The Charlotte News

Friday, February 17, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Joint Atomic Energy Committee opened an inquiry this date into the state of the nation's civilian defenses against atomic attack, with the Atomic Energy Commission first called to provide its views, to be followed by the National Security Resources Board. The inquiry would delve into questions regarding defenses to the prospective hydrogen bomb, the effect of a strong civil defense program on American institutions, economy, and civil liberties, whether dispersion of industry and governmental resources was necessary, whether a new Federal agency was necessary to deal with civil defense, and the interrelationship between Federal, municipal and state governments with regard to civil defense preparedness.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard debate over whether to endorse a resolution sponsored by Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire and 18 other Senators to make world government an objective of American foreign policy and to strengthen the U.N.

At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington, the President told the 5,300 guests who had paid $100 per plate to attend that the Republicans were criticizing the Administration for engaging in socialism to hide their own "negative inaction". He compared them to a cuttlefish which squirted out a cloud of black ink whenever its slumber was disturbed. The President said that the Administration's program was not socialist but was grounded in the "firm faith in the strength of free enterprise".

Senator Robert Taft, having coined the GOP slogan for 1950, "liberty versus Socialism", reiterated his insistence that the President's program was socialist.

On the way to the dinner, the President, a day after proclaiming at a conference of law enforcement officials that he never ran red lights despite Presidential prerogatives enabling such violation, was being whisked through twenty red lights by a police escort during a four-mile course.

In Budapest, the trial of IT&T executive Robert Vogeler on charges of spying for the U.S., began as his British assistant and two Hungarian co-defendants confessed to the charges. The Government had announced previously that Mr. Vogeler had confessed but skipped him in the opening day of the trial.

The State Department charged that the guilt of Mr. Vogeler had been decided in advance by the Hungarian Government, as the Deputy Prime Minister had asserted that he was guilty ten days prior to the trial.

In New York, Judy Coplon, on trial for attempting to provide to an alleged Russian accomplice secret documents taken from her place of employment at the Justice Department, changed lawyers in the middle of the trial, firing her previous attorney and receiving the appointment of three attorneys in his stead. In a recent news conference, her prior attorney had called Ms. Coplon a "damn fool" and she had then told him to shut up. But after the split, he insisted on her innocence and said that he would continue to work for her interests in any way he was needed. He had been representing her gratis, as an old friend of the family.

In Cleveland, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Railway Conductors, representing about 250,000 operating employees, decided to strike, starting February 27. Their demands included a 40-hour week for 85,000 yardmen and contract improvements for road men and dining car stewards.

The President asked his fact-finding board in the coal dispute to provide him a report by the next day, a week after it had issued its initial report finding a crisis-level coal shortage in the country, prompting the President to seek an injunction to end the strike. Despite a temporary restraining order having issued the previous Saturday, the strike persisted. The operators and John L. Lewis were engaged in their third straight day of renewed negotiations to try to work out a new contract, the old one having expired the previous July 1. Prior to the current strike, which had begun in the captive steel company mines, the miners had been on a three-day work week since December 1, ordered by Mr. Lewis, and the refusal to work was largely in protest of the shortened work schedule, not the refusal of the operators to provide the benefits which Mr. Lewis was seeking. Mr. Lewis had shortened the work schedule to place pressure on the operators to form the new contract.

On Princess Royal Island off British Columbia, 12 of 17 airmen who had parachuted from a B-36 had been rescued, but five still remained missing. Rescuers had found tracks in the snow and tree-snagged parachutes which they hoped would lead to the remaining men.

In New York, General George Marshall opened the Red Cross drive, with a national goal of 67 million dollars.

In Vatican City, Pope Pius XII had recovered from the flu after being bedridden for three days.

In London, the sun came out after seventeen consecutive days of rain.

On the editorial page, "A Last Supreme Effort" finds that, as Winston Churchill had urged, albeit during the midst of the general election campaign in Britain, there had to be such an effort at constructing a lasting peace as the world could not live long under threat of a war with the hydrogen bomb as the means of combat. Even though previous peace conferences since the war had failed to produce results, there had to be renewed effort to construct a world in which the abiding principle would be "live and let live", reaching a compromise between the East and West such that each would no longer pose a threat to the other or that the increasingly tensed rope would not finally be broken.

"The alternative is too terrible to think about."

"Organized Gambling" discusses the presence of slot machines and bookmaking in Charlotte despite being illegal in the state. Local prosecutors were without the ability to proceed against the racket men of Chicago and New York who sold the slot machines to North Carolina clubs and supplied the race results to local bookmakers. Part of the money spent in Charlotte in these pursuits wound up in the pockets of gambling kingpins Frank Costello, Mickey Cohen, and others, who used bullets and bombs as means of doing business.

Mayor W. Cooper Green of Birmingham, appearing at the Washington conference of law enforcement officials, had made some suggestions for combating the problem: banning interstate transmission of horse-racing information for purposes of gambling; forbidding interstate shipment of gambling devices into states where they were illegal; and requiring identification of owners and users of gambling devices which required purchase of Federal tax stamps.

While the Bill of Rights had to be respected in combating organized crime, it ventures, a method had to be found to stop such operations and Federal laws might provide the answer.

"A City's Arteries" discusses the problem of fixing traffic snafus at six intersections in the city while also tackling the problems of needed surfacing of many streets and lack of paving in some residential areas. There was consideration being given to allowing municipalities to share in a greater proportion of State highway funding than in the past and if adopted, it would aid in meeting these problems without adding to the city's tax burden.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Just a Bowl of Cherries", recommends to Representative Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, exercised about Congress being overly concerned with such trifles as Arkansas hound dogs and Punxsutawney groundhogs while the hydrogen bomb sat ticking, that he "unlax". For the Congress, as Thomas Jefferson had observed, had to move at its own petty pace.

To escape the incumbent pressure of the atomic age, the House, on occasion, had to take up such trifles as the fact that the clocks in the chamber read different times. It was the nature of the beast.

Drew Pearson tells of the President being alarmed regarding Soviet war production having advanced beyond what U.S. intelligence sources had previously reported. That had resulted in the President and Secretary of State Acheson deciding to re-evaluate foreign policy in that light. Mr. Pearson provides a synopsis of the major regions of Communist influence.

In Eastern Europe, the signs were encouraging for the West. Bulgaria was embroiled in a civil war outside its big cities, as living conditions were intolerable. Farmers had revolted.

In Albania, a pro-Western revolt appeared certain.

Along the Hungarian-Yugoslav border, the situation was tense, with a war of nerves proceeding.

In the Far East, things were not so good for the U.S., as the century-long imperialism practiced by Great Britain, France, and The Netherlands had provided fertile ground for Communism to flourish, and Moscow had been exploiting the tendency. Though the U.S. had a good anti-imperialist record, it was tied to the imperialist policies of its allies by association. U.S. support of the British in Hong Kong, the French mismanagement of Indochina, and the Dutch stupidity in Indonesia had given plenty of grist for the Communist propaganda mills.

At an important staff meeting the previous week, Secretary Acheson had determined to make a stand in Southeast Asia, with Indochina selected as the battlefield. For it was believed that if Indochina fell to the Communists, then so, too, would Burma, Siam, the Malays, Ceylon, India, and probably Indonesia—the "domino theory" which would eventually lead, in 1965, to America's full-scale involvement in the civil war in Vietnam. Mr. Acheson ordered part of the President's special discretionary fund allocated to aid of the French against Ho Chi Minh's guerrilla forces and designated Edmund Gullion, an intelligence expert, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Indochina.

Mao Tse-Tung was still in Moscow after two months, reported to be under virtual house arrest until he agreed to provide Manchuria to Russia.

The U.S. military experts felt confident regarding the Philippines, unless Southeast Asia were to fall.

Charles Luckman, former head of Rinso, Lux, Pepsodent and Lifebuoy, was talking to the President at a cocktail party shortly after losing his job and suggested that he was unemployed. The President responded that he would not be for long, in apparent allusion to hiring him for Government service. Mr. Luckman's friends wanted him to become Secretary of Commerce but another former soap company president, Charles Sawyer, former head of Procter & Gamble, was in that position. Mr. Pearson notes that Mr. Luckman had supported the President with campaign contributions and otherwise.

Marquis Childs discusses Articles 55 and 56 of the U.N. Charter, a pledge by the original signatory nations to maintain full employment across the world through "joint and separate" action of the member nations.

But a recent U.N. report titled "National and International Measures for Full Employment", prepared by five distinguished economists, had warned that conditions existed which could lead to a world-wide depression such as that of the early Thirties, as there could be no lasting prosperity as long as there was a major imbalance between the economies of America and dollar-starved Europe and Asia.

The five economists found that decline in U.S. economic activity had been arrested in recent months and production and employment had moved upward.

One of the first reactions to the stock market crash of October, 1929, Mr. Childs observes, had been the raising of tariff barriers to keep out competing foreign goods while nations tried to dump their own products at low prices. President Hoover had reluctantly signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley bill raising tariffs.

The U.N. report contained recommendations to prevent that situation from occurring again, primarily by requiring that in a recession, the country would have to deposit to the World Bank U.S. currency equivalent to the drop in imports as measured against a continuing high level of exports, such that other countries could then buy those dollars to purchase commodities on the world market as needed.

The report said that it could not conceive of a satisfactory solution to the world problem of full employment without rectification of the chronic dollar shortage. Yet, there was little sign of concerted or individual action per the Charter to rectify the problem.

The Federal Reserve Board had recently reported that consumer credit was at an all-time high, with nearly 18.8 billion dollars worth generated in 1949, a 2.5 billion dollar increase over 1948, a billion increase in December over the previous December.

He posits from the report that measures were necessary to prevent a decline, as the free world would not long remain free if anything like the spreading debacle of twenty years earlier were to obtain a foothold.

Robert C. Ruark tells of his boxer having fallen in love with a cat and being forlorn without the feline's company, such that he felt the need to call in a dog psychiatrist to cure the malady. Mr. Ruark did not like cats and did not want to remedy the situation by having one around.

Nor did he want Lassie around as Lassie was actually male.

He had two dogs when a child, one, Frank, having been a desperate ladies' man who pursued the chase with such assiduity as to ignore his duties chasing quail, the other, Tom, a sissy at whom the other dogs sneered, causing him to brood excessively. Frank had inadvertently hung himself on the fence while trying to climb it to chase after a pooch. Tom developed an "ingrowing rabbit complex", thinking all rabbits wanted to kill him and fretted himself to death. All of it had occurred before psychiatry took hold to delve into bone fixations and similar fetishes.

So he resigns himself to hiring a dog psychiatrist for his boxer's love fixation for a cat. He did not mind the cost as it was better than having a cat around.

A letter writer from Lancaster, S.C., a transplanted Yankee who had also written on the same subject on January 25, again criticizes Mrs. J. Waties Waring for her recent remarks critical of Southerners. He thinks that she was inhibiting the cause of progress, as much so as was the Klan on the other side of the fence.

That's a convenient dodge from the main issue, which was justice replacing injustice and inequality of opportunity, the ultimate object of her remarks.

A letter writer who was white and had grown up in the South disagreed with segregation and had never understood it, finds "separate but equal" facilities not so, that there were two sets of standards, one for black people and one for white people.

He agrees with Mrs. Waring that whites and blacks ought be free to intermarry but did not agree with some of her other ideas.

He concludes that no one could say they were Christian while also condoning or supporting segregation and white supremacy.

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