Saturday, September 29, 1945

The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 29, 1945

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the New York City elevator operators and building service workers had been ordered by their union head, David Sullivan, to return to work after Governor Thomas Dewey had obtained the assent of both labor and management to settle the dispute by arbitration.

Soon, the Empire State Building workers could return above the 10th floor and the ankle-deep refuse would be swept away and packed onto the barges headed out to sea, the eternal sea.

The 6,000 print and dye workers in the textile plants of Paterson, N.J., and approximately 14,000 others in the trade in the New Jersey area, continued to refuse to return to work, in the face of a threat to nullify their union contract. But it turned out that the contention by the union president that the strike had spread to 62,000 workers in nine Eastern seaboard states, as far as South Carolina, was false. None of the plants in the other states found any workers striking.

Martha Azer of the News tells a sad account of three Salisbury boys, the Pinions, each destined to die of muscular dystrophy, as somewhat vaguely related the day before on the editorial page. When hearing of their plight, the community had reached out and collected $8,500 for their care and comfort for the rest of their lives, including over a $1,000 collected by the Charlotte Optimist Club. Scant welfare payments to their mother had not been enough to care for them, and their father had died in 1934, prior to the first symptoms and diagnosis at Duke.

In Tokyo, General MacArthur ordered that the Japanese Home Ministry not censor any press and radio reports after there had been an attempt by the agency to block dissemination of Tokyo and Osaka newspapers reporting of the Emperor's visit to General MacArthur, during which he lost his face by doffing his hat, bowing, and shaking hands with his inferior.

The Home Ministry, acting pursuant to laws on the books in Japan since 1900, permitting press censorship, had undertaken its action because, it said, the news was "too awesome and would have a bad effect on the Japanese people".

Whether the agency also thought it an iconic meeting, is not stated.

In Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Cordoba in Argentina, students called a general strike in protest of the Government state of siege, having censored all press and radio and detained newspaper editors in advance of the national election. Some 300 students booed Vice-President Juan Peron, the strong man of Argentina, when he visited the University of La Plata to swear in a Federally-appointed governor. Three thousand persons had been jailed in Buenos Aires, and at Villa Devoto, the jailers were forced to release ordinary criminals to accommodate the political prisoners. Some of those detained, however, were being released, and an afternoon newspaper had been allowed to resume publication.

Ambassador Spruille Braden, nominated to replace Nelson Rockefeller as Assistant Secretary of State on Inter-American affairs, conferred with Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson regarding the situation in Argentina, anent whether the Argentine had complied with its commitment to eradicate fascism and establish a democratic government, to which it obligated itself at the Mexico City conference earlier in the year.

It was thought that the last session of the London conference of Foreign Ministers would occur Monday, as there was still debate ongoing regarding how to resolve the Balkans treaties, the Russians wanting only the Big Three involved, per Potsdam, and the Britons and Americans wanting the participation fully of France and China. It was hoped that the impasse on participation could be cleared during the weekend so that the actual treaties could be written.

An early frost, extending from Michigan through the Ohio Valley and the Middle Mississippi Valley, into Southwest Texas, hit the Midwest, with temperatures recorded as low as 17 degrees in Land O' Lakes, Wisconsin, 22 degrees in Iowa and 24 in Nebraska.

Button up.

And, tonight, War Time officially ends at 2:00 a.m. You may have a second V-E and V-J Day, should you care, to celebrate.

You can buy all the hamburger you like, now.

Candidly, for awhile, we had thought to end this project at this point, as we had assumed that, by this time, there would be little of continuing interest appearing in the News on a daily basis.

But, several months ago, we made the determination to trudge onward awhile longer, perhaps another year, perhaps to the end of 1946. That way, we shall be able to obtain all of the news on the Nuremberg trials, the Congressional investigation into Pearl Harbor, and the crucial results of the 1946 Congressional election which would usher in the political careers of three major figures on the American political landscape for the ensuing 28 years, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Congressman Richard Nixon, and Congressman John F. Kennedy.

Our notes henceforth may be a little shorter, depending on interest and energy. But, we said that once in July, 2008, that is July, 1941, when we tried to quit and returned after a week of hiking in the Himalayas, and, well...

One thing, however, we wish to make abundantly clear: we do not intend to cover every year of The News until it ceased publication in 1985. That's forty more years, and we have other fish to fry. Besides, after about 1956, we get it, and in some detail, even if you might not. We therefore leave it to you to deal with the rest. Don't take from that the notion that we intend either to go through 1956.

On the editorial page, "Going Up" finds it inevitable that the unions were supporting the 65-cent proposed minimum wage and that other hikes would likely follow, that with it would come higher prices and costs of living, while thousands of unskilled workers would wind up overpaid in relation to their worth. But, it allows, perhaps the benefits would outweigh the accompanying evils of the move. It predicts that, eventually, labor might demand that the Government take over the entire field of labor regulation.

"Expert Opinion" suggests that the opinion of Kentucky Representative Andrew May of the Military Affairs Committee carried little weight when he advocated maintaining separate the Army and Navy rather than combining the two under the proposed Defense Department. He had predicted in 1942 that the war would be over that year.

But the lack of coordination which had led to Pearl Harbor and the inevitable cooperation which had won the war stood as the best testimony on the matter.

"Confession?" finds the statement by Elliott Roosevelt that his radio station network in Texas was now worth two million dollars to be unconvincing that the write-off of the bulk of the loan by A&P head John Hartford was legitimate, that it was not done for political favors, that Mr. Roosevelt had not acted badly in the enterprise.

"A Promoter" reports on a talk by James Wick, editor of a Washington news letter on the nation's business community. Mr. Wick believed that there was little hope for living in peace with Russia and that returning servicemen would be strongly opposed to unions.

He stated that Russia could not enjoy hegemony in Europe, that the efforts at it must be arrested, lest there be war with the Soviets. He suggested that Britain should be played against Russia and that the United States only enter the conflict whenever the balance between the two favored too much one or the other. He spoke of Russia as an aggressor in terms similar to Nazi Germany.

As to veterans, he predicted they would become a force in and of themselves, more powerful than organized labor.

In both opinions, he was casting the seeds abroad the land for strife. As to the latter, it appeared that he had not considered the fact that most of the veterans had been workers in civilian life.

"The Long Lines" comments on the State Hospitals Board meeting at Goldsboro and the determination that patients should be taken in order, without preference. The hospitals suffered from long waiting lists, Morganton with 150. As long as the waiting lists existed, says the piece, the State would not have performed its duty to the citizenry to treat these afflicted persons.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas relating of an experience in Topeka where he was provided a hotel room only after assuring the innkeeper that he was going to vote against the $25 per week Federal unemployment compensation guarantee. He counseled his colleagues that there were plenty of jobs available in Kansas and no one was seeking unemployment compensation. He believed that unemployment compensation belonged with the states, as wages and working conditions varied state to state.

Drew Pearson reports on the Jefferson Island gathering of Administration officials, the President, and Congressmen, that the singularly most remarkable thing which people noted after 12 years of being ushered over to see the President formally, was that President Truman could get around on his own and circulate, with a pickle in one hand, creating a different atmosphere of greater accessibility.

Surplus Property administrator Stuart Symington, future Missouri Senator, told of visiting with General Eisenhower in the wake of the controversy with Marshal Georgi Zhukov over the Time photograph of a Berlin dancer standing on her head with her legs spread and a photograph of Stalin in between, Zhukov's consequent insult and desire to have the magazine punished, saying that in Russia, such an editor would be shot. And, according to General Eisenhower, there was probity in the remark as he reported that the Russians had shot a Russian pilot who inadvertently had shot down an American plane.

In that regard, things would change.

That's right, Axis Sally.

President Truman wanted to pitch horseshoes and play poker. He refused an invitation by Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson to play bridge, because, he said, it was too intellectual.

The President, this time, unlike his pre-Potsdam game back in Independence, had reportedly lost $310 to Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson, within a year to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But Judge Vinson lost it all back to the President the following night, reports Mr. Pearson, after the President threatened to have the Treasury Secretary investigated by the IRB to insure the reporting of his winnings.

—See there, Bob? Another case in point.

—Yeah, they sure don't mind using the tax authorities even on their own, but when we do it with some selected troublemakers and Communists...

—Yeah, Connally, right. See?

—Oh, I know, my sainted mother even. Yeah.

He next reports of Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo brushing aside at the gathering the efforts of Postmaster General Robert Hannegan to finalize the confirmation of former Congressman Ray McKeough to a position on the Maritime Commission, stalled in committee because of Mr. McKeough having been regional CIO PAC director for the Midwest. Mr. Bilbo insisted that, while he realized that Mr. McKeough was Mr. Hannegan's friend, the committee had to follow its democratic principles—an unspoken jest when it came to Senator Bilbo and his history of overt racism.

Senator Warren Magnuson had complained at the gathering to the President that he had been a Naval commander in the reserve longer than anyone else in the Navy and had never been promoted, in response to which the President made "Maggie" his Naval aide for the day.

At that point, lieutenant commander in the reserve, Congressman Lyndon Johnson, asserted that he also had been without promotion. "All right, Pal," said Senator Maggie, "you and I are never separated. You are now my naval aide for the day."

—Yeah.

—Bob, what about a dog? They say they help campaigns.

—Yeah. A cloth coat for the wife always, too. Good thinking, Bob.

—Oh, very good, yeah. An Oldsmobile. No Cadillac. No. That's like those South American dictators. Yeah.

Marquis Childs discusses the foreshadowing of the 1948 Republican presidential campaign. A small group of the party in Washington and New York had in mind revenge, as manifested by the call for the Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation and the attempts to tarnish the memory of President Roosevelt with it and the investigations into his family's dealings. Their only concern was, not for the country, but whether they could attract the independent voter to their fold.

He suggests a parallel to the Harding-Coolidge era, just following President Harding's death August 2, 1923, at which time President Coolidge quietly got rid of the worst offenders out of the Teapot Dome scandal, President Harding's death having saved him from probable impeachment, and relied on the twenties prosperity to win the day in the 1924 election, while the Democrats sought to brandish the scandal-ridden Harding years and Teapot Dome. The result was disaster for the Democrats, John W. Davis, though a weak compromise candidate, polling only 136 electoral votes to the 382 for Coolidge.

Mr. Childs states that he does not seek to compare Roosevelt and Truman to Harding and Coolidge, only to suggest that the American public was not too concerned about warmed-over scandal.

That rule, however, did not hold true the next time this same sort of complex arose in American politics, in the election of 1976, when Watergate continued to be an issue, despite President Ford having had nothing whatsoever to do with it except that he made the critical political mistake of pardoning his predecessor for all crimes involved in Watergate, thus depriving the American people of judicial inquiry into the President's knowledge and motivations regarding the cover-up and the lengths to which he went, seeking the use, through the CIA, of pressure on the FBI to halt the investigation for the fact that it would get into the "Bay of Pigs thing", the "smoking gun", which led to the resignation of President Nixon for obstruction of justice.

"We are a forward looking people. Perhaps we ought pay more attention to the past. But the fact is that we don't. If everything is going along all right, our inclination is to let the past take care of itself."

He suggests that, if President Truman had his way, reconversion would be complete by mid-1946, with prosperity, however short-lived, to come thereafter, probably carrying the tide of 1948. If it were to play out that way, he predicts, it would be hard to defeat Truman, regardless of the outcome of the Pearl Harbor investigation, as he was not then a part of the administration but a Senator. The wrench in the works would be labor-management relations, with such issues as recognition of the foremen's unions set to come to the fore.

Should the recovery go awry, he thinks, then political power might shift temporarily to the Republicans, with extremists from the left or right then able to enter the picture and have their day.

Samuel Grafton discusses the recurring problem of dissension between the West and Russia, a subject on which some in America thrived, felt safer as long as it existed. It was behind the hesitancy by some American commanders in Germany, not naming General Patton, to seek rigidly de-Nazification, on the premise that Germany still needed to be strong to act as a bulwark to the Soviets, the old pre-war argument of the America Firsters and the Cliveden Set in Great Britain.

Until the subject of Russia was firmly addressed and a workable solution reached in mutual relations, there could be no real resolution of the Balkans and the other issues hanging fire at the London Foreign Ministers Conference. Instead, the tendency was to fret about the peripheral matters, dodging the big one.

Dorothy Thompson reports that speculation had it that the problems surrounding the Foreign Ministers Conference was in part the result of three of the Big Five nations having new foreign ministers, Mr. Wang instead of T. V. Soong for China, Ernest Bevin instead of Anthony Eden for Britain, and James Byrnes instead of Edward Stettinius for the United States, even if both Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Bevin had been present at Potsdam in July. V. M. Molotov of Russia and M. Bidault of France, with much longer foreign policy experience, appeared in consequence to have an advantage.

Critics were carping that the meeting should have been preceded by exchange of memoranda from experts and agreement reached in advance so that the foreign ministers would have needed only to formalize those agreements. Others contended that the heads of state should have again met.

But, of course, Potsdam had left to this conference in London the remaining issues to be worked out with regard to treaties with the Balkans, the Italian colonies in Africa and Trieste, disposition of the Rhine and Ruhr, and the like. So, she concludes, another meeting of the heads of state would have only led, in circularity, back to where things presently were.

The impasse, she posits, had grown from the inadequacy of the United Nations Charter and the fear of the Big Five of creating conditions ripening into another war.

The American people were living under the delusion, she suggests, that the atom bomb could be maintained for long as an exclusive secret. But the scientists were trying to explain that they had no special knowledge other than in the development of that which they had called the "gadget", and that the principles which had gone to develop it, as well as its fuel, uranium and plutonium, were not by any means exclusive to the United States, that other countries would have the means in short order, probably within two years. Russia had two known sources of uranium, in Czechoslovakia and Southern Saxony. The Russians had attempted to buy uranium from Canada three years earlier and thus had been for awhile well aware of its significance, had probably already taken steps to mine it.

The scientists therefore advocated turning over to international control the atomic technology, to be utilized only arithmetically to multiply and divide energy, with mutual policing of the large laboratories, such as Oak Ridge, necessary to effect the product.

"The scientists want atomic energy absolutely barred from the field of weapons and used internationally, to build a great new era in the life of man."

As to the Dorman Smith...

As to the Side Glances...

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Our papa always said to us on the ferris wheel at the fair, though we knew not why, as we were not the least bit nervous, but it made him feel better to think that we might be, and so we endured in silence his remark, which, in another tree, made sense sometimes: "Look up. Look up."

If at morrow, noon, the world should explode, would the eternal sea, Cynic, boil away, erode to a mere vapor, a cloud with only an empty void within it, swirling captiously of all susceptible of its pull-slip, like a deep sea quay devouring, in prenuptial, the Ancient Gull Ship?

The end is not far away, they say, and have since the beginning. It is true, in a sense, as a lifetime rounded has but three score and ten typically in scenes to tint wit's dreams, from the pain sentient of mother's womb to the rein of last breath's gasp, whether by surprise or circumstance or the expected scything rasp. The curtain is but fain what we will, allowed to pass or to return slow or fast, to grasp the wheel.

Or is it that? Or is it else?

But could it be nothing, that which we cannot comprehend, endless, vast nothing, a cipher, an absolute numb-slot kill?

No, we think not, for we cannot think on it. Nor can you, unless you feign to be dead. But in the feigning, you are but acting a part, which sets you still but in a corner of the feathering quill, unseen, but plainly made, a fading whisper yelling that which all in distress have ever, on the eternal sea, stayed.

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