The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 22, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Peiping in China had agreed to terms of surrender to the Communists as the Chinese Government named five delegates at a tea party of high Government officials to negotiate a nationwide settlement. The Communists gave no indication that they would accept peace on any terms other than total surrender, and the Communist radio appeared to reject in advance any desire of the Government for peace as bogus and performed at the direction of the U.S. Government.
On the Island of Rhodes, Egyptian and Israeli negotiators again conferred with U.N. acting mediator for Palestine Dr. Ralph Bunche. The Israelis were said to be insistent on holding the main road network and most of the Negev Desert in southern Palestine, as well as Beersheba, provided to the Arabs under the November, 1947 U.N.-approved partition plan. Beersheba controlled the road north to Jerusalem, west to Gaza, and south to the Egyptian border. Talks had deadlocked over the boundaries to be established in the Negev. Dr. Bunche intimated to the press that both sides were out of arguments and that either agreement or break-up of the conference, begun January 13, would occur in the ensuing few days.
In Czechoslovakia, security police were reported to be holding 60 persons, both Czech Army officers and civilians, at Bratislava on charges of spying for American intelligence services in Austria. Several such arrests had been taking place since early January.
Dean Acheson issued a written statement to the press on his first day on the job as Secretary of State, quoting Biblical text which he said had been referenced often by former Secretary of State under President Hoover and Secretary of War under FDR, Henry Stimson, from the Second Book of Kings: Let not him that buckleth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it off.
On the 25th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, the editor of Pravda in Moscow, in the presence of Josef Stalin, declared the previous night that it was the century of Communism, not Wall Street, and that Russia had an "unshakeable will for international cooperation". He went on to attack "Anglo-American warmongers" and "reactionaries" whose plans for China had failed. He cited the growth of national liberation movements in Indonesia, Malaya, and Indo-China as being expressions of colonial and semi-colonial peoples indicative of the crisis of decadent capitalism.
The Soviet news agency Tass described the President's inauguration speech as an "enraged attack" on Communism. It viewed the President's proposal for aiding backward nations as an attempt to extend the influence of American capital.
In Rome, several thousand students marched on the Foreign Office, protesting by shouting "venduto", meaning "sold out", for the Government having agreed to deliver Italian warships to the Russians as reparations for the war.
At Fort Meade, Md., former inmates of the postwar disciplinary camp at Wurzburg, Germany, told a general court martial that they were mistreated by Army officers during January, 1947. One witness said that both of his feet had to be amputated because while in an unheated cell in solitary confinement for missing a formation, he was denied shoes and socks, causing his feet to become swollen from exposure. A guard testified that he had seen ice in the latrine buckets of prisoners in solitary confinement, that they were allowed to go to the regular latrine, but only while naked, when their buckets became full. The first of four such officers was on trial for neglect of duty. The other three were his superiors.
In Great Falls, Montana, four of twelve crewmen were killed when a B-29 crashed into a snow-covered field minutes after take-off at the Air Base. The plane was en route to its home base in Spokane, Wash., from a base in Salina, Kans.—the home base to which another B-29 was headed from England when it crashed the previous week at Lochgoilhead, Scotland, killing at least six of twenty aboard.
In West Branch, Mich., a young man, 22, was released from custody after questioning regarding his being discovered by State Police riding along a country road with the asphyxiated body of his girlfriend, 14, beside him in the front seat. He told the police that she had been driving and had become nauseated, stopped the car, then fell asleep from weakness. He had also fallen asleep and when he awakened, his girlfriend was dead. Bewildered, he began driving aimlessly through the countryside with the girl's body beside him, until a gas station attendant tipped the police and they stopped him.
Always check for exhaust leaks in winter.
Near Columbia, Tenn., two Vanderbilt University students were killed in an automobile accident and three others injured seriously on a rain-slickened highway as the car in which they were riding crashed into the back of a truck.
The Western U.S. was hit by new snow, primarily in Nevada. At Hamilton Field in California, the Fourth Air Force was preparing an airlift for Nevada livestock, as well as that in other weather-beset states, awaiting approval from Washington. At Ely, Nev., the secretary of the United Stockmen's Association estimated that 70,000 sheep were in critical condition for lack of food and exposure.
Send them mutton and sweaters. Contribute until your heart bleeds for the poor little lambs who have lost their way.
The President overslept on this morning, arising only at 6:30, an hour later than usual, tired from the week of inaugural festivities. He got six hours of sleep compared to the two and a half on Thursday and four and a half on Wednesday.
Drinking on the job again.
In Winston-Salem, N.C., Police Chief John M. Gold announced the finding that, after a police investigation lasting several weeks, games of chicken with automobiles were being widely played in the city and county. Two young drivers had been arrested after they had prepared to send their cars over the cliff into the ocean, the Sea of Verrazzano surrounding Winston-Salem, stopped by a phalanx of police vehicles before one would surely have been killed and the other charged with reckless vehicular manslaughter, or negligent murder as the case might have been in South Carolina.
One of the games was described as
"Russian Roulette", in which the lead driver zigzagged
over the road to prevent the driver behind from passing, allowing the
pass only on curves or at intersections. One young driver had been
killed in the idle pursuit a few weeks earlier. Another game was "On
Your Mark
The horseshoe-shaped drive around R.
J. Reynolds High School was used for another game, the name of which
was not told but probably was "Demons' Dare Dood
For full disclosure, we have to impart that we began high school driver's education classes in that same horseshoe every morning once upon a time, in much the same way described.
30-30.
It ended badly. We wound up on the wrong end of the Hawthorne Curve in a shoebox without a horn by which to extricate ourselves.
In Maidstone, England, Harry the parrot, mainstay of the Bull Inn pub, the previous day laid an egg for the first time, prompting the management to announce that Harry's name would henceforth be Harriet.
Why?
Maybe because Harriet a cracker.
On the editorial page, "A Lesson from China" remarks on the fall of the Kuomintang, the ruling party under Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist regime in China. It occurred without a sound. Chiang had fled the capital for his hometown. He had been brave in battle but not a leader in peace. He was too old and too tired to lead his armies against the Communists. Meanwhile, his Government suffered from rampant graft, officials looting the treasury, leaving the people to starve and thus allowing an entry for the Communists in the North to take up the cudgels against the Government on behalf of a starving people who no longer supported the Chiang regime.
The Communists had won the war. The defeat of Chiang, though he may have been in the end a villain, was nevertheless a defeat for the West and a victory for Russia. The piece suggests that what could be learned was only a lesson in not abandoning any place in the world to Communist aggression, that there was no such thing as ideological neutrality, and that the West could not procrastinate. The West could not start a shooting war with Russia for its inexorable consequences and thus could not enter the fight against the Chinese Communists. By the time the danger was recognized, it was too late to fight an ideological war.
It urges that had the country had the foresight to rebuild China rather than using it as a base to afford Far Eastern defense against Russia, had Chiang been forced to clean house internally before receiving American aid, then things might have been different and the Communists might have lost.
The West could still win the fight in Indonesia, the Philippines, and India, provided it took the appropriate lessons from the Chinese defeat.
Of course, to pay for it all, taxes on everyone could have been increased to 99 percent of gross adjusted income immediately after the war; but that would not have been very practical either, now, would it?
"Go Slow on Road Bonds" finds that the proposed referendum for the 200 million dollar bond issue to pave and otherwise improve rural roads definitely ought occur to allow the people to express their view. But it recommends to the Legislature that it proceed slowly and perhaps cut back the amount of the initial bond issue.
"Better Bookkeeping Needed" tells of the 29-year superintendent of Warren County schools entering prison to serve a sentence of five to seven years for embezzlement of $45,000 following his plea of nolo contendere. The superintendent had received funds, including teacher salaries, to operate a black school which did not exist at all in 1946-47. He had also ordered various equipment useful in the home as school equipment, which never turned up in the schools, including a bath set which he had initialed with his own initials.
It suggests that a better system of oversight was needed in the schools.
A piece from the
The piece recommends giving to the March of Dimes.
Drew Pearson tells of several world events, largely ignored by the press, occurring during the inauguration ceremonies in Washington. Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin chastised U.S. Ambassador to London Lewis Douglas after the latter called upon him to complain of the British sending troops to the area around the Palestine-Egyptian border. Mr. Bevin told him that Britain would move troops wherever it pleased regardless of U.S. advice.
Well you can go to the Commies, you little Socialist bastard.
The American Embassy in Belgrade was closing a trade deal with Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia to lure him from the Communist sphere. Tito had suggested the deal after Moscow announced plans to cut trade with Yugoslavia by 90 percent after Tito's Politburo-deemed excessive independence and criticism of the Soviet.
The State Department had suddenly canceled an Air Force flight to Peru for the fact of Peru's new dictatorship, previously planned by former Air Force General Harold George, presently running the Peruvian lines. The President had warned the State Department not to recognize Venezuela's new military dictatorship.
Former President Herbert Hoover refused to release a copy of the confidential report of the Hoover Commission on Government reorganization to Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan. But the report had already been sent to the heads of every agricultural college in the nation by the head of the Commission subcommittee examining the Agriculture Department.
The British had thrown a monkey wrench into the North Atlantic pact by demanding through British Ambassador to Washington Sir Oliver Franks that Britain's African colonies and dominions be included in the new alliance. The U.S. and France, especially France, adamantly opposed such inclusion.
The American Embassy in China had notified the State Department that the Chinese Communist Army was being commanded by several hundred of Russia's top Army officers, including at least ten generals. Soviet General Tasenko, who directed the Russian march against the Japanese in the closing days of the war, had just engineered the downfall of Tientsin.
House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia intended to fight for a 70-group Air Force. He had previously been the Navy's best friend in Congress, but now believed the Air Force to be the first line of defense.
There were so many people at inaugural events because the committee had distributed twice as many tickets as they expected people to show, while 98 percent of the recipients accepted the invitations. Eight thousand people had jammed the National Guard Armory for an inaugural ball, when it was supposed to accommodate only 5,300.
Marquis Childs finds Republican Party emotions running the gamut from the bitter, as Senator Wayne Morse who was deprived a Republican spot on the Foreign Relations Committee when the Democrats took away a minority seat, to the contemptuous and envious.
The Democrats, however, had swept to victory in November with spirit and looked forward to the successor to President Truman emerging from the present field of young Democrats who had helped to give him the victory. There were new Senators and House members, new Governors, such as Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who had a chance to clean up the mess left behind in Illinois by a corrupt Republican machine.
G. Mennen Williams of Michigan was also a Governor to be watched, had run without the blessing of his wealthy Republican family and so had to mortgage his home to finance the campaign.
Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut, former OPA administrator under FDR, also had a political future, but would have a tough row to hoe with the GOP Legislature.
Black leaders from all over the country were attending the inaugural, as it was this bloc which helped more than any other single bloc to deliver the election to the Democrats. The Republicans had to wonder whether the black bloc would permanently be in the Democratic column in future elections.
The party jubilation might turn sour from old feuds but no matter what would happen in the future, the present demonstration of unity was formidable and implied growth in the direction indicated by the voters in the fall. It was thus not wise of the GOP to sit back and simply wait for the Democrats to fall.
James Marlow discusses the "bold new program" of aid to underdeveloped countries to which the President briefly alluded in the inaugural address, without elucidating in detail what he intended. He had stated that the U.S. should help these nations with skill and knowledge, as well with capital investment, the latter being a mystery as to precise meaning, whether from the Treasury as part of a pooling arrangement of nations or from providing incentives for private investment.
He had said that these investments would be accompanied by guarantees of the recipient nations, but did not explain the type of guarantee, whether, for instance, not to seize the foreign property and interests of investors, or military guarantees to allow intervention against seizure by an outside force, such as might occur in a Communist takeover. Other countries might see such a guarantee as meddling in internal affairs of another country, a resented form of turn-of-the-century dollar diplomacy. But the U.S. had interfered in the internal affairs of Greece as a contingency for providing military and economic aid.
The President, probably to counter in advance charges by Soviet propaganda of revived imperialism, said that the old imperialist ways of exploitation for foreign profit had no place in the country's plans. Yet, no businessman invested money without expectation of profit. Only a group of nations could do so.
So, Mr. Marlow concludes with the question again of what the President meant.
A letter writer agrees generally with the editorial of January 18, "Second Degree Citizens", which suggested that civil rights leaders concerned about minority civil rights ought pay more attention to the typically lenient treatment provided defendants accused in black-on-black crimes, but disagrees on this latter point. She tells of black leaders for years having insisted on tougher treatment for such offenders. And blacks needed protection from other blacks not nearly so much as from whites.
A letter writer questions why the newspaper published the two letters, one to North Carolina Senator J. Melville Broughton and the other to Congressman Hamilton Jones, appearing January 19, as both letters said the same thing regarding his urging that the cancellation of the veterans' hospitals in North Carolina by the V.A. was ultimately beneficial for its frugality, regardless of its adverse effect on the citizens of the state. The writer provides his suggested letter as one which would have been better.
A letter writer also objects to the same letter writer's criticism of public spending for roads and hospitals, which the previous writer had found to be socialisitic.
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