Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Jews of the Irgun
organization claimed the capture of an Arab village, Yehudia, twelve
miles east of Tel Aviv, which had blocked the way to Lydda airport,
where most air operations had ceased. Arabs were attacking Kfar
Etzion, south of Jerusalem. Other skirmishes also dotted Palestine.
King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan sent a message to the U.N.,
stating that the fighting in Palestine would reach a "pinnacle
of horror" after the end of the British Mandate on May 15,
promising intervention to halt the "butchery" of the
Arabs by the Jews.
Members of Congress of both parties appeared before the House
Foreign Affairs Committee recommending revision to the U.N. to make
it stronger, with or without Russia.
A bill was approved by the House Rules Committee which would
make criminal the revelation of confidential Congressional committee
information.
In Ohio, the Republican presidential primary proceeded,
pitting Senator Taft against former Minnesota Governor Harold
Stassen, vying for 23 of the state's 53 delegates to the convention,
the remaining 30 running unopposed as already aligned with Senator
Taft. Turnout appeared heavy.
In Alabama, a Democratic primary was taking place to select
26 delegates from a slate of 84, 29 of whom had stated their intent
to quit the convention if it nominated the President.
Contests were also occurring in Florida and Indiana.
Georgia had selected Democratic convention delegates the day
before and left them uninstructed.
Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota stated that hearings would
begin May 24 on revision of Taft-Hartley to make it stronger in
dealing with strikes.
In Chicago, a mediation conference with the three railroad
brotherhoods threatening strike on May 11 ended with no prospect of
resolution of the dispute over increased wages. The railroads were
willing to give no more than the 15.5 cents per hour recommended by
the President's fact-finding board. The three brotherhoods were
asking for an increase of 30 percent or at least $3 per day.
Eighteen other rail unions had accepted the board recommendation the
previous fall.
An AFL representative criticized an AMA doctor for breaking a
tacit agreement not to inject politics into the meeting of the
National Health Assembly, called upon to provide advice to the
President for a 10-year national health program. The doctor,
Morris Fishbein, had called national health insurance "peasant
medicine".
In Prattville, Ala., twelve miles north of Montgomery, a
tornado blew down a school, hurting several of its students.
Three were killed and 53 injured in McKinney and Princeton,
Texas, by a tornado the previous day.
In Nuremberg, the dentist of Adolf Hitler said that he was
certain that the Russians had Hitler's jaw, identified by the
dentist's former assistant, in the custody of the Russians. While
she could not make a positive identification for access to only some
of the X-rays, he was convinced by a statement in the article
concerning the matter which said that old-fashioned dental work had
been employed, a type of bridgework he said that he had used to make
Hitler twelve upper false teeth in 1934. He invited the Russians to
show him the jaw so that he could quickly confirm the
identification.
In Youngstown, O., Jesse James was robbed by a woman after he
had visited a couple of taverns with her and a man. While the man
held Jesse, the woman rifled his pockets, taking $100.
On the editorial page, "Hypocrisy in Taylor's Case" comments on the arrest of Senator Glen Taylor in Birmingham,
Alabama, for violation of the local segregation ordinance, finds it
as the local police spokesman had described it, for the purpose of
getting headlines for the Wallace-Taylor candidacy.
Henry Wallace made political capital out of the arrest as he
spoke in Kansas City, calling it an example of the hypocrisy of
spending billions for defense abroad while freedom was being
trampled at home.
The piece instead finds the hypocrisy to belong to Mr.
Wallace and Senator Taylor for promoting "social revolution"
in the name of "peace and prosperity". Most people, it
opines, would lose hope in having rapprochement with Russia if it
could only come through discord at home.
The Birmingham ordinance, it urges, was on the books to
harass outside agitators as Senator Taylor, and to exploit it was
demagogy.
"It is a measure of their extremity that they must
depend on such incidents to attract public attention to the Third
Party."
Hogwash. Perhaps, if the editors had been more familiar with
Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor and the dog-and-firehose
tactics which would make this white trash reprobate scalawag
notorious across the nation by the early 1960's, they would
have thought differently of the act by Senator Taylor, honorable in
all respects to call attention to such white trash dictators, little
Hitlers.
Whoever wrote this garbage should have visited Birmingham
before speaking out of turn as Pavlov's Dog, characteristic of the press of 1948 regarding the Wallace-Taylor ticket.
"Dewey's Warning on Red Hunt" agrees with Thomas
Dewey in his advice in Oregon that the attempt in Congress to outlaw
the Communist Party would only drive it underground and make it more
pernicious. Mr. Dewey deemed the effort unconstitutional and
undemocratic.
But Governor Dewey also spoke favorably of the bill sponsored
by Representative Karl Mundt which would require registration of all
Communist Party members and Communist front organizations, while
making the officers of the Party subject to criminal prosecution.
The Mundt bill was guilty of the same vices which the efforts to
outlaw the Party were. It could be extended to harass liberals and
New Dealers as sympathizers.
The piece finds the Mundt bill more disturbing therefore than
outlawing the Communist Party outright.
"Myrtle Beach Gets Ready" tells of the annual
decision in North Carolina families arising as to whether to visit
the beach or the mountains. It comments that datelines from Myrtle
Beach appeared often in the newspaper because it was deemed as
important to local residents as news within Charlotte. It finds no
better choice of vacation spots than the Smokies or Myrtle Beach.
A piece from the New York Herald Tribune, titled
"Marriage in Moscow", tells of the Soviet Union having
decreed that weddings, too drab and proper, should be accompanied by
"cavortings, giddiness, and tarantara."
The wedding was the second deterrent to marriage, the first
being the inability to find a willing partner. It suggests that the
Soviets might be starting therefore at the wrong end of the marital union,
that their effort should begin with enlivening divorce ceremonies,
to deter the ending of the union.
Sumner Welles, former Undersecretary of State until August,
1943, tells of former Secretary of State Cordell Hull relating in a
syndicated installment of his memoirs of having taken great
satisfaction in blocking a proposal of Mr. Welles made in 1937 for
an international conference, an idea supported at the time by FDR.
Mr. Hull had opposed the conference for his belief that it
would have weakened the democracies. The idea was finally killed
when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rejected the idea, a decision which Winston
Churchill had recently stated in his memoirs to have been discarding
of "the last frail chance" to save the world from war.
Thereafter, Hitler was able to take over Austria through
Anschluss, the last hope of preventing war being thereby
lost.
Mr. Welles concludes by asking rhetorically whether, if there had
been only a small chance of success in October, 1937 to avert war
with a conference, it had not been worth taking the risk.
Drew Pearson finds the rumor that Eleanor Roosevelt would
oppose the President's nomination in June, if true, to be
devastating to the President, as he had appointed her as a U.N.
delegate with the idea in mind that she would help him be nominated.
He next tells of Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma having as
one of his cotton trading surrogates Robert Harriss, who had handled
Father Coughlin's silver speculation during the Thirties. Mr.
Harriss had been able to obtain advance copy of the speeches of
Senator Thomas, affecting commodities prices, and then invest
accordingly.
Senator Taft's policies were not that popular in his home
state of Ohio, possibly influencing the outcome of this date's Ohio
primary.
Senator Forrest Donnell of Missouri began hearings on
tidelands oil. Senator Donnell believed it belonged to the Federal
Government, as determined by the Supreme Court. He was investigating
the influence of big oil money on politics. The same pressure lobby
which had prevailed in making loans to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia
and was responsible for reversing the partition policy in Palestine
was now seeking to have the tidelands oil reserve turned over
legislatively to the coastal states.
Standard Oil of California and Texaco went hand-in-hand with
this lobbying group.
He notes that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was
responsible for convincing the President to reverse the stance on
partition and that Mr. Forrestal's former Wall Street firm once
handled the Aramco interests.
Stewart Alsop, in Rome, finds that with the Communists in
Italy isolated finally, ERP should have a fair test, though
nationalists and conservatives stated, with some pleasure, that it
was bound to fail. The key would be emigration of Italians to avoid
the problems with ever-increasing population at a rate of 500,000
per year. Premier Alicide De Gasperi hoped to find living
accommodations for 200,000 Italians abroad. Millions of workers were
able to work only 20 to 24 hours per week for want of full-time
jobs.
Italian exports had been cut short by the war and its
aftermath. ERP presented a means of postponing collapse for four
years. But the American experts maintained that Italy could recover,
depending on Italians themselves. Inflation had been brought under
control and production was up, reconstruction underway. Italians
were eager to work.
The conviction was growing that Italy, France, and the rest
of Western Europe could only recover permanently by means of
economic unity, finding incipient expression of that desire in the
recent formation of the Western European Union.
He concludes that ERP had at least provided the hope for
recovery and the glue by which the WEU could begin to prosper.
Samuel Grafton finds American opinion in favor of the U.N.
roaring at Russia as a lion but also coddling of the Arabs for their oil,
throwing away American prestige in the latter enterprise by the
reversal on the partition of Palestine.
Some of the same ambiguity was evident with respect to
Western Europe. On the one hand, America wanted Western Europe
strong through the Marshall Plan to withstand Soviet aggression,
while on the other, there was concern in the House about sending too
much agricultural machinery and newsprint to Western Europe.
Hovering beneath this ambiguity was concern over whether to
trust the U.N. or Western Europe to maintain security against
Russia, whether to take the Arab oil and keep American machinery and
otherwise retreat into a form of isolationism.
The man seeking peace, he concludes, was "secure,
precise, and practical", avoiding the dichotomism of the time.
A Quote of the Day: "Knitting, somebody argues, is to a woman what a cigar is to a man. However, it might be pointed out that the ladies don't leave their dropped stitches all over the living-room floor." —Roanoke Times
Apart from the error of starting a sentence with "however", it is not, however, necessarily true.