The Charlotte News
Saturday, September 20, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault told the U.N. General Assembly that the conflict between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had reached such a point that it was useless any longer to expect or attempt to effect reconciliation between the two governments.
The Lebanese delegate objected to U.S. policy favoring division of Palestine between Jewish and Arab territories.
Former New York Mayor and, more recently, head of UNRRA, Fiorello La Guardia
The U.N. General Assembly paused for a moment of silence in honor of the former Mayor.
The hurricane of the previous three days had reportedly killed at least eight persons in the areas of Biloxi, Gulfport, and Pass Christian, Miss. Another ten deaths were unofficially reported.
An eyewitness account by A.P. reporter Elliott Chase regarding the hurricane tells of Highway 90 between Gulfport and New Orleans having been rendered impassable by the hurricane. Unconfirmed reports told of 13 persons having been killed in the area of Gulfport. He recounts of heavy damage being suffered also in Biloxi.
A new storm was reported to be forming in the Caribbean.
On Tuesday, a tidal wave had hit Grand Bahama Island and swept away half the houses in the village of West End on Settlement Point. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter had arrived the previous night to provide assistance to those without shelter and food.
Corn and wheat prices continued to decline in light of the buyers' strike, giving hope to consumers.
In London, Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten were said to be likely to take their honeymoon in Britain upon their scheduled marriage in November. The Government had restricted foreign travel as part of its austerity policy.
In Raleigh, the State Attorney General and the Lenoir Solicitor agreed that R. L. Fritz, former principal of the Hudson School in Caldwell County, should face criminal charges on whether he had intent to defraud in padding the payroll of the school to pay overtime to teachers to keep the school going during a nationwide staff shortage, especially acute in the South and in North Carolina. He had been stripped of his teaching certificate by the State Board of Education. Mr. Fritz was the president of the North Carolina Education Association and had advocated higher teacher salaries than that passed by the Legislature in the 1947 session.
He was probably a Communist also and should be hung.
On Wednesday, The News would present a preview of the football season. College terms in those days, and into the mid-1960's, did not begin usually until around the middle of September.
Anyway, don't miss the Wednesday edition should you wish to know what's what.
On the editorial page, "Taft in California Climate" tells of Senator Robert Taft, during his preliminary campaign tour of the West, telling the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that the largest contributory factor to inflation was high wages, while also expressing support for an increase in the minimum wage to 60 cents per hour from 40 cents, and tax reduction. Apparently, the latter was meant to appeal to his business oriented audience, as well as to the wage earner. But if he was correct about high wages being the primary culprit in causing inflation, then an increase in the minimum wage and tax reduction would only contribute further to the upward spiral.
It finds in his stated desire to level off prices and wages at 50 to 60 percent higher than the pre-war levels the inherent suggestion for reinstitution of government controls. Mr. Taft had been one of the leading proponents of free enterprise during the debate on removal of controls in mid-1946. Perhaps, it remarks, the California climate was doing him good.
Don't bet on it. He was still in the fog.
"Confusion in Morgenthau Diaries" remarks on the first installment in Collier's from the Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., former Secretary of the Treasury during the Roosevelt years. It reveals that he did not like Henry Wallace from the beginning, when FDR appointed him to be Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. Mr. Wallace, according to Mr. Morgenthau, was the most profligate spender among the principal triumvirate in charge of New Deal spending, which included WPA head Harry Hopkins and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, in charge of the Public Works Administration. Mr. Morgenthau stated that he was in favor of all necessary spending for human needs but not so much that would demoralize the business community. He found Mr. Hopkins the most efficient of the three, Mr. Ickes too slow and careful, spending money "through a medicine dropper". Mr. Wallace's approach to spending was "nonsense".
The editorial finds that Mr. Morgenthau did not back up his assertions with facts. He merely stated baldly that in one nine-month period, Mr. Wallace "gave away" 516 million dollars at an administrative cost to the Government of 130 million. But in context, that referred to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and other agencies which proved the salvation of farmers during the latter stages of the Depression, after the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. The AAA had a necessarily large and complex bureaucratic framework to distribute subsidies and educate farmers on techniques to avoid soil erosion and depletion, and so it was unfair to compare its machinery with such relatively simple bureaus as WPA. By making the comparison, Mr. Morgenthau appeared to argue that relief to farmers was not so important as relief to industrial workers.
The impression from the first installment of the Diaries was that Mr. Morgenthau had yet to understand the entire scope of the New Deal program. But a certain amount of incoherence, it offers, was to be expected from someone who spent their time in government trying to balance the budget while simultaneously priming the pump, and since had been trying to discern what happened, from perusal of his 600 volumes of diary entries.
The piece does not note an exchange, made more interesting by later history, related by Mr. Morgenthau which the President had with then Maritime Commission chairman Joseph Kennedy, circa 1936, in which the latter was upset about the budget. The President said, "Now, Joe, just go away and stop worrying. Henry and I have another white rabbit to pull out of our hats." Mr. Kennedy had replied, "Mr. President, if you have got it, I am going to get drunk next Monday night."
It also does not relate of the nickname once regularly applied to Mr. Morgenthau in The News, and other places "Oleo, Butter and Legislation" suggests that if butter, approaching $1 per pound, went to $35 an ounce, the Government would place it in Fort Knox, isolate it from use by the public. Sales of oleomargarine had markedly increased because of the high price of its dairy competitor. Manufacturers estimated that Americans would, in the coming year, consume 700 million pounds of margarine, costing about 40 cents per pound, compared to 540 million the previous year. There were heavy taxes on margarine, promoted by the dairy industry lobbyists through the years, and most states refused to allow it to be sold as yellow margarine, rather coming to the consumer as a lard-like substance. The consumer had to add food coloring to make it appealing to the eye and palate. It suggests that the ten minutes of labor per pound for the purpose would amount to 87.5 million "woman hours" in the kitchen. With artificial coloring used in orange juice and grape juice, and other such products, it sees no reason not to allow yellow coloring to be used in margarine. We advocate purple and green stripes. A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Canada's Decontrol Policy", tells of Canada removing ceilings on some goods while leaving them in place on rents, sugar, meat, wheat, fats, dried fruit, iron, steel, and tin. The Canadian cost of living had risen only 36.1 percent over the base period 1935-39, while the American cost of living had risen in the same period 57.1 percent. Meanwhile, Canadian business had advanced as their reasonably priced exports were in demand. The piece suggests that Americans ought take heed. Drew Pearson remarks of the Cabinet preparing to meet with the President upon his return to Washington this date from his trip to Brazil. The major items on the agenda were whether to call a special session of Congress to meet the emergency in Europe, heavily favored by Secretary of State Marshall, and whether to reimpose rationing and price controls to stem the inflationary spiral at home, adversely affecting the ability of the European nations to buy U.S. goods. But Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson had already informed associates recently that when Europe received 1.8 million tons of wheat from U.S. farmers in August, they had gone on an eating binge rather than storing it for winter. Moreover, Europe did not have dollars to pay for the wheat, the U.S. lacked freight cars to transport it to the East Coast, and Europe did not collect its own wheat. On the latter point, Mr. Anderson had pointed out that Greece had a wheat harvest of 600,000 tons the previous year, but collected only one-twelfth of it. Greek officials offered him no explanation when he inquired as to the reason for the discrepancy, only lamely suggested that it was resultant of a change in Government. Thus, Mr. Anderson would probably advise the President that the Europeans had neglected the self-help part of the Marshall Plan. O. Max Gardner, who had died in early February on the morning on which he was to sail to Britain to begin his tenure as Ambassador, would have, Mr. Pearson remarks, been able to engender better understanding between Americans and Britons than was currently the case. His homespun nature and understanding of American reaction would have enabled him to provide good counsel to the British Government to avoid some of the diplomatic faux pas which had occurred of late, insulting to many Americans. The British had never appreciated Mr. Gardner's value, having not gotten to know him. They did not send any representaitve to his funeral in Shelby, N.C., and when his widow attended a dinner with the President, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, and the widow of the late Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, Lord Inverchapel told her that he was glad to see her consorting with such people, apparently believing that the Gardners had truck too much with ordinary folk. Australia's Herbert Evatt would ask the U.N. General Assembly to issue a ceasefire order to the Greek Government and the guerillas fighting in Northern Greece, similar to that recently issued to the Dutch and Indonesians in the East Indies. The ceasefire would be coupled with the Greek Government's offer of amnesty to the guerrillas, but guaranteed by the U.N. with observers sent to insure that it would be carried out. Mr. Pearson reports that Andrei Gromyko, despite backing the Indonesian ceasefire, would oppose the resolution for Greece. Marquis Childs, in Athens, discusses the conflict between U.S. Ambassador to Greece Lincoln MacVeagh, in the position, with the exception of a brief respite, for fourteen years, and newly arrived Dwight Griswold, former Governor of Nebraska, in charge of administering the U.S. aid to Greece. Mr. MacVeagh had been educated at Groton and was steeped in classical Greek literature, could deliver beautiful speeches in Greek. Mr. Griswold, in starkly contrasting style, wore baggy seersucker pants and sport shirts, chewed gum in cadence, to the annoyance of Greeks with whom he came in contact. The two approached Greek politics from different positions. Mr. MacVeagh had long distrusted the aging Themistokles Sophoulis, head of the Liberal Party, believed him to be flirting with Communists. He had ignored Mr. Sophoulis for 18 months, despite the latter's reputation in Greece for high integrity. Mr. MacVeagh had been cozy with the King and was an old friend of Constantin Tsaldaris, head of the Royalist Party. Mr. Griswold believed that a coalition government was necessary, not one solely made up of Mr. Tsaldaris and his followers. Loy Henderson, in charge of Near East affairs for the State Department, was dispatched to Greece and informed both Mr. Tsaldaris and Mr. Sophoulis that refusing to cooperate with one another was no longer acceptable, that the American public was not pleased with the political in-fighting ongoing in Greece, and thus coerced the two to cooperate, with an implied ultimatum that the aid program might be curtailed otherwise. The result was the recently formed coalition Cabinet, with Mr. Sophoulis as Premier and Mr. Tsaldaris as Vice-Premier. Mr. Childs concludes that perhaps Mr. MacVeagh and Mr. Griswold might also, therefore, work out their differences. Stewart Alsop discusses the conundrum facing the Government regarding the European crisis and the need for dollars forthwith to avert collapse, the inability to purchase coal and grains as the dollars were running out. The question was from whence the dollars would come, as the Congress would likely not pass the Marshall Plan before early spring. That left the World Bank, the officers of which had repeatedly stated its purpose not to be provision of stopgap measures but to stabilize currencies. The Export-Import Bank was another possibility, but it was taking much the same position. The third potential source was the 400 million dollars in proceeds frozen from the U.S. 3.75 billion-dollar loan of 1946 to Britain, unfreezing it on condition that Britain accept Greek and French Sterling for dollars, with which the latter could then buy their necessary coal and wheat for the winter months ahead. But it was doubtful that Britain would accept such an arrangement when it was also starved for dollars and facing crisis, the people already heavily rationed. The Paris conference on the Marshall Plan was behind schedule in rendering a final report acceptable to America anent the attending 16 nations' needs. Then, the three American committees would have to review the plan for submission to Congress. It appeared that they would not be able to deliver their reports before early November. The respective foreign relations committees of the House and Senate then would have to hold hearings, taking probably several weeks, followed by debate in each chamber before the Marshall Plan could be passed. It appeared that the Soviet sphere would be able to gobble up Western Europe before the Marshall Plan would ever go into effect. Congress thus had to be persuaded to provide some interim emergency aid. But the Republican leadership was convinced that Congress would only act on the basis of overwhelming evidence of the necessitous state of Europeans. A letter from a German refugee who fled Berlin after the Russians had moved in and taken his family's home and belongings, now living in Bonn in the British zone of occupation, tells of the rude living conditions he and his family endured, solicits aid to make it through the winter. He offers shame for his fellow countrymen having followed and placed their blind trust in "a kind of anti-Christ". Gee, things are tough all over, pal. Next time, don't say, "Sieg heil," when someone charming tells you to blame them for all your problems. Say, "Go to hell, Hitler, go to hell." A letter from A. W. Black responds to the editors' comment following a letter suggesting that Henry Ford would be written up by historians as a greater liberal than Henry Wallace, to which the editors had responded by inquiring whether the writer referred to the Henry Ford who gave the first $5 per day industrial wage or the Henry Ford who had published in 1920-21 the bitterly anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent. Mr. Black thinks the label "anti-Semitic" to be overly inclusive, violative of Webster's definition of Semite, as embracing, in addition to Jews, Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians and other peoples of Southeast Asia. Okay, why don't we just refer to the anti-Semites then as little Klan-like Nazis and be done with it? A letter responds to Mr. Black's previously stated objection to the Jewish War Veterans' stance, favoring that the U.N. order forthwith British evacuation from Palestine and substitute a U.N. police force, part of which could be comprised by the Jewish War Veterans, and his further rejoinder to a reply which had cited Mark Twain as favoring the Jewish homeland, in response to Mr. Black's injunction that Humpty Dumpty could not be put back together again in Palestine, the Jews having been expelled by the Roman General Julius Severus 1,800 years earlier. Mr. Black had called Mr. Twain a sentimentalist. This writer quotes from the Bible, I Kings 3:12, on the concept: "Lo, I have given thee, Israel, a wise and understanding heart..." A letter responds to the Baptist minister who had sided with the Southern Baptists in objecting to President Truman corresponding with Pope Pius XII and to the Supreme Court decision upholding as an essential service use of public school buses to transport children to Catholic schools, not violative of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This writer thinks the latter holding only fair as Catholics paid taxes to support the public schools, as every other taxpayer, did not seek reimbursement when they sent their children to the private Catholic school. Framed Edition
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