The Charlotte News

Saturday, August 16, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Whitehaven, England, 107 coal miners were trapped underground by an explosion. Three miners emerged after 21 hours, raising hopes that 50 still missing might be alive. Fifty-four bodies had been located and hope was nearly gone for the remaining miners when the three men emerged. They had crawled to safety from the deadly gas in the mine. Ten had escaped shortly after the blast. The pit was difficult to reach as it was two miles out, underneath the Irish Sea, taking twelve hours to begin the rescue effort. Its tunnels extended to a depth of 800 to 2,000 feet beneath the sea.

One woman shouted, "Godspeed the rescuers!"

It was the fourth blast in the mines of England since they came under Government ownership on January 1, 1947. The previous three blasts had claimed 26 lives. The largest recent mine disaster in England had been at Stokes-on-Trent in 1942, claiming 58 men. The worst mine disaster in England's history was at Senthenydd, South Wales, in 1913, taking 436 lives. Whitehaven's worst mine disaster had occurred in 1919 when 136 were killed in the Wellington pit.

In northern Greece, guerrilla activity was reported to have increased sharply during the previous two days. Hundreds of village homes in the area of western Thrace to western Macedonia were reported burned, with many casualties resulting. The guerrilla headquarters radio asserted that General Markos Vifiades, guerrilla chieftain, had taken over administration of a "democratic government" until such time as a provisional government could be formed.

The 20-nation Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro unanimously approved a resolution to support mediation by Argentina and Brazil of the Paraguayan civil war.

The Argentine Foreign Minister praised his Fascist dictator, Juan Peron, for adopting a system midway between communism and capitalism.

A spokesman for the AFL Seafarers International Union said that a nationwide shipping strike likely would be called within the ensuing couple of days. A CIO union in Baltimore had been striking for 50 days, partly in protest of Taft-Hartley. Some 72,000 maritime workers were idle on the East and Gulf Coasts, including 13,000 in Baltimore.

In Lancaster, S.C., the former Chief of Police who went on a shooting rampage the previous day, killing three men, including a constable, and seriously injuring a deputy sheriff, who had his right arm amputated as a result, was deemed by a coroner's jury to have caused the death of the constable.

Eastern Air Lines began flights between Charlotte and Chicago, inaugurating an important link to the Midwest. Pete McKnight of The News rode on the maiden flight along the route, aboard a DC-3. Other members of the Charlotte media were also aboard.

A still life of Lake Waccamaw in Eastern North Carolina took first prize in the sixth week of the amateur photo contest, vying for the weekly $5 first prize and $25 grand first prize after the seventh week of competition, with the winner set to compete for a national grand prize up to $1,500. John W. Glenn of Monroe captured second prize with a picture of his daughter, earning him $2.50.

Tom Schlesinger of The News reports from Akron, Ohio, on the tenth Soap Box Derby race to be held the following day, in which Charlotte's champion, 13-year old Drew Hearn, would compete with his sleek racer, down the 975-foot course at Derby Downs. His first race would be in the 31st heat against racers from Boston and Colorado Springs.

The judges had ruled that talcum powder and graphite could not be used in the race to lubricate the racers. The graphite, according to officials, made the racers so slick that the pitmen could hardly handle them. It also clashed with the white uniforms and caused a messy appearance.

Young Mr. Hearn, in consequence, had to get busy with a rag and solvents to remove the graphite from his racer.

Many of the contestants crowded around his car and admired its design. His unofficial trial time had been one of the best.

The race would be re-broadcast the following day on WAYS from 8:00 to 8:30 p.m. The race would be run between 2:00 and 4:50.

Actor Jimmy Stewart was on hand for the festivities as the honorary marshal and would dedicate this night an Alaskan totem pole, a gift from Juneau to the boys of America.

So there is only one thing left to say, obviously: Godspeed.

On the editorial page, "Alcoholics Challenge the Drys" suggests that the County's drys re-read Burke Davis's August 13 piece on alcoholism before becoming too involved in the struggle to prevent Sunday sale of beer. The report offered hope for temperance and, the piece counsels, it should be the focal point of the dry struggle. Mr. Davis reported on two Charlotteans, an Episcopal priest and a member of alcoholics anonymous, having attended a month-long seminar on alcoholism at Yale. They had determined that alcoholism is a disease, to be treated as any other disease. They wanted now to establish an information center on alcoholism in Charlotte.

The suggestion had been made that ABC store profits from controlled-sale of liquor could be used to treat alcoholism and the piece finds the idea worth considering. The success of any such program depended on the entire community, including the churches, the WCTU, the professions and other volunteers. There were three Alcoholics Anonymous groups in the city.

There were 60 million drinkers in the country, nearly half the 140 million population, and 750,000 were deemed excessive drinkers. A. A. could only help in the third and last stage of alcoholism. "Social drinkers" and solitary drinkers contributed to the problem. Education and research were needed to get at its root and eradicate it.

"Death on the Charlotte Streets" tells of Charlotte's drivers killing pedestrians at an alarming rate. During the first six months of 1947, 371 persons had been killed and 2,909 injured in 5,253 traffic accidents across the state, a decrease of 24 percent from the previous year. Charlotte led all cities and towns with 13 traffic fatalities.

It credits the decrease to an education program by the Highway Safety Division and stricter enforcement by the Highway Patrol—more likely, given the decrease nationwide, the result of better cars and tires on the road than in the first year following the war when production of new cars was delayed by the strikes of the auto workers. There were now far fewer jalopies on the road from pre-1942, production having been stopped for the war in February, 1942.

Charlotte was about to hire a traffic engineer but it would be months before changes could be implemented to make the traffic pattern safer. Meanwhile, the citizenry had to rely on themselves and the Police Department to enforce the traffic laws.

"Behind the Soviet Illusion" comments on Representative Alvin O'Konski of Wisconsin, an eccentric and often humorous Republican, being greeted with both derision and alarm when he suggested recently that the best way to handle Europe was to allow it to become Communist and then to get a belly full of it.

The piece comments that the more it read of Paul Ward's series on the page, the more it thought that Mr. O'Konski might have something, even if advice not practical or prudent to follow at present. The glaring fact to be gleaned from the Ward pieces was that the U.S.S.R's worst enemy was itself. He had demonstrated most of the country's social reforms to be illusory and that the Russian people, themselves, were fed up with the system.

It finds the series to be an important contribution to understanding Soviet life and the challenge faced by the U.S. in dealing with Communist Russia. The articles showed both its strengths and weaknesses and that the Russian people did not enjoy the same quality of life as Americans. But the Russian system did demonstrate a capacity to rule in a state of crisis.

The report urged the need for emergent action to rebuild Europe to avoid the fertile ground of poverty and depressed conditions in which Communism could grow.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Georgia Moves Forward", comments on the wave of racial violence in the South since the end of the war having produced a wave in response in the South of people of good will seeking to put an end to it. The latest example, it cites, was the Georgia State Board of Corrections which had ordered closure of the convict highway camp system because of an incident July 11 near Brunswick in which eight black men were killed by guards who claimed they were trying to escape from the camp. A Grand Jury had refused to indict the warden or the five guards.

But County Commissioner Sam Levine had dared to go before the Board of Corrections and state that it was a needless massacre. The eight black men had been returned to the camp because they refused to enter a snake-infested ditch to do work. They were not attempting to escape. The warden ordered that county policemen present open fire; they refused. The guards obeyed the order.

The Board of Corrections then ordered the closure of the two most noisome of the camps. The State had, under the leadership of Governor Ellis Arnall, outlawed the chain gang in 1943. But it still had 89 labor camps controlled by the counties. It was the most antiquated penal system in the country, dating back to 1848.

It speculates that had Herman Talmadge been successful in his bid to accept the award of the Governor's Office from the Legislature after his father, Eugene, had died in December, 1946, right after being re-elected Governor following four years of being out of office, then it was likely nothing would have happened. Eugene Talmadge had run a campaign of race-baiting, and his son initially came to office promising the same brand of politics, until the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that Lt. Governor M. E. Thompson was the rightful successor to the office. Governor Thompson was milder and more progressive.

Even the Glynn County Grand Jury which refused to indict had approved the closure of the camp.

"So in Georgia, as in the rest of the South, the area of enlightenment perceptibly spreads and 'freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.'"

Robert S. Allen, substituting for vacationing Drew Pearson, bestows the Merry-Go-Round's brass ring on the anonymous newsmen of the country, some of whom were syndicated columnists, who dedicatedly reported the news each day and commented upon it. While occasionally one might win recognition for a particular story, most went about their business anonymously reporting the news.

He singles out for recognition several journalists. Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune had reported in the spring of the mutiny plot by some St. Louis Cardinals against the first black player in Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mr. Woodward had smashed their notions of racial discrimination before they could spread and spared baseball a major scandal.

Mr. Woodward was 52, from Worcester, Mass., a graduate of Amherst College. He had been in the Merchant Marine during World War I after being rejected for service because of poor eyesight. After ten years as a reporter in Boston, he became a sports writer for the Herald Tribune in 1930, and became sports editor in 1938.

Robert E. ("Fleet") Williams was an editorial and political writer for the Raleigh News & Observer, "one of the ablest, most courageous and liberal news men of the South." He had served in World War I, following five rejections by his draft board on physical grounds. He had covered every type of story, from police news to international conferences.

Herb Block, known as "Herblock" to readers, was a cartoonist for the Washington Post whose daily panels were "without peer". He said more in one panel than a squad of pundits in eight columns of copy. He finds "Mr. Atom" especially devastating. Mr. Block, 37, was shy and soft-spoken, started drawing while in grammar school in Chicago. He went to work for a Chicago paper at age 17. He joined the Post after serving in the Army during the war, interrupting his successful stint as a political cartoonist. His daily panel appeared in 130 newspapers.

Mr. Allen does not mention that Mr. Block had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his cartoon appearing March 11, 1941, captioned "British Plane".

Richard S. Davis was known as "The Conscience of City Hall" in Milwaukee where he had written for the Journal since 1918. He was the "spearhead of decency and progress", having single-handedly pushed through a slum-clearance program several years earlier through a series of articles.

Charles Raudebaugh, general assignment reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, had uncovered a sordid abortion racket in the city and had covered the founding of the U.N. His chapter on San Francisco contained in "Our Fair City", a best-selling study on municipal rule, had drawn the ire of the chief of police and the approbation of his home town.

Marshall McNeil, Ruth Finney, and Daniel Kidney of the Scripps-Howard News Syndicate in Washington knew more of Washington politics and operation than most in the Government, as well as about lobbyists and other manipulators of the public weal.

Paul W. Ward, in the twelfth in the series of articles for the Baltimore Sun, collectively titled "Life in the Soviet Union", examines medicine in Russia. He first finds that the Russian boasts of low mortality rates seemed incredible to the Western observer. Respect for hygiene was a matter of bureaucratic directive rather than concern for germs. Rules were obeyed rigidly, but if the rules overlooked bacterial reality, reason suffered. Operating room floors were scrubbed, but by old women in street clothes while surgery transpired. Surgeons, obeying the rule to wear surgical gloves, would often pause in the midst of surgery to shake hands with visitors among the staff who passed at will in and out of the operating room, the door to which remained open, admitting flies which clustered above the operating table.

Shortage of supplies and equipment also tended to cast suspicion on the glowing statistics adduced by the Soviets regarding mortality. Even the best hospital, reserved for the "scientific workers", was, until recently, without an X-ray machine. Medicines also were inferior in quality to those in the West. Even doctors who bragged on the quality of hospitals admitted that Russian penicillin was no good, produced of too large strains, to satisfy demand. The country's "leading authority" on the drug was unaware that it had to be kept on ice or would lose its potency after a day. He was enthralled by a popular treatise on penicillin sent to him from America.

Marquis Childs finds Attorney General Tom Clark in the habit of announcing plans for his stew before catching his rabbit, as in the recently enunciated plan to investigate and potentially prosecute the worst offenders at price-fixing in contravention of anti-trust laws in the areas of food, clothing, and housing. In cynical Washington, the common explanation was that Mr. Clark wanted to be on the ticket with President Truman in 1948.

If he actually was going to put everyone in jail who contributed to high prices, remarks Mr. Childs, the jails would be overflowing. The Administration itself had committed two errors which contributed to inflation: the repeal of the excess profits tax and the removal of wage controls with the encouragement to labor to demand increases. Removal of the tax permitted bloated profits reported in recent months, which in turn had given fuel to labor leaders to demand higher wages. Only Bernard Baruch, among economic experts, had spoken against the repeal. And the higher wages had contributed to higher prices, producing a spiral.

Prosecutions for anti-trust violations could only prove successful in an environment sympathetic to those prosecutions. Former head of the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department, Thurman Arnold, had considered it his duty to develop such a favorable atmosphere. But no one with the same force had come forth from the Justice Department to do so since his departure.

He concludes that inflation would be a political football in the 1948 campaign, but all of the speeches would ultimately have little impact on what the average consumer paid.

A letter writer in the electrical business objects to the interpretation contained in a News article of August 11 regarding the city's wiring regulations. One regulation restricted cord length from appliances to six feet. It did not apply, he clarifies, to outside wiring of larger sizes, as he suggests the article had implied. He urges leaving interpretation to the trained City Inspector.

Electrical fences, he adds, which had been responsible for two deaths in Charlotte, were completely safe if properly connected.

You need that low-voltage transformer, pardner. Don't just hook her up right to the 220. That could be dangerous, especially if it come up a shower.

A letter writer favors keeping the Sabbath holy and not playing golf, as suggested by a second letter writer on the subject, responding to a previous letter.

She says the day was coming when people would reap what they had sown.

It seems, from reading all of this reportage, that the days of that had been amply manifested in the previous twenty years.

A little Sunday golf or baseball, or what have you, might provide needed recreation that went along with rest.

The original letter writer responds to the responding letter regarding his view that the Sunday Sabbath ought be maintained as sacred, for praising God.

But what about the other six days? Don't you think that if you stress Sunday too much, people get the idea that they can do anything they want the rest of the week and then obtain forgiveness for it on Sunday?

A letter from the letter writer who had stated that the state was big enough for many religions, not just Christianity, and recommended the Sunday golf rule, comments on Monday's editorial, "Political Ideas in the Church", finding it a bit restrained in saying that there were "certain discrepancies" in the thinking of some churchmen. But he liked the fact that the piece referred to the clergy as "churchmen" and not Christians, and adds that certain social reform was rejected because it had already been tried in the Soviet Union.

Herblock...

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