The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 24, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. sided with Russia against Britain to block immediate debate of the report of the U.N. Trusteeship Council. The Soviet delegation, which had boycotted the Council meetings, wanted more time to study the issues. The debate instead would be held the following week.
Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the U.S. delegation, had been chosen by Secretary of State Marshall, with concurrence by the White House, to take part in responding to Andrei Vishinsky's charge of U.S. warmongering.
A Big Three commission agreed that 330 million dollars worth of gold seized by the Germans from the other European nations during the war could be returned, half of which could be distributed by October 15. It would, however, only afford brief relief for the troubled nations.
The President was scheduled this afternoon to meet with his Cabinet to discuss the food situation at home and abroad.
The Congressional food subcommittee investigating food prices in New York called on the President to use every means at his disposal to restrain speculation on food, driving prices to "unjustifiable levels". It suggested that margin requirements for grain exchanges should be raised and that Government food purchases should be studied to minimize their impact on speculation.
Gordon Gray of Winston-Salem was sworn in this date as Assistant Secretary of the Army, as his three young sons, Gordon, Jr., Burton, and Boyden, looked on. Boyden Gray would become chief counsel to President George H. W. Bush.
NLRB legal counsel Robert Denham challenged the AFL International Typographical Union for unfair labor practices under Taft-Hartley in their refusal to bargain in good faith with 22 Baltimore printing firms and for coercing the firms to select certain plant foremen
The union officers said that they "deny emphatically any such charges."
It appeared as a Comedy of Errors
In Seattle, labor booed and noisily walked out on Senator Robert Taft as he spoke in defense of the Taft-Hartley Act, denouncing labor leaders who had criticized the law. The predominantly Republican audience drowned out the boos.
Earlier, at the railway station, a nervous driver slammed a car door on Mr. Taft's left hand, requiring six stitches.
At least it was not his knee. But he could have written a book, perhaps, catchily titled "Six Stitches".
In Leonardtown, Md., the jury took only an hour and 55 minutes to render a verdict of guilty against the sailor accused of second degree murder of a Naval flight officer's wife. He was subject to a five to eighteen year sentence.
There may be a country or folk ballad in that case somewhere. Call it "Falling off the Bed".
In Sacramento, disc jockey Frank Nicholson, known as "Rodeo Roy", married the "sterilized heiress" late on Saturday, his wife having died Friday night of an overdose of a headache remedy with divorce proceedings pending. Tactfully, the new Mrs. Nicholson stated that the wife had agreed that the two would be married "as soon as she withdrew from the scene. Well, she withdrew."
Nothing like a class act.
Mr. Nicholson had a plain clothes policeman accompanying him at his wife's funeral as someone had communicated by telephone that Rodeo Roy would be "bumped off" at the proceeding.
In Pittsburgh, a City Councilman renewed his longstanding plea to effect sidewalk repairs in the city. The unhealthy state of the sidewalks, he contended, would be exacerbated by the longer skirt lengths now in fashion among women.
A tropical storm dumped 4.68 inches of rain on Charleston, with winds gusting to 45 mph. The storm was headed north with less intensity, toward Cape Hatteras.
Winston-Salem, plagued by a water shortage, received much needed rain, with a third of an inch falling in 24 hours.
That is because the City fathers secretly contacted the Hollisterians, who attacked the Roswellian camp and eliminated some of their controlling forces manipulating the weather. But that's old news.
A special 40-page section of the newspaper this date was devoted to the nationwide outlook for the football season. Be sure to catch it on the run—something our team had great trouble doing this last Saturday. We shall just chalk it up to an incident of piracy on the high seas, and hope for the best this weekend in discerning what's what
On the editorial page, "Wallace Still Swings Wild" tells of Henry Wallace having stated before the United Electrical Workers in Boston that the U.S. would never win a third world war as the reactionary governments it was supporting abroad would crumble in the event of a war with Russia.
The piece thinks it would only inspire further bombast from the former Vice-President's bombastic critics.
While true that in the event of such a war, revolution might occur on the Continent, and that the atom bomb was not the absolutely potent weapon which advocates of first strike, as former Governor George Earle of Pennsylvania, proposed, it did not necessarily follow that the United States could not win such a war.
In making the statement, Mr. Wallace had revealed himself to be "as emotional, extreme and dogmatic in his thinking as those Americans who can see war as the only way out."
Mr. Wallace, it concludes, had not taken enough time off from the campaign circuit.
"Tar Heels Take Over the Army" gives high praise to President Truman's appointment of Gordon Gray as Assistant Secretary of the Army. Mr. Gray was able and had been a successful publisher in Winston-Salem at a relatively young age, was also a competent public servant in his three terms in the State Senate.
With Kenneth Royall, also of North Carolina, heading the Army Department, North Carolinians had a right to view the Army at present as their special responsibility.
"Signal in Petkov's Death" suggests relationship between the fiery debate between Russia and the U.S. at the U.N. and the execution in Bulgaria of Nikola Petkov two days earlier. The fact that Mr. Petkov was hurriedly executed, over the objections of both Britain and the United States, suggested the weakening of Soviet influence in Bulgaria, within the Soviet sphere. He appeared to have been purged as the most efficient and courageous of the opposition leaders to the Communists in the Balkans.
The purpose of the swift execution appeared to be to quash any notion of revolt at home and show defiance internationally to the West, to demonstrate visibly that Russia could not be moved by world opinion.
Likewise, the criticism of the Marshall Plan before the U.N. had the same latter purpose and betrayed the same alarm at Soviet weakness.
It concludes that the calculated risk undertaken by Secretary of State Marshall in strongly criticizing Russia at the U.N. might soon take the offensive from the Russians in the "so-called 'cold war'".
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Doggoned Serious Business", tells of National Dog Week having begun September 21, with Greensboro's Mayor Fielding Fly having been one of its original proclaimers.
It provides some practical advice to dog owners, which included getting up and loudly admonishing the canine should it howl, so that neighbors would not think the owner insensible to their discomfort. Also, it was good to warn dinner guests of the dog's favorite piece of meat. And never talk baby-talk
Finally, it warns never to forget the fate of the ass, as related in one of Aesop's fabular moral essays
Drew Pearson tells of a battle brewing between the Export-Import Bank, which considered Europe a bad financial risk for a loan of any of its 800 million dollars, and the State and Treasury Departments, which were desperately seeking money on an interim emergent basis for Europe until spring, when the Marshall Plan would be implemented.
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was showing favoritism for his old friends in the Navy, retaining only his Navy and Marine aides and office staff.
Speaker of the House Joe Martin was recently telling friends that he believed a sudden boom for either General Eisenhower or General MacArthur could take place, giving the nomination of the GOP to either one in 1948, to General MacArthur if the mood became desperate for need of an iron hand. When asked about the calamity attending the Bonus March of 1932, in which the Army forces in Washington were led by General MacArthur—with then Major Eisenhower also present—, he explained that the public had a short memory. When asked whether General MacArthur would not be considered too old to be President, Mr. Martin responded that people were as young as they feel and that the General had to feel young to have run Japan as vigorously as he had.
Mr. Martin denied any designs on the presidency for himself, explaining that his Western trip had started with two speaking engagements, and then he decided to detour to North Dakota to shoot pheasants.
Mr. Pearson relates also of the last visit to Capitol Hill by Fiorello La Guardia the previous July, during which Congressman John Dingell of Michigan warned his old friend to slow down because he appeared frail. Mr. La Guardia had died the previous Saturday.
Marquis Childs, in Athens, tells of politics being the only luxury remaining to the people of Greece. A session of the Greek Parliament combined the excitement of a fight, a football game, and an opera. Partisans came to view the proceedings, packing the galleries, cheering the entrance of each of their respective leaders. The women attended, dressed to the nines, with an energetic applause lauding each leader, reserved in America for sports heroes and revered opera singers.
Political feuds in Greece were complicated by long prior histories, the untangling of which was bewildering to Americans trying to administer the aid program and establish order out of the chaos produced during the war. It was hoped that the coalition Government of Themistokles Sophoulis would be able to bring that desired order. At 86 and head of the Liberal Party, he was widely revered in the country, was a Republican but not a Socialist.
Individualism in Greece had run wild. Everywhere two Greeks gathered produced a political party
The Communists had leaders, as Nicholas Zachariades, trained in Moscow, believed now to be in either Yugoslavia or Albania, in waiting to form a free government, apart from the throne.
The trade unions also were divided in their affiliations, as, by law, any group of seven could form a union. Before the Metaxas dictatorship, there had been 600 unions, and by 1940, 1,400. Presently, there were 2,200, divided among fifteen federations. There were even a union of orphans and a union of retired dancing instructors
It would take years to get the Greek unions back on solid ground. The International Labor Office was about to send a mission to Greece to try to help to disentangle the labor laws which had encouraged the disintegration.
The rampant individualism, he suggests, could still prove disastrous in Greece if not checked.
Joseph Alsop, in Rome, finds Italy still to be a good investment for the U.S. in a risky world. Italy had managed to rebuild much of its infrastructure destroyed during the war. He cites Salerno, where the bloody landing had occurred in 1943, as example of that rebirth, with hardly a sign remaining of the war. Italians worked, whether in the factories of Milan and Turin or in the Tuscan countryside. Industrial production had risen from 25 percent to 70 percent and farm output, from 60 percent of that prior to the war to 80 percent.
The population had risen by three million since 1940, preventing life from improving for the individual, with rations at 200 grams of bread per day plus small servings of fish, fruit, cheese and bits of meat obtained through the black market at high prices or from relatives who had farms. With such a low standard of living extant, the Communists remained powerful. To raise the standard would take U.S. dollars to buy wheat for bread, fertilizer, and coal and raw materials. Disaster would occur without that aid or if economic collapse across the world were to take place.
Obtaining wheat from the allocated resources of the world would be tougher than getting the dollars. The Italian Government needed 250 million dollars for the remainder of the 1947-48 fiscal year, 825 million for 1949, 410 million for 1950 and 130 million for 1951. While large in the abstract, it was small by comparison to the 20 billion necessary to maintain a strong defense.
Tripling the cost of national defense would be a first step toward allowing Western Europe to pass into the Soviet sphere.
A letter from the president of the Friends of the Birds, Inc., tells of the great unsolved mystery of the bird migration each year from the North Pole to the South Pole. The warbler would eat 3,500 aphids in 40 minutes during the September migration.
She recommends keeping the birdbath fresh, and explains how to hold and feed a bird if one were found incapacitated in the city. Fear could kill it. No closed boxes, release the aviator in the morning outside crowded districts, in a park or cemetery. If one flew inside a building or home, don't give chase but open a door or window.
She says that the female warbler
A letter gives praise to the September 20 editorial "Oleo, Butter and Legislation", saying that the piece was correct in asserting that legislation preventing the use of yellow food coloring in margarine, urged by the dairy competition, lacked sense, given the use of coloring in orange and grape juices.
He thinks margarine was more akin to butter than was water to milk and so need not be sold as "margarine"
A letter from A. W. Black responds to a letter written in reply to his statement that Palestine could no more be put back together again than Humpty Dumpty. He says that his opinion was formed from fastidious research and that he never allowed weaklings to talk him out of it.
Nor had he ever misquoted the Bible as had his correspondent in reply, purportedly quoting from I Kings 3:12-13, but substituting "Israel" for "Solomon", "Israel" being "wholly inappropriate and alien to the entire passage" and a "shameful and unethical trick to achieve a point, that is both trivial and beggarly"—never minding that Solomon was King of Israel and that often within the context of the English language, as in Shakespeare, a sovereignty was deemed synonymous with its King.
In any event, given the admonition of Revelations 22:19, that banishment from the Holy City and the Book of Life awaits those who would add to or subtract from the words of the Bible, no doubt, in Mr. Black's view, the respondent ought be hanged
A letter from the chairman of the Chester County Guernsey Festival thanks the newspaper for its cooperation in promoting the festival held September 16. The Guernseys had received a good crowd of admirers and were thankful.
A letter writer, after reading a News editorial, praises Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for speaking out in his written statement to the realtors' convention in Myrtle Beach, critical of the real estate lobby.
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