The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 8, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews told the House Armed Services Committee that he believed that 353 million dollars worth of cuts in spending for the Navy, especially regarding its air arm, as ordered by the Pentagon, would impair the nation's security. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had agreed to give a hearing to Navy complaints. The Navy's share of defense spending cuts equated to about nine percent of the overall defense budget for 1950, whereas the Army cuts equated to eight percent and the Air Force, 3.5 percent.

The Chinese began fleeing Canton as the Nationalist front to the north against the Chinese Communists showed signs of collapsing. It was anticipated that the provisional capital in Canton would be moved to Chungking on Monday. Kukong and Hengyang had been yielded without a fight. General Pai Chung-Hsi, central front commander, had quit Hengyang and was preparing to set up headquarters at Kweilin in his native Kwangsi Province, leaving Canton to be vanquished.

In London, a well-informed source said that the British Labor Government was contemplating recognition of the Communist Chinese Government. India was expected to do likewise. Thus far, no Western powers had done so.

The Nationalist Chinese released two seized American merchant ships for running a blockade of Shanghai.

In Prague, the press reported that the Government would take over the churches in the country on November 1 under a prospective law slated to become effective that day.

In Rome, atomic scientist Enrico Fermi said that there would be no atomic war for twenty years, as long as the U.S. maintained nuclear supremacy over the Soviets. He said that a contemplated preventive war by the U.S. was "politically impossible and militarily impractical" for the dominance of Russian land forces in Europe, only leading therefore to destruction of Europe.

We will get to live until 1969.

But then, we predict, Mr. Nixon will save the day from the Rooskies! And then, they'll declare martial law and he'll be in office for about forty years.

Glory be. Praise the Loot.

Charlotte had been singled out, according to experts of U.S. News & World Report, as an atom bomb target for the Russians in the event of war. It was the only such place in the Carolinas. Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk, Oak Ridge, Chattanooga, and Knoxville were also potential targets in the South, along with 85 other places across the nation within the range of Russian "suicide planes" carrying atomic bombs over the North Pole. It would take one bomb to destroy each city of 100,000 or more population, except for very large cities or those geographically extending over a wide area.

Governor Kerr Scott of North Carolina expressed the opinion therefore that cities should not become larger in the nuclear era but industrial plants ought be placed instead in rural areas.

Equal opportunity thus would be afforded for mutual destruction of rural and urban areas by the Rooskies.

John L. Lewis and the Southern Coal Operators agreed to resume their talks the following Wednesday in Charleston and White Sulphur Springs, W. Va.

Once the mining industry collapses with the intrusion of cheaper natural gas, they can dig the new hangout there for the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive Branch in the event of nuclear war with the Rooskies.

The AFL embarked on a plan to carve out a million members from the CIO in 1950.

Senator Bert Henry Miller of Idaho died of a heart attack at age 70. He had been elected to the Senate in 1948. The state's Governor, a Republican, could now appoint the Democrat's successor.

In Canton, China, American explorer Leonard Clark, accused of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two men in the midst of a drunken party, was denied bail after a hearing. Mr. Clark denied the shootings. He was in the hospital, having been shot in the chest. The prosecutor claimed that the shootings took place regarding jealousy over the wife of one of the dead men, who denied having intimate relations with Mr. Clark.

William Donovan, former head of the OSS of which Mr. Clark had been a member during the war, better hurry to address Mr. Clark's entreaties for help before the Communists take over the city.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., a 27-year old woman went berserk and killed her two children, ages eighteen months and six, with a celery knife because she could not stand any longer their continual crying. The family had just moved into a new home the previous night.

Next time, feed them carrots when you move them to new surroundings.

Houston flooding from a ten-inch rainfall, the heaviest in years, had taken the life of one person who drowned.

In Boise, Idaho, National Guardsmen were trying to locate hundreds of hunters stranded in the Minidoka National Forest by the first snowstorm of the year, causing ten-inch accumulations in some areas over a one-day period.

Ten inches? We used to play in that in the backyard and we didn't even have guns. Hunters are sissies.

In Dartmouth, Eng., fish were swimming in local streets following a cloudburst which backed up the River Dart into the town's sewer system.

At Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the Yankees had a 3-0 lead after four innings against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the fourth game of the World Series. The Yankees would go on to win 6-4, to grab a 3 to 1 game lead. The potentially deciding game of the Series would thus take place Sunday at Ebbets Field.

Be sure and catch it. No cats will be allowed in the stadium. There have been reports of cat-grabbers on the prowl, who will also grab your purse and make for the exit. Purse grabbers pay no taxes on their booty.

On the editorial page, "Frank Graham's Farm Stand" tells of Senator Graham favoring the farm plan of Senator Clinton Anderson, reasoning that the farmer deserved a prosperous level of existence by Government guarantee given the farmers' creative input to the society.

But the piece finds other occupations, as ministers and airplane designers, university presidents and newspapermen, also worthy of such treatment if farmers were.

It concludes that farm subsidy was one thing, to guard against lean crop years and overproduction, but farm insurance was different. No one, it thinks, was entitled to a guaranteed income. Senator Graham failed to recognize the distinction.

"Newspaperboy Day" introduces two hypothetical deliverers. Joe, whose father was dead and whose mother worked but had not the training for a profitable job, needed the newspaper route to help with family expenses. Bill did not have financial worries, came from a prosperous family, but wanted training which would help him in business and enable him to be an asset to his father's business when, eventually, he would join it.

It thus invites the public to remember this date as National Newspaperboy Day. (Girls cannot do it because it requires the strength to carry a big bag around slung over your shoulder and to awaken at 5:00 a.m.)

"New Places in Society" applauds the National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week for having awakened employers to the benefits of hiring the handicapped. In Charlotte, the North Carolina Employment Service had sent 694 such persons to employers and 369 of them had found jobs.

Arthur Krock, in a piece from the New York Times, comments on the low morale of Navy officers and enlisted men in the wake of military unification. W. Barton Leach, Harvard Law School professor on loan to the Air Force, had written a paper for the Air Force which made recommendations to alleviate the problems associated with two to one votes against the Navy by the Joint Chiefs regarding defense cuts. Mr. Leach had concluded that such decisions were likely to continue as long as service careers were dependent on particular weapons, and service personnel could not be shifted from one weapon to another.

Drew Pearson tells of the U.S. losing its air superiority to Britain, France, and The Netherlands, especially Britain, because the previous Congress had objected to use of Army funds for development of commercial planes, prompting American airplane manufacturers to stop designing new types of transport planes capable of being transformed to commercial passenger planes. Meanwhile, Britain had developed a jet-propelled transport plane.

Francis Cardinal Spellman had flown to the Vatican, presumably to address with Pope Pius XII his eroding position with the Vatican following his public criticism of Eleanor Roosevelt regarding her advocacy of public funding only for public education. The Pope was reportedly displeased at Cardinal Spellman for having engaged in this criticism of the former First Lady and his position as rising papal secretary and favored American Cardinal had apparently been lost to Cardinal Stritch of Chicago.

Amiable Senator Clyde Hoey had described the settlement for $1,500 in fines by the Customs Bureau of John Maragon's case of attempted importation illegally of perfume in champagne bottles to have been "usual". Mr. Pearson had inquired of the Bureau regarding other such cases and found that there was far more lenient treatment accorded Mr. Maragon than Jack Benny and George Burns, for instance, each of whom was forced to pay substantially heavier fines and received suspended one-year jail sentences for attempting to smuggle through third parties jewelry worth about the same as the perfume of Mr. Maragon, a little over $2,000. So apparently having as a friend, as did Mr. Maragon, General Harry Vaughan, military aide to the President, helped to alleviate the burden.

Airplane manufacturer Glenn Martin had assigned detectives to look into Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington's past in St. Louis, as Mr. Martin had specialized in Navy planes in the past and was mad because the B-36, chosen as the Air Force long-range strategic bomber mainstay, was being built by Consolidated Vultee.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the agreement recently made between Secretary of State Acheson and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of Britain to formulate a treaty finally with Japan, with China included but not Russia. Russia had been the roadblock by insistence on having veto power over any treaty provisions on which the other three powers agreed.

But it was now necessary to construct such a treaty five years after the war as the bureaucracy associated with American occupation and its attempt to control all aspects of Japanese life was becoming entrenched and increasingly unpopular with the Japanese, a boon to Japanese Communists.

Messrs. Acheson and Bevin had agreed that they would first again explore, for the ensuing two or three months, the attitudes of the Russians toward a treaty and if they refused to change their position, proceed to form the treaty without them. The treaty would recognize Japanese internal sovereignty, leaving the Japanese free to govern themselves within broad limits. But American occupation troops would remain, albeit removed from the major population centers where their well-supplied lifestyles, when juxtaposed to the struggling Japanese population, had caused resentment. Bases would be reserved in outlying areas to which the troops would be removed. Given what had happened in China, it was necessary to preserve American troops in Japan indefinitely.

The Russians would accuse the U.S. of dishonoring its postwar pledges, but the move would be necessary to avoid erosion of the Western position in Asia.

Robert C. Ruark finds historian Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman's habit of going to bed at 9:00 p.m. and arising at 2:30 a.m. to be for the birds, not him. He had been forced while in the Navy to rise at 5:30 each morning and vowed that when he got out, he would sleep until noon every day, even it meant starvation.

He could think of nothing which could not be done better after a good lunch at about 3:00 p.m.

The Spanish liked to eat around midnight and sleep in the afternoon, a practice he deems wise. The hardest working man he ever knew was Broadway producer Billy Rose, who never arose before 11:00 in the morning. He figures that eight hours of sleep was fine no matter when it was transacted, and that just because it was not at night before dawn was no reason to consign the sleeper during other hours to the category of a dissolute profligate.

Such people, he finds, had been taunted with the titles of "slug-abed, sleepy-head and generally described as a no-count trifler who can only wind up hawking apples or, if successful, peddling marijuana or running numbers."

He does not knock farmers or laborers or Dr. Freeman for their habits, but wants those habits not imposed on the rest of the population.

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