The Charlotte News

Friday, December 16, 1949

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a top labor adviser to the President said that the chief executive had rejected the Southern coal operators' advice to invoke Taft-Hartley regarding the three-day work week imposed by John L. Lewis, that the President did not view the condition as a national emergency warranting the seeking of injunctive relief.

It was still possible that coal miners who were upset about working only a three-day week might strike on their own after Christmas, though it remained a speculative proposition.

Ernest Vaccaro reports that the President and General Eisenhower remained good friends, as the President's press secretary Charles G. Ross made it a point to convey to the press in Key West. He was responding to rumors that the President was concerned about the General possibly running for the presidency in 1952. Mr. Ross said that he knew of no one with whom the President had discussed the possibility of an Eisenhower candidacy and that the President had no objection to anyone running for the presidency.

U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie had decided not to seek re-election to his post at the conclusion of his five-year term at the beginning of 1951.

In Frankfurt, West Germany, Pastor Martin Niemoeller, leader of the German Protestant Church who had resisted the Nazis during the war and was imprisoned, was quoted by the Wiesbaden Courier as having found the new West German Republic to have been "conceived by the Vatican and born in Washington" and carped that the German people should have been asked whether they wanted a West German state. He wanted to prevent Germany from becoming a battleground in any new war and that in such a war, Germans would not be fighting against other Germans.

In Greenwich, Conn., the three-day conference of leading Protestant churchmen formed a permanent body aimed at unifying the Church in the United States.

In Rome, Ga., the jury in the Klan flogging case remained in deliberations after seven hours the previous day without a verdict, following the trial of the ten defendants, including the Sheriff and three deputies, on civil rights violations of seven black citizens for conspiring to falsely arrest and then flog the victims in derogation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

In Wake Forest, N.C., a battered man, who later died, was found on the front seat of his car, and a Wake Forest senior who had fled the scene and was still at large was charged with murder in the case. The victim, also a Wake Forest student, had been shot in the head with dum-dum bullets, fired from a gun found under the seat of the car with other such bullets.

In Raleigh, plans for a mass prison break so that inmates could spend Christmas with their families had been interdicted by prison officials. They had discovered three homemade shotguns, two of which were not assembled, parts for a homemade pistol plus ammunition, several hacksaws, and a key to one of the prison cellblocks. The prisoners apparently had planned to saw their way out of the cells and then kidnap guards and hold them as hostages until they were released to go home to decorate their trees. The plans were discovered through letters from some of the inmates to their families saying that they expected to be home for Christmas.

They were going to come back after New Year's Day. What's the problem?

Near Reno, Nev., one man suffered a broken leg and another a broken arm when six crew members parachuted from an Air Force C-82 cargo plane. Five of the men hiked to the highway and were picked up by a motorist. A rescue party was being sent back to rescue the man with the broken leg.

They need better airplanes in which to fly around.

In Charlotte, a construction company announced plans to build 300 units of low-cost housing for white tenants, to be known as Westwood Apartments, to rent at between $37.50 and $52.50 per month. Hardwood floors and inlaid linoleum in the kitchens would be special features of the units, and a complete bathroom would be provided as well. Landscaping and shrubbery would add to the beauty of the complex. And there would be asbestos siding and roofs—to give all the residents asbestosis through the years.

Well, where are the Eastwood Apartments?

In New York, "Dry Friday", during which all men had been urged not to shave for a day to conserve water, had not worked well, as most men had apparently shaved. The advice had also extended to not taking baths or showers, washing dishes or clothes at one time, and drinking one glass less of water during the day. If the experiment worked, City officials said, it would become a routine for the duration of the drought.

What about City issuance of clothes pins for the noses?

There are eight million stories in the Naked City and you don't want to smell any of them when they get gamy.

And as for the "Beard for Babies" advertising campaign, you don't want to give people any strange ideas. That city is strange enough as it is.

Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York was set to marry a younger woman in Florida the following Tuesday. He should shower and shave first.

Western Union was revising its rates for sending telegrams, to become effective February 1 absent FCC intervention to prevent it.

Incidentally, not reported on the front page, the Girl Scout in Kelso, Wash., as reported Tuesday, who was taken away by Sasquatch into the woods the previous Sunday to steal her cookies, was found this date, none the worse for wear from her four-day ordeal with Sasquatch. She did not wish to discuss the matter, obviously, for its traumatic impact on her psyche, and so made up a cover story, full, however, of revelatory code words and euphemisms, such as "cabin in the woods", "boards", and "corner".

Moral: Never go searching for Christmas trees in the woods alone or take a turn down a lonely road, away from the madding crowd with whom you came—or you, too, may meet up with Sasquatch.

On the editorial page, "An Inadequate Report" tells of an anonymous letter coming to The News which it deemed appropriate to publish, an objection by the residents of N. Brevard Street for being included among the areas of the Grand Jury report labeled as having high incidence of crime. The residents said that while neighboring areas did have a high amount of crime, their own street was not in that same basket and they resented being so included.

The piece agrees and finds that the Grand Jury had merely accepted hearsay reports of crime without using their investigative powers to look at the situation firsthand, urges that in the future it do so before damaging the reputations of innocent residents.

"The Wrong Strategy" finds that the Truman Administration's decision to pursue first the most difficult part of the civil rights program, the legislation to revive the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission, created originally by executive order of FDR pursuant to the War Powers Act and made applicable to firms operating under Government war contracts, and make it permanent, was a misguided approach to civil rights. It thinks that the anti-poll tax legislation, which had a realistic chance of passage, either as a law or proposed Constitutional amendment, and the anti-lynching legislation would better serve as initial inroads to the civil rights problem before tackling the problematic issue of the FEPC, which was the most resisted in the South of the three parts of the President's program.

Even the liberal Washington Post had suggested that timetable, to avoid the prospect of losing the entire fight by putting the worst foot forward first.

It concludes that the President, in so doing, was more interested in attracting votes than in genuinely advancing the cause of civil rights.

"Effective Anti-Klan Weapon" praises Mayor Herbert Shaw and the City Council for promptly passing a new ordinance banning the wearing of masks or hoods in public, designed to curb the activities of the new Klan Klavern which had formed recently in the community.

"The First Snow" tells of Charlotte's first snow of the winter in the morning, which had fallen briefly and then melted in the sun.

How did that happen?

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Unfair Amateurs", tells of James Caesar Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians objecting to college pep bands playing at sporting contests in Madison Square Garden as they were taking away jobs from professional union musicians. It thinks that the logic therefore ought be extended to college basketball and football players, depriving the professional athletes of work, to the cheerleaders depriving professional acrobats of a job, and so on.

The Notre Dame-UNC football game played recently at Yankee Stadium, it ventures, would have been more entertaining and perhaps less lopsided for the Irish had both teams, or at least North Carolina, fielded professional athletes.

Amateur school plays should be banned as they deprived out-of-work professional thespians of jobs.

It favors a Congressional investigation of the whole matter as the project of Mr. Petrillo might turn into a union drive for an anti-amateur law.

Drew Pearson tells again of one of the worst scandals in the nation being income tax fraud and the manner in which the small tax cheat was prosecuted or penalized while the major, well-heeled tax cheat received the help of the politically powerful in stopping prosecutions. He provides an example of a nefarious individual who had cheated the Government of $700,000 in taxes and yet had so far avoided, through official help, prosecution, despite a shady past spanning back several years.

Marquis Childs wonders whether the cost being suffered in humiliation by the country's diplomats was worth maintaining diplomatic relations with the Communist satellite nations of Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary. He focuses on Bulgaria where the diplomats were being denied license plate renewals and, along with the rest of the population, suffering deprivations of such essentials as water for all but one hour each day, from 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. One of the members of the American Ministry's staff had lived with his wife and small child in a partially heated single-room apartment with such water restrictions through the previous winter. Secret police harassed the neighbors of the family, preventing the neighbors' child from talking to the child of the Ministry staff member.

Normally, diplomats were provided perquisites, as were the diplomats of foreign countries, including the satellites, in the U.S.

He questions whether it was worth the trade in goods which could be acquired elsewhere and the information to be accumulated only grudgingly in the first instance, made worse by the inability to get around effectively without transportation or proper housing.

He favors serving notice on the satellite regimes that they would need to reciprocate in terms of providing favored status to the diplomats and their families or have their own diplomats in the U.S. sent home. It would be effective, without stooping to the level of the dictatorships by cutting essential services.

Robert C. Ruark, still in Los Angeles, adopts the persona of a movie producer, and relates of his travails and ulcers acquired in the business. It defies synopsis. The banks were unkind and the audiences fickle, the contracts niggling.

"Yeah, bring me some dessert. Stewed apricots with some more cottage cheese. In this racket, who needs apple pie?"

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