The Charlotte News
Tuesday, January 4, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Far Eastern Commission in Japan had settled most of the remaining questions about Japan's future except for reparations and the size of its industry postwar. Both problems, the Commission assured, would be resolved in the coming year, the latter having been held up pending a determination of Japan's industrial need to become self-supporting. The reparations issue awaited determination of what Japanese assets were to be removed and to which nations they would be sent and in what quantity.
In Tsingtao, China, Vice-Admiral Oscar Badger, commander of the Western Pacific Fleet, denied rumors that U.S. forces were being withdrawn from China. The rumors developed out of the termination by the Marines of their lease on the campus of Shantung University, where they maintained a barracks, and ensuing negotiations to return to the university the facility. After the rumors developed, the effort was abandoned.
The State Department made public a note to Russia demanding an exact count of German war prisoners it was still holding. The U.S. had no word on the fate of about half of the 890,000 prisoners Russia acknowledged it was holding in the spring of 1947. A Big Four agreement had been reached in early 1947 that all prisoners would be discharged by the end of 1948. The three Western powers knew of only 195,000 prisoners sent into the Western zones, though the Russians claimed 257,000 had been returned to all four zones. The Soviet news agency Tass indicated that the repatriation of the remaining prisoners would take place in accordance with a Soviet plan that the process be completed during 1949. Tass repeated a Russian charge that the Western powers were holding prisoners under a phony claim of their being volunteer workers in the Western zones, denied by the three Western powers. The U.S. stated that the last German war prisoners, except for those in hospitals or AWOL, were released in mid-1947.
A Republican-controlled special committee of the 80th Congress had found no evidence that Federal employees had used confidential information of the Government to speculate on commodity markets. It recommended that all Government employees engaged in policy-making for commodity purchases by the Government be prohibited from speculation and that Congress continue oversight. The committee had been created a year earlier amid rumors that many Government officials were making large sums from such speculation.
Congress was awaiting the President's State of the Union message the following day. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn said he believed that the proposals would be greeted favorably by the majority.
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, in a letter to Speaker Sam Rayburn, asked the new Congress for new and stronger laws to protect the nation's secrets.
In New York, the grand jury investigating spying in the Government called the secretary of former Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre as a witness. Mr. Sayre had been Alger Hiss's superior at the State Department in 1937-38, during the period in which Whittaker Chambers claimed that Mr. Hiss had passed to him secret Government documents for transfer to the Soviets. Many of the "pumpkin papers" found on Mr. Chambers's Maryland farm had come from Mr. Sayre's office.
Oksana Kasenkina (or "Kosenkina" as her name had previously been spelled), the Russian school teacher who the previous August had jumped from a third-floor window at the Soviet consulate in New York to escape what she termed as her "cage", was received into the Roman Catholic church of the Eastern rite in New York. She had decided to join the Catholic Church while in Roosevelt Hospital recovering from her injuries sustained in the fall. She regarded the Catholic Church as "the main force against Communism in the world".
In Warren, Ark., a hundred miles southeast of Little Rock, at least 46 were killed and 300 injured by a tornado which struck the previous afternoon. Doctors and nurses from Hot Springs and Little Rock came to the aid of the injured, working through the rain and hail into the night. One entire family of eight was killed by the tornado. Other tornadoes hit elsewhere in Arkansas and in Louisiana, killing four and injuring more than 60 persons.
A blizzard in the Western plains states had stranded hundreds of motorists in Colorado and Wyoming.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of George Shelton, 65, humble station agent for the Seaboard Air Line Railway, being named by the local V.F.W. man of the year in nearby Matthews, N.C.
On the editorial page, "A Champion All the Way" tells of man being in a hurry in the Twentieth Century, as epitomized by Sir Malcolm Campbell who had established first in 1935 the land speed record for an automobile and then a speed boat record in 1939, the latter still standing in 1948 at his death a few days earlier in England.
He had started racing bicycles and motorcycles, then turned to airplanes in 1909, until a series of crashes caused him to change his interest to automotive design, and finally to speedboats.
Now the jet had transplanted conventional propulsion. The steps forward in land and water speed might seem slow in the future as man ventured into space travel, but pioneering in any field was to be measured by the skill which a person employed to make use of the knowledge and technology available at a given time. In that respect, it concludes, Mr. Campbell was unequaled.
"Skunks, Mules and Governors" tells of Governor-elect Kerr Scott having impliedly called the State legislators jackasses. No one had taken offense, however, as such barbs were his stock-in-trade, just as he had referred to the Chapel Hill-Durham Highway proposed by Governor Gregg Cherry as a "Football Road".
Thus far, covering the colorful new Governor had proved a field day for the press. He was quite quotable, as when he said, "If I was a skunk then, I'm one now."
Now, he would have to act and the people of the state would come to know what kind of a man he really was.
"Fantasy—With a Moral" uses Fanny Coe's chosen version of the proverbial choice of the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow or personal happiness to symbolize the support of North Carolina's Senators Hoey and Broughton and local Representative Hamilton Jones for Federal aid to education. The piece suggests that they first determine how much the proposed 300 million was really needed in North Carolina, with a Federal fiscal deficit of 619 million dollars and a debt of 252 billion from the war. North Carolina had no debt and held a surplus of 80 million dollars.
Furthermore, it suggests, the Federal aid package ultimately would come with strings attached regarding elimination of segregation.
God forbid! Not that.
Drew Pearson tells of the behind-the-scenes meeting of the Republican liberals to try to end the leadership of Senator Taft. Senators Baldwin, Lodge, Morse and Young wanted to make it clear that Mr. Taft's "insatiable political ambition" had caused him to place himself above party interests. Senator Lodge was willing to be the candidate in opposition to Senator Taft for the leadership position. They expressed a determination to continue to fight against Senator Taft's leadership even though it appeared he had the votes to be re-elected.
Mr. Pearson hopes that the 81st Congress would show its independence from the real estate lobby by not bowing to their desires to keep Congressmen Hugo Sims of South Carolina and Clinton McKinnon of California off the Banking & Currency Committee for their having defeated the two lackeys of the real estate lobby, John Riley and Charles Fletcher.
Atomic scientists and weather experts were working to prevent discharge of deadly waste gases into the air around New York City from the Brookhaven, Long Island, atomic pile set to go into operation in the spring. They wanted to insure that the radioactive gases would only go up and keep going up, rather than falling down, potentially with catastrophic results to the population.
Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson of Texas had sent an urgent appeal to Congress for approval of a private judicial washroom in the Jefferson, Texas, Courthouse.
Credit was due Congressman Chet Holifield of California for having stood up for embattled Edward Condon of the Bureau of Standards the previous spring when it required courage to do so. Now, HUAC admitted it had been unfair to Dr. Condon.
The President was considering former Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall for a Cabinet post.
Stewart Alsop finds that though the revolt of liberal Republicans against the conservative leadership of Senator Robert Taft would be defeated, the liberals, given the Senator's voting record, ought be for him.
While he had voted for curtailment of Marshall Plan aid, otherwise, Senator Irving Ives of New York voted exactly as Senator Taft on key issues. Senator Taft had voted for Federal aid to education, whereas Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., trying to unseat Senator Taft as party leader in the Senate, voted against it. He also had a similar voting record to Senator William Knowland of California, another of the liberals trying to unseat him. Senator Taft had a more liberal voting record than Senators Chan Gurney, Raymond Baldwin, and Milton Young, also among the coterie seeking new leadership. His leadership had in fact been more progressive than most of his Republican colleagues.
Ironically, despite House GOP conservatism at the leadership positions, there was no similar revolt afoot to replace them, outgoing Speaker Joe Martin and floor leader Charles Halleck of Indiana. House Republicans had rejected the Taft housing bill, education and health measures, as well a milder version of the labor law than Taft-Hartley. Adoption of the Taft program would have made the GOP House appear moderate.
The primary policy reason for the
revolt was Mr. Taft's stance on foreign policy regarding limitation
of ERP. But more than any other factor, the opposition arose from
personality differences, making him stand out as a symbol for
Republican conservatism when he actually belonged with the liberal
GOP wing. His return to leadership with Senators Wherry and Millikin,
along with the House GOP leaders, would offer proof that the
Republicans could not alter their course, that the party was determined "to
ring out the new
Indeed, the revolt against Senator Taft, as explained on the previous day's front page, had been defeated by a change in GOP rules which previously prevented the policy committee chairman from serving more than four years.
The ostensible irony, incidentally, should not be lost that the chief Republican revolter to the conservative leadership of Senator Taft was Senator Lodge, the running mate eventually of Vice-President Nixon in the presidential election of 1960, subsequently made Ambassador to South Vietnam by President Kennedy, while Senator Kennedy, in 1955, having defeated Senator Lodge
Marquis Childs looks at the nation's defense and finds that one-third of the projected 15 billion dollar defense budget would go to provisioning the troops, as clothing and shoes, as well as food, cost twice as much as in 1940. In consequence, draft calls were being reduced from their projected numbers as the armed forces could not stay within the budget otherwise.
The problem was finding a way to modernize and rearm the services within the remaining ten billion dollars and still provide adequate security for the country.
Added to that budget would be military aid to Europe so that the Western allies could begin rebuilding their armed forces.
Secretary of Defense Forrestal had posited in his first annual report that hard choices would have to be made by the people and their elected representatives to determine a balance between aid and defense. Mr. Childs remarks that the cynic might add that it would also take "some plain, harsh speaking."
Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, suggests that colonialism soon had to end across the world. It was especially offensive in this time of stress on freedom. No longer, as a half century earlier, was the emphasis on getting wealthy or, as three centuries earlier, on exploration, breeding and sustaining colonialism. He regards the founding of the Western Alliance, to develop into NATO in the spring, as signifying the end of colonialism, even if not intended to effect that result. Otherwise, the Alliance would collapse.
The Alliance was designed in furtherance of the rights of mankind and it could not long endure in a state where The Netherlands, one of its five nations, was undertaking a "police action" against the Indonesian Republicans of Java and Sumatra. Nor could it last if the French had a force in Indo-China or the British continued an effort to keep the Jews from settling their homeland in Israel.
While there was a Truman Doctrine which spelled out the type of people the country could not abide, it was necessary to have such a policy which indicated the type of people acceptable to the nation. It was not enough to have them be the enemy of Russia. Chiang Kai-Shek was opposed to the Communists, but his disregard for human rights and democratic practices made him unsuitable as an ally. The election had shown that the American people believed that a positive, pro-liberal stance was necessary to uphold democracy, not just an anti-Communist line.
The Netherlands did not qualify as long as they were oppressive toward others, even if they had the right stance on Communism. For such a Western Alliance would not require gunfire to effect its defeat; the laughter of the peasants of the East would drive it down.
Mr. Grafton advocates therefore cutting off Marshall Plan aid to Holland, not just to Dutch Indonesia in a driblet, as had been done with the suspension of fourteen million dollars worth of aid. For the President not to do so would imply that he did not understand the meaning of his election.
"The one who writes a slogan must be the first to obey it. The price one pays for the right to raise a motto is to fulfill it."
Dr. Charles C. Price, a professor of chemistry at Notre Dame and member of the World Federalists Association, in the second of two consecutive pieces on world government, expounds in favor of a world federation in which each nation would surrender its right to declare war or maintain any armed force capable of offensive action, that each nation would submit to the fundamental laws of the organization and that the nations would have coordinated and mutual defense through a common armed force.
Stressing the importance of such a cohesive body in the atomic age, he quotes Benjamin Franklin from 1776: "We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Eleventh Day of
Christmas: Eleven Peepers Peeping
Framed Edition
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