Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. General
Assembly voted 46 to 0 to take immediate action to protect
Jerusalem, approving a request to have the U.N. trusteeship council
formulate plans to safeguard the city. The move pertained only to
Jerusalem.
King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan was planning to head his Arab
legions, trained by the British, in Palestine. Two-thirds of the
forces, or 10,000 men, were already on duty as security forces with
the British. Jews and Arabs mobilized along the southern edges of
Jerusalem this date. Haganah had asked the Irgun forces to stop
their attack on the Arab city of Jaffa, but the call went unheeded.
Jewish forces hurled mortar fire into Acre, enabling escape of most
of the 200 prisoners in the Acre prison, but were repelled by the
British. The flow of oil from Iraq into Haifa, seized by Jewish
forces the previous week, was halted. Battle lines were being formed
for control of Alamein camp, a vital facility for the Arabs to
prevent the Jews from blocking Arab access to Jerusalem from Hebron,
Beersheba and the south, when the British evacuated.
In Haifa, all was quiet and it appeared Jews and Arabs were
beginning to work together again.
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal told a Senate
Appropriations subcommittee that if the defense program were left
solely to the military, it would "fortify the moon." He
did not think a 70-group Air Force fell into that latter
classification, but he favored a 66-group Air Force for maximum cost
efficiency.
The Administration was said to be in the final phases of
planning military backing for Western Europe, but Secretary
Forrestal told the subcommittee that he had not heard of such a
plan, that the implications, however, of the Western European Union
pointed toward the U.S. being asked to provide help in rearming the
five nations of that group, Britain, France, and the Benelux
countries.
Convicted Nazi saboteurs Ernest Burger and George John Dasch,
who had landed with six others in New York and Florida from U-boats
in June, 1942, were freed from custody and allowed to return to
Germany, after the President approved a Justice Department
recommendation for clemency. The other six convicted defendants had
been executed in August, 1942. FDR had reduced the death sentences for the
released men to life and 30 years respectively, because both had
provided information on the conspiracy. Present Secretary of the
Army Kenneth Royall had served as Army-appointed defense counsel for
the eight men.
Senator James Murray of Montana criticized the National
Physicians Committee of Chicago for running a contest for newspaper
cartoonists, in an attempt, he said, to discredit the National
Health Assembly, planning to meet to develop national health
safeguards for the ensuing decade. Senator Murray charged that the
effort undermined a free press and constituted an overt attempt at
bribery in furtherance of the Committee's opposition to national
health insurance.
In the House, the margarine bloc won a key victory over the
butter forces, making it probable that legislation would be passed
in the House to remove the discriminatory taxes on margarine.
Charlotte was seeking again to have faster airmail service
for it being in the center of the largest air pocket for airmail
east of the Mississippi River.
"America's Town Meeting of the Air" was set to
broadcast from Charlotte at 7:30 the following evening, to be held
in the Armory. The panel would include columnist Dorothy Thompson,
Idaho Senator Glen Taylor, Progressive James Stewart Martin, and
publisher Dwight MacDonald. North Carolina native George Denny was
the regular host of the program. The question posed would be whether
a third party could bring to the country peace and prosperity.
You can get one of a limited number of tickets for the
program at $2 each. Hurry.
On the editorial page, "Russia's Crazy Game of Bluff" finds the new air restrictions being imposed by Russia on Western
traffic into and out of Berlin to be the post-Italian election move
in the game of bluff which it was waging to divert attention and
encourage insecurity and alarm in the West, while Russia was busy
mobilizing and creating alliances in the East. When Russia reached
its position of satisfaction, it would seek peace terms, after
forcing the West, theoretically, to maintain its military strength
at the expense of capitalist freedom, until bankruptcy would occur.
The piece thinks the strategy nonsensical, even if following Marxian
doctrine, but the effort was driving the U.S. crazy in the process.
The American strategists had to produce a program for
settlement and world federation to stop the arms race.
"Witch Hunters Hurt Science" tells of the Atomic
Scientists of Chicago, who had worked on the Manhattan Project,
having rendered a poll of its membership in which 63 percent of the
two-thirds of the respondents, 101, half of whom worked for the
Government, had stated that the handling of the case of Dr. Edward
Condon by HUAC had made them reluctant to accept employment with the
Government.
HUAC, supported by the House, was heading for a showdown with
the Secretary of Commerce regarding its demand for the loyalty
investigation records on Dr. Condon, director of the Bureau of
Standards, for his supposedly being the top risk in atomic security
for allegedly associating with a Soviet espionage agent.
The piece thinks that regardless of the outcome of this
showdown, set to go into the courts, the real issue was the worth of
HUAC in tracking down Communists. On the one hand, real
Communists operated with sufficient stealth to avoid the Committee's
grasp while on the other, the intrusive effort into private lives
was causing major damage in the country.
The piece wonders why the Congress, in the overwhelming House
vote on Saturday to support the HUAC effort with respect to Dr.
Condon, was "perpetuating and encouraging the antics of its
witch hunters".
"Who Speaks for Administration?" wonders why
there was evidenced divergence within the Administration on the
economic prospectus, with Undersecretary of the Treasury A. L. M.
Wiggins having told on Friday the American Cotton Manufacturers that
with voluntary efforts on the part of business, inflation could be
brought under control. That view was at variance with the
President's re-articulation the previous week in a press conference
of the need for his ten-point anti-inflation package to be passed,
inclusive of wage, price, allocation and credit controls. Mr.
Wiggins's formula sounded as the Republican voluntary plan, rejected
by the President as inadequate.
It reminds the piece of the divergence on foreign policy in
September, 1946 between the "get tough" policy with
Russia advanced by then Secretary of State James Byrnes and the
opposition to it made publicly by then Secretary of Commerce Henry
Wallace, leading to Mr. Wallace being fired from that position a few
weeks later.
The piece thinks that the Administration had set such a
pattern and it communicated the idea that the President, while
giving lip service to New Deal controls on the economy, actually did
not support them.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled
"Look Back to Glory?" finds gubernatorial "dream"
candidate W. F. Stanley dreaming when he proclaimed the hope that
North Carolina could return to the glory days it had supposedly
enjoyed in antebellum times.
The piece reminds that North Carolina was then referenced as
"Old Rip" for its sleepy ways and one-third illiteracy.
They were not glory times but times of impoverishment, and the fact
that North Carolina had not sought to revel in a non-existent past had stimulated its momentum toward progress.
Of course, history has a way, unfortunately, of repeatingitself.
Drew Pearson tells of the Republican House caucus debating
aid to education and a raise in pay for postal workers, both opposed
by Speaker Joe Martin and Majority Leader Charles Halleck. Mr.
Martin favored placing priority first on defense.
Congressman Fred Hartley had blocked the teacher pay-raise
bill in committee.
Congressman Fred Smith of Ohio labeled the
Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill a Communist measure for its
provision on financing of the construction of public housing.
Congressman George Bender of Ohio wondered aloud at anyone trying to
suggest Senator Taft as a Communist, eliciting loud laughter in the
caucus.
Mr. Halleck opposed discharge petitions, as that which had
passed on margarine, allowing it to go directly to the floor for
vote, escaping the committees. Much talk ensued of margarine.
Four Senators, Republicans Taft, Charles Tobey of New
Hamsphire, Ralph Flanders of Vermont, and Democrat John Sparkman of
Alabama, all had been the prime movers in getting the housing bill
passed in the Senate. On the other side, the real estate lobby had
influenced Senators Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Harry Cain of
Washington, James Kem of Missouri, and Democrat Spessard Holland of
Florida. In the House, the primary opposition was from Jesse Wolcott
of Michigan and Charles Fletcher of California.
Samuel Grafton again tells of Harry and his wife Margaret.
Harry saved dimes. On this evening, he turned on the radio, warning
of the grim situation in Europe. He believed that historians of the
21st century would write of the period that a typical 1948 domestic
scene was one in which a man sat comfortably in his living room
"listening to intimations of disaster." It was similar
to the image of whittling conveyed of the commodious daily
habituation of an earlier time.
Harry left his chair and roved around the room, fingering the
change in his pocket. He thought about the endless bad news since
the end of the war, of new and mightier and more terrible weapons.
He then thought of placing his change, $7.40 worth, in its
usual desk cubbyhole, conveying a feeling of security in an insecure
world.
Just then, Margaret entered the room, however, and said that
her cousin Jim had enlisted in the Army, that they ought to buy him
something, suggested spending $7 to $8.
Marquis Childs looks at the presidential campaign of Henry
Wallace, finds some of his supporters, such as Paul Robeson, willing
to accept a dictatorship of the left to avoid the evils of a
dictatorship of the right. Mr. Wallace did not subscribe to that
view, being a deeply religious man. Nor was it true of most of his
supporters.
His campaign manager predicted that he would poll ten million
votes out of about 60 million total to be cast. Mr. Childs thinks
that vote total possible, particularly if the major parties
nominated President Truman and an ultra-conservative for the
Republicans, such as Speaker of the House Joe Martin. Some had
predicted a million votes for the Wallace candidacy in New York,
alone.
The effort of the campaign was to create an image of Mr.
Wallace as a persecuted martyr by the monopolists and by the press.
Walter Reuther was the most prominent spokesperson for the
non-Communist left, making a forthright attack on Mr. Wallace, such
that some in the Wallace campaign had seriously considered filing
suit for slander or libel against the UAW president. The attempt on
Mr. Reuther's life the previous week underscored the bitterness between the
two factions of the left of labor, the pro-Communists and
anti-Communists.
He recalls the street violence in Germany in the early
Thirties between the Communists and Socialists, as Hitler was
consolidating his forces to seize dictatorial control.
He concludes that abuse of freedom would bring an end to
freedom.
A letter from a representative of the United World
Federalists states its disagreement with the letter from A. W. Black
on the subject of world government.
He finds Mr. Black's logic hard to follow. Pal, you are not
the only one.
But again, with 20-20 hindsight in store, world government
has proved not only unnecessary to resolving issues of peace in an
atomic world, as the U.N. steadily grew in authority and prestige,
advanced enormously during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October,
1962, but also an unworkable idea in terms of surrender of national
sovereignty. Few, if any, nations in the world would support such a
loss of national identity and control of its own people.
There are many who favor no government, but few, if any,
today are in favor of world government. While it may sound good at
first blush, the problem is in its implementation in practice. It is
difficult enough to govern the United States with an Executive
Branch of two elected representatives, only one of whom has any
substantial Constitutional power, and a Legislature of 535 elected
members, to govern more than 300 million people. To be fair, the
Assembly of a world government would have to have millions of
representatives and a large committee of presiding officers, and that is
why it is impracticable.
Currently, each member of the U.S. House of Representatives represents about 690,000 constituents. In a world of more than seven billion people presently, to achieve just that increasingly unworkable ratio of representation would require more than 10,000 representatives in a World Assembly. The result would lend to "chaos" the definition of order.
Query, incidentally, whether the Federal law which established the number of Representatives at 435 in 1911, when the population of the United States was at 92 million, meaning representation was at a ratio of one to 212,000, should be amended to provide for a proportionately larger House of about 1,351. The number is not Constitutionally mandated or fixed, but Article I, Section 2 impliedly contemplates a representation of about 30,000 per Representative in a nation at the Founding of four million people, though the wording only specifies no more than one Representative per 30,000 and thus does not bar a larger number of constituents. The first apportioned House based on population, in 1793, consisting of 105 members, established the proportionate representation at about one for every 38,000. Until 1921, the Congress routinely increased the size of the House every decade to keep pace with the increasing population. The Congress which could not agree on a reapportionment bill in 1921 was the same one which refused approval of the League of Nations, arguably leading to World War II.