The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 3, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S., France, and Britain were completing a joint declaration to present to Russia regarding the acceptance of terms for lifting of the Berlin blockade. An informed source stated that the blockade would be lifted by May 11 and that the Big Four Council of Foreign Ministers would meet May 25 to discuss Germany. The only official announcement, however, was that the talks on the negotiations were proceeding "satisfactorily".
In China, Kwangteh, midway between Wuhu and Hangchow, was captured by the Communists, according to Peiping Communist radio. It also reported that Tatung, the last Nationalist bastion north of the Yangtze other than surrounded Tsingtao, had been captured.
In New York, the U.N. Special Political Committee was called upon to consider the membership application of Israel after being referred to that 58-member committee the previous day by the General Assembly.
Army chief of staff General Omar Bradley told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that America's defense frontiers were in the heart of Europe. He urged approval of NATO, saying that the bridgehead established at Normandy in June, 1944, costing 21,000 American casualties in ten days, had to be held to avoid the necessity of another bloodbath in the future.
General Claire Chennault, head of the "Flying Tigers" in China during the war, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he favored aid for the anti-Communist forces in China so that they could hold a beachhead as a staging area for the resurgence of nationalism. He said that the war in China had been lost by the "passivity" of the U.S.
Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn predicted that the House would pass the compromise labor bill with the amendments he had outlined the previous day.
In New York, Housing Expediter Tighe Woods said to a meeting of businessmen that landlords and tenants would be happier under the new rent control law and the formula on which "fair rent" would be determined, the latter just released the previous night. Meanwhile, a citywide rent strike against increases was being urged by Congressman Vito Marcantonio, and landlords also were unhappy with the new law.
Friends of Jonathan Daniels said that the Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer was getting ready to talk to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson about being appointed by the President to become the new Secretary of the Navy, replacing John L. Sullivan who had recently resigned.
In Detroit, the UAW local, prior to approval by the international union, ordered a strike of 60,000 members to begin on Wednesday at Ford Motor Company's Rouge plant. The strike regarded a speedup on the assembly line and the local said that Ford had violated its oral agreement to maintain the speed at status quo during the negotiations, instead sped up the line. Prior to the announcement, settlement appeared near in the dispute.
In Carlisle, Pa., a funeral director was killed the previous night when the hearse he was driving was hit by a truck at an interchange. The truck driver, who said that his brakes failed, was charged with aggravated assault and battery.
In Martinsville, Va., seven men were convicted for the rape of a housewife four months earlier as she walked through the black section of town. The jury fixed the punishment as death for each defendant. Each of the men had allegedly confessed according to police, but the defendants nevertheless pleaded not guilty and went through trials, several claiming that they were frightened and that the police had coerced them into the confessions with promises to do what they could for them. The victim identified each of the seven men as being among her assailants.
In Pinehurst, N.C., Dr. J. A. Jones, pastor of Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, told the North Carolina bankers that "socialism is inevitably immoral", that it discredited the "dignity and significance of man", magnifying the fault of individualism.
In Oklahoma City, police spotted a bootlegger they had not seen for awhile and decided to pull him over. He said that he had been in California during his absence. They found that he was carrying 452 pints of illegal whiskey.
In Charlotte, General Robert Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, would be present for the opening of the new store on the following Thursday morning. You don't want to miss that. It only comes once in a lifetime. You can probably find a new manual lawnmower cheap. You might even find a new home inside.
On the editorial page, "Peace in Whose Time?" finds the lifting of the Berlin blockade to be the latest manifestation of appeasement of the West by Russia, a process which had been ongoing for several months.
But, it warns, such a stance might only represent the calm before the storm.
Russia was offering peace perhaps because of the need to concentrate on Asia and Communist China, or the realization that war presently could destroy all it had achieved in Eastern Europe since the war, or because it was attempting to blunt the efficacy of NATO and the flow of arms to Western Europe as part of it by convincing the U.S. that it was unnecessary.
It recommends, however, not being suckered into another Munich as in 1938 with the Nazis, and that "eternal vigilance is the price of peace."
"Spell It Out for 'Em" favors more "walk
"Up and Up It Goes" tells of the General Assembly having approved, provided the 200-million dollar rural road bond issue passed, 747.5 million dollars for the 1949-51 biennium. The piece provides the general breakdown of that total. The 1947 Assembly had appropriated 418 million and the 1945 session, 273 million. Even allowing for the fact that spending of the accumulated surplus of the fiscally conservative war years was included in the new budget, it nevertheless demonstrated, urges the editorial, the plight of the taxpayer, squeezed from three sides, by local, state, and federal revenue raising.
A piece from the
Salisbury Post,
titled "Could Be Worse", tells of its fashion columnist
blaming designers for not putting forth the kind of hats which women
liked. The piece suggests that no pretty face was enhanced by a hat,
but that they did distract from an unattractive woman.
Psychologically
"That she so often achieves the perfect horror is beside the point; at least she reaches."
It concludes that designers could not make the perfect hat to please women, as there simply was no such thing.
Drew Pearson tells of the American housewife not being aware that, increasingly, the food she bought for the household had been "Farbenized", that is containing the same ersatz ingredients which I. G. Farben had developed for the German troops and civilian population during the war. The extent of the use of such ingredients had been investigated to some degree by the FDA, which had held hearings on synthetic substitutes for milk and shortening in bread.
Representative Frank Keefe of Wisconsin had disclosed that the ingredients of bread could be so saturated with chemicals that it lost nearly all of its nutritional value, that a cornucopia of non-nutritional chemicals, mostly developed by Farben, was being fed the public as substitutes for milk, fats and eggs in such foods as cake, doughnuts, cereal mixes, etc., and that the manufacturers of these synthetic foodstuffs had not performed adequate research to insure their safety.
Bread manufacturers were placing softening agents in the mix which kept the bread soft to the touch in the store. Appearance and taste superseded nutritional value.
The Department of Agriculture foresaw a serious threat to the dairy industry by this ersatz intrusion. It recommended new legislation to limit the use of these ingredients such that nutritional value would not be compromised.
The President, having been invited to Santa Fe for the centennial of the local newspaper, told of his early visits to New Mexico in 1909 and 1924, during both visits having stopped at a curio shop. The owner had told him that he had a trunk which belonged to former Governor Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur. He also confessed that if he sold it, it would be the ninth one he had pawned off as such. The owner also imparted of having once had the skull of Napoleon in his shop. A woman had asked whether it was not too small to be Napoleon's skull, to which the shop owner had retorted that it was his skull when he was a boy. The President got great delight in retelling these stories.
DeWitt MacKenzie tells of India, by and large, being happy over the agreement which permitted it to become a republic while still remaining a member of the British Commonwealth, without the necessity to acknowledge the sovereignty of the British throne.
But there were some disgruntled elements who were bound not to approve, such as the hundreds of princes who had lost their royal perquisites since independence was granted two years earlier.
Only the fate of Kashmir remained unsettled, pending a plebiscite to determine whether it would join India or Pakistan.
He relates of having been a guest in 1916 of one of the most powerful of the princes, the last Maharajah of Gwalier. The Maharajah told of the subjects being more obeisant to the sovereign king-emperor than to the prince's government. The British had cultivated this level of respect for the throne among the princes. In 1911, a ceremonial crowning of King George V and Queen Mary was held to great pomp in New Delhi. The Maharajahs came before them kneeling and then dutifully backing away in correct form. One Maharajah, who carried a cane against royal protocol, also turned his back on the King and Queen too quickly, was thus denied cherished prerogatives by the Viceroy for years afterward.
So the new arrangement whereby India no longer recognized the throne was a tough circumstance to which to become accustomed for the Maharajahs.
Stewart Alsop, in Tokyo, tells of his interview of General MacArthur, who was not the man of the Sunday supplements, rather an elderly man who loaned himself easily to parody for his meaningless bombast and theater. But beneath that exterior were shrewdness, great ability and intense patriotism, the latter resemblant to that of Charles De Gaulle.
Even those who believed that the occupation was going sour found that General MacArthur's peculiar personality was its greatest intangible asset. The country people of Japan called him "Tenno Mak", after one of their most beloved pre-meiji rulers. None of the Japanese criticized him.
The right had attacked his policy in Japan for supposedly failing to encourage free enterprise, usually regarding his limiting those who wished to make a fast dollar, and by the left for not encouraging democratic forces, including the Communist Party. The occupation policy had recently shifted markedly to the right, but primarily because of pressure from home. General MacArthur, himself, however, had brought about land reform, dissolution of the industrial family trusts, the Zaibatsu, creation of a large labor movement and encouragement of civil liberties.
But the enthusiasm and idealism had gone from the occupation and it was time for it to end. Nearly all that was left was a vast military bureaucracy, feeding on itself, lost in a morass of red tape, lapsing into anti-climax. But when change inevitably would come, it would be hard to replace General MacArthur.
James Marlow tells of the first half of the Congressional session for the year proceeding slowly, with little concrete action taking place. But the first months of any session usually were slow, as the Congress had to prepare in committee hearings the big bills for debate and vote. The only major legislation thus far completed was the rent control extension bill. Both houses had approved the Marshall Plan fund for another fifteen months, but had not yet appropriated more than the first billion dollars for the ensuing three months.
The Senate had approved the 35 million dollar bill for the states to provide health care for school children, but the House had not yet gotten to the bill. The Senate was ready to vote on the 300 million dollar aid to education bill, but not the House. The House was ready to vote on the new labor bill, but not the Senate.
The President's health initiative had little or no chance of passage during the year, though hearings would begin.
Senate ratification of NATO and then, before both houses, the determination of whether to provide arms to the Western European members remained ahead, the latter still a thorny issue as both chambers were calling for more economy.
Samuel Grafton, no longer carried by The News, discusses the difficulty facing Secretary of State Acheson in trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Soviet Union. First and foremost, it was harder to achieve bipartisan harmony in a negotiation for peace, perceived as weakness, than during a period of non-negotiation, perceived as toughness.
Second, the American people would expect negotiation to occur openly. But open negotiations were freighted with the difficulty that a position taken could then not easily be withdrawn without appearing to retreat, whereas a position taken in private could be easily changed without loss of confidence. So for Mr. Acheson to negotiate effectively would require negotiation in private.
Third, he would need to obtain concessions from Russia while trying to convince Congress of the necessity for NATO and arms for the Western European members, the two aims being contrarietal. For the more likely peace would be achieved, the harder it would be to convince Congress that arms for Western Europe were necessary to oppose Soviet aggression.
So, in sum, it was easier to get along domestically when not negotiating than when negotiations were transpiring. The way of negotiation was incomparably harder than the way of toughness.
He concludes that in a time when a lot was being said about political maturity in the country, there would be an opportunity to demonstrate it by understanding genuinely Mr. Acheson's difficulties and those of the world rather than showing mere defiance, inevitably "maturity of a lesser order."
Is there anything else you would care to have explained regarding why the strongest support of the current putative Republican presidential nominee
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