Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Arab nations
accepted the U.N. four-week truce proposal for Palestine, which
included stoppage of arms shipments to both Arabs and Jews, but
"explained" that the Jewish demand that immigration
continue to Israel while the truce was in effect posed a peril, and
also stated that a permanent truce would not be possible as long as
Israel remained in existence or partition continued. It did not make
clear, however, whether the explanation was a condition for
acceptance of the truce. The U.N. had not yet set a cease-fire time.
Israel had already accepted the truce conditioned only on Arab
acceptance. Israel had set 3:00 a.m. as the time of ceasefire but
stated that they would continue firing if the Arabs did so.
The Arab Legion claimed that it had scattered an Israeli
attack force in Rumana, seven miles northwest of Jenin, and at Givat
Shaul, killing 100 Jews. It said that 80 additional Jews were killed
in Jerusalem. Marksmen of the Arab Legion killed 20 Jews attacking
the Zion, Jaffa and new gates of old Jerusalem the previous night
after midnight, presumably included in the report of 80 killed.
In London, the six-nation conference on the political and
economic future of Western Europe reported having reached agreement
on the "whole field" of recommendations after six weeks
of talks. The conference included the U.S., Britain, France, and the
Benelux countries. The recommendations included establishment of a
separate government for the Western zone of Germany early in 1949
and plans for creating an international control board for the
industrial Ruhr region of Germany. The report did not mention,
however, specific agreements, which would not be made public for a
couple of more weeks.
In Washington, more than 3,000 opponents of the Mundt-Nixon
bill, designed to curb Communism in the country, gathered at the
Capitol in protest. There was no disorder. The group had come from
New York and most were associated with the Committee for Democratic
Rights while others belonged to a pro-civil rights group.
Separate from the protest, former OPA head Leon Henderson of
the Americans for Democratic Action said that Communists secretly
hoped that the bill would pass to provide them political martyrdom.
He said that ADA viewed the bill as dangerous and urged the Senate
not to pass it.
The article, we note, represents the first time that
Congressman Richard Nixon got his name in a headline in The News.
It would not be the last.
A record peacetime Army and Air Force appropriation bill
passed the House, providing for 6.5 billion dollars for the 1948-49
fiscal year. Debate would occur the next day on a record peacetime
Navy appropriation for 3.6 billion. Less than two hours of floor
debate transpired on the Army bill after a report came from the
Appropriations Committee recommending it.
NBC offered to step away from the Voice of America and lease
its international radio stations to the Government for a dollar per
year following the controversy over some statements transmitted by
VOA under NBC control to Latin America. An executive at NBC blamed
the broadcasts in question on divided responsibility between the
State Department and the network. No English translation had been
made because of lack of funding. NBC thought that State was checking
the program script. He said that the writer and producer responsible
for the broadcasts had left the network. He stressed that only six
out of thousands of programs had been deemed objectionable.
The Federal District Court in Washington postponed a decision
until Friday on whether to grant the NLRB request for an injunction
requiring the UMW to bargain with the Southern Coal Producers
Association, which John L. Lewis had refused to recognize as a
group, though willing to bargain with each operator separately.
Another coal strike was possible unless a new contract could be
formed before June 30 when the present contract expired.
The Columbia River flood crest bore down on the Clatskanie
area near Portland, Ore., as it was just three inches below the top
of the dike and moving higher. Volunteers were sandbagging the dike
to raise its top. The dike was crucial to protect Portland from
flooding. The river was moving seaward, as towns upstream were
trying to recover after inundation.
In New York, a man read of the plight of an Army private who
was trying to marry his French fiancee who had just come from France
but was confined to Ellis Island for want of a $500 bond. The
stranger put up the bond, bought their wedding ring and vacated his
apartment in Manhattan to allow them to have a place to live after
their marriage. He said that he wanted them to be happy.
Martha Azer London of The News tells of Homer, purple
grackle, who was getting good marks in school. The teacher of
Homer's sixth grade classroom had received him after a friend saved
his life when a bullfrog almost devoured him. The boys and girls of
the classroom liked Homer and fed him scrambled eggs with a tweezer
and water with an eye dropper. Homer liked that and began flying
around the room. He liked the children and did not want to leave the
classroom even when the windows were open. He even perched on the
sill one day and looked at the sky but did not fly away, much to the
relief of the children. Each weekend, a different student took Homer
home. With school ending the following day, the teacher was going to
take care of him during the summer vacation. Homer, concludes Ms. London,
was a bird. A picture of Homer with a student is included.
But just wait until Homer calls all of his friends next fall
for the harvest season. You will regret ever inviting Homer into
your midst.
On the editorial page, "Notes for a Letter to Stalin" discusses Drew Pearson's open letter to Josef Stalin of the previous
day, in which he had suggested to the Soviet Prime Minister the
creation of a Friendship Train for Russian children, similar to
those which had been formed to supply food and clothing for the
winter to Italy and France in November and December. The object
would be to show that both the people of Russia and the U.S. did not
want war.
The piece suggests that, as Stalin had replied to the letter
of Henry Wallace proposing a common ground for peace discussion, so,
too, might he respond to the Pearson letter. But the piece thinks
that should he do so, he should be aware that his response to Mr.
Wallace had the effect of chilling relations with the American
people who believed he was bypassing the Government for purposes of
propaganda as a diversion to ERP. It points out that the Russians
had known for years, with lend-lease, Yalta, Potsdam, and UNRRA aid
that America preferred peace and friendship with the Russians. It
also makes the point that time for a positive demonstration of a
change in Russia's policy was running out, that numerous
opportunities for cooperative action at the U.N. had been ignored.
It concludes that in light of that record, friendship gestures
conveyed in open letters were out of order.
"The Lady Needs Scrubbing" tells of an Interior
Department appropriations bill for $500,000, to clean up the Statue
of Liberty and Bedloes Island on which it was situated, calling
attention to the facts that the statue and the island were in great
need of sprucing up after 62 years since the gift from France. It
favors the beauty treatment.
"The Armed Services an Opportunity" urges
volunteering for the armed forces to obtain a good education and
personalized experience. It points out that eighty percent of the
current U.S. budget was devoted to defense or payment for past wars,
that 85 percent of the budgets since 1915 had been so devoted.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled
"South's Problem No. 1", remarks on an article in the
Baltimore Evening Sun, "Conserving the Mental Top
Soil", by former News Editor and Associate Editor Burke
Davis, saying that the young men of the South were one of the
region's chief exports, heading north and west to greener pastures
for jobs in industry.
More than 1.5 million Southerners had left the region since
1940, even if some of them would return from war work. North
Carolina shared in the problem.
The answer, it posits, was to provide greater economic
opportunities to hold people in the region. Increased
industrialization was a start but greater diversification was
needed. The new business administration schools at UNC and the
University of Virginia would help.
Drew Pearson tells of President Truman having informed
General MacArthur that while he was free to come home anytime, the
President would not order him home. General MacArthur had remarked
that if he were ordered home, he would come to National Airport,
drive to the White House, consult with the President, and then turn
around and return to Tokyo. When hearing of the remark, the
President had said that if he believed that the General would follow
that itinerary, he would order him home right away.
The Foundation for Economic Education, led by Leonard Reed,
was busy trying to persuade Congressmen who were isolationist in
tendency to cut appropriations for ERP. The Foundation prepared
speeches for the Congressmen, whom he lists, and they had been
giving those speeches, with identical paragraphs included.
John L. Lewis appeared to have mended fences with his former
bitter enemy Ray Edmundson, giving the latter a job as
director of District 50 of UMW in Kansas City. A political deal had
to have been made to effect such a change of heart in Mr. Lewis,
probably involving Governor Dwight Green of Illinois, an ally of Mr.
Edmundson. It suggested that Mr. Lewis would support Speaker of the
House Joe Martin for the presidency and Governor Green for the
vice-presidency on the Republican ticket. Mr. Martin had urged the coal
settlement regarding pension demands by the miners the previous
month.
Representative "Runt" Bishop of Illinois
remarked, upon hearing that the crippled Democratic House doorkeeper
had been fired, that he would have fired the man a long time
earlier. But Representative Bishop did not know that the doorkeeper
had been doing odd jobs for the Congressman for free, including
having taken home 7,000 envelopes to address after hours.
Ovid Martin of the Associated Press tells of the prospect of
over-abundance of potatoes in the country in the ensuing four months
as the spuds headed to market, necessitating for the third year in a
row that the Government buy the surplus. The cost during the
previous two years had exceeded 125 million dollars. Most of the
surplus was expected from California, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The farm price supports which guaranteed 90 percent of parity
would expire at the end of the year. It was feared that the potato
surplus could cause Congress to renew supports at significantly
lower parity levels.
Some of the purchased potatoes would go to feed livestock or
to alcohol production and by-products, but some would have to be
dumped in all likelihood as they were perishable.
The Government had prevailed on farmers to cut production,
but better fertilizers and soil tillage methods had produced the
surpluses.
James Marlow tells of a study made by the House Foreign
Affairs Committee of 506 Communist leaders outside the Western
Hemisphere, finding that the average age was 46, many having not
been workers, and twenty percent having university level education.
They included teachers, architects, engineers, lawyers, doctors, and
economists. Nearly half had been imprisoned, many more than once.
Many had been sentenced to death. About a quarter had been active as
labor organizers, a quarter had been guerrilla fighters against
Nazis or others, and about a third had been Communist journalists.
Seventy-five percent had been in the party since 1927 and more than
half since 1922. Twenty percent were members of the Cabinet of
various governments and 40 percent were members of national
legislatures.
The report found that few groups in history had conformed so
closely to party doctrine and strategy.
The report showed that the Communist leadership was
experienced and knowledgeable, not callow youth. The same, according
to Crane Brinton in his 1938 book, The Anatomy of a Revolution,
had been true of the Jacobins in the French Revolution. The Jacobin
was of an average age of 42 and also from the middle classes.
He concludes by imparting that Vladimir Lenin was 47 in 1917
at the time of the Russian Revolution whereas Robespierre had been
in his early thirties at the outset of the French Revolution.
Stewart Alsop, in Berlin, tells of every new arrival to the
city remarking of a sense of unreality as the American sector
proceeded within the undamaged suburbs as any American suburb might,
with hot dogs and Cokes plentifully in evidence, while the older
part of the city remained a complete ruin. But it was believed that
if war were to break out, it might have its start in Berlin for the
fact that the Soviets were determined to force the West out of the
city. Many observers believed that the Russians were prepared to
risk a great deal to accomplish that goal.
One reason for the adamance was that Western influence
managed to find its way beyond the iron curtain into the Soviet
sector. Another was that the Soviet plan to revive a controlled form
of German nationalism designed to bring all of Germany into the
Soviet sphere could not take place as long as the Western nations
were present.
The Russians had formed the Nationalist Bourgeois Party,
openly a haven for former Nazis. The primary Soviet instrument for
encouraging nationalism was the People's Congress, designed to
become a Soviet shadow government and intended to become the
official government when the Western nations could be forced to
leave.
While there was no official policy in place urging
evacuation, the effort to push the West out was evident through the
blocking of supplies into and out of the American sector of the
city, cutting off shipments and stopping convoys from Berlin to the
west.
So far, the effort had not been successful and so the
attitude of the Russians had to be to up the ante, either by force,
inevitably precipitating war with the West, and so improbable, or by cutting
the civilian supply lines to Berlin from the West—to take
place in fact before month's end. The conventional thinking was that
the blockade would be based on some fortuitous pretext such as the
failure of the Magdeburg Bridge over the Elbe to operate. Whatever the
cause, the two million people in the Western sectors of Berlin would
soon face starvation, dependent as they were on supplies from the
West. Americans in the sectors were already supplied by air but the
Germans depended on ground and canal transportation.
The Russian goal would be to create food riots among the
Germans to allow fertile ground for Soviet propaganda against the
West, offering to feed the Berliners provided the Western powers
evacuated.
The Berlin Airlift of 1948 ultimately would circumvent this
effort.
A letter writer urges that some of the American aid to
Britain was going to support King Abdullah's Arab Legion, fighting
against Israel. He urges lifting the arms embargo against Palestine,
primarily harmful to Israel.
A letter from the secretary of the North Carolina Optometric
Society thanks both The News and The Charlotte Observer
for their support of its recent meeting in Charlotte.
