The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 24, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an outbreak of new wildcat strikes in coal mining, shipbuilding, and livestock handling had occurred on the first day Taft-Hartley had been the law of the land. The miners, 40 percent of whom had stopped work, were saying, "Let the Senators mine the coal." More than 155,000 miners were idle in eight states, starting the previous night in Alabama. The ripple effect immediately slowed production in the steel industry.

In Omaha, 245 livestock handlers walked off the job, apparently in protest of the bill becoming law. In New York, 4,000 shipbuilders did not report for work. A union spokesman said that 40,000 workers in the East Coast Bethlehem Ship Yards would not report for work on Tuesday.

Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, who had voted to sustain the President's veto, predicted that the Senate override of the veto had supplied tremendous momentum to the third party movement. Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, who joined 19 other Democrats voting to override, expressed the belief that the President had, with the veto, made his wing of the party the labor party for 1948. Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who voted to override, stated that the Republicans had lost the rank-and-file worker in the vote. He explained that his vote was premised on promises from Republican leaders that the bill would be amended in 1948 to remove the more objectionable provisions. Senator Irving Ives of New York, who had been the primary force behind some degree of moderation in the final bill, predicted that the worker would not turn against the Republicans. Senator Ives also stated that the NLRB's appropriation for the year would have to be doubled to handle the expected increased caseload under Taft-Hartley.

President Truman met with members of the NLRB at the White House to discuss procedures under the new Act.

Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, co-sponsor of the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, proposed that the Act's provisions to enable the President to seize vital industries in the event of a crippling strike be extended a year to meet the exigencies of a potential coal strike. The Act's seizure provisions would otherwise expire June 30.

A summer gasoline shortage from increased sales had forced Standard Oil Company of Indiana to curtail allocation to twelve of the fifteen Midwestern states where it had retail outlets. It left it to retailers to determine how to allocate the allotted gasoline.

Russian officials in Berlin stated that German prisoners of war would be released at an accelerated rate in the coming four months, with 100,000 expected to be released. Some 900,000 German prisoners were still held in Russia.

For the second time in two weeks, Russia rejected a request from the British Foreign Office to clarify the situation in Hungary, where a Communist-backed coup had led to the resignation of Premier Farenc Nagy.

Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin was expected to propose to the French and Russian foreign ministers an All-European conference to consider the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe with American aid dollars. The British Foreign Office was consulting on the matter with Undersecretary of State Will Clayton.

The U.S. was concerned about plans in Britain to cut back imports of American film, food, and tobacco to save dollars. The plan was seen as contrary to the terms of the 1946 loan to Britain which had provided that no discrimination against American trade would take place. British officials responded that Britain simply could no longer afford the goods.

In Japan, the nation's 60,000 Geishas were reported having a tough time with all of the restaurants closed to conserve food, had appealed to the Government for help. The Geishas had said that they were not "accessories of high luxury", that they wanted their raison d'etre to be recognized as true artistry, that they wished to appear where there was "no sake, no liquor". Premier Tetsu Katayama responded by radio, urging Japanese women to do their part to adapt to life under the new Constitution.

The Board of Trustees of Columbia University were about to release a statement from General Eisenhower which was believed to contain a conditional acceptance of their offer of the presidency, to take effect in the middle of 1948, contingent upon his being released by the President from his duties as Chief of Staff of the Army.

Tom Watkins of The News tells of a strange disease laying to waste numerous acres of cotton in Mecklenburg and neighboring counties. The disease, which started at the bottom leaves of the plant, remained a mystery to the entomologists looking for the source. Farmers with 50 years of experience had never seen its like. It was theorized that the hot weather of a few weeks earlier followed by a cold snap had reduced the resistance of the cotton plant, that lice, which were believed to be killing the plant, were not present, but the lady beetle, which ordinarily fed on the lice, was. Whatever was causing the blight worked quickly. Cotton which had been thriving a few days earlier suddenly showed signs of approaching death.

On the editorial page, "The Vetoes and the Party Lines" tells of the President being accused of thwarting the will of the people with his two successive vetoes, the first, on the tax cut bill having been sustained, and then that of the Taft-Hartley Act, overridden.

But he had acted as the Constitution allows and at least the disagreement with Congress was defining the issues for the 1948 election. There would be a choice between two political philosophies, one, the Democratic, more or less liberal, and the other conservative. If the President had signed the bills, the voters would have no clear choice in the election. Domestic policy would have been reduced to the same bipartisan cooperation as foreign policy.

The vetoes were in keeping with the partisan tradition which was a cornerstone of representative government.

"Stability for the Building Industry" tells of the Carolinas Branch of the Associated General Contractors having voted to eliminate "escalator clauses" from construction contracts, which, during the war, had provided for adjustments to contract price when costs would rise during the course of the building project. It made for indefinite estimates of cost. But with the war over, the roller coaster conditions prompting the insertion of such clauses had disappeared.

The piece sees it as a sign that there was no longer any barrier to getting the postwar construction process underway.

"Instrument of Public Service" tells of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond having been given the green light by the State House of Representatives to revise state government through appointment of a commission to study and recommend changes, as well as to implement them. He was trying to get the measure through the State Senate when it would convene in early 1948.

It appeared as a laudable effort and the editorial wishes the Governor well in it.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "History's Royal Joke", tells of the Spanish Cortez, the Parliament, enacting a law to give Generalissimo Francisco Franco tenure for life as El Caudillo, and allowing him to name his own successor. It was not surprising as the entire Cortez was appointed by Sr. Franco or were dependent on him for office. It effectively established him as the uncrowned king, a living mockery to the democratic ideal.

Drew Pearson tells of a secret session between Southern Democrats and the President regarding the Taft-Hartley bill, at which they resolved most of their differences with the President and declared that they were as solid as ever behind him. Most of the Southern members of Congress had, however, voted to override the veto as they voted for the bill in the first instance.

He informs that at the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, President Truman had brought, among his entourage, Kansas City U.S. Marshal Fred Canfield. When introduced to Josef Stalin, the Soviet Premier was so impressed with Marshal Canfield that he offered to award him three prestigious Soviet orders of merit for being the Marshal of the United States. The President then had to explain the distinction, that there were 124 other marshals in the country who would feel slighted if the Russian Premier decorated only one. Premier Stalin relented.

Senator Taft believed that the House cuts of 32 percent of the Agriculture Department's budget had gone too far, that ten percent was about right.

Senator Richard Russell of Georgia refused to compromise on the cuts to the soil conservation service. He promised a floor fight if the budget were not fully restored in the Senate. Rather than risk alienating traditional Republican strongholds in the Midwest, it was likely that the cuts would be restored.

Marquis Childs comments on the President's veto of the Taft-Hartley bill being assailed by the Congress and the press as a political maneuver. It had been, but so had the whole process, in the year before a presidential election. He could have exercised his prerogative and allowed the bill to become law without signing it, while complaining of it in a message. He could have signed it and thus been hailed by the press as cooperative. The veto did not win him friends in labor, as John L. Lewis in AFL was going to support Governor Dewey, and the far left of labor was more concerned with foreign policy.

In vetoing the bill, he followed the advice of Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach, Secretary of Interior Julius Krug, NLRB chairman Paul Herzog, and adviser and legal counsel Clark Clifford. In so doing, it was not so politically advantageous as it at first had appeared.

The weakness, he finds, was in the President's message, not reaffirming his commitment to a less restrictive and less byzantine bill to address the abuses of labor. But no matter what he had said, the political atmosphere in which the bill had been passed was bound to create criticism.

Samuel Grafton discusses the economy, that the expected recession had been avoided thus far by a high level of exports, five times that of the pre-war level. The country depended for the time on the poverty of the rest of the world to support the stream of exports. Some of the exports were being paid by American tax money but it was still staving off recession. The loan to Britain may have been keeping some people off relief rolls in the U.S.

But as the foreign countries began to run out of dollars, the trade would begin to dry up. At that point, another prop would be needed for the economy. He suggests that it should be a public housing program in the form of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft bill. While not big enough to solve the housing problem, it was a start and could create the necessary activity in heavy goods to keep the economy going should exports begin to falter.

A letter from A. W. Black takes exception to the editorial of June 17, "The Un-American Committee Looks South", criticizing the report of HUAC, released a week earlier, stating that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was a Communist-front organization and that its former president, Frank Porter Graham, while not a Communist, had associated with Communists and sympathizers in the organization and had a tendency so to associate himself. Mr. Black, who had written several reactionary letters since the prior summer, thinks the criticism to be a reaction unmindful of the real danger in the country from Communism.

A letter from a career military man urges Charlotteans to keep the city clean of litter. It was, he says, the cleanest city he had ever visited and he wished it to stay that way.

A letter writer presents a portion of an editorial from The Monroe Journal explaining that neighboring Union County would never vote to establish controlled sale of liquor as had Mecklenburg a week earlier. The writer says that it was true as long as Union County did not put a back door on the store—presumably to allow the purchaser to escape notice while buying liquor as with the home delivery afforded under the bootlegging system.

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