Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that as deaths in
Palestine for the week reached 45, including 22 Jews, fires were
burning in Tel Aviv, set by Arab demonstrators, including the
torching of thirty Arab-owned homes occupied by Jews until they had
fled. In Aden, in Yemen, 25 Arabs and 19 Jews had been killed. In
Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, the death toll was about
20, thus sending the total deaths above 100.
Jerusalem and Haifa remained relatively quiet, with only one
Arab dying from a bomb in Haifa.
In Paris, the Minister of Interior told the National Assembly
that he had authorized the police to fire on mobs, to which
Communist deputies responded by shouting that he was an "assassin".
Meanwhile, Government employees began joining the two million
strikers in the country. The Assembly the day before had passed the
anti-strike legislation and the Upper Chamber was considering it.
The key industrial center of St. Etienne was said to be
virtually under the control of the strikers. The strike police were
said to be stopping passersby for identity and had issued orders to
the press of the city not to publish without approval of the
committee.
A Congressman proposed in the House that the emergency aid to
France, Italy, and Austria be cut from the requested 597 million
dollars to 300 million. Debate in the House on the bill was
proceeding. The Senate had already approved the aid.
On Guam, three former Japanese Army officers were convicted
by a U.S. military tribunal of beheading an American flier who had
parachuted from his disabled plane to Koror Island in the Palau
group in 1945. A fourth defendant was acquitted. The three convicted
would be sentenced the following day.
In Chichibu, Japan, six Japanese were crushed to death in a
crowd of 100,000, halted by lowered railway gates to allow a train
to pass after the people had attended a fireworks display.
Helen Keller was given permission to return to Japan the
following summer to continue with her work among the deaf, mute, and
blind, interrupted ten years earlier by the war. Japan had 2.5
million such handicapped persons.
In New York, newly elected president of the National
Association of Manufacturers, Morris Sayre, urged that higher
production at no greater cost should be the guiding principle of
industry to hold down prices.
The AFL asked its members to contribute $1 each to its
campaign to reverse the effects of Taft-Hartley and to defeat
members of Congress who had voted for it.
Each of the Hollywood Ten, cited for contempt of Congress for
refusing to answer whether they had ever been affiliated with the
Communist Party, were indicted for the contempt, and eight of them
were also charged with refusing to answer whether they were members
of the Screen Writers Guild, another ground for the contempt
citations. The maximum penalty each faced was a fine of $1,000 and a
year in jail, with a minimum of one month in jail and $100 fine.
Each defendant would eventually be sentenced to a year.
The cost of newsprint rose to $100 per ton as delivered in
Charlotte. A table of average yearly newsprint prices is presented
for the period since 1933, when newsprint was at $44 per ton.
Dick Young of The News reports of further
investigation into the bombing the previous day of a sandwich shop
in Charlotte, resulting in the death of the proprietor and injury to
his wife. The dead man was a well-known bootlegger. No new clues had
been adduced, but police were still operating on the premise that
the explosion had been deliberately caused.
In New York, Mayor William O'Dwyer had ordered an
investigation into the assistant superintendent's order that 23
Brooklyn schools not be allowed to celebrate Christmas in their
classrooms. The superintendent claimed that the matter was the
result of a misunderstanding from an order by the assistant to
refrain from communicating religious statements in the celebrations.
Among the carols considered too religious was "Hark, the Herald
Angels Sing". For years, the Brooklyn schools had celebrated
both Christmas and Channukah.
The assistant superintendent said that he was not knockin' or
puttin' it down. It was just something he said, and now it's all
this. Santa Claus, he said, was alright, as was "Jingle Bells"
and other non-religious expressions of the holiday, such as Bret
Harte's "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar" or
Dickens's "A Christmas Carol".
Roy Rogers was to be wed to Dale Evans on New Year's Eve at
the Oklahoma Flying L Ranch, owned by V. B. Likins. Don't miss it,
now.
Radio critic John Crosby, by way of explaining his dislike of
the radio program "Big Story", tells on page 2-A of
murder being so commonplace that it was downright dull.
On the editorial page, "A Mecklenburg Freedom Shrine"
tells of church bells tolling to greet the Freedom Train the
previous day, the climax of Rededication Week, to reaffirm the
founding principles of the country.
A permanent freedom shrine in Charlotte was being sought and
a pageant was being planned to celebrate the following May 20, to
commemorate the Mecklenburg Resolves, supposedly formed that date in
1775, though of doubtful authenticity, as the supposed document did
not surface until 50 years later.
But have it your way.
Bear in mind, however, that freedom is not born through
claims and labels but rather by daily action and responsibility to
uphold the dignity of our Constitution with respect to every single
person one encounters. Improvement on those counts, in the state and
county, is vastly needed.
"English Case Against Controls" tells of Cyril
Falls, professor of history at Oxford, offering in the Illustrated
London News his views on rationing and wage and price controls
from the English perspective. He believed that controls blunted the
incentive of the worker to produce, as he could then obtain the
necessities of life at affordable prices.
The piece thinks the argument logical but unrealistic in that
he failed to address the necessity of such controls in the
curtailment of inflation. He reminded of Senator Taft and his
anti-control colleagues who championed free enterprise without
providing any alternative to controls for curbing inflation when it
took dictatorial command of the economy.
"Charlotte's New Liberal Church" suggests the
establishment of the Unitarian Church in the community as being a
step toward religious and cultural advancement. Five Presidents had
been Unitarians: the Adamses, Thomas Jefferson, Millard Fillmore,
and William Howard Taft. Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, and Chief
Justice John Marshall had also been members of the denomination.
Its use of reason in resolving matters of religious
significance was a boon to enlightenment. They would attract persons
who perhaps had not been members of an organized religion
previously, but whose philosophy was simpatico with Unitarianism.
A piece from the Kansas City Star—former newspaper of
News editor William Reddig—, titled "Britain Since
1776", tells of the British Government informing that when
Burma achieved independence in January, it would be the first member
of the British Commonwealth since 1776 to declare its independence.
It was a qualified statement as Eire, for instance, remained within
the Commonwealth only on an ambiguous basis, having rejected
allegiance to the Crown. And India and Pakistan had recently become
dominions, with the decision to be made by their peoples the
following year on whether to become independent.
Britain had maintained its empire, while others crumbled, by
enabling members to have home rule and even to control their own
foreign relations, forming a commonwealth.
Burma had decided to depart this protective umbrella. The
British believed it a poor decision for a politically inexperienced
nation to enter the field of foreign relations at such a time. Yet,
the British were not seeking to impede the decision.
Pakistan and India would thus have visible proof that if they
desired full independence, they could have it.
Drew Pearson tells of a trade organization of clothiers
calling at the White House to visit the former haberdasher. They
presented him with a four-in-hand necktie with a Missouri mule and
the three wise men engraved on it. The President remarked that it
was his first Christmas present and draped it over his hand in a
haberdasher's knot, saying he still knew how to perform that
sleight. The President promised to attend their February convention,
the object of their visit.
Ambassador to Uruguay Ellis Briggs had been ordered by the
State Department to stop a meeting of Communists from being held in
Montevideo in mid-December. The Government of Uruguay claimed to
have no information on such a meeting. The Department wanted him to
try to stop it at the other end, by preventing the key player from
attending, the top Brazilian Communist, Luis Carlos Prestes. Mr.
Briggs objected that such an effort ought be handled by the
Ambassador to Brazil. But he proceeded nonetheless to try to stop
Sr. Prestes from attending.
More members of the Federal Reserve Board were coming to the
conclusion that voluntary controls on prices would not work and that
the President's plan for limited controls ought be authorized by the
Congress. An example was in consumer credit. When controls were
removed, Sears had initially tried to continue with voluntary
limitations on credit, but Montgomery Ward and other retail
competitors drove them to curtail the program.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue had revealed that the whisky
producers had doubled production in advance of the production
moratorium for 60 days, such that the savings in grain was proving
minuscule. They had done so by delaying the start of the moratorium
for a month. But there was also a normal increase in production in
the fall, albeit not usually double.
Stewart Alsop tells of the President favoring the appointment
of an executive agency with one head who would report only to the
President as the entity to administer the European aid program.
Committees within the agency would work respectively with the State,
Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture Departments. The Administration
had rejected the proposal made in Congress to have the aid
administered by a board of directors as a corporation.
Whatever the final proposal would be, it was pretty certain
that the Congress would treat it with the back of their hands and
proceed to form the administration of the program per their own vision.
The technicians studying the Marshall Plan had reached much
the same conclusion as the Administration. They doubted that four
years would be sufficient to rebuild Europe, that it would take
roughly a decade. They also believed that the official figures of 16
to 20 billion dollars of aid would be inadequate to do the job, that
it would likely take 30 billion.
But the pressure in Congress was decidedly to reduce the
amount of aid, not increase it.
The Democrats were convinced that the President had neatly
hung the problem of inflation on the necks of the Congress by asking
for limited wage and price controls and rationing. The danger was
that the Republicans might retaliate by reducing the amount of aid.
The more responsible members of Congress, as Senator Arthur
Vandenberg and Representative Charles Eaton, were convinced that
cut-rate aid to Europe would not suffice to wage the peace.
Samuel Grafton suggests that Christmas, 1947 was really the
first truly peacetime Christmas since the war, as the previous year,
while the uniforms were gone, was still of a mindset not completely
demobilized. If a neighbor had more meat, it was no longer
considered outrageous but rather more a private victory for the
neighbor. Stores were now pushing to sell merchandise.
The return of the individual was marked at the opening of the
Metropolitan Opera by a woman showing a leg and another smoking a
cigar. The flow of books about sex was restoring that feeling,
replacing the reportage of the foreign correspondent. The public was
not following with the same intensity as two years earlier the
foreign scorecard versus the U.S. People watched the world
developing without the belief that they had any significant role in
making it.
Christmas would be less public, more private. It was a pity,
for in that time of increased privacy, basic decisions about the
future would be made. When public concern would again amount, it
would only be after those momentous changes had become viable.
A letter writer finds the reception of the Freedom Train to
be representative of the past of the county and state, and proceeds
to tell how the people helped to give birth to freedom.
But that all rings a bit hollow when racial segregation was
steadfastly being maintained. That isn't freedom or any semblance of
it.
A letter from a representative of the Distillers Feed
Research Council takes issue with claims in a column of Drew
Pearson, in which he stated that the distillers used up 70 percent
of the nutritional value of the grain they distilled, leaving only
30 percent for the feed grain returned to the farmers. The letter
claims that the 70 percent usage was in weight through loss of
starch, but not the nutritional value, that very little of such was
depleted in the distilling process.
A letter writer believes that an injustice had been committed
to the Ralph Edwards hosted "Truth or Consequences" in an
article in the newspaper titled "Miss Hush Named by Library
Staff". The article revealed the possible identity of Miss Hush
and thus might cut the donations to the March of Dimes campaign for
which the search for "Miss Hush" was initiated on the
program.
The editors respond that the newspaper had beat other
publications to the punch by only a day or two. Time had
published Miss Hush's picture and Walter Winchell had also revealed
her identity. Ralph Edwards, himself, was quoted in Time as
being "sick of the whole stunt."
We've no idea what that was all about. You decide. But if
you're wrong...
