Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that King Abdullah of
Trans-Jordan urged all Arab nations to send their armies into
Palestine to battle the Jews at the point when the British ended
their mandate on May 15. Trans-Jordan had supplied 10,000 troops,
two-thirds of its armed forces, to the British in Palestine. The King
assured that they would maintain those duties until the mandate
ended, at which point they would join the Arab effort against
Zionism.
In Cairo, sources said that as many as 50,000 Arabs from six
countries would move into Palestine after the end of the mandate
unless U.N. action first intervened to change the situation. The
move came in response to a determination of underestimation of the
power of the Jewish forces operating under Haganah, which had just
taken control of Haifa after a rout of the Arab forces.
The British Colonial Secretary urged the U.N. to take
immediate action to stop open warfare in Palestine rather than
trying for the nonce to effect a long-term solution to the problem,
prior to May 15. He said that the British Government would cooperate
with any stop-gap measures undertaken between May 15 and August 1,
at which point the final withdrawal of British troops would be
complete. The Government said that his statements did not reflect
any Cabinet decisions of the previous two days.
Republican members of the House Banking Committee raised
objections to the public housing provision of the Senate-passed
Taft-Ellender-Wagner long-term housing bill to encourage 15 million
new homes to be constructed by 1958. But Congressman Jesse Wolcott,
chairman of the Committee, said that some form of housing bill would
pass. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, a
Democrat, expressed assurance that the bill, as written, could pass
the House. She was petitioning to get a majority of the House
members to favor bringing the bill directly to the floor. The
provisions of the Senate bill are stated.
Representative J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC, stated
that there would be a "showdown" if the President
continued to insist on not turning over the results of the loyalty
investigation of Dr. Edward Condon, head of the Bureau of Standards,
accused by HUAC of being the principal risk in the Government to
atomic security for his having allegedly had contact, "knowingly
or unknowingly", with a Communist espionage agent. Mr. Thomas
gave the Secretary of Commerce 48 hours to comply with the demand.
The President had replied at a news conference that there had
been a case involving Thomas Jefferson as President refusing to
provide a letter requested by the defense counsel of Aaron Burr in
his trials for both treason and subsequent misdemeanor after his acquittal in the treason trial, a decision ultimately upheld by Chief
Justice John Marshall, resultant of a compromise whereby the letter
was turned over with certain parts of it redacted.
Mr. Thomas said that his opinion was that times had changed,
that there was precedent for demanding that the Secretary of
Commerce produce the letter or be taken into custody by the House
sergeant-at-arms until he did so. He added that there had been no
decision reached, however, to resort to that latter extreme measure. In that event, the Secretary
would then ask for a writ of habeas corpus and the matter would wind
up in the Supreme Court for final resolution.
That same incident involving President Jefferson, as we
pointed out obliquely and by coincidence a few days ago, was raised
by President Nixon during Watergate, at a press conference of
October 26, 1973, regarding tapes being subpoenaed by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in relation to the Federal Grand Jury proceedings, seeking indictments for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury against John Erlichman, Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell, Chuck Colson and three others involved in the Watergate coverup, to which
objection had been made by the Administration under the premise of "executive
privilege", that the tapes contained matter deemed unilaterally by the
Administration to be protected for the purpose of
assuring "national security", the same rationale used in
this instance by President Truman, albeit not regarding the break-in
of the Republican National Committee headquarters during a presidential
election year, with those arrested linked back to the Committee to
Re-Elect the President, headed by the previous Attorney General of
the United States. President Nixon had sought, on the basis of the Jefferson precedent, a compromise whereby Senator John Stennis of Mississippi would act as auditor of the tapes, providing a transcription or summary of relevant portions, a compromise which Mr. Cox rejected, leading to his being ordered fired by the President on October 20, 1973 and the redundant firings of two successive Attorneys General the same day who refused to fire Mr. Cox, until President Nixon found his compliant errand boy in Bobby Bork, that which became notoriously known at the time as the "Saturday Night Massacre"—probably giving someone at NBC eventually the notion two years later to inaugurate "Saturday Night Live" to afford the nation the relief of laughter following 12 years of tears.
But, perhaps the operatives in that one thought the "C" in DNC stood for "Commee". Follow the money.
President Truman had inadvertently attributed, according to
press secretary Charles G. Ross, to Thomas Jefferson a remark
properly belonging 25 years later to President Andrew Jackson,
that Chief Justice Marshall had made the decision and now he should
enforce it, in reference to Worcester v. Georgia and its holding that a Georgia statute, under which a non-Indian missionary was convicted for trespass for being on Indian lands, was held unconstitutional for its usurping exclusive Federal jurisdiction of Indian lands. President Jackson had intended his comment ironically, to suggest that the Supreme Court could not enforce Federal law on the states, in those days there being no FBI or National Guard to be Federalized.
To avoid confusion, incidentally, no tomahawks were involved in Worcester or in the Saturday Night Massacre, the latter having nothing, insofar as we know, to do with either Presidents Jefferson, Jackson or Truman. Why, even Bob Haldeman eventually grew his hair a little longer and John Erlichman sprouted a beard.
Americans for Democratic Action called on the Congress to end
Jim Crow segregation. It should be noted that as a practical matter, the Federal Government could do no more than declare public
facilities not according Equal Protection of the law through the
separate-but-equal doctrine and that private facilities open to the
public and operating in interstate commerce could not discriminate
based on race or other prohibited forms of discrimination under the
Constitution. The Congress is limited by the powers set forth in
Article I of the Constitution, including those "necessary and
proper" to carry out the laws passed pursuant to its powers,
which include the power to regulate any activity substantially
impacting interstate commerce.
The same argument, incidentally, may be applied to attempts
by private individuals to restrict freedom of speech.
In Kansas City, 70 police officers clashed with strikers at
the Cudahy Packing Co. meatpacking plant, after orders issued for
them to get tough, resulting in a ten-minute battle inside the union
hall. Eight persons, including two women, were injured. The union
hall was emptied. The union demanded an investigation of the
incident for use of police brutality—to say nothing of the
abuse of the rights of freedom of assembly and exercise of free
speech and association, for which the police could be sued pursuant
to 42 USC 1983, on the books since shortly after the Civil War.
The Federal District Court in Washington postponed
indefinitely any further action regarding the possibility of further
fines or jail for John L. Lewis and others on the executive
committee of UMW in further penalty for the contempt by refusing to
end the coal strike until a week after service of the order by the
Court to do so. The Government recommended no further action at the
present time, as most of the miners were now reporting back to work.
The Court had already fined Mr. Lewis $20,000 and the union 1.4
million the prior Wednesday.
In Detroit, the police continued to investigate the attempted
murder of UAW president Walter Reuther, having taken into custody
two hearsay witnesses, one an admitted Communist who said that he
knew who fired the shotgun which wounded Mr. Reuther as he stood in
his kitchen with his wife. The man was working at the Ford Motor Co.
foundry at the time of the shooting and so was not being charged
with complicity.
An unidentified witness said that a political opponent of Mr.
Reuther, a former secretary-treasurer of UAW, had been seen on a
street corner near the Reuther residence at around the time of the
shooting, talking to two men in a red car. A red sedan had been seen
fleeing the scene of the shooting. The former UAW officer denied the
claim to prosecutors and told of his whereabouts at the time.
In Raleigh, two black men, one convicted of three murders by
arson involving the house of his girlfriend wherein were her two
small children and the other convicted of rape of a white woman in
front of her two children, were executed minutes apart in the gas
chamber at Central Prison. Both men maintained to the end that they
were innocent.
In Lenoir, N.C., a man hit on the head at a carnival and
found dying, subsequently succumbed to the injuries. The police were
looking for a man known as "Pee Wee" as a suspect in the
homicide.
If you should see Pee Wee, alert law enforcement that they
might handle the situation. Don't shoot at Pee Wee or beat him over
the head.
In Windsor, N.C., a man accused of passing counterfeit money,
robbery, and assaulting a Highway Patrolman near Fayetteville was
apprehended via roadblocks. The robbery consisted of taking the
officer's revolver and patrol car keys. At the time of capture, the
man was accompanied by his wife and another man, neither of whom had
any role in the criminal misconduct. The man was originally stopped
based on a license number taken of his car after he passed a
counterfeit bill at a service station in Selma, N.C.
On the editorial page, "Fight Against Truman Stalls" finds the pledge of the Texas Democratic delegation to support the
nominee of the party and not to engage in a revolt against the
President to be signal of the anti-Truman campaign having lost its
momentum. It now appeared that the President would be nominated by
the convention on the first or second ballot.
It was unlikely that the Republicans would try to pass the
civil rights legislation which was the basis for the Southern
revolt, for to do so might knock the President out as nominee and
upset the Republican plans, hinged to the nomination of the
President whose chances for election they viewed as slim to none.
"Threat to Basic Principles" tells of the Senate
bills to curb or ban liquor advertising, protested by the American
Newspaper Publishers Association for violating free speech and press
for it being outside the power of Congress to regulate.
The News did not accept liquor advertising, but did
for wine and beer. But the piece assures that doing so as a matter
of taste did not mean that it favored a ban for others; it did not.
It believes that neither the Federal Government nor the State
had the right, with liquor sales approved, to ban advertising of a
legal product, that doing so at least violated the spirit, if not
the letter, of the Constitution.
We note that the Supreme Court has distinguished commercial
free speech from individual free speech, on the notion of the former
speech being a function of commercial purchase under contract, and
thus not deserving of the same level of strict protection as the
latter, though still embraced by the First Amendment.
"Italian Voters Sadden Wallace" comments on Henry
Wallace's statement that the U.S. was foolish if it believed that it
had bought friendship along with the votes in Italy with coercive
pressure under the promise of ERP aid.
The piece finds the argument to suggest no more coercion than
utilized in an American election, and that the demands to be
continually made on Washington by Italy would neither be surprising
nor new.
The key point, it concludes, was that the American view had won out
over the Communist view.
A piece in the Atlanta Journal, "Peace Now Is a
Necessity", finds peace necessary for survival in the atomic
age. While Dr. Philip Owen of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Survey
Commission had stated that the effects of radiation following the
Japanese blasts were not prolonged, such was of little comfort in
the face of figures showing that the Hiroshima bomb killed 78,150,
21.2 percent of whom died of radiation, and injured another 64,678.
And the bombs had already become far more powerful than the
Hiroshima bomb and would only become increasingly potent as time
went on. The most recent figures in the Information, Please
Almanac for American deaths in World War II in 44 months of
fighting showed 201,000 killed—now set at around 300,000.
A rain of atomic bombs would obviously end civilization.
Drew Pearson tells of a document being found in Germany,
written during the war, which sought authorization for a new
crematorium which would be big enough to burn 40 bodies daily at
Auschwitz, run by the I. G. Farben company. It was believed that the
document would assure findings of guilt against the company's
directors for complicity in war crimes. Just as the evidence
surfaced, however, General Telford Taylor, the effective war crimes
prosecutor, was called home to Washington. At the same time, some
highly placed defense chieftains had started a quiet drive to save
I. G. Farben, Krupps, and other munitions manufacturers from
conviction for being complicit in war crimes, that they might
continue to supply arms for Western Germany, deemed necessary to
stop Soviet expansion.
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had been a partner in
Dillon, Read, which had loaned large sums of money to the munitions
manufacturers in question. Now, there had been a change in
Administration policy since after the end of the war, whereby there
was no longer the intention to break up the large German cartels and
hold the munitions companies responsible for war crimes. General
Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. occupation zone, had
refused to approve such a policy.
National defense officials were giving top priority to
construction of fourteen underground factories for essential
industries. Large American air bases with underground hangars were
being built to afford flights across the Arctic. Economist John
Kenneth Galbraith had been retained by Secretary Forrestal to advise
on mobilization.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the Soviets continuing to
wage a war of nerves in Europe, stressing a recent tantrum thrown by
the Soviet Ambassador to Iran before a diplomatic colleague not
involved with Iran, saying that Iran could fall under Soviet
dominance very easily unless it stopped kowtowing to U.S.
imperialism. The Ambassador said that Soviet forces were prepared to
invade Iran to protect the Soviet frontier. He then related that
Norway and Denmark were next on the Soviet agenda after the takeover
in Czechoslovakia.
The Danes and Norwegians were aware of seven Soviet divisions
deployed in the northern part of the Soviet occupation zone of
Germany, conducting maneuvers around Rostock, near the Danish
border. There were rumors that Russia might invade both countries.
The Russian war of nerves, however, appeared to have slackened in
Scandinavia after Finland agreed to a treaty with Russia.
The Alsops suggest that if the Soviets were planning to
occupy Iran to prevent it from becoming a base for anti-Soviet
activity, as the Soviet Ambassador had intimated, then it would mean
world war three. But most experts fortunately believed it to be more
bluff in the continuing war of nerves.
They find Congress, however, continuing to reduce ERP
appropriations and resisting provision of the military with the
necessary manpower effectively to resist Soviet efforts at
expansion. They find it to be playing "political tiddly-winks
with the destiny" of the United States.
Samuel Grafton finds the way in which America had to listen
for results of the Italian election to determine the future to have
been a demeaning and humiliating experience. The country's fortunes
should not be dependent on the fortuitous outcome of a foreign
election.
He insists that such a situation should not recur in the
future and that the way to prevent it was to assure that there would
be no reasonable doubt as to how a civilized country similar to the
U.S. would vote. As long as the cold war continued, there would be
other such battles.
He opines that changing from prosecution of the cold war to
searching for peace would be a way to get more things done faster.
The Marshall Plan conveyed the notion that bread was important and
that in America there was plenty of bread. But also it had to be
shown to Europe that peace existed in America. Then, the outcome of
foreign elections would be predictable.
He again suggests insistence by the U.S. on holding
conferences with Russia and to stress waging peace, ignoring those
who would call it appeasement. They ignored the precept that if the
U.S. allowed Russia to make the demands for peace, the Soviets would
use it as a sword.
A letter replies to that of A. W. Black of April 20 which had
criticized the recent series of four articles of the United World
Federalists favoring world government, with or without the Soviet
bloc of nations. The author says that Mr. Black was correct in
asserting that the U.N. was no more than a weak debating society,
accomplishing little. His argument, however, was that war was inevitable and
could not be prevented by world organization or world government.
This author concludes that war was obsolete and it was worth
giving world government a try to eliminate it.
A letter writer likes the editorial cartoon of Vaughn Shoemaker carried on April
12, finds it illustrative of the belief that no amount of dollars
could bring peace, that only a spiritual awakening could do so.
A letter writer advises Charlotteans dismayed over finding
adequate funding for indigent patients admitted to the Charlotte
Memorial Hospital to come to Shelby and find a population contented
with its perfect system.
From our experience, limited though it is and in the distant
past, the folks in Shelby went to the hospital in Charlotte whenever
they needed hospitalization. We cannot recall a hospital even
existing in Shelby in that time. If there was one, it was very
small. But maybe he refers to something else, perhaps the charity
extended by family members to those who were discharged from the
Charlotte hospital.
