Tuesday, June 25, 1946

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 25, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate-House confreres had reached agreement the night before on a compromise version of the one-year extension of OPA. It knocked out the end of price controls which had been set to occur on meat, poultry, dairy products, butter, cigarettes, and gasoline, the most controversial of the provisions of the original bill.

The House passed the Senate-House compromise legislation on the draft, extending it until March 31 and exempting only 18-year olds.

Both the current draft and OPA would expire on July 1 without extension.

The "terminal pay" bill for veterans which had passed the House ran into problems in the Senate Military Committee.

The Russians refused to respond to protests by the State Department regarding suppression of news out of Rumania and the Soviet-backed Government there ordered a Christian Science Monitor correspondent who had written critically of the Rumanian Government to leave the country.

The scheduled test of the atomic bomb in Operation Crossroads, set to occur July 1, is reviewed in a report from Don Whitehead, aboard the U.S.S. Appalachian, the press observation ship which would be positioned 18 miles from the lagoon where the blast would occur. The closest ship would be 8.5 miles away, Admiral W. H. Blandy's flagship, the Mount McKinley. Some 40,000 Army and Navy personnel would take part in the tests. The purpose of the tests would be to determine the capability of the atomic bomb against ships at sea and at anchorage.

In Trenton, N.J., a 26-year old man fought extradition back to South Carolina, having escaped from a chain gang. He claimed he had been tortured into confession of a minor theft, but the New Jersey Attorney General argued that it was of no moment as the State's extradition laws did not allow consideration of the guilt or innocence of the convict or the fairness of his trial.

Cotton prices rose to 23-year highs, over 30 cents per pound, more than $2 per bale higher.

Governor Herbert O'Conor of Maryland won the Democratic primary for the Senate. Hagerstown publisher William Lane won the Democratic nomination for Governor, defeating Millard Tawes, the State Comptroller backed by the Democratic machine.

One gas hog thus won while the other in the V-12 Cadillac lost.

On the editorial page, "Emergency Means Emergency" discusses the Governor's Emergency Committee to determine how many veterans wanted to attend college and to try to establish adequate facilities temporarily to accommodate them. But the Committee had delayed the date for veterans registration until July 23. It caused a tremendous logistical problem for the veterans as they could not know whether they would be attending college in the fall and thus whether or not to take a permanent job.

It suggests to Governor Gregg Cherry the example of Governor Sparks of Alabama regarding his making veterans education the number one priority, having taken an active role in initiating the necessary action to bring it to reality.

It recommends that Governor Cherry light a fire under the Emergency Committee.

"Could This Be Economy?" indicates that the 79th Congress was economy-minded and that the days of the New Deal free spending had passed. Yet, recently, the House had voted unanimously to appropriate between 3.5 and 8 billion dollars for the first veterans' bonus of World War II, to pay the 15 million veterans for missed furlough time.

It was the same House which wanted to end food subsidies and considered the President's full employment plan to be economically unsound.

While perhaps the bill for the veterans should have passed, the piece would have liked to have seen at least one Representative rise in protest for the expense.

The move did not explain why the Congress was permitting the injustice to occur to veterans regarding lack of housing, the House having initially refused to approve of a 400-million dollar subsidy for the temporary housing bill, later restored.

"The Passing of William S. Hart" laments the death of the cowboy actor of the silent era. He was, in truth, born and bred in the East, including a stint with his family in Asheville at the turn of the century, but had become on film the stone faced, steely-eyed man among men, courageous to a fault, courteous to women, but never in love. He would likely not have fared well, it suggests, in the latter day when cowboys had to be crooners and marry the girl.

He had died at 83 with a million dollars in the bank.

The slicker cowboys of the time would keep alive the indelible image of the original and greatest of the Western heroes of the screen.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "On Power and Responsibility", comments on an interview in Atlanta of the president of the Textile Workers Union, Emil Rieve, who had stated that organized labor had to be responsible to employers and the general public. The statement barely received any notice. But, says the piece, he made good sense.

Drew Pearson comments on the absence of many Democratic members from the House Military Affairs Committee debate on control of nuclear energy, a debate held behind closed doors.

Mr. Pearson had garnered a few of the details. The House Committee determined that two Army men should be on the Atomic Control Board, despite the Senate having ruled that out after weeks of careful scrutiny and debate, a move supported by the White House and the War Department. Most of the talk was done by Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, who interrupted Representative Chet Holifield of California even in his attempt merely to read the bill aloud to the Committee.

He next comments on a confidential report of Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal regarding Russian influence in the Balkans. One part which had leaked dealt with the practice of typesetters refusing to set the type of editorials with which they disagreed.

The Indianapolis Star meanwhile had informed the St. Petersburg Times that it was unable to get its printers to set the type for an advertisement which might break the ongoing strike at the Times. The publisher of the Times was pro-labor but the International Typographical Union was led by Woodruff Randolph, the Caesar Petrillo of the typesetters. He wanted the typesetters to be able to set the type for ads which would run in the afternoon paper though the same ad had run in the morning paper. The type thus set would then be tossed in the melting pot. It was simply a way to increase the work and wages of the typesetters, but was one reason small independent papers struggled financially.

Marquis Childs discusses the new 53rd Secretary of the Treasury, John W. Snyder, replacing Fred Vinson who had the day before been sworn in as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He comments that not all of the Treasury Secretaries had been mental giants. Some had "rattled around in Alexander Hamilton's shoes, and when they have gone out of office, obscurity has closed around them."

The Treasury had able civil servants and the Secretary, while shaping policy, did not have a huge impact on the basic machinery. But Mr. Snyder's task would be complicated by the huge war debt, the largest in the history of the nation. The public held outstanding war bonds totaling 49 billion dollars which would eventually need to be redeemed. He would also serve as chairman of the National Advisory Council on international monetary and financial problems.

Given the weight Mr. Snyder would thus have, it was disturbing that he often spoke as a small town xenophobe, criticizing foreigners for coming to the United States with their hands out.

Mr. Snyder had endured a great deal of criticism, his defenders suggesting that his detractors had been old New Dealers in conspiracy against him. But part of the criticism had come from those genuinely concerned over his competence. He had received most of his praise when before the Senate Banking Committee from Republicans and ultra-conservatives.

Big business liked him, as they did George Allen, another of President Truman's Missouri cronies, who now headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. At a recent dinner, Mr. Allen had responded to questions by Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, demonstrating an appalling lack of knowledge of the functioning of RFC. He even acknowledged his fumbling for answers by asserting that the able staff could manage the details of RFC.

Both Mr. Allen and Mr. Snyder were yes-men to the President and it did him no good. It was doubtful that such men of questionable competence could carry out progressive policies.

Samuel Grafton, still in Los Angeles, comments that he had heard little during his tour of the country, from the Outer Banks through the Deep South to the West Coast, regarding the atomic bomb. When it was mentioned, an uneasiness seemed to present itself, as if an improper topic had been introduced to the conversation. Most correspondents, when polled, had predicted that the Bikini test would result in only slight damage to the warships. Both approaches seemed to Mr. Grafton to be a form of denial.

The political apathy in the country which he had found might actually stem, not so much from indifference as from fear, a kind of ducking and covering against the trepidation stimulated by the travails at hand. There were other causes as well, the absence from the stage of dynamic personalities such as Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt.

President Truman might be causing the apathy by his own lack of success in getting his policies through Congress. The play was so dull that the audience was bored. The dream of an harmonious world and plenty after the war had not been realized in the space of a year. The public was simply disappointed and disaffected. The apathetic citizen had not so much lost interest in politics as he had simply lost faith in its ability to solve his problems.

Reverend A. P. Wilson of Charlotte's First Christian Church, guest speaker on the weekly "Synagogue of the Air" conducted by Rabbi Philip Frankel of Temple Beth El, presents the transcript of that talk, in which he discusses the debt owed by Christianity to Judaism.

He explains that the concepts of "redemption", "atonement", "righteousness", "faith", "penitence", "salvation", "holiness", and other such notions derived from Judaism.

The Christian owes his concept of a monotheistic God to the Jew, a concept derived in Judaism through trial and error over a period of time.

The Ten Commandments were the basic Hebrew law.

The principal early Christians and disciples were all Jews.

The Old Testament was Jewish in origin; the New Testament was largely written by Jews.

Reverend Wilson asserts the belief that modern democracy, including the four freedoms and the concept of equality, derived from the code of Israel.

Out of the synagogue developed the church. The freedom of speech developed in the synagogue allowed the Christian church to develop and flourish.

He thus advocates common fellowship between Jews and Christians which would develop respect for the differences in the religions while enhancing the understanding of the common foundations.

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