The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 1, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President sought from Congress 1.222 billion dollars to extend the arms program a second year for rearming the free nations against Russian aggression. Most of the money, a billion dollars, would go to the NATO nations. Another 120 million would go to Turkey and Greece, and the remaining 102 million would go to Iran, the Philippines and Korea. The amount was somewhat less than the 1.3 billion which Congress approved the previous year for rearming twelve nations.
In Tokyo, the Japanese Communist Party ordered a general strike for Saturday in retaliation for the rushed trial by the occupation forces of the eight defendants charged with attacking four American enlisted men and a captain during the Tuesday Communist demonstrations against continued occupation. The design of the strike was to influence Sunday's elections for the upper house of Parliament. Communists controlled about ten percent of the organized work force. About 20,000 students from fifty universities were expected to join the striking workers. General MacArthur, in a May 2 speech, had suggested the possibility of outlawing the Japanese Communist Party.
In Seoul, South Korea, major parties were rejected in favor of independents in the elections held the previous Tuesday, while both supporters and opposition candidates to President Syngman Rhee suffered defeat. Only 31 of 175 incumbents in the race won, as independent candidates took 128 of the 210 seats in the unicameral legislature, picking up 33 seats more than in the election two years earlier.
In Luebeck, Germany, 10,000 Communist youths, marooned for two nights just inside the Soviet zone, began moving toward their West German homes this date after ending their sitdown strike. They had been camping in the East-West border zone, a no-man's land, since participating in the Whitsunday demonstrations in East Berlin.
Former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts said that thirty Senators and more than fifty Representatives had pledged support of the proposed Atlantic Union convention, under a resolution sponsored by Senator Estes Kefauver to study the possibility of forming a Transatlantic federation of the democratic countries. Justice Roberts was president of the Atlantic Union Committee, pushing for the resolution.
The Senate Labor Committee sent investigators to assess charges made by the Textile Workers of America that police and Tennessee National Guardsmen had engaged in "bloody attacks" on striking textile workers at the American Enka Corporation plant in Morristown, on strike for nine weeks.
The prospect that Oscar Ewing was proposed as secretary for a new health, education and security department under a reorganization plan submitted by the President appeared to cause its disfavor among Republicans. The President's proposal for a new welfare department had been defeated the previous year by a vote of 60 to 32 in the Senate on the ground that it would provide too much power to Mr. Ewing.
The President had, according to Senate investigators, offered to make the tax returns of suspected gamblers and racketeers available to the Kefauver committee investigating gambling and organized crime. Senator Kefauver said that the committee had proof, obtained the previous weekend in Miami, that Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles and John O'Rourke of West Palm Beach, Fla., had been doing business together in gambling and bookmaking for a long period of time.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson asked the Senate Armed Services Committee to extend the draft three years and allow the President authority to draft in time of emergency without the prior Congressional approval required in the two-year extension voted by the House. Secretary Johnson argued for the authority on the premise of an atomic attack requiring immediate action by the President to mobilize forces under potential conditions where the capital was destroyed leaving the Congress not in a position to operate readily.
In Quonset, R.I., nine men were killed and two others injured in the crash of a Navy bomber at the Quonset Naval Air Base after one engine had caught fire necessitating the attempted return of the aircraft 23 minutes after leaving the base.
In Raleigh, Senator Frank Graham's headquarters released statements of several county managers and key supporters of the campaign of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, who had placed third in the Saturday Senate primary, pledging their support for Senator Graham in a runoff, which was still not definitely sought by Willis Smith, who placed second in the race. Former Senator Reynolds had said that he hoped there would be no runoff.
In Newton, N.C., three persons were arrested following a 16-mile chase by police after the arrestees had allegedly robbed a service station. The police said that the three confessed and admitted being involved in other robberies and one shooting in Catawba County. Booty from some of the robberies was found on the three.
Most of the nation had fair weather to begin June, with rain in some places and temperatures over 100 degrees in Arizona and Southern California desert areas.
On the editorial page, "An Old Law Plagues Industry" tells of Modern Industry inveighing against the Walsh-Healey Act of 1936 which had mandated a minimum wage, prior to enactment of the Wage and Hours Law in 1938, in work under Federal Government contract, enabling the Secretary of Labor to set wages for particular industries under such contracts. Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin, for instance, had set the minimum wage at $1.23 per hour for the iron and steel industry and 95 cents for the soap industry, well above the 75 cent normal minimum wage.
"Let's Hope the Rumors Are False" regards the rumors that Secretary of State Acheson might soon resign his post. It hopes that they were false as he had converted the nation's foreign policy from ad hoc crisis management to a long-range global strategy. He had been the guiding force behind the diplomacy which had developed this strategy. It finds his value to foreign policy outweighing by far the self-assessment that he was harming the Administration by being a lightning rod for criticism from such sources as Senator McCarthy, and that the latter should not badger him out of the State Department.
Mr. Acheson would remain in the position through the end of the Truman presidency.
"Alabama Rejoins the Party" tells of the runoff election in Alabama for control of the state Democratic executive committee giving the regular Democrats five of seven contested seats and a clear majority of 39 of the 72 seats on the committee which controlled state party machinery. Dixiecrats had taken control of the committee in 1948, keeping the President off the ballot in Alabama, enabling the state's electors to go to Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Now, Alabama was again under the control of the regular Democrats.
It urges that there was no room for a splinter party in the South and that it could not be successful, that the Dixiecrats could either join the Republicans or rejoin the Democrats and seek to change the party from within. It suggests that the Southern Democrats had thus far resisted the changes sought by the Truman Administration which were inimical to the South and as long as that remained the case, there was no need for the Dixiecrat movement.
"Four Idaho Indians" tells of four Indians who had allegedly stolen a sheep in Idaho having been convicted and sentenced to fourteen years each in prison, without benefit of counsel. The sheep had been picked up by the defendants, ages 19 to 25, from the highway as a present for a newborn baby. None of the four had a prior criminal record. They were not aware of how serious the charge was or how much time they could draw, and took the advice of the prosecutor to waive counsel and plead guilty as the judge would be lenient. They then received the maximum sentences.
The Association on American Indian Affairs had filed a brief with the State Supreme Court arguing that the defendants were deprived of their fundamental right to effective assistance of counsel and were entitled therefore to have their entries of pleas withdrawn.
The piece supports the argument and finds the case important for standing for the rights of all Americans, in the process of upholding the rights of these four defendants.
The case would be reversed by the Idaho Supreme Court at the end of the month.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "North Carolina's Primary", examines the Senate primary race in terms of North Carolina being "one of the most progressive Southern states", facing the conservatism of Willis Smith versus the liberalism of Senator Graham, former president of UNC for 19 years, an institution "which for two decades has been leading the South in regional self-examination".
It finds Senator Graham to have been both an outstanding educator and adviser to the Roosevelt Administration and the Truman Administration, before being appointed by Governor Kerr Scott the previous year to the Senate. During the campaign, he had dissented from the Brannan agricultural plan and the compulsory aspects of the Fair Employment Practices Commission bill, but generally supported the Fair Deal, opposed by the conservatives.
North Carolina had been typically the most progressive state in the South on race relations, and Governor Scott had pledged to see that "'the minority race has a fair opportunity'". But the membership of Senator Graham, in 1947, on the President's Civil Rights Commission and the FEPC proposal, supported by that Commission along with desegregation generally of society, had led his opponents to attack him on the issue of race, using language reminiscent of the old days when race prejudice in the South was running high. Yet, Senator Graham's plurality victory had turned back this tide of racism. A defeat would have given encouragement to the forces of reaction throughout the South rather than support of a Democratic Party in the region which was "willing to align itself with social forces facing race relations squarely rather than obliquely."
Bill Sharpe of The News
provides his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from
newspapers from around the state. Mrs. Theo Davis of the Zebulon
Record tells of her grandmother routinely quoting the superstition
that if one threw outdoors the combings from one's hair and it was
used by birds
Must be the result of vicariously
sensed
But would the Midshipman pictured on
the front page suffer a headache
W. G. Hazel of the Pee Dee
Advocate finds that fishing was as addictive as gambling, and
that fishing
John Wesley Clay of the Winston-Salem Journal tells of a job applicant reeking of alcohol and so imparting to the man that there were two occasions when he should abstain from drink, when seeking a job and when holding a job. The man then asked dejectedly, as he walked out, when he should drink.
That wasn't a very nice way to treat the fellow. You should have sent him out to Bowman Gray Stadium to cover the Saturday night auto races where he would have been at home with the other fans and you would have had yourself a permanent reporter for the races for the next fifty years, so that you would not have to break in your cub sports reporters that way.
The Southern Pines Pilot says that one reason General Marshall liked to live in Southern Pines was that no one paid him any mind as he walked down the street, that the residents all believed they were just as important as he was.
The Goldsboro News-Argus reports that two men were riding on a train in their compartment, conversing about the Vice-President's recent marriage and wondering aloud how he had landed such a lovely young widow. Eventually, a knock on the door came, with a request to speak more softly. The next morning, one of the men stuck his head out of the compartment and from the next compartment a man stuck his head out, complaining of the train being late and delaying him for an important meeting. It was Vice-President Barkley.
And so forth, and so, so on, so forth and so.
Drew Pearson again discusses the Amerasia case and why it was not prosecuted in 1945-46 when six defendants had been arrested, but only two convicted finally pursuant to plea bargains, and then fined. The FBI and OSS had conducted illegal searches of the offices of the magazine and of the home of at least one of the co-defendants. Realizing that the case was imploding when one of the attorneys for the defendants found out about the illegal searches and filed a motion to suppress the evidence, the prosecutor rushed to finalize a plea bargain to which another defendant had tentatively agreed, before his attorney discovered the illegal search issue. Although the attorney for that defendant did become aware of the motion to suppress, he reluctantly went forward with the agreement and his client pleaded guilty and was fined $2,500. Another defendant received the same treatment.
The prosecutor had recently told the Tydings committee investigating the matter that the President had told him at the time not to let anything stop him from "sending those bastards to jail", disappointing Republicans on the committee who had hoped that they could uncover high-level pressure not to prosecute the case vigorously.
Despite the information regarding the illegal search having been widely known for four years, the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain had been forcing upon their editors several editorials each week and at least one feature story per day suggesting that the Amerasia case was blocked by influence exerted from within the Government, supporting the thesis of Senator Joseph McCarthy that Communist sympathies within the Government had enabled the light treatment. The Scripps-Howard newspapers ignored the illegal search issue. Yet, in the early days of the Roosevelt Administration, a committee chaired by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, since 1937 on the Supreme Court, had subpoenaed certain files from the Hearst newspapers and went to their offices and seized them, causing a hue and cry among the Scripps-Howard newspapers for violations of rights to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Yet, now, they tacitly approved the FBI and OSS warrantless, illegal seizure of Amerasia documents.
Stewart Alsop tells of not much attention having been paid to an announcement from Moscow that the postwar five-year plan for dispersion of industry, intended to reduce vulnerability to atomic attack, was four-fifths complete.
The question then arose as to what the U.S. was doing to reduce its vulnerability, of particular interest to the East and West coast cities considered within range of Soviet attack. And the answer was nothing. The Atomic Energy Commission had received a plan about a year earlier but not much had taken place with respect to it, and the National Security Resources Board, under the new chairmanship of Stuart Symington, had promised plans in the future. The only real answer was to engage in dispersion of industries. While deep bomb shelters could help withstand the blast and radiation, they would not reduce vulnerability of American industry and hence war potential.
The cost of dispersion, however, would be huge, requiring every city to be transformed into a "strip city", considered at the time silly. An incentive program, under which the already existing trend of decentralization would be accelerated over a period of years, had been proposed. But the cost was considered equal to the annual budget for the military, about 14 billion dollars, with a central organization to match. A telling question had also been posed as to whether joint Atomic Energy Committee chairman Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut would encourage the aircraft industry to leave Hartford.
The Congressional Quarterly presents a study of the pros and cons of extension of rent control, set to expire June 30, with the House considering presently the extension under a bill allowing for an additional six months with local jurisdictions then able to opt for an additional six-month extension on their own. As that is a specific piece of legislation which has been covered quite a lot and had only transitory impact on the economy of the wartime and postwar periods, we shall let you peruse the arguments on your own if you have a special interest in the topic.
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