The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 21, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Russia had exercised its U.N. Security Council veto twice in succession this day to block the the applications of Italy and Austria for membership in the U.N. They were the sixth and seventh such vetoes by the Soviets during the week and the seventeenth and eighteenth since the founding of the organization two years earlier. Russia was the only nay vote to block the proposals, which took the form that votes on admission be held before the General Assembly.

The applications of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania failed to obtain a majority of support in the Security Council, a requirement even in the absence of a veto, as nine or ten of the eleven nations abstained. The U.S. opposed the admission of each of the three on the ground that they could not yet abide by the U.N. Charter.

Russia had protested to the State Department against holding an American-British-French conference anent the rebuilding of German industrial capacity. The State Department said that the conference would proceed nevertheless.

The U.S. had protested the continued occupation by Russia of the port of Dairen in China. It also stated that, notwithstanding Russian demands that only a four-power conference consider the Japanese treaty, an eleven-nation conference would be held, at which a two-thirds majority vote would be required for passing on the treaty provisions. It would proceed with or without Soviet participation.

Britain delivered an ultimatum to the 4,400 Jewish refugees aboard three British ships off Marseilles for three weeks, refusing to leave, that they would need disembark the following day or be transported to Germany and placed in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp within the British occupation zone. They had attempted to land in Palestine a month earlier and were taken to Marseilles by the British.

Discussion began in Washington with Britain regarding easing conditions on the remaining loan proceeds of the 3.75 billion dollar loan made in 1946. Only 850 million dollars remained of the loan and the British had just taken another 450 million of those proceeds to pay for goods on order from the U.S. Treasury officials were convinced that only emergency action could save Britain from total financial collapse. The British were authorized by the U.S. to stop freely exchanging dollars for pounds, as originally required by the terms of the loan when other countries requested such payment. Treasury officials compared it to the U.S. Bank Holiday of 1933, in this instance preventing essentially a run on the Bank of England for its dollars.

The action to suspend conversion of pounds to dollars threatened further shortages in England of food and other important imports. According to Hugh Dalton, Chancellor for the Exchequer, the move would potentially interfere with some trade and hence supplies, necessitating a probable reduction in rations.

The President's mid-year economic report forecast of a five billion dollar surplus by the following June caused Republicans to call for a tax cut in 1948 and to proclaim that the President's veto two times in succession of the previous tax bill was unjustified. The President countered that the surplus should be used for debt retirement, not to lower taxes.

In New Orleans, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a reactionary racist who had regularly utilized obstructionist tactics to block progressive legislation and recently been accused of graft by influence peddling in war contracts, died indirectly of mouth cancer at age 69. By provisional agreement, he had been barred temporarily from his seat at the start of his third term in the Senate the previous January, based on alleged intimidation of black voters in the 1946 primary and the war graft charges, final action on whether to bar him permanently having been deferred because of his failing health. As part of the alleged illegal gifts he received from a major war contractor, to whom he had funneled a lucrative contract, was his "Dream House" in Poplarville, Miss. The immediate cause of death, according to the doctors, was a nerve inflammation which had left him partially paralyzed.

The previous year, he had published a book titled Take Your Choice—Separation or Mongrelization. Mr. Bilbo openly admitted membership in the Klan and regularly engaged in race-baiting throughout his career. When once he was asked who would pick the cotton if blacks were shipped back to Africa pursuant to a bill he had introduced, he responded that the mechanical cotton picker would do the work and it would not be "demanding social equality or intermarriage with the whites."

In Jacksonville, Fla., a woman complained that her husband, whom she had met in Asheville, N.C., tortured her and beat her in a hotel room. He was charged with assault with intent to commit murder and a crime against nature. The couple had separated three weeks earlier after his drinking became excessive. The wife alleged that he had tied her to the bed and used a hunting knife to carve his initials into her thigh and cut crosses into her breasts. She had escaped by using her toes to grasp the knife, bringing it close enough to cut her restraints. The man, who had been a staff sergeant in the Eighth Air Force and had flown combat missions over Germany during the war, was quoted as saying that whatever his wife had said of the previous night was true.

In Euphrata, Wash., two brothers, meeting for the first time in six years, shook hands so vigorously that one broke the other's arm.

In Charlotte, the FBI agent in charge of the Charlotte office had his convertible stolen, shortly after which it turned over on Pineville Road, killing one man and injuring three other occupants. The driver was charged with manslaughter and auto theft. One other occupant was charged also with auto theft.

Also in Charlotte, a bootlegger's car blew a tire, careened out of control, and overturned against an embankment on Providence Road while going 70 mph with a liquor haul aboard. The driver escaped injury, but lost a lot of his tax-paid Calvert Reserve whiskey, even if 336 bottles survived the crash. A photograph of the haul appears on the page.

He may have been over the gallon limit. We'll get out our abacus and check that. They could have been those little baby bottles from the airlines.

The man was to be tried the following day in Recorder's Court for violation of the Turlington Act.

Police said that they expected bootlegging to continue in the area, despite the impending start of the ABC system in September, especially at night when liquor stores were closed and there was no way to get liquored up should a person have been too drunk or lazy during the day to get to the store.

On the editorial page, "Columbia Incident Holds Fire" finds the recent incident in Columbia, N.C., in which 200 to 300 white men had forced six Harvard, Yale, and U.N.C. students to leave the home of a black man whom they were assisting in establishing a farmers' credit union for black farmers, to be an incident betraying more racial tension in the state than either the Ahoskie Kiwanis Cadillac lottery—in which initially a black man was excluded from cashing in his winning ticket because of race and finally, after threat of exposure in the Senate, the Kiwanians having agreed to grant him also a Cadillac—, or the attempted lynching of Buddy Bush in Jackson in Northampton County.

The students were present as an experiment conducted by the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and if such peaceful, cooperative arrangements could not be undertaken without being blocked by racial prejudice, no progress in race relations could take place.

The Police Chief had stated that it was good that the students had left, as violence otherwise might have transpired.

Henry Wallace, while in Raleigh the previous June, had observed, as he imparted in The New Republic, that sincere Southern liberals who were inclined to maintain undemocratic traditions as segregation were mistaken, as the Raleigh City Commissioners had voted two to one to support an integrated meeting at which Mr. Wallace spoke, as demanded by its organizers, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

It finds that the Columbia incident stood in stark contrast to Mr. Wallace's rosy outlook and gave to determined liberals as Mr. Wallace a warning that they should restrict their efforts on behalf of racial progress to that which public opinion in the state and region would accept. Any effort to venture further would only endanger the success of the moderate program.

"Pushing Britain Toward Abyss" tells of the London Daily Mail reporting that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was going to step aside for declining health as soon as the Anglo-American conference on easing the conditions of the American loan to Britain was completed. The rumor would produce concern regarding the stability of the British Labor Government, even if the Daily Mail was a mouthpiece for the Conservative Party. The newspaper also ascribed the ongoing unrest within the Labor Party, with one faction wanting a more active program, as a cause of the supposed resignation. Since Parliament had just provided the Prime Minister with economic powers equivalent to those in wartime, the ability to direct labor, it would be of concern if Mr. Attlee were succeeded by a more radical leader.

Many observers agreed with Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times that the crisis in England was not the result of Socialism but rather the combined forces of war and political revolution, accompanied by economic exhaustion. The political crisis, she contended, which had developed out of the economic crisis, was primarily within the Labor Party.

If Mr. Attlee should step aside, then the Socialists, not the Conservatives of Winston Churchill, would likely gain control in the House. Thus, Mr. Churchill, by loudly protesting the grant of sweeping economic powers to Mr. Attlee, calling them "dictatorial", was effectively forcing the hand of Labor in a direction even more opposed to his party's interests.

Tom Lynch of The News tells of the jitterbugging going on in Charlotte's night spots, resemblant to the native dances of Indians described by John Lawson, an Englishman who had written of the Piedmont from his experiences traveling through the area in 1701. The dogs fled the circle as the native dance commenced with the beat of a drum. Fine young men dressed in feathers then emerged, their faces obscured by vizards made from gourds, with bells upon their ankles and knees. They danced for about an hour, brandishing their wooden weapons in offensive gestures.

Then, about thirty women entered the dirt circle and danced for about six hours until they were all in "white lather". Every young male then took the girl he liked as his partner for the night, conducive to quick romance and hastened weddings.

Rum heightened the frenzy of the Indians, just as in modern times in the juke joints. Some of the Indians, while drinking, fell into the fires and burned their legs and arms, causing them to be crippled the rest of their lives. Others fell off cliffs and broke bones.

Mr. Lawson admired the stamina of the dancers, a method used to improve their wind. Mr. Lynch finds it similar to the danceathons of modern times.

Mr. Lawson reported of another practice whereby the Indians took their enemies as captive and then stuck them with light-wood splinters, then lighted as candles, forcing the victim to dance around the fire until exhausted or dead.

The Indians also conducted war dances upon the prospect of warfare.

While the dances were pagan, Mr. Lynch questions whether they were any more so than the jitterbugs of 1947.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Exports as a Business Factor", finds that the President's mid-year economic report had shown that the products for which shortages existed in the country, automobiles, textiles, rubber products, iron and steel mill products, and machinery, led the list of increased exports. It finds that the anticipated decline in exports would result in these goods coming into the domestic market and thus not cause a downturn in business activity.

Robert S. Allen, substituting for his former partner Drew Pearson, tells of former Nebraska Governor Dwight Griswold, assigned to oversee the distribution of aid in Greece, not having to wait long to find that he had a huge job in dealing with the ultra-reactionary Government of Greece. The Greek Government had informed him shortly after arrival that the country's food reserves were exhausted. It was believed that both incompetence and deliberate pressure had resulted in the food shortage. The U.S. could not allow food riots to take place as that would be exploited by the Communists and could spread adverse propaganda across Europe. Mr. Griswold acted fast and decisively, as did the State Department.

As soon as Mr. Griswold alerted the State Department to the emergency, it responded by getting the War Department to divert two shiploads of flour headed to Germany. The action had averted a disaster.

He next informs of Lieutenant Governor Arthur Coolidge of Massachusetts, fourth cousin of the former President, who was as niggardly as his distant cousin. When the Governor was away on business and Mr. Coolidge was Acting Governor, he saw that the Capitol sprinklers were running even as it rained. He ordered them turned off, as, he said, God was watering the grass.

At the Boston City Club, with an array of haute cuisine on the menu, he ordered the Luncheon Special, costing 90 cents.

"Our Fair City", best-seller on municipal rule, had pointed out that the state legislatures had long kept a stranglehold on cities. The average voter did not understand this situation. James Cox-owned newspapers in Dayton, Atlanta, and Miami were explaining the process. The report from the 1920 Democratic nominee's organs had been called the "spearhead of revolt of the cities."

Allan Kline, head of the Iowa Farm Bureau, was running for the presidency of the National Farm Bureau and had a tough row to hoe in doing so. Midwestern farmers supported his notions of reducing Government subsidies, but Southern farmers, growers of cotton, wanted the supports left alone. Ed O'Neal, Southern farm spokesman, also was running, and the South could outvote the Midwest. Mr. Kline thus was trying to effect a compromise with the Southerners.

Paul W. Ward, in the 16th in his series of articles from the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", relates of the monetary situation in Russia, that the dollar would buy 30 rubles on the black market, whereas the official rate of exchange was 5.3 rubles to the dollar. But in neighboring countries, Russian soldiers gladly accepted a dollar for 40 to 60 rubles, indicative of the instability of the Russian currency, more so than that of Greece, Britain, or France. The franc, for instance, rarely sold on the black market for more than two and half to three time its official rate.

The Russians recently had made the French pay their bills at the Moscow Conference in dollars rather than francs. It also exchanged the dollar at 12 rubles, the "diplomatic rate", rather than the official 5.3, cutting the cost of Soviet goods to the foreign delegations who could pay in dollars. But the ruble was still overvalued even at 8.3 cents, its actual value being more like 3 cents, or, based on merchandise pricing in ration stores, about 5 cents, discounting qualitative differences from American goods of the same type, and about 2 cents in non-ration stores.

UNRRA supplies had cost Russians the equivalent of 3.93 cents in rubles.

Industrial rubles had a higher value than the consumer ruble.

Prior to the war, sales taxes amounted to 50 to 60 percent of the retail price of goods, the Russians favoring sales taxes over income taxes to raise revenue, though the former were regressive in nature. Since the war, sales taxes amounted to about 70 percent of the retail price, though the tax was higher on non-rationed commercial goods than on rationed goods.

The value of the ruble had declined about 82 percent since the period between 1932 and 1937.

Marquis Childs, on his way to Germany, tells of his intent to report on what Americans were doing in Europe, both in terms of occupation duties in Germany and Austria and in relief and rehabilitation for Greece, Italy, and Western Europe.

Some Americans wanted a Pax Americana, a form of benevolent imperialism, while others desired a more constructive role for rehabilitating Europe, close to the Marshall Plan's objectives.

Regardless of which tack was pursued, the question was whether Americans had the pertinacity to undertake the program for the length of time necessary to achieve progress. Part of the answer was in Europe, how Americans had performed to date and how Europeans perceived the performance.

He quotes from The Economist that if resources, scientific knowledge and productive "know-how" were the basis for power, then the U.S. could take on the rest of the world easily. But, it continued, they were not. There had to be also a willingness and ability to use economic resources in support of national policy. Though Russia was unlikely, for another generation, to have the resources at the command of America, they had the ability by the nature of their government to force the workers to produce.

Mr. Childs adds that his reports would also deal with European political and economic trends.

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