The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 15, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Federal Grand Jury in New York, following a two-week investigation, had cleared Government officials and agencies in the Amerasia case regarding 1,700 documents stolen from the State Department which had wound up in 1945 in the hands of the magazine. It found no one in the Justice Department to have been remiss or acted improperly in delaying the case. The Grand Jury also asked the Justice Department to issue a detailed report on the matter and counseled against employment in the future by the Government of poor security risks, urging also disbarment of attorneys who refused to answer questions propounded by judicial bodies, grand juries, or governmental inquiry boards.
How about starting with the present Attorney General in 2017? Or maybe Republicans get special privileges to assert from the ether whatever they can conjure to avoid questioning and thereby avoid potential perjury.
Six arrests in the Amerasia case in 1945 had resulted in five indictments, three of which cases were dropped and two defendants allowed to plead guilty pursuant to plea bargains with fines because of illegal searches by the OSS and FBI in the case.
It was the same Grand Jury, sitting for eighteen months, which had recently returned an indictment against former Commerce Department economist William Remington for perjury for denying the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley that he had been a Communist, and had previously indicted Judy Coplon for taking Justice Department files with intent of transmitting them to Valentin Gubitchev for transmission to the Soviets, the latter cases resulting in convictions.
A second Air France plane crashed the previous night off Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, causing the deaths of at least 39 of the 51 aboard. Twelve were rescued. It was close to the spot where another Air France plane had crashed two days earlier on attempted landing, taking 46 lives. Both planes, C-54 Skymasters, had been en route to Indo-China from Paris. Officials had not discarded as a cause possible sabotage by Indo-Chinese Communists fighting the French. The crashes occurred almost identically, during attempted landings in stormy weather at an airport without radar approach facilities and only two radio beacons for guidance, both planes falling into water short of the runway.
Future CIA director John McCone was sworn in as Undersecretary of the Air Force.
The President observed Marine training maneuvers at Quantico, Va.
House Democrats of the Ways & Means Committee, meeting with Speaker Sam Rayburn, were said to be largely in agreement on 1.1 billion dollars in excise tax cuts, to be offset in part by an increase in the income tax rate on corporations from 38 percent to 41 percent, generating half a billion dollars in new revenue. The President had vowed to veto any tax cuts not offset by new revenue or spending cuts.
A Presidential fact-finding board recommended a 40-hour work week and an 18-cent hourly pay increase for about 75,000 railroad yard workers, but denial of wage increases for about 125,000 trainmen and conductors.
The CIO executive board voted to expel the American Communications Association for following the Communist Party line instead of CIO policy. The union claimed that the CIO was following anti-Semitic and anti-black policy in undertaking the action. The board countered that the union had alternately taken interventionist and isolationist positions through the years in consistent variation with the positions of the Communist Party.
U. S. military installations in the Philippines, valued at 8.5 million dollars, were awarded to the Philippine Government by the U.S., with title to vest in the latter in March, 1953.
Representative John D. Lodge, brother of Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Connecticut.
The Justice Department ruled that the Farmers Cooperative Exchange of North Carolina had violated no law in urging support of Senator Frank Graham in a widely distributed letter. A complaint had been initiated by ten Mecklenburg County residents, claiming the mailing violated the Corrupt Practices Act, preventing expenditure of funds by a corporation on behalf of a candidate in a primary race. The Department said that the Supreme Court had ruled that it was not a violation for a corporation in the regular conduct of its business to declare itself in favor of a candidate.
Judge Hubert Olive of Lexington, N.C., in a radio address the previous evening on behalf of Senator Frank Graham, accused opposing Democratic candidate Willis Smith of adopting the Republican attack on the Truman Administration by calling it the "welfare state", a slogan of derision against Democrats. J. C. B. Ehringhaus, Jr., son of the late Governor, said in response, via radio on behalf of Mr. Smith, that such rhetoric was a smear and those engaging in it were "surly malcontents" who sought to reconstruct in a day "those basic precepts which 150 years of sober and deliberate effort has builded."
A vast haze, which scientists said was natural, hung over the mid-Pacific, covering about two million square miles, believed possibly to be the result of the recent eruption of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, still spewing lava.
It's the haze which covers the people from Mars coming down. They then move to Texas in stealth.
On the editorial page, "Fact or Fantasy?" counsels that it would be wise to assume that if war were to come, Russia could bring it to America, and that, in the meantime, America was inadequately prepared for such an attack, in terms of defense and decentralization of industry.
There was no such thing, according to the commanding officer of the Air Force University, General George Kenny, as airtight radar. The National Security Resources Board also was alarmed at lack of defense preparedness, urging, according to U.S. News & World Report, expenditure of a hundred billion dollars for civil defense preparations, with pump-priming capability, dwarfing the New Deal, in reserve in the event of a downturn in business.
The program would entail underground parking lots usable in war as bomb shelters, suburban hospitals, express highways for rapid evacuation, perimeter fire departments, public buildings capable of being used as emergency control centers, expanded waterworks and firefighting.
It urges that the program be put into place. Joseph Alsop had suggested in recent columns that the U.S. had three to four years before Russia would reach its climax in war preparedness, but, the piece cautions, the country should not count on that amount of time.
Look around you carefully today and you will see nothing but civil defense preparedness from the Cold War days.
"The Church and the Chest" tells of the Community Chest being an adjunct of the church in doing work for the needy of the community. The Charlotte Ministerial Association had voted its support of the Chest drive and the piece believes the action would further the aims of the Chest.
"The Hard-Working Policeman" tells of Tom Fesperman of The News having reported on the lot of the policeman, having to appear in court every time he made an arrest, doing so usually in his off-hours without pay. It pointed up a recommendation made by the Institute of Government study of consolidation of City and County services, suggesting merger of the Recorder's Courts such that officers would have a better opportunity of doing their courtroom work while on duty, so that they could be paid for the time.
"It Didn't Work" tells of the prewar French psychology of undue reliance on the Maginot Line having been transferred to the U.S., the latest manifestation of which being the "baby atomic bomb", capable of being delivered by small jets. While such might prove formidable in warfare, reliance on it, as with the full size atomic bombs, it warns, was as much of a mistake as the French reliance on the Maginot Line, which had proved fatal against the German onslaught in 1940.
Drew Pearson tells of the Navy being ready to remove the guided missile from the top secret category as it would likely make the big bomber as obsolete as a dodo. He provides its non-secret aspects: that it was guided to the target by radar echoes; that the Joint Chiefs were so impressed by it that they had persuaded Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to earmark millions for mass experimentation and production of it; that the Navy's new construction program before Congress proposed that two cruisers and several small vessels and submarines be converted to guided missiles; that the Navy had developed anti-submarine and anti-ship missiles capable of underwater travel; and that it would make short shrift of invading airplanes by being able to home in on them. The Navy had developed about 200 Lark missiles, originally developed as a counter-measure to the Japanese kamikaze pilots, which could operate above the atmosphere. The Air Force was cooperating with the Navy in the development program. He notes that a ram jet was also in development by the Navy.
He tells of lobbyist Frank McCarthy being responsible for the split in the Democrats over the basing point price bill, with one group, concerned regarding its monopolistic implications, urging the President to veto it, while the other, led by Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming, supported it.
Soviet propaganda was blaming an
outbreak of Colorado beetles in East Germany and Poland on the
U.S.—which actually had come via Liverpool by way
The previous week, a hundred guerrilla operators had been seized in Poland for derailing Russian troop trains.
Russia was reported to have behind the iron curtain a slave labor force of twenty million, with eleven concentration camps in East Germany alone.
The previous month, Generalissimo
Francisco Franco of Spain had asked the Export-Import Bank for a loan
of 700 million dollars to build a fertilizer plant
Marquis Childs discusses the investigation of two committees by the House Congressional committee investigating lobbies, finding, as was sooner or later to be anticipated, rightist groups having fallen under scrutiny as well as those of the left. The Committee for Constitutional Government was a rightist organization which had refused to supply the House committee with its sources of financing. The House committee was eager to find out who was funding it, as it had disseminated 670,000 copies of the anti-New Deal, anti-Fair Deal The Road Ahead by John T. Flynn. The AMA had distributed 1.5 million copies of the book.
The CCG had cited in defense free speech rights and rights to privacy.
Likewise had the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, in refusing to supply its records to the House committee. The JAFRC was on the Attorney General's subversive list and was linked to Communism. Eleven of its members had been convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to three to six months in jail each, those sentences to begin shortly as they had exhausted their appeals after four years since the dispute initially arose.
Mr. Childs concludes that he hated to see anyone go to jail for their ideas but that once the effort had begun in that direction against one part of the political spectrum, it was bound, sooner or later, to involve the other side; and the more people who would go to jail would send a chilling message through the society that it was no longer worth the risk to speak or think at all.
Robert C. Ruark tells of his gout having returned, causing him to begin researching in consequence the malady, finding that its causes resembled those of ulcers, an insatiable desire to be superior persons being at the heart of it. He views people without the problem to be jealous of those with it, especially when he was only 34 and temporarily broke.
None of the computers at Harvard had ever had the gout or ulcers. So he was hoping that his pain was the result of both, as he would suddenly be a man of double distinction.
We recommend, for starters, not being so intent on perfecting your fried chicken such that you have to consume gin while doing so to ease the pain of the grease burns during the course of an hour over a hot stove.
A letter writer from Pittsboro says that Senator Frank Graham's plan ultimately to end segregation, as urged by the President's Civil Rights Commission report of 1947, had already begun, with the desegregation of schools on the horizon, as forecast by the recent Sweatt v. Painter decision of the Supreme Court ordering integration of the University of Texas Law School for qualified applicants for want of a substantially equal black law school in the state. He wonders why the Court had not been candid and simply held the separate-but-equal doctrine unconstitutional, overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. He thinks it preferred perhaps chaos and confusion to the quick death of that doctrine.
He does not like the situation and attributes it to Senator Graham and his teachings as much as to anyone. He ventures that God made the different races and that the "one-blood" philosophy of Senator Graham did not lend itself to "Nordics and Negroes", if by that he meant amalgamation of the races. He says that he respects the children of the land, "even the Negro children", and advises the elders that it was dangerous to vote as a bloc, as blacks would need the help of the opposition party at some point.
He says that he intended to vote for Willis Smith in the runoff of June 24.
Why? He will be dead in three years.
A letter writer thinks a deal was made between Governor Kerr Scott and the President the previous year when Governor Scott appointed Frank Graham to the Senate to replace deceased J. Melville Broughton, that the President had agreed to appoint Capus Waynick, the Governor's campaign manager, to be Ambassador to Nicaragua. He counsels putting the brakes on the President and his Fair Deal program. He urges study of the two candidates and voting for Willis Smith.
Why? Governor Scott will be in that Senate seat by the beginning of 1955.
It will be 23 years yet before you get your wish for a long-term reactionary from the state in the Senate. But don't despair, for he was in the news during the previous week demonstrating his nose for news in house paint and carpentry.
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