The Charlotte News
Monday, November 19, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that North Korean radio reported the previous night that the North Korean Foreign Minister had sent to the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council demands to cease hostilities in Korea immediately, accept the "just and reasonable" proposals of the Communist negotiators, that each side withdraw two kilometers from the current battle lines, that all foreign troops withdraw from Korea, and that the allies be held responsible for "atrocities" committed against Koreans. This announcement occurred during a 48-hour recess in the truce talks begun this date so that the Communists could study the most recent proposal of the allies, which entailed acceptance of the latest Communist proposal for establishment of the agreed ceasefire zone before finalization of the other terms, provided that within thirty days the other terms would be finalized or the agreement to the buffer zone would be null and void, and that fighting would continue until all terms of the ceasefire were complete.
Meanwhile, at Peiping, Communist China's Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai issued a statement which backed up the Soviet proposal that the ceasefire line be along the 38th parallel, rejected months earlier by the allies.
The Communists had set Wednesday for providing their final reply in the ceasefire talks.
In ground action, Chinese Communist troops counter-attacked for 12 hours on the central front this date, but dug-in allied troops, who had pushed the enemy back three miles in a two-day offensive, withstood the attack, which ended before dawn when the Chinese battalion withdrew.
In the air war on Sunday, two U.S. Sabre jets hit eight MIG-15 jets on the ground at an airbase in northwestern Korea, the first time enemy jets had been so caught. Seven other MIGs were reported hit in three air battles.
In Paris, at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, Secretary of State Acheson introduced the West's disarmament plan and urged its acceptance. The program would set up a 12-nation disarmament commission, to be comprised of the Security Council members plus Canada, to initiate a stepped, supervised reduction of arms as proposed by the Big Three Western powers, which would result in a conference to include non-members of the U.N., such as Communist China.
At the Nevada atomic test site in Yucca Flat, a new series of detonations began this date during the morning hours, with a flash visible in Las Vegas, 75 miles away, albeit without the usual accompanying atomic cloud, suggestive of an underground detonation. It was the sixth explosion during the fall, the others having occurred between October 22 and November 5.
It was hinted in political and press circles in Tehran that Premier Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran was headed to Egypt during his return trip from a visit in Washington, to discuss formation of a Middle East Moslem bloc which would be independent of both the West and Russia. The rumor was not yet confirmed by official Iranian sources.
Assistant U.S. Attorney for Northern California, Charles O'Gara, had testified in executive session before the Senate Finance Committee the previous August 31 that he had evidence of bad corruption within the San Francisco IRB office, according to his opening statement to the Committee, released by Senator John Williams of Delaware. Mr. O'Gara had said that it was common to fix the taxes of gangsters and hoodlums. A recommendation for Mr. O'Gara's dismissal was presently before the Justice Department after the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco had accused him of "slandering innocent people". Attorney General J. Howard McGrath was said to have taken no action on the recommendation and would not until further investigation was completed. Senator Williams said that he made the statement available to the press because of this pending recommendation.
In New York, a General Sessions Court judge stated that the influence of gamblers on college sports could "explode into an atomic athletic scandal", immediately before passing sentence on 14 basketball players convicted of conspiring to fix games. He accused colleges of engaging in big business and professionalism in their sports programs and with recruiting practices which bought and paid for the athletes. He indicated that the college presidents and faculties needed to take direct control of their athletic programs. A bulletin indicates that Salvatore Sollazzo, a fixer of basketball games, was sentenced by the judge to a term of 8 to 16 years in prison. The sentences imposed on the players are not included.
In Buenos Aires, La Prensa, earlier closed down by the Government, appeared on newsstands for the first time in nearly ten months, with its new boss, the giant labor union controlled by El Presidente Juan Peron.
Another Gallup poll appears, this one providing the results of a head-to-head match between the President and Senator Taft, showing that 45 percent of the respondents preferred the Senator over the President, who polled 42 percent, with the remainder undecided. Two previously published polls had shown that General Eisenhower led the President 64 percent to 28 percent, while Governor Earl Warren led him by 55 percent to 35 percent. The previous spring, a poll had shown Harold Stassen leading the President by a margin of 3 to 2.
In Tokyo, geisha girls returned to work after a two-week strike, having received the back pay they sought from restaurant owners, plus a union shop.
During the weekend, frigid air caused a numbing chill over most of the nation, with some Eastern states receiving snow, up to 18 inches in areas of northwestern Pennsylvania and 15 inches near Cleveland. Florida had its coldest weather of the season, threatening truck crops as far south as the Everglades, with a low of 24 degrees forecast for the area around Gainesville and 38 to 40 in Miami. In Southern California, temperatures were near freezing, prompting citrus growers to put out smudge pots.
An introductory "Flash Gordon" comic strip is included on the front page. Thank you very much for that. Life may have been changed by its omission.
On the editorial page, "The Troubles of Mr. Snavely" tells of UNC football coach Carl Snavely having come under a great deal of criticism in the press for his team's poor record in 1951, though they had made a good showing the previous weekend against Notre Dame, losing 12-7 in Chapel Hill. It suggests therefore that should they beat Duke the following Saturday, all might be forgotten about the dismal season. (Unfortunately, they would lose, 19-7. Their only wins were in the opener against N.C. State, 21-0, and against South Carolina, 21-6, in the fourth game. The three non-conference opponents were formidable, including, in addition to Notre Dame, Texas and Georgia.)
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, in its sports pages, had produced numerous stories hinting and predicting that the UNC alumni would put pressure on the administration to fire Mr. Snavely at the end of the season. Those stories had been picked up by the wire services and passed around nationally, a spread of rumors which the piece finds tantamount to McCarthyism.
It makes it clear that it held no brief for Mr. Snavely or for any football coach, but finds it deplorable that newspapers, rather than the alumni, had been behind the rumors that there was a campaign afoot to "get" Mr. Snavely.
Ed Bilpuch, a star of the previous year's UNC team, had written in the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper, "It is not in keeping with sportsmanship, either on or off the field, to kick a man when he is down."
As indicated, Mr. Snavely had a successful record in two coaching stints at UNC, the first during two seasons in the mid-Thirties, with an overall record in seven seasons of 52-16-2, until the 1950 season, when the team posted a 3-5-2 record, and would stay one more season, shortened to eight games by an outbreak of polio, before resigning at its end, following the second two-win season in a row. Fully 19 of his 35 losses at UNC occurred in the last three seasons.
"Ridgway's Duck Hunting" does not fault General Matthew Ridgway, U.N. supreme commander in Korea, for having been duck hunting at the time the report of the enemy murder of some 6,600 U.N. prisoners of war was disclosed by a colonel in the Eighth Army's Judge Advocate General Corps. It finds that the General was entitled, as everyone else, to a little relaxation and that no doubt duck hunting afforded him time to consider military strategy, that the process of duck hunting itself involved strategy. It had not yet seen any criticism leveled at him for having been engaged in this pastime, but fully expected it to come.
"Generals Eisenhower and Washington" tells of Drew Pearson recently having drawn an analogy between the two generals, finding that General Washington had 13 bosses when he established the Revolutionary Army, whereas General Eisenhower had 12 in the form of the NATO nations, with two more, Greece and Turkey, about to be added. This comparison had prompted the News to research the matter in Clement Wood's A Complete History of the United States, quoting extensively therefrom, replacing in parentheses the appropriate NATO-related analog in each case to that extant during the Revolution and formation of the fledgling Government under the Articles of Confederation. At that earlier time, it was determined that what had been needed was a supreme power to regulate the general concerns of the Confederation, that is a Federal government, and the piece expresses the hope that the lesson would be learned regarding NATO.
The nuts on the radio out in Texas would have fifty separate state governments under a weak or non-existent Federal Government and propose that pattern for the rest of the world, to do away with "globalism"—a pattern adopted and promoted by the moron in the White House, a pattern which would inexorably eventuate in another world war.
Drew Pearson again addresses the issue of the National Production Authority providing aid for establishment of a new aluminum plant to be operated jointly by the Harvey Machine Company and the Anaconda Copper Company, both of which had been singled out for providing shoddy products to the military under Government contracts during the war, which could have caused, if not caught, the deaths of many American troops. Harvey had supplied approximately 150 defective gauges for use in company and Naval inspections, permitting defective projectiles to pass inspection for use by the Navy.
Anaconda had provided defective wire to both the Army and Navy, bearing inspection tags though actually not inspected. Part of the wire was used in communications in the field and another part as degaussing wire to protect warships from submarine attack. The wire was caught before it ever went into combat.
He tells of yet another company, Olin Industries, with extensive holdings in several states, including North Carolina, aid to which the Government was also considering for establishing it in the aluminum business. During the war, ten members of one of its subsidiaries had been indicted in St. Louis on a conspiracy to pass defective ammunition, making false statements and violating the Sabotage Act. Eventually they had been found not guilty, but the Government was appealing a civil suit for 214 million dollars in damages against the subsidiary.
He promises another column regarding companies with bad war records presently profiting from big war contracts.
Joseph Alsop tells of the State Department apparently junking its Middle Eastern policy after its "feebleness and folly". Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee, who had headed the Middle Eastern branch, was being transferred to the Embassy in Turkey. The change was comparable to the junking of the Far Eastern policy in 1949, when it was taken over by future Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Mr. Alsop posits that if the same level of improvement would take place in the Middle Eastern leadership, a disaster in the region might still be averted.
He proceeds to compare the Middle Eastern and Far Eastern policies, pointing out that the specialist groupings within the State Department, until recently, had formed separate careers within the larger career of the Foreign Service, causing a certain myopia to form within each specialized grouping. When the Iranian oil crisis demanded hard and disagreeable American action to safeguard American and Western strategic, economic and political interests, those interests were subordinated to a desire to enter a Middle Eastern popularity contest. In both Far Eastern and Middle Eastern policy, it was never reckoned that inaction could be just as bad as action of the wrong type. So it was in China and so it had been also in the Iranian oil nationalization crisis, in the former involving the Chinese Nationalists, in the latter, the British. The inaction led to false optimism in both cases, with the prediction that the Chinese Communists could not organize China for its vast frontiers for up to fifty years, and likewise in Iran, where it was assumed that a settlement could be worked out, through the able assistance of Averell Harriman, with the irrational Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
In each case, great efforts had also been made to avoid responsibility for the bad outcomes. Yet in both cases, wise American action could have averted the problems. He suggests that there might yet be time to salvage the situation in the Middle East.
Robert C. Ruark tells of being exasperated by tip-hungry, incompetent waiters and busboys in New York restaurants, always in a hurry and providing lousy service. Whenever he wished to escape such incompetence, he ventured to Luchow's, which served German cuisine and where he knew he would be waited on with courtesy by Hugo Schemke, who did not place a premium on time and speed, deplored the tendency of the younger waiters in that direction. Mr. Schemke subscribed to the philosophy that a waiter had "an obligation to his guest", something he found rarely exhibited anymore.
A letter from the president of the Charlotte Negro Junior Chamber of Commerce congratulates the organizer of the Charlotte Carrousel, which he finds to have been the best ever, and also expresses gratitude for the dignity accorded the black groups in the parade.
A letter writer from Huntersville thanks the heads of two businesses, Hankins-Whittington and Foremost Dairies, for a job well done in arranging the Carrousel parade. Because of the efforts of Mr. Hankins, he imparts, patients at the Mecklenburg Sanatorium, of whom the writer was one, were able to attend the parade.
A letter writer from Dillon, S.C., finds the editorial "Bombastic and Provocative", critical of General MacArthur's Seattle speech, to have been "distorted" and hopes that God would help the readers who were taken in by the editorial. He offers nothing, however, in the way of facts to dispute anything in the editorial.
A letter writer thinks that the syndicated column of Erich Brandeis printed on November 14, should be reprinted on the front page so that more people would read it. He neglects to explain what the particular column concerned—perhaps not using yesterday's newspaper as fish wrap.
In any event, more serious fare must always appear on the front page, such as a "Flash Gordon" comic strip—which is probably more serious than about half the news these days deemed worthy of front page treatment, a fault in the culture producing news as much as the reportage thereof, a culture geared to manufacturing stories for achieving the fifteen minutes, a large number of such stories being based on offense taken against subjective sensibilities, equivalent in most instances to those of an average teenager or child, being hurt by some perceived slight or remark made, often deliberately misinterpreted so as to escalate the matter instanter to ostensibly newsworthy status. At least in 1951, the news had not devolved to the level of one neighbor accusing another of being a Communist, news of such accusations being reserved to those with political power or notoriety.
Here is a hint: If a news organization, or even a prosecutor's office, has to rely on a privately produced cellphone video for a story, or charge, regarding a private citizen which does not involve either violence, serious injury, or a natural disaster or the like, it is not news, or worthy of prosecution, but rather someone's pet irritant being made news, or the subject of a petty charge, in manipulative fashion.
A letter writer encloses an editorial from the Belmont Banner regarding the tendency of rural schoolchildren to play in the highway while waiting for their school bus. He says that several children waited for the school bus in front of his house and that they chased each other into the road in front of traffic, played games on the pavement and had shot marbles nearly under the front wheels of cars.
A letter writer objects to the letter which had suggested that the newspaper begin carrying "Alley Oop" in the comic strips at the expense of some other strip, such as "Pogo". He finds "Pogo" to deal with subtle situations, requiring careful reading, unlike "Alley Oop" which dealt with "gruntings and bludgeonings", "pre-historic ughs and stone hammers", which "might easily cause a mental impasse." He threatens to have the editors' scalps should they ever touch a hair on Pogo's head.
You could go to jail for that. They
should file a police report against you. They should ruin your life.
You just threatened them with a scalping. Is there no justice
Framed Edition
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