The Charlotte News

Monday, January 24, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in China, thousands of Chiang Kai-Shek's personal troops were abandoning their posts in Nanking and Shanghai to follow Chiang south to his native village of Chilow, 210 miles from Nanking. Acting President Li Tsung-Jen reportedly ordered 50,000 troops personally loyal to him into the Nanking sector from the Hankow front. All Government troops were reported to have abandoned Pukow, Nanking's railway station on the north bank of the Yangtze.

On the Island of Rhodes, the armistice talks resumed between the Egyptians and Israelis, albeit possibly only temporarily. Breakdown of the talks still remained a possibility and appeared to have occurred during the weekend before the resumption. The Israelis were reported reliably to have blocked the exit from Faluja of trapped Egyptian troops, scheduled to begin this date. The parties were reported to be at odds on setting the boundaries in the Negev region.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., a group of hooded Klansmen walked in on the services of the white Philadelphia Baptist Church the previous night, causing the church pianist to faint and her husband to resign as musical director and member of the board of trustees. The Klansmen, who claimed to be "Clansmen", had handed the minister a note which lauded the "splendid work" of the church for the community. They also claimed to have no hatred for anyone and that "these foreignisms" were waging a fight against them because of their sustenance of the "noble traditions" of their forefathers. The minister read the note aloud, after which the Klansmen offered up a prayer and then departed into the night to other good deeds for their community.

The minister said that he had received information the previous week that the Klansmen might enter the church, but that he did not understand why they felt the need to wear masks. The man who resigned his post in the church said that he had recently read that Dr. Samuel Green, Atlanta Grand Dragon, had said that Klan members did not enter churches absent invitations from the minister.

These men of the kloth are the country's future trump card. Praise the Laird! Keep the Devil out and behind the Wall. We can cruise to Viktory against the foreignisms with Purity and Dignity for all.

The Senate Rules Committee appeared ready to pass on a recommendation to change Senate rules to avoid future filibusters, but 17 Southern Senators had vowed to block the measure when it came to the floor for debate.

North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott stated that he wanted a one-cent increase in the state gasoline tax even if voters failed to approved his urged 200-million dollar bond issue for building and improving rural roads in the state, part of the long-term financing for which was to be the one-cent tax.

State Senator Joe Blythe of Mecklenburg County, DNC national treasurer during the 1948 campaign, died suddenly at age 58 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Washington the previous day and would be buried the following day, with DNC national chairman Senator Howard McGrath set to attend the funeral along with other dignitaries. The General Assembly would suspend activities the following day in recognition of Mr. Blythe.

The News begins a contest this date to determine the identity of "Mr. X". It presents a photograph with an "X" across the face of Mr. X. This night, between 7:00 and 8:00, the newspaper would place calls to as many as 30 people until the first person correctly identified the mystery person, with a prize at stake of $10. If no one correctly identified the person, another clue would be supplied the following day and the prize increased to $20. If by Friday, no one had correctly guessed the identity, then the $50 would be supplied to the newspaper's Empty Stocking Fund for the following Christmas to supply gifts for needy families in the community.

Clue No. 1 is that the mystery man is from New England.

But the contest comes with the obvious caveat that if you guess correctly, you are, in effect, taking money from needy families for next Christmas, and so shame on you. You deserve coal next Christmas.

Our guess is that it is Xavier Cugat. Who do you think it is?

On the editorial page, "Senator Joseph L. Blythe" praises the late State Senator and DNC treasurer who had just suddenly died the previous day. It finds him to have been one of the preeminent outstanding men produced by Mecklenburg County, with his crowning achievement having been his success as DNC treasurer during the late Democratic campaign. He had also been very active in local civic affairs.

"Necessities vs. Luxuries" disfavors the Truman proposal for expanded social services in the country at a time when it was being called upon to spend 15 billion dollars for defense and another 7.5 billion for foreign aid.

Yeah, we don't want to spend a couple of billion on a bunch of deadbeats here at home. Let 'em starve. Save the Chinese for Chiang. Wise move.

"Meritorious Project" tells of the Shrine All-Star high school football game, from its modest beginnings a dozen years earlier, having provided a total of $172,000 in the previous three games to the Shrine Hospital for Crippled Children in Greenville, N.C. It thus provides kudos to the four Shrine temples which sponsored the annual event.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "More Funds for the Parks", tells of the President wanting to double the budget of 15 million dollars for the National Park Service, and that, indeed, the paltry present budget of the Service was not enough to perform adequately its job in 26 national parks and 154 other national monuments. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was one park which had been neglected during and since the war. Even the increased budget was little more than a token for preservation and maintenance of the objects of America's recreational pursuits.

Harold K. Milks discusses the departure of Chiang Kai-Shek from Nanking for his hometown after 22 years as the strong man in China. He left behind a country overrun by Communists from the North, who had been driven there by Chiang 14 years earlier, and beset by rampant inflation.

A leading cause of the collapse of the regime was Chiang's refusal to delegate authority, surrounding himself with loyal but frequently incompetent lieutenants. He had personally assumed command of the armies in the previous few months and had gone to Peiping to run military operations in Manchuria and the North.

Mr. Milks imparts briefly of Chiang's biography.

Drew Pearson tells of the Agriculture Department's experimental station at Beltsville, Md., testing radioactive fertilizer as a means to increase crop yields by measuring the radioactivity of phosphorous as a tracer to determine how much fertilizer was needed per acre to produce maximum yield.

House Speaker Sam Rayburn, without children, would sneak away to be with his friends under five on occasion, as he had done on his 67th birthday. The party was hosted by four-year old Lynda Bird Johnson. But her 18-month old sister Luci turned out to be the life of the party by climbing on Mr. Rayburn's knee and trying to comb his "egg-bald head". Lynda Bird brought in a cake with 21 candles and a basket of birthday presents, among which was a quirt, bringing a laugh to Mr. Rayburn who believed he might need it to get more work from the Democratic mules in Congress.

—Yeah, Bob. I think we ought to investigate this business to see what we can find out and use on Rayburn from this party he had.

—Yeah, subversive, Bob.

—Oh, I know, kids are where it starts. They're the worst. And that Johnson fellow, their father, another far left New Deal Commie, if you want my opinion, trying to go places.

—Yeah, Russia, Mao's China, they start them right off, right out of the crib.

—Okay, that will be good, full report in a month.

—Mel? Who the hell is Mel?

—Oh, okay. One of the ratfinks. Don't want too many people involved though. Gets messy.

—Yeah, one might spill the beans, open doors best left closed.

—Same to you, Bob.

"Rootin'-tootin'" John Rankin had been subdued to docility for the present after being booted from HUAC by the House Democratic leadership. He had originally vowed to fight the move and suddenly decided to cooperate with the leadership.

The White House wanted to remove Senator Howard McGrath as chairman of the DNC, a move not desired by the President. But Senator McGrath wanted to resign. It was likely that George Killion of San Francisco would replace him.

A Washington journalist had recently called NLRB chairman Paul Herzog and heard only barking. Mr. Herzog often impersonated a dog and began telephone calls with the sound of barking.

Joseph Alsop, in Paris, finds that the best way to test the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe was through the absence of inflation, starvation, economic and political chaos. The Western European nations had not succumbed to the establishment of dictatorships from either the Right or the Left. The Kremlin had not achieved its expected triumphs and so the Marshall Plan could be perceived as having paid for itself as "political fire insurance".

There was doubt whether the Marshall Plan could place Western Europe on a sound economic footing by 1952, its projected termination date. The countries had a projected debt of three billion dollars at the conclusion of the program. With the dual threat, on the one hand economic decay and on the other totalitarian aggression, as in France, but not in Britain, the changes had to develop without too much sacrifice of the people, lest they be driven into the arms of the totalitarians. Marshall Plan aid, however, had alleviated much of the need for such extreme sacrifice and had regulated the aid in such a way as to mandate measures which prevented deficit financing, encouraged fiscal responsibility and efficiency.

George Kennan, State Department planner and chief architect of the Marshall Plan, had stated in an article written as "Mr. X" in Foreign Affairs that the Marshall Plan would, by rebuilding Western Europe, resolve the threat of Soviet Communism making inroads to it.

In France, however, the farmers, small manufacturers, and shopkeepers were hoarding inventory and fungible goods, an estimated five billion dollars worth, encouraged by inflation, but moreover, the fear of war.

So, the fear of war and strategic insecurity were weapons more useful to the Russians than the Western European Communists. It was therefore of utmost importance to restore strategic and economic strength to enable conquering of these potentially paralyzing fears.

Marquis Childs tells of a sentence having been omitted from the President's inaugural address which might have made it more easy to understand his intentions with regard to aid to underdeveloped nations. The sentence had urged private capital to combine labor to make American benefits available to these nations to enable all ships to rise, and "to take up where the Marshall Plan leaves off." One reason for the omission was to avoid the perception that he intended the program only for Marshall Plan recipient nations, that it applied to the world. It was also to avoid the prospect of the recipient nations believing that they could delay taking more responsibility for economic stabilization in their own countries, where large deficits were already predicted by 1952. The American people would be reluctant to extend the aid beyond that target date.

The economic plight of Europe was not only from the war but extended back in time to the turn of the century as European productivity remained relatively stagnant during the great period of growth of capital production in the U.S. Thus was the aim of the President's conception of American sharing of technology to the advantage of borrower and lender.

A letter writer, commenting on the editorial telling of the refusal of the First Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders bagpipe band to play at the annual Chelsea Arts Ball in Royal Albert Hall in London on New Year's Eve because of their conclusion that their being hired by the BBC for the occasion to avoid the union ban on non-union bands playing live music implied that bagpipes were not musical instruments, explains the bagpipe's parts and that it was as much an instrument of music as the clarinet or other woodwinds, that it should be popular in Scotland County, N.C., and in other parts of the state, given the large concentration of Scotch-Irish bloodlines.

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