The Charlotte News
Monday, May 1, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Representative Frank Karsten of Missouri had suggested that an inquiry occur to determine whether the charges by Senator Joseph McCarthy were "a hoax, a deceit, or fraud upon the American people". He said that two Republican-controlled House committees had, two years earlier, investigated a list of 108 names of persons employed or who had sought employment in the State Department regarding whether they were security risks, and had determined that the Department was handling the matter in a satisfactory way. He said that the majority, if not all, of the cases raised by Senator McCarthy were people on that list, suggesting a hoax.
This date, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the claims of Senator McCarthy would hear from Freda Utley, whom he claimed was a former Communist who had told him in 1940 that Owen Lattimore had decided to throw in his lot with totalitarian enemies of the country.
Well, if a former Commie says it, you know it has to be one hundred percent, unadulteratedly pure truth.
During the weekend, Secretary of State Acheson, along with former Secretaries Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and James Byrnes vigorously denied that Mr. Lattimore had been the principal architect, as also claimed by Senator McCarthy, of Far Eastern foreign policy, covering a period spanning back to 1933.
Threats of trouble marked the
East-West May Day
Anti-Communist demonstrators at Potsdamer Platz began surging toward the Soviet sector shouting "black S.S." and "Communist pigs" at East German police guarding the Brandenburg Gate. The West Germans began hurling stones at the East German police, who refrained from retaliation. Some of these demonstrators also seized two East German civilians and beat them severely.
Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of Naval operations, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Navy had developed a guided missile which should be put into operation immediately. He urged allocation of 40 million dollars for the conversion of a heavy cruiser into a ship capable of launching guided missiles.
The Supreme Court refused to grant a hearing in a case from Georgia upholding a year-old law designed to curb black voting by requiring educational tests, including reading of sections of the State and Federal Constitutions, failing which the prospective voter had to answer correctly ten of thirty questions regarding government. It had been described as Governor Herman Talmadge's "pet" law, requiring re-registration of all of Georgia's voters. The Governor had described the measure as fulfilling his campaign promise to end "evil bloc voting" by blacks. The Court's order denying hearing said only that no substantial Federal question had been raised.
Following a 15-hour bargaining session with Federal mediators the previous afternoon and night, the 10,000 striking telephone installers ended their week-old strike against the Bell System, which had been called in sympathy with 105 striking Western Electric employees in South Bend, Ind., who had refused to walk across a muddy field to install a television tower. The cessation of the strike might only be temporary.
Chrysler's general manager said that technical wording of a new contract was delaying final settlement of the 97-day strike of UAW workers. General agreement had been reached on a $100 per month pension plan, inclusive of Federal Social Security benefits.
The fourth "Guideposts" column, this one by Bert Kessel, as edited by Norman Vincent Peale, tells of Mr. Kessel, as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, leading a company during the invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945, and among his company being a "misfit" private nicknamed "Squeaky", based on his falsetto voice. He was considered an apple-polisher and few other Marines would have anything to do with him, most mocking him if they spoke to him at all. He had applied to a machine gun crew but was made a cook.
Much of his free time was spent reading the Bible and he organized a weekly prayer meeting in his tent, which few attended. His fellow Marines felt that he diminished respect for religion, as he was perceived as weak.
Once he asked Lt. Kessel, whom he regarded as a friend, to help him avenge an unprovoked beating administered by another Marine, but the lieutenant suggested that he make the man his friend and prepare instead for fighting the enemy.
In Mosinee, Wis., a mock trial of life under Soviet rule took place, simulating the conditions in Moscow, to teach citizens and surprised city officials how such life transpired.
In Winnsboro, S.C., a convict escaped from prison where he was serving a ten-year sentence for a $41,000 armed robbery of an elderly Salem Crossroads merchant the prior August, prompting a three-state hunt. He had pleaded guilty as an accomplice to the "man without fingerprints" and a young woman. He had left a dummy rolled up in his blankets in the jail and escaped the night before from the stockade office while awaiting a call from his wife. He had been rated as a prison trusty.
They better give him one of them pre-frontal low-bottomies.
Vice-President Alben Barkley and his new wife arrived in Winston-Salem for a visit scheduled for Salisbury, changed for inclement weather. Mayor Victor Shaw of Charlotte presented the Vice-President with the city's key. They later rode to Salisbury to celebrate the 181st anniversary of the opening of the Daniel Boone Trail into Kentucky. Mr. Barkley had ancestors from Rowan County who had worshiped with the Boones during the eighteenth century.
In Hollywood, actor Cesar Romero
In Perth, Scotland, the Earl of Strathmore, nephew of Queen Elizabeth, was fined ten pounds and his license suspended for a year, for drunk driving the prior December. He had collided with another car.
The News sponsors a "Why I Love Mother" contest, in honor of Mother's Day, for those 12 and under, who would write a letter so explaining, with a $15 first prize and $10 second prize in the offing.
You better get out your pens, kids,
and start thinking positive thoughts about mom. She could pay off
big
On the editorial page, "An Irresponsible Congress" finds that as the House Ways & Means Committee was recommending about a billion dollars of cuts in excise taxes, substantially more than that recommended by the President, the Senate had increased the House version of the Rivers and Harbors bill by 740 million dollars, the House had passed a pork-barrel measure restoring 279 million dollars for V.A. hospitals previously canceled by the Administration, and the House Appropriations Committee had approved an increase of 330 million in defense expenditures.
The total increase thus surpassed a billion dollars, and so while preaching economy, the Congress was proposing to spend a net of two billion dollars more than proposed by the Administration. It suggests that voters would not be fooled by such election-year log-rolling.
"A Bright New Era" praises the work of the two surgeons, one in Asheville and one at Duke, for their successful pre-frontal lobotomies being performed on mental patients. The superintendent of the State Hospital at Morganton believed that a quarter of the patients at his facility would benefit from the operation, which disconnected the prefrontal lobe of the brain—whether administered through the eye socket with an ice pick, as in the usual procedure, or less crudely, not being explained. A representative of the Camp Butner mental facility said that he thought that 30 to 35 percent of the patients there could be helped by the surgery.
Some patients had shown enough improvement that they could be returned to their families at home. Others showed improvement while remaining in the facility. About a third showed "great improvement".
It cautions that the surgery had not been accepted by all doctors, as some thought it too radical and dangerous. It applauds, however, the State Hospitals Board of Control, as well as the two surgeons, for taking the "bold step". It regards them as performing a public service.
Of course, this editorial was written in ignorance of the bitter results of this form of surgery, which only would become widely recognized a few years later.
"Dr. Hunter Blakely" tells of the president of Queens College, who had in eleven years in the position expanded the curriculum and brought a higher level of scholarship to the institution, having taken a position as secretary of higher education in the Presbyterian Church at Richmond. It says that he would be missed for his role at the College and in the community.
"The Spring Cold" distinguishes the spring cold, with its sniffles and sneezes, from the winter cold, relegating the sufferer to the indoors, "bundled in with his nose-drops, orange juice and aspirin", while others enjoyed the spring weather. It concludes: "Ah sadness! Ah irony! Ah choo!"
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy being warned by Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota that he needed to stop making so many speeches with outlandish claims regarding Communists in the Government. Mr. Judd told him that he would provide him with the names of persons the China lobby had branded as Communists but warned that he had no proof or he would have sought to expose them himself. He suggested to Senator McCarthy that a Marine, as had been the Senator during the war, thought that any beach could be taken by wading into it.
John Maragon, convicted recently of two counts of perjury to Congress regarding his five-percenter activities in procuring Government contracts for clients, now had little left of the influence he once wielded through Maj. General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide, including influencing the development of the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey. Yet, he was still able the previous month to convince the FBI to investigate his rumor that Mr. Pearson had a draft evader on his staff, a charge which proved wholly untrue.
Three years earlier, he had sought to have Mr. Pearson indicted for criminal libel, pursuant to a D.C. statute which had been in disuse for 75 years, for having claimed in a column that Mr. Maragon had pleaded guilty in 1920 to transporting liquor illegally. It turned out, after FBI investigation, that he had been guilty of the charge and so there was no ground for libel.
Similarly, the prior summer, Mr. Maragon had asked to testify before the Senate to dispute a claim of Mr. Pearson that he was not only a five-percenter, but a fifty-percenter. By doing so, he had recently admitted, he had gotten himself into hot water.
The President praised Congressman Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for pursuing the steel trust and urged him to keep at it. He said that he would, and intended to look into monopolies also in air transportation, newsprint, big distilleries and soap interests. The President again expressed hearty approval, saying that he had been a trust-buster during his Senate days.
Marquis Childs discusses the push by the Department of Justice to change the Voorhis Act, the Smith Act, and the Alien Registration Act, along with immigration laws, to bring persons trained in espionage and sabotage, such as Soviet diplomats, within the foreign agents registration act, and provide greater assistance to the FBI and military intelligence for obtaining admissible evidence against aliens violating security. Other changes would tighten security at military installations.
But none of these recommended steps had been passed by the Senate, which did the most talking about security. It was unlikely that it would get around to these measures before the summer adjournment, as the Fair Labor Practices Committee bill was on the agenda and a Southern filibuster was promised in response, albeit possibly to be short-lived.
The politics of security was likely to gravitate around the Mundt-Nixon bill, co-sponsored by Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Congressman Richard Nixon of California, which would set up a subversive activities board appointed by the President to determine subversive organizations under broadly worded definitions, allowing great discretion in the board to determine subjectively what constituted such an organization under the rubrics "Communist political organization" or "Communist front". The resulting stigma to be attached to members of organizations so categorized could ruin careers and livelihoods.
Moreover, such a board would be politicized by the fact of its Presidential appointment and would change mercurially with the political winds in determining what was "subversive".
The Department of Justice opposed Mundt-Nixon for it investing the Government with powers going far beyond tradition, absent a clear and present danger such as a declared shooting war.
He suggests that such an extreme step would not be justified until all loopholes in existing laws were closed. There were more than 3,000 undesirable aliens in the country who could not be deported for the fact that their countries of origin would not accept their return.
Robert C. Ruark discusses, movingly for its candor, the selection process for the Unknown Soldier from World War II, winnowing it down from 8,000 unidentifiable remains to six soldiers from whom the Unknown was to be chosen in a manner which Mr. Ruark says he did not know and did not wish to know.
As a G.I., himself, having served in the Navy in the Pacific during the war, he tells of knowing no soldier who had expressed any desire to be transported home as a corpse to be buried in a cemetery. He had found them an unsentimental lot where their own potential deaths were concerned. Likewise, every soldier had his own personal favorite as the "Unknown".
His was Jimmy Queen, a fraternity brother and roommate at UNC, who was killed when his LCI was blown to bits by a German shell as he delivered supplies, according to his dangerous routine, from Bizerte to Sicily or Italy.
Mr. Queen hailed from Waynesville, N.C., was large and likable, had gone to law school before being tossed his first year for lack of adequate effort, and after a stint with the WPA, married and started a family, returned to law school, finished and began practicing law, before volunteering for the Navy after Pearl Harbor, despite having a trick knee which would have qualified him for 4-F, non-draft status, not to mention 3-A for being married with dependent children.
After the explosion, they never found any of his remains. His portrait was hung in the Waynesville Courthouse.
Mr. Ruark suggests that any veteran or wife, widow, mother, father or friend of a veteran had the right to have their own personal Unknown Soldier. His, therefore, was Jimmy Queen. But few wanted "any more souvenirs from the last mess." So, he concludes, the selection of a corpse as a "form of souvenir" was one nobody needed and few wanted.
A letter writer tells of the induction ceremony at UNC of the Order of the Golden Fleece becoming a Frank Graham rally, as he was retapped for the honorary. He says that while considering Mr. Graham his good friend, he was not supporting him in the special Senate race because he was the embodiment of the "welfare state".
A
letter from the president and
general manager of WSOC radio responds to "By-passing the
Queen City", anent the tour of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC
Symphony Orchestra
A letter writer advocates honest and factual reporting and the fastest possible economic development of the people of North Carolina by means of the Government backing research and training in industrial and technical know-how.
That's indisputable. You sound like Barry Goldwater.
A letter from the chairman of the Mecklenburg County chapter of the American Red Cross tells of the drive not quite meeting its goal, though reaching $98,000, which, with help from the National Organization, would probably enable the chapter to provide its services through the year without difficulty. He thanks the newspaper for its help and publicity.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal , "In Which Is Noted A Reaction Among the Masculine Gender To Certain Styles Popular About This Time of Year:
"Fellows act silly
Over girls who look frilly."And, you lend Spee gulls
till he
Comes courting in the manner wriggly.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.