The Charlotte News
Wednesday, August 6, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Howard Hughes
In London, Prime Minister Clement Attlee told Commons that Britain would reduce its armed forces by 420,000, one third of the total manpower, increase the labor time of workers in essential industries as coal, cut its imports, and seek moderation of the terms of the 3.75 billion dollar U.S. loan of 1946 to alter the non-discriminatory trade provisions and limits on convertibility from dollars to sterling. He denied charges by Opposition Leader Winston Churchill that the Labor Government had "frittered away" the loan proceeds.
President Truman accepted an invitation to visit Brazil for three days later in the month or in September to address the Inter-American Security Conference at Rio de Janeiro.
R. L. Fritz, Hudson School principal from Caldwell County, N.C., who had been stripped the previous day of his teaching credential by the State Board of Education for his bad accounting method in paying non-employees and temporary teachers a total of $1,641.19 during a teacher shortage, reimbursed the amount, also per the order of the Board. Mr. Fritz, earlier in the year, had been elected president of the North Carolina Education Association, favoring higher salaries for teachers than that approved by the Legislature earlier in the year. He had also recently personally endorsed Charles Johnson for the gubernatorial nomination for 1948. He was represented in the matter before the Board by former Congressman and future Senator Sam J. Ervin. His practice had been to place non-teaching substitute teachers on the payroll and when they reimbursed the amount paid them to the school, he used it to pay regular teachers for extra teaching duty. He said that the unusual method was out of a genuine desire to keep the school open when there was a teacher shortage. The Board had turned the matter over to the State Attorney General for further investigation.
The investigation ought be, of course, whether the Board had acted solely out of political spite or out of a quasi-sincere exercise of their duties. Whatever the case, the Board, when faced with the Hobson's Choice, deemed it more important to the public interest strictly to preserve outdated legislative limits on teacher pay than to afford an education to school children, the lack of funding for education, threatening the closure of the school, as with schools at the time across the state and across the nation, in part being a function of the Southern opposition for years to Federal funding of education for fear that with it would come eventual strings mandating integration of the public schools.
In Raleigh, Governor Gregg Cherry summoned a Superior Court Judge and the Solicitor of Northampton County to a meeting to discuss the failure of the Grand Jury the previous day to indict the seven white men accused of the May 23 attempted lynching of Buddy Bush, who had avoided being lynched only by escaping the clutches of the mob after being hauled out of the county jail at night. The Governor ordered the Superior Court Judge to act as a Committing Magistrate to rehear the matter, insisting that "justice shall prevail". The Judge had agreed to hold the hearing.
In Greenville, S.C., the Southern Presbyterian Church laymen heard statements from several persons on the matter of the Federal Council of Churches and whether the Southern Presbyterians ought withdraw from the organization because it threatened the separation of Church and State—presumably by supporting the recent Supreme Court decision which authorized a public school district to transport via bus Catholic parochial school children as an essential service, not violative of separation doctrine. The Council was also accused of "endangering amicable" race relations in the South—probably because of its condemnation of the friendly hazing practice of lynching niggers who got out of line or leered unreasonably at their white womens.
Duke Power promised fifteen new buses for Charlotte by November, with extended services to new areas. The power company also said that street lighting would soon be improved.
A Charlotte representative pleaded before the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington for additional trunk lines for Charlotte to afford further north-south and east-west air travel, to add Charlotte to new routes between Atlanta, Washington, and New York and between Knoxville, Norfolk, and Washington. The Board had denied Charlotte service favored by Delta, Capital, and other carriers. Greensboro also vied for the North Carolina stop on the Atlanta, Washington, New York route.
In Los Angeles, the trial of actress Madge Meredith and her three co-defendants, a nurseryman, a former Beverly Hills policeman, and a cook, was set to begin in September on charges of kidnaping, robbery, and assault. They stood accused of assaulting Ms. Meredith's former business manager in the Hollywood Hills on June 30 and holding him nearly all day in a remote canyon. The actress and the business manager had developed a dispute over title to some property.
Don't miss it. It will be exciting. You may never be the same again.
In Auburn, Mass., a member of the Board of Selectmen visited a home of a mill worker about whom a complaint had been made for keeping an excessive number of dogs on the premises. The Selectman said that 29 dogs, one in each window, were peering out at him when he went to the home. The Board ordered the man to reduce to two dogs his complement. He said he had acquired them one by one and could not part with any of them. His wife complained that the law was a terrible thing to make them get rid of their dogs.
You will feel a whole lot better, probably, without all those dogs around. Maybe someone will inquire as to how much each one costs.
No dogs, no mail, reports Emery Wister on the front page of the local section. Keep that in mind, especially if you provide safe harbor for 29 dogs.
In Gothen, N.Y., Rodney, owned by a Charlotte resident, took first place in the first heat of the Hambletonian trotting race. Hoot Mon had faded badly in the closing stretch. Rodney, however, would only place in the final race, losing to Hoot Mon, obviously finding out, through trial and error, how to beat Rodney.
The temporary bleachers had collapsed at the race, injuring 33 persons.
On the editorial page, "Time for Labor to Reconsider" finds UAW's settlement with Ford, whereby Ford agreed to provide a year of grace on enforcement of the Taft-Hartley penalty provisions for illegal strikes, to be potentially causative of more public disdain for labor, should it become a means by which labor could circumvent Taft-Hartley. Union leaders, it opines, ought stop and consider therefore their tactics in the wake of the legislation, with deference to the generally anti-labor mood of the public.
They also ought ponder whether the rank-and-file members would follow them in their effort to sabotage the new law before it could be adequately tested. While the majority of labor disapproved of Taft-Hartley, according to a recent poll, they primarily disapproved of the closed shop ban, but favored the rest of it. Some union leaders also were not unalterably opposed to the legislation.
It hopes that certain union leaders would refrain from destruction of the reservoir of good will toward labor present in the American people and not wreck the progress toward better labor-management equity and relations, the primary purpose of Taft-Hartley.
"Elliott Roosevelt's 'Martyrdom'" comments on Mr. Roosevelt's claim that he was being persecuted by Republican Senators in the current investigation of the Howard Hughes war contract by the Senate War Investigating Subcommittee. It finds the operation of Senators Homer Ferguson of Michigan and Owen Brewster of Maine to be plainly political in nature. But it recognizes also that the hearing would be no more gently undertaken if the situation were reversed and Democrats were conducting probes of prior Republican Administrations.
It wonders why Mr. Roosevelt, knowing that he was a lightning rod for such a probe, would undertake so much responsibility as he had in recommending the war contract for photo reconnaissance planes, while accepting favors, however meager, from Mr. Hughes.
It concludes that the investigation would have served a purpose were it to demonstrate to Mr. Roosevelt a clearer appreciation of the facts of American life. But, in view of his expression of rejoicing in Cafe Society and that he had been expressly forbidden from doing such things by General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Force, it finds it unlikely that such a positive result would occur.
Too bad that Donald Nixon was not listening to the sad tale in 1947 or that his older brother apparently had not sat him down and said something like, "See, Donald, now look: never, under any circumstances, take candy from strangers, especially not Howard Hughes. Yeah."
"Sunday Beer and the ABC Prospect" tells of the dry forces gearing up to have the County Commissioners reinstate the ban on Sunday sales of beer and wine which had recently lapsed. Their argument was better than against the ABC system of controlled sale of liquor because there was no debate available that banning Sunday sale encouraged bootlegging, with customers able to obtain beer and wine otherwise legally and liquor through the ABC system. But, it cautions, the dry forces should probably wait to make their argument until the public was more willing to hear them and until it became clear that Charlotte's taverns were taking away the churchgoers on Sunday.
A piece from the St. Louis Star-Times, titled "Why Not Zymurgeons?" comments on various practitioners of licensed skills and arts having adopted more palatable names for their trades than the simple originals: undertakers became morticians, hair-dressers, beauticians, and so on. It suggests, for instance, that the barber ought soon become a chirotonsor.
But more to the point locally, it recommends that St. Louis brewers might consider "zymurgeon" as a better descriptor of their craft, as a brewery was actually a zythepsary practicing zymurgy or fermentation—no doubt, dividing the light from the dark within the firmament, at least after four or five.
A. Z. F. Wood tells of moving to the South in 1941 from the North. He had lived in Greensboro and in Lancaster, S.C., both having a variety of types of people and both as different from one another as was the North from Greensboro. He believes that he would find an equivalent difference between Lancaster and Charleston.
Drew Pearson tells of Eva Peron receiving decorations from both Francisco Franco and Pope Pius XII during her current tour of European capitals. She had discussed by long distance phone with her husband, Dictator Juan Peron, his precarious political situation. Despite security precautions, the column is able to present a verbatim transcript. Sr. Peron assured his wife that everything was safe and sound at home in Argentina.
Mr. Pearson quips that she had good reason to be worried, as the Argentine military had been keeping an eye on the dictator, including a tap on his phone.
He next tells of the initial concerns anent Secretary of State Marshall, that, being a military man, he would try to run the State Department as a military organization, had proved completely without justification. The primary criticism after six months was that he lacked confidence in himself, proceeding too cautiously. Secretary Marshall had, to some extent, reversed the process of leadership followed by Secretary Byrnes, his predecessor, whereby the Secretary led and his advisers followed. Secretary Marshall relied more heavily on his advisers, with some good results, as with the Marshall Plan, originally propounded by George Kennan, his planner. But the results had not been so good in Latin America, especially in Argentina.
A major problem was the departure of experienced personnel from the Department, such as Undersecretary Dean Acheson, replaced by Wall Street banker Robert Lovett, formerly of the War Department.
He concludes that training a new Secretary of State took time but that the six months lost in dealing with Europe and the emergent need for aid to halt Soviet expansion might prove costly during the ensuing decade.
He adds to his list of efficient freshman Congressmen, Joe Evins of Tennessee.
He finds a waste of manpower in Maj. General Rosie O'Donnell, a crack wartime flier, now writing publicity for the Air Forces.
When racetrack officials at Tanforan in California claimed to have lost money, an alert judge found that they had made nearly 4.5 million dollars in profits during the 40-day spring meet, and jailed them for violating veterans' housing preferences by using building materials to build track facilities.
He recounts of an edgy Capitol Police force, following the attempted shooting of Senator John Bricker on July 12 by a longtime grudge-carrying former Capitol policeman who had lost money 15 years earlier when Mr. Bricker, as Ohio Attorney General, had ordered closure of a savings and loan association. The Capitol Police had responded immediately to a loud bang in a Capitol restroom, finding only that a patron had trouble with a screen and had kicked it the floor.
Paul W. Ward, in the third of his series from the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", examines more Russian jokes, this time focusing on life in Russia: "Things are better than they were 25 years ago" or "Things will be better 50 years hence." A corollary had it that when Russia caught up with the U.S., that was where the Russian wished to get off.
A statue of Lenin with his arm pointing westward was said by students to be telling them to leave the Soviet Union.
There were many such quips which expressed a cynical regard for Soviet propaganda, some of which he recounts. One went: "Drought? Naturally, there was drought, 200,000,000 people had their mouths full of water." He explains that the latter phrase in Russia meant that one was unable to talk.
Another one had a Russian worker asking another how they were treating him. The reply was: "Just like Lenin. They won't feed me and they won't bury
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of two facts gone missing from the news of late: first, that the Soviet Union was considering having its obedient satellites become agents for aggressive action in Europe; and, second, that the U.S. sloth in providing aid to Britain and Europe had permitted a weakening of resistance to such Soviet aggression should it become manifest.
A convincing case had been made that Bulgaria and Yugoslavia had been responsible for the border actions in northern Greece, with the intent to establish a "free Macedonia", with its capital at Salonika, to be supplemented with small portions of Yugoslav and Bulgarian territory. Then, the south Slav federation would be established, comprised of all of the Soviet Balkan satellites, including the new Macedonia.
Britain had reached exhaustion of its financial resources, with the result that the Government was pulling in its world commitments, including reduction of the garrisons in Greece and Italy. The timing, while known by the U.S. for many months to be imminent, in the face of the recent efforts at Soviet expansionism, could not be worse.
But at least it had forced Britain to face reality and Britain and the U.S. were now committed to a hard stand against Soviet expansion. The Soviets would likely therefore proceed cautiously.
A piece from The New York Times discusses the death rate from auto accidents in mid-1947, down from 15,290 to 14,480 from one year earlier, a reduction of nine percent despite increase in travel by eleven percent.
It urges not taking chances on the road or losing tempers or abandoning judgment while behind the wheel or on foot.
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.