The Charlotte News

Tuesday, March 7, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in New York, both Judy Coplon and Valentin Gubitchev were found guilty of conspiracy and attempted espionage for Ms. Coplon taking secret documents from her place of employment at the Justice Department and then intending to transfer them to Mr. Gubitchev, a Russian, at the time employed with the U.N. Secretariat. The jurors had retired late the previous afternoon, were sequestered through the night, and returned the verdict at 11:45 a.m. Ms. Coplon was acquitted of an additional charge of attempting to transfer classified FBI documents to unauthorized persons—seemingly an inconsistent verdict, albeit that determination dependent on the elements required for conviction of the other crimes. The charge on which the pair were convicted alleged conspiracy to commit espionage by Ms. Coplon's removal of classified documents from Government files and defrauding the United States of Ms. Coplon's impartial services. Ms. Coplon was found guilty also of attempted espionage by transmittal of the documents to a citizen of a foreign power with the belief that they would be used to injure the United States, that charge carrying a possible 20-year sentence. Mr. Gubitchev was also convicted of attempting to receive secret documents. Sentencing would take place the following Thursday. Ms. Coplon was already serving 40 months to ten years for conviction the prior summer of taking the same documents.

In Sofia, Bulgaria, a former Bulgarian translator for the U.S. legation in Sofia confessed to the people's court to having spied for the U.S. since 1946 and having done so at the direction of former Minister Donald Heath, recently ordered home when the U.S. broke relations with Bulgaria. The State Department had released an affidavit signed by the defendant while at the legation, in which he stated that his confession had been coerced by police and that they continued to try to break his will until he agreed to return to the American legation to spy for them.

In Washington, Victor Kravchenko, a former Russian official, testified to HUAC that the Klaus Fuchs case in Britain was only one of many "bitter surprises" in store for the West regarding Soviet spying. He said that spying was one of the principal duties of Soviet diplomats and all other Soviet representatives, whether military or economic.

In Paris, the subway lines were running at about 55 percent of normal operation despite a Communist-called transportation strike. About six percent of the city's 1,900 buses were operating, supplemented, however, by 3,000 buses operated by soldiers or private, volunteer operators.

A French carrier was scheduled to arrive at Norfolk this date to begin the billion dollar military aid program for the NATO nations of Western Europe. It would carry about 40 Navy fighters and bombers to a secret destination in French territory.

On Hainan island, held by the Nationalists, about a thousand Chinese Communist troops were reported to have landed, and fighting was in progress. It was unclear whether the landing was a test of the defenses of the island or an invasion. The general in command of the island had recently pledged allegiance to Chiang Kai-Shek.

The House Labor Committee, by a vote of 16 to 9, refused approval of Federal aid for parochial and private schools, rejecting a proposal by Congressman John F. Kennedy to extend the aid to cover bus service for non-public schools. Mr. Kennedy said that the action meant that there would be many in the House who would not strongly support the Federal aid to education bill and that he would not vote for the bill.

The House passed a bill by a vote of 261 to 110 to make Hawaii a state. The previous Friday, the House had approved statehood for Alaska by a vote of 186 to 146. The measures now would go to the Senate. Neither territory would become a state until 1959.

UMW head John L. Lewis proposed to Philip Murray, president of CIO and the United Steelworkers, a "mutual aid pact" between UMW and the Steelworkers. Mr. Lewis returned a $500,000 check from the Steelworkers to UMW for help during the recently settled coal strike, saying that the money had not been needed. UMW had offered a million dollars to the UAW in their strike at Chrysler.

In Brooklyn, a 19-year old, just released from a mental institution, stabbed seven people randomly on the street with a butcher knife, killing four of them. Police chased the youth for three blocks before subduing him with rifle butts. He offered no explanation for his actions.

In Manchester, N.H., in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder for the mercy killing of his terminally ill cancer patient, an expert witness, the head of forensic medicine at Harvard, testified that substantially more than 40 cc's of air, the amount which the prosecution alleged the defendant used to kill the patient, would be required to kill a human being, regardless of the condition of the person.

In Shelby, N.C., as reported by Kays Gary, fire swept through two buildings in the downtown area, causing about $300,000 of damage but injuring no one. The fire had started by spontaneous combustion of oily rags in the machine shop of an auto parts company, occupant of one of the two buildings destroyed. The fire had in turn caused oil drums to explode, causing the fire to spread.

In Bristol, England, a man was able to identify his car stolen three years earlier by the fact of gum he had used to plug an oil leak, notwithstanding that the car had been repainted and its engine and chassis numbers changed. The court accepted the gum identification and awarded him his car.

Part of chapter twenty-one of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the serialization by The News of the book.

On the editorial page, "There's Credit Enough for All" thanks the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, the Duke Power Co., and the mayors of the six cities in which the Duke buses operated in the Carolinas for averting the strike of bus drivers and coming to agreement on a plan for appointment of a three-man fact-finding board which would consider the matter for 60 days and make recommendations for settlement.

"Double-Header at the Armory" tells of the two shows by Gene Autry and his troupe at the Armory-Auditorium on Sunday having demonstrated the shortcomings of that venue, such that it was hoped many would vote for a new auditorium to be built when next the measure was on the ballot. The acoustics were bad, the facilities overcrowded, cigarette smoke stifled from poor ventilation, and children were crushed in the crowd. The only saving grace was the singing of Mr. Autry.

And if that was the saving grace, things were really bad.

"Who Shall Inherit the Earth?" addresses the piece by Ralph McGill below regarding the ten persons to be selected for survival in the event of a nuclear war. It posits that the picking would be theoretical as the most desirable people would be apt to be in the larger cities where the bombs would hit first, leaving only those who were weak, old or cowardly, "rejects hiding out from responsibility", as the survivors.

It suggests that regarding the matter in that light should cause better appreciation for humanity and what might actually result from such a nuclear holocaust.

"A Mildly Ridiculous Fad" finds the popular "cap" hairdo among women to be absurd, dreamed up by fashion designers so that women would need new wardrobes. But the women wearing the hair design and the men who had to look at it were not so thrilled about it.

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "A Freeman's Right", applauds Governor Kerr Scott for insisting that the new roadbuilder's headquarters in Albemarle have spittoons. It finds that such accouterments were essential to clear thinking, that without the ability to smoke and chew tobacco, and thus a receptacle for the emission of expectorant at regular intervals, no deep thinking or discussion could take place.

Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution tells of a challenge offered by a man in the Missouri Ozarks who had a cavern which he wanted to use as an atomic shelter. For publicity, he challenged people to name the ten persons, excluding themselves, relatives and acquaintances, who they would select as the ten persons to be saved in the event of atomic warfare. Mr. McGill accepts the challenge and names Dr. James B. Conant, president of Harvard and a physicist, Dr. Hugh Bennett, chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Charles Kettering, inventor, and Dr. James Paulin, a physician and surgeon of Atlanta.

He would also include a foreman of a plant and a manager.

Last, he would have two young couples for purposes of propagation of the species. They would come from the ranks of 4-H, Future Farmers and Homemakers organizations.

He would include the Bible and the great books of the Western world as the means for carrying on the civilization.

Drew Pearson tells of the President urging House Speaker Sam Rayburn to get a satisfactory Federal aid to education bill through the House, after it had already passed the Senate. He would then sign it.

Civil defense planners were forming a group of volunteer aircraft spotters in an arc of 25 states from North Carolina across the northern states to California, to supplement the radar system which was not yet fully operational and suffering from many blind spots. The Navy had arranged with civilian authorities to have a dim-out along the West Coast in the event of an emergency, to protect against submarines. The Atlantic Coast would follow. Key civilians in each city would be trained to care for the wounded and restore the cities to emergency operations. A national war game had been proposed to assure civilian preparedness.

Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa was probing high consumer prices on coffee, milk, bread, eggs, poultry and livestock, finding that the farmers were earning less income while consumers paid more, with the middlemen having greater income. Examples were A & P stores and General Foods.

U.S. Steel's Frick Coal Co. refused to give John L. Lewis a larger wage increase than that given to the United Steelworkers on the premise that if UMW received such an increase, the Steelworkers and other major unions would then seek higher wages to match.

Maine potatoes were glutting the market more than Idaho spuds, the result of Maine farmers using fertilizers and insect sprays to provide greater yields per acre, getting around Federal acreage limitations intended to curtail overproduction.

A hot war with Russia was recently averted when the U.S. intervened to stop Marshal Tito from invading Albania, which would have likely triggered a counter-attack against Yugoslavia by Russia. The U.S. threatened to denounce him before the U.N. if he undertook the invasion of Albania.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop again look at the weakness of the nation's defenses in light of the economizing measures of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, stressing air defense, which Mr. Johnson had claimed initially was the equivalent of the seventy groups thought necessary by air experts not to lose a war in the initial stages. But more recently, he had trimmed the estimate to the equivalent of 52.5 groups.

Yet, Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington estimated the strength to be only the equivalent of 43 or 44 groups.

It was difficult to measure air strength for the fact of constant replacement of obsolete aircraft being necessary to keep the groups up to date. The more reliable measure was airframe weight. Under that assessment, air experts determined that, at rock bottom, to prevent the loss of a war at the outset, a minimum of 45 million pounds of airframes needed to be added annually. Yet, in fiscal year 1950, deliveries were only for 23.5 million pounds, trimmed further by Secretary Johnson for 1951, to close to 21 million pounds, the amount delivered in 1947.

Thus, the recent pronouncement by Mr. Johnson that the nation had achieved "peace through strength" was belied by the facts, amounting only to weakness, leading, if the experts were correct, to disaster, to the loss of a war at the outset.

Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the twenty-seventh in his series of articles on childhood education, favors teaching children to learn through doing rather than strictly by lecture, which he finds the weakest mode of teaching.

He cites a class he once observed in which the teacher was teaching the students about poetry, demonstrating knowledge and interest in the subject. But the students were not involved in the process as she told them her interpretation of the poems rather than letting the students provide their own interpretations. Consequently, their interest level was minimal.

Learning by doing enabled students to have fun while they learned.

A letter writer disagrees with the previous writer who advocated removal from the Park & Recreation Commission of the man accused of employing the person who had attempted to blow up the WBT radio tower but for the intervention of police who were aware of the plot. He believes that in the spirit of Christian charity and based on the presumption of innocence, the trial ought first go forward before any such action should occur.

A letter from the secretary of the Charlotte Moose Lodge 1113 thanks The News for its support during the opening celebration of the lodge.

A pome from the Atlanta Journal appears, "In Which An Off-Hand Remark Concerning the Second Month Of the Year Is Recorded:

"I like February—
But not very."

Yet, always be wary:
On the Ides of March, in the Senate,
Do not tarry.

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