The Charlotte News
Saturday, September 23, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that two American divisions were racing northward Saturday to determine which could first link to allied Marines fighting the reinforced enemy in the outskirts of Seoul. The First Cavalry Division pushed patrols beyond Sangju, gaining 35 miles in 35 hours against an enemy force who seemed to have lost the ability to "do anything else but run". The Seventh Division around Suwon was the other division on the move toward Seoul. Along a more southerly route, the 24th Division reached Kumchon, on their way back toward Seoul.
Correspondent Hal Boyle, with the First Cavalry, said that many field officers believed that a linkage between the forces in the north would destroy the enemy and that the end of major fighting in South Korea could come by the first week in October. Other officers, however, were more conservative in their assessment.
At Seoul, allied Marines had prongs north and southwest of the city, with reports indicating that they were two miles from the center of the city. Prisoners reportedly had been captured from the North Korean Ninth Division, which had been fighting in the south around Haman. Another North Korean regiment was reported in Seoul from Sariwon, 90 miles to the north. The enemy appeared to have about 15,000 troops now defending the city.
In a tragic mistake, American planes had fire-bombed and strafed British troops west of the Naktong River. A combat photographer, Gene Herrick, had witnessed the incident and he said casualties among the British appeared heavy, some having been badly burned by napalm. Mr. Herrick observed about 40 wounded. The troops were among the 1,500 British troops who had recently entered the fight from Hong Kong. An air strike had been called in as the British soldiers were attacking Hill 303 against stiff enemy resistance near Taegu. Some of the soldiers were angry about the friendly-fire incident but a private from Liverpool said that it was just one of those things, that up to that point, the Yank airmen had given them very good support. Another private reported that several officers were lost. As Mr. Herrick was assisting in carrying the wounded, the North Koreans, he reported, opened fire with a self-propelled gun on a litter column, killing one of the wounded soldiers.
Correspondent Stan Swinton, with the 25th Division, reports of a sergeant in the fight who chose to be in Korea, as his occupation duty in Germany had been no place to be with a war ongoing. During a furlough, therefore, he had flown, at his own expense, to Tokyo, then hitch-hiked aboard a plane to Taegu and from there, took a freight train to Pusan. He then found a truck headed for the front and climbed aboard. After the story came out, the Pentagon cleared his re-assignment. The sergeant had fought with the 25th Division during World War II in the Pacific and these were his buddies.
At the U.N., the General Assembly voted to accept a credentials committee report recommending that Nationalist China continue to be seated in the Assembly until a study could be made of the situation. Russia's attempted objection to adoption of the report had failed.
Senator William Jenner of Indiana, who had attacked Secretary of Defense Marshall during his recent confirmation hearings, called Drew Pearson a "revolving S.O.B." for the fact that Mr. Pearson was reportedly going to present the following day an attack on Senator Jenner, indicating that he had been put in the Senate by the leader of the Indiana Klan, Bob Lyons. He said that he was going to do so because of the unfair attacks on General Marshall. Mr. Pearson said, in reference to the Senator, that "a hit dog always howls". Senator Jenner bragged that he had only used the same description used by two Presidents, Truman and FDR, the latter having called Mr. Pearson a chronic liar in 1943.
On the Senate floor, Senator William Langer of North Dakota, 64, collapsed, gasping for breath, and was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital. The attack interrupted a five and a half hour, all-night filibuster of the attempt to override the President's veto of the anti-subversion bill, the McCarran bill, passed during the week. Senator Langer and a few other Senators, including Paul Douglas of Illinois, were staging the fight. In his veto message, the President had called the bill "hysterical", "hasty and ill-considered" and would "make a mockery of the Bill of Rights". But Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that he would vote for override. The House had already overridden the veto, by a vote of 286 to 48. Senate leaders were confident that the necessary votes were present for a two-thirds override.
The Congress sent to the President a 17 billion dollar military and foreign aid emergency money bill, in much the same form as he had proposed. An effort, opposed by the President, had failed which would have included a provision to ban U.S. economic aid to any nation which traded with Russia or its satellites in arms and munitions or any article which could be used for military purposes. The President said that it would have hurt Western Europe more than Russia.
The AF of L convention in Houston set aside its business to make political plans for the defeat of Senator Taft in Ohio.
An Air Force B-50 bomber with 16 persons aboard, including four passengers, was reported missing during a flight from Goose Bay, Labrador, to Tuscon, Ariz., after being more than a day overdue. A search was underway.
The moon would enter a total eclipse on Monday and would appear as a coppery-red ball. That's because when the earth rotates around the moon, it gets in there every once in awhile—which, a little paraphrased, is what one tv commentator, no doubt an astrophysicist, had to say about the recent solar eclipse.
U.S. Marines driving on Seoul had liberated a storehouse of canned foods and proceeded to dine on their acquired provender, baby food.
Daylight Savings Time was ending Sunday at 2:00 a.m. And so it was time to fall back an hour. Be sure and adjust your clocks so that you will not be late for work on Monday.
On the editorial page, "How to Avoid Controls" tells of former World War II OPA administrator and now Governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, being in favor of selective price controls. But the President still hoped to avoid the prospect, while being worried about inflation.
The piece suggests that inflation could be deterred by getting rid of the fat in Congress's river and harbors bill and then cutting all appropriations, perhaps even leading to the sought five billion dollars savings to balance the budget, currently being done with a tax increase. The next step, it advises, would be to repeal all farm subsidies. Taxes should then be increased to cover all spending, having a deflationary impact. It also suggests a hands-off policy by the Government regarding all strikes not directly impacting national defense, and in those latter strikes, taking over the struck business and operating it on a profits basis with wages frozen at pre-strike levels, thus deterring strikes.
It concludes that such measures would avoid the need for price and wage controls while holding the cost-of-living down, for at least awhile.
"Backward, Turn Backward" finds Time behind the times, hoist by its own petard in issuing its weekly magazine five days in advance of the stated date on the cover. The September 18 issue had taken a swipe at the slow mobilization policy of the Pentagon, which had produced no progress along the 120-mile defense arc around Pusan, at the same time as Marines were moving house-to-house in Seoul following the September 15 Inchon landings, two days after the Time issue hit the newsstands.
The September 25 issue, released on September 21, nonetheless stuck by its guns, saying that the Inchon landings represented progress but that its implications for victory depended on whether ground commander General Walton Walker had enough men in the south.
The piece concludes, "Backward,
turn backward
"Cancer Is a Disease" objects, as had a medical journal, to use of the term "cancer" to describe malignant situations not associated with the disease, as it thinks that such references would not cause the public to be any more quickly disabused of the decades of stigma attached to having cancer.
But there is a cancer growing on the Presidency in 2017, and it appears malignant. Time for the operation.
A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Charlotte Cracks Down on Klan", remarks of the Charlotte Recorder's Court having found eight of nine men guilty of vandalism for burning a cross on a person's lawn and painting red crosses on the homes of other black citizens, while burning a fence of a white woman. The Recorder fined them and gave them suspended sentences to the roads provided they made restitution for the property damage.
The sentences were kept light because the defendants were dumb, "uneducated boobs" who were trying to escape their inferiority by donning white robes and hoods and harassing people. The Recorder had remarked that such violence had not occurred in the state during his lifetime. The piece finds that it would likely not repeat, as even ignorant fools could understand when law enforcement would not tolerate such behavior.
Drew Pearson offers kudos to Sir Gladwyn Jebb, the chief British delegate to the U.N. who was acting as president of the Security Council during September, for his putting in his place Russian chief delegate Jakob Malik along with his obstructionist tactics on behalf of Russia as Council president during August. He finds that Sir Gladwyn had done more to improve British-American relations than anything since the war. The American people, at least in the Eastern section of the country, who saw the drama unfold on television, had approved, transforming Sir Gladwyn into a folk hero. The U.N. had benefited greatly from this shot in the arm, after being nearly moribund before the Korean war. Its quick action had given it new standing. Then Mr. Malik walked into the role of a villain during August and Sir Gladwyn had now become the equivalent of Joe DiMaggio and Hopalong Cassidy.
Sir Gladwyn was one of the founding fathers of the U.N. and wanted to save it from Soviet strangulation.
Both Senators Wayne Morse and Leverett Saltonstall had openly found detestable the questioning by fellow Republican William Jenner of Indiana of General Marshall during his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.
Nelson Rockefeller was being considered for the position of Ambassador to the Vatican. Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas had told the British to stop selling large amounts of tin and rubber to the Russians. The American Ambassador in Yugoslavia had cabled that the Russians were making progress in stirring up revolution against Tito, after a 40 percent crop failure in that country. The U.S. Mission in Iran reported that the Russians had two fully equipped airborne armies concentrated on the Iranian border.
Marquis Childs advocates more effort being devoted to bolstering the alliance with India to promote the idea that the U.S. wanted to enable independence in the Far East while Russia wanted to engage in imperialism, as Prime Minister Nehru had warned a few months earlier while speaking in Indonesia.
The Dutch were not forgetting or forgiving the U.S. intervention on behalf of the independence of Indonesia, costing the Dutch a valuable resource.
To prevent the peasants from being drawn into Communism, the relationship between Europe, Asia, and America had to be improved, and India was the key to it. Without this friendship being nurtured, there appeared little hope for peace in the Far East.
Robert C. Ruark says that he was not a hoarder, at least not much of one, but that he could understand the impulse and so did not condemn people who hoarded items which they believed would become scarce during wartime, even if they caused inflation on scarce goods and triggered rationing.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of all the important legislation which would be passed by the 81st Congress having been completed. Senator Clyde Hoey called it a "productive meeting" and Senator Frank Graham said it was "a fairly good session". They pointed with pride to the revised Social Security law as the highlight of the 1950 session, along with measures on foreign affairs and appropriations. Senator Graham opposed the proposed loan to Spain while Senator Hoey had favored it.
Senator Graham was concerned about the passed McCarran bill, as he was one of the seven Senators voting against it. He believed that it would endanger, for instance, a Christian pacifist group who might be required to register under its terms.
Senator Graham had turned down the job of director of the Red Cross because, he said, he thought someone else, someone less controversial, could do the job better than he.
Senator Hoey's committee investigating homosexuals in the Government had completed its hearings and would soon issue an interim report.
Special Presidential adviser Gordon Gray and his staff had issued a report saying that the best way to fight Communism was through raising the standard of living and improving economic conditions. The President had asked him to investigate the world shortage of dollars and so the recommendation had exceeded the original scope of the inquiry.
Allard Lowenstein
Senator Hoey had said that no one in their right mind could regard Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman as a Communist, as recently charged by Senator Schoeppel of Kansas, albeit subsequently having backed off that statement.
Senator Hoey was concerned that there were Communists in the Federal Council of Churches.
Neither North Carolina Senator smoked or drank.
Congressman Bob Doughton of North Carolina, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, who had been in Congress for forty years, intended to outlast Adolph Sabath of Illinois, the record-holder, who had been in the House for 44 years.
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