Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Ford and the UAW had reached agreement on a wage increase of 18 cents per hour, the equivalent of 15.1 percent, avoiding the prospect of a strike. Chrysler was beginning negotiations expected to reach a similar settlement. The strike at G.M., meanwhile, remained in effect.

Walter Reuther, vice-president of the UAW, told the Senate Labor Committee that G.M. had used vulgar language in rejecting even a one-cent per hour wage increase. G.M. compared the interest it had in the magazines to the union arguments—whatever that means. The union had returned to its demand for a 30 percent wage increase.

The major railroads and eighteen of twenty of the railroad unions agreed to enter arbitration in their dispute over wages, in which railroad workers demanded a 30 percent increase. The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen stated, however, that the planned strike vote would still proceed as scheduled.

The United Packinghouse Workers Union recommended that its 193,000 members return to work on Monday following the seizure this date of the packing houses by the Government, albeit to be conditioned on a statement from Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson that he would seek immediately to obtain approval for a retroactive wage increase to the start of the seizure after any recommendation for an increased wage by a Government fact-finding committee. Secretary Anderson had apparently indicated his willingness to do so.

The recommendation reversed the decision of the National Wage Policy Committee of that union, announced the previous day. If the recommended wage failed to meet union demands, however, the union was reserving the right to resume the strike.

The 55,000-member AFL-affiliated Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen had returned to work at the point of seizure.

In London, it was believed that selection of a new Iranian Premier, Ahmed Iavam, known to be friendly to Russia, would likely result in the dropping of Iran's complaint to the Security Council regarding Russia's interference with Government troops seeking to intervene in the Insurgent independence movement in Azerbaijan Province in Northern Iran. The possibility existed also that the matter would be delayed while the new Premier negotiated directly with Russia. The complaint, however, still could be filed by another nation.

Maj. General Walter Short told the joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor that Generals Marshall, Sherman Miles, head of G-2, and L.T. Gerow, head of the War Plants Division, had sought to shift blame for the unpreparedness for the attack onto General Short. He exempted former Secretary of War Henry Stimson from the group, except on policy matters.

Non-commissioned RAF personnel struck at a base near Calcutta, the fifth such strike in a week, demanding that they be allowed to return home.

A German, describing herself as not being a Nazi, asked for $10,000 in damages for destruction by American bombers on August 5 of two houses she owned in a village in Japan.

Gut luck.

Hal Boyle, writing from Hong Kong, provides the first in a series of pieces on the late Chester Bennett, "the hero of Hong Kong". His young daughter, Carol Ann, who could not yet talk, had never seen her father. The Japanese had beheaded him along with 32 other prisoners convicted of crimes against Japan. The Japanese had accused Mr. Bennett of espionage and smuggling money into the internment camp in which he was imprisoned so that several thousand Europeans could purchase food, saving many lives. A fellow prisoner stated that the Japanese had been correct on both counts but could not offer proof.

Mr. Bennett had originally come to Hong Kong as a small-time Hollywood producer and photographer looking into the possibility of wild animal pictures. He fell in love and decided to stay. Eventually, he bought several restaurants and bars. When the Japanese invaded in December, 1941, he and 3,000 other Americans and Europeans were placed in a concentration camp.

The Japanese allowed the British to select one person to spend 300,000 Hong Kong dollars on food rations. They selected Mr. Bennett because he knew food. It was the first step toward his death at the hands of the Japanese.

A three-judge circuit court in Illinois refused a petition for writ of mandamus to compel the Champaign school district to cease teaching classes in non-sectarian religion. The plaintiff's son was a student and she claimed he was the only student in the class refusing to participate in the religious instruction, causing him embarrassment. She contended that the classes violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, prohibiting the government from establishing a religion, thus violating separation of church and state.

Ultimately, in 1948, the case would reach the U.S. Supreme Court and the state decision, eventually upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court, would be reversed 8 to 1 in McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, based on the violation of separation of church and state. Justice Hugo Black delivered the majority opinion and Justice Stanley Reed dissented. Justices Robert Jackson, Wiley Rutledge, Harold Burton, and Felix Frankfurter joined the majority in separate concurring opinions, agreeing with the result, but with some stated reservations from the majority opinion. The other three members of the majority were Justices William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Chief Justice Fred Vinson.

The majority opinion stated:

"To hold that a state cannot consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments utilize its public school system to aid any or all religious faiths or sects in the dissemination of their doctrines and ideals does not, as counsel urge, manifest a governmental hostility to religion or religious teachings. A manifestation of such hostility would be at war with our national tradition as embodied in the First Amendment's guaranty of the free exercise of religion. For the First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other within its respective sphere. Or, as we said in [Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), holding 5 to 4 that the Establishment Clause was not infringed by a school board following a state statute in reimbursing bus transportation costs to all parents of school children in the district, including those attending private parochial schools], the First Amendment had erected a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable.

"Here not only are the state's tax supported public school buildings used for the dissemination of religious doctrines. The State also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps to provide pupils for their religious classes through use of the state's compulsory public school machinery. This is not separation of Church and State."

Similarly, the concurring opinion stated:

"We do not consider, as indeed we could not, school programs not before us which, though colloquially characterized as 'released time,' present situations differing in aspects that may well be constitutionally crucial. Different forms which 'released time' has taken during more than thirty years of growth include programs which, like that before us, could not withstand the test of the Constitution; others may be found unexceptionable. We do not now attempt to weigh in the Constitutional scale every separate detail or various combination of factors which may establish a valid 'released time' program. We find that the basic Constitutional principle of absolute separation was violated when the State of Illinois, speaking through its Supreme Court, sustained the school authorities of Champaign in sponsoring and effectively furthering religious beliefs by its educational arrangement.

"Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a 'wall of separation,' not of a fine line easily overstepped. The public school at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. 'The great American principle of eternal separation'—Elihu Root's phrase bears repetition—is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our diversities. It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in its full integrity. We renew our conviction that 'we have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion.' Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. at page 59, 67 S.Ct. at page 532. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, 'good fences make good neighbors.'"

Ms. McCollum, a self-proclaimed "rationalist or atheist", won the case, not because the Supreme Court liked atheists and disliked religion, but because such was the required result under the Constitution, the ultimate arbiter in our system of jurisprudence.

Again, those who misunderstand what separation means and from whence it derives, because the words "separation of church and state" are not in the Constitution, must look to logic and realize that if the State cannot establish a religion, as the First Amendment does expressly forbid, then the inescapable implication is that there must be separation. If publicly funded institutions, in other words, are used for religious instruction or indoctrination, the State has established a religion.

It must be stressed also that the separation is reciprocal, offering protection to both the church and the individual from interference by the State with religious beliefs. If the religious zealot seeks to tear down the wall, allow intrusion of the church into public institutions funded by public tax dollars, then he will find quickly that he has also allowed the State to dictate that which he believes, just as the case in totalitarian states. One cannot have a one-sided wall.

A photograph appears of a one-eared bunny rabbit.

On the editorial page, "Will You Share Now?" urges the community to participate in making available spare rooms and garage space and the like to homeless veterans and their families under a community-sponsored program to promote such sharing to relieve the housing shortage until more permanent housing could be obtained.

"Atoms in Escrow" suggests that the world likely breathed easier when the U.N. voted to place the issue of control of atomic energy with a special atomic commission to be organized by the Security Council. It promised peaceful ends rather than an arms race.

"Needless, Heedless Anger" offers that the Southern Senators engaging in the filibuster against a vote on the FEPC were losing stature and dignity in the process, as in all such filibusters, designed as they were to deny the working of basic democratic processes.

A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Red Herring", supports the right of the G.I.'s in Europe to assemble and petition their Government for redress of grievances, specifically their desire to be discharged and sent home. General Eisenhower had sensibly responded by assuring that demobilization would take place as rapidly as possible and that only enough men for occupation would be retained in the Army.

Drew Pearson tells of Okinawa being "the worst hell-hole in the Pacific", as G.I.'s reported that conditions on the island were little better than at the end of the war, with a hundred thousand troops still stationed there, getting in each other's way, with poor food and little recreation.

Marquis Childs discusses the importance of the Fair Employment Practices Commission bill to the rest of the Truman program, that if the Republicans, who were uniformly behind it in the Senate, combined with Northern Democrats ultimately to pass it, it could cause such resentment in the South as to endanger other important parts of the Administration's program, such as the loan to Great Britain, to which many Southerners had expressed opposition.

Samuel Grafton suggests that Big Business was making a colossal mistake in its ways and means of trying to perpetuate the free enterprise system against that which it perceived as an assault from the left.

Dorothy Thompson comments on an essay by William James, published in 1906, titled "A Moral Equivalent for War", in which he dissented from the prevailing view that war was evil, rather stating it to fulfill the function of causing men to abandon selfish individualism and combine in cooperative action, while honoring virtues of heroism and self-sacrifice. He believed that abolition of war would lead to crass materialism and, ultimately, disintegration of societies unless peacetime called upon the same virtues in pursuit of a common goal.

She offers that Professor James had been vindicated in his opinion by the current status of the nation, the disintegration rapidly of unity after the end of the war, with labor and management locked in a pitched battle, Congress and the Administration likewise at odds, while the people settled into apathy.

But, the preparation for these attitudes and conditions had been unwittingly undertaken during the war, as the promise of the post-war had served to increase expectations in the public mind beyond that which had been achieved thus far.

She reservedly criticized the President, recognizing the while that no one in the country was much helping him, for not providing a new vision for the post-war environment. The people, she believed, were prepared to follow such a vision.

Ms. Thompson confesses to a feeling that her writing had become overly pessimistic in recent months, but also feeling that pessimism was justified.

The peace had to become the moral equivalent of war, as Professor James had asserted in his essay. There had to be a sense of a cooperative struggle in the country for something beyond merely individual self-interest, to provide a spirit of community.

Professor James, in his essay, had concluded:

"[H. G.] Wells adds that he thinks that the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of 'Meat! Meat!' and that of the 'general-staff' of any civilized nation. History has seen the latter interval bridged over; the former one can be bridged over much more easily."

A perennial letter writer criticizes the Army brass hats and Cabinet officers for the delays in demobilization, urges that in peacetime, the country should not indoctrinate youth through universal military training to a surrender of rights and freedom in exchange for military discipline.

Another letter writer suggests to the letter writer of January 17 who had written in praise of North Carolina Secretary of State Thad Eure's attempt to dissuade the Student Legislative Assembly from its decision to admit blacks in the next session, that he and Mr. Eure join Lee's Army, that it was 1861 and "the boys of your persuasion could use some help from you at Appomattox in '65."

Well, that's a fine howdy-do, smart aleck Yankee-boy. Why don't you just go back home to Yankeeland where you'll be more comfortable with your Liberal views?

The South Shall Rise Again!