Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, according to an
authoritative source, the four-power diplomatic talks in Moscow were
reaching an end. There would be at least one more meeting between
the diplomats, on Friday.
In Belgrade, the Communist bloc countries in the Danubian
Conference voted this date to give themselves exclusive control of
the Danube River. The Western powers stated that they would not heed
the decision. The U.S. opposed the move while France and Britain
abstained.
In Washington, HUAC stated that it had not been able to find
any trace of a freelance writer named George Crosley, as identified
the previous day in executive session in New York by Alger Hiss to
have been Whittaker Chambers acting under a pseudonym, when Mr. Hiss
knew him between fall, 1935 and spring or summer, 1936. (Mr. Hiss
stated the previous day that the time frame was 1934 through 1935,
but later corrected the mistake after refreshing his recollection of
his employment history which set the short time frame during which
he knew Mr. Chambers.)
Committee members appeared pleased that Mr. Hiss at least had
admitted knowing Mr. Chambers, if under a different name. They said
it kept the investigation from heading down the wrong track.
Lead investigator for the Committee Robert Stripling stated
that Congressman Richard Nixon had remained in New York to question
more witnesses in executive session this date, including the wife of Mr. Hiss.
Secretary of State Marshall stated that investigation of
Russian diplomatic charges regarding the two Russian school teachers
who were seeking asylum in the U.S. had shown that the charges of
U.S. kidnaping of the teachers were not sustained. The teachers
themselves, Oksana Kosenkina and Mikhail Samarin and his wife,
denied the charges and said they wanted to stay in the U.S.
A court case was pending in New York to determine whether Ms.
Kosenkina remained in the technical custody of the Soviet
Consul-General while recuperating in Roosevelt Hospital after
jumping from the third-floor window of the consulate to escape her
"cage".
It was believed that the Russians were about to begin to
close the schools they had operated in foreign countries to teach
the children of Russian diplomats, as Mr. Samarin and Ms. Kosenkina
were employed.
General Eisenhower, according to the New York Star,
denied that Columbia University, of which he was president, had any
taint of Communism within its staff or textbooks. The General said
that he was shocked by a report in the Star the previous day
which stated that HUAC, starting in the fall, would seek to
determine the extent to which Communist influence had impacted
college campuses. Columbia was mentioned in the story. The General
said that he would resign immediately if he thought Columbia was so
infiltrated or associated with any form of ideology other than a
democratic one. He spoke generally, saying that he would like to see
anyone seek to prove that college campuses were anything but
democratic-minded.
The American commander in Berlin, Col. Frank Howley, declared
that the Russian blockade of the city had failed to bring Berlin
into submission. He said that 57,100 tons of the offered 60,000 tons
of coal from Russia necessarily would go to the Russian zone of
Berlin.
In Athens, Greece, five persons were arrested in connection
with the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk the previous May.
His bullet-riddled body had been discovered in Salonika Bay on May
16, several days after being last seen heading to interview
guerrilla leader Markos Vafiades. The five were the mother of Greek
newspaperman Gregory Stathopoulos, and four employees of the hotel
where Mr. Polk had been staying in Salonika when he disappeared.
Russia vetoed admission of Ceylon to the U.N., the 27th time
the Russians had played the role of naysayer.
Secretary of State Marshall said that the U.S., France and
Britain would send 300 men to Palestine to act as truce observers.
New Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin said that Taft-Hartley
was a "blow at unionism". He specifically criticized the
provisions outlawing the closed shop and banning union expenditures
in political campaigns.
A threatened strike of CIO seamen was averted when 42
shipping companies agreed to retain hiring halls and provide
increases in pay.
Near Macomb, Ill., a mystery had to developed as to the cause
of a fire which destroyed a farmhouse and barn after 100 to 200
small fires erupted in the structures over a period of ten days.
Fire investigators theorized that it came from use of a highly
flammable fly spray on the farm. The first fires started in the
wallpaper and spread to inside the walls. The family had moved into
the garage.
In Kings Mountain, N.C., a young woman, 15, was found shot to
death in a bedroom of her home in the Shady Rest community. A man
who was slightly wounded and the owner of the house were being held
for questioning. The wounded man said that his wife had entered the
bedroom while he and the girl were in bed together and began firing
a gun at the girl, wounding him in the process. But a Sheriff's
deputy said that much of his story was inconsistent.
On the editorial page, "Babe Ruth and His America" provides a contrast between the front page stories regarding the
Communist spy ring extant in the country before and during the war,
as told by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers to HUAC and the
Senate Investigating Committee, and the last days of Babe Ruth spent
enduring the final stages of throat cancer until he had finally
succumbed two days earlier.
Ms. Bentley had been educated at Vassar and yet knew little
of American history, symptomatic of college students of the time, as
found by New York Times survey a few years earlier. The piece
finds the deficiency to have provided the ripe ground for
gullibility to Communist indoctrination to which Ms. Bentley fell
victim.
Babe Ruth had grown up in mean circumstances, educated in a
training school for boys in Baltimore, then finding baseball. He had
never wavered in patriotism, showing that higher education did not
necessarily guarantee better citizenship. To Mr. Ruth and his
followers, faith in America was something absorbed, not learned from
books.
It suggests that the baseball immortals had instructed the
American citizenry on citizenship more than had the politicians. And
among those immortals, Babe Ruth had no peer.
It concludes, "When we turn to the story of the
Bambino, we learn more about the real America than we get from the
Washington dispatches."
"Court Closes a Loophole" remarks on Superior
Court Solicitor Basil Whitener having established an outstanding
record for efficiency and energy since taking office in 1947. He had
started a campaign to clear up past non-payment of fines, not so
easy as it might at first appear. Defendants had to be located and
arrested when they were in arrears. Capiases had just been issued in
93 such cases, some delinquent for ten years in their accounts to
the courts. A total of $8,000 in fines was involved. The piece
congratulates the effort of Superior Court officials in trying to
put an end to the practice of delinquency in such payments.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "A
Welcome 'Demmy-Tassy'", tells of the Association of American
Railroads having undertaken a campaign to have railroad personnel be
more friendly and courteous to passengers. A friend of the writer
was surprised to find on one Southern Railway line that he received
a free cup of coffee. The waiter had said, "Demmy-tassy with
the compliments of the railroad, sir."
England's railroads were likewise stressing politeness to
patrons. Criticism on the account spanned back to 1843, according to
the Manchester Guardian. It remarked that clerks and porters
aboard England's trains thought of themselves apparently as "very
great men". They scoffed at passenger questions and generally
were rude.
The American railroads, it ventures, would be most
appreciative of the public reaction to increased courtesy. The
public, no matter from which country they came, enjoyed courtesy.
Robert S. Allen, former writing partner of Drew Pearson
before the war, takes over for him as he goes on a three-week
vacation. Mr. Allen looks at the character of Russia, focusing on
the distinction between the Russian people, amiable, emotional, and
the Russian bureaucrats, alike whether operating under the former
czars or under the Kremlin, ruthless and unscrupulous. The key to
Russian foreign policy was to get information on the West to the
Russian people to counteract the propaganda from Moscow regularly
fed them. The Russian people were the soft spot in Russia's armor
and the Kremlin knew it. The State Department behaved as if they did
not understand the fact.
When Mr. Pearson had sought in the previous few weeks to
float the idea of sending weather balloons with messages of goodwill
and small gifts over Russia, the U.S. military responded favorably
while the State Department nixed the idea because they were
concerned that the Russians might become offended.
He offers that the best tactics to use with Russian diplomats
was to offend them, as it was the only language they understood. Mr.
Allen therefore proposes that the 100 ships loaned to Russia during
the war outside of lend-lease be seized in U.S. ports until the cost
of the ships was repaid. The U.S. had sold hydroelectric equipment
for the Dneiper River Dam, for which no payment had been made. The
U.S. was losing 1.5 million dollars per day in the Berlin airlift.
He suggests increasing the tolls by a hundred-fold through the
Panama Canal for every Russian ship until these debts were paid. The
British could do likewise at the Suez Canal. The U.S. also should
demand distribution of American media in Russia in the same quantity
as Russian propaganda was being distributed in the U.S.
He also proposes getting the truth out to the Russian people.
The U.S. could provide such things as comic books to the Germans and
Austrians so that they could distribute it among the people of
Berlin and Vienna. Western seamen could take propaganda ashore into
the Eastern bloc countries and the material could then be
transported easily inside Russia by pro-Western citizens of the
satellite countries. Finally, just as American pilots, some for
loyalty and others for the high rate of pay, were flying munitions
for Israel from Czechoslovakia to Palestine, pilots could be found
to carry propaganda into Russia.
Marquis Childs, in McCall, Idaho, looks at election year
politics in the first of a series of articles. He finds the people
quarreling over strictly parochial issues having no relation to the
needs of the country.
The West Coast had the greatest growth in population in
recent years, California and Oregon gaining over 40 percent in
population since 1940, compared to 5 percent in New York. Such
growth was limited in the Mountain States. In Idaho, demand was at
the peak for everything the state produced and the prices paid to
the producer consequently were also at the peak.
Mr. Childs relates that he was staying in a fancy new resort
hotel overlooking Payette Lakes, which would become part of a resort
with one of the world's longest ski lifts, all built with local
capital.
Because of the delicate balance between land and water, the
West had to be maintained in part by the Government and not left
entirely to private exploitation. Water power could be produced
cheaply in the West to enable it to compete with the East
financially. Industrial expansion was necessary to keep the
burgeoning population employed. Only the Government could expand and
initiate the great power projects necessary to provide low-cost
power for new industry.
The Government had to protect the watersheds as well. Capital
had been drained off from the West in the form of forests, soil, and
water during the great period of expansion. The Government had to
apply restraints to sustain the development.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop relate of a certain Ann Smith, not
her real name, who was employed as a Navy clerk-stenographer in the
Panama Canal Zone since 1945. She taught, with the Navy's
permission, English classes at night, most of her students being
people of color. She had expressed mild interest in race relations.
In 1947, after she met Petty Officer Robert Brown, they
became engaged and he sought Naval permission to marry Ms. Smith. A
long period of investigation of her loyalty then followed, during
which she was asked 21 questions regarding whether she read The
New Republic, whether she new four particular individuals,
whether she had books on the Soviet Union, etc. She answered the
questions fully, with no answers which should have reflected on her
loyalty.
In early 1948, however, the Navy found her to be disloyal and
having given false answers to the 21 questions. Permission to marry
Petty Officer Brown was denied.
They remark that in other times or if it were an isolated
case, it might not be so remarkable. But since it was becoming the
norm to find such cases in which liberties were threatened and
unfairness prevailed, it was noteworthy. They promise to explore in
another column Ms. Smith's subsequent experience.
The Editors' Roundtable, compiled by James Galloway of
Asheville, looks at editorial opinion on the Moscow diplomatic
conferences among the Big Four representatives, most finding it
unlikely to lead to a basic settlement but some also believing that
Russia, with its economic difficulties, might be inclined to more
favorable negotiations. The majority believed that Russian
cooperation would only lull the West until a more opportune time for
the Russians. Lifting of the Berlin blockade as a condition for
further negotiations was deemed likely.
The Indianapolis Star finds the most likely outcome to
be an agreement to confer further on the German question,
accompanied by an easing of the blockade. It advises avoiding
appeasement which would only lead to more appeasement and eventually
war.
The Kansas City Star finds that a unified Germany
would not likely become Communist unless the cards were stacked in
advance by a minority power clique. Such was why the West had
opposed Russian demands for a highly centralized German government,
more susceptible to a coup than with police authority retained by
the individual states.
The Binghamton (N.Y.) Press predicts that Russia might
be given a role in the Ruhr, controlled by the six-power agreement
thus far excluding Russia. Russia wanted inter-allied control of the
industrial region of Germany, a necessary factor for control of the
economic life of Western Europe. France especially opposed the
Russian plan.
The Shreveport Times finds that while it was
conceivable that Russia might be given a role in the management of
the Ruhr's resources, it was unthinkable that it would be given any
form of control of the region.
The Phoenix Gazette ventures that because the Russians
desired to share in the Ruhr, many concessions could be extracted
from Russia for the benefit of the West.
The New York Times suggests that the Yugoslav
defection from the Soviet sphere and Tito's angling for trade with
the West were warnings to Russia which might induce the Soviets to
allow participation by some of the satellites in the Marshall Plan,
at least to the extent of increasing trade with the West. The best
hope for recovery and peace in Europe appeared to lie in the fact of
recognition of such economic realities.
The Syracuse Herald Journal finds talk, in itself,
insufficient as a cure for clash of vital interests. A temporary
peace might appear clever, it offers, but many issues would remain
unresolved.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram finds that Russia might
soften its foreign policy to gain economic relief from the West. Or
it might resort to a tougher attitude, even turning to war in
desperation. The U.S. ought be receptive to an alleviation of Soviet
policy despite its motives but also should be fully alert to the
opposite which was indicated by material developments thus far.
Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best, it posits, was the
most prudent attitude for America to have toward Russia.
A letter writer again argues that the Civil War ended all
states' rights and since that time, no states had any inherent
rights, only those granted by the Federal Government. Every
President since Abraham Lincoln had distorted or ignored the
Constitution.
He finds that disfranchising blacks was wrong, but that
equally wrong was the attempt to end the right to be exclusive,
presumably in reference to segregation imposed by state laws.
He concludes: "States' rights are 'rights' only when
they are right. If they are right their constitutionality is of
secondary importance."
