The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 22, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House passed a bill approving a 70-bomber group Air Force, but did not approve an anti-segregation amendment to it, which would have prohibited Government purchases from firms practicing employment discrimination.
It was reported that the Russian military administration in East Berlin would not impose a ban on West Berliners spending eastern marks in either sector of the city or in East Germany. The West had recently imposed a ban on the eastern marks and it was believed that the Russians might retaliate. The Russian announcement was considered therefore an important concession.
In Frankfurt, General Lucius Clay confirmed the death sentence of S.S. Sergeant Hubert Huber, one of the defendants convicted in the killings of U.S. prisoners of war at Malmedy on December 17, 1944. One other death sentence had been confirmed and another commuted by General Clay during the prior weekend.
The State Department stood by its order denying visas to twelve foreign delegates, including four Britons, to enter the country to attend a conference which the Department believed was dedicated to furtherance of Communist propaganda and criticism of the U.S. The Department, however, granted visas to seven Russians and 15 other Eastern European Communists to attend the conference.
On Thursday night, the President and First Lady would hold a small black-tie dinner for former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife at Blair House, across the street from the White House, under renovation.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors considered asking Congress to double outlays for highways to relieve the "traffic chaos" across the nation in the aftermath of the war and increased numbers of vehicles on the roads.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, speaking before the Conference, praised the NATO agreement as the "best bet to keep the present cold war from getting hot."
North Carolinians from Charlotte, Salisbury, Albemarle and Raleigh testified before the Senate Veterans Committee in protest of the V.A. cancellation of two planned V.A. hospitals, one for Salisbury and the other for Charlotte.
Chairman Carl Vinson of the House Armed Services Committee said that the armed forces did not intend to call up any more inductees under the current draft law passed in 1947, set to expire in June, 1950.
North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott said that he hoped to appoint a successor to deceased Senator J. Melville Broughton by the end of the week. Senator Broughton had died in Washington of a heart attack after only two months in office. Governor Scott said that he did not yet have any appointee in mind.
The Southern Railway Co. announced plans to absorb the Atlantic & Yadkin Railroad, which ran for 130 miles between Greensboro and Sanford, N.C.
In Palm Springs, Calif., Frank "The
Punch" Sinatra had argued with a guest at a party regarding the
mixing of his drink, resulting in the guest being treated for a gash
on his head. After the melee, the host got the two men together for a
peaceful meeting and shaking of hands. Said Mr. Sinatra: "It
was just one of those things
Well, look on the bright side. It is better to suffer a punch than wind up shot in the foot and other places by an old friend.
A year earlier, Mr. Sinatra had been arrested on a complaint of assault against Broadway columnist Le Mortimer outside a nightclub in Hollywood. The complaint was settled civilly.
A photograph appears, taken of the President in Bermuda in 1946 in a bathing suit, which Bess Truman had called a "disgrace to the family". The prior episode had led to the President ordering the seizure the previous week of photographs taken from a blimp by press photographers of the President lying on the beach at Key West, for fear that they would provoke the wrath of the First Lady once again.
In Madison Square Garden in New York this night, the University of Kentucky crushed the University of Illinois 76 to 47 in the finals of the East Regional, setting up a championship match between the 1948 N.C.A.A. champion Wildcats and 1945 and 1946 champion Oklahoma A & M the following Saturday night in Seattle. Kentucky head coach Adolph Rupp said that his players had rebounded from their disappointing game a week earlier, in which they lost to eventual N.I.T. runner-up Loyola of Chicago in the quarterfinals of the N.I.T. Kentucky had been a heavy favorite to win both tournaments. The University of San Francisco had won the N.I.T.
In that time, the N.I.T. was considered to have nearly the same prestige as the ten-year old N.C.A.A. Tournament, though the latter had gained and probably overtaken the N.I.T. in recent years. The final Associated Press poll of March 8, 1949, for instance, had Kentucky number 1 and Oklahoma A & M number two, with San Francisco at number 8. Illinois had been ranked number 4. Loyola was at 16. The N.I.T. had the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, and 16 teams, an average ranking a little above 8, plus four unranked New York area teams in play-in games, while the N.C.A.A. Tournament had the numbers 1, 2, 4, 11, 14, 17, 21, and 24 teams, the latter two, strictly speaking, unranked, an average ranking a little above 12. UCLA, it should be noted, in its first year under head coach John Wooden, in neither tournament, was ranked number 15.
On the editorial page, "Rent Control Extension" finds that as long as the experience of Greensboro was the case across the nation, wherein over 100 percent increases in rents were recorded in just the last two months of 1948 and the first month of 1949, there was a need for rent control, the protestations of landlord lobbies to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senate and House bills differed on the terms of extension and amount of increase allowed, and those differences had to be ironed out to afford new legislation before the current rent control law expired at the end of the month. Otherwise, unscrupulous landlords would exploit the housing shortage and gouge helpless tenants.
"Off to a Good Start" tells of 55 Senators already having expressed approval of the NATO agreement, suggesting that the agreement would be ratified by the necessary 64 of 96 votes. The Senators wanted to make sure that the agreement did not obligate in advance the country to proceed to war in the event of an attack on one of the member nations.
The editorial suggests that the agreement would not necessarily assure peace, as the price of peace was eternal vigilance. Neither the atom bomb nor NATO, it advises, should lull the country into a sense of security and inviolability.
"Better Air Service" tells of two local air committees having successfully attracted to Charlotte two additional air routes to supplement the original north-south only route of a few years earlier. The committee was seeking now to improve service further in both commercial passenger and air mail service.
"Between-Seasons Remembering" suggests that each year, as a new season began, one tried in vain to remember the previous year's same season.
To take up space and the time of day, perhaps to combat a dose of spring fever, the piece rhetorically welcomes the coming of spring.
Drew Pearson tells of a relatively obscure amendment to the Marshall Plan appropriation bill in the Senate, one which would cut aid from a nation which, as an aggressor, blocked peace efforts of the U.N. Security Council.
He reviews the effort of Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and Charles Evans Hughes to effect peace between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1928. Though the effort failed because Dillon, Read on Wall Street loaned Bolivia 20 million dollars with which to buy arms, the effort had set a good precedent.
In 1931, Secretary of State Henry Stimson sought to use the League of Nations, the Nine-Power Pact, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war to effect peace between the aggressor Japan and China in Mukden in Manchuria. He wound up undercut by the economic interests of Britain, France, and the U.S. Right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, American oil companies and scrap-iron dealers had shipped vast quantities of their product to Japan, used for war-making.
In 1935, the weakened League of Nations sought to apply economic sanctions against Italy for Mussolini's thrust into defenseless Ethiopia. It cut off all trade with Italy, except the vital export of oil. The dictatorships learned from the episode how easy it was to manipulate the Western democracies. Hitler, for instance, later learned that Standard Oil of New Jersey had agreed secretly with I. G. Farben to withhold the patents from the world market on synthetic rubber, with America then suffering from a shortage of rubber after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the nearly simultaneous attacks on the rubber-rich Philippines, East Indies, and Malaysia.
Presently, in 1949, the oil lobbyists, led by Standard Vacuum, were seeking to exploit the oil in the Dutch East Indies, by seeking to have the State Department refrain from imposing sanctions of loss of Marshall Plan aid against Holland for its December aggressive action against the Indonesian Republic.
Although the isolationist Republicans were long gone from the State Department, the Democrats who had replaced them still allowed the oil companies to hold as much sway on shortsighted principles of economic exploitation, potentially causing history, he warns, to repeat.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss former Senator and Governor of Washington Mon Wallgren, whose nomination to be chairman of the National Defense Resources Board had been tabled recently by the Senate Military Affairs Committee on the premise that he was not suitably qualified for the position. The rejection had hurt him. He had been defeated in November for re-election as Governor and the position had been offered by his old friend, the President, as a balm to hurt natures, though in fact he did not relish being Governor for another term.
He was a good man, well-intentioned, but without any particular competence which suited him to such an important role as identifying natural resources for industrial preparedness and mobilization in the event of war.
Mr. Wallgren had argued that his prior experience on the Senate War Investigating Committee with Senator Truman had prepared him well for the position. The Senators on the Military Affairs Committee, however, thought differently.
The Alsops conclude that there were thousands of men like him, good stewards of government. But the complicated times required more than just "good guys".
DeWitt MacKenzie tells of ERP administrator Paul Hoffman having recently said that Russia was unlikely to start a war as long as the "free peoples of the world" stood together. But, suggests Mr. MacKenzie, he needed to define what he meant by "free peoples".
American educational leaders were now planning to recommend that schools discuss openly and objectively the Soviet system on the premise that an open, frank discussion would reveal its flaws and make it less attractive to a younger generation.
Bolshevism had emerged out of the harsh realities of the czarist system in Russia, in which the peasants were slaves to the elitists in the society. But after the Revolution of 1917, the new elite Bolshevists became the minority rulers once again of the society, with a class of proletarian peasants in much the same subjugated condition as under the czars.
The educational experts of the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association, of which Columbia president Dwight Eisenhower was a member, thus believed that exposing these facts in the schools would produce salutary ends.
A letter writer responds to the March 12 labor law questionnaire printed in The News, which had asked whether Taft-Hartley should be repealed and, if so, what type of law should replace it. He favors a new law under which prosecutions for unfair labor practices would apply equally to labor and management.
A letter writer, responding to an article in Time on January 3, in which it was stated that the President still liked bourbon, poker, and laughing at military aide General Harry Vaughan's off-color jokes, asserts that men as the President who used "profane and vulgar" language were not of the same "high standards in moral and spiritual matters as reverent men of modest and clean speech."
He finds the New Deal administration different from that of President Woodrow Wilson, "the Bible-believing Presbyterian elder who confessed Christ as Saviour".
He believes that "Bible Christianity" had to oppose "New Deal socialism and the moral standards of New Deal socialism." He blames preachers without courage and conviction, engaging in neutrality, for the condition.
We take it that his version of "Bible Christianity" is that of the Old Testament "eye for an eye" ideal and not the New Testament Golden Rule, characteristic of the "New Deal socialism".
A letter from a candidate for City Council urges that something should be done about the abject living conditions of many people in the community.
Another
Pome from the Atlanta
Journal appears, this one "in which a feminine attribute is
discussed somewhat frankly:
"Girls who walk with shortened
step
Seem to have a lot more pep."
Yet another Pome appears from the Journal, "in which a word of cheer is offered gals of certain physical and personality attributes:
It is perhaps the better part of
valor that the pomet was not of a mind to rhyme baseball terms
Framed Edition
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