Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. State
Department made public an official protest of the abduction on
January 14 of two American military attaches by Soviet troops in
Hungary. They had been released following an initial protest. The
protest stressed that the Russian troops were not occupation forces
but were present only to maintain Russian supply lines into Austria
and thus should respect Hungarian sovereignty.
Commodities prices continued to fall causing world stock
markets also to fall. Wheat fell the daily limit of ten cents and
corn, 8 cents. Cotton also fell by $4 to $7 per bale in New York,
along with cocoa, hides, tallow, grease, and butter. Cattle and
sheep remained steady in the barnyard while hog prices increased 50
cents to a dollar per hundred-weight as arrivals at the Chicago
market were the smallest in number since the week price controls
ended in October, 1946. Securities markets in London, Copenhagen,
Sydney, and Manila slumped in response to the changes.
Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson told the Senate
committee investigating speculation that E. T. Maynard of Chicago
had been a major commodities speculator who made $300,000 to
$400,000 during the previous few days as market prices fell. He had
sold short a million bushels of grain on February 4, the day prices
began to plunge.
A Federal Grand Jury in Washington indicted the CIO and its
president Philip Murray for criminal violation of the Taft-Hartley
ban on expending money for political purposes for its taking out an
ad the previous summer for a candidate in a Maryland Congressional
race. The violation was deliberate, for the purpose of establishing a
test case on the provision of the law, which CIO believed to be
violative of freedom of speech. Attorney General Tom Clark admitted
that, while the Justice Department would enforce the statute as
written, there was a potential free speech problem in the provision
at issue.
In Los Angeles, a leading psychiatrist, Dr. Edward A.
Strecker, chairman of the psychiatric division of the National
Research Council, said that the increase in divorce and juvenile
delinquency had the country on the brink of disintegration. Parents,
especially mothers, were failing to instill self-reliance in their
children, causing them to become immature adults unable to meet
responsibilities. The materialistic society had caused loss of
spiritual values. He said, however, that the road to decadence was
reversible with much effort.
In Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn announced that MGM executives
had agreed to take a 50 percent cut in salaries in the interest of
security in the film business.
Hope they don't wind up in the poor folks home.
Lionel Weil, member of the UNC Board of Trustees and
prominent Goldsboro businessman, had died at age 71 in his hometown.
New Orleans had one of its gayest Mardi Gras celebrations in
its history and began the celebration of Lent on this Ash Wednesday,
the inception of a 40-day period of abstinence and penitence. Police said
that they had received only 426 complaints on Shrove Tuesday, the
culmination of the week of Mardi Gras.
Tom Fesperman tells of a Duke Power Company bus having
skidded off a snow-covered embankment and landed on its side on
Providence Road in Charlotte, leaving three people, the driver and
the only two passengers, narrowly escaping serious injury. They had
only minor scratches. The bus suffered only a broken window.
You'll have to call a tow truck.
Primary roads in Charlotte had been cleared of snow the
previous afternoon and secondary roads were now clear. Local buses
were running on schedule, but most transportation to the east and
west had been canceled. Eastern Air Lines had canceled all flights
into and out of Charlotte. All other major North Carolina airports
were closed.
Charlotte City schools resumed classes but most County
schools remained closed.
Light freezing rain was predicted through the afternoon of
this date and ordinary rain for this night and the following day,
with the next day's minimum temperature anticipated to be slightly
above freezing after a low this date of 24. It was 28 at noon, 90 degrees in the shade.
On the editorial page, "South Answers the Challenge" gives praise to the Southern Governors conference held at Wakulla
Springs, Fla., for its endorsement of the regional college concept
in the South, an idea which the piece views as promising more
progress for the South than the President's ten-point civil rights
program.
It thinks that the Governors presented a good example by taking
a positive step rather an exclusively negative step in opposing the
President's program. And they had put on hold the proposal of
Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi to revolt against the
Democratic Party and hold their own nominating convention. It
appeared to push the old reactionary leadership into the background
in favor of a more thoughtful, progressive program.
But, as the column, itself, had recognized recently, the
regional graduate college proposal would not likely pass constitutional muster
in the Federal courts as it entailed construction of facilities to
meet the separate-but-equal requirement by pooling state resources
regionally, causing some states therefore not to have the necessary
facilities within their boundaries, clearly requisite under the
recent Sipuel decision of the Supreme Court, as well as its predecessor decision
in Gaines in 1938. Thus, any wisdom it ascribes to the
endorsement of the plan by the Southern Governors is necessarily
limited by these metes and bounds staked out by the High Court.
Moreover, the predictions in which the editorial engages, suggesting
battle lines being drawn between the more progressive Southern
politicians and the reactionaries, would never fully materialize
without the considerable intervention of the Federal courts to drag
the South, literally kicking and screaming in some parts, into the
Twentieth Century.
It reports that Governor Strom Thurmond had been named by the
Governors to present to the Administration their
objections to the civil rights program, considers him to be
representative of this new "enlightened, progressive type of
leadership" in the South. Obviously, he would not be that come
July, leading the walkout of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic
Convention based on introduction of the civil rights plank into the
platform. We shall see at that juncture how the editorial column
responds.
We remind also that there was more than one editorialist at
work writing the column and so apparent inconsistency is not the
result of schizoid or wishy-washy behavior. Plainly, this editorial
presents a view which appears completely different from that
of the previous editorial of January 21 regarding the regional college concept.
It finds the acceptance of the regional college proposal to
indicate the lack of need for Federal supervision over the South.
If anything, when viewed objectively, it suggested the exact
opposite, an attempt to maintain the antiquated Jim Crow system at
any cost, including continued violation of the
Constitutional requirements, in place since the immediate aftermath
of the Civil War, embodied in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, the former providing for equal protection under law,
making the panoply of Federal rights in the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, and the latter providing the right to vote
to all citizens. The President's civil rights program did nothing
save to seek finally to provide some teeth to these rights, extant in the abstract for eighty years.
"Trade Crosses Another Frontier" tells of a
positive sign of restoration of European economy being the reopening
of the border between France and Spain for the first time since the
war. It foreshadowed the return of Franco's Spain to the community
of European nations and would help stabilize the West.
To Russia, however, it was a sign in furtherance of fascist
influences and opened the border to Nazi spies.
There was no evidence that the U.S. had anything to do with
the matter, but Russia charged that neither Washington nor London
objected, tacitly permitting the trade agreement. The piece finds
that such passivity did not suggest tenderness by Washington toward
Franco. It instead represented far-sighted statesmanship, premised
on the determination that economic restoration had to precede
political settlement.
The U.S. was trading with totalitarian Russia and its
satellites, and so the Russian charge that it placed the U.S. in
support of a trade partnership with a fascist regime was
nonsensical. The Marshall Plan envisioned restoration of trade with
all of Europe, including the Soviet bloc nations.
Furthermore, Russia's attempts to sabotage the Marshall Plan
had increased the need for Spanish trade.
The piece opines that it was encouraging to see the
Government dealing with dictatorships of any political stripe, as it
meant that the State Department was putting the need for economic
recovery above ideological differences.
"Secrets Too Deep for Soviets" tells of the Soviets
getting ready to release German Foreign Office documents they had
seized after the war, showing the West in bad light during and after
Munich in September, 1938. It was in response to the recent State
Department release of documents showing that the Russians had sought
in December, 1940 to effect a peace with Germany on condition that
Russia be allowed to control Finland, the Dardanelles, and thus the
Middle East, a tender to which Hitler never responded.
As with the latter documents, the Russian documents showed
nothing new. They did remind, however, that the West was not
repeating the mistake of appeasement of Germany as at Munich and was
neither making Germany strong but instead stressing a European
community.
It also demonstrated that Russia was repeating the same
propaganda blunders followed by Germany during the war. The U.S.
could not claim to have been perfect since the war but it was not
making the colossal blunders of the Soviet Union.
Drew Pearson tells of Harry Truman exhibiting the patience of
Job with respect to his military aide, General Harry Vaughan. But
that patience had nearly reached the breaking point the previous
week when General Vaughan had nominated himself as the chief armed
forces aide in charge of all other military aides, contrary to
protocol which had always recognized military aides as being of
equal rank. Without reading the note, the President passed it on to
press secretary Charles G. Ross to read to the press. Mr. Ross,
after reading it, told the President what General Vaughan intended
and the President became angry. General Vaughan, meanwhile, held his
own press conference and announced his appointment in that role, in
further violation of protocol. The President admonished General
Vaughan over the incident but did not demote him.
Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island charged that the
hearings before the Homer Ferguson-chaired Senate Appropriations
subcommittee investigating commodities speculation was designed to drag
into the election period. Senator William Knowland of California,
acting as chair, denied the allegation. The committee was preparing
to look into charges that Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma had
deliberately sought to influence markets in cotton and silver while
he had surrogates trade in his behalf on those commodities.
Alaska's canning and shipping interests were lobbying to
block re-appointment of Ernest Greuning as Governor of the
Territory, for his support of higher taxes and lower maritime
freight rates. Nevertheless, he would be reappointed.
Former Congressman Howard McMurray of Wisconsin had proposed
to DNC chairman Howard McGrath, Senator from Rhode Island, that President
Truman threaten to Congress to resign unless they would pass his
program on inflation control, taxes, civil rights and foreign aid
prior to May 6. With no Vice-President, that would turn over the
presidency to House Speaker Joe Martin, placing responsibility for
the results squarely on the Republicans. Senator McGrath, Mr.
Pearson reports, did not like the idea.
Marquis Childs discusses Senator Arthur Vandenberg of
Michigan and the renewed effort by some in the GOP to get him to run
despite his firm statement a year earlier in Life that he was not a
candidate. He had meant it. But, Mr. Childs informs, he would accept
a draft by the convention in a deadlock under two conditions, that
he would be a one-term President if elected and that he would not
engage in a cross-country campaign. He believed that a one-term
President would be freed from politics in making decisions.
Moreover, he was about to turn 64, the same age as President Truman
at his next birthday, and the demands on his health would be
enormous as President. He had, however, demonstrated as chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee that he had continued vitality in
office.
An effort had begun in his home state to draft him, initiated
by the Governor and Senator Homer Ferguson.
But Senator Vandenberg still maintained that he would not be
a candidate.
Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State until August,
1943, discusses I Saw Poland Betrayed by former Ambassador to
Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, published during the week. He predicts
that it would be attacked from the left as the viewpoint of an
extreme reactionary, and hailed from the right as showing the need
for American military power to resolve the world crisis. He believes
the book showed clear thinking and helped to illuminate the problems
facing the country on the world stage.
Ambassador Lane told of the Communist-dominated Polish
Government blocking his efforts to protect American interests and to
persuade the Poles that American disapproval of the Polish
Government had not diminished the desire to help Poland recover
economically from the war. He also informed of the Communists
preventing formation of a representative government mandated by the
Yalta agreement of February, 1945. He placed some of the blame for
this result on the State Department under the successive direction
of Edward Stettinius and James Byrnes, between latter 1944 and early
1947, being feeble and vacillating in its resolve to confront the
Communists.
Mr. Lane had insisted that FDR had sold Poland out at
Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta, but Mr. Welles disagrees with that part
of his thesis. Mr. Welles was personally involved in these
conferences and assures that President Roosevelt was committed to
seeing that Poland achieved its self-determination and independence,
as well as the elimination of the Danzig Corridor issue on which
Hitler premised the invasion in September, 1939 to start the war. The late President also had
wanted Poland to have a sovereign coast line with the economic
advantages required to raise its standard of living.
FDR had favored a boundary roughly equal to the Curzon Line
as Poland's eastern frontier, as a means of reducing potential
controversy with Russia and providing it with a homogeneous
population, reducing internal conflict. He also wanted any
territorial cessions made in the East compensated by equivalent
cession to Poland in the West. Any perception of softness at Tehran and Yalta had to be tempered by the fact that both conferences had occurred when
any breach in Allied unity could have cost the war. In consequence, FDR had to
proceed with diplomacy.
Poland and Czechoslovakia were the keys, he asserts, to the
future of Central and Eastern Europe and as long as they were
controlled by the Soviets, there could be no healthy solution for
the problems of Germany and Austria, and little hope of eliminating
the barriers extant between Eastern and Western Europe.
The Socialists in Poland had maintained their independence
from the Communists and vowed to cooperate with the Socialists of
Western Europe. That was a positive sign in a dark picture, as the
Socialists were a moderating force, as in England, France, and
Italy.
The century-long evisceration of Poland as a sovereign nation
had not eradicated its sense of national identity and patriotism.
Its fate depended on the policies of the great powers. Only when
America would assert to the Soviet Union its commitment to the goal
of Polish independence, would it regain its freedom and become a
beacon for the rest of Europe.
DeWitt MacKenzie, AP foreign affairs analyst, suggests that a
showdown had to transpire soon between the U.N. and the Soviet bloc
nations within its membership. Korea, he posits, might be an early
and decisive test. The country, annexed by Japan in 1910 pursuant to the 1905 treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, was divided after the war into zones, with the
U.S. occupying the South, Russia, the North, with the aim of
consolidation of the zones after free elections to establish an
independent government. Russia had instead sealed off the northern
zone and communized the region, while seeking to organize Communist
cells in the South and stimulate rebellion.
The U.N. had authorized a commission to hold free elections,
but the Russians would not allow it to enter the North. Efforts at sabotage had also
occurred in the South to stop the commission from transacting its
work. The commission had reported this result to the Little
Assembly, which, during intersessions of the General Assembly, sat now on a
permanent basis. It likely would provide authority to the
commission to carry on in the South, as half a loaf was better than
none and abandoning the South to the Communists would be
unacceptable.
North Korea had been informally annexed to the Soviet Union.
It bordered Siberia, not far from Vladivostok, making the region
strategic to enable Russian penetration further south.
The U.N., he concludes, would need be content, for the sake
of world peace, with half a loaf for the time being.
A Quote of the Day: "A friend of ours offers to the
gentler sex the practical suggestion that skirts be mounted
something like window shades. Then they can be run up or down,
depending on the rapidity with which the fashion arbiterschange
their minds." —Jackson (Miss.) Daily News