Thursday, December 6, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 6, 1945

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that former Ambassador to China General Patrick Hurley had accused before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson of destroying American policy in Iran. He did not elaborate except to testify regarding the issuance of the American-British-Russian declaration at Tehran in December, 1943, regarding Iran. He did not make any immediate connection between the document and Dean Acheson, leaving the Senators puzzled. Ambassador Hurley engaged in a shouting match with Senator Tom Connally of Texas before the testimony began.

The Tehran Declaration, as it regarded Iran in Section "b", only gave recognition to the fact of Iran having enabled transport of vital war materials to the Allies, especially to the Soviet Union, and promised post-war financial aid in deference to this assistance, as well as assured recognition of territorial integrity after the war and adherence mutually to Atlantic Charter principles. Apparently, General Hurley was reading into this document some sinister plot to allow the Soviet Union to have a special post-war role in Iran, leading to the present troubles with the Insurgents out of Azerbaijan Province, rumored to be receiving arms from the Soviets.

The Soviets were in fact protecting the Insurgents from the Iranian Government forces moving north to quell the insurrection in Azerbaijan, the Insurgents seeking autonomy from Iran. But how the Tehran Declaration leads to those ends and why General Hurley laid the document at the doorstep of then Assistant Secretary of State Acheson, a document signed by the Big Three heads of state, is what, undoubtedly, had the Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee shaking their heads.

At Nuremberg, British prosecutors continued their opening statement anent count two of the indictment, stating that Hermann Goering had submitted a declaration alleging that Hitler had delayed the invasion of Poland by a week to try to obtain from the British a promise of neutrality. Herr Goering contended that he had been in contact with Lord Halifax to try to avert war with Britain.

During the statement, the presiding judge of the tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, declared a recess to investigate the smell of burning wire in the courtroom. It was discovered that it came from a ventilator fan motor.

Possibly overworked with so many Nazis in the courtroom.

General MacArthur ordered the arrest for war crimes of Prince Konoye, Premier of Japan on three occasions, including during the Mukden incident as well a few months prior to Pearl Harbor a decade later. Marquis Koichi Kido, Emperor Hirohito's right-hand man, was also arrested, along with seven other high level persons.

General George C. Marshall testified before the joint Congressional committee investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor, stating that all available P-36's, 31 in all, had been sent from the mainland to Hawaii for its defense in January, 1941. The total complement was then at 50. The decision was based on the belief that Pearl Harbor was most vulnerable to an air attack. He also asserted his lack of awareness of any commitment to war by President Roosevelt prior to the attack.

From Fort Lauderdale, it was reported that five Navy bombers and a sixth search plane were missing off the coast of Florida. The five planes had been due to arrive late the previous afternoon, had reported at 5:25 that they had enough fuel remaining for about 75 minutes of flight time. Tending to dispel Bermuda Triangle disappearance, of which this incident, Flight 19, is one of the chief examples noted through the decades since, was the sighting of an explosion the previous night by the crew of a steamer, the Gaines Mills—though speculated that the explosion was from the search plane, heavily laden with fuel, and that the five Navy Avengers in fact crashed during an off-course westward flight over Georgia into the Okeefenokee Swamp, an official sighting having been recorded that night in eastern Georgia of five unidentified planes, albeit apparently after the point of Flight 19's estimated exhaustion of fuel.

It was probably the aliens from Atlantis, upset about the atomic bomb.

We note that on May 2, 1998, the Miss Charlotte, a small craft, disappeared in a "rogue wave" in the Triangle. That would have been the 98th birthday of W. J. Cash, and was the 26th anniversary of the death of J. Edgar Hoover. And, at the time, we were hard at work on the initial phases of this site, having begun that very week formatting the American Mercury articles of Cash and preparing their associated notes. Make of it what you will.

G.M. offered a ten percent wage increase to workers, thirty percent higher than in 1941, but the offer was refused. Negotiations, however, continued and optimism was running high that the impasse might be resolved within ten days. The Administration meanwhile provided figures showing that the cost of living had increased by 33 percent since 1941, higher than the previously estimated 30 percent.

The Veterans Administration, and its director General Omar Bradley, had selected Charlotte as the location for a high-rise 500-bed veterans hospital. The hospital would cost approximately 3.5 million dollars to build. It was to be part of a network of 29 hospitals, to cost a total of about 158 million dollars, providing nearly 29,000 beds throughout the nation for veterans.

Following a bit over two years of marriage, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles announced that they were getting a divorce.

Whether it had been as a house of mirrors, with some weird music from Harry Cohn unsettling the scene, is anybody's guess.

Freck Sproles reports of continuing contributions to the Empty Stocking Fund for the needy children of Charlotte, now up to $1,122.15, nearly tripled since the previous day, thanks to a $500 contribution by the J. Schoenith Co., manufacturer of candy, baked goods, and peanut products.

The little girl in faux tears did it.

Expert News photographer Tom Franklin, who must have studied under Mr. Welles, has another tender one on the front page to tug at the heart strings.

On the editorial page, "Mr. Truman Adds a Dimension" finds the President's proposal for fact-finding committees on labor-management to be aimed at the ordinary consumer, thus being decried by both labor and management. Neither should have anything to fear if their opposite claims held any truth, that is, that the companies had not been turning the profits which labor contended they had, and that labor was really having it as tough as it claimed. The fact-finding committees would likely find large profits which then could be proposed to be split three ways, with a modest increase in wages, an increase in dividends to stockholders, and lowering of prices to consumers.

The piece suggests the President's motive in making the proposal to be sound, even if considered by both labor and management as bane rather than boon.

"An Overdose of Democracy" tells of the Student Legislative Assembly meeting in Raleigh, designed as a laboratory for students to learn of the legislative process, but in this instance entering naively into uncharted waters which had stirred considerable controversy when they announced their decision to invite black students from black colleges into the Assembly at their next session.

The resolution had caused Secretary of State Thad Eure to come to them and urge that they reconsider their stance, that it was contrary to all tradition and could even result in loss of appropriations for the University. They thumbed their noses at that prospect and insisted on the democratic rule which had carried the resolution.

Mr. Eure persisted, however, contending that the idea had to have originated from someone outside the state, attending the University on the G.I. Bill.

The whole of the matter suggested the gap between the generations. The students did not understand the tradition on which Mr. Eure sought to shed light, and Mr. Eure was genuinely so steeped in that tradition that he could not possibly conceive of such a radical notion having originated in the mind of a North Carolinian.

"Mr. Eure, of course, is turning away from an unpleasant future and gazing hopefully back into a simpler past. The students, as is their way, are thrusting out in advance of their time. It is small wonder they cannot see eye to eye."

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Toward the Same Purpose", discusses the State Hospital Board and its need to provide for better service to the indigent and mentally unbalanced by having programs of rehabilitation and undertaking sound management practices, requiring that those able to pay do so.

Drew Pearson discusses the ten-member Far Eastern Advisory Committee meeting in Washington having reached agreement on basic policy to be implemented in Japan, more restrictive than that formulated by the State Department and implemented by General MacArthur. Russia was not on the committee, though their presence had been desired.

Australian Foreign Minister Herbert Evatt had asked correspondent Laurence Todd of the Russian Tass news agency whether Russia would join the committee to make it a full football team, to which Mr. Todd responded with a laugh.

He next imparts of Henry Wallace having noticed a headline beneath a photo of Dean Acheson, which had stated: "Red Dean Calls for Friendship with Russia". It actually referred to the Dean of Canterbury, sometimes called the "Red Dean", and was not meant to imply Communist sympathies. Both Dean Acheson and the Red Dean had spoken at a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden calling for better relations with Russia. Mr. Wallace sent the clipping to Mr. Acheson with the comment that at least they had not started calling him "Red Henry" yet.

Mr. Pearson next reports of the Labor-Management Conference, treated largely as a failure, having come close to making some limited progress despite itself and its divisions, not only between labor and management, but also within each side. The progressive clique on the side of management, led by Robert Sarnoff of RCA and Eric Johnston of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wanted their conservative colleagues to abandon the harsh anti-labor provisions of their proposal, calling for abrogation of the Wagner Act, establishing the right of collective bargaining, and for repeal of the Norris-La Guardia Act, preventing injunctions from issuing against strikes. Though the Sarnoff-Johnston efforts had proved nearly successful, in the end, the conservatives stuck by their restrictive proposals, dooming the conference to failure.

On the labor side, John L. Lewis, while plumping for labor unity, had actually spent most of the conference trying to split CIO and AFL asunder so that he might enter the breach as a healer and come out the leader of CIO.

Marquis Childs continues the comparison between the present situation in China and the civil war in Russia in 1919 between the Czarists and the Bolsheviks, a civil war into which the British, the Japanese, and the French had sought American involvement, but which had been successfully resisted. But the Russians thereafter distrusted the rest of the world.

At that earlier time, there was a coterie of men in the State Department who believed that they could aid the Czarists and cause the Revolution to be abandoned by the masses. The attitude resulted from a fundamental misunderstanding of the long-term tension between the Czarists and the proletariat.

At present, the same sort of misunderstanding appeared in American policy toward China, that providing some limited help to Chiang's forces would enable victory over the Communists, and result in a unified China. But there was danger in the belief, that it could result in a quagmire, requiring the United States to send more troops, money, and guns to the fight, and gradually draw the U.S. into the internal dispute.

Mr. Childs points out that the gravest problem with such intervention was that it ran contrary to American tradition and that the great majority of the people of the country stood opposed to it. The country had been aroused to fight in World War II only after direct attack on its territory.

With the war over, the American people were motivated only to see to it that the troops were brought home, did not want to become embroiled in another war. The troops themselves were angry about being kept in foreign territory beyond their ostensible need. In China, there was complaint by fliers of still being forced to fly the perilous route over the Hump in the Himalayas to carry supplies to Chiang's forces from India and Burma, nearly four months after the end of the war.

This attitude was that which confused many foreign nations. Arguments could be presented that a century-long Pax Americana should become the order of the day, to use American might to enforce the peace around the world, working benevolently through the U.N. But it could not be done practically for lack of public support for such a position of world leadership.

It left the country but one choice for foreign policy, to be, as Walter Lippmann had suggested, the friendly mediator between nations. The active internationalists needed to come to grips with this limitation on the potential of American force and influence around the world, an autonomic restraint to be imposed from within.

"We have a chance to become a working partner in a world organization. Quarrels over intervention, in China or anywhere else, weaken that possibility because such quarrels inevitably stir all the old isolationist prejudices."

Samuel Grafton finds it no shock, as reported by an Army study, that the German people disliked the American occupiers. Another more interesting study had stated that a main barrier to German political education was the belief that there would be a war between America and Russia, that the Germans followed with keen interest all indications of discord between the two nations. The result was that Germans felt no compelling need to solve their own problems or change their political course. Thus the deteriorating relations between Russia and the United States did not affect only the two countries.

Gunther Stein had written an article in The Christian Science Monitor stating that because of the fear of Communism, Japan might ultimately emerge as the strongest country in Asia. In China, the policy of the Kuomintang was to oppose agrarian reform sought by the Communists, the opposite policy to that being put in place by General MacArthur in post-war Japan, his reforms being more far-reaching than those of the Communists.

By helping, impelled by fear of Communism, the Chiang Government in China, America might well find itself having aided the former enemy, Japan, to become the leader in Asia, while an unreformed China would be restricted in progress by a severe internal crisis.

The Japanese, like the Germans, believed, with some grim satisfaction, that a war might eventually erupt between America and Russia.

Mr. Grafton reminds that, as with the atomic bomb, there could be chain reactions in politics.

A letter writer, in an open letter to North Carolina Senator Clyde Hoey, tells of his son stuck on Okinawa, having served in the Army for three years, overseas for 18 months. The men, he imparts, were increasingly frustrated at not being able to get home. The military claim was absence of boats to transport them, but Drew Pearson had contended in his column that there were plenty of boats sitting idle in the harbors of the United States.

Another letter protests the consideration being given to building a parking deck over the Founder's Cemetery, as discussed the previous week in the editorial column. He notes that in New York City, the Trinity graveyard remained safe from surrounding encroachment by urban improvement. Charlotte, he insists, could certainly do without such improvement.

It did.

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