The Charlotte News
Monday, October 6, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, in a nationwide broadcast by radio and television the previous night, asked for Americans to forgo consumption of meat on Tuesdays and eggs and poultry on Thursdays, and to save a slice of bread each day, as a means to feed Europe during the upcoming winter. He urged public restaurants to serve bread and butter only on request. The First Lady, he explained, had issued those instructions to the White House staff.
He also demanded that the grain exchanges raise their minimum down payments for margin purchasing of grain futures to one-third to head off speculation which was pushing grain prices upward. The President stated that if there were not voluntary compliance by the exchanges, then the Government would impose limits on trading. He also requested that the liquor distillers shut down for 60 days to conserve grain.
The President called for emergency aid to France and Italy of 580 million dollars.
The speech marked the first time that a U.S. President had given a speech via television.
The Russian newspapers printed a Communist manifesto calling for formation of an organization reminiscent of the earlier Comintern formed in 1919, largely abolished during the war, rallying the Communist parties of nine nations, including France and Italy, to resist the Marshall Plan and what the newspapers called its imperialistic aims. An information bureau was to be established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to coordinate Communist activities in the nine countries. A conference, attended by Russian delegates General Andreu Zhdanov and Georgei Malenkov, both of the Politburo had been held the previous month in Poland to map plans for the organization.
The Foreign Minister of Iraq attacked Zionism as an “aggressive and virulent” political movement, in protesting the proposal to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish sections. Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly committee on Palestine, he equated Zionism with Nazism in its propaganda techniques.
In London, Congressman John F. Kennedy told reporters that he was recovering from a bout with malaria after suffering from it for a month following a relapse in Ireland, preventing his tour of France and Italy. During his time in the Navy, Mr. Kennedy had contracted malaria in the Pacific in 1943.
Also in London, Scotland Yard reported that a ten-month old infant son missing from home in Leeds, had been taken by his father, of Greensboro, N.C., aboard a ship bound for New York. The veteran had gone to Leeds to visit his wife and son six weeks earlier and wanted her to bring the child with her back to America, but she had refused. The father often had care of the child during his visit and left with him.
In Chester, S.C., a black man had allegedly inflicted serious injuries on a young white woman and killed her male escort, a war veteran, with a blunt instrument, then committed suicide by shotgun as police came to his home to attempt interrogation. The police found bloody clothes in the man’s home linking him to the crime. The man had served thirteen years on a conviction for a 1932 murder from which he was paroled in 1945, the first parolee implicated in a subsequent killing in South Carolina. Racial tension in the area was already high because of a trial in which a black defendant was accused of killing a white man.
In Memphis, a black trusty of the Shelby County Jail was killed and two deputies wounded by a black prisoner. The prisoner had gone berserk and began shooting up the place.
In Ambler, Pa., four masked gunmen robbed ten members of a residential country club of $7,700, trussing the ten victims.
In Santa Ana, California, Louise Overell and George Gollum, who allegedly had killed her parents for inheritance by beating them over the head with a ball peen hammer and then setting an explosion on the family yacht on which their bodies were found March 15, were acquitted of the murder charges against them. The verdict was announced after two days of deliberations following a 74 court-day trial which had begun the previous May, the longest murder trial to that point in American court history. Some 12,000 people had gathered at the courthouse to hear the verdict.
But true love did not conquer, as Ms. Overell declared, without stating her reason, that her marriage plans and relationship with her previously betrothed was kaput. She was now sole heir to her parents’ half-million dollar estate—which subsequently would be largely consumed by debts left behind by her father, and Ms. Overell would die in a dive in the mid-sixties of alcohol poisoning.
A photograph appears of Sari Gabor Hilton and her apartment on 83rd Street in New York, from which she had been robbed on Saturday of up to $700,000 worth of jewels by a man wearing a gray coat and sunglasses who forced his way into the apartment at gunpoint. Ms. Hilton was examining mugbook photos of possible suspects. She was the sister of actress Eva Gabor and was estranged from her husband, Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate.
In
Yankee Stadium, the Brooklyn Dodgers led the seventh game of the World Series
The sixth game had been won by the Dodgers the previous day, 8 to 6, with Ralph Branca on the mound for the Dodgers and Joe Page for the Yankees.
Ray Howe tells of heat and grippe affecting the UNC football team in advance of its Saturday game with the University of Texas Longhorns.
Would it were that such a simple explanation would provide rationale and remedy for the present edition.
On
the editorial page,
“Horse and Buggy Air Mail” tells of Charlotte not enjoying
good relations with the Post Office since the end of U.S. Mule, Al Capp’s
creation as a friend of Li’l Abner.
It proposes that the Mule
News reporter Tom Lynch had ferreted out the facts, finding that the air mail hubs in Washington and Atlanta were the sorting centers for mail for the Carolinas, producing the delays. Congressman Hamilton Jones had promised swift investigation and action on the matter.
“Parenthood in Our Time” finds the bestowing of parents of the year honors on those who had large numbers of children in a time of decreasing size of families to be misplaced for its social consequences. Large families proliferated in the lower economic classes and perpetuated conditions of poverty and lack of educational opportunity. It finds the parents of the year awards more apropos to those parents who instilled responsibility and “moral concepts in their children in an amoral time.”
“Less Liquor Means More Food” tells of the Distilled Spirits Institute recommending to the liquor industry that it curtail by 50 percent its grain used in liquor production and eliminate completely use of wheat, which would enable 2.5 million bushels of additional grain for export to Europe. It was the principal component of the voluntary reduction in consumption of food in the country.
A piece from the Washington Post, titled “Reciprocity for Russia”, tells of the recommendation of a House special committee regarding whether Russian personnel should be admitted to the U.S. and to occupied areas, favoring “strict reciprocity” based on the Soviet denials of entry to Russia and their occupation zones by American personnel.
The piece thinks it justified, especially given the recent refusal by Russia to admit an Assistant Secretary of State and several Senators.
Drew Pearson tells of British M.P. Henry Usborne having arrived in the U.S. showing plenty of energy, belying the notion that Britain was tired. Mr. Usborne made laundry machinery but that was not the purpose of his trip. Rather, he was promoting the idea of world government and was obtaining an enthusiastic response from many influential Americans, such as Albert Einstein and Dr. Leo Szilard. Mr. Usborne saw the powers deadlocked, with Russia suspicious of any move by the U.S. and Western European nations toward world peace, no matter how sincerely motivated. So he advocated that the common people give voice to a desire for world government, making it possible for such a thing then to come into existence.
He believed that the U.N. could never resolve the impasse given its deadlock. But if millions of people in Britain, the U.S., and France nominated their own representatives to meet in Geneva for a world conference, then such a world government could be established. He believed that it would take at least two years to form such a conference. He wanted it to start with England, France, and Scandinavia.
Senator Harry Cain of Washington told Senator Robert Taft that he ought pay the picketers at his speeches, for they were drawing more attention to him than his words.
Harold Stassen told Washington office manager Earl Hart, a pianist, that he would be the White House piano player in a Stassen administration.
The President had as his first choice for the new DNC chairman Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, but he had declined on the basis that his job was too important at the time to take a political position.
General Eisenhower had asked whether bobby-soxers waiting for his autograph were waiting for Frank Sinatra.
Former President Hoover had insisted on taking German economist Gustav Stoelper with him on his tour of Europe for the President, despite State Department initial expression of reservations.
Alert Captain William Broderick and Lt. Marlin Wilson of the Capitol Police had grabbed a man with a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster before he could do damage, after receiving a tip from Congressman John Hennings of Tennessee.
Senator Harry Cain had decided to side with Howard Hughes in the ongoing investigation of the Hughes war contracts before the Ferguson subcommittee of the Brewster War Investigating Committee of the Senate. Mr. Cain had inspected the Hughes plant in California and was impressed. Senator Owen Brewster had selected as secretary for his advisory board on the Joint Congressional Air Policy Committee an outspoken opponent of his program to designate one international airline for each area of service.
Erwin D. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, discusses National Newspaper Week over a radio program, the transcript of which is provided. He suggests that as Americans stood at a crossroads of history, they needed accurate reporting from newspapers, with the facts gathered as swiftly as practicable. News gathering in the United States had been steadily improving for fifty years. Overseas, however, it still needed improvement. With a half dozen exceptions, American newspapers no longer maintained their own foreign correspondents, relying instead on the three major wire services, which could not always provide enough coverage for want of staff but performed well.
Some newspapers sensationalized already sensational stories and presented foreign disputes as contests from the sports pages. But there was improvement, as many newspapers had dropped the “clash-and-crash lingo” employed during the war. An international crisis was no longer deemed necessary to adorn every day’s edition.
There was growing awareness that aid in the form of dollars would not be enough to rebuild Europe, that the nations would need rely to the extent possible on self-help. There was need to acquaint the world with the dynamism and revolutionary potential of American democracy, to act as the best export.
American newspapers could lead the country into a spiritual renascence. The job began at home. Selfishness, greed and corruption could be exposed, social justice extolled as an obligation. “Without fear or favor” could become the motto behind which lay reality rather than mere newsprint.
Victor Riesel, in Chicago, tells of having arrived from Detroit to find out what the “grass roots” of labor believed about 1948 politics and labor’s role in the campaign. But the story was in Peoria, where the AFL made it clear that, with the exception of the Teamsters and a few others, it would not split from the Republicans despite Taft-Hartley.
But in Chicago, the CIO, with 150,000 members in the area, was sticking with the Democrats, as were most of the organization’s member unions. The AFL snubbed the Progressive Party and CIO distrusted it. But some supported it for its advocacy of clean judges, popular in Chicago. If it got five percent of the union support, it could nominate Henry Wallace and gubernatorial and mayoral candidates.
It was signal of the nation’s politics, with the CIO continuing Democratic, the AFL continuing Republican, and the leftists supporting Henry Wallace.
But in Detroit, things were in a different pattern, with the CIO having nominated 40 of the city’s 191 candidates for nine spots on the City Council. Mr. Riesel urges that it was an election to watch closely.
A letter from the director of the National Tax Relief Coalition finds hallmarks of the Communist-Marxist hate regime conception of government to be heavy progressive or graduated income tax, abolition of rights to inheritance, plus the confiscation of all private property for state ownership. He wants a complete overhaul of the U.S. tax system.
A letter from a registered nurse finds it problematic that a bold headline of September 29 in The News had announced that nine persons had been killed in Palestine while a smaller headline on the second front page told of eight persons killed on North Carolina highways. She thinks the news ought to stress home state killings more than foreign killings.
She thinks that hemlines were comparable to the white lines in crosswalks. Heart disease could be stopped by stopping sooner the car, as it was on the rise from resulting shock. Drivers ought be facing murder charges when they killed someone after crossing the line. The driver ought be for a little below the speed limit and a little behind the line, for it would look bad to win the battle of the hemline and lose the battle of the white line.
Framed Edition
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