The Charlotte News
Wednesday, November 23, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at the U.N., Russia's Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky announced that Russia was no longer recognizing the Chinese Nationalist delegation at the U.N., including their status as a permanent member of the Security Council. Russia had previously broken diplomatic relations with the Chiang regime and established recognition of the Communist Chinese.
The Soviet bloc was in the minority in both the Security Council and the General Assembly, each of which separately would likely be called upon later in the week to settle the issue of Chinese recognition.
The Chinese Communists had released American Consul General Angus Ward from jail at Mukden, where he had been maintained since October 24 with four members of his staff for allegedly beating a Chinese worker at the consulate. The aides were also released. A people's court had found them guilty and sentenced them to prison but then commuted the sentences to deportation.
In Chungking, the Nationalist Government was streamlined, with thousands of workers dismissed, so that the Government could become mobile with the fighting front. The Government admitted that the Communist forces were within 70 miles of the provisional capital, reaching Wulong.
In Panama City, two men claimed the presidency of the country following a wild night of rioting in which one three-year old child was killed and eleven persons, including the child's father, wounded. The former President, Dr. Daniel Chanis, Jr., who had been forced to resign in a coup on the prior Sunday, led a group of thousands of supporters in a march on the presidential palace in an attempt to regain power, declaring before the national assembly that he had withdrawn his resignation. Roberto Chiari, former Vice-President, meanwhile had been sworn in as President after Dr. Chanis, in only his fourth month as President, succumbed to a police ultimatum and resigned. The marchers had been dispersed by the national police with machine guns, tear gas, and rifle fire.
In New York, in the second trial of Alger Hiss for perjury, notes of former Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, made following his 1939 interview of Whittaker Chambers, were introduced into evidence by the defense in an effort to discredit star Government witness Mr. Chambers, who claimed to have received secret Government documents from Mr. Hiss for transmittal to the Russians, a claim Mr. Hiss had denied, denying also having met Mr. Chambers during the period when the documents were claimed to have been transferred, both denials being the basis for the two counts of perjury before the grand jury the previous December. Mr. Chambers had admitted during cross-examination the previous day that he received monthly a briefcase full of secret documents from Henry Julian Wadleigh of the State Department. The defense was attempting to show that all of the documents in question had come from Mr. Wadleigh and not Mr. Hiss.
Mr. Chambers also admitted having made a suicide pact with his brother and that his brother had actually killed himself, an event, said Mr. Chambers, which had a "paralyzing effect" on him. The defense also asked him about some poems he had written years earlier.
It all took place out on the animal farm with the pumpkins hiding the microfilm previously hidden in the dumbwaiter shaft for a decade.
In Lubbock, Tex., seven persons were killed and ten others injured at a rail crossing when a freight train hit a truck loaded with Latin American cotton pickers. It was the second such accident reported in as many weeks, the other in Gila Bend, Arizona, reported November 11.
In York, S.C., the second trial of Nathan Corn, sentenced to death the previous December for the murder of his employer George Beam, Jr., was set to begin the following Monday. Mr. Corn's conviction had been reversed by the South Carolina Supreme Court.
In Charlotte, a public hearing would be held on December 6 before the City Council regarding whether to continue rent control in the city. Be sure to attend.
The Institute of Government suggested in Charlotte a method for consolidation of all tax processes of the City and County governments, via a three-member supervising agency.
In Raleigh, the North Carolina
Supreme Court announced its affirmance of the conviction of Monroe
Medlin, convicted of first degree murder in September in Charlotte
for the August slaying of Mrs. E. O. Anderson, his former employer,
at her home in the Myers Park neighborhood, while struggling over a
shotgun which Mrs. Anderson had retrieved to oust Mr. Medlin from the
premises. The lawyers for Mr. Medlin had provided the Court with a
no-issue brief—as we have suggested previously, a complete
abandonment of their client worthy of disbarment in a capital
case—and the Court had undertaken a required cursory review of
the record and, of course, found no issue. Mr. Medlin therefore would
be executed on December 9, when a proper appeal, raising issues
regarding the jury instructions and the adequacy of the evidence to
support a first degree murder conviction as opposed to a reduced
degree for imperfect self-defense, might have spared him from the
death penalty. But such was the state of frontier justice
Vern Haugland tells of a 13-year old girl from Massachusetts having written the Department of Agriculture regarding how she should go about preparing for a career working with animals, and receiving a response from the director of the Department of Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service, telling her that opportunities were available for artists and photographers or, with a college degree and maybe a master's degree, in the biological sciences. He added that she might also become the wife of a photographer or artist or biologist and thus enter the field by proxy.
The Government reported that the weather for Thanksgiving would be good and the turkeys cheaper than in 1948.
On the editorial page, "Byrnes the Realist" tells of James Byrnes of South Carolina, former Secretary of State, having given a speech during the week to the Southern conference of Governors, wherein he had said that deficit spending would continue as the Executive Branch would not make serious cuts in the budget and the Congress would not pass the President's proposed tax increase.
The piece finds it a fair statement of the situation. Between Congress and the Administration, budgets tended to grow, not reduce.
"The Clifford Resignation" discusses the resignation of Presidential legal adviser and principal speechwriter Clark Clifford, finds that while it might initially be greeted with delight by conservative detractors of the Administration, it was not the result of any difference between the liberal Mr. Clifford and the President. Rather, Mr. Clifford wanted to enter the private sector and take advantage of his reputation.
Mr. Clifford was credited with being the architect and voice of the Fair Deal. He had exerted a strong influence on the President. It would not go away merely by his leaving the Administration.
"Rumbling of the Dixiecrats" tells of the conference of Southern Governors in Biloxi, Mississippi, in which the Dixiecrats had proposed a resolution to align the conference with States Rights principles. Resolutions, however, had to be approved unanimously for adoption and the Dixiecrats, fearing a loss, dropped the idea.
James Byrnes gave an address which avoided mention of States Rights.
The conference ended and the Dixiecrat revival died aborning.
It suggests that everyone ought be for the concept of States Rights but that the best way to accomplish it was to remain in the Democratic Party or to have the South open up to the Republican Party and form a two-party system. It could never be accomplished, it ventures, by a group of mavericks more intent on furthering the interests of their own party than promoting States Rights.
"Teaching Baby to Talk" describes the efforts of new parents to coax the first words out of their infants, starting with "da-da" and "ma-ma", progressing to "hey". When coaxed to say "hello", however, the baby inevitably would utter "hell", and the effort had to subside for awhile on polysyllabication.
The objective observer realized that it would be awhile before baby understood what each word being uttered meant.
Baby, the rain must fall. It's universally primordial: al-pha and o-me-ga.
Bob Sain of The News, in the second in his series of pieces on aging and care for the aged, finds it a medical problem since the medical profession had been responsible for prolonging life in the society. After providing more statistics on life expectancy by demographic data, he examines senility.
It was characterized by a loss of short-term memory, as well as reason and judgment, with interest being harder to arouse and sustain, emotions dulled. It could come at 60 or not at all, before death at 90. One local doctor said that it was inevitable if one lived long enough.
Dr. Howard Rusk of the Department of Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine at NYU's College of Medicine had discussed the matter in the October, 1949 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, saying that in 1940, 26.5 percent of the population, those over 45, required over half of the nation's medical care, that by 1980, those over 45 would likely comprise half the population, requiring therefore nearly double the medical care of 1949.
In the December 18, 1948 issue of The Nation, Dr. Martin Gumpert, a New York specialist in mental and physical health of the elderly, stated that committing an older person to an institution without giving them opportunity for recovery through adequate medical care was a "grave wrong", and withholding the necessary resources for such a recovery was a crime against society.
We'll give them something to do: ringing the bells in the band and being the doorman.
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "GM's Tax 'Dividend'", tells of the GM stock dividend for the end of the year bringing the total for 1949 to $8 per share and aggregate dividends to common shareholders to 352 million dollars. GM's income tax bill for the first three quarters was 366.5 million dollars, with another 338 million in other taxes. On top of that, state sales taxes on vehicle sales had averaged about $22 per unit in 1948. The Federal Government also received income taxes on the dividends.
So, the taxes far exceeded the record dividends to be paid to stockholders. Moreover, GM, itself, earned more than $11 on each common share of stock for reinvestment in the business.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada advising Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco during his recent visit with the dictator, telling him that if he handled things right, he could be in good standing with the U.S. and the West within a year. He told him that a sizable bloc of Senators would support Spain's admission to specialized agencies of the U.N. and to the Western Union. He advised him to continue to keep to the line of anti-Communism to form public opinion in his favor.
Less than a week later, Franco was following the Senator's advice on Radio Madrid, trumpeting Spain's role against "Russian Communist barbarism".
Doctors at the Infectious Diseases agency of the Government in Bethesda were, without fanfare or publicity, regularly researching control and cures for diseases from parrot fever to polio to the common cold, all at great personal risk to their own health, albeit curtailed by the modern laboratory built for them in 1946. He details some of their experiments and research.
Marquis Childs tells of France being without a government for 19 days until the present Government of Premier Georges Bidault was formed. Most of the French had accepted the interim chaos with a shrug of the shoulder. How long the current Government would last was anyone's guess, but was likely not to be long. M. Bidault had admitted that he had become Premier by serendipity, happened to walk into the office of President Vincent Auriol when the search for a compromise premier had reached a desperate point.
The country had produced since the war no political leadership. Even General Charles DeGaulle was receding into the past, with support only from the right-wing Socialists.
As German power revived, however, French concern was heightened. Foreign Minister Robert Schuman was nearly persuaded by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Secretary of State Acheson that West Germany should be admitted to the European community. And the Western High Commissioners were given some bargaining power with Konrad Adenauer, new leader of West Germany, to slow down the dismantling of German industry. But M. Schuman remained only partially persuaded, out of concern that the Socialists might pull out of the French Government which had agreed to full German accord. The French also were concerned that Britain might not stand by European economic unity in the event of another war.
Many French wanted the U.S. to take a stronger position in effecting French and British cooperation both economically and militarily.
The French were also concerned about the lobbyists in Congress who urged cooperation with Franco in Spain, that it portended a strategy whereby, in the event of Soviet occupation of Western Europe, the Western powers would defend a foothold on the Iberian peninsula while preparing to retake the rest of Europe. But the French were convinced that in that event, there would be nothing worth retaking.
He observes that the time for America to take decisive action was passing and the opportunity might not recur under the present favorable circumstances.
Robert C. Ruark, in Salt Lake City, tells of the trial of a man on a charge of attempting to shoot down a Piper Cub airplane with a shotgun, being awaited in Denver with great expectation. Mr. Ruark was for the man, facing a year in jail for the assault. He found that the defendant, a duck hunter who had been buzzed three times by the plane, could have as easily shot the head off the pilot as to put his No. 4 shot in the belly of the aircraft from his plugged shotgun, as the accused was a shooting champion and retired antiaircraft gunner.
He was bitterly contemplating his trial and lamenting the fact that the duck season was nearly over with his only bag being the Cub and five ducks.
Ducks Unlimited had raised a large fund for his defense, and a new lobby, labeled "Cubs for Freedom", was said to be planning to combat same.
A letter writer tells of having encountered difficulty with women in positions of responsibility, as when he encountered, during year-round life on the road, a female co-owner of a hotel who refused to cash his check unless he acquired guarantors from local sources. He had subsequently decided not to recommend the town as a meeting place of groups from several states, for which he had the responsibility of organizing.
A letter writer responds to the responsive letter anent the editorial on the Lehman-Dulles special Senate election in New York, won by former Governor Lehman over interim incumbent John Foster Dulles, finds both the letter and the editors' response, as well a responsive letter to the first letter, wanting. He explains.
A letter writer bemoans the lack of a daily column in the newspaper, as in Northern papers, on television, despite some 8,500 households in the area having the device. He says that such a column would increase advertising in the newspaper and thus its circulation.
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