The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 6, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Eddy Gilmore, that Josef Stalin had disclosed in a front-page Pravda newspaper interview that Russia had recently detonated a second atomic bomb and that it planned more tests of atomic bombs of various calibers, marking the first time that the Soviets had announced detonation of an atomic bomb. Stalin advised American leaders not to "get excited and raise the alarm" regarding this test, that Soviet bombs were no threat to American security because they were not contemplated as part of an attack on the U.S. or any other country at any time, but rather were for its own defense against the "Anglo-American aggressive front". Gordon Dean, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, said that Stalin was only confirming what the U.S. already knew regarding the test.
Nate Polowetzky reports from Korea that American and French infantrymen had charged with fixed bayonets behind flamethrowers to seize virtually all of "Heartbreak Ridge" this date. Meanwhile, the allied offensive in the western sector of the front came to a halt with most objectives secured, after gaining up to five miles in four days in the biggest allied drive in the previous three months.
In the air war, U.S. jets engaged enemy planes at 3 to 1 odds, with the Americans losing one plane but probably destroying one enemy fighter and damaging two more.
There was no new move toward reopening the ceasefire talks.
Former Governor of Minnesota Harold Stassen the previous Monday had told the Senate Internal Security subcommittee considering the confirmation of Ambassador-at Large Philip Jessup to become a delegate to the U.N., that the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had informed him the prior November that Secretary of State Acheson and Mr. Jessup had proposed at a White House meeting that further military aid to the Chinese Nationalists be terminated. The State Department had replied that a conference had been held on February 5, 1949, to consider such a proposal made by a U.S. military representative in China but had been turned down by the President after Congressional leadership objected. It said that Mr. Jessup was not present and did not indicate what Mr. Acheson's position had been. Mr. Stassen suggested to the subcommittee that it subpoena the diary of Senator Vandenberg, as, according to Senator Vandenberg's son, it would corroborate the "essential facts" of his earlier testimony.
Two of the largest bills of the 82nd Congress, the 57 billion dollar defense budget and 7.4 billion dollar foreign aid measure, were slated for high priority when the Senate would meet on Monday. Administration leaders expressed confidence that they would be pushed through rapidly and with little trouble of passage. The defense budget was the largest peacetime appropriation bill in the nation's history and had cleared the House the previous day after having been reconciled in conference to eliminate differences between the House and Senate measures passed previously. The foreign aid measure was also the result of reconciliation.
House investigators for a Ways & Means subcommittee hinted at new revelations of scandals within the IRB in the wake of the mounting allegations of tax shakedowns and sideline profits by key collection officials.
It was reported in Yugoslavia that in Hungary 400 coal miners had been arrested following a strike precipitated by the elimination of extra lard rations for the workers. The newspaper in Belgrade did not provide the source of the information.
In St. Louis, Basil Whitener of Gastonia and Richard Nelson of Illinois were battling for the national presidency of the Young Democrats, to be decided late in the afternoon. Mr. Whitener was the Solicitor for the judicial district comprised of Mecklenburg and Gaston Counties and had been a leading figure in the Young Democrats and in party circles in the state for several years. Governor Adlai Stevenson had addressed the delegates to the convention, stating that "confusion and bitter conflict" existed among Republicans.
In Chicago, a wealthy building contractor had been shot to death on July 19 and a 17-year old Air Force private from Chicago admitted to police this date that he had been the killer, following his arrest for questioning the prior day. The motive, he said, was robbery and he had two accomplices in the crime.
In San Francisco, a man confessed to the killing of a man by firing a .22 rifle through the peephole in the man's front door. The killer had hoped to marry the victim's estranged wife.
He had a strange way of asking for her hand in marriage.
Near Greensboro, an automobile collided with a tractor-trailer truck, killing five Burlington residents and injuring a man and a woman. The driver of the truck said that he was going up a hill when he saw the automobile headed toward his truck.
Snow fell in some Western states, with seven inches measured at Fort Bridges, Wyo., this date while summertime-type weather pervaded most of the East and South, with highs in the high 80s and 90s in many areas, including 94 in Washington and Greensboro, N.C., 92 in Memphis and Charleston, S.C., and 89 at Rochester, N. Y., and in Philadelphia.
In Rome, Sheppard King III, heir to a Houston oil fortune, renewed his adoration for an Egyptian dancer and stated that they would be married during the first week of December. His former wife gave them her blessings. Mr. King's young sister denied that she planned to marry an Egyptian fencer but only had affection for a private first class in the Air Force medical department, serving in Korea. Mr. King, his sister and former wife were all traveling together and staying in the same hotel, presumably in separate rooms.
In Los Angeles, a man was sentenced to six months in jail for spanking a woman, Mary MacLaren, 51, who had been an actress during the silent movie era. The man had responded to her July ad offering her services as a child's companion, telling her that his 14-year old daughter needed spanking sometimes and that he would have to spank her, too, to see if she could become one of the family. When he arrived at her residence to qualify her for the job, a policeman was hiding in the closet.
The Public Library in Syracuse, N.Y., admitted that it had few patrons since the start of the World Series, and so had installed a television set which would be on hand for the balance of the games.
Such lends credence to a letter writer below.
The New York Giants would beat the New York Yankees this date, 6 to 2, to take a two to one game lead in the Series.
On the editorial page, "Peace and Disarmament" tells of several outstanding Americans during the previous week voicing their concerns regarding U.S. adoption of a bellicose attitude while leaving the Russians to monopolize the peace front. America publicized its defense efforts while Russia advertised its peace efforts in Europe and Asia. America's publicity regarding its peace efforts were small by comparison.
Former Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman believed that the free world had reached the point militarily where it could thwart the plans of Russia for world conquest and he urged a drive by the U.S. for universal disarmament.
But columnist Stewart Alsop, in France, did not believe the free world was yet in a position to thwart Soviet aggression. He had expressed concern about the way French citizens were being indoctrinated by the Moscow peace line such that he had heard one woman tell him that whereas America talked of cannons, one could not eat a cannon, and that the Russians wanted peace.
Head of Look Magazine, John Cowles, had recently returned from Europe and Asia with a belief similar to that of Mr. Hoffman, but believed that Russia would never agree to effective international control of armaments. Yet, he ventured, if the proposal were repeatedly made by the U.S. and Russia repeatedly refused to accord it, the world would be repeatedly reminded that Russia was the aggressor and the warmonger.
Erwin D. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, believed that all of the talk about secret weapons and atomic power had left peace on a very shaky basis, that peace had never come from an arms race, rather only from mutual understanding.
It suggests that while the President and the Secretary of State repeatedly stated the nation's peaceful goals, such expressions were not enough, that it needed to be adapted to the country's knowledge of mass communications through such means as Voice of America and urging Congress to give more money to it. It believes it was time to counter the military hysteria which gripped the country with the reasoning expressed by the men to which it refers. If military preparation, while necessary to a point, continued to grow apace for years to come, it would lead to economic chaos through increased taxation. That would enable Russia to take over America at its leisure after collapse financially. It favors putting some of the defense spending to work in the area of psychological warfare if the goal genuinely were world peace.
"Progress Story" finds a report by the Charlotte Public Library to provide information of its encouraging growth in facilities and use of those facilities, as provided in a table which showed that in 1941 there were 61,600 books on hand, 329,226 books loaned out, with a budget of $38,000, while in 1951 the stock had more than doubled to 138,268 books, with 525,193 loaned out, with an annual budget of $148,000.
In 1940, the library had ranked at the bottom among all public libraries serving cities of 100,000 or more population, and in that category had the smallest book stock and books per capita, the second lowest operating income and the third lowest number of staff members. It had risen markedly since that time, but still had only a book stock half the national average. Use of the library was up 60 percent and per capita expenditures were 60 percent of the national average.
It finds that the fact that the facilities were being used so freely demonstrated that the library was fulfilling its objective to enrich the people of the community and thereby increase the general level of education.
Well, one would have to do a little more digging to establish the certainty of that assumption, finding out what books were being loaned out the most; for there is a difference between War and Peace or A Farewell to Arms, for instance, and the Hardy Boys mysteries. And once that was done, one would need to undertake a questionnaire survey of those who had checked out the most loaned books considered good literature and query as to what readers got out of those books. For it is one thing to check out a book and quite another to read it, and yet quite another to interpret and understand it and be able to communicate that to others.
We do not mean that as a suggested slam on any Charlottean's level of literacy but only as a suggestion to dig further into the real efficacy of the library. Certainly, for instance, Harry Golden very much benefited from reading books and, hopefully, he represented a large segment of Charlotte's population at the time—though, candidly, we have our strong doubts.
Meanwhile, of course, Winston-Salem was a bastion of literacy and a positive encampment of litterateurs.
"Confusion Compounded" finds that the latest clarification by the White House of its September 24 executive order enabling agency heads to classify for security reasons information and documents under their control to have only confused the matter more. The White House had said that the order was designed to protect secret information when it left the military departments and went to other agencies. While that appeared reasonable, it was, the piece observes, not what the original order had stated. Furthermore, at his press conference, the President had said that "slick magazines and newspapers" had published 95 percent of the nation's secrets and that publishers had a responsibility not to print information which was of value to the enemy even if cleared by a governmental agency. But later, the White House clarified that this statement only meant that cleared information could be published, provided the official giving the clearance was qualified to judge its value, leaving reporters to wonder how they would assess an official's qualifications. The President's statement about a Yale study having concluded that 95 percent of the nation's secrets had been published led to speculation as to whether the Yale experts who made the study had access to all of the nation's secrets in order to come up with that assessment.
It concludes that the President had not made the case for his order or its lack of potential for abuse in the hands of non-military agencies.
Drew Pearson tells of soybean prices having taken a sudden drop recently, suggestive of some tampering with them again. Previously, a group of Chinese speculators had rigged the market so that the price had shot up by a dollar per bushel, but this time it had dropped from $3.14 to $2.70 per bushel so that speculators betting on the short side of the market were able to make a killing while American farmers took a big hit. The Agriculture Department was required to investigate any suspicious activity in the commodity market, and he suggests that Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan look into these manipulations in both soybeans and rye, and promises that his column could provide him with sworn statements of witnesses who would testify that certain Chinese had been interested in both commodities and were able to make a profit in the commodity market without paying U.S. taxes, then using that money to finance the smear campaigns of the China lobby against Secretary of State Acheson and former Secretary of Defense Marshall, contending their affinity to Communist China.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Omar Bradley was cross-examined by friends of General MacArthur in an executive session of the Senate Armed Services Committee recently as to why the Air Force had recently bombed Rashin near the Siberian border when General MacArthur had been ordered not to bomb it. Senator Harry Cain of Washington was the chief examiner and when he asked why the orders had been reversed, General Bradley stated that the Russians had read of the MacArthur hearings and in consequence knew of these orders and believed therefore that Rashin was safe from bombing, so built up huge supplies there and gave them little protection. The reason General MacArthur had been forbidden from bombing the location was because of the proximity to the Russian border and the possibility of inadvertently bombing in Siberia, possibly drawing Russia into the Korean War. Thus, the Air Force had been ordered to bomb Rashin only in clear weather and at a low altitude, and by visual recognition rather than instruments, resulting in heavy destruction of enemy supplies.
General Bradley also said that the biggest threat to U.N. forces remained the Russian Air Force and that if Russia did enter the war, the U.N. forces could not maintain their air superiority. He predicted that during the winter, a stalemate would ensue and that the plan was to remain on active defense, harassing the enemy and wiping out as many Chinese as possible. General Bradley appeared pessimistic about the prospects of the ceasefire talks.
He also warned that the futuristic secret weapons which had been discussed recently were four to six years away in development and could not be depended upon any time soon, therefore, to make any substantial contribution to military operations.
Recently on the Senate floor, Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee engaged in a finger-shaking diatribe at fellow Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver regarding the latter's plan to have a roving Federal judge for both the Middle and Western Districts of Tennessee, prompting Senator William Langer of North Dakota to inquire as to which Senator from Tennessee represented the Hatfields and which, the McCoys.
Stewart Alsop tells of Winston Churchill having visited Paris and stated that he did not have in mind a European army when he declared his support for a European union. Mr. Alsop suggests that what he had in mind all along was likely a European coalition with England at its head, rather than that which General Eisenhower's headquarters was now promoting very seriously. Meanwhile, the chief French planner had predicted that there would be a United States of Europe by 1953.
General Eisenhower and most of his staff had come to believe that there could be no real European military strength built on individual national efforts, but rather would require both the French Schuman plan for pooling iron and steel resources in Europe between France and Germany and the European army.
An international army would mean an international foreign policy and that a third of each nation's budget in Western Europe would be contributing to an army controlled by no single nation. That would trigger the necessity of a European foreign ministry and a European finance ministry, with a European defense ministry as the logical next step. The French leaders and General Eisenhower and his staff agreed that a European army could only work within the framework of a European federation.
But such a federation would be opposed by the Communists and the Gaullists in France and so the entire idea might turn out to be "wishful nonsense".
Robert C. Ruark discusses the escape from such weighty issues as the detonation of a second atom bomb by the Russians, the Korean War and the larger Cold War, through the National League pennant race between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, won by the Giants in the bottom of the ninth of the third game with a three-run homerun.
"This devotion to simple trivia sounds a lot more like we used to be, when the nation was healthy, than our recent role of solvers of the world's weighty woes. I realize that this is treasonous to the self-assumed role of salvation we have assumed, but I don't care. Away with the Russians, adieu to the atom, and let the Baluchistanian babu look after his own headaches. Play ball!"
A letter writer from Chicago, director of the Commission on Financing of Hospital Care, who was born in the Dismal Swamp, compliments the editorial of September 18, "Getting at the Facts", regarding the hospital study.
A letter writer from Moses Lake, Wash., compliments the editorial "Freedom and Revolution" as logical and fair, especially in times when it was popular to lay all sorts of evils at the door of Communism. He especially praises the last paragraph.
A letter from the president of Davidson College, Dr. J. R. Cunningham, thanks the newspaper for its help in making possible the successful conclusion of the recent Davidson Development Program, the first time the College had ever sought funding from the community at large, brought on by inflation and the current military program.
A letter writer could not understand why the whole country became so hysterical about baseball. She points out that at the very same time the Giants had won the pennant, the President had announced that Russia had set off another atom bomb. Yet, people did not even seem to stop to think about it and few commentators mentioned it. Members of Congress went to the baseball game instead of doing their job to prevent a Russian "conflagration". She says she does not object to baseball as a game and had a son who played it, but that such emphasis, to the exclusion of other more important issues, was problematic. "We may all be killed just because of this crazy baseball."
She adds a P.S. that she just heard that a Senate committee investigating Ambassador Jessup had stopped its proceedings to obtain news about a ballgame, wonders what the country was coming to.
Wait until the day when the Republicans will turn the confirmation of a nomination to the Supreme Court into a ballgame, on seeming penalty that if it failed, all of the Heavens would fall to earth and the End would come in a mighty flourish of God's wrath on the heathen Democrats for their daring to stand in the way of God's will that the Republicans shall control the U.S. Supreme Court forever and a day—never minding that Republican appointees have had uninterrupted majority control thereof since 1970, during which interim period most of those horrible, terrible, heathen, liberal decisions, including Roe v. Wade, have been decided, while the rest, such as Miranda v. Arizona and other such terrible decisions making the job of the police and rubber hose much tougher to accomplish to get the guilty locked up, had come during the leadership of the Court by another Republican appointee, Chief Justice Earl Warren, under whose 16-year tenure as Chief, the Court was comprised since 1957, including the appointment in 1962 by President Kennedy of a Republican, Byron White, of five Republicans and four Democrats, though from 1962 to 1970, five Democratic appointees. Thus, to be clear, there have been more Republicans on the Supreme Court than Democrats consistently, without interruption, for even one minute, since 1957. And actually, if one includes Justice Harold Burton, a Republican appointed by President Truman, that unbroken control by a Republican majority yet goes back one more year to 1956, when Justice William Brennan replaced retiring Justice Sherman Minton, albeit a liberal replacing a conservative.
But never mind facts when you are a
Republican, who desires total control and elimination of all contrary
viewpoints, or at least relegation of those viewpoints to the margins
where you can safely give them only grudging lip service. (Speaking of whom, incidentally, it is not at all clear what exactly Sing-Along McConnell meant when he referred to a "tradition" established in 1888, during the first Presidency of Grover
Cleveland, that a Senate of a different party from that of the President did not confirm a nominee to the Supreme Court in a presidential election year. The only vacancy which occurred in 1888 was that of the Chief Justice, Morrison Waite, who died in March. The Republican Senate confirmed Democrat Cleveland's replacement nominee, Melville Fuller, in July, 1888. There is, in fact, no example of this "tradition" at all. To the contrary, in 1880, a heavily Democratic Senate quickly confirmed Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes's selection of William Woods to replace retiring Justice William Strong, who had retired after the election which saw Republican James Garfield win. In 1956, ahead of the election, Justice Brennan, a Republican appointee, was confirmed by a Democratic Senate. In 1968, when Strom Thurmond and Co. filibustered to death the nomination by President Johnson of Justice Abe Fortas to become Chief to replace retiring Chief Justice Warren, there were hearings held by the Democratic Senate and but for the filibuster, Justice Fortas would have been confirmed, as a majority voted for cloture, albeit not enough to form the necessary supermajority. As with most of what Sing-Along says, it is made up from whole cloth within his imagination of the moment—unless, of course, he was thinking of some other country, such as Russia or Germany in 1888, one closer to his heart and mindset
Well, on that, there is always next season, right around the corner, provided, of course, Democrats and independents who have seen quite enough of this present mess will turn out in droves at the polls to cast their ballots. Just think of it this way, a vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections means at least some good tv for the next couple of years, with all the investigatory hearings set to occur which have backed up under the Republican obstructionists. It will be like 1973 and 1974 all over again. For those too young, what a time that was... You will enjoy the show. And instead of a rich man's tax bill being the crowning achievement of the biennial period for the "President", we may actually get some bipartisan legislation for a change.
It is not too late, by the way, for you Trumpies to return to reality, realizing the con job which has been played on you. Many have already disabused themselves of the brainwashing which went on in 2015-16, tantamount to the old Communist and Nazi propaganda methods, the Big Lie, from which the Trumpie leaders learned their craft, even if by indirection through former Nixon and McCarthy dirty tricksters Roger Stone and Roy Cohn.
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