The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 25, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy and Owen Lattimore were both barred by the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee from attendance of a hearing in executive session taking further testimony from former Communist Louis Budenz, who had testified the previous week that he had heard from three persons, at least two of whom had since denied making the statements, that Mr. Lattimore was part of a "Communist cell" within the Institute of Pacific Relations. Mr. Budenz was reportedly providing to the subcommittee this date the names of 20 Communist writers who had received help from Mr. Lattimore in getting connections with the Institute.

After the hearing, Senator McCarthy was upset and said he would file a formal protest for being excluded from hearing his own witness.

Mr. Lattimore was scheduled to testify the following day before the subcommittee but had sought more time for preparation.

Republican Senators reacted negatively to the President's speech the prior day before the ABA, in which he had defended the Administration's efforts to weed out Communists and other security risks from the Government, that it had been accomplished through the loyalty boards and that the threat of Communism generally in the country had been stemmed by the various prosecutions undertaken by the Justice Department for perjury and contempt of Congress, as well as for outright espionage, and that no "Gestapo-like" apparatus was needed in the country to police further any such threats. The Republicans disputed the claim that the threat of Communism domestically had been eradicated, saying that such a claim did not gibe with the FBI reports.

Congressman Stephen Young of Ohio, in his weekly Ohio newspaper column, "Straight from Washington", said that Russia and the U.S. were each reconnoitering each other's coastlines and that such had been the mission of the Navy Privateer shot down over the Baltic by a Soviet plane on April 8. He attached significance to the fact that there had been three American radar experts aboard that plane, with the object, he said, of testing the Soviet radar net. In response, the Navy said that it would continue to fly its planes, unarmed, wherever international law permitted. Mr. Young had also recalled that the previous August, the U.S. had lost the submarine Cochino off the Norwegian coast, about 280 miles west of the Russian port at Murmansk.

Wes Gallagher of the Associated Press recalls the meeting he witnessed five years earlier when American and Russian troops finally joined together at Torgau on the Elbe River and celebrated their mutual victory over Germany. He contrasts the jubilant atmosphere pervading that day with the iron curtain which had since descended between the two countries and Eastern and Western Europe. Recently, the Soviet Army newspaper in Berlin had said that General Eisenhower was seeking to become the commander-in-chief of "the Atlantic aggression system", a statement, if made in 1945, which would have been regarded as worthy only of a Nazi. G.I.'s and officers alike had gotten on well at the Elbe; things had changed since that time.

The Navy announced plans to build atomic-powered submarines and to convert a cruiser into a guided-missile combat vessel. Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of Naval operations, laid forth the proposed plans and requested 335 million dollars in appropriations for them from the House Armed Services Committee.

Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, to become the 1952 and 1956 Democratic nominee for the presidency, told the Senate Banking Committee that unless Congress extended rent controls another year beyond the June 30 deadline, he would be forced to call a special session of the Illinois Legislature to enact state controls, without which there would be disorder, even perhaps violence. He was supportive of a compromise measure which would give states and cities an opportunity upon request to extend controls for six months.

The Communications Workers of America stated that it was possible that they might delay their scheduled nationwide telephone strike set to start the following day. They sought a package equivalent to 37 cents per hour in higher compensation. The strike would impact 204,000 members employed by Bell Telephone, and perhaps as many as 300,000 total. A strike begun the prior day impacted 10,000 telephone installers of Western Electric, but did not affect telephone service immediately. That strike was in sympathy with a South Bend, Ind., strike of 105 workers who refused, as ordered, to tread through a muddy field to install a television station antenna.

In Charlotte, 900 Southern Bell employees were set to strike on Wednesday absent the postponement. Long distance service would be crippled as a result.

Pursuant to the two-week truce agreed upon during the weekend, efforts would begin the following Thursday at Government mediation of the pending railway strike against four of the nation's leading railroads over demands by the Brotherhood of Firemen and Enginemen for a second fireman on diesel locomotives. The operators claimed the union was engaged in "featherbedding" by demanding the extra fireman.

In Peru, Neb., a psychology professor, who had been fired from his post at Peru State Teachers College, killed the president of the College and another instructor, head of the Education Department, then went home and killed himself. A note beside his body said that the College president had "tried to fire the wrong person". A witness said that the professor, on the faculty since 1926, never spoke a word as he fired the fatal shots at the education professor. Each of the two victims was felled by three bullets.

A census taker recounts a recent experience in a remote farming section of Horry County, S.C., in which the sons of a man, who they said had never told the census taker anything, planned to follow their deceased Pa's reticence and refuse also to give up any information. One said: "We don't bother the gover'ment. And we ain't wantin' them botherin' us." When the persistent census taker told them that being counted was important for obtaining proper representation in Congress, the man responded: "Ain't never voted yet. And ain't a-hankerin' to." When the enumerator said that he would have to report the matter and the Government would send someone else, the man said that his shotgun "ain't never failed Pa" and he guessed it could still shoot. When told he was subject to a fine or jail for not responding, he said he had no money but could serve his time. The census taker left, fearing he might be shot, and the man suggested, "Now, that ain't such a bad idee."

On the editorial page, "That Hospital Appropriation" tells of the V.A. Hospital bill having passed the House the previous day on a voice vote, thus without recordation of the yeas and nays of individual members. The bill would restore many of the hospitals struck as unneeded by the Administration the previous year, including one in Charlotte. The piece finds that if the hospitals had been needed, then the Administration, not fond of economy, would surely have built them. Without a roll call vote, the members were not accountable for such pork-barreling. The bill still had to pass the Senate.