The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 16, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in London at the foreign ministers conference, the U.S., Britain, and France worked on tentative plans for economic consolidation of Western Germany. French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault said that he would accept economic unification of the three zones in the Western sector, provided it would be profitable to France. The British and American zones had already been united economically.

The Big Four conference ended and Soviet Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov departed for Moscow. Some deputies remained, however, and there would be additional efforts starting the following day to conclude an Austrian treaty. Secretary of State Marshall planned to depart on Thursday.

The emergency aid bill for France, Italy, Austria, and China was sent to the President for signature, authorizing that no more than 597 million dollars could be spent, but not setting a particular amount otherwise beyond the 150 million authorized immediately.

The House Appropriations Committee this date sent to the floor a bill authorizing 509 million dollars for France, Austria, and Italy, nothing for China. The previous House bill, reconciled under the bill sent to the President, had authorized 60 million for China. The bill provided that 88 million would be in reserve for possible use in China.

The new House bill also cut from 490 million to 230 million a fund which the Army had requested for government and relief expenses in occupied areas.

U.S. deputy delegate to the U.N. Herschel Johnson, from Charlotte, suffered a mild heart attack. His condition was not serious. Mr. Johnson had a large role in obtaining assent from the General Assembly for the partition of Palestine.

The New York State Council of the Knights of Columbus protested a Christmas card sent out by Henry Wallace, calling it an atheistic attack on their Christian beliefs. The card, entitled "Mother and Child", showed a nude woman with her child, and Mr. Wallace's message: "I hear no armies marching, I hear only a world crying out for peace." The Knights considered it "sacrilegious and obscene".

The baby Jesus was never suckled in the nude. A bottle was used. Everybody knows that.

And Jesus, furthermore, stands for war, not peace. Everyone understands that also. The Knights were absolutely, positively, a hundred and fifty-five and one-quarter percent correct. Mr. Wallace was an atheistic Commie. Merry Russian Christmas.

In Wheeling, W. Va., bingo addicts were able to circumvent a ruling by the State Attorney General banning bingo as a game of chance, awarding, under a new local ordinance, prizes to bingo winners for providing correct or even incorrect answers to simple questions following their win.

In Santa Monica, Calif., Andy Russell, crooner, would soon croon again, after recovery from having his tonsils removed.

In Lenoir, N.C., the trial of former high school principal R. L. Fritz, accused of misappropriating school funds to pay regular teachers for overtime work to keep the short-handed school functioning, continued. Defense attorney Sam J. Ervin cross-examined the Caldwell County School Superintendent, a prosecution witness, as to the state law regarding employment of teachers not always being followed at the high school because of a teacher shortage in the county. Mr. Fritz, as well as other principals in the county, had to employ teachers who refused to sign contracts, a violation of state law. Health certificates, also required, were not always filed in advance of employment. Cough-cough. In some instances, said the Superintendent, high school students had to be used in the county as instructors.

Tom Fesperman tells of the Captain in the Fire Department who headed the Fire Prevention Bureau in Charlotte, warning of the fire hazard posed by Christmas trees. He recommended no dried out trees, no open flames in the vicinity of the tree, that trees not be left lighted without someone present, that trees be connected at a remote plug away from the tree, that residents erect the trees only a few days prior to Christmas and remove them soon afterward. In addition, he counseled that there should be no dried leaves or cornstalks used as decorations, no crepe paper or untreated cotton, no erection of trees in hotel rooms without the permission of the manager, and no electric trains or electric toys which caused sparks placed underneath the tree. We take that latter category to include flesh-colored Christs which glow in the dark.

Children of the Eastover School in Charlotte are shown in a photograph trimming a fireproof tree.

Don't wind up being burned up at Christmas. That is not good.

In Knoxville, Tenn., a judge awarded $230 to a man who said that a woman came to his home for dinner, announcing herself as his fourth cousin, and then, without his consent, stayed for five months. He had not seen her in twenty years.

On the editorial page, "Big Government in Education" discusses the report of the President's Commission on Higher Education, recommending increasing of Federal aid to education to enable doubling of college enrollment by 1960. It called for greatly expanded professional and graduate schools, from an enrollment of 175,000 to 600,000. Administration of colleges would have two million more personnel than in 1940. Nearly a million new teachers would be recruited. Hundreds of new community colleges would be established.

The Commission also recommended abolition of segregation and the minority quota system.

While the piece finds the program to be unobjectionable, it does not agree with the concept of predicating it on Federal aid and coercion.

The four Southern members of the Commission had dissented, their report to follow, primarily based on the majority's recommendation regarding segregation and quotas. While they might be accused by some of bowing to regional prejudices, they appeared actually to be taking exception to the notion of coerced change from the Federal Government, negating state and local self-determination. The piece implies that the Commission's recommendations were violative of the Constitution insofar as its protection afforded states rights.

The piece finds the Commission, as with the Civil Rights Commission report of a few weeks earlier, advocating immediate abolition of segregation throughout the society and passage of anti-poll tax legislation, anti-lynching legislation, and establishing the fair employment practices commission, to be engaging in naively idealistic advice, without taking into account the practical realities of the time, advising that such a program would inflame prejudices which the Commissions were seeking to eliminate. It believes America could not be remade from Washington.

We reiterate our profound disagreement with this notion. It is true that the reaction which it predicts did occur from the elimination through Federal action of legal segregation in the society during the 1950's and 1960's, with violence becoming routine as a reaction in some parts of the Deep South, albeit not so pervasive as it perhaps appeared through highlight in the new medium of television. The immediacy of that presentation to the viewer in the living room became a means of instilling national conscience, in a manner never previously afforded by newsreels at the theater or on radio. By the same token, it also perhaps helped to spread like wildfire some of the hatred and bitter reactions, an unfortunate byproduct of well intentioned coverage.

The society had dallied for nearly a century following the Civil War, with only grudging progress toward realization of the concepts originally embodied in the Bill of Rights and extended to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. When the piece says that the Commission failed to understand the Constitution's restraints on Federal power vis-à-vis states rights, it fails in its own understanding of that instrument and, most especially, the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it works in relation to states rights, embodied in the Tenth Amendment. The Supremacy Clause always trumps states rights in every field in which the President and the Congress are empowered to act, including the area of regulation of interstate commerce. The Fourteenth Amendment required that all fundamental liberties be recognized by the states, regardless of "states rights". For the Tenth Amendment only provides powers to the states which are not exclusively the province of the Federal Government or which belong to the people.

To say that the Commission's recommendations were not recognizing the Constitution was only to fuel the kind of "states rights" rhetoric which caused, the following summer, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond to walk out of the Democratic Convention, leading his Dixiecrat revolt because of a strong civil rights plank being introduced into the Democratic platform. And the segregationist movement, which had thrived in piecemeal since the Civil War, suddenly had an organizing force behind it again across the South, more respectable than the previous leadership afforded by such surreptitiously covert organizations as the Klan, with the rallying cry of preservation of states rights against the Federal Government.

The News certainly did not give birth to this concept, as it had been around for decades, even, in one form or another, since the Founding, but it appears to have shifted, under its new publisher and editor, more to the right in this regard than previously had been the case under Associate Editors W. J. Cash, Stuart Rabb, Burke Davis, and Harry Ashmore, during the editorship of J. E. Dowd, even if each of them, in perhaps varying degrees, found fault with force bills as being stimulative of the hair-trigger temper of the most rabid Southerners. But none of them had ever ventured that such efforts were anything but proper under the Constitution. And that is the most regrettable part of this editorial.

"More Safety or Danger in UMT" tells of University of Chicago chancellor Dr. Robert Hutchins attacking Universal Military Training before the National Conference for the Prevention of War. He found the proposal to be a "ridiculous and wasteful act of war" by the country, which would inflame other nations to respond.

The piece questions what other nations he had in mind, as those outside the Soviet sphere would applaud the strengthening of U.S. preparedness. It would act more as a deterrent to Russia than it would provocation.

Dr. Hutchins asserted that UMT would not deter war in the atomic age, as nations would not respond to conventional military training as a threat, that the atomic bomb was a sufficient deterrent. The piece rejoins that the country had to have an invasion force to supplement its nuclear arsenal and also a domestic force to assure coordination of defenses in the event of attack.

It agrees, however, that UMT could cause the country to become more bellicose in its stance, a grave danger, but asserts that the Russian challenge had left no alternative.

Dr. Hutchins, as explained in late July, founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, in 1959, and former News Editor Harry Ashmore joined the organization that year, leaving his post as Editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, after winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his salutary editorializing on the Little Rock school integration crisis of the fall of 1957 and beyond. Mr. Ashmore, along with the Center, took a determined stance against the Vietnam War, and Mr. Ashmore eventually went to Hanoi in 1967 and visited with Ho Chi Minh, seeking terms to end the war, which he then relayed to Washington.

"Russia's Battle with Inflation" discusses Russia's devaluation of its paper currency to one-tenth its previous value to combat runaway inflation, to reduce buying power.

Conservative U.S. bankers and economists found devaluation a more orthodox means of reeling in inflation than through controls and rationing. The Administration was considering a program to reduce the money supply to induce a mild recession, but was hesitating out of fear that it might turn into a depression.

The Russian move appeared to indicate that it was stabilizing its currency for engaging in greater economic warfare with the West. There were reports that Russia might adopt the gold standard, which it could do with 10 billion dollars worth of gold available, accumulated in the previous 20 years. A ruble backed by gold could be used to obtain scarce goods from European countries, including those to be benefited under the Marshall Plan. Such buying would force up the price of goods in Western Europe and could turn trade eastward, heightening the economic chaos already besetting Western Europe.

A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Vending Machine Age", tells of the prediction by the National Automatic Merchandising Association that within the ensuing decade, man would be served by vending machines on an unprecedented level. It suggests that with the amount of coins necessary to feed these omnipresent mechanisms, the silver dollar likely would be brought back into circulation.

Drew Pearson tells of the unhappy U.S. Ambassador to Australia, Robert Butler, desiring a new diplomatic assignment. He had initially decreed that the Star Spangled Banner be played at dawn in Canberra, causing one career diplomat to be wary of disturbing the local residents and arousing diplomatic personnel prior to their usual hour. The news leaked out and the Ambassador withdrew the order, but fired the career diplomat.

Next, the St. Paul shipbuilder took his family to six Australian cities, beginning with the state of New South Wales, expecting full reception by the local government representatives. The Governor General at first invited him only to lunch, displeasing the Ambassador, and then even canceled that date. Ambassador Butler then drafted an official note to the Governor General, saying that he was "deeply insulted", a diplomatic faux pas without precedence. The note was not sent.

Then there was a dispute over the Ambassador not having the use of a plane, which he believed had been promised, though the ostensible promise was extended by mistake. The plane actually was intended for the military attache, with whom Mr. Butler then had an irreconcilable rift.

Mr. Pearson recounts of other such petty episodes involving Ambassador Butler.

Samuel Grafton unveils "Grafton's Law", which held that the Republican leadership responded to the public weal at a ratio of 1:10, as evidenced by the turn, within a year of the Republican sweep of the Congress on a platform of decontrol, to a form of control, even if based on voluntary compliance and suspension of the anti-trust laws to allow price-fixing. It thus was not the free market advocated a year earlier by the Republicans and showed a belated recognition of the fact that inflation had caused the new attitude, diametrically opposed to that of a year earlier, that a free marketplace would be better than continued control. The previous attitude had derived from the condition that everyone was relatively rich. But the uncontrolled marketplace had not caused, even with higher production, prices to come down as predicted.

The corollary to the Law was that the Republican response was one-tenth that necessary to address the issue of inflation. Another corollary was that by the time the Republicans responded, the remedy proposed would be arithmetically further behind, as the public would be ten times more concerned.

He expresses some regret at having discovered the Law, but believes it to be serving a function to explain to Republicans why they had lost four successive national elections.

Joseph Alsop, in London, explains that the unproductive foreign ministers conference had at least allowed Secretary of State Marshall and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to get to know one another better. Until this point, the economic and political closeness between Britain and the U.S. had not matched the military cooperation. The previous year had seen petty diplomatic and economic irritation develop between the two countries.

The previous spring, for instance, Undersecretary of State Will Clayton had gone to London to discuss the Marshall Plan, prior to the Paris conference of the 16 nations seeking aid to determine their own needs under the Plan, and had offended British Cabinet members by suggesting that the Plan would be most beneficial to Italy and that Britain was just another beneficiary nation under it. Such a miscue resulted from the absence of regular communication between representatives of the two nations, as had occurred between FDR and Winston Churchill during the war.

The British had no advance warning of Secretary Marshall's Harvard speech enunciating the outline of the Plan the previous early June. Notwithstanding, Mr. Bevin had responded to it promptly in a feat of diplomacy. Nor were the British apprised in advance of the proposal by Secretary Marshall of the "little assembly" plan at the U.N., to have the political committee meet full time to act as a check on the veto on the Security Council. The British delegate had to wire to London for instructions and fortunately the British went along.

Mr. Alsop finds it unfortunate that such arms-length bargaining with the British was transpiring, as Britain was the other great non-Soviet power left in the world. It was not therefore just another European nation. There was mutual need for one another between Britain and the U.S.

Ambassador Lewis Douglas had done much to smooth Anglo-American relations, and the London conference, during which Secretary Marshall had worked closely with Mr. Bevin, had very nearly completed the healing process.

A letter writer decries V. M. Molotov and Andrei Vishinsky for their constant harangues of America for its supposed imperialist motives in distributing aid to Europe.

He cites and quotes extensively from an article in the December American Mercury, titled "Report on Russian Imperialism", by Neal Stanford, which told of Russian expansion under the Tsars from 1853 to 1914, exceeding any other country, and contraction under the Soviets after the 1917 Revolution until the beginning of World War II in 1939, after which it had again entered a period of great expansion. The article seeks to expose Russia's imperialist motives during the war and post-war period, based on a report by the State Department citing 15 instances of official Soviet expansion in the period, with Mr. Stanford adding other examples of informal expansion through installation of Communist-dominated governments, puppets of Moscow, in Hungary, the Eastern-bloc Balkans, and Poland.

A letter from failed Republican Congressional candidate P. C. Burkholder agrees with "top critics" that the New Deal was suppressing facts in support of appeasement of Russia. President Truman was dismantling the country to please the Soviets.

He did not need to do that, Mr. Burkholder. The South had for some time made a very good effort collectively of resigning itself to totalitarianism of a sort.

Anyway, he goes on a bit, as usual. And he was going to run yet again for Congress in 1948. That ought to be a joyful prospect to which everyone ought look forward in the year ahead. We hope that he won't start another campaign regarding adulteration of buttermilk.

A letter writer applauds a recent article advocating a new Southern Railway station for Charlotte to replace the dilapidated affair then extant, and urges that the newspaper continue this valuable campaign.

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