The Charlotte News
Wednesday, November 20, 1946
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that there was still no word from John L. Lewis whether he would call off the coal strike, ordered delayed by a Federal Court for at least nine days, set to begin at midnight this date. Should he refuse to call off the strike, he could face a charge of contempt.
In anticipation of the strike, more miners had walked off the job, raising the total from 87,000 the previous day to 125,000 in eleven states. There were 400,000 coal miners nationwide.
The Government warned that brownouts, to conserve energy in the face of dwindling coal reserves, might become necessary in every state east of the Mississippi as a result of a strike.
New calls were being made among members of Congress to enact tough labor-restrictive legislation in the new Congress.
The armed services had withdrawn their objection to use for transportation of natural gas of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines, used during the war to transport oil to the East Coast, previously desired by the military for reserve in the event of another national emergency.
Some states, including Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Utah, were denying payment of unemployment compensation to miners who would strike on the basis that it was against the law to strike against the Government. Pennsylvania was also considering doing so.
The CIO convention in Atlantic City condemned the Federal Court order to delay the strike as a violation of the Norris-La Guardia anti-injunction legislation, preventing injunctions against strikes. In this instance, however, it was illegal to strike against the Government, pursuant to the Smith-Connally Act.
The United States called upon U.N. members to provide the numbers of troops in service at home and abroad. The Russians had agreed only to provide numbers of troops in service at home. V. M. Molotov had made an alternative proposal to have all nations include troops both in former enemy and non-enemy states. He criticized Great Britain and the United States for maintaining troops in friendly countries in peacetime. Senator Tom Connally rejoindered that the United States presence in such countries in no way threatened peace and security. He stated that the U.S. would be glad to supply the numbers.
In Frankfurt, Germany, fifteen members of an underground gang of former SS and Hitler youth leaders were arrested in connection with recent bombings in Stuttgart, Esslingen, and Bachnang. The military police who made the arrests stated that the gang was planning further bomb attacks when taken into custody. The ringleader was Sigried Kabus, 22, a former SS major.
In Asheville, the Baptist State Convention asked for appointment of a committee to study the offer of the Wake Forest campus in Wake Forest, N.C., as the site of a junior college and Baptist theological seminary once the college had moved to Winston-Salem.
The convention broke with tradition and voted in favor of Federal anti-lynching legislation and condemned racial segregation within the church.
In the third installment of his three-part series on divorce, Burke Davis of The News tells of the frequent practice of perjury among South Carolinians regarding length of residence in North Carolina, required to be six months to obtain a divorce. South Carolina did not permit divorce. A virtual divorce mill appeared to be operating in Mecklenburg County as a result.
After discussing alimony, he suggests that the community needed to take the lead in trying to stem the ever-increasing divorce rate, threatening the sanctity of the family as an institution.
In New London, Conn., a 39-year old woman had her 21st child. Her husband was a construction worker, who also did a lot of building by night obviously. She bore her first child 23 years earlier. Seventeen of the children remained alive.
Give that father also a wrapped
In Charlotte, an electrical transformer failed, knocking out service to many downtown businesses, including The News, for more than an hour this date, starting at 10:40 a.m. The problem began just as the newspaper was set to begin the run of the first edition.
Probably that cat
News sports editor Ray Howe would provide the following day and on Friday a pre-game look at the Duke versus North Carolina football game for the coming Saturday, billed as the top event in state football for the 1946 season.
Too bad Mr. Howe could not have, the previous weekend, provided us some antecedent information on Belmont basketball.
Ah well, remember Santa Clara in November, 2004. Could be a good omen. We shall see, and soon enough, starting this weekend
On the editorial page, "A Fair Hearing for Bilbo" comments on the prospect for a fair hearing for the Mississippi Senator before the Senate investigating committee, with Senator Ellender of Louisiana chairing the committee for the nonce and Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina also a member, both sure to defend the peculiarities of Southern electoral processes against attack. The committee investigating corruption in war contracts might have better success at proving misconduct by Senator Bilbo.
The piece thinks him unfit for office based on several reasons other than his views on race. Refusing to grant his seat for his racist views would only stultify expression of differences of opinion.
He might wind up achieving a kind of martyrdom among his Southern supporters and it was unlikely that he would be unseated. But it was at least encouraging that the committee was going to investigate how one of the more prominent Southern demagogues had come to power and remained there.
"Professor Shapley's Contempt" comments on the irresponsibility of Congressman John Rankin, operating as a one-man HUAC, summoning Harvard astronomer, Dr. Harlow Shapley, to Washington to provide membership lists of two PAC organizations to which he did not belong and then citing him for contempt for refusing to provide the documents he did not have. It was typical of the sort of activities in which HUAC had engaged since the days of the Dies Committee before the war.
While it recognizes a legitimate basis for investigating genuine Communists in the country, even if they posed more of a nuisance than a genuine danger, there was no proper suspicion of Dr. Shapley. Mr. Rankin and Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, to be the new chairman of HUAC in the new Congress, used the power to get at their political enemies among liberals, not to investigate actual threats to the security of the nation.
It suggests that such investigations, in need of sensitivity and restraint, could not be entrusted to the least perceptive members of the House, such as Mr. Rankin and Mr. Thomas.
"Miss Knox and Her Spastics" tells of News reporter Dorothy Knox having become exhausted by her work to formulate the Altrusa Club's Spastic Survey of Mecklenburg County, a survey of children suffering from cerebral palsy. Ms. Knox had for years championed the cause, having discovered that these children were among the state's most neglected handicapped.
Three-fourths of the children functioned on a normal level mentally, but were simply physically impaired. Often, they could be taught to use other areas of the brain to send impulses to the paralyzed limbs. But it was a lengthy process, requiring great attention, special equipment, and months of hospitalization.
There were very few treatment centers for cerebral palsy in the nation, none in North Carolina. There was a bill before the Legislature, however, to establish one.
The first step was to determine how many such people were in the county. And that was the purpose of the survey on which Ms. Knox was taking such an active effort that she was too exhausted to supply her normal column to the newspaper.
Until such a treatment facility was created, the community conscience would have no rest from the prodding of Ms. Knox.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Paternalism in Race Relations", comments that the Southern black found as much disturbing about the paternalism recently expressed by outgoing Governor Chauncey Sparks of Alabama as in the overt racism expressed by Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. Governor Sparks blamed all racial trouble on outside agitators. His attitude was that the Southern white man knew the Southern black man and could handle him without outside assistance.
It was necessary, said the Governor, to maintain segregation and deny social equality to blacks. It was also necessary to protect the franchise against exercise by those unqualified to use it. It was another way of saying that the black citizen should not vote.
Drew Pearson provides his third recent column on John L. Lewis. He indicates that Mr. Lewis, having been indicted during the Wilson Administration, was not afraid of jail. If indicted again, he would become a hero to the labor movement.
He was afraid of competition from the gas and oil industry. With the rising price of coal, many industries were converting to oil as a source of energy. But this process was too slow to have any impact on the pending coal strike.
Mr. Lewis had been nearly ousted from the union leadership in the twenties, when his plan to have the operators pay the miners $7.50 per day, a high wage at the time, wound up doing more harm than good. The operators hired non-union workers at a cheaper wage and union membership dropped considerably. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce to President Coolidge, had approved the Lewis plan and even sought to have Mr. Lewis nominated as Secretary of Labor.
When FDR came into office, the Wagner Act soon gave Mr. Lewis a virtual monopoly such that he was no longer threatened by non-union miners.
Philip Murray, not Mr. Lewis, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, had sold FDR on the concept of compulsory collective bargaining under the Wagner Act. Mr. Lewis refused to meet with Governor Roosevelt during the 1932 campaign. Only after the election did he venture to talk with the new President.
Mr. Lewis considered his half-million dollar donation to the Democrats from the dues of mine workers to be a personal bargaining chip. He broke from the President in 1940, but it was inevitable as they had never been close and Mr. Lewis had been a Republican before 1933. He had, however, supported Roosevelt strongly in the early years of his presidency.
A fourth column on Mr. Lewis would soon follow.
Marquis Childs indicates that there was no suggestion by the President or his advisers that he intended not to run for re-election in 1948. Nevertheless, many Democrats were scrambling to position themselves as possible alternatives for the nomination.
Reports had it that Robert Hannegan was going to step aside as DNC chairman and that Governor Robert Kerr of Oklahoma would succeed him. If so, he was likely to be only an interim chairman.
Gael Sullivan, Second Assistant Postmaster General, was also a possible successor, favored by Mr. Hannegan, Postmaster General
Another clique of supporters was forming to back Chief Justice Fred Vinson for the nomination.
Should the convention reject President Truman as the nominee, then it would face a split in the party, with labor opposing a Southern-favored candidate as Harry Flood Byrd. The two Supreme Court members would then be possible compromise candidates.
The eager beavers
Harold Ickes examines the several reasons for the Democratic defeat in the midterm election. Part of it was the inevitability, after 14 years of Democratic power, of the desire for change by the public. Part of it was the misplaced blame given the Administration for the many strikes and the rising costs of goods. The war was largely responsible for both conditions. And the Congressional Democrats of the South had cooperated with Republicans in bringing an end to effective price control.
A movement in the country to bring about war with Russia was another factor.
Henry Wallace had campaigned for Democrats, but it had backfired by his appearing too soft on Russia.
The withdrawn nomination of Ed Pauley as Undersecretary of the Navy the previous spring was another issue, along with the President having called on the Pendergast machine to defeat Democratic Congressman Roger Slaughter in the Missouri primary because he had opposed Administration policy, consistently holding up proposed legislation in the Rules Committee which he chaired.
The fact that the President had expressed trust of John L. Lewis and then sought draft of labor from the Congress also had posed a problem for voters.
The primary responsibility for the defeat, however, lay with Robert Hannegan, Edward Flynn of New York, Ed Pauley, and Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago. Boss Hague in Jersey City and the Pendergast machine in Kansas City had their share of the blame as well. President Roosevelt also bore some of the blame, especially for the presence of Robert Hannegan as DNC chair.
But at the end of the day, it was President Truman's insistence on surrounding himself with political hacks and his refusal to live up to his opportunities which had caused the defeat.
A letter forwards a copy of a telegram sent to the President decrying the efforts of John L. Lewis and indicating that the public was fed up with his one-man stands, holding up the country at various times. He urges the President to take action.
A regular letter writer suggests to the Republicans: "Victor
It was too late to correct such mistakes, but the Democrats who had helped the Republicans achieve victory would be to blame should another depression take place.
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