The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 24, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House Rules Committee wound up in a tie vote, 5 to 5, on whether to send the controversial Fair Employment Practices Commission measure to the House floor for debate and vote, meaning that the bill remained bottled up in the Committee. As two Republican members were absent, a motion to reconsider was made, for consideration when they returned. Both, however, were believed to be ready to vote against sending the bill to the full House. But one member voted against sending out the bill only because of the absent members. Thus, the vote would likely still be tied and no action taken. The bill could be brought before the full House by a committee chairman in two weeks, on the second or fourth Monday of the month, provided Speaker Sam Rayburn would recognize the chairman. The previous day, he had recognized a chairman regarding bills on statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. Any bill languishing in committee for three weeks was subject to being brought to the floor in that manner.

HUAC heard testimony from an Atomic Energy Commission official that a private citizen knew about the Manhattan Project at the time his company sold a thousand pounds of uranium compounds to Russia in spring, 1943. The testimony was elicited by Congressman Richard Nixon.

In New York, the trial began of Judy Coplon and her alleged accomplice in espionage, Valentin Gubitchev. She stood accused of intending to transfer Justice Department secret documents to Mr. Gubitchev at the time of their arrest. Ms. Coplon had already been convicted in Washington in a previous trial of improperly taking the documents from her place of employment.

A report from aboard the Flying Arrow, the merchant ship which had been attacked in the Yangtze River approach to Shanghai for attempting to run the Nationalist blockade line of the Communist-held port, tells of finding famine reports from Communist North China in Shantung while ashore when the ship was being repaired. The informant claimed that many millions would die as a result. He said that the Communist administration was a mess because of untrained personnel and reluctance by the Communists to use available experienced professional men. He also said that the Communist money was worth no more than the Kuomintang currency.

The continuing strike of coal miners in captive mines of steel companies had caused 500 steelworkers to be laid off by one company, with another 500 possibly to follow by week's end. Other companies were also planning to cut back operations.

In Detroit, a strike was nearing at Chrysler, as 50,000 workers were set to walk out the following day at 10:00 a.m. The UAW abandoned its demand for a $100 per month pension and instead sought a 10 cents per hour wage increase, but Chrysler showed no signs of agreeing to the demand.

A photograph appears of Preston Tucker in Chicago, driving one of his Tucker automobiles and waving, after being acquitted on charges of defrauding investors in the company for not building his automobile as promised.

In Boston, two gunmen robbed $2,000 from the exclusive Union Club, extant since 1863. The robbery occurred just after the payroll had been delivered by a Brinks armored truck. A Brinks facility had been robbed in Boston of 1.5 million dollars the previous week.

In Beverly Hills, California, a man who had been convicted the previous year of burglary, was given the custody of $40,000 worth of jewels found in his car's radiator hose when arrested. No one had claimed the jewels and the man contended that he had received them from a man he had staked in a poker game.

In Los Angeles, a nine-year old girl testified to a court that she did not want to be in movies but wanted to be able to eat what she wanted. She claimed that her mother had beaten her when she gained weight, prompting the mother's arrest and a custody hearing. Her mother said that the child had an uncontrollable appetite, but denied beating her so that she could obtain roles. There's always a place in movies for the fat little girl.

Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray received the approval of Governor Kerr Scott as the new president of UNC, after his selection by a special committee of trustees, awaiting approval by the full Board of Trustees.

In Charlotte, the trial began regarding the 19-year old boy, charged with murder, who claimed to have blacked out and fatally shot a taxi driver after the boy and his girlfriend had met the driver and his wife at a party on New Year's Eve. He had also allegedly shot and beat the wife.

Also in Charlotte, police had become aware of the identity of a man who had allegedly hired the man who police arrested while in the act of attempting to blow up the WBT radio tower. The man had not yet been arrested. The police chief said that the man's identity was widely known and would come as a complete shock. The deal, the defendant said, had been consummated in Columbia, S.C., where the defendant lived.

It must have been the President, upset over programming. Or perhaps Governor Thurmond.

On the editorial page, "Un-Horatio Alger" tells of the meteoric career of Alger Hiss, from an attorney working in the State Department to becoming secretary-general of the U.N. Charter Conference in spring, 1945, and finally the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but having abruptly ended when on Saturday the jury in his retrial for perjury in New York found him guilty on both counts, based on his testimony before the Grand Jury that he had not provided secret State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers or had contact with him during the relevant period in 1938 when the documents were allegedly passed. The previous jury in the case had hung.

The piece suggests that while Mr. Hiss's appeal was pending, the Department of Justice might accept Mr. Chambers's offer to help in the prosecutions of Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, Charles Kramer, Henry Collins, Abraham George Silver, and John Abt—the latter being the attorney who in 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald would seek to contact after being arrested for the assassination of President Kennedy, after which Mr. Abt stated that he had no connection with Mr. Oswald, had never heard of him prior to the assassination and did not know he had tried to contact him until after the fatal shooting of Oswald two days after the assassination. All of these men had testified before HUAC during the summer and fall of 1948 when the Chambers accusations against Mr. Hiss surfaced, initially naming him only as a member of the Communist underground, changing the story to espionage when Mr. Hiss sued Mr. Chambers for slander based on his accusation on a radio program that Mr. Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party during the latter 1930's. The Grand Jury had probed the matter at the instance of HUAC, and with the considerable prodding and testimony before the Grand Jury by Congressman Richard Nixon.

The matter remains controversial to this day and no one has ever presented an ironclad case for guilt or innocence of Mr. Hiss in all the years since the trial. Without such evidence to be marshaled, it appears probable that the jury committed a miscarriage of justice by rendering a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty, apparently swayed heavily by the Woodstock typewriter in evidence, on which some of the documents winding up in the possession of Mr. Chambers were allegedly transcribed, about which the jurors had asked for re-reading of testimony before rendering their verdict.

As we have pointed out previously, the so-called Venona file compiled by U.S. intelligence from translated Soviet wartime intercepts, to which many attach great significance, proves nothing, as it merely speculates that a certain code word, "Ales", used by the Russians in those intercepts, referred to Mr. Hiss. There is no proof of that speculation and so the Venona documents do not advance the case against Mr. Hiss one iota. That a former KGB agent in the mid-1980's identified Mr. Hiss as a wartime agent is purely hearsay and not to be given any credit for the fact of the source. People say a lot of things years after the fact, especially when paid by an author of a book to say them.

Mr. Hiss maintained his innocence to the end of his days in 1996. And given the contemporaneous changing stories of Mr. Chambers over a short period of time—notably admitting at one point, for instance, that deceased Harry Dexter White, also formerly of the State Department, may have provided him with one of the documents in issue, coupled with the fact that Mr. White had access to all of the documents in question—, it is quite likely that he made up the entire scenario to cooperate with HUAC so that he would not become the object of an indictment for his HUAC testimony. HUAC members had referred the matter to the Justice Department on the basis that either Mr. Hiss or Mr. Chambers had to be committing perjury. Given what we know of how Mr. Nixon ran things thereafter, it is entirely feasible that Mr. Nixon and HUAC chief investigator Robert Stripling induced Mr. Chambers to change his story to one of espionage by Mr. Hiss, not only to protect himself from prosecution, but, from the HUAC perspective, for political impact and publicity, that which HUAC had to have to remain viable as a committee.

One thing about the case is clear: without it, we would likely have scarcely, if at all, ever heard of Congressman Richard Nixon. And the country would be far richer for that blissful ignorance.

"Challenge to the Drys" tells of Governor Kerr Scott addressing the Allied Church League, explaining that while he supported the effort to bring about prohibition, it would be no good without adequate enforcement, and the present ABC system of State-controlled liquor sales was working well while raising revenue. Prohibition only brought back the bootlegger and winked at enforcement.

The Governor still believed that the people ought have a choice through statewide referendum and would likely seek it from the 1951 Legislature. Local option, however, still was allowing their voices to be heard, which the piece regards as the "most democratic process of all".

"Classic Theater in 'The Sticks'" tells of the performance of The Taming of the Shrew by Margaret Webster's Shakespeare Company, performed at the Armory-Auditorium, drawing a good crowd of 2,700, with about 500 standing in line at the door to buy tickets.

Harry Golden of the Shakespeare Society of Charlotte and Pauline Owen, the president of the English Teachers Association, had worked tirelessly to inform the people of the area of the performance, making it a financial success and proving that Charlotte could support classic theater. In the past, many touring companies had bypassed the city because they believed the populace would not turn out for such performances.

"The Growing Divorce Problem" tells of the Saturday Evening Post, in the first of a five-part series, revealing that about one-sixth of the adult female population in the country, six million women, had been divorced. There was ongoing debate as to whether couples who were unhappy were not better off divorced. But there were ramifications to divorce carried on generationally, that children of divorced parents were more prone to divorce. Broken homes also tended to be more prone to spawning of juvenile delinquency among the children.

But divorce could not be outlawed without probably worse results. It recommends to young couples that they look before they leap, to take a closer look at divorce and its results, and that more studies of the problem as that in The Post be conducted.

A piece from Golfing, a British publication, responds to Charlotte golfer Clayton Heafner, following his remarks during the fall after his return from England where he had participated in the Ryder Cup competition as a member of the U.S. team. He had complained of being "ear-banged" whenever they attended the many obligatory dinners held during the competition. The piece defends the dinner speakers of Britain re golf, insists that they were not dull, even if not brilliant. It encourages those who arranged in the future dinner programmes which Mr. Heafner might attend to invite a fresh quota of "Heafnerisms" to avoid having them repressed, only to be told later to an American journalist.

Drew Pearson tells of two Justice Department lawyers who had begun about a year earlier investigating gambling operations in the country. The previous week, a 16-member California narcotics ring had been indicted. The leader was Joe Sica of New Jersey, formerly of the Frank Costello gang. He ran a health club in Los Angeles which doubled as a narcotics center. His operations stretched into the Central Valley, aided by his friend Joe Cannon, gambling kingpin of Fresno. For a time, Pine Lake Lodge outside Fresno became headquarters for the mob, but was now under new management and the mob was gone.

Prostitution interests operating in Fresno regularly paid off the police and city officials to operate. Gambling establishments also made such payments. The police chief at the time received only $450 per month, but nevertheless he or his wife owned 1,742 acres of land plus three lots within the City of Fresno, two recently sold ranches, a hotel and restaurant and a tire recapping business. But the new Mayor, Gordon Dunn, who had vowed to clean up Fresno, had promptly fired this police chief and clamped down on prostitution and gambling.

Three months later, a man was arrested with a kilo of heroin in his car as he sped through the Central Valley—traveling so fast that a vacuum cleaner had to be utilized to clean the drugs from the back seat area—, leading to the arrest of Joe Sica and fifteen others. The case showed how closely knit together were the gambling operations with prostitution and narcotics.

He promises next to reveal the identities of the "big boys" who provided protection near the top.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the controversy over past Administration policy regarding China, with Senator Homer Ferguson making the claim that all policy after 1944 was based on a secret, pro-Communist memo by Vice-President Henry Wallace. That claim was false, as the memo in question only favored thorough modernization and reconstruction of the Chinese Nationalist Government, something which everyone who supported aid to Chiang favored. Furthermore, Mr. Wallace had recommended to FDR that he remove General Joseph Stilwell, inimical to Chiang, from command in China and replace him with General Albert Wedemeyer, who later became Chiang's friend. These statements showed that Mr. Wallace was certainly not influenced by the Chinese Communists.

Radio commentary currently was stating that there was a pro-Communist plot in the State Department which undermined the Chiang regime. But no such plot existed. Rather, there were two competing arguments at work, one premised on the notion that it was inevitable that Chiang would fall, urging, in response, development of "Titoism" among the Communists, to resist Moscow. The other was to send military aid and advice, as was done with Greece.

The Alsops find that General Stilwell badly mismanaged affairs in China, leading to the defeat by the Communists, that General Marshall as Secretary of State had, in formulating policy, relied too heavily on General Stilwell's experiences. The ultimate responsibility for the failure lay with Secretary Marshall. They conclude that while it was tragic, it was not sinister, "mistaken but not mysterious."

Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the twenty-first in his series of articles on childhood education, praises the presence of bands and choruses in schools, finds them more useful for student growth than algebra, geometry, and Latin. He tells of not having such outlets when he was in school but that in 1950, most modern schools had such benefits. In the high schools, music was no longer considered sissy.

The "President's" "press secretary" was at it again today, defending the indefensible, claiming that the Boss Man had held for a long time the idea that there were illegal immigrants voting, that those voting in 2016 totaled three to five million votes taken away from His Highness and given to his opponent. That notion supposedly was based on a 2008 study which showed, according to the "press secretary", that "14 percent of people who had voted were non-citizens".

Well, lawsy me and shut our mouths. Fourteen percent of those who voted? There were 129 million people who voted in 2008. That means that about 18.8 million people must have voted illegally.

But the problem immediately arises that the best estimates of those immigrants not in the country legally by early 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security, was about 10.8 million. So that means that another eight million people somehow sneaked over the border at midnight on election day and sneaked back the next day after voting. Must have been. Because this new White House does not lie. No sir. They are 100 percent down the line, real. Awesome.

Yessir.

Actually, the referenced study out of Old Dominion University said nothing about fourteen percent of those who voted being illegal immigrants or non-citizens. What it said, based on a small study, was that 38 respondents, 11.3 percent of the total respondents in the study, all of whom were "non-citizen immigrants", answered that they had voted in the 2008 election. Of those, only 5 were verified. (See Table 2 at page 152 of the study.) It never mentions fourteen percent, but rather, in its conclusions, estimates, based on the data compiled, that something less than fifteen percent and something more than zero percent of the "non-citizen immigrants" voted in 2008. (See page 154 of the study.) It also says that the data suggested the number of such voters to be "quite small". It said that somewhere between 3.3 and 19.8 percent of non-citizen immigrants were registered to vote in 2008—a rather wide range of possibilities. (See page 151 of the study.) The fourteen percent figure appears to come from the always and invariably reliable "Judicial Watch", another reactionary organization you can always trust, basing its figure on an obviously half-read paragraph or two in the conclusion of the study, but not to be found in the body of it.

The number of "non-citizen immigrants" in the country, according to the 2010 census, was estimated to be 22.48 million, meaning that if as many as 11.3 percent voted, that would equate to 2.54 million, even at that top level estimate made by the study, based on the responses of 38 people, not equating to 2.9 million, by which former Secretary of State Clinton won the popular vote, or five million, as claimed as the top end of the range by His Highness.

To extrapolate from this small sample 11.3 percent into raw numbers to reach the estimated three to five million votes tabulated by His Highness as having been cast by "illegal immigrants" for his opponent would mean a minimum of 26 million illegal immigrants in the country in 2016, 3.5 million more than all non-citizen immigrants, legal and illegal, estimated in the 2010 census. For 11.3 percent of about 26 million is Secretary of State Clinton's 2.9 million popular vote margin of victory. As there were only an estimated 10.8 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally in early 2009, that would have to mean that either that number has, since 2009, risen about 150 percent, or that the numbers of voting immigrants rose exponentially beyond that reported in the 2014 study from 2008 and 2010, such that about thirty percent of all illegal immigrants voted, not merely 11.3 percent of the "non-citizen immigrants". And every one of those votes necessarily had to be cast for former Secretary of State Clinton to equate to His Highness's numbers at the low end of three million. At five million, obviously, the numbers of presumed illegal immigrants would have to go even higher into the stratosphere, reaching around 45 million in His Highness's world, nearly twice the 2010 census data for non-citizen immigrants and 4.5 times the DHS figures for illegal immigrants present in early 2009.

But make no mistake, if His Highness says so, they are here and they are taking over.

It has to be true because His Highness and his honorable retinue at the White House do not lie. You can take it to the bank. No wonder he wants to deport all of these people tomorrow. They nearly cost him the White House.

No wonder he had to conspire with the Russians to throw the election his way. Turnabout is fair play.

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