The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 3, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. stated that it would allow no Russian "peace maneuver" to disrupt the increasing unity of the Western nations. Secretary of State Acheson rejected the offer of Josef Stalin to meet with the President somewhere behind the iron curtain, saying that the offer was only a political maneuver to gain favor internationally. Mr. Acheson said that it would be useless for the President to travel such distance only to reaffirm that which both Russia and the U.S had pledged before the U.N., the commitment to peace. Mr. Acheson blamed the failure to gain a permanent peace on the obstructionism practiced by the Soviets.

The Navy indicated that to meet the President's proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, it would need to deactivate 72 ships and cut its manpower strength by 30,000, plus a five percent reduction in aircraft. Overall, however, the fleet would increase by 15 ships under the budget.

In Budapest, Josef Cardinal Mindszenty told a tribunal trying him for treason that he committed most of the acts with which he was charged but denied ever seeking to overthrow the Communist Government. He was accused along with six other defendants.

The Government of Hungary expelled an American diplomat, Stephen Koczak, stating its suspicion that he was spying.

Oregon Senator Wayne Morse said that the President's labor bill did not have a chance of passage in its current form and would need extensive revision to be acceptable to a majority of the Senate. Meanwhile, a House Labor subcommittee approved, along party lines by a vote of 7 to 5, the repeal of Taft-Hartley and reinstatement of the Wagner Labor Relations Act without change.

Frank Porter Graham, UNC president, serving as an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, was labeled a security risk by Congressmen Edward Hebert of Louisiana and John Rankin of Mississippi, both members of HUAC in the previous Congress. Mr. Hebert said that Dr. Graham was found to have helped, directed, or to be a member of 18 organizations deemed by the Attorney General "subversive" or in sympathy with Communists. Mr. Rankin added that there was an active Communist organization operating on the campus of UNC.

We think that the headquarters may have been at the Scuttlebutt.

Whatever the case, Dr. Graham would be appointed by Governor Kerr Scott to the Senate the following month, after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled in favor of UNC receiving a bequest of 1.5 million dollars from the estate of William Ackland, whose will had originally provided the bequest for a museum of art at Duke, declined by the University. The Court reversed the Federal District Court which had held that Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., named with UNC as an alternate beneficiary, should receive the bequest. The Court of Appeals ruled that UNC was better positioned to carry out the desires of the testator. The late former Governor O. Max Gardner had been counsel for UNC on the matter before his death in early 1947 as he was preparing to leave New York to take his post as Ambassador to Great Britain. His law firm continued the representation. Mr. Gardner's son said that his father had regarded it as the greatest legal case of his career.

Ackland Art Museum, which deliberately appears as a mausoleum from the exterior, as it is one, bearing the remains of Mr. Ackland—that which Duke had found objectionable—was established on the campus of UNC in 1958 and remains. The old Scuttlebutt, however, is no more. But that which was next door, wherein rumours had it that the interiors for an affair to remember were shot in 1967, still is—as is this.

Emery Wister of The News reports of Judge Wilson Warlick being sworn in after confirmation finally as the Federal District Court Judge for the Western District of North Carolina, a seat to which he had been appointed the previous March but having had his confirmation held up by the previous Republican-controlled Congress.

In Washington, the judge in the case of Mildred Gillars, accused of treason for her Nazi propaganda broadcasts as "Axis Sally" during the war, ruled that the witness who only affirmed his oath to testify truthfully was nevertheless competent to testify. The defense had contended that because the witness stated that he did not believe in rewards or punishments in the hereafter, he was not competent to testify. The witness became the second person to testify that Ms. Gillars had played a role in "Vision of Invasion", a radio dramatization broadcast during the war, alleged as one of the acts of treason. Treason requires under the Constitution that each act be proved by at least two witnesses.

In Cleveland, O., a man complained about the smell of his wife's paints and sought a restraining order from a judge, who issued it pending investigation by the Domestic Relations Bureau. The husband added that his wife did not know how to paint. But she countered that he was not home enough to smell her paints.

In Thomasville, N.C., Dugan Aycock sank his 114th shot on the ninth hole at the Thomasville Country Club to finish his eight-mile "round" for the March of Dimes. That is all it tells us.

We think we have figured out who "Mr. X" was this week: Eliot Ness.

On the editorial page, "Is This the Same Harry?" recalls the President in May, 1946, in an attempt to break the nationwide rail strike after Government takeover of the railroads had failed to do so, having asked Congress for legislation to permit injunctions, loss of seniority of striking workers, drafting of striking rail workers, and criminal penalties of violators. The strike was called off.