The Charlotte News
Friday, March 24, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy was contesting the State Department's contention that the publicly unnamed man who was supposedly the top Russian spy in the country was not, as the Senator claimed, in the Department. Senator Millard Tydings, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating Senator McCarthy's charges, said the previous day that the man's employment history, as provided to him by the State Department, was that he had never been connected with the State Department, that for a period of four months, five years earlier, had been associated with a U.S. foreign mission. One time, he had addressed a group of State Department employees.
Senator McCarthy claimed that the report was a deliberate misstatement of the man's employment record, in "another one of those obvious attempts to twist and distort the truth." He claimed that the man had a desk at the State Department and was a top adviser on the Far East, at least until three or four weeks earlier.
The House Armed Services Committee voted to authorize 689 million dollars for military construction, to strengthen the nation's air defense over a period of years. The bill was an amended version of a Senate bill passed in January and would now proceed to the House floor.
Senators of the Appropriations subcommittee working on the military budget voted unanimously to call General Eisenhower to testify regarding his view that America had disarmed beyond the point of safety. In a speech the previous night at Columbia University, of which the General was president, he had expressed that view regarding some areas of defense.
Southern Senators claimed enough support to win a new vote regarding a controversial farm price support bill, without which, claimed Senator Richard Russell, the farm program would effectively be at the beginning of its end. A reconciled bill out of the Senate-House conference committee had been approved the day before regarding ending of price supports on potatoes after the current fiscal year, while allowing excess production of peanuts to be harvested without penalty as long as the excess was turned over to the Government at whatever price the peanuts would bring, and also affecting cotton. It had been passed by the House earlier the previous day. Northern Senators of potato producing states wanted reconsideration of the bill as many Senators had been absent at the time of the vote. The Southern Senators had tried unsuccessfully to prevent reconsideration.
In Brussels, a parade of 15,000 persons chanting, "Death to Leopold!" became violent as street cars were stoned, one set on fire, and an operator beaten. The Socialists had called a 24-hour general strike demanding that King Leopold II abdicate for his perceived role during the war in surrendering Belgium to the Nazis. He had been in exile in Germany since during the war after being imprisoned by the Nazis. A national plebiscite had favored his return to the throne, but the matter was still up to Parliament to determine finally, and the coalition Cabinet had resigned the prior Saturday when the Liberals refused to support a plan by the Christian Democrats to return the King to the throne.
Chrysler offered striking UAW workers a 30 million dollar pension package, rejected immediately by the workers.
In Winston-Salem, a woman drowned two of her children, ages two and a half and six months. She told the Sheriff that she acted because the man she had been dating cast her aside. She had five other children and had intended to drown one more, age five, and then commit suicide, but lost her nerve, saying that she did not have the heart to throw the little one back in. "We was goin' a-drownin'," she said. "There's no use in lyin' about it. I was worryin'." She was estranged from her husband and claimed the man she had been seeing had wrecked her home before dumping her. She was charged with murder.
A fire at the Croatan Frozen Food locker plant in Morehead City, N.C., destroyed the plant, worth $200,000.
In Charlotte, in the trial of the
man accused of hiring a man to blow up the WBT radio tower, final
arguments of both sides were presented and the case was expected to
go to the jury during the afternoon of this date. The prosecution had
presented a rebuttal witness who claimed to have seen the defendant
in Columbia, S.C., on January 12, the date on which the planter of the explosives claimed
to have been hired in Columbia by the defendant to blow up the tower. The
defendant had presented evidence showing that he was in Charlotte on
that date. A group of announcers for WBT also testified that at a
meeting in September, the defendant had stated that there was no need
to place guards around the WBT tower, for when the union local he
headed decided to do something, it would be big. He had also referred
to the WBT general manager, Charles Crutchfield, in a profane manner.
The defendant testified that he had written the FCC complaining of
giving the television broadcast rights to WBT as it was poorly
presenting television
The question of who had tipped police that the man was coming to Charlotte to dynamite the tower, enabling police to find the dynamite hidden in the woods, interdict the plot and arrest the man, was never answered during the trial. He had turned State's evidence after pleading guilty to his part in the plot.
A part of chapter fifty-four 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, "Railroads vs. Trucks" tells of the railroads asking for a decrease in freight rates in the state but the trucking industry objecting, holding up approval by the State Utilities Commission.
It finds selfish interests at work on both sides and offers that the Commission should render a decision based only on the public interest, that maintaining freight rates artificially high on the railroads only to protect trucking would not serve the public well. It therefore urges approval of the requested decrease.
"Wake Forest Lives On" finds that Wake Forest, N.C., was the ideal site for the Eastern Baptist seminary and would solve the problem of what to do with the Wake Forest College campus after the College moved to Winston-Salem—to become Reynolda College of Silas Creek. The College would also receive 1.6 million dollars for the campus from the Southern Baptist Convention, to be used in making the move.
Atlanta and Charlotte were prominent among the cities vying for the seminary but would gladly step aside, it suggests, in favor of Wake Forest.
"The Cardinal Is Mistaken" tells of Francis Cardinal Spellman stating, in response to the bill sponsored by Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina to deny Federal aid for busing to all school children, that in North Carolina religious schools were publicly funded but not Catholic schools. The statement was erroneous. The State contributed to some orphanage schools operated by religious denominations but those were part of the public school system and were subject to the same controls as other public schools. The same aid had been available to Catholic orphanages as long as they followed the same conditions, but they had declined.
"Eliminating Jail Hazards" tells of the Grand Jury investigating the tragedy of the jailhouse fire at Spray, which claimed six lives of persons incarcerated for public drunkenness, having made three recommendations, installation of an adequate ventilation system, provision of mattresses and bedding made of fire-resistant materials, and that persons jailed for drunkenness be placed in bare cells with heat and no flammable materials.
The piece thinks the recommendations sensible and that such precautions should be followed in all jails of the state.
A piece from the Atlanta Constitution, titled "Is a Vote Too Much to Ask?" urges that in fairness, the proposed Constitutional amendment sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., to make the electoral votes proportional to the popular vote, ought have its day on the floor of the House and be passed so that the people of the states could determine whether or not to ratify it.
Thus far, it had been bottled up in the House Rules Committee by a coalition of ultra-conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, after passing the Senate. The Republicans feared the amendment would harm the party, and the liberal Democrats believed it would dilute the Northern urban vote, where minorities provided the swing factor in presidential elections in electoral-rich states as New York and Pennsylvania.
Georgia Congressman Eugene Cox believed that the vote in the Rules Committee could be reversed and the bill brought to the floor.
Bob Sain of The News looks at sex crimes and tells of a bill before the New York Legislature to make certain specified forcible, violent sex crimes and sex crimes against small children subject to an indeterminate term of one year to life imprisonment, to be imposed only after psychiatric examination. At that point, the Department of Mental Hygiene, the Department of Corrections and the Board of Parole would study defendants who received such sentences and recommend, where feasible, therapeutic treatment, with psychiatric examinations at least once every two years. Governor Thomas Dewey had proposed the bill following recommendations by a blue ribbon panel which had studied the problem. The expressed experimental aim of the legislation was to develop a scientific method of treatment rather than strictly punishing the perpetrators of such heinous crimes, while insuring that the convicted would remain away from society as long as they posed a danger.
Mr. Sain finds it a good approach, that there had to be a balance struck between exacting societal vengeance, the desire to lock away permanently such offenders, and too much concern for providing treatment on the ground that the psychopathic personality was not responsible for the conduct.
Drew Pearson tells of Oklahoma Senator Elmer Thomas having told the press that chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, had testified that there was no prospect of war on the horizon with Russia. But in fact the General had said that, while there was no immediate prospect of a hot war for at least two years, or until the Russians had a chance to build up their nuclear stockpile and increase their industrial output, there was also no peace at hand and the 13 billion dollar defense budget was a cold war budget.
Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, who owned considerable oil and natural gas interests through his company Kerr-McGee, was no novice at politics and was trying to make sure that Northern cities would be paying more for natural gas to increase his profits, through the appointment as a Federal judge of W. R. Wallace of Magnolia-Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. The Senator might also profit from the sale of asphalt from Kerr-McGee for a proposed toll highway through Oklahoma. Application had been made to the RFC for a 35.5 million dollar loan for the project. The RFC wanted the local road authority to put up five to six million dollars first. If the road were made of concrete, it would last longer but would be more expensive to build. Kerr-McGee was bidding on the project but did not yet have the contract. Senator Kerr, a month after he had entered the Senate, had also gotten his brother appointed to the RFC in Oklahoma.
He notes that Senators with a direct pecuniary interest in a bill were supposed to recuse themselves from voting on it. Senator Kerr had lobbied hard for the natural gas bill and it remained to be seen whether he would vote.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of the city revealing that the Soviet claims of desiring peace were belied by the facts, as Russia was preparing East Germany for another cold war offensive, involving more military provocation than in the past. The Communist youth assault in May, as he had discussed the previous day, was the first such planned attack, designed to intimidate West Berliners and demonstrate a popular demand for liberation of the Western sectors. The Eastern zone election would then take place on October 15, after which a militantly Communist East German Government would be returned to office. Without Western counter-measures, the worst trouble could be foreseen in its immediate aftermath.
The East German puppet government would stage a new blockade, using units of the German "people's army" instead of Russian troops. The Russians would disclaim responsibility.
To try to thwart another Western airlift in response to a blockade, as in 1948-49, the Russians would seek to jam radar, which could prove effective in poor weather after October 15. If the Western allies were made to appear too weak to maintain their Berlin sectors, then the political situation throughout Western Europe would be weakened and the Soviets would have won their terror campaign.
But the Soviets were almost certainly too weak to succeed in a renewed blockade, as long as the U.S. forewarned that it would meet such an action with a hard response.
He recommends adopting a serious defense program to meet the Soviet build-up of its defenses, as mere Western firmness would be insufficient to stop the Soviet offensive otherwise.
Robert C. Ruark regards the seeding of the clouds by New York City to produce rain. He suggests that dry ice and silver iodide seemed fairly ordinary in the hydrogen bomb age. Moreover, legislators were trying to push through bills to restrict the practice. And there were too many props such as airplanes and two-way radios complicating that which was at base simple sorcery.
He says that in his native North Carolina, they once had itinerant conjurers who could even specify the amount of rain to be drawn from the heavens. One such rain-maker had exhorted the Lord to send no more than a "sizzle-sozzle", not a "rip-roarin' gully-washer".
Other methods of rain-producing magic included voodoo, in which scantily clad vestal virgins danced around by the dark of the moon as tom-toms played and the head voodoo man set forth incantations. American Indians conjured rain through dancing. An even simpler way was to go to a high hill and talk to the clouds, build a fire with herbs, owl feathers, newt livers, and various other animal parts, then sacrifice a small black goat.
He finds therefore too much modern effort surrounding the current attempt to produce rain in New York. "Oh, Papa Damballah! Times have certainly changed."
Whether or not there was any voodoo being practiced in Madison Square Garden the previous night in New York, CCNY, unranked in the final Associated Press basketball poll and having won the equally prestigious N.I.T. over number one Bradley on March 18, was victorious over Ohio State, number two in the final poll, 56 to 55, in the semifinals of the Eastern Regional. N.C. State, ranked fifth in the final poll, beat 1947 N.C.A.A. champion and number four Holy Cross, led by Bob Cousy, 87 to 74, in the other side of the bracket.
This night, in the Western Regional in Kansas City, unranked Baylor would nip unranked BYU, 56 to 55, and Bradley would beat number seven U.C.L.A., 73 to 59, in John Wooden's N.C.A.A. Tournament debut in his second year as head coach of the Bruins. The regional finals and consolation games would occur the following night, with the national finals between the two regional winners to take place the following Tuesday night in Madison Square Garden.
And in 2017, as far as UNC is concerned this night, it is three down and three to go, with no Wildcats, Zags, or Jayhawks apt to stand in the way of destiny
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.