Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Dutch forces moved deeper into Indonesian Republic territory at half a dozen points as Indonesian reports told of stiffening resistance, with fighting reported around Probolinggo, an important East Java port. The beachhead stretched east from this point 70 miles to Pandji. The Dutch claimed that there was no opposition at Probolinggo and that opposition in establishing the beachhead was less than expected, with 150 Dutch casualties from the previous day.

The operation was the first amphibious assault since the end of World War II. The Indonesians termed the action a "colonial war". It derived from initial aggression by the Dutch in response to inability to form an agreement for independence of Indonesia under the Dutch crown, and claims that the Indonesians were arming. The Dutch called it a "local police action".

The Dutch Marines had been trained at Camp Lejeune during the summer of 1945 at the request of the Dutch Government.

The Dutch Government contended to the U.N. that the police action was authorized because of continuing acts of violence, including a food blockade, and "hostile and inflammatory propaganda"

At the U.N., the U.S. accepted a British amendment to the American resolution on the Balkans, eliminating a paragraph in its border-watch commission proposal attributing blame to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania for the border trouble in Greece, as the Balkans Subcommittee had reported was the case. The Russians had especially objected to this provision and the move was an attempt to gain Russian cooperation so that the veto would not be exercised. The British wording stated that any hostile action by Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, or Greece would be deemed a threat to the peace, as classified under Chapter VII of the Charter, authorizing military action. U.S. representative Herschel Johnson warned that any interference with the border watch commission would be regarded as a threat to the peace.

Victor Kravchenko, former official of the Soviet Purchasing Commission in New York and author of I Chose Freedom, testified to HUAC that every responsible representative of the Soviet Government in the U.S. was either an economic or political spy. The deputy chairman of the Purchasing Commission, he claimed, was the principal personality representing the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the country, superior to Andrei Gromyko, former Ambassador and presently the Soviet representative at the U.N.

The Senate approved a bill, already approved by the House, which exempted war brides from a restriction which limited immigration of those with less than 51 percent Caucasian blood, permitting three Hawaiian war brides to enter the country.

In San Francisco, a strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers which had stranded western passenger lines of the Southern Pacific Railroad and involved 3,500 engineers, ended early, six hours and 45 minutes after it had begun, following an agreement with the union, a demand for higher wages having been waived. Some passengers slept aboard the stopped trains while negotiations continued.

A felony bad check charge had been dismissed in New York against Lady Iris Mountbatten O'Malley, third cousin of King George VI, after the check made to a dress shop was paid.

In Nicaragua, the Cerro Negro volcano near Leon was erupting. The 28-mile diameter volcano had thus far caused no casualties but it was feared that crops had been destroyed. Sand from the volcano covered the streets and buildings of Leon.

National and state FHA officials were meeting at the Hotel Charlotte to dedicate the Independence Post housing project in the Country Club Hills section and to mark the establishment of a processing office of the FHA in Charlotte.

Emery Wister of The News reports that July had been unseasonably cool, less than two degrees below normal at a mean temperature of 78.5 degrees. It had been 62 during the morning hours this date, three degrees higher than the all-time low for the date, recorded in 1929. The coolest July on record was in 1891, when the average temperature was 75 degrees. Since 1879, the July average for Charlotte had dropped below 77 degrees only six times. The highest average was 82, recorded four times, most recently in each of the years 1930-32. The previous year, the average was 76.

The Soap Box Derby local finals would be held the coming Saturday, beginning at 12:15. Admission would be free.

In Hollywood, Harold Peary, the "Great Gildersleeve" of radio, and his wife, Gloria Holiday, had a son, born prematurely on March 9. The two were married on or about June 27, having waited an appropriately decent time to announce the birth of their child. Or, perhaps they had been on a very extended honeymoon, lasting since around early June, 1946.

On the editorial page, "Toward a New Regional Unity" tells of the Southern Association of Science and Industry, with the goals of improving education in the South in research and science, creating an appreciation by Southerners of the opportunities and resources in the South, and completing an inventory of Southern resources.

"A Post-Mortem on the Veto" finds petulant the criticism of President Truman by the Birmingham News, the Augusta Chronicle, and the Indianapolis Star for having expressed his intention in advance to veto the second tax bill. The piece thinks that the criticism would have been valid on any other bill, but since the President had already vetoed the first bill in June and the second bill only changed by six months the effective date to the beginning of 1948, there was no reason for the President not to have expressed his obvious intention to veto the bill.

"Mr. Fritz Mounts the Bandwagon" tells of R. L. Fritz, president of the North Carolina Education Association, personally endorsing Charles Johnson for the gubernatorial nomination in 1948. He had forwarded his endorsement to newspapers without mentioning his status with the NCEA. But the effort to separate himself from an official endorsement was futile. He was helping a bandwagon psychology to take hold by making his endorsement ten months before the primary, and the fact suggested that he was as interested in politics as in education.

A piece from the Salisbury Post, titled "Nature's Corner on Normalcy", tells of a person who was prominent in the furniture business having found a return to normalcy hearkened in the recent Chicago Furniture Exposition. The piece thinks it a false harbinger as there was no such thing as normalcy, presently any more than in the past when President Harding had suggested it after World War I. Only nature determined normalcy.

Drew Pearson tells of Senator John W. Bricker having charged the President with having indulged in cheap demagoguery when he reluctantly approved the extension of rent control with a message that the real estate lobby needed to be investigated for its power over the Congress. But Senator Robert Taft had responded to his Ohio colleague that he would like such an investigation.

Samuel Grafton wonders why the critics of the Marshall Plan, such as Senator Robert Taft and Sears chairman General Robert E. Wood, were not being roundly skewered as was Henry Wallace when he was criticizing the Truman Doctrine in Europe in April. The argument that Mr. Wallace had done so abroad carried little weight, as news traveled fast abroad.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the difficulty faced by Secretary of State Marshall in convincing the parsimonious Republican Congress that the need for aid to Greece was dire to ward off Communist threats to the Government.

A letter writer takes issue with the recent editorial which contended that the South was conservative and had voted for FDR out of expediency. He contends that the South was conservative because too many Southerners were disfranchised. An open ballot would produce an overwhelming majority for the Roosevelt policies.

Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, for instance, only needed a little over 100,000 votes to be re-elected, while a million in that state were qualified to vote.

He predicts that when Senator Clyde Hoey would run for re-election in 1950 he would not be showing himself shaking hands with Senator Robert Taft—a recent controversy having been stirred in Raleigh by such a photograph in the wake of the Senate override of the President's veto of Taft-Hartley—but rather would search for a friendly letter from FDR.

A letter writer responds to the Air Force sergeant from Pope Field, a Northern native, who had written a letter saying he was more impressed with the South in the year he had been present than his former low opinion had admitted, in part because of the liberality of The News and its recent statements decrying the Greenville acquittal of the 28 defendants in the Willie Earle lynching case. This writer hopes the sergeant would go back to from whence he had come. He thinks the Yankees needed to progress, not Southerners.

The editors note that the Asheville Citizen had also editorially bristled at the letter, finding the soldier to have a chip on his shoulder, put there in part by politicians and publications "professional in their uses of regional hatred". It found more significance in the recent action of the Ahoskie Kiwanis Club in righting a wrong than in the attempts to exploit the racial problems of the South, as in the reaction by such publications as PM to the verdict at Greenville. The Kiwanians had given a Cadillac to a black man who possessed the winning lottery ticket, after they awarded the Cadillac to a white man because the winner was black. They gave away two Cadillacs.

The Asheville Citizen in this instance was obviously purblind to the fact that the Ahoskie Kiwanis Club acted purely in self-interest after the matter received national exposure, prompting Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico to threaten to condemn the Club on the floor of the Senate. The fact which was most telling about the incident was the initially absurd action by the Club. That it was pressured into doing something right by threat of adverse publicity from its wrong hardly made it something about which any Southerner in his or her right mind ought be bragging. It was tantamount to a bank robber giving the bank back the money and expecting a pat on the back.

The Citizen also displays the old Southern defensiveness when anyone, especially a Northerner, dared to criticize the region for its obvious shortcomings in the area of race relations.

But such were the times.

The soldier was offering his observations in good humor. The fact that these idiots responded as they did demonstrated that his original opinion probably was closer to the truth for most Southerners of the time than his reformed opinion based on reading The News. There were islands of liberal thought, but they were only islands in a sea of reaction, as demonstrated repeatedly during the 1950's and 1960's.

One has to be thoroughly stupid to respond defensively to good natured jest about the region of the country or the nation or the state or the city or town from which one hails. Perhaps, too stupid to live. For if all one has going for one's self is such foolish regional, national or other form of local pride, one is in pretty poor shape psychologically. Get some help before you start a war, dumb bell.

A letter writer finds persuasive the argument of the Alsops on July 10, saying that the Marshall Plan was essential to assuring that Western Europe would not fall into the Soviet sphere. But he thinks that with so much of the world threatened by Communism, there was good reason to despair and that the optimists might be seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.

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