The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 22, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of HUAC, informed the press that the Committee had evidence of subversive activities, including Communist espionage, by at least 79 Hollywood personalities. The evidence, he said, would be presented the following week, after the members could investigate charges made by screenwriter John Moffitt the previous day that a Communist agent, masquerading as head of the William Morris Agency, had tricked a test pilot, "Slick" Goodlin, into revealing information on a supersonic "bomber", the XS-1—which, unknown to the public at the time, Chuck Yeager had, a week earlier, flown to the first supersonic speeds. The agent denied the charges, calling them a "malicious invention", and Air Force officers in Washington indicated that Mr. Goodlin would have had little knowledge of either the mechanics or theory of the plane to impart. Obviously, he was flying only by the seat of his pants, and probably some Beeman's.

Paul McNutt, counsel for the movie industry, countered that the investigation by HUAC had devolved to an effort to try to control what was presented on the motion picture screens of America.

In explaining to the Senate War Investigating Committee why a plan for industrial war mobilization, formulated prior to the war, had been shelved after Pearl Harbor, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal said that the plan stressed too much the Army and Navy roles and was inadequate vis-à-vis delineation of the contributions to be made throughout the economy, especially by the civilian sector. He contended that the contingency plan, especially as revised in 1939, had attempted to apply the lessons articulated by Bernard Baruch as head of the World War I War Industries Board, but, having been developed by the Army and Navy, was too centered on the military.

Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, who had maintained that the Committee leadership was bent on smearing President Roosevelt for political purposes, had insisted that the Committee was not authorized to conduct hearings into mobilization contingencies. Chairman Owen Brewster of Maine, however, disputed the contention and assured that the investigation would proceed without regard to politics.

The U.N. General Assembly had voted 40 to 6 the previous day to set up the Balkans border watch commission, to report to the Security Council re any incursions of the Greek borders. The commission, to be headquartered in Salonika, would begin work on November 21. Russia and Poland, elected to the eleven-member commission, continued to assert that they would boycott participation.

Debate was scheduled to begin this date on the proposal of the Soviets that warmongering by nations be outlawed. The U.S. position was to remain mum and merely vote against the proposal rather than take the Soviet bait and engage in acrimonious debate.

Chile joined Brazil in formally breaking diplomatic relations with Russia, based on the allegations that Communists had spawned a recent strike in the Chilean coal mines. Communists dominated the labor unions of the coal, copper and nitrate mines.

Members of France's Cabinet delivered their resignations to Premier Paul Ramadier so that he might form a new government, the most recent having been formed May 4 when five Communist members were expelled. The Premier, himself, said that he would not resign. Some observers had speculated that the successes in the municipal elections of the Gaulists would allow General De Gaulle to return to power, should Premier Ramadier fail to form a new Cabinet.

Procter & Gamble raised wholesale prices by six percent on its soaps and three percent on its vegetable shortenings, resultant of rising costs of raw materials, as tallow, coconut oil, and cotton seed oil. It was the second such increase within a month, the first having raised soap prices by ten percent and shortenings by three percent.

Guess you'll have to eliminate for awhile the soap and shortening and use ersatz or natural products.

The Bureau of Agricultural Economics predicted that in 1948, prices would continue to rise on livestock and meats as production of meats would decrease by 10 pounds per person versus that of 1947, which had thus far had an average per capita rate of 155 pounds. Egg and poultry prices also were expected to rise, as were dairy products, the latter, however, possibly to drop in the second half of the year. Prices of wheat, which the day before had hit their highest level since 1917 on the Chicago market, would be determined by the size of the 1948 crop. Number 2 red wheat brought $3.16.5 the day before, its highest price since 1920, three years after the Revolution. Corn and other livestock feeds were also expected to increase in price, unless you happened to have the unhappy fate of being a "stewer", in which case you were likely condemned to imminent death. Potatoes and wool also would rise, and fruit would remain about the same.

The continuing price hikes were bad news for Europe.

In St. Paul, Minn., a train wreck resulted in 22 persons injured, at least one seriously, when a Soo Line passenger train crashed head-on into a Northern Pacific freight.

In New York, a tall man wearing an Army jacket strolled up to a group of persons chatting on a Greenwich Village stoop on 10th Street near Bleecker just before midnight, drew a gun, and fired a number of times, then casually walked away, leaving two people dead and two wounded. One of the dead was an Army veteran, 19 years old. The other was a 66-year old woman who knocked her 19-year old son out of the line of fire and was then hit herself. There appeared no apparent motive for the crime.

The secretary to Congressman Hamilton Jones had informed The News that the investigation into the delays and circuitous routing of airmail into the Carolinas was underway. The Post Office Department had dispatched several inspectors to determine the problem and its solution.

Ralph Gibson tells, on page 21-A, of an inter-city bus driver, with twenty years experience, having gotten busing in his blood.

The piece views that as the point, that the U.S. would go so far that it would accumulate as many detractors abroad as Russia had.

Mr. Warburg had come to the view that seeking to put in place in Europe and Asia a type of free enterprise and capitalism as in the U.S. would be "impossible" because "you can't have capitalism without capitalists."

The piece thinks that the opinion rang true, with leftists governments on the Continent hemming in whatever few capitalists remained after the long series of dictators had winnowed them out. It rendered dim the hope of stopping Russia by erecting a democracy here and there or by establishing industries to feed the populations. The U.S. would need either to adopt to living with governments dissimilar to the United States in Western Europe or prepare for the eventuality of war with the Soviet Union.

The problem, it thinks, was the steady stream of people, among whom were often some of its best young minds, leaving the state for the North and West. It included also farm laborers, tenant farmers, and the like, at the bottom of the socio-economic scale.

The remedy therefore was not to promote bigger families in the vein of Hitler and Mussolini, but to create new, diversified industry and agriculture to improve incomes, and to provide better educational opportunities for more of the population.

There was too much praise of sale of textile plants to outside interests and too little regarding the development of rural industries.

It suggests that enough evidence of Communist agents at work in the country had surfaced in recent months to be disturbing to thoughtful citizens, that it was not all a witch-hunt. But the drive to root out such agents would cause suffering to many liberals who were no more than proper exponents of freedom and democracy. In consequence, civil liberties had to be carefully protected in the process. "But we cannot afford to leave the Reds to their dirty, silent game."

The piece thinks that the hunt for Communists in Hollywood was apropos as they posed a danger, as foreign agents, to everyone. But it deserved better treatment than provided by HUAC, where investigations had a tendency to turn into inquisitions. It required more than the word of producers that Communist ideology was not being injected into films.

"And more than the airy charges of dapper Adolphe Menjou that he thinks he knows some Reds."

The position ignored the fact that America blended its capitalism with socialism, that capitalism had failed in Europe prior to the war and that Europe was in too narrow straits to find recovery in a capitalist system. For America to demand such a return would be tantamount to a dictatorial policy, lending credence to Russian criticism of the Marshall Plan as having imperialist aims.

The fundamental difference between socialism and Communism was that the adherents to the former emulated America and wanted to preserve civil liberties, while the Communists were intractably opposed to America and wished to take away basic freedoms.

America needed all the friends it could find and so it would be dangerous to deny aid on the basis of forms of socialism not antithetical to the American system.

The banks had also allegedly conspired with the large insurance companies to dominate the money markets. Such a deal had been worked out on December 5, 1941 to float securities, followed by a meeting on the following May 5 in which it was agreed that the insurance companies would have first option to purchase 50 percent of any stock or bond flotation in which they expressed interest, that they would refrain from bidding on stocks and bonds offered by competitive bid, and would discourage other investment bankers from selling securities through competitive bidding. The result, claimed Justice, had rendered money rates artificially high and non-competitive, and costs of floating the stocks and bonds exorbitant.

He provides a list of other charges against the "17 club".

The need was for dollars and those could be had by the unfreezing of the 400 million remaining of the 1946 3.75 billion dollar U.S. loan, frozen because of Britain's refusal to abide the condition that foreign Sterling, especially from Italy and France, also critically short on dollars but having an ample reserve of Sterling, be accepted in trade. But the temporary solution could only be of benefit if the Marshall Plan were actually implemented. Otherwise, there would be economic collapse despite making it through the winter on emergency aid.

The strangest manifestation of it had come at a Presidential press conference the prior week, in which the President suddenly had taken exception to price controls and rationing, calling them incidents in peacetime of a "police state", which he would avoid to the extent possible. The President admitted that the Republican plan of eliminating controls to stimulate production and thereby level out prices had not worked, but he nevertheless had accepted the situation and seemed to like it. That was so despite his having vetoed the first price control extension bill in June, 1946 for its inclusion of such a morass of bureaucratic regulations as to make further price control impracticable.

But now the President had given in on the matter, demonstrating how becoming accustomed to change worked even at the highest levels.

"The President couldn't have looked more peculiar in a long skirt."

Until 1869, the curriculum had been fairly rigid, requiring such courses as Greek, Latin, Hebrew (so's you could read backwards), logic, some applied mathematics, and a little science. Most other American colleges followed suit.

When science took the field as a star player, however, in the latter half of the Nineteenth century, it began to have a more prominent role in the curriculum. Charles Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869 and retained the position for forty years, broadening the curriculum during his tenure and allowing students to choose whether to concentrate on a given area or be eclectic in their choice of esoterica. The elective system thus created was altered somewhat under A. Lawrence Lowell, his successor, who remained as president until 1933. He inaugurated a "concentration system", the equivalent of majors, requiring the student to select one field on which to concentrate, while also being permitted electives in other areas.

Educators came to question the validity of the Lowell system because of its tendency to allow students to pick a curriculum outside the major which did not require analytical, abstract thought, to enable a broad view of the world. The educators thus fixed on providing a system which would afford a general education regarding values and establishing of clear thinking, with an understanding of the physical and social world in which the individual lives collectively.

In 1946, Harvard had adopted a system utilized for many years in other colleges, whereby the student could concentrate on a specialized field while at the same time studying a more generalized curriculum, including the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—not to mention physical education, and, at the University of North Carolina, at least, demonstration of accumulation of the ability to swim prior to receipt of the sheep's skin, so that one would not be either consumed by the sharks or driven to ground by the undertow of the waves.

At Harvard, the student still had the option of operating under the Lowell system, but 500 students had chosen the new hybrid vehicle the previous year, and 1,700 of 5,600 undergraduates had so opted in 1947. Following several more years of experimentation in the process, the Harvard dons would determine whether to make the new system mandatory.

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