The Charlotte News

Friday, November 4, 1949

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Commerce Department had placed restrictions on shipments of strategic goods, capable of use by industry in war-making, to any place in the world save Canada. The concern was that in the future such goods could be re-shipped to the Soviet Union and its satellites. Of particular focus of the restrictions were Communist China and Latin America. Direct shipment of such goods to Russia had been under virtual ban since March, 1948.

New chief of Naval operations Forrest Sherman immediately eliminated the 30-man propaganda arm of the Navy known as Operation 23, headed by Captain Arleigh Burke. Though it had been authorized for a different purpose, it had become the planning apparatus for the testimony of officers before the House Armed Services Committee regarding the Navy's displeasure with unification policy and the strategic preference for the Air Force by the Joint Chiefs.

The previous day, Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared that the Navy was three times stronger than the combined navies of the other nations.

The U.N. political committee voted 38 to 6, with two abstentions, in favor of a four-power resolution accusing Albania and Bulgaria of aiding the Greek guerrillas and thereby menacing the peace. It urged an arms embargo on the two countries until they ceased aid to the rebels. Yugoslavia joined the Soviet-bloc nations in opposition to it. A Russian resolution, calling for a general Greek election to be supervised by the big powers, a declaration of amnesty for the guerrillas, the dissolution of the U.N. Special Commission on the Balkans, the cessation of military aid to Greece by foreign powers, and the establishment in Greece of a big power frontier commission on which Russia would be represented, was soundly defeated by the committee.

The State Department announced that the foreign ministers of the Big Three powers, the U.S., Britain, and France, had agreed to meet in Paris to discuss Germany and other problems, on a date to be determined.

RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson stated that the President's program was taking more from the American people than it cost them to eat and was piling up debt which their children would have to pay. He was responding to the President's speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, the previous night in which he had promised to move forward with his Fair Deal program and keep his promises made during the campaign. He promised to make a stump tour the following year on behalf of all Congressional candidates who supported his program.

Government mediator Cyrus Ching arranged a meeting with John L. Lewis as a first step in trying to resolve the coal strike. Mr. Lewis had offered to negotiate in Chicago the next day to effect a separate settlement in Indiana and Illinois of the dispute regarding pension contributions. Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois had urged operators and the UMW to resolve their differences to relieve widening stress from the strike in that state. Meanwhile, two Senators and nine members of the House urged the President to invoke the injunctive provisions of Taft-Hartley to end the strike.

In New York, a couple were found stabbed to death in a suite at the Hotel Alamac. Police viewed it as possibly a murder-suicide. Both were stabbed multiple times. The woman worked for the State Department as a clerk and the man for the U.N. documents and sales division.

In Warwick, R.I., the wreckage of a plane was found with its dead pilot after it had circled Boston for hours in a thick fog the previous night.

In Mullins, S.C., charges of kidnaping were expected to be brought this date against the two farmers who had taken by cake inveiglement the seven-year old girl two days earlier as she got off her school bus, and then later released her unharmed after their car bogged down on a country road.

On the editorial page, "Deficits and How They Grow" finds no surprise in the President's estimate of a 5.5 billion dollar budget deficit for the 1949-50 fiscal year. Neither he nor Congress had faced the realities of cutting the budget. In January, he had predicted a 900 million dollar deficit. The budget exceeded by 1.6 billion his estimated budget in January, while revenue was off three billion from the January forecast. Hence the 5.5 billion dollar deficit, three times the 1.8 billion deficit in 1948-49.

Only one other peacetime deficit had been larger, that in 1940-41, when the nation was building the war machine.

Cuts in the defense and foreign aid budgets amounted to 1.9 billion, but were then neutralized by larger expenditures for veterans and other, non-war related, but politically popular, expenditures.

But, it notes, the cuts might be sped up when the new session convened in January, as 1950 was an election year.

"Should Auditorium Pay for Itself?" is against financing of the new auditorium through revenue bonds as they would be paid off through revenue raised by the use of the auditorium, mandating high fees for its use and causing it to have to house concessions and offices, harmful to a clean design. It also would place the City in competition with the private building industry. A public auditorium was a public service and there was no more reason to expect it to pay for itself than parks, streets, or fire and police services.

"Concession on Public Housing" tells of the Winston-Salem Board of Realtors, in approving 1,200 new public housing units for the city, having shown itself unusually progressive even if placing a couple of unrelated conditions on the endorsement, one recommending the lifting of rent controls, a contingency to which Mayor Marshall Kurfees objected as irrelevant. The piece agrees.

The Board stressed that it did not thereby endorse public housing but wanted clearance of slums and provision of low-cost housing to the lowest income groups. Such seemed to be an admission that private enterprise could not alone do the job of providing for low income housing and so was notable.

"Non-Communist Affidavits" discusses the recent move to abolish the new requirement at UNC that faculty members sign a non-Communist affidavit. The affidavit would not serve to catch Communists as Communists would simply answer it falsely to preserve their utility to the party. It also set up a test of political faith as a precondition for teaching, dangerous to academic freedom.

The piece believes the requirement, established in haste in an atmosphere of fear, ought be abolished.

Drew Pearson again addresses the background of the Navy row with the Air Force and Army and within the Navy, itself. With the exception of Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Edison, Secretary for a short time under FDR, there had been no Secretary in the previous half century who had really dominated the Navy Department, and Secretary Daniels was hated by the admirals, Mr. Edison eased out by them. His successor, Frank Knox, was simply ignored or circumvented by the admirals.

During the early stages of World War II, in contrast to the First World War, the U.S. lost many troops in German U-boat attacks, some along the American shoreline. The merchant fleet also fared poorly. Secretary Knox had sought to stress anti-submarine warfare, but was resisted by the admirals who favored concentrating on the big battleships, not escort vessels or sonic listening devices.

Charles E. Wilson, head of the War Production Board, called in the Naval Architect who designed an escort vessel similar to a British corvette, but that did not occur until latter 1942.

The admirals resisted consulting with British submarine experts despite their two years of advance experience with the U-boats. Eventually, the Navy was persuaded to adopt sonar but it was then held up in various bureaus for two more years as American ships were being sunk by U-boats.

The admirals had kept for themselves the important communiques, hiding them from Secretary Knox. His successor, James Forrestal, was tipped to this practice and so he interceded to obtain these communiques, while his tipster was disciplined by being sent to Miami, far away from Washington. But Secretary Forrestal brought him back and made Admiral Louis Denfeld his chief of personnel, after which things went well. Some of the admirals, however, never forgave Secretary Forrestal after he came out in favor of unification, a fact which had affected Mr. Forrestal during the last two months of his life before his May, 1949 suicide.

Operation 23, the Navy propaganda unit, was conducting a whispering campaign against the new chief of operations, Admiral Forrest Sherman, referring to him as the "Quisling of the Navy" for his support of unification.

Admiral Denfeld had been presiding over the meeting of the Joint Chiefs in the absence of General Omar Bradley, the chairman, when the President had fired him as chief of Naval operations.

The President had told friends that he intended to give the axe to several Air Force generals unless they stopped scheming to build a 70-group Air Force, when the President favored 48 groups.

Robert C. Ruark wonders what had become of the famed American competitive spirit. He does not believe that it was healthy for the individual to unionize everything, including the Government, as it robbed him of the right to go from rags to riches in Horatio Alger fashion. The only perfect security was a life sentence in jail, but it was not much fun.

The most miserable people in the world were those who had retired to grow roses following a lifetime of meeting emergencies and living through crises and combats.

He asserts that President Truman had nearly blackmailed his way into election in 1948 by threatening the farmers and workers, under the Government's thumb, even if the opposition afforded little choice. Meanwhile, he had gathered around him "clunks".

Physical and spiritual achievement were gained through strife. When existence was underwritten, the people would become yawning, dull exhibits of insipidity.

"Me, I'd rather go out and slug a cop or kick an ashcan."

Marquis Childs, in Frankfurt, West Germany, suggests that he had found through touring Europe the indicator of Russian intentions. It had for long intended to overcome the U.S. without a shooting war, with a dual objective of flooding the West with gold mined in Siberia by Russian slave labor, thereby to undermine through dilution the value of the U.S. gold supply, spreading in the process economic chaos; and to create a chain of atomic power stations across the Soviet Union, linked together in a great power grid, producing the cheapest power in the world, enabling Russian industry to out-produce the rest of the world.

It was believed that the wholesale arrests in Czechoslovakia would supply new recruits for that forced labor pogrom, in which it was estimated that 100,000 had already died.

Soviet couriers and even Russian diplomats had been found smuggling gold through diplomatic channels into the West.

As to the power plan, Russia had no major electric power grid and only limited petroleum resources, and so no duplication would arise from the atomic power plan, which would double as provision of enormous war potential. In contrast to the U.S., where the power interests were concerned about competition from cheap atomic power, Russia was not so hampered.

The director of this cold war strategy was Bela Varga, an Hungarian-born economist and planner. Even moderate success in the role would make him a powerful player within the Soviet system.

A letter writer wants all of the city's tenants to become homeowners and landlords by engaging in sacrifice to afford the down payment.

You sound like a DT'er.

A letter from the executive secretary of the Teachers' and State Employees' Retirement System comments on Dick Young's "Victims of Actuarial Axe—The Forgotten Ex-Teachers", in which he had reported that a retired teacher with 22 years of service was receiving $10.05 per month. The writer wishes to correct the story, says that this teacher, No. 733, had in fact only 17 years of service and had started back to work at age 52. She had only contributed $177.63 to the retirement system, thus received such a low stipend.

If a teacher started working at age 20 and retired at 60, the teacher would receive $1,400 per year in retirement, having received a salary of about $2,400. Length of service and salary determined the retirement amount.

To pay teacher No. 733 $50 per month, as Mr. Young had suggested, would mean that the fund would subsidize a pension for $40 per month, something which it was not set up to do.

What if teacher No. 733 lives more than 18 months beyond her retirement?

A letter writer responds to another writer who had responded to his letter about the eleven convicted American Communists in New York. He says, nevertheless, that the same still went. He had served the U.S.A. and was proud of his name, of the U.S.A. and being a "true Democrat".

You sound like a DT'er, too.

You will have to admit, whatever you think about the candidates for public office generally in 2016, it has to have been one of the funnier campaign seasons ever on record, and, fortunately, not the saddest, no thanks to the DT'ers and their fearless leader, at least intentionally.

Did it ever occur to you, DT'er, that making of yourself a disgraceful laughing stock, promoting non-existent, fanciful claims and uninformed theories and regularly inveighing against conspiracies which do not exist, could not exist in any real world, as your leader daily does, is not the way to achieve respect in our society for anything you may think, espouse, or do.

Next time, try to find a substantive issue on which to stand and become knowledgeable of it, at least one, rather than mindlessly spewing fabular garbage daily about your opponent to the point where everyone, save the pathologically ill, becomes so tired of it that they want to scream. That earns scorn, not votes, stupid.

It will be a relief after next Wednesday not to have to listen daily anymore to that squinchy, little voice and view those awful, robotic hand gesticulations which this inartful fool from Manhattan, puppet-tool of syndicalistic interests, uses to fill the void spaces in his morass of megalomaniacally mindless verbiage.

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