The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 4, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Joseph McCarthy said that the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating his charges had a witness, Frank Bielaski, once an agent for the OSS, who could testify that as early as February, 1945, persons, including State Department employees, connected with Amerasia Magazine were collecting and transmitting atomic secrets to the Russians. The subcommittee was questioning Mr. Bielaski in executive session, to which Senator McCarthy objected.
Mr. Bielaski, it reports, had participated in the June, 1945 raid of the magazine, resulting in the arrests of six persons, three of whom were indicted and only two prosecuted, Philip Jaffe and Sigurd Larsen, both only fined in the end, as their conduct was found by the Justice Department not to have involved any element of disloyalty. In 1946, a House Judiciary subcommittee found that few, if any, of the documents found in the possession of the three defendants, some of which had been marked as "top secret", "secret" or "confidential", were of real importance to national defense or the war, as many had already been given wide publicity. A minority report had asserted, however, that since the thieves who took the documents thought they were valuable, the intent to commit espionage was demonstrated.
Before HUAC, William Remington of the Commerce Department again disputed that he had ever been a Communist. He had been suspended briefly during a Senate investigation into his loyalty two years earlier after being implicated as a member of a Communist cell by Elizabeth Bentley, but had been reinstated after a loyalty review board cleared him. Chairman Wood of HUAC claimed that new evidence had surfaced which implicated Mr. Remington anew.
It appeared doubtful that Prime Minister Josef Stalin would see U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie during his Moscow visit to urge a meeting of leaders at the U.N. Security Council to work out a solution to the cold war. He would likely be seen only by Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky or Deputy Prime Minister V. M. Molotov. The snub by Stalin was believed likely for the role of Mr. Lie in refusing Soviet entreaties to hand over Leon Trotsky in 1936 after he fled to Norway, where Mr. Lie was the Justice Minister at the time. He gave Trotsky permission to leave Norway at which time he fled to Mexico where he continued issuing broadsides against the Stalin regime, until he was assassinated in 1940. Mr. Lie had been received by Stalin, however, in 1946 regarding organizational issues of the newly formed U.N.
The President at a press conference responded to questions regarding a statement attributed to Senator Millard Tydings that an accidental war could be touched off at any time, saying that Senator Tydings was unduly alarmed, that the situation was far better than in 1946 and that he did not foresee a shooting war, that he anticipated that the defense budget for 1951-52 would be lower than the one for the coming fiscal year, which he had submitted at 13.9 billion and the Congress had increased by 350 million for increased air power. He said that his response to Republicans who wanted to cut Marshall Plan spending was that it was cheaper than spending for a shooting war.
The President also denied that the defeat of Senator Claude Pepper by Congressman George Smathers in the Florida Democratic primary was a setback for the Fair Deal. He said that he did not intend to invite any candidates involved in intra-party fights aboard his cross-country train set to depart the following week, disputing a claim by Senator Glen Taylor, contested by former Senator D. Worth Clark, that he was invited aboard to ride across his native Idaho. The President also said, when told that James Roosevelt had said that the President would like to see him become Governor of California, that he would like the Democratic candidates to win and bore no ill-feeling toward Mr. Roosevelt for his pre-nomination opposition in 1948 as he had supported the ticket after the convention.
Congressman Smathers, meanwhile, called his victory over Senator Pepper a victory by liberalism over radicalism.
Mr. Pepper would be elected to the House from Florida in 1962 and would serve until his death in May, 1989 at age 88.
The House Ways & Means Committee voted against cuts in excise taxes on whiskey and beer. Wine was yet to be considered.
The House Armed Services Committee voted unanimously to recommend extension of the Selective Service Act for another two years, but the bill left it to Congress to determine whether there would be inductions. It also would curb the President's power to seize industries in wartime until Congress declared a national emergency. It also would permit any peacetime inductee under age 19 to decline active military duty on application of his own or that of his parents.
Sissies.
In an address to the national convention of the CIO Textile Workers Union of America, Federal Security Administrator Oscar Ewing said that the cry of socialism was no answer to the people's need for the President's compulsory health insurance program, opposed by the AMA and other "mercenary mouthpiece" associations of the medical profession. He said that the family with an income less than $5,000 annually would go broke if faced with paying for care of a major illness. Voluntary plans, he said, did not go far enough. He also urged passage of the Social Security Act amendments.
In Detroit, Chrysler and the UAW settled the 99-day old strike by agreeing to a 10-cent per hour pension benefits package, in pursuit of which the autoworkers had called the strike the previous January 25. The terms of the three-year agreement included the $100 per month pension, inclusive of Social Security benefits, for workers over 65 with 25 years on the job, with a hike also in health care benefits. It was the second longest strike in automotive history, to the 113-day strike at G.M. in 1945-46. The strike cost an estimated 1.4 million dollars in lost wages and sales. UAW president Walter Reuther said that it was a "victory" over the "blind selfishness" of Chrysler. The vice-president of Chrysler also praised the outcome.
In Catania, Sicily, fourteen men were killed and forty injured in a bomb blast taking place while the killed workmen were trying to disarm heavy caliber aerial bombs to obtain the explosives for industrial purposes.
Henry J. Taylor, in the seventh "Guideposts" column, as edited by Norman Vincent Peale, tells of finding what God was like as he descended as a boy in a barrel, makeshift for a yet to be installed elavator, down the mine shaft in which his father worked. He describes the experience in detail, all the while having been frightened practically beyond the ability to breathe, as his father reassured him not to be afraid.
Unfortunately, he never makes it out of the mine shaft.
The manner for registration for the
upcoming May 27 primary is set forth for those of you not yet
registered since April 2, 1949. Otherwise, Jesse Helms, in pursuit of
the election of Willis Smith, may be standing outside the polling
place telling you, "No, no, no, you can't vote no mo'
On the editorial page, "Auditorium-Coliseum Project" solicits opinions from the people of Charlotte on the proposal by the David Ovens-chaired committee that a 2,000 to 3,000-seat auditorium be built on the same parcel of land as a 10,000-seat coliseum, with plenty of space for parking available. It finds this recommendation wise and questions only whether the auditorium would be of adequate size.
They will have plenty of parking,
unlike Greensboro where of a cold winter's night, you might have to
walk pert near a mile to and from your car and back. They had a nice
pizza place though acrossed the road, slices which warmed the cockells
of your heart on the way back home, win or lose, mainly win. But they
would get a McDonald's in 'ere in Charlotte in 1959, so's you can
have yourself a 15-cent hamburger
"Scratch One Opportunist" finds that the defeat of Senator Claude Pepper eliminated from the Congress a Senator who had always only been a superficial, opportunistic liberal consistently supportive of the New Deal and Fair Deal. It finds, however, that the defeat would not seriously weaken the Democratic Party as his opponent, George Smathers, was of proven ability in his four years in Congress, albeit more conservative politically and fiscally than Senator Pepper, positions more coincident with the views of Floridians.
Mudslinging on both sides during the campaign, it finds, had reached a new low. Because the personalities involved were paramount and the issues had concerned many matters endemic to the state, the outcome would carry limited national significance. It only proved, asserts the piece, that a politician had to be more than an opportunist to sustain support after 14 years in the Senate.
"Social Security Expansion" tells of advocates of Social Security expansion having been pleasantly surprised when fiscally conservative Senator Walter George of Georgia announced that the Senate Finance Committee wanted to expand the House measure revising Social Security and make it even more expansive, providing yet greater benefits to a larger class of people. The original 1935 Social Security Act had become outmoded through time as the cost of living had risen, and the piece supports the revisions, supported also, it says, by even the most dedicated opponents of big government.
"Music on the Rails" tells of the Southern Railway planning to replace the unromantic
blast of the diesel airhorn with "airchimes" tuned in a
particular order of keys, C-sharp, E-natural, G-natural, A-natural,
and C-sharp. (Why not switch the positions of the A and E notes so
that there is formed a nice acronym by which to remember the tune
It predicts that "Mary Had a Little Lamb" would soon emanate from the trains and wonders whether the engineers would thus have to take courses in music.
As long as they don't blow "Mairzie Doats".
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Off on a Good Course", finds agreement with Governor Kerr Scott when he said that he believed his appointment of the new Highway Patrol commander from within the ranks of the Patrol to have been a good course. Commander James Smith's first act had been to halt the practice of painting red circles on the highways where fatal accidents had occurred and to cancel an order that patrolmen make at least one arrest per day.
The red circles had not worked to scare drivers into being more cautious and the quota system detracted from the primary duty of patrolmen to patrol the highways to insure safety, in which case arrests would not be necessary.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides a short poem by Henry C. McFadyen, appearing in State Magazine, regarding Uncle Will and Aunt Lizzie, who was "kinda sickly", but outlived him by keeping him busy.
The Smithfield Herald reports of a motorist who had a quiet, uneventful trip down Bloody 301, the highway between Benson and Smithfield, for the fact that the motorist was behind a Highway Patrol car the whole way. (We hope we did not spoil the trick ending. If you took the Evelyn Wood course, it wouldn't make any difference anyway. You can read in your sleep, through walls and concrete abutments.)
The Mt. Olive Tribune tells
of Speck Hood escaping from a man's yard where he normally stayed,
then being knocked down by a motorist on Highway 117, near the
freezer locker plant. The motorist took Speck to town and sought to
locate his home, finally did and he was carried to Clinton to have
his ailing shoulder fixed, was doing nicely. Other motorists would
just rush off and leave other people in the road after hitting them.
Speck was fortunate to be hit by a good samaritan
The Sumter Item tells of the Labour Party's majority in Parliament being reduced from six to four by one death and one resignation, suggests that if a Labourite forgot to wear rubbers on a wet day, it could end the Labour Government. That would only be true if it were slippery that day.
John Wesley Clay of the Winston-Salem Journal tells of a professor's theory that indolence was inherited being confirmed by the fact that he knew of several people in town whose lifespans to date were so short that the quantity demonstrated by them could not have been accumulated in such a brief period.
The Sanford Herald tells of a teacher who wanted each child in her room to purchase a copy of the class photograph so that they could, as adults, point to their classmates and state what they were doing at that point. One small voice piped up and said that they could point to the teacher and say, "She's dead."
The Camden (S.C) Chronicle finds an instructive allegory re the European countries in a frog who got stuck in a rut in the road and could not get himself out, only to be greeted free from the rut by a fellow frog the following day, telling his friend that he had extricated himself because a truck had come along and he had no other choice but to be gutted.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator McCarthy having obtained from Senator Bourke Hickenlooper the name of Haldore Hanson of the State Department, having been identified, along with 21 others, as a Communist by former Communist Louis Budenz testifying in executive session to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee. That was so despite careful attempts to preserve the secrecy of the hearing.
Notwithstanding those efforts, Mr. Pearson had also obtained the names of some of the other people on the list, including a Marine hero who led "Carlson's Raiders" and originated the "Gung Ho" battle cry against the Japanese, Brig. General Evan Carlson, who Mr. Budenz had claimed had been introduced to him as a Communist before he was a general. Edgar Snow, an associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post, was another mentioned by Mr. Budenz. Anna Louise Strong, who had been kicked out of Russia as a spy, was also on the list, along with Joseph Barnes, former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Lawrence Rossinger of the New York Times, Mary Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation, and well-known writer Gunther Stein. Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut had denied publicly that Mr. Hanson had been among those named, but Mr. Pearson confirms that he had been.
Mr. Budenz had also told the subcommittee that former Vice-President Henry Wallace was not a Communist and that he knew nothing about John Davies of the State Department. Mr. Budenz claimed that he had been reformed after being convinced to return to the Catholic Church.
He said that he believed that the most truthful people in the world were former Communists. Mr. Pearson, as the previous day, points out, however, his untruthfulness to "Who's Who" regarding his prior marriages, including two simultaneous marriages.
Marquis Childs tells of the President and Secretary of State Acheson having determined not to urge an investigation by Congress into the Nationalist China lobby, despite urging to do so. They believed that it would only further embitter the controversy regarding Far Eastern policy without producing sufficiently counterbalancing results in exposing the money being poured into the country for propaganda purposes.
Many of the Nationalist lobby were former Communists who brought to their task the same type of zeal they had brought to the Communist cause.
It would be difficult to ferret out the financial sources because most of the funding, believed to be more than a half-billion dollars, was squirreled away in Swiss and New York bank accounts under names not directly connected with the lobby.
If Formosa were to fall to the Communists, as Hainan Island had recently despite the Nationalist forces on the island having had twice as many troops as the Communists, then it would produce further recriminations toward American policy.
To head off this prospect, John Foster Dulles, newly appointed adviser to Secretary Acheson, had urged sending in a U.S. occupation force to Formosa on the rationale that the island remained a Japanese possession and that the U.S. had occupational command of Japan. That would make the Nationalist forces on the island internees. The population was Japanese, Chinese and Korean, or varying mixtures of the three, and the Formosans would likely welcome the U.S. But the Nationalist troops would likely resist such a move and possibly cause a shooting war.
The Nationalist propaganda reasoned that since Russia was aiding Communist China, the U.S. ought aid the Nationalist forces on Formosa. But with the fall of Hainan so easily, the prospect of that taking place was unlikely.
James Marlow discusses the implementation of the Hoover Commission recommendations, 288 in all, spread over 18 reports, following a two-year study concluding in June, 1949. Thus far, Congress had enacted only 20 percent of the recommendations. The President had sent 21 recommendations which were still pending, requiring affirmative action by Congress to disapprove them or they would become law by May 24, resulting in 60 percent of the recommendations being implemented. Congress, however, might kill some of the plans, requiring only the disapproval of one house to do so. He provides a list of the changes made by recommendation of the President, including six of seven plans submitted, the only one disapproved thus far having been creation of a department of welfare embracing education, health and public welfare functions—later to become HEW during the Eisenhower Administration. Congress had also approved some plans on its own hook, also listed, permitted by the legislation regarding some areas.
Framed Edition
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