The Charlotte News

Friday, March 31, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Acheson at a press conference had replied to Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges of Communist affinity by Owen Lattimore as a State Department adviser until recently, that Mr. Lattimore was not the architect of Far Eastern policy and that he believed he had never even met him. He said that his contacts with the Department had been few, beginning shortly after the end of the war in October, 1945. He enumerated the contacts and described their substance.

The Senator, the previous day, had claimed again that Mr. Lattimore had been the real director of American policy in the Far East. He claimed to have a witness who would assert that Mr. Lattimore was a member of the Communist Party and had various affidavits to back up the charges, that he had been a Soviet agent since 1936. Previously, the Senator had called the then publicly unnamed Mr. Lattimore the top Soviet spy in the country and expressly had hinged his entire position regarding Communists in the State Department to proving this charge. Mr. Lattimore had already responded by calling the charges "pure moonshine" and an "unmitigated lie".

The Federal Power Commission approved the application of Commonwealth Natural Gas Corp. to deliver natural gas to Virginia. Its application was granted over that of Piedmont Natural Gas Corp., seeking to deliver gas to the Carolinas and to Virginia, the latter claimed as necessary to the economic viability of supplying the Carolinas market. Piedmont was given 60 days to file an amended petition limited only to the Carolinas.

In San Francisco, the Federal case accusing West Coast ILWU head, Harry Bridges, of perjury went to a jury after 81 days of trial. He had denied being a Communist when he obtained his U.S. citizenship in 1945, and that was claimed by the Government to have been perjurious. Two union aides were also charged with conspiracy in the case for aiding him in the statement.

In Vine Falls, Manitoba, five persons were burned to death in their home, including the father, two small children and two babysitters. No cause of the blaze was stated.

In Palm Beach, Fla., the executive vice-president of the National Cotton Council claimed that "Big Labor" and "Big Government" were the "chief authors" of socialism in the country.

Call the cops.

In Shelby, N.C., O. Max Gardner, Jr., son of the late Governor and Ambassador to Great Britain, withdrew from the State Senate race because of a continuing case of neuritis.

Ashley Smith of The News provides the first of two articles about former Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, who had also been the "assistant president" to FDR as War Mobilizer during the war, now running for Governor of South Carolina. To South Carolinians favoring states' rights, his credentials as a states' rights advocate had been proven by the fact of his incurring the ire of the President, who had said, shortly after his entry to the gubernatorial race, that he was "free to do as he damn pleases". A large portion of the South viewed him as the ringleader of Democratic opposition to the President's civil rights program and several other parts of the Fair Deal program and spending policy. But Mr. Byrnes's view of states' rights was that the states had to exercise those rights responsibly if they expected to keep them. He was not in favor of the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948, led by present Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He would oppose from within the Democratic Party over-centralization of government. Mr. Smith asserts that it appeared therefore that Mr. Byrnes's views were in accord with most of the citizens of the Palmetto state.

In Charlotte, plans were being made by the Carolinas Festival Committee for a three-day festival similar to Mardi Gras, to be held the following November, a week before Thanksgiving. A suggested plan would be developed in the course of the following two to three weeks. The committee was planning to depart from the usual Christmas theme of the celebration, as it had been criticized for commercializing the religious holiday. Some suggested names for the event were "Golden Harvest Festival", "Festival of Fun", and "Festival of Lights".

Look at them, secularizing Christmas as Mardi Gras.

Emery Wister of The News tells of census enumerators getting their last-minute instructions before entering the field to begin the 1950 census in the community the following day. The entirety of Mecklenburg County would be included as the Charlotte metropolitan area, whereas in 1940, the area embraced only a small perimeter outside the city limits.

A sample questionnaire is provided—and if any taker deviates therefrom, you must call the cops immediately and report them for mental molestation and harassment.

A part of chapter sixty-three of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler is continued from the previous day on the page, as part of the abridged serialization of the book.

On the editorial page, "To Annex or Not To Annex?" finds that the City Council ought answer two questions pertaining to annexation separately, the first being whether to annex new territory while other sections were without essential services, and the second, whether to annex gradually and evenly as fringe areas built up rather than waiting ten years and then take in more than the city could handle comfortably. It suggests that if the City Manager could provide a way to extend services to the new areas while also filling existing service gaps within present boundaries, then it would be better for the City Council to go along with him.

Incidentally, if implied by the title, we would have to disapprove of the annexation of Hamlet by Charlotte.

"Piecemeal Farm Legislation" faults the Congress for piecemeal treatment of agricultural issues in its bill sent to the President earlier in the week, increasing acreage available for production under price supports for cotton and peanuts while reducing it for potatoes. The farm problem was national, not sectional, and could not be ameliorated under such sectionally-specific legislation. The present price supports had been set during the war to stimulate production and with that production no longer necessary, it was imperative to get all crop production down, not only the three regulated by the instant legislation.

"Compounding a Hazard" takes issue with the injured Charlotte police officer who had commandeered a hot rod stopped for speeding on Duncan Avenue and then ordered the driver to give chase to another hot-rodder. It urges that hot-rodding ought be stopped but not through such hot-rod means.

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "The Decisive Issue", tells of having stated in its March 15 edition that "Sound Money" was the best issue for the Republicans to assert to achieve victory in the coming elections, that there could be no sound money or honest government in deficit financing, absent compelling necessity. If the Republicans went along with deficit financing, it would destroy the party and not to attack it was tacitly to acquiesce in it. The present Government was adding to the national debt with dollars it would pay off, if at all, in depreciated dollars. It thus exhorts undertaking of radical reform of fiscal policies at the national level as the chief issue of the day.

Drew Pearson tells of the President, in a long-distance telephone call with Congressional leaders from Key West, having railed about Senator McCarthy, finding that he was doing "irreparable harm" to the Government, especially the State Department, with his "loose talk". He believed it was even more damaging to the nation's prestige abroad, especially in Western Europe. He said that the Senator had made the job of foreign diplomats doubly difficult, as they were chary about being seen talking to anyone who might have a hint of Communist leanings in France, Italy, and other countries, leaving embassies and legations virtually isolated and demoralized.

The head of the State Department's loyalty review board, Mr. Pearson points out, was a Republican, General Conrad Snow, appointed on recommendation of Senator Styles Bridges, assisting Senator McCarthy with his attacks. The chairman of the top loyalty review board was also a Republican, Seth Richardson, who had served under President Hoover. Only the courts could overrule the boards.

Secretary of State Acheson had fired more employees than any previous Secretary of State.

He quotes from Senator McCarthy's latest vitriolic attack on Mr. Acheson, calling him a "Fascist-like diplomat" and "incorrigible liar", among other things.

The Air Force, which had tracked all of the flying saucer reports, said that the discs from elsewhere did not exist. They were referring queries to the first chapter of Ezekiel, in which it was reported that the Prophet Ezekiel saw a living wheel in the heavens.

Likely story from Big Government.

He next provides various snippets of information, including that around 50,000 coal miners would possibly be laid off later in the year because of gas and oil competition, as the small companies were likely to go under.

Marquis Childs discusses the harm done to bipartisan foreign policy from the absence of Senate leadership in that direction by Senator Arthur Vandenberg, primary exponent of the strategy, who had been ill since the prior fall and was unlikely to return to the Senate any time soon. As a result, bipartisanship on foreign policy was virtually a dead issue.

The current Republican leadership was being provided in the Senate by Senators Taft, Wherry, and Bridges, each of whom had endorsed the tactics of Senator McCarthy insofar as his effort to get Secretary Acheson to resign. Senator Taft had told Senator McCarthy that he should continue in his course, for if he missed one target, he might be able to hit another.

The opposition within the Republican Party to this trio had been timid.

Elder statesman Henry Stimson had recently pointed out in his letter to the New York Times the danger of McCarthyism, but that statement would not cause the Taft-Bridges-Wherry triumvirate to cease their efforts.

Someone, such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., could step forward and exert positive leadership within the GOP, telling his true feeling about a bipartisan approach to foreign policy and the peril of being querulous about it posed for the security of the nation. Mr. Childs thinks the response within the party would be immediate and positive. Such a leader should demand an end to irresponsibility in the party and call for the Truman Administration to produce a positive approach to resolve the issues between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

He suggests that the Taft-Wherry-Bridges approach might win elections in 1950 and 1952 but would not go far in winning the peace, and that, he concludes, would amount to a world tragedy transcending the fate of any individual.

Robert C. Ruark tells of being nearly fed up with the chronicles of "Georgeous" Gussie Moran's underwear or pants, and generally with the stress placed in advertising on female "harnessings".

He says when young, he had gotten a charge out of looking at the ladies' lingerie section of the Sears catalogue, but believed that publicity surrounding the matter had advanced to the level that there were no longer feminine secrets to be preserved, such that he feared for true romance.

Now, with all the advertising, one had to wonder whether there were any women at all who did not need shoring up by the whalebone and elastic industries. The female chest had degenerated to little more than costume jewelry, as the market in falsies had burgeoned.

He had read a dispatch from Hollywood that girls were going in for "outside undies", and he believed it.

All females over 14 ventured forth each day, apparently, accoutered with more armor than the knights of old. The boudoir appeared as a tack-room at a livery stable, with horse blinkers for the eyes to accommodate the female in sleep, chin straps, straps to push madame out in some places, to squeeze her in at others. He had no idea how the average woman got in and out of such contraptions without a staff of servants.

He recommends that women downplay these beneficial beauty aids lest her loving cavalier wax suddenly disenamored at the last minute and elope with a horse.

A letter writer says that he has trouble forgetting his good years at UNC while Frank Graham was its president, but nevertheless does not agree with Senator Graham's position that segregation should be eliminated through education and religion rather than Federal intervention. The writer thinks segregation inappropriate in the churches and schools—comingling thereby the issue, first between private and public schools, and also as to purely private exercise of freedom of religion and association issues, thus misunderstanding the entire framework of the matter Constitutionally.

He is also content with the set-up whereby blacks were employed in the tobacco industry and whites in the textile industry, apparently therefore disagreeing with the notion of equal opportunity in employment, to be provided under the proposed legislation to establish a Fair Employment Practices Commission, or even at the state level, as protected at the time in New York under a program inaugurated by Governor Thomas Dewey.

He wants, first, establishment of a sound economy without deficit financing and sees no effort of Senator Graham to achieve that end.

A letter writer approves the idea proposed by a letter of March 27, indicating a desire to have the City take over the Quartermaster Depot and turn it into a truckers' depot.

A letter writer finds that peace-mongering was safer than it had been a few months earlier when Reactionaries had been able to deter peace advocates with the label "appeaser".

A letter writer finds that perhaps the reason why Charlotte had more crime per capita, according to Readers Digest, than any other city was because the police spent too much time enforcing laws against public drunkenness and parking and loitering violators than tending to more serious crime. He also finds the police officers lacking discipline, wearing wrinkled uniforms, smoking cigars on duty and needing a shave, while idly chattering with friends.

A letter writer condemns the vote of Senator Clyde Hoey in favor of the legislation pushed by Senator Bob Kerr of Oklahoma to deregulate the natural gas industry, as redounding potentially to the detriment of citizens of North Carolina.

A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which A Reason Is Suggested Why So Many Marriages Go On The Rocks:

"Cupid
Is Stupid."

But poor Cupid
Cannot help
The self-duped id.

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