The Charlotte News

Monday, March 20, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Ambassador Philip Jessup told the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges that he had "Communist affinity" that the Senator had shown a "shocking disregard for the interests" of the country, holding up an American envoy to the world as "a liar and traitor", and denied any such sympathies. He added that during his absence while on a survey mission to the Far East, he had been attacked by only two sources, Izvestia and Senator McCarthy. He suggested that while anyone believing in guilt by association might draw conclusions from that fact, he did not believe in that concept.

Senator McCarthy had based his charge in part on the fact that Dr. Jessup, in 1946 and 1944, had been listed as a sponsor of a dinner of the American-Russian Institute, which Dr. Jessup admitted but said that others, as H. V. Kaltenborn, also appeared among the hundred sponsors and that there was no reason for a loyal American not to sponsor such a dinner. The Senator had also cited Dr. Jessup's association for several years with the Institute of Pacific Relations, which he claimed was headed by an admitted Communist. Dr. Jessup responded that he was proud of the Institute's work, dedicated to increasing knowledge and friendship among the peoples of the Pacific area, and that when he first became involved with the Institute in 1933, its head was Newton Baker, former Secretary of War under President Wilson.

White House sources disclosed that the President was considering allowing the Foreign Relations Committee members to have limited access to the loyalty files of those persons accused by Senator McCarthy. The files would be inspected only at the White House and regarding only specific charges leveled by the Senator.

In Passaic, N.J., the Marine Corps League, a national organization of Marine veterans, gave Senator McCarthy its annual Americanism award for 1950, for "rousing the nation to the menace of bad security risks in our Government."

Be sure and throw a little Heinz 57 on that sucker when you present it.

In Key West, the President expressed his continued support for Secretary of State Acheson and said that any rumors of his replacement were unfounded.

Administration leaders were seeking to revive bipartisan foreign policy in the Congress, lagging since Senator Arthur Vandenberg had been ill. Former Senator Howard McGrath, now Attorney General, was seeking to forge new relationships anent the issue between Republicans and Democrats.

The first batch of about 75 American B-29's took off for Britain this date as part of the billion-dollar American military aid program for Western Europe under NATO.

The State Department said that the Chinese Communists had blocked a mass evacuation of Americans and other foreigners from China, refusing to let them board two landing craft at Shanghai to ferry them to an American ship. The Communist authorities believed that the two landing vessels, LST's used in the war, were not commercial craft as they in fact were.

Poland's Communist-led Government told the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to cut its military attache staff by ten persons.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to cut a billion dollars from foreign aid for the ensuing fiscal year and substitute an equivalent amount in surplus farm commodities.

The House Appropriations Committee tentatively approved all parts of an omnibus appropriations bill except that portion regarding defense expenditures, deferring until the following day action on the entire bill, which cut expenditures under the President's 42.4 billion dollar budget by more than a billion dollars. Meanwhile, bipartisan support was building for reducing the budget by another billion dollars.

Valentin Gubitchev, convicted in New York with Judy Coplon, of conspiracy to commit espionage, pursuant to his suspended sentence of 15 years, returned to Russia. He wished good luck to Ms. Coplon, sentenced to an active term of 15 years for attempting to provide him with secret Justice Department documents taken in the course of her employment at the Department. She had claimed that the two were lovers.

North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott acknowledged that the State Board of Elections may not have used the proper method on the prior Saturday in changing personnel of eight county election boards.

In Charlotte, the numbering began for the 1950 census, as census takers visited the first homes.

Parts of chapters forty-two and forty-three of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appear on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the 1949 book.

On the editorial page, "Two Dangerous Amendments" finds it a sign of the times that the Justice Department had to intervene to protect the citizens from creation of a Gestapo-like FBI to act as police, judge and jury of loyalty determinations of employees of the Government under the House-passed version of the National Science Foundation bill.

The piece agrees that the House bill would violate the intended function of the FBI as exclusively an investigative and reporting agency, as opposed to an adjudicatory body as well.

It recommends that the conference committee seeking to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the bill strike out the offending portions to prevent the administration or one of its agencies from having the power of a dictatorship in a misguided effort to safeguard security.

"Matter of Necessity" finds that Secretary of State Acheson's seven-point plan for peace with the Russians was not likely to be accepted by them, as he understood, but was nevertheless necessary as stating the nation's case to the world. It provides the seven points, which included finishing the treaties with Japan, Austria, and Germany, ceasing police state tactics in the satellite countries and allowing free elections, ceasing tactics to overthrow legitimate governments, ending obstruction at the U.N., approaching control of atomic energy in good faith, observing rules of respect for diplomats and cessation of use of diplomats for spying, and ceasing distortion of the aims of the U.S.

More than mere words would be necessary to enable the two systems to coexist peacefully. It would require, ventures the piece, strengthening of the U.S. position throughout the non-Communist world, including implementation of the President's "Point Four" plan for agricultural and industrial improvement of underdeveloped nations. The country also had to remember how to make war. But words, too, were necessary if Russia and the world were to understand the U.S. position.

"Coal Strike Aftermath" finds persuasive the word of an expelled local UMW president from Canton, O., who claimed that John L. Lewis had provided secret signals to the miners to remain off the job while publicly telling them to return to work in compliance with the court order of February 11, thus avoiding a contempt citation.

In a complaint to the NLRB, he claimed that he had been expelled from his position and fined $50,000 by UMW for urging his men to return to work. The piece suggests that perhaps the hearing on the claim would reveal whether Mr. Lewis in fact provided such secret signals.

"For Body and Soul" recognizes the death of Charles C. Beam of Charlotte, who had left his modest estate to the Presbyterian Hospital and First Presbyterian Church, as his wife and two sisters had predeceased him. It finds the fact testimony to his generosity and his concern for ministering to both the body and soul.

A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "'Hard to Beat'", tells of UNC faculty member Arthur M. Whitehall, Jr., writing an article in The Saturday Evening Post titled "What's So Bad About a Professor's Job?", making the case that for those for whom a "way of life" was as important as "making a living", teaching had strong appeal, that a professor's life was hard to beat for "plain downright satisfaction with a total work situation".

The piece finds that while teachers were poorly paid, it was good to see a good teacher praising the merits of the teaching profession in terms of reward and satisfaction, rather than grading it strictly on financial remuneration.

Drew Pearson tells of the National Association of Manufacturers having opened a campaign recently to defeat the Truman Administration. They declared that FDR, Truman, UAW president Walter Reuther, and their ilk, were the "avowed enemies" of American business. They opposed socialism as a worse menace than Communism. They urged business executives to pay attention to The Road Ahead, by Roosevelt-hater John T. Flynn. The book had even become required reading at Holton Arms School for girls in Washington.

Republicans were becoming increasingly embarrassed regarding Senator Joseph McCarthy's inability to support his claims of 207 or 205 or 81 or 57 Communists in the State Department. Thus far at the hearings investigating his claims, he had managed to show no such person still in the employ of the Department. He rushed into situations without the facts, just as he had used his place on the bench in 1946 during his successful campaign for Senator without resigning, leading to his nearly being disbarred for violations of ethical canons of the judiciary. Mr. Pearson quotes from the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision which found his conduct unethical while not disbarring him. Mr. McCarthy at the time had sneered at the Board of Bar Commissioners, who had recommended his disbarment, by calling them a "disgrace to every honest, decent lawyer" in the state and recommending that they resign.

In contrast to the Senator was Governor Earl Warren of California. The Board of Regents of the University of California had sought to impose a required loyalty oath of faculty members, which Governor Warren, as a member of the Board, refused to approve. Such fairness was why he had garnered the majority of Democratic votes, as well as those of his own Republican Party, in the 1946 gubernatorial election.

Col. Robert McCormick, isolationist publisher of the Chicago Tribune, had recently gone to Bombay and was asked about the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, responding that he had never heard of it until 24 hours before arriving in India. One Indian reporter then asked him sarcastically whether such ignorance was not responsible for American lack of prestige in the Far East.

Stewart Alsop tells of the RNC having collected during the first quarter of the year only $148,000, whereas the DNC had collected $675,000, being counter-intuitive to the traditional notions of the Democrats as the poor man's party and Republicans being of the rich. They were now occupying reverse roles. Even with the relatively poor performance, however, the Republicans were better off than a year earlier when they were practically broke. During 1948, the RNC collected only $260,000 while the Democrats received 1.6 million. The Republicans in that period had $770,000 in expenses.

The result would be that in the 1950 mid-term elections, the GOP would be at a distinct disadvantage. Only in Boston had the large contributors made contributions to the Republicans. Big business contributors, however, were practically absent.

By contrast, the Democrats received large sums from American industry and finance. Yet, Mr. Alsop regards it as not indicative of business having turned exclusively to the Democrats, even if an important and aggressive section of it was heavily contributing thereto. Rather, the large contributors from business were simply withholding contributions from the Republican Party. Some strategists believed the change was because the GOP had ceased being faithful to the principles of Mark Hanna from the turn of the century. The Republicans' recently produced "statement of principles" was an effort to restore that lost faith.

Robert C. Ruark tells of New York Yankees television and radio announcer Dizzy Dean bringing the language back to basics, as it had been getting too fancy of late. Formerly a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, Mr. Dean, since his retirement from baseball, had become an announcer on the radio to the consternation of grammarians who believed he was undoing all of the progress since "the invention of the parsed sentence." His use of the language was "practical rather than effete, and architectural rather than artistic." Stan Musial "swang" at the ball, with a different nuanced meaning from "swung". A player "slud" into third base, having a different connotation from "slid". He had once said that the players were returning to their "respectable positions", which Mr. Ruark took to mean that they were then earning a decent living in a clean sport.

Mr. Dean had been an excellent pitcher at the height of his career and, when he was not, he could talk his way out of it. Once when he had stubbed his toe during the all-star game in the late Thirties, he claimed that he had to favor it, causing him to strain his pitching arm.

Mr. Ruark concludes that having Mr. Dean on the airwaves was a boon to education rather than a hindrance. "The press agents and bureaucrats have nice-nellied the tongue to a thin shadow of its former robust self, and before long all our kids will be using 'contact' as a verb unless we begin to rub a little salt into the language." He regards Mr. Dean as the James Joyce of the sports broadcasters, sounding "awful round and ripe and pretty when he says it."

We once listened occasionally to old Dizzy Dean on the tv and we done slud, swang, and strunned, to the point where we didn't cotton to baseball too much no more. You don't get them bruises around the eye sockets and fat lips playing football and basketball, or running on the track.

Anyway, it's now two down and four to go. UNC has got to win it all because that is the only route left to prevent the "best conference in the country" this year from making fools of everyone who thought it so a week ago.

A letter writer favors establishment of downtown parking facilities in Charlotte. Winston-Salem had recently bought a downtown church and office building and razed them to make way for a parking lot near the Robert E. Lee Hotel. Oakland, California, had recently built a downtown parking garage costing over a million dollars. He cites several other such projects across the nation, in Atlanta, Houston, Richmond, Los Angeles, Washington, Dayton, and Miami. He says that he owned no downtown land which he could sell for such a purpose but urges the project as a boon to business.

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