The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 23, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that actors Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, and Ronald Reagan testified before HUAC, each finding Communist influence in Hollywood to be only that of a small minority, albeit causing more disturbance than their numbers justified. Mr. Montgomery, a PT-boat commander during the war and immediate past president of the Screen Actors Guild, stated that the small minority was militant and well organized. Mr. Murphy, future Senator from California, found their number to be less than one percent of the Guild, of which he had been president. Mr. Reagan, who had just become president of the Guild, agreed and said that the Communists had sought to "muscle in" on the movie industry but had not succeeded, down on the waterfront. He disfavored outlawing of the party, believed the industry could argue its differences within the bounds of democracy. He was also suspicious of Paul Robeson when asked to endorse a singing recital of Mr. Robeson, ostensibly to raise money for an "all-nations" hospital to be built in Los Angeles, but decided nevertheless to lend his name in sponsorship as he thought the event would be apolitical, contrary to the accounts which he eventually read in the newspapers. He probably sang some more of those Communist songs.

Mr. Montgomery wore a brownish-gray striped suit, a white shirt and a grey pin-striped tie. You will have to turn to page 2-A to find, perhaps, the sartorial complement adorning the other two witnesses. Be careful if either sported any red, or even a pink carnation.

The President held a prolonged Cabinet meeting on the European dollar, food, and coal crisis and would meet during the afternoon with Congressional leaders on the subject. It was thought that there might come from the latter meeting an agreement on whether to call a special session of Congress to deal with the matter.

At the U.N., American chief delegate Warren Austin labeled the Russian proposal to outlaw warmongering as a means to develop a police state and shackle the American people and their leadership with a gag rule by limiting freedom of the press and speech to make comment, giving magistrates of the World Court the power to determine what was warmongering propaganda. He defended both former Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoting from his recent book, Speaking Frankly, and future Secretary John Foster Dulles against the charges of Andrei Vishinsky that both men were warmongers.

Former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles has a piece on the inside of the newspaper in which he found some of the statements by Mr. Byrnes recounted in Speaking Frankly to be erroneous.

Former Assistant Secretary of War under FDR between 1937 and 1940, Louis Johnson, told the Senate War Investigating Committee that he and the President knew as early as 1938 that war was coming and that America could not remain out of it. Planning was so "helter-skelter" for the eventuality that he went to the President to discuss the matter. He said that the war mobilization contingency plan developed by the Army and Navy, amended in 1939, was scrapped because it did not meet the specifications of General Brehon Somervell, chief of Army supply during the war. At one point, General Somervell wanted to get rid of General Marshall as Army chief of staff. Mr. Johnson contested some of the statements by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, made the previous day to the Committee, as inexact.

Premier Paul Ramadier of France attacked both the Communist left and the Gaullist right for threats to the Government, and accused General De Gaulle's proposal to re-write the Constitution to provide a stronger executive on the model of the United States to be a direct affront to the will of the French people who had passed the current Constitution forming the Fourth Republic. M. Ramadier had just purged all Gaullists from the Cabinet by having the entire Cabinet resign, and was preparing to form a new Government, support for which he appealed to Parliament to provide.

Britain banned tobacco imports from the U.S. and announced new cuts in food imports as part of its austerity program to preserve scarce dollars. Sir Stafford Cripps, the new Minister of Economic Affairs, also announced a cut of 800 million dollars worth of Government and private expenditures for homes, new factories, and new plant machinery. He said that Britain must import less and export more.

Dr. Leo Wolman, professor of economics at Columbia University, told the Cotton Textile Institute convention in New York that labor policy across the world, save the U.S., involved reorganization of society, and that Taft-Hartley had interrupted a trend in the U.S. of Government intervention in fundamental economic decisions to identify trade unions with the interests of the Government.

Near Portland, Maine, a large forest fire continued to burn out of control after causing two deaths and 3.5 million dollars worth of damage. The fire was moving toward Bar Harbor.

In Southport, N.C., a captain who was assistant supervisor of the Maritime Commission's reserve fleet basin in Wilmington was arrested and charged with the murder of the Sheriff of Brunswick County after an alleged scuffle in which the Sheriff was killed following a traffic stop of the captain.

Dick Young of The News tells of ten Government bonds, totaling a value of $500, having been found inside a telephone book inadvertently put in the garbage, and returned by an alert and honest garbage collector to their rightful holder. The woman stated that she had placed them in the phone book for safekeeping when she went out of town. How they came to be in the trash is covered on page 2-A.

But to avoid a Communist taint, especially to M. Ramadier and HUAC, they might want to rethink the label for the services.

The piece thinks it an act of magnanimity to an already overtaxed citizenry to allow them to share in this "secret".

After reciting statistics on the tax burdens of the Southern states severally, it concludes that a sales tax, for its regressive nature, hitting the average consumer equally with the wealthy, was necessary only when there were no other sources of revenue sufficient to maintain essential services. It favors that the Governors instead devote their energies to stimulation of industrial and agricultural development.

The piece recognizes that the Supreme Court also would likely not accept such suppression by law as permissible, contrary as it would be to free speech and association pursuant to the First Amendment.

Moreover, non-Communist groups would protest for infringement on civil liberties in the country, already being infringed in the name of seeking out Communists.

Until HUAC produced more evidence of a genuine threat, the considered thinking on the matter should find that the argument against Communism was more persuasively conducted with it practiced and promoted in the open rather than under the rose.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco, while dressed in a glittering admiral's uniform, lectured three visiting Congressmen on preparing the people for democracy.  

At the insistence of the President, the Democrats were going to hold their nominating convention the following July in San Francisco, moving to the West for the first time in twenty years. Mr. Truman believed it necessary to carry California to win the election.

Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan was looking for a way out of reconvening in November the hearings investigating the war contracts of Howard Hughes for the fact that Mr. Ferguson had discovered that the XF-11, the war contract for which served, along with that to build the Spruce Goose, as object of the hearings, flew as well or better than other reconnaissance planes of the Army, as Elliott Roosevelt, who recommended the contract, had found in 1944. And it appeared the Spruce Goose also would fly.

Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder would not inform France where its hidden assets in the U.S. were located, though France had offered to use them to pay for its own food as a form of emergency aid. The banks which had disclosed the information during the war had asked that Treasury maintain it in confidence.

George Kennan, State Department planner who developed the Marshall Plan, told reporters the previous week that the Soviet bluster was nothing new, had been ongoing for 160 years, with few respites. The primary problem in Europe was in France and Italy where the power vacuums had to be filled, to be done either by a reluctant U.S. or by Russia. The country which did so would dominate Europe. Russia did not war, did not want it in 1941, were forced by the Nazi hand. Mr. Kennan had concluded that war was not in the offing.

The liquor distillers were using the authorization from the Justice Department to cooperate in the 60-day moratorium, recommended by the Citizens Food Committee to conserve grain for Europe, as a means to cooperate also in publicly criticizing Committee chairman Charles Luckman. George Sokolsky's column the previous week closely paralleled the campaign, suggesting that the distillers should not suffer when the soap companies were not being asked to conserve fats. Mr. Sokolsky was once exposed as being on the payroll of Republic Steel and N.A.M. while writing for newspapers. He had also been a ghost writer for the speeches of Pappy Pass the B's O'Daniel. Mr. Pearson points out that less grain for hogs and cattle meant less fat for the soap companies from the hogs and cattle.

And…her majesty's a pretty nice girl, but she clucks a lot along the way, especially on poultryless Thursdays, when busy laying in golden slumbers to mend her stockings of eggs for the overstock surely to betide Wednesdays.

The biggest food problem out on the farm was not the Kosher bacon but rather the grain being fed to the livestock, disappearing at an alarming rate. Hence, we glean, the need to reconsider meatless Tuesdays.

There are about 300,000 of you cluckers out there and we want you to start de-graining.

The budget problems of the country were also being worked out through direction from the U.S. mission. The original budget was four trillion drachmas against half that in revenue. The mission was seeking to balance the budget to head off crippling inflation. To that end, the mission was insisting on eliminating unnecessary expenditures, including the discharge of 15,000 excess civil servants. Moreover, Americans would be placed in key positions to assure that the recommended measures would be implemented.

All of these orchestrated changes were performed at the invitation of the Greek leaders themselves and they were pleased with the results thus far. The Greeks also wanted American direction of the Greek Army. Obviously, the American mission members were also pleased with the results or they would not have accepted the responsibility entailed by the invitation.

The HUAC investigation of Hollywood had been fostered by this international tension with Russia, "as if a revolution could be made by sneaking a phrase into the fifth reel." (Which is even worse if the third man were proved in the fifth column by the fourth reel while on the ferris wheel.)

A man could become the object of suspicion in the investigation merely by ridiculing the rich, "as if manufacture of ironic comments about the rich were not a traditional American sport, indulged in by almost every writer of consequence we have had in the last fifty years." (Which, recalling the precursor Dies Committee investigation in 1940 into Kit Marlowe as a supposed Red, would make the bold assumption that the orchestrators of the HUAC investigation read any form of fiction more serious than Dick Tracy cartoons for fear the printed page might intrude on the sanctity of their carefully cultivated sense of realism, which understood that fascism was no threat as long as its classic enemy was grabbed by its roots and jerked from the ground before it could blossom.)

The Communists promoted that capitalism produced war, and they benefited by blaming capitalism whenever war erupted, then picking up the pieces after the fact. He believes that the Russians did not want war but war was a trap into which capitalism routinely fell. While war was necessary on occasion in true defense of freedom, Americans, in that event, had always known what to do.

"To be stubbornly, furiously for peace is the way to cross the dope, and to put the burden of proof on the Soviet system."

Those who bellowed for war aided the opposition as it could use him "down to his last squeal and garble."

Framed Edition

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