Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Russian officers
had informed American officials that they would keep armed Soviet
troops in central Berlin as long as the U.S. maintained its military
police presence in the area. The British had erected barbed wire
along their sector boundary in Berlin and the British, Americans,
and Russians had reinforced their patrols.
Meanwhile, Russian soldiers kidnaped four more Western sector
German policemen this date, two from the British sector and two
plainclothesmen of the American zone, the latter by means of force.
The Russians had seized nine such officers in recent weeks, three of
whom from the American zone had managed to escape.
Sixteen of the F-80 Shooting Star jet fighters sent to
Germany had returned to the United States.
What's wrong with that LeMay guy? Is he a pansy, too? Ain't
we gon' have no war? We 'as packed and ready to go to fight them
Rooskies in Berlin.
Soviet Consul-General Jacob Lomakin had booked passage from
New York for himself and his family on a Swedish-American liner,
presumably to return to Moscow after being expelled by the State
Department regarding his conduct in the case of Russian school
teacher Oksana Kosenkina. The Vice-Consul stated, however, that the
trip back to Moscow had been planned for a couple of months.
President Truman was expected to revoke the credentials of Mr.
Lomakin which had permitted him to stay in the U.S.
Meanwhile, two doctors named by Mr. Lomakin to examine Ms.
Kosenkina, recovering in Roosevelt Hospital from her third-story
jump from a window at the Russian consulate in New York, were deemed
inadequate by doctors at the hospital and not allowed to examine the
patient. They were not surgeons. Mr. Lomakin responded by saying
that if they were not allowed the examination he would hold
Roosevelt responsible—perhaps along with Lenin.
The Danube River would remain under Soviet control regardless
of the outcome of the Danubian Conference, dominated by the
Soviet-bloc countries. The Western powers had refused to sign the
pact voted by the Soviet-bloc nations at the conference, giving the
Russians the same control they had enjoyed since the end of the war.
Under the agreement, no shipper could navigate the Danube from
central Germany to the Black Sea without Soviet permission. Soviet
Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky had made it clear that
Western economic penetration was not desired. The Russians had made
the matter one of territorial rights rather than international
cooperation. Even if the Western countries had an agreement with one
of the states through which the river passed, since policing was in
the hands of each state, another country could block navigation
through it.
In Greece, the Greek Army formed pincers from two conjoined
fighting forces in the Grammos Mountains to cut off the remaining
guerrillas from escape across the Albanian border. The guerrillas
were reported to be in pell-mell retreat.
Alabama Senator John Sparkman, to become the 1952 Democratic
vice-presidential nominee, and South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston
backed Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to become the 1960 Republican
vice-presidential nominee, in his effort to abolish the
winner-take-all form of the electoral college and hold presidential
elections strictly on the basis of popular vote, apportioning the
electors by proportion of the vote which a candidate would carry.
Senator Lodge proposed a Constitutional amendment to that effect.
The Southern Senators believed the effect on the South would be
ameliorative, allowing Republicans to make inroads on the Solid
South electoral lock and thus cause the South not to be taken for
granted by the national Democratic Party.
As we have stated before, in the Twentieth Century and
beyond, nothing else makes any sense whatsoever. The electoral
college was never meant for an age of mass electronic communication
and relatively fast transportation. Its sustained existence in this
age only encourages use of those very means of electronic
communication and fast transportation for the crafting of electoral
victories in cheap political games, ultimately, risking stolen
elections. But, just as with the rules on Senate filibusters, a lot
of responsible talk gets swept under the rug in Congress by partisan
self-interest and quickly forgotten. In the wake of the wake-up call
for the country in 2000, there is no excuse for inaction on the
matter and not allowing the people to determine it through the
process of amendment of the Constitution.
Listen to Senator Lodge.
For the first time in 19 years, Mildred Elizabeth Gillars,
known by her wartime radio anti-American propaganda name as "Axis
Sally" or "Midge", was returned from Germany to
the U.S. to stand trial for treason. She had been arrested two years
earlier in the American zone of Germany and released on condition
that she report every two weeks to the AMG, as the Justice
Department collected evidence for the treason case against her. She
had broadcast her messages, intended to diminish American soldier
morale, to North Africa and Italy. The program was called "Home,
Sweet Home".
The Federal Government obtained a temporary injunction to bar
a strike of 45,000 East Coast stevedores set otherwise to have begun
at midnight this date. The President had ordered the Justice
Department to seek the injunction on the basis that the strike would
imperil public health and safety. District Court Judge Harold Medina
issued the injunction. Judge Medina would preside over the trial of
the American Communist Party leaders recently indicted under the
Smith Act for conspiracy to overthrow the Government by force and
violence, the trial to result in convictions and prison terms in
1949.
An eleven-month old infant, suffering from glaucoma, was
flown from her home in Victoria, B.C., to Los Angeles to undergo
surgery to implant a special lens on her eyes to prevent potential
permanent blindness from the degenerative disease.
In Smithfield, N.C., a jury was deliberating whether to find
guilt on a first degree murder charge, invoking the death penalty,
in a case involving the wife of a wealthy tobacconist defendant. The
defense had argued diminished capacity by intoxication and sought a
verdict of manslaughter. The defendant had shot his wife twice with
a shotgun, as he had confessed to his father on July 28, immediately
after the shooting. His father said that he looked wild and had been
drinking.
Pete McKnight of The News tells of State Senator Joe
Blythe, DNC treasurer, facing some local party criticism,
albeit most of it in good humor, for sticking with President Truman
and not following the Southern revolt of the Dixiecrats. He wanted
to respond in the local newspapers but could not for the fact that
his words would wind up in the national press and could prove
embarrassing in other parts of the country.
In Mecklenburg County, county police arrested a man for
opening a swimming pool in violation of a regulation of the County
Board of Health shutting down pools to curb the spread of polio. The
pool owner had denied permission to children to swim there, but the
Board had extended the prohibition, formerly applied only to
children, to everyone the previous day.
On the editorial page, "Diplomatic Blow to Soviet" finds justified the U.S. reaction to the case of Russian school
teacher Oksana Kosenkina, seeking asylum in the country, by
demanding that Soviet Consul-General Jacob Lomakin be sent home by
the Russians. Mr. Lomakin had defied a court order in New York that
Ms. Kosenkina be produced by the Consul at a hearing to determine
whether she was being held involuntarily at the consulate. He had
also provided false accounts of the incident, suggesting that the
U.S., through the anti-Communist Tolstoy Foundation, had kidnaped
Ms. Kosenkina and taken her to their farm in New York. Subsequently,
after being returned to the consulate by the Russians, Ms. Kosenkina
jumped from the third floor, suffering injuries, in her attempt to
escape her "cage". A New York Judge, Samuel Dickstein, former member of HUAC when Martin Dies of Texas had been its chairman prior to the war, ruled that her own
wishes were paramount and that the Consul had no technical custody
of her while recovering in Roosevelt Hospital, a determination
consistent with the State Department opinion on the matter.
The piece ventures that the Russians were not seeking to
protect the rights of Ms. Kosenkina on foreign soil and had no
ground under international law or treaties to act as it had,
demanding her return to the custody of the Consul. The American
State Department diplomatic note to the Soviets stated that the
Government could not permit the exercise of the police power of any
foreign government within the United States.
The piece concludes that Premier Stalin ought consider that
Mr. Lomakin had violated international law and aroused vitriolic
reaction internationally and consequently not only order him home
but also install a new Foreign Commissar to replace V. M. Molotov.
"In Defense of Our Writers" reports that not
since the mid-Twenties to early Thirties, with John Dos Passos,
Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan and
William Faulkner, had there been so much concern over who was
writing what in American fiction. Life, among other
publications, had scolded the new, young writers, led by Norman Mailer and his best-selling The Naked and the Dead, for not having
"range, variety, depth and pace." The magazine quoted Samuel Grafton
that no one would dream of writing a novel about a Republican or
basic American values.
The piece finds Life and the public who supported that
opinion to be unduly harsh in their criticism. The writer could not
re-create basic American values. Those values had changed markedly
since the turn of the century. Mass media had changed the small,
remote town or village to a mere suburb of the big city. The people
of those hamlets and byways were now completely informed of world
events as they took place.
The Forties were a decade of change or "decade of
survival", as one social critic had suggested. The piece finds
that the turbulent world was not conducive to any writing save
journalistic inditement. The world first needed to settle down
economically and on the international stage before writers could
meet the criteria set by Life. It ventures that Life's
criticism was better directed at the politicians rather than the
writers, who were performing honestly and effectively in describing
things as they were.
A piece from the New York World Telegram, "Billy
Rose and the 'Met'", suggests as salutary the many changes in
staging for various operas which showmen Billy Rose would
incorporate were he allowed to take over the Metropolitan Opera for
one season and underwrite it against losses as he promised. The Met
was otherwise going to have to close for the 1948-49 season because
of inability to meet union demands. The suggestions offered by the
piece include an Aquacade in "Siegfried's Journey to the
Rhine", a thousand girl violinists accompanying "The
Evening Star", ski girls "by the leggy dozen"
racing down the slopes of Sun Valley as the setting for "Boheme's"
Mimi, and Mrs. Billy Rose and Esther Williams swimming through an
iridescent tank between acts while the Rockettes pranced in
precision along the edge to the accompaniment of "Lohengrin".
The piece says, "Take it from here, Billy."
Robert Allen, substituting for vacationing Drew Pearson,
discusses Robert Young, head of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad,
having failed in his bid to take control of the New York Central
system, blocked by the Interstate Commerce Commission on grounds of
creating a monopoly. In an interview with Mr. Allen, Mr. Young
criticized the Association of American Railroads, found fault with
both Democrats and Republicans, and denounced putting taxpayer money
into China.
He intended to take over the Virginian Railway, the block for
taking over the New York Central, because of competition with the C
& O. The Virginian was owned by Mellon and they seemed willing
to part with it to escape charges of forming a monopoly.
He blamed the AAR for a shortage in railway cars and for the
Government claim of hundreds of millions of dollars for wartime
freight rate overcharges in relation to war contracts. He said that
the AAR did not want to modernize, that it could get steel for new
railroad cars if it wanted to do so.
He saw the President as being very different from when he was
a Senator and a harsh critic of Wall Street. As President, he had
appointed to his Cabinet several Wall Street men, James Forrestal,
Averell Harriman and others.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop find that the headline hunts of J.
Parnell Thomas and HUAC could not solve the real problem of national
security in the country.
Guilt by association was the worst danger to civil liberties.
Recently, an employee of the State Department was charged with
associating with ten suspected Communists. He had never heard of
five of them and had only casual contact with four. He had known one
of the ten closely for several years. That person was a banker with
high standing in the banking community. Neither the State Department
employee nor the banker knew why he was suspect. But it finally came
out that he had lived briefly in Albuquerque several years earlier
at which time an anonymous landlady had reported to the FBI that the
man kept Communist literature in his basement. It turned out that
the literature in question was The New Republic. It was a
typical scenario.
The hearings had inquired of the parentage of witnesses and
even their grandparentage. The Alsops wonder why such questions were
relevant. Furthermore, there was rarely allowed confrontation of
adverse witnesses because reports were maintained in secret. The FBI
believed that to allow the accused to know the identity of reliable
informants would compromise their sources.
The Alsops posit that accused witnesses ought be able to
confront and question their accusers. Such was fundamental fairness
under the Constitution.
They conclude that there was no easy solution to maintaining
national security. "But a Government of drones and boneheads
and toadies hardly contributes to national security." If the
type thing which they outline continued, then, they assure, it would
be the type of government the country would get.
Marquis Childs, still in McCall, Idaho, gives praise to the
U.S. Forest Service for their effort in preserving the Western
lands. Forest supervisors and rangers had a lot of autonomy to make
decisions locally on what was best for forest and stream. There was
also, however, typical bureaucratic red tape such that lumbermen and
stock growers accused the service of arbitrary and dictatorial
decisions.
But without the water from the watersheds protected by the
service, the West would disappear. The Bureau of Reclamation built
reservoirs to catch the spring runoff from winter snow melt. During
the growing season, this water was released to farmers in the
valleys through an elaborate irrigation system, transforming the
land from basically desert into rich farm and grazing land.
Fire was the worst enemy. The smoke jumpers of the Forest
Service were the front line troops who fought it. In Payette
National Forest, where Mr. Childs was visiting, the supervisor had
60 smoke jumpers from 483 young summer applicants.
The other prime enemy was overgrazing the land. In this
regard, politics entered the picture. The Forest Service had
considerable cooperation in Idaho from stockmen and ranchers, unlike
Wyoming and Nevada where a move was afoot which appeared to have as
a goal removal of public forests from the protection of the Forest
Service and turning the lands over to the states, then to private
interests for exploitation. That move, however, had backfired.
Farmers, sportsmen, and conservationists supported the Forest
Service protection and politicians quickly fell into line.
He concludes that Congressional economy and inflationary
prices had seriously hampered the work of the Forest Service but
their dedication remained to build on America's future.
The Editors' Roundtable, compiled by James Galloway of
Asheville, examines the bill passed by Congress and signed into law
reluctantly by the President as inadequate to curb inflation,
curbing bank and installment buying credit. Most editors approved
the bill but opinion was divided as to whether it was enough.
The Roundtable looks at opinion from the Des Moines
Tribune, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Atlanta
Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Wall
Street Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, and the
Kansas City Star. Because this issue was transitory and not
of particularly significant interest historically, except to note
the inflationary trend after the removal of price controls in
mid-1946 and the failure of the 80th Congress to address the issue
of control of prices, and its impact on the election of 1948, we
shall let the reader this time peruse those arcane opinions without
providing a summary of each.
A letter writer favors regular rebuke by Christians of those
who trampled the Sabbath, that it would put a stop to such trampling
in trades of death, purveying whisky.
But what about the wine, mister? Jesus drank the party wine.
We note that this date's edition would be the last time that
William Reddig's name appeared on the masthead of the editorial page
as Editor. Exactly what that subsequent omission meant, we cannot
ascertain. He remained, at least nominally, the Editor through at
least the following December at the time of the Sixtieth Anniversary
Edition of the newspaper. Mr. Reddig, who had worked for over twenty
years at the Kansas City Star, had become Editor in late
July, 1947, at the time of the departure of Harry Ashmore for the
Arkansas Gazette, shortly thereafter becoming its Editor.
