Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at Triveni Sangham
in India, the ashes of Mohandas K. Gandhi were distributed this date
along the Ganges at the confluence of the trinity of rivers most
sacred to India, in accordance with a Hindu funeral rite. Hundreds
of thousands of people attended the ceremony. Portions of the
Mahatma's ashes were distributed to all sections of India for use in
separate rites, as a symbol of his bond with the people of India.
The Soviet Information Bureau contended that German Foreign
Office documents from 1937-38, seized at the end of the war, showed
that Great Britain and France had encouraged Hitler prior to the
start of the war to invade Russia and that the two nations allowed
Germany to take over Czechoslovakia after the Munich Pact of
September, 1938. Little mention was made of the United States in
this release. Meetings between British diplomats and Hitler, at
which was discussed a deal whereby Germany would attack Russia, were
alleged to have occurred on November 19, 1937 and on both March 3
and July 10, 1938.
The British Foreign Office denied the charge of any collusion
with Hitler to invade Russia.
It was the second released statement regarding the documents,
intended as response to the State Department's release of documents
on January 21, showing that Russia sought peace with Germany in
December, 1940 on conditions that it be given a free hand in Finland
and in the Dardanelles, enabling free access to the Middle East, an
offer to which Hitler made no reply.
A leading cotton trader from New Orleans told the Senate
Agriculture Committee that he was not aware of any Government leaks
which would benefit trading, that there may have been some in the
past but not in recent years. He posited that requirements of high
margins on wheat trading had precipitated the current price decline
by discouraging speculators from entering the market, causing the
farmer to receive less for his product. He said that no legislation
could eliminate speculation.
Income in the U.S. in 1947 totaled 197 billion dollars,
twenty billion higher than the previous record. The increase was
attributed by the Commerce Department primarily to increased farm
income. The annualized rate of income for December reached 209.7
billion, a little higher than that used by Republicans to justify
the 6.5 billion dollar proposed tax cut.
On the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, Governor Thomas Dewey
said that President Truman had failed in his foreign policy and that
he was getting ready to propose an alternative.
Senator Taft called for a hard-boiled approach to the
Marshall Plan and for tax reduction.
Harold Stassen said that Senator Vandenberg was the best
exponent of the principles of President Lincoln with respect to
world problems.
The Southern Governors upset over the President's ten-point
civil rights program announced that they would go to Washington on
George Washington's Birthday, February 22.
Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, vice-chairman of the
joint Senate-House Housing Committee, predicted that Congress would
pass a long-term housing bill during 1948. He disfavored
Government-operated or owned public housing projects. He wanted a
goal of 1.5 million new units per year, but admitted that 700,000 of
the units would inevitably be out of the reach of the average
consumer without Government participation in the financing or a
method to reduce prices.
In New York, Professor Albert Einstein of Princeton received
the One World Award for 1948 for his recognition that scientists are
involved in mankind and cannot avoid taking stands on moral issues
of the time. He would receive a trip around the world as the award,
in honor of the late Wendell Willkie who espoused the "One
World" philosophy in 1943 in his book of the same name,
following his round the world trip.
As the nation's stock markets remained closed for Lincoln
Day, world markets marked time in anticipation of the next day's trading.
In Chicago, livestock was traded at 50 cents lower to 25
cents higher than the previous day. Cattle prices were unchanged and
lamb was 25 cents higher.
Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive
announced a five percent wholesale price cut in soap, in response to
lower prices on fat and oil.
Some New York food retailers cut prices on meat by around 15
percent.
In Ulrichstein, Germany, a Danish airliner, a C-47 transport,
crashed on a foggy hill in the vicinity of Frankfurt after losing
altitude, killing an estimated eleven persons aboard. Ten persons
survived.
Some fifty miles from Alamosa, Colorado, a 400-foot wide,
ten-foot deep avalanche swept three small cars of a mountain railway
into 400-foot deep Toltec Gorge, but none of the fourteen occupants
were killed. Five were hospitalized and seven others had minor
injuries. The snow cushioned the cars as they plunged down the
40-degree slope into the gorge. One car came to a rest against a
tree just a few yards from a precipitous 500-foot cliff. The other
two cars stopped further up the slope.
More rain was predicted for Charlotte after a deluge this
date which washed away most of the remaining ice and snow from the
snowstorm the previous Monday. The low was predicted as 33 degrees
for the following morning. The low this date was 32 degrees and it
was 41 by 12:30 p.m.
In Palm Beach, Fla., future Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, grandson of John
D. Rockefeller, would marry Barbara Sears, daughter of Lithuanian
immigrants, the following day in an evening ceremony at the home of
Winston Guest. The bride to be had played "Pearl" in the
Boston company presentation of Tobacco Road and had appeared in several
films.
Everyone is invited obviously, or why else would news of the
event be on the front page of the newspaper?
You can get you some of that free caviar on saltines.
On the editorial page, "Dangerous Confusion over UMT" finds it irresponsible for the Congress to have pigeon-holed
Universal Military Training. Religious and school groups had been
especially active in opposition to it, but, while earnest in their
attack, could also be in error.
Dr. Robert Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago,
had given a speech in which he had said that he had not read the
lengthy report of the President's Advisory Commission on UMT, nevertheless willingly ventured a negative opinion on the proposal. The piece
suggests that he was as positive of the lack of danger of war as he
had been in 1941 when he and other isolationists fought a defense
build-up in the country.
It recommends reading the first 95 pages of the report and
opines that opposing UMT encouraged potential enemies and increased
the risk of a war for which the country would be ill-prepared.
Dr. Hutchins, we note, would, in 1959, become the founder of the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, California, which would have as its vice-chairman former News Editor Harry Ashmore, who resigned in July, 1947 to become Associate Editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, of which he would quickly become Editor, and in which capacity he would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1958 for his editorials on the school integration crisis at Central High School in Little Rock during the fall of 1957 and into the spring of 1958.
As previously explained, Mr. Ashmore and the Center, in 1967, became conduits to try to achieve a platform for peace in Vietnam, as set forth in brief beginning at the 1:26:00 mark of "In the Year of the Pig"—which is to suggest the Year of the Monkey, 1968, and the Year of the Rabbit, 1963. (Perhaps less attention to alleged copyright violations for absurdly money-grubbing third or fourth-hand reasons, 48 years on, regarding material few would ever see or of which would even become aware other than in an environment such as Youtube or its equivalent, would be far more astute to the salutary purpose of such films as "In the Year of the Pig", whose original documentarian has been deceased since 1989, than purblind ignorance of the substance of that on which someone purports to hold a copyright, effectively attempting thereby to lock away understanding and sharing of same behind some authoritarian's doe-eyed, vaulted wall.)
"'Expert' Analysis of the 1948 Man" finds more
cheer than gloom coming from the report of psychiatrist Dr. Edward
A. Strecker, urging that America was on the brink of disintegration
from the rising rates of divorce and juvenile delinquency. The piece
counsels that man had been contending against such forces for time
immemorial and had withstood two world wars and universal
depressions in the previous 44 years. He was nevertheless seeking to achieve
peace out of this morass.
The editorial finds humankind merely responding adaptively to
the changes wrought by modernity. Its performance thus far should be
applauded rather than bemoaned as auguring the end. The people were
looking ahead with the pioneer spirit.
"They seem to be short mostly in psychiatrists and
prophets who have the pioneer's faith in man and his destiny."
"Bob Taft on the Price Decline" finds Senator
Taft's praise of the lowering of prices as vindication of his free
market philosophy to be wrong-headed when he then turned on the
President by suggesting that the Administration was seeking to limit
the downturn in prices that it could continue to make a rational
case for re-implementation of price and wage controls.
The President had to be concerned about limiting the downturn
so as not to allow it to become a depression with widespread
unemployment. As people might become nervous over the quality of the
President's leadership, public criticism of him could cause the
downturn to become such a rout.
Senator Taft would attack Government relief
measures for such unemployment with equal vigor to that he was applying to price and
wage controls, and that, suggests the editorial, was troubling.
A piece from the Providence (R.I.) Bulletin, titled
"Whistling Critics", recommends that theater and music
critics in the country take up the French practice of whistling to
express disapproval, as had at least one French critic,
reproved for doing so by the Paris Association of Drama and Music
Critics.
The piece asserts that critics ought be given a whistle with varying tones to express the level of disapproval, thus providing
the audience and public with a convenient short-hand, eliminating
the need for the written review.
Drew Pearson tells of trying to convince Henry Kaiser that
his suggestions of additional Friendship Trains running from other
parts of the country, in supplement of the November train which went
from Los Angles to New York, had been wrong-headed, that in so doing he had
underestimated the resolve of the American people to form additional
trains on their own. One was coming from the Southwest, a Friend
Ship had been organized in New England, and two trains were coming
from Springfield, Ill., and Lincoln, Neb., respectively, as the
Abraham Lincoln trains.
He regards it to be appropriate on the birthday of President
Lincoln to determine whether Americans were acting on the charge contained in
the Gettysburg Address: "It is for us the
living ... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."
He proceeds to relate of various efforts across the country
to provide aid directly to Europe, such as the Maine iron works
which was building fishing trawlers for France, packed with food and
clothing collected by Maine Rotary Clubs. The Rotary Club of Nantes,
France, would distribute the food and clothing. The Maine Sardine
Packers provided a carload of food. In New Orleans, the people
adopted the French city of Orleans and were providing their surplus
food to that city. The same sort of effort had occurred in Michigan,
Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and
Alaska.
The aid, as he could attest from riding the Friendship Trains
through France and Italy distributing the earlier collections, would
be genuinely appreciated.
Marquis Childs suggests that fears surrounded ERP, the fear
by the State Department that the Congress would so emasculate the
Plan as to render it ineffective in the draw, the fear of the
Republican leadership in Congress that a small band of recalcitrant
Senators were intent on doing just that. The 16 recipient nations
had proposed a new meeting which then was called off. The process
demonstrated a lack of leadership to carry the ball and make ERP
successful.
After a tentative date for the meeting was set, word reached
Washington that the intent was to discuss the kinds of political
contingencies attached to the aid which would render it unworkable.
The State Department, worried of the effect such discussion might
have on the legislative process in Congress, sought to have the
meeting called off or postponed. Thus, it appeared there would be no
meeting.
Mr. Childs think it would have been better simply to have
asked that discussion of unacceptable political contingencies be
removed from the meeting's agenda.
Another example of the fear governing the situation came in
the form of talk of compromise on the program in Congress, where the
Administration was suggesting that the first year of ERP be funded
from the RFC at around 5.5 billion dollars to avoid stalemate and a
prolonged debate on the 6.8 billion proposed for the Plan by the
President. Senator Vandenberg had suggested that such a debate could
wreck the entire program. But compromise could divert public
attention from the real issues involved, the rebuilding of Western
Europe to ward off potential Soviet expansion. And those who wanted
to emasculate the program could use compromise as a stalking horse
to afford time to weaken it.
Secretary of State Marshall would soon address the National
Farm Institute at Des Moines in reference to that issue, so that the
ultimate goal would not become lost in the devil's shuffle over the
details.
Samuel Grafton looks at the decrease in prices, warns of the
person wishing to lower wages based on it, as prices were not down
very much and had not been reflected yet in the cost of living. It
would not harm anything if reduction of wages lagged behind
reduction in prices.
He also cautions of anyone suggesting that rent control ought
be eliminated on the basis that inflation was under control.
The Congressman who wanted to undertake artificial buying of
agricultural product to keep farm prices up was another of whom to
be wary.
The person who advocated a period of unemployment as a
"natural readjustment" was likewise to be avoided.
Generally, he advises not listening to the advice of those
who had contended that prices would adjust shortly after controls
were eliminated based on higher production and increased
competition.
A letter writer favors an agreement by both houses of
Congress that they would commit to cooperation on foreign policy.
A letter writer assumes that the President intended to use
Federal power and snoopers to abolish racial segregation and states'
rights, believes it would lead to calamity for all and that the
President was in league with CIO and the Communists.
He advocates calling a Democratic convention for Southerners
other than in Philadelphia, where the "mongrel convention"
would take place in July.
A letter writer finds the opponents to civil rights to be the
enemies, undermining the Constitution and the Bible, especially the
Sermon on the Mount. She recommends putting such Fascists in jail,
suggests that the President so had the power under the Constitution
to do.
While the first point is a good one, the rest appears to be
precisely contrary to the Sermon on the Mount, as well the
Constitution, especially the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Or did we
miss the part where Jesus said, "Blessed are the bold who shall
place in bonds all who shall disagree with these words"? That
may have been the Roman Jesus, the impostor known to all as
"Heyzeus".
And the Constitution does not say that the President has
authority to do anything remotely of the kind suggested. The
Congress has limited authority to suspend, pursuant to Article I,
Section 9, the right to habeas corpus, that is to say due process
rights ordinarily attendant arrest and incarceration, but only in
times of rebellion or invasion threatening the public safety. The
President would only have that authority if granted by the Congress
under emergency legislation, as during the late war. While one might
make a theoretical case burg by burg on the dangers posed by the
Klan and similar organizations to the public safety, such activity
had not reached a point, as in the Civil War, where the Congress
could call on historical precedent to support any such move, to
which there would only have been violent backlash potentially
stimulative of a civil war in fact among the hotheads of the South.
A letter writer predicts violence in the South should
Congress enact any part of the President's civil rights bill. He
thinks it would cause a second period of Reconstruction, reminiscent
of the carpetbagger era. He advocates reading Thomas Dixon's The
Clansman and The Leopard's Spots for insight as to what
would occur in such an environment.
We would recommend, instead, The Mind of the South by
W. J. Cash for insight into what precipitates the attitudinal mindset held by
the letter writer, how to ameliorate it and bring it from the
Nineteenth Century wedding to which it is romantically and
superstitiously pledged in blood-oath fealty, to a modern
understanding of mutual self-interest accruing from an integrated
society, educationally, economically and socially.
