The Charlotte News
Monday, December 5, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that HUAC investigator Louis Russell said that the Committee had evidence that in 1943 the U.S. sent a shipment of uranium material to Russia, and that two other shipments were also made, one of which was from Canada. In addition, the State Department had arranged for Russia to receive heavy water. The allegation had been made the previous year by former Congressman John McDowell of Pennsylvania, a member of HUAC defeated for re-election. Mr. Russell also said that there was no evidence that deceased FDR aide Harry Hopkins was involved. He also said that the Air Force captain who alleged the previous week that Mr. Hopkins had provided information to the Soviets during the war whenever they needed it, would testify before HUAC during the afternoon of this date.
In China, the provisional capital at Chengtu was being evacuated, with Nationalist Government officials going to Formosa. Communist troops were heading toward Chengtu from the former provisional capital, Chungking, which had fallen to the Communists the previous week.
The FHA said that its new anti-discrimination rule, banning FHA-guaranteed financing to any property which was subject to a restrictive covenant to prevent renting or selling of the property to persons of certain races, religions, or national origins, would not prevent property owners from selecting the tenant they wished or selling to whomever they wished. It only required the mortgagor to refrain from filing of record any such covenant until such time as the mortgage was paid or the FHA mortgage insurance terminated and that the mortgage would contain a provision which would allow the mortgagee to accelerate the balance upon violation of the provision.
As anticipated, former Assistant Secretary of State William Benton was appointed to the Senate seat of Republican Raymond Baldwin by Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut, former head of OPA. Senator Baldwin was resigning to take a position as Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, also appointed by Governor Bowles.
Coal miners returned to work after a brief walkout on December 1 following the end of the three-week hiatus in the strike regarding the UMW welfare and pension fund payments. John L. Lewis had promptly ended the latter strike and ordered the miners to return for three-day work weeks.
In Pittsburgh, some steel prices would soon increase, according to an industry spokesman, because of rising production costs.
In Northern Germany, ten persons were killed and sixteen injured when winds reaching 60 mph toppled war-weakened buildings. Five died in Berlin.
In Ashland, Ky., former Congressman Andrew May, 74, entered Federal prison to begin his 8 to 24-month sentence for his 1947 conviction for receiving bribes on war contracts from the Garsson brothers, convicted with him.
In Evansville, Ind., a 22-year old Florida State law student confessed to the hammer-slaying of his Evansville High School sweetheart, 16, who supposedly, according to him, had asked that they die in each other's arms. The girl was five months pregnant. He said that they had left Evansville a week earlier with the intention to be married the following day in Florida. But then she changed her mind and told him that they were doing wrong and should die in each other's arms. They then agreed that he would shoot her and then himself. But when he tried to load his rifle, a piece fell off and they became concerned that it would not work, and so he took the hammer from his tool chest and told his beloved to bend over the car. After hitting her four or five times on the head, cracking open her skull, he buried his darling's body under some leaves. He then drove to a bridge to afford a storybook ending to the tale of star-crossed love, tried to jump but lost his nerve. He entered a plea of guilty to unpremeditated murder and sought no leniency from the court. His name was Mr. Slay.
In Long Beach, Calif., five persons were killed in a crash of a Beechcraft Bonanza airplane at the Long Beach Municipal Airport. The plane stalled while trying to take off.
In Belvedere, S.C., six men were killed and three injured in a head-on collision of two cars. Three of the men were soldiers from Georgia.
In Chester, S.C., a man was shot and in critical condition. A woman sitting in his car with him had shot him and then he was able to start the car and pursue her after she jumped out, running her down. He then put her back in the car and drove to a doctor's office. The woman suffered a fractured shoulder and other injuries. The Sheriff had not yet determined what had caused the shooting.
In York, S.C., the defense case began in the trial of Nathan Corn, accused of murdering his employer, George Beam. He presented a witness who claimed to have bought an oil meter from Mr. Beam, in the fuel oil business. The prosecution contended that after the murder, two meters were missing. The other meter, the defense claimed, was purchased by a Charlotte man. The prosecution was contending that Mr. Corn murdered his boss to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company. The defendant sought to establish that the killing did not occur in the employer's warehouse.
In Los Angeles, Shirley Temple
received a divorce from actor John Agar
In Hollywood, famed Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya, 73, died of burns suffered when her bed caught fire from a lit cigarette. She had come to the country in 1923.
Also in Hollywood, actress-singer Betty
Hutton was at home recovering from a sprained back suffered while
bouncing in a net during the shooting of a scene
In Savannah, Ga., a courthouse porter went to the post office to deliver a letter and found that it needed 12 more cents of postage, consisting of four stamps. But by the time he added them, the postal clerk determined that the stamps had boosted the weight such that three more cents was needed.
He may be there until Christmas
trying to mail that letter
On the editorial page, "Civil Rights and Housing" ventures that it might take months to find out the precise meaning of the anti-discrimination rule of FHA, preventing prospective guarantee of financing of any housing which had restrictive covenants on race, religion or national origin.
It finds the provision to be in conflict with the will of the Congress, as such a law had failed to win approval in 1949 by a substantial margin, that it was a move for minority votes in the 1950 mid-term elections, and that it stood as a warning to the proponents of Federal aid to education that such efforts would be attempted once the schools became dependent on Federal aid.
While the President's effort to have his civil rights program enacted was laudable, it finds his tactics likely to cause distress to many proponents of civil rights on the theory that the people responded better to persuasion than coercion in changing their thinking.
"The Submarine Menace" finds new chief of Naval operations Admiral Forrest Sherman to be alert in facing the menace of the Schnorkel submarine of Russia, undetectable by all sonar and other detection devices, and urging the Navy to undertake the research necessary to counter it. The fact had not been broached in the hearings on the Army-Navy conflict regarding unification.
It finds Admiral Sherman entirely correct in giving first priority to this problem, for the Navy could not hope to protect its ships on the high seas as long as they were subject to attack by these submarines operating in stealth and at long range.
"Nalle Foundation" tells of the Nalle Clinic Foundation established in Charlotte in 1947 for the purpose of promoting medical education, research and charity in administration of medical care. It had made disbursements to Mercy Hospital's building fund, the streptomycin fund of the County Sanatorium, the Charlotte Memorial Hospital, and encouraged young physicians of the Carolinas to establish a general practice in the states by supplying a $200 per month stipend during training.
"Essay on Passing" bemoans the careless drivers who pass when neither time nor space properly permitted, causing other drivers to have to steer clear, possibly causing accidents in which the passer was not involved directly. The safe driver remained at the mercy of this menace of the roads.
The best way to teach them a lesson is to play chicken with them every time you encounter one of these malcontent reprobates of the highways. Instead of slowing down and being a weaselly little appeaser, perhaps going onto the shoulder to avoid potential collision, just gun it full blast and smile a demonic grin. They will never pass unsafely again.
Drew Pearson contrasts the efforts of the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the inebriated Senators of the Appropriations subcommittee traveling abroad in terms of their impact on foreign relations. He describes in detail the antics of the Senators, headed by Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, who had made news by complaining of lack of adequate hospitality from Sweden, threatening to terminate its Marshall Plan aid as a result. The subcommittee had gone to Franco's Spain despite no Marshall Plan dollars being spent there. Senator Thomas claimed that a member of the subcommittee, presumably Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, had a relative there he wanted to visit.
While Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina and Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia did not partake, other Senators imbibed publicly in Spain until drunk, making fools of themselves and harming the reputation of the country.
Then after the weekend siesta, they flew back to Paris where they announced that dictator Franco should receive a 100 million dollar American loan.
He notes that perhaps the Swedes were wise in not rolling out the red carpet for the Thomas committee.
The Jaycees of Amarillo, Texas, on the other hand, had a program they called "universal understanding", through which they formed contacts abroad by mail to exchange letters with groups of young men. The recipients of the letters in Salzburg, Austria, formed their own Austrian-American Youth Bridge and wanted to form their own Jaycees, a move, he notes, which required the Government to change the Austrian Constitution. The Amarillo Jaycees were sending a representative to Austria in 1950 to establish better acquaintance.
He suggests that this kind of people-to-people understanding was doing more than perhaps even the Marshall Plan to establish a foundation for peace, and a lot more than the drunken, junketing Senators.
Marquis Childs, in London, tells of parallels existing in Britain, in labor and politics, with their counterparts in the U.S. CIO's positions resembled those of the Labor Party while AFL, though more conservative, nevertheless had a goal of active participation in politics.
On the political side, the Conservative Party, just as the Republicans, were divided and dispirited since their defeat to Labor in 1945. They manifested an outward show of confidence in the coming elections of 1950 and had a war chest of millions of dollars provided by big industrialists with which to spread propaganda. Below the surface, however, the level of confidence was not so great. There was even a suspicion that the Conservatives did not want to win for the responsibility attached to leadership.
The Conservatives had the isolationist Lord Beaverbrook, all for Empire, as the Republicans had their isolationist Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.
The overwhelming majority view on the coming election was that Labor would win with a reduced majority. Labor had provided so many benefits to so many people that it was believed that it had to constitute the majority. Meanwhile the Conservatives were perceived as having no positive program, that their policies might lead to unemployment.
The minority view, possessed by several highly informed editors who did not want a Conservative victory, was that the Conservatives might win, based on polls which were showing that Conservatives had support from 49 percent of the population while Labor only enjoyed 39 percent support, with the balance to the independent parties, the reverse of the 1945 results. The poll appeared to confirm the intuition that a sizable majority of the people had rejected regimentation and bungling by Labor.
But it was also to be remembered that a lot could occur in the course of the three months or so before the election, as judged by the occurrences, contrary to polls and pundits, in the U.S. election of 1948.
Robert C. Ruark, in San Francisco, tells of the Los Angeles murder of a six-year old girl by an elderly man who was described by the psychiatrist employed by the District Attorney as having acted out of fear rather than sexual deviancy, that he actually had loved the little girl and missed her, that he was motivated by a libido suffering from senility and lack of aggression with older women. His latent tendencies had surfaced after the break-up of his marriage.
But the man had hacked the child to pieces after molesting her, as he had done to other children. At the time of the killing, he was a fugitive from a morals charge, having jumped bail. The psychiatric analysis was of little comfort to the child's parents.
While Mr. Ruark says that he was empathetic to a point with the societal and psychological problems of the killer or robber, he was more concerned about the victim. He asserts that in crimes against children, it was less important to be concerned about the analysis of the perpetrator than it was to assure adequate punishment for the crime. He favors life imprisonment for a second sex offense, saving the trouble, he says, of executing the person later "when he blows his top and stuffs some kiddie in a culvert". And, he concludes, it would be much easier on the kids.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of being branded before the U.N. the previous week by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky as "bandits of the pen" and "congenital murderers". They suggest that every reporter writes from a particular perspective, causing the world's events to seem important or unimportant, serious or comic.
They describe their own perspective as finding it remiss not to point out that it was no longer the secure, happy world with nations living in isolation guarded by distances and oceans, as in their grandparents' day. In a world of increasing state power, it could neither be denied that two forms of government orientation to the people had emerged, that in which the government served the people and that in which the government lorded over the people, treating them as serfs and vassals. The latter was true of Hitler's regime and of the Soviet Union. That a war had to occur to stop Hitler was the result of the weakness of the democracies.
If the country faltered or lapsed into self-indulgence in the face of the new challenge thus presented, it would be defeated. And blinking the reality before them would be to engage in such folly.
They conclude that if plain reporting made them "bandits of the pen", then they wore the title as a badge of honor.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Attention Is Called To The Brilliantly Colored Leaves To Be Seen Hereabouts During the Eleventh Month Of The Year:
"Nature shows its treasure trove
In the vibrant month of Nov."
And, by Jove, when no sound appears,
On that certain Eve, not even the meese,
You know it is the time of cheer,
The ho-ho-ho mienof latter Dec.
Framed Edition
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