The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 25, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, in his address the previous evening by radio, asked Congress to take action to control prices to avoid both depression in the country and totalitarian aggression abroad from the peril presented to foreign countries unable to afford to purchase necessary American food and supplies.
House Majority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana and Representative Jesse Wolcott of Michigan, chairman of the House Banking Committee, said that the President was playing politics by linking inflation to foreign aid. Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, chairman of the House-Senate committee investigating prices, complained that the President had not given much direction on how to remedy rising prices.
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon praised the speech and asserted the belief that the Congress would enact the necessary measures.
The price of wheat fell below $3 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, in response to needed rain falling in the wheat-producing states and the President's call for a special session. Cotton prices, which had dropped the previous day in New York, went back up on the futures exchange. Grains also began rising again after falling their permissible limit the previous day, but then closed lower by 1 3/8 to 3 1/8. The response in the grain market was said by traders to be based on rumors that the President would seek re-imposition of price controls on grains and limit margin purchases on the futures market, as well as require allocation of supplies among mills, distillers, processors and other industries.
The remains of the first of the war dead from Europe to be re-interred in the United States were scheduled to arrive in New York the following morning aboard the Joseph V. Connolly, bearing 6,200 bodies. The combined military services planned to hold a commemoration service in their honor after a procession bearing one coffin on a caisson would pass from the pier to Central Park.
A
group of actors had raised funds to send actress Karen Morley
Another
group, the Committee for the First Amendment, planned to air a half-hour program
nationally, "Hollywood Fights Back"
They were all Commies. Everybody knows that.
The President proclaimed all of Maine a disaster area in the wake of the wind storm which precipitated numerous forest fires, centering around the resort town of Bar Harbor and six nearby villages. Eleven people had lost their lives and 100,000 acres had been burned, leaving 2,500 homeless. The damage also extended into New Hampshire. There were also reports of arson as far away as Cape Cod.
In Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, a United Airlines DC-6 had crashed the previous day, killing all 52 persons aboard after a fire had caused it to plummet to earth and explode, 1,500 yards from an emergency landing strip which the pilot was seeking to reach. The plane had been bound from Los Angeles to Chicago. No cause of the crash was yet determined.
Through subsequent reconstruction of the aircraft by the Civil Aeronautics Board, it was determined that the probable cause of the fire, which led to disintegration of the aircraft during flight, was the regular transfer of fuel by the captain from an outboard to an inboard alternative tank, which was not stopped in time to prevent overflow into the cabin heater intake, causing ignition. The crews of the DC-6 had not been warned of any hazards in this regard or trained to take any special precautions to prevent such overflow. The manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft, stated that the plane was not designed for such inflight transfers of fuel. But crews had been regularly making the transfers. The CAB report determined that the cabin fire was not survivable prior to the crash, but had not yet reached the cockpit.
In consequence of the crash, the airline industry voluntarily would withdraw the DC-6 from service on November 11, 1947, until the cause could be determined and modifications made accordingly. The withdrawal would include the President's new plane, The Independence, a DC-6.
Most of the nation's liquor distillers were set to close at midnight for 60 days, pursuant to the request of the President and the Citizens Food Committee, to conserve grain for Europe, estimated at ten to twelve million bushels of grain, about a tenth of that required to feed Europe during the winter. The compliant distillers represented 95 percent of the whiskey and industrial alcohol production in the country.
In Moscow, Brazilian diplomats were being deprived of exit visas until the Soviet Government was convinced that Russian diplomats in Brazil would be granted visas, following the termination by Brazil of diplomatic relations with Russia after it had refused to apologize for criticism of Brazil's Army and President presented in the Communist Weekly Literary Gazette.
In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the Federal Government accused a corporation of defrauding prospective homeowners, mainly veterans, out of $156,000, by demanding 20 percent down payments on hundreds of prefabricated homes which were then never delivered.
Dick
Young of The News reports that the
long-range program for planning to meet the needs of Charlotte into the future
would be presented on Monday afternoon at the Charlotte Planning Board. Be sure
and attend
Forty unidentified Canadian geese made an unauthorized landing at the airport in Shawnee, Oklahoma. As airport personnel took up shotguns, they took off again before any could be apprehended.
Emery Wister, in the theater section, tells of North Carolina's Shepperd Strudwick
On the editorial page, "Taft's 'Riot of Inconsistencies'" finds that Senator Robert Taft's stock had gone up in recent weeks in polling data, presumably responsible for his having declared himself the previous day as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948. It thinks that the reason could be found in his criticism of the Administration for its "riot of inconsistencies" on domestic and foreign policy. The piece agrees that the Administration had been inconsistent on foreign policy, but that it had been largely produced by the effort at bi-partisanship, the inconsistencies having been contributed equally as much by Senator Taft.
Senator Taft disfavored universal military training and the Marshall Plan while being an advocate of resistance to Soviet expansion, paradoxical positions. The President favored the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe while also enunciating the Truman Doctrine for resisting Communism in the Balkans, paradoxical in the sense that one was trumpeting peaceful ends while the other was tending toward the bellicose.
The people seemed willing to accept the paradoxical notion that the country could live isolated from the rest of the world while resisting Communism, similar to the views held by Senator Taft. Such attitudes accounted for his surge in popularity. But the fact that the President had been inconsistent by favoring on the one hand a peaceful plan put him ahead of Senator Taft in terms of the good of the world.
"Regional Schools for the South" tells of the exorbitant price paid by the region for its institutionalized segregation, especially in its schools. The "separate but equal" school systems were hardly equal, causing further costs socially and economically for the region.
To try to remedy this deficiency, the Southern Governors Conference, meeting in Asheville, had proposed regional schools for black and white students to receive technical, professional, and graduate training. The piece thinks it a good move to raise educational standards, especially for black students. It would enable pooling of resources among the states to help the poorer Southern states which could not afford to provide better schools.
"Our President Leads Again" finds hope from the President's broadcast of the previous night, calling for a special session of Congress to provide emergency aid to Europe and to deal with inflation. It was as much a surprise as it had been to the Republicans that the President had once again decided to seize the reins and lead, abandoning his too tenuous approach previously undertaken in the spirit of bipartisanship. The Republican leadership in Congress had believed that they had the President hemmed in regarding the Marshall Plan and re-establishment of price control. But his new direction signaled, regardless of political consequences for the coming year, a harbinger perhaps of better days ahead.
A
piece from the
Washington Post,
titled "Historic Shrines", tells of Congress having held in abeyance at the
last session the fate of Fort Sumter, which had been declared surplus property
by the War Department, to be sold. A private entity, the National Council for
Historic Sites and Buildings, was working to try to coordinate private and
public funding to maintain the site as an historic landmark. They would form a
national trust to receive gifts for the purpose, patterned after that in
England
The
piece believes that the Council
Drew Pearson provides excerpts of some letters he had received from people across the country, as a means of demonstrating how the people were ahead of their Government in providing aid for the peoples of the world. The writers were commentng favorably on Mr. Pearson's idea of a "Friendship Train" to run from Los Angeles to New York, collecting food and other goods along the way, as a means of telling the Europeans that the contributions of the country were coming from the sacrifices of individual Americans for humanitarian reasons and not simply from the Government for political expediency, as claimed by the Russians.
Marquis Childs, in London, tells of Europeans keeping an eye on America as having the power for good and evil with its vast economic resources. Its decisions would largely determine the fate of Britain and the Continent.
The Communists also understood the fact.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had warned U.S. Ambassador to London Lewis Douglas in May that the French situation would be critical by the fall. Yet, America had not acted to implement the Marshall Plan, proposed in June, awaiting delayed mapping of the needs by the 16 nations to receive the aid and then the report of the Harriman committee at home to determine the country's resources to provide the aid.
Mr. Bevin understood that divided government in the U.S. meant that foreign policy would move slowly if at all, for political reasons.
Americans tended to want to blame Communism for Europe's ills. Europeans did not see it so simply, rather believed that the tension between the U.S. and Russia was leading to an inevitable war, with Western Europe caught in the middle.
In France, for instance, the strikes were not so much the result of Communist activity as they were a function of the economic strains from the dollar shortage, placing stress on wage earners. It was deemed surprising that there had not been more strikes than in the transportation facilities.
Joseph Alsop finds the President's call for a special session of Congress and his address on the need to bring down the spiral of inflation to be signal finally of his having come to grips with the need for emergency aid to Europe. The question remained whether anything could be done to halt inflation, even if the Congress were to grant the President authority to act and if he was determined to take the requisite action.
Former OPA heads Chester Bowles and Paul Porter both agreed that to try to revive the complicated price control structure of OPA days during the war would be futile. They concurred that rolling back the prices of a few selected commodities and raw materials would be most effective, those of wheat, corn, cotton, steel, copper, fats and oils. Mr. Porter also wanted prices controlled on livestock, while Mr. Bowles disagreed, his experience having convinced him that controls on meat without rationing would not work and that rationing could be made 70 percent effective within 90 days. Mr. Porter believed that effective control had to be implemented for two years so that producers would not hold back product in anticipation of higher prices after the release of controls.
Mr. Bowles would penalize cattle producers for over-fattening their herds, where a lot of grain was being consumed. To do so, he would freeze prices of livestock over a certain weight, lower then than the hogs and cattle with trim waistlines. That would save 170 million bushels of grain for Europe.
He also favored wage control, as did Mr. Porter. But, he also favored an excess profits tax as during the war, encouraging producers to put profits back into increasing production while lowering prices.
A letter writer who had written on October 14 in response to an October 9 piece by Tom Lynch on the World Federalists, favoring world government centered around the U.N., writes again in response to the October 18 letter from the head of the Charlotte chapter of the World Federalists praising the Lynch piece and criticizing the writer's responsive letter. He reiterates his belief that the World Federalist notion, that some organization would be better than none, even if without the Soviet-bloc nations participating, would divide the world into two camps and make war more likely. Such a union, he thinks, would be tantamount to the old League of Nations and thus virtually useless in preventing war.
A letter from failed Republican Congressional candidate P. C. Burkholder responds to a letter responding to his previous letter critical of the Truman Administration for perpetuating the New Deal, under which, he claims, inflation had occurred leading to current problems. He again praises the Republican Congress for keeping the Truman Administration in check on its spending. He stresses that he had not criticized the Republican Congress, as the previous letter writer had insisted that he had.
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