The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 21, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a column of troops and 40 tanks of unknown national origin was advancing from Antung in Manchuria toward Seoul as U.S. Marines were battling to take the former South Korean capital, meeting stiffening resistance. North Korean reinforcements were arriving from several directions. The Marines had entered the city at 6:00 p.m., Wednesday. The Tenth Corps had reached the house-to-house fighting phase.

Correspondent Belman Morin, on the Han River, reports of the big push of men and machines across the river to Seoul. There had been very little opposition to the crossing. By late afternoon, they had rounded up 200 enemy prisoners, ranging in age from 14 to grown men. The suburb of Yongdungpo was burning. The dead, American and Korean, lined the road between the river and Seoul.

The new enemy column was said to be as close as 30 air miles from Seoul, although other reports placed it 210 miles north, just south of the Yalu River. At the Pentagon, the Army said that no information had reached it regarding such a force. It was thought that it might be a column spotted and dispersed by American planes shortly after the Inchon landings.

The North Koreans were reported still to be putting up a fight along the southern defense arc around Pusan, despite recent allied successes.

General MacArthur left the front and flew back to Tokyo for the first time since Friday's Inchon landing.

A 16-year old expectant mother surrendered to American soldiers, saying that she had been forced to become a spy for the North Koreans.

The Defense Department reported 223 new Korean war casualties, with 35 of them killed in action, 164 wounded, ten missing and 14 injured in war zone accidents. That brought the total American casualties through September 15 to 13,911, including 1,684 killed, 3,518 missing, and 8,709 wounded.

General Marshall was confirmed and sworn in as the new Secretary of Defense. He promptly met with the Joint Chiefs.

At the U.N., Secretary of State Acheson's anti-aggression program was approved by the 14-nation steering committee for full General Assembly consideration. It also approved of a full airing of the Nationalist Chinese charge that the Soviet Union aided the Chinese Communists in coming to power, a demand that Russia account for thousands of German and Japanese war prisoners, a review of the Greek-Balkan question, and a reopening of the issue of whether the ban on sending diplomats to Spain ought persist.

In Frankfurt, American High Commissioner John J. McCloy made plain that the Western allies would fight if the Communists staged a Korea-type attack on West Germany utilizing the East German police. He said that the Big Three foreign ministers meeting in New York had authorized creation of a 30,000-man police force, to be be reviewed when formed. Its design was to offset the East German force

The Senate had passed the reconciled McCarran anti-subversion bill 51 to 7 and the House had approved it 312 to 20, suggesting that the votes in each chamber for a two-thirds override of an expected Presidential veto might be available.

In a press conference, the President supported the statement by Averell Harriman to the AF of L convention in Houston that Senator Taft had a voting record which furthered the designs of the Kremlin. He also said that he was very pleased with the record of the current Congress. He indicated that he had no plans to campaign for Democrats in the fall Congressional elections.

In Spain, movie actress Madeleine Carroll married Andrew Heiskell, publisher of Life. She was a former wife of actor Sterling Hayden and French director Henri Lavorel, among others.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, a shapely model displaying a housecoat and nightgown for an audience threw open the housecoat, whereupon the audience gasped as she had forgotten to don the nightgown. Vigorous applause followed.

On the editorial page, "Who's a Communist?" wonders who had been fighting the Communists during the previous five years if, as Senator Taft charged, the Administration was appeasing Communists with its Far Eastern policy and with the policies adopted at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, while, as Averell Harriman had found, Senator Taft was taking the same positions on the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the military arms program as the Communists.

It finds that what was wrong was that both sides wanted to eliminate the other in an election year, and so it was easy to see the beam in the other's eye while ignoring the mote in one's own.

"Narrow Squeak for Mr. Attlee" tells of Commons upholding by a vote of 306 to 300 the decision to nationalize Britain's steel industry. The only logical objection of the other Western powers might arise if it were to impede production for NATO rearmament. But the narrow margin of victory showed how unstable Britain's Labor Government was, giving rise to the belief that another general election ought be held soon to establish a greater working majority for one party or the other.

"Worth a Try, Anyway" finds that the people who lived near the Tremont Avenue rock quarry had a legitimate complaint about the giant hole which served to attract dumping of garbage. The City had no authority to spend public funds on private property. But it had decided to start dumping refuse there to fill it in, even though opposed by nearby residents as creating a worse nuisance. The piece thinks the proposed method was worth a try.

"Whatever Happened to the Flu?" remarks that with all of the miracle drugs on the market, one no longer had the flu, from which remedy was had by a mustard plaster and a hot water bottle, but rather a virus, to be treated by chloromycetin and histamines, pro and anti.

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Calling All Gooks", examines the ostensibly pejorative term as it was being used in Korea against the enemy. It had been used by Koreans to refer to the United States, as "Mee Gook", "Mee" being in reference to America and "gook", to country. The word "gook" had been heard so often by American G.I.'s that they apparently thought it referred to Koreans.

Americans referred to Mexicans as "greasers" and Mexicans referred to Americans as "gringos", the reason for the latter being that a hundred years earlier, American soldiers had sung a song, "Green grow the grasses".

It finds that all countries had some form of disparaging reference to enemy soldiers, but that it was funny that both Americans and Koreans were "gooks". And the truth was, it suggests, that everyone was a "gook", that the United Nations ought be changed to the "United Gooks".

We still say it is a shortened portmanteau for "spooky guerrillas"...

Drew Pearson tells of two Government employees who were still receiving large salaries from private companies, one from U.S. Steel and the other from I.T. & T.

James Roosevelt helped to place the insurance on two housing projects at an Air Force base in Victorville, California. Air Force officials, however, said that they had nothing to do with placing the insurance, that it was in the hands of the private developers of the two projects.

Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson took the news of his dismissal hard, having planned that very morning to give speeches to the ABA, AF of L and the American Legion. The following day at a staff conference, he was seen with tears in his eyes when staff tried to console him.

The President greeted Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman, after beating back the attack of Senator Andrew Schoeppel, as "Joe Louis", the "champ". A similar campaign by Republicans against the remaining members of the Cabinet had been abandoned because this one had so badly backfired.

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had worked out a plan with India's Prime Minister Nehru to get Communist China seated at the U.N. They contended that Russia, while ostensibly campaigning to seat Communist China, actually wanted to keep it out so that Russia could continue as Communist Chinese spokesman and appear thereby friendly. Mr. Bevin and Prime Minister Nehru were convinced that Mao Tse-Tung and the Kremlin were not getting along well, hoped therefore that Mao might turn into a Chinese Tito, rebelling against the Soviet brand of Communism.

Marquis Childs tells of another Communist purge taking place, this time in East Germany, rooting out all traces of "foul liberalism", that is the right of the individual to make a free choice.

There were some Americans, he finds, who were willing to shut the door on freedom of choice, out of fear, a drive for power or greed or hate or some other motivation. Some of that urge was reflected in the McCarran bill passed by Congress, to require registration of Communists and front organizations as well as allowing in an emergency internment of subversives.

The same urge was reflected in the organizations of "professional patrioteers" and those who would see to it that certain individuals were banned from radio and television because of some past political affiliation with a suspect organization. In some cases, blacklisting had been done on the flimsiest evidence or no evidence at all. The practice had been ongoing for some time. Eighteen months earlier, Frederic March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, sued Counterattack, the publisher of "Red Channels", for libel at a cost of more than $50,000. They finally obtained a grudging retraction. Since that time, many persons had been subjected to the same treatment by the publication.

Depriving a person of his or her livelihood was the same thing as a purge. Senator Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas was attempting the same tactic when he accused Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman of "Communist ties". The reason for the attack was that Secretary Chapman had angered the power interests. Mr. Chapman had been injured so badly while fighting in World War I that he could not get life insurance.

That smear had backfired in public opinion, and Mr. Childs is certain that when Americans understood the meaning of the present attempt to suppress freedom, they would always react against it. But they might react in violence and anger against those engineering it and that, itself, could prove injurious to freedom.

Robert C. Ruark remarks on the release on parole of former Congressmen Andrew May and J. Parnell Thomas. Mr. May was released after serving nine months of his eight-to-24 month sentence following conviction for receiving bribes on war contracts.

Mr. Thomas had been convicted of fraud against the Government by receipt of salary kickbacks from bogus Congressional staff. Mr. Ruark was never exercised about Mr. Thomas but wanted Mr. May and General Benny Myers hung, as they had performed as traitors in time of war, General Myers having received kickbacks and special amenities also from the award of war contracts.

Mr. Ruark finds it a bad moment to be forgiving crooks from World War II, with the draft on and taxes up. He thinks that Mr. May's poor health should not have been an excuse for early release.

He was aware that the big sinners could soften their penalties but he did not have to like the fact.

A letter writer gives high praise to Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, providing extensive reasons for his praise for the former Vice-President and Senator from South Carolina and why he should be included, along with the other two noted mid-Nineteenth Century orators, as members of the "Hall of Fame for Great Americans" located in New York.

Mr. Calhoun has still never been inducted, probably for his support of slavery. The 1950 inductions included former Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, women's rights reformer Susan B. Anthony, scientist Josiah Gibbs, and former U.S. Physician and Surgeon General William C. Gorgas.

The most recent inductees, in 1976, were American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, botanist Luther Burbank, and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Former President Franklin Roosevelt, former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, peanut developer George Washington Carver, and composer John Philip Sousa were inducted in 1973.

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