The Charlotte News
Tuesday, February 15, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that reaction to Senator Tom Connally and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of the Foreign Relations Committee having enunciated the position that the Senate would not go along with a war pledge as part of the North Atlantic Treaty had produced immediate reaction in Europe. Soviet newspapers jumped on the notion by saying America had abandoned obligations to the Western Allies when it came to war. The London Daily Mail, a Conservative publication, editorialized that just when hopes had been built for the Atlantic pact, the U.S. was reported to be "hedging on the terms". It was feared among British diplomats that the agreement would be so watered-down as to fail of its purpose of assuring united strength and security against a potential aggressor.
The AFL produced documentary evidence to the U.N. that eight to fourteen million slave laborers were working under intolerable conditions in Russia. Affidavits of three eyewitnesses were presented to the Economic & Social Council. Dr. Julius Margolin, one of the former inmates, described the situation as being reminiscent of a scene in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths, in which as many as a hundred prisoners lived in a single room. He said that the conditions were far worse than at Dachau in Nazi Germany during the war. The U.S. was challenging Russia to allow U.N. investigators to enter the country to examine the charges.
AFL president William Green shouted at the Senate Labor Committee that the workers were angry about Taft-Hartley and demanding its repeal. He generally endorsed the Administration substitute measure, which followed the former Wagner Act, adding provisions to ban the jurisdictional strike and secondary boycotts. Mr. Green was particularly incensed about the Taft-Hartley ban on the closed shop. He complained that it prevented the firing of employees adjudged by the union to be Communists and, in consequence, ousted from the union.
Landlords protested at Capitol Hill the proposed two-year rent control extension legislation for being confiscatory of their property. Some threatened mass evictions of tenants if the legislation were passed. The Reverend Wallace Murphy of Tulsa, Okla., originator of the mass eviction idea, led part of the rally—from deep down in his charitable, religious soul.
The House Veterans Affairs Committee approved a compromise bill to provide all veterans of World Wars I and II with a pension of $90 per month at the age of 65.
Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn visited the President and shortly thereafter declared that a tax increase was still probable, despite the House Ways & Means Committee having pushed it aside for the nonce in favor of taking up the Social Security bill to expand coverage. Mr. Rayburn said that the President had requested that order of consideration.
In Philadelphia, a taxi strike began on top of the ongoing five-day transportation strike, producing scattered fistfights. The strike added 3,800 drivers to the 11,000 transportation workers on strike in the city. You better walk.
In New York, radio actress Patricia
Ryan, 27, was discovered dead in her bed by her husband. She had
regularly played Kathleen in the "Aldrich Family"
Governor Kerr Scott cleared a judge in Fayetteville, N.C., of any intoxication while sitting on the bench. He had been reported as appearing strange during court, but it turned out that he was receiving prescribed medication for diabetes which produced dizziness.
In Gastonia, N.C., two men had died and three others were in critical condition from consumption of a bay rum-paint thinner cocktail during a party the previous night, lasting into the morning.
Three or four deaths of house painters had been reported out of Sylva on January 8 from consumption of the same type of mixture, paint thinner and moonshine.
The advertising must have run: "We are dying to paint your house."
In Jacksonville, Fla., hundreds of women complained of runs suddenly occurring in their nylon hose. The City Health Officer said that certain gases which had mixed with the air and smoke might have reacted with the nylon to produce the runs, but he was at a loss to explain the situation with accuracy and called the chemists from the University of Florida.
Meanwhile, in Reading, Pa., a chemist at a knitting mill said that the phenomenon had occurred there a year earlier and the problem had probably been the result of discharge of acidic gases from a chemical plant. A Wilmington, Del., spokesman for Du Pont, one of the largest nylon producers, said that he had never run across anything similar to the problem experienced in Jacksonville.
Regardless of cause, there was a run on hosiery in the shops of Jacksonville.
There may be more to this story than
meets the eye. We shall await it being run down
There is no further clue to the identity of "Miss X". "Miss X", on second thought, however, could not be Jane Wyatt. While she was born in New Jersey, the town of her birth was Mahwah. Since she later appeared as the mother in "Father Knows Best", The News would not have been so obvious in its first clue, even if that series, in its tv version, was still a couple of years down the road from being. Having the obvious gift of prophecy, the newspaper would have known these things by sooth.
So, upon further cogitation, we have
determined that "Miss X", obviously with hair dyed
brunette in the photograph, may be found here
Ralph Gibson of The News reports on parolees in Mecklenburg County who had been released, according to state law when merited, after service of a third of their sentence. He gives one example of a parolee who had made the system work well, had married and was earning $400 per month driving a truck on long hauls. Another was an illiterate man convicted of second degree murder who had served 15 years of a 25-year sentence, was released in 1945 and had worked regularly, attended church, and married since that time.
The Welfare Department, headed by
Wallace Kuralt, provided social counseling for the parolees. Mr.
Kuralt, the father of later News reporter and CBS
correspondent Charles Kuralt
For the same period, one of every five parolees across the state suffered revocation. Among the counties, Mecklenburg was one of the more successful.
Of the 53 parolees in the county on January 1, ten had served a quarter of their sentence, 26 had served less than half, and only four had served as much as four-fifths.
On the editorial page, "Tragedy in Guilford" regards the stoning and burning to death of a black man by three young black boys, ages 10 to 12, in Greensboro during the weekend. The editorial is concerned that many might read the story with a shrug and pass it off because of it involving a black victim and black perpetrators, a typical reaction in such cases. Such insouciance led to more such crimes of violence.
The three children lacked developed sensitivity and compassion for human life; the callousness communicated was that since people died every day in wars, one more death made no difference. The nature of the act betrayed, however, a lack of any thought by the children. They had simply acted, without conscience or sense of social restraint.
While society might be partially to blame, the bulk of the culpability, it suggests, belonged with the parents for not teaching simple, rudimentary lessons of conduct toward one's fellow human beings, that a rock in the face, or the torching of incendiary material, in this case straw and excelsior, in the immediate vicinity of another could lead to death or serious injury.
"We Can Wait a While" disfavors a resolution before the Legislature to require public employees and candidates for office to swear a loyalty oath and sign an affidavit of non-Communist affiliation. While it might be well-intentioned, it was inadvisable for its being meaningless to a Communist and its dubious constitutionality.
The Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Smith Act, which made it a crime to organize or aid in organizing any group which advocated or taught the overthrow of the Government by force and violence, or so to advocate. Until the matter was settled at the national level, North Carolina, it opines, without a Communist threat, ought refrain.
"Gift With a String" disfavors accepting Federal aid to education for the inevitable strings with which it would come, recommends giving the students a good education by using State resources without resort to Federal aid. It praises the Mecklenburg delegation to the Legislature, in contrast to the two U.S. Senators, J. Melville Broughton and Clyde Hoey, for favoring a resolution to accept the Federal aid as long as it came without controls. The piece warns that no aid, no matter the stipulation, could be insulated completely from Federal control.
Yeah, we don't want that. They might force us to go to school with them people over yonder or read them books that we don't want to read. That'd be terr'ble.
"State Oleo Restrictions" tells of Tennessee, joining about 29 other states, having eliminated its 10-cent discriminatory tax on margarine and recommends that North Carolina follow suit. North Carolina still forbade the serving of colored margarine in public eating places. Wholesalers had to pay a $75 per annum license fee, regardless of whether they sold colored or white margarine.
A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "Tragedy Brought Home", tells of a mentally incompetent black prisoner in the South Carolina State Penitentiary having killed himself by pounding his head against the wall of his cell. He died of what was described as a heart condition.
Locally, prisoners in Cleveland County who were insane were having to be confined increasingly in the jail because of lack of space for mental patients in the State institutions. The jailers did the best they could but the facility was not equipped to handle mental patients and the personnel could not maintain 24-hour vigils.
It recommends that if nothing else, a padded cell ought be available at the county jail to avoid such a tragedy as occurred in South Carolina.
Drew Pearson discusses the State Department having condemned before the U.N. the Dutch action of December in Indonesia. But when the Democrats had initiated a resolution to condemn the action and to cut off ERP aid to Holland, then Acting Secretary of State Robert Lovett had asked Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas to back off, which, against his better judgment, he then did.
When Secretary of State Acheson took over, the Senators wanted to hear his views on cutting off the aid and held up the resolution as a courtesy to him. But then Mr. Acheson failed to appear, to their anger, sending State Department counselor Chip Bohlen in his stead. Meanwhile, the Republicans took up the resolution regarding the termination of aid and intended to launch an attack on the Administration for being two-faced on the Dutch-Indonesian policy.
He next imparts what the various states were doing with the gifts they were receiving from the Merci Train from France.
The President had placed his domestic program in the hands of Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan and had told the Cabinet to take orders from him, converting Mr. Brannan essentially into an "assistant president".
The people of Puerto Rico had accepted the results of their first gubernatorial election the previous November. Senator Joe O'Mahoney of Wyoming commented that it stood in contrast to the U.S. which had rejected its poll results.
Retired VFW national commander Lyall Beggs of Wisconsin had been a prosecutor and after he left the office, defended a man accused of drunkenness, whom he had previously prosecuted for drunk driving. The prosecuting witness, a WCTU lady, said that she adjudged the defendant drunk by his glassy stare, though she had smelled no alcohol. Mr. Beggs then inquired of his client as to his eyesight, which the client then proceeded to explain was fine in his good eye but not very good in his glass eye. He won the case.
AFL chief lobbyist Lewis Hines was publicly opposed to Taft-Hartley, but behind the scenes appeared very friendly with Senator Taft and Congressman Ed Martin of Pennsylvania, prompting complaint from Democratic Senators.
DeWitt MacKenzie expresses hope that the Russian language was not being neglected in America but doubts that very many Americans had an abiding desire to learn it. A hot war growing out of the cold war would require Americans to know more of the Soviet Union. The tendency to play ostrich regarding the evils of Communism was disappearing. The country had tried to avoid discussing the facts to avoid Communism spreading among the people and to avoid friction with Russia. There was a growing feeling, however, that the way to combat an evil was to learn all there was to know about it, and so, increasingly, Communism was being discussed in the classrooms of universities and high schools.
While there was the risk on occasion that a Communist sympathizer might be teaching the subject and thus push it in a propagandistic manner, it had been Mr. MacKenzie's experience that such sympathizers always found a way to propagandize the subject anyway, even if taboo.
The true facts had to be obtained
from the U.S. Government, as they would not come from behind the iron
curtain. He advises to learn to speak Russian if the reader wanted to
do so. "If a lot of us know the language we shall be prepared
to co-operate with Russia one day when Bolshevism is as dead as old
Marley." At that point, he imagines, they would call it "'one
world'"
Joseph Alsop, in London, discusses Britain's desire to form an Anglo-American alliance to replace the "Pax Britannica" of the nineteenth century. Evidence of this notion was found in the fact that Britain had voluntarily agreed that if a war came, the U.S. could name its own commander for the Western Alliance to replace Field Marshal Montgomery, who had been named to the post with French acquiescence. Another fact supporting the premise was that the British had invited the U.S. to form a trusteeship in Tripolitania and establish a base at Cyrenaica, strengthening the Anglo-American partnership in the Mediterranean. The U.S. had initially reacted coldly to the proposition, but it might yet come to pass.
Regardless, the British intention was clear. Another such cooperative venture was the recent Pandora operation, designed to test long-range strategic bomber effectiveness by the combined air forces of Britain and the U.S. British and U.S. planners were also actively going back and forth between the two capitals.
A formal commitment to the North Atlantic Pact would go far in assuring security to Europe. Mr. Alsop expresses the hope that the leaders of both nations, however, would explicate more thoroughly the rather amorphous process taking place.
A letter from several polio victims and family members of victims thank the community for helping to make the March of Dimes campaign a success and thank the March of Dimes for the treatment it had provided.
A letter writer comments adversely regarding an ad placed by trucking companies which had claimed that they paid more than half of the the cost and upkeep for the highways. They also claimed that they proceeded safely. He begs to differ with both points, and asserts that the trucks were causing the highways to break apart, that the companies therefore ought either build their own roads or pay for the entire cost of upkeep on existing roads.
A letter writer finds amusing a Tom Fesperman piece on potatoes, which had appeared February 10. He thinks a potato entirely of skin ought be cultivated if that was where most of the nutrients were. The 100 million bushel surplus of potatoes would have been consumed had the price been 75 cents rather than $3 or more per bushel. Given that five times as many potatoes could be raised per acre as wheat, the farmers, he says, had gotten wise when the Government placed the price support under potatoes at the same level as wheat, and so had raised as many potatoes as they could without regard to the market. That, in turn, made all farm produce scarce.
Whatever you called them, "taters", "tatoes" or "pertaters", and however one spoke of "kivering" them—presumably from the frost on Mars—, he advises remembrance of the lines:
Framed Edition
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