The Charlotte News

Friday, April 7, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Millard Tydings, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the charges of Senator McCarthy that there were Communists in the State Department, said that the FBI records he had examined cleared Owen Lattimore of charges made by Senator McCarthy that he was a Communist spy. Senator Tydings revealed during Mr. Lattimore's testimony that four of the five members of the subcommittee had been shown a summary of his FBI file, compiled by J. Edgar Hoover.

The subcommittee stood in recess until the following Tuesday at which time it expected to receive from Senator McCarthy the names of witnesses he claimed would bolster his contentions regarding Mr. Lattimore.

Outside the hearing room, Senator McCarthy contended that either Senator Tydings had not seen the file or was lying. He claimed to know what was in the files.

In Jerusalem on Good Friday, thousands of Christians arrived to follow the streets of the Via Dolorosa, along which Jesus bore his cross to the crucifixion. The procession ended at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christ's tomb was enshrined. The Church had been repaired following a fire the previous winter which had damaged its cupola. U.N. truce observers accompanied pilgrims from the Jewish section of the city across barbed wire barricades to the Arab section.

In Prague, the Communist-controlled Czech radio claimed that an American man teaching in the city had sought asylum from the U.S. for himself, his wife and children.

In Allentown, Pa., a man was found guilty by a jury of voluntary manslaughter in the mercy-killing of his cancer-ridden brother. The jury recommended mercy in sentencing. The maximum sentence was twelve years in prison.

In New York, a fire hit the 23rd floor of the 80-story Woolworth Building in the early morning. Two workmen were overcome by smoke inhalation and one fireman was slightly injured. About a hundred workers fled from the building. It was the highest fire in New York since an airplane hit the 78th floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.

In Raleigh, the State completed its case-in-chief against the Wake Forest College student accused of murdering a former student in a car on the campus the previous December 14, after an alleged argument regarding a gambling debt. The defendant was slated to take the stand in the afternoon, after 27 defense witnesses were presented during the morning, attesting to his character. The prosecution had presented a ballistics expert who testified that a gun found in the car belonging to the defendant had been used to fire the fatal shot into the victim's head.

In Charlotte, the case in Federal Court against officials of the Southeastern Peoples College, charged with fraud, ended with a plea bargain pursuant to which a fine was imposed on one woman official for $12,000 and against the College for $88,000. The woman was also sentenced to a year and a day in jail, suspended. The case was based on veterans' fraud by the G.I. Bill being used improperly. Four cases against individual veterans had been disposed of after pleas in three cases of nolo contendere, suspended sentences and $300 fines, and one case ending in a prayer for judgment and a $200 fine. Cases against other individual veterans would continue.

Temperatures reached a new low for the date in the Carolinas, 27 degrees at Douglas Airport in Charlotte.

And we note that it was fortunate that the N.C.A.A. semifinals were played last Saturday rather than this Saturday, as it hailed briefly where we happen to be early this morning. It was bright and sunny last Saturday. Too bad, Ducks. You could have been a Ute.

In Turkey, Tex., a two-year old girl was found by her parents chewing on the tail of a rattlesnake while sitting in the yard. They took her to a doctor who found no evidence of any bite.

In Hollywood, actor Walter Huston died in the early morning after being stricken early the previous day with a kidney ailment or blood clot, prior to a planned surprise party for his 66th birthday. He had not attended the party but celebrated his birthday in a Beverly Hills hotel with Spencer Tracy, son John, and others. Mr. Huston had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor the previous year for his role in "The Treasure of Sierra Madre", a film John Huston directed, adapted the novel to screen, and appeared in briefly, winning the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The elder had recently returned from New York to begin work on a movie, "Old 880", renamed prior to release, "Mister 880".

On the editorial page, "Double Talk in High Places" tells of Senator Clyde Hoey having criticized Attorney General J. Howard McGrath for intervening on behalf of the appellant in Henderson v. U.S., the case involving segregated dining car facilities on the Southern Railway as approved by the I.C.C. The Justice Department was seeking to have the Supreme Court overturn Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896, requiring that separate-but-equal facilities be afforded for the races, to pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The piece supports the criticism for its contention that undoing segregation would unsettle generations-old social structures of a large part of the country.

But it also finds that Senator Hoey had voted with Senator Frank Graham for the Federal aid to education bill, with Senator Hoey finding it to protect adequately against Federal intervention in the schools. The piece warns that, with such Federal effort to overturn Plessy, however, Federal intervention in education would not be far behind and so recommends reconsideration of his vote, should the education bill, stalled in the House Labor & Education Committee, ultimately be passed and come back to the Senate at some point.

Again, the piece is misunderstanding how things work. The Federal aid to education bill was not an inroad to force integration. That could have been done at any time by the simple expedient of the Supreme Court finding that Plessy had not served its intended function—as the Court would find in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. The Fourteenth Amendment had not changed, merely the manner in which its prescriptions were accomplished. Henderson was ultimately determined, two months later, on a misapplication by the I.C.C. of a Federal statute passed pursuant to the powers conveyed by the Commerce Clause, and, because of the failure to accord the statute, did not need to reach the Constitutional issues raised, nor implicate Plessy.

There was no "double talk".

"Flying Boat Follows the Dirigible" tells of a Marshall Mars Flying Boat having caught fire in midair and then exploded upon landing in Honolulu harbor during the week, bringing nearly to a close the era of flying boats, which had, in turn, largely replaced dirigibles as a means of heavy transport. They would continue to see limited use but were no longer the work horse of military and commercial aviation.

"How Fast Can You Stop Your Car?" tells of a study by Yellow Cab Co. of California finding that invited guests had varying guesses on the stopping distance of a car at 30 mph. One said eight feet, another 50, and a third, 90. They were then invited to test out their theories with a specially equipped car. It took 27 feet to react to a stop signal, and 45 feet to stop, in all, 72 feet.

Such misconceptions were more common than not and accounted for many accidents. It suggests that the State impress such understanding on drivers.

The general rule of thumb, unless you happen to be driving a 1950 crate with original drum brakes and a pedal travel of several feet, is one car-length for every ten miles per hour, or, even better, maintaining a two-second distance between your car and the car in front of you, by selecting a stationary mark as the car ahead passes it and then quickly counting, depending on the celerity of your ordinary speech, 1001, 1002. If you pass the mark before completing the count and your speed is more than a crawl, you need to let up on the gas. Don't jam on the brakes, however, without a quick glance in the rear view mirror. If a vehicle is there, practice restraint.

"Significance of Holy Week", an Easter week guest editorial by Dr. Warner L. Hall of the Second Church Branch, Covenant Presbyterian Church, tells of men with wisdom doubting the power of God because of unmerited suffering in the world, but explains that the Easter story was one which gave solace to the believer, that such unmerited suffering was recompensed with redemption and the promise of life everlasting.

Ralph Coghlan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes of America's "new leisure class", the beneficiaries of pension systems being adopted throughout industry, supplemented through Social Security payments. He provides a plethora of statistics on the subject. He concludes that Karl Marx's prediction that capitalism would dig its own grave by discharging expended employees before their time, to make way for cheaper replacements and thus creating a huge class of unemployed, could no longer come true now in such a pension-embraced society.

Drew Pearson tells of the public tending to disagree with Senator McCarthy while believing that he was sincere in his belief that Communists were in the State Department. (Call an exterminator.) His colleagues in the Senate, however, were beginning to equate him with the demagogic, self-serving tactics exhibited by the late Huey Long. They explained that they found his tactics exemplified in his effort the previous year to discredit the Army for giving the death penalty to twelve of 73 convicted SS men for the Malmedy massacre of 350 unarmed American soldiers and 100 Belgian civilians, all prisoners, during the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944. The previous year, the Senator had campaigned to have those convictions reversed, claiming that the Army had coerced the confessions. A subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee convened to investigate the matter, however, unanimously concluded that the Army acted appropriately and that the National Council for the Prevention of War, and other such groups with close German ties, had peddled the claims to Senator McCarthy.

German Communist newspapers had promoted the Senator's claims regarding treatment of the Malmedy defendants, describing in lurid detail the ascribed torture techniques, all found by the subcommittee to be untrue.

He notes that in consequence of the Senator's protests, however, the Army had delayed execution of the twelve former SS men sentenced to death for the massacre.

He reports of several members of the House having gone home and taken a powder on the important votes hanging fire at the time, the natural gas bill and the Marshall Plan appropriation for the coming fiscal year.

Robert C. Ruark worries about the coming of the census taker to his door, fearing an impostor who might relieve him of his booty, his Hope Diamond and other trinkets contained in his bureau. He also fears the real McCoy asking him about how he achieved his millions, when in fact it had come from the Brinks robbery he had pulled alone. And what would happen when he disclosed his intent to sell his carload of rifles to Korea at a sizable profit? Fine and imprisonment or no, for the taker who disclosed the information, he could not be certain that super-spies would not have his confession in their file.

He distrusts statistics, as they had built and dismantled the New Deal and were the "diet of the Truman Administration". Former President Hoover had belabored statistics to recommend Government reorganization for the sake of efficiency, and little had come of it. Figures were of little use if ignoring those not convenient.

He tells of a housewife relating that a census-taker had left his card when he found out that her young daughter made great profits the prior year, wanted her to call him should she need odd jobs performed around her yard. In a nutshell, it summed his opinion on statistics.

Marquis Childs tells of the best information indicating that the President would sign the Kerr bill deregulating the independent producers in the natural gas industry, embracing most of the largest producers. He would say that he was reluctantly signing it and would rely heavily on the section which required the FPC to make periodic evaluation of gas prices and report to the White House should an abrupt rise occur.

The bill would mean significantly increased natural gas prices for consumers and so the loud outcry against it might ultimately change the President's mind. But the lobbying groups and politicians in favor of it, especially the bill's sponsor, Senator Bob Kerr, were powerful within the Democratic Party. Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senator Tom Connally, both of Texas, were also onboard. Twenty-two Republicans and only twenty-one Democrats, the latter including five paired votes, had opposed it in the Senate. Thirty-one Democrats voted for it.

Two of the major pipeline companies had opposed it.

The President's rationale, if he signed it, would, however, sound a little thin, Mr. Childs ventures, on the campaign trail in the fall.

We have to ask whether Herblock this date intended a subliminal jab at Congressman Richard Nixon by drawing a perfect caricature of him and labeling it "McCarthy". Whether intended or not, it was apt. They were interchangeable.

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