The Charlotte News
Friday, February 24, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Federal judge who had issued on February 11 a temporary restraining order temporarily ending the UMW strike pending a hearing on the injunction, and then earlier in the week issued an order to show cause re contempt for the fact that the miners had not returned to work, despite John L. Lewis and the union urging them to do so, upheld the order to show cause and set trial for Monday.
In Britain, the Labour Party held a narrow lead in the Parliamentary elections, the first since July, 1945. It appeared doubtful that Labour would have a workable majority even if it defeated the combined opposition of the Conservatives and Liberals. That condition would force another election in the near future. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Labour held 310 seats in Commons to 281 for the Conservatives and seven for the Liberals. A Labour spokesman said that his party needed a 30-seat majority to function effectively. In the dissolved Commons, with 640 seats, Labour had the edge by 381 to 202 seats for the Conservatives. Splinter groups in the elections were completely obliterated behind the major three parties.
In Austria, a man identified by police as the U.S. Naval attache to Bucharest died after falling from a train in a railroad tunnel south of Salzburg. The police said that it could have been an accident when he lost his balance while standing next to a door of the train when it rounded a curve. Washington officials said that they were not eliminating the possibility that the man was forced from the train. The man was a close friend of Robert Vogeler, the American businessman sentenced the prior Tuesday by the Hungarian Government to fifteen years in prison for spying.
In Hamburg, former German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had his eighteen year prison term for war crimes associated with atrocities of troops under his command in Poland and Russia reduced to twelve years.
The President, as expected, set up a fact-finding board in the rail dispute, which, pursuant to the Railway Labor Act, automatically delayed the strike set for Monday for thirty days from the time the board would issue its report, which could be anytime in the ensuing thirty days.
The Senate Banking Committee cut in half the proposed middle class housing bill urged by the President, from two to one million dollars in Government-guaranteed loans for families with incomes between $2,400 and $4,700 per year. Foes of the bill, as Senator John W. Bricker, vowed to fight for even more cuts on the floor.
The Senate was split on what to do about potato price-supports, with potato state Senators opposing the effort of Majority Leader Scott Lucas to remove all supports on potatoes planted after a certain date, and continuing in that mode until controls on production could be implemented. Meanwhile, another plan would place even more stringent restrictions on supports.
The Labor Department announced that consumer prices dropped .4 percent in January, to 66.9 percent above the prewar average between 1935 and 1939.
Following suit, GM announced immediate price cuts of $10 to $40 on its cars and trucks and the cost of living allowance in the GM contract with workers was adjusted downward, meaning wages would fall commensurately by two cents per hour for the ensuing quarter.
In Raleigh, local attorney and previous Speaker of the State House, Willis Smith, filed his candidacy, as anticipated, for the Senate race against incumbent Senator Frank Graham. The primary was set for May 27. Former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds was also in the race.
In Winnsboro, S.C., the "man without fingerprints" and his female co-defendant presented alibi evidence in their trial for the $41,000 robbery the previous August of an elderly storekeeper. The woman denied that she had ever been to the store, claimed that she was in Charlotte at the time of the robbery. A witness said that the principal defendant was also in Charlotte at the time of the robbery. The woman's sister-in-law claimed that the victim had identified her as an accomplice at the time of the preliminary hearing, not the defendant.
Part of chapter three of The Greatest Story Ever Told appears on the front page, the third installment of the serialized presentation of the recently published historical novel by Fulton Oursler, based on the life of Jesus Christ as told in the Gospels.
On the editorial page, "Arbitration Is Imperative" finds that the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing the Duke Power Co. bus drivers threatening strike for a raise of 20 cents per hour, had not defended their position to the public by supplying facts to show the demanded wage increase was warranted. As a strike would significantly harm the public, the public had a right to know the facts.
The piece favors submission of the matter to arbitration, which Duke was willing to do but the BRT was not. It finds that a full report on the matter would at least elucidate the issues and provide a basis, if settlement ultimately did not occur, for new legislation in this area, devoid of State legislation, by the General Assembly in 1951.
"Searches and Seizures" finds that the case of U.S. v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, decided 5 to 3 during the week by the Supreme Court, had undermined the Fourth Amendment by declaring the test of a valid search and seizure to be whether the search was reasonable, not whether it was reasonable to produce a search warrant. Before the ruling, delivered by newcomer Justice Sherman Minton, the Court had held that absent some exigent circumstances attending the arrest, risk of destruction of evidence, flight, a mobile suspect in a motor vehicle, etc., a warrant had to be procured when practicable before conducting a search outside an area within the immediate reach of the arrestee or seizure of evidence not in plain view.
In Rabinowitz, an arrest warrant had issued, based on police knowledge that the defendant had in his possession some altered stamps, four of which he had sold to an undercover postal agent, but there was no search warrant. After the arrest, a search incident to the arrest was conducted of the room in which defendant was arrested and in which he carried on his business of selling the forged stamps, finding in the process numerous altered stamps, which formed the basis for the charge in issue. The Court found that under the particular circumstances of the case, the initial issuance of a valid arrest warrant based on probable cause, the proximity of the area searched to the defendant when arrested, the fact that it was an area open to the public from which he transacted an illegal business, and that the search specifically sought evidence related to the criminal enterprise for which he was being arrested, the search was reasonable. It held that the reasonableness of the search was to be determined case by case based on the facts, that in the instant case, the search was not the prohibited general or exploratory search.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, with whom Justice Robert Jackson joined, issued a dissent, in which he argued that the rule thus created by the majority gave law enforcement a free hand to conduct searches incident to pretextual arrest warrants, a practice well known in the past, "commonplace", he said, "in the police state of today and too well-known in this country."
Justice Hugo Black also issued a separate dissent, based on the notion that the case overruled in part by the majority, Trupiano v. U.S., decided by the Court in 1948 and holding that where it was practicable to obtain a search warrant, evidence procured without one had to be suppressed under the judicially created sanction of the exclusionary rule, remained viable and that the test therein should be given more time to work before being tossed out. Justice Black had joined the dissent of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in the 5 to 4 decision in Trupiano. That dissent opined that the rule of a prior holding of the Court, now being applied by the majority in Rabinowitz, ought be determinative, that a search incident to a lawful arrest, specifically for things connected with the crime for which the defendant was being arrested and in the same room or proximal area where the arrest took place, was reasonable though accomplished without a warrant. Since Trupiano, Justice Frank Murphy, who had delivered the majority opinion, and Justice Wiley Rutledge, who had joined it, had died the previous summer and been replaced by Justices Minton and Tom Clark.
Justice William O. Douglas took no part in the decision.
The piece agrees with the dissent of Justice Frankfurter.
"On Tropical Vacationers" expresses envy for those who were taking winter vacations in Florida, Havana or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The rest had to suffer the winter chill. It suggests that if traveling friends continued to regale of their tales of such exotic travel, the editors would crawl under a sunlamp and stay until the vernal equinox.
A piece from the Buffalo Evening News, titled "St. Louis Attacks Its Slums", tells of a plan in St. Louis to have private investors pool assets to accumulate a five million dollar fund which would then form the basis, after using it to clear away slums, to obtain FHA-backed loans to build anew some 5,000 apartment units on the sites, revitalizing a whole area of downtown. It had nothing to do with public housing but would stimulate the kind of investment necessary to rehabilitate the slum areas themselves.
Drew Pearson tells of Bert Andrews, Washington bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune, having been hired by the RNC as its new director of public relations, to be given virtual free rein by RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson.
Civilian defense plans being laid at the Pentagon were focusing on having adequate blood plasma on hand for radiation poisoning, dispersal of major industries, and underground garages, the latter being able to serve both current parking needs in major cities and as air-raid shelters in the event of an attack.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was asked during hearings before the House Armed Services Committee why the Army had to impose a draft to get adequate personnel. Chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia interrupted to say that the answer was simple, that the Navy floated, the Air Force flew, and the Army walked.
John L. Lewis at age 70 faced the dual tragedies that, having done more for one segment of labor than any other individual in history, he had also reduced demand significantly for the product of that labor, as well that his high-handed approach had so alienated the mass of Americans that the welter of negative opinion had rubbed off on the coal miners, despite their deserving of public sympathy. He had also lost control of the miners for the first time, refusing his orders that they return to work to accord the court order. They were angry at the shortened work week prior to the strike, at the operators for not agreeing to a new contract since the previous July 1, and at Taft-Hartley for curtailing their ability to strike. The coal industry, he concludes, was sick, faced with stiff competition from cheaper oil and natural gas, and Mr. Lewis's tactics had made it sicker. He suggests that some unproductive mines be closed and the productive ones operated full time, that some of the miners ought perhaps move to other jobs, and that overall planning be provided for the coal industry.
J. Russell Sprague, political adviser to Governor Dewey, told New York GOP leaders that they should support Governor Dewey's decision if he sought renomination in 1952, and also support his choice for the nomination if he decided not to run. They agreed to the first request but not the second.
A State Department press officer told reporters, when asked about the Klaus Fuchs arrest in London for giving atomic secrets to the Russians, that the Department had no comment, but that it presented a contrast between the democratic approach to such a person and the Communist approach. The latter was to have the individual vanish without trial, whereas in the democracies the charges were aired and debated in public forums and the press and presented in a public trial.
Marquis Childs tells of finding in his visit to a dozen communities across the country in recent weeks a good deal of uncertainty and confusion among the American people. He remarks that for Senator Joseph McCarthy to have suggested that there were 57 "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, without presenting any supporting facts, only fed the existing atmosphere of suspicion and did not contribute to security at home. Only one of the four people the Senator had finally named, John Service, was still in the employ of the State Department, and Mr. Service had been cleared by former Secretary of State James Byrnes after a previous false charge had been made against him. He was presently serving as consul to Calcutta, requested for the post by Ambassador to India, Loy Henderson, consistently anti-Communist.
Senator McCarthy's list apparently had been developed from 108 persons suggested as suspicious by the Senate Appropriations Committee during the previous Republican Congress. Forty-four of those persons were still employed in the State Department at that time, were subjected to a thorough loyalty check and subsequently cleared.
Senator McCarthy was undermining American foreign policy, creating suspicion in Europe and Asia among those countries wishing to work with the U.S.
Mr. Childs suggests that Government security had been too lax during the war and that the statute of limitations on treason ought be lengthened. Any genuine information affecting security should be provided to the FBI forthwith.
But such statements as that by Representative Walter Judd of Minnesota, who had recently visited Oregon and said that the Pacific Northwest was expendable for American defense, that the defense plans revolved around the Eastern half of the nations, only created more confusion, especially in light of the nearly non-existent defenses of Alaska.
Robert C. Ruark, a day after he
described the New Jersey treatment approach to sex offenders as
"ROT"
Such was the state to which he was
reduced in seeking to mine excitement stronger than the headlines
that his newest film, "Stage Fright"
So blasé would be the news of the arrival of Martians that The London Times, Mr. Hitchcock ventured, would state the story in a single incidental paragraph. "My business is getting so tough, in face of the facts," he despaired, "that I will have to make a hero out of a double schizophrenic, just to top this atom thief, Fuchs. The Hyde-side is the nice side. I tell you, it's rough."
A decade hence, he would make good on his prediction.
Mr. Ruark concludes that since the end of the war, with flying saucer scares and spy trials and mercy killings right and left, the subject of villainy had been exhausted and the bizarre, depleted. If someone told him that the moon was made of green cheese, he would tell them to pass him a slice. For if the dearth of remaining fictional settings beat Mr. Hitchcock, it also beat him.
A letter writer, writing about Brotherhood Week, suggests that actual application of brotherhood and its handmaiden, religion, was necessary to preserve the world from destruction. He hopes that the National Council of Christians and Jews, sponsors of the Week, could accomplish the goal of peace as marshaled by the true practice of religion.
A letter writer praises the "Everyday Counselor" column of the Reverend Herbert Spaugh of Charlotte, appearing daily in the newspaper.
A British letter writer challenges the statement of the Reverend Billy Graham appearing in The News on February 18, that if the Labour Government were re-elected, it would make a secret deal with the Russians to bypass England and attack America directly. He wants Dr. Graham to state more directly his reasons for the statement. Either, he suggests, the statement was based on reasonable conclusions from fact or hunch, and if the latter, as he suspects, then it was outrageous for him to have made such a statement about a staunch ally of the U.S. He is sickened by the insult to his country and urges Dr. Graham to withdraw the statement or justify it.
A letter writer wants the newspaper to obtain copies of the bids to be submitted to the County Commissioners by private contractors for real property appraisals for purposes of revaluation. He understood that the Commissioners had already made up their minds on which firm would get the contract and that the bids were only a formality.
A letter writer, a black man, praises Mrs. J. Waties Waring, wife of the Federal judge who had issued the ruling that barring blacks from voting in the South Carolina primary, after stripping the statute books of reference to the primaries and purporting to make the parties private clubs, was violative of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. He finds that Southerners who had criticized Mrs. Waring for her remarks about Southerners in January at the black YWCA in Charleston were wrong, that some people would rather do as Senator Clyde Hoey, who taught Sunday School and then on Monday sought to filibuster against civil rights. He concludes that Southerners should praise Mrs. Waring rather than condemn her, as she stood firmly opposed to segregation.
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