The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 19, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Damascus, Syria, and Beirut, Lebanon, bombs were thrown into the the U.S. legation compounds, apparently aimed at mounting tensions over the Arab-Israeli conflict. A U.S. Marine guard was wounded in the Damascus incident.
Secretary of State Acheson urged approval by Congress of the International Trade Organization, to strengthen the West in the cold war.
A Soviet weekly in Moscow, New Times, charged that the U.S. had deliberately provoked the shooting down of a U.S. plane over the Baltic Sea on April 8. It claimed that the U.S. had rescue planes waiting in Denmark in anticipation of the incident and that the U.S. plane, unarmed, fired first.
The State Department called the story "lies".
Czechoslovakia ordered the expulsion of the director of the U.S. Information Service in the country and that all USIS activity cease. The Government accused him of "grossly abusing" his diplomatic office by using Czech nationals to spy and produce propaganda against the Government. Secretary of State Acheson said that the charges were "trumped up".
Republican Senators Styles Bridges and Kenneth Wherry demanded that if the Administration wanted bipartisan support for foreign policy, it keep the GOP Senators informed as policy was being formulated and take into account their criticism in that formulation.
Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin found the Postmaster General's cutback in postal service "outrageous". The order directed post offices to curtail home deliveries to one per day and take other steps to reduce costs, including closure of post office windows earlier.
Dr. Edward O'Brien of Detroit contended to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, meeting in Denver, that the vaccine BCG would stamp out tuberculosis.
Freezing weather added to the problems of thousands made homeless by flood waters in North Dakota and Western Minnesota.
At the South Carolina state convention of the Democratic Party, the primary theme was "no retreat" from the Dixiecrat movement begun by Governor Strom Thurmond and company in 1948. State Senator George Warren, in his keynote address, said that he believed that the "informed Negroes" of the state were not in favor of intermarriage, in contravention of the State Constitution, as advocated by Mrs J. Waties Waring, wife of the Federal Judge in Charleston who had held the privatized South Carolina primary system unconstitutional for depriving blacks of their right to vote. Mr. Warren said that South Carolinians were "insulted" by the civil rights plan of the Administration and its "force bills", and would fight "socialism".
Tom Fesperman of The News reports that the City Council voted to discontinue rent controls immediately. The next step was to send the resolution to the Governor who would have to approve the move and then forward it to the Housing Expediter in Washington for final approval. Two members of the Council had opposed the resolution.
In Rome, an advertisement appeared
for 60 live lions to work in a film
On the editorial page, "What Is a Lobbyist?" tells of the Federal District Court acquittal of former Missouri Democratic Congressman Roger Slaughter, targeted successfully by President Truman for purge in 1946, on the criminal charge of failing to register as a lobbyist while carrying on lobbying activities after leaving Congress. He had claimed that he was acting only as an attorney in promoting certain legislation on behalf of his clients. The Court found the law itself constitutional as not abridging free speech, but also found it too vague in defining the role of a lobbyist as distinguished from an attorney acting for a client and so found that the Government had not proved its case, granting a directed verdict at the conclusion of the Government's case.
The piece urges that Congress clarify the act requiring registration of lobbyists, as pressure group activity was on the increase.
"Helping Old Folks" praises the Community Council and the local chapter of the American Association of Social Workers for sponsoring an institute called "Growing Old", seeking to provide a larger picture to the community anent the problems associated with the elderly and their care.
"Past, Present, and Future" tells of the New York Times bemoaning the facts that 34 percent of American colleges and universities did not require a course in American history and that only 37 percent required even a high school level course in the subject for admission. Educators had decried the fact for not mandating a rudimentary background in the country's history, necessary for effective citizenship.
The piece agrees but adds that an understanding of world history in the modern world was also necessary to live in peace with other nations.
We might add, regarding generally academic studies at institutions of higher learning, that the president of the University of Maryland, who has recently suggested that the University of North Carolina ought suffer the N.C.A.A. sanction of the "death penalty" for its athletic programs, especially basketball and football, for a longstanding previous practice, involving on average about 172 students per year, 81 of whom per year were student-athletes, over a period of 18 years, in a few courses catering to athletes which required only papers and no classes, exposed and cleaned up by the University, itself, over five years ago, should perhaps not throw stones. For we note that UNC's academic standing is rated fifth by educators in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking of public universities and colleges, while Maryland stands at number twenty. Moreover, UNC performs at that level while maintaining the second cheapest in-state tuition among the top 30 public schools, behind only the University of Florida, ranked fourteenth.
It would be an exhibition of the better part of valor and wisdom for college and university presidents to tend to their own academic gardens and not advise others, generally superior in academic reputation, not just recently, but for decades, on how to conduct their affairs. We do not see the University of Maryland limiting its emphasis on basketball and football, indeed saw it pay out 31.3 million dollars to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big Ten three years ago, presumably on the notion that it could be more competitive and earn more revenue from its major sports programs by the move, not because the Big Ten schools are generally better academically than those of the A.C.C. (The aggregate average academic standing of the A.C.C. schools, incidentally, is 55.46 for the schools participating in basketball, inclusive of Notre Dame, and 58.35 for the football schools, without Notre Dame. The average standing of the Big Ten schools is 60.92. Those standings are, for the A.C.C.: Duke, 8; Notre Dame, 15; Virginia, 20; Wake Forest, 27; UNC, 30; Boston College, 31; Georgia Tech, 34; Miami, 44; Syracuse, 60; Clemson, 66; Pittsburgh, 68; Virginia Tech, 74; N.C. State, 92; Florida State, 92; and Louisville, 171. For the Big Ten: Northwestern, 12; Michigan, 27; Wisconsin, 44; Illinois, 44; Penn. State, 50; Ohio State, 54; Maryland, 60; Purdue, 60; Rutgers, 70; Minnesota, 71; Michigan State, 82; Iowa, 82; Indiana, 86; and Nebraska, 111. Thus, seven or nearly half of the A.C.C. schools are in the top 35 schools nationally whereas only two Big Ten schools make that cut. And Maryland is not one of them.)
Perhaps, to keep the soot off the pot, the University of Maryland president made the catty remark about UNC.
The more important statistic, insofar as the relatively few student-athletes at any university or college, is their rate of graduation. We have not examined those relative statistics between UNC basketball and football and that of those sports at Maryland, but we would bet that, over time, they are at least comparable, as UNC has, historically, had one of the higher such rates among major institutions participating actively in sports.
Moreover, what good are classes if a student-athlete turns pro after a year or two in college? Why not focus energies in this regard on the University of Kentucky, ranked 133 nationally in academic standing, which has a revolving door on such "one and done" athletes in its basketball program, rather than trying, as many have, to make UNC the poster-child for improper academic deference to athletes, a problem which the University exposed and dealt with years ago, when anyone with any sense knows that this practice of deferring to athletes, in one version or another, has been ongoing for decades at every institution which stresses football and basketball athletics as a means of bringing in revenue to the institution.
The more important issue is whether some star athletes out of high school are misusing the academic deference provided them initially of a college scholarship, when far more deserving students academically would use that scholarship to obtain a four-year degree and not pursue a major instead in preparation for professional athletics. Why not take up that cudgel?
Or is that one not a little too controversial for the fact that many college presidents now also receive outrageous amounts of money, money in part made from the athletic programs and television broadcast agreements regarding the major N.C.A.A. sports?
The N.C.A.A. ought pass a rule requiring every student entering a college or university on an athletic scholarship to agree, in a legally binding contract, that departure from school for professional athletics before the normal date for graduation would result in certain costs and penalties, including remitting to the college or university during the first year of their professional contract the entire cost of the scholarship expended on them to the date of their departure from school. In addition, leaving after the first year or earlier, would result in a penalty of forfeiture of 75 percent of their first year professional salary, to be paid to the N.C.A.A. for distribution to the general scholarship fund of all member schools—that distribution, rather than to the individual school, preventing any incentive for a school to recruit such athletes out of high school. If the athlete leaves after the second year, then a 50 percent penalty would apply, and, after the third year, a 25 percent penalty, each again based on first year professional earnings. If the student goes on, within the four-year period, to graduate on time, however, all penalties would be eliminated, though the athletic scholarship refund provisions to the individual school would still apply. That would put a virtual stop to this abuse of the college scholarship program, which has significantly harmed the college game and made a mockery of amateur sports and therefore the N.C.A.A., itself. That is an increasingly pervasive trend for the past 45 years, albeit one of the least practitioners of it being the University of North Carolina.
"A Georgia Invention" finds wise the Supreme Court decision, declining to interfere with the Georgia unit-voting system, which favored rural districts over urban districts. The Court based its decision on the precedents which held that the Court would not interfere with state determinations on electoral weighting by geographic areas within the state. The piece asserts that had the decision been otherwise, it would have been anomalous given the archaic institution of the electoral college on the Federal level, also weighting votes unfairly for the smaller states over the more populous states.
In regard to this argument, it should be borne in mind, however, that the winner-take-all formulation for electoral votes is determined by each state legislature, per the Constitution, and is not, itself, a Constitutional requirement. Nevertheless, there is an irreducible minimum number of electors, determined by each state's two Senators and allotted number of Representatives, for each of the smaller states which would render even a constitutionally-mandated proportional system, as sought in 1949-50 by the proposed Lodge amendment, still unfairly weighted, albeit less so, toward the least populous states.
It concludes that it was to be left to Georgia voters to deal with the unit-voting system and its results, Governor Herman Talmadge.
A piece from the Fayetteville Observer, titled "Massey Hill Project", praises a project in Fayetteville initiated by a local civic club called the "15 to 55 Club", which sought pledges from citizens to obey traffic laws, refrain from drinking while driving and to be courteous behind the wheel. As these problems were the leading causes of fatal traffic accidents, it endorses the sentiment and recommends that every citizen sign the pledge.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy having received a year earlier $10,000, ultimately in money from RFC loans, from Lustron Corp., manufacturer of prefabricated houses, for a 7,000-word article on housing which the Senator had based on observations gleaned from his trip in 1948 to investigate housing, undertaken at Government expense.
In the Senator's campaign to root out supposed Communists from the State Department, he had received active support from the clergy at Georgetown University and from former Coughlinite extremists among Catholics. William J. Goodwin, among the latter group, was a lobbyist for the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang, with a connection to Senator Taft. Meanwhile, a recent editorial in the Catholic Review, official organ of the Washington-Baltimore archdiocese, had been critical of the Senator's campaign.
Mr. Goodwin's connection to Senator Taft probably explained why he was backing Senator McCarthy, in the belief that a run for the presidency in 1952 would need to garner Catholic votes. Senators Lodge, Flanders, and Ives, as well as Governor Dewey, meanwhile opposed Senator McCarthy's efforts.
He notes that the clergy at Georgetown had been especially upset by the decision of the Administration not to send an ambassador to the Vatican, a decision, however, made by the President, not Secretary Acheson whom they had blamed.
Taxpayers still did not know how much Senators paid their staffs, despite a promised report on same which only listed names and not salaries.
A cult of drug addicts had developed in the West among Indians from use of the drug peyote, derived from the seed pod of cactus.
John McCone, future director of the CIA during the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, had been asked to become Undersecretary of the Air Force.
Marquis Childs tells of the Republicans being disappointed, more so than Democrats of the gas-producing states, at the decision of the President to veto the natural gas deregulation bill which would have raised prices on consumers. The GOP had hoped to use it as their principal issue in the fall midterm elections, as suggesting that the President's rhetoric regarding "special interests" did not match his actions in caving to them. Now, they could not take that stance.
Conventional wisdom in Washington had been that the President would reluctantly sign the bill, using the language in it requiring periodic monitoring of prices as his rationale. Instead, he adopted the opposition to it championed by Senator Paul Douglas that because it regarded a monopoly which transported its product through a limited-access pipeline, the result to consumers would have been much higher prices, when regulated natural gas provided a cheap alternative to oil and coal. By doing so, the President opposed House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senator Tom Connally, both of Texas and very powerful on Capitol Hill. He was aware that they could, in retaliation, stall his Fair Deal legislation to death.
He had been convinced, however, by the mayors of eighteen large cities across the country and by Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman to veto the bill in the interest of consumers. The President had developed great respect for the advice of Mr. Chapman as Undersecretary and as his whistle-stop adviser during the 1948 campaign. Mr. Chapman had arranged an imminent tour for the President into the West, during which it would have been tough to defend signing of the Kerr deregulation bill while also promoting low-cost power from public hydroelectric projects championed by the Administration.
Mr. Childs cautions, however, that the veto could also be costly by exposing further the weak and indifferent leadership on the Hill.
Stewart Alsop discusses the problems which some of the nuclear scientists were raising with regard to development of the hydrogen bomb, the principal one being the so-called "problem of maintaining assembly", raised by Dr. Robert Milliken. That problem arose from the necessity of the fission bomb trigger to generate the heat necessary for nuclear fusion of the hydrogen bomb. The atomic blast lasted only a small fraction of a second and the problem arose in use of that briefly available energy as the trigger without also destroying the hydrogen bomb material in the process.
There were two types of theoretical
hydrogen bombs, one using freely available deuterium and the other
using tritium, heavier hydrogen, which had to be produced from
lithium via atomic reaction, much as plutonium was produced from
scarce uranium for the atomic bomb. Deuterium was much slower in its
reaction time than tritium and thus tritium would help eliminate the
problem
Moreover, the cost of producing a
hydrogen bomb was much greater than for the atom bomb as new atomic
piles would need to be constructed for the production of tritium, and
the resulting bang for the buck
A letter writer corrects what he perceives as a misimpression being conveyed to the public that farmers were getting rich from the Government price-support program.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., of Chapel Hill takes issue with The News for reprinting, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an editorial regarding primarily the claimed "dirty tactics" of Senate primary opponent Willis Smith in seeking to paint Senator Frank Graham with a Red brush, trying to taint him with Communist associations through his work on various committees in the past. The author wants the newspaper, if the editors believed the tactics to be unfair, to "come out from behind the woodpile" and make the allegation directly rather than relying on an editorial from a distant newspaper.
Mr. Cherry detects no dirty tactics. Since Charles Tillet of Charlotte had labeled Mr. Smith a "reactionary Republican", he contends, it was fitting to respond that Senator Graham was a "Socialist", the philosophy of which he finds Senator Graham to have been an exponent since around 1925.
The sentiment is not surprising as Mr. Cherry, a student at the University, had reported to Senator Clyde Hoey the previous year the fact that Hans Freistadt, then a graduate student with a scholarship under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, was an open member of the Communist Party, leading then to a Senate investigation of the matter and, ultimately, withdrawal of the scholarship.
He may not have taken enough courses in United States history to realize that a goodly portion of our Constitution is based on what he would call "socialistic" principles, starting with the Fourteenth Amendment.
The editors reply to the letter that the newspaper daily reprinted editorials from other publications and no more expressed thereby approval or disapproval of the views communicated than of the published syndicated editorials or the letters to the editor, as that of Mr. Cherry.
A letter writer from Chapel Hill responds to an editorial advocating early diagnosis and confinement of potential risks to society before they committed untoward acts, as the former UNC student, who had prior mental issues, who had recently killed a UNC student and then committed suicide after an argument regarding a stolen rifle. The letter writer advocates moving with caution in this direction of preliminary diagnosis and points out that no one had favored locking up traffic violators as potential risks to public safety. He warns that the year 2000 might otherwise find the society with two classes of people, mental patients and mental hospital attendants.
Or, more to the point, at least by
2001, a society where the inmates had largely taken over the asylum—a
process, having been interrupted, finally completed
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