The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 10, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Nate Polowetzky, that the allies, after turning down the Communist counter-proposal for establishing the ceasefire buffer zone in Korea along current battle lines without alterations later except by mutual consent, had submitted a new proposal to the Communist negotiators regarding the buffer zone, that it could be based on the battle lines with "such minor local adjustments as may be mutually considered desirable", assumed by observers to mean that allied hard-won positions in the central and eastern fronts might be traded for Kaesong, demanded by the Communists. The offer was met, according to a U.N. spokesman, with a generally negative response, though the Communists did not close the door on its consideration.

In ground and air action, First Division Marines, celebrating the 176th birthday of the Marine Corps, hit enemy-held hills with an artillery and aerial assault, and then an artillery spotter plane flew above the area with a trailing banner which read "happy birthday". For several days, Marine planes had dropped pamphlets on the North Korean lines inviting their troops to the birthday party.

Visiting Korea, General Hoyt Vandenberg, chief of staff of the Air Force, said that improved jet fighter planes were ready for use against the Communists in Korea. He said that jet bombers, the Boeing B-47 and the Australian Canberra, would eventually replace the B-29 bombers.

In Paris, the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey announced that they intended to form the Middle East Defense Command to arm, train and help defend Israel and the Arab world, including its vital waterways and oil lands, against Communist aggression. Turkey was expected to be the kingpin of the organization. The Arab world was split over acceptance of the proposal, with Egypt flatly refusing to join while the Syrian Government which had favored it fell in Damascus this date amid anti-Western demonstrations.

Also in Paris, at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, Russia suffered a defeat in its campaign to seat Communist China, as the 14-member Steering Committee refused, by a vote of 11 to 2 plus one abstention, to put the question on the agenda. Only Russia and Poland dissented. Observers believed that the Soviets would stage a final fight on the issue on the Assembly floor. U.S. chief delegate Warren Austin said that the move was a reiteration of a proposal which had been considered and rejected by the body and its committees nearly 90 times. The Security Council approved a U.S.-British proposal to provide Frank Graham, mediator in the dispute between India and Pakistan regarding Kashmir, six additional weeks to try to achieve agreement on removal of Indian and Pakistani troops from the princely state.

In New York, CIO head Philip Murray, also head of the United Steelworkers union, would meet in Atlantic City the following week to formulate the Steelworkers' demands under a new contract, after the present contract, under which the workers were receiving an average of about $1.90 per hour, would expire at the end of the year. The CIO convention, which had just concluded, had effectively determined to torpedo the Government's stabilization program.

Also in New York, the possibility of a new crisis loomed over the waterfront as rival factions within the AFL International Longshoremen's Association charged each other with truce violations, following the calling off of the strike. Leaders on opposite sides of the dispute accused each other of discrimination against strikers and non-strikers. The dissident ILA group charge that underworld figure Anthony Anastasia, an ILA hiring boss, had locked out seventeen wildcat strikers who sought to return to work the previous day at Brooklyn piers. Mr. Anastasia said that he had refused to hire two men on orders from his employer. ILA president Joseph Ryan responded that the rebel locals were threatening to oust longshoremen who worked during the 25-day strike.

Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming said that the Defense Department had assured him that it would vigorously enforce a new law which he had sponsored, forbidding defense contract seekers from providing Government employees with gifts or gratuities for the purpose of influence. The law provided for cancellation of contracts upon evidence that the contractor provided such gifts.

In Philadelphia, Congressman Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, former RNC chairman, asserted that General Eisenhower would run for president as a Republican and would be elected.

Favorite-son candidates appeared ready to declare in the 1952 presidential race for the purpose of gathering delegates for either Senator Taft or General Eisenhower. Governor Earl Warren of California appeared ready to declare his candidacy within the following week. Harold Stassen said at a Chicago news conference that his plans would remain open until January and that it was less likely he would run if the General entered the race, that he would not support Senator Taft. Strictly speaking, neither were favorite sons, in the sense that they depended solely on their home states for support, but Governor Warren would have to lean primarily on California's delegates and Mr. Stassen on those of Minnesota, where he had been Governor.

In Newark, bandits killed a special policeman, slugged two supermarket employees and escaped with more than $11,000 in five different holdups the previous night, fleeing, in three of the instances, in a light blue convertible. Police were reluctant to associate all five holdups and focused their attention on two men who had fled on foot following the robbery of a gas station at around midnight.

In Los Angeles, a young woman was arrested after confessing to the killing of her infant by stabbing it and then placing it in a tub of hot water, then trying to commit suicide before losing her nerve.

In El Paso, six prisoners were taken from the jail to the hospital the previous day as blood donors, but only five returned, after one of them complained of feeling dizzy, was allowed to get some air, and took off.

In New York, operetta and song composer Sigmund Romberg, 64, died the previous night of a cerebral hemorrhage at his hotel. He was the composer of such musicals as "The Student Prince", "Desert Song", "Maytime", "Blossomtime" and "New Moon", had composed 78 operettas and more than 2,000 songs during a 40-year period.

In Chapel Hill, William Meade Prince, 58, a famed illustrator and author, died by suicide, shooting himself in his right temple.

Dick Young of The News tells of the modern school library being a place to have fun, where students learned the pleasure which came from good reading. Modern librarians might also recommend a filmstrip, radio program or recording, as well as books. Many of the school libraries in Charlotte had small listening booths for the students. (At our school, they used to turn up the treble so damned high on the headphones, or else the headphones, themselves, were simply so cheap, that the resulting crisp tintinnabulation gave us a headache in nothing flat, causing us to want to scream in defiance, though holding our peace for the sake of decorum. They needed some deep, resonant bass as a counterbalance.) Mr. Young says that progress had been made rapidly in school libraries, as even so recently as 30 years earlier, most books had fine type and few illustrations, making them unattractive to students. (Need loads of them picters and big, big print, one word per page 'll do her, so that you don't have to 'member so much for them book reports.)

In 1919, Franklin Matthews, librarian for the Boy Scouts, had suggested the first children's book week to promote reading among children, such a success that it was adopted by the American Booksellers Association, such that book publishers began to compete with each other for issuing attractive books. Even textbooks in the lower grades were now of this type.

A picture of a young girl in the third grade is presented, ostensibly marveling over her book text, obviously, however, a staged photograph, probably holding a book she had not read, would not read and one which was of absolutely no interest to her, then or later.

Now, little girl, strike a pose like you have just read something extraordinarily interesting and, at the same time, startling in your book. No, don't stick out your tongue and cross your eyes.

On the editorial page, "A New Link Is Needed" finds that if, as the City engineers had indicated, an underpass was not feasible at E. 36th Street and the Southern Railroad, then a new site should be sought for a link between N. Tryon Street and the North Charlotte area where an overpass or an underpass could be built, preferable to the Council's decision to spend $125,000 to widen E. 36th Street into a four-lane boulevard.

We agree. Let us do it now, before it is too late to avoid Armageddon.

"The Augusta Investigation" tells of the House Labor & Education Committee investigation of alleged violations of Taft-Hartley at the South Carolina hydrogen bomb plant having revealed that the Atomic Energy Commission, the du Pont Corporation and the labor unions, having all colluded to violate the law by insisting on union membership as a condition for employment at the project. A du Pont official had admitted in a letter to an officer of the union that in light of the pending probe by the Committee, 100 nonunion workers would be hired and then absorbed into the union to avoid conditions becoming so unpleasant for them that they would quit. At least six men had told a member of the Committee that they had been fired for refusing to join unions.

It suggests that the integrity of du Pont, the unions and the AEC should be questioned in this instance based on disregard of the law by all three and that the Federal Government ought become more interested in prosecuting the case than in being an active partner in the violation.

"Point IV Goes to the Root" tells of a visit to Charlotte during the week by Dr. Shri S. Nehru, an Indian jurist, who reported the effectiveness of U.S. technical experts in his country. It believes that if more persons heard about the positive impact of American technical assistance to underdeveloped countries under the Point Four program, it might achieve its rightful place as a major aspect of U.S. foreign policy rather than its currently underfunded status.

The current issue of Economic Intelligence, published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dealt with "successful foreign investment", as under Point Four, the editors asserting that "foreign investment must be of a self-liquidating nature" facilitating "the production of print products which will earn sufficient foreign exchange to service the debt." This reasoning, it opines, made good sense from a business standpoint, but the time had long passed when the prospect of reasonable returns should guide foreign investment, just as there was no expectation for direct return in dollars from the billions being invested in foreign military aid. Similarly, investment in Point Four, which helped countries help themselves, would, in time, pay dividends, reducing the dependency on U.S. aid and thus the burden on American taxpayers.

When Horace Holmes, who headed the Point Four agricultural group, had gone to India, the climate surrounding his work had been anything but favorable. But he found a few people who had the right spirit and began to make headway. For instance, when some villagers objected to turning under legumes while they were green because it meant killing plants, forbidden by the Hindu precepts, he utilized a young farmer and farm-lecturer to explain to them that their first obligation under Hindu law was to feed themselves and their bullocks, that they therefore were faced with a choice between two evils, the lesser of which was to turn the legumes for the sake of feeding themselves. That strategy had worked and crop yields dramatically increased, prompting Prime Minister Nehru to pay tribute to Mr. Holmes and his remarkable ways.

If such success could be multiplied many times, farmers would be in a position of enabling private enterprise to deal with them profitably. Point Four was not just some idealistic program, but employed realistic thinking. It suggests that everyone had a stake in this program to help underdeveloped countries raise their standards of living, that the country had become so engrossed in military preparedness that most had forgotten that rearmament was the result of much of the world's problems and not the cause, the cause, poverty and hunger, being that which Point Four was seeking to eradicate.

Drew Pearson tells of the meeting of the Secretaries of Defense, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, together with the Joint Chiefs, with General Eisenhower and the President at the White House earlier in the week, with the question ripe on everyone's mind being whether the President and the General had discussed politics when they met alone. No hint was related as to whether or not such conversation had occurred, but the President appeared at the meeting to be somber, usually indicative of his having received bad news, the speculation being that the General had imparted to him his intention to run on the Republican ticket. The meeting consisted of a summary by the principals, for the benefit of the President, of that which they had discussed with the General at the Pentagon earlier that day. The General outlined his plan for building a small, rapid deployment force in Europe by the end of 1952 to avoid having to wait until 1954 for the development of a large army, which he believed would be too late, as the Soviets were thought to be ready in the following year to make their major aggressive move. The Secretaries and Joint Chiefs responded to the General's expressed need for greater manpower and equipment by explaining that each service was short of equipment because of labor strikes and shortages of machine tools, plus too much strategic material being drained into civilian production. The first priority, they explained, had to be Korea. When Mobilization chief Charles E. Wilson said that production would be rolling by the following spring, the General retorted that the equipment was needed before the following spring.

The General had also made the point that, while the effort was being made to encourage Western Europe to bolster its own military production, a problem arose by the fact that those countries preferred manufacturing civilian goods and bolstering their civilian economies, perceived that the U.S., by sending military aid, was only preparing its own defenses by making Western Europe the front line. He also outlined a potential conflict between himself as military commander and Averell Harriman, the new civilian administrator, over who should allocate the military aid, as neither wanted to take responsibility for saying how much aid each country should obtain.

Marquis Childs, in San Francisco, tells of the President's stock being lower across the country than at any time during his Presidency, even lower than it had been four years earlier. People were more concerned about rising prices and new plants being built for arms production, resulting in displacement of populations, than in the President's speech earlier in the week regarding foreign policy, as Europe was too far away to be of immediate concern.

They were also concerned about the revelations regarding Administration influence peddling and the scandal at the IRB, especially acute in San Francisco where one of the messiest situations at the IRB had been uncovered.

Furthermore, the President's recent appointment of General Mark Clark to be Ambassador to the Vatican had started what amounted to a prairie fire of indignation among Protestants, complaining about violation of the principle of separation of church and state, the opposite of which was, in the minds of these Protestants, represented by the Vatican. Newspapers which had defended the move as being practical statesmanship, given that the Vatican was a primary listening post in Europe, were besieged by letters, often from Protestant clergymen, expressing their violent opposition. Some even believed Catholicism to be as much a threat to America as Communism. Such a response appeared to be an open invitation to demagogic exploitation, such as that used by Senator McCarthy and his ilk regarding Communism.

To many Americans, General Eisenhower appeared puzzling, as they could not understand why during his recent visit, he had avoided the subject of politics, while his friends continued confidently to promote him as a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1952, with the result, in the opinion of Mr. Childs, that the likelihood was diminishing for an upsurge of popular demand which would compel the professionals of the party to accept the General as the nominee. He concludes that while the door was not shut to this possibility, each day which passed closed the aperture further.

Stewart Alsop, in Cairo, tells of the three primary leaders in Egypt, whose predicament vis-à-vis the people showed how futile it would be for the British to try to compromise with the Government. The Prime Minister, Nahas Pasha, was old and one of the founders of the Egyptian independence movement, and, while possessed of great prestige in the country, the real power vested in the younger Minister of Interior, Serag el Din Pasha, and the Foreign Minister, Salah el Din. The former had recently cracked down on the street mobs, resulting in an uneasy calm in Cairo and Alexandria. The latter, by contrast, was effectively a "prisoner of the streets", as he was sometimes called, for deriving his power from the mobs rather than the aristocratic Pashas, from whom Serag el Din obtained his power. All three were inescapably committed publicly to the ouster of the British from the Suez Canal zone as a precondition to any settlement, completely unacceptable to the British, who had the power to remain as long as they wished against a weak Egyptian army and police force. Moreover, neither the British nor the Americans would reward a government which had rebelled against the Western powers.

The Prime Minister had stated to Mr. Alsop that he believed ouster would "create a better atmosphere" for defense discussions, seemingly therefore moderating his position somewhat. But, in fact, the Government was trapped by its own extremism and thus incapable of any real compromise, when faced with the prospect of the street mobs taking over and potentially eliminating the Pashas. The Interior Minister controlled the ruling Waafdist Party machinery. The Foreign Minister could afford to be patient, as his present post had come from the patronage of the Prime Minister and by his popularity with the street mobs for his consistently taking the most extreme positions against the British. It was believed that in the final crisis rapidly overtaking the Government, the Foreign Minister would favor letting the mobs have their way.

A letter writer believes that candidates for city, county or state offices should be regarded for their qualifications rather than their race, and that therefore when a black person filed for candidacy, the name and address of the candidate should suffice, without reference to race.

Aletter from four executives of the Blue Ridge Baptist Association in Marion relates the opinion that the Catholic Church was "a religious dictatorship, which has never been identified either with freedom or tolerance", and, unless drastically changed, could "never be identified with those principles of freedom and religious beliefs and practices that have made our country great in heart as well as strong in power and spirit." Thus, they oppose the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican.

A letter writer disagrees with an article written by Rosanne Smith Robinson on Southern womanhood, which had appeared in Look Magazine in the November 20 issue. She feels the article was degrading and should not go unchallenged, suggests that the editors of the newspaper and all Southern editors take note of it and upbraid—presumably not "uphold"—Ms. Robinson for it.

She must have questioned Miss Sca'lett's heritage or somethin' equally indicative of low breedin', maybe insinuatin' that Rhett was a scoundrelous, sciolistic scalawag or that Miss Pittypat was entitled to equal rights.

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