The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 5, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, as expected, stated formally that the U.S. would not intervene militarily in Formosa to prevent the Chinese Communists from taking control of the island from the Nationalists, but said the U.S. would continue limited financial aid to the Chiang regime. He recognized Formosa as Chinese territory under the Cairo agreement of November, 1943, made between China, the U.S., and Britain, which guaranteed the return of Formosa from Japan to China after the war. The President said that the agreement was reaffirmed at Potsdam in July, 1945.
In London, the man who predicted the previous January that the Russians would attempt to detonate an atomic bomb in 1949, Kenneth de Courcy, editor of Intelligence Digest, had predicted another for 7:00 p.m., EST, on Saturday. He also said that Russia was ahead of the U.S. in some areas of atomic development. He claimed to have obtained his information from informed sources behind the iron curtain. He added that a technical problem could postpone the explosion until January 10.
We told you. We may have only a few days left. The atmosphere may explode.
Pakistan recognized the Chinese Communists and an informed source in London said that Britain would do so by Saturday. The British Foreign Office had summoned the Chinese Nationalist ambassador, presumably to tell him of the decision.
Greece's coalition Government collapsed in a pre-election dispute between Populist and Liberal Cabinet ministers. Premier Alexander Diomedes delivered the Cabinet's resignation to King Paul.
The Congress promised to defeat quickly at least a half dozen of the President's proposals urged the previous day in his State of the Union message, starting with his proposed "moderate" tax increase. They would also nix, with apparent bipartisan support, continuation of the draft, repeal of Taft-Hartley, the Brannan farm plan, the compulsory health insurance proposal, and the St. Lawrence seaway project. But his proposed expansion of the benefits and coverage under Social Security and continuation, on a reduced scale, of foreign economic and military aid appeared likely to pass. Doubtful were his proposals for middle-income housing, continuation of rent control, expansion of admissions of displaced persons from Europe, and formalized incentives for his "Point 4" initiative for private technical assistance to underdeveloped nations. Even less chance of passage was given to the civil rights program and approval of establishment of an international trade organization.
A hundred Republican members of the House signed a petition saying that the President had committed "to the eventual socialization of America and the elimination of the traditional American competitive system."
He's a Commie. Let's lock him up. He may have been secretly born in Russia and issued by the Commies a fake birth certificate, his real name being Trumaneskie.
Forty-nine additional mine owner groups asked the NLRB to seek an order to force an end to the three-day work week ordered by John L. Lewis at the beginning of December, resulting in a shortage of coal.
In Manchester, N.H., the doctor accused of the euthanasia of his terminally ill cancer patient entered a plea of not guilty to the charge of first degree murder. He was freed on bail pending trial, apparently unprecedented in a capital case in New Hampshire.
In Rutherfordton, N.C., a man was held for kidnaping his two young sons, ages 12 and 14, who were wards of the juvenile court. He allegedly took them from a boarding house where they had been sent by the Welfare Department. (The crime in question is usually denominated "child-stealing" to distinguish it from traditional kidnaping, that is where a person would ordinarily have a recognized right to custody and control of the individual but for a prior lawful alteration of that right.)
A Charlotte ice company was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Macon, Ga., along with six other Southern companies on charges of attempting to form a monopoly in the supply of ice for preservation of shipments of perishable produce in nine Southern states.
Winter weather again hit a wide area of the country, from Southern California to the Southern states and into the Rockies and Midwest.
Weather is a terrible thing, compromising our national security, costing us billions of dollars every year and hundreds of lives. Let us build a wall and a big roof to keep it out, in Trumplanderkind. Long live the new nation of walls.
On the editorial page, "Ten-Year Platform—II" again looks at the ten-point program for Charlotte's growth and development over the ensuing decade, as reported by Tom Fesperman on Monday, this time stressing the school building program needed to keep pace with the baby-boom generation. The need was self-evident. The only questions were how much it would cost and how to obtain the money. It proceeds then to explore the difficult answers, as it had several times before.
"The President's Message" praises the President's State of the Union message of the previous day as unusually buoyant and optimistic, offering olive branches to big business by both affirmative statements and omissions, the latter including the prior year's four billion dollar corporate income tax increase, instead suggesting repeal of some of the wartime excise taxes and increasing taxes only moderately. His tone was less harsh regarding Taft-Hartley, suggesting that it be amended rather than completely repealed. He called for plugging loopholes in the anti-trust laws to encourage competition and aid small business. He also omitted his inflation control package, save urging renewal of rent control.
He offered the Brannan farm program and stressed aid to middle-income housing, though without specificity on the latter point.
Otherwise, the message was largely a rehash of his Fair Deal programs urged previously. In all, it was a mild message, a departure from his usual "give 'em hell" style. It posits that it was so because he could not afford to give too much hell to the Democratic Congress and was saving his more fiery rhetoric for the campaign trail in the mid-term elections later in the year.
"Love at First Sight" tells of the Social Hygiene Society of Washington finding that the song "Some Enchanted Evening" from "South Pacific" had generated spontaneous feelings of love in couples in the D.C. area. The representative of the Society had said that a man emerging from the musical would approach a woman stranger and grab her with the intent of making her his own for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether she was an idiot or an alcoholic.
The piece finds that love at first sight had been of value in the past, for without it, Romeo and Juliet might never have gotten together—or engaged in their ensuing mutual violence, mayhem, murder and suicide. It appears to defeat its own point. Many misunderstand that play, we fear. It was actually the predecessor of "Natural Born Killers".
It concludes that you could no more prevent the malady than athlete's foot or beri-beri by advising against contracting them.
It may be not that bad. At least they refrained from analogizing to an itch in certain locations.
In any event, we now understand. The
"President-elect" of 2017 must have gone to "South
Pacific" once too often
Drew Pearson tells of the great work of the American Legion to collect Christmas gifts for the children of Europe, making friends abroad in the process. The Legion had acquired a new sense of international responsibility generally. He provides numerous examples of specific communities aiding in the effort, including Marietta, Ga., Nashville, Des Moines and other Iowa cities, Toledo, O., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., etc.
In Connecticut, former Congresswoman Claire Booth Luce was being groomed to run for the GOP nomination for the Senate seat occupied by Senator Brien McMahon, up for-re-election in the fall. Congressman John Lodge, brother of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, was planning to run for the other Senate seat, temporarily held by William Benton, up for special election in the fall—as further covered by Marquis Childs. The GOP was also planning to run a formidable candidate against Governor Chester Bowles, placing stress on Connecticut.
Deceased former President and Chief
Justice William Howard Taft had once taught law to current Supreme
Court Justice Sherman Minton and, in that capacity, had remarked that
Mr. Minton would have to go to the Supreme Court to change a particular rule
as it was the law. (The column does not tell what rule was in question, maybe one having to do with excessive rotundity
There were five picketing cases
before the Supreme Court this term, the most important of which was
probably that of two individuals who had been banned by court
injunction, affirmed by the California Supreme Court, from picketing
a Lucky
The case, Hughes v. Superior Court, 339 U.S. 460, would be decided later in the year and would hold 8 to 0 that the injunction was not violative of free speech under the First and Fourteenth Amendments by denying a right to picket, a practice under the facts of the case subject to regulation by the State for time, place, and manner as a special type of commercial speech, despite the stated purpose of the picket in this case being to secure rights of equal employment regardless of race. Political picketing, without a commercial purpose, would present a different case. Justice Felix Frankfurter delivered the opinion of the Court and Justice William O. Douglas took no part in the decision.
After Leon Pearson had Quaker leader
Clarence Pickett on his show, the latter received almost as many
requests for his pamphlet on U.S.-Soviet relations as there were
entrants in a tv contest giving away a free tv on "Who Said
That?"
Joseph & Stewart Alsop again discuss the development of the hydrogen bomb and the debate whether to accelerate its development through a concerted project as the Manhattan Project on the atom bomb. They remark that the consideration of such a project appeared as a "Walpurgis Night dream of total destruction", Ragnarok, and suggest that "the worst nightmares" had a way of coming true in those days.
The projected cost to build the super-bomb in short order was about three to four billion dollars. But the question remained whether the bomb, if developed soon, could be delivered to a certain target in the event of war. It was difficult, because of the great distances and rough terrain, to hit Russian cities from the air with accuracy. The hydrogen bomb, because of its capability to devastate an area of 60 to 100 square miles, would reduce the need for accuracy. And its importance would be increased with the development of guided missiles to carry it. Thus far, however, accurate guidance systems were still in development, albeit with great strides having been made in the prior year with the development of a "non-precessable" gyroscope at MIT, one which was not appreciably subject to the effect of friction and thus served as a reliable guidance device. Such guided missiles with hydrogen bombs attached as warheads were expected by weapons experts to be the strategic attack force of the future.
But American strategic air capability had been reduced significantly in the previous six months by development of an excellent Soviet jet fighter and the start of an air warning net. If progress in Soviet defense capabilities outpaced the development of new American weapons systems, the effort would be for naught, freezing in place any stockpile of hydrogen or atomic weapons.
Marquis Childs suggests that the mid-term elections would see the defeat or resignation of many familiar faces in Congress. Senator Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut had already resigned to accept an appointment to the Connecticut Supreme Court.
Governor Chester Bowles, former head of the Office of Price Administration, had appointed former Assistant Secretary of State William Benton as his successor. Mr. Benton was a former business partner of Mr. Bowles and was quite successful as publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica, owner of Muzak, and as a university administrator. As Assistant Secretary of State, he headed up the information service and sometimes found himself at loggerheads with members of the Senate, with whom he would now be a colleague. He had once been called on the carpet by a Congressional committee for having approved of a modern art collection to travel to South America and Europe at Government expense, as a means of good will. But many of the committee members mocked his choice of art. Later, the State Department sold the collection.
Senator Benton would have to run in a special election the following fall and in the meantime would wish to perform well to justify the confidence placed in him by Governor Bowles, who would be running for re-election himself and had been touted as a major Democratic candidate for 1952.
It had been reported that the President would seek re-election and regarded Mr. Bowles as an adversary whom he needed to get out of the way. The Connecticut races thus were a key piece of the national election picture for 1950.
A letter writer finds misguided the sympathy being expressed for the Candia, N.H., doctor who had committed an act of euthanasia by injecting air into a vein of a patient who was terminally ill with cancer. Even her own brothers said that they bore no ill will toward the doctor, given their sister's prolonged suffering. The writer opines, however, that to kill anyone without due process of law was to play God and was a barbaric practice. He was not anxious to see the doctor punished for murder, but also believed that those who sympathized with him ought think through the matter more thoroughly.
A
letter writer, age 64, objects to
public housing in Charlotte on the ground that housing with garden
plots, not afforded by public housing, would be preferable as
providing a means of self-support. She believes that the presently
planned public housing units would not provide incentive for the
residents to pull themselves up but rather would have a depressive
effect
How about a nice shrubbery
A
Quote of the Day: "Memphis
has one great distinction among American cities. This is the place
where they take banners
Twelfth
Framed Edition
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