The Charlotte News

Friday, June 13, 1947

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Government labor experts would advise the President that the Taft-Hartley bill was unworkable and would not prevent a coal strike, as John L. Lewis could use the provision allowing strikes when there were reasonable concerns regarding safety. They also objected to the prospect that "yellow-dog" independent contracts were permitted for employees, and that industry-wide bargaining would be hampered by the requirement that workers involved in a dispute could vote secretly on whether to accept their employer's last settlement offer, thus potentially crippling collective bargaining. There was also objection to a provision limiting payroll deductions for union dues, allowing for reopening of existing contracts. Unions could also force employers to drop members for nonpayment of dues. The NLRB could seek injunctions under the bill without dealing with the complaints raised, making it too easy to take labor disputes into Federal court. Administration officials also objected to the concept of a labor czar in the form of the general counsel to be appointed by the President and who could determine unilaterally which cases were heard by the NLRB. Finally, foremen and other supervisory personnel would lose their status as protected "employees".

Other reports indicated that some Administration officials were advocating that the President sign the bill, as it was certain to be passed over a veto in any event and that it did afford a means to prevent a coal strike.

In Detroit, four foremen were dragged from an automobile and beaten on their way back to work at the Ford Rouge plant.

A new walkout occurred at Continental Motor, with 1,200 employees striking.

Hudson settled its dispute with the UAW, reaching agreement with 600 clerical workers whose strike had affected 15,000, who refused to cross the picket line.

Packard also reached agreement on a 15-cent hourly wage increase in exchange for dropping of claims for back pay.

In St. Louis, street car and bus operators went on strike, stranding commuters and causing traffic jams. The union demanded 35 cents per hour increase in pay while the company contended that the arbitration board's decision to grant a 17.5-cent per hour raise was binding on both parties. The 17.5 cents brought the hourly wage to $1.22.

In Oakland, California, AFL transit employees of the Key System struck, leaving commuters to utilize automobiles to get to work, causing near record levels of traffic on the Bay Bridge. The workers sought a 36-cent per hour increase from their current pay of $1.20 per hour. The company had offered $1.26. They also wanted their eight working hours to be within ten hours on the clock, rather than the current twelve.

You just want everything and the price of it, don't you?

Farmers in the corn belt feared that a delayed spring, with late cold weather and heavy rains, and an early fall frost would cripple their crop production. Corn had been planted much later than usual and only favorable weather henceforth would allow for a good crop. Thousands of acres of corn, oats, and wheat had been washed away by the flooding. Farm experts said that late corn would be more moist and not as good for feed. June 15 was the customary deadline for planting corn, after which the ground was left fallow or planted with soybeans. The current forecast for most of the Midwest was for rain and cool weather.

The State Department announced that Assistant Secretary Will Clayton would visit Europe soon to discuss the problems faced by foreign officials. He had no specific marching orders from either the President or Secretary Marshall and expected to do more listening than talking.

Russia charged before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that the U.S.-controlled Japanese Government was closing its eyes to Fascist activities, that the old Japanese military clique had regained power in the country, arresting opposition political leaders and demonstrators.

Ousted Hungarian Premier Ferenc Nagy, victim of a Soviet-backed coup, was reported to be en route to the United States.

The President returned from his visit to Canada, taking an automobile tour of Niagara Falls.

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to add back 54 million dollars to the House-pared budget of the Department of Interior, with 37 million added back for the reclamation bureau and nine million for the Bonneville power administration. The appropriation still cut over 80 million dollars sought by the Department.

The House Appropriations Committee cut the Veterans Administration budget by 131 thousand dollars, to 6.9 million dollars.

In Atlanta, the Ku Klux Klan voluntarily surrendered their Georgia charter, revocation of which had been sought by the State on the basis that the Klan operated as a profit-making venture in contradiction to the terms of the charter. The State Attorney General said that the Klan Klubhouse could continue to operate as a national organization based on right of free assembly.

In Forrest City, Ark., a black farm hand pleaded guilty to murdering a female cab driver on May 22, the day after the Greenville, S.C., jury had acquitted all remaining 28 defendants, most of whom were cab drivers, for the admitted lynching of Willie Earle a day after he had been arrested for the murder of a Greenville cab driver in February. A special jury would determine the man's fate, whether execution or life imprisonment. He admitted abducting the woman, attempting to rape her, and then slashing her throat.

In New York, a porter was held on charges of assault and robbery in the beating of radio script writer Madge Tucker Miller inside her apartment. The man had posed as a window cleaner to gain entry, then knocked her unconscious with a three-pound metal dog. The man admitted the attack. Sixty detectives had been assigned to the case.

In Santa Ana, California, jury selection continued in the trial of 18-year old Louise Overell and her boyfriend, George Goldum, 21, for the murder of her parents by bludgeoning them to death with a ball peen hammer aboard the Overell yacht and then setting the yacht afire with the parents' bodies aboard. Thus far, 445 veniremen had been summoned and dismissed as unacceptable for the jury—presumably for being prejudiced by the pre-trial publicity in the case.

In Atlantic City, Dr. Edward Weiss told the American Medical Association that it was unwise for the unstable to become parents, that it would only exacerbate their nervous condition.

It was also unwise, no doubt, for parents to have unstable children.

In Los Angeles, actor Lionel Stander and his wife were facing foreclosure, the lender alleging that they owed $16,200 in payments on a $65,000 home which they had purchased the previous October, but then filed bankruptcy and successfully stayed the lawsuit.

Southern Bell announced plans to add a fifth floor to its building at 208 N. Caldwell Street, at a cost of $273,000.

We'll look forward to that. One floor more to ride the elevator up and down.

On the editorial page, "The Choice Before the Voters" again, and hopefully for the last time, looks at the referendum scheduled for the next day regarding controlled sale of liquor in Mecklenburg. It was ABC simple. You can read it. It has been stated so many times that we think we need not go into it any more.

Enough is enough. Vote and live with it. Dig yourself.

"Yes, It Was a Civil War" tells of the commander of the Sons of Union Veterans being insistent that the war of 1861 to 1865 be called the Civil War and not the War Between the States, as was popular nomenclature in the South. The commander made the point that the Constitution does not allow war between the states. The official record of Congress had termed it the "War of the Rebellion". President Lincoln had used the phrase "civil war" in the Gettysburg Address. Several prominent Confederate Generals, including James Longstreet, Joseph E. Johnston, G. T. Beauregard, Wade Hampton, John D. Imboden, Basil Duke, (bully, bully...), and others had written articles for Century Magazine, published in 1884-91, under the general heading, "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War". (It also includes in the writers John Bell Hood, who died in 1879 before the series began, Evander Law, Kirby Smith, and Benjamin Cheatham, perhaps a nascent limited liability partnership, but no entry appears from any of them. Should have been going to the library rather than concentrating all that wasted print on the booze. Got to dig for the nuggets of the news...)

During the war, the Union flag bore 34 stars, including one each for the states in rebellion.

It concedes the argument as the victors were entitled to dub the war. But it adds that had Marse Robert possessed "one more regiment..."

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Eat, Drink and Be Happy", tells of a plump maiden in a pink dress at the downtown fizzery expressly giving up on her useless two-week diet and ordering a 5,000-calorie banana split which she promptly devoured.

Recently, a Chicago physician, Dr. Donald Cook, had advised against diets, to avoid stomach ulcers. He said that it was unwise to go more than five hours without food, that one should sit erectly rather than slumping, and drink something at least once every hour. He also urged not to wear tight belts and get plenty of rest.

But it finds it hard to accept the additional advice not to be tense when the world situation and the domestic labor situation appeared to hang by tenterhooks.

Drew Pearson tells of Savings and Loan League lobbyist Morton Bodfish having circulated a confidential memo in which he disclosed that Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had introduced four bills affecting savings and loans, was a director of one of the largest savings and loans. The lobbying effort was against low-cost veterans housing and for savings and loans.

He next tells of sculptor Charles Keck presenting a bronze bust of the President to him in the White House, commissioned by the American Legion. The President was deeply appreciative but wondered at the absence of glasses, handed his own to Mr. Keck who then sought to fit them to the bust. He said that he would find a way to incorporate them, that he had experienced the same issue with Theodore Roosevelt's monocle, the ribbon being even more of a challenge.

Senator Taft recently had become engaged in argument with both Senator James Murray of Montana and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, after Mr. Taft suggested that when Mr. Murray had chaired the Labor Committee, he had suppressed labor legislation. Mr. Murray objected that it was not true, and Mr. Pepper supported the assertion. Mr. Taft had also called the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Health Insurance bill a piece of propaganda. Mr. Taft had introduced his own health bill, considerably more moderate.

Marquis Childs discusses the diminishing supply of dollars abroad, in Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and India, meaning that these countries would soon not be able to import as much from the United States as before, when dollars were plentiful. Canada's dollar and gold reserve had dropped to 1.245 billion dollars, meaning that they would have to curtail U.S. imports in the near future.

Britain, after its long, harsh winter, had just stopped importing dried eggs for the fact of no longer being able to afford them with dollars, the 1946 loan dollars having nearly dried up. The eggs which Britain did not buy were not as problematic as they might have been as the surplus, expected to be large to accommodate exports, turned out only moderate. The Government had to buy up the surplus to enable farmers to achieve 90 percent of parity, and parity was rising because of rising farm costs.

When foreign markets dried up for want of dollars, resulting from the trade imbalances, then the surpluses from both farm and factory would become an issue at home.

The piece is intended to dovetail with his other recent pieces advocating the foreign aid program to bolster European economies, that they might be able to afford more American exports and at the same require in the long haul less American foreign aid.

Samuel Grafton comments on the failure of the Truman Doctrine in the face of the Hungarian coup backed by the Soviets. It could not be viewed as a failure for liberals as they had not been consulted for nearly two years on how to handle Russia. The Truman Doctrine fed the Russians as it reduced all questions to resolution by force, a game the Russians had understood well since the Revolution.

The new approach enunciated by Secretary of State Marshall was refreshing as it recognized the goal of saving souls rather than borders and land. It would doubtless displease those who wanted to throw a relatively small amount of aid to a decrepit monarchy in Greece and have that be a solution to the problems. The Marshall Plan thus far appeared to be all-inclusive and represent more of a return to ideals.

Mr. Grafton predicts that there would soon be a return to consultation with liberals and idealists, but that they would be harder to please than the reactionaries, as they were not content to set up a wall and call it victory.

A letter writer asserts that race relations in the South had been badly distorted by the recent horrific episode in Greenville, the acquittal of all of the defendants in the lynching of Willie Earle on February 17, 26 of them having provided written admissions of their part in the criminal conduct, several implicating Carlos Hurd as administering the final coup de grace to Mr. Earle with a shotgun blast to his head.

But while deploring the result, the author also says that it was no more characteristic of the South than the gangster violence of the Midwest during the Prohibition days. To afford a more positive note, he quotes an editorial from the Asheville Citizen telling of junior nurses aide training in Asheville, with one of three groups of the trainees having come from the black schools. All of the three groups graduated. The black nurses' aides would go to work at the Asheville Colored Hospital. The piece had concluded: "All are a credit to their race and to the co-operative planning in the community which has made such a program possible."

Such was the conventional thinking in 1947. A lot of barriers still had to be overcome, even with well-meaning people, inured by traditional experience to paternalism and segregation.

A letter from A. W. Black finds the six million supposed Communists in the country and 11,000 in the Federal Government, rife within the media, to pose an imminent threat to freedom in the country. Unless brought under control, Commm-mmm-mmmunists would take over as they had in Europe.

And so on and so forth... quoting J. Edgar Hoover re the Red Menace abroad the land.

He favors making the Communist Party illegal, as in Brazil.

A letter writer wants the United States to retain the atomic secret as its own, as America was the great bastion of preservation of the peace. All islands which benefited the U.S. should be retained.

A letter from a representative of the Conference of Christians & Jews thanks The News for its efforts in promoting better understanding and harmony between the different races and faiths within the community, urges that each citizen had a responsibility likewise.

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