The Charlotte News

Monday, May 8, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Paris, Secretary of State Acheson, following talks with French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, said that American economic and military aid would be sent forthwith to French Indo-China to enable it to resist the threat of Communism posed by the guerrilla Viet-Minh forces operating under Ho Chi Minh. He did not specify the proposed amount of the aid.

Four dollars 'll do her. Just put it in the right places.

The U.S. was also urging France to transfer control of the affairs of Vietnam, the French-created state within Indo-China led by Bao Dai, from the colonies minister to the Foreign Minister to add to Vietnam's prestige and provide Bao Dai with the cloak of greater symbolic opposition to Communism. Russia and Communist China had recognized the Ho forces—as opposed to the faux horses. Many nationalistic forces in Indo-China had been reluctant to support Bao Dai because the French had granted only limited autonomy to the regime. Mr. Acheson, according to diplomatic sources, was planning to ask M. Schuman for assurances that steps toward independence would be taken as fast as the war would allow. He would want to know whether the U.S. would be asked to foot the bill for French colonial conquest or whether Indo-China would be provided full independence with French retention of only some diplomatic ties.

Thus far, the President had promised 15 million dollars to Indo-China in aid from the 75 million appropriated for the Far East. But France complained that it was too little and too slow in coming, that failure to provide more could result in a Communist victory, opening the way for the Communist takeover of Thailand, Burma and the Malay peninsula.

Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont introduced a resolution before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee to bar further public hearings investigating the charges of Senator Joseph McCarthy that there were Communists in the State Department, as the public hearings were adversely affecting morale of Government employees and causing uncertainty in relations abroad.

The President, on the fifth anniversary of V-E Day, aboard his cross-country train at a whistle-stop in Galesburg, Ill., said that the decisions in the coming months in the U.S. would determine whether there would be a third world war and whether isolationists would allow the rest of the world to be swallowed by Communism. He related of having worn a cap to school in 1892, reading, "Cleveland-Stevenson", for the ticket of former President Grover Cleveland and running-mate Adlai Stevenson, grandfather to the present Illinois Governor. Some Republican boys had then taken his hat from him and torn it up, and, he said, Republicans had been trying to do the same thing to him ever since.

It was also the President's 66th birthday, in celebration of which his staff had presented him with the nine-volume Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams.

In the Senate, debate began finally on the Fair Employment Practices Committee bill. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia was leading a group of 18 Southern Senators planning a filibuster of the measure. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that he intended to allow debate to run through the week before attempting to obtain cloture by a two-thirds vote of the membership, and would not run round-the-clock sessions in the meantime. An unofficial vote had 59 Senators favoring cloture, five short of the necessary super-majority, but five Senators were absent at the time.

The Supreme Court, in Building Service Union v. Gazzam, 339 U.S. 532, an 8 to 0 decision delivered by Justice Sherman Minton, upheld a lower court decision from the State of Washington that states, as Washington, in which the public policy was against coercion by employers of the choice of employees' union representative, may forbid by injunction picketing aimed at coercing employers to coerce workers to select a union representative, and that such an injunction did not violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Justice William O. Douglas did not participate in the decision.

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, hundreds of blocks were flooded as troops and civilian volunteers worked to bolster sagging dikes to avoid a new flooding threat from the Red River flowing out of North Dakota and Minnesota.

In Rimouski, Quebec, a fire lasting 30 hours devastated the town, leaving 20 million dollars worth of damage, 2,000 persons homeless and 312 homes destroyed. There were no deaths. Starting Saturday night when a power line snapped in heavy winds and set two lumber mills on fire, it was one of the worst fires in Canadian history.

In Turkey, a bridge collapsed in Northern Anatolio, dropping a bus into a ravine, killing 25 of the 49 persons aboard and injuring the others.

John Glossinger, author of You Are Born to Victory, in the tenth "Guideposts" column, three having been excluded from the front page since the previous Wednesday, tells of trying to break through barriers of reticent employees in his former company, Kay-Scheerer Corp., citing one clerk who had worked for 16 years at about the same pay, $25 per week, remaining shy, glum and unapproachable throughout the span of his employment. But Mr. Glossinger was impressed by many of his qualities, including integrity and performing the job conscientiously. So one day, he approached him and told him that he was in a rut from which Mr. Glossinger wished to help him dislodge. But after several such consultations, the man, appearing suspicious of the efforts, said that he had not the education to make anything of himself, causing his feeling of inferiority. Mr. Glossinger then proposed to the employee that he seek a Higher Power, which seemed to interest him.

In Charlotte, the determination by the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen whether to accept the fact-finding board recommendation for a net 8.5 cent wage hike for Duke Power Co. bus drivers and mechanics was expected this date, affecting six cities. W. S. O'B. Robinson represented Duke and would meet at a conference along with the union representative, led by the U.S. mediator and Mayor Victor Shaw of Charlotte, later in the day.

On the editorial page, "The Dreary FEPC Debate" finds that the debate to begin this week on the Fair Employment Practices Committee bill, designed to eliminate racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in employment, while representing a sound policy in theory, was only going to devolve to filibuster and set back the idea for its arousing old passions. There were other forms of discrimination, as against middle-aged persons, handicapped workers, and women, not addressed by the proposed legislation. Furthermore, it ventures, the bill sought to coerce employment and would be unenforceable, creating chaos in industry if it passed and were sought to be enforced. It concludes that Americans, at the end of the debate after the forces against it assured its defeat in filibuster, would be further away from equality of opportunity than they had been before.

Sure, as long as editors go along with the retrograde notions of segregationists in the South who found every such effort to be synonymous with "socialism", never bothering to educate constituents to the idea that the Government has the perfect right and obligation under the Constitution to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment via the Commerce Clause, allowing regulation of matters substantially affecting interstate commerce. If that is "socialism", then blame the Founders for the concept, only clarified as being applicable to the states in the aftermath of the Civil War by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Stupid is as stupid does.

"Music vs. Issues" finds it disappointing that W. E. Horner had chosen to add a hillbilly band to his campaign against incumbent Congressman C. B. Deane in the Eighth District race in Rockingham County, as the race had been shaping up as one of substance, Mr. Deane being a Fair Dealer, and Mr. Horner opposing most of it. It hopes that Mr. Horner used the band only to gather people around the hustings and not in substitute for substance.

"One Down, Three to Go" finds that with the victory of the regular Democrats in Alabama over the Dixiecrats in the executive committee elections, the Dixiecrats appeared to be going the way of the Confederacy. There had been no choice two years earlier when the Dixiecrats were swept onto the committee without opposition; things had been different this time with Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman supplying their slate of candidates.

It explains that the result did not mean, however, that Alabama had accepted civil rights, rather that Senator Hill had convinced them that they stood a better chance of defeating it with the regular Democrats.

But it left now only South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which had voted for the Dixiecrats in 1948, still in the States' Rights camp.

It suggests that while there was no room for a third party in the South, there was room for a more active Republican Party, or if not that, at least a two-faction Democratic Party. That Alabama had abandoned the Dixiecrats, it finds, was a sensible move.

"Battle of the Menus" tells of there being plenty of good cuisine to be had in the downtown cafes of Charlotte, despite the sympathy given to diners relegated thereto from those eating lunches at home. But the real action, it finds, was in the menu nom de gastronomia. The prettified names for ordinary food often taxed the imagination. It provides examples, such as medalion of capon for the chicken pattie and Sauce Joudelot, which one person believed was simply woven from thin air.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Heading Off Eisenhower Boom", finds that Harold Stassen appeared to be trying to head off the boom for General Eisenhower for the GOP nomination in 1952. His recent comment that the President was the worst ever occupant of the White House had been calculated to get him press coverage. The piece finds it in bad taste, that while the President's "non-political" cross-country tour was subject to criticism, albeit with the DNC footing part of the bill, he was not the first President to take an interest in mid-term elections.

Mr. Stassen appeared to have forgotten, it remarks, that nominations had to come before elections, was talking as if he were already the party nominee. But he would not be able to beat out General Eisenhower or other competitors merely by being the first on the hustings.

The reason, incidentally, that Mr. Stassen did not also refer to the President as a "blah-blah-blah" was because he, unlike the present occupant of the White House in 2017, was not one, even to his political opponents. The present "President" steers from the rear, is a carwheeler, or carswinger, as the case may alternate on a given day.

Drew Pearson tells of former Presidential adviser Clark Clifford, in an effort to settle a debate aboard the Presidential yacht Williamsburg recently, having telephoned New York Supreme Court Judge Ferdinand Pecora to find out whether the circus midget who once sat on the lap of J. P. Morgan had done so at the Senate investigation of Wall Street or the Senate investigation of munitions. Judge Pecora replied that it was at the former, on or about May 28, 1933, prior to the munitions investigation, but corrected that it had not occurred before the committee members, for whom he had served as counsel.

Mr. Pearson finds it illustrative of the problem with respect to the people around President Truman, as anyone familiar with that time would have recalled readily the incident and before which committee and about when it took place, as the investigation had led to formation of the SEC.

The Florida Senate primary outcome in favor of Congressman George Smathers over Senator Claude Pepper and the close race for the Democratic executive committee spots in Alabama between the Dixiecrats and the candidates of Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman had underscored what the pundits had been saying, that the President's political stock was in the cellar. Four reasons were cited: the McCarthy charges, which, while not being per se generally believed, had led people to think that where there was smoke, there was fire; the murders of Charles Binaggio and Charles Gargota in Kansas City, having renewed attention to the President's former ties to the Pendergast machine, despite the President, to his credit, having sent his own investigators to examine the shootings, a fact generally unknown to the public; the irritation of the farmers at falling prices, the public's irritation with continuing labor strikes, and business's irritation about high taxes; and the conclusion that there was not much leadership issuing from Washington.

Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, up for re-election in November, was concerned about the McCarthy smear tactics backfiring onto him and hurting his chances.

One reason for the President's veto of the natural gas deregulation bill was the receipt of 5,000 letters against it in the course of one hour.

David Lloyd had succeeded Clark Clifford as the President's chief ghost writer. The President's ghost writer during the campaign in 1948 was now ghosting for Governor Dewey.

The AMA was the backstage partner of the FTC in its order against over-the-counter sales of antihistamines. Notwithstanding the fact, doctors prescribed twelve million tablets in 1949. One of the over-the-counter drugs, Inhiston, was owned by the Government as part of the alien property from the war—coming from the men who arrived in the spaceship.

Marquis Childs tells of Manchester Boddy, Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in California to be vacated by Sheridan Downey because of prolonged illness. Mr. Boddy, a newspaper publisher and columnist for 25 years and owner of a camellia ranch for exporting flowers, was seeking a middle course between the liberal Democrats, represented by Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the likely Democratic nominee, and the conservative Republicans, represented by Congressman Richard Nixon, the virtual lock for the GOP nomination. (His middle name, incidentally, was not "Nilhous", Mr. Childs, as you, no doubt, will come to realize in time. Maybe the error, however, was the result of the devil's apprentice.)

One candidate could conceivably win both nominations in California, but that prospect in the Senate race was considered unlikely of occurrence.

Mr. Nixon had garnered his notoriety from the HUAC hearings, anent the Hollywood Ten in 1947 and, especially, the Hiss-Chambers hearings of August, 1948, and the subsequent revelation the following November of the "pumpkin papers" by Mr. Chambers through Robert Stripling, the lead investigator for HUAC at the time. "At 37 Nixon has an intensity of manner and purpose that bespeak the crusader." He was touring the state in a station wagon equipped with loudspeakers from which he spoke morning 'til night, sometimes seven or eight times per day. It was to be expected that in the fall campaign, he would use Communism for all it was worth against his opponent—and how.

Conservative Democrats argued that, with the parallel before them of the Smathers-Pepper Senate Democratic primary race just concluded in Florida, the Democrats would be wise to nominate Mr. Boddy, not subject to the Red-smear tactic.

But, Mr. Childs cautions, Florida was not resemblant to California politically, other than in spawning a considerable number of candidates willing to engage in radical experiments. It was not easy in such an atmosphere to steer the middle course, but Mr. Boddy was trying.

It should be noted that, as compiled in the linked material above by the 1976-78 U.C.-Berkeley oral history project for Helen Gahagan Douglas, while there was some contention in 1950 press accounts and later that Mr. Boddy had initiated the Red-smear campaign against Congresswoman Douglas prior to it being picked up by Mr. Nixon and his campaign, the consensus of subsequent opinion of those close to the campaigns in 1950, and the better of the argument, was that Mr. Nixon, well along his way in Red-smear tactics, as practiced on Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1946, and as became his standard practice as a member of HUAC, needed no advance paradigm for conducting a Red smear on the basis of implied or even expressed guilt by association with supposed subversive or fellow-traveling groups, such as accepting contributions or support from the CIO PAC, as charged against Mr. Voorhis, or by being "soft" on Communism in legislative action, as charged against Ms. Douglas, including apparently direct claims by the Nixon campaign in a last-minute barrage of telephone calls asking the leading question, "Have you heard that Helen Gahagan Douglas is a Communist?"

Had Mr. Boddy, believed less susceptible to such claims, been the Democratic nominee in 1950, would history have been radically different? For without Mr. Nixon winning that race, he would not have been the choice for the vice-presidential nomination in 1952. Congressmen, in those times, short of being Speaker, were simply never chosen as vice-presidential candidates. But could Mr. Boddy have beaten him? We shall never know, any more than we can know whether Orson Welles, had he run as contemplated, would have beaten Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin in 1946. Had it been otherwise, not only would the nation have benefited, but so, too, Messrs. Nixon and McCarthy, would they not have?

Robert C. Ruark takes to task current sportswriters for their butchering of the English language. He notes that he had once been a sportswriter, but that at that time they had evolved from referring to the high fly into the outfield as a "can of corn" or the three-base hit as a "bingle for triple hassocks".

He cites an example: "Besides the Bauer and Berra bangs there were three doubles and two triples with sizzling-hot Phil Rizzuto two-and-three-baggering in three official AB's after four-fouring against the A's in Philadelphia, Tuesday." He concedes that Philadelphia was in Tuesday and proceeds to decipher the rest of the coded language, assuming that "AB" was either a degree or indicative of "Able Seaman". He finds the dictionary not listing the verb "to bagger" but does discover the noun form to refer to a person who bags, thus concludes, accordingly, that Rizzuto had been pouring sand into the bags, ably with degrees.

Likewise, unable to find the verb "to four", assumes it to be a musical note formed against the A's in Philadelphia, Tuesday, where they had concerts on the day named for the state.

He goes on to review with derision the tendency of sportswriters to render sophisticated sounding English out of the gibberish usually issuing from the players' mouths.

"Ah, well, I cavil at trifles, and bay at the moon. Anybody hit pay-dirt in a football game lately, or has a boxer drawn claret from the nose of his play-fellow? I am a kid who loves to coin a cliché on a dull day, and this was a dull day."

Must have been a foolish, claret Pennsylvania.

A letter writer wonders whether RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had ever read Shakespeare—even if, in context, the reference appears a little out of joint, this being more to the point—, following his exultant remarks at the defeat of Senator Claude Pepper to another Democrat. He hopes that Mr. Gabrielson would praise the victories of more Democrats.

A letter from the Mecklenburg County manager of the Willis Smith campaign thanks the newspaper for its editorial of May 5, "Smith or Graham or Reynolds", in which it endorsed Mr. Smith.

A letter writer from Chapel Hill addresses the same editorial, finds it disappointing for looking "inward and backward, not outward and forward."

A letter writer, a Republican, commenting on the same piece, thanks the editors for endorsing Mr. Smith.

A letter writer proclaims that it would be former Senator Reynolds laughing as a hyena on May 27, after his primary victory over Senator Graham and Mr. Smith.

A letter writer suggests that the highest form of democracy was not to legislate other people's morals.

A letter writer comments on the previous letter attacking sportswriters for favoring racial equality in sports, specifically Bob Quincy's suggestion that integrated basketball teams be allowed to play in the new William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the campus of N.C. State that it might qualify as a locus for the N.C.A.A. Tournament. This writer wonders whether the previous author was in the dark regarding what was taking place in sports, such as the presence of Joe Louis in the boxing ring and the presence of three black players on the 1950 N.C.A.A. and N.I.T. champion C.C.N.Y. team, which had beaten N.C. State in the national semi-finals of the N.C.A.A. Tournament. He finds that sportsmanship did not look at the color of the opposition but rather only at their skill level.

We once saw President Johnson in Reynolds Coliseum, October 6, 1964. We had seen Duke beat UNC in there in the semi-finals of the A.C.C. Tournament, March 6, 1964, 65 to 49. For the result, we enjoyed the former quite a bit more than the latter. We remember someone yelling from the stands repeatedly, "Stop loafing, Cunningham." It was not us. And we went nowhere near the Wachovia Bank on Hillsboro Street, incidentally.

A letter writer compliments O. C. Fogus, the head of the sanitation department in Charlotte, for getting everything done on time and in the best possible way.

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