The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 11, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Big Three conference began in London, with the foreign ministers discussing ways to coordinate and improve Western defenses in the cold war. Britain, initially reserved regarding a French plan for pooling much of Europe's coal and steel resources, appeared to be increasingly receptive to the proposal, already approved by Secretary of State Acheson. The plan was intended to resolve a longstanding feud between Germany and France. Both British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Conservative leader Winston Churchill agreed that the plan ought soon be debated before Parliament. Coal and steel had been nationalized in Britain, but steel, unlike coal, had not yet been taken over by the Government.
The President, during his cross-country train tour, told an audience at the dedication of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State that he was determined to develop low-cost public power on all of the country's major rivers and fight against its use for private profit. He criticized the private power companies for resisting this effort and predicted that the Columbia Valley Administration would be brought into existence, similar to TVA.
Aboard his train the previous evening, the President made public a telegram which he had sent to Vice-President Barkley, stating that the NLRB should not continue to operate as a "two-headed freak" with the presence of the independent counsel, deciding which cases could come before the Board, a role created as part of the Taft-Hartley legislation. The President proposed in a new reorganization plan that the authority be returned to the five-member Board.
Senator Taft, leader of the opposition, predicted that the plan would not succeed, would possibly be dead by nightfall.
Mr. Taft had succeeded the previous day with a motion, passed 50 to 22, to lay aside the FEPC debate and turn instead to Mr. Taft's resolution to disapprove the President's reorganization plan. He claimed that the plan was designed to accomplish indirectly the repeal of Taft-Hartley, insofar as the NLRB, by elimination of the general counsel.
A House Civil Service subcommittee reported that the Army finance center in St. Louis had overpaid over 157 million dollars in allotments to military dependents, with the GAO still to review another 120,000 cases. There were reports of Communist infiltration and "bad security risks" being employed at the center.
Commies are everywhere. Wherever there is a problem, you can rest assured that a Commie is behind it.
The House Labor Committee decided not to investigate whether John L. Lewis had provided signals surreptitiously to union locals not to stop a strike despite his public statements to the contrary, when miners refused to obey the UMW officials and return to work, in defiance of a court order ending the strike. Committee chairman John Lesinski revoked the authority of the Committee to subpoena Mr. Lewis, making any hearing on the matter useless. Representative Andrew Jacobs of Indiana, who had proposed the hearing, called the action "plain political cowardice".
In Trazegnier, Belgium, at least thirteen coal miners were killed and 25 more, trapped by an explosion. Thirty others were also believed trapped in the debris.
The strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen at four of the leading railroads in the country had caused swiftly mounting unemployment in coal mining and other related industries. Fourteen major mines had shut down in Western Pennsylvania. The G.M. Fisher Body plant at Cleveland laid off 2,500 employees, but called back 1,500 this date. Overall, a third of the nation's rail passenger traffic and a fourth of the freight traffic had been disrupted by the strike.
Near Knoxville, Tenn., two Southern Railway freight trains were fired upon from an ambuscade at a switching yard north of the city. An official of the striking Brotherhood said that there had been no violence or sabotage perpetrated by union members.
In North Carolina, a few Southern Railway freight trains were still running, despite the strike.
The Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Chicago, voted unanimously to purchase the Wake Forest College campus for 1.6 million dollars for use as its Southeastern seminary, following vacation of the campus by the College when it would move to Winston-Salem, clearing the way for the previously approved acceptance of a twelve million dollar grant from the Reynolds Foundation to locate the College there, conditioned on the Southern Baptists contributing an equal amount. Wake Forest president Thurman Kitchin said that he approved the action of the convention, that the college would be more unto itself, in the midst of an industrial area, in Winston-Salem, rather than having to compete with several other institutions of higher learning in and around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
In Raleigh, pleas for party harmony characterized the speeches before the Democratic state convention, in the keynote address of North Carolina Secretary of State Thad Eure, echoed by state party chairman and future Senator B. Everett Jordan.
In Durand, Mich., a Guernsey calf was born weighing 142.5 pounds, about double the average weight for a newborn.
On the editorial page, "A Guarantee of Service" tells of the crippling effect on the nation which the rail strike against four of the leading railroads of the nation, the Southern, Santa Fe, New York Central, and Pennsylvania systems, would have, even affecting those not directly dependent on the railroads for passenger service, as freight and mail service would also be severely limited.
It suggests that a likely result of this strike would be the passage in Congress of a bill calling for compulsory arbitration as a last resort to avert rail strikes, that such would be wise, to allow for fair wages and working conditions while also preventing such crippling strikes, in this case revolving around the demand by the union for a second fireman on multiple diesel locomotive trains, despite the fact that those trains did not have a fire to tend. The railroads had thus claimed that the demand was make-work in nature, not the genuine safety concern described by the union.
"Kicking Around an Old
Problem" tells of yet another committee being appointed to
study stream pollution in the city following several studies already
on the subject, while the streams remained polluted. It suggests,
"Sumer is icumen in
The polluted creeks at least were musical in Charlotte.
"'Where Are They?'" tells of voters not registering for the upcoming May 27 primary, according to registrars in the city and county. With only 37,000 registered voters thus far on the books of the 175,000 residents of the county, it again urges registration before the deadline the coming Saturday.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, presents one from the Marion Star, telling of a terminally ill patient wanting to read the last installment of a Saturday Evening Post serial before her death, and her physician obliging by writing the Post, which then sent her an early copy.
Well, what was the story?
The Zebulon Record presented
a piece in which the editorialist complained of not hearing on the
radio anything worthwhile, but after turning the set off, being
concerned of missing too much, cited the example of a crooner
The Roxboro Courier-Times suggests that in response to Francis, the talking mule, there should be a mule-braying human next to come from Hollywood, to be previewed before an audience of mules, probably producing as much hee-hawing as the audience in Roxboro when they had seen Francis.
Pete Ivey of the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem provides what he deems to be a good quote from William D. Carmichael, controller and acting president of the University, for whom Carmichael Auditorium at UNC would be named in 1965, upon the dedication the prior week of William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the campus of N.C. State in Raleigh. He had said: "It would be less than Chesterfieldian of me, Governor Scott, if I did not say that it was a Lucky Strike for North Carolina when Reynolds hit on Camels."
We do not wish to think about that too much.
And so, so, so, so on and so, so, so forth, and so.
Drew Pearson imparts that the President had recently met with Maine Senator Owen Brewster at the Carlton Hotel in Washington and challenged the Senator to lay out the Republican plan in opposition to the Fair Deal as he laid forth his plan to the people during his cross-country tour. Senator Brewster had accepted the challenge and had begun to line up speakers, such as Senator Taft in Chicago, to contest the Fair Deal, said that the challenge would continue through the mid-term elections.
Secretary of State Acheson, prior to
leaving for the London Big Three conference, had been told by Ed
Dickinson of ERP that French Indo-China was the most vital area for
preventing the spread of Communism. State Department officials
concurred, finding that if Indo-China were to fall, so, too, would
Burma, the Malays, Siam, India, and Indonesia, bringing the entire
Far East under a Communist, and, hence, Russian, sphere of influence.
It was believed that it was Russia's chief goal, as the Red Army
lacked oil, gasoline, tin and rubber, available from the region south
of Indo-China—just as the Japanese, constrained to an island
nation, had sought control of this region with the simultaneous
attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and the British ports of
Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong in December, 1941, following the deal made with Vichy, at the instance of the Nazi occupiers, in July, 1941, enabling Japan, without a fight, to take control of Indo-China, which, in turn, had spawned the guerrilla movement of Ho Chi Minh
But the Senate was concerned about China, not Indo-China, perhaps because of the well-heeled Kuomintang lobby in Washington. When Secretary Acheson had proposed aid for Indo-China, Senator Walter George of Georgia had rebuked him. The French also were a problem, as the French administration in Indo-China was notoriously corrupt, inefficient, and imperialistic, was disliked by the native population, given to killing of French troops if they strayed a mile or so outside the towns. There was no loyalty shown to Emperor Bao Dai, whom the French had set up as ruler, and there was likewise bitter hatred of Communist guerrilla leader Ho, who followed a scorched-earth policy.
So, Secretary Acheson had resistance on the one hand at home in the Senate, and on the other, from the French.
John L. Lewis was seeking to purge Representative Anthony Cavalcante of Pennsylvania for demanding that district four of UMW have local autonomy and the right to elect its own officers.
The President's Council of Economic Advisers, while pleased with the drop in unemployment, remained concerned about the unemployment besetting New England, at 12 percent, compared to 5.5 percent nationally. The Council would soon set up a task force to study the problem and make recommendations.
Charles Stickney of Minnesota had been set to become Undersecretary of Agriculture, until he had begun telling farmers that they could collect $8 per day expenses for listening to Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan when he visited the state. In response, Senator George Aiken of Vermont had launched an investigation to determine whether there had been improper use of Government funds, and Mr. Stickney was no longer being considered for Undersecretary. Mr. Pearson notes that when Secretary Brannan had found out that the farmers in the audience were receiving the stipend, he changed the speech to a non-political subject.
The big coal operators were planning to form a virtual union of their own, which would give Harry Moses, head of the H. S. Frick Coal Co., owned by U.S. Steel, the same dictatorial powers over Northern coal operators which John L. Lewis enjoyed over the miners. U.S. Steel already had a monopoly over the steel industry and this setup would give it control of the coal industry as well.
Marquis Childs discusses the rift in the Democratic Party between the Southerners and the rest of the party, being accentuated by the fact of the ongoing debate during the week regarding the FEPC bill while the President toured the country preaching Democratic unity. The fact that the bill was headed for defeat by filibuster reminded of the lack of leadership in the party after seventeen years in the White House.
Beyond that currently divisive issue was the nomination by the President of the first black jurist to the U.S. Court of Appeals, William H. Hastie, who had been Governor of the Virgin Islands and, prior to that, U.S. District Judge for the Virgin Islands, the first black Federal judge, appointed by FDR in 1937. He was currently nominated to the Third District Court of Appeals, covering New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. His nomination had been pending since the previous October and only one hearing had apparently taken place, and not until a month earlier, though even that was in executive session and the Judge, himself, was not notified of it. The nomination was holed up in the Judiciary Committee chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada and appeared to be going nowhere, despite the Judge's excellent qualifications.
The Committee had apparently ordered a second FBI investigation into his loyalty because of his membership in some black organizations which had been included on the Attorney General's subversive list, and because he had been chairman more recently of the Americans for Democratic Action, a strongly anti-Communist organization, more recently chaired by Senator Hubert Humphrey and including Eleanor Roosevelt in its membership.
Judge Hastie had campaigned hard in 1948 for the President and was instrumental in attracting the black vote from the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace.
While there was room for criticizing the partisan nature of judicial appointments, there having been 272 Democrats appointed to Federal judgeships of the 289 total openings since 1933, and, similarly, only 20 Democrats of 214 appointed Federal judges during the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover Administrations, it was unfair to discriminate against this particular nominee because of his race, as appeared to be the case, given action on other nominations during the same period.
Judge Hastie
President Kennedy related to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as indicated in Mr. Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, published in 1965, that he had considered Judge Hastie for the Supreme Court vacancy in 1962 when Justice Charles Whittaker retired, but determined it to be "too early" to appoint a black Justice, and ultimately settled on Byron White. The first black Justice, Thurgood Marshall, would be appointed by President Johnson in 1967, having been appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Kennedy in 1961.
Robert C. Ruark tells of the latest press agentry out of Hollywood suggesting that "milady's legs have once again taken precedence over her mizzen as the focal point of allure". ("Mizzen" apparently refers to the fore and aft sails on the mizzenmast, and so you can figure it from there with your special Captain Video decoder ring and manual.)
He finds that the topic among women was fragile nylon stockings, apt to spring a run while the wearer was beside herself in a chair. Women were convinced that evil spirits were woven into the hose. He provides samples of the conversations. They refused to believe that the more fragile stockings were the result of sheerer material than before the war being used in the manufacture. When the war had started, a pair of hose lasted six months, but now the wearers were lucky if they lasted a day. They would trade ten pairs of today's stockings for those of 1941.
Mr. Ruark says that he was
unconcerned, personally, as he wore only white cotton socks daily,
was a great admirer of Jane Russell
If they decided to do so, they would
resort to bobbysox or hip-boots, or even cut off their legs and
hobble around on their kneecaps to make the point
He had performed research on the hose and found them no more flimsy than in the past, and so, without experience with them, could not attest one way or the other.
Framed Edition
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