The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 18, 1947
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the plan of Secretary of State Marshall to overhaul the processes by which the U.N. resolved issues of peace had received support from the smaller nations, as Canada, Australia, and the Philippines voiced full support of the program to increase the role of the General Assembly to avoid the stalemates experienced in the Security Council. China avoided mention of the program but indicated willingness to surrender some of its veto power on the Council. The delegates to the General Assembly gathering anxiously were awaiting a speech by Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vishinsky, scheduled for this afternoon.
The U.S., Belgium, and Australia were selected to serve on a U.N. commission to assist negotiations between the Dutch and Indonesians in resolving the crisis of the previous several months in the Indies.
The huge hurricane striking Florida the previous day with winds up to 120 mph suddenly took a turn for the Gulf of Mexico and now threatened a 500-mile stretch of the Gulf Coast from Cedar Keys, Fla., to Morgan City, La. It was thought that it would hit Pensacola and northwest Florida by midnight, but it had taken the turn to the northwest. Fort Myers, however, had been hit hard by the storm as it passed into the Gulf.
Preliminary damage estimates in the Miami areas were at six million dollars, with several communities not yet reporting. Citrus groves were heavily damaged. At least three had died in the hurricane thus far and six were missing. The ferocity of the storm was generally considered equal to that of the storms hitting the area in 1928, 1930, and 1935.
Hal Boyle reports from Palm Beach of the hurricane aftermath. He found the streets littered with hundreds of fallen palm trees. He reports that no lives were lost in Palm Beach as most of the mansions of the wealthy were shuttered, leaving caretakers, police, and fire personnel as the only persons in residence. A pre-dawn tour revealed a place which looked as a "dowager with her hair caught in an electric drier." Continuing, Mr. Boyle found that, "Green coconuts rolled crazily in the streets like bowling balls on a spree... The Everglades golf links and the Palm Beach Golf Club looked like a series of salt water duck ponds."
Prices slumped in the Chicago cattle and grain markets, attributed to the consumer strike against high meat prices and the sharp reduction in November grain exports. The prices of some grades of hogs dropped $2 per hundred weight. Wheat and corn prices dropped the limit, and grain remained weak in later trading. Steers dropped $1 to $1.50 lower than the previous day. Egg and butter prices also declined, the former by 1.25 cents per dozen and the latter .5 to .9 cents per pound. In New York, cotton dropped $2 per bale.
In Michigan, 180,000 autoworkers, led by the UAW, organized a consumers cooperative to resist rising prices on food. The members each contributed $1 to support the campaign. Several union locals planned to establish their own grocery stores to sell food to members at cost.
In Los Angeles, a woman modeled for the court an evening gown which showed an inch of her bare midriff, as part of a divorce suit in which she contended that her husband ripped the gown at the shoulder, upset at her "nakedness" at a party the two had just attended. The judge found the gown "perfectly decent". She had used the judge's chambers to change into the gown, presumably while the judge was absent.
On the editorial page, "Blow to North Carolina Justice" comments on the failure of the Warren County Grand Jury to return an indictment against the only remaining defendant from the seven-man lynch mob, which had failed in its task to lynch Buddy Bush on May 23 only for the fortuity of his being able to effect an escape into the woods in Jackson in Northampton County. The Grand Jury also refused indictment of the jailer who had admittedly led the lynch mob to Mr. Bush's cell and pointed him out, claiming not to be threatened by the men in so doing.
A Grand Jury in Northampton County had, six weeks earlier, also shirked its duty in refusing to indict any of the seven men. Governor Gregg Cherry had then met with the Solicitor and a Superior Court Judge and it was agreed that the matter would be submitted, pursuant to North Carolina's 1893 anti-lynch law, to a committing magistrate, who then held to answer the jailer and one of the seven, who had confessed the crime to the FBI, finding insufficient evidence against the other six after holding properly that the confession could be admitted only against the declarant. Under the anti-lynch law, the matter could then be submitted anew to a Grand Jury in a neighboring county.
It posits that the ways of North Carolina justice were strange. Not long previously, a bus driver who had killed a black man under questionable circumstances had been freed by a Grand Jury. A week later, in the same city, a bus driver was fined $15 for tossing a dog
Now came the second refusal of a grand jury to indict in the Buddy Bush matter.
"An extreme aberration of justice, such as that which offers a canine more favorable status in our courts than a human or which writes off the death of three men at $333.33 a head, is of little concern to the smug citizen whose intercourse with the law is limited to an occasional parking ticket." But to those who regularly flouted the law, it presented an open invitation again to disregard it.
No system was safe when a mob could, with impunity, take a prisoner and attempt to lynch him; none was safe in a society where, again with impunity, a mob could advance on a jail, as had happened the previous Saturday in Norwood, and shout, "hang the police". The state, it predicts, was facing darker days unless citizens began to realize what contempt for the law and its institutions was doing to them.
Of course, as to the latter incident, it all depends on inflection. If the crowd merely shouted, "hang the police", using the vernacular form of "hang", then it was merely an act of defiance against undue exercise of authority. And, given the news of late, who could blame them? Law and order always begins at home, at the police station, with a dutiful police officer walking the narrow line between efficient and dignified enforcement of the law and refraining from use of unnecessary or ad hominem, vengeful exercise of physical force, especially excessive force for the circumstances, grasping after the fact for rationalization inapplicable hypothetical to justify the act—much as does the average two-bit criminal: he didn't have no need for that money anyway, probably would spend it on wine, women, and song.
"How to Control the Hotheads?" tells of Justice Robert Jackson, lead American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of the previous year, having proposed as limits to warfare among nations that the use of air power and the treatment of prisoners of war be carefully circumscribed. He said nothing of limiting the use of the atomic bomb or outlawing war, presumably because he recognized that America and Russia held such intense mutual suspicion of one another as to be beyond reconciliation in that manner. Yet, he also had stated that it appeared as a certainty that the Russian people and their leaders did not wish to have a war with the United States. He cautioned against brusque and boastful talk on both sides as the precipitant devices of war.
The piece remarks that recently, a group of Americans and Britons of their countries' respective expeditions to Antarctica had gathered to resolve their differences amicably as an example to the world.
It suggests therefore that the world leaders ought be sent to the South Pole to cool off before the next meeting of the powers. "A deep freeze might benefit the boys no end."
"Taft to the Rescue Again" finds interesting Senator Taft's simplicity and candor in dealing with issues, as when he recently had stated in Los Angeles, during his tour to assess his viability as a presidential candidate in 1948, that the threat of totalitarianism in the United States was not from abroad or the foreign economic crisis, but rather originating from within, from the Federal Government. He reasoned, with his his typical facility, that with Federal, state, and local taxes consuming 30 percent of income, the incentive for private enterprise was drying up, enabling the Government, particularly the Federal Government under the leadership of the Democrats, to take increasing control of the lives of Americans until "finally government will absorb most private activity." Thus would come the destruction of freedom.
The piece suggests wryly that it was too bad the country had to deal with the other problems than those of which the Senator spoke, such as war, inflation, world hunger, disease, and slum conditions, among others, all ignored in the Taft program.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Down the Hamburg Gangplank", finds the treatment of the 4,300 "Exodus 1947" passengers by the British, shipping them back to Hamburg after they had refused to disembark in France following their forced deportation from Palestine to which they had sought immigration in July, easy enough to criticize, especially as the camps to which the displaced persons were sent resembled too closely the Nazi concentration camps of the war.
But the piece, while condemning that treatment, which included kicking and beating recalcitrant passengers to effect their disembarcation in Hamburg, also finds fault with the United States for doing more to relieve the displaced persons of Europe, especially the failure to admit 100,000 refugees over four years, as proposed by the President in 1946 and sought in the bill of Representative Stratton of Illinois. It urges that the Congress should have acted and the President should have done more, although recognizing that he had repeated recently his exhortation to act.
The result was that the displaced Jews of Europe were left to wander pillar to post, "unwanted seemingly everywhere."
A piece from the Congressional Quarterly takes a look at inflation in the country and the ongoing Congressional investigation of the price picture, holding hearings in the various regions of the country during September and October. It finds that inflation could cost Congressmen their jobs, just as the voters had thrown out the Democrats in 1946. Inflation would raise the cost of foreign aid programs, perhaps ending Republican plans for a tax cut in 1948. The foreign aid program being advocated by the Administration might increase prices further unless accompanied by new Government controls.
It posits that Congress did not need to investigate to realize that prices were high. The most alarming thing to the Congressmen was the rate of increase. Commodity markets for the prior two weeks were rising three to eight cents more per day. There was even talk of four-dollar wheat.
Food had nearly doubled in price from that in the prewar period, 1935 to 1939. It provides a chart based on the 1935-39 average of 100 for the country and major cities within it, the U.S. as a whole going from 97.2 in 1940 to 145.6 in mid-June, 1946, to 190.5 on the same date in 1947.
The statistics were supplying the Democrats a field day against Republicans who had favored the end of price control a year earlier. Republicans countered that the official data only showed the prices under OPA, not the high black market prices being paid by average consumers for scarce foods. The Republicans also contended that the Administration had moved faster than the Congress in removing price controls—a dissembling charge as the President only threw in the towel in the end the previous fall when the gutting of price control regulations by the Congress during the summer, after the President had reluctantly approved the measure to limit controls passed on the eve of the scheduled end of controls on June 30, 1946 to avoid the prospect of having no controls in place, made further regulation futile.
It lists the various possibilities being discussed to try to get prices down. New price control had only slight support. Talking prices down was seen by many members of Congress as the most effective means short of legislation, proposals for which they lacked. Increasing production was another means bandied about, but production was already at record highs. Rationing had picked up new support, but there was question as to its effectiveness without accompanying price controls. Credit controls was another means, but there was not much credit in food consumption. Limiting exports was another method being discussed, but there was disagreement as to how much impact exports had on domestic prices. As to taxes, some favored keeping taxes high to reduce the money in circulation to buy goods, while the other side wanted to reduce taxes so that businessmen and farmers would no longer withhold goods from the stream of commerce in anticipation of tax reduction. It was hoped that there would be more buyer restraint to hold prices down. Finally, Senators Ralph Flanders of Vermont and Irving Ives of New York had called for commodity markets to reduce speculation, but the Government could not so order.
Various pressure groups were at odds on whether to return to price controls, some of the farmers and some labor groups favoring it, business and the National Grange generally opposed.
Drew Pearson tells of the President getting into binds whenever he relied on his advisers to determine his judgment, usually doing well when he acted on his own advice. An example was the case of his radio adviser, J. Leonard Reinsch. He had been turned down the previous spring for an FCC license to start a radio station in Cincinnati. Shortly afterward, Ray Wakefield, the FCC commissioner who had voted against granting the license, was not reappointed by the President. In his stead was appointed Congressman Robert Jones, a Republican isolationist who had regularly voted against Roosevelt-Truman policy. Mr. Reinsch and others, including former Speaker Sam Rayburn, had urged the appointment.
Subsequently, the chairman of the FCC, Charles Denny, brought the President a copy of a story from Broadcasting Magazine, which stated that Mr. Denny was resigning and that Mr. Reinsch would take his place. Mr. Denny told the President that he was not planning to resign but would if the President so desired. The President stated that he had no intention of relieving Mr. Denny of his position and was angry at Mr. Reinsch for apparently planting the story. The result was that Mr. Reinsch was now in the doghouse and the President was looking for a new radio adviser. The President also had realized his mistake in not reappointing Mr. Wakefield and planned to appoint him either to the Federal Power Commission or to the Federal bench in California.
In England, the black market was kept to a minimum and the more prosperous the Briton, the more closely he followed rationing. The head of Lever Brothers was entertaining the U.S. head of operations at his home in London when he noticed the American had six bars of Swan soap, brought with him on his trip, which he was re-packing into his suitcase for his return, asked if he could have the soap. The head of the company would not take bars from his own factory in England.
The corn shortage might be eliminated in America if rats would be eliminated. One rat consumed about 100 pounds of grain per year. The Department of Interior estimated the rat population to be twice the U.S. population. Rats sometimes meant to a farmer the difference between profit and loss on his grain. They also spoiled much of the corn as they ate. The Fish & Wildlife Service was working to eradicate rats, but had suffered budget cuts in Congress.
The Army developed a particularly virulent rat poison during the war. Labeled "1080", it could wipe out all of the rats on a farm overnight. But it was also deadly to farm animals and so it had not been put into general use. Government experts recommended red squill as the best rat poison, as well as pumping gas into the rats' underground burrows. Rat traps could not keep up with the reproductive cycle of rats.
He notes that the Library of Congress had eliminated its rats after a woman had been frightened by one in the reading room. Worried that the rats might eat important documents and paintings, officials took action. A check of other Government buildings found many within the halls of Congress, none in the White House, though a few infested the lawn of the Executive Mansion.
To what extent he was still being literal in the last sentence is left to the reader's discernment.
Marquis Childs, in Athens, tells of the wealthy of Greece having sought during the summer to buy their way out of the country, in response to the rumors of an impending armed uprising in Athens and troop movements in the north. They were paying up to $1,500 American to option a seat on a ship and promised an additional three times that amount if the option were exercised. The vessels were going only to Turkey or Egypt. It was estimated that a billion dollars of private Greek capital was in foreign banks.
The aid mission was supposed to be complete by the end of the current fiscal year, but most predicted it would only be getting started in full operation by that point. One member of the mission called it a "breadline with guns".
During 1945 and 1946, UNRRA had expended 800 million dollars on relief for Greece, and the American aid would be 350 million by the fiscal year deadline, 300 million of which would come directly from the Truman Doctrine appropriation and 50 million from the European relief fund. About half of it was earmarked for rehabilitation and reconstruction, but that might be decreased in favor of more military aid.
Yet, no semblance of return to any form of normalcy in the country was evident. That could occur only when the Greeks, themselves, began to believe in the stability of the country.
The transportation facilities in Greece were nearly obliterated from the war. In consequence, there were high prices and an active black market.
The casual traveler in Athens could not see the ongoing civil war in the north or that the economic lifeblood of the country had been nearly drained away. The American aid likely could only slow the erosion. An infusion of major financial capital would be needed to get the country back on its feet, and that was beyond the capability of the aid program.
Samuel Grafton discusses the likelihood of a consumers' strike to ward off inflation. Even Senator Taft had urged Americans to eat less, although refraining from suggesting a strike. Once, the country had price controls and farm subsidies which kept prices stable during the war. But with those gone in the name of more freedom, the country was actually less free. There was also the fact of freedom to utilize the Government for the benefit of the people. Now, Congress wanted less government. But the result was rampant inflation.
He quotes from a previous piece he had written twenty months earlier, regarding the aftermath of World War I in 1919 and the fact that it suddenly became fashionable, as related by Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald-Tribune in Our Times, Volume VI, to go to work in overalls rather than business suits, as buying came to a halt, prices fell rapidly, unemployment rose, and depression resulted.
Twenty months earlier, the economy was relatively still stable, before the end of price control. He compares the result to an act of vandalism, at which the observer was revolted, "as at the sight of men giving their boots to a fine picture, and flinging dirt upon it. With the best will in the world, of course."
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