The Charlotte News
Thursday, July 7, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Brig. General James McCormack, Jr., director of the Atomic Energy Commission's military application division, testified to the joint Atomic Energy Committee that the atomic bomb had completely changed since the advent of the AEC in 1947 and that all production bottlenecks of any size had been eliminated. He said that production of the bomb had been bogged down when the AEC took over management of atomic energy and AEC had infused new life to the process. Production, formerly concentrated in Los Alamos on a custom manufacture basis, was now broadly distributed across the country.
Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, whose charges of mismanagement of AEC had prompted the hearings, responded that he was tired of denigration of the Army during the Manhattan Project.
Committee chairman Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut said that there were no atomic bombs in the arsenal in 1947 when AEC took over production from the Army.
The State Department revealed that Russia had reduced, unilaterally, without explanation, its interest payment on lend-lease repayment to the U.S. by about two-thirds, while making the payment on time on July 1. But about five million dollars was due and the Russians had paid only 1.5 million.
In London, the deputy foreign ministers of the Big Four agreed to exempt Austria from war reparations to the Allies. It allowed, however, Yugoslavia to retain 15 million dollars worth of Austrian assets.
In New York, Governor Thomas Dewey appointed his former campaign foreign policy adviser in both 1944 and 1948, John Foster Dulles, to the Senate seat vacated by Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat, resigning June 28 for longstanding ill health. Mr. Dulles would serve only until December 1, after a special election to fill the seat to be held in November, an election in which Mr. Dulles did not intend to run. Former Governor Herbert Lehman, head of UNRRA after the war, was the likely Democratic candidate—who would win the seat. Senator Wagner had served in the Senate for 23 years. Mr. Dulles would serve as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower from 1953 until his death in 1959.
In Geneva, after most delegates to the 60-nation diplomatic conference on war conventions had departed, the Soviet Union presented its written demand for abolition of atomic warfare to the secretariat of the conference.
In New York, in the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, the Government gave its summation, with U.S. Attorney Thomas Murphy arguing that "uncontradicted facts" proved that Mr. Hiss lied to the grand jury when he claimed not to have provided State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers in February and March, 1938 and when he claimed not to have met Mr. Chambers after the beginning of 1937. The Woodstock typewriter on which Priscilla Hiss had allegedly typed some of the transcribed documents provided Mr. Chambers, the original State Department documents and those in the case allegedly provided Mr. Chambers, formed a triad, he maintained, of incontrovertible proof of Mr. Hiss's guilt. He asked jurors to ignore the "clean-cut, handsome" appearance of Mr. Hiss and his intelligence, as well as the "short and fat" appearance of Mr. Chambers with bad teeth, plus the "demure and attractive" Mrs. Hiss versus the "plain, severe" Mrs. Chambers. These factors were emotional in nature and he wanted the jury to focus on the facts. He said that Mr. Hiss "stinks" as festering roses stunk worse than weeds. Mr. Hiss's heart was "black and cancerous". He denied defense counsel's claim that Mr. Chambers was a "moral leper" and suggested that Mr. Hiss was, being the "bosom pal" of Mr. Chambers, the moral leper. He called Mr. Hiss a "traitor", "another Benedict Arnold, another Judas Iscariot, another Judge Manton."
Well, so it is with your mama.
In Manila, it was reported that four persons had died from a typhoon hitting Cebu.
In Portugal, twenty persons died from a series of heavy thunderstorms and a heat wave taking place during the previous week, as temperatures reached a somewhat sizzling 146 in Coimbra. Thirteen were killed by lightning, six by drowning and one by sunstroke.
"Little Steel", the 72 small steel companies of the nation, formed new contracts with the Steelworkers of America Union. There was a possibility that "Big Steel" would strike on July 16, if no contract were formed by then.
Columnist Westbrook Pegler told a House Labor subcommittee that labor unions had been infiltrated with "despots, criminals and Communists", and that rank and file members had little voice in matters.
The President described the domestic economy as "bullish" and promised his mid-year report to Congress the following week. The President appeared resigned to the fact that Congress would not pass his proposed four billion dollar tax increase, primarily on corporations and the wealthy.
Stock prices started a decline after the President's statement, but then recovered, and prices remained at the top of a recovery begun in mid-June.
Governor Kerr Scott of North Carolina met with the President, discussing politics, the President thanking the Governor again for the appointment of Dr. Frank Graham to fill the Senate seat left vacant in March by the death of J. Melville Broughton. He told the President that during his trip from the Governors' Conference in Colorado, he had passed through the President's hometown of Independence, Mo., which he had enjoyed, and also reported that he saw only four or five mules in Missouri, to which the President responded that he had therefore not visited the right places.
The President nominated Edward Lawson to be Minister to Iceland.
What did he do to deserve that?
In Boston, the National Education Association, meeting in convention, said that it did not wish to reply to the statement of Francis Cardinal Spellman regarding his criticism of the Barden substitute aid to education bill limiting Federal aid to public schools.
In Chicago, police reported that a 13-year old boy first admitted and then denied that he had hanged a young boy, a neighbor, from a rafter in the basement of his family's home. He said that he was nervous when at first he admitted the killing.
In Charleston, S.C., the South Carolina Cosmetologists Association would meet at Folly Beach the following Saturday for their two-day convention. If you have an interest in the cosmos or just wish to find out about the training program for going into space in the not too distant future, once rocketry is improved, you better get on down there.
In Hollywood, actress Virginia Mayo
told of having her bathing suit torn off by a wave hitting her near
Malibu, leaving her au naturel,
buffeted by the waves. A photographer captured two or three
pictures of the scene but only after a woman friend of Ms. Mayo had
come to her rescue with a beach towel. Press agents at the studio for
which Ms. Mayo worked said that they had nothing
On the editorial page, "What About the Pact?" examines some of the liabilities of NATO, that it virtually promised that the U.S. would go to war in the event of attack on one of the member nations, that the alignment of 350 million people in twelve nations might provoke the Soviets to undertake further action, potentially triggering a war, in Central Europe and Scandinavia, that military aid to the Western European members of the pact would cost the U.S. 1.45 billion dollars per year according to the President, and that military aid might ultimately involve troops as well as guns.
The editorial offers, however, that before the idea of NATO was proposed a year earlier and before the Marshall Plan went into effect in spring, 1948, with provisional aid before that, before the Berlin Airlift destroyed the efficacy of the Berlin blockade during the prior year, and before the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey went into effect in mid-1947, the Soviets were not backing down as they appeared to be in 1949. Only that latter condition had given credence to the recent statement by John Foster Dulles that he believed that the Soviets did not want war.
NATO, it suggests, could therefore achieve a balance of power and deter Russian aggression in both Europe and Asia. So, it concludes, NATO appeared worth the estimated 1.45 billion dollars, and more, for the military aid to back it.
"Byrnes on the Warpath" welcomes the decision of former Secretary of State James Byrnes to oppose the Administration's Fair Deal program and its Federal "intervention and regimentation". His comments at Washington & Lee University in that regard had been taken up by conservative Democrats and Republicans as fuel for their attacks on the President's domestic program.
But Mr. Byrnes had responded to these echoes of his remarks by saying that he had not aimed them at the President or Democrats but rather at both parties trying to out-promise one another. He said that his opponents to that view had their right of expression as did he.
The piece thinks that Mr. Byrnes had exploded the myth of Government as Santa Claus and underscored the notion that deficit financing in peacetime was a road to disaster.
Again, the piece and Mr. Byrnes appear to lay the blame for deficit spending on the Fair Deal programs, while those amounted only to a pittance compared to the 27 billion of the 44 billion dollar budget consumed by defense and foreign aid spending plus the budgets of independent agencies and departments. The problem, a problem more of the age itself, was how to stop war without vast military apparati in place during peacetime, threatening to bankrupt mutually the powers emerging on opposite sides after the war. The only way to have effectively reduced deficit spending was not to eradicate necessary Federal programs to ameliorate poverty and inferior levels of education in the poorer pockets of the country, the absence of which would only cause the devolution of society back to the depression which had started the whole cycle during the Twenties, but rather to find the way out of the redundant cycles of depression and war into which the world had fallen periodically through the centuries.
"Shift in Birth Rates" tells of the Population Reference Bureau reporting in the July Population Bulletin that between 1940 and 1947 the birth rate among women who were college graduates had risen by 81 percent compared to an increase of only 29 percent in the same period for women with only five years of grade school. The birth rate above two children per family was still 87 percent higher for the latter group than the former in 1947, but far less than the 165 percent differential recorded in 1940. In every category of birth rate, college educated women led in percentage of increase during that period. The results countered the longstanding belief that the more education one got the less was the tendency toward having more than two children.
To explain its findings, the report stated that birth control, originally in the hands only of the wealthy who least needed it, now had come into general usage by those with less education. In Europe, groups with the lowest income were producing the smallest families.
While there were reservations about the findings, if they proved true over time, it suggests, there would be less concern about the prospect of lower mental and physical standards of the human race through the coming centuries.
They are still producing like rabbits, always will because of the human hormonal dynamics in youth, when wisdom is needed most and found most usually wanting in varying degrees. Beyond the slow process of generational education both conventionally and experientially, there is little recipe available, which also preserves democracy and does not go the way of Hitler and eugenics, to conquer that complex. And with world war contained and pandemic disease ameliorated in the postmodern world, there is no longer a check, through battle and plagues, on this natural human tendency of overpopulation—such that now we have a nut running for president, who would not understand a sociological explanation of unsavory world events if it bit him where the moon don't shine, proposes walls and legislative bars to immigration, probably eventually mass extermination, as a remedy for the basic pattern which has beset humankind from the time of the Garden. He and his ardent followers simply do not understand the fundamentals of the human dynamic and human history, any more than the ancient Romans did.
What would you expect from a spoiled brat who is good at one thing—salesmanship.
And the Republicans, professing to repudiate loudly his repeated expressions of bigotry and racism, look nonetheless for ways to lie to the American people about his opponent, professing yesterday, in a disgraceful display, to suggest that former Secretary of State Clinton had "lied" to Congress about her e-mails, simply because her generalized testimony to Congress regarding over 50,000 e-mails sent and received via her home server in her official capacity as Secretary between 2009 and 2013, differed in minor respects from that which the FBI actually found after nearly a year of close analysis of the e-mails by 100 FBI agents, the result of which was that no "reasonable prosecutor" would seek a criminal indictment for anything they had found.
And this arrogant bunch of blockhead Republicans in the Congress, who are bound for home for keeps come November, who have, as no other Congress in the history of this country, refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, find, strangely, adequate time to hold hearings in July of an election year on this nonsense, e-mails sent four to eight years ago, following the practice of Secretary Clinton's two predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, trying the while to throw a wrench in the works of the election, only because they want the puppet Conny Donny as their little manipulandum, especially to obtain their preference in a Supreme Court nominee, to continue artificially thereby to hold sway by minority rule over the rest of the country.
And if you are so helplessly naive as to believe Conny Donny is "self-financed", you need to read a little more and get out a calculator. The actual scorecard on the 50 largest contributors to campaign financing in 2016 among the so-called unlimited "super Political Action Committees", contributing the bulk of the financing, shows 32 Republican-leaning financiers, contributing 189.1 million dollars, to 15 Democratic-leaning financiers, contributing 114.3 million, with three "independents" contributing 11.6 million. Who is responsible for that tawdry mess but the former five-Justice Republican majority of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case in 2010, eviscerating McCain-Feingold campaign finance limitations on the trumped-up rationale of freedom of speech for corporations worth billions of dollars. Poor things, if we limited their free political speech so that they cannot continue to brainwash the American public in the political arena as they have in the cornflakes and toothpaste arenas. What would the Founders have said about their concept of individual "free speech" being extended to multi-national corporations with such unprecedentedly huge amounts of money at their disposal, brought about through lax enforcement over time of the antitrust laws against monopolies and the concept of the free-market run amok, possessed of the means of instant national and international mass communication, unknown and without conception in the minds of the Founders, even in the mind of the great inventor Ben Franklin?
If it is not so, if it is not all the result of cheap, partisan hacksmanship, you arrogant Republican Congressional punks with big, big mouths, then where are the hearings on Secretaries Powell and Rice? who did the same thing as Secretary Clinton. And where are the referrals on them to the FBI for investigation for false statements to the inspector general of the State Department, as they, too, professed belief, no doubt as honestly held as that of Secretary Clinton, that they had not sent from their private home computer servers classified information, when, according to the inspector general, both did. You people are going home. Your arrogance knows no end.
The point is that there is, as the FBI in its wisdom found, a great difference between a conscious, deliberate "lie" and an inadvertent misstatement regarding a great volume of information which is from years prior, from which a few isolated, cherry-picked facts are then plucked, after a lengthy and detailed study, to suit political fancies and try to obtain the conclusion which these political fanciers desired, frustrated by an objective and exhaustive process conducted by the FBI—a partisan attempt, not seen since the days of HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy, to trap in a web of innuendo a former Government official who, without question, served her post honorably and well.
Meanwhile, these same Republicans refuse to pass gun laws to prevent persons on terror watch lists and no-fly lists from obtaining guns and to ban generally assault weapons useful only by the military in battle, so that the stupid constituents back home who think it neat to have these type weapons for toys, to look and act tough like the action actors on the big screen, will continue to vote for them as the lemmings they are, awaiting death at the hands of people, just like them, with no criminal record of consequence, and so able to obtain these weapons, made for killing, with the plan in mind to kill, and so, eventually, finding no defensive use for the weapons as nobody in fact bothers these paranoid idiots, develop a need within their insanity for their use in mass killing offensively.
This is what this Congress of Republicans does with the taxpayers' money. These arrogant Republican punks today on display are the real liars who ought be retired by the voters come election day.
Under whose watch, under whose resourceful intelligence, under whose execution of that intelligence was the preeminent terrorist of the age, Usama Bin Laden, eliminated?
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Meeting the Issue", praises Charlotte for its City Council having approved a raise of six cents in the property tax rate to bring in the revenue necessary to meet the budget, 25 cents less than what would have been necessary, according to City Manager Henry Yancey, had it not been for the revenue generated by ABC-controlled liquor sales.
It urges a similar exertion of willpower by Greensboro to raise its necessary revenue for programs needed for progress.
Drew Pearson tells of the AMA distributing postcards through doctors warning that they would seek the defeat of members of Congress voting for the President's health program, the centerpiece of which was compulsory health insurance. A chief sponsor of the legislation, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, reported receipt of hundreds of these postcards, each one filling in a blank for the number of votes in the sender's family. The President had also received them. One sender, despite actually supporting the health program, reported to Senator Pepper that he was compelled to fill one out by a doctor performing surgery on his wife. Others reported similar experiences.
Which gives rise to the question: how many postcards could a doctor dictate to his patient during a prostate examination?
Five hundred aging veterans of past wars were waiting to enter the National Soldiers' Home in Washington but there was no room. The administrators of the Home wanted to make room, had 33 million dollars with which to do so, but it was held in trust by the Treasury Department and the veterans could not obtain its benefits without an act of Congress, though the fund had been contributed by the veterans. The Budget Bureau had turned down a request to release 16.7 million dollars to expand the Home, not done since 1911, and that had influenced Congress to withhold the funding.
The Bendix strike of 6,000 workers at South Bend, Ind., had nearly grounded the Berlin Airlift and so the Air Force had summoned both sides to the Pentagon finally to settle it. He relates of the substance of the meeting, which only took 24 hours to resolve the strike.
Which gives rise to another question.
The President had told Representative Mike Mansfield of Montana that Representative Mike Kirwan of Ohio had done a splendid job in navigating through the House the public power bill, which, according to Mr. Mansfield, faced a hard time in the Senate.
Marquis Childs discusses the competing theories of what remedial measures to take regarding the economy, in part influenced by politics, even affecting the recommendations by the Council of Economic Advisers.
The New Deal wing of the Democratic Party favored the Keynesian approach, public works and public investment, as a means to ward off the recession. The principal exponents of this method were Senators John Sparkman of Alabama, James Murray of Montana, and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Their proposal called for spending at least 15 billion dollars, part of which would guarantee private investment. Of the three members of the Council, Leon Keyserling most favored this approach.
The Federal Reserve Board, by contrast, favored taking no drastic action at this early stage, had been taking steps to ease credit to avoid the deflationary trend. Controls over consumer installment credit had been relaxed, stock market margin requirements reduced, and member bank reserve requirements lowered. Their view was, essentially, that rushing in with the mustard plaster before the patient really needed such a drastic remedy could create a serious risk.
Which gives rise to yet another question.
The group wanting more drastic action appeared to forget that 1949 was exerting different economic pressures from those during the New Deal. During the early Thirties, the public debt was only 22.5 billion dollars, whereas, postwar, it had ballooned, because of the war, to 250 billion, creating limits to further deficit financing, capable of deepening the recession.
The Progressive Party of former Vice-President Henry Wallace, seeking to exploit the situation, proclaimed that a depression was underway. Mr. Childs regards it as wishful thinking and propaganda suited to the Soviets.
On the right, Southern Democrats such as Senator Walter George of Georgia, along with ultraconservative and reactionary Republicans, desired economy and a balanced budget, ignoring the while the previous attempt of President Hoover along the same lines during the Great Depression following the fall of 1929. Such an attempt to balance the budget under these conditions would only aggravate the problem.
Mr. Childs suggests that a substantial tax cut for individuals would ordinarily be effective but for the fact that the GOP-controlled 80th Congress a year earlier had reduced taxes and thus fanned the flames of inflation which had already been raging. He cites that action as an example of bad timing.
James Marlow discusses the housing bill as it relates to the present slum dweller, the apocryphal
As the work of slum clearance was being done, the Government stipulated that the displaced former slum dwellers had to have a place to live for the community to qualify for the funding. These former slum dwellers would obtain first option on low-cost public housing. Thus, the cities wishing slum clearance would likely start with Government help in constructing such housing.
The Public Housing Administration would check, investigate and determine which cities qualified for the funding and how much would be provided.
A letter writer wants the Police Department cleaned up as she had experienced rude treatment from a police officer for turning right onto a one-way street in an absent-minded manner. The officer, whom she names, then forced her to double-park as he gave her a ticket. She sought to complain to his captain, was informed by a woman that he was out of town, the woman then rudely chastising her for the complaint. She returned the following day, spoke to the captain, who also treated her rudely. He warned her that she would receive rough treatment if she went to court rather than paying the fine.
She then called the City Manager, who was courteous.
She concludes that the police needed lessons in manners from Emily Post and Dale Carnegie.
A letter writer responds to the June 21 editorial, "Separation of Church and State", which she finds unacceptable as contradicting her Catholic principles, as did the June 29 editorial, "Statement of Principles". She finds the latter to have imposed restrictions amounting to discrimination by saying that it would not tolerate attacks on religion as the debate was not about religion per se. She finds, however, that the editors would deprive the 2.5 million children attending parochial schools from Federal aid to education under the bill proposed by Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina.
She is also confused, does not understand the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and how it works, in perfect conjunction with freedom of religious belief. She fails to regard that the reason for that clause was the constant recurrence of civil wars which had beset England through the centuries regarding the Church of England, and whether it should be Catholic or Protestant. It is not really that complicated.
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