The Charlotte News

Wednesday, May 28, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that seven men had been arrested for the attempted lynching of Buddy Bush the previous Friday morning, a fate from which he was saved only by his own ingenuity in escaping their grasp and heading into the woods for two days before surrendering to the FBI late Sunday. The seven men are named, all workers. The men were released on $2,500 bonds each, and their trials were set for early August. They were charged with conspiracy to break and enter a jail with intent to kill or injure, breaking and entering with that intent, and kidnaping. The maximum sentences are not provided.

The FBI reported that one of the accused had confessed involvement and implicated seven others, suggesting that one other arrest was likely.

In Landsberg, Germany, the other 26 Nazis condemned to death for their role in the deaths during the war of 700,000 people at Mauthausen, Austria, were hanged this date, following 22 such executions the previous day, in the yard of the prison in which Adolf Hitler began Mein Kampf in 1924. The executions this date took three and a half hours to perform. One of the condemned prisoners, a mess sergeant at the concentration camp, was granted a last-minute reprieve from the death sentence. His response was anger that he was not being hanged with the others.

One young guard said that he would go to the gallows singing, "Give Me Five Minutes More" and "Open the Door, Richard". But when the time came, his last words were uttered haltingly, claiming that he went to the gallows as Jesus, without fault, concluding, "Father, forgive them."

Secretly, undoubtedly, die fadder wa' Hitler.

The Senate rejected the proposal of Senator John McClellan of Arkansas to raise tax exemptions from $500 to $750, as well as his other proposal to apply community property laws for purposes of taxation across the entire nation.

State Representative James Vogler of Mecklenburg County declared his candidacy in 1948 for State Treasurer. The current Treasurer, Charles Johnson, who had occupied the office since 1933, had announced his intention to run for Governor and not seek re-election.

In Kansas City, it was reported by officials that stored ballots from the prior August primary election, under examination by a Grand Jury for possible vote fraud, had been opened and ballots were missing, one box being empty. The Grand Jury the previous night had returned 81 indictments against 71 persons and recommended a recount of all ballots in the Democratic race for representative in the President's home district. The Grand Jury expressed the belief that incumbent Roger Slaughter was the actual winner of the primary, over the President's favored candidate, Enos Axtell, who lost in the general election despite backing, at the behest of the President, by the James Pendergast machine. The theft of the ballots appeared to be by a professional. The vault containing the ballot boxes had been pried open.

We assume that questions will be raised as to who knew what and when.

It appears that the letter writer of the previous August may have been on the right track.

It did not, however, turn into World Series-gate.

In Grandview, Mo., Martha Truman, the President's 94-year old mother, had improved dramatically in recent days, prompting the President to plan to return to Washington.

The Ford Motor Co. offered its workers an increase of 15 cents per hour, effective June 1, plus six paid holidays. There was no word yet whether UAW would accept the offer.

In Winston-Salem, the United Tobacco Workers continued to negotiate with Reynolds Tobacco Co. and a Federal mediator in secrecy regarding resolution of the strike, ongoing since May 1. The union represented 5,000 to 8,000 workers, many of whom had not joined the strike. The Winston-Salem Journal had run a story, based on the statements of two former union organizers, stating that the CIO union's leadership was dominated by Communists.

Burke Davis provides the first of a series of reports on ABC stores in North Carolina, to educate the public on the matter in advance of the June 14 referendum in Mecklenburg County. He explains the process of selecting a local ABC board to pick persons to operate the stores if the referendum were successful. He explains that clerks of the stores would be prohibited from sale of alcohol to minors, intoxicated persons, persons convicted previously of drunkenness or drunk driving, known habitual drunks, and known bootleggers.

Only sober adults, who dug neither cold nor goal, could buy liquor.

In Columbia, S.C., three masked men robbed a home of $87,000 in cash, the largest robbery in the city's history. The robbers, possessed of a shotgun, held captive two brothers who owned the house, and after beating them up, forced revelation of the cash buried in a box in the cellar.

Up to a foot of snow fell in western Nebraska, with the deepest recorded at Alliance.

In Los Angeles, the wife of film art director Vincent Korda was reported to be ready to file for divorce. A judge rebuked the couple for attempting a mail order decree of divorce while both were away from the city.

In Santa Monica, actor Jon Hall and singer Frances Langford, his wife, proposed to build at the Santa Monica airport an air clubhouse with a hangar and aircraft sales agency. The estimated cost would be $750,000.

On the editorial page, "Prohibition Is a Two-Sided Picture" encourages the majority of the community, who it believes to favor establishment of ABC stores, to register for the June 14 referendum and vote, lest the well-organized minority wind up winning the election against a disorganized and largely silent majority.

"GOP Cart Before the Horse" tells of the fiscal conservatives among Democrats in the Senate, Senators Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, Walter George of Georgia, and Millard Tydings of Maryland, leading the opposition to the Republican determination to cut taxes by four billion dollars and before there had been a final determination of the budget cuts. Despite the opposition, however, the proponents of the tax measure appeared to have won.

But the Democratic opposition had made telling points as to the failure of the GOP to face fiscal realities, insisting on passing the President's expensive program on foreign policy to block Soviet expansion while making paper-cut stabs at other necessary appropriations, such as the State Department's Voice of America and the Agriculture Department.

"The Supreme Court Set a Goal" agrees with the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Interstate Commerce Commission order to reduce Southern freight rates by ten percent and increase Northern rates by the same amount, to equalize the rates and undo the decades of discrimination which had caused manufacturers to avoid establishing plants in the South, as raw materials could be shipped north cheaply but not finished goods. The editorial thinks that the adjustment would not be so painful as predicted.

The railroads had argued that variations in costs across the country led to differential rates, and some of their arguments were persuasive. The rates would never be exactly equal, but the Supreme Court decision had taken away the railroads' conclusion that discrimination was inevitable and placed the emphasis instead on equalizing rates.

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "It's Love, Love, Love", tells of love being the stock in trade of Tin Pan Alley, even if sometimes it wasted its efforts on such nonsense as "Mairzy Doats" and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah".

It occasionally presented feel-good songs, such as "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and "With a Song in My Heart". But those were the exceptions.

The piece says that it prefers, however, the older love songs to the newer ones. "Oh, My Darling", "Sweet Adeline", or "Jeanie, with the Light Brown Hair" were preferable for hours of listening to even "five minutes more, only five minutes more" of "Sister Sal, who's musical" or "Sioux City Sue".

Drew Pearson reports of James Adams, director of the American Cancer Society and head of Standard Brands foods, having turned down five million dollars of a 17-million dollar appropriation passed by the fiscally conservative House. Mr. Adams, a Republican, told the Senate that he did not want the money being overseen by the Director of the Public Health Service, Surgeon General Tom Parran, a dedicated public servant. So the Senate cut the appropriation to twelve million. He told of Alfred P. Sloan, head of G.M., contributing heavily to cancer research. Mr. Sloan had also given $100,000 to defeat Democratic candidates.

Mr. Adams proposed that the cancer research fund be administered by Charles Kettering of G.M. and Frank Howard of Standard Oil of New Jersey. In fall, 1939, Mr. Howard had held a secret conference in Holland with Hitler, after the invasion of Poland, making a deal with I. G. Farben, the German conglomerate, to withhold synthetic rubber patents from the American public, causing a shortage of rubber during the war. He was thus able to obtain for his company 2,000 foreign patents in exchange, and the deal was to proceed, regardless of whether the U.S. entered the war.

Despite an effort by Senator Claude Pepper to restore the five million dollars, the Senate approved the request of Mr. Adams, playing politics with cancer, a disease which at the time was killing 175,000 Americans per year.

Mr. Pearson again returns to the topic of the torture by the Japanese of some of the 1,700 Allied prisoners of war at camp no. 17 in Fukuoka District during the war, resulting from Lt. Commander Edward Little turning in prisoners for various infractions, now the subject of a secret court martial. He provides another written affidavit of one of the prisoners, implicating Lt. Commander Little. The affidavit tells of the Japanese using electrical shock of 100 volts attached to iron bars which the prisoners were forced to hold, with water running over the bars and the clothing of the prisoners, as a form of punishment for routine infractions. The application of the shock treatment was repeated every two hours over the course of several days. The affiant places some of the blame on T/Sgt. J. P. Bennett for also reporting the men for these infractions.

Marquis Childs contrasts Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York City with Governor Thomas Dewey, finding them opposites. Mr. O'Dwyer, 57, was born in County Mayo, Ireland and was Roman Catholic. Mr. Dewey, 45, came from Owosso, Mich., was Protestant.

Mayor O'Dwyer believed that the State Legislature routinely committed injustices to the city in limiting appropriations, with the city getting far less than the 56 to 70 percent of the state's revenue generated by New Yorkers. He was particularly angry that out of 83 million dollars generated by a 5-cent fare increase on the subways, only six million would go to improvement of the system, the remainder to interest and other charges, to pay off the 315 million dollars with which the real estate interests had socked the city for the old Interborough Rapid Transit system.

The Legislature fixed the limit on the city's ability to borrow and there was always pressure to break through that limit.

Mayor O'Dwyer was being mentioned as a potential candidate for Governor in 1950 and that made him a rival of sorts to Governor Dewey. The Mayor, however, brushed aside such talk of his candidacy, as he had enough trouble running the city. Every day, 22,500 tons of food had to be brought into the city and the Mayor appeared to treat each truckload as his personal responsibility, to see that it reached the consumers.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the intention of Congress to cut the 725 million dollar appropriation requested by the War Department for the year's occupation and rebuilding expense in Germany, Japan, and Korea. The amount was already inadequate, but the Congress unrealistically continued to try to chip away at it, further cutting the ability of those nations to recover promptly from the war and consequently contribute to the industrial economy of the world. Germany was especially a priority to enable renewed industrial production, to relieve the burden on Western aid, especially that of the U.S., and to provide Europe with needed goods.

President Roosevelt had wanted the northern sector of Germany for occupation by American forces, but Prime Minister Churchill had worked out a deal at the Quebec Conference whereby he accepted the agrarian plan proposed by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, to limit industrial production of Germany to its bare needs, and agreed to provide Bremen to the U.S. zone so that communication lines to the south would not necessarily have to run through France, with its post-war chaos being foreseen by FDR. The British then got the northern zone, plus a generous amount of post-war lend-lease commitment, and the Americans the southern zone.

But with the German industrial complex thus in the hands of British civil servants, recovery in Germany had been slow. The primary reason for it was inadequate funding, with Britain unable to shoulder its financial burden, leaving it to the U.S. to supply the bulk of the financing.

When it was determined in 1946 that the zones would be combined, Secretary of State Byrnes and American zone commander General Lucius Clay made a rare mistake in placing on Britain 70 percent of the financial burden for the combined zone. Britain now could not accept that burden.

A letter writer responds to a letter which had contended that the Volstead Act implementing Prohibition in 1919 had been responsible for the post-World War I economic boom. He thinks otherwise, that Prohibition led to a lawless era. He favors controlled sale of liquor in the upcoming referendum.

A letter writer opposes the referendum, stating that liquor was an evil which had to be driven from the state. He desires fifteen minutes of radio time in which he believes he could convince everyone to vote against liquor.

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