The Charlotte News

Friday, January 12, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied artillery and air strikes, including rarely used B-29s in tactical missions, had stopped the North Korean attack from the heights on recently abandoned Wonju, but another North Korean force, two divisions strong, was striking 30 miles behind that position threatening the entire U.N. line in central Korea, along the approaches to Tanyang, 37 miles south of Wonju. The Communist troops broke and fled into the hills from Wonju at dusk after allied bombardment by heavy explosives, fragmentation bombs and napalm. About 450 enemy troops had been killed. Allied troops then reoccupied the dominant height southeast of the road hub. The fighting was taking place in bitter cold weather with foot-deep snow.

At the U.N., the U.S. accepted a plan under which it was hoped that peace could be achieved with Communist China in Korea. Russia expressed coolness toward the five-point proposal, providing for an immediate ceasefire, with safeguards to insure that it would not be used to rebuild forces, the consideration of further steps toward peace following the ceasefire, withdrawal of all non-Korean forces with arrangements for free elections, appropriate interim arrangements for the administration of Korea pending the elections, and an ensuing U.N.-sponsored conference on Far East problems, including those of Formosa and China's representation at the U.N., with Communist Chinese participation at the conference, along with the U.S., Russia, and Britain. A non-Communist spokesman said that if China rejected the plan, there would no further peace overtures. Diplomats held out little hope that the Chinese would accept the five-point proposal. The General Assembly was expected to vote on it this date.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee that the President had increased the military manpower quota by 260,000, to be implemented before the end of the fiscal year, from 3.2 to 3.46 million.

The FBI said that it had investigated 9,000 cases of alleged draft violations during the prior six months, with more than 2,200 inquiries coming in every month. More than a third of the investigated cases were found to be in compliance. The purpose of the investigations was to get eligible men into the draft, not to prosecute evaders absent a showing of willful evasion.

War? Ain't never heard of it over here, doc.

The President, the previous day, assured at a press conference that he would consult with Congress, specifically the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees of both chambers, as a matter of politeness before sending troops to Western Europe but would not be bound by their advice. The President said that as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he was not bound by Congress in sending troops abroad except as it limited appropriations for the military generally. Senator Taft said that it marked the end of bipartisan foreign policy. Senator Taft was not on the Foreign Relations or Armed Services committees, but the President, when a journalist pointed out the fact, said that he was on the GOP policy committee and so could be on one of those committees if he so chose. The President also said that General MacArthur had not, as reported, recommended withdrawal of U.N. troops from Korea.

Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, generally regarded as a supporter of Administration foreign policy, was named by Republican Senators, based on seniority, to the open Republican seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In Vatican City, a decree issued from the Catholic Church forbidding Catholic clergy from joining such civic organizations as Rotary International, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, or other clubs of a "worldly character". It recommended instead such civic organizations as the Knights of Columbus or Catholic Church-sponsored organizations. The decree was issued by the Congregation of the Sacred Office and approved by Pope Pius XII. Clergy, according to a Vatican source, were permitted to attend motion pictures, but could not participate in other worldly activities as "communal hunting", a fox or rabbit hunt.

In Battle Creek, Mich., an Army private, 19, who had served in Korea, was to lose both of his feet and most of his fingers of both hands resulting from frostbite suffered as he lay wounded after an attack by the Communist Chinese. He had been stacked up with the wounded by the enemy, who later returned and machine-gunned the stack. He had survived and crawled away until rescuers found him. Doctors said that he would be able to learn to walk on prosthetic feet and could later grip things with the aid of plastic surgery.

In North Adams, Mass., an elderly man, 88, was growing a third set of teeth, three new upper teeth to go with his eight remaining original adult teeth.

He should donate those to the three-year old girl who lost her baby teeth prematurely and would have none at all until around age 6.

In Raleigh, legislation was introduced to the State House to restore the motor vehicle inspection law. It provided for inspection by either State operated lanes or private garages approved by the State, designed to better facilitate inspections than under the two-year law adopted in 1947 and abandoned for inefficiency in 1949. A bill was also introduced to allow a referendum in Winston-Salem to determine whether to have ABC stores for controlled sale of liquor. Other introduced bills would provide for better salaries for doctors in State hospitals and for changes of the State's parole laws.

On the editorial page, "Staggered Commission Terms?" tells of the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners favoring staggered terms for its members.

We favor sobriety while in office.

"On Changing the Voting Age" reminds that the General Assembly could only approve of submission of a State constitutional amendment to the people insofar as changing the voting age to 18, as currently proposed before the Assembly. The basic premise of the move was that if one were old enough to fight in a war, one should be able to vote. It had a logic difficult to counter.

The Franklin Press had argued, however, that the right to vote, as established by the Fifteenth Amendment, was not so much a privilege conferred as a reward as it was a responsibility and that if a young man who had served a few months in the military had the right to vote once, then one who had been wounded in service ought be able to vote several times and one who had been permanently disabled, a score or more times.

Someone else had pointed out, however, that such reasoning would suggest that an aging person should be denied the right to vote. Others had wondered whether 18-year old females, not subject to the draft, would be permitted to vote. And the other laws of the state which relied on age 21 as the point of majority, such as the age of purchase of alcohol and purchase of real estate, might also have to be amended.

It also wonders whether there was any great demand among the 18-year olds to vote or whether the impetus for it was coming from political leaders planning to run for office.

The editorial says that it had no view on the appropriate voting age but also believed that it should not be based on such glib and seductive logic as the line, "If he's old enough to fight, he's old enough to vote."

Nevertheless, it would be that line of logic which ultimately proved successful in giving 18-year olds nationwide the right to vote, with the ratification in 1971 of the 26th Amendment, in the midst of the Vietnam war and widespread student unrest regarding the war's continued justification, as well the draft which was supplying the bulk of the manpower for it, including production of the "volunteers" into the Navy, Air Force or Marines, who volunteered only to avoid draft into the dreaded Army infantry because of low lottery numbers.

But, have things developed over time to the point where now the call is, "If she's old enough to vote, she's old enough to fight"? In short, have we developed slowly into the old Soviet Union, replete with the old jokes about masculine women in the culture? And, with the draft eliminated since the end of American involvement in Vietnam, not to mention de-emphasis of physical education in the schools since the Nixon Administration, has the average male become so emasculated, little Nixonites, as to need a mother figure who is strong physically, not just emotionally, to make up for little wimp-face who wants a big gun for Christmas as a substitute for the puny dingle-dangle hiding beneath layers of blubber?

"Pearson's Pentagon Pipeline" tells of it having become jaded over time to the supposed "secret revelations" consistently being paraded to the nation by Drew Pearson, usually no more secret or confidential than the tips picked up from Washington newsletters. And it was disgusted by the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the prior year. But, that said, it finds that if the claims of Mr. Pearson in his December 30 column were correct, that he had obtained secret Pentagon dispatches, to the apparent fact of which Senator McCarthy had taken umbrage and wanted investigated by Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, then the columnist should be investigated, as no one had the right to have such secret communications and to publish them until officially released.

You will have some disagreement on that stance from the New York Times and the Washington Post about 20 years down the road...

A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Who Did It?" tells of the response by the utilities to Governor Kerr Scott's urging to extend rural electrification being that 88 percent of the state already had electricity. While true, according to the North Carolina Rural Electrification Administration, the majority of that electrification had been accomplished by the REA. Prior to the establishment of the REA in 1935 and its competition to the utilities, the utilities had only electrified three percent of the state. The REA had built over half the infrastructure to connect with only about thirty percent of the customers. The private utilities were only responsible for 58.7 percent of the electrification of the state. Moreover, that remaining twelve percent yet to be electrified amounted in raw numbers to 32,844 farms.

Drew Pearson tells of the President receiving advice that the best thing he could do to promote national unity would be to appoint two Republicans to his Cabinet, such as Governor Dewey as Secretary of State. The current bickering on foreign policy was having a depressing effect among allies abroad, especially coming on top of the debacle in Korea in December and the letter of the President to Washington Post music critic Paul Hume for his negative review of daughter Margaret's operatic performance, that letter having been published all over the world, reducing confidence among allies in the President's ability to control his temper at a critical time. (Of course, it might also have deterred the Communist world for fear that unstable Harry might wake up one morning in a nasty mood and drop the big ones again just for the hell of it. As one potential saving grace, we suppose the same notion might apply today to tweet-tweet.)

Top Democrats recalled how FDR had brought unity at a critical juncture in 1940 by appointing Republicans Frank Knox to be Secretary of the Navy and Henry Stimson to be Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson having been Secretary of State under President Hoover. (He neglects to mention the elevation of Hoover-appointee to the Supreme Court, Harlan F. Stone, to become Chief Justice upon the retirement of Charles Evans Hughes in 1941, even if Justice Stone had been generally supportive of the New Deal.)

Governor Dewey was recognized as a man of ability and integrity who generally had the best interests of the country at heart. Secretary of State Acheson would be glad to leave his post in the wake of so much controversy swirling about him for the previous six months since the outbreak of the Korean war. Privately, he had expressed a desire to leave, but did not want to do so while under fire.

Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews had made a political comeback after being under fire a year earlier for his support of unification of the military and the nixing of the supercarrier. The Navy was being investigated in Congress for issuing negative propaganda against the Air Force. In the meantime, he had kept quiet and worked efficiently with his new chief of Naval operations, Admiral Forrest Sherman, his own pick for the position. The Navy had scored triumphs in Korea, especially the evacuation of the troops from Hungnam without loss. And the supercarrier was now to be built after all. In consequence, Secretary Matthews had extricated himself from hot water.

He notes that Admiral Sherman had been so fair to the Army and Air Force that if General Bradley should be promoted to become White House chief of staff, then Admiral Sherman would likely become chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Senator Wayne Morse, who heretofore had campaigned for conservative, anti-labor Republicans no matter how much he disagreed with them personally, had stated that he would do so no longer because the Republican conference had refused to place him on the GOP policy committee, regarded by him as a form of discipline. Senator William Langer of North Dakota had protested the exclusion from the committee of any progressives and recommended Senator Morse.

University of Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson, named Coach of the Year in 1950, had recently exchanged some comments with new Senate Majority Leader, Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona, formerly of Oklahoma, regarding the need in Arizona for leftover Oklahoma football players. Senator McFarland, after saying that as a Senator, he felt like one of the Oklahoma football players being tackled hard, wondered who was tackled hardest on the team, to which Coach Wilkinson had responded that, as in Congress, it was the star player.

Marquis Childs discusses the propaganda value to the Russians of Senator Taft's speech questioning whether the President had authority, without further Congressional approval, to send troops to Western Europe under NATO. He notes that, according to the New York Times, just as the recent isolationist speeches of former President Hoover and former Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy had proved useful to Pravda, so had the statements of Senator Taft. Pravda had devoted about a third of its foreign news coverage to the Senate speech. It was similar to the use made of the America First efforts in 1938-40 by the Nazi propaganda organs.

The Times placed emphasis on the fact that Senator Taft's remark that there was "no unquestionable proofs" that the Soviets intended a general war with the U.S. had been used by the Soviet press to great advantage, serving their continuing program of the previous year to indicate their peaceful intentions in the world. The Stockholm peace treaty petition, circulated around the world by the Soviets, had been signed by North Korea, and the latter Government had claimed that the North Korean invasion of South Korea had been in response to aggression by the South.

He concludes that it was entirely probable that Russia intended to launch an attack on the U.S. But when the East German "police force" attacked West Germany, it would be characterized as an attempt to put down aggression of the imperialist West zone, even though it would be the first step toward conquering Western Europe. If it were to proceed unchecked, it would make further defense of Western Europe impossible.

Senator Taft's speech to the Senate was thus proving useful to divide the non-Communist world and buttress Soviet claims of peaceful intent, by overstating and oversimplifying Soviet imperialist intentions, effectively replaying the history of a decade earlier.

Robert C. Ruark compliments First Lady Bess Truman for being able to remain in the background, modest and humble, during her husband's time in the White House, extending to nearly six years. He regards it as a minor miracle in Washington that someone in such a normally prominent role could have escaped without being embroiled in any controversy. Generally, there had been no criticism of her because her simplicity and modesty provided nothing to knock.

Daughter Margaret had leaned little on the White House in trying to establish her own career as an operatic singer. She was regarded as extremely nice, conducting herself modestly and with poise, as contrasted with Princess Margaret of Britain. Ms. Truman did not deliver impromptu arias in odd places and her public behavior never prompted scandal.

He acknowledges, "I'm no music critic—so long as her daddy's critical appreciation of his duckling does not distract him from his duties at hand."

The President, he concludes, was blessed with a practically flawless family, which had included the President's late elderly mother. He regards it as a blessing because in such times, he feels the country could not stand it if the First Lady were publicly second-guessing the Government and Margaret were to take over the WAC.

A letter writer finds it unnecessary for the State General Assembly to restore the automobile inspection law, to remove the $15 limit on the sale of new cars and to tax food and medicine, the latter being "an abomination under the sun". He thinks nearly all serious auto accidents were caused by carelessness, fast driving and drunkenness.

A letter writer views the world in chaos, with the U.S. losing everywhere, and time running out fast, as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa might pass to the Soviet sphere if Germany were lost. He regards the world outlook as worse than during World War II. The only way out of the dilemma, he advises, was through repentance and a return to God.

A letter writer from Chattanooga, Tenn., favors giving an inducement to the Japanese of home-rule in exchange for their full assistance in the Korean war and fortifying their island defenses against Russia. He also favors an absolute embargo on all imports and exports to and from Communist China and then enforcing it through a blockade. He favors supporting Chiang Kai-Shek in Formosa in an invasion of the mainland. He thinks the country should forge ahead with European allies, having now, through the Marshall Plan, built them up after World War II.

A letter writer from North Belmont favors admitting American mistakes and sins to bolster the "weaker, wicked brothers". "The truth is marching on!"

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