The Charlotte News
Friday, November 19, 1948
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. General Assembly in Paris rejected, by a vote of 36 to 6, the Soviet proposal to have multilateral reduction of arms by one-third within a year and, by a vote of 37 to 6, the Soviet-proposed ban of the atomic bomb, but voted approval, 43 to 6, of the Western-backed plan for general arms reduction. The six votes in each case represented the Soviet bloc nations.
Soviet delegate and Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vishinsky had charged that the U.S. and Britain were carrying on a "mad armaments race" and that a "war psychosis" had aligned both countries against the Soviet Union.
Also at the U.N., self-described "citizen of the world" Garry Davis, who had renounced his U.S. citizenship, demonstrated before the organization until he was forcibly removed. He demanded to speak to the people of the world regarding the concept of "one world", and some voices from the gallery urged the body to let him be heard. After Mr. Davis, a veteran of the war, was removed, a wartime French Resistance leader, Col. Robert Sarrazac, started to deliver Mr. Davis's prepared remarks to the body, until he also was removed.
In Munich, fifteen more German war criminals were hanged this date, bringing to 73 the number of executions during the previous six weeks, on convictions for murder of concentration camp prisoners and American soldiers. Since the previous October 15, nine war criminals had been hanged every Friday at Landsberg Prison.
In Palestine, Israel retained control of the Negev Desert as the U.N. Security Council deadline passed for reduction to the original complements of troops in the area before October 14 when the Negev was taken in fighting by the Israelis. Israel chose not to obey the U.N. directive and order its troops from the Negev. It said, however, that all troops who had entered the region after October 14 had been withdrawn, leaving only the forces who had been in the area since May 15, the date the British withdrew from Palestine. U.N. mediator for Palestine, Dr. Ralph Bunche, said that he was pleased with the statement by Israel as it demonstrated acceptance in principle of the Security Council resolution.
The rulers of Egypt, King Farouk, and Iran, Shah Reza Pahlevi, both divorced their wives who had not borne them a male heir to their thrones. The Shah's wife was the sister of King Farouk. King Farouk's wife, 17 at marriage, had given birth to three daughters. The Shah's wife, also 17 when they married, had given birth to one daughter. Both men were in their late twenties.
In China, the claim the previous day by a Nationalist military officer that the Nationalist troops had defeated the Communists for control of the city of Suchow had buoyed the spirits of the people of Nanking and caused them to regard Chiang Kai-Shek with new respect.
In Brussels, Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak and his coalition Cabinet resigned, believed to be because of Cabinet dissension regarding the pardon by Minister of Justice Paul Struye of two Belgian Nazi collaborators during the war, accused of responsibility in the deaths of several patriots.
The Legislature of Ohio was considering ordering a statewide recount of the presidential ballots, after one county had reported an undercount of 10,518 ballots cast for Governor Dewey. The majority of the President had been reduced to 6,817 votes after initial counts had him winning by 17,500 votes. The outcome could not change, however, the election results.
Senator J. Howard McGrath, DNC chairman, said that there would be no compromise with Southerners regarding civil rights and that the election results showed that the country wanted the program of the President passed, that the Congress would act accordingly. He also indicated that there would be no attempt to punish the renegade Dixiecrats, who had bolted the party over the civil rights program, by denying them committee positions. He said that he personally favored a change in Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, favorite tactic of Southern Senators to block civil rights legislation. Most of the 42 Republicans in the new Senate were expected to support the legislation. Senator McGrath also said that the election results showed that the people favored complete repeal of Taft-Hartley.
Representative Frank Boykin of Alabama claimed that the President had told him that he did not believe in the civil rights program he advocated but needed it to win. Mr. Boykin added that the President's victory was the best thing which had ever happened to the country, but he believed that compromise ought be the order of the day.
Though argued before the U.S. Supreme Court eight days before Mr. Boykin's death in March 1969, the well-known case of Boykin v. Alabama, (1969) 395 U.S. 238, determining that a plea of guilty cannot be entered against a defendant unless made voluntarily and with a knowing and intelligent waiver of Constitutional rights, had nothing to do with Representative Boykin.
A blizzard had isolated Garden City, Kansas, as many families were caught off guard and without adequate supplies and food. Snow was not to any great depth, but high winds had caused drifting.
The twenty hunters isolated by snow squalls in the Idaho wilderness were rescued.
In Washington, a railroad engineer retired after 48 years, with his longest single trip extending only 156 miles, the bulk of his travel having occurred within the rail yards of Washington and Baltimore.
In Hoopestown, Ill., a representative of a parking meter company told the chief of police that the meters in the town were in good working order, whereupon he returned to his car to find a ticket for overtime parking.
Governor-elect Kerr Scott of North Carolina had the previous night suggested that the school and college building programs might be delayed for want of adequate revenue to fund the State Board of Education's requested 50 million dollars. He advised counties to raise the needed funds by conducting new property tax valuations. But Dr. Clyde Erwin, elected new State Superintendent of Education, urged fellow educators to go to work at home and instruct people to the needs of education to make sure that the programs would go forward.
Dr. Arthur Hollis Edens was selected by the Duke Board of Trustees to succeed as president Dr. Robert L. Flowers, who at age 77 had announced his retirement the previous January after a half century of service to the school, having been its president since 1940, succeeding Dr. William Preston Few upon his death. Dr. Edens, 47, would assume his duties after February 1, 1949. A native of Tennessee, he had been in the administrations of both Emory University in Atlanta and the University of Georgia.
In Gastonia, scene of a shootout two weeks earlier between a young man and 50 police officers, had real gunfire again at the rodeo and wild west show, as two men, charged with assault with intent to kill, fired rifles through holes in the fence at the show. The two men shortly before had been ejected after an argument with personnel of the show.
Governor Gregg Cherry appointed Greensboro Daily News sport editor Smith Barrier, along with I. E. Ready of Roanoke Rapids, to the State Recreation Advisory Commission.
On the editorial page, "Comes the Revolution" tells of Governor-elect Kerr Scott having startled the North Carolina Forestry Association dinner by addressing it with critical talk of the industry toward farmers, accusing them of catering too much to the timber interests. He advised that if they wanted a break from the State, they would have to work with citizens connected with the business of forestry.
Mr. Scott had campaigned on a message of reorganizing State Government and cleaning house, to make it more responsive to the people.
He advised "aristocrats in politics," in the state and across the nation, to look at the election results and realize that a revolution had taken place, which required housecleaning at both levels of government.
Mr. Scott had promised to build roads and provide aid to education and this state New Deal program, suggests the piece, would be the centerpiece of his term as Governor. But it would require revenue, and taxes in the state were already high, so high as to diminish the desire of new industry to locate there. State per capita income was also at or around 42nd in the nation.
The piece therefore recommends slow progress.
But is that not why you were "Ol' 42" for so long? For there is more to life than merely income taxes, and the quality of education available in a state and the quality of its roads obviously have a lot to do with attracting those new industries. And who else but the corporations ought bear the brunt?
In short, you make little sense with your corporate mentality glaring, are talking more conservative mumbo-jumbo than the newspaper had ever seen in print apparently in its previous 60 years of existence. That's what happens when the family-owned newspaper is sold to a group of outside investors.
"Revise the College" tells of the electoral college meeting on December 13 to formalize the results of the election. The piece regards the college as an outmoded institution which needed revision through constitutional amendment, to make its awarded votes in each state proportional to the popular vote rather than a winner-take-all system—a process determined still state by state. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had proposed such an amendment prior to the election.
Had the votes been so apportioned in 1948, Governor Dewey's electoral count would have lagged behind that of the President by about 25 to 30 votes rather than 115.
Originally, the electoral college was designed as a system under which a group of selectmen from each state would choose the President and Vice-President, apart from popular will, in a time when few people in the country were literate and had any form of higher education.
By the third election, in which John Adams was elected President, the freedom of the electors was constrained to the popular will. And so it had been since, with the exception of an occasional errant elector. Such was why the college had lingered on without change, as it had not usually posed any harm to the democracy.
The electoral college majority could, however, be won without carrying even a plurality of the popular vote, as had occurred twice before in the nation's history, in 1876, in which Samuel Tilden, popular vote winner, lost the electoral vote to Rutherford B. Hayes on the decision of a commission to determine disputed slates of electors from four states, and in 1888, in which incumbent President Grover Cleveland, popular vote winner, lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison—having occurred again, of course, in 2000, in which Vice-President Al Gore won the popular vote by a half million and Governor George W. Bush, by two electoral votes, achieved a majority in the college, following the dispute in the count in Florida being settled by the Supreme Court in favor of voiding a recount based on its being contrary to Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection of voters in certain counties because not all counties were having their ballots recounted, leaving the final determination in Florida, and thus the outcome of the election, settled by only about 550 popular votes.
"Mr. Summey, a Friendly Man" tells of the death of A. T. Summey, a distinguished major-domo at the Commercial National Bank, always having a friendly word for patrons. An active sportsman, he had made many friends in Charlotte through the years of his residence.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "Motor Vehicle Inspection", tells of bills in New York and Missouri to require inspection of automobiles having failed, but believes that the legislation would begin to be passed across the country. New Jersey had semi-annual inspection.
The cars on the road were still predominantly older models and it was necessary to insure that lights, brakes, horns, and other such safety equipment were properly functional.
Drew Pearson tells of the Hoover Commission on reorganizing the Executive Branch to make it more efficient in operation going forward despite the defeat of the Republican Congress which had authorized it. The primary reason was President Truman, who had developed a genuine friendship with former President Hoover, who reciprocated in admiration. The President was sensitive to the Dewey charge during the campaign that Washington needed a housecleaning. The President had one in mind. But he had to receive authorization from Congress to conduct it, an authority denied FDR when he had sought it.
The President believed that former President Hoover would not make any recommendations which President Truman would not want to implement. The two were the only living persons who had occupied the White House and had, therefore, a special bond. Mr. Hoover had refrained from making statements during the campaign because of his respect for the President. Furthermore, Mr. Hoover needed the President's imprimatur for the Commission's recommendations, as it was the last public service the former President would perform and he wanted it to be a lasting monument to his career. Without the President's approval of the recommendations, the Democratic Congress would likely not pass them and Mr. Hoover's chance of a comeback in popular opinion would be gone.
The new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Sol Bloom of New York, was opposed to further aid for the Chiang Kai-Shek Government in China as well as sending missions to China to observe and make recommendations about things of which the Congress was already aware, as the recent mission by former Ambassador William Bullitt, appointed by the GOP Congress before the election.
The Department of Interior intended to ask Congress to force the steel industry to boost production if it did not undertake voluntarily to do so. Since the war, production had dropped from 95.5 million tons annually to 91.2 million because of refusal of Big Steel to expand while costs remained high.
The Democrats were trying to obtain agreement with Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar to make him president pro tem of the Senate if he would step aside as chairman of the Appropriations Committee to enable Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona to fill the post. It was doubted that Senator McKellar would be so accommodating.
General counsel Robert Denham of the NLRB, who had been given super-authority under Taft-Hartley to determine what cases the NLRB could consider, would have his position eliminated by the new Congress. Labor leaders were not sorrowful.
Congressman Arthur Klein of New York was proposing that every citizen who votes in a Federal election would receive a $40 income tax exemption, an incentive to vote.
Marquis Childs finds the struggle against world Communism to be represented in microcosm by the civil wars in China and Greece. China was such a vast territory that no amount of aid could likely have saved it from Communist control. More money would have only prolonged the Government of Chiang Kai-Shek, doomed to fall.
But in Greece, it was still possible to effect genuine reform and defeat the Communist guerrillas, replacing the reactionary Government with a democratic one.
Col. C. M. Woodhouse, who had been the British commander of the Allied military mission to the Greek guerrilla forces fighting the Nazis during the war, had recently published in England Apple of Discord in which he posited that the Greek Government was a fiction, embroiled in various debates over constitutional forms while the peasantry starved. The problems in the country were organic rather than political. U.S. aid had helped to maintain this ongoing fiction. His opinions were those of a Conservative in Britain who had served as a chief adviser on Greece to former Prime Minister Churchill.
The only option for the future appeared to be to pour aid into Greece in greater quantity to effect revitalization of its economy through development of its natural resources via projects similar to TVA.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Canada and the five Western European Union nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty, an alliance which would be based on mutual military aid in the case of attack against one of the members, with two contingencies, one being that the individual nations could not go beyond their constitutional framework and the other, that each nation would determine unilaterally what constituted a triggering attack. The Rio Pact would be the model for NATO.
The nations were in basic agreement on these foundational issues, but there was considerable discord on whether other nations should be invited to join. Six other candidates were under consideration, Eire, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and Italy. Italy was the most problematic to the French, who believed that if other nations were included, then American military aid would be diluted.
Britain and the U.S., however, wanted all six included. Sweden was still a wild card, not wishing to join. But Norway and Denmark might form an agreement with Sweden to make joinder acceptable.
The French wanted to know in advance how much U.S. aid would be forthcoming and wanted assurances that in the case of war, the U.S. would form its strategy around saving Western Europe rather than Spain or some other outpost. No commitments could yet be made on these points, and none would be made. But the policy makers were firm in their commitment to defense of Western Europe and so the point was impliedly included. French doubts would likely be mollified in that manner and the French would likely accept the other six nations because of the Anglo-American desire for their inclusion.
A letter writer questions a captioned photograph, provided, appearing in The News, which stated that an orphaned kitten, adopted by a dog, had been born three weeks earlier, while its mother had been killed a month earlier by a car.
The editors respond candidly that the "Cat Editor" was "cat-napping". He had meant to indicate that the cat had been adopted by a dog named "Legs", whose mother had been killed a month earlier—probably by a driver accompanied by a dog named "Diamond".
At least no one squeezed the kitten to death. The photographer appeared to be engaging in cruelty to animals, however, by positioning the kitten drinking milk from a bottle resting on his flashbulb. That posed a clear and present danger for the kitten to burn its little head.
A letter writer says that the conflict in the world had only one issue, Christ or anti-Christ.
That sounds all well and good until you begin to think about Palestine and the war there between Jews and Muslims.
A letter writer waxes poetic with respect to Charlotte and offers up two verses in ode to the Queen City.
We confess that we were kidding about the Big Penguin and the Candy Apple. They actually call Charlotte the Goldfish with a Big Orange Lollipop, the Goldfish BOL, for short.
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