Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Berlin, the Red
Army patrolled the borders of the city while anti-Communists gave a
martyr's funeral to a German youth slain in rioting the previous
week. The American M.P.'s reported several swift incursions to the
American zone by Russian patrols but none had caused trouble.
Eastern sector police claimed that 150 German youths had stoned
three policemen, the third such stoning in recent weeks. They
claimed that the youths were incited by older people, one of whom
was said to be drunk. That person along with 15 youths were placed
under arrest, but the youths were released after several hours.
The U.N. Security Council, meeting in Paris, voted 8 to 0,
with abstentions from China, Russia and the Ukraine, to look into
the situation regarding the attack by India on the princely state of
Hyderabad. Speakers on both sides of the issue were then invited
before the Council. India's representative objected, as he contended
that Hyderabad was not a state and thus had no standing before the
U.N. Hyderabad's representative claimed that India had committed an
act of aggression on September 13 when it invaded.
France's five-day old Government led by Premier Henri
Queuille was already in trouble, with strikes, many led by
Communists, besetting the country. On the right, followers of
General De Gaulle continued to push for new national elections.
Opposition existed in the National Assembly to the Premier's
financial program, including general wage increases and a tax hike.
Pollster Elmo Roper tells of President Truman having lost the
support of every major group which had supported FDR and given him
his margin of victory in each of the previous four presidential
elections. He provides the comparative results. The President had
only 32.9 percent of the support of young voters between 21 and 34,
with Governor Dewey registering 44.5 percent. That compared to FDR
in 1944 having 54.9 to Governor Dewey's 40.7 percent. Similar
results occurred among lower middle income voters, those in cities
over a million population, and among independent voters. Even among
Democrats, the President polled only 52.7 percent, compared to 20.7
percent for Governor Dewey, whereas four years earlier, FDR had
polled 78.1 percent.
He concludes that Mr. Dewey had not so much won the election,
as he considers a foregone conclusion, but that the President had
lost it. The reasons cited were it being time for a change, Mr.
Truman not filling the shoes of President Roosevelt, a lack of
efficient administration, a strong point of Governor Dewey, a shift
to the right during prosperous times as were extant, and the split
in the Democratic Party produced by the defection of the Dixiecrats
and the Progressives.
The President planned to depart the next day for a
cross-country campaign for 16 days to the West Coast, to return via
Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and West Virginia, all key
states for November.
Governor Dewey was also headed to the West Coast with stops
on the way back scheduled in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Because the Republicans had reserved the Hollywood Bowl, the
President was relegated to Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles when the
two candidates would speak a day apart, the President to speak on
September 23 and Mr. Dewey the following night. DNC chairman J.
Howard McGrath charged that the DNC had rented an empty stadium in
Texas just to deny its use to the President.
Thirty-nine crewmen of a British freighter had been rescued
from the North Atlantic after a hurricane had hit on Tuesday causing
the ship to list to 55 degrees, prompting abandonment. The fate of
six others was still unknown.
In Erie, Pa., an ice man whom everyone considered to be the
ideal father was convicted of second degree murder for beating to
death his six year old son on May 30. He had administered around a
hundred blows with a web belt. The man said that he beat his son for
refusing to tell him where he had hidden a hammer. He said that his
son's last words were that he still loved his father.
Martha Azer London of The News continues her story
begun the previous day regarding the family whose rented home had
burned down relegating them initially to a chicken coop with rats,
until friends and co-workers and the Red Cross came to their aid.
Now, strangers were joining to provide whatever they could to the
distraught family.
A photograph shows the family cooking outside their new tent,
properly using the oil stove outside, per fire safety, all courtesy
of the Red Cross.
They probably also could use a goat or cow, to act as a lawnmower.
Ralph Gibson of The News tells of the County Health
Board being ready to lift the ban on assembly, imposed because of
the record polio outbreak during the summer. It would enable schools
to open on September 22 as scheduled.
Sorry. That was a good try, students.
Plans were being made for observance of Girl Scout Week
locally, October 30 through November 6.
Girls, by the end of that fateful week, you can rest assured
that the Communist New Deal will finally be over and the Government
will no longer impose restrictions on your ability to engage in
unfettered free enterprise door to door in the sale of your cookies,
even in Boston.
On the editorial page, "Important Farm Demonstration" finds that parents and teachers found out quickly of the wisdom of
Samuel Johnson's statement: "Example is always more
efficacious than precept."
The following month, a demonstration would take place to show
how a farm which was worthless could be made overnight into a
fertile operation. On October 14, hundreds of men and many pieces of
donated equipment would go to a farm owned by two veterans and give
it a makeover in 24 hours, increasing the farm's value by $20,000.
The land was the country's greatest resource, it offers, and
it should be nurtured and preserved if there was to be lasting
prosperity. The true beneficiaries would be the people of the
Piedmont who could learn from the example.
"The Balkan Sideshow" remarks on the secrecy
attending the death on August 31 of Col. General Andrei Zhdanov,
head of the Cominform and believed to be responsible for the
confrontation with Marshal Tito for not being enough pro-Soviet.
Observers speculated that the death might provide an opening for
Moscow to patch up relations with Yugoslavia. But Pravda
immediately heaped new criticism on Tito the previous week.
The rift between Russia and Yugoslavia showed the
totalitarian methods used in Communism, whereby as soon as someone
got out of line, he was denounced. It posits that Communists in the
Western world still had time to open their eyes and see the system
for what it was, just as had the Russian teachers in New York,
Oksana Kosenkina and Mikhail Samarin.
"Dixiecrat Party Line" tells of the Dixiecrats entering the race late and thus having to scurry about "like so many beetles" to get the names of Governors Thurmond and Wright on the North Carolina ballot. So it was natural that the N.C. Dixiecrats remained somewhat confused about the Dixiecrat party line. It was amusing to read that they had not determined what to do about the Democrats. The state chairman took Governor Gregg Cherry to task for supposedly delaying Dixiecrat organization.
Dave Clark of the Textile Bulletin, an active Dixiecrab, believed that the Dixiecrat chairman was wrong, that the State Attorney General had been cooperative in getting the decision out early from the State Supreme Court, overruling the Board of Elections in denying the Dixiecrat petition for the ballot.
It urges the party to state its purpose so that those in the state who wanted to vote against both Truman and Dewey would have a place to go. It states that The News also did not know for what the party stood.
A piece from the New York Sun, titled "Our
Voting Population", finds the Bureau of the Census reporting
that 94.6 million Americans would be eligible to vote in the
November 2 election. In 1944, 48 million had cast ballots. Voting
age population had increased about ten million since 1940, with 60
percent of that number being women voters. The popular vote would
inevitably be larger than in 1944. Many would choose not to vote and
others would not meet various state residence requirements.
Drew Pearson tells of the great-grandson of Bismarck having
been arrested in the Western zone of Germany. U.S. and British
intelligence had been trying to catch Baron Von Einsiedel for
months, as he was considered the leader of the Free Germany
Committee which the Russians had organized from the surrendering
Nazi Army in Stalingrad during the war. Since the war, he had been
operating cooperatively with the Russians. He had been sentenced to
six months for carrying false papers. Mr. Pearson wonders what U.S.
officials would do with him after the six months were over.
Ambassador Averell Harriman had been working to get the 16
recipient nations under ERP to cut their aid allocations in favor of
increasing that of Western Germany. At first they balked on the
basis that it would make Germany strong again and lead potentially
to another war. Ambassador Harriman initially agreed with that
analysis but was overruled by ERP administrator Paul Hoffman, taking
his orders from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.
Mr. Pearson notes that Mr. Forrestal's Wall Street firm had
arranged prewar loans to German munitions manufacturers. Now,
Secretary Forrestal was making loans at Government expense.
In Dexter, Iowa, the President, during his coming
cross-country tour, would be greeted by "The Flying Hoofs",
a teenage equestrian drill team who owned their own horses. They had worked up a routine called "The Presidential".
The American airlift was now flying champagne into Berlin, as
25 tons daily was allotted to the French and they could order
anything they wanted for the menu.
The President told the American Sons of Italy recently that
Governor Dewey was playing politics with the issue of returning as
trusteeships the former African colonies of Italy to woo
Italian-American votes. He said that he would leave the matter up to
the State Department. He agreed that giving the colonies to Italy
under a trusteeship would provide incentive to fight the harder
against Communism.
For the first time, a presidential candidate would have a
bodyguard prior to election day, as Governor Dewey had hired former
Secret Service agents Mike Reilly and Robert Bose to form his
detail.
"Housewives for Truman", traveling in trailers,
were about to embark on a campaign to stress the high cost of
living.
Marquis Childs comments on the President's statement to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science that scientists
could not be driven into Government laboratories but that they could
be driven out. Mr. Childs reminds that the latter occurred in the
Fascist states. Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, and
Neils Bohr all sought and obtained asylum in the United States,
helping to develop nuclear fission leading to the bomb. Germany's
scientists were herded into what amounted to concentration camps.
German science had thrived for a long time before the Nazis and then
it was squelched.
Now, scientists in the U.S. felt threatened by a Government
which suspected them of disloyalty. A letter to the President from
the head of MIT, Karl Compton, and seven other leading scientists,
including Philip Morse, who had just resigned from the Atomic Energy
Commission to return to MIT, had prompted the President's remarks.
Mr. Childs views the problem as the result of undue suspicion
of scientists as long-haired eccentrics who needed watching lest
they reveal secrets. Such suspicion had been characteristic of the
Army during the Manhattan Project.
HUAC was building up to an atomic spy inquiry and if it
hampered scientists and science, further harm would be done.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop relate of the "tele-con
nightmare" ongoing for eighty days since the beginning of the
Berlin blockade. The tele-con received and scrambled messages and
re-sent them to the four Western capitals, including West Berlin.
The diplomats involved in the four-power talks became so exhausted
that Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told a tele-con operator
to relay to Ambassador Lewis Douglas that he should stop as no one
was making sense anymore.
The governments of France, Britain, and the U.S. had been at
odds as to whether it was worthwhile to continue the talks, one
government first favoring extension, then changing its mind while
another took up the cause of extension.
If nothing could be resolved, the Big Three would take the
case to the U.N. After Russia would exercise its veto in the
Security Council, it was expected that the General Assembly would
issue a strong statement of censure of Russia regarding the
blockade.
Polls showed that 82 percent of the American people were
prepared to face war over the crisis rather than yield to Soviet
bullying. More than 60 percent favored breaking the blockade by
means of an armed convoy to Berlin.
Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, tells of the times having changed since the war, from relative simplicity, fighting a common enemy with "love and action", to a complex state in which "worry and close judgment" were the prime characteristics on display. It was not a good time for liberals. Tears were scarce. Conservatism had made it harder for liberals by unifying behind an outcry against Russia as liberals had against Hitler. The right thought itself as eloquent as had been the left during the war against Fascism.
But, nevertheless, he believes that the liberal was not in such bad shape as it appeared, even with the election nigh and prospects dim. For a win for Governor Dewey would not necessarily sideline liberals, any more than they had been by the victory of Warren Harding in 1920. The liberal's business was to see to it that every family had a decent place to live and adequate food, with freedom and lack of want. Mr. Dewey had to get along with liberals. Nor would the defeat of the Democrats have the same negative impact on liberals which it once would have.
And conservatism had not found a replica of the wartime unity against Hitler by opposing Soviet Communism. There remained hope in the people that a war would be averted and a permanent peace effected.
But, he concludes, liberalism had clearly suffered a setback in an ultimate battle it could not lose, while conservatism had administered a blow in a fight it could not win.
A letter from Central High School football fans at the
Southern Railway Station wonders why the price of the tickets had
gone up at Central by a quarter when Harding and Tech High Schools
were still charging $1, especially as Central was larger than the other two schools and thus had presumably a larger fan base to supply the stands at each game with patrons.
To add insult to injury, Central had lost its first game to
Fayetteville by a score of 41 to 7.
Well, yeah. What gives there? Give them back the quarter so
that they can catch the first freight out of town.
The editors seek to explain.
A letter from a G.I. says that Time had printed that
the Charlotte News had said that Henry Wallace mortified
them. He warns that they would be mortified the more as the
Progressive Party was on the landscape to stay, would be going
strong "when both jackass and elephant are washed away."
A letter writer wonders which party Dave Clark of the Textile
Bulletin was supporting as a "labor-hater".
A letter from A. W. Black takes issue with the praise given
FDR and the New Deal by a recent letter, and then proceeds to
undertake his favorite occupation, attacking the New Deal, saying
that every act FDR undertook was for the purpose of "communizing
America".
Well, that was the idea, stupid. We are communists. Didn't
anyone inform you? That's what happens when you elect the likes of
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover right in a row.
Another Pome from the Atlanta Journal, this one
"Revealing a Certain Fascination Derived From Pronouncing a
Word in More or Less Common Usage:
