Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Southern Senators
had informed Rhode Island Senator J. Howard McGrath, DNC chairman,
and Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach, a former Senator from
Washington State, that only the withdrawal of President Truman from
the race could heal their infringed pride from the President's
suggestion to Congress that it pass a civil rights program. They
also said that the offer of Senator McGrath to dilute the civil
rights plank to its 1944 version would be fine but not enough.
In Columbia, S.C., John McCray, editor of the black newspaper, Lighthouse and Informer,
asked Governor Strom Thurmond to investigate the burning of two or
possibly three crosses in the vicinity of black homes in West
Columbia, occurring March 2.
The Jewish Agency, through Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, told the
U.N. that the Agency was determined to go ahead with the creation of
a Jewish state in Palestine even if the U.N. was incapable of
enforcing the partition plan passed by the General Assembly on
November 29.
Haganah reported that 30 Arabs were killed and many wounded
the previous night in a clash with Jews on the plains of Sharon,
between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The fight erupted after Arabs attacked
the Jewish settlement of Magdiel on the Tel Aviv-Haifa Highway. As
the orange growing season in the Sharon area was coming to an end,
observers believed it would become a major battleground between
Arabs and Jews.
The Commerce Department refused to provide a subcommittee of
HUAC with subpoenaed records of the Commerce Department loyalty
board's investigation of Dr. Edward Condon, head of the Bureau of
Standards, accused by HUAC of being the "weakest link" in
atomic security for his having supposedly associated, knowingly or
unknowingly, with a Soviet espionage agent.
In New York, ten men were charged with grand larceny in the
theft of millions of dollars worth of merchandise from Railway
Express. The police had investigated the ring for eight weeks prior
to the arrests. The ring had been spotted when $1,000 worth of
dresses were stolen from a truck in the Bronx two months earlier.
Drivers would pull their trucks into neighborhood garages where part
of the loads were then switched to other trucks.
In Trenton, N.J., an eighteen-year old boy and his three
"bodyguards" were arrested for an unsuccessful attempt to
kidnap the bookkeeper of the youth's estranged father. One of the
bodyguards had tipped police to the plot because he did want to be
involved in a murder.
Near Greenville, Miss., thirteen crewmen of a 180-foot
towboat were dead or missing after it rammed into a bridge and
quickly sank in the swollen waters of the Mississippi River.
Thirteen others had survived.
The President returned from his trip to Puerto Rico and the
Virgin Islands and his vacation in Key West, met with his Cabinet
for the first time in three weeks.
In Hollywood, the trial separation of actor Donald O'Connor
from his wife ended after only five days, with the couple
reconciling and Mr. O'Connor moving back into the family home. They
had just had a spat.
In Charlotte, a new smoke abatement engineer was appointed by
the City Manager.
In the final tally of The News straw poll, General
Eisenhower won with 679 votes to 450 for runner-up Henry Wallace.
Governor Dewey had 354 votes, Senator Vandenberg, 212, Senator Harry
F. Byrd, 194, Senator Robert Taft, 164, and President Truman, coming
in a distant seventh, had 122 votes. Others receiving votes included
former Secretary of State James Byrnes, with 101 votes, former
Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, 97, General MacArthur, 56,
Governor Earl Warren, 37, and Secretary of State Marshall, with 32.
Fully 439 telephonically recorded votes for General
Eisenhower, and 223 for Mr. Wallace, had been registered in the
four-hour period the previous evening during which The News
opened its telephone line to the public for voting. Of the 2,588
votes cast during the previous eleven days, 1,145 had been received during
the call-in period.
There is something very fishy about these results.
In the quarterfinals of the Southern Conference Basketball
Tournament the previous day and night in Durham, N.C. State defeated
William & Mary 73 to 52, North Carolina beat VPI 61 to 40,
Davidson got by Maryland 58 to 51, and Duke nipped George Washington
54 to 51. Duke would meet Davidson and North Carolina would play
N.C. State this night in the semifinals. Keep your fingers crossed.
On the editorial page, "Senator Hoey Speaks for Peace" tells of Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina having made an
eloquent speech on the Senate floor in favor of the Marshall Plan.
He said that Russia was suspicious of the U.S. and not assured of
itself, that if it had the same resources as the U.S., it would use
them to subjugate the world and could not understand why the U.S.
did not share the same goal.
He viewed ERP as the most practical means of demonstrating
America's peaceful and democratic intentions.
"A Good Time in Charlotte" tells of Charlotte being
on the march to progress, as exampled by the effort of the Jaycees
to establish training for retarded children to make them suitable
for admission to the public schools. The Chamber of Commerce had
approved a program to advance the community with cultural events.
The City Council had undertaken a study of traffic problems in the
city and the School Board was planning for expansion of educational
facilities.
"A Contest for Thurmond Chatham" tells of Bob
Duncan, a Stokes County publisher, having entered the Fifth District
Congressional race to oppose Thurmond Chatham, of Winston-Salem,
chairman of the board of Chatham Manufacturing Company. The seat was
being vacated by retiring John Folger. It was likely that Mr.
Chatham would win and appeared well qualified for the position.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Hard
Work Pays Off", tells of the Milwaukee Journal reporting
that the young man who wanted to get ahead should stick with a
single company. Only 15 percent of executives in Wisconsin were
selected from outside the company. Another prerequisite was
versatility, knowing how the company worked from top to bottom.
Drew Pearson tells of Wisconsin Representative Frank Keefe,
the Congressman who had grilled admirals two years earlier on their
preparedness before Pearl Harbor, having become,
counter-intuitively, a humane advocate for better health care. He
had scolded the U.S. Public Health Service for not asking enough in
their budget to publicize a new means of preserving children's teeth
by treating them with sodium fluoride. It could be painted on the
teeth about four times between ages three and thirteen, and,
thereafter, most children could forget about going to the dentist.
The Health Service said that the reason the formula had not been
given to dentists was that there were too few of them to do more
than emergency dental work. Even dental assistants were in short
supply.
The whole process each time took only a minute to perform,
after cleaning of the teeth. A gallon of the solution, enough to
take care of the school age population of an ordinary sized
community, cost five cents.
General Eisenhower's perfect teeth were attributed to the
sodium fluoride in the water where he had lived as a boy, in
Denison, Texas. Some areas of the Dakotas and Southwest had too much
fluoride in the water, causing the teeth to be mottled. The Health
Service was experimenting with putting the right amount of sodium
fluoride in the drinking water supplies. Increasingly, city water
supplies were becoming polluted. About a hundred million people
lived in communities in which eight million dollars needed to be
spent to improve the water supply and sewage disposal.
The U.S. had the lowest death rate in its history, with ten
of every thousand people dying in 1946. Infant mortality was at an
all time low also, at 35.1 per thousand. The lowest rate was in
Arkansas, at 26.4, and the highest, in New Mexico, at 81.2.
Tuberculosis had dropped from the chief cause of death at the turn
of the century to seventh. Heart disease was the number one killer.
The incidence of polio was increasing. Viruses were getting worse.
Typhus was also on the rise.
Marquis Childs finds HUAC's suggestion of disloyalty of Dr.
Edward Condon, head of the Bureau of Standards, to be another
example of a witch-hunt by the Committee, its case being built
entirely on the facts that he talked to the wife of the Polish
Ambassador and to two or three employees of the Soviet satellite
embassies. The report of the subcommittee had found that the former
counselor to the Polish Embassy had purchased 270 books about atomic
energy published by the Commerce Department.
He finds the matter childish, as the publication in 1945 of
the Smyth Report, released with the consent of Manhattan Project
head Maj. General Leslie Groves, had revealed the "secret"
of the atomic bomb to those who understood physics. The fact had
recently been underscored by University of Chicago chancellor Robert
Hutchins in an article in American Magazine. There was no
more atomic "secret".
Moreover, Dr. Condon's loyalty had been checked by the
Department of Commerce loyalty board and found to be above reproach,
after hearing all the evidence on the matter of his associations.
The HUAC subcommittee had not asked Dr. Condon to appear. The loyalty board had found
that Dr. Condon spoke openly his political views, which inevitably
were not those of HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey—who would soon go to jail.
It raised the question whether a person, in or out of
Government, was to be denied the right to speak and advocate views
contrary to those held by the most narrow conservatives, pinheads by any other name.
Dr. Condon was being smeared for having been appointed in
1945 by then Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace and for being the
object of a smear in a small portion of the press. Mr. Childs finds
that to make the allegation against Dr. Condon without first
allowing him to be heard was to render the country as the enemy it
professed to despise.
Samuel Grafton again provides definitions, this time for
"Practical Politics", the art of computing how many county
chairmen were on your side, at a time when voters wanted as their
candidate a non-professional politician as General Eisenhower; "The
Healthy Society", a daring society, in contrast to the
decadence characterizing America, despite the country's intrepidity
in fact; "Secret Diplomacy", that in which great questions
were resolved between nations while the press remained outside;
"Open Diplomacy", a process in which the President
remained outside with reporters, without meetings; "Deflation",
the downturn of a major economic cycle, during which the consumer
had no money to buy the cheaper products; and "Vindication",
that obtained at the polls when the other side was split and your
candidate was attractive and right.
A letter writer addresses an open letter to Senator Clyde
Hoey, in which he expresses dismay that Dr. Frank Porter Graham was
president of the University while obviously being a Communist.
Whatever you want to believe, pal. Take it and shove it.
A letter writer complains of the speed of the younger set
and their "moral corruption and free-lovism" practiced in
the booths, on the dance floors, and in the parked cars in which
riotous living was taking place. He favors a religious revival to
combat the corrupt lovism.
A letter from the director of the Charlotte Mint Museum
thanks the newspaper for promoting the need for the change of the
Number 9 bus route to accommodate younger riders to the museum. The
City Council and Duke Power had approved the route change to bring
the bus route within closer proximity to the museum.
A letter writer finds the case of the Charlotte child who was
mentally deficient and not admitted to a State facility for
overcrowding, while her brother suffered from rheumatic fever, to be
a blot on the State of North Carolina. The story had been told in
The News during mid-January and, in response, the State had
assured admittance of the child within a few weeks.
A letter writer compliments "Truman, Wallace, Roosevelt"
of February 28, as a nicely condensed compendium of political facts.
But it is better, by far, to say "compendia" than "one
of the most condensed compendiums". If you had taken Latin, you
would know that.
