The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 12, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Millard Tydings, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges of Communists in the State Department, said that he was refusing to accept an aide to the subcommittee nominated by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., because the man was a Republican office seeker. Another man, also a Republican, nominated by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, had been approved as a staff aide the previous day.
Senator Taft said in his weekly column appearing in Ohio newspapers, "Washington Report", that the President had prejudged the allegations of Senator McCarthy and should "if he can do so, eliminate any suspicion of treason" from the Administration. He also said: "The pro-Communist influence in the State Department has been reflected in a strongly pro-Communist policy in the Far Eastern division and a strongly pro-Communist policy in China which succeeded finally in delivering China and perhaps the entire East to Communism."
He was running for re-election to the Senate in 1950, with an eye on the presidency in 1952. At least he didn't call him "crooked Harry" or "Commie Harry".
Former Communist Louis Budenz, produced as a witness by Senator McCarthy, was set to testify before the subcommittee on April 20, expected to assert that he knew Owen Lattimore, described by Senator McCarthy as the top Communist spy in the country, as a member of the Communist Party when Mr. Budenz, who had testified previously in 1946 and 1948 before HUAC, had been a Communist. Mr. Lattimore would then be allowed to reply to the testimony at the hearing.
The crew of an American search plane reported spotting an oil slick and what appeared to be a life raft in the Baltic Sea, close to where an American B-24 had last been in radio contact before disappearing the prior Saturday during a flight from Wiesbaden to Copenhagen. The search crew saw no signs of life. The unarmed plane had apparently been involved in a shooting incident by a Soviet pursuit plane after the Soviets claimed it violated Soviet airspace over Latvia, the subject of a formal protest by the Soviets to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow the previous day.
The State Department was not treating the matter lightly but also was not planning to make it into a casus belli.
Secretary of State Acheson said that plans to remove some 2,000 Americans and other foreigners from Shanghai had been abandoned because of difficulties with cooperation by the Communist Chinese in making the arrangements. Efforts would be made, he said, to get the Communists to move the refugees to a North China port or to British Hong Kong.
Near Albuquerque, 13 crew members of a B-29 were killed in the fiery crash of the plane while on a secret mission in a secret area of the Sandia special weapons base, three minutes after taking off from Kirtland Air Force Base. The plane was from Walker Air Force Base near Roswell, N.M.
In India, a passenger train was reported to have jumped the rails and crashed into a stream, killing 50 persons, south of Bareilly in Uttarpradesh.
In Hyde Park, N.Y., 3,000 persons per day during tourist season, a half million annually, continued to visit the grave of FDR, five years after his death in Warm Springs, Ga. To commemorate the occasion, a public service was to be conducted this date at the grave, and the library and Roosevelt home would be open without the normal admission fee. The gardener on the estate since 1897, William Plog, said that flowers in the vases of the home were still changed every day and the rose garden raked every morning, as they had been when the President was alive, "the way he'd want it".
President Truman, 65, was reported fit and confident after five years in office.
In Fayetteville, N.C., the commander of the State Highway Patrol, C. R. Tolar, pleaded guilty to a charge of speeding 60 mph in a 35 mph zone and was fined $10 plus court costs. He said that he did not see the city limits sign lowering the speed limit automatically, and was going less than 50 mph at the time he was pulled over, a claim corroborated by his wife. He had told the patrolman that he was on his way to Lumberton to visit his sick mother-in-law.
Meanwhile, the Raleigh Times called for his resignation after this second driving incident, following his recent indictment in Beaufort County for reckless driving in connection with his alleged failure to obey a patrolman slowing traffic around a funeral. In that incident, commander Tolar had claimed he was on his way to investigate what had been described as an automobile accident scene and so had not slowed when directed to do so and operated his siren, with illegal use of which he was also charged.
On the editorial page, "Court Ruling Is Needed" finds the Supreme Court's denial of review to writers John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, convicted of contempt of Congress for not answering questions posed by HUAC in fall, 1947 regarding whether they had ever been Communists, to have left the law in a state of flux. The Court of Appeals decision which was allowed to stand had justified its affirmance of the convictions on the basis that the right to remain silent and freedom of speech were not absolute and had to give way when weighed against the national interest in combating an evil perceived as a threat thereto, in this case, Communism.
The piece finds fault with that analysis, recognizing that such things as defamation and threats of actual violence or statements posing a clear and present danger of inciting violence were not protected speech, suggesting that the issue in the cases was not speech but refusal to speak. (Actually, the First Amendment issue raised was interference with the right of freedom of association, rather than speech, per se.)
Refusing to speak before such committees, it opines, as the former Martin Dies or John Rankin-led versions of HUAC, investigating all manner of leftist activity while refusing to investigate such organizations as the Klan, would be a thing which many thoughtful Americans would choose to do. If one could be asked about past Communist ties, then one could be asked potentially about Socialist Party ties or conceivably regarding membership in an opposing political party, and then jailed for contempt for refusing to talk.
It views the Court of Appeals decision as contravening the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination as well, as Communist Party membership, while not per se criminal, was becoming the equivalent in the public's mind. It remained unclear why the Supreme Court had declined review, whether it approved the Court of Appeals decision or for some other reason. (For a valid assertion of the Fifth Amendment privilege, there must be some conceivable criminal prosecution flowing from a compelled answer to any question regarding which it is asserted.)
It hopes therefore that when the case involving the Smith Act convictions of the top eleven American Communist Party leaders came before the Supreme Court, it would accept the cases for hearing and clarify these points for the American people.
"Neglect of Latin America" tells of the former editor of the Louisville Times, Tom Wallace, addressing the Charlotte Rotary Club, suggesting that there were sufficient resources in North and South America to provide for peacetime and to make the Americas invincible in war, but that the country was expending so many of its resources fighting Communism in Europe and Asia that it had forgotten the benefits to be derived from the Good Neighbor Policy inaugurated under FDR.
E. O. Guerrant, professor emeritus at Davidson College, in his new book on the Good Neighbor Policy, had been critical of the Truman Administration for the same reason, charging that President Truman had made an about-face on Latin America, neglecting it with the extension of the Monroe Doctrine overseas, under the Truman Doctrine and NATO.
The piece concludes that with the formula for Inter-American unity having been proven during the war, it ought be as useful during the cold war.
"Murder on the Hill" tells of the former UNC student who had shot and killed his former roommate regarding a dispute over a stolen rifle and then killed himself some hours later in Chapel Hill. The man had been persuaded to go to a mental institution the prior year, after suffering from stress from his six years in the Air Force, including service during the war in the Pacific. But he had then left the institution.
The piece suggests that had he gone to court on the case, he would have been adjudged insane and confined to a mental institution. The Raleigh News & Observer had commented that while a child suffering from measles was required by law to remain at home, a person determined by a qualified doctor to be mentally incompetent could remain at large as long as he and his family were unwilling to submit to a voluntary commitment. The reason for the paradox, suggests the piece, was likely the lack of confidence in psychiatry.
With such incidents involving war veterans mounting, including the Howard Unruh case of mass murder in Camden, New Jersey, the prior September, public opinion would, it predicts, soon mandate some stricter laws to enable commitment involuntarily of such persons before they committed some heinous crime.
It is impossible, without prior untoward conduct of a serious nature to predict future such conduct, and no psychiatrist in his or her right mind would suggest a person to be homicidal absent some overt behavior of the type, such as a violent and potentially deadly assault with little or no provocation. Due process rights apply to every citizen, not just those whom we deem "sane".
After all, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory studies of students during exam times have routinely shown that most exhibit tendencies which are identified normally with those characteristics demonstrated by psychotics. How, therefore, would anyone be determined objectively to be insane, absent prior unprovoked violent, assaultive behavior?
A piece from the New York Times, titled "The Groundhog", tells of the creature emerging from his winter hibernation as spring began to blossom.
So what else is new among the things fit to print?
Drew Pearson recaps the five years which had passed since Vice-President Truman, less than three months since assuming that position, had become President upon the sudden death of FDR. One of the key points, he believes, which historians would examine in assessing the Truman legacy was the present White House inner circle which had insulated the Administration from the outside world, eliminating anyone who posed as a rival to the President, alienating in the process former Secretary of Agriculture, now Senator, Clinton Anderson, and causing friction with Vice-President Alben Barkley, on the notion that the latter, at age 72, might run for the presidency in 1952.
It was not known whether the President would run again, but the palace guard was hoping that he would as they had grown accustomed to the perquisites of the high office. A year earlier, this loyal retinue had wanted ERP administrator Paul Hoffman to leave the position as he was becoming too popular. It was also the reason that a weak Democratic candidate was supported for the Ohio Senate seat against Senator Taft, as he would be an easier opponent in 1952 than General Eisenhower.
The complex had carried into the field of foreign affairs, following the assertion of independence by Secretary of State James Byrnes, making an unauthorized broadcast to the American people after returning from the failed London treaty conference in fall, 1945, causing the President to hit the ceiling. It was a reason why Secretary of State Acheson could not give a statement to the people about the loyalty review boards being staffed with Republicans, and past Presidents having withheld from Congress confidential files of the executive branch, as a defense against the claims of Senator McCarthy aimed at getting rid of Mr. Acheson. Instead, the President had issued abrupt statements from Key West, refusing the release of the loyalty files, without clarifying points on rationale to advance public understanding.
A president, he concludes, was only as powerful as his public support, and Congress would rebel when a president's popularity began to weaken. And President Truman's popularity had sunk, in large part, from the actions of the "jealous zealots" around him.
Joseph Alsop, in Vienna, tells of the Russians the previous spring having been on the verge of agreement finally to formalize a treaty which would have ended the Allied occupation of Austria, including withdrawal from the "line of communications" in Hungary and Rumania. As a quid pro quo, the U.S. had agreed to allow the Soviets to retain ownership of stolen Austrian industries on the phony rationale that they were former German assets. But suddenly, the prior September, the Russians raised the "pea debt", the worth of dried peas which they had delivered as a gift to the starving Viennese, as an excuse for backing out of the negotiations.
The reason for the sudden change on such a flimsy excuse was that the Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb and now could use it to intimidate Western Europe.
At the same time, the prior August, the Soviets exchanged volatile notes with Yugoslavia, making peaceful coexistence forever impossible between the two countries. They also began at the same time to transform the East German police into a new German army.
The Russian atomic bomb marked therefore a turning point in Soviet policy. Mr. Alsop posits that with firmness, the U.S. could still turn back the Soviet attack on Berlin, but by the following year, if the Western defenses continued to decline while the Soviets continued to build up their own military capability, Western Europe might be frightened into surrender and the cold war could be lost.
Marquis Childs tells of Germans circulating bitter anti-American propaganda. Some of them were working toward an understanding with Russia which would make it possible to turn against the West, especially the U.S.
Senator McCarthy had given the propaganda a boost with his claims of coerced confessions from the German SS soldiers responsible for the Malmedy massacre in December, 1944, and his subsequent belittling of Senators on a subcommittee, especially Senator Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut, for having found the claims untrue.
Now, Republicans in the Senate would prefer to forget the Senator's charges of Communists in the State Department after Owen Lattimore had demolished the claim that he was the top Communist spy in the country.
Senator McCarthy, in making his Malmedy claim, was following the lead of the National Council for the Prevention of War, which had taken unverified claims of the prisoners themselves as the basis for the charges. Likewise, the charges against Mr. Lattimore appeared to have derived from the files of the Nationalist China lobby.
Senator McCarthy's motive in discrediting Senator Baldwin had not been made clear and the real motivation behind the NCPW, the investigation of which had been recommended by the subcommittee headed by Senator Baldwin which had looked into the Malmedy claim of Senator McCarthy, had likewise not been ascertained.
A letter writer advocates voting only for candidates who vowed to lower taxes.
That's new.
A letter writer finds the mud-slinging by reactionaries against liberals, charging Communist sympathies, to be without substance, as no solid evidence had been presented that the liberals favored nationalization of private property, a central facet of Communism.
A letter writer presents a friend's previously composed poem to the recently deceased Vaslav Nijinsky, who had been one of the world's greatest dancers before going insane 31 years before his death.
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