The Charlotte News

Friday, May 19, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate virtually killed the Fair Employment Practices Committee bill by voting effectively to allow the Southern Senate filibuster to continue by not voting for cloture. Drew Pearson in his column this date explains how the Republicans supplied the necessary abstaining votes to prevent cloture, pursuant to a deal arranged between Senators Richard Russell and Robert Taft. The cloture vote failed by twelve votes to obtain the required 64 votes or two-thirds of the membership, the vote having been 52 to 32 in favor of cloture, with twelve abstaining or not present, the latter group including Senator Frank Graham of North Carolina.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that another attempt would be made to stop the filibuster the following week by picking up additional votes from absent Senators. One of the absent Senators, however, Senator Garrett Withers of Kentucky, was reported to have been intending to vote against cloture if present, meaning that the filibuster could not be defeated without a change of vote by one of the Senators voting against cloture.

Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, newly appointed chairman of the special committee investigating organized crime and gambling in the country, told the press that a two-pronged attack would be waged on the underworld, aimed at ferreting out any income tax evasion and investigation of links with political groups. The spotlight would be on the accumulation of wealth in organized crime. He said that at least a dozen undercover agents would be sent into the field soon.

In London, the Big Three foreign ministers announced that they would appoint civilian high commissioners soon to replace the military governors in the Western occupation zones of Austria and would lighten Austria's occupation burdens.

In San Francisco, General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, speaking before the Chamber of Commerce and the Commercial Club, said that the U.S. must shore up its defenses to meet the threat of a possible Russian atomic attack, favored establishment of mobilization plans to be put into effect at the first warning signal, including standby emergency war powers for the President.

General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, speaking before a Detroit luncheon observing Armed Forces Day the following day, said that the Air Force was too weak to maintain a concentrated air war for more than a few months and that the aircraft industry was in no position to replace heavy combat losses.

The House Appropriations Committee recommended acceleration of production of warplanes and anti-submarine weapons as part of a 625 million dollar bill sent to the House for a vote expected the following week. The bill included 50 million dollars in economic aid for Korea, in addition to the 60 million already provided.

Two U.S. airmen, who had been freed by the Chinese Communists after being held captive for 18 months, returned home, arriving in Long Beach, California. They said that they had admitted to the Communists being spies to obtain release.

The House Ways & Mean Committee voted to approve a cut in taxes on the coal industry by five to ten million dollars to enable it to remain competitive with cheaper natural gas and oil.

The Charlotte Housing Authority had selected a 48-acre tract on York Road for construction of 400 low-cost housing units for black residents. The preliminary building and site plans had been approved by the Public Housing Administration. A total of 102 buildings would be built, each to house two to six families.

In Raleigh, Jack Bridges, a 23-year old Georgia native convicted the previous year of killing a young Raleigh mechanic, Keston Norris Privette, was executed in the gas chamber. The victim had been struck on the head with a rifle butt and buried alive in a shallow grave. The murder was the result of a love triangle between the defendant and the victim's wife. The wife was placed on probation after being found guilty of adultery. The defendant had said that he did not believe he should have been held solely responsible for the murder. Governor Kerr Scott had refused a request for commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment.

In Charlotte, an all-male jury delivered a verdict of guilty of second degree murder against a woman accused of killing her husband, claiming that she had shot him because he had forced her to engage in a series of unnatural sex acts with him over a period of time and was threatening at the time to kill her if she did not let him into their locked bedroom. The prosecution had contended that she planned the murder as part of a murder-suicide, writing a note so implying, and that she had shot her husband while he slept. She had been charged with first degree murder. The verdict came after about four hours of deliberation.

On the editorial page, "What Is Technical Assistance?" discusses the President's "Point Four" program, originally proposed in his 1949 inaugural address, and finally given an appropriation of 35 million dollars to be spent on technical assistance to underdeveloped nations, coordinating private and public resources to enable these nations to use better agricultural techniques and develop industrial resources, to become self-sustaining.

As examples of such assistance, it cites the World Health Organization's successful effort in Greece to eradicate malaria with DDT used to exterminate mosquitoes, and its eradication of the cholera epidemic which had beset Egypt. The Food and Agriculture Organization had worked to provide better agricultural techniques to increase food production across the world, as in Icelandic and Latin American fishing practices.

Two-thirds of the people of the world were undernourished and half were illiterate. Technical assistance could help to improve these deficiencies, turning "know-how into show-how", as U.N. Ambassador Warren Austin had put it.

It praises the effort as a means of showing the world what democracy could do positively with relatively little funding, far more effective that Russian propaganda filled with false promises.

"New Global Policy" tells of the Big Three at the recent foreign ministers conference having approved of a plan proposed by France to internationalize the European steel industry, bringing France and Germany closer together economically and politically, as well as reaching agreement providing for military and economic aid to France for the French-backed Indo-Chinese regime of Bao Dai, fighting to resist the Communist rebels of Ho Chi Minh. The conference had also resulted in creation of a permanent committee of deputy foreign ministers to coordinate the NATO nations economically and militarily to unite the defense effort against Russia.

It suggests these moves as having formed a global defense policy at last, replacing the ad hoc approach to foreign policy since the war and congratulates Secretary of State Acheson for it.

"Supervision of Campaigns Needed" tells of the appointment by the City Council of an attorney to study the issue of control of charitable solicitations in the community without infringing on rights of speech and finds the appointment wise, as the attorney in question had opposed the proposed regulatory ordinance of the previous year as being too strict. Thus, his advice on a new proposal would likely carry great weight with the Council.

"Zeal Leads to Excess" tells of news of Senator Joseph McCarthy now being relegated to the inside pages of newspapers, indicative of the Senator's fading newsworthiness and influence after he had failed to prove his charges of Communist spying by Owen Lattimore, which he made the linchpin of his overall charges of Communist influence on Far Eastern policy in the State Department, supposedly leading to the fall of China to the Communists.

Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor had reported that German newspapers had never fallen for the McCarthy line and had given it only subdued coverage from the beginning of the news cycle in mid-February.

The piece urges that it did not mean that German newspapers were more canny than the American press but rather that the latter, in its zeal to report the news impartially and fully, had not always been able to avoid excesses. The McCarthy story, it concludes, had been overplayed but it could not have been ignored by the press without assuming a terrible responsibility for the omission.

Actually, for the present, the Senator was remaining relatively quiet because the Senators of the Foreign Relations subcommittee examining his charges were busy at the White House looking over the loyalty files of the 81 persons who Senator McCarthy charged with being "card-carrying Communists", later modified to "security risks". The Senators had said it would take a couple of months to complete the process, carried out in the Cabinet room under the watchful eyes of John Peurifoy and other State Department and FBI personnel.

Have no fear, Commie haters and Liberal loathers, Senator McCarthy will return to the stage.

Drew Pearson discusses a deal transacted between Senators Robert Taft of Ohio and Richard Russell of Georgia to exchange Republican abstentions in the cloture effort on debate of FEPC for the Southern Democratic votes necessary to provide the legislative veto of the President's reorganization plan re the NLRB, which would have abolished the office of general counsel and returned the function of selecting cases to the Board.

Senator Taft, himself, was going to vote for cloture to keep his voting record clean for the upcoming election in Ohio. But he had lined up, he claimed, the necessary six or more Republican Senators, including Senators Chan Gurney of South Dakota, George Malone of Nevada, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Milton Young of North Dakota, Eugene Milliken of Colorado, and Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, to abstain from voting on cloture and thereby insure that the cloture vote would fall short of the necessary 64 votes or two-thirds of the membership to close off debate on the controversial measure. But what he had not told Senator Russell was that these and other Republicans had already privately stated that they would be willing to vote against cloture on the principle of not shutting off debate, making Senator Russell's agreement with respect to defeat of the President's NLRB reorganization plan unnecessary.

Mr. Pearson says that the plan had been recommended by the Hoover Commission—contradicting a recent News editorial which had said that the Commission did not make a recommendation one way or the other on reorganization of the NLRB.

Governor Dewey in New York had urged Elliott Roosevelt to run against Congressman Vito Marcantonio in the coming primary, said that if he could get the support of Tammany, then the Republicans would back him. The decision of Tammany was pending.

Congress would be willing to appropriate the money for continuing through the end of the fiscal year the cash-strapped Housing Expediter's office, in charge of enforcement of rent control, but the House Rules Committee was blocking it.

There was in the making a probe of Congressmen who used their franking privilege or allowed it to be used by others to distribute propaganda of lobbies.

The Civil Aeronautics Administration was planning to place restrictions on the flights of private aircraft, making them register a flight plan before getting approval for takeoff, so as to enable tracking of airplanes to prevent a surprise atomic attack. The regulation would check all flights entering the U.S. from abroad and those flying over defense areas.

Secretary of State Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had agreed on a plan for moving American B-29 atom bombers to new bases in Britain as a precaution against surprise Russian attack. The planes would be manned by special crews on duty constantly.

Marquis Childs, in Denver, discusses a new, expensive office building being dedicated for the Denver Post, once a sensational frontier newspaper typical of the Old West, now turned into an organ of respectability. With the price of newsprint having reached $100 per ton and such new buildings with presses costing around six million dollars, the newspaper publishing business had become expensive to operate, threatening competition in a given market. The Chicago and New York newspapers of Marshall Field were said to cost 30 million dollars to operate.

To compete, newspapers had to have advertising, but to do so meant choking off some of the space for news and opinion, absent both of which in abundance, a newspaper would cease to serve the public function as a marketplace for expression of ideas, as the free press envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders.

Television now served as new competition in the advertising world.

The new pressures placed even more responsibilities on newspaper publishers to make sure that there was no monopoly of viewpoint or prejudice involved in newspapers. The press had privileges which rested on the concepts of freedom of inquiry and ideas.

"The mere huckster may claim those privileges for a time. But ignoring the duties and responsibilities that go with privilege, the huckster will in the end lose all."

We think that the last two sentences ought be dedicated to Fox News and its functional equivalent today. What good are you to attract an audience merely to massage their worst prejudices, to give positive reinforcement to their most elemental and primordial urges and inject them into the realm of politics, all to sell them cornflakes? Why not just develop a traveling carnival? It would be the same thing. Despite cosmetic changes at Fox News in the past year, it remains the same old biased presentation, promoting the politics of division, long ago discarded in this country, seeking to prettify the pig with makeup and sell it as a saving grace at the table of plenty.

Robert C. Ruark discusses again the airlines and the advance made twenty years earlier when United Airlines first began hiring female stewardesses to calm trepidatious passengers. But only in the previous year or so had the airlines finally gotten around to an even more important public relations effort, that being to install a loudspeaker in the cabin hooked to a microphone in the cockpit so that the captain could make calming announcements to the passengers.

He finds that all the praiseworthy efforts of the stewardesses went to naught unless the passengers, during a storm or passage through turbulent air pockets or loss of an engine or wing or tail, could be calmed by the steady voice of the pilot in charge of the plane. If he could remain calm, then so could the passengers in such parlous straits of travail.

Mr. Ruark provides some quotes from the captain to the passengers, which he had heard during a recent United flight, imparting that calming effect.

Nowadays on United, of course, they tell a person that either they will accept the offer of recompense in exchange for giving up their reserved seat so that deadheads of the Airline can fly, or they will send the local goon squad to drag the recalcitrant passengers, unduly insistent on maintaining their contract with the Airline, bodily from the plane.

Have a lovely day.

The Eupora (Miss.) Webster Progress tells of the Lucky Strike advertising slogan, "LSMFT", being coopted to mean, "Lord, Save Me From Truman". It would later be taken to represent another alternative slogan, at least among little boys. If memory serves, it went something like, "Luce Stars Mean Floppy Tars".

A letter writer praises the defeat of Senator Claude Pepper in the Democratic primary by Congressman George Smathers in Florida and hopes that North Carolina would follow suit in defeating Senator Frank Graham, thinks that such men, in supporting "foreign organizations", had to know what they were doing unless they were not smart enough to be cognizant of the facts, in which case they were not needed in Washington.

A letter addresses a previous letter from a doctor who had suggested that The News endorsement of Willis Smith would likely provide to his candidacy the "kiss of death", as suggested also by a previous writer, this writer asking when it had become a crime for a newspaper or an individual to support a Republican. He favors defeat of Senator Graham, as UNC had been said to have been a hotbed of Communism for many years and blames Senator Graham for it as the institution's president from 1930 through early 1949. He says that men were afraid to speak out in America for fear of reprisal from their employers.

They're all Reds down 'ere, ain't they? Talkin' all 'bout dat socialism stuff and learnin' to be Commies while wearin' blue. Let's go down 'ere and change the names of all the buildin's to reflect our views. Then them Commies can't find their way to class no more...

A letter writer questions whether President Truman was liberal when he was in favor of cutting the military budget, supposedly ignoring the advice of Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, as well as that of Secretaries Acheson and Johnson, plus State Department adviser John Foster Dulles.

He has his facts badly wrong.

A letter writer, who had previously written that the May 5 endorsement of Mr. Smith would be his "kiss of death", finds the May 12 News editorial, commenting on the reaction to the May 5 editorial, to have been "petulant" in its tone, arguing that liberals were now contending that Senator Graham was a conservative. He finds this claim to be nonsense. He supports a previous writer who criticized the editorial for its hypocrisy in finding Senator Graham honorable and astute while endorsing Mr. Smith because he was more suited to the times as a voice in alliance with Senator Clyde Hoey in contravention of the Fair Deal.

He charges the Smith campaign with conducting a deceitful effort against Senator Graham, involving "innuendo, subterfuge, and half truths". By contrast, Senator Graham had not uttered any unkind word about Mr. Smith.

The editors respond to a statement by the writer asking rhetorically whether, when the two Senators of the state voted identically on ten of fourteen bills, it implied that the Truman policies were in fact as bad as the newspaper sought to make them appear, by citing the CIO News of January 2, indicating that Senator Hoey had voted "right" on only four of sixteen issues considered important to the CIO, whereas Senator Graham had voted "right" on ten of them, was absent on two votes and was not yet serving when four votes occurred.

A letter writer supports A. H. Barkley of Mecklenburg County in his bid to become the Republican nominee for the Senate seat occupied by Senator Graham.

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