The Charlotte News
Monday, June 19, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in New York, gambling kingpin Frank Erickson pleaded guilty to 60 counts of conspiracy and bookmaking and would be sentenced on June 26. The maximum penalty on each count was a year in jail and a fine. The prosecutor said that he would seek the "stiffest" sentence for Mr. Erickson, implying that the plea was not entered pursuant to a plea bargain. Observers believed that the pleas were entered to protect the identities of big-money gamblers and to try to obtain a lesser sentence—although if the latter were paramount, a plea bargain seemingly presenting itself as the only sensible route to take, naming names in the process, bearing in such a feat, effete as it would be in temerity, that the route would probably have insured the creep a fitting in inches of heel for a new set of shoes, concretely speaking, floating then, as it were, at some depth or another, with the fishes, if not the finches and lips' plea-wishes sealed, somewhere in the Hudson.
Two Senate committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, formally approved an appropriation of 1.222 billion dollars for the foreign arms aid program. They recommended limiting of the President's power to give arms aid to nations outside NATO.
Vice-President Alben Barkley said that he doubted the propriety of having the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate improprieties of the Justice Department in delaying and handling the Amerasia case prosecutions in 1945-46, as it was not a grand jury and could not initiate impeachment proceedings. Senator Joseph McCarthy and other Republicans had expressed dissatisfaction with the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigation of the matter, claiming it to be a whitewash.
In West Germany, voters on Sunday in the North Rhine-Westphalia state in the Ruhr rejected Communism, party candidates receiving only 5.5 percent of the vote for fifth place, and voted for creation of a state constitution which called for socialization of the Ruhr's basic industries. The region had once been West Germany's Communist stronghold when, three years earlier, the Communists received fourteen percent of the vote, becoming the third largest party in the state. Nationalists, some of whom voiced ideas similar to the Nazis, had received even less support than the Communists, at 1.9 percent. The conservative Christian Democrats, together with the right-wing Free Democratic Party, took 119 of the 215 seats, and the socialist Social Democrats, 68 seats, those parties receiving most of the votes. The Communists were apportioned 12 seats on the basis of their total vote, though failing to get a candidate elected directly.
The Western allies were reported by a German magazine, with pictures, to be mining key roads and bridges throughout West Germany and other parts of Europe to stall any possible Soviet attack. American headquarters had no comment, but a French source confirmed the report. Communist newspapers found the efforts to be "part of the American aggressor's plan to march against the Soviet Union."
The President renominated the four existing members of the Atomic Energy Commission, each with staggered terms between one and four years. Sumner Pike would continue as acting chairman, pending appointment of a permanent chairman to replace David Lilienthal who had resigned at the beginning of the year.
Congressional sources said that the President intended to ask Congress for 300 million dollars to speed up development of the hydrogen bomb. There was no indication whether the work had turned to actual construction of the fusion bomb.
The House Ways & Means Committee abandoned its previously approved proposal to cut the excise tax on economy brands of cigarettes, such as Wings, Marvel and Avalon, to encourage competition with the major brands. It would next consider whether to raise the corporate income tax to produce a half billion dollars more in revenue, to make up for about half of the 1.1 billion dollars worth of approved excise tax cuts.
You need those Wings cigarettes so that you will be closer to heaven already when you are finally called home with lung cancer at age 50 and St. Peter inquires, "Are you stupid or what?"
Around Knoxville, Tenn., an earthquake was felt the previous night.
In Cumberland, Md., a bus accident killed one teenager, seriously injured two others and less seriously injured 15 other passengers.
Ralph Gibson of The News tells of an Army master sergeant, with twenty years of service, working now at the Charlotte Quartermaster Depot, having, a year earlier, been a full colonel in the Quartermaster Corps, though he would still retire at that rank. He would have been involuntarily retired from the Army otherwise at the end of 1949, and, he said, he loved the Army and did not wish to return to civilian life.
In Charlotte, three knives, a brick, a drinking glass, a cue stick, a chair, an ice pick, a bottle, a piece of wood, and a "sharp instrument" were utilized as deadly weapons in Charlotte during the weekend in various alleged criminal acts listed.
In Hollywood, actress and singer
Judy Garland was suspended by MGM Studios for failure to report on
Saturday to the set of a picture in which she was appearing with Fred
Astaire
In London, actress Dorothy Lamour
On the editorial page, "The Post Office and Politics" tells of the bill, which would take the Post Office Department out of politics and make the 20,000 postmasters subject to the Civil Service system and not patronage appointment, having been bottled up for a year in committee. The Hoover Commission had recommended the change, backed by the Administration. But the Senate Post Office & Civil Service Committee had thus far blocked it. It recommends sending letters to the state's two Senators as well as the chairman, Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina, and other members of the Committee, whom it lists, and inquiring why the bill had been delayed.
"Another Sensible Veto" finds the President's veto of the basing point pricing bill to have been appropriate, as had been the earlier veto of the natural gas deregulation bill, as the bill would have been to the benefit of big business at the expense of small business and the consumer.
"New Mental Procedure" finds commendable a new procedure at the Mental Hygiene Clinic, in association with the Clerk of Court, to determine the mental state of persons presented for admission to the State Hospital. They required that the person first be examined by a competent psychiatrist before commitment. Such pre-evaluation, it suggests, would relieve the State hospitals of a great number of cases committed for "senility" or because families felt they could not handle the person.
That assumes, of course, that the "competent" psychiatrist is not some incompetent Bozo, doesn't it?
"Beat-Pounding" finds the country calling for putting police officers back on the beat to prevent crime before it happened. Collier's had found that Washington had a fine detective squad and modern equipment for crime detection after the crime occurred. But there was precious little effort devoted to prevention of crime. It finds the same true of Charlotte and hopes that more officers would be placed on the beat, as at Howell's Arcade following a series of thefts plaguing the merchants during the prior week.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "18 Ways to Spell Appalaction", tells of a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania having found his students spelling Appalachian eighteen wrong ways, including Appliachian and Apalatian.
But, the piece suggests, such aberrant orthography was not necessarily at variance with applied scholarship. Even Shakespeare gave variants of his own name, including Shakspir, and never established an official version. Havelock Ellis told of a learned man who wrote a biography of a man he admired greatly and spelled his name differently every time it arose in the volume, none of them coincident with the official version.
"It was Havilock Elles' conclusion that over-preoccupation with spelling was the mark of a small mind." So it wonders whether the Lehigh professor might not be making a mountain of a molehill, "to be specific, an Appalachant mountain."
As a service to foreign visitors to our country, it is properly spelled and pronounced "Appalatchain".
Drew Pearson reminds that during the war 60 percent of war contracts had been awarded to six corporations because of the brass hats stressing the urgency for the orders. But the Army recently, with plenty of time, had shown a preference for Westinghouse when ordering water coolers, despite Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson having expressed, when he assumed the position, an intention to help small business. Westinghouse's bid had not originally met specifications among the sixteen competing bids, but the Army allowed it to remedy the fault after the close of bidding. Another company competing for the bid protested to Secretary Johnson but got nowhere. Eventually, after the intervention of Congressman Emanuel Celler, Comptroller General Lindsay Warren declared the Westinghouse bid illegal.
Cyrus Ching, the Government mediator, had recently told close friends about getting the parties to agree in the recent coal strike, at one point going up the back stairs to meet John L. Lewis, trying to avoid reporters. His wife, who was listening, interjected that it was like trying to hide a bass fiddle. Mr. Ching weighed 250 pounds.
Former OSS agent Archbold Van Beuran had recently apologized to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the McCarthy charges for his part in cooking up a telegram suggested by Senator McCarthy, a Scripps-Howard Newspaper reporter, and the Republican counsel for the subcommittee. The telegram criticized the committee for a whitewash in the the Amerasia case, but the words actually were those of Senator McCarthy and the other two, rather than belonging to Mr. Van Beuran. Senator McCarthy nevertheless had read the telegram to the subcommittee as if it were from Mr. Van Beuran, accusing the subcommittee of prejudice and whitewashing.
Marquis Childs tells of a recent off-the-record statement by Governor Thomas Dewey, critical of the Republican Party for its unwillingness to adopt a set of moderate principles out of fear that it would "hamper opportunity for unlimited opportunism." Senator Irving Ives of New York had recently sought to warn the New York Young Republicans of the same idea, stating that two of every three new voters were registering as Democrats and that unless the trend changed, the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs and Federalists and become extinct. But then the Young Republicans responded by seeking to adopt a strong resolution in favor of supporting Senator McCarthy. It was modified somewhat by calling for a nonpartisan commission to investigate suspected security leaks in the State Department, but eventually passed.
He finds that Governor Dewey would continue to be a force within the party because of his political astuteness and his awareness that it was the middle of the Twentieth Century and not the pre-McKinley era.
Stewart Alsop predicts that unless the Republicans could come close to control of the Senate in the mid-term elections, requiring a net gain of seven seats for a majority, they could not hope to regain Senate control in the 1952 elections, regardless of who would win the presidency. They would need in 1950 a minimum of five seats gained to accomplish that goal.
There were twenty-three Democrats up for re-election, ten of whom were considered vulnerable, and only thirteen Republicans. But in 1952, twenty or twenty-one Republican seats would be on the line with only eleven or twelve Democratic seats in the offing, and only two of the latter being vulnerable. It would thus be miraculous for the Republicans to pick up more than a couple of seats in 1952, meaning that a minimum of five had to be gained in 1950 for control to be wrested from the Democrats two years hence.
The Republicans would need something close to a landslide in 1950 to achieve the desired result. They hoped to pick up seats in the Duff-Myers race in Pennsylvania, the Nixon-Douglas race in California, and in the contest for the seat of William Benton in Connecticut. They thought that their chances were fair to good in the contests for seats in New York, Idaho, Utah, Washington, and Illinois, with an outside chance for the seat of Brien McMahon in Connecticut and that of Pat McCarran in Nevada. Other seats were conceded by the GOP realists.
If they were to lose only a couple of the Republican contested seats, they would have to get seven of the ten vulnerable Democratic seats, a considerable challenge. Thus, even if General Eisenhower were to sweep the country in 1952, the fruits of victory would be denied the Republicans by the presence of a hostile Senate. And the Republicans had as much chance of doing so, Mr. Alsop concludes, as a bridge player who had bid a grand slam and needed three finesses to make it.
Despite picking up a net gain of four rather than his stated minimum five seats in 1950, the finesses would occur enough to provide spare control of the Senate to the GOP in 1953 by one seat plus the liberal independent seat of Wayne Morse, formerly a Republican, to become a Democrat in 1955, resulting in an effective tie on some issues, with Vice-President Nixon being the tiebreaker, that despite the unexpected loss of the Massachusetts seat of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., to Congressman John F. Kennedy. The 83rd Congress would be further complicated in the spare GOP majority by the death of Senator Taft in mid-1953 and the appointment of a Democrat the following November for a year in his stead, shifting temporarily the spare numerical majority, though not the leadership, to the Democrats for eight months until the death in June, 1954 of Lester Hunt of Wyoming and his replacement by a Republican appointee through the following November, when the Democrats again would take control of the Senate—not unlike the shifting sands of fate in the initially tied Senate of 2001-2002.
Of course, it must be borne in mind that throughout this period of time, that of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and beyond into the late Sixties, Democratic Party fealty to the national leadership, insofar as the South was concerned, meant little on some issues, especially civil rights and farm issues, and often coalitions would be formed between Southern Democrats and Republicans effectively to frustrate some progressive legislation and enact other legislation against the will of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, sometimes resulting in vetoes, sometimes not.
We note that people today, however, who attempt, as some do, to make the completely mendacious and specious argument that the "Democrats" were responsible for segregation and its maintenance through time are preposterously either ignorant or deceitful, or both. One must be able to follow the bouncing ball better and the changing makeup through time of the Republican Party, most easily tracked in microcosm in the "Southern Srategy" of Richard Nixon employed in the presidential campaign of 1968, and the consequent electoral shifts in the South. It was, in terms of a more apt label, the tricky Dixiecrats, in coalition with sympathetic Republicans, a coalition forming an animal entirely different from that based on the principles of either major party—call it a Phantassdix—, who effectively maintained segregation through time.
A letter writer tells of being ardently for Senator Graham, but appreciating the editorials of the newspaper, even if disagreeing with its endorsement of Willis Smith.
A letter writer from Hamlet finds Senator Graham to be a Socialist backing the Truman Administration and supports Mr. Smith, thinks Senator Graham ought move to England.
A letter writer from Pinehurst recommends The Road Ahead by John T. Flynn, as exposing Senator Graham at page 79 as sympathetic with Communist organizations. He thinks Governor Kerr Scott talking about Senator Graham being sympathetic to the farmer had not obtained as many votes as it might have, because the Governor, a farmer, had turned into a professional politician.
A letter writer from Selma, N.C., finds it unfair for the Raleigh News & Observer to back one Democratic candidate, Senator Graham, over another Democrat in the primary.
It must be equally wrong then for The News to back Mr. Smith, wouldn't ye say?
A letter writer responds to two letters responding to his previous letter regarding damage done by "boxcars of the highway" to roads, refers the previous writers to "The Rape of the Roads" in Reader's Digest.
Is that fit reading for children? Is
the subtitle of the article "Macadam and Eve"?
Framed Edition
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