Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Russians
halted traffic temporarily on the autobahn linking Western Germany
to Berlin, saying that it was caused by the closure temporarily of a
bridge across the Elbe for repairs. General Lucius Clay, military
governor of the American occupation zone, said that the U.S. would
use the detour route even if motorists had to drive 300 miles out of
their way. Later, the Russians reopened the bridge, saying that the signs for the detour around it had not yet been completed.
Russia had accepted the American proposal for a ten-nation
conference on July 30 to arrange for free international navigation
on the Danube River. Russia withdrew its previous opposition to the
participation of Austria in the conference. A site was yet to be
chosen.
Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina announced a caucus
of Southern states opposed to the nomination of President Truman at
the Democratic convention, the caucus to take place a day or two
prior to the convention. The action was determined by seven Southern
Governors at a meeting during the National Governors Conference in
New Castle, N.H. Governor Thurmond said that they were against the
President, that he would probably be nominated but could not be
elected. He hoped that the President would realize the futility in
accepting the nomination.
Well, absolutely.
Three railroad brotherhood heads blamed the President for the
failure to settle the rail dispute with the three railroad
brotherhoods. One of them, Alvanley Johnston of the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Engineers, had vowed two years earlier to defeat Mr.
Truman in 1948 for standing down the railroad strike at that time
by asking Congress to pass legislation to authorize him to draft labor if necessary to keep
the trains running.
Congress passed the one-year extension of the Reciprocal
Trade Agreements Act, with the provisions intact requiring the
President to inform Congress of his reasons if he changed tariffs
contrary to the recommendations of the Tariff Commission. The
Administration wanted a three-year extension without the controls
tacked on by amendment, the three-year extension intended to provide greater confidence to the Western allies in continuity of the policy.
A House Expenditures subcommittee reported that the
controversial statements which had been broadcast to Latin America
by the Voice of America, controlled at the time by NBC, got out
because of lack of State Department oversight.
The broadcasts had to be farmed out to NBC because of
Congressional cuts in the VOA budget.
A hearing on the confirmation of Judge Wilson Warlick to
become Federal District Court Judge of the Western District of North
Carolina was postponed until later this date. North Carolina
Republicans were going to appear at the hearing to voice concerns.
The House gave up passage of the Senate-passed draft bill
until the next day. Representative Leo Allen of Illinois, chairman
of the Rules Committee, urged its defeat. It was expected to pass.
Pack up that duffle bag and prepare to move out, you young
whipper-snapper. You're going to the front lines again, Mister,
sooner or later, and probably sooner.
Hail stones the size of bird eggs pelted Hartsville, S.C.,
for fifteen minutes the previous afternoon.
The murder of the young businessman in Rock Hill, S.C.,
remained unsolved and police remained mum on progress in the case.
No bullet had been recovered from the single wound which entered
through his back and exited his chest.
A piece speculates on changes in State Government if Kerr
Scott, facing a run-off with Charles Johnson in the gubernatorial
primary, were to be elected—as he would be. A house-cleaning
of high jobholders would take place, starting with the Highway
Commission.
The President departed Los Angeles the previous night aboard
his special train, bound for Kansas City, to arrive on Wednesday
afternoon. At his last California stop, in San Bernardino, he urged
again that the choice would be between whether he was right on the
domestic issues or whether the Congress was right. When someone
presented him with a gift of eggs, he said that he was glad that
they had not been thrown at him, to which someone in the crowd
shouted, "Throw 'em at Taft." The President responded,
"I wouldn't throw fresh eggs at Senator Taft."
The President continued to make back-platform remarks in various stops in Arizona and New Mexico.
On the editorial page, "A Better Way to Fight Polio" comments on the request by the County Health officer that parents
keep their children under age sixteen indoors to help in stopping
the spread of polio, following the report of eight cases in
Mecklenburg County. Many parents had complied with the request.
Then, the City Health officer stated that the fear of polio
was exaggerated and that no restriction of movement was necessary,
that in any event there was no way to prevent polio. His statement
would thus counteract the advice of the County and cause parents to
reverse their restrictions.
It suggests that better consultation was necessary between
the health officers before giving such contrary statements.
"GOP Politics in a Judgeship" comments on the
partisan attempt by the Republicans in the Senate to hold up the
nomination of Judge Wilson Warlick to become Federal District Court
Judge for the Western District of North Carolina, until after the
election, on the belief that a Republican President could then make
the appointment anew. It reiterates Judge Warlick's exemplary record
on the Superior Court bench and the false claims by the State GOP a
few weeks earlier, attacking that record.
It suggests that the Republicans, by the tactic, might
convince North Carolinians that they had not developed the
leadership requisite for greater consideration by the South.
"Arabs Don't Like U.S. or UN" finds that the six
Arab nations, along with Australia and El Salvador, disfavored
locating the U.N. headquarters in the U.S., wanted it in Geneva. The
Arabs did not like the pro-Zionist sentiment abundant in New York
and other areas of the U.S.
While newspapers in the country were supportive of Israel,
that would not necessarily equate with public opinion and would not
affect the voting in the U.N. in any event. It might even create a
backlash effect among the delegates.
It finds little logic in the movement and thinks it peevish.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled
"North Carolina Bargain", tells of Joseph Brandt,
writing in The Library Journal, giving high praise to the UNC
Press as one of first of the regional presses and having made great
progress during its twenty-five years of existence. The State provided
only about $4,000 per year for its support, while the Press had made
one of the great contributions to letters in the Twentieth Century.
But now, the piece warns, the directors of the Press had, one
by one, left for higher paying jobs, while the State's surplus was
fat. The State needed to make up its mind whether to be stingy or
pay for progress.
Drew Pearson tells of a maneuver by Congressman Max Schwabe
of Missouri which effectively killed the Federal aid to education
bill by moving to adjourn the penultimate session of the Education &
Labor Committee because the bell had rung at noon signaling that the
House was in session and technically stopping all committee
business. The last such session would be on Friday, with not enough
time to get the bill to the floor for a vote on Saturday, the end of
the session before the break for the elections. The Republican
leadership was relieved.
Speaker Joe Martin was urging Senator Taft to speed up the
legislative agenda during the week to meet the schedule of the
House, while realizing that the threat of filibuster was a Senate
handicap. The two were contemplating recalling Congress into session
after the conventions, though Senator Taft had suggested that it
occur between the conventions.
The real estate lobby was busy trying to block the
Taft-Ellender-Wagner long-term housing bill, but Republicans Merlin
Hull of Wisconsin, William Stratton of Illinois and Hugh Scott of
Pennsylvania joined with Democrats Helen Gahagan Douglas of
California, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, and Wright Patman of Texas to
defeat the last-minute attempt to strip the public housing and slum
clearance provisions from the bill.
Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State until August,
1943, finds the current failure of the Big Four powers to agree on
the fate of Germany emblematic of the lack of wisdom shown in
concluding the four-power agreement at Yalta before the war had
ended.
While both the establishment of an international authority
over the industrial Ruhr to aid Western Europe and Germany in
getting back on their feet and the commitment of the U.S. to retain
troops in Western Germany until peace in Europe was secure thus
appealed to the U.S. Government, there were also dangers in the
plan. The U.S. and Britain had failed to re-educate the Germans, as
shown in a recent poll in which 64 percent of Germans
sampled approved the Nazi Government, thought Hitler and the Nazis
had committed no crimes against humanity.
Britain's policy in recent months had been directed to the
building of Germany as a buffer state against Russia. American
policy appeared likewise. These were the same policies of the 1920's
which led to the debacle of blinking the build-up of the German war
apparatus in the 1930's under Hitler.
Giving German leaders authority again would lead inexorably
to the same form of nationalistic self-interest which had led to
Nazism.
Moreover, it did not escape the notice of Germans that when
Germany had united with Russia, its stock had flourished. Both
Russia and Germany had mutual interests in dividing Poland. Russia
could not dominate Europe unless it got German cooperation and so
Russia would offer Germany its former provinces now ceded to Poland
to achieve amity and support from the German people.
He finds that the six-power plan therefore for Western
Germany would convince the Germans that their lot was better off in
allying with the Soviets than with the West.
Stewart Alsop, in Paris, tells of U.S. Ambassador to Great
Britain Lewis Douglas having inquired of the French Ambassador to
Britain, Rene Massigli, whether France would back the U.S. in use of
force should the Russians attempt to compel the evacuation from
Berlin by the Western Powers. Suggesting the lack of confidence held by France in the U.S., M. Massigli responded, after
consulting with the Foreign Ministry, "What force?"
Russia understood that little presently, beyond eight or ten
poorly equipped divisions of France and the Benelux countries, stood
between it and the English Channel. With the Marshall Plan and the
Western European Union at their inception, such status would not
last long. The temptation thus had to be to exploit the weakness
forthwith.
It had been expected that in exchange for France's assent to
the agreement on Western Germany, the U.S. would make a formal
commitment to the WEU and provide military aid to the countries and
especially France. But then no word came from Washington and efforts
by Foreign Minister Georges Bidault to contact Secretary of State
Marshall regarding the matter went unanswered. France even suspected
that the misinterpreted exchange of notes in early May between
Ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith and Foreign Commissar V. M.
Molotov was premised on a deal which would leave France in the cold,
on the order of the Munich Pact of 1938.
Thus, the question then posed by Ambassador Douglas to
Ambassador Massigli seemed to presuppose war in the offing, a war in
which France would be quickly occupied as in 1940. Then came the
House reduction of ERP by 25 percent, lending proof to the French
belief that the U.S. could not be trusted as an ally. As a result,
Paris suffered from a sense of insecurity, nearly to the point of
hysteria in some quarters. It was a fact, Mr. Alsop concludes, which
the U.S. Government had to understand and with which it had to be
prepared to deal.
Samuel Grafton discusses the concept of international
security. The current U.S. policy started at the edges and hoped it
would reach the center through the Marshall Plan. He favors instead
starting at the center and working outward.
The Mundt-Nixon bill had to convince international observers
that the U.S. felt internally insecure. A centrifugal security plan
would instead express domestic security without alarm over a few
Communists within the country.
Such insecurity was also expressed in the fact that defense
build-up easily passed through Congress while necessary measures for
peace, the Information Service, ERP, had been emasculated. He favors
walking softly and with a big stick, that the way to be secure was
not to be afraid.
A letter writer thinks the GOP ought nominate Harold Stassen
as, according to a recent Roper poll, he was the most popular
Republican in the field when the GOP nominee was poised against
General Eisenhower. He thinks the Democrats might nominate the
General.
That's probably about it: Eisenhower versus Stassen.
Another Pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, this
one "Imparting the Information That When a Gal Gets Sharply
Dressed She Likes Nothing Better Than to Put on the Feed Bag:
"Women in finery Like to visit the dinery."
But potes who first visit the winery Are likely to be thought as swinery.
