The Charlotte News
Friday, October 17, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Syria and Egypt formally challenged the authority of the U.N. to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. They wanted the World Court to determine whether the organization had the legal authority so to act.
After debate on the subject, 14 of the 57 nations, including Russia and the United States, favored partition and 12 opposed it, while 31 had not yet declared a position.
In the context of the Marshall plan to make the political committee of the General Assembly permanent, to offset the Big Five veto on the Security Council, Andrei Gromyko charged before the committee that the U.S. respected neither the U.N. Charter nor the principles on which the organization was founded.
In Rio de Janeiro, a high Brazilian Government official stated that the Government would shortly announce a break in diplomatic relations with Russia, because of a failure to respond to a note demanding explanation for attacks on the Brazilian Government made in editorials appearing in Izvestia. The Literary Gazette, another Communist publication, had stated that the Brazilian "crab with claws" followed the U.S. "horse with hooves".
The British weekly press, including the New Statesman, the Nation, and the Spectator, criticized America for being slow to provide aid to Europe.
Senator Claude Pepper of Florida said that he did not agree with the President’s assessment the previous day that a return to rationing and price control in peacetime would smack of a police state. Most Democrats, however, saw the President’s statement as having attenuated any effort to re-establish price controls, a move which had been favored by two former heads of OPA, Chester Bowles and Leon Henderson.
Philip Murray was re-elected president of the CIO and rejected the invitation of William Green and John L. Lewis of AFL to rejoin the latter organization.
The
Civil Aeronautics Board stated that a device which locked the controls during
flight, usually used on the ground to prevent the plane from being buffeted by
winds, caused an American Airlines DC-4 to flip on its back and go into a
nearly fatal dive over Mt. Riley
At
least he did not try to open
Thirty passengers aboard a French Intercontinental Transport Airlines plane were all safe after the plane was forced to land in Cartagena Bay in Spain when one of its two engines stopped working.
The husband of the Polish war bride accused of murdering a man she met in a bar in Palo Alto, California, claiming that he tried to wrest from her a gun which she had obtained from another man in the bar, said that he was standing by to see what would develop.
A Stanford senior meanwhile charged that she and the man who gave her the gun, also charged in the murder, had robbed him after she had lured him to take a ride on Sunday night.
The South Piedmont teachers of the North Carolina Education Association met in Charlotte and unanimously agreed to oppose the State Board of Education action in revoking the teaching certificate of former Hudson School principal R. L. Fritz for having paid teachers overtime not authorized in the budget. They wanted to take such power away from the State Board, saying that it did not possess the expressed power in the first instance. Mr. Fritz was the president of the NCEA.
The teachers also advocated a minimum pay scale of $2,400 annually for those teachers with a four-year college degree, as opposed to the current $1,620, plus liberalization of retirement benefits, and that salaries be incrementally raised at least $100 per year.
The sports writers had predicted the football scores for the following day.
Our
pick is 49 to 42
On the editorial page, "Roosevelt Jr. Misses the Mark" finds FDR, Jr., having given an expected pro-New Deal speech to the CIO convention in Boston, advocating a coalition of farmers, labor, housewives, and veterans to defeat the special interests who had corralled the Congressional majority during the previous year, that a new Congress could be elected which would not be servile to those interests. The piece thinks that were FDR still alive he would have made similar remarks but would have gone much further, to try to forge a unity of all people in the country, not just the groups mentioned by his son, and would have premised its need on the prospect of world democracy, not on election year politics.
There was no one on the scene who could forge that kind of unity, to avoid the paralyzing situation exemplified by UAW president Walter Reuther saying he would rather see Senator Taft in hell than in the White House and that his enemies had deliberately sought to undermine his reputation by distributing propaganda touting him as the running mate on a Taft ticket.
"Henry Knocks, But No One Hears" suggests that former Vice-President Henry Wallace looked more like a sideshow statesman than the exciting liberal he once was. During the week, he had spoken in Baltimore and said that America’s get-tough policy with Russia had caused the country to make new enemies abroad every day. He charged that Wall Street and the militarists had pushed the policies which had led to this disaster, that the spiral of inflation had created danger at home and abroad.
What he said made sense, and so it was too bad, the piece asserts, that he could no longer make himself heard, having angered too many people with his statements.
"Music
in the
Shrubbery
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Life Among the British", tells of the need for Americans to grasp what conditions were like in England during October, that the new austerity program had meant a return to wartime conditions without the glory. The high prices in Britain eclipsed the inflated prices in America. Britain had also won the war but was enduring continuing hardship since its end.
The
weekly ration was 20 cents worth of meat and one egg
Wilfred
T. Connell, fourth vice-president of the International Photo-Engravers Union
The cycle of inflation had largely nullified increased wages in the country, and stultified the construction of new homes. He recommends greater production to break the spiral, as increased wages alone would only add to it. He favors some increase in wages, but only when production also increased by suitable amounts. He asserts that it was a solution which struck many labor officials as heresy but was an economic fact which had to be faced.
Drew Pearson tells of the Army and Navy strategists believing that Russia could not produce atomic bombs in quantity prior to 1951 even if, as was deemed likely, it had the secret presently. The military was recommending that doctors be trained in how to deal with atomic warfare during that interim before Russia could develop the bomb in significant numbers.
He provides the civil defense preparedness list for doctors.
He had traveled recently in the Midwest, and, contrary to reports of retreat to isolationism, he found patriotic efforts by farmers to provide relief for Europe. The Amvets were also planning to collect packages for Europe, as were the VFW.
One individual in Oklahoma, hearing Mr. Pearson on the radio telling of rats eating the grain, went about killing 300 of them in one day.
The American people thus appeared to be ahead of the Government, not worrying about who would foot the bill for interim aid, but rather giving it themselves. It showed a strong democracy at work, which could prevail over Communism without war.
Marquis Childs, in Paris, tells of the city erecting a façade of well-being for the sake of outsiders, but underneath it ailing mightily. Essential goods were in short supply; soap was non-existent. The third winter since liberation promised to be possibly the toughest yet. American help was vital for the city to make it through the winter.
The Government of Premier Paul Ramadier was weak, with little popular support. The economy thus continued to unravel as inflation continued to mount with the currency inspiring less confidence. Increasingly, trade was taking place in the black market. The gold in the country was in the hands of the peasants, as a means of exchange for butter and wheat. The farmers hoarded grain as there was little reason to sell it for the fact that the money would buy little.
The bad previous winter, followed by spring floods and summer drought, had cut badly into the already dwindling food supply.
Dishwashers who worked in the big restaurants would steal waste fats for the making of crude soap to sell on the black market as a means of survival.
The city seemed to dream of the past, as the present offered little about which to be optimistic.
Joseph Alsop, also in Paris, tells of American diplomats, because of the need to please Congress, playing the role of wilting violets when it came to making hard decisions. Just resigned Undersecretary of State Will Clayton had exhibited these tendencies at the Paris conference of 16 nations which had met to map out their needs under the Marshall Plan. Mr. Clayton had expressed a foolish optimism about those needs so that the nations could deliver a lower figure, more palatable to Congress.
The reluctance to put forward the hard facts to Congress could result in terrible reverses in the world contest with Russia.
The chief planner of the Marshall Plan, George Kennan, had just prepared a report in which he stated candidly the belief that it was impossible to cooperate with the Soviet Union as presently constituted, recommended containment until a change in the Soviet state would take place. While he had been criticized for this view, Mr. Alsop believes him to be correct and that containment could be accomplished with sufficient American effort.
Great progress had been made in Western Europe during the previous year. Whereas a year earlier, the attitude had been that both Italy and France might fall to the Communists, now the only concern for that happening was in the event that America did not provide aid to Italy and France before the winter.
Framed Edition
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