The Charlotte News
Tuesday, December 6, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Air Force Major George Racey Jordan told a news conference of taking secret radar equipment from four C-47 transport planes bound for Russia during the war, but that a fifth plane with such equipment, taking off from a different base, had reached Russia. He said that when he informed his superior at Wright Field in Ohio of the radar equipment which he found at the base at Great Falls, Mont., he was told to rip it out. The previous Friday during a radio broadcast, the former lend-lease expediting officer had alleged that the Russians obtained uranium products during the war, and then repeated the accusation the previous day before HUAC. He said that HUAC had instructed him not to reveal the identities of "Mr. X" and "Mr. Y" responsible for transfer of those materials. HUAC chairman John Wood told him that the Committee would investigate the matter and reveal the names when ready.
University of Chicago atomic scientists minimized the importance of the shipments of uranium products to Russia in 1943. Dr. Harold Urey, who had helped to develop the atomic bomb, said that the uranium derivatives in question comprised only stable compounds of very small amounts, with virtually no value for explosive purposes. Shutting off the shipments would have signaled that the compounds had acquired a new value which they had not several years earlier. Before the war, they were considered common chemicals, usable in laboratory experiments.
American Consular General at Mukden, Angus Ward, reported that he and his staff were arranging to leave Mukden at 3:45 a.m. Wednesday, pursuant to the order of the people's court in Communist China after they had been found guilty of criminally assaulting a Chinese employee of the consulate, a trumped-up charge according to the State Department.
In Key West, where the President was vacationing, Presidential advisers and aides arrived in growing numbers, producing a housing problem. Clark Clifford brought a draft of the State of the Union, which would call for repeal of Taft-Hartley, completion of the legislative passage of Social Security expansion, enactment of the Brannan agricultural plan, as well enactment of the national health program and the civil rights program of the President.
The CIO-affiliated Communications Workers charged before the NLRB that Bell Telephone was refusing to bargain over pensions. AT & T had recently changed their pension plan, doubling benefits to $100 per month, less Social Security, for retiring workers, put in place without consulting the union while it was bargaining with Bell for $100 per month in addition to Social Security benefits.
Dr. Andy Hall of Mount Vernon, Ill., was named "outstanding general practitioner" of the year by the AMA.
The AMA president attacked the Administration for "renewed assault on medicine and free enterprise" through the President's proposed national compulsory health insurance plan.
Connie Donny is going to have us a new plan for health care, the Billionaire Plan. When you get sick in 2017, you just call Connie Donny and ask him to send a doctor on over to your place. He'll take care of you. He's a multi-billionaire. He's not even a-gonna take a salary from the poor, struggling people. Neither are the other billionaires and millionaires comprising his Cabinet. They'll do you right. And if they don't, you can't complain 'cause you're only paying them a dollar apiece a year. Would you work for that?
In Atlanta, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, representing 29 million Protestant church members, announced its intention to intervene as a friend of the court on behalf of Herman Marion Sweatt in his landmark case of Sweatt v. Painter, seeking admission to the University of Texas Law School for there being no adequate black law school in the state meeting the standards of "separate but equal" required under Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. The Council intended to argue that segregation, itself, was a pernicious evil, promoted inequality, was un-Christian and illegal under the Constitution. Only the Southern Presbyterians dissented from the resolution. The Southern Baptists were not members of the Council. All other Southern Protestant organizations agreed with the decision. (Apparently, the amicus brief was never filed because of objection by Texas Attorney General Price Daniel on the ground that some Southern churches within the Council still practiced segregation.)
Another report of the Council urged reshaping of American foreign policy in the Far East to help the masses of people living in poverty, making them susceptible to Communism.
Another report urged raising Christmas above "mere tinsel and tin foil", promoting the spiritual side of the holiday over its commercial aspects.
The head of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, Robert Young, entered the coal dispute as an intermediary, first meeting with operators and then leaving to meet with UMW officials.
Federal Housing Expediter Tighe Woods said that, based on a survey of available rental housing in Charlotte, the time had not yet come for removal of rent controls in the city. The statement occurred a few hours before the City Council was to start hearings on the matter.
In Omaha, a four-year old girl dying of cystic fibrosis, was being transported by train to Chicago for a final visit with her cousins for Christmas. Her parents were supplying the present after efforts to improve her health in California had failed and her condition had worsened.
In York, S.C., defendant Nathan Corn, on trial for murdering his employer George Beam, decided not to take the stand in his own behalf. During his first trial, which had ended in a finding of guilt and death sentence, overturned by the State Supreme Court, he had testified, denying the killing. The prosecution was seeking to prove he had murdered Mr. Beam to hide embezzlement from the company and that he had taken an oil meter from the warehouse where the murder took place to use in weighting down the body. Evidence had been admitted that two meters were missing, though the defense submitted evidence which appeared to account for both. The defense presented three witnesses, each of whom placed Mr. Beam as alive after the time set by the prosecution for the murder and subsequent hiding of the body inside a crate in a creek bed.
On the editorial page, "Our New Blighted Areas" tells of a report from the City Health officer that four areas of Charlotte, Hoskins, an area off Statesville Avenue, Furr Town and Griertown, were living under "primitive" conditions of health and sanitation, without water and city sewage facilities.
The best way to resolve the problem in the long-term was the consolidation of City and County Health Departments. Disease did not respect boundaries and the County Health Department could, if aware of the problems of the City, enact more exacting standards suitable to urban needs in these four fringe areas currently under County control.
"More Home Rule Needed" tells of North Carolina, with 1,337 new laws on the books during 1949, ranked third in legislative activity behind California, with 2,232, and Florida, with 1,515. North Carolina's General Assembly had the highest percentage of passage of laws, enacting 74 percent of those proposed. (The Governor at the time had no veto power.)
It meant that the state had no home rule, that local bills were passed by the Assembly without consideration or recommendation, as found by a special commission reporting to the Governor the previous February. The commission recommended more home rule for cities and counties that they could enact their own solutions to their own problems. It recommended a change to the State Constitution to delineate the authority between State and local entities.
It urges the Governor to submit the report to the Legislature in its ensuing biennial session of 1951.
"Frost" elaborately tells of the thermometer hitting 30 and ice, the first frost of the season, beginning to form across the landscape during the night and melting away again by sunrise.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "St. Pete Shoots Santa", tells of the voters of St. Petersburg, Fla., having voted against a low-rent public housing project which carried with it five million dollars of Federal funding for 475 units. Only 18 percent of the eligible voters voted and the proposal failed by about 600 votes. The two newspapers in town had supported the measure, albeit one with reservations. But the real estate interests were opposed. A study had found 5,000 substandard units in 1944.
Whatever the cause for the defeat, whether the city's dependence on the tourist trade, as the Tampa Tribune had suggested, or some other reason, the voters had reversed the saying, "Nobody wants to shoot Santa Claus". The city's voters had just committed a "murderous assault on the old gentleman."
Ralph Gibson of The News tells of the City and County Governments currently paying $40,000 per year to support a court which specialized in not sending people to jail, the Domestic Relations and Juvenile Court, repaying the taxpayers in rehabilitated youth and mended marriages. The court prevented entrance of the press for reasons of privacy to the litigants, with juveniles protected under law.
In the Juvenile Court, a "counselor" held office pursuant to 1949 legislation, acting as the prosecutor, and the court pronounced a verdict only of "delinquent" or "not delinquent", with informal hearings held in the judge's chambers.
On the Domestic Relations side of the Court, the adults were usually given the option by the counselor of resolving their differences under particular terms.
The judge was usually lenient, operating on the Boys Town thesis, "There is no such thing as a bad boy". But he could be tough with tough, recidivist cases. Most of the defendants were from underprivileged homes and had received no Christian education. The parents themselves were usually delinquent and often alcoholic.
Recently, instead of following the advice of the father of a 13-year old and committing the errant boy, caught by his father in the act of breaking into cars, to reform school as the father demanded, he submitted the matter for investigation by the social agencies and found that both parents were alcoholic and separated. The judge thus sent the child to a foster home where he had readjusted to normal society.
But the case continued as it was also the goal to reunite the parents and resolve their home difficulties through Alcoholics Anonymous, then to put the boy back in the home when it was appropriate.
Drew Pearson tells of Latin America turning to Fascism, in Panama, where Arnulfo Arias had just been installed as a dictator, a man with previous ties to Hitler and Mussolini, and in Colombia, where a Fascist party, aided and abetted by Spain's Franco, had instituted such terror, with approximately a thousand people killed in rioting, as to make it impossible to hold elections.
The President, meanwhile, regarded Latin American relations as a success, having visited Mexico and Brazil and hosted a visit from the Brazilian President, soon to be making a trip to Chile. Mr. Pearson ventures that the President, however, thought too much in terms of brass bands and bunting as characterizing good relations. There were positive efforts by the State Department in Latin America under Edward Miller, Assistant Secretary for Latin America, and through the Export-Import Bank, which had made several loans to Latin American countries. But a successful policy was neither based entirely on providing loans. He concludes that gears of American foreign policy toward Latin America often did not mesh.
Jesse Jones, former head of RFC and Secretary of Commerce, long considered the financial czar of Texas, now had a rival in Texas oil tycoon Glenn McCarthy of Houston. He had built a 15-story hotel, the Shamrock, in Houston and was planning to build a new business center on its outskirts, which he hoped to finance with an RFC loan. To that end, he had flown RFC officials to Houston for his sponsored "Sam Rayburn Day", to honor the House Speaker from Texas.
Mr. Pearson notes that old-guard Democrats in Houston were pleased when only 1,500 people showed up for the celebration, in an auditorium holding ten times that capacity, while the Truman-labor Democrats who had taken over political control of the city had supported and organized the event.
The clerks of HUAC reported a commotion to the Capitol Police and an officer responded to hear of a man who babbled at them incoherently and beat it down the hall, appeared dangerous and needed to be locked up, according to the clerks. The officer pursued and caught up with the man who babbled incoherently awhile before finally scribbling a note, plaintively inquiring, "How in the hell do you get out of this place?" The man was a mute.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the President's tax policy, which he was going to determine while on vacation in Key West, based on analysis of reports prepared for him on the subject by Treasury and by his Council of Economic Advisers. For once, the Advisers appeared to agree with Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder that an increase in taxes on business would be deflationary, reducing gross national product and income, thus to be avoided at present.
So if the President was to adhere to his previous position, to raise taxes to resolve the six-billion dollar budget deficit, he would have to go against the advice of Treasury and the Advisers. Even if he were to accept the general advice, it was still likely that some tax increases would occur. Removal of some of the wartime excise taxes would likely be passed by the Congress in the coming session and the President would want to impose other taxes, most likely raising of corporate, gift and inheritance taxes, to compensate for the lost revenue.
While a change by the President of his intention to raise taxes on the wealthy would not, of itself, suggest self-indulgence, his failure to recognize the underlying basic economic policy requiring such changes did. The Administration was trying to avoid all of the unpleasant choices between taxation and spending cuts in such vital areas as defense.
The Alsops conclude that following the way of least discomfort was very pleasant for awhile, but only for awhile.
Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of
the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the fourteenth of his series on
childhood education, tells of the eighth grade classes at his school
studying North Carolina, making a trip to Raleigh each year
obligatory. The students in 1949 wanted also to tour the new Morehead
Planetarium
Such field trips had to be planned carefully to obtain the most from them, with advance study. For instance, visiting the Gothic Duke Chapel would not mean very much to students until they had studied the architecture of the cathedrals of Europe. Learning of the solar system would aid in appreciating better a trip to the Planetarium.
It was helpful, he suggests, also for a parent or two to accompany the teacher on such field trips, to act as an additional chaperone.
He tells of taking his students some years earlier to see a football game at Wake Forest College in the Raleigh suburb of Wake Forest, and as they neared the campus, a 15-year old student riding with him suddenly became silent. When Mr. McFadyen asked what was wrong, the student said that he was looking at the hills as he had never seen hills except in books. Despite living 50 miles away, he had never seen hills at age 15. So, he concludes, it was important to the learning process of students to get out in the world and see things firsthand.
Come on
Here is the latest blockhead, to be appointed by Connie to be the new EPA head, talking to his Tupperware party
Framed Edition
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