Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Taft
stated, as chairman of the joint Economic Committee, that the
Congress would not approve regulation of the amount of grain and
corn fed to livestock, as urged by the President as part of his
ten-point program to control inflation. Already, the Congress had
made clear that wage and price controls and rationing would not be
passed. Leading to the decision was the testimony of Secretary of
Agriculture Clinton Anderson, who stated the previous day that the
provision would not work without price control and that if price
control were put into effect, the limitations on feeding livestock
would not be necessary. The Secretary stated that in consequence of
not imposing controls, there would be a meat shortage and sharply
rising prices between February and possibly June.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended speedy
action on the President's proposal for appropriation of 597 million
dollars worth of emergency aid for France, Italy, and Austria.
Debate in the full body would begin Monday. The Committee approved
the aid unanimously on Wednesday. The report spoke of riots in Italy
and France bespeaking the efforts of forces at work to exploit cold
and hunger among the masses.
In Paris, the National Assembly elected former Finance
Minister Robert Schuman as the new Premier to replace Paul Ramadier
who had resigned on Wednesday amid a national strike. The Gaullists
supported M. Schuman or abstained. The vote came after refusal the
previous night to provide a vote of confidence for Premier-designate
Leon Blum, the Socialist leader, failing by nine votes receipt of a necessary
majority.
Harold Milks of the Associated Press reports that after
fifteen months of American officers having lived among the Lolo
tribesmen of West China, along the China-Tibet border, they had
concluded that there were no American airmen in captivity.
An American officer had suggested more than a year earlier that five
American airmen were in the Lolo country awaiting rescue. An
expedition a year earlier had found the remains of four American
airmen downed during the war. Thirty-five of 36 airmen had been
found alive in Lololand, fueling rumors that there were others, some of whom might be slaves of the tribesmen.
The Senate War Investigating subcommittee ended its inquiry
into the dealings of Maj. General Bennett Meyers, retired, former
deputy chief procurement officer for the Army Air Forces during the
war, who had allegedly formed a company and taken a large annual
salary from it while funneling war contracts to same via
recommendations to Bell Aircraft to subcontract through the
company, Aviation Electric Corp. General Hap Arnold, wartime head of
the Air Forces, stated his opinion that, based on the evidence
presented, General Meyers had disgraced his uniform and rank,
thanking the subcommittee for exposing a rotten apple in the barrel.
The subcommittee stated that the record was being forwarded to
prosecutors.
General Meyers would subsequently be prosecuted and convicted of a felony, attempting to persuade an employee of Aviation Electric Corp. to conceal his role in the company from the subcommittee, for the purpose of hiding his conflict of interest in establishing and capitalizing the company and receiving substantial kickbacks from salaries from the dummy officers he hired to operate the company, while recommending war contracts for same in his role as the deputy procurement officer of the Army Air Forces, also a crime. President Truman would dismiss him from the Air Force in July, 1948.
It is likely that General Meyers was not the only rotten apple in the military barrel during the war, making large profits on the side from his military service. But, as deputy chief procurement officer, he happened to become entangled with the Ferguson subcommittee's investigation into the Hughes war contracts, an investigation which had proved embarrassing to the subcommittee when Mr. Hughes made a monkey out of Senator Ferguson, taking him to task with great effect vis-a-vis the public, as well the chairman of the full committee, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, whom Mr. Hughes accused of seeking to coerce Mr. Hughes to merge Hughes Aircraft with Pan American Airways by agreeing not to proceed with the investigation as quid pro quo for such cooperation. Senator Brewster was cozy with Juan Trippe, chairman of Pan Am, and was seeking to get a bill through Congress which would provide the company exclusive routes for South American travel. In consequence of the public embarrassment of finding nothing corrupt in either the Hughes war contracts or their procurement by Elliott Roosevelt, the initial focus of the hearings, a plain effort to tarnish the Roosevelt name for GOP political gain, the subcommittee had to find someone to provide distraction from the dearth of paydirt otherwise in this aspect of the Grand Plan of the GOP to use its mandate of the previous November to conduct political witch-hunts, to investigate everything about the war, as it had promised. General Meyers conveniently popped up to act as raison d'etre for the probe.
The subcommittee investigation, which no doubt had, not incidentally, as adjunctive object the implied exposition of negligence of the War Investigating Committee chaired by Senator Truman during the war in not ferreting out these wartime abuses, was part and parcel of the contempt citations issued against the Hollywood Ten by HUAC in latter October and, the following year, the Alger Hiss investigation via star witness Whittaker Chambers and his microfilm-filled pumpkin out on his Baltimore County farm. For someone, after all, had to be responsible for all this. And it could not be isolationists in Congress who enabled, during the Thirties, Hitler to build his war machine unabated, as that reflected too much on Republicans and their pals, the conservative Democrats.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of
living index showed for September a rise of 66.1 percent above the
August, 1939 pre-war level, 12.3 percent higher than a year earlier
and 22.9 percent higher than in June, 1946, just prior to the end of
most price controls.
Burke Davis of The News, in the fifth article of his
series on former Governor and interim Senator Cameron Morrison of
Charlotte, tells of Mr. Morrison having informed a former president
of the University with pride that he never had attended college but
that his education had been gleaned from reading. Of late, he was
reading poetic philosophers.
His 3,000-acre farm outside Charlotte, possessed of one of
the finest Jersey herds in the country, was now paying for itself, and he had devoted most of his time to it during the previous twenty
years, except for the two years he had served in the Senate,
appointed by Governor O. Max Gardner to succeed deceased Senator Lee
Overman, until being defeated in the primary in 1932 by Robert Rice
Reynolds.
His Jersey cows came from prime stock, bulls such as It of
Oaklands and Cock Robin. He had built the herd with his wife's
money.
Nancy Brame of The News tells of a ten-day old infant
nicknamed "Choo-Choo", for whom care was being provided at
Charlotte's Memorial Hospital. The origin of the nickname came from
the fact that the baby was born on a train heading from Portsmouth,
N.H., to New Orleans, where his father was stationed in the Navy.
Choo-Choo's picture is on the page. Happy birthday,
Choo-Choo. Roll 'em down...
On the editorial page, "Party Politics and Inflation"
tells of Walter Lippmann having praised the President for eight of
his ten points in the program presented to Congress for emergency
aid to France, Italy, and Austria and to curb inflation, but pulled
up short on the remaining pair of points, believing it to be
injection of politics unfairly to the mix. The two he referenced
were the requests for authority for wage and price controls and for
rationing. The President knew that the Congress would not grant them
and so was merely offering the requests that he might use the
refusal in the coming campaign.
But, says the piece, Mr. Lippmann ignored the confession of
the President, offered in courageous fashion, that he had made a
"colossal mistake" in abandoning price and wage controls
too soon. And the President had set forth the only concrete suggestions
for putting the brakes on inflation. The Republicans had not offered
any plan of their own. And by so refraining, they would obviously
have used the fact in their campaign that no plan had been
proffered, had the President not done so.
The Republicans would have only themselves to blame,
therefore, if, indeed, the President's requests wound up putting
them "in the hole" in the campaign, as suggested by Mr.
Lippmann and others. It was less unfairness than it was exertion of
leadership by the President. He had provoked a salutary debate on
the issue of controls.
"Freedom Train Is Whistling" tells of the Freedom
Train, carrying more than a hundred important historical documents
of the country, rolling across the land, set to visit Charlotte on
December 4. A liberty party would begin on November 28, opening
"Rededication Week". The train, it says, was whistling to
all good citizens to come aboard and learn of the country's past,
from the beginnings of the discovery of the land by Christopher
Columbus to the birth of the U.N., both events being represented
among the documents.
"Where Our Money Goes in China" tells of Governor
Dewey urging that aid to the reactionary Government of Chiang
Kai-Shek was more emergent than the aid to Europe. But the State
Department advised the exact opposite, Secretary of State Marshall
having expressed disillusionment with the Government of Chiang.
Mr. Dewey's advice fit a strange GOP tendency to abandon
economy when it came to China while practicing parsimony toward
Europe. The attitude was derived from the fact that Chiang was
fighting the Communists, betraying on the part of the GOP a greater
concern with military action than with peaceful reconstruction.
Chiang had warred on the Communists for 20 years and had used
the fact to gain Western military and economic aid. If he were to
defeat them, he would lose the basis for asking for that aid. The
prospects were that he would lose Manchuria and the Northern part of
China to the Communists, perhaps more, increasing
the pressure for more American aid to prop up a failing regime.
Where it would end, it posits, no one knew, especially not the
Republicans.
A piece from the New York Herald Tribune, titled
"Codified Boredom", finds the new code of the National
Association of Broadcasters, as reviewed by columnist John Crosby,
reflecting the attitude that radio should offend no one. Mr. Crosby
had found that the effort to provide milquetoast for the masses
would not raise, and very likely would lower, the cultural standards
of radio. The piece goes further and finds that culture presupposed
thought and thought presupposed contention. If every program were
gauged by its level of offensiveness with a view to elimination of
same, the result would be a sterile nullity.
Mr. Crosby had suggested that the appropriateness of a
program or discussion be left to the station to determine rather
than being subjected to a rigid code. But that notion, the piece
opines, only delayed the decision without altering the basis for it.
It advocates that radio should be concerned with serving the
public, not finding the lowest common denominator within it. It
should be left to function as magazines and newspapers, voluntarily
filtering that which was deemed inappropriate. Radio should not
become a "vulgarizing bore".
Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of the Treasury John W.
Snyder, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Secretary of
Agriculture Clinton Anderson, and Secretary of Commerce Averell
Harriman having recommended to the President that he not seek from
Congress authority to renew limited wage and price controls and
rationing. They wanted him to stress that he would not use such
controls unless voluntary measures failed. Mr. Anderson and Mr.
Harriman especially were concerned that advisers Clark Clifford and
Leon Keyserling, who had written most of the speech, had gone too
far in proposing compulsory controls, as they thought it would anger
Congress.
The President agreed that his intent was not to use the
proposed controls unless the voluntary measures proved unworkable,
but that he did not want to raise false hopes that controls would
not be necessary. So he left the speech as written with the
exception of some modification to fit the objections of his Cabinet
members. At the last minute, however, he added the proviso that
vital commodities in short supply would be subject to control, a
catch-all category that was not in the original version. Mr.
Anderson and Mr. Harriman believed that provision would make it
tougher to convince Congress to grant the authority.
And the Republican Congress was angry. But the President was
sticking by his position that with the threat of controls in the
offing, it would not be necessary to implement them, that most of
industry would voluntarily comply to avoid controls.
Mr. Harriman intended to meet with industrial leaders to try
to effect voluntary price control before the Congress would consider
the issue. He wanted relaxation of the price-fixing rules in the
anti-trust laws to permit such agreement. He was especially anxious
to get the big steel companies to eliminate the gray market in
steel, which charged prices double and triple that of the
manufacturers. And steel was the major component of the economy
which was driving inflation.
He notes that meatless Tuesdays would likely continue, along
with the voluntary food conservation generally, until the European
winter emergency had passed.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of all American and British
officials present in the city believing that after the assumed
failure of the London foreign ministers conference, not yet begun,
there would have to be urgent steps taken to form a provisional
government in Western Germany. They believed it was a vain exercise
to continue to try to deal with the Soviets in constructing an
agreement on Germany, as the Soviet control of Eastern Germany was
based on ruthless terror. It was not realistic to believe that the
Soviets could be persuaded to start anew with democratic methods.
Even General Lucius Clay was of the opinion that there was no hope
of such rapprochement.
The currency in all four sectors, based on reichsmarks
printed by the Allies, was losing all value except as a form of
scrip to buy official rations. The Russians had been given dies by
the Allies to print the money and had printed uncounted billions to
pay for troops and to "buy" industries in the Soviet zone,
as well as to pay for all other occupation costs. The Soviets had
refused to agree to currency reform. The valueless currency was
leading to chaos and complete failure of the attempt to rebuild
Germany's economic life. Currency reform therefore had to begin at
once, and it was thus left to the Western Allies to do so in the
Western zone. That would divide Germany between East and West, but
it was a matter of expediency to prevent a catastrophe.
Moreover, the rationing system had to be strengthened along
with the entire administrative machinery, and in the West, that would
have to be accomplished by the Germans themselves with a genuinely
representative provisional government.
The remaining question following the London conference would
be whether the French would join the Americans and British in
setting up the Western zone. For two years, the French had favored a
decentralized federation, essentially a clumsy and unworkable plan
of government. They were concerned that a divided Germany would form
around Berlin and so urged a policy of bankruptcy, indefinite
continuity of the present broken system which inexorably would lead
to administrative and financial collapse. And since General De
Gaulle was a proponent of this view, it could not be dismissed.
Marquis Childs tells of the Grand Jury in Washington having
investigated for seven months the presence of a Communist spy ring
in the nation's capital and being about to release its report. The
leaked information suggested that no one would be indicted, but the
Grand Jury would report of what had led to the inquiry and what it
had disclosed.
It had originated two and a half years earlier when a woman
informant told the FBI of a spy ring of which she had been a member,
giving the names of a dozen or more persons involved who were
employees of the Government, allegedly providing documents to the
Soviets, as she had done after using a specific basement room to microfilm the papers. The FBI presented the information to the Justice Department
and it, in turn, presented it to the Grand Jury.
But in the end, there was no such conspiracy and it was
difficult to understand why it had taken so long to determine the
fact. That the persons the woman had named were likely leftists
meant that no matter what the Grand Jury said, many in the public
would believe the worst.
There were in the United States, as in the
Canadian spy ring case, misguided idealists who were dupes of Soviet
agents. There were also people who were intrigued by the notion of
being a spy and found in Communism a temptation to feel important.
The Canadian case revealed that the types of documents provided the
Soviets were no more than those they could have received by writing
to the Canadian Government. The same appeared to characterize the
documents delivered by the Washington spy ring. One such document,
for instance, had presented the financial condition of China, hardly
a secret.
The real problem with the investigation was that it sowed
doubt and dissension within the country.
"That is the menace of Communism in this country, and in
my opinion it is the only menace."
A letter writer states that the American farmer would not be
so greedy to hold out for higher prices on wheat and other valuable
crops to feed Europe when so much hung in the balance and
humanitarian concerns were at stake.
A letter writer thinks that it did not make sense that
America was abandoning its historic position of not meddling in
European affairs, thinks that aid to Europe made no sense and that
the country ought get back to its isolationist roots.
All well and good, provided you could find a way to undo the
entire latter Nineteenth and first half of the Twentieth Centuries
and the period's various inventions which made the world permanently
and irrevocably smaller, with the United States no longer able to
find insularity in the buffer of a mere two oceans. That had been
proved, to all with any sense, by the time between the wars and what
had happened as a result. Maybe this letter writer fell asleep for a
few years in there.
A letter from a member of the Mooresville Victory Festival
Steering Committee thanks the newspaper for helping it to make its
festival a success. While the weather was not cooperative, their
spirit was undaunted for planning for the following year.
