The Charlotte News
Monday, February 27, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a surprise move, placed a rider on the appropriations measure, which would end rent control funding by June 30, if passed. The provision would direct that the 2.6 million dollar allocation be used to wrap up operations of the Housing Expediter's office, which oversaw the rent control program. The entire bill had priority because of funding contained therein for an increased atomic energy program, aimed at development of the hydrogen bomb. The President had asked for rent control to be extended for another year. The move prompted protest from Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, chairman of the Banking subcommittee, who said that he did not believe that the funding measure allowed enough for the Housing Expediter to continue even until June 30, as the office had sought a million dollars more than the 2.6 million for that remaining period.
Rent control may have been blown to hell by the hydrogen bomb.
A bill, sponsored by Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, was ready for House consideration to extend the Selective Service classification system for three years but not permitting in the meantime actual drafting of men without further action by Congress. The President had sought extension of the draft, set to expire June 30. No one had been inducted since the beginning of 1949.
The National Council Against Conscription was protesting "militarism in education", claiming that in some colleges, the military subsidy for research had led to Government investigation of students and faculty involved in the program. Institutions of higher learning, it claimed, were increasingly dependent on this subsidy for their existence. Where military training and faculties had been installed, the concomitant discipline of West Point or Annapolis, it complained, compromised the free academic atmosphere of civilian colleges. The statement was signed by 26 individuals, including Albert Einstein and the presidents of several colleges, including Davidson.
No progress had occurred over the weekend in resolving the coal strike. The trial of the contempt citation against UMW began in Federal court regarding violation of the court's temporary restraining order of February 11 for the union members not having returned to work in compliance with the order ending the strike. The union waived a jury trial on the matter. (The first sentence of the story is in error in suggesting that UMW pleaded "innocent" to the contempt. No defendant pleads "innocent" to anything, as we have previously instructed. The only pleas available under our system of jurisprudence, because of the burden of proof being on the prosecution, are "guilty", "not guilty" and, where permitted, no contest or nolo contendere.)
In North Carolina, the threatened six-city strike, including Charlotte, by Duke Power Co. bus drivers had been averted at the last minute the previous midnight, five hours before the strike was set to begin, as explained in an editorial below, and signs were that a 60-day cooling off period would prevail during which a fact-finding board would be appointed and issue a report and recommendations for settlement of the dispute over the demanded 20-cents per hour wage increase and establishment of a contributory pension fund. Mayor Victor Shaw had managed to convince the sides to agree to a period of truce for ten days, to allow the union to call for a vote by its members on whether to accept the fact-finding board proposal. The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing the drivers, said that the principle of the fact-finding board was generally acceptable. Duke had immediately accepted all of Mayor Shaw's proposed terms.
An American freighter was attacked this date by a bomber off the coast of Tsingtao in China. There was no indication of the source of the plane. Nationalist China had engaged in attacks on American freighters the previous month off the coast of Shanghai for attempting to run the blockade of the Communist-held port.
In Manchester, N.H., in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder in the euthanasia of a terminally ill cancer patient, an attending nurse testified that the doctor had said to her that air injected to the veins would act as an embolus, which would prove fatal. The doctor then took an empty syringe and plunged it into the arm of the patient and the nurse heard a gasp. She had then re-pierced the patient's arm with an empty syringe and heard a louder gasp than on the first occasion. The doctor then said that the patient was dead. She said that three persons had attempted without success to find the pulse of the patient prior to the arrival of the doctor on the scene, but that the patient was gasping.
Over the coast of South Carolina, a Pan Am stewardess, sleeping at the time, was blown partially through a 15-inch window of a pressurized Lockheed Constellation cabin early this date after the window had blown out during a flight from New York to Miami. She was pulled to safety by the purser. On February 11, two crew members were blown from separate planes, one having fallen to his death through an accidentally opened door and the other having held on with his leg to a portion of the steps attached to an opened door until the plane safely landed. The latter was back in the air within 15 minutes after release from the hospital the same day.
In Oklahoma City, dogs trained to hunt mountain lions had failed to catch the scent thus far of a leopard on the loose after it had escaped from the local zoo on Saturday by springing eighteen feet from its pit. The dogs were fooled by the scents of other zoo animals in the vicinity of the fence under which the leopard had re-entered the zoo grounds and so could not properly discriminate the leopard's scent. A helicopter had been dispatched from Fort Sill to conduct a search by air.
If you see the animal, approach only
with due caution
In Tokyo, police allowed The
Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Part of chapter five of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the front page as part of the serialization of the historical novel based on the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ.
On the editorial page, "Mayor Shaw's Smart Move" praises the effort of Mayor Victor Shaw of Charlotte in getting the two sides in the bus drivers' wage and pension fund dispute to agree to afford a little more time before calling a bus strike, set originally for this date in Charlotte and five other cities served by Duke Power Co. buses. It hopes that, in the meantime, the union would accept the Mayor's further proposal for a 60-day cooling-off period during which a fact-finding board could study the issue and make recommendations for settlement. Duke had already accepted the proposal.
"Tuition Goes Up" finds that the hike in tuition by Davidson College was justified because of decline in both return on endowment investment and contribution of room rents to operational costs through the years. It praises the decision to devote 20 percent of the increased revenue to provision of scholarships based on need, to place on the more affluent families of students the burden of providing for the less financially able. The rise was commensurate with that at Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Washington & Lee, and considerably less than at several Northern private institutions of higher learning, such as Swarthmore, Amherst, and Brown.
"Voters, Take Your Pick" welcomes to the North Carolina Democratic Senate race for the seat occupied by Senator Frank Graham, Raleigh attorney Willis Smith, as providing an alternative to the liberal Senator Graham and the conservative-isolationist platform of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. It suggests that Mr. Smith was more likely to position himself in the middle between the two. The piece finds that the choices belied the former suggestion of the column that too often in North Carolina politics, the voters were not given viable choices from among similar Democrats in the principal races for public office in the one-party state.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Blocs Fighting Electoral Reform", tells of the NAACP, the CIO PAC, and the Americans for Democratic Action all fighting against the Lodge amendment, as already passed by the Senate, to amend the Constitution to make electoral voting proportional to the popular vote for President and Vice-President. Each such group viewed the proposed amendment as being aimed at empowering the South while diluting the power of blacks in the major cities of the North and of labor.
But, the piece offers, each group's arguments against the amendment provided the best reasons for its passage by two-thirds of the House and ratification by three-fourths of the states, as the argument for empowering small political blocs extended to the South and the other states effectively disfranchised in the elections of the previous 80 years, in which only six states had been decisive—New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. The major parties had concentrated 75 percent of their efforts therefore in those six states, offering up 179 electoral votes and insuring a victory provided a majority of them were carried.
With the electoral college, each party was free to pander to racial, religious and social minorities to achieve at least a plurality of the vote in each state, with only Georgia requiring a majority to be entitled to all of its electoral votes. It regards such pandering as the greatest weakness of the country's democratic institutions and a travesty to democracy for negation of majority rule.
The editorial interjects also, however, that the FEPC bill was a prime contemporaneous exponent of this pandering, not understanding, apparently, the difference between legislation, mandated by historical negation of rights protected under the Constitution, to remedy past discrimination toward minority groups with readily identifiable, immutable characteristics and allowing a minority of the body politic to have its way in an election of the chief executive at the expense of the plurality, as in the cases of the 2000 and, to an even greater extent, the 2016 general elections. The minority interests of the electorate are always protected in any event by the fact of quadrennial elections for President and by the fact of the checks and balances afforded under a properly operating Congress, the result of free elections sans gerrymandering of House districts, and by a properly operating Supreme Court and Federal judiciary, not politicized by repeated efforts in that direction, the most outrageous of which in the country's history having occurred in 2016, with the refusal of the Republican majority in the Senate even to hold hearings on the nomination of Federal Judge Merrick Garland, never once in the process questioning his merit and qualifications to sit on the highest court or the Constitutional authority of the President to appoint the successor to Justice Antonin Scalia, who died a year ago and whose seat remains vacant—and, hopefully, will remain vacant, on principle, for the next four years or until a Democrat is elected again to the presidency, that being necessary to sanction the misbehavior of the Republicans last year and to serve warning to future Senate majorities of either party not to repeat that autocratic and utterly despicable behavior.
The rationale which the Republicans foisted on the American people, though in the face of all historical precedent back to the Founding running to the contrary, was that, in an election year, a vacancy on the Supreme Court should await the voice of the people in the election before being filled. Even following that idiotic reasoning, discounting thereby the voice of the people expressed in the prior election for President, the people did speak in 2016 and, by 2.9 million popular votes, elected Hillary Clinton President. Thus, at minimum, the appointment to the Supreme Court ought occur only through bipartisan discussion with bipartisan concordance on the nominee, not the process undertaken by the current "President".
Drew Pearson provides an open letter to Secretary of State Acheson, sympathetic with his decision that calling another peace conference with the Russians to discuss atomic control would be useless and that the only thing the Russians understood was force. Russia had been, as Mr. Acheson had suggested four years earlier as Undersecretary, as the thief going door to door in the neighborhood checking for unsecured latches, in Berlin, in China, in Indochina, Burma, and the Philippines.
But, Mr. Pearson finds, by way of doing service to his old friend, Mr. Acheson, the American people were confused and that a series of radio addresses by Mr. Acheson to provide them greater information on what to expect and why decisions were being made would be most helpful. No one in the country wanted to fight another war in far-off lands if they believed it would only lead to more wars. Thus, they were concerned about Mr. Acheson's view that the Russians only understood force. They wanted leadership, and atomic leadership in an atomic-jet age, not "horse-and-buggy politics".
He concludes that the people could, if necessary, bear more sacrifice and hardship, but did not want to be kept in the dark in doing so.
Marquis Childs discusses the inept handling by the Democratic Congressional leadership of the Fair Employment Practices Commission bill by insisting on having a bill with compulsory provisions and punishment for non-compliance. From the beginning, it had been obvious that such a bill could not get by a Senate filibuster of Republicans and Southern Democrats. A compromise bill, however, without punitive enforcement provisions, probably could pass both houses and at least act as an educational interim measure.
The bill sponsored by Congressman Brooks Hays of Arkansas, which had a provision requiring investigation of employment discrimination while making compliance voluntary and providing for education of employers and the public on the subject, would have been acceptable to many Southerners and could have supplemented existing state experiments in FEPC. The bill likely would have passed if limited in duration to two or three years, to determine its impact. Even advocates of the original Administration bill realized that, if passed, it could be used in the South to inflame passions against blacks generally and so would have likely supported such a measure.
But the final measure which emerged from the House the previous week had tacked to it many amendments which would knowingly insure its defeat in the Senate, such as provisions for non-discrimination toward women and the disabled in hiring, advancement and wages. Southerners had tacked on most of those amendments to assure Senate defeat.
While the Democrats could use the failure to pass a bill in the fall elections against the Republicans, if repeated failure to pass a bill continued, it could lead to cynicism and despair on the part of the protected interests rather than votes, as the detriment inured to both parties.
In the House, the Democrats supporting the stronger bill had not much to gain by voting against the Republican-sponsored compromise measure which passed, reluctantly therefore had gone along.
Robert C. Ruark finds that the recent story in Life regarding the building of the atomic bomb and how easy it was to construct one in the garage, was of questionable merit and rendered Russian spies no longer necessary. The public Smyth Report of 1946 had been the principal source of information for the Life article, along with other information published by the Government. No secrets had been disclosed. But the result was a recipe for anyone to build a bomb, with the right parts and a supply of fissionable material.
He remarks that the country no longer had to look for leakers of secrets on the bomb or wonder how the Russians got it earlier than anticipated. The answer was that the recipe had been given to them by the Government, itself.
He cautions that a little knowledge
could be dangerous and that Life had overplayed the simplicity
of "cooking up a holocaust", that bringing the bomb into
the public domain was a mistake "which will wind up with the
fragments of the world stuck to the ceiling, as happens in the
incident of the Martini-driven chef with something special in the way
of meat sauce
A letter from the president of the Charlotte Boat & Gun Club, Inc., favors teaching more boat owners about "safe and sane" boating.
We are glad to note that he does not
advocate "safe and sane" gunning, especially while
boating
A letter from the director of the State Department of Archives and History remarks on a photograph appearing in The News of the Tryon County historical marker, a county which, in 1779, had been divided into Rutherford and Lincoln Counties. It was one of many markers being erected across the state in honor of historical events, personages, and locales, a program begun in 1935 and with 600 such markers established to date. The necessary research had been performed by William S. Powell of the UNC history department, and the inscriptions provided by a group of historians from the leading five colleges and universities in the state.
A letter writer takes exception to a previous letter writer of February 20 who had said that "no honorable white man or woman" could condone interracial marriage. He advises, instead of reading The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots of the late Thomas Dixon, as recommended by the previous writer, reading a good account of the life of Jesus Christ, to eliminate from their heads the "crazy crackpot ideas as to 'white supremacy'". He further questions how the previous writer could regard the South, as distinct from the rest of the nation or the world, as "God's country".
He concludes that many parts of the South were in worse state than depicted by the controversial remarks since the prior January of Mrs. J. Waties Waring, wife of the Federal judge from Charleston who had held the South Carolina primary Constitutionally infirm for disallowing black voters exercise of their franchise. She had drawn fire more recently for having advocated tolerance of interracial marriage and, earlier, in January, for having criticized Southerners during a talk at the black YWCA of Charleston.
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