The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 9, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President's coal fact-finding board ended hearings and began preparing a report, due by the following Monday. They hoped to present it to the President on Saturday.

Members of two railroad operating unions voted to strike to obtain a 40-hour week, but a spokesman said that pursuant to the National Railway Mediation Act, the strike could not occur before spring.

In Frankfurt, Germany, the father of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had been arrested in London for allegedly providing secret atomic information to the Russians, denied a report that he had called his son a Communist. He said that his son had the brain of a giant and the soul of a child, and he believed in his innocence. The Leipzig University theology professor wanted to attend his son's trial in London, scheduled for the following day, but had no way to get there.

A report by the National Security Resources Board recommended that buildings in the atomic age be located as far from strategic areas as possible or built underground. They cautioned against use of load-bearing brick walls.

In Washington, the executive secretary of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, John Victory, told the Cosmopolitan Club that Russia was ahead in production of number of aircraft but that the U.S. believed it had better planes.

The House passed a bill to raise postal rates, expected to generate an additional 130 million dollars in revenue. The bill would next go to the Senate.

In New York, a longshoreman went berserk with a kitchen knife in the Times Square area and commandeered a bus, sending the driver and passengers out into the rain. He then drove the bus several blocks and fled on foot until two policemen caught him. No one was hurt.

Also in New York, two men had been arrested after they admitted taking part in the robbery of the home of showman Billy Rose and his wife while they had attended the theater two weeks earlier.

In Los Angeles, two bandits held up a West Los Angeles jewelry salesman at his home and got away with jewels valued at $200,000.

In New Orleans, a woman from Randleman, N.C., was found strangled by her own bra in an an apartment on Magazine Street. A neighbor had heard the sounds of a heated argument and a scuffle emanating from the apartment early the prior Monday.

News Editor Pete McKnight, in the third in his three-part series of articles resulting from an interview the previous weekend in Asheville with former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds anent his run for the Senate against Senator Frank Graham, tells of his earlier campaigns in which he had portrayed himself as poor. He could no longer get away with that contention after having married into the wealth of the Hope Diamond of the late Evalyn Walsh McLean. Among other things in his platform, including opposition to the FEPC and any other attempt to force social equality by law, he said that he would outlaw the Communist Party and favored a $100-per-month pension for everyone over 65, to be paid for by eliminating all foreign spending.

That way, you can retire at leisure into World War III.

In Los Angeles, the nine-year old girl who had complained that her parents deprived her of food so that she could obtain film roles, wanted to eat what she wanted and so no longer desired to be in movies, was involved in a struggle in the corridors of the courthouse as she ran to her real mother and said that she wanted her, then was seen sobbing amid a tug-of-war between her real mother and her adoptive mother. The court ruled that the real mother no longer had rights to the child but also suggested to the foster parents that they return to Texas and get the girl out of Los Angeles. They agreed. The charges of child abuse were still pending against the adoptive mother.

On the editorial page, "A Time for Reason" advocates reason by both sides in the contract dispute between Duke Power and the bus drivers of Charlotte and five other cities in the state, to avoid a strike which would have a serious impact on the public.

"All Things to All Men" tells of the new Republican Party platform trying to appeal to all interests at once, fighting for lower taxes and less Government power while championing farm price supports, a national health program for the indigent, better security for the elderly, civil rights, and sound agricultural and labor management policies. The piece finds that it sought to stop the trend toward socialism by advocating its own brand of socialism.

It suggests that unless the Republicans made more than usually expected gains by the party out of power in the midterm elections, it was to be hoped that they would next time produce principles which could withstand closer scrutiny.

"Unified Health Services" finds that given the Mecklenburg County Medical Society's endorsement of the plan recommended by the Institute of Government to consolidate the city and county health services, the City Council and County Commissioners should take the first step to make it a reality.

"On Banning Stromboli" finds that studios, movie theater owners, and the public had the right to boycott the movie "Stromboli" because of the affair of its director Roberto Rossellini and star Ingrid Bergman, producing an illegitimate child. But bans by law, through actions of city councils or legislatures, should not occur based on such opinions, unless the film itself was offensive.

The piece suggests that the American people would likely turn away from the film on their own because of the behavior of the star and director, but if not, it would show the public's insatiable curiosity, albeit not reflective of personal morals.

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Freedom for a Fascist", tells of William Dudley Pelley, who had led the Silver Shirts organization during the war and had been in prison since 1942 after conviction for sedition, having been paroled. Sedition, it offers, waxed and waned in the public sentiment based on the times, whether war or peace. Now that peace had prevailed for five years, sedition was no longer looked upon with such disdain as during the war.

During the previous two years, Mr. Pelley had published pamphlets seeking his parole, betraying in them an inability to distinguish between anti-Communist Fascism and anti-Communist, anti-Fascist democracy. He had championed Fascism during the war, carrying on the propaganda under the cloak of Christianity, while preaching religious and racial bigotry.

The piece urges that such propaganda had to be suppressed, not by law, but by the good sense of the American people.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings, a collection of humorous snippets from newspapers around the state, provides a piece from the Fuquay Independent telling of one woman being asked by an election official with what party she was affiliated and answering that she did not want a ballot if she had to answer, as the party "ain't divorced yet".

The Winston-Salem Journal reported a story derived from the local chitterling feast, in which a woman, after hearing Evangelist Ham deliver a sermon, thanked him and asked his name, whereupon he told her to think of the best part of the hog, at which point she addressed him as "Bro Chitterling".

The Laurinburg Exchange reported that the courtroom testimony of a woman involved in an altercation with another woman was that the assailant had "jumped sore" at her. The piece thinks that, while wanting of proper grammar, it was a proper expression of indignation and fury.

The Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem reported of Dr. R. Gordon Spaugh preaching a sermon at Home Moravian Church entitled, "It's Time to Wake Up". An elderly man was dozing during the sermon, until Dr. Spaugh exclaimed the title of the sermon, at which point the man awakened.

From the Goldsboro News-Argus, it was reported that Ami Beach is not yours, but grandpa's.

And so forth, and so on.

Drew Pearson quotes from a February 2 speech by Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, in which he said that the U.S. had to take responsibility for the failure of diplomacy with Russia to effect peace, that it needed to re-double the efforts, and that building the hydrogen bomb was only a way of buying a few months or years of averting "well-nigh certain catastrophe." He advocated more spending on such things as the Voice of America, to bring America's message directly to the Russian people and those behind the iron curtain.

Mr. Pearson quotes from his own column of July and August, 1948, in which he had advocated direct communication with the Russian people, the weakest point in the Soviet armor. He advocated dropping balloons carrying friendship messages, much as Senator McMahon advocated dropping leaflets over Russia.

At the time of the columns, Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington had embraced the idea of appeal directly to the Russian people. Then chief of Naval operations Admiral Louis Denfeld was only mildly interested. The State Department had expressed no interest, Assistant Secretary George Allen, in charge of Voice of America, having stated the belief that friendship messages to the Russian people might undercut America's "stiff-arm" diplomacy, designed to send the message to the Russians that if they went beyond a certain point, they risked war.

Secretary of State Marshall, however, appeared to favor a direct radio appeal to the Russian people delivered by him or the President, but the plan was never implemented. Mr. Pearson speculates that the more staid diplomats may have dissuaded him from such a speech.

Now that the Russians had the atom bomb and perhaps the hydrogen bomb, something beyond routine diplomacy was all the more urgent. But when the President had announced at a press conference his decision to move forward with production of the hydrogen bomb, he missed the opportunity to deliver a world-wide speech, making a direct appeal for peace. His terse announcement gave the Kremlin the opportunity to propagate the notion again that the U.S. was militaristic, while making their own appeal for peace.

Robert C. Ruark finds that some of the press suggesting that Ingrid Bergman and Robert Rossellini were courageous for having defied convention was a lot of nonsense, that they had actually been very selfish because of the inevitable hardship which their new son would one day face as he came of age from an illegitimate birth. He finds it hard enough for someone to be the child of famous parents without adding to it such a social stigma.

He says that the adults' lives were their own to wreck but should not extend to the destruction of the child.

The legitimate daughter of actress Helen Hayes had to bear such a stigma for being "an act of God" baby because of a legal squabble in which Ms. Hayes was entangled at the time of the birth.

He had a friend who had been born to a white mother while visiting Egypt, resulting in the son being of dark color. The son had suffered all of his 50 years and had to live abroad, outside of England, because of being born to racially mixed parentage.

Mr. Ruark concludes that he made no moral judgments on people as long as their actions pertained only to themselves but finds it improper for two parents to wreck a child's life with their irresponsible actions.

"All his life this kid will be known as Bergman's folly, or something more euphonious and vicious." He adds sardonically that the decision not to have a honeymoon was a good touch, as babies were an awful nuisance on their parents' honeymoon.

Marquis Childs discusses John L. Lewis and the ups and downs of his career. During the Depression, the UMW was flat broke and he was able to recover only through the programs of the New Deal. Now he was bucking for another fall as he had won so many wage and benefit increases for the miners that they had priced themselves beyond the competition in oil and natural gas, leaving the coal industry in the cold. Nearly 40 percent of the nation's locomotives operated on diesel or electricity and homeowners were regularly switching their heating to oil and gas.

While in many industrial processes, as steel manufacture, there was no substitute for coal, the demands Mr. Lewis exacted had caused price increases to ripple throughout the economy, causing many Americans to be priced out of the market. The result could be an economic downturn which would adversely affect the welfare system of the UMW, paid on a per ton basis.

Other unions, as the printers union, had also established a monopoly position, and the result had been the demise of many newspapers, reducing employment.

Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia had recently introduced legislation to bring unions under antitrust legislation if they were shown to exercise an unreasonable monopoly in an industry affecting the nation's health and welfare.

He concludes that Mr. Lewis, at age 70, might yet fall and rise again, but the latest effort was chancy as it was in defiance of most of the American people.

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