The Charlotte News

Tuesday, March 4, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House refused to approve the Senate resolution to cut the President's proposed 37.5 billion dollar budget by only 4.5 billion dollars rather than the six billion which had been approved by the House, including about two billion in defense cuts not in the Senate version. The matter was sent to a Joint Conference Committee for reconciliation. It was expected that the ultimate cuts would be around five billion dollars.

In a series of raids in Athens, Greece, police arrested 200 persons for recruiting youths for guerilla bands and sending arms to the guerillas in northern Greece.

Former Secretary of State Byrnes told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee considering ratification of the treaties formed with Italy, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria that getting the occupation forces out of Europe was a primary consideration in forming those treaties. Russia, he said, had half a million troops outside Germany and the U.S. had 200,000 and Britain 250,000 in Western Europe.

Parenthetically, the fifth concluded treaty, that with Poland, is not mentioned, whether the result of a casual omission by the reporter or specfically not included by Mr. Byrnes, not being entirely clear. Perhaps Mr. Byrnes deliberately avoided mention of the treaty for the disapproval by the State Department of the January Polish election.

In Madrid, twelve Gypsies were reported killed when the bridge under which they lived, weakened by downpours, collapsed on them, along the road to Almudena Cemetery in the Ventas suburb.

The House Public Works Subcommittee voted to allow the Government to sell steam to the DAR for heating Constitution Hall. A representative of the Committee for Racial Democracy opposed the bill for the group denying privileges to blacks to perform in the Hall.

The New York Cotton Exchange closed until further notice as members of the United Financial Employees staged a strike at the Exchange, the first such strike at a large commodities exchange. About 100 of the 103 employees walked off the job. The striking workers sought a 20 percent wage increase, an adequate pension plan, and other benefits. Both sides had already agreed to a 15 percent wage hike, but not on the other issues.

In Malden, Mass, five police officers were required to protect a 17-year old boy as he attended his arraignment on the charge that on Sunday night he had murdered an eleven-year old girl. Relatives of the girl wanted to strike, claw, and spit at him. The boy's mother stated that he had returned home with mud on his clothes and gave no explanation. She had then turned him in to authorities.

Representative James Richards of South Carolina proposed a bill before Congress to equip commercial airline passengers with parachutes. He stated that the airlines were criminally negligent for not providing chutes.

The South Carolina House had approved legal divorce in the state, and the bill was now pending in the Senate.

The North Carolina Senate passed the bill to separate Game & Inland Fisheries from the Department of Conservation & Development, permitting divorce among wildlife. The House was likely also to approve.

The House passed a bill to outlaw manufacture and sale of fireworks, already passed by the Senate. North Carolina's Governor at the time had no right of veto.

A State Senator defended the bill he was sponsoring for a statewide referendum on alcohol, though admitting it had unfair features. If the dry forces were to win such a vote, the whole state would become dry, but if the wet forces were to win, things would not change from the status quo. The last statewide referendum on the subject had been in 1908.

Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton was honeymooning in Switzerland with her fourth husband, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy of Lithuanian royalty. She had divorced Cary Grant in Aug., 1945. Currently, she resided in Tangier, Morocco.

On the editorial page, "Battleground of the Public Mind" tells of the debate over the anti-closed shop bill in the Legislature having triggered the memory of Tom Bost of the Greensboro Daily News regarding the Administration of Governor Walter Bickett 25 years earlier when feeling against unions also had been running high. After he had left office in 1921, a printers' strike in Raleigh had prompted him to state that he would counsel labor to continue to strike if he were its enemy.

The proponents of the ban on the closed shop had largely ridden the emotional tide of the anti-John Lewis feeling in the country, despite the fact that North Carolina had no coal mines. But the measure was deemed prophylactic and so had passed the House.

Labor, it thinks, should heed Governor Bickett's words from a quarter century earlier, as labor's greatest enemy was public opinion galvanized against it. Labor needed, therefore, to exercise responsibility.

"Rend, Amend and Recommit" tells of the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill predicting that the current session of the Legislature would adjourn by April 10, but finding itself probably to be too optimistic in the face of an unusual amount of controversy having arisen during the session.

Several bills had been introduced to gain special advantage for special interests, gumming up the works. The bill to regulate undertakers was one, now apparently deceased. There was a bill to prohibit law enforcement to act as undercover operatives to catch bootleggers. A bill would prohibit tenant farmers from moving if they owed money to the landlord. A bill would abolish the necessity of averring under penalty of perjury that there had been no fraud or deceit in obtaining a divorce. Another bill would abolish the requirement of registration of lobbyists with the General Assembly.

"Grass Roots in Guilford" tells of the High Point Enterprise conducting a straw poll among its readers, with the result that out of some 4,700 respondents, virtually all had supported the South Piedmont teachers' efforts to obtain a higher pay increase than the twenty percent favored by Governor Gregg Cherry and the Legislature, despite the fact that a higher increase would reportedly strain the State's budget.

Drew Pearson discusses Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina taking pride in his past efforts to rid the Farm Security Administration of "Reds" and his more recent efforts to combine the FSA with the Department of Agriculture's crop loan functions, to become the Farmers Home Administration.

He had not been so forthcoming, however, about obtaining a nice job in the Government for a relative, placing his brother-in-law in the FHA and his sister as his brother-in-law's secretary, at a combined salary of $13,000 per year.

Thirty-one Baptist missionaries had visited the President and he had exhorted them to spread the gospel of peace around the world.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio had engaged in a tete-a-tete with Philip Murray of CIO during a hearing before the Labor Committee, in which Mr. Murray contended that there had been no major strike in steel since 1936, when the "Little Steel" strike at Republic had resulted in violence, with 23 workers murdered in Chicago. Senator Taft suggested that there had been violence on both sides, to which Mr. Murray, head of the Steelworkers Union, testily responded that the Supreme Court had found Republic operating in violation of the Wagner Act. Senator Taft also suggested that it was better to lower prices than raise wages, apparently forgetting for the moment that he had been primarily responsible for the removal of price controls the previous summer.

A fellow Mississippian told of the pent-up frustration and wrath of Congressman John Rankin, no longer in the forefront of either HUAC or the Veterans Committee, roles to which he had become ruefully accustomed.

The Navy was a chief user of paint to preserve the ships, the more in need because of mothballing, but had cut back to ease the squeeze on veterans seeking housing. The Navy in 1946 had used only 2.5 percent of the nation's supply of titanium dioxide, a key ingredient of paint, and would use even less in the coming year.

Marquis Childs tells of the "long rope of the past" pulling on Secretary of State Marshall as he departed for Moscow to attend the Foreign Ministers Council meeting, with its primary agenda to begin the process of settlement of the treaties with Germany and Austria.

The Russians had suddenly announced their agreement with the American position on trusteeships for the U.S. over the Japanese mandates seized by the U.S. during the war. Secretary Byrnes, the previous summer, had reached loggerheads on the issue with Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov. He had confronted Mr. Molotov with the fact that Russia was occupying the Kurile Islands and the entirety of Sakhalin, half of which had formerly belonged to Japan. Mr. Molotov stated that the matter was a settled issue. Mr. Byrnes regarded that as contrary to the Potsdam and Yalta agreements, that no territorial settlement should take place until the treaty with Japan was completed. Since that exchange, nothing had occurred on the issue until the recent Soviet note approving the trusteeship arrangement.

The Navy was primarily responsible for the trusteeship policy, and, like it or not, Secretary Marshall had to implement it. The rationale expressed by the Russians for their approval of the policy was that the American sacrifice had been the greatest in obtaining the islands in question and so America had a rightful claim to them.

But, likewise, Russia undoubtedly would use the same rationale to justify taking territory for itself in Eastern Europe, its desired buffer zones. Russia had made the great sacrifice in these countries. So it would prove difficult to resist the request.

Edgar Snow had written a series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post explaining that America's desire for protective island bases in the Pacific looked to the Russians as aggression while Russian desires for buffer bases in Eastern Europe appeared to Americans as aggression.

Mr. Childs reminds that if the world were to be divided into sole trusteeships, it would not look much different from the world prior to World War I or II. It would only feed new suspicions and breed new wars.

The long rope of the future was also being increscently pulled taut, getting down to the "nut-cutting of this thing on the Hill".

Samuel Grafton, writing still from Paris, relates of the harsh conditions in both England and France. In France, a shortage of equipment had caused the Army to cut the term of enlistment from a year to six months, and a shortage of sports equipment caused the national program of physical fitness for young people to go wanting, as young men were seen kicking footballs made of newspaper tied with string.

The British left-wing wanted to disband the Army for the fact of a manpower shortage in the country.

Some French were looking upon the upward trend in bankruptcies as a positive sign, indicative of a downward turn in prices. Things were so bad economically that the distinction between right and left had been nearly obliterated. The left-leaning Government had been forced to turn aside labor's demand for a minimum wage of 7,000 francs per month. Its desire for more exports was not being supported by higher wages to increase production. Productivity could be increased if the country had better machinery and enough labor to build it.

More food for labor would also assist the effort. A good meal for two people cost $20. The peasant farmers were reluctant to ship food to the cities until they were assured of the stability of the franc they would receive in return. Keeping wages down and cutting prices to avert inflation was the response of the Government.

Labor was ready to strike and turn against all of the parties, even the left. One knew that life hung by a thread when even political protest sought new forms in which to express itself.

A letter writer believes that if controlled sale of liquor were approved in a referendum, the bootlegging trade and its attendant crime would only increase.

A letter from a "Frequent Visitor" tells of the dread of visiting Charlotte because of crowds on the Square.

A letter writer asks why the nation was training large armies for use of the old equipment, when all the pundits were saying that a prospective war would be fought with other than such conventional weaponry.

The editors find themselves stumped as well and ask readers to venture help if they could in answering the woman's query.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.