The Charlotte News

Saturday, April 26, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman had told Secretary of State Marshall upon his return from the unsuccessful Moscow Foreign Ministers Council meeting that he was pleased with the Secretary's performance.

The President personally greeted Secretary Marshall at National Airport in Washington. The Secretary was planning to meet with the President the following day to provide a report.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee had given a favorable report the previous day on the aid proposal for Greece and Turkey.

The telephone strike was still without settlement, as the Long Lines Unit of A.T.&.T rejected a union offer for a $6 wage increase, well below their demanded $12 increase. A.T.&T. offered instead to negotiate only on a local basis. The NFTW union vice-president stated that it showed that the company was not interested in settling the strike. A local settlement in Maryland by the AFTW, withdrawing from the NFTW, caused the Federal conciliator for that area to suggest that it might be the way to resolve the strike nationally. But NFTW continued to refuse to accept local arbitration as a means for resolution.

Bethlehem Steel and Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. followed the lead of U.S. Steel in negotiating with the Steelworkers Union a 12.5 cents per hour raise in wages plus other benefits. Nearly 250,000 steel workers were now covered by those terms.

At Nanking, two American officers, held by the Chinese Communists for 55 days in Manchuria, told of being kept in solitary confinement for 34 days and brought four times before a court on charges of spying. They were convicted of reconnoitering for Chinese Government troops. Their actual mission, they said, was merely to scout Changchun to determine the likelihood it would fall to the Communists so that they could have time to evacuate their families. They had been released to Americans the previous Thursday.

In Haifa, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the City died of wounds received from two young Jewish assailants.

Henry Wallace was on his way home from Paris after his controversial speaking tour of England and France, in which he had criticized the new Truman Doctrine for bypassing the U.N. in proposing unilateral U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey. He had advocated building up nations through aid consisting of farm implements and instruction in advanced agricultural methods to enable self-development and self-determination, rather than aid to royalist dictatorial regimes such as in Greece, aimed at military fortification to act as bulwarks to Communist expansionism in the Balkans.

He was asked about reports that the Hollywood Bowl had canceled his scheduled May speech. He replied that he was confident that free speech was not dead in the United States and that he would be permitted to speak in Hollywood. The manager of Gilmore Stadium had offered his site for the former Vice-President to make the speech.

Two more American soldier-prisoners at Frankfurt, Germany, had died from consumption of anti-freeze. The death toll now was five, with eleven others suffering from the effects of the consumption, three being critically ill.

Fifteen of 33 members of the crew of a Chilean vessel which exploded off of Coquimbo, Chile, were believed lost. Eighteen had been pulled to safety. It was hoped that some of the eleven missing men had been able to swim to shore, five miles from the point of the explosion.

In Durham, police investigating the robbery and shooting of a Duke Hospital nurse and the setting of seven fires inside the hospital the night before the assault, had released a UNC student who had known the nurse.

Another intentionally set fire had erupted the previous night and a nurse who responded to the smell of smoke was knocked down by a blow to her face from a man's fist. She caught a glimpse of the man and was able to give a partial description. After searching the hospital, police found the same UNC student on the premises and took him into custody again.

We think that you better start paying more attention to Duke students. This discrimination against light blue is not acceptable and we protest strongly that this man should go free until more evidence is accumulated, and also that you not put his name on the front page of the newspaper, thereby possibly ruining his life before a scintilla of evidence is adduced. We think the Durham police ought be questioned as suspects in the attack and setting of the fires.

Controversial opera soprano Kirsten Flagstad, labeled as pro-Quisling in her native Norway for returning home to be with her admittedly pro-Quisling husband in 1941, was set to perform in Charlotte the following day. The Police Chief stated that there would be no interference with pickets as long as they remained orderly. The VFW denied that it intended to picket the performance.

A third of the nation would go on Daylight Savings Time the following morning at 2:00 a,.m. Make sure you spring forward an hour if you live in the areas which observe the change, as listed. We are just trying to help you get to work on time Monday so that you will not be early and then be tempted to ask futilely for portal pay.

Actor Sterling Hayden and his second wife were on their honeymoon in Santa Barbara, California, after marriage the previous day.

A photograph from Matopes, South Africa, of the Royal Family, prior to their recent departure for England, shows Princess Elizabeth in her stocking feet, pointing to an object of interest outside the camera's view. It had been snapped while they were climbing to the tomb of Cecil Rhodes on Matopes. The Queen damaged her shoes and the Princess gave up her own for the sake of her mother's comfort.

That's entirely admirable. We support the gesture. She would have been a bit of a heel, after all, not to have done so.

In any event, the Queen, no doubt, upon return, would need visit the cobbler and obtain some new half-soles. Next time, she would have to take along her mummichogs, made from the finest East Indian rubber of the Tulgey Wood.

On the editorial page, "The Vote Must Be Representative" urges Charlotte voters to express their will at the ballot box on the following Monday at the mayoral, City Council, and school board election, as well deciding annexation by the City.

It had been a lethargic campaign, with no heated issues, stimulating little public interest. But if the voters failed to exercise their franchise, then they would have no one to blame but themselves should they complain about City Government in the ensuing two years.

"The First Sign of Recession" tells of liquor sales in New York having been cut in half since February, 1946, causing distillers to view the time as a recession. In Chicago, tax revenue on alcohol had dropped 42.4 percent just in March. Similar reports came from Washington, California, and Georgia. Nightclubs were closing rapidly as a result. In Chicago, 600 saloon keepers had not renewed their licenses.

The figures were good news for those concerned either about the economy and too much spending for unnecessary luxury items, or about the problem of alcohol consumption in the country. The first break in prices always occurred in luxury items.

The liquor producers had priced themselves out of the market, taking full advantage of the aftermath of the war and the shortage because of the need for distilled alcohol by the Army and Navy.

The pattern would likely soon ripple through the entire economy, bringing relief from high prices.

"The Teachers' Lobby Is Defensive" finds without merit the exception taken by The Elizabeth City Daily Advance to former Congressman and Judge Sam J. Ervin being hired by the South Piedmont Teachers to lobby the Legislature during the previous session for higher teacher pay. The teachers had every right to hire Mr. Ervin. He had submitted a detailed expense account which included 15 cents deposited in a parking meter, for a total, including his fee, of $5,432.81.

The Advance was not looking at the other lobbyists for businesses and professional organizations, who charged comparable fees. The idea posed by the newspaper that the Legislature would have provided the same salary increase for teachers without Mr. Ervin's services was debatable, and, in any event, could be said of any lobbying effort.

The editorial suggests that the Advance and other critics look to who had started such lobbying efforts and not deny like input for the teachers or other interested groups needing to grab the ears of legislators.

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Hair to Match a Mood", wonders what Time had against women who dyed their hair. It had remarked in announcing the coronation of Jinx Falkenburg as the number one brunette of the year, that Rita Hayworth, the top blonde, was a former red-head, and Evelyn Keyes, the top red-head, was a former blonde.

With various forms of make-up and artificial tans, down to toenail coloring, there was no reason to discriminate against artificial hair coloring. The male was already so duped that dye could not dupe him the more.

It urges dyeing away.

Drew Pearson provides some disjointed notes from the Antarctic expedition of Admiral Richard E. Byrd. He had been popular in New Zealand during the expedition's stopover there. In chatting with Prime Minister Peter Frazer, the Admiral had stated that the P.M. would not wish his brother, Senator Harry Flood Byrd, to become President, to which Mr. Frazer replied diplomatically that he would have no objection to the Admiral becoming President.

The expedition had left a year earlier than planned to beat the Russian whaling expedition. One of the most severe shortages in the world was fat, and whale oil was necessary for certain delicate war instruments.

The real hero of the expedition was Admiral Richard Cruzen, commander of the Task Force, who steered the ships through the ice. Admiral Cruzen had ordered the evacuation of Antarctica to outrun the Russian whalers.

A feud developed between Admiral Byrd and the chief aerial geographer, who wanted to limit the area which Admiral Byrd wished to claim as discovered and explored by the expedition. The geographer contended that it had not been properly surveyed.

Admiral Byrd flew over the South Pole and dropped flags of the United Nations. But in the rest of Antarctica, U.S. flags were dropped by the Navy.

Scientists claimed that the military leaders of the expedition treated them as surplus baggage.

The hurried departure prevented many valuable photographs.

Admiral Byrd sent telegrams to each of the companies whose products had survived the fifteen years since the prior expedition to Little America. One tobacco company offered him a substantial emolument for endorsement of their product.

He thought that Greenland was the most strategically important land in the world and stated that the expedition was designed to train personnel for operations there.

Admiral Byrd believed that the public had been bamboozled on the U.N., enabling appeasement and domination of smaller countries by totalitarian regimes. He thus strongly disfavored turning Antarctica over to U.N. trusteeship.

During a previous trip, men were filmed apparently trudging through a blizzard, when in fact it was artificial, blown by the propeller of an airplane. Admiral Byrd assured that no such photographic tricks would be employed on the 1947 expedition. But on the last day, the rear of a plane was jacked up so that it was level, and Admiral Byrd photographed, appearing to drop flags out the door over the South Pole.

Samuel Grafton discusses the economic theories which were leading toward recession. The first was that high production would decrease prices. Yet, production was running at 72 percent above the boom year of 1929 and prices were still high. The solution was not in the need for higher production but the opposite, the need for lower prices to bring orderly production.

Another canard was that prices were high because wages had risen precipitously, dragging prices with them. But the truth was that wages had remained stable the previous fall when prices rose in response to the release of controls. Higher cost of living was dragging along the necessity for higher wages, not the opposite.

Much of Congress favored a high price economy, part of the pro-inflationary, soft-money tradition in American life. That notion was particularly prominent among representatives from rural districts who were not going to tamper with high prices on farm products, quite suitable to their constituents.

Adding to these theories was that tax reduction would stimulate production and lower prices. But that theory was premised on the assumption of constant present revenues, an unrealistic assumption to go along with the other unrealistic theories which were fast leading the country along the way to a recession.

Stewart Alsop, still in Cairo, had found unanimity among the most experienced observers and officials to whom he had talked during his travels through the Middle East, that the U.S. and Great Britain were facing the danger of becoming defenders of the bad status quo in the region, in an effort to stop Soviet expansion. With only a couple of exceptions, the Governments were not good and were bound to be toppled under Soviet pressure and propaganda.

The long-term objective of the Soviets was to achieve control of the region, while the American objective was to prevent it. The front line in this contest consisted of Iran, Turkey, and Greece. A year earlier, the Soviets had nearly broken through the line in Iran, and in Greece during the immediately past winter. Only determined American action in both cases had prevented a breach.

The Russians were now aware that any aggression in Greece or Turkey would be met by U.S. military action, and the Russians did not want war.

Aside from military force, the Russians could employ a political weapon, trying to achieve election of the Communist Party in one or more countries of the region, the equivalent of military occupation of a country. This weapon would be chief in the Soviet arsenal and one which gave the Soviets a distinct advantage over the West, when the states in question were largely illiterate and the people living in abject poverty without democratic traditions.

As long as the animals in these states enjoyed a better life than the people, the Russians would have rich soil in which to cultivate Communism, never minding that such change to that system would place the populations under a more ruthless rule than at present.

One British official summed the matter by saying that a revolution could not be organized against the corrupt ruling classes as the West did not operate that way, but, in the long run, only determined social reforms would prevent a blow-up, one which would be inevitably pro-Soviet. In sum, that was the Western dilemma.

A letter from Inez Flow labels liquor evil and advises, pursuant to Biblical teaching, to avoid it and vote no on the referendum on controlled sale in June. She asks what Christ would say if he were to see the lines of people wanting to get into ABC stores to buy liquor.

A letter from the Southern representative of the Audubon Society of Charleston comments on an item in The News of April 21 which had described the killing of an eagle by an individual near Chester, S.C. The open and uncritical publicity attendant the act appeared to indicate that neither the newspaper nor the person involved realized that it was a Federal crime, established by law in 1940, to kill an eagle.

He wants the newspaper to warn that a jail sentence and fine of up to $500 were punishments for violation of this law.

A letter writer sides with former Vice-President Henry Wallace in his criticism in Britain and France of the American foreign policy of unilateral aid to Greece and Turkey, bypassing the U.N. He indicates that Senator Robert Taft, who had found fault with Mr. Wallace on the point, was now abroad, and the writer wonders whether it was inappropriate also to speak in favor of a war-mongering Government.

He suggests that Christ probably had critics of his Sermon on the Mount, but that it still resounded through the centuries.

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