The Charlotte News
Monday, November 5, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. negotiators had proposed that the issue of the establishment of the buffer zone in Korea be temporarily bypassed so that consideration could be undertaken of the remaining issues necessary to establish a truce, including provisions for administration of the ceasefire and for exchange of prisoners. The proposal was coupled with provisions that the principle of any ceasefire zone would be based on the battle line at the time of signing of the armistice and that the zone would be 2.5 miles wide. Initial indications were that the Communists would reject the proposal, but they did say they would consider it.
In ground action, Chinese troops repulsed allied infantrymen attacking two hills lost to tank-led Communists northwest of Yonchon on the western front on Sunday. The attack the previous day by the enemy had been its largest effort in the previous two months. The U.N. troops had recaptured the hills but were then forced to withdraw under mounting Chinese pressure. Shortly after noon this date, the U.N. forces again attacked, this time under protection of airstrikes and tank support. The battle was continuing.
In air action, allied planes knocked out six of twenty enemy tanks and one of three self-propelled guns sighted in the ground assault during eight hours of fighting on Sunday. On Monday, allied planes were hunting the tanks which had gotten away as well as the supporting ground troops. The U.S. Fifth Air Force said that its pilots had shot down two MIGs and probably destroyed two others while damaging six in three battles on Sunday. No allied planes had been lost in the aerial combat, but two had been shot down in other parts of Korea by ground fire. In all, 92 American fighter planes contested 145 enemy jets.
In Paris, the U.N. General Assembly, in its final session of its fifth assembly this date rejected a Russian demand that the question of seating China based on the Communist Government be given priority in the sixth assembly, opening the following day. The U.S. was reliably reported to have determined to propose a worldwide arms census, including a complete accounting of all atomic weaponry, to be placed before the Assembly during the week. It was reportedly the heart of the peace plan which the President would announce on Wednesday night and which Secretary of State Acheson would present to the Assembly later in the week. Britain had agreed to support the U.S. plan and France was said to be considering it. The White House declined comment on these reports.
Foreign observers wondered whether it was coincidence that the President had scheduled his talk for November 7, the same day the Soviets celebrated the 34th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Normally, a Soviet official would make a foreign policy speech on the eve of the anniversary, and it appeared that the President might be planning to answer any such speech. The name of the speaker in Russia had not yet been disclosed.
General Eisenhower met with top military officials this date in Washington before going to the White House to meet with the President for two hours, to discuss NATO military preparedness. Speculation continued that the subject of whether the General intended to allow himself to be drafted for the 1952 presidential nomination would enter into the talks with the President.
The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, said that the Federal District Court in San Francisco had not used "proper methods" in fixing a $50,000 bail for 12 Communist lieutenants accused under the Smith Act in Los Angeles.
At the Yucca Flat, Nevada, atomic test site, 75 miles from Las Vegas, the fifth atomic blast in the most recent test series occurred during the morning hours this date. Thirty seconds following the detonation, the usual atomic cloud could be observed from Las Vegas. It was described as being perhaps the largest yet observed. Residents of the area had been advised by local radio stations to open windows in their homes and businesses, to prevent breakage. Newsmen covering the event from Mt. Charleston were warned to leave the area shortly after the blast, indicative of its size, as such a warning had not been issued previously during tests in this series.
Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a member of the joint Atomic Energy Committee, told reporters that he saw no conflict between his call for use of atomic weapons in Korea and his statement the previous night that the small countries of the U.N. ought presently strike a hard blow for Korean peace before it was too late. He said that the U.S. and other U.N. powers had made only "futile efforts to end the violence" in Korea and had "forfeited the trust" placed in them. He favored the Paris General Assembly meeting not adjourning until it had worked out a solution to the Korean War. He asserted that the Korean War ought be conducted on an all-out basis or left alone completely. He said, in response to a question, that use of atomic weapons in Korea would not result in the Russians retaliating, that such was "too absurd to consider". He believed that U.S. use of atomic weapons would be a reason why the Russians would not use atomic weapons against the U.S., based on their respect for U.S. atomic superiority.
In Richmond, California, on Saturday night, a man held his wife at gunpoint as they walked six blocks in the bright glare of a police spotlight after the woman's uncle had summoned the police regarding the confrontation. Eventually, the woman stumbled and fell and her husband dropped beside her, asking whether she loved him, to which she responded affirmatively, at which point he fatally shot himself in the head.
In New York, British actor James
Mason reported the previous night that eleven pieces of jewelry
Cold and snow had claimed 88 lives in the East and Midwest while shattering temperature records, as two Arctic cold fronts, both witches, one day apart, struck from the Canadian prairies down the Eastern seaboard and into the Deep South. In Lone Rock, Wisc., the temperature was nine below zero and eight below in Bismark, N.D. Western New York had the heaviest snowfall on record for the first week of November, with some drifts reaching several feet in depth and the Niagara area receiving 11 inches—the spot for many honeymooners. In Pittsburgh, the temperature was 22, the third record low in three days. In Chicago, the mercury dropped to 11, a fourth successive record.
Where do we go from here?
On the editorial page, "NATO Moves Forward" tells of Roscoe Drummond, chief of the Washington bureau of the Christian Science Monitor, having recently stated that the new political thinking in Europe and the U.S. was that NATO should move beyond only a military alliance and also establish a political relationship between the twelve member nations.
At the recent Ottawa conference of NATO, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson expressed the belief that the present was the time to establish solid foundations for a NATO federation. Shortly before the recent adjournment of Congress, Senators John Sparkman of Alabama and Guy Gillette of Iowa, plus 21 others, including Paul Douglas, James Duff, Estes Kefauver and J. William Fulbright, had introduced a bill to create a Hoover-type commission to study relations between the NATO nations in reference to determination of ways and means to achieve a more effective operation. A similar bill had been introduced in the House. The previous weekend in Memphis, former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, president of the Atlantic Union Committee, said that the idea was growing among free people of the West that the Atlantic Union, that is a federation of the world's democracies, was the "only salvation to the free way of life in the world".
The piece suggests that regarding it as the "only salvation" was debatable, but it agrees with former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, who said before the same AUC meeting that exploration of the concept was never impractical and urged members of the Atlantic community to discuss areas of possible agreement and then proceed from there. He was concerned about the way immediate military problems regarding Korea and elsewhere obscured the economic and military problems of NATO.
The piece agrees, finds that any member of NATO could exert a veto and disrupt the organization's work, making speed and efficiency almost impossible. If General Eisenhower were to leave his post as supreme commander, the organization might collapse of its own weight, and so discussion aimed at providing a central direction for the NATO community was long overdue.
"The Old One-Two" tells of South Carolina Governor James Byrnes having, on the heels of Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd's excoriation of the "Truman Party" during a speaking engagement in Selma, Ala., spoken at Clemson, criticizing the Administration for failing to control inflation, voicing alarm over the power being exercised by the Federal Government over business and the people, and having demanded that all emergency powers be restored to the people when the current emergency was over. While Governor Byrnes had not resorted to the political overtones with which Senator Byrd had infused his speech, not making any direct threat of revolting from the Democratic Party or forming any splinter-party movement, he had urged voters to forget party labels in voting during 1952.
The editorial suggests again, in accordance with a theme established in recent years, that the South had nothing to gain from continuing to vote Democratic and that nothing short of a vigorous two-party system in the South would give the region its rightful place in planning national political leadership.
Fifty years ago this date was
election day in 1968, when former Vice-President Richard Nixon won
the presidency over Vice-President Hubert Humphrey by about 500,000
votes
Recall that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly three million votes and two percent over Donald Trump, and regard the mess which has transpired since that time in terms of the country's low psyche and palpable disunity. The "President" is a destructive force like no other head of the executive branch since Richard Nixon, and probably surpassing even him in practicing the divide-and-conquer mentality. While Mr. Nixon told them what they wanted to hear in the spring of 1968 and then "ran like hell" back to the center in the fall, his "Southern strategy", Mr. Trump tells them what they want to hear all the time and never makes any pretense of governing the entire country based on any semblance of a consensus or effort to work with Democrats, all the more sinister for his having become "President" only by dint of the long outmoded electoral college.
Perhaps former Nixon White House counsel John Dean recently put it best when he said that Mr. Nixon was "corrupt" but Mr. Trump is "evil". What else would you call someone who deliberately seeks to divide the country into mutually despising camps of the disgruntled, no one in consequence, beyond a group of millionaires and billionaires populating the upper echelons of government, having any real voice in how the country is governed, so that he can emerge as the popular choice of a small but vocal plurality, in the hope that his plurality will emerge as the only remaining cohesive voice left amid deliberately sown chaos otherwise? Such are the ways and means historically of evil autocrats.
Vote tomorrow to send a message to this "President", who has made the midterm elections a referendum on his job performance thus far.
He is an amateur with no prior political experience, does not understand the necessity of building coalitions by which to govern effectively, but seeks to govern through bullying and use of catch-phrases designed to reaffirm his support among a small minority of politically disaffected people in this country who are so manipulable and lacking in basic understanding of how the country works as to be pitiable—at least to the point where, as in two egregious recent examples, the second of which was one of the more despicable acts in the country's history, they become violent, having been steeped and educated in the rhetoric of hate and disunity by this "President".
He understands one thing, the bottom line in business and getting there without regard for truth, ethics or morality, just providing the right rallying spirit for his employees, "us versus the competition", in this case, his diminishing coterie of intensely loyal followers, waving little signs and wearing stupid little hats as the necessary but only dues for membership in the bilious Billionaire's social club.
Government of the country, however, is not a business enterprise. It is not governed by the bottom line. We live in a representative democracy where all voices must be heard at once, not accomplished by speaking of the majority as a "radical mob" who ought be "locked up".
Send a loud message that the country does not respond to the rhetoric and practice of hate and disunity, but rather to compassion and understanding of one another, that diversity is a founding principle of the country and is not going to be destroyed by xenophobic rhetoric, fear of the "other".
Vote as though democracy depended on it, because it might this time.
We say it again: you cannot govern a country from a minority position and not expect chaos and revolt as the result. The Trumpies would "lock up" all who disagree with them and rationalize it on trumped-up lies, the projection of their fears and troubles onto a convenient scapegoat, confirmed consistently to them by their Leader, either as Democrats or illegal immigrants come to take their jobs and rape and murder their daughters. That is not the way of a democracy but rather a third world dictatorship—which, in fact, is what they inveigh to obtain, autocratic rule by fiat.
Resoundingly reject tomorrow that specious reasoning, contrary to the Constitution, and vote affirmatively for the candidate in your district and state who best represents pluralistic inclusion, understanding, compassion and governance through consensus building, person by person, group by group, regardless of pocketbook or background.
And by the Fourteenth Amendment, everyone born in the United States is a citizen thereof, notwithstanding attempts to parse the language, "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", to mean something other than its obvious original intent, when compared to the Thirteenth Amendment utilizing similar language, to distinguish the "United States" from the Western territories extant at the time of the Amendment's passage in 1868 and to except foreign diplomatic personnel enjoying diplomatic immunity from the laws of the land. Moreover, illegal immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States when they are on U.S. soil. To try to construe that Amendment otherwise or dare suggest amendment of it is to tamper with one's own birthright citizenship. Do you really want some billionaire acting as President, now or later, to be able to make a determination sometime down the line that because you disagree with that billionaire's whimsical fiat of the moment, he or she might take you to court and have you declared no longer fit to be a citizen, despite being born in the United States of United States citizens, and thus deportable as a deplorable to a foreign country of his or her choosing? Mess around with such an integrally fundamental part of the Constitution, granting equal rights to all citizens, and that could very well be the result.
"Forsyth Shows the Way" tells of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County having conducted a United Fund campaign which had surpassed its $425,000 goal and raised more than a half-million dollars and still receiving contributions. It points out that charitable giving in Forsyth County was not quite like that in Mecklenburg, for there was a higher concentration of wealth in the former and so large gifts from a few individuals characterized such campaigns.
There had been periodic efforts to consolidate solicitation campaigns in Mecklenburg, but so far they had come to naught. It suggests that the county was still plagued by an excess of charity campaigns, discouraging free giving by the populace. It hopes that the community might eventually adopt a united fund drive, now that Forsyth had led the way.
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Beauty Boosts Business", tells of many firms having found that selecting beauty queens to represent their particular products provided favorable publicity, surpassing conventional advertising. Jinx Falkenburg had been representing the beer industry for 12 years, during which its sales had increased by 600 percent. One company reported that eight million ballots had been cast nationwide for its beauty queen representative, among six candidates.
A long-time judge of the Miss America pageant noted that the winner of these beauty contests usually stood 5'6" tall, had a 36-inch bust line, a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, whereas the average female in the country stood 5'3", and had measurements of 34-27-37. It suggests that the young lady whose height did not match the beauty-queen average need not lose heart, "since other attractions can serve a similar purpose."
Times have changed since Susie Chapstick and the Doublemint twins.
An excerpt from a booklet published by G.M., titled "Let's Get Out of the Muddle", tells of the U.S. road system, while being the best in the world, being in need of extensive repair and expansion, as the bulk of it had been built in the Twenties and Thirties, without regard to the vast expansion in number of motor vehicles on the roadways of the nation. Roads had become a mainstay of American travel and trade and more money had to be pumped into the system to ensure that it would keep pace with its growing use.
Much of the system was dying of old age, especially after being neglected throughout World War II, when money and labor had to be devoted to defense. Inflation since 1941 had practically doubled the cost of construction and the population had increased at the same time by about 19 million, while vehicle registration increased by over 15 million and the mileage driven by those vehicles, risen from 300 billion to 450 billion per year. The road system had been built for the earlier time and now city streets had become bottlenecks, while spending on highways was not always in keeping with wisdom. Money had been spent for roads which were not justified by traffic needs. It concludes that more money had to be spent on the roads that were needed and those funds spent wisely.
What if you own a Ford or Mercury?
Drew Pearson tells of DNC vice-chairman India Edwards having tendered her resignation after the President had put forward Frank McKinney as the new chairman of the DNC to replace William Boyle who had resigned amid controversy. The President initially had offered Ms. Edwards the chairmanship, but she had turned it down while stating that she wanted to have input to the process of selecting a new chairman, which the President had assured she would. Thereafter, she wrote the President, suggesting several prominent Democrats to be chairman, including Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, former Congressman John Carroll of Denver and Price administrator Mike DiSalle. She tendered her resignation when the President overlooked her choices and appointed Mr. McKinney, not very well known within the party.
News of her resignation resonated negatively within the Democratic ranks, as Ms. Edwards was regarded highly. The result was that the DNC leadership refused initially to confirm the selection of Mr. McKinney unless the President could convince Ms. Edwards to stay on as vice-chairman.
The President quickly apologized to Ms. Edwards for the misunderstanding and urged her to remain, which she agreed to do. The opposition to Mr. McKinney then diminished, and especially after his resounding speech the next day, promising to clean out influence peddlers.
Marquis Childs, in Corpus Christi, Tex., tells of industrial growth in Corpus Christi and nearby Houston, fueled by the oil, natural gas and low-cost transportation industries. Corpus Christi had a population well over 100,000, not including outlying areas where the population had doubled in the prior decade. New plants had been erected for producing petroleum and the ingredients of synthetic rubber. Houston claimed to be the second largest port in the country and its population had for some time surpassed a half-million and was continuing to grow. Military installations which were being constructed or were projected would continue the expansion. The Navy had a new training center for jet pilots at Kingsville and a defense housing project would have to be authorized to provide the living quarters there.
Houston had a housing problem and streets were not yet paved in many sections, but the promise of quick wealth continued to draw speculators to the area. Much of it was myth, as the oil industry increasingly was dominated by highly specialized technology, but much of the wealth was new and the oil depletion allowance enabled oil producers to retain a higher portion of their earnings than most business operations.
In Corpus Christi, the Driscoll Hotel was one of the finest hotels in the country, built by the widow of a pioneer oilman, Robert Driscoll. When Ms. Driscoll had died, she left her entire estate to a children's hospital presently under construction, one which would provide for patients regardless of race, color or creed. Ms. Driscoll believed that there should be no discrimination in treating those who were ill.
Although Texas had one of its poorest cotton crops in many years, department store sales in the leading cities were reported down by only one and a half to two percent, a condition which, had it occurred ten or twenty years earlier, would have been devastating for business.
Robert C. Ruark complains of the new taxes having taken a larger chunk of his salary while prices of consumer goods continued to rise. He concludes that he would take his higher taxes and keep his big mouth shut if everybody else took the same whipping. But if people in the Government continued adjusting prices to compensate for the tax increases, then he was going to complain loudly. The price adjustment nullified the effort to hold down inflation on the one hand and drove the static wage-earner into "double desperation" on the other. He suggests that economic controls could not work unless the entire economy were placed under control.
Framed Edition
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