The Charlotte News
Saturday, July 5, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Chicago, in the last two days before the start of the Republican convention on Monday, General Eisenhower arrived on his cross-country train trip from Denver, seeking to carry his battle for delegates to the convention floor. Senator Taft planned to arrive by airplane later in the day. A large crowd had greeted the General and his wife, Mamie, as they arrived shortly before noon. The General was incensed about the efforts of "a little group of arrogant men" to steal the nomination from him. During the early morning before his arrival, the General told a crowd in Clinton, Iowa, that "the people are demanding the right to run their own government and not have a little group run it for them." He described the battle ahead as one "between right and wrong" and vowed that he would put up a fight in Chicago to win the nomination, that the principle was more important than who became the nominee, stating that "in a way I find it another D-Day."
The New York national committeeman, an Eisenhower supporter, predicted a victory by 50 votes on the issue of barring disputed delegates from voting on the seating of other disputed delegations.
Senator Taft accused General Eisenhower this date of making "wild charges", filling the air with "libel and vituperation" regarding the RNC decision the previous day to compromise on the Texas delegation and provide 22 of the delegates to Senator Taft and 16 to General Eisenhower. The Senator said that the reason for these charges was that the General did not have the delegates to achieve victory. He described the decision by the Eisenhower camp to reject the compromise as showing "the ruthless character of the Eisenhower managers." He accused them of seeking to override the will of the convention by the "unlimited use of propaganda through a press and radio, television system which they think they can control." He said it was their attitude and not his which threatened party harmony and success in November. He added that he expected to lead the General by 150 votes on the first ballot, but refused to say whether he anticipated victory on that ballot. He said that the majority decision was on his side.
Currently, the Associated Press tally of delegates showed 530 for Senator Taft and 427 for General Eisenhower, with 604 needed to nominate.
Senator Eugene Milliken of Colorado, chairman of the platform committee, told reporter Edwin B. Haakinson that the committee had received completed rough drafts from 10 or 11 subcommittees, all of them with the exception of the subcommittee working on the civil rights plank. He said that if they did not receive the latter, they would have to write it as the full committee. Other committee sources indicated that all members working on the civil rights plank had agreed that the party should not urge a compulsory FEPC or other Federal compulsory measures to combat racial discrimination, though some favored strict Federal legislation against poll taxes, lynching and other forms of racial discrimination. Both Senator Taft and General Eisenhower, however, did not and it was believed by many Republicans that the plank therefore should reflect their views. As a compromise, some members of the committee had suggested a voluntary FEPC which could enforce bans on discrimination if regarding Government contracts and jobs. They had also proposed a voluntary commission to examine racial conditions in the country.
Charles Jonas, Republican candidate for Congress from the local district, and delegate to the Republican convention, told The News by telephone from Lincolnton, N.C., this date that he thought it was a "big mistake in Texas not to open the door to everybody." He would not say how he would vote on the issue of the Texas delegation, should it reach the floor, until he heard all of the briefs. He said that he remained uncommitted for either candidate, but hinted that he was for the General by stating that he wanted a "united front".
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota asked this date for an immediate Senate inquiry into campaign spending by presidential candidates of both major parties. He indicated that he was introducing a bill to provide for such an investigation and also had written a Senate election subcommittee urging that because many Americans were disturbed by the reports of political deals resulting in the "stealing" of delegates, "smear literature" and use of patronage and the like by many of the presidential candidates and their supporters, there was need for such an investigation to avoid public cynicism about politics and to avoid having "a price tag" placed on the presidency. He named no names in the process.
Another hurried day of legislation in Congress was promised this date, before adjournment sometime during the night so that Republican members could depart for the convention. Administration leaders were planning for a sine die adjournment, meaning that the session would not resume prior to the end of the Congress unless the President called it back into special session. Some Republican Senators and a few Democrats favored recessing until a date certain or at least providing Congressional leaders authority to call another session. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, the Republican floor leader, told a reporter that Republicans were divided among themselves on the issue. Some members had protested vigorously the previous day at the hurried pace of legislation, in many cases without copies of the bills available for the members to read before voting.
A joint Senate-House conference committee agreed this date on a bill to increase insurance and assistance payments under Social Security by about 540 million dollars per year, benefiting about eight million persons immediately and carrying a two-year limitation on the increase to grants in assistance categories. The bill would now go before the House and Senate for final action before being sent to the President.
In the air war in Korea, U.N. pilots destroyed or damaged 21 enemy jets and destroyed an enemy military school, without losing a single plane in a raid the previous day near the Manchurian border. The battle was between 85 U.S. Sabre jets and 115 MIG-15s. Other planes had attacked enemy supply points in North Korea. No allied planes had been lost during the week, the first such clean weekly record since the prior August.
Also in Korea, President Syngman Rhee won his fight to shift the election of the president from the National Assembly to the people.
The S. S. United States was making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic at a speed of 36 knots and was heading for a new passenger ship record, previously held by Britain's Queen Mary, established on its maiden voyage in 1938. Currently, the United States was 6 to 12 hours ahead of that record, expected to pass Bishop's Rock, the point of determination of passenger ship speed records, on Monday before dawn. The ship had run into a heavy mist the previous night, causing visibility to drop to zero and navigation to be done through radar, but the ship came through the ordeal successfully, maintaining 36 knots.
The toll of violent deaths for the holiday weekend reached 306 on Saturday, accruing at a faster rate than on the Memorial Day weekend a month earlier. Only one fatality had been reported from fireworks, with 190 from traffic accidents, 89 from drowning, and 26 from other causes. The rate of traffic deaths was surpassing the Memorial Day weekend death rate, which saw 363 persons killed, an all-time record for that holiday. It was approaching the pace predicted by the National Safety Council of 340 traffic fatalities during the three-day weekend, from 6:00 p.m. on Thursday to midnight Sunday.
On the editorial page, "Taft Yanks Strings and Puppets Jump" finds that the Taft-dominated RNC, in seating the previous day the disputed Texas delegation in a claimed "compromise", had, in fact, engaged in "a calculated effort to minimize and make slightly more palatable the brazen and unconscionable larcenies of the previous two days."
In all, 38 delegates had been at stake, 33 of whom had been legally seated as Eisenhower delegates, while five were committed to Senator Taft. Given the larcenies occurring with the Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana delegations, it had been a foregone conclusion that Senator Taft could take all 38 delegates if he so desired. But with the scandals mounting and the sense of fair play across the country being outraged, letters and telegrams of protest having poured into the convention and General Eisenhower having lashed out at the "Iron Curtain" tactics being displayed, the Taft managers had become worried and the "compromise" was effected, whereby 22 of the delegates for the Senator and 16 for the General would be seated, in accordance with a suggestion made by former President Hoover.
The effort was rejected by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., General Eisenhower's campaign manager, but the "puppets" on the RNC had accepted the compromise.
It concludes that the Senator's "shoddy and disreputable combine" might hold together long enough to win him the nomination, despite the upcoming disputes by the Eisenhower forces on the convention floor, but that the American people had to be thoroughly disgusted by the "insufferable display of Republican Pendergastism". It urges that the Senator had to realize that a continuation of such "vicious, undemocratic practices" would not only shatter his reputation for honesty and integrity but would assure his resounding defeat in the general election in November, "as indeed it should".
Don't you worry. You're going to get a rip-roaring new Vice-President dedicated to the single proposition that the Government stay as clean as a hound's tooth, not to mention preservation of law and order in the land by any and all means necessary, legal or not. Raise those arms high for Victory.
"'Jeffersonians'" tells of the Senate voting to override the President's veto the previous week of the restrictive, discriminatory McCarran Immigration Act, with every Southern Democrat voting to override, resulting in the bill becoming law by a vote of 57 to 26, two votes more than necessary for the required two-thirds majority. (In all likelihood, incidentally, with 13 Senators absent, including the ill Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, it was likely that advance vote-counting assured override without the absentees, most of whom presumably could have been called upon, if necessary, to accomplish the task.)
It wonders how Southern Democrats could classify themselves as "Jeffersonian Democrats" with such a vote, when President Thomas Jefferson had stated in his first annual message:
"… And shall we refuse
the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the
savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this
land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? The
Constitution, indeed, has wisely provided that, for admission to
certain offices of important trust, a residence shall be required
sufficient to develop character and design. But might not the general
character and capabilities of a citizen be safely communicated to
everyone manifesting a bona fide purpose of embarking his life and
fortunes permanently with us?"
The relevant question today is how can any citizen of the United States purport to be an American, in the traditional sense of the word, that is embodying the spirit and letter of the Bill of Rights, and favor the building of a wall on our Southern border, an expensive symbol of hostility to immigrants, not any practical device by which to limit illegal immigration. That which it bespeaks is nothing short of totalitarianism and the inability, a facet of totalitarianism, to see beyond one's own nose.
Moreover, how could anyone in their right mind support such a concept while wearing a "MAGA" hat?
The current "President" often wonders aloud in his Tweetie-bird ramblings whether the next early voice in the republic's history to be silenced would include Thomas Jefferson, while, effectively, himself, silencing that voice.
"Senator Bricker Is on the Wrong Track" tells of Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio and 57 of his colleagues having proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the power of the executive branch in making treaties and executive agreements with other countries. He was afraid that some restrictive U.N. covenant might supersede the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the issue, though the California Supreme Court had recently held that a treaty "does not automatically supersede local laws which are inconsistent with it unless the treaty provisions are self-executing," indicating that the U.N. Charter was not self-executing.
The piece finds the issue to be within the purview of the Supreme Court to decide, rather than trying to alter the Constitution to embrace the matter. For to do the latter, could alter and limit the treaty-making power of the Government at a time when speedy international cooperation was needed. The reason for executive agreements in lieu of treaties was because of the cumbersome Constitutional machinery, requiring that two-thirds of the Senators present ratify each treaty. At the time of the Constitutional convention in 1787, the four Southern states wanted the provision to protect Mississippi navigation and the future of New Orleans as a port, while four New England states wanted to protect their fishery rights. If either group of four could obtain one other state's Senators, they could sway the vote in the Senate against any treaty. Thus was the origin of the two-thirds requirement. In that time, the Senators were elected by the state legislatures and were presumed to have more foreign-affairs knowledge than the members of the House, whom Alexander Hamilton thought unfit to determine the ratification of treaties. The result had been that for years a small minority of Senators could exert tremendous and inordinately negative influence on foreign affairs.
The Senate had emasculated the Hay arbitration treaties of 1904, impeding the efforts of President William Howard Taft to advance the arbitration treaties of 1911, and had rejected the Treaty of Versailles, with the provision for the League of Nations and the World Court, favored by the Wilson Administration, but failing to achieve ratification in the Senate during the early days of the subsequent Harding Administration, after President Harding refused his endorsement, favoring a "return to normalcy" after World War I.
The executive branch had resorted to executive agreements in order to circumvent these limitations, requiring only majority approval of Congress. Those matters included Lend-Lease in 1941, the postwar U.N. recovery administration, precursor to the Marshall Plan, the loan to Britain in 1946, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which set up the economic machinery for the U.N., as well as others.
It indicates that the power to make treaties should not be limited, but rather democratized by constitutional amendment, empowering both houses to approve or disapprove treaties by a simple majority vote. Thomas Jefferson had been an advocate of that position, and the House, during the 79th Congress of 1945-47 had proposed that arrangement. A better-informed people in the modern era, therefore, rather than just a small handful of Senators, would be able to determine the general direction of foreign policy.
"Indian Affair" tells of the House, in the rush to adjournment, having passed a bill to have the Bureau of Indian Affairs investigate the Indians, authorizing $75,000 to determine which Indians were ready to conduct their affairs without Government supervision. Later in the day, the House voted to conduct its own investigation of the Indian Bureau to determine whether it had already studied the Indians properly to determine their qualification for being freed from Government supervision.
The piece counsels having the Indians investigate Congress, and indicates that their conclusion might be that they were as fully prepared for self-government as were some members of Congress.
Drew Pearson, in Chicago, tells of the outcome of the Republican convention depending on pressure politics, "the political steamroller vs. the pocketbook steamroller". While the Taft machine had shown it was able to run roughshod over the Eisenhower forces in the early going, the big-money interests were quietly dismantling the steamroller of the Senator, drawing key men into the Eisenhower camp, causing the steamroller to lose momentum. Thus it was coming down to whether the Taft frontal pressure or Wall Street's backstage pressure would win out.
Sinclair Weeks, the Republican finance chairman, had recently announced his support for General Eisenhower, though in the past he had leaned toward Senator Taft, having raised $82,000 for the Senator since the beginning of the year. He had been pressured by Wall Street to change allegiance and had finally acquiesced. Others who had felt such financial pressure included Pennsylvania Governor John Fine and Michigan's national committeeman, Arthur Summerfield, a large Chevy dealer.
The outcome of the nomination would depend on how certain pivotal states would go, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, and Maryland, each of which he briefly synopsizes. Mr. Summerfield would considerably help the effort in Michigan, though Taft forces had been appealing to Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson. The Pennsylvania outcome initially appeared largely dependent on Governor Fine, appeal to whom had been made by General MacArthur on behalf of Senator Taft, and General MacArthur had a great deal of sway over Governor Fine. Governor Dewey, however, had been appealing to the county chairmen of the state on behalf of General Eisenhower and the majority of the delegation now appeared ready to vote for the General, with Governor Fine able to sway at most only about 17 votes. In California, most delegates would stay with the decision of Governor Earl Warren on the initial ballots, though 20 to 23 were committed to Senator Taft. The Maryland delegates, except for a few, were solidly for General Eisenhower.
The majority of these delegations, therefore, were in favor of the General, but if the Senator entered the convention with strong first-ballot strength, he might be able to garner enough scattered votes from Pennsylvania and Michigan to win the nomination. As it currently stood, Governor Fine's 17 votes might prove decisive.
The real issue at stake, however, he ventures, was whether the Republican Party wanted to function in the South by breaking up its absentee landlord feudal system, keeping the party "in a more degraded state of peonage than tenant farmers on the worst Mississippi plantation". He cites the example of South Carolina as to how the system worked, with the Republican national committeeman, Edgar Morris, living in Washington in a $100,000 mansion and running an electric appliance store, all while nominally residing in Pickens, S.C. He even had long been a member of the D.C. Board of Public Welfare, which required him to be a resident of D.C. The previous week, the South Carolina Republicans had become irked with him and obtained a preliminary ruling from a South Carolina court that he was in every legal and moral sense a resident of Washington and had no right therefore to represent the Republican Party in South Carolina. Yet, he was on the credentials committee at the convention, determining which Southern delegates would be seated. Mr. Morris was for Senator Taft. His partner from South Carolina was Mrs. John Messervy, the Republican national committeewoman, who was supposed to live in Charleston. Mr. Pearson had tried to reach her at her supposed address in that city, but the fact was that she lived near Louisville, Ky., where she owned a radio station. She also was a Taft supporter.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of friends of Governor Adlai Stevenson indicating that they had no doubt at this point that he would accept the nomination of the Democrats if it were offered. At least three times in recent weeks, he had been on the verge of issuing a Shermanesque statement, firmly indicating that if the nomination were offered, he would not accept it. He had been talked out of issuing that statement, however, on the basis of sheer patriotism, if Senator Taft were nominated by the Republicans, on the firm belief that his election to the presidency would be a disaster.
The Governor had recently stated that he would accept the nomination "in the light of conditions then existing", which, according to these friends, included a Taft nomination.
Illinois Democratic leader Jacob Arvey was convinced that the Governor would be nominated on a very early ballot on that basis. The Governor had somehow made himself acceptable to the conservatives and the Southerners, especially given that he was on record as being against the compulsory Fair Employment Practices Commission, as well as other Administration-favored measures. He was also acceptable to liberals and labor groups and yet he could not be labeled a "Truman stooge", having turned down entry to the race at the time of the President's endorsement of him earlier in the year. He had, however, lost some party leaders in the meantime, such as Paul Fitzpatrick of New York, who had endorsed other candidates. And the President had reportedly turned sour on the Governor as his successor. In light of those facts, it was far from certain that the Governor would consent to run or that he would be nominated in the event that General Eisenhower were the Republican nominee. Undoubtedly, however, he would accept the probable nomination if Senator Taft were the nominee.
The Governor was about the only candidate around whom the Democrats could come together, and professional observers therefore regarded him as the strongest candidate.
Marquis Childs, in Chicago, tells of observers, including the most ardent supporters of General Eisenhower, being surprised in the month since his return to the United States, at the lack of the great upsurge in expected enthusiasm which would carry him to victory. Mr. Childs relates of his opinion as to the reasons why that spontaneous reaction had not taken place, the first being that it was not his first homecoming since the war and on this occasion, he had immediately doffed his uniform, without which he no longer suited the public's image of the military hero.
But that which had attracted so many of his ardent supporters were his qualities of warmth, courage, faith, and friendliness, inspiring confidence in his ability to lead into the future. Those qualities, however, had been diluted before television cameras, newsreels and radio microphones on the hustings. The General could not be expected to acquire the technique of politicking overnight, but it was hard to understand why the Eisenhower organization had not received better technical advice, the experts in such matters having indicated that the cameras seemed always to be trained on the General at the wrong angle, foreshortening the image such that his face seemed even broader than it was. He had read speeches from a manuscript, seldom looking up, instead of reading them from large cue cards held behind the cameras.
At least, without cards, he did not
have to seek, when one failed to arrive on time, to ad lib about "ramming
The polls did show that the General was gaining strength in the previous month and, furthermore, close observers had remarked that his "magic" was working with the convention delegates, the professionals contending that he had captured at least 75 new delegates, formerly committed to Senator Taft or on the fence, in the face-to-face discussions with the delegates and delegations. Others would likely be won in the final days before the first ballot, and those who were close to his organization believed that it was on this basis that he would win the nomination.
A letter from Fred H. McIntyre thanks the newspaper for its courtesies shown him during his recent campaign for the Democratic nomination for the State Senate, and especially to Tom Fesperman for an article which he had written, with an accompanying photograph of Mr. McIntyre. He also thanks the voters who had nominated him and assures that if he were to win in November, he would give the people of the county "the best administration" in his power.
A letter writer from Kingstree, S.C., tells of having had for a long time a hospital insurance policy, issued by an out-of-state company, on which he had regularly made payments. Recently, his wife had become seriously ill and the company had paid the hospital bill, enclosing a note seeking to use his name in its circulars, soliciting from him a few remarks about the policy, to which he provided his approval. Immediately afterward, however, they canceled the policy on the basis that the illness of his wife presented too much risk into the future. He counsels others that such policies had fine print enabling the insurance company to cancel at any time, despite regular payments of premiums. He had written to the State Insurance commissioner, who replied that there was nothing he could do.
A letter writer from New York, previously writing from Monroe, tells of having purchased a copy of The News recently from a stand in Times Square and was neither "'shocked'" nor "'disgusted'" at the contents of a letter of condemnation of his own June 20 letter urging one American party, that he never had such a reaction to finding fools in the world. He suggests that the previous responsive letter writer had missed in his original letter his modifying adjectives in the case of "true Christianity" and "welfare state".
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