The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 12, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Acheson, in an address before the National Press Club, stated that the Soviet Union was busy detaching the Northern provinces of China and making them a part of the U.S.S.R. The process, he said, was complete in Manchuria and nearly so in Outer Mongolia. In so doing, Russia was placing its puppets in power in China. He also said that the Communist Chinese had developed new methods by which to help the Russians and provide "insidious weapons of penetration". The real interest of the U.S. in Asia, he added, was to protect the people's interests and their spirit of independence and self-development, not just to stop the spread of Communism. The country had to avoid "folly or foolish adventures" which would obscure this fact by deflecting the anger of the Chinese people from Russia onto the U.S.

The Secretary criticized Senator Robert Taft for advocating a military mission to Formosa, saying that his view that a little aid to Formosa now might save it and prevent the spread of Communism was to adopt a position which, without doubt, would wind up in failure if followed.

A report from aboard the Flying Arrow, American merchant ship which had been fired on 30 to 40 times by the Nationalist Chinese when it sought to run the blockade of communist-held Shanghai Harbor three days earlier, was headed, under escort by two U.S. destroyers, to Tsingtao for repairs.

The British, after recognizing Communist China, were rumored in an unconfirmed report to be preparing an armed convoy to sail from Hong Kong to Shanghai in an effort to break the Nationalist blockade.

The Senate Armed Services Committee decided to question Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews regarding the row over defense policy before confirming Admiral Forrest Sherman as the new chief of Naval operations.

The Veterans Administration was assembling data to support the President's contention that there were signs of widespread abuse in the G.I. education program. The V.A. was preparing a 400-page report for the Senate Labor Committee, to be submitted February 1, and was remaining mum on its contents.

The Civil Service Commission reported that 14,211 civilian workers of the Federal Government had been cut from the payrolls in November, 1949, reducing the total number of Federal employees to 1.988 million, the first time the number had dropped below two million since November, 1948. Most of the cuts were in the Defense Department, with nearly 14,000 workers terminated.

That's a relief. We thought for sure every single one of them was coming after us.

In Hammond, Ind., six persons, including two children, were killed in a fire at a home, and law enforcement personnel said that there was evidence of murder and suicide found on the premises, consisting of bloody butcher knives and empty .22-caliber cartridges. The man who apparently engaged in the untoward acts had been separated from his wife just before Christmas and the wife had filed for divorce, obtaining a restraining order against her husband. Both were now dead.

In Davenport, Iowa, a woman was charged with murder in the deaths of 41 women in a fire at a private mental hospital the prior Saturday. The woman, a 23-year old patient at the facility, had admitted starting the fire in her room. The doctor who attended the woman said that she was a schizophrenic who believed herself responsible for "all the troubles of the world" and that thus her story was subject to question.

In New York, the president of the real estate board advised the wiring of automobile horns so that they could not be blown except when the car was in motion, to combat noisy drivers stuck in traffic. Not a sound idea, as it does not provide for the stagnant motorist who finds a truck or car suddenly hurtling toward his position. Then one would simply have to scream, "Hey, you."

In Raleigh, cities and towns proposed through the North Carolina League of Municipalities that the State take over construction and maintenance of municipal streets.

Near Boone, N.C., the three armed fugitives who fled from a wrecked and burned car, leaving behind stolen goods, appeared to have eluded 100 law enforcement officers looking for them in the mountainous countryside. The officers found an abandoned shack where one of the men had apparently rested for a time before slipping through the net of surrounding officers. Without new leads, the search would be discontinued at 3:00 p.m. this date.

You can come on out, fellas, and lollygag on down the road at 3:01. That's when they ring the bell.

More rain fell this date in flood-stricken areas of Illinois and Indiana, increasing the danger of breached levees. Rain extended from Central Texas to the Ohio Valley.

There were all kinds of weather across the country. It just never stops.

Build the wall and dome, Trumplanderkinders. Keep the threatening elements out. Take away everybody's health care. We don't need it. Everybody has to die sometime. Why, if the cancer does not get you, a car probably will hit you. Or someone will shoot you, being protected by the Second Amendment, the only right that really counts in Trumplanderkind.

On the editorial page, "Ten-Year Platform—VII" discusses again one of the ten points of the program for progress of Charlotte during the ensuing decade, as set forth by News reporter Tom Fesperman on January 2, this time stressing traffic congestion and the need to relieve the downtown bottlenecks. It provides a list of the worst offending locations.

It suggests that the unbottling would be a big task for only one decade, as Charlotte, like most cities in the country, had been planned at a time when the automobile was not foreseen.

Indeed, in our estimate, Charlotte still has not unbottled the problem, has, in fact, with the many superhighways and viaducts and bypasses, made the city a maze unlike most others on the North American Continent, the worst city, since about 1995, in which we have ever driven, save Mexico City, where if you come out of a roundabout alive you are fortunate. In Charlotte, if you can find your way out of the city without first dying of starvation, you are fortunate.

Sometimes, it is best to leave what is alright alone. Reinventing the wheel every decade or so, for the sake of tangible "growth and progress", is not necessarily a good idea, may, indeed, lead to big city problems of crime and poverty which only complicate growth and progress in any real sense. Probably the best city planners are those who do not seek to leave their "mark" on a community, but rather advise leaving it the hell alone to grow or not at its own pace. But maybe, for reliance too much, starting in earnest in the 1980's, on corporate money and input on curriculum policy, they do not teach that at the urban planning departments in the universities these days.

"Dearth of Candidates" laments the probability that both Senator Clyde Hoey and interim Senator Frank Graham would not face opposition in the spring Democratic primaries for re-election. The absence of a viable Republican Party in the state was bad enough, it offers, but not to have any alternative within the Democratic Party compounded the problem.

As indicated, Raleigh attorney Willis Smith would throw his hat in the ring and run in the race against Senator Graham, would win the contest after waging a race-baiting campaign orchestrated and managed by Jesse Helms in his first foray into politics.

We shall see in the spring what the column says about that race. We hope that it will eat the words of this piece, find it equally repugnant to its expressed notion that only former isolationist Senator Robert Rice Reynolds was likely to be an opponent of Senator Hoey, in fact to enter the other race and wind up a distant third.

It's too bad that North Carolina voters did not run Jesse Helms out of the state on a rail at that point in time and save us from the national disgrace which that rapscallion brought on the state for three decades. If you lived elsewhere than in the South during his tenure, you would blush at his reputation nationally. But some North Carolinians sometimes, even ordinarily progressive North Carolinians, have a way of being too excusing of reactionaries, too willing to go along to get along—until their democracy suddenly is found eviscerated and in ruins.

We wish that Dean Smith had run, as urged, against the scoundrel in 1996, as he probably would have won. But that is history.

"Charlotte and Shakespeare" praises the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company for bringing to Charlotte the following week The Taming of the Shrew, sponsored by the the Shakespeare Society of Charlotte and the Mecklenburg Council of English Teachers. It would bring the Bard to life for those who suffered from having been forced to memorize parts of the plays in school.

A piece from the Indiana Teacher , titled "Credo for Teachers", provides the eleven commandments for teachers. Examples:

"VI. Thou shalt not kill in any way, even the smallest, the curiosity of a little child, yes, tho it seems often the curiosity of a cat and never-ending."

"XI. Thou shalt not lose thy sense of humor, for verily without it thou art lost and doomed surely to beat out thy brains upon thy blackboard."

Drew Pearson tells of House Speaker Sam Rayburn's birthday luncheon, hosted by Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson. The President presented the Speaker with a hat, claiming that Mr. Rayburn had worn the same one throughout his 40 years in Washington. The President properly fitted it on his head, relying on his experience as a haberdasher, at which point the Speaker promptly pulled it down over his ears. The President also told him that Vice-President Barkley had remarked of listening to the Speaker when he was but a kid, and that given the Vice-President's age, he could hardly believe that Mr. Rayburn was only 68.

Senator Johnson introduced the Speaker as a man who had made his friends proud and his critics ashamed.

Mr. Rayburn expressed the belief that 97 or 98 percent of the people in the world were good and that he had no room in his heart for hatred. He suggested that under the leadership of the President, the country had taken the courage to lead the world "for good and righteousness".

The House Small Business Committee, chaired by Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, was issuing a report on small business in the country being gobbled up by competition from monopolies. It would recommend that the FTC be overhauled to afford more protection of small business and, to that end, that more teeth be placed in the antitrust laws, barring executives convicted of monopolistic practices from resuming their jobs for a specified period, allowing the Government and private individuals to initiate lawsuits for treble damages, and providing for increase in fines from $5,000 to $50,000 for violations.

An able commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, Sumner Pike, was soon resigning his post to return to his home state of Maine to run for the State Legislature.

Former San Antonio Mayor and former Congressman Maury Maverick criticized the State Department for not explaining better to the people the purpose and function of NATO, as he believed the people in Texas thought it pertained to fish swimming in the North Atlantic.

In a manner of speaking, it probably did.

Marquis Childs discusses the proposal of deficit spending in the President's budget, with large expenditures for public works at a time when there was full employment and incomes near the top, a practice not prescribed by traditional Keynesian economics. The latter indicated such public works and deficit spending when incomes were falling, as a means of compensating for the fact. To practice that form of economics in the present was to risk using up the Government credit, not preserving it for a time when it was urgently needed.

The budget included 1.4 billion dollars for flood control, always subject to pork-barrel politics for the fact of a particular project being pushed in the various Congressional districts. By contrast, the more needed expenditures, for defense and foreign aid, for instance, were not usually subject to pork-barreling as no particular area of the country was necessarily served. Yet, it was for the general welfare, more important than the area-specific projects.

The President rightly blamed the previous Congress for its cutting of taxes by five billion dollars in 1948, an irresponsible act. But, he posits, the President had committed a worse error right after the war in urging that excess profits taxes be immediately repealed, a request which the Congress was more than happy to oblige. That had precipitated the spiral of profits and inflation which followed, as the safety valve of the wartime period was suddenly released after four years. Bernard Baruch, for one, had warned of this probability.

Mr. Childs suggests that while the few billion in deficit spending might not amount to much at the present, it could encroach on the future as it was based on the assumption of continued prosperity, nearly full employment and high incomes. He finds that such optimism came too naturally to the President.

Frederick C. Othman also looks at the proposed budget, and finds in it many seemingly absurd and unnecessary items, such as $266,000 to investigate sheep and goats, $173,000 to investigate honey bees, an unknown amount to study how to turn milk into synthetic rubber, $860,000 to control white-fringe beetles, 1.5 million dollars to investigate fish, $56,000 to protect birds, $584,000 to protect and investigate Alaskan seals, etc.

He was initially cheered by the fact that the President had excluded from this year's budget an item appearing in previous budgets, $30 for moving unnamed "things" at the White House. But then he saw an item included for 75 million dollars for the Navy to transport things.

A letter from the national safety chairman of the Travelers Protective Association of America praises the editorial "Dangerous 'Toys'" of January 7, re BB guns and their ability in the hands of immature children to inflict serious injuries, two dozen Charlotte children having been wounded in the eye since Christmas, with two losing one of their eyes as a result of BB-gun accidents. He says that his group was solidly behind a law to abolish BB guns all over the nation.

How about real guns, also?

We note on January 13, 2017 that in the last 24 hours, two reports have come from Alabama regarding the use of BB guns irresponsibly and criminally, apparently a problem spanning back several years. In one case, in Athens, a young couple, ages 19 and 20, used a BB gun to hold up a man in his home, grabbing the booty of $1 from his wallet. In the second case, hours later, in Tuscaloosa, an 18-year old boy sought to hold up a credit union by holding eleven hostages at the point of a BB gun. All three were arrested without violence and charged with felonies.

It could have been worse, we suppose, had firearms been involved. But in prior instances, wielders of BB guns have wound up critically injured or killed by police in the course of committing such untoward conduct.

Next time, use a basketball and you likely will not get into much trouble, though if you try to rob a bank with one, you might wind up in the booby hatch, with other patients as your cheerleaders.

As we have imparted previously, we came close to incurring serious injury from a projectile fired from a spring-loaded toy rifle when we were but a little tyke. The person behind the other end of the barrel was not an enemy and was ten years our senior, nor retarded, but nevertheless, it nearly took an eye out, but for a duck of a centimeter or so at the right moment. One must have quick reflexes in the dangerous zone of cowboy and Indian battle in one's bedroom, down by the river, next to the swamp. The projectile in this instance was the broken bronze leg of Traveller, Robert E. Lee's horse. And you do not forget being struck in the area of the eye with a horse's leg.

So, we know whereof we speak and do not mean to make light of children's injuries from such incidents, rather to stimulate, through encouragement to sports, an alternative means of release of restless energy and the desire to be aggressive against one's fellow man. If the child is too young to pick up a basketball or football, then he obviously is too young to have anything which fires a projectile with any concerted force. Give the gift at Christmas which creates hope through hoop and goal dreams, even if most of them, after being nurtured for a time, will be dashed. The fun is in the hope. Nothing good can come of guns of any sort. Nor is there anything rugged about their use or those who wield them. That is all movieola nonsense. A basketball player or football player is far more rugged than any weak-kneed cuss in the woods carrying a loaded rifle to shoot helpless, dumb little animals.

How many stellar athletes do you hear bragging about shooting Bambi during the weekend?

A letter from the chairman of the Charlotte Planning Board provides a resolution passed by the Board praising the ten-point plan appearing in The News on January 2.

A letter writer finds the editorial endorsement of the bill to eliminate the discriminatory tax on margarine to be factually correct but not addressing the actual reason for dairy farmers being in opposition to it. He explains that in eliminating the tax, butter prices would have to drop to compete with margarine, causing, in turn, the price of milk to drop, interdependent as it was on butter prices, harming the dairy farmers.

He leaves an unexplained note that the statements in the letter were not reflective of the views of the administration of Bob Jones University.

We never even thought that they might be, as we did not realize that being pro-butter and anti-margarine were stances naturally assumed to be synonymous with that institution.

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