The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 3, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that according to White House sources, the President was about to accept the resignation, long tendered, by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and name Louis Johnson as his successor, a correct story. It had been expected that Secretary Forrestal would leave after the election. The President had delayed action on the matter to quell press speculation.
White House sources indicated that Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall was next expected to leave, though they did not know exactly when. Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, whose resignation some in the White House had desired, was expected to stay on indefinitely.
The State Department responded to a note of protest by Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov regarding the order of General Lucius Clay that the Soviet repatriation mission vacate the American zone of Germany, asserting that it gave General Clay full support in the action. It said that voluntary return of Soviet citizens to Russia was acceptable but not if forced or coerced, as suspected was taking place. It also refuted the claim of Mr. Molotov that there were large numbers of Soviet citizens still desirous of return to Russia but for being hampered by the U.S.
In Frankfurt, given that the eight Russian occupants of the repatriation mission had not vacated as ordered, the building was surrounded by barbed wire erected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, pursuant to an order by General Clay, with floodlights directed at the building. The object was to prevent food from being smuggled to the occupants and to prevent them from leaving without detection. The Army had offered transportation to the border, however, if the occupants left voluntarily. Water, telephone, gas and electricity, as well as food, had been cut off the previous day, following the deadline for evacuation at midnight on March 1. When one of the Russians asked for a newspaper, he was provided with a copy of Stars & Stripes, with a story on the front page about the round-the-world, 94-hour flight of the B-50 bomber, "Lucky Lady II", concluding the previous day. The Russian sincerely thanked the M.P.'s for the courtesy.
In Arras, France, a rabbit hunter discovered the skeletal remains of several doctors and patients who had been buried in 1918 when an Allied artillery shell struck close to an underground German Army field hospital and sealed their communications trench. Searchers from Arras then dug up the site, an abandoned quarry, and found rifles and helmets next to the door and the patients' skeletons still lying in rows of cots.
But what was behind the arras? Was it, perhaps, Polonius, or, mark you, Claudius?
Southern Senators continued their filibuster into a fourth day to try to prevent calling up of a resolution to change Senate rules to permit cloture of debate on resolutions and motions by a two-thirds majority vote. The ultimate aim of the preservation of the filibuster rule was the civil rights program of the President. Presently, Senator Spessard Holland of Florida held the floor. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that he was undecided as to when to begin to try to cut off the filibuster by filing a cloture petition with the presiding officer.
The House Banking Committee voted 23 to 2 to extend rent controls for fifteen more months, amending the Administration request for a two-year extension. It also voted not to impose fines and imprisonment on landlords willfully violating rent ceilings and rejected a proposal that the rent administrator set ceilings to provide for reasonable return on fair value of the property.
A missing Air Force C-54 transport plane with nine aboard had been found crashed in Mexico, a hundred miles south of its destination at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio after a flight from Hamilton Field in California. All nine aboard were killed.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, seven persons had died in their beds and three injured in a flash fire at a tenement, caused by an exploding oil stove.
In Muscegon, Mich., a mother and her eight children, as well as a boarder, died in a house fire after an explosion of an oil stove. The children ranged in age from 3 to 15 years old.
In Asheboro, N.C., the parents of a missing two and half year old crippled girl, whose body the father said he burned after finding the child dead upon his return home, were charged with neglect of all three of their young children, pending further investigation of the ashes to which the father had directed authorities, indicating they were the missing child's remains.
In Raleigh, hundreds of citizens showed up at the request of Governor Kerr Scott to express their views on education to the Legislature, considering the proposals by the Governor to increase by 10.1 million dollars the Advisory Budget Commission's recommendation to spend 83.5 million dollars per year for the ensuing two years and to hold a referendum on the proposed 50 million dollar bond issue to fund a school building program.
The General Assembly enacted into law a measure to give teachers and State employees a 20 percent pay increase, retroactive to the previous October 1.
The State House Committee on Conservation and Development gave a favorable report to a bill designed to address stream pollution.
Emery Wister of The News reports of six members of the 156th Fighter Squadron of the North Carolina Air National Guard helping to fight a fire in a huge smoldering sawdust pile, accumulated over thirty years, at a lumber yard in Peachland, near Charlotte. The Governor had ordered the men and their firetruck to assist in preventing the blaze from spreading to nearby houses.
"Mr.
X", the baseball manager or player living in North Carolina,
still refuses identification. He could be hidden behind the arras,
threatening a strike
On the editorial page, "Budgeting and Accounting" tells of the Hoover Commission report on Government budgeting and accounting, a report based on the investigation headed by North Carolinian John W. Hanes, former Undersecretary of the Treasury. He had looked at the Treasury Department, the Office of the Budget, and the accounting methods prescribed by the Comptroller General.
The Commission then concluded that the Federal budget was an inadequate document which was poorly organized and improperly designed. It proposed instead a performance budget, based on functions and activities, to show clearly what present governmental costs were. It also proposed overhauling of the appropriations structure and changes within the Bureau of the Budget to capitalize on the other two changes. It finally recommended separating accounting and auditing functions, with the former under the Treasury Department and the latter under the Comptroller General.
The piece urges adoption of these recommendations and indicates a debt of gratitude of the public to Mr. Hanes for them.
"Dissension Among Doctors" examines the national health insurance plan proposed by the Administration and that hurriedly proposed as a counter by the American Medical Association, finds neither completely satisfactory.
It finds reasonable the proposal of 167 doctors who had refused to pay the $25 per member cost assessment levied by the A.M.A. for a propaganda campaign against the President's plan. They opposed the Wagner-Murray-Dingell medical insurance bill but also the A.M.A. plan. They proposed instead the calling by the A.M.A. of a conference of many groups and interested individuals to discuss openly a proposal for medical coverage, with emphasis on consumer participation in the discussion. A primary function of the conference would be to organize and direct the necessary studies, and prepare detail of a truly comprehensive plan for preventive and curative medicine.
The piece urges the A.M.A. to accept the latter proposal rather than continuing to fight the "rebel" doctors as it had. It points out that the New York Medical Society had just rejected the Congressional bill and the A.M.A. plan, as well as the $25 assessment, indicative of considerable objection to the latter from within the medical profession.
"Carriers Under Fire" tells of an article in Air Force, titled "The Case against the Flat-Top", in which it was argued by the Air Force that the 60 percent of the Navy's budget devoted to air war was being wasted. It argued generally against spending more money on aircraft carriers, saying that during the late war, land-based attacks on Japan had proved far more successful than those from carriers. It pointed out that the Air Force, at a fifth of its maximum wartime strength, had with B-29's delivered two and a half times the tonnage of bombs at less than a fifth the cost in money and manpower as that of Task Force 58 operating at maximum war strength in the same area and under the same operational conditions.
Russia, it continued, had no navy or merchant marine of consequence, eliminating the need for a large surface U.S. Navy. The targets in Russia were not the type, i.e., islands and enemy surface craft, against which the Navy had scored success in World War II.
The article had omitted, the piece
points out, a third problem, the extreme vulnerability of surface
craft to the atomic bomb, as proved in the Bikini
It concludes that the Air Force argument was persuasive and that in the atomic era, the time of aircraft carriers had passed.
Drew Pearson remarks on the President calling him an "s.o.b." for criticizing General Harry Vaughan and his receipt of a decoration from El Presidente Juan Peron of Argentina, undermining, in Mr. Pearson's mind, American policy in all of Latin America, as Sr. Peron was considered the worst dictator in the region. (As the press recently had pointed out at a Presidential press conference, both Mr. Pearson and Sr. Peron, ironically, had been among 23 persons nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 1948.)
Mr. Pearson had informed his wife after returning from the Merci Train trip across the country that they would spend some time together and get away for a vacation. To that end, he took the phone off the hook the first day back, but left the kitchen phone connected. When it rang persistently, he gave in and picked it up, to find that the U.P. was seeking comment on the President's statement, the first he had heard about it.
His initial reaction was to blame his wife for the interruption because she had voted for President Truman in the election. He decided, however, to make lemonade from the lemon the President had presented him and regard the reference as meaning "Servants of Brotherhood".
He was familiar with muledriver language from his time in Yugoslavia after World War I and knew that it took very strong language to get such beasts of burden going. President Truman, as a farm boy in Missouri, had to drive mules and so it was not surprising that his vocabulary had adapted accordingly.
He concludes that while neither he nor the President were driving mules any longer, they could join perhaps in helping to form his new organization, the membership certificates to which he was preparing for presentation to anyone who believed that there were people in their neighborhoods who had sacrificed for their fellow man. So he invites his readers to write about these ordinary Americans so that they, too, could be S.O.B.'s.
Marquis Childs discusses the unenviable position of Vice-President Alben Barkley of Kentucky, soon to be called upon to rule on the issue of whether a resolution or motion was subject to unlimited debate as in the past or whether cloture of debate could be effected by a two-thirds majority, as was the rule on bills. The issue on which the determination would arise was whether a resolution to bring a rule change on that very issue to the floor for debate could be effected without, itself, being subject to unlimited filibuster. The ultimate issue was the President's civil rights program and whether each component could be killed in the Senate by filibuster.
Vice-President Barkley would alienate many of his trusting colleagues, no matter how he ruled. The Southern Democrats had been largely responsible for his nomination the previous summer, as a crowning glory to his career, at a time when few Democrats believed that victory in the fall was possible. But now, he had to remain loyal to the Administration. And the previous summer, he had opposed Senator Arthur Vandenberg's ruling that debate on a resolution or motion was not subject to cloture, a ruling which followed a previous ruling by Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee when he had been president pro tem in the 79th Congress.
The split in the party was deep regarding the issue and it was likely only to become more complicated. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was planning to propose an amendment to the labor bill to bar discrimination by unions on membership, a move which would be opposed by most Southerners.
In the middle of this divide in the party stood Vice-President Barkley, as presiding officer of the Senate.
Joseph Alsop, returning to Washington from his trip through Europe, tells of Western Europe having completely frustrated the attempt of the Soviets to take it over, resulting in a stalemate between East and West. Just fifteen months earlier, the fate of Western Europe hung in the balance. Had the Marshall Plan not been initiated a year earlier, the Italian leaders had told Mr. Alsop, they would have lost the will to fight against the Communists. France would have followed such a downfall, triggering the eventual fall of all of Western Europe.
Presently, in contrast, all of the Communist parties in Western Europe were in retreat. But still there was the problem of defining the American role in the internal politics of the countries receiving Marshall Plan aid. As long as the Communists remained in control of the European labor movement, full recovery from the war could not occur.
The reason for the Cachin-Togliatti "peace offensive" recently in France and Italy was to muddle the workers and forestall the effort being made by non-Communists to gain control of the labor unions. During the ensuing year or two, the non-Communists would have an excellent chance to do so, provided America did not become identified as a champion of reaction but rather appear as its enemy. It must be done, he posits, even if it meant supporting economic measures in Western Europe deemed abhorrent to American thinking, presumably meaning socialism.
A letter from A. W. Black, bearing his usual air of sweetness, starts in the following way: "Now that the sentimental jag of 'Brotherhood Week' is over, the atmosphere cleared of hypocritical lip service to 'tolerance', and the synthetic milk of human kindness poured back into the swill pots of pretense, those humble souls not persuaded to such guile and deception, and perhaps inclined toward a measure of cynicism, may comfortably relax and enjoy the passing parade of chicanery and double-dealing disguised as 'sweet brotherhood'."
He goes on to say that while the idea of brotherhood was admirable, only one in a million people knew how to practice it.
And that one certainly was not Mr. Black.
A letter writer tells of a man from Gaffney, S.C., apparently her relative, having written a letter to the editor some months earlier saying that he was too old to partake of the educational benefits to which he was entitled under the G.I. Bill and wished, therefore, that he could pass them on to his son. In consequence, the letter had been reprinted and distributed all over the country and a movement begun to allow such passing of benefits to the eldest son, as now proposed in a bill in Congress presently pending.
We thought that the former quaint institution under English law of primogeniture and entail had been abolished, at the insistence of Thomas Jefferson, at the Founding. What happens to the younger under the resurrection of this royal practice for veterans? Guess they have to grow to be pikers picking peppers in snatches out of the hot garden patch
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