The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 16, 1948
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Western officials indicated that Andrei Vishinsky had alienated the six "neutral" nations of the U.N. Security Council meeting in Paris by challenging their motives for attempting to mediate the Berlin crisis, claiming that a "clever maneuver" had been made to lure Russia into a trap.
Poland charged in Paris before the U.N. disarmament subcommittee that President Truman was a "prisoner of a military clique", that personally he had wanted to send an envoy, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, to Moscow to negotiate on nuclear control but was overruled by his military masters.
The U.S. issued a protest of the Soviet announcement that anti-aircraft fire would be aimed at towed aircraft in a training exercise this date at Hasselberg Airport in the Berlin airlift corridor.
The anti-Communist Berlin City Council stated that it would proceed with elections on December 5, with or without Russian approval.
Israel rejected a ceasefire order issued by the U.N. to Israeli and Egyptian forces fighting in the Negev Desert. It said that because the Egyptians had not recognized the ceasefire and had fired on a Jewish convoy in the Negev on October 15, killing several persons, the Israelis could not stop fighting until assurances were provided by the U.N. that Jewish convoys, villages, and communications lines would not be attacked by the Arabs. The convoy had been intended to supply Jewish settlements in the southern Negev. Assassinated U.N. Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte had recommended that the Negev be provided to the Arabs.
The American-British zone of Trieste had been admitted to ERP.
The President issued a statement saying that he had ordered the Defense Department to organize all military reserve units for national security, based on the Navy and Marines having gotten ahead of the Army and Air Force in organization of reserves. The order was not based on deterioration of international relations.
In China, Chinhsien, a key Nationalist base in Manchuria, fell to the Communists. In September, Tsinan, another key base, had fallen to the Communists.
France was planning to change the value of the franc as a way of trying to improve its economic problems. The Communist-led strikes, however, were on the wane.
U.S. Ambassador to Greece Henry Grady, in response to press questions, said in a written statement that the military picture in the country was not satisfactory and indicated that hard fighting against the Communist-led rebel guerrillas lay ahead. He asserted that more cooperation was needed between the Greek Government and the American economic-military mission.
Informed observers said that there were more guerrillas in Greece presently than before the start of the summer operation which had successfully taken back the Grammos Mountains guerrilla stronghold. It appeared that the war had grown into a much larger international conflict, between Communist and anti-Communist forces.
A scientist from the Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear facility said that an atomic-powered airplane had advanced beyond the stage of theory and been placed on the engineers' drawing board. One pound of uranium could power a B-29 six times around the globe. The scientist said that an atomic-powered aviation engine would be tested within five years.
That's comforting, unless it should crash, as those B-29's occasionally seem prone to do.
Black teachers in Oklahoma City won a Federal District Court case seeking equal pay with similarly situated white teachers. Emme Lee Freeman, a black teacher at Douglas High School, had brought the suit against the City.
The President, campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., said that the Republicans had sought to "debauch" the election. He accused the GOP Congress of passing a "rich man's tax bill" earlier in the year, over his veto. He also said that the Republican "firemen" were too busy playing "political checkers" to put out the inflationary blaze.
Well, they may have had a cocker spaniel down at the firehouse distracting them from their task, rolling over, wagging his tail, playing tricks for the folks in advance of Halloween and the pumpkins.
The President had so far traveled 15,000 miles on the campaign trail, with more than 7,000 remaining in the last 16 days of the campaign. He was returning to Washington on this afternoon. On Monday, he would fly to Miami to speak to the American Legion convention.
Also this date, he held a press conference from aboard the campaign train.
Governor Dewey said that the Democrats had made "trades with the forces of aggression".
He was visiting his mother for the weekend in Owosso, Mich., and would return to Albany on Monday.
Relax, it's in the bag. Spend some time with mom.
Former Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued a statement saying that Governor Dewey's statement in Louisville recently that he had initiated a plan in 1944 to take partisan politics out of the election was taking credit for something which many people of both parties had a hand in doing. Mr. Dewey had claimed that he refrained in the 1944 campaign from telling of "some of the blunders and tragedies" of the Roosevelt Administration in foreign policy and conduct of the war. Mr. Hull suggested that Mr. Dewey's statements could inject partisan politics into foreign policy and that he had agreed with Mr. Dewey's 1944 statement that politics should be kept out of foreign affairs.
John Daly of The News tells of Duke Power planning to engage in a 100-million dollar expansion program in Charlotte, to take place over several years. Several new power plants in the region were already under construction.
According to the Journal of Mental Science, it was a good thing occasionally to blow your top, as related on the back page in the "Mirror of Your Mind" column.
Our present society is well advised to heed that advice, a society seemingly so concerned about anyone displaying any slight hint of anger that it seeks to punish freedom of speech, creating an atmosphere where guns thrive and speech goes out the window, natural concomitants and hallmarks of fascism.
Some idiotic person in Roseburg, Oregon, described as a retired truck driver, stated, in the wake of the community college shooting there a couple of weeks ago, "A well-armed society is a polite society."
Yeah, and Hitler and Mussolini thought precisely the same way, you moron from hell. If you, you little pansy, need a gun to enforce politeness, you are not only a weak, emasculated creep, with a mind too flimsy and degenerate to argue a point, but are a dumb fascist who does not understand that everyone in this country has the right to be rude, to be obnoxious, to say what we damned well please, and without "consequences", to come right up to your little pansy, pinched, dumb face and tell you, nose to nose, that you are a pansy, bullying, arrogant idiot for carrying a gun to a rally to greet the President of the United States trying to heal a hurting community, or to any other place, public or private.
We urge everyone who hates guns, thinks they ought be banned, to approach these little, scared pansies with their tough, open-carried guns and be as rude as you can to them, shame them into rejoining the human race, if that is possible amid their long-term corporate and tv brainwashing.
If Congress is too weak and vacillating, in the pay of the bribes given them by the gun lobby as they are, then we, as Americans, must take the matter into our own hands and make these cowards give up their guns by negatively and openly and rudely sanctioning them until they do. If that makes us rude bullies, so be it. Lives will be saved by that kind of rude bullying. If you want to live in a police state, continue to hem and haw, and let these loud-mouth fools have their way with their guns.
The gun advocates are not peace-loving citizens. They are weak, pugnacious little punks and are the problem.
Guns are for cowards and pansies. You do not impress anyone as some big, tough Wild Western gunzel by carrying a big gun. You only advertise your weakness and complete lack of impact on the world.
On the editorial page, "Government and Private Enterprise" finds that despite many bad experiences had during the New Deal with alphabet agencies, not all government operations were bad and it was not necessarily the case that government and private enterprise could not work well together.
It cites the Thursday "Miracle Day" in Charlotte, during which private enterprise cooperated with State and U.S. Government bureaus to achieve a salutary result, in the rejuvenation of the 120-acre Kelly farm to demonstrate to 60,000 spectators the benefits of soil conservation techniques.
The Soil Conservation Service had come into its own during the New Deal years, had worked well with farmers to eliminate practices which formerly had promoted soil erosion and dustbowl conditions.
By the same token, the fertilizers and machines at work on the Kelly farm could never have been developed except through private enterprise.
But the government and private enterprise worked cooperatively side by side to get the job done on this project, a job neither could have accomplished on its own.
"Musings on the Preventive War" remarks on the article by Air Force Col. Dale Smith in the Air University Quarterly Review, as referenced the previous week by Marquis Childs, in which Col. Smith posited a quick, 30-day blitz war accomplished by 300 planes dropping atomic bombs on strategic targets to cripple the enemy economically, causing the enemy's army to be left in the field without supplies and thus unable to operate, forced to surrender. Col. Smith's opinion, it finds, was typical of the Air Force, though remaining unofficial.
He found that the question was whether the planes could reach their targets and admitted that there were difficulties to be overcome in that regard, as Russian targets, for instance, would involve flights twice the distances flown during the late war.
The piece views it as unnecessary speculation, likely to cause the Soviets to react by widening their European and Asian buffer zones the more. Fear bred reaction and reaction bred more fear, in a vicious chain.
It asserts that there was little chance that the U.S. would resort to a "preventive war"—that is, a preemptive war—"because a democracy by its very nature is almost always the victim, never the instigator, of surprise warfare." That realization would likely temper Russian leaders who understood this practicality. Yet, a war could be started accidentally as well as intentionally, especially in a world divided between opposing armed camps, as the world was quickly becoming.
The Soviets, it concludes, could do much to alleviate this mutual build-up of arms by changing course and being more cooperative.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "There Is Such an Animal", tells of a piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch having concluded that travel leveled expectations of other places, such as the case of the Eskimo nursing student in Philadelphia who had been raised in Alaska but had never seen an igloo and believed Philadelphia to be cold.
It says that the South could show
the same Eskimo student a native North Carolinian who had never
lynched a black person, learned the second stanza
Drew Pearson reports that Governor Dewey, speaking in Pittsburgh, had said that his administration would bring "new and vigorous leadership" to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service—a Service already controlled by the Republicans. The current Republican director was in the process of reorganizing the Service and Governor Dewey had cut the ground out from underneath his efforts, as no one would wish to join while expecting to be fired in three months.
U.S. District Court Judge T. Whitfield Davidson of Dallas, Texas, was showing bias toward the real estate interests and against veterans in levying fines not even equal to the illicit profits made in real estate fraud cases involving victimized veterans.
He notes that Judge Davidson was the same judge who refused to extradite Texas oilman Freeman Burford when indicted in Louisiana for allegedly bribing Louisiana Governor Dick Leche in a hot oil case. Mr. Leche was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, but Mr. Burford remained free. Judge Davidson was of the opinion that Texas did not have to honor a Federal demand for extradition to Louisiana.
Marquis Childs, aboard the Dewey "Victory Special" campaign train, tells of the shrewd managers aboard who might have called it "Destiny Special", with great events to come. You could almost hear "Pomp and Circumstance" or "Hail to the Chief" from the wings.
The campaign was orchestrated with clockwork precision, learned from two gubernatorial campaigns and the presidential race of 1944.
It was no accident, he posits, that, as Warren Moscow had pointed out in Politics in the Empire State, in fourteen of twenty presidential campaigns since the end of the Civil War, at least one of the candidates had hailed from New York.
Both New York Governors Al Smith, the Democratic nominee in 1928, and FDR had developed the same skills of administration which Governor Dewey had acquired. There were also differences in background, as Governor Smith came from the Fulton Street fish wharves and FDR was a Hudson Valley aristocrat. Mr. Dewey was a transplant from Michigan. He was also the first candidate for the presidency who had been born in the Twentieth Century.
Beyond the campaign, the time would come, says Mr. Childs, when the Administration of President Dewey would begin and tough decisions would have to be made. He would be prepared.
Joseph Alsop, in Louisville, finds it likely that Senator John Sherman Cooper would defeat Congressman Virgil Chapman—as he would not. He says that it would be the blueprint for the GOP election—as it would.
The GOP, he predicts, would not lose the Senate, after all, though their candidates were in trouble in some states, as were Democrats in one or two, New Mexico and Montana. It appeared inconceivable that an electoral sweep for Governor Dewey, as predicted, would not carry along both houses of Congress for the Republicans.
The strength of Mr. Dewey was that he was regarded as competent and energetic and the President was considered inadequate and incompetent. A farm housewife had said that Mr. Truman was a good man but that you could not vote for someone for President whom you believed would make a "thriftless farmer".
That's why he lost.
It was said that if a person such as Justice William O. Douglas had received the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1944, then the Democrats would be winning the election. It was also being said that if the Republicans had chosen a person with the politics of the 80th Congress, then even President Truman would be winning.
A letter from a Dixiecrat elector out of the Sixth Congressional District of North Carolina says that North Carolinians were disappointed in listening to the Democratic Convention in July, finding that Jonathan Daniels and Governor Gregg Cherry "were enlisted under the banner of Walter White", executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P.
He provides comments made by Mr. White in and since 1944, that if the Democrats nominated a Southerner for vice-president, then they could kiss the black vote good-bye, and other statements, which the elector finds objectionable. He thinks it was all the result of Communist infiltration, to the churches, schools, and "most of all the white civilization of this region".
Is that the region of Hades of which you are speaking?
A letter writer urges the nation to heed God to avoid being vanquished by its enemies.
Framed Edition
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