The Charlotte News
Tuesday, February 7, 1950
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had testified again this date in executive session before the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, indicating that he believed the British had moved too early in the arrest of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, accused of providing atomic secrets to the Russians, that had they waited, he might have led investigators to others involved in the matter. Also, he complained that the British were moving too slowly in their investigation, preventing the FBI from obtaining any information from any confession which Dr. Fuchs might have provided which might implicate others, enabling thereby persons to flee the U.S. in the meantime.
Senator John W. Bricker of the Committee urged that the Quebec Conference agreement of 1943 between the U.S., Canada and Great Britain should be made public, that the secret pact may have opened the door to foreign scientists to work on the atom bomb without proper U.S. security checks.
In New York, Nationalist China asked the year-round "little assembly" of the U.N. to hold Russia accountable for playing a large part in the civil war in China and to cast a moral judgment against Russia, while realizing that expulsion from the U.N. was out of the question. The Russians meanwhile boycotted their twelfth U.N. body in refusing to sit any longer on the eighteen-member Economic & Social Council after it had voted 10 to 3, with five abstentions, not to oust Nationalist China as a member.
In the House, debate opened on a bill to give short-term economic aid to Korea and Formosa, a replacement measure for the aid bill defeated earlier to supply 60 million dollars additional money to Korea to thwart Communism. Aid to Nationalist China and Korea was set to expire February 15. The new bill would continue aid to both Korea and Formosa through June 30.
Lewis Strauss announced that he would resign from the Atomic Energy Commission, effective April 15, to return to private life, and the President accepted the resignation.
The fact-finding board appointed the previous day by the President to provide a report on the coal situation within a week was trying to speed up their schedule. Coal production had fallen to an inconsequential amount as 378,000 miners had joined the strike which had started in the captive steel mines. The railroads and steel companies had laid off 20,000 workers as a result.
The CIO Communications Workers postponed their planned telephone strike, set to start the following day, until February 24, to afford more time for Federal mediators to work on a compromise agreement between the sides.
Governor Kerr Scott of North Carolina told a press conference in Raleigh that Senator Frank Graham was a true humanitarian who was comparable to William Jennings Bryan. He dismissed contentions by some that Senator Graham was a Communist, said that humanitarians often had such slurs cast upon their reputations, just as Mr. Bryan had been called a Socialist.
News Editor Pete McKnight had visited former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds in Asheville during the prior weekend and submits the first in a series of articles on his interviews. Mr. Reynolds said that he chose to run against Senator Graham rather than Senator Clyde Hoey because he believed that the people were less favorable toward Senator Graham, giving Mr. Reynolds a better chance to win, and because he was more naturally opposed to Senator Graham's views. He had maintained as secret his decision to enter the other race until he announced it so that it would make a bigger splash in the news.
In Winston-Salem, Mayor Marshall Kurfees said that he was contemplating a run against Senator Hoey. Although he had utmost respect for the Senator and former Governor, he believed that the people wanted fresh blood in Washington.
In Bridgeport, Conn., the trial of the woman for second degree murder in the euthanasia of her father who was dying of cancer, was nearing its end as the prosecution and defense provided their summations. The prosecutor argued that the defendant was sane at the time of her act. He said, however, that no one would deny that she loved her father deeply. The defense argued that in keeping from her father the final medical verdict that he was dying, her mind had snapped and, laboring under a delusion, she then shot him in the head to spare him further suffering.
Drew Pearson provides a piece on the front page anent a B-17 which had been purchased by the Civil Air Patrol of Charlotte for $350 and then apparently sold, in breach of the original contract terms with the Government, to a private company which intended to sell it to Denmark, also in violation of the contract. The plane was supposed to have been sold to CAP as an educational device only, was not to be flown or sold, and was to be scrapped after falling into disuse. Sometimes, Mr. Pearson remarks, war surplus planes so purchased for a cheap price were resold to foreign governments for as much as $25,000. The company in New Jersey which had apparently bought the plane and was last reported to have custody of it, said that it had sold numerous single engine planes to various countries and had bought three B-17's, one of which had been sold to dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the other two probably to go to France and Denmark. Another company out of Minnesota was awaiting priority to purchase the Charlotte plane. But the Air Force had put a stop to any sale and grounded the plane after it had improperly flown from Wadesboro, N.C., to Newark.
Ashley Smith of the News tells of the plane in question being the "Ding How", which had flown General Eisenhower about during the war. The plane was in Newark where it was grounded, and CAP still had title to it and would continue to do so.
On the editorial page, "Potatoes and More Potatoes" discusses the Government's problem of having 50 million bushels of surplus potatoes which it had bought under the price-support program only to be unable to unload most of them, such that they would inevitably need to be destroyed. The scenario had occurred in 1943 as well and most of the potatoes then had to be destroyed. Nothing was done afterward to avoid the result again. In 1946, the taxpayer footed the bill for 91 million dollars worth of surplus potatoes, 250 million in 1948, and about 90 million in 1949.
The Department of Agriculture had sought to limit acreage of potato production but the farmers planted the spuds closer together. The consequence was that the consumer was paying 3.5 cents per pound for potatoes while the Government destroyed its surplus.
Former Secretary of Agriculture and now-Senator Clinton Anderson wanted the Government to be able to regulate the number of bushels produced rather than the acreage. The piece finds this proposal wise and that the farmers should not balk at it as they had been getting too much for their surpluses each year. If they did object, then the Government ought abandon the potato price-support system completely.
"Water Shortages—A Critical Problem" finds the water shortage to be critical in many parts of the nation, not just in New York and New Jersey as recently reported, prompting voluntary no-water days each week in New York City. Ohio had such a shortage that many industries had to curtail expansion. California and Arizona likewise had problems.
North Carolina needed better flood control and protection against soil erosion to insure against such problems.
The President had appointed a commission of experts to study and make recommendations on the problem. It hopes for cooperation with the commission so that it could achieve the necessary long-range results to provide for adequate water resources in the future across the country.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Discriminatory, Intolerable", tells of Superior Court Judge W. C. Harris in Person County finding that, based on a Grand Jury report, conditions in a black school were unfit for holding instruction. The superintendent of schools had appeared before the Grand Jury and stated that some of the worst conditions would be eliminated by planned consolidation, but the Judge found the prospect unsatisfactory, that something needed to be done to remedy the circumstances immediately.
The piece agrees that it was a disgrace for any school district to permit one race to have better schools or other social welfare facilities than the other. The South had proceeded for a long time under a double standard of public duty. But that day, it posits, was over, as the social conscience of the region had begun to awaken. Vast strides had been made in North Carolina toward providing equal facilities. The expose in Person County was only one of several such efforts. The will of the State was to insure that the birthright of equal educational opportunity be provided to every child regardless of race.
Drew Pearson tells of Mrs. Bennett Champ Clark, wife of the Federal Judge and former Senator, attending a gathering of the Missouri delegation in Congress with the President, and telling of her late fox terrier which she claimed had outshone every other canine in Washington. Bess Truman at some point offered that the Trumans once had a dog, to which Mrs. Clark inquired as to the type. Mrs. Truman responded, "Oh, just a plain dog."
The American Legion had collected some three million toys which were being shipped to Rotterdam to provide a late Christmas for the children of Europe. There were more to come and he congratulates the Legion for its prodigious efforts, including packaging and shipping the toys to Philadelphia where they were placed on a ship. CARE would distribute the toys in Europe. The effort, he suggests, would help to preserve the peace some twenty years hence when the recipient children would come of age. Too many Americans had forgotten that lesson after World War I.
Senator Millard Tydings, whom FDR had sought unsuccessfully to purge as a Democrat in 1938 for not supporting the New Deal, was now up for re-election again. This time, Senator Tydings wanted intervention by the President, and to that end, invited him to dedicate the new airport near Baltimore. A Republican Congressman objected for the visit's political overtones, but the President promised not to make a political speech, saying that since it was an international airport, he would feel obliged to touch on international matters.
Robert C. Ruark discusses euthanasia in terms of the case out of Bridgeport, Conn., in which a woman was being tried for second degree murder for the shooting fatally of her father as he lay dying of cancer in the hospital. Her defense was insanity.
Mr. Ruark thinks that only the individual and God had the right to end a life, not a third party, no matter the motive. He says that a bad hangover could resemble all manner of terrible diseases and he would not wish to have a relative end his days merely because he was in need of a bromo.
Furthermore, it was difficult in hastening the process of natural death to distinguish between honest humanitarian motives and mere greed for a relative's bank account. He decries the amateur physician in the home who prescribed a variety of pet potions and nostrums, wishes no one anything but ill who professed to be able to cure the common cold with a shotgun.
Dying, he concludes, was a personal thing which should be left to the individual to determine. He finds no difficulty in the apparently common practice with terminal patients of leaving by their bedside a regimen of goofballs in case they decided to end matters on their own. But providing assistance was meddling in the business of the Almighty and the patient.
Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the twenty-third in his weekly series of articles on childhood education, discusses homework. Teachers varied considerably in what they expected from students and the theory behind homework had changed a great deal since his own schooldays some 20-30 years earlier.
The rule had been that the student was supposed to do most of his or her preparation outside the classroom and be ready to recite what they had learned. But in later years, the trend had shifted to less study at home because of the need for guidance of students when they ran into difficulties, and because of increasing awareness of the great number of distractions outside the classroom, through extracurricular activities as well as home life and ambient noise from siblings and the like.
He remarks that many English teachers who assigned eight book reports during a year wondered in their hearts where the students would find the time to read the books. He says that they did not, but that the reports were written anyway.
That's news. We always read
There was an effort, he continues, to balance the need for participation in outside activities with the need for doing schoolwork outside the class.
Parents, he advises, should therefore not be too concerned if the child brought home fewer books than they recalled carrying. Yet, if the child was doing no homework, then they should discuss the matter with the teacher.
Most parents were too busy or tired
at night to assist in homework. He always had found time, however, to
do so with his children, with geography, history, English, and
spelling. But he drew the line at arithmetic
Do you ever have that dream where you have several book reports due during the course of the year and it is now about April and you have yet to turn a single one in or begin reading any of the books from the parallel reading list, indeed have forgotten even where the classroom is located and what period it met, as you haven't attended class since about October? We have that one every now and then, though in actuality never having suffered that fate. We always awaken dazed and confused, with the sense of dread of impending disaster bearing down. Perhaps, it is good to be fearful of such neglect, even long after the fact.
The closest we ever came to realization of a similar situation was sleeping through a geology midterm examination once in college for having stayed up too late studying, only to arrive at the class just as everyone was leaving and turning in their exams. Fortunately, the same exam was being given in the afternoon and the professor was a gentleman and a scholar. We never repeated that mistake, made sure the snooze alarm was well out of reach on exam mornings.
A letter from Leon Gutman, who would found a well-known gift shop in Charlotte, Gutman Galleries, praises the newspaper and especially Tom Fesperman for bringing to light the lack of special education facilities in the community for the physically and mentally handicapped. He reminds that many valuable contributions to various endeavors in society had been made by such people, such as Beethoven, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexander Pope, Dostoievski, Alfred Nobel, and Charles Steinmetz, each of whom had suffered from diseases or afflictions. He concludes that it was more difficult to raise a camellia than a weed.
A letter writer comments on a story about Alexander Home in Charlotte and suggests a donation campaign for the underprivileged children.
A letter writer compliments the newspaper for publicizing the effort of Congress to send an amendment to the states to change the electoral college so that votes would be apportioned based on the popular vote in each state, thought at the time to be an aid to the South which was taken for granted for the existence of the one-party system. He thinks it a good idea.
He makes a mistake in assuming that only two-thirds of the states were needed for ratification. Two-thirds of each house of Congress must pass the amendment for it to go to the states, where three-fourths of them must approve for ratification. The Constitution may also be amended by three-fourths of the state legislatures after two-thirds of the states have proposed an amendment.
In the case of this particular proposed amendment, which, of course, never got to the states, the proposed change may be effected by each state without resort to amendment of the Constitution as the state legislatures determine the manner of selection of their electors and how they are apportioned. Currently, such a movement is taking place, awaiting, by compact of the states participating, enough total votes to equate to a majority of the electors before taking effect. There are more than enough states in which the measure is presently pending and in which it has passed one house of the legislature, to add to the current total of 165 committed electoral votes in ten signatory states and the District of Columbia, to reach the majority plateau to enact the compact.
When, through gerrymandering of the House districts into an abstract painting, manipulation in slickly packaged presidential campaigns of the electoral college map, and the very nature of the Senate, with two Senators per state regardless of size, the minority political interest in the country, that is to say the corporate party line, has become the numeric majority in determining two branches and thus likely to become so again in the third branch, it is time for peaceful revision to accord democratic will, lest we have a violent revolution in the streets to make it so.
A letter writer finds that the Government imposed too many taxes and that there would inevitably be a revolt against it, as there always had been. He finds that the greatest threat to the country was not Communism but rather the trend of the Government.
A letter writer congratulates the Charlotte Interdenominational Missionary Union for its resolution regarding Christmas, as appearing the previous week, and urges following its recommendations against taking Christ out of Christmas and holding the Christmas parade before Thanksgiving.
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