The Charlotte News

Friday, October 31, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Russia wanted the U.N. General Assembly to reverse its decision rejecting by a vote of 35 to 7 a resolution proposed by Yugoslavia, which had accused the U.S. and Britain of shielding war criminals. The U.S. had countered that the move was aimed at getting the U.S. to turn over political dissidents to the Soviet-bloc nations.

Four of the largest unions in the nation, UMW, UAW, the United Steelworkers, and the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers unions each had not yet filed the statement of non-Communist affiliation required under Taft-Hartley to continue to partake of the services of the NLRB, with this date being the extended deadline for compliance. John L. Lewis had already openly declared his intent to defy the law and force the issue into the courts. Philip Murray had declared likewise on behalf of the Steelworkers, as had Walter Reuther on behalf of UAW. All three unions were considered anti-Communist. The UERMW was considered left wing.

The SEC and the FTC reported that there had been a very strong first quarter in the textile industry, with a 6.6 percent return relative to capital investment. Paper and allied products had a 6.4 percent return to be the second strongest industry in the country. Third was apparel and finished textile products, at 5.6 percent. The lowest return was registered in the transportation equipment industry, with a .7 percent return. Tobacco was second lowest at 2.3 percent. The average return for all manufacturers was 4.3 percent. Total net after-tax income for all manufacturers was 2.7 billion dollars for the quarter.

Controls on consumer credit purchasing expired at midnight, but there was widespread belief that the President would ask the Congress to re-impose some regulations during the special session to convene November 17. There were some private industry suggestions for control, such as in purchases of automobiles, where the industry favored a rule of requiring a third down and a limit of 24 months of payments on new cars, and other terms on older cars, down payment varying with the length of terms. Radios and phonographs were set at 25 percent down and 18 months to pay.

A typhoon hit the Philippines, leaving six dead and heavy damage, striking thirty miles south of Manila.

The wreckage of the Pan American Clipper, lost Sunday near Ketchikan, Alaska, had been discovered on a mountainside on Annette Island. There appeared to be no survivors among the 18 persons aboard.

In Oslo, Norway, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded the 1947 prize to the London Service Council and the Philadelphia Service Committee of the Society of Friends. Pope Pius XII and Mohandas K. Gandhi had also been nominees.

In Birmingham, Ala., a gang of four to six bandits tied up the owner of a jewelry store and his wife at their home, took the keys to the store and then cleaned it out, making off with $75,000 worth of jewelry. One of the bandits guarded the couple while the robbery took place. The others then returned and took the family car to effect their escape. The daughter of the family broke her bonds shortly after the departure of the thieves and reported the incident to a neighbor who called police.

In North Carolina's Central Prison, four black men were executed, each convicted of murder, in the second largest execution in a single day in the state's history, the largest, five, having occurred a month earlier on October 3, in a year which would see more executions in the state, 23, than at any time since the State-administered death penalty had been initiated in 1910. The earlier executions had involved three black and two white men.

The previous executions had prompted the Warden of Central Prison, who was an opponent of capital punishment, to express his favor for public executions within the locus of the crime to afford proper deterrence, a move which The News had found to bespeak a return to procedures followed in the state prior to 1910 and hearken thus a step backward in penology, as those earlier executions had not served to deter the serious crimes for which capital punishment was exacted.

In Oakland, California, a woman who became lost on a dark street pulled the fire alarm at a fire box, causing five fire trucks to respond. When she told them she was lost, a police car was summoned to take her home.

James Walker, former Mayor of Charlotte, died at age 69 following a long period of declining health.

The Royal Crown Bottling Company plant of Charlotte had been purchased by new owners for $100,000. The new owners intended to triple present output.

There were two other RC plants, in Houston and Nashville, owned also by the new owners. The Charlotte plant had been established in 1930.

Soon, you will be able to obtain an ROC Cola just about anywhere this side of the Arabian Desert.

Broadway columnist Earl Wilson tells of Newell's Johnny Long doing well in the Broadway music world, on page 7-A.

The Council reasoned that owners might tear down the substandard housing they owned and not build anew, that bad housing was better than none. While the point was salient, the piece thinks it incumbent on the Council to present more data that the cost of repairing or replacing the 12,000 substandard dwellings would be prohibitive, without adding to the financial burdens of the poor.

It suggests that a Federal anti-lynching law would not guarantee any better result than in state courts, as the jury to be drawn in each such instance would ultimately come from the state's residents. States whose poll taxes would be abolished under a Federal law would resort to some other subterfuge by which to deny the vote. If the Congress predicated aid to states on elimination of segregation, then some states would refuse the assistance in preference to abandoning their traditional barriers to legal and social equality.

But the states, in response, it reasons, had to be vigilant of protection of civil liberties and mindful of the extant violations of which the report marshaled ample substantiating evidence.

Was it the Committee or the type of response in this editorial, asking, as it were, the arsonist to patrol and put out the fire whenever it was spotted, which grandly exalted ideals, confusing myopia with utopia, and ignored practical realities?

Moreover, it does not seek to explain beyond a conclusory statement that the Federal Government lacked the authority under the Constitution to invade states' rights, ignoring the broad powers afforded by the Commerce Clause to enact legislation in areas which substantially affect interstate commerce, the rationale, along with the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, for the subsequent Civil Rights Act of 1964, and onward, enabling regulation of public accommodations operating within the stream of interstate commerce offered by privately owned establishments, regardless of whether the remedial legislation invoked economic or social regulation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was premised on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

While it would no doubt relieve many a housewife from the drudgery of cooking cakes and breads from scratch, it wants to preserve "corn pone a la South."

Let's not, fat boy. You go sop your gravy som'ers else. You're splashing.

But it counsels not to forget: "On one's own unreason too, as well as one's neighbor's!"

Mr. Dirksen returned, wanting the President to call a special session. He had gotten his wish.

Price controls on sugar had ended this date for the first time since the war, but the orders of sugar by the Army for Germany and Japan had suddenly precipitously risen during the summer with further rises to occur, based on sugar providing calories at a cheaper rate than wheat because of record Cuban sugar and Western beet-sugar crops. It was likely that sugar prices would rise in the short-term and then go down.

Bernard Baruch had informed the Senate War Investigating Committee that he had been appointed by FDR in 1943 to be head of the War Production Board but that the decision was changed and Donald Nelson retained in the position. Mr. Pearson gives the back story from a column he had written April 30, 1943. Mr. Baruch had been favored by the Army and Navy brass initially, but when Mr. Nelson had fired the unpopular Ferd Eberhardt, the brass determined to throw their support back to Mr. Nelson. It was an important change as the move to oust civilian control of war production was engineered by then Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal, now Secretary of Defense.

The Hollywood luminaries representing the Committee for the First Amendment, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Paul Henreid, who attended the HUAC hearings to provide moral support to the writers summoned before the Committee to testify as to their past or present affiliation with the Communist Party, were apparently deliberately seated in the rear of the hearing room by the guard, who gruffly escorted them past empty seats at the front. June Havoc and Jane Wyatt were eventually provided seats nearer the front by one of the guards. Two charwomen whom the latter two women engaged in conversation were upset at the discriminatory seating arrangement.

But being charwomen, why could they not effect a change in the chars assigned?

Perhaps it was for the acting cadre's own safety, to keep them a proper distance from the hot chars within the crucible.

The Russians then proceeded to seize every valuable piece of industrial property in their occupation zone of Austria, taking more than 300 plants plus several banks, and other valuable properties including farm land. The Russian conception of "German assets" was broad, even including some American properties, entailing oil interests, seized by the Germans during the war. The Russians also claimed the German autobahn built in Austria prior to 1938 and the land beneath it, but offered to trade it for industrial plants not susceptible to inclusion within the category of "German assets". The total value of these assets was 700 to 800 million dollars. It was controlled by a holding company, USIVA.

The Russians were using the ownership to political advantage. When the food riots had occurred the previous May, workers in the Russian-owned plants were given time off to participate. They refused to sign a treaty until given economic extraterritoriality in Austria. They would define to the Austrian Government what their entitlement to all "profits" from the seized industries meant at a later time, after the treaty was concluded.

The American insistence on an Austrian treaty without such provisions which threatened the country's independence had forestalled conclusion of a treaty, and the occupation thus continued. The leaders of Austria were willing to grant about a third of the Soviet economic demands to end the occupation and believed that General Mark Clark, when he was the head of the American occupation zone, had been too intractable in his resistance to the Soviet demands.

The cabbie said to him that he hoped price controls and allocations might return because it brought big tippers to Washington to obtain their priorities. He then cast a longing glance at his passenger.

Mr. Grafton found it hard to say what the news of the day was. He found a general attitude among the people of seeking individual corners for succor rather than favoring national action, as during the war. Street congestion in New York and Washington appeared to him to be about the biggest news story at present.

He tipped the cabbie the usual 15 cents and went on his way.

Whatever the case, Ovens Auditorium eventually was built in the mid-1950's. So there.

Gingerbread half-baked in the oven, men in the crucible, you know it's Hallowe'en when the frost's on the pumpkin and the actors in the back, deprived by the badges of their coign of vantage scene, ha'nt any matches with which to light the lanterns o' Jack, for the wax-weary peddlers down front, acting far too fast, trickily had stolen their pack-searing sheen.

Framed Edition

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