Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Berlin,
Communist-led demonstrators broke into City Hall using battering
rams. Two American correspondents inside the building were injured
in fist fights. The object, as with the prior two recent
demonstrations, apparently was to force the anti-Communist City
Government to resign. The Soviet-controlled police made no attempt
to halt the entry.
In Warsaw, the Polish Communist Workers Party began a purge
of nationalist members who failed to adhere to Marxist-Leninist
ideology, and called for a "class war" in farm villages
throughout Poland. They assembled at the behest of President
Boleslaw Bierut. The Vice-Premier and secretary-general of the
party, who had backed the Yugoslav Communists, was purged and the
President installed in his stead as secretary-general.
The State Department said that the Bulgarian Government had
framed an American diplomat, the Vice-Consul of the Sofia legation,
when he had been ousted from the country on a charge of spying. The
Bulgarian Government charged that he had obtained important written
espionage from two Bulgarians who were agents for American
intelligence.
President Truman addressed about 20,000 people at 8:15 a.m.
at Grands Rapids, Mich., this Labor Day, saying that Congress had
passed no low-cost housing measure because Senator Taft had run out
on his own bill, the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill. He attacked the real
estate lobby for its effort in sidetracking the provisions of the
legislation calling for public housing and slum clearance. He
advocated a price control law. Applause, it records, was only
scattered. He then moved aboard his train to five other stops for
speeches in Michigan. He had stopped at Harrisburg and Altoona, Pa.,
the night before.
In North Jersey, 4,300 truck drivers joined 10,000 already on
strike in New York. Stocks were dwindling in many stores, especially
food markets, as a result of the strike.
In Switzerland, the Matterhorn apparently had claimed four
lives of Swiss climbers who had been missing since Friday after they
sought to reach the 14,780-foot summit without a guide.
In the Philippines, the continuing eruption of Mt. Hibokhibok
for the sixth straight day had thus far claimed five lives and
displaced about 29,000 of the 45,000 residents of Camiguin Island.
It was feared that the volcano would emit poison gases.
In Amsterdam, Princess Juliana formally ascended the throne
to succeed her mother, Queen Wilhemina, 68, who had just abdicated
after 50 years. The ceremony saw the largest gathering of European
royalty since the wedding of Princess Elizabeth of Britain the
previous November.
In Charlotte, Red Cross workers continued on Labor Day to
collect blood for the blood bank, with an announced goal of 11,700
donors.
In Cleveland, Maj. Richard L. Johnson, in an F-86 Sabre jet,
failed to break officially the record of 651 mph set in a Navy
research plane, though he had been unofficially clocked at 670 mph
as an average on six passes of the field. But because of inclement
weather, he flew off course on one pass and a camera jammed on
another, disqualifying his run for the record. He said that he stood
ready to try again.
The Bendix cross-country race to Los Angeles was still to
come, vying for a $40,000 prize.
In Hollywood, stars turned out to raise money for a 100-bed
wing of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, taking in $200,000 to
$250,000 in conjunction with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum &
Bailey Circus on Saturday night. Greer Garson, Gary Cooper, Danny
Kaye, Edgar Bergen, Keenan Wynn, Ed Wynn, Ronald Coleman, Frank
Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Jack Carson, Dennis O'Keefe, Buster Keaton,
Van Johnson, Betty Grable, Virginia Bruce, Elizabeth Taylor, Dianna
Lynn, Audrey Totter, Lizabeth Scott, June Havoc, Ann Blyth, William
Powell, Virginia Mayo, Lucille Ball, Celeste Holm, Margaret O'Brien,
Sabu, Ann Miller, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lex Barker, Esther Williams,
Robert Cummings, Rhonda Fleming, Carmen Miranda, Bob Hope, Dorothy
Lamour, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, Peter
Lawford, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Barry
Fitzgerald all donned circus attire and roles to please the
assembled patrons. You may read of each role each played. There will be
a quiz later.
On the editorial page, "Labor Day" celebrates the
day first begun in 1882 in New York by the Knights of Labor to
celebrate organized labor. Now, it represented all labor. It was
important, it ventures, to ask why we labor. It answers that while
on one level, it was for basic subsistence, on another it was to serve
the world. American labor had served the world during World War II
to break the back of fascism and now was engaged in rebuilding the
war-torn nations.
America should not look down its noses at other nations, it
opines, because they had not matched the industrial achievement of
the U.S. It was cause for pride, not complacency. American labor had
to make the world secure. That was the goal when people would return
to work on Tuesday. The U.S. had to show to the world that free
enterprise meant a free people, free to choose the course of one's
life.
"Wallace and the South" quotes from a piece from
Harper's in 1869 by Major John William De
Forest of the U.S. Army Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, S.C.,
suggesting that sectionalism between North and South had to end to
assure solidarity in the nation, that it was more beneficial for the
South for it to be so. The passage, from page 340 of the second of the two above-referenced issues, had been quoted in A
Union Office in the Reconstruction, recently published by
the Yale University Press:When will this sectional aversion end? I can only offer the obvious reflection that it is desirable for both North and South, but especially
for the weaker of the two, that it should
end as quickly as possible. For the sake of the
entire republic we should endeavor to make all
our citizens feel that they are Americans, and
nothing but Americans. If we do not accomplish
this end, we shall not rival the greatness
of the Romans. It was not patricianism
which made Rome great so much as the vast
community and bonded strength of Roman citizenship.
Let us remember in our legislation
the law of solidarity: the fact that no section
of a community can be injured without injuring
the other sections; that the perfect prosperity
of the whole depends upon the prosperity of all
the parts.
The piece finds the egging of Henry Wallace in the South to
have been symptomatic of misunderstanding between the regions. The
barrages were aimed at Mr. Wallace's views on civil rights and his
decision to stay in the homes and hotels of black people during his
Southern tour.
As Dr. Howard Odum of UNC had pointed out in a book published
the previous year, the South believed it had been making great
strides in race relations for some time, as violence had diminished
and black participation in political, cultural and economic life was
on the increase. But when coercive civil rights legislation was
proposed, the Southern mind became defensive and the movement toward
tolerance and fairness slowed.
It posits that eggs and tomatoes and the people who threw
them were unreasonable, but that the unthinking idealist who
proposed revolution rather than evolution was also unreasoning. Such
a person was going against Major De Forest's "law of
solidarity", which had to break down the wall of
misunderstanding between the South and the rest of the nation.
It would be a lot easier if so many uneducated and undereducated Southerners so
often did not behave as idiotic fools in search of a brain to share.
The issue is no more regional solidarity than it is race. It
is a matter of thinking it through and seeing how idiotic it is to
be prejudiced against anyone whom you have never encountered as an
individual. It is, of course, sometimes in daily intercourse, quite
easy to find from negative encounters in fact exemplars seemingly
perfectly fitted to preexisting stereotypes of one sort or the
other.
We must also bear in mind, however, that most of these
stereotypical persons, though not always, are callow youth, persons
with limited education, of poor background, or a mix of all three
components in a dangerous cocktail. While exasperating, patience
must be accorded them to enable slow learning at their slow pace.
So you might slowly ask the question, next time you encounter
such a person, "What...do...you...want?" And make no
sudden gestures as it agitates them unduly.
"Mr. Thomas and the Gecko" tells of Mrs. Wynford
Vaughn Thomas, in her Kensington home in England, having seen a
gecko bite her husband and screamed right at the screen. Her
husband, a television broadcaster, did not scream, proceeded instead
to pry loose the gecko's teeth from his finger. All the while, the
episode was being broadcast live by a television crew from the
London Zoo.
Mr. Thomas had gone to the zoo with his television crew to
capture animal impressions, maybe a cockatoo or two. He was
describing the sweet disposition of the gecko when it bit him.
It wonders whether the television camera would become the
Pinkerton of the future, able to sweep nightclubs in search of the
spouse claiming to work late and then broadcast the actual story to
the other spouse, or enable an accused murderer to prove his
presence instead at the races when the murder occurred, because his
visage had appeared on the tv screen.
Would the overly ambitious sports fan "lose his sanity
wrapped in a blanket" while watching the televised Duke-UNC
football game or the Wake Forest-N.C. State affair or the Army-Navy
contest?
You have no idea how prophetic you have waxed, 15 years into
the future.
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Both
Ends and the Middle", finds the President campaigning on the
promise to bring prices down if elected. Vice-presidential nominee
Senator Alben Barkley had said in Illinois that a Republican
President would mean lower farm prices.
So, it concludes, that a Truman-Barkley Administration would
see to it that farmers received high prices and consumers bought at
low prices. "And happy days will be here—yet."
Robert Allen, substituting for vacationing Drew Pearson,
tells of intimates of John L. Lewis whispering that he might soon
retire. At 68, he was not in good health. His successor would be Tom
Kennedy, UMW vice-president.
CIO president Philip Murray had been highly critical of the
Progressive Party, as CIO voted to back the Truman-Barkley ticket.
He said that those who were talking about civil rights were not
doing much to help their cause in the South, that the CIO
was the organization which permitted whites and blacks to join the
same union, was doing more than merely talking about
civil rights. Albert Fitzgerald of the United Electrical Workers,
supporting Mr. Wallace, had opposed the endorsement of the
President, but remained silent after the diatribe of Mr. Murray.
Walter Reuther, predicts Mr. Allen, would be overwhelmingly
re-elected president of UAW.
George Meany, AFL secretary-treasurer, said that he had never
voted Republican in his life and would not start doing so in 1948.
AFL president William Green, though 75, would not quit the
position during this year. His re-election was certain. His
successor would likely be either Mr. Meany or George Harrison of the
Railway Clerks Brotherhood.
What about Mr. Blue? If not him, Mr. Holy would do.
Bill Hutcheson, head of the carpenters' union and an ardent
Republican, was not invited to the AFL executive board meeting which
endorsed the President. He was no longer head of the RNC labor
division which he headed each quadrennial from 1932-44, probably
because he had the previous year opposed Taft-Hartley.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of more than a thousand
Soviet occupation troops and civilians in Germany deserting each
month for the American zone. That was so, despite the good chance
that they would be caught by the Soviet secret police, killed if
caught, and their families in Russia made to suffer. The best for
which they could hope if they succeeded was a shadowy half-life
without a country. Something over 13,000, 4,000 of whom were
officers, including two generals, had followed this path during the
previous year. About 3,000 were civilians. There were likely many
more who were unknown and others who had deserted to the British
zone or to Austria or other bordering countries.
For awhile after the war, an agreement was followed by the
Americans to return deserters to the Soviets, thus to certain death.
But that policy had been quietly abandoned except in cases where the
Russians could precisely identify the person and specify where he
could be located, a rare occurrence. The British had never returned
the deserters and so desertion probably had been even higher to that
zone.
American officials had learned that many of the deserters
could provide valuable information, though many were simple peasants
and workers.
The rate of desertion betrayed the fact that the Soviet
system had been a dismal failure. The fact that the Soviet
leadership was seeking to isolate the Soviet sphere was another such
indicator. It did not mean that the Soviet system of leadership was
crumbling, for there were thousands more who stayed for every
deserter who left. But the system at its core was rotten.
Max Hall discusses the World Council of Churches declaration
that the Christian Church should reject both Communistic and
capitalistic ideologies. Charles Taft, brother of Senator Robert
Taft, had sought amendment of the report to say instead that the
Council rejected only laissez-faire or unregulated
capitalism. The amendment was adopted.
The original concept of Adam Smith, that the free market
should be the only regulation of capitalism, was no longer popular
in Europe and increasingly was becoming unpopular in the United
States.
It was unclear what the Council did favor. Dr. John Bennett,
an American delegate to the meeting, who, along with Mr. Taft, was
on the committee which drafted the report, said that it was
"experimentation between certain limits", similar to the
democratic Socialism being practiced by the Labour Government in
England.
A letter from State Senator R. M. Kennedy of Kershaw County
remarks on the July 17 front page article by Managing Editor Pete
McKnight regarding DNC treasurer and State Senator Joe Blythe,
finding Mr. Blythe both apologetic and incriminating. Mr. Kennedy
had attended the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and says that
he could understand the frustration Mr. Blythe felt for not having
any input to party decisions. Mr. Blythe had claimed that he was not
consulted by DNC chairman J. Howard McGrath when the decision was
made to desegregate party headquarters staff. The "mongrel
aggregation" of the DNC leadership had so transacted business,
he suggests, for some time.
Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, from North Carolina,
was likewise not consulted in the decision by the President to
desegregate the Army. Mr. Kennedy appears to wonder why Secretary
Royall had not determined to disobey the President's order.
Well, since that would be met, no doubt, by the President
issuing an immediate demand for Secretary Royall's resignation, perhaps
it is better for some low-ranking idiots in State Legislatures to
shut up about things of which they know nothing and stick to local
bread and buttermilk issues of which they usually know too much but
nevertheless befitting their pay grade.
A letter writer says that there appeared to be a race ongoing
between food supply and world population with population outrunning
supply. He wants an extensive farm program undertaken in foreign
countries and improved domestically.
A letter writer finds the tomato and egg throwers in
Charlotte at the appearance of Henry Wallace the previous week to
have been childish and denying of the basic right of free speech.
They appeared not to take democracy too seriously.
As good New Dealers themselves, no doubt, they were simply
making the political statement, however woolly of expression, that
Mr. Wallace did not breakfast on grilled millionaire.
A letter writer finds "Dixiecrat" to have been a
misnomer and one which should have never first appeared in print in
The News, its origin owing to the practical need to shorten
headlines, thus catching on with the press nationally. He
thinks that the states' rights advocates were not confined to Dixie.
Perhaps not geographically, but in mind and spirit,
certainly.