The Charlotte News
Monday, April 24, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President was said to be drafting a reply to the charges of Senator Joseph McCarthy that there were Communists in the Government, a statement before the ABA set to be broadcast nationwide on NBC radio this night at 10:00.
Meanwhile, the Senator stated that Secretary of State Acheson's Saturday statement to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the charges regarding Communists in the State Department were "mad and vicious" and a "filthy business", proved that Mr. Acheson went along with the "Truman-Tydings-McMahon line that the real criminals" were those who tried to expose and get rid of Communists. Mr. Acheson had compared Senator McCarthy's method to ringing every fire alarm in a city, though without knowledge of any specific fire, so that the fire department might wheel around and find one. He even compared it to the Howard Unruh murder rampage of the previous September in Camden, N.J. The statements were made in the presence of the Senator.
The President signed a resolution passed by Congress honoring the ten crewmen of the Navy Privateer lost over the Baltic, shot down by a Soviet plane on April 8 on the pretext that the plane, in fact unarmed, had fired first and was over Latvian territory. The resolution, passed unanimously by both the Senate and House, backed the State Department demand for an apology and reparations. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas charged the Soviets with a "criminal" action in the matter.
Retiring Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington said that the strength of the Air Force had declined during the previous six months but that the remaining forces had increased in efficiency.
Telephone equipment workers went on a nationwide strike this date, albeit not immediately impacting phone service. The CIO Communication Workers of America predicted that all of its 10,000 members would be off the job by midnight in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Western Electric, target of the strike, reported that 5,000 employees had not reported to work, with the Western states still to report. The union said it would not picket until the Wednesday deadline when the wage demand part of the strike was set to start. The current strike was in support of a strike by 104 employees in South Bend, Ind., over being forced to walk a half mile through a muddy field to install a tower for a television station. The strike was expected to halt work by heavy equipment installers in eight North Carolina cities, including Charlotte.
The Government sought a two-week
delay in the strike called for Wednesday by the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen against four of the nation's leading
railroads, based on demands for a second fireman
FCC chairman Wayne Coy told a Senate Commerce subcommittee that the proposed anti-gambling bill urged by the Justice Department, banning interstate transmission of gambling information, would only lead to confusion and evasion. He urged passage of a substitute bill submitted by the FCC, which would limit the ban to information on bets and wagers, the odds on any sporting event and the prices paid by the winners.
Connecticut Governor and former head of the Office of Price Administration, Chester Bowles, testified to the Senate Banking Committee that he foresaw large increases in rents if the Congress did not renew rent controls for another year. Housing Expediter Tighe Woods said that the pressure which the housing shortage could exert on unregulated rents was already apparent in cities where controls had been optionally ended.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., State Representative Charles Schuh, Jr., leader of the State House forces supporting Governor Fuller Warren, was shot to death in his office during the morning, allegedly by a 71-year old retired meat cutter. No motive had yet been established for the murder. The accused, who had been observed amiably shaking hands with Mr. Schuh on the street a short time earlier, said that he did not know what happened.
In Washington, the Government rested its case-in-chief in the prosecution of John Maragon on three remaining counts of perjury before Congress, and the defense sought a judgment of acquittal based on non-proof of at least one element of the charges. The Government dropped one count, premised on the denial by the defendant that he received $5,000 from his mother-in-law as a loan, as the mother-in-law was too ill to testify.
In Baden Baden, Germany, two lions escaped from a circus and clawed a twenty-year old German girl to death.
Southeast of Bermuda, nine U.S. Marines and three fishermen were picked up by Air Force search planes after spending two days aboard a fishing boat in rough seas.
In Maiden, N.C., an unmasked gunman robbed the branch of the Northwestern Bank this date of between two and four thousand dollars and then escaped by car in a flurry of gunfire as two men in separate vehicles gave chase, exchanging gunfire with the robber. Only two employees were present at the time. No one was injured.
In London, the British Air Ministry euphemistically described snow which had fallen as "frozen rain showers".
In Charlotte, Montaldo's announced plans to remodel its store, to be completed within three years at a cost of $700,000.
On the editorial page, "Post Office Inefficiency" provides the Hoover Commission's assessment of the faults in the Post Office Department, which, if corrected, would result in savings each year of 114 million dollars from the Department's half billion dollar deficit. The Postmaster General's recent cut from two deliveries to one per day was therefore just a start, it posits, in the right direction.
"Understanding Mental Illness" seeks to apprise the public of Mental Health Week, that they might seek to understand better the nature of mental illness.
Most of them just needed to look hard in the mirror and recognize the dark spots which they ordinarily shaded over with makeup, liquor or other substances.
"Primary Politicking" wonders whether the DNC would accept the resignation of Mrs. Charles Tillett as vice-chairman for the fact of her support of Senator Frank Graham in the Senate primary. If not, or if the Committee did not meet in the meantime, then it might be charged that her resignation was so much subterfuge.
Meanwhile, the unnamed campaign manager of Democratic opponent Willis Smith was insisting that Jonathan Daniels resign his post as North Carolina committeeman because of his support for Senator Graham. But in the same breath, the campaign manager had urged that it would likely backfire, just as the attempted purge by FDR of various disloyal members of Congress in 1938. The piece wonders therefore how Mr. Daniels's continuation in the post could both hurt and help Mr. Smith at the same time.
It finds that the primary was about the only part of the political process in the one-party state where Democratic officials could do any politicking, and the people, in any event, would select a candidate based on qualifications, not on support by party officials.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Nice Neighbors", praises the selection of former Daily News city editor and associate editor Lenoir Chambers as editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. He had been that newspaper's associate editor previously and then became editor of the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch.
It notes that A. T. Dill, educated at UNC and former reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, who had been associate editor at the Virginian-Pilot, was becoming editor of the Ledger-Dispatch, and that Harold Sugg, educated at Davidson and UNC, was becoming associate editor of the Virginian-Pilot. It finds it pleasing that so many North Carolina-educated journalists were being recognized by these leading Virginia newspapers.
Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor discusses the laudable, though losing, effort of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois to cut the pork out of the Rivers and Harbors bill, which had passed the Senate the previous week by a vote of 53 to 19, resulting in a 1.565 billion dollar bill out of the Senate and a 1.117 billion dollar bill out of the House. After Senator Douglas had introduced twenty amendments to the bill, all of which were defeated, the Senators even provided mock applause at the last such amendment.
Drew Pearson relates of a $100,000 tax fraud case against the head of a St. Louis shoe company, having been delayed for the fact of his claim, at age 51, made through a doctor, that he was in ill health, suffering from epilepsy. Mr. Pearson notes that it had gotten to be the case that anyone with any ailment at any age could delay Government prosecutions as long as they had a doctor attesting to endangerment of their health by the stress of a trial.
He next provides nine quotes from newspapers during and shortly after the war, asks readers to guess each quote's attributed source. He then provides the answers. You can do your own guessing.
Southwest dust storms would not cause another dust bowl, as in the latter Thirties, because soil conservation had covered most of the area with grass.
Marquis Childs discusses the harm being done to America's reputation abroad by the charges of Senator McCarthy, despite the fact that, thus far, nothing had been adduced to substantiate them. Summing up the feeling among foreign diplomats, an unnamed foreign minister of one Western European democracy had wondered aloud how America could indulge in such a frivolous controversy if the Government really meant to resist Soviet Communism.
The charges also affected the perception of America's capacity to resist Communism. A newspaper in Rio de Janeiro had said that it would not be surprising if the President were accused next of being a Communist, and that the creation of a perception that there were Communists in the highest levels of the State Department could not stimulate confidence in the ability to resist Communism.
He points out that according to one
of the most influential Republicans in Congress, the origin of the
claims came about merely by dint
The Senator had called on Father John Cronin, among others, to obtain information to buttress his claims, but Father Cronin had responded that despite compiling a file on Communists for a decade for the Catholic Church, he could not provide one name of a Communist in the State Department, stated affirmatively that his investigation showed that there were none. He added that had the Senator limited his claim to Communist sympathizers and security risks, he might have been able to prove it.
Mr. Childs relates that after Secretary of State Marshall had appointed John Peurifoy to take charge of the Department's loyalty program, he had done such a thorough job of weeding out all security risks that he was charged with "persecution" in the press, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune having received a Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing the Department's overzealous effort in this regard. The result was, however, that there were no Communists or security risks of any sort remaining in the Department.
The channels to remove such risks therefore existed and had worked and, he advises, to put the matter now in a political context was doing great harm to the country.
Robert C. Ruark finds Carol Reed's "The Third Man", based on a Graham Greene story, which had premiered in the United States in early February, to be both lacking in its ascribed art and even less possessed of its attributed suspense. He was thoroughly disenchanted with the film, even finding Anton Zaras's now-familiar theme to be "the dullest song since 'Mairzie Doats'".
"This is a peanut butter sandwich with delusions of caviar canape, and would be swell if anybody had thought to put the peanut butter on the bread." He finds the chase sequence through the sewers of Vienna for the elusive truth about the third man to have been surpassed by Lon Chaney in "The Phantom of the Opera". The "sick baby thing" he finds to be mere flag-waving.
He allows that Carol Reed's direction was fine, but only for the fact that he had nothing to direct in the way of a story and no single character bearing a resemblance to a human being, so had to spend his time dreaming up artistic camera shots.
"If you can squeeze a sewer or
a ferris wheel
Even the brief, late appearance of Orson Welles in the picture had accomplished a feat he thought not possible: Mr. Welles, he finds, "played Orson Welles as if he disbelieved that he was playing Orson Welles. And brother, that is really the ham what ain't."
Perhaps the problem lay in his admitted expectation of a Hitchcockian-type thriller.
In any event, the contemporaneous New York Times review of Bosley Crowther found a good bit more to cheer about in the film than did Mr. Ruark, while also finding it somewhat flawed. But once one got past the idea that the story was simply a "bang-up melodrama" without a point of view, not seeking to make any grand statement, then, he opined, one could enjoy it as an example of fine film-making.
Time has proved the film worthy of continuing praise, long after many of the vaunted films of the time have passed, mercifully, into obscurity, and few critics today would agree with Mr. Ruark's harsh assessment at the time of its release.
It won the British Academy Award for Best British Picture in 1950 and was nominated in 1951 for an American Academy Award for Best Director. It certainly ranks as one of the better U.S.-released films of 1950 and one of the more interesting of the entire era of black and white film, lasting roughly, in gradually diminishing degrees, through 1956. That it still holds the interest of viewers in 2017, as it has through the decades since its release, provides a strong endorsement of its cinematic qualities, though not necessarily an unerring assessment of the artistic merit of a film.
Yet, if one went to it, as did Mr. Ruark, with the mistaken expectation of a spine-tingling thriller, there would be inevitable disappointment. As a picture with its backdrop being an act of treachery, it is more in the mold of "Casablanca" than, say, "Foreign Correspondent" or "Saboteur", which place the treachery at the forefront and the love story as incidental to the action.
And if he did not like the recurring
sound of the zither
Framed Edition
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