The Charlotte News
Thursday, November 3, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that John L. Lewis asked Governor Henry Schricker of Indiana to renew his effort to construct a separate compromise agreement to end the coal strike in that state, after the coal operators the previous day had rejected the initial attempt. Mr. Lewis said that he would meet with the Indiana operators on short notice.
Meanwhile, discussion between the Southern operators and UMW was ended the previous day, the operators' president saying it would be fruitless to continue after five months of getting nowhere.
The President was aboard a train to St. Paul, Minn., addressing a crowd of several hundred from the rear platform at Savannah, Ill., saying he was doing his best to fulfill his campaign pledges and would send his Fair Deal program back to Congress in 1950 to enact the remaining parts. His appearance in Minneapolis was part of "Truman Day", in celebration of the state's centennial. He had been elected one year earlier, on November 2.
Admiral Forrest Sherman, having been appointed as the new chief of Naval operations, assigned Rear Admiral John Ballentine, Pacific war hero, to assume his old post as commander of the Mediterranean Sixth Task Fleet. Admiral Sherman also attended his first meeting of the Joint Chiefs.
A major fight was shaping up in Congress for 1950 over plans to increase imports by several billion dollars per year, favored by Secretary of State Acheson to create stability in the Western economies. The nation had a trade surplus of six billion dollars in 1948.
The U.S. and Britain had eased their ban on the sale of commercial aircraft to Yugoslavia, another attempt to bolster Tito in his anti-Russian stance. The first shipments of gasoline and lubricants were cleared by the State Department this date.
In Port Washington, N.Y.,
multi-millionaire copper king and art philanthropist Solomon
Guggenheim died at age 88. Eventually, in 1959, the Solomon
Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art
In New York, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, including Judge Learned Hand, ruled that the eleven Communist defendants convicted under the Smith Act could be released on bail pending their appeals, setting $20,000 and $30,000 bails, totaling $260,000. Shortly afterward, the Civil Rights Congress posted the bail money for all defendants. The Government, conceding that the appeal presented a substantial question regarding the constitutionality of the statute, had sought an aggregate bail of a million dollars. Attorney O. John Rogge, former Justice Department attorney, appearing for some of the defendants, asked that bail be no more than $10,000 each.
In Stockholm, the Nobel Prize was
awarded to Dr. Hideki Yukawa
The committee decided to forgo the 1949 prize for literature as there had been a deadlock between awarding it to the top candidates, including Winston Churchill and Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.
James Kemper quit as the treasurer for the RNC as funds had dwindled from $832,000 in 1948 to only $90,000. The Chicago insurance executive wanted to spend his time trying to elect a Republican House and Senate rather than raising money and had pledged to quit if funds fell below $125,000. He had been treasurer since 1944. He said that being an officer for the RNC limited his expression of certain political opinions, as his disagreement with parts of Administration foreign policy, the giving of aid to Britain with its Socialist Government, akin, he believed, to Communism.
In Mullins, S.C., a seven-year old girl who had been taken away by two strange men the previous day, turned up this date at a farm unharmed. The two men, both farmers who had been drinking, had been arrested but no charges had been filed. They were kept in an unnamed jail. No medical evidence had been found to indicate that that they had harmed the little girl. They had used cake and chewing gum to lure her into their car. The police described the action as a kidnaping but could not ascribe a motive as the parents of the little girl were tenant farmers.
In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott commuted the death sentence of Tom Wood to life, based on psychiatric findings that he was insane at the time of the act of killing his wife by stabbing her multiple times. He had been convicted of first degree murder in Harnett County.
On the editorial page, "City-County Consolidation" tells of Albert Coates, director of the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, having appeared the previous day before leaders of the community to present the first of nine reports on his findings regarding the potential savings from consolidation of City and County services. His report had been stimulated by the County and City Governments allotting $20,000 for the purpose after a 1946 series of reports by Burke Davis, formerly of The News, showing waste and duplication from having two governments operating side by side.
The initial report explained how Charlotte and Mecklenburg County had developed as governmental and legal entities and traced relationships between city and county services, both growing in size through time. The historical development in terms of cost and efficiency would be presented in the remaining eight reports.
"Planning an Auditorium" tells of real progress being made toward building a new municipal auditorium in the city. The City Council approved the membership of a special committee the previous day, appointed by chairman David Ovens. The committee would study auditoriums in other cities and recommend type, design and location.
Eventually, in 1955, the David Ovens Auditorium would open next door to the new Charlotte Coliseum, opened the same year.
"Washington Air Tragedy" opines that the central question for investigation in the collision of the Bolivian fighter plane into the Eastern Air Lines DC-4 passenger plane, killing all 55 aboard, was why the Bolivian pilot, who survived the crash, did not heed the tower's warning to circle away from the airport.
It was more economical for commercial and military craft to share facilities, but not the safest way. Military pilots did not have the responsibility of passengers about which to be concerned and so were not as rule-conscious as were pilots for carriers. Nor did the military pilots generally have the same experience as commercial pilots. It was not the first time that military and commercial planes had collided. The editorial urges that it was time to consider whether they ought share the same facilities in crowded areas.
"Be Bop Ad Nauseam" tells of music, news, weather reports and dratted commercials being played on all the rolling stock of the Capital Transit Co. in Washington, to the consternation of passengers.
It suggests that the trend might extend to Charlotte's buses, trapping passengers in unwanted rhythms. It proposes therefore a postscript to the Bill of Rights: the right to silence.
You have the right to remain silent.
Drew Pearson tells of Admiral Forrest Sherman, the new chief of Naval operations. He had been a favorite of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and believed in military unification. He had wanted to testify before the House Armed Services Committee in the recent hearings re low morale in the Navy after unification, but Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, who already had him in mind as chief of operations, did want him tarnished by those hearings.
Since the announcement that the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb, preparations for atomic war in Britain had been intensified in anticipation of London being the Russian's initial target.
Despite recent trouble between Italy and Yugoslavia over Trieste, Yugoslavia was dickering with Italy to manufacture ammunition, its main missing military resource.
The unsung hero of the steel negotiations was chief Government mediator Cyrus Ching, 73, former head of U.S. Rubber. He had worked patiently day after day to work out an acceptable agreement.
Marquis Childs, in Berlin, tells of suspicion growing that the Prussian and Russian totalitarian urges, long held, for domination of the Eurasian heartland were combining to try to realize the goal.
Premier Stalin was pitching nationalism to the German people, with Nazis in the Eastern zone having been given full rights, some achieving positions of power in the new East German Government. An example was George Dertinger, the new Foreign Minister, who had helped to build fascism in Germany.
Rumor had it that the Free Germany Committee, formed in Russia among Germans who renounced Nazism during the war, was being used to form a new German army in the East. Some had returned to Germany to lead extremist parties, as General Vincenz Mueller, head of the Nazi-like National Democratic Union. Others were said to have gone to China and were attached to the Communist military leaders there.
After World War I, German Junker officers had directed formation of the Russian Army.
The owners and managers in Germany, the same who had helped to build up Hitler, wanted to find an outlet for their products in Eastern Europe and Asia, and to this end, they were urging cooperation with the new East German state. The anti-Communist Social Democrats and trade union leaders opposed such an agreement.
The Prussian Junker class of army officers had only one raison d'être, to fight, and so it was natural for them to want to find an outlet for their training in China.
A problem for creating any such working agreement with Germany, however, was that a large chunk of it had been ceded to Poland and another to the Soviet Union. Reversal of those cessions would create independent leaders such as Tito many times over. It would also be difficult to suppress nationalistic fervor for the return of such cities as Breslau and Stettin.
Because Russia lacked the technology to direct organization in China and because German scientists had contributed substantially to Russian development since war's end, Stalin would likely favor a deal providing for effective collaboration with the Germans, just as the mutual non-aggression pact formed with Germany in August, 1939.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of Russia having advanced in other areas besides the development of the atomic bomb at a much faster rate than predicted by American scientists and observers, in air defense and increase of steel production. The Russians had remedied their air deficit by copying captured American B-29's. Their jet interceptors had been proven as good as any in the West. Steel capacity was believed to have surpassed 20 million tons annually, two-thirds that of Germany at the start of the late war.
Only in electronics, radar, did they remain behind. But even there, some progress was being made.
They conclude that such were grave facts but ones which had to be faced.
A letter writer who had been born 67 years earlier in the North Carolina mountains begs to differ with the letter writers who described a disease as "tizzie" or "tussus". Rather it was "pstisic", pronounced "tizick", an hereditary disease common in the mountains of Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina sixty years earlier. He tells of the folk remedies for it and for rheumatism and snakebite.
It was actually called "phizzy", the only cure for it being to turn around three times one way, then four times the other, perform sixteen somersaults in succession, wait exactly thirteen seconds, then jump over a three-foot wide creek with no less than 23 inches of standing water in it, while carrying a frog in one's right hand, a three-year old pregnant dog, brown with two white spots on her head, in the left, and a two-inch birthday cake candle in the right pants pocket. If that did not get rid of the phizzy, then one had to go to a doctor in the city, preferably a phizzologist
A letter writer remarks on the editorial finding, in the President's support in the special Senate election of former New York Governor Herbert Lehman, ingratitude for Senator John Foster Dulles's support of Administration foreign policy, finds equal ingratitude demonstrated by Governor Dewey for the efforts of Governor Lehman, who had made Mr. Dewey by appointing him special prosecutor of Manhattan to clean up organized crime. Now, Mr. Dewey vehemently opposed Mr. Lehman for the Senate.
A letter from the superintendent of the Oxford Orphanage praises the newspaper for its support of orphanages and urges giving during the Thanksgiving period to their campaigns to raise money.
A letter from the Fire Chief expresses appreciation for the newspaper's support of Fire Prevention Week.
Framed Edition
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