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About La Grande evening observer. (La Grande, Or.) 1904-1959 | View Entire Issue (June 6, 1945)
CD EDITORIAL PAGE La Grande Evening Observer Frank Schlro, Publisher WEDNESDAY EVENING, JUNE 6, 1915 And It's About Time! EVENING OBSERVER'S PROGRESS PROGRAM IRRIGATION Complete the Grande Ronde Valley irrigation project. LA GRANpE A city of 10,000 Extend 'the city limits. TODAY'S TEXT Kor God Rivoth to n man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy: but (o the sinner he giveUi travail, to gather and to heap up, that lie may give to him that is good before God. This also is vanity and vexation of spirit. Kcelesiastes 2 :2(i. THOUGHT FOR TODAY These riches are posses.s'd, but no enjov'd! Homer. Our Community Cannery With food supplies in the nation de clared tighter today than for n year, it becomes imperative that some commun ity action be taken to retain the com munity cannery in our city and county. In the two seasons of its operation nearly 00,(1(10 cans were processed by several hundred county families. That tin's did much to alleviate the food situa tion is obvious. In addition, the can nery has provided housewives with an opportunity to practice some of the finer arts of homemaking. The cannery hitherto has been oper ated as a cooperative affair between the war food administration and the I.a Grande public schools through the voca tional education system. The school system has announced it self as perfectly willing to continue to provide the teaching staff, sponsorship ami maintenance for the project, but the government insists it be housed per manently as a condition of allowing it to remain here. Immediate action is Funny Business 'A lilllo over-drip attachment to proven) those Icrritit iquctkS ,i while lit ' practicing!" Page Two necessary as many other communities have already made application for sim ilar projects as soon as they became available. The cannery can be located anywhere in the community, but a building with boiler and water must hp provided for housing. To meet similar -situations' Corvallis and Myrtle Point constructed permanent housing for their units. Equipment consists of three 200 quart size pressure cookers, three cool ing vats, specially built canning tables, four electricnlly controlled sealers and other miscellaneous articles. It has been suggested that if no other convenient means of housing can be acquired, the city and county govern ments can cooperate in the construction of an expensive unit for permanent housing. Loss of the cannery will be n loss to this county. It is our hope that some means of holding it here can be found. Infantry Day is June Fifteenth On June 1", 10 I I, the army and citizens cooperated in the celebration of the first Infantry Day. This June 15 will mark Infantry Day II. During those 12 months the war has taken n deci sive turn. G e r m a n y as a military liower has, for the time being, been de feated. Some day the full story of that achievement will be told. When it is told, the longest, though not necessarily the most glamorous chapter in it wiil deal with the weary, heroic, anonym ous, unshaven, griping, determined foot soldier. It's the infantryman who takes the hiss and holds the hill and dies holding it. It's the infantryman who mops up and occupies. It's the infantryman who, when all the scores are added up, wins the war. o SO THEY SAY In such a world community of machine pr iduetion, it is impos sible that any nation henceforth can live in isolation. William I. Clayton, assistant secretary of state. Civil avi itior. is sure tn be a great thins. It will step up tre mendously because the war has shown the possibilities of trans ocean flying. William S. Jack, Cleveland in dustrialist. Wo do not propose to ask for more aucr.ft than are ncevssary for success1 -.il prosecution of the war. lien. II. It A'nolil, roimmuriler, army air lorccs. Wow is :t possible that ttwy have been able to forget to this extent all t!ie services I have ren dered? Marshal II nri-Philippe Petaiti, to stand trial for treason in Funcc. Washington Merry-Go-Round Br DREW PEARSON WASHINGTON Despite all the ballyhoo about grandiose plans for the trial of war criminals, the real (not is that, as of this writing, not one Nazi has been listed for trial by the American section of the war crimes commission. , The British have proposed names. The Russians have gone ahead with an undeter mined number. And the United States army has tried and punished Various Nazis who committed crimes against American soldiers. But not one name so far has been listed by the United States section of the war crimes commission under United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Furthermore, at a secret meeting held in Washington a few days ago, Justice Jackson would not be pinned down to conviction of any large group of Nazis, such as the ges tapo or SS elite. guard, before Christmas. He even said he wasn't sure they wore guilty under International law. How peculiar the whole runaround regard ing the trial of Nazi war criminals is, has just been emphasized in a confidential report to the White JSouse by Herbert Bell, former minister to Portugal and Hungary and until recently Unitc4 States chairman on the war crimes commission. Mr. Bell reveals in his report that some state department officials did not agree with him that Hitlerites who beat up and killed victims because, of their religion should be considered guilty of war crimes. Bell took a vigorous stand on this and eventually his differences with the stute department caused him te be euchred out of the war crimes commission. Naii-U. S. Cartels Not much has been in the papers about it, but a significant lawsuit is now being fought out in New York between the United States government and Standard Oil of New Jersey. It involves 2000 German patents, which the justice department claims were turned over to Standard by the Nazis for safe-keeping during the war. The government has seized them and Standard is suing to get them back. The patents are some of the most valuable in the entire war effort, including those for making synthetic rubber, which Standard Oil held back from the American public for a year and a half after the -war started in Europe. ' - WE, THE WOMEN Br RUTH MILLETT The short news item that told about a man being fined $10 by a six-man jury for being cruel to at rat,. raises the question of whether or not the American mind will ever know how to cope' with the Nazis, jiow that they are conquered. The man fined for cruelty allegedly trapped a rat and tied him to a tree, so that his two cats eoUld practico rat catching. Maybe it wasn't a pretty sight. But if a man's abode is infested with rats a loath some animal without any lovable or redeem ing qualities it seems as though he might use any method possible to get rid pf them. But a rat tied up in the sentimental American mind isn't a rat at all, but a fel low creature that deserves fair play and a sporting chnce. That kind of sentimental bosh makes us lose sight of the fact that a rat, trapped, is Behind Scenes in Washington By PETER EDSON, La Grande Evening Observer Washington Correspondent SAN FRANCISCO With some 40,000 to 45,000 native born American of Japanese ex traction still to be released from war reloca tion authority centers in the west, the prob lem of refitting these U. S. citizens into ci vilian life is being looked on with growing concern. They have perfectly good legal and constitutional rights, yet because the United States is still at war with Japan there are some elements of the population who seem to believe that anyone of Japanese ancestry must be kicked around. In the first five months of 1045 there have been 70 "incidents" of threats or terrorism against Japanese-Americans who have at tempted to return to their pre-war homes after being released from the war relocation authority centers. S'xly-fivc of the inci dents have been in California. Nineteen of these cases have involved shootings. Ninety per cent of the shootings have been in four central California coun ties Merced. Fresno, Madera and Tulare. None of the shootings have been fatal but there have been several near misses, an at tempted dynamiting, several cases of setting fire to houses in which the Japanese-Americans were living, labor disturbances in which men refused to work alongside descendants of Japanese, and a number of visits by local citizens who have threatened bodily harm to the Japanese-Americans if they remained in the areas where they formerly lived or now wish to take up residence. The significant thins about al' these inci dents is that there h.ive been nfl convictions of the offenders. In the few cases that have been brought to trial the accused have been set free or giv-n suspended sentences. W. R. Cozzens. deputy director of the war ( relocation authority in charge oi its western operations throughout the war, looks upon these incidents as the possible beginning of hut he calls,' ' local option on citizenship." Cozzens himself is a rative Californian and probably the most experienced of all VRA officials m dealing with the problems of American citizens of Ji-panese extraction. So there is no long-distance, social workers' mollycoddling in his point of view. ' In themselves the 70 incidents may not be considered Uttibly impoitant, says Cozzens. ' I One of the most significant pieces of'evi dence is a letter taken from the company's own secret files, dated October 22, 1939, a little over a month after the war started. Standard's Frank Howard had gone to Hol land to arrange various deals with I. G. Far ben. This is the Nazi cartel with which Stan dard formed its patent partnership. The letter, signed by Howard, told how he arranged to take over Nazi patents and hold them, apparently for safekeeping, even if the United States came into the war. Howard reported: , .?. "Purusant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland, where I had three days of discussion with the representatives of the I. G. They deliv ered to me assignments of some 2000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which would operate througli the war, whether tha United States came in or not." If this document is not sufficiently con vincing, however, the justice department has another ace up its sleeve. The United States army has captured three high-ranking offi cials of I. G. Farben in Germany, President Hermann Schmitz and Managers Max Ilgner and Dr. August von Knierim. Their testi mony, if given, may be veiy interesting. Not only are many industrialists watching the Standard Oil suit to see whether they get the I. G. Farben patents back but, ac cording to Attorney General Biddle, several companies are already negotiating with Ger man industrialists to work out new cart'-d deals for after the war. . ' Capital Chaff When a newsreel tried to get Representa tive Clint Anderson (secretary of agriculture-to-be) to pose with a pitchfork or on a tractor, the genial Anderson declined, "I remember when Cal Coolidge posed in a ten gallon hat," he said. "You can't do that to me. I'm just an insurance man" . . . AP re porter Ed Kennedy, the boy who broke the armistice story ahead of his pals, got chided by the capital branch of the newspaper guild, "Kennedy should come to Washing ton," he was told. "With the vast number of advance 'hold for release' stories here, it should take no time at all for him to make Richard Harding Davb look like a cub when it comes to getting scoops.'' just a rat and what becomes of him doesn't matter, so long as he isn't allowed to live and reproduce his kind. And so is a defeated and captured Nazi a Nazi still. Let's hope that our sentimental ' pity for anything caught or capture won't let us forget that or start talking about com passion and fair play. An American editor, back from a tour of German concentration camps, has declared that the whole German people should be held responsible for war atrocities, and that until we have eliminated the German gen eral staff, we'' are going to have the seeds of another war. Undoubtedly that is a hard-headed, prac tical, sane view of the matter. But will we cany it through we, a people who can be so sentimental and forgiving that we wopy over what becomes of a captured rat? yeari but if this kind of terrorism is allowed to go unchecked; it can easily lead to excesses. Hitler got his start, Cozzens points out, by sanctioning abuses against one group of native-born German citizens. First they were deprivd of, their citizenship and denied its rights, Then there was terrorism against them and -confiscation of their property. These abuses grew until they became the atrocities committed against the Poles, the Dutch and all the German-enslaved people of central Europe. The time to check such violation of the rights of citizenship is obviously before the practice gets out of hand. None of the vic tims of the 70 incidents has been a Japanese citizen that could in any way be classified as an alien enemy. Some have actually been discharged U. S. servicemen. All have been American-born citizens who happen to have had Japanese ancestor!. Analysis of the motivation behind the in cidents reveals several curious factors. Only a few of the acts of terrorism have been committed by outright hoodlums, though such incidents have been perhaps the worst. In a majority of the cases there has been a motive of selfish economic gain, the per petrators being other American citizens who have been profiting by war-time operation of land or property boloneing to the Japanese-Americans, while the owners were de tained in war relocation centers. As soon as the rightful ow ners return to reclaim and resume possession of ;heir property or their jobs the trouble begins to brew. Another curious fact is that there appears to be little real resentment against the peo ple coming from the relaction centers by the families of service men ot by the service men 4,'iemsi .-es. American soldiers and marines who have been taught and have nat- ' ural reasons to hate tnd kill all Japanese might be expected to be hostile towards Japanese-American civilians, but aren't. Th-; reason is simply tha over 10.000 of those American born citizens of Japanese extrac tion have made combat re-ords in Italy kind France and in the army intelligence services in the Pacific of which any American soldier or sailor who knows the facts can well be proud. Side Glances f i ftm tOPft. IMS 8Y ZM SERVICE. IHC. T. M. t U. tKt. OTT. V I "My horoscope says this is a good day for important meetings, but I wish we had time to sit dow.a in comfort while we tell each other our troubles!" O McKENNEY ON BRIDGE By WM. E. McKENNEY, America's Card Authority COURAGE IN OPENING BRINGS SEVEN ODD In the recent southeastern sec tional championships in Miami, Ned Tobin, the league's first sec retary, and I ware pressed into the game at the last minute to fill out a table and at the end of Tobln AAKQJ10 V J 10 8 7 5 J42 A None Duplicate Both vul. South West North East 1 A Pass 2 N. T. Pass 3 V Pass 4 A Pass Opening K. 1 the three sessions of play, were out in fiont. I-,got quite a thrill out of winning with Ned. He is one of the old-time fine bridge players end winning a major championship at around 80 is Questions & A nswers Q Who is the heir apparent to the throne of Iraq? A Prince Abdul Ilah, regent of Iraq, and di-ect descendant of the prophet Mohammed. Q President Truman recently set up a special division for home food supply as part of the war food administration. Who heads it? A Paul C. Stark, Louisiana, Mo. . Q- When is Father's Day this Sunday, June 17. What color pennant indi cates the aoproach of a storm at sea from the northwest? A A red pennant below a square red flag with black center. Q At what altitude do cirrus clouds occur? A At 30,000 feet or above, just at the base of the strato sphere. This Curious World o r A9875 V AQ9 A93 K 109 432 I N IAS VK2 VV E 643 KQ108 a 765 862 Dealer J7!" VVMiCH IS THE CAPITAL OF iWirzEBLAMD y i i m&Kf G WATER SNAKES AWCSS T"E LE42IN& DBiTT?OEeS SAV.E FiSH. ANSWER: Bern, not Geneva, as commonly believed. NEXT: What ij a Louisiana marh hare? 67 quite a stunt. I . will look for ward to defending with him next year. ,, He certainly got he maximum out of today's hand. On the opening lead, he had the choice of making a safety play and re fusing to win the first diamond, or going up with the first ace and trying for seven odd. Ned is no coward, wd up with the ace he, went. He then pulled a small club from dummy. East' went in with the ace, which Tobirijrump ed. Now he took three rounds of trump, finessed the heart. One losing diamond was discarded on the king of clubs and , tKet other one ruffed for seven odd. P IN FORMER YEARS !K . 10 Years Ago Sherman Harer ol La Grande was graduated with the class of 1935 from Oregon State'collego at -Corvallis, . where -he -f(jored "inT?lei!trtFalrfgte affilinted with ThetajXi. His mother, Mrs. W. S. Harer,-ttend- ed the graduation exercises.. Miss Donna Feik went to Rex burg, Idaho, to join her sister and brother-in-law and accompany them to Salt Lake City. A. W. Nelson and family left for Portland to witness the Rose Festival. 15 Years Ago Two hundred dollars were do-' nated to the La Grande munici pal band by the American Legion post to pay expenses on the contest trip in July. Mrs. W. H. Bohnenkamp, Mrs. Chester Newlin, Mrs, F. S. Ivan hoe, Mrs. Anna Pollick and Mrs. Chase Bohnenkamp drove to Baker to visit Mrs. C. Bohnen kainp's mother, Mrs. R. Johnson. . 30 Years Ago ,. Miss Irma Martin, daughter of J. H. Martin, storekeeper for the O.-W. for many years, (and Miss Nell Kenneda, daughter of an old-time employe of the company, were chosen by the railroad to b4 its guests at the Portland Rose festival. Pouring of cement into the framework about the city reser voir was started, on a project to increase its capacity .bjrf almost ' one-half. ,., r
