The current trend was to replace disarmament with faith in arms, hence turning away from the internationalist concept.

Thirteen Southern agricultural commissioners had signed a joint declaration favoring high tariffs to protect Southern crops against foreign competition. The move was a break from Southern tradition and admission that Southern agriculture was not self-sustaining. It also tactily admitted that Southern faith in internationalism was waning.

The South had never suffered from isolationism as a whole, especially in economic terms or in the willingness to fight anywhere in the world. It had served to counterbalance the Midwest and New England tendencies to the contrary.

As the thirteen commissioners were addressing the new Republican Congress, favorable to higher tariffs, they would speak with a loud voice and receive support from Northern industry, also desirous of protectionism. The effort, if successful, could turn out to be economically disastrous.

Furthermore, no evidence had been adduced that Mr. Bilbo personally had deprived any voters of their rights. That the system which produced him had done so was no argument against his being seated, any more than it was in any other Southern state, equally guilty of such irregularities.

The Senator remained vulnerable, however, on the receipt of money for war contracts. Reports were stating that Southern Senators nevertheless were prepared to vote in favor of Mr. Bilbo, based on a sense of regional loyalty.

The piece suggests resort to the 1910 ruling by the Mississippi Legislature, which had determined that Mr. Bilbo was unfit to serve in that body for having accepted bribes, finding his defense that he was serving as an undercover decoy to ferret out corruption to be unworthy of belief.

He looks at the women's wear industry as a leading opponent of price control during the year. The result was that stores had huge stocks of women's wear, without buyers. Skilled needlecrafters were, in consequence, without work. With prices so high, women had staged a virtual buyers' strike. Sales were down 20 percent for the previous month compared to a year earlier. The ratio of stock on hand to sales was the highest in Federal Reserve history.

Thousands of small businessmen could not plan for the future as they did not know what materials would cost and how high wages would go.

OPA directors Leon Henderson and Chester Bowles had made price control work during the war, as they refused to play politics with it. The result was to win powerful enemies in business.

Early in 1946, Mr. Bowles had been overruled by the President, operating on the advice of John W. Snyder, in wanting the strike of steel workers resolved without allowing steel to raise prices, based on the industry's high profits during the war. U.S. Steel had, as a result, racked up in the first three quarters 196 percent more profit than in the first three quarters of 1945. The other major steel companies had done even better.

Mr. Bowles had sought early in the year to have Congress renew price control for a full year, that only this move would forestall the cycle of demand for higher wages, higher prices, and resultant inflation. But with the special interests lobbying Congress, it refused Mr. Bowles's exhortations and only gave a watered-down, ineffective extension of price control, ultimately failing.

The people who were hurt the most by these changes were wage earners at the bottom of the income scale who had nothing to do with the cause. The result might be depression.

Merchants associations were warning against heavy stocking of merchandise.

Both trends were part of the natural processes which were supposed to bring prices down in the wake of release of controls. But food prices were still at their highest point in history at a time of the highest sustained production. The claims in October that release of price controls on meat would allow production to rise and thus bring prices down, had proved without prescience.

The so-called natural process was not working in an unnatural period of time after a great war. The prices of newspapers and admission to art museums, for instance, were going up, even as other prices were starting to fall. Some even speculated that a few strikes in the coming year might restrict production enough to keep prices high.

There was an emotional price to be paid for large-scale changes in national policy at one time.

The absence of a strong Republican Party in the South, he offers, was ultimately destructive of democracy and hence the Democratic Party also.

"Between the Potomac and the Rio Grande democracy walks on one leg. So it is."

But the object was not publicity, rather to discuss ways of uniting on matters of social reform, race relations and other problems facing the country in the coming years.

A statement of common purpose in this regard was suggested by Mr. Childs as being useful to counteract the Red-baiting and witch hunting sure to follow should the Republicans allow the mentality of Congressman John Rankin and HUAC counsel Ernie Adamson to prevail in the 80th Congress. It was the reason that the sponsors of the meeting were being careful to avoid any ties to Communists. The meeting might not accomplish much but it would form a platform corresponding to the desires of millions of Americans.

—Bob, did you see?

—I know, yeah. Every Commie in the Democratic Party, including Voorhis and that Douglas woman. Yeah.

—Good thinking, Bob. Get somebody up there to take down their license plate numbers and give them to Mr. Hoover. Then, we shall be in good stead with him.

—O, yeah, yeah. To the future, Bob. Happy New Year to you, too. Who will win tomorrow in the bowl games?

—Yeah, good. Justice in the Sugar. Remember to congratulate for me any California teams who win.

—Okay, Bob. You know best. I'll do it myself.

And so passed the world from 1946, a year of adjustment and economic and political change and turmoil, into 1947, with a new Republican Congress set to take its oath on Friday. It was not the pleasant, happy-go-lucky year, as often mistakenly painted with a broad brush. It was full of despair and lack of direction, veterans' complaints over lack of suitable housing, high prices, low wages, strikes, complaints over labor unions having too much power, Congressional tugs of war with the President over retaining price controls, and generally a citizenry disheartened with its leader, forced upon them by circumstance in April, 1945, and none too impressive to them thus far.

The entire year can be summed up as the year of the blahs, interspersed by anxious concern regarding the future of the world and the economy, not leftover ecstacy regarding victory in World War II, but disappointment that the future was not shaping up better domestically or internationally, peace, with the threat of the atomic bomb and an arms race with the Soviets imminent, seeming only to be a temporary status, with a foregone conclusion prevailing that another war would soon have to be fought to restrain Soviet Communism.

China was in the midst of civil war between the Government and Communist forces. French Indo-China was showing signs of instability, with the French-recognized Vietnamese Government of Ho Chi Minh seeking to oust the French. Korea had shown signs of instability between the northern and southern sections, and the desire generally to be rid of Russian and American occupiers. Palestine was a source of continuing violence as Jews protested the British restriction on immigration of displaced persons from Europe. The long, enduring struggle in that region had begun in earnest with the bombing earlier in the year at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

It was a better world than that of the preceding eight years. But it was a world uneasy, unstable economically, hungry and cold in Europe, and concerned that the next war, set to end civilization, might be around the corner as soon as Russia inevitably developed its own atomic weapon. Advances in weaponry, rocketry, the jet, and the atomic stockpile in the United States thus continued apace along with the concomitant desire being expressed for universal military training, or, as the President had recently recommended, "universal training", without being associated with the military aspects.

The first hints of the post-war corrosive Red-baiting also had shown its divisive head in the campaign and promised to be a centerpiece of the new Republican Congress, as the Republicans lashed out at all Democrats as being either Red in fact or at least fellow travelers. It had reacquired its spark and traction, dissipated during the war, from two major well-heads: the brakes placed on reconversion in the country from strikes thought stimulated in many instances by Communist elements within the CIO, even if John L. Lewis and the UMW were decidedly Republican in orientation; and the caveat issued in March at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, by Winston Churchill regarding the dangers of an iron curtain descending over Russia and Eastern Europe.

The reactionary violent impulse in some, no longer satiated actually or vicariously by the war, again found its weak targets, the Nisei being restored from wartime resettlement camps in the West, blacks in the South, a trend largely, though not completely, in abeyance during the war.

The Nuremberg trials of the 21 leading Nazis left alive at the end of the war transpired during the year mainly to yawns among Allied observers, with typical expressions among both liberals and conservatives being that it was a sham with a foregone conclusion, performed more for its theater than any genuine meting of justice, albeit praised in the end in October for having set a major precedent in international law, with swiftly exacted executions of the eleven condemned prisoners, one which thus held hope for future deterrence of the ready henchmen necessary to give breath to a nationalistic people's movement bent ultimately on forging militaristic expansionism fomenting inexorably war, as the Fascist movement which had transpired in Italy in 1921-22, in turn stimulating the seeds of Nazism in Germany between 1923 and 1933, born ultimately from widespread material want and normless dissatisfaction.

The one bright spot had come at the end of the year, with the seeming agreement at the U.N. on control of atomic energy and arms reduction. But dangerous disagreement on how to implement it practically and assure adherence to the limitations through inspections and insuring sanctions for violation had also overshadowed the success, the Soviets opposing a relaxation of the veto power on the Security Council for approval of sanctions. Thus, even that bright spot had its reservations.

The United States missed its dynamic leader, even if in some circles there was relief that he no longer was around to unite Democrats politically, leaving Southern reactionaries and moderates pitted against the liberal New Deal faction, both domestically and in foreign policy, a faction which had seen its input to the Administration dwindle to nil by the time of the unceremonious firing of Henry Wallace in September in the wake of his expression in Madison Square Garden of dissent from Secretary of State Byrnes's recently articulated "get-tough" policy with Russia, a policy which Mr. Byrnes subsequently clarified had been misunderstood in its intent.

President Truman, considered well-meaning and honest, despite his taint of the Pendergast machine out of Kansas City, and being too eager to please his coterie of Missouri advisers, too compromising with Congress, simply had failed to spark the imagination of the people to put shoulder to the wheel in cooperative effort in the post-war era. The result was drift, perilous drift, even if the successful and tough stand taken to end the coal strike in early December had closed out the year for the Administration on a positive note.

So we hope and trust you are not falling for the silly notion that 1946 constituted somehow the good old days and would it were that we could return to them. You are far better off entering 2014 than they were entering 1947, and, be it known, in large thanks to the relentless efforts maintained through time by those then in positions of leadership and among the citizens, to resolve the problems besetting the world at the time, far greater than anything troubling us as a society and world today.

So have a happy and safe New Year and a pleasant 2014.