The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 18, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Colorado Senator Ed Johnson, a member of the joint Atomic Energy Committee, told a reporter that a large civil defense organization not only was unnecessary at the time, but could prove disastrous by provoking unnecessary alarm and causing waste of resources. He believed that defense plans should not go into effect until there was a real threat of attack. Senator William Knowland of California countered, however, that the program would be a way for the Atomic Energy Commission to take into their confidence state and local officials, without disclosing vital security information.
In Paris, the French Parliament's upper house approved, by a vote of 292 to 20, acceptance of American arms aid pursuant to NATO. Only Communist Party members voted against it. The lower house, the National Assembly, had approved the measure the previous Thursday.
In Brussels, the Belgian coalition Cabinet resigned following lengthy Liberal Party deliberations regarding the proposed return to the throne of King Leopold III, exiled since the war. A recent plebiscite had given him 57.6 percent support but the final decision lay with Parliament. The Government had failed to reach agreement on convening Parliament for the purpose and so the Prime Minister decided to present the resignations to the Prince Regent. The controversy primarily surrounded whether the King had sold Belgium out to the Nazis in June, 1940.
In Frankfurt, West Germany, the woman accused of murdering her husband the previous October was convicted by a military tribunal and sentenced to fifteen years. The court rejected a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. At one point during the proceedings, the defendant had yelled out that they could hang her if they wanted as long as the defense psychiatrist would cease his testimony regarding her supposed psychopathic personality which led to delusions of persecution the night she shot her husband. She received the verdict on second degree murder calmly. After an argument with a friend of her husband at a party over her Brooklyn accent and his Southern accent, she left the party and went home, waited in the dark for her husband to return and then immediately shot him fatally.
General Muir Fairchild, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, died suddenly of a heart attack the previous night at age 55.
Off Halifax, Nova Scotia, a fishing trawler sunk after being rammed by a steamship during the early morning darkness, carrying eleven of seventeen crewmen to their deaths.
The missing crew of 40 men of the net tender Elder were found safe after Navy rescue near Eniwetok in the mid-Pacific. Twenty-six of the men had been picked up from a lifeboat during mid-afternoon the previous day and the remaining fourteen, who had refused to leave the stricken ship with five feet of water in its engine room, were picked up that night. The last previous reports from the ship had come March 7 and it had been due at Eniwetok on the previous Sunday. A series of explosions had doomed the craft, which was to assist in forthcoming atomic experiments.
Columnist Bruce Barton recalls Senator J. Ham Lewis of Illinois who dyed his whiskers pink for attention. He told the press that they could criticize him all they wanted as long they did not leave him out. He understood mass psychology, that the more he was criticized by the press, the more his mass following grew.
Irvin Cobb, in The Thunders of Silence, had written of such a U.S. Congressman, who was so unpopular that the entire press of the country was trying to defeat him, and yet his following grew commensurately.
He reckons that Josef Stalin might suffer the dreaded fate of silence were the press of the country to ignore him rather than giving him so much free publicity. The demagogue suffered from lack of fuel from the press.
He might have added, more to the point, Senator Joseph McCarthy to the equation, as well, had he been entirely prescient, the present "President" during his late campaign of 2016, our new Willie Stark.
As the filing deadline expired at noon this date, six of North Carolina's Democratic Congressmen were unopposed for re-nomination and would be certified as the Democratic nominees. P. C. Burkholder of Charlotte, a twice-failed Republican nominee in the Tenth District, filed as a Democrat this time to contest Congressman Hamilton Jones and a third candidate.
In Mount Holly, N.C., two brothers were under arrest for having shot up a store with a shotgun during a twenty-minute period the previous day, following an argument with the store's proprietor when he ordered one of the brothers to leave for alleged drunkenness earlier in the day. No one was injured in the shooting despite several customers and children being present. The store owner and one customer had returned fire with a pistol and small caliber rifle. Damage to the premises was slight.
The President assured the population that they had nothing to fear by disclosing information to Census takers in 1950, that the information would not be used to harm anyone.
The Weather Bureau predicted an unusually cold Easter for two-thirds of the country in April.
In Ellsmere Port, England, the local Chamber of Commerce determined that it could increase attendance of its monthly meetings by moving the location from a church, where only 25 to 80 had attended, to a pub.
In London, marriage registrars predicted a drop in Easter weddings and a boom in pre-Easter nuptials for the fact that the tax year ended April 5 and men who married before that date could claim an exemption for the whole year.
A part of chapter forty-one of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.
On the editorial page, "An Experiment Worth Watching" tells of the experiment to put general appropriations not fixed by law under a single omnibus bill rather than having separate bills for each agency and department. It was designed to encourage economy. The House Appropriations Committee had cut 1.2 billion dollars from the President's budget and the Republicans had proposed another three billion dollars in reductions, in combination to cut the deficit to a billion dollars.
It suggests that the Administration was not completely responsible for deficit spending, that the Congress had to shoulder its responsibility. With the single package bill on appropriations, the matter was now more transparent for the people to judge Congressional effort in that regard.
"Death Behind Bars" finds the tragedy at Spray, N.C., in which six prisoners arrested on public drunkenness charges had perished in a jailhouse blaze set either deliberately or accidentally by setting a mattress on fire. It was not unlike the fire in Sandia, N.M., at the Army guardhouse, which had killed fourteen prisoners recently when an oil stove exploded. It suggests that it was worse for people to die in a fire when locked up than under ordinary circumstances, as they had no means of escape.
It urges a complete investigation of detention facilities in the state to encourage fire safety and to fix blame in the Spray tragedy.
"The Fate of Captain Crommelin" finds it appropriate that Captain John Crommelin had been placed on indefinite furlough at half pay for his criticism of military unification the previous year, complaining that the Navy was being "nibbled to death". He eventually had admitted that he had distributed to the press confidential memos between admirals critical of defense policies. The action was better than hauling him before a court martial.
The Navy had simultaneously also issued a new policy discouraging officers on active duty from criticizing Defense Department policies. The piece finds it sounding as a gag order, but adds that ordinary rules in a democracy did not apply to the military, lest chaos would result.
"Nature—The Unpredictable" tells of the mercurial nature of local winter temperatures in 1950, having been balmy in January, then plunging to freezing and returning to spring-like weather on at least three different occasions. The changes had fooled the flora.
The elms, it explains, for instance, were "frothy with half-opened buds which, having felt the belated blasts, thought better of it and stopped short to wait for the sun again." But the daffodils, jonquils, camellias and boxwoods appeared oblivious to the changes.
The plants, it concludes, were eternal optimists and plunged forward despite nature's vicissitudes.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Another Sunlit Hour Is Promised", tells of the Legislature finally passing daylight savings time and the Governor about to sign the bill, causing the necessary readjustments to the extra hour of daylight each day in Kentucky.
National daylight savings time would not begin until 1967 and thus many states, including North Carolina until 1966, did not recognize it. It also sometimes varied by cities and towns within a state. Indeed, in places such as Bristol, Tenn.-Va., where the state line runs down the main street, Tennessee recognized daylight savings time while Virginia did not, resulting in closing time for the stores on one side of the street being an hour ahead of those on the other. And if the dime store was on the wrong side, you were in trouble.
Drew Pearson tells of a memorial at long last being in the works for Haym Solomon, Jewish financier of the Revolution. It had been authorized by Congress 12 years earlier but had been left to the people to plan and finance. Thus, it had taken a dozen years to form a society for the purpose.
Senator Wiliam Langer, the maverick Republican from North Dakota, had taken advantage of an opportunity recently to recess the Senate when no one was on the floor to object, causing Majority Leader Scott Lucas to scold Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran of Nevada for not having someone on the floor at all times to guard against such shenanigans. Senator McCarran, however, suggested that it was Senator Lucas's responsibility. The following day, Senator Lucas also chastised Senator Langer, albeit in more polite terms given that he was a Republican.
Mr. Pearson provides some examples of the fanciful notions of America which Moscow Radio was broadcasting to the Russian people in the hope they would believe it, such as that three-fourths of the American people did not earn enough income to make ends meet, that millions of American farmers were living in poverty, that tens of millions of Americans lived in slums, and that tens of thousands were itinerant workers seeking menial work in order to find employment—forced to toil at many jobs while on the run from the police lieutenant obsessed with their capture.
In Russia, the worker had to work 117 hours for a pair of shoes worth $5. Low-grade stewing beef which cost 19 cents a pound in American chain stores cost $5 per pound in Russia and was beyond the reach of low and middle class persons. The staple of life, a loaf of black bread, was still running 2.5 times the price it had been in 1940, while luxury items as caviar and good vodka had dropped below prewar price levels.
Marquis Childs tells of the House amendment to the Senate bill establishing the National Science Foundation, an amendment which would require the FBI to approve or disapprove of a Government employee's loyalty after performing an investigation and report. It would provide the FBI with unprecedented powers, akin to those of the Gestapo or the Russian secret police. J. Edgar Hoover had said that he did not want such power. The Justice Department had sent a strong letter to the House and Senate committees, making it plain that such a law would be an unprecedented grant of authority. It was to be hoped therefore that Representative Howard Smith of Virginia and others who had supported the amendment would assess it anew.
The amendment would also render anyone who had ever been a member of a "subversive organization", as declared by the Attorney General, ineligible for a science scholarship or employment by the Science Foundation. The Justice Department letter had also found this aspect unacceptable as disqualifying many otherwise highly qualified individuals for mere flirtation with such an organization in the past. The amendment would take away from the individual the right to defend one's self on a claim of disloyalty.
Mr. Childs had recently spent time with several university scientists and they had all agreed that there were too many strictures on Government research grants and the like already imposed for security reasons, causing qualified individuals to decline Government service.
He concludes that driving such persons from Government service was truly subversive of the well-being of the nation.
Tom Schlesinger of The News provides his weekly "Capital Roundup", telling of Senator Frank Graham having gone to the President to obtain a dry dock for Wilmington, to generate revenue by being able to repair ships, a necessary service for ships sailing along the coast. But no sooner than the Senator had secured the dock at $1 per year, the Navy came up with a plan to cure rust and corrosion by dumping chemicals in the water. It was now up to Governor Kerr Scott whether the State would accept the dock. If the State Port Authority would guarantee part of the five million dollars necessary for Wilmington to maintain the dock, it would relieve many of the problems.
Senator Clyde Hoey was not disturbed by the entry to the Senate race of Mayor Marshall Kurfees of Winston-Salem, saying that he was a personal friend.
Mary Price, originally from Greensboro, who had been in the news in summer, 1948 when she became a HUAC witness at the instance of Elizabeth Bentley, charging her with being a contact for a Russian spy ring, and then in fall, 1948, had run for Governor of North Carolina on the Progressive Party ticket of former Vice-President Henry Wallace, had drifted so far from the spotlight since that time that the prior December when she was the victim of a hit-and-run drunk driver who nearly killed her, there was no mention of her past in the report. She was presently convalescing in Florida after having worked for the CIO PAC and Czech Embassy in Washington in the meantime.
Former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, running in the Senate race against Senator Graham, had been in Washington the previous week and when asked about his platform, said that he supported "motherhood and the flag", as well as cutting the budget, and America in preference to Europe, including counting America's displaced persons first. (Bob was an early role model for Donny, including the inheritance of all his wealth and his claim to be for the people when the object of his actual advocacy was always only Bob and more Bob. He also had a penchant for the ladies...)
The liberal replacement for the McCarran bill regarding displaced persons would likely eventually pass, eliminating the discriminatory quotas which had come out of committee. Senator Hoey would likely vote against the revised measure while Senator Graham would vote in favor of it.
The House was planning an Easter vacation between April 6 and 17, possibly holding up appropriations bills.
Get your Easter bonnets early before they sell out.
Robert C. Ruark finds that the censorship of televised bullfighting in America was foolish in light of the fact that roller derbies, with females knocking each other around, and wrestling, "even with intimations of homosexuality", were acceptable fare. He hopes that some member of Congress would remedy the slight to bullfighting.
It was alright to sell magazines showing scantily clad women punching and pummeling one another, but not the bullfight.
He had covered wrestling in earlier days and had observed that the dedicated patron of such matches was not the sort of person he would have in his house, unless he were dealing in green mould.
He finds the proliferation of such fare on television indicative of a streak of sadism at work in the culture, vicariously released by observing wrestling, professional hockey, and roller derbies. It would shock the regular patron of the Spanish or Mexican bullfights.
So he advocates the bullfight as an
alternative for the television audience to seek vicarious sadism, as
it at least had a certain dignity and was strictly on the level.
Either the matador killed the toro or the toro killed the matador.
The famous bullfighter Manolete
Speaking of sport, as indicated earlier in the week, though not mentioned on The News front page, unranked CCNY would win the National Invitation Tournament in New York this night, defeating Bradley, ranked number one in the final Associated Press college basketball poll, 69 to 61. The teams would meet again, with the same result, on March 28 in the finals of the N.C.A.A. Tournament.
We note that in the 2017 N.C.A.A. Tournament thus far, half way through the second round, the A.C.C., with nine teams in the tournament originally, has not acquitted itself very well, holding a record of six wins and six losses, with three teams, UNC, Louisville, and Duke, left to play Sunday to complete the second round. We trust that it will not be a black Sunday as in 1979 for the A.C.C., as it was a black Saturday today with three good teams losing, and that all three remaining teams will be victorious tomorrow and hold the conference standard high. (Since writing this paragraph, Louisville has fallen to Michigan, leaving only Duke and UNC as representatives of the conference going forward.)
Even in the N.I.T., of three A.C.C. teams in, only one, Georgia Tech, remains after less than two full rounds of play.
As far as UNC is concerned, it is one down and five to go. We agree with President Obama on his final bracket predictions.
Don't tell anyone but he obtained
that bit of intelligence by wiretapping the Greek goddess of
basketball, Tarus Heelius Nippin Tuckus, who, according to Greek
mythology, gave the waters of Greece to all who sought them and
allowed men to jump that they might not be constrained to the earth
in worldly pursuits, thus giving rise to the game of basketball in
A.D. 1891 as a winter pursuit for boys to keep them out of the
troubled waters by releasing themselves from the spell of earth's
gravity until spring, when they could pursue the more traditional
Greek sporting contests—which did not include building walls
The color associated with her, for her transitory fiery red temper, invariably returning instanter to its usual state of equanimous sunshine, was orange, and thus...
...But, we digress. We must to Pamplona for early preparation, in anticipation of July—which was when Gettysburg occurred, neither either Manassas.
Framed Edition
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