The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 24, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the North Carolina Democratic Senate primary runoff was being held this date between the initial primary winner Senator Frank Graham and the runner-up, Willis Smith, who had garnered 53,000 fewer votes in the four-way race which did not deliver a majority for Senator Graham, prompting the runoff. Some sections of Raleigh and Asheville were reporting heavier turnout than the primary record of 618,000 for the state on May 27, while other areas reported lighter turnout. Charlotte precincts reported a "fairly good" turnout.
The French National Assembly overthrew Prime Minister Georges Bidault and his moderate Cabinet in a vote of no confidence with 352 against and 230 for the Government, regarding specifically an issue on wage increases for Government workers, opposed by the Government. The opposition coalition was formed by Communists, Socialists, and Gaullists. Support came from the Premier's leftist party and the moderate Radical Socialists. The coming resignation of Foreign Minister Robert Schuman with the Cabinet would possibly deal a critical blow to the success of the pending final agreement on sharing of coal and iron resources in France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, a plan first proposed by M. Schuman. Some had questioned the viability of the plan without British participation, which thus far had been refused by the Labour leadership. It was the first time during the postwar Fourth Republic that the Assembly had refused a vote of confidence and M. Bidault had won six such votes.
A Naval Reserve captain reported that a destroyer escort had found the remains of a missing Northwest Airliner six miles east of South Milwaukee, after the craft disappeared with 58 persons aboard the previous night during a thunderstorm over Lake Michigan before midnight. Two oil slicks and wreckage had also been spotted in the area by search planes. If all aboard the DC-4 had perished in the mishap, it would make it the worst air disaster to date in U.S. commercial aviation history.
The President signed the rent control bill extending rent controls to the end of the year, with another six months available for cities opting to extend them to June 30, 1951.
The President dedicated the new Friendship International Airport in Baltimore and said that he had confidence in the prospects for a permanent peace despite the conflict in the world presently. The President, on his way for a weekend visit at his home in Missouri, had logged 83,700 miles in air travel since coming to the Presidency in April, 1945.
Switchmen of five big Western and Midwestern railroads were set to strike the following morning after negotiations had deadlocked. Four of the railroads said that they would cease operations if the strike occurred.
Near Goldsboro, N.C., a Kannapolis man was burned to death in the crash of his light plane while crop dusting.
A 40 & 8 train boxcar, resembling the troop carrier boxcars of World War I, arrived in Charlotte for the American Legion convention and that of the Auxiliary, both of which began this date. Some 5,500 men and women were expected to arrive for the event.
On Sunday, the Korean War would begin, with a surprise attack by the Soviet-backed troops of the Northern republic, crossing the 38th parallel, demarcation line between the postwar occupation zones of Russia and the U.S., into the Southern Republic of Korea, the officially recognized state. The incursion would begin five years beyond the end of the American invasion of the Japanese-held island of Okinawa, site of the last major ground fighting of World War II.
No one yet knew it, but the five years of relative peace in the world, aside from the civil wars in China and Greece, the Arab-Israeli conflict, a minor civil war in Indonesia and the still relatively minor guerrilla conflict in Indo-China, had ended.
On the editorial page, "It's Important That You Vote Today" urges voting in the Senate runoff election, informing that the polls closed at 6:30. The citizens of the state had voted in record numbers in the initial primary. The experts predicted as low as 400,000 for the runoff, less than two-thirds of the initial turnout. It questions, however, why the turnout should be lower.
It concludes that there were two good men vying for the position, only one of whom would be elected, with the outcome affecting each voter through the decisions made by the winner.
"Tydings Wants to Dicker" praises Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland for urging direct talks between the U.S. and Russia, for even though the demands of Stalin were unacceptable, it presented itself as an opening from which dickering could begin.
"Lie Is No Communist Tool" finds Senators Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and William Knowland of California to have misspoken badly when they said that U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie was a tool of the Communists or perhaps their ally for urging that Communist China be seated in the U.N. to appease Russia and bring them back to the body. He was doing so because of his belief that it was the only way to save the U.N. from disintegration, not out of sympathy for the Communist Chinese. The piece agrees with Secretary of State Acheson's rejection of the Lie proposal but also recognizes the other side to the argument, that State Department policy had heretofore been to recognize the government in control in a given country, which, in the case of China, like it or not, was the Communist Government.
"A Link With the West" tells of the possibility soon of a direct flight from the Piedmont to the West Coast, as the Civil Aeronautics Board pondered the granting of the route to Eastern Air Lines, extending its current western terminus from San Antonio. Such a flight could be made presently but only with one or two connections.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Charlotte Maintains Its Position", congratulates Charlotte on its 32 percent growth during the prior decade, even if falling short of its expectation of 150,000 and a 50 percent increase. Winston-Salem had hoped to reach 100,000 but fell short by 13,000. Charlotte maintained its position as largest city in the Carolinas, by 46,000 over Winston-Salem, the second largest city. Charlotte had tripled its size since 1920, growing 78 percent during the Twenties. Its location had helped the effort and it had an active Chamber of Commerce which boosted the city. It finds that other cities could profit from study of Charlotte as a model for progress.
Drew Pearson publishes the reply of Congressman John Wood to the column's expose of his activities, calling Mr. Pearson an "archliar" and "scandalmonger" among other things. The Congressman admitted accepting the $1,000 commission, detailed previously by Mr. Pearson, for the Congressman urging passage of an individual compensation bill for a constituent injured by an Army truck. The commission constituted a violation of the law.
Mr. Wood had also awarded mail routes, not on merit as required by law, but on the basis of who paid the most for them. In one case, he admitted having awarded a route because of a large legal fee he had received, pushing aside six candidates who had scored higher on the test.
The Congressman had a drinking problem as well and had been too drunk to argue for his substitute bill for Taft-Hartley during debate of it, such that two Republicans, former Speaker Joe Martin and Congressman Charles Halleck, had to substitute for him.
Mr. Pearson says that the people had a right to know that Congressman Wood had these problems, including those elucidated in his recent prior columns on the subject.
Robert C. Ruark finds the admission of guilt in New York by Frank Erickson to a count of conspiracy and 59 counts of illegal gambling to have been remarkably simple, raising the question of why, if he had been known as a gambling kingpin for 20 years, he had not been nabbed previously. He hopes it might be a bellwether of things to come in making persons, as Frank Costello, previously believed immune to the law, finally culpable. In the latter case, it would take a prosecutor ready to ignore Mr. Costello's political connections.
Even Al Capone, once thought immune to the law, known as a murderer and thug, having beaten a friend to death for kicks with a baseball bat on one occasion, had been brought to heel finally on an income tax evasion charge. Likewise, Charles "Lucky" Luciano had been sent to prison by a young Thomas Dewey, convicted of running a prostitution ring.
The fall of Mr. Erickson had proved that no one was too big for the law to catch if there was enough incentive applied by law enforcement to catching them.
A letter writer finds both Senator Graham and Willis Smith to be Christians, but intends to vote for Mr. Smith in the runoff as he found Senator Graham for many years past traveling on the road of Socialism toward Communism. Senator Graham and other liberal Southern Senators, as Claude Pepper and Estes Kefauver, had voted consistently against the things which Senators such as Clyde Hoey supported. He finds him a "dangerous man" who aligned himself with 18 "subversive organizations".
Mr. Smith was a man, he suggests, who would support states' rights and other principles of Jeffersonian democracy, would fight against subversive trends, checking "Socialism-Communism" and preserving "our freedom and American way of life".
What is "our American way of life"? You and people like you talk about it a lot but never seem willing or able to define it very well, except in some negative nonsense about being opposed to "subversion". What was the Revolution but a bunch of rag-tag subversives overthrowing the existing order?
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of North Carolina tobacco men owing a lot to the jewelry manufacturers of Rhode Island for reversal of the stand by the House Ways & Means Committee to decrease the excise tax on economy brand cigarettes. Chairman Robert Doughton of the Committee was willing to wreck everything if the Committee continued to approve the measure 13 to 12. He had argued that lower priced cigarettes would mean lower prices for tobacco farmers. It was rumored that he was able to leverage a change of vote by a Rhode Island Congressman, from a district with several jewelry manufacturers, by threatening otherwise to reverse the decrease in the jewelry tax.
The group representing the economy brands stated that Mr. Doughton had managed to get the vote changed, that the large tobacco interests had benefited at the expense of the consumer, but that it was only a temporary victory.
It was not clear who was responsible for the anti-Graham propaganda flooding in from outside the state during the Senate campaign but it was likely the Committee for Constitutional Government, which aimed its mailings at the "educated ignorant" and had embraced John T. Flynn's The Road Ahead. It favored such general things as "free enterprise" and the "American way of life" without telling what was meant by those phrases. The House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities, looking into the CCG, had evidence that it intended rule by strong men and that its version of "free enterprise" meant unrestricted business, enabling the rich to get richer and the poor, poorer.
Congressman Wright Patman of Texas had said recently that there was a danger of Fascism in the country and that he considered the CCG the spearhead of that threat.
Query, incidentally, how the reasoning of the Rumely case of 1953, to which link is made above, permitted the HUAC investigations to proceed under its enabling resolution and not thereby encounter the Constitutional limits of interference with free speech and freedom of association. Would HUAC have been able to investigate the CCG without running up against the problems encountered by the Lobby Committee because of the limits, as found by the Court, in its enabling resolution, restricting its purview to "lobbying activities" directed to Congress, not extending to efforts to mold general opinion? The Court would largely answer that question in 1957 in Watkins v. U.S., a 6 to 1 decision, from which Justice Tom Clark was the lone dissenter, holding that HUAC had not made sufficiently clear the pertinence of its inquiry to its authorized legislative purpose in propounding questions to a witness, who refused to answer, asking whether he knew of Communist activities on the part of certain named persons, only some of whom had a role in union organizing activities, the asserted subject of the inquiry according to the Government, resulting in his conviction for contempt—finding essentially that the phrase "un-American activities" was so vague as to permit the Committee to venture anywhere it wanted in its investigations, making the task of the Court difficult in discerning, from the Committee's statements during the particular hearings, whether the questions to which answers had been refused were "pertinent to the question under inquiry" within the broad scope of the 1938 resolution establishing the Committee, holding in this case that it had not been properly defined for the witness such that he was accorded Due Process. The majority included Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had delivered the opinion of the Court in Rumely in 1953, and who filed a separate concurrence.
Senator Clyde Hoey's investigating subcommittee was assigned the task of investigating homosexuals and other moral perverts in the Government. The assignment was disappointing to the Scripps-Howard newspapers and those of Col. Bertie McCormick, for they wanted someone as chair who would embarrass the Administration with lurid stories and headlines, not the style of Senator Hoey, who would hold the hearings in executive session. It would also be difficult to say that it would be a whitewash after the five-percenter hearings of the previous year before the subcommittee, exposing the President's military aide, Maj. General Harry Vaughan, as an enabler for John Maragon, the latter convicted since of perjury before the subcommittee.
Senator McCarthy would step off the subcommittee for the investigation of the perverts as he had helped to initiate it with his claims—or perhaps because he had a conflict of interest, given his staff to be. Senator Margaret Chase Smith would remain on the subcommittee. Senator Hoey had made it plain that he viewed homosexuals in Government as a security risk for their susceptibility to blackmail.
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