The Charlotte News
Tuesday, August 12, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Attorney General Tom Clark had ordered an investigation of food, clothing, and housing prices to determine whether there were conspiracies in these industries to keep prices at the present high levels. He promised jail terms to anti-trust law violators.
The CIO Full Employment Committee called on Congress to conduct a special session at which price controls would be reinstituted to avoid another round of strikes to produce higher wages to keep pace with rising prices.
The Indonesians charged the Dutch Government with initiating attacks in west Java and the Dutch charged the Indonesians with an attack on a Dutch camp in Sumatra, actions in violation of the ceasefire declared mutually in compliance with the directive of the U.N. Security Council.
The United States asserted that if the U.N. Security Council could not resolve the Balkans situation, it would join the other nations in protecting Greece under the provisions of the Charter. Herschel Johnson, deputy U.S. delegate, asserted that the Russians were bent on supporting the Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, and Albanian incursions along the borders with Greece in an effort to set up a totalitarian regime in Greece. He said that the responsibilities did not end simply because the Soviets chose to exercise their veto on the Security Council. He said that in September, the Balkans issue would be placed before the General Assembly should the Security Council not resolve the crisis. Yugoslavia had accused the U.S. of misrepresenting the situation in the Balkans to provide a basis for exercising the Truman Doctrine in Greece.
Anglo-American talks began in Washington regarding the coal situation in the Ruhr, with the State Department opening the door to discussion of any problem associated with the Ruhr, including provision for discussion of the potential for socialization of the mines, previously considered taboo by the Americans.
All 31 defendants in the war crimes trial involving Buchenwald concentration camp personnel were convicted by the U.S. Military Court in Dachau, Germany. The defendants included Ilsa Koch, the widow of the former commandant of the camp, accused of making lampshades from the skin of the murdered prisoners. Sentencing was to be held on Thursday. It was estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 prisoners at Buchenwald had died in captivity.
In New York, Chief Signalman Harold Hirshberg was convicted by a Navy court martial for striking two fellow prisoners while in a Japanese prison camp during the war. He was acquitted of seven charges of assault against six other fellow prisoners and of reporting the escape plans of three prisoners, one of whom was tortured to death by the Japanese. The maximum penalty faced from the convictions was six months on each charge and a dishonorable discharge. The imposed penalty was not publicly disclosed.
In London, following an all night debate, the House of Commons approved the Labor Government's emergency economic measure, providing powers to the Government similar to those possessed during the war, a bill which Opposition Leader Winston Churchill had the previous day described as "dictatorial". It allowed the Government to direct labor in essential industries. The vote was 178 to 64. It was sent to the House of Lords for final passage. The Labor Party refused to bow to Conservative efforts for assurance that the Government would not nationalize the iron and steel industries, but it did accept an amendment that there would be no attempt to curtail freedom of the press in the country.
A National Airlines DC-4 with 25 aboard made an emergency stop in Philadelphia after encountering a flock of geese during a flight to Newark. The geese had made a hole in the leading edge of one of the plane's wings large enough to fit a human head.
In Groton, Conn., a submarine rescued a small-plane pilot who was standing on the wing of the stranded plane in Long Island Sound after the engine had stopped operating.
In Chicago, William P. Odom completed his solo record round-the-world
Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming predicted that the break-up of the hearings into the Howard Hughes matter would result in tightening of the law requiring registration of lobbyists, re-examination of the need for special committees such as the Ferguson Subcommittee to investigate matters, and a closer examination of the background and qualifications of all Congressional committee staffs. He said that the "one-company" bill to provide airlines with monopolies on certain international routes had been killed by the hearings, and that lobbying to kill public power by utilities would come under closer scrutiny. He also predicted that future investigations in Congress would avoid "intemperate and unproven accusations".
In Detroit, a man admitted beating to death his 20-year old wife of eleven days and then dismembering her body, because she was a "no good woman". He stated that he gave her $500 and she went out with "tramps", bought whisky and clothes for a man. Witnesses told police that the woman was a frequent visitor to local taverns. Her first marriage had been at age 13. Different parts of her body were found on Sunday and Monday in two different locations.
In Baltimore, at the National Beauty Culturists League convention, it was revealed that American women purchased 100,000 wigs per year.
In Los Angeles, the District Attorney filed bigamy charges against a man described as quite a dancer despite being pudgy, bald, and bespectacled. He had been married eight times with one annulment and no divorces. He had met most of his wives in dance halls. His last three marriages had taken place in five weeks, six since being discharged in 1942 from Folsom Prison, where he had served four years for bigamy.
In Chicago, an Irish setter, Keyco, had befriended a duckling, standing guard over its coop and supplying the duckling with rides on its back.
Also in Chicago, a 64-year old self-denominated "King of the Hoboes" stated that the annual Hobo Convention at Britt, Iowa, was for "phoneys" and he therefore was going to boycott it. The elected King from the previous year and the former King were not really hoboes, he said, because they were not bums at least half the time and were not single. They were the work of publicity agents. He proclaimed himself the bona fide article since 1940. He was orchestrating a boxcar campaign against the meeting, to be held on August 27.
If you wish to join his worthy effort and protest this usurpation through indoctrination by means of media dissemination of misinformation, just write him, c/o The King, Hoboville
His destination, no doubt, was Bangor, Maine.
Ray Howe discusses the Mid-State
On the editorial page, "'Heat of Hell' on Brewster" tells of both Henry Kaiser and Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug testifying of the "heat of hell" having been applied to obtain war contracts, but neither having explained what he meant.
But it was borne out by Senator Homer Ferguson, chairman of the War Investigating Subcommittee, having called off the Howard Hughes hearings until November 17, with Mr. Hughes predicting they would never be resumed. It left the observer with the feeling that more sensational disclosures by Mr. Hughes were about to be made, leading to the adjournment of the hearings. He had agreed on Saturday to provide documents showing the names of others besides Elliott Roosevelt for whom he had supplied entertainment. He had hinted that the guest list included important members of the armed forces.
Lending credence to the notion, Comptroller General Lindsay Warren had declared that the practice of accepting such entertainment was the rule rather than the exception with some high Government officials.
It was part of the overall lobbying problem which grew to enormous proportions during the first session of the current 80th Congress. A quarter of the registered lobbies had spent nearly three million dollars during those six months, with the purpose of affecting legislation. The Congressional Quarterly pegged the bill at closer to five million, given that some organizations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers, did not feel they needed to register under the law.
The Howard Hughes probe had demonstrated that the Congress needed to investigate all lobbying efforts and the subject of providing "entertainment" to gain influence. If the probe were not revived in November and extended more broadly, then it would be dismissed as a fiasco. The Republican attempt to uncover Democratic "confusion and corruption", as promised, had involved thus far only a smear campaign directed against Elliott Roosevelt and Howard Hughes.
"Royall's Gubernatorial Prospect" doubts that Secretary of War Kenneth Royall had committed himself as firmly to running for the North Carolina gubernatorial nomination as suggested in the Saturday column by Drew Pearson. But there was an effort by Governor Gregg Cherry and Senator William B. Umstead to find a candidate to stop State Treasurer Charles Johnson, deemed the favorite for the nomination. Mr. Royall would be well-advised not to take too seriously the talk that Mr. Johnson could be defeated. But at the same time, he was not the shoo-in many believed him to be. A campaign, however, merely aimed at stopping his candidacy would not be conducive, it suggests, to good government in the state.
In the end, Mr. Royall would not run. Kerr Scott would become the next Governor.
"'Captain Tom' of Charlotte" pays tribute to Thomas Griffith, Charlotte businessman and civic leader who had died the previous day at age 83.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Mavericks in the GOP", tells of the Republicans desiring to be shed of the like of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, who usually voted with the liberal Democrats. Another such Republican Senator was George Aiken of Vermont. But intra-party purges seldom worked, as with the attempt by FDR in 1938 to purge some Southern conservative and Midwestern and Western isolationist Democrats.
On the other side of the coin, however, there were such Democratic Senators as Pappy P. B. Lee O'Daniel and Harry F. Byrd, who regularly voted with conservative interests in Congress.
Drew Pearson tells of the Navy having ordered, at long last, an investigation of the Green Bowlers, a fraternal organization at Annapolis designed to promote fellow members to top Naval commands. The probe had been conducted in secret and so no one knew what the results would be. He imparts of the Green Bowler history, started as a drinking fraternity in 1906. Presently, it had 28 admirals and one Marine Corps general as members. Every year, Green Bowlers on the faculty of the Naval Academy selected new members from among the midshipmen. There were many in influential posts within the Government. Each wore a ring, on the inside of which was carved a green bowl.
He who wears the ring
He next tells of Congressmen taking junkets with their wives in Alaska during the summer. They included Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana and his wife, and his personal clerk along with his wife, as well as Congressman and future Senator from Pennsylvania Hugh Scott and wife. Chairman of the House Public Lands Committee, Fred Crawford of Illinois, snapped that he was not talking to Drew Pearson about any trip to Alaska.
Mr. Pearson remarks that if these junkets were designed to focus on Alaska's problems, they could prove beneficial. But thus far, the members had paid little attention to Alaska except during the summer.
Paul W. Ward, in the eighth in his series of articles for the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", suggests that developments in Russian arts and letters were in stark contrast to the assertions of intended cooperation with America conveyed by Josef Stalin to Harold Stassen when the latter visited Moscow, and by Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov on May Day.
Intellectuals in Russia were convinced that the Government was determined to rid Soviet literature, drama, and music of all "alien influences" and convert it to engines of propaganda against the West to reduce the gravitational pull by the latter on Soviet youth, rejecting Soviet authoritarianism in favor of Western ideals of capitalism and liberalism. The campaign had begun at the end of the war. The Communist Party hierarchy, the Orgburo, was supervising the campaign, and both Stalin and Molotov had led the drive. Stalin had called leading Soviet authors, theater directors, and movie producers to the Kremlin in August and ordered them to remove Western influences from their works, to stress instead capitalistic "encirclement" by the West and Western "imperialism" as a threat to new wars.
The purge was being undertaken with fervor, causing confusion and depression among intellectuals and artists in Russia. It even extended to children's literature. The "Red Army" press, Krasnoarmeets, had come under criticism for "bourgeois deviations".
A new publication, "Culture and Life", had been initiated by the Government to combat any ideas which would distract the citizenry from the task of building communism. The citizens, however, clung to ideas which the Government deemed "bourgeois". Nearly every ballet at the Bolshoi
And Bing Crosby
The other guy must still have been off fishing.
Marquis Childs tells of the effort for 75 years to regulate transportation in the country, the railroads, the steamship lines, and finally the airlines. The interests of the industries often differed markedly from those of the public, even if seemingly operating on parallel tracks.
The Maritime Commission, for instance, was a cumbersome bureaucracy appearing to act as rubber-stamp for the decisions of the steamship companies. An anti-trust action brought in San Francisco by the Justice Department against shipping lines for rate-fixing had caused a stir in the industry because other lines in other ports utilized the same rate structure. Foreign companies paid their seamen less and so profited more under the reduced rate structures, allowed by the Maritime Commission. If the Commission were to rule against the Department of Justice, the Department could proceed into the courts.
A commission or department was needed to oversee all of transportation, to cut through the maze of bureaucracy presently entangling the nation's roads, harbors, and airways. The result would be savings of Government money and efficiency. But present forces in government and industry found the existing system a convenient morass.
A letter responds negatively to the letter writer who sought to enlist the support of Governor Cherry in condemning those who conducted business and entertainment on Sundays. He says that it took all kinds of religions to make up a state. No law should tell a person what he could or could not do on Sunday. He recommends: "Do unto Sunday golfers as you would have non-Sunday golfers do unto you if you were a Sunday golfer
A letter writer thinks that the war had brought on better times and wages, not the Roosevelt Administration, which had only brought in labor organizers seeking to take part of the workers' wages in union dues, and high taxes from the Government to pay for "a gang of loafers" who did nothing.
He obviously therefore ultimately credited the bold leadership of Hitler and Tojo with providing better wages in the country.
A letter writer favors Government spending on future war through use of money which did not have interest attached to avoid bankrupting the economy.
Now, why didn't dey tink o' dat? All dose silly war bond drives. All dey needed to do was to print de money and spend it directly, like. Very simple. Dey have, like, the printing machine der in Washington, and so why not use it and avoid de interest? You see what de man is sayin' here.
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