Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, appointed in 1930 to the Court by President Herbert Hoover, had announced his resignation, providing President Truman his first Supreme Court appointment.

Republican Senator Harold Burton of Ohio would be the new appointee, the first of four Justices, including the Chief Justice, who President Truman would appoint during his nearly eight years in office. His other appointees would be Fred Vinson as Chief Justice, Senator Sherman Minton, and Attorney General Tom Clark.

Justice Roberts, who had headed the Roberts Commission which investigated Pearl Harbor in early 1942, was only one of two remaining members of the Court who had been appointed originally by a Republican President. Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was the other, but he had been elevated by FDR to Chief after being appointed by President Calvin Coolidge as Associate Justice.

Justice Roberts had been a regular dissenter on the Court. In his last term, he had submitted 51 dissents, more than in any previous term.

Speculation ran that Chief Justice Stone might also soon resign. The information was inaccurate. But he would pass away on April 22, 1946. With his death, it would be the first time since 1881 in the history of the Court that Presidents of a single political party had made all of the appointments to the Court. The Republicans dominated the presidency from Abraham Lincoln through Chester A. Arthur, save for Andrew Johnson, who had no appointments. In 1837, the Democrats had made all of the appointments, spread over Presidents Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren. And, of course, President Washington appointed the entirety of the original Court. Republicans had made all of the appointments to the Court by 1910 when Chief Justice Edward White was elevated by President Taft from Justice. But, similar to the situation extant after the resignation of Justice Roberts, Justice White had been originally appointed by Democrat Grover Cleveland. President Truman's appointment of Senator Burton, however, would prevent the complete dominance of the Court by Democrats.

Presently War Mobilizer, Fred Vinson was about to be named Secretary of the Treasury to replace Henry Morgenthau who announced his resignation this date, effective when the President would return from the Big Three Conference at Potsdam. Mr. Morgenthau was one of the long-term Cabinet members under FDR, serving since 1934 as Secretary. He had been the chief proponent in the Administration of a hard peace for Germany, favoring complete de-industrialization and an agrarian-based economy. Somewhat modified to permit some industrialization, with strict regulation to forbid the forming of the war-tending cartels, the plan was favored by both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

As Congressman Sol Bloom, delegate to the San Francisco Conference, urged ratification of the U. N. Charter by the Senate, Senator Tom Connally, also a delegate, expressed the hope that hearings on ratification, slated to begin Monday before the Foreign Relations Committee, would be completed by the end of the week. The Senator was confident that all efforts to insert reservations to the Charter by individual Senators would be beaten down.

The London Polish government-in-exile was officially repudiated by both the United States and Great Britain, but announced its intent to carry on despite British intent to withdraw all financial support. It asked that the 250,000 men of its armed forces remain loyal. It also declared that it would surrender its authority only to a Polish government which was representative of all Poles.

The Fifth Air Force had been transferred from the Philippines to Okinawa to begin raids to supplement those undertaken by the B-29's of the 20th Air Force. The Fifth Air Force struck targets at Tojimbara, Byu, Izumi, Chiran, and Omura on Kyushu, and sank three enemy planes in the northern Kyushu harbor of Fukuoka.

The Australians of the Seventh Infantry pushed five miles toward the last Japanese-held oilfields at Samarinda on Borneo, 55 miles northeast of Balikpapan, after overrunning Manggar airfield.

The Navy permitted a Japanese hospital ship to transport from Wake Island 974 wounded or starving Japanese soldiers, an unprecedented act in the Pacific war. Most of the men were dying of malnutrition because of the longstanding blockade of Wake. Only fourteen were actually wounded. The act removed most of the remaining Japanese garrison holding the island and constituted virtual surrender of Wake.

In Japan, things were getting desperate. Kitchen knives, frying pans, and shovels were being fashioned from the casings of dropped American bombs.

Prime Minister John Curtin of Australia had died the previous day at age 60.

Canada announced that it would resume rationing of meat shortly.

The Department of Agriculture promised that 100,000 Axis prisoners of war would be delivered to farms to alleviate the labor shortage during the fall harvesting season, 15,000 more than provided in the spring and summer planting and cultivating season.

Workers at Goodyear began returning to work in Akron following Government seizure of the plants, on strike for 20 days. Firestone remained on strike for the sixth day, leaving 16,500 workers idle.

In all, 52,250 workers were either striking or out of work. A new strike of a mere 50 CIO plant railroad operators occurred at Carnegie-Illinois Steel in Chicago, the second largest steel manufacturer in the country, rendering 13,000 employees idle. Cleveland's Republic Steel was forced to shut down by 100 steel workers. In Eastern Pennsylvania, 4,100 coal miners were on strike.

In San Francisco Superior Court, a 25 year-old resident of Chinatown who had grown up thinking himself Chinese discovered that he was Caucasian. He learned of his true ethnic identity while being arraigned on a charge of theft of gold coins and watches. A routine background check showed that he had been born in Sacramento of Caucasian parents but had been adopted by a Chinese couple at age one and taken to Hong Kong where he grew up, then returned to America in 1941.

He apparently comprehended little or no English, as revealed by a colloquy with the judge in which he expressed a desire to be both an American and a "China boy", echoing the judge's phrase. The judge ordered an interpreter.

The lad will be back in court on Monday. Send someone from The Chronicle and let us see what is going on here. Sounds pretty fishy. Somebody may be playing Mahjong.

On the editorial page, "The Critic" remarks on Senator Harlan Bushfield of North Dakota having become the first Republican Senator to criticize the U. N. Charter, as reported on the inside page earlier in the week. He had stated six problems with the Charter, four of which dealt with surrender of Congressional war-making powers to the Security Council and the other two with trading Hemispheric security under the Monroe Doctrine and the Pan American Union to the broader U. N. General Assembly.

But even Senator Bushfield intended to vote for the Charter, its deficiencies notwithstanding. There were unlikely to be any votes against the Charter in the end. But isolationist Senators still could undermine the strength of the U. N. by refusing to approve the Bretton Woods proposals for a World Bank and International Monetary Fund or so amending the latter as to make it meaningless. They could also weaken the President's authority over reciprocal trade agreements and tariff adjustments.

"Honeymoon's End" explains that, while the people and Democrats were still behind President Truman with such uniformity that his honeymoon in office was still transpiring, the Republicans were beginning to criticize the new President for having taken over and continued the "repudiated" New Deal programs. Republican National Committee chair Herbert Brownell, future Attorney General under President Eisenhower, had vowed to make food control, favored by the Republicans and rejected by Democrats, an issue in the 1946 Congressional campaigns.

"John's Trap" reports that Representative John Rankin of Mississippi had double-crossed himself. He had in January proposed that the Dies Un-American Activities Committee be made permanent, and, catching the new membership by surprise with the maneuver, was able to get it passed. But Thomas Hart of New Jersey, the new chairman succeeding Martin Dies, who had not run for re-election in 1944, had just resigned because of poor health.

"The Big Money" comments on the fact that North Carolina's fiscal year income had surpassed a record at 117 million dollars. Revenues were more than twice those for 1940-41 before the war. There was a surplus of 26 million in the budget, which allowed for capital improvements in services and institutions. The contingent raises in teacher salaries, passed by the Legislature in its session at the beginning of the year, could also be implemented. It was hoped that the surplus could be devoted to the State Hospital system to build new facilities.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Scott Lucas of Indiana debating presidential succession with Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas.

Drew Pearson reports of a meeting between United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration chair Herbert Lehman, former New York Governor, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, former Republican candidate for Governor of New York, regarding expected acute food shortages in Europe come winter. There was actually plenty of food in Europe but the means of distribution were wanting. Governor Lehman sought therefore 50,000 of the 800,000 Army trucks in Europe to do the job. He pointed out that fed people are more docile, less prone to foment revolution, than the unfed. No answer, however, was forthcoming from Secretary Stimson.

Samuel Grafton asserted that the country was too quick to blame the food shortages on the war. In 1935, for instance, when there had been no war and no black market, and prices had been fairly stable, some families received twice as much beef and butter as others.

Yeah, but was it the best of butter?

Marquis Childs discusses reconversion of industry to peacetime production and the cancellation of war contracts underway by the Office of Contract Settlement headed by Robert Hinckley. His job was to cancel billions of dollars worth of war contracts, the total of which thus far canceled having been 27.5 billion dollars worth, 18 billion of which had been settled.

He also discusses the pending confirmation of President Truman's appointment of future Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri to head the War Surplus Property Board. Congress was still investigating his background, with emphasis on his company's earlier connection with monopolistic control of patents, practices which Mr. Symington had disavowed.

A letter writer, the Chairman of the Women's Division of the Union County War Finance Committee, corrects the editorial of July 4, "Shy Customers", contending that the Western counties of the state, Region 9, had met only 70 percent of the quota for Series E war bond purchases and that Stanly County was the only one to have topped the goal. She instructs that Union County had surpassed the quota before Stanly, as a whole. The editors duly apologize, instructing that they had missed the sport, had based their conclusion on July 1 prints, a day before, which had Stanly as the only county which had reached the goal since, a typographical error aloof in the News report. All that glisters also causes one to squint.