St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 18

-t -I 23 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, TUESDAY, JUNE 8, 1948 ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Marshall Plan Cut 1 "'u'. tion, but one day it is going to have to stop depending on the sheer luck of continental abundance and low population density. It is goiag to have to put a really resolute push into the conservation of its resources or find that the luck has run out. Founded by JOSEPH PULITZER Xitctmbtr 12.

Publishtd by The Pulitzer Publishing Co. Telephone Address MAin mi I ni Olive St. (1) THE rOST-DISPATCH PLATFORM I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles; that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. JOSEPH PULITZER. April 10, 1907.

LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE Progress in Germany The Russians already are howling about the federal government which is to be set up in Western Germany. And it is not absolutely certain that the pledged support of France will be forthcoming in the end. Nevertheless, the step is a logical one, and one over-long delayed. Three years of experience have shown that there is little hope for building a democratic and productive Germany unless the Germans themselves are given a larger hand in the job. Buck-passing has been the chief fruit of the division of the country into almost autonomous Laender (states).

The synthetic, powerless Laen-derrat in Stuttgart simply has not brought about the necessary co-ordination. And under an appointed American presiding officer, it certainly is not democratic. Now a constituent assembly is. to be held, and the Germans are to set up their own elected From the general outline of the agreement reached by the Benelux countries, France, Britain and the United States, it seems that all necessary precautions are being taken. Occupation is to continue until all are assured that Germany is not a potential military threat.

For the time being, the new government is to be kept out of the field of foreign policy. International supervision is to be maintained over the industrial Ruhr. And so on. The big argument against the plan is that it is destroying Germany's unity. Already Dr.

Paul Kastner, chairman of the Liberal Democratic party in the Russian zone, is crying: "Woe betide the Germans who help in the partitioning of' our country." Wilhelm Pieck, Germany's leading Communist, is even more vehement. Both, however, are merely echoing the Moscow line. It is more distressing to find some Americans against the plan simply because they are afraid of such Russian propaganda. If such counsel were followed, the West would mark time indefinitely. Conditions probably would worsen, and there would be even more grist for the Red propaganda mills.

Germans Vote Communist Why What the House proposes in reducing Marshall plan aid is to insure that its transient value will never become permanent. It has left just about that part of the fund which will be required for relief food, fuel, fiber, and fertilizer. It has cut out 3ust about the amount that should be. spent for reconstruction increases in the production of coal, grain, livestock, electricity, oil, crude steel, inland transport, and merchant The effect of the cut, if it is not reversed in the Senate, will be to help keep people from perishing, but not to help them rebuild to a point at which they can cease being dependent on the United States and become self-supporting. This country muffed a chance to help Europe rebuild through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

UNRRA supplied a very large amount of relief and a very small amount of rehabilitation. Another chance was missed in the World Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The bank has neither reconstructed nor developed where most needed. The Marshall aid plan is the third effort to assist Europe in getting back on its feet. Is it, too, to become a lost opportunity, because of the grotesque notions of economy promoted by Chairman Taber of the House Appropriations Committee, called "the stingiest man in It will -not be economic reconstruction alone that will suffer if Marshall aid is emasculated.

Political reconstruction will suffer as well. The strengthening of the French Government, the victory for democracy in the Italian elections, the formation of a five-nation Western Union of Europe, all are good results of Marshall aid, achieved even before the aid was forthcoming. These constructive developments will suffer if aid is cut below adequacy as the House pro-" poses. The Communists' hands will be strengthened. The word of the United States Government will lose in faith and credit with the world.

Congress has authorized the aid other nations cannot understand why it does not appropriate it in full. So good and understanding a friend as England is puzzled by this gap between promise and performance. The British consider that Congress, in authorizing $5,300,000,000 for a year's aid, bound itself to appropriate it and so it did, ethically if not legally. In the Marshall aid program. Congress has indulged more than it can afford in the business of now you see it, now you don't.

To be effective, the United States must stand for what it stands for on a continuing basis, and not merely for one day's voting in the House of Representatives. A sense of long-term responsibility on the part of Congress would not only do more for world peace and prosperity it would also do more for real economy than all the shortsighted savings in Mr. Taber's philosophy. pSLV' "wte J3 1 '0 To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: I read with interest your editorial entitled "Electoral Warning in Bavaria" and I am really amazed at your naive question, "Why, in the area where the United States is making- its greatest effort for democracy in Europe, should the Communists gain so much as one vote? Why should they not be losing ground?" As one who spent three weeks in Germany last fall and has seen occupation authorities at work, I am only surprised that'the Communists did not pull a much greater vote than the percentage which disturbs you so much. The handling of the political situation is a joke.

Who are those new Communists? Nazis, whose party has been outlawed, but birds of the same feather, Communists, are recognized as a democratic party! The de-nazification policy is a mockery. Louis Lochner, the former chief of the Berlin Bureau of the Associated Press, has described this folly vividly in the June issue of the Reader's Digest. The food situation is so catastrophic that anyone could lose any ideology, of whatever shade If you live on less than 1000 calories daily for three years and Buffer the consequences of undernourishment you will not have much praise for the powers that govern you. Newspapers, books and magazines are as scarce as hen's teeth in the occupied zones. Why are we denying them the written word? I was asked by hundreds of persons, Why does not America offset the Russian propaganda by giving them its side in newspapers and magazines? The Russians, who are realists, use this system to the utmost.

THE RED SEA CLOSES OVER CZECHOSLOVAKIA Good Use for $16,000,000 Since most Aldermen have already committed themselves in principle to the $16,000,000 bond issue for slum clearance, the chances are that it will get on the November ballots. It is a hard-headed business proposition, quite apart from the obvious social advantages of clearing slums. Every year, the city's run-down neighborhoods eat four or five million dollars more in municipal services than they can pay for in taxes. This amounts, as Mayor Kaufmann puts it, to "a subsidy borne by the owners of other property." The bond issue is a necessary civic act to eliminate the filth, misery and rotten housing that load this dead weight on everything and everybody in the city. As a community enterprise, it is like a private business enterprise speeding money to replace obsolete factories and save more money.

St. Louis taxpayers and voters coulu hardly ask for a more gilt-edged investment in civic benefit. Between Book Ends America's Part in a Murder George Polk, who told his home audience the truth about the order we support in Greece, was slain; yet our Government does not demand a strict accounting; its efforts to gloss over such scandals make all its pious declarations about free -reporting seem hypocrisy. The Mirror of Public Opinion A Vote for Norman Thomas To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: After carefully reading the interview1 with Norman Thomas, presidential nominee of the Socialist party, reprinted in the Post-Dispatch, I shall vote for him. He expressed himself for a program which I am certain millions of American voters are for.

ADOLF DYROFF. Quincy, III. Genius and Eccentric THE LEGEND OF HENRY FORD, by Keith Swrd. (Rinehart, New 550 pagej. JS.CO.) Keith Sward, who has a Ph.D.

in ogy but works as far afield as labor education at times, spent the better part of the past 10 years welding together this hefty volume. Not only has he turned out one of the most commendable social biographies one has seen in years, he has also accomplished a debunking chore that would have done Lincoln Steffens prOud. Sward says he Leland Stowe, Author and Correspondent The grave issues raised by the murder ef CBS correspondent George Polk cannot be sidestepped. Despite all other excesses, the lives of foreign reporters were respected by both sides throughout Spain's bitter civil war. Nor has any foreign correspond Who'd Win foi the Cards? To tha Editor ef the Post-Dispatch: In answer to so-called "Cardinal Fan." Who does he suppose would pitch for the Cardinals if they gave away Pollet and Hunger two rookies up from the Pony League? These two are potentially great pitchers, and if they don't win quite a few games this year, believe me it won't be their fault.

I think the others should be given a chance but you don't toss aside pitchers you know CAN win for pitchers you think MIGHT win. A REAL CARDINAL FAN. P.S. I have yet to see a pitcher win a game when he has been given no runs. "read through four libraries" in gathering his material, and 67 pages of notes and bibliography bear that out.

The Ford Sward found is demigod, genius and eccentric His masterpiece in -tact was his first recorded public speech in 1915, before the Inmates of Sine ent as yet met death through violence in any Communist-con-" trolled Iron Curtain country. Even in chaotic China I cannot recall such an event. It remained for an American correspondent of such outstanding courage as George Polk to be assassinated in supposedly American-di Sine- PenitentiArv. Good Fight by Bakewell To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: i Congressman Bakewell in his effort to get the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill out of committee has fought a good fight and lost, i WALTER P. COXEY.

George Polk The End of Eduard Benes? The story of Eduard Benes seems at its end. Old and sick, he can hardly hope to add another chapter. The fates may grant him the opportunity, but who can count on it? His lifework seems undone. A story which began with a fanfare of freedom's bugles has become a threnody. There were doubts about Benes just as there were doubts about Masaryk after the Communists took over in Czechoslovakia.

Some insinuated that the two might have been rather compliant. The Red censorship gave them little chance to dispel these misgivings. But Masaryk banished them by suicide. And now Benes has refused to sign the new Communist-written constitution of his "country, and he has resigned its presidency. This is his protest, his sign to the world that he has kept the faith.

It is tragic that he should have had to confirm his career in this way. His long preparation for Czechoslovak independence, his service under the elder Masaryk, his own turn in the presidency, the Munich tragedy, exile and return to Prague with new hopes for democracy such a record of patriotism should not have needed this latest gesture of defiance. But Benes never had a really easy time of it. There were always difficulties, always compromises to be made. Perhaps he entered on some with too much optimism.

Perhaps lie made mistakes. But most of the time he and his people certainly had to make their way alone. There was little enough help from the outside, but plenty of pressure. First there was the Haps-burg yoke, then Hitler's, and then Stalin's. To the man's great honor, he yielded to little of the pressure, never really wore any of the yokes.

So quite aside from how much or how little the future may hold, he already has given to his country and the world one very precious thijig: a brave example. Australia's Generous Gesture The Commonwealth of Australia has made an international gift which stands out handsomely against the bickering and hatred which afflict so much of the world. The Commonwealth has offered free of charge $3,500,000 worth of raw wool to six nations on both sides of the "iron curtain," and Poland -already has received thev $800,000 worth which is its share. The recipients have only to agree that the wool will be used for relief purposes, that none will go for military uniforms, and that the people will be told of the origin of the gift and its purpose. If anything can make for mutual good feelings among nations and cancel out the ill will generated by clumsy diplomacy, this sort of freehanded giving must be it.

A Stone for Bread "A booby trap, a sorry mess, ill-befitting a great democracy." This judgment on the Senate displaced persons bill by Earl G. Harrison, as chairman of the national citizens' committee on the DPs, is hard, but no harder than that of many students of the legislation, including outstanding editors. Describing the same bill, the Washington Post says that "to the world's outcasts who asked for bread, the Senate has decided to give a stone." The New York Times calls the measure passed by the Senate "a sorry job," which throws aside "the high humanitarian principles of the original Stratton bill." The Stratton bill, which its sponsor, the Rep-rcsentative-at-large from Illinois, kept free from unfair restrictions, still sleeps in House committee, many months after its introduction. The Revercomb-Wiley bill which has been passed by the Senate and is now before the lower chamber is chock full of conditions which make it unworthy of the nation whose largest harbor presents the Statue of Liberty, welcoming the oppressed from other lands. The Senate bill would require 50 per cent of those admitted to be agricultural workers.

This is a discrimination against many desirable persons who happen to have other skills. It requires. 50 per cent to be nationals of the former Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). This puts other DPs at a serious disadvantage since only about one DP in five is a native of the Baltic area. Both of these provisions discriminate against Jewish DPs who are among the most miserable of these homeless unfortunates.

Fortunately, Republican Representative Fellows of Maine is sponsoring a substitute measure which would correct these flaws one by one. The Fellows bill would admit 200,000 DPs and it would do so without the unfair limitations which cause Mr. Harrison to call the Senate bill a booby trap. The time is short but there is time enough to make the change. If the House Rules Committee will give it a chance, the chamber could, and we like to believe would, do what is so clearly required.

This Noisy City To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: Speaking of horn blowing, here is my eomplaint: i We live on Kingshighway and our bed-loom windows overlook the Express Highway. From about 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. horns are blasting the night long. They start blasting four blocks away and keep it up till they pass Kingshighway.

The horn blowing on the Express Highway really is so unnecessary. Why not stop horn blowing there after 10 p.m.? Me for the country when the housing Shortage is over. MAE. Henry Ford he began: "Boys, I'm glad to see you here The most interesting single chapter concerns the "Peace Ship" on which Ford sailed in 1916 for Europe, under the slogan, "Get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas. It was loaded with dignitaries.

-sincere pacifists, crackpots and political sharpers. And privately. Ford was already blaming World War I on "the Jews." When war finally did come, after the Peace Ship's failure, Ford quickly became America's No. 1 patriot, and watched the contracts roll In. The "Dearborn Independent" episode reads like sheer fantasy, even with all the footnotes.

For 10 years, Ford financed the most violently anti-Semitic, periodical in America, getting such wide circulation that a "New York Times' reporter visited Hitler's Munich office in 1922, and found Ford's picture on the wall, his periodicals piled on a nearby table. Then a single Jew started suit against Ford, and the latter shied away from court. He refused to back up Editor W. J. Cameron, denying he had ever read a copy of his own newspaper.

Later he apologized and settled out of court because, he admitted, the thing was hurting business. Sward lays bare innumerable examples of Ford's ruthlessness in business prime" among which was his hoodwinking the Leland brothers. As for his associates, he made them all insecure, on the theory that fear boosted production. Ford's political philosophy was best expressed in a 1922 mandate to the Ford Company: "The vast majority of men want to stay put. They want to be led and have no responsibility democracy has ing to do with the question, 'Who ought toi be boss?" This reviewer would like to nominate this splendid social history for the Pulitzer prize.

Sward has illuminated the entire background of a misty legend, and the picture be discloses is sobering and significant. RALPH PETERSON. They judge American professions ef democracy, justice through the courts, subordination of police roles and freedom of the press by how we promote these things in the place nearest at hand. Greece is our baby now. President Truman insisted that the United States assume responsibility for Greece, without sharing controls with the United Nations or other governments.

But Greece still has a police state. United States representatives make no move to curb mass executions. And an American reporter who dared to tell some of the ugly truth about our self-sought "mess in Greece" can be murdered coldbloodedly without sharp and decisive action. (FBI agents should have been sent to Greece within 48 hours after Polk's body was found not three weeks afterward.) Failure of Criswold Mission The Truman Administration asked for all this when it plunged, impetuously and unprepared, into the stinking political cesspool of postwar Greece. If the United States has any job at all in Greece, it is to aid in creating a moderate, middle-ground government which the majority of Greeks have desired all along.

The Griswold mission has failed dismally. Reporters who tried to inform the American public of our failures or of the Greek Government's black record have been "out of favor." Griswold himself sharply criticized the New York Herald Tribune correspondent, Homer Bigart, by letter to his editors. Neither Bigart nor George Polk, nor other Americans who have reported most courageously from Greece, could be accused of being "pro-Communist" or "Reds" of any variety. After some 20 years in the fraternity of American foreign correspondents, I can state with pride that, in overwhelming majority, I know these men to be devoted to democratic principles. Men of such caliber deserve the utmost support of Washington in their efforts to get the facts.

Must More Reporters Die? This is another reason why the murder of George Polk cannot be treated as merely an "unfortunate It is an outright challenge to the White House, the State Department and Congress as to whether Washington means what it professes about "free and untrammelled reporting." It is equally a challenge to Washington's Greek policy and to the weak, hesitant and timid attitude of the mission in Greece. As Griswold's successor, Ambassador Henry F. Grady faces a most difficult uphill fight. Will Grady and the United States Government really fight for democratic principles? Or will other murderers, in Greece, China and elsewhere, be encouraged to put bullets through the heads of other American correspondents who willingly risk everything in order to tell the American people more truth than is SAFETY FIRST. Bill Vaughan in the Kansas City Star.

seat beside the driver is the most dangerous spot in a motor car, safety statistics indicate. Which may be the reason so many young women one sees on the highway seem intent on sitting under the wheel along with him. Clean It Up To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: A few lines about your slum clearance project. All I have seen of St. Louis is what I Have seen from the train and I will say it is about the dirtiest place I have ever seen.

By all means clean it tip. JOHN A. KENNEDY. Lebanon, Mo. rected Greece.

Thus far, Polk's professional colleagues alone appear deeply concerned. The United Nations Correspondents, the New York Newspaper Guild and the Overseas Writers in Washington have demanded investigations. The State Department waits patiently for the Athens Government to complete an inquiry whose findings are bound to be inadequate, if not suspect. If Polk had been murdered in Poland or Yugoslavia, Washington would certainly have reacted with more energy and much less restraint. Mud on Our Banners On all occasions, the United States Government champions universal freedom of reporting, with full security for journalists concerned and without censorship.

If Washington means what it says, why has it failed to take drastic steps to bring Polk's murderers to justice? Nearly half a billion dollars of American taxpayers' money has been poured into Greece. A military and economic mission has been operating there for almost a year. With this huge investment in a small country of less than 7,000,000, are not the American people entitled to absolute assurance of free and utterly frank reporting? Recently the Greek Government executed several hundred of its many thousands of "political" prisoners as many as 152 in a single day. No word of protest came from Dwight Griswold, chief of the United States mission. Yet these victims had been held since January, 1945.

I was in Athens then. There have been far more executions in Greece than in Red-dominated Iron Curtain countries at least, so far as our reporters have been able to learn. As Rotten as Yugoslavia Why does the mission refuse to demand moderation and mercy? Why should Greek Government, which depends for its existence on American cash and aid, be allowed to persist in methods of brutal repression? Why should a Greek Government, under American sponsorship, tinue to be at least as terroristic and ruthless as the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and elsewhere? In every European country average eiti-xen are asking these and similar questions. Picture of a Landlord To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: The letter from a landlord undoubtedly was read by many couples who felt as we did. We visualize this landlord as living off the fat of the land while bleeding young couples of what little money they may have saved, and renting undesirable quarters which the couples are forced to live in due to a scarcity of "well built, fair priced houses" that this landlord has the nerve to say are plentiful! No, we don't expect to "start where Dad left off" as he stated but those of us who were fortunate enough to save a little during the war don't intend to invest this blood-earned money In poorly-constructed dumps.

We too are of the housing shortage. A TENANT. Belleville, 111. Goddess, 1943 The year was 1900. Henry Adams stood in the gallery of machines in the great Paris Exposition contemplating the dynamo as the ultimate energy, symbol of infinity, as a moral force such as the early Christians regarded the Cross.

Henry was the eternal student, a searcher for truth, not as the chemist or physicist searches for fact, but as the philosopher seeks truth. He was searching for the truth which relates the physical force of the dynamo and the spiritual force of the Cross. "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build the cathedral at Chartres," "mused Adams, but he was puzzled about the force behind the force of machines in his own America where neither Virgin nor Venus ever had value in their ancient sense. What then would propel our young mechanical civilization? Well, Henry Adams would have had his answer had he lived into this Atom Age with its public relations experts. He would have seen a streamlined train carrying America's most precious documents, her charters of freedom and liberty to the far ends of the country.

Mecca was coming to the pilgrim but lest the pilgrim ignore Mecca, the public relations boys revived Venus. They will select a Miss Freedom Train to be the Goddess of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights when the sacred documents arrive in St. Louis this week. Next week our make-believe goddess may be Miss Prune Week or Queen of Straw Hat Week. That, Henry Adams, is what has become of your search for the spiritual force for the Machine Age.

Lucky 'Country, But The United States has 48 persons per square mile, in contrast with 700 per square mile in Belgium and 725 in England and Wales, according to a new estimate by Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. These figures show this country's comparatively high ability to supply itself with food and materials, but they give no cause for complacency. Supplies of several strategic minerals, such as copper, approach the vanishing point. By and large, the good agricultural land is overworked and underprotected, with the result that fertility, steadily runs away in floods and in more subtle forms of erosion. Nutrition scientists warn that productive land per person is already shrinking toward the danger point, and increasing population speeds up the shrinkage.

The Metropolitan's statisticians estimate that population density will be up to 62 per square mile by 1975. Ours is a great, powerful and fortunate na- They Earned Their Country the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: The West must not allow Israel to perish. These people by their blood, sweat and tears have earned the right to a homeland. LUCIEN BARNES. Columbia, Mo.

What the Insurance Agent Sees AN ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING, by Hubbard Hoover. (McGraw-Hill Publishing New York, 241 pages, price $3.00.) The man who has an answer for everything Is the life insurance agent, usually unappreciated and sometimes abused. Hubbard Hoover was one who knew all the answers. In many years of getting the names on the dotted lines he came to know pretty well the man on the buying end. Now that Hubbard has turned to other pursuits he has taken his pen in hand to tell about the life of an insurance man as related to the lives of all sorts of men and women who have been his clients.

His book is a behind-the-scenes story of what goes on in life insurance on both sides of the desk, the tragedy and comedy that are the lot of the agent and, less usual, the comedy and tragedy that sometimes occur in the lives of the insured. The human interest, rather than the technical aspects of his vocation, are emphasized. Complacent Americans To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: Americans who think that the United States should appease Russia and that we are in no danger are living in false complacency. ALICE HANCHETT. Syracuse, N.

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