The Charlotte News

Friday, June 2, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. had developed atomic warheads for guided missiles, though NATO military planners did not regard them as substitutes for stronger conventional ground and air forces in Western Europe or for stronger air and naval forces in the U.S.

The State Department disclosed that the Western powers were considering a proposal made by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to create a central police force of 25,000 men in West Germany. The matter had been referred to the Big Three high commissioners for decision following discussions with West German leaders. The proposal was prompted by Russia having armed a 50,000-man East German police force.

Secretary of State Acheson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. might have to increase its annual expenditure for foreign arms in years to come, as the Western world was a long way from having an adequate security force. He urged approval of the 1.222 billion dollar arms aid program proposed for the following fiscal year. Mr. Acheson's assessment appeared at odds with the President's statement at a news conference the prior day that the country was closer to peace than at any time in the five years since the end of the war.

In Tokyo, occupation headquarters stated that it had received a report from a Japanese policeman that an arrested Japanese paranoiac had claimed that he planned to assassinate General MacArthur. The report, however, was discounted, according to the General's intelligence officer, as no one was going to kill "Santa Claus". No extra guards were assigned to the General and he continued his normal schedule.

The Kefauver Committee, investigating organized crime and gambling, appeared to be headed toward the biggest crackdown on the underworld since the days of Prohibition in the Twenties. Senator Kefauver said that he would ask the FCC to freeze all Western Union message files, normally destroyed after six months, and indicated that the Commission had already frozen telephone toll slips, also normally destroyed after six months.

The Senate Banking Committee approved extension of rent controls for six months, permitting cities, as with the pending House bill, to opt for an additional six-month extension.

In Kona, Hawaii, Mauna Loa volcano had erupted the previous night and two persons, a retired couple, were missing and sixty families displaced, as the lava poured at a rate of forty miles per hour in a mile-wide and ten-foot deep river twenty miles to the ocean.

In Calhoun, Ga., police were cautiously closing in on a pair of armed men and a scar-faced redheaded woman holed up somewhere in a large wooded area with a machine gun seized from a Tennessee Highway Patrolman along with his patrol car the previous day, when the patrolman had stopped them for a routine check and they pulled a pistol on him. The police searching the area had not yet spotted the three desperadoes after conducting a house-to-house search. After exchange of gunfire with police earlier, bloodstains were found in their abandoned car, acquired from a woman in Chattanooga after they told her that they were with the Patrol and had car trouble.

Keep your eyes peeled. They are not with the Patrol.

In Raleigh, Willis Smith had still not decided whether to ask for a runoff primary after coming in second the previous Saturday to Democratic rival, Senator Frank Graham, who had failed to poll a majority of the 600,000 votes cast in the three-person race with former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. Meanwhile, another principal backer of Senator Reynolds had thrown his support to Senator Graham after several such supporters and county campaign managers had been reported to have done so the previous day. Senator Reynolds had indicated his belief that there should be no runoff.

The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce Census Committee had wound up its chores, according to its chairman, J. E. Dowd, general manager and former editor of The News.

As pictured, an Atlanta cab driver had flung himself on a dog which was foaming at the mouth and preparing to attack some kindergarten children, and then held it until the children could reach safety. A passerby then shot the dog. The dead dog is shown in the gutter being examined by the children and the cab driver—to make sure that it is dead, as dead as the Old South.

On the editorial page, "We'll Have to Pay for Our Growth" urges approval of the 5.75 million dollar bond issue approved by the City Council for a vote during the summer for the purpose of general improvements, and water and sewage expansion and improvements. Such was necessary, it finds, to provide for the growing population of the city.

"The Value of Moral Strength" tells of Senator Brien McMahon having told the editors of U.S. News & World Report that moral strength had to be expanded in the free world, as well as military and economic strength, to convince the peoples of Asia and Europe that the U.S. wanted peace, a point which some doubted, as the Prime Minister of Pakistan had recently informed him. He wanted to take some of the money being spent on armaments and provide it to the U.N. for worldwide aid and assistance to all countries, on condition that they would accept international control of atomic energy and reduction of spending on armaments by two thirds.

It finds that while such was not the perfect answer to the arms race, the Senator appeared to be on the right track.

"The Voting at Craggy Camp" tells of the superintendent of a prison camp in Buncombe County having allowed its 22 prisoners to vote in the primary the previous Saturday while no other prisoners in the state were so allowed. Prison Director J. B. Moore had promised to look into the matter and establish a statewide policy one way or the other, having said that his initial impression was that certain privileges were denied prisoners. There was no law, however, preventing voting by prisoners unless they were convicted felons.

It urges that if an absentee ballot system could be set up practically for the prisoners, there was no reason not to allow them to vote, but if not, then Mr. Moore ought ban prisoner voting statewide.

A piece from the Washington Post, titled "On Toscanini", tells of four thousand persons, including the President and his family, having heard Arturo Toscanini conduct the NBC Orchestra at Constitution Hall in the nation's capital recently, a performance which became magical in its perfection, "as when one sees a velvet darkness creep over the Dolomites, the Grand Canyon suddenly, the Acropolis crowned in violet light, the olive trees swaying like ballet dancers on the shores of the sunny Mediterranean, a storm in full fury at sea, Pavlova in motion, the rapture of a first love, the stilted peace that steals over the soul at prayer in a noble cathedral." It had put the audience "in tune with the infinite."

Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson's wire-pulling having enabled G.A.F. corporation, seized from Germany after the war and operated by the Justice Department, to be represented by his law firm, one of the best in the East, at a substantial fee.

G.A.F. profits had dropped, however, and Mr. Pearson provides a list of the men running it, one of the largest German companies in the world, including as a director singer Morton Downey.

The House Ways & Means Committee, upon motion of Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, had kept a black messenger, Hughlon Greene, on the payroll of the Committee after they learned he was terminally ill. When they were forced to replace him, chairman Robert Doughton of North Carolina appointed a subcommittee to take care of Mr. Greene. The Congressmen had sought no publicity for their largess and Mr. Pearson notes that he discovered it only by accident.

Senator Alexander Wiley had gone from being a supporter of Senator McCarthy and his charges of Communists in the Government to urging caution at jumping to conclusions until all of the evidence on both sides was presented.

Even though West Coast Teamster head Dave Beck and the AFL convention were backing Fred Howser for California Attorney General, most of the AFL votes were expected to go to San Francisco District Attorney Pat Brown—later Governor from 1959-67, and father of Jerry Brown, Governor from 1975-83, and again currently, since 2011. Mr. Brown would be elected Attorney General in 1950, in which capacity he would serve for eight years. (We hope, incidentally, that there is another Brown family member in the waiting next year, as that family has provided two of the only three Democratic Governors of the state since 1943, the third, Gray Davis, having had his second term prematurely ended by recall in 2003 after five years in office, even if Governor Earl Warren was elected by both parties. That's right: California is, historically, as schizoid politically as North Carolina.)

Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who had one of the worst attendance records in Congress, was boycotting the House Labor Committee for approving a watered-down FEPC bill without sanctions, eventually passed by the House.

The President planned to appoint defeated Florida Senator Claude Pepper to a top Government job early the following year.

Robert C. Ruark tells of a six-year old named Leigh Patricia, whose father worked in the State Department and was not a Communist. Because she had been raised thus far in Latin American countries, she had not seen television, did not know Howdy Doody or Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, had not even experienced bubble gum or seen a comic book. She was retarded, as she had been spanked for being bad and was impressed with the notion that children should be seen and not heard at the dining table.

She spoke three languages and had studied ballet with the prima ballerina of Argentina, had dolls, but possessed no other privileges enjoyed by most American children.

He thus was concerned as to how, having come to the U.S. for the first time, she would fit in with the children who were brash, threw cereal at their mothers and bit the ankles of guests.

Soon, she would be exposed to baseball and Dizzy Dean, learning thereby English the easy way, such that she would understand that the player slud into second after he had swang and missed a couple of times before that. She would learn of Milton Berle and Duz detergent, would assume that cigarettes ought be in her diet if they were as salubrious as the ads proclaimed them.

She would soon come to realize that nothing she did was wrong and that any manner of behavior freed her from her inhibitions, enabling her to avoid trauma and psychoneurosis later in life.

He fears that her early training, however, might inhibit her from kicking her mother or shooting a playmate without compunction, thus saddling her with complexes which could plague her in years to come.

Marquis Childs tells of Stuart Symington, new chairman of the National Security Resources Board, studying up on reports, proposals, and plans to determine the best approach to urban civil defense in the event of an atomic bomb attack. The Mayor of San Francisco, Elmer Robinson, had criticized him for undue delay in coming up with a master plan, while other urban leaders had urged that the project be abandoned as futile. Complete defense would mean surrender of total control to the Federal Government, leading to a paradox, as realized much earlier by Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the joint Atomic Energy Committee.

The air space above the country was not policed. Planes were requested to file flight plans, but there was no mandate for it. The radar network was still being implemented around North America. But in Russia, by contrast, foreign planes were forbidden in Soviet airspace, with the exception of the plane used by the American Ambassador, which required that a Russian navigator be aboard during the pre-noticed flight over Russian territory through a narrow, defined corridor to West Berlin.

Atomic bombs could be delivered not only by plane but in the hulls of ships parked in American ports, where law prohibited searches of a foreign ship until it had been in port for at least 90 days. Even if that law were made less restrictive, the search of all foreign ships would be impracticable, if not impossible.

Mr. Symington was grappling with these various issues. Such practical minutiae as variations across cities and states in the size of fire hoses and their couplings were also matters to be addressed.

A letter writer comments on the May 29 editorial, "Reflections on the Election", finding it timely and aptly stating the hope that the candidates would control their supporters in the runoff primary. He disapproves, however, of the word "Liberalism" to describe the New and Fair Dealers, people, he finds, who liked to waste public funds.

He considers salient the revelations of the Hiss case regarding the state of the State Department.

He wants the Senate candidates in the runoff primary campaign to state their words unequivocally, not in "weasel words".

A letter from the director of the Audio-Visual Education Department of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Schools thanks radio station WAYS for its contributions of transcriptions of literature to the Department during the school year.

A letter writer thanks the newspaper for printing his previous letter supporting Senator Graham, despite the newspaper's position supporting Willis Smith, a viewpoint, he says, which, though biased, was more open than that of most newspapers.

The editors note that the "People's Platform" was intended for the readers, not the editors, and they encourage all form of comment—obviously.

A letter from Edgar T. Williams, candidate in the local district for Congress, thanks his supporters for their effort though unsuccessful.

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