The Charlotte News
Friday, April 14, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson criticized the President's claim the previous day of credit for economic prosperity in the country since the war, saying that the President was losing the cold war in Asia, fostering socialism, and imposing the largest national debt and highest taxes in the country's peacetime history. He cited the country's 255 billion dollar debt, growing larger every day, as a principal part of the proof—not bothering to point out that the bulk of it had been generated in fighting the late war, which Mr. Gabrielson, presumably, would have opted not to fight.
The number of home starts in the prior month, about 110,000, had set a new record in the country, with the pace thus far in the year breaking the record set in 1949. The starts in March, 1949 had numbered 69,400. For the first three months of the year, home starts were at 270,000 units, compared to 16,800 for the same period in 1949.
Two Republican Senators, Kenneth Wherry and Hugh Butler, both of Nebraska, protested the State Department's plans for negotiating cuts in tariffs with 17 other nations, claiming it would accelerate unemployment and effectively ship U.S. jobs overseas, lowering the standard of living at home. Democratic Senators Willis Robertson of Virginia and Joe O'Mahoney of Wyoming urged caution in agreeing to the cuts at the 40-nation trade conference, to be held in England the following September 28. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, however, supported the plan, as without it, he suggested, Western Europe would not only be weakened but domestic export industries harmed, creating additional unemployment. The State Department action, supported actively by the President, was aimed at relieving the dollar shortage in Western Europe and serving as an alternative to more foreign aid. Cuts in tariffs were being proposed on such items as wool, fish, clocks, wine, whiskey, paper, textiles, toys, china, rayon, and dairy products.
Senators Wherry, Homer Ferguson of Michigan, and William Knowland of California accused the President of seeking to elect a Congress which would rubber-stamp his foreign policies, after the President had asserted to a U.N. group the previous day that "this time we are trying to elect a Congress that believes in international cooperation wholeheartedly". But Senator Wayne Morse, also a Republican, said that the President was consulting the GOP increasingly on foreign policy and trying in earnest to re-establish bipartisanship. The previous day, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Tom Connally accused Republicans of "base slander" in attacking the State Department and the Administration, in reference to the McCarthy charges.
The President granted a pardon to former Mayor and Congressman James Curley of Boston, convicted of mail fraud in early 1947 and sentenced to six to eighteen months in prison, continuing to serve as Mayor even while serving the sentence. Later that year, the President commuted the sentence to credit for time served after five months. Mr. Curley's company had been found to have bilked $60,000 from clients on the representation that it could obtain Government contracts for them. Two other company officials were convicted with Mr. Curley, the company's president. The pardon was sought by Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts, House Majority Leader, who said he took the action on his own initiative without Mr. Curley's knowledge. He did so out of compassion as Mr. Curley's son and daughter had recently died within 24 hours of one another.
In Garmisch-Parten-Kirchen, Germany, at the outset of an Air Force court martial, two U.S. Army undercover agents, who had posed as Russian agents, testified that a 19-year old American airman told them the previous October 7 that he had volunteered to supply secret military information to Russia because he believed in Communism. He was charged with attempting to provide to a foreign nation classified information involving national defense.
Fog was hampering the hunt for the missing B-24, believed shot down over the Baltic by the Soviets after it had allegedly penetrated Soviet frontier airspace over Latvia the prior Saturday. Wreckage and what appeared as a life raft had been spotted by the crew of a B-17 in an area near where the plane had last made radio contact.
Strict Federal controls over planting and marketing of potatoes were approved by a Senate Agriculture subcommittee, rejecting a proposed trial of the Brannan farm plan.
In Columbus, O., the Ohio State University student Senate determined that the May queen candidates would not need be adjudged in bathing suit competition, as they had previously ordered, stymied when the Women's Self-Government Association decreed that coeds could not enter contests in which bathing suits were worn. The coeds generally found it cheapening and unnecessary, that grace and poise were more important than good looking legs. But the sophomore class president countered that when one looked at a girl in a bathing suit, the thought was not of politics, that the evils of campus politics would thus be eliminated by the bathing suit competition.
Why not compromise and go nude? Then no one would be focusing attention on their legs. Stop the oppression from society's encumbering habiliments!
The mercury dropped to record lows for the date in North Carolina, 29 in Raleigh, causing some damage to crops. Lumberton recorded 29 degrees, Greensboro, 30, Winston-Salem, 28, Hickory, 26, Asheville, 25, and Wilmington, 33.
In Charlotte, another date-record was set, at 31, breaking by .3 degrees that of April 14, 1920—eight years after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk, and 55 years after the assassination of President Lincoln on Good Friday, 1865.
The mercury was set to go into the fifties in the afternoon, up to 41 by noon.
Better button up, especially in Columbus.
On the editorial page, "Mr. Hanes, Meet Mr. Cannon" discusses the effort of the U.S. to resolve the dollar gap in Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and by stimulating trade among the nations. But the aid was expensive and fiscal conservatives wanted it cut. Yet, with that would come complications. Five million bales of cotton, for instance, had been shipped to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan during the year and if curtailed, the cotton farmers would suffer, necessitating a farm price support bailout to remedy overproduction without a ready market.
Robert Hanes of North Carolina, chief of ERP's special mission to West Germany and president of Wachovia Bank, told Germans during the week that they would have to try harder to sell their products in the American market, to help resolve the dollar shortage, as ERP would end sooner or later. That would mean competition from abroad in the American market, ending some of the protections afforded by tariffs and customs regulations.
But Charles Cannon, president of Cannon Mills in North Carolina, told his stockholders that the President's effort to close the dollar gap in foreign trade posed a future threat to the textile industry, as exports of cotton goods had declined while imports were coming into the country, sometimes at half the price of domestic products.
Gordon Gray, who had just left his post as Army Secretary to become UNC president, was undertaking a special mission for the President to find out if there was any other way to close the dollar gap than through increased trade.
The piece votes for increased foreign trade in the American market, despite its resulting hardships. The alternative was to continue aid abroad while subsidizing a high standard of living at home through the farm price support program. It suggests to American businessmen as Mr. Cannon that they could not have their cake and eat it, too.
"The Atomic Revolution" tells of the University of Michigan having produced a pamphlet titled "To Live with the Atom", regarding ways to have a better life through application of atomic science to peacetime uses. It compared the Atomic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution in terms of the progress to be made, provided the society did not drift in this regard. The University had established the Memorial-Phoenix Project as a way to steer that revolution.
"Mr. Penny Bows Out" tells of retiring State Senator George T. Penny, who had been a loud proponent of prohibition in the state, blocking an ABC vote the prior year in Guilford County, his home. It was a reminder that the days of the "old-style rafter-rattling, gravel-voiced politician" were gone, replaced by a sleeker, suaver type who depended on logic rather than lung-power.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Dirty Tactics in Tar Heelia", finds it dirty pool that Senator Frank Graham, who had served his country honorably in various positions and on Government committees during and since the war, in addition to his service as UNC president, was being labeled a Communist in his Senate campaign. It suggests that it was to be expected of the likes of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, but not of Willis Smith, former ABA president. The piece finds Senator Graham "head and shoulders" above his two opponents and that he was no more a Communist than they were fair fighters. In view of the state's progressive past, it anticipates that he would be returned to the Senate.
Oh, but you have not heard of the great one, Jesse Helms, taking over management of Mr. Smith's campaign. His charming powers of persuasion are without equal.
Drew Pearson tells of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow having told of a large Soviet bureau being established to find oil for the Russian war machine, as oil fields in the Caucasus had begun to run dry. To this end, V. M. Molotov had sent hundreds of Russian geologists to Sinkiang Province in Communist China and ordered priorities for drilling in Kirghizia, in Central Asia, and on Sakhalin Island in Soviet territory.
U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Lewis Douglas, had cabled that Britain might cancel its previous recognition of Communist China, as Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was angry that the Communists had not acknowledged the recognition in three months since it was extended. Rather than serving its intended function of protecting Britain's large economic interests in Hong Kong, it had boomeranged, as the Chinese had let it be known that before reciprocating, they wanted to reopen the Sino-British treaty which had provided Hong Kong to the British, and also demanded support by the British of a Communist Chinese seat on the U.N. Security Council, occupied by Nationalist China since the founding of the organization.
So many Congressmen went home on weekends that large lobbying groups had arranged to hold votes on vital legislation on weekends to take advantage of the high absenteeism. The Kerr bill to deregulate natural gas, for instance, had been scheduled in the House on a Friday by Speaker Sam Rayburn and his friends, because its foes were home in New York and Chicago, enabling the bill narrowly to pass, 176 to 174.
Mr. Pearson thus vows to expose the worst offenders, starting with the Republicans, whom he proceeds to list, along with their number of absences. The list includes future Assistant Secretary of State and Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky and prior RNC chairman and future Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, as well as powerful Republican leader, Congressman Charles Halleck of Indiana. He promises soon to provide similar exposure of Democrats with high absentee records.
John Foster Dulles had declined acceptance initially of the appointment as special adviser to Secretary of State Acheson, wanting a more important role. To obtain his acquiescence, he was promised a later appointment as Assistant Secretary and, should Undersecretary James Webb resign, appointment to that position.
When former FDR press secretary Steve Early would soon resign as Undersecretary of Defense, he would be succeeded by Frank Pace, the new Army Secretary succeeding Gordon Gray, leaving to become UNC president.
Winston Churchill, chafing to return to leadership while he still had the chance, was pressing hard for a new election in Britain, after the February election had been indecisive, providing Labour a spare majority in Parliament. But Tory support for the move was scant, meaning that it would likely be fall before another election would be held.
Joseph Alsop, in Vienna, tells of the Austrian capital being the great spy center of postwar Europe, as well as the center of trade between the Soviet empire and Western Europe. The two great prizes in the Soviet postwar arsenal were the Skoda munitions works in Czechoslovakia and the Manfred Weiss works in Hungary, both of which had collapsed by war's end but had been revived to the point that Skoda was at wartime production levels and Weiss had three times its prewar labor force. They were being operated by the Soviets as hard as Hitler ever worked them and they were producing everything from cannon to bazookas.
East German industry had received over 500,000 tons of high-grade steel from the Soviet Union during the previous year. German business leaders predicted that shipments of steel would reach a million tons the following year. Reports had come of large production of improved V-2's and other guided missiles in the East German factories.
Whereas the Russians would ordinarily seek such vital components as ball bearings, radar equipment, and servo mechanisms from Vienna if they were in short supply, they were not seeking them, indicative of the supply being adequate within Russia and its satellites, manufactured from stolen or purchased patent drawings, or their own designs.
All of it added up to Russia not having peaceful intentions. And the U.S. had very little time left to act to counter the effort, as American leaders sought, as Stanley Baldwin had with Britain in the mid-Thirties, to cajole the people into a sense of complacency regarding defense capability.
Marquis Childs finds that the gangland murder of Charles Binaggio in Kansas City, in the heart of Pendergast country, the President's home bailiwick, could not be shrugged off and, he predicts, would haunt the Democratic Party in the coming midterm elections.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans were in the middle of a party squabble which rivaled the Pendergast mess, even if no murder had yet occurred. Charges of graft, crime and corruption, however, flew wildly, as Governor James Duff was fighting it out with the powerful machine led by former Senator Joseph Grundy, as the Governor campaigned for the Senate nomination against Congressman John Kunkel for a seat held by Democrat Francis Myers, Majority Whip in the Senate. Mr. Kunkel had charged that the Governor had made "the most brazen political deal" in state history, to hand over control of state government to corrupt forces in exchange for their support and controlled votes. The Governor denied the charge and claimed that powerful men in the Grundy organization were corrupt and that Mr. Kunkel was a mere puppet of this organization.
The net effect of this type of corruption in both parties at the state and local levels was disgust among voters. An investigation of organized crime and gambling, therefore, as sought by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, might be cathartic, provided it could remain free of politicization and over-sensationalism.
Those who protested most strongly interference by the Federal Government into state affairs usually were the first to demand that the FBI restore order when local law enforcement failed its responsibilities. The Federal Government could break up the interstate networks which enabled organized crime and gambling to thrive, but it could not restore morality and decency to local politics.
A letter writer corrects a caption under a picture appearing in the newspaper of the Shipp Monument, to Lieutenant William E. Shipp, located at the corner of Mint and West 4th Streets in Charlotte, which had indicated erroneously that he was the first Southerner to graduate from West Point after the Civil War. The writer tells of two others who preceded him, while giving further information on Lieutenant Shipp.
A letter from twice-failed Republican Congressional candidate, now running as a Democrat, P. C. Burkholder, tells of the woodpecker, urging its preservation and warning that the loss of one woodpecker meant millions more pests. He was enclosing his information from the Federal Government on the subject to the County Police so that they would be mindful of the woodpecker's benefits to society the next time they were called out on a hunt for one to silence its pecking sound.
Moreover, P.C., it might just be a night owl writer pecking away at their typewriter, and not the fault of Woody at all.
Lay off the woodpeckers! And buy country buttermilk. He has his campaign platform all set.
A letter writer urges putting Robert Rice Reynolds back in the Senate, as he would be a dedicated fighter against the Communists threatening America.
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