The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 22, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the forces opposed to the Fair Employment Practices Commission legislation vowed to filibuster the effort to present the bill on the floor of the House for two hours of debate pursuant to a special Wednesday rule available every four months. They read, among other things, George Washington's Farewell Address, followed by a reading of the journal of the previous day's proceedings, usually waived, in an effort to delay the debate. The bill had to be brought up this date under the special rule and disposed of in one day, absent a two-thirds majority allowing further debate. One of the largest galleries of spectators present in years attended the proceedings. The bill had been stuck in the Rules Committee since the previous summer.
Congressman John Lesinski of Michigan, chairman of the House Labor Committee, said that a member was busy preparing emergency legislation to authorize the President to seize the coal mines because of the emergency prompted by the continuing strike despite the Federal court order temporarily ending it and the resulting contempt citation against UMW. He suggested that the Federal judge might be urged by the Justice Department to add John L. Lewis and the heads of several locals to the contempt citation. The judge had not found them in contempt because Mr. Lewis and the locals had ordered the miners back to work. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a member of the Senate Labor Committee, said that he believed the time had come for the Government to take over the mines.
The President urged the Communication Workers involved in the threatened strike against the phone companies, to start the following Friday, to call a truce for 60 days, during which time collective bargaining could take place. The president of the Communications Workers said the previous night that the strike appeared inevitable.
The President, in a speech celebrating Washington's birthday, said that the U.S. and other free nations had to be ready to use force if necessary to combat the "deadly attack" of Communism.
In Glen Falls, N.Y., a fire struck the 100-room Towers Hotel, killing no one, though at least nine persons were injured.
In Princeton, N.J., fire virtually decimated a cyclotron in Palmer Physical Laboratory. The machine had been built in 1935 and was one of the first atom smashers in the U.S.
In Pontiac, Mich., the remains of a man were dug up in the family cow shed and the story, pieced together by authorities, emerged that he had been shot to death by one of his sons. The mother said that the man was horrible and deserved what he got. The family had decided to cover up the killing, which had occurred two years earlier. The prosecutor planned to seek a first degree murder charge against the son.
In Manchester, N.H., jury selection was completed in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder in the mercy-killing of his terminally ill patient. All members of the jury were male. Nine were Roman Catholic and three, Protestant. The Catholic Church specifically opposed euthanasia. The prosecutor had informally accused the defense attorney of jury tampering but the judge said he found no evidence of wrongdoing.
In Winnsboro, S.C., a man pleaded guilty to robbery and highway robbery for his part in the $41,000 robbery of an elderly man of his life savings at his Salem Crossroads store the previous August 13. He turned State's evidence against his two co-defendants, the so-called "man without fingerprints", and a female alleged to be an accomplice.
Near Charlotte, an Air Force plane, out of gas, made a forced landing onto a farm and then crashed into a farmhouse on the property. No one was seriously injured.
Part of the first chapter of The Greatest Story Ever Told, the recently published historical novel by Fulton Oursler based on the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, appears on the front page as the first serialized installment of the book.
On the editorial page, "On the Brink of Anarchy" finds that the nation was teetering on the edge of civil insurrection from the continuing coal strike and the ineptitude of the Government to put an end to it by court order. The miners were ignoring the order and appeared willing to allow UMW to suffer contempt and resulting heavy fines, even to the point of exhausting the union's 13 to 20 million dollar treasury.
The piece suggests that as Taft-Hartley remained the law, it had to be enforced. While the miners could not be forced to work, the President and Congress had to find some way to restore the Government's authority and put an end to the threatened insurrection and coal shortage in the country resulting from the strike. It advocates using whatever power was necessary to do so.
"Police State 'Justice'" finds distressing the conviction in Hungary of American businessman Robert Vogeler, based on a coerced confession, and his subsequent 15-year sentence for spying. But it also finds it par for the course in a Communist state, as had been the way of it in Communist Russia for years. Confessions had been extracted from defendants in Russia by torture, starvation, incessant interrogation, use of drugs and other such techniques. Mr. Vogeler had been held incommunicado since the prior November and without proper counsel, prior to his "confession" to the charges.
"A Third Senatorial Candidate?" remarks favorably on the prospect of Raleigh attorney and former State Speaker of the House Willis Smith entering the Senate race as a moderate alternative to the liberal Senator Frank Graham and the reactionary former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. It says that, without commenting on the qualifications of the candidates, it welcomed a broader choice for the voters.
We shall see, once the campaign heats up and turns to race-baiting and Red-baiting as orchestrated by Mr. Smith's campaign manager, Jesse Helms, how the column reacts, if at all, to these tactics—to prove successful for Mr. Smith in the race.
There were plenty of sucker morons around in 1950, too.
"How Does the Consumer Gain?" wonders how, if State Agricultural Commissioner L. Y. Ballentine was correct when he said that the bulk of the cost of the farmer's product went to processing and transportation rather than to the farmer, the Brannan agricultural plan—to pay subsidies to farmers on perishable produce while allowing the market price on perishables to reach their own level for the benefit of consumers—would help the consumer. The bulk of the price at the market was based on other costs than the price paid to the farmer, according to Mr. Ballentine, even on perishables such as canned tomatoes.
But maybe after canning, they were no longer to be deemed "perishables" under the plan.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Snow", tells of the many things snow is to different people. For instance:
Snow is a silence falling. It is
thought without words.
Snow is a quiet dream, rest that outlives the awakening.
Snow is unsought experience, infused with unexpected benignity.
Snow is a gentle critic. The stark tree blooms in whiteness. The angular roofline is clothed.
Snow is the kind historian. The
record
Dr. Vernon Kinross-Wright of the Charlotte Mental Hygiene Clinic discusses heart disease as a function of worry and stress, recommends reducing stress as a means to combat it and its potentially deadly results. But, he also insists that such diseases as hardening of the arteries were not necessarily fatal and so the patient should not become so worried about it as to complicate the malady the more, leading potentially to coronary thrombosis.
Let not malice domestic come between you and your heart. Time is on your side.
Drew Pearson discusses the Spanish Falangist radio, an arm of dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, having condemned the fact of Secretary of State Acheson's continued friendship with Alger Hiss despite the latter's recent conviction for perjury in connection with his Grand Jury testimony in late 1948 regarding denial of giving secret State Department documents to confessed Communist courier and spy Whittaker Chambers. The Falangist organ had cited Senator Joseph McCarthy's recent charge of 57 "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, found it not surprising "that there was every type of undesirable among the advisers to the late President [Roosevelt]."
So, if you want to know what type of person readily jumped on Senator McCarthy's Red-hunt bandwagon in 1950, look no further than the Fascist dictator's captive press. You will find much the same sort of mentality today still hailing this historical reprobate as a "hero".
Mr. Pearson goes on to recount several other episodes from American history of a similar nature, in which a prominent person in Government took an unpopular stand in favor of someone accused of wrongdoing and received criticism for it. President Truman, for instance, had continued to defend Kansas City Boss Tom Pendergast after the latter had gone to prison in 1939 for tax evasion. He speculates that it may have been a motivating reason for the President to overlook Mr. Acheson's defense of his old friend, Mr. Hiss. When Mr. Acheson had tendered his resignation three weeks earlier for the embarrassment being caused the Administration, the President told him not to pay any attention to those "yapping sons-of-bitches".
Charles Evans Hughes, formerly a Supreme Court Justice and later Chief Justice as well as Republican presidential nominee in 1916, had, as a private attorney, defended Senator Truman Newberry on alleged violations of the Corrupt Practices Act and, after his conviction, continued to support him. Eventually, the conviction was set aside on appeal. But future Secretary of State Cordell Hull said of Mr. Hughes, by then Secretary of State in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, that he had to be the only intelligent person in the country who did not know that Senator Newberry had stolen his seat in his 1918 race against Henry Ford.
In 1807, Andrew Jackson had defended former Vice-President Aaron Burr when being tried for treason, against a mob outside the Richmond courthouse where the trial was taking place. Based on the incident, President James Madison later held up the promotion of Col. Jackson to General during the War of 1812.
President William Howard Taft, in 1909, had written a letter to Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger absolving him of responsibility in the Alaskan land scandals. But in 1911, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis investigated the matter and found that the letter had been written by Secretary Ballinger's attorney. Later, however, Secretary of Interior under FDR, Harold Ickes, who had been a strong supporter of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 when he ran against President Taft regarding this issue, discovered records which absolved Secretary Ballinger of wrongdoing in the scandals.
Marquis Childs reminds of the recent expose of the deplorable conditions in mental institutions of the country, culminating in the film "The Snake Pit". He says that after the spotlight had been removed and some of the worst of the conditions remedied, there still remained many thousands of people living in those institutions, insufficiently staffed and funded.
A group of doctors and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene were seeking to obtain more funding for mental health services from Congress, with the current allocation at ten million and the goal being 26 million for the National Institute of Mental Health, founded three years earlier as part of the U.S. Public Health Service.
The lack of funding was frustrating to mental health professionals who believed that they were on the threshold of discovery of a treatment, by the recently discovered hormones cortisone and ACTH, for the lead contributor to mental health problems, schizophrenia, accounting for nearly half of the long-term patients in mental facilities. (Mr. Childs erroneously characterizes the disorder as "split personality", a rare form of mental illness, referred to as schizoid personality, in which the person genuinely does not realize the existence of two or more separate and distinct behavior patterns or personalities. Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, schizophrenia, by contrast, is characterized by dissociative conduct, delusions and inability to discern between what is in the realm of delusion and that which is reality, skewed perceptions. Its most typical accompanying disorder is clinical paranoia, again different from and more extensive than the common perception of the malady as a "persecution complex". Paranoia extends well beyond that realm, again into actual delusion and hallucination, hearing condemnatory voices, literally, and the like, behaving as if they actually exist and impact events, influencing every aspect of the subject's behavior—not merely a transitory feeling that someone has it in for you, which may or may not be the case, but hardly qualifying as clinical paranoia if based on actual events, even if misperceived as to intent. In the end, however, labels are merely convenient categorization for pedagogical purposes, often corrupted by the misunderstanding or ill-willed to form a segregated caste or classification of those suffering from these maladies, only complicating recovery from the disorders; the important point, in terms of understanding mental illness, is the manifestation of the mental disturbance and whether it amounts truly to a psychosis, that is extending into the realm of hallucination, actual perception of it and belief that it is real.)
With all the attention being paid to heart disease, tuberculosis, and cancer, mental health was being neglected despite half the hospital beds in the nation being filled by mental patients, and 350,000 more beds being needed. One in every eighteen persons suffered from some form of mental illness, not including the mental diseases associated with alcoholism and sex crimes.
Mr. Childs suggests that the added funding would eventually save a part of the billion dollars which mental health issues were estimated to cost the country each year.
Incidentally, while on the subject, we cannot resist the speculation, though not motivated by irresistible impulse, gathered from legal circles of which we have been a part, that the so-called SODDI defense might be a manifestation of split personality disorder, that is "some other dude did it"—but that probably connotes an entirely distinct manifestation, having to do with conscious self-preservation in the face of having committed conduct so contrary to the accepted norms of society as to have been proscribed by laws with serious penal consequences
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the possibility that the President would appoint James Bruce, 1948 major campaign contributor and former Ambassador to Argentina, to become Ambassador to Great Britain and its deleterious impact on British-American relations at a critical time, perhaps leading even to dissolution of the longstanding friendship between the two nations. Mr. Bruce, they point out, had distinguished himself in Argentina by befriending dictator Juan Peron and his wife Evita, was unfit to serve in the post in Britain.
Ambassador Lewis Douglas, who had done an outstanding job since taking over the post in early 1947, wanted to retire but had been persuaded by the President and Secretary of State Acheson to remain on the job through the end of the year.
If Mr. Bruce were appointed, they suggest, it would indicate that Mr. Acheson's power over his own Department had been overtaken by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, who wanted Mr. Bruce appointed to the post. Mr. Acheson was not in favor of the appointment.
In the end, the new Ambassador appointed the following December would be Walter Gifford.
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