Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Palestine, four
British personnel, two policemen and two soldiers, were killed, two
on the Jaffa Road in Jerusalem and two in Tel Aviv, part of a
continuing spate of violence in which eleven were killed and 30
wounded during the previous three days. The attackers in Jerusalem
fled on foot and the assailants in Tel Aviv fired from a speeding
car. The latter shooting occurred as funeral services were taking
place for five young Jews killed on Wednesday by police, during a
raid near Tel Aviv on a house thought to be a terrorist training
school. The police theorized that the attacks were the work of the
Stern Gang, one of the violent Jewish underground organizations.
The Jewish Agency denounced the rash of shootings, which
included the previous day an attack resulting in the deaths of four
British oil men and a policeman in Haifa.
In Britain, a budget-leak crisis had forced the resignation
of Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, the first such
resignation of Britain's so-called big five leaders since the Labor
Government achieved power in July, 1945. Mr. Dalton had revealed to
a London Star reporter details of tax secrets shortly before
announcing the emergency budget in Parliament on the previous
Wednesday. Mr. Dalton apologized to the House on Thursday for the
indiscretion. The Cabinet then met hastily to demand the
resignation. Prime Minister Clement Attlee appointed economic czar
Sir Stafford Cripps as his replacement, making Sir Stafford the
"strong man" of the Labor Government. A Conservative
Scotch M.P. stated that the move made Sir Stafford a
"near-dictator".
Conservative newspapers were predicting that the development
would further reduce the waning prestige of the Labor Government.
Opposition Leader Winston Churchill demanded a full investigation of
the incident which led to the resignation. Observers thought it
might herald an attempt to oust the entire Attlee Cabinet.
Republicans were reported to have interpreted the President's
statement that the Marshall Plan had to be financed out of taxes as
giving signal that he would again oppose a tax-cut favored by the
GOP, twice vetoed during the summer by the President.
Representative George Bender of Ohio called for a five to ten
billion dollar tax cut plan, substantially more than the four
billion proposed by House Ways & Means chairman Harold Knutson,
chief proponent of the cut, who had reluctantly agreed to defer a
third attempt at a tax cut until the start of the new session of
Congress in January rather than in the special session as he
originally proposed. Mr. Bender believed that such a cut could be
accommodated in the budget along with the Marshall Plan, provided
that "extravagance, militarism, and adventurism" were not
included in the humanitarian aid program for Europe.
The Senate War Investigating subcommittee, looking into the
war contracts of Howard Hughes, began its widened investigation into
the procurement practices of the Army Air Forces during the war, to
determine the extent to which the Air Force had knowledge of and
sought to expose corruption. Maj. General Bennett Meyers had
testified that he told his superiors on February 3, 1943 that he had
no aircraft company stock, at a time when he held 2,700 shares,
worth over $35,000. Maj. General J. W. Jones, Air Force inspector
general, testified that the Air Force had dismissed as "crackpot"
a letter dated June 22, 1945, sent to the FBI from Kansas City,
asserting that General Meyers had made one to two million dollars
from the war, that the Air Force had then tried to conceal the
existence of the letter from the subcommittee.
In anticipation of the broadened investigation, the
subcommittee summoned Maj. General Oliver Echols, retired chief of
procurement, and Larry Bell, president of Bell Aircraft. Mr. Bell
was summoned to testify concerning information gathered by the
subcommittee that a thousand shares of Bell stock was part of the
aircraft stock held by General Meyers in February, 1943 when he told
the Air Force he had none.
Governor Earl Warren of California announced from Sacramento
that he was entering the GOP race for the presidency, but stated
that he would not wage an active campaign or seek delegates outside
California. He consented to having his name placed in nomination by
the California delegation to the convention the following June and
expressed hope that the voters of the state would approve the
delegation pledged to him. He said that he was not interested in a
vice-presidential spot on the ticket—which he would ultimately
occupy.
UAW president Walter Reuther urged at a press conference that
the Congress cut prices by 12 percent to avoid the union seeking
another wage boost. His opponents in the union wanted to begin a
drive for higher wages forthwith, without reference to price
controls. The UAW convention meeting in Atlantic City was going to
decide this date between the two approaches.
Mr. Reuther also rejected support of a third party candidacy
of former Vice-President Henry Wallace.
At Mount Spokane, Washington, a B-29 crashed during a
snowstorm, killing five crew members aboard and injuring two others
riding in the tail section. The tail had separated from the body of
the fuselage, sparing the men's lives. The plane, according to the
survivors, had been flying on instruments at the time of the crash.
According to two ground observers, it exploded on impact, skidded,
and came to a halt about 100 feet from where the two men were riding
along on a snow plow, directly in its path.
In Newark, N.J., the battle between the attempt of a private
salvage company to scrap the decommissioned battleship New Mexico
and the City of Newark, which was seeking to prevent further
scrapping of Navy ships in New York Harbor, was temporarily postponed
until Saturday as the tide could not accommodate the ship until that
time. Newark had ordered its fireboats to turn their water hoses
into the path of the ship to prevent its ingress to the Harbor,
resulting in the armada being dubbed the "Squirt-gun Navy".
The ship, scheduled originally to enter the Harbor at 10:15 a.m.
this date, was now situated five miles southeast of Ambrose
Lightship, under tow by two tugs. It would need to negotiate a
difficult 120-degree turn as it entered the channel, enabling the
fireboats time to get into position to fire. Admiral Halsey, a
native of nearby Elizabeth, N.J., refused to participate in the
battle.
Stay tuned, as World War III might erupt as a result.
Stranger things have happened.
In the Uninta Mountains of northeastern Utah, a young doctor
and his wife were rescued from an icy ledge 12,000 feet in
elevation, after spending five days trapped without food following
on the crash the previous Saturday of the small plane the doctor
was piloting. The couple used mutual body heat to stay warm and
conserved their energy to survive, while dreaming of hamburgers.
With onions?
Now you talkin'.
An experiment to fashion an Eskimo lamp from the plane's
carburetor and fuel, utilizing a registration plate with a hole
punched in it as a flue, failed when it consumed all the oxygen in
the cabin and turned it to carbon monoxide gases.
They had found it disconcerting when they heard over the
still operating radio of the plane that they would likely not be
found before the spring thaw. The plane was sighted on Wednesday and
emergency packages of food were immediately dropped to the couple.
The doctor lost a shoe while retrieving the supplies and ran around
in the snow for twenty minutes with one foot bare. Initially, the
food made them ill and they had to consume only tomato juice.
Shouldn't have been dreaming of hamburgers. Water, only cool,
clear water.
The last night, after the food and warm clothes were dropped,
was one of the coldest thus far during the winter in the area, far
below zero.
They fought the laws of nature and won.
On the editorial page, "De Gaulle's Wave of the Future"
finds General De Gaulle's speech the previous day in France, calling
for unity with Britain and the U.S. against Communism, to have
darkened the outlook for democracy, economic recovery of Europe, and
peace. It would please only those who wanted to settle the dispute
with Russia by means of armed conflict. The piece asserts that the speech
had jeopardized the success of the upcoming London Big Four foreign
ministers conference, aiming finally to achieve treaties with
Germany and Austria, having already failed in previous conferences
to find sufficient common ground between the West and Russia for the purpose.
Failure to achieve a German treaty this time would result in
a separate treaty being formed between the West and Western Germany,
creating a separate state, divided between East and West.
It appeared at first as a way of hitting the Soviets harder.
But it would also end all hope of peaceful settlement of the
East-West crisis and provide at best a dubious advantage to the
West. The prospect of success of the Marshall Plan would be less
likely under such a scenario.
French reaction was finding its strongest expression in
Gaullist circles, where renewal of French imperialist hopes was
encouraged by division of Germany. The likelihood was that General
De Gaulle would win the Parliamentary elections scheduled for the
following May and thus would be leading the Government which would
implement the Marshall Plan in France, as well as having a say in
the implementation of the Plan in Western Germany. His call for an
anti-Communist alliance was thus a signal to rightists everywhere to
work hard for the defeat of the effort at the London conference to
form the treaties, and stood as warning to Russia to prepare for the
worst.
Hitler had similarly risen to power opposing the Communists,
and the "Napoleonic aspects" of General De Gaulle's rise
to power appeared to increase as the hour of decision drew near.
"Labor's PAC, RLPL and LEPL" tells of a new
railroad PAC having formed, "RLPL", for the 1948 campaign,
to add to those already formed by the AFL, "LEPL", and CIO
labor organizations.
The piece thinks that organized labor had embarked on a
dubious course in so doing, that it would not make significant gains
in the political arena. Their only unifying principle was opposition
to Taft-Hartley. And employers had made it clear that they were not
going to apply the law, enacted the previous June over the
President's veto, so as to make it the "slave labor" act
which the unions had sought to brand it. Until the unions could
demonstrate that workers had actually suffered under the law, it was
doubtful that they could arouse much support even from within their
own ranks.
The PAC's bragged of organizing 16 million workers, but that was a
deceptive claim as union members did not traditionally vote as a
bloc, and most of those members were concentrated in a few
industrial states.
There was general prosperity, high wages, and full
employment, all conditions which would make it difficult to forge
any unity among workers. The unions, it concludes, would do well to
demonstrate an effort which would outweigh the opposition which
their crusade would create.
"Need for Volunteers Is Urgent" comments on the
previous day's Congressional Quarterly piece reprinted on the
page, which made it appear unlikely that universal military training
would be passed by the 80th Congress, making the need for volunteers
for the armed forces to fulfill its defense quotas especially
pressing. The Navy needed 50,000 men in the coming months. And the
Army and Air Force needed 50,000 applicants per month to be able to
select 21,000 for the Army and 9,000 for the Air Force. The
services, it informs, offered $75 per month, equivalent to $200 in
civilian life, plus bonuses for flying, parachute and glider duty,
and overseas service. It also offered educational opportunities.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled
"Those 'Sinister' Dixie Flags", objects to a notion having
developed in the country that University of Virginia football fans,
who had shown up at Virginia games against Harvard and Penn waving
Confederate flags, were engaged in a reactionary campaign to
re-institute slavery in the nation and subject blacks once again to
an enforced status of addressing "massa". Time had
so implied in its account of the Harvard game at Charlottesville the
previous month, saying that the flag was a symbol of protest to the
fact that Harvard had on its squad a black tackle, Chester Pierce. A
letter to the editor, printed November 10, had responded that such
was ordinary practice at Virginia whenever it faced a Northern
opponent.
Some fans had carried flags with them to Franklin Field in
Philadelphia to observe the game against Penn. During halftime, the
announcer had stated that most of those with the flags were from New
York and Pennsylvania.
The piece says that it was all in good fun, not meant as any
form of protest.
But, of course, within a few short years, as the Civil Rights
Movement began sweeping the South, that flag being sported by others
less sportive than college football fans, would make a sinister
appearance in mean-spirited and violent confrontations broadcast
nationally, forever turning that symbol of Southern traditional
pride to one of Southern racism and hate, like it or not. Those who might have
wanted to preserve it as an historical relic or even, in lighter
vein, as a college riddler's bit of carnival, should have gone to
the racists at that time and confronted them in fashion bold
befitting the flag which they wanted to fly, to dissociate it from
racism. They did not. And it is far too late now. The damage is
permanent, as so it ought be to avoid misconstruing "innocent
fun" as plain, unadulterated race-baiting.
Fortunately, one would no longer see the Confederate flag
being waved at Southern football games after the gradual integration
of Southern colleges and universities in the latter sixties and into
the early seventies. It was by then no longer considered "innocent
fun" to sport it, unless, of course, one were in sympathy with
the white-trash likes of the Ku Klux Klan.
We note that such a flag was being waved by students of our
school at the December 28, 1963 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida,
a particularly inappropriate time and place for even such playful expression, thoughtless.
And it was only a few years ago, in 2001, that the State of Georgia
finally had the gumption to take down the notorious symbol from its
State Capitol in Atlanta, coming finally to realize that it branded
the state as being populated primarily by stupid, racist
rednecks—hardly the case, even if a few very visible and
politically powerful were and, in some cases, still are.
In our estimate, within our lifetime, that damnable piece of
dirty cloth and that for which it stands got a President killed,
having already been responsible for the death of another 98 years
prior to that time, and is forever thus tainted as a cause for
spilling patriotic blood in the not so distant past.
Take the ugly thing, if you should own one, and run it
through a shredder, burn it, stamp on it, and then feed the remnants
to the pigs out in the barnyard. Then, and only then, perhaps, will
you be shed of its curse, damning you to purblind obscurantism.
It is fine in a museum, as we cannot and should not deny our
past as a country, from which might be learned lessons to avoid. But
it has no place otherwise in a free society which purports to
believe in freedom and equal rights and opportunities for all.
And if you don't like it, move to Argentina.
Drew Pearson tells of Governor Earl Warren of California
remarking that the "Friendship Train", on its way from Los
Angeles to New York collecting food for Europe, was without a
representative of the U.S. Government. Its spirit was coming from
the people. The railroads had provided free transportation and local
citizens were donating the goods. A few people in Hollywood, led by Harry
Warner of Warner Brothers, had organized the train, originally
conceptualized by Mr. Pearson as a means to drive home to Western
Europeans the notion that the bulk of their aid was coming from the
American people, not Russia, as they had been told by the Communist parties
in the recipient countries, notably Italy and France.
He had talked recently to a young woman who complained that
life had been easier during the war, as everyone had known what was
expected of them. In some ways, he ventures, she had been right.
Nationally, the patriotic effort during the war had ended with the
end of the war, even if it had continued in the smaller towns across
the land. John L. Lewis had placed wages ahead of the interests of
the country and the country largely followed that lead.
But slowly, he perceives, the country was trying to replace
the wartime spirit of patriotism with a peacetime spirit of
cooperation. There was no easy road to peace and it would cost
nearly as much to maintain as had the war.
He again provides several examples of contributions to the
Friendship Train, the 10,000 pounds of macaroni for Italians having
been contributed by the church ladies of Kemmerer, Wyo., the Lions
Club in Rawlins, Wyo, which had donated a carload of milk, the
people of Rock Springs, Wyo., who stood in the snow for an hour just
to observe the train passing through the town, the people of small
Green River, Wyo., who donated a carload of food. The same scenarios
had been repeated in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah. The people
of Santa Clara, Calif., had gotten started late and rushed a boxcar
along to catch up with the train. In Sacramento, the crowd listening
to Governor Warren spontaneously collected $680 to contribute to the
train.
The State Department had a news representative aboard the
train, which had no A.P. or U.P. reporters assigned to it, to relay
the news via the Voice of America and the Armed Forces Radio network
throughout the world.
A national radio broadcast regarding the train featured
Governor Warren and three railroad engineers, one each in America,
Italy, and France. Lionel Barrymore and Dinah Shore participated in
the program. Governor Warren told the nervous engineer from the
Southern Pacific that he had been a call-boy for the railroad in
Bakersfield forty years earlier, alerting the engineers and firemen
at their homes when a train was coming into town that they might
begin to stoke the fireboxes of their locomotives—perhaps not
entirely unlike General Gouverneur Kemble Warren who alerted the
Union lines from his position on Little Round Top of the approach
of the Confederates from the Devil's Den down below during the
second day of battle at Gettysburg.
Marquis Childs tells of Secretary of State Marshall telling
the foreign affairs committees of each house during the week that
the European Recovery Program, dubbed "ERP", would need
597 million dollars in emergency aid to cover the period through the
end of March. By that point, it was assumed that the Congress would
have passed the full ERP. Three telephone-book sized reports were
being prepared to hand to Congress justifying the program and the
ability of the country to pay for it.
Secretary Marshall wanted a central administrator for the
program, who would be an ambassador, working within the context of
the State Department and Foreign Service. The House subcommittee
studying the matter, chaired by Representative Christian Herter
of Massachusetts, had advocated in its report that a corporation
with a board of directors administer the program. The Averell
Harriman committee, which had assessed the nation's resources for
the program, had recommended a similar administrative organization.
Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas was reportedly being
considered as the choice for administrator of the program under the
Marshall proposal. He had the necessary business background and
could be approved by the Republican Congress. He had done a good job
as Ambassador, having gotten on well with the Labor Cabinet in
Britain since being confirmed to the post to succeed the deceased O.
Max Gardner earlier in the year.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of the city being emblematic
of a post-war world left as two armed camps. Shortly, the Big Four
foreign ministers would gather in London to try again to effect a
German peace treaty. But the conference, short of a complete
reversal of Russian policy regarding principally reparations and the
form of government in Germany, would wind up in stalemate. The result would be
a divided Germany between East and West. The world in consequence
would likewise be divided. The inevitability of such a result was
openly acknowledged by observers in Berlin.
The contest would be over who would get the blame for such
division. The Soviets were going to try to lay it on the West by
proposing immediate termination of Allied occupation in favor of a
unified Germany. But the effort would only be for German
consumption. Both sides were giving lip service to unity while
preparing for a divided country.
The Russians likely would emphasize a nationalistic appeal,
with a new Russian front formed in the Eastern zone out of the
war-time Free Germany movement, comprised of German soldiers,
officers, and generals captured by the Soviets, willing to cooperate
with the Allied cause at the time. The Soviet Unity Party, which the
Soviets had favored as its puppet, had failed to attract any
significant support. The Free Germany group included released
soldiers and officers from the other Allies, now being trained in Russia, said to include 20 former Wehrmacht
generals and 420 officers. The likelihood was that this cadre
was being formed to lead a German army and would constitute the kernel
for a "national front", to be merged with the SUP.
The British and Americans, who were prohibited from similarly
using German stooges, were preparing plans for a provisional German
government in the Western zone. For this program to be successful
even in a divided country, the Germans would need be given
responsibility for reconstruction of the Western zone.
He concludes that it was academic to consider any other
course and that the time for academic theorizing had passed.
Henry Seidel Canby, in a piece reprinted from the Saturday
Evening Post, suggests the country as being anti-Communist while
not being anti-Russian or anti-human nature. He finds the HUAC
hearings investigating Hollywood to resemble those of the People's Court in
Nazi Germany—a kangaroo court with foreordained results of
conviction for the prupose of achieving and sustaining political power.
He provides a list of types of persons who would be
considered Communists if HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas of New
Jersey got his way. It includes a scholar who would publish an
appeal to disobey any law which a citizen deemed immoral or who
charged that the Government acted without principle. Or one who
would take up the defense of a fanatic who inveighed against slave
trafficking, a defendant, thus, such as Henry David Thoreau.
Or one who claimed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson, that conscience
was superior to government and that love was more important than
Army efficiency.
Or such as two former sailors, James Fenimore Cooper and
Herman Melville, who violently attacked the conduct of the Navy.
Or a novelist, as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had at one time
been a member of the Communist organization.
And so on down the list, including Henry and William James,
Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
William Dean Howells, Henry George, or Edward Bellamy in Looking
Backward—all, in Mr. Thomas's conception, no doubt subject to being labeled Communists or fellow
travelers, bent on subverting the American system of government.
He concludes rhetorically: "Gentlemen of the committee,
do you think it would have been a better America today if these men
of imagination had been officially smeared and harrowed into
silence? A government that gives its critics a bad name in order to
hang them—well, we have seen two such governments, one now in the
ruins of its own despotism, and we say a plague on both their
houses, and a double plague on whoever tries to build another like
them in the terrorism of smirch and smear."
And the same is true as much today as it was in 1947 and
earlier, assuming, that is, that the goal is a more perfect
democratic union and not a fascist police state which patrols,
informally through use of subtle methods designed to chill or by
means of more visible tools as employed in 1947 and beyond by HUAC,
our thoughts and free expression of ideas.
A letter from the wife of the chief engineer of new radio
station WABZ in Albemarle corrects a story which had appeared in the
newspaper on November 7 and stated that her husband was instead the
manager of the station.
