The Charlotte News
Monday, January 2, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President appeared to stand by his decision not to use troops to block the Communist Chinese from capturing Formosa, the island bastion of the Nationalists. The decision, reportedly reached with the National Security Council, did not, however, preclude economic, advisory and political support for the Nationalists.
A report from Tokyo said that General MacArthur advocated resisting the efforts of the Communists to capture Formosa, but there was no indication that he favored military intervention.
It was believed that the chief component of the Fair Deal program to be passed in the 1950 session of the 81st Congress would be expansion of Social Security, with bipartisan support for the measure. Battles would likely ensue, however, over the President's proposals for civil rights, public housing, aid to education, continuation of rent controls and additional river valley authorities similar to TVA.
In Helsinki, the Finnish Government prepared an answer to Soviet charges, brought by Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky, that the country was harboring more than 300 Russian war criminals in violation of the Russo-Finnish treaty. The Russian action was believed to be aimed at influencing the Finnish election to be held soon.
It would appear that the Russian Government, in 67 years, has not learned its lesson.
In advance of the 1950 mid-term elections, the CIO and the AFL were distributing the voting records of members of Congress to show who was right and who wrong on labor issues.
Near Little Rock, Ark., a manhunt was afoot for three or four armed men, believed to be escapees from Tucker State Prison Farm, who had killed a prison trusty-guard during their escape, shot a town marshal and had two brief gun battles with law enforcement officers.
In Candia, N.H., 606 of 650 registered voters of the town gave their support to a doctor accused of murder in the euthanasia of a woman suffering from terminal cancer. He had allegedly injected air into her veins in a sufficient quantity to cause death. The doctor thanked those who had voiced their support in the petition.
Thus far, the tally for traffic deaths was 185 since Friday at 6:00 p.m., well short of the National Safety Council's predicted total of 330 through midnight this date. Fires had claimed an additional 40 lives and miscellaneous accidents another 61 victims. In 1948, in a two-day New Year's weekend, the death toll in accidents was 309, of which 207 were from traffic accidents. The death toll from accidents during the first eleven months of 1949 had been 28,350.
Five prominent men of Charlotte, Mayor Victor Shaw, County Chairman Sid McAden, F.C. Abbott, prominent real estate entrepreneur, Osmond Barringer, who brought the first cars to the city, and Harry Harding, former superintendent of the Charlotte public schools, told The News of the half-century of progress in Charlotte.
Tom Fesperman, as remarked in an editorial below, presents a ten-point plan for progress of Charlotte over the ensuing decade. It involved organization of an urban redevelopment commission, a ten-million dollar bond issue for school construction, county-wide property revaluation, consolidation of City and County Governments to the extent feasible, public housing based on the 1950 census, formation of a group of civic leaders modeled after the "Committee of One Hundred" in Winston-Salem, a new city auditorium, a program of traffic control, improved air transportation facilities, and decontamination of Charlotte's polluted creeks.
On the editorial page, "The Taxi Dispute" discusses the protest during the weekend of the Red Top and Victory taxicab companies to recent City Council decisions regulating fares and banning of "cruising" for fares and renting of cabs to drivers.
The City Council had full authority to do so, and in each case, acted for the benefit of the public, its primary concern, even if it also owed an obligation to the drivers. But the cab companies had enjoyed greater profits under the old system and so naturally wished to preserve it.
While there was room for correction with experience in the rate schedule passed by the Council, the rates were flexible and could be changed. One cab operator wanted a "poor man's rate" and such was quite acceptable as long as the cab driver utilized a meter. But what the company really wanted was a higher rate by getting rid of the meters.
It urges that if the two companies persisted in flouting the ordinance, then their certificates to operate should be lifted.
"The Challenging Decade" comments on the front-page piece by Tom Fesperman in which he sets forth a ten-point program for Charlotte in the coming decade. It finds nothing new in the projects listed, that they represented the goals which the newspaper deemed essential for Charlotte's progress over the ensuing ten years.
You had better hurry up about it
because come Christmas, 1959, we will be in Ivey's watching the
sketch artist carefully while we toy with our new red aluminium hula-hoop, tap, tap, rapping to
his irritated distraction. For we expect to be entertained
"Good Business Ahead" quotes from the conservative, cautious Keystone Investor year-end business and financial review to the effect that fears of war and of either inflation or deflation appeared to have had greater acceptance than facts. It suggested that the country was in for many years of progress and development.
The piece relates of some of the findings of the Investor to buttress the claim.
So it was good news when so many Americans appeared to be approaching the coming decade with alarm rather than optimism.
Drew Pearson suggests that the thing which Americans most devoutly wished for in the new year was a war—which they would get, in Korea. Senator McKellar, he suggests, would call him a liar for saying it, but he finds it true. His wife had recently reminded him that he had predicted World War II 15 to 20 years earlier. So he decides to review the history leading to that war, as history tended to repeat itself.
He had covered the 1927 Naval Conference in Geneva, at which President Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg had sought a treaty between the major powers to limit the mad race for naval rearmament following World War I. But some of the Navy brass appeared at the time to be conspiring with the shipbuilding interests to defeat the treaty. He had been called before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee subsequently to substantiate the contention. It had been the start of a pattern which had continued since, with certain steel and shipbuilding companies conducting one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation for a big Navy, regardless of need or the foreign policy of the Government.
The previous fall, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews had tried to stop these interests from having their way by limiting the military role of the Navy to its necessary purpose in modern times, anti-submarine warfare, rather than building largely obsolete supercarriers.
In 1934, Mr. Pearson had disclosed how Secretary of State Henry Stimson and Secretary of War Patrick Hurley had argued during the previous Hoover Administration regarding a proposed embargo on arms to South America. Secretary Stimson had urged Congress to prevent sales of arms to Bolivia and Paraguay, but Secretary Hurley and the Army chieftains lobbied secretly against such a measure. Secretary Hurley claimed that Mr. Pearson was a "cowardly liar" in publishing these facts, but later admitted before Congress that he had opposed the arms embargo.
In 1934-35, the column had presented a series of stories on how the British secretly encouraged the Japanese when the State Department had sought to discourage the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. He had predicted in 1934 that the invasion would lead to the invasion of China and three years later, that occurred. It was during the Manchurian invasion that the seeds of the thereafter inexorable Pacific War were planted. And the British bore a part of the responsibility for it.
All of these factors, private interests, military interests, and foreign allied interests, could not exert force against the policy of the U.S. Government, without the result being war.
And it appeared presently, he concludes, that Britain might be on the verge of undercutting American policy regarding China by recognizing the Communist Government "for the sake of a few pounds sterling".
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of Winston Churchill, during a spring, 1948 luncheon, having stated that America was "like a great and powerful horse, pulling all the rest of the world up the hill to peace and prosperity." But he had paused at the time between puffs of his cigar to pose the question whether America would stay the course.
Then the answer was not difficult, as the Marshall Plan was just starting. And Mr. Churchill appeared to accept this answer, talked further of the 1930's, when he knew war was coming but that no one could stop it. Britain, as the recognized world leader at the time, was engaged first in somnolence, then in appeasement. And war came.
But Mr. Churchill, though he had predicted that war and felt it in his bones at the time, did not in 1948 feel that war with Russia would come. The Alsops regarded it at the time as somewhat surprising as he had warned the world of the Iron Curtain in March, 1946, just as he had warned of the Nazis during the 1930's. His optimism, however, was based on America staying the course.
They suggest that he might have a different opinion now, at the dawn of 1950, with the American leaders in both parties impairing U.S. foreign policy generally, and the Russian detonation of an atom bomb and the Far Eastern crisis being "shoved under the rug with nervous haste." There would be ground for him to believe, they venture, that America was not staying the course after all. And it was the case that neither wealth, power, nor good fortune of geography would protect any nation which shirked its responsibilities which that power and wealth conferred.
Marquis Childs discusses the quest of the Republican Party for a suitable presidential candidate for 1952. Governor Thomas Dewey had formally removed himself as a potential candidate, recognizing the reality that a twice-defeated nominee could not realistically run a third time. The focus had turned to General Eisenhower as the candidate around whom the various parts of the party might coalesce, both in terms of his internationalist foreign policy and his respect for states' rights and individual freedom.
But the conservative Taft wing of the party would not necessarily go along, wanting to reel in foreign policy and spending abroad.
A scurrilous attack had been launched against the General with a circular being distributed, headed, "Wake up, America! Gen. Ike the kike!" It went on to declare that he was a Caesar who was responsible for the "destruction and ruination of Germany". It was symptomatic of the dark forces at work trying to turn the country back to "violent nationalism"—not unlike the wild claims of the Trumpettes of 2016, following the lead of their fearless leader.
The isolationists would almost uniformly reject such hate but the conservative wing of the GOP could wind up with these "rabid extremists riding on their bandwagon and giving the impression that they are in fact part of the band". He concludes that nothing would more quickly alienate the great mass of Americans—and so it was in 2016, all 74 million of us, the 53.9 percent who did not vote for the Idiot.
Robert C. Ruark, in Honolulu, tells
of his having witnessed the hula dance for many years, including the
chief exponent of it, Iolani Luahini
He liked the hula but disliked the pseudo-art form into which a "hootchy-kooch" had been transformed. And, he observes, the Hawaiians concentrated on the hips also, the ami-ami movement, not the hands. He could not do the ami-ami, meaning "let's go around the island".
The wiki-wiki was a sort of startled forward movement, as if being goaded with a sharp stick from behind.
When the hula degenerated to bump and grind, the locals excused it by suggesting that the dancer must be from Samoa or Tahiti, but the reality was that they were trying to get around the fact that they were in the "burley-cue business".
He finds the Hawaiian music accompanying the hula also to be phony, being a cousin to the tango, suggesting that Oahu was more beautiful than any other place in the world, that the girls were sexier, the sun brighter and the flowers more fragrant.
"Eh-ah, eh-ah" was a grunt thrown in when they ran out of superlatives, until "haina", meaning to knock off, or "haina-ho", to knock off completely, arrived.
He decides, as he reaches haina-ho, that if the wiggle were taken out of the hula, there would be no
dance at all, just a lecture
A letter writer, age 14, says that she believed that the young girl who had lost her hand because of an inoperable tumor on one of her fingers, had her hand, that which God gave her, taken by the doctor. She says that she wanted to keep her own hand and make the best of it.
Ninth Day of Christmas
Framed Edition
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