The Charlotte News
Friday, November 11, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Notes: The front page reports that the President, in his Armistice Day message before the National Conference of Christians & Jews, renewed his call for passage of his civil rights program to overcome "discrimination and injustice". A few hours earlier, at 11:01 a.m., the precise moment of the 1918 Armistice in France, he had laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery and said that no one cared whether that soldier had been a Catholic, Jew, or Protestant, or what his color and origin were. He said that the enemy nations always sought to use American prejudice to stir disunity and so it was necessary to achieve greater justice and equality to counter such disparaging efforts.
Top civilian military leaders, speaking at Armistice Day celebrations across the country, urged the country to maintain the strength of the armed forces to avoid a third world war and the costs associated with war.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson said that plans were underway to move the seat of Government from Washington in the event of attack.
You had better dust off those contingency plans, given the unstable maniac who will be occupying the White House come January 20, 2017.
In Charlotte, a traditional observance of Armistice Day was held at Independence Square.
John L. Lewis said that he was willing to renew mediation of the coal dispute the following week with Government mediators. Chief mediator Cyrus Ching had scheduled a meeting for the previous day and Mr. Lewis did not show, said that he would be available Monday. Mr. Ching then responded that he was too busy to meet on Monday. Mr. Lewis called the scheduled meeting "the Ching fiasco", that Mr. Ching had arbitrarily fixed Thursday as the meeting day without consulting UMW.
It appeared that settlement was about to be reached in the steel strike with U.S. Steel, on the same terms as the settlement with Bethlehem Steel, that is a welfare and pension stipend of $100 per month, taking into account Social Security benefits, for workers over 65 with twenty-five years of service, with equal contributions made by workers and the companies. The agreement only needed formalization. U.S. Steel was the last of the major steel companies to settle.
The President accepted the resignation of Julius Krug as Secretary of the Interior and appointed in his stead Undersecretary Oscar Chapman. Press secretary Charles G. Ross would not say why Mr. Krug was resigning. There had been reports for awhile that relations between the President and Mr. Krug had been deteriorating.
Near Indianapolis, a B-29, en route from Roswell, N.M., crashed and burned, but it was not known whether anyone was killed. At least 7 or 8 of the crew of 12 had parachuted to safety.
In Riberac, France, a coal truck rolled into an Armistice Day throng decorating a war monument and killed six persons, including three town officials. The truck driver said that visibility was poor and that his brakes had failed.
In Gila Bend, Ariz., a truck loaded with cotton pickers ran into a semi-trailer, killing nine men and injuring twelve others, as the cotton truck rolled over two or three times in the highway and the adjoining desert. The driver of the truck said that the semi-trailer was stalled in the road, but a bus driver who witnessed the accident said that the tractor-trailer was moving slowly when the other truck tried to pass, was prevented by an oncoming car, then tried to pull back into its lane and clipped the corner of the semi-trailer.
In Los Angeles, it was reported that James Roosevelt was expected soon to announce his intention to run for governor of California.
In New York, a Marine wearing a good conduct medal slugged three men and swung at two others, then jumped through a third floor window at the Strand Theater, landed on a first floor landing unhurt, whereupon he fought with police, was taken to a hospital.
In Charleston, S.C., two men died in a coal hopper, buried under tons of coal, while they had tried to clear a stoppage in the hopper at the South Carolina Power Co.
In Sheffield, England, a man told a bankruptcy court that he worked at a mine by night and sold fruits and vegetables by day, slept one hour in the mornings, three hours in the afternoons, and all day Sunday.
In London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, delayed a speech before the Authors' Club the previous night because he had left his pipe at home and could not make a speech without it. A call to his home brought the pipe to him by taxi and he made his speech.
On the editorial page, "A Matter of Perspective" tells of the residents of the Latta Park area having protested to the City Council the construction of a recreation building in the park because of its proximity to their homes and the fear that it would produce excessive noise, traffic congestion, and use by outside adult groups. They had waited 18 months after the project was initially well publicized to register their complaints. It suggests holding a hearing at which other residents of the area, not living quite so close to the site, might come forward and express their views.
"Bosses on the Lam" tells of Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City having lost power and announced his retirement from politics after his candidate had lost the gubernatorial race to incumbent Governor Alfred Driscoll. In Boston, Mayor James Curley lost re-election after his long career spent in and out of trouble and jail, most recently for mail fraud. Philadelphia voters threw out its Republican office holders after revelations of waste, inefficiency and corruption, seriously jeopardizing Republican control of the state.
Big city bosses had reached their height under FDR and now were on the way out. The piece suggests that their day was not done, but it did appear that the voters were becoming wise to them.
That to which many of the 2016 voters apparently have not become wise is the projection technique of the Republican nominee, who regularly told voters that the other side was guilty of everything of which he was guilty, including, in the final analysis, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, probable mass vote theft, perhaps voting both under actual names and from the graveyard in many of the predominantly white precincts to counteract what the voters had been told by the Republican nominee would be massive voter fraud in the inner cities, of which there is not one whit of evidence in modern times.
How do three states which had voted in presidential elections for the Democrats for decades, in the case of Wisconsin since 1988, in both Pennsylvania and Michigan since 1992, suddenly turn for the Republican, especially given the clown running under the party banner in 2016? Was it the glorious magnetism of the clown's personality, his perceived penchant for telling them "what they were thinking", i.e., what they wanted to hear, the "eternal truth", the light of lights? Not likely, even for a snake-oil salesman. It was achieved through the oldest trick in the book: prepare the populace for the other side committing fraud at the polls in the face of no such evidence, while in the meantime coaching the mesmerized minions on why and how to steal the vote for the clown, to fight fancifully conjured fire with actual fire. How is it that Donny, weeks before the election, was able to say with such confidence that if Pennsylvania were to be decided for Secretary Clinton, it would have to be the result of voter fraud when even his campaign's own internal polling and all of the regular polls had Secretary Clinton winning that state handily going into election day? The same scenario, though the polls showed the race narrowing and closer during the last week, was true in both Michigan and Wisconsin, where both states were considered, nevertheless, reliably in Secretary Clinton's column on the day prior to the election.
Gosh, he must be psychic, able to read the thoughts of every single voter in every single precinct. And, golly gee, those rallies... Not likely.
Incidentally, the current popular vote count, still in process, stands at 60,467,601 for Secretary Clinton and 60,072,551 for her opponent, a gradually increasing margin of 395,050 for Secretary Clinton, as absentee ballots, valid if postmarked by election day, are still being counted in several states, including over 4.3 million such ballots in California, about a third of the total cast, where Secretary Clinton enjoys a two to one margin of victory thus far.
It is noteworthy that a state such as Idaho, for instance, with four electoral votes, cast a total of about 680,000 votes, .5 percent of the roughly 125 million cast nationwide, while California, with 55 electoral votes, 13 times that of Idaho, cast, in the final tally, over 12 million votes, roughly 10 percent of the total nationwide and 19 to 20 times that of Idaho. Such underscores the inherent anachronistic unfairness of the electoral college, one thing on which we agree with Donny.
The disparity is demonstrated even more vividly in states as Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota, each having the mandatory minimum of three electoral votes, one for each representative and senator, where the popular votes this election, including third-party candidates, total 250,000, 340,000, and 370,000, respectively, representing .2, .27, and .3 percent of the popular vote, three-quarters of one percent of the total nationwide vote. The 9 electoral votes of those three states, however, equate to 1.67 percent of the 538 votes of the electoral college, over twice the proportion of those states' total popular vote. Adding the other two three-vote states with heavy Republican majorities to the total, Montana, with 480,000 popular votes, and Alaska, with 250,000, and the percentages are not much better, 3.5 percent of the electoral college among the six states, inclusive of four-vote Idaho, representing 2.37 million votes or 1.89 percent of the popular vote, still nearly a 2 to 1 ratio, electoral votes to popular vote.
Comparing those six states to California, the disparity in representation in the electoral college is 19 votes for 2.37 million voters to 55 electoral votes for over 12 million voters, giving those six states a disproportionate weighting of 34.5 percent electorally, the 19 votes compared to 55 votes, to 20 percent on the popular vote, 2.37 million compared to 12 million, roughly therefore in combination giving those six sparsely populated states a 7 to 4 weighting advantage electorally over densely populated California.
That same scenario is then repeated nationwide in a total of 19 states with substantial Republican margins, each with less than ten electoral votes, including the six stressed above, equating to a total of 100 electoral votes, 18.5 percent of the electoral college, while only representing a total popular vote of 19 million, 15.2 percent of the nationwide popular vote. When compared with California, the electoral advantage in those states over the popular vote they represent is over 9 to 8.
While one can argue that, to some extent, some small, heavily Democratic states with three electoral votes each, Vermont, Delaware, and D.C., plus Hawaii, with 4, neutralize the impact of those sparsely populated states with substantial Republican enclaves. But the point is made that the electoral college, given the results nationwide in 2000 and 2016 in the popular vote versus the electoral outcome, skews unfairly the weight of the electorate toward sparsely populated states, ever increasingly so in a modern age of computers and widely available statistical information, where demographic data can be quickly pin-pointed with accuracy, not only among but within states, and then used at will by a particular candidate to achieve the necessary vote on the electoral map, regardless of the popular will of the nation—telling them what they want to hear while buying and selling them out cheap to the professional politicians, fast in the rear.
Smile and smile...
"That Margin of Error" tells of George Gallup, after getting the polling so wrong for the 1948 presidential election, predicting a win by Dewey, had changed his methods of sampling and so had gotten the result of the Lehman-Dulles race correct, even if overstating the margin of victory for former Governor Lehman by ten percentage points, when the final margin was four points. It therefore suggests further refinements.
"Co-operative Service" congratulated the local Retail Coal Merchants Association for meeting the shortage of coal during the 52-day strike by buying small amounts from non-union mines and buying back stock from apartment houses and the like which had stocked up during the summer, with the coal then distributed equitably among families who were without coal for heating.
Though the strike had been temporarily halted for three weeks through the end of the month, there would be no flow of coal from the renewed mining operations for at least a week.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Pumpkin versus Squash", finds that pumpkins had not been popular at Thanksgiving except in the Midwest. The Northeast had come to grow more squash than any other section. The reason was utilitarian, that squash could be used as a vegetable and for pie while pumpkin was useful only as a pie or livestock feed. But in the Midwest, the native would scorn the notion of squash pie.
New England, it concludes, would rewrite James Whitcomb Riley to make it, "When the frost is on the squash..."
A statement by the Sugar Committee of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages comments on the Sugar Act of 1948, which regulated how much sugar the people could have each year, setting quotas for the producing areas to deliver their product to markets.
Cuba had become impatient with the quotas and was selling much of its excess sugar to other markets. It suggests that, in light of the domestic shortage, the Secretary of Agriculture, responsible for establishing the quotas, take steps to get to market at once all sugar necessary to satisfy the needs of households and industry.
Drew Pearson tells of the last boxcar of the French Merci Train, in thanks for the Friendship Train from America to France and Italy in late 1947 before the beginning of Marshall Plan aid, having arrived in Kansas. The train had been a success, extending thanks directly to the American people for a gesture provided directly from the American people to the French. It showed that the ordinary people from Kansas to Normandy, those who had to do the fighting in the event of war, were now determined to effect diplomacy directly. Perhaps, he ventures, they could do more than ambassadors, when not hampered by iron curtains.
The gestures stood in contrast to what had occurred 31 years earlier after the 1918 Armistice, when the American people naively believed that a peace treaty would be salutary in and of itself. Isolationism then was renewed officially and "back to normalcy" was proclaimed by President Harding in 1921.
But after V-E and V-J Days in 1945, things had been different, with the American people realizing that had the country not retreated to isolationism between the wars, there would likely have been no second war. They were now determined that there would not be a third one. It explained why so many CARE packages had been sent to Europe and several million letters sent to Italy during their elections to encourage friends and relatives to vote for democracy. It explained the Friendship Train, which Mr. Pearson had organized.
He compares peace to matrimony, that the treaty was merely the equivalent of the marriage license. It was important for the people of the nations to get to know one another directly.
Stupid D.T. boy wants to return to normalcy and isolationism, the nationalism which gave rise in the Twenties and Thirties to Mussolini and Hitler. Congratulations, those of you who voted for this crazy person, on your foresight in "electing" him. He has already backtracked on his promises to build the Wall and engage in wholesale deportations. Good luck on any of the rest of his erstwhile promises. The only thing you are going to get is heartache and disappointment, but it is, in this case, well-deserved because what you wanted from him was racism and religious bigotry, creation of an unconstitutional police state, consistent with the rhetoric of his campaign rallies. As Newt Gingrich was quoted this date as cynically saying, the promise to have Mexico pay for the wall provided "a great campaign device". That is what you bought and that is what you get, a gimmick, the old Bait-Switch scheme for which Donny is famous. We tried to tell you but you would not listen.
We are very tired of the eternally stupid.
Guess now we shall have to get about the counter-revolution very quickly to undo the gutting of democracy before it gets started.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the result in the Dulles-Lehman special Senate election in which former Governor Herbert Lehman defeated incumbent John Foster Dulles, appointed to the New York seat earlier in the year by Governor Dewey to replace retiring Robert Wagner, having ironically provided to Governor Dewey more influence in the Republican Party for the result having endorsed the Fair Deal, of which the Governor's program was an exponent, and because the charge of Mr. Dulles that the GOP had been too much involved in "me-tooism" had been exploded. Mr. Dulles had taken stands on domestic policy well to the right of conservative Senator Robert Taft.
Governor Dewey, however, had told his close confidantes that he intended to retire from active politics after the end of his current term as Governor. But there would be heavy pressure on him to run for Governor again in 1950. Winning that election would place him in the position of controlling the New York delegation at the 1952 convention, giving him great influence in the choice of the nominee. It was not likely that Governor Dewey would again run for the presidency, having done so three times and been the nominee twice. But he could be seen in the role of king-maker.
It was likely that the leading candidate would be Senator Taft and it would be natural for Governor Dewey to oppose him. The candidate who most fit the bill of someone whom the Governor would support, strong on foreign policy and moderate on domestic policy, with ties to New York, was General Eisenhower, president of Columbia. Mr. Dewey had already made friendly contacts with the General. The New York financial community was also increasingly enthusiastic about an Eisenhower candidacy.
The defeat of Mr. Dulles had strengthened the position of Mr. Dewey to wage the fight of the "me-tooers" against those opposed to that positioning. It was likely that Senator Taft on the one side and Governor Dewey, General Eisenhower and their East Coast admirers on the other, would have major roles in that fight ahead.
Robert C. Ruark, in Denver, tells of a man named Doreal, known as "the Supreme Voice", who had moved his home from Denver to a small valley between two peaks outside the city to escape the atomic bomb. The mountains were supposed to contain sufficient lead to insulate the inhabitants from radiation. Mr. Ruark thus thinks he ought also to find such a refuge.
Doreal, who had spent much time in Tibet, practiced contact with "universal consciousness" and was unbounded by time and space. He was currently on a speaking tour and so Mr. Ruark had to settle for a chat with the second in charge of the Temple. He told of the group not being fanatics, that they believed in reincarnation, retaining eternal memories by knowing from where one came, as in his case, stretching all the way back to the lost cities of Atlantis, 51,000 years earlier. In those cities, he imparted, the inhabitants could neutralize gravitation, and there were two moons. He said that the Temple had several thousand members.
There was a long and winding road up to the top of the mountain, which had cost $100,000 to build.
A Pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Is Pointed Out The Fact That Various People React In Various Ways to Alcoholic Potions:
"One little snort
May make you cavort."
And be careful for what you wish, in short,
Lest you wind up down by law, in Court.
Framed Edition
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