The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 26, 1946
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Russia sought to block inquiry into the Iranian situation by the U.N. Security Council, meeting in New York. The British-American position favoring the inquiry lacked only one vote to make a majority of seven of the Council.
Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko stated that Russia and Iran had reached an agreement on withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Northern Iran.
Two members of Parliament in Britain, one Conservative and one Labor Party member, embarked on an unofficial visit to Iran to determine firsthand the veracity of reports of Russian withdrawal.
Reports from Moscow indicated that Red Army troops continued the withdrawal based on an agreement with Iranian Premier Qavam, confirmed by Prime Minister Stalin.
A report from Iran stated that troops were withdrawing from Karaj, twenty miles northwest of Tehran.
With tensions easing regarding the Iranian situation, Ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith informed reporters that he would tell Prime Minister Stalin that the American people wished to understand the motives of the Soviet Union with regard to the U.N. and peace.
The United States obtained UNRRA approval to prevent occupying armies from living off occupied territory, proposed because of alleged Soviet acquisition of large tracts of land in Austria which could be utilized for food production. Russia opposed the move as being outside UNRRA authority. A further resolution to punish offending nations by lowering their aid from UNRRA was deferred.
The Civilian Production Administration placed severe restrictions on building and repair of all non-residential structures, requiring specific authorization for construction of new commercial or industrial buildings. The order was intended to make available materials for the needed 2.7 million new houses to be built during the coming two years. Certain enumerated exemptions applied. See if your plans qualify.
Some 4,000 G.I. brides in London, set to sail to the United States to join their husbands, suddenly changed their minds and decided to stay in Britain.
The UMW declined the offer from mine owners of a raise of 18.5 cents per hour plus a fund for victims of mine accidents, and John L. Lewis stated that the miners would stay away from work the following week unless a new contract could be negotiated by the weekend. He said that it was not a strike and that 47 million tons of coal was in storage, thus minimizing the impact on the American people.
Max Hall again reports on the UAW convention in Atlantic City. The union rejected a proposal to increase dues and declared support for remaining strikers of G.M. plants who had not yet accepted the national settlement. They would vote for the new president of the union the next day, vice-president Walter Reuther or incumbent president R. J. Thomas. Both camps claimed victory to be imminent.
In response to a claim by the Western states director of the Office of Civilian Defense that in 1943 12 to 15 Japanese sailors from a submarine had been captured on U.S. soil by an Army unit on maneuvers, Sixth Army headquarters denied the story, saying that the director was likely confused regarding maneuvers in which American soldiers had posed as enemy raiders.
Wake Forest College was considering whether to accept from the Smith Reynolds Foundation a conditional gift of 25 to 40 million dollars, contingent on the college moving its campus to a 300-acre parcel on Reynolda Estate in Winston-Salem, worth about a million dollars. The final approval would need come from the North Carolina Baptist Convention, which would not meet until November.
Reynolda College, as it would henceforth be called, will likely accept the gift.
Bowman Gray Medical School of Wake Forest had been located in Winston-Salem in 1938 and graduated its first class in 1944.
Wake Forest was founded in the village of the same name, near Raleigh, in 1834 and became co-educational in 1941. Enrollment stood at about a thousand students in 1946, with an endowment of about 3.5 million dollars.
President Truman would be on hand for the groundbreaking ceremony in Winston-Salem in October, 1951
Reynolda didn't go over so well as a name, too much like Duke, and so they changed it back.
The ideas to call the sports teams the "Mild Smokes", and the freshman squads the "Springtime Frosh", were also tossed in the bin as crass appeals to commercialism, along with the initial decision to change the school colors to red and green, producing inevitably a conflict with N.C. State.
There is still nothing on the front page even mentioning the University of North Carolina participating in the N.C.A.A. Tournament finals in New York in Madison Square Garden this night against the Oklahoma A & M Aggies. The omission is indicative of the step-child status of college basketball in these times.
We are sorry to report that North Carolina lost 43 to 40
All-American Bob Kurland scored 23 of the Aggies' 43 points and was voted the Most Valuable Player of the Tournament. Weldon Kern scored 7 and A. L. Bennett, 6.
Bones McKinney, who before the war had played for two years at N.C. State, would join the N.B.A. the following season and play for six years, with the Washington Capitols and the Boston Celtics. In 1958, he would become head coach of Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, a position he would hold until 1965, albeit sometimes only with the aid of a seatbelt, winning two A.C.C. Tournaments, in 1961 and 1962, and reaching the Final Four in 1962 with a team led by Len Chappell and Billy Packer. Bones McKinney was also an ordained Baptist minister.
Hook Dillon would play two more years at U.N.C., earning All-American honors again in 1947. He would play one professional season with the Washington Capitols.
If you claim to be a Carolina basketball fan and do not know at least the name Hook Dillon and a little about this team coached by Ben Carnevale, you cannot count yourself a true aficionado of Carolina basketball.
In any event, as we promised, it was exciting
We enjoyed very much the first half of the game on Saturday also, between North Carolina and Kansas, but not so much the blizzard of the second half. Maybe next year.
How did we know that such a result might be likely despite a nine point North Carolina lead, you may ask yourself, when at halftime, we added the link underlying "block", that is the duel in the snow from "War and Peace". We just knew, that's all. We truly wish that we did not. It was sort of one of those premonitory moments which on occasion we experience, like the hail storm where we were just before game time when North Carolina faced Utah in the semi-finals in 1998. We knew right then that it would probably be a long afternoon. And it was.
Sorry about the bad prediction that North Carolina would beat Oklahoma A & M. Hope you didn't lose a lot of dough. If you did, you deserve to lose it.
On the editorial page, "The Great Dry Victory in Rockingham" tells of the overwhelming victory by the Dry forces in a vote in Rockingham County on whether to allow sale of liquor through the A.B.C. system.
The campaign against legal sale had been heated and emotional, coming from the pulpit, school children being used as pickets by church organizations. The children held signs saying, "A Vote for Liquor Is a Vote Against Me". Church organizations transported Dry voters to the polls. Ministers posted the names of church members who had signed the petition favoring sale and condemned them from the pulpit.
The proponents of the measure could only counter with statistics on drunkenness during prohibition and the county's heavy bootlegging traffic.
The piece asserts that it was likely the vote was based on the emotional side of the matter rather reasoned logic.
Because Mecklenburg County was more urban than Rockingham, it was conceivable that Mecklenburgers would not be as easily swayed by emotional harangues warning of fire and brimstone accompanying legal sale of liquor.
The real issue, it says, was whether control was a better method of encouraging temperance than prohibition which drove the liquor trade underground.
Driving a man from his church because he favored control struck the editors as particularly un-Christian.
Rockingham had previously come within 500 votes of accepting control and so the heavy two-to-one majority for the Drys suggested that the church campaign had made the difference. It questions, however, whether the churches had really convinced the 3,000 voters to turn aside from alcohol or whether they had voted out of fear of public condemnation.
"A New Test of Party Loyalty" finds the selection by President Truman of the housing program to be an excellent choice as a test of party loyalty, as he had expressed in his Jackson Day Dinner address. Providing housing for veterans, it suggests, ought supersede issues of party politics.
The housing bill, emasculated in the House, had a good chance of having its key provisions, the ceiling on old housing prices and subsidies to builders to encourage building of low-cost housing, restored in the Senate.
The President had couched the argument in terms of siding with veterans or the housing lobby and housing speculators.
The eight House members from North Carolina who had voted against the house-ceiling, including Sam Ervin and Bob Doughton, would have to reverse themselves to meet the President's loyalty test, meaning confession of error.
The veterans would find reason to vote against Congressmen who had taken this position and the President was wise to point out the matter to encourage a change of stance on his housing program.
"The Signs and Portents of 1946" tells of cotton, without restraint on prices, having climbed to 27 cents and still going up. But the Congressmen from the cotton states remained determined to nix any attempt by OPA to place a ceiling on the commodity.
The piece confesses its delight at the rising of cotton prices, but shared the consternation of the Atlanta Journal at the reaction of the Congressmen. The cotton speculator was the natural enemy to the farmer. The Journal decried the speculators as being traditionally considered nefarious individuals, whether in New York or New Orleans, both cotton exchanges considered "hot-beds of iniquity, infested with gamblers, whose sole purpose was to extort by their speculative schemes the very life-blood of the honest tillers of the soil."
It appeared to the editors that 1946 was not only a year of revolution economically but "The Year The Leopard Changed His Spots".
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "A Resonant, Reverberating Keynote", tells of the selection of Ways and Means chairman, Congressman Robert Doughton, to be the keynoter for the state Democratic convention. It predicts that his address would not be a "series of short yelps, but a resonant reverberation attesting to the lead dog's scent and sight of the quarry."
Drew Pearson recounts the reasons for former New York Governor Herbert Lehman having tendered his resignation as head of the UNRRA, that he was disgusted with the deceit and fraud surrounding the effort to feed the world's hungry and with the appointment by President Truman of former President Herbert Hoover to go to Europe and assess the needs of the territory which UNRRA had already surveyed.
Mr. Lehman had told friends that he believed Mr. Hoover would play politics with food, as he had done after World War I. Mr. Lehman was not consulted about the appointment. Only Henry Wallace in the Cabinet was consulted and he had initially protested, but eventually was cajoled by the President and Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson to go along.
The failure of the United States to meet its quotas through rationing had already prompted Mr. Lehman to consider resigning. He also felt that the Canadian, British, and American food board, which controlled exports, had made political decisions. Refusing to fault the Truman Administration, he tendered his resignation.
Next, Mr. Pearson tells of Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson having won concessions in the first world monetary conference, convincing his fellow delegates to establish the world bank and monetary fund in Washington, despite an initial preference of the delegation for New York.
Lastly, he tells of the hope within the State Department, including Secretary of State Byrnes, that former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius would step aside as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. He was not adept at delicate diplomacy, had read all of his statements at the London Conference, never varying from the prepared text. Secretary Byrnes was heading the delegation in New York and Mr. Stettinius was acting as his assistant. He had been made the Ambassador in a deal made at the San Francisco Charter Conference the previous June, under which the President wanted Mr. Byrnes to take over at State and move Mr. Stettinius into the position as Ambassador as consolation.
Marquis Childs tells of a report prepared by the CIO delegation to the Soviet Union in October which wound up a compromise between the pro-Soviet leftists members of CIO and the objective part of the delegation, which he describes as moderate.
The report related of the Soviet problems in industrial development with an acute shortage of workers, resultant of the war. Men were being put to work as tool and die makers with six months of training when six years was deemed mandatory. Some Germans were being used, but were of little use in skilled jobs as they practiced subtle sabotage.
Many of the delegates concluded that it would take many years for the Soviets to catch up to America in productivity. The report avoided conclusions on trade unions, but some delegates thought the unions showed dedication to democratic ideals. It recommended frequent exchange of visitors between the two countries.
On the last day of the meeting, two of the delegates nearly came to blows regarding differences on the relative merits of the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., a situation which puzzled their Russian hosts.
Samuel Grafton tells of the effects of Congressional delay in extending price controls. Hogs were not being sent to market by farmers, were consuming the feed which could be used to supply Europe.
Export quotas could not be met as a result, threatening loss of some of the foreign markets.
Congressional bungling of the price control issue could trigger a domestic crisis of the type which put the Republicans out of power in 1932. But, Mr. Grafton warns, the Republicans ought not depend too heavily on being the beneficiaries of such a crisis. A third party movement from the left would be more likely in that event.
He recommends that the members of Congress who were playing politics with price control consider these issues. The problem was not merely that the price of eggs might rise a dime or two, but that the world trying to buy and sell eggs might undergo "a sudden and irresistible malformation".
A letter from the man who had previously written suggesting Catholics to be totalitarian and haters of democracy asks that the editors destroy his second letter before printing it because of their editorial comments attached to the first one of February 21.
He says that the editors had purposely withheld it for two or three weeks so that it would be published during Brotherhood Week and thus be garnished with their unfavorable commentary on it, inviting negative replies. The negative responses to his letter, however, he says, had been printed within a few days of his intial letter.
He insists that the column was an "editor's platform" rather than a "people's platform".
The editors respond that the flow of communications to the Platform was irregular. Both the speech by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Mo., on March 5 and the Burke Davis series of articles on controlled sale of liquor had generated a plethora of response. Priority was provided letters which were topical. The letter on the Catholic Church was on a subject hundreds of years old and likely to persist. Thus, the delay in publication of his original letter was not deliberate. For the same reason, they had not deliberately postponed either the publication of his rebuttal, as they had also postponed publication of three letters critical of his letter. Furthermore, they saw no reason why they should withhold their own commentary when it was always subject to subsequent rebuttal.
They then proceed to publish his second letter, despite his directive to tear it up.
The writer quotes at length Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, saying, among other things, that it was not intolerance to protest Vatican support for the Franco Fascist regime in Spain.
The author takes solace therefore in these words—and so there.
Framed Edition
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