The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 6, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via George A. McArthur, that a bloody battle had raged for a hill position on the Korean western front from midnight to dawn Tuesday with the Chinese Communists reported as being successful in overrunning allied defenses, as action quieted during the daylight hours, after which allied patrols, moving through ankle-deep mud, had made only one contact with the enemy, a long-range exchange of small-arms fire. There was no estimate of the casualties incurred. The enemy offensive had now lasted three days in drizzling rain over a 20-mile sector in the Yonchon to Chorwon area.

The inclement weather had grounded most U.N. warplanes, and the Fifth Air Force reported only 19 successful sorties during the day.

In the ceasefire talks, a U.N. spokesman said that the enemy implicitly wanted to call off the fighting without signing a formal armistice, a position which the U.N. negotiators rejected, as the Communists had rejected the U.N. offer made Monday to bypass temporarily the stalled ceasefire buffer zone issue and proceed to the other issues necessary to resolve a ceasefire, saying that the buffer zone had to be resolved first. Such continued exclusive attention to the issue, said the U.N. spokesman, would result in a de facto ceasefire which would enable armistice talks to drag on indefinitely.

General Eisenhower, visiting the President in Washington, said to a press conference that if the time ever came for him to speak out on politics, he would do so but that at present, his job as supreme commander of NATO was too important for him to take any political stand. He said that no one was authorized to act for him in any Eisenhower-for-President movement and that no one would need to speak for him. He said that he had spoken with Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania by phone earlier in the day and that both spoke of some subjects of mild interest to both of them but had not spoken regarding an "Eisenhower for President boom", as addressed by a question, adding that he did not know that it had reached the proportions of a "boom".

In London, Prime Minister Churchill declared to Commons that his new Conservative Government had found the country "on the road to national bankruptcy", warned that Britain was entering a period of emergency during which he would be forced to take "exceptional measures", and that he would soon ask for a secret session of Commons at which he would give full information on the country's defense position. He did not specify what remedies he had in mind. He did say that the Conservative Party intended to nullify Labor's nationalization of the iron and steel industry and to continue a firm policy both in the Iranian oil nationalization dispute and the Egyptian attempt unilaterally to abrogate the 1899 agreement of joint administration between Britain and Egypt of the Sudan and the 1936 treaty which provided Britain access to the Suez Canal in exchange for Britain's defense thereof.

In Paris, President Vincent Auriol opened the sixth session of the U.N. General Assembly this date with an appeal for a Big Three meeting in Paris between the three heads of state, President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Premier Stalin, to discuss world tensions, though not referring to the three heads of state by name. None of the three foreign ministers made comment after the speech regarding the prospect of a Big Three conference.

Investigators for the subcommittee looking into the IRB scandals had decided to examine the records of two major tax cases involving well-known Charlotte residents, one being a 2.4 million dollar combined tax claim against the owner of Red Top Taxi Co., and four of his business enterprises, plus three of his personal associates, and the second being a claim of over $500,000 against the head of a Charlotte machinery company. The investigators wanted to know why there had been no prosecution or final settlement of the first case, which had been sent to Washington in June, 1949, or the second case, which had been sent up in the spring of 1950, and what, if any, connection there was in these two cases with Lamar Caudle, formerly of North Carolina and now head of the Justice Department's tax division.

A statement from two Charlotte attorneys mentioned by the subcommittee in relation to these cases is printed on the page, stating that the use of their names by a News story as counsel in the first case in an unfavorable light was an unjust and unwarranted insinuation and did not state the facts properly, suggests that the newspaper study the record before making further comment, adding that they had never represented the man in question in any criminal or fraud action before the IRB or any other Federal bureau or agency, and had represented him on civil matters only, with no connection to any of the cases mentioned in the article.

A labor walkout was set to occur on three rail systems and the St. Louis terminal on the following Thursday by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, prompting the Government to take action to avert it. The Brotherhood president said that the lines would continue to operate trains carrying war matériel, troops, milk and hospital supplies, but not mail. The President had authority under the Railroad Act to create a board to look into the issues and recommend settlement terms, which would have the effect of postponing the strike for up to 60 days, after which the Government could seek an injunction.

In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott told a press conference that he had no objection to the U.S. having diplomatic representation at the Vatican, as it was regarded as one of the best listening posts in the world. He said that he did not see it as a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, as merely sending a representative did not mean the U.S. was subscribing to the Vatican's conception of church and state.

Emery Wister of The News tells of Hollywood starlet Wanda Hendrix being named honorary queen of the Carolinas Carrousel to be held on November 15 in Charlotte. While still in her teens, she had made her movie debut in "Confidential Agent", which starred Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall. In the part, she had been hurled from a window and killed. One of her first major roles was in "Welcome Stranger", in 1947, in which she played opposite Bing Crosby as a 12-year old, even though 17 at the time. The same year, she played the lead in "Ride the Pink Horse", one of the top suspense thrillers of that year. In 1948, she had co-starred with Melvyn Douglas in "My Own True Love", and with John Lund, in "Miss Tatlock's Millions".

Thus, you will not wish to miss her, as she will likely become one of the greatest female stars of all time, indelible to the collective American memory in her many, many unforgettable roles, for which, undoubtedly, she will receive numerous Academy Awards.

Another Gallup poll would appear the following day, tapping public opinion, one year out from the 1952 election, on who the most popular candidate would be in the presidential race and the relative strength among voters of the two parties.

On the editorial page, "Caudle Should Go—Now" finds that Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle, head of the Justice Department's tax division, should resign forthwith for his having entered a speculative business deal with an oft-arrested gambler, taken payments from a gambler to cover his losses in oil speculation, gone to Italy the prior summer on an expenses-paid trip to provide tax advice to an individual from whom he then accepted a loan of $2,000, and having interfered in an investigation of tax cases in St. Louis, notwithstanding the protests of a Federal District Court judge.

Mr. Caudle, originally from Wadesboro, N.C., and a former district attorney in North Carolina, had been, it finds, "extremely careless with the dignity and responsibility of his office". He was charming and affable, liked to pat people on the back and call them "podner", often apologized when he did something wrong, but then continued to do it. While no illegal activities had yet been charged against him, he had done things which were in the "twilight zone of ethics", causing a loss of public confidence in the tax enforcement division, a cloud which would remain as long as Mr. Caudle remained its head.

In 1955, Mr. Caudle would be indicted with another defendant, the former appointments secretary for President Truman, for allegedly receiving an after-the-fact bribe of oil royalties, which he claimed he had refused, from a defendant for whom Mr. Caudle had recommended non-prosecution in a tax fraud case in 1951, instead recommending that the matter be handled only via civil remedies, and would eventually be convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, which he began serving in 1960 after exhaustion of his regular appeal and subsequent appeal of a denial of a motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence not capable of being discovered or presented at trial. President Johnson, after President Kennedy had pardoned Mr. Caudle's co-defendant in 1962, pardoned Mr. Caudle in 1965. He maintained his innocence to the end of his life in 1969.

Indeed, it would appear from the climate of the times, that "Bulldog" Nixon, who insisted that he would persist in the investigation of IRB and Justice Department corruption, as part of the overall investigation of Government influence-peddling, may have been indirectly behind the effort to put Mr. Caudle in prison, as much so as he had directly, in 1948-1950, been responsible for sending Alger Hiss to prison, though without overtones of issues of loyalty to the United States in the case of Mr. Caudle. With those pardons having been given by the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations, it was only, therefore, turn-about being fair play that as President, Mr. Nixon would issue a Christmas commutation to an object of prosecution by Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, that good and fine man, Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa—whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day, though scattered it may be. And Mr. Nixon, let us make this point perfectly clear, was no crook.

Parenthetically, it might be recalled that Mr. Caudle, in his first months in Washington at the time in fall 1945, was the first person to discover the suicide death of his friend, Congressman Joe Ervin of North Carolina, who was supposed to have Christmas dinner with Mr. Caudle and his wife the day on which Mr. Caudle discovered Mr. Ervin's apartment full of gas and a suicide note beside his lifeless body. Mr. Ervin was the brother of then-Superior Court Judge Sam Ervin, who was then appointed to succeed his brother for the remainder of the term in Congress on condition that he would not run for the seat in the 1946 election.

And the rest, as they say....

"Should Blood Be Drafted?" tells of the recent column by Robert C. Ruark, proposing that men who were deferred from the draft be subject to draft of their blood, having prompted a Gallup poll in which 80 percent of the respondents favored the proposition, with 57 percent also favoring drafting the blood of all physically able persons in the country.

But in practice, only a small percentage of people were volunteering their blood, which suggested that the people wanted to be forced to the blood banks. It finds, however, that more likely it was the fact that would-be donors were simply procrastinating in giving blood.

It therefore provides the address and phone number of the local Red Cross Blood Center and urges giving for the sake of the soldiers in Korea.

"On Treaties and the Constitution" tells of a move afoot to amend the language of the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution, regarding treaties being the supreme law of the land, along with the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The literature supporting this move, however, provided an ellipsis in lieu of the language referring to the Constitution and the laws, making the Clause appear to refer only to treaties as being supreme law of the land, and thus misleading to the uninformed reader, eliminating the essential meaning that the Constitution, from which all Federal laws and treaties derive their efficacy, was first and foremost supreme.

The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution was necessary to make it clear that the Constitution, itself, and the laws and treaties arising thereunder, took precedence over the laws of any of the states, necessary, insofar as treaties were concerned, to ensure that only the Federal Government could make treaties with a foreign power.

The controversy had arisen after the California Court of Appeal had ruled that Articles 55 and 56 of the U.N. Charter nullified the California Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920, which provided that no alien could own land within the state of California. While a previous case regarding the constitutionality of the California laws as applied with particularity in that case, to effect escheat to the State of land provided by the alien father to his citizen son in ostensible violation of the State law, had gone to the Supreme Court in 1948, holding the law as applied to citizens to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, the issue of whether the Charter nullified the laws had not reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The piece ventures that if it did reach the High Court, the proper recourse was not amendment of the Constitution to limit the treaty-making power of the Senate but rather for the Senate to examine critically all proposed treaties to ensure that they did not violate the traditional state customs and traditions, rejecting those which did. It suggests that if the Senate was not sufficiently competent to do so, then it was not competent to ratify treaties in the first place. It served no useful purpose, however, to confuse the matter by making the claim, for example, that ratification of a proposed World Bill of Rights would nullify the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Parenthetically, the case would never reach the U.S. Supreme Court, as the California Supreme Court, the following April, held, in a 4 to 3 decision, that the Alien Land Laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment, holding in the process that the U.N. Charter was not intended to abrogate existing U.S. domestic law.

"Well-Spent Nickels" praises the farmer-approved "Nickels-for-Know-How" voluntary tax on feed and fertilizer, which would cost each farmer no more than a quarter per year, and would raise $125,000 for research administered by the Agricultural Foundation at N.C. State. The tax could be refunded to the farmer by his turning in tags from the feed and fertilizer purchased subject to the tax, but the piece ventures that few would seek the refund because of the value the tax would provide in return.

A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Material for the Voice", tells of NAACP executive secretary Walter White having authored a recent article in the Saturday Review of Literature, titled "Time for a Progress Report", in which he had stated, regarding progress in U.S. race relations: "We prefer to take our chances and fight our way in a democracy, whatever its shortcomings, for we are making progress … often painfully slow, but it is still progress."

Mr. White had gone on to cite black progress in fifteen different areas during the previous decade, including Supreme Court rulings, integration of the armed forces, production of race-problem movies in Hollywood, progress in fair employment practices legislation and in labor unions, a better press, appointments to diplomatic and judicial posts, and gains in employment and housing.

He never suggested that the job of progress had advanced beyond its beginnings, but that it was advancing. Given his position, this was a significant statement and one which deserved to be broadcast by the Voice of America and other agencies seeking to tell the world the truth about interracial issues in 1951 America, these facts being inconsonant with Communist propaganda to the contrary.

Drew Pearson tells of the President, concerned in 1948 about the prospect of General Eisenhower running for the Democratic nomination, having dispatched his friend and court-jester George Allen, also a friend of the General, to find out the General's intentions. Mr. Allen had first contacted the General's brother, Milton, then president of Kansas State University, since having become president of Penn State, and formerly an adviser in the Truman Administration, who told Mr. Allen that the General had no intention of running for the presidency at that time.

Presently, Milton Eisenhower had not given Democrats any similar assurance, but on the contrary had informed Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, the chief backer of the Eisenhower candidacy, that his brother would run in 1952 on the GOP ticket. The President had known this for some time, also communicated through Mr. Allen, who had visited early the previous summer, at the President's urging, with the General in Paris to communicate the President's suggestion that if the General were going to run, he should do so as a Democrat, where he would feel more at home, and could effectively be "summoned" by the President to come home and run, that the President might even be willing to make the nominating speech for him at the Democratic convention. The President drafted a personal note to the General communicating these thoughts, delivered by Mr. Allen in person; and when Mr. Allen returned, he told the President that the General did not intend to quit as NATO supreme commander in the near future to run for the presidency but that since the job would be completed by the following spring, he would then have plenty of time to decide whether to enter politics, and would, in any event, inform the President before he did anything.

Many political observers believed, since the President's appointment of General Mark Clark as Ambassador to the Vatican, that the President had made up his mind not to run in 1952, given the known adverse political effect of this appointment among Protestants.

He adds that while the President and his friends were convinced in 1948 that General Eisenhower would not run, a group of Democratic leaders, led by Jack Arvey of Chicago, were equally convinced that he would, having gotten the word through singer Morton Downey, who had become friends with the General through golfing with him at the Westchester Country Club, assuring that the General intended to run in 1948. Mr. Pearson indicates that it was that thread on which the great Eisenhower boom of that year had hung.

Joseph Alsop exposes the problems with the notion being bandied about by supporters of Senator Taft for the Republican nomination that General Eisenhower was not a Republican and was more likely to accept the Democratic nomination. He indicates that if the President had waited another month to appoint the General as supreme commander of NATO, the General would have enrolled himself as a Republican in the state of New York.

By the same token, the General was a loyal soldier in uniform and that fact might prove the most serious impediment to his draft as the GOP nominee.

It was a matter of public record that in 1945, while the General was still commander of Allied forces in Europe, the President had offered his support to him and for any office he might desire, including the presidency. It was not a matter of record but appeared well authenticated that the President had again made the same offer in advance of the 1948 election, when the General was being discussed as a possible candidate by both parties.

While it was unlikely for the President, under present circumstances, to make again the same offer to the General he made in 1948, it was likely, in their present meeting in Washington, ostensibly only to discuss the progress of rearmament within NATO, whether the General intended to run for political office such that the President could be prepared to appoint a successor in that event. If the President did so, Mr. Alsop posits, he would be speaking sincerely.

For his part, General Eisenhower had the conflict of his own known conviction that it was wrong to enter politics directly from uniform and also that Western rearmament depended upon his own continuation in command of NATO.

But those concerns, suggests Mr. Alsop, ought be overridden by the fact that the President was not, as he had been in 1948, carrying forward the foreign and defense policies of the country with brilliant execution. There was a crying need in the country for leadership in which the people could have faith. The General as President would avert the GOP plunge into isolationism with Senator Taft as nominee and also inspire greater confidence abroad than he could as merely supreme commander of NATO, while also satisfying this longing for leadership.

Robert C. Ruark tells of a new magazine titled Gentry, which cost two dollars, and had in its pages such things as a swatch of actual material to advertise shirts and suits and a sachet of herbs in association with a piece on food, promising in a future issue a leaf of fine old tobacco in accompaniment of a tobacco ad. He wonders whether next they would have lingerie accompanying lingerie ads or perhaps a clip-on live "dame" attired in a black lace corset, though the latter, he admits, would cause talk in the neighborhood.

For these and other various reasons he lays out, he thinks the magazine had gone too far in illustrating its text.

"Seems to me we are entering a fresh field of journalism so rich that no one man can be a critic. Not only must one agree or disagree with the prose, but must consider that very possibly the shirt flannel sits oddly with his complexion, and that he would look a frightful frump in the suitings on page five. You can just hear the conversation in the smart Manhattan bars: 'Joe's text is terrible, and on top of that, he attaches too much marjoram to his food section.'"

A letter writer finds that if the Republicans drafted General Eisenhower for the presidential nomination in 1952, the President would be a "dead duck", that the General could win regardless of the party he chose. He adds that he had voted for the Democratic ticket for 40 years, but that President Truman had never received his vote and never would.

A letter writer from Pittsboro finds that there was little, if any, change likely to come in State Government regardless of who the next governor would be, as the people knew what they wanted and that for which they were willing to be taxed. He finds the country becoming increasingly socialistic, as had Britain under the Labor Party, and that North Carolina was following suit. He suggests that Britain's present status was a reminder of the way the country should not go.

A letter from five Army sergeants stationed in Cold Bay, Alaska, tells of each man in his lifetime having to do many things which did not appeal to him, in their case, one of those things being to pull a tour of duty in the Aleutian Islands, with the nearest town 600 miles away, prompting them to stay in their barracks at night and engage in lie-telling contests. Their main pleasure was mail call and so they provide their address, via Seattle, where one could write them.

What had they done to deserve that post? Perhaps, you better address that question first before getting too close to them as pen pals.

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