The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 11, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via John Randolph, that American tanks had cut through valleys on each side of "Heartbreak Ridge" in the eastern sector of Korea this date, in a running battle with enemy artillery and mortars. Behind this fire came U.S. infantry, storming the northernmost peak of the Ridge, but halted by entrenched enemy troops. Other U.S. infantrymen overran Chinese troops, capturing a dominating peak on nearby Kim Il Sung Ridge and penetrated two other nearby peaks. In the biggest airlift in history by helicopter, about 1,000 Marines were flown to the front to positions almost within sight of the enemy, without incident.
Chinese Communist radio claimed that it had inflicted over 13,000 U.N. casualties during the previous week and killed, captured or wounded almost 10,000 allied troops during its fall offensive in the western sector during the week. Official U.N. figures had not yet been released for that period but the report comments that Communist figures were usually greatly exaggerated.
Liaison officers of both the allies and Communists met again this date to try to reconvene the ceasefire talks and scheduled another meeting for Friday morning, following selection of a site near Panmunjom for resumption of the talks. It was reported from the meeting that headway was being made, though no final agreement had yet been reached to resume the talks. The sticking point appeared to be settlement of a neutrality agreement for the Panmunjom area.
In Cairo, Egyptians continued to demonstrate in favor of the Government policy ousting the British from the Suez Canal and from the British-Egyptian Sudan. Thousands of demonstrators shouted: "Down with Britain. We want the British to get out of our country." At the forefront of the crowd were Sudanese students of two Cairo universities. Eventually they dispersed without incident. The previous day, mobs had smashed British and French business offices and American soft drink trucks.
Perhaps, in the intervening day, someone offered them a Coke or Pepsi and got them to relax a little.
The House passed a 4.4 billion dollar appropriation bill, chiefly for military construction and the Atomic Energy Commission, in a roll call vote of 300 to 19. It refused to eliminate from the measure a 13 million dollar airport in the President's hometown of Grandview, Missouri. The measure would now go to the Senate for consideration.
Final agreement appeared likely on the 6 billion dollar bill to increase taxes after last-minute bargaining between House and Senate confreres to reconcile differences in the measures.
The FBI disclosed that it had been making wholesale arrests throughout the country in connection with theft of Federal Government property, primarily from military installations. Thirty persons had been taken into custody in the previous 24 hours in New Jersey, California, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and Washington, D.C. Ninety others had been arrested during the prior two months. The total thefts amounted to one million dollars worth of property.
The Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune reported that slot machine operators in that city were upset by the success of two men formerly of Las Vegas and their "system" for beating their slot machines. The two men refused to disclose how much they had won. The newspaper said they had won seven jackpots in a period of 45 minutes at one parlor, netting $210. The police chief had investigated and found nothing wrong, rejecting the demand of the operators that the two be arrested. Slot machines were legal in Idaho on a local-option basis. In Lewiston, the machines generated $340,000 per year in taxes. The men said that it was legitimate for them to take money from the operators through their system, as long as they did so honestly. One said that the success of the system depended on timing. No details are provided, in case you are contemplating adopting the "system".
In Detroit, an unemployed father of
four rigged up a make-shift electric chair in his home, according to
police, and electrocuted himself. His wife had filed in court a
non-support complaint against him that day. It provides details, in
case you might be contemplating the same action
In London, the Government announced
a new program of conservation, banning the manufacture of metal
hair-curlers starting the following Monday. Frizzy hair, that
electrocuted look
On the editorial page, "The Personable Mr. Finnegan" discusses James Finnegan of St. Louis, the former tax collector who was under investigation for taking payoffs on the side. He had not originally wanted the job when he took it in 1944, primarily as a favor to the late Robert Hannegan, then Commissioner of the IRB. Getting jobs for other people was, according to Mr. Finnegan in testifying before the Senate subcommittee investigating the matter, a major part of the job. He said that he took the $7,500 per year job because it only required about three or four hours per day and sometimes less.
Eventually, he had tried to quit a year earlier, but was persuaded by the President to remain because the IRB was not in a position to appoint a successor. Meanwhile, Mr. Finnegan made a lot more money than his Government salary from his law practice and he claimed that it was just coincidence that some of the legal fees came from clients whose tax returns had crossed his desk as tax collector.
It hopes that Mr. Finnegan's personable nature would not convince the Senators that his activities ought be overlooked. For most taxpayers found it unsavory that he took a Government job and earned money from it on the side in his law practice. The country wanted to know a good deal more about Mr. Finnegan and the implications generally for the IRB.
"Stassen's Vague Charges" tells of Harold Stassen testifying before both Senator Pat McCarran's subcommittee investigating Communism and Senator John Sparkman's committee considering recommendation of confirmation of Philip Jessup to become a member of the U.N. delegation. He had said during the week before the Sparkman committee that the pattern established in China was now being transferred to India to bring about Communist domination there. He noted that while Prime Minister Nehru had sought in the fall of 1949 surplus wheat from the U.S. to avoid mass starvation, Congress had not received the request from the Administration until December, 1950.
The piece finds it unclear what Mr. Stassen was trying to suggest, perhaps seeking to link the State Department with incipient Communism in India, but if so, was way off base. The Administration's record in support of Nehru was better than that of Congress, which delayed for over six months in providing the wheat, and in the final vote, 58 Republicans and 36 Democrats in the House opposed it, while in the Senate, conservative Republicans, Senators Everett Dirksen, William Langer, Kenneth Wherry, and Herman Welker, opposed it.
The President and Secretary Acheson had been firm in their support of the Point Foor aid to India and other such countries, while Congress lagged behind. Conservative opposition in Congress to provision of aid to India stemmed from Nehru's socialistic tendencies and dissatisfaction with his foreign policy, not any desire to support spread of Communism to India.
It finds that the stature of Mr. Stassen had decreased when he suggested unproven charges of Communist Chinese sympathies against Mr. Jessup and that unless he backed up these new allegations about India, the validity of his testimony had to be questioned.
"Charlotte's Aviation Future" tells of the city having been in a poor competitive position vis-à-vis other Southern air centers after the war, served only by Eastern Air Lines, which had only ten flights per day, all on north-south routes, most arriving and departing in the middle of the night. At the time, Atlanta had 34 daily Eastern flights, traveling in many directions. Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem were vying for more air service for the Triad.
In September, 1945, a special series appearing in the News had informed how delay and inaction in Charlotte was compromising its future in commercial aviation.
Now, there were 54 scheduled flights by four different airlines at the Municipal Airport each day and Charlotte, 71st in population, ranked 25th in air transportation. Between 1949 and 1950, passenger usage increased by 64 percent, to about 87,000. During the first half of 1951, usage totaled almost as much as for all of 1950 and forecasts put the total at around 200,000 for 1952 and 300,000 for 1953. A plan for air transportation drawn up for the city in 1950 was already out of date and improvements planned for 1951 might be inadequate for the ensuing decade. It favors proceeding into the future with sufficient imagination to provide the necessary facilities to keep pace with increased demand for air travel.
"End of the Series" recaps the sixth and final game of the World Series, won by the New York Yankees over the New York Giants, 4 to 3, albeit after a rally from a 4 to 1 deficit in the ninth inning. It finds that there were several reasons why this Series had caught the fancy of Americans more than past recent Series. The Giants had made a tremendous stretch drive to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League pennant race, forcing a three-game playoff, won in the third game in thrilling fashion by the Giants, 5 to 4. Joe DiMaggio, retiring from the game, had now played in more Series games and had more at-bats in the Series than any other player in history. Several of the top pitchers, in their first appearances, had given up more hits than they were accustomed to doing. Gil McDougald and Monte Irvin, among others, had tremendous games. And, the Yankees came through with their clutch hitting.
But, it finds, the primary reason for the public's fascination with the Series was that it gave respite from the world's weighty problems. People understood baseball, whereas they might not understand the atomic bomb, and it would provide them with a topic of conversation during the dreary winter ahead.
Don't worry. In time, that need will
be displaced by college basketball, a sport not rife with
Commies—even if there are a few teams which sport red as their
primary school color. These players go regularly to college and learn
of the many dangers of totalitarian dictatorships, while baseball
players are too busy whacking the leather-covered, cork-cored sphere
into cages on the farm to attend college in most cases, thus being
susceptible to Commie propaganda as they stand in the outfield, proletarian lackeys to the bourgeoisie,
awaiting fly balls, missiles headed in their direction, oblivious to
the danger
Drew Pearson reminds that in 1946, General Omar Bradley told a small group of Congressmen that if the Russian Army chose to invade Europe, it could reach the English Channel within twelve days and nothing could stop it. At present, the Russian Army could be stopped at the Rhine, the result primarily of new strategic atomic weapons which could be used against troops in the field and not indiscriminately against civilian populations in cities. Because large troop concentrations had to form at bridges to cross a river, they presented perfect targets for such weapons.
He notes that this concept was the basis for Senator Brien McMahon's resolution to increase spending on atomic weapons development.
U.S. scientists were skeptical of a British newsletter which claimed that a British scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo, who had defected behind the Iron Curtain, had taught the Russians how to build a hydrogen bomb. They believed that the second detonation of an atomic bomb, attributed to Mr. Pontecorvo, had moved the Russians closer to development of a strategic atomic bomb.
From seismometers and Geiger counters stationed around the borders of the Soviet Union, it appeared likely that the Russians had sought and failed to detonate an atomic bomb several weeks prior to the second blast, perhaps failing because of a faulty trigger mechanism, the most delicate part of the bomb. The second, successful detonation was of a bomb much less powerful than the weaker atomic bombs in the U.S. arsenal.
The best intelligence suggested that the Russians had scientists equal to those of the U.S. but lacked the technical know-how and large-scale production capability to make the bomb. The only sources of uranium for Russia were in depleted mines in East Germany and in the Jackamov region of Czechoslovakia, the latter of which had been the region where Czech miners had deserted and fled across the border into Germany, carrying pro-Western messages received from the Freedom Balloons launched in August over Czechoslovakia.
Secretary of State Acheson was prepared to make another attempt, through the U.N., to bring atomic energy production under control. He would not deviate from the Baruch plan and would insist on a foolproof method of international inspection. U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Alan Kirk, had warned that Stalin's recent statement regarding atomic control was intended only to prevent use by the U.S. of atomic weapons in Korea.
Richard Strout, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, tells of one of the worst collateral effects of McCarthyism being the tendency of Congress to investigate matters in the past rather than in the present. It was spending more time looking at charges of Communism in the Government, going back as far as 1935, ignoring the critical issue at present regarding the British-Iranian oil nationalization dispute, which affected the U.S. second only to Britain, in that Iran controlled 17 percent of the world's oil.
The Senate Internal Security Committee, chaired by Pat McCarran of Nevada, was investigating the Institute of Pacific Relations to determine whether it had pro-Communist influence on State Department policy toward China from 1935 onward. A subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, considering confirmation of Philip Jessup to become a delegate to the U.N., was also covering ground regarding his affiliations back to 1935, with an eye toward whether he held Communist sympathies. The Senate subcommittee considering Senator William Benton's proposal to oust from the Senate, for perjury and false statements anent Communists in the State Department, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was considering charges of the latter Senator which also covered old ground. The MacArthur hearings during April and May principally examined whether the State Department had provided adequate support to the Chinese Nationalists. Senate debate over confirmation of Ambassador-nominate Chester Bowles involved questions of Pacific policy, suspicions of past radicalism and his early connections with the New Deal.
Congress appeared not to have time to focus on current critical issues, being too preoccupied with the collapse of the Nationalist regime in China, occurring between 1945 in 1949.
Another adverse effect of McCarthyism was that the State Department was now spending much of its time asking whether a given course of action could be readily justified to a suspicious Congress rather than considering fully its advantage to U.S. foreign policy over the long haul.
Marquis Childs finds that the statements of Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, made in his speech at the University of Southern California recently, in which he touted the new modern weaponry, including strategic atomic weapons which could be used on the battlefield to target troops rather than civilian populations of cities, had oversold the concept of such weapons, still in the developmental stage. To do so carried the risk of giving a false sense of security to the American people, which was not yet extant.
The Pentagon had not been aware of Mr. Dean's speech until he was actually delivering it. The approach in the Department of Defense had been to understate such weapons and stress that they were still in the experimental stage.
Mr. Dean wanted, however, more Congressional appropriations for atomic weaponry and thus was engaged in this optimistic sales pitch.
Mr. Childs concludes that the over-optimism was likely to have unfortunate consequences both at home and abroad.
A letter from Robert McCormick, research director for the Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report—not the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, compliments the series of articles on the Hoover Commission by Vic Reinemer, which had run recently on the front pages of the News. He thinks them worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
A letter from A. Lee Wiggins, former Undersecretary of the Treasury, from Hartsville, S.C., also compliments the same series.
A letter writer commends Coleman Roberts of the Carolian Motor Club for his article republished in the newspaper from the State on October 3, regarding highway safety, but finds that he had overlooked the danger coming from the application of the truck lines to the Interstate Commerce Commission for authority to transport ammunition and other dangerous cargo over the highways. The number of north-south routes through the Carolinas posed a great danger from this prospect. The AAA had filed a protest against the application.
A letter writer finds a new state law preventing any candidate of any political party from filing for candidacy in a party primary different from that to which the candidate belonged, to be "Socialistic" and in violation of Federal statutes, which he does not bother to identify.
Incidentally, the Quote of the Day, from the Lexington (Ky.) Leader, while cute, makes little sense, as appellate courts function much as referee reviews of football or basketball plays during stoppage of action, to assure that during the heat of the moment in trials, the judge, prosecutor, or jury had not committed either Constitutional or prejudicial errors with respect to the accused, fatal to the conviction or sentence thereof, when the prosecution has the burden of proof to show beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty the guilt of the accused. Trials move swiftly, just like a basketball or football game, and many times, therefore, errors occur, even by the most attentive and scholarly of jurists, requiring reversal of a verdict of guilty and/or sentence thereafter imposed by the court or jury. Appellate courts should not be simply either rubber stamps for trial courts or considered by the public to be dealing in "legal technicalities" by which the guilty escape judgment, at least for the time being, until, after most appellate reversals, a new trial can be had.
Only Fascists and Communists, and other totalitarian regimes "lock 'em up", Trumpie. Stop and think for a change before chanting mindless billingsgate at your "rallies", reminiscent of Nazi Germany, led by your fearless leader. Or, perhaps you do not think that Nazis were "deplorables". Take a step back sometime from these "rallies", Trumpie, and you will see, if you view it at all objectively, assuming for the moment that you are capable of any kind of objective viewpoint, how you appear to most American people.
And to the head Moron, who just encouraged adoption of a "stop-and-frisk" policy to police departments across the country, if your advice is followed, you are just encouraging a litany of lawsuits under 42 U.S.C. 1983, for interference with freedom of travel, long recognized as a Constitutional right, by dint of violation of the Fourth Amendment proscription against searches and seizures, including the seizure of the person, however transitory, without probable cause for the stop and frisk, the one exception coming in the area of traffic stops because of the inherent mobility of the subject, even there still requiring probable cause for any intrusive search of the person or the vehicle. And that is not to mention the fact that any incriminating evidence seized thereby would ultimately need be excluded in any criminal proceeding resulting from the stop-and-frisk policy. Why don't you, Moron, either study law, yourself, or hire some counsel who are not yes-men and women and understand a little, at least, about the Constitution and prior Supreme Court decisions, before spouting off in approbation of absurdly unconstitutional conduct? in an atmosphere already rife with overly precipitous police action, leading too often to death or critical injury of innocent persons or at least those who could have been, with proper self-restraint by the police not compromising of officer safety, taken into custody without violence. "Stop-and-frisk", which implies something less than probable cause for a search, is patently a violation of the Fourth Amendment. If there is probable cause, there is no need for a "stop-and-frisk" policy, as any legitimate stop-and-frisk, viewed on the particular facts of each such instance, based on the inherent reasonableness of an officer's articulated observations giving rise to a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, not on subjective hunch and not as a matter of departmental "policy", falls squarely within the allowed searches under the Fourth Amendment.
But perhaps the Moron has torn that one out of the document while engrafting into it the "presumption of innocence" in Senate confirmation hearings of judges, which, incidentally, by the very need for contemplation of which, suggests a major flaw in the process of selection of properly qualified jurists by the head Moron.
Of course, the Moron knows that his primary constituency really only cares about one sentence of the Constitution, that comprising the Second Amendment, which they regularly misread and misinterpret as a full and unrestricted right to bear arms, not one limited by the necessity of maintaining a well-regulated militia, that is, the National Guard and police.
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