Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the French
National Assembly approved the six-nation plan to set up a
semi-independent government of Western Germany, to internationalize
the Ruhr industrial region, and provide for occupation of Germany
until peace was deemed secure by the signatories. During debate on
the measure, both the far right and the Communists in France accused
the Government of Premier Robert Schuman of not protecting French
interests. The other five nations, the U.S., Britain, and the
Benelux countries, had already approved the plan, formulated at the
recent London conference. The Russians had been invited to place
Eastern Germany under the same plan but had thus far rejected the
notion.
The reconciliation committee of the House and Senate began
debate on the cuts to foreign aid. The Senate bill had restored the
bulk of the billion dollars cut by the House appropriations measure.
The very fate of the world hangs in the balance on the
outcome, with adjournment for the conventions set for Saturday. We
hope they find common ground by then.
Where's the Gipper when we need him? Oh, that's right. He's
for Truman and that civil rights guy Humphrey of Minneapolis.
The House voted to place the draft on standby until 1949, by
delaying registration until January 31. The House also refused to
provide a blanket exemption to World War II veterans, but did exempt
those with a year or more of service and allowed those with more
than 90 days of service to be exempt by joining a National Guard
reserve unit.
The Congress, for the third time in three days, overrode the
veto of the President, the latest being on the Bulwinkle bill, which
allowed railroad rate agreements to be outside the purview of the
antitrust laws. Earlier in the week, the Congress overrode vetoes on
social security and the bill transferring the U.S. Employment
Service from the Labor Department to the Federal Security Agency. It
marked the first time in history that a Congress had overridden
three vetoes in such short order.
A United Air Lines plane, bound from San Diego to New York,
crashed into high tension wires near Mt. Carmel, Pa., reportedly
killing all 41 persons aboard.
Tom Fesperman of The News reports from Rock Hill,
S.C., that the investigation into the shooting murder of a local
businessman had focused on a 34-year old suspect, a truck driver and
salesman employee of the victim's fuel oil business. It was believed
that the murder had taken place in the victim's warehouse during the
weekend of June 6. Arrested at 8:00 p.m. the previous night, the
suspect was grilled non-stop by detectives until 3:30 a.m., and at
one point was confronted with the wooden crate in which the
deceased's decomposed body was discovered in a creek bed, with the
smell of the corpse still emanating from it. No confession, however,
had been signed, despite the plain coercion.
Near Spencer Mountain, N.C., Sheriff's deputies were summoned
to a home the previous midnight to find a six-year old girl shot to
death, with eight bullet wounds, and her mother unconscious from six
gunshot wounds. The bodies were discovered by the husband-father and
his brother. No charges had been filed, pending investigation by the
coroner.
Former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen conceded that he
would be in third place on the first ballot at the GOP convention
set to start Monday at Philadelphia, but predicted again that he
would win on the ninth ballot.
President Truman began his return trip by special train from
his home in Independence, Mo., to Washington, continuing to take to
task the 80th Congress. At Sedalia, Mo., he said that the
Congress had "done a grand job to the people, not for them."
He would again pass through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio as he
returned. Margaret Truman, who had made the cross-country trip with
her father, stayed in Independence with her mother Bess. She
declined comment when asked whether she had been the "number
one" attraction with the crowds, at every supermarket parking
lot.
A recent poll by Fortune Magazine, as explained by
pollster Elmo Roper,showed President Truman nearly at the
nadir of his popularity, receiving only 33.7 percent support in the
election, above only an April poll, in which he had received 32.1
percent support. Based on the poll results, he would be beaten by
Thomas Dewey, Harold Stassen or General Eisenhower, would have a
close race with Senator Arthur Vandenberg and would probably beat
Senator Robert Taft. General Eisenhower would also likely beat any
Republican candidate were he to be nominated by the Democrats.
Mr. Roper points out that the sample was taken before the
President's cross-country tour.
On the editorial page, "America's Test in the Draft" agrees with former House Ways & Means Chairman Robert Doughton
of North Carolina that the peacetime draft was "undemocratic
and un-American" but disagrees that it was, as a temporary
two-year measure, "unnecessary". The present
international situation was a continuation of the two world wars and
so it was not peacetime in the true sense of the term.
Congress had faced the dual tasks of establishing ERP and
military preparedness as means to establish stability in Europe and
thereby convince Soviet Russia not to engage in expansionist
tactics. A third element of U.S. foreign policy was the
strengthening of the U.N., as it was necessary to keep America
strong as the U.N. matured.
While not enough had been done by the Administration and
Congress to effect peace, the policy being pursued had the support
of most of the people and nothing better would come along anytime
soon. The draft was a vital part of that policy to maintain military
preparedness.
"GOP Never Forgets or Changes" finds no
justification in the North Carolina Republicans' contention that
their fight against Judge Wilson Warlick's nomination as the
Federal District Court Judge for the Western District was no more
partisan than had been his predecessor's efforts in 1919. They
recalled, in elephantine fashion, that Judge E. Yates Webb, who had
retired recently, had been chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
at the time, which passed a bill to allow the appointment by
President Wilson of an Assistant Judge to then sitting Western
District Judge James Boyd, to become Judge upon the latter's
retirement. Judge Boyd was in poor health and needed an assistant
and Representative Webb subsequently became that Assistant,
eventually becoming Judge on his retirement. It points out that he
was confirmed by a Republican Senate.
The piece finds both political parties guilty of partisan
maneuvering in such matters but believes that did not excuse the
shameless effort to sidetrack the nomination of an able and
estimable jurist for purely partisan reasons, so that the next
President, expected to be a Republican, could appoint the successor.
"Sergeant Gardner on Duty" recognizes, upon his
untimely death, Charlotte Police Sergeant R. C. Gardner for his 40
years of service without a blemish. He had always been faithful to
duty and had been stricken while on duty the previous week, had been
known to his fellow officers simply as "the Sergeant"
during his long tenure since 1908.
A piece without a by-line, based on figures supplied by the
Institute of Life Insurance in its bulletin Money Matters, looks at the increased agricultural efficiency, with production
having increased 29 percent between 1939 and 1945, in large part the
result of increased mechanization and development of better farming
methods through science.
Drew Pearson looks at Senator Arthur Vandenberg as a
candidate for the GOP nomination. In 1936, Col. Robert McCormick had
sought him out for the vice-presidential spot on the Alf Landon
ticket, but Senator Vandenberg, then an isolationist, abruptly asked
Col. McCormick how he would like to be vice-president of anything.
Eventual Secretary of the Navy under FDR, Chicago publisher Frank
Knox, became the GOP vice-presidential nominee in that landslide FDR
election.
Senator Vandenberg had been a dark horse candidate in each of
1936, 1940 and 1944, had wanted the presidency in earlier days. He
could probably have the nomination in 1948 and be President if he
would let his friends work for him. But he would not.
He had been pompous earlier in his career, nearly losing
re-election to the Senate in 1934, and had learned wisdom from his
many mistakes during the course of his political maturation. He had
once courted the support of reactionary Gerald L. K. Smith, and as
late as 1943 at the Mackinac Island GOP strategy conference had
favored a strong isolationist platform and General MacArthur for the
1944 nomination. In 1939, he had downplayed the reality of the war
at its start after Germany invaded Poland. He had favored as much as V.
M. Molotov the unilateral veto at the U.N. Charter Conference in
1945.
Senator Vandenberg in his present incarnation as the chief
battler for a bipartisan foreign policy had been a product of the
atomic age. He had become the most influential leader of the
Republicans and the most influential spokesman in the nation on
foreign policy.
On domestic matters, he took his cues usually from the GM
clique dominant in Michigan or Arthur Summerfield, GOP national
committeeman and president of the Detroit Auto Dealers.
The primary concern of the GOP leaders insofar as the Senator
being the nominee were twofold, first, his age of 64 and his health,
and, second, whether he could be controlled. On the latter point, he
would be controllable on domestic matters but would be his own
person on foreign policy. His health had slowed him down but he
remained vital and was the same age as the President.
Mr. Pearson says that he was convinced that the Senator did
not wish to be President at this point but that he would serve if
nominated. He concludes that, regardless of the outcome of the
convention, he was one of the great statesmen of the times and the
most important contemporary influence on foreign policy.
Marquis Childs finds that in the scramble at the last minute
by the Republican Congress to accomplish business, Senator Taft was
leading the charge for housing, education, and health, not unmindful
of his political fortunes in the coming Republican convention. Yet,
he was proving powerless to have his way, despite being the
ostensible Republican leader in the Senate.
The aid to education bill was an example, which had been
bottled up in the House, despite Senator Taft's campaign manager,
Representative Clarence Brown of Ohio, being a member of the Rules
Committee holding it up. It raised suspicions of Mr. Taft playing
politics. He was able to place blame for the impasse on Speaker Joe
Martin, eager to show his independence from Senator Taft and his
opposition to "socialistic measures", education and
health, opposed by his own wealthy backers for the nomination.
Yet, Senator Taft had moved in the Senate to cut a billion
dollars from ERP, pleasing to Col. Robert McCormick, isolationist
publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
Richard H. Rovere, in Harper's, had said, in a
sympathetic overall appraisal, that Senator Taft would not likely
supply the international leadership necessary to heal the rift
between East and West.
But Senator Taft probably knew more about government than any
President since Woodrow Wilson, and likely in more detail and
practical terms than the professorial Mr. Wilson.
The Senator had been too blunt in his career to win the
popular acclaim which Harold Stassen had garnered in the campaign.
Taft-Hartley had earned him few friends among labor.
He was, however, a man of integrity and, he concludes, the
Republicans could do worse as a nominee.
Samuel Grafton finds the 1948 campaign returning to the days
of old when Republicans were perennially the shoo-in to win the
White House without having to campaign on argument, without having
to face a Roosevelt or make ideological concessions to the
popularity of the New Deal.
Yet, this return to "the age of innocence" was
peculiar in that the GOP intended to win, in part, on the basis of
the business boom, which, according to the New York Journal of
Commerce was the result of the Treasury's easy credit policy,
the Federal armaments and foreign aid programs, and the "wholesale
use of government credit to finance new construction", all
Government programs.
So, the Republicans would be claiming that they had brought
the country back to traditional conservatism without resort to New
Deal-type measures, when the Government in 1948 would be spending 40
billion dollars against the highest FDR budget during the Depression
of 9 billion.
The GOP had pretended that liberalism no longer existed and
that it never had been a vital force in the country. And it had done
so under the cover of this remarkable 40-billion dollar budget. He
concludes that the cost of getting rid of liberalism, therefore, was
roughly five times the cost of maintaining it under FDR.
The Republicans would argue that the difference was that the
budget was now balanced. Yet, it would be an embarrassing argument
to make, as the New Dealers had maintained that the way to a
balanced budget was to spend enough to stimulate growth and income
in the country. The GOP had never accepted that precept during the
Roosevelt era.
Mr. Grafton concludes that this was one of the most expensive
returns to simplicity in all history.
