The Charlotte News

Wednesday, May 10, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that four members of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, including chairman Millard Tydings and Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., plus one other Democrat and one other Republican, began checking the State Department loyalty files, including all information supplied by the FBI, anent 81 persons whose loyalty had been questioned by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The inspection took place in the Cabinet room at the White House in the presence of several Cabinet officials and, according to Senator Tydings, was expected to take about a month to complete.

In Seoul, South Korea, Defense Minister Sihn Sung Mo warned that invasion by Communist North Korea was imminent, that intelligence sources indicated that North Korean forces were moving toward the border. He said that the North Korean Army had 183,000 trained men, 173 planes, 173 tanks, and 32 naval vessels, plus the services of 9,000 guerrillas and constabulary and youth corps units. About 25,000 North Koreans who had fought with the Communists in China had returned to support the North Korean forces.

A strike of railroad firemen of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, beginning at 6:00 a.m. this date, crippled the nation's rail service, as Federal mediators abandoned hope of a quick settlement, having attempted to frame a resolution through 9:00 the previous night. The strike, affecting the four largest railroads of the nation, centered on a demand, ostensibly premised on safety, for a second fireman on multiple diesel locomotive trains. The railroads contended that the additional fireman was unnecessary, a contention upheld by the President's fact-finding board, as diesels had no fire to tend. It was the first major rail strike since May, 1946, a strike quickly resolved when the President threatened to begin drafting personnel to operate the trains and sought Congressional approval for the action.

Unemployment was to rise swiftly if the strike dragged on for any significant period. Coal mining would be one of the first industries hit. Airlines and bus lines began doing a booming business, and rail lines unaffected by the strike reported increased business.

Southern Railway passenger traffic in the Carolinas was completely suspended, but some freight trains operated with emergency crews. The postmaster at Charlotte advised use of air mail.

Tom Fesperman of The News tells of the late arrival in the morning of the Southern Railway No. 36, likely the last such passenger train to pass through Charlotte for awhile, until the strike was resolved.

The President, during his cross-country tour by train, said in Pocatello, Idaho, that he believed the cold war with Russia would continue for a "long, long time" and disclosed that he had signed the National Science Foundation Act to keep the country moving forward in scientific development, including increase of its atomic energy program for use in peaceful applications. The President was also scheduled to make stops in Oregon and Washington during the day, after a foreign policy speech the previous night in Laramie, Wyoming, during which he promised ultimate victory for the free nations against the "new and terrible tyranny" of Russia.

Special instructions had been issued to the railway union members running the President's train not to abandon it, and so the trip would not be suddenly interrupted by the strike.

In Philadelphia, AFL president William Green said that in 1950, the AFL would seek lower prices and higher wages.

The most damaging floods in years continued to sweep over areas of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska, isolating numerous communities. Seventeen had been drowned in Nebraska, including seven or eight passengers aboard a bus which was swept by water from a highway near Unadilla, and four others in a car swept from the road near Auburn. In Southern Manitoba, 15,000 persons were homeless from flooding and another 10,000 were being evacuated.

In New York, a well-digger stuck in a 20-foot deep well shaft for nearly 24 hours, after one of his legs had been pinned by a boulder, was nearly unconscious from pain and exhaustion as rescuers toiled to release him. A Roman Catholic priest had administered to him last rites. The man had also suffered burns of his hands and face when a cigarette passed to him exploded after coming in contact with the pure oxygen being piped to him in the well bottom. He eventually did not make it.

He needed the new, revolutionary incense filter.

In Paris, Persian Princess Fatemeh wed for the second time Vincent Lee Hillyer of Los Banos, California. The second ceremony, this one Moslem, was designed to appease Iran's royal family following a civil ceremony in Paris, which had prompted the Shah to strip the Princess of her royal prerogatives, restoration of which was conditioned on the second ceremony.

On the editorial page, "Training Household Workers" praises the efforts of a group to train blacks of the city for domestic service in homes as maids and cooks, as for many, such jobs were the only ones available, despite being regarded by many black leaders as demeaning. It quotes John Temple Graves of Atlanta as encouraging domestic service as "one of the finest arts" for requiring "such intimate association and fundamental work" inside the home, in close contact with the family, usually affording the closest contact between blacks and whites of the community. The piece informs that an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 black residents of Charlotte were engaged in such work, at varying hours and wages, most without formal instruction on how to be top-level servants.

"The Commercial Angle" finds that the contribution to the city's commercial development was a collateral benefit to be considered, along with the basic purpose of providing pleasure to the people, in planning a new auditorium and coliseum. It provides the example of Asheville and the benefits to the economy of the city from its hosting of a recent convention.

"Shrinking Distances" tells of the President, during his cross-country tour, explaining at Laramie, Wyo., why isolationism could never again be the foreign policy of the country, that the world had shrunk too much through modern means of transport to make it again viable. He explained that signposts pointing in the four directions from Laramie could read: "London, 30 hours", "Shanghai, 44 hours", "Santiago, 35 hours", and "Moscow, 45 hours", in reference to commercial flying times. And military aircraft, he had pointed out, could fly the distances in even shorter periods, some in half the time.

The piece urges that this argument was sufficient to reject isolationism and alone provided the rationale for the need of a strong internationalist policy.

A piece from the Anderson (S.C.) Independent, titled "Riding the Gravy Train", tells of former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Edwin Nourse, speaking before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, complaining of the Southern Democrats and Republicans who groused the most in Congress about deficit spending nevertheless hypocritically continuing to vote for appropriations bills. The one thing, it suggests, which the businessmen ought take from his talk was that business could not be effective advocates of economy in government as long as they insisted on seeking exemptions for their own pet interests.

Drew Pearson tells of U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie remarking to a friend, before leaving on his trip to Moscow, that he was glad the press had not asked him for his comment on the President's statement that the world was in better condition than in 1946, for he thought the present situation was very dangerous, not because of threat of war but threat to the existence of the U.N. He believed that unless the snafu between the West and Russia and its satellites were resolved in the coming six to eight months, the organization would collapse. He believed the Soviets recognized that their walkout was a blunder. He wanted to offer them some method of face-saving, a "little peephole", according to Mr. Lie, through which to extricate themselves from the mistake. He appeared to have thrown the previously manifested caution to the wind which had characterized his five-year term as Secretary-General, appeared determined now to break the deadlock.

He did not have the support of the State Department in the mission, which sought to deter him from embarking on it as it could merely supply a new basis for Russian propaganda to blame the West for not coming to terms.

In private, he was not the persona of the fence-sitting diplomat he presented in public, rather expressed his opinions readily, such as his view that the internationalization of Jerusalem was an unworkable decision rammed through the U.N. by a coalition of Catholics, Communist, and Arabs.

The previous December, he had told a friend that a Big Four conference of the chief executives could resolve the cold war, but said that he could not urge such a meeting to President Truman for the State Department's disapproval. He wondered why the President had never made changes within the State Department, which he believed would be beneficial, after making such a clean sweep within the Cabinet.

At least, a semblance of the proposed four-power conference was now taking place, with the Big Three foreign ministers meeting in London and Mr. Lie meeting with the Kremlin, serving effectively as the ambassador of good will between the two ends.

Joseph Alsop, in London, discusses the London conference of foreign ministers, seeking a solution to Western defense, the linchpin for solutions to all other problems regarding the cold war. Yet, there was no possibility of resolving the defense problem unless Secretary of State Acheson was ready to commit the Administration to greater American effort. At least, the time of "fiddle-faddle" was over and the leaders had gotten down to making decisions.

One key decision had come about regarding the unworkable joint British and American chiefs of staff, excluding the French who consequently had suspected skullduggery. Since the French were expected to contribute the largest ground force to Western defense, they had finally been accepted as part of the combined chiefs.

While the Soviets were consistently increasing their atomic stockpile and strategic air force, the Western defenses continued to consist of an air warning system and fighter squadrons in the British Isles. Funds had to be found for a Western European radar screen, increase in fighter defense, more anti-aircraft guns and guided missiles, as well as the bases and men for them.

The Western general staff of the Big Three should, he urges, reconstitute or replace the NATO group. The U.S. should join the other Western nations to contribute a far larger defense effort, with the U.S. assuming command of the new defense structure. If these steps were taken, he posits, then the planning and preparation for the defenses could be undertaken in a few months, with the more difficult task of increasing defenses beginning thereafter, when new American and British defense budgets were adopted.

If not done, then the Europeans would not undertake to defend themselves as they knew they could accomplish little without a major American contribution, and it would be impossible to resolve either the German problem or the Far Eastern problem, or to achieve better political organization of the West.

Marquis Childs discusses the dictatorial power exercised by John L. Lewis over the coal miners. His control of the welfare and pension trust funds gave him a new kind of power, and with the contributions of the companies now being raised to 30 cents from the previous 20 cents, he had that much more power, with income under his control reaching between 100 and 120 million dollars. As far as Mr. Childs could determine from the closed-mouthed UMW, there were virtually no checks on Mr. Lewis's use of the money, save by a quarterly audit of the bookkeeping methods of the three trustees, one of whom was Mr. Lewis as head of UMW, one a company-nominated member, and the third, a neutral member. The latter position was currently held by a close friend of Mr. Lewis. Thus, the majority of the board was under his control. They could determine the size of the pensions and who could be excluded from receipt, giving them far-reaching and dangerous power.

Based on past performance of Mr. Lewis, as when, a decade earlier, he had created a wholly owned subsidiary of UMW through which he made investments in several private coal companies and advanced to it a half million dollars in UMW funds to pay off bonds of the company and prevent its liquidation, loans which were still being repaid to the union, all without any input from the rank-and-file, he would not be a reliable steward of the miners' interests in his current position with respect to the welfare and pensions fund, would use it only as a means to consolidate the more his power over the union.

A letter writer from Chapel Hill complains that the May 5 editorial on the Senate race only reviewed the matter from the Republican perspective, that there was plenty of room for conservatism in the Democratic Party but not Republicanism, as essentially advocated by the editorial.

He says that Senator Frank Graham would not echo everything favored by the President, as suggested by the editorial, as he had not during his year in the position. Nor did he take orders from Governor Kerr Scott or state Democratic committeeman Jonathan Daniels, as also implied by the piece. He says that Senator Graham did not support FEPC, socialized medicine, or other such programs. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith, he ventures, would only, according to the editorial, put a check on Mr. Truman's "joy ride".

He finds the newspaper to have tried to become Republican when it supported Thomas Dewey for the presidency in 1948, and was still at it.

A letter writer from Pittsboro finds the same editorial to be a "masterpiece of thought, logic and diction."

A letter writer from Concord, N.C., wonders whether Mr. Smith was a Republican or Democrat, after both The News and the Charlotte Observer, traditionally a Republican newspaper, had endorsed him.

A letter from Harry Golden, publisher of the Carolina Israelite, urges that the Willis Smiths of the state were commonplace and could be obtained in any election, while Senator Graham presented an opportunity which came along but once in a generation, a man who had been reluctant to enter public life from his position as a University president. He hopes that Woodrow Wilson and FDR, from heaven, could look down and forgive the "editorial aberration" of The News.

Actually, insofar as endorsing the Republican in 1948, it was not so aberrant for The News, as in 1940, then editor J. E. Dowd endorsed Wendell Willkie while then associate editor W. J. Cash endorsed FDR, in side-by-side editorials. In 1944, in the midst of the war, the newspaper, with Mr. Dowd as editor and Burke Davis as associate editor, had found that Mr. Dewey offered no viable choice on foreign policy, the central issue of the time, and so endorsed a fourth term for FDR. The current editor, Pete McKnight, was an old friend of Cash, living down the hall from him during his three years of residence at the Frederick Apartments between early 1938 and Cash's marriage at Christmas, 1940.

Here's a good one. The "President" takes an unprecedented step since the FBI director became subject to a ten-year maximum term, and fires, without any ethical violations being cited as rationale, James Comey this past Tuesday, in only his fourth year as director, citing his supposedly having usurped the role of prosecutor when he announced his recommendation last July that former Secretary of State Clinton, putative Democratic nominee for the presidency at the time, should not be prosecuted for having used a home e-mail server—a completely appropriate decision unless you happen to be one of those nuts who believe in the snakeoil salesman currently occupying the White House. So the snakeoil salesman has one of his two lackeys now heading the Justice Department, write him a memo which recommends that Mr. Comey be fired for so superseding his investigatory function and recommending non-prosecution.

There is no statutory restriction on the President's ability to remove an FBI director and no showing of cause is required. But it is unprecedented because it is the first time a director has been removed under the 1976 law for any reason other than for ethical violations, as in the case of President Clinton seeking the resignation of William Sessions and ultimately firing him in 1993 for ethical problems involving use of an FBI airplane at government expense for private use, among other similar things.

In the letter in which the snakeoil salesman fired director Comey, he thanked him for telling him three times that he was not under investigation by the FBI. That was cute, for it raises an ethical issue, not only for the former director but, moreover, for the "President", as to whether they should have been discussing a pending FBI investigation at all.

In any event, the kicker to the saga is that last July, the entire reason for Mr. Comey making the statement recommending non-prosecution was that Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the time had recused herself from making that decision, contra the usual practice, in response to the Republican outcry, including that of the putative Republican nominee, the snakeoil salesman, that she do so because of her brief meeting with former President Clinton on her airplane, leaving it expressly up to the FBI to make the recommendation which would then be followed by the Justice Department. Of course, no such decisions should have been in the offing in July of a presidential election year regarding a presidential nominee in any event, but the Republicans in the Congress had made sure of that timing by keeping the matter hot on the griddle for five years, in the end being much ado about less than nothing.

Thus, we have a nice, little circular game in play, whereby the Republicans complain about an innocent meeting on an airplane between former President Clinton and then Attorney General Lynch, prompting her to recuse herself from making the decision on whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton, avoiding thereby any appearance of impropriety, leaving it naturally up to the FBI recommendation on prosecution, director Comey then recommending against prosecution, and now this snakeoil pitch artist claiming that the reason he had to fire Mr. Comey, unprecedented though it is for anything less than ethical issues, was because of his usurping the role of prosecutor in his July decision, all so that the snakeoil salesman can, with seeming justification, get his own man into the top job in the FBI and thereby keep free from impeachment for his outrageous conduct in obviously throwing the election through the help of his pal, Vlad over in Russia, all done surreptitiously, of course, through plausible denial by use of surrogates, former allies and operatives of his campaign.

Now we have a racist Attorney General, a crook as "President", and God only knows who to become the next head of the FBI. Perhaps, he will nominate the head of the KKK. Impeach this jerky turkey. Enough. He is lying scum of the earth. Not our President, never going to be. We did not think it was possible to sink lower than President Nixon during his five and a half years in office, but this creepy jackass has accomplished it in his first 110 days. He is seeking to consolidate partisan power in a way not accomplished since the days of Mr. Nixon, in complete derogation of the fact that he was not even elected by a plurality of the people.

We suppose that, next, he will begin distribution of his Trump parasols at $75 apiece, mandatory for all Americans to purchase, as they will bear the slogan, "Make America Great Again", to ward off the evil aliens coming to take over the country.

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