The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 8, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy charged before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a named State Department female employee had been affiliated with at least 28 Communist-front organizations. He said that she was a member of the U.N. Economic & Social Council's Commission on the Status of Women, an organization, according to the U.N., from which she had resigned in February. The Senator also claimed that the wife of Secretary of State Acheson was the sponsor of the Washington branch of a "Communist-front organization", the Congress of American Women. The Senator balked when challenged by Senator Millard Tydings to name a high State Department official who was shielding disloyal persons, saying that he would get to that when the particular case arose.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, said in a speech to the Women's National Press Club that while the U.S. had not yet achieved a defense capable of guaranteeing withstanding an initial attack, he believed that it would in time. He also said that the forces in being and the potential forces of friendly nations would be sufficient to win a war if it occurred. He said that the atomic stockpile and the means to deliver the weapons afforded an immediate but inconclusive blow of retaliation. He further said that the U.S. could not hope to match the Soviet military build-up item by item without significantly diminishing the American standard of living.
In Norfolk, Va., the loading began of the first planes bound for France as part of the military aid program for NATO.
In Paris, the anti-sabotage measure which had provoked fierce opposition from Communists for their opposition to arms from the U.S. to France under NATO, passed the National Assembly by a vote of 393 to 186. Premier Georges Bidault had turned the measure into a vote of confidence for the coalition Government.
In Sofia, the former Bulgarian translator for the U.S. legation was sentenced to 15 years in prison following his conviction for spying for the U.S. He had previously provided an affidavit to the State Department saying that his confession to the charge was coerced by torture by the Bulgarian police. The U.S. had recently severed diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, the first such break with a nation since the war.
Rear Admiral Joel T. Boone, who had been the senior medical officer in the Defense Department, said that he was fired by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson because he disagreed with the economizing measures being undertaken by the Secretary, which he found "shortsighted". The Defense Department confirmed that his disagreement over economizing in the medical corps was the reason for the firing.
The House the previous day had passed the bill to eliminate the discriminatory tax on oleo margarine and the Senate was expected to pass the measure this date.
In Minneapolis, a Northwest Airlines passenger plane, trying to make an instrument landing in inclement weather after being diverted to Minneapolis, crashed into a house two miles short of the airport, killing all 13 aboard plus two young children watching television at the time in their home.
In Manchester, N.H., in the first degree murder trial of the doctor accused of euthanizing his terminally ill cancer patient, the prosecution demanded the collapsed vein of the victim which the chief medical examiner who performed the autopsy had testified earlier was proof that that the defendant could not have injected air into her veins as he could not have done so with a collapsed vein. The defense contended that the prosecution had never previously sought the evidence while the prosecutor implied that the defense had withheld the evidence.
In Richmond, Portsmouth, Norfolk and other parts of Northern Virginia, as told by former News reporter C. A. Paul, bus drivers were on strike. Yet, the buses continued to roll with pretty much the same drivers at the wheels, as the Commonwealth had technically taken over operations while the executives of the bus company continued in actual control. He provides the background leading to the situation.
Blizzards supplanted mild, springlike weather in the Midwest, with snow, sleet, and gales hitting the Northern Plains into Iowa and headed toward Lake Michigan.
In Las Vegas, actress Nan Grey was divorced from jockey Jackie Westrope on grounds of mental cruelty.
In San Jose, California, firemen had to use hacksaws to extricate a six-year old boy, as pictured, from a garbage can into which he had crammed himself during a game of hide and seek.
A part of chapter twenty-two of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appears on the page as part of the serialization by The News of the book, published in 1949.
On the editorial page, "What's a Contract Worth?" wonders how the new UMW contract could be trusted if the UMW leadership could command the miners to return to work to comply with a court order only to have them ignore the command and remain on strike. It questions what would prevent the miners from striking in defiance of the new contract and what would prevent them from doing so during a national emergency. The recent strike had thus showed up weaknesses in the Government's ability to end strikes under Taft-Hartley and the UMW's lack of control over the miners.
"Cracking the Whip" finds that the State Utilities Commission, the object of criticism of late by Governor Kerr Scott, was now taking to task the telephone companies for dragging their feet in extending service to rural areas, was no longer the rubber stamp of old regarding rate increases. The piece applauds the new approach.
"Put Up or Shut Up" finds that it was time for Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his February claims of various numbers of "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, to perform the command suggested by the title of the piece. If he did not disclose facts tending to prove the truth of his claims to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the piece presciently predicts, then his stature in the public estimate would be even less than his small standing at present.
"A Last Chapter for 'Spoon River'", starting with a quote from "Silence", laments the death of Edgar Lee Masters at age 81, though he had long ago passed his literary peak, gone even by the time, years earlier, when he had resided in a Charlotte hotel.
In 1915, he had regaled the public with the Spoon River Anthology, an homage to the common man, which presaged such masterpieces as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and its expose of small-town hypocrisy.
He had written more poems, novels and biographies into the Forties, but none had matched the earlier period of his writing. He had lost his way, it concludes, on the path to finding the literary Grail.
An editorial from the Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont discusses the House-passed FEPC bill which allowed for voluntary compliance instead of punitive sanctions. Nevertheless, the piece finds, the bill was as dangerous as the former bill by permitting harassment of employers into compliance. It allowed for investigations of complaints of employment discrimination and in pursuit thereof, granted the power to issue subpoenas to a five-person board to be appointed by the President. In so doing, the piece suggests, the employer could be hounded into hiring and firing compliance, such that he could no longer control his business and workplace environment.
It concludes that while the principle of non-discrimination in hiring, promotion, wages, etc., was laudable, the means of carrying it out, whether through Government compulsion or coercion through this voluntary compliance bill, amounted to dangerous intrusion to individual rights. It urges that the Senate kill the measure.
Drew Pearson tells of U.S. Attorneys, who had been reluctant to bring large income tax evasion cases, left to languish or resolved on penalties, now getting busy, after Mr. Pearson's columns had revealed the laxity. On January 20, he had revealed that five IRB agents in New York City had been shaking down taxpayers who had cases of back taxes or fraud. On March 3, the five agents were indicted.
Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire recently had gone toe to toe with Secretary of State Acheson, asking the latter in a series of questions how he viewed various hypothetical scenarios regarding security risks, boiling it down finally to someone who had given to an unauthorized person State Department classified files, an obvious reference to Mr. Acheson's old friend, Alger Hiss. In each case, Mr. Acheson replied that such a person would be a security risk, enabling him to pass the test.
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia had, sometime earlier, gone to see the President, suggesting that if the latter would compromise on the FEPC bill, some Southern Senators might yield on other things. The President responded that he was adamant about the civil rights program and that he would not back down an inch.
In the remodeling of the White House, some 750,000 old bricks, dating back to the time of George Washington, had been salvaged and the question had arisen what to do with them. The President wanted them scrapped so that a black market would not develop in their sale. A Congressional committee wanted to give some of the bricks to museums. But others wanted them auctioned off to construct a home for homeless boys in honor of President Washington, who never had children of his own.
The Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Ellis Briggs, had recently managed to gain the release of two Mormon missionaries jailed by the Communist Czech Government. Reprisals were feared against 300 Mormon converts left behind in the country.
Republicans were hopeful of getting former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and Congressman John Lodge of Connecticut to run for the Senate seat.
RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson was trying to get Oregon Republicans to lay off running against liberal Senator Wayne Morse as Democrats were wooing him and Mr. Gabrielson wanted to keep him in the Republican fold. Ultimately, he would become an independent in 1952 and defect to the Democrats in 1955.
Former ERP administrator Paul Hoffman had said just before the recent British elections that it would probably be better for the Marshall Plan if Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party were returned to power.
Robert C. Ruark finds academic intrusion to the democratization of sleep, that which was the entitlement of rich and poor alike, by the fact of experiments conducted at Mr. Ruark's alma mater, UNC, showing that knowledge could be imbued to the mind while a subject slept soundly.
Mr. Ruark loudly objects: "Here is where I stand up on my hind legs and quarrel noisily at science. Sleep has been one of the few commodities of our time that has been unharassed by taxes or social distinction. A poor man owns just as large a lien on dreams as a rich man, and generally can sneer at his peers in this department."
So he regards the experiments showing that the sleeper would retain a good portion of what was imparted during sleep to be an assault on the sanctity of the world of dreams and life's counterfeit emulation of death, even quotes Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy in defense of the uninterrupted state. He adamantly insists that sleep be left free from indoctrination by the propagandists.
Joseph Alsop, in Bonn, West Germany, discuss the new Bonn Government and its efforts to construct a new Germany through laws passed under a democratic system. New Chancellor Konrad Adenauer said that at least Germans now knew "what to avoid". But there was also not much positive in this negative message. Bonn had experienced inflation, economic crisis, the false promise of Nazism and victory, mating with the eventual reality of total defeat. The quest now was to avoid going through that series of events again.
The new Bundestag was dominated by moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, unlike the rest of Europe where the extremes on either side of the political spectrum were in the majority. There were some rightists and a few Communists, but on the whole, the majority was in the moderate parties, with the fringes less in evidence than in the U.S. Congress.
Between the time of unification of France under Cardinal Richelieu until the defeat of Napoleon, France had sought to conquer Europe on the average of about once every 30 to 40 years. Since that time, Germany had assumed that inchoate role of attempted and thwarted imperialists. Similar to the downfall of French imperialism was now the downfall of German imperialism and its national dynamism. In consequence of the former Nazi state, the Government at Bonn demonstrated so little evident will for conquest that it was hard to imagine any government with less such will. But if the Bonn Government failed, and it had many obstacles to overcome, then the old poisons of German nationalism might resurface.
The Alsops observe also that the Western allies might not allow the experiment in democracy to succeed. The recent French agreement with the Saar, a region claimed by Germany, to provide it greater autonomy in exchange for control of its rich coal deposits for the next 50 years, had evidenced in it a resurgence of nationalism. If the Bonn Government were allowed to behave as a true government, then it might succeed. But if it were made a vehicle for continuing punishment of Germany for the war, then it would inevitably fail.
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