The Charlotte News

Monday, January 9, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had issued a proposed budget of 42.4 billion dollars for the 1950-51 fiscal year, resulting in a prospective deficit for the year of 5.1 billion dollars. The budget included 13.5 billion for defense, an increase of 400 million dollars over the 1949-50 budget, and 4.7 billion in foreign aid. The combined total for defense and foreign aid was 886 million dollars less than the current fiscal year totals. Domestic spending would rise under the budget proposal by 823 million dollars to 12.4 billion. The new budget was 850 million dollars less than that for 1949-50. Included in the total was 6.1 billion for veterans, with the President urging Congress not to add special bonuses to that total, saying that the primary obligation was to the two million disabled veterans and the 300,000 families of veterans who had died from disabilities. It was the longest budget report on record, at 27,000 words—which is why we have applied economy to condense it to 153 words.

The budget amounted to $283.17 for every man, woman, and child in the country during the year, $4.70 less than the prior year, $172.03 more than in the 1940-41 fiscal year.

Speaking over NBC radio, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, getting ready to return to Formosa to join her husband after 13 months in the U.S., predicted that the Nationalists on the mainland would eventually rise up and defeat the Chinese Communists and that meanwhile the Nationalists on Formosa would hold that island bastion. She chastised Britain for its recognition of the Communist Government and praised the U.S. for its moral support.

Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan visited with the President and Secretary of State Acheson regarding the Chinese situation. He was highly critical of Administration policy in determining not to provide military support for Formosa against any attack by the Communists and declared that the announcement had ended bipartisan foreign policy.

The American merchant ship Flying Arrow was heavily shelled, hit 30 to 40 times, and seriously damaged by the Chinese Nationalists as it neared the Yangtze River approach to Shanghai, seeking to run the Nationalist blockade into that Communist-held port. An Associated Press newsman aboard said that the attack by a single gunboat occurred in international waters. The captain of the vessel was seeking State Department intervention to afford the ship safe passage to the next harbor for repairs. A spokesman for the Nationalist Government said that the ship was shelled to prevent it from entering the Nationalist-mined waters along the approach to the harbor.

The Supreme Court refused review of the Maryland Court of Appeals decision which had struck down Baltimore's gag rule on crime news and invalidated contempt citations against three Baltimore radio stations and a radio newsman. In a rare opinion accompanying the denial of review, Justice Felix Frankfurter, after providing the facts of the case via quotation from the trial court's decision, said that the denial of review meant nothing more than that fewer than four Justices favored review and that it did not imply approval or disapproval of the lower court decision. In an Appendix, he then cites and summarizes several English cases, grouped by those finding contempt and not finding contempt, where alleged press interference with the administration of justice was at issue.

The opinion provides good illumination of Supreme Court procedures on granting or not review in any case where discretionary review lies, embracing most cases before the Court. The various reasons discussed by Justice Frankfurter behind denying review remain valid to this day and the opinion is therefore worth reading carefully by anyone unfamiliar with those processes, rarely discussed in the press or on television.

The opinion ought also serve as a primer on the largely self-policing responsibility of the press in covering criminal cases, which, in our opinion, is, in modern times, typically done with as much reckless abandon as a drunk driver driving down a busy, circuitous highway at 90 miles per hour, all tending toward the destruction of our democracy and its most vital processes, starting with the right of an unbiased jury in civil and criminal matters. What begins as rank and biased coverage of a criminal case, tantamount in some instances to stimulation of a lynch-mob mentality, by such organs of fancy as Fox News, ultimately carries over to our elections and the right of the citizenry to reasonably unbiased coverage of the candidates and their positions on issues, as the news organs, and a particularly passive, unanalytical part of the viewing audience, become inured to yellow journalistic practices in the coverage of the former and thus see no problem in covering the elections the same way, all with an eye toward providing entertainment by which to sell cornflakes, not to inform or make better citizens.

About 43,000 soft coal miners struck at captive mines of steel companies and one large coal mining company. There was no explanation for the work stoppage, which affected pits in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and Alabama. Thirty thousand of the miners were in Western Pennsylvania.

Sixty-three persons, including sixteen children, died across the country and in Canada in a series of weekend fires. The total included the 40 women, 39 of whom were patients, at a private mental hospital in Davenport, Iowa, on Saturday morning. Twenty-four persons were saved in that fire. The cause remained unknown.

The levees along the Wabash River threatened to give way and flood thousands of acres of farmland in Indiana. One levee north of Vincennes had already failed on Sunday night, flooding 16,000 acres.

In Southern California, a five-day cold snap which had taken a huge toll on crops, had ended. Rain fell heavily the previous day across the area, with 1.12 inches in Los Angeles.

Memphis, Tenn., was thawing out after its crippling ice storm. Cold weather prevailed from New England as far south as Columbia, S.C., where the temperature fell to 27. Most of the remainder of the country had normal temperatures.

On the editorial page, "Ten Year Platform—V" continues its look at the ten-point program for progress in Charlotte over the ensuing decade, as set forth the previous Monday on the front page by reporter Tom Fesperman, looking this date at the desire to take advantage of Federal money for public housing and slum clearance. Access to the money had not been approved by the 1949 Legislature and so an effort needed to be mounted to encourage the 1951 Legislature to approve of its receipt. The 1950 census would help the City Government better plan for adequate long-range low income housing.

"Fire Among the Helpless" comments on the tragic fire at a private mental hospital in Davenport, Iowa, which took the lives of 40 or more patients trapped inside on Saturday morning. It was not yet known whether hospital officials were negligent in not affording means of escape from barred windows.

The fire chief who had inspected North Carolina's Dix Hill in Raleigh the previous fall had given warning to officials that the institution contained fire hazards, which the piece lists. It was to be hoped that the Davenport fire would serve as a reminder to the mental hospitals of the state to take proper precautions.

"Death of a Newspaper" tells of the 117-year old New York Sun merging with the New York World-Telegram, owned by the Scripps-Howard News Syndicate. The Sun had produced such journalistic luminaries as Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Dana, Jacob Riiz, and Arthur Brisbane. It had continually improved its position in the city throughout its history until recent years when its vigor had waned.

The end of The Sun meant that New York was served by only three afternoon dailies, consolidation being a growing trend across the country.

It concludes by advising that competition was the lifeblood of journalism.

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Privacy for the Khans", finds that the birth of the daughter of Rita Hayworth and husband Aly Khan had been over-covered by the press and should now be laid to rest, to afford the couple a degree of privacy.

Drew Pearson tells of air experts predicting that commercial aircraft would one day be produced which could fly at the speed of sound even if the expense would be too prohibitive for regular commercial travel. Military planes would fly at unlimited speeds, powered by atomic energy, at altitudes of 80,000 to 100,000 feet, controlled from the ground, with the pilot going along only in case something went wrong.

They also predicted that a rocket would be sent to Mars within 50 years.

Yeah, sure. And, we suppose, they will put a man on the moon within 20 years.

The biggest problem of inter-planetary travel was to develop a fuel light and compact enough, yet powerful enough to break away from earth's gravity and venture into space. Scientists believed that the answer lay in atomic fuels. The scientists were predicting that interplanetary travel by commercial passengers would be possible by the end of the century.

Congressman Usher Burdick of North Dakota warned his fellow Republicans to clean house of staff not doing much or any work, to regain the respect of the people in Congress, in the wake of the conviction of Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of fraud against the Government for taking kickbacks of salaries of bogus staff members.

The President was upset by Republican heckling during his State of the Union message for his references to the failures of the 80th Congress. House Majority Leader John McCormack perked him up, however, by telling him that it could happen only in a democracy.

Presidential adviser Clark Clifford had told friends that his return to the private sector might be short-lived.

The Shah of Iran was interested in the daughter of the Iranian ambassador to Washington, but she was in love with an Iranian Embassy attache and did not wish to be a queen.

The U.S. Army had warned the State Department against conveying military secrets to the Iranian Government as there was thought to be a high-ranking Iranian Army officer with Russian sympathies.

The U.S. had decided to help rebuild the French Navy to counter the Russian submarine threat.

State Department chief planner George Kennan was going to Latin America to study the growth of Communism there, especially in the maritime unions.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the President having chosen the position of Secretary of State Acheson over that of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson regarding the decision not to provide military support to Formosa in the event of attack from the Chinese Communists. Secretary Johnson and General MacArthur had made a concerted effort to impress upon the Administration the need to defend Formosa, while the State Department had regarded it as risking war and not in defense of a significant enough strategic position to warrant such risk. Secretary Johnson and General MacArthur had convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to adopt their position, but not the President, who had become increasingly disenchanted with Secretary Johnson generally since his appointment as Secretary in March, 1949.

They conclude that the President's choice of Mr. Acheson over Mr. Johnson appeared to be a permanent one and would have far-reaching effects on Asiatic policy and the decision whether to go forward with a speedy building project for the hydrogen bomb.

Marquis Childs tells of the Rural Electrification Administration reporting of nearly 80 percent of all farms in the country having electricity, compared to but 11 percent in 1935. Of those electrified since 1935, 57 percent had received power from systems financed through the REA. It was one of the reasons that the New Deal-Fair Deal continued to win elections.

The nonpartisan National Rural Electric Cooperative Association united the interests of those power users operating under 971 cooperatives working in conjunction with REA.

In Oklahoma, Senator Elmer Thomas, up for re-election in 1950, had generated ill feeling from REA coops in that state for his having sent out a questionnaire to a million Oklahomans with a leading question on whether they wanted private utilities or publicly financed coops to supply their power. The Cooperative Association wanted REA cooperatives to build their own lines while the private power companies wanted to be able to take the low-cost power and distribute it on their lines.

It was likely that a compromise would be worked out whereby a company would distribute power in rural areas at low rates where the company had existing power lines, leaving the remaining areas for the coops. This compromise was probably acceptable to Congressman Mike Monroney, a supporter of the coops and to be Senator Thomas's Democratic opponent in the spring primary.

For his stand against public power and in favor of the private interests, Senator Thomas, he posits, was likely to find himself in trouble in the election, as the group benefiting from Federal legislation in this area formed a powerful force in politics of the time.

Robert C. Ruark, in Honolulu, visits Pearl Harbor where he had served during the war, finds its defenses much weaker than on December 7, 1941 and the Navy and Air Force generally weaker than at that time. He provides the various statistics to prove the point.

It was being suggested that Pearl Harbor was no longer a strategic target for an enemy, but the same argument had been presented in 1941 and it remained the repair depot for ships in the Pacific.

He concludes that the ghosts of the 1,200 men who lost their lives on the U.S.S. Arizona during the attack by the Japanese might find it to their "wry amusement" that their protection currently was reduced to two score obsolete National Guard fighters and a handful of Navy craft.

A letter writer finds the Mayor and three members of the City Council behaving paradoxically by being against ending rent control and then favoring the increase in cab fares. She finds public housing to be a disincentive to home ownership. She further objects to the payment of $2,500 for the education of the director of the Sanitation Department, when the same money might provide for education to underprivileged children.

She is shifting between apples and oranges, appears not quite understanding of the interrelationship between state, Federal and local governments and the limitations imposed by the State on the City's powers.

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