The Charlotte News
Wednesday, August 20, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a father and son suffocated to death in a well near Charlotte and two other men nearly succumbed. One of the injured men was directing the cleaning of the well when he smelled gas. He then asked that the father and son pull him out, which they then did immediately. The father was then lowered into the well to check for gas at water level. He sent up a bucket of water and then called up that he was weakening. By the time the rope was lowered again, he had apparently collapsed and did not respond. At that point, his 15-year old son went into the well and he, too, collapsed from exposure to the gas. A man then volunteered to be lowered to try to effect rescue and was able to attach the rope to the son. When firemen arrived on the scene, they were able to go into the well wearing gas masks, but it was too late for the father who had already suffocated, as had the son.
In Kings Mountain, N.C., the Cherryville Chief of Police was killed by four gunshots by a Highway Patrolman the previous night after the Chief had allegedly resisted arrest following a stop for weaving down the road. The Patrolman said that the Chief had tried to start a fight with him, charged him with a knife, cut his arm. It was then that the Patrolman shot the Chief. He said that the Chief showed definite signs of having been drinking. The daughter of the Chief was also along, in another car, and had tried to get her father to cooperate. A coroner's jury cleared the Patrolman, determining that the shooting was a justifiable homicide under the circumstances.
It was a normal day in the Tar Heel State.
U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie contested the contention of Russia that the Balkans Commission was liquidated, and stated that he had no intention of disbanding the group and a subcommission in Greece, unless the Security Council ordered such an action. He supported the view of the U.S. and Britain that the Commission would continue to function indefinitely in light of the Security Council having failed to find a solution to the Balkans problem.
Secretary of State Marshall told the Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro that Europe's economic recovery was vital to all of the Americas and took precedence over the needs of the Western Hemisphere. He stressed that unity among the 20 nations at the conference was imperative. He said that in undertaking the Marshall Plan, the U.S. had not forgotten the economic problems of the West.
In Italy, American Army troops were resigned to continuing occupation duties in the country through the winter. They could not leave until 90 days after the effective date of the treaty with Italy, held up by the refusal thus far of the Soviets to approve the treaty already given approbation by the other three powers.
The director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that there was no recession in sight for the remainder of the summer.
Sports Editor Ray Howe tells on the sports page of Bonnie Bill Livie of the Bonnie Braes course having begun work on a 17-year old golfing idea.
Perhaps, it was to patch one of the holes with a divot
On the editorial page, "Harry Truman vs. Eva Peron" questions whether Eva Peron, making herself conspicuous at the Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro, could stand up to the prestige of President Truman, set to visit and address the Conference shortly. The Conference had as a goal the formalization of the 1945 Act of Chapultepec into a treaty for collective security among the 22 attending nations of the Western Hemisphere. The proposed treaty would take a two-thirds vote to be passed. Argentina had been adopting obstructionist methods to block or delay the treaty, designed to eliminate any veto power on which Argentina depended for its expansionist aims.
It had been Argentina's original pro-Nazi sympathies which produced the Act of Chapultepec, even if Argentina subsequently agreed to its terms. Fear over Argentina's Fascism continued nevertheless.
Fear of Argentina and the Perons may ironically have hastened the collective security arrangement and brought about the defeat of the dictator and his wife. If so, it would be a great day for world peace. The U.N. had inspired the Act of Chapultepec and its desire in principle for unanimity. Eliminating the veto—or Evita
If President Truman prevailed over Eva Peron, then his place in history would be assured "as one of the great architects of a new order of peace."
While perhaps recognizing the reality of Latin America at the time, that the perception of "prestige", in matters of state, in matters of religion, was more important than democratic principle, nevertheless, in the abstract, the latter always and inevitably trumps any vestige of "prestige" over the long haul.
The defeat of Fascism is inherent in its need for dictatorship to sustain itself, while the vitality of democracy is maintained by the very nature of its premise. And to suggest cynically that there is little difference in practice between the two systems is to subscribe thereby and submit to Fascism. Yet, a society must ever be vigilant when Fascism pokes its head out from underneath a democratic cloak
"North Carolina Fails Governor" remarks of 25 percent of North Carolinians having stated the opinion firmly that Governor Gregg Cherry was interfering too much in the justice system by his effort to insure that justice prevailed in the matter of the attempted lynching in Northampton County of Buddy Bush the previous May, after the Grand Jury had refused to indict the seven white men accused of abducting him at gunpoint from the county jail and, but for his escape, evidencing a clear intent to lynch him. The Governor had called a meeting with a Superior Court Judge and the County Solicitor and arranged to have the matter put before another Grand Jury in an adjoining county. The seven men had since been re-arrested.
The recent episode in Columbia, N.C., in which a mob of 200 to 300 white men had formed and successfully given an ultimatum to six white Harvard, Yale, and U.N.C. students to remove themselves from the house of a black man whom they were aiding to establish a credit cooperative in which a large land plat would be purchased and then provided in smaller portions to black farmers, was emblematic of this invidious spirit of reaction in the populace, injurious to democracy.
The piece concludes that even among a minority of the people, such sentiments could destroy the institutions of government and harm justice. It would take more than the honorable efforts of the Governor to remove this strain of intolerance from the mind of the state.
Apparently, the mind of a quarter of the state believed that it was not interference for a mob of 200 to 300 men to drive students from the house of a citizen, apparently on threat of violence, that it was not interference to seek to hang a man accused of leering at a white woman, but was for the Governor to insist, after an FBI-obtained confession from one of the seven attempted lynchers, that at very least an indictment be issued in the case.
Such it was; such it probably still is.
"Korea, the Army Blues and ABC" provides a letter from an Army corporal from North Carolina stationed in Korea who advised that he had never been a drinker until coming overseas in August, 1944 and enduring long periods of boredom. He counsels patience and that the soldier, upon return, might take time to swear off the bottle but eventually would.
The piece thinks the advice worth keeping, in light of the fact that the ABC system had ordered 50,000 bottles of liquor to supply the ABC stores when the system went into effect in Mecklenburg County in September. Though it was taking the "jugheads" time to get over their service apparently, it was hoped that they would, in accordance with the advice of the corporal in Korea. It hopes that the ABC system would enable the men to drink at home with their wives and sweethearts rather than going to speakeasies for a nip.
Somehow, this piece rings hollow and appears to act as an enabler. The best advice is not to cry in your beer but learn to conquer boredom through other, more constructive and creative, means. Get a hobby or two, jughead.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Poor Speaking Weather", tells of Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina suggesting that there was no real threat of inflation, that fear was the country's worst enemy.
But inflation was threatening. Nevertheless, the citizenry appeared to have accepted Senator Hoey's statement as well intended.
It does not expect Mr. Hoey to have exerted himself in the heat by resorting to fear-mongering. But it wanted to know why the picnickers who came to listen subjected themselves to to an August political speech.
Robert S. Allen again discusses Lt. General John C. H. Lee, accused by G.I.'s and their parents of living lavishly while enlisted men suffered from lack and imposition of severe discipline. During the war, General Lee had developed a reputation for hoarding supplies. For weeks at one point, cigarettes were not reaching the troops because of theft and black marketing by supply personnel and because General Lee had not taken steps to move the ample supply of cigarettes to the front.
On another occasion, at Christmas, 1944, mail broke down as families and loved ones had overburdened the system with mail in anticipation of the holiday season. General Omar Bradley had urged General Lee to get the mail moving, but he did nothing at a time when transportation was still available. And then at the outbreak of the Battle of the Bulge in mid-December, all the available transportation was utilized in the fight and so soldiers spent Christmas on the front lines without mail from home.
On a third occasion, General Lee failed to get winter garb to the soldiers, including snow camouflage, producing thousands of casualties from frozen limbs. Many of the men were permanently disabled as a result. When winter-lined shoes did not arrive, General Patton had blankets cut into strips to serve as lining.
He next tells of Justice Felix Frankfurter being garrulous. During his summer vacation spent at Charlemont in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, he continued to talk freely. When a waiter accidentally spilled soup down his neck, the Justice said that at least it would be possible to tell whether the soup was good, depending on how hard it was to remove the stain from his clothes, the harder, the worse the quality.
He remarked to his listeners that while times were dark, there was still hope. Fear, he remarked, was the worst of counsellors. If the country used its resources properly, it had no reason to fear any foreign country or ideology.
He also said that his wife had told him to keep quiet. For once he got started, he would talk incessantly.
Word from Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, was that Josef Stalin had regained his health. He had given up drinking to achieve the glowing result. When toasts were offered, Premier Stalin drank only water
The War and Navy Departments were engaging in chain letters, with a potential payoff of $2,448.
Thirty-two members of Alcoholics Anonymous in Washington were newspaper correspondents.
No one understood why wives of Senators were called "ladies" and wives of Representatives, "women".
Paul W. Ward, in the 15th article in the series for the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", tells of Russia being still a country of hand pumps, ox carts, log cabins, and primitive roads. The bathtubs had "more rings than a giant redwood." Lavatories, even in hospitals, were filthy.
The efforts of Soviet leaders to Westernize Russia had met with only slight success. Housing was scarcely better than before the 1917 Revolution. Housing space before the Revolution was 2.5 sq. yds. per inhabitant of Moscow; by 1936, despite a 150 percent increase in housing space, only a quarter sq. yd. had been added per capita because of the growing population. And the number of people in Moscow had nearly doubled since 1936, to seven million. The result was that all of Moscow was a slum. In one apartment house, a family of four were living under a stairway, with only a sheet to block them from passersby.
Mr. Ward did not see the better housing, reserved for the ruling classes. He doubts, however, that the dachas being built could be very good as the Communists had purged most of the country's artisans and aristocrats. The architecture in the country generally looked sloppy.
He did meet intellectuals who received better housing than the proletarians. They had two or three rooms per family. A female bureaucrat with high standing in the Communist Party had four rooms, a cook, a maid, a car and a chauffeur. She told him that all of the "best families" lived in that style, a statement he found remarkable in a society which touted an absence of class.
He concludes that housing was unlikely to improve in the near future, if the shabby structures which had been built and were already dilapidated were indicators of things to come.
Marquis Childs discusses Henry Kaiser's effort to have 85 million dollars of his remaining 105 million-dollar loan balance on the Fontana steel plant in California forgiven by the Government. It was not, in his conception, a subsidy, but rather righting the slate in that the Government had sold the Geneva plant in Utah to U.S. Steel for 20 cents on the dollar, a plant built by the Government during the war and run by U. S. Steel. Kaiser had built the Fontana plant with the loan proceeds from the Government. He argued, therefore, that it was unfair to provide U.S. Steel with such an effective subsidy and make Kaiser pay the full amount, as both plants were built for war production.
The RFC, which had made the loan, passed the matter to the Congress, where powerful pressures would be exerted on both sides of the issue. Western business wanted a Western steel plant to compete with the East. And economizers would put pressure on the Government to collect every penny of the loan.
The charge that Mr. Kaiser was playing politics, riding the crest of the New Deal wave to prosperity, was a silly game, as politics were played in the establishment of the railroads and in airline transportation, as well as all such industries. To make that charge was tantamount to suggesting that only the major players, such as U.S. Steel, should have a stake in the steel industry. He hopes that the country had not yet reached that point.
A letter writer finds Charlotte's cab drivers dangerous and rowdy, ready to fight at the drop of a hat in the event of some near traffic mishap caused by the reckless cab driver.
Hang 'em. Hang 'em all. Worthless scum.
A letter writer thinks that if it was a smoker who had a smoking bus passenger arrested under the city's obscure new ordinance banning smokers from buses, then his action should be heeded. But if it was a non-smoker trying to spread discomfort, the action should be treated with disdain. There was a time, he suggests, when it was apropos not to smoke on public conveyances because of the presence of women. But that time had passed and now women were as apt to be smoking as men. There should be no interruption of a passenger's comfort on the buses, as only about one in ten passengers became nauseated at cigarette smoke.
He adds that he did not ride the buses.
That is one of the more idiotic statements ever presented on the editorial page, outside the realm of politics, race and religion. It thoroughly ignores, not only the as yet unknown, but suspected, secondary-smoke health issues, but presumes that because most folk were polite enough not to tell arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless morons not to smoke around them and thereby stifle the breathing air to the point of, perhaps not nausea, but certainly inducing of severe headache, it was quite alright to do so. Never mind the blue-gray haze emanating from Old Smoky over there on the bus or in the auditorium or gymnasium or arena, or what have you—have you nothing but Hell to give? That was all perfectly dandy with everyone, despite the coughs and slightly jaundiced appearance in result.
Smoking is not alright in public places. It is not your right to pollute the air we all have to breathe, stupid. If you wish to kill yourself by smoking, please do so in an airtight room somewhere.
A letter from A. W. Black suggests that the coddling of Communists at the University was at once amusing and disgusting. "The Danger to Chapel Hill" had shown similar guile by suggesting that purging Frank Porter Graham from the presidency of the University would be as injurious to the state and the University as a small group of Communists among the student body. That was nonsensical, he opines. Communism was a menace on any plain, and "NCU" was no exception.
Presumably, UNC could be one, but we digress.
One rotten apple could infect the whole of the barrel, he insists. Communism sought to hollow out American life to its core.
Guess we know who Mr. Black will be supporting in the Senate race, come 1972.
A letter writer suggests that a group seeking to raise a 100 million dollars to save souls for God from Satan would likely discover, upon arrival at the Pearly Gates, that they were on the wrong road.
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.