The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 13, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that counterattacking U.S. Second Division troops, with French and Dutch support, captured Hill 247 for the second time in two days late Saturday in central Korea, 1.5 to two miles south of Wonju, after beating back five waves of screaming enemy troops in a furious battle transpiring in 25-below zero weather. The recovery of the hill, named for its height in meters, was aided by 80 fighter and bomber planes which pounded the enemy positions for eight hours before the charge. It was estimated by correspondent William Barnard that the enemy suffered 3,100 killed during two days of fighting, during which 8,000 to 10,000 enemy troops hurled themselves against the allied horseshoe-shaped front. It was the fifth day of battle for two vital passes in the Sobaek mountain range leading to the main route from the southeast port of Pusan to Taegu, down which the withdrawing Eighth Army had passed from Seoul. By noon this date, according to Mr. Barnard, the waves of assaults by the enemy abruptly ceased.
In the western sector, there was little action but the enemy continued to amass its strength.
At the U.N., it appeared that Russia would not oppose the five-point ceasefire proposal for Korea supported by the U.S., giving new vitality to the proposal previously thought dead aborning. The General Assembly's political committee would vote on the proposal later in the day. If approved, the proposal would be forwarded to the Communist Chinese Government. Russian support would leave Communist China the option of supporting the proposal, a prospect previously dismissed as unlikely by most diplomats.
Senator Taft said that the proposed U.N. ceasefire amounted to "complete appeasement" of the Chinese Communists and that he would rather see a complete withdrawal of Americans from the peninsula. Other Congressmen also were demanding withdrawal.
There were strong signs that the Senate would receive a substitute measure for the Defense Department proposal to lower the minimum draft age from 19 to 18. Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland said that there was talk of one of two compromises. One would require that the 18-year old draftees undergo a year of training before being assigned to combat or overseas locations. Another, favored by the Senate Armed Services subcommittee chairman, Senator Lyndon Johnson, would limit the draft to those 18 and a half or older. Senator Johnson asked Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg, who had been testifying on the matter, to return on Monday after considering further the proposal and obtaining more facts regarding how many draftees the compromise proposal would produce.
General Eisenhower, supreme commander of NATO, visited Norway during his tour of Western Europe, saying that it was the brightest part of the Western defense system he had yet seen. He found it a country with a geographically defensible position which the Government was determined to defend. General Eisenhower was not going to visit Franco's Spain during his tour.
The President, in his economic message to Congress delivered the previous day, said that "very much more than" the eight billion dollars per year in new taxes passed by the previous Congress would be needed to balance the budget. Congressman Robert Doughton, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, suggested that double that amount was a fair estimate. The specific amount would be disclosed by the President in his Monday budget message.
Congress coupled praise for the tax increase proposal with criticism of the Administration's handling of the wage-price problem, resulting in rampant inflation. Senator Joe O'Mahoney, chairman of the joint Economic Committee, who normally supported the Administration's economic policies, was one of the more outspoken critics of the lack of White House response to inflation and called for immediate implementation of wage and price controls. Senator Hubert Humphrey echoed the remarks, as did a number of Republicans, including Senators Homer Capehart and John W. Bricker.
In Chicago, four firemen were killed
and four others were injured in a fire and explosion
Look there; that's exciting. Never seen nothin' like 'at. This is better 'an the fights. You gotta another Schlitz in 'ere?
A Manhattan corporation and 204 persons were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in New York Friday on charges of using the GI Bill to defraud the Government of nearly $300,000. The indictment included 199 veterans enrolled in the Grow System Beauty School on 42nd Street. The indictment said that 90 percent of those enrolled never had attended classes or even knew where the school was. The school had not enforced the failure to attend classes but pocketed the tuition.
Hey, what's the deal heah? Everybody gotta have Grow beauty. Correspondence course. They probably do the same thing at Columbia. Fight for your country and look what you get.
On the editorial page, "Truck Damage to Roads" tells of an experimental study in Maryland conducted over a period of six months regarding a 1.1-mile stretch of reinforced concrete roadway and the damage caused to it by truck traffic. It found that as axle loads increased arithmetically, the damage to the road increased geometrically, such that a 30 percent increase in axle load could produce an increase in damage of several hundred percent.
The study's findings suggested that North Carolina weight limits were dangerously high at 31,500 pounds for single axles and 40,000 pounds for tandem axles. The State Highway Commission was currently examining weight limits in the state vis-à-vis the findings of the study.
What if you don't have no axles on your truck?
"Tobey Wins Committee Post" finds that the Republicans' selection of Senator Charles Tobey to fill the vacancy on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to have been a wise choice, as he was generally a supporter of Administration foreign policy and would therefore strengthen the Committee's internationalist position.
The isolationist bloc had wanted Senator William Knowland of California, who, while generally in favor of defense of Europe, also fervently believed that it was wise to defend Chiang Kai-Shek and Formosa, and his selection therefore would have proved problematic anent Far Eastern policy.
As Senator Tobey placed the national interest above party interest, he was a good pick for the Committee.
"Nabbing the 'Small Fry'" tells of North Carolina courts having been generally reluctant to crack down on small time bootleggers, numbers operators and others of the stripe, as the big time operators were considered the primary culprits. But a Recorder in Wilmington had handed down relatively stiff sentences to four of nineteen men convicted of numbers running, providing them two years each in jail, with the others receiving suspended sentences. He apparently considered the numbers runners indispensable to the enterprise and so a means to get at the big operators. The piece tends to agree with the approach because it was difficult usually to catch the heads of the rackets.
"What Price Glory?" tells of Sinclair Lewis, who had died during the week at age 65 after prolonged illness, having achieved his greatest work in the Twenties, with Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, between 1920 and 1926, primarily for which he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, and then Elmer Gantry in 1927 and Dodsworth in 1929. The piece finds that genius tended to have a shorter life than authors. It suggests that perhaps the world was not conducive to genius because of the adulation heaped on it. Sometimes, someone such as Thomas Merton came on the scene to dominate the best seller list, as he had in 1949, and then disappeared into a Trappist monastery, as he had also done.
The society could not stop such glorification of popular novelists, baseball stars or Hollywood child prodigies, but it could recognize the terrific price which came with glory.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "On the Local Level", tells of two specially equipped rooms to be included for the mentally ill in the new Shelby hospital, expected to be completed the following spring. It meant that persons who needed psychiatric care would not be thrown in jail. In most communities in the state, there were no such facilities. It represented a small amount of progress in a field where indifference and inaction had for too long prevailed.
Mental hygiene clinics, it advises, were of even greater need, for diagnosing mental illness and providing early treatment to avoid having to resort to specially equipped hospital rooms.
Drew Pearson tells of the investigating committee, chaired by Senator Guy Gillette, considering how to stop the inflationary spiral of food prices, especially meats. The committee was urging raising of sheep to ease both the wool and lamb shortage, as there were fewer sheep in the country than at any time since the Civil War. (That is because everyone was losing sleep and thus in need of counting them as they escaped the paddock into the countryside.)
The Department of Justice, he urges, ought crack down on price-fixing among the large bakers and roll back prices on bread. Committee studies showed bread prices jumping as high as 25 cents per loaf in Albuquerque despite ingredients dropping in price.
Milk deliveries were becoming outmoded and were running up the cost of milk. Another factor was adding a penny for adding vitamins to milk when it only cost a sixteenth of a cent.
How much is the pink elephant meat and the maraschinos?
Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois found that the President shared the same problem with President Lincoln during the Civil War vis-à-vis the opposing party. President Lincoln had to bring in Democratic support while President Truman had to gather Republican support. Senator Douglas, responding to the claim of Senator Taft that Republicans were being excluded from foreign policy, said that there were more Republicans running foreign policy than Democrats, including former Senator Warren Austin, chief delegate to the U.N., John Foster Dulles, chief Far Eastern adviser in the State Department, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a delegate to the U.N., and former Senator John Sherman Cooper, who had undertaken various diplomatic missions for the State Department.
Senator George Malone of Nevada had gotten Senator Richard Russell to agree to let him co-sponsor the universal military training measure, prepared by Senator Russell. Senator Malone then sent out a press release on the bill commenting on it, without ever mentioning Senator Russell other than as a co-sponsor.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the President having taken the advice of senior advisers, the DNC, Democratic Congressional leaders and the State Department to step back on civil rights and defer the program until after the Korean war, so as not to alienate Southern Democrats, necessary to accomplish foreign policy aims.
The Alsops regard it as a critical and necessary move to avoid losing the Southerners to an isolationist coalition of Republicans. Aside from fiscally conservative Senator Harry F. Byrd, who had swung, because of his insistence on economy, to nearly complete isolationism, such moderate Democrats as Georgia Senators Richard Russell and Walter George were moving toward active support of the Administration foreign and defense policies. The latter Senators had represented a group which Senator Taft and his allies had hoped to woo only a month or so earlier.
The Democrats now would be voting pretty solidly, with the Southerners further encouraged by the dispensation of patronage from the White House, joined by some progressive Republicans, as Senator Wayne Morse and Margaret Chase Smith, such that the Administration foreign policy appeared ready to be approved in the new Congress.
The Alsops suggest that as FDR had done in 1943, President Truman needed to cast aside the Fair Deal domestic program and concentrate on the war.
Marquis Childs tells of new political coalitions forming in the Government. The Southern Democrats effectively controlled the Senate. They could join with Republicans to block social legislation of the Administration, and with Northern Democrats on foreign and defense policy issues. The President had sought to console Senator Byrd with a recent letter, as he knew he would need him on foreign policy.
Republicans, meanwhile, just two votes short of a majority in the Senate, had shifted further to the right. They had excluded all of the progressives from the GOP policy committee and the influence of Senator McCarthy had grown within the inner councils of the party. Many within the party were adopting the "Gibraltar in America" line of former President Hoover, favoring in a recent speech gradual withdrawal of defenses from Western Europe and the Far East to the two oceans.
Similarly, among Democrats, the Northern liberal-labor faction was being left out of the inner council.
Organized labor, both CIO and AF of L, favored cooperation with Western Europe, viewed the Taft-Hoover form of pulling back defenses as inimical to international labor.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capitol Roundup", tells of neither North Carolina Senator having anything to complain about regarding committee assignments, as Senator Willis Smith was the only freshman Senator to receive his first choice, the Judiciary Committee, while Senator Clyde Hoey was renamed to his three prior committee assignments, becoming second in seniority on two of them and third on the other.
Senator Smith was also serving on the District Committee, overseeing D.C., one of two such committees where most freshmen served.
Thomas L. Robinson, publisher of The News, received the first pass to the Senate issued by Senator Smith.
A friend had told Congressman Jere Cooper, second in line on the House Ways & Means Committee to North Carolinas's Robert Doughton, the chairman, that he would still be second in line thirty years hence when he was dead at 87 and Mr. Doughton would be only 116.
There was some support in the Southern bloc of Congress for Senator Taft's move to prevent the President from sending troops to Western Europe without Congressional approval. Senator Hoey said that he believed it would be wise, for the sake of unity, for the President to consult with Congress before sending any troops abroad. Senator Smith said that while there were exceptional emergencies, generally the President should not send troops abroad without the consent of Congress.
Senator Hoey lauded the President's State of the Union address, and Senator Smith found it "reassuring". Mr. Doughton said that he and his colleagues would do what they could to raise taxes, per the President's requests, without wrecking the economy. Congressman Graham Barden still wanted to preserve his 300 million dollar aid to education bill, which he found threatened by the proposed cuts in domestic expenditures.
Senator Richard Nixon of California had taken over the office in the S.O.B. between Senator Hoey and Senator Smith after Louisiana Senator Russell Long had vacated it, apparently finding the atmosphere becoming too conservative. Senator Smith had gone to Duke as an undergraduate and for law school. Senator Nixon had graduated from the Law School, and Senator Hoey had received an honorary degree from the institution.
Only one, however, would eventually have his portrait taken down.
Senator Hoey would introduce a bill for control of homosexuals in the Government. It had died in the previous Congress.
The two North Carolina Senators had not made up their minds on universal military training. Senator Hoey had previously opposed it but now believed it might have to be adopted.
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