The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 2, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Owen Lattimore, Far Eastern expert who had been accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy as the top Communist spy in the country, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee this date, calling "hogwash" and "the product of a twisted and malignant personality" the testimony of former Communist Louis Budenz, connecting Mr. Lattimore with Communism based on hearsay claims of others, since denied. He called Mr. Budenz a "liar" and swore again, as he had on April 6, that he was not a Communist or a Soviet spy. He attacked Senator McCarthy for "fraud and deceit", calling him a "bad policy risk", echoing the remark of the Senator made about Mr. Lattimore after tempering his earlier claims of Communist espionage. He also dismissed as unfounded the statement to the subcommittee the prior day by former Communist and Nazi Freda Utley, that if Mr. Lattimore was not a Communist, he acted like one. Mr. Lattimore was accompanied by his attorney, future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas.
Two representatives of the Continental Press Service of Cleveland told the Senate Commerce subcommittee investigating interstate transmission of gambling information, the ban of which was proposed under a pending bill, that the service, which distributed racing news, did not have any customers in Kansas City, notwithstanding a Grand Jury report to the contrary based on statements by city and state officials identifying it as the chief distributor of the information in the city.
Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley urged the House Armed Services Committee to extend the draft, set to expire June 24. He referenced the shooting down of an unarmed American Navy plane over the Baltic by the Soviets on April 8 as providing little comfort or excuse for delay in maintaining Selective Service. Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia recommended a two-year extension while leaving to Congress the authority to determine when and whether anyone would be inducted or any industry seized in the national interest. There had been no inductions under the effective Selective Service Act since the beginning of 1949.
In New York, Alger Hiss, convicted after retrial the prior January of two counts of perjury for his testimony before a Grand Jury in December, 1948 regarding his denial of alleged provision of secret State Department documents to former Communist courier Whittaker Chambers, was disbarred from the practice of law in that state. Mr. Hiss, who was appealing the conviction, had been sentenced to five years in prison.
In Washington, John Maragon, convicted the previous week on two counts of perjury before Congress for his statements regarding his financial dealings in the five-percenter investigation of procurement of Government contracts, was sentenced to serve eight months to two years in prison. The maximum penalty had been 40 months to ten years on each count.
Exceptionally heavy early voting was reported this date in the Florida Democratic Senate primary between Senator Claude Pepper and Congressman George Smathers, as well as in the race in Alabama for determining members of the state Democratic committee, a contest between the Dixiecrat slate of candidates and that of Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman.
The president of the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington that reasonably increasing imports of foreign goods would help, rather than hinder, the prosperity of the country. Two economic experts, former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Edwin Nourse, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Mark Leva, also told the group that the country needed to insure that heavy defense spending would not endanger the economy. Dr. Nourse recommended that the country learn to say "nuts", as General Anthony McAuliffe had to the German ultimatum of surrender at Bastogne in 1944, when called upon for more defense spending every time the Russians threw a scare into the country.
In the fifth "Guideposts"
column, as edited by Norman Vincent Peale, Natalie Kalmus, Technicolor
In Nashville, Tenn., two gunmen held up a bank and escaped with between $20,000 and $30,000. Neither of the two employees nor the lone customer present at the time saw how the escape was accomplished.
In Tokyo, a man, who said he was tired of living, stabbed a street walker on the belief that killing someone would result in his receiving the death penalty. But the victim lived and so he would be sentenced only to jail.
Tough break.
In New York, Frank Sinatra
On the editorial page, "Is War Inevitable?" finds that, despite others having previously made the same suggestion, the proposal of former President Hoover that an alternative world organization be established without the Communist nations as members had received a lot of attention because of his stature and the forum at which he had suggested it, the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
Before answering the question, the American people needed to determine whether war was inevitable, and if found to be so, then the concept was reasonable. But if found not to be imminent, there was no reason to abandon the U.N., though it had not been able to heal the divide between the Western democracies and the Communist world. It would be foolish, it posits, to oust the Communist nations from the U.N., only exacerbating the extant cleavage, making war inevitable.
It suggests that Mr. Hoover's proposal would have been more provocative had he expressed what he appeared to have been thinking, that war was inevitable.
"As Florida Goes..." finds that the Florida Senate primary between Senator Claude Pepper and Congressman George Smathers would not be the bellwether test of the Fair Deal as touted, that Florida was not an average state and there were many local and state issues at stake, plus two forceful personalities on the stage, in addition to contests over the Fair Deal and Senator Pepper's wartime sympathy to Soviet Russia. While it would serve as a straw in the wind, the outcome, it predicts, would not portend the fate of the Fair Deal.
"Crime Inquiry a Farce" finds Herblock's cartoon on the page to come close to the mark regarding the Senate investigation of gambling. The inquiry thus far had been a farce, with most witnesses simply refusing to answer the Senators' questions. None of the witnesses had been asked the central question, however, regarding how far crime had infiltrated local and state government.
The Grand Jury in Kansas City had found that the annual booty for gambling operations was 34.5 million dollars and that the Kansas City underworld extended into Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. Charles Binaggio and his henchman, Charles Gargotta, had been killed the previous month in Kansas City, apparently because Mr. Gargotta had testified to the Grand Jury—the Mayor, however, having told the Commerce subcommittee the previous week that it was the probable result of the promise of Mr. Binaggio to open up the city to gambling in exchange for campaign contributions to Democratic candidates in 1948 and his inability to deliver on that promise in the face of police crackdown.
It urges that Congress should stop playing "patty-cake" with the thugs and administer some of the same tough treatment, i.e. recommendations to the Justice Department to seek contempt and perjury indictments, as it had done with other recalcitrant witnesses.
"A Phrase to Forget" finds that the phrase, "this will bring joy to the hearts of the men in the Kremlin", was shopworn after being applied to lynchings in the South, McCarthyism, and, the previous week, to the protests by students in New York City regarding the failure of the City to approve the higher bonuses desired by teachers to maintain extracurricular activities.
While there was some truth in the claims, it prefers appeal to the national conscience over these matters rather than placing it in the context of pleasing the Kremlin. It favors, therefore, the substitute statement: "This will bring shame to the hearts and souls of the American people."
A piece from the
Memphis
Commercial-Appeal, titled "Circleville Is Right",
praises the people of Circleville, O.
Drew Pearson tells of the President telling a group of mayors that he remained solidly behind extension of rent controls for another year and that whether they would need to be extended beyond that time would depend on economic conditions prevailing a year hence.
Marshall Plan aid to Franco's Spain, championed by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, had been defeated based on the advice that Franco was barely hanging onto authority, and that without the American aid, his military would abandon him. Moreover, Franco's relationship with the Vatican had waned and corruption in his Government had reached a new high. In consequence of drought, widespread poverty, and other hardships of the people, Communists were successfully infiltrating the Falangist Party of Franco.
Vice-President Alben Barkley told 60 Methodist ministers recently a story about a minister in Paducah, Ky., who was preaching a sermon outside the church one Sunday when a bee flew up his pant leg. He proceeded to say that his heart was full of love and kindness, but, as he swatted the bee after it stung him, "hell fire" was in his britches.
Stewart Alsop, presenting a consistent theme of late, wonders whether Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson should any longer hold his position after preaching economy when he came to the post a year earlier and now having retreated from that stance completely, on the purported bases of the atomic detonation by the Soviets, the loss of China to the Communists, and the threatening situation in Southeast Asia. Yet, all of those matters had been threatening when he came into office and the Soviet atom bomb had occurred prior to the President's announcement of it the previous September.
Mr. Johnson had promised to save the taxpayers a billion dollars for the present fiscal year and to hold the 1951 fiscal budget to thirteen billion, with twelve the maximum thereafter. He proclaimed that increases in American military strength had nevertheless been effected through economy. While, according to House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson, about 600 million dollars of genuine economy had been implemented, 1.5 billion in cuts had impaired military strength. The savings was invested in military hardware, not returned to the Treasury, as Mr. Johnson had originally said would occur.
The previous week, he had requested an increase of 300 million dollars for aircraft procurement and an additional 50 million for anti-submarine work.
The 1951 economy program had already been tossed out, while Secretary Johnson continued to proclaim economy. Meanwhile, as Mr. Vinson had explained recently, the defense strength had been severely, perhaps irremediably, compromised such that the claim of advance was being made while in fact retreating.
Mr. Alsop concludes that the notion contained the seeds of the country's destruction.
Henry C. McFadyen, superintendent of the Albemarle, N.C., schools, in the thirty-fifth in his weekly series of articles on childhood education, tells of the U.S. National Bank in Portland, Oregon, recruiting students out of high school for receipt of scholarships to college that they might be groomed as assistant managers of branch banks, similar to the way professional baseball teams recruited high school players for their farm teams.
To start their training, the chosen students were employed at the banks during holiday periods and on afternoons and Saturdays. They were then employed for 15 months after high school, required to save $100 per month from their $140 monthly salaries to invest in college, which the bank would then supplement. They were permitted to study any curriculum they desired as long as they followed a career in banking. At the end of the freshman year, they would return to the bank for another thirteen months, the same pattern to be followed for six years.
He finds the plan worth watching, good for the students and the bank.
Of course, he does not account for the fact that much of the college experience is gathered from social interaction with other bright students on a continuing basis, and to interrupt that continuum twice in the first two years, while keeping the student in school two years beyond the normal graduation date of peers would be problematic, unless the object is to try to make college into an assembly-line process, much as a car is built—a rather stupid and short-sighted concept. Let us build another widget, a bank manager, fit for the junkyard at age 45, at which time downsizing or cheaper assets are desirable.
Louis Graves of the Chapel Hill Weekly remarks of "scintilla" appearing in court again in its usual context: "not a scintilla of evidence". Lawyers were fond of using it, though in Latin, it actually meant "spark", but had come to be used only in its figurative sense, a small manifestation of something. It had some 50 or 60 synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus but lawyers, being fond of Latin, always used "scintilla" rather than such words as "bit", "shred" or "atom". Somehow, scintilla sounded better anyway, as its polysyllabication gave it a certain context of implied erudition and, furthermore, he concludes, it had a musical quality about it which was unmistakeable. "Long live scintilla!"
There is, we suggest, scant evidence for the case that "scintilla" survives in the modern argot of the lawyer's courtroom lexicon, it having become so pedestrian and jejune through repeated usage in 1950's courtroom dramas on television as to be rendered meaningless. One would now hear such phraseology instead as: "I respect my opponent's [never "learned" as that is likewise obsolete as smacking of insincere blandishments] ability to present to you the case against my client in a most effective and dramatic manner, appreciate further his many courtesies extended to me throughout the course of this long and tedious trial; but let me now explain why his argument—and I stress 'argument', not marshaled evidence, of which there is a paucity, if any, to be found, even with the aid of the most searching of microscopes—, is full of nothing more than conjecture and hypothesized circumstance, emotion and reactive rhetoric, indeed, devoid of every conceivable trace of logic, reason, common sense and even decency, in fact, disappears into the thin and rarefied ether, wherein only our old friends of lore, Mysticism and Superstition, hold court in their twin apotheosized reigns."
A letter writer wonders why sportswriters, such as Bob Quincy of The News, favored racial equality in sports. He suggests that they must have been either ignorant Yankees or ignorant Southerners. He finds that Mr. Quincy's suggestion that integrated teams be allowed to play in the new William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the N.C. State campus so that it would enable the N.C.A.A. Tournament to be played at the site evidenced a belief that "national prominence is more to be desired than local integrity". He says that since head coach Everett Case was a Yankee and that much of the student body hailed from that section, there was little likelihood of protest from the school, itself.
He believes that the rest of the state owed it to themselves, their ancestors and children to resist "such a despicable movement to the limit".
He finds that few activities were more intimately fraternal than sports and so if intermixing were allowed, the line would be breached and no one would know where it could be drawn again. He says that such persons advocating integration of ball teams ought be "ostracized by all decent white people and forced to live with their chosen race".
He says that not too long earlier, the black race had been friendly and likable, causing "respectable white people" to treat them humanely and decently. Friendship between the races was evident, as long as neither stepped outside their bounds.
He concludes: "Any man who boldly states that the dubious fame attendant upon the location of the NCAA tourney is preferable to our adherence to our laws, our principles, and our traditions serves to feed the flames of racial discord and is unfit to write a column in a Southern newspaper! Such is Quincy!"
Look
And they call them "cagers", anyway. That ought to be quite appealing to your sense and sensibilities.
Times will change
"Under the pioneering leadership of President Frank Porter Graham, the University of North Carolina was widely recognized as a major liberal voice in the South. By 1951 it had cautiously opened its doors to a few black students, and that number steadily increased. The changing policy in race relations raised the legitimate question about the recruiting of black athletes. For me, integrating basketball was an obvious thing to do. I did not see it as a political issue but primarily an ethical one. It was the right and fair move to make. I recalled the precedent of my own alma mater, the University of Kansas, where a black athlete was recruited on the team in 1951. At Carolina, this was overdue, as it was at Kansas.
I have been called 'courageous' for leading the way in the South toward the integration of collegiate basketball, but I never considered it a matter of courage. It was simply the correct thing to do. In fact, I was annoyed that it was regarded as so earthshaking and newsworthy. I saw it as only one small example of what was beginning to happen all over the country.
...I must also acknowledge that my perspective was significantly shaped by my Christian faith, as indeed much of the civil rights activism of the time emanated from the church, with the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
—from A Coach's Life, by Dean Smith, pp. 92-93, Random House, 1999
A letter from the general chairman of the 1950 Piedmont Sales Conference thanks the newspaper on behalf of the Charlotte Sales Executives' Club for its publicity and support during the event, especially the efforts of reporters Dick Young and Martha Azer London.
Framed Edition
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