The Charlotte News
Friday, June 9, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, speaking at the University of Missouri commencement exercises, said that abandoning the Marshall Plan would be disastrous to Western Europe at this juncture and that the vital national interest in a healthy world economy would continue after the aid stopped in 1952. In conclusion, he urged the graduates to read "Locksley Hall" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, as he had seen the future.
Senator William Knowland of California demanded that Senate investigators looking anew at the Amerasia case subpoena the diary of the late Defense Secretary James Forrestal because he had been named as the high Government official who had suggested that the six 1945 arrests made in the case be delayed. The diary was in the custody of the White House.
An authoritative source in New York stated that the Government was not too happy about the new investigation into the case by a Grand Jury in New York, suggesting that the action was undertaken on its own without Government sanction. Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, the Wurlitzer king, wanted a thorough investigation of the Justice Department's role in the case.
Meanwhile, former OSS agent Archbold Van Beuren testified to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that the Amerasia case had been a threat to national security in wartime—especially if you had wanted the Germans and Japanese to win the war so that you could have an opportunity to be Reichsfuehrer or Samurai commander for your home district. He told reporters that he had appeared before the Grand Jury the previous Tuesday.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had told the subcommittee that there was a larger volume of subversive activities in the country than had existed in any period of the war.
Senator Joseph McCarthy, speaking in Milwaukee to the Wisconsin Republican state convention, blasted Secretary of State Acheson, calling him "the Red Dean of fashion", claiming that he had worked on the "team of world strategy to create a Red China and Red Poland", that the Secretary was at the forefront of the Administration's "war-mongering abroad while it permits the enemy within our gates to operate with impunity", and demanded that he be fired. Parenthetically, as to the latter quoted statement, the Senator echoed Communist propaganda and might well, consciously or unconsciously out of his liquor bottle, have been referring to his own cabal as the "enemy". He added that one could condemn Communism in the "Acheson manner, with a lace handkerchief, a silk glove and a Harvard accent, if you please," but that Communism could not be fought that way, with "kid gloves or powderpuffs", that those who believed the Government was harboring Communists were "victims of an all-out campaign of vilification and smear launched by the vast taxpayer-supported press corps of the Government agencies and supported by the left-wing, phoney 'liberal' press and radio commentators."
He would have fit right in with the current "Administration" in 2017 and its Congressional psychological support group trying to cover up the collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign of 2016, and the "President's" subsequently attempted obstruction of justice in the investigation of it, no?
A Brooklyn Grand Jury indicted Harry Gold, Philadelphia chemist, along with two unidentified persons, on charges of providing documents in 1944 and 1945 to British atomic scientist, Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had confessed to providing documents on the atomic bomb to the Russians between 1944 and 1947. Mr. Gold had been arrested on May 23 by the FBI, officials of which had quoted Mr. Gold as admitting contact with Dr. Fuchs. Jurisdiction was based on the allegation that the contacts with Dr. Fuchs occurred in Brooklyn.
Senator Harry Cain of Washington started a filibuster to block an attempt to set a date for a Senate vote on the bill to extend rent controls beyond June 30. Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that the Senate would remain in session until Christmas if necessary to get a vote on the measure.
The Senate Agriculture subcommittee, chaired by Senator Guy Gillette, investigating the sudden spike in coffee prices, urged the Justice Department to crack down on speculative trading in coffee.
Get them A & P beans back down to level so's we can get our morning shot o' Joe again. Damnation, what's goin' on here? Can't even get a cup o' coffee no more without spendin' three weeks' wages.
It had been determined that the U.S. B-29 bomber which had caught fire and crashed in the North Sea off England the previous day had shot itself down during gunnery practice, as bullets from its machine gun struck the right outboard engine during firing off the Norfolk coast. Automatic safety devices which would ordinarily have prevented such a mishap had failed. A search continued for four missing crewmen of the eleven aboard, four having survived.
In Pontiac, Mich., a woman golf champion of the city was killed and her mother wounded in a rifle ambush in front of her home early this date and police were searching for her former suitor as a suspect after he had driven to a friend's house, left some belongings and told the friend to hold them as he would be dead in twenty minutes. Earlier the previous evening, the victim and the suitor had been observed arguing at a tavern.
In Baltimore, a man was indicted for murdering another man in a pre-arranged pistol duel over a card game. The indicted man had won the duel, but only because the victim had a defective weapon which could not fire.
In Massanetta Springs, Va., a World War I field artillery chaplain and former Rhodes scholar, Dr. Benjamin Rice Lacy, Jr., president of the Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, was elected the new moderator by the 90th general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, the Southern branch of the church.
Charlotte City Manager Henry Yancey had met with State officials and reported that the plan of Charlotte to eliminate dangerous and congestive downtown railroad grade-crossings with underpasses had been well received, suggesting the prospect for State matching funds for the estimated 5.5 million dollar program.
On the editorial page, "Shameful Prison Conditions" tells of prison specialist Dr. Austin MacCormick, who had suggested separating the prisons from the Highway Commission and creating a State Department of Corrections, having provided his reasons for the recommendation. Central Prison in Raleigh, he reported, was a "disgrace", "mediocre at best", with half the prisoners idle despite excellent industrial equipment available for them to use, harsh discipline for offenders and an idle life for those obeying the rules. The warden was a political appointee, without the training or understanding necessary for his position, and a deputy, who also lacked understanding of how modern prisons worked, had actual authority in the facility.
He had described Women's Prison as merely a disgrace and the victim of long neglect.
He also criticized the road camp system, figuratively placing dollar signs on the back of every prisoner, providing no attempt at rehabilitation. The prisoners ought be sent instead, he said, to conservation camps and the like.
He expressed, however, approval of the new Butner Youth Center, established the previous October, and its farm director.
The overall result was that the prison population flowed back into the general population of the state without rehabilitation, and thus likely to engage in further crime.
The piece thinks that his recommendations ought be given careful consideration by Governor Kerr Scott and the Prison Advisory Council and that unless a better plan were found, it should be presented to the 1951 General Assembly, as it was time for action to remove the shameful conditions in the state's prisons.
"Further Light on Segregation" examines the lawsuit brought to integrate the UNC Law School, contending that the North Carolina Law College of Durham, later that of N.C. Central University, was not substantially equal to the one at UNC. It examines the case in light of the Supreme Court ruling the previous Monday in Sweatt v. Painter, holding that the black law school in Texas was not substantially equal to the University of Texas Law School, mandating, under the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, that the latter admit the petitioner, otherwise qualified for admission but for his race. The basis of the inequality was said by the Court to be in the number and reputation of faculty members, experience of the administration, variety of courses, opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, scope of the library, the presence of law reviews and similar activities, and tradition and prestige of the law school. The opinion also noted that the black law school barred whites from admission, which meant that were the petitioner forced to attend the school, the predominant number of judges, lawyers, and other officials with whom the petitioner would come in contact as a lawyer would be graduates of another law school.
The piece finds that under such an analysis, it was conceivable that no black graduate or professional school could meet the standard of substantial equality with a white school. Such arguments could then be extended to undergraduate programs and public schools generally.
It finds that the old standard of equality had been exchanged for a new, more exacting standard and that the standard might place North Carolina public schools in an untenable position. It urges that it was not too soon to begin thinking about conformance to such standards.
The piece appears to assume that the "substantially equal" language of Sweatt was new. It was not, having been used in 1938 in State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the first case to hold non-satisfaction with the Plessy standard in the context of professional schools, also on the basis of lack of substantially equal law school facilities within the state for black students, even if, in a technical sense, that was dicta as applied to the educational setting in question, as no black law school was present at all in Missouri though the State arranged to pay tuition for out of state attendance of a black law school. But, as the Court then stated, it had used that premise of "substantially equal facilities", which the State of Missouri did not contest, in other contexts since Plessy, dating back at least to 1914. It was by no means "new", as the piece contends.
And we note again, as Wednesday, that in 1938, seventy percent of the UNC Law School student body had responded positively to a questionnaire asking whether the Law School should be integrated. So the dilatory nature of integration was not necessarily the result of the individual institution or its students wanting to bar integration but rather of the state and local government politicians not wanting to rock the boat and thereby jeopardize their political standing with their constituents whom they well knew to include, mainly, substantially illiterate and functionally illiterate boobs.
"The Other Side" tells of Frank C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor raising the issue as to whether the voters did or did not want someone subject to election, as the President and his Cabinet, making determinations on reorganization of Government, rather than having the various Civil Service employees of the Government, who could not be removed by the voters, making those decisions. When the agency heads became entrenched, they tended to cater to the special interests rather than to the desires of the public. The railroads, for instance, fought the plan to reorganize the ICC and the banks had fought the plan to make the Comptroller of the Currency subject to the authority of the Treasury Secretary.
While the President might abuse his power in reorganizing the Government agencies, as when President Truman recently appointed his old friend Mon Wallgren to chair the FPC, in the long run, the people probably would derive from the process better government, provided the Hoover Commission recommendations were followed. So the argument that it was a "power grab" for the President was one adequately met by this counter-argument.
Drew Pearson, referring back to his column of June 3 in which he had listed the people who had called him a liar, and then promised that he would write another column on his differences with Senator Taft, who had recently called him a liar regarding the supposed quid pro quo with Senator Russell whereby six Republicans would abstain from the vote on cloture of the Senate filibuster against the FEPC bill for Democratic support of the veto of the President's reorganization of the NLRB to eliminate the position of general counsel, says that in deference to his wife, an admirer of Senator Taft, he should refrain from further comment. His wife had suggested that people might think he was implying that the Senator ought go to jail, as had so many others who had called him a liar.
He told his wife that Senator Taft had waited until late April to deny his story that the Senator was supporting Senator McCarthy in his charges, after several stories from other reporters in the interim had appeared confirming just that. But by late April, it had become clear that Senator McCarthy's charges had backfired and, when it became apparent he could not support them, public sentiment had turned against him. Only then had Senator Taft backed away from his prior support. He asked his wife who she believed, him or her hero, Senator Taft. She dropped the subject.
Later, he began thinking that the Taft denial of the story about the deal with Senator Russell was a bit like an occasion in 1931, just after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, when Secretary of State Henry Stimson, seeing things more clearly than anyone else at the time, had denied a Pearson story that the Secretary had sought bases from Chile and Mexico to guard the Pacific against war and that the two countries had agreed. Mr. Stimson had later called Mr. Pearson and said that he had to deny the story, though true, because otherwise Chile and Mexico might become incensed at the leak. Mr. Pearson believed also that the Secretary might have been concerned that President Hoover, who opposed becoming involved in the Pacific, might not like the suggestion of such a deal.
He adds that a coalition of Dixiecrats and Republicans could block the Truman Administration whenever they wished, as they were doing presently in chopping a billion dollars from the President's proposed budget.
Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan had reshuffled his budget to make room for emergency funds to combat the bark beetle infestation of spruce trees in Colorado, as Congress delayed in providing the necessary funding for the program.
Justice William O. Douglas, who had nearly been killed climbing a mountain the previous summer in Oregon, was going to take on the Himalayas in Tibet during the summer.
The President was considering vetoing the basing point pricing legislation, as it filled the antitrust laws full of holes.
Senator Russell vigorously objected to the new draft bill because it did not provide for segregation of troops by race.
Marquis Childs tells of six German visitors to the State Department recently making a study of civil liberties, and in the course of studying the Loyalty Review Board, chaired by Republican Seth Richardson, with values out of the Coolidge era, an underling of Mr. Richardson had told them in response to their inquiry of what was meant by his terms, "pinko" and "fellow traveler", that a "pinko" was a person who opposed racial segregation and wanted to fight for civil liberties. When asked subsequently whether they would like to speak to several lawyers defending persons who had been investigated by the Review Board, they declined, saying that they had all the information they needed.
Such had become the reality in Washington, threatening civil liberties in the name of getting at "disloyal persons" in the Government, in the process playing right into the hands of Russian and Communist propaganda.
There was no question that the Loyalty Review Board had conducted its investigations thoroughly, but recently, notwithstanding that fact, Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer had fired two employees, William Remington and Michael Lee, accused previously of disloyalty but later cleared by the Board, to promote, according to the Secretary, efficiency of administration, clarifying that the firing was not because of disloyalty, ignoring the fact that such a firing would imply just that. He had yielded to Congressional pressures in so doing, prompting Senator George Malone of Nevada to call for a thorough investigation of the entire Department. Secretary Sawyer had added that he favored giving departments the right to hire and fire employees, circumventing the normal Civil Service process.
Drew Middleton, writing from Germany in the New York Times Magazine, had stated that the greatest weapon the U.S. had in the struggle against the Soviets was not the atom bomb or the Marshall Plan, but rather, as a Dutch diplomat had once told him, maintenance of freedom and justice, causing the free world to turn to the U.S. for leadership, failing which they and the U.S. would be lost. Mr. Childs adds, "Amen!"
Robert C. Ruark tells of Vogue's advice on how to spend the summer, including reading Jane Austen in a hammock, seeing the secret part of the day at 5:00 a.m., rotating one's ankles 25 times each morning, and making batiste nightgowns. He finds that his ankles were fine, he looked silly in pajamas, Ms. Austen's books were not hammock reading, and that he regularly saw the secret part of the day with no one other than Billy Rose, men banging ashcans, and stickup men to keep him company. But, in keeping with the advice of the magazine to figure out who one admired, he says that he admires the writers of the copy of Vogue, who had restored his faith in elves and would keep him out of the saloons during the summer.
A letter writer, in the motor carrier business, comments on a previous letter which urged that the trucking companies, rather than the taxpayer, foot the bill for damage by big trucks to the highways. He notes that the writer had not informed that he worked for the Southern Railway Co. He thinks that the railroads were advocating nationalization of the transportation facilities of the country and that competition in transportation should continue.
A letter writer, responding to the same letter, says that trucks paid their way on the highways to enable the people to receive the kind of service they wanted.
A letter writer comments on a news story about Charlotte exhibitionists for whom the police were looking. She thinks they were more numerous than previously thought, as she lived across from Independence Park and had seen on two occasions such men in the park during the previous year while walking her dog, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Both times, the men had ducked into the rest rooms by the tennis courts. She had reported it to the policeman on duty who told her to tell the park maintenance man, which she then did, only to see the maintenance man talking with one of the offenders for a few minutes and parting in separate directions.
Well, at least they did not part in the same direction, arm in arm.
She imparts that she was the mother of a ten-year old girl and was concerned about the safety of the park as a result, before an injury or murder would occur.
A letter writer finds an ill wind boding for Willis Smith should he become North Carolina's next Senator. Marquis Childs had, the prior Monday, found Mr. Smith, a Democrat, to be of the McKinley crowd among Republicans, more Republican than all save about six Republican Senators. He says that the eyes of the nation were now focused on the state and they had been given the opportunity to show that their system of justice and equality need be apologetic to none. He wishes Godspeed to Senator Graham and believes that he would be victorious in the runoff.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.