The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 17, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Governor Thomas Dewey, 48, had withdrawn his name from consideration for a third term as Governor of New York and indicated his intent to retire from political life. He said that he was very tired after twenty years in public life. He stated that he would likely return to private law practice. Most Republicans found little surprise in the announcement as the Governor had previously said, right after the loss in 1948, the second straight quadrennial loss in a presidential election, that he would not again be a candidate for public office. Few in the party believed that he could be renominated a third time in any event.
The Governor would, after all, be nominated for Governor again, then run and win in the fall, before retiring from politics finally at the beginning of 1955.
The President signed a bill authorizing more than a half billion dollars in military construction projects over the ensuing two years, including millions for super-secret projects, the nature of which had not even been disclosed to Congress.
The President, acting pursuant to the Internal Revenue code, made available to Senate crime investigators the income tax records of persons under scrutiny.
In Columbus, O., the receiver for Lustron Corp. denied having called "unethical" the receipt by Senator Joseph McCarthy of a $10,000 fee from the corporation for writing an article on housing for it. But the two Associated Press reporters who quoted him as making the remark checked their notes again and stood by the story.
In Crooksville, O., thousands fled the path of a flash flood through the southwestern Ohio valley, with one person killed and an estimated million dollars of damage resulting, following a four-hour cloudburst causing the Moxahala and Jonathan Creeks to overflow their banks, catching by surprise the residents of Crooksville, Roeville and several tiny mining towns.
In Pomeroy, Wash., a hundred miles south of Spokane, a cloudburst produced a flash flood destroying one home and leaving three persons missing.
Governor Kerr Scott received the SBI report on State Prison director J. B. Moore, following accusation by WRAL news director Jesse Helms on June 9 that he had interviewed and photographed a prisoner painting the front porch of Mr. Moore's residence and two more prisoners working on construction of a garage with a room above it in the back of the house. Mr. Moore had responded that he had used no State materials in the construction and that the prisoners were volunteering their services in aid of the trusty normally assigned to the director's residence, while the prisoners were between tasks and using the house as a staging area for a demolition project at N.C. State. The head of the Highway Commission, Dr. Henry Jordan, with oversight over prisons, said that neither he nor the Governor wanted to whitewash the matter or persecute anyone, and so felt it necessary to cooperate with the request of Mr. Moore that he be permitted to look at the report before any action would be taken.
As indicated, on July 1, the Commission would hold a hearing on the matter and at its conclusion, Mr. Moore would submit his resignation, while maintaining that he had done nothing wrong.
In Asheville, an 11-month old girl accidentally hanged herself while playing on a bed in her parent's log home. She had inadvertently managed to wedge her chin on one of the logs after falling from the bed.
In Winston-Salem, the unidentified 17-year old girl who had an ambition to become a nurse before being attacked and brutally beaten with a rifle and smothered underneath a mattress inside her father's radio shop in the downtown area the previous morning, remained near death. Doctors had found outward signs of attempted rape but were unable to complete the test to determine the full extent of the assault.
In Charlotte, the director of public relations of the National Association of Life Underwriters advocated in a speech before the convention of North Carolina Life Underwriters that Social Security be extended to all gainfully employed persons.
Two women fliers, missing since late the prior day in their flight from Washington to Florida, had landed safely at Sumter, S.C., in the early morning, where they refueled and flew on to Savannah, Ga. Godspeed...
In Numata, Japan, two years earlier, burglars plagued the town to such a degree that police advised citizens to obtain dogs to keep watch. But now the village had a new problem, 3,600 dogs.
It was hot in Charlotte, with temperatures soaring to 90 degrees by 12:30 p.m., with an expected high of 93 by mid-afternoon. Time to go to the beach and get Rover into the surf...
On the editorial page, "On Smear Tactics" finds silly the labeling of Willis Smith a "Republican" by supporters of Senator Frank Graham. Perhaps, it ventures, they believed that such did not constitute a smear tactic. But it wonders how far one had to go in opposing the Truman Fair Deal before suddenly crossing the line to become such a Republican Democrat. Senator Graham had opposed the compulsory version of the FEPC bill, the national compulsory health insurance bill, and the Brannan agricultural plan. He also opposed deficit spending as long as national defense and foreign aid were not compromised by balancing the budget. It wonders whether such positions made him a Republican. For Mr. Smith opposed the same things.
So why are you so dead set against Senator Graham, tried and true, and ready to get onboard with Mr. Smith?
It finds irony in the fact that organs such as the Raleigh News & Observer, which supported Senator Graham wholeheartedly, also condemned Dixiecrats for leaving the Democratic Party, finding the party big enough for such discordant voices to unite in harmony.
It concludes that "Dixiecrat" and "Republican" were as much smear labels as "Communist" and "Negro-lover" on the other side, sought by Smith supporters to be pinned on Senator Graham. It was equally opposed to such labels regardless of which side used them.
Are you on medication, or is it just on Saturdays?
It was, after all, a News copy editor in 1948 who coined the term "Dixiecrat" for the States' Righters of Strom Thurmond, Fielding Wright, and company. But who's remembering what?
And, actually, let's not be overly polite—for change is never effected in attitudes by use of euphemisms, singing to the choir: The Smith followers were accusing Senator Graham of being a "nigger-lover" most of the time in private, if not in semi-public gatherings, at some of their "rallies" organized by Mr. Helms of WRAL. Yes or no?
It is "yes" because we have personally heard it, many years subsequent, albeit not at a rally and only in relation to a similarly situated political surrogate of Senator Graham, from supporters of Mr. Helms.
And we do not recall ever hearing euphemisms employed for "Republican", such as the "R-word" or "Unreconstructedcrats".
"So Goes the Free Press" assesses the strike against the New York World Telegram & Sun by its mechanical workers, which, because of a mutual aid pact signed between the International Typographical Union and the American Newspaper Guild members, caused also the employees in the editorial and news department to refuse to cross the picket lines, effectively shutting the newspaper down. The New York Publishers Association had broken off negotiation with the printers charging deliberate violations of the contract in the Telegram & Sun strike.
The piece supports the Publishers Association, finding that if such bilateral pacts between unions could work to shut down operations, collective bargaining with management was virtually destroyed, allowing each union to set its demands as high as it pleased and wait until the publisher agreed.
The trend toward monopoly in the American press was strong and newspaper costs had skyrocketed because of high newsprint and labor costs. More newspapers were finding it necessary to merge as a result, to keep labor costs down. Lack of competition, in consequence, presented a danger to a free press.
"Try Again, Mr. Wood" discusses the answer of Congressman John Wood of Georgia to Drew Pearson's charges that the Congressman took a ten percent commission for obtaining a personal injury settlement for a constituent against the Army, finding his calling Mr. Pearson a liar to be insufficient. Mr. Wood admitted the salient facts as claimed by the column but simply defended the fee for his law firm in representing the constituent.
The piece regards it as unethical for Mr. Wood to maintain association with his law firm when it had charged a fee for his own actions in Congress on behalf of a constituent. It thinks he needed to come up with a better explanation.
A piece from the Knoxville News-Sentinel, titled "Getting More Industries", tells of a company rejecting a Tennessee town for location of a new plant, despite it offering annual taxation of only $440 compared to the eventually chosen city, at $46,000, because the Tennessee town lacked proper schools, recreation facilities, and other services conducive to community life. It finds that giving tax concessions to attract new industry was fine but not at the expense of basic services for want of an adequate tax base to support them. It was a principal reason the newspaper was backing the new Knoxville civic center, to provide community spirit.
Drew Pearson tells of several Democratic Senators lending their support to re-investigation of the Amerasia case and the Justice Department's handling of it, as favored by Republicans, despite a clean bill of health provided the Department by the New York Grand Jury which had spent two weeks re-investigating the matter recently. The Democrats were planning to broaden the Justice Department probe to include other wartime cases which had been kept from public view, particularly the prosecution of the Chicago Tribune for giving aid and comfort to the Japanese following the Battle of Midway in 1942. A Grand Jury was called to investigate the matter but suddenly the Department, without explanation, pulled back and the case never went forward. To avoid the appearance of a political witch-hunt against the severest critic of the Administration, William Mitchell, Attorney General under President Hoover, had been selected as special prosecutor to bring the Midway case against the Tribune before the Grand Jury.
The Tribune had also published a story on December 5, 1941 about American mobilization, planning to build an army of ten million men, with confidential memos between President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to support it. Some members of the Administration, though not the President or Secretary Knox, owner of the competing Chicago Daily News, had urged prosecution for this act at the time as well. Likewise, nothing ever happened.
Both of these cases were considered more damaging to national security at the time than the Amerasia case in 1945, as the earlier matters implied communication of confidential information to the Japanese at critical junctures in the war.
A disgruntled landlady of Philadelphia, opposed to extension of rent control, ran onto the Senate floor and attacked Senator Francis Myers of Pennsylvania for his vote in favor of the extension.
He notes that Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina had quietly engineered passage of the rent control extension bill.
Marquis Childs tells of the President making an exception in his home state of Missouri, as he had in 1946 in the Congressional race from his home district, to his ordinary rule of not intervening in Democratic primary races, this time in the Senate race, endorsing State Senator Emery Allison, in an effort to defeat in the fall GOP Senator Forrest Donnell. But Mr. Allison was a party regular with little else to recommend him for the Senate. He often blocked Fair Deal-type legislation, such as having participated in a move to obstruct an attempt to open the University of Missouri to admission of black students. He bottled up a desegregation bill in the Senate committee he chaired, which had been overwhelmingly passed by the lower house of the Legislature.
His strongest opponent was Congressman Thomas Higgins of St. Louis, who had reportedly received the backing of the murdered gambling boss and political operative, Charles Binaggio, but Mr. Higgins had denied it.
Senator Donnell, while meticulous to a fault, was at once considered honest, an attribute of great value in boss-ridden Missouri.
Experts believed that Mr. Allison would win the primary but in the fall would lose to Mr. Donnell. But, he allows, that prediction could prove wrong.
He concludes that the President had never made any visible effort to clean up the corruption or to raise the level of candidates in his home state to a point in accord with his beliefs, and that such insouciance was not good enough for the national head of the party.
Robert C. Ruark finds it comforting that New Jersey had solved the problem of sex offenders by turning them over to psychiatry rather than penology, with a psychiatric review board to determine when the person was fit to be released into society again. A new law in the state also permitted a person to request State psychiatric aid if he or she believed that they were becoming dangerous from a mental condition.
He relates of some news clippings in front of him, one of which told of a man, recently released from a State mental hospital, having stabbed a stranger to death because he felt like it, another, of a father of a woman who was killed by an insane husband released from the Matteawan State hospital in New York, suing the State for wrongful death, and still another, of a patient released from Matteawan who then stabbed to death four strangers, and yet other such cases.
Mr. Ruark believes that sex offenders usually had been repeatedly arrested for such offenses and let off with a slap on the wrist, eventually satiating their preternatural urges with murder, then placed in an insane asylum, awaiting release when proving to the satisfaction of their warders that they could behave themselves—though, for good reason, providing no examples to support his pet theory.
He believes that, for the benefit of the majority of sane people in the society, the "creeps and perverts and violently senseless" ought be relegated to a "snug haven" permanently separate from society so that they could not run amok with guns, knives, or sinister sexual intent.
Have another bottle of gin, Mr. Ruark. If, as you previously asserted, you did major in sociology at UNC, you sure as hell did not retain much from the effort.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina being such a polished and practiced parliamentarian, proved in the days when there was no Vice-President after April, 1945 through early 1949, that he was asked often to substitute for president pro tem Senator Kenneth McKellar as presiding officer of the Senate to settle attempted filibusters before they could get off the ground. During the week, despite being an opponent of renewed extension of rent control, the Senator took to task landlords in the galleries of the Senate yelling their support of speakers against the bill, such as Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio. So firm were Senator Hoey's remonstrations that by the time Senator Walter George of Georgia rose to speak in fiery opposition, the galleries were silent in response, nevertheless showing their support by waving handkerchiefs.
Senator Hoey said that his secret was knowing the rule book.
U. S. News & World Report had published a story on House Ways & Means chairman Robert Doughton of North Carolina, providing his many homiletic views of life, imparted in the piece, such as, "Get the most feathers you can with the fewest squawks from the goose."
Mr. Schlesinger provides the breakdown of the North Carolina delegation on the vote on rent control extension, most following Senator Hoey's lead, with seven against in the House, two in favor, and three abstaining. Senator Graham had voted for it by proxy.
Every House member seeking re-election had thus far won their primary nominations. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was the only exception thus far in the Senate, defeated by an incumbent House member, George Smathers. Senator Hoey found in the fact that the public was not mad enough at the way things were, but said it was a good sign for the Democrats in the fall.
The North Carolina Congressional delegation believed strongly that as a result of the Supreme Court rulings against segregation recently, UNC would be integrated in the ensuing few years.
It would occur in the law school in 1951 and in the undergraduate student body in 1955.
Incidentally, to the group of people intent on effecting name changes of buildings at UNC for their being freighted with inappropriate political connotations, even from 145 years ago, you had better get busy again with another building named in 1965, Carmichael Auditorium, now, for unknown reasons, changed to Carmichael Arena, as it was William D. Carmichael who was named as the defendant in the McKissick case, titularly blocking admission to the law school in 1951 of the four plaintiffs, each a black applicant qualified but for his race. Never mind that it was the Legislature actually blocking integration and neither the administration nor the student body, and that Mr. Carmichael just happened to be the acting president of the University at the time, awaiting Gordon Gray finishing his duties for the Truman Administration. It is the name and its symbolic content that sticks in the craw and mandates a change. And that was 1965 when the building was named, for goodness sake, not 1920.
Segregationists off campus!
But don't propose to call it McKissick Arena, as Mr. McKissick in 1966 called Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, despite his having introduced the most progressive civil rights plank ever theretofore introduced at any major party convention to the Democratic convention in 1948, prompting the pre-planned walkout of the Dixiecrats, and despite his leading the effort in the Senate to get the 1964 Civil Rights bill passed, a racist, and, subsequently, in 1968, apparently endorsed former Vice-President Richard Nixon in the race against Mr. Humphrey. That would therefore be lending to the venerated old building, where Dean Smith first made his mark on college basketball, too much affinity to Duke.
In any event, there is Carmichael, Carr, Carrboro, Mangum, Battle-Vance-Pettigrew, Hamilton, and Ehringhaus, the latter for his son having endorsed Willis Smith in 1950, just for starters, all still in definite need of name overhaul. Get busy. We shall keep you apprised as the questionable names arise. There are likely many more. Does not South Building, constructed, apparently by malingerers, between 1798 and 1814, imply some plantation connotation for its location between the Places and being the home of the administration for so many years? Where is North Building
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