The Charlotte News

Monday, January 16, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Soviets walked out of the U.N. economic and social council's committee on procedure for the presence of Chinese Nationalists on the committee, and vowed to spread the protest to other committees of the U.N. Czechoslovakia joined the Soviets in the protest. The previous Friday, the Soviets had walked out of the Security Council for the same reason. The Soviet-bloc countries had boycotted for two years the "little assembly", which met year-round, having claimed that it violated the Charter by transgressing the jurisdiction of the Security Council. But now they boycotted for the presence of the Nationalists and their charge about to be brought before the body that the Russians had aided the Chinese Communists. Yugoslavia also continued the boycott of the "little assembly", despite breaking with the Cominform.

The President reportedly urged, in a meeting with Democratic leaders, opposition to the change of rules to make it easier to pigeonhole bills in the House Rules Committee, which had approved the change the previous week to eliminate the rule passed the previous year to allow debate and a floor vote on bills before the Committee for 21 days, provided a committee chairman called the bill up for action. The rules change, now before the full House for a vote, was aimed at preventing Fair Deal legislation, especially the pending Fair Employment Practices Committee bill, from reaching the floor. Many Democrats worried that without White House help in defeating the effort, a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans would effectively take control of the House. Speaker Sam Rayburn reportedly had told the President during the meeting that the vote in the House on the rules change would likely be close.

The President urged Congress to pass a new law to assure against a rubber shortage in the event of war by giving the President authority to shift some of the Government's 700 million dollar synthetic rubber industry to private ownership and have it exist on a stand-by status.

Senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, urged a three billion dollar cut from the President's proposed 1950-51 fiscal year budget of 42.43 billion dollars. He asserted his belief that the budget, with a projected 5.1 billion dollar deficit, could be balanced without harming essential Government services or welshing on commitments abroad.

The Supreme Court, in a 4 to 3 decision, Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537, upheld the right of the Government to exclude, without hearing, war brides and other aliens deemed unfit by the Attorney General to enter the country. The opinion, delivered by Justice Sherman Minton, held that the National Emergency Act of June 21, 1941 did not impermissibly delegate legislative power to the Attorney General to determine whether aliens could enter the country. Since the national emergency continued, the power under the Act also continued. The separate dissents of Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson, the latter joined by Justices Frankfurter and Hugo Black, did not question the right of Congress to delegate this power to the executive branch but found that there was no intent of Congress to do so without affording a hearing. The Attorney General had determined that the bride in question created a substantial security risk and that the information on which he based his decision was, itself, too compromising of security to be exposed in a hearing. Justice Frankfurter had added in his dissent that the War Brides Act of 1945 had allowed admission of war brides, even if deemed mentally or physically defective, and so expressed a will to create an exception to the general rule regarding exclusion of aliens. Justices William O. Douglas and Tom Clark, Attorney General at the time of the order of exclusion, took no part in the decision.

The Court also refused review of the denial of a motion for new trial by Judith Coplon in her first conviction in Washington the previous June for taking classified documents from her Justice Department job. She had sought review of the claim that the Government had illegally tapped her telephone to acquire evidence which led to her conviction. She was now facing trial for espionage in New York, alleging that she had intended to deliver the same documents to her co-defendant, an alleged Russian spy, who worked for the U.N. Secretariat.

In New York, the defense rested in the retrial of Alger Hiss for perjury. The trial had begun November 17 and had proceeded for 36 court days before a jury of eight women and four men. A psychiatrist, one of the last defense witnesses, had changed his mind on cross-examination and said that the statement by Mr. Hiss's chief accuser, Whittaker Chambers, that he was a better Communist than Josef Stalin, did not prove anything about the mental state of Mr. Chambers. The previous week he had said during his direct examination that the remark showed that Mr. Chambers had "grandiose ideas" about himself. The case was expected to go to the jury during the current week.

At least 52 deaths were attributed to the winter storm which had swept over the Northern plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest, veering into Canada, where a blizzard struck during the weekend. Ten of the deaths were in Canada. Temperatures were far below normal from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Coast. The low temperature at Riverside, California, was 26 early this date. Other California towns also had freezing temperatures, while Los Angeles recorded 42 degrees.

At least 64,600 soft coal miners in six states defied the suggestion of John L. Lewis to return to work this date and remained off the job. The miners, who worked principally for captive steel company mines and one coal company, were led by 45,000 miners in Western Pennsylvania. The miners appeared to be acting to prompt a showdown over the shortened three-day work week ordered by Mr. Lewis, rather than on the basis of any complaint about wages or conditions of work.

In Robinson, Ill., a janitor who worked at the post office shot and beat two post office inspectors, and then collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack. Both postal inspectors were seriously injured and one was in critical condition. The inspectors had been watching the janitor after recent losses were discovered in the mail, had confronted him about the matter the previous night, whereupon, after denying the thefts, he grabbed a .45 caliber pistol and shot one inspector in the chest and began beating the other with the pistol when the latter reached for the janitor's legs to tackle him. The janitor then grabbed another .45 pistol and shot the first inspector again in the chest. Shortly thereafter, the janitor collapsed and later died.

The postman always rings twice.

Emery Wister of The News tells of a rainbow forming over the city in the morning, ending over the Post Office Building. There, the first refund checks for holders of Veterans' National Life Insurance policies were in the morning mail. It was estimated that county veterans would receive about three million dollars in refunds, with average payments being $125, in a range from 90 cents to $528.

Mack Bell of The News tells of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Charlotte to discuss the possibility of locating a new seminary in the city—as further discussed in an editorial.

In Milan, Italy, attorneys for movie director Roberto Rosellini were finishing a property settlement with his former wife following her Austrian annulment of the marriage. Mr. Rossellini was preparing to marry actress Ingrid Bergman after her divorce was finalized.

In Hollywood, actor Jack Carson and Warner Brothers Studio had mutually dissolved their agreement after Mr. Carson finished a picture for the studio on Friday. No reason was given for the parting of ways. He was moving on to beefier roles at Columbia.

Also in Hollywood, the local chess groups named Virginia Mayo as the most beautiful girl of 1946. They had decided to give the award in 1946 but were only now getting around to announcing it. The reason for the delay was that they played chess.

There may have been other reasons, too sinister to report.

On the editorial page, "A Backward Step" tells of the effort to backtrack by the House Rules Committee and undo the rule passed the previous year to prevent pigeon-holing of bills in the Committee. The new rule allowed for a floor vote after a bill had been stuck in the Committee for 21 days, provided a committee chairman called for action on the floor. The Committee had voted the previous week to rescind the rule, relegating, if passed by the full House, the procedure to get a bill out of the Committee to a discharge petition, requiring a majority vote of the House. The 9 to 2 vote of the Committee was formed through a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans. Its immediate objective was to block Fair Deal legislation, especially the FEPC bill.

The piece regards the move as anti-democratic, no matter how meritorious the specific objective, and favors instead open and free debate on legislation, "not to be delimited or subverted by a handful of committee members wielding authority greater than that of the House itself."

It suggests that the Senate filibuster served as an adequate brake on legislation of questionable merit.

The same might be said of the authoritarians in the Republican Party in 2016 who blocked the nomination of Federal Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, the first time in our nation's history that the Senate has ever refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nomination, an abomination to democracy as we have known it since 1789.

We hope, therefore, that when the Idiot makes his nomination, the Democrats will filibuster it to death, unless it is Judge Garland or some other appropriately qualified nominee. And, that they will continue to do so until an appropriately qualified nominee is presented, even if it takes four years.

The Jerk and the Fascists of the Senate shall not have their way against the plainly expressed will of the people.

"Baptist Seminary Bid" tells of Charlotte's invitation to the Southern Baptist Convention to establish a seminary in the city to be presented the following day. It had the solid backing of the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the ministers of the city.

The Convention had determined to establish a seminary in the Western and the Eastern U.S., had chosen Berkeley, California, as the locale for the Golden Gate Seminary and was still looking for the site for the Eastern seminary. It would have an initial enrollment of 1,000 and would be the equal of the famed seminary at Louisville.

The piece hopes that the Convention would select Charlotte as the site.

"Redevelopment Gains Momentum" tells of the move toward urban redevelopment picking up steam in the state after the proposal to accept Federal funding available for slum clearance and redevelopment had been rejected by the 1949 Legislature, defeated by opposition from the real estate interests. Now, the League of Municipalities appeared to be trying to work with the Real Estate Board to effect an agreement to submit provisions to the 1951 Legislature which would permit redevelopment to go froward.

Urban redevelopment, it posits, offered the best hope North Carolina cities had for clearing slums and converting the land to other functions, while having new housing for those displaced.

"In Defense of Loitering" finds the City's efforts to clean up loiterers on the city streets to be misplaced. While there were bums around, it was also the case that many chose to observe human behavior by standing with a toothpick in the mouth and hands "comfortably resident in the pockets", in the process, learning a lot. The "purposeful loiterer" had a "front row seat for the greatest show on earth: people".

The move, it suggests, got at the roots of a basic freedom and should not be passed over lightly.

"Viva loitering!"

But some of those loiterers are here from elsewhere, from a neighboring planet or galaxy. We know. We have seen their fingers.

A piece from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, titled "90 vs. 50 vs. 23 Per Cent", tells of a plebiscite of farmers across twenty states resulting in 90 percent support for a plan to accept a 23 percent reduction in cotton acreage while receiving 90 percent parity on the remaining yield. The option was to have guaranteed prices drop to 50 percent of parity. Thus, the 90 percent vote was not surprising. The piece suggests that the farm agents had probably made sure the vote was heavy.

It concludes that it was emblematic of the democratic processes in a "gimme government" and showed why the use of the results in Congress to support the legislation would be meaningless in the abstract.

Drew Pearson again looks at the investigation to be conducted into the interstate gambling rackets by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Initial focus would be on Fresno, California, and the campaign of the new Mayor, Gordon Dunn, to clean up the gambling rackets in that city, an unlikely spot for a gambling operation. Yet, it would demonstrate the influence within Government which some of the gambling kingpins appeared to exert to get tax fraud cases dropped. Recently, in San Mateo, California, local Treasury agents had investigated gambler Emelio "Gombo" Georgetti regarding $400,000 worth of hidden income but were frustrated when the case reached Washington. The same thing had happened in the investigation of Al Gionotti, a slot machine king of San Mateo, who had concealed $50,000 to $100,000 in income.

In Fresno, two Chicago gunmen, Broncotto and Pedrotti, were caught robbing "The Big Headed Kid", a tavern, and the local gambling czar, Joe Cannon, could not raise their bail, leaving them stuck in the Fresno jail, until Los Angeles gambling kingpin, Mickey Cohen, posted the money. The Fresno District Attorney, Jim Theusen, was offered $20,000 to drop the charges but refused, reporting the offer to the judge. Despite pressure from two State senators to back away, he sent the pair to jail.

Mayor Dunn had campaigned the previous spring on cleaning up Fresno and appeared to be following through with his promise. One gambler had offered the Mayor $35,000 to open the city to one bookmaking establishment and the Mayor kicked him out of his office. Some of the men who helped to elect the Mayor had sought to have the city opened up, one of whom had helped elect the California Attorney General, Fred Howser. Joe Cannon had proposed that the Fresno police chief be removed, always a first step in establishing illicit operations. But Mayor Dunn had resisted these efforts as well.

Even Mayor Dunn's campaign manager had set up a branch narcotics office to knock off all narcotics racketeers who were not paying off, via a chinchilla ranch, while protecting their own racketeers.

Merchants claimed that the "closed city" policy hurt business. But the local AFL head backed the Mayor's efforts to keep gambling out of Fresno.

Some of the Mayor's political enemies were beginning a petition for recall, but he remained undaunted in his quest for clean government.

The case served to show how the gambling empire across the country operated.

Marquis Childs tells of Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas intending to start a new series of hearings on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and its lending practices being influenced by politics. The President wanted the RFC to become a key part of the Administration's efforts to help small and middle-sized businesses. The investigation would focus on 44.5 million dollars in lending to Lustron, the builder of prefabricated homes which had not lived up to its forecast of production of a hundred homes per day after the large RFC loans, and 44 million dollars to Kaiser-Frazer automobile to aid in the production of its lower-priced family car. Lustron was losing a million dollars per day and building only 15 houses per day.

The problem was whether the Government was favoring certain companies by making such loans, and thereby harming small and middle-sized businesses. The hearings might provide some clarity to the process of making these loans, necessary to stimulate competition in big business but also subject to caution for potentially causing antitrust problems.

Robert C. Ruark, in Sydney, tells of Australia being less lively since the departure of the American G.I.'s during the war. The people of Sydney were constantly interested in hearing from Americans whether the country had changed since the war and whether the Americans still remembered the country favorably. The band at Prince's, where he ate dinner with a United Press reporter, played "Baby, It's Cold Outside", whereas five years earlier, they were playing "Working for the Yankee Dollar". Beer and whiskey, as always, he says, were in short supply. American cigarettes cost $6 per carton on the black market.

A letter writer comments on the ten-point program for development of Charlotte over the ensuing decade, as set forth on the front page of January 2 and discussed in individual daily editorials between January 4 and the previous Saturday. He wishes to stress the need for cleaning up the creeks of the city, especially Sugaw Creek, beset by foul odors from industrial discharge and broken sewage lines, as well as the need for improved traffic flow. He asserts that cleaning up of the slums, another part of the ten-part program, would alleviate both of the other problems to a degree. He wants Sugaw Creek "buried, like the dead cats along its banks" and placed in a position where the motorists could ride over it without knowing it was there.

A letter writer favors election of an able Republican nominee in Mecklenburg County for the Congressional seat occupied by Democrat Hamilton Jones, rather than the usual run-of-the-mine GOP candidate. He suggests that however able Mr. Jones was, he remained committed to the Fair Deal programs, and to serve the district's true tendencies required a Republican.

A letter writer wonders why the Highway Commission wanted to build 86 miles of new roads in the county when the previous spring, many prominent citizens of the county expressed their opposition to the "fool-hardy scheme".

A letter from the chairman of the county Christmas Seals campaign and the executive secretary of the Mecklenburg County Tuberculosis & Health Association thank the newspaper for its support during the 1949 Seal sale.

No matter how worthy the cause, seals should not be for sale at Christmas or at any other time of the year, as they do not make good pets and belong in a proper refuge where they can swim around freely. We firmly oppose, therefore, Christmas Seals, just as the Easter Chicks.

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