The Charlotte News
Saturday, April 15, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie was planning to go to Moscow to try to save the U.N. He hoped to meet with Premier Josef Stalin, Deputy Premier V. M. Molotov, and Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky, in an effort to get Russia to resume normal relations in the organization. He would also meet with British and French officials along the way. There was still some chance that intervening events might obviate the necessity of the trip, but such a contingency appeared unlikely of occurrence.
The President vetoed the Kerr natural gas deregulation bill, saying it would not be in the national interest, as consumers of natural gas could not easily move from one producer to another because of the inherent nature of the product being pumped through pipelines, unlike oil and coal. The bill had been criticized for assuring increases of consumer prices on natural gas.
In Germany, a U.S. Air Force court martial convicted the 19-year old American Air Force corporal who had provided secret military information to two American undercover agents posing as Russian agents. He was sentenced to five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. He had claimed in his defense that he was seeking to trap some Russian spies when he gave the secret documents to the undercover agents. He also claimed to hate Communism and to be loyal to the United States.
In Brussels, exiled King Leopold III told Belgians via radio that he was willing to abandon his power temporarily in favor of his son, Crown Prince Baudoin, 19, but added that his decision could not be made until a vote of Parliament was taken calling him back to the throne. A recent plebiscite had favored his return by 57 percent. The exiled King was controversial for his perceived role in turning Belgium over to the Nazis in 1940.
Columnist Bruce Barton tells of reading two books on the two world wars, one by former President Hoover, America's First Crusade, and the other by General Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe. While respecting the works and their authors, he objected to use of the word "crusade" as invoking the disastrous Christian Crusades of the period 1096 to 1291, spreading blood over Western Europe and into Asia Minor. Nowhere in the Constitution was there any power granted to the President or Congress to launch a crusade, Congress only having the power to declare war for the national defense.
He concludes that while winning two world wars, the country had lost the "crusade" to make the world safe for democracy and establish the "four freedoms" enunciated in 1941 by FDR. He predicts that the country would also lose a crusade to obliterate Communism.
He warns that the Crusaders of the Middle Ages captured the Holy City twice but, in the end, it had wound up right back where it had started, in the hands of the "infidel" Mohammedans.
The cold weather gripping the Eastern half of the nation for the previous ten days appeared ready to give way to more seasonable temperatures after causing extensive crop damage. Peach orchards in Georgia and the Carolinas suffered sixteen million dollars worth of damage. (That's that debil again wid de peach pie.) Bowling Green, Ky., recorded 29 degrees, Atlanta and New York, 35, and Washington, 33, during the morning. In Miami, the temperature dropped to 51, the coldest April 15 in the local weather bureau's 39-year history, the previous record low for the date having been 53 in 1940.
In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott accepted the resignation of embattled State Highway Patrol commander C. R. Tolar, after he had been involved in a speeding incident while on private business and earlier indicted for reckless driving and illegal use of his siren when he disobeyed a directive to slow down for a funeral, claiming that he was responding to a report of a traffic accident. The previous Sunday, the Governor had told Mr. Tolar that he would not accept his resignation, but on Wednesday, the Governor asked for it, following the speeding incident the prior Sunday and his plea of guilty to same. Mr. Tolar contended that the Motor Vehicles commissioner, a supporter of the Governor's opponents, had vowed to get Mr. Tolar out of office within six months of his appointment. The Governor announced also that Major J. R. Smith would succeed Mr. Tolar on May 1.
In North Carolina, the filing deadline for local offices and the State Legislature occurred this date, with the result predicted that many local candidates, who had been loath to back one of the Senate candidates until their opponents were determined, might now provide an endorsement.
A man in Tokyo taunted Japanese authorities, claiming to be above the law, following his arrest for stealing kimonos and a bag of rice, as he explained that he had been declared dead the previous May.
In Cleveland, a trackless trolley
It could blow you afar
In Richmond, Calif., a switch engine
hit a car carrier full of 1950 Fords, as pictured on the page,
causing $6,000 worth of damage. (It's a good thing that they weren't
1950 Plymouths or they might have exploded
In Cleveland, a semi-deaf elderly gentleman at a retirement home was introduced to a person he understood to be the undertaker, causing him to be a little taken aback, if not dragged completely under. It turned out to be the census taker.
We warned you: death and pestilence are all they bring.
On the editorial page, "Pots and Kettles" comments on the partisan bickering in Washington. Bipartisanship on foreign policy during and after the war had been the rule, through the Republican-led 80th Congress which began in 1947. But following the 1948 election and its thorough rejection of the Republicans, bipartisanship began to slip away. Then came the loss of China to the Communists in 1949 and Senator McCarthy's campaign, begun the previous February, charging Communists in the State Department, supported by Senators Kenneth Wherry, Bourke Hickenlooper, and Robert Taft. Bipartisanship disappeared.
The President recently had moved to repair the damage with the appointment of John Foster Dulles as an adviser to Secretary of State Acheson and of former Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky to accompany Mr. Acheson to Europe. The President's emissaries again began consulting with Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the primary Republican exponent of bipartisanship, who had been ill, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
But then the President had just told a U.N. group the day before that his Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress were trying to elect a Congress which believed in international cooperation, causing immediate backlash from three Republican Senators, claiming that he was politicizing foreign policy to win votes in the midterm elections.
It suggests that the best advice to both sides had perhaps come from Governor Dewey who said that it was no time for Republicans to be rocking the boat on which everyone was a passenger. It was to be hoped that it would have a calming effect.
"The Lineberry 'Boom'" tells of Charlotte police chief Frank Littlejohn recommending County Police chief Stanhope Lineberry to be the new commander of the State Highway Patrol to replace C. R. Tolar. The piece agrees with the assessment, though expresses regret that he might leave his post in the county.
"For the Last Time (We Hope)" corrects the misunderstanding of the Greensboro Daily News that the Reverend Billy Graham was not actually from North Carolina or specifically Charlotte. It provides his many contacts with Charlotte, including growing up there and having his parents reside there for the previous twenty years. Currently, he lived in the Western part of the state with his family.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Yesterday's News", tells of the role of the press in a fast-paced world becoming increasingly to forecast the future as opposed to reporting only of what had occurred in the past. Thirty years earlier, the press gave extensive and detailed coverage to a speech which in 1950 would rate only four paragraphs. The press would rush out to greet an arriving dignitary in town and provide a large amount of coverage, but then become stingy with space devoted to the following speech, the very reason for the dignitary's visit.
Drew Pearson tells of Western Europe being reluctant to supply the men for the planned common defense under NATO. At the recent Hague conference, the French complained that they had an army tied down in Indo-China, where Communist guerrillas were killing French officers at the rate of one-half a West Point graduating class per year. Smaller countries did not want to tax their budgets. That had led to two proposals, bringing Franco's Spain, with its 500,000-man army, into NATO, and arming a West German army of 150,000 men. Neither plan was accepted, as the British opposed incorporation of Spain, and the French objected to the German army because they anticipated it joining Russia in the event of an attack. He notes that Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was not anxious to resume normal relations with Franco until he granted Protestants, second-class citizens in the country, the right of free worship.
Western Europe thus remained without the armies necessary to thwart a Russian attack.
Senator Harry Cain of Washington nearly got into a fight with reporter Frank McNaughton of Time because the latter had listed him among the eight most expendable Senators, an opinion which most journalists shared. But when Mr. McNaughton, half the Senator's size, feistily stood his ground, the Senator backed down. He then went to the floor and told his colleagues that he was not expendable. But the more he talked, the more the listeners believed that Mr. McNaughton was right. He even called the reporter a "4-F in war and 4-F in peace".
The Joint Chiefs had asked Secretary of State Acheson to stop the shipment of steel from West Germany to Communist China after it had been authorized by the high commissioner of the U.S. zone in West Germany, John J. McCloy. The Joint Chiefs were reminded of the continuing flow of scrap iron and oil to Japan before the war.
After passage of the Kerr natural gas deregulation bill through a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans, the rift between Southern Democrats and Northern big-city Democrats was wider than ever before.
Marquis Childs discusses the effort of Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada to get the Paiute Indians to relinquish claims to lands on their reservation, in favor of white ranchers who were using contiguous parcels which were difficult to operate as separate tracts. The Department of Interior had resisted the move for years, since Harold Ickes had been Secretary during the Roosevelt years, through Julius Krug and now Oscar Chapman.
The Department had sought to resolve
the matter through purchase of the ranchers' land, but they had held
out for far more than fair market value, making the transaction
unworkable
So Senator McCarran was persisting in his perennial effort, just as he had tried to defeat the liberalization of the Displaced Persons Act, recently passed 47 to 37 in the Senate.
He was facing re-election in 1950 and was striving to please the two major concerns in the state, ranching and mining, with gambling a close third. Word was that the proposed investigation of gambling in the nation would uncover some links between the Senator and those national interests, which spent lavishly to corrupt public officials.
Through seniority, the Senator had
become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was chairman
also of several powerful subcommittees. So, Mr. Childs concludes, it
was not surprising that he thought he could singlehandedly get the
Paiutes off their reservation and prevent displaced persons
Robert C. Ruark is at a loss to understand how Judge Stephen S. Jackson, appointed as the "orgy-snooper" on Hollywood by the Senate Commerce Committee, would go about his business, as most of the Hollywood bad behavior occurred behind closed doors or out at sea on a yacht. The revelation of Ingrid Bergman's illegitimate child with director Roberto Rossellini was an exception to prove the rule.
Often snoopers were snooped on, and he suggests that, in consequence, there might be some embarrassed lawmakers at the hearings, some of whom were susceptible to being exposed as having "limp wrists" or being "Old Garter Snappers", each of whom journalists only visited in pairs.
Thus far, the Judge had turned up only some dirty magazines and obtained a victory against stripteasing, after attending the show three times and reporting that the way the lady shook was a caution.
As far as illegitimate births were concerned, the GI's, he reports, left behind a "few score thousand of woods-colts" from the war years, and so Ms. Bergman had no copyright on the transgression.
He thinks Congress was dumb to become mixed up in such a fruitless witch-hunt, when the McCarthy hearings had thus far produced little beyond "doubt and cheap sensation". "The army of perverts in the State Department argues a little more loud evil … than Bergman's baby, Hayworth's prince or Jane Russell's blouse-size."
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Round-Up", tells of some pundits having placed stock in the May 2 Florida Senate primary ace between incumbent Claude Pepper and Congressman George Smathers as being predictive of how well the Fair Deal would fare in the midterm elections. And it appeared that Fair Deal advocate, Senator Pepper, was winning.
But in the North Carolina Senate race, newspaper editors, as one in Chattanooga, had suggested a different dynamic at work, one which might show how far the Communist scare had insinuated itself into American life. Willis Smith had characterized the campaign as having as its main issue "Communism and Socialism", whereas the editor found it to be instead Senator Graham's career of public service in which he had tried to work for all the people.
The New York Times also had suggested the North Carolina race as a bellwether of the effect of McCarthyism on the country.
Others viewed the election as a crossroads between the progressive gubernatorial Administration of Kerr Scott and a trail backward to conservatism. The race also was being seen as an indicator of the effect of Dixiecrats in the state, as the opponents of Senator Graham spoke a lot about states' rights.
Stewart Alsop had told of a Florida smear campaign against Senator Pepper which also included, among other like charges, the notion that boys and girls had "matriculated" together at UNC while Frank Graham was its president.
Parenthetically, today, being more broadminded and tolerant of aberrant campus activities than in 1950, we would not blink an eye at such conduct, unless, of course, it also included gesticulation, peroration, or even mastication together, especially if it occurred in class.
Senator Clyde Hoey had criticized Attorney General J. Howard McGrath for taking up the cudgels against segregation in the Henderson case, involving segregated dining-car seating on the Southern Railway as permitted by the F.C.C. Senator Hoey disliked the effort to overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate-but-equal.
Another delay in the Fair Employment Practices Commission bill was expected, until sometime in May, as other bills took priority. It would be brought up, however, before the May 27 North Carolina Senate primary, but after the Florida primary.
Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia was giving Senator Graham credit for helping the Administration pass the revised displaced persons bill, removing certain discriminatory provisions.
Department store magnate W. H. Belk of Charlotte was expected soon to endorse Senator Graham.
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