The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 4, 1948

THREE EDITORIALS

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.

Serves him right for robbing all those trains.

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.

Not necessarily true.

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.

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