Part I Part2 Part3 Part4 Part5 Part6 Part7 Part8 Part9 Part10
Read my Dad's editorials until I fell asleep last night. We share the same egalitarian world view. He also shares my violent disgust and revulsion of Nazis and Fascists.
He was editor for about two years, I believe he was replaced when the paper was sold, which is a pretty common practice. It looks like he wrote at least one editorial a day, seven days a week during that time. What a wonderful body of work and so many are still relevant today. The writing style is dated and not sophisticated but neither was the paper or its audience. It was blue collar all the way.
He shaped a progressive community centered newspaper with regular features on things like your legal rights as an employee, what the government was doing and resources for returning vets. He took on just about everyone including the President of the United States.
He wrote an editorial which was a Civics class for the masses, explaining the three branches of government and who did what and why. He took on the governor of New Jersey over his failure to take care of returning vets and the staggering housing crisis. He wrote a lot about veteran's issues and what the government needed to do in their behalf. He wrote about his war experiences (he was part of the Jolly Rogers) and the experiences of other vets. He wrote about International issues as the world reshaped itself after the war. There was really no subject he avoided.
There are so many editorials, timeless in so many cases in the lessons they want us to learn. Still topical and valid more than 70 years later. It is a snapshot into the world of the greatest generation and how war changed them and the country for all time. Perhaps their greatest gift to us is as truth seekers who spoke that truth to power no matter the cost, the greatest generation came back to build the greatest country.
This editorial was published September 30, 1946. In reading the paper and his editorials things really haven't changed much, the left led by Henry Wallace is pulling progressives on both coasts much to the party's consternation. Unions are still trying to pull the whole party left, Truman is trying to hold the middle of the country and the housing market sucks for returning Vets. Enjoy, I smile a great big smile when I read about the kind of world he wanted and thought he fought for.
WHO’S UN-AMERICAN
Almost everyone has heard about the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That’s the congressional group which takes its marching orders from Representative John E Rankin of Mississippi. This committee is supposed to investigate subversive activity throughout the country. Its members are particularly interested in government projects the atomic plant down at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Un-American activity is exposed and crushed wherever the committee’s investigators can find it.
Not a bad idea on the surface - provided that there’s general agreement over what, exactly, constitutes an un-American activity. But there appears to be no such agreement. Representative Rankin himself is notorious for a brand of Americanism which may go over in the backwoods of Mississippi, but holds no appeal for the rest of the country. Rankin hates communists and he hates foreigners. He believes in the racial and cultural superiority of the white Protestant American. For him the American way is a narrow private road fenced with no trespass.
His fierce opposition to communism is all right with most people. Very few of us have any sympathy for communists. But we don’t, like Rankin, find communists under the bed every night. The gentleman from Mississippi sees communists behind the OPA; he believes that the setting up of a fair employment practices committee would be a communist measure. Likewise the federal housing program. The journalists who criticized his leadership of the House Veterans’ Committee and forced Brigadier General Hines from the Veterans’ Administration in favor of General Bradley - they are communists too, says Mr. Rankin of Mississippi.
This is the congressman who has just turned his investigators loose on the atomic scientists down at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It’s a safe bet that before he is through some of our most brilliant young physicists will be discredited and forced to resign from the atomic project. They will be kicked out of their laboratories because they didn’t meet Representative Rankin’s narrow and prejudiced standards of Americanism. Perhaps a few of them will be foreign born. One of these was a young Jewish scientist from Canada, Dr. Louis A. Sloton, who last May walked into a radioactive barrage to scatter a plutonium pile whose deadly chain reaction would soon have killed every man in the building. Dr. Sloton won’t be able to answer any un-American charge, because nine days after the accident his body literally fell apart from radiation burns. But other scientists can tell Mr. Rankin that while Sloton may have been un-American - because he was Jewish and Canadian and fought against Franco-Spain - he nevertheless assembled and delivered the first atomic bomb in history.
What seems to be needed is a clear-cut definition of Americanism. Right now the word doesn’t mean much of anything. We call the Ku Klux Klan un-American, the Klan calls the Catholics un-American, the Catholics denounce communists, communists denounce fascists, fascists denounce Jews, and so on. Almost anybody can be accused of un-American activity, depending on the prejudices of his accuser.
From this corner un-American activity would consist of promoting totalitarian measures and promoting racial and religious prejudice. Any attempt to control free thought and free speech is un-American. And persecuting a man without formal charges-that’s un-American. Before he goes down to Oak Ridge let Mr. Rankin of Mississippi ask himself whether he is qualified to throw the first brick.