The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 11, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the United States endorsed the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states and agreed to help the U.N. preserve order during a recommended two-year transition period. The U.S. also endorsed in principle the recommendation of the Palestine special committee majority report that 150,000 Jewish immigrants be admitted to Palestine during the two-year period. Delegate Herschel Johnson also stated that Britain should continue to administer Palestine until U.N. authority could take over the responsibility and that it was not free to follow its plan of withdrawal.

The Jewish Agency, through chairman David Ben-Gurion, welcomed the move, while the Arab states again stated their disapproval. The Indian delegate favored a federalized Arab state in lieu of partition, with Jewish areas within it given broad powers of autonomy.

Joseph C. Goodwin of the A.P. reports that there were not apparently a thousand troops, as claimed the previous day by the Arab League states, within 20 miles of the Palestinian border from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, unless they were "hiding in caves or camouflaged as camels". A 300-mile aerial surveillance of the area found only four troops, two Arab Legionnaires guarding the winter home of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan and two at the Allenby Bridge across the Jordan. The plane encountered mainly Arab shepherds, angry for scattering their flocks at low altitude. A spokesman for Hagana in Jerusalem said it was convinced that the claims by the Arab League of troop movements constituted a "war of nerves".

According to Mr. Goodwin, "The pastoral tranquility of border towns and villages appeared as peaceful as a Sunday in Carolina."

The Citizens Food Committee stated that a clear majority of the nation's distillers had agreed to the President's requested 60-day moratorium to save grain for Europe. The Distilled Spirits Institute, representing 60 percent of the industry, warned, however, that the period would bring serious unemployment to the industry and cause cattle-feeding problems—as the cattle would need their usual allotment of distilled spirits to avoid the D.T.'s. But the spokesman said that his concern agreed to go along, to get along.

Head 'em up, move 'em out.

In Belgrade, the Yugoslav Government severed diplomatic relations with Chile regarding the expulsion by Chile of two Yugoslav diplomats for allegedly engaging in a Communist-directed campaign against Chile, the U.S., and defense of the Western Hemisphere. The campaign consisted of instigating strikes and sabotage in Chile. Yugoslavia contended that the action was in furtherance of expansionist tendencies by those directing internal and external policies of Chile.

CIO head Philip Murray spoke to businessmen in Boston, saying that he believed in American free enterprise but did not know how much longer the system as practiced could endure as it amounted in many places to "practiced extortion". He also criticized Taft-Hartley and said that member unions would be free to determine their own policy in regard to dealing with the NLRB as reorganized under the Act.

The name of General Eisenhower was going to be placed on the ballot in the Wisconsin and possibly the New York primaries in 1948, with or without the candidate's approval, according to a leader of the “Draft Eisenhower for President League”. They hoped to duplicate the efforts to nominate Wendell Willkie in 1940.

Republican nominee in 1936, Alf Landon, said that he knew nothing of the League and had refused to join when invited to do so, had not been told not to endorse the General, as the League had represented.

In Jackson, Miss., five "very meek" Alabama Klansmen surrendered to police after burning a cross in a vacant lot. They said that they had come to Mississippi after receiving an anonymous letter saying that blacks were out of control in Jackson. That was enough for them.

The tropical storm in the Caribbean had increased to hurricane intensity, packing winds of 100 mph in the Dry Tortugas and heading toward Florida, 60 miles away from Key West, expected to make landfall in the vicinity of Fort Myers by this night. Batten the hatches.

A specially equipped B-17 Army bomber took off for Florida to attempt to seed the storm with dry ice pellets in a scientific experiment. Aboard was a scientist for G.E. who had developed a technique of creating rain by dropping dry ice into cumulus clouds. The scientists did not hope to stop the storm but rather wanted to observe the effects of seeding.

Well, now, look here. What you need with more rain in a hurricane, boy?

In Baltimore, a woman had undergone hypnosis at Johns Hopkins Hospital before giving birth to her baby boy.

In Sevilla, Spain, the Duchess of Montoro was getting ready to wed Luis Martinez de Irugo Yartazcoz, fourth son of the Duke of Sotomayor, in the most spectacular event in the country since the Spanish civil war.

Be sure and book your plane reservations early. If you miss it, the couple would honeymoon in the U.S. You can see them at that time. Throw kisses and express how much you love them for their Royalty.

The Southern Conference, meeting in Richmond, ruled that the University of Richmond candidate for admission to play football, Vernon Morgan, was ineligible because at age 15 he had signed a professional baseball contract. The move prompted question as to whether UNC All-American football star halfback Charlie "Choo-Choo" Justice was eligible, given that, according to a recent article in Pic Magazine, he had signed a professional football contract while in the Navy, from which he had been released because it was found he was under the age of majority consent at the time. An attorney for the University of Richmond stated that if true, it was another reason why the Southern Conference should reverse its ruling on Mr. Morgan.

Listen here, boy, Mr. Justice is a star. Your boy is still just a boy. That's the difference. Put it in your piped hat and smoke it. Vitiation of consent by minority, rendering a contract a nullity, voidable at the instance of the signee, only applies to stars, according to Hoyle and Coke.

Perhaps, the N.C.A.A. will want, nonetheless, to look back into that case with an eye toward discipline of the University for using an ineligible player. Tear down the statue and blot out the record, to do Justice to the matter.

On the front page of the second section, Tom Fesperman tells of Bob Pressley having found gold in hillbilly music.

Dr. Brock Chisholm, executive secretary of the Interim Commission of the U.N.'s World Health Organization, told of the surge in American fear of war and that Americans were about the only people so concerned, the Europeans being too tired and preoccupied with the task of finding adequate food to think much about war.

According to Maj. General Leslie Groves, Army director of the Manhattan Project, it would take five to seven years for another country fully to develop the bomb even with the aid of the U.S., and 15 to 20 years without that help.

The fear came from concern that those who were trigger-happy might use the bomb before attempting diplomatic methods and economic reconstruction to achieve peace. Atomic power was breeding a war spirit in America and fear along with it.

But as to his other suggestion of public executions, it had been tried elsewhere, such as in England, and failed to have any deterrent value. And it had been tried also in North Carolina prior to 1910 when the State took over executions.

It posits that the seeds of crime were not to be found in the manner of execution but rather in the moral, social, and economic failings of the time. The improvement had to come from those origins rather than at the gallows end of the chain.

If the State were deaf to the warden's proposal of elimination of capital punishment, it should not heed his advice regarding public execution.

To avoid facing the issue of release of price controls having been the stimulus for inflation, the blame had been placed squarely on the consumer. The threat of war from starving peoples abroad ought make it clear to the consumer that conservation was necessary. But it would probably take resumption of price control, as the appetite dictated will.

Now, Communist leaders in France and Italy were planning to repeat the process regarding a few planned shipments of Russian wheat.

Mr. Pearson proposes a "Friendship Train" to trek across America, starting in Los Angeles, to publicize the collection of food as it went, until it reached New York Harbor for shipment abroad.

He concludes by noting that Italian painter, Constantino Brumidi, who fled Italy after plotting against the King, had painted the decorative frescoes on the Capitol Dome in Washington, often the subject of amazement to tourists. The wife of Congressman John Murdock of Arizona was planning a drive to rescue the painter from obscurity and provide his unmarked grave with proper recognition, also would seek to have her husband introduce a bill to provide posthumous honor to Mr. Brumidi.

A block of wood or the village idiot could also pass the tests.

Loyalty, he thinks, ought have some positive formula for ascertainment. A person concerned in 1932 or 1933 about the rise of Hitler might have joined a front organization to oppose Nazism. A friend might have dismissed the threat of Hitler and felt he was no menace. The second man would qualify for the Government, but not the first.

While loyalty was a subjective quality, there ought be some way to determine it other than through the absence of disloyalty.

Those who responded to world events, as Thomas Jefferson, would probably not qualify while those who were nonentities, passive by nature, would. He concludes that a "dull, pious, scared conformity is not a positive American virtue."

Mr. Grafton is not perhaps fully grasping the notion in October, 1947 that such vague terms as "moral turpitude" and "loyalty" are often used by officialdom for political reasons against those who are simply not perceived as willing to follow the "party line", an irritant to the body politic's business as usual, a means of keeping the club free from unnecessary dissent, querulous parlay regarding such things as whether the Government at times might tend toward fascism, developed from corporate bribery, in establishing its policies. The obvious cases in which the terms are applied substantively and accurately, such as theft and actual treason, then are used to establish the lid for the container into which other disparate cases are poured, those wherein the terms are applied only vaguely and loosely to facts not fitting closely, in any objective sense, the meaning of the terms in the abstract but which can be conveniently squeezed under the rubrics for political expediency, to cast those engaged in unsavory dissent as sub-human "birds of a feather" with the thieves and treasonous reprobates, thus to marginalize their significance and impact on the society, thus to cover up, sometimes, by prestidigital distraction the very real crimes being committed by that officialdom.

The Communist Party was one extreme to which the despairing might turn, but the younger trade unionists were actively opposing Communist influence within the unions. The Gaulist movement, founded by General De Gaulle, was far more popular, composed of non-Communists. The General had no totalitarian ambitions and was without doubt among France's most important men. But he had virtually no labor support, appealing instead to the center and right. The Gaulist movement had begun a decade earlier and was organized in tens of thousands of cities and communes, with between a million and 1.5 million paid members. General De Gaulle favored scrapping the Fourth Republic and writing a new Constitution modeled on the American document, with a strong executive branch to replace the parliamentary system in place.

Most observers believed that in the event of increasing despair, General De Gaulle would come to power rather than the Communists. But the Communists were prepared in that event to call a general strike. The result thus would be civil war reminiscent of the Spanish conflict of the latter Thirties.

He remarks that a Congressman from Arkansas had found during his tour of Europe that Europeans appeared doing alright regarding food, were suffering little starvation, no more than in America.

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