The Charlotte News

Monday, June 23, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate voted 68 to 25 during the afternoon to override the President's veto of Friday of the Taft-Hartley bill, causing it thus to become law. The House had voted to override on Friday. The Senate vote was six votes more than the necessary number among the 93 of 95 seated Senators voting. Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah was still in Geneva at the international trade conference and Senator Robert Wagner of New York was ill. Both would have voted to sustain the veto. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, previously under investigation for encouraging voting irregularities in 1946 and accepting bribes for war contracts, had never been sworn to his seat and was shortly to die in Mississippi of cancer.

The Supreme Court, in a 6 to 2 decision, in U.S. v. State of California, 332 U.S. 19, delivered by Justice Hugo Black, upheld the Federal Government's claim to tidal oil lands submerged off the California coast, extending three miles out, and denied California's state claim on which it had collected royalties from leases of the lands to private oil companies.

Justices Stanley Reed and Felix Frankfurter dissented. Justice Robert Jackson did not participate.

Attorney General Tom Clark had previously said that the suit did not affect other tidal lands beyond those in California in issue in the case. Mr. Clark assured that the Administration intended to do equity to California and the private companies involved in the leases.

The Court also upheld, 5 to 3, U.S. v. Petrillo, 332 U.S. 1, in another opinion delivered by Justice Black, the Constitutionality of the Lea Act, which forbade coercive or extortionate activity in forcing employers to employ more persons than customarily needed for a given task. The law had been passed by Congress to meet the tactics of James Caesar Petrillo with respect to the American Federation of Musicians and his practices of forcing employers to employ certain numbers of musicians and other members of the union, whether their services were necessary for a particular task at a radio station or not. The case was remanded for further trial in Federal District Court in Chicago to determine whether Mr. Petrillo actually violated the law, the case having been terminated early with the ruling that the law was unconstitutional.

Justice Reed wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge. Justice William O. Douglas did not participate.

In Georgia, three men were caught after a six-day manhunt following the June 15 murder of a revenue agent who had come upon a still and been met with a fusillade of gunfire. The three men, all black, were pursued by a cadre of law enforcement officials through swamps and undergrowth. The three men, all brothers, were listed by the FBI as "Reds". At present, they had not been charged but were being questioned.

It is too bad that those law enforcement officials did not demonstrate the same tenacity the previous summer at Moore's Ford, Georgia, when the two black couples were murdered in broad daylight and no one seemed to know any one of the mob of 25 to 30 unmasked men—a crime for which no one was ever prosecuted.

In Jackson, N.C., a black man, accused in the rape of a white woman, was indicted by a Grand Jury. Conviction of rape carried a mandatory death sentence. Conviction of first degree burglary, for which he was also indicted, was likewise subject to a death sentence, provided that the judge could, in the exercise of discretion, impose a life sentence instead. An alleged accomplice in the crime, also black, would be placed before the Grand Jury the following Thursday.

The judge told the jury that it was too bad not as much attention was paid to regular murder cases and rape cases as paid to lynchings.

Perhaps, he should have been lynched and he might have understood better those greater sensitivities to lynchings, which usually entailed deliberate infliction of sadistic torture and, in the cases where the victim had allegedly committed a rape, castration before death.

The foreign ministers of Russia, France, and England would meet Friday in Paris to discuss the Marshall Plan for the economic and political rebuilding of Europe, the Russians having agreed to have Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov attend the meeting. Britain and France had given Russia until the end of this date to make up its mind whether it would participate in the Plan, meaning that the acceptance of aid would curtail Russia's ability to establish satellites in Eastern Europe.

Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of Britain said that the meetings would be public, as in all previous meetings of the foreign ministers, no plumber had been located who could stop a leak.

The President appointed a commission of 19 leaders from business, agriculture, education and research to tell him how much aid could safely be provided abroad.

In Russia, the Food Minister declared that bread rationing was to be abandoned at some indefinite point in time, as the sugar beet crop was doing better than anticipated and food production generally had increased 38 percent over the fourth quarter of 1946.

Secretary of State Marshall urged to Congress that uniform standards be adopted in the arms and ammunition to be used for defense of the country and to be used to supply other countries in the Western Hemisphere.

In Los Angeles Harbor at Wilmington, 30 miles from Los Angeles, a ship, carrying three million gallons of fuel, blew up, causing ten million dollars worth of damage. It took six hours to bring the fire under control. After the Texas City, Tex., disaster of April 16, an emergency plan had been adopted and was put immediately into action, limiting the damage. Twelve men were listed as missing, with about 30 injured. The cause of the blast was unknown. The Texas City blast had been caused by a fire in one hold of a tanker containing ammonium nitrate, spreading to other storage tanks and tankers, producing subsequent explosions and resulting in nearly 600 deaths.

In Los Angeles, a produce merchant with a long list of aliases, who owed money to another man, was killed on the same day he was to have been married. The man to whom the money was owed was booked on suspicion of murder.

Whether he was Ray Barboni of Miami remains to be seen.

A woman in Oklahoma City claimed for her brother, in the Navy, a duffle bag found on a highway near Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, full of over $16,000 in savings bonds.

The president of NBC stated to a Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce subcommittee that a new radio communication system, called Ultrafax, had been developed which could transmit a million words per minute.

The problem is that no one can read that fast, pal.

The radio broadcasters of today, he predicted, would become the publishers of tomorrow. Radio newspapers would become commonplace. Every form of artistic expression would be available in the home. Each new printed page, he said, was treated as a XXX picture and was flashed in rapid succession. He favored no Government controls, as contemplated, on the XXX transmissions to the home by limiting them to the "public interest, convenience, or necessity", found it to be tantamount to Nazi censorship.

He probably had been partying with Ray Barboni of Miami.

Charlotte Hornets manager Spencer Abbott resigned, ending an era, as told by Furman Bisher in "Bish's Dish" on the sports page.

Mr. Abbott may have been forced to resign by Ray Barboni of Miami, displeased with team play of late.

On the editorial page, "This Is the Way It Works" finds repugnant to democratic will the filibuster of a small group of Senators, led by Glen Taylor of Idaho, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, Wayne Morse of Oregon, and James Murray of Washington, in an effort to delay to death the vote on the President's veto of the Taft-Hartley bill in the hope of finding the necessary votes needed to avoid override.

These same Senators had been highly critical of use of the device to block the majority will on such matters as making permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission and it should not be any the more acceptable when utilized to obstruct a vote on a matter regarded as conservative.

The piece finds it absurd to predict that the skies would fall if the bill became law, that if it proved as bad as the President predicted, it would be amended. If the veto were sustained in the Senate, then the Congress would undoubtedly draft a new law within a week and send it back to the President. Democracy was untidy but usually served the best interests of the country as a whole.

"ABC Is Off to a Good Start" tells of the selection of the new law enforcement chief for the ABC Board, Henry Severs, who had police experience and FBI training, and had demonstrated his ability in law enforcement.

"How Are Things on Main Street?" reports of an article in Life which sought an answer to the question in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, immortalized by Sinclair Lewis in his 1920 novel, Main Street. Henry Grunwald of Life had reported back that the intervening years had brought changes to the community. The provincialism against which the protagonist of the book had rebelled had largely disappeared. Neon had replaced painted signs and conversation lost most of its regional patina.

But the primary interest remained in local affairs, with the church, the home, and school continuing their centrality within the lives of the people. Yet, there was increasing recognition of the town's place in the world. Such awareness had shaken some of the faith in the old code by which the town had always lived. Still Christian, devotion had weakened. When asked about their faith, most had responded hesitantly as if it were indecent to discuss such matters.

The piece concludes that things on Main Street

were about like those on Fifth Avenue, the Rue de la Paix, and Bubbling Well Road. There was one world, if not the sort envisioned by the late Wendell Willkie in 1942. Main Street might be improved. But even Mr. Lewis probably had pangs when thinking of the way it used to be.

By dint of coincidence, before reading this piece, we took a tour last evening of our old neighborhoods, via the Google street-level panoramic viewing system, the existence of which we were not aware until last night, though apparently it has been around for a few years now. We have used another mapping service and so wound up behind the times. In any event, after viewing our childhood home up close, and then driving down the road and around corners where we had not been since leaving that locale at a young age, we found ourselves reeling, feeling slightly sick, especially as we rounded the bend, over the river, and into the swamp—actually not into it, as you cannot leave the roadway very far, but via feeling.

We then flew suddenly to our grandparents' old home and toured that neighborhood, where we had visited a few times in the past twenty years. We then went back to the neighborhood where our parents resided the last decades of their lives, which we have also plentifully visited until a short time back.

At the end of the tour, we felt dizzy, never having in such a short space of four hours been able to traverse in such detail such a broad expanse of territory, all without leaving the succor of our home today.

Main Street, while not physically changed very much at all in the many decades of passage in these particular haunts, has at least changed markedly in recent times in terms of its accessibility and interface with the world. Whether it has in the process yet become significantly more sophisticated is probably determinable only individually and as a function of the level of experience and understanding brought from other sources prior to experiencing the new technology, changing very rapidly with the popularity of the internet since the latter 1990's.

But it has changed, and it will, with time, change our perceptions of the world collectively. There is, of course, the old saw that familiarity breeds contempt, and there is a chance that the closer the world is brought together in virtual space, and with it, the greater realization that people are basically alike from place to place and group to group, differing only by individual characteristics, there may also come, as with all such advances through time, a kind of "future shock" which leaves much of the world in a state of confusion, and ultimately produces a tendency to shrink back into quaint provincialism for security and succor.

In any event, we went back last evening, unknown to the people who now live there, and climbed in the tree in our front yard where we used to go for escape when about three years old. Not a whit of that house has changed, even the color of shutters being the same as the day we departed long ago, on an August morn. We even visited the spot where we petted the copperhead snake that warm summer's day three years or so before we left, and nearly, but for an alert mother, did not live to tell the tale of it as it was, we are told, coiling, when she pulled us back from childish curiosity as to what this beastie was, basking in the sunlight on the front porch of our place of refuge, nearby the ordinary repository of the Lincoln.

We recommend the exercise for you, not the snake, but the tour of your own haunts. But beware. Take along some stomach medication. The ride is wavy. And, occasionally, you inevitably wind up on the wrong side of the roadway, heading into oncoming traffic, as well as bounding right over trucks and cars, and sometimes cutting through fields of corn, if not wheat, a psychologically disconcerting experience of the moment.

We note that along the road behind the swamp, which adjoined our original hant, there is, as of last summer, down the way a piece, a self-storage facility adorned by a line of palm trees, doing quite well, it would appear, in the sandy loam. Whether they also produce cocoanuts as the season permits, we could not tell. The climate is tropical, it being nearly south of the Border.

We also never realized that the old homestead was so very close to the country club at the crest of the mountain, by the gulf stream waters, though we retain some hint of vestige of pleasant memory associated with the colonial-inspired architecture of the clubhouse during its fleeting passage through our existence, if somehow clubbed out of it.

The thing most notable, which we have always carried with us, is that the eternally flat topography provides an expansively big sky, reaching, forever reaching beyond the grasp of even imagination, equivalent to the lands of the West, even to the tint of the sky, the tendency of cloud formations in delicate webs, in Montana or the Dakotas, the Central Valley of California, just as it struck us as a little tyke, with analogy then only vicariously available by way of images conveyed in magazines and moompicters. Thus, such landscapes always convey, in surrogate, a relayed image fixed of home turf fitting with that emblazoned, upside down and backwards, on the retinas first long ago.

Next stop, we suppose, will have to be Lovell, Wyo., although we have not yet checked whether the technology has been extended to that location yet.

A piece from the New York Times, "A Nurse of Novelists", tells of the death at age 63 of Max Perkins, editor at Scribners who had painstakingly edited the voluminous manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe into readable novels. Of Time and the River, published in 1935, was his most enduring editing effort. During 36 years at the publishing house, he had been editor for many other authors as well, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Ring Lardner, and was universally admired and liked. He had exerted a firm but kind editing pencil with his authors. His female authors included Marjorie Rawlings, Nancy Hale, and Marcia Davenport.

Mr. Perkins had become a staff writer for The New York Times right out of Harvard before eventually joining Scribners. The shy young man had left behind affectionate memories at the Times, as the older man had at the publishing house.

Drew Pearson tells of Justice Harold Burton, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Truman in October, 1945 in the wake of the resignation of Justice Owen Roberts, the only Republican-appointed seat then remaining on the Court, having authored only three majority opinions during the entire current term of the Court, since the previous October, the lowest count in many terms. By contrast, Justice Douglas, who had been ill for part of the term, had written 26 while Justice Black had authored a like number. The only Republican still on the bench, after the sudden death a year earlier of Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, former Senator Burton liked to attend parties, regularly being a guest on the Washington social circuit.

Recently, he had attended a reception given by Afghanistan, a tea party at the Czech Embassy, and a cocktail party to inspect the portrait, painted by his brother, of former Attorney General Francis Biddle. His regular attendance at such functions had become a standing joke in Washington. The illness of Justice Douglas was attributed to overwork because of Justice Burton not pulling his share of the load.

While Justice Frankfurter had written only five majority opinions and Justice Rutledge, only four, they each had contributed several dissenting and concurring opinions along the way, 24 and 19, respectively. Justice Burton, by contrast, had written only three dissents. Justice Murphy had authored 13 majority opinions, Stanley Reed, 11, with Robert Jackson and Chief Justice Fred Vinson contributing ten each.

Justice Burton had not contributed many opinions during his first term either, but was excused from the paucity by his junior status. That lenience had dissipated in the second term.

He next informs of General Eisenhower being desirous of becoming president of a university, was interested in the offer of the position at Columbia, especially because it admitted students of all faiths and races. When asked whether he would agree to be a candidate for president of the country, he said that he would not refuse it if given the nomination by acclamation without having to campaign for it. He believed that it would not happen that way. He said that he would continue at his post as Chief of Staff of the Army until he had finished the job of transition to peacetime, but confided also to a friend that he was not happy in the position.

He had recently suggested that the best way to handle the Russians was to tell them the truth.

The Civil Aeronautics Board was trying to determine whether to impose a fine on United Airlines for its May 29 crash at La Guardia, killing 43 persons, at the time the largest death toll in American aviation history, broken the following day by the death of 50 in a crash in Pennsylvania, also aboard a DC-4. In the La Guardia crash on takeoff, the CAB determined that the plane was overloaded as it tried to get off the ground on runway 13, the shortest runway at the airport. (Early reports had stated the cause of the crash to be a freak gust of wind which had blown up during a rainstorm occurring at the time.) If the fine were imposed, it would result in lawsuits for wrongful death by the passengers' families. The financially strapped airlines could ill afford such litigation.

The CAB had imposed a $5,000 fine against United for improper routing, to save twenty minutes of flight time, in a crash occurring at Elk Mountain, Wyo., on January 26, 1946.

Congress was accusing CAB of engaging in too much regulation of the airlines, but when it relaxed the regulations, accidents began to proliferate.

Marquis Childs tells of HUAC seemingly being determined to convert Henry Wallace into a martyr. Recently, they had suggested implementation of Gestapo-type surveillance of the audiences of his speeches, in the hope of deterring left-wing followers from attending.

While Mr. Wallace had drawn large audiences during both his European and American tours, he had not garnered any great political support. In England, Labor was not backing him. In America, his strongest support politically had come in Minnesota from the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party. But its chief vote-getter, Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, did not associate himself with Mr. Wallace.

He also received strong support in California, but former California Attorney General Robert Kenny, who had organized the appearances, had lost badly in the 1946 election for Governor to incumbent Earl Warren, losing even the Democratic primary to him under the peculiar system then in effect in California, allowing dual primary entries by one candidate, regardless of party affiliation.

In Washington, it appeared that Mr. Wallace may have alienated support for the Democrat in a special Congressional election, handing it to the Republican who campaigned for the Truman Doctrine.

When Mr. Wallace campaigned for peace, he was tapping the root of a strong desire in the public, but when he provided easy solutions, he was ignoring the grim facts of the previous two years.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop wonder whether the country was as conservative as the Eightieth Congress, ventures that such an assumption appeared contrary to the fact that the three parties shaping up to contest in the 1948 election were promoting candidates ranging from Mr. Wallace on the far left to President Truman and the major contenders for the Republican nomination in the center. Most political observers believed that Thomas Dewey had his figure firmly ensconced again on the Republican wedding cake. Focus was turning to who his running mate might be. He had recently met with Governor Earl Warren—the eventual vice-presidential nominee—and with former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen. Mr. Dewey had made a cryptic remark about being unable to get Governor Warren to leave his native heath, suggesting he had failed to convince him to join the ticket. Thus, Mr. Stassen appeared to be the likely choice.

President Truman was leaning toward his old friend and fishing companion Mon Wallgren, former Senator and presently Governor of Washington. Supreme Court Justice Douglas, who had been on the short list of nominees for vice-president in 1944, was also again being considered. President Truman would ultimately select Minority Leader Alben Barkley.

Mr. Wallace was clearly going to run on a third party ticket, and it appeared that former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia would be on the ticket with him. Mr. La Guardia, however, would pass away in September. The Progressive Party would select Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho as Mr. Wallace's running mate.

The third party, they opine, would split the Democrats and assure a Republican victory and a much more conservative 81st Congress, solidifying the grip of the most conservative part of the Republican Party, meaning that the new president, should it be Mr. Dewey, would have difficulty with his own party in Congress. That was what the Communists, who were the spark plugs of the third party movement, wanted.

And, of course, it was so and America went Communist under President Dewey. World War III took place on November 1, 1954, lasted three hours, after the Commies decided to take over. Thereafter, General MacArthur asserted his authority at the White House, as he had been made chief of staff after the deaths of President Dewey and Vice-President Warren in a hail of Commie gunfire as they stormed the White House lawn. General MacArthur retained the position of Acting President through his death in 1964. After that point, the history becomes murky as all records were moved into the Bunker in West Virginia. Everybody else died.

And it was all the doing of that Henry Wallace and the Commies.

At least the country was spared George Wallace, who, after forming an anti-Commie militia with General Edwin Walker and General Charles Cabell, was shot by a subversive in his own organization, as were the two Generals. The assassin had no name, went by the moniker "Ozzie Rabbit", forming the Hole in the Ground gang with a former F.B.I. agent who went by the Indian code-name, "He Who Stares at Rails", after the three-hour war.

A letter cynically asserts the belief that the advent of ABC controlled sale of liquor would not have the ameliorative effect on bootlegging and associated crime and delinquency, while bringing in revenue for worthy causes, as promoted by the advocates. She concludes that human beings were secondary when revenue was at stake.

A letter writer pays homage to recently deceased Sam Wolfe, Attorney General of South Carolina, from Gaffney, with whom the perennial writer had gone to military school at Patrick's Military Institute, which had passed out of existence when Clemson College came into being. Mr. Wolfe, he said, had a rigorous discipline from an early age and the writer thinks he would have made an excellent judge had he ever sought a position on the bench.

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.