Monday, October 1, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, October 1, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State James Byrnes was expected to return to the United States from the London Foreign Ministers Conference with the bad news of newly strained relations with the Soviet Union. The problems had apparently developed from the Anglo-American desire to restrict Soviet hegemony through Europe and tension anent American uncertainty regarding whether to share the secret of the atomic bomb.

Speculation ran that the fact that three of the foreign ministers were new, that there had been no preliminary exchange of views prior to the conference, that, troubling to the Soviets, publicity suggested the U.S. as being dominant economically and militarily, the fact of mutual suspicion, and varying interpretations of words such as "democracy" among the powers, had all contributed to the failure of the conference to reach agreement on the major issues.

The Soviets were reported to be refusing to sign the conference documents unless their demand was met to allow only the Big Three, less France and China, to determine the treaties with Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. The argument was that the Potsdam Agreement had allowed only the signatories who had signed the armistice with the Axis satellites to write the treaties with those nations.

President Truman became the first sitting President to visit the Supreme Court, to witness Senator Harold Burton of Ohio being sworn in as his first appointee to the Court. President Truman would appoint three more justices, Chief Justice Fred Vinson to replace retiring Harlan Fiske Stone, Attorney General Tom Clark to replace Frank Murphy upon his death in 1949, and former Senator Sherman Minton to replace Wiley Rutledge, who would also die in 1949.

The President wore a gray double-breasted suit and soft collar shirt to the swearing-in ceremony.

It was announced also that the President intended to address Congress during the week on his intentions with regard to the atomic bomb, whether the secret ought be turned over to the United Nations or retained. The House Appropriations Subcommittee recommended retention of the secret until the scientists who developed the device could be heard.

A Japanese general who had commanded Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands and left a note admitting that he had ordered the torture of American airmen in January, 1944, committed suicide rather than surrender.

The tracing of Japanese assets and currency ordered by General MacArthur was seeking millions of seized gold, silver, and currency from the plundered countries the Japanese had occupied, especially in the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, as well as in Northern China, Burma, and Indo-China.

From Shanghai came a report that ten Chinese families witnessed, over a period of months, the beheading of about a thousand Chinese prisoners by the Japanese, near Shanghai in a Confucian temple. Three of the Doolittle raiders of April 18, 1942 were reported to have been executed a hundred yards from the same temple, but the Chinese did not recall seeing the event as they were maintained at a distance.

Admiral of the Fleet Ernest King announced his expected intention to retire at the beginning of 1946. About 100,000 persons turned out to welcome Admiral King back to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio.

In Rome, Rita Zucca, Zucca, in Italian, incidentally, meaning "pumpkin", better known as "Axis Sally" during the war for her propaganda broadcasts from Milan, was convicted of trading intelligence with the enemy and sentenced to four years and five months of confinement.

Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson proposed to the House Ways and Means Committee a five billion-dollar tax reduction plan, of which individual taxpayer reductions would amount to over three billion dollars, with 13 million taxpayers eliminated from the responsibility of paying any Federal income taxes. The reduction would leave tax revenue at 27.5 billion dollars, compared to 1944 peak revenue at 46.5 billion, with the predicted post-war budget running in excess of 25 billion, compared to wartime budgets of 100 billion. The package would eliminate the 35 percent excess profits tax on corporate wartime profits and reduce the wartime excise taxes on luxury items to that of 1942. Social Security taxes would be frozen at one percent temporarily.

Reconversion Director John W. Snyder stated that there might be as many as eight million unemployed persons in the country by the following spring and that the figure could remain high through 1946.

About 140 electrical workers struck in Texas, shutting down hydroelectric power to 25,000 rural customers. But elsewhere, as the New York City elevator operator and service and maintenance workers strike ended, with agreed arbitration, allowing 1.5 million workers to return to regular duties, the number of idle workers throughout the country was reduced to 352,000, substantially lower than the half million reported Saturday and the 650,000 reported the previous Thursday, the latter figure having included some 40,000 textile print and dye workers who, it turned out, did not strike.

The Police Department had erected signs at intersections in the downtown area of Charlotte to remind motorists not to blow their horns unnecessarily. Saying simply, "No Horn", the signs, however, might have proved confusing to the visitor or immigrant, especially to the people from outer space, who then would feel constrained not to use a horn at all, even when some fool barreled through the red light doing 100 mph.

Oops, that was the cops chasing a moonshiner or a Purple People Eater, or perhaps simply a delayed reflection of the event in the warp and woof of the space-time continuum. It can happen to you.

It reminds of the time, many years ago, when we were South of the Border in Olde Mejico. It was just at dusk, as we had returned from the pyramids, the way back to the City having been lost for two turns of the clockface in the roundabout, trying to seek downtown, back from the ancient Bird myths of the Teotihuacan to the present then of Niyonia, South of the Border in Olde Mejico.

Finally, after endurance of frustrating steerage along the back roads, through many travails and time splats, to achieve, with Newport in store, the road back 450 rings from 1523, we managed at long last to come into the City, as dusk bestruck from the summer sky, the solar platter blinding what was left of our crescent jewelry, such that we went through the crossroads controlled, not from the center, as that to which we were accustomed in El Norte, but rather, as with the rotaries, the foreign placement of the stack-o-bulbs upon the corners, just as had been, no doubt, in 1941, the case.

Oblivious, into a long queue we then proceeded quickly to wait. Whereupon, we heard a whistle out the orange gate, and, looking laterally, saw a gendarme of the gendarmerie blowing, blowing ever so stoically from his windpipe, as casually he strode forward to our position.

Came he then to our window as we were in pause, and began his oratory. Not a word could we comprehend, mellifluous though it was, and so motioned with our hands and said, "No comprende Espanol, pero pequito, muy pequito. No he sido yo, el bebé. ¿Cava, el cobre? Lo siento mucho. Por favor..."

At that point, of course, the kind gendarme of the gendarmerie took compassion at a glance on our plight and motioned onward into the orange night, uttering something to the effect, in Spanish: "Stupid gringo, while I shall let it pass this time, should you run my light again, I will string you to the post and garrotte you, serve your innards as sausage appetizers to my ninos in mi casa. Comprende, stupid gringo?"

"Gracias, Senor," we said. "Los ojos en el rayo, de ahora en adelante," and proceeded on our way in our little blue roadster, Newport now having advanced on the rockaday to "Candy Man".

Town Line, N.Y., 14 miles from Buffalo, was debating whether to return to the Union, from which it had seceded in 1861 to join the Confederacy. Since the status had been discovered a few months earlier and publicized, the town had become a tourist attraction. The town had written to President Truman asking for his advice on whether to rejoin the Union, stating that the town would abide by his decision.

They were not alone in this anachronized, starry-eyed misexcision.

Despite the return to standard time from War Time on Sunday morning at 2:00 a.m., the House found its clocks still running an hour fast. The House nevertheless convened an hour early.

On the editorial page, "Taking Stock" again comments on the low ranking of North Carolina among the states in most vital categories, and introduces the first of a series of articles on the page by the State Planning Board suggesting avenues to improvement.

"Death of a Theory" finds that the 82-0 victory in the Senate on Friday for an amendment of Senator Walter George of Georgia to the Full Employment bill, whereby every jobs bill to be passed pursuant to it would have to have an accompanying provision for tax revenue to support it. This amendment effectively ripped the heart out of President Truman's 21-point reconversion program, which was designed to extend the spirit of the New Deal. President Roosevelt believed that deficit spending was the only way to achieve social change through legislation, and by insisting on a balanced budget on a pay-as-you-go basis, as this amendment did, the social change of earlier years could not be effected.

"The U.S. Expands" discusses the oil off the continental shelf of the United States and its importance given the experts' prediction that American oil reserves would be depleted within twenty years. The House had approved the offshore oil drilling by private companies under lease from the states. President Truman had then issued an executive order claiming all the offshore lands for the Federal Government, though not nullifying yet the right of the states to administer it. The lands proclaimed for the Government went well beyond the three-mile international limit, up to 700 miles in some cases. Some were therefore proclaiming the action as a form of imperialism.

Ultimately, the courts would need decide whether the states or the Federal Government had the exclusive right to administer the lands.

"Dark Vision" comments on Clare Boothe Luce's statement to the House, as published in the Congressional Record excerpt of the previous Friday, that the atomic bomb called for the building of air raid shelters and moving factories underground, a contrast to her former statements of a bright, limitless America once FDR and his cronies were out of the White House.

Concludes the piece, "The leaves shall blow and rot untended across the broad land. It won't matter. We'll be underground, digging deeper tunnels, lining up at some subterranean bureau to pick up our relief checks."

The Cold War was already afoot and gaining greater traction by the day. The country, the world, had grown so inured to war that it was questionable whether it could live for long without the threat of it, to curdle the blood and provide that downy feeling of security against the potential intruder, under the covers at night, when all was dark and quiet, listening, listening for the distant echoing sound of the hoof beat down the street, of the war drum's cadence once again.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi favoring chemurgic research in aid of agriculture.

Senator William Langer of North Dakota wonders why one of the labs had not been constructed in the middle Northwest. Senator Bilbo responded that it had been Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, prior to his becoming Vice-President in 1941, who had chosen the sites for the labs, and Senator Bilbo wondered why Mississippi had not been chosen. But he said that the lab in Peoria, Ill., served North Dakota, to which Senator Langer protested, that it was a thousand miles from North Dakota.

But Senator Bilbo countered that the labs only tested the crops, and crops could be sent to these labs from remote locations, just as the Pennsylvania lab tested Virginia apples. But he assured Senator Langer that he would support his efforts to establish a lab in the middle Northwest if he would only write the bill. Senator Langer stated that he would.

The State Planning Board report mentioned in the column discusses the potential for diversification of crops, away from tobacco, proposing truck and berries, soy beans, and peaches, among others.

It points out that 91 percent of all industrial wage earners in the state in 1939 had worked in wood, including furniture manufacture, textiles, and tobacco, 70 percent of them in textiles. Only South Carolina, with 79 percent in textiles, had such a large concentration of the work force in a single industry. By comparison, Detroit had 61 percent of its labor force in the auto industry.

Compounding the problem of this concentration of labor was the fact of the low wages in textiles, and the concentration, without competitive industries, left these leading industries in a low-wage status. Thus, the state, the report advised, needed more diversified industry as well.

Drew Pearson, having started the assessment a week earlier, discusses further the blunders which had led to the Battle of the Bulge in mid-December, 1944. On December 10, six days before the start of the offensive in the Ardennes, Col. B. Albert Dickson, chief of intelligence for the Second Army, had, after conducting interviews with captured Germans, addressed a memorandum to his superior officers warning of the coming offensive. He pointed out that the Germans were training men to infiltrate behind American lines and then escape back to make reports. The colonel prepared a map showing the disposition of the German lines and urged that they be bombed. His report was ignored.

On December 12, the Twelfth Army Group drafted a report refuting Col. Dickson's account and stating that such an attack could occur.

Mr. Pearson stresses again, urging a Congressional investigation, that American casualties in the Ardennes offensive were 60,000 versus less than 3,000 at Pearl Harbor.

The column next reports of the visit of various movie moguls with Attorney General Tom Clark, only staying six minutes to provide him a brief opposing the Government's anti-trust suit against the movie industry in their vertical monopoly of movie houses and distributors.

At the same time, former War Production Board head Donald Nelson called on President Truman on behalf of the independent movie producers, such as Frank Capra and Walt Disney, to favor the anti-trust suit, as they contended their pictures could not be shown in major movie houses owned by MGM, 20th Century, RKO and Warner, embracing the bulk of theaters in major urban areas. The President had assured Mr. Nelson that this time the case would go to trial and that no compromise, as sought by the movie moguls, woud be accepted.

On both previous occasions when the Justice Department, under Francis Biddle, had sought to undertake anti-trust suits against the big five companies, Administration intervention, by James Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, had stopped it.

—Yeah, Bob. I saw it, yeah. It's like I've said all along. They got away with it. Oh yeah. But not us. Why, they even raised a problem with the Sammy Davis thing. And the cubolo.

—Oh yeah, yeah. Jack Kennedy could go out to Las Vegas and own the place. But no, no...

—Taping system to catch them? Yeah, good suggestion, Bob. Maybe with a button behind the desk that I can unobtrusively nudge with my knee?

—Okay, yeah, you get on that.

—For accuracy in the memoirs, right.

Marquis Childs suggests that, despite President Truman's denial of a defeat, in the House having shelved his unemployment compensation bill in response to the striking workers, he had in fact suffered a major setback in his reconversion policy. The Senate had cut out the guaranteed $25 per week and allowed only the extension to 26 weeks in duration of payments. Truman had made firm friendships when a Senator, but being a liberal Senator and a liberal President were two different cats, and these friendships did not prevent defections from Administration policy. Even his recent conservative appointments to the Court of Appeals had not provided the expected quid pro quo from the Congress on his legislative program.

The major problem now confronting the President was reconciling the demands of labor to maintain the level of high wartime wages with the efforts of those who wanted a return to pre-war wages. This problem rested at the heart of the tension with Congress.

A letter writer addresses to Senator Clyde Hoey the issue of the bill of rights pending for the Merchant Marine, similar to the G. I. Bill of Rights, and wonders why it was dragging in a subcommittee.

Another letter writer addresses the letter writer's September 22 attack on the WCTU as being a bunch of uneducated idiots, by calling the author of that letter an idiot.

"The records in court and prison," she says, "show that 80 per cent of crimes due to drinking this devil's brew are caused by people who haven't passed the third grade in school."

No geography. Can't get in the Army.

So, she concludes, the attack on the WCTU members' level of education as not exceeding primary grades was defamatory and was a label which belonged instead to the "drunkards". She suggests that the author move to Reno to achieve his recommendation of local adoption of the Reno ordinance permitting bars to sell liquor until midnight.

All of which leads to saddling the White Horse in Tokyo.

This could happen to you.

Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance—
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance's list
Before the Perishing!

* * * *

The Bird must sing to earn the Crumb
What merit have the Tune
No Breakfast if it guaranty

The Rose content may bloom
To gain renown of Lady's Drawer
But if the Lady come
But once a Century, the Rose
Superfluous become—

* * * *

The Poets light but Lamps—
Themselves—go out—
The Wicks they stimulate—
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns—
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference—

* * * *

Essential Oils—are wrung—
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns—alone—
It is the gift of Screws—

The General Rose—decay—
But this—in Lady's Drawer
Make Summer—When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary—

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