The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 16, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Taipei, Formosa, the Chinese Nationalists, without a shot being fired, abandoned the vital Chushan island blockade base, a hundred miles southeast of Shanghai, and Chiang Kai-Shek promised for the first time a mainland counter-offensive within two years, said the withdrawal was to concentrate defenses to prevent the Communists from wiping out the forces piecemeal. The Nationalists had vowed to defend the bastion on Chushan to the death.

Senator Robert Taft was scheduled to reply at 10:30 this night to the speech the previous night in Chicago to the Democrats, in which the President had called for ouster of the "obstructionists" from Congress and advised Republicans to "come out for something". The Taft speech would also be carried on the radio networks, as had the President's speech, which was also carried on NBC television.

The rail strike was settled and the firemen of the five major railways of the country were ordered back to work after six days. Both sides expressed satisfaction with the settlement, which the railroads said entailed withdrawal of the demand by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen that a second fireman be included on multiple diesel-locomotive trains, a dispute brewing for more than a decade. The Brotherhood, however, said it had modified its demand, not withdrawn it entirely. A new walkout had been authorized by the Brotherhood over its demand for a second engineer on such trains, but had not yet been ordered.

Normal rail service by Southern Railway was expected to resume the next day.

The House Ways & Means Committee approved a ten percent withholding tax on corporate dividends. It would not place any new obligation on taxpayers but was designed to obtain taxes from persons who presently failed to report dividends as part of their personal income.

John L. Lewis refused to testify voluntarily to the House Labor subcommittee regarding whether he sent secret signals to the union locals in the recent strike ordering them not to comply with a Federal court order to return to work, when he had publicly ordered them back to work in compliance with the order. Mr. Lewis denied having done so.

Bob Sain of The News reports from the State Hospital at Camp Butner, tells of a young boy who had recently had a pre-frontal lobotomy, finding that he hid his face in his hands, would not communicate. The Duke Hospital psychiatrist attending him and the other staff agreed that it was too early to determine the result of the controversial surgery which had occurred only a few weeks earlier, that five or six months would be necessary.

In Cairo, Egypt's royal council refused to recognize the California marriage between King Farouk's sister and a Christian commoner, ordered an administrator to take control of her properties along with that of the Queen Mother.

In Kirksville, Mo., quadruplets were born to a 19-year old mother, three of whom survived. The mother had given birth to twins two years earlier.

Better cease using the powdered milk before you have octuplets.

On the editorial page, "A Defeat for Mr. Truman" finds the President responsible for the defeat by the Senate, by a vote of 53 to 30, of his submitted reorganization plan which provided for returning of the general counsel's powers to the chairman of the NLRB and abolishing the general counsel position created by Taft-Hartley, allowing the general counsel to determine which cases came before the Board. Thus the plan was nixed, a plan not recommended one way or the other by the Hoover Commission. Senator Taft had proposed a bill, passed by the Senate in 1949, that the general counsel be abolished but the powers returned to the Board. The President, wishing repeal of Taft-Hartley, persuaded the House leadership to delay the Taft proposal and it never came to a vote. The Senate had been suspicious that the President's submitted plan would result in giving the Board ultimate power again as prosecutor, judge and jury, as a way of circumventing Taft-Hartley, and so defeated it.

Neither management nor labor was happy with the current set-up, but Congress was unlikely to correct the situation as long as the President continued to sabotage efforts to correct it by insisting on repeal of Taft-Hartley, either directly or indirectly, as with his just defeated plan.

"What About 11th St" tells of supporting the plans to widen Stonewall Street and to build an underpass beneath the Southern Railway tracks at that location, and for the underpass at West Trade Street crossing, as well as spending money to eliminate other bottlenecks in the city. It also favored doing something about 11th Street before all the money was spent.

We certainly agree.

"On Dimming Lights" cautions drivers to remember to dim their headlights when meeting oncoming vehicles at night, thereby reducing the chance of a collision. It also stresses the need for strong headlights to enable the driver to see the road and other drivers to see the car of the driver coming down the road, over the hills and around the curves, through the dairy barn.

"It's Your Platform—Use It" tells of having received so many letters on its May 5 editorial endorsing Willis Smith for the Senate over Senator Graham that it had on Saturday to throw out its regular syndicated columnists and the editorial cartoon to make room for them. The plethora of mail suggested that North Carolina voters were more interested in the upcoming primary than had been apparent, that readers had a strong proprietary interest in the newspaper, and that they also had literary skill in imparting their ideas.

It expresses pleasure at the great response, pro and con the editorial, and hopes that the avalanche of mail would continue.

A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Veteran Democratic Fighter Wins Again", tells of Cameron Morrison, former Governor and Senator, having given an impressive speech before the Democratic County Convention in Mecklenburg recently. He had begun his fight for the Democrats around the turn of the century during the Red Shirt days, prior to the election of Governor Charles B. Aycock in 1900, in the struggle to wrest control of State Government from the Reconstruction Republicans.

While not a candidate presently, Mr. Morrison had received a standing ovation at the County Convention. They were applauding not just his speech but also what he had meant to the Democratic Party in the state for 50 years.

It should be noted that in the special Senate election of 1932, the interim incumbent, Senator Morrison, was defeated by Robert Rice Reynolds after Mr. Reynolds campaigned about the state in a broken down jalopy claiming to be a man of the people to the wealthy, caviar-eating former Governor Morrison.

Incidentally, there are dormitories on the UNC campus named for both Governor Aycock, opened in 1924, and Governor Morrison, opened on South Campus in 1965, the latter being one of the four X buildings. You had better get busy working to change those names. We hate to tell but you have a lot of work ahead. There may be forty or fifty buildings, if not more, on campus which are questionable calls in terms of the eponymic donor's politics if gauged by today's standards. Indeed, probably about the only one lacking controversy would be Hinton James, the first student at the University. But, who knows? His family may have owned a slave or two.

Drew Pearson tells of the proliferation of ghost writers among Republicans, each working for his own dark horse. They were led by Bob Humphreys, Vic Johnston, Arthur Hachten, Dick Guylay, and Bill Mylander, a brief sketch of each of whom he provides.

He notes that RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had become exercised at these ghost writers for circulating the rumor that he was on the way out.

Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was opposed to the Point Four program of the President to provide technical assistance to underdeveloped nations, and Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was contesting him over this opposition. He relates of the testy colloquy between the two anent the issue on the Senate floor.

He notes that Senator Connally had done an exceptional job in getting foreign relations bills through the Senate.

He finds that it was not Owen Lattimore who had called the Communist Chinese "agrarian reformers" and got other writers to do likewise, as claimed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, but rather Republican Patrick Hurley, former Ambassador to China under FDR and Secretary of War under President Hoover. He had made the statement, according to the Washington Post at the time, on November 29, 1945 at the National Press Club. He supplies the quoted passage.

He notes that Mr. Lattimore had said that he knew the Chinese Communists were not just peasant reformers and so had never written or said anything of the kind attributed to him by Senator McCarthy.

Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the thirty-seventh in his series of articles on childhood education, discusses the fact that boys at the high school broke into the shop during the Christmas holidays to work on projects and into the gymnasium on weekends to shoot basketball. He disliked running them off when otherwise they would be downtown or roaming about in cars and so left the gymnasium open on weekends to allow them to play all they wanted without supervision.

Sometimes, lights were left burning or showers left running, but the students did no real damage. He realized, however, that he was taking a chance.

He believed that it presented an opportunity for an agency to provide volunteer adult supervisors for such purposes, including libraries, auditoriums, dining rooms and other such school facilities. Such use had already been catching on throughout the country. While it presented the possibility of having to clean up after such use and having to plan school events around it, it was also beneficial to the community.

Joseph Alsop, in London, finds that at the London conference of foreign ministers, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman's proposal for Franco-German sharing of German coal and steel complexes to have been received as comic farce.

The Communists and the German Socialist leader were displeased with the idea, and the British, always suspicious of European combines, were also not enthusiastic. But West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was pleased that such an initiative was being proposed.

This proposal, plus revision of the German occupation statute to allow Germany to sit as an equal in the Council of Europe, would meet the requirements of U.S. High Commissioner in West Germany John McCloy. And with varying degrees of reluctance, the British and other continental powers would enter the new heavy industry pool. It would enable Germany's industrial potential to contribute to Western Europe's strength without undue risk. The Schuman proposal was, therefore, unless the detailed study of it revealed hidden problems, a major and vital step toward working out a German solution.

A letter writer says that he had been all for Senator Graham until he learned that he had favored the present system of price supports which had resulted in the potato disaster of the previous year, causing the Government to be saddled with millions of dollars worth of useless potatoes, the bulk of which had to be destroyed. So he was deserting Senator Graham in favor of Willis Smith.

You lie. You were never for Senator Graham. A few spuds would not change a normal person's mind about anything, especially if your real name was "Corn", "L.A. Corn", no less. That's cute. And "Uncle Sugar"...

Sounds like you come from a family cooking up a child named Moonshine.

You need to go back to Ma and Pa Kettle and take a rest.

Guess this is what the piece above meant when it referred to the literary abilities exhibited by some of the writers on the topic.

A letter from Lenoir comments on the May 5 editorial endorsing Willis Smith. He thinks Senator Graham is a Communist and that Governor Kerr Scott had done a great service for the state by transferring him out of the role as UNC president to Washington, "knowing full well he wouldn't be on the job long enough to do much harm," enabling the University to "banish forever the faintest trace of the hammer and cycle [sic] and once again go all out for the stars and stripes."

At least he didn't say the "stars and strips".

A letter writer approves of the May 5 editorial and hopes that many would read it.

A letter writer, a former UNC student, finds Senator Graham to be one of the great men of the time and chastises the editors for having sought to camouflage their intent in the May 5 editorial by stating at the outset that they were not seeking to determine who was best suited to be Senator, then stating that Willis Smith was the best fit.

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