The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 13, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in China, the Communists had stated terms of peace, said to mandate their absolute control of the country. They demanded, according to an informant in Peiping, the removal of Chiang Kai-Shek as President and of Li Tsung-Jen as Vice-President, as well as punishment of war criminals, scrapping of the constitution, and installation of a coalition government to include five Communists, three members of the Nationalist Kuomintang, and four others from other political parties in the country. A ceasefire would mean that the armies would maintain their present positions.
During the confirmation process by
the Senate pursuant to his appointment by the President as Secretary
of State, Dean Acheson was subjected to questioning regarding his
association with Alger Hiss, said that they were friends and remained
so. He also said that Donald Hiss, Alger's brother, was his executive
assistant while he was Assistant Secretary of State, and that Mr.
Hiss had served with complete loyalty. Alger Hiss had only begun to
report directly to Mr. Acheson in 1946 when the latter became
Undersecretary. Mr. Acheson denied that his law firm, of which Donald
Hiss was a member, influenced approval by the State Department of a
90 million dollar loan to Communist-controlled Poland in 1946. Mr
Acheson disputed the memory of former Assistant Secretary of State
Adolf Berle in his testimony before HUAC the previous August when he
said that Alger Hiss, rather than Donald, was the executive assistant
to Mr. Acheson at the State Department. Mr. Acheson had also been
informed by Mr. Berle at the time that one of the Hiss brothers,
though he had refused to say which one or, for "security
reasons", who
Former President Hoover asked Congress to provide to the President broad authority to reorganize the Executive Branch, following an extensive study by the commission which he had chaired. President Hoover counseled giving President Truman greater authority than that reluctantly provided FDR in 1939, which had reserved the power of Congress to veto changes proposed by the President. About twenty agencies had been excluded by Congress from the President's authority. President Hoover recommended against that practice under new reorganizational authority. The old Reorganization Act had expired at the end of the previous March.
The President asked the Senate again to confirm Superior Court Judge Wilson Warlick as Federal District Court Judge for the Western District of North Carolina. The President had made the appointment the previous March at the retirement of Judge E. Yates Webb, but the GOP Senate had not confirmed him, and the seat was temporarily filled by Judge D. E. Henderson the previous fall. It was believed that the Democratic Senate would quickly confirm Judge Warlick.
In Raleigh, the Advisory Budget Commission proposed a two-year budget to the General Assembly of $467,000, the largest in the state's history. Its various constituent parts are listed. While recommending an increase in pay to teachers equating to an average of $2,400 per year, it did not recommend the $2,400 minimum pay to teachers with Class A certificates, as sought by Governor Kerr Scott and recommended by the State Board of Education. The current average pay was $1,943 per year.
Governor Scott said that the State could not afford to have a larger budget than that recommend by the Commission without new taxes or Federal aid or both.
Bill Odom was reported 1,200 miles
from Honolulu on the morning of this date, in his attempt at a
5,285-mile record flight for small planes. He was flying a
Beechcraft
In New York, dancer Vicki Evans was free on bail following her arrest as a California fugitive on a felony marijuana possession charge. She had been arrested the previous September with actor Robert Mitchum and two other co-defendants, but had failed to appear for trial with the other three, all convicted earlier in the week.
On the editorial page, "Prerequisite for a Dynasty" tells of Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia asking the Legislature to abolish the present voter registration lists and replace them with new registration to restore the vote exclusively to "people who do their own thinking and voting in accordance with their own convictions and judgment." He wanted a system unassailable in any court.
The Speaker of the Georgia House had said frankly that the aim was to bar 80 percent of all black voters from registration by instituting an educational requirement. Governor Talmadge, however, had stressed that he did not mean to base the requirement on education, as there were many who were illiterate who nevertheless had the "degree of wisdom and common sense necessary to understand the duties and obligations of citizenship."
It finds the proposed Talmadge requirement similar to Alabama's Boswell amendment which required voter registrants to understand and be able to explain to the satisfaction of registrars the U.S. Constitution, a requirement which had been ruled unconstitutional recently by a three-judge Federal Court.
The Columbus Ledger had found Governor Talmadge to have lifted his campaign directly from Josef Goebbels, that it was morally wrong to base qualifications for voting on the "shade of a man's epidermis." The Georgia League of Women Voters had also condemned the practice as keeping voter rolls artificially small so as to be packed potentially with political supporters of particular candidates.
The Governor was essentially asking for the foundation of his own dynasty, the disfranchisement of large blocs of voters, including 150,000 presently registered black voters.
With the county-unit system in Georgia already weighting rural districts over urban districts in state elections, the proposed practice stood as another canon by which political control of the state could be maintained in the hands of the few, enough to sustain the Talmadge dynasty through the "wool hat" boys, his chief supporters.
"Year of Accomplishment" congratulates Arthur Jones, superintendent of the Charlotte Park & Recreation Department, for his year in the post before just announcing his leaving to join a private banking firm. He had brought Charlotte public recreation to life. It lists the several accomplishments during the year.
It also lauds the selection of R. Foster Blaisdell of Texas as his successor.
"Opportunity for the Solicitor" comments on the grand jury indictment of the magistrate accused of extortion and malfeasance for his part in a scheme involving a constable who regularly rounded up black citizens late at night for alleged gambling violations and brought them immediately before the magistrate without counsel, who then allowed them to go back home on payment of costs, higher costs than normally charged in such cases. Seventy such cases had taken place in six weeks starting the previous late October, all involving black defendants accused of gambling offenses, over which the magistrate had no jurisdiction.
Magistrates were appointed in lots by the Governor or pursuant to the Omnibus Bill of the Legislature and had very little oversight. It was thus not surprising, suggests the piece, that such practices as those charged in Charlotte occurred, with magistrates who had not the foggiest notion what their powers were, how they should conduct themselves, or even what their raison d'etre was.
It hopes that the case would expose the "faults of this archaic, cumbersome, and faulty system".
"Georgia Justice" tells of an all-white jury in Toombs County, Georgia, having acquitted, after 25 minutes of deliberations, William Howell, one of the two white men indicted for murdering Robert Mallard, a successful black farmer, on November 20 in the presence of his wife.
The defense had called two of the jurors as character witnesses for the accused. The two had testified that they would not believe the widow of Mr. Mallard even under oath.
The result strengthened the argument that a Federal anti-lynching law was, after all, needed to supplement state prosecutions.
The piece suggests that the prosecutor might not have adequately conducted voir dire of the jury to determine their preconceived notions about the case or whether they knew the defendant or witnesses, but that even so, such a glaring omission would suggest lack of adequate motivation to prosecute such interracial cases.
The case was closed as far as Georgia was concerned, but, it remarks, it was evident from the result that hatred and intolerance remained a part of the Southern fabric, and would remain so until those Southerners who yelled so loudly for states' rights became equally concerned regarding the rights of individual citizens.
The piece does not relate of the fate of the second defendant in the case, Roderick Clifton, the case having been dismissed by the prosecutor, presumably because Mr. Mallard's widow had not been able to identify him except by the presence of his car at the scene. Of less moment, she had also not been able to describe Mr. Howell, among several robed, masked and unmasked men present at the scene, as having fired the fatal shot. But that did not prevent his conviction for being part of a criminal conspiracy or for aiding and abetting in the murder, equally culpable therefore as any principal.
We note that the change in tone, refreshingly so, of this editorial to a more modern stance than the rather backward view predominantly expressed on states' rights by the editors during the previous year or so, since the departure of Harry Ashmore for the Arkansas Gazette, may suggest that Pete McKnight, to become Editor on March 4, 1949, was the author of this piece.
Mr. McKnight, a graduate of Davidson College, had written a recent editorial criticizing the effort of State Representative John Regan to require an oath of loyalty and statement of Communist non-affiliation for instructors at State institutions of higher learning, to which Mr. Regan had responded in a letter that he believed the editorial writer was a UNC graduate for the piece having opined that the aim of the proposed law appeared primarily to be against UNC, to which the editors had responded that the author was a Davidson graduate.
Just who was responsible for the previous editorials, which appeared to turn back the clock about twenty years on most issues regarding race, is unknown. We do not pin them to former Editor William Reddig—the first non-native North or South Carolinian to be Editor or Associate Editor of the newspaper—, as it was not clear that he regularly wrote editorials for the newspaper during his time as Editor, which may have ended in any event the previous August at the point when his name, without explanation, disappeared from the editorial page masthead. There may have been in the interim several editorial writers until a new Editor could be chosen. Certainly the varying tone of the editorials suggests as much.
Mr. McKnight, incidentally, was a
close friend of W. J. Cash, lived down the hall
Drew Pearson discusses the appointment of Budget Director James Webb to become Undersecretary of State, charged with cleaning out the chaff from the Department. The President had not known him when he appointed him Director of the Budget in 1946, but Mr. Webb had gained his confidence sufficiently to occupy this important role. Mr. Pearson recounts Mr. Webb's rise from North Carolina to Government service, first, in 1922, as a secretary to Congressman Edward Pou, then, in 1923, as a member of subsequent North Carolina Governor O. Max Gardner's Washington law firm, then a year or so afterward, hired away by another North Carolinian at Sperry Gyroscope, where he remained until 1943 when he rejoined the Marines. He left in 1945 when he became assistant to Undersecretary of Treasury Gardner, who then recommended him to the President for the position of Budget Director in 1946.
Mr. Pearson notes that he would be conservative, as he had been at the Bureau of the Budget.
When informed by the inaugural committee chairman that tickets were going like hotcakes for the President's inauguration, suggesting that the people were as enthusiastic as the day after the election, the President expressed that perhaps it meant only that there were a lot more Democrats than there used to be.
The President had told the head of the National Grange that his idea of a roundtable discussion between farm, labor and business leaders was a good one.
On the morning of the inauguration, the President would meet with the members of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, whom he commanded as a captain in World War I.
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek had about completed arrangements to purchase a 30-room mansion in Virginia for $175,000, which, Mr. Pearson notes, could feed a lot of Chinese coolies.
The AFL and CIO had prepared a joint petition asking the State Department, Treasury Department, and the Senate to investigate charges made in Mr. Pearson's column against Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan.
Senator Owen Brewster of Maine had found in an article written for the Aero Digest that the Navy-Air Force struggle for appropriations was healthy, championed the cause of the Navy in delivering air power to strategic locations.
Marquis Childs finds that the Republican Party was so exiled by being out of power for 16 years that it was as a Balkanized Government-in-exile, with various factions competing for dominance. On the one hand were the moneyed elite, who he likens to royalty and aristocracy, represented by Senator Homer Capehart, Congressman Charles Halleck, both of Indiana, and Congressman John Taber of New York. They continued to be for economy in Government, even at the expense of fighting the cold war. As part of the GOP-controlled 80th Congress, they had cut appropriations to the State Department, most notably to the information services, causing a large amount of minor damage to enable a small saving.
Then there were those Republicans who were for moderate reform, enough to make the GOP return to power conceivable and enable the party to govern once in power. They were represented by such persons as Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, George Aiken of Vermont, and Charles Tobey of New Hampshire. Their views, however, were not so far afield from those of Senator Robert Taft.
The split between these two factions was greater than the public generally realized. Those of the right who believed that Senator Taft was an extreme radical leaning toward socialism, who included many of the first faction, formed the most pronounced schism in the party. They usually held the purse strings and so had a larger voice than others.
With the Democrats now coalescing under President Truman, there was a danger that the splintered Republicans could not form an adequate opposition to express constructive, vital criticism. The old shibboleths about economy would no longer work.
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, finds that the keystone was still missing in the "arch of the future" which America was seeking to build in France through the Marshall Plan. For the French remained without the security which they desired against the Soviets.
The President, in setting a ceiling on defense spending and thereby cutting the authorized 70-group Air Force to 48 groups, was harming that sense of security and thereby undermining the good work of ERP during the previous year. (It should be noted that the President, in defense of this policy, had recently stated that the size and number of planes in the Air Force was more important than the number of combat groups.)
On the positive side, the President had supplied France the previous October with military supplies, including tanks, to outfit three French divisions in Germany and place them on a better footing for fighting, a move which had helped engender the feeling of security.
The five nations of the Western
Union had agreed on conservative plans to restore their self-defense,
to occur in stages starting with sufficient defense to hold the line
at the Rhine
Mr. Alsop finds that every essential element was therefore present for restoration of the non-Soviet world to strength. It was tragic that, after two world wars, such had to occur, but it was a reality. It was also a fact that without a strong America, no North Atlantic Pact or Western Union could ever make Western Europe safe.
He concludes that with the arch thus
begun, the keystone had to be supplied at "whatever cost
James Marlow discusses the President's budget message to Congress, requesting 42 billion dollars, half of which was in defense and foreign aid. He offers that had it not been for the cold war threat, there would have been a leveling off between postwar supply and wartime pent-up demand by 1948. As it was, the process never had a chance to begin. The rearmament was preventing the country from reaching that stasis and by so doing, delayed the answer to a critical question: what would happen when peace would come? Would there be a depression with mass unemployment when the defense industries were no longer needed?
He posits that the defense build-up and foreign aid program might be necessary for a prolonged period. The more the Russians could prolong it, the better it would be for achievement of their goal to break the American economy and thereby win the cold war without shooting.
He reminds that the struggle with Russia, even without shooting, was "vast, bitter and with no letup or mercy in sight."
A couple of more years then?
A letter writer provides a copy of a letter he had just sent to the City Manager, Henry Yancey, regarding the process for acquiring city licenses for automobiles. License tags were only provided through the Carolina Motor Club office and he wants them distributed at City Hall or through the mail to facilitate the process.
Framed Edition
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