Friday, July 18, 1947

The Charlotte News

Friday, July 18, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. Security Council ended debate on the Balkans situation and began considering the differences between the American and Russian plans for action, revolving around the response to the Balkans Subcommittee report that Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria were aiding and training guerrillas in northern Greece. The French representative expressed the belief that the debate had ended on a peaceful note, with the three accused Balkan nations and Greece pledging cooperation in resolving the situation peacefully. The plan of the U.S., to form a semi-permanent border-watch commission, would be the first to be considered by the Council. Following a speech the previous day by Andrei Gromyko, it was believed that Russia might abstain from the vote rather than veto the U.S. proposal.

Representative Charles Eaton of New Jersey stated that the United States was on the verge of becoming involved in a shooting war in Greece, with "alien armed forces" present in the country. Either the U.S. would make a stand, he asserted, or the Russians would take over the country.

Beware. He could probably see Russia from his window.

In Haifa in Palestine, two of 4,500 Jewish immigrants aboard a refugee vessel, renamed by the immigrants Exodus, 1947, were reported killed and 25 wounded by gunfire of British Marines who boarded the vessel and were met by smoke bombs, steam jets and other weapons. The ship, originally the President Warfield, had been utilized as a troop ship during the Normandy invasion in June, 1944. Hagana, moderate Jewish organization, had sought intervention by the U.N. on behalf of the immigrants.

As expected, the House had overridden the President's veto of the reiterated tax bill, by a vote of 299 to 108. Of those voting to override, 63 were Democrats, including seven of the twelve-member North Carolina delegation. It now proceeded to the Senate, appearing to be four votes short of an override, based on the original vote of 60 to 32 for passage of the measure. The President, in June, had vetoed the identical measure, but for the effective date, and the House had sustained the veto, 268 to 137, two votes short of the necessary two-thirds for override. In consequence, the Senate had not voted on the veto. The President's veto message was nearly identical to that accompanying his first veto, calling for a fair tax reduction for lower income groups and for a more pervasive tax reduction at a time when the wartime debt was properly reduced.

RNC chairman Carroll Reece criticized the President and vowed that the Truman Administration would go down in history as the "veto Administration".

Instead, the 80th Congress would go down in history as the "do-nothing Congress".

Dick Young reports that a workman in Charlotte had barely escaped death when his contact with a high voltage line had knocked him from a two-story building under construction. He had suffered only minor injuries for having his fall broken when he landed on a man standing on the ground, who also escaped injury.

President and publisher of The News Thomas L. Robinson appointed a new circulation manager, William W. Sirmon, 33, promoted from his position as city circulation manager, succeeding J. B. Kilgo who had resigned at the beginning of the month to enter business. Mr. Sirmon had worked as county circulation manager for The News from April 1940 until entry to the Coast Guard two years later, where he served until late 1945.

Nancy Brame of The News reports of a seventeen percent increase between 1945 and 1946 in the number of Charlotte families involved in social breakdowns, according to a survey conducted by the Charlotte Community Council. The survey analyzed families in which one or more members had been involved in adult crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, neglect, mental disease, mental deficiency, or illegitimate birth. Twenty-four percent more Charlotte families in 1946 were involved in crime than in 1945. A fifth of Charlotte families, or 18.9 percent, had social breakdowns in 1946. A quarter of the families suffering breakdowns in 1945 had again suffered them in 1946. Arrests for drunkenness increased by a third in 1946.

And twenty-six percent had fewer cavities by using Crest.

On the editorial page, "Secretary Marshall and the Grass Roots" views the Secretary's appeal for support of the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe at the Governors' Conference in Salt Lake City to have been more of an appeal to the grass roots of the country than to the state chief executives per se. The governors had passed a resolution urging that partisan politics be kept out of foreign policy.

But partisan politics, it reasons, was part of the American system and the means by which debate on issues took place. Thus, to inform the public on the Marshall Plan would require necessarily the operation of some partisan politics and it was questionable whether the plan could achieve popular support in the country without it.

"Tuesday's Special Election" tells of a movie starring the late John Barrymore, "The Great Man Votes", brought to mind by Charlotte's special school election, requiring a special ballot box for one voter in the Crab Orchard precinct. His vote could decide the election as the vote would occur under the North Carolina law requiring a majority of registered voters on a measure considered to be on a non-essential matter. Only 433 persons were registered in the ten precincts in which the election was being held, the low registration probably the result of citizens having believed that when the annexation measure passed, they had voted to join the City School District also.

The issue, however, was important: whether the outlying communities which had already voted to be annexed by Charlotte would also join the City School District. If affirmative, the citizens would be subject to the approved special school tax. If in the negative, the citizens would send their children to the County schools, unless they agreed to pay special tuition charges for attendance at City schools, and would be exempt from the tax.

If the vote was no, it would impact 10,000 citizens in the newly annexed areas, forcing the County school system to serve a new urban population and the City to serve a School District smaller than the City.

It hopes that the measure would pass and that those few who had registered for the election would understand the consequences of a no vote.

"It's a Joke, Listeners" tells of a Raleigh radio broadcaster having claimed to have been in contact with the flying saucers seen across the country in latter June and July and found that they were piloted by little green men from Mars, trying to locate Hollywood.

The result consisted of jammed switchboards, knocking out the control tower at the Raleigh airport.

The piece muses that perhaps the country had lived so long on the edge of a nightmare that it only needed a slight nudge to be thrown into a tizzy.

But the most interesting aspect, it posits, was the different impact created by newspapers and radio. Hal Boyle's two reports from aboard the flying saucer with Balmy, published on July 8-9, had created not a ripple of reaction while the Raleigh radio broadcast had stirred local hysteria reminiscent on a smaller scale of that generated by the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast of Halloween, 1938.

It concludes that the dramatics which the inflection of voice could transmit via radio caused an effect not possible in print, resulting in the radio commentators being limited to the matter-of-fact presentation, free from the jest.

We have to agree. We have imparted previously of our fate one October afternoon in 1969, the result of a radio broadcaster's prank, or, rather, that of a college newspaper writer, picked up by an irresponsible broadcaster and then disseminated in run-amok fashion across the country, without a hint that the report might traffick in the result of artifice.

That which the piece perhaps is too polite to state is that broadcasters reach many people who do not read editorial columns or even light columns, as that presented by Mr. Boyle. Indeed, in 1947, radio broadcasts were reaching many adults who could not read at all, or read only on rudimentary levels. Whether such is still the case is doubtful. No one today, save small children, would believe in a radio broadcast or television broadcast, no matter how sincerely presented, that flying saucers had landed or made contact with a broadcaster, though howls might result to fire the broadcaster from the airwaves and place him or her in prison, to damn their kin, and curdle their milk.

But, in finer cases, not involving little green men from Mars, would the public's gullibility not be challenged to the boundary of sanity?

Whether, incidentally, we were the first to discover it or not, we cannot say. But on "Magical Mystery Tour", there is, in fact, a little-known frequency empressed into the record, one of which only kitty-cats are capable of reception. If you should play it repeatedly on a phonograph for your kitty-cat, at high volume, and only upon varied order of the songs, with the turntable tilted slightly askew, at an angle of precisely 28 degrees, with the ambient temperature set at 67 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take three degrees, no more, no less, and in a particular sequence, which you will need intuit for yourself, you will see the result of which we make note. It is quite astonishingly overwhelming to observe, defying all logic and laws of physics, even unto the aether and empyreal realms of difficult disentanglement from the motivationally insistent ukase thus formed upon our existence.

A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Democracy Was the Loser", finds democracy to have been the big loser when the reactionary Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith carried on his "Christian Nationalist Crusade", denouncing Jews, Communists, blacks, and Roman Catholics as being conjoined in an international conspiracy, and was roundly booed as he spoke at the Old South Meetinghouse in Boston.

Only 40 or so of his followers had attended the meeting, but the booing by many times that number gave him publicity which his movement needed to thrive. He said nothing audible during the entire hour of his speech. Most of the hecklers were formally organized, some Communists, some pinks, and many liberals.

The piece decries the Smith Crusade but finds even more despicable the attempt to shout him down.

Drew Pearson tells of Capitol observers wondering why the Senate War Investigating Committee headed by Senator Owen Brewster of Maine was not investigating the stealing of atomic secrets, obtained by two Army sergeants while the Army provided security for the secret. If it had occurred under the civilian AEC, it was believed that the Committee would be investigating with vigor.

He next tells of former Secretary of State James Byrnes wanting to devote the $60,000 he had received for his memoirs and his efforts to enabling scholarships for fatherless boys to attend college. He recalled his own plight as a fatherless boy, his father having died before he was born.

Former California Attorney General Bob Kenny continued his plans to form a third party movement, to be headed by Henry Wallace, a move which would mean certain defeat for the Democrats in 1948.

President Truman, meeting in his usual weekly confab with the six Congressional leaders of both parties, had made an argument for the Stratton bill to permit entry of 400,000 displaced persons from Europe over a four-year period. He rejected the Congressional leaders' argument that the American people needed to be educated to the need for the measure that they could adjust to the idea of receipt into the country of so many immigrants, countering that the people were ready. Former Speaker Sam Rayburn told the President that the Democrats of the South would vote largely against the bill. The same, according to Senators Alben Barkley and Arthur Vandenberg, was likely true of the Senate. The President was given assurance, however, by the leaders that the bill would receive top priority in the 1948 session of Congress.

At the end of the meeting, the President thanked the leaders for making Speaker Joe Martin his successor under the new presidential succession law. Senator Vandenberg quipped that if the President took any long plane trips, he hoped that he would take the fellow Republican Speaker with him, that being his only chance. Senator Vandenberg, as president pro tem of the Senate, was next in the new line of succession.

During debate of confirmation of a Federal judicial appointment in Texas, Republican Senators ostensibly opposing the appointment out of political fealty to Senator Pappy P. the B. W. Lee O'Daniel whispered to Senator Tom Connally, favoring the appointment, that they would switch sides if he needed a couple of votes, as they were only supporting Senator Pappy because he had supported Republicans on so many issues.

Marquis Childs suggests a stronger people's lobby in Washington to counteract the powerful interests' lobbies. A few days earlier, the bill had passed the House with little debate, to reduce the Federal Power Commission's authority to regulate the sale of natural gas. The two sides of the bill varied as to estimated costs to the consumer resultant of the bill.

Proponents of the bill, the oil and gas companies, were amply heard in hearings on the bill. The primary opponents were from the coal industry. Others favoring the bill included states' rights advocates. But there were few, if any, witnesses who genuinely represented the public interest. For the public, it meant that prices would continue to rise.

Increasingly, members of Congress were speaking for special interests, not the public. Congressman Ross Rizley of Oklahoma was the chief sponsor of the bill in the House, while Senator Ed Moore of Oklahoma was its sponsor in the Senate.

He recommends that if the Congress was to be no more than a middleman for the special interests, then the lobbyists for the special interests ought be the ones to be changed by the people.

Samuel Grafton finds the 1948 campaign shaping up to be dull, a condition dangerous to the Democrats, as dangerous as a third-party movement. Democrats and independents had remained home in the 1946 California primaries and Republicans had swept both primaries under the double entry system permitted at the time in California, with Governor Earl Warren winning both gubernatorial primaries over Democrat Bob Kenny.

Both parties were in agreement to a great extent on foreign policy, leaving the match between the chief rivals as ping-pong, the Republicans contending perhaps that the Democrats wanted to spend too much money on foreign aid compared to the Republicans' fiscal conservatism, and the like.

On domestic policy, the President could argue that the Republicans had passed Taft-Hartley over his veto and thus make a genuine appeal to labor. He could also contend with credulity that the Republicans had destroyed price control in the lead-up to the 1946 elections. But many Democrats had voted for Taft-Hartley, and the inflation coming from the elimination of price control might dissipate by late 1948. The Republicans could only claim that they made a supreme effort to obtain a tax break for the people, vetoed twice by the President.

He counsels that if the Democrats were smart, they would pick as a vice-presidential running mate an active champion of low-cost housing. Or the Republicans could pick up the gauntlet on the issue, one of the hottest brewing beneath the surface.

Otherwise, the campaign would please no one but local county chairmen as the public yawned, wondering what the joke was.

A letter finds University of North Carolina president Frank Graham's recent statement at the University regarding the freedoms of the individual embodied in the Constitution extending to nations of the world to be the result of some misunderstanding. The writer says that he could not understand two of the Four Freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt in early 1941—not, as he posits, originating with Winston Churchill in the Atlantic Charter of August, 1941. He understands freedom of speech and freedom of worship, but could not understand the concepts of the freedoms from fear and want. Fear of God, for instance, he says, was salutary. And want produced incentive.

He advocates having some "common commonsense" in limiting the Marshall Plan or any other other plan for rehabilitation of Europe.

A letter writer finds there to be a "gang of well-paid loafers in Washington City". The war-mongering Congress was busy whipping the flames as "a gang of long-coated legal lights" were busy in Paris trying to disarm the world for peace.

"There is some logic in such business. But that is the way this high-stepping, hell-bent generation of social vipers look at it."

A letter writer joins the writer of July 15 who had complained of sardine-crowding on Charlotte buses. He had ridden "40 & 8s in Africa—35 men to one of those small dinkies, but it is nothing compared to this."

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