The Charlotte News

Friday, May 12, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the reaction in Congress to discussion by military officials of sharing the atomic bomb with other NATO nations was nearly uniformly negative, the exception being House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia, who said that if those nations of Western Europe needed it to ward off an aggressor, they should have it. There was, however, some Congressional support for the idea of stockpiling atom bombs under American control at bases in foreign countries.

The President spoke in Butte, Mont., during his cross-country train tour, saying that he would not relent in his fight to have Taft-Hartley repealed, despite the setbacks in that regard. He said the intention of the law had been to strengthen the hand of management by undermining the strength of the unions. He said that Government action in the seventeen years of the New Deal and Fair Deal had saved business from going under, that had it not been for the programs initiated under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, some of the businessmen complaining of socialism and regimentation from these programs would not have had businesses at all.

The Government was reportedly reviving its attempt to resolve the rail strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen against four of the nation's leading railroads, begun Wednesday. There was, however, no official confirmation of the report.

Freight traffic in the Carolinas, according to a Southern Railway spokesman, had been restored to "practically normal" and passenger service was being rapidly expanded again. The Southern Railway lines to the east of Atlanta and Asheville were doing well because the firemen had not struck on those lines.

Convicted American Communist leader Eugene Dennis was ordered to begin serving his one-year jail sentence for contempt of Congress in 1947 for refusing to answer questions before HUAC. He had sought delay of the sentence until his appeal could be heard in January. Mr. Dennis had also been convicted of Smith Act violations with the other ten American Communist Party leaders who were defendants in that separate case. He was also appealing that conviction and sentence to five years in prison, and was free on bond pending the outcome of the appeal in that matter.

The Navy was investigating a report that an unidentified submarine had been sighted by a Mobile Gas tanker off the New Jersey coast on Wednesday afternoon.

The Navy announced that a Viking rocket had achieved its record apogee of 106.4 miles after being launched from a ship in the mid-Pacific the previous night, the first time a Viking had been launched from a ship. Other rockets, as the V-2, had achieved higher altitudes of 114 miles, launched from the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, and a two-stage rocket had reached 230 miles from that base.

The Justice Department announced that it would undertake a major antitrust action against seven large oil companies in connection with operations in five Far Western states, including the three coastal states, plus Nevada and Arizona.

In Thompsonville, Conn., four masked gunmen armed with shotguns slugged and robbed three Brinks guards of $15,000 in the pay room of a carpet factory at 4:00 a.m., and then fled in an automobile. On January 17, a Brinks office had been robbed in Boston of 1.7 million dollars and no one had yet been caught in that heist.

In Raleigh at the state Democratic convention, many of the delegates had chosen not to attend the proceedings, instead were seen milling around the hotels and visiting with party leaders. They had found the convention too harmonious and thus dull. The only sticking point, the Senate campaign in the Smith-Graham-Reynolds race, got no mention from the platform.

Governor Kerr Scott, in a press conference, said that he believed that personalities rather than issues would decide the Senate race. Former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds told the Governor that he was being too active on behalf of Senator Frank Graham, whom the Governor had appointed to the seat a year earlier following the death of J. Melville Broughton after only two months as Senator. Mr. Reynolds said it was okay with him, however, and that he would beat Senator Graham anyway.

The Governor also said that all of the mail regarding his appointment of James Smith as the new Highway Patrol commander had been favorable.

On the editorial page, "Man Without a Following" tells of its May 5 editorial endorsing Willis Smith for the Senate seat against Senator Graham in the May 27 Democratic primary having provoked quite a lot of mail, with the liberals contending that Senator Graham was really conservative, far more moderate than the President.

It finds that those correspondents had so embroidered the Senator's record that it wonders whether they were backing a reactionary by mistake. It reiterates its respect for Senator Graham but states again that it felt that he represented the wrong ideology for the present, too aligned with the Fair Deal. It notes that no one, in the process of defending Senator Graham, had also defended the President, and so wonders what sort of Democrats these were.

"Cash and Guns to Indo-China" finds that the U.S. business in Indo-China was the same as in Berlin and NATO, containment of Russian Communism. Undersecretary of State James Webb had just announced that the country would implement at once a recommendation by a special survey mission that about 60 million dollars be devoted for aid to Southeast Asia, paying for the French soldiers fighting against the guerrilla movement of Ho Chi Minh. The money would come from the 79 million dollars earmarked by Congress for the Far East.

It points out that the French regime was not perfect and that the U.S. would be accused of subverting the desire of the native population for freedom, as manifested by the Ho guerrillas. But without the U.S. aid, it posits, Ho would win and the country would fall into the Communist sphere, possibly allowing eventually the whole of Southeast Asia to become Communist, under Russian control.

It adds that it was to be hoped that the French-backed Bao Dai regime would gain a measure of independence but that the overriding concern was defeat of Communism in Indo-China.

"Decision on the 'Gallon Law'" tells of the State Supreme Court, in a decision announced by Justice Sam J. Ervin, having clarified the Turlington Act, which limited to one gallon the amount of alcoholic beverage which could be carried on the person or transported. The Court ruled that it applied to one gallon per vehicle, not, as had been interpreted previously by some lower court judges, one gallon per occupant. The piece praises the clarification as enabling both enforcement henceforth to become more efficient and the public to conform to the law.

"Colonial's Safety Record" tells of Colonial Air Lines having celebrated its twentieth anniversary without a fatality or serious injury in over 300 million passenger miles, albeit marred recently, when one of its planes had crashed and burned, killing all aboard. Nevertheless, it suggests, such a remarkable record deserved more attention than it was getting, even if the airline was small and therefore less susceptible to accidents than the larger companies with more airplanes and flights.

A piece from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, titled "The Perfect Lure", finds the idea of putting Social Security on a pay-as-you-go basis while also nearly doubling benefits and expanding coverage by a third was the product of deliberate deception. Social Security had built up a 14 billion dollar surplus from which, it was theorized, the proposed increased benefits could be paid without raising payroll taxes. But, it states, such was a fallacious claim. The payroll taxes would have to be raised to pay for the increases and the public, it suggests, should be told so frankly.

Drew Pearson discusses the upcoming Pennsylvania primary having great portent for the Republicans in the 1952 presidential race, by determining whether the Joe Grundy machine in that state could be unseated, and, if so, forecasting a GOP trend toward progressivism. Mr. Grundy, 86, had long been an advocate of high tariffs and stood as a symbol of the robber-baron era when the theme was that the public could be damned as long as profits were being made by big companies and utilities. The machine had received a jolt in 1934 when the first Democratic regime in 50 years in the state came to power, enacting progressive social and economic legislation. More importantly, the Republican legislatures which followed did not repeal these reforms. Present Governor James Duff, a Republican, had obtained 50 million dollars for cleaning up the polluted Schuylkill River, was planning new bridges across the Delaware, reforming the overcrowded mental institutions, and had raised teacher pay to the second highest in the nation.

Governor Duff was running for the Senate and was expected to win the GOP nomination easily. While the Grundy machine had no problem with getting rid of Governor Duff by sending him to Washington, they did not wish to see his hand-picked successor, a former Theodore Roosevelt Bull Mooser in 1912 and also a progressive, become Governor. That decision was at stake in the primary. If Governor Duff's chosen successor won, then the Governor would become a leader to progressive Republicans and perhaps even a favorite for the presidential nomination.

Mr. Pearson notes that the fall election would be a formidable challenge, however, in both races, as incumbent Senator Francis Myers, popular with many Republicans, was running, and the Democratic gubernatorial nominee would also have GOP support.

Marquis Childs discusses the President's "Point 4" program, which had just passed the Senate by a single vote, providing for 45 million dollars in aid to underdeveloped countries to assist them in developing better agriculture and industry. Senator Taft had decried the effort as wasteful spending, accomplishing nothing, that the country could not aid such large countries as India and China.

But Mr. Childs hastens to differ, citing a Rockefeller Foundation report which had found that, for instance, in Sardinia, where the population was relatively sparse compared to mainland Italy for the fact of widespread malaria, aid supplied by the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and supplemented by the Rockefeller Foundation, amounting to a total of twelve million dollars, had served virtually to eradicate malaria from the island and make it therefore conducive to greater habitation. The relatively small amount of money had gone to insect and mosquito control.

While it was not exactly the type of application which would occur under Point 4, it served as example of what a small amount of money could do with the right technology and advisers behind it. Thus, he regards the program as a valid use of the nation's resources, providing the most efficient answer to Communism.

Robert C. Ruark takes issue with the concept of "the little man", so often bandied about in newsreels and in print. He wonders who this proverbial person was, someone small in stature or simply of limited means and background.

But he considered President Truman a "small man", insofar as the usual presidential stature was concerned, just as he regarded a great many legislative leaders likewise, as adjudged by their talents when posed against the mantle they donned.

On the other hand he had known persons of limited means who became wealthy through personal creativity and industry.

The "little man", he finds, was just as physically large on average and was possessed of the same physical qualities as the "big men" of society. Jesus, after all, had been a "little man" in the sense of his mean background and occupation. So had been Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mohammed and Buddha.

So he concludes that there were no such "little" people anywhere, "except the big or important people who suckle on their own delusions of grandeur, and who lose themselves so permanently in the clouds of their delusion that they are constrained to enshrine themselves as gods by peering down their noses at less lucky folk."

A letter writer from Pinehurst responds to the editorial of May 5 on the Senate race between Willis Smith, Senator Graham and former Senator Reynolds, finds that the editorial's reasoning in support of its decision to endorse Mr. Smith was flawed by following the route of negation which had so much characterized the Republican Party since 1936. Nothing constructive had been adduced in support of Mr. Smith. The tone of the editorial had been the same as that of the campaign waged by Smith supporters, more against Senator Graham than for Mr. Smith.

He wonders whether Mr. Smith could elicit from Senators the same respect and attention commanded by Senator Graham, who, on several occasions, reportedly had spoken so eloquently on topics that Senators of both parties left the cloak rooms and came to the floor to listen.

He suggests that the newspaper unwittingly may have, with its endorsement, delivered the "kiss of death" to Mr. Smith's chances.

He adds that he had been a reader of the newspaper for many years and in that time had respected its "intelligent liberalism", but had found that since Thomas Robinson had taken over as publisher in early 1947 from the late W. C. Dowd, Jr., upon the sale of the newspaper from the Dowd family to a group of investors, it had become just another "stuffed shirt" organ, insofar as its editorial policy was concerned.

We have to agree with that assessment. The editorial column has increasingly become, in that three and a half years, though not uniformly so, proper material for quick consignment to use as fish wrap or kitty-box liner. It started downhill fast after the departure of editor Harry Ashmore at the end of July, 1947.

The editorials remain worthwhile historically, however, as providing a good glimpse of the differing points of view and the typical arguments being posed against the Fair Deal and the Truman Administration, as well as against civil rights legislation as Federal force bills, while being supportive of integration of society and equality of opportunity generally, notwithstanding the conundrum which those seemingly paradoxical notions pose to the modern reader, after that which would occur in the Fifties through mid-Seventies.

Have no fear, however, as the war in Korea is just around the corner, we hear, and the news will quickly shift again for awhile to good old war and away from all of these tedious domestic issues.

They just could not live without it for very long.

Incidentally, after being elected June 24 in the primary runoff with Senator Graham, following the Senator's plurality victory in the initial primary election, Mr. Smith then adding, at the behest of campaign adviser Jesse Helms, race-baiting to his Red-smear tactics, Senator Smith would die in mid-1953.

Just the facts, ma'am; not a threat.

A letter writer urges voting for Mr. Smith.

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