The Charlotte News

Wednesday, July 27, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Acheson urged in a press conference that Congress suspend judgment on the President's military aid request for the Western European members of NATO until all of the evidence had been submitted. Secretary Acheson was scheduled to appear the following day before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss the matter. He refused to answer whether the Government had information that the Soviets were actively preparing for war.

He also said that there was nothing significant in the shift of American personnel from Berlin and that Americans remaining in China faced a danger of being treated as hostages by the Chinese Communists. He cited as example of the latter the fact that Randall Gould, editor of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury had been held since the previous day without food, water or sleep by newspaper workers as part of a labor dispute.

The U.S. military high command, including chiefs of staff General Omar Bradley, Admiral Louis Denfeld, and Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg, would consult with the military commanders of the NATO countries later in the week in Paris, Vienna, London, and Frankfurt to discuss matters of mutual interest including the military aid proposal.

The dollar shortage in Britain was developing into a monetary crisis for all of the Marshall Plan nations. Britain's request for 624 million dollars in additional American aid, tentatively granted by agreement of Congressional Democratic leaders, albeit 16 percent below the request, was not received well by the French as it would reduce commensurately the aid going to the other 15 ERP-recipient nations. The British claimed an expected dollar deficit in the sterling area of 1.547 billion dollars for the coming fiscal year, implying that it would need that much aid or be required to cut imports from the U.S. Britain's original estimate for requisite aid was 1.114 billion and so the additional request was meant to bring that number up to the dollar deficit line after Congress had scaled back the original request to 923 million as part of general trimming of ERP aid to 4.5 billion, possibly to go as low as four billion. At that rate, Britain would receive 40 percent of all ERP aid. Because the European nations had to agree on economic cooperation, the resistance of the other ERP recipients to the increased aid to Britain could wreck the Marshall Plan.

The anti-poll tax bill passed the House by a vote of 273 to 116, the fifth time in a decade such a bill had passed the House. If the Senate were to break precedent and not filibuster the bill to death, then the first effect would likely be that the remaining seven poll tax states would split ballots and provide State election ballots only to those persons who had paid poll taxes while Federal ballots would go to everyone, implying the need for a Constitutional amendment, eventually sent to the states in 1962 and ratified in early 1964.

John L. Lewis and UMW rejected an offer by Northern and Western coal operators for a two-year extension of the existing contract in exchange for dropping the three-day work week which had been imposed pending negotiation of a new contract after the old one expired at the end of June.

In Detroit, G.M. employment reached a peacetime peak in excess of 400,000, 28,000 higher than the average for the third quarter of 1948. The highest prewar peak had been 319,000 during the second quarter of 1941, albeit with part of the employees then engaged in defense work for the newly approved Lend-Lease program and FDR's declared National Emergency in late May, 1941.

In Camden, S.C., the du Pont plant which produced orlon was struck by 800 workers.

Eleanor Roosevelt, in a letter to Francis Cardinal Spellman, said that she would continue to stand for the things she believed right in the Government's action, saying she had no intention of attacking the Catholic Church or "sense of being an 'unworthy American mother'", as Cardinal Spellman had referred to her in his responsive letter to her June 23 "My Day" column in which she had expressed support for limiting Federal aid to education to public schools. She reminded that the final judgment of the worthiness of all human beings was in the hands of God. She said also that she had never supported the Barden bill, denying public funding to parochial and private schools, but rather supported Federal aid to education generally.

In New York, a female defendant on trial with an alleged male accomplice for the murder the previous January 4 of a "lonely heart" widow, 66, testified that she she had found the dead woman at her feet some time after the woman had slapped her and did not know how much time had elapsed between the two events. She regained awareness as she was being shaken by the alleged accomplice, alarmedly asking her what had she done. Preceding the incident, the dead woman had allegedly approached the man to seek intimacy and he had asked his co-defendant to "handle" her. The female defendant then entered the living room and found the woman naked on the couch and rebuked her, at which point the woman slapped the defendant. The dead woman had been bludgeoned and strangled to death.

In Tampa, Fla., a former Baptist minister was shot to death by the father of his 15-year old bride with whom the dead man had eloped in June. The incident occurred as the father pulled up beside the minister's car at a stoplight and began an argument, at which point he shot the minister five times.

The Charlotte City Council delayed action for two weeks on an ordinance which would create a seven-member commission to regulate solicitations for charity campaigns in the city.

The cool spell in Sumter, S.C., which had systematically recorded maximum daily temperatures of 92 and 93 degrees while surrounding towns remained at around 100 degrees, ended abruptly when it was discovered that a new member of the weather station had been looking at the readings only once per day at 5:00 p.m. rather than the usual hourly recordations.

He must be shot at dawn.

On the editorial page, "Setting the Record Straight" discusses the attack by prohibition advocate Francis O. Clarkson on the ABC-controlled sale of liquor as having, since its inception in Mecklenburg County in September, 1947, impliedly served to increase crime as evidenced by increased City and County expenses for police and social services.

The piece examines more closely the figures he had cited and finds other explanations for them, having nothing to do with alcohol consumption, such as salary increases and expenses for replacement of worn out police vehicles, whereas expenses for such things as fingerprinting, directly proportionate to the number of arrests made, had not changed between 1946-47 and 1947-48 after the ABC program went into effect.

"'Me Too' Policy in Britain" finds the British Conservative Party of Winston Churchill to be a "me too" party, much as the American Republican Party, as evidenced by the speech the previous week of the former and future Prime Minister in which he avoided attack on the socialist policies of the Labor Government and promised to retain, if the Conservatives were put back in power, the major reforms of recent years, effectively promising to administer the Labor program more efficiently. The piece predicts that the effort would fail as dismally as had the Republican effort to the same effect vis-à-vis the Democrats in the 1948 campaign.

The Conservative Party policy statement pledged that it would not undertake further socialization of industry and vaguely promised to return to private enterprise some of the sectors already socialized. Mr. Churchill had criticized the Labor Government but also claimed that the social reforms were actually extensions of programs initiated under his Coalition Government during the war. Yet, he charged that the socialization program had led to higher gas and electricity costs, as well as losses by the publicly owned coal industry and transportation facilities. He compared the program to Communism.

Britons likely would be left wondering what difference it would make who would win the coming elections of 1950.

The Conservatives, it finds, deserved the comment of Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the statements of the former Prime Minister and the Party were "dishonest" and "a wonderful mass of confused thinking."

"Our Bob to the Rescue" tells of the Asheville Citizen, the A.P. and the U.P. reporting of the intention of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds to run for the Senate again. His law partner had confirmed the fact.

The piece posits that at one time, the people might have been sufficiently gullible to accept Senator Reynolds when he ran successfully against the wealth of former Governor and Senator Cameron Morrison in 1932, touring the state in his Model A. But the people had grown up since that time and the brand of isolationism which had characterized the Senate career of Mr. Reynolds was no longer acceptable to an informed electorate.

He had decided not to run again in 1944 in the primary won by former Governor Clyde Hoey. Mr. Reynolds, whose views on immigrants during his tenure in the Senate precisely paralleled the views being espoused by the 2016 Republican nominee, that a large percentage of immigrants are criminals or indigent ne'er-do-wells who must be kept out of the United States, would run in the 1950 Democratic primary, coming in a distant third with ten percent of the vote, behind race-baiting Willis Smith, whose campaign was managed by Jesse Helms, and second-place finisher Senator Frank Graham, appointed the previous March by Governor Kerr Scott to fill the vacancy caused by the death of new Senator and former Governor J. Melville Broughton.

Query whether the rhetoric of the Republican presidential nominee, bordering on or crossing the border entirely into the realm of insanity, is being motivated, at least in part, by the co-chair of the Republican Platform Committee for 2016, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, one of the least informed and craziest of many crazy and ill-informed Republican misanthropes in the Congress these days, a woman whose views are so ridiculously inconsonant with reality as to be laughably tragic, a perfect fit, of course, for some lesser lights of that and other districts who think it fun to put in the Congress a dim bulb for the sake of committing a joke on the American people, but not so much fun when the result of that joke is violence potentially against your own kith and ken as some idiot picks up a gun which these NRA-bribed, double-talking idiots allow to be obtained through too lax gun laws and blows a member of one's family into oblivion.

A piece by John Gould from the Christian Science Monitor tells of the former importance of the rain barrel to collect water in dry times on the farm in earlier days. But since soaps worked in any waters in modern times, the necessity of having around a rain barrel had disappeared. But he misses the sound of the rain filling it, a kind of music with rain on the roof and the barrel filling up.

Drew Pearson looks at the investigation into the B-36 and whether Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington had shown any special preference for the airplane to benefit companies with which they had previously been associated, Emerson Electric in the case of Mr. Symington and the manufacturer of the B-36, Floyd Odlum of Consolidated Vultee, in the case of Mr. Johnson. Mr. Pearson had learned that the origin of the Congressional smear tactics in this regard came from Glenn L. Martin, president of the Glenn L. Martin Co. of Baltimore, manufacturer of Navy planes. Mr. Martin had circulated a memo containing the accusations of self-interest in pushing the B-36. The memo had been used by Congressman Jimmy Van Zandt to attack the B-36 by suggesting that the contract had saved Consolidated Vultee from financial crisis. Mr. Martin had been unable to convince other airplane manufacturers to join him, in part because his own profits were made solely from Government contracts. Mr. Martin had been eased out of his job as president of his company and into the less active role of chairman of the board.

Mr. Pearson had found nothing to the charge relating to Secretary Symington and Emerson Electric. Nor was there any reason to doubt the B-36 as a basis for the Air Force strategic bombing force, given its range and bombing capability. The smear developed out of the Navy competition with the Air Force.

Marquis Childs finds a "clear and present danger" to exist in the society in the conflict, mounting since the war, between Protestants and Catholics. The latest flak hurled by Francis Cardinal Spellman at Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina for his bill to limit Federal aid to education to public schools and against Eleanor Roosevelt for taking the same position, though not per se adherent to the Barden bill which she said that she had not read thoroughly, was not helping matters. No minority could feel secure if the spirit of live-and-let-live was replaced by mutual hatred and reprisal.

A reasonable solution to the outcry of some Catholics occasioned by the Barden bill was instead to pass the 35 million dollar Federal aid for school health services which would apply to both public and private schools, including parochial schools. Congressman Barden was in favor of this latter bill, proving that he had no animus in mind against any religion.

That would permit the passage of the 300 million dollar aid to education bill already approved by the Senate, allowing the states to determine where the aid would go, whether only to public schools or also to private and parochial schools only for services necessary for the general welfare of students, as permitted by the Supreme Court's 1947 Everson case as not violative of the First Amendment Establishment Clause providing for separation of church and state.

The President faced the religious dilemma in appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court to succeed Justice Frank Murphy, a Catholic, who had died the previous week. Ordinarily, the seat would go to a Catholic, as Justice Murphy had succeeded Justice Pierce Butler, a Catholic, in 1940. But, Mr. Childs suggests, such was not a foregone conclusion—and, indeed, the President would soon appoint Attorney General Tom Clark, a Presbyterian, to the seat. When Justice Wiley Rutledge would die in September, however, the President would appoint in his stead former Senator and now Federal Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sherman Minton, a Catholic, to the seat.

The President appeared to be troubled by the notion of an assumption that a seat on the Court should be occupied by a person of a given minority, emphasizing the separateness rather than the common citizenship of all Americans.

Mr. Childs suggests that in many ways Justice Murphy had been a living exponent of the theory of societal integration rather than separateness or special status. He regularly filed opinions which upheld unpopular beliefs, even when they cut against his own Catholicism, and that fact suggested the greater diversity of opinion within the minorities than the public was led to believe. He concludes that such should make possible a compromise on the issue of Federal aid to education.

James Marlow tells of the State Department advising the President that the need for arms in Western Europe was acute, to make the recovery process continue smoothly under the Marshall Plan by raising the confidence level of the countries against potential attack by the Soviets.

The Soviets could take over Western Europe either by direct attack or by threat of same such that the Communists were allowed to control each country. The coup in Czechoslovakia in March, 1948 had served as example to encourage fear among the Western Europeans.

There was concern that the Soviets might take over any arms supplied to Western Europe should they be able to conquer the nations anyway—as had been the case with the Communist aggression in China. In that event, those arms might be turned on the U.S. But the President had not addressed this issue.

Instead, he had focused on the need for arms to eliminate the trepidation which would impede recovery, the absence of which would leave the door open to Communist aggression. The way to block the Communists inside and outside any of the NATO countries was to help those nations economically and militarily as soon as possible.

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