The Charlotte News
Friday, August 8, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Howard Hughes
At one point, Senator Homer Ferguson demanded to know if Mr. Hughes had the papers subpoenaed by the Committee and Mr. Hughes responded that he did not have them on his person. Senator Ferguson instructed him not to get smart with the Committee.
Mr. Hughes stated that he did not know the whereabouts of John Meyer, who had testified earlier in the week. The Subcommittee wanted him to return for further questioning. Mr. Hughes said that he would not produce Mr. Meyer because he had already twice been before the Committee. When Senator Ferguson
Mr. Hughes was greeted with applause as he re-entered the chamber after lunch.
Senator Owen Brewster, chairman of the full Committee, stated that he regretted making a statement that an airline hostess was afraid to travel alone with Mr. Hughes. She had appeared and refuted the alleged statement. He said that he had made the statement out of anger at Mr. Hughes. Senator Brewster had also contended that he knew nothing of a possible merger between TWA and Pan Am at the time Mr. Hughes imputed to him the statement that he would call off the hearing if Mr. Hughes would agree to such a merger. Mr Hughes had countered with articles from Aviation News indicating the Senator did know about it.
Senator Brewster held up a photograph of himself with Mr. Hughes and then-Senator Truman in 1944 to dispute the claim by Mr. Hughes that he had never spoken to Senator Brewster prior to the winter of 1947 when the alleged coercive offer was made.
Elliott Roosevelt, in his concluding testimony, thanked the Subcommittee for its fairness to him. Senator Brewster stated that he was profoundly appreciative of the statement.
The President reluctantly signed a bill which would end on November 1, 1947 all controls on installment purchases. He signed the bill because it provided controls for three more months, which he deemed better than immediate abandonment.
The last three of the 430,353 German and Italian prisoners in the United States during the war were set to sail to Bremerhaven in a few days.
In London, Winston Churchill described a Labor bill, passed in Commons, providing extensive Government powers during the economic crisis, to be a "blank check for totalitarian government." The bill empowered the Government to tell Britons where they must work and allowed taking over the management of firms considered to be operating without efficiency.
The Motion Picture Association of America voted to end indefinitely all export of American films to Britain because of an import tax on films which would absorb 75 percent of the profits made in Britain.
In London, the BBC's "Bright and Early" program began as usual at 6:30 a.m., but without an announcer, who, it was believed, had overslept.
Of course, he might have died.
A Midwest heat wave, with temperatures of 100 degrees or more, had claimed the lives of 112, but cooler temperatures were recorded this date.
In Hot Springs, Ark., a prosecutor told of his wife having killed his father at their home the previous evening because she was "hysterical with fright", as his father had been drinking excessively and had become irrational, abusive, and violent. He had struck his daughter-in-law and bruised her earlier in the week. He had begun mistreating a horse at the family home the day before and said that he would kill it, and also threatened his daughter-in-law. As she went into the house, he followed, cursing her. She picked up a gun and shot him. The prosecutor had led a veterans' reform ticket the previous year in Hot Springs, unseating an entrenched political machine.
The Agriculture Department forecast that the year's cotton production would be at nearly 12 million bales, somewhat below the ten-year average but well above the 8.6 million bale total for 1946. The prediction caused the price in New York to drop $5 per bale, as the predicted crop somewhat exceeded previous expectations.
Boll weevils were causing considerable damage to the cotton in Georgia and the Carolinas.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
William P. Odom left Cairo, a third of the way into his attempted record solo flight around the world, seeking to cut in half the 186-hour record of the late Wiley Post, set in 1933. He had been flying only 22 hours and 46 minutes. His next stop would be in Karachi, India.
Ralph Gibson of The News tells of the publicity chairman for the Shrine Bowl high school all-star football game having disclosed policies on how the players would be accommodated while in Charlotte for the game, scheduled for December 6. The teams were being expanded from 22 players each to 30. The coaches nominated the players, no more than four seniors from each of the schools, and then a committee made the selection from among those players.
On the back page of the newspaper, Earl Wilson reports of an interview with Jane Russell
On the editorial page, "Brewster's Answer Isn't Sufficient" regards Senator Owen Brewster's response to the allegation by Howard Hughes that the Senator had offered not to hold the hearings into the war contracts of Mr. Hughes if he would agree to merge TWA with Pan Am to be inadequate. Senator Brewster's longtime friendliness to Pan Am and receipt of favors from the airline drew his impartiality into question in conducting the investigation, regardless of the truth of the Hughes allegation. The whole matter reflected badly on the War Investigating Committee which Senator Brewster chaired.
It was too bad, says the piece, because the investigation needed to be undertaken to shine a light on the influence peddling which went on during the war to obtain war contracts. The hearing had to proceed in the face of the charges and it had brought to light matters which called for a full investigation of lobbying.
"Main Point in the Bus Dispute" tells of the need for Duke Power to provide more buses and more routes to relieve overcrowding on the Charlotte lines. Duke Power had claimed a loss of $80,000 during the first half of 1947, but that was an argument for more buses to increase patronage. The City Council had appointed a committee to study the matter.
"Three Rahs for Old Alabama" imparts that the Alabama Senate had provided that until Alabama and Auburn resumed their old football rivalry, the two institutions could not use their 1948-49 appropriations. The two schools had spent a million dollars for enlargement of their stadia. The whole matter suggested an over-emphasis on football based on the philosophy that a college education required, first, development of the personality before development of the mind.
UNC had garnered $75,000 from its New Year's Day appearance in the Sugar Bowl for the North Carolina "'Educational'" Foundation. But the editorial takes solace in the notion that North Carolina's Legislature at least had not directed the state's colleges and universities to resume old rivalries or be deprived of appropriations.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Britain's 'Super-Austerity'", tells of the British program being implemented in the face of shortages and economic crisis in the country. During the war, Britons had to get by on 8 ounces of sugar per week, 1 to 5 eggs per month, 2 ounces of tea per week, an ounce of cheese per week, 23 cents worth of meat, 4 ounces of bacon and ham, if any were available, and 2 pints of milk per week. Clothing was also strictly rationed and there was almost no tobacco and very little beer.
That had been considered "austerity" and now the British spoke of "super-austerity", which would probably be no worse for the fact of British manufacturing turning out durable goods not available during the war, even if many of these goods would have to be exported.
Drew Pearson recounts of Col. Robert Ginsburgh being passed over for promotion despite his having served in two world wars and been a faithful and effective assistant to Secretary of War Robert Patterson, both while Mr. Patterson had been Secretary and while Undersecretary. Col. Ginsburgh had served well also under General MacArthur, who had recommended his promotion to brigadier general, nixed by the brass in Washington.
Mr. Pearson suggests that the reason for his being passed over was his religion.
He next tells of Congressman Robert Kean of New Jersey being interested in serving his own pocketbook by pushing through a bill in the closing days of the session which would cut out the six-cent stamp tax on loans of stock passed during the Hoover Administration to discourage short-selling, which had contributed to the stock market crash. Mr. Kean was a partner in the N.Y. Stock Exchange firm of Kean, Taylor & Co. and his bill would save a lot of work for investment firms.
The two Senators from Utah, Democrat Elbert Thomas and Republican Arthur Watkins, were at odds over confirmation of the President's appointment to the National Labor Relations Board of former Senator Abe Murdock of Utah, who had been defeated by Senator Watkins. Senator Thomas urged the President not to withdraw the appointment and the President had agreed.
President Truman, he informs, was not happy with the direction of his old War Investigating Committee, with its present investigation of the Howard Hughes war contract and the connection of Elliott Roosevelt. He was saddened that the Committee had become politicized.
Paul W. Ward, in the fifth of his series of articles from the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", discusses the plight of Jews in Russia. A holdover from Czarist Russia was the practice of stamping "Jew" on the passports of a minority of the Russian citizens. There was no particular formal civil disability from being so labeled, but it enabled the individual agents who processed the passports to exercise their own personal anti-Semitism, which might translate into fewer ration coupons or an inferior job or place of habitat.
Jews in Russia were not particularly religious, and so it was not freighted with the same religious and ethnic discrimination which had taken place in Nazi Germany.
Lazar Kaganovich was the only Jew remaining in the Politburo and no Jew had held any high post in the Foreign Office since Ivan Maisky and Maxim Litvinov. Nor were Jews prominent as members of the Communist Party. The prewar purges had largely eliminated them from the party hierarchy and from the Soviet intelligentsia, in which they had previously been predominant.
He relates of a couple of jokes involving Jews, one of which was that the Jew could not sleep anywhere any better than in the Soviet Union, to which the Jew responded that he had of late "developed an interest in eating, too."
Marquis Childs discusses the UMW contract recently negotiated with the owners to avoid a strike, containing a provision exempting for a year the UMW from the Taft-Hartley penalty provisions for undertaking wildcat strikes. As a result, the Ford workers had demanded and obtained the same provision.
Congressman Fred Hartley of New Jersey believed that the provision in the UMW contract was illegal, while Senator Taft thought otherwise. Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota would head a joint House-Senate Committee to oversee and enforce Taft-Hartley, and he tended toward the Hartley view on the matter.
But the reason for the settlement of the contract was so that there would be no lost production in coal, impacting steel and the ability to send coal abroad, desperately needed in Europe.
As the law did not take effect until August 22, presently workers could strike without being subject to its provisions.
In the two years since the end of the war, workers had increased their pay in absolute terms substantially, but relative to inflation, not so much. They would, suggests Mr. Childs, have been better off concentrating on obtaining a guaranteed annual wage rather than being so concerned with advances in hourly wages. It was not too late to change policy and the unions would be better served by not abusing Taft-Hartley but rather facing up to it realistically.
Several letters congratulate The News for its edition on the Piedment Carolinas and their industrial potential, under the editorial direction of Burke Davis. The writers included the president of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Charles Crutchfield of WBT radio, Virginius Dabney, Editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Floyd Hendley, Managing Editor of the Greensboro Daily News, and Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago Sun.
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