Thursday, April 4, 1946

The Charlotte News

Thursday, April 4, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. Security Council had tabled further consideration of the Iranian case until May 6. The vote followed criticism by Australia's representative of the walkout by Andrei Gromyko the previous week. Only Russia and Australia, both abstaining, did not vote for the resolution desired by Iran.

The U.N. adopted that designation officially, rather than the convention which had been used heretofore, "U.N.O." It was pointed out by the public relations director that nowhere in the U.N. Charter were the words "United Nations Organization."

In Nuremberg, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel testified on direct examination for the second day that only twenty divisions guarded Western Germany, from Holland to Switzerland, during the Blitzkrieg of September, 1939 and that a French attack at that time would not have been defensible by Germany. He stated that both Allied and Axis secrets leaked out through the close connections between the Belgian and Italian royal houses. Germany had learned in this manner that Belgium was being pressured by both England and France to abandon its neutrality. While they were waffling, Hitler informed the military only a short time before the start of the attack on the neutral Low Countries, fearing that the news might leak through the royal houses.

The Senate Banking Committee approved long-range legislation for building 12.5 million new homes during the ensuing decade to complement the emergency legislation which had passed through the committee the previous day. The legislation provided for easier Government loans and credits to encourage builders and provided for low-rent housing. A provision sought by labor to require wages or fees be paid to workers at the going rate in the locality of construction on any project funded with the aid of a Government loan was dropped from the bill.

Ralph McGill, in the third of his five articles on Palestine, reports from Ramot-Hashavim of having discussed farming with a farmer who belonged to a colony of small farmers, one of eight such colonies in Palestine. The farmers in this colony had all come in 1933 from Germany in middle-age, that being medieval. Of the 60 families in the colony, ten were headed by lawyers, fifteen, physicians, others being pharmacists, merchants, or manufacturers. They had learned farming on their own, borrowing from the Jewish Agency to purchase the land, expensive by the standards of Palestine as it was not on a hill. They raised poultry and grew fruit and vegetables.

To make a living at the occupation, the farmers had to work long hours and do their own work without hiring help. But all of the farmers in the colony, working as a cooperative, were making a profit and had money in savings. The buying and selling was done through the cooperative. Had they tried to do it individually, they would have failed.

Hal Boyle, still in Athens, tells of the job of Constantine Doxiadis, architect and civil engineer, assigned to design and rebuild Greece from its war ruins, ruins which he had helped to create as technical adviser on strategic sabotage for the Allies. In the latter capacity he had helped organize 250 engineers and 500 students to engage in sabotage efforts.

He told Mr. Boyle that he believed it would take 600 million dollars and ten years to rebuild Greece, that Greeks had raised five million dollars and would need aid in some form from the Allies to accomplish the enormous task. Their contribution to the war effort, he asserted, deserved recompense by such aid.

Two men, one a former sailor discharged in November and the other having served overseas in the Army, discharged but six weeks earlier, died in a collision with a Greyhound bus on Charlotte's Wilkinson Boulevard, near Club Lido, at 3:30 a.m. Their 1940 Ford Coach was struck broadside by the bus as they sought to pull into the roadway from a parking lot. One man was thrown from the car and dragged under the bus for a long distance while the other man remained in the car. Only one passenger on the bus was injured and her injuries were not serious.

The two young men survived the war but not the notorious treachery of Wilkinson Boulevard.

George W. Stowe of Belmont had purchased for $450,000 the Alpine Cotton Mills in Morganton from its stockholders.

Professor Maxwell's weather prediction for the date, we note, is upside down. What that portended, we could not say and dare not speculate, as it could mean the end of the world at hand.

A photograph shows 14-year old Sabert Sevet of Pittsburgh who had stowed away with invasion forces of the Army bound for Europe and, despite his youth, had served two years in the Army as an interpreter. He was now serving in Switzerland in the same capacity, with fluency in French, German, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian.

On the editorial page, "The Real Definition of Economy" discusses the City-County bond issue to pay for improvements of water and sewage facilities, school expansion, and special projects like parks, a new library, and a new auditorium. There was opposition to the whole 12-point package based on the expenditure of money at this time.

But the piece points out that the entire package would cost the city dweller but 48.63 cents per hundred dollars of property valuation and the county dweller only 21.62 cents per hundred. The bulk of it would be devoted to water, sewage, and schools. About one-sixth would go to the special projects.

The whole package was a vote of confidence in Charlotte's future.

"Confusion in Cherry Blossom Time" finds the Senators in Washington perhaps in need of a spring respite, given that Senator Murray had threatened to have Senator Taft removed from the hearing room two days earlier, that Senator Morse had said that the Republicans were pursuing a blind course of reaction likely to result in the re-election of President Truman, that 50 Southern members of Congress were calling for an apology from DNC chair Robert Hannegan for a remark in the women's section of the Party magazine condemning the Southern support of the Case anti-labor bill as a vote against the American people.

But, it points out, that if the vote for the Case bill was one for the American people, it meant that the Republicans also were for the American people and the Democratic Party as a whole, an enemy of the people. Moreover, these same Southern Democrats had once supported the principles which the Case bill sought now to limit.

They should come home and consider the more weighty issue at stake: "Was Harry Truman, an old haberdasher himself, guilty of heresy when he wore a striped cravat with a dinner jacket at a banquet honoring the late Andrew Jackson, patron saint of the Democratic (or was it Republican?) Party?"

"Getting Rid of a $52,500 Bag" sides with the majority vote of the City Council to re-sell a property, purchased for $52,500 for the purpose of building a Veterans' Recreation Center but having fallen through when it was discovered that the anonymous donor of $50,000 for a building on the property had placed conditions on the gift which were illegal—presumably, though not stated, having to do with some form of discrimination, religious or racial.

It was better to get rid of the property rather than hang onto it when no immediate prospect was in sight for placing a building on it.

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "The Bootleggers Win Again", comments on the Dry victory in Rockingham County, finding Eastern North Carolina tending to be Wet while the Piedmont and Western sections were Dry.

The Rockingham vote suggested that there were many more people in that county favoring illegal sale of liquor than legal sale, despite the fact that illegal sale provided no revenue to the State.

A Presbyterian churchman in Durham had taken out an ad saying that A.B.C. controlled sale in that county had driven out 556 speakeasies and 1,200 bootleggers. A Reidsville attorney who had been a prohibitionist took out an ad in which he said that he had been to numerous social functions where liquor flowed among church and non-church members alike and that if the county voted as it drank it would approve controlled sale by a margin of 10 to 1.

The piece concludes that the county had gone Dry by a margin of 2 to 1, with five times the vote for Dry that it had in 1935. "Write your own answer."

Drew Pearson reports that it had been 25 years since the Washington Arms Conference of 1921. Present had been Charles Evans Hughes for the United States, Lord Balfour for Great Britain, Aristide Briand for France, and Premier Kato for Japan. Each were able to speak for their respective governments without so much as a cable back home.

The U.S. took the lead in scrapping of battleships, in the hope that such idealism would be contagious.

The Geneva Naval Conference of 1927 and the London Naval Conference of 1930 followed, supplemented by the several League of Nations disarmament conferences. With each such conference, some of the idealism exerted toward peace slipped beneath the waves.

Even the supreme idealist Aristide Briand dozed idly at the conference table in the latter conferences, a disheartened old man. At Geneva, the Russian Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinoff, had been a staunch advocate of mutual disarmament, complete disarmament, not the structured quotas favored by the U.S. and Britain.

Much had been changed by the war, with Russia now having the most powerful Army in the world and the United States contemplating having a 1.5 million man peacetime Army for the first time in its history. The U.S. would not go to war on any basis, however, save invasion of its own territory. Given that the Czar had fought the Crimean War over Turkey 90 years earlier, it appeared that perhaps the world was stumbling along at least in the right direction.

He next tells of local prohibition of liquor gaining favor in many places in the country, Florida and Arkansas being two such states with some counties voting to go Dry, while Indiana and other states had drives ongoing to prohibit sale of liquor.

At the time, nearly a third of the nation's counties were dry. Despite these forces, however, it was unlikely that Congress could be pressured into voting for another prohibition amendment to the Constitution for the reasons that war veterans would oppose it and it would result in loss of needed Federal revenue, amounting to 2.4 billion dollars in 1945, plus 600 million more in state revenue.

Marquis Childs describes a report by a traveler just returned from Moscow who contended that Russia would remain a closed world. He described the masters of the Kremlin as being as "surgeons engaged in an elaborate and extended vivisection of the mind of the Russian people." These surgeons did not want anyone interrupting the operation until the mindset was firmly implanted.

Andrei Gromyko was in many respects a product of the Bolshevik Revolution, requiring absolute obedience to the will of the higher authority. One of the primary characteristics of the Russian mind was suspicion. Thus, it appeared that a wall had developed between Mr. Gromyko and his colleagues on the Security Council.

From the perspective of Moscow, he posits, Russia was embattled on the Security Council, especially on the Iranian issue, with the West joining in unanimity with China, leaving Russia only with the possible support of Poland and Australia, the latter having voted on one issue with Russia. Thus, the old view of power politics and conquest appeared to prevail.

The continued insistence of the U.S. to exclusive possession of the atomic secret and in having complete sovereignty over island bases in the Pacific lent credence to the Russian suspicions.

A victory by either side on the Iranian issue would be meaningless as the result would only increase suspicion.

Mr. Childs suggests that a cure might be for Prime Minister Stalin to visit the United States and size up the situation for himself, however improbable the prospect of such a visit was.

Samuel Grafton discusses the American occupation zone in Germany, that all history lessons on the war had been removed from the German schools for the first eight grades, and in the high schools only a sterile version of the history was being taught.

The Army had done an efficient job of weeding out Nazis, as more Germans had been removed from positions than in any of the three other sectors of occupation.

The problem with the American approach was that it was mechanical, not allowing participation in democracy by Germans, rather trying to teach them of it. An open and free press would be a first step toward allowing Germans to participate in democracy.

The Russians had trusted the Germans who were on their side. America had not even done that, trusting no one. The result was inertia within the American occupation zone.

It was in America's self-interest to encourage such free political action, as to deny it reflected a troubled doubt of American democracy.

"The moral crisis, the crisis of faith, is ours, not the Germans' when a supreme moment in history catches us with our mouths open, uttering a pear-shaped nothing."

"High noon", incidentally, Pat, from January 10, 1944, is now here. "Cars" is here. It gets old, Pat, mighty old. You really are stupid, mighty stupid. Wasn't the word invented for you? Stupid, we mean.

A regular letter writer offers the entire text of Rudyard Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" for readers to contemplate. It concludes:

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—There are only four things certain since Social Progress began—That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"

"Break bread", from May 12, 1945, is now here. Some semblance of "determine" is now here.

The letter writer who had written in defense of Ireland and criticizing British imperialism suggests that it would be better to test a smaller atomic bomb than that dropped on Japan, to avoid the prospect of a tidal wave or unpredictable effects on the weather.

A letter warns of the possibility of World War III erupting with Russia, advising not to fall for Stalin's advocacy of peace. The more the U.S. would give Russia, the more it would "bomerang" as with Pearl Harbor—"so let the ism that bites our hand feed themselves."

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