Sunday Herald Tribune "Opinion of the Week"

The "Opinion of the Week" included letters to the editors and editorial cartoons. The letters were lengthy as in the Times. For the most part those in the Herald Tribune this Sunday expressed the outrage of economic conservatives over the continuation of New Deal policies and wartime controls.

Edna Mann wrote in support of the loan to Britain. She dismissed critics who did not want to support a Socialist government, pointing out that this was an extension of credit to a good customer and was necessary for world trade.

Freeman R. Hathaway of the Steamship Historical Society noted that many of the excursion steamships that had plied the Long Island Sound and Hudson River would not return to civilian use after their wartime use as military barracks but would be headed instead to the scrap heap. He listed some of those that would be lost and their former routes.

Investment banker Andre de Saint-Phalle argued that price controls should be used solely to curb inflation and speculation and not as an instrument for economic reform as they were now being used. This, he said, struck at the heart of the capitalist and free enterprise systems by allowing wages and the cost of raw materials to rise while controlling the price of the finished product. Companies were being asked to produce at a loss (and investment bankers were not making their accustomed killing). Saint-Phalle, who had lost his original firm and his fortune in the stock market crash, was a French-born cultural conservative who deplored modern art. His daughter Niki de Saint-Phalle was a teenage hellion in the mid-Forties who had been expelled from several elite schools. At the end of the decade she became a fashion model and later a prominent avant garde artist.

William J. Lyman contended that a black market in labor existed in Detroit in the housing industry. Both union and non-union labor were guilty of the practice. Some sub-contractors on industrial jobs were paying workers $125 a day, or so he said. Some unions were denying apprenticeships to qualified applicants to keep labor in short supply. Homeowners were profiting from the resulting inflated prices, He wrote that he had some sympathy for the union members who, he conceded, were trying to make up for the many lean years in the past. Although he does not say it, business owners also were looking to keep wages at the Depression era level while expecting to reap a postwar profit from higher prices due to exploding demand.

Delmer Hubbell complained that price controls were slowing production.

Symon Gould advocated accepting the invitation of the Dominican Republic to take in 100,000 Jewish refugees and hoped that other Central and South American countries would follow this example. He argued that the Jews had to be freed from Europe and that as long as restrictions remained on resettlement in Palestine other homes had to be found immediately. Gould was a rare book dealer and film buff considered the father of the art house movie movement through his screenings at the Cameo Theatre in the 1920s. However several filmmakers said their prints somehow disappeared in his care (See Lovers of Cinema: the First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945 by Jan-Christopher Horak.) He founded the Vegetarian Party in 1947 or 1948, depending on which source you believe, apparently largely as a publicity stunt. He was the party's vice presidential choice in 1948 when he and his running mate, Dr. John Maxwell, received four write-in votes in the election. At the time Gould was associate editor of American Vegetarian magazine and Maxwell had a restaurant. The party urged a ban on slaughterhouses, limiting the raising of poultry or cattle, and a ban on alcohol, tobacco and medicine. (See here.), as well as Pacifism and moderate Socialism. Gould continued to run on the ticket, twice for president, until his death in 1960 when the party disappeared.

The Herald Tribune ran several letters for and against the choice of Tennessee congressman B. Carroll Reece as head of the National Republican Committee, an important issue to the paper's GOP readership. Some found him too conservative to lead the party to victory while others argued he was needed to oppose the “pink tinge” of “so-called liberalism.” Reece had New York ties having taught at NYU before entering politics. His district was one of two historically Republican congressional districts (and Union supporters during the Civil War) in the mountains of northeast Tennessee, anomalies in the otherwise Solid South. Although a solid conservative on economic, social and foreign policy issues, he supported civil rights for African Americans.

Prominent placement was given a letter by E.L. Messler of Pittsburgh comparing Henry Wallace, Chester Bowles, New Dealers, union leaders and “Commies” to Hitler for spreading lies about economic history. Sound familiar? He wrote that their claim that the last World War had been followed by a Depression and that the current systems of controls was needed to prevent this from happening again was untrue. Messler argued that the Depression that followed reconversion was minor and lasted only 18 months, followed by a period of prosperity. He feared the current policies would depress tax receipts by curtailing profits. Afterwards the countries to which we have loaned money for modernization will pay their debts by selling cheap goods, labor and food to us making it difficult for us to compete. (This did not happen.)

One of the more interesting political cartoons in the paper that day portrayed the hobgoblins of the postwar world at Uncle Sam's door looking for handouts. Some wore hats identifying them as Anarchy, Socialism and Famine. A globe was their spokesman, holding out a bar of soap and declaring “Soap or Eats!' or parenthetically the more modern “Tricks or Treats.” A piece of paper on the doorstep read “Food For All the World-- Or Else.”