The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 31, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Paris at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, according to French sources, the three Western powers voted against Russia's proposal to invite a delegation from the Communist-dominated German People's Congress to appear at the conference. The three Western powers also conferred on the dual currency issue in Berlin.

The State Department ordered the closing of the U.S. consulate at Mukden in Manchuria, which the Communists had kept isolated for the previous six months.

In La Paz, Bolivia, strikers hurled dynamite from hilltop redoubts in a battle with Bolivian troops trying to maintain order after the weekend rioting in the Andean tin mines. Bolivia was under a Government-declared siege as a result. A U.S. citizen continued to be held hostage by the strikers. At least 29 persons, including two American engineers, had been killed, with two miners killed and six others wounded the previous day. The Government blamed the rightist nationalist revolutionary movement for the uprising.

General Lucius Clay, former military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany, retired this date from the Army. He had recently come home from Germany.

The House Armed Services Committee began its hearings into potential conflicts of interest between new Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and the award of contracts to Consolidated Vultee Corp. for the B-36 bomber. Mr. Johnson had been a board member and the attorney for Consolidated before becoming Secretary of Defense, and executives of Consolidated had given generous contributions to the Truman campaign the previous year, which Mr. Johnson had been instrumental in collecting.

Senator Millard Tydings proposed that all members of Congress take a five percent pay cut should they pass the proposal to make across-the-board cuts of five percent in the Federal budget for all departments and agencies.

Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal would be called to testify the following day before the joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee investigating charges brought by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper that Mr. Lilienthal had mismanaged the AEC.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in N.L.R.B. v. Crompton-Higland Mills, Inc., 337 U.S. 217, delivered by Justice Harold Burton, that an N.L.R.B. cease and desist order was justified on its findings of facts regarding its determination that a union had to be notified before a substantially higher wage increase could be granted during contract negotiations than that which the company had been willing to grant during negotiations with the union representative, unless the increase had been rejected by the union. The Court specifically upheld the Board decision that it was an unfair labor practice for a textile mill to raise wages twelve days after contract talks with the CIO Textile Workers Union of America had transpired, that such conduct violated the duty of the employer under the National Labor Relations Act to engage in collective bargaining and, in effect, coerced the employees to accept the wages offered in lieu of union negotiations.

Justices William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge differed on part II of the decision, holding that there was no need for the order of the N.L.R.B. to go further to require the employer to undertake affirmative remedial steps as posting notices of the employer's action, thus dissented to that part of the decision.

In New York, the trial began of Alger Hiss on a charge of perjury before the Federal grand jury the previous fall, regarding his claim that he had not provided secret documents from the State Department to confessed former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers, as well as his claim that he had not talked to Mr. Chambers at all in February or March, 1938, when Mr. Chambers alleged the documents were passed to him. Jury selection was in process.

In New York, stocks hit a new low for 1949, with the leading stocks declining on average three cents to around $3 per share.

In Hamlet, N.C., a policeman had been shot and was near death as a massive manhunt was underway for three men in a car, one of whom had allegedly shot the police officer as he tried to serve a warrant on the man for the murder of the man's wife and two children. The manhunt involved police and sheriff's officers from surrounding counties and two South Carolina counties, plus Highway Patrolmen.

In Montreat, N.C., the Southern Presbyterian Conference continued, with a proposal being debated whether to apologize to the estate of a Greensboro man who had left stock to the Church. The Church had sued his estate for fraud for alleged mishandling of the stock, a suit eventually dismissed. No decision was reached on the resolution.

Tom Schlesinger of The News tells of the chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Hugh Bennett, describing as miracles the one-day demonstrations he had witnessed across the country in soil conservation. He was in Charlotte to see the results of the one-day demonstration the previous October on the Kelly brothers' farm, rejuvenating a farm which had depleted soil to make it productive again, utilizing community labor and donated equipment, all performed in a day. He placed the Kelly farm among the top such miracle operations. He predicted that by increasing present facilities, the job of major conservation in the country could be completed by 1970.

Well, it won't matter as we'll all be dead by then from the atomic bomb.

Emery Wister of The News reports of a new twenty-dollar bill issued by the Treasury which had a new, updated back with the Truman Balcony added to the image of the White House, plus some new shrubbery. The bills had caused an initial stir with some local residents as counterfeit tens and twenties had been showing up in the vicinity in recent months, triggering a spate of complaints about the new bills. The face of the twenty, bearing the likeness of President Andrew Jackson, had not been changed.

On page 4-B, the story appears of the Athlete of the Year award recipient for Charlotte, Don Thomas.

On the editorial page, "Poker at Paris" tells of the poker game between the West and Russia at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting. But the Western ministers did not expect agreement, believed that Russia called the meeting only to sound out the Western demands, which included a federal German government for the entire country, operating under the new West German constitution, with a four-power council overseeing certain aspects of government, assuring that industry would remain non-military, among other things.