Friday, June 21, 1946

The Charlotte News

Friday, June 21, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that OPA had raised bituminous coal prices by an average of 40.5 cents per ton to offset the wage increases of the coal strike settlement plus the lost profits of the operators during the 59-day strike. The increases ranged from 10 cents to $1.46 per ton depending on the district of the mine. Retail prices would rise 3.25 percent. Only 15 percent of the coal mined was used for household purposes.

The piece adds that in Charlotte and surrounding areas, most households used coal and the average retail price hike would be 46 to 58 cents per ton.

The operators had not yet accepted the contract to which agreement was made between the Government and UMW and the prices indicated would only be in effect as long as the Government continued to operate the mines.

Anthracite coal, used primarily for home heating, would likely be raised a dollar per ton.

In India, the major cities were in turmoil as protests erupted over the arrest in Kashmir of Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru, arrested for defying a magistrate's order banning him from entering his home province. There was a general strike in Bombay, with a 100,000 workers staying at home and students boycotting classes. All markets in Karachi, Calcutta, and Madras were closed.

Indian Moslem leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah urged Moslems not to be stampeded into actions which would reflect adversely on their cause.

President Truman stated to reporters that the Russian proposal on atomic energy might lead to a negotiated compromise with the American proposal, the primary differences being that the American proposal would not relinquish control of the atomic secret until safeguards and regulations were in place, whereas the Soviet proposal would require its surrender within 90 days and regulations only within six months, and that the Soviet proposal would retain the veto for the Big Five, a principal part of the U.S. proposal being that no veto would be allowed. The President had emphasized the day before that American policy would remain firm on the issue of eliminating the veto.

Secretary of State James Byrnes announced that he had proposed in April to China, Russia, and Britain a plan under which Japan would be kept disarmed for at least 25 years, under a four-power commission. A similar proposal had been made also with respect to Germany at the same time.

At the Paris four-power foreign ministers conference, agreement was reached on disposition of Italian colonies, permitting the conference to turn to the issue of Trieste. The colonies were to be maintained for a year in joint trustee status and if no resolution could be reached in that time, the issue would be turned over to the U.N. The agreement set the tone for a new cooperative atmosphere at the conference.

British Army Headquarters revealed that it had discovered evidence that the radical Jewish group, Irgun Zvai Leumi, had plotted to kidnap Lt. General Sir Evelyn Barker, commander-in-chief of British forces in Palestine. The group had kidnapped six other officers. The kidnappers and five of their victims remained undiscovered. One of the kidnapped officers had managed to escape the previous day by jumping from a hotel window in Jerusalem. The others had been taken in Tel Aviv.

Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, described the kidnapping as "lunacy" and urged the kidnappers to release their victims.

At Bad Nauheim, Germany, in the continuing trial of American Army officers alleged to have inflicted cruelty on American prisoners at Lichfield prison in England, the prosecution charged that the Lichfield guardhouse was "worse than the dungeons of the Dark Ages" and that the camp commander, Col. James Kilian, now being tried, had provided direct orders to inflict cruelty on American prisoners.

The joint House-Senate confreres appeared to have reconciled the draft bills to exempt 18-year olds in a compromise.

The joint confreres on reconciliation of the OPA bills reached agreement on a profit margin to be allowed manufacturers and to pass along price hikes to consumers.

Harold Ickes, in his column, discusses the Philippine independence set to go into effect on July 4. Manuel Roxas had been elected the President and one of his first duties would be to determine what should be done with the Filipino collaborators during Japanese occupation. But, since President Roxas was one of the chief collaborators, his role in this regard would prove politically problematic. He had been captured as a Brigadier General of the U.S. Army on Mindanao. He accepted a position in the Japanese puppet government. Others, such as Vicente Lim, who led the 46th Division at Bataan, had refused any such position and later was killed while in captivity.

While General Roxas had refused to become the puppet President, he helped draft the constitution for the puppet government and gave advice to the puppet President and was a member of his puppet Cabinet. Though still wearing the uniform of the United States, he supported a declaration of war against the U.S. Nevertheless, the United States had not sought to brand him a traitor.

General MacArthur had liberated General Roxas while declaring the other Cabinet members to be captured. President Sergio Osmena returned to the Philippines and found General Roxas presiding over the Senate. President Osmena had kept collaborators out of his Cabinet, but General Roxas nevertheless prevented the Cabinet from being confirmed, requiring President Osmena to reform the Cabinet with the approval of General Roxas and the other collaborators.

The Filipinos saw that General Roxas was accorded special treatment by the U.S. Army and so it was little wonder that they elected him President, to obtain this favor, politically and economically.

On June 29, 1944, President Roosevelt had issued a statement saying that no collaborators should be allowed to remain in authority in the Philippines. President Truman had issued a similar statement. It had been General MacArthur's fault that the collaborators had not been brought to trial and that General Roxas was now President. It was believed that General MacArthur favored General Roxas.

Mr. Ickes suggests that it would be interesting to observe what President Roxas would do with respect to the collaborators.

In Dallas, an exploding boiler at noon had killed at least five persons and injured scores more at the Baker Hotel, one of the largest in the southwest. Some of the injured were taken to Parkland Hospital, where at least one died, and others were transported to Baylor Hospital.

It marked the third hotel disaster in just two weeks, the La Salle Hotel fire in Chicago having claimed 61 lives on June 5, and, four days later, the Canfield Hotel fire in Dubuque, Iowa, taking an additional 16 lives.

In San Bernardino, California, a boxcar broke loose from a switching crew and careened at 70 miles per hour down a grade for five miles. An engineer was able to stop the car by allowing it to abut with his locomotive and gradually then bring it to a stop.

In La Grange, Ky., an inmate at the La Grange State Reformatory, sentenced to a 21-year sentence for manslaughter, and having served ten years, escaped the night before, not realizing he was to have been paroled this date. In consequence, he was consigned, when captured, to serve the remaining eleven years of his sentence.

Moral: Check with the Warden re the scheduled release date before escaping.

For its 60th birthday in the fall, the Statue of Liberty in New York was set to receive a new interior coat of green paint and have its interior surfaces fenced off from visitors, especially females, leaving graffiti on the walls in lipstick. The Statue was experiencing a record number of visitors, over half a million annually.

On page 6-B, Al Capp presents Joe Btfspik, the world's worst jinx, becoming involved with another new character, Miss Fortune.

We wish them well.

On the editorial page, "We Are About to Miss the Boat" discusses the great opportunity for education for veterans at the expense of the Federal Government under the G.I. Bill. The University of North Carolina had turned down 9,000 applications from veterans, belying the notion that most veterans did not want to go to college. Two of every three were being turned down.

At Clemson, five of six on the honor roll were veterans, belying the notion that the veterans would not work hard at college.

Increasing campus housing, plus hiring more teachers, and supplying more textbooks and research facilities would enable more of the veterans to obtain an education and the time was ripe for doing it. Some educators were considering the idea of establishing temporary junior colleges with public school teachers acting as instructors to receive the veterans who could not get into the regular institutions.

"Old Fears Haunt the Russians" comments on the Russian proposal for atomic control, demanding that the unilateral veto be preserved on the international authority. It was a product of old suspicions of Russia harbored against the West and the correct belief that the Security Council was heavily weighted in membership toward the West and thus would always outnumber Russian interests.

But it also meant that Russian isolationism and refusal to surrender sovereignty would destroy the U.N. and any attempt to control nuclear energy. The United States had learned its isolationist lesson from the aftermath of World War I. It was too bad that it had to sit by and watch the Russians repeat the old mistakes that the U.S. had made 25 years earlier.

But it was difficult to see how any compromise could be reached which would be satisfactory to both American interests and those of Russia in sharing nuclear technology.

"A Long Way from Alabama" comments on the victory by native Alabaman Joe Louis in the boxing ring over Billy Conn, earning him $600,000.

Though only possessed of a fourth-grade education, Mr. Louis, it says, was as intelligent as he was well-coordinated. He had responded to a reporter's question during the war as to how he could fight for a country which had not treated black people too well by saying, "There's nothing wrong with this country that Hitler can cure." The piece finds it a good epigram.

He was worthy of the folk ballad about a mythical fight between the Brown Bomber and John Henry, in which Mr. Louis comes out on top after 93 rounds, scoring a clean knockout.

Drew Pearson cites several examples of Supreme Court Justices in recent years having not disqualified themselves in cases in which a party was represented by previous law connections of the Justice.

Former Justice Owen Roberts, in 1933, had not disqualified himself and had sided with a subsidiary of Bell Telephone and A.T.&T. against the Maryland Public Service Commission, despite his having once represented both Bell and A.T.&T.

Former Justice Pierce Butler had represented the Great Northern Railroad and was a close friend to its head, but nevertheless, in 1936, sat on a case and delivered the majority opinion which decided for the railroad against the State of North Dakota, which took ten million dollars off the railroad's tax bill. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justices Roberts and Willis Van Devanter, each of whom had represented railroad interests, joined in the majority.

The previous year when Governor Ellis Arnall of Georgia had personally argued the case before the Supreme Court regarding discriminatory freight rates against the South, Justice Roberts who had represented the Pennsylvania Railroad, had not recused himself, despite the prime target of Governor Arnall's suit having been that railroad. Though the case was decided for Georgia, Justice Roberts voted in favor of the railroad.

When the case which had invalidated the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Butler v. U.S., came before the Court, the lawyer for the plaintiffs was an old friend of Justice Roberts and had recommended him for the Court. But he did not remove himself from consideration of the case and voted with the majority against the constitutional validity of the AAA legislation.

The late Chief Justice Harlan Stone had sat on Duquesne Warehouse Co. v. Railroad Retirement Fund, in which the Duquesne attorney had been Chief Justice Stone's personal attorney, even had drafted his will.

Finally, Justice Robert Jackson was incorrect in asserting that Chief Justice Stone had not sat on two cases involving his old law firm's representation of parties. He had, in both the North American Holding Co. case and the Engineers Public Service Co. case, participated in the decisions. He had also sat on a third case involving his old law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, that of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which had sought a determination of whether it was part of the North American Holding Co.

Peter Edson comments that with the resolution of the maritime dispute without a strike, the labor picture in the country was in the best shape it had been in months, leaving only 143,000 workers involved in about 300 disputes, less than a dozen of which having national import. The question was whether there would come a second round of strikes in the late summer and early fall as other contracts ended.

The bulk of the 7.5 million workers who had received wage hikes had obtained, per the Government recommendation, 18.5 cents per hour. The Longshoremen's International Union, however, had received 22 cents while the other maritime unions received about nine cents and a shorter work week of 48 hours, but, including additional overtime, would effectively receive 22 to 25 cents.

The remaining major disputes involved the non-ferrous metals miners who had tied up copper production, the CIO farm equipment workers of Allis-Chalmers and J. I. Case, UMW District 50 workers at Columbia Chemicals, CIO auto workers at Mack Truck and White Motors, AFL carpenters in Cleveland, and redwood lumbermen in Northern California.

The Packinghouse Workers were set to begin negotiations for a new contract in July, asking for 12 cents per hour in wage increase, to raise base pay to a dollar per hour, plus a guaranteed annual income.

The average pay for the 37 million industrial workers of the country was $1.05 per hour, not reflecting the recent increases.

A new round of demands for wage increases might be prompted by the Congressional action stripping controls from OPA which would send the cost of living upward.

Samuel Grafton, still in Los Angeles, discusses the Baruch Plan for control of atomic energy as compared to that proposed by the Carnegie Endowment the previous Sunday, calling for limited production of atomic weapons by one or more nations acting under authority of a world organization for a period of time, provided that the nations producing the bombs would promise to use them only as directed by the U.N. Security Council.

Inspectors under the Carnegie Plan would need to be "here, there, and everywhere", and no nation could veto an inspection. The Carnegie plan expressly recognized the previous failed plans for controls of weapons under the League of Nations but asserted that at least such a plan would afford useful standards by which to judge state conduct.

The Baruch Plan would disallow production of any weapons and destroy all of the U.S. arsenal over a period of time when controls and inspection would be in place. The world authority would possess the nuclear technology. The Carnegie plan would leave the technology in the hands of each nation and rely instead on inspection.

The Carnegie plan thus respected nationalism and sovereignty while the Baruch plan appeared more realistic in accomplishing the goal of control.

It was easier to debate the finer points of these plans than it was to practically implement them in a world in which the West and Russia stood at considerable odds to one another.

Mr. Grafton wonders how Russia, unable to accept majority rule on the Security Council, would accept such a plan in a world authority to control use of atomic energy.

He concludes that perhaps the reason that so many treaties became as scraps of paper after their execution was because they were but scraps of paper before execution.

A letter from an English woman who had just arrived in the United States comments on an article which had appeared in the newspaper, condemnatory of gluttony on the part of Americans in food consumption while Europe was starving. She confirmed from her own observations that meager rations were available in Europe and England. The Dutch, she says, had been reduced at one point to eating flower bulbs. The British still received only one egg per week. Melons were too expensive to afford in England and other fruit such as bananas had not been available since before the war.

A letter writer from Los Angeles asks for help in locating a man she had met named Johnny, discharged from the Navy early in the year.

The editors ask: "Anybody here seen Johnny?" They provide the woman's name and address.

Write her if you have seen the man fitting the description. She may still be looking.

A letter from Republican Congressional candidate P. C. Burkholder offers to debate his opponent, Hamilton Jones. He suggests that The News sponsor such a debate.

The editors reply that they only sponsored a debate in the "People's Platform" space.

A letter carps at the Administration and recommends Drew Pearson's column of June 12, says that "to cure a boil on your carcass it is rather heroic treatment to hit it with a hammer—but let's hunt for a sledge."

The editors respond: "You don't mean that hammer that goes with the sickle do you?"

A letter from the Republican chairman of Mecklenburg County expresses thanks for publishing on June 15 his letter and past results in local Congressional elections, explains that his figures, at variance with those which The News had from prior elections in the district, were from the reapportioned district. He assures that the Republican committee would investigate the expenditures of Mr. Jones, reported as $1,800.

A letter asks for the return of the "Looking for Life" column by Eric Brandeis.

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