Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Banking
Committee decided to begin hearings on a four-part anti-inflation
program recommended by the President but would defer action on price
and wage controls and rationing, also recommended. The hearings, to
begin the following week, would pertain to rent control, installment
buying control, bank credit control, and change of margins allowable
for purchase of stock.
President Truman wished Godspeed to Secretary of State
Marshall as he departed for London to attend the foreign ministers
conference to settle the German and Austrian treaties.
The Senate War Investigating subcommittee heard further
testimony from Maj. General Bennett Meyers, stating that he never
received any money from Aviation Electric Corp. other than for
repayment of loans he had made to it. He called the testimony during
the prior two days by B. H. Lamarre and T. E. Readnower, claiming
that he was paid substantial salaries by the company through
kickbacks from their salaries as stooge officers of the company,
completely false.
Mr. Lamarre asserted that the General had sought to get him
to provide perjured testimony to cover up the General's role in the
company and that they could make real money after the hearings if he
would do so.
Another individual, president of Vimalert Co., testified that
he received his first war contract with the Army Air Forces two
weeks after making a personal loan of $25,000 to General Meyers.
Vimalert had previously been refused a war contract. They had
acquired vigor to add to their alertness in the two week interim.
Attorney General Tom Clark stated that when the hearings
concluded, the Justice Department would seek an indictment against
General Meyers for income tax violations.
In Miami, a circus father saved his son and daughter when
they fell during a high-wire act performed for the Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The two men were in the hospital
with injuries suffered in the fall, the father with a broken neck
and the son with a fractured vertebra of the spine. The daughter was
bruised and shaken. The son and daughter had been riding a bicycle
on the wire when they lost their balance 33 feet off the ground. As
they fell, without a net in place, the father rushed over and
cushioned the fall. The three were natives of England.
In London, Princess Elizabeth was wed to Lt. Philip
Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey at 11:45 a.m. Present were 3,000
members of royalty and commoners, as the world listened to the
proceedings by radio. The only mishap occurred when young Prince
Michael stumbled twice as he followed the train of the wedding gown
of the Princess, his duty in the ceremony. But he never lost his
grip on the lace, as Princess Margaret steadied him.
The royal couple departed for their honeymoon in Southern England.
In Lenoir, N.C., the Caldwell County clerk of court issued
subpoenas for the State Board of Education to appear before the
Grand Jury assessing whether to indict R. L. Fritz, former principal
of Hudson High School and the president of the North Carolina
Education Association, for his having misappropriated $1,600 worth
of school funds, paid to regular teachers for overtime in excess of their legally authorized pay rather than
to substitutes, as the payments were listed on the books.
Leave it to North Carolina officialdom to exalt form over
substance. They always have and, apparently, always will, it seeming
to be a carefully preserved trait, holdover from the caves, in the
bloodstreams and gene pools, passed generationally by certain
members of that elite group, who enjoy more rights than the
commoners. They never have learned, unfortunately, how to read the
English language and therefore are constrained to react to little
checkboxes on a page, emblematic of their royal heritage.
Burke Davis of The News offers the third installment
in the series of articles on former Governor and interim Senator
Cameron Morrison of Charlotte. He ran in 1920 for Governor on the
slogan, "From the Plowhandle to the Mansion". He made 103
regular speeches in 90 days all over the state and gave many more
extemporized talks. He won the first primary against future Governor
O. Max Gardner of Shelby by 87 votes. During the runoff, he was
labeled a drunkard, a gambler, and an infidel, among other things.
Publicist Tod Mann reports on the sports page that Duke would
be fighting cannons with pistols when it faced UNC in football the
following Saturday. Jake Wade would provide the UNC view of the game
the following day.
This night, our predicted score was a bit off, 38-36 versus
the actual result of 45-20. But the predicted winner was accurate,
and they did stick at 38 points, against 7, then 14, then 20, for
a full quarter of the game.
Mr. Mann was also correct in his assessment, if 67 years
early.
Our team was heard toward the end of the game shouting
something in unison, indiscernible or at least not subject to
repetition over the air. We suspect that it had something to do with
animal husbandry and sports medicine, perhaps royal blue also.
Anyway, the stands were nearly empty by the last five minutes
of the game. We don't blame them for walking out. They had to go in
search of a shot of dark blue love tonic.
On the editorial page, "Showdown in the 'Cold War'"
discusses Secretary of State Marshall's declaration the previous day
in a speech in Chicago that the country would no longer stand idly
by while Soviet propaganda falsely charged warmongering and
imperialistic motives behind the foreign aid program. During the
coming days, the Communists were making their final bids to gain
control of the Governments of Italy and France through fomenting
revolution in those countries. The Secretary's statement was
therefore well timed to bolster morale in Western Europe.
The piece predicts that the Russians would soon be forced to
withdraw from Germany and Austria should the Communists be unable to
take control of France and Italy, and that, if so, the Russians
would have shot their last "big bolt" in the cold war.
That Secretary Marshall was going to the London foreign ministers
conference with the aim of establishing a treaty with Germany, with
or without Soviet agreement, signaled that the showdown with Russia
was at hand.
"Bell's Case for a Rate Increase" discusses the
proposed Bell Telephone rate increase based on high demand in urban
areas, the opposite of ordinary economic theory. The company had
responded to the Charlotte City Council inquiries by explaining its
position, that more subscribers and more telephones in a given area,
as Charlotte, meant more service being provided. Equipment and
operating costs increased to the company per unit as the service
expanded.
"Senator Taft and Donald Duck" finds Senator Taft's
frenzy over the President's request for authority to re-impose
limited price, wage, and other controls plus rationing on selected
scarce commodities reminding, along with Andrei Vishinski's tirades
against American "warmongering", of the tantrums thrown by
Donald Duck. They were not frightening anyone, merely calling
attention to the fact that the times were changing in ways contrary
to their viewpoints.
Mr. Taft was showing that he regarded virtually all
Government control as corrupt and had no real desire for spending on
foreign aid. Yet, he had already conceded that some credit control
and export control, as well as rent control, would probably need be
enacted to allow for the Marshall Plan to proceed.
The fact that the President was seeking authority from
Congress to impose the controls distinguished it from
characterization as a police state, as Mr. Taft had sought to do,
and as the President, himself, had suggested regarding peacetime
controls, a month earlier.
Regardless of the outcome in Congress, the President had
measurably improved his position for the 1948 campaign, his ability
to blame Congress for any shortcomings on the economy and in respect
to the European crisis. It was no wonder that "Donald Taft"
was in such a tizzy.
Drew Pearson tells of freshman Senator Joseph McCarthy of
Wisconsin having redefined his views on housing after initially
being the prime moving force behind the allowance of a 15 percent
increase to landlords who negotiated a lease through 1948, bowing to
the real estate lobby in so doing. He had stayed home while his
colleagues toured Europe and studied the housing situation. The
Joint Committee on Housing would soon issue a report in consequence,
that the problem of housing was too large for private enterprise
alone to handle. Following hearings held across the country, it
would urge, with the support of Senator McCarthy and others who
previously had favored private enterprise as the sole tonic, a
Federal housing program. Mr. Pearson provides a summary of the
report based on an advance copy he had obtained. The report would be
released soon.
He tells also of a woman having called Senator McCarthy at 3:00
a.m. when he was in Chicago and telling him that there was no need
for wasting money on the hearings, that the simple solution to
housing was for Congress to pass the right laws.
The residents of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas had become upset
that the Friendship Train was passing to the north of them and so
banded together to form a special train to be loaded with wheat,
scheduled to leave Wichita the next day and arrive in Philadelphia
on November 30.
Governor Thomas Dewey had managed to scoop the committee in
the House, chaired by Representative Christian Herter, regarding its
report and recommendations re European aid. Two days before the
report was released, Governor Dewey had issued his own statement,
which essentially set forth the same recommendations and the same
administrative set-up for dispensing the aid as did the House
report. The committee was upset and wondered how he had received an
advance copy of the report. The likely culprit, it was assumed, was
Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, Mr. Dewey's chief
foreign policy adviser in the 1944 presidential campaign. Allen
Dulles—future CIA director until 1961, relieved by President Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation which Mr. Dulles had wholeheartedly endorsed as a holdover from the Eisenhower Administration, and, in 1963-64, a member of the Warren Commission—, had accompanied the Committee on its European tour.
The President suspected the steel companies of facilitating
the gray market in which steel was selling at two to three times the
list price charged by manufacturers, contributing to inflationary
pressure.
One of the largest steel lobbies was pressuring the
Government, including the White House, to exempt steel from
prospective controls being recommended by the President. Meanwhile,
the large steel manufacturers were making the largest profits in
their history.
A piece from The Congressional Quarterly provides
brief biographical sketches of the significant personages involved
in the special session of Congress and their roles in the body. They
included Senators Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Chan Gurney of South
Dakota, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, J. Howard McGrath of Rhode
Island, John J. Sparkman of Alabama, Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut,
Homer Ferguson of Michigan, and James Kem of Missouri.
In the House, those who would have significant roles included
Representatives Fred Hartley of New Jersey, Christian Herter of
Massachusetts, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, J. Parnell Thomas of New
Jersey, Clarence Brown of Ohio, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Albert
Gore of Tennessee, and Walter Ploeser of Missouri.
Marquis Childs suggests that the country, despite being the
strongest in the world after the war, manifested fears which
betrayed instead a sense of weakness in the face of Communism. This
weakness was developing into a witch hunt. It was that which would
do harm to the country, not Communism. A witch hunt could destroy
free thought. Men and women had already had their futures placed in
jeopardy without any means to know the charges against them, let
alone to respond.
The process was spreading to areas outside the Government, as
suggested by a member of the FCC, Clifford Durr, who predicted that
the hunt for Communists would next invade radio, as the FBI was
already seeking from the Commission unsolicited reports on the
loyalty of individuals in radio broadcasting. The information, said
Mr. Durr, was baseless gossip.
The FBI appeared to be trying to influence the Commission in
how it granted licenses. If so, Congress needed to know about it.
The individuals involved, according to Mr. Childs's information,
were not broadcasters of news and opinion, but there was nothing
preventing it from spreading to those positions, and the mere
suggestion of the possibility was enough to chill broadcasters.
The Japanese, he points out, had used thought police when
they prepared for the conquest of East Asia, to ferret out the disloyal
dissenters and then put them in jail.
If the current methods were not checked in the United States,
something very like a thought police, he posits, might develop.
Joseph C. Harsch, in a piece from The Christian Science
Monitor, traces the origin of the concept of the Marshall Plan
to a phone call by Leonard Miall of the BBC to the British Embassy
in Washington, discovering therein by happenstance, from someone who
thought the speech might be significant, that Secretary of State
Marshall was about to deliver an important speech the previous June
5 at Harvard. Had Mr. Miall not made the contact and then acted on
the tip to cover the event, it was conceivable that the British
Foreign Office might have missed the significance of Secretary
Marshall's statement and the Marshall Plan might never have
developed.
Dean Acheson, then Acting Secretary of State as
Undersecretary, made a speech on May 8 in Cleveland, Miss., while
Secretary Marshall was at the foreign ministers conference in
Moscow. In it, he had outlined the economic problems of Western
Europe. The speech had been something of an accident as Mr. Acheson
was substituting for the President, who decided not to speak because
of the controversy swirling around Senator Theodore Bilbo. The
speech of Mr. Acheson received little press coverage as it proposed
no remedies.
When Secretary Marshall returned to Washington, he was
briefed by Mr. Acheson on the economic problems of France, Italy,
and Britain, prompting his consideration of the matter. He believed
that something had to be done but that it would be against protocol
to bring it up directly with the countries involved and so he
decided to raise it obliquely in the Harvard speech, suggesting that
the countries set forth their own plan for recovery and that the
United States would then stand prepared to underwrite that portion
which the nations could not provide themselves.
It was not until Mr. Miall delivered his account of the
speech to the BBC, based on his phone call to the British Embassy,
and the BBC gave the speech full coverage, which the other British
news outlets largely ignored, that the concept caught the attention
of the British Foreign Office. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin then
picked up the idea and ran with it. It was only then that the press
in both Britain and the United States began to cover the Marshall
announcement.
The Monitor finds no evidence that the speech had been
previewed to the British Government.
A letter writer responds to the piece of Sumner Welles
appearing November 11 in which Mr. Welles had recommended the
restoration of funding to the Voice of America and other information
agencies so that an effective form of American information could be
conveyed to Europe to combat Soviet propaganda. This author thinks
that the best way to develop such effective propaganda was for the
Rightists in the country to stop beating up Americans with their
"reactionary capitalism, which they, with a straight face, call
the 'American Way'". An American truth campaign was needed, he
suggests, for Americans. When FDR died, he ventures, so, too, did
real democracy in the land and across the world. Representative J.
Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC, had taken the deceased President's
place in defining that for which the country stood—presumably,
though he does not say it, witches, witchcraft, and more witches and
witchcraft, with pumpkins out on the farm with the farm animals and
plenty of tricks to go with them.
