The Charlotte News
Monday, May 29, 1950
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Berlin Whitsuntide march of a half million Communist youths turned out to be just another Communist parade, not the promoted battle for which the West had been prepared. There was no storming of the Western sectors, as had originally been conceived, all of it being confined to East Berlin. Of the huge crowd, some appeared to journalists as fanatics, while others seemed only to be sightseers or reluctant participants. But all cheered on cue from their Communist leaders and did as they were told, if some without enthusiasm.
Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer had asked for the resignations of two men, Michael Lee and William Remington, after they had been categorized as security risks. He said that he was not questioning their loyalty but believed he had to ask for their resignations in the interest of efficient administration. Mr. Lee had shown up for work this date and Mr. Remington declared his intent to return after the holiday. The Department was drawing up administrative charges for their dismissal but had no plans to suspend them in the meantime.
Secretary of State Acheson and U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie conferred with the President this date regarding their recent trips abroad, but both labeled the conference "confidential".
The Supreme Court denied a rehearing of their previous April 10 refusal of review of the contempt of Congress convictions of Hollywood screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, for their refusal under the Fifth Amendment to testify whether they had ever been Communists when asked the questions by HUAC in fall, 1947. The other eight defendants among the Hollywood Ten, also cited for contempt, and who had awaited the adjudication by the courts of the validity of the assertion of the privilege in the two test cases, would now enter their pleas of guilty in exchange for similar sentences of a year each in jail and fines.
The Chicago Daily News reported that John L. Lewis and UMW had dropped a $50,000 fine and charges that the former president of a UMW local had sought to establish a rival union, and also restored his job with back pay, as well as restoring his job with the mining company, after he had filed complaints with the NLRB against the UMW and the mining company, pending in Federal court.
In Michigan City, Ind., two State prison convicts had died and four others rendered seriously ill during a weekend spree of ingestion of typewriter cleaning fluid. One of the inmates had purchased the substance, being told it was pure grain alcohol.
In Defiance, O., four tons of dynamite exploded at a limestone quarry, killing three men and injuring a fourth, as the men were placing the dynamite in drilled holes for blasting out the quarry.
According to the National Safety Council, the Memorial Day weekend thus far had recorded a national death toll of 275, of which 181 were caused by traffic accidents, with one day still to go through midnight Tuesday. The Council had predicted 200 traffic fatalities for the four-day period.
In North Carolina, the tally in the special Democratic Senate primary race between Senator Frank Graham, Willis Smith, and former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds on Saturday showed, with 1,924 of the state's 1,990 precincts reporting, a 50,000 vote plurality for Senator Graham, polling 295,342, Mr. Smith, 245,080, Senator Reynolds, 56,016, and a fourth candidate, 5,665 votes.
Senator Reynolds wanted the primary to end the race, but it was up to Mr. Smith whether there would be a runoff, available under state law when no majority was received by any candidate. He had until June 12 to make his decision. In the one-party state, the ultimate winner of the primary would be assured victory in the fall.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of the Mecklenburg County results showing professional, white collar and rural precincts going to Willis Smith, who polled 14,963 votes to 10,245 for Senator Graham, who had grown up in the county, with Senator Reynolds receiving 1,364. Mr. Smith led in 58 of 67 precincts, only two of the nine for Senator Graham falling outside Charlotte. Only about half the expected black voters turned out, about 2,000 to 2,500. Senator Graham had won the predominantly black precincts. Mecklenburg was the only populous county in the state to provide Mr. Smith with a large lead. Buncombe, location of Asheville, Guilford, location of Greensboro and High Point, Forsyth, location of Winston-Salem, and Durham all voted decisively for Senator Graham, with Wake, location of Raleigh, and New Hanover, location of Wilmington, giving him narrow margins. He also enjoyed surprising victories in the smaller Eastern counties of the state outside New Hanover and Wake.
In the Piedmont, Cabarrus, Union, Catawba, and Mecklenburg voted for Mr. Smith. Rowan, Burke, Lincoln, Anson, and Stanly voted for Senator Graham.
On the editorial page, "Reflections on the Election" looks at the possibility of a runoff primary between Senator Graham and Willis Smith, finds that the decision of Mr. Smith ought rest with the roughly 250,000 voters who voted for him, even if the results of a runoff would not appear likely to favor his ultimate victory, given that the combined 60,000 votes of the other two opponents would only barely make up the 50,000 vote deficit to Senator Graham, even in the unlikely event that most of those Reynolds-Boyd voters would vote again and uniformly change their preference to Mr. Smith. Senator Graham's supporters, by contrast, were quite loyal and he could thus count on them to repeat in a runoff.
There was also a possibility that the racial and Communist smear tactics employed in the campaign by the Smith forces would generate even greater reaction in the ensuing month, as had begun to be the case in the latter stages of the campaign.
The record-breaking primary turnout of 600,000 had surprised most observers, as the highest predicted was 525,000. The strength of Senator Graham in the Eastern counties and that of Mr. Smith in the industrial Piedmont and in Mecklenburg were also surprises. Mr. Smith had taken three mountain counties thought safely in the Graham column. The Graham strength in the rural counties, it ventures, could be attributable to the influence of Governor Kerr Scott, a farmer before entering State Government, or the fact that the rural sections were naturally more liberal or oriented toward populism than the industrial areas of the state.
It hopes that if Mr. Smith did elect to demand a runoff, then the candidates would induce their supporters to stick to the issues, the chief one being, in its view, Liberalism versus Conservatism, as canalized by the Fair Deal policies. It finds that the campaign had not thus far been waged on that basis.
You can't get those crazy people who
vote on the hot-button issues of race and Communism to look at
serious issues, any more than you can most of their children,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of today, at least those who
never fell far enough from the cuckoo's nest, to look beyond the same
sort of emotional issues, whether it be immigration, Tourism
"The City's Parking Problem" tells of the head of the Old Dominion Box Co. in Charlotte, Eddie Dillard, urging that something had to be done to remedy the absence of sufficient downtown parking in the city. His committee recommended a permanent commission of volunteers to study the matter, that the commission would identify areas of parking needs and look for available sites, giving private enterprise first opportunity at building parking lots.
Otherwise, it finds, decentralization of business eventually would result, complicating traffic control the more.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Socialized Medicine's Ills", tells of the reported illness in Britain during its first full year of socialized medicine showing a rise of 8 percent with workdays lost rising 22 percent, most of the increase occurring among female workers, with that of males rising only about 9 percent compared to that of women being about 35 percent. Officials claimed the rise was the result of those previously who had been unable to afford care now being able to access it.
But it was also believed that the claims for medical care were being sought unnecessarily in many cases as taxes were now paying for it. The disbursement of State funds for staying at home from work also discouraged a speedy recovery.
It concludes that the British experience argued against adopting the President's compulsory medical insurance program.
Bob Sain of The News tells of the Farmer's Almanac for 1950 having caused a stir for the discovery recently of seven missing editions, dating the first publication to 1818 instead of the previously assumed inception date of 1825, upsetting the farmers' ritual across the nation, from Kennebunkport to San Jose, in obedience to its prescriptions. Ray Geiger, the editor, had recently visited Charlotte and Mr. Sain had talked to him about the new contents of the Almanac for the year, a detailed explication of which he provides, such as the inclusion of "Eight Rules for Prevention of Forest Fires" and "Twelve Rules for Happiness". An astrological chart was also included.
In earlier editions, the Almanac had frankly admitted, as in 1856, that readers knew as much about the weather as the editors did. Now, the predictions were confined to within a few days of a given period and no disclaimers were issued.
Benjamin Franklin, writing as "Richard Saunders", the "Poor Richard" of legend, had once predicted the death of his nearest competitor, Titan Leeds, set to occur, he had proclaimed, on October 17, 1733, precisely at 3:29 p.m. Mr. Franklin thereafter insisted on the accuracy of the prediction, even though Mr. Leeds had lived.
Now, the Almanac had suggested such apparently unrelated miscellany as words for wooing, first aid for a snakebite, plus the type of nails for casing and hanging a door.
One bit of included humor told of a patron ordering a cup of coffee at a hot dog stand and saying that it looked like rain, to which the proprietor asked testily whether it did not taste, however, like coffee.
Drew Pearson tells of being asked to write a column for inclusion in a time capsule, to be buried in Wichita and dug up in the year 2000, and so he writes the piece to the readers of that future time. He tells of his grandfather traveling to Kansas by prairie schooner around 1850, pitching a tent at night nearly any place he wished. There had been no fences, no no-trespassing signs, no speed laws, no service stations or gasoline fumes. His grandfather had been able also to settle almost any place he chose. He recalled as a boy, when his mother would take him to Kansas to visit his grandparents, seeing Indians in the Union Station at Kansas City when they changed trains. Now, parking was a problem even in the smaller towns and airplanes had to be stacked to circle the airports for want of adequate runways to land.
Since the turn of the century, modernization had advanced quickly, but especially during the prior ten years, when the mechanics of mass human destruction had accelerated arithmetically, placing the world at a turning point where man had to learn to live with himself or perish. Atom and hydrogen bombs, nerve gas, germ warfare, and rocketry had all contributed to this complex of attendant problems, resulting in mass fear. He conceives that the year 2000 would look back on the era as being characterized by fear.
In 1920, the country had killed Woodrow Wilson's idea of the League of Nations because they believed the nation could remain isolated by oceans after World War I, a process which continued through the start of World War II. Even in spring, 1945, at the U.N. Charter conference in San Francisco, the U.S. had insisted on the right of veto for the Big Five permanent members of the Security Council.
Now, that fear was demonstrated by looking under the bed for spies instead of looking forward, by politicians talking at length about past mistakes rather than trying to prevent new ones. The emphasis was on defense to the point that there was fear it would lead to national bankruptcy, despite such a psychological state of fear likely finding no resolution from military might.
Removal of fear, he posits, especially from the Russian mind, would end the world's problems. If the country had spent one-tenth of the ingenuity it had put into developing new weapons, instead into communicating truthful information about the U.S. behind the Iron Curtain, those fears would be eliminated. He hopes that by 2000, the country would have realized that simple fact.
The present cold war was a thought war and it was to be hoped that it would not go beyond that and turn into a shooting war. He thinks that germ or nuclear war would beat the nations to a shooting war this time in any event. But notwithstanding that likelihood, the nations were still spending lavishly on conventional weapons.
He hopes that by 2000, the readers could think how foolish "those poor dubs were back in 1950" and that the age of fear would be far behind, that men would have learned how to live together, to know each other, and work together, to respect the commandment, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
Well, Mr. Pearson, we were pretty well along the way perhaps to that goal by 2000, until November 8 came along in that election year and changed everything, putting, albeit not until December 12, the "poor dubs" back into power, resulting in a recrudescent climate of fear, without which, they had learned since the end of the Cold War in 1989, they had no political power, or simply were so wedded to the tingling excitement generated by fear that they could not live without it. The current occupant of the White House has taken that brand of fear, compounded it with the new McCarthyism and gone to town with it.
But as to the latter, not unlike his mentor, Mr. Nixon, apparently acting on the advice of Mr. Nixon's leftover, unreconstructed surrogates, he has obstructed justice already in his first four months in office and appears well on his way to impeachment—provided there is any justice left in the land. And his extremist followers can kick and scream and threaten bloody murder all they wish in retaliation: no one is above the Constitution, and especially not the President, who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. This "President" does not appear to know how the Constitution and the laws work, apparent to anyone with any sense during his campaign. In such a high office, as in any office or simply as an individual, however, ignorance of the law is no excuse to afford immunity from prosecution or impeachment.
Good luck with your revooolushun, Trumpies. It was great while it lasted, huh? Better luck next time. Maybe if you would jettison that Fascist handbook, the same one used by the Confederacy and every other totalitarian regime ever known to man in history, you would obtain more pleasure out of life.
Marquis Childs, in examining further the third group of persons who desired a world war between the U.S. and Russia, as he began in his column on Saturday, tells of the former Communist having become a prominent feature of the political landscape, readily available to implicate others in Communist activities while lending his or her voice, often for handsome profits, to condemn the Soviet system and Communism in general. The Washington Star had recently noted that the trend had become so accepted by Americans that few were asking whether or not such conduct would not be the perfect ploy of Moscow to ingratiate to the American people "former" Communists, supposedly reformed in their ways, to sow distrust and discord among the people of the country.
Six prominent former Communists, including prominent black author Richard Wright, had recently co-authored The God That Failed, an attack on Russian Communism. Louis Fischer in that work had written of the "dissatisfied, disillusioned commissar types", who, in turning away from Soviet Communism, were drawn to new forms of regimentation with less brutal absolutes or to a more successful form of totalitarianism.
He finds that, without question, some former Communists had contributed to the knowledge of the "Communist conspiracy" and its penetration of every phase of the proselyte's life. But when they had gone on to assert that only a former Communist was capable of directing the fight against Communism, it became clear what Mr. Fischer meant when he had written of "disillusioned commissar types". Some of them were said to have great influence in Pentagon planning and strategy, and their goal was a kind of Jihad or Holy War, to eliminate the evil which had corrupted them.
Among this group were former ambassadors, officials, and the like, who had formerly been pro-Russian until the Communists caused a reaction in them which turned to anger and outraged frustration.
The ideological warfare had contributed to the atmosphere of sensationalism in the country, replete with the televised committee hearing and glaring headlines, antithetical to the traditions of American free society.
At the root of the problem was respect for the individual, as opposed to the Communist perspective where the individual was but a statistic, as in the planned starvation of a whole class of Russians in the early Thirties to speed collectivization of farms. Similarly, the former Communists had no trouble speaking of the extermination of a whole generation to rid the world of Communism. The fundamental principle of the end justifying the means remained uppermost in the minds of the former Communist, just as it had when they were Communists.
He concludes that it was long past time to recognize the threat, in all its manifestations, to the existence of democracy everywhere.
He does not say that a fundamental perspective in life, authoritarianism, failure to be liberated from the childish perception of egocentrism and the notion that the world revolves around the child rather than recognition of the child's place in it, was, in large part, the gravitational pull, the attractive mechanism, which Communism held for most of its converts, at least those outside the economic structures which motivated acceptance of party identification for acquiring the perquisites to be had from it within the Russian state and its satellites. It is fundamentally that which he discusses, giving rise to the "commissar" complex even after leaving the party, the party not having satisfied the need for personal dominance over great numbers of others.
Robert C. Ruark reports of having kicked a pigeon on Fifth Avenue in New York recently, because he had become fed up with the feathers with which it flocked and their continual pestering of the passerby with solicitation of handouts. Rather than being able to hunt out its daily provender, the pigeon relied on the beneficence of human society, acting in the process as a "sly propagandist", issuing its: "Coooooo. Coooooo. Coooooo."
"Look at me the bird says. Lookit this big chest of mine. Look at this she-pigeon I just happened to have with me. Lookit how I got her tamed. Lookit what a great guy she thinks I am. Lookie how I can strut. Watch me fly a little bit. Whoops! Don't you wish you could do that, you earthbound bum?"
"Cooo. Coooo. Coooo. Don't you wish I were you."
He finds the bird detestable in that it framed no proper nest, had ugly offspring in their infant state, had few morals, and arrogated itself to the human race, looked bitterly and superciliously upon anyone who refused submission to its beggarly entreaties. The bird would seek crumbs from the largess of a bum as easily as from Bernard Baruch sitting on his park bench. All they said was "gimme", could care less from whence the gift derived, whether stolen or lawfully acquired. "Coooo."
No one ever kicked a pigeon to let them know how detestable they were.
"Well, neighbors, times have changed around this town. At least one resident has kicked a pigeon, and an expression of distrust has suddenly inflamed one pigeon's little red eyes. I have no excuses whatsoever to offer. I just think it's time somebody kicked a pigeon, and nominated myself for the chore."
In your zeal to express disgust, however, Mr. Ruark, don't be lured, while having your pleasant lunch on a rooftop, perhaps with some added punch in your bowl, by rude inveiglement to the edge of the ledge where the pigeons proliferate, and then realize, to your momentary horror, that in putting one swift foot's worth of pressure to the hind quarters of the pigeon, which could then merely fly away and look back with simpering derision at your impetuous expression of choler, you, being unwinged, had stepped into the echoing abyss twenty stories above street level.
Coooooo. Coooooo. Cooooo.
Leadership, not salesmanship.
Framed Edition
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