The Charlotte News
Tuesday, December 26, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that Lt. General Matthew Ridgway arrived in South Korea this
date from Washington via Tokyo to take over command of the Eighth
Army following the death in a jeep accident Saturday of Lt. General
Walton Walker. He had assumed command of the Tenth Corps as well,
just evacuated from Hungnam in the northeast sector. His forces
were awaiting an imminent Communist offensive as Chinese and North
Koreans were massed, together with equipment, supplies, and
artillery, all along the 120-mile front three-fourths of the way
across Korea, as their patrols jabbed at numerous points leading through the graph
Private funeral services were held in Yokohama, Japan, for General Walker. His body would be shipped to the U.S. on December 30 for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Meanwhile, the Communist Chinese military leader Chu Teh, in a radio broadcast from Peiping, warned the U.N. troops to leave Korea entirely and the U.S. to remove from Formosa. The Chinese also demanded a seat in the U.N. He maintained that the Chinese troops massed in North Korea were volunteers who were fighting out of a sense of justice against "imperialists".
President Syngman Rhee of South Korea said that rumors that the Government was fleeing Seoul were untrue, that only the National Assemblymen and Government officials not required in Seoul had evacuated.
Undersecretary of the Air Force and future CIA director John McCone said that the Air Force was gearing its emergency mobilization program to four times the strength of the force presently in Korea. He estimated that the goal could be achieved by late 1953. The immediate goal was doubling of the Air Force within two years, a move already underway.
The President, intending originally to stay one more day in Independence, Mo., cut his holiday vacation short by a day and returned to Washington to address defense problems in the Far East and Europe. The White House said that no new crisis had prompted the early return. It followed, however, the announcement the previous day by General MacArthur that a Communist Chinese "secret political and military decision of enormous scope" had been discovered during the November "end-of-the-war" offensive begun November 24—no doubt supplying the heretofore hidden rationale for the deadly, disastrous month-long venture which wound up in withdrawal, completed, true to the General's word, with the troops, by Christmas, back at home or on their way by ship, even if only to the cold comfort offered by Pusan.
In Harrisburg, Pa., a widowed mother learned that her son had lost both arms and legs while serving in northeast Korea with the Seventh Division on December 14, causing her to collapse in heartbreak on Christmas night. Correspondent Bill Loftus, reporting of the matter, says that it had fallen to him to impart the news to the woman and that he would never forget the ordeal. Her son had arrived in California by air on Christmas Eve and had telephoned his mother, saying nothing of his condition. But his status, that of the first quadriplegic of the Korean war, had reached the news services and Mr. Loftus was assigned the task of locating his mother to tell her by telephone of the report. When he realized that she had not heard the news, he quickly ended the conversation, but, upon reflection, had to call her again to let her know the truth. Shortly afterward, she fainted. He concludes the report by suggesting that there would never again be "peace on earth" for the mother.
The three-day holiday toll for traffic and other accidental deaths was 664, 515 of which were traffic related, the highest traffic toll since the all-time record of 555 in 1936. In 1949, the total had been 580 deaths, of which 413 had been in traffic. The National Safety Council had estimated prior to the holiday that 440 would die, the highest it had ever predicted for Christmas. The total more than doubled the count of an ordinary three-day period with similar weather, December 8 to 11, when 245 traffic fatalities had occurred. Over the first ten months of 1950, 28,020 traffic deaths had taken place, 92 per day. Texas, with 41 traffic and 18 other accidental deaths, led the nation during the holiday period, followed by California, with 40 and 11, New York, 27 and 21, and Illinois, 34 and 3, respectively. North Carolina ranked eighth in the grim statistics, with 20 traffic deaths and 4 other accidental deaths, placing it behind the leading four states plus Michigan, with 24 and 4, Kansas, with 18 and 8, and Ohio with 20 and 6, and followed closely by Pennsylvania, 22 and 2, and Virginia, 18 and 3.
In Frankfurt, Ky., an eight-year old girl suffering from cancer of the adrenal glands died on Christmas, though after being visited by Santa Claus earlier on Friday. She had been too weak, however, to get much cheer from the event, arranged by her parents. She had been scheduled to undergo treatment by atomic medicine.
In Pottsville, Pa., a doctor delivered a baby on Christmas for free, having promised years earlier to do so if called upon on Christmas, but until the previous day, never having been summoned to make a delivery.
Out on the mainline, Scotland Yard
searched for the Stone of Scone
Alton Blakeslee, Associated Press science reporter, in the first of a series of three articles, tells of the common cold cure still eluding medical science after 2,000 years of search for a remedy. It was the number one disease, with Americans estimated to suffer from 500 million colds per year, three times the number of the population. Women were more susceptible to it than men and December and January were the peak months for the malady. Two-thirds of Americans had three colds per year and about a fourth had four. Lost days of work cost two billion dollars in wages, lost production, medicines and medical bills, accounting for more than half of all absenteeism from work. The cold could lead to complications such as pneumonia. Some doctors believed it was caused by a virus or many viruses, while others claimed it was the result of an allergy. Still others suggested it as a group of illnesses. Cold viruses could be communicated via a handkerchief or by drift through the air from a cough or sneeze.
Ah-choo.
The northern half of the country was beset by cold and new snow, from Montana through the Great Lakes region into New York and Pennsylvania, with the heaviest accumulation in Minnesota and Iowa, into Indiana and Michigan. Chicago received seven inches, and from four to seven inches accumulated elsewhere. The temperature reached seventeen below zero in Minnesota and North Dakota, and eleven below in South Dakota. In Phoenix, Ariz., it was 76 the previous day, tying a Christmas record set in 1919 and 1933.
The "Our Weather" box again remarks of signs that the weather patterns were moderating, as winters generally were not as severe as decades earlier, though qualified by the report that Thomas Jefferson had observed that winters had not seemed so rough as when he had been a boy. The worst snow storm on record to hit New York, however, had occurred three years earlier.
That proves it, then. It's all a myth.
On the editorial page, "Growth of Lobbying" tells of the Congressional Quarterly reporting that lobbying efforts had grown yearly, with the current year having produced a record expenditure in furtherance thereof. In the first half of 1947, there had been 132 such groups, spending 2.7 million dollars, whereas in the first half of 1950, there had been 324 such groups spending almost 5.3 million dollars. Ten lobbying groups had each spent more than $100,000 in the first six months of the year, led by the Committee for Constitutional Government, spending over $500,000. It lists the others and their expenditures.
The Quarterly predicted that spending for the entirety of 1950 would greatly surpass the nearly eight million dollars of 1949.
While no one would propose curtailing such efforts, falling as they did within the First Amendment, the business of lobbying had become so huge as to threaten to become completely out of hand. Most informed observers believed that the requirements for regular reports from lobbyists were too vague and full of loopholes to be effective. There was need for public scrutiny of these groups so that the public would know who was trying to influence their legislators' opinions, by how much and why. Otherwise, there would be no justice to those with little or no voice in government.
"A Strong Voice Is Needed" finds that many had cheered the isolationist speech of Herbert Hoover the previous week, advocating return to use of the two oceans as insular protection to the U.S. while pulling back aid and defense abroad, leaving it to the foreign countries to fend more for themselves against Communism. It posits that the reason for receptivity of this discredited view of defense, a theory which had led from World War I to World War II, was because there was no clear leadership on the landscape for the internationalist view.
It points to the Time quote offered by Bob Sain in the previous day's edition reflecting back to Christmas, 1940, which had said that the country hungered for leadership—bearing in mind that Time publisher Henry Luce had become by 1940 entirely disenchanted with the Roosevelt Administration, and so whether this quote was truly reflective of the feelings abounding in the country is subject to grave doubt, as perhaps put into perspective by the competing editorials in The News indited by editor J. E. Dowd and associate editor W. J. Cash in advance of the November, 1940 election.
The piece concludes by hoping that the necessary leadership would materialize.
"Home Hazards" tells of
the new Red Cross reporting service for home accidents in need of
hospitalization having been a success in its first two weeks of
operation. One man had fallen off a ladder while helping his wife
hang curtains and gotten the curtain rod jammed into his mouth. A
woman had stuck a crochet needle through her finger and a boy had
managed to get a holly berry lodged in his ear—perhaps trying
too hard to realize a Holly Jolly Christmas up close, when what he
needed to hear was a song along other lines
It cautions that while most people
were more concerned of the broader world crisis at present, there was
always time for concern for the immediate dangers posed by hazards
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "North Carolina's School Revolution", tells of Dr. Clyde Erwin, State Superintendent of Public Schools, having said that 75 million dollars had been raised in local communities from bond elections for the purpose of building new school facilities. The State had added 50 million dollars, courtesy of the 1949 Legislature and the voters, half having come from a statewide bond election and the other half by legislative appropriation. The result had been astonishing progress in building new school structures. The State Education Committee in 1948 had set 150 million dollars as the ten-year goal and the combined State and local appropriations were already within 25 million of reaching that goal.
The funding was adding 10,000 new classrooms for 300,000 children and the state, according to Dr. Erwin, was becoming a "building laboratory for eastern America".
The piece thinks the resulting architecture would have as significant an impact on the community life in the state as had the cathedrals in the middle ages in Europe or during any similar period when institutional architecture had set the style which others emulated. The construction would help the economic boom in the state.
Just don't let Senator Nixon or any of his former colleagues on HUAC come in there and influence the architecture, or there will be no telling what you might get, especially in the restrooms of some of the elementary schools.
Drew Pearson tells of the Defense Department having written a secret memorandum on mobilization, proposing that either the automobile industry or the radio and television industry be drafted for war production before taking standby defense plants out of mothballs. It pointed out that already operating plants could be converted to war production within 9 to 12 months, whereas the standby plants in mothballs would take much longer to reactivate, including tooling and training of labor. It used airplane manufacture as example, showing that a plant producing 5,000 planes in the first year, would produce 18,000 units in the second year and 50,000 in the third year.
Congressman Compton White of Idaho had asked the President before Christmas what, other than world peace, he wanted most for Christmas, to which the President had replied that he would like to be all alone for ten days.
The President had promised Secretary of State Acheson, upon his return from the Brussels NATO foreign and defense ministers council meeting, that he would continue in the position as long as he was President. Mr. Acheson had thanked the President for standing by him when many Republicans in Congress and others were howling for his scalp, claiming that the country had lost confidence in his policies, especially regarding the Far East and Communist China.
The new price administrator, Mike DiSalle, complained that every second person he met claimed to be the brains behind some Government executive or member of Congress, causing him to wonder why, with so many brains around, the country had drifted into such trouble.
John Steelman, Presidential aide who had recently resolved the railroad dispute, had read Mr. Pearson's column of the previous week with displeasure, regarding the suggested need to get management and labor together in the same room until a resolution was hammered out, to avert a shutdown of the nation's railroads. But thus spurred by what he read, he nevertheless did exactly as the quoted source, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, had advised and resolved the strike.
Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan, debating against the civil defense bill the previous week, had said on the House floor that he could support it if it had been a bill to protect blast furnaces or war production industries valuable to defense, but not as a bill to protect the civilian population, not in any danger unless there were an attack on the country.
Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah sent his secretary to buy a stamp and told her to bring back the change from a quarter, as every cent had to be saved.
Senator Taft had let out his publicity ace, indicative of his decision not to seek the Republican presidential nomination for 1952.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was receiving the silent treatment from Senate colleagues, as they would walk out of the chamber when he rose to speak.
They probably did not wish to run the risk of having him become overwrought with emotion during one of his anti-Red tirades and lashing out at the handiest scapegoats available with perhaps a shoe or two to their groins.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop deliver what amounts to an after-Christmas pep talk to the American people, urging that they must not surrender their defenses such that the totalitarian will of the Soviet Union would triumph in its goal to rule the world, as evidenced in the police-state, slave-labor living conditions of Eastern Europe behind the iron curtain, in places such as Prague in Czechoslovakia and Leipzig in East Germany, where Communist Party rule through the secret police was iron-handed and brutal.
"In every contest between slave state and free, the freemen begin with disadvantages, and the defeatists mumble. But when this nation is united by a common peril and a common faith, while it may lose the first battle, no power on earth can keep us from victory in the end."
Of course, while what they said is understandable within the context of the times of late 1950, it had also to be borne in mind that the lessons of World War II were still fresh in the minds of those who kept a close eye on current events and world shifts, against a backdrop within the general populace of the abiding desire to forget those terrible earlier times of first war in their youth, depression following the initial boom of the middle to late Twenties, and then war again on an even greater scale, and to rebuild the country from that dreary wartime state to manifest a different form of democratic will, one more geared to building a peacetime, prosperous economy embraced more of consumerism than patriotism. Such tendencies are evident in the media of the time, from advertising to radio and the fresh, erratic television programming of the day, to the popular fare at the movies. The commentary of the day in the editorials made regular mention of those tendencies. And so it was against this backdrop that the Alsops wrote this date.
But, as was regularly being warned also in editorials of the time, to go the route of the McCarthyites and seek, for political gain, to lead the society into a morass of fear of itself, dividing the population against one another in suspicion over lack of sufficient patriotism, over suspicion of Communist sympathy, of Communist cooperation, or even of secret Communist affiliation, aimed primarily at liberalism in the country in the hope of associating the New Deal with Communism, of the movement toward better realization of civil rights for minorities with totalitarian will, was to court the disaster of becoming the very society being fought. In short, the worst of it was being waged as a deliberate divide-and-conquer strategy, which, in the end, threatened the society with as much totalitarianism as was present in the Russian state under Communist domination.
While it was not easily susceptible to neat dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats or even liberals and conservatives, the division was discernible, more on the basis of those dedicated to serving the public will while leading the thinking of the time in support of values embraced by the Constitution versus those dedicated to preservation of what they saw as the irreducible minimum traditions of the past necessary to preserve the country, which included such tendencies as white supremacy, nationalism, America first, isolationism and an overall tendency to convince the populace that they were not able to make decisions for themselves, to leave the thinking to the professional decision-makers while feeding them propaganda to make them believe their decisions were the basis of their own free determinations, channeled by the "patriotic" way of those leaders who knew better than the liberals, in and out of Government, who had championed the New Deal and Fair Deal of the previous 18 years, the "socialist" way—ultimately that counter-tendency bearing the very hallmarks of a totalitarian state for its will being opposed to the central tenets of the Constitution, the very foundation of the country, a dedication to genuine equality of opportunity for all its citizens, regardless of race, creed or color—the truest meaning of Christmas.
Robert C. Ruark, in New Orleans, tells of meeting by happenstance in the French Quarter his old chief engineer aboard ship while in the Navy, telling him of being back at sea, not liking it any better than before, that the two of them were not cut out for that "hero stuff".
He remembers the chief laughing once during an air raid in London and cursing the food at sea. He had been as scared of submarine duty as anybody else but had stood by below according to his duty.
His serendipitous meeting with the chief made the point of his story, that he had come to New Orleans to go duck hunting and wound up meeting up with the past of the war, as the country was rebuilding for future war.
"It is raining just like it used to rain in World War Twice.
"You see the uniforms all around again, with the frighteningly young faces under the jaunty caps, and wonder if they could have been that young nearly a decade ago."
The chief wanted to know if he remembered the Bar Nolly in Casablanca, to which Mr. Ruark asked him if he remembered the major in Bizerte and the sergeant with the guitar and bad white wine in Ferryville. The chief found it all familiar and invited him aboard ship for lunch. Mr. Ruark went and found the ship like all ships, and the Mississippi River looking as cold and brown as ever.
The chief remarked that the country had economic controls again, that it had been just as the day before yesterday that the same stuff had been in place. He had no more enthusiasm for it, as it did not seem fair.
A letter writer finds the December 22 editorial, "Hoover's Plan for America", criticizing the former President's isolationist speech of the prior week, to have been among the most informative and sensible editorials on the subject which he had read. He agrees with its points and thanks the editors for the service.
A letter writer from Dallas, N.C., lauds the same editorial and laments the fact that many were agreeing with the former President. She finds that radio commentators Elmer Davis and Edward R. Murrow would endorse the editorial view espoused by The News on the topic.
A letter writer commends the conduct of a Yellow Cab driver who stopped to assist her late at night the prior Friday when her car had stalled two miles from her home. He agreed to push her car all the way home and then refused payment afterward.
We hope he went on to become a Decathlon champion in the Olympics after accomplishment of what must have been an exhausting feat.
A letter writer from Asheville had addressed a letter to the Charlotte Merchant's Association, care of the newspaper, complimenting the beauty of Charlotte and its Christmas spirit. She liked Ivey's, Belks and the Nativity display in front of Sears.
She hoped that the joys and activities of the season, however, would not unduly distract from the true meaning of Christmas, that Jesus was the "Giver of all good and perfect gifts".
Well, now, it begins to sound like you may be giving one of those ostensible compliments cloaked in actual bitter denunciation for the unmitigated worldliness you had witnessed in the big city. What you were perhaps really saying was something along the lines: "Charlotte, you may be beautiful, but even Queens need advice now and again, and you are so screwed up, girl, spending so much time on your makeup and dress that you don't care enough for your spiritual side; you need, in other words, to worry less about having your crown on straight and more of your steady gait, before the Debil gets you and sends you straight to Hell."
No, you know that's what you meant.
Second Day
Framed Edition
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