Saturday, May 11, 1946

The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 11, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that John L. Lewis, after a two-hour meeting with the bituminous coal operators, had made no progress, as his two-week hiatus in the strike was about to begin on Monday, provided the local operators assured back pay during the working hiatus, after the contract might be signed with a hike in wages.

Mr. O'Neill, first to leave the conference room, spoke for the operators and replied, "No statement, no statement, no statement."

Mr. Lewis then emerged, asking what Mr. O'Neill had said, and when told, stated, "We'll duplicate that statement."

Mr. McGrady, the Federal conciliator, indicated that the confreres would vote each afternoon whether to continue negotiations into the evening and whether to resume the next day.

President Truman stated that he wanted a settlement within four or five days—implicitly suggesting his intent otherwise to seize the mines, his authority to do so beyond May 15, still up to the House, the Senate having voted on Thursday to extend the authority for 45 days by passing the bill to extend the draft until July 1.

In Johnstown, Pa., the two UMW locals of the county, the Scalp Level Local and the St. Michael's Local, refused to accept the truce— apparently misunderstanding the word "truce", as distinct from "armistice"—suggesting that to do so meant that for the previous six weeks they had been chasing the "will-o'-the-wisp", declaring that they had just begun to fight, that the miners facing a death sentence from silicosis could call no truce, and declared that they would not throw in the towel even if Mr. Lewis was going to do so. The miners relied on their traditional "no contract-no work" policy—still misunderstanding, however, the word "truce", which implies by its terms, resumption of the war should favorable terms not be negotiated, that sometimes, favorable terms could not be obtained while the country and the world lay starving from the actions of a bunch of spoiled morons laying down their drills.

Hey, moron. Lamp-leaner, with the folded arms. Yeah, you. You don't like it? You know where you can move. We have a Constitution in this country. Maybe they don't teach you that in the mine company town school, or suggest that it is only applicable to you and yours. We have a newsflash for you, Scalp Level.

In response to the coal strike moratorium, the ODT, according to the American Association of Railroads, had lifted the embargo on non-essential freight and the 50 percent cut in passenger carriage, Order No. 60, but not yet the 25 percent reduction in rail passenger service.

The removal of the freight embargo enabled General Motors to keep its employees on the job. There was no word from Chrysler and Ford.

In Yokohama, Japan, a thousand workers of an electric factory stormed the Kanagawa prefectural office, demanding a special rice ration, leaving after being promised an issue of flour and starch.

In Asheville, N.C., the AF of L third biennial Southern labor conference got underway, with speeches from George Googe, Frank Fenton, and George Meany, attacking the CIO's efforts at union organizing in the South, accusing CIO of being Communist. The AFL, touting itself as a defender of American democracy, urged its own organizing efforts. Mr. Fenton said that the South needed "no new Messiahs coming down here talking about a new form of Government."

The passenger curtailment Order No. 60 had delayed Pullman cars from arriving with delegates and leaders, and so not all were yet present, including AFL president William Green.

In Tehran, talks broke down between members of a delegation from Azerbaijan Province and the Iranian Central Government, seeking resolution of the dispute which had led to insurrection in Azerbaijan, seeking independence from Iran. The Azerbaijanis, saying that failure of resolution might result in civil war, returned to Tabriz.

At the four-power foreign ministers conference in Paris, Secretary of State Byrnes accepted the Russian demand that Italy be required to pay 100 million dollars in war reparations, subject to conditions specifying and limiting the sources of the reparations, which V.M. Molotov rejected. For one, he stated that naval vessels, one of the sources specified by Mr. Byrnes, were to be considered legitimate war booty and not reparations. Mr. Byrnes had responded that booty could be claimed only by those who had captured it, and that Russia had captured no Italian naval vessels.

The Russians appeared to back away from opposition to a French proposal that Italy be allowed to retain as sole trustee its colonies acquired prior to Mussolini coming to power in 1922. It also appeared not any longer to oppose a U.S. proposal for establishment of an Inter-Allied Commission to investigate and prosecute war criminals within Italy for a particular period following signing of the Italian treaty.

Economic Stabilizer Chester Bowles recommended raising price ceilings on all grain feeds to enable farmers to earn the profits necessary to induce them to take the grains to market rather than using it as livestock feed, also resulting therefore in getting the livestock to market, thus easing the shortage of grain and meat. He stated that the U.S. had fallen miserably short of its goal for supplying grain overseas, by 27.450 million bushels since the beginning of the year, resulting in the deaths of untold millions, and that therefore drastic steps had to be taken.

In Grant, Mich., a captain of the State Police reported that a resident of the Muskogon Heights trailer camp had confessed to the slaying of his pregnant wife and step-daughter, whose bodies had been found in a shallow grave on Friday. Identification of the bodies, buried for approximately a month, was via a small, square locket around the wife's neck, containing snapshots of her and her husband.

Hal Boyle, still in Berlin, reports that the Swiss had pretty much occupied the market on watches, ending the black market in Germany. The chief customers of the black market had been the Russians, such that the GI's had joked that when they wanted to know the time, they should call the Soviet Embassy.

Another joke, the best, however, was that a G.I. had a sundial for sale: met a Russian in downtown Berlin, who asked, "Wanta sell your watch?" to which the G.I. responded, "I don't have a watch," to which the Russian responded, "Look, I got four." The G.I. saw the four on the Russian's arm, the nearest to his eye saying 11:00, held up a stick, said he could tell time by the stick, did not have to wind it, poked it in the ground, showed the Russian the shadow thus produced by the sun, circumscribed a line around it, placed numbers along the line, "11" marked at the spot where the shadow fell. He then told the Russian that his watch said 11:00 and asked of the Russian what time he had, to which—

The Russian offered a thousand marks, a hundred bucks American, for the watch.

That's a joke, Son—at least, in Tombstone Territory.

A caption beneath a photograph of a gentleman in trouble with a capital "T", looking for the pool, crossing the line, tells of his having stumbled into the Chicago Opera Building, following top-hatted and evening gown-adorned first-night performance attenders, while thinking he was entering the railway station where he was going to use his ticket for Gary, Indiana.

You may peruse on page 12-A the report of Martha Azer as she tells of the rehabilitation of wayward girls taking place at North Carolina's Samarcand Institute, which she found to be doing a splendid job, with a splendid time guaranteed for all.

On the editorial page, "A Welcome Congressional Reversal" praises the House for putting back into the temporary housing bill the provision for 400 million dollars in subsidies to builders to encourage low and medium-priced housing, albeit still a compromise with the 600 million requested by the President. The vote had come in the wake of Southern Democrats doing an about-face and voting for the provision. It meant that opposition to Federal housing now lay squarely in the lap of Republicans.

The Congressmen had apparently found out in their home districts during the Easter recess that the public viewed the matter as sufficiently urgent to warrant the expenditure, without which the program for construction of 2.7 million houses for veterans during the ensuing two years would be meaningless.

The piece recommends forgiving and forgetting the House's lost weekend.

"The Eloquence of Winston Churchill" finds salutary the former Prime Minister's recommendation to the Dutch Parliament that a United States of Europe be established in place of dangerous nationalism. His enemies would likely see in it an anti-Russian scheme, and perhaps fear of Russian domination was the impelling motivation for it. He included both East and West in his conceptualization but, says the piece, an array of Western Europe against the Soviet would likely not be unwelcome.

Mr. Churchill did not sound much as a plotter, rather someone who had determined to devote the remainder of his years to explaining the conflict between Western political democracy and Soviet economic democracy. He might be wrong, says the editorial, but he had earned the right to express the honest opinion on the subject and if relations with Russians had become so delicate as to be imperiled by his eloquence, then they could not long endure in any event.

"Home-Grown Fascists Are Stirring Again" finds it a statement on the times that the Kluckers were riding again, albeit with crosses burning only tentatively. As Drew Pearson had explained in his column on Wednesday, they had managed to run a Jewish woman from her new store in Chattanooga by burning a cross across the street from it.

Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution reported that there were renewed signs of Klan activity in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida, not impacting much yet, but "sweating and trying". They solicited members to pay $10 each, $8 of which went to the recruiter of the neophyte Klucker. The recruiters often earned as much as $100 per week and lived well, wore nice suits, making the work attractive.

"The fact," said Mr. McGill, "that they have to explain, locally, that the Rome they are talking about is one of those foreign countries and not Rome, Ga., is a complete characterizer of about two-thirds of their membership."

Their success was not unique to the South, the Klan having historically had its greatest successes in places such as Indiana and Nutley, N.J.

The South could contribute a great service to the nation by stamping out the fiery crosses before they could burn external of their internal tinder, and arraying Southern opinion against such home-grown fanaticism. "The time to do it is now."

And, of course, it is always the case, with due regard to the notion that even the Kluckers have the right of freedom of speech, even hate speech, vile, and thoroughly condemnable. Suppressing it is the ultimate path which leads to a whole society becoming Nazified or dangerously tending toward it. Through penetrating the veil of the ugly speech, we learn as much about getting along with mankind as through the pretty speech.

We can deal with it only so long by laughing at it, until the laughter itself becomes so confusing as to suggest some sympathy with it, not the intended implication. By the same token, insisting on not laughing at it on occasion is to invite its being taken with such seriousness as to magnify its impact and ingratiate others to its device, in need always of being taken oh so secretly seriously to make membership in it alluring.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Subversive Activity in Russia", tells of Russia trying to raise its revenue for rebuilding under the new five-year plan by a lottery.

The piece finds that the fact suggested Russia drifting toward capitalism. But it would need consult Earl Browder for further advice on the subject.

Drew Pearson, who unfortunately again is in the blur today, discusses the lobbyist John R. Monroe, a.k.a. John P. Monroe, as he had previously on April 8, 1944.

"The Big Red House on R Street", from the latter date, is now here.

The 1963 Hertz commercial to which we linked four years ago only to have it disappear, and then again three years ago, only to have it disappear again, has now re-surfaced here. There is a reason why we are so insistent on preservation of these links. It is not a game or without considerable thought that we link to outside material.

We have, in dutiful compliance to thoroughness, located the blurred column on Mr. Monroe. Mr. Pearson reiterates much of what he had related previously on the subject, explaining again that in response to the original 1943 column, Mr. Monroe had initiated a million dollar libel suit against Mr. Pearson and a $350,000 suit against The Washington Post, a lawsuit which he lost. Mr. Monroe, however, continued his shady and nefarious activities, eventually costing him two years in prison and a $100,000 fine in New York for participating in the black market in textiles, which had earned him several hundred thousand dollars.

Mr. Pearson also tells of the attempts of a House sub-committee on Justice to whittle down the budget of the anti-trust division of the Justice Department, such that it would have to lay off part of its current staff. As chairman of the sub-committee, Congressman Louis Rabaut of Detroit was the chief backer of the effort.

Incidentally, while on the subject of shadows, bells, alarums, and signals issued live over the tv by "witnesses" to run, run, run, apparently auditioning for their roles in the Sun, Sun, Sun of the Society for the Preservation of Gerenuks, the Governor of Oklahoma in 1963

Was she naked on tv as Nixon's operator? We never saw that one.

Guess so.

That fairly let's the cat right out of the bag, doesn't it?

Buel Patch discusses the trend toward surrender of some sovereign rights of nations to preserve the peace. The rejected proposed French constitution for the Fourth Republic had contained a controversial provision which provided for limited sovereignty of France for organization and defense of peace, meaning that, subject to reciprocity of other nations, France could surrender its sovereignty to the U.N.

At the San Francisco Charter Conference a year earlier, China and the Netherlands had expressed a similar willingness, though the Charter, itself, ultimately provided that no member nation was surrendering any part of its sovereignty.

The Congress had given the President authority to issue orders prohibiting economic relations between the United States and foreign countries against which sanctions had been authorized and imposed by the U.N. Security Council. British Commons had approved a similar bill.

The pending bill on domestic control of atomic energy had within it a provision to limit sovereign rights, allowing that any of its provisions which would run contrary to international control would be deemed void. This provision would outrun Supreme Court decisions which had held that treaties trump countervailing statutes enacted prior to the treaty, but not afterward.

These actions, analogous to the individual States having surrendered under the U.S. Constitution their sovereignty to the supremacy of the Federal Government, appeared as seeds of a possible trend.

Bertram Benedict remarks that the plan of Secretary of State Byrnes to maintain a Big Four assurance of disarming Germany and Japan for 25 years was close to violating the admonition of George Washington against a "permanent alliance" and of Thomas Jefferson, against "entangling alliances". Supporters of the Byrnes policy, however, responded that the world had dramatically changed since the days of the Founding Fathers, with the airplane, rocket, and atomic bomb having dramatically reduced distances in the world for the purpose of stirring trouble with a capital "T".

The proposal was not dissimilar to the joint assurance of America and Britain in 1919 to protect France against future German aggression. The hope was that the new proposal would cause France to be less insistent on detaching the Rhineland, the Saar, and the Ruhr from Germany, while giving assurance that, this time, as in 1921 President Harding and the Congress had done, the U.S. would not renege on its commitment.

In 1919, France had been willing to give up demands for control of the left bank of the Rhine only if the U.S. and Britain would assure defense of France in the event of German aggression, provided that disarmament of the Rhineland failed to provide security to France.

A letter expresses alarm at the increasing activities of the Klan since the end of the war. Economic conditions were not of the type which were yet conducive to widespread growth of the Klan, but high inflation and consequent depression could bring about another surge in the Klan's popularity. He urges the newspapers to deal with the menace by education of its evils before it had a chance to catch on.

A letter greets with approbation the establishment in 37 states of Republican Open Forums, since the announcement was made a month earlier urging their formation. California had established twenty such forums. The first Open Forum problem was the relationship with Russia.

The editors note that the 37 states did not include any Southern state, where Republican inquiry apparently went not beyond trying to find out who would be the postmaster locally when the GOP next obtained the White House.

ROF's are quite fine with us, as long as there are equally active DOF's, and any other OF which might desire to have a go.

A letter relates that a company had sent a telegram to Senators Bailey and Hoey, and Congressman Ervin, the quoted contents of which wind up in the blur, as does the first portion of the editors' reply. The part which can be read reveals that the subject was the Case bill to limit union and strike activities, stating the editors' view that the Case bill went too far in the direction of management and that the only proper way to achieve balance was a bill which had as paramount the public interest.

A letter from Chicago provides a short piece appearing in the May issue of The Rotarian, authored by a citizen of Charlotte, stating that five years earlier there had been 46 active Rotary Clubs in Japan, but now none. He urged re-establishment of the dormant clubs to reverse or revise the 2,600 years of Japanese unified thinking. Rotary, he further suggests, had planted its seeds in the 70,000 Buddhist shrines and the 2,000 Christian churches in Japan.

The gentleman may not have realized it but he also presents, by his reference to time, a strong enough case that Rotary may have been part, at least, of the font from which flowed the ideal of blood sacrifice which led to the little poetaster-Empress and her little horsy-Husband causing the war and the shedding of blood in the millions. But, that is just our take on the Rotarian matter.

A letter from the manager of the Veterans Administration in Winston-Salem, Judson D. DeRamus, thanks The News for its help in making Veterans' Opportunity Week a success.

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