The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 28, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy was challenged by a State Department employee, Haldore Hanson, whom the Senator had accused of being a Communist, to make the assertion outside the Senate so that he could be sued for defamation. Mr. Hanson testified to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the Senator's claims that he was not a Communist and never had been or ever belonged to any organization dubbed subversive by the Attorney General. He was the fourth person accused by the Senator who had come before the subcommittee and denied the Senator's claims.
Near Ottawa, Ontario, U.S. Ambassador to Canada Lawrence A. Steinhardt, a veteran diplomat, and four others died in the fiery crash of a U.S. Embassy C-47 transport plane, occurring shortly after takeoff of a flight from Ottawa to the U.S. One Air Force sergeant survived. The weather was clear at the time and witnesses said that the plane appeared to explode shortly after departure.
Britain's Labour Government ordered further austerity measures, consisting of additional cuts in purchases from the U.S. and other dollar countries to preserve its eroding dollar reserve. It planned to cut the dollar expenditure in half in 1950 by cutting imports from dollar countries by 26 percent. A survey of the economic picture had reported that the dollar shortage would continue to be a problem for many years to come.
The Ambrose Lightship at the entrance to New York Harbor was rammed at 4:04 a.m. by an inbound passenger and mail vessel, and five Coast Guard cutters were dispatched to aid the Lightship. There were no casualties reported among the fifteen Coast Guardsmen manning the Lightship. Though listing, there was no danger of it sinking or overturning.
The second article of a three-part-series by News Editor Pete McKnight regarding an interview with Democratic Senatorial candidate Willis Smith tells of the Raleigh attorney having thought in 1931 that he was done with elective politics after leaving the State House as Speaker. Initially, he had not been interested in advice of friends that he run against incumbent interim Senator Frank Graham, as he had been a friend to Mr. Graham when he served as University president and did not understand the desire of the people for a middle of the road alternative candidate. But he finally acquiesced, pushed by the volume of mail received urging him to run, to provide another alternative to former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds for those who wanted to vote for someone perceived as being more moderate than Senator Graham, perceived as a liberal.
Governor Kerr Scott told a press conference that he believed the big corporations were trying to intervene in the Senate election and defeat Senator Graham, as they had selected every previous Senator from the state since the turn of the century until his appointment a year earlier of Senator Graham to the seat vacated by the death of newly elected Senator J. Melville Broughton. The people, he said, were fed up with the domination of machine politics in the state.
Not mentioned on the page, unranked
CCNY duplicated its feat of winning the N.I.T. on March 18 by again
defeating number one Bradley, this time by a narrower margin, 71-68,
in the N.C.A.A. Tournament championship game, played
Good luck to all of the Final Four schools in 2017, as they all have weathered their fair share of storms to get to this vaunted position, two never having been and one not since 1939—but most of our Well-wishing luck is extended necessarily to UNC, in its twentieth appearance in the final games.
If they don't win, there is no telling what is going to take place out there in the universe. You just do not tamper with the prophecies of Tarus Heelius Nippin Tuckus, the Greek goddess of basketball. The last time some mere mortals tried it, the fall from the Garden...
Well, enough said.
Storms in the Midwest, South, and Great Plains brought snow, rain, sleet, hail, floods, dust, blizzards, and gale force winds. Colder temperatures resulted and heavy fog enshrouded New York City.
The Census starts Saturday. You
don't count unless you're counted
A part of chapter sixty 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, "What Now, McCarthy?" finds that Senator McCarthy had not provided a shred of evidence to support his claim that Owen Lattimore was the top Russian spy in the country and that until recently had been in the employ of the State Department. He had not been employed at the State Department for five years and there was no evidence of any sentiment related to Communism beyond his intense anti-Communism.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had analyzed the information in the loyalty files pertaining to the persons accused by Senator McCarthy and told the members of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the claims that he could find no basis for them.
The piece finds, presciently, that the Senator's attacks constituted "one of the shoddiest and most irresponsible exhibitions of sordid, underhanded politics" that the nation had ever witnessed and regarded it as a "complete fiasco", that the Senator's own reputation would suffer more in the end than those whom he had attacked and labeled Communists or Communist sympathizers.
"A Time for Leadership" recommends the Washington Post editorial reprinted on the page anent the need for leadership by the Administration at a time when its policies appeared to be coming apart. The better qualified members of the Administration had departed for the most part and had been replaced by persons of lesser ability in most cases. The foreign policy was being questioned as to whether it would enable the U.S. to continue as a world leader in the postwar period and General Eisenhower had questioned the level of reduction of defense in terms of its impact on security. The President, meanwhile, insisted on pushing his domestic program forward, despite deficit financing.
It finds that the Post had summed it well by suggesting that drift by the White House left the country rudderless. The piece hopes that the President would soon realize the poor leadership he was providing.
"Simple But Effective" tells of a County Commissioner who had a plan for inexpensive revaluation of real property on a fair and equitable basis, by the City and County each assigning one tax appraiser to the task, to work alongside the experts hired by the City and County for the purpose of providing methods and procedures for the job. The piece thinks the plan reasonable.
"Voice from the Hills" congratulates the Asheville Citizen on its eightieth anniversary, founded by Randolph Abbott Shotwell as The North Carolina Citizen in the midst of a virtual mountain wilderness. The newspaper had published a 220-page edition in which it told the story of the tremendous growth which had occurred in the area during its history. Established with a circulation of 1,200, it now served 29,500 readers. The piece praises the newspaper for its journalism, tuned to the needs of the citizens of the Western part of the state.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "The Rest of Ike's Speech", regards General Eisenhower's address at Columbia where he was president, having stated that disarmament had led in some areas of defense to compromise of security. He went on, however, to speak in favor of disarmament while building up the police powers of the U.N. and encouraging scientific and technical assistance to underdeveloped nations as under the President's "Point Four" program.
So, the piece laments, it was unfortunate that the headlines concerned only his negative statement when in fact the overall tenor of the speech painted a more positive picture of the times, in which he foresaw no imminent recurrence of world war.
As indicated in the editorial above, a piece from the Washington Post examines the "rudderless" state of the country for lack of leadership from the President, describing the condition prevalent as "malaise"—a term which would later be used by the press to characterize the late Seventies under the leadership of President Carter, who often praised President Truman. (Perhaps, the timing of the applications of the term was not entirely coincidental as such a societal condition tends to result after a war in which much or all of the societal engine, psychologically, industrially, economically, is devoted to fighting and winning the war, breeding expectations for the period of peace which often cannot match the reality of the aftermath and the inevitable attempt by much of the society to effect a return to "normalcy" and relegate the wartime period and its harsh memories quickly to the past, leading in turn to a feeling of having lost purpose, that the gratification which could be obtained, directly or vicariously, from won battles in war could not be so easily calculated and quantified in peace, making achievement ephemeral, in the abstract rather than the concrete, that the perception and ready acceptance of a readily identifiable common enemy had become such a custom that it was hard to shake as provender to nurture collective purpose, a feeling of accomplishment and resulting esteem at defeating that common enemy; thus, malaise. Thus, to resurrect the common enemy, to restore the lost sense of purpose, HUAC's witch-hunts and McCarthyism became popular, if controversial, between 1947 and 1954; the creation of the "Evil Empire" in the Eighties as a departure in rhetoric if not fact from earlier attempts at Detente with the Russians.)
It finds the reason for the problem to be that the leadership was not measuring up to the "potential fellowship". Only the President could provide the necessary leadership to mend the problem.
Secretary of State Acheson, it finds, did not have the popular or party standing to exert such leadership on foreign policy, though the President had given him the podium for doing so. Moreover, Republicans, led by Senator McCarthy, were trying to destroy Mr. Acheson, as the April meeting of foreign ministers loomed. And Mr. Acheson had never wanted this responsibility, believed that the President ought control the direction of foreign policy, found the independence of Secretary of State James Byrnes to have been improper.
Eventually, the division in the Government would trickle down to the people. The evidence of neglect at the top came with the empty greeting of the President's casual announcement regarding continued exploration of the hydrogen bomb development. While the State Department and the President insisted that the country's policy did not change because of the news of atomic detonation by the Soviets, the attitude of Americans and Europeans had. Even the belated start of shipping arms under the military aid program had not offset the uneasiness in Europe.
It finds, however, that the President was not entirely to blame for the void in leadership, that he had exerted it in 1947-48 with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and once again with his "Point Four" program for technical assistance to underdeveloped nations, unveiled in his 1949 inaugural address. But around him, there was lacking creative drive.
So, it finds that the needs were for reassertion of executive leadership in world affairs and more dynamic staff work at the White House and State Department to keep American leadership primed for the mission of world leadership.
Too much partisanship was crowding out patriotism and, it posits, much more of it would cause the country to appear to the world as a blinded Samson pulling down the pillars upon itself.
Drew Pearson tells of important Congressional votes sometimes being cast in closed-door sessions, as when Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma cast his vote with the Southern Senators on the cotton acreage bill. The Senator had so alienated the farm vote that he was struggling to get it back by favoring this bill, which increased the acreage allowed to cotton farmers whose winter wheat had been destroyed by green bugs. The plan would only help Oklahoma farmers as it was the only state which produced cotton in quantity and also suffered the wheat loss from green bugs. He insisted on the plan as a quid pro quo for adding his crucial vote in the Senate conference seeking to reconcile the bill with the House version. The vote was otherwise tied at 3 to 3. After it passed the conference, it was blocked, however, on the floor by a technical maneuver, but Senator Thomas was still lobbying for it.
He notes that Senator Thomas had used his influence the previous year to force down wheat prices at the same time he was speculating on wheat through a surrogate.
Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire had lectured a few bored colleagues regarding the ridiculous policy procedure of the body, suggesting that it needed to be changed so that words of wisdom of Senators would not fall on deaf ears.
As another grass roots effort to win the peace, six orphans of American war heroes were being sent to Europe by the VFW ladies auxiliary, to return with a similar orphan from each of several countries to tour the U.S.
Voice of America was penetrating the iron curtain, much of it by word of mouth since few owned radios in Eastern Europe. He provides excerpts from letters received in response to Voice of America, from a group of Russians, an individual Russian, a German just returned from a four-year stint in a Russian prison, and a group from East Germany, all praising the broadcasts and showing skepticism toward Russian propaganda. One had asked whether it was true that a capitalist with investments in five different states could vote five times, as it was so represented in school as the reason for defeat in the U.S. of the Communist Party.
Joseph Alsop, in Frankfurt, finds the U.S. losing the cold war in Germany, that unless remedial steps were taken, it would be lost in two to three years at most. The danger was not in the revival of German nationalism but rather in the adoption by the Kremlin of new cold war tactics of terror, which it had the strength to make work.
The Soviet Army in the Eastern zone numbered 250,000, wholly engaged in combat training as the routine occupation duties had been turned over to the puppet East German police. They had new equipment and a supporting airfield net. Moreover, a new German army was being trained which would be comprised of eight to twelve divisions, eventually having an intimidating psychological impact on West Germany.
In the face of this build-up, the U.S. was not marshaling any significant defensive capability, the claims of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding. The Russians were so confident that they were preparing for the results of their victories, providing the largest German industrialists with generous business offers. The Russians were aware of the Western inadequacy and acting with the confidence of a force knowledgeable of its superiority.
The West Germans, as the rest of Western Europe, were unprepared. But unless they despaired, the Soviet preparations would come to nothing. Yet, they were already edging close to despair and a single American failure could push them over that edge, enabling, if it occurred, all of Germany to fall under the Soviet grip.
Mr. Alsop offers that this was the central problem which ought be occupying the leaders in Congress, more than the charges of domestic Communist infiltration made by Senator McCarthy.
Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the thirtieth in his series of weekly articles on childhood education, provides a checklist for parents to determine whether their child was ready to start school in the fall. The list included whether prospective students could cross the street on their own, hang up their own coats and hats, go to the bathroom by themselves, tie their own shoes and sashes, and were possessed of the knowledge of their full names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Such were tasks which could be taught at home.
Well, there were other things, too,
such as knowing the square root of 16, the play in which the line "Et
tu Brute" occurs, who is buried in Grant's Tomb and where it is
located, the cause of the Chicago fire, who won the battle of
Gettysburg, and how many words were in the famous address
commemorating the national cemetery, who originally delivered it and
on what date—and not to pay radiator fees to the older students
who harass the younger with these sorts of hazing questions, upon
failure to answer within five seconds. Also, little boys must be
taught not to play with the little girls' hair
The most important thing, he continues, was to insure that the child was in good health before starting school, and the next thing was to provide a sense of independence. To accomplish the latter, parents could give their child little chores around the house, emptying waste baskets, pushing the carpet sweeper, changing the transmission on the car, putting on a new roof, milking the chickens, and such. The child could be sent on errands to the store and sent to other homes to play with children, or taken to story hour at the library—the latter so that they could learn some of the answers to the hazing questions.
He had written earlier about the
value of the parent reading to the young child as a means of
increasing attention span
The parent ought provide the impression that school would be a wonderful place where the child would have a good time.
Well, don't lie to the child. That
isn't going to help improve the miserable, traumatic experience which
we all have in twelve years of school. Such undue, rosy
characterizations only breed false expectations, quickly dashed by
the second day, making the child feel that he or she is peculiar for
not enjoying the sadistic hours of ennui and anomie whiled away in
school malingering, awaiting only the bell
He recommends never saying to the youngster, "Just wait until you get in school as the teacher will straighten you out."
One mother came to school every day for the first week until her child went to her and pushed her away, telling her to go home. He suggests it as an example of parents sometimes being too protective of the apron strings.
One other thing: If you encounter some older boys, one possessed of a bullwhip, one afternoon in the first grade, and they order you to go to an elderly woman's door and say some nasty words on penalty of being whipped if you do not obey, do as we did, and pretend in earnest to accept, walk toward the door nonchalantly, and then veer away at the last moment and walk on toward home. Don't run. Otherwise, similar to an angry dog, they will pursue. They will never bother you again.
Use your native wits, not television and movies, to handle bullies. The bullies are operating off scenes from television and movies and pride themselves on being hep to every new wrinkle which is presented from the night before, or, if being clever, last week. When confronted with one they have not seen, they know not what next to do.
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