The Charlotte News
Monday, February 13, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Truman Administration, through the National Security Council, was undertaking a thorough reexamination of American foreign policy to determine where the country stood in the conflict with Russia. It was not expected, according to knowledgeable officials, to produce any new policy. It was anticipated that the review would let the Government know how much more powerful the U.S. would be than Russia with the hydrogen bomb, how long it could hold such an edge, and the bomb's effect on strategic planning.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said during the weekend that the effort to achieve atomic control should be revived and suggested that the President appoint a group of experts to study the matter. Senators Brien McMahon and Millard Tydings recently had made similar suggestions.
Jack Bell of the Associated Press reports that Senators Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Edward Martin of Pennsylvania were leading Senate Republicans in new attacks against what they said were Communists infiltrating the Government, demanding investigation of charges that the Truman Administration was "riddled with Communists", as charged by Senator Martin during the weekend, and that the State Department had, as charged by Senator McCarthy during the weekend in Salt Lake City, 57 "card-carrying Communists" among its employees. Senator McCarthy wrote the President during the weekend, demanding that these 57 individuals be fired, saying that "failure on your part will label the Democratic Party as being the bed-fellow of international Communism". The State Department had denied that there were any Communists in its employ and that if there were, they would like to know who they were so that they could get rid of them. The Senator said that about 300 persons had been certified to the Secretary of State by the loyalty review board as being subject to discharge but that only 80 had been fired and that this action had been taken after a "lengthy consultation with Alger Hiss". Senator Martin said that he did not think Secretary of State Acheson was a Communist but that he had blundered by continuing to support his old friend Alger Hiss following the latter's recent conviction for perjury for denying that he gave Whittaker Chambers State Department documents in 1938 or that he had any contact with Mr. Chambers during the relevant period of alleged transmission of the documents. Senators Kenneth Wherry, John W. Bricker, and Robert Hendrickson joined in the weekend clamor from the stump, saying Republicans would root out Communists from the Government such as Mr. Hiss—who had not been employed with the Government since 1946.
Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said that while the U.S. might be ahead in atomic and hydrogen bomb development, it was at least two years behind the Russians in guided missile technology. Each of the services, he explained, had their own missile program but as yet, no "worthwhile" guided missile had been developed. He criticized the military for directing expenditures to weapons which had been used to win World War II to the exclusion of the more modern weaponry.
In London, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin told a political rally the previous night that Russia's object was to gain control of Europe. He defended British expenditures on armament and the presence of American bombers in Britain. He said that the Western powers had been willing to negotiate with Russia for peace but that the Soviets had refused to cooperate with a four-power conference.
The U.S. Joint Chiefs, just returning from the Pacific, announced at a press conference that they had given to General MacArthur authority to control American Naval forces in Japanese waters in the event of war. They said that they had made a top secret report to the President regarding the Communist advance in Asia. Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of Naval operations, said that there was no evidence that Russia had increased the percentage of its naval forces in the Pacific since the end of the war and that American naval forces in the region were equipped and deployed with sufficient strength to meet any threat from Soviet submarines.
Southern coal producers accepted the invitation of John L. Lewis, complying with the Federal court order of the previous week, to resume negotiations on the following Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal miners refused to return to work despite a court order from the same judge ending the strike temporarily, pending a hearing on an injunction to end the strike for 80 days pursuant to Taft-Hartley.
Tornadoes ripped through four states, in East Texas, northwest Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and Tennessee, killing 47 people and injuring another 200. Nine of the dead were in Hurricane Hill, Tenn., 58 miles north of Memphis. Twenty-nine were reported dead in Louisiana and nine in East Texas.
In Baltimore, two doctors at Johns Hopkins had isolated at least one strain which appeared to transmit the common cold. The scientists were not clear on what the precise cause was, but ventured that it was probably a virus or a combination of several viruses. The doctors had worked with nineteen volunteer inmates at the Maryland State Reformatory for Males at Breathedsville in isolating the strain, removing the cold germ and transplanting it into a series of chicken eggs, where it stayed alive through five transfers. Nine of the men were then injected with the fifth-generation germ while ten were given a placebo. Six of those injected with the germ developed a cold while only one of the control group had a trace. In a replication of the experiment, four developed colds and three others had a trace while none of the control subjects showed any signs of infection.
Guess the solution is not to eat chicken eggs.
In Bristol, England, "Mrs. It" who had been exorcised by a vicar of the Church of England three weeks earlier from her hant at No. 13 Highsworth, had returned with a companion ghost. According to the residents of the home, the pair did a nightly routine up and down the stairs, sometimes sounding as dancing. They had named the first ghost "Mrs. It", though they believed it belonged to a woman who died in the house 18 years earlier, who had returned for the first time the prior December—probably in response to many Christmas spirits being on hand. After calling in a spiritualist, the residents learned that the ghost was either an atrocious speller or spoke a foreign language, possibly Russian. Using a ouija board, the spirit had spelled out "eehfhmev".
That's simple. She was trying to convey the caveat, "If 'em evah come around hyeh..."
Tom Fesperman of The News reports from Winston-Salem that the Committee of 100, founded in 1946, could study all manner of problems, including the cost of groceries to determine whether local consumers paid more than in other cities in the state. The Committee had conducted a study to determine why the City's Salem Reservoir was dangerously low during the post-war summers, finding that a four-million dollar water bond issue was necessary to improve the water facilities. Another area of study was the house numbering system in the city, following complaints that they were not consecutively numbered, that 430 might be next to 1816 on the same street. The reason, found the Committee, was that homeowners became so sentimentally attached to their old numbers that they took them with them when they moved and attached them to their new houses. Others took a liking to new-fangled house-number signs and bought them, regardless of the actual numeration contained thereon.
We always found that problem in the
juxtaposition: "blue, 93, 43, 232, hut, hut, hut
On the editorial page, "Snafu Potato Policy" finds that the fact that the Government was dumping surplus potatoes in the Atlantic while Canada was shipping potatoes into the U.S. at a cheaper price than American farmers could afford to match, would be funny except for the facts that needy families could not afford to buy five pounds of potatoes and the price-support policy was making potato farmers wealthy while costing the taxpayer 100 million dollars per year, resulting in wasted potatoes. It muses that a Government which had beat the Germans and Japanese in the war was stymied over spuds.
"Labor Law's Supreme Test" tells of the report of the President's coal fact-finding board having for the first time revealed what had kept UMW and the coal operators at loggerheads in their negotiations since the expiration of the contract the previous July 1. The board faulted both sides, as producers insisted that John L. Lewis abandon his demands for contract clauses providing that miners would work only when "able and willing", for the union shop, "memorial periods", and payment to the welfare and pension fund only for the benefit of UMW members, while Mr. Lewis had not made known his welfare and pension fund demands until the producers agreed to those four conditions.
The Federal court had recently ordered UMW to cease its demands for the four conditions, deemed either illegal under Taft-Hartley or to be unfair labor practices. Such might narrow the area of disagreement. Some of the miners, however, wanted to defy the court injunction ordering them to end the strike and return production to normal, pending a hearing on the 80-day injunction.
The piece concludes that if Mr. Lewis failed to get the miners to return to work, he would do enormous damage to the union he had built.
"Shifting the Blame" finds Governor Kerr Scott seeking to blame the "conservatives" in the Legislature for the deficit rather than putting blame where it appeared to belong, on those of his own supporters who voted for increased spending but against the offsetting tax increases urged by the Governor. The "conservatives" had also opposed new taxes but were in the minority of that opposition. It suggests that until the Governor was more specific in his casting of blame, it would regard his statements as a political maneuver against his ideological opposition.
A piece from the Anderson (S.C.) Independent, titled "Popular Will Should Be Obeyed", discusses the bill, co-sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Congressman Ed Gossett of Texas, proposing an amendment to the Constitution to make electoral college voting proportional to the popular vote, which had passed the Senate by the required two-thirds majority and was now headed to the House.
Dissatisfaction, it notes, with the electoral college had begun as far back as 1796 when the original format allowed for the election of a President of one party and a Vice-President of another. Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote in 1820, but did not receive a majority of the electors, resulting in the House electing his opponent John Quincy Adams, was a longtime opponent of the electoral college. The election of 1876, in which Samuel Tilden won the popular vote only to have disputed slates of electors in four states decided on a partisan basis by a fifteen-person commission and awarded to Rutherford B. Hayes, swinging the electoral vote to his column, ending, as a result of his promises to attract the alternate electoral slates in three of the states in question, Reconstruction in the South. In 1888, incumbent President Grover Cleveland had won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison.
Up to that point in 1950, every effort to reform the electoral voting had been blocked by one party or the other, fearing that it would be to the advantage of the opposing party.
It suggests that the House bill would likely pass and then be submitted to the states for ratification by three-fourths of them. It thinks it time to ratify the amendment as reform was needed, with the President having more power than ever before in history.
Because of the 2000 and 2016 outcomes, the times are even more desperately seeking an amendment to this anachronistic institution, meant for the horse-and-buggy days, drowning in undemocratic elitist checks from another age when the great majority of the populace was without literacy and education, without benefit of modern media communication to inform the electorate, and when the college, itself, was actually voting independently of the popular vote, not constrained by it and thus serving as a means to manipulate the outcome of an election, contrary to the popular will of the people, turning the original purpose of the electoral college upside down.
Tom Fesperman of The News suggests that while City and County officials were planning to revalue real property to raise revenue for needed projects in the community, it was good to look at valuation of personal property, valued under an outmoded system resulting in undervaluation for the fact of large exemptions on personal property, inadequate space on the form for complete listing of belongings, and the absence of an oath by the owner to back up the declaration of property.
Well, what do you propose as an enforcement mechanism beyond the registration of automobiles, a house-to-house search for sofas, missing change, and model airplanes and the glue with which to assemble them?
Drew Pearson tells of the schism within the Republican Party in their statement of principles for the midterm elections, with the conservatives on one side and the "Young Turks", such as Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Margaret Chaise Smith, and George Aiken on the other. The latter group believed that there was not enough support for civil rights in the platform, that, in the case of Senator Aiken, farm coops and the Rural Electrification Administration was being short-changed, and that the phrase "Liberty against Socialism" ought to read instead, "Liberty against Totalitarianism", that the party would lose votes with the former. Senator Lodge complained that labor legislation proposals placed too much emphasis on retaining the name "Taft-Hartley" rather than correcting injustices under existing law. Senator Aiken concluded that it was a great day for the Democrats.
Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington complained to Undersecretary of Defense Steve Early that Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had made Mr. Symington, who had said that air defenses were inadequate, appear foolish with Mr. Johnson's statement recently that the U.S. could lick the Russians at 5:00 a.m.
Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a former school teacher in Texas, had recently spoken to a women's club regarding Federal aid to education, indicating that it would come only with Federal control. Mr. Pearson notes that while Mr. Rayburn opposed Federal aid to education, he could also be counted on to seek to have the President's program at least considered by the House.
Before the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, Lt. General Leslie Groves, wartime military head of the Manhattan Project, had sought to blame FDR for atomic leaks to the Russians, that the leaks would not have happened had FDR followed the advice of General Groves to have more careful screening of British and American scientists working on the project. Committee chairman Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, and members of the Committee, Congressmen Chet Holifield of California and Henry Jackson of Washington, hotly contested the General on this issue, suggesting that if the President had followed his advice and placed scientists under such military discipline, many would have resigned from the project and the country would have lost the race to develop atomic supremacy. Some Congressmen also objected to the General's claim that Army engineers could have built the bomb without scientists, one Congressman saying that it would have been the equivalent of a house being built without a blueprint.
Marquis Childs tells of a bill for veterans sponsored by Senator Taft and GOP Congressman Olin Teague, extending to 1956 the G.I. Bill from its 1951 cut-off date for enrollment in courses, adding thereby several billion dollars to the cost of G.I. education, averaging 2.5 billion dollars per year since 1944. In the face of the Republican cry for economy and against deficit-spending, the bill was incongruous.
The Bureau of the Budget and the Veterans Administration had sent a report to the President recommending cutbacks in G.I. Educational benefits, reporting that numerous fly-by-night schools had developed to permit veterans, especially the unemployed in industrial areas, to take advantage of both the enrollment stipend of $120 per month and unemployment compensation, meaning that often the veteran received more in Federal benefits than through maintaining a regular job, thus serving as a disincentive to employment. In rural areas of Kentucky, it was reported that veterans, seeking to take advantage of the stipend, were often sitting in the fourth grade next to children.
The President was therefore expected to ask Congress for a bill to put an end to such abuse and cut back on the Taft-Teague bill.
Robert C. Ruark finds that the coming of television would alter the genetic makeup of mankind such that people of the future would be legless, not needing any longer to walk for the fact of the set serving all their mobility needs, with one large ear for listening to the tv and the other one becoming tiny, to listen to small talk surrounding it, plus a big hole in the head so others could peer through to watch roller derby.
He had watched television with some actors and found all of the small talk to surround television, in a most vapid way. In between this talk and "shhh's", they watched "Leave It to the Girls", Abe Burrows, Paul Whiteman conducting a ballet about cowtowns, and finally Kukla, Fran and Ollie. He finds television to be a total loss for mankind.
Framed Edition
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