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 donnadu 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.