Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that 74 House Democrats
from the South had signed a pledge to "oppose to the finish"
the President's civil rights proposal. The pledge had been drawn up
by some 50 Southern Democrats the previous Friday. Some of the
Southerners were now voicing opposition to the President's
nomination as the Democratic candidate.
The House Judiciary Subcommittee approved the Federal
anti-lynching law, part of the President's program, the principal
provisions of which are set forth on the page. The legislation would
now proceed to the full Committee.
In Prague, President Eduard Benes announced that he had
accepted Communist Premier Klement Gottwald's proposal for a new
Cabinet, dominated by Communists but including some Social Democrats
and members of other parties.
The Senate passed the one-month temporary extension of rent
controls already passed by the House, and the measure was thus sent
to the President for approval. The bill was designed as provisional
while details of a longer range program were considered by the
House. The Senate also passed the long-range 14-month rent extension
and sent it to the House.
A General Accounting Office report of widespread fraud in war
contract settlements, involving about one in twenty such contracts
or 145 total regarding some four million dollars in overpayments,
brought calls on Capitol Hill for a prompt investigation of the
matter.
North Carolina Senator William B. Umstead announced his
candidacy for re-election to the seat to which he was appointed by
Governor Gregg Cherry on the death of Senator Josiah W. Bailey in
December, 1946. His only announced opponent in the primary race was
former Governor J. Melville Broughton—who would win the election,
only to die after two months in office.
In Tallahassee, Fla., a white man was in custody for criminal
assault of a sixteen-year old black girl following indictment by the
Grand Jury. The man allegedly had hired her as a nurse for his
children and she claimed to have then accompanied him to a remote
spot where the assault occurred.
In Hollywood, a large lumber company fire destroyed part of a
square block and threatened the rest.
In Washington, eight persons were injured when a streetcar
struck a bus and bounced some 60 feet off the tracks at an
intersection four blocks from the Capitol.
It was fortunate that the whole place was not destroyed.
In Charlotte, mud, loosened from city streets in a light
rain, coated the sidewalks and was being tracked by pedestrians
everywhere they went. The slow rain was not hard enough to wash away
the muddy residue left by alternating spring and winter weather of
recent weeks.
You better find yourself a mud-shoveler down 'ere at the
hardware store.
The City Manager of Charlotte, Henry Yancey, was seeking an
audience with the State Attorney General to find out the limits of
authority between the City and County Government and how they might
combine services to promote efficiency and fiscal parsimony.
The initial respondents to The News straw poll in the
presidential race favored General Eisenhower and Henry Wallace over
the President. Mr. Wallace tied for first place with General
Eisenhower, followed in order by the President and Senator Arthur
Vandenberg. Thomas Dewey was tied for third with Senator Taft and
former Secretary of State James Byrnes. In addition to those for Mr.
Byrnes, votes were cast for such Democrats as Ellis Arnall and
Senator Harry F. Byrd.
The poll was continuing. Send in your three cents worth on
the zig-zag.
On the editorial page, "U.S. Stands by United Nations" tells of the primary argument against U.S. support of the U.N.
effort to save the partition plan, and hence the viability of the
U.N. itself, being that it would anger the Arab states, give the
Soviets a foothold in Palestine via their part in an international
police force, and thus jeopardize the U.S. interests in the Middle
East, significantly, continued access to the oil on which the
country had increasingly come to depend as its own reserves had been
depleted by the war.
And, moreover, even if undertaken, there was no guarantee
that armed force would quell the conflict in Palestine and enable
the partition. There was also no assurance that the other nations on
the Security Council would support creation of an international
police force for the purpose. Britain had not liked the partition
plan from the beginning and had shown an increasing sympathy, since
it was passed the previous November, for the Arab cause.
But not to take action would leave the door open for Russia
to undertake unilateral force to stop the violence as a threat to
its own security.
No progress could be made without agreement between the U.S.
and Russia. It ventures that agreement on this issue, despite
agreement on partition itself, would require more concessions than
either country previously had been disposed to make.
The situation gave a bargaining advantage to Russia. It was
to be hoped that forces were directing the nations against their
will along a course toward peace.
"A Gain for Our Children" discusses the local plan
championed by the Jaycees to establish public school classes for
mentally retarded children. The step was needed, and, with the help
of such experts as Dr. Bernardine Schmidt from the University of
Mississippi, soon to provide a talk on the subject, the effort
should prove salutary.
"Wallace Out of This World" finds Henry Wallace's
testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to have
established only that peace on the world stage was impossible and
that Mr. Wallace was the last person to be entrusted with the
responsibility of trying to achieve peace. His plan to end the cold
war was to introduce world socialism. His efforts would make the
Soviets even more intransigent in their claims of imperialism
against the U.S., given his statements against the Administration,
the Wall Street bankers, and Republican "imperialists".
Instead, a program was needed which made sense to Wall Street
and Washington, as well as to Moscow. Leaders could not be replaced
overnight, as Mr. Wallace appeared to assume. It had to be impressed
upon the leaders and people of both sides that war was not
inevitable.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled,
"Man Without a Country", tells of a Harvard graduate of
good background renouncing his U.S. citizenship to become a citizen
of the world. He was concerned about the growing nationalism in the
world. Many in the country shared the basic sentiment. But by taking
the extreme step which the young man had, he had sacrificed his role
in determining the future course of the cause which he espoused.
Even the proponents of world government allowed that national
identities and citizenships would not be renounced under such a
formulation, only that the larger citizenship of the world would
take its place alongside national citizenship.
Drew Pearson tells of the British and French Governments
seeking to suppress the release by the State Department of seized
German Foreign Office documents showing that Russia had sought to
form a separate peace with Germany during the summer of 1943 because
of the slow opening of the second front in Western Europe by the
other Allies to take the Nazi heat off of Russia. The reason was
that Russia had seized German documents showing that the British,
under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, along with his supporting
Cliveden Set, had urged Germany to invade Russia. Those documents
would paint Britain in as bad or worse light than the U.S. documents
did Russia. Lord Lothian and Lord Runciman were center stage in this
British effort. At one point, FDR, alarmed by reports of British
banks lending money to Germany in the spring of 1939 for its
rearmament, warned Mr. Chamberlain that if the efforts continued,
Great Britain would have to function on its own. Following the
creation of the Munich Pact at the end of September, 1938, FDR
instructed Ambassador Joseph Kennedy to tell Mr. Chamberlain that
appeasement had to end, that Hitler only understood hard-boiled
tactics.
It eventually leaked that Prime Minister Chamberlain,
himself, had investments in German armament. Not until March 16,
1939, a day after Hitler took the remainder of Czechoslovakia, did
the British finally stop their appeasement policy. Throughout the
prior time, British leaders urged Hitler to invade Russia while
Britain supplied the funding for the armament.
He notes that many observers considered the policy of
Republican foreign policy architect John Foster Dulles and Secretary
of Defense James Forrestal, favoring rebuilding of German industry,
to parallel that of the Cliveden Set in 1938.
Senator Kenneth McKellar placed a document in the
Congressional Record recently, giving himself credit for establishing
TVA, when he had been one of its most ardent critics through time
for its want of supplying him political patronage. The document had
been written at the direction of Senator McKellar, himself, by a
staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Earl Cooper.
Marquis Childs discusses the attempt to woo Henry Wallace
back to the Democratic Party being futile, as Mr. Wallace was a
visionary who believed in his vision, as all such visionaries. He
had described his followers as Gideon's Army, implicitly placing him
in the role of Gideon. Such a man was unlikely to return to the
worldly camp of the Democrats.
Some had written Mr. Childs, based on earlier columns on Mr.
Wallace, and accused him of suggesting that only Communists would
support the former Vice-President. But that was the opposite of what
he had said in January when he expressed that Mr. Wallace had
probably dealt the President's re-election bid a mortal blow. For
Mr. Wallace's followers were in favor of all that was good and
against all that was bad and fit therefore into Gideon's Army.
It was also true, however, that most of the zealots and
manipulators around Mr. Wallace were Communists or sympathetic with
the principles of Communism. They were aiming for 1952, with 1948
merely a staging ground. It was hoped that the Wallace candidacy
would cause the Republicans to nominate a conservative as Senator
John Brickman or Speaker Joe Martin, who would then be elected and
provoke such reaction that Mr. Wallace would win the support of the
defectors in 1952 after an economic depression.
While it was doubtful that Mr. Wallace, himself, thought in
such terms, the end result was that it was extremely dubious that
Mr. Wallace would return to the Democratic Party.
DeWitt MacKenzie discusses the attempt of Czechoslovakia to
escape the Communist net being drawn over Eastern Europe and the
dynamic in the effort providing insight to the methodology of the
Communists in a relatively open arena. First came the infiltration
subtly of Communists into trade unions and political organizations,
until certain key positions in Government could be obtained, after
which would come the death blow to liberty. He thinks the same sort
of thing could transpire in North or South America and thus
warranted analysis.
Washington said that there was no doubt that Moscow was
pulling the strings of Premier Klement Gottwald. The present crisis
occurred when eight anti-Communist ministers resigned the coalition
Cabinet. President Eduard Benes then refused initially to accept the
resignations, which had been precipitated by the efforts of the
Premier to communize the police force. Premier Gottwald insisted
that the resignations be accepted, that he might fill the positions
with Communists. The Premier then had his Minister of Interior place
the police in front of all government buildings and foreign
embassies, stifling speech to a degree and arresting foes of
Communism. Police seized the headquarters of the anti-Communist
National Socialist Party and the country quickly was turned into a
police state.
The questions thus arising were whether the Russians would
dare challenge world opinion by using force to take over
Czechoslovakia and if force were to be used, would the Czech people
fight, if so, would they have the strength to resist the Communist
tide. Mr. MacKenzie deems it a crucial moment for the future of
freedom.
A letter writer tells of his gloom regarding several stories
in the news of late, from the Chinese situation as discussed by the
Alsops, (including the prospect of Soviet joinder to the embryonic Communist movements of Southeast Asia, not "Southwest Asia"), to the Palestine partition plan discussed by Dorothy Thompson
(in the Greensboro Daily News). Walter Lippmann thought that
emergency measures beyond the Marshall Plan might become necessary.
Don't worry, mister. A-Day will occur January 1, 1953 and
take away all your troubles in a flash.
A letter writer finds the attempts by ministers the previous
Sunday, in honor of George Washington's birthday, to paint the
nation's first President as an orthodox Christian to be without
foundation in historical fact. He had attended the Episcopal Church,
but mainly to accompany wife Martha. Bishop White had said that
President Washington was a great and good man but not a believing
Christian. The rector of the church in New York which the first
couple attended during his Presidency, said that he was a "Deist",
meaning that he believed in a God of Nature but not that the
Scriptures came from God.
Such may explain why the General, in his devoirs to the
ladies of the countryside, is said by some noteworthy historians to
have been the father of the country in more ways than one.