The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 14, 1949
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. Steel and three other large steel producers appeared to balk at the President's fact-finding board recommendation for payment by the companies of a ten-cent increase in pension and social insurance benefits, renewing the threat of a steel strike at the expiration of the ten-day extension of the 60-day strike moratorium to consider the board report.
Secretary of State Acheson charged that Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania would be charged in the U.N. General Assembly with violations of human rights. He said that the three Soviet satellite countries had turned down requests to appoint commissions, as provided in their peace treaties, to inquire into the charges, and that they had repeatedly violated the treaties' human rights clauses, which required fair trials and recognition of individual freedoms. The three countries claimed not to have violated human rights clauses and were unwilling to appoint the commissions, calling into question, said the Secretary, their good faith in signing the treaties.
The British delegation to the fourth annual meeting of governors of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington did not make a statement in reply to the IMF suggestion the previous day that countries in short supply of dollars consider devaluation of their currencies. The silence suggested that the British disfavored such a move.
A former Communist newsman, Howard Rushmore, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee this date that Earl Browder, once the head of the American Communist Party, had held secret meetings in the White House with FDR in 1944. He stated that the information had come from Benjamin Gitlow, a Communist Party official. Mr. Rushmore also reported that Mrs. Browder received help from both Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Eleanor Roosevelt to avoid deportation in 1940 and that the Government had overlooked her illegal re-entry from Canada. The subcommittee was considering a bill sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada to provide the Government greater power to block entry of subversive aliens and deport those present in the country.
The President named Maj. General Anthony McAuliffe, famous for his "nuts" reply to the Germans' entreaty to surrender after surrounding his 103rd Infantry Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944, to be the new chief of the Army Chemical Corps to replace Maj. General Alden Waitt, relieved of his duties and retired by Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray for his involvement in the investigation of influence peddling in Government contracts.
The President also named defeated Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky to be the chief Republican delegate to the U.N., replacing John Foster Dulles, who earlier had been appointed by Governor Dewey to the Senate seat vacated by retiring New York Senator Robert Wagner. He renominated Warren Austin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phillip Jessup as the other three delegates.
In Pennsylvania, the victory of John Saylor over the mother of deceased Congressman and World War II veteran, Robert Coffey, Jr., to fill his seat, was viewed as an attack on the President's Fair Deal domestic program. Mr. Saylor had campaigned on the premise that the program sought to create a "welfare state".
In McAlester, Okla., a coal mine caved in, killing one man and injuring three others, while 135 miners escaped unhurt.
Near Gaffney, S.C., a youth claimed that the Asbury School District owed him $540 for allegedly terminating his contract to drive the district's school bus during the previous term.
In Columbia, S.C., a University of South Carolina associate professor of engineering, charged with pistol-whipping a nurse the previous August 3, had, according to testimony during trial by the alleged victim, taken pictures of her at Myrtle Beach without her bathing suit. She said that both expressed interest in photography and he had proposed marriage to her several times, telling her first that he was single and then that a divorce from his wife was pending. She had refused his proposals and he allegedly had threatened to send the pictures of her to a camera club in Columbia if she did not marry him, but subsequently agreed to destroy the negatives. He was charged with burglary with intent to commit murder and assault and battery with intent to kill.
In Charlotte, an FBI agent said that a Charlotte man had confessed to the $41,500 robbery of a Salem Crossroads, S.C., store, taking the proprietor's life savings. The man, who had been arrested in a small country church in Georgia during the morning, said that he and another man—already under arrest after being caught by the Hickory police the previous week following his picking up a hitchhiker and driving his new 1949 black Ford at speeds of over 100 mph while drunk—, had committed the robbery. Two other men were, according to the new arrestee, also involved in the plan.
Police had not yet recovered the loot from the robbery, of which the new arrestee claimed to have received only $6,000.
The "man without fingerprints", implicated by the new arrestee, claimed, however, that he could prove his innocence through an alibi and that the arrested man was "put up to" his story by some form of coercion. He was therefore not worried.
But without fingerprints, how do we know that the alibi witnesses were with the right man?
In Raleigh, it was reported that the freezing of fruit for ice cream flavoring had become a new industry in the state, completing its first season successfully at Lexington, established by the Breyer Ice Cream Co. of Philadelphia. The plant had processed more than 500 tons of peaches from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Breyer said that as soon as supplies of berries and nuts could be assured, the list of frozen products would be expanded, strawberry production already being underway in Lexington.
Don't worry about the supply of
nuts
It's gonna be so nice with everyone being able to hit each other with virtual impunity and call each other any name you want in the New State of Trump. But remember, liberals, sometimes, hit back harder than you might expect.
In London, a British colonial office of Nigeria reported receipt of a plea from a West African man who reported having been "dejobbed" for "laziness", and, being heavily "childrenized", with sixteen by five "savage wives", protested the claim, saying that he could not possibly be lazy, having brought sixteen children "into this vale of tears". He hoped that the recipient would be merciful and "rejobulate" him. Officials in London did not know whether he had obtained his old job again.
In Monaco, the former husband of actress Lana Turner, Stephen Crane, married French actress Martine Carroll.
On the editorial page, "Blast at Unification" comments on Captain John Crommelin's statement that the Navy was being "emasculated" by the decisions of the heads of the Army and Air Force within the Joint Chiefs. As he had violated military regulations in speaking out on a political matter as an officer, the captain had resigned himself to being court martialed.
Captain Crommelin admitted to being present when the memorandum had been drafted regarding the B-36 having supposedly been chosen as the Air Force long-range strategic bomber of preference through the self-interest of the responsible parties, having an interest in Consolidated Vultee, manufacturers of the B-36. None of it had been true.
The Captain's illustrious career it suggests, would not be damaged by his statements and he would likely not draw serious censure, as others, such as Admiral William Halsey, would take up his cry. But the people would likely pay little heed to the last desperate attempt of the Navy to avoid unification of the military under a modern, effective program of national defense.
"Wallace Withdraws" praises the decision of former Vice-President Henry Wallace not to run for the Senate seat in New York against Senator John Foster Dulles and his Democratic opponent, former Governor Herbert Lehman. Mr. Wallace, supported by Congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party, would have only split the vote as he had in New York in 1948, giving the state to Governor Dewey, a result which might have followed in a three-way Senatorial race, redounding to the benefit of Mr. Dulles.
The piece hopes that the decision was harbinger of Mr. Wallace's complete retirement from politics.
"Winston's One-Man Campaign" tells of State ABC chairman Robert Winston seeking to keep illegal bootleg whiskey from other states out of dry counties of North Carolina. He had been able to get the cooperation of Maryland officials and distillers, but not yet those of Illinois and the District of Columbia. He had urged distillers to cooperate on the thesis that otherwise North Carolina might vote dry in 1951.
The piece finds the logic well motivated but flawed, as the dry forces were not mad at bootleggers but rather at ABC, and distillers could not possibly stem the flow of illegal whiskey into the state's dry areas.
Enforcement depended upon vigorous local enforcement and the moral support of the people. It suggests that the Governor ought sit down with the sheriffs of the dry counties and insist on better enforcement. In the wet counties, ABC enforcement officers had virtually shut down bootlegging operations.
"The Right to Counsel" remarks on the statement by one of the wounded victims of Howard Unruh, following his murderous shooting spree, killing 13 people in Camden, N.J., the previous week, a U.S. record toll at that time for any single mass shooting, that Mr. Unruh was nevertheless entitled to a fair trial. It suggests that unlike many countries, the U.S. assured due process in its Constitution and the right to have effective assistance of counsel.
It finds that Monroe Medlin, who had been found guilty in Charlotte of first degree murder and sentenced to death in the shooting of Mrs. E. O. Anderson on August 1, had received a fair trial with competent appointed counsel. Likewise had Mildred Ross Wallace in the case of shooting her husband fatally with a shotgun after an argument over his involvement with another woman, found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
The only problem would be that Mr. Medlin would be completely abandoned on appeal, his defense counsel, whether the same as at trial or different counsel being unknown, having sent the court a no-issue letter—an outrageous act of incompetence after a jury trial in a capital case or any other felony case. Any lawyer too dumb to find a viable issue on appeal in such a case after a four-day jury trial is not competent to practice law and should have been disbarred. The North Carolina Supreme Court undertook a required cursory review of the record and, of course, found no issue—not expected to generate an effective appeal, as courts always have to rely on briefing by counsel on both sides, are ill-equipped with time and adequate staff to review records on their own, not narrowed in focus to specific issues. Mr. Medlin was then executed without benefit of an effective appeal on December 9, 1949—an utter disgrace to justice.
More than likely, he was guilty of nothing worse than second degree murder or even manslaughter, based on his claim of at least imperfect self-defense, struggling for control of the shotgun which Mrs. Anderson obtained and pointed at him when it accidentally discharged into her shoulder, certainly appeared less culpable for first degree murder than Ms. Wallace. Any evidence to the contrary of his assertions contained in his front-page published statement to police on August 2 in that regard was not adduced in the front-page press reports on the case and there was no effort to summarize the evidence in the brief per curiam State Supreme Court decision affirming the conviction and sentence. And even aside from the quantum of evidence supporting or not the theory of self-defense or imperfect self-defense and any errors or omissions in instructing thereon, there are always properly arguable issues on appeal after any jury trial of a criminal matter, especially involving a felony. But he was black, his victim was white and upper middle class, and Ms. Wallace was white, eliminated only her poor white-trash husband, and it was 1949.
Mr. Unruh, as pointed out, would be institutionalized the rest of his days after being found insane, and would die in 2009 at age 88.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "When Is a Man 'Old'?" agrees with 73-year old Senator Clyde Hoey that health and vigor were more important than chronological age. Former News & Observer editor Josephus Daniels, who had died the previous year at 85, had, a quarter century earlier when 63, taken special interest in the death of the King of Rumania who had died that year also at age 63, believed as did Senator Hoey regarding chronological age. Mr. Daniels, it notes, would scoff at the notion that 73 was "old". It concludes that the Senator's critics would need find something else to criticize besides his being "old".
We have a definition of "old":
Saying one thing one day, another the next, calling one's political
opponent a "crook" without a single shred of evidence beyond
the bald, bizarre claims by the mentally defective basket cases who support
the old geezer, repeatedly shouting "lock her up" while
he leads the hue and cry, saying that e-mails sent by his opponent via a private home
server while Secretary of State, of which there was no evidence of
breach by hackers or compromise of any information thus sent, shown
to be equally secure to the porous State Department servers, somehow constitutes a
worse scandal than Watergate, while having, himself, run a corrupt
"University" defrauding thousands of thousands of dollars
each, and bribing at least one state official along the way with a $25,000
campaign donation to void one investigation into it, demanding apology from his opponent for calling half of his followers a "basket of deplorables" for their consistently displayed racism, sexism, and xenophobia, after he has, for months, underwritten violence at his "rallies" with false promises to pay the legal bills of any of his deplorables who would hit a protester, never once renouncing the violence or discouraging it, showing himself daily not to believe in free speech, regularly ordering his hired goon squads
The Reverend Jack T. Akin, pastor of the first Baptist Church of Monroe, praises Willie Webb, the storm drain worker who gave artificial respiration to a small boy who was washed out of the drain unconscious after being sucked into it 400 yards upstream by heavy rain waters. The act had saved the boy's life. The boy was white and Mr. Webb was black. The pastor suggests it as a parable of human brotherhood which all should follow.
Drew Pearson tells of the British being angry at the way Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder had treated them at the financial conference in Washington, as if they were privates in the Missouri National Guard.
The President was considering naming Averell Harriman as chairman of the National Security Resources Board, following his first nomination, that of Mon Wallgren, having been withdrawn after the Senate objected to his lack of experience for the job.
Admiral D. C. Ramsey cautioned Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska that if statehood were granted to Hawaii, a Japanese Nisei might become a Senator. Senator Butler responded that he would not like that.
Following Hawaiian statehood in 1959, Daniel Inouye, a World War II hero in the Italian campaign, became the first Japanese-American Congressman and then in 1962, was elected the first Japanese-American Senator, serving until his death in 2012, the second longest serving Senator in U.S. history, six months short of the record established by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
The French were upset at being excluded from the financial conference between the U.S., Canada, and Britain, as the French economy was tied to that of Britain.
Secretary of State Acheson had mandated that within a year he review the steel rolling mill to be shipped to Yugoslavia, or just before it was to be shipped, to make sure that it would not fall into Russia's hands.
Mr. Pearson provides more examples of air junkets via military transport planes.
Vice-President Barkeley's chauffeur was getting married and wanted the Vice-President to attend because, he told him, so many people had confused him with the Vice-President.
Courtesy Associates in Washington provided babysitters to such persons as Senator Hubert Humphrey and Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, and selected maids for others, obtained Army-Navy football game tickets, and other such tasks for the big shots of Washington.
The Senate Banking and Currency Committee was set to start an investigation of Lustron, Inc., regarding how it had spent the millions of dollars borrowed from the RFC to start its prefabricated home construction business.
Catholic friends of Eleanor Roosevelt believed that the criticism of her by Francis Cardinal Spellman had been more motivated by her opposition to U.S. diplomatic recognition of Franco's Spain than her position that public funding should go only to public schools.
Harold A. Ward writes of the President's steel fact-finding board's recommendations, accepted by the United Steelworkers, being considered by the steel companies, all having agreed to a ten-day extension to the 60-day strike moratorium to consider the report. The report rejected the union demand for a 30-cent wage plus benefits package, which included a 12.5 cents per hour wage hike, and recommended instead a 10-cent pension and social insurance benefits package.
Since Philip Murray was both head of CIO and the Steelworkers, other CIO unions, specifically UMW and UAW, had awaited the outcome of the negotiations to provide them with direction.
Much of the credit for the favorable result belonged to Cyrus Ching, head of the Government's conciliation service, who had suggested to the President the appointment of the fact-finding board and the 60-day moratorium, assuring him that the union would accept mediation by the board. He had not always been successful. The Hawaiian dock strike remained far from resolution, so far in fact, he had just announced, that further mediation appeared hopeless.
Ahead lay the rubber contract negotiations and those in electrical manufacturing and the maritime industry, considered rugged assignments for mediation. But for now, Mr. Ching could bask in the glory of his achievement with regard to steel.
Henry C. McFayden, superintendent of public schools in Albemarle, N.C., in the second of
his weekly series on the beginning of a child's education, addresses
parental expectations, both high and low, and how they impacted the
child starting school. Too low expectations could translate into poor
performance as surely as could too high expectations, leading to
frustration. He disfavors paid rewards for grades as creating inevitable confusion, especially among siblings of varied academic capabilities, and likewise setting a
parental example of devaluing the necessity of school, as a parent
who routinely had come by the school to pick her children up early
once every week or two to attend the movies
He tells of his own mother having set a fine example when he was a child, as once he had tripped a girl causing her to fall to the ground, then hurried homeward, only to be caught by the principal with his mother looking on and saying nothing. He was taken back to the school and spanked. His mother never even asked what was at issue.
He stresses that the things a parent did were more impressive to the child than what was said, though the latter was also of importance in instilling a sense of value on school subjects and impressing that failure was unacceptable.
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