Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that twenty-one
Southern Senators demanded equal radio broadcast time to respond to
a presentation by the Mutual Broadcasting Company, titled "To
Secure These Rights", a program which dramatized the
President's civil rights program. All Southern Senators of eleven
states, save Claude Pepper of Florida, signed the petition. Mutual
said that it would consider it. The same Senators had vowed to
filibuster the civil rights program.
We note that it was 50 years ago this date in 2015, when on
March 7, 1965, men and women of the United States sought to embark
on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and were prohibited
from so doing by Governor George Wallace's police at the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, the police inflicting beatings and shoving
to the ground people involved in the march, black and white,
sweeping through the peaceful crowd of marchers with billy-clubs, a
scene which had become all too familiar to American television
viewers in the preceding five years. The marchers would eventually
be permitted to pass unimpeded to Montgomery on March 21, but only
after a Federal Judge intervened to grant the permission and
President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and mobilized the Army to assure
the marchers' safe passage. The march was intended to dramatize the
need of a voting rights bill, which the President would later in the
year sign into law, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War
and the Fifteenth Amendment's expressed guarantee to all citizens of
the right to vote.
The little man in Montgomery, who was most responsible for
sowing the seeds of hate in the country which led ultimately to
Dallas and, eventually, to Memphis and Los Angeles, was once again
made the fool for all with any sensibility to see. He would,
however, finally pay dearly for his rhetoric of hate and racism.
And, of course, he was not the only such spewer of vitriol on the
national political stage in that era. But he was the most visible
and had the largest following of any other of the numerous
hate-mongers, including those of the Klan.
We never accepted the sincerity of his subsequent apology,
for we think it was tendered for political expediency, just as he
conducted his entire public career.
He was, indeed, probably not a racist personally. But that is
of no moment when he led, deliberately, for his personal political
aggrandizement, a movement in the country which stimulated the fire
in the belly of many atavists, who had not the sense to get out of a
shower of rain, to resist to the bitter end any form of rationality,
destroying in the process others' good and decent lives, and, in
some instances, even killing those with whom they disagreed. This carefully cultivated coterie of states' rightists formed in the South came to embrace, ultimately, by 1968, those of like mind from all sections of the country, hurtling them onward with the rhetoric of discord cloaked in "peace" on their own terms, in a manner resemblant to the old techniques of Machiavelli, taken over in more modern times by such personages as Mussolini and Hitler.
We count George C. Wallace, therefore, as the worst citizen
to hold high political office in the United States during the
Twentieth Century. He has, however, a lot of competitors from that
period of the 1950's through the 1970's.
In London, the U.S., Britain, and France had agreed upon
international control of the German Ruhr, including Germany, and to
have close cooperation in utilizing Western Germany's resources as
part of the Marshall Plan. The three nations also reached accord on
the provision that Western Germany should have a federal form of
government, protecting the rights of the states but under a
sufficiently strong central authority. The three powers had not yet
formally merged the French zone economically with the
British-American zone, but indications were that such was
forthcoming.
A 36-nation five-year wheat agreement, establishing a $2 per
bushel ceiling price on that exported by the U.S., Canada, and
Australia, was formed in Washington. The market price at present was
about $2.50. Russia and Argentina refused to participate in the
agreement. Argentina was selling wheat to Europe at $4.85 per
bushel.
Former FDR kingmaker Jim Farley, speaking on the new radio
show "Meet the Press", predicted that Henry Wallace would
receive five million votes in the November election. He would
actually only get a bit more than a fifth of that. He also said that
President Truman would be the Democratic nominee. Among his
possibilities for vice-president, he did not name the eventual
nominee, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, Democratic Minority
Leader. He correctly predicted that his native New York State might
vote Republican in November, albeit, in the end, only by less than one percent. He believed that if there were to be a
fight at the Republican convention, then Senator Arthur Vandenberg
might emerge as the dark horse.
At San Francisco, Harry Bridges was ousted as the CIO
Northern California regional director for supporting Henry Wallace's
third-party presidential campaign, contrary to CIO policy. A third
attempt was reportedly being made to deport him to his native
Australia, but the Justice Department denied these reports. Mr.
Bridges remained head of the International Longshoremen's &
Warehousemen's Union and vice-president of the CIO National
Executive Council. He charged the Truman Administration with playing
politics with his deportation.
During tests at White Sands, N.M., a new Navy rocket, the
Aerobee, reached a record apogee for an American rocket of 78 miles
and an American rocket record speed of 3,000 miles per hour. The
German-made V-2 had reached an altitude of 114 miles and a speed of
3,500 mph during earlier post-war U.S. testing at White Sands.
Emery Wister of The News interviews the American
Legion national commander, James O'Neill, speaking in nearby
Kannapolis the previous night. Commander O'Neill believed that
Universal Military Training would likely pass in the Congress, but
that it would be only after a hard fight. He criticized Henry
Wallace's recommendation of deference toward Russia.
Governor Gregg Cherry of North Carolina, speaking at East
Carolina Teachers College, said that the state had more illiteracy
than 42 other states in the nation, the five below North Carolina
all being Southern states. While the state was making progress in
education, he urged that much more was needed through cooperative
effort. He informed that the state had two million boys and girls
between five and seventeen years of age who were not in school, the
tenth highest rank in the nation in that statistic.
On the sports page, sports editor Ray Howe continued his
coverage of the Southern Conference Basketball Tournament. The
semifinal games in Durham the previous night wound up with Duke
beating Davidson handily, 53 to 37, and N.C. State winning over
North Carolina, 55 to 50, setting up the final game for this
night—which N.C. State, as anticipated, would win against Duke, 58
to 50.
N.C. State would now proceed into the N.I.T., an invitation
to which they had already received, at the time as well or better
received as that to the N.C.A.A. Tournament. State would lose in the
first round quarterfinal game to DePaul, 75 to 64.
No Southern Conference school other than State was
invited to either tournament, each with only an eight team field.
As indicated last month, the State team included on its roster two future head coaches, Vic Bubas of Duke and Norm Sloan of State, one nearly winning a national championship, but for U.C.L.A., and the other winning a national chmapionship in spite of U.C.L.A., a decade apart.
Kentucky, under Coach Adolph Rupp, would win the 1948 N.C.A.A.
Tournament, its first such championship and the first of two
consecutive N.C.A.A. championships, while St. Louis would win the
N.I.T. Kentucky had won the N.I.T. in 1946.
We venture that it will not be so this year, in 2015. Sorry,
but perfect records in regular season usually have a way of finding
an exception to the rule in post-season tournament play. You
should have lost while you had the chance, several times.
A light freezing rain began in Charlotte by 11:00 a.m.,
threatening to usher in more cold weather. It was predicted that the
freezing rain would continue into the following day and could change
to sleet.
City buses continued to run on schedule, as did airport
traffic.
On the editorial page, we note initially that the previous
day, Brodie Griffith, longtime Managing Editor, appeared on the masthead for the first time as
Executive Editor, a new position at The News. As of August
23, William Reddig's name would be dropped from the masthead as
Editor, though, apparently, he still remained in that titular
position. Just what the change suggested, we shall have to wait and
determine later, as there is no mention of it on the front pages or
editorial pages of these dates.
According to Bruce Clayton, W. J. Cash's second biographer, former Associate Editor and acting Editor during the war, Burke Davis, and News reporter Reed Sarratt described Mr. Griffith in 1984 in these terms: "...[A] South Carolina farmboy, who liked a clear, crisp, lean sentence, a swig of whiskey—in the 1940's he became a tee-totaler—the Democratic Party, the American Legion, and reminiscing about his days in the infantry during World War I. This old-time Southern newspaperman surveyed the world from beneath a green eye-shade and through a haze of cigarette smoke. He scowled at young reporters. But he could also offer fatherly advice and be courtly, particularly around ladies. He was a 'yellow dog' Democrat, he liked to tell newcomers to the paper, meaning he would vote for a yellow dog should the party nominate one. He saw nothing irregular about the fact that his crack reporter, John Daly, was deeply involved in local Democratic politics and regularly served as campaign manager for congressional candidates." —W.J. Cash: A Life, 1991, p. 132
"Second Call for Eisenhower" suggests that the
2,600 participants in The News straw poll, registering their
clear preference for General Eisenhower and Henry Wallace in that
order, conveyed the notion that there was a heavy protest vote
against both major parties. Together, the two polled nearly half of
the votes. The Asheville Citizen, in consequence, called
Charlotte "The Disgruntled Queen". It referred the
results, rigged though they might have been, to the attention of
Southern Textile Bulletin publisher Dave Clark, "preoccupied
aforetime and longtime with the heresies of Chapel Hill."
Charlotte ought respond by calling Asheville "Mr. Mustard" for
that undeserved insult.
The editorial finds the protest to extend beyond the area of
civil rights, since Mr. Wallace stood to the left of the President
on that issue. Many in the Democratic Party were seeking General
Eisenhower as a replacement for President Truman on the ticket. They
believed that he fit better with the Democrats than with the GOP,
having been given his command of the European theater of war by
President Roosevelt and made chief of staff of the Army by President
Truman.
It suggests that, despite the General having removed his name
from consideration in January, his candidacy would both end the
Southern revolt and assure the Democrats another four years in
office. It predicts that the Democratic convention might yet
therefore try to draft General Eisenhower.
In perfect hindsight, one benefit would have been that a
certain vice-presidential candidate likely never would have surfaced
from the subterranean regions with which he was most familiar, as
eventually colorfully portrayed by Herblock, or ever been considered
seriously for the presidency. How much history might have been
changed.
But, as the editorial said, that's just a pipedream...
"Good News from Brussels" finds important
Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett's statement that any European
union to be formed between France, Britain, and the Benelux
countries at the conference in Brussels would be only between
European countries, would not involve the U.S. The union would be
broadened to include other nations when they were able to join
economically.
Communists would likely attack the union as being a stalking
horse behind which American imperialism could develop inroads to
Europe. But the fact that the U.S., though encouraging the union,
would remain aloof from it gave proof that there was no substance to
the charge.
The union, it offers, could be formed without doing violence
to the U.N. Charter, which allowed for regional pacts of this sort
for mutual security. The Western Hemispheric Security Zone, formed
the previous summer at Rio, was a precedent for such a mutual
defense agreement.
The Western European Union, to be formed the following
September after the Treaty of Brussels would be signed two weeks
hence, would lead, in April, 1949, to creation of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, which did include the United States. The push
for it became more insistent with the Berlin blockade imposed by
Russia in the coming month of 1948. Eventually in response, in 1955,
the Warsaw Pact between Russia and Eastern Europe would be formed.
"True Heroism at Belmont" agrees with a letter
writer who suggested that Clarence Perkins of Belmont, N.C., 18,
deserved a Carnegie Medal for his efforts to save a three-year old
girl who fell to the bottom of a 60-foot well. After two older men
were unable to extricate the child, young Mr. Perkins agreed to be
lowered by his ankles down into the well, where he was able to grasp
the child's hands and pull her to safety. She suffered only minor
injuries.
A piece from the St. Louis Star-Times, titled "Good
Old Vivien", welcomes the return to the national scene of
Vivien Kellema, to provide some livelihood and sense that the
ordinary had returned. She had publicly refused to make the final
payment on her 1943 income tax because she did not like the war. In
1944, she got mad about leaks of personal correspondence to a
representative of the Nazi steel interests in Argentina. Recently,
she had told the Los Angeles Rotary Club that she did not like the
income tax system and hinted that she would cease withholding
Federal taxes from her employees' wages.
The piece finds her one-against-all campaign to be silly
rather than inspiring. But at least it hearkened a return to
normalcy.
Drew Pearson writes an open memo to Senator Homer Ferguson of
Michigan, head of the subcommittee investigating war contracts. He
provides evidence and witnesses against Senator Owen Brewster, head
of the War Investigating Committee, which had launched the
investigation into Howard Hughes and Elliott Roosevelt the previous
summer. Senator Brewster then wound up being charged by Mr. Hughes
as having said he would agree to drop the investigation provided Mr.
Hughes and his TWA would agree not to compete with Juan Trippe and
his Pan American Airways for the South American air routes. Senator
Brewster and Mr. Trippe were tight.
He provides the name of Senator Brewster's housekeeper who
could testify that the Senator would fly to Dexter, Maine, nearly
every weekend for six months out of the year in a private Pan Am
plane. He also flew to speaking engagements in the plane. Senator
Brewster, however, stopped using the plane when the hearings began
the previous summer, instead took the train or flew aboard Northeast
Airlines. The housekeeper was told to remain mum regarding the Pan
Am largesse.
Mr. Pearson points out that it was illegal to provide free
trips to members of Congress.
He provides the name of another witness, whose nephew worked
for Pan Am in 1946-47 and saw Senator Brewster boarding the private
Pan Am plane on several occasions. He also provides the name of the
pilot of the aircraft. He suggests, in addition, checking Pan Am
logs and records which would show that the Senator's trip to South
America had been of interest to Mr. Trippe.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the candidacy of Harold
Stassen, thought by many observers to be a political lightweight but
being taken more seriously of late and regarded as one of the
toughest political professionals in the field. If he could inflict a
serious blow to either Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft in the New
Hampshire primary or, more importantly, the Ohio or Oregon primary,
then he would be well positioned to be on the ticket as the
vice-presidential candidate of one or the other of the two front
runners. Mr. Stassen hoped to run well in the Ohio industrial cities
on the strength of opposition to Senator Taft because of
Taft-Hartley. If he were to capture around ten to twelve of the 53
delegates from Ohio, he would be doing well and position himself for
a fight at the convention. If he got only two or three delegates,
however, he would have a poor showing.
His strategy was to do harm to the front runners and for
that, he was not popular with either one. It was therefore not to be
expected that either candidate would throw his support to former
Governor Stassen in the event of a deadlock at the convention.
Senator Taft's supporters hinted that a deal would be made whereby,
in the event of a deadlock, one of the two front runners would
withdraw.
Mr. Stassen's strategy was an all-or-nothing gamble which, if
it succeeded, could lead to the nomination even if that prospect was
unlikely. But he would nevertheless have a substantial likelihood
of being the vice-presidential nominee, especially on a ticket with
Senator Arthur Vandenberg following a deadlock.
Marquis Childs tells of two Senators offering a remarkable
contrast, Senator Vandenberg on the one hand, receiving high praise
for his recent speech in praise of ERP, and Senator Joseph Ball of
Minnesota on the other, the leader of the opposition to ERP, wishing
to cut the first year appropriation from 5.3 billion dollars down to
around 3.5 billion, despite the fact that such a cut would so
emasculate ERP as to render it useless in terms of rehabilitation
and recovery of Western Europe.
Senator Vandenberg had displayed political maturity while
Senator Ball had shown the opposite characteristic. Not long before,
prior to the war, Senator Vandenberg had been a leading isolationist
who coasted along on the Washington party circuit. But World War II
and its advanced weaponry had caused him to mature and develop a
sense of personal responsibility.
In 1944, Senator Ball, despite being a Republican, had
supported FDR. He based his decision on foreign policy and continued
conduct of the war. In doing so, he embarrassed former Governor of
Minnesota Harold Stassen, who had initially appointed Senator Ball
to the seat. But now he faced re-election in 1948 and appeared to be
burning bridges from his 1944 bipartisan stand.
His new position appeared to be on the zig-zag, much as his
labor stand. Mr. Childs concludes that since he was twenty years the
junior of Senator Vandenberg, Senator Ball's stance might be just a function of
his need still to grow up.
A letter from Francis O. Clarkson, subsequently to become a
Superior Court Judge, and the son of former and deceased State
Supreme Court Justice Heriot Clarkson, offers George Washington's
own words on the subject of religion to rebut the notion, set forth
by a previous letter, that he was a Deist, that is, believed in a
God of Nature but not in the Scriptures. The quotation is in the
form of prayerful supplication, made June 8, 1783 at Newburgh, N.Y., asking God to keep the United States
under His protection and to enable everyone in the country to do
justice, love mercy, and have charity, humility, and pacific temper
of mind. The prayer had been provided the members of the armed
services during the late war.
He says that the reason General Washington could not be
confirmed into the Episcopal Church was that there was no bishop at
the time in the United States who could perform the rite.
That had to be the reason why he chose to launch an attack
across the Delaware on the Hessians on Christmas night, 1776. It was
because he was a devout believer in the Christian tradition, no
doubt.
You are just a lawyer at this point and we make room for the
prospect of your subsequent higher education once you assume the
bench.
A letter from P. C. Burkholder replies to a February 20
letter critical of his letters, protesting that The News provided
Mr. Burkholder free advertising for his Congressional campaign of
1948 and asked that the service be discontinued, that Mr. Burkholder
be required to purchase space in the newspaper as any other
candidate.
As always, Mr. Burkholder uses the opportunity again to
attack the New Deal, even attacks the March of Dimes as a Roosevelt
scam, an "hypocritical racket".
He notes that he had traced Shelby for a person of the last
name Burkholder, which the previous letter writer claimed to be, and
found no one of that name, warns subsequent writers to choose a
larger town if they were going to falsify their identity.
He would become the Congress quite as well as those idiotic
Republicans on the House Science and Technology Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee who think that a
cold winter dispels the "myth" of global warming and that
melting ice in a bourbon glass signifies that no danger come what
may will from ice sliding off Greenland into the Atlantic or the
collapse of the Western Antarctic ice shelf into the Pacific,
notwithstanding uniform agreement to the contrary by every scientist
not in the pay of Big Oil, not to mention the ample anecdotal
evidence cast before the eyes of anyone who can see and think beyond
Big Oil money and the suicidal desire to run that gas guzzler into
Hell on Earth.
A letter writer responds to a letter of March 4 which had
equated, by favorable association, President Truman with Herbert
Hoover and Winston Churchill and then proceeded to lambast the
President as the equivalent of a Republican isolationist.
This writer appropriately thinks that the previous writer
sounded "exactly like a fellow that started out to drink
everybody under the table and ended up 'crying in his beer'."
He obviously has been watching some of the hearings before
the House and Senate Science and Environment Committees of late.
