The Charlotte News
Monday, January 30, 1950
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that representatives of the U.S., Belgium and Britain were meeting in Washington to discuss atomic energy. At issue was a possible $200 to $300 increase in the cost per ton of uranium from the Belgian Congo and detailed arrangements of the Congo's export of uranium to the U.S. and Britain, with the bulk going to the U.S.
Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the joint Atomic Energy Committee, said that the Committee would shortly recommend to the President whether or not to initiate production of the hydrogen bomb.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Tom Connally said that he favored production of the hydrogen bomb.
In Chicago, atomic scientist Harold Brown said that Russia may be ahead of the U.S. in development of the hydrogen bomb. But Ohio Representative Charles Elston of the joint Atomic Energy Committee insisted that the U.S. was far ahead of Russia in development.
Secretary of State Acheson told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he favored continued economic aid to Korea, that he believed democratic South Korea could resist anything short of a major attack from the North, but that discontinuance of aid would be a mistake. The House had recently defeated provision of an additional 60 million dollars of ERP aid to Korea, recommended by ERP administrator Paul Hoffman and the Korean Ambassador to Washington as being necessary to resist Communism. Secretary Acheson favored a substitute proposal which tied economic aid to Korea to the extension until June 30 of the China Aid Act, set to expire February 15. He said that the hope was that Korea would be self-supporting after 1952.
The President appeared prepared to act if the coal strike in the steel company captive mines did not end forthwith and the three-day work week resumed. But there was no indication that the miners intended to abandon the strike. The President could either seek an 80-day injunction against the strike or set up a fact-finding board to make recommendations while urging the miners to return to work in the meantime. A White House official said that the meeting on Wednesday between UMW and management to resume contract negotiations would not, in itself, be enough to head off action by the President.
In Jacksonville, Fla., three Klan organizations merged and vowed to beat "1,100 pro-Communist organizations" and "hate movements" in the country. The Klan groups singled out the NAACP, B'nai B'rith, and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America as the worst offenders. Each of those organizations promised to continue working for civil rights.
In New York, representatives of 60 national organizations at the "all America conference", sponsored by the American Legion, set forth the groundwork for an organization to combat Communism in the country. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota addressed the group, saying that Russia had a stockpile of atomic bombs which could knock out the U.S. in "90 seconds" in the event of war. The conference promised another meeting within 90 days.
Listen heyeh, we need it now. Why not anotha meeting in 90 seconds?
In Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, the search for the C-54 transport plane with 44 persons aboard, missing since the previous Thursday, was intensified. The rescue effort, involving 50 large U.S. and Canadian planes and over 7,000 men, was the largest ever conducted in the region, beset by sub-zero temperatures and short days. A ranger in the area reported having seen a large plane overhead on Thursday and then feeling a large thud followed by an explosion and smoke.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of more than 2,000 children in Charlotte who were mentally and physically handicapped and thus needed special education, while only 270 were obtaining this education, with only 37 in special classes while the others were taught by itinerant teachers for inadequate weekly periods. There was no class available for mentally deficient black children while only 15 such white children were receiving special instruction. Eleven white children who were crippled received special education while no such black children were being so taught. Haphazard home training by mothers was deemed insufficient for the needs of the remainder of these children. Throughout the state, only about 4,000 children received special education while an estimated 65,000 had such needs.
In Charlotte, P. H. Batte, 55, general manager of The Charlotte Observer, died suddenly when stricken at his home by a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been widely known in state journalism circles for 27 years, was active in civic organizations, and is the subject of an editorial below.
On the editorial page, "The Raleigh Conference", in a by-lined editorial by Editor Pete McKnight, provides the details of the weekend Democratic Party conference in Raleigh, designed as a regional conference to consider ways to heal the split between the national party organization and those of the Southern states, offering North Carolina as example of an operation which worked well with the national party.
He finds that the conference tightened the ties between the national organization and the state party, with national committeeman Jonathan Daniels, Governor Kerr Scott and Senator Frank Graham lending prestige to the national party, even if Mr. Daniels had not been completely satisfactory to all North Carolina Democrats. The control of the state party organization had passed to the three within the previous two weeks and it had propitious implications for the 1950 races for the Senate and the 1951 General Assembly.
But from the standpoint of the national and regional organizations, the results of the conference had not been so clear, as matters of regional concern, such as civil rights, had been ignored in favor of stressing unity.
It begged the question whether North Carolina and the other Southern states would benefit in the long-run from the one-party system in the South, stamping out, through "persuasion and compulsion", all opposition within the Democratic Party. Opposition within the party had made the North Carolina party progressive and strong. But if opposition were completely crushed, political fortunes would become dependent on personal favor, as that exhibited during the weekend, and the results remained questionable.
Whether the type of opposition to be offered in the spring primary, however, to Senator Graham's candidacy by Raleigh attorney Willis Smith and his race-baiting, Red-baiting campaign managed by Jesse Helms, was the type of opposition envisioned by Mr. McKnight remains to be seen as the primary race would develop.
"P. H. Batte of the Observer" tells of the sudden death of the Charlotte Observer general manager, who had helped through fourteen years to build the newspaper into a fierce competitor of The News. It praises Mr. Batte's business judgments and notes that the general manager of any newspaper was vital to the business end of what, at base, was a public service organization.
Drew Pearson tells of five Treasury agents in New York City having apparently engaged in a shakedown of two companies accused initially of tax problems. One had been indicted for bribery and the four others had been suspended. He provides the details of the cases. Thus far, however, despite the discovery of the matters six months earlier, no further action had been taken.
Marquis Childs finds that Americans for Democratic Action had been so successful in its political organizing that Republicans were seeking to establish a similar organization. But the Republicans assumed that ADA represented only the left wing of the Democratic Party, an association which ADA sought to minimize. In fact, ADA-backed candidates had been so successful in 1948 that it was indistinguishable from the Democratic machine.
During the lead-up to the 1948 Democratic convention, ADA had backed General Eisenhower for the Democratic nomination. When he refused to enter the race, it switched allegiance to Justice William O. Douglas.
But also at the convention, now-Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and national chairman of ADA, had forced a floor fight on the civil rights plank he introduced, causing the Dixiecrats to walk out, a move which solidified the Northern black vote for the party and benefited President Truman in the election. ADA had stood as an anti-Communist counter to the Progressive Party of former Vice-President Henry Wallace, attracting independents and liberals to the Democrats.
As a wing of the Democratic Party, ADA had little bargaining power, as demonstrated by its support of the FEPC bill, which was being sidetracked by the Administration so that the President could blame Republicans during the midterm election campaign for not passing it. ADA could protest the action, but do little more.
Robert C. Ruark tells of having started a feud with the nation's commercial airlines about four years earlier for rude and sloppy service, departing and arriving off schedule, losing luggage, slow ticketing, serving lousy meals in the air, and employing snippy stewardesses "with delusions of being a movie actress".
But now, after having flown through 30,000 trouble-free miles across the country and overseas to Hawaii and Australia and back to New York, he apologizes and withdraws his former complaints, finding none of the problems any longer plaguing the airlines. His trip had been flawless.
Give it a few years, Mr. Ruark, and you will see the old habits returning with many new wrinkles added, such as ground personnel acquiring standardized keys to luggage such that when they see on the scanner a tempting item, such as a Nikon camera, they utilize their key, swipe the camera, and reroute your locked bag slated for Charlotte, to Miami, and then, when you complain to Delta Airlines, their little representative sends you a letter telling you that their insurance policy does not cover lost cameras. Or, stranding the passenger overnight three different times in St. Louis on a cross-country flight to Charlotte because the airline missed its connecting flight in its hub city, and, on the third occasion, TWA even refusing to pay for the motel room, despite the next flight being the next morning, more than twelve hours later. Or, again TWA, trying to charge you an extra $50 for an "extra" suitcase when you brought the same luggage with you, with exactly the same weight, on an inbound flight and are returning on a round-trip ticket, the airline never having raised an eyebrow on the inbound amount of luggage, thus breaching the contract formed by the ticket, the idiot at the counter causing more than a little disturbance and distress to the passenger in the process. And many more such things...
Then there was Continental, defying easy description, as you sought to go to your mother's funeral.
Of course, as to TWA and Continental, there is one consolation in that they no longer exist, blown into the ground by the crazy people they routinely employed on the ground, apparently working for commissions based on how much distress they could cause passengers.
We have found, most typically, only the ground personnel to be the aspiring thespians, before anyone in the air.
You know, when people come to the airport to go from here to there, all they really want to do, often tired by the time they get to the airport, is to get from here to there with as little trouble and cognitive dissonance as possible. We do not want to put up with dramatizations of the mental problems or substance-abuse problems of ground personnel or anyone else. We are not your counselors. You get paid; the passengers pay your salaries. Just get us from here to there, with all belongings and all peace of mind reasonably intact. It really is not that challenging, given the cost of a ticket. And some people have long, very long, memories when trifled with by scumbag mental defectives.
A letter writer provides information on gasoline tax paid in the state, totaling 8.75 cents per gallon. He finds that most North Carolinians were unaware of this high taxation and urges them to wake up and become tax conscious.
A
letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr.,
responds to another letter writer who had condemned Communism while
finding that God's wrath had been visited upon China for rejecting
God. Mr. Cherry finds this ascription of curse problematic,
cites Edmund's soliloquy from King Lear
A letter writer believes that the world would be a happy place if everyone were Christians, as all murders, drunkenness, theft, and other crimes would cease and jails would be closed.
A letter writer questions why Alger Hiss or any other person should be convicted on the words of an acknowledged spy and liar, Whittaker Chambers. She finds the country to have fallen on "strange times" when a man of Mr. Hiss's background could be convicted on such testimony.
Strange days, indeed
Hooray for Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General who suffered firing today by our new Despot-in-chief rather than defend his Poobah executive order banning refugees for 90 days from entering the country from designated Muslim countries and all refugees for 120 days. Another President tried this sort of despotic maneuver in 1973, albeit under different circumstances, and within less than a year had to resign the office in disgrace or face impeachment and removal.
We shall see...
According to Gallup, no President in the history of the poll, taken since President Truman, has started his tenure in office with lower approval ratings than the Idiot in 2017, now at 45 percent and dropping, with 48 percent disapproving of his actions thus far.
Best of luck with your executive orders, Stupid. You cannot repeal the Constitution and existing laws with executive orders. Nor may you govern a country which rejects your leadership. Maybe no one has informed you of those realities—yet. While trying to appeal to your Neanderthal base, you have alienated over half the country in one week.
We are a nation of inclusion, not exclusion, a society embracing pluralism, not homogeneity. Take your executive orders and stick them where the moon does not shine. This is not your reality show, Dummy. You must be the President of all the people or none of them. Make your choice. You are not, thus far, standing on any firm historical ground of this country or on any principle on which it was founded. That may stand you in good stead with the small minority of maniacs who supported you so fervently at your rallies during the campaign, but it does not with the overwhelming majority of the country you seek to govern.
Framed Edition
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