Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Foreign
Ministers Conference had opened in London, with the enunciated
objective of finally adopting treaties with Germany and Austria. The
foreign ministers had met the previous April in Moscow but had
failed to reach an acceptable compromise, primarily on the issues of
Soviet reparations, the form of government to be set up
provisionally in Germany, and the control of the industrial areas of
Germany, especially the Ruhr.
In Paris, a general strike of French railway workers was
called by the National Federation of Railroad Workers. It was
rumored that new Premier Robert Schuman would begin to conscript
workers in key factory jobs.
The Army announced in Trieste that six American soldiers had
been released by Yugoslav troops this date. Details of their
detention and the reasons offered for it would be forthcoming within
two days. The Army speculated that the men, comprising an entire
patrol, inadvertently had wandered the previous day out of bounds in
Venezia Giulia, the area of Trieste. Eighteen U.S. soldiers had been
arrested by the Yugoslavs since the prior August.
Postmaster General Robert Hannegan, who recently had resigned
his post as head of the DNC, also resigned his Cabinet post to
become president and part owner of the St. Louis Cardinals. The
President, in breaking with the tradition of appointing the DNC
chairman to the post, selected for the first time in history a
person from the civil service ranks in the Post Office Department,
Jessie Donaldson, to succeed Mr. Hannegan. Mr. Donaldson had worked
for the Department for 42 of his 62 years, starting as a postal
carrier.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder stated that price controls
and controls on consumer credit were necessary to attenuate
inflation. He also urged against tax reduction in the near future.
In Chicago, 1,500 AFL printers struck against the six daily
Chicago newspapers. The newspapers continued to publish, albeit
somewhat behind schedule.
Off the coast of Alaska, the Clarksdale Victory, an
Army transport, broke in half during a heavy storm, as it carried 40
crewmen but no passengers. Three survivors had been spotted by the
Coast Guard on a beach.
In Waupin, Wisc., an uprising by 69 inmates within the State
Prison ended peacefully after an appeal issued by the Warden to
return to their cells. They dropped their hand-made weapons and gave
up. The four guard hostages they held were released unharmed. The
men gave up apparently for want of cigarettes.
See there? You become a slave to the will of the cigarette
and compromise the impetus to win freedom from tyranny and
oppression.
In Norristown, Pa., the Ridley Township High School Band was
withdrawn from the Montgomery County Thanksgiving Day Parade because
of James Caesar Petrillo, head of the American Federation of
Musicians, having issued an edict proclaiming that the band had to
be withdrawn or face union action against the Parade by ordering all
union musicians to boycott it.
Tom Watkins of The News tells of the fiscal problems
facing Charlotte.
Sports editor Ray Howe designates North Carolina, winners
over Duke by a score of 21-0 the previous Saturday, as the team of
the week.
This year, as we pointed out last week, the two teams met for
the first time on a Thursday since Thanksgiving Day, 1963, postponed
from that previous tragic weekend. The first Thursday game between
the two schools, incidentally, came in 1922 on University Day,
October 12, when Duke was still Trinity College. UNC won that game,
20-0.
Anyway, the score this week will be 58 to 36, not to mention
103-80, 75-65, and 63-60.
On the editorial page, "No Substitutes for Marshall
Plan" finds that the column's campaign to replace "ERP"
permanently with "Marshall Plan" as the proper name for
the relief program had garnered support elsewhere, as other
editorialists counseled likewise. It finds ERP to have a vulgar
sound, not belonging in "respectable company of geometrical
figures".
The Plan was identified with Secretary of State Marshall and
thus ought bear his name. The Herter Committee in the House had
urged adoption of the "Marshall Plan", thus lending an
official imprimatur to the convention. That Committee recommended
establishment of a new agency to administer the Plan. In having such
a new agency, it was obvious that the Congress believed that it
would be more responsive to the Republican viewpoint than would the
State Department as administrators.
It warns that the Republicans, while having the right to
insure that the money was spent correctly, should not use the
opportunity to enable Congressional control of foreign internal
affairs. Too many of the GOP were seeking to use it as a means of
continuing a two-world conflict, between East and West.
It would be a serious mistake were the Congress to set up a
program significantly different from the vision set forth by
Secretary Marshall.
"To Peace through War Talk" tells of Dr. A. A.
Brill, a psychiatrist who wrote for the Journal of Living,
recommending war talk as a salutary release of aggressive
tendencies, as in sport. After a war in which such instincts were
given full rein to gallop, unabated by customary societal taboos
against murder and brutality, peaceful emotions were hard to
reacquire. Thus, the talking war in the aftermath was healthful as a
transition to peace and was not serving as prelude to another war.
The piece hopes that Dr. Brill was correct and no shooting
war would break out before the editorial reached print. It
recommends to those suffering from the emotional hangover which the
doctor described to engage in sports or run a mile every morning or
build a boat in their basement, while the diplomats fought things
out in London regarding the German and Austrian treaties.
"Albert Lea to Charlotte" discusses the report of
the retired head of the Chamber of Commerce of Albert Lea, Minn.,
counseling that the best booster was a good knocker. The retired
president of the Chamber had, in his report, decided to provide an
unvarnished view of the community's efforts during the previous
year. He attacked the housing shortage, persisting despite creation
of a housing authority in the town. There were other shortcomings
which he stressed as well.
The editorial tells of Albert Lea actually being an
attractive, progressive community, with the Albert Lea Plan and
Jobs, Inc., designed to create new business opportunities for
veterans.
But the retiring president of the Chamber felt it important
that the community not be satisfied with itself, and so stressed its
warts.
The piece thinks it an attitude which ought also prevail in
Charlotte.
A piece from the Dallas Morning News, titled "Rural
Blight on Cities", tells of Woodall Rogers of Dallas advising
the American Municipal Association of which he was president that
the placing of restrictions on cities was strangling their ability
to tackle social problems and encouraged grabbing of city government
functions by racketeering organizations. Some states, as New York,
had been able to check this trend, but Texas was still governed in
such manner that rural areas held sway in forming legislation,
blocking redistricting by population concentration and growth and
diverting tax revenue to rural areas, denying it to the cities from
which most of the revenue derived.
Twice, the Texas Legislature had denied Dallas funds for
neighborhood development to replace slums. Yet, denied proportional
representation, as in Georgia and other states, the cities were
helpless. A new state constitution might aid Texas, it suggests, but
in the meantime, it was hoped that the rural-dominated Legislature
might act more reasonably toward the cities.
Hell's bells, we ain't a-gonna accommodate no city slickers,
come in here wid all 'at fancy New Deal Commie talk, clearing de
slums and all. Let dem go on out and work for a livin', out in 'e
fields, for a change, like we do. You come on down to our farms
threatenin' us like 'at, you ain't a-gonna leave standin' up, boy.
You best know it.
Drew Pearson, aboard the Southwest Special Friendship Train,
which was transporting to Philadelphia collected wheat, organized
too late to join the main train, again relates of the generosity of
ordinary Americans, businesses, and civic clubs throughout the
country, as the main Friendship Train had traveled from Los Angeles
to New York over the course of eleven days. He provides numerous
examples.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of the most significant
occurrence in recent months in the city being a lecture by Marshal
Sokolovsky, Soviet commander in Germany, to his German economic and
production experts, in which he had said that other work would be
found for the German experts if production were not soon increased
in the Soviet zone of Germany. It was a cloaked threat of some form
of harsh treatment, such as employment in the uranium mines.
Production was flagging and sabotage was a problem in factories.
Mr. Sokolovsky then covered remedies, providing for
inducements to encourage production while observers would be
established to catch any form of lassitude or inefficiency on the
job, with severe punishment imposed for violations. He also required
that the Germans become acquainted with Soviet history and Soviet
successes. Weekly seminars would be set up and attendance recorded.
In the Soviet zone, the machines had been operating
constantly without repair since the end of the war and were now
breaking down, with parts unavailable. Raw materials had been
consumed without location of new sources. A high proportion of the
output was going to Russia.
As examples, in the Krupps Gruson works, it had been recently
discovered that 20 percent of the raw material was being sold on the
black market. At Unterwellenborn, forty percent of the iron castings
were found to be ruined by an improper mix, probably because of use
of Russian ore with a high sulfur content. At the Rostock shipyards,
instruments and equipment ready for installation were destroyed by
improper storage.
The total picture meant that more and more product was being
lost to the Germans, either through decreased production or by
diversion to Russia. Incentive to produce at greater levels thus was
diminished while the lot of the individual German in the zone grew
steadily worse.
Samuel Grafton suggests that the world was haunted by the
ghost of love which had characterized the Allied relationship of the
war. It had been replaced by bitter enmity between East and West,
with as much hate in Russia for the West as there was in the U.S.
for Russia. The Marshall Plan was supposed to behave to rejuvenate
the spirit of peace and friendship among nations, but it was, in the
end, only a halfway measure, promising a divided world, as only the
Western nations were partaking.
The Communist threat to Italy and France was real and the
Communists intended to try to undermine the Plan to keep America
from delivering the aid. In the end, the Communists in the two
countries might lose all of their standing in the effort, but they
were willing to take that risk.
Mr. Grafton wonders what remained. Was it to be a bloody
struggle? Or would the quest for amity continue? Was the
"inevitability of conflict" not a Communist doctrine,
while the "inevitability of compromise" a democratic
notion?
Former Secretary of State under President Hoover and
Secretary of War under FDR, Henry Stimson, favored the Marshall
Plan, urged that the hope it provided for world peace could not be
blinked, as it maintained a sense of humanity in the country and
kept alive the spirit of just a few years earlier that global unity
could ultimately prevail over war.
Charles W. Duke, continuing his series on the Freedom Train,
carrying the important documents from the nation's history across
the country to be viewed by the citizenry, tells of the Mayflower
Compact being included on the train. Just before Thanksgiving, he
relates of its history, coming about from the Pilgrims landing in
Plymouth on Cape Cod in 1620. They formed the Compact because a
minority favored turning back to Virginia, which was the proper
object of their patent. They had been blown off course in coming
from the Netherlands, winding up hundreds of miles north of their
target destination. The Compact stated simply that they would abide
by the government which the majority of them chose. It became the
basis for the democratic form of government which grew up in the
Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies and set the pattern for the other colonies
to follow.
The Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges of 1701 was also
included, granting colonial liberties. William Penn, in
producing it, had granted the largest number of such civil
privileges made by a company proprietor to colonists. But the
original Charter was too wieldy in its creation of a large council
of governance, and so was replaced by the Great Charter of the
Province.
The Declaration of the Nine Colonies from 1765 was also
aboard, reporting of the proceedings of a Congress held in New York
to protest the Stamp Act. Twenty-seven delegates, three from each
colony, attended and agreed that the colonists had the same rights
as Englishmen. It was the first sign of defiance to the Crown and
Parliament, and assertion of the right of self-government.
Works of Thomas Paine were also aboard, including a first
edition of his Common Sense, which lit the fires of the
Revolution in 1776.
The 1776 manuscript of the essay by early Supreme Court
Justice James Iredell, of North Carolina, was also aboard, setting
forth the case of the colonists against Britain.
