Friday, OCTOBER 1, 1948

The Charlotte News

Friday, October 1, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Soviet Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vishinsky told the U.N. political committee, in response to U.S. chief delegate Warren Austin's statement the previous day that Russia stood in the way of an agreement on atomic control, that the Baruch proposal on atomic control would permit exclusive control by the United States and that the U.S., both President Truman and Governor Dewey, harbored the "illusion" that the U.S. had exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. He accused the U.S. of having "war aims" by continuing to develop more powerful atomic weaponry.

He had hinted a year earlier also that Russia might already have an atomic bomb. But Canadian delegate General A.G.L. McNaughton informed the press that the West was quite certain that Russia had not yet developed an atomic bomb.

Col. Frank Howley, U.S. commandant in Berlin, stated that while there would be a cold winter ahead in Berlin, the airlift was providing more than minimum needs and would continue to do so through the winter. He said there was a stockpile of food on hand to last 39 days, whereas at the beginning of the airlift on June 26, there were 24 days of supply. An average of 2,300 metric tons of coal were being flown in daily to the city with planned consumption at about 2,100 metric tons.

Only three percent of the blockaded Berliners had accepted the Russian offer to receive food in the Soviet sector.

Twelve additional C-54 transports arrived from the Far East to supplement the airlift. Each of the planes carried ten tons of cargo.

In Paris, a new bloc of twelve Middle Eastern nations, each with somewhat anti-Soviet sentiments, was reported to be forming, set to alter the voting blocs of the U.N. The countries included Greece, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, and Afghanistan. That included all of the Arab League nations. Those nations plus the 20 Latin American nations could join to form a majority of the 58-nation General Assembly. Greece had recently joined with the Arab League to prevent placing the issue of Palestine at the top of the political committee's agenda.

HUAC member Representative John McDowell told the press that a hundred or more of America's secrets had been stolen and provided the Russians, including information on the atomic bomb, jet propulsion, and radar. He said that Russia had not yet obtained enough information, however, to develop the bomb. He said that fundamental changes might be required in the American court system to protect against divulging secret information in the process of bringing defendants to justice in espionage trials. The Committee had recently recommended prosecution of four named scientists for espionage.

Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall told of the Army being the healthiest in peacetime history.

The President toured Kentucky and West Virginia this date, telling the audience of 4,000 at Shelbyville, Ky., of his paternal grandfather who had run off and gotten married in the town and of his maternal grandmother whose brother escaped jury duty by living in a house astride the county line.

Speaking in Louisville the previous night, he blamed the National Association of Manufacturers for inflation. He spoke at length this date in Charleston, W. Va.

Governor Dewey, speaking in Salt Lake City the previous night, said that the chief domestic issue was world peace and that it could not be had through appeasement.

The RNC denied a report by the DNC that Governor Dewey in February had told a group of veterans that he would abolish the Civil Service Commission as President and that Civil Service employees were "mediocre at their best". Two veterans who were present averred that he made no such statements.

A photograph appears of Governor Dewey having his photograph taken by an admirer in Helena, Mont., after the boy gave him an apple.

Another photograph shows the President shaking hands with Chief Robert West of the Creek Indians during his whistlestop in Muscogee, Oklahoma, two days earlier.

In Baton Rouge, a Louisiana district court issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the Louisiana Secretary of State from listing Governors Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright as the Democratic candidates for president and vice-president respectively. The Louisiana Legislature had, the previous Sunday, passed a law allowing the President and Senator Alben Barkley to be on the ballot but not as Democrats.

In Maryland, the Secretary of State refused to accept a petition of the Dixiecrats for inclusion on the ballot. They were challenging the action in court.

In Havana, Cuban President Grau San Martin pardoned the exotic dancer who had shot and killed her lover, Chicago attorney John Mee, aboard a yacht in Havana Harbor on April 8, 1947. She had claimed self-defense after Mr. Mee had allegedly beaten and threatened to kill her during an argument after she discovered he was already married. She had been convicted and was serving an 18-year sentence at the time of the pardon.

Nancy Brame Dumbell of The News reports of the closing session of the Western North Carolina Methodist Conference in High Point, with the appointment of new pastors for each of four churches in Charlotte, Hawthorne Lane, Central Avenue, Purcell, and Wesley Heights.

In Chicago, three physicians reported in The Journal of the AMA that penicillin dust inhaled directly into the nose, throat, and lungs had cured the symptoms of the common cold in one to three days. Three to six minutes were required for each inhalation, administered through a mask one to three times daily. The treatment was relatively cheap. Of 169 patients treated, 42 percent were cured and 38 percent had marked improvement, while the remainder had fewer cavities.

On the editorial page, "Mint Julep without the Julep" tells of the defunct Literary Digest having predicted in 1932 that President Hoover would defeat FDR handily. Afterward, the prestige of polls fell precipitously. (Perhaps, the editorialist confused the Digest poll with that of another publication or perhaps there was another poll involved, but the results of the large straw poll published weekly in the Digest in September and October, 1932 wound up predicting a decisive victory for FDR, by a margin of 56 to 37.5 percent, whereas the actual results on November 8 were 57.5 to 40, with FDR carrying 42 states instead of the poll's predicted 41, 472 to 59 electoral votes against the poll's predicted 474 to 57. Perhaps, the faulty memory was based on the 1916 election in which the Digest had predicted a win by 4.5 million votes by Charles Evans Hughes over President Wilson, when the President won by half a million.) But since that time, it continues, new polling techniques had improved the accuracy of the science. In 1936, Elmo Roper had predicted the result between FDR and Alf Landon to within 1.1 percent of the returns, and in 1940, to within a half percent, in 1944 to within .3 percent. On September 9, he had made the call that the 1948 race was over and that he would no longer make comment on presidential polls unless a major event, such as a war, intervened.

During the current week, he told of Mr. Dewey leading the President by a margin of 44 to 31 percent, with 15 percent of the respondents being undecided.

Counter-intuitively, Time had reported that the President was drawing large, enthusiastic crowds on his cross-country train tour, whereas the audiences at Governor Dewey's speeches remained dignified. The crowds liked the President's "give 'em hell" show and were naturally sympathetic with the underdog. Governor Dewey was speaking vaguely and sitting tight, resting on his apparently comfortable lead.

The piece finds polling to take the fun out of the campaign, that the voter had nothing about which to argue or laugh, sans zest or zip. It prefers the semblance of a good horse race.

"This one is as though Citation were running in a claiming race."

"Trade School Training" examines the recurrent problem of truancy in the Charlotte schools. Studies had found that typically lack of interest in the subject matter and not understanding the pertinence of some subjects to later life were at the heart of the problem.

It had been determined that less than half of the nation's high school students could benefit from two years of college. So, it assumes that there were many junior high school students who would profit more from courses in mechanics, carpentry and other trades than from scholastic work. It therefore endorses the County Board of Public Welfare proposal that two trade schools, one for blacks and one for whites, be established for the county. It asserts that the beneficiaries of the training would be able to give more to society as a result than with traditional academic training.

At the same time, it adds that it does not view, as some did, all academic training as useless. Such a view neglected the benefits of acculturation in the society beyond utilitarian functions. The high schools should continue to provide basic academic instruction to the great majority of students capable of acquiring the education.

It finds the two trade schools cheaper than the alternative of having to provide welfare for those adults who had acquired no job skills during their adolescent years and did not benefit from academic training.

The simple fact was that they needed to learn how to put the socket on the nut, twist her up, and to make a dovetail joint. If you can do that, you can get 'ere.

"A Matter of Centuries" finds South Carolina considering an historical pageant, probably to be staged in Charleston, to celebrate the state's history. It counsels careful planning. "Shout Freedom!" which had been planned for only a few months in Charlotte before its May presentation, would have benefited, it offers, by more extensive preparation. These dramas portrayed centuries of development and so a year or two of preparation was not out of order.

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "They Can't Hold It", tells of two Cleveland police officers getting drunk in the line of duty to test a new drunkometer. They consumed a half a fifth of 86.6-proof whiskey, which the piece assumes was Scotch, as it was served with soda.

The piece thinks that the pair ought to have been able to consume 100-proof whiskey and that therefore it was time for Cleveland either to strengthen their cops or eliminate whiskey completely. If the police were any indication of ability to hold liquor generally in the community, any number of untoward things would result from an average cocktail party in Cleveland, accidents, murders, suicides.

Drew Pearson tells of Governor Dewey's campaign train operating with clockwork precision whereas the President's did not, the latter more "helter-skelter, hit and miss, hot and human."

The President, for instance, did not know until the last minute that Judge Sam Rosenman would not be on the train for the trip. Clark Clifford suggested to the President that Judge Rosenman did not any longer need them. But the real reason for his absence was that the Truman aides, Mr. Clifford and Treasury Secretary John Snyder, did not want him around. Judge Rosenman, who had advised and written speeches for FDR, had been perfectly willing to continue working as a speechwriter and adviser to the President.

Mr. Pearson notes that playwright Robert Sherwood, by contrast, another speechwriter for the President, had begged off accompanying him on the tour.

The President's advisers wanted him to make an issue of the fact that Governor Dewey had obtained a farm draft deferment at a time when he was not in public office or practicing law. They also wanted him to publicize the fact that those around the Governor had also been able to avoid the draft, not one having served during the war. The President had only hinted at the matter during his tour of California by saying that none of his advisers had sought farm deferments and that he had sought while in the Senate to volunteer to train troops in 1942, had not sought a farm deferment in World War I but volunteered at age 33.

Mr. Pearson provides further reactions from those civic leaders from North and South who came together in Montgomery, Ala., at a meeting sponsored by the Blue & Gray Association to try to effect better understanding between North and South. The vice-president of Lions International wanted a longer conference and believed blacks and whites in Alabama were realizing their problems, were much less resigned to continue matters per the status quo. A representative of Civitan International found the building program for black schools in Montgomery to be consuming the entire construction budget, but that city leaders believed it justified for prior neglect. The North also had problems with the influx of people from Southern rural areas, he stated, at a time when there was a shortage of housing.

More newspapers were demanding that HUAC chairman Congressman J. Parnell Thomas answer the charges made by Mr. Pearson in his column, that the Congressman had hired bogus staff, who did little or nothing, and then pocketed their salaries to supplement his own, a crime.

Maj. General Leslie Groves, wartime military director of the Manhattan Project, had side-stepped all of HUAC's questions regarding atomic spying based on secrecy, stating that the President had directed that all officers, active and reserve, refrain from giving confidential information to Congress.

Marquis Childs, in Oklahoma City, finds Oklahoma to be one of the few doubtful states in the presidential election, with neither Dixiecrats nor Progressives on the ballot. It appeared that the President had a slight edge. He had just completed a 21-stop, two-day tour of the state.

In the Senate race, Republican Congressman Ross Rizley was running against former Governor Robert Kerr. Mr. Rizley, largely reactionary on both foreign and domestic matters, was an avowed opponent of civil rights legislation, while Governor Kerr had taken a neutral stance on the issue.

Thomas Dewey, as President, would have to deal with reactionaries such as Mr. Rizley.

Tulsa was a hotbed of reactionary politics, repudiated across most of the rest of the state. Tulsans hated FDR, believed he deliberately got the country into the war. They did not particularly like Governor Dewey, preferred either Senator Taft or Senator John W. Bricker. Nevertheless, they were working hard for the GOP ticket.

Mr. Kerr had ten million dollars of personal wealth, made mostly in oil, to spend on the campaign and was a popular vote-getter.

Governor Dewey would tour the state in late October, and even if he managed to carry it, it remained doubtful that he could pull along Republican Congressional candidates on his short coattails.

James Marlow discusses the Berlin crisis and its antecedent events, stressing the economic aspects which led to it. The four powers at the end of the war needed to rebuild the economy of Germany while also putting down Nazism and making sure its future recurrence would be squelched. He promises a column on the political aspects later. The economic problem was that the four powers had agreed in 1945 to set up economic agencies to unite the economy of Germany so that it could function as a unit, facilitating reconstruction. But the Russians insisted on Communism as the basis for the economy of the Eastern zone. The Western zones favored capitalism, wanted to keep Communism out. Thus the unifying agencies had never been formed.

Britain and the U.S. had unified their zones economically and France was coming aboard. But Russia remained obstinately separate and refused to cooperate economically, leading ultimately to the blockade, ostensibly set up to prevent Western marks from entering the Eastern zone of Berlin where Soviet marks had been made the established currency.

Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, discusses the Berlin crisis in terms of three sides, the Western side, the Russian side, and the peace side. Anyone who was "passionately, wholeheartedly, redneckedly" stating the Western case or the Russian case was not stating the peace case. Stating the Western case meant inevitably that the case for peace receded, just as in the case of stating adamantly the Russian case. Yet the world was made of Communists and capitalists and it was therefore in such a world that peace had to be made.

There were peace interests over and above those intent on making their arguments for one side or the other and the peace interests had to find a way to embrace these opposing sides. He suggests that the U.N. direct the West and Russia to make peace within a month. If the U.N. would not state the case for peace, he wonders, who else would?

A forecast on the stand of a Dewey Administration on various issues is included, which you may read if you are of a mind to consider the hypothetical built on the hypothetical, none of which ever took place in history.

A letter writer thanks God for such men of vision and peace as Henry Wallace and says that he would not forget the day when the former Vice-President tried to speak in Charlotte and had eggs and tomatoes hurled at him for his trouble.

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