Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approved the President's
program to provide 597 million dollars of emergency aid to France,
Italy, and Austria. Several amendments requested by the State
Department were also included, one of which saying that the
provisional aid would not imply an obligation to furnish further
aid. Administration of the program would be by the State Department,
as determined by the discretion of the President.
Shortly before this action, the Senate-House joint economic
committee deferred action on the President's proposal for price and
wage controls and rationing, and proposed to take up the other
proposed economic controls beginning Friday. Senator Taft stated
that the deferred controls would be better left for the regular
session, beginning in January. Jessie Wolcott of Michigan, however,
stated that his House Banking Committee would begin consideration of
all of the controls the following Tuesday.
Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder told a news
conference that the Administration had no intention of setting up a
new OPA for administration of price controls, referring to the
pervasive controls which were in place under the agency during the
war.
Secretary of State Marshall stated that it was time to call a
halt to the brazen campaign of lying by the Soviet Government in its
propaganda campaign to undermine the Marshall Plan as an
imperialistic scheme to dictate internal political policy of the 16
recipient nations and charging the U.S. with warmongering and trying
to begin a third world war with Russia. The Secretary made the
statements in a speech in Chicago as he prepared for departure for
London to meet with V. M. Molotov at the foreign ministers
conference to try to resolve finally the treaties with Germany and
Austria. He stressed that his main goal at the conference would be
to resolve the treaty with Germany, even without Russia, working for
a provisional central authority within a federated German state.
The Senate War Investigating subcommittee heard from T. E.
Readnower of Aviation Electric Corp. that the company paid him a
salary of $100 per month plus $1,000 annually as vice-president and
secretary of the company and that he, in turn, provided $15,000 in
salary to Maj. General Bennett Meyers during the war while the
latter was deputy chief of procurement for the Army Air Forces. Mr.
Readnower was the brother-in-law of B. H. Lamarre, president of the
firm, who had already testified that 90 percent of his $32,000
annual salary was paid to General Meyers. Mr. Lamarre stated further
that General Meyers's father-in-law, a bus driver for a railroad,
received $12,000 per year in salary as production manager of the
company, despite lack of any business experience. General Meyers
told him that his soon-to-be father-in-law, whose daughter Mr.
Lamarre did not know at the time was the General's fiancee, had
worked for a railroad during his career and made considerable money.
House Ways & Means Committee chairman Harold Knutson
predicted a battle in the spring when the 1934 Reciprocal Trade
Agreement came up for renewal, as a result of the new trade
agreement formed in Geneva with 22 nations which permitted
substantial cuts in tariffs to be made by the Administration to
facilitate foreign trade.
After negotiations with the Navy, the City of Newark, N.J.,
had determined to use its fireboats to welcome the former battleship
New Mexico into New York Harbor for scrapping rather than
blocking it, as originally planned, by use of the water from the
fireboats. The Battle of Newark was thus averted—until another day.
In Tokyo, thieves made off with wooden grave markers,
presumably for use as fuel. The municipal authorities put up signs
warning that thieves would face punishment from heaven for such
offense.
R.I.P.
In Charlotte, Dr. Claudius Murchison, president of the
Cotton Manufacturers Textile Institute, told the annual meeting of the Carded Yarn
Association that it was likely that the country would spend four
billion dollars in the ensuing year on an aid program for Europe
under the Marshall Plan. He also predicted that the President's
program of controls on the economy would not be recognizable after
it emerged from Congress.
Burke Davis of The News, in his second in a series of
reports on former Governor and interim Senator Cameron Morrison of
Charlotte, tells of the former Governor liking to think of himself
as a rough-and-tumble Scotsman and homebody among politicians. His
grandparents had been immigrants from Scotland when they were
children. His father, a "tempestuous" six-foot tall
Scotsman who could knock down any man in the county, had fought for
the Confederacy. During Mr. Morrison's campaign for Governor,
political enemies had said rough things about his father, the worst
being that he had been a Republican. His maternal grandfather had
been a member of the North Carolina General Assembly. He attended
school in a log schoolhouse, open only a month or two each year. His
mother died when he was eight. When he was deemed fit for college at
his subsequent boarding school, he was unable to attend for
financial exiguity.
Central High School in Charlotte was preparing to play on
Friday night Gastonia High School in football. Preparatory to the
affair, students, apparently of Gastonia, had painted various signs
on Central's campus: "Beat Central" and "G.H.S.",
listing also the Central schedule, apparently in disparagement of
the Duke, that is, the Central schedule.
In Gastonia, the school was found to have splotches of paint
on the doors but nothing else.
Go, fight, paint. At least no one yet apparently had branded
in paint one of the opposing players as being unusually affectionate
with farm animals.
On the editorial page, "Tax Cut 'A First Essential'"
tells of John W. Hanes, a member of the House Ways & Means
Committee tax study committee, advocating in Greensboro a tax
reduction, which, he contended, could be had along with the Marshall
Plan. He based his optimism on the prospect of a seven to ten
billion dollar surplus for the year in the Federal budget, against
the prediction during the summer by the Administration of a deficit
to justify vetoing the two back-to-back tax measures, identical save for their effective dates. Since that
time, however, the Administration had admitted that there would be a
surplus, stating that it would be about four billion dollars.
While it was hard to disagree with Mr. Hanes's view that Federal
spending had reached alarming proportions and needed curtailment,
his ideas of a four billion dollar budget slash would cut the heart
out of the New Deal social experimentation. And it was questionable
whether such would serve the country well. The piece thinks that he
was right in stating that a tax cut was "a first essential"
to getting the economy back on sound footing, but ventures that a more gradual
reduction in spending ought take place, not the one grand slash Mr.
Hanes advocated.
"Marshall Plan Cannot Fail" says it was boycotting
the use of "ERP" for European Recovery Program, as "the
Marshall Plan" was the only appropriate moniker for it.
Secretary of State Marshall had been a primary architect of the Plan
and so it was only fitting that it bear his name.
It predicts that it would pass Congress despite critics who
wanted to limit it. The Plan had a destiny to fulfill. It had
received the approval of the American people and all of those who
opposed human misery. It could not be stopped by a few misguided
members of Congress.
"Man in a Turban Tours South" tells of Rev. Jesse
Wayman Routte of New York City, who had reported touring the South
with a purple turban and affecting a Swedish accent. He was treated
as a foreign dignitary as a result. No one asked him about his race
and, despite being black, he was able to use all public
accommodations which were ordinarily reserved for whites only.
The Reverend had concluded that in some parts of the South,
they judged a man by the hat he wore.
The editorial does not agree with the latter notion but finds
it revealing of the race complex that the Reverend was, regardless
of color, able to travel without impedance through Alabama and the
Deep South. It concludes that color, thus, was not the determining
factor for race prejudice.
It believes that education, religion, and broader economic
opportunity for all would work to eliminate racial prejudice, and it
would require long-range methods.
But the clergyman from New York had, if nothing else, shown
that the heavens would not fall should a black man be respected for
what he was and not invidiously classified by the color of his skin.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Mr.
Crump's Eloquence", regards Boss Ed Crump of Memphis, "Mister
Ed", and his statements on the prospect that a former Governor,
Gordon Browning, would be a candidate for another term as
Chancellor of Memphis. He had said he would vote for a
yellow dog before Mr. Browning, who, to him, looked like the
different artists' representations through time of Judas Iscariot,
as displayed in the Louvre. Mr. Browning was the sort who would milk
his neighbor's cow through a crack in the fence.
Mr. Browning responded, "A jackass always brays."
The Journal thinks that Mr. Crump got the better of
the verbal joust and that a dignified silence would have better served
Mr. Browning. But the mutual vilification may have established the
foundation for the following year's gubernatorial campaign.
Drew Pearson suggests that the most notable achievement of
the Roosevelt Administration economically was the creation of the
SEC. But working behind the scenes, the financiers had managed to
obtain a measure of control over the SEC, as Wall Street had wooed
the commissioners such that the big banking houses no longer had
anything about which to worry. An example was the attempt to make
Commissioner Edward Hanrahan president of the business he was
charged with investigating, the Stock Exchange.
Most of the Commissioners seemed not to take their jobs very
seriously, with the exception of Robert McConnaughey of Kansas, who
had presided over the SEC nine of the previous twelve months.
Senator Elbert Thomas, who had fought to preserve OPA, urged
fellow members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work
closely with whatever committee would be considering the controls
recommended by the President.
The American Legion rank-and-file had scored a victory by
ousting their national housing chairman who had sided with the real
estate lobby on veterans housing. His replacement was an advocate of
housing for veterans.
The Germans believed that meatless Tuesdays were designed to
prepare the country for war with Russia and to try to force prices
up. Senator Harry Cain of Washington State had so found during his tour of Germany. He
also found grass growing on the autobahn, cows pulling plows, and
city people grubbing for potatoes. Most Germans rejected the idea
that America was sending huge amounts of food to Europe, opting for
the Communist propaganda and joking that food was coming only
through the radio, that of 50 ships sent from America, 48 would be
full of de-Nazification forms and the other two with grapefruit.
Mr. Pearson notes that the Friendship Train and a newsreel to be shown
Europeans of its progress across the country were designed to dispel
such notions.
He next relates of the high-handed tactics of House Ways &
Means chairman Harold Knutson, who recently had convened a hearing
without a quorum present because he was in a hurry to get to
Florida. He had also appointed the tax study committee without
consulting the other 24 members of the Committee. The first witness
to testify at the quorum-less hearing was Roswell Magill, chairman
of the tax committee.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, continues his look at "the
night of the soul" which he regarded the Soviet presence in
Eastern Germany to be. He presents a story of one anonymous exemplar
who had endured and escaped the Soviet terror, as reported to the
American authorities in the Western sector. He had been a former
American prisoner of war. In the fall of 1946, he visited Berlin
from Hamburg, where M.V.D. agents immediately detained him and
charged him with espionage. He denied the charge. After three
interrogations, he was thrown to the floor and beaten. He was housed
in a filthy dungeon-type cell with 25 other prisoners, either
Socialists or former Western prisoners of war, the latter being a
cause of immediate concern to the Soviets.
He claimed that the prisoners were routinely beaten by the
guards. After three months, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, set
up as a concentration camp, its role under the Nazis during the war.
Diet was skimpy. The commandant even had a former SS man on
his staff. The primary difference from its days under Nazi command
was that the camp had no executions. But there was cruelty, some of
which led to death.
The prisoner in question was able to escape while assigned to
work outside the camp.
Samuel Grafton comments on the instant visceral reaction from
the Republicans in Congress to the President's call for return to
rationing and some selected price control and wage control. They
were torn between wanting free enterprise and the Marshall Plan to
stop Soviet expansion by aiding Europe. They were the same
Republicans who wanted tax cuts and had stood by as inflation sent
the cost of living soaring during the previous year.
The Marshall Plan, he asserts, could not be carried out
without the controls urged by the President. For sending seven to
eight billion dollars worth of aid annually was certain otherwise to
raise prices, raising the costs of the plan three to four times that
appropriated. So those decrying controls were not really in favor of
the Plan even if they claimed to be.
The enemies of controls, he ventures, might be shocked at the
public reaction to the prospect of renewal of controls, given the
unsavory experience during the year without controls.
The people might realize the courage of the President
politically in asking for the controls and would turn to his
leadership with confidence, not inspired by those seeking to protect
what they considered to be "free enterprise".
James Marlow of the Associated Press suggests that the
chances were slim that the President's program of price and wage
controls plus rationing would pass Congress, given that the
Republican leadership stood opposed to it.
Prices had risen 23 percent since the end of price control in
the summer and fall of 1946.
The President would be able to use inaction by the Congress
in his campaign—as he would, ultimately describing it during the
1948 campaign, with great effect among the public, as the
"do-nothing Congress".
What the President wanted was only limited controls on scarce
goods and not a return to OPA.
Congress, Mr. Marlow concludes, might grant the President
authority to impose controls over allocation of raw materials and
credit control restoration.
A letter from failed Republican Congressional candidate P. C.
Burkholder states his belief that America could not afford the
Marshall Plan. He says that the country was at a dangerous
crossroads and a wrong turn could mean the end of democracy.
