The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 30, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site
Ed. Note: The front page reports that HUAC had cited two more screenwriters for
contempt for refusing to answer whether they had ever been members of the
Communist Party, bringing the complement to ten cited writers, producers, or directors, including Adrian Scott
Poet
and writer Berthold Brecht
Better watch those songs, too, as they will infiltrate and warp your mind. First thing you know, you will think that Hitler was a bad influence.
Secretary of State Marshall was preparing the Marshall Plan for presentation to the Congressional foreign relations and appropriations committees on November 10. The main focus would be on its likelihood of success and saving Western Europe from Communism. The basics of the Plan were that the U.S. would provide six billion dollars worth of relief supplies free to Europe during the first year, plus such things as factory equipment on the basis of a loan, and then further aid based on calculated needs, as yet undeterminable, decreasing each year as progress in recovery would be made, with the goal of recovery within four years. The Plan also called for reconstruction loans from the World Bank.
Senator Taft told a press conference that he foresaw no possibility of bi-partisan cooperation on control of prices in the coming special session of Congress, to begin November 17.
Attorney
General Tom Clark announced the filing of anti-trust law violations against seventeen
In Paris, the French National Assembly provided a narrow vote of confidence to the Ramadier Government, as the Premier sought to steer the nation between the extremes of Gaullism and Communism in the wake of the municipal elections which delivered 40 percent of the vote for the Gaullist coalition and 30 percent for the Communists. Premier Ramadier had removed both parties' representatives from the Cabinet and consequently both parties had complained. He said that he wanted France to be for Frenchmen, not a camp for Americans or Russians.
A plane crash near Klamath Falls, Oregon, had claimed the life of Governor Earl Snell of that state. Two other top State officials also died in the crash of the small plane carrying four persons.
Maine received more needed rain to quench the forest fires of the previous two weeks which, the previous weekend, had wreaked havoc on Bar Harbor and other nearby resort communities before spreading to other parts of the state and into adjoining states.
In Joliet, Ill., a 700-lb. woman was removed from her home to a hospital, requiring the lifting capabilities of seventeen men, including ten policemen. They finally resorted to having an undertaker provide his casket cart to load her into the ambulance. But it took the cart, two undertakers, the policemen, and five hospital employees to unload her. She was placed on a hospital bed reinforced with a number of slabs of lumber. She had been bedridden for twenty years and suffered a hip injury a week earlier.
In Sanatorium, N.C., three inmates of the prison ward at the State tuberculosis sanatorium had escaped. They locked up the attendant and stole a tin of narcotics, stole a prison truck, abandoned it, and then commandeered a vehicle from a couple after hitching a ride. One of the men had been incarcerated on a health law violation and had only 27 days left to serve of his year-long sentence.
Be on the lookout. They are armed with coughs.
Tom Watkins tells of the jury considering the verdict in the case of the alleged misappropriation of parking meter collections by the chief Safety Inspector of the City, who, according to the co-defendant in the case who had already pleaded guilty, had allegedly spent the money on bootleg liquor for employees for the Department. The defense had claimed that the co-defendant, not yet sentenced, was selling the jury a bill of goods to protect his own skin by laying guilt on the other.
They had been out since 10:00 a.m.
Keep your fingers crossed. On the outcome may turn the fate of the republic.
Tom Fesperman reports of a five-year old girl, pictured on the page, getting her big break, set to appear in "Madame Butterfly" at the armory-auditorium, in replacement of the four-year old girl who ordinarily played the role but had become ill at the last minute. The Puccini opera would begin at 8:15 p.m. Don't be late.
On the editorial page, "A 'Master Plan' for Charlotte" praises the master plan given the city by the City Planning Board, designed to set goals for the city for the ensuing twenty years. The defeat the previous Tuesday of the 2.5 million dollar bond election for construction of a new auditorium, however, had dampened the prospects of achieving short-range goals, even if hope was seen from the fact that it had lost by only 83 votes.
It urges the residents to understand the long-term prospectus for the city and that to make progress, these goals would need to be achieved at each step of the way, to keep pace with other modern cities across the country, which were beginning to undertake post-war planning for balanced growth, with facilities planned to meet the inevitable population changes.
"Americanism
in Washington" tells of chief Hollywood censor, head of the M.P.A.A.—which still
rates your movies, so's you don't see too many nudies intervening the war and shoot-'em-up scenes
or hear dirty-birdy words
He had, says the piece, described perfectly what the Thomas Committee was doing. It was a strange method of impressing the citizenry of the evils of the U.S.S.R. To interrupt the circus, it was time for Congress to overhaul the procedures by which its committees operated to assure the protection of civil liberties. A clarification of the President's Loyalty Order, which allowed the FBI to conduct investigations into Government employees to determine loyalty, was also due clarification—as recommended by the President's Committee on Civil Rights in their report released the previous day. The American Society of Newspaper Editors had condemned an attempt to implement the Order in such a way that the ordinary affairs of civilian agencies would be beyond public scrutiny.
The piece concludes that the Committee on Civil Rights might have stressed more the un-American trend which had developed in Washington of late.
"Bright Note on Inflation" finds the varied opinions on the budget capabilities for 1948 remarkable, from the estimate of Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder that there would be enough in a balanced budget for aid to Europe and perhaps payment on the national debt, but no room for a tax cut, to that of Senator Taft, who believed that there could be a tax cut and limited foreign aid, to that of Congressman Ralph Knutson, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, who believed that a four billion dollar tax cut, as had been twice vetoed in 1947, would be on the table the following year and that European aid would be no more than a billion dollars. Added to that panoply was the opinion of conservative economist Raymond Moley, who asserted that Americans could have their cake and eat it, too, with all of the above proposals available under a ten billion dollar surplus, six billion higher than the President's estimate, based on record profits and high wages.
The piece concludes: "Inflation, it's wonderful."
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Call for Southern Research", tells of a report, Higher Education in the South, published by the U.N.C. Press, conceived by the late Dean Kremer J. Hoke of William & Mary, commending the progress made in the South in fifty years. In 1897, a fourth of the white native adults of the South had been unable to read or write. Schools were partisan and ecclesiastical and higher education was at its nadir, lacking financial support.
But financial support was still lacking among Southern colleges and universities. The study showed, for instance, that half of the teachers in graduate schools in the South did not meet a standard which assessed whether they could properly educate creative students or had made a significant contribution to the field in which they were teaching.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Taft having decided to assemble his joint Committee on the Economic Report three days before the November 17 start date for the special session, to discuss the findings of the subcommittees which had toured the country during the summer to investigate high prices. The most exhaustive study was performed in the East. That subcommittee, chaired by Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, found that food prices were the primary inflationary culprit, as one-third of the family budget was devoted to it. Consumer food prices had risen 50 to 67 percent. Profiteering by food producers was minimal, despite record income. The primary cause of high prices was the wild speculation in the grain, hog, and beef markets. It also found that the wages of special groups within the economy, blacks, teachers, white-collar workers and others, had not kept pace with the rising cost of living.
One of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress was Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska. But he had obtained an appointment for his son to Annapolis, at a cost to the taxpayers of $10,000 per year, then allowed him to drop out after two years. Mr. Pearson notes that some Congressmen favored a requirement that anyone attending the military academies be required to serve for five years following graduation.
AFL leaders were suggesting that it was only a matter time before UMW head John L. Lewis would once again take his union and depart from AFL, following his defeat in a bid to control the executive board at the AFL convention in San Francisco. Many of the AFL leadership were displeased with the antics of Mr. Lewis and did not care if he left. Dan Tobin of the Teamsters was chief among them.
Senator Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan only wanted to work through the U.N. with regard to sending military aide to Palestine. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine reminded him of Greece, but Senator Vandenburg declared that not to be a precedent.
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was facing strong opposition in his home state for bucking the GOP regulars. But, he said, the opposing voices were from the office buildings, not from among the workers, and he was confident of victory when he was up for re-election in 1950.
Most Capitol Hill observers believed the President was wrong in telling Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett that his choice for an Assistant Secretary, Mark Etheridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal, would not be confirmed by the Senate.
Most Congressmen returning from the tour of Europe had solidified their opinions gleaned prior to the trip. Few had changed. One Congressman who visited Norway saw cows feeding on rolls of cellulose fiber and was told that those who survived the winter would do so on dried fish. It was uncertain how the milk would taste.
American-born Congressman August Andresen of Red Wing, Minn., whose parents came from Norway, spoke over a nationwide network to Norway when he visited the country during the tour.
Future Senate Majority Leader, Congressman Mike Mansfield of Montana, told the White House that he had seen plenty of underfed children during the tour of Europe, disputing the contrary observations of John Taber of New York, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Millions of such children were there, he informed. It only took two good eyes to see them.
Marquis Childs, in Wolverhampton, England, tells of the West Midland Division of the National Coal Board having established its offices in Himley Hall on the edge of the town. The $180,000 house had been purchased after nationalization of the coal mines on the justification that the fields beneath the estate could be mined for coal to reimburse the Government for the cost. Nevertheless, the Conservative press had attacked the expenditure as an extravagance during a time of Government austerity. That same press was also attacking the stated intention of the Coal Board to dig for coal on the Lyme Hall estate, turned over to the National Trust by the owners as a museum and public park.
They should get together with the coughers who escaped from the State sanatorium and try to shift emphasis to mining gold beneath the Cliffs of Dover.
The average output per man-shift in Britain's mines was about a ton, whereas in the U.S. it was five tons, the difference being primarily in the lack of modernization of equipment in the British mines, but also because of the absence in England of many broad, straight seams of coal as found in the U.S., and the presence of water in many British seams. The Coal Board was seeking to remedy that discrepancy and production had improved in the West Midland Division since nationalization the previous January.
The new Battle for Britain on the economic front had as a goal production of two tons of coal per day per man-shift. The coming of Christmas, bringing the incentive of earning more pay, was likely to raise production, already rising slowly.
Joseph Alsop, in Trieste—a by-line mistakenly attributed to Samuel Grafton—, tells more of the free city under supervision of the U.N. It was a toy state on the scale of Lichtenstein, where nothing agreeable or disagreeable was easily hidden. The Communist Party existed openly, with its headquarters just across the waterfront street from the headquarters of the Anglo-American forces.
He focuses on Vittorio Vidali, the probable controller of the Communist party apparatus in Trieste. He had been forced to leave Fascist Italy under Mussolini and joined the Comintern. After training in Moscow, he had acted as an itinerant agent in Europe. He had been sent to Spain, working to wreck the Loyalist movement from within during the Spanish Civil War. He was then transferred to Mexico, working under Ambassador Oumansky, an operative of the secret police who betrayed his superiors to rise in the Communist ranks. In 1943, he was brought by Moscow to Italy to work in the underground, spending as much time fighting future democratic competitors as the fascist enemies.
At present, his mission consisted of watching over the Trieste station on the underground railway to Yugoslavia, which brought Communist recruits, some involuntarily, from all over Europe, and, primarily, bringing Trieste under the power of Marshal Tito. His ploy had to work against an anti-Communist majority of 200,000 persons and so dirty tricks had to be employed. Infiltration techniques were utilized to penetrate labor unions, social clubs, and cultural organizations. The union in the shipyards was Communist-controlled and the workers of one shipyard so controlled attempted to lead a general strike, which failed. It had been designed to coincide with the attempted September 15 coup, which had also failed.
Economic infiltration was also utilized, organizing phony firms to gain a foothold in Trieste's economy.
Terror was used in other cases, as with the anti-Tito editor, Ursic, who had suddenly disappeared. An Istrian priest, Bulesich, was publicly eliminated.
A letter writer finds Vaughn Shoemaker's editorial cartoon of October 25 to harm the cause of democracy and provide the newspaper with immunity from the Red label for several months.
Just
how he came to this warped opinion is unfathomable, other than through gross
misinterpretation
He then quotes extensively from the late Fiorello La Guardia's "Blueprint for Total Labor Unity", which had appeared on June 29 in PM, and believes it an antidote to reaction. He concludes that if reaction continued in the country until 1952, a recipe for prevention of which Mr. La Guardia had sought in his article to provide, the country would be ripe for Communism. He advises rooting for the liberals who had been smeared.
That's a good sentiment, but first you must take your time by your lights and properly identify what is liberal and what isn't. That, too, has been a major problem, at times more so than at others, within our society for quite a long time, probably since the Founding, and was part and parcel, if not the primary reason, that HUAC had come to exist and was not howled down in the process when it was resurrected in force after the war, by the people demonstrating en masse in the streets before the Capitol.
Reaction can occur on the left as well as on the right, even if deemed "radicalism" in its leftist form, assuming, of course, that basic model ever actually obtains when boiled down to cases and is more useful than as merely a pedagogical device for generalization.
A letter writer says that he had observed the whisky trade from the time the "booze joints" were opened. He saw large numbers of empty bottles set in corners "where formerly there were none, or up to one, or two."
One store, he believes, sold more liquor in a day than all the bootleggers would sell in 30 years. And the bootlegger money had stayed at home, whereas the ABC stores sent gobs of money out of state, "wherein they thrive on wreckage."
He favors voting dry as soon as possible.
A letter writer from Asheville responds to the letter which had recommended Senator Clyde Hoey as President Truman's running mate in 1948. He feels it an excellent idea, but the writer had personally informed him at Fligel's Store in Charlotte that the President was just another Herbert Hoover and that Governor Dewey would be elected if nominated by the Republicans. He wonders wherefore the change.
He adds the "P.S.", that he still had the pants the man had sold him as a good salesman, and asserts that Senator Hoey ought be President, not just Vice-President.
Well, as the old aphorism has it: "When a man states his case in Fligel's, something is bound to happen on the wedding cake."
Framed Edition
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