The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 7, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
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Ed. Note: The front page reports that before the U.N. General Assembly, Pakistan
joined the Arab countries in objecting to the partition plan for Palestine and
demanded an immediate end to Jewish immigration to the country. The Pakistani
delegate compared the creation of a separate Jewish state to establishment of a
separate Negro state within the U.S. He said that the Arabs were entitled to
their independence from Britain in Palestine. He cited the slaughter ongoing
along the Pakistani-Indian border as proof of what would occur under partition
The British Foreign Office had announced that Russia had agreed to a Big Four foreign ministers conference beginning November 25 to try to work out a German peace treaty. The effort to do so the previous March in Moscow had failed.
At the same time, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin issued statements critical of the new Information Bureau which the nine Soviet-bloc nations had agreed to establish, with the avowed purpose of fighting against British and American imperialism. They found it to hearken back to the Comintern, abandoned during the war. The head of the Communist Party in Italy denied that the intent of the organization was to re-establish the Comintern.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that more people would die of starvation in the world in 1948 than in any year of the war.
In
compliance with the demand of the President, the commodities markets in Chicago,
Kansas City, and Minneapolis doubled the required down payment to one-third for
purchase of grain futures on margin, to curb speculation. The National
Restaurant Association pledged to support meatless Tuesdays and no eggs
We hope the folks do not miss the sacrifice.
Charles Luckman, chairman of the Citizens Food Committee, asked all newspapers in the country to begin posting each Tuesday a reminder that it would be a meatless day and to do likewise with respect to eggs and poultry on Thursdays.
During
a joint session of the House and Senate Agriculture Committee studying food, Representative
Chester Gross of Pennsylvania accused the Agriculture Department of lying about
the claimed depressed plight of the average American farmer. He found it
insulting to farm families
In
London, it was reported that Fuel Minister Emanuel Shinwell was being removed
from the Cabinet to become War Minister. Mr. Shinwell had enjoyed support from
labor and the left, especially among coal miners, but had been the target for
criticism
The American Newspaper Publishers Association filed a complaint with the NLRB charging that the International Typographical Union had violated the Taft-Hartley Act and that the union required publishers effectively to conspire with them to violate the law.
The NLRB voted 4 to 1 that CIO and AFL officers were not required under Taft-Hartley to execute affidavits of non-Communist affiliation that they might continue to utilize the services of NLRB. The ruling overruled NLRB counsel Robert Denham.
The House was investigating the situation surrounding the parole in Illinois of four members of the Al Capone gang the previous August after they had served a third of their ten-year sentences for conspiracy to extort a million dollars from the movie industry. An Illinois public safety officer who had originally agreed to act as parole supervisor for one of the men had reneged on the agreement, an action which members of Congress found despicable.
The Warden of Central Prison in Raleigh, Hugh Wilson, stated his opposition to capital punishment, in the wake of the five executions which had taken place there the previous week, the most ever in one day. He said, however, that as long as capital punishment was legal, it should serve a deterrent purpose by holding public executions in the counties where the crimes for which the convicted person was being executed had been committed.
The
man who took his ten-month old son in Leeds, England, and fled after his wife
refused to join him in the United States, arrived in his hometown of
Greensboro, N.C. He did not wish to discuss the matter
In Dalton, Ga., the Mayor and two City Councilmen resigned in the wake of a reversed decision by the Council firing five city sanitation workers. The workers and sympathizers claimed that they had been fired for their union membership, not the claimed inefficiency. The sympathizers had gathered in the Council chamber and refused to allow the Council to leave until the decision was reversed. The Council complied.
On the editorial page, “America’s Hour of Danger” suggests that America’s willingness to accept the French proposal at the U.N. to relent on the U.S. proposal to declare Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria aggressors in northern Greece, provided that the three countries accept the border watch commission, was the result of the recognition that the American people were not strongly behind the Marshall Plan. Congressional leaders had expressed the notion that the aid would not be a blank check.
With that part of the program not working well as the critical winter approached in Europe, the Administration had apparently decided to relax the tension with the Soviet bloc at the U.N. to avoid the prospect of deepening the “cold war”.
The country could either reverse the cold war trend or accept the responsibility of rebuilding Europe. If it did neither, then the Soviets would continue to make gains until the cold war would become a hot one, inevitably resulting in an atomic blast which would end the world.
“Lesson on American Free Press” disagrees with Eleanor Roosevelt in her defense of freedom of the press to the Russians, when she suggested at the U.N. that a slothful system was the price paid for having democracy and freedom of speech, enabling the airing of all opinions. The piece thinks the general defense apropos and good, but that the reason for America’s sloth was that not enough opinions were being expressed to contradict the usual voices. Americans were thus in the doldrums, not because of a free press and free expression of ideas, but rather the opposite.
“Here
We Go Again” remarks again on Charlotte’s snarled downtown traffic and the
attempts of the City Council to find remedies for it. The piece finds bemused
impatience regarding the need for a traffic engineer
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled “Good Advice from Henry Ford”, tells of an address by Henry Ford II to the automobile and airplane parts manufacturers at Cleveland, in which he had said that they shared a responsibility in solving the worldwide deficit in production. He remarked that industry had followed a pattern based on the past rather than looking to the future. Manufacturers had to accept the dual responsibility not only of increasing production in America but in stimulating it abroad, both necessary for America to sustain a high living standard.
The
piece remarks that he could not have delivered a more convincing endorsement of
the Marshall Plan.
Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall laudably having sought to encourage leaders from business, labor and agriculture to give their services to the Government. Attracting qualified personnel had been one of the great difficulties since the end of the war.
He next tells of President Truman, in an impromptu moment, having stated privately with simple eloquence to the Gold Star Mothers that what the Government was seeking to do was to avoid ever again having Gold Star Mothers. Some of the women who had lost sons during the war wept.
The initiation ceremony during the President’s return trip from Brazil aboard the U.S.S. Missouri for the Polliwogs who had never crossed the equator brought to light another such ceremony from September, 1944 aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, during the thick of the war in the Pacific. Irresponsibility reigned during the ceremony. Several men were injured. Forty pilots were reported the next day unfit for duty and several planes were damaged and pushed over the side of the carrier.
Despite preaching economy, the Republicans were employing nine people, three times the number employed by the Democrats, to distribute campaign literature. Some of it was going out under the franking privilege. He notes that the last session of Congress had spent more on itself than any other in history, triple that of the New Deal Congresses.
Recently, French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault visited Washington and spoke with his friend, former Secretary of State James Byrnes. Mr. Bidault recalled a conversation they had a year earlier in which Mr. Byrnes complained that the French did not work hard enough, that they kept their barber shops closed on Mondays. Mr. Bidault had informed Mr. Byrnes that because the French wanted to be clean-shaven at least one day per week, the barber shops remained open on Sundays.
Samuel Grafton dichotomizes the choice of governance as being between “wholesale” and “retail”. The latter entailed price control and subsidy when a given sector could not make a profit under controlled prices. Wholesale government was “like a road company Hamlet”, announcing that it would abandon price control and allow free enterprise to flourish, forgetting in the meantime the individual who had to live with higher prices. Wholesale government produced bits of cruelty while the retail variety always devolved to the silly when examined too closely under the microscope.
The problem with wholesale government was that conditions, such as a poor corn crop, intruded to cause problems not easily subject to adjustment. The theory was good for good times, but not for times of uncertainty after a war. To adopt it was to play Hamlet in the open air in a rainstorm. The country had become a victim of “ideological impatience”.
Mr. Grafton believes that the Government should have combined the two approaches, maintaining some controls and subsidies.
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, tells of positive signs in France, with production up to nearly what it was in 1938. Politically, the Communists had reached their peak months before, albeit continuing to make some gains among the peasants. If economic recovery continued, there was reason to believe that the Communists could be driven from their leadership positions in the French Labor Federation within about a year.
The poor harvest was a cause of great difficulty, draining dollars to buy grain, along with the loss of convertibility of British Sterling to dollars. The combination had produced inflation. The Bank of France had been forced to restrict imports on food, grains, fats, petroleum products and coal. The country’s petroleum stocks would last only a couple of more months. To allow for imports of petroleum, it was determined that contracts for 450,000 tons of coal would be cancelled.
President Truman meanwhile had promised France 100 million dollars immediately and 300 million after the December special session of Congress. But France needed 100 million dollars per month until the Marshall Plan became effective roughly seven months hence. In consequence, France would be left without imports for the ensuing three months or so, producing unemployment during the winter and reduction of the near-starvation rations. Inflation, disorganization, and extremism would then reign unchallenged.
Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State until August, 1944, suggests that the Palestine situation presented a good opportunity for the U.S. and Russia to agree on a resolution as both had expressed willingness to support the partition plan. The majority report of the U.N. special committee on Palestine had produced a basic plan which was wise, even if there was ground for disagreement with some of the details.
The division of the country into three sections did not have to produce conflict between Arabs and Jews but could afford an opportunity for political and economic collaboration. The Jewish state would contain 550,000 Jews and the Arab state, 500,000 Arabs. During a two-year transition period, 6,250 Jews per month would be permitted to enter the Jewish state.
He believes that the threats by some Arab leaders to “drench the Holy Land in blood” by way of self-defense was bluster which need not be taken too seriously. It would be paradoxical for the Arab nations to defy the U.N., for their own independence and prosperity largely depended on the organization.
The administration of Palestine was costing the British about $140,000 per year and would cost that much until it achieved independence. The financial burden should be shared proportionately by all of the U.N. member nations. The nature of the police force after British withdrawal was more problematic as the Security Council had no armed force. Under Article 43 of the U.N. Charter, the Security Council could call on all member nations to supply armed forces for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.
But if the U.S. were to send troops to Palestine, the Soviets would interpret it as a threat to their security. Likewise, if the Soviets insisted on sending their own troops, the Western powers would view it with suspicion. Thus, an agreement that none of the major powers would supply military forces would be salutary.
The matter could not be resolved unless the U.S. and Russia agreed to support any solution decided upon by the Assembly. And if they could so agree, it would have an ameliorative effect on the tensions existing between the two nations.
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