The Charlotte News
Wednesday, October 11, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the North Koreans fought hard against three allied forces converging on Pyongyang. The South Korean forces were driving on the capital from the east and southeast after capturing Wonsan and the American First Cavalry was driving from the south, all within less than 100 miles. Maj. General Hobart Gay told a correspondent that the North Koreans were beaten and it was only a matter of time before the North Korean capital would fall. Mop-up operations were proceeding in Wonsan. To the southeast, South Korean forces captured Kumhwa, a major road center, and drove several miles to the northwest.
North Korean Premier Kim Il Sung said in a radio broadcast that his people could not surrender, that their "motherhood" was face to face with a "grave crisis". He ordered his troops to fight until "the final day of victory". He urged study of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia as an example to follow. The message was apparently in response to General MacArthur's last ultimatum of surrender, broadcast on Sunday.
The President said at a press conference the previous day that he would discuss with General MacArthur in their prospective meeting in the Pacific the needed actions in the final phase of the Korean war to assure "a unified, independent and democratic Korea."
The Defense Department warned that the Korean war was "far from over" and that plenty of fighting still lay ahead.
Good, we thought we had missed out on all the fun and sun.
The Army called for drafting 40,000 more men during December, raising the total to 210,000 inductees since the start of the new defense build-up program. It would boost the total size of the Army to 970,000, including National Guard units and reserves, compared to 591,000 before the Korean war. Its objective was a 1.3-1.5 million man Army out of a projected three million men to be in the armed forces.
After disappointment on the part of Western diplomats at the U.N. for the expression of support by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky for the four-point plan of Secretary of State Acheson to provide the U.N. General Assembly with power in emergencies not strapped by the Big Five veto in the Security Council, turning out to be nearly complete opposition to the plan, the Western nations nevertheless persevered with the proposal. Mr. Vishinsky had asserted that, while he would support having armed forces at the ready to enforce resolutions of the organization, the rest of the proposal, to allow the General Assembly to act in emergencies, would undermine the power of the Security Council, that only the Council could control such an armed force. He claimed that the veto was a right of the minority nations to protect themselves against the will of the majority.
Ambassador to Moscow Alan Kirk would leave Moscow the following day for a two-week tour of Western Europe, proceeding on personal business.
The President named Cyrus Ching, the Government's lead labor dispute mediator, to head the Wage Stabilization Board.
Heads of fifteen non-operating rail unions with a million members announced they were seeking a 25-cents per hour wage increase, to cost the railroads an estimated 400 million dollars per year. The average worker in the unions presently received $60.15 per week and the raise would boost that by ten dollars. They had received their last wage increase, seven cents, two years earlier.
The Government imposed rigid export trade restrictions on cotton to halt rising prices and assure the domestic supply.
The Government Bureau of Statistics reported that food prices, based on a survey of 25 primary foods, rose another 1.4 percent in the last two weeks of September, bringing the total rise to 2.7 percent above the prices registered on June 15, before the outbreak of the war on June 25.
Starting the next day, the Government would impose new restrictions on mortgages, with minimum down payments of ten percent for non-veterans on houses costing less than $5,000, up to 50 percent for houses costing above $24,250, the total range being 5 to 45 percent, and the term of payment being shortened to twenty years, rather than the current standard of 25 years.
A proposal to replace Secretary of State Acheson would be brought before the American Legion convention in Los Angeles. The outgoing national executive committee recommended the proposal because, it contended, the American people had lost confidence in him.
In Rome, film director Roberto Rossellini said that he had filed suit against Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado for making derogatory remarks about him at a cocktail party in Rome the previous night, calling him a scoundrel in the presence of five Italian newspaper men. On the Senate floor the previous March, Senator Johnson had also attacked Mr. Rossellini, the object of press scrutiny at the time for fathering a child out of wedlock with Ingrid Bergman, to whom he was now married, saying that he had been a Nazi collaborator, a black market operator, and a "notorious cocaine addict". Mr. Rossellini at the time had replied that his work was the best response.
In Torreon, Mexico, a Mexican youth was in jail but happy after hitching a ride on the tail of a United passenger airliner on Monday in its flight to Mexico City. His clothing was ripped to bits as the plane took off at 160 mph and climbed to 12,000 feet in near freezing temperatures. His back was cut and bleeding from the lashing caused by the shreds of his shirt. He had worn a leather helmet and goggles to protect his head during the hour-long flight, before the pilot landed again at Torreon after sensing something wrong with the tail rudder. The youth said that he had always wanted to fly but did not have the money. He had hung around the Torreon airport for a week before deciding that the only way to accomplish his feat was to fly by night—and the seat of his tail.
Fulton Oursler presents chapter 3 of
his serialized Why I Know There Is a God, telling of a meeting
with Dr. Albert Schweitzer
On the editorial page, "The Picture of Gordon Gray" finds that the right person had been selected as president of the Consolidated University. He had demonstrated in his address at his installation the prior day that he was humble and modest, had a broad vision with a good sense of perspective, was a man of courage and firmness and, above all, fair-minded. He also showed a sense of humor. It admires especially the passage excerpted on the page re Communism. He also showed that he understood the position of the University in the affairs of the state, region, nation, and the world.
It provides a quote of his pledge to the Board of Trustees as the most telling example of the qualities he had demonstrated in the address.
"Vishinsky's Quarterbacking" finds Andrei Vishinsky to be a master at play-calling in the Russian U.N. delegation, as exampled by his sudden statement on Monday agreeing with part of the four-point proposal of Secretary Acheson to have a veto-free General Assembly able to act in emergencies and deploy a security force to back up U.N. resolutions. It finds that the Russians could not logically oppose the resolution as it was aimed against aggressor nations and the Soviets had claimed that the U.S. was the aggressor in Korea.
But then, as the Western delegates questioned the motive for the apparent sudden support, Mr. Vishinsky as suddenly reversed field and called the proposal to have the Assembly act in emergencies "bizarre" and "illegal", contrary to the Charter's establishment of the Security Council, providing the Big Five with the power of unilateral veto. It predicts that there would yet be more changes in Soviet attitude before the matter came to a vote.
"Will Segregation Stand Up in N.C.?" questions whether the decision of Federal District Court Judge Johnson J. Hayes would withstand appellate review in the case of Floyd McKissick and others seeking admission to the UNC Law School on the basis that the facilities at the Law School of the North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham, now N.C. Central University, violated the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson and thus did not pass muster under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The judge had distinguished the facts of the case from those of Sweatt v. Painter, decided by the Supreme Court the prior spring, holding that, under Plessy, the plaintiff had to be admitted to the University of Texas Law School because of the lack of a substantially equal State-provided black facility for the study of law. In Sweatt, the black law school, however, was found to have been hastily established, with not only an inferior physical plant and faculty to that of the University of Texas Law School, but moreover lacking in the intangibles, the prestige in the community of lawyers and judges and producing the practitioners of the law from among the graduates of the law school.
By contrast, suggests the piece, the North Carolina College for Negroes Law School had been established a decade earlier and was found by the Federal District Court to possess these intangible qualities on a substantially equal basis to that of UNC. The District Court had found: "There are certain differences of facilities existing at the University Law School not present at the College Law School but such disparities as do exist are either overcome or equalized by advantages which the plaintiffs would enjoy at the College Law School... There is no evidence before the court to show that a Negro lawyer attending the University of North Carolina would enjoy a higher standing with the Judges, and lawyers, and litigants, and jurors and witnesses than he would enjoy if he attended the College Law School."
The piece remarks that the case would ultimately await decision by the Supreme Court to decide the fate of the applicants. Eventually in 1951, as indicated, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals would reverse and order admission of the applicants on the basis that the State had not shown proof that it had provided a separate but substantially equal law school for black applicants. The case would not go to the Supreme Court.
Drew Pearson discusses the distraction of enlisted men from their duties by such things as waiting two hours recently to hear General Lawton Collins, chief of staff of the Army, address them at Camp Pickett, Va. He had told them that he was a great believer in the prestige of rank, a line which had stuck with them. Congressmen Wayne Hays of Ohio and John McGuire of Connecticut dropped in to see how the draftees were being treated and were received initially by officers tartly, being told that the men were busy assembling for the General's visit. They decided that other such surprise visits would therefore be in order.
He notes that the remark on rank by General Collins referred to the fact that all enlisted men could be promoted and that junior officers and non-commissioned officers were the backbone of the Army.
Henry Kaiser had just repaid all of the outstanding amount due on a loan from the Government during the war to build the Fontana steel plant in Southern California, disproving the contention of the major steel producers in the East that California was too sparsely populated to support a successful steel operation. Mr. Kaiser had greatly expanded the operation even after the war and it was thriving. The Eastern steel producers had waited until after the war to set up their operations in the West, capitalizing on war surplus plants, purchased at pennies on the dollar. Mr. Kaiser had used private enterprise and paid 100 cents on the dollar for his plant.
Federal judges in Texas had been lenient on tax evaders, in one case the judge imposing only a fine of $20,000 on a defendant, a millionaire businessman who had cheated the Government out of $250,000 in taxes, albeit prosecution for part of which having been barred by the applicable statute of limitations. The judge had even given the defendant a choice between the stated fine and a $5,000 to $10,000 fine plus a short probated sentence.
An excerpt appears from the installation address of former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray as president of the Consolidated University of North Carolina, provided the previous day on the campus of N.C. State at William Neal Reynolds Coliseum, the excerpt concerning his views of Communism. He asserts that while Communism was as the underside of a bound rock, refusing enlightenment, and that the University would not knowingly provide safe harbor to the advocates of such a closed-minded system, it would also have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the fact of adherence to the philosophy and system before taking any action, and that there should be no obsession with rooting out Communism, given that its adherents were small in number.
Marquis Childs, in London, tells of new hope in Britain that the Korean war would swiftly reach its end, arising from the recent victories in the North, and that a third world war would be averted. But at at the same time, there was fear in the British Government that the Communist Chinese would become involved in the fight and result in endless warfare between Asians and the West.
In an August meeting of the executive council of the Labor Party, Prime Minister Clement Attlee was asked whether, if the U.S. became embroiled in a war with Communist China concerning Formosa, the British would be obliged to become an ally. Prime Minister Attlee had replied in the negative. Some Labor Party members believed that communication of this reply to the President may have contributed to his decision to fire Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and also influenced his radio broadcast clarifying American policy on Formosa, following the dispute with General MacArthur and his withdrawn address to the American Legion in which he had said the U.S. would unilaterally protect Formosa permanently, apart from the U.N. stance, adhered to by the Administration, to neutralize Formosa only for the duration of the Korean war.
Some Americans found the British position to be appeasement, but behind the position was the realization of how Western forces could become bogged down in Asia, leaving the Russians free to wage aggression in Europe. There was acute concern that a third world war would finish off Europe, following that end nearly having been realized in World War II.
The British treasury had just announced gold and dollar reserves valued at 2.75 billion, the highest level since the end of the war. It was the result of many factors, the Marshall Plan probably first among them, but also including British austerity and the devaluation of the pound. A new war would wipe out this economic progress and the opportunity might never come again to rebuild the economy.
The facts explained the British reluctance to rearm, but could not be ignored in calculating policy, as the British viewed the ultimate objective as preserving peace with honor and freedom to the extent it could be done.
A letter writer tells of a child who had drowned in Sugaw Creek after it had taken 40 minutes for the Charlotte Rescue Crew to arrive, despite the writer having called within seconds of discovery of the child. She deplores the fact that the Fire Rescue Squad lacked the proper equipment for such resuscitation.
A letter from Charlotte Schools superintendent Elmer H. Garinger thanks the newspaper for its support of the passed school bond issue. He informs that three new schools would be required to educate the children who had come into the community just since the prior June 5 when the prior school year had ended. The newspaper had helped spread the word of the increscent educational pressure this burgeoning population placed on the community.
A letter writer from Forest City warns of the AMA sending out messages complaining of the "welfare state". He thinks the responsibilities of the state extended beyond the policing duties to the welfare duties.
A letter writer from McBee, S.C., finds that justice had taken a holiday in Conway, S.C., in the failure of the Grand Jury to return indictments against the Grand Dragon of the Carolinas Klan, Thomas Hamilton, and four other Klansmen involved in the melee at a black dance hall in Myrtle Beach the prior August, resulting in the death of one Klansman, a Conway police officer. He finds that if the Grand Jury represented the populace, then the course of equal justice had sunk to a low level.
On a purely technical point, he misunderstands the grand jury as a "jury of peers". That concept is associated with the petit or trial jury, while the grand jury is, by theoretical conception, a jury comprised of the more educated, better members of the community, hence "grand" versus "petit", even if the terms also could refer to the relative size of the two adjudicatory bodies, the grand jury usually comprised of more than the twelve good and true and serving on a prolonged basis.
Framed Edition
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