The Charlotte News
Wednesday, October 27, 1948
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Paris, the foreign ministers of France, Britain, and the U.S. offered Russia a new avenue by which to resolve the Berlin crisis, based on the six-nation proposal vetoed the previous Monday in the U.N. Security Council by Russia. They said that they would leave the Berlin crisis on the Security Council agenda, signaling that the next move was Russia's.
The Russians asserted that they could, whenever they wanted, conduct gunnery practice in the air corridor supplying the American-British airlift to Berlin. They denied any four-power agreement on air safety rules for the corridor. The statement came in reply to an official protest by the British and Americans that their planes were being endangered by the practice and that it violated four-power rules of safety.
ERP would not make any new grants to nine of the 16 recipient European countries until they signed loan agreements. Only Britain and Iceland had current loan agreements. Five nations, Austria, Greece, Trieste, and the allied zones of Germany, were exempt because of their current economic conditions.
The U.S., Britain, and France agreed to conduct a full review of the reparations allocations of German industrial plants to determine whether leaving the plants extant would better benefit the Marshall Plan. Britain and France nixed a proposal by the U.S., however, to halt all dismantling of plants pending the further review.
In Nuremberg, an American war crimes tribunal acquitted thirteen leading German military commanders of plotting to start World War II. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb was convicted of crimes against civilization, being active in the early planning for invasion of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the low countries, and France. Field Marshal Hugo Sperrie, responsible for the 1940 Blitz on London was freed on all four counts against him. The trial had lasted nine months. No one had been convicted of planning aggressive war since the top Nazis were convicted in October, 1946.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Mark Andrews stated, in a Navy Day address in New Orleans, that the Navy stood ready for a quick retaliatory response from the Mediterranean to any act of aggression.
Near Marseilles, France, a train carrying coal miners planning to return to work in the mines was derailed causing, however, no injuries. The Government had encouraged the back-to-work movement to thwart the Communist-led strike.
John L. Lewis, UMW president, proposed that AFL president William Green importune the President to intervene to halt the shooting of coal miners in France by police and troops seeking to take over the mines of the country since the previous Monday. He wanted the President to cut off aid under the Marshall Plan to France if the French Government did not cease the effort.
The largest bus strike in the city's
history had the previous day beset New York for four hours, affecting
3.5 million riders. Several thousand of the 8,500 drivers who struck
refused to return to work this date, though the strike was supposed to last only the four hours. The strike pertained to a demand
for back wages
In Buffalo, the AFL bartenders union local agreed to provide free baby sitting service on election day for members and their wives who wanted to vote. But the secretary of the local made it clear that they were not extending the service to get out a Republican vote, not even for a price.
In Charlotte, the Community Chest drive, set to end the previous day, had fallen $41,000 short of its $307,000 goal, was extended therefore until 1:00 p.m. on Friday.
The President, speaking at Hartford, Conn., said that rents would increase by 20 percent the following March under the Republicans. He advocated price controls and continuation of rent control beyond the February deadline. He also appeared in Pittsfield, Mass., discussing labor-baiting by the GOP. At Springfield, Mass., he portrayed Thomas Dewey as a "vicious" critic of the nation's school teachers, possessed of an "un-American point of view on the public schools". A statement had been attributed to Mr. Dewey, one which he denied making, that he had said that the teachers' lobby was more "vicious and dishonest" than any of the other lobbies. The President would deliver a major address this night in Boston and would proceed to New York for a speech the following night in Madison Square Garden.
State Democratic chairman Capus Waynick said that the effort of the GOP in the state to wage Congressional campaigns in each of the state's twelve districts was doomed to failure. He warned Democrats, however, to be most alert in the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Districts.
On the editorial page, "State Dental College" favors the proposal of the state's dentists to form a four-year, state-supported dental school at the University of North Carolina in association with the new four-year medical school.
North Carolina had ranked 43rd among the states in 1940 in dental care, albeit improving some since. Nevertheless, in 1947, the ratio remained one dentist for every 4,554 people, compared to a national average of one for every 1,870 persons.
Only a hundred North Carolinians had applied to out-of-state dental colleges in 1948 and only 25 had been accepted. Most North Carolinians who went to dental school attended either Emory University in Atlanta, the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, or the University of Maryland, each operating with a quota, it says, for out of state students. Thus, North Carolinians had little chance of entering dental school.
The proposed dental school at UNC was therefore greatly needed.
"2nd Ward-West Charlotte Grid" informs of the second annual News-sponsored football game between West Charlotte High School and Second Ward High School, both black schools with scant funding available for athletics. All schools received their athletic funding only from ticket sales. The previous year's effort had raised $1,800, split between the two schools, enough to fund their athletic programs. It urges purchasing a ticket for the game set for November 6 to effect the same goal again.
"News from the Solar System" tells of the Navy sending rockets, called "Aerobees", 60 and 70 miles above the earth to take pictures for the first time of the earth from far above, showing that it was genuinely round.
Historians of the year 2000, it ventures, might rank the photos of greater importance than either the campaign for the presidency or the sparring at the U.N. between the Western nations and Russia re Berlin and atomic control. But for the present, the pictures did not rate front page news.
Time had recently stated that man would likely keep fooling around with the atom until he blew the earth into asteroids. But if, perchance, he managed to survive, he would soon have the freedom to explore the whole solar system.
Dr. Olaf Stapledon of the British Interplanetary Society thought Mars would be easiest of the eight other planets to colonize, and Jupiter and Saturn the most difficult. Venus might in time rival the earth as a home for intelligent beings. He talked in terms of organizing the solar system into the United Solar System.
The piece prefers to achieve peace
first on earth with the U.S.S.R. before venturing off into the U.S.S.
But it thinks that viewing of the earth from a great distance might
humble man and so invites the Russians for a rocket
Drew Pearson comments on the Senate campaign of Paul Douglas in Illinois against Senator Curley Brooks, minion of the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Douglas, a former professor at the University of Chicago, who had risen in the late war from enlisting as a private at age 50 to become a lieutenant colonel, was by far, he opines, the better qualified.
Guy Gillette, whom FDR had sought to purge when he was in the Senate in 1936 but won anyhow, was staging a comeback in Iowa, and appeared likely to win the Senate race.
Former Senator George Magill of Kansas was also staging a comeback and could win the Senate seat over former Governor Andy Schoeppel, whom former Governor Alf Landon had once called "the errand boy of the big corporations".
Adlai Stevenson was well positioned to defeat Governor Dwight Green in the gubernatorial race in Illinois.
Bob Kerr appeared set to defeat GOP Congressman Ross Rizley in the Senate race in Oklahoma.
Four of the five given good chances by Mr. Pearson would triumph, with only George Magill losing to Mr. Schoeppel in Kansas.
Marquis Childs tells of the Republicans missing the boat during the campaign by having not sought to point out that a Democratic Senate would mean the return to power of several reactionary or cantankerous and aging Southerners, to be key committee chairmen. They included: Kenneth McKellar, 79, of Tennessee on the Appropriations Committee; Walter George, 70, of Georgia on the Finance Committee; Tom Connally, 71, of Texas on the Foreign Relations Committee; Burnet Maybank of South Carolina on the Banking and Currency Committee; Elmer Thomas, 72, of Oklahoma on the Agriculture Committee; and, though not a Southerner, Pat McCarran, 72, of Nevada on the Judiciary Committee.
Such Senators could hamstring efforts by 46-year old progressive Thomas Dewey to effect changes as President.
Yet, the Republicans were running as friends of the Southerners, embracing them as allies, to win a few votes potentially in the South, unnecessary to Mr. Dewey's inevitable landslide. Senator Taft, campaigning in Nashville, had recently said that the Republicans were not substantially different from the Southern Democrats.
Mr. Childs believes that the strategy made no sense.
James Marlow tells of Russia having exercised its Security Council veto in the U.N. for the 27th and 28th times with the vetoes on control of atomic energy and on the six-nation proposal for lifting the Berlin blockade in exchange for establishing the Russian mark as the sole currency of Berlin and discussing, in a Big Four meeting of the foreign ministers thereafter, the German problems generally.
He believes that only time would tell whether these vetoes and continuing obstruction, contrasted with no use of the veto by the United States in three years since the creation of the U.N., were designed to render the organization impotent and to keep the world in fear.
The House Committee on Foreign Affairs had published a study called "The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism", in which it stated that Pravda had admitted in 1931 that the only reason for Russian joinder of the League of Nations commission studying European union was to wreck the project.
A letter writer urges voting for incumbent Democrat Hamilton Jones for the Tenth District Congressional race.
A letter writer says that he would not get to vote in the election because he had been sick and could not register. Workers at his precinct in Asheville refused to walk a block to his home to register him. He had wanted to vote for Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren. He hopes that some person who was planning not to vote would go to the polls and vote for him by proxy.
A letter writer expresses surprise at twice-failed GOP Congressional candidate P.C. Burkholder's decision, announced the previous Saturday, to bolt the GOP for the Democrats, finds his reasoning attacking the New Deal constantly flawed. Mr. Burkholder reminds him of a man he knew who was a Methodist but complained that the preacher never shook his hand and so bolted to the Baptists, and when last he saw him, was a member of the Church of God.
He says that if "P.C.B." would promise not to sling any more mud, he could join the Dixiecrats.
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