Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach had appointed a fact-finding board which included future University of California president Clark Kerr, then a faculty member at Berkeley, to make recommendations regarding the meatpackers strike. The AFL Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the Butcher Workmen Union had indicated that they were prepared to accept a 15 cents per hour wage hike rather than the originally demanded 25 cents; the CIO United Packinghouse Workers, however, maintained their demand at 17.5 cents with later negotiations to be reserved for the additional 7.5 cents. The meat packers had offered thus far only ten cents an hour in wage increases.

The previous evening, the President gave notice to Benjamin Fairless, president of U.S. Steel, and Philip Murray, head of CIO, that they had until the afternoon hours of this date to reach an accord to avert the steel strike scheduled to begin the following Monday or he would intervene and take action. The two sides remained deadlocked 4.5 cents apart, with steel offering 15 cents per hour. It was believed that the Government would likely recommend 17.5 or 18 cents as a compromise.

The electrical workers offered to submit their grievance to arbitration in the three-day old strike of 200,000 workers, primarily at G.E., Westinghouse, and G.M.

Ford and the UAW remained at loggerheads, with Ford willing to offer no more than a 17.5 percent wage increase, while the Government had recommended 19.5 percent in the G.M. strike. Ford was not yet on strike.

The first meeting of the U.N. Security Council took place in London, with the first order of business being Iran's complaint against Russia for territorial incursion in the Azerbaijan Province dispute with Iranian Insurgents, being protected against Iranian Government troops by Russian troops. The Insurgents were thought to have been armed and encouraged by the Russians, wishing a satellite in northern Iran.

The General Assembly heard a plea by the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk, to turn the entire world armament system, including nuclear power, over to the U.N.

British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin indicated that three of Britain's post-World War I mandates from the League of Nations, the Cameroons, Togoland, and Tanganyika, were in the process of being converted to trusteeships under the U.N. The other two mandates were Palestine and Trans-Jordan.

Belgium, likewise, was preparing to transfer to the same status Ruanda and Urandi in East Africa.

Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel, continuing his testimony before the joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor, stated that he never conceived of the Fleet in Hawaii as a defensive mechanism but rather an offensive force. He also testified that he did not consider the message received from the Navy Department on November 27, 1941 to be a "war warning", that it was little different from the previous messages which warned of possible enemy action from Japan. He had never seen the term "war warning" used in any message of the time and thus was not influenced to discontinue training exercises and undertake positive security measures. The Rear Admiral stated that he did not have sufficient surface units or submarines to conduct patrols from all directions off Oahu, and did not consider patrols to the north and west of the island to be practicable.

General MacArthur had sent a cable to General Eisenhower warning that if the Army were allowed to dip below the targeted 400,000 men in the Pacific by July 1, then there would be insufficient forces to carry out occupation duties in Japan and Korea.

In Nuremberg, not covered on the page, the British and Americans having finished their presentation of evidence, the French provided their opening statement to the war crimes tribunal.

Hal Boyle takes considerable issue with H. L. Mencken, who had recently stated, as quoted after the piece, that the reporters who covered the war had not done a good job of it, had been "a sorry lot", either "typewriter statesmen turning out dope stuff drearily dreamed up" or "sentimental human interest scribblers turning out maudlin stuff about the common soldier easy to get by the censors."

Mr. Boyle states that it had been a difficult job to clear things through sometimes arbitrary censorship but that, by and large, the reporters had performed admirably and remarkably under the worst of circumstances, often under fire. He cites Ernie Pyle as not being among the latter category, as expressly included by Mr. Mencken. Mr. Pyle had lost his life April 18, 1945 on Ie Jima when a Japanese sniper shot him shortly after his arrival from the European theater. Indeed, Mr. Boyle points out, Mr. Pyle had caused considerable irritation to the Army brass in Tunisia in 1943 at the beginning of his coverage of the North African campaign, the commanders fearing that he was compromising soldier morale. In fact, he had bolstered it considerably, as told by the men themselves to Mr. Boyle during his tour of the front.

"They wrote boldly, critically and fully. Not since William Howard Russell of the London Times stirred the world with his uncensored accounts of the Crimean battles has there been more honest war coverage."

To the claim of Mr. Mencken that he could not even tell who the general was who had been defeated in the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Boyle responds that it had been accurately reported at the time that it was General Gerd von Rundstedt.

A photograph appears of the Japanese-Filipino translator in Manila, Takuma Higashiji, smiling broadly after confessing at his war crimes trial to the murder of 200 Filipinos and the rape of numerous Filipino women. He stated that he believed he deserved a ten-year sentence.

Another photograph appears of the Badgett quadruplets in Galveston as they approached their seventh birthday on February 1. The sisters had become celebrities since birth.

Near Spearmint, Colorado, a herd of cattle attacked a Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad freight train and overturned the caboose, slightly injuring the conductor and brakeman. Why the piece was titled "Cattle's Nerve Good, But Not Their Judgment" is left for the reader to discern. Maybe there was some cattle feed in the freight cars or something like that.

Or, maybe Juicy Fruit.

On the editorial page, "The Twain Meet" finds the muddy secondary roads in both the Western and Eastern rural areas of the state to be in equal need of attention, and that there was considerable movement among the rural dwellers to get action forthwith or the legislators should be prepared to be voted out of office come summer.

"No Ceiling, That Is" finds the rhetoric of the Southern members of Congress regarding the threat that if OPA placed ceiling prices on cotton, then OPA would be allowed to expire at the end of June, to be an opportunity to voice support for cotton farmers, even if it was unlikely that OPA would institute the ceilings, unless there were some motivating need based on sudden rise in prices.

"To Fit the Crime" suggests New York Times reporter Gladwyn Hill to be mischaracterizing the Army newsreels being shown the Germans as "inept". Based on the descriptions, they were similar to the newsreels shown by the commercial companies before movies, and were fitting for a people in need of punishment. They had shown the Germans quiet scenes of American and British life juxtaposed to German suffering, as well as the usual fare of inane material which inevitably occurred in newsreels for American civilian consumption.

A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "The Tar Heel Share", finds the Federal Government to have calculated the share of each North Carolinian in the Federal debt to be $1,267, which seemed modest compared to the overall burden. But it questioned the method of calculation because it was based on the state's ability to pay rather than population. But then it divided the total debt thus owed by the state by the number of people, each of whom paid taxes based on ability to pay. Thus, the individual burden, it believes, ought be figured differently.

Drew Pearson discusses the conference recently between presidential chief of staff Admiral William Leahy and the President, in which Admiral Leahy conveyed his belief that the commitment made by President Roosevelt to Prime Minister Churchill at Yalta to maintain a two-million man occupation force in Europe after the war was unrealistic. Admiral Leahy had so informed FDR at the time. He had predicted that what was now transpiring would occur, that once the war was over, the men would wish to come home, not remain abroad.

Marquis Childs discusses the loss of good will by the labor movement in some of its recent strike activity, especially as essential services, such as the telephone, were being interrupted. He comments that it began to appear that there was a conscious effort by labor leaders to destroy the gains made by labor since 1933. Congress was resentful of the strikes and anti-labor legislation was likely to be the result.

Samuel Grafton again looks at the opening meetings of the first formal session of the U.N., being held in London, and finds it grappling with definition for its role in world affairs. The Russians appeared to view the General Assembly as a place where the major powers could meet and structure their own agreements among themselves, not an opportunity for the voice of the Assembly to be heard. The Russians were resistant to parliamentary procedure, resistant to the notion that the majority could override the will of the strongest individual members.

A piece from The Christian Science Monitor, titled "The Russians Know the UNO Ropes", finds the Russians being well aware of the parliamentary game to be exploited at the U.N. meeting. They had skillfully used the rules during three months of preparatory meetings to this first conference of the General Assembly. They had deftly maneuvered in San Francisco to set up in the Charter the unilateral veto on the Security Council and had gotten determination of all of the major territorial issues, treaty questions, and security questions by private meetings between the Big Three since, at Potsdam, Moscow, and London.

A letter writer compliments North Carolina Secretary of State Thad Eure for his efforts, albeit unsuccessful, to get the Student Legislative Assembly to withdraw its vote to seat black students in the next annual Assembly. He thinks that the letter of support of the student action from University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham was one which would take a Philadelphia lawyer to understand.

He observes, most astutely, eisegetically, in the long and fine tradition of the South, with white silk robes waving in the wind as the pointy hoods stretched moonward amid the weeping willows drooping into the misty dawn over the snarling vines of the lime-shaded swamp, as the horses sprung across the countryside to string up another wayward Negro in their midst:

"There is no real Christian that wants the Negro maltreated, but we white people as a race had nothing to do with the Negro being placed in the position the sin of one of their forebear's placed them in. These preachers of equality for the Negro overlook the word of God, Gen. 9:22, 24, 25, 26 and 27: 'And Ham, the father of Caanan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without, And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said cursed be Caanan: a SERVANT of SERVANTS shall be he unto his brethren.'" And SERVANT and SERVANT and SERVE, and so forth.

He concludes by saying, after quoting from Luke 17:7-9: "This Scripture from Lukes Gospel were spoken by none other than the Lord, Jesus Christ."

The editors, being smart aleck Yankee-inclined atheists, add: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. Matthew. 7.12."

Well, now, that's a fine howdy-do. Aren't you the smart one?

We can read the Scripture, and it says right there that Caanan was a servant, several times. Caanan was to be a servant to his brethren. And since Caanan was plainly black as the Ace of Spades, we know what that means. He was to be a servant to his Brethren, us white folks, because Ham saw Noah's nakedness. And anybody who shall dispute it goes against the word of Jesus Christ, himself, and so is evil and has committed unrighteous sin, from which it is our sworn duties as White Knights of the Klu Klucks Klaanan to lynch all these Negroes who get out of line, and any white folks who try to unjustify it, also.

Who can dispute that? If you do, you go against the Word.

In any event, he promised to vote for Mr. Eure in the future, even though he had not before done so. Whether Mr. Eure really wanted his vote is another question.

One cannot blame the gentleman too much though. He was undoubtedly under the irremediable, occlusive spell of the Reverend Thornton Stringfellow from 1856.

The South Shall Rise Again!