The Charlotte News

Thursday, April 20, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that former Communist Louis Budenz testified to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, investigating the charges of Senator McCarthy anent Communists in the State Department, that Owen Lattimore, described by the Senator as the top Communist spy in the country, had been a member of a Communist cell at the Institute for Pacific Relations. He said that Mr. Lattimore, a Far Eastern expert, had been party to a 1937 conspiracy to deliver China to the Communists. But he also said that he was not suggesting that Mr. Lattimore had been a Communist. He claimed to be testifying reluctantly with no partisan interest in the matter. (Drew Pearson this date begs to differ.)

Senator Tom Connally of Texas, prior to the start of debate on the nearly four billion dollar foreign aid appropriations bill, asked his colleagues to join in a nonpartisan foreign policy to lift the case for world peace above "the mists and fogs of party politics".

Senator Robert Taft said that he and the Republican Senate policy committee, which he chaired, agreed with Senator Styles Bridges that the President, if he expected cooperation, needed to consult regularly with Republicans and allow them to participate in the formulation of foreign policy.

The President, in speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, began a "great campaign of truth" to convince the world that the U.S. had no intent to wage war except in defense of freedom, and said that he had directed, in consequence, Secretary of State Acheson to strengthen the national information program, to overcome Soviet "deceit, distortion, and lies". He added that there was "too much nonsense about striped trousers in foreign affairs" and that "far more influence is exerted by the baggy pants of the managing editor". He found that most editors were meeting well their responsibilities in this regard but that a few were performing badly.

The President signed the four billion dollar housing bill, to provide incentives, through loans and mortgage guarantees, for construction of housing for low and middle income families.

The House Ways & Means Committee voted to approve 75 million dollars in reduced manufacturers' excise taxes, including complete repeal of the levies on household stoves, water heaters, light bulbs, and several other items. The reduction did not impact automobiles or other vehicles, parts or accessories, tires or tubes, excise taxes on which amounted to a half billion dollars annually.

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen announced its intention to call a strike the following Wednesday against four of the nation's largest railroads, involving about 18,000 of the 110,000 union members. The strike was governed by the Railway Labor Act and not Taft-Hartley.

According to a well-informed source, Finland delivered three accused Soviet war criminals to Russia during the week, among the 56 war criminals whose surrender had been demanded by the Soviets.

In Berlin, Hitler's birthday had revived talk that he might still be alive, a myth believed by many Germans. Some said that he was in Spain or Argentina and was better than the leadership they now had. Some believed he was all right personally but suffered from bad advice, that he did not know until the "last minute" what was happening—sort of akin to the way President Nixon is still regarded by some misled Americans, those with faulty memories or too young at the time to remember the reality of the situation.

In Nassau, a female attorney, 38, was found murdered, hit on the head and dumped into a well while still alive. No evidence was found of sexual assault. A search was afoot for a man, described as a "hotel waiter-type", seen cycling with her a short time prior to her disappearance. She had served in Tokyo on the staff of Joseph Keenan during the war crimes trials and had been a Justice Department attorney prior to that.

In Washington, Government witnesses testified in the trial of John Maragon for perjury before Congress regarding his financial affairs in connection with his alleged procurement of Government contracts for clients for fees, that he had been paid $1,268 for representing a New Jersey molasses company in its difficulties with the Agriculture Department. The defense, through cross-examination, sought to bring out that $500 of the money was a cover-up contribution paid by a Milwaukee Republican to the Democratic Party in Missouri for which Mr. Maragon was only a conduit, and that another $100 was for a gold coin which Mr. Maragon had lost. One witness who represented the molasses company said that he first met Mr. Maragon at a party given in honor of Maj. General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide who allegedly supplied Mr. Maragon access to White House influence in obtaining leverage to acquire Government contracts or lenience for his clients.

Dr. Austin MacCormick of the Osborne Foundation of New York had prepared a report setting forth detailed recommendations for improvements to the North Carolina prison system and delivered it to the State Prison Advisory Council, which had sought the report. Its contents were yet to be revealed.

In Weybridge, England, author Warwick Deeping died at age 73.

Movie producer Sam Goldwyn and his wife would sail for Europe aboard the Queen Mary the following Saturday.

On the editorial page, "Senate Spending Spree" finds the Senate not undertaking promised budget cutting as it approved the large rivers and harbors appropriations bill, after wrangling over log-rolling amendments for the sake of pork-barrel politics.

Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois had waged a fight to cut the appropriations, but each of his twenty offered amendments in that direction had been defeated. He found that a large part of the blame lay with the demands of constituents who insisted on their pet projects.

Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia warned that the Congress had approved of projects which would run to 30 billion dollars in future years, despite the Budget Bureau having approved only one billion dollars worth of projects. Senator Homer Ferguson had favored taking up the projects individually rather than as part of an omnibus bill, but his sensible proposal was rejected.

The Senate, it concludes, had failed in its test of sincerity on reduction of the budget.

"Any Letters Today?" finds reasonable the cut by the Postmaster General in mail service to allow only one postal delivery per day rather than two, in an effort to cut the operating deficit of the service. It suggests that with the forthcoming vote on the budget for the Post Office, Congress could show whether it was willing to displease the public, to bring the overall budget closer to being balanced.

"A Lesson for the World" praises the work of conservationist and ornithologist William Vogt, a proponent of conservation of natural resources. As a warning against placing consumption ahead of replenishment of resources, he pointed to Haiti and El Salvador as examples of countries which had consumed their resources and, as a result, had to import, evacuate, or starve.

"Another Victory for Education" finds North Carolina counties voting one by one to finance improvements to education, Buncombe County having just approved a 5.5 million-dollar school building bond issue. The moves in the counties recognized the needs for education and the central place good education had to occupy to build a sound society. It finds that the fallacy behind state and Federal aid was the assumption that local governmental units would not undertake the necessary improvements, an assumption contradicted by the efforts in North Carolina.

A piece from the Chattanooga Times, titled "Drifting Toward Hysteria", finds deplorable, as had a recently reprinted piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Red-baiting by both Willis Smith and former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds against Senator Frank Graham in the Democratic primary race. It had advanced so far that Senator Graham had felt compelled to issue a statement saying that he had always opposed Communism and Socialism, as well as Fascism and Nazism, or any other form of totalitarianism.

House Speaker Sam Rayburn had stated in Asheville recently that the "meanest man who walks the earth" was the one who spread "unjustified fears and fills the people full of unhappiness and discontent and distrust." Yet, the piece finds, such a Communist-Fascist technique was being employed in every state of the country. It hopes that North Carolina would halt the trend in the May 27 primary.

It would vote a plurality for Senator Graham that date, but, in the runoff primary, in which Mr. Smith would take off the gloves completely and add race-baiting and more intense Red-baiting to the mix, a spare majority would give the latter the nomination.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", a collection of snippets from newspapers across the state, provides one from the Fuquay Independent, telling of Olla Ray Boyd urging his candidacy for the Senate on the basis that the Senate needed a hog-raiser to replace the "stuffed shirts". He was being promoted for the job despite having received only 2,000 votes when he ran for Governor in 1948.

Don't you worry, Olla Ray; they will get you a hog-raiser in there come 1992, even if he will be the least educated man in the Senate. That's what we need up 'ere, don't it, less education and more people who understand pigs?

Beatrice Cobb of the Morganton News-Herald tells of North Carolina's Governor being compensated $20,000 per year, including a $15,000 salary, making him the highest paid executive officer of any Southern state. California and New York each paid total compensation of $25,000.

John Wesley Clay of the Winston-Salem Journal tells of a man going for a ride with his wife on a nice spring day and being encouraged by her to pick flowers in a pasture. He crawled under the fence, spotted a bull and asked the farmer nearby whether it was safe, to which the farmer responded in the affirmative, that it was a damned sight safer than he was.

And so goes it on and on, and so forth.

Drew Pearson relates of the background of Louis Budenz, from his time as an A.F. of L. labor organizer, plotter of the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, tried and acquitted 21 times in connection with labor disputes, and for ten years, from the mid-thirties, associated with the Daily Worker, including serving as its editor, before being persuaded to return to his Catholic roots and begin a teaching career at Notre Dame and Fordham. He had also been a witness at the trial of the eleven top American Communist Party members. He had a new book coming out the following May, regarding the inner workings and machinations of the Communist Party, titled Men Without Faces.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, he would be testifying that Fredrick Field, a millionaire Communist, and Earl Browder, the former head of the American Communist Party, had told him of Owen Lattimore, suggesting his connection to the party, perhaps even as a member. Yet, in all of his prior writings, in magazines and a previous book, Mr. Budenz had never mentioned Mr. Lattimore. In the manuscript of the unpublished work, he referred to the Institute of Pacific Relations, of which Mr. Lattimore had been a member, and mentioned Philip Jessup and others, but not Mr. Lattimore. He had suddenly inserted Mr. Lattimore's name just a few days earlier, while the book was in its galley-proof stage. He also had long discussions with the FBI, and until the previous week, had never mentioned Mr. Lattimore. Only after Senator McCarthy appealed to him for testimony did he suddenly recall anything about Mr. Lattimore.

In a series of Collier's articles in 1948 and 1949, he had revealed his knowledge of the inner workings of Communism and told of his participation in the plot to assassinate Trotsky.

He had also related in Collier's of a Communist front organization which had Eleanor Roosevelt as honorary chairperson and included Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, Rita Hayworth, and labor leaders William Green and Philip Murray as members, serving as a screen for Marshal Tito, then under Moscow's wing. He suggested it as being emblematic of the skill with which Moscow spread Communist influence through innocent dupes.

Mr. Pearson suggests that the American people had a right to know how they had been fooled in the past and that Mr. Budenz deserved credit for revealing it, but that most of the activities which he described had occurred during the war when Russia was an ally. Senator McCarthy, however, had made suspect any public official who sided with the Russians during that period. He suggests that the people who were used were gullible and made the mistake of lending their names to Communist front organizations, but were no more Communists than the President.

So, he stresses, to have been friendly with Russia between 1941 and 1945 did not necessarily imply that one was a Communist.

Marquis Childs discusses the plans in East Germany, set to coincide with the foreign ministers conference in London in mid-May, to offer to East Germany sham independence under a treaty which would remove all Russian troops within a year. The Deputy Premier, Walter Ulbricht, was in on the arrangement, having been briefed in Moscow. The design was to stimulate propaganda appealing to the former Nazi-Storm Trooper elements in West Germany, who believed that at least temporary alliance with the Russians was their only hope against extinction by the West. Thus, whatever steps were achieved at the London conference would appear as a reaction to the Soviet moves in East Germany.

But Secretary of State Acheson would recommend at the conference increased Marshall Plan aid to West Berlin to revive employment and trade, diluting much of the effect of this Russian effort.

The planned May 28 youth demonstration in West Berlin was being met by the effective leadership of General Maxwell Taylor and would likely be much more modest as a result.

Mr. Childs concludes that the advantage of a dictatorship over a democracy was that plans could change suddenly without consultation with the people and thus the Soviet plans could remain in a state of flux, while the democracies could only react as they became aware of matters through intelligence gathering.

Robert C. Ruark, a former sportswriter, remarks on the coming of baseball season, which he says that he used to enjoy but now found tedious. The sport had changed and now involved racial politics, trade unions, night games and television. He especially disliked the night games as doing away with the earthy feeling of an afternoon game under the hot sun.

Spring training had become as mechanized as a concentration camp. The emphasis was on money-making exhibitions, leaving the players insufficient time to get into proper shape.

Moreover, cases were in court contesting the move of some players to the Mexican leagues after the war. The New York legislature had sought to prevent the Brooklyn Dodgers from charging separate admission fees for same-day games which were not played as doubleheaders.

The platoon system was employed just as in football, with pitchers changed according to the individual batter.

He apologizes for sounding sour, but protests that it had been previously a simple sport, now becoming "as complicated as a treason trial".

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