Tuesday, September 10, 1946

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 10, 1946

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the London Conference on Palestine began with Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that Britain did not support the partition plan recommended by the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine, proposing a four-way partition. The Jewish Agency had thus far refused to participate, but an informed source said that it would, provided Britain would agree to partition and establishment of an autonomous Jewish region.

In Tel Aviv, a curfew was lifted which had been imposed on the city's 200,000 Jewish residents in the wake of violence which left three dead and others injured.

Yugoslavia had tentatively agreed to indemnify the United States for the loss of the five-man crew in the incident of August 19 in which an American plane was shot down. A question had been raised, however, as to whether the Yugoslavs should reimburse for the two lost planes, including that forced to crash land on August 9.

Assistant Secretary of Labor Philip Hannah reported that he had been unsuccessful during a trip to San Francisco to try to effect a truce in the maritime strike and that it was therefore likely to continue until the Wage Stabilization Board would reverse its decision to disallow a wage increase of more than $17.50 per month because of the tendency of higher wages to be inflationary. Management and labor had agreed on a $27.50 per month increase.

A Puerto Rican sailor who had abandoned his three small children at a Brooklyn orphanage on Saturday returned, as he had promised in a note, to explain his actions. He said to police that he had lost his job when the maritime strike began, his wife had left him, and he could not care for the children. He had still not found a job. He was arrested for abandonment.

Butcher shops in most cities were reported to be running out of meat as price ceilings went back into effect for the first time since July 1. In New York City, 90 percent of the dealers had no meat at all. During the interim, the markets had been glutted with meat. Now, producers were holding back their cattle and livestock, leaving production at 8 to 50 percent that of normal.

The manager of Leader Department Store of Lima, Ohio, had read that the Civil Production Administration had predicted shortages of men's clothing by the end of the year and continuing until 1948. He then took out a full-page ad instructing readers that his store had plenty of suits and shirts on hand for the end of the year.

Chester Bowles, former OPA chief, announced that he was in the Connecticut gubernatorial race for the Democratic nomination. The state convention would be held the following week to select the nominee.

The stock market, as it had the previous Tuesday, dropped again, to its lowest point for the year, with shares losing between one dollar and twelve dollars. Apparently, the market had come not to like Tuesdays.

Three kingpins of Charlotte's lottery were convicted of engaging in an illegal lottery and conspiracy to promote same. The court deferred judgment on the misdemeanor violations until the following day at which time the defense would produce character witnesses for the purpose of sentencing. The widow of deceased lottery participant Carl Lippard testified against the defendants on the basis that she believed her husband's death had not been the result of natural causes. The charges had come in August following several weeks of SBI investigation into the operation.

A map is shown of the proposed route of a cross-town boulevard for Charlotte linking Monroe Road with Wilkinson Boulevard. The plan was controversial for its impact on residential neighborhoods and was set to be heard by the City Council this date. Via a somewhat modified route, this wide thoroughfare would come to be known as Independence Boulevard.

On the editorial page, "A New American Foreign Policy" comments on the statement by Secretary of State Byrnes at Stuttgart the previous week regarding Germany, that it had redefined American foreign policy. His call for a democratic Germany as prerequisite to reconstruction of Europe was sound on its face.

France, not Russia, had initially criticized the statement as supporting a return to power politics in Europe as after World War I.

The British applauded the speech as their policy was built on the spheres of influence being implicitly advocated.

The Germans praised it, for it gave them the basis of hope to keep the West pitted against the East.

The Russians offered little objection, but simply gave a stock indication of opposition to anything originating from the West.

By implication, Mr. Byrnes saw little hope of healing the fractures with Russia and essentially favored a policy of pitting Western democracy against Soviet Communism.

The American press had reacted favorably on the notion that Mr. Byrnes was meeting head-on Russian expansionism. It was being argued that the best chance for maintaining peace was to take what Walter Lippmann had called "a calculated risk of war"—perhaps not dissimilar to the concept of "brinksmanship" later advocated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles under President Eisenhower, a policy used to advantage in the dispute between the Nationalist Chinese and Red China during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1958, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 under President Kennedy, the latter in which a piece by Mr. Lippmann of October 25, 1962 had figured prominently, floating the idea before the public of a deal, ultimately transacted, along with a no-invasion pledge of Cuba, to end the crisis, providing for exchange of the obsolete Jupiter missiles in Turkey for removal of the missiles in Cuba.

While better than the drift of isolationism before the war, the Byrnes speech committed the United States to leadership in a European and Asiatic bloc of nations bound by economic and military treaties—that which militarily would come to be known as NATO, formed in 1949, and SEATO, formed in 1954—, thus ending the dream of 1945 that there could be "one world".

While Russia's attitude had been in part the cause of the return to power politics as a policy, the United States position of desiring a peacetime draft and universal military training, maintaining full production of the atomic bomb, and insisting on retention of all captured Pacific bases had also significantly contributed to the suspicious reaction of the Russians. The country had never undertaken the calculated risk of peace by surrendering part of its sovereignty to the U.N.

General Eisenhower, speaking in Boston, had urged a supreme national effort to prevent another war to avoid calamity to civilization. He found it necessary to win over any doubters internationally.

The piece concludes that the General was in the best position to understand the stakes and it remained to be seen whether Russia and the United States could long survive deadlocked in a situation just short of military conflict, seeking to prove points to each other by threat of military force.

Incidentally, whoever supplied to the Wicked-pedia the erroneous notion that "brinksmanship" is an erroneous form of "brinkmanship", needs to think it out some. The term derives from the colloquial form, "gamesmanship". We do not say, in English anyway, "gamemanship". When one thinks too much inside the box and not enough creatively, "brinkmanship" is the sort of place one winds up.

Perhaps, post-Cuban Missile Crisis, the better term, in any event, is "blinksmanship".

"Distinguished, Patriotic Tar Heel" states that it was not an ardent fan of bandleader and comedian Kay Kyser as a radio comedian, but was becoming a fan of him as a good citizen. He had always made it clear that he was still a resident of his home state of North Carolina. Between stints in New York and Hollywood, he came home to Rocky Mount.

Recently he did so and went to Manteo to support "The Lost Colony" pageant. He then performed a stump tour on behalf of the new medical care plan for the state, and was presently planning to support the North Carolina Symphony.

He had given generously to the Symphony Endowment Fund but with a characteristic shrug of the shoulders and insistence that he was merely responding to his old classmate, Spencer Murphy, Editor of the Salisbury Post, passing the hat. The piece states that it believed instead that Mr. Murphy, when he said rather that it was Mr. Kyser's own spirit of generosity which motivated the contribution, was probably right.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "How to Choose a Candidate", finds that the New York Democratic Convention, according to the New York Times, was excited by the candidacy of Erastus Corning II, Mayor of Albany, for lieutenant governor. Mr. Corning had been in service, working his way up from private to private first class.

With so many generals and admirals with political ambitions, it was only fitting that a Pfc. should have his day in the sun.

Drew Pearson states that the President's trip to Bermuda had climaxed a major change in press relations. No longer was the President friendly and open, but was cool and aloof, his closest friends in the press having let him down as off-the-record chats had been reported.

Several weeks earlier, the President had invited members of the "Hard Rock Club" pressmen who had followed his vice-presidential campaign in 1944, to join him for an evening aboard the yacht Williamsburg. Over cards and bourbon, he freely discussed in uncomplimentary terms Russia and Chester Bowles, saying of the latter that Congress would more willingly have approved price control had Mr. Bowles not talked so much.

Afterward, Time reporter Edward Lockett made note of the comments in the magazine and thereafter the President had refused any longer to speak to him. Another reporter, from the Chicago Sun, who was not a member of the club, learned of the President's comments on Russia and reported them, further angering the President.

So, on the Bermuda trip, he had instructed press secretary Charles Ross to tell the reporters that he would answer no question which did not pertain to the trip. When one reporter broke the rule, the President angrily snapped at him.

Mr. Pearson notes that the change was probably a good thing as the President had been too informal and open in his original dealings with the press, for instance his off-the-cuff remark from a veranda at Reel Foot Lake, Tenn., the previous year that the country did not intend to share the nuclear secret.

He next tells of Chief Justice Fred Vinson meeting with Justice Robert Jackson when the latter had returned from Nuremberg, finding him more rational than when he had bitterly criticized in the spring Justice Hugo Black. It appeared that Justice Jackson was ready to resume his seat in a cooperative atmosphere. Associates had suggested that the darkness of the Nuremberg trial had adversely affected his mood.

Bess Truman was studying Spanish along with Cabinet and Supreme Court wives. Tutor Ramon Ramos of Cuba believed in a hands-on approach to learning a foreign language, such as by cooking in Spanish at the White House. Most of the cuisine was Spanish onions, prompting Margaret Truman, according to her mother, to declare that the whole place stank.

He concludes with his Capital Chaff, among which is the note that President Truman suffered from seasickness for two days coming and going on his trip to Bermuda.

Barnet Nover comments on the radio address of Secretary of State Byrnes delivered from the Stuttgart Opera House the previous week, setting forth, he says, the first comprehensive statement of U.S. foreign policy toward post-war Germany. The charge had frequently been made since V-E Day that America had no such policy and that it was being developed ad hoc. While the accusation had not been well-founded, the new policy clearly set forth America's position and it was one which appeared workable. Most of the policy was not new and tracked to a great degree the Potsdam Declaration of July, 1945. The statement favoring a unified German economy was from the Secretary's address of July 11 to the Foreign Ministers Council.

During the year since Potsdam, nothing much had been done to unify the four occupation zones, as the Declaration had set forth as a goal. There were barriers created by the lack of a unified transportation system, communications or postal services, and unequal distribution of food and industrial products, leaving Germany an economic wasteland.

Russia, more than the other three occupying nations, was responsible for lack of implementation of the plan, despite it supporting German unification on a centralized rather than a Federalized basis.

Mr. Byrnes had made it clear, however, that the United States was committed to remaining in Europe for a long time and would, insofar as practicable, carry out a plan of action to effect the goals of occupation.

Samuel Grafton comments on the order of New York City appearing as a mask cloaking disorder of the times, the failure to achieve the unity of the three major allies which only two years earlier had appeared as a realistic goal. An orderly war had given way to a disorderly peace.

Someone informed him of a newsboy who sold a lot of papers by parading through the theater district at night, shouting in an ominous tone the single word "Russia!".

Even with meat plentiful for the moment in restaurants and lights brightly burning in the city, the effect was somehow more threatening than during war when the lights were dim and there was no meat.

No one any longer spoke of the hope of world unity.

"When there is a sense of order in the world, a sandwich will do, but when order goes, mountains of beef will not drive away hunger, nor will banks of lights dispel the dark. The little bit of order which a man named Roosevelt established for so short a time has been broken; and what is left becomes a parody of order, as the great humming metropolis itself dwindles to a comment on a chaos wide as the world."

A letter from an English teacher at Central High School in Charlotte imparts a poem written for the GI, titled "Spirit of the GI Student".

A letter from a former GI remarks on the War Department's Committee for Military Justice deliberating on whether to allow enlisted men to sit on court martial tribunals. He had once sat in the brig for two months before having his case adjudicated. The men were resigned to being given a stiff sentence, sometimes ridiculously so, by the officers.

He offers, however, that putting enlisted men on the tribunals would not solve the problem as those smart enough to understand justice would know they were brighter than the average enlisted man, which is why the officers pushed around the enlisted man.

He concludes that there simply was no justice.

A letter writer advocates giving money to the veterans of World War I over 50 who could not find a job, rather than sending it to support foreign aid.

A letter welcomes back Samuel Grafton from his month-long vacation and asserts the belief, after reading the piece of September 3, that he was now keener for the break.

Herblock....

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