Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that reliable
diplomatic sources in Moscow stated that if the next round of talks
between the Big Three ambassadors and the Stalin Government failed,
then the matter of the Berlin blockade would be referred by the U.S.
to the U.N., probably the General Assembly, for resolution.
In Paris, the nations of Western Europe reached a working
agreement for mutual recovery as their delegates agreed to division
of the 4.875 billion dollars in ERP aid during the first year of the
program. Britain would receive the largest amount, 1.223 billion,
France the next largest allocation, 989 million. The other
allocations are provided. No allotments were made for Switzerland or
Portugal as it was agreed that neither country needed American aid.
In Berlin, the Soviet military administration's official
newspaper accused the Western allies of inciting Berliners against
Russia and Communism. It warned that Thursday's street fighting
following an anti-Communist demonstration could have serious
consequences. They labeled the demonstrators as "fascists",
incited by the West. The intent appeared to be to build support for
the following day's Communist counter-rally and for the ouster of
the anti-Communist Berlin City Government.
It was also reported by the Russian-controlled press that a
British and American backed spy ring led by Germans had been smashed
in East Germany with the arrest of 15 agents. The report claimed
that the agents were led by Kurt Schumacher, Social Democrat leader
in West Germany, operating an underground throughout the Russian
zone.
Actually, there was a tunnel being built at the instance of
CIA agent William Harvey, to listen in on the Soviet
intelligence office in East Berlin. So, perhaps the Russian concerns
were not entirely unfounded or the result exclusively of propaganda.
Secretary of State Marshall met separately with Senator
Arthur Vandenberg and British Ambassador Sir Oliver Franks regarding
the Berlin crisis. Senator Vandenberg had met, along with John
Foster Dulles, with Governor Dewey the previous night.
Friends of the President said that he had abandoned plans for
a lengthy Southern tour in light of the increasing anger among
Southerners regarding his civil rights program. Some appearances
would be made.
Governor Dewey, starting September 20, would make eight major
appearances across the nation following Mr. Truman's Western tour by
train. Mr. Dewey would speak in Des Moines, San Francisco and Los
Angeles, then proceed to Oregon and Washington.
Senator Edward Martin of Pennsylvania charged the President
with "the most indecent kind of political trickery and
political dishonesty" in blaming the Congress for inflation.
In Asheville, N.C., the commander of the American Legion,
James O'Neil, told a convention of a thousand Legionnaires that the
revelations in Washington showed the depth of Communist espionage in
the U.S. Government. He said that the Legion knew "the score"
and would give complete backing to the committees of Congress
performing the investigations.
That is comforting to know.
Representative Monroe Redden was on the welcoming committee
for the Legion.
Don't you want to investigate?
Having fought for the country in time of war does not
necessarily make one immune from being a complete moron.
The North Carolina Board of Health reported that 2,004 polio
cases had been reported during the year, a record. A total of 112
new cases were reported during the previous week, compared to 138
the week before that. The August cases numbered 664. Thus far in
September, 67 cases had been reported. The death toll for the year
from the crippling disease stood at 99. In Mecklenburg County, 119
cases had been reported for the year, with 13 deaths.
In New York, striking truckers reached agreement with 226
individual companies, allowing 2,000 of the 9,400 strikers to return
to the job. The resolution was based on a reduced wage demand, from
25 cents per hour to 17.5 cents.
At the Briggs plant in Detroit, they were still trying to
figure how to make the lawn mowers more powerful than a speeding
bullet.
In Lansing, Mich., Siamese twins had been born on September
5, joined by the pelvis and abdomen, were not doing well.
In Windber, Pa., a coal miner's daughter was about to marry a
wealthy polo player. The daughter had five years earlier moved to
New York to work for a Wall Street brokerage.
In Mullins, S.C., another world-shaking event took place: the
public library got a fresh coat of paint on the outside. The steel
bookcases also had arrived.
Well, when are they going to paint the interior again?
In Florence, S.C., schools would open Wednesday morning.
Don't be late or stay at home for the harvest of the cotton.
In Atlantic City, the Miss America pageant continued. Miss
Montana had won the talent competition the previous night, with a
song and dance from "Carmen". Miss Atlanta, measuring
34-24-36, won the bathing suit contest. The field was being narrowed
to fifteen contestants of the total of 55 for the final competition
this date. Where are the measurements for the other bathing suit
winners? There is some form of favoritism taking place.
In New York, hundreds of migratory birds were killed in the
vicinity of the Empire State Building, littering Fifth Avenue and
side streets. The general manager of the Bronx Zoo said that they
may have crashed into the skyscraper during their migration, perhaps
attracted by the lighted windows on the upper floors. Some were
songbirds.
So much for that friendly Southern gesture of sending the
mockingbirds north. Blame Strom and Fielding for putting the hex on
them. The birds may have thought that they were talking about
stets' rights.
Some fell onto 34th Street. So much for the Miracle of the
previous Christmas.
Better luck, next year, birdbrains.
On the editorial page, "The Dixiecrat Victory" finds confusion to be the likely result with four parties on the
November ballot, following the decision of the North Carolina
Supreme Court to allow the Dixiecrats to qualify after they had been
denied by the State Board of Elections. Some believed that it would
provide the Republicans a chance to carry the state for the first
time since 1928 when backlash against Catholic, Wet Al Smith caused
a revolt.
The name on the ballot, "States' Rights Democrats",
could confuse many voters. But others believed that it would also
produce higher turnout at the polls and help state Democratic
candidates.
It does not wish to venture predictions, however, in a
strange political year.
"For the Benefit of All" comments on the programs
available in the mental health field for alcoholics. The Yale
University National Committee for Education on Alcoholism was a
longstanding program. During the week, such a program, though not so
ambitious, was announced for Charlotte. Dr. Herbert Spaugh, Moravian
minister and pastor of the Little Church on the Lane, led the effort
to establish the program.
The program would not succeed, it urges, unless alcoholics
and their families made use of the facilities to be provided. It
would benefit society by reducing the crime rate and returning
citizens to a productive life from their alcoholic haze.
We hope that the effort might start with HUAC.
"Right Back to Berlin" finds a village in Wales
named Llanfairpwllgwyngwllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,
which the locals called Llanfair. It means in Welsh, "Church
of St. Mary in a hollow of white hazel, near a rapid whirlpool and
to St. Tysilio's church, near a red cave."
Then there was the New Zealand hilltop with a name one letter
shorter, formed in the Maori tongue. Both names had appeared in
National Geographic.
It adds that a lake south of Worcester, Mass., was called
Chaugogagogmanchaugagochaubunagungamaug.
It says it intended the piece to take the mind from Berlin,
with only six letters. But the name of the lake near Worcester, in
the Indian language, actually meant, "You fish on your side, I
fish on my side, nobody fish in the middle," returning thought
to Berlin again.
You have no idea, once again, how prophetic you will be
proved in a scant 13 years.
Perhaps, also, the piece predicts go-go dancing.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "It
Did Sound Ominous", comments on the denial of a quote
attributed to former House Ways & Means Committee chairman
Robert Doughton of North Carolina that no candidate who dared to
support the President would be elected in the 9th Congressional
District, that he said, in fact, that he did intend to support the
President. The piece takes his word for it, that he never made the
former statement. But it did not mean that he would side with the
President, if he were re-elected, on such issues as taxation, labor
conditions or civil rights. It thinks that Mr. Doughton had decided
simply not to go against the traditional party grain.
Drew Pearson tells of a meeting of the Joint Chiefs at which
General Omar Bradley, chief of staff of the Army, outlined the U. S.
policy in the event of war, relating troop deployment of 300,000 in
Europe, of which only 30,000 were combat troops. He said that the
U.S., with British and French assistance, could likely fall back to
the Rhine. Admiral William Leahy, the president's chief of staff,
then asked how long the U.S. could hold the Rhine. General Bradley
replied that he did not wish to make any promises but believed it
could be held for awhile, long enough to bring up reinforcements.
Admiral Leahy pointed out that the Russians had 40 divisions in
Germany, or about 600,000 men, and that he thus doubted that the
Rhine could be held longer than ten days. The French, he asserted,
would head for home. They would keep the three or four good bridges
across the Rhine open "to get their mistresses home". He
believed that the U.S. could do no more than hold Turkey and Spain.
One of the air generals present then said that given 60 days
and the atomic bomb, the Air Force could halt the Red Army in its
tracks. Admiral Leahy disagreed, said that the U.S. should have left
Berlin and Germany long ago. He said that he was just being
realistic.
General Bradley responded that the Italian elections would
not have wound up in a democratic victory were it not for the
presence of American troops in Europe. Others said that Russia would
rejoice at American abandonment of Germany and that it would have a
disastrous psychological impact on European democracies. It was then
unanimously agreed among the Joint Chiefs that there would be no
appeasement or withdrawal from Germany.
Former Ambassador to France and Russia William Bullitt was
organizing "Democrats-for-Dewey" clubs. A staunch
Roosevelt supporter, he had once persuaded FDR to recognize Russia.
He was advised by a friend that if he wanted to serve in the Dewey
administration, as he had indicated he would not decline, he should
contribute $50,000.
The Los Angeles Daily News had, by means of hot
editorials, goaded U.S. Attorney James Carter into prosecuting
housing frauds.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the National Security
Council determining that unless Russia changed its attitude, the
effort to resolve the Berlin crisis would be shifted from Berlin to
Moscow. The determination suggested that the Soviet military
commander in Berlin, Marshal Sokolovsky, had reduced the Big Four
talks in Berlin to a sham. But it also meant that no one expected a
good result from the Big Four talks in Moscow. It meant that the
crisis could not be resolved by agreement and would probably grow
deeper.
In the last previous meeting between Premier Stalin and the
Big Three ambassadors, Stalin had said that the problems regarding
the dual currencies in Berlin, the reason originally given by the
Russians for halting traffic into Berlin from the Western sectors,
were largely technical in nature and soluble at the local level
between the military commanders. He assured that Marshal Sokolovsky
would receive instructions to negotiate reasonably and in good faith
on the currency issue. But subsequently, Andrei Vishinsky and V. M.
Molotov showed little enthusiasm for the Stalin plan.
As soon as the Berlin talks began, it was obvious that
Marshal Sokolovsky had received different instructions from those
which Stalin had promised. Instead, he demanded an exclusive veto on
the currency and essentially sought Soviet control of Berlin's
economy and politics in exchange for lifting the blockade.
At the same time, the Communists in Berlin sought to
interfere with the City Government meetings, to seize control
directly of the City. Marshal Sokolovsky then announced that the
Soviets would hold mass air maneuvers over Berlin, with the presumed
purpose of stopping the Western airlift.
Thus it was not surprising that the National Security Council
and the President determined that only a pro forma attempt
would remain, through the Moscow talks, to achieve rapprochement.
Marquis Childs discusses the efforts of the Dewey team to
construct speeches for the campaign which would satisfy as many
party interests as feasible, a difficult task. Powers in the party
would desire transfer of oil and mineral rights in the tidal lands
from the Federal Government to the states, further income tax
reductions with the potential for a national sales tax to compensate
for lost revenue, removal of the Government from power distribution
in Federally-constructed dams and sale of the power instead to
private utilities, repeal of the 160-acre limitation on irrigation
rights in the Central Valley of California, and liberalization of
grazing and timber rights on Federal lands. Other demands also would
be sought from a Dewey administration.
With some of these issues, Governor Dewey would be in
agreement, such as on tidal oil lands, favored by Governor Warren
for some time. On others, he would not be, knowing them to be
inflationary, as with the tax proposals, and as being contrary to
Republican traditions of conservation regarding the extension of
grazing and timber rights.
The question thus remained whether President Dewey could
reconcile these disparate interests and govern effectively.
He did okay as President, all things considered, better than
President Hamilton.
Gerald W. Johnson, writing in the New York Star, finds
that no matter who threw the party, the South was left to pick up
the bill. The bulk of the slavery profits went to New England,
formed the foundation of many Boston fortunes. But the bill for
emancipation was taxed to the South, resulting in a three-billion
dollar property loss. Moreover, the South had to pay the bill for
educating the slaves who had been freed.
When industrialization took place, the South again got the
bill in the form of higher freight rates and a discriminatory
tariff, for 60 years.
"Now destiny in a waiter's coat is thrusting another
check under its nose," the abolition of Jim Crow. North
Carolina had already suffered the previous week, in the egg and
tomato throwing at Henry Wallace, its name becoming a "hissing
and a by-word", despite it being the most respected Southern
state for progressivism.
Mr. Johnson had lived in Greensboro and found the city highly
civilized. He had once seen a black man acquitted by an all-white
jury for allegedly raping a white woman, in a trial in which the
defendant had no witnesses save to attest to his character. The late
Earle Godbey, Editor of the Greensboro Daily News, became
infuriated when a "swinish" white policeman insulted a
black doctor. Mr. Johnson also had seen the esteem which black men
earned from the white community from their attendance at black
institutions of higher learning. Two white policemen, assigned to a
rough black neighborhood, the "Bullpen", cleaned it up
in three weeks by hiring a black evangelist who converted the whole
area. There were hard-working and honest whites and blacks who
sought to eliminate xenophobia from the community, a slow,
painstaking process, of which the reformists were aware but
undertook anyway, refusing to admit the problem to be ineradicable.
That was the city which was now being presented as the place
where Storm Troopers barged into a public meeting and broke it up.
The South was paying the bill.
He finds the explanation to lie in fear, fear in Greensboro,
fear in the South. North Carolina was only half as afraid, though,
of its 981,000 black population as was California of its 110,000
Japanese Americans at the outbreak of the war. He explains that he
finds it only half so because North Carolinians never dreamed of
placing black citizens in concentration camps.
Fearful people were always ugly and Greensboro was no
exception. He expresses an unpleasant feeling at seeing the city
disgraced nationally.
He does not question the sincerity of Henry Wallace or seek to challenge him, but
remarks that his program reminded of Sir Oswald Mosley staging his
parades for his Fascist cause in the Jewish quarter of London.
We note that Mr. Johnson, who had for years been with the
Baltimore Evening Sun, was a friend to W. J. Cash and had
graduated from Wake Forest a decade ahead of Cash.
Mr. Johnson would live until 1980, long enough to see
Greensboro humiliated yet again in the national press during the
lunch counter sit-ins at Woolworth in 1960, the first such sit-ins
in the nation, designed to desegregate lunch counters; and yet
again, in 1979 when Ku Klux Klansmen unprovokedly opened fire on
Communist Workers Party members, killing five. He would not live
long enough to see the ultimate humiliation of Greensboro, however,
when in late 1980, a local jury acquitted the Klansmen of the
murders, and again in 1984, when a Federal jury in Greensboro
acquitted the reprobates of civil rights violations of those
murdered in cold blood on videotape.
Neither Greensboro nor any community in the nation or the
world is ever immune from prejudice, hatred, racism, or plain
stupidity, no matter how civilized and nice it may be on the surface
when things are going along normally.
A piece from the Charleston News & Courier says
that the Spartanburg Journal suggested that Strom Thurmond
resign as Governor because he was a presidential candidate. It
endorsed the President. The News & Courier says that it
favors election of Governor Thurmond, and also believed that he
ought resign as Governor, as soon as President Truman resigned his
office, along with all the other presidential and vice-presidential
candidates. The only candidate, it remarks, on any of the ballots
who was not on the Government payroll was former Vice-President
Wallace.
