Year 1949

__________ 

“There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb – that’s two nations having it.” 

Harold C. Urey, Nobel Prize winner

__________ 

The Soviet Union becomes the second member of the atomic bomb club.

 

January 20: Harry S. Truman is sworn in as president, for a full term. Goldman writes: “On orders from the White House, for the first time in American history Negroes were invited to the top social events of the Inaugural.” (1/91-92) 

 In his Inaugural Address, Truman introduced what came to be known as the “Point Four” program. Much of the money would come from the United States, but it would be co-operative and carried out through the U.N. 

“Our aim,” the president summarized, “should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to lighten their burdens. … Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.”

 

Soon, more than 2,000 Americans would be “explaining sewage disposal or more efficient ways to teach reading” in far corners of the globe, “starting rivulets of change down unpredictable centuries.” 

One administrator of the program would later explain, “What makes Point 4 different from the ordinary concept of economic aid and makes it so infinitely appealing is that it emphasizes the distribution of knowledge rather than of money.” (1/94) 

In the months after Truman was sworn in for a full term, prices were going down. “The nickel beer returned to Manhattan, the $1.99 shirt to Kansas City, and a Des Moines newspaper discovered that a basket of groceries which cost $4.19 in 1948 could be bought now for $3.29.” (1/95) 

Meanwhile, Goldman explains, the Truman administration had given Chiang Kai-shek and his government more than $2 billion dollars; and that government was still failing. “The only alternative open to the United States was full-scale intervention on behalf of a Government,” said Secretary of State Acheson, “which had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people.” (1/98) 

 

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February: A growing fear of communism grips the people of the United States. Francis Cardinal Spellman appears, 

in the pulpit of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to speak one of the most passionate sermons ever delivered from an American pulpit. America was in imminent danger of “Communist conquest and annihilation….Are we, the American people, the tools and the fools for which the communists take us?” The situation called for an immediate end of all “ostrich-like actions and pretenses, particularly in halting the Communist floodings of our own land.”

 

Previously, the Catechetical Guild of St. Paul had distributed a comic-strip pamphlet called Is This Tomorrow? In it, Communist mobs were depicted as attacking Saint Patrick’s with torches and nailing Cardinal Spellman to the door. (1/131)

 

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March 8: At around 6:30 p.m., Irving Feiner mounts a soapbox at the corner of South McBride and Harrison Streets, in Syracuse, New York. A student at Syracuse University, Feiner will later admit he was “a contentious young man.” But he is there to promote a leftist rally to be held at a nearby hotel.

 

The police later insisted that Feiner urged blacks to take up arms against whites. He attacked the mayor, local politicians, and the American Legion. (For the rest of his life, he would deny that he called President Harry S. Truman a bum, insisting that if he had meant to attack Truman, he would have used stronger language than that.)

 

Even the size of the crowd that gathered ended up in dispute. Police thought there were 75 to 80 whites and blacks. Lawyers for Mr. Feiner would later suggest that the number was more like 25 or 30. The sidewalks were blocked, and police felt the crowd was becoming “restive.” Several listeners heckled the young student, and at least one man threatened him.

 

Saying he feared a riot, a police officer twice asked Mr. Feiner to get down from the box. He refused and was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Found guilty by a judge, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

 

Feiner, and free speech groups eventually appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. (See: January 1951).

 

Feiner had dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Army and go off to Europe to fight the Nazis. He was attending college on the G.I. Bill at the time of his arrest. 

 

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May 12: Israel becomes the 59^th member of the United Nations. The vote to admit is 37-12. Six Arab nations immediately walk out in protest. They insist Israel has not complied with a U.N. resolution requiring for an international regime in Jerusalem and repatriation of Arab refugees.

 

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I could “vent my frustrations with being discriminated against.” 

George Taliaferro, star running back for Indiana University, is drafted by the Chicago Bears in the thirteenth round. 

What makes his selection historic is that Taliaferro is African American, the first player of his race drafted by an NFL team. 

He has already experienced steady racism at IU, where he and other African American players are forbidden to live in a dorm, eat in the cafeteria or swim in the university pool. In 1945 he helps Indiana win it’s only undisputed Big Ten championship ever. (It was called the Western Conference in those days.) In the days of two-way players in football, he lines up variously at halfback, quarterback, defensive back, and punts for Indiana, winning team MVP in 1948. 

“The thing I liked most about football was hitting people,” he told an interviewer long after he retired. “It allowed me to vent my frustrations with being discriminated against in the United States.” 

Taliaferro never expected to be drafted by the NFL; so he had already signed with the Los Angeles Dons of the All-American Football Conference by the time the draft took place. The Dons paid him a $4,000 bonus. 

George Halas, the coach of the Bears, said he was sorry to lose Taliaferro, because he felt he was the first black player “I’ve felt could make the team.” 

Taliaferro never believed that, bemoaning the reluctance of pro football to integrate. “The thing that bothers me to this day,” Taliaferro once said, “is that I can name for you any number – hundreds – of African-American players who could have played in the National Football League.” 

     The All-American Football Conference and the NFL merged in 1950 and Taliaferro went on to play in the NFL for six years, earning All-Pro honors three times.

 

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     Another athlete is having a particularly good year: Esther Williams, an actress, and former Olympic hopeful in a swimming pool. She had made the U.S. Olympic team at age 17, in 1940, but World War II put an end to any thought of the Games that year, and again, four years later. 

     Instead, she won fame swimming in Hollywood pools. By 1949, she had become one of Hollywood’s top ten most bankable stars – gracing multiple movies – and swimming her way into viewers’ hearts. As The New York Times later explained,  

Ms. Williams once estimated that she had swum 1,250 miles for the cameras. In a bathing suit, she was a special kind of all-American girl: tall, lithe, breathtakingly attractive and unpretentious. She begged MGM for serious nonswimming roles, but the studio’s response was, in effect, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” … Her only dry-land box-office success was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” … with Ms. Williams as the owner of a baseball team whose players included Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (although even in that film, she was seen briefly in a swimming pool).

 

     The film critic Pauline Kael would eventually sum up the young actor’s greatest appeal: “Esther Williams had one contribution to make to movies – her magnificent athletic body. And for over 10 years MGM made the most of it, keeping her in clinging, wet bathing suits and hoping the audience would shiver.” 

     Out of the pool, in the real world, Williams was married four times, mostly badly. At 17, before she rose to fame, she wed for the first time, “to Leonard Kovner, a pre-med student whom she supported by working as a stock girl at a fancy department store.” When that marriage ended badly, Kovner demanded $1,500, all the money she had saved, before he would agree to a divorce. Her second try, to singer Ben Gage, lasted thirteen years, and brought her three children. “According to Ms. Williams, Mr. Gage frittered away $10 million of her money on alcohol, gambling and failed business ventures. He also neglected to pay taxes and left her in hock to the Internal Revenue Service for $750,000 by the time they divorced in 1959.” 

     A decade later, she married Fernando Lamas, an Argentine-born actor and director. He provided Esther with money, for a change. But he refused to allow her children to live with them – or even come to the wedding. After Lamas died, she married once more, when she was 73.

     Below, three shots of the actor:

 

* 

Clem Walker and Leone Baxter, his second wife, managed sixty California campaigns, including referendum votes between 1933 and 1959. They won fifty-five. 

In 1949 they offered their services to the American Medical Association and helped block President Truman’s health-insurance plan. Theodore H. White describes their principles: “The first of these…was unspoken: ‘Politics is too important to be left to politicians.’ The second is simpler; ‘More Americans like corn than caviar.’ The third is still operational: either party, or any legislature, can be taken over for a specific purpose if enough muscle, enough volunteers, enough grass-roots strength can be coaxed out of the ballot boxes.

 

And there were corollaries to these basic principles: the best kind of campaign is an attack campaign; in any campaign, an enemy has to be invented against whom the voters can be warned; issues are to be few, but must be clear—and must confront the voter with an emotional decision; the independent vote is critical in a close election, and once the party is captured by a nomination, the independent must be the target of all suasion and P. R.

 

Lastly, Whitaker and Baxter believed that a campaign must have an inner rhythm, a pace, a timing that would capture the attention of the news system, both print and electronic.

 

“Whitaker and Baxter were themselves sublimely uninterested in any substantive issues. Their ethics were those of a skilled lawyer who does his best to win a case. They could, for their fee, deliver a tailor-made campaign for anybody or any cause; and they usually won.” (Breach of Faith, p. 55; slightly modified)

 

* 

August 29: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb, catching the U.S. by surprise. Goldman writes: 

American scientists had believed the Russians would not get the atomic bomb until at least 1952, some even saying it would not be before 1955. In Chicago Harold C. Urey, the Nobel Prize leader in atomic research, managed to phrase what so many Americans were feeling. He was “flattened” by the announcement, Urey told reporters. “There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb – that’s two nations having it.” (1-100)

 

Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence, saw that fear of communism was warping American thought. He got off a perfect definition of a patriotic American as “one who tells all his secrets without being asked, believes we should go to war with Russia, holds no political view without prior consultation with his employer, does not ask for increases in salary or wages, and is in favor of peace, universal military training, brotherhood, and baseball.” (1/101) 

Goldman notes: “the shocks of 1949 were so severe that all old alignments were being shattered.” (1/127) 

…Albert Einstein went on television, the simple sweater jacket, the scraggly gray hair, the childlike face with the brilliant eyes all adding to the aura of an otherworldly wisdom beyond the power of ordinary mortals. With the order of President Truman to produce an H-bomb, Einstein said, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities. … General annihilation beckons.”

 

* 

September 6: Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran, who had seen extensive combat, goes for a 20-minute stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey, and shoots and kills thirteen people, including three children. Suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, he never stands trial. At the time of the rampage, Howard was living at home with his mother. The New York Times describes what happened: 

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend’s home. 

At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker’s shop on his block. He pulled out a 9 millimeter German Luger pistol he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.

“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.”

 

Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.

 

     Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.

 

The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”

 

Then Mr. Unruh approached a tavern, but the owner, Frank Engel, having heard the shots, locked the door and fled with his patrons to the rear as Mr. Unruh shot into the bar.

 

Next, Mr. Unruh fired into an apartment window and shot Thomas Hamilton, a 2-year-old, in the head. After shooting into a restaurant, he fired through the window of a passing automobile and hit Alvin Day, 24, a television repairman.

 

Mr. Engel, who owned a pistol, shot Mr. Unruh in the hip from an upper-floor window of the tavern building, but Mr. Unruh seemed not to notice the wound. 

Having reloaded his pistol, he went to a drugstore owned by Maurice Cohen, 40, whose family had argued with Mr. Unruh over his using the Cohens’s gate to take a shortcut from his home to the street. As Mr. Unruh entered, Jason Hutton, 45, an insurance agent, was emerging. Mr. Unruh shot him in the head.

Mr. Cohen fled to the roof of his apartment above the drugstore as his wife, Rose, 38, hid in a closet and pushed their son Charles, 12, into another closet. Mr. Unruh shot Mr. Cohen in the back, sending him plunging to the street. He also shot Ms. Cohen, firing through the closet door, and Minnie Cohen, 63, the druggist’s mother, as she was trying to call the police from a bedroom. Charles Cohen was unharmed.

Over the next few minutes, Mr. Unruh shot Helen Matlack Wilson, 37; her son, John, 9; and her mother, Emma Matlack, 68, who were in a car stopped at a red light. He also wounded Charles Peterson, 18, who had approached Mr. Hutton’s body outside the drug store, unaware that the gunman was still on the scene.

On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harrie, 36, and her son Armand, 16.

 

Unruh then retreated to his mother’s apartment. Fifty police converged, and opened fire with machine guns, shotguns, and pistols. At one point, a city official phoned the apartment and Howard answered. 

Mr. Buxton [the Camden official] asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed. 

“I don’t know, I haven’t counted,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good score.” 

“Why are you killing people?” Mr. Buxton asked. 

“I don’t know,” Mr. Unruh replied.

 

He was driven out into the open, after tear gas was fired into the building. He surrendered without further incident, and remained in state custody, in facilities for the criminally insane, for the rest of his life. He died at age 88, in October, 2009.

 

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September 25: Pro football is a different kind of game in 1949. In the season opener for the Chicago Bears, they hold the Green Bay Packers to -7 yards passing, when three different players combine to throw 13 passes, for zero completions, with one quarterback sack. The Bears turn the ball over three times, which would be terrible by modern standards. The Packers return the favor, only double, losing the ball six times, and the game, 17-0. Attendance is 25, 571.

 

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Baseball season: For the second time in her career, Doris Sams is chosen as MVP of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (founded in 1943). Highlights of her career will include leading the league with a record twelve homeruns in one season and hitting over .300, in each of her last four seasons, in a row. Sams was also a pitcher, and had one perfect game, another no hitter, and won a third epic duel, going all the way in a 1-0 win, against the Rockford Peaches, in 22 innings. 

    Another star of the league is Dorothy Kamenshek, the first baseman (“basewoman’?) for the Peaches. Twice, during her ten seasons, she led the league in batting average, and was chosen for seven All-Star teams. “She had the whole package,” another player recalled. “She could hit with power, she could lay the bunt down and steal the base. She was a great first baseman – she could go off the ground three feet and grab it, or dig it out of the dirt. She was a tough lady, and she was as smart as they come.” 

    Skirts were a required part of the uniform for the women, but Kamenshek wasn’t afraid to slide. She stole 109 bases in one season. “We got used to it,” she once said. “In the spring, we’re always hoping we’d develop calluses. If you got your skin toughened up, you were pretty lucky most of year.”

 

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October 7: George Blanda knocks down a 29-yard field goal in the first quarter of a Chicago Bears win, 17-7, over the Chicago Cardinals. He will go on to play 26 seasons, first with the Bears – not counting 1959, when he retired – then jumping to the American Football League in 1960, with the Houston Oilers. In the early years, the AFL will prove to be a pass happy league, with the Oilers winning the first two championships, and Blanda throwing 36 touchdown passes in 1961, and then 42 interceptions the following season. 

    Before he is done, Blanda will play in 340 games, make 335 field goals, attempt 641, and in an era of the straight-ahead kicking style, hit on only eight of 38 attempts, fifty yards or longer. Before he hangs up his cleats, he will score 2,002 points, a record at the time he retired. 

    “He never got older,” The Sporting News once wrote. “He just got better. He was the epitome of the grizzled veteran, the symbol of everlasting youth.”