Drew Pearson tells of the President having cracked down
harder than ever before on the State Department to press for the
votes at the U.N. for the partition of Palestine. He had discovered
that some countries were falling out of line on the issue because of
secret sabotage from State Department officials. Mrs. Roosevelt had
urged the President to take action, threatening to resign the U.N.
delegation were the Assembly to refuse approval of partition based
on fumbling by the State Department. In the end, influence was
exerted on countries either indebted to or dependent on the U.S. to
vote in accord with the U.S.-Soviet position.
The two men who worked the hardest to put across the plan
were Secretary-General Oswaldo Aranha of Brazil and the man he
defeated for the position, Herbert Evatt of Australia.
He notes that partition represented the first major
cooperative effort between the U.S. and Russia since the formation
of the U.N.
He tells of several members of Congress being tricked into
attending a dinner, at the ostensible invitations of five state
commissioners of agriculture, when the actual host was Ralph Moore
of Texas, a notorious lobbyist, friend to Senators Pappy Lee O'D. of
Texas and Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma. Mr. Moore was being investigated
by the Justice Department.
The guests heard propaganda attacks on the President,
Secretary of State Marshall, and Charles Luckman, head of the
domestic food conservation committee, all three branded as seeking
dictatorial powers.
Mr. Pearson asked Mr. Moore why he had attended the party
and he refused to answer, saying it was none of his business.
Georgia's Agricultural Commissioner, Tom Linder, recited at the
party a poem for the President, which Mr. Pearson reprints:
He wiggled in and he wiggled out;
He left the country all in
doubt
Whether the snake that made the track
Was going out or coming
back.Meanwhile, the members of Congress ate seafood and filet
mignon, while sipping cocktails.
Marquis Childs, in Tucson, looks at the high cost of living,
at 66 percent above the pre-war level, finding many households
priced out of the ability to make purchases beyond bare necessities.
The other limit to prosperity was the scarcity of materials,
especially steel, from which so many derivative products were
manufactured, both for domestic consumption and the foreign market.
The 16 nations participating in the Marshall Plan indicated
their need of 700,000 short tons of steel sheets and strip during
the coming year. It amounted to four times the recent rate of export
from the U.S. to these same countries. The Averell Harriman
committee report on the country's available resources for the Plan
had stated that there was no assurance that U.S. production of steel
could meet the needs of Europe. That announcement would likely bring
down steel prices and, in turn, trigger perhaps the readjustment
needed to stabilize inflation.
The steel companies had contended that they could not expand,
but those arguments would need be weighed against world needs to
produce economic and political stability.
Charles W. Duke, in the last of his series on the "Freedom
Train", tells of the Atlantic Charter being aboard. Signed
initially by FDR and Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, it stood
for the principle that the four freedoms enunciated by President
Roosevelt in January, 1941 would be assured the liberated nations, at least insofar as freedom from fear and want.
It was then signed by 24 nations, including Russia, China, Poland,
Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. During the war, 19 other nations
joined as signatories, including Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia. They all promised mutual cooperation and that no separate
peace would be formed with the Axis nations.
The U.S. official duplicate of the Charter of the U.N.,
formed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, was also aboard the train.
He concludes by explaining that the documents on the train
spanned from Christopher Columbus and his voyage to the New World in
1492 through the 1945 U.N. Charter, 453 years of history.
A
letter writer thinks there ought be more stress in the city
and county on the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May,
1775.
He regrets that Mecklenburg, which had originated the concept
of independence, was not even mentioned on the Freedom Train.
You do not want to go too far with that or they might call
you a liar. Local lore is one thing. Outsiders can dismiss it as
pleasant eccentricity. But when you try to impose the notion on
others, it fast loses its force in the questionable authenticity of
that particular claim.
A
letter from failed Republican Congressional candidate P. C.
Burkholder comments on the November 22 editorial, "Where Our
Money Goes in China", finds its criticism of Governor Dewey for
seeking aid for the Chiang Government, without heed to its
reactionary nature, to blink the fact that the State Department had
helped the Communists to violate the terms of the ceasefire. He
accuses the editorial of thus supporting, by implication, the
Communist cause in China.
The
Quote of the Day: "With television perhaps we shall
know what the studio audience sees to make it laugh so much more
heartily than what we hear makes us laugh." —Memphis
Commercial-Appeal
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.
')
}
//-->