The Charlotte News
Friday, January 13, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite opposition from chairman Tom Connally, was going to call Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, to testify before the Committee the following week regarding the importance of protecting Formosa from the Communists on the mainland of China. The effort was led by Republicans on the Committee who favored a military mission to Formosa for the purpose. The President and Secretary of State Acheson were firmly opposed to such a mission and the Secretary had so informed the Committee two days earlier, believing that aid to the Nationalists ought be limited to advice and moral support, as well "Point 4" program aid to underdeveloped nations. Secretary Johnson and the Joint Chiefs were on record as favoring such a mission if necessary to protect Formosa.
On Formosa, the Nationalist Defense Ministry claimed that a Russian advisory group was aiding the Chinese Communists to prepare an assault on the Chusan islands, the base for Nationalist air assaults on Shanghai and seven miles off the mainland. The Nationalists claimed that four Russian officers were attached to each division of Red forces.
Before the House Rules Committee, considering whether to allow the bill to establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission to reach the floor for a vote, Southern Democrats and Republicans claimed politics to be the motivation for the bill, to provide equal opportunity in employment regardless of race, nationality, or religion. Among the carpers were Representatives Ed Cox of Georgia, claiming it was designed "to protect the alien in the North rather than the Negro in the South", and William Colmer of Mississippi, who thought it would create a danger of a "police state". The bill, sponsored by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York, had passed the Labor Committee in the previous session and could be approved for a floor vote through that Committee even if the Rules Committee failed to approve. The Southerners contended that the bill would be defeated in the Senate even if it passed the House.
A critical coal shortage was reported in 36 cities by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The President had reiterated the previous day at a press conference that he had no immediate intention to intervene to seek to eliminate the three-day work week called by John L. Lewis December 1, leading to the shortage.
NLRB general counsel Robert Denham had made a speech in New York, contending that the NLRB was reliant on repeal of Taft-Hartley and was patterning its decisions on the political climate extant in the country. The Board issued no public statement in response but privately appeared hopping mad over the speech, even considering a complaint to the President, who had authority to remove Mr. Denham. Many in labor circles had wanted the President to do so.
The NLRB issued a decision upholding the right of an employer in a manufacturing company in San Diego to dress as Simon Legree from Uncle Tom's Cabin and playfully wander among his employees cracking a whip. The textile union seeking to organize the plant had maintained that the manager's act was responsible for it losing the election. The manager had come up with the idea as a response to being pictured in the manner of a Legree in a pamphlet put forth by the union. He used the whip to command employees to vote.
In the stock market, prices fell by a few cents to a dollar, interrupting a 17-month bull market, resulting in the worst drop in 14 months. Steel and automobile stock were the most active in trading, all headed downward. Rail stocks were slightly above the lowest points in general trading and utilities remained unchanged.
In Chatham, England, a British Navy submarine, the H.M.S. Truculent, sank on the Thames after being rammed by a Swedish tanker the previous night, and 61 of 76 men aboard were either known to be or presumed dead. Fifteen men had been rescued, some bobbing to the surface in their life jackets, and nine bodies thus far had been recovered from the craft. Icy waters limited survival time. Eventually, the death toll would rise to 64. Rescuers were guided to the craft by its yellow buoy, thought to have been deployed accidentally. It was believed to be the biggest peacetime disaster involving a British submarine since the Thetis had sunk in Liverpool Bay in June, 1939, claiming 99 lives.
In Mount Blanchard, O., a man robbed a bank of $395 after threatening to blow it up with nitroglycerine, failing to obtain the thousands of dollars in the vault by virtue of a time-lock device, then fled in an automobile. The Ohio Highway Patrol had blocked all roads within a 20-mile radius.
If you see him, with his little bottle, approach with caution.
In Los Angeles, the Wake Forest student who had been sought for four weeks in the December 15 shooting of another Wake Forest student, left bleeding to death in a car on the campus, was arrested in a hotel room strewn with religious literature. He said that he had accidentally shot the other student during a scuffle and had not intended to kill him. He and the victim, he said, after returning from a basketball game in Raleigh, had argued over $200 worth of checks the victim was holding for the accused, representing payment for gambling debts. He said that he had turned to religion during his time on the lam, after slipping away from the scene via bus. He was charged with murder. A tip, originating in Eastern North Carolina, that the suspect was in a hotel in Los Angeles had led to the arrest.
You see what happens
Flood dangers were mounting in many
Midwest river areas as more rain fell over a wide region of the
country. Rain, rain, rain, nothing but rain
On the editorial page, "Ten-Year Platform—IX" continues the look at the ten-point program for progress in Charlotte over the ensuing decade, as set forth by News reporter Tom Fesperman on January 2, this time stressing the need for continued modernization of airport facilities to enable continued growth of the city.
The airport would through time be modernized, more or less
"The British Election" discusses the upcoming general election in Britain set for February 23, with the key issue to be whether Labor's nationalization of industries and economic controls would continue or whether the Conservative approach of maintaining most of the controls but with more efficient management promised, while reducing the trend toward nationalization, would succeed. Based on success by Labor in by-elections, bets were that the party would continue in control of Parliament. With recent Conservative successes in New Zealand and Australia, the outcome in Britain, it suggests, would affect the campaigns during the mid-term elections in the U.S.
"Challenge to Congress" tells of two alternative budget proposals having been submitted, one by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia and the other by Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. The former proposed a 36 billion dollar budget and Mr. Morse, a Republican, proposed reduction of expenditures from the 1949-50 fiscal year by six billion, coupled with a 2.5 billion dollar tax decrease to remedy tax inequities, leaving room for a surplus in the budget.
It suggests that with one conservative Democrat and a liberal Republican both simultaneously making such proposals, the demands of the people for both tax relief and reduction of Federal spending were being heard in Washington. Time would tell, however, whether the proposals would have an impact on the budget in an election year, when spending would be more popular to please the beneficiaries.
Russell Barnes, of the Detroit News, explores the issues involved in whether the U.S. should send military support to Formosa and the Chiang Nationalist regime to protect it from being overtaken by the Chinese Communists of the mainland. The principal Congressional proponents for such a move were Senators William Knowland of California and Homer Ferguson of Michigan, with former President Hoover also having recently weighed in favorably.
Mr. Barnes suggests that several questions needed to be answered by the public in determining whether military intervention would be a sound approach, starting with whether the U.S. should risk a war in Asia and the corollary of whether in waging such a war the country would be prepared to expend the necessary lives and money to win it, especially if it required trying to take back the mainland from the Communists rather than simply a defensive effort of Formosa.
The Chiang regime had been rejected by most of the Chinese people for the Government's failure to provide for the people, in the meantime engaging in graft and inefficiency. Formosans disliked both the mainland Chinese and the former Japanese occupiers.
While American intervention could occur without occupation, as in Greece, the fact of military intervention would supply the Russian propaganda effort at branding the U.S. an imperialist power in the Far East, could therefore serve to strengthen the Communist cause. Such an expensive mission might also actually be supported by Russia to weaken further the U.S. economy, with its resources already devoted so heavily to rebuilding and defending Western Europe.
Fighting such a war would entail fighting it over the long-haul to conclusion against a hostile population. Otherwise, national prestige would suffer enormously and the U.S. reputation would be weakened worldwide. The country would also be acting in derogation of the recent diplomatic recognition being provided to the Chinese Communists by Britain and other allied nations. Thus, the question of the morality of such a war would be raised, as that recognition was based on anticipated Chinese Communist conformance to international law.
He concludes that the problems inherent in such a military mission were too difficult to be solved through snap judgments.
A map
Drew Pearson tells of possibly having contributed indirectly to a gangland murder in Chicago in 1946.
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had proposed a probe of the gambling syndicates and their impact on Government. The Senate Investigating Committee of Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina had initiated such an investigation the previous summer and then quickly backed away from it—probably because it had uncovered the relationship of John Maragon, under indictment for perjury in relation to the "five-percenter" investigation by the same Committee, to a gambler who worked with murdered gangland leader Arnold Rothstein and was a partner of gambling kingpin Frank Costello, as well as Mr. Maragon's relationship to Bill Helis, the "golden Greek" of the race track world. Since Mr. Maragon had, for a long time, easy entree to the White House through his close friendship to Presidential military aide, Maj. General Harry Vaughan, the repercussions politically were probably too great for the Committee to persist in the investigation.
Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, however, had developed the links between Mr. Maragon and Messrs. Costello and Helis, and obtained during hearings an acknowledgment from General Vaughan that Mr. Helis had contributed money to the Democratic political campaigns.
Mr. Pearson says that he did not subscribe to the belief, as championed by some, that the Kansas City Pendergast machine, which had originally made Harry Truman in politics, had entrenched itself in the White House. But with Mr. Costello controlling a two billion-dollar gambling business, he could afford to spread money around to obtain influence.
The murder for which Mr. Pearson was indirectly responsible in Chicago involved the killing of Jack Regan, a former associate of Moe Annenberg, who had taken over Mr. Annenberg's racing wire when the latter went to prison for income tax evasion while now-deceased Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy was Attorney General under FDR. Mr. Regan then found himself ruled by the syndicate and decided to provide all he knew to Mr. Pearson in an interview in Chicago in spring, 1946. Mr. Pearson then relayed the information to then-Attorney General Tom Clark and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover anent Mr. Regan's claim of the syndicate's monopoly over nightclubs, taverns and beer businesses, more tightly run than anything ever conceived by big business. He had contended that the hotels were required to buy ice cubes, towels and beer, rent slot machines and hire bartenders through the old Al Capone syndicate, then controlled by Pete Locivella of Detroit and Dan Corotello of the Sicilian society in Chicago, each dividing the territory.
For his willingness to implicate individual leaders of the syndicate, Mr. Regan, despite having 12 FBI
agents assigned to his protection, wound up being shot from a
vegetable truck while stopping at a red light one afternoon. He did
not die right away but lingered in the hospital, appeared to be out
of the woods eventually. But after finally succumbing, an autopsy
revealed a tube of mercury in his intestines. No one knew how it got
there, but, posits Mr. Pearson, the gangsters of Chicago were
powerful and had ways of penetrating hospitals. They also could
penetrate the Federal Government, as he promises to reveal in future
columns
Marquis Childs discusses the demise of the New York Sun the previous week and the blame for the closure by management placed on rising labor costs, an ascription of cause to which the New York Newspaper Guild had objected by pointing out that labor costs had risen less than newsprint costs.
And, indeed, he points out, newsprint costs had soared from $58.50 to $100 per ton between 1945 and 1948, with the eight major newsprint companies, primarily in Canada, obtaining a commensurate rise in profits, from 38.5 million dollars to 96.2 million. Meanwhile, newspaper profits had fallen 54 percent, albeit in large part due to the profit reduction in the Hearst chain. The result was the steady trend toward consolidation of newspapers and the reduction therefore in competition in the various major city markets.
The Canadian Government had backed the increase in newsprint costs, understandably so to increase dollar input to the economy. But Congressman Wright Patman's House Small Business Committee had suggested that a small group of companies was able to exert monopolistic control over the newsprint industry. During the previous Congress, the Senate Small Business Committee, chaired by Senator Kenneth Wherry, had investigated the newsprint situation and recommended that resources should be developed in Alaska, if necessary with Government help, to aid in access to Alaskan timber to produce newsprint.
He concludes that rising labor costs had also contributed to the problem of reduction of newspaper profits, with the result that, with newspaper closures, fewer people were employed, only the remainder having higher wages. And the market of ideas, essential to a democracy, meanwhile was reduced.
Robert C. Ruark bids aloha to Hawaii and is headed to Australia, says that he would take no position on statehood but would feel happy about certain persons representing Hawaii in Congress should statehood come to pass.
One such person was Thelma Akana, who danced the hula and was a friend to Arthur Godfrey.
Another was Henrietta who worked for an airline on Molokai and had waited for him for two hours on the side of the road to deliver an inconsequential message.
Dr. Edwin Chung-Hoon had worked for improvement in the lot of the lepers.
And Miki Fo brought her whole family to see him off on a plant trip.
He would miss these people, the
climate, the descendants of the missionaries, the beach boys
Framed Edition
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