The Charlotte News

Friday, October 15, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Andrei Vishinsky told the U. N. Security Council that he would have nothing to say on the Berlin crisis. He termed the request by the six "neutral" nations of the Security Council to provide further information on the August 30 agreement between Premier Stalin and the three Western diplomats in Moscow a "very skilled maneuver", to which the Argentine delegate took great umbrage. Mr. Vishinsky said that he intended no reflection on the integrity of the delegates. He repeated that the matter belonged before the Big Four Foreign Ministers Council, not the Security Council of the U.N. France, Britain, and the U.S. agreed to provide the requested information.

Russia recently had advocated having the Security Council abandon consideration of the Berlin crisis and returning to the August 30 agreement, whereby the blockade would be lifted for the Western powers' agreement that the Soviet mark would be the recognized Berlin currency with four-power control of it.

Britain, before the U.N. social committee, claimed that Russia had enslaved millions of workers in a system unparalleled in history, that they were maintained as domestic animals. The contention came in response to the criticism leveled at Britain by Russian delegate Andrei Pavlov, that the British were oppressing colonial peoples and had caused the deaths of millions of people through starvation. The Russian, White Russian and Yugoslav delegates sought to reply, but the chair recognized Eleanor Roosevelt who successfully moved that debate be terminated.

The Western powers in Berlin informed the West Berliners that their food ration would be increased by 270 calories to 2,000 per day.

In Munich, a German denazification court ordered the confiscation of Hitler's assets, along with those of wife Eva Braun. Hitler was declared a major Nazi offender if still alive.

In Italy, the Government sought to forestall Communist-led walkouts of the transport workers, set to begin Monday, and movie operators, set to start this date. A token strike of a million workers had taken place the previous day. Most were back at work.

In China, the Communists had captured Chinhsien in southwestern Manchuria the previous day, a key supply point for embattled Mukden.

ERP administrator Paul Hoffman told a press conference that because of progress in reconstruction, the fund for ERP for the following year might be lower than the five billion dollars for 1948. He reported that he had called a halt to British and French dismantling of German industrial plants until it could be determined that it was in the best long-term interest of Europe to do so. The British and French agreed.

In Greece, twelve U.S. warships formed the largest contingent yet in Greek waters. It included the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, four cruisers, five destroyers and two auxiliaries, most of which were anchored at Piraeus Harbor in Athens.

Governor Dewey, after endorsing Senator Joseph Ball from the back platform of his train en route to St. Paul, Minn., had a rotten tomato hurled in his direction. The tomato struck Senator Ball on the shoulder and splattered Mrs. Dewey at Alberta Lea, though it was not clear at whom the tomato was aimed.

The President toured Indiana this date, concluding the day with a speech in Indianapolis.

The President would visit Raleigh the following Tuesday and would receive an hospitable welcome, without eggs and tomatoes as a chaser, according to DNC treasurer Joe Blythe, State Senator from Charlotte. While present, the President, besides giving speeches, would open the State Fair, ride in a parade, and dedicate a statue on the Capitol grounds to three former North Carolinians who became Presidents, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

A just released Gallup poll showed the President with greater strength in North Carolina than previously supposed, having been estimated at only 40 percent.

In Georgia, the largest mass execution in 11 years, involving originally five condemned men, had been reduced to two this date, J. B. Beetles and William Davis, convicted of killing a Carroll County storekeeper. Governor M. E. Thompson postponed one man's execution for 60 days to allow him to testify in another murder case, and gave 60-day reprieves likewise to two others.

In Mullins, S.C., Wings over Jordan would appear at the Anderson Theater on October 24.

Dick Young of The News tells of the City Traffic Engineer returning from a national convention in Philadelphia, where off-street parking and one-way streets to alleviate congestion were the main themes. The institute's magazine, Traffic Engineering, had reprinted an editorial from The News.

Billy Campbell, son of Hugh Campbell of Tirzah, S.C., did not blow his mind out in a car—rather, entered his registered Hereford bull in the competition at the State Fair for the following week. Be there for the Bull Run. It's outstanding. A Hereford will beat the Therefords and the Everywherefords every time. That's what they say, anyway.

On the editorial page, "Brush-Off for Parking Plan" tells of the City Council having done nothing regarding the proposal to construct off-street parking facilities run by the City. Much discussion had transpired but no action, following the two-year study recommendations by the Planning Board to build such facilities. It was not yet too late, but one day it would be, unless the Council began to follow the Board's recommendations.

"Global Aspects of a Southern Problem" remarks on Nobel Prize winning novelist Pearl Buck's criticism of Warren Austin, chief U.S. delegate to the U.N., for his comment to the General Assembly recently that the Russian atomic proposal was a "piece of Oriental trickery", finding it insensitive to the Chinese delegation present.

Mr. Austin had no malice in mind in his statement, the piece offers, but it had been careless, indicative of the Western conception of the Far East.

In Washington, when the Ethiopian minister to the U.S. was asked by an usher at the meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science to move his seat, he objected and left.

In Franco's Spain, the National Film Censorship Board banned "Gentleman's Agreement" with a statement which denied that the Catholic Church should call a Jew a "brother", causing a protest by Cardinal Spellman in New York and other repercussions.

The piece finds the episodes to add up to another chapter in man's inhumanity to man. It finds that only the notion of Christian brotherhood could begin to resolve the fears in the world which precipitated such prejudices. Clash of arms and passage of laws, it opines, could not effect change of attitudes.

It quotes the Southern Regional Council that "[t]he South may defend its rights to do the job [of improvement of civil rights] in its own way, but the South cannot insist on doing it in its own good time."

The piece agrees.

"Trucking Industry Chooses Well" finds the selection of Charlotte's Buddy Horton, head of Horton Motor Lines, as president of the American Trucking Association to be a wise choice.

A piece from the Greenville (S.C.) News, titled "41 Million Cars", informs that the Public Roads Administration had estimated that as the number of motor vehicles on the road in 1948, three million more than in 1947. Many people were forced to drive old jalopies because manufacturers had not been able to keep pace with demand for new cars and trucks. Such old cars and trucks formed a traffic hazard. The growing number of vehicles showed the need for better roads and highways and more parking facilities in the cities. When auto manufacturers caught up with demand, the burden on the highway infrastructure in the country would be even greater.

Drew Pearson finds that Kentucky, thanks to Senator Alben Barkley being on the ticket, would vote for President Truman in the election and would not elect Democratic Congressman Virgil Chapman, an "unsober" man who had a miserable legislative record, to replace incumbent Senator John Sherman Cooper, who had done a good job in the Senate.

He would be right on the first prediction, wrong on the second, though Mr. Cooper would be returned to the Senate in 1952 after the death of Senator Chapman.

Democratic Governor Clements of Kentucky was not actively supporting Mr. Chapman because the latter had refused to state his support for the President, preferring an independent course.

The two largest contingents of Communists in the country, according to the FBI, were in New York, with 30,000, and California, with 8,500, totaling more than 50 percent of all U.S. Communists. The Governors of the two states formed the Republican presidential ticket.

California had not decertified in 1946 the Labor School, a "subversive organization" according to the Justice Department, when requested by the Veterans Administration to do so, but continued the certification until the end of June, 1948, forcing Government payouts to a school which was teaching Communism.

The President had stated in Louisville that three steel companies owned half of the U.S. ingot capacity, blinking the fact that one of the companies was the giant U.S. Steel and that the Administration had helped increase that company's partial monopoly by selling it the Government-owned Geneva, Utah, plant at 20 cents on the dollar, despite Justice Department opposition to the sale for its tendency to create an increased monopoly. Similarly, one of the other companies was Republic Steel, also helped by the Administration to increase its monopoly.

Mr. Pearson notes that U.S. Steel got its Administration entry through Secretary of Treasury John W. Snyder and that Republic got its in from former Administration court jester George Allen.

Marquis Childs tells of the majority of the electorate being poised to cast their ballots against rather than for a presidential candidate. In the South, the Dixiecrats would be voting against President Truman and his civil rights program rather than for Governors Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright. The effort was to restore a past which could never be retrieved.

The vote for Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas would likewise be a protest vote, one which could not stand the Communist influence within the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. Mr. Thomas had run each quadrennial for President since 1928. He had polled nearly a million votes in 1932. In 1948, he was on the ballot in 32 states. The campaign chest was only $150,000. Mr. Wallace had sought to ignore the challenge posed by the Socialists.

The Socialist strategy was to enter Congressional candidates in races in districts where the seated Congressman was a reactionary, in contrast to the Progressive stance of entering candidates where a liberal was running, deliberately to try to elect conservatives and reactionaries, in the hope of turning the country ultimately further left in reaction to the rightist reaction.

In 1944, the Socialists polled only 80,518 votes, in 1940, 99,557. They hoped to attract 600,000 votes in 1948, but that was likely too optimistic.

James Marlow explains what an employer could do under Federal law with respect to a merit raise of an employee without consent of the union. The Supreme Court the previous Monday had issued a denial of review of a lower court decision regarding the matter.

An issue had developed when a company in Tennessee had given merit raises in addition to collectively bargained union wages, and in renegotiation of the contract, the union had demanded not only raises in regular wages but also in the merit wages, to which the company balked as not included in NLRB-mandated collective bargaining. When the union went to the NLRB, it ruled that merit raises were properly the subject of collective bargaining.

The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the NLRB ruling. The Supreme Court then refused review.

Additional questions had arisen. The employer could grant merit raises if there was no contract provision regarding them, and could do so even in the event of attempted bargaining on them which had broken down.

The employer could also give merit raises to non-union employees, but the union contract on merit raises would also be binding on non-union employees.

Also, the union could demand from the employer a list of those employees who received merit raises, even where no union contract provision applied to them.

Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, remarks on the speech the previous week by Winston Churchill at Llandudno, Wales, in which he had expressed the belief that the only thing standing between Western Europe being vanquished by Russia was the atomic bomb being in the sole possession of the West. Mr. Grafton finds this notion disturbing, omitting from the equation such unquantifiable matters as ingenuity, creativity, faith, and patience, boiling security down to a device which could be stowed in a closet.

There was a problem with Mr. Churchill's analysis in that during the previous three years since successful testing and use of the bomb, the Soviets had not been deterred from aggression. Thus, the bomb had not truly brought security.

He regards the Churchill speech as the most dismal of dismal speeches since the end of the war and one which was sad given that Mr. Churchill was a great man and leader. Mr. Grafton recalls a time when the wartime Prime Minister did not posit survival on gadgets, was not even troubled that Britain was without rifles at the outset of the war with Germany.

A letter writer wants the country to refuse to give an inch on Berlin, as the Russians had already pushed the U.S. around since the war, thanks to "small concessions" made by FDR at Tehran and Yalta, and by President Truman at Potsdam.

Never mind that those concessions, his primary beef being allowance of Russia to have control of part of Berlin and Germany, were made to an essential ally in the war, without whose assistance, the war might not have been won and plainly would not have been won without much greater loss of American life. The writer allows the time-worn fallacy of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" to form his fallacious argument, omitting key facts along the way.

A letter writer hopes that the Republicans in Mecklenburg County, after decades in the desert, would be able to assume the mantle of local authority and responsibility with grace rather than disgrace.

A letter from the president of the Stonewall Jackson Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy thanks the newspaper for making their convention a success.

A letter from a dentist thanks the newspaper for its coverage of the meeting of the Second District Dental Society.

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