The Charlotte News
Thursday, November 24, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal had announced unexpectedly the previous day his resignation, effective December 31, and the President had reluctantly accepted it. No successor had been named. Mr. Lilienthal had been the object of attack by the joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress during hearings earlier in the year, from charges initiated by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa. The hearings had resulted in a majority report finding that there was no substance to the claim of gross mismanagement at the AEC or any compromise of national security. Mr. Lilienthal said in his resignation that he wished to return to private life, and later that it was proper at a time when his job was "going well".
The Western allies agreed to stop dismantling 18 large German factories in Berlin in return for German pledges to help keep the peace in Europe.
The State Department was looking forward to hearing from American Consul General Angus Ward following his release, along with four of his staff, by the Communist Chinese, held under arrest since October 24 on a bogus charge. They had been found guilty but released the previous day, under an order of deportation.
In Buenos Aires, the offices of the Associated Press and the United Press were seized by an Argentine Congressional committee for opposing the regime of El Presidente Juan Peron. The financial records of the news organizations were being scrutinized for possible connections to a left wing group which had opposed the election of El Presidente in 1946.
In Panama City, police laid siege to about 30 high school students holed up in a university building, following a gun battle between the police and the students in which seven persons were wounded. The police claimed that the students opened fire on a patrol car which was dispersing groups gathered to demonstrate support of efforts to regain the presidency by the deposed President, Daniel Chanis, Jr., following a Sunday coup orchestrated by the national police, Panama's only military force.
It was expected that the U.S. Congress the following year would reject extension of the draft.
Think again.
Coal talks might be resumed the following week as the November 30 end of the three-week hiatus in the strike loomed.
In New York, a Kings County jury found a man not guilty of charges of poisoning his young wife with strychnine. Twice previously, he had been convicted on the charges and sentenced to death only to have the convictions reversed by the appellate courts. The jury deliberated more than 20 hours before rendering the verdict.
After the defendant had married his wife in 1940, her mother had died in agony, resulting in her daughter getting half the insurance proceeds. Then, two years later, the wife, 23 and pregnant, was overcome by convulsions and died in great pain, resulting in the husband receiving the insurance proceeds. The woman's aunt became suspicious as both women described intense pain in their feet, symptoms of strychnine poisoning. The bodies had been exhumed and their organs found to contain strychnine. The defendant was then charged in the deaths.
In Washington, 42 Government cafeterias offered special 50-cent turkey dinners for Government employees.
The President and Mrs. Truman spent a quiet Thanksgiving at Blair House in Washington while the White House was being renovated.
In Ankara, Turkey, members of the American military mission prepared to eat their Thanksgiving meal consisting of Hindi, meaning "Indian bird".
In Los Angeles, a court found a woman, 81, guilty of begging and sentenced her to 15 days in jail, after testimony by policewomen that they had found $2,123 sewn into her underclothing. The woman claimed that she had inherited the money from her brother who had died a year earlier.
She should appeal the conviction as the police apparently observed no direct evidence of begging.
In Augusta, Ga., Thanksgiving dinner was provided to 13 poor children by a businessman visiting from Highland Park, Ill., who had found it too expensive to fly home for Thanksgiving. He called the welfare department and asked them to round up 13 deserving children and bring them to his hotel, then told the hotel manager to spare no cost in providing them a meal in the main dining room for which he footed the bill. He also provided them tickets to a show.
What was the show?
One little girl in Charlotte was going to eat a whole turkey.
On the editorial page, "Consolidation of Tax System" tells of the North Carolina Institute of Government recommendation that the tax systems of the City and County be consolidated via a three-person governing board.
The concept lacked popular appeal and was thus the province of the City Council and County Commissioners to determine. The report had revealed no inequities to rural dwellers vis-à-vis urban dwellers.
It finds, based on a perusal of the report, that while consolidation of the tax systems was less urgent than consolidation of other departments, it should receive favorable consideration in the future.
"Census Coming Up" recalls the 1940 drive to have the citizenry cooperate with the census to get the city's population over the 100,000 mark, achieved in the end, with 899 to spare. It says the effort for 1950 was off to a promising start and fancifully asserts that the city might hit 150,000 in the new decennial census.
"Thanksgiving Remembered" tells poetically of the sights and sounds and smells of Thanksgiving Day.
"Fragile, broken cornstalks tremble in the wind and cotton fields are plains of curling leaves. Elms and poplars and oaks are deserted homes, black and chilled; the leaves have gone."
Bob Sain of The News, in the third of his series of four articles on aging and care for the aged, finds that the biggest problem faced by society in caring for the aged population was mental health. He provides age statistics of patients who had sought admission to State Hospitals for the previous decade. Many, he posits, could have avoided resort to admission to mental hospitals had they received psychiatric care earlier, that many suffered from illnesses which were only reactions to the normal processes of aging and did not involve brain pathology.
Dr. Howard Rusk of NYU's College of Medicine had said that one of the most neglected groups was the senile psychotics, placed in public retirement homes or state hospitals alongside disturbed psychotic patients. Such misplacement was also true of elderly suffering from mental illnesses other than senile psychoses.
Dr. Randall R. MacLean of Edmonton,
Alberta, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, (apparently in the article by Dr. Rusk cited the previous day), that
elderly psychotics
Mr. Sain suggests that a similar program in North Carolina would benefit the patients and solve the overcrowding besetting mental hospitals in the state. During the previous year, the State Hospitals Board of Control had offered facilities at Camp Butner to the State Board of Public Welfare for the care of elderly patients, but the latter had turned down the proposal as it felt unable to maintain such a facility. So it was left to the State Hospitals Board to carry out such a program in state hospitals.
A program used successfully in Vancouver, B.C., provided a model which the director of the Charlotte Mental Hygiene Clinic believed could prove adaptable in the state. A system of 100-bed units had been established in the population centers for the care of the older patients, both physically and mentally, enabling them to remain close to friends and families.
A piece from the Columbia (S.C.) Record, titled "Traffic Court Justice", tells of a piece condensed from Kiwanis magazine appearing in Reader's Digest, by Albert Q. Maisel, asking rhetorically whether traffic court justice was blind. He found that many cities, including New York, were stressing traffic enforcement, including parking infractions, to the point that they were ignoring more serious criminal misconduct. New York had stressed parking fines. Chicago, however, had, in the process of a crackdown on moving violations, reduced its traffic deaths by 20 percent.
Other towns, as White Plains, N.Y., had used the revenue from parking meters to build parking lots for shoppers.
It suggests that Columbia was overemphasizing parking infractions.
Drew Pearson tells of Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut likely to appoint former Assistant Secretary of State William Benton as the new interim Senator to replace retiring Raymond Baldwin after the new year. Mr. Benton had been responsible for creation of the Voice of America but had run afoul of President Truman's tastes when he brought a modern art exhibit to Washington, art which Mr. Truman described as "scrambled eggs".
Since resigning the State Department
at the insistence of Secretary of State Marshall in 1947, he had
returned to Connecticut where he owned Encyclopedia Britannica and
Muzak
The Mormons were forgoing one meal per year and donating the amount saved to someone who could not afford Thanksgiving dinner, in many cases giving the money to the Community Chest. He suggests such a notion for Washington, where the Community Chest drive had not met its goal.
Twenty-four students of Howard University had recently toured Scandinavia to counteract negative propaganda generated by Paul Robeson, who had stressed downtrodden, lynched, and undernourished black citizens in the U.S. The drama students presented Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck in Ibsen's Norwegian hometown and attracted full houses to each performance and rave reviews from the Norwegian critics. After that, they played to full houses throughout their tour of Denmark and Sweden, were now in the American zone of Germany and had been asked to perform in France and Holland. It was another example of people-to-people diplomacy at work to good effect.
A British banking official was coming to the U.S. but would skip his normal visits with Wall Street and instead concentrate, at the request of the British Government, on meeting with American Government officials to suggest ways of stimulating trade through freer exchange of currency and private investment capital between the U.S. and Britain.
Marquis Childs, in Paris, tells of a one-day strike in France to occur Friday which perhaps presaged major labor upheavals during the winter. Large-scale strikes could slow recovery, particularly in coal mining where the union and the nationalized industries were dominated by Communists. The one-day strike was called by the anti-Communist unions and its roots were in the grievances of the mass of French workers regarding the lack of benefit from the postwar governments, with wage levels frozen and prices rising. At the same time, industrial profits were relatively high and the owners were showing signs of prosperity, particularly with respect to the export of capital to such "safe" countries as Switzerland, America, Spain and Argentina.
The peasant farmer, too, had enjoyed considerable prosperity, the result in part of government subsidies.
The resulting resentment of the workers had been directed as much at union leaders as anyone else. Many union members, anti-Communists and Communists alike, were not paying their dues or accepting discipline from the union leaders. The circulation of the chief Communist newspaper had fallen by about 60 percent. But in a leaderless, chaotic situation as prevailed in France, anything could happen and so the demise of the Communists was not necessarily a positive sign for the West.
The Government had promised a raise in wages from $38 to $43 monthly plus increased State benefits. The unions wanted also a return to collective bargaining and the Government was agreeing to concessions in that regard. But if it proved too little, too late, major winter strikes could play havoc with European recovery generally and the effort to integrate the European economy.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of American policy toward Western Europe revolving around integration of the economies and so they examine what it meant. The real objective was to get back to the status of 1910 by 1952, with a Europe possessed of internal trading comparable to that prior to World War I, to take place in a series of stages. Five countries, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg would first join to form "Fritalux", with the three Scandinavian countries then subsequently to join and West Germany to come yet later, all to form a free trading area.
The proponents of the plan believed that such integration would strengthen the Western European economies and make them less dependent on U.S. aid. It was also designed to integrate West Germany with the rest of Western Europe so that it would not turn again against the West.
But flies in the ointment could be found in the threatened collapse of the British economy, the keystone of European recovery and financial stability.
The proponents agreed that the plan would not produce substantial benefits for a number of years and so would not meet the contingencies which immediately threatened American foreign policy. Nor would it affect the defenseless stance of Western Europe to Soviet massive rearmament.
There was therefore a danger that the new policy would be seen as a panacea, a substitute for a real policy which would thwart Russian expansion.
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