The Charlotte News
Tuesday, April 4, 1950
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Tom Connally said that it was unlikely that the Senate would vote to cite for contempt Administration officials resisting, by Presidential order, the subpoenas issued by the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for certain loyalty board records of persons in the State Department, accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Communist leanings or membership. The subcommittee also sought voluntary release by Senator McCarthy of six documents which he had provided to the FBI, related to his charge that Owen Lattimore was the top Soviet spy in the State Department, albeit a charge he had since modified to posing a "bad policy risk". The three officials refusing the subpoenas were Secretary of State Acheson, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, and Civil Service Commission head, Harry Mitchell. Senator Millard Tydings, chairman of the subcommittee, said that he considered slim the chance of receipt of documents either from the Administration or Senator McCarthy.
The Defense Department ordered new studies by the Joint Chiefs of the proposed 13.9 billion dollar defense budget to determine whether more money should be allocated to the Air Force and Navy air wing. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson said that if the Joint Chiefs recommended more money be allocated for the Air Force, he would ask the President and the Budget Bureau for those funds. General Eisenhower had said the previous week that he believed an additional 800 million dollars ought be added to the defense budget, but the Secretary said that he was confident that the equipment recommended by the General could be obtained within the existing budget. Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia had called for 562 million dollars more for warplanes.
In Berlin, Maj. General Maxwell Taylor, U.S. commandant of the American zone, disclosed that the Western powers had organized an allied general staff for use in an emergency, resemblant to the wartime Supreme Headquarters. General Taylor, later to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs just prior to the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, said that the primary task for the general staff was to plan the suppression of any "putsch" from the Eastern sector by the Communists, and had come into being after the threatened youth march of a half million East Germans in Berlin during the coming May 27-30.
Albanian exiles in Rome said that a revolt against the Russian domination of Albania had flared in the ranks of the Albanian Communists, resulting in a bloody purge of Trotskyites and Nationalists.
The White House, through press secretary Charles G. Ross, said from Key West that neither the President nor members of his staff had any knowledge of flying saucers. He said that the project set up by the Air Force in December, 1947 to investigate such reports had been ended the previous August, after it was determined that there was nothing to substantiate the reports. Press interest had been stimulated anew after David Lawrence of U.S. News & World Report had stated recently that the saucers did exist and were in fact aircraft of unusual design developed by the military, probably by the Navy. Mr. Ross said such a secret weapons project was "extremely unlikely".
You can tell by the way they're hedging that those saucers are real and that they come from Mars, with them little green men stored out yonder in the desert somers.
The Distilled Spirits Institute reported an increase in Federal seizures of moonshine stills, up by 387 over the same two-month period of January-February, 1949, 283 more than in the same period of prewar 1940. They cited the plentiful availability of sugar and copper and the nine dollar per gallon Federal tax on legal whiskey as the reasons.
You have to control the sugar and copper better. The Martians are bringing it in by the saucerful.
In Cincinnati, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and two-year sentence of E. F. Pritchard, Jr., once a political favorite of FDR, for conspiracy to force ballots, ballot box stuffing, in Bourbon County, Ky. He had previously been an aide to both Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Justice Felix Frankfurter.
In Iowa City, Ia., the jury began deliberations in the case of the young man accused of murder of his girlfriend by strangulation, which he had claimed was accidental in the course of playful mutual strangulation during a passionate kiss. The court instructed the jurors on first and second degree murder as well as manslaughter.
In Cleveland, Cheetah was tried by a civil jury for biting a customer at a pet shop after picking her pocket of $10.
The Martians worked through him to do it.
In Chula Vista, California, John Kellogg, cereal air, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 66.
In Charlotte, a civic leader was killed when his car plunged off Wilmont Road into a ditch during the morning hours, after he failed to make a long curve near Becker's Riding Academy.
Also in Charlotte, three homeless and jobless men and one woman were given, respectively, 30-day road and jail sentences in City Police Court for vagrancy after being found in a slum house. One of the men had a serious hip injury which he said came from being cut with a razor by another man. Police said that each of the five persons had been observed on other occasions drunk on "smoke", a mixture of paint thinner, soft drinks, and cheap whiskey. The officers found several bottles of the mixture at the time of arrest.
As long as they didn't have any mirrors to go with it, which could prove really lethal.
A part of chapter sixty-eight of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.
On the front page, "What about Ted Franklin?" discusses the case of the 15-year old boy accused of murdering a service station operator the prior Saturday in Charlotte. The accused had come from a broken home, read mystery stories, played hooky, had previously been arrested for theft of automobile equipment. He had confessed to the act, and, posits the piece, his harsh life experience did not excuse it, nor was it sufficient to cause it. It wonders who was to blame, parents, society, the other things within his immediate environment, or the accused, himself.
"Assassination by Innuendo" quotes from a column by Stewart Alsop that Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was being subjected to the rumors that he was a "shameless extrovert", that his daughter was a thespian, that he practiced nepotism with his sister-in-law, and that he had been engaged in celibacy before being married. All of these things were uttered as if damnable sins, taking advantage of those without adequate vocabulary to understand their meaning. And, in fact, even the supposed factual bases for those claims were, for the most part, false.
Mr. Alsop had found the effort similar to what Senator McCarthy was doing to Secretary of State Acheson. The tactics, the piece concludes, were used by weak and unethical persons to deflect focus from the real issues.
"Mr. Truman Is Right" agrees with the President's refusal to obey a Senate subpoena for loyalty files compiled by the FBI regarding persons accused by Senator McCarthy of being Communists or sympathizers. Release of the files would handicap the work of the FBI in the future, would damage the reputations of innocent persons, violate precedent spanning back to the Founding against the executive branch being compelled to provide documents to the legislative branch, and would bypass the loyalty review board, already working.
It suggests that claims by Republicans that the refusal implied that the President had something to hide would not be accepted by the American people.
"Right Man for the Job" tells of the New York Safety Exposition having related comparative figures on traffic fatalities, that there were 666 such deaths in 1907, compared to 31,500 in 1949. In all, 927,260 persons had been killed in U.S. traffic accidents during that 43-year period. The dead of all American wars from the revolution through World War II totaled 852,000.
The piece compliments Governor Kerr Scott for setting aside politics in his appointment of a new advisory committee on highway safety, headed by an outspoken critic of the Governor, John Park, publisher of the Raleigh Times.
"The Recurrent Resurrection", another guest editorial for Easter week, by Dr. William Harrison Williams of the Pritchard Memorial Baptist Church, suggests that resurrection was necessary for everyone, as well for the church, itself. He posits that the resurrection experience was the greatest need for society, to conquer the grip of fear holding mankind. He assures that the living Christ would not fail in spiritual reign and that justice on earth would prevail.
That'll be the Day, as long as there are Republicans around with too much power, stolen through appeal to ignorant fools, telling them what they want to hear, while laughing in private at their incredible gullibility.
A piece from the Fayetteville Observer, titled "Dust Storms", wonders whether the dust storms recently reported from Kansas were harbinger of a new dust bowl era, as that which in the latter Thirties had caused the Okie migration to the West. It says it does not know whether Providence or provident agricultural techniques had ended the earlier dust bowl, but suggests that if it was repeating, there was at least the solace to be gleaned from the earlier time that it would not be of indefinite duration.
The earlier dust bowl ended because of better plowing and planting techniques taught farmers by the Agriculture Department under the steady and knowledgeable hand of Secretary Henry Wallace. Few historians would seriously debate that notion today and for the past several decades. But it was unpopular by 1950 to give Mr. Wallace any credit for anything other than falsely ascribing to him sympathy with Communists, only because the American Communist Party had endorsed his Progressive Party candidacy in 1948.
Drew Pearson indicates that President Taft and six other Presidents had sided with the position adopted by President Truman and against that of the Senate Republicans regarding turning over confidential executive branch documents to either Congressional body. President Washington had refused to provide to the House a copy of instructions to U.S. diplomats who had negotiated a treaty with Great Britain. President Jefferson had refused to allow two Cabinet members to supply documents in the trial of Aaron Burr. President Monroe had declined to provide papers regarding the conduct of two Navy officers. President Jackson had refused to provide a memo read by him to the Cabinet regarding removal of public money from the bank of the United States. President Tyler refused to provide War Department reports on the Cherokee Indians to the House. President Cleveland supported the position of his Attorney General in refusing to give the Senate documents anent removal of a district attorney.
These precedents should be distinguished from that at issue in U.S. v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, decided, 8-0, in 1974 by the Supreme Court, determining that a bald claim of "executive privilege", without more, was insufficient to avoid a Justice Department subpoena directed to the President for production of tapes and documents in an ongoing criminal case, that involving an intra-branch subpoena rather than one from the legislative branch to the executive, thus not implicating separation of powers doctrine.
He next imparts a letter written by the Dilowa, the living Buddha of Western Mongolia, to Prime Minister Nehru of India, a country long considered a bulwark to Communism, a view shared by the Dilowa. He sought protection in India for Mongol refugees fleeing the "red terror".
Congressman Ray Madden of Indiana objected to the House Rules Committee, at the instance of Dixiecrat and acting chairman Gene Cox of Georgia, hastily calling up the natural gas bill to deregulate the industry without providing adequate time to study it. The bill would affect adversely consumer prices on natural gas for millions of Americans.
Robert C. Ruark recommends Leave Your Language Alone! by Cornell professor Albert Hall, and Science Is a Sacred Cow, by a scientist, Anthony Standen. Professor Hall suggested that the language was overly cluttered with useless rules, that it was silly to sacrifice simplicity for rules of grammar formulated out of Latin in the 17th century. Mr. Ruark wholly agrees. He favors "ain't" over the more formal rendition of the negative of the verb "to be". He obeys no rules on prepositions ending sentences or dangling participles. He wonders what the difference is between saying "I will" and "I shall", except as a useless form of schoolmarm stricture. Ditto for the distinction between "may" and "can", one seeking permission, the other implying ability.
The professor viewed "it's me" as being as sound as "it is I".
We note that, routinely, probably from television, we hear educated people make statements as, "They gave the gift to Jukie and I," when they mean, properly, "They gave the gift to Jukie and me." You would not say, "They gave the gift to I," in normal conversation. There is no change simply for convenience by adding another party-object to the clause. So, we strongly disapprove and disagree with both Mr. Ruark and the professor. The culture is in quite enough trouble without sacrificing the English language to a state of anomic suicide. If there are no rules, we reiterate, there ain't no rules. Beware. For proper and precise use of language is inextricably bound to proper and precise reasoning.
He next considers Mr. Standen's work on science, favoring complete control of the hydrogen bomb. He had asserted that scientists had a "fabulous collective ego", suggesting the proposition that disproving ghosts was practically impossible for admitting necessarily of the possibility that ghosts might only appear when scientists were not present.
Mr. Ruark had felt such doubt in the faith of science when Dr. Robert Millikan had announced recently that he was not sure whether the hydrogen bomb could be built. It was the same way Mr. Ruark had felt regarding whether two and two equaled four, for it might equate to three and a half.
He wishes a hearty sale for both books.
It is four
Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the thirty-first in his series of weekly articles on childhood education, tells of his previous column about homework being hard to accomplish at home having stirred quite a controversy in Albemarle. He corrects any misimpression conveyed that he disfavored homework, saying that he definitely was in favor of it, that the better students invariably were seen to exit the school each day with an armful of books. Yet, he finds it not advisable to overload students with outside assignments.
A year earlier, he had taken part in a poll with parents in which they were asked how much homework ought be assigned, to which the most popular answer was about an hour's worth. He thinks most high school teachers would be satisfied with that much outside work on all subjects. (You had better double or triple that if you intend to go to a decent college, at least by twenty years hence. An hour is fit for the first grade, maybe. Then, you can go out and play. No, don't you complain that it will be dark by then...)
Many students would not do any outside work and the only solution was to arrange for study halls, but, even there, many students would not accomplish any work. (These are the students who, as adults, you encounter in various jobs jabbering away with their fellow employees or other customers while you are forced to wait in line, late for an appointment, for the end of their jabber session, oblivious to anyone but their jabbering egos, while you know that if you say anything, they will only seek to make it worse, even possibly call the cops, because they hate themselves and their two-bit, routinized jobs which permit not a whit of creativity. Better buckle down and do the creative work when you have the opportunity so that you don't get stuck in a dead-end position for the rest of your life, jabbering to other mindless people. We have no problem, incidentally, with people who can converse while doing their jobs efficiently. We only criticize those who take a lengthy jabber break while you wait.)
He suggests that the amount of work to be done outside class depended on the subject matter, whether academic or technical in nature. If a student were taking only a couple of academic courses, then he might be able to get all of his assignments done in a study hall.
A drawback to homework was that lazy students might simply copy the homework of others. The only remedy was to have the work performed in class. He thinks written work should not be assigned unless the teacher was prepared to read it. His experience was that students would not do much studying unless they had to write something about it. But the teacher did not have the time in a high school to check the writing of 120 or 140 students taught every day.
Spot checks, however, varying from student to student on a given day, maybe limited to two or three, on an assignment of 300 words or less of writing, serve to deter laziness while preserving the teacher's energy and yet instilling good writing habits in the students. Or, you could have two or three read aloud their 300 words at the beginning of a couple of classes per week, and then invite open criticism for a few minutes. And if a student is unprepared, without their page of writing, you have one of the hefty football players dangle them by their ankles for a few minutes out the second floor window. The girls can be dangled in effigy, unless wearing pants.
The Gettysburg Address is provided in full, juxtaposed to a humorous rendition of it arranged for taxpayers, by a taxpayer, appearing in the Shelby (S.D.) Record.
A letter writer warns that the Supreme Court decision in the Georgia unit-voting system case could, if held viable under the Constitution as in the lower courts, open the door potentially for other Southern states to adopt a similar system to enable the rural vote to trump the urban vote, and consequently to nullify the black vote in the South. He notes that when originally enacted in Georgia in 1917, there was no black vote and so its original purpose was not to perpetuate white supremacy. Now, however, it was having that effect.
In keeping with our tradition from 2005 and 2009, we offer our Ode to the 2017 edition of the chosen admittees to the Order
Last year, pre-season number one,
Wound up number two,
But we try harder.
This year, number six,
Wound up number one.There's Justin Jackson in the corner
Shooting over the guarder;
Then Joel Berry drives, jumps:
Add twice three more to the larder.Next time down the floor,
Here comes Kennedy Meeks,
Dancing cheek to cheek
With his man in the post.
Score another bucket
For the Old Blue Ghost.Isaiah Hicks, so the prophets say,
Will squeeze inside and make The Defense pay.
In off the bench comes Luke Maye,
Scores the Big One on the fade away.Now comes Theo Pinson
Hitting like a champ,
Passing cross-court to
Nate Britt, another three this trip,
The D lost their pants.Up jumps Tony Bradley,
Going to the well;
He'll make them, break them,
And give them cause to swear.Seventh Woods, not to be denied,
Works the ball around the horn
And takes it inside, dishes off to Jackson,
To Theo, to Berry; oh lordy, another
Opponent just committed hara-kiri.Into the game, to clean up the blood,
Steps Stilman White,
Brandon Robinson, Shea Rush,
Kanler Coker, Aaron Rohlman,
And the other side surrenders.
The torture was enough.And the player time forgot,
Kenny Williams, will be back
Well, next year, heart and soul from
The bench, sweeping away the fear.So, look there at Ramses, how happy he is,
Jumping through the Hoops.
It's six down and none to go;
Got that sixth banner to hang
Where only the fearless help raise the roof,
And jam these tripping Dukers, forked, aloof.Coach Roy Williams has magical number three,
And next year, maybe number four.
With a hundred Tournament wins,
Put his name up there at the top in the Lore.It's Basketball, the name of the game,
Like Christmas, comes but once a year,
Giving the shot to those with the shot,
For a team's shot at fame,
Failing which, never let drop a tear.Many are called, few are chosen:
Tarus Heelius Nippin Tuckus
Took light from the sun
And, just in fun,
Completely thawed the Winter frozen.So, '57, '82, '93, '05, '09,
The old trainkeeps on rolling
Down the line;
We join you now,
And hope to see you fine and lean,
Next year; for tonight, good morrow,
UNC Champs in Seventeen; Gonzaga,
Good game, should feel no sorrow.
There's undoubtedly more from you to be seen
N.B.: Special thanks to Kris Jenkins,.
Take a leaf from us, next winter, to borrow.
The brother behind the bench.
No hard feelings for last year's
Last quarter-second skill,
Which your thirst for first
Our fire for victory did quench.
Just don't do itever again ...
Framed Edition
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