Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House sustained the President's veto on the tax-cut bill with 268 voting to override and 137 to sustain, failing the necessary two-thirds majority by two votes. The override votes consisted of 233 Republicans, with only two Republicans voting to sustain, plus the American Labor Party member. Speaker Joe Martin of Massachusetts stated that there would be no further effort to reduce taxes during the year, adding that the country might have to wait until there was a Republican President to reduce taxes.

President Truman appointed five experts to investigate air safety in light of the three recent DC-4 crashes taking a total of 146 lives since May 29. Details were provided on the most recent crash, on Saturday, which took 50 lives near Leesburg, Va. The plane was attempting to land and crashed into a mountainside. The C.A.B. spokesman stated that the pilot may have miscalculated his position.

A draft-Henry Wallace for president movement began in California, led by former California Attorney General Robert Kenny. Meanwhile, the previous night, the former Vice-President, in an event sponsored by the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, spoke in the Watergate Amphitheater in Washington to a receptive, cheering crowd of 8,000 to 10,500. The crowd extended onto Memorial Bridge and a bordering roadway, near the Lincoln Memorial. He asserted that there would be a third party movement if the two major parties continued on a suicidal path to war and depression. He urged President Truman to meet with Premier Stalin in Berlin to discuss economic and trade relations. He added that it ought be easier to reach an agreement with a "valiant ally than with the dictator in Argentina."

Twenty-five years from this date, the break-in by C.R.E.E.P. operatives to the Democratic National Headquarters, located at the Watergate Hotel-Apartment Complex, would take place. Was it coincidence? subconsciously retained memories intersecting with reality? some strangely planned, deliberate collision with past events taking place nearby? or perhaps the spirit of Mr. Wallace, not taking kindly to having been labeled a Communist by his like, playing havoc with Mr. Nixon and his doomed presidency?

In his Princeton commencement address, President Truman renewed his call for universal training to give heart to smaller nations in their resistance to totalitarian encroachment.

In Boston, a woman testified that Douglas Chandler, on trial for treason for his "Paul Revere" radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany during the war, had complained of the technical quality of the radio broadcasts, and corroborated her husband's testimony of three overt acts in which they witnessed Mr. Chandler broadcasting or admitting to the broadcasts.

In Reidsville, Georgia, a 25-year old black man, James Brown, died in the electric chair following conviction for rape of a white woman. The date of the rape was not given, but his trial had just occurred on May 22, lasting three hours. Just before sentence was passed, he admitted breaking the law. He was accused of raping two white women shortly after he had escaped from the Bullock County convict camp, where he was serving a sentence for forgery. He was not tried on the second charge. There was no indication of an appeal.

At least they did not lynch him, even it was the functional equivalent.

The Justice Department announced that it was considering civil rights prosecution of the 28 jury-acquitted defendants on May 21 in Greenville, S.C., in the trial for the lynching of Willie Earle. Three defendants were acquitted by the judge by directed verdict. The theory of the contemplated subsequent prosecution would be that the 14th Amendment rights of Mr. Earle were violated by the defendants.

In St. Louis, the strike of street car and bus operators entered its fifth day, causing retail trade to be off by 30 to 40 percent.

Because of the NMU strike tying up over 750 vessels, most of which were on the East Coast, the railroads declared that an embargo would probably go into effect this date on all goods bound for foreign ports so as not to clog the ports with shipments. An exception would be made for coal bound for foreign ports on ships which were not affected by the work stoppage.

In Carolina Beach, N.C., the American Legion elected its new North Carolina Department commander, Ray Galloway.

In Hollywood, actress June Haver, 21, announced that she would soon file for divorce from her husband, musician Jimmy Zito, 23. They were married in Reno on March 9.

On the editorial page, "The Veto Was Really Conservative" states that three of President Truman's reasons offered to justify his tax-bill veto, to reduce inflation, first to reduce the public debt, and to reduce appropriations before reducing revenue, were conservative. The only political charge made by the President was that it was a "rich man's bill".

"The Un-American Committee Looks South" questions HUAC's conclusion that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was "perhaps the most deviously camouflaged Communist front organization" in the country. It finds the North Carolina membership list to include leading citizens of the state, including Frank Porter Graham, president of the University, a past president of the Conference. None of them could be regarded as Communists or fellow travelers.

You may listen, starting at the 2:07:00 mark, to Senator Helms 20 years into his Senate career, here, and again, in the afternoon session, at 2:45:00, regarding the alleged 1980 Reagan-Bush "October surprise", i.e., a pre-election promise of arms to Iran from Israel and, eventually, Iran-Contra, for withholding the release of the American hostages in Iran until after election day, and yet again, the following day, at the 11:30 mark and at 49:30, anent normalization of relations with Cuba, engaging in his usual "bullfeathers", pitting left versus right, black versus white, never seeming to realize that he was consistently and unremittingly defending Fascism and even treason in the name of "moral rectitude".

The heart of the matter, insofar as the Southern Conference was concerned, was explained in The News in 1938, as HUAC had labeled the Conference Communist at that time for having the effrontery to seek to abolish Jim Crow laws in the South.

We note that the Southern Conference issued an invitation to W. J. Cash to speak to a meeting of the group in the immediate wake of the publication of The Mind of the South in February, 1941. He had to decline because of a prior conflicting engagement. But, undoubtedly, the fact that they invited him made him at least an honorary Red.

"Rebecca West Returns a Verdict" reports of a piece by Ms. West in the current New Yorker regarding the Greenville trial of the 31 defendants, 26 of whom admitted lynching Willie Earle on February 17, all of whom wound up being acquitted in May. It suggests that few Southerners would question her compassionate conclusion. She understood regional and national prejudices but did not share them. She saw the acquittal as a failure of mankind rather than as a regional or local failure.

She understood the passions aroused in the lynchers by the murder of one of their own, a cab driver. She did not condemn the jury which let them go free. All, she said, were caught in a tide of events and their sin was weakness rather than malice.

Her anger was reserved for the defense attorneys who overtly appealed to racial prejudices, as they, alone, had a choice and chose to betray their neighbors.

The piece finds it a more perceptive verdict from the trial than the confused and frightened jury had delivered.

We disagree, in reading the piece by Ms. West, that she cast the greatest blame on the defense attorneys. Her implicit blame was cast most firmly on the Sheriff's Office in Greenville, outside the offices of which the cab drivers congregated in advance of the lynching, at an hour when most would normally have been off duty and heading home, to form their criminal conspiracy to lynch Willie Earle. Yet, none of the persons on duty at the Sheriff's Office could identify a single sole among them, despite their faces being well known in the community. No one had attempted to find out what the congregation of cab drivers was about, though fully cognizant of the fact of the murder of a local cab driver and arrest of Willie Earle for same, taking place less than 24 hours earlier.

Ironically, she notes, the victim of murder, of which Mr. Earle stood accused when kidnaped from the Pickens jail, cab driver T. W. Brown of Greenville, was said to have been a kindly man and one who kept a watchful eye on the hotspurs among his fellow drivers. Lynching was the very type of activity which he would have dissuaded them from doing.

We note also that Ms. West had obviously delved, wisely, into The Mind of the South before covering the trial and writing her article, as she mentions at the end of page 35: "The [Pickens] jail is a red-brick building, planned with much fantasy by somebody who had seen pictures of castles in books and had read the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Radcliffe, or had been brought up by people who had read them." Such dovetails, too perfectly for coincidence, along with her additional reference to Shelley, with the following from Cash's book, by 1947, widely read by anyone with scholarly interest in the South:

One almost blushes to set down the score of the Old South here. If Charleston had its St. Cecilia and its public library, there is no record that it ever added a single idea of any notable importance to the sum total of man's stock. If it imported Mrs. Radcliffe, Scott, Byron, wet from the press, it left its only novelist, William Gilmore Simms, to find his reputation in England, and all his life snubbed him because he had no proper pedigree. If it fetched in the sleek trumpery of the schools of Van Dyck and Reynolds, of Ingres and Houdon and Flaxman, it drove its one able painter, Washington Allston (though he was born an aristocrat), to achieve his first recognition abroad and at last to settle in New England.

And Charleston is the peak. Leaving Mr. Jefferson aside, the whole South produced, not only no original philosopher but no derivative one to set beside Emerson and Thoreau; no novelist but poor Simms to measure against the Northern galaxy headed by Hawthorne and Melville and Cooper; no painter but Allston to stand in the company of Ryder and a dozen Yankees; no poet deserving the name save Poe—only half a Southerner. And Poe, for all his zeal for slavery, it despised in life as an inconsequential nobody; left him, and with him the Southern Literary Messenger, to starve, and claimed him at last only when his bones were whitening in Westminster churchyard.

Poe, indeed.

Ms. West does not seem to have gotten deeply enough, however, into Cash's explanation of the Southern cult of lynching, how it came to be and how it persisted through time into the modern era. She rationalizes and seeks to blame the verdict on slick defense attorneys leading the poor, ignorant lambs of the jury down the primrose path of chicanery, thus providing in the process the handy-dandy for future juries in the South to throw up their hands and profess ignorance of the basic law and morality, all with an agreeable wink to the defendants. The defense attorneys' conduct in their arguments was, as previously indicated, disgraceful to the bar and to the citizenry. They were not zealous advocates for their clients, but rather gross appellants seeking the depths of the worst emotions capable of being elicited from the volatile mix within each individual juror seated in the box, the old-time religion of hate of all which was foreign and outside their quaint little never-never world, stolen and trampled upon by the Yankee during the Woa.

But the jury, no matter how ignorant or uneducated, knew better than to say that murder was acceptable, but for the color of the victim and the accused. They were guilty of nullification of guilt for murder and deserve for that everlasting condemnation.

The prosecution's case was not "weak", as Ms. West seemed to believe. Indeed, it could not have been stronger. The admissions and confessions would have been thrown out and barred from evidence completely, if any reasonable argument of coercion could have been marshalled by the defense. It was not for the jury to speculate on the willingness of each admission and confession, absent proof presented to negate the fact, of which there was none.

The defendants, all 28, should have been found guilty of criminal conspiracy to commit murder, and all subjected to the death penalty, as the only means to stop dead in its tracks that which persisted in the South for another two decades and more, confident that Southern juries would acquit, even if the lynching of Willie Earle was the last recorded in South Carolina. Had it been so, many tragedies in other parts of the South, including Dallas in 1963, might not have been.

One of the defendants, she relates, at pages 55-56, had tattooed just above the knuckles of his left hand the letters forming "LOVE" and, on the right, "HATE", with "T" and "O" intervening on each successive thumb. He explained that he had made the tattoo himself, for "lack of sense" at the age of seventeen. He remained, of course, mentally at that age or younger, had never grown out of his nonsensical ways, laughable and absurd to the point of being pitiable, were it not for the depravity of his actions, quite consistent with that printed, apparently in mirrored imagery, on the hands which had murdered in pathologically unrepentant and unforgiving cold blood.

Drew Pearson tells of the manner in which tax policy in the country was formulated. Three years earlier, counsel to the Treasury Department Randolph Paul had been asked to meet five men, Wall Street banker John W. Hanes, J. Cheever Cowdin of N.A.M., Ellsworth Alvord, U.S. Chamber of Commerce tax lobbyist, Lewis Brown of Johns-Manville Co., and Roswell Magill, a Wall Street tax lawyer. The five had little luck with Mr. Paul in formulating policy, but now had attracted the ear of House Ways & Means Committee chairman Harold Knutson of Minnesota, who had appointed Messrs. Hanes, Cowdin, and Magill, two multi-millionaires and a lawyer for multi-millionaires, to formulate the tax plan for the country.

He next relates of Commissioner of Baseball Happy Chandler, former Governor and Senator from Kentucky, hearing of the two sons of Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons being upset with his decision to suspend Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher for the season. After Mr. Chandler wrote them a letter trying to explain his action, the two boys, ages 7 and 9, continued to be dissatisfied, wanted particulars. He had not written them a return note.

It was unlikely that a mine safety bill would come from the Republican House, despite John L. Lewis having swung his support in that direction since the 1940 presidential election and despite the Centralia, Ill., mine disaster earlier in the year. There was a better chance for a bill out of the Senate. One thing hurting Mr. Lewis was his opposition in the last election to Democratic Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia who had sponsored mine safety legislation. Many Republicans took note of the lack of political fealty to those who tried to do UMW a good turn.

Some of Republican Senator Chan Gurney's colleagues were irked that he would open up to two brass hats a closed hearing on the Army-Navy merger. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire stated that he supposed it was an "open-closed meeting".

Marquis Childs tells of Senator Arthur Vandenberg wanting an inventory of what was needed in the world in terms of American aid, rather than proceeding on an ad hoc basis. But such an inventory needed to be undertaken quickly as time was running short, the British loan money from 1946 set to run out shortly after the first of the year, as would other Western European aid money, meaning exports would be sharply curtailed and rehabilitation halted. For the ensuing six months, Communists throughout Europe would seek to sabotage the recovery process, to make of the countries ripe pickings.

Samuel Grafton suggests that a new sport was forming in the country, Communists versus reactionaries, to replace cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians. Politics had devolved to a process of counting friends and enemies, as opposed to debate. The majority was becoming a fixed, permanent group, no longer mutable as in the past. The treatment of labor recently by the Congress in formulating Taft-Hartley was indicative of this new tendency.

A letter tells of a rape case occurring in Charlotte, garnering little notice. It involved a black defendant and a black victim, an eight-year old. The allegations were that the defendant, a 27-year old veteran, had given the girl whiskey and "home brew", then raped her, in a three-room house with two other adults present. A physician testified that she had been raped by someone. A plea bargain was entered, pursuant to which he pleaded guilty to assault and attempted rape.

A letter writer chastises The News for its editorial on gubernatorial candidate Mayne Albright, a progressive G.I., finding the editorial dismissive of his chances at the polls without ever giving him an opportunity first to run and demonstrate his attractiveness as a candidate. The writer finds the short shrift thus given him to be unworthy of such a liberal newspaper.

He thinks that the recent passage of the new health program was progressive, as was the equal pay for teachers, irrespective of race. And so there was no reason to assume that a liberal candidate for governor should be written off as doomed from the start.

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