The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 26, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a witness in the Owen Lattimore hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, John J. Huber, a one-time FBI informant, turned up safe but shaken after disappearing for 24 hours from a Washington hotel. He told his wife that he had a blackout in New York and would be home that evening. An FBI friend said that Mr. Huber, apprehensive about tough questioning from Senator Millard Tydings, had been overcome by the prospect of a public hearing, having been promised a closed hearing.
In Washington, John Maragon was convicted, after jury deliberations lasting 96 minutes, on two counts of perjury before the Senate Investigating subcommittee which had investigated five-percenters the previous year. Mr. Maragon had been accused of lying about his claimed lack of fees for his services in procuring Government contracts for clients, relying on White House influence from General Harry Vaughan, military aide to the President. He was acquitted, however, on that charge and was convicted for lying about having only one bank account and for claiming that he had severed connections with an importing company when he took a job with the State Department in 1945. General Vaughan was never called as a witness by either side and both sides faulted the other for not doing so.
Betting "Commissioner" James Caroll of St. Louis, "Mr. Big" in the odds-making business, who announced odds on the Kentucky Derby and Major League baseball, told a Senate Commerce subcommittee that there was no connection between big-time gambling and organized crime, that commissioners operated as independent businessmen without moral compunction. He said that there was no gambling syndicate, combination, or organization. He opposed the proposed legislation to ban fast wire-service communications of betting information, saying that the information had no effect on betting but rather only served to eliminate the anxiety of bettors.
Senator Taft called for a test of the willingness of Congress to cut the budget by slicing 500 million dollars from the President's proposed 3.4 billion dollar foreign aid appropriation bill.
The House Appropriations Committee recommended that the military budget be increased by 350 million dollars for the coming fiscal year, as sought by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson in an effort to combat Communism.
The House Ways & Means Committee voted to cut the excise tax on movie and sports tickets in half, from twenty to ten percent. The total in excise taxes recommended for cut thus far had been 575 million dollars, well in excess of the 190 million recommended in cuts by the President. The Committee was considering recommending another half billion dollars in cuts as well.
During the "Operation Swarmer" airlift exercise, a C-54 crashed and burned between Hartsville and Darlington, S.C., but none of the crew were seriously injured.
In London, the Labour Government narrowly survived two critical tests by five-vote margins, averting a Parliamentary defeat which would have forced the Government to resign. One measure doubled the gasoline tax and the second imposed a one-third percent purchase tax on trucks. Labour held a seven-vote majority over the combined Conservatives and Liberal Party members.
An escaped Japanese prisoner from Russian custody on Sakhalin claimed that Japanese airmen were training Russians how to fly. He also claimed that there were 15,000 Japanese on Sakhalin awaiting return home, whereas the Russians had recently claimed that the repatriation program was complete.
Under Government mediation, Bell Telephone and Communications Workers appeared headed toward early settlement of their differences at the outset of a two-week truce in the strike which had been originally slated to start this date.
In New York, a thousand protesting students clamored for more pay for their teachers, while stomping down a 30-foot section of railing in the park in front of City Hall Plaza, and hurling their textbooks high into the air. There were isolated protest marches also in other sections of the city, which, according to police estimates, included 10,000 students, with an additional 9,000 parading in front of several schools in Brooklyn. The new City budget allowed for a $250 per year increase in salaries instead of the requested $650, causing teachers to boycott after-hours work, forcing cancellation of many extracurricular activities, including proms and athletic events.
In Seattle, an unexplained explosion destroyed a four-story apartment building but no one was killed or injured.
In Washington, police arrested seven men in a roundup of holdup suspects and found a uniform of a Brinks armored car service at a house where three of the arrestees were found. They were therefore being questioned in connection with the Brinks robbery in Boston the prior January.
Snow and ice fell over parts of the Midwest, with snow besetting parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In this date's News, the largest grocery section ever printed for a single advertiser in newspaper history was included for the Dixie Wholesale and Retail Meat Co., consisting of 32 pages, eclipsing the Miami Daily News's previous record of 24 pages for Frederick's Super Market of Miami, set one year earlier.
You won't want to miss it. Such events normally occur but once in a lifetime.
On the editorial page, "An Answer to M'Carthy" finds that the President, rather than getting into a "braying contest with a jackass", had, in his speech two nights earlier to the ABA, set out instead to explain affirmatively the actions being taken by the Government to weed out Communists and other security risks, while assuring that the job had been done efficiently and effectively, that there was no need to transform the FBI into a "Gestapo-like secret police" or to become a "right-wing totalitarian country" to accomplish the task.
The piece agrees with the President and finds that while Communists needed to be rooted out of key government positions wherever they were found, making a mockery of the Bill of Rights in the process would do more harm than good.
"The Rail Strike Truce" suggests to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, in the midst of a two-week truce in their threatened strike over demand for a second fireman aboard diesel locomotives, that they realize that the railroads were being hard-hit by competition and that there was a dire need for more efficiency through reduced costs or there would be no jobs for engineers, firemen or anyone else on the railroads.
"By-Passing the Queen City—II" tells of the Metropolitan Opera singers, ready to perform selections from Tosca
It again uses the occasion to urge, as the day before regarding the bypass by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the Mayor's auditorium committee to get busy on submission of a proposal to replace the outmoded and acoustically unfit Armory-Auditorium.
"Personal Thermodynamics" finds summer just around the corner with its heat-stroke inducing rays, while viewing spring as an uncertain season—and filling otherwise blank space in the column on a spring noonday getting close to deadline, no doubt.
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Shopworn Issues", finds the efforts in North Carolina by Willis Smith and former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds to smear Senator Frank Graham as being in sympathy with Communists, as well as the same campaign in Florida by Congressman George Smathers against Senator Claude Pepper, to be rolling out old issues and trying to prove that no documentation was necessary to make such charges stick in the atmosphere created by Senator McCarthy, practicing the same craft.
The piece, however, warns the Graham and Pepper opponents that they had better find something more substantial and more novel on which to hang their hook, as it predicts that the Red-baiting festival might soon come to an end. It believes that North Carolinians and Floridians would see how silly the theme was and reject it.
Drew Pearson tells of the Joint Chiefs in 1944-45 having urged President Roosevelt to make concessions to the Russians to obtain their backing in the proposed invasion of Japan, for without a Russian attack across Manchuria, it was thought at the time, there would be 100,000 American casualties in a land invasion of Japan.
Buttressing the belief, General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, had advised the Joint Chiefs that they could not rely on the atomic bomb, notwithstanding Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer advising that the new weapon could end the war. As a consequence, there was even agreement by the Joint Chiefs on providing Russia with railway access to the Pacific, Baltic, and Persian Gulf, much more than FDR ever eventually offered at Yalta in February, 1945.
General Marshall later advised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after his year-long mission in China for President Truman in 1946, that Chiang Kai-Shek's Government in China was a lost cause, that American aid was not reaching the fighting forces and Chiang's instructions were not being followed by the independent war lords and thieves surrounding him.
The previous winter, a secret report told of the native Formosans being opposed to Chiang, resultant of the killing of hundreds during the early months of Chinese occupation in 1945, that they would therefore not fight for him during any battle against the Communists for Formosa. The Chinese, too, were in bad fettle, wanting to return home. But the report said also that if Chiang would surrender authority to the Formosans, the U.S. would support an independent Formosa.
When Harry Truman was a Senator in charge of the Senate Investigating Committee prior to mid-1944, he advised FDR that as much as half of American aid being flown across the Hump in the Himalayas to China was not reaching the fighting fronts and that one Chinese warlord was even sending tungsten to the Japanese.
A delegation of prominent Jewish leaders urged Attorney General J. Howard McGrath to support a bill outlawing interstate travel of masked or hooded persons. They also presented him with a copy of a new book published by the Anti-Defamation League, A Measure of Freedom. Attorney General McGrath said that he would support the bill but added that he did not wish to do anything to harm the sale of bedsheets manufactured in New England.
Washington Star editor Ben McKelway joked before the American Society of Newspaper Editors that because two years earlier the Society had Russian guests, they would likely be investigated by HUAC, but that he did not want to steal the thunder of Senator McCarthy, set to appear later that night before the Society.
Marquis Childs discusses the Senate campaign in Florida and the Alabama campaign for the Democratic executive committee, both signaling in their outcomes the direction which the Democratic Party would take in the South. In the Florida campaign, Congressman Smathers, once a protege of Senator Pepper, was attacking him as a friend to Communists. In the meantime, Senator Pepper was trying to back-pedal from the President's civil rights program while Congressman Smathers was making hay from the fact that Senator Pepper had supported the Fair Deal and the civil rights program.
In an effort to make the case, the Smathers campaign had circulated a pamphlet, prepared by a former FBI agent, showing pictures of Senator Pepper with Paul Robeson and Henry Wallace, insinuating that the FBI, in fact not the case, had a file on the Senator.
In Alabama, the effort to control the state party executive committee by the Dixiecrats, opposing the slate supported by Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, would, if the Dixiecrats were successful, revive interest in the movement. A defeat would probably end its political viability in the South. At stake were Southern electors in 1952 who could prove determinative in giving a Republican the presidency.
Robert C. Ruark finds that the method of guilt by association, of which Senator McCarthy had become a notorious exponent during the previous two months, was not so bad as far as keeping people out of high places in government. He believes that if persons in influential positions regularly hung out with Communists or Communist sympathizers, then the ideology could not help but wear off on them, making them unsuitable for high positions.
So, he concludes that if Owen Lattimore in fact had close relations with Philip Jaffe, Jake Stachel, and Frederick Field, as Louis Budenz had contended in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, then Senator McCarthy would have won his case, as Mr. Lattimore would then be proven unsuitable as an adviser for the State Department, an "undesirable alien in his own land".
That's
a bit ridiculous, assuming you believe in some rudimentary semblance
of the Constitution and its guarantee of freedom of association
Go
back to reviewing the movies, where your judgment, apt or inept, is at
least harmless. Funny is as funny
A letter writer finds the President and the State Department appearing to cross swords with Russia when the President told the newspaper editors that he wanted a "truth campaign", while also insinuating that Russia was to be identified as "liars" and "slanderers". He praises the Council for Prevention of War and Senators Brien McMahon and Millard Tydings, who he finds had genuinely sought to avoid war.
A letter from the president of the Board of Directors of the Heart Association of Charlotte thanks the newspaper for its support in the Association's drive, especially the reporting of Bob Sain and Dick Young.
A letter writer urges election of Senator Frank Graham in the coming May 27 special Senatorial primary, urging the words of Theodore Roosevelt in his favor.
A letter from conservationist and ornithologist William Vogt thanks the city for welcoming him recently, and especially the Charlotte Children's Nature Museum and its director, Laura Owens.
A letter writer finds the U.S. fast becoming a "police state" under New Dealism, "planning schemes inspired by Socialists and Communists and their twin, mediocrity". He finds, as a result, democracy on the way out in the country.
Don't you worry and fret, now. Joe and Dick are coming to the rescue. Sleep tighty. Don't let the bedbugs bity.
Framed Edition
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