The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 2, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Washington, the Federal court found the UMW not guilty of the civil and criminal contempt for which the court had cited it on February 11 for failure to obtain compliance by the miners with the court's temporary restraining order ending the strike pending a hearing on the injunction. The judge rendered his decision two minutes after the end of the court trial, finding no cause for sustaining the contempt, apparently in light of the evidence presented by the union that it had sought repeatedly to obtain compliance and could not control the actions of the miners to continue the strike on their own.
There were indications that the Government's next move might be seizure of the coal mines.
In a press conference, the President said again that he had no intention of going to Moscow or to any other foreign locale for a conference with foreign leaders, had no comment on Senator Brien McMahon's call the previous day for a NATO conference to draft a plan for atomic control to be presented to a U.N. Assembly meeting in Moscow. He also had no comment on the Senate investigation of Senator Joseph McCarthy's charge that there were Communists in the State Department, but said that he would cooperate. He did not say whether he would turn over loyalty board reports. He also said that there was no truth in the charge that defense cuts had weakened the nation's defense.
In New York, the Government rested its case in Federal court in the trial of the espionage charges against Judy Coplon and Valentin Gubitchev, for Ms. Coplon's alleged attempt to provide the co-defendant with secret documents she had taken from her job in the Justice Department. Ms. Coplon had been found guilty earlier in Washington for illegally taking the documents.
The Export-Import Bank granted a 20-million dollar loan to Yugoslavia, the second such loan in six months, and appeared ready to provide more if needed.
Tom Fesperman of The News interviews North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott, visiting Charlotte, informs that the Governor had explained that the dirt road to his farm in Haw River had not yet been paved pursuant to the rural roads program because he had told his neighbors who complained of their bad roads that his road could await their own being paved. He assured that nearly every road in Mecklenburg County would be paved by the time the program was completed.
The Governor believed that the entry of Raleigh attorney Willis Smith to the Senate race against interim incumbent Senator Frank Graham, whom he had appointed a year earlier after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton, would not hurt Senator Graham much. He said that the cry that Senator Graham was sympathetic to Communists was merely hurling of the new cuss word.
The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing Duke Power Co. bus drivers in six cities of the state including Charlotte, had not yet agreed to the terms for setting up a fact-finding board, as part of their agreement in principle with the proposal of Mayor Victor Shaw of Charlotte to set up such a board and have a 60-day truce to work out a settlement of the dispute over wages and establishment of a pension fund.
In Monson, Me., eight members of a family died in a house fire originating in the kitchen, while in Kenosha, Wis., another family of five died in a fire at their frame cabin in a trailer camp, started apparently by an oil heater.
In Manchester, N.H., in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder for euthanizing a terminally ill patient, the State's principal witness, a doctor who was chief medical examiner for New York City, said that he believed the victim was killed by the defendant's injection of air to her veins. He said that there was not apparent any other cause for sudden death at the time beyond the embolism caused by the injection.
Blustery, cold March winds whipped across wide areas from the Dakotas to the South Atlantic states. Fair weather was reported over the Western half of the country, with 66 recorded at Miami, 45 in New Orleans, and 55 in Los Angeles.
In Columbus, O., the Welfare Department determined that if a family owned a television set, they were not entitled to welfare payments, as it was apparent many families were using part of their payments to pay installments on tv sets.
They were being relieved from relief for having sought too much relief from the relief.
The Federal Board of Geographic Names approved the changes of Showlow, Ariz., to Show Low, the name of a card game, and Put in Bay, O., back to its original Put-in-Bay.
That'll show you to try and change their names.
Part of chapter eight of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the serialization by The News of the book.
On the editorial page, "The Persistent Stepchild" discusses the opposition by the Americans for Democratic Action to the proposed Lodge amendment to the Constitution to make the electoral vote proportional to the popular vote in each state, that opposition being based on the belief that it would empower the South at the expense of liberals for a generation to come.
The piece finds the ADA position therefore supportive of a sort of national gerrymandering which could suppress minority votes. The amendment, by contrast, was designed to provide empowerment to each person voting in the popular vote, would effectively enfranchise Southerners traditionally disfranchised for the fact of overwhelming conservative Democratic voting in the one-party states, preventing the minority from having any effect on national elections.
It finds that the amendment would not likely cause Southerners to begin to vote their actual, individual convictions on national issues, as the Southern Democrats routinely climbed aboard the national party line despite it not being concordant with their views at the state level. State and local organization was too ingrained for that change to take place rapidly.
Thus, it finds the ADA position unduly alarmist.
Don't you worry. Mr. Nixon, even without that amendment proposed by his 1960 running mate, will be comin' around again about 18 years down the pike and take care of all of it fer ye. You'll be happy as can be as a new Republikan—or a little crypto-Klansman, as the case may be. A-cheating we will go.
"Laughter in the Kremlin" finds that Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had admitted providing atomic secrets to the Russians from 1943 to 1947 for receipt of $400 and was sentenced at the Old Bailey earlier in the week to 14 years in prison, was likely responsible for the Russians having developed the atomic bomb and so wonders whether historians 500 years hence would realize his importance. It speculates that without the secret, the Russians might have been more compliant in talks on control of atomic energy. If the country had lost the Cold War, then Dr. Fuchs was one of the persons responsible.
The piece finds it remarkable that an appeal was being considered by his defense counsel and suggests that Dr. Fuchs never had it so good, that the Western world regarded the sentence as unduly light given the magnitude of the crime.
It concludes by suggesting the title of the piece in response to the sentence.
Don't worry. You will get your blood soon enough, notwithstanding the fact, as they have already told you numerous times, that everything a nuclear physicist needed for building the bomb, besides the actual materials, was contained in the Smyth Report, made public by the U.S. Government, with the concurrence of Manhattan Project head, Maj. General Leslie Groves, and the Army, in August, 1945. And the Russians had access to their own stores of uranium and employed slave labor to mine it.
Was it really, therefore, Dr. Fuchs and the Rosenbergs who were to blame for giving away the secrets or were they merely handy scapegoats for the inevitable sieve in a democracy, not wedded to absolute secrecy for the prospect of then becoming a police state as totalitarian as the enemy being fought?
"A Lad to Lead the Land" tells of an eleven-year old boy who remained on the job at his father's newsstand after the elder had collapsed and was being revived by firemen across the street, continued at the post, in tears, even after being told his father had died. He said that they had the stand for only two years and that his father would not want him to leave it unattended.
The piece finds the courage thus displayed to be that which made the country strong and sees in the story the hope that the welfare statism and socialism causing so much concern in the country, would not, after all, be triumphant.
We find in the story the breeding of callousness in callow youth. Maybe the father, hard-bitten and determined to make a buck even at the expense of his own health, was better off demised.
The new conservatism on the march at The News is ever-threatening to take over and eliminate its former liberal tradition.
A piece from the Atlanta Constitution, titled "The Brannan Plan Is Deceptive", finds the plan's claims that it would lower consumer food prices while maintaining the farmer's support level on perishable produce to ignore the fact that consumer prices would fall less than half of that to farmers, as farmers received less than 50 cents on the dollar from retail prices, meaning farm costs would have to diminish by 30 percent for the consumer to get 15 percent off food prices. Meanwhile, the farmer would be subject to more stringent controls on production. Furthermore, the Agriculture Department could not estimate the cost of the program and observers did not believe it would be any less than the cost of the present price support program, running to 3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and expected to rise to six billion the following year.
It finds the program therefore unacceptable to farmers and consumers alike.
Bill Sharpe presents his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers from around the state. Pete Ivey of the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem tells of a man in the Eastern part of the state who was not yet decided on whether to throw his hat into the ring for clerk of court, inquired of a friend whether he had heard any talk of his being a candidate, whereupon the friend told him that he had, that he had mentioned the possibility at the general store and that everyone had laughed.
The Pee Dee Advocate tells of the defendant on trial for stealing cotton who told the defense attorney during direct examination that he was born in McColl, S.C., grew up in McColl, and, when asked where he resided lately, replied, the county jail.
The Moore County News tells of sitting down in the barber shop for a shoe shine from the usual shine artist, and opening the newspaper, only to realize after a time that the shine was more brutal than the usual, eventually looking down to see the polish on his socks and trouser cuffs, finally realizing that the shine was being provided by State Senator Wilbur Currie, who declared that the job paid better than that of State Senator, and therefore, the column declares, Senator Wilbur would have its support in the next election.
And so, so on, and so forth.
Drew Pearson tells of an important income tax fraud case, regarding two men accused of cheating on their taxes from profits realized off the sale of jewelry at Army post exchanges during the war, having been closed without prosecution the prior June. But after the column, the previous December, had published a story indicating that the former law partner of the U.S. Attorney who was supposed to prosecute the case was the defendants' defense lawyer, the Government, despite the denials by the U.S. Attorney of any conflict of interest, reopened the case and the two men had just been indicted.
The Council of Economic Advisers had just published a significant three-page report on the country's economic problems, saying that the major problem was the sharp rise in unemployment, albeit offset in part by a high level of home construction, business loans and bank clearings, leaving the situation not so alarming though in need of close study. The problem lay in expanding the economy fast enough to absorb the increasing number of people entering the job market, increased by 1.3 million in 1949. They recommended a program to stimulate business investment, planning for large-scale public works and increased attention to local areas with high unemployment, plus continued Government spending and the rapid settlement of the coal strike. He notes that few economists agreed that the situation was not alarming, and that men over 40 with families were the hardest hit in the unemployment picture.
During the House "filibuster" of the Wednesday morning attempt to get the FEPC bill on the floor for two hours of special debate and consideration, after it had been locked up in the Rules Committee since the previous summer, reactionary Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, who had sought to lead the active filibuster to block the attempt, was silenced by Congressman Andrew Jacobs of Indiana, saying that he was tired of "this Holy Willie prayer", reminiscent of the poem by Robert Burns regarding Holy Willie, who proclaimed to the Lord that he was not so wicked as his neighbors. He said that he was tired of hearing Mr. Rankin impute chicanery to those with whom he disagreed. He said that Mr. Rankin favored enforcement of Taft-Hartley against John L. Lewis, believed in the "right to work" in that dispute, but now, with regard to FEPC, was not so much in favor of that right. Mr. Rankin then remained quiet for fifteen minutes.
RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had, in a little over six months, pulled the GOP out of debt and put more than $200,000 in its coffers, whereas, when narrowly elected to the position, the party had been bankrupt.
Robert C. Ruark again plumps for a personal subsidy as a writer, for all the rejected pieces he could not hawk, to match the subsidies being given to farmers for their overproduction of potatoes and eggs, leading to waste of taxpayer money, as well those provided oil producers as a depletion allowance, race horse owners, shipping lines and airlines.
He concludes: "Money. Gimme money. Gimme lots of money. Gimme other people's money. Subsidy for one, subsidy for all. And that, Washington, means lovely little me."
Marquis Childs discusses the California primary races for the Senate and gubernatorial nominations in both major parties. In the Senate Democratic race, two-term incumbent Senator Sheridan Downey faced a formidable challenge from Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was campaigning all over the state. Senator Downey, who had originally been a populist favoring a pension for every retired person every Thursday, was now for the major farm and power interests in the Central Valley. He had accused former Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes and current Reclamation Commissioner Michael Straus of conspiring to oust the former Commissioner, Harry Bashore, from his position and had appeared at Senate hearings arranged to investigate the matter. Mr. Ickes was angry about the claim and accused Senator Downey of "unabashed perjury" in connection with his Senate testimony. Mr. Ickes was therefore likely to campaign actively for Ms. Douglas.
On the Republican side, Congressman Richard Nixon would be the likely nominee, though facing an active challenge from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Fred Hauser. Mr. Nixon had obtained notoriety for his role in pressing the perjury prosecution of Alger Hiss before the Grand Jury, testifying in the proceedings in December, 1948.
In the gubernatorial race, two-term incumbent Governor Earl Warren was planning to run in both party primaries, and in the Democratic primary, which he had won as well as his own party's primary in 1946, was expected to do well though his opponent would be James Roosevelt, who had a popular liberal following.
Of course, we know the outcomes in
the land, as Mr. Childs describes it, of the "giant geraniums
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.