The Charlotte News

Friday, October 8, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Argentina's representative on the U.N. Security Council was acting for the six "neutral" nations of the Council in attempting to effect rapprochement between the East and West in the Berlin crisis. Herbert Evatt of Australia and Secretary-General Trygve Lie were said to be ready to make an appeal to the Big Four to agree to a three-month truce, during which the blockade of Berlin would be lifted while the four foreign ministers met to try to resolve the differences permanently. American and British sources said that it was unlikely that they would be receptive to such a course as it could imply that Russia had a right therefore to reimpose the blockade.

At the request of Eleanor Roosevelt, the U.N. social committee unanimously adopted a protocol for narcotics control, including the synthetic substances which had been developed since the existing conventions had been established between 1925 and 1931.

Cuba, Egypt and Norway would replace Colombia, Belgium and Syria on the Security Council at the first of the year. Israel bitterly resented the inclusion of Egypt.

The U.S. increased its propaganda warfare against Russia, removing all tact. Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told the special advisory commission on the U.S. Office of Information that he had received orders from Paris to "debunk" the Russian proposal for simultaneous limited disarmament, a ban of the atom bomb, and establishment of a control organization for nuclear energy. French radio had regarded the proposal by Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vishinsky as a fresh basis for discussions. The policy of debunking appeared as a change from prior policy of the State Department under Secretary Marshall.

Personal incomes of Americans rose in August to an unprecedented annualized rate of 215 billion dollars. Increase in the number of persons working in farming and trade chiefly accounted for the two billion dollar increase over the July rate.

G.E. and two affiliate companies were convicted of conspiring between 1927 and 1940 to monopolize trade in tungsten and carbide hard metal compositions and products both in the U.S. and abroad. The hard metals were used in airplane, ship, and automobile manufacture. The indictment had been issued in 1941 but the case had been suspended during the war. The individual officers involved were subject to five years each in prison and fines of $25,000 each. The case was heard before a Federal judge after the defendants waived a jury trial.

Nobel Prize winning author Pearl Buck told Maryland educators that American prejudice against the non-white races was an aid to Communism. She said that the people of Asia were terrified that the U.S. was building Japan into a strong country again. She said also that she was distressed to see that the audience was composed completely of whites. She said that the personality and character of the American black race were not damaged. Whites, however, were split between their Christian principles and denying equality to blacks. She said that it was insensitive for Warren Austin to have said before the U.N. General Assembly that the Russian proposal on disarmament was a piece of "Oriental trickery" while friends from the East were present.

President Truman spoke to a crowd estimated at 5,000 in Albany, N.Y., again asking that the voters keep the Democrats in the White House and give them back control of Congress. Governor Dewey had given state employees time off to hear the President. Mr. Truman would deliver a major address this night in Buffalo.

Governor Dewey, addressing a group in the Alfred E. Smith housing project in New York City, asked for joint action between the Federal Government and private enterprise, as well as state and local governments, to end the housing shortage. While builders would build a million new homes in the current year, he said, it was not nearly enough.

Governor Earl Warren, campaigning in Madison, Wisc., said that the state welfare legislation and workmen's compensation legislation showed the GOP in practice.

In Cincinnati, the UMW convention indirectly endorsed Governor Dewey for the presidency by attacking President Truman for his anti-strike rebuffs to John L. Lewis and the union, seeking and obtaining injunctions and fines for contempt.

The Maryland Court of Appeals turned down the request of the Dixiecrats to be included on the Maryland ballot and so it was unlikely that they would appear.

Elmo Roper finds the civil rights program of the President to be his Achilles heel in the election. He finds that the President might not "have been elected" even with the traditional Solid South, but that without it, as shown by a recent poll by Arthur Crossley, he had no chance of winning. He would likely lose Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and possibly Louisiana to the Dixiecrats, representing 38 electoral votes.

Many considered the President to have taken a bold stand on civil rights when he knew it would hurt him politically. But the issue was not considered by most voters to be of equivalent importance to inflation and peace. The latest Fortune poll had found that 42.6 percent of all voters believed that Congress should pass laws to insure equality of the races, while 49 percent believed it ought be left to the states. The non-Southern totals were 50 percent and 40.9 percent, respectively. In the South, it was 21.6 percent for Federal legislation on equality and 72.1 percent believing it ought be left to the states, with much higher results, approaching or above 50 percent, in the former column for every other region.

When the question posed was whether legislation ought require employers to hire solely based on race or religion, the total was 24.9 percent favoring Federal legislation and 26.9 percent wanting it left to the states, while 37.4 percent wanted no such legislation at all.

By a two to one margin, voters said they believed that the President would work harder to achieve repeal of the poll tax than would Governor Dewey. They were generally not sure where the Governor stood on civil rights, with most seeing him as a mirror of their own beliefs on the issue.

The Achilles heel for the country in the eyes of the world, Mr. Roper concludes, was the way the country treated its minorities. He believes that history would treat the President better on this issue than would the voters on November 2.

In Los Angeles, Barbara Ford, daughter of film director John Ford, claimed that she was a kissless bride whom actor Robert Walker married only for convenience. She sought annulment of the July 8 marriage on the ground that he had no intention to perform his duties as a husband or to be more than a husband in form. They had separated on August 14.

He just wasn't a kisser, perhaps, or at least of her kisser.

The Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves in Cleveland by a score of 2 to 0 in the third game of the World Series, to take a 2-1 advantage. Gene Bearden pitched for the winners and Vern Bickford for the Braves.

On the editorial page, "....As Night Follows Day" finds interesting an item of September 30 suggesting that an English bolt would fit an American nut in an agreement sought for 50 years between the two countries. Combined with other items indicating the real possibility of war with Russia, it foretold of war's inevitability unless the Russians could change policy. Nobody wanted war as neither side was prepared for another war. But the signs were present and in Paris and Berlin hung the fate of man's destiny.

"Fred Allen on the Warpath" tells of the radio comedian's latest campaign to do do away with radio give-away programs so that pure entertainment could again occupy the airwaves.

The F.C.C. had also entered the picture, suggesting that it might take the give-away programs off the air as violative of lottery laws. The piece finds that reasoning pretty dull, however, and that it would have been spicier to have them determine that the programs were communistic.

Mr. Allen was giving away numerous prizes, such as the gangplank of the Queen Mary, and had offered a $5,000 bond to listeners of the give-away programs to indemnify them for losing out on prizes if they listened to the Fred Allen Show. And, it wonders who would dare miss winning the prizes of the type Mr. Allen was giving away just to win a washing machine or $64.

"Song of the Cosmos" tells of a group of scientists, electrical engineers and pioneers in radio communication having gone to Ithaca, N.Y., to tune in on the universe that they might listen to the "song of the cosmos" via frequency 14.2 megacycles. They could pick up the sun, the moon, or the Milky Way, with but a flip of the dial.

The piece suggests that radio listeners need only buy the special equipment and they, too, could tune in to this music. One scientist described it as "a combination of gravel falling on the roof and the howling of wolves."

The editorial thinks it "celestial re-bop".

A piece from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, titled "Clinic for Alcoholics", tells of the opening of the clinic for alcoholics at the Medical College of Virginia as a pilot program. Alcohol-related offenses had for years represented 50 percent of those jailed in the state. The new approach was to treat alcoholism as a sickness rather than as an offense warranting jail. Initially, the clinic would only operate on Saturdays, with beds to be included for the highly intelligent to assist the psychiatrists in searching for root causes.

It quotes from The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson: "The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot." The piece concludes that the findings to be obtained at the new facility might help to explain the alcoholic and chart better methods of treatment.

Drew Pearson tells of a story leaking from General Lucius Clay that American paratroopers had cleared out a nest of 15,000 Soviet-Mongolian troops who had deserted from the Russian Army in 1945 and holed up in the American sector of Berlin during the early days of occupation. Initially, green M.P.'s were unable to do anything about the seasoned Russian troops, who were looting and raping every night in Berlin. But when the paratroopers arrived, they meted out brutality for brutality to the Mongols, loaded them onto trucks and dumped them at the gates of the Russian sector. There, they faced court-martial proceedings for desertion. The entire clean-up operation took only ten days.

General Clay had told his Congressional visitors that the Russians only understood and respected brute force. They mistook conciliation for weakness and therefore it would be a grave mistake to retreat from Berlin.

Harold Stassen was asked by the Minneapolis Community Chest leaders to greet a stewardess bringing red feathers for the annual drive. He declined because of a prior speaking engagement. The Chest leaders thought it too bad as they told him that she was attractive, brunette and 21.

High Pentagon officials, worried over the Berlin crisis, were determined not to get caught napping as at Pearl Harbor. They had instituted a special telephone system to avoid a repeat performance. As recorded by Bruce Catton in War Lords of Washington, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had asserted in private on December 4, 1941 that war could start with Japan at any moment but that the Navy was quite ready. He thought then that the war would last about six months.

J. Monroe Johnson of South Carolina, director of Defense Transportation within the I.C.C., wanted to have as much fundraising as possible for the Democrats before the election. Some wondered how it could be done effectively, however, as the Hatch Act forbade campaign solicitation from Federal employees.

Marquis Childs tells of a pair of articles by Col. Frederick Moore and Col. Dale Smith in the Air University Quarterly Review disclosing the idea, consistent with that of the Air Force brass, that a war with Russia could be successfully concluded in one to three months with a series of atomic attacks by air. The articles outlined a strategy advocated by top Air Force policymakers. They did not expressly mention Russia, only a theoretical enemy. They posited the use of about 300 bombers in such an operation, dwarfed in size by the mammoth raids during the war.

Skeptics in both the Army and Navy questioned the viability of such a plan. One of the most outspoken such critics was Admiral William Leahy, the President's chief of staff. His bluntness had not endeared him to Air Force brass. Some recent stories suggested that the President was ignoring Admiral Leahy's advice, wanted to find a way to get him to retire.

General Omar Bradley was also a critic of the plan. He believed a war with Russia could last 30 years or longer. Concentrated atomic attacks would not prevent Russian resistance, could inspire the Russians to resist to the last man standing. The centers of Communist power would be transferred to Western Europe. Retaking Europe would be more difficult than in World War II.

Hanson Baldwin, the military expert for The New York Times, had written that it appeared that military men were making the country's foreign policy. The disagreement among the military suggested a major chasm in strategy presumed requisite for such a war, the preparation necessary for 30 days of warfare versus that for 30 years.

DeWitt MacKenzie tells of the Communists intensifying their assault on Asia, primarily in China. The Chinese Communists claimed that their struggle had nothing to do with Moscow, but that was a fiction. The Chinese were working closely with the Russians.

On October 3, a House Foreign Affairs Committee report declared China to be the decisive area in the struggle between Russia and the West. On October 5, A.P. correspondent Spencer Moosa reported from Peiping that there was a growing belief in the city that the Chinese Communists were over the hump in their plans to dominate China. On October 6, a dispatch from Nanking announced that Changchun had been abandoned by the Nationalists in the face of attacks from the Communist forces.

In Southeast Asia, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and French Indochina were seething with Communist-inspired rebellions.

While the West understood the threat, there was a limit to which they could respond for the fact of the precedence given Europe. The frontier in the fight against Communism was considered to be the Elbe River.

The House subcommittee recommended that Nationalist China receive both greater financial assistance and military aid. But if America tried to bolster the Asiatic theater while also dealing with European recovery, the burden would be too great on the country's resources. Europe was the most pressing front and had to be held at all costs.

D. C. Williams tells of the Kimberley District of South Africa being discovered in 1867 when a Boer youngster was found to be using diamonds for toys.

Violin strings were made usually from the intestines of a lamb, not a cat, notwithstanding that they were called "catgut".

Wild birds rarely lived to be more than ten years old, and 21 was the greatest longevity recorded thus far.

James Marlow tells of there never having been a presidential campaign like that of 1948. Both candidates had recently toured the country by train, with Mr. Truman taking off the gloves against his Republican opponents. Mr. Dewey responded with a few blows of his own against the Democrats. But they were embracing over foreign policy, as both parties had shaped it.

As a backdrop, the country had reached a crisis with Russia. Secretary of State Marshall briefed the President on what was happening in Paris and John Foster Dulles, the likely successor as Secretary of State in a Dewey administration, was explaining it to Governor Dewey.

A letter from the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Welfare Board thanks the newspaper for its editorial approval of the two proposed trade schools for the county.

A letter from the president of the Mint Museum of Art thanks the newspaper for a feature on October 3 regarding the museum.

A letter from the president of the North Carolina Federation of Business & Professional Women's Clubs thanks the newspaper generally during National Newspaper Week for its role in making life better in the community.

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