The Charlotte News

Monday, October 20, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Jack Warner of Warner Brothers Studios told HUAC that persons with "un-American leanings" had infiltrated the movie industry, mainly in the writing division, but refrained from labeling them Communists. Un-American ideas, he ventured, had crept into the scripts, first noted in 1936 and 1937, but the studios had cut them out. He said that he would not know a Communist if he saw one. He had seen Fascists abroad but had not recalled seeing any in Hollywood.

Mr. Warner's attorney was Paul McNutt, former Governor of the Philippines and head of the War Manpower Commission, once had been considered as a potential Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1940.

In Hollywood, actor George Murphy, future California Senator between 1965 and 1971, announced a campaign to get Hollywood behind the Republicans in 1948, to remove the specter of Hollywood being largely comprised of either New Deal Democrats or radicals and crackpots. The committee thus formed included Robert Montgomery, Walt Disney, Leo McCarey, Adolphe Menjou, and Ginger Rogers. Charter members included Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Dennis Morgan, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Harold Peary, Mary Pickford, Penny Singleton, Robert Sparks, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Jeanette MacDonald, Gene Raymond, Edward Arnold, Walter Pidgeon, William Bendix, and director Sam Wood.

Russia asked the General Assembly of the U.N. to reverse the decision of the political committee and order the military personnel of the U.S. and Britain out of Greece, and to disapprove of the border watch commission favored by the U.S. and approved by the 57-nation committee.

There was still no resolution on the deadlock in the vote to seat a third new rotating two-year member of the Security Council, between the Ukraine and India, the Ukraine still leading 29 to 24 but without the necessary two-thirds majority of those nations present.

In France, the party formed by General Charles De Gaulle was leading in 29 of 37 municipal elections in the previous day's balloting. The party received about 40 percent of the vote thus far tabulated, against 28 percent for the Communists and 19 percent for the Socialists.

A report by Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug stated that the country could supply 20 billion dollars worth of aid to Europe without impairing its resources. To do so, it had to conserve grain, retain export controls, and maintain high production and transportation.

Senator Claude Pepper of Florida criticized the report as being too timid, as it suggested that the country should provide aid only to the extent that Americans would not have to sacrifice, when Europe's need for the aid was crucial to the future of world peace.

The I.C.C. was seeking a refund from 719 railroads for alleged overcharges during the war for transportation of inert explosives.

The Southern Governors Conference began in Asheville, N.C., with criticism by Virginia Governor Tuck of Federal spending during the previous 15 years and by Governor Beauford Jester of Texas of the tidelands oil case decision of the Supreme Court, granting the Federal Government control of the tidelands oil off California. Governor Jester believed it forecasted a move to nationalize all of the vital natural resources of the nation.

And, of course, the presently nationalized oil industry, as for many decades now, no longer profiting any private interests, proved Governor Jester to have been a prophet of limitless foresight.

In Hamilton, Bermuda, winds estimated at 90 mph hit the island as a hurricane came within 75 miles of it with winds at 100 mph. The hurricane was moving within 50 miles before moving out to sea. The winds knocked the mast off the yacht Zephyr, which had won the Amorita Cup series the previous season.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia recorded a severe earthquake, centered 3,400 miles away, probably off the coast of Mexico. Other recording centers in the U.S. also registered the earthquake.

In Atlanta, a 12-year old boy who wanted to become a pilot got in a small plane and started the engine, began taxiing down the field, until he bumped into a DC-3. No one was injured and both planes were only slightly damaged. His parents indicated that the boy went to the airport every chance he got, but had no actual experience in flying.

In Raleigh, a man who had escaped from the Randolph County Prison Camp the previous Thursday with three other inmates was caught when the driver whom he had allegedly kidnaped at gunpoint alerted police that the man was crouched on the floor of his car. The escapee was serving a term of five to eight years for highway robbery. Another of the three escapees was located in a freight car. Two remained at large.

Be on the lookout. If you see them, call the police instantly.

Four Charlotteans died this date in either accidents or shooting deaths, one in a train collision with a car, another in an auto accident, and two by shooting, one accidentally.

In London, black marketeers were rumored to be offering as much as 750 pounds, about $3,000, for invitations to the wedding in November of Princess Elizabeth and Lt. Philip Mountbatten. That was so despite the invitations being non-transferable and the prospect of identification being needed to acquire entrance to Westminster Abby for the wedding.

According to the Carolina Farmer section of the newspaper, weather was no problem at the Nixon place in Lincoln County, as Mr. Nixon had given up reliance on the weathermen.

Premier Stalin had come to the conference desiring peace and ironing out of differences between the three allies. But Prime Minister Churchill wanted to wait until the war was over before setting up the rules for the peace, waiting until the assembly was convened in which Britain would have a majority. The failure to reach agreement on those rules and the veto continued to haunt, through the San Francisco Charter Conference in spring, 1945, to the present time in the U.N.

The selfishness of Britain and Russia, plus some by America, had created the current tension. In consequence, the parties had not entered the postwar era in a spirit of cooperation, but rather under one of compromise and expediency.

The piece expects that such would be the case everywhere the committee heard testimony, that farmers would express support for subsidies for their particular crop and for the soil conservation program which had saved their topsoil. It was a different story from the early days of the New Deal when farmers often distrusted the Federal Government.

The editorial thinks it good to remember that it took a long time for the farmers to reach the point of awareness of the munificence of Government, and that future resistance to change could be as costly as it had been in the past.

The Citizen was not disturbed by the prospect as the state had only eleven Representatives until recently and only ten for a time before that. And the state was producing babies in surplus, with prospects good for the postwar era, "babies and more babies".

The peak had been reached in 1921, at 33.3 births per 1,000 and now stood at about 29 per 1,000, but rising with an estimated 10,000 more births expected for the year than in 1946. The problem was providing a good education for the little ones.

The piece bets on the "babies to maintain a full House."

Mr. Pearson had acquired a document, however, consisting of the minutes of a January 20, 1942 Nazi meeting, the Wannsee Conference, at which the "final solution" was determined on the "Jewish problem", that is extermination. The public had not been apprised of the names of these Nazi planners and those who still lived had not been indicted.

The plan had been to work the Jews to death in concentration camps that they would "fall out through natural diminution." Even should some survive, they would be ultimately exterminated to avoid forming new Jewish cells. He publishes verbatim excerpts from the minutes.

The participants were: Gauletier Dr. Meyer, Reichamtsleiter Dr. Leibrandt, State Secretaries Dr. Stuckart, Naumann, Dr. Freisler, and Dr. Beuhler, Under State Secretary Luther, SS-Oberfuehrer Klopfer, Ministerialdirektor Kritzinger, SS-Gruppenfuehrer Hofman, and, the chief architect of the "final solution", the deceased head of the Security Police and the SD, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich—fatally wounded by shooting and explosion of a bomb from an ambuscade by underground Czech operatives in Prague in late May, 1942 while he rode in his open Mercedes-Benz, the incident which, at the direction of Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, led the Nazis, in search of the perpetrators the following month, to raze the village of Lidice and murder its male inhabitants, sending the women and children to concentration camps where most did not survive the war.

The report places primary responsibility for the "final solution" with Heydrich and Himmler—also dead since his May, 1945 suicide, shortly after capture by the Allies at the end of the war in Europe.

Heydrich had proposed driving the Jews out of German life and the "lebensraum" of the German people. Himmler forbade Jewish emigration, replacing the emigration program with evacuation of Jews to the East as a "further solution possibility", as authorized by the Fuehrer. Such actions were temporary, pending the "final solution", which would involve eleven million Jews.

A list of countries with Jews in Europe, including England, Ireland, Switzerland and Scandinavia, as well as Russia, which contained about 5.25 million Jews according to the Nazis, was then included in the minutes, indicative of Hitler's plan to occupy these countries and then exterminate their Jews as well.

In the East, the Jews would be employed in big labor gangs and those capable of work would be assigned to build roads, during which it was expected that they would "fall out through natural diminution." Those surviving the ordeal would be treated "accordingly".

'Though we called your friend from his bed this night, he could not speak for you,
'For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.'

It did not imply that America would be powerless to affect how its aid dollars were spent, but the effect would have to be indirect, by making it clear that further nationalization could impair productivity and thus should not be undertaken. If the action were directed, however, by fiat, then it would work to the advantage of the Communists and extreme left of the Labor Party, desirous of failure of the Plan.

Britain's economic problems did not stem from immediate effects but rather extended back in time, such that the overseas investments, especially in America, which had been accumulated since the Victorian era of the late Nineteenth century, had been consumed largely by the two world wars, especially the late war. Added to that were huge debts to India and other Commonwealth nations.

The Russians had trained a German Army consisting largely of the German survivors of the Stalingrad offensive who would be loyal to Russia in the event of evacuation of foreign troops from Germany and could move in from Russia easily to fill a power vacuum as in Korea.

Thus, while an aim of American foreign policy was to get Russia out of Germany and thus out of the Balkans nations in which Russia maintained its foothold on the valid premise of continuing communication lines with Germany and Austria, it could not, because of the inevitable result, accept such a Russian offer if it were presented. American policy would want a German and Austrian treaty formed and supervised democratic elections assured for a unified Germany, both economically and politically.

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