Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that confessed
Communist courier of espionage for the Soviets during the war,
Elizabeth Bentley, testified before HUAC this date that she had been
paid $2,000 by Anatol Gromov, first secretary of the Russian
Embassy, in October, 1945 and told by him that the Soviet Supreme
Council had awarded to her a medal for her efforts.
Ms. Bentley appeared this date in rejoinder to Henry Collins,
former officer of the American Military Government in Europe, who
testified that he was not and never had been a spy, but refused,
pursuant to the Fifth Amendment, to say whether he had been a
Communist. In testimony the previous week, Whittaker Chambers, admitted former Communist, had
implicated Mr. Collins as
being part of the "Communist underground" in the country
prior to the war. Mr. Chambers had said that while Mr. Collins had worked in the Department of Agriculture, all of the meetings of the Communist underground group were held in his apartment during the mid-thirties.
HUAC intended to take the testimony in executive session in
New York the following day from Russian school teacher Mikhail
Samarin, teacher of children of the Soviet delegates to the U.N.,
who had sought the protection of the American Government and said
that he did not wish to return to the Soviet Union. The Committee
also intended to send one person to Canada to take the statement of
Igor Gouzenko—whose book, The Iron Curtain, was appearing in
installments in The News. Mr. Gouzenko was responsible for
breaking the Canadian spy ring two years earlier.
According to Representative John McDowell, because many
members of the Committee had to leave town to campaign, they
intended to stand in recess for the following week.
The Republicans had said that they planned to keep the
hearings before HUAC and the Senate Investigating Committee going
throughout September. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, hearing the
report, said that it was a part of a "smear campaign",
to discredit FDR, President Truman and the Democratic Party.
Arkansas Democratic Senator John McClellan, on the Senate
Investigating Committee, said that the President's statement that
the hearings were a "red herring" to distract the nation
from more substantive matters such as inflation, was "almost
indefensible". He said that regardless of whether Ms.
Bentley's story was true or not, the American people had suspicions
which ought to be cleared up.
Secretary of State Marshall said in a press conference that
the State Department would not tolerate pressures being placed on
any of the witnesses appearing before HUAC, in apparent reference to
the Soviet attempt to prevent the testimony of Mr. Samarin and his
wife. He said also that the Government would not tolerate American
officials breaking into foreign embassies and violating diplomatic
immunity, in reference to the other teacher, Oksana Kosenkina,
reported to be in the confines of the Soviet consulate and thus not
subject to subpoena by the Committee as long as she was there,
considered foreign soil.
The Secretary also said, in the context of the Danubian
Conference ongoing in Belgrade regarding riparian rights along the
Danube, that the U.S. should not make any agreement with the
Russians for merely the sake of agreement. The statement was
interpreted as also applying to the Moscow talks anent Berlin and
Germany, though he specifically refrained from comment on those
talks. He said that the Soviet proposal anent the Danube was
designed to give control of navigation rights solely to the Russians
and that the U.S. would continue to champion free navigation for the
welfare of Europe.
At the Danubian Conference, the Communist bloc voted against
the second American effort to guarantee free navigation on the
river, registering a 7 to 3 vote. The Conference accepted a Russian
proposal, by a vote of 7 to 1, which would provide the Soviet bloc
control of navigation. Only France voted against it.
In Berlin, Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington said
that the Berlin airlift could operate during the winter, if
necessary. He said that it was becoming a larger job than the supply
of the Chinese and American troops defending China against the
Japanese during the war, via The Hump over the Himalayas after the
Japanese conquest of Burma. He said that no plans had been made to
fly fighter planes over Berlin. He also informed that the American
Air Force had 100 C-54 transports in service of the airlift at the
time.
The meat industry said that a bumper corn crop in the nation
would help meat prices, but not for a year. Meanwhile, housewives
continued their meat boycott and butchers reported slumping sales.
In Louisville, more than 300 restaurants agreed to cooperate in the
boycott by having a meatless Tuesday, as during the war.
The President met with organizers of Truman-Barkley clubs in
eleven states, which would operate separately from the DNC and raise
their own campaign funds.
In Houston, the Dixiecrats arrived to hear the acceptance
speech of party presidential candidate Governor Strom Thurmond of
South Carolina and to shape their strategy for the campaign.
The Progressive Party supporters of Henry Wallace, meeting in
Dallas, said that they would picket the Dixiecrat rally of this
night.
In South Carolina, the primary election showed Senator Burnet
Maybank well in the lead and headed for victory. The primary was the
first such election in the state in 72 years in which blacks could
legally participate. About 30,000 black citizens had gone to the
polls. No race friction was reported.
The third place candidate in the race for the Senate seat,
Neville Bennett, charged the Maybank campaign with "political
trickery" for labeling Mr. Bennett the "Negro's choice".
He said that the reason Senator Maybank carried the black vote was
because he had been responsible for the appointment of Judge J.
Waties Waring to the Federal District Court. Judge Waring had handed
down the decision a year earlier which found unconstitutional the
South Carolina Democratic Party's attempt to make the Democratic
primary a private club into which voters could exercise the
franchise only by permitted invitation, the decision having thus
opened the primary to all citizens under the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments. The Judge had also found that the
Legislature's stripping from the statute books all references to
primaries had done nothing to relieve the State of its
Constitutional obligations and was state action in derogation of
protected rights. He had relied on the 1944 Allwright Supreme
Court decision out of Texas, opening the primaries in that state to
all citizens.
During the first week of enforcement of Charlotte's Uniform
Housing Ordinance, 164 houses were inspected. Very few were deemed
unfit for habitation such that they had to be condemned, but most
were cited for various code violations such as lack of running
water, screens, indoor toilets, baths and electric lights. The
houses were inhabited by both whites and blacks.
Ray Stallings and Tom Fesperman of The News tell of
the story of a professional gambler and a magician, billed as
"Irresponsible Irvin", having been nabbed in Charlotte,
accused of robbing and murdering an Illinois industrialist early the
previous Monday. Both were from Newport, Ky. They gave conflicting
accounts. The gambler said that a girl accomplice shooting at him as
he fled the scene must have shot the robbery victim. The gambler admitted
having planned the robbery, planting the girl, "Red"
Knight, with the industrialist, to provide the gambler the best time
to commit the robbery. He said that the girl had the victim's gun
during the robbery and that he had struck the victim on the head
with the "knucks" when the victim resisted. He obtained
$17 and then fled from the car in which the robbery occurred. He
then heard shots and inferred that the girl was shooting at him for
running out on her, instead presumably striking the victim who was
in the line of fire.
The gambler, however, had admitted the previous night that he
had shot the victim. A few hours later, both he and the irresponsible magician
said that they did not know who did the shooting. Then, the gambler
gave to reporters his new story about the girl. They apparently gave
yet another version while being fingerprinted, but that one is on
page 16-A.
Showman Billy Rose offered for one season to take over the
financially strained Metropolitan Opera, saying that he would
personally guarantee it against a deficit. He said that he would
streamline the productions while preserving the traditions of the
opera. The Met had just announced that it would not operate for the
current season because it could not afford to meet union demands.
The Opera Association was trying to work out a way to avoid the
shutdown.
Reports from Boston had it that the Saco-Lowell Shops,
textile machinery company, was negotiating to purchase the Edwards
Co. of Sanford, N.C., a subsidiary of Indian Motorcycle.
Freck Sproles of The News tells of the fall fashions
for women in the Woman's Section of the newspaper.
Why is there not a Man's Section?
On the editorial page, "Mecklenburg's Gains Under ABC" tells of consumption of alcohol having dropped nationally during the
previous year, a function of heavy Federal taxes and inflation. But
the trend had not affected drinking in Mecklenburg, according to
figures released by the ABC Board, showing that 8.8 million dollars
worth of liquor had been sold in the county since the inception of
ABC controlled sales ten months earlier. The profit on the expected
ten million dollars of sales for the first year, the goal set for
the second year, would be 1.4 million, $665,000 of which would come
back to the City and County and $70,000 for the public library.
That way, in between drunks, you can go down and check out a
new book to read.
It suggests that the county might join the trend of the
nation in time, but that in the first year after the end of
prohibition in the county, it was not surprising to see huge sales.
The consumption would cut taxes, however, by 30.64 cents per
thousand in the City and 29.41 cents per thousand in the County. The
bootlegger had all but been eliminated from the scene as well.
It congratulates the ABC police and Board chairman Frank Sims
for a job well done.
"Revolt of the Neutrals" comments on the
statement by the A.P.'s foreign affairs analyst DeWitt MacKenzie
that Scandinavia would not remain neutral in any war between the
Communist bloc and the Western democracies. He found it also true of
most nations of Europe and the rest of the world.
Yet, France and the Benelux countries had made it clear that
they would not join the U.S. and Britain in any show of force
against Russia regarding the Berlin blockade. There was a strong
pacifist movement in Italy, and Sweden had recently declared that it
intended to maintain armed neutrality in a third world war, was
seeking to convince Norway of the same stand.
Russia was encountering resistance in the Soviet bloc from
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, extending increasingly to the rest of
the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
The resistance on both sides to bellicosity had made
diplomatic bluffing difficult in the struggle between the Soviet
Union and the West. It explained why the diplomats were now engaged
in the Moscow talks. The situation had brought a lull in the cold
war if not an end to the big-power struggle. It underscored the
statement by U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie in his annual report,
that the world would never submit to the rule of any ideology,
whether that of Communism or extreme capitalism.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled
"Jane Doe for President", tells of Dorothy Thompson,
writing in honor of the centennial of the women's rights convention
at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in the August edition of the Ladies' Home
Journal, finding that women had reached their pinnacle of
performance in statecraft rather than in arts and letters. She cited
Joan of Arc, Blanche of Castile, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Queens
Elizabeth I, Victoria, Maria Theresa, and Catherine as examples.
The New York Herald Tribune had suggested that
Lucretia Mott, the leader at Seneca Falls in 1848, would have made a
better President than some of the recent occupants of the White
House.
In 1881, a Congressional committee had recommended that Anna
Carroll, the woman who devised the strategy which brought success to
General Grant on the Tennessee, was an "unrecognized member of
Lincoln's Cabinet" and deserving of an emolument for her
service equal to that of the major generals.
It concludes that the qualities of which Ms. Thompson had
written, "common sense, human judgment, prudence, and
consciousness of the race", should lead more and more women
into public service "and why not the White House?"
Why not the White House?
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "The
Precursors", tells of Dr. Robert Millikan stating that
Benjamin Franklin, 200 years earlier, had been the initial
discoverer of electrons. He set forth his particle theory of
electricity in a letter to Peter Collison.
Dr. Millikan said that the real inventor of jet propulsion
was James Rumsay of Maryland in the eighteenth century. Roger Bacon
had developed the idea of mechanically propelled boats and
circumnavigating the globe in them sometime in the thirteenth
century. He also conceived the telescope 300 years before Galileo
and flying machines 600 years before Samuel Langley and the Wright
Brothers.
The piece is reminded of the fact that Mme. Ferrara-Lombroso
had written some years earlier that all of the ideas for modern
inventions had been developed by the ancients, but with the
foresight in tow regarding the evil they might inflict, and thus had
chosen consciously not to develop them. "The present seems
hardly an appropriate moment for saying that they were wrong."
Drew Pearson tells of the real estate lobby, during the
special session of Congress, having written free radio speeches for
Senate Majority Leader Kenneth Wherry. One speech they wrote,
however, was so bad, telling of the Republicans standing for
bubblegum for little girls and a thousand bananas whereas the
Democrats only stood for one, considered two bananas a monopoly,
that he threw it in the trash, said that the DNC could have been its
authors.
Mr. Pearson notes that Senator Harry Cain of Washington was
the biggest subscriber to the real estate lobby's writing and
research effort.
The veterans called on the President to urge him to get House
Minority Leader Sam Rayburn to sign the discharge petition of
Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas to bring the
Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill out of committee to the floor for
a vote. Mr. Rayburn controlled a block of 25 votes necessary to form
the required majority of the House. The President informed that Mr.
Rayburn already had done so. The representative of the AMVETS told
the President that TEW would, with its provisions for eradication of
slums and public housing, help reduce juvenile delinquency in the
urban areas. The President agreed, said that was one reason he had
given the bill so much priority in the session.
Mr. Pearson notes that after Senator Taft withdrew his
support of the bill of which he had been co-sponsor, slum clearance
and public housing were removed from the final bill which passed.
DNC chairman, Senator J. Howard McGrath, held a "harmony
party" for the Democratic Senators, designed to bring the
South back onboard with the party. But the party was set for the
same day that he announced the end of segregation at DNC
headquarters, causing Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina and
others to stay away. Some Southerners, such as Senators Spessard
Holland and Claude Pepper of Florida and John Sparkman of Alabama,
future vice-presidential running mate in 1952 with Governor Adlai
Stevenson, attended the party. When they toasted the President,
Senator James Eastland of Mississippi remained seated until urged to
join, which he finally did.
Senator Tom Connally of Texas, at the urging of Senator
Pepper, told of "Ol' Blue Nose", regarding the hired
hand returned to Texas after 15 years to face a murder charge. None
of the witnesses to the murder could positively identify him after
the passage of 15 years. One man, however, who had hunted with the
hired hand, said that he was still not sure the man was not the
murderer because they used to hunt with his dog, Ol' Blue Nose. When
the defense lawyer asked him why he could not be sure, he said that
as he was leaving the jail after the show-up of the suspect, the latter had
asked the witness, "How is Ol' Blue Nose?"
The party, he notes, wound up serenading Senator Alben
Barkley, the vice-presidential nominee, with "My Old Kentucky
Home" and "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling". Tom
Connally heard "Deep in the Heart of Texas".
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the Russians having
entered a tough phase in negotiations in Moscow with the Big Three
ambassadors, diminishing expectations for imminent lifting of the
Berlin blockade. The first phase of negotiations had been the
meeting with Premier Stalin and Foreign Commissar Molotov, during
which Stalin had been affable and reasonable. The three ambassadors
left with the belief that the blockade would soon be lifted, and
without demands of advance concessions by the Russians.
Starting with the meeting with Mr. Molotov alone on August 6,
the second phase, the tough phase, had begun. Ambassador Walter
Bedell Smith refused comment afterward, saying only that it was
three hours with Molotov without Stalin. Mr. Molotov had told the
ambassadors that their view of the previous meeting was wrong, that
Premier Stalin had not suggested that the blockade might be lifted
without concessions in advance, namely abandonment of the plans to
establish a separate Western German government by calling off the
scheduled meeting in September which was designed to set up the
provisional government.
There would be advantage to the Americans and British of the
postponement if the blockade were then lifted, as it would enable
building up supplies again in the Western sections of Berlin. It
would, however, appear to the Germans as Western weakness. The
Americans had also stated firmly that, while willing to negotiate,
they would not grant concessions prior to lifting of the blockade.
Barnet Nover discusses the annual report on the U.N. by
Secretary-General Trygve Lie, making a powerful case for the utility
of the organization. Many had come to believe that it was a
well-meaning but largely futile body. But the choice was between the
U.N. and no world organization. Thus, the Congress in the special
session had authorized the expenditure of 65 million dollars to
build a permanent home on the site in Manhattan which had been
donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
The U.N. was not the organization for which many had hoped at
its founding. It was handicapped by the unilateral veto of the Big
Five on the Security Council. But the most serious handicap was a
function of the extant world, lending amazement to any
accomplishment at all by the body.
Russia had done very little to make the organization work
effectively. But the U.N. was the only organ which brought the West
and Russia together on a regular basis.
According to Mr. Lie, the East-West conflict had been the
basis for many setbacks during the previous year, but the U.N. had
operated as a restraining device more than had been appreciated.
Yet, with the exception of Palestine, Russia and the U.S. had
differed on important issues within the U.N. as much as they had
outside the body.
Mr. Lie, concludes Mr. Nover, was correct in asserting that
resolution of the German issue, the most serious dispute between the
West and Russia, was the key to the effectiveness of the U.N.
A letter writer, commenting on the August 6 editorial on the
difference between genuine hillbilly music and the jukebox variant
version, wants included in the company of Lamar Stringfield and
Aaron Copland, as composers utilizing folk themes in their
compositions, Kurt Weill, citing his new opera, "Down in the
Valley" as example. It incorporated "Sourwood Mountain",
"Hop Up, My Lady", "The Lonesome Dove", and
"Little Black Train". He believes that it was comparable
to "Rodeo" by Mr. Copland, choreographed by Agnes
DeMille. It took less time to sing than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
The opera had been greeted enthusiastically at its opening in
July at the University of Indiana. Several persons from the
Carolinas had leading roles in the production. Designed for small
groups, the opera, he thinks, ought be performed by the Carolina
Playmakers in Chapel Hill.
A letter writer compliments another writer of August 5 regarding the polio epidemic and the need for higher local taxes to pay for such things as DDT spraying prior to the outbreak. He
then tells a story about sales tax, and then relates that a person
driving from Manteo to Murphy, the breadth of the state, failed to
see a single Highway Patrolman, all of them having taken to the
country roads in their Buicks with their girlfriends.
We don't know what he means either or how it all relates.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., birthplace of W.
J. Cash, says that he is disgusted with the Dixiecrats. He was born
in Grant's time in the 1870's and had never voted for anyone except
Democrats, President Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation
having killed states' rights, the Constitution and the Supreme
Court.
He wants all of the Democrats to stop fooling around and vote
for President Truman. Poor whites, blacks, and labor, he predicts,
could elect him. It was the country's only hope.
A Quote of the Day: "The new Ford which looks, from
behind, like a Nash, from the front like an Olds, from the side like
a Frazier, looks on the price tag like a Packard."
—Louisville Times
