The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 16, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Syria and Egypt planned to challenge the validity of U.N. action on partition of Palestine by introducing a joint resolution to that effect, said to be supported by all of the Arab countries.
Poland criticized the Marshall proposal for a permanent Assembly political committee to act as a so-called "Little Assembly" to break deadlocks in the Security Council on certain issues. Eight nations had declared support for it while the Slavic bloc opposed it. Australia was proposing amendment to make it palatable to the Soviets.
The President, at a press conference, renewed his appeals for voluntary conservation of food to avoid price controls and rationing, which he disfavored as "police state" action. He said that calling a special session of Congress to provide emergency funding for Europe was still a possibility but he hoped to find the funding through existing sources. He pointed out that the Export-Import Bank had purchased 50 million dollars worth of French francs in recent days.
In Paris, 40,000 merchant seamen and shore workers went on strike, as a general transportation strike had hit Paris for three days. Ten percent of the subway workers voted to return to work. The nation’s railway workers had not yet struck.
George Meany, head of the plumbers union, and Dan Tobin, head of the Teamsters, were given virtual control of the policy-making council of the AFL at the close of the convention in San Francisco. They had defeated John L. Lewis and William Hutcheson for the top spots. Mr. Lewis suffered from his stand refusing to sign the affidavit of non-Communist affiliation, initially required to have AFL unions participate in mediation by the NLRB, a requirement, however, which had been lifted by the Board, contrary to the ruling of its Taft-Hartley czar, Robert Denham.
Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., addressed the CIO convention in Boston, urging that a union of farmers, labor, housewives, and veterans join to elect a new Congress, one not serving the special interests as he thought the 80th was doing.
The hurricane which had hit Savannah the previous day had damaged some 1,500 homes and a hundred businesses, valued at a million dollars.
The storm had reduced itself to a zephyr, which was still faster than a Ford, if you could afford the rouge.
Southeast
Florida continued to deal with heavy flooding from the torrential rains dumped
on the area, the worst in several years—probably from the seeding of the cumulus
clouds with dry ice by the G.E. scientist flying high in the B-17
In Redwood City, California, a Polish war bride who had left her husband in Montana was under investigation for shooting to death a Palo Alto man in whose car she had been riding on Wednesday morning. She claimed that they had met in a bar and he had forced her into his car and "drove like a Nazi", grabbed her gun which she retrieved whereupon he then grabbed at it again, at which point it went off, hitting him. The man's wife had just filed for divorce and said she had been expecting something of the kind to happen. The object of scrutiny in the matter refused to identify her G.I. husband, referred to him only as "Curtin".
Bandleader Xavier Cugat
Furman Bisher, on the sports page, tells of Denton resident Max Lanier being desirous of pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals when his five-year exile from Major League Baseball was completed, imposed for his having jumped in 1946 to the Mexican League.
On the editorial page, "We Are a New Regional Spa" tells of the first two weeks of ABC controlled liquor sales in Mecklenburg County proceeding smoothly, with public drunkenness arrests on the decline and business booming. The county was selling not only to its own residents but to others in both North and South Carolina. The figures, it predicts, for the first quarter of business would be very high.
"We Can't Have Two Worlds" tells of Winston Churchill, speaking in New York at the Al Smith Memorial Foundation dinner, having predicted that the Soviet Union and its satellites would one day leave the U.N., at which point there would be two worlds, a sorrowful sight. But he added that the West should not be too depressed over the prospect.
The piece finds it double-talk given Mr. Churchill’s warning of two worlds at Fulton, Mo., in March, 1946. It believes Mr. Churchill would in fact be elated were such a move to take place.
It finds the former Prime Minister’s optimism that such would isolate the Communists behind the iron curtain to be a misplaced interpretation, as the challenge to the Communists since Fulton by the West had only produced increasing Soviet aggression in Europe and in Asia.
That he believed there would be no war necessarily to come from the two worlds as long as one of the worlds was stronger than the other was of little comfort. The U.S. was the chief arsenal of the West. Dividing the world into two hostile camps was a dangerous proposition.
The belief in two worlds was unduly facile as there were many worlds. The fiction being promulgated by Mr. Churchill would only produce disorder.
"Settlement in a Rape Case" finds that a solicitor in Eastern North Carolina who had agreed to drop rape charges against two white youths because the alleged victim had in the interim been married and wished to get on with her life, to have resorted to a bad reason for dismissing the case. The two had been indicted by a Grand Jury and, it ventures, ought have a trial to encourage and maintain respect for the law.
But, the piece fails to take account of the practicalities of the courtroom. With an unwilling prosecutrix in a rape case, there is very little or no case to be mustered and thus it would be rather foolhardy to proceed with a prosecution on such a state of the evidence. That does not do damage to the law, unless the defendants themselves had in some way coerced or manipulated that outcome, apparently not the case. Such dismissals happen all the time in courtrooms across the country.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Toward a New Farm Policy", tells of the Department of Agriculture proposing that Congress adjust the parity formula for loans to farmers to compensate for the overly high values given to cotton and wheat and other farm products based on the flat formula of 1909-14. Decreasing wheat, corn, and cotton to world market prices was necessary to avoid distortions and surpluses producing burdens on the taxpayer.
The Congressmen from the states which produced these products, however, were rising in protest of the proposal. Rather, they remained concerned with prices for the sake of prices, without focus on the long-range goal of smoothing out farm production to match markets. But at least the proposal was having a hearing.
Drew Pearson again discusses the anti-trust investigation ongoing in the Justice Department of Wall Street floating stocks and bonds among their favored banking customers while cutting out outside banks. The lawyers from John Foster Dulles’s law firm, representing, among other clients, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, John W. Davis’s firm, representing J. P. Morgan, Harriman, Ripley, and Smith, Barney, John J. McCloy’s firm representing Kuhn, Loeb, and John Cahill’s firm representing Dillon, Read, had all come to Washington to visit the Justice Department. The new head of the anti-trust division, John Sonnett, had moved slowly on the Wall Street case, and a rumor was afoot that a settlement might be in the offing. But the case involving Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., with Wall Street firms again eliminating Ohio banks, had angered Midwestern concerns and the matter had come to the attention of the President. The President then had sent word to the Justice Department that he wanted action. The case therefore would likely go forward by the end of the month against the big firms, including Dillon, Read, and Harriman, Ripley, home to several high Administration officials, including Averell Harriman, James Forrestal, and Robert Lovett.
He next applauds Admiral Frank Warner, chief of Naval Air Training, for riding an already chartered bus to save the taxpayers money, rather than flying the 40 miles from Eglin, Fla., to Pensacola to attend a dinner in his honor.
California wanted the Sixth Army supply depot, moved to Utah for the duration of the war for safekeeping, returned. California intended to locate it in Stockton. The Army had been convinced by Utah not to move the depot if freight rates could be adjusted on overseas shipments to match those in California. The ICC was considering the matter.
Samuel Grafton suggests that the Administration had gone about saving grain the "easy way" and produced complications while saving relatively little. The hard way would have been to get the farmers to feed five percent less grain to livestock, cutting production, normally at 8 billion dollars per year, merely from 30 to 29 billion. But that might have angered some farmers and so the easy way had been chosen: instructing households to conserve bread and asking the distillers to shut down production of liquor for 60 days. The latter course meant that the byproduct of liquor distilling, a rich livestock grain, would be wanting. And the housewives, also according to the Wall Street Journal, had begun to hoard plentiful sugar and canned goods.
An editorialist had complained that Europe was sending beer to America when America was trying to conserve grain for Europe. The easy way allowed for such complaint, regardless of the fact that most of the beer came from countries such as Czechoslovakia, which were not going to receive the aid. But it suggested that the European crisis was little more than a gag. Even the Scotch sent from Britain had been distilled probably years earlier and, in any event, helped relieve the British dollar shortage.
The Administration, in its policy of conservation in this manner, was fostering an atmosphere of bitterness against Europe. That situation could have been avoided, he ventures, had the Administration found the courage to force a reduction of grain being fed to livestock, having the ancillary benefit of increasing the slaughter rate, making meat more plentiful in the country.
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, finds a crash, even worse than in Rome, likely to occur which would redound ultimately to the U.S. and be worse than that of 1929. The trouble arose from a monthly trading deficit with the rest of the world, one which the French no longer had the dollars or credits to cover. In France, that deficit was 120 million dollars per month, compared to about 45 to 55 million in Italy. Both countries could obtain coal and wheat only through dollars and most countries outside the U.S. could no longer afford to pay for French goods in dollars. And U.S. import purchases from France were relatively small.
Thus, without the dollars from U.S. loans, the economies of France and Italy would come to a stop. Moreover, other countries would be unable to export or purchase imports made by French and Italian industry and thus their economies also would be thrown out of balance. Canada was already suffering from the dollar shortage, as was Mexico and all of South America. Everywhere, American exports were in danger of being severely reduced. Economic depression would spread like wildfire, eventually affecting the United States. And the psychological impact of seeing the rest of the Western world in economic chaos could not help but impact American business.
A letter writer supports Drew Pearson's suggestion of a "Friendship Train" to run across the country from Los Angeles collecting food as it went, to promote to Europeans the notion that the food was coming to them directly from the citizenry, and thereby match Soviet propaganda for the relative pittance of wheat the Russians were contributing to France and Europe. She thinks that it would be un-Christian not to send food and clothes to the Europeans. She wants the President to do more than merely ask housewives to conserve food.
A letter writer finds order prevailing from the new ABC system in Mecklenburg and bootlegging in decline.
A letter from A. W. Black comments on the Tom Lynch piece regarding the World Federalists, favoring world government centered around the U.N., even if accomplished without the Soviet-bloc nations. He thinks the organization to be out to lunch given the world crisis at hand, with New York City likely to become the "next Pearl Harbor" any day.
He distinguishes "union" and "unity" by drawing an example of tying a cat and dog together by their tails and hanging them over a clothesline to produce union, but not unity.
But, as with all of your arguments, Mr. Black, you overlook a vital point: dogs and cats cannot talk to one another or appreciate that there is a way other than to fight or effect flight. Maybe that escaped your learning, or you were too busy observing the dog and cat you tied together to realize the folly of your analogy.
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.