The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 13, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that HUAC heard testimony that only a fraction of the black population of the nation were Communists but that the Communists were planning to set up a "Soviet Republic" among blacks in the South. Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania proposed that singer and actor Paul Robeson be called before the Committee to obtain his views on some of his recent pro-Russian statements. Baseball player Jackie Robinson was slated to appear before the Committee on the following Monday as part of a panel of blacks who had asked for a forum in which to respond to Mr. Robeson's comments that black citizens would not fight in a war against Russia. Alvin Stokes, an investigator for HUAC, testified this date, saying that only about 1,400 blacks in the U.S. were Communists. A letter from General Eisenhower was also placed in the record, in which he stated that the black soldiers of World War II provided "irrefutable proof" of black loyalty to the United States.
Secretary of State Acheson stated to a press conference that he opposed any cut to the Administration's proposed 1.45 billion dollars in arms aid to Western Europe and other areas. He also said that newly appointed New York Senator John Foster Dulles was correct when he asserted that at the Paris meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, the U.S. delegation had rejected the notion that they should ignore Soviet overtures to cooperation on the belief that any such cooperation might lead to relaxation of attention to the Soviet threat by the American people. They determined that the American people could spot any insincerity on the part of the Russians.
Russia charged before the eleven-nation Far Eastern Commission that General MacArthur and the Japanese Government were carrying on a "brutal" campaign against the democratic forces of Japan and had brought the Japanese economy to total collapse. Russia called for the Commission to permit workers in Japanese Government enterprises to bargain collectively and strike, forbidden by General MacArthur and the Government.
The United Steelworkers Union executive board accepted the President's invitation to a 60-day delay of their strike while a Presidential board investigated the dispute. Jones & Laughlin was the only steel producer which had accepted the proposal. U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Republic had each rejected it. The former two companies said that their operations would continue under extant contracts even if the union did strike as those contracts would be in effect until the following spring.
In Frankfurt, American officials had uncovered a racket involving sending of goods, such as tobacco, hosiery, and chocolate, from the U.S. to phony charities in Germany to be resold on the black market. A good portion of the 500 to 600 million dollars of customs evasions annually involved these shipments, the resultant losses from which could provide revenue for ERP.
A reliable source reported that the Czechoslovakian Central Committee of the Communist Party had adopted a six-point program designed to destroy the Catholic Church in that country. It included confiscation of Church property, control of pulpit speeches, and use of "immoral women" to show the immorality of the Catholic Church through gossip and stories printed in the national press.
In Honolulu, the territorial Governor, Ingram Stainback, sought new powers from the Legislature to end the islands' 74-day old dock strike.
In New York, Mayor William O'Dwyer announced that he would run for re-election.
In Pittsburgh, the mother of a man serving a sentence for armed robbery was beaten and robbed of $10 as she returned from her job at a downtown hotel. Her son had pleaded guilty to being a member of a bandit trio.
Also in Pittsburgh, a young German war bride jumped to her death from the eighth floor of a downtown office building. She had separated from her American husband whom she had married while he served in Germany.
In New Bedford, Mass., cotton manufacturer and yachtsman, Morgan Butler, 60, died. He was president of Hoosac Mills.
In Winston-Salem, N.C., the wife of Representative Thurmond Chatham died. Mrs. Chatham was a member of the Hanes family, prominent in the hosiery business.
In Charlotte, a conference of civic leaders recommended adoption by the City Council of control over charitable fund-raising campaigns.
The City Council was planning to consider plans for construction of a contagious disease unit and a pediatrics outpatient clinic as additions for Memorial Hospital. The Variety Club, a men's charitable organization, would contribute up to $15,000 of the excess needed over the estimated $100,000 for the project, plus $25,000 for the first year of maintenance of the outpatient clinic.
A special section of the newspaper salutes television, the newest industry in the Carolinas. It is crammed full of pictures of television stars and pertinent information on the the new and fascinating industry. You don't want to miss that. Turn to Section 3.
On the editorial page, "Another Way to Bolster Pact" discusses the proposal of eleven Senators, including Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, to amend the U.N. Charter to include a NATO-type alliance for the members, without the Security Council unilateral veto for each of the Big Five, providing military aid and setting up an international police force, essentially the Culbertson ABC Plan.
The piece finds the proposal salutary, to eliminate the refuge of the veto being used most frequently by Russia among the five permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S., Britain, France, and China.
"But Will They Convict?" wonders whether Alabama petit juries will start what the grand jury had begun and convict the seventeen men, including some in law enforcement, accused of Klan-like floggings, primarily of white people for failure to follow what the Klan deemed social norms. The law enforcement officers were not indicted for failing to prevent Klan action but for participating in it. Those in the South who had observed police cars leading Klan parades would not find the fact surprising.
The grand jury's action was to be commended but may have been only a gesture to take Federal pressure off Alabama. Whatever the motives, if the petit juries convicted the seventeen men, then the Klan would have encountered defeat in a former stronghold.
"In Defense of Characters" ventures that characters were a necessary attribute to any society as establishing norms by contrast, and so finds it disturbing that the City of Atlanta was placing limits on characters venturing onto Peachtree Street.
Jack Scott, picked up by the Atlanta
police, was one such character. When they booked him, they noted he had rings
As a human institution, it
concludes, the character was known and cherished and the police would
serve humanity better by honoring the institution rather than
badgering
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Cities and New Tax Sources", tells of city governments across the nation seeking new revenue bases to replace declines in property tax revenues, down nationally by 8.4 percent between 1942 and 1947. The new sources were primarily from utilities taxes, gross receipts on business sales, amusement taxes, retail sales levies, income and payroll levies, city gas and motor taxes, alcohol taxes, tobacco levies, and hotel taxes.
Some of the new levies had proved unpopular and had been abandoned by some cities, as Providence, R.I., having abrogated its hotel tax. Further research, it counsels, appeared essential to prevent such heavy burdens from local taxes, stacked on top of state and Federal taxes, while insuring municipal growth through adequate revenue to afford postwar projects.
Drew Pearson tells of two international developments which may or may not be related. Unlike other postwar years, there was no sign of military activity by the Russians, and in the spring, business in Europe had been booming and the Marshall Plan hailed a success, at which point, the Russians adopted a conciliatory policy, ending the Berlin blockade. But then British business went into a slump and American unemployment rose. Russian policy then shifted such that at the Paris meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Andrei Vishinsky was polite but obstinate. The meeting was a failure and the Berlin blockade was only partially lifted. The Russians appeared to assume that the Western economic depression for which they had hoped had arrived and that the less military activity in the Soviet bloc, the more chance there would be for economic stagnation in the West.
At the end of 1947, when Mr. Pearson
had gone to France and Italy with the Friendship Train, Italian
Foreign Minister Count Carlo Sforza suggested that the only economic
salvation for Europe was a United States of Europe and that war could
never be abolished until nationalism
He finds the admonition of Count Sforza to have proved correct, that ERP administrators had not been tough enough in getting trade flowing between European countries, one reason being that NATO did not precede ERP. Without a political alliance assuring the necessary economic unity in case of war, it was not possible to convince individual countries, such as France, to give up portions of their industrial development to other countries, such as Belgium, to enable balance throughout Europe. The fact was true in steel and automobiles, for instance, as such factories in each country could be turned to military production in the event of war.
The Marshall Plan had, in some instances, actually inhibited needed economic reforms, for instance counseling against the breaking up of Italy's landed estates on the premise that Congress would never approve the move because it smacked of socialism, with the result that ERP aid might be terminated or suspended. That attitude confirmed what Count Sforza had said, that the Marshall Plan, without more emphasis on European political and economic unity, would fail.
Incidentally, to the foxymorons who believe that the recent vote in Britain to exit the European Union, as an expression of nationalism, whether something with which one might agree or not, has some parallel in the United States to Conny Donny's contention that he would, as President, eliminate immigration for all Arabic nations—as any attempt to limit such a ban to "Islamic fundamentalists" or "radical Islamists" would inevitably be struck down as a violation of the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause—and spend an estimated twenty billion dollars or more over a period of many years to build a wall, plus billions of dollars in annual maintenance, to keep out no more than 60 percent of the illegal emigres from the South, an estimated 40 percent coming legally by airplane and overstaying their visas, not to mention the impracticability of actually building such a wall in certain areas where waterways form the border, blinks the notion that the EU is primarily an economic union and not a resignation of individual national sovereignty except with regard to financial issues. To equate that with the United States is grossly and dangerously to misunderstand U.S. history and our Constitution.
Are these idiots, including the idiot Conny Donny, now dubbed their billionaire fearless leader, really proposing the logical extension of Brexit to the U.S., meaning secession by each state through some plebiscite, steered in its outcome by the Foxymorons, such that each state would tend to its own economy and revenue raising? Is that it, Conny Donny
If so, you are one for the booby hatch, along with your crazy followers and their daily media-fix brainwashers, the Foxymorons, whose claim to knowledge of our Constitution by their "legal experts" seems not to extend beyond the Second Amendment, even that ignoring the clause regarding a "well-regulated militia", they who regard freedom of speech exercised by anyone but their circle of cronies as a "threat" to be dealt with by force and intimidation, just as Conny Donny, their new fearless leader, who rejects all people, including press affiliates, who will not subscribe to his routine of generalities voiced in the demogogic tradition as appeal to the morons, without specifics on how he would accomplish any of it within the bounds of the Constitution, just, "It's gonna be great, folks," a paraphrase of his hero, Benito Mussolini
Have we forgotten so quickly that 15 of the 19 terrorists who were responsible for commandeering and slamming two 767's into the World Trade Center and one 757 into the Pentagon hailed from U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, not the "terrorist" countries, and that the ringleader, Mohammed Atta, entered the country via Hamburg? How would you have stopped them, pray tell, Donny, from coming into the country? With a questionnaire which asks whether they were planning any terrorist activities on U.S. soil? Or, maybe, just old-fashioned profiling, whether they were nice or not to the people at the airport, smiled a becoming smile?
Oh, oh, oh, no, let's change the subject back to e-mails because Conny Donny is behind in the polls—save Rasputin, which has him leading by 53 points in a 146-point survey—and thus we must, must, must catch up soon or it's gonna be Armageddon with That Woman in charge.
Never mind that, at base, the private e-mail server, to be distinguished from your ordinary home computer which communicates with a remote server operated by some commercial company, obviously represented a genuine attempt by former Secretary of State Clinton, however imperfect within the limits of technology to withstand determined hackers of Government e-mail communications, not to mention that only emulating the efforts of former Secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice before her, to have a more secure system via a specially set up home server for e-mail communication than that afforded by the porous system provided through the State Department. But let us not discuss that. Let's talk about ly
We think, however, that we understand how Conny Donny would handle confidential information of the Government. He would just send it out via Tweets to everyone so that there would be no issue of secrecy or withholding of information by the Government from the People.
Stewart Alsop, still in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, tells of the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare being the most striking phenomenon in Southeast Asia, having pushed the French nearly out of Indo-China and being active in Burma. In Malaya, the guerrillas, though small in number, had forced the British to arm thousands of men and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in defense.
Derailing of trains, mining of roads, and ambushing of convoys were relatively easy activities and, except for the latter operation, remote. Regular forces were largely helpless against such tactics. The population aided the guerrillas with shelter, food, and information. While the Malayans were anti-Communist, half the population was Chinese, influenced by the Communist takeover in China. Chinese squatters who resided on public or private land, often deep in the jungle, were the primary source of succor to the guerrillas. So the British had resorted to novel tactics to cut off the guerrillas from these villages.
One such tactic was to shoot from the air an area in the jungle to keep the guerrillas on the run. Another was to "beat" them into a trap and supply the troops by airdrops. As the troops closed in, the guerrillas retreated until they hit a "stop", usually a river line against which the British had stationed firepower. Many of the guerrillas, however, managed to escape through the lines of the beaters, away from the "stop" line. Two such "bandit hunts" were presently underway.
The British were also hopeful of reaching an agreement with Siam to close the border which afforded escape for the guerrillas.
Few believed that these British tactics could defeat the guerrillas in less than a year. Mr. Alsop urges that the U.S. would want to study how such a small number of guerrillas amid a population who were friendly to the British could challenge British power. Guerrilla warfare, he concludes, was changing the face of postwar Asia.
Marquis Childs tells of the contents of the President's economic report to Congress being only a small part of that which was considered and eliminated by the Council of Economic Advisers. Some, for example, wanted more stress on sustaining purchasing power for the industrial areas where unemployment was highest. It was believed that unemployment insurance provided an adequate cushion in those areas, absent in 1929 when the Depression began. But the assumption that such would avoid a serious depression had been challenged by the AFL, finding that in many states the benefits had been reduced.
The President recognized this argument and urged greater cooperation between the Federal Government and the states in the area of unemployment insurance by establishing minimum standards across the country and broadening coverage. At present, there were no such minimum standards.
Twenty-two states had developed rules to eliminate many from unemployment insurance by refusing benefits to those who left employment voluntarily without good cause attributable to the employer. While the President urged amendment of such laws, it was unlikely to occur.
The strikes since the war had largely had inflationary results, but in the present economy a major strike, as in steel, would likely produce deflation. It was an unknown troubling to those trying to predict the economy.
A letter writer believes that at hand was the era predicted by the prophet Zephaniah in the Bible, in which neither gold nor silver could deliver the world from the wrath of God. He finds it to mean that money would become useless and was passing out of existence as the root of all evil.
A letter writer from Sydney, Australia, 16, seeks male pen friends. He likes open air and bush-walking, among other pursuits. His address is provided should you have common interests. Maybe you could tie yourself a kangaroo down, sport.
A letter writer responds to the letter written in response by the "U.S. Commissioner" to the letter from the woman who believed herself rudely mistreated by the Charlotte police after being cited for a wrong right turn onto a one-way street. He reminds that the ordinary citizen encountered by the police was not a "thug and a lowbrow" and that anyone who could not distinguish such persons had no business being on the police department.
A letter writer questions whether the Charlotte Police Department needed the twelve extra men they were requesting. He had seen two policemen escorting a young woman to a world premier for a new soap at a local drug store and so wondered, with such waste of time evident, why more personnel were needed. He thinks it indicative of an ample complement of officers and that the politicians wanted to stock the Department with their relatives and friends.
Framed Edition
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