Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal told the House Armed Services Committee that
a major war would find domestic petroleum production short by two
million barrels per day to meet its needs. He recommended
development of submerged coastal and Alaskan oil areas.
Bernard Baruch testified to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in favor of the Marshall Plan and an anti-inflation
measure to go along with it. He recommended that the latter package include a rollback of farm prices, an
agreement with labor to defer further wage increases, and avoidance of
tax cuts for two years as well as return to the excess profits tax
existing during the war.
Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont and Congressman Jacob
Javits of New York introduced a bill to allow meat rationing by the
Administration to alleviate the meat shortage.
Republicans considered a billion-dollar reduction in their
proposed 5.6 billion dollar tax cut plan, that they might attract
Democratic support to enable overruling of a Presidential veto.
The Supreme Court, in Lee v. Mississippi, 332 US 742, a decision delivered by Justice
Frank Murphy, unanimously reversed a conviction of a man sentenced at age 17 in
Jackson, Miss., to eighteen years in prison for assault with intent
to commit rape. The Court found that the defendant's confession had
been improperly coerced by "duress, fear, threats and physical
violence", in violation of the Fifth Amendment privilege
against self-incrimination and the right of due process, as extended
to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. As a matter of form, the Court
remanded the case so that the State court could express its opinion on the voluntariness of the confession as the State court had resolved the matter on its erroneous finding that the defendant was precluded even from raising the voluntariness of the confession as an issue because he had denied making the confession. The Court found the latter fact to be irrelevant because the jury necessarily found that he had so confessed.
In another case, Von Moltke v. Gillies, 332 US 708, the Court decided 6 to 3 to reverse the lower court denial of a petition for writ of habeas corpus and ordered an evidentiary hearing below to determine facts anent whether the petitioner, in fact, as she claimed, entered her plea of guilty to a violation of the Espionage Act after allegedly being apprised by an FBI agent that she was equally guilty for associating with persons involved in an espionage conspiracy. The Government agreed that if the factual contention was true, the woman, who had no attorney when she entered the plea, was entitled to reversal on the basis of a coerced plea, not entered with a knowing and voluntary waiver of her rights to counsel and the panoply of due process rights attendant a trial, pursuant to the Sixth and Fifth Amendments, respectively.
A concurrence of two members of the Court, Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson, found that the appropriate remedy was to remand to the District Court for a hearing to determine this factual issue, the gravamen of the case as they viewed it. The Court thus found that if the evidentiary hearing determined that the petitioner had been so informed by the FBI agent, she should be released from further service of the four-year sentence to which she was consigned pursuant to the plea.
The dissent of Justice Harold Burton, joined by Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Justice Stanley Reed, opined that the Government was correct in asserting that the petitioner had not produced sufficient evidence to justify her contention that the FBI agent made the alleged statements and thus the petition should be denied.
It should be noted that, potentially, even if the factual contention would be sustained and the plea of guilty thus nullified, the woman still might have to face the music a second time, as the Fifth Amendment bar against double jeopardy does not apply in a case reversed on appeal, whether by guilty plea or finding of guilt after a trial. It is then within prosecutorial discretion to seek another or renewed prosecution against the accused, based on the factual circumstances attendant the case.
Thirty-five persons had died from the cold wave striking the
Eastern half of the nation. Five died in each of Kentucky and
Connecticut, with four each in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Two towns
in Pennsylvania recorded lows of 38 below zero, and several towns
and cities in New York recorded double-digit below-zero
temperatures. In New York City, it was 8 degrees above zero.
The executive order issued on Saturday by the President,
impacting Federal buildings and vehicles, had caused voluntary
reduction in industrial use of petroleum.
Tom Fesperman of The News reports of an eleven-year
old mentally deficient girl living in a four-room home with nine
other people, including five children. Her younger brother suffered
from rheumatic fever and her acutely manic condition was hampering
his recovery. The parents had been frustrated in trying to place her
in a facility, being told that they were already overcrowded with no
space available.
In Copenhagen, a plane hit a flock of swans, killing three,
and causing the plane to return to the airport.
Napoleon, the world's most famous dog, appears on the comics
page each afternoon. Don't miss him. You will wish to observe
whether he had a funny way of holding his right paw, tucked into his
collar.
On the editorial page, "A Delay on Churchill's Monument"
tells of the English-Speaking Union having shelved its plan,
originally suggested by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, to raise
money for a fund to bring British youths to study in American
universities, to coincide with the unveiling in April of a statue to
FDR in London. The excuse given was that the Union wanted first to
concentrate on the FDR memorial.
But the piece speculates that perhaps it derived instead from
the great change of American opinion on Mr. Churchill since war's
end and his March, 1946 Fulton, Missouri, "iron curtain"
speech, after which the suspicion of Russian expansion and the need
to arrest it reached fever pitch. It wonders whether, if the
Marshall Plan had been proposed at Fulton, the Soviets might have
refrained from their subsequent expansionist activities and joined
the invitation to participate in the program.
Mr. Churchill, it concludes, had put the cart before the
horse.
"Common Sense on a Tax Cut" finds North Carolina
Congressman Robert Doughton correct in his opposition to both the
Truman $40 individual tax credit to be financed by raising corporate
taxes by 3.2 billion dollars, and the proposal by House Ways &
Means chairman Harold Knutson for a 5.6 billion dollar tax cut.
The Truman proposal, it finds, would discourage hope of
reduced prices through increased production.
The Knutson bill was inflationary and would leave little for
reducing the national debt run up during the war, would also cut the
heart from ERP and drastically cut Government services.
Mr. Doughton, it thinks, reasonably wanted to effect a middle
ground by trimming the President's proposed 40-billion dollar budget and
affording a lower tax cut than that suggested by the GOP.
"Canada Restores Price Control" tells of Canada
reimposing controls on meat and butter prices and seeking to
re-institute rent control. It suggests that the Canadians were not
suffering from the same delusions as many in America, that controls
were of no value because they did not offer an absolute cure for
inflation. But controls did alleviate the strain of inflation on
the lower economic classes, even as the control measures spawned black
markets and tended to cause reduction in production in peacetime.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled
"Moscow Fairy Tale", relates a story of two crumbs, a
Gunpowder Crumb and a Bread Crumb, living in a hunter's beard. The
former vowed to destroy both the hunter and latter Crumb. Bread Crumb was then eaten by the hunter and a sparrow pecked Gunpowder,
at which point he blew up. Everyone lived happily ever, save Pravda.
For Pravda was upset at its junior counterpart having
printed the above tale for its youthful readers. The story was
thought to be pacifist in nature. Man needed both gunpowder and
bread, it declared.
The piece thinks the story salutary and in line with the aims
of the Marshall Plan. But as such, it would meet inevitably with
both Russian and some American censure. It was content, however, to
allow "Pravda to peck away at the moral and blow up all
by itself."
Drew Pearson again looks at the prospect of war between
Russia and the U.S., viewed through the eyes of Western Europeans
with whom he had contact during his recent tour of France and Italy
with the Friendship Train. He starts with a quote from Clare Boothe
Luce, former Congresswoman from Connecticut, regarding the present
"tug-of-war", suggesting that Russia's newer outlook
produced by the Revolution needed to be outrun by the U.S. with its
own modern outlook.
We might wish initially to inquire of Ms. Luce whether that
would mean junking the Constitution and declaring her Queen Bee,
with all the advanced knowledge and perspicacity which she somehow
managed to acquire at times, even more than that of the CIA and the
President.
Mr. Pearson relates of his own experience in the Balkans
right after World War I, trying to work out a simple accord whereby
Yugoslavia's over-supply of corn would be traded with Austria for
repairs of inoperable Yugoslavian locomotives. The Yugoslavians
balked, however, not wishing to feed the hated Austrians. That
hatred was especially overt in and around Trieste, with Italians
hating Yugoslavs—South Africans...all together, now...never mind.
Ms. Luce, incidentally, would later become Ambassador to
Italy, between 1953 and 1956, under President Eisenhower.
Two weeks earlier, when Mr. Pearson had visited this area, he
discovered that Tito and the Communists had effected an appreciable
change in relations around Trieste, convincing many Italians to live
in peace with Yugoslavs. It had been accomplished through shrewd
propaganda. He says that the area had been better off under the old
Austro-Hungarian Empire extant prior to World War I, and might be
better off again were Tito able to unite these diverse economic
interests and resources.
The Soviets were busy creating a United States of Europe to
good advantage. The Marshall Plan could interrupt this process and
turn the tide toward the West. Its prospect had already had an
ameliorative effect in the abrupt ending of the strikes in Italy
and France. The Soviets might next strike in Greece, Austria, or
Czechoslovakia.
The ultimate question was whether the Plan would go far
enough and transcend merely the status of a temporary stopgap. To
assure its endurance, there needed to be, he posits, a United States
of Europe. Not to make such political and economic cohesion an
aspect of the Plan, he believes, was a major mistake. There was
discussion among the states of mutual economic issues and lowering
of tariff barriers. The prejudices between European countries would
pose a wall, however, over which the cap needed to be tossed.
The first step was to build a United States of Western
Europe—eventually accomplished largely through the mutual
interdependence within NATO and the European Common Market. He says
that once such an organization were established, one by one, such
nations as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria would come into the
Western sphere.
The problem was that America was not enough promoting abroad
its own system. He favors a lot more American "salesmanship".
He is too polite to remark, as he had suggested during the
summer of 1946 when in Atlanta to hold a rally at the State Capitol
to counter the re-emergence of the Klan, that in large measure,
inhibiting good promotion of democracy in the U.S. was the
recalcitrance of the most atavistic of Southerners and their
political apologists who exchanged tacit or expressed approbation of
their mental wedding to an antebellum never-never land for
maintenance of segregation and assurance of a ready and exclusive
pool of voters.
More leadership was needed, not salesmanship.
Marquis Childs remarks that the President's Air Policy
Commission report—released the previous week, recommending
significantly increased spending on the Air Force to effect
modernization and expansion, in preparation for a potential atomic
attack, by "A-Day", set by agreement as January 1, 1953—had refrained from judgment on the division of the budget between
the separate military branches. But it plainly believed that there
was a great amount of waste in the budget devoted to
preparation for "yesterday's war"—the Guns of September,
if not August, as it were.
Such waste continued despite the merger of the armed forces
six months earlier under the Department of Defense. Shore
installations on the Pacific Coast, for instance, could have no
possible relation to any future war. In previous times, the
insularity of the two oceans afforded time for preparation anew for
war; but no more in the atomic-jet age. Time's barrier had been
breached, even the wall of sound, the previous October, if not yet
known to the public.
Another Pearl Harbor in the atomic era would mean final
defeat and disaster.
The Commission had asked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal
to tell them what had been done to cut waste since merger, and he
could show very little. They understood, however, the barnacles
protecting the Navy from budget reorganization. The primary task for
Secretary Forrestal was to create a viable Air Force while keeping
the Navy in modern array. And that latter task meant pruning some of
the antiquated vestiges of the Navy to make way for the Air Force.
The vested interests in resistance of such efforts were not all inside the Army and Navy.
When it had come time to trim or eliminate the old frontier forts
used in fighting the Indians, the surrounding towns rose up in
protest. Army officers who also did not want change allied with
these forces and lobbied Congress to maintain the status quo.
"Those days are gone forever. If Congress and the nation
persist in living in that kind of a past, then the awakening will
eventually be a rude one."
DeWitt MacKenzie, A.P. foreign affairs analyst, examines the
methods of the enemy in the cold war. He looks at "Protocol M",
the purported plan of the Communists to disrupt Western Germany and
thus cripple the Marshall Plan. He labels the protocol an example of
the "unscrupulous efficiency" of the Communist
revolutionary methods, in which no holds were barred.
A document prepared by the British Foreign Office anent the
protocol stated that it utilized all weapons of the proletariat to
succeed.
The methods included strikes and disorders, destruction of
property and liquidation of opponents, including death or political
imprisonment. The British report stated that the Cominform, founded
in Belgrade the previous year, would "coordinate the common
battle of all socialist movements in Europe."
Mr. MacKenzie distinguishes between socialism and Russian
Communism, engrafted on which was Bolshevism, the revolutionary
methodology. The Communists and Socialists were often disavowing one
another in Western Europe, in Britain, France, and Italy.
According to the protocol, as found by the report, the
unification of the working class was of paramount importance to the
Communist movement. The Bolsheviks concentrated on the German Ruhr
and its coal mines and manufacturing facilities.
He finds the protocol, on the whole, to be of the Bolos'
typical tactics, seeking to secure a foothold in Western Europe.
Protocol M, thus, could not be overlooked by those fighting "Red ism"—ism, ism, ism.
Brother, you can say that again.
Especially that 3M stuff—if you know what we mean.
A letter writer, a veteran of World War I, relates of
personal experiences in trying to find housing in Rock Hill, S.C.,
and coming up empty. He suggests adherence to the Golden Rule, lest
the current boom go bust.
Maude Waddell, who once contributed her verses regularly to
The News during the days when W. J. Cash was Associate
Editor, provides a poem, titled "Robert Edward Lee", in
ode to the Confederate General.
Its opening lines and theme borrow from Sir Walter Scott, perhaps also imbuing shades
of Cash:
Softly the South wind is sighing,
Soldier, take your rest...
