The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 15, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman urged Congress to pass new legislation which would enable placing of embargoes on shipments of arms to unfriendly nations. The Neutrality Act, he stated, made no differentiation between aggressor nations and peaceful nations, requiring sale and shipments of arms without discrimination, except where it would violate a treaty. That law had been passed during a period of neutrality and was now outmoded.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee discussed the possibility of stating for the record its dim view of Henry Wallace's attack on American "imperialism" with regard to the proposed aid to Greece and Turkey. No final action was taken.

The VFW asked the President to revoke Mr. Wallace's passport.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wallace met with British Agriculture Minister Tom Williams to discuss Mr. Wallace's field of expertise, scientific farming. There was no discussion this date of the American foreign policy.

A Conservative M.P. raised the question of whether Mr. Wallace's Sunday address via the BBC was made after consultation with the British Government. He also wanted to know whether the privilege would be afforded other Americans who might wish to respond to Mr. Wallace's remarks. Mr. Wallace had during the address discussed and criticized both the domestic and foreign policy of the United States.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the Vandenberg amendment to the Greek-Turkish aid bill, to allow the U.N. by majority vote of the General Assembly or the Security Council to stop aid to Greece or Turkey in the event that the U.N. was providing the aid instead.

The Foreign Ministers Council, meeting in Moscow, failed to reach agreement on a treaty for Germany. Secretary of State Marshall blamed the Russians for the failure. Britain and France had supported the U.S. draft of the treaty. Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov had wanted to include reparations within the treaty, not at present subject to agreement by the other three powers.

Secretary of State Marshall met with Premier Stalin, the last of the Big Four foreign ministers to do so.

In Bratislava, Dr. Joseph Tiso was sentenced to hang for crimes against the state during the Nazi occupation of Slovakia. The verdict and sentence came from a special national court.

Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder stated that there appeared to be significant price cuts forthcoming from major industries the following week.

The Senate Labor Committee voted narrowly not to include restrictions on industry-wide collective bargaining in the proposed labor bill. The committee also voted to have one omnibus bill rather than three separate bills. The committee, according to chairman Robert Taft, had reached decisions on all major aspects of the labor legislation.

Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach was scheduled to provide a radio address this night on the status of the telephone strike. He had put forth a plan for settlement and issued a deadline of 5:00 p.m. for decision by the company and the union.

In New York, people were lining up for smallpox vaccinations after the first outbreak in the city since 1912. Two persons had died.

In Southampton, England, the Queen Elizabeth was freed from a sandbar.

The Reynolds "Bombshell" flew over Alaska toward the North American mainland early in the day on its last leg of the record-breaking round-the-world flight, with landing in New York scheduled for this night. By the time it reached Adak, it had flown 59 hours and 14 minutes. The flying time for 15,210 miles had been 49 hours and 13 minutes, at an approximate average speed of 308 miles per hour.

Unprecedented crowds of people turned out, as the above-referenced newsreel makes evident, at each stop of the airplane, so intense was worldwide attention focused on this feat. The first question posed by reporters after the landing was, "Did you have to pass through steel to break the record?"

In Jamestown, N.D., a two-year old collie had won a hunger strike and was paroled to its owners. The dog had been taken into custody by police after biting an eleven-year old boy. The dog howled and fretted, refused to eat, even when brought roast chicken.

Chicken. He needed caviar and crackers.

The Charlotte Hornets opened the Tri-State League baseball season against Rock Hill on this evening. Sports editor Ray Howe and Furman Bisher reported the opening day festivities on the sports page.

You can read about it and go to the game tonight.

On the editorial page, "The Question Is Before the Voters" discusses the upcoming June 7 election on whether to have controlled sale of liquor in Mecklenburg County, urges that the question was not a moral one, but whether sale, already present illegally, would be legalized and controlled, to eliminate the bulk of the bootlegging operations and derive revenue in the bargain. It did not believe that the system would decrease drunkenness in the community but would eliminate the big crime syndicates which accompanied the bootlegging racket and accounted for other types of more serious crime.

"Mr. Wallace Saws Off His Limb" finds probably unjustified the alarm over Henry Wallace's campaign in Europe to stop what he viewed as American imperialism bypassing the U.N. under the new Truman Doctrine, as that which he would impart in Europe would have little impact on policy.

But it thinks that Mr. Wallace's labeling of the President's policy as "imperialism" went beyond propriety and even more than that, placed him in ideological company with Marxists, accepting the same facile view of history, though expressly not suggesting that he actually was sympathetic to Communism.

By doing so, he had passed from the scene as an effective political voice, leaving a vacuum in American politics, with the gadfly no longer of concern. He could now be dismissed by both parties, leaving foreign policy to develop without public debate. Some of Mr. Wallace's questions had not been answered and so it was too bad that he had so effectively taken himself out of the discussion.

"Football Isn't the Only Competition" tells of Thomas L. Wilson departing as director of the UNC Press, after a short but active tenure in which such works as Rupert Vance's All These People and the Air Force history titled One Damned Island After Another, had been published. Mr. Wilson was joining the Harvard University Press as its director. His colleagues were sorry to see him go but happy that he had reached the pinnacle of the university publishing world.

Mr. Wilson was a native of Chapel Hill but would have been passing up a great opportunity for advancement and financial improvement had he refused the Harvard position. It was a dilemma, it suggests, which the University perpetually faced. Limited in finances, its reputation nonetheless always had attracted top professors and educators. But when superior offers came from other top schools, the University was unable to meet or beat them.

It takes pride in the fact that a Southern state had produced in Chapel Hill "a sort of intellectual seed-bed for the nation."

Which, we note, is all the more reason why young men and women, when given the special opportunity to attend the University on an athletic scholarship, should take full advantage of that unique opportunity, remain at the institution through graduation, and enjoy to the fullest degree their youth, an experience in scholastic effort which will last them the remainder of their lives, no matter the field into which they might enter later on.

All kidding or cynicism aside about a college education, it is the one thing money cannot buy. And, if utilized properly, it will enable an abiding love affair with understanding and knowledge, producing incalculable human benefits, whether any direct financial benefit derives from it or not. Anyone who disagrees probably needs to go back to school and enjoy another curriculum, different from the one they had as an undergraduate.

It is a four-year period for learning and beginning to understand in a broad sense the world in which we live, enabling then the particulars of each scenario we encounter through our years to be better handled than it otherwise would be.

If you are in college, thank your lucky stars for the opportunity. If you are in a major university, you are blessed even more. Enjoy it and take full advantage of the horizon laid before you while you have that precious and fleeting time. It will not come again and the foundation you lay for yourself, as no one else can do for you, neither professor nor tutor, will serve as the building blocks for the rest of your days. Make it therefore as strong as you possibly can while the advantage of professors and other good students in your midst persists.

A piece from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, titled "Our New Hepcat Diplomat", tells of clarinetist Benny Goodman having been named by the State Department as an adviser to jazz up the Voice of America broadcasts being sent to Russia. The piece thinks that Josef Stalin would not be impressed at his age with the jazz broadcasts, when, for instance, he might hear, "Beat me, daddy, eight to the bar".

Drew Pearson tells of the President's Cabinet meeting on high prices in which the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Edwin Nourse, had done most of the talking, warning that there would be grave economic consequences ahead if something were not done quickly to bring prices into line. Prices had increased on all goods about 70 percent since the previous July 1, and food had risen about 80 percent, with raw materials increasing about 55 percent. Wholesalers and retailers in some fields were pricing themselves out of the market. Demand was diminishing, even in areas, such as appliances and high-priced automobiles, where there was pent-up demand from the absence of availability of such items during the war. As prices had increased, wages had dropped about 5.5 billion dollars during the two years between early 1945 and the end of 1946. Profits, however, had soared to twelve billion dollars in 1946, a record.

With OPA gone, prices had not stabilized from high production, as industry had predicted to Congress to encourage dropping of price controls. Some of the manufacturers were afraid to get together to lower prices for fear of prosecution for price-fixing under anti-trust laws. Attorney General Tom Clark stated that he did not believe the Justice Department would have any problem with that action and he wanted to try to alleviate the fear.

Dr. Nourse did not believe a recession was inevitable and that it could be avoided by expansion of production, especially in steel. But Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder argued that steel should not have the burden of expansion which would lower prices, when there had been no civilian market for steel during the war. Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug and Federal Reserve chairman Marriner Eccles thought that steel should take the lead in lowering prices and profits.

The Federal Reserve Board had found that 40 percent of American families had only $40 in savings, that 70 percent of the population had but 20 percent of the savings, while the top ten percent held 80 percent of the savings. This inequity spelled economic problems on the horizon as the greatest market among consumers was within the lower 70 percent.

Marquis Childs tells of the lobbying efforts of cattle and sheep stockmen of the West to get the Government to sell them 200 million acres of land which they had grazed for many years at reduced rates. They had generated propaganda, saying that for the Government to own the land was tantamount to Communism.

Public reaction, especially from organized sportsmen and conservationists, was immediately negative. Newspapers also condemned the effort. In the end, no legislation had been passed. But the stockmen still were trying to obtain reduction of appropriations for the U.S. Forest Service, which maintained the lands, so that enforcement could not be accomplished efficiently and the stockmen could graze more cattle and sheep than the land would properly accommodate, causing eventually desert conditions to occur from over-grazed acreage.

Mr. Childs urges public opposition to a bill being proposed by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada to weaken the Forest Service, a necessary agency to preserve public lands.

Stewart Alsop, writing from Cairo, tells of Egypt being the bridge between Africa and the Arab world, Africa being the center of the effort at imperialism by the British. For the first time in 65 years, there was no British soldier any longer in the Egyptian delta between Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said—the latter to become a flashpoint in late 1956 in the war between Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt, in an effort to reopen the Suez Canal to international traffic after President Abdel Nasser of Egypt had nationalized the canal in July of that year, barring Israeli traffic and eventually, by October, prohibiting all non-Egyptian traffic.

King Farouk had held a celebration to mark the evacuation of British troops, and he was justified in doing so. But among ruling class Egyptians, there was a feeling that, with Russia showing designs on the region, the evacuation of the British had left them exposed.

The policy of Egypt demanded immediate evacuation and permanent annexation of the Sudan to Egypt. But the need for protection might lead to a compromise with the British when the matter came before the U.N. Their position was motivated by the need to wrest control from the British of the headwaters of the Nile, which prevented Egyptian independence. Any diversion of the Nile could create a desert in Egypt, and so the British held the trump card on Egyptian government policy.

The British held that the Sudan and the Suez Canal area were vital to their defense strategy for the Middle East against Russian expansion. Forward areas with air bases in Habbaniya, Iraq, and Transjordan would be lightly defended. While the Suez Canal would be evacuated, airbases and radar installations had to be maintained for quick re-occupation in the event of war. The Sudan was to be the perimeter of the defense arc. Just south of the Sudan was the heart of the British defense area, the center of which was to be Kenya, linked to a supply base in Nigeria on the West coast.

The plan was designed to cause Soviet leadership to think twice before risking any military venture into the Middle East.

A letter quotes Biblical verse as a warning against drink. A vote, he says, for controlled sale of liquor is inviting the "wrath and curse of God."

A letter takes to task Walter Winchell for continuing to denounce opera soprano Kirsten Flagstad of Norway for being allegedly pro-Quisling during the war, urging listeners therefore not to attend her U.S. performances. The writer accuses Mr. Winchell of indulging in hate and goes through the defense of Ms. Flagstad, which has already previously been adequately explored: that she went back to Norway to be with her family and her admittedly pro-Quisling husband, but had not, herself, supported the Quisling puppet regime or aided the Nazis. She had also not actively opposed the Nazis and that was cited by critics as her main fault.

He leaves the matter up to the Charlotte audience which would or would not attend her performance.

A letter writer fully supports the Truman Doctrine with respect to Greece and Turkey, and asserts that it ought be expanded to take into account all nations which might fall under the Soviet sphere.

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