National Reports
JR., WILLIAM K. WYANT & FISZMAN, JOSEPH R. & EUBANKS, BICKNELL
National Reports Will Ike's Speeches Haunt Him? By William K. Wyant Jr. St. Louis Former President Harry S. Truman, looking happy, relaxed and healthy, was in St. Louis recently to make the...
...With a population of 131,041, there are 20,000 unemployed...
...The Administration has stated that $27 million will be allocated to the South this year for new plants and equipment...
...As late as August 27, 1952, columnist Joseph Alsop was able to say that the Republican candidate "has defied the venomous partisans to be truthful and honest about such grave problems as the Korean War...
...But one who saw the "Second Battle of Korea" develop in the Midwest during the summer of 1952 can scarcely avoid recalling how handily the Republicans won it, or how little regard some of them showed for the possibility that they themselves might one day have to make harsh decisions in the Far East...
...In Nashville, the stately buildings of Fisk University rise up from the heart of the slums, close to the railroad yards and dumping grounds...
...Eisenhower's Detroit address en-raged his old chief...
...Representative George Mahon, from the Texas Panhandle, urges bringing water across the plains from the Missouri River...
...Now there is the fateful question of whether U.S...
...Afterward, receiving newspapermen before entraining for his home at Independence, he cheerfully parried efforts to draw him into saying something specific about Indo-China or the Army-McCarthy imbroglio...
...As a result of these dissatisfactions, the popularity of Senator Estes Kefauver grows tremendously...
...This brought questions from Congress...
...Water Shortage Perils Southwestern Boom By Bicknell Eubanks Dallas Dramatic and gigantic answers are being proposed for the crippling problems created by one of the worst droughts ever to hit the Southwest...
...but one must pass dreadful slums--shacks surrounded by rot and garbage where hungry dogs seek old bones in trash cans--to reach the majestic expanse which is the Chickamauga Dam...
...The 21/2-per-cent charge would increase power rates in the Valley by $27 million...
...Indeed, the impression was left that the State Department had acted against military advice and was contemptuous of danger from the north...
...Poverty, ignorance and moonshine in the isolated mountain hamlets, the Dogpatches of the United States and genuine intellectualism in towns like Chattanooga and Nashville...
...Webb warns, the people of the Southwest are being called upon now "to act for themselves in warding off a great calamity...
...When Defense Secretary Wilson awarded these contracts to General Motors, Chrysler was forced to shut down...
...Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay came down to East Tennessee in the middle of March to visit the Alcoa plant and also saw the TVA installations for the first time...
...TVA is the pride of Tennessee...
...At Champaign, Illinois, the crusading candidate addressed an audience composed principally of University of Illinois students, some of whom would presumably be called on to bear arms for their country...
...REPORT FROM By Joseph R. Fiszman Chattanooga Tennessee is full of extremes and contradictions...
...The only thing I am against is monopoly...
...The magnitude of Eisenhower's triumph, however, suggests that he could have won without the partisan, almost frantic emphasis which the issue received in the campaign's closing days...
...This was the speech that contained the offer to go personally to Korea...
...Narrowing the focus a bit, Chattanooga has homes designed by some of the nation's most advanced architects and dwellings which date back to the Civil War...
...But will this and other projects of TVA be completed now that the House Appropriations Committee has slashed $38 million from the $141.8-million TVA budget which President Eisenhower recommended...
...The recent intrigues against TVA Chairman Gordon Clapp, a career official who is tremendously popular here, have also contributed to local uncertainty...
...In the cities, the water problem gets more acute as the population reaches record levels almost hourly...
...Several times, in recent years, one or more have gone dry, as the Rio Grande did in 1953...
...Webb also wrote a monograph...
...Chattanooga also has one of the few movie theaters in the South showing foreign films, and the original Coca-Cola bottling plant...
...Not only will the people themselves put added strain on overworked municipal supplies, but the industries which have made this phenomenal growth possible demand additional billions of gallons of water daily...
...They await assurance from Washington, but what they hear gives no relief...
...These proposals range from building conventional dams to transporting surplus waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to the headwaters of such Southwestern river systems as the Colorado of Texas, the Brazos, the Trinity and the Canadian...
...President Trunan charged that the speech contained so many quotations out of context that it added up to an attempt to deceive the electorate...
...it is not known how many of these are idle...
...Still a third plan has been proposed by Guy C. Jackson Jr., of Anahuac, Texas, President of the Texas Water Conservation Association...
...This canal would transfer surplus water from the Texas-Louisiana border, where annual rainfalls of 50 inches are common, into the less fortunate areas to the southwest...
...Beyond this figure of 66,000 registered unemployed, there is 30 per cent of the Middle Tennessee labor force which does not qualify for the unemployment-insurance program...
...A short time later, Eisenhower was speaking of the "terrible blunders" which led to the war...
...Even Boss Crump, who opposed him in 1948 and thereafter, announced from his Arkansas vacation retreat that, while he is "filing no brief for Kefauver," he might perhaps endorse the Senator because, among other things, Kefauver is "a strong supporter of TVA, which means everything to Memphis, Shelby County and Tennessee.'' When Kefauver recently held open house in Nashville, he was visited not only by dozens of delegations but by hundreds of ordinary citizens who came to contribute their dollars to his re-election campaign...
...Eventually, we dug a well which furnished a scanty supply, abundant only in rainy seasons when the surface water reinforced the meager subterranean trickle...
...Radical steps must be taken...
...These figures please everybody but the water experts...
...City slums and fine parks...
...Will they be completed now that the same committee has recommended an interest charge of 21/2 per cent on all funds allocated to TVA power facilities and recommended abolishing TVA's authority to limit the power rates charged by the municipalities and cooperatives...
...Asked in Knoxville what he thought of TVA, Secretary McKay answered: "I have no quarrel with public power...
...But so far no word has been uttered against such private monopolies as the mighty Georgia Power Company and the Alabama Power Company...
...The finest Negro educational institutions and the worst cases of discrimination...
...The Authority's big new project is the Kingston Steam Plant, now under construction, which will have a power capacity of 1.6 million kilowatts...
...None have the benefit of winter snow-packs to recharge them in the spring thaws...
...As he does so, it is lamentable that memories of the 1952 debate on Korea are what they are...
...The truth of the matter may be had by anybody who troubles to compare the Detroit speech with the full text of the House Committee's report...
...Point followed point with relentless logic...
...These rivers rise in areas which are chronically deficient in rainfall...
...Louis recently to make the principal address at a testimonial dinner...
...Touring Indiana, he hinted to Hoosier housewives that a different hand at the tiller might have saved both China and the taxpayers' money without ruffling a hair on Junior's head or altering the price-tags at the supermarket...
...Precisely to what extent the "debate" over Korea influenced voters will never be known...
...It calls for channeling Mississippi River floodwaters...
...soldiers will be needed to retrieve the situation in Indo-China...
...Actually, however, the spokesman was Major-General Charles L. Bolte of the Department of the Army's Plans and Operations Division...
...The decision included the intention to ask Congress for aid to Korea to compensate for the withdrawal of American forces...
...They are not being asked to make a sacrifice, but to avert one by making an investment in the future...
...The drought in the Southwest is already more than three years old...
...Coca-Cola not only provides Chattanooga with great wealth, but supplies the schools with their "Drive Slowly" signs...
...The affair was in honor of Rabbi Samuel Thurman of the United Hebrew Temple, a close personal friend, and Truman spoke up for justice and tolerance, declaring: "Those of us who believe in God can never be content to live for ourselves alone...
...A major reason for the increased unemployment is the fact that many small industries here were dependent on Chrysler's subcontracts for Army equipment...
...Famous Lookout Mountain, around which bloody battles once raged, is now inhabited by "the Lookout Mountain Set," the conservative, withdrawn and respectable middle class...
...How can this be done when the means for doing so are taken away...
...In addition, thousands of unemployed, mainly Negroes, who had gone to Detroit in search of better-paying jobs have come back to their slums, disappointed and penniless...
...The two most ambitious suggestions have come from Texas Congressmen...
...colonial mansions and modernistic homes...
...Chattanooga today has one of the worst unemployment problems in the South...
...Once more, farmers and ranchers are hauling water...
...In the High Plains, where vast wheat spreads have long been irrigated by well-water, the water table is dropping relentlessly lower...
...Some have drilled their wells deeper, but many have gone through the water-bearing strata...
...Among other things, the Detroit speech contained this passage: "The terrible record of these years reaches its dramatic climax in a series of unforgettable scenes on Capitol Hill in June of 1949...
...The Houston Chamber of Commerce recently estimated that Harris County (metropolitan Houston) will pass the one-million population mark a few seconds after midnight next July 3. Dallas County has already passed the 750,000 mark...
...To them he said: "We must avoid, ladies and gentlemen, the kind of bungling that led us into Korea and could lead us into others...
...All this is causing Tennesseans much uneasiness...
...1953) applies pretty well to the entire Southwest: "The hard fact is that Texas simply does not have enough water in the right places to support its fast-growing population, industry and agriculture...
...For a classic example of how to simplify a complex sequence of events for listeners shaky on recent history, students of politics could hardly do better than the speech prepared for Eisenhower's appearance in Detroit on October 24, 1952...
...Even the aforementioned Chattanooga News-Free Press, to which everything created by the previous administration is abhorrent, dares not criticize TVA...
...Many Tennesseans fear that his removal would be the prelude to the scuttling of TVA...
...It is a state of contrasts and contradictions...
...These waters, taken from the Missouri Basin at flood time, would be poured into Southwestern river basins, which, by a series of dams, would be converted into elongated reservoirs...
...There was a sense of urgency in the hope, because those Americans who believed in the United Nations saw clearly that the slow progress of the Korean War had endangered the whole concept of joint action against an aggressor...
...More Water For Texas, recently published by the University of Texas Press...
...and many areas are short more than a year's rainfall...
...The hope that 1952 would come and go without an emotional binge on Korea was vastly encouraged, it will be remembered, when Eisenhower was nominated...
...As Dr...
...Walter Prescott Webb, University of Texas history professor and author of The Great Plains and Vanishing Frontier...
...President Eisenhower is meeting the challenge manfully...
...yet, enemies of the Authority still insist that TVA pay back in forty years all the funds advanced to it by the Federal Government...
...What a well-informed Texas writer, William Weber Johnson, said in Life magazine (July 13...
...He told how five Republican Committee members had issued a minority report demanding that troops remain in Korea...
...To voters with only vague knowledge of how the United States got involved in Korea, the Detroit indictment must have seemed unanswerable...
...In it, he recalls his boyhood in central West Texas "where there was barely enough water for domestic purposes, often not enough for the stock, and never enough for the crops except in the unusual years when the rains came in bountiful supply...
...some have closed down entirely...
...The Memphis machine boss, Ed Crump and Senator Estes Ke-fauver and Representative J. Percy Priest...
...Three representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two brigadier-generals and a rear admiral, also testified and backed General Bolte's position fully...
...Ugly industrial towns and the wonderful Smoky Mountains, their valleys and the plains covered with rich blue grass growing high and thick in winter and summer...
...It is costing more and more to irrigate, and costs may soon top profits...
...He and his aides faced a group of Republican Congressmen both skeptical and fearful...
...Tennessee has the best press in the South--the Chattanooga Times, owned by the same Ochs family which runs the New York Times, and the Nashville Tennessean...
...Small factories and foundries, which previously produced for the Army and gave their men 48 hours' work with 52 hours' pay, have shifted to a forty-hour week or less...
...The young farm boys must stay on the farms...
...None of it has yet been, seen in Tennessee...
...In addition to the 20,000 unemployed in Chattanooga, there are 66,000 more unemployed in Middle Tennessee (including Nashville)--mainly workers in the building trades previously employed in public housing and various TVA projects...
...Politicians of the style of Al Capp's Senator Jack S. Fogbound and truly progressive statesmen...
...By then, the decision to complete withdrawal of American forces from Korea--despite menacing signs from the north--had been drawn up by the Department of State...
...Tennessee also has the most reactionary paper in the South--the Chattanooga News-Free Press, which prints George Sokolsky and Westbrook Pegler, and (oddly for the Democratic South) supports Senator McCarthy...
...And so Tennessee, the Volunteer State, lives in a mood of expectation as spring bursts into gorgeous bloom...
...the students must stay in school...
...He did not waver in his insistence that Truman's decision to back up South Korea with troops was right...
...The Administration parade of civilian and military witnesses before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was headed by the Secretary of State...
...Again, Truman had no comment...
...The Monday-morning quarterback is the smartest man in the world," he remarked...
...In other words, the Southwest's tremendous boom since the start of World War II is being threatened by the lack of sufficient water for industry, farm and home...
...The former President's attitude is fitting and proper...
...A reporter asked if he thought Republican handling of the Korean issue in the 1952 Presidential campaign might now hamper the Administration as it faces up to Indo-China...
...Popular sympathy is being intensified by a spreading rumor that not only his political enemies but even the Mafia has engaged itself financially in order to "get their man" in the August 5 primaries...
...And, in most of the area, neither conventional engineering nor moderate expenditures can appreciably correct the present trend...
...During the last twenty years, it has created new jobs, brought new, cheap electricity to the countryside, made the Tennessee River navigable, halted floods, virtually wiped out malaria, reduced soil erosion, and created lakes and wonderful camp sites...
...In his early campaigning, Eisenhower was reluctant to cheapen his appeal...
...At a time when any competent schoolboy might have predicted the consequences, Eisenhower suggested, the nation's leadership had reeled drunkenly, fearfully, from one error to the next...
...The interbasin canal proposed by Senator Johnson has won approval from such serious students as Dr...
...Because this trend began in July 1953, many of the unemployed have already exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance and some are now on the welfare rolls...
...Historical monuments, old cemeteries, ancient plows pulled by horses and TVA...
...Senator Lyndon B. Johnson has proposed (and has had examined by Bureau of Reclamation experts) plans for an interbasin canal to parallel the Texas Gulf Coast...
...Even here in north central Texas (usually a bit wetter than the territory west of the traditional 30-inch rainfall line), precipitation during March was less than a fifth of normal...
...The former President suggested, in effect, that the man in the White House has a back-breaking job and can do without uninformed criticism...
...Then we paid a man to drill a deeper well, and it was all both wells could do to keep us from hauling water in the dry seasons...
...First: Republican Congressman John Lodge of Connecticut asked: '[Do] you feel that the Korean Government is able to fill the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of the Occupation forces?' "The Administration answered: 'Definitely.' " In this first point, and in those which followed, Eisenhower's speech was meticulously accurate...
...From what had gone before, for example, the implication of the speech was that the witness who answered "Definitely" to Congressman Lodge's question was a bungling civilian, a State Department man, or worse...
...When completed, it will be the largest steam-generating plant in the world...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 16
