The Charlotte News

Monday, June 9, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that American sources in Budapest told of Communists seeking to buy out the Hungarian-American Oil Co., principally owned by Standard Oil, and had refused admission to the country of American CARE personnel based on Russian objections. While Standard had refused the offer, the new Communist Government might nationalize the oil fields, plus the banks and industry.

Bulgaria's Premier Georgi Dimitrov, a Communist, asserted that the arrest the previous week of the Opposition Leader, Nikolai Petrov, was a Bulgarian home question and thus no business of the West.

The Communist regime in Albania stated that all military planes flying over the country would be fired upon.

In New Delhi, the Moslem League, headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, voted to make Moslem India an independent state, Pakistan, after a brief period as a British dominion. Opponents of the League broke into the meeting and police used teargas to subdue them.

The All-India Congress, primarily Hindu, was expected to approve on Saturday the British plan for independence of India, with majority Hindu areas comprising Hindustan.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine charged that U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie had transgressed the proper boundaries of his position by circulating a British note on immigration of refugees to the Holy Land. They asked that Mr. Lie circulate to all 55 nations of the organization the protest note as he had the British note.

The French Government announced the temporary incorporation of Saarburg into French occupation territory until a treaty with Germany could be formed, stating that the town was commercially tied to the French town of Sierck, fourteen miles away.

In Manila, 31 Japanese soldiers accused of butchering and eating Filipinos and sometimes their own men during their prolonged period of hiding in the jungles of Mindanao, would go on trial the following month for war crimes before the Philippine Army tribunal. The soldiers had surrendered in January after being convinced that the war was over.

A Filipino stated that three of the men had broken into his home and killed members of his family, then cut pieces of flesh from the bodies, cooked it and ate. When they finished, they held a gun to the remaining family members' heads and ordered them to eat the meat.

In Madrid, Generalissimo Francisco Franco decreed that a referendum would be held on July 6 to decide whether a law of succession, approved by Parliament, would take effect, making Sr. Franco chief of state of a kingdom. The law gave him the power to name his own successor.

Some 10,000 coal miners in southwestern Pennsylvania had walked off the job in protest of the Taft-Hartley bill. Fourteen captive mines were shut down by the strike. The president of the UMW local declared the walkouts to be unauthorized.

A strike impacting 2,000 workers at the Connor plant which built bodies for Packard, took place involving Briggs Manufacturing Company employees, members of the CIO UAW.

In Paulsboro, N.J., a grand jury indicted a young black man for rape of a 20-year old pregnant white woman, who alleged that he attacked her in the front seat of an automobile as her husband was tied up in the back seat.

The House Appropriations Committee recommended that the Office of Housing Expediter be terminated at the end of the month and called for a sharp curtailment of the National Housing Agency.

Former Secretary of Commerce and RFC chairman Jesse Jones of Texas told the House Banking Committee that he foresaw no possibility of a depression in the near future.

Weekend floods of the Mississippi and Des Moines Rivers from tornadoes passing through four states, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Nebraska, took 23 lives and left at least 2,962 homeless families, involving more than 12,000 persons. Seven of eleven deaths in Iowa occurred in Ottumwa. Four hundred families were left homeless in Hannibal, Mo.

In New York, the Bowery Improvement Committee of the East Side Chamber of Commerce had suggested to Mayor William O'Dwyer that a farm colony be established by the city in upstate New York to accommodate the chronic alcoholics proliferating within the Bowery.

In Manheim, Pa., former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, acting on behalf of his church congregation, presented the annual payment of one red rose for use of the church, deeded on the condition in 1772 by Baron William Henry Stiegel. A sixth-generation descendant received the rose.

On the editorial page, "Senator Taft Hurls a Boomerang" finds Senator Robert Taft engaging in backfiring rhetoric in his recent criticism of President Truman as having supposedly wrecked OPA after championing lower prices, and then championed inflation with his foreign aid program. But Senator Taft, the previous summer, had led the fight against OPA in the Senate. The President only ended the useless remnants left to him after the Congress got through gutting the effectiveness of the agency.

As to foreign aid, the Senator's argument echoed his old isolationism and reminded of those who had charged FDR with engineering World War II to end economic worries and assure his re-election. The Senator's argument ignored the issue which President Truman's policy sought to address, Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and the threat of Communism to economically depressed areas.

The exchange reminded that the 1948 election cycle was beginning. But the ineptitude displayed in this opening salvo by Senator Taft did not make him appear as a competent candidate for the Republican nomination.

"'Vision of a New Hope....'" comments on the State Supreme Court having found valid and enforceable the contract between the Smith Reynolds Foundation and Wake Forest College to move its campus to Winston-Salem in exchange for a $350,000 annual endowment.

The editorial states that the Baptists would need supplement the endowment with generous contributions, as they would need to build a completely new campus.

It applauds the move, and asserts that Winston-Salem would enable the new Wake Forest to continue to thrive as an institution of higher education.

"The Retirement of Boss Hague" comments on the retirement of Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, longtime political boss in the Democratic Party, electing not to run again for Mayor.

But he also announced that his nephew would succeed him.

He had built an organization which used the public coffers to deliver votes and sustain itself, typical of big city bosses. In 1930, he spent 33.4 million dollars in the city of 330,000. He had raised the money through high taxes and then funneled 25 million of the proceeds into a charity hospital, to maintain support among the poor.

He had become vice-chairman of the DNC, a position he still held, and from which he had wielded enormous political power nationally.

Though never earning more than $8,500 per year from his Mayoral salary, he managed to afford a $125,000 beach estate.

He controlled the police as his own Gestapo. But, despite the availability of state support on occasion to oust him from power, the local residents never saw fit to do so. That, too, was typical of the big city bosses. It took a willing and gullible electorate to sustain their power, as with Caesar and Hitler.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "The Shining Sacrifice", tells of a white youth diving into a lake near Raleigh to save his fishing companion, a black youth, who had fallen overboard. Both wound up drowned. The piece hopes that the heroic sacrifice irrespective of race might reflect some positive light on the South to offset some of the negative recent events.

Drew Pearson regards the State Department's decision to sell arms to Argentina under Juan Peron and to oust Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden, President Peron's enemy, as possibly one of the most important diplomatic moves in many years. He examines some of the backstage maneuvering leading to the decisions.

Mr. Braden argued that the dictatorship of Peron should work to prevent sale of arms to Argentina, as it would encourage Peron to be aggressive against his neighbors. Other advisers to Secretary Marshall, however, believed that Argentina could be key to building an anti-Soviet bloc in Latin America and thus should be provided arms to encourage friendly relations with the U.S. Mr. Braden countered with Peron's five-year plan for establishing a Fascist Government, aimed at creating the most powerful military nation in South America, including experimentation in atomic energy. The program also called for control of the judiciary and other suppressive measures, including control of education, labor, banning all strikes unless Peron approved, control of the press, movies and radio, and establishment of a secret police. The plan also called for Argentine expansion, including increasing the birth rate and immigration from Europe, seeking "racially pure" immigrants from Spain and Italy. He wished to increase the population from 14 million to 100 million within 50 years.

In the end, Mr. Braden was overruled, based on the notion that Argentina could provide an effective bulwark against Soviet expansion in Latin America.

Sr. Peron, incidentally, did not reach his goal for population expansion by 1997. In 2000, the population of Argentina stood at 36.9 million, population increase having slowed substantially in the decade of the 1960's, to 3.6 million, otherwise increasing at a rate of about five million per decade since 1947.

Marquis Childs discusses the Internal Revenue Bureau's effort to close certain tax loopholes regarding tax-exempt organizations, both foundations and leftist political organizations. The IRB was examining whether the organizations were genuinely devoting their activities to educational or charitable purposes, as required by the tax exempt status.

Most of the shares of Ford Motor Co. stock were left by the late Henry Ford to a charitable foundation.

The tax-exempt status of the PAC for Palestine had been revoked when it was found campaigning against the loan to Britain in 1946.

No substantial portion of such a foundation's funds could be utilized to influence legislation or for propaganda. Fellow traveler organizations had been reported to be operating as tax exempt organizations despite contributing money to political campaigns. And Hollywood had been contributing heavily to leftist tax-exempt organizations to take advantage of a charitable deduction. The Treasury was looking at these claims to make sure that the charitable donations were to appropriately classified organizations.

The House had slashed the budget of the IRB by 25 million dollars, 20 million of which was restored in the Senate. If the budget wound up slashed too much, it would be difficult for the IRB to enforce the tax code against tax chiselers.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop examine the negotiations between John L. Lewis and the coal operators, with the June 30 date looming when the Government would turn control back to the owners after a year under Government management. Mr. Lewis's recent demand for a 35-cents per hour increase meant essentially a refusal to negotiate with the operators, placing pressure on the President to sign the labor bill, that he might have emergency powers to halt a coal strike. Mr. Lewis had called Taft-Hartley a "slave bill". All indications were that he did not want a coal strike, as three strikes during the previous year had adversely impacted the UMW members. UMW rank-and-file had wired the Government asking that a coal strike be averted at all costs.

The apparent reason that Mr. Lewis wanted the President to sign the bill was so that he would lose the election in 1948. If he signed the bill, a sizable part of labor would likely defect to the third party headed by Henry Wallace, splitting the Democratic vote within labor. Furthermore, the efforts within CIO to fight the Communists would be weakened if the President were to sign the bill, causing a blow-up within CIO, enabling Mr. Lewis to get control of the non-Communist part of the rival organization, leaving him solidly in control of organized labor.

A letter writer opposing the liquor referendum advises that the voters pray before casting their ballots, that they might vote correctly.

A letter writer responds to "Prohibition Is a Two-Sided Picture", informing that in the past the State had asked church people to participate in the control of liquor through the dispensary, formerly run by the financial agent of Wake Forest College. The dispensary was considered the lesser of two evils, but the person who now considered the bootlegger the greater of two evils, had "his skin taken off."

A letter writer responds to the May 24 editorial, "Round Three on the Boulevard", opposing the cross-town boulevard. He favors improving present roads, thus not destroying valuable land to the citizens, such as the Rose Garden and ball field across Seventh Street from it.

A letter writer opposes the liquor referendum, for the usual reasons, that it would stimulate drunks among the young. The stores were not for control of liquor but for the promotion of it. Voting for the ABC system was voting for the "enemy" and an "'ignoble experiment'".

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