Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State
Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had told the House
Foreign Affairs Committee that unless the 275 million dollars of
additional aid proposed by the President for Greece and Turkey were
approved, the two countries could not remain free of Communist
domination.
In Palestine, a truckload of dynamite exploded in an Arab
residential section of Haifa and police said that eleven Arabs,
including two policemen, were killed and 27 wounded. It was possible
that more victims remained trapped in the wreckage of a seven-story
building which collapsed. The Stern Gang had taken responsibility
for the explosion.
Four Republican Senators urged that the U.S. muster support
among friendly nations to have a veto-free independent supreme
council, apart from the Security Council at the U.N., to check the
international spread of Communism. The plan was offered as an
amendment to the 5.3 billion dollar appropriation bill for the first
year of the Marshall Plan.
The 3.75 billion dollar loan to England in July, 1946 was
reported exhausted, spent at the rate of 200 million per month. The
loan originally had been expected to last for four or five years. It
had lasted instead just 19.5 months.
Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, as a member of the
Senate Banking Committee, questioned the fitness of Thomas McCabe to
be appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board based on his
having, while in charge of foreign war surplus property sales
between 1944 and 1946, cut the tails off of eleven B-25 bombers
after their sale to a private Chinese firm was made public, to
forestall adverse publicity at home surrounding the deal.
The Czechoslovakian Ambassador to the U.S. resigned his post
in protest of the Communist Party takeover in his country.
A nationwide strike of meat workers was called for March 16
by the CIO United Packinghouse Workers.
Governor Jim Folsom of Alabama blamed politics for the filing
by a woman of a paternity suit against him, claiming that he was the
father of her baby boy. The suit sought a declaration that the
Governor was the woman's common law husband and father of the child.
Governor Folsom was a widower. The woman was divorced.
Governor Thomas Dewey had placed his political stock in three
primaries, those in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
The News straw poll showed General Eisenhower still
leading with 185 votes. Henry Wallace resumed his runner-up position
with 180. Thomas Dewey had fallen again to third with 163. Senator
Taft had 110, Senator Vandenberg, 109, Senator Harry F. Byrd, 97,
Harold Stassen, 67, followed by President Truman at 66, still in
eighth place.
The last ballot had been published the previous day and so if
you wish to vote, you had better pink that one, shear it, stamp it,
and drop it in the box, double-quick. Time is running out.
Special instruction for retarded children in the Charlotte
public schools, a program sponsored by the Jaycees, was assured
after the Jaycees voted to donate $2,400 to employ a skilled teacher
to direct the program. The teacher would provide special training to
the students at a facility provided by Christ Episcopal Church
without charge, in preparation for the entry to the public schools
by the students.
News sports editor Ray Howe was set to cover the
Southern Conference Basketball Tournament at Durham, beginning this
night with two games in the ten-team field. N.C. State was the heavy
favorite, and, win or lose, already had an invitation to the N.I.T.,
at the time prestigious as or more so than the N.C.A.A. Tournament.
On the editorial page, "What's Behind the Condon Case?" comments on HUAC's subpoena of Commerce Department loyalty board
records of Dr. Edward Condon, head of the Bureau of Standards,
premised on HUAC's claim that he was "the weakest link" in
atomic security because of his known or unknown association with a
Soviet agent.
The piece finds it to suggest HUAC as a "politically-inspired
agency for smearing American citizens in outrageous violation of
their Constitutional rights." Had any of the agencies who had
investigated Dr. Condon, including the military, the FBI and
Commerce Department, found his credentials less than sterling, he
would have been dismissed. It counsels that HUAC ought be rebuked by
the President and Congress should the Committee fail to make its
case.
HUAC was seeking to influence Secretary of Commerce Averell
Harriman to overrule the Commerce Department's loyalty board which
had given Dr. Condon a clean bill of health. Notwithstanding that determination, HUAC
had found that former Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace had
recommended Dr. Condon for the position, that Dr. Condon was a
member of the American Soviet Science Society, and that he had been
in the company of a self-confessed Soviet espionage agent.
HUAC failed to mention that the Society was supported by a
Rockefeller Foundation grant of $25,000. The appointment by
Secretary Wallace was in 1945. And the supposed association with a
Soviet agent admittedly had no evidence behind it which suggested
anything more than an unknowing brush. Yet, HUAC claimed the matter
was of the same stripe as Communist infiltration in Czechoslovakia.
HUAC was primarily concerned with slandering American
citizens who did not share the members' fanatical hatred of Russia
or their reactionary political opinions. The piece favors
Congressional investigation of both Dr. Condon, to clear his name,
and the intentions of HUAC.
"The Great Folly of Our Time" discusses the
recommendation of the Congressional Aviation Policy Board to raise
expenditures on air power to such a level as to raise the budget
substantially for the ensuing five years. The report followed
closely in time the release of the President's Air Advisory
Commission report which had urged expenditure of 24 billion dollars over
the ensuing four years, by "A-Day", January 1, 1953, when,
it found, the prospect of nuclear war otherwise might be likely.
The piece finds that if Congress were to approve these proposals,
the third world war would have begun. It hopes that the American
people would express the desire for more effort to be put into peace
rather than this preparation for war. The President's Commission had
stated that the country would only be secure in an absolute sense if
war were abolished, advocated continuing to work within the U.N.
toward effecting that goal.
The editorial favors the statement of U.N. Secretary-General
Trygve Lie, as expressed in '48 Magazine, that war of any
sort with any weaponry was futile, had to be prevented for all time
by the collective will of the people.
"'Hit Come on a Trash-Mover'" tells of the story
which circulated in Western North Carolina, hit being tolt in
mountain di'lect, of the king who hired a weather prophet who told
him that it was not even going to be a "sizzole-sozzle" of
a rain when the king fixed to go fishing at a hole clost to his best
girl's house. The king then donned his best clothes for the
expedition, only to be told by a farmer upon an ass along the way
that it was going to "rain a trash-mover and gully-washer",
that in consequence the king best get on back home.
When the gully-washer occurred, after the king failed to heed
the farmer's advice, the king's girl saw him all wet and commenced
to laughing something fierce. The king went home, throwed out his
prophet, fotched up the farmer, whereupon the farmer told him that
all he had done was to look at his ass, because if it was to come a
gully-washer and a trash-mover, his ass's ears lopped down and the
lower they laid, the harder the rain was to be a-comin'.
Whereupon the king proposed to hire the farmer's ass to
predict the weather.
"'And that's how it started, and jackasses hev been
holding high political positions ever since.'"
Truth be known, hit's a hard rain a-gonna fall, lessen you
jackasses get your weather straightened out and stop trying to play
these stupid snowball-in-hell games with global warming.
Yeah, you, and your dumb family, who think that because you
can build an igloo down yonder in Oklahoma when it's snowing in the
winter, that that thar igloo mean thar ain't no global warming
during the warmest winter across the world in recorded history.
You're a dumb little ass, ain't ye? We'll call upon you next
hurricane season to bail. Here's back your snowball in hell, Mr.
Ass, whole.
Take it, with your viscid oil donations to your slicked-up
campaign for all those real smart people down yonder in Oklahoma who
done elected you, and shove it where the moon don't shine—which
could be hard to find among the idiots who would vote for an ass
like you.
Perhaps, the problem derives from the asses confusing icebergs floating in the water with glacial ice on the land, flowing into the water. We recommend a Congressional allocation for educating the asses in basic college-level geology. Of course, that would presuppose that the asses are at all educable, that they could possibly see beyond the benefits bestowed on them by their oily contributors, a dubious proposition. And to rationalize to one's self that driving the gas guzzler, after all, helps a struggling farmer in Greenland produce potatoes and cabbage is to miss the point completely. No one can blame the local resident for adapting to his changed environment, but when it is perfectly evident that it is man's footprint in the past century, coincident with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, which is having the increscent effect on the global weather pattern which threatens the rest of us, it is time to halt, dead in its tracks, the beneficial impact to 60,000 people in Greenland and the non-existent population of Antarctica, the latter on the hunch maybe that one day it might develop into a hot sub-tropical resort. Greenlanders can always re-adapt to the way it was previously. It will be quite a lot more difficult for the rest of us.
And, by the way, this note being, as it is, for the benefit of Mr. Asinine, the water from the melting of the polar ice in Antarctica does not flow off into space because it is at the bottom of the planet.
A piece from the Columbia (S.C.) Record, titled
"Making Haste Slowly", tells of New York about to become
the nineteenth state to approve the proposed amendment to the
Constitution to limit the President to two terms in office. It would
require 36 states for ratification and would not apply in any event
to President Truman and would not preclude any President sitting at
the time the Amendment would be ratified from completing the term.
The Amendment would fail were the Southern states not to
approve it. It was, it suggests, the small amount of power remaining
with the South.
The 22nd Amendment would be ratified in early 1951. President
Truman could have run for another term in 1952 had he so chosen. He
chose not to do so as he had originally proposed the term limit to
the Congress, shortly after becoming President. The Amendment was
passed by the Congress and sent to the states a year earlier.
Had Governor Dewey been elected in 1948, he would have been
limited to two terms.
Had President Ford won in 1976, he could not have run for re-election in 1980. But query whether the eventual impeachment conviction in the Senate, a fait accompli, of Richard Nixon and his removal from office could have forestalled the transition of power for another five months to allow President Ford the potential for the additional term.
In case you are ever asked on a quiz show for this bit of
arcana, you will be able to win the Big Money.
Drew Pearson tells of the Republican majority in the Senate
having paused business for three hours while the grain allocation to
the distillers was amended, at the behest of lobbyists for
Seagram's, Hiram Walker, and National Distillers, to provide the
bulk of the allocation to them. Prior to that time, Secretary of
Agriculture Clinton Anderson had allocated grain to independent
companies, with the approval of the Senate Banking & Currency
Committee. But the Republican majority overruled its own Committee,
favoring instead the whiskey trust. The primary reason was that
Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky would be defeated
in that Democratic state if the allocation were not so amended.
Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky also voted for the change.
A move in Idaho by Democrats to banish Senator Glen Taylor
from the party, following his becoming the vice-presidential
candidate with Henry Wallace on the third party ticket, had failed.
The State Department had sought to save Czechoslovakia from
Communist Party domination by obtaining authorization from the
Export-Import Bank for a 50 million dollar loan to strengthen the
Benes-Masaryk Government. But, eventually, the Czech Cabinet
succumbed to Communist pressure and the State Department realized at
that point that the Czechs had lost the will to fight.
The Democratic Party in Michigan was launching a drive to
rebuild the party in that state.
Henry Wallace and Senator Taylor were formulating strategy
for their convention, to be held in Chicago in June, and the ensuing
campaign, reviewing procedures for getting on the ballot in various
states, with Florida being the only state which they agreed was
hopeless. Senator Taylor wanted to call the party the "Progressive
Party", but the christening was delayed until the convention.
They agreed to support both Democratic and Republican candidates who
were found to be truly liberal.
The next step in unification of the armed forces was to unify
the fleets under the Navy. The Army maintained more ships afloat
than the Navy at the time.
At Stanford, buttons appeared advocating the candidacy of
Henry Kaiser for the presidency.
Senator Harry F. Byrd had told Southern Democrats that he
would not oppose President Truman for the nomination.
Marquis Childs finds the talk of substituting someone else
for President Truman on the Democratic ticket to be just talk, the
trouble being in nominating someone sufficiently acceptable to both
Southern reactionaries and Northern liberals, who would still have
voter appeal, an unlikely prospect.
Those who remained with the President agreed that New York
State, following the Bronx special election, appeared hopelessly
lost. Their hope was to woo the West and provide a vice-presidential
candidate with liberal credentials. Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of
Wyoming appeared ideal for the latter role. As a Catholic, he could
also have drawing power in the Northeast corridor. But the problem
lay in the fact that the Western states outside California had few
electoral votes.
The Republican sweep of the West in the mid-term elections
was also a factor with which to be reckoned, but disappointment in
the Republican Congress and the finding that many of those swept in
by the election were ultra-conservatives or reactionaries had caused
disaffection. Senator Harry Cain of Washington was an example.
Liberal Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, elected in 1944, was at odds
with Republicans and being pushed aside by the leadership.
The President had made more appointments from the West than
any recent President and so the realists were concentrating on the
West as a repository of Democratic votes for November.
The President would sweep the West in the election, winning
all states west of the Mississippi except Oregon, the Dakotas,
Kansas and Nebraska, with Louisiana and three other Southern states voting for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.
DeWitt MacKenzie discusses the situation in Czechoslovakia,
finds democracy dead in the wake of the takeover of the Government
by the Communists the previous week. He believes, however, that the
spirit of democracy still lived in the country, awaiting a
fortuitous spark to ignite it to action. Such might come indirectly
from aging President Eduard Benes, credited, along with Thomas
Masaryk, with founding the republic, freeing it from the
Austro-Hungarian empire during and immediately following World War
I. Mr. Masaryk was dead and his son, Jan, was now the Foreign
Minister, pushed aside, however, in the recent Cabinet shake-up.
When the spark of inspiration from these men would light the
fires of freedom anew, then it could inspire such movements in other
Communist-dominated states as well.
A letter writer from New England supports Senator Harry F.
Byrd for President, sings his praises to high heaven in the apple
trees.
Why don't you move back from whence you came?
A letter writer praises "Truman, Wallace, Roosevelt"
of February 28, finds it an apt appraisal of the situation the
Democrats were facing in 1948. She finds President Truman helpless
to act decisively in various situations and so she hopes that all
the Southern states would join to put up a candidate for whom
Southerners could vote with pride. While the Southerner would not
win, at least they could tell the rest, the Republicans and Wallace
supporters, that the South was no longer in the bag.
That makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. You've been
sipping the moonshine again with those damned oil people from out in
Oklahoma, ain't ye? They'll charm with all that snake oil money
until you can't see straight, sparking you with this and that
hot-button issue, and then rob you blind, leaving you without your
hot buttons to boot.
A letter from a retired postal clerk tells of his experience
under the FEPC when it was in effect pursuant to executive order of
FDR as a wartime measure, since expired, but sought by President
Truman to be renewed by Congress as part of his civil rights
program. When denied postal employment in 1944, he had complained
that not a single black person had been appointed to be a clerk or
carrier of the post office in his local district since 1905. The
Government sent investigators to examine the matter and as a result,
he and six other blacks had been hired as carriers.
His point was that those who sought to oppose FEPC on the
ground that it would do more harm than good to blacks did not
appreciate the actual workings of the agency when it existed.
A letter from a past president of the North Carolina
Hairdressers & Cosmetologists Association thanks the newspaper
for its presentation of the Association and its work.
