| OCR Text |
Show WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS BY JOSEPH W. LaBESE Pan America Faces Hard Job Maintaining Neutrality Zone; Agree on More Restrictions (EDITOR'S NOTE When opinions are expressed In these columns, they are those of the news analyst and not necessarily of this newspaper.) Released by Western Newspaper Union. PAN AMERICA: Violations Determined to "share the fate of his ship," Capt. Hans Langsdorf of the scuttled German battleship Graf Spue blew out his brains In a Buenos Aires hotel. At Port Everglades, ,Fla., rested the Nazi freighter Arauca, Arau-ca, driven to refuge when a British warship fired across her bow a few miles from shore. At Ellis Island, N. Y., were landed the 400 survivors of Germany's luxury liner Columbia, Colum-bia, scuttled off the Virginia capes rather than face inevitable capture by a British destroyer. Crewmen DEFENSE: Navy Day As Europe's war came nearer home (See PA.'-AMERICA), two items of domestic news drew more attention than usual: C At Washington the navy department depart-ment awarded a $20,016,699 contract for airplanes to the Consolidated Aircraft corporation at San Diego. C At Quincy, Mass., the navy tested test-ed its newest airplane carrier, the $21,000,000 Wasp, which steamed on a trial run along the New England coast with its secret deck equipment equip-ment shrouded by tarpaulins. AGRICULTURE: Woe In today's unhappy agricultural plight, one of the sorrows of improved im-proved production methods is that increased acreage yields only glut the nation's already overfilled granaries. gran-aries. Thus, at year's end, the U. S. department of agriculture sadly announced an-nounced that despite acreage slashes in 1939 total farm production produc-tion was in many cases above last year's. Best example was corn, which yielded 29.5 bushels per acre compared com-pared with last year's 27.8 bushels and the 10-year average (1928-37) of 23 bushels. Reason for this boost was the new hybrid variety which Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace Wal-lace has promoted among the tall corn growers of his native Iowa. Although Al-though corn acreage harvested was the smallest since 1898, production was 2,619,137,000 bushels, the largest larg-est with one exception (1937) since 1932. Among wheat, corn, oats, rye and barley, the only other increased grain crop was barley. Total grain production was 4,626,000,000 against 4,868,000,000 in 1938. Winter wheat (but not spring) was up 13,000,000 WmitiS I GERMAN LUXURY 'WM jtZJ LINER COLUMBUS 'JfM SCUTTLED HERE GERMAN FREIGHTER flli. DRIVEN ASHORE Bi WMfk BRITISH CRUISER 5 GRAF SPEE WAs' li SCUTTLED HERE "mM AFTER SEA FIGHT '0 hours, the customary time of departure. de-parture. But on one such morning Helgoland saw the biggest air battle in history. When it was over the Nazi high command announced 36 of 52 British planes were shot down, meanwhile admitting the loss of two ships. London scoffed, placing British Brit-ish losses at seven and German at 12. Apparently the "security patrol" bogged down shortly thereafter, for the Germans, no longer laying mines, began dropping aerial torpedoes torpe-does on British merchant craft. Lost by this and other means were 23 allied vessels in three days. Other war news: C. French Navy Minister Cesar Cam-pinchi Cam-pinchi figured the British had sunk 30 to 35 Nazi U-boats, and that France had scored 10 times. His conclusion: The Reich has lost between be-tween 42 and 47 of the 60 submarines subma-rines she had when the war started. C. Raring to fight, cheering, singing and shouting, "Where the hell is Hitler?" the vanguard of Canada's expeditionary force (in which observers ob-servers noticed a few Americans) docked in Britain. In the North Lumbering down Finland's arctic highway came a huge motorized Soviet So-viet army while plucky guerilla fighters pecked away at the roadside. road-side. Russian casualties: About 30,000 men and 200 tanks. But it was victory of a sort, and that was what Moscow demanded. A Copenhagen Copen-hagen newspaper reported that Josef Stalin was raging mad over his army's failure in Finland, having hav-ing ordered a purge of military leadership lead-ership and an investigation at the front. Day after this Russian advance, the resourceful Finns made themselves them-selves warm while a blizzard drove the mercury to 25 below zero, paralyzing para-lyzing the ill-clad Reds. In the south only an ineffectual air raid on Helsinki, Abo and Hango disturbed dis-turbed Finnish calm, and that night they celebrated prematurely the sinking of Russia's warship October Revolution. (It was badly damaged, but managed to limp home.) To a League of Nations committee commit-tee the Finns sent word that they could hold out all winter if they got planes and guns. League Secretary-General Secretary-General Joseph Avenol got to work immediately, sending Helsinki assurances as-surances that Britain and France would provide supplies, but not men. LABOR: Probe More unsavory each day became the testimony in a house committee's commit-tee's investigation of the National Labor Relations board. Starting with the allegation of minority Boardsman William Leiserson that his fellow members (Warren Madden Mad-den and Edwin L. Smith) were "partial," "par-tial," the testimony went on to allege: al-lege: C. That Boardsman Smith had taken "extra-legal" action in attempting to settle a knitting mill strike; more- "fcSk 'Vt&i !T 'vS1 .sV 'n: yfr v v ' a NEUTRALITY VIOLATIONS There will be teeth, now. were interned for 60 days, but must then leave the U. S. (Before he hilled himself, Graf Spee's captain told how the ship had fooled her raiding victims by camouflaging, camouflag-ing, once by changing her superstructure superstruc-ture to resemble the British cruiser Renown, Re-nown, London heard how its cruiser Exeter had staged a valiant fight against Graf Spee until help arrived. Said the report: One seaman, who had both legs shot off, commented that he was "not doing too badly under somewhat adverse ad-verse circumstances." He died a few hours later.) The Spee, Columbus and Arauca incidents brought Europe's war to Pan-American shores for the first time, and there was every indication indica-tion that Western hemisphere governments gov-ernments would tolerate no more of these carryings-on. Guided by the U. S., nations which established a fanciful "neutrality zone" at Panama Pana-ma City last October began laying their plans. It was revealed that the U. S. had agreed to join Brazil and Argentina in helping Uruguay force Graf Spee out of Montevideo harbor, had the pocket vessel refused to move. Stirred to even greater action by the Columbus and Arauca incidents, Pan America planned to put teeth in its neutrality declaration. The teeth: Any belligerent warship that violates the principle of the neutrality neutral-ity zone will be accorded no assistance assist-ance in American ports. If a ship guilty of such violation seeks refuge or repairs in an American port, it and its crew will be interned for the war's duration. Nobody expected Britain and Germany Ger-many to pay much attention; indeed, in-deed, a London paper pointedly remarked re-marked that American nations had no right of sovereignty over extraterritorial extra-territorial waters. But Washington at least hoped the restrictions would prevent fighting in American territorial terri-torial waters. Already interned by Argentina are the 1,039 crewmen of Graf Spee who found themselves scattered hastily to provinces far from the ocean. THE WARS: In the West Not all of Europe's mid-December warfare took place in American waters wa-ters (see above). The western front was quiet as usual, but Britain's new "security patrol" over the North sea ran into a pack of Mes-serschmidt Mes-serschmidt trouble. Purpose of the patrol is to keep mine-laying German planes at their bases during the early morning L n : ' HYBRID CORN (Exhibited by C. E. Troyer of LaFon-taine, LaFon-taine, Ind., who used it to win the "corn king" title al Chicago's international interna-tional livestock show.) bushels over the preliminary estimate esti-mate on a harvested area 12,000,000 acres less than in 1936. Soy beans registered 87,409,000 bushels compared com-pared with the estimate of 63,000,-000 63,000,-000 bushels. The cotton yield, unusually un-usually high, averaged 236 pounds per acre from the smallest acreage in 40 years. Tobacco also set a new yield record of 911 pounds per acre, total production also reaching a new high of 1,769,639,000 pounds. Other farm news: C, Signed in Washington was a supplementary sup-plementary trade agreement between be-tween the U. S. and Cuba, restoring tariff reductions on sugar and tobacco to-bacco imports which were terminated terminat-ed by presidential proclamation when Europe went to war. Cuban tariff reductions were granted on peanut butter, salmon and mohair products, that nation also agreeing to maintain improved treatment for U. S. rice. C. President Roosevelt told reporters he intended to ask congress to raise the $550,000,000 "owed to the treasury" treas-ury" as a result of farm parity payments pay-ments and other agricultural expenditures ex-penditures which were approved by the legislators, but not provided for. POLITICS: Farm Vote For several months many political forecasters have believed 1940's presidential election will be won or lost in the midwestern farm belt. As the preseason campaign drew to a close (it will start again after congress adjourns) it became apparent ap-parent that Republicans coricentrate most of their ammunition on the progressive-minded farm belt. First Democrat to see the light was Montana's Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, himself a potential candidate, candi-date, who warned that westerners would vote the Republican ticket unless the Democrats nominate a "liberal." Explanation: "... their natural tendency has been with the Republican party and they could see no reason to change if a conservative con-servative Democrat is nominated." Meanwhile the rumor spread that smart Republicans may try to swing to their cause two of the West's foremost liberals Minnesota's Minne-sota's Sen. Henrik Shipstead, a Farmer-Laborite, and Wisconsin's Sen. Robert M. LaFollette, whose doughty father once dominated the G. O. P. Key man in this campaign cam-paign is Minnesota's youthful Gov. Harold Stassen, a Republican whose masterful fence-straddling has welded weld-ed a strong party consisting of progressive pro-gressive Republicans and disgruntled right-wing Farmer-Laborites. Already committed to supporting Shipstead in the Republican primary, pri-mary, Governor Stassen could easily eas-ily extend his idea into neighboring farm states, where discontent with the administration's reciprocal trade program may prove a No. 1 talking point for Republicans in 1940. NATHAN WITT A conspiracy? over that he had attempted to sponsor spon-sor a boycott of the mill's products by a Boston department store. C That Philip G. Phillips, regional NLRB director at Cincinnati, had written his superiors that the city editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer was a "swell guy and a dear friend of mine," and had kept out of print a series of articles critical to NLRB. When the city editor and his boss denied this, Director Phillips said that his "language was ill-chosen." Earlier it was brought out that C. I. O. had refused to drop a complaint com-plaint against a Cincinnati firm because be-cause the employer refused to reinstate rein-state a worker discharged for communistic com-munistic activities. CThat Nathan Witt, NLRB secretary secre-tary whom Boardsman Leiserson would have fired, "plotted" with C. I. O.'s Steel Workers Organizing company to force Inland Steel into a written agreement providing for exclusive bargaining. Commented Committeeman Harry Routzohn (Rep., Ohio): "I think this constitutes consti-tutes a conspiracy." After several days of this, committee com-mittee members were reported ready to ask congress for major amendments in the Wagner act So did several other groups, including C. I. O. and the National Association of Manufacturers. |
