The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 8, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a usually reliable source had reported that the Chinese Government had asked the U.S., Britain, and France to mediate the civil war in China and obtain a negotiated peace with the Communists.
It was reported that the Communist attack on Tientsin had ended with occupation by the Communist forces of sections of the city. Nationalist forces ceased firing after the attack began, suggestive that an agreement on surrender of the city had been reached.
Britain accused Israel of shooting down five RAF planes over Egyptian soil near the Palestinian border in the area of Rafa. Israel admitted shooting down the five planes, but claimed that they were on armed reconnaissance over Palestine at the time and that some carried bombs. Britain told its Air Force to consider any Israeli plane over Egyptian territory to be hostile. Britain intended to present a protest of the incident to the U.N. Security Council.
Otherwise, all fronts were reported quiet in Palestine in the wake of the U.N.-ordered ceasefire to which both the Israelis and Egyptians had acceded, including the central sector upon which Iraqi forces reportedly had fired the previous day.
Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi was reported likely no longer to be a member of HUAC in the new Congress. A new rule was being recommended by the Democratic Party caucus, subject to approval by the full House, to prevent committee chairmen from serving on any other committee, and Mr. Rankin chaired the Veterans Affairs Committee. The rule was aimed specifically at Mr. Rankin.
Former President Hoover had suggested that reorganization power be provided to President Truman, but chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Pat McCarran said that the proposal would have to be studied carefully as the previous reorganization authority given FDR resulted in an enlargement of the Executive Branch, not its reduction.
Democrats assured business that there would be no revival of OPA in the process of providing the President with any limited control authority over prices, production, and wages. Some Democrats expressed doubt in the wisdom of controls.
There was some evidence among influential Republicans and a few Democrats of disappointment in the choice of Dean Acheson to be the successor to Secretary of State Marshall. Deemed significant, Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Bourke Hickenlooper and Alexander Smith refused public comment on the appointment.
In Miami, the Air Force continued its demonstration of its jet-propelled Shooting Stars in the 17th annual All-American Air Maneuvers, despite the death the previous day of an Air Force pilot after his fighter crashed and burned before 5,000 spectators.
George Truman, who had flown around the world, left Toronto for Miami with a load of snowballs aboard, after having declared the previous night that he was backing out of the trip because he had read that there were blizzards in Florida.
In Indianapolis, 41 passengers aboard a bus screamed as a hold-up man exchanged shots with his pursuer who killed the robber, who had taken about $100 from a grocer and fled. The grocer told the proprietor of another store of the robbery and the latter gave chase with a shotgun, forcing the bus to stop. No one else was wounded.
No matter how heroic this idiot may at first appear, do not follow his example. For one thing, he could be charged with murder as there is no right to use deadly force against a person to recover stolen property. Second, he might have killed or wounded any number of passengers over $100. He obviously had been attending too many Westerns.
In Asheville, N.C., wood alcohol in paint thinner was blamed for the death of a man, the third among a paint thinner-moonshine whiskey party of seven painters at Sylva the previous Wednesday night. Three others remained under treatment and a seventh man was missing and feared also dead.
At least they didn't try to mix it with paint.
In Los Angeles, a 90-year old widow married her 28-year old chauffeur in what she termed a contractual relationship so that he could have her property when she died. Her name was not Daisy.
Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington State was a week late for the start of the new Congress, but rumors that the cause was his friendship with "Toni Seven", a blonde whose real name was June Millarde, were placed in doubt by the Senator's secretary who said that the probable cause was the bad Western weather.
The West and the Plains States prepared for another blizzard following the three-day storm earlier in the week in which twenty persons lost their lives and thousands were marooned in cars and trains. Meanwhile, Miami recorded 71 degrees and Los Angeles, where it had been freezing earlier in the week, hit 69.
On the editorial page, "State Department Changes" tells of Senator Arthur Vandenberg suggesting that both Secretary of State Marshall and Undersecretary Robert Lovett were men nearly indispensable to the nation. Many felt likewise. During the war, it would have seemed impossible for General Marshall to have improved his stature with Americans. But he had as Secretary of State during the prior two years. He had guided the nation through the most treacherous diplomatic territory in its history.
In replacing Secretary Marshall with Dean Acheson, the President had made a choice which would likely prove popular, given Mr. Acheson's rich background in the State Department as Assistant Secretary to Cordell Hull throughout the war period and as Undersecretary from August, 1945 through July 1, 1947 under Secretaries James Byrnes and Marshall. He had also served on the Hoover Commission for studying the reorganization of the executive branch.
It also praises the appointment of North Carolina's James Webb, Budget Director, as Undersecretary, replacing Mr. Lovett.
The piece expresses the hope that with the State Department now under the direction of two civilians, foreign policy would cease to be determined by military personnel, such as General Clay in Germany and General MacArthur in Japan, that the State Department would exercise tighter control over foreign policy, as it should.
"The Stonewall Street Project" favors the Stonewall Project of the city, widening of Stonewall Street from Graham Street across Tryon to the intersection with the planned Independence Boulevard at Caldwell, as well as otherwise facilitating traffic flow.
It had nothing to do with Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, and HUAC.
But Big Ben Boulevard in St. Louis, maybe.
"Prices—Going Down?" tells of consumer prices dropping to levels of the previous June, especially food prices, and that the continuing drop in wholesale prices would soon be realized by the consumer in further savings, offering a relief finally from inflation.
"Deepest Note of Woe" tells of the BBC, because of a ban on live broadcast music by
non-union bands, having on New Year's Eve substituted bagpipes for
the usual dance
The piece suggests that radio sets
in Edinburgh might be silent for some time to come in response to the
BBC's faux pas. But, it finds, they could not be blamed. For
anyone who had listened at sunset to the skirling of "The
Minstrel Lad"
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Truth about the T-H Act", examines the Taft-Hartley Act and its proposed repeal in the new Congress. The Taft-Hartley watchdog committee had just issued its report, signed by only one of five Democrats on the committee, finding that the Act was not destructive of labor, as had been claimed, and that it had proved workable in practice. The piece suggests that the report be given a thorough reading by members of Congress before determining to repeal the Act in whole, especially when deciding what to enact in its place.
Drew Pearson tells of the President reliving the fateful afternoon of April 12, 1945, when he first got the news at around 5:00 that FDR had died and that he was therefore President. He had come to House Speaker Sam Rayburn's office for a conference, which included Congressmen John McCormick, Lyndon Johnson, and Wright Patman, and House parliamentarian Lewis Deschler. As Mr. Rayburn was sworn in again as Speaker of the 81st Congress, the President visited his office and sat in the same chair in which he had sat that April afternoon in 1945, with the same group present, in addition to some others, including Vice-President-elect Barkley, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, Attorney General Tom Clark, Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, and secretary of the Senate Leslie Biffle.
The Dutch Ambassador in Washington had agreed on December 14 to allow the U.S. to ship American textiles through the Dutch blockade to Indonesia, acting at the time piously, trumpeting the Dutch humanitarian motives in doing so. At the very time, however, the Dutch were preparing for the December 19 attack on Indonesia. Mr. Pearson compares the two-faced gesture to Japanese Ambassador Kurusu negotiating with Secretary of State Hull for peace right up until the hour of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. He provides the text of the Dutch Ambassador's note and quips that it had not come from either Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers.
A rift between Senators Charles Tobey and Styles Bridges, both of New Hampshire, had nearly come into the open recently when Senator Bridges was about to take his oath of office for a new term. It was customary for the other Senator of the same state to accompany him to take the oath. But, initially, when Senator Bridges tapped Senator Tobey on the shoulder to join him, Senator Tobey refused to budge. Eventually, however, he did join his colleague for the swearing-in ceremony.
Stewart Alsop tells of the State of the Union and the entry to the House by the President to deliver it. He suggests that it was hard to believe that the "remarkably unremarkable men", President Truman, Vice-President-elect Barkley, Secretary of Defense Forrestal, Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett and Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, possessed more power between them than any other men in the world.
The speech, itself, demonstrated that the country, even in a time of prosperity, had taken a decisive turn to the left, well to the left of any recommendations ever made to Congress by a prior President. It provided a blueprint for what in Europe was known as "social democracy", that in every field affecting the public welfare, the Government assumed ultimate responsibility.
The most leftist issue proposed was the Government construction of steel plants if the steel industry did not produce adequately for the country's needs.
Experienced observers on Capitol Hill were predicting that two-thirds to three-fourths of the President's program would ultimately become law, and if so, it would be a better domestic scorecard than anyone since FDR at the start of his second term. The chances were therefore good that the country would at least get a sample of what Justice William O. Douglas termed "the social welfare state".
Marquis Childs comments that to friends, the remarkable thing about the President was how little he had changed since first coming to the Senate in 1935. He was still loyal, kind and persistent enough to suggest stubbornness. His loyalty and charity, however, sometimes overshadowed the necessities of the Presidency.
His enemies, of whom there were many, preferred to dismiss him as an "accident of bossed politics." His championing of sweeping social reforms was laid to attracting votes. But that was an oversimplification and an injustice. His determination to continue the New Deal was more than merely an effort to attract votes. He had a strong sense of the urgency of the popular will in such matters as health care and housing. He understood that social change could not be shunted to the side, that to do so in a democracy was to court destruction of the democratic process itself.
He had changed during his four years in office in the sense that he was no longer the uneasy heir to Franklin Roosevelt, the man who acceded to the Presidency by accident and genuinely did not want the job. The Congress showed every sign of willingness to cooperate with him and, with the Congressional roadblocks removed, there was a good chance that most of his program would pass in the ensuing six months.
The economy would play a major role, however, in the success of his second term. Organized labor could play havoc with his program if there were unrelenting strikes after repeal of Taft-Hartley. There was also the possibility of a disaster on the foreign scene.
But, he concludes, regardless of what might take place, nothing could rob the President of his present status at front and center on the world stage.
Framed Edition
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