▲Wednesday, March 1

St. David’s Day (Wales)

Mar 1: Klaus Fuchs convicted for treason. Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who had fled the Nazis in 1933 to became a British citizen and work on early British atomic bomb projects and the Manhattan Project, pleads guilty and is convicted in London on charges that he stole top secret information from Britain and the U.S. and passed it on to the Soviet Union. He is sentenced to fourteen years in prison, the maximum allowed under British law for simple treason, specifically, for violating the Official Secrets Act of 1911. (His crime did not qualify for high treason, which is a hanging offense.) He will serve a little more than nine years. After his release in 1959, he will emigrate to East Germany where he will continue his nuclear research at Rossendorf.

▲Thursday, March 2

Mar 2: Black tenant farmer saved from white-sheeted mob. A well-to-do farmer intervenes to save an African-American tenant farmer from a flogging by a white-sheeted mob near Eastman, Georgia. A mob calls out Jessie Lee Goodman from his home during the night while he is sleeping with his wife and children. They accuse him of stealing oil, drag him into the woods and whip him. Otho Wiggins is awoken and drives his pickup truck to the site of the flogging, turns his headlights on, and begins firing toward the surprised mob with his .22 rifle. No one is injured, but the mob scatters. Wiggins notifies Dodge County Sheriff O.B Peacock, but the sheriff claims he can’t leave his wife and children to investigate. The sheriff later laughs when he tells the local newspaper editor that he won’t investigate: “I don’t want the Ku Klux Klan getting after me.” That got the attention of the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, which, in turn, lit a fire under Sheriff Peacock. Within a week, he will arrest Theo Lewis, 43, and Alfred Crumley, 45, but the grand jury will refuse to indict them. The Eastman Times-Journal reveals that this is the third flogging in less than three months. Just before Christmas, a hooded and masked mob flogged Lou Ella Wilkerson, a white woman, for leaving her husband. And on February 16, a similar gang flogged Riley Dykes, “a crippled Negro employed on the Sam Bush farm.” He was flogged 25 times with a leather strap because “he talked too big to a white man.”

Mar 2: UMW acquitted of contempt, talks remain deadlocked. Federal Judge Richmond B. Keech surprises the Justice Department by acquitting the United Mine Workers of contempt of court, saying that the court cannot convict “on conjecture.” He rules that the union did act in good faith when its president, John L. Lewis, issued two back-to-work orders in compliance with Judge Keech’s temporary injunction, even though the union members themselves ignored the court’s and Lewis’s orders. Talks between coal operators and union officials resumed, but made no progress. But with this decision, coupled with hints dropped by President Truman that a mine seizure order might be in the works, observers feel that the two sides may be able to come up with an agreement in the next few days to end the nine-month deadlock.

▲Friday, March 3

Mar 3: Mine owners and UMW agree to new contract. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, and representatives of Northern, Western, and “captive” (steel-company owned) coal mines achieve a breakthrough in talks aimed at ending the nearly nine month-long coal strike that has brought massive cutbacks to rail service and steel production across the country. The agreement comes only a few hours after President Truman asks Congress for authority to seize the closed mines. The tentative agreement calls for a 70¢ raise to $14.75 per day (about $160 today), and an increase of 10¢ a ton in operators’ payments to the miners’ welfare fund. There are still several minor technicalities to work out in drafting the formal contracts, but both sides say that there shouldn’t be any impediment to miners returning to work on Monday. The only open question now is whether the Southern coal operators will join their Northern, Western and captive counterparts.

Mar 3: California professors threaten to quit en masse over loyalty oath. A group of non-tenured faculty members at the University of California vote 300 to 1 to quit en masse if any member of the group is dismissed for refusing to sign the loyalty oath required by the Board of Regents. The group acknowledges its “extreme vulnerability” because of lack of tenure, but points out “that academic freedom means that a scholar is to be judged solely on his professional competence and performance in the academic field.” The regents’ required loyalty oath is “in direct conflict with the principles of academic freedom and detrimental to the cause of free education everywhere.” The regents have imposed an April 30 deadline for signing the oath.

▲Saturday, March 4

Mar 4: UMW and coal companies haggle over details while industry begins planning for resumed coal deliveries. Anticipating that yesterday’s announced agreement between the United Mine Workers and coal operators won’t unravel over the weekend, the Interstate Commerce Commission revokes orders for a further fifteen percent cut in railroad passenger and freight traffic for coal-powered trains. Had it gone into effect, passenger service would have been curtailed to 35% of normal, and freight service would have been operating at 60% of normal. The rail carriers report an average of only twelve days of coal supply. Railroads instead begin moving empty coal cars to mining regions and other collection points in anticipation of renewed coal haulage when the mines resume operations. Crippled industries, schools, power companies and other businesses also begin cautious preparations to resume full operations. In Washington, D.C., representatives of the coal companies and UMW continue to hash out detailed language for the contract that fully and accurately spells out the agreed-upon terms while conforming to the law. One coal operator grumbles that the union is trying to renegotiate the whole agreement, but there’s no real sign of trouble. In case there is, leaders in both the House and Senate signal that if anything should cause the agreement between the coal companies and the UMW to fall apart, they are prepared to move swiftly to give President Truman the authorization he needs to take control of the mines. It’s expected that the final agreement will be signed sometime tomorrow.

Mar 4: Miners celebrate strike’s end. Carnival-like celebrations break out in several communities in Western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky as miners, steelworkers and railroad workers look forward to returning to work and receiving a regular paycheck again. Their pay increase is only about two-thirds of what they wanted. Even so, their jubilation overshadows any misgivings they may have. They have been working a three-day-a-week schedule for eight months before launching a wildcat strike almost eight weeks ago. And because it was an unauthorized wildcat strike, the United Mine Workers union was legally prohibited from providing financial assistance to striking miners. Between the strikes and the abbreviated work schedule, the average miner has lost about $1,873 (about $20,400 today) in wages. With this pay increase, it will take that average miner about 13½ years to come out even. Says one miner in Uniontown, Pennsylvania: “Empty pockets, empty larders and frozen credit will be a thing of the past if this contract is signed. But it will take a lot of work to make up the losses we suffered in the strike. Maybe we’ll never make it up.”

▲Sunday, March 5

Mar 5: Coal operators and UMW sign 2¼-year contract. The United Mine Workers issues its back-to-work notice to union locals at 5:30 p.m., and miners return to work beginning with the midnight shift tonight.

Mar 5: Last trolly crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. After more than fifty years of carrying passengers over the East River, the last trolly car crosses the Brooklyn Bridge this morning shortly after midnight. A boy scout blows taps on the bugle when the car leaves the Park Rown terminus and small fireworks lining the tracks are lit as the trolly passes. One hundred and four passengers are on board; some are officials, most are old timers and young teenagers. Motorman James Brensan, a veteran of the trolly service, makes the run, not because of his years of service but because it is his regularly scheduled route. The Brooklyn Bridge is about to undergo 1½ years of road construction which will add traffic and bus lanes and eliminate the trolley’s tracks.

▲Monday, March 6

Mar 6: African chief who married “white queen” barred from leaving London. Seretse Khama, chief of the African Bamanhwato tribe of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (Botswana) who married a white clerk for Loyds of London in 1947, reveals that the British Cabinet has prohibited him from returning to his home in the Bechuanaland protectorate for five years without its permission. Khama says that he has been informed of the cabinet’s position by Philip Noel Baker, then-Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, last Friday. Khama and his wife are living in Serowe, the Bamanhwato people’s capital, but he had returned to London at the British government’s request on February 15 for what he thought would be negotiations with the Cabinet. Instead, he says, “I feel I have been double-crossed” now that he’s been told he won’t be allowed to return home. “I only thought those things were supposed to happen in Russia,” he says. His wife, Ruth Williams Khama, feared a trap and rejected government pleas to accompany her husband to London. She remains in Serowe where she is expecting the couple’s first child in June.

▲Tuesday, March 7

Mar 7: Northwest Orient airliner crashes in Minneapolis. The crash occurs during a landing attempt during a snowstorm. The pilot of the Martin 2-0-2 airliner loses visual sight of the ground due to the blowing snow and clips a flagpole. The pilot is able to pull the plane up and circle around for another approach when part of the left wing falls off and the plane dives into a house. All ten passengers and three crew members are killed, along with two two children sleeping in their bedrooms inside the home.

Mar 7: US flag flies again over USS Arizona. As military chiefs and Hawaii territorial Gov. Ingram Stainback look on, Navy personnel raise a large flag over the battered, rusting, and sunken hulk of the Arizona where it lays along the old Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor. This marks the first time a flag has flown from the Arizona since December 7, 1941, when it sank during a Japanese surprise attack. The boarding party mounts the rusted and twisted superstructure for the brief four-minute ceremony. The American flag will fly over the Arizona every day from 8:00 a.m. to sundown beginning today. The Arizona is a grave memorial to the 1,177 officers and crew who died during the attack. Most of their bodies remain in the wreckage. A permanent floating memorial will be erected over the Arizona in 1962.

▲Wednesday, March 8

Mar 8: McCarthy accuses two State Department officials of Communist ties. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) accuses Dorothy Kenyon, a former municipal judge and a recent State Department official at the United Nations, of having been “affiliated with at least twenty-eight Communist-front organizations.” Kenyon calls McCarthy “an unmitigated liar” and says, “Sen. McCarthy is a coward to take shelter in the cloak of Congressional immunity.” McCarthy also accuses Ambassador-at-large Dr. Phillip C. Jessup, “a gentleman now formulating top flight policy in the Far East” of holding “an unusual affinity… for Communist causes.” McCarthy lobs these charges before a special Senate investigations subcommittee chaired by Sen. Millard E. Tydings (D-MD), which is tasked to look into the charges McCarthy made on the Senate Floor on February 20.

Mar 8: British MPs assail banishment of Seretse Khama. Intense criticism from both sides of the British House of Commons is hurled at the Labour government’s decision to banish Seretse Khama, chief of the African Bamanhwato tribe, from his home in the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (Botswana) for five years. His 1947 marriage to a white clerk who worked at Lloyds of London has raised the ire of the South African government of D.F. Malan, which is poised to implement a strict policy of racial separation known as apartheid. Malan had denounced the marriage as “nauseating” and he has already banned the couple from entering Mafikeng, a town in South Africa which serves as Bechuanaland’s administrative capital. Malan’s vocal opposition worries London that South Africa may meddle economically or militarily in Bechuanaland. Seretse was induced to go to London in February, only to learn that he would not be allowed to return home where his wife is expecting their first child in June. Conservative party leader Winston Churchill calls the ban “a very discreditable transaction.” Labour MP Reginald Sorensen declares that the race-based decision — although Prime Minister Clement Attlee insists race played no part in it — is already having the “gravest repercussions” around the world. The Times of London, in its lead editorial, says the decision displays the difference between Britain’s pledge “before the nations to respect the equal right of all races” and the racist policies of D.F. Malan’s Nationalist government. Labour M.P. Richard Crossman puts it more bluntly in the Daily Mirror: “I am not convinced that appeasement will be more successful when applied to South African nazis than it was when we tried it on their European cousins.”

▲Thursday, March 9

Mar 9: Iraq gives Jews one year to leave. Iraq enacts its Law of Denaturalization, giving its Jewish citizens one year to legally emigrate on the condition that they surrender their Iraqi citizenship and never return. In 1948, Iraq had stripped its Jewish citizens all of the rights and privileges of citizenship, made all “zionist activity” punishable by execution, prohibited Jews from engaging in banking and foreign currency transactions, fired Jews from government offices, railways, post and telegraph offices on the grounds that they would engage in “sabotage and treason,” and barred Jews from emigrating on the grounds that they would move to Israel and strengthen its fighting forces. Almost 124,000 people, or 90% of the Jewish population, will leave Iraq for Israel. Almost all of them will be forced to surrender their property to the Iraqi treasury.

▲Friday, March 10

▲Saturday, March 11

Mar 11: State Dept challenges McCarthy to back up his charges with evidence. Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy challenges Sen. Joseph McCarthy to provide evidence to support McCarthy’s allegations of Communists in the State Department. “I think that Senator McCarthy owes it to the country to make available… any evidence which he has that involves the loyalty of persons in the Department of State, whether it be the 205 that he said were Communists in Wheeling, the 57 that he said were card-carrying Communists in Salt Lake City, the four that he said weren’t Communists at all in Reno, the 81 that he mentioned on the floor of the Senate, or just one.”

▲Sunday, March 12

Mar 12: Cross is burned in front of Federal judge’s home. A crude four-foot (1.3 m) cross is burned overnight in front of the home of Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring in Charleston, South Carolina. The judge and his wife, Elizabeth Avery Waling, are both outspoken critics of white supremacy in the South. Police blame the cross burning in front of the 61 Meeting Street home on “pranksters” despite strong Klan activity throughout the area. Says Judge Waring, “The suggestion of pranksters is usually put out by police who do not wish to apprehend the real offenders. It is common knowledge that the KKK is highly organized in South Carolina, and I know from confidential sources that the Charleston County group has some 400 to 500 members. Parades have been staged in various sections, some within about twenty miles (32 km) of Charleston. This exhibition of the typical savagery of the Southern white supremacists proves that it is time for the decent people of America to demand that their national government take steps to suppress the real enemies of the American way of life.” In 1947, Judge Waring ruled that Negro voters must be allowed to participate in the Democratic primary. Like elsewhere in the South, South Carolina is essentially a one-party state where Democratic primary winners are virtually guaranteed to prevail in the general election. Says Mrs. Waring, “no White person has put a foot in our home since the Judge’s decision.” Last month, Mrs. Waring appeared in NBC radio’s Meet the Press to discuss interracial problems. She endorsed civil rights and full social integration, including marriage. “Let them marry White people of that’s what they want,” she said. Two weeks later, Judge Waring told an audience in Harlem that the South is sick with “the cancer of segregation.” Since then, a movement has been brewing in South Carolina calling for Judge Waring’s impeachment.

Mar 12: Belgian voters split on King Leopold’s return. Belgians go to the polls hoping to finally resolve the Royal Question:  Should exiled King Leopold III be allowed to return to the throne? When Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, King Leopold surrendered to the Nazis rather than join his government in exile to continue the fight. When the government returned to Brussels in 1945, it declared Leopold “unable to rule” after Leopold refused to declare his support for the Allies. Leopold’s brother, the quiet and well-regarded Prince Charles, has been ruling Belgium as Regent. In 1949, the Social Christian (Catholic) Party, which draws its support mainly from the Dutch-speaking, agricultural Flanders region where Leopold remains popular, won a bare majority in Parliament, displacing the minority government of Socialist Paul-Henri Spaak. The new government, under Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens, called a non-binding referendum to decide whether to invite the King to return. The Socialists, who draw their support mainly from the wealthier industrial belt of Wallonia, staunchly oppose both his return and the referendum itself.  Spaak predicted that Leopold would carry Flanders and lose Wallonia, and therefore disrupt the careful political balance that governments have sought to preserve between the two regions. Predicts Spaalk, “The government would not only have on its hands the King’s abdication or return, it would also have to appease the anger, acerbity and rancor of Flanders or Wallonia.” His prediction was right. Nationwide, 57% vote for the King’s return, with majorities in seven of the nine provinces voting yes. But the vote is split along regional lines: only 42% of Walloons support his return while 72% of Flemish vote yes. Worse, within Wallonia’s northern industrial belt of Hainaut, Liège, and Namur provinces, along with the Walloon portion of Brabant, support for Leopold in some arrondissements is as low as 31%. In Liège’s eponymous arrondissement, only 35% of voters call for Leopold’s return, while just over the Walloon-Flemish line in Limburg’s Tongeren-Maaseik arrondissement, 84% of voters back the King. Over the next four months, the government’s attempt to bring Leopold back to Brussels despite this sharp geographical divide will provoke the country’s worst crisis since World War II and threaten to plunge Belgium into civil war.

Mar 12: Eighty killed in world’s worst air disaster so far. Seventy-five passengers and five crew members are killed in the world’s worst air disaster to date when a chartered Avro 688 Tudor V carrying rugby fans on a return trip from Belfast crashes while trying to land at Llandow aerodrome, fifteen miles west of Cardiff in South Wales. The airliner is carrying seventy-eight passengers, six more than its normal maximum load, as it approaches the runway at Llandow at an abnormally low altitude. The pilot pulls the plane up, but the aircraft stalls as the nose rises 35 degrees to vertical. The plane turns clockwise and crashes onto a field within sight of friends and family awaiting the fans’ return. Three passengers survive: two who were sitting in added seats bolted onto the tail section, and a third who was in the lavatory at the time of the crash. The Ministry of Civil Aviation will determine that the probable cause of the accident was the added seats in the aircraft’s rear, which moved the center of gravity further back and reduced the effectiveness of the aircraft’s elevators.

▲Monday, March 13

Mar 13: McCarthy says State Department official is “Communizing the world.” Sen. Joseph McCarthy accuses State Department official Haldore E. Hanson of being on “a mission to communize the world … a burning all-consuming mission (that) has raised him from a penniless operator of a Communist magazine in Peiping in the middle Thirties to one of the architects of our foreign policy in the State Department today.” Hanson, a former war correspondent who covered the Chinese civil war and the invasion of China by Japan, is an assistant director of the Point Four development and recovery program for Asia. McCarthy’s sole evidence against Hanson consists of very brief excerpts from Hanson’s 1939 book Humane Endeavor: The Story of the China War, which McCarthy claims is evidence of Hanson’s “hero worship” of the Communists. McCarthy also lobs charges against Owen Lattimore, who is director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and a frequent consultant to the State Department on Far East policy. McCarthy describes Lattimore as “a policy-making State Department attaché collaborating with those who have sworn to destroy the nation by force of violence.” Lattimore is currently out of the country, heading a U.N mission evaluating technical and economic assistance in remote regions of Afghanistan. Cut off from communications, Lattimore won’t learn of McCarthy’s charges until March 24.

▲Tuesday, March 14

Mar 14: McCarthy names five “bad security risks,” including one homosexual. The State Department has been challenging McCarthy to provide his list of names that he claims are communists and security risks so they can be checked out. McCarthy instead decides to try the individuals in the court of public opinion. He had earlier named Dorothy Kenyon, former American member of a United Nations commission. On the day she is due to defend herself before a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, McCarthy grabs the headlines again by naming four more: a former state department employee now at UNESCO, a Harvard University astronomer, a Williams College professor, and a State Department Far East expert. McCarthy also describes, but doesn’t publicly name, “a homosexual” who was allowed to resign from the State Department in 1948 only to take a job with the CIA in a “most sensitive” position. McCarthy says that his “perversion” made him a bad security risk.

Mar 14: State Department official clears herself of McCarthy’s charges. Dorothy Kenyon, a former municipal judge and a recent State Department official at the United Nations, denies under oath before the Tydings Senate Subcommittee that she has ever had “any connection of any kind with communism or its adherents.” She produces documentary evidence to refute charges made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) on March 8, and points to public statements she had made throughout her career that were critical of Soviet policies, especially when the Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany to divide Poland in 1939. McCarthy decides that he has another important engagement and is not present during Kenyon’s testimony. The only Republican present to hear Kenyon’s testimony, Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA), concedes that he is convinced that Kenyon is innocent of McCarthy’s charges. Incredibly, and to the guffaws of Democrats on the panel, Hickenlooper tries to argue that, in his interpretation, McCarthy hadn’t charged her with subversion. Democrats respond that the whole point of the subcommittee’s work is to investigate McCarthy’s charges of Communists in the State Department. If he didn’t mean to accuse Kenyon of being one of them, Democrats argue, he would not have brought her name up.

▲Wednesday, March 15

Mar 15: Today is the deadline for filing income tax returns. The deadline for American taxpayers to file their income tax returns is midnight tonight. A typical household’s annual income is about $3,100 (about $32,800 today). The standard deduction is 10% of income, up to $1,000 (about $10,600 today). The personal exemption is $600 per person (about $5,300 today). This means that a typical family of four would pay about $65 (less than $700 today), and a family of five would pay virtually no taxes. The lowest tax rate is 20% for those whose net income after exemptions and deductions is less than $2,000 (about $21,300 today). The top marginal tax rate is 91% for those making more than $200,000 (about $2.1 million today), but the total bill is capped at a maximum of 72% of total income. The same tax brackets apply to single taxpayers, heads of households, and married couples filing separately. Married couples filing jointly get a special break beginning this year. Their marginal tax rates are determined by the bracket corresponding to half of their taxable income.

▲Thursday, March 16

▲Friday, March 17

St. Patrick’s Day

Mar 17: KKK parades through Columbia, South Carolina.  The motorcade of about 100 cars with 150 to 200 unmasked Ku Klux Klansmen drive from downtown Columbia to Capitol Airport, where they hold a cross-burning ceremony. The state Constabulary, the Richland County sheriff’s office and city police officials all deny knowledge of the parade, which takes place on busy downtown streets between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night. The demonstration is held on the eve of the first Democratic Party registrations here. In 1947, Federal Judge J. Waties Waring issued an injunction that ended the South Carolina Democratic Party’s all-white primary. With South Carolina being essentially a one-party state, the Democratic primary all but guarantees the winner of the general election. As a result of Judge Waring’s ruling, 35,000 African-Americans had registered to vote. Thomas Hamilton, head of the Association of Carolina Klans, says he authorized the parade, but declined to say whether it had anything to do with the current registration drive. A cross had been burned on Judge Waring’s lawn in Charleston earlier this week.

Mar 17: Belgians go on general strike over King Leopold’s return from exile. A quarter of a million Belgian workers go out on general strike in protest against efforts to restore exiled King Leopold III to the throne. The strike, which was called by Socialist trade union leaders, is confined mainly to the industrial French-speaking Wallonia region, which voted 58% against the King’s return last Sunday. In conservative, agricultural Dutch-speaking Flanders, 72% voted for his return. The strikes were originally meant to last twenty-four hours as a warning demonstration, but a Socialist Trade Union Federation official says it will continue “until Wallonia is liberated from the domination of the Flemish clericals who want Leopold back on the throne.” Leopold, who is in exile in Switzerland, urges Parliament to heed the “unquestionable majority” and end the regency of his brother, Prince Charles.

▲Saturday, March 18

Mar 18: Belgian government collapses over King Leopold’s return. The Belgian government of Gaston Eyskens collapses when the Liberals, who hold the balance of power, hold firm on their pre-referendum promise to oppose King Leopold’s return unless he got more than half of the vote in each of the three regions: Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Leopold won 57% nationwide, but he failed to muster a majority in Wallonia and Brussels.

▲Sunday, March 19

Mar 19: Nationalist China says it has landed on mainland coast. Officials of the Republic of China on Taiwan say that their Nationalist troops landed on the Chinese mainland coast on Wednesday and captured the coastal town of Sungmen (Songmen), about 200 miles (320 km) south of Shanghai. The attack comes five months after Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) declared victory over the Nationalist government and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Nationalist forces have been bombing Shanghai and other coastal cities, and signaling plans to launch air raids on almost a dozen other cities. In addition to taking Sungmen, Nationalist say that they have also landed at Haimen (Jianmen), thirteen miles (21km) to the north, giving them control of about twenty-miles (32 km) of coastline. They report advancing thirty miles inland toward Linhai with the aim of cutting off Chinese reinforcements. They report killing 2,500 Chinese Communist troops. The Nationalist announcement describes the attack as a “raid,” leaving some doubt as to whether they intend to stay. Gen. Chiang Kai-shek has repeatedly promised that his forces will return to the mainland and drive out the “Soviet aggressors.” A naval communiqué also reports that patrols on the east side of the Luichow (Leizhou) Peninsula intercepted more than thirty junks near Tan Hai (Donghai) Island.

▲Monday, March 20

Mar 20: Ambassador Jessup accuses McCarthy of harming national interests. U.S. Ambassador at Large Philip C. Jessup accuses Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) of making “false and irresponsible” charges that show a “shocking disregard” for the national interest and harms the U.S.’s foreign relations. Jessup makes this statement while testifying before the Tydings Senate subcommittee charged with investigating McCarthy’s claims of Communists in the State Department. McCarthy had told the panel on March 8 that Jessup held “an unusual affinity with Communist causes.” Jessup brought before the panel documentation and past statements showing his clear opposition to Communism. He also has letters of support from Gens. George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

▲Tuesday, March 21

Documentation:
Mar 21: Columnist George E. Sokolsky says homosexuals are “advantageously stationed” in the State Department. The nationally-syndicated columnist, a supporter and mentor of Sen. McCarthy, writes: “A charge that 91 employees of the State Department were dismissed for being homosexuals passes with little excitement. …Perhaps the reason is that the word, homosexual, is considered bad. It is not the word that is bad; it is the consequences of the deed that lay the individual open to blackmail. He is ashamed; he is frightened; he has become accustomed to secrecy, conspiracy, lying. He is always subject to blackmail. … A liar advantageously stationed; a blackmailed creature in a sensitive spot; a frightened soul, caught in the web of conspiracy, can produce such a result as the conquest of China by Soviet Russia by consent. There is the menace.”

Mar 21: McCarthy says he will “stand or fall” in naming “top Russian espionage agent” in the State Department. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) tells reporters that he will soon name a man “now connected” with the State Department who is “the top Russian espionage agent in this country.” McCarthy says, “This man I’m talking about was (Alger) Hiss’s onetime boss in the espionage ring. He has a desk in the State Department and has access to the files — or at least he had until four or five weeks ago .” McCarthy confidently adds: “I am willing to stand or fall on this one. If I am shown to be wrong on this, I think the subcommittee would be justified in not taking my other cases too seriously.” McCarthy says this before going into a meeting of a Senate subcommittee tasked with investigating McCarthy’s charges of Communists in the State Department. Subcommittee chairman Sen. Millard Tydings (D-MD) immediately calls the committee into a closed session. Tydings later tells reporters that McCarthy gave the committee the name. Tydings says McCarthy offered no direct evidence, but referred the subcommittee to “certain sources where he said he believed the evidence might be obtained.”

Mar 21: Nationalist China says mainland incursion is ended. A Navy spokesman says that part of the landing force announced on Sunday that went ashore about 200 miles (320 km) south of Shanghai has withdrawn, and the rest have gone inland to join Nationalist guerillas. The spokesman boasts that the operation is just an overture for larger ones to come.

▲Wednesday, March 22

▲Thursday, March 23

Documentation:
Mar 23: Robert C. Ruark’s column warns of homosexuals “traveling in packs.” The Scripps-Howard columnist writes that the ninety-one homosexuals mentioned by State Department official John Peurofoy all were part of just one such pack: “I know the story of the highly-placed State Department executive who crowded the lists with so many homosexuals that 91 resignations of firings have recently resulted. His appointees surrounded themselves with their appointees, and on down the line. What you have finally is a corroded organization which can be bribed, bulled or blackmailed in the easiest possible fashion. …A great deal of the trouble we are in, internationally, can be laid to the tolerance of that kind of weakness in a service which should be above reproach.”

Mar 23: American actor, comedian and writer Terry Sweeny is born. He will become the first openly-gay cast member for Saturday Night Live in the 1985-1986 season.

Mar 23: Academy Awards ceremony held in Hollywood. The film All the Kings Men takes three of the top Oscars at the Academy Awards, held at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. The film wins the Best Motion Picture award, Broderick Crawford wins Best Actor, and Mercedes McCambridge wins Best Supporting Actress. Olivia de Havilland adds a second Oscar to her mantle when she wins Best Actress for her role in The Heiress. The Best Supporting Actor goes to Dean Jagger in Twelve O’Clock High. Joseph Mankiewicz wins two Oscars, for Best Director and Best Screenplay, for A Letter to Three Wives.

▲Friday, March 24

Documentation:
Mar 24: Robert C. Ruark follows up with “a drunk, a homosexual, and a flagrant fool.” Ruark follows his March 23 article with a tale of a trip to Africa aboard a ship full of State Department employees. “This was our delegation — a drunk, a homosexual, and a flagrant fool. … When a drunk is in charge of one set of papers and a homosexual is in charge of another and the fool has reign over still another, you don’t really need spies.  Any half-stupid private detective, for ten bucks a day, can catch any or all in compromise, and shake him for whatever you wish.” Sen. Joseph McCarthy is impressed enough with this column to place it into the Congressional Record. Populist Congressman Clare Hoffman (R-MI), a McCarthy ally in the House, calls for an investigation into Ruark’s charges.

Documentation:
Mar 24: Westbrook Pegler says homosexuals in government weren’t a problem before FDR. Right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler has long been a nasty critic of FDR and the New Deal. Pegler is so right wing that in the 1960s he will write for the John Birch Society, the White Christian Council and the anti-Semitic Christian Crusade. But in the 1950s his column is distributed by King Features to more than 120 papers across the country. In today’s column, he writes: “In the history of the United States, no situation ever existed before the long Roosevelt regime which was even comparable to that which was revealed recently by John E. Peurifoy … It is common knowledge that such persons (homosexuals) have psychic ways of seeking one another. They flock together and are secretive and without honor. …. No reason occurs why the State Department should have been so heavily contaminated and others should not have been equally corrupt. There is no reason to assume, in the absence of proof, that the 91 who were eliminated from the State Department were, in the English phrase, ‘the lot of them.’ Others may be there still.

Mar 24: FBI director Hoover says there’s nothing in FBI files to support McCarthy’s charge. The Senate subcommittee investigating Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s charges of Communist infiltration in the State Department is given what FBI director J. Edgar Hoover describes as a complete analysis of confidential files about the man who Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) called “the top Russian espionage agent.” Hoover tells the closed session that there is nothing in the files to support McCarthy’s charges. Hoover also says that to release the files themselves would result in the “complete collapse” of FBI procedures that require absolute confidentiality from informants. He also says that files often included unproven and false rumors, and that their release would be ruinous to innocent people.

Mar 24: Half a million Belgians go on strike. Up to half a million workers in the Walloon provinces of Belgium go on a twenty-four hour general strike in a demonstration against the return of exiled King Leopold III. In Brussels, work goes on more or less as usual, except for a riot by students that injures about twenty-five. Efforts to form a new government fail. The only way to form a government would be for an alliance of all-Catholic parties, which party leaders fear would cause even more strife between Wallonia’s powerful Socialists and the more conservative and agricultural Flanders.

▲Saturday, March 25

Mar 25: Wisconsin campaigns to desegregate hotels and resort. Ahead of the summer travel season, the state of Wisconsin launches a campaign to remove the “Gentiles Only” and “Restricted Clientele” signs from the state’s resorts, hotels and tourist homes. A special committee of the Governor’s Commission on Human Rights is sending letters to 6,400 operators, reminding them of the state’s anti-discrimination law that has been on the books since 1895. The State Highway Department is also joining the campaign by printing on all of its maps of Wisconsin resort areas: “Wisconsin human rights statute 340.75 guarantees full and equal enjoyment of all places of public accommodation or amusement alike to all persons of every race and color.” Most hotel and tourist home operators say they will comply with the law. A resort operator in Spooner responds, “Your letter … has made me a proud citizen of the state of Wisconsin.” But in the next two months, sixteen will express their disapproval. “Dust out a jail cell,” one resort owner will reply. “I am your prospective client.” He needn’t worry. The 1895 law is toothless. It imposes no jail penalties or fines.

▲Sunday, March 26

Mar 26: Owen Lattimore named as “top Russian espionage agent.” Columnist Drew Pearson reveals on his radio program that the State Department adviser who McCarthy accused of being “the top Russian espionage agent” in the U.S. is Johns Hopkins University professor Owen Lattimore. Members of the Senate subcommittee confirm the identification.

▲Monday, March 27

Mar 27: U.S. Army drops racial limits in recruiting. The U.S. Army begins open recruiting of all races as the next step in President Truman’s 1948 order integrating the U.S. military. Until now, a racial quota has limited African-American recruitment to no more than 10% of the total. The Army adopted a policy of allowing African-American soldiers to qualify for all Army jobs and schools just last January. Southern Senators and Congressmen loudly denounce the announcement. Rep. Ed Gossett, of Wichita Falls, Texas, predicts, “In due time, the caliber, if not the morale, of American fighting forces may be destroyed. … This and other similar actions would not at this time be happening but for the political power of racial minorities in the big states and in the big cities of big states. The Yankee politicians in both major parties do these things to get the minority votes in New York City, Chicago and Detroit.” He calls for Electoral College reforms which he says will “take away the tremendous political advantage of these minorities.”

Mar 27: Owen Lattimore learns of McCarthy’s charges against him. Owen Lattimore, who Sen. Joseph McCarthy accused of being “the top Russian espionage agent” in the U.S., finally receives word about McCarthy’s charges. He has been spending several weeks heading a U.N. mission to discuss technical and economic assistance in Afghanistan, and has been out of direct communication with the West. Upon receiving word about McCarthy’s accusations, Lattimore cables the Associated Press: “McCarthy’s off record rantings pure moonshine. Delighted his whole case rests on me as this means he will fall flat on face. Exactly what he has said on record unknown here so cannot reply in detail but will be home in a few days and will contact you then.”

Mar 27: Truman says Jessup will stay on the job, praises his work. President Truman stood firmly behind Dr. Philip Jessup, the most prominent person in Truman’s administration accused by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) of aiding “Communist causes.” Jessup, an ambassador at large at the State Department, returned to the U.S. from a tour of Asian allies to testify last week before the Tydings Senate subcommittee charged with investigating McCarthy’s claims. Truman announces that Jessup will not go back to Columbia University as previously planned but will stay on as roving ambassador. “The extremely valuable trip he has just completed to Asia and the Far East has underscored his unusual usefulness to the United States Government, and I am delighted that Gen. Eisenhower, as president of Columbia University, has agreed that Ambassador Jessup’s leave of absence should be extended indefinitely.”

▲Tuesday, March 28

Mar 28: State Department official dares McCarthy to waive libel immunity. State Department foreign aid official Haldore E. Hanson accuses Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) of “hatemongering” and spreading “base and loose charges” behind the protection of Congressional immunity. Two weeks earlier, McCarthy accused Hanson of having “an all-consuming mission” to “communize the world.” Speaking before a Senate investigations subcommittee chaired by Sen. Millard Tydings (D-MD), Hanson offers a challenge: “If Sen. McCarthy will say directly what he has insinuated, if he will call me a Communist in that kind of direct American English which Midwesterners are accustomed to using, and say it without benefit of immunity, I assure him that he will be called upon to answer to me in a court of justice.” Hanson added, “I wish to state now, under oath, that I am not a Communist. I have never been a Communist. I have never belonged to an organization cited by the Attorney General as being a Communist-front organization.” Hanson discloses that because of McCarthy’s charges against him, his neighbors in Virginia have branded him as “a Russian spy” and are circulating a petition “calling my family undesirable and asking us to get out of the community.”

▲Wednesday, March 29

Mar 29: Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herblock introduces the word “McCarthyism” into the American political lexicon.

▲Thursday, March 30

Mar 30: McCarthy says Lattimore was “high up” in Communist circles. Taking full advantage of immunity against libel charges for speeches made on the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) holds that floor for a four-hour speech in which he charges that Far East expert Owen Lattimore had been for years a member of the Community Party. McCarthy charges that Lattimore, director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, was working double duty as a “Soviet agent” while a State Department consultant on Far East policy. He also claims that a witness will place Lattimore “high up” in Communist party circles. McCarthy accuses Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being “the voice for the mind of Lattimore,” and that every major components of State Department policy in the Far East has been welcomed by the Soviet Union. He also says that the State Department’s Far Eastern Division and the Voice of America are “almost completely controlled and dominated by individuals who are more loyal to the ideals and designs of Communism than to those of the free, God-fearing half of the world.”

▲Friday, March 31

Documentation:
Mar 31: Rep. Arthur L. Miller gives “the putrid facts” about homosexuality. During a debate to fund the Marshal Plan of foreign economic aid through 1951, Rep. Miller (R-NE) proposes an amendment prohibiting homosexuals from working in the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the agency tasked with administering the program. Miller, a physician by training, defends his amendment in a statement stripping “the fetid, stinking flesh off of this skeleton of homosexuality.” He says: “There are places in Washington where they gather for the purpose of sex orgies, where they worship at the cesspool and flesh pots of iniquity. There is a restaurant downtown where you will find male prostitutes. … Those people like to be known to each other. They have signs used on streetcars and in public places to call attention to others of like mind. Their rug and fairy parties are elaborate. … [T]here is some physical danger to anyone exposing all of the details and nastiness of homosexuality, because some of these people are dangerous. They will go to any limit.” His amendment will fail. Four days later, he will grumble to the house that “yesterday a taxicab driver told me that the homosexuals had quite a celebration on Saturday and Sunday nights. They were celebrating the green light they thought they received from this House.”

Mar 31: Atomic Energy Commission orders destruction of April’s Scientific American. Gerard Piel, editor of Scientific American, reveals that the Atomic Energy Commission ordered the burning of 3,000 copies of the April issue because of an article about the hydrogen bomb. On March 15, the commission requested that about half of the article be withheld from publication, but the issue was already on the presses. Piel noted that the material had been widely published here and abroad, and had either been declassified or had never been classified. “Strict compliance with the commission’s policies would mean that we could not teach physics,” said Piel. In the end, only a fraction of one column was excised, and the revised issue went to press.

Mar 31: Hot Springs, New Mexico, becomes Truth or Consequences.  Hot Springs residents vote overwhelmingly, 1,294 to 295, to change the town’s name to Truth or Consequences. The change comes after Ralph Edwards, host of the popular NBC radio program announces that he will host the show’s tenth anniversary program in the first town that renames itself after the show.