The Charlotte News

Friday, November 21, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President named General Omar Bradley chief of staff of the Army to replace retiring General Eisenhower, about to assume in January the presidency of Columbia University. Carl Gray, vice-president of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Association and formerly a brigadier general in charge of railway transportation in the European theater in 1943, would replace General Bradley as head of the Veterans Administration. The President also appointed General C. B. Cates to succeed General A. A. Vandegrift as commandant of the Marine Corps.

The President, in a press conference, urged Congress to fix margins on speculative stock and securities trading. He was targeting speculation on wheat, cotton, and similar products.

Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri reported that the House Appropriations Committee had learned during a wartime secret visit in May, 1945 to the atomic energy production plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., that there were foreign spies from all enemy nations working there. They were permitted to remain on the job, however, so that they could be watched and the spy network traced. The Congressmen were informed that the spies could not do any damage because they were insulated in terms of their knowledge, as were all workers. There was also a blackboard set up to show progress on the project, which was in fact bogus. He had never determined what the Government had done with these workers at the end of the war. The reason for the visit was that several members of the Committee had begun to complain about funneling millions of dollars into a secret project which was supposed to end the war, some members thinking it "foolishness".

Before the Senate War Investigating subcommittee, Maj. General Bennett Meyers admitted having signed a false affidavit regarding use of a Cadillac, the affidavit having asserted that it had been bought by Aviation Electric before a wartime Government freeze on deliveries of new cars became effective at the beginning of 1942, when in fact it had not been. General Meyers, embarrassed, said that it was a routine signature, that anyone would have signed it, including Committee counsel William Rogers, future Attorney General and Secretary of State. (Maybe his second boss, more likely.) He also claimed that he set up the Aviation Electric Corp. to help his girlfriend, the wife of the designated president of the company, B. H. Lamarre, whom he elevated from a $35 per week job.

In Paris, Socialist Premier-designate Leon Blum said that the country was in danger from the declared war on the French people by the Communists on the left and by the Gaullists on the right. The latter wanted to revise the Constitution to provide for a strong chief executive in the manner of the United States. Mr. Blum found this position to be tantamount to favoring a dictatorship. Premier Paul Ramadier had resigned Wednesday after half a million workers in the country had gone on strike, nearly crippling all of France. Mr. Blum was seeking support in the National Assembly to form a new Cabinet.

In Romsey, England, Princess Elizabeth and new husband, Lt. Philip Mountbatten, now Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, partook of rationed bacon and eggs for breakfast, as they honeymooned at Broadlands, the estate of Earl Mountbatten. Celebrants in London of the previous rainy day were no longer in evidence, as street sweepers swept away the litter left behind. The throngs had remained past midnight, beckoning, in rolling voices, further royal appearances on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, shouting, "We want the King," and "We want Margaret." No one appeared.

Be that way.

Burke Davis of The News, in the fourth in his series of articles on former Governor and interim Senator Cameron Morrison, tells of him not liking the idea of being known as the "Good Roads Governor", for there was more to his program than that. Mr. Davis suggests that a good case could be made that Mr. Morrison was the first progressive Governor in the South, rallying people to a progressive cause before Al Smith and FDR. And he had done so with a populace wedded to conservatism.

During his term, 1921-25, ad valorem taxes were abolished, income taxes raised, and State taxes limited to ten percent, except for education. The appropriation for the University was doubled and that for Woman's College in Greensboro, tripled. The branches of the Greater University nearly were consolidated. The N.C. College for Negroes, later North Carolina Central, became a State institution. The Gastonia orthopedic hospital for children came under State control. In two sessions, the General Assembly spent 65 million dollars for roads. School funding was greatly increased through a five million dollar bond approved by voters. The State's mental hospitals were expanded as was public health. The poll tax was abolished.

Mr. Morrison said that he was trying during his term to realize the dreams set forth at the turn of the century by Governor Charles B. Aycock, known as the "Education Governor".

News reporter Tom Schlesinger, son of renowned historian Arthur Schlesinger and brother to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., interviews a private detective on page 7-A, finds that his life was not so glamorous and thrilling as the detective novels and movies would suggest.

On the editorial page, "Princess, Princesses and People" tells of the fairy tale marriage being celebrated in Britain between Princess Elizabeth and Lt. Philip Mountbatten. It gleans that the moral was that Britons were so happy over the affair because it reminded of their triumph over regal power, caste, and privilege, that the great remaining throne in the world now reported to a Socialist Government. The throne was now regulated by the citizens and so they could look with bright hope on it with the marriage of its prospective occupiers for the coming generation.

No longer, as in earlier times, were people beheaded by the thousands when they merely voiced opposition to the existence of the crown or suggested that the show of privilege was not worth the expense.

We are constrained to remark that to us Americans who neither believe that we are bastards of royalty nor that even benevolent royalty has any benefit or utility whatsoever other than to oppress the gullible masses and impress them with the notion of blind obeisance to a human power above their wee, little reach, the entire concept of royalty is both strange and demeaning, not something which we endorse, rather something about which, to throw off its yoke, we fought a Revolution. And we remain damned proud of it.

"A Flight into Cuckoo Land" regards the address of Dr. Gus Dyer to a regional meeting of the Southern States Industrial Council, suggesting that government intervention in business was a "repudiation of the divine plan for human society". He included social security, unemployment compensation, and labor unions as such ungodly plans.

The piece finds his injection of theology into business from his point of view as an economic expert to be misplaced. As if that were not enough, he had gone on to provide an analogy which suggested that part of his economic training had come from the neighborhood of the Bronx Zoo. He had described the process by which a mockingbird cares for its young, stopping its feeding and protection at a certain point in development, finding that behavior to be good example for the human.

The piece suggests that if human beings were as birds, then the simple plan put forth by the doctor might be valid. But birds were equipped to fly south for winter and did not have to contend with depressions, the next meal being as close as the nearest worm. Nor did the bird have to worry about loss of employment or invasion of his home by predators.

Ants, it says, live under a communistic system. But neither the bird system nor the ant system has anything to do with human systems.

"Indeed, if we humans do not begin to realize that the law of the jungle is not the plan envisioned by the Creator for the operation of our affairs, the birds may soon have it all for themselves."

"Nebulous Politics and Psychiatry" finds Governor Gregg Cherry to have done the right thing in allowing a death sentence to go forward against a convicted rapist despite six of ten psychiatrists having found that he was insane while four found him sane enough to know right from wrong. The Governor had personally interviewed the condemned prisoner before reaching his decision. That meeting had been criticized by a psychiatrist at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem as usurping the role of psychiatry. The Governor responded that psychiatry was as nebulous as being Governor.

The piece thinks that the doctor would have been on sound footing had he criticized the death penalty law or the law which placed the heavy final responsibility for determining clemency on the Governor, but not for the Governor having undertaken a personal assessment to better inform his judgment.

It suggests that the emphasis ought be on research to try to diminish the tendencies to rape, as well as determining whether rape ought be subject to the death penalty.

A short piece from the Asheville Citizen wonders whether everyone in Raleigh had left town when Henry Wallace spoke there, based on the depopulation figure in the Louisville Courier-Journal, which told of 2,700 of the 6,000 people of Raleigh having turned out for the speech.

Drew Pearson tells of the special Southwest wheat section of the Friendship Train having departed Wichita with 102 cars, carrying wheat from Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Mr. Pearson, after having conceptualized the train and ridden on it for eleven days from Los Angeles to New York, deemed it a success, with 270 boxcar loads of food delivered to New York Harbor for the trip to France and Italy. The Italian newspapers and radio broadcasts were already promoting the train, and Italian Premier de Gasperi had expressed thanks.

He suggests that the effort of Americans to give food directly could continue through American Overseas Aid in New York as well as through CARE and the Christian Rural Overseas Program in Chicago.

He also suggests that some of the aid to go to Europe under the Marshall Plan in the form of long-term financial assistance be furnished by American business firms by way of loans from the RFC to these firms, further to underscore the collective effort of Americans in providing the aid.

Marquis Childs posits that to carry out ERP would require the best brains of the country, economic and political specialists. The U.S. had that responsibility for its world leadership industrially and technologically.

Given that status, the country could not afford the kind of witch-hunt beginning within the Government. Such would deter the best people from entering Government service. Eleven employees of the State Department had been dismissed during the previous several months, without any proper basis, labeled "bad security risks". The Department needed able personnel to administer the Marshall Plan.

Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune had presented one of the cases in detail, showing that the man had been shadowed by the FBI for eight months without revelation of anything other than vague suggestions regarding his associates, whom he had seen at infrequent intervals.

In July, 1945, the FBI took into custody during a raid five men and a woman, two of the men being State Department employees. They were stripped and treated as common criminals before being cleared of any wrongdoing.

The State Department was taking steps to insure that employees who were dismissed in the future for disloyalty could appeal to the twenty-person Loyalty Board. But getting prospective employees cleared through the maze of loyalty tests was no easy task for agencies of the Government.

Recently, a man who sought employment as an economist at one agency was considered doubtful because five years before the war, he had been associated with the "Communist-dominated" American Civil Rights Union. His sterling combat record did not offset the association.

If such continued, then the country would be unable to recruit the proper personnel to perform the job under the Marshall Plan.

Samuel Grafton wonders why Senator Taft, in recommending five billion dollars per year in aid under ERP rather than the required seven billion, was being such a spendthrift, as under-funding the Plan would not accomplish the goal of rebuilding Europe. It reduced the program to a handout. Mr. Taft, however, did not like price control and rationing, believed that the job could be accomplished without such economic controls at five billion dollars.

The Republicans were in trouble with the country because their theories about the economy being better off under an unfettered system and that the country would not need to aid Europe after the war were blowing up. They had even mocked the President when he tried voluntary rationing, their own pet alternative to price control. If they were going to reform, they had to face reality.

A letter writer provides a poem for the newspaper carriers.

Sample:
He's just somebody's little boy,
Trying hard to make the grade;
Let's show him we appreciate
The effort he has made.

She advocates tipping.

A letter from A. W. Black takes to task the "do-gooder" Ellis Arnall, former Governor of Georgia, for his suggestion that Communism was not the bogey it was being made out to be by many Americans. Mr. Black thinks it a definite and growing threat.

He urges that Mr. Arnall ought "hie away to the environs of Acheron"—apparently making some vague allusion to Macbeth, making no sense, as Mr. Arnall could hardly be classified as a politically greedy figure bent on power at any cost. Rather, the Nixons and McCarthys and Rankins and Thomases fit that mold quite well.

But Mr. Black was never one for making any sense except by viewing him as being entirely ironic in his various diatribes. Unfortunately, it would appear that he was not intentionally being ironic.

A letter writer suggests that there was no scientific solution to be found to bring about world peace.

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