The Charlotte News
Friday, April 21, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy urged the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating his charges of Communists in the State Department to subpoena other witnesses beyond former Communist Louis Budenz, to try to confirm directly that Owen Lattimore was a member of a "Communist cell", as Mr. Budenz testified that he had heard through hearsay. Attorneys for Mr. Lattimore had already asked that one of these individuals who allegedly so informed Mr. Budenz, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, be subpoenaed. The other two were Earl Browder and Jack Stachel. Mr. Browder stated that he had never made any such statement regarding Mr. Lattimore and that he did not recall ever discussing him with anyone. Mr. Field said that the Budenz statement was a "shameless and slanderous lie".
Well, what do you expect? They were Commies.
Following the testimony of Mr. Budenz, a former high-ranking Army officer disputed to the subcommittee that Mr. Lattimore had ever been associated with the Communist Party.
Probably a Commie. Let's investigate the Army.
The Soviets rejected the note of protest and demand for compensation from the State Department regarding the shooting down of a Navy Privateer over the Baltic on April 8, based on the pretext enunciated by the Russians that it had strayed into Soviet territory over Latvia. The plane carried ten crewmen, all lost. The Russian response repeated earlier claims that the plane, in fact unarmed, but which the Russians claimed to have been a B-29, first fired on the Russian interceptors and refused demands to land after breaching international law by incursion on Soviet territory while attempting to photograph defense installations.
The United States ordered the Czech consulate in Chicago closed in response to the order by the Czech Government that the libraries of the U.S. Information Service be closed in Bratislava and that the USIS official, a press attache at the American Embassy in Prague, be expelled on the basis that the USIS was engaged in spying. The U.S. regarded the charge as nonsense but agreed to honor the order, warning, however, that further consequences regarding Czech consulates in the U.S. would follow.
Diplomatic officials predicted that the U.S., Britain, and France would reject the formal note of protest from Russia claiming that the Big Three were turning Trieste into a military base, contrary to the treaty setting it up as a free, independent territory. The Western diplomats viewed the Russian note as a propaganda move. The Western and Eastern powers had never agreed on a governor per the treaty, a condition for which the West blamed Russia. Western diplomats pointed out that until a governor was appointed, the treaty did not require withdrawal of occupation troops, required only 90 days after appointment of a governor. After failure to achieve consensus on a governor, the Western allies had proposed that the territory be given to Italy, to which Yugoslavia had objected. The previous week, the Western powers had asked Yugoslavia and Italy to reach agreement on Trieste.
A member of the Atomic Energy Commission, Henry Smyth, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the AEC was trying to maintain a "middle course" in its censorship policy, between the need for secrecy and the public's right to know. He said that a clear solution to the dilemma would only present itself if the country knew when it might have to defend itself against another war, the more imminent, the more secrecy being necessary.
The President urged Congress to continue authorization for rent controls, set to expire June 30, until mid-1951, that otherwise rents would rise precipitously and create more inflation.
The House Ways & Means Committee approved further cuts of excise taxes by 250 million dollars, bringing the total cuts to 335 million, nearly twice as much as that requested by the President. Among the taxes proposed for elimination was a ten percent tax on sporting goods used in schools, as well as reduction from 20 to 10 percent of the tax on jewelry and furs, removing it entirely from watches and alarm clocks worth less than specified amounts.
In Washington, the Government's case neared its conclusion in the perjury trial of John Maragon, based on the Government's contention that he lied to Congress when he claimed the previous year in hearings on so-called "five-percenters", agents who negotiated Government contracts for clients for a fee, that he had never received any fees or negotiated any Government contracts between 1945 and 1949. This date, witnesses testified regarding his dealings with Transamerica Traders, Inc., which had purchased war surplus materials from the War Assets Administration.
A shipping strike on the East and West coasts was averted by a negotiated settlement between 40 shipping companies and the AFL Masters, Mates & Pilot Association.
Charles G. Mullen, formerly of Charlotte, prominently identified with many newspapers in the Carolinas for many years, died at age 65 in Tampa. After association with the Charlotte Observer, he had been in Florida since 1916.
At Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, Frank R. McNinch, former chairman of both the FPC and FCC, and former Mayor of Charlotte from 1917 to 1921, died at age 77.
On the editorial page, "The Budenz Testimony" outlines the testimony of Louis Budenz to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, in which he had said that he had not seen, personally, Owen Lattimore at any Communist meeting while Mr. Budenz had been a member of the party, had only heard rumors of his associations, but could not say he was a Communist, and believed Senator McCarthy's claim to be inaccurate that he was the top Soviet spy in the country.
So, while not providing any information to advance Senator McCarthy's claims or bolster in any way Communist connections to Mr. Lattimore, he had provided insight to the inner workings of the Communist Party in the country and so had proved valuable as a witness generally.
It concludes that Senator McCarthy's charges that there were Communists in the State Department had thus far not been borne out by a shred of evidence.
"Whistling in the Dark" finds the South Carolina Democrats, who had just met in convention, to be conducting themselves in accordance with the title of the piece when they criticized the national party for "socialism" and vowed to continue to fight for states' rights and against the Fair Deal.
The piece wishes them success in seeking to buck the trend of the national party, but cautions that unless they were willing to break with tradition and line up with the Republican "carpetbaggers", they would likely find little success.
"End of Rent Controls" finds that the City Council had acted wisely in voting to end rent controls, as they had served their purpose to keep rents down after the war while the economy adjusted. If the Governor approved the petition, then rent controls would end in Charlotte. In that event, it challenges landlords to act with reasonable restraint in not raising rents precipitously in response.
"Railroad Strike Unjustified" finds the threatened strike for the following Wednesday by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen against four of the nation's leading railroads to be unjustified for seeking a demand which had already previously been determined by the President's fact-finding board to be unwarranted. The union sought an extra man on the big diesels and a fireman on the small diesels used in the freight yards. The strike, it concludes, being another in a string of labor abuses, would receive no sympathy from the people.
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Paradise Lost", tells of the seagulls of St. Augustine having lost their meal ticket when the shrimp boats moved to Key West. Some had flown with them, but others remained, having lost their instinct for catching their normal prey, in consequence, could be seen starving along the beaches.
It finds that the gulls had a happy time of it as long as they had their own welfare state, but now were in trouble.
R. F. Beasley, in a piece from the Union County Journal, supports the conclusions of the News editorial, "Mr. Hanes, Meet Mr. Cannon", finds that protectionist trade policies to appease the textile industry would prove disastrous at a time when free trade was necessary to supply markets overseas for American goods and farm produce, while allowing imports to compete in the American market to ease the dollar shortage abroad and aid in stabilizing the European economies.
A return to the days of President McKinley and high tariffs, he posits, would only play hob with those salutary goals. With America's skill level, it was silly, he concludes, to assume that competition from abroad would create disaster domestically. Free trade was necessary to maintain the peace, as prosperous peoples were unlikely to wage war.
Drew Pearson recounts several earlier stories he had published over which he had received quite a lot of angry mail: the April, 1945 story that Stalin had sent an angry message to FDR five days before his death, claiming that the U.S. had made a deal with the Nazis to enable them to transfer more troops to the Eastern front to kill more Russians; the story in February, 1946 that the Canadians were about to expose a Communist spy ring in their Government; the story in September, 1947 that it had come to light that a group of U.S. Government employees had stolen blueprints of the B-29, copied them and then given them ultimately to the Russians.
Each of these stories stimulated mail claiming that the Russians were friendly and thus could not have been engaged in such inconsonant activities. Now, the same sorts of people were criticizing him for taking Senator McCarthy to task. They had been too sympathetic to the Russians immediately after the war and now were too willing to believe anything negative about them.
He suggests that Senator McCarthy, had he acted from information published in Mr. Pearson's column in 1946 and 1947, could have behaved sensibly. Instead, he had waited until the past February, when the horse was already out of the barn and the secrets divulged, to start his campaign, claiming initially that 207 Communists were in the State Department, quickly amending the charge to 57, finally reduced to one, Owen Lattimore. And not a shred of proof had been shown that Mr. Lattimore ever had been a Communist. Moreover, he had not worked in the State Department for five years and only twice acted as a consultant during that period, when Senator McCarthy's claims had centered thus far on the State Department.
He notes that one effect of the McCarthy charges was that State Department personnel and diplomats would no longer talk to journalists.
Stewart Alsop again looks at the
problems associated with building the hydrogen bomb, prime among
which, as he had discussed two days earlier, was maintaining assembly
of the weapon while a conventional atomic fission explosion generated
the heat necessary to trigger the fusion explosion for the hydrogen
bomb. Tritium, heavy hydrogen which reacted faster than deuterium to enable the fission
It appeared that the Government was not acting with any special emphasis on resolving these problems, while Russia was making a concerted effort to develop a hydrogen bomb. The atomic scientists who had developed the atom bomb during the war were not engaged in developing the hydrogen bomb and, indeed, many had opposed its development, as had former AEC chairman David Lilienthal.
But, he concludes, unless the bomb proved too expensive to make for its destructive potential being less cost-effective than a number of atom bombs, the country needed to get busy to keep up with the Soviet nuclear potential. And, part of that process was to elucidate to the people, insofar as practicable without revealing secrets, what was at stake and how much such a program would cost so that intelligent choices could be made.
Robert C. Ruark discusses the
perjury trial of John Maragon, finding that his lawyer's description
of him as a "peanut vendor"
He finds the Maragon prosecution for four counts of perjury, for which he could be sentenced, if convicted, to 40 years in prison, to be much ado about little, regarding alleged lies about how much money he had made in his efforts to procure Government contracts for his clients.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which A Note Is Sounded With Regard To The Current Season of the Year:
