Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at the University
of California in Berkeley, Secretary of State Marshall accused
Russia of using Nazi tactics in the Communist drive to engulf
European free nations, saying that never before in the history of
the United States had its ideals and interests been so threatened.
He said that if Italy or any other Western nation elected a
Communist government, it would automatically cut itself off from
American aid as the Communists did not support the recovery program.
But he also said that the U.S. maintained an open door to any
conciliatory move by the Russians. Until such a move occurred,
however, the firm policy would be to oppose further Soviet
encroachment. The crisis extended beyond Europe to the Near and
Middle East, as well as into China, Indonesia, Latin America, and
Korea. He again urged Congress promptly to enact ERP.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the 5.3 billion dollar
ERP appropriation for the first year. Aid for Greece, Turkey, and
China were included in the bill, despite Democratic objection.
Meanwhile, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved
the proposed additional 275 million dollars worth of aid to Greece
and Turkey. No final decision had yet been reached on the proposed
aid to China.
Senate Republican leaders appeared near an agreement on a
plan to register young men in the country for the draft but to delay
actual induction until such point that voluntary enlistments lagged
or the world situation became so bad as to require mobilization.
An informal poll of the House Armed Services Committee showed
wide support for renewal of the draft.
The Senate approved limiting the tax cut to no more than 4.8
billion dollars. The House had passed a bill allowing 6.5 billion in
cuts. Final vote on the Senate bill would likely occur later this
date.
Madame Curie was released from Ellis Island in New York after
being detained there since arrival the previous night by plane from
Greece. Attorney General Tom Clark ordered the release to enable her
15-day visit in the country to conduct lectures. Madame Curie, along
with her husband Frederick, had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in
1935 for their discoveries in radioactivity.
In Centralia, Ill., an explosion of undetermined origin had
killed five persons and injured 25 when a two-story building was
leveled.
In Charlotte, a man was under arrest for allegedly robbing
and shooting a Charlotte attorney. An accomplice was being sought in
the robbery and assault. The victim, a well known criminal defense
attorney in the city, was badly wounded in the neck during the
attack on W. Sixth Street near Church Street at around 3:30 a.m. The
man in custody was tracked by police and found hiding in a closet,
admitted his part in the robbery but claimed that his companion had fired
the shot. The arrested man explained that he spotted the victim
winning a lot of money in a craps game and told his companion of it,
whereupon they determined to commit the robbery outside as the man
started to enter his car.
The previous night in Madison Square Garden in New York, Kentucky beat Columbia 76 to 53 and Holy Cross topped Michigan 63 to 45, in the opening quarterfinal pairings of the N.C.A.A. Tournament. This night in Kansas City, Wyoming would meet Kansas State and Baylor would vie with Washington. We hope that you are having good success predicting the results. We have missed a couple thus far.
On the editorial page, "Wallace Missed the Boat" comments on Henry Wallace's statement in response to the President's
St. Patrick's Day message on foreign policy, that it was a complete
admission of failure of the Truman Doctrine. While it was true that
the Doctrine had not been wholly effective, the worse failure was the
appeasement policy advocated by Mr. Wallace. It appeared Mr. Wallace had
missed the boat by removing from the Democratic Party and
challenging the hard line approach to Russia via the third party.
Had he remained, he could have attracted the alienated supporters of
President Roosevelt and the independents.
While he probably could not have obtained the nomination, he
could have controlled enough delegates to have an effect on policy
at the Democratic convention. As it was, the former Vice-President was
relegated to support only by a small band of Communists and fellow
travelers.
"Strange American Confusion" finds ridiculous
Senator Vandenberg's stated disappointment that the President had
not spelled out in his speech two days earlier the foreign policy of
the country. The President had in fact set forth the Truman Doctrine
in its final terms. The detractors from the left and the right did
not want to understand the President's speech, which had articulated
the great crisis facing the nation.
The Truman Doctrine, in the year since it was first put forth
with respect to Turkey and Greece, had not been respected by Russia
because the American people had not shown the resolve to back up the
Doctrine with mobilization. The result had been an extension of
Soviet power in Eastern and Central Europe, with concomitant threat
to the West. Even with these portents in the winds, there were still
those appeasers and isolationists who refused to see the crisis for
what it was, a crisis which had been growing steadily since the end
of the war.
"A Call from Our Forests" tells of the state's forests comprising 18.4 million acres—six times that of Britain—,
representing about 59 percent of North Carolina's territory, most of
which was under private ownership, the rest Federal. Half of the
forest land was on farms, yielding twenty different products worth
50 million dollars per year. The forests also helped to protect the
watershed of a hundred hydroelectric developments and provided jobs
for 71,000 workers. The forests were worth about 400 million
dollars. The state had more than seven percent of the nation's
timber growth and twelve percent of the sound wood volume of the South.
But more trees were being cut than grown. The State
maintained two nurseries, but it would take them 67 years to
replenish the state's lost treevolume. The State Forester had
recently stated in The News that better restocking and
conservation practices needed to be employed, with State ownership
of the poorer lands and increased research into forestry and
timberland management.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled
"Whadya Mean—Accent?" tells of the head of the Boston
public schools Department of Speech Improvement contending that
Bostonians spoke the purest English uttered anywhere. The piece
wonders, however, how such a claim had come to be when Bostonians
spoke of parties as "patties" and cars as "caas".
The town hall was in the village "squay-ya". And law was
"lore", if recent, "morden". (We think the
latter are more at "lawr" and "mod-en", that stated sounding as
Brooklynese.)
It found it not surprising that the practitioners of the
speech did not recognize their own accent, as such was usually the
case.
Add a twang, incidentally, to the above and you have a lot of
Southern speech as well.
Guess ever'bawdy came ova on the Mayflowa togetha. What
happened?
Drew Pearson spells out the concerns arising from the
President's speech to the Congress two days earlier. The first was
the news of development of Russia's germ warfare program. The
Russians had been working on such plans during the war as they
sought to formulate inoculation for their own troops. Such had been
known to the U.S. Army for some time.
The second concern was the plan to establish a new
Soviet-German government by May 1, with the capital at Koenigsberg
and Field Marshal Von Paulus at its head. The General had trained a
special German unit of the Red Army in Russia after being taken
prisoner at Stalingrad during the war, and that force now numbered
about 1.6 million men. The families of the leading officers were
maintained in Moscow as hostages to prevent a double-cross.
Other worries were Russian troop maneuvers in and around
Germany and the Russian grab for more territory.
Part of the reason for the President's speech was to warn Russia that further expansion could mean war,
while reassuring France, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries of
continuing American support.
The officers of the Air Force were not in favor of building
carriers as they took too long to construct and became white
elephants, requiring too many warships to protect them. They were also
quite susceptible to being destroyed or rendered useless by atomic
bombs, even by close proximity to a blast. The U.S.S. Pennsylvania had to be towed from Okinawa to
sea and scuttled recently because of its radioactivity, persisting
almost two years after the July, 1946 Bikini tests. The survivor of Pearl Harbor was thus not even salvageable for its steel. The Air Force generals also found a large land army to be of
little use in modern warfare at home, favoring air power as both
a deterrent and an effective strike force.
Secretary of State Marshall had, however, recommended to
Congress development of a large Army as a psychological deterrent,
stating that development of airplanes took too long.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop find the President's speech on
foreign policy to the Congress having made it plain that it would be
the central issue in the campaign and would greatly affect the
outcome, especially in determining who between the Taft and the
Vandenberg schools of thought would be the Republican nominee. The
Republican Senators had split almost evenly on the vote to reduce
ERP from 5.3 to four billion dollars for the first year,
demonstrating the close division in the party.
It was believed that Senator Vandenberg was now the man to
beat for the nomination rather than Governor Dewey, despite Senator
Vandenberg having ruled himself out for the nomination. If drafted,
however, there was little doubt that he would accept. Moreover,
former Governor Harold Stassen was willing to accept a vice-presidential
spot on a Vandenberg ticket, providing such a popularly backed
combination strong promise for election.
The nomination of Senator Taft or someone of the same
isolationist ideology was not yet out of the question, but Senator
Taft himself had lost much of his luster with the party leadership
because of his poor showing in the polls. Those who had been backing
him were shifting to House Speaker Joe Martin, more conservative
than Senator Taft.
It appeared that, barring a miracle, it would be
mathematically impossible now for the President to win the election,
given his tremendous slide in recent weeks. That had helped the Taft
stock as had also the candidacy of General MacArthur, who Taft
backers believed would siphon off support from both Governor Dewey
and Mr. Stassen.
If the expected deadlock were to occur at the convention
between Senator Taft and Governor Dewey, the choice would be between
either Senator Vandenberg or Mr. Stassen on the one side of the
spectrum and General MacArthur or Speaker Martin on the other.
Samuel Grafton offers that the President in his speech had
presented the crisis facing the nation but not how to solve it. He
had not even invited Russia to meet for a conference. If there were
no possible basis for rapprochement with Russia, then the road to
peace was not available and only war therefore lay ahead.
It was a bad speech to leave out hope for an alternative,
while recommending peacetime conscription, a novelty in the
country's history. The speech was very nearly a plea for
mobilization.
Mr. Grafton again urges a conference with Russia as the
alternative to following the road to war.
A letter writer who became a citizen of Charlotte in 1897
tells of how he had witnessed Northerners and Southerners marching
side by side in a parade of troops heading to the Spanish-American
War, as well in the parade heading to the fight under General
Pershing in World War I. The same had been true at the outset of
American involvement in World War II.
He views, therefore, the attempts to renew strife between the
North and South to be unrighteous and un-American. The country was
comprised of one people.
A letter writer favors enacting a law, along with universal
military training, to ban sale of alcohol on military bases. He also
wants Congress to close all the distilleries until the food crisis
had passed. No foreign aid should be given unless the recipient
nation promised to close its breweries.
A letter writer finds Drew Pearson's column doing more good
than harm, though he finds some of the latter likely.
