The Charlotte News

Monday, September 13, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Berlin, a liberal democratic newspaper stated that "X-Day" for achieving Communist control of Berlin had been set for some time after the U.S. presidential election on November 2. In the meantime, claimed the story, the Communists would use every opportunity to cause riots, strikes and demonstrations, with the aim of driving the anti-Communist City Government from power and, by means of the air maneuvers, interfering with the Western allied airlift, Phase Two of their putsch to control Berlin.

At least it was not A-Day, yet.

Indian troops had invaded the princely state of Hyderabad from all four sides this date, with the declared purpose of restoring order. Indian casualties were reported to be slight and those of the opposing forces serious in the Aurengabad section of northwest Hyderabad. The rich Nizam had refused to disband their private armies and Nizam General H. E. H. Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, a Moslem, had refused to accede to India. Eighty percent of the inhabitants of Hyderabad were Hindus and India had demanded a plebiscite to determine the future of the state.

Less than two days earlier, Governor General of Pakistan, founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had died. New Delhi sources said that they expected his death to ease tensions between India and Pakistan.

Masses of demonstrators marched to the Prime Minister's residence in Karachi, Pakistan, to demand a declaration of war against India for the attack on Hyderabad. They shouted "Long live the Nizam" and "Do away with the Indian Union".

Secretary of State Marshall rejected Soviet protests regarding the asylum requests of Russian school teachers Oksana Kosenkina and Mikhail Samarin, saying that it was up to each as individuals as to where they wished to live. They would enjoy complete freedom of movement within the U.S. He also said that the U.S. was closing as quickly as possible its consulate in Vladivostok.

In New York, the daughter of a U.S. career diplomat received a suspended three-month sentence on a conviction for loitering in her East Side Manhattan apartment for the purpose of committing an act of prostitution, along with two other women receiving such suspended sentences on similar charges, one a daughter of a retired minister. They were convicted on the basis of wiretap evidence. The daughter of the diplomat rushed into the arms of her husband and told the press that the couple, along with their son, intended to go to Europe, that her husband was very understanding. Another of the three was pregnant.

John Crosby, radio critic, comments on the NBC program "Marriage in Distress", on page 2-A.

A hurricane with 100 mph winds struck Bermuda this date, causing extensive property damage.

In Asheville, the North Carolina American Legion elected its officers. Attorney Terry Sanford of Fayetteville, veteran of the late war and future Governor, Senator and president of Duke University, was chosen as the judge advocate.

The convention heard a speech delivered by proxy from Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall who stated that Communist totalitarianism had since the war spread over a larger territory than had Nazism during the war. He said that Russia had four million men under arms, a military establishment which would cost 35 billion dollars for America to maintain.

Charles Lambeth, 54, City Councilman and former Mayor of Charlotte, died in New York City following major surgery, after he had developed a major throat problem several months earlier.

Tom Schesinger of The News reports that a piece of farm land which would ordinarily take twenty years to overhaul would be revitalized in a day on October 14 when 120 acres of worthless land near Charlotte, owned by two veterans, would be made fertile through collective action. The demonstration was being sponsored by The News, the Soil Conservation District of the Lower Catawba, the Extension Service, and the Grange. More than 350 men and 109 pieces of farm equipment, furnished by various local equipment dealers, would take part in the effort, to demonstrate what could be accomplished when proper practices of soil conservation were undertaken. Over 30,000 spectators were expected for the event. It was estimated that the farm would increase in value by $20,000 from the single day of effort.

Beware, friends: the collective farm and its concomitant inducements to communal action generally have come to Charlotte, and we know what that means.

On the editorial page, "Make the Re-Appraisal Now" presents an actual case of a local property owner whose house cost $27,000 but was being taxed at a value of $5,100, three times the worth of his car. There were thousands of such cases. The City Council, as a result, was considering a survey of all property for reassessment. It would cost $400,000 but would pay for itself, said its proponents, within two or three years. It had been ten years since the last reassessment and it was necessary for equalization, as a great deal of new construction and improvements had taken place during that decade.

The piece favors making the reassessment presently rather than waiting for a study by the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill as that study would have to await the 1951 Legislature's approval and could wind up being pigeonholed indefinitely.

"The Sky's the Limit" tells of Horace Michael Ainscough from Lancashire, England, who had dug coal all of his life, including after he arrived in America 21 years earlier at age 41. But the previous February, he had gotten sick and had to quit the Wyoming coal company for which he had worked all those years. The previous week, with a phalanx of press present, John L. Lewis presented Mr. Ainscough with a check for $100 as the first coal miner to receive the monthly pension which Mr. Lewis had fought so hard to get for UMW members. Four hundred and fifty other retired miners of average age of 66.3 years, with more than 39 years of average service, had likewise sought the payments.

While pension plans were not new to American business, the coal plan was and had been won through great cost to the American public in strikes and court injunctions of same, followed by contempt proceedings for violation, and would be financed by a royalty of 20 cents per ton of coal mined, to be passed on to the consumer.

The plan was good in that it gave the miners security and made them thus immune from the attractiveness of any foreign "ism". But also it had a dangerous side in that there was nothing to prevent Mr. Lewis from seeking more for the miners under the plan, with the consumers again left to foot the bill.

"A Lesson from France" tells of a piece appearing in the Christian Science Monitor about French farmers and their insouciant reaction to the recurring political upheavals in the French Government. They were more interested in the price of their livestock or the prospects for a good wine season. The farmers were the backbone of France and so the expression of apathy partially explained the unstable government, for if the people did not take part in the government of a democracy, the government could not exist.

The result of the leaderless nation could be the rise to power of General De Gaulle as a dictator or semi-dictator and then the fomenting of a revolution by the people to depose him, returning the nation to a leaderless status.

It posits that the French experience served as warning to America not to allow such apathy and cynicism to become the watchwords of societal life. Only alertness through time had avoided the state and would continue to prevent a similar fate for the U.S.

Drew Pearson tells of only 3,000 Republican leaders showing up for the reply of Harold Stassen to President Truman's Labor Day Michigan speeches, despite the Masonic Hall in Detroit holding 5,500. Arthur Summerfield, one of the largest Chevrolet dealers, was supposed to drum up support for the Stassen reply. But he was under investigation by a Federal grand jury and had become one of the most controversial persons in Michigan Republican politics. The average Michigan voter had a feeling that something was rotten high up in GOP officialdom. Michigan's Attorney General sought to conduct an investigation but was frustrated by Governor Sigler and the local courts.

Mr. Pearson had canceled checks showing that Michigan businessmen thumbed their noses at the Corrupt Practices Act in raising money for the GOP. Two G.M. officials were implicated along with eleven G.M. dealers, including Mr. Summerfield.

One such violator was a Pontiac and Cadillac dealer. Another was a Ford and Lincoln dealer sending a check for $500 ostensibly to the Ford Motor Co., though plainly a forgery and funneled into the GOP war chest, intended as a ruse to allow the donation to be considered a deductible business expense. Such machinations enabled the GOP to amass a large campaign chest in 1946, when the Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress.

The FBI had joined the hunt to uncover housing frauds against veterans. One case was against a New Jersey real estate agent for overcharging a veteran $500 on a $5,000 house. He said in defense that he was only doing what everyone else was doing.

Jewish war veterans met with the President, interested in discussing with him public housing and other veterans aid measures. But the President wanted to discuss Palestine, saying that he believed the U.S. still had a primary role in resolving the conflict. He was upset that Czechoslovakia was reportedly providing arms to Israel. The head of the group told him that they, too, were upset at the fact as they were not Zionists.

Marquis Childs finds that the people organizing the Wallace third-party campaign were not believers in the American system, wanted to shut out the middle way of compromise. As the objective had become clear, support for Mr. Wallace had waned. No longer could smug Republicans assume that the Wallace ticket would guarantee a Dewey-Warren victory by siphoning off five or ten million Democratic votes.

The central core of the Progressive Party remained Communists and fellow travelers. But many who were neither remained loyal to Mr. Wallace. They regarded the Democratic Party as anomalous, passing into discard, and the Republicans as reactionaries bringing on Fascism. They regarded the choice to be the latter or the Left as they would define it.

Many Republicans wanted the GOP to become truly progressive to render that choice nugatory. Mr. Childs remarks that the opportunity for such transition was there and that it represented the surest way to thwart those who believed the choice to be between two violent extremes, left or right.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop remark that control of the Senate in the election was the Republican alarm and the Democratic hope, with GOP seats in Minnesota, Wyoming, West Virginia, Illinois, Kentucky, and Oklahoma in potential trouble. Only a loss of four would shift control back to the Democrats.

The national presidential preference polls showed President Truman with about 41 percent compared to 54 percent for Governor Dewey.

The House, they find, would not be altered significantly by a Dewey victory. Visible distaste nationally for the performance of the 80th Congress plus the influence of the Wallace party in the North could cause some shifts in House elections, the first factor favoring the Democrats, the latter, the Republicans, each, however, counterbalancing the other.

The idea that ticket-splitting was not an American tradition was nonsense, as proved in 1928. But it was still remarkable that the Senate was in jeopardy given the strength of Governor Dewey nationally. With the exception of the Kentucky race, where Senator John Sherman Cooper was the incumbent, all of the GOP incumbents in jeopardy were isolationist and reactionary, such as Chapman Revercomb in West Virginia, Joseph Ball in Minnesota, and Curly Brooks in Illinois. Mr. Dewey had sought to distance himself from these Senators. His advisers had been progressives in the party and would continue to be so in a Dewey administration.

While ticket-splitting was higher than supposed, it was not usually enough to make up a 13 percent presidential deficit, or seven percent. In New York, for instance, in 1928, when the state voted for Herbert Hoover over Governor Al Smith of New York in the presidential race, they had voted for FDR for Governor, but only affording a difference of three percent from the presidential margin. They conclude therefore, that despite the polls in the Senate races in the states in question, it was likely that the isolationists would be victorious on the coattails of Governor Dewey come election day.

And that's about the way it turned out—in Chicago.

A letter writer seeks to know what a "true fact" was, of which he had heard on the radio discussion by Drew Pearson and several members of Congress.

Well, here it is: A true fact is manifestly true of its own accord, not subject to external vicissitudes or alteration by subsequently discovered facts. An example is that the earth is more or less round, that a day, as we define it, is one revolution of the earth, approximately 24 hours in duration. You can take it from there.

The smart aleck, incidentally, who contends that if the earth were to explode, it would no longer be true that the globe was more or less round, fails to take into account the fact that in the event of that stated contingency, the earth, being no more, would no longer have inhabitants who could perceive the non-existence of the earth and so it could not be said, with certainty, that any quality of truth or falsity could be attributed to the statement regarding its more or less roundness, a temporal interruption of the condition having been assumed to take place to alter a previously obtaining status. But, the absence of any concrete evidence to the contrary, as borne out by a percipient being, would cause, necessarily, the previously accepted condition to continue to be asserted as true until negated with evidence of at least equally convincing probity.

And, since no person is omniscient, no one may superimpose one's self in such role and thus assume the nature of things after the earth's hypothetical explosion, as if an omniscient observer from afar. For all you know, the sum of the matter might still be round, more or less, roundness, more or less, being a readily accepted state within the universe. We do not know the result for the contingency has never obtained in reality and we could not know the result for the stated reason of obliterated earthly perception. And that is another true fact.

Or, more simply, symbolically, if a + b = c, then c - b = a.

Adding a "d" to that conditional statement would, incidentally, represent the entire spectrum of letter grades we achieved in ninth grade geometry, being intent on proving our well-roundedness, having gone from the d to the a in the space of the last quarter, but for, initially, a claimed zero for alleged want of a daily homework assignment, the supposed existence of which we then were able to establish as apocryphal, logically, the product of the teacher's mistaken perception, such that a - 0 did not equate to a b, enabling the synaptical jump from d to a to be complete, to the consternation, for unknown reasons, of the teacher—who apparently thought us to be mocking her in some manner.

A letter writer responds to the letter writer who had been a faithful News reader since 1908 but disagreed on the stance of the newspaper regarding controlled sale of liquor, wine and beer. The author believes that he had confused the admonition of being one's brother's keeper with the notion of being the keeper of his brothers' conscience. Cain was merely asking God, "'How the hell should I know where Abel is?'"

God did not direct his followers to enforce the Gospel. Every man, when becoming an adult, had the choice of the path he would follow. No other had the moral right to make the decision for him.

He thinks the letter writer ought find solace in the notion that the country spent more on munitions than alcohol, as the previous writer had said he would give his life for his country but that he shuddered to think that more money was spent on alcohol than preserving God's Kingdom.

He agrees, however, with the previous writer that America was being weighed in the balance and found wanting.

A letter from State Senator R. M. Kennedy, Jr., responds to a letter of September 8 responding to Mr. Kennedy's previous letter regarding State Senator and DNC treasurer Joe Blythe. Mr. Kennedy here says that the Truman Administration had shown no loyalty to the South for its support and had humiliated the South at every turn to court the black vote in the North. He finds the Truman program on civil rights to hearken "Stalinism unbounded!" Had it not been for some Republicans in Congress refusing to support cloture of debate on the civil rights issues, he ventures, then the program would have been enacted.

He believes that the only hope for the South was to support the States Rights candidates, Strom and Fielding.

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