The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 3, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the second session of the 81st Congress formally convening this date, with one eye already on the mid-term elections. The first day had consisted mainly of the usual formalities. The following day at around 1:00 p.m., the President would deliver his State of the Union message to both houses, to be carried by all major radio and television networks. Stay tuned.

Well-informed sources stated that the U.S. would provide military and economic aid to Formosa so that the Nationalists could hold the island against the Chinese Communists.

In retaliation for the arrest in Hungary of an American businessman on charges of spying, the State Department, describing those charges as "trumped up", had ordered Hungary to close its consulates in Cleveland and New York by January 15.

Wonder what would have happened if in 1948, evidence had surfaced of spying by the Russians on the American election, seeking to influence it for one side or the other. It seems that in 2016-17, there are many fair-weather patriots abounding, especially prevalent among the Trumpettes, waving the flag in everyone's face obnoxiously when it serves their nationalistic, racist purposes and conveniently blinking the truth when evidence arises of tampering by Russia with our electoral processes, the inviolable integrity of which forms the foundation of any democratic society. Of course, since the Trumpettes never met a democratic process which they regard as anything but "fixed", unless it favors their preordained result, it is scarcely surprising that they hitch their wagons to a State which appears to be steadily backsliding into its totalitarian past. We are not talking about South Carolina.

Britain, according to an informed source, had stemmed its dollar shortage through devaluation of the pound, increasing the likelihood that the general election, required before July, would be called by the Labor Government for February or March.

Egypt was holding its first election in five years, with a heavy turnout reported at the polls. Women could not vote. British newspapers speculated that the elections might be affected by the report of King Farouk having broken up a romance between two of his subjects so that he could marry a beautiful 16-year old commoner, that the matter could touch off a revolution.

Alleged "five-percenter" John Maragon, who at one time had unfettered entree to the White House, had been indicted by the Grand Jury in Washington on four counts of perjury for his stating to Congress that he had received no pay for aiding the procurement of Government contracts and that he did not negotiate any Government business through his contacts in the Administration, notably Presidential military aide General Harry Vaughan.

Most of the Illinois UMW had walked off the job this date but were ordered by the head of the local union to return to the pits on Monday after he discussed the matter with John L. Lewis.

In Atlanta, Governor Herman Talmadge hinted that he would run for re-election, despite the Georgia Constitution prohibiting a second consecutive term. In anticipation of an adverse ruling by the State Attorney General on the matter, the Governor said that the people, not a "conniving scheming, selfish, cunning politician", would choose the next governor.

In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott, a year into his term, predicted at a press conference that North Carolina would eventually incorporate municipal streets into the State Highway system. In response to a question, he said that Tommy Panther, organizer of the Klan in Gastonia, had not requested an interview with him but that he would grant it if Mr. Panther did so, as the Governor, who had frequently criticized the Klan, had an open-door policy. That sort of response, however, might encourage Mr. Wolf, dressed as a sheep, to seek an interview also.

The New Year's three-day weekend took 402 lives in accidents, with 255 killed in traffic mishaps, albeit 75 fewer than predicted by the National Safety Council. Fires claimed 75 lives. The numbers compared to 309 and 207, respectively, in 1948 in a two-day holiday period. Texas led the nation with 58 deaths from accidents, including 30 traffic fatalities. California had 31 deaths, Illinois, 30, and New York, 28. North Carolina, seventh on the list in the Christmas weekend death tolls, tied with Washington for ninth place this time. Wet and foggy weather was believed to have been a major reason for the lower totals, keeping people off the highways.

"Winter's twin punches, snow and sub-zero temperatures" struck across the central and western parts of the land, from Southern California to northwestern Illinois. Four skiers in the San Bernardino Mountains of California were found unharmed after being trapped in an abandoned stable by snow for more than thirteen hours. A hiker was feared lost on Mt. Baldy at the Devil's Backbone. He may have hiked too far to the south.

On the editorial page, "Cold War in the East" tells of a new foreign policy being implemented for the Far East, starting with the strengthening of the Seventh Fleet in Asiatic waters and the possibility that an American military mission would be sent to Formosa to advise Chiang Kai-Shek.

Withholding of American recognition from the Communist Government would not only potentially give the Nationalists in China some succor, it would reassure Indo-China, Burma, Malaya, India and Indonesia that the U.S. would back them up if they were to oppose Communism.

But India had already announced its recognition of the Communists and Britain appeared ready to do so.

Until the President released the rumored new white paper on China policy, however, it would be difficult to understand the policy now being formulated with respect to the Far East.

"Hoover Commission Troubles" tells of people being in favor of the recommendations of the Hoover Commission to streamline the Government and reduce waste, as long as it did not affect their own interests.

Josephine Ripley of the Christian Science Monitor had recently looked at the matter and found that bankers, for instance, liked most of the Hoover reports but were opposed to the transfer of the FDIC to the Treasury, that the National Association of Manufacturers was in favor of four of the reports but was reserving judgment on the remainder until the reorganization bills were sent to Congress—and so forth.

The piece thinks it would be a miracle if, in the end, any reorganization took place pursuant to the Commission recommendations and hopes that there would be enough people willing to fight for them, apart from their own selfish interests, to effectuate the needed reforms and thereby save billions of dollars.

"Long-Needed Survey" tells of the Highway Commission, in response to a recommendation by the Prison Advisory Council, having decided to hire a nationally-known penologist, Austin MacCormick, to assess North Carolina's ailing penal system, beset with problems of prisoner discipline, lack of proper food, and recidivism.

Dr. Howard Odum of UNC had made an exhaustive inquiry of the system during the term of Governor O. Max Gardner in the latter twenties, but his recommendations were never implemented. Dr. Odum was now updating his observations for use by the new penologist. Now, there was adequate money to make needed improvements, unlike the former period during the Depression.

The piece approves of the move and asserts that it was time for the State to bring its penal system and methods up to modern standards.

"Republicans, Take Heart" tells of virtually every magazine on the newsstands offering up a remedy for the Republican Party, even if they disagreed on the means to accomplish it. The RNC chairman had named a committee of 15 to draft a "statement of principles" on which party candidates could run in the mid-term elections of 1950.

In 1948, all the experts had been prescribing cures for the ailing Democrats and it was, the piece suggests, not impossible that they were just as wrong in 1950 about the prospects for the GOP.

Drew Pearson finds that as Congress began the new session, there were two important driving forces behind American foreign policy, that the British were double-crossing the U.S. in China by recognizing the new Communist Government of Mao Tse-Tung, and that Congress would soon begin to criticize vehemently U.S. policy toward China.

The recognition by Britain was coming at a time when it would most harm the State Department's relation with Congress, and it was being done to advance British financial interests in Hong Kong.

While the President was demanding a positive policy on China, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Secretary of State Acheson were arguing the matter between them. But it was difficult to achieve a policy toward China because of its heterogeneity, as exemplified by the fact that its people spoke twenty different languages. The age-old policy of passive resistance and the boycott was likely the only one which would work either in China or against it. It would involve severing trade relations with China, even if necessarily resulting in thousands of starving Chinese people and consequent riots in the cities; but it was the only effective means by which the Communist Government could be taught not to seize American consul-generals, as in the case of Angus Ward in Mukden, or imprison U.S. aviators. And it was the only way to prevent the southward advance of Communism into the Philippines, Indo-China, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and India.

The U.S. could not, practically, invade China and thus such a boycott-blockade would be the only effective means to halt the spread of Communism in the region.

China had applied such a boycott to the Western world in Canton in 1925, in protest of British marines killing Chinese students. It had worked with respect to Canton but its limitation to that city caused it to fail in the broader sense of getting all foreign diplomats ousted from China, a result which might have followed had the boycott extended to other cities.

In 1936, Admiral William Leahy, then chief of Naval operations under FDR, proposed that the American and British fleets blockade Japanese waters and sever access to supplies of oil, cotton, copper, and scrap iron. If implemented, World War II might have been avoided. But at the time, there was dissent among the Nine Powers of the treaty guaranteeing Chinese sovereignty, as well as within the Roosevelt Administration, resulting in cancellation of the boycott plan.

Now, the biggest thorn to any boycott was Britain.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the development of the hydrogen bomb and the decision being made whether it was worth the investment to build on a rush basis, similar to the Manhattan Project during the war regarding the development of the atom bomb. From the time immediately after the war, the Government had been aware of the concept of the thousand-times more powerful bomb than that dropped on Hiroshima. The President had asked Dr. Vannevar Bush and Dr. James B. Conant, president of Harvard, to look at the matter and they had reported back that development on a rush basis would not result in acquisition of sufficient additional power to warrant the cost. Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Commission had been working on the development at a normal pace rather than under an accelerated three to four-year program.

But now that the Russians had detonated an atom bomb the prior August, it was necessary to revisit the issue. Some, such as outgoing AEC chairman David Lilienthal, objected to the hydrogen bomb on moral grounds. But most appeared to oppose its quick development on the same ground that Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant had in 1945, that there were more efficient ways to spend money on defense.

Thus it was that decisions were being made on the security of the country's future.

Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the eighteenth in his series of articles on childhood education, discusses the need of young boys, starting in about the seventh or eighth grade, to have a positive male role model, a "manly man", as a teacher. Up to that age, female teachers would suffice.

Twenty-four years earlier, at age 14, his parents had moved him from the small Texas town where he had grown up, and recently he had returned to reminisce of old times. He found that he remembered only two of his teachers, one of whom had been such a male teacher, who taught the boys arithmetic and football in the seventh grade. The town's people so respected the man that after he retired from teaching and was suffering from crippling arthritis the last six years of his life, they made sure that there was someone who visited with him every afternoon to play card games or Monopoly.

He says that he could not advise how to get more male teachers of the type in the junior and senior high schools but finds that they were wanting. He suspects that such teachers would exert a positive influence as well on the female students, as they would welcome the opportunity to see what men other than their fathers were like.

Why did he only recall two of his teachers from the eighth grade and earlier? We recall all of ours, by face and name. Maybe at the time he partook occasionally of the Texas locoweed.

A letter writer objects to the tacitly enforced separation of an American GI from his Japanese wife by order of the Army.

A letter writer objects to the City Council having forced the cab companies to install meters and charge specific rates, resulting in the elimination of the "poor man's taxi".

A letter writer objects that the newspaper appeared to jeer him every time he went before the City Council. He says that he had been a close friend to the original publisher of The News, W. C. Dowd, Sr., and had subscribed to the newspaper since its founding in 1888. He wants more accurate reporting on his inveighing against Council actions, such as donating $2,500 to the Sanitation Division so that its director could "complete his education".

Tenth Day of Christmas: Ten Amendments Leaping out the Window in Trumplanderkind.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.