The Charlotte News
Thursday, November 6, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President told a press conference that he had asked that the Congress first consider the emergency aid to Europe in the special session of Congress to start November 17 before it considered anti-inflation measures, although he considered both of equal importance.
Speaker of the House Joe Martin said that he believed that the Congress would act on the measures in the order the President had specified, but cautioned that the foreign aid program would have to be justified before approval. Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota stated that the aid should be tailored in accordance with the self-help which the recipient countries were willing to undertake, that is an "incentive quota" system.
The Speaker also stated that he did not favor bringing up tax legislation in the special session, as proposed by House Ways & Means chairman Harold Knutson of Minnesota. He wanted any such proposal delayed until the start of the new session in January.
In London, V. M. Molotov charged, in a speech broadcast to Russia marking the 30th anniversary of the Revolution, that the United States was planning aggression against the Soviet Union as evidenced by the retention of the atomic secret and the establishment of new naval and air bases close to Russia. He said that the secret of the bomb had been known for some time, but not the method by which it was assembled. He claimed that both Britain and the U.S. were trying to impede efforts to outlaw the atomic bomb. He also made room for collaboration with capitalist countries, but stated that capitalism was on its last legs.
In Augusta, Ga., the chairman of Governor M. E. Thompson's faction of the Democratic Party, William Morris, was knocked down and pummeled by a supporter of Herman Talmadge, who, earlier in the year, had been denied the Governor's Mansion after the Legislature awarded him the election following the death of his father, former Governor Eugene Talmadge, the previous December after the elder Talmadge had been elected Governor. The Georgia Supreme Court had declared Mr. Thompson, as Lieutenant Governor, the rightful successor under the State Constitution. The incident occurred before a hearing in a lawsuit to determine which faction controlled the Democratic Party in the state.
Mr. Morris had approached the former Georgia Speaker of the House, Roy Harris, and called him a "son of a bitch", or words to that effect, for being publisher of the Augusta Courier, a white supremacist newspaper. Mr Harris then leaped on Mr. Morris and knocked him into the jury box, began hitting him about the face. Other attorneys then intervened. Mr. Morris then lunged at Mr. Harris but was restrained. Mr. Morris had beaten Mr. Harris in 1946 in the race for the latter's legislative seat.
At least they were spirited. It would probably do the country some good if some of our latter-day politicians displayed some color occasionally, even if perhaps not so much as in this particular instance. Then again, it is better than the car chase and murder du jour stories which usually populate the margins of the news.
In Beckley, W. Va., a socially prominent businessman and the wife of a dentist were found slain at the bottom of an embankment, having apparently been shot while in in the backseat of the dentist's car and their bodies then rolled down the embankment. The murders occurred near the Black Knight Country Club.
In Raleigh, the State Board of Education was contemplating whether to take the case of R. L. Fritz, president of the North Carolina Education Association, champion of higher teacher salaries, and former principal at the Hudson School in Caldwell County, to court for his having misappropriated $1,600 in State funds which had been paid for substitute teachers but which Mr. Fritz had reimbursed to regular teachers for overtime pay to keep the understaffed school running. Earlier in the year, the Board had revoked his teaching certificate. The State Attorney General and the County Solicitor wanted to initiate a criminal prosecution but wanted the cooperation of the Board in so doing.
Tom Lynch of The News follows up on the story of a month earlier regarding the slow boat taken by airmail to Charlotte. Letters from New York were still arriving by airmail in two days, the same amount of time it took for regular mail to reach Charlotte. The matter was being investigated by Congressman Hamilton Jones, who had alerted the Post Office Department, which assured that they were looking into the problem. They informed that they had found some irregularities in the airmail service, which cost two cents more than the three-cent regular mail
Sports writer Furman Bisher tells of a Charlotte dentist having received $5,000 for first place in the Southeastern North Carolina Beach Association's fishing contest for reeling in a 74-pound sailfish. The award matched 90 percent of the dentist's annual salary. He said that the fish had put up a stiff fight, having to be jerked from the water seventeen times. The fish measured seven feet, eleven inches, and was caught off the old position buoy near the mouth of the Cape Fear River.
You go fish there and maybe you, too, can obtain $5,000 for a fish.
On the editorial page, "Fright Left by Halloween" tells of a particularly raucous October 31 in Charlotte, amounting to a night of terror in the Myers Park, Eastover and Dilworth sections of the city. Pedestrians were stoned and hit with milk bottles. Cannon crackers were hurled at passing motorists and at pedestrians on sidewalks. A brick had been thrown at a lighted window where a woman was hanging curtains, but was luckily deflected by a bush. Bricks were also thrown through plate glass windows at the same residence, showering glass over the beds of four children fortunately elsewhere at the time. Papers and leaves were set on fire on the front porch of another Myers Park home.
Street lights were knocked out, signs torn down, car tires slashed. The riotous conduct continued into the early morning hours.
The piece suggests that the violence of Halloween continued the spirit of lawlessness through the year and was the result of overly permissive parents condoning juvenile delinquency.
"Marshall Plan Is Paying Off" tells of Republican Congressman John Davis Lodge of Connecticut, brother of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, having told of his finding during his trip through Europe that the trend was against Communism, as reflected in the polling results in the municipal elections in France, in Norway, and in Rome. In Denmark, the Communist representation in Parliament had been cut in half. Nationalization in Britain had also been slowed by the prospect of the Marshall Plan aiding both Britain and its trading partner France. The recent municipal elections in Britain had also trended for the Conservatives.
The turn to the right was especially significant to the Marshall Plan as Congress was getting ready to convene its special session, to start November 17. The Plan had already paid large dividends before being implemented. The only question was whether Americans had the sense to recognize the fact.
"One Step Away from Bilboism" finds it encouraging that John Stennis, who had won the Senate election n Mississippi to replace Theodore Bilbo, who had died the previous August, had run a campaign which did not exploit white supremacy and that the opponents who had, chief among whom was Congressman John Rankin, had lost badly in the six-person race, Mr. Rankin coming in dead last among five Democrats. Judge Stennis polled 27 percent of the vote, while the three white supremacists, together, had garnered 59 percent. The remaining 14 percent went to a candidate who also appeared not to use white supremacy in his campaign.
The figures were disturbing, despite the victory by Mr. Stennis. That more than half the voters in the election had voted for white supremacist candidates suggested that the ghost of Bilbo lingered on in Mississippi politics. The victory of Mr. Stennis appeared the result of vote-splitting by the white supremacists and the fact of minimal outside influence to raise the hackles of the reactionary part of the electorate. In the last election, in 1946, in which Mr. Bilbo had run and won, Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell had sought to make his defeat a national issue. None of the white supremacists running in the current election had the showmanship abilities of Senator Bilbo. And the President's Civil Rights Committee had issued so late its report, recommending complete integration of society, that candidates could not exploit it.
But the editorial fears that the Bilbo spirit still lingered in the state, as long as citizens were denied the right to vote and "as long as an illiterate, ill-fed electorate remains fertile soil for sowers of hate."
A piece from the London Times, titled "Britain without Hollywood", tells of the day fast approaching when Britain would see no more new American films, as Hollywood had banned the export of its films based on the new British duties being levied, eroding, according to M.P.A.A. head Eric Johnston, most of the remainder of the already skimpy profits. British film producers would seek to fill the entertainment gap, but something, it says, would be missing from their lives.
Most tragic, British moviegoers would be losing, amid the glamour and glitz, the Hollywood conception of London, always enveloped in a dense fog, a land which Britons had learned to love and which had redeemed many a poor film. The Hollywood House of Commons was more animated and better lit than the London version, and always full of international drama.
Britain's aristocracy always had beautiful American daughters who lived in castles and were addicted to sport, particularly fox-hunting. The lower classes wore gaiters in the country and, being costers in the city, dressed to fit the manner of their calling.
Save in wartime, the Army was always comprised almost entirely of senior officers.
There were but two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.
Cricket and football were not much played, leading the populace to a good deal of crime.
But it had been a wonderful place to visit, the only problem being that when the British encountered Americans in the Hollywood version, they almost never comprehended American life.
Drew Pearson tells of abolition of the excess profits tax from the war having been done at the end of the war at the behest of then Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson, subsequently appointed to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the death of Harlan Stone in May, 1946. Various experts, including Postmaster General Robert Hannegan, who had been commissioner of internal revenue, and Marriner Eccles, Federal Reserve Board chairman, had argued that ending the tax so soon after the war would produce inflation. Three Senators opposed ending the tax, Tom Connally of Texas, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming. They had predicted that as soon as big business was again given the incentive to make large profits, pressure would be placed on removing price controls, in turn producing inflation. That is what had transpired.
Profits of the 402 major companies on the New York Stock Exchange had soared 97.9 percent above the previous year, even though 1946 after-tax profits had been the highest in history. It was the reason that labor was seeking another round of wage hikes, in turn again set to raise the cost of living.
He notes that many had wondered why Chief Justice Vinson, once a crusader for liberal ideals, had shifted to the right, both while at Treasury and on the Supreme Court. His close friends said that it was the result of the loss of FDR's strong leadership and the retirement of the Chief Justice's chief assistant, Ed Pritchard, who had kept his boss liberal for many years.
He next tells of American oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Standard of California and Texaco forming ARAMCO, having made 91 million dollars on investment of $100,000 by dint of incorporating in the Bahamas and thus not having to pay taxes on the profits in the U.S., all while using Government money to keep King Ibn Saud happy, to protect the companies' concessions—selling popcorn and peanuts at the Saudi football games on Saturdays for a tidy sum.
He tells of his own revelations on March 29 of the high prices paid by the Navy for oil from ARAMCO, long before the current Senate War Investigating Committee expose.
American troops would begin departing Italy on December 6 to be in compliance with the requirement of being out of the country by the 15th, 90 days after conclusion of the peace treaty. Meanwhile, Russia, facing the same deadline in Bulgaria, had shown no signs of preparation for departure.
Joseph Alsop, in Prague, tells of the city having a prosperous appearance, in contrast to the rest of Europe, with the shops full of goods and the streets jammed with traffic, the people "downright fat".
But beneath that surface, Czechoslovakia was in the grip of a "creeping terror". Since the end of the war Communists had ruled as Democrats, East and West had met without an intervening iron curtain, and human freedom had survived in the face of Soviet power. But that period was coming fast to an end as the iron curtain was threatening to descend within a few months, enabling the release of the underground terror into the open. Czechoslovakia would become as Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, under the Soviet fist.
There were no Soviet troops in the country and so it was amazing that such a freedom-loving people would accept such a fate. Prime Minister Gottwald, a Communist, had the real power over aging President Benes. The Communists had placed at the head of the Army General Svoboda, commander of the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia during the war. He had passed over experienced officers from the Western theater and promoted those with connections to Russia. Moreover, the counter-intelligence corps had come under the domination of Communists or their puppets.
Thus, the Army was infiltrated by Communists and neutralized. The Information Ministry was overtly Communist and the Ministry of the Interior, also headed by a Communist, had transformed all branches of the national police into service organizations for the party. The Communists controlled the labor unions and many of the armed partisans. Thus, the instruments of staging a coup were all present.
These instruments had been in Communist hands for awhile, but until recently the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister believed that they should behave in the Western vein as the country was economically dependent on the West. When the Marshall Plan was announced, both Communists and non-Communists voted to send a delegation to the pre-planning conference to put in a request for aid. That had occurred after Poland had indicated its intent to do likewise. But the Politburo and Josef Stalin had intervened to stop the delegation from attending, forcing them finally to vote not to go. People in the streets of Prague spoke of the reversal as the "new Munich".
The incident had shown Moscow that there was some spirit of independence still in Prague and the word went out to "put the screws on" the Czechs. Mr. Alsop says that the screws were now on.
Samuel Grafton tells of a shift in the American middle class to the right, following by a year its election of the Republican Congress. A few weeks earlier, the French had provided a 40 percent plurality to the Gaullists in the municipal elections, a swing to the right by the French middle class. The British middle class had just given the Conservatives a large victory in the mayoral elections.
The major change was in districts where heretofore liberals could achieve victories in otherwise conservative districts. Now those districts, with the war over, were returning to their natural ideological roots. The left of center viewpoint was being left out in the cold in all three countries.
It did not mean that the conservatives were content. Their appetite had been whetted and they were all the more determined to gain more power, as in the U.S. The Republican victory brought only more determined campaigns against radical and leftist thinking, to try to preserve their power. With it came increased tension with Russia. With General De Gaulle in power in France, and should Winston Churchill come to power again in England, there would yet be more tension.
Such rightward drift would increase the division of the world into two camps. It was likely that Russian policies had contributed to this shift and that they would take full advantage in their propaganda efforts to promote the idea that the West had become rightist in orientation, even if inaccurate.
The division between Russia and the West had helped to destroy the liberal movements in both the U.S. and Britain. Some 25 million young Russians had just signed a petition that they supported Russia in a defensive fight against the West. Until the division could be bridged, it would be useless to expect normal evolutionary processes to solve the world's problems. He finds the East-West quarrel to be the defining issue of the time.
A letter from the secretary-treasurer of the Charlotte Building Trades Council responds to the report of October 29 regarding the Housing Authority having recommended to the City Council that it implement the substandard housing ordinance and the Council's determination to delay further the imposition of the ordinance, passed before the war, the deferral being because of purported continuing scarcity of building materials.
The Building Trades Council commend the Authority for bringing the matter to the attention of the public. They affirm that there were sufficient materials and labor available with which to correct the substandard housing in the city and favor immediate enforcement of the ordinance.
A
letter writer responds to the
anonymous letter writer of October 24 who believed that FDR had sold
the country out to Stalin and that Harry Truman was an uneducated
"nitwit" following in the late President's tracks, did
not want to be identified for fear that someone would think him
stupid enough to read The News. This writer thinks the
correspondent was bitten by Westbrook Pegler
He thinks that should Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft be nominated by the Republicans, it would be the end of the party, and if either were elected, the end of the country.
A
letter from the Buckingham Street
Fire Station
Send him a book about the pouring
rain
Framed Edition
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