The Charlotte News
Wednesday, January 5, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President presented his State of the Union message to Congress at 1:00 p.m. this date, seeking four billion dollars in new tax revenue, primarily from increased corporate taxes, standby authority to impose economic controls, and social legislation, including renewal of his civil rights program first enunciated in early 1948. He also called for repeal of Taft-Hartley, universal military training, support prices for farmers and removal of Government storage limits impeding purchase of excess production at support prices, expanded Social Security benefits, Federal aid to education, prepaid medical insurance, and a million new units of public housing within the ensuing seven years. He favored re-enactment of the Wagner Act of 1935 with provisions added to ban jurisdictional strikes and secondary boycotts as under Taft-Hartley. The President's proposals echoed many of the same of a year earlier, but with a Democratic Congress and mandate from the people by virtue of his re-election.
During the speech, he used the phrase, used during the campaign several times, which would come to characterize the second term: "Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from our Government a fair deal."
Congressional reaction varied. Senator Robert Taft said that he believed there was room for cutting Government spending before raising taxes. Congressman Gene Cox of Georgia interpreted the message as "going into a socialistic state" as England had gone, making "a violent turn to the left". Congressman Robert Doughton of North Carolina, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, said that he was glad that the President had laid down no hard and fast rules on taxes, found the proposal on taxes "worthy of serious consideration". Senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that he also was glad that the President had not laid down hard rules on taxes.
Prices on the New York stock exchanges headed upward as the President began his address, with automobile, steel, and rail stocks doing better than others. The stock market had declined almost to a 1948-49 low in anticipation of worse news for business from the President. Absence of reference to an excess profits tax was considered positive for business, along with retention of some features of Taft-Hartley and authority to control wages.
It was anticipated that the President, in his budget statement to the Congress, expected the following Monday, would seek 41.9 billion dollars, including 15 billion for defense, for the 1949-50 fiscal year. That overall budget was expected to rise during the course of the year by about two billion dollars.
The Dutch announced the end of their formal campaign to regain control of the Indonesian Republic regions of Sumatra and Java, ordering a ceasefire on Sumatra, having already done so on December 31 on Java. Prior to the ceasefire on Sumatra, the Dutch had captured Benkoelen, the last major city in Republican hands. Further action would be confined to roaming groups and gangs of individuals seeking to cause disturbances.
Several U.N. Security Council delegates had asserted that the Dutch delay in obedience to the order of the Council for immediate ceasefire the previous week represented defiance to U.N. will.
The State Department was urging anew that Israel and the Arab nations resolve their differences over Palestine, in advance of the U.N. Security Council meeting in New York set to begin on Friday to discuss the situation. The State Department declared that rumors of threatened cancellation of a loan of 100 million dollars to Israel were untrue.
Egypt claimed renewal of hostilities by the Israelis in the Negev Desert, in the area of Rafa, following weekend bombardment of Gaza and Khan Yunis, both held by the Egyptians pursuant to the partition plan approved by the U.N. in November, 1947.
Senators Burnet Maybank of South Carolina and Richard Russell of Georgia predicted the creation of a Savannah Valley Authority in the two states, similar to TVA.
The North Carolina biennial session of the General Assembly convened this date and immediately and unanimously killed its controversial gag rule, in effect since 1947, whereby a two-thirds vote was necessary to obtain withdrawal of a bill from committee or approval of a minority report or removal of a bill from an unfavorable calendar. Prior to that time, those actions could be accomplished by a simple majority. Two aid to education bills were immediately introduced, one providing for 50 million dollars and the other identical measure, for 40 million. Another measure was introduced to raise minimum teacher salaries to $2,400 annually for Class A certificate holders.
Two North Carolina officials, the State Highway Patrol commander, Col. H. J. Hatcher, and the chief clerk of the State Utilities Commission, Charles Z. Flack, resigned their posts a day before the inauguration of Governor Kerr Scott, the latter having been requested by the Governor and the former expected for his support of the Democratic opponent in the primary, Charles Johnson.
In Southampton, England, the Queen Mary was repaired after being extricated from a sandbar, and set sail for New York. The ship had been blown aground in Cherbourg Harbor the previous Saturday, was stuck for only twelve hours, but repairs of the damaged hull then delayed its sailing.
In Berlin, Edward J. Lada, a former U.S. Army paratrooper who had crashed through the Soviet blockade to reach the Russian sector where his two-year old daughter and her mother were located, was charged with seven offenses by a military tribunal, subjecting him to ten years in prison and a heavy fine. When he crashed the blockade originally, German actress Ursula Schmidt emerged to say that he had done it to see her, but when he spurned her for Ruth, his true love, she became spiteful and told him off in the newspapers. Mr. Lada said on December 22 that, if necessary, he would defect and renounce his U.S. citizenship to be with Ruth and the child in the Russian zone.
The winter blizzard subsided in the Western plains states, though the Dakotas and western Nebraska would still suffer from it for another 24 hours. The citrus belts of California and Arizona endured more sub-freezing weather this date. Travelers remained stranded along highways in Utah, Idaho, and Colorado. Eight Union Pacific trains were halted by the snow in Utah and Idaho. In the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, temperatures unofficially were reported to be 47 to 62 degrees below zero.
On the editorial page, "Scale Model of World Battle" finds the cold war presented in microcosm in "troubled, unhappy Korea." South Korea had just achieved its status as an independent republic, but, the piece believes, it would be short-lived unless Communism and democracy could find a way to coexist.
The U.S. maintained a contingent of 30,000 troops in the South because the Soviets, when they pulled out, had installed a Communist regime in the North, which had indicated its dedication to ruling the entire country.
Dr. Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, had to train enough South Korean troops and strengthen the economy sufficiently to withstand the Communist threat from the North with its 150,000 to 200,000 Russian-trained "police" troops. Until these tasks were accomplished by the Rhee regime, the South could not begin its effort to educate the mass of illiterate peasants of the country who had lived as virtual slaves to the Japanese since 1910.
The South was divided from the North by a barrier as thick as that comprising the iron curtain in Europe, with no intercommunication allowed between the two sides. But two million refugees from the North to the South told the familiar stories of Communist persecution and loss of liberty.
The elections in the South had been held under U.N. supervision six months earlier and the U.S. had granted limited recognition to the Rhee Government the previous August. The Government had been recognized, over Soviet objection, by the U.N. the previous month. The President, in response, had just granted full recognition to the Government.
While in other times, the efforts might foreshadow an ouster of the Communists from the North by the Rhee Government, with the cold war moving to the Far East, Korea's fight had just become part of a worldwide struggle, in China, in Indonesia, Malaya and Burma, India and Pakistan.
It concludes that the freedom of South Korea was only tenuous at present, dependent on the success of other free peoples in the world battle against Communism.
"The Rocky Road to Fame" begins by quoting from Othello the lines about filching of one's good name benefiting not the robber but making the victim poor indeed.
In Western North Carolina, people would befriend a person easily unless one called them a liar, thief or murderer. Hamp Kendall of Lenoir had been labeled a murderer for 40 years despite being cleared of the alleged crime after spending nine years behind bars after the wrongful conviction. Another man had finally confessed to the murder. The tombstone of the victim of the crime nevertheless still stood as mute testimony, libelously, to the crime. Erected by the victim's family, it labeled Mr. Kendall as the murderer of Lawrence Nelson.
No one, not even Governor Gregg Cherry to whom Mr. Kendall had recently appealed, could do anything about the tombstone as it was private property.
Then after the newspapers got involved and gave Mr. Kendall publicity, it was determined by State Attorney General Harry McMullen that Mr. Kendall could sue for defamation and get the offending script removed.
The piece concludes that with all the favorable publicity the tombstone had brought to Mr. Kendall, getting his story of a miscarriage of justice broadcast all over the country, it could not imagine why he would want to have the accusation removed as it had proved his "nugget of gold".
"They'll Be Hungrier This Year" tells of the Democratic Party enjoying a $100,000 surplus after the election, as Democrats began to return to the fold to bask in the success which many had not helped to take place.
DNC treasurer Joe Blythe of Charlotte was pleased with the result and looked forward to the Jackson-Jefferson Day dinners, the previous year having been lean in attracting contributions, $600,000 to $700,000 below normal.
Many Democrats had predated their checks prior to the election and then sent them in after the fact, claiming they had been returned.
Pete McKnight of The News, preempting Herblock or Shoemaker, provides a special feature editorial on the 1949 General Assembly biennial session beginning this date, and its agenda. There was pressure to undertake backlogged road construction, capital improvements on State institutions, education and salary readjustments. These demands were against a backdrop of a large State surplus and rebellion against conservative government in favor of a more positive, dynamic approach. But the requests were exceeding the anticipated revenue. There was also a question as to how big the surplus was, in any event inadequate to cover all the needs of the state, including the 240-million dollar road construction project favored by new Governor Kerr Scott.
The answer to the conundrum lay in the "movement of the people" which had elected Mr. Scott. He was not a New Dealer as President Truman but believed in progress for the rural areas of the state, had enjoyed support from farmers, labor, and the middle class, had promised to fight determinedly to improve their lot.
Drew Pearson tells of Governor Dewey inviting former Secretary of War Robert Patterson to join the Circuit Court of Appeals for New York State. He congratulated Mr. Patterson on winning, on behalf of the New York GOP machine, the Surrogate Frankenthaler case, to which Mr. Patterson replied it had not been hard as he had all the facts on his side, making it a "lead pipe cinch". Mr. Dewey replied jocularly that he was the last person to whom anyone should talk of "lead pipe cinches".
Representative John Rankin of Mississippi had been heckled the previous week by freshman Democrats in the House as he tried to hoot down attempts at changing the House rules to modify the all-powerful Rules Committee, by declaring that the effort was "hatched in Moscow" and by the Fair Employment Practices Commission "gang", which he claimed was first "propounded" in 1920 by Josef Stalin. Congressman John Dingell of Michigan interrupted to inquire rhetorically whether the Rules Committee had not blocked the FEPC bill, the housing bill's public housing and slum clearance provisions, bowing to the real estate lobby, and other liberal legislation. But Congressman Gene Cox of Georgia responded that the liberals were trying to blast the Rules Committee out of existence, to "change the American form of government". Representative Herman Eberharter of Pennsylvania insisted instead that they were trying to preserve it.
Floor leader John McCormick of Massachusetts reminded the recalcitrant Democrats that if the caucus voted the changes by a two-thirds majority, all Democrats would be bound to vote for it on the floor. Mr. Rankin quibbled on the sanction to be imposed for not doing so, to which Mr. McCormick urged following one's conscience as a good Democrat.
Senate employees were petitioning the Rules Committee to allow beer to be served in the Senate dining room.
Retiring Congressman Fred Hartley of New Jersey had summoned Congressman Charles Lesinski of Michigan to Washington on purportedly urgent business. It turned out that he wanted the new chairman of the House Labor Committee to retain the staff which had written the Taft-Hartley bill. Mr. Lesinski then fired all of them.
Former President Hoover had asked President Truman recently for his autograph to give to his grandson.
Mary Jane Truman, the President's sister, had been assigned a detail of three Secret Service Agents while in Washington. She drove them around in her old Chevrolet.
When asked whether he would consider becoming Secretary of State, Senator Arthur Vandenberg replied that he would be uncomfortable in Cabinet meetings when asked for his position on Taft-Hartley, the excess profits tax, and other measures on which he held a position contrary to that of the President.
James Marlow discusses the reduction of power by the House of its Rules Committee by changing the rules for discharge of a bill, allowing any committee chairman to make a motion for a floor vote after a bill had been pending for 21 days in the Rules Committee, and upon gaining a majority, allowing the bill to be discharged to the House floor for debate and a vote. It cleared the way for the President's social legislation to reach the floor rather than being bottled up in the Rules Committee.
The previous rules had only allowed for discharge by a petition signed by a majority of the House members—the difference being that a majority of the full membership was required versus only a majority of a quorum on the floor at a given time, subject to recognition of the movant by the Speaker, under the new rule.
The Labor Committee had already approved repeal of Taft-Hartley. But it still had to go before the Rules Committee, albeit now not so subject to dying there. Speaker Sam Rayburn, able to recognize motions on the floor, would now wield power to determine which bills would reach a vote.
It did not necessarily mean that the President's program on housing, education, civil rights, labor, reserve economic controls, and the rest would pass the Congress, but the process had at least partially been relieved of a major roadblock.
The Senate, it is noted, had no such omnipotent committee as the Rules Committee had been.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "A Good Half Loaf", predicts that some form of civil rights legislation would pass in the new Congress, as both party platforms were pledged to it and the liberal Democrats who wanted a strong civil rights plank had been victorious on election day.
The Courier-Journal wanted to see legislation pass which met three tests: that it would genuinely help black citizens to realize their fundamental civil rights rather than attacking social distinctions between the races; that it would be enforceable; and that it would improve the international reputation of the country as one which practiced the democracy it preached. It did not believe that all three tests were satisfied by the President's ten-point civil rights package submitted to the previous Congress, its primary points being an anti-lynching law, anti-poll tax law, creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and elimination of segregation in interstate transportation facilities and in the military.
It suggests that public opinion was such that the anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation could be passed and enforced, and should therefore be separated out from the President's program such that emphasis could be placed on those two items separately by all persons of good will in the country.
While some argued that a Federal anti-lynching law had become superfluous in the South with so few lynchings and adequate state prosecutions when there was one, the November 20 lynching of Robert Mallard in Georgia had brought to the fore again the farce of Southern justice when it came to interracial crimes in some counties of the South. The first task of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had appeared to be exoneration of the Klan in the lynching rather than locating the perpetrators of the murder. Only after public outrage was exhibited from around the country following editorials in the Atlanta Constitution which had exposed the matter, did a grand jury step in to indict two men identified by the widow of Mr. Mallard as being involved in the shooting of her husband—though she could not identify one man except by his car and she could not say that the other was definitely one of the shooters.
A Federal anti-lynching law, it concludes, was needed.
The Southern opponents of the anti-poll tax legislation would likely filibuster it to death in the Senate and the better route, it opines, was to pass a constitutional amendment, which, while it might take two or more years to ratify, would be better in the long-run than the legislative route, which might never produce results to ban all such hindrance to free exercise of the franchise.
The piece finds no justification for job discrimination or segregation in society. But it expresses the belief that Federal legislation in that regard would prove unenforceable and engender so much bitterness in the South that it would harm the black cause.
The Catholic publication Commonweal had noted that the habit, for instance, in the South of calling blacks by their first names rather than by "Mr." or "Mrs." had been so deeply ingrained in white Southerners that no law or sanction could reach it.
The Supreme Court had already ruled that segregation could not take place in interstate transportation facilities. But laws, it believes, designed to target segregation and require equal employment opportunity could not be enforced in the South.
Black leaders and political agitators would, understandably, not settle for the half loaf of anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation. But persons genuinely concerned with progress of blacks in the society wanted results, not "gaudy displays of sympathy".
The further reforms on segregation and employment opportunity, it suggests, should await a later time when public opinion had been educated to a point of acceptance, as was the case on the anti-poll tax and anti-lynch laws, not so ten years earlier.
W. L. Gordon provides some facta, first, that former President John Adams lived over a year after his son John Quincy became President in 1825. He leaves out the more interesting fact, however, that President Adams died the same day in Quincy, Massachusetts, as former President Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Va., both exactly fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Second, the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the Treaty of Paris had been concluded, as neither army was aware of the treaty for the slow means of communication. Again, he omits the fact that General Andrew Jackson made his name in that battle, leading him to the White House, defeating President John Quincy Adams in 1828 after the House had selected Mr. Adams over General Jackson, the popular vote winner, following the election of 1824 having been thrown into the House for want of an electoral college majority for either candidate.
Third, only about a third of the people in the U.S. attempting suicide accomplished it. He leaves out the rather important point that many ostensible suicide attempts are merely "gestures" or feints to obtain, desperately, attention.
A letter from a taxi driver in Charlotte tells of the average driver suffering reputationally in the community and earning only about $35 per seventy-hour week. He suggests that a reporter be assigned to one cab of each of the three companies in town to acquire the facts and general attitude of passengers. No one had been able to understand the proceedings before the City Council or the Merchants Association anent the taxis, and he asserts that such an impartial report would produce greater clarity.
Twelfth Day of
Christmas: Twelve Dimmers Dimming
Framed Edition
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