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.