Wednesday, March 13, 1946

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 13, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, after 113 days, the General Motors strike had finally been settled with management accepting the 18.5 cents per hour wage increase, the equivalent of 16.5 percent. Together with other boosts in the package, UAW reported that it met the 19.5 cents per hour recommended by the President. The strike had been the longest and costliest in automotive industry history. It was expected that the 175,000 striking workers would resume work the following week.

President Truman, acting at the request of Ed Pauley, withdrew his troubled nomination as Undersecretary of the Navy, saying that Mr. Pauley had defended well his good name against repeated misrepresentations, "vicious and unwarranted attacks" on his integrity. The nomination had been pending confirmation for six weeks and had been challenged primarily regarding Mr. Pauley's oil interests and the allegation of former Interior Secretary Harold Ickes that Mr. Pauley in 1944 had, as treasurer of the DNC, offered to raise $300,000 in 1944 campaign contributions from oil men, provided the Government would drop its claim on offshore oil lands. Mr. Pauley had consistently denied the charge.

No one else had confirmed that such a deal had been proposed. Future Supreme Court Justice and, at the time in September, 1944, Undersecretary of Interior, Abe Fortas had testified that he was present at the meeting, recalled discussion of the tidelands oil issue and the raising of campaign funds but could not recall whether the two were interconnected.

Mr. Ickes, Interior Secretary since 1933, had resigned his post in early February because the President had publicly suggested that he might be "mistaken" in his recollection of the conversation. Mr. Ickes took the reference to be an attack on his credibility.

From Iran, it was reported by the British that Russian combat troops were moving into Northern Iran at Karaj, twenty miles from Tehran, replete with fourteen Sherman tanks and twenty fighter planes, sent to Russia originally during the war via American Lend-Lease. Karaj is in the area of Turkey and Iraq. Secretary of State Byrnes immediately dispatched a note to Moscow demanding an explanation.

Premier Qavam Es Saltaneh of Iran had just returned from inconclusive talks in Moscow, reporting that the Soviets would not agree to remove troops from Iran without concessions regarding Azerbaijan Province which he would not make. The Russians, by a treaty concluded in 1942, had agreed to remove troops six months after the end of the war, coinciding with March 2, 1946.

Iran at the time was the world's fourth largest oil producing nation.

At Nuremberg, after the conclusion of the cross-examination of Albert Kesselring, defendant Hermann Goering took the stand at the war crimes tribunal in his own behalf and reportedly lectured the judges as if they were schoolboys, saying that Hitler had seized power in 1933 to make Germany free from political confusion, with as many as 37 parties vying for leadership in the Reichstag. He suggested that the Nazi Party would have had full control had an American-type system been in place. He described a military plot led by General Kurt von Schleicher and General Curt von Hammerstein-Equord against Hitler in 1933, narrowly averted just hours before Hitler took his oath as Chancellor. General von Schleicher was killed during the purge of 1934.

The second in a series of stories by Eddy Gilmore on Russia reports on roads, waterways and airways being planned by the Soviet Government. The presidium had in February approved the creation of a commissariat for road-building and machinery for the purpose. One of the largest projects was a thousand-mile five or six lane highway to connect Moscow with the resort area on the Black Sea at Simferopol. The road would pass through Kursk where the Russian Army dealt a heavy blow to the German panzer divisions during the summer of 1943. The road would interconnect the Ukraine's breadbasket with Moscow, as well as the Georgian fruit-growing areas. Work had already begun on the road.

Another highway was to travel north into the Baltic States of Latvia and Lithuania, starting the following summer.

A 375-mile canal was planned for the Turkmen Republic, designed primarily for irrigation. Expected to take two years to build, it might eventually become a waterway to the Caspian Sea, a dream of Peter the Great.

Eddy Gilmore also reports separately from Moscow that Pravda had attacked the United States for the presence of American businessmen and politicians in Korea catering to Dr. Syngman Rhee, who had returned recently to Korea after 33 years of Japanese-imposed exile. The article described him as an "old trader in the honor and freedom" of the Korean people. It charged that Dr. Rhee and his followers were making deals with American businessmen and politicians to obtain financial assistance so that Dr. Rhee could gain control of Korea.

An article on Egypt by an Egyptian writer in Cairo was printed in Izvestia, questioning when American troops would leave the country. It charged that the British wanted the American troops to remain so that British troops would not have to evacuate.

A separate item indicates that Moscow radio reported that Josef Stalin had told a reporter for Pravda that the Churchill speech of March 5 in Fulton, Mo., had been "very dangerous" and contained "lies" regarding Soviet dominance over Bucharest, Belgrade, Budapest, and Warsaw.

Hal Boyle, still in Cairo, tells of an American dentist who had lived in the city for 30 years and believed firmly in the Egyptian tradition of an afternoon siesta. The climate, he said, was fine as long as one lived with it as the Egyptians did, taking their afternoon nap. The Americans and British who ignored the custom, he insisted, encountered health problems or even died by trying to remain active in the hot afternoon sun. He complained that he missed his siesta when he had to attend one of their funerals, following a heart attack from over-exertion on the golf course or the tennis court.

Hotels in the city were overcrowded. Mr. Boyle wound up staying on a houseboat on the Nile, anchored in one of the best residential sections of the city.

On the editorial page, "The Matter of Party Loyalty" discusses the conservative Southern Democrats who had aligned with the Republicans, having found themselves without a party under FDR and now, in the "half-hearted" attempt of President Truman to carry on in that tradition.

An effort had been orchestrated by Congressman Fred Hartley of New Jersey to make the coalition of Democrats and Republicans official by appointing a ten-member steering committee to which Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina had been named. But the Congressman, professing party loyalty, had now publicly denied it, refusing to acknowledge any connection with such a coalition. Nevertheless, Congressman Barden did join the coalition to defeat the key portions of the President's housing bill.

The piece suggests that the days had passed when it would be considered political treason to bolt the party and become a Republican. Instead, it would be seen as an act of statesmanship when the representative no longer believed the party represented the interests for which he stood. At present, it offers, the Democrats bringing about the demise of the President's program were being hypocritical by proclaiming themselves loyal to the party.

Remember, though, as the gentleman had stated a few days earlier, never call them hypocritical...

"A Warning from Wuerzburg" comments on the reprinting the day before in The News of the recent order of Col. Frank Ebey, commander of the occupation forces in Wuerzburg, Germany, to the 205th Antiaircraft Battalion, indicating that morale had been raised in the civilian population of Germany by the anti-Russian sentiment running through the speech of Winston Churchill, and was therefore ordering that no further statements be made regarding the speech in the presence of German civilians. He further warned them against allowing the opinions of frauleins to sway their thoughts from the memories of their buddies who lay dead in the European soil after fighting Nazism. And, he further reminded, the Russians had died for the same cause.

He concluded by stating: "I am not a pinko or red. But the Russians are our allies. They have guts and by God I never want to fight again. Think it over. You have been warned."

The piece advises that a good many Americans would be well served also to consider the words of Colonel Ebey.

"The Threat of Absentee Ownership" reports that the piece by John Daly appearing Saturday on the front page regarding the increase in Northern absentee ownership of cotton textile mills in the South had been picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in The New York Times, as a letter to the editor indicates.

The letter writer's fears that a mob would take over Southern business and have everyone working in the cotton fields was a bit exaggerated, but there was some genuine threat to the Southern economy by the frenetic activity in textile stocks. Mills and chains were changing hands almost daily. Some of it was the result of a genuine desire to integrate functions of spinning, weaving, and finishing. Some of it was the result of a desire to avoid payment of high income taxes. And it was natural that an highly prospering industry during the war would now attract investment capital.

But much of it was also the result of speculation, with the sole motivation being to turn a quick profit by buying and re-selling the business, resulting in lower efficiency in production. Absentee ownership had freighted with it, inevitably, disinterested ownership, without imbibing the daily interests of the citizens such that management could empathize with their inherent frustrations, limitations, screams, and dreams.

The way to stop it, this encroachment, advises the editorial, was for Southerners to use Northern financing to beat the Northern purchaser, the furriner, at his own game. It had been done once before in the earlier days.

Drew Pearson reports that the trouble spot in the world most worrisome to Secretary of War Robert Patterson was Trieste on the Adriatic, where two British and American divisions were facing eight superior Yugoslav divisions. It was expected that the Yugoslavs, backed by Russian troops, might at any time move to take the vital port. The situation could lead to war.

The Russians were maintaining an army of 1.1 million men in Hungary, far more than necessary for internal policing. These troops, fresh and well-trained, were at Lake Balaton, within easy reach of Trieste.

Yugoslavia had some legitimate claim to Trieste based on a promise made to King Peter in 1940 that Trieste would go to Yugoslavia provided it resisted the Nazis, as it did. But most of the population of Trieste was Italian, with Yugoslavs dominating in the outlying areas.

The primary motivation of the U.S. in retaining it was that it would provide the Russians with a base of operations from which to take control of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean, an ambition long held by the Czars.

He notes that a strong U.N. could internationalize Trieste and create trusteeships for the areas of the Eastern Mediterranean to prevent them from becoming pawns of either Britain or Russia.

He next discusses retiring Congressman Hatton Sumners of Dallas, known for his championing of States' rights and resistance to FDR's Court-packing plan of 1937.

To close associates, he was better known, however, for leaving on his pajamas beneath his clothes if he planned to spend the night away from home. The eccentricity had come to light at a cocktail party at the apartment of Speaker Sam Rayburn when a woman noticed a red-striped white pant leg showing beneath the Congressman's trousers. Eventually the woman drew his attention to it, but he took it in stride and simply explained candidly that they were his pajamas which he always wore when he stayed with Congressman Howard Smith across the river.

Lastly, Mr. Pearson reports of John L. Lewis, in one of his first acts on the executive board of the AFL, having persuaded the board to obtain a new headquarters near the White House to compete with the CIO headquarters already established two blocks away by Philip Murray. It hearkened the expected attempt by Mr. Lewis to take over CIO.

Marquis Childs explains that at the current time there were 1,458 Soviet citizens within the United States, of whom a thousand were officials and assistants, and the remainder wives and children. There were only 125 U.S. citizens in Russia, of whom 15 to 20 were engineers and a small number, journalists. Because of continuing scarcity in Russia, the disparity in numbers did not necessarily imply any deliberate curtailment of American access. Nevertheless, with peace, more friendly exchange was to be expected.

During the war, there had been more Russians in the U.S., connected with Lend-Lease. The currently present Russians lived reclusively and had little contact with Americans. In New York, they lived at Glen Cove, the former estate of J. P. Morgan. In Washington, they had an estate of 24 acres and palatial buildings to match.

U.S. representatives were rarely permitted to travel outside of Moscow, as it had been during the war. Russians in America were permitted free right of travel.

Mr. Childs states that the time had come to demand reciprocal rights without any hint of hostility.

Samuel Grafton reports that the approval of the 3.75 billion dollar loan to Britain was in trouble. Letters to Congress were reported as running 400 to 1 against it in the wake of the Churchill speech at Westminster College on March 5. The isolationists were generally demanding air bases from Britain in exchange for the loan. Generally, they were for neither the loan nor the proposed alliance suggested by Mr. Churchill.

Zionists also had joined the chorus against the loan, outraged by British refusal to allow more Jewish refugees into Palestine.

Even the internationalists were not wholeheartedly behind it anymore since the rupture of relations with Russia, as the decline for prospects of world peace made them less inclined to support Britain.

Despite the opposition, the loan, he offers, had to be granted or every British imperial policy would be toughened to insure its economic survival. Mr. Churchill and the Tories did not really want the loan but rather the Empire in its old form, with an ally or two to back it up. To refuse the loan would be an additional setback to the prospects for peace.

"Men who believe in half a world must not be surprised to find themselves followed on the platform by other men who feel that a quarter-world is an even better cut."

As indicated in the column, a letter discusses the story as reported by John Daly the previous week regarding absentee ownership by Northerners of Southern textile mills. The writer believes that it was a concerted attempt by the New York "mob" to take over Southern industry and thereby economically dictate terms to the South. He asserts that if it were allowed to happen, it would not be safe to walk the streets of America.

A letter writer sends an open letter to the City Manager in protest of a plan to resume city dumping of garbage at the old rock quarry, in the neighborhood where the letter writer lived.

A letter finds the editorial page to have passed its former state as being merely the second comics page of the newspaper, into the realm of the ridiculous, especially given its stand in favor of legalization of sale of liquor in Mecklenburg. He says that he was personally acquainted with the founder of the newspaper and that it had been known in earlier years for its strict moral code. What was wrong fifty years earlier, he opines, was still wrong.

Herblock perhaps presents an accurate view of the world stage at this juncture in history.

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