The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 11, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the FBI, for the first time, received from the British the secret confession of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, convicted in London on March 1 of providing atomic secrets to the Russians. The material he admitted providing was considered revelatory of atomic secrets to the Russians and, moreover, included educated estimates of the stockpile of American atomic bombs and rate of production. He may have also passed secrets on the hydrogen bomb, of which he was privy while working on the Manhattan Project during the war in the U.S. and at Harwell in Britain after the war. He admitted giving secrets to the Russians from 1943 through 1947, when he had a change of heart about Communism.
Pope Pius XII declared in an encyclical that the arms race left "the souls of all fearful and suspended" and called for a crusade of prayer on Passion Sunday, March 26, to invoke God's will to prevent evils. He said that truth was often supplanted by falsehood which was then used as an "instrument of dispute".
Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Richard Nixon come immediately to mind, more so than Communists.
Josef Stalin was about to give a campaign speech this date which observers believed would be the most important statement from the Russian Prime Minister in the previous four years. It came on the eve of the national elections to the Supreme Soviet. Observers believed it would contain an overture to the West for peace. Deputy Prime Minister V. M. Molotov the previous night had stressed Russia's desire for peace. He also said that the "blackmailers from the imperialist camp" were trying to scare the Russian people with a hydrogen bomb which did not exist, the first time any Soviet leader had mentioned the H-bomb by name.
In Antwerp, fifty demonstrators were injured in protests of the following day's advisory election on the future of Belgian King Leopold II, in exile in Germany. The king was perceived as having left the country to the control of the Nazis during the war. He had not followed the Government into exile in London in 1940 but remained to be imprisoned by the Nazis and was finally deported to Germany in 1944. In 1945, the Belgian Parliament voted that he could not return without its permission. Leopold had said he would abdicate in favor of his nineteen-year old son if he received less than 55 percent approval in the referendum. Even if he received the majority, he might not return to the throne, as Parliament still retained the last word on the matter. Former Premier Paul-Henri Spaak was the leader of the Socialist campaign against return of the king. The issue had sparked bitter division in the country.
ERP administrator Paul Hoffman said that unless Britain joined other European nations in an effort to reduce trade barriers, it stood to lose 150 million dollars in ERP aid, not as a punitive measure but to be redirected to a European payments union designed to alleviate trade restrictions.
Columnist Bruce Barton tells of a Wall Street acquaintance once remarking that there were two fields of endeavor in which brains meant little to success, writing poetry and making money. John Keats showed little scholastic aptitude but provided such masterpieces as "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Henry Ford had demonstrated little scholarship, once confusing Benedict Arnold with Arnold Bennett and the Baltic with the Balkans. Yet, he had an aptitude for revolutionizing industry with the assembly line to produce a cheap automobile for the masses by labor earning a minimum wage of $5 per day.
Mr. Barton concludes that without poets or industrialists, progress in the spiritual life of mankind on the one hand and in material pursuits on the other would be stultified. The British Socialists looked down on money-makers, but the British were not getting along so well without them.
In Petersburg, Ill., final respects were paid to poet Edgar Lee Masters, as stores closed and more than 200 high school students attended the services. The author of The Spoon River Anthology had died the prior Monday at age 81. His poem, "Silence"—a verse from which had been quoted at the head of the editorial on Mr. Masters appearing in The News earlier in the week—was read at the funeral.
In St. Joseph, Mo., Dr. Edward Higdon, 75, was maintaining a diary on his incurable disease, myasthenia gravis, crippling of the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, eventually spreading to the respiratory system and heart. Prostigmine afforded temporary relief from choking symptoms. There was little known of the disease as the sufferer experienced no pain or fever.
In North Carolina, candidates for public office had until the following Saturday to enter their names on the spring party ballots. Formerly, candidates had until the last day before the primary to enter the race.
In Charlotte, a doorbell began ringing at a house at 2:00 a.m., alerting the residents who discovered smoke coming from the roof and began extinguishing the fire before the Fire Department arrived to finish the job. The source of ignition was faulty wiring in the walls.
In Walla Walla, Wash., a contest to determine the better billboard for attracting tourism to the state was held, between "Cheesecake", a pretty girl, and McNary Dam. The dame beat the dam, says the report.
A part of chapter twenty-eight of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.
On the editorial page, "Lodge Proposal Hits a Snag" tells of the proposed Lodge amendment to amend the Constitution to provide for electoral votes being proportional to the popular vote in each state, having been defeated in the House Rules Committee after passing the Senate by the required two-thirds majority. It was thus unlikely that the proposed amendment would ever reach the House floor for a vote in the present session.
Thus, the opponents of the change, who argued that the amendment would benefit the South and harm minority interests in the Northern cities, appeared to have won. Yet, it finds, the amendment, in time, would have ended one-party rule in the South and made it easier for Republicans to assert national power.
It concludes that despite the reasonableness of the change to the antiquated institution of the electoral college, which would allow for direct popular voting for President and Vice-President, the important thing to Congress was self-perpetuation in office, not fairness to the people.
"Injustice Finally Rectified" tells of the discriminatory tax on oleo margarine finally having been removed by Congress but only after the lobbies for and against it, the dairy lobby on one side and the cotton lobby on the other, had fought it out for Congressional support. It was the way things usually occurred in Congress, rather than on the merits of any particular measure, in this case, finally favoring the rights of consumers to purchase the cheaper margarine without penalty.
"Kitten in the Kiln" tells of the cat which survived 36 hours in a brick oven in Minerva,
Ohio, coming out only scorched and dried out, but still purring. It
suggests in consequence using cats for survival in the case of an
atomic blast, teaching them to administer first aid to those who
could not reach shelters or to become firemen
"Blowing Your Own Horn" tells of the director of Highway Safety for North Carolina's DMV condemning horn blowers as safety hazards, more so than avoiding accidents in the employment of the noisy apparatus. He explained that the horn was once required by law to be blown under King Alfred in 700, who enacted an ordinance requiring that a person coming upon a stranger on the road either had to shout or blow a horn or be deemed a thief subject to execution. But those days, said the director, were gone forever. The piece, no fan of the horn, agrees.
A piece from the Denver Post, titled "The Oil Men Are Wailing", tells of the oil industry denouncing the President for his desire to overhaul the oil depletion allowance to get rid of its provision permitting the exemption from taxes of 27.5 percent of gross income to compensate for dry holes to be taken in perpetuity.
In 1949, the oil companies increased their dividends by 87 million dollars over 1948, and so needed a stronger argument against the President's program than their whine that they needed the depletion allowance in perpetuity to compensate for the risks they took in investment and to provide continued incentives for oil exploration.
Drew Pearson tells of Ambassador to Great Britain, Lewis Douglas, having told Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson during the week that he recommended withholding atomic secrets from the new British Minister of Defense Emmanuel Shinwell and the British War Minister John Strachey, for the latter's suspected connections to Communists and the former's leftist politics. The trepidation engendered by the recent revelations in connection with the admissions and conviction of Dr. Klaus Fuchs for giving atomic secrets to the Russians had fueled the suspicions.
North Carolina Congressman Graham Barden of the House Labor Committee was arguing for his bill to deny Federal benefits for school buses, whether for public or private schools. The Congressman said that when he was a boy he had to walk three miles to school and learned to run the distance, was not afforded the luxury of transportation. But Congressman Andrew Jacobs of Indiana decided to outdo Mr. Barden by telling him that before he could start to school each morning, his father had insisted that he catch a rabbit, requiring him to run as far as five miles, and, if the rabbit, once caught, was too scrawny, he would have to let it go and start anew.
As reported during the week, the Labor Committee had defeated approval of the proposal of Congressman John F. Kennedy to fund busing for parochial and private school students, as well as for public schools, prompting Mr. Kennedy to say that he would vote against the Federal aid to education bill on the floor.
Another Federal income-tax evader, the former Sheriff of Prince Georges County in Maryland, had been indicted, following exposure in Mr. Pearson's column on June 26, 1949, and further revelation on October 26 that the U.S. Attorney had sent the case back to Washington recommending against prosecution, plus his further suggestion in his column of January 29 that the case be investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee which was considering the reappointment of the U.S. Attorney in question.
Former assistant Attorney General Alex Campbell, previously in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department, had during the previous decade laid the groundwork for the recent cases against Judy Coplon and Valentin Gubitchev, Alger Hiss, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, former chair of HUAC, and such wartime spies as Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose. Mr. Pearson suggests him as one bureaucrat who got the job done and played an important role in the destiny of the country in the process.
Senator Frank Graham, by all accounts, had done an excellent job in his first year as a Senator, but nevertheless would face stiff challenges in the Democratic primary in North Carolina from Raleigh attorney and former ABA president Willis Smith and former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. It was believed that the weaker of the two opponents would drop out of the race and concentrate backing against Senator Graham. Thus far, despite Senator Graham being for labor and the Fair Deal program, both labor and the White House had not offered any support for his re-election. Meanwhile, no one was opposing Senator Clyde Hoey, who was expected to align with the Dixiecrats after the election.
He notes that Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, who had been selected to be the next president of UNC to replace Senator Graham, had not taken a stance in the election, though his family of Winston-Salem was backing Mr. Smith.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the Senate race in Ohio and its implications for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. Senator Taft appeared the favorite to win the race for the Senate against Democratic hopeful Joseph Ferguson, State Auditor, a party hack who was barely literate. The race would have been closer had the preference of the liberals and labor, Murray Lincoln, been in the race for the Democratic nomination. As it was, it was unlikely that the voters would turn from the experience and seniority of Senator Taft, despite his being identified with Taft-Hartley, unpopular with labor. Labor would not be so energized by Mr. Ferguson as they would have been by Mr. Lincoln.
Assuming a win by Senator Taft, then he would become the favorite for the 1952 GOP nomination, despite his isolationism and conservatism, albeit more moderate than deemed, potentially producing a counter-movement for General Eisenhower, Governor Earl Warren, or Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. But at the present, there was no sign of such a movement materializing.
The Alsops conclude that with the Ohio race going as expected for the Taft forces, it was later than the anti-Taft forces on the national stage realized.
Robert C. Ruark tells of quail hunting with Bernard Baruch in South Carolina while discussing taxes. He had decided during the conversation that writers and other artists, even ballplayers and boxers, suffered from depreciation of their principal asset, their being, as much as workers and machinery, and deserved a depletion allowance or a pension. After some consideration, he decided to let the ballplayers, as Joe DiMaggio, and actors and artists take care of themselves, as they earned enough for their lifetimes, even if depleted substantially by taxes. He wanted some form of tax break for writers and quail shooters.
Tom Schlesinger of The News provides his weekly "Capital Roundup", telling of North Carolina likely to lose, in result of the 1950 census, part of its Congressional delegation for the first time since 1860. While increasing population since 1940 by 8 percent, the state was behind the national average increase of 13 percent. In 1940, the state had twelve representatives, one short of its high of 13 in 1810. Its low had been seven in 1860. The West Coast states would gain 11 to 15 representatives and to compensate, North Carolina would lose one, along with several other states losing one or two, as the total House membership, subject to adjustment by the Congress but not changed since 1913, was 435—which means also that the number of electors has not appreciably changed either, save for the addition in 1959 of Alaska and Hawaii, as that number is based on the total House and Senate membership.
The population of the country in 1913 was about 92.2 million, based on the 1910 census, and population density was 26 persons per square mile, whereas the 2010 population of the country was 308.7 million with population density at 87 persons per square mile (most of the latter depression of density, of course, based on the wide open spaces of the West and Alaska). That means that the individual's representation in Congress has been diluted by more than threefold during the century since the number of representatives was last adjusted. At the Founding, the population of the country was 3.9 million and population density was 4.5 persons per square mile, while there were 67 members of the House, meaning each Congressman represented a constituency of 58,208 persons while in 1913 that average was 212,000 persons and today it is more than 709,655 per Congressman.
He suggests that the shifts in representation could impact the 1952 presidential election because of the electoral shift to the West from the East and South. The West stressed reclamation, power, and irrigation. Southern and Democratic influence would be decreased commensurately. But the Democrats favoring the Fair Deal argued that the difference would be meaningless as Republicans in the West tended to support Fair Deal legislation.
Most observers agreed that the state legislatures elected in 1950 would be the most important factor in determining the presidential election of 1952, as they would redraw the Congressional districts for the ensuing decade. He discusses the ramifications of redistricting to North Carolina.
As we recently referenced, North Carolina has in 2016 been adjudged one of the least democratic states in the nation for the abstract art—or more to the point, as President Truman might have described it, "scrambled eggs"—, employed, primarily by Republican legislatures, in strained redistricting of the state in an effort to marginalize minority voting and dilute formerly Democratic districts. Such gerrymandering across the nation, you will find, is why we have a Republican majority in the House when the majority of the country votes Democratic, in six of the last seven presidential elections since 1992.
It is time to be rid of gerrymandering, discrimination in which was struck down by Baker v. Carr in 1962, and to be rid completely of the electoral college, which in combination form the yoke to this country, casting it into slavery to that part of the moneyed classes inclined to Fascism and to those too ignorant not to be conned into voting against their own interests by a slick snake-oil sales pitch offered up by the slickers.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.