The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 2, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that John L. Lewis had told the Governor of Indiana, Henry Schricker, that he was ready to negotiate a prompt coal peace pact with mine operators in that state, separate from any other settlement. The Governor had declared a state of emergency and demanded immediate settlement of the strike. The Governor said that in response to the letter from Mr. Lewis, he would attempt to form a meeting between the coal operators of Indiana and the UMW head. He had also called a meeting of the miners union policy committee meeting in Chicago the previous day, thought for the purpose of forming a separate settlement in Illinois.

The CIO voted at its convention in Cleveland to amend its rules to bar Communists, Fascists or other members of totalitarian movements from holding high offices in member unions and authorize the executive board to expel unions which favored such movements. The CIO resolutions committee approved expulsion of the United Electrical Workers and the Farm Equipment Workers, both considered sympathetic to Communists.

The President told a meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers that his Point 4 program to encourage private investment in underdeveloped nations would help prove that the American system was the best for those countries.

Admiral Louis Denfeld, removed from his position as chief of Naval operations, was reported to have been offered a position as commander of the Naval forces in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. Admiral Forrest Sherman was about to be made chief of Naval operations, consistent with rumors of the previous few days.

The search for bodies in the Potomac River near National Airport in Washington continued following the midair collision between a Bolivian P-38 fighter plane and an Eastern Air Lines DC-4 the previous day as both planes tried to land at the airport, killing all 55 aboard the latter craft. Eight bodies still remained missing.

As a result of the crash, members of Congress issued demands for tighter regulations on military planes flying in commercial air lanes. The tower had radioed to the Bolivian pilot, who was the lone survivor of the crash, to circle away from the airport but he apparently did not hear or understand the communication.

In Denver, Henry Blackmer, who had fled into exile in Europe to avoid charges of perjury and tax evasion in connection with the Teapot Dome scandal 25 years earlier and had recently returned to the U.S. to face the charges, was fined $20,000 for tax evasion. The other charges were dismissed based on a report that Mr. Blackmer had not been in Colorado at the time of their alleged occurrences. The Court refused to impose a jail sentence based on the frail health of the defendant, who was 80.

In Cincinnati, six persons died and seven others were injured in a fire at a three-story apartment building.

In Santa Rosa, California, a newlywed couple, the bride's sister, and a ranch hand were allegedly shot and killed the previous night by a ranch hand using a shotgun. The man surrendered to police. The couple had driven to the man's cottage to obtain a trunk which the bride had left there before the marriage, whereupon an argument ensued followed by the shotgun blasts, killing the couple and the bride's sister. The five-year old niece of the bride, left in the car, fled the scene, screaming. The ranch hand then went to another ranch hand's cabin and killed him as well. The man said that he had told the couple to wait until the next morning to retrieve the trunk, that they pushed their way into his place, at which point he shot them. The bride had been his girlfriend until shortly before the marriage and had lived with him in the cabin. The prosecutor quoted the man as saying that he killed the other ranch hand because, "Him want kill me long time."

Albert Coates, director of the North Carolina Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, delivered the first installment of his nine-part report on consolidation of the Charlotte City and Mecklenburg County governments, written as a result of a request and appropriation by the two governments after a series of articles in 1946 by then News reporter Burke Davis showing duplication of services. Mr. Coates requested that the City Council and County Commissioners and their department heads meet with him on eight other weekly occasions to receive the subsequent parts of the report.

In Charlotte, two brothers were arrested and charged with manslaughter for the early morning shooting of an unidentified black man. The brothers claimed that they shot the man after he attacked them in a patch of woods near their home and after firing in the air several times in an attempt to frighten him away. Police had investigated on an earlier complaint by the brothers of a prowler but found no one. The brothers then tracked the man into the woods.

The Community Chest campaign in Charlotte faced failure unless $82,000 could be raised within 24 hours. The twenty percent deficit from the goal would leave many charities wanting for funds.

On the editorial page, "The Bethlehem Steel Pattern" finds that the break in the steel impasse by Bethlehem and the United Steelworkers had generated hope that it would lead to an industry-wide settlement. The result was similar to that reached by Ford with the UAW. For 26 years, Bethlehem had in place a welfare and pension fund. The settlement provided for greater employer contributions, to be shared equally by contributions of the workers, to provide a minimum of $100 per month for workers over 65 with 25 years of experience, including their Social Security benefits. Some benefits would be higher, up to $250 per month, while others, with less experience at 65, lower, to $65 per month. It was also agreed that the union could not strike for higher wages until the end of 1950 and could not seek higher pension benefits before the end of 1954.

No one had yet figured to what extent the increase in pension would impact the price of steel, on which 45 percent of industry depended. The welfare and pensions fund fight comprised the third great phase in labor-management relations, the first having been the right to organize and the second for higher wages. The piece regards its implications as being so far-reaching as not to be capable yet of assessment.

"Lure of the Smokies" reports that, according to the National Park Service, the Great Smoky Mountains Park drew more visitors in 1948-49 than any other park in the system, with 1.5 million entering, compared to 1.138 million who had gone to Rocky Mountain Park in Colorado and 1.133 million to Yosemite in California (or perhaps meaning Yellowstone, as it states the locale as Wyoming-Montana-Idaho). It concedes that part of the attraction was the accessibility of the Smokies to the Northeastern population corridor.

Fort Raleigh in Manteo had also drawn 128,688 visitors, a substantial increase from the 101,000 of the previous year.

Still needed, it suggests, were better roads from the North Carolina side of the Smokies and better tourist facilities to make the journey even easier.

We could have sworn, incidentally, that we were just in Yosemite for the last four days. But who knows? Maybe it was Yellowstone or somewhere in the wilds of Mexico or down in Argentina.

"Edward R. Stettinius, Jr." finds the former head of U.S. Steel, G.M., Secretary of State, and first U.S. top delegate to the U.N., who had died at age 49 two days earlier, to have been an informal, friendly person born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, but who worked harder at his job as Secretary than those under his direction. It finds that the nation had lost an able public servant who had presided over creation of the U.N. in his short, but eventful seven-month tenure as Secretary between late 1944 and mid-1945.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Yeas and Nays of It", submits as backdrop to the 1950 Senate campaigns the voting records of Senators Clyde Hoey and Frank Graham of North Carolina. It finds them remarkably alike, providing their votes on major issues, the same in 16 instances and divergent on only seven, primarily concerning labor legislation, the minimum wage and power development. Both Senators were standing for election in 1950, Senator Graham in a special election.

Dick Young of The News tells of the City traffic engineer having transformed in a year the downtown traffic problem by eliminating intersection bottlenecks and establishing traffic islands to provide channelization, a process dating back to Roman times.

Drew Pearson, as a means of explaining the current rebellion of the Navy against military unification, tells of the admirals having lived a charmed life since the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt, continued under FDR. They also had the secret support of Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, and other large corporations whose businesses flourished by building battleships. The only two Presidents who bucked the Navy, Coolidge and Hoover, faced a revolt by the admirals, aided and abetted by the big shipbuilding companies. The admirals had become accustomed to running things during FDR's Administration.

In early 1940, FDR appointed as Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, the son of Thomas Edison, who conflicted with the admirals when he visited Pearl Harbor and criticized their method of handling things prior to the 1941 attack. He wanted fuel tanks buried underground to avoid having them become targets. He wanted decks on battleships cleared of superstructures so that the guns could fire unimpeded into the air, not just broadside, as he warned that the next war would be an air war. He found 28 new destroyers so top heavy that weight had to be added to the keels to keep them from toppling over, despite the shipyards having warned the admirals of this problem as the ships were being constructed. The deck plates on three destroyers buckled in moderately rolling seas. Millions of defective rivets, insisted on by the Navy instead of welds, had to be replaced.

The Navy brass was seething under this criticism and went to FDR with their complaints. FDR then suggested to Mr. Edison that he run for Governor of New Jersey, which he did, eventually winning. At that point, in mid-1940, the President named the 1936 Republican vice-presidential nominee Frank Knox to be the new Secretary of the Navy.

Secretary Knox got along with the admirals, as he did not know too much about the Navy but liked its polish and precision. He came to realize that FDR and the admirals ran the ship. Admiral Ernest King, then chief of operations, regularly went over Secretary Knox to the President if he did not like a Knox decision. He was even barred from a Navy Department room in which all naval strategy was formulated. By the time he died in spring, 1944, to be succeeded by James Forrestal, he knew that he was no more Secretary in any real sense than had been FDR's first appointee, the genial Senator Claude Swanson, who had let the admirals have their way.

Marquis Childs, in Bonn, West Germany, tells of the newly created West German Government in the city, headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The events in Germany during the previous 16 years continued to plague the new Government.

As example, the Allied commissioners had reported that a new mass grave had been discovered at Dachau, larger than any other mass burial ground, one estimate finding that it held 300,000 corpses, in a hole 18 feet deep and 360 by 60 feet in area. A road had been built across the grave, done, according to sources, at the instance of local German officials wishing to hide the crime against humanity. When workers were attempting to obtain sand from a nearby pit, the grave, which had already begun to settle, was discovered. Even then, the local burgomeister tried to suggest that the corpses were from the Napoleonic war.

The Allied commissioners had been so shocked by the discovery that they initially kept the news from the world for fear of inflaming public opinion anew against Germany at a critical moment in postwar reconstruction.

American policymakers viewed the Adenauer Government as imperfect but the best obtainable in view of the failures and conflicts among the Allies and even among Americans in the postwar years. Hope lay in integrating this Government with the countries of Western Europe, with the urgency for such integration resting on the Americans. For a worse government, motivated by hates of the past, might follow a failed Adenauer Administration, himself, according to the commissioners, motivated by a sincere desire to bring West Germany into the community of Western nations.

The past could neither be ignored nor allowed to dominate the present, lest a repeat of the events of the Thirties transpire.

Robert C. Ruark tells of Life, as editorialized the previous week in The News, having just run a photojournalistic essay by Margaret Bourke-White portraying the South in a favorable light, an unusual event for a national organ. It was more popular, he believes, to characterize white Southerners as subhuman. "Oh, sing a song of sorghum, pockets full of pickaninnies. Yas Suh, Marse Cap'm Cuhnel Massa Boss, Suh."

He says that he had done his share of kidding the South, as only befit a native son who had gone off to live in the North. But he had never characterized it as wholly Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" or Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire". He had realized from a young age that lynchings were rare and that not all Southern whites were members of the Klan. Nor did they subsist on cowpeas and shortnin' bread and play the banjo in the moonlight. He says that his grandpa did, however, chew tobacco, drink corn whiskey and play the fiddle.

He suggests that Ms. Bourke-White's photo-essay of the progress in agriculture and industry in the South may have been a form of expiation for her former husband, Erskine Caldwell, having written the South up as a tribe of Jeeter Lesters.

As riots occurred in Detroit and he viewed the conditions of Harlem, he wonders whether emancipation was going on in the right area of the country. Some sections of the South had made vast strides in betterment of the living conditions for both races.

He wonders what such progress would do to the writing careers of Messrs. Caldwell, Williams, and William Faulkner. He fears therefore that Life may have done the country a disservice and that they had better retreat to the "mockin' birds and the magnolia school of thought, with sowbelly on the side and a hooded mask under every white pillow."

"Yes, suh, son, mah old daddy rode and fit with Wade Hampton and Ah'd shot a Yankee quickern' Ah'd stomp a snake."

A letter writer responds to Harry Golden's letter of October 25, leery of a Republican President in the future, by insisting that the record be examined, that two Democratic Presidents, Wilson and FDR, had "pushed" the country into two world wars, had given the country Prohibition, had allowed Communists and fellow travelers to fill every Federal office, enabled labor leaders to take over, provided big racketeers escape from taxes, and saddled the country with huge debt—most of which came from the late war.

He thinks that the Republicans, if finally elected in 1952, would get the blame for the depression to follow from all the years of profligate Democratic spending.

Undoubtedly, he believes a better world would have resulted had the Germans and Japanese won the war and taken over the United States or left it as a lonely, armed island fortress within Germania-Japania while they developed the atom bomb and rockets and jets by which to deliver it to target.

But that debt, by gummy...

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