The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 18, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in London, the NATO foreign ministers concluded their four-day conference, with Secretary of State Acheson stating that the West had made substantial progress toward achieving collective security against the threat of Communism. The U.S. would continue, along with France, Britain, and Canada, the association with European recovery after the scheduled end of ERP in 1952. Deputy foreign ministers of each nation were to be appointed forthwith to serve permanently on a NATO defense committee, which would study and make recommendations regarding coordination of plans to defend the NATO region, while also promoting public information anent the objectives of NATO. The Big Three foreign minsters said that they had agreed on certain changes in policy toward Austria but decided to maintain those secret for the present.
U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie reported that Prime Minister Stalin was hale and hearty as he spoke to him Monday for an hour and a half, that rumors of his ill health were false.
The British House Secretary told Commons that Dr. Klaus Fuchs, convicted in Britain for passing atomic secrets to the Russians and sentenced to 14 years in prison, would have to speak to FBI agents regarding his information and contacts only if he consented to the interrogation.
Rumania asked the U.S. to reduce by half its legation at Bucharest, claiming that some Americans had taken part in espionage. The U.S. the previous month had requested that Rumania close an office in New York after Rumania had forced the suspension of the U.S. Information Service in Bucharest on the same pretext of alleged spying activity.
Senator Owen Brewster told the Senate that Victor Johnston's expenses as a shadow of President Truman during his cross-country train trip, were paid by John W. Hanes, former Undersecretary of the Treasury in 1938-39, of New York and Winston-Salem. Senator Brewster, head of the Senate Republican campaign committee, had arranged for Mr. Johnston to follow the train to determine to what degree the trip was political, as it was being paid partially by taxpayers, supplemented by the DNC. Senate Democratic Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that Mr. Johnston had found himself almost in agreement with the President as he went along on the trip and quoted from a news account indicating that Mr. Johnston had said nobody "hated" the President.
The House Banking Committee approved extension of rent controls for another year, but provided that they would expire at the end of the year unless cities voted to continue them for another six months.
The NLRB issued a complaint for unfair labor practices against UMW and an Illinois coal company on behalf of a man who claimed he was fired the previous March for trying to obey a Federal court back-to-work order in the recent coal strike, while the union contended he was fired for trying to set up a rival union.
The AFL Switchmen's Union of North America threatened a strike against ten Midwestern and Western railroads, ten percent of the nation's carriers, starting the following Tuesday morning regarding wages. A Presidential fact-finding board had promised to hear the union's case along with that of two other operating unions, but the union refused to wait as it wanted to be heard separately.
Southern Bell Telephone Co. and the CIO Communications Workers of America concluded four months of negotiations and agreed to a new contract, with the company saying the higher wages would probably require a request for higher rates, causing an angry response from the union for the company seeking to use a small wage hike, amounting to less than $250,000, as an excuse to raise rates.
A B-29 bomber carrying sixteen persons, en route to England from Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La., crashed in the Azores with no survivors.
In London, a 69-year old man died when he swallowed a toothpick and it cut a blood vessel in his intestines, causing a fatal hemorrhage.
In Charlotte, a woman on trial for first degree murder testified during cross-examination by the solicitor that she could not remember shooting her husband on April 6. During direct examination by her attorney, she had described a series of forced unnatural sex relations with her husband on several different occasions, sometimes being strapped to the bedposts with leather belts. She said that she shot her husband because of differences regarding marital relations. She had written a note to her parents which the solicitor sought to suggest to her was evidence of planning for a murder-suicide, regarding which she had lost her nerve after killing her husband. She denied that contention, despite the note directing disposal of her property as in the nature of a will and saying that her husband had tried to change but could not. She claimed that she had written the note as her husband pounded on the bedroom door and threatened to kill her if she did not let him in.
In Charlotte, a baby girl about ten months of age had reportedly been abandoned at the bus station the previous night and was subsequently taken into police custody. The mother who had left the child with a woman at the station appeared to be about 14 or 15 and was from Gastonia. The woman who had received the child and took it to her brother's home in Kannapolis was a textile mill worker whom relatives had sought to have admitted to a mental hospital. Police continued to investigate her story.
The saga of Charlotte Place into the edge of night continues, as sand through the hour glass, daily. But soon, Dr. Richard Kimble will arrive in town and fix all of the problems before moving on down the line.
On the editorial page, "The Pennsylvania Election" tells of the landslide victory in Pennsylvania of Governor James Duff in the GOP Senate primary, ending the 30-year grip of the Republican Grundy machine on state politics and, in the process, rejecting the old guard Republican policies which had led to repeated defeats nationally. It had also effectively vindicated Governor Duff's stand at the 1948 GOP convention against Governor Dewey and made it likely that the New York Governor would not seek a third presidential nomination—as he had long ago assured he would not, right after the 1948 defeat. Governor Duff would become a major party figure and be a factor at the 1952 convention.
It finds that Republican opposition to the Democrats in the 17 years since FDR had returned the Democrats to power had been woefully inept, unimaginative, unrealistic and unmindful of the direction of the political winds in the world. The leaders had smugly rested on their laurels, assuming that most of the country was at heart Republican. If Governor Duff, it posits, could shatter this smugness, then both Republicans and Democrats would be grateful to him.
"Capus Waynick's New Job" finds that the new temporary job assignment for the Ambassador to Nicaragua in administering the 35 million dollars just authorized for the President's "Point Four" program for technical assistance to underdeveloped nations would be a difficult task, as he had no clearly charted course for proceeding in this novel program.
Other North Carolinians had also been called on by the President in the area of foreign policy. Former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, UNC president-designate, was seeking new ways to facilitate getting much needed dollars to Europe through easing of foreign trade restrictions, and Robert Hanes of Winston-Salem was making high level ERP administrative decisions. James Webb, who had made the announcement of the recall of Ambassador Waynick to Washington for the Point Four assignment, was Undersecretary of State. And Frank Graham had been sent to Indonesia before becoming Senator to help establish a republic independent from the Dutch Government to avoid a Communist takeover.
It expresses confidence in Mr. Waynick's abilities to fulfill his duties well.
"Red Harvest" urges replacing the North Carolina vehicle inspection law, repealed by the 1949 Legislature. It reports that ten persons had been killed in the state in auto accidents on the prior Sunday and that 329 had been killed thus far in 1950, with 4,067 injured. By comparison to the prior year during the same period, when the vehicle inspection law remained in effect, the figures were 284 and 3,076, respectively. It acknowledges that only seven percent of the 1949 accidents were the result of mechanical defects, but it posits that difficulty in control of the vehicle because of poor repair probably contributed to others.
"In Re Didelphis Virginiana" tells of a U.C.-Berkeley zoologist stating, according to the New York Times, that the opossum was an anomalous creature for having survived from the time of the dinosaurs while widening its range despite being slow, stupid, cowardly and defenseless.
It concludes that if one placed a
sweet potato in its mouth, then cooked it, it came out looking fairly
regular, not so aberrant after all. You could also make it into a marsupial, with a salad on the side-car
You had to look up the word "anomaly"? No wonder you are endorsing Willis Smith.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Economy Revolt", tells of the House at the last minute cutting a billion dollars from the omnibus appropriations bill, leaving it to the Administration to sort out how the cuts would be made and so was irresponsibly accomplished. (It fails to point out that this amount was to offset the billion dollars worth of cut excise taxes which the Administration said had to be offset with revenue or spending cuts to avoid a veto.)
It finds, however, the savings at least to be a start in the right direction and hopes that the Senate, which had to approve the omnibus bill, would make cuts in unnecessary V.A. services and other pork-barrel projects.
Drew Pearson tells of one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war having been that Japan was floating balloons filled with incendiary devices across the Pacific Ocean to Oregon, Washington and as far east as Illinois and Texas. U.S. censors were ordered to suppress the news of these balloons, even when an Oregon family climbed a tree to examine one and was blown to bits. The devices were designed to cause forest fires. The censorship was to avoid letting the Japanese know how successful the balloons had been. After the war, it came to light in cross-examination of Japanese military men that 60,000 of the balloons had been launched.
He reminds that he had two years earlier suggested that the same type balloons, sans explosives, be used to carry propaganda into Russia. They could be inflated to descend into certain planned areas carrying items as soap and candy or shortwave radio sets, in addition to propaganda leaflets. It would help circumvent the Soviet efforts at jamming Voice of America broadcasts. Assistant Secretary of State Ed Barrett was re-examining the idea.
Willis Smith had been telling North Carolinians that he was for the working man and supported the minimum wage but in fact had opposed the 40-cent minimum wage as late as 1947 in a speech to the North Carolina General Assembly, saying it was "harsh, unreasonable, and unnecessary". The current minimum wage was 75 cents, raised to that level by the current Congress the prior year.
He notes that Mr. Smith had received a fee of over $23,000 for liquidating a roofing company in 98 days, at the effective rate of $219 per day, in contrast to the $16 per week he found excessive for workers.
There is your typical Jesse Helms wunderkind hero for you.
A Soviet plot to force the U.S. from its Pacific bases was in the offing with thousands of Chinese forced laborers being used to build large airports within bombing range of Okinawa in China's Fukien Province, with a jet base at Kingpo. It fit the Joint Chiefs' information that the Soviets were plotting diversionary tactics in Europe to distract attention from plans in the Far East aimed at control of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The President was complaining about Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson talking too much off the cuff, causing him to have to learn things third hand, as when Mr. Johnson talked to Bernard Baruch. Mr. Johnson had also given secrets to a British film magnate regarding the Russians shooting down the American plane over the Baltic on April 8.
He notes that the President was not fond of Mr. Baruch after he had refused to serve on a Democratic committee in the 1948 presidential campaign.
U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie was laughed at in Prague by Communist journalists when he claimed that he was not a representative of the Western "warmonger" powers.
Egypt was quietly recruiting an army and navy to do battle again with Israel, with armed frigates being bought privately from U.S. companies.
The Brumbach & Barley Circus of East Germany had slipped across the border into Western Europe, despite a large caravan of 90 wagons and the usual menagerie of animals.
Tom Fesperman of The News discusses the primary race between Senator Frank Graham and Willis Smith, finds the platforms of the two candidates virtually indistinguishable in terms of their official views on the FEPC, capitalism and free enterprise generally, deficit financing, support of the continued farm parity price support program on such basic commodities as tobacco, reasonable minimum wages and social security, and opposition to socialized medicine, with Senator Graham favoring extension of the North Carolina medical program to the national level as opposed to the Murray-Dingell compulsory health insurance program.
He recognizes that the two candidates might not be quite so close together philosophically as their platforms would suggest. The general impression was that Mr. Smith was a moderate to conservative candidate, even though his campaign literature cast him as "Liberal-Progressive-Sane", while Senator Graham was a liberal, considered "ultra" to "temperate". It brought up the old question of what was a liberal and what was a conservative.
Mr. Smith had a decided edge in publicity, as he daily attacked Senator Graham for being far more radical than his platform suggested, claiming that the Senator was for the FEPC, the abolition of segregation, socialized medicine, deficit spending, and other forms of socialism.
He concludes that given the platforms of the two men, however, the campaign slogan might be, "Befuddled enough?"
A piece from the Nashville Banner tells of measles being classified in the dictionary as singular, but concludes that there were presently a lot of them regardless of their status semantically.
A piece from the Tylertown (Miss.) Times tells of a prominent office holder listing the names of seven persons who had stated their intentions to run for sheriff and finding the majority of the candidates having as many qualifications for the office as one of the prime bulls, for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
A letter writer favors taking dog-fight observations into the arena of international politics and not wagging the tail to signal that a fight was not in the offing, by that means to bluff the Soviets into backing down in their persistent desire to occupy Europe.
A letter writer agrees with a previous letter re the May 5 editorial endorsing Willis Smith for the special Senate Democratic primary election, and advocates that advertisers get together and make the press less conservative.
A letter from a boy thanks a friend for saving his life when he had nearly drowned the previous Saturday while swimming near the Buster Boyd Bridge.
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