The Charlotte News
Monday, May 2, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. representative in the talks with the Soviets regarding the removal of the Berlin blockade met this date with British and French representatives, following a weekend of conferences with State Department officials, briefing them on what had occurred in the talks with the Russian representative the previous week. The day's talks were expected to concern the common plan of procedures for the three Western powers. A meeting between all four powers then might be arranged, presumably later in the week.
Former Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. would not necessarily be plunged into immediate war by an attack on one of the NATO member nations, that the determination of going to war would remain with Congress.
In Shanghai, traffic was suspended on the last railway escape route from the city to south China. The money market crashed at noon after the garrison headquarters outlawed free trading in prewar silver dollars on penalty of death.
The Supreme Court refused to hear a new test case on whether blacks who purchased property in white neighborhoods could be made subject to restrictive covenants. The Court had held a year earlier that such covenants were not enforceable when state action was involved, which included suit to enforce them through the courts. Six white property owners in Maryland asked the Court to hear the case, in which the lower court had held the covenants unenforceable based on the earlier Supreme Court decision. The petitioners argued that the precedent had been misapplied in their case, involving different facts whereby the blacks in question knew of the restrictive covenants when they purchased the properties.
The Court also unanimously upheld, in U.S. v. Wallace & Tiernan Co., 336 US 793, a decision delivered by Justice Hugo Black, the Government's right to use documents in an antitrust case, barred in the lower court on the ground of illegal search and seizure because the grand jury which ordered the documents be produced pursuant to a subpoena was improperly constituted for the systematic exclusion of women, notwithstanding that the issuance of the subpoena, itself, did not violate the Fourth Amendment and was performed under the direction of the lower court.
Congressional hearings got underway
on civil rights legislation in the House Administration subcommittee,
chaired by Congressman Burr Harrison of Virginia, regarding a bill to
abolish the poll tax. Later in the week, a House Labor subcommittee
headed by Representative Adam Clayton Powell
House Speaker Sam Rayburn said that he supported five amendments to the Administration labor bill, to give the President authority to intervene by injunction or plant seizure to end a threatened strike involving the public welfare, to insure freedom of speech on both sides of the the labor controversy, require non-Communist affidavits of both labor and management, provide financial reports of labor organizations to union members and the public, and to require that both sides bargain in good faith. He did not say whether the President had approved the proposed amendments.
Senator Robert Taft, opening the second day of debate on the 300 million dollar Federal aid to education bill, said that it was in the national interest for the Federal Government to aid the states in providing a decent, minimum education for children. In answer to the complaint that Federal aid would cause Federal control of education, he said that the bill exerted a minimum of Federal control.
In New York, the perjury trial of Alger Hiss was postponed for a fifth time, until May 23. The Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to prosecute the case was ill and so the Government requested the continuance.
Also in New York, a summons was issued by a magistrate charging New York Giants manager Leo Durocher with simple assault.
In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a five-year old boy, mute, who often ran away from home and so was chained and padlocked in a crib, died in a fire at the home. The fire appeared to have been started by the boy playing with matches. The mother made a futile effort to save him.
The chief statistician for the Army
general staff, Ernest Blanche, stated in his recent book, You
Can't Win, that there were 50,000 people in the country who liked
to bet and therefore were suckers. Most gambling games, he found,
were crooked, and even when honest, the odds were minuscule that one
could win. There were 2.6 million possible poker hands and 1.3
million would not even contain a single pair. The odds against a
royal flush were 650,000 to 1. The same sort of odds were present in
the game of bridge, or racing or craps. Lotteries were rigged for the
operators, who kept 46 to 55 percent of the take. Gambling, he had
determined, relied on the old P. T. Barnum slogan that a sucker
On the editorial page, "Arms-Aid Needed" tells of some in the Senate looking at the dying patient which was Western Europe and asking how much the medicine would cost to save it. One such person was Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah. He would not likely block the arms aid to Western Europe but without it, the NATO pact would be just another piece of paper lacking a promise of support.
While currently the Berlin blockade crisis appeared nearly over, prompting talk of peace in the cold war, such a peace still needed protection.
"Dr. Thurman Kitchin" pays homage to the retiring Wake Forest College president who would become president emeritus on June 30, 1950, in advance of the move of the College to Winston-Salem. During his twenty-year tenure, enrollment had grown from 300 during World War I to 2,100, and its curriculum and departmental organization had expanded, its financial support increased and a four-year medical school established, all without altering the intimate, friendly atmosphere of the college. Dr. Kitchin had come to be known and loved by the many thousands of students who had matriculated at the college during his years as president.
"Slicing the Pie" tells
of the American taxpayer being tired of government of
By contrast, Congressman Harold Cooley of North Carolina liked the Brannan program because it would not affect flue-cured tobacco prices under parity, which would achieve a new high of 49 cents per pound.
The piece concludes that neither
appeared concerned with the welfare of the people, only with their
special interests
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "When Our Fields Are Green", tells of the average farm worker in the state working only 178 days per year and that a quarter of the acreage produced 75 percent of the agricultural income. North Carolina imported large quantities of milk and 85 percent of its eggs.
Thus, there was room for improvement in dairying, poultry raising, and diversified farming, despite great improvement in those areas in recent decades. The state had a relatively long growing season and dairying called for more diversified crop farming, to grow hays and other sown crops which would fight soil erosion. Such development would add to the state's prosperity.
A Congressional Quarterly study looks at Congressional party-line voting in light of the GOP-Southern Democrat coalition, finds that Republicans were as badly split as Democrats. A table is included.
Drew Pearson tells of Missouri Congressman Clare Magee having turned down an invitation to a cocktail party thrown by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an annual event. He told them that he could not attend because he simply did not agree with that for which they stood, having attended a previous such party in which it was stated that the new Congress would be the first labor government of the nation. He concluded by thanking them with the declining admonition that the cocktails might cause him "to forget the usual amenities that a guest should display to his host."
In the negotiations to lift the Berlin blockade, the U.S. had the trump card of the airlift, but the Russians held two, that of China, where the Communists were taking over both Nanking and Shanghai which were supposed to have held up until the summer, and, second, the threat of Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany, leaving in place the German Communist troops trained by the Soviets. The West had no such force in the event of withdrawal. If the Russians withdrew, the Western troops would either remain and become increasingly unpopular or withdraw, leaving the Communist troops to take over all of Germany; or the Western troops could withdraw except in the industrial Ruhr and the Rhineland, still, however, causing great resentment among Germans. He concludes that the nation which lost the war, Germany, might come out the victor after all.
Former Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall had recently appointed the vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank to become director of finance for Germany. It was significant in that Chase had been trying since before the war to obtain a dominant financial position in Western Germany.
He notes that John J. McCloy, former Chase attorney and close friend of Chase CEO Winthrop Aldrich, had been offered the civilian governorship of the American occupation zone of West Germany to replace General Lucius Clay as military governor. Curtis Calder, another Wall Street tycoon, had been proposed as the replacement for Secretary Royall.
Joseph Alsop tells of new Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson having shifted offices, abolished boards, urged the Joint Chiefs to hasten development of their unified strategy, and ordered the stoppage of work on the supercarrier United States five days after the laying of its hull. The latter, he suggests, was inevitable if Mr. Johnson was to live up to his self-billing as a go-getter administrator.
The carrier was too expensive. The large planes which were to fly from it had not been perfected. And the whole of the operation would have been susceptible to air and submarine attack, necessitating a force of flak ships, smaller carriers for fighter protection, as well as the usual destroyer and other vessel escorts. The consequent overall cost of the task force was estimated at 1.5 to two billion dollars. And the aircraft would not even be expected to land on the supercarrier after taking off from it, necessarily limiting its operations. The project would have only provided the bomber range which a B-26 already could effect. And B-47's were already rendering the B-36 obsolete.
But the primary reason for scrapping the program was that it represented the Navy's anachronistic attempt to take over a major part of offensive operations, when the only nation against whom such a force would be used was a non-naval, land based power, the Soviet Union.
Two questions arose, whether the Navy's carrier aviation was out of balance with the Navy's primary mission and whether the size of the Marine Corps was out of balance with the Marines' mission, both predicated on the Pacific operations in World War II. But no such problems as then confronted the armed forces should arise in a future war, and the Navy and Marines would not be usable against Russia as they were in the island-hopping across the Pacific against the Japanese. The task of the Navy would be limited to anti-submarine warfare in a war with Russia.
The decision to scrap the supercarrier was recognition of this new status of the Navy.
Marquis Childs discusses the decision of GOP Senator Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut to accept an appointment by Democratic Governor Chester Bowles to join the Connecticut Supreme Court and leave the Senate, to which he had been elected in 1946, following active party persuasion to run in the first place. He had always wanted to be on the State Supreme Court and so when the opportunity presented itself, he had no hesitation in accepting, despite being accused by fellow Republicans of turning his back on the party.
He had already been suffering slings and arrows from Republicans for being overly liberal in his moderate-liberal stances.
A great many conscientious members of Congress, observes Mr. Childs, were in like position in both parties, fed up with carping by those who contributed nothing to the common weal.
Such was not true of Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana and his like, who were convinced that what was good for the National Association of Manufacturers was good for the country, or of the professional naysayers as Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire.
Senator Baldwin had been booed at a Hartford dinner recently by members of his own party and such pressure had been placed on him that he likely would resign the Senate well before the December inception date for the judgeship.
Senator Baldwin had done a great deal as Governor to restore the prestige of the Republican Party in Connecticut, but as soon as he got to Washington an effort by the party leaders began to push away his loyal coterie and replace them with those eager to ride the gravy train to power in anticipation of a GOP victory in 1948. So, it was not, in the end, surprising that Senator Baldwin wanted to leave the Senate and political life generally.
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