Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the worst rioting
since the U.N. partition plan had been approved for Palestine on
November 29 had occurred after a bomb thrown from a Jewish taxi
exploded along an employment line of a hundred Arabs at the
Consolidated Refinery in Haifa, killing 47 persons, 36 Jews and 11
Arabs, and wounding 14 Jews and 47 Arabs. Bloody fighting ensued
between an estimated 1,800 Arabs and 400 Jews. The violence raised
the death toll since November 29 to 478 in Palestine and 599
throughout the Middle East.
In other fighting, Arabs machine-gunned a Jewish bus filled
with nurses and other Hadassah Hospital personnel as the bus
climbed Mt. Scopus, wounding fourteen occupants, two seriously.
Arabs also opened fire on Tel Aviv for an hour but no casualty
reports had been received.
The British banned Jewish taxis from the streets of Jerusalem
to avoid further attacks from such vehicles.
The guerrillas of Northern Greece attacked anew at Konitsa,
under siege since Christmas Day, and a decisive battle for the city
was ongoing. The Government forces had maintained their outer
perimeter for 24 hours against repeated assaults. Government forces
pushed the rebels out of the Gambala heights, north of Kalpaki, in
hand-to-hand fighting during the morning, jeopardizing the guerrilla
position on the strategic Bourazani bridge. The Government estimated
guerrilla strength at 29,000, 15,000 being concentrated in the area
around Konitsa. The estimate was 11,000 higher than previously made.
In Bucharest, Rumania, 26-year old King Mihai I abdicated the
throne and turned the Government over to the Communist-dominated
Cabinet. He was the last reigning monarch of Eastern European
countries dominated by the Soviets. Only King Paul of Greece
remained on the throne in the Balkans or Southern Europe.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond upheld the
decision of Federal District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, which had
upheld the right of blacks to vote in South Carolina primaries,
notwithstanding the attempt to privatize the election, removing all
statements regarding the primaries from the statute books, seeking
to make the Democratic Party into a club which controlled who could
vote in its sponsored primary in the one-party state.
The Federal Works Administrator, Maj. General Philip Fleming
told the President that the country needed 75 billion dollars worth
of public works construction, including highways, schools, airports
and other such projects.
At the White House, the voluntary inflation control bill had
turned up missing prior to the President's signature the previous
day. After a search by the Secret Service of trashcans, it remained
not to be found. A duplicate, however, was available, albeit only
after obtaining signatures from Senator Arthur Vandenberg, president
pro tempore of the Senate, and House Speaker Joe Martin, the latter
at his home in Dedham, Massachusetts.
You might want to examine Feller's tummy with an X-ray
machine.
And remember ye olde saying of the wise: 'Tis better to lose voluntarily an anti-inflation bill with lots of rubber in it than to shred involuntarily portraits of Benjamin Franklin as a prophylactic measure.
Under authority of the new bill, the distillers were placed
on rationing of grain through the end of 1948, limited to using 2.45
million bushels, less than half the consumption by the industry
during the first ten months of 1947, prior to the 60-day voluntary
moratorium on usage ended December 24.
Republicans welcomed the entry of Henry Wallace as a third
party candidate in the 1948 presidential race as hearkening the
disintegration of the Democratic Party. RNC chairman Carroll Reece
said that the Communist wing of the party had departed the
Pendergast wing. House Minority Leader John McCormack predicted that
the party would be stronger for the fact that the loss of voters
would be more than offset by those who would vote for the Democrats
because of Mr. Wallace's attempt to create confusion. President
Truman made no comment.
Mr. Wallace's speech in Chicago the previous night announcing
his candidacy had centered on the "bipartisan reactionary war
policy" and that his new party would stress abundance and
security rather than scarcity and war.
The last serious third party effort had been made by Robert
LaFollette under the Progressive Party banner in 1924, polling 4.8
million votes.
In Boston, 25 persons were injured in a series of explosions
in the Dewey Square area, caused by accumulation of gases in pipes
under the snow-covered streets. Manhole covers were sent flying by
the explosions. Windows of nearby buildings were shattered as high
as the eleventh floor.
In Spartanburg, S.C., a business man of the community was
being held for further investigation pursuant to a determination by
a coroner's jury that a fire in which the body of his wife was found
was of undetermined origin and that the woman had died by causes
unknown.
On the editorial page, "Soviet Bluff and Bombast for
'48" tells of Izvestia propaganda stating that the
capitalist countries had made no gains in 1947 and a report from
Paris indicating that there would be a Communist offensive in
France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Austria during 1948. It finds the
matter to sound as bluff and bravado designed to cover up the lack
of achievement by the Communists in Western Europe in 1947.
The Truman Doctrine and the U.N. Balkans watch commission had
weakened the Communist threat to Turkey and Greece. In Austria,
France, and Italy, the Communists had lost considerable ground after
the fizzling of the general strikes in the latter two countries.
The U.N. had formed the permanent political committee at the
U.N. to offset the veto power of Russia on the Security Council and
created the Korean independence commission to forestall trouble with
Russia seeking to exert control over the Northern occupation zone.
Sixteen Western European nations were going to participate in
the Marshall Plan.
While the cold war had not yet been won, considerable advance
had been made by the Western democracies in 1947, the indications of
Soviet propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
"Vittorio Emanuele's Legacy" finds a moral for the
times in the death in exile in Alexandria the previous Sunday of
former King Emanuele of Italy. It disagrees with Dewitt Mackenzie
who had written that Emanuele brought about his own downfall by
appeasing Mussolini. But, it posits, the King had provided power to
Mussolini, not to encourage Fascism but to suppress Communism. And
that was the lesson.
Turning to the right to get rid of the left was a path to
totalitarianism. Rather than Mr. Mackenzie's conclusion that
appeasement of Fascism was to be likened to appeasement of
Communism, the piece finds that the Red scare should be avoided as a
smokescreen of the right. The Communists themselves aided and
abetted this rightist movement on the ground that it would produce
such disaffection as to move the country to the Communist camp.
"GOP Hears Inflation Rumbles" tells of some
Republicans not feeling so good about the voluntary anti-inflation
measure reluctantly signed by the President. Some leaders, including
Senator Taft, had expressed the view that some control measures
would need be implemented.
The Republicans, it suggests, had made a good start with this
measure in producing their own defeat in 1948.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Sad
Story from Wyoming", finds distressing the formation by the
University of Wyoming trustees of a committee to read several
hundred textbooks to determine whether any contained "subversive
or un-American" material, terms which they had left undefined.
It appeared as a witch-hunt, insulting to the faculty and resented
by the students as an affront to their intelligence.
It asks whether the path to enlightenment in the future would
be blindness, the way of the totalitarian state. The Nazis had
burned books.
Such censorship, it points out, also violated the First
Amendment.
Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State until August,
1943, discusses the Panamanian Assembly decision to disallow
long-term leases to America of fourteen military bases considered
vital for defense of the Canal Zone. He attempts to correct
misimpressions of the refusal, stating that while it was true that
Communists had aroused public sentiment against the agreement, it
was also true that the people of Panama had been deprived of
commercial opportunities in the Zone, causing anti-American feeling.
The treaty of 1903 which created the Zone had relegated
Panama to the status of a protectorate of the U.S., giving the
latter the power to intervene in Panama and to expropriate lands
which it unilaterally determined were necessary for defense of the
canal. The right of expropriation continued for 33 years, often
enforced with little justification.
In 1936, the Roosevelt Administration negotiated a new treaty
as part of the Good Neighbor program with Latin America, designed to
eliminate the uncertainty of unjust expropriation and place the
countries on the footing of a partnership with both responsible for
defense and maintenance of the canal.
Panama was one of the first republics to declare war on the
Axis after Pearl Harbor and then leased 134 bases to the U.S. prior
to the end of 1942, insisting only that the bases be promptly
returned at the end of the war. But the U.S. then delayed unduly
after the war in returning 120 of the bases, leaving the fourteen in
issue. The governments finally agreed on a lease of the fourteen
bases for twenty years, after the U.S. had initially sought a
99-year lease. The impression was thereby created with the
Panamanian people that the U.S. had reverted to the old high-handed
tactics.
The collective sentiment appeared to be that while some lease
of the bases necessary to protect the canal was reasonable, it was
unreasonable, in terms of current times, to provide the U.S. with a
lease as long as twenty years.
The decision of the U.S. Government to return the bases
immediately to Panama was wise, to create an atmosphere of good will
and foster trust. A shorter term lease might then be effected, which
could be extended as world tensions justified.
Drew Pearson, in Marseilles, tells of the Friendship Train
delivering its food over a period of three days from Marseilles to
Paris, a course taking seven times the usual amount of time of ten
hours to enable the people to understand fully the import of the
gift, coming directly from the American people. He provides an
account of the way that message was delivered. Mr. Pearson's brother
Leon, who spoke much better French, did the talking for his part of
the presentation. The train spent between two hours and the whole
afternoon at each stop, whereas it had been limited to 45 minutes at
each location on the U.S. collection tour.
At Valence, a bullet-riddled wall at the railway station
marked where four men had died two weeks earlier during the violence
of the general strike, inspired by Communists. But next to the pock
marks was a sign which read: "Welcome et merci!"
Various French citizens visited the train along the way,
including leader of the French forces in North Africa during the
war, Henri Giraud.
One French electrician told of his car having been
machine-gunned by an American plane during the war, killing his
chauffeur and wounding him three times. He had not liked Americans
since that time, but the Friendship Train, he said, had caused him
to reflect on the fact that the shooting was only a mistake, as
sometimes friends make.
Stewart Alsop finds that Senator Arthur Vandenberg genuinely
was not in pursuit of the Republican nomination for the presidency
and would soon withdraw his name from favorite-son status in
Michigan. It would free him from the prospect of having to watch his
every word in public and devote his energies to the foreign aid
program. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, his effort
was key to obtaining a sound program out of the Senate. Hearings
before the Committee, to begin January 7, would be center stage in
the national debate on the Marshall Plan. The list of witnesses
included supporters of the Plan, former Secretary of War under FDR
and Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover, Henry Stimson, and
former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, as well as those
believed opposed to the Plan, including former Ambassador to Britain
Joseph Kennedy and former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones.
While Senator Vandenberg had made no preliminary commitments
to the Plan and it was certain that the Plan would be altered by the
time it emerged from the Committee, probably limiting its
recommended appropriation to one year at a time, it was a safe bet
that it would be a sound version, capable of meeting the goal of
rebuilding Europe on a strong economic footing.
The primary danger of emasculation of ERP lay in the House,
where Majority Leader Charles Halleck and his deputy, Representative
Leslie Arends of Illinois, were ready to pare the program down
considerably. But the prestige of Senator Vandenberg would likely
serve to blunt those efforts.
Samuel Grafton regards 1947 as the year in which the country
finally realized that FDR had died, as the shift in Government
emphasis turned from how a person behaved to how a person thought.
No longer did it matter how much goods cost or whether housing was
available or how much food was available.
While price control went by the boards, the Federal snooper
suddenly turned up to gauge shades of pink to red in political
viewpoints and associations. That occurred while the nation bragged
vis-à-vis
Russia that it was in the U.S. that a person could think as one
pleased.
It was the year of "Big Fright" re Communism, real
or supposed. But it was also the year of the Marshall Plan, a
positive advance.
He finds it a "year in a corridor, one bumpy and
perverse, and lined with distorting mirrors which have on occasion
falsely promised to be rooms; it has been a year of as much sideward
motion as forward progress."
Happy Sixth Day of Christmas: Six in time waving from the
Friendship Train, rightward, leftward, no one cares down the line
when there's no food on the table.
