The Charlotte News

Monday, May 12, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Arab countries of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq warned the U.N. 55-nation Political Committee that they would not accept any resolution on Palestine which did not allow for an independent state. Turkey voiced its support of this position. The Foreign Minister of Iraq stated that the Arab nations would never accept a Jewish homeland within Palestine. He also declared that a Zionist state would mean war by one people against another.

The Jewish Agency clashed with Russia in the debate on whether to have immediate independence for Palestine, stating that such a goal as sought by Russia loaded the dice against Jews. The Agency representative also contended that the head of the Arab Higher Committee of Palestine, the Mufti now in Cairo, was involved during the war in atrocities against European Jews on behalf of the Nazis.

In Greece, two days after Congressional passage of the President's 400-million dollar aid bill to Greece and Turkey, it was reported that a 20,000-man Government force had launched a second phase of a general offensive against guerrilla bands in northern Greece, in northwest Thessaly and western Macedonia, in a 100-square mile area of the Pindus Mountains where 3,000 to 4,000 guerrillas were reported to be holed up.

Chinese Communist troops were reported to have penetrated the suburbs of Taiyuan, capital of Shansi Province.

The Supreme Court, in State of N. Y. v. U.S., 331 U.S. 284, upheld by a vote of 7-2, in an opinion delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, an Interstate Commerce Commission ruling of May, 1945 which had boosted freight rates on manufactured products by ten percent in Northeastern states while lowering them ten percent in Southern states, an effort to eliminate the differential traditionally discriminatory to Southern shippers and manufacturers.

Justices Robert Jackson and Felix Frankfurter dissented on the ground that the decision would add 50 million dollars annually to the shipping bill of Northeastern manufacturers, amounting to a surtax on half the population of the nation residing in those states. Justice Jackson compared the move to placing lead on a fast horse to slow it down. Justice Frankfurter termed it alternatively "burning down the barn to roast a pig".

Listen here, boys, are you calling the South a pig and a slow horse? That's fightin' words right there. Get ye a bicycle chain and some knives and be prepared to do battle out behind the gym after Court adjourns. We'll be there waiting.

Naw, there's no point in takin' it out and tryin' to cover it up. We done heard what ye said the first time. Get ye chains.

J. A. Daly reports that the decision would have an immediate positive impact on Charlotte's shipping and manufacturing. The fight against the discriminatory rates had been ongoing for twenty years.

The Senate was prepared to vote on the labor bill the following day, as debate would end at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday.

The telephone strike entered its sixth week, despite the A.T.&T. Long Lines settlement and Southern Bell settlement, as those unions would not cross picket lines until the entire Bell System strike was resolved. Negotiations continued. Illinois Bell was at 88 percent of normal service despite over half of its employees having refused to cross picket lines.

Veterans Administration head General Omar Bradley stated that automobiles should be provided by the V.A. to disabled veterans only when they demonstrated a need for a car. He spoke against expanding the classes of disabled veterans so entitled, as being considered by Congress.

In Greenville, S.C., the jury selection began in the trial of the cases of 28 defendants charged with murdering Willie Earle in February by lynching him after removing him from the Pickens jail, holding the jailer at gunpoint. Mr. Earle had been charged with murdering a taxi driver in Greenville the previous night and had been in jail only a short time when the lynch mob, comprised primarily of taxi drivers, showed up and took him. After being brutally beaten, he was shot in the head with a shotgun.

The courtroom, including the gallery reserved for black spectators, was filled.

In Washington, Methodist Bishop Wilbur Hammaker of Denver told the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee that liquor ads which promoted "no stagger—not even a swagger", that is drinkers who were always well-ordered in their behavior, were luring young people to drink. He was testifying for a bill introduced by Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas, barring liquor ads from interstate commerce. The Bishop wanted fair representation in the ads: brawlers and murderers and disheveled, staggering men and women using coarse language.

"Satan has decked himself in the radiant raiment of angels."

He had a point. But you cannot blame advertising for your own weakness in succumbing to a fad. It is your own fault and weakness, and not that of anyone else. So stop giving yourself that crutch, dumb bell. It is you, stupid, and you alone. You are the dummy who gives in to corporate advertising, no matter how slick or manipulative it might be. It is ultimately your weakness, your decision which gives it traction. Banning it has little to do with it. Illegal narcotic drugs have never been advertised, but they still proliferate.

You speech banners are as moronic as those who give in to the wrong things.

Becoming aware of the manipulation at a young age is the sure, and only certain, panacea against it. Yet, some foolish parents seek to "protect" their children against the world by censoring selected parts of it, rather than guiding them through uncharted or troublesome waters, and then express shock one day when those "good" children grow up to become alcoholics, addicts, or criminals. Censorship is the ultimate evil. Know of thine enemy that you may defeat it.

In Los Angeles, a fifth woman was found strangled after being raped, a few hours after a fourth victim's husband was arrested for that strangulation murder. The string of homicides had begun in mid-January with the discovery in a vacant lot of the bisected body of Elizabeth Short. The other three victims were aviatrix Jeanne French, former film studio secretary Evelyn Winters, and Dorothy Montgomery, the latter whose husband had just been charged with her murder after her body was found May 3 beneath a pepper tree. The present victim, as some of the others, had one shoe missing, but her body bore no signs of mutilation.

In Phoenix, Winnie Ruth Judd was captured twelve hours following her third escape from the state mental facility. She was confined for the murder of two women in 1931, after which she had dismembered their bodies and shipped the parts in trunks to Los Angeles.

Whether she received preferred shipping rates or whether it would have been cheaper to do the shipping from the Northeast is not stated.

These are things you want to know. Plan ahead.

In Charlotte, ground was broken for a new $115,000 Naval Reserve Armory.

Go there and become aware.

It's 15, actually, a shift of 15 votes. You need writers for your adaptations who can count. Assuming the total of 497 votes cast to be accurate, the final tally would have been 278 to 219. If you do not study mathematique and strive for accuracy, you wind up with explosions.

On the editorial page, "Stilling the Voice of America" comments on the House determination to cripple or eliminate the Voice of America out of fear of Government propaganda being disseminated by the State Department.

A year earlier, the American Society of Newspaper Editors looked into the matter with a critical and jaundiced eye, but found VOA to be operating on a modest budget to provide a necessary purpose of broadcasting into Russia, and, despite some excesses, recommended that it should not be cut in its funding.

Such a vote of confidence by a conservative organization could not easily be overlooked. If the VOA went off the air, the frequencies would be taken over by foreign governments in Europe and anti-American propaganda would inevitably be transmitted.

The piece favors retention of the service without cutting its modest budget.

"The Vindication of Louie Newton" tells of a fiery debate taking place at the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis, with Dr. J. Frank Norris, a fundamentalist leader from Fort Worth, charging the president of the organization, Dr. Newton, with appeasement of Russia after the latter had toured Russia the previous year at the invitation of the Soviets and reported that the Baptists in Russia had fared surprisingly well during the war, having full freedom of worship under the Communist Government. He had denied casting favor on that Government, but his critics nevertheless so charged.

Despite the criticism, however, Dr. Newton was re-elected president of the Southern Baptists, establishing that the majority of the membership did not view the minister under the stroke of any such Red brush as Dr. Norris sought to apply.

"The Egg and Union County" tells of the transformation of neighboring Union County, as detailed in "The Carolina Farmer" section of the newspaper this date, from a one-crop county of cotton production as it had been in the Twenties to a diversified system which now included the grains, barley, wheat and oats, becoming the predominant staples of the county. The grains fed poultry and had given the county prosperity as it had never before enjoyed.

Union was an example of a county facing its need for change and accomplishing it.

A piece from the High Point Enterprise, "That North-South Differential", agrees with John L. Lewis on the point that Southern coal miners should not be paid less than miners of other sections. Southerners, however, had been largely responsible for the differential, though FDR and others had aided the process.

While it was true that the Southern miner did not have to put as much money into heavy winter clothing and fuel as his Northern counterpart, perhaps he had to spend for refrigeration and light clothes in summer.

The Roosevelt Administration had put more money into Pennsylvania than nine Southern states, with three times the population, at a time when FDR was calling the South, per UNC Professor Howard Odum's work, the No. 1 Economic Problem.

It urges that the South stop considering itself to be a lower class apart from the nation. It finds North Carolinians to be among the worst offenders in this regard. The state bragged of paying its teachers more than other Southern states, and made other such regional comparisons, rather than using the nation as a bellwether.

Drew Pearson tells of lobbyist Morton Bodfish, representing the U.S. Savings & Loan Association and the American Savings & Loan Association, throwing a lavish dinner at the Statler Hotel in Washington for 40 Congressmen and Senators to assail the Taft-Ellender-Wagner long-term housing bill as inimical to free enterprise.

Mr. Bodfish had been for some time, since during the war, an effective and influential lobbyist who had corralled the votes of many Congressmen.

Speaker of the House Joe Martin of Massachusetts had refused to attend the dinner, knowing better.

Mr. Pearson then provides the names of several of the attendees. Senator P. the B. W. Lee O'Daniel of Texas had given a sermonette on the value of savings and loans, from which he personally had benefited. Representative Everett Dirksen of Illinois compared the free enterprise of his hometown, Pekin, to political Washington.

Ohio Congressman John Vorys told a dinner gathering given by Senator John W. Bricker and his wife that he had met soothsayers while in Egypt and had paid a pound to obtain an answer to his question as to who would be the next President, Senator Taft on a Taft-Bricker ticket or Senator Bricker on a Bricker-Taft ticket. The others in the group, however, were anxious to depart and so he had to go before hearing the answer.

Probably a good thing, as the soothsayer worth his pound in salt would simply have said that it would as soon be Flit Flicker-Snit Snicker as either one.

Marquis Childs quotes from an editorial column by Frank R. Kent that there were more left-wing New Dealers within the channels of communication at present than before the Republican sweep in the mid-term elections the previous November. Arthur Krock of the New York Times and Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald-Tribune had editorialized in the same vein. Their basic line was that these New Deal "propagandists" were standing in the way of Republican programs.

Mr. Childs casts upon the unstirred waters of resolution in this vein a ripple of self-confessed relatively callow doubt, based on his observation during the New Deal years of the lack of impact of most newspaper editorial writers, notably Messrs. Sullivan and Kent, who were steadfastly opposed to FDR and his policies throughout the time, without resultant effect at the ballot box. So, he concludes that they were presuming too much influence on the part of newspaper commentators at present inveighing against Republican policies.

The three commentators had used the phrase "lame duck columnists" to describe these holdover New Dealers. He finds that ironic as they, themselves, could have been so described during the New Deal years. The position suggested that thought and opinion should necessarily follow the ballot box, antithetical to an informed democracy.

Senator Robert Taft and persons at the RNC had taken up this same line.

The point was rather misplaced given that most newspapers and commentators, in radio and newspapers, were conservative. The radio commentators who had taken a liberal approach to labor and other issues had been replaced by persons who provided a more conservative dictum.

Mr. Childs concludes by reminding that the Soviet press was free of opposition, giving uniform praise to the Government. It was hardly an ideal model to follow.

Samuel Grafton remarks of the politician now having to tread warily in waters fraught with greater peril than in the fall when he could get away with scaring voters into submission, exhorting that it did not matter what meat cost but rather whether one could purchase it. Now, with the cost of living going up further after controls had been lifted and production was the highest ever in peacetime, the philosophy preached by the Republicans in the fall rang hollow.

Sixteen Republicans had just voted with the Democrats against the ban on industry-wide collective bargaining, one of the key components of Senator Taft's labor bill. That defection was indicative of the shift in public mood.

There were layoffs in lumber, woolen goods manufacturers, construction, and plastics and leather industries.

The Congressional effort to lower taxes and kill off price control had reached its climax and was now on the decline. The public, increasingly on the economic downside, was reading the front pages again rather than so much just the comic section.

Many of Mr. Grafton's liberal friends wondered what the reaction to giving 400 million dollars of aid to Greece and Turkey would ultimately be when unemployment appeared to be rising again.

A letter replies to the response of the minister of the First Wesleyan Methodist Church to his earlier letter regarding the liquor debate and the referendum of June 14 to establish ABC stores for government-controlled sale of alcohol to replace the bootlegging system thriving under prohibition.

The writer debates Biblical language with the minister. The minister had suggested that Jesus turned the water to grape juice, not wine, and that the juice was then only used transitorily. The writer gives his impression that Jesus had performed a miracle under which the natural laws did not apply, as when he fed the multitudes with two fish and five loaves of bread. Under the minister's analysis, Jesus simply had a few grapes up his sleeve which he then squeezed into the water as a party host providing a nice party-wine for the wedding guests who were not content with only water.

The writer suggests that the minister had confused "context" with "commentary".

The context this writer had previously suggested, he contends, fit better the words of Jesus at Luke 7:34, when he said in rebuke of the Pharisees: "The Son of man is come eating and drinking: and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber."

We note that the King James Version states the last phrases in full as: "Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!"

The writer clarifies that his point was that quoting Scripture for or against the referendum was of little use in proving any thesis.

A letter responds to the letter of A. W. Black—probably an ill-advised thing to try to do, as Mr. Black may have in fact been a White, or even a Green, posing as a Black—regarding his criticism of the newspaper's piece praising WBT radio announcer Grady Cole. He thinks that the writer must have either been jealous or not received his double-money back under one of the product guarantees which Mr. Cole personally advertised and underwrote.

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.