The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 5, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site ed. Note: The front page reports that the chairman of the State Department's loyalty board stated to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, investigating the charges of Senator Joseph McCarthy, that there were no known Communists within the Department. He said that in 246 cases processed by the board in the prior two years, only two had been determined as security risks and five had resigned with charges pending. There was no indication by the chairman what had occurred with the two cases. Senator McCarthy had called the board "either incompetent or stupid" for passing on nine individuals who he claimed were Communists. The chairman refused comment on these nine individuals for the President's order refusing disclosure of the loyalty board records subpoenaed by the subcommittee.

The Chinese Nationalist Foreign Minister protested to the U.N. that the Soviets were aiding the Chinese Communists, including supply of fliers and air technicians, setting up an air force signal corps, and providing former Japanese planes and former U.S. lend-lease planes. There had also been an earlier report that on Sunday, two Soviet planes had shot down two Nationalist pilots, but this incident was not included in the protest.

Congressman Harold Cooley of North Carolina, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, denounced the Administration's Brannan farm program as an untried idea based on a consumer subsidy. The previous day, Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan and Senator Hubert Humphrey had argued to a group of farmers in Minnesota in favor of the plan.

The Federal Trade Commission announced a crackdown on false and misleading advertising by cigarette manufacturers, issuing cease and desist orders to Reynolds Tobacco Co. and P. Lorillard Co. It was considering like action against the American Tobacco Co. as well. The FTC said that all cigarettes contained some nicotine and throat irritants and that there was no basis, therefore, for concluding that one brand was less offending than others.

In Iowa City, Ia., the young man accused of murdering his girlfriend by strangulation was acquitted by the jury, following 23 hours since the start of deliberations. One juror told a reporter that the defendant's testimony regarding his having related the story under sodium pentothal that the two had engaged in playful mutual strangulation during a kiss and that the girl then suddenly fell over dead had convinced him of the truth of the matter—or, perhaps more properly phrased, raised a reasonable doubt as to the defendant's guilt.

No, don't second guess, as you were not in attendance at the trial and did not hear the evidence. The most unfortunate part of the case was that it had occurred at the Empty Arms hotel.

In Raleigh, jury selection commenced in the trial of the Wake Forest College student who had allegedly murdered another student the prior December 15 and then fled by bus and car to Los Angeles after slipping police custody at the scene. The prosecutor said that he would seek a verdict of guilty for first degree murder and apparently the death penalty.

Emery Wister of The News tells of the trial beginning in U.S. District Court of officials and students charged by information, rather than pursuant to indictment, with misdemeanor conspiracy to defraud the Southeastern Peoples College of Charlotte.

The City Council and County Commissioners were set to hear a summary of a report compiled by the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, recommending consolidation of the City and County police departments for increased efficiency.

In Detroit, a dead man's aorta was transplanted to the heart of a 57-year old man in an attempt to save his life, as the patient's aorta was distended and about to burst. Doctors Conrad Lam and H. H. Aram, who performed the operation, called it a success, but did not say whether there was any precedent at the Henry Ford Hospital. The patient was improving. The six-inch segment of the dead man's aorta had been preserved for five days.

A part of chapter sixty-nine of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.

On the editorial page, "How Old Is 'Too Old'?" suggests that the remedy for employers terminating persons still in their prime in favor of younger employees who could be hired at lower wages or salaries was better education of employers to the notion that the economic health of the entire community was salutary to business, and that rendering persons unemployed in middle age, when it was difficult to find other work, was contrary to that aim. Public works, as proposed by Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin, would only supply a partial answer, as would broadening and extending Social Security benefits.

"More Patchwork" tells of the President, while signing the bill which relaxed strictures on cotton and peanut acreage and tightened that on potatoes, having complained that a more comprehensive bill was necessary to regulate farming and stop overproduction. He had found the bill he signed to be a step in the right direction, but not going far enough. He urged again passage of the Brannan plan.

The Christian Science Monitor had predicted that the "butter bust" would become as notorious as the potato debacle of the prior year, as much of the butter purchased by the Government's Consumer Credit Corporation under support prices was beginning to spoil.

Consumers were frustrated and wanted a resolution to avoid such waste of tax money and, it suggests, if the Congress could not find a reasonable alternative to the Brannan plan, then patience, already worn thin, would wear out.

"School for Delinquents?" endorses the recommendation for a manual training school for delinquents urged by the Charlotte Domestic Relations and Juvenile Court supervising judge. Such a school would provide the youngsters, from broken homes and without parental guidance, a means to learn a trade and contribute positively to the society.

"The Focal Point of Life", an Easter week guest editorial by the Reverend Robert L. Crandall of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, discusses the omnipresent conflict between the will of man and the will of God, as personified by the crucifixion of Christ. To be rid of this conflict in an attempt to be integrated, he finds, was to proceed in the wrong direction. It was why Easter was the most joyful of occasions for Christians, as it showed how the Lord could use the cross as a means toward an end, giving Christ the ability to use death as a vehicle to serve the will of the Father.

He suggests Easter as a time when reconstruction of one's life could begin, placing God and Christ at the center of existence.

Harry McMullen, State Attorney General, supplies the background for planned amici curiae briefs to be filed by North Carolina and ten other Southern states in Sweatt v. Painter, the case before the Supreme Court to determine whether Herman Sweatt ought be admitted to the University of Texas Law School, for which he had qualified but for his racial identity, because the separate law school for blacks in the state did not comport with the separate-but-equal requirement of the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, and in two others before the high Court, McLaurin v. Oklahoma, challenging segregated seating within the University of Oklahoma doctoral program, to which Mr. McLaurin had been ordered admitted for violation of separate-but-equal doctrine by the State, and in Henderson v. U.S., challenging the Constitutional validity of segregated Southern Railway dining car facilities allowed by the I.C.C., the petitioners were contending that Plessy ought be overruled. It was this contention to which the Southern states objected primarily in filing the friend-of-the-court briefs. It was believed that it would throw the public schools into chaos by requiring an end to segregation.

He presents his argument, which has been presented ad nauseam here and so will not need further elucidation.

It would be soundly rejected in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which found unanimously that because in 58 years, Plessy had not accommodated separate-but-equal facilities in the public schools, it could no longer pass Constitutional muster. Sweatt would find the separate State-run law school for blacks inadequate and order the University of Texas Law School to admit the petitioner, and so did not need to reach the issue of the continued viability of Plessy.

Essentially, over a period of 16 years, after 1938 when the Court decided Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, holding that the State of Missouri had not provided an in-state law school for blacks in violation of Plessy, the Court heard cases repeatedly involving higher education facilities found not to pass muster under Plessy, making the Court quite receptive by 1954 to the notion that Plessy had not fulfilled its intended function and that segregation itself in public education was violative therefore of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Drew Pearson tells of Congressman John Rooney of New York seeking to trim the budget of the Civil Aeronautics Board by 23 percent, which would require reduction of 100 of the 640-person staff, already overburdened with regulating the nation's civil aviation. It was said that the motive was a personal grudge held against the CAB chairman, Joseph O'Connell, for complaining that Mr. Rooney spent too little time in Washington attending his Congressional duties, a valid complaint, says Mr. Pearson.

Observers had come to believe that the unfounded allegations being set forth by Senator McCarthy were motivated by Joseph Kamp, a Fascist-minded person who had been convicted in 1948 of contempt of Congress, affirmed by the Court of Appeals. Mr. Pearson reviews the Senator's consistent amendment and reduction of his initial claim, that there were 207 "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, trimmed quickly to 57, then changed to "Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers". Whereas he had first been willing to make general statements in public, he was now confining himself to the Senate where he enjoyed immunity from defamation laws. He was paraphrasing Mr. Kamp's rhetoric appearing in his publications, endorsed by the Klan—not unlike the present "President" who, during the campaign and since, has been echoing consistently the outrageously false and baseless Steve Bannon lines out of Breitbart.

Congressman Charles Halleck had managed to convince three Republicans to change their votes against the natural gas deregulation bill sponsored by Senator Bob Kerr of Oklahoma, such that the bill, defeated on the first ballot by a vote of 179 to 173, was able narrowly to pass.

Joseph Alsop, in Frankfurt, finds, after having spent a month in Germany and talking to many hundreds of Germans, that if you "do not try to win a cold war, you must expect to lost it." He suggests further that there was no difference between a cold and a hot war, beyond the absence of shooting in the former. But insofar as mobilization of resources and ruthlessness of methods, or the price of defeat, they were identical.

He posits that the loss of Germany, which would likely occur, if the present course continued to be followed, would then imply the loss of Western Europe, leaving only two choices, surrender or transforming the U.S. into a "permanently alerted armed camp."

Germany was not presently susceptible to unity except under the terms dictated by Moscow. "You can proclaim the lamb's neutrality, but it will not be respected by the wolf."

For a relatively small outlay, the Western zones of Berlin could be transformed into show places for the Eastern sector. He had found a picture of courage in the uranium workers in the East who daily risked their lives to escape from their enslavement. Likewise, the West Germans, currently fearful, were ready to be rallied with a proper offensive policy invigorated by the U.S.

The first step was to provide military security, after which could come economic, political, and psychological pressures to the Soviet empire, more vulnerable than the West. When such "conditions of fact", of which Secretary Acheson frequently spoke, could be realized, peaceful coexistence could finally become a possibility.

Marquis Childs finds the FBI and CIA to be quite adequate in fighting espionage, that the FBI had contributed most of the effort in revealing the espionage of British scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had admitted in London having provided British and U.S. atomic secrets to the Russians between 1944 and 1947.

But, he urges, the technique of Senator McCarthy was "aimed for the most part at traitorous thoughts."

He recommends Treason, the Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History, by Nathaniel Weyl, as putting in perspective the subject of treason during the country's history. There had been traitors during the Revolution, as Aaron Burr—a charge never proven, as he was acquitted at trial in 1807. The Civil War had its Copperheads and anti-conscription rioters in Northern cities. During the Spanish-American War, a commanding general of the Army had been an agent for the Spanish secret service. But, Mr. Weyl had instructed, no foreign government had ever deployed the type of apparatus for intelligence gathering which the Soviets had in the Communist parties of the world. He concluded that treason undermined freedom, itself, not merely the government.

The totalitarian movements, particularly Communism, had been led by intellectuals seeking absolute faith and absolute truth, sans moral choice. But that denied creativity, Mr. Weyl concluded, leaving their minds too dogmatically egocentric and immature to embrace freedom.

Mr. Childs finds the atmosphere created by Senator McCarthy to be reminiscent of the months preceding Pearl Harbor in fall, 1941, as some of the same people resisting President Roosevelt's efforts at the time to provide aid to Britain and France were now seeking to displace Secretary Acheson.

Mr. Weyl, incidentally, a former Communist, would testify before a Senate subcommittee in 1952 that he had been a part of the Ware underground Communist cell within the Government during the 1930's while he worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and had personally seen Alger Hiss at more than two of the meetings. That, of course, was simply another claim not backed by any documentary evidence. Where was he in 1948 when Whittaker Chambers was making his contentions regarding Mr. Hiss before the world? Why did he not step forward, as any good citizen would with such information, during the Hiss perjury trial in 1949 and the retrial in 1950, to back up the assertions of Mr. Chambers? Would such a claim not have been good publicity for a book with sluggish sales by 1952?

A letter writer thanks the newspaper for publicizing the recent "Culture and Collards" program, involving the Little Symphony, of which he was part.

A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which A Word Is Spoken Versus A Life Of Lawlessness:

"Persons who engage in crime
Gamble with their future time."

And Senators who throw out the Rules
In expedient advance of political agendas,
Will soon find themselves the Fools,
Come 2018, Novemba.

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