Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Paris before
the U.N. political committee, Russia, through Andrei Vishinsky,
formally proposed a ban on the atom bomb and simultaneous formation
of an atomic control organization. The Russians previously had
proposed that first the ban be implemented and then consideration be
given to a control organization.
The previous day, Mr. Vishinsky had argued vigorously that
the bomb should be banned first before control machinery was put
into place, down at the bowery.
U.S. chief delegate to the U.N. Warren Austin said that it
was an "Oriental maneuver", the sincerity of which he
doubted. He preferred having first control and then consideration of
a ban, as favored by a majority of the member delegates of the U.N.
Atomic Energy Commission.
General A.G.L. McNaughton of Canada, Canadian delegate to the
U.N. meeting in Paris, told the press that there was no "precise
indication" that Russia yet had the atomic bomb and that Mr.
Vishinsky's statements suggesting such the day before were
"thoroughly dishonest". He said that the Russians were
attempting to make the Western world "hysterical" by
such implied claims. He also said that there was no doubt, however,
that the Russians would soon have the bomb but that probably it
would be another five years during which control could be
considered. If no plan for control of atomic energy were in place by
then, he continued, the world would be in for real hysteria.
He viewed the Vishinsky-enunciated plan this date for
simultaneous control and ban of the bomb to be a "red
herring", but that the concession was an admission that their
previous stance was illogical.
In Kansas City, Maj. General "Wild Bill" Donovan,
head of the O.S.S. during the war, told the Missouri Bar Association
that he did not believe that the Marshall Plan was enough for
Europe, that he favored giving military aid and putting a blockade
on the Kiel and Suez Canals, through which proceeded essential Russian trade, to give Russia a dose of its own Berlin
medicine.
In Buenos Aires, the Argentine Government suspended the right
of five foreign correspondents, four Americans employed by U.S.
publications and one Uruguayan working for Reuters, to work in the
country. Eight days earlier, dictator El Presidente Juan Peron had
criticized the foreign press, calling them "spies and
saboteurs".
The President concluded his 16-day, 19-state cross-country
train tour this date by arriving back at Washington's Union Station,
saying that in his crusade against the special interests on behalf
of the people, "I have just begun to fight." The
President had made about 140 speeches during the tour, which covered
8,300 miles. He estimated that he saw two to three million people
during the stops.
Governor Dewey campaigned through Missouri this date, was due
to return to New York on Sunday, where John Foster Dulles, his
foreign affairs adviser, would provide him with an update on the
Paris meeting of the U.N. Mr. Dewey had told an audience in
Cheyenne, Wyo., that civilization had to find a way out of the
"wilderness of confusion made by men not equal to
responsibilities forced on them by history." He said that it
was a "sorry thing" that "integrity and thrift and
knowledge" were needed in Washington.
Former Vice-President Henry Wallace told a group of
supporters in Hollywood that the country could never win
friends by showing how "well dressed and well fed and
complacent" it was. He criticized film companies and HUAC for
cooperating in allowing the latter to set the standards for the
movie industry, making it hard to produce pictures with integrity.
Governor Strom Thurmond attacked all three of his rivals in a
speech in Baltimore.
The election was exactly a month away.
The Georgia Democratic executive committee, following months
of confusion, pledged its twelve presidential electors to President
Truman.
British philosopher Bertrand Russell was among 31 passengers
saved when a Norwegian airlines flying boat capsized near Trondheim,
killing six and injuring several others.
In New York, Customs officials found 16 pounds of heroin
worth $200,000 aboard the Italian liner Vulcania the previous
day. Officials said that they believed the drugs to have originated
with an organized mob operating out of Italy, with which Lucky
Luciano was involved. It was the fourth big drug seizure of the
year, all apparently related.
Also in New York, nine men were believed drowned in the
Hudson River when a tugboat collided with a 12,000-ton Liberty ship.
Six were rescued. The tugboat sank.
In Des Moines, Iowa, five youths, ranging in age from 15 to
20, were sentenced to 30 days each in jail for contributing to the
delinquency of minor girls, after a ten-day series of wild parties
by more than 30 teenagers who broke into the Sheriff's cabin and
used it for their rendezvous. Nine of the girls were taken into
custody and three remained in the juvenile home, the others having
been released to their parents. More than twenty of the teenagers
had admitted to participation in immoral acts at the beer and liquor
parties. One fifteen-year old girl said that she had been attacked
fifteen times by seven boys in one evening. Two of the youths had
been charged with statutory rape.
In Philadelphia, General Eisenhower told a gathering of 3,500
newsboys that they had provided unselfish devotion to the service of
country and fellow man and followed good Americanism in their effort
to deliver the country's newspapers each day. He had been a
newspaper carrier, himself.
Two Charlotte News carriers, pictured, returned from
attendance of a tour of Raleigh with 54 other newspaperboys, two
from each of the leading dailies across the state, as part of
National Newspaperboy Day. They had met Governor Gregg Cherry,
visited N.C. State and Central Prison, and were taken to Capitol
Square, presumably on the hunch that some might wind up in all three
places one day. The previous day, they had heard an address by the
publisher of the Durham Herald-Sun, Carl Council. He told
them that had they paid for the privilege for their business
training received from newspaper carrying, it would have been a
bargain.
The little green rubberbands provided cheap fun. (We prefer, incidentally, the substitution of "non-logical", which makes the conundrum posed more understandable, not to mention more logically consistent and appropriately descriptive as the opposing form to "autological" than "heterological", more apropos as an antonym of "homological", not here brought into issue.)
Also in a statement commemorative of National Newspaper Week,
Secretary of State Marshall said that the barriers to the flow of
information had to be reduced or eliminated and that no people had
ever lost their liberties with a free press, that censorship and
press control were the first steps to subjugation by a dictator.
Mecklenburg County men facing the November draft induction
would receive their pre-induction physical examinations October 11.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of bottles and broken
glass being hurled onto the field at the football game between
Central High and Joe E. Brown High of Atlanta the previous night at
Memorial Stadium, prompting the Police Chief to assign ten more men
to future games. The bottles thrown took a crew all morning to clean
up, filling two ten-gallon containers, each about the size of a hat
worn by each of the hurlers. The bottles had been tossed at the
visiting players' bench throughout the game. The Park Board
superintendent said that consideration was being given to using
paper cups instead of bottles for the soft drinks.
You might also want to check the contents of what the patrons
might be bringing to the stadium to fortify what they purchase from
the concessionaires.
On pages 6B and 7B is the Design No. B-18 of the ranch-style
house, should you have a mind and pocketbook to build one.
If not, perhaps you can use instead Design No. B-17.
On the editorial page, "Mr. Dewey's Foreign Policy" tells of Governor Dewey's outline to be followed in foreign affairs
as President having sealed the doom of GOP isolationism and assured
that U.S. policy would have continuity no matter who was President.
He vowed to remember the lesson of Munich of ten years earlier,
never to try to purchase peace with appeasement. He would be
faithful to the U.N. and cooperation with American neighbors. He
would continue the Marshall Plan and the Administration's policy
generally in Europe, encouraging development of the WEU and
revitalization of the industrial Ruhr. He would also continue the
policy embodied in the Rio Pact.
He did promise an end to neglect of China, the only major
departure from current Administration policy.
The piece concludes that if Mr. Dewey needed any more
stature, he had gained it from this speech. His words were
comforting to Americans, if disquieting to the Kremlin.
"Your Right to Know..." celebrates National
Newspaper Week, tells of the world of the previous decade being as
close to chaos as it could come without breaking apart. It was the
most challenging decade of the six which The Charlotte News
had faced since its founding in 1888, trying, as with all
newspapers, to report the momentous news of the hour amid shortages
of staff and newsprint during the war. The motto of the Week was:
"Your right to know is the key to all your liberties."
It promises self-examination and correction of shortcomings
of the newspaper and vows to direct attention to "injustice
and corruption" wherever it was found. It would strive, as in
the past, to have a "high regard for truth and a dedicated
devotion to public service."
Erwin Canham, editor of The Christian Science Monitor
and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors,
provides, at the request of the Associated Press, 500 words on how
to read a newspaper, also in celebration of National Newspaper Week.
His first reaction, he says, was to advise reading it as one
pleased, standing on one's head if preferred.
But he also had to ask whether part of the function of the
newspaper was to make better citizens and communities out of its
readership. Free speech was a two-way, dynamic method of
communication, with reading of what was printed being essential to
the process, planting in the reader the seed of action.
So, he concludes that the need was to read with awareness of
the responsibility to use the information to govern the reader's
decisions in various aspects of daily life, to "preserve and
purify" liberties. The only thing a newspaper could ask of the
reader was to take the information and use it to favorable advantage
to avoid war and destruction.
It was the newspaper which supplied the information which
"marks you off from the slave in darkness and makes you a free
man."
Rabbi Philip Frankel of Charlotte's Temple Beth El provides a
New Year's message in celebration of Rosh Hashanah, beginning the
year 5709 at sundown the following day. He offers a prayer for peace
in the world and that the new home for Jews in Israel would flourish
and prosper.
Drew Pearson relates of General Lucius Clay, American
military occupation governor, telling Congressional visitors to
Frankfurt that Russia was not as strong militarily as previously
believed, that they were quite afraid of getting into a war with the
U.S., respected the industrial might of America which they lacked.
Russia had assumed that the blockade of Berlin would force the West
from the city within a week and had not recovered from their
surprise regarding the effectiveness of the British-American
airlift. The General did not expect the Russians to go to war over
Berlin but said that they would maintain their continual propaganda
campaign and bluffing tactics. The worst thing, he opined, that the
country could do would be to leave Berlin, only encouraging the
Russians to undertake moves which would lead to war.
Senator Homer Ferguson was resorting to the easiest response
of any cornered politician, to yell "liar" at his
opposition. The Senator had responded to Mr. Pearson's pair of
recent columns regarding the letter sent to him the previous
February by Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma to deter Mr. Ferguson
from continuing with a probe of Senator Thomas's speculation in the
cotton market through surrogates while affecting the price of cotton
accordingly from the floor. Senator Thomas had threatened to expose
Senator Ferguson's favors from Chrysler while considering the
company's applications to obtain Government contracts. Senator
Ferguson, however, denied that this letter of Senator Thomas had
anything to do with his dropping the investigation, that, rather,
the Senate Expenditures Subcommittee had overruled him and stopped
the investigation. But the records showed no attempt by the Senator
to go to the full committee to overrule the subcommittee, which was
his prerogative.
Senators William Fulbright of Arkansas and Scott Lucas of
Illinois had described the American Embassy in France as the weakest
spot in the country's diplomatic representation. The Ambassador to
Paris, Jefferson Caffery, was unimpressive to the Senators and the
staff at the Embassy could not even explain to American visitors how
to cash a check in France. Both Senators praised other American
embassies in Europe, especially that in Italy.
U.S. aircraft pilots in Germany called themselves "Clay's
pigeons".
The DNC was upset with the Saturday Evening Post for
placing President Truman under the microscope while not giving the
same treatment to Governor Dewey, refusing the DNC's demand that it
do so.
Marquis Childs tells of the House committee investigating the
FCC based on its Port Huron decision that radio stations could not
censor political speech and the Scott decision requiring that in
"fundamental controversies" stations had to afford equal
time to an opposing viewpoint. The committee had tried to suggest
that the latter decision, involving an atheist being granted time to
respond to religious broadcasting, extended to require stations
generally to grant atheists equal time to all religious broadcasts.
The committee thus accused the FCC of "thought policing".
One witness before the committee criticized the Scott
decision because of its prolix discussion of atheism and religion.
But the same witness had also celebrated diversity of expression of
opinion as a mainstay of American democracy. Indeed, a monolithic
culture, ventures Mr. Childs, would be tantamount to the extant
condition of the Soviet Union.
The committee believed that a case out of Ohio could work to
tag the FCC as leaning toward Communism. It appeared to be the
beginning of an effort to shut out all opinion left of center.
A new FM station in Washington, WCFM, was about to go on the
air, organized by cooperatives to promote diversity of viewpoints.
Most radio stations celebrated fair play, as one which gave airtime
to Senator Glen Taylor because it believed that the Wallace-Taylor
ticket had not received enough exposure over the airwaves.
Mr. Childs suggests that if any radio station was backing the
maneuvers of the House committee, then it was undermining itself.
James Marlow looks at the political side of the Berlin
crisis, the question of the type of government which would exist in
Germany once the four powers ceased occupation, whether Communist or
democratic.
The Americans, British, and French were setting up a Western
government, opposed by the Russians, who were invited to take part
but refused. Premier Stalin had asked the three powers to cease in
the effort but they had given a negative reply.
Germany was divided into 16 states, five of which were in the
Eastern sector and four each in the British and American zones, with
three in the French.
The Russians wanted a strong central government for Germany,
which could permit the Communists to gain control. The Western
powers wanted each separate state to have strong powers in each of
their legislatures and a less powerful central government. Each
state would control its own police, education system and the like.
The German Communists would find it harder to seize power with such
a decentralized system in place.
When the four powers could not agree on the form of
government, the West began its move to set up a separate Western
government. Under the plan, the Germans were permitted to elect
their own representatives to a constituent assembly which had the
function of drawing up a constitution subject to approval by the
Western powers. Once accomplished, the Germans could elect their own
representatives, subject to control of the three powers as long as
they remained as occupying forces.
No one knew when the three powers could finally evacuate
Germany. If the Russians were to set up their own government in the
East, then "crisis upon crisis" in such a divided
Germany would likely occur.
A letter writer urges kicking from the American scene the
Progressive Party of Henry Wallace, filled with "Communists,
Reds, anarchists, liars, robbers and enemy rats." He wants to
unite and fight the rats at home, making thereby headway toward
peace. Free speech and free thought were worth fighting for. He
urges voting "the straight American ticket" and "down
with any third party".
A Quote of the Day: "Senator Alben W. Barkley is right,
in commenting upon the spy revelations, when he says, 'Nobody loves
a Communist.' Nobody wants a Communist in the Government, either.
But sometimes it isn't necessary to burn down the house just to
roast the pig." –Lexington (Ky.) Herald
