The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 21, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site
Ed. Note: The front page reports that actor Adolphe Menjou
He had testified on May 15 in secret to the Committee that Hollywood was one of the great centers for Communist activities in the United States and that he believed that Moscow wanted to utilize American movies as a tool for Communist propaganda, that Communists in the country working for Moscow were engaged in treason. He wanted the Communist Party outlawed as a conspiracy to overthrow the Government by force. He also wanted propaganda movies so labeled. No movie producers, he opined, were Communists but rather all were patriotic Americans. Mr. Menjou, who testified for an hour, concluded by advocating that the country arm itself "to the teeth" and adopt universal military training.
Under
questioning by Congressman Richard Nixon of California, Mr. Menjou
stated that his criteria for being a Communist were attendance of a meeting
where Paul Robeson was present, providing him with applause, and listening to
his Communist songs
A crowd of some 400 spectators in the hearing room gave Mr. Menjou a standing ovation at the conclusion of his testimony.
Dr. Herbert Evatt of Australia told the U.N. General Assembly that the boycott by Russia of the proposed Balkans watchdog committee to oversee and report on border incursions in Greece was an attack on the organization, and that the Soviet criticism of the U.S. aid to Greece was hypocritical in light of the Soviet aid to Poland, Yugoslavia, and other satellite countries.
The debate was nearing end on the watchdog committee, with victory expected for the U.S. proposal.
Per a previous announcement of intention, Brazil severed all diplomatic relations with Russia for its having failed to apologize for the Communist Weekly Literary Gazette's attacks on Brazil's Army and describing Brazil's President as an incompetent soldier and a Fascist. The article had also objectionably referred to U.N. General Assembly president Oswaldo Aranha as a "lackey" of the U.S. Relations between the two nations had already been icy for several months. The Gazette had recently attacked President Truman, comparing him to Hitler in launching the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine as masks for U.S. imperialist aims.
In London, the new session of the Parliament opened with announcement from King George VI of Labor Party plans to curb the power of the House of Lords by amendment to the Parliament Act of 1911, triggering a storm of protests from Conservatives, including Opposition Leader Winston Churchill who viewed it as an act of "social aggression". Labor confirmed that the plan had been reached in the Cabinet the previous day. In addition, the Labor Party agenda included a bill for nationalization of the gas industry and coordination of the fuel and power industries. Penal reforms, which likely included abolition of flogging and other forms of corporal punishment as well as abolition of capital punishment, were also on the agenda. By tradition, the monarch delivered the agenda at the start of each session of Parliament.
In Washington, poultry and feed producers presented their second plan for eliminating poultryless Thursdays, whereby chickens would be deprived of grain, presumably every day, a plan which appeared an acceptable substitute to the Citizens Food Committee. The producers' claim that eating chicken would result in saving grain by eliminating their feeding had proved too uncertain to Committee chairman Charles Luckman as a savings device to restore poultry on the voluntary Thursday menu.
You cluckers will have to do without until Europe is fed.
Eggless Thursdays remained on the menu pending further consideration after the poultry issue was resolved. But many Government officials favored its retention as it would prompt farmers to kill their "stewers", chickens which consumed full shares of grain while producing few eggs.
The Pan American Union approved in principle a proposal by Argentina to extend the Truman conservation program to all of Latin America.
In Asheville, N.C., at the Southern Governors Conference, UNC economics professor Dr. Clarence Heer proposed a uniform system of taxing industry so that states would not be competing against one another to attract manufacturers.
Clemson College elected new sophomore class officers, who are listed.
In Shreveport, La., the Highway Patrol detained on Sunday a 15-year old Brooklyn boy and his 15-year old girlfriend who were stopped and found to be in possession of a suitcase with $24,000 in cash inside, with two hitchhikers in the backseat. The couple said that they had left Brooklyn, purchasing the car for $2,000, to get as far away as they could from the city. The fathers of each of the couple arrived and obtained their release from custody, but the money was retained by police until they could verify its legal possession.
In New York, a woman wanted to terminate visitation rights of her estranged husband with their four-year old daughter, a product of artificial insemination, contending that he was not her actual genetic father. The father's attorney asserted that, since the doctor could not be called as a witness for the doctor-patient privilege shared by the husband, there was no way to prove the mother's veracity. Her petition was denied on procedural rather than substantive grounds.
Following two straight losses, to Texas and Wake Forest, UNC won its fourth game of the season the previous Saturday, defeating William & Mary 13 to 7, and became thus sports editor Ray Howe's team of the week. North Carolina would go undefeated the rest of the way and finish 8-2.
On the editorial page, "Are the French with Us?" remarks on the outcome of the French election, ostensibly optimistic for America as General De Gaulle's coalition party had outpolled the Communists by 40 percent to 30 percent, with the Socialists coming in third. But, the piece points out, it was not so clear cut as to be interpreted as a victory for democracy over Communism. For the Communists still attracted nearly a third of the vote. And in Europe, socialism was long established as an accepted form of government, even considered conservative in some countries.
The truth was that democracy had been tested in Europe for quite a long time, and often had been found wanting. It meant that, with a somewhat tenuous victory for the Gaulists, America had to undertake its responsibility to the world that much more assiduously to show that democracy paid off better than other forms of government.
"There,
That's Much Better" tells of Life,
having ridiculed "Big Jim" Folsom, Governor of Alabama, a few weeks earlier, now
having published an editorial, "The State of the South"
But the parallels with Europe had to be made reservedly, as the South during Reconstruction and afterward had no Communist army poised on its frontiers ready to leap at the first sign of vulnerability. Europe did not have the luxury of time, as had the South for 80 years since the Civil War.
Moreover, Life had oversimplified the solution to the racial division in the region by suggesting that equality of economic opportunity would suffice as a panacea, that five million jobs would work wonders. The problem was deeper than that, requiring Southerners as a whole to understand the moral principle of equality of rights for all humanity. Until that time, living in harmony, without violence, would not be easily accomplished.
It welcomes the editorial nonetheless as a hopeful look at the South, refreshing the wellspring of ideas from the constant litany of reminders of poverty, ignorance, racism, and politicians who too often were either clowns or demagogues.
The Life piece, incidentally, quotes from the prefatory "Preview to Understanding" at the beginning of The Mind of the South, that the South was "not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it", and winds its theme around that statement. Time had reviewed the book favorably in February, 1941 at its publication.
"Dewey and a Duet, Perhaps" remarks on the announcement by George Murphy, song and dance man who would eventually dance his way, for one unremarkable term, into the United States Senate in the mid-Sixties, that a group of movie people in Hollywood were starting a campaign for the GOP in 1948, to show that Hollywood was not just comprised of New Dealers, crackpots and radicals.
The piece thinks it a reflection of the belated Republican realization that persons of glamour had replaced the politicians from Washington as the cognoscenti in the country, that Hollywood attracted the hearts and minds of the average American like no other sales technique.
But it can't help but wonder at the spectacle of Bing Crosby crooning with Jeanette MacDonald while Fred Astaire danced in front of the somewhat dour visage of Robert Taft on the platform behind them.
A
piece from the
Christian Science Monitor ,
titled "Women Labor Leaders", tells of women having no prominent place in
either the AFL or CIO, that one day undoubtedly they would. There were only 200
women out of 5,000 top labor leaders listed in Who's Who in Labor. But there were three million women in unions, a
fifth of the membership. More than half of the employed women in the country
were married and had little spare time for active work in the union. But the
primary reason for the paucity appeared to be the traditional discrimination against women. It
advocates greater proportional representation among the leadership
Drew Pearson tells of President Truman having an active interest in developing gadgets for the airline industry, to which end he had turned his Presidential plane, The Independence, into a flying laboratory for testing of these devices, performed by his pilot, Lt. Col. Henry Myers.
While flying, the President often occupied the co-pilot's seat, though, per the instruction of Col. Myers, he never touched the controls as quid pro quo for the Colonel not involving himself in politics. The President often did his own navigating, however, and did so with aplomb in geography. He knew, for instance, when tested by the crew of the plane, the name of the island on which the Statue of Liberty sits.
Recently, the plane went on an experimental flight to the Arctic to test a heated wing, which had performed well. The plane had also flown into the recent Florida hurricane after it had moved inland and dissipated, the object being to test the "picture radar" on the swirling winds. Among other improvements made to the plane since it had been placed into service a few months earlier, was that it could fly at 20,000 feet with the same cabin pressure as at 8,000 feet.
He next tells of Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug's report to the President on the resources of the country which could be expended in the Marshall Plan. Steel would be in short supply for an indefinite period and increased production capacity had to be stressed. Oil was being consumed more rapidly than being replenished by discovery of new wells. Conservation through importation of petroleum would be necessary. Lumber and forest products were in bad shape and no great amount could be exported in the coming year. Wheat could continue to be exported in large quantities, dependent on weather, but fewer livestock would be available the following year than in 1947. Exports of feed grains in 1948 would be small.
The House-Senate Housing Committee hearings had been delayed by the chairman, Representative Ralph Gamble of New York, because Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy feared that the chairman might be removed from the position if the full Housing Committee were called into session. Several members of the Committee had wanted Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire to be the chairman and sought to vote by proxy, disallowed by Senator McCarthy, paving the way for Mr. Gamble to be selected. Senator McCarthy did not want Senator Tobey in the position because the latter was a foe of the real estate lobby, which Senator McCarthy embraced.
Samuel Grafton recounts the beginning of an
average day for Ed, who was plagued by the thought—beginning with comments made
by his wife Jane that he should sleep later than 6:30 in the mornings like most
average men, continued by his insistence that he did not want steak like the
average man but rather kidneys or a salad for dinner
Stewart Alsop , in Athens, tells of Greece needing to have its peace restored if the American aid program pursuant to the Truman Doctrine, as administered by former Nebraska Governor Dwight Griswold, was to be effective. Resultant of the Greek Government's request, American Ambassador Lincoln MacVeigh and the head of military intelligence for the country, Major General William Chamberlain, would recommend that Americans assume the responsibility of directing the Greek Army in its operations against the guerrillas in the north. The American officials in the country were all in accord on this point.
The guerrillas numbered 18,000, 60 percent of whom were kidnaped recruits held in place by threats of murder, both of themselves and their families. It presented a favorable situation for the Greek Army to face a less than viscerally determined opposing force. But at present the Army was immobilized, as 100,000 of the 140,000 men comprising it had been assigned to tasks behind the lines, on the premise that there would be a larger contingent in the field, necessary to combat a well-entrenched force as the guerrillas in the mountains, supplied as they were by Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. And, furthermore, politics demanded defense of the larger cities, leaving, for the most part, the peasant villages undefended against the guerrillas, able thus to ransack at will by night for goods and supplies.
Unless the situation were soon reversed by American direction of the forces, the peasants in the countryside would accept guerrilla rule in preference to the present chaos.
A letter writer reprints a letter from a hundred Citadel students who had been veterans in the war, sent to the President, in which they urged that Soviet aggression should be returned by the United States, as the Russians had been given every opportunity to share in the rebuilding of Europe. The students wanted the country to pull all of its superior aces out onto the table. They viewed the Marshall Plan as indirect action, that strengthening forces at home and abroad was direct action. They wanted an Army and Navy once again second to none, so that "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" could again be sung without reserve.
"The only way to beat an unfair fighter is to beat him to the punch before he fouls you."
The original writer adds that a decade hence might afford no more than seven minutes preparation for war, and so the country had better get about preparing while it had the chance, before Hiroshima might appear as the Garden of Eden by comparison to the aftermath of the next world war.
All of which, to the callow and gleaner of the dross, might seem somehow prophetic in tone, but the fact is that the Cold War endured likely far longer than required for peace because of this very mentality at times getting in charge of things and in the way of détente. One must ask which came first, the chicken or the egg, when assessing the arms race, how it came to be and how it ultimately stood down. Is it not the case that its eventual end was not so much the result of pressure or threats but rather by economic realities having finally hit home to the Soviet Union, following a prolonged war in Afghanistan which got nowhere, after decades of post-war strain of which everyone was tired?
It is quite naïve and displays an ignorance of history and its continuity through time to adopt the belief that a large military build-up in the United States, occurring over a period of decades, not just during the Reagan Administration, primarily ended the Cold War. If anything, without the huge, continuing build-up in the United States, the Soviets would have focused more attention on their own reconstruction and less on militarism through the decades. But since it transpired otherwise, that is an impossible premise also to prove, every bit as much as the contrary hypothesis. Was it not a locomotive set on course on each side of the divide, which, the more cars were added, gathered momentum to a point that it was nearly incapable of being stopped by its own mechanisms?
The same is true today, of course, with respect to the interminable so-called "war on terrorism", which, in one form or another, has been ongoing since at least the early 1970's. To turn the country into a virtual police state on the premise of stopping domestic terrorism is a means by which to congratulate the terrorists on victory for undermining and weakening our democracy, even from their graves, gradually turning the United States into something increasingly resemblant to those countries from which the terrorists hail.
No one and nothing can protect anyone from life or, ultimately, from death. We cannot make the rubber bathtub.
A letter writer says that there are many mentally defective and helpless children being neglected in South Carolina for lack of facilities in the state to house them. He criticizes the absence of funding to enlarge the State Training School at Clinton. He hopes that the South Carolina Legislature would respond.
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