The Charlotte News
Friday, June 27, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the United States charged before the U.N. Security Council that Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria had been using force against Greece, and urged use of force by the U.N. to counteract it if necessary. Greece alleged that the three nations were part of a plan to set up a Communist dictatorship in Greece. The Balkan Commission had reported that the three Soviet satellites were aiding the guerrillas in northern Greece. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin said that the aggression violated Chapter XII of the U.N. Charter, forbidding acts which threatened the peace and allowing force to be used to interdict it if the situation became aggravated.
Former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts told the House Armed Services Committee that he believed the U.N. would never function effectively as a security organization because any one of the Big Three nations could, by use of the unilateral Security Council veto, block action. Congress, he urged, should thus enact universal military training forthwith. In stressing the urgency, he warned that Russia would have the atomic bomb by 1948 or 1949.
Representative Lyndon Johnson of Texas asked Justice Roberts whether the house was on fire and the country ought thus to act, to which Mr. Roberts stated assent.
The State Department announced that the U.S. had sold 130 million rounds of special 7.92-mm ammunition to China at a price of $656,658, about six million dollars less than the ammunition had cost. The ammunition was designed for the "Generalissimo" rifle of German design, manufactured for China during the war under lend-lease. Only a small amount of the ammunition, which did not fit American weapons, had been delivered before V-J Day. The Nationalist forces in China had been rationing ammunition while reports came of the Russians having supplied the Chinese Communists with ammunition.
The foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Russia began consulting in Paris with regard to the Marshall Plan for aid to rebuild Europe. Russia had not yet committed to cooperation in the aid program.
The State Department fired ten employees for being bad security risks. They were not necessarily disloyal but concerns had been raised over the employees' discretion and the company they kept.
A House Republican introduced a bill to prohibit exports of petroleum unless the War and Navy Departments certified that the exports did not interfere with national security. Concern had been voiced in the House regarding recent petroleum exports to Russia, even if no higher than those of 1945 and 1946.
CIO president Philip Murray joined AFL president William Green in asserting that CIO did not intend a protest strike to Taft-Hartley, but would insist that it be strictly enforced to preserve labor rights, and that CIO was going to draft a program of compliance after studying the law.
Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. cut its production to 45 percent of normal capacity in response to the continuing coal miners' strike in protest of Taft-Hartley. It had been operating at 104 percent.
Ford announced an agreement with UAW for an increased wage of seven cents per hour and a pension plan, effectively equating to 15 cents per hour. Average wages under the increase would be $1.46.5 per hour. G.M. workers were receiving $1.42 and Chrysler workers, $144.5.
In Greenville, S.C., the South Carolina Federation of Labor appeared poised to become the first labor organization to set up a political organization to avoid the Taft-Hartley provision preventing unions from engaging in political activity. The new organization planned to meet as private citizens rather than as union members.
In Buenos Aires, two Argentine Congressmen planned to duel with one another to settle a dispute regarding a supposed insult to Evita Peron, wife of Fascist dictator President Juan Peron. Ernesto San Martino, an opposition radical, had supposedly made the insult, and Peronista Eduardo Colom had taken exception. Duels were illegal in Argentina, but that did not seem to deter the two duelists. Sr. San Martino had stated in Congress that tributes to high Government officials should not be extended to their wives. Sr. Colom took offense and mutual personal insults followed.
Presently, the wife of El Presidente was in España receiving high honors from Generalissimo Francisco Franco, an exponent of democracy and freedom from the olde world to the new. She also had a 20-minute audience with Pope Pius XII at Vatican City after receiving high honors from Sr. Franco.
In Milwaukee, a Presbyterian minister was convicted by a jury of arson for setting his church on fire January 25, causing $150,000 worth of damage with intent to commit insurance fraud and build a larger church. He turned pale at the verdict.
In Hollywood, Harold Peary, who played the Great Gildersleeve
Also in Hollywood, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan had a child born prematurely, three months ahead of schedule according to the piece. It was their third child. The baby girl would shortly die.
The premature nature of the birth has to be questioned as some form of press agentry at work, as a report the previous May 8 had stated that the child was due in late June. This was late June. It is hard to imagine that such an error would then come true.
We leave it to you to ferret out the truth. It is not our province to enter into such matters relating to personal conduct. We simply point out the strange and apparently conflicting reports.
On the editorial page, "Cotton for Japan and Germany" tells of the War Department buying half the cotton for mills in Germany and Japan from abroad, as it was cheaper than American cotton. Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina was leading a fight by Southern Democrats to have a ratio established of 70 percent American cotton. He threatened legislation to impose the ratio were it not established voluntarily.
The piece thinks it was not necessarily wise as it amounted to another Government subsidy and forced the occupied nations to purchase high-priced American cotton, meaning that they could not make a profit in their home markets. The difference would have to be paid by the American occupation forces and would delay the time when the nations could become independent.
The State Department was striving for free international trade and the 70-30 plan was not in accord with that approach.
"You Get What You Pay For" tells of the new chairman of the ABC Board in Mecklenburg, Frank Sims, receiving a salary of $7,500 per year, even though the Board would gross five million dollars per annum. Even so, the pay made Mr. Sims the second highest paid public official in the county, topped only by the City Manager at $16,000. It exceeded the $6,000 paid annually to the State ABC Board chairman and was equal to the salaries of the State Attorney General and Supreme Court Justices.
The relatively high pay was justified to obtain qualified personnel for the Board.
"The Significant Choice in Burke" tells of Burke County having passed a referendum for school bonds to supplement that provided by the State. It showed the proper concern of the citizens for the degraded system of public secondary and primary education in the state, lacking in qualified personnel and physical plant.
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "The South and Tax Cuts", comments on the fact that 25 of the 35 House Democrats who voted to override the President's sustained veto of the tax-cut bill had come from the South, finds that there was no clear reason for such strong Southern support of tax reduction. The bill had favored the higher brackets, not the low and moderate income workers predominating in the South.
Some Representatives of Northern and Western states apparently had voted against tax reduction only to follow the President's lead. The Southerners, lacking party discipline, seemed again to have simply formed a coalition with the Republicans.
Drew Pearson tells of several Republican Senators having been hoist by their own petard, as their landlord at the Westchester Apartments had given them notice of a 17.5 percent rent increase, which the Senators had supported, at least to the extent of 15 percent, in the rent control extension bill, provided the landlord and tenant signed a lease through early 1948. Some of the Senators had filed a protest with the landlord.
The House Ways & Means Committee was quietly going about forming another tax bill, this one to cut excise taxes, affecting primarily transportation and communications costs paid by the consumer. They hoped to put the President on the spot such that if he vetoed it, they could claim that he was not being supportive of the average citizen, the charge he had made of Congress in vetoing the tax-cut bill.
He next remarks of Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois having come to the House 15 years earlier with a bold, booming voice but having, in the previous five years, modulated the tone and gained the respect of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle for being willing to change his opinion on issues. Representative Leon Gavin of Pennsylvania also had a booming voice but had recently begun to take a leaf from Mr. Dirksen. In so lowering his volume, he had drawn comment from Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan, asking why he had changed his tone, to which Mr. Gavin replied that he was trying to appear as a statesman.
He notes that Mr. Dirksen had become one of the most powerful and respected members of the House, and favored an American information service in Europe, the importance of which he had become convinced during a tour of Europe and Asia in 1945. He wanted a non-political council of newspaper and radio men to advise the State Department on such propaganda.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop suggest that the foundation of a third party had been made greatly more difficult by the President's veto of the Taft-Hartley bill, finding the odds now about nine to one that former Vice-President Henry Wallace would be thrust forward as the leader of the party of peace and toilers. They proceed to put forth the proof of their previous statement that Mr. Wallace's core support came primarily from the Communist Party.
At a meeting of the Communist Party national committee in summer, 1946, it had issued a report which called for formation of a peoples party and to use the CIO PAC, the National Citizens' PAC, and the International Citizens' Committee machinery in the formation. That had been accomplished. They believed that a non-Communist leader was necessary for the party, and they favored Mr. Wallace, though at the time he was not in favor of a third party movement. Their report urged that he be convinced of its merit in reshaping Democratic Party direction toward a progressive stance.
It was a game of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance to obtain influence in the political process. Mr. Wallace was not so foolish as to take orders from the Communists, but some of the program they favored got through to him by way of his coterie of advisers, such as Raymond Walsh, Michael Straight, and Harold Young. The latter had made the remark: "Now we got a slogan nobody can beat. Who's against peace, anyway?"
Samuel Grafton tells of the Republican fear that the President would not faithfully execute the new Taft-Hartley law and therefore were looking for an appointment for the general counsel to the NLRB, with the ability to determine which cases came before the Board, who would support the law. The Republicans also intended to set up a watchdog committee in Congress to assure that the law was properly implemented. These moves were serving only to increase the Republican divide from labor.
So, they were also worried that the bill would kill their hopes to win in 1948. They thus warned management that it would be best not to take advantage of the technicalities in the law.
They were afraid, too, that the President would too faithfully administer the law, so that its technical weaknesses would be brought to light and cause it to be hated.
The fact that the Republicans worried in both directions exposed the febrility of the new law, that its overly proactive intricacies defeated its original purpose, to give management rights which had accrued to labor under the Wagner Act. The Republicans, having committed to the course, could not hope to regain the support of labor. It was going to become the major political issue, he asserts, of the day.
The remarks of Josephus Daniels, former Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson when FDR had been his Assistant Secretary, and later appointed by FDR to be Ambassador to Mexico, a position he held for eight years until October, 1941, are reprinted on the page from his dedicatory address at Warm Springs, Georgia, upon the occasion of the designation of the Little White House as a national historic landmark.
Mr. Daniels, who was always close to the late President, praised him as a statesman for the ages, undoubtedly fitting his stature both at the time and in subsequent assessment of his Presidency. He reminded that it was on the soil of Warm Springs that he determined not to be captive of his fears.
It was a lesson which that generation took to heart and carried with it both in fighting the Depression and then in fighting Fascism in Europe and feudalism in Japan.
Mr. Daniels urged that the country had "more to give than to guard", that the greatest power of the country was not in weapons but rather in building democracy.
We recommend, incidentally, if you are in the area of Warm Springs, a visit to the Little White House. Much history was made there, as the President used it, along with Hyde Park, as a refuge from Washington whenever he could escape, and, of course, died there on April 12, 1945. The visit is well worth the time.
A letter from New York tells of a graduate school study undertaken by the author in 1943-44 regarding English literature and the specific study of satire. He had discovered in reviewing the literature that the basic formula for satire was "A, non-A", that is thesis and antithesis, and he had determined in the process that the conflict
We are not sure why any graduate student would be consulting such secondary sources as he references, but in any event, he was seeking comment on the merit of the point as he believed it to be the imperative for future progress and success.
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