The Charlotte News

Monday, May 10, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman, with the railroad strike of three of 21 railway brotherhoods set to begin at 6:00 a.m. the following day, had seized the nation's railroads and placed them under control of the Army. The strike had not yet been called off but probably would be. The seizure took place pursuant to residual war powers for the health and safety of the nation in an emergency. Present wage conditions would be maintained, according to the President's order.

In preparation for the strike, 88 major railroads had stopped taking orders for shipments of perishable goods. About 10,000 agricultural workers in California had been laid off. In New York, prices of perishables rose sharply, to as much as double former wholesale prices. The City's many commuters prepared for a rail transit shutdown.

Locally, mail was to be delivered to certain locations by truck. Commercial airline business was picking up as rail and bus lines were quiet around Charlotte.

In Palestine, two Haganah brigades drove Arabs from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem supply route and extended the fight into the Judean hills. Successes were scored at Bab al-Wad, ten miles west of Jerusalem, with a reliable source reporting that Haganah had occupied all strategic points on both sides of the strategic location on the highway. The harshest fighting was for the Arab village of Beth Mahsir, over the hilltop from the highway, with Haganah seeking to surround it.

In Jackson, Miss., South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond proclaimed to the States Rights convention that the President had stabbed the South in the back, predicted that the Democratic Party would lose the South in the November election unless it disavowed the Federal civil rights program promulgated by the President. The Governor urged the delegations to warn the national party that they would not be bound by the popular vote in their states if the nominee were supportive of the civil rights program, which included an anti-lynching bill, an anti-poll tax bill, desegregation of public transportation, and making permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission extant during the war.

For the first time since Reconstruction, a black candidate, Larkin Marshall, was running for the Senate seat in Georgia. Mr. Marshall was publisher of the Macon World and would be running on the Progressive Party ticket of former Vice-President Henry Wallace and Senator Glen Taylor.

CIO president Philip Murray accused American business of practicing extortion and said there was no true system of free enterprise in the country, with more people suffering in the country than before the war while big business profits were at record levels.

Senator Chan Gurney of South Dakota announced that the Armed Services Committee had agreed to most of the provisions of the proposed temporary draft legislation and universal military training program. Once it cleared committee, it was scheduled for early action on the Senate floor.

On the editorial page, "A New Force in the Chamber"—not foreshadowing the HUAC Hiss investigation of the ensuing fall—tells of the beginning of the three-day membership campaign for the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, holding out great promise to the city's business community.

"In Our Governorship Traditions" finds the office of Governor of North Carolina to hold great prestige for its being served well by men of integrity for the previous 50 years. Few other Southern states had done so well. Progress had occurred in the state since the turn of the century from such good government.

With the primary approaching, effectively to determine the next Governor in the one-party state, the newspaper endorses State Treasurer Charles Johnson as the most competent among the candidates. The other candidates, it finds, including eventual winner Kerr Scott, the State Agricultural Commissioner, would have to learn the job by trial and error.

"Soup, Onions and Contentment" synopsizes the op-ed pieces appearing in The Atlanta Journal. Morgan Blake refuted the rumor that he was off the wagon, said he took vitamins. Ernest Rogers slurped soup to determine if it tasted better than with a spoon. Olin Miller advised the sleep-impaired to imagine themselves blankets slung over a clothesline to remedy their insomnia. Edna Cain Daniel defended eating onions as a way of life.

Other newspapers reflected the same type of fare. Those who discounted it, claiming no bad habits to be cured, it suggests, probably beat their wives in private. It finds the subjects altogether fitting.

Three short pieces which follow, respectively, from the Lafayette (LA.) Advertiser, the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times, and the Lamar (Mo.) Democrat, we shall refrain from summarizing, but instead simply offer in dedication to Fox News and its head Clucker.

Oil 'em up, move 'em out.

Drew Pearson tells of lobbying having become the top industry in Washington, with the oil lobby leading the pack. It had just scored a victory in convincing the Administration to change policy on the partition of Palestine so as not to anger the Arabs. The oil lobby now focused on trying to convince Congress to reverse the decision of the Supreme Court and grant the tidelands oil reserves, determined to belong to the Federal Government, back to the states for lease of the rights to big oil in return for royalties to the states, as had been the case before the efforts of the Justice Department under Attorney General Tom Clark to get the issue before the Supreme Court.

Senator Edward Moore of Oklahoma, about to retire, was leading the charge for the effort in Congress. The Attorney General of Nebraska and the Assistant Attorney General of California were the "shock troop" commanders of the oil lobby, despite their public positions.

Dr. Edward Rumely was the psychological warfare chieftain—call him the "awe" commander. He had once been jailed for concealing operations for Germany in World War I, though later pardoned. He employed 50 people to put out propaganda to the American public—sort of akin to the role of Fox News today and its head chicken-licker.

Where was he, parenthetically, during the Vietnam era? He was just the right age for draft eligibility, born in 1940. How did he manage to skip out? It appears he may have been too drunk to get in.

Dr. Rumely produced material which was tax deductible to businesses for educational purposes when they sent it out to colleges and universities.

When the California Legislature was convinced by the lobby to appropriate $43,000 to the lobby, Governor Earl Warren vetoed the bill after he found that $25,000 of the money was earmarked for entertainment and food for members of Congress. The oil companies, however, would likely fill the void.

Stewart Alsop, in Trieste, tells of something occurring in the previous three days in Trieste which could have impact beyond its immediate borders. The Communist Party had suddenly shifted its efforts from the hard-line tactics against Anglo-American policy and military brutality, with May Day being set for the start of a violent campaign to undermine Anglo-American military authority. The tone had become tougher in the wake of the Italian elections in which the Communists had not fared well, capturing only 30 percent of the National Assembly seats.

But on April 29, the Communist press suddenly became muted and, while continuing to preach invective against Anglo-American imperialism, the threat of open defiance was absent. The May Day celebration contained only the usual displays. Since then, nervous quietude had pervaded Trieste.

Observers believed that Yugoslavia's Tito was feeling out the Anglo-American authorities with the tougher talk to see if he could bluff them into weakness, permitting him then to grab Trieste. The firmness of the Americans and British had apparently caused Moscow to direct Tito to stand down.

Another possibility was that a shift in policy was taking place which would affect all of Western Europe. Similar changes had been noted in Italy since the elections. If such were true, a period of different relations with the Soviets was about to begin.

James Marlow provides a look at the new, enlarged 70-group Air Force from the present 55 groups. It would take until 1952 to reach the new capacity and cost billions of dollars, taking that long to build the new planes.

The President's Air Policy Commission had produced a report in January, predicting that an enemy nation would have enough atomic weapons to start a nuclear war by the theoretical "A-Day", January 1, 1953. The attack could be sudden and the Air Force needed to be stronger to withstand it.

The President and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal did not believe so many new planes were needed as early as 1952, but Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington pleaded the case for the larger force, convincing Congress of its wisdom.

At its peak during World War II, the Air Force had consisted of 243 groups or 40,000 combat planes, whereas the 55 groups extant in 1948 consisted of 5,500 active combat planes and 7,500 in storage. The 70-group force would have 6,869 active combat planes and 8,100 in storage. The older planes in the meantime would need to be replaced to reach the total target complement by 1952. Thus, in the first year, 2,700 planes would be ordered and in each successive year, thousands more.

A letter writer favors putting signs on ABC stores: "We destroy homes by the sale of our product and debauch the people who drink the liquor we sell."

That would serve well as a disclaimer for Fox News, don't you think?

Of course, that would presuppose the fundamentally incongruous notion that any of its regular viewers could read.

A letter writer wisely advocates supporting the proposed Constitutional amendment introduced by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., to abolish the electoral college and have electors apportioned based on the popular vote, that any other system was fundamentally anti-democratic.

Maude Waddell provides a poem, "Requiem for the Confederate Dead".

Candidly, we could care less. You can read it for yourself. If she had made one up for the "Civil War Dead of a Nation Once Divided, Healed", fine. But to celebrate that bunch of illiterate rag-tag, evil exploiters of humanity is to say something fundamental about one's self which was not acceptable even in 1861, let alone in 1948 or in 2015.

If you do not like the country, move somewhere else. But do not try to divide it against itself and its Constitution for your own aggrandizement economically or politically, the heart of that which occurred in anticipation of the Civil War, the bulk of the Southern people being misled by self-interested idiots, most, if not all, of whom we would regard today as functionally illiterate—not unlike those holding down the fort at Fox News and its head Clucker.

Look around you and see what is happening to our country and then listen to that crowd and their nightly spewing of vitriol against everything conducive to democracy. It is disgraceful that the FCC permits them to broadcast their plain, arrogant defamation nightly with impunity. They reached the limit of free speech a long time ago and should be off the airwaves. They promote anti-free speech and anti-democratic division in the country in a biased way never before seen in television.

It is not just portrayal of "another side to the story", to balance a supposed leftist tilt of the news, which no one in their right mind would perceive in the first place or would have in 1996 when this amateur crowd began. It is relativism in its most invidious form, tending toward stimulation of violence in the streets by a continual stream of daily lies and race hatred and division, led by a man who once, in a 1970 memo, promoted to the Nixon Administration the idea of riling up the backlash against "niggers" in the country with a "a good, mean [George] Wallaceite cab driver"—a typology, no doubt, exemplified by the lead character in the ironic movie "Joe" of the same year—on a panel of pre-determined questioners with canned questions for President Nixon, to offset what he considered to be an obligatory black person on the panel. To call this man human scum is a compliment. Yet, he controls the minds of a good portion of the functional illiterates in this country who watch Fox News regularly, teaches them how to spew propaganda as good little Nazis and Fascists, right down the party line. It gives license to hate and even kill; it gives license to ruin lives of those with whom the reactionaries in the country disagree, a return to that mentality which prevailed during the Nixon years.

Get these losers off the airwaves. It is subversion at work, nightly since 1996. Is it any wonder that since that point, we have had a bogus, partisan impeachment in 1998-99, as nothing else in the history of the country, a contested election with a minority-selected President finally appointed by the 5 to 4 partisan decision of the Supreme Court in 2000, the events of September 11, 2001 and resultant pair of wars, the second cooked up on bogus claims, obvious at the time to anyone who read the reports of the weapons' inspectors, anent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the continuing "war on terrorism" curtailing our civil liberties, plus major daily dissension recurring among the people as a result of those shell-shocking events? And now, with their continuing bombastic bombardment of billingsgate regarding a non-news story over e-mails, trying desperately to make it a campaign issue in 2016, they seek to influence yet another election in the most perniciously partisan manner imaginable.

You cannot use the public airwaves to commit defamation daily, colored in the form of "opinion", running off all of your political enemies as some Mafioso don, or his primetime donna du jour, and not be called to account.

One of the problems with this idiot may well be that he has obviously not exercised since around 1958. Lose some weight, you idiot. You look quite a bit like Hermann Goering.

Do your part. Boycott this scum and urge your friends and neighbors to do likewise. Write your Democratic Congressman and petition the President to investigate this nutwork for subversive and defamatory activities, violative of the limits of a free press and free speech.

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