Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that twelve Jews and
eight Arabs had been killed in three-cornered fighting with British
forces in the southern coastal plain of Palestine. The Arabs were of
Isdud, north of Gaza, and the Jews, of the Yavna settlement.
On the northern frontier, British forces appeared to be
seeking to seal off Palestine from outside assistance from other
Arabs, driving back with armed force 600 Arabs from Syria the
previous day. The attack had extended to the village of Dan and
appeared to be part of a general attack plan orchestrated by
longtime Arab revolt leader Fawzi Bey Al Kaukji. Arab volunteers
were coming from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq and
Lebanon, presently training in southern Syria.
Hey, stupid. Yeah you, you dumb towel-head. You, who do not
understand or respect anything but greasy wealth and do not
appreciate freedom of speech and its concomitant, freedom of
religious belief. No one is taking your land. It was desert before
the European Jews came and taught you how to grow things, dumbbell.
Grow up.
Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas testified to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. might recover as much as
1.3 to 2.8 billion dollars of the 6.8 billion to be tendered in aid
the first year and a quarter to the 16 recipient Western European
nations under the proposed Marshall Plan.
Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire stated that the
Department of Interior had informed him of a 22-state meeting to be
held in Washington the following Thursday anent the fuel oil
shortage across the country. It coincided with a recommendation of
his Senate Commerce subcommittee which was investigating the issue.
A ten-day old strike in Texas City, Texas, which had tied up
millions of gallons of fuel oil, had been settled through Federal
mediation.
Senator Tobey also stated that his home state of New
Hampshire was determined to cast its eight convention delegate votes
for General Eisenhower and that no one, not even the General, could
stop the movement. The primary was scheduled for March 9. The
Senator was elected as a member of the board of directors of the
Draft Eisenhower League formed in New York. General Eisenhower, ill
with a cold, made no comment.
Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico indicated his support for
Secretary of State Marshall as the vice-presidential nominee on the
Democratic ticket. General Marshall had stated that he had no
intention of being on the ticket.
Supporters of General MacArthur in Illinois indicated that
his name would be on the primary ballot on April 13. He had received
550,000 of nearly 800,000 votes cast in the 1944 primary, advisory
only and not binding on the delegates.
In New Orleans, three of the bank robbers who made away with
$114,000 from the Hibernia National Bank the previous day had been
captured. Two others, "the brains of the outfit", remained
at large, with $49,000 of the loot from the robbery. It was thought
that they might be aboard a bus with the money being carried in a
suitcase—hence the label, "the brains of the outfit".
Police were stopping buses across three states.
Here's a hint, once again: look for a woman answering to the
moniker "Tania".
From Lausanne, Switzerland, it was reported that former King
Mihai I of Rumania, who had recently abdicated, would not
immediately be marrying Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma, as rumored
to be imminent. The former monarch's advisers had advised against it
as it would give the wrong impression, immediately following his
abdication. An aide said that it would have been favorable while he
remained on the throne as it would have enhanced his image with the
people. But he might yet marry her eventually, it was remarked, as
he really loved her.
By the photograph, she looks a little like "Tania",
don't you think? Police in Louisiana might wish to investigate.
In Boston, a four-coach passenger train bound from Providence
overturned at the Back Bay station, injuring ten passengers and
jolting 53 others. None were injured seriously.
In Raleigh, Raleigh News & Observer publisher
Josephus Daniels, whose condition in the last several days had
worsened, was reported to be lying near death. He had been active
through the previous month when he attended a White House press
conference and then denounced afterward warmongers, saying, "If
you talk about war, the people will think war. If you talk peace,
they will think peace."
Mr. Daniels, former Secretary of the Navy under President
Wilson and Ambassador to Mexico under FDR, would pass away the
following Thursday.
In Huntersville, near Charlotte, a female stroke victim who
had been paralyzed for 19 weeks burned to death as helpless
neighbors looked on. Her husband had been at the grocery store when
the fire ignited, thought to have stemmed from a cigarette or match.
But her husband stated that while she used to smoke, she had not
done so for some time.
In Charlotte, a defendant in a non-support case first sought
to hurl his wife over the balustrade of the third floor of the
Courthouse and, when unable to accomplish that, had slashed her
about the throat and neck with a knife before 100 to 150 bystanders
rushed to intervene. The woman's cries for help could be heard down
to the basement of the building.
Songwriter Irving Berlin was honored by the French Government
with the Cross of Knighthood of the French Legion of Honor for his
contributions to music.
Emery Wister of The News tells of Robert Young, the
railroad magnate, having been named Hollywood's "Man of the
Year". You can read all about it on the movie page.
What happened to George Harrison?
Frank Morgan says: "Horses... Fast horses, that is. But
no horse can go as fast as the money you bet on him. Which reminds
me: Bulls and bears aren't responsible for nearly as many stock
losses as bum steers!"
On the editorial page, "Truman's Turn to the Left"
refers to Lord Bryce's work on American politics, The American
Commonwealth, in which he had posited that no radical Republican
and no conservative Democrat could be elected President. FDR had
accepted the analysis and preached it with good result. The
Republicans defied the rule of Bryce in 1940 when they nominated the
liberal Wendell Willkie and lost; the Democrats had done so in
nominating the conservative John W. Davis in 1924.
Former DNC chairman Robert Hannegan had sought to convince
the President of the notion in 1946 but had little effect, and the
result was disastrous for the Democrats in the mid-term elections.
Labor voters had stayed home.
But now the President was plainly turning back to the left
and the New Deal. It wonders whether it was too late. It posits that
1948, with prosperity and boom being the order of the day, was not a
year in which the country appeared prepared to turn to the left. It
concludes that the President thus was leaning on the Bryce theory
too heavily. The people were looking for a leader who would curb
inflation and direct foreign policy in a direction designed to
promote world economic stability and peace in the atomic age.
The President's move leftward, it finds, might blunt the
effort by Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, but would also
play into the hands of the Republicans.
"Board's Mistake in Fritz Case" comments on the
State Board of Education decision to restore the teaching
certificate of R. L. Fritz, former principal of the Hudson School in
Caldwell County and president of the North Carolina Education
Association, following his acquittal on charges of misappropriation
of school funds by paying teachers for overtime work to keep his
school running. The Board had voted 6 to 3 to overturn its earlier
decision. The Board claimed that it was awaiting the outcome of the
case before making a final determination, implying that it was not
really reversing a permanent decision.
The piece questions why then the Board's decision had not
been unanimous. The Board had also stated that Mr. Fritz had been
"sufficiently punished", but the editorial wonders for what he had been
punished.
It opines that the Board should have either deferred its
original decision until after the court action or rendered a final
decision the previous August. The decision had amounted to an
indefinite suspension. Mr. Fritz had been unemployed in the schools
since August and it was unclear what his status would be in the
future. The Board, it finds, had established an unclear precedent
for orderly and uniform disciplinary procedures.
The piece neglects to factor in the ability of Mr. Fritz's
counsel, Sam J. Ervin, to prevail on the Board with considerable
powers of persuasion from within his suit, perhaps thus leading to an anomalous result.
"Taft, Santa Claus and Stalin" suggests a new
speech-writer for Senator Taft, based on his statements in reply to
the Truman State of the Union message. He had described the
President's proposal as promising "Santa Claus" and as
being "totalitarian" in its effect, to leave as much
freedom under a "ten-year Truman plan" as under the Stalin
five-year plan.
It finds that the average twelve-year old would be able to
figure out the puerility of the Taft statements. It would take
something more than such drivel to bring votes to the GOP and Mr.
Taft. There was nothing so wrong with wanting to regulate corporate
profits, socialize medicine, build more hydro-electric projects on
the order of TVA, expand schools, balance the economy, eliminate
discrimination and the like proposed by the President. There was
nothing in it to suggest that it would lead to a totalitarian or
police state.
—Yeah, Bob, did you read that one?
—Yeah, well, we'll show them who's boss.
—A plan to infiltrate liberal groups and other Commies to
create distrust from within and possibly stimulate violence in the
streets and lay it off on the Commie liberal policies of Truman.
Yeah, good, Bob. I like it. Get to work on that right away. Hold off
on the violence angle for awhile until we see if they will see it
our way. It might backfire, if we deploy that strategy right now.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "A
Demagogue's Device", attacks Herman Talmadge's effort in
Georgia to circumvent the proscription against all-white primaries,
as recently handed down by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals
against the legislative effort in South Carolina to make the parties
in that state private clubs to admit voters to the primaries as they
wished. Mr. Talmadge, who had failed in the courts in his bid a year
earlier to be named by the Legislature to succeed his deceased
father as Governor, explicitly had said that he thought 85-90
percent of blacks should be denied the vote while even illiterate
whites should be allowed to vote via the chicanery of tests designed
to require a person to explain to the subjective satisfaction of
voter registrars the Constitution.
Alabama had initiated the subterfuge, the Boswell amendment,
being challenged in the courts by the NAACP.
Mr. Talmadge was running in the special election for
Governor, with the primary in the one-party state only six months
away. He was plainly playing therefore to local prejudice to acquire
votes. The law could not be passed until after the election and was
destined to be invalidated in the courts.
But, it finds, such was the process by which demagogues, such
as the late Eugene Talmadge, and the sons of demagogues, as Herman
Talmadge, came to be elected.
Drew Pearson, in Paris on his way back home from accompanying
the Friendship Train, tells of a contest being sponsored in the
French schools to award prizes for the top twenty letters of thanks
to America for the Friendship Train food, delivered in the previous
three weeks to both France and Italy from average Americans. The
letters would be made into a book for distribution in the U.S.
He gives praise to Henry Cassidy of NBC whose committee made
sure an American press representative was aboard each of the several
trains in France which distributed the food, to assure that the
French people understood the source. John Secondari of CBS performed
the similar function in Italy.
He gives praise to many others, individuals and companies, in
each country for publicity and coordination of the distribution
effort.
The only sour note in the French press had come from the
Communist newspaper in France which attacked Mr. Pearson as a
"blackguard...with ill breeding", claiming that much of
the food had not come from America. He corrects the misinformation
and quotes from Le Figaro taking to task the Humanite
misstatements.
Mr. Pearson had originally conceived the idea of the
Friendship Train in his column the previous October as a means to
counteract Soviet propaganda surrounding their paucity of
contributions to the French the previous year, relative to the U.S.,
nevertheless resulting in great welcoming committees for the Soviet
wheat and little recognition of the far greater American Government
contributions.
Marquis Childs finds the President's few definite
recommendations contained in the State of the Union message to be as
lonely raisins in a large sweet pudding, designed to stir as little
controversy as possible in an election year.
He looks back a year earlier to the President's proposals
which had been quietly buried in Congress. The long-term housing
bill was one such proposal which the President had stressed the
previous year, predicting that new starts in housing in 1947 would
surpass the peak year of 1926. Instead, the numbers were far below
that peak, amounting to only 795,000 starts and 745,000 completions,
compared to 849,000 starts in 1926 and even more in 1925. And there
was a smaller population twenty years earlier.
Building materials had not been expedited during the year, as
non-residential buildings were built as much as ever. So-called
veterans' housing had been constructed but was being rented at rates
too high for most veterans to afford.
In the current message to Congress, the President had said
that every American in the ensuing decade "should" have a
decent home. He did not say "must" and did not use the
definite "will" of a year earlier in relation to
Government expedition of materials.
He used the same sort of language with respect to inflation,
taxes, displaced persons in Europe, and other topics. He had been
advised not to antagonize Congress with ERP hanging in the balance.
The fact that Republicans had reacted to the relatively mild
proposals with denunciation showed that they were itching to be
antagonistic. But passing the buck did not neutralize the
consequences of failure.
Victor Riesel reports that James Caesar Petrillo, head of the
American Federation of Musicians, would testify in House labor
hearings before the committee chaired by Congressman Fred Hartley,
co-sponsor of Taft-Hartley. Mr. Hartley was campaigning for yet
tougher labor laws. He proposed to subject unions to restraint of
trade legislation, making it a crime, for instance, for Mr. Petrillo
to ban recordings or prohibit musicians from playing on television
broadcasts or shutting down the radio stations with a strike at the
end of January.
A second law favored by Mr. Hartley was one banning picket
lines or other union activity from interference with workers who
wanted to work. He also wished to ban industry-wide strikes,
limiting them to local unions.
Mr. Hartley believed that labor leadership was proving
Taft-Hartley not only not too tough but inadequate in certain
scenarios.
The hearings would begin the following Tuesday.
A letter writer, desiring not to minimize the efforts of
Charlotte booster C. O. Kuester, seeks to set the record straight on
the 1929 Confederate Reunion held in Charlotte, that others had a
hand in the success of that event. A piece appearing January 2 in
the newspaper had, according to the writer, implied that it was the
sole doing of Mr. Kuester.
The writer had been president of the Stonewall Jackson
chapter and was present at the time in 1929.
Well, enough said. Kudos to you, suh—er, ma'am.
She also says that she had never heard that President Taft
had come to Charlotte in 1909 for the May 20 celebration of the
signing of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence in 1775. The
Greater Charlotte Club at the time was new and had only a minor role
in that event. A central committee of prominent businessmen had
formed it. The Club had kept a book of names of those attending, but
it had been lost soon afterward.
Similar to the Colony, we suppose.
In any event, we hope that you were successful in leading the
charge across the field at Gettysburg.
A letter praises the editorial, "Wallace Calls 'Lunatic
Fringe'", for clarifying that the objects of that term were
diffused throughout the social fabric and not properly a fringe at
all. The piece had suggested that it included many conservatives.
This writer thinks that the first session of the 80th
Congress was on a "binge of the fringe", keeping to
partisan politics for its own sake. He suggests three notable
quotations to the Congress.
