The Charlotte News
Monday, November 22, 1948
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Marshall met with President Truman at the White House to discuss foreign policy and the Paris U.N. meeting.
Roving Ambassador for the Marshall Plan Averell Harriman also met with the President this date. He said afterward that he imparted to the President that a wave of enthusiasm had swept Europe with his re-election.
The six "neutral" nations of the U.N. Security Council, which had propounded a questionnaire on the Berlin currency issues to each of the Big Four nations, said that the Russian response appeared to be "satisfactory". But there was need still to compare it with the answers of the Western powers before determining whether there was ground for accord to enable ending of the Berlin blockade crisis. They believed that there was a good chance for agreement.
In China, the Communists were reported by independent sources to be threatening the east flank of Suchow, but pro-Government reports insisted that Government troops still held the initiative. The Government commanders had proclaimed victory in Suchow the previous week.
Nationalist commander General Fu Tso-Yi declared martial law in five provinces under his command.
Light fighting between Government troops and the Communists was reported outside of Peiping. The Communists had captured Paoting, 90 miles southwest of Peiping.
Madame Chiang addressed an appeal for American aid on the radio, declaring that if China were to fall to the Communists, so would all of Asia.
The Communists said via radio that American aid to Chiang's Government would be considered an act of hostility.
Senate Democratic leaders were seeking compromise with Southern opponents of the civil rights legislation, and possibly therefore would postpone efforts to block future filibusters. Some Southerners had stated that they might accept modified versions of the anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills, but would not accept anti-segregation or anti-job discrimination measures in any form.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg proposed that the Senate change its rules to allow 90 percent of the membership to force a vote any time on national emergency measures.
The President spent his first night back in Washington at Blair House, across the street from the White House, and reported it was comfortable. He and the First Family would spend most of the second term there while the White House was undergoing a full renovation of its ailing interior, leaving only the exterior walls standing.
Former Secretary of State James Byrnes stated that he would definitely not be a candidate for the Senate from South Carolina in 1950. He responded to rumors to that effect contained in an article by Doris Fleeson of the Washington Evening Star.
The AFL Teamsters staged a strike of 3,500 drivers in New York.
The AFL convention, meeting in Cincinnati, adopted a resolution calling for a military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In Hayward, Wis., a search was
underway for missing singer Bobby Breen
Ralph Gibson of The News reports that Mecklenburg County police would begin to use the new intoximeter to measure blood-alcohol level in suspected drunk drivers.
At Jack Wood, Ltd., in Charlotte, a clothing store, passersby were able to see an after-hours intruder nearly elude police capture after moving about in the well-lighted store at around 7:00 p.m. the previous night. The man was unaware that bystanders, who alerted police, were looking through the shopping window at him. He was then apprehended out of the view of the spectators as he left via a skylight on the roof of the store. No merchandise was found to be missing.
The News was running a contest to seek the longest subscriber in its 60-year history, as the newspaper prepared for its birthday in early December. The winner would receive a dollar per year for every year of subscription.
The losers would say, "Shut up and deal."
On the editorial page, "Sights Too High?" tells of the State Board of Education, having in 1947 requested no more than a 20 percent teacher salary increase, now favoring a 59 percent increase before the Advisory Budget Commission.
The reasons for the change were that the education lobbyists had stood firm in 1947 in favor of greater increases and had gotten most of what they desired, and that the recent State School Commission report to the Governor had listed numerous needs in education, among them higher teacher salaries.
Governor-elect Kerr Scott favored the $2,400 minimum salary. The new Congress was planning to pass Federal aid to education quickly at the start of 1949, and North Carolina would probably be entitled to 15 million dollars under that legislation.
The piece suggests, however, that the education leaders in the state might be harming their chances with the Legislature by setting their sights too high, given the need for other expenditures in the budget.
"Free-Spending Uncle Sam" informs of some statistical findings made by the Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison firm of management engineers regarding Government spending, for instance, that the Government was spending annually 13 million dollars more than the entire national debt at the end of World War I in 1918, more than the entire income of everyone in 1946 living West of the Mississippi, except in Texas, et cetera.
But, the piece points out, the major part of the spending was on the debt of past wars, veterans payments, and preparing for future war. There was no way to reduce this burden.
The same firm promised next to explain how Federal spending could be reduced. The piece suggests that the way do it was to find a way to stop wars. But the country appeared no closer to that goal than 30 years earlier.
"Much Done, Much To Be Done" tells of textile publicist Henry Lesesne having given the textile industry, and particularly the Piedmont area of the Carolinas, favorable publicity in an article appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, explaining efforts of employers to raise the standard of living of workers, the South's rising per capita income, as well as research and modernization for Southern mills.
But he also reminded that the South was the only region of the country which had not achieved a per capita annual average income of $1,000 or more. And in some of the company villages for textile workers, there was no indoor plumbing, though there were a library and recreation facilities.
Income would begin to increase, it asserts, when Southern raw materials remained in the South for processing in manufacture of goods.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Community-Wide Co-operation", tells of the Forsyth County Community Chest drive having exceeded its goal by five percent, and the reason therefor being community cooperation.
Mecklenburg County's drive, by contrast, had failed to meet the goal by eight percent.
Drew Pearson tells of Vice-President-elect Alben Barkley set to play the role of liaison between the White House and Congress as well as sitting in on all Cabinet meetings.
Senator Joseph McCarthy, associated with the housing lobby and previously opposed to public housing and slum clearance, had suddenly done an about-face, favoring the legislation, asking Senator Taft, co-sponsor of the long-term housing bill, to help round up Republican votes for the measure. He had apparently been reading the election returns.
The French "Merci Train", to say thank you for the the "Friendship Train" bearing food and clothing for the previous winter a year earlier, was being prepared, with 48 cars, one for each state and a 49th for Hawaii, being loaded with French goods. The creation of the train had been spearheaded by Commandant Guy de la Vasselais, French liaison officer to General Patton during the war. The cars of the train had been used to transport American soldiers in France during the war.
Vice-President-elect Barkley believed that Senator Glen Taylor ought be welcomed back into the fold of the Democratic Party, whereas others, such as Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois, believed that he should be purged for having run as vice-presidential candidate with Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket.
Senator Joseph Ball, who Mr. Pearson describes as Minnesota's "political humpty-dumpty", who had a great fall to Mayor Hubert Humphrey, was hoping to write a syndicated column in his new private life.
Harold Stassen, who lost the 1948 GOP presidential nomination to Governor Dewey, was already being touted by supporters for the nomination in 1952, only, he notes, 1,460 days from the election.
Marquis Childs tells of Governor Dewey having received the loudest applause during the campaign when he spoke of a general housecleaning due in Washington. The Hoover Commission had been at work on recommendations for streamlining the Executive Branch. Its preliminary indications stated the need for changes in the Post Office Department, enabling the Post Office to retain its income for its own budget, as with TVA.
The Post Office had lost 300 million dollars in the previous year and was set to lose half a billion in 1948-49. Its deficit was produced by Congressionally required subsidies for mail carried by the railroads, overseen by the ICC, and by the airlines, overseen by CAB. The Department had no control over the construction of post offices, overseen by Treasury.
The Hoover Commission also wanted agencies to be able to hire personnel outside the Civil Service Commission, also as with TVA.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the President's votes in the election having run behind local Democratic politicians in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and Minnesota. These states had swung to the President in the latter days of the campaign, primarily based on the corn market and the GOP Congress having banned the Government storage of grain, preventing Government payments of price supports for want of storage facilities, forcing farmers to sell at below support prices.
Another key factor had been labor's intense effort to get out the vote to defeat Congressmen who had supported Taft-Hartley. This effort provided collateral benefits to the President.
The CIO, AFL, and the railroad brotherhoods all had been united in this effort, quietly undertaken. It was in contrast to the CIO PAC of 1944 which had loudly undertaken to support candidates and had generally failed. The effort counteracted the weakness of the big city machines, of which the organization leaders had been acutely aware, lending to their pessimism over the outcome.
The President's Thanksgiving Proclamation is provided verbatim.
A letter from the Pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Clover, S.C., comments on the November 13 editorial "Partners in Crime", which had found community complicity in the killing by a drug and alcohol crazed 21-year old of a Gastonia police officer and wounding of another and two civilians during a shootout with 50 police officers two weeks earlier. The editorial had found that part of the blame derived from not stopping the sale of the dangerous barbiturates which the man had taken with whiskey.
The writer thinks whiskey therefore, as well as beer, should also receive the blame, for the man was reported to be a regular beer and liquor drinker.
A piece from the Lexington (Ky.) Leader wonders what color was toast, when a description of a woman's silk gown told of it being a "toast color". It wonders whether the gown was moderately toasted or fully toasted, or even burnt black.
It asks in response what people meant when they used the phrase "warm as toast". Was it just out of the toaster, or a slice which had been on the cold plate for half an hour?
A piece from the Joplin (Mo.) Globe says that people who never went to church did not know what they were missing.
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