Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Tass was studying
the proposal made by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin before Commons
on Thursday and seconded by Opposition Leader Winston Churchill the
previous day, to foster Western European union beginning with
unification of Western Germany. The initial reaction by Tass was to
view it as U.S. and British imperialism. Belgium expressed favor for
the plan and the Netherlands was giving it careful consideration.
Denmark, Sweden and Norway had yet to provide a reaction.
Senator Arthur Vandenburg unveiled a plan, developed by the
Brookings Institution, to have ERP administered by a single
Cabinet-level administrator, but not subject to State Department
control. The administrator would have complete control, subject only
to presidential veto. Earlier, some GOP leaders had favored an eight-man
bipartisan corporate board subject to Congressional oversight. The
Administration wanted a single administrator working under the supervision of the State Department.
The CIO proposed a 29-month extension of rent controls beyond
the February 20 end date, and abolition of all of the leases made to
run through 1948 pursuant to the current law, which permitted 15 percent
rent increases in such leases, to assure tenants that the rent
specified in the contract would be frozen after the February
expiration date, until the end of the lease term. The CIO wanted all
provisions allowing rental increase eliminated.
In Louisiana, Earl Long, brother of the late Governor and
Senator Huey Long, was well ahead in the tabulation of the
Democratic primary votes for Governor. He had not yet obtained a
necessary majority, however, and a runoff was thus likely. Mr. Long
had been Governor previously.
In Ambridge, Pa., a 25-year old Cleveland man, having been
drinking a dark liquid, shot a female passenger and a trainman on a
Pennsylvania Flyer coach bound from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, before
being subdued by passengers, including the husband of the woman who
was shot. The man was arrested on a charge of assault with intent to
kill. He said that he had done no wrong.
In Goshen, Ind., the 75-year old leader of an Amish sect pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to six months at the State prison farm for assault and
battery of his 41-year old daughter, kept tied by a rope and chain
in her room for ten years for refusing to join the sect. Three
physicians who examined the daughter said that she was insane.
In Lawton, Okla., an intoxicated soldier from Fort Sill led
MP's on a chase for 12 miles shortly before midnight, after he
commandeered a tank and proceeded hurly-burly, crashing it into
three cars and panicking Lawton residents. When he returned to the
base after his cruise downtown, the pursuers were able to construct
a fake barrier made from scaffolding and bluff him to a halt. He was
then taken into custody.
He was just preparing for that Day to come in May.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of the eight-year old
boy, whose mentally deficient older sister had compromised his
recovery at home from rheumatic fever, being admitted to Mercy
Hospital in the city for treatment. His sister's violent outbursts
had delayed his recovery. Following the attention focused on the
case by the News stories, the girl was to be admitted to the
Caswell Training School in Kinston within several weeks.
The piece points out that there were several other cases in
the county also awaiting admission to the overcrowded State
hospitals.
A sleet storm hit the Carolinas, covering the highways and
byways and dirty roads which lead right to your door with two inches
of snow and ice for the nonce, for your contemplation and
admiration. The storm had developed from the mass of cold air
beneath warm air drifting in from the Rockies. The temperature in
Charlotte, reaching a low of only 41 on Thursday, dropped to 16 by
the early afternoon of this date.
There was much slipping and sliding of pedestrians along
sidewalks, and motorists moving without their usual abandon along
roadways. Some men carried new sleds as they proceeded through the
Square.
Stay at home, relax, and read a book, build a fire, rest
your restive toesies, but don't put the book on the pyre, and also don't go
outside to pickposies.
On the editorial page, "Douglas' Challenge to South"
remarks of the "subterranean rumble" stirring amid
Southern Democrats anent the prospect of Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas becoming the vice-presidential candidate on the
ticket with President Truman. The stirrings were unfavorable for
Justice Douglas's known liberal opinions, many of which had struck
at the foundations of segregation. But the rumble was unlikely to
cause disturbance of the intention of the big city bosses to offer
him the nomination. It had been these bosses who had dumped from the
ticket Vice-President Henry Wallace in 1944 for Senator Truman, to
the pleasure of the Southern Democratic leaders at the time.
But that move in 1944 did not signify Democratic power;
rather, it was the coincidence of the bosses making a choice
simpatico with the Southerners.
Mr. Truman had moved leftward, and to cinch the tie to the
left of the party, a liberal vice-presidential candidate appeared
necessary. Mr. Justice Douglas presented the right background for
the position.
It offers that the Southern Democrats would not achieve any
power nationally until they stopped voting with the Republicans in
Congress and began voting in accordance with liberal objectives. For
it was liberalism which had vast popular appeal. The Democrats could
win only when they espoused those liberal views made popular in the
New Deal. Yet, the South, for all its liberal tradition, had
produced no great liberal leader of national rank. The region paid
little attention to its foremost liberal leaders, such as former
Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida,
Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, and UNC president Frank Porter
Graham—the latter to be appointed to the Senate seat of deceased J.
Melville Broughton, after his death two months into his first term
in 1949.
The vice-presidential candidate ultimately would be former
Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky. Justice Douglas
would remain on the Court until his retirement after a stroke in
1975, that despite a determined effort in the latter sixties, led by
Representative Gerald Ford, to push Justice Douglas to resign or
even into impeachment, as Justice Douglas describes in one volume of
his memoirs, The Court Years. The effort occurred all because
the Justice still had the innate ability to chew gum and walk at the
same time, though once in the Teens, he had been arrested riding the rails for a bum in his prime.
We note that the opinions of the Southerners, of whom the piece speaks, were somewhat mistaken in laying judgments contained in majority opinions solely to the Justice whose name appeared thereon, in this instance, Justice Douglas. For to obtain consensus in opinions on the Court means that the inevitable result is a collective opinion. Justices are typically assigned cases by the Chief for writing a legal opinion thereon, which, after due research by a Justice's law clerks—young lawyers, not clerks in the typical sense—, is then circulated among the members of the Court for comment, suggested change, and the like. Then, alternative opinions might be drafted and offered in the stead of or in supplement to the lead opinion, the latter utilizing different or additional reasoning to reach the same legal result. Thereafter, following discussion in conference, and, sometimes, further amendment, additional dissents or concurring opinions offered as alternative, a vote is finally taken. From that process, a "dissent" or "concurrence" might become the majority opinion, and vice versa. Depending on the Court and depending on the case, its subject and complexity, that procedure may vary. But that is typically the way things work. Thus, while one could fairly discern from a lone dissent or a lone concurrence a particular legal viewpoint of a Justice, one could not necessarily divine precisely from a majority opinion more than the general viewpoint of those Justices voting in favor of it, irrespective of the particular Justice who delivers the opinion. One cannot simply read therefore majority opinions delivered by particular Justices and assume therefrom particularized authorship, as one might read a book. It is rather a consensus opinion which develops in the majority or plurality following a somewhat lengthy and involved process of consideration.
It was true, however, that Justice Douglas was consistently a prime defender of civil liberties on the Court, whether it was during the era of Chief Justices Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, or Warren Earl Burger, encompassing the span of his tenure on the Court. And that stance was, in that time, normally associated with being liberal. Yet, for instance, in 1944, he voted with the majority in the notorious Korematsu case, upholding as Constitutional, under the peculiar emergent circumstances then extant, the 1942 executive order interning Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast following Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan. That opinion was delivered by Justice Hugo Black, another prime defender of civil liberties during the era. Justice Frank Murphy, also a consistent defender of civil liberties, dissented, along with Justices Robert Jackson and Owen Roberts, typically considered "conservatives" on the Court.
The words "liberal" and "conservative", always somewhat murky, have become increasingly so twisted and confused in our society since the advent of the age of television in the 1950's that one cannot any longer necessarily equate across time spans those labels as applied to particular individual Justices on the Court or even to particular individuals in society generally. What may have been quite liberal in 1948 may be considered quite conservative today by relative standards. One can only try to effect, for pedagogical purposes, a more abstract standard by which to place, philosophically, the legal opinions of particular Justices, assuming that has any importance, which, in a close study of the law, it should not. The validity of each legal opinion should stand on its own reasoning and through time, regardless of authorship or labels applied to it, and sometimes, as in Korematsu, framed by the very particular circumstance under which it arose. Those labels may thus properly differ by the type of legal issue before the Court. Such labels, in other words, while we use them to pigeonhole Justices by quick reference marks, often break down when getting down to cases and realizing the actual facts and legal principles steering a Justice's reasoning.
Good judgment therefore should not reject out of hand a particular legal opinion simply because it bears the name at the top of a Justice who has suffered the indignity through time of being labeled a "conservative", "liberal", or "moderate". One should read legal opinions with an open mind and realize that results in cases are sometimes limited by the particular legal stance of the case, or the facts underlying it, or the higher Constitutional principle involved, not because one party is "good" and deserves therefore to "win" and the other "bad", a "loser" in an unremitting state of perdition, and deserving hell on earth. That is not the way the law functions, at least outside the courtrooms of the ilk of "Judge" Roy Bean and other such drunken louts pretending to be lawyerly judges. If you admire that sort, or make such emotionally laden, personality driven judgments, you are in trouble vis-a-vis the law of the land and need to study its actual applications through time more closely.
"Churchill Sounds the Alarm" posits that Winston
Churchill's position enunciated in Commons the previous day, in
support of the British Labor Government's position of urging union
in Western Europe to secure itself against encroachment by the
Soviets, to be a fine example for American Republicans to do
likewise with respect to the Marshall Plan, and not to follow the
lead of Senator Taft and former President Herbert Hoover in
attacking the Plan and seeking to eviscerate it to the point of
producing impotency.
The Plan, it offers, was necessary to arrest Russia's
westward advance, through recovery rather than engaging in
increscent saber-rattling rhetoric and enhancing of the implements of
war.
The British Government, apparently in concert with
Washington, appeared deliberately to be urging a showdown with the
Soviets, to avoid a worse showdown potentially when Russia achieved
production of the atomic bomb, thought by Mr. Churchill to be a year
or two away. The piece finds this approach to dovetail with the
Marshall Plan.
"Eisenhower Changes the Picture" suggests that the
definite withdrawal by General Eisenhower from consideration as the
presidential GOP nominee indicated possible maneuvering behind the
scenes, as his candidacy had been discussed for the previous year
without his having definitely put his foot upon it. It refers the
reader to the below column of the Alsops for further exposition of
this point.
It finds the withdrawal doing nothing for General MacArthur
and plenty for Governor Dewey, Senator Vandenburg, who had stated he
was not a candidate, Harold Stassen, and Earl Warren, the latter
only a candidate in California, stating that he would conduct no
national campaign—effectively running therefore to control a slate
of delegates at the convention.
More than anyone else, the President benefited from the
withdrawal, as only General Eisenhower had been beating him in the
public opinion polls.
A short piece from the Lexington (Ky.) Leader tells of
the Jackson County Sun disfavoring poetry submissions so much
that it charged 3 cents per word, whereas classified ads cost only 2
cents per word.
But was not that because poetry is much more costly and time
consuming to produce than classifieds, thus subject to profiteering
through a royalty tax of an additional paltry penny per word?
Or was it the case that the words out of place made for
hyper-typer minted pendulums swinging in the space unyielding, a
devil's disciple's disgrace, unwielding their knife blades'
shaper-rapiers' unsuspected face—suddenly—in the midst of rented
pain and plenty of sun-scalded race of rainy-gainers wanting to
inflict coups de grace in their alleys so tinny, flaming
farcical folly from the few to the many, one, and thus add, for the
sake of Ra, then and there, on the counter, a single sun-drenched
penny? Dear sir or madame, won't you please, for a full extra buck,
atone and printy?
Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall of
North Carolina having unabashedly used $50,000 of Government money
to lobby for military conscription, despite proscription against
such lobbying in the Federal law, making it a crime to do so. Mr.
Royall had even admitted the conduct to the Congress, thus putting
Attorney General Tom Clark on the spot as to whether to prosecute or
not.
The House Expenditures Subcommittee, chaired by
Representative Forrest Harness of Indiana, had in July explained the
lobbying effort, virtually all of the money having been spent on the
making and distribution of a military-training propaganda film. Two
members of the Army were employed also to tour the country promoting
Universal Military Training.
The FBI had completed its investigation of Mr. Royall and it
was reported to be highly unfavorable. Furthermore, Mr. Royall had
refused to agree to refrain from violating the same law in the
future.
One of the more interesting Senate races shaping up for the
year, he suggests, was that in Wyoming, where Judge Thurman Arnold,
former lead trust-buster in the Justice Department, was contesting
incumbent GOP Senator Edward V. Robertson, a conservative ranch
owner. It would tell a lot about the electorate, based on which
candidate would become the choice, given their diametrically opposed
views on government and finances.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the RNC having determined
that the rank-and-file members of the party would not again dictate
the selection of a candidate as General Eisenhower, as they had done
in 1940 with the nomination of Wendell Willkie, until shortly prior
to that time, a Democrat. They wanted an old-guard candidate,
probably, for the most part, desiring Senator Taft, but realizing
they would need to settle on a more practical choice. Governor
Dewey, though he was too independent to become naturally their
choice a second time, had the most committed delegates.
The movement for the Eisenhower candidacy had been propelled
by Stuart Scheftel, a magazine publisher, Henry Sears, brother-in-law of
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and, most recently, Senator Charles Tobey of New
Hampshire. Polls were showing the General to be the strongest
potential Republican nominee. Mr. Scheftel was busy withdrawing the
General's name, however, from the Oregon primary ballot and was not
so eager to join Senator Tobey's move to place him on the New
Hampshire ballot.
Without these organizational moves to round up and accumulate
delegates for the convention, it would have been impossible, they conclude, for
General Eisenhower's candidacy to have succeeded.
The editors note that the piece might explain some of the
reasons that General Eisenhower had, the previous day, finally,
without any equivocation, withdrawn his name from consideration as a
candidate, even if Senator Tobey believed that there might be enough
room for semantic quibbling to catch a last glimmer of hope in the
twilight. He would have to wait four years, however, for realization
of thatglimmering.
Samuel Grafton continues his analysis of the country's
foreign policy, stating that columnist Walter Lippmann had suggested
that if the country forged its policy on the basis solely of
anti-Russianism, it would wind up funneling money to any state which
cried for help from the dratted Communists, no matter whether the
government was fair or foul. Another writer had suggested that an
annual 40-billion dollar defense budget might be the result.
Wait until you see Star Wars, Mr. Grafton, promulgated by a
new President somewhere down the line, one, nevertheless, who has
been in your news just a few months back and with whom you are
reasonably familiar, albeit playing a considerably different role in your time.
"And we are moving helplessly, automatically, in these
directions. There is an unbuttonedness about us, a sense of loss of
control, of being adrift, in the grip of mighty forces, unkempt,
blowzy, compulsive."
Ah, you did read the tea leaves, after all.
He finds that the new perspective, while not of war, was also
not of peace, rather of a sense of hopelessness about maintaining
the peace.
The eleven-billion dollar defense budget, built on fear,
could easily wind up stretching to 40 to 50 billion. "The cat
of conformity has our tongues, placid conformity in the drift toward
war."
Such defense budgets would reduce the country to the level of
the prewar European countries which could not afford progress after
defense. It meant dispensing with the magic which had built America
and made it different. Soldiers would become the preeminent members
of society in such a state.
Only redirecting policy to search for peace could wrest
control from the drift. The country needed to convince itself and
the rest of the world that it desired peace. In that time, a
battleship could be built without scaring everyone, whereas,
presently, the country could not even feed the hungry abroad without
engendering fear. He suggests that such be the cry against any
American making a bellicose speech.
A letter writer finds that man had not advanced morally in
5,000 years, still living by the Ten Commandments. In every
generation, man devolved to the primeval state of war. The danger to
capitalism was not Russia but materialistic greed. He favors "exact
justice, equal opportunity, and equal right".
After expounding considerably further in the realm of
generalization, he concludes, as he always does, "So it is."
Fine, but show these people how to bring those high
principles about, that you might one day say, "So it was, but
now it is better."
A letter writer thanks the newspaper for its publicity given
Bill McGarrahan in his campaign for children.
A letter from the superintendent of the public schools of
Blacksburg, S.C., thanks the newspaper for the favorable publicity
it gave the schools of the town.
