The Charlotte News
Friday, October 7, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford told the House Armed Services Committee that the Air Force undermined unification of the military, that the B-36, a "1941 airplane", was "a billion dollar blunder", a "bad gamble with national security", and useless in the event of atomic war. He said that the split between the forces had grown to "malignant proportions".
Whether, as a result, a cancer was growing on the Presidency was not yet known.
In Berlin, the German Peoples Council proclaimed the new East German republic, the GDR. A new president, premier and cabinet would be named the following week as a provisional government. The first election would be held in one year. A manifesto was adopted which vowed to fight against the new West German republic founded by France, Britain, and the U.S.
Senator Clyde Hoey stated that the five percenter probe regarding influence peddling in procurement of Government contracts would continue and that Drew Pearson's report to the contrary in this date's newspapers was untrue. Perfume manufacturer David Bennett and five percenter James V. Hunt were yet to be heard by the committee, both being too ill yet to testify.
The U.S. deficit climbed to a rate of a little over two billion dollars for the fiscal year after its first quarter. Estimates ranged between two and eight billion in deficit for the entire year. Administration experts placed it at about four billion.
President Truman was visiting the Colle estate, part of Thomas Jefferson's estate located a mile from Monticello, for the weekend.
As Government mediation efforts to resolve the coal strike began this date, Alcoa workers threatened to strike.
In San Francisco, the House of Deputies at the Episcopal Church's triennial convention voted against the House of Bishops attempt to liberalize the marriage canons by recognizing divorce and allowing bishops to dissolve marriages for causes arising during wedlock. Presently, such prenuptial causes as concealed venereal disease, fraud and duress were recognized as grounds for dissolution. Conservatives blocked the change.
In New York, the board of directors of NBC elevated Niles Trammell to be board chairman, replacing RCA board chairman David Sarnoff, and elected Joseph H. McConnell, previously executive vice-president of RCA, the new president. The changes were made to meet changes in broadcast techniques and the rapid development of television. Mr. McConnell was originally a native of Davidson, N.C., in Mecklenburg County and had attended college at Davidson. His father had been a dean and professor at the College.
In Camden, N.J., Howard Unruh, who had gone on a murder rampage for twenty minutes, killing thirteen people on September 6, was determined by psychiatrists to be insane. As a result of the finding, he was committed to an insane asylum without standing trial. He suffered from dementia praecox, an incurable disease of brain degeneration. Mr. Unruh would die in the insane asylum at Trenton in 2009 at age 88.
The Journal of the American Medical Association said that the medical profession had no cure for the common cold, that rest was the best remedy and that the common remedy of "reasonable doses" of alcohol was effective because it caused peripheral vasodilatation and re-established circulation in chilled cutapeous and mucosal surfaces.
But could you play the harmonica?
In Rome, tobacco heiress Doris Duke, divorced in 1948 from Porfirio Rubirosa, was seen again in his company and a source close to Ms. Duke said a reconciliation was in the works.
In Columbia, S.C., a 30-year old peanut products salesman was shot to death in his bed at around 3:00 a.m. by an unknown intruder, while his wife who slept next to him was unharmed. She awoke to the sound of gunfire and began screaming as her husband, who had already been shot, tried to sit up in bed, at which point she urged him to lay back down. He had kept large sums of money at the home and the motive appeared to be robbery.
In the North Carolina mountains a mile from Mount Mitchell and six miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway, the burned wreckage of a C-47 Air Force transport plane was discovered with all nine aboard dead. The plane had been en route from Washington via Greenville, S.C., to Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Ala., at the time of the accident during fog and rain.
In Charlotte, citizens were called upon by Mayor Victor Shaw to recognize Newspaperboy Day on Saturday.
Don't throw the newspaper back at the boy simply because he wakes you up with the newspaper hitting your upstairs window at 6:00 a.m., crashing through, causing the cat to turn over the fishbowl which floods your bed and sets the room ablaze when, startled to wakefulness, you inadvertently hit the alarm clock snooze button and, fumbling in the dark, knock a heavy alabaster cigarette lighter onto the floor which hits the carpet upside down, ignites and burns the whole house down before the Fire Department can arrive.
It's okay. He is performing a service to keep you informed.
At Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the Yankees and Dodgers were tied 1 to 1 at the end of the fifth inning of the third game of the World Series. The Yankees would go on to win 4 to 3, taking a 2 to 1 game lead in the the better-of-seven Series.
On the editorial page, "'Slave Labor' Law Remains" finds that it would be ironic were the President to have to resort to a Taft-Hartley injunction to stop the steel strike, as the President wanted to repeal the law, and Phillip Murray, head of the United Steelworkers, had called it a "slave labor" law. But it appeared that it would be the only way finally to end the impasse regarding the ten-cent per hour company contribution to a welfare fund recommended by the President's fact-finding board and accepted by the Steelworkers, while the companies wanted worker contributions to the plan.
It suggests that the President's behavior in the matter so far appeared motivated by politics and the nation's welfare would soon demand that he exert leadership to end the strike.
"School Bus Tragedy" comments on the bus accident the previous day on a bridge along a dirt road, in which six students were killed in Middlesex, N.C. The Highway Department had been alerted of the need to cut brambles and vines obscuring the roadway but had not acted.
The school had not received an allotted fourth bus, causing the bus to be overcrowded. There was no evidence that the young student driver was at fault. And it was unclear why an ice truck was sitting on the narrow bridge where the accident occurred when the bus sideswiped it.
Parade Magazine had just presented a piece in which the state was lauded for use of the student drivers, finding that only seven deaths had occurred in the eight years of the program.
The piece finds that the clearing of obstructions and expanding bus fleets did not need to await the rural road paving program.
"Social Security Expansion" finds the vote of 333 to 14 for House passage of the Social Security expansion bill to equal roughly the collective will across the country in favor of it. The idea of worker contribution to pensions was preferable to strictly employer-developed funds as demanded by organized labor.
"Boulevard Pass" finds a suggestion good that a pedestrian overpass be built near the Chantilly School over the new Independence Boulevard. Students would not use the underground passageways. The overpass had not been planned with the road because the school was built after the road route was determined. The overpass was necessary to prevent serious injury or death from the high volume of traffic which would pass over the new multi-lane highway.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Profession vs. Practice", tells of registered nurses in the state protesting against the division of medical first-aiders and last-aiders into professional and practical nurses, with the requirement that professional nurses receive university training. It finds the practical nurses more "cheerful, serviceable and better-looking" than those university trained. Hippocrates, himself, had not attended a university and would not be accredited, it opines, if he opened a medical school in 1949.
Drew Pearson, as contradicted by Senator Clyde Hoey on the front page, finds it not surprising that there would be no further hearings regarding the five percenters and influence peddling. He tells of David Bennett, the perfume manufacturer who supplied the freezers to General Harry Vaughan who gave them in turn to Bess Truman, then Secretary of Treasury Fred Vinson and others, at about the same time that General Vaughan's friend, John Maragon, was smuggling perfume into the country for Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett had four yachts, three of which had been purchased from the Maritime Commission, on which poker parties took place. He sought to buy another from the Government with the help of John Maragon and General Vaughan in 1945. While Vice-President, Harry Truman had been a guest aboard these yachts and played poker there with General Vaughan.
Mr. Bennett also had acquired four surplus airplanes from the Government, at about one-fifth to less than one-third their original cost.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the dispute regarding claimed diminished Navy morale in light of military unification. Unification had forced the Navy back into its primary role, control of the seas, after it had used the Naval air wing during the war to defeat inferior Japanese air power. But the limitations on Naval aviators imposed under unification had produced open insubordination within the Navy, itself.
The fury of the Naval aviators had been directed not only against the President and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson but also against Admiral Louis Denfeld, chief of Naval operations, on the claim that he had been criminally weak to accept that the Navy could no longer make its own policies and develop its own strength, independent of the other branches, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs. The hope in the complaints was to motivate Admiral Denfeld to act.
The Soviets had no Navy except for submarines and so it was logical to economize, if at all in the U.S. military, with the Navy. The British Navy had long ago been cut to the bone and the U.S. forces had also been reduced. Captain John Crommelin, however, believed this reduction of the Navy to be crippling of U.S. strength. But, in fact, the U.S. Navy outnumbered the Soviets in strength by at least ten to one. General Eisenhower believed that there was no justification in investing more than 30 percent of total defense funds in maintaining Navy strength at that level. The other branches were relatively weak and so the argument for weakening the Navy was hard to counter.
If morale was dangerously low, as claimed by Captain Crommelin and Admirals Arthur W. Radford, Pacific Fleet Commander, and Bogan, it could not be improved by insubordination of high officers. Nor could open attacks on the more cooperative officers, as Admiral Denfeld.
The facts, they find, did not support or justify the claims.
Marquis Childs finds that the Senate Commerce Committee, which had voted not to approve the nomination of Leland Olds for reappointment to the Federal Power Commission, had placed itself in a ludicrous position. For if he was all the things claimed in hearings before the Committee, then he should never have been named to the FPC in the first instance, ten years earlier, or reconfirmed for a second term five years earlier. Everything he had written which was being marshaled against him had been available in both earlier confirmation processes. The real issue was that Mr. Olds had gone to bat for the consumer to the consternation of the power interests, to assure that consumers paid reasonable rates for gas and electricity.
The type of regulation Mr. Olds favored could not be considered dangerous Government encroachment on the private sector. Nor did the Committee so claim, but rather raised his writings of twenty years earlier as suggestive that he favored radical, socialist views contrary to free enterprise.
Adolph Berle, an avowed anti-Communist, had testified favorably for Mr. Olds, as had others. But the natural gas interests wanted to remove regulation of their industry from the FPC and were promoting a bill, sponsored by Senator Robert Kerr, a natural gas company owner, for the purpose, a bill which Mr. Olds had opposed. Passage of that bill would result in higher prices for natural gas to consumers.
Tom Schlesinger of The News tells of Congressman Hamilton Jones of Charlotte being optimistic that the Veterans Hospital, which had been planned for Charlotte but was cut when several projects were canceled by the President, would be rejuvenated. Charlotte was at the top of the list, along with Greenville, S.C., and Grand Rapids, Mich., should new veterans hospitals be built.
Senator Clyde Hoey had said that the Justice Department was planning to indict John Maragon on a perjury count in connection with his testimony before the Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Hoey which had investigated five percenters and influence peddling in procurement of Government contracts.
The Golden Jubilee Year of the North Carolina Society began with attendance by a thousand persons at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington.
Senator Frank Graham had been confined to bed the previous week for three days with a bad cold. Senator Graham had said that while the new Congress had not lived up to expectations, Republican charges that it was a "do-nothing" Congress, made in retaliation for the label applied to the previous GOP Congress by the President during the 1948 campaign, were unwarranted.
Senator Graham is probably on his last legs and thus must be defeated next spring. His successor, no doubt, will be robust and healthy, or Jesse Helms, a man of superior physical condition, would not be his campaign manager.
A letter writer finds the criticism of placement of traffic islands on E. Boulevard to be misplaced. He congratulates the City Traffic Engineer for the improvement.
A letter writer suggests that the newspaper had missed the story from the Associated Press the previous week quoting the RNC chairman as saying that the President's announcement that the Soviets had the atomic bomb had been timed to take away headlines from the Republicans' Sioux City, Iowa, farm conference.
Actually, that was on the editorial page, as part of a New York Times editorial reprinted October 4.
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