The Charlotte News

Saturday, April 10, 1954

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Attorney General Herbert Brownell had said the previous night in a nationally televised speech that the FBI, the Justice Department and the courts were ever vigilant but that the nation needed more stringent laws to dig Communists from hiding. He left the impression that those three governmental organs would be sufficient to get the job done, apart from Congressional committee investigations into domestic Communism. He said that new laws were needed to destroy the Communist Party in the country by legal and orderly processes, enabling elimination of Communist control of industrial organizations or labor unions in vital sections of the economy, and enabling imposition of the death penalty for peacetime as well as wartime espionage. His speech drew praise from both Republicans and Democrats.

At the request of Senator McCarthy, the Investigations subcommittee, set to begin hearings on his dispute with the Army, had agreed to postpone the start of the hearings by one day, to April 22, to allow time for him to make a scheduled Texas Independence Day speech in Houston on April 21. Senator Karl Mundt, acting chairman of the subcommittee during the special investigation, said that closed-door meetings would take place instead on April 21, regarding preliminary matters to the public hearings. Senator McCarthy, in Tucson the previous day, said that he intended to discuss publicly his charge made on the CBS program "See It Now" the prior Tuesday, allotted the full half-hour to respond to Edward R. Murrow's program of March 9 devoted to the rise to power of Senator McCarthy, that there had been an 18-month delay in development of the hydrogen bomb because of Communists or Communist sympathizers within the Government. The President had already responded at his press conference the following day that he knew of no such delay in the development of the bomb.

In Chicago, Senator Hubert Humphrey said this date, before the annual convention of the Americans for Democratic Action, that the ADA had fought Communism in America "long before" Senator McCarthy and "before it became fashionable for a lot of politicians to do so." He said that long before the Senator had made his February, 1950 speech in Wheeling, W. Va., claiming that 204 Communists were present in the State Department, the ADA had inflicted great and decisive defeats on the Communists within the country. He cited the ADA's rallying of millions of Americans to support the programs of resistance to Communist aggression, such as the Truman Doctrine of military aid to Greece and Turkey, and the Marshall Plan, to provide aid to rebuild postwar Europe, programs which the Senator said might one day be remembered as the turning points in the annals of the century. He said that when the ADA had been founded in 1946, the members had to fight both isolationists and Communists. Adlai Stevenson, in a Chicago hospital for treatment of a kidney ailment, sent a message to the convention saying that he hoped attacks on the ADA did not mean that there were people who did not believe that an organization could be for greater freedom, justice and opportunity for all and against Communism at the same time. Senator McCarthy and some other Republicans had attacked the ADA, which generally had supported both the Truman and Roosevelt Administrations. Senator Herbert Lehman of New York said in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the honorary chairman of the organization, that Senator McCarthy was "relatively unimportant" and that his power was waning.

At the U.N., delegates from the West solidly supported a proposal for private talks among the Big Four nations, Canada and Russia regarding world disarmament, with Russia asking for time to study the plan. A British delegate had made the proposal before the U.N. Disarmament Commission the previous day, to take the discussions out of the public eye. U.S. chief delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., seconded the proposal, as did the lead delegate for France. Ambassador Lodge said that the country would never consent to "any shadow agreement which would gamble with our security", nor would it expect the Soviet Union to do so, that only a "real agreement" was worth anything to either nation. He said that the subcommittee might consider a recent call by India's Prime Minister Nehru for an immediate moratorium on all further hydrogen bomb tests. Most delegates expected the Russians to agree to the secret talks, but some observers wondered whether Russia might be preparing to insist on participation in the talks by Communist China.

Secretary of State Dulles said, following a conference with the President this date, that he was flying to Europe to seek British and French cooperation in forming a united front against the Communist threat to Southeast Asia. He was scheduled to reach London late on Sunday, after departing this date from Washington, and then to fly to Paris on Tuesday, to return to Washington by the end of the following week. He said that the purpose of the U.S. was not to prevent a peaceful settlement at the upcoming April 26 Geneva conference, "but to create the unity of free will needed to assure a peaceful settlement which will in fact preserve the vital interests of us all."

From Hanoi, it was reported by the French high command that troops rallying from the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu had inflicted "heavy losses" on the Vietminh and smashed a network of rebel trenches on the eastern side of the fortress. French infantrymen, spearheaded by tanks and following three hours of artillery bombardment, had attacked the Vietminh, and, at the point of bayonets, driven them from a hill position in the east. They were then driven from a series of winding trenches in bloody hand-to-hand combat. The French high command said that losses of the French troops had been "appreciable". Earlier, the French had announced that the Vietminh had staged a sneak attack on the main airstrip at the fortress the previous night and blown up the northeast section, by placing bamboo poles stuffed with nitroglycerin under the field's steel matting. The damage had been repaired, however, despite a Communist artillery barrage.

In Raleigh, Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York told members of the North Carolina Teachers Association, comprised of black teachers, that the Supreme Court was tied four to four on the issue of abolishing school segregation, with Chief Justice Earl Warren abstaining from the vote—which, had that been the case, as it obviously was not, would have meant that the lower court rulings in each of the five cases before the Court, from school districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and D.C., all subsumed under Brown v. Board of Education, would have stood. He said that he had a feeling that the Chief Justice would, however, cast a vote in the end which would render a 5 to 4 decision in favor of abolishing segregation. He said that the decision would be the most important governmental action since the Civil War and would come as a "complete shock to whites and Negroes having separate schools", that the shock could be absorbed by spreading integration over a three-year period, during the first year of which white and black children of preschool age and the first three grades would attend classes together, then the next four grades in the second year would be integrated, and the remaining grades in the third year. He believed that such a transition would be as hard for the black students as for the white students, and that the whole question of equality was a moral question, making it difficult. He said that when members of different races wanted to meet socially, they would, and that no law would be needed for it. He stated, "The immorality of America has caused the need of laws to bring about what God ordained", equal rights for all races. He said that it was not a Christian nation but rather a nation of church-goers, and that if Christ were present on the scene, "it would be to be crucified again—or lynched."

In Toledo, O., a house painter, who had been a resident of the city for 18 years and whose only known police record had been a traffic summons for having no muffler on his car, had been identified by police as an escapee in 1936 from a Huntsville, Texas, penitentiary where he had been serving a life term as an habitual criminal, having since successfully deceived his family about his past. He had first come to the attention of authorities two weeks earlier while stopping to get water for his car's radiator, when his young son noticed a red toy fire engine on a sidewalk nearby, picked it up, prompting a man to stick his head out of his house and yell that the boy was stealing the fire engine, whereupon the boy dropped it and ran back to the car, at which point his father drove them away, only to have the angry man who believed the boy was stealing the fire engine take down the license number and summon police about what he thought was an attempted theft. Detectives went to the man's home and after questioning both father and son, booked the father on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Police then routinely recorded and circulated his fingerprints, after which they received a telegram from Texas authorities identifying him as the 1936 escapee under a different name, given a life sentence for a series of burglaries.

In New York, a 17-year old, who, for the previous 18 months, had been employed by a Greenwich Village rubber casting firm to cash a weekly payroll check at a neighboring bank and then pick up coffee and sandwiches for fellow employees, had encountered a holdup man who cornered him and demanded "the payroll", then surrendering to the bandit what he had, some change and sandwich orders, as the boss of the company had forgotten to give him the payroll check for deposit.

Harry Shuford of The News reports that the five former members of the Mecklenburg County Draft Board, who had resigned after saying they had received "political pressure" from some unknown source in Washington to delay for 60 days the induction of an unnamed individual from Charlotte, whose identity was being presumed, continued to resist making any public statements on the matter and apparently had no change of attitude. Director of Selective Service, General Lewis Hershey, visiting Raleigh, had said that the matter was between the Board and him, and that they had a perfect right to resign for not liking what he had done, and that he had nothing but praise for the Board, that full responsibility lay with him. The person who was presumed to be in issue was a student at UNC, a former high school basketball star in Charlotte, who was scheduled to graduate from UNC in June, and for whom his father had admitted interceding on his behalf to obtain a 60-day deferment of his draft induction to permit him to finish his college degree. Again, without a war on, what the hell is the big deal?

On the editorial page, "Draft Postponement Needs Explanation" indicates that two members of the local county draft board had been there since it had gone into operation in 1940, while another had served since July, 1952, and a fourth, since September, 1952. All five members of the board were prominent citizens of the community and all were responsible and mature, experienced in administering Selective Service regulations, and familiar with the types of pressure applied at every level of the Selective Service system on behalf of individual registrants facing induction.