Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of
Agriculture Clinton Anderson and Secretary of Commerce Averell
Harriman had told, respectively, the House Banking Committee and
joint Economic Committee that the Government needed to have controls
on allocation regarding steel and wheat to effectuate the European
aid and recovery program. Both favored restoration of price controls
and rationing on scarce commodities.
There appeared to be a move afoot in the Senate to whittle
down by 108 million dollars the 597 million recommended by the
President for emergency aid to Europe during the winter. The House
Foreign Affairs Committee had already recommended such a cut, wile
adding back 60 million in aid for China. Delays were appearing in
passing the program, as the House Appropriations Committee,
according to chairman John Taber, could not consider the aid before
December 4.
At the foreign ministers conference in London, agreement was
reached to place first on the agenda the Austrian treaty and then
deal with the German treaty. The Big Four had agreed on a six-point
program for Austria but not on whether to give it priority versus
the German problems.
At the U.N., the approval of the partition plan for Palestine
was set back as the Arab nations opposing the plan picked up support
from Greece and the Philippines. Siam had voted against partition
the previous day in the Palestine committee, while the committee
voted 25 to 13 to approve the plan, backed by both the U.S. and
Russia. But the plenary session would require a two-thirds majority,
irrespective of abstentions, and one more affirmative vote was thus
required. Siam was now absent, however, from the proceedings. But
the new supporters might offset that difference as Greece had
abstained in the committee vote, and the Philippines had been
absent.
In Paris, the French Ministry of the Interior announced that
nineteen Russians were being expelled for interfering in French
affairs during the ongoing strike by over a million workers. A
street battle had erupted between police and strikers in Lyon,
attributed to unrest stimulated by the Communist-dominated General
Confederation of Labor.
President Truman commuted to time served the Federal mail
fraud sentence of Mayor James Curley of Boston. He had completed
five months imprisonment of a six to eighteen month sentence. The
President also commuted the sentence of former member of the NLRB,
Donald Wakefield Smith, convicted on the same charge, both in
relation to graft involving war contracts.
The Coast Guard found four men alive and three dead from the
Clarksdale Victory, an Army transport ship which had run
aground on Hippa Island in Alaska. Thirty-seven members of the crew,
however, remained missing.
The six daily newspapers of Chicago, with curtailed
production caused by a printers strike, were experimenting with new
ways to produce the print without resort to the linotypists.
Instead, they were using standard typists to type out the print and
then photograph it in a composed, columnar form onto a metal
engraving plate, at which point the printing process was the same as
after linotyping.
On the editorial page, "'Forgotten Man' in Tax Picture"
remarks on the statements by Representative Harold Knutson of
Minnesota, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, criticizing
the President for wanting to feed the hungry of Europe while the
Navajo Indians were dying of hunger and disease and while 500
schoolchildren of Dallas, Texas, were unable to attend school for
want of clothing. He labeled as "bleeding hearts" those
who cried about Europe and Asia.
He then read into the Congressional Record his little
poem to the "little man", which the piece reprints.
It finds the "forgotten man" of Mr. Knutson not to
be the same as that which FDR had found in 1932, "ill-fed,
ill-clothed, ill-housed". For Mr. Knutson stood opposed to a
proposal to raise personal exemptions from $500 to $600, removing
thereby six million low-income persons from responsibility for
taxes. That, he said, would interfere with his plan to provide
across-the-board tax cuts for all taxpayers—giving the greatest
slice of it therefore to the "forgotten man" of Mr.
Knutson, rolling in dough.
It expresses the hope that the Navajo and Dallas
schoolchildren could wait until humanitarian Knutson got around to
them, just as he had promised that the Congress might later get
around to the six million low-income persons to be benefited under
the proposed increase to the personal exemption.
The difference between a bleeding-heart liberal and a
bleeding-heart conservative, as Mr. Knutson, we might add, is that
the latter believed firmly in the literal bleeding heart while the
former sought to avert it by allaying hunger, understanding the role
of government as being the insurer of the ideals for which the
Constitution stands, not a profit-making venture, either as a whole
or for its individual public servants.
You don't run the government as a business, dummy. If you
want to run a business, run a business and stay out of public
office.
"An Extra for Our Thanksgiving" reports of
Mecklenburg County having been given such a good financial prognosis
that the citizens were provided a ten cents property tax reduction
for the coming fiscal year without reducing county services. While
praising of this effort by the County, it warns the citizenry
against using the savings to effect consumer purchases, fueling inflationary
pressures. Rather, it advises putting the money in savings.
"'Rotten Apple in Our Barrel'" tells of Air Force
Secretary Stuart Symington having described the scandal swirling
around former Air Corps deputy chief of procurement Maj. General
Bennett Meyers as being one of the most shocking ever revealed in
any branch of the Government. It had shown that the General had made
upwards of $150,000 personally in war contracts, which he
essentially had procured for himself and his company, Aviation
Electric Corp. He now faced prosecution for fraud, perjury and
income tax evasion.
General Hap Arnold, wartime head of the Air Forces, had
declared General Meyers to have been a rotten apple and thanked the
subcommittee for exposing him.
Mr. Symington had found General Meyers's superiors not to be
negligent in not realizing his profiteering chicanery. But he also
asserted that the War Department should have conducted its own probe
two years earlier when an anonymous letter told of the General's
improper practices, accusing him of using insider information to
purchase stocks in war contract recipient companies.
The Secretary had called attention to the fact that the Air
Force was currently reorganizing its procurement structure and
taking steps to assure accountability. The piece thus finds the Senate War
Investigating Committee's efforts salutary in trying to get to the
bottom of the "war contract mess."
But whatever the "mess" was, the country won the
war, and, we venture, it was a silly partisan mistake to start down
a road with an inevitable result of second-guessing that effort,
even if not doing so meant allowing a few profiteering crooks during
the war, whether Government and military insiders or corporate
bigwigs, to escape punishment. And, the corporate bigwigs, it should
be noted, did manage somehow to escape prosecution and punishment.
For if you try to punish all corruption and seek to eradicate
it, you only wind up punishing the visible few, usually guilty of
petty crime compared to the fatcats with practical immunity derived
from political influence, while the great masses take then cue from
the prosecuted "rebels" and perform their artifice with
greater stealth learned from the expose, in rebellion against the
sinister "Gov'ment" covering up the deeds of the fatcats
to go after the little cats, as General Meyers, the scapegoat.
And was it it not the case that conducting such a review of
the war to expose corruption during it, including ultimately the
expose of supposed "Communist influence" in the Army and
State Department, as revealed by that Great Revealer Joseph
McCarthy, demoralized the country and turned its patriotic spirit
manifested during the war to a kind of cynicism, finding no longer
so much to respect about its leadership, military or political, and
diminishing thus in the process a hard fought victory, both at home
and abroad, as well compromising and delaying the enormous effort
which the country undertook to mobilize its vast resources left
intact after the war to provide the greatest part of the stimulus
aid necessary to rebuild Europe and Asia? Would it not have been
better than engaging in all these redundant and silly
investigations, which prolonged for nearly fifty years an internally
destructive cold war, to let the world war pass into history and
rest with the dead of Flanders Fields?
In the end, the tacit assumption behind such hearings was
that World War III was both an inevitability and imminent, in need
therefore of preparation for its eventuality, to avoid repeating
the mistakes of World War II.
But the ailing Republican Party and the disgruntled
reactionary Southern Democrats needed bones over which to pick, to
get the booboisie on their side and keep them there, back down on
the farm again, as during the long, harsh days for the worker and
farmer from the Civil War through the Depression. So FDR had to be
made into something impliedly kin to a Communist warmonger—that
which the Nazis had branded him during the war. Then the fatcats and
the pols could thrive again, while the booboisie was satisfied that
they were now being ruled by upstanding moral men, who, though fat
and not very funny, were nevertheless at least honorable and honest.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Lady
Nicotine to Rescue", remarks on Virginia Senator A. Willis
Robertson's plan to make tobacco an "essential commodity"
to be sent overseas under ERP for its morale-building qualities to
combat the strain on the nerves produced in Europe by the cold war.
He had said that it had been gleaned from the experience of the men
in service during the war that tobacco "provides a great
consolation and incentive."
For the fact of nearly coughing up one's lungs is good
preparation for the battlefield in which certain death becomes a
compromise with certain life pain, thus neither any longer to be
feared.
The piece asserts that the Senator's expression was motivated
by the fact that he came from one of the two chief
tobacco-manufacturing states at a time when the prospects for export
was down, with England having cut out tobacco imports pursuant to
its austerity program to preserve dollars. The tobacco farmers faced
a 30 percent acreage cut to continue to receive Government
subsidies.
But, it concludes nevertheless that the Senator's argument
had witness from the fact that tobacco was a delicacy on the black
markets of Europe.
"A puff of smoke and the solace it gives may be no more
than an illusion, but illusions are mighty important to a
disillusioned Europe."
Drew Pearson reports that Maj. General Bennett Meyers, the
final focus of the Senate War Investigating subcommittee inquiry
into the Hughes war contracts, maintained three sets of books on Air
Corps procurements, in addition to the subcommittee's expose of his
concealed personal profits during the war from Aviation Electric
Corp., which he set up. The first set of books told the true facts
of procurement, intended for the brass hats to see. A second set was
for the White House, to demonstrate to FDR how brilliant the brass
hats of the Air Corps were. The third set was for Congress, to show
why the Air Corps needed more money.
The former assistants of former
Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Undersecretary during the war,
had told of General Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, having
been aware of the three sets of books and having assisted General
Meyers in fighting the effort of Undersecretary Patterson to take a
survey of the procurement practices of the Air Corps. The survey,
when eventually conducted, showed a practice of continually ordering
planes and parts in advance of the need for them. When they had too
many pilots, they ordered more planes; when they had too many planes,
they ordered more gas and pilots; and when they had too many of all
three, they ordered more air bases to accommodate them.
General Arnold, when he saw the report, wanted it concealed
in the safe.
But a copy was delivered to FDR top aide Harry Hopkins. When
Mr. Hopkins confronted General Arnold about the waste, the General
denied the truth of the report.
Mr. Pearson relates of an incident in which General Meyers
had tossed a hotel key to a Colonel and ordered him to turn it into
the desk. The Colonel, worth several million dollars, let it fall to
the floor, later told General Meyers that he was thinking of buying
an airplane after the war and hiring a general to be its pilot.
President Truman had recently talked with the head of the
Disabled American Veterans, John Golob, and told him that he wanted
to preserve the peace but was willing to use force if necessary to
prevent further disabled veterans. He held up a closed fist as he
said so. He also said that the country had to be patient in
assisting the nations of Europe in getting back on their feet, as
they had lost so much of their manpower in the war. The President
expressed regret at having asked Congress after V-J Day to cancel
the remaining 63 billion dollars worth of unused appropriations for
the war, saying that if he had not done so, it could have been used
in reconstruction, possibly preventing the current chaos besetting
Europe.
Charles W. Duke, in his series of articles on the Freedom
Train, tells of the original rough draft of the Declaration of
Independence being aboard. On June 11, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had
been appointed, along with Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston,
John Adams, and Rogers Sherman, by the Second Continental Congress
to draft the document. After a meeting at which the basic points to
be included in the document were settled, Mr. Jefferson, being the
most able writer among the group, was selected to perform
authorship, went to his home and drafted the document alone.
Afterward, the draft was circulated to the others for corrections
and insertions. Until recently the draft in the Library of Congress,
now on the Freedom Train, was thought to be the first rough draft.
But a fragment of an earlier draft had been discovered.
A letter from Mr. Jefferson on July 1, 1776 to his friend
William Fleming was also included, assuring the constituency of the
Virginia Convention that he was in favor of independence.
A manuscript copy of the Declaration signed by Benjamin
Franklin and Silas Deane, sent to Frederick the Great of Prussia in
February, 1777, was also aboard.
Also included was the only known letter dated July 4, 1776
from a signer of the Declaration, Caesar Rodney of Delaware.
The first and last pages of one of two contemporaneously
created duplicates of the Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783,
wherein Britain recognized the independence of the United States,
was also on the train.
Samuel Grafton suggests the many reasons why the country
could give thanks on Thanksgiving, 1947. One reason was that there
was no internal violence in America, despite its having passed a
serious crisis in human affairs, a claim few places in the world
could presently make. In America, at least a handful of newspapers
and public figures were willing to fight for the right of Americans
to think as they pleased. Thanks could be given for the way the
children looked on the streets or on the fields. Thanks could be
given for time, itself, for the lapse of two years since the war and
the erosion of the naivete which had accompanied the end of the war,
when it was believed that America could recede into a new
isolationism from the rest of the world.
"Thanks for time which cools the fighting man, and
answers him long after he thinks to have silenced all opponents."
A letter writer finds the Pilgrim example of a three-day
Thanksgiving amid harsh conditions to be in stark contrast to the
Thanksgivings of modernity in which everything was taken for granted
by the assured expedient of comfort against the harsher elements, as
faced by the Pilgrims in humble thanks for survival.
A letter writer visiting Washington extols the virtues of the
capital of the nation as symbol of its ideals.
A letter wants more restrictions and greater specificity
placed on the aid program to Europe—obviously missing the point
that it was not intended as a handout but as a rebuilding device
toward effecting democratic prosperity, to avoid the temptation
again to fascism or communism or the military build-up accompanying
same, thus had to remain flexible and not so specific.
A letter writer thanks the newspaper for its editorial of
November 21 regarding the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince
Philip. Before reading it, the writer had been confused as to how a
country could endue so much pomp and ceremony while suffering want
at home. He now understood better the reason for it.