Monday, March 6, 1950

The Charlotte News

Monday, March 6, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that about a third of the nation's soft coal mines were back in operation this date following the end of the strike after a new contract had been formed over the weekend, but production was slow to return to normal. Dependent industries, as steel and railroads, were even slower to return to normal operations. Badly needed coal would be going to areas of the country suffering from the cold by the following day.

According to a French source in Paris, a Big Three foreign ministers meeting would take place in London on April 12, coincident with a meeting in London of the foreign ministers of the twelve NATO nations. The source said that an array of international issues would be discussed by the Big Three, including the German question and the rebellion to the French-sponsored Government of Bao Dai by the guerrillas under Ho Chi Minh in Indochina. French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman said that the Big Three conference would also discuss a possible meeting with Russia.

In Paris, a Communist-led strike of bus and subway lines brought confusion to the city. Meanwhile, a 72-hour filibuster of the anti-espionage measure in the National Assembly was finally ended by Premier Georges Bidault by calling for a vote of confidence on the measure. The legislation would allow ships carrying military supplies to be offloaded by Government troops. The Communists had protested the arms shipments from the U.S. pursuant to NATO as bringing France closer to war with Russia.

Also in Paris, former French President of the Third Republic, Albert LeBrun, in office from 1932 to the German occupation in July, 1940, died at age 78. He had been deposed by Marshal Petain and spent the time of occupation during the war in retirement in the French Alps. He was never blamed for France's defeat by Germany.

In Athens, Greece, General Nicholas Plastiras, head of the National Progressive Union, emerged from the previous day's elections as a powerful new leftist force in the country, his party holding a narrow plurality of 29 percent, with half of the votes counted, over the conservatives and moderate liberals.

In London, the Labour Government, having won only a narrow victory by seven seats in Commons in the recent elections, shed some of its plans for further nationalization of industries, with King George VI making no mention of nationalization under the new Government in his speech, prepared by the new Cabinet, to open the new Parliament. The general tone of the statement by Labour signalled avoidance of controversy and thus obviation of another election, at least for several months. The Liberal Party had said on the eve of the election that it could support Labour if further nationalization were dropped.

In New York, the espionage case against Judy Coplon, former Justice Department employee, and Russian Valentin Gubitchev had reached final summations by the attorneys and would go to the jury the following day.

The President would leave for Key West, Fla., for a three-week vacation on Sunday. No date had been set for his return.

Hey, some of us have to work for a living.

In Frankfurt, Germany, at the opening of the military court first degree murder trial of a woman accused of killing her Air Force husband the previous October 20, an Army lieutenant testified that the woman had argued with him regarding Brooklyn and Southern accents, about an hour before she had killed her husband. She had taunted him over his Southern accent and he then asked to hear some of her Brooklynese. She then warned him of her temper and after several more exchanges, slapped him. She then left the party and returned home, where, according to the prosecution, she waited in the dark for her husband, then shot him. The defense entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

What do you wanna do dat for?

In Manchester, N.H., in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder in the euthanization of his terminally ill cancer patient, the defendant took the witness stand and testified that the patient was lifeless when he reached her bedside, but that then "something snapped", causing him to inject air into her veins. The doctor had no explanation for his behavior. He said that at the time of the death, he had said that he had not taken a life because the patient was already dead. He said that he never had any intention of killing the patient. He indicated on the charts that he had injected air into her veins.

In Chester, S.C., a 17-year old pregnant mother was stabbed to death and her 25-year old estranged husband, a textile mill worker, was arrested for murder. She had brought non-support charges against the accused. He confessed the killing to police and said that they could electrocute him.

Spring weather was experienced by most of the nation this date, with places in Oklahoma hitting 80 degrees, but a blizzard hit Minnesota, and lower temperatures were recorded in the Great Lakes region.

Part of chapter nineteen 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, "Let's Call a Spade a Spade" discusses objections to Federal aid to education for its prospect of leading to meddling in the operation of the public schools. The President recently had said that he was opposed to any form of control of local school operations by the Federal Government.

But the real concern was not so much the control of operations as ending segregation in the schools. Supreme Court decisions had regularly been tending in that direction, with the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson being found not to result in equal facilities in practice.

It concludes that the President, therefore, with his civil rights legislation and especially FEPC, was talking out of both sides of his mouth, that while there may not be any intent to control the operations of the schools, there would be, ultimately, an attempt through Federal funding to end segregation. Many people in the South, it posits, needed no more rationale for opposing Federal aid.

The piece fails to recognize that, with or without Federal aid, the courts had authority to wipe out any segregation involving government action, on the basis of it not according Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, that is complying with the separate-but-equal requirement of Plessy, decided in 1896. And so it would be four years later in Brown v. Board of Education.

"One Down, Nine to Go" tells of an aerial mapping of the county about to take place in preparation for revaluation of real property for tax purposes, the first of ten goals set forth by The News in January for the community during the ensuing decade. Revaluation was necessary to raise revenue for the needed projects and so the piece welcomes the development.

"How Do You Scare Your Kids?" refers to a piece on the page by Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, criticizing television for presenting infantile fare for the average twelve-year old mentality rather than trying to uplift viewers with better quality entertainment. While Mr. Cousins had a personal motivation in the criticism in that he wanted people to continue to read books, it was no ground for dismissing the apt criticism.

It suggests that there were some good dramas and variety programs on television, in contrast to the bloody mystery shows, and that the producers would learn that the better shows had greater appeal than the latter fare. The main object of television, selling products, would thus be served the more by presenting better programming.

Norman Cousins, as indicated, finds television presenting violence and untoward behavior of various sorts which children were quickly learning to emulate for the worse. For instance, a nine-year old boy in a Boston suburb recently had presented a bad report card to his father and suggested that they could remedy the situation by poisoning his teacher with laced candy presented to her for Christmas, as he had seen the ploy used the previous week in a mystery program, wherein a man poisoned his wife in such manner. (The kid must have fibbed, seeking through misdirection to throw off the coppers by changing the plot a mite and suggesting it was a television program when in fact it was on the radio.) Part of the blame, Mr. Cousins suggests, rested with the parents but a large part also lay with the television producers.

The movies and radio, along with pulp magazines and terror comic books, had already committed the blunder of appealing to the lowest common denominator among the audience, and now television was on the same track, to its own self-destruction. He recommends raising the sights above the average mentality of a 12-year old and realizing that the national educational level had increased in recent years. He understands that television was not an educational medium but advocates a creative approach to the entertainment being presented, necessary to prevent the new medium from being murdered in its cradle.

Drew Pearson tells of the unsolved murder of a key Government witness in California in the investigation of a major narcotics ring, after the witness had agreed to help the Government in bringing indictments against fifteen members of the ring. The witness had been caught speeding in the Central Valley of California near Bakersfield while carrying a kilogram of heroin. He had sped so fast that while trying to dump the heroin out the window, some had fallen into the backseat and later had to be scooped up by law enforcement with a vacuum.

After he agreed to cooperate with Federal authorities by making an undercover purchase of heroin from the ring using marked money, the California Attorney General, Fred Howser, and Assistant Attorney General, Mike Riordan, refused to cooperate in delaying prosecution of the witness on the heroin charges that he might cooperate in building the case against the drug ring. It was unclear why the State authorities would not cooperate. But a phone call was traced from the office of the alleged head of the narcotics ring, Joe Sica of Fresno, to the office of one of Mr. Howser's campaign managers.
Eventually, the witness pleaded guilty to the State charge, and the State judge in Bakersfield agreed to postpone sentencing to assist Federal authorities. The undercover sale and subsequent indictment was then able to proceed against the fifteen-member ring.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles received a tip two weeks earlier that a gang from the East was in town to kill the Government witness, who had been in hiding, under Government protection, in Arizona. He returned the previous week to Los Angeles for arraignment (or, more probably, the preliminary hearing of the indicted ring), and then went to his mother's home in Fresno, where, subsequently, he was found on the couch with a bullet through his head. The narcotics ring of Joe Sica was still slated to stand trial in the biggest narcotics case in the country's history, but there was no longer a Government witness to implicate them in the sale of the heroin.

Marquis Childs, in Atlanta, discusses Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia and his run for re-election after serving out the remainder of his father's term, following a special election two years earlier. He would only be able to serve one four-year term under state succession law, and wanted to run for the Senate. He had been talked out of running for the Senate in 1950 by the banking interests, who wanted Senator Walter George to remain in his position of seniority, enabling him to chair the Senate Finance Committee.

Governor Talmadge was popular with the rural sections of the state and had been able successfully to play the rural areas against the cities, while using fear of the President's civil rights program as ending segregation to frighten rural voters.

His likely competition would be M. E. Thompson, whom he had defeated two years earlier, the former Lieutenant Governor elected with the elder Talmadge in 1946 and who succeeded him when the latter died before taking office, following a bitter fight with Herman Talmadge for the right of succession, eventually decided by the State Supreme Court in favor of Mr. Thompson. The progressive Governor between 1943 and 1947, Ellis Arnall, had vowed to stay out of the race.

There were now 100,000 black voters in the state participating in the Democratic primary, but it was still a one-party state, leaving a limited choice for voters.

Robert C. Ruark tells of love being no anodyne for ulcers, as had been claimed by a doctor in Pittsburgh, to the contrary, instead causing heart palpitations, loss of sleep, irritability and inattentiveness to job or studies. He says that he was not knocking love but found it no cure for any minor condition.

A letter writer wonders whether the issue of nixing white supremacy was not political in nature. He says that he was a Yankee and knew that most Yankees, if possessed of the same segregation laws as in the South, would use them just as determinedly. He finds the white race divided into classes, just as with racial segregation, and thinks that the white race ought look after its own problems first before interfering with "other problems".

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