committee to advocate the measure for the District of Columbia. To a convention of the National Woman’s Party in 1921, she said:
What shall we do now we have the vote? Let us, all of us, the men and women of America, organize for the purpose of taking a continuous and direct part in our own government. Each neighborhood should be organized in one non-exclusive, non-partisan group and should have as its meeting place and center of cooperation the schoolhouse, because it is common property. The neighborhood then should be defined for practical purposes by the limits of the school district. Also, there must be a way of drawing together all the neighborhood groups of a city or town or rural district.
Served as advertising writer
In the summer of 1923, Miss Wilson entered the advertising business as a consultant and writer for the Biow Agency, with which she remained two years. At about this time, or a little later, she engaged on a speculation in oil stocks which turned out badly. On Feb. 5, 1927, a judgment of $10,512 was entered against her in the county clerk’s office. Supplementary proceedings instituted to bring her into court for an examination of her finances were suspended, however, and it became known that she had taken a position as a bond saleswoman to pay off the debt.
The public heard little more of Miss Wilson until June 1940, when George Nakashima, an American-born Japanese architect, returned from India with the announcement that Miss Wilson had found peace and seclusion from the world in a religious colony at Pondicherry, where Mr. Nakashima had spent two years building a dormitory for Aurobindo’s followers.
When Herbert L. Matthews, New York Times correspondent, saw Miss Wilson in January 1943, at Sri Aurobindo’s ashram (the lodging where he receives and lodges his followers), she had been a sadhak or follower for four years. The former President’s daughter told him that she was happier than ever before and did not want to return to the United States.
She said:
I am not homesick. In fact, I never felt more at home anywhere any time in her life.
Her name in the ashram was Nishtha, a Sanskrit word whose meaning Aurobindo explained to her in mystic terminology as “leading to the discovery of the divine self in every human being.”
Miss Wilson told Mr. Matthews that she had not been a regular churchgoer since girlhood, but had become interested in Indian religious classics and the works of Indian mystics about ten years ago. One day, five years later, quite by chance, she selected a book by Sri Aurobindo from the card catalogue in the New York Public Library and began to read it in the main reading room. She only stopped when an attendant told her it was closing time. She returned daily until she had finished the book. The journey to Pondicherry followed.
Both sisters of Miss Wilson were married in the White House: Eleanor Randolph Wilson in 1914 to the then Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, from whom she obtained a divorce; Jessie Woodrow Wilson in 1913 to Francis B. Sayre, former U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines. She died in 1933.
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