Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Southern
Democrats, led by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, began a
filibuster of the anti-poll tax legislation, the first of the civil
rights bills presented to the floor in the special session which
began the previous Monday. The Southerners, through Senator Richard
Russell of Georgia, thus far denied that they were beginning a
filibuster, saying they were informing the country of the nature of
the bill. Senator Stennis called it unconstitutional. The bill was
submitted to the floor by Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska. It
would ban the poll taxes still extant in seven Southern states and
New Hampshire.
A potential deal with the Southerners, whereby the
House-passed bill would be altered to become a proposed amendment to
the Constitution and the anti-poll tax provision would be the only
part of the civil rights program brought up during the special
session, failed to reach agreement. Senator Wherry said that he
still wanted to bring the anti-lynching and FEPC bills to the floor.
Senator Taft said that the Republicans would undertake every
parliamentary effort available to avoid filibuster and pass the
civil rights laws.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of Britain stated to Commons
that the Government was considering a halt to its military
demobilization program because of the tension between the West and
Russia regarding Berlin. The program had reduced manpower at the
rate of 20,000 per month.
The Big Three ambassadors to Moscow were shortly expected to
approach Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov with a plan to end the
blockade of Berlin, based on a plan of U.S. Ambassador Walter Bedell
Smith. It was hoped that the talks would lead to a four-power
conference in Paris in September.
In Nuremberg, a U.S. military tribunal acquitted all 24
directors of the I. G. Farben chemical combine for plotting and
waging aggressive war, but convicted nine for looting countries
overrun by Germany, specifically, France, Poland, Norway, and Russia. Findings on
two additional counts of crimes against humanity would be determined
the following day. The decisions followed an eleven-month trial. The
court found that the directors knew too little about the plans of
the Nazis for waging aggressive war to make them culpable.
The verdict came a day after a massive explosion of
undetermined origin killed at least 300 at the I. G. Farben plant in
Ludwigshafen.
Food prices, especially meat, showed a drop, attributed to
boycotts by housewives. The Dun & Bradstreet wholesale food
price index fell 12 cents since the previous week and 18 cents from
its all-time high of $7.36 two weeks earlier. But that represented
only 2.5 percent of the total of wholesale prices of 31 foods in
general use. Some food prices continued to rise, notably eggs,
flour, peas, potatoes, and hogs.
Cigarettes rose a penny per pack retail and zinc and lead
also rose in price, to name but three poisons.
The President provided to Congress the Administration draft
of the proposed anti-inflation bill, which included provision for a
small OPA, with a goal of pushing back prices to those of November,
1947, at which point the President had called a special session and presented
price control legislation. Republicans and Democrats alike expressed
the belief that the bill was doomed from the inception.
DNC treasurer Joe Blythe of Charlotte said that the
Democratic Party was not broke, as reported. The parties were
limited to three million dollars in expenditures and he believed
that the Democrats would reach that limit by election day.
Contributions, he said, had exceeded expectations.
Harold Stassen, former Minnesota Governor and candidate for
the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, was named president
of the University of Pennsylvania. At 41, he was the youngest
president in the history of the University.
Near Shanghai, a C-46 transport plane of the Chennault lines
crashed, killing 19 persons aboard, all except one, the American
pilot, being Chinese soldiers. It was the first crash of a plane
owned by retired U.S. Maj. General Claire Chennault.
In North Carolina, 39 new cases of polio were reported,
bringing the record total for the year to 1,037, 622 of which had
been reported during the month of July.
In Smithfield, N.C., a tobacconist was jailed for allegedly
murdering his wife the previous night with a shotgun, following by a
week and a half their separation. He confessed to the crime.
On the editorial page, "The President Shows His Hand" comments on the notion that the Truman Administration was running
out of talent and ideas, with Secretary of State Marshall and
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, a Republican, being the only
remaining members of national stature, the rest being leftovers and
Missourians. It finds that the President's program to combat inflation was more
of the same recipe which had not worked in the past, was hopelessly
outdated, in some respects a program to maintain high prices.
Experience during the war with the excess profits tax, which
he sought to revive, was that it had the effect of raising prices as
it encouraged profligate spending by corporations after they reached
their profit limit, resulting in extravagance and higher prices.
High taxes were responsible for the high prices and so it made
little sense to add more taxes.
As to his proposal for consumer credit controls, that applied
to consumer goods rather than the primary source of the high cost of
living, food.
The proposed Federal Reserve regulations on bank credit,
limiting the amount of funds a bank could lend and the purposes for
the loans, would do little as the banks were more conservative than
the Government in spending money.
The proposal to authorize regulation of speculation on
commodities would not remedy the goad for the speculation,
Government subsidies on commodities maintaining them at 90 percent
of parity, keeping prices artificially high and thus stimulating
speculation.
Allocation and inventory controls of scarce commodities were
useful in regulating business. Proposed rationing might not have to
be used, as conceded by the President. It was thrown in for good
measure.
Rent control, still in effect, would be enhanced under the
President's program, with added enforcement. The piece concedes that
such would be salutary in light of the housing shortage, provided
rents were allowed to increase to reasonable levels, in line with
new building costs.
The President had failed to provide a comprehensive program,
however, including limits on wages, indicating that prices under the
program would remain stagnant. He urged that wages be paid from high
corporate profits, but such was an unrealistic expectation.
It concludes that it was a "weak exhibition by a weak
President, hardly worth the interruption of Congressional
vacations."
"Kefauver's Fight Against Crump" tells of
Congressman Estes Kefauver, running for the Senate in Tennessee,
showing that Boss Ed Crump of Memphis was losing his grip, at age
72, on local and state politics. The gubernatorial challenger to the
Crump machine in the August 5 primary was Chancellor Gordon
Browning, former Governor ten years earlier.
Progressive Congressman Kefauver, completing his fourth term
in the House, represented the new leadership in the Democratic
Party. He had led the movement for reorganization of Congress,
including the elimination of unnecessary committees and revision of
seniority rules regarding chairs, putting forth his recommendations
in his book Twentieth Century Congress. He was strongly in
favor of TVA, campaigning against the opposition to it by Boss Crump
and both Senators, Kenneth McKellar and Tom Stewart, the latter
being one of the opponents in the primary, along with a circuit
judge from Memphis to whom Boss Crump gave his support.
Forecasts suggested a victory for Mr. Kefauver—who would win
and go on to be the 1956 vice-presidential nominee, narrowly
defeating Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for the
nomination in an open convention, running with Governor Adlai
Stevenson of Illinois.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "Blue
Sky", celebrates the blue sky as the "blue of infinity"
without illusion. "Blue light is there, the blue end of the
spectrum filtered out of the sun's rays by dust particles that float
high in the upper atmosphere." Above it was a deep purplish
gray.
"Clear the sky and look up to the depths of infinity,
and there it is, the blue that is healing to the heart and soothing
to the senses."
Which poses the philosophical question of the day: How do we
know that it is infinite when we cannot conceptualize of any such
thing? save by way of a circle or, likewise, in the case of the
mathematical symbol, to avoid confusion with nullity, a figure eight on its side. Thus, if one,
theoretically, were to venture far enough into space, would one
eventually and necessarily, to adhere to notions of rationality,
come back to the place of origin? If there is an end to it, what
lies on the other side of the wall?
When we refer to conceptualization of infinity, we mean to exclude mere analogy as a reference point to some vague idea of infinity or simple substitution of terms, such as eternality for infinity. That merely forms an argumentative tautology.
Conversely, as already implied, we can neither conceive of an absolute nullity, a cipher, a void, death as a final state of non-being. We can analogize to it by sleep, but always with consciousness in play, even if not always consciously perceived as such, certainly, under ordinary circumstances, with the expectation of waking. Do infinity and the finiteness of nothing actually exist?
We posit that consciousness of nothing for eternity would be tantamount to Hell.
Drew Pearson tells of State Department representative in
Germany Robert Murphy informing the House Foreign Affairs Committee
the previous week that it was not possible to get private capital
interested in investing in Germany's reconstruction for fear that
when the U.S. departed, Russia would move in, with the consequent
confiscation of private property. He said that it was one of the
primary reasons that the U.S. could not leave Berlin. When a German
set up a private business in the Western zone, a Russian would warn
that after the West had evacuated, he would be liquidated. General
Lucius Clay, military governor of the American occupation zone,
concurred.
He next relates that his idea of floating weather balloons
over Russia with attached messages of friendship, bearing candy, soap and
other small tokens from the American people, had received a good
response from the people and the Government, albeit slow in the
latter case. He provides a cross-section of the mail on the subject,
including one from a woman in Bat Cave, N.C., who favored the idea.
Marquis Childs suggests that the President would have been
better served by sharing blame for inflation with the Republicans of
the Congress and suggesting that the time had come to redress the
problem. He finds the worst part of the President's message to the
special session on Tuesday to have been that regarding higher wages,
recommending "non-inflationary wage increases" to keep
pace with the rising cost of living, finding that many profit
margins were adequate to absorb the higher wages without
commensurate price increases. While theoretically true, it was
impossible to compel management to take wage increases from existing
profit margins. To try to control that process would be to alter the
free enterprise system.
The President had also recommended restoration of the excess
profits tax extant during the war, of which, three years earlier, at
war's conclusion, he had recommended repeal. Parenthetically, it was through this mechanism that the President hoped to encourage business to take increases in wages from profits.
The most glaring omission was the failure to face up to the
record of high farm prices in a year of record-breaking crop yields.
A makeshift subsidy-loan program was extended until 1950 by the
Congress just before the June 19 adjournment and signed into law by
the President. Potato subsidies, for instance, had cost the
Government 40 million dollars in 1947 and 17 million thus far in
1948. The potatoes taken on consignment were then destroyed by the
Government. The Government had loaned 60 million on wheat in 1947,
with it possibly reaching 200 million in 1948. The amount might be
recovered, however, if demand for wheat remained high and if prices
did not fall below existing levels.
But under controls, food prices might drop. That, however, was
academic as the Congress would not pass the controls which the
President had proposed.
Another curious recommendation was to allow the Federal
Reserve Board to regulate inflationary bank credit, a course urged
by Fed chairman Marriner Eccles, demoted a few months earlier by the
President to vice-chairman.
He concludes that recommendations and good intentions were
measured against past performance, a penalty for having been
President for three difficult postwar years during which inevitable
economic readjustments had to be made.
DeWitt MacKenzie tells of the U.N. commission for
conventional armaments having decided that such weapons could not be
controlled until there was agreement for an international police
force, atomic control established, and peace treaties made with
Germany and Japan.
He views it as shadow boxing since the U.N. could not
function as a peacekeeping organization until the cold war was
settled. It could not be resolved until the issue of world
revolution for the spread of Communism had been resolved.
A British weekly publication, Time and Tide, had aptly
summed up the matter by saying that the issue was whether Russia had
the wherewithal to carry on with its plans for destruction of the
democracies or would abandon those efforts. In all probability, it
continued, Russia did not want war at present, awaiting a time when
the democracies had so eroded internally that the slightest push
could topple them.
Thus, only when Russia decided to cease in its effort at
engulfing the democracies would come a reduction in the tensions
constituting the cold war. It would not mean its end, only an armed
truce. Communist revolution on the world scene would last as long as
Red dictatorship remained in control of Russia. That would remain
until the people under the dictatorship determined to overthrow it.
Russia was determined to get control of Germany and was
disturbed by the way the three Western powers persisted in seeking
to establish a West German government apart from Russia. Mr.
MacKenzie finds that it would not be surprising to see Russia seek
compromise to buy time to begin counter action.
He counsels that there could be no peace while Communism was
grasping for power across the world, including in America.
Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, tells
of having attended the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia,
just as he had the Republican and Democratic conventions in the same
city. Yet, he had come away from the three without any firm
conviction of support for either of the parties or their candidates.
He supposes it derived from some inner failing that he chose to
stand alone in 1948. But he also reckons with the notion that a
person should commit to his or her own inner lack of calling to a
particular movement.
He has, on second thought, however, the sense that he was in
the majority, not the minority, in feeling that neither Governor
Dewey, the re-invented President, nor former Vice-President Wallace
would be able to lead the country into the promised land of peace
and prosperity for the ensuing four years.
He chooses to go along with the many who doubted, as he did.
He finds that there might be something healthy in the doubt, that to
make loud partisan noises in such a year was to join the minority
and commit oneself against the work of understanding and
conciliation which had to lie ahead.
A letter writer congratulates Tom Fesperman for a splendid
job revealing the problems of the slums in the city. The unnamed
"Reader" says that in other cities in which he or she
had resided, there was never the filth and garbage besetting
Charlotte allowed to remain on the streets. The reader sees no
justification for the name "Queen City", wants it to
earn the title "Clean City".
A letter writer, "Dubitante", recollecting a
story of his boyhood, recommends taking to the woods on election day
rather than following either the road to Hell or the road to
Damnation.
A letter from the president of the Save the Children
Federation asks for donations of old clothing to send to the
children who would otherwise suffer from lack of adequate clothing
during the coming winter, both in rural America and in Europe.
A letter writer favors a Christian burial for Jim Crow. He
relates of two poems which had stuck in his memory, the first, from
some years earlier, being:
All the world that I have known Is made of glass, and steel, and stone.
And the temple where I kneel Is made of glass, and stone, and steel.
Even these must pass— The stone... the steel... the glass...
