The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 25, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the State Department charged that Russia was absorbing four of China's richest northern areas, as supported by two secret agreements between the Russians and Chinese Communists, the so-called Moscow and Harbin agreements. The report supported the claims of Secretary of State Acheson, who, in a statement two weeks earlier, had said that Russia was detaching from China the industrially rich areas of Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia, and annexing them to the Soviet Union. The report said that Russian penetration into Outer Mongolia was complete and a treaty negotiated authorizing the presence of Soviet troops in the region. A special trade agreement had been signed the previous July which reportedly gave Russia 60 percent of a farmer's produce in Manchuria. During the prior weekend, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Vishinsky had denounced the claims as a "monstrous lie".

The President and the Joint Chiefs agreed to a compromise whereby peacetime draft inductions would be left to Congress provided the President could act in an emergency. The present draft law was set to expire at the end of June and no inductions had taken place pursuant to it for more than a year. The Administration wanted a three-year extension.

The head of the Bureau of Mines advised the President that a national emergency in coal now existed or at least appeared imminent, so as to trigger the emergency provisions of Taft-Hartley and enable the President to seek an injunction against the three-day work week and the ongoing strike of captive steel company mines. The President had maintained since the start of the three-day week on December 1 that no national emergency yet existed.

Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa claimed that there were enough votes in the Senate to pass by the necessary two-thirds majority the proposed constitutional amendment to provide equal rights to women. Senator Gillette and 22 other Senators co-sponsored the amendment, which had been debated periodically for thirty years. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that the vote would be close. Senator Richard Russell expressed hope of accumulating more than the one-third votes necessary for defeat. He also had proposed an amendment to require three-fourths of the states for ratification. He believed that the amendment would effect rescission of the laws built up over time to protect women's rights. Other Senators, including Estes Kefauver and Wayne Morse, formerly a law professor, proposed instead a commission to study and report to the President on the economic, civil, social and political status of women.

In Detroit, 89,000 workers at Chrysler struck after failing to reach agreement on wage demands, following failed negotiations of six months on a $100 per month welfare and pension package.

In New York, Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years in Federal prison for his conviction on Saturday of two counts of perjury, and his attorneys filed notice of appeal. No fine was imposed. He continued to deny in open court that he ever provided, in 1938 or at any other time, State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers, as Mr. Chambers claimed. He expressed confidence that in the future, facts would come out to show that Mr. Chambers was able to forge the documents on a typewriter to make them appear similar to documents produced on the Woodstock typewriter in evidence which had belonged to the Hiss family. His lawyer said that Mr. Hiss's financial resources had been exhausted before the end of the first trial, which concluded in a hung jury, and that he had to borrow money to pay his debts, including the fees for the second trial.

Out of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, came the story of a trapper of Ketchikan, Alaska, who had drifted for eight days in a 36-foot troller and walked through zero temperatures for nine additional hours, but was in good condition at Masset where he was found when police spotted his signal fires.

In Charlotte, the 19-year old boy, who had been charged with first degree murder for the killing of a taxi driver whom he and his date had met at a party the previous December 23, changed his plea to no contest on a charge of second degree murder and was sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison. An additional two years for assault of the taxi driver's wife, and five to ten years on five counts of unrelated breaking and entering were added, with all sentences to run consecutively. The presentation of evidence in the trial had begun during the morning, prior to the plea bargain. The judge provided that the authorities at Central Prison could prescribe a commitment to an asylum. The defendant had claimed that he periodically blacked out from blinding headaches and that such was the case at the time of the shooting.

Also in Charlotte, a nephew of the man accused of attempting to blow up the WBT radio tower utilizing dynamite had been arrested on an open charge in Columbia, S.C., while police investigated his connection to the plot. The arrest of the "important man" in the case, who allegedly had hired the principal defendant, was expected this date.

Stay tuned for the arrest of either the President or Governor Strom Thurmond.

Also in Charlotte, the Notre Dame football coach, Frank Leahy, paid a visit and was greeted by Mayor Victor Shaw and 500 others who had extended a luncheon invitation to him at the City Club. He said he was not hungry but was relieved when told that the invitation did not mandate a speech. He would make an address at the Hotel Charlotte to the Quarterback Club this night. He told News sports reporter Bob Quincy that as far as he knew the September 30 rematch between UNC and Notre Dame would be played in South Bend. The 1949 game the previous November 12, which the Irish had easily won in the second half, 42 to 6, had been played in Yankee Stadium, without senior Tar Heel star Charlie Justice able to participate for an ankle injury. He said that the first half of the game, which wound up tied 6 to 6 at halftime, was as close as any half all season.

Sub-zero temperatures hit the Northern plains states while rain, snow and sleet hit the Central states. New England was beset by sheets of ice after an overnight storm which killed at least two persons. It was warm in Florida and in parts of the East and lower Midwest.

Weather, weather everywhere, every day. Will it ever stop?

In London, Tailor and Cutter magazine picked at British television announcers for holding their right shoulders too low or left shoulders too high, such that they appeared to be standing on a hill.

That's better than today, when half of them, including the new "press secretary" last Saturday, use those idiotic shoulder pads to make themselves look bigger before the cameras. Be yourself, dummy. Everyone knows you don't play football.

On the editorial page, "Medicine's Responsibility" comments on the column on the page by Bob Sain of The News in which he set forth response by North Carolina medical leaders to the idea suggested by medical school academicians that the failure to provide adequate medical schools in the country, leading to inadequate numbers of doctors, especially in rural areas, was the result of an intentional desire to keep the medical profession a "closed shop". The North Carolina response was that the criticism was not appropriate and that the need for money to build the facilities was the critical problem.

But the piece suggests that while that appeared to be the case, it did not relieve the medical profession entirely of the problem because the people had allowed the profession largely to be self-regulatory, and the profession still had a duty to inculcate in young doctors the social responsibility attached to entering medicine.

The President's compulsory health insurance plan, it concludes, was not acceptable to many people in the country but it at least had reminded doctors of their responsibility to the public and thus served a substantial purpose.

"Mr. Baruch Sounds Off Again" tells of Bernard Baruch having warned of the continuing failure of the Government to produce a contingency plan for war becoming more dangerous as the Russians proceeded to build a stockpile of nuclear weapons. He proposed passage of full mobilization emergency laws to go into effect in the event of war, creation of a permanent mobilization agency, and a constant, vigilant inventory of natural resources needed for war.

The piece thinks it a good, reasonable plan which would avoid the debacle of another Pearl Harbor. It finds him more realistic than some of the leaders of the country who worried more about re-election than national preparedness.

"Mao's Great Dilemma" comments on the month-long meeting between Mao Tse-Tung and Josef Stalin in Moscow, regarding control of Manchuria. Mao needed substantial Russian aid for the ailing Chinese economy but would have to provide Russia with territory and a controlling voice in the Government to obtain it. If he did meet those conditions, there was no guarantee the Russians would comply, as they had not in Eastern Europe, and, in any event, such an agreement would create resentment among the Chinese people and all nationalistic peoples of Asia.

It concludes that the conflict between nationalism in Asia and Communism in Russia presented the best chance for success of the U.S. hands-off policy.

"Another Berlin Flareup" tells of the recent problem in Berlin involving no more than the Americans first allowing the West Berlin police to occupy the West Berlin railway station, at which point the Russians, in charge of rail transportation, cut rail traffic by 60 percent, at which point the Americans ordered the offices vacated again, following which the Russians slowed highway traffic at checkpoints. It assures that nothing else came of it and that no renewal of the 1948 blockade appeared imminent.

The U.S. Army had, nevertheless, declared its readiness to resume the airlift should a blockade be imposed, which was probably enough to deter the Russians from any further action.

Bob Sain of The News, as indicated in the piece above, imparts the response of North Carolina medical leaders to the criticism leveled at the medical profession by the Association of Medical Colleges, meeting in Cincinnati, that the profession place immediate priority on training more doctors, with unofficial comment being that the profession was deliberately limiting admissions to medical schools to limit competition.

The dean of Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem said that the real problem instead was the desire to maintain standards in the profession. The dean of Duke University School of Medicine said that the problem was lack of money. A Charlotte urologist, who was president of the Southern Medical Association, maintained that admissions committees at medical schools needed to put more emphasis on proper distribution of doctors, with a greater understanding of proper medical care and the needs of the people, than on the number of students graduating.

The problem was that the doctor-patient ratio was decreasing, with Charlotte having gone from one doctor for every 502 persons in 1902 to one for every 627 in 1949. And Charlotte was a city with good medical facilities, attracting good doctors. Less than one-third of the doctors were present in rural communities, with almost half being over age 55. The cities, with a fifth of the population, had half the doctors in the state.

Moreover, there were only 76 doctors on average beginning to practice in the state each year, while 80 were retiring, dying, or leaving the state. The establishment of the new four-year medical school at UNC would help alleviate this problem, but was not expected to provide the panacea. The state had 2,300 doctors and needed 1,300 more to meet minimum requirements. In 1940, only four counties had more than one doctor per thousand of population while 43 counties had less than one per 2,000.

The medical schools of the state would only produce a few hundred doctors per year and many would depart the state to practice. Thus, it would take a long time for the public to be adequately served, the dean of Bowman Gray having stated that an AMA survey had predicted that the problem of shortage of doctors would be solved across the country by 1960.

Everything is going to be good by 1960, that is if the Rooskies don't get us first with the H-bomb.

Drew Pearson discusses the continuing month-long meeting between Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung in Moscow regarding control of Manchuria. If Mao returned home without Manchuria and with commitments to supply Russia with troops, laborers, and food, his authority would be weakened. The Kremlin was trying to undermine Mao with hundreds of Soviet officials, acting as agricultural advisers, military experts, engineers and welfare officials, moving into the Chinese Communist Government to control its propaganda machine. It was believed that if Mao sold out to Russia, the Chinese people would "take care of him".

He next imparts of the secret Republican caucus regarding the House Rules Committee gag rule and the attempt to revive it. House Minority Leader Joe Martin was for it but allowed debate on the issue. He favored the FEPC bill, but believed the gag rule would save money by blocking Administration programs involving large amounts of spending. Former floor leader Charles Halleck also favored it. Other Congressmen were opposed to the gag rule as they favored open debate on the floor on measures. They believed that stands had to be taken rather than dodging issues if they were to win elections. Congressmen Clifford Case and Jacob Javits believed that support of the rule would play into the hands of the Democrats in the next election.

Others lashed out at Southern Democrats for tricking the Republicans into a political coalition over such things as elimination of the discriminatory tax on margarine when their real goal was the gag rule to defeat the President's civil rights legislation, especially the FEPC bill. The Southerners, these GOP Congressmen proclaimed, were taking care of their own interests, such as cotton, before economy.

Marquis Childs discusses the impact of the Alger Hiss verdict, finds that it left a bad taste in the mouths of most Americans, save those on the far right who supported Fascism, those possessed of an inherent distrust of ideas and opinions which deviated at all from the orthodox view. "That is part of the psychosis of distrust and fear that is Fascism."

During the thirties, many Americans had believed that Soviet Communism was the only answer to Nazism and Fascism, and the world's economic ills which had bred those systems. Others had found Mussolini appealing for getting the trains to run on time and ending begging in Italy. Still others believed that Hitler was the answer for stabilizing Europe against Communism. Such people might have been the agents of an international organization for those systems, had one been in existence, similar to the American Communist Party and the Comintern.

He asserts that no matter how distasteful it might be, revelation and analysis of the acts of those who conspired against the government should proceed. But when pushed to the point of persecution and criminal prosecution, the basis for a free society was imperiled.

He finds it ironic that men as Whittaker Chambers who were most guilty of denying faith in the American system, now appeared to want to make the rest of society "pay for their sense of guilt" by pushing for bigger and better heresy trials.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the division in the Republican Party during a year of mid-term elections. The Congressional leadership of Joe Martin in the House was uninspired. He and his lieutenants had joined Southern Democrats the previous week in trying to restore the former powers of the Rules Committee to pigeonhole legislation, causing a revolt within the Republican Party among members fearful of backlash in the North where the black vote was strong, helping other Democrats ultimately to defeat the effort. Those who broke ranks were serving notice that nothing was to be gained by remaining orthodox.

The President's strategy was to have FEPC defeated by filibuster in the Senate so that he could then use that defeat against Republicans in the mid-term races. Senators Irving Ives of New York and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts were trying to persuade fellow Republicans to vote for cloture. But it was generally believed that not enough votes could be mustered to effect it and that the Southerners would therefore win again, enabling the President to blame Republicans.

The principles being drawn up by the RNC were intended to appeal to big donors of the party and would alienate most voters who earned less than $10,000 per year.

While this dichotomy gave the President an opening on domestic policy, it worked against him on foreign policy, as Republicans were trying to reduce foreign spending for the sake of economy, exampled by the recent refusal to provide 60 million dollars in additional financial aid to Korea, claimed as necessary to avoid Communist takeover, defeated by a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. In the Senate, the same coalition was working to reduce ERP aid.

The Alsops thus find that the Republicans appeared to be creating the worst of both worlds, a trend likely to continue as they feared the reaction of contributors more than that of the voters.

A letter writer from Lancaster, S.C., responds to Mrs. Waring—apparently in reference to the wife of Federal Judge J. Waties Waring anent remarks she made earlier in the month at the Charleston black Y.W.C.A.—having suggested that Southern whites were "full of pride and complacency" and were "morally weak and low". Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had described the statement as "beneath comment" and the writer agrees that it was probably beneath the position of governor to comment, assuming, he says, there was any dignity to the office left after Governor Thurmond had stood on his head. But since he was not a governor, he felt obliged to comment, found the remarks ill-tempered and certain only to arouse hate. He had been a Yankee until nine years earlier and finds her generalizations "sophomoric", that all Southerners were not alike.

He reminds that all who took part in the slave trade were dead.

The remarks, he believes, were not helping the South out of its resulting residual trouble left from that era, that it was an example of group prejudice, similar to racial prejudice, to attack a whole region of the country and ascribe traits to all its inhabitants.

He probably had not had his house stoned by the morally weak and low or had a stranger knock at the door and proclaim the occupant to be a "nigger-loving son of a bitch".

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