The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 31, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed Note: The front page
indicates that Secretary of State Acheson, reporting to Congress on
his recent London conferences with the Big Three and NATO nations,
told the members, meeting at the Library of Congress, that the
growing power of Russia could only be met by organizing the military
might of the West into "balanced collective forces",
meaning that the twelve nations would build up defenses for the
entire organization, not for each nation's individual defense. The
U.S., under this conception, would spend more on the Navy and Air
Force than on the Army. He said that none of the foreign ministers in
London were concerned with an immediate threat of war but worried
that unless they were prepared to meet a Russian threat presently, it
would come to exist. The address
In Tokyo, based on orders of General MacArthur, the trial of eight students accused of attacking four Americans on the previous Tuesday during a Communist demonstration, had already begun, recessing just before midnight until the next morning. Three hundred university students and workers yelled outside the court building for the release of the defendants and demanded a public trial.
There is nothing like the military conception of due process.
In New York, the New York County grand jury returned a 60-count information against Frank Erickson, operator of a multi-million dollar gambling operation and just identified by Senate investigators for the Kefauver committee as the "big shot" also of Miami gambling. Conviction on the charges of conspiracy and bookmaking would allow for sentence up to a year in jail plus a fine on each count. Mr. Erickson had been called a "tinhorn punk" by the late Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had threatened his arrest if he returned to New York.
In Greensboro, N.C., two men disputed for the office of president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company, with one contending that the board of directors had elected him to replace the current president and the latter claiming the election to be of dubious legality under company by-laws.
Let's get to it then.
In Charlotte, the City Council approved a 5.75 million dollar bond issue to be subject to a special election, for general improvements, sewer expansion, and extension of the water system to newly annexed areas.
Bernard Baruch was visiting the city informally and staying at the Hotel Charlotte, was telling those who had learned of his identity as he sat in the lobby, of the great industrial and agricultural progress of his native state of South Carolina. He also said that the Carolinas had the best year-round climate of any states of which he was aware. He had stopped in Charlotte to catch a flight to New York, after visiting his country place in Kingstree, South Carolina. He said that he would have a statement on world affairs when he spoke at Washington University in St. Louis on June 6.
It appeared that Willis Smith, runner-up in the Saturday Senate primary to Senator Frank Graham, would ask for a runoff, to be held on June 24, though no firm decision on the matter had yet been made.
Governor Kerr Scott told journalists in Raleigh that he was pleased with the primary results and was surprised by the record size of the turnout. In response to a question, he said that he did not believe that the black vote represented the decisive factor in the state, that too many eligible black voters had not voted. He added that prisoners should be allowed to vote. He also expected a progress report soon on a survey being made for the feasibility of building a high speed toll turnpike across the state.
In Mecklenburg County, a man told the Census enumerator that he was 117 and produced some facts to prove it, making him the oldest county resident among the six centenarians counted.
Through the end of the four-day,
102-hour Memorial Day weekend, the nation's death toll in accidents
reached 560, of which 340 were traffic related. The rate of traffic
deaths was therefore 80 per day, compared to 77.9 for the previous
Memorial Day record, established the previous year, when 253 died in
three days. The overall accident death rate was second to 1947 when
504 had died during a three-day weekend. New Hampshire was the only
state which did not have at least one violent death. The National
Safety Council reported that the traffic death toll was a hundred
more than for the typical four-day period, which averaged 78 per day
during the first quarter of 1950, inclusive of those who died
subsequent to the accident. The president of the Council said that
the explanation lay in the fact that "too many people didn't
give a whoop
On the editorial page, "The Twig Is Bent" finds that though the 500,000 Communist youths who had marched in East Berlin on Whitsunday were but youngsters and remained largely orderly in disporting themselves, they nevertheless could portend a future army of autonomic followers, just as the Nazi youth of the Thirties had eventually become part of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
It urges that America could insure that its youth would not fit the Jugend mold of Germany, and to that end, parents should stress varied community activities, such as participation in Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting, stimulation of appreciation for fine music or even the harmless "vapidity" of the jukebox fare, as opposed to merely the martial music of the military brass.
Oh, well, that is Common
"A Good Day for Good Government" praises generally the voters' selections for offices outside the Senate race, for Congress and state and local positions.
"No Gallups We" reports that Willis Smith had been quoted by the Twin City Sentinel in Winston Salem as having predicted, based on a News straw poll, that he would win the primary with 60 percent of the vote. But it corrects that he made the prediction several days before the final results of the poll were tallied and it does not know where he got his figure, but assures that it was not from the News. Moreover, though the poll was tiny, it turned out close to the actual results in Mecklenburg County, showing 54 percent for Mr. Smith to his actual 56 percent, and 39.5 percent for Senator Graham, compared to his actual 38.4 percent, with the rest to former Senator Reynolds. The News had also stated in the story accompanying the results of the poll that it was only a small sample randomly taken from the telephone book, without regard to voter registration.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "JP Justice", tells of many "bad check" cases appearing in the Justice of the Peace courts of the state being no more than bad debts which had been arranged by the creditor so that he could have a check as evidence of the debt, knowing it was no good at the time, then seeking to cash it knowing it would be returned. Such was an abuse of the legal system. JP's were also in the midst of traffic ticket rackets, in collusion with corrupt officers, fining motorists exorbitant fees without affording them a fair hearing. There were also other JP rackets.
The piece urges the 1951 Legislature to deal with the matter.
Drew Pearson tells of one reason for Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson's trip to Japan being Army and Navy opposition to making Japan neutral, a concept bantered about quite a bit by General MacArthur.
President Inonu of Turkey was mad at the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey for talking him into holding unnecessary elections, in which his Government had been defeated.
Police had hinted to Senate investigators that Soviet perverts were being used out of the Soviet Embassy to get acquainted with Americans, to try to place them in compromising positions and then coerce them to spy for Russia. They also said that Hitler had a worldwide list of perverts and that the Soviets had probably confiscated it after the war or were compiling a list of their own.
Betting commissioner James Carroll of St. Louis admitted to Senators off the record that gambling thrived, despite laws against bookmaking, because the laws were not enforced.
Secretary of State Acheson's talks in the London Big Three and NATO conferences would be followed by setting up a super-strategy board in the Government for conducting propaganda, economic warfare, diplomacy, military strategy and spy activities.
The State Department had leaned over so far to appease Republican Senators by keeping them informed on developments that Democrats were accusing the Department of allowing itself to be run by the GOP, as the Democrats had to read about policy in the newspapers. Democrats were therefore threatening to investigate Republicans in the Department, such as General MacArthur in Japan, High Commissioner John J. McCloy in Germany, ERP administrator Paul Hoffman, and chief delegate to the U.N. Warren Austin, along with special advisers John Foster Dulles and John Sherman Cooper. (Two of those men, Mr. McCloy and Mr. Cooper, along with the brother of Mr. Dulles, Allen, would serve in 1964 on the Warren Commission, chaired by a Republican, Chief Justice Earl Warren. President Johnson, of course, selected these men for their credentials and to make the Commission bipartisan, with one Democratic and one Republican Senator and Congressman, including Senator Richard Russell with Senator Cooper, Congressmen Hale Boggs and Gerald Ford, along with Mr. Dulles, Mr. McCloy, and the chairman.)
The Navy was ahead of the other services in development of guided missiles, which admirals believed would relegate airplanes to a minor role in warfare.
Senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the new committee assigned to investigate organized crime and gambling, wanted to create a "little FBI" for use by Congress to investigate such matters.
The proposed arrangement of a trade deal between Spain and Russia was regarded by the State Department as a form of blackmail by Generalissimo Francisco Franco to coerce a loan from the U.S. The Department advised that the U.S. needed to acquiesce.
Marquis Childs discusses the anxious expectation of the American people that U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie might have returned from Moscow with peace feelers after talking with Josef Stalin and the other leaders of the Kremlin, even though he had stated there was no such specific proposal, only a general willingness indicated to engage in talks in the Security Council, provided first the issue of recognition of Communist China were resolved.
The fact that such American expectation existed, however, signaled the level of anxiety among Americans regarding the prospect of war unless constructive steps could be taken toward achieving a lasting peace.
He provides several quotes from Winston Churchill between 1946 and 1948, as assembled by a University of Chicago scientist, in which the former Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader urged direct talks between the leaders of the powers to try to resolve the divide or at least work out a way to live in peaceful coexistence across that divide, that the latter would be better than to allow continuing distrust to produce a world war.
The previous February, Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, recommended a plan for atomic peace and challenged others to develop a better plan. But nothing had occurred since that time, and Mr. Childs counsels that something needed to happen before time ran out.
Tom Bost of the Greensboro Daily News discusses the raising of the race issue in North Carolina politics through history, the worst of which had occurred in 1898 when the Wilmington riots occurred and murder became part of the equation. In 1900, when Charles B. Aycock was running for Governor, he had made it plain that he was tired of crying "nigger" and wanted to do something else for the state, becoming the education Governor. He had given Democrats a tongue-lashing in 1904 at the state Democratic convention for trying to find ways to deprive blacks of their educational rights by having only black taxes pay for black education and white taxes, for white education.
Governor Aycock was not allowed by the State Constitution to succeed himself and his successor, Robert B. Glenn, was being nominated on the "anti-nigger" platform. Governor Glenn, however, converted quickly to the decency of Governor Aycock and never sought to urge the segregated tax proposal. The race issue officially died in 1900 but some areas of it had been revived since that time with limited success.
In 1910, General Julian S. Carr—for whom Carr Building on the UNC campus, formerly the international student dormitory, had been named in 1900—,
kind to disfranchised and powerless blacks, having built a hosiery
mill in Durham and employed exclusively blacks in it as workers
In 1950, those raising the race issue in the Democratic Party, the supporters of Willis Smith, were doing so in claimed response to it being raised by the Southern mavericks, Senator Graham, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida.
Mr. Bost questions, however, when North Carolina had ever voted with other Southern states in the first place. Other Southerners had wanted one of the state's Governors to take a states' right stand, starting in 1940 when J. Melville Broughton was elected Governor. He had refused, as had his successor, Governor Gregg Cherry and current Governor Kerr Scott. So that indifference to states' rights and the Dixiecrat incarnation of it of 1948 was nothing new in the state.
Cole Blease, the fiery and reactionary South Carolina Senator and Governor, had raged against the South Carolina Legislature for seeking to enact a bill to make it illegal for white teachers to teach in black schools. The Columbia State and Charleston News and Courier had editorialized heavily against the legislation, and the son of a Confederate chaplain, Rev. Dr. Jones, preached a sermon in Columbia against it, hoping that the legislators would not "legislate the Gospel out of South Carolina".
Mr. Bost concludes that it was to be hoped that the "True Thinkers" in the state would not do so in North Carolina by allowing the race issue to achieve dominance.
Five newspaper editorials are included on the prior Saturday Senate primary between Willis Smith, Senator Graham, and former Senator Reynolds. The Durham Herald argues for a cleaner campaign in the future, that a dirty campaign, as had just occurred, was no credit to democracy in the state.
The Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald believes that after a runoff, the margin would be so close between Mr. Smith and Mr. Graham that the trend-diviners would be unable to discern any clear pattern to distinguish from the Fair Deal advocates and those opposing it.
The Fayetteville Observer predicts that while Mr. Smith had an uphill climb to overcome the 50,000-vote deficit by which he came in second to Mr. Graham, he would likely receive virtually all of the Reynolds vote, which would be enough narrowly to win the runoff.
The Atlanta Journal tentatively concludes that North Carolina had swung to the right, else Senator Graham would have won the primary decisively by a majority, eliminating the necessity of a runoff, but that because of his unique stature in the state, it was impossible to derive a clear pattern by which to assess national opinion on the Fair Deal.
The Louisville Courier Journal finds the heavy, record-breaking vote for a primary in North Carolina being in part motivated by revulsion to the negative campaign run by Mr. Smith. Senator Graham had the strong backing of the Kerr Scott machine in the state, which had helped to overcome the Senator's political naivete. Mr. Smith, by contrast, was backed by powerful financial interests in the state.
It finds that that the Senator's large plurality might reflect endorsement of the Fair Deal, as Mr. Smith had made the President's program and Senator Graham's support of it a major theme of the campaign. But that issue was also subordinated to personal issues.
It concludes that whoever won the runoff, the first primary vote reflected a responsible decision on world obligations as the isolationism of former Senator Reynolds had been thoroughly rejected.
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