The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 26, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson and Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman had told, respectively, the House Banking Committee and joint Economic Committee that the Government needed to have controls on allocation regarding steel and wheat to effectuate the European aid and recovery program. Both favored restoration of price controls and rationing on scarce commodities.

There appeared to be a move afoot in the Senate to whittle down by 108 million dollars the 597 million recommended by the President for emergency aid to Europe during the winter. The House Foreign Affairs Committee had already recommended such a cut, wile adding back 60 million in aid for China. Delays were appearing in passing the program, as the House Appropriations Committee, according to chairman John Taber, could not consider the aid before December 4.

At the foreign ministers conference in London, agreement was reached to place first on the agenda the Austrian treaty and then deal with the German treaty. The Big Four had agreed on a six-point program for Austria but not on whether to give it priority versus the German problems.

At the U.N., the approval of the partition plan for Palestine was set back as the Arab nations opposing the plan picked up support from Greece and the Philippines. Siam had voted against partition the previous day in the Palestine committee, while the committee voted 25 to 13 to approve the plan, backed by both the U.S. and Russia. But the plenary session would require a two-thirds majority, irrespective of abstentions, and one more affirmative vote was thus required. Siam was now absent, however, from the proceedings. But the new supporters might offset that difference as Greece had abstained in the committee vote, and the Philippines had been absent.

In Paris, the French Ministry of the Interior announced that nineteen Russians were being expelled for interfering in French affairs during the ongoing strike by over a million workers. A street battle had erupted between police and strikers in Lyon, attributed to unrest stimulated by the Communist-dominated General Confederation of Labor.

President Truman commuted to time served the Federal mail fraud sentence of Mayor James Curley of Boston. He had completed five months imprisonment of a six to eighteen month sentence. The President also commuted the sentence of former member of the NLRB, Donald Wakefield Smith, convicted on the same charge, both in relation to graft involving war contracts.

The Coast Guard found four men alive and three dead from the Clarksdale Victory, an Army transport ship which had run aground on Hippa Island in Alaska. Thirty-seven members of the crew, however, remained missing.

The six daily newspapers of Chicago, with curtailed production caused by a printers strike, were experimenting with new ways to produce the print without resort to the linotypists. Instead, they were using standard typists to type out the print and then photograph it in a composed, columnar form onto a metal engraving plate, at which point the printing process was the same as after linotyping.

On the editorial page, "'Forgotten Man' in Tax Picture" remarks on the statements by Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, criticizing the President for wanting to feed the hungry of Europe while the Navajo Indians were dying of hunger and disease and while 500 schoolchildren of Dallas, Texas, were unable to attend school for want of clothing. He labeled as "bleeding hearts" those who cried about Europe and Asia.

He then read into the Congressional Record his little poem to the "little man", which the piece reprints.

It finds the "forgotten man" of Mr. Knutson not to be the same as that which FDR had found in 1932, "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed". For Mr. Knutson stood opposed to a proposal to raise personal exemptions from $500 to $600, removing thereby six million low-income persons from responsibility for taxes. That, he said, would interfere with his plan to provide across-the-board tax cuts for all taxpayers—giving the greatest slice of it therefore to the "forgotten man" of Mr. Knutson, rolling in dough.

It expresses the hope that the Navajo and Dallas schoolchildren could wait until humanitarian Knutson got around to them, just as he had promised that the Congress might later get around to the six million low-income persons to be benefited under the proposed increase to the personal exemption.

The difference between a bleeding-heart liberal and a bleeding-heart conservative, as Mr. Knutson, we might add, is that the latter believed firmly in the literal bleeding heart while the former sought to avert it by allaying hunger, understanding the role of government as being the insurer of the ideals for which the Constitution stands, not a profit-making venture, either as a whole or for its individual public servants.

You don't run the government as a business, dummy. If you want to run a business, run a business and stay out of public office.

"An Extra for Our Thanksgiving" reports of Mecklenburg County having been given such a good financial prognosis that the citizens were provided a ten cents property tax reduction for the coming fiscal year without reducing county services. While praising of this effort by the County, it warns the citizenry against using the savings to effect consumer purchases, fueling inflationary pressures. Rather, it advises putting the money in savings.

"'Rotten Apple in Our Barrel'" tells of Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington having described the scandal swirling around former Air Corps deputy chief of procurement Maj. General Bennett Meyers as being one of the most shocking ever revealed in any branch of the Government. It had shown that the General had made upwards of $150,000 personally in war contracts, which he essentially had procured for himself and his company, Aviation Electric Corp. He now faced prosecution for fraud, perjury and income tax evasion.

General Hap Arnold, wartime head of the Air Forces, had declared General Meyers to have been a rotten apple and thanked the subcommittee for exposing him.

Mr. Symington had found General Meyers's superiors not to be negligent in not realizing his profiteering chicanery. But he also asserted that the War Department should have conducted its own probe two years earlier when an anonymous letter told of the General's improper practices, accusing him of using insider information to purchase stocks in war contract recipient companies.

The Secretary had called attention to the fact that the Air Force was currently reorganizing its procurement structure and taking steps to assure accountability. The piece thus finds the Senate War Investigating Committee's efforts salutary in trying to get to the bottom of the "war contract mess."

But whatever the "mess" was, the country won the war, and, we venture, it was a silly partisan mistake to start down a road with an inevitable result of second-guessing that effort, even if not doing so meant allowing a few profiteering crooks during the war, whether Government and military insiders or corporate bigwigs, to escape punishment. And, the corporate bigwigs, it should be noted, did manage somehow to escape prosecution and punishment.

For if you try to punish all corruption and seek to eradicate it, you only wind up punishing the visible few, usually guilty of petty crime compared to the fatcats with practical immunity derived from political influence, while the great masses take then cue from the prosecuted "rebels" and perform their artifice with greater stealth learned from the expose, in rebellion against the sinister "Gov'ment" covering up the deeds of the fatcats to go after the little cats, as General Meyers, the scapegoat.

And was it it not the case that conducting such a review of the war to expose corruption during it, including ultimately the expose of supposed "Communist influence" in the Army and State Department, as revealed by that Great Revealer Joseph McCarthy, demoralized the country and turned its patriotic spirit manifested during the war to a kind of cynicism, finding no longer so much to respect about its leadership, military or political, and diminishing thus in the process a hard fought victory, both at home and abroad, as well compromising and delaying the enormous effort which the country undertook to mobilize its vast resources left intact after the war to provide the greatest part of the stimulus aid necessary to rebuild Europe and Asia? Would it not have been better than engaging in all these redundant and silly investigations, which prolonged for nearly fifty years an internally destructive cold war, to let the world war pass into history and rest with the dead of Flanders Fields?

In the end, the tacit assumption behind such hearings was that World War III was both an inevitability and imminent, in need therefore of preparation for its eventuality, to avoid repeating the mistakes of World War II.

But the ailing Republican Party and the disgruntled reactionary Southern Democrats needed bones over which to pick, to get the booboisie on their side and keep them there, back down on the farm again, as during the long, harsh days for the worker and farmer from the Civil War through the Depression. So FDR had to be made into something impliedly kin to a Communist warmonger—that which the Nazis had branded him during the war. Then the fatcats and the pols could thrive again, while the booboisie was satisfied that they were now being ruled by upstanding moral men, who, though fat and not very funny, were nevertheless at least honorable and honest.

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Lady Nicotine to Rescue", remarks on Virginia Senator A. Willis Robertson's plan to make tobacco an "essential commodity" to be sent overseas under ERP for its morale-building qualities to combat the strain on the nerves produced in Europe by the cold war. He had said that it had been gleaned from the experience of the men in service during the war that tobacco "provides a great consolation and incentive."

For the fact of nearly coughing up one's lungs is good preparation for the battlefield in which certain death becomes a compromise with certain life pain, thus neither any longer to be feared.

The piece asserts that the Senator's expression was motivated by the fact that he came from one of the two chief tobacco-manufacturing states at a time when the prospects for export was down, with England having cut out tobacco imports pursuant to its austerity program to preserve dollars. The tobacco farmers faced a 30 percent acreage cut to continue to receive Government subsidies.

But, it concludes nevertheless that the Senator's argument had witness from the fact that tobacco was a delicacy on the black markets of Europe.

"A puff of smoke and the solace it gives may be no more than an illusion, but illusions are mighty important to a disillusioned Europe."

Drew Pearson reports that Maj. General Bennett Meyers, the final focus of the Senate War Investigating subcommittee inquiry into the Hughes war contracts, maintained three sets of books on Air Corps procurements, in addition to the subcommittee's expose of his concealed personal profits during the war from Aviation Electric Corp., which he set up. The first set of books told the true facts of procurement, intended for the brass hats to see. A second set was for the White House, to demonstrate to FDR how brilliant the brass hats of the Air Corps were. The third set was for Congress, to show why the Air Corps needed more money.

The former assistants of former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Undersecretary during the war, had told of General Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, having been aware of the three sets of books and having assisted General Meyers in fighting the effort of Undersecretary Patterson to take a survey of the procurement practices of the Air Corps. The survey, when eventually conducted, showed a practice of continually ordering planes and parts in advance of the need for them. When they had too many pilots, they ordered more planes; when they had too many planes, they ordered more gas and pilots; and when they had too many of all three, they ordered more air bases to accommodate them.

General Arnold, when he saw the report, wanted it concealed in the safe.

But a copy was delivered to FDR top aide Harry Hopkins. When Mr. Hopkins confronted General Arnold about the waste, the General denied the truth of the report.

Mr. Pearson relates of an incident in which General Meyers had tossed a hotel key to a Colonel and ordered him to turn it into the desk. The Colonel, worth several million dollars, let it fall to the floor, later told General Meyers that he was thinking of buying an airplane after the war and hiring a general to be its pilot.

President Truman had recently talked with the head of the Disabled American Veterans, John Golob, and told him that he wanted to preserve the peace but was willing to use force if necessary to prevent further disabled veterans. He held up a closed fist as he said so. He also said that the country had to be patient in assisting the nations of Europe in getting back on their feet, as they had lost so much of their manpower in the war. The President expressed regret at having asked Congress after V-J Day to cancel the remaining 63 billion dollars worth of unused appropriations for the war, saying that if he had not done so, it could have been used in reconstruction, possibly preventing the current chaos besetting Europe.

Charles W. Duke, in his series of articles on the Freedom Train, tells of the original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence being aboard. On June 11, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had been appointed, along with Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, John Adams, and Rogers Sherman, by the Second Continental Congress to draft the document. After a meeting at which the basic points to be included in the document were settled, Mr. Jefferson, being the most able writer among the group, was selected to perform authorship, went to his home and drafted the document alone. Afterward, the draft was circulated to the others for corrections and insertions. Until recently the draft in the Library of Congress, now on the Freedom Train, was thought to be the first rough draft. But a fragment of an earlier draft had been discovered.

A letter from Mr. Jefferson on July 1, 1776 to his friend William Fleming was also included, assuring the constituency of the Virginia Convention that he was in favor of independence.

A manuscript copy of the Declaration signed by Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, sent to Frederick the Great of Prussia in February, 1777, was also aboard.

Also included was the only known letter dated July 4, 1776 from a signer of the Declaration, Caesar Rodney of Delaware.

The first and last pages of one of two contemporaneously created duplicates of the Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783, wherein Britain recognized the independence of the United States, was also on the train.

Samuel Grafton suggests the many reasons why the country could give thanks on Thanksgiving, 1947. One reason was that there was no internal violence in America, despite its having passed a serious crisis in human affairs, a claim few places in the world could presently make. In America, at least a handful of newspapers and public figures were willing to fight for the right of Americans to think as they pleased. Thanks could be given for the way the children looked on the streets or on the fields. Thanks could be given for time, itself, for the lapse of two years since the war and the erosion of the naivete which had accompanied the end of the war, when it was believed that America could recede into a new isolationism from the rest of the world.

"Thanks for time which cools the fighting man, and answers him long after he thinks to have silenced all opponents."

A letter writer finds the Pilgrim example of a three-day Thanksgiving amid harsh conditions to be in stark contrast to the Thanksgivings of modernity in which everything was taken for granted by the assured expedient of comfort against the harsher elements, as faced by the Pilgrims in humble thanks for survival.

A letter writer visiting Washington extols the virtues of the capital of the nation as symbol of its ideals.

A letter wants more restrictions and greater specificity placed on the aid program to Europe—obviously missing the point that it was not intended as a handout but as a rebuilding device toward effecting democratic prosperity, to avoid the temptation again to fascism or communism or the military build-up accompanying same, thus had to remain flexible and not so specific.

A letter writer thanks the newspaper for its editorial of November 21 regarding the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Before reading it, the writer had been confused as to how a country could endue so much pomp and ceremony while suffering want at home. He now understood better the reason for it.

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