Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Bombay, India,
the police commissioner informed that six enemies of Gandhi, named
as co-conspirators by his assassin, Nathur Ram Godse, had been
arrested. Two others were still at large. The motive for the
assassination was concern that Gandhi's call for peace with the
Moslems would work to effect a solution to the communal problem in
favor of the Moslems. The former president of the militant
organization Mahasabha, of which Godse was a member, was also
detained for questioning without charges.
In Atlanta, Southern Democrats still suffered from hurt
feelings from the President's proposal of a ten-point program on
civil rights. The Atlanta Journal compared the program to
something initiated by Moscow. Even normally progressive editor of
the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill, wrote that it gave to
"despicable organizations ... a membership appeal," in
apparent allusion to the Klan, in hair-trigger reaction to the President's plan. He found secession from the
national party, however, to be no answer.
E.D. Nixon, president of the Alabama branch of the NAACP,
stated that the South was seeking to "re-enslave" its
black citizens and that opposition to anti-lynch legislation was so
that Southerners could continue to use the old ritual as a means to
keep the black person down, mentally and spiritually.
Southern Republicans expressed the opinion that the trouble
boded well for them, as they would never treat the South as the
Southern Democrats were about to do.
President Truman told a press conference that prices were
rising so fast that a crash was inevitable unless something were
done to halt the increase. He had no comment on the sharp nosedive
of the previous day and this day on commodities and stocks.
Corn and wheat prices fell by as much as ten cents a bushel,
the limit for a day, on the Chicago exchange. Cotton fell on the New
York market by $3 per bale before rallying slightly.
The President said that the efforts by Republicans in
Congress to cut his 39.7 billion dollar budget proposal would get
nowhere.
He also refused to say flatly that he would be a candidate
for re-election in 1948.
Attorney General Tom Clark stated that Communism could be
curbed only through laws on the books and not by declaring the
Communist Party illegal, that such an act would only drive it
underground and would in any event possibly be unconstitutional.
In Tulsa, Okla., a woman won the title as purse-cramming
champion, winning a purse flashlight. She had managed to stuff 218
items in her purse, including a car and a wheelbarrow.
Tom Watkins of The News reports of the State
estimating a million dollars worth of damage to roads in an
eight-county area around Charlotte from the recent snow and ice
storm. Counties in the eastern part of the state had been hit even
worse because of the greater presence of secondary dirt roads,
costing twice as much to repair.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, son of historian Arthur
Schlesinger and brother to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tells of a
Charlotte couple heading north to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a
seven-week vacation. The auto trip in their 1942 Chevrolet would
range to 6,000 miles. They had spent some time there during the war
and liked the cold climate. Estimated time of arrival was February
27. The couple's cat would reside with a neighbor, as cats were not
present in Alaska. The husband of the couple manufactured an ice
chipper and business was slow during the winter.
Tom Fesperman tells on page 8-A of the "sassy and hardy"
pigeons of downtown Charlotte. He was writing in a literal sense,
not of the shoppers and motorists.
On the editorial page, "Welcome to Traffic Engineer"
welcomes Charlotte's new traffic engineer, Herman Hoose, from the
Midwest. It hopes that he would soon determine whether the Charlotte
driver was the worst in the state based on the highest accident
rates or whether the problem lay elsewhere, in the city's snarled
traffic problems and lack of parking.
All we can say safely is that whoever designed the
present-day traffic system in Charlotte, that existing for the past
25 years or so, was drunk at the time. It is quite possible to
become lost, as in few cities in the United States, despite good
familiarity with previous traffic patterns, and emerge only after
hours of difficulty, especially on a rainy, foggy day. The system,
somewhere along the line, lost its rhyme and reason, its intuitive
good sense, to some idiotic efficiency experts, who are never that,
but rather fools lacking common sense.
Sorry. That is our estimate of it.
"'Just Around the Corner' Again" finds the hearings
being held on inflation control to be cosmetic, only for purposes of
the election, and that what was bound to emerge would be more of the
same passed by the special session, voluntary type measures without
teeth.
The Gallup poll showed that 51 percent of the country wanted
restoration of controls and rationing, as favored by the President.
Only 41 percent opposed. Thus, the Administration would exploit the
lack of action by the Congress in the coming campaign. The
Administration shared responsibility with the Congress for initially
abandoning controls in 1945-47, but the President had made his
stance clear in his ten-point program since the message to the
special session in November, reaffirmed in his State of the Union
message and budget message.
After the election, it was clear that controls would have to
return to prevent the spiral of inflation. Nothing outside an
OPA-type set-up would suffice to put the brakes on it.
The idea that a curb on inflation through "keen
competition" was "just around the corner", as an
industrial executive contended, reminded of Herbert Hoover's like
prognosis for prosperity, made just after the October, 1929 Crash.
"Where the State Is Losing Money" explains why it
was taking time to obtain the allocated 2.5 million dollars for
improvement of the State's mental facilities, that the commission in
charge of the spending wanted to wait until the market was ripe for
the cost of building materials, to get the most for the money. It
questions, however, whether enough had been done since 1937 when the
commission was first set up to advise on the problems of the
facilities and their solutions.
Drew Pearson finds the ultimatum of Senator Elmer Thomas of
Oklahoma that he would not testify regarding his cotton and grain
speculation, to be raising the prospect suffered by other
Republican Senators in the previous forty years who took such stands
while being investigated, that of being denied their seats or being
so severely censured that they had to resign. He offers several
examples. The only Democrat suffering such a fate in that period had
been the late Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, in 1946-47,
prior to his death the previous August.
The record showed that Senator Thomas had made speeches on
the floor which influenced cotton prices while he speculated on the
cotton market through associates, his wife and his secretary. Such
appeared as a criminal violation of the Commodity Exchange Act.
Ed Pauley, about to leave his Government positions, was
leaving behind friends in high places who could potentially aid him
in his oil interests.
Rural Missourians who never cottoned to the Pendergast
machine would likely vote for President Truman in November because
of $3 corn and wheat. It was the same kind of impetus which had
propelled the re-election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
Marquis Childs discusses the problems in Palestine, with
British policy being informed by the fear that the Holy Land would,
within a decade, become Communist, in a weakened condition
characterized by the widespread violence. A recent dispatch from the
British Foreign Office to the New York Times had said that of
15,000 unauthorized immigrants to Palestine aboard two ships, a
thousand were members of militant Communist organizations.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin placed the blame for this
condition on the U.S. Both the State Department and Defense
Department had received such reports of Communist infiltration for
some time. The refugees had come from the Soviet satellite states
and were presumed therefore to have been assembled deliberately by
the Soviets for the purpose of infiltration.
Russia's assent to the partition plan, approved by the U.N.
November 29, 1947, was presumed to have behind it the intent to
enable Soviet domination ultimately of Palestine and the Near East,
depriving the West of the necessary oil coming out of that area.
At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the Western
democracies had dodged the reality of the situation, allowing the
moderate Government of Spain to come under the control of
Communists, as the Soviets were supplying the only aid being
received by the Loyalists to combat the tanks and planes from Italy
and Germany supporting Franco's Insurgents. In the end, Franco's
fascist dictatorship resulted.
Mr. Childs suggests that something of the kind could take
place in Palestine should necessarily immediate decisions be evaded
in an atmosphere of suspicion.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the first crisis having
come up in the debate on ERP as Senator Arthur Vandenberg the
previous weekend had talked with the State Department in an effort
to develop a realistic figure which would be approved by his Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and yet be effective, without alienating
the opposition. The Budget Bureau had sought such a method by
limiting the estimate to the coming fiscal year, knocking off the
additional calendar quarter and taking out another quarter of the
appropriation because of slow payment by the Government on its
contracts, creating the illusion that only 4.5 billion would be
necessary for allocation in the first year, rather than the 6.8
billion sought by the Administration for the first 15 months.
Such a plan appeared to be supported by conservative Senator
William Knowland of California who led twenty opposing Republican
Senators. It was believed that he could supply many of those in that
faction in support of such a plan. It would delay final decision on
ERP effectively until after the election without restricting ERP
spending in the meantime. If the administrator spent the money
faster than anticipated, he could ask the next Congress for a
deficiency allocation.
But the appearance of a concession at the outset remained
bothersome to the State Department as the Plan still would have to
clear the more troublesome hurdle of the House. Thus, the State
Department appeared inclined to retain the original 6.8 billion
dollar request for the first 15 months rather than resort to the
suggested artifice.
A letter writer objects to the President's ten-point program
on civil rights, especially the recommendations for ending
segregation, establishing an anti-lynch law, an anti-poll tax law,
and making permanent the FEPC.
He says that since there was only one lynching in 1947, there
was no need for an anti-lynch law.
Apparently, he refers to the Willie Earle case out of
Greenville, S.C., occurring the previous February, wherein all of
the 31 defendants in the case were acquitted, 28 by the jury, and
insofar as the jury verdict, in a plain nullification of the law, as
eyewitnesses among the defendants identified the persons directly
responsible for the gruesome murder of Mr. Earle. The point of the
proposed law was to deter any such act from occurring by penalizing under a Federal law
not only the participants but also the jailers
who would turn over defendants to such a mob.
Even one case of lynching is one case too many for a
civilized society, especially when accomplished with impunity. This writer apparently did not think so.
He also neglects the attempted lynching of Buddy Bush in
Jackson, N.C., shortly after the Greenville acquittal the previous
May, his escape from the lynch mob having prevented sure death at
their hands. Two attempts in two different counties to obtain
indictments went for naught, despite the kidnapers having been
identified.
And the writer goes on in similar vein with regard to any attempt to eliminate Jim Crow segregation or discriminatory practices in employment through the FEPC, advocating finally a
separate Democratic Party for the South from the national party.
We recommend, as always, simply moving to Argentina. Instead, most of these atavists eventually would become Southern Republicans.
While on the subjects of civil rights and traffic engineering, we have to wonder whether the President's motorcade through Dallas on November 22, 1963 could have reached Market Hall, across the road from the President's destination that fateful afternoon, the Trade Mart, just as easily via Industrial Boulevard, accessible directly from the convergence of Main and Commerce, but not so easily the Trade Mart without going onto the planned route of Stemmons Freeway, necessitating the sharp, slow turn at Houston onto Elm, not allowing a direct route down Main. To turn onto Stemmons Freeway, because of the traffic median, required the Elm route, not so the Main route directly to Industrial, which also leads to the Trade Mart and Market Hall area. Our question, simply put, is whether there was at the time some necessary traffic pattern upon reaching the Trade Mart-Market Hall complex which would have required a circuitous route, not acceptable for the President's motorcade, to reach the Trade Mart, to the right off Industrial, which would not have been the case for Market Hall, to the left off Industrial. We cannot answer the question as the Dallas Trade Center complex has changed markedly since 1963. Thus, we only pose it.
It is significant, as Mr. Nixon and his law firm's client, Pepsi-Cola, were holding their three-day conference, attended also by actress Joan Crawford, widow of the former chairman of the Board of Pepsi, from November 20 into the evening of the 21st, Mr. Nixon addressing the group on the 21st at Market Hall, having stayed at the Baker Hotel on Commerce, today, a block away from Belo Garden, about five blocks east from Dealey Plaza, wherein also Ms. Crawford stayed, just down the hall from Mr. Nixon, both attending a gala ball at the Empire Room of the Statler Hilton on the night of the 21st. Market Hall was thus presumably not available to the President, had the route to it been the more desirable and safe.
We have to raise the question, as such a dirty trick, a man-trap as it were, would have been right up the alley of Richard Nixon and his cadre of supporters at the time. Perhaps some enterprising researcher or someone with a memory of the streets around the Trade Mart complex in 1963, or access to the City Engineer's maps of those streets at the time, can come up with the answer. It might help to solve a riddle, a little riddle of history.
In any event, it is said that Mr. Nixon first received news of the assassination, as he returned home via taxi in New York City, while stopped at a stoplight near the 59th Street Bridge. Sock it to him?
A letter writer takes issue with P. C. Burkholder's frequent
contributions to the People's Platform, as he prepared to run again
for the Republican nomination for Congress, having been the failed
nominee in 1946. The writer finds his reasoning specious in his
letter of September 27, 1947, blaming the New Deal for everything,
including the Depression, the war, and the inflation since the war.
The writer thinks that he had not shown that he possessed the
requisite knowledge to be in Congress and recommends that the
Republicans not nominate him again.
Well, listen here, Mr. Smarty Pants. He knows about country
buttermilk and what more would you want in a Congressman?
A letter from failed Republican Congressional candidate P. C.
Burkholder answers a letter of January 29 critical of his previous
stances. He says that he was thankful to be a Republican and not a
New Dealer, and to live in a land where that was possible.
"My whistle is not stuck and damn the New Deal and all
their long-range programs." They were designed to gain power
over the people, using the stacked Supreme Court to do it. They had
given Russia everything at the peace table.
