Thursday, May 27, 1948

The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 27, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Arabs were attacking anew from much-exchanged Ramat Rehel old and new Jerusalem, as King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan prayed at Moslem and Christian shrines within the city. He was cheered by 25,000 Arabs as he toured old Jerusalem, 300 yards from trapped Jews inside the old city. The pace of the fighting had increased since the rejection the previous day by the Arabs of the U.N. truce proposal except on limited terms not acceptable to Israel.

The A.P. reported that Israelis had cleared northern Galilee of Syrian and Lebanese invaders, including occupation of western Galilee, allotted to Arabs under the U.N. partition plan. The Israeli Army reported wiping out Beit Hanoun, just north of Gaza, killing 30 Egyptians. Jewish planes were reported to have attacked Ramallah near Jerusalem, along the supply road from Tel Aviv.

The Secretary-General for the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, stated that a third of the Israeli Army, 15,000 troops, were inside Jerusalem and the strategy of the Arabs was to trap them by cutting off supply lanes to the city.

In London, France, Belgium, the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg agreed on internationalization of the Ruhr of Germany after concessions were made to previously objecting France to assure that the iron ore, coal and coke from the region would not fuel revitalization of German war industry. The move paved the way for creation of a provisional German Government for Western Germany.

The State Department had sent to Congress a list of about three dozen violations by Russia of agreements made with the U.S. in recent years, primarily relating to Yalta and Potsdam. The list was in response to a request by Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana to provide evidence in support of the President's March 17 statement to Congress that one nation had persistently violated international accords and blocked thereby world peace. The report, which was not yet public, also had labeled the recent "peace offensive" of the Soviets during May as "propaganda".

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Representative Leo Isacson of New York denounced the Mundt-Nixon bill as a "menace to democracy", destructive of the First Amendment freedoms. An American Legion leader, however, testified that it was needed as a club against Communist fifth columns, suggesting that 100,000 quislings in the country threatened to take over the land and were collecting a war chest of a half million dollars to promote the effort to dupes and sympathizers.

If that's all it takes, pal, forget it.

Henry Wallace, highly critical of the bill, had asked to appear before the Judiciary Committee considering the House-passed bill, but chairman Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin had nixed the proposal on the ground that it would provide the former Vice-President a forum for free political advertising. Senator Wiley did allow, however, two days for hearing opponents of the bill and only one for supporters.

In Peiping, five persons were hanged for allegedly being Chinese Communists.

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 17 to 2 to have General MacArthur return to the U.S. from Japan to testify regarding Far East relations. General MacArthur had not been in the country since prior to Pearl Harbor.

House and Senate Republicans planned an investigation in each chamber of claims that the Voice of America had libeled the country in broadcasts to Latin America, allegedly stating, "New England was founded by hypocrisy and Texas by sin."

Senator Arthur Vandenberg gave his support to extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in its present form, without the House-passed amendments to provide for Congressional oversight of the President's authority to adjust tariffs to accommodate the vicissitudes of international trade in relation to the American economy. He deemed the length of extension to be of no moment but preferred two or three years to the House bill which allowed only one year. The Democrats wanted a three-year extension without the amendments.

The Senate Finance Committee unanimously approved the margarine bill which would remove the discriminatory tax versus butter.

Charlotte contractor and North Carolina Democratic national committeeman Joe Blythe, also a State Senator, was named DNC treasurer. He had recently asked for unity in the party despite divisions over civil rights and reiterated that entreaty to his fellow Southern Democrats.

In Los Angeles, a 13-year old boy was being questioned by police in the fatal shooting of a 14-year old schoolmate during a pretended holdup on the grounds of their junior high school.

In Shelby, N.C., the Police Chief reported that a warrant had been issued against a 25-year old wounded, medically-discharged veteran of the D-Day landings for allegedly stabbing his estranged wife the previous night in a theater in Shelby while they attended separately the film "Homecoming", starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner.

The man's wife was in "fairly good" condition after the stabbing. The man said that the hospital bombing scenes in the film had driven him "nuts". He then chased his wife into the balcony where he tackled her and stabbed her eight times, then stabbed himself in the chest three times. The man had been in a hospital during the war while it was bombed. An usher said the man had seen the movie previously and had offered tips to the ushers to tell him when his wife came to the theater. His condition was described as critical.

He was presently an asphalt inspector for the State Department of Highways.

On the editorial page, "For Four Years, and Six" renews the newspaper's endorsements of Charles Johnson for Governor and former Governor J. Melville Broughton for Senator in the upcoming Saturday primary—determinative of the November winner in the traditionally one-party state.

Governor Broughton would win the Senate race, only to die two months into office in March, 1949. UNC president Frank Porter Graham would be appointed by newly elected Governor Kerr Scott to succeed him. Senator Graham would be defeated in 1950, however, by Raleigh attorney Willis Smith, running a race-baiting campaign orchestrated by Jesse Helms.

Incumbent Senator William B. Umstead, who had served, notes the editorial, creditably since his appointment to succeed deceased Senator Josiah W. Bailey in December, 1946, would go on to be elected Governor in 1952, but would die in office in 1954, succeeded by Lieutenant Governor Luther Hodges. Before Governor Umstead would die, he would appoint State Supreme Court Justice Sam J. Ervin to the Senate seat of Senator Clyde Hoey following his death in the spring of 1954.

Governor Scott would be elected to the Senate following the death of Willis Smith in 1953, defeating his Umstead-appointed successor, Alton Lennon, but would also die in office in 1958. His successor, B. Everett Jordan, would be defeated in the 1972 Democratic primary by Congressman Nick Galifianakis, who would lose the general election to Mr. Helms.

Mr. Helms, however, did not represent the "party of Lincoln", though nominally a Republican.

Don't worry. It's all Greek.

"UN: 3—How To Strengthen It" finds that ERP was a first step toward making the U.N. stronger within its present framework. A second step was to strengthen the U.S. military. The third step would be to strengthen U.S. allies. The fourth step would be to promote association of like-minded states in the U.N., such as the Western European Union and the Organization of American States. The fifth step was the loan of 65 million dollars for the construction of the U.N. headquarters in New York on land donated by John D. Rockefeller, to be repaid from the regular U.N. budget, to which the U.S. contributed 40 percent annually.

The U.S. delegation supported each of these steps and they were backed by convincing arguments.

"A Bishop at the Age of 37" tells of Reverend M. George Henry of Charlotte's Protestant Episcopal Church, becoming the Episcopal bishop of the diocese of Western North Carolina. He had been born in Chapel Hill to a Latin professor father who was later registrar of the University, and had served in churches in several North Carolina cities, including Durham and Winston-Salem. It thinks his selection quite appropriate.

A piece from the Winston-Salem Sentinel, titled "There Are More Things..." tells of former Atlanta Mayor Roy LeCraw having gone looking for Presbyterian missionaries and discovered among the volunteers Dr. Sandy Marks of Wilmington, N.C., who was willing to give up a thriving dental practice to go to the Belgian Congo to train natives in the art of dentistry.

It finds the action laudable and not so foolish as people seeking material comforts might think. It ends with a quote from Hamlet: "There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in thy philosophy."

Heny Leader provides his synopsis of Governor Thomas Dewey, in a series of articles on the candidates. He was not a hail-fellow-well-met, preferred to leave his coat on, no matter how hot the weather. Neither did he kiss babies.

His father had helped to found the Republican Party of Owossa, Mich., where young Tom grew up. He had come of age respected in the community as an argumentative boy, but likable.

He irritated easily but no longer showed it as earlier in the current campaign. He had a flare for showmanship. Most of his addresses were prepared and he usually stuck to the script.

He was unduly cautious regarding appointments as Governor, having the State Police investigate each appointee, received criticism for the practice from civil libertarians.

He smoked, occasionally took a drink, and played poker and rummy once in awhile. But he was free from any public scandal during his tenure as District Attorney of Manhattan and five years as Governor.

The 1944 Republican nominee, friends said, would not be disappointed if he were not re-nominated in 1948.

Drew Pearson discusses first the margarine bill, released the previous month finally from committee in the House where it had been tied down by the butter interests for decades, to the floor for debate on whether to eliminate the discriminatory tax in favor of butter. The cottonseed lobby in the South had put the counter-heat on Congressmen to pass the bill and it had passed the House, was now before the Senate for consideration.

Presently, the debate had turned to the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill, which had passed the Senate and was then pigeonholed in the House Banking & Currency Committee. Its opponents relied on the real estate lobby for support. Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas of California had set about getting a discharge petition, requiring a simple majority of the House, to free the bill from committee, as had been done with margarine the previous month. House Minority Whip John McCormack had become the first member to sign the petition, followed by House Minority Leader Sam Rayburn, both not usually signing petitions. She had collected, in all, 125 names but the effort had then stalled. Only 15 of the 110 Southerners had signed. The names included future Ways & Means chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, James Morrison and Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Wright Patman of Texas.

The Southerners had signed the margarine petition, but that drive was led by an active lobby. This one was opposed by an active lobby. The supporters were veterans and housewives, largely unorganized.

Mr. Pearson reminds that nothing was more effective in fighting Communism than providing for low-cost housing.

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had promised Congress to hold up steel shipments to Saudi Arabia until it was determined by the Joint Chiefs whether a pipeline to the Mediterranean was truly necessary for American security. The Commerce Department also supported the delay. Regardless, Aramco was going to receive 16,000 tons of steel in mid-June for shipment to the Middle East. He notes that Dillon, Read, of which Secretary Forrestal had been a former partner, had done financing for some of the companies backing Aramco.

Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia wanted the Post Office to investigate whether anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith had violated postal regulations by circulating a document, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", which claimed that Jews had a master plan for world domination. He had mailed it to each member of Congress. Henry Ford had published the "Protocols" in the early Twenties. So had Adolf Hitler and the Czarist regime in Russia.

The Library of Congress had researched the "Protocols", however, and found them to be "rank and pernicious forgeries".

Marquis Childs tells of the Republican Congress being behind the protectionist days of even William McKinley at the turn of the century. For even President McKinley, the day before he was fatally shot, spoke at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 5, 1901 of the days of exclusivity having passed and the time of expansion of international trade being present, with reciprocal trade treaties being in "harmony with the spirit of the times". He favored reforming obsolete tariffs to revise trade and expand markets. At the time, the Senate was considering several trade treaties in seriatim.

A major revision had occurred when the Hull trade agreements act was passed in 1934, to remove the treaties from politics and place them in the hands of an inter-departmental committee which would consider the agreements in light of the nation's economy.

Now, the House wanted to return to the era of political logrolling with respect to these treaties. The Senate had the ball and needed to act to eliminate the one-year extension and Congressional oversight of the President in adjusting tariffs.

Mr. Childs favors open hearings before the Senate Finance Committee on the matter to inform the public of the issues at stake. On the outcome depended the success of ERP, as stated recently by Secretary of State Marshall, for the fact that Western Europe had come to rely on open trade with the U.S. The outcome would also determine whether the Republicans were capable of responsible leadership.

He concludes: "It is high time that the Republican Party caught up with William McKinley."

Samuel Grafton finds the Mundt-Nixon bill to be hearkening of an era not of security, as intended, but rather insecurity, the most insecure in American history, a time of the "peephole and chained door" form of security.

Representative Gerald Landis of Indiana had introduced an amendment to Taft-Hartley to allow employers to fire at will anyone who was a member of a subversive organization, as solely determined by the Attorney General. Conceivably, that might include labor unions as subversive organizations, if an Attorney General so decided.

"It is a security that puts its faith, not in social structure, not in precedent, not in continuity of a successful tradition, but in force alone, and, as such, it must end by peopling the world with a dozen unknown terrors for every one visible before."

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