The Charlotte News

Monday, December 17, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via O. H. P. King, that the truce negotiators in Korea haggled this date over prisoner exchange and armistice supervision, with "absolutely negative" results and "no progress", according to a U.N. spokesman, as only ten days remained before expiration of the previously agreed provisional ceasefire line, which required conclusion of an armistice agreement by December 27 for it to remain effective. Neither side had thus far asked for an extension of the deadline and the allies indicated that unless there was reasonable expectation produced by the negotiations of reaching final agreement on the remaining issues, there would be no extension sought.

An allied radio broadcast from Tokyo had indicated that acceptance of the Communist demands regarding blanket exchange of war prisoners could leave some allied soldiers in Communist prison camps for the rest of their lives. The allies had been seeking a man-for-man exchange, with lists of prisoners stated forthwith, prior to conclusion of final armistice terms, along with neutral inspections of the camps. The allies had already produced 2,500 sheets of paper containing the names of all Communist prisoners under their control and indicated preparedness to turn over the list to the Communists, provided they did likewise with their prisoners.

In reported ground action, North Korean radio had claimed, in an unconfirmed report, that Communist troops the previous day had recaptured two Yellow Sea islands, Cho and Yuk, off the west coast of Korea, the report contending that 174 U.N. soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured in the amphibious operation. The U.N. had confirmed that the Communists had retaken three other islands off northwest Korea about two weeks earlier. The U.S. Eighth Army reported that no American soldier had been killed during the 24-hour period ending Sunday evening, the first time since August that such a no-death report had issued.

In the air war, American F-86 Sabre jets damaged two enemy MIG-15s in a 25-minute battle this date over Sinanju in northwest Korea, as hazy weather reduced air activity otherwise.

The Air Force, marking the first anniversary of the first use of the Sabre jet in combat, said in Washington this date that the Sabres held a ratio of 10 to 1 in victories over MIG-15s in Korea. It said that as of December 14, the Fourth Fighter Wing, equipped with the Sabres, had destroyed 130 enemy jets, probably destroyed 20 and damaged 143, with the loss of only 14 Sabres. The Wing was also credited with bagging eleven enemy planes of other types.

In New York, Federal District Court Judge Thomas F. Murphy had accepted an assignment from the President to clean up the Government. Judge Murphy had been the lead prosecutor in the Government's ultimately successful perjury case against Alger Hiss in 1949 and 1950. He would direct a non-partisan commission designed to take action to eliminate from the Federal payroll those officials who had betrayed their trusts. He would be given a free hand to direct the job as he saw fit and would be responsible only to the President.

The Loyalty Review Board in Washington reopened the cases of 565 Federal employees for a determination under the new standard of proof that a "reasonable doubt" of loyalty was sufficient to bar Federal employment. Veteran diplomat John Service had been fired the previous week by the State Department after an adverse finding by the Board utilizing this standard. Previously, a showing of actual disloyalty was required for discharge, the new standard having been adopted by order of the President the previous May 1.

IRB commissioner John Dunlap told a press conference that he had more than 65 special agents investigating reports of heavy tax shakedowns and other irregularities in New York City, the only place where the Bureau had a special crew that large working at the present time.

U.S. News & World Report stated that General Eisenhower had said he would definitely not accept any offers of the Democratic nomination for the presidency and would, based on his family history and background, as well as his personal views, allow Republicans to place his name in nomination at the GOP convention the following summer. He would run if nominated, but had not changed his position that he would not actively seek the nomination. The article, which quoted no individual sources by name but relied on canvassing various persons with first-hand knowledge on the subject, stated that it could not establish that the President had any part, direct or indirect, in any proposals that the General run as a Democrat. It said that its sources were different from those relied upon by Arthur Krock, the Washington correspondent for the New York Times, who had, in a story of November 8, stated that the General had not accepted an offer by the President to run as a Democrat during the General's early November visit with the President in Washington. The U.S. News article said that it had come to the conclusion that Justice William O. Douglas had been Mr. Krock's source for that report.

In Elizabeth, N.J., the Civil Aeronautics Board, spurred by angry townspeople, opened a five-way inquiry this date into the flaming crash of a Florida-bound airliner in which 56 persons had perished three miles from the Newark airport, just missing the midtown Elizabeth business district and crashing into a river bank, after the pilot had heroically sought to control the descent of the plane, resulting in the second worst airline disaster in American history.

In Augusta, Ga., the Army set up emergency field kitchens to feed nearly 3,000 hospital patients after an explosion at the Atlantic Gas Light Co. plant left the town without gas service, while temperatures reached a low of eighteen degrees.

A cold wave had gripped the Eastern section of the country, resulting in the loss of 121 lives during the previous four days, with temperatures reaching record lows, below zero in several locations from the Rockies to New England, and in scattered locations in the Appalachian Mountains, with 5 degree temperatures recorded in the North Carolina mountains and 25 degrees along the South Carolina seaboard. In Houlton, Me., the mercury dropped to 30 below zero and 25 below in Bismarck, N.D. In New York City, a low of 8.7 degrees was reached in the early morning hours and daytime temperatures were not expected to rise above 20. Motorists in the Northeast took to public transportation as thousands of cars had failed to start.

In Statesville, N.C., Dr. Joseph Johnston, 70, former superintendent of the Presbyterian Orphans Home at Barium Springs, died in the hospital the previous day. He had served as the superintendent for 27 years before retiring in 1949, after which he became personnel and public relations director at Davis Hospital, where he died.

In Pawtucket, R.I., a man armed with a shotgun and wearing a yellow-knitted mask which appeared to be "somebody's underwear", held up a hotel this date but got away only with the night clerk's unfinished coffee. The clerk had reached under the desk to grab a steel bar and accidentally knocked his lunchbox to the floor, which the thief apparently took to be the cash box, grabbed it and fled with only a thermos bottle partially filled with coffee. The clerk said he had eaten the sandwiches earlier.

On the editorial page, "There Is Still Time" tells of the Charlotte Memorial Hospital fund-raising campaign still being one-third short of its $400,000 goal, with two days left in the drive. Members of the medical profession had been responsible for donating or pledging more than one-third of the $265,265 thus far raised. While, it admits, it was not a good time of year, so close to Christmas, to be holding a fund-raising drive, it was still hoped that generous donations would meet the goal by Wednesday for the worthy cause.

Get out your checkbooks.

"A Treatment, Not a Cure" indicates surprise at the stern punishment meted out by the Southern Conference college presidents to Maryland and Clemson for their having accepted bowl bids, contrary to the September vote of the presidents that Conference members would not accept bowl bids in 1951 without first obtaining permission from the Conference, which both Maryland and Clemson had failed to do. Few had expected more than a mild reprimand, but both institutions were instead placed on one-year probation, preventing them from playing non-conference opponents the following season and from voting in conference matters.

It suggests that the college presidents had, for a long time, let themselves be pushed around by alumni and athletic directors and coaches, with the result that academic standards had been significantly lowered to permit admission of athletes who ordinarily could not make the grade in college. They had also lost control over the financial affairs of the athletic programs and had stood by idly while football had been taken over from the students and handed to the fans, with the result that the sport had, for all intents and purposes, become professionalized.

The issue was bigger than just post-season bowl games and involved the basic structure of the educational system and its goals. While the action of the Southern Conference college presidents would not resolve this issue, it could become a forerunner of a reappraisal of intercollegiate athletics which would restore some balance to the scale of values and permit "the dog to wag the tail for a change."

The 1952 season would be the last in which seven of the Southern Conference schools, including Maryland and Clemson, would participate before breaking off to form the Atlantic Coast Conference in May, 1953, with the University of Virginia to follow late in the year, after football season.

"Farm Tenancy in N.C." tells of tenant farming having increased steadily from the Civil War to 1930, when the percentage of farmers who were tenants had reached over 49 percent, but then during the New Deal years and since, according to UNC's Institute for Research and Social Science, had steadily declined, to 44.4 percent in 1940, 42.6 percent in 1945, down to 38.2 percent of the state's 288,508 farms currently.

The proportion of tenants to owner-operated farms varied from county to county, from three-fourths of the farms operated by tenants in some counties down to only seven percent in others. In Mecklenburg County, tenants operated 29.8 percent of the farms in 1950, down from 40.4 percent in 1945.

In other parts of the country, in the Midwest and the West, tenant farming was not associated with poor living conditions and low agricultural production as it had been historically in the South. Rather, tenants were affluent operators who made substantial annual profits and reinvested it in machinery and fertilizer which enabled further production of the land under modern farming methods, avoiding the soil depletion which had resulted in the Dust Bowl era and economic ruination in the South during the Thirties.

It was pleased to note the encouraging trend toward farm ownership in the state and hoped it would continue, as the family farm, operated by the owner and his family, had many advantages as a more stable, proud farm population.

"One Thousand Dead Carolinians" urges the General Assembly in 1953 to pass stricter motor vehicle laws, indicating that the Carolina Motor Club had taken a poll which found that 78 percent of respondents favored mandatory jail sentences of not less than five days for first convictions for drunk driving and 82 percent favored mandatory periodic mechanical inspections.

It reminds that the death toll for the year on North Carolina highways had reached nearly 1,000 and hopes that the Legislature would respond appropriately.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Marse Robert Attacked Too Soon", tells of the United Press All-Southern Conference football team of 1951 being comprised primarily of Northerners, including five Pennsylvanians, three New Jerseyites, a Washingtonian, a Virginian and South Carolinian. The powerhouse of the Conference, Maryland, had a squad of 97 players, of whom 42 hailed from Pennsylvania, ten from New York, five from New Jersey and three from Rhode Island. It lists the All-Conference team and each player's hometown.

It concludes that had General Lee and the Confederacy been able to recruit some of the Pennsylvania blockers for the battle at Gettysburg, the "Late Unpleasantness would have been a different story! A different story, suh!"

But you neglect to recall the legend of the Tar Heels, having purportedly derived in part from the stand at Gettysburg, in another part, from the Revolution. Take your pick of legends. As we have imparted previously, our theory is that it derives simply from the fact that the heel of the state, if its shape is perceived as that of a shoe, is, historically, the richest tar-producing region in the world, has little to do with war—so you don't have to contemplate changing the nickname of the state or that of the University to make it accord with your perfect perception of cleansed history.

Parenthetically, as we have long ago stated herein, at the very inception of this website, in fact, we have been cognizant for many decades of the subliminal negative connotations offered in plain view by Confederate monuments dotting almost every courthouse square in the South, reminiscent of its strange career which they memorialize, have long silently cursed them as we passed, and so offer no support to those who would seek to preserve them, while also believing that there are better avenues to withdraw them from public view than with acts of juvenile vandalism, which only throw fuel to the fire of those who would burn the crosses to try to save their "her'tage", thus being cracker-baiting, the other side of the same coin to race-baiting, surely an unproductive route in bringing harmony to society regarding a long past history which long ago was healed in our nation by bloody struggles decades, even a century after the Civil War, and long before the current group of vandals were born. We thus urge them to study history more assiduously and find more constructive approaches for taking on the symbols of the Old South than to drag them down with ropes and chains. Debate is the best teacher; shaming of the adversary in their own eyes finally, the most salutary remedy. Trying to "get even" for something which happened over a hundred years ago is the same sucker game which the Klan played long ago and accomplishes nothing positive, is a childish pursuit of ghosts, conjurations in the modern age most usually born of television and movie representations, sometimes misinterpreted but disseminated more easily than lettered material to the lesser lights.

When those pushing for the removal of these monuments can go to Shelby, N.C., for instance, the original hometown of Thomas Dixon, author of the racist The Leopard Spots and The Clansman, the basis for D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", and peacefully, through education and civil debate, convince the town fathers and mothers therein to agree to remove this hideous blight on the landscape, an anachronistic memorial erected, as with all such memorials, in a time when literacy was relatively low, sensitivities were necessarily provincially cultivated and determined, and living Civil War memories remained extant among veterans and their immediate families still in the community, a time now long past, then a true start will have been made, symbolically at least, toward achieving perhaps better understanding of the continuing perception of Southern fealty in some to the worst of the Old South traditions, reminiscent of "Cloud-Cuckoo Town", which such statues painfully engender and convey in others, visitors to the community where they still stand, whether in reality having much effect on attitudes and perceptions of the residents in such small towns being at least debatable—attitudes which perhaps could be tapped by an enterprising sociological study conducted by questionnaires distributed to residents, designed to ferret out racial attitudes in Southern communities with such statues versus those locales of a similar socio-economic and racial composition where there is no statue commemorating the Confederacy. For, based on voting and demographic patterns, it is typically there, in the small, rural towns, where no major college or university exists to educate beliefs and ameliorate attitudes, where the real energy needs to be focused for ridding from our society the last vestiges of prejudice aimed at "the other". That will not be done by reckless and vindictive acts of vandalism.

Elsewhere the development of Southern unreality and romanticism is clear, also.

One of the most immediately striking and important changes the Civil War and Reconstruction had brought to the South was that they had irrevocably halted it in its march toward aristocracy. Before long, indeed, the movement, as we shall see more fully later, would be definitely in the other direction. The very model for it all, the Virginians, would be slipping into decay, and the master class in general would be falling back from the gains they had made in the last decades before the beginning of combat.

But at the same time the South was, of course, being continually driven more and more on the defensive. The need to justify itself in the eyes of the world and in its own and to assert its pride as against the Yankee was more imperative now than it had ever been before. Moreover, there was naturally a great aversion on the part of the individuals who made up the master class to surrender the glory which had been theirs under the ancien regime. And like many another people come upon evil days, the South in its entirety was filled with an immense regret and nostalgia; yearned backward toward its past with passionate longing.

And so it happened that, while the actuality of aristocracy was drawing away toward the limbo of aborted and unrealized things, the claim of its possession as an achieved and essentially indefeasible heritage, so far from being abated, was reasserted with a kind of frenzied intensity.

It was in this period that the legend of the Old South finally emerged and fully took on the form in which we know it today. With the antebellum world removed to the realm of retrospect, the shackles of reality, as so often happens in such cases, fell away from it altogether. Perpetually suspended in the great haze of memory, it hung, as it were, poised, somewhere between earth and sky, colossal, shining, and incomparably lovely—a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land wherein at last everybody who had ever laid claim to the title of planter would be metamorphosed with swift precision, beyond any lingering shade of doubt, into the breathing image of Marse Chan and Squire Effingham, and wherein life would move always in stately and noble measure through scenery out of Watteau.

—from The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash, 1941, Book Two, Chapter I, "Of the Frontier the Yankee Made", Section 8, pp. 126-127 of 1969 ed.

Drew Pearson finds the roots of the present corruption in the Government to have stemmed from three sources, the fact that FDR, during the war years, had devoted his attention to winning the war and delegated to others control of domestic policy, the fact that FDR's desire to be re-elected in 1944 had caused him to deliver control of the Democratic Party to the big-city bosses, including Robert Hannegan of St. Louis, Frank Hague of Jersey City, Ed Kelly of Chicago, and Ed Flynn of the Bronx, all of whom had been responsible for placing Harry Truman on the ticket that year, and, finally, the fact that after President Truman had been in office for a month in May, 1945, he sought the resignation of Attorney General Francis Biddle in favor of Tom Clark as head of the Justice Department, the President having held against Mr. Biddle his rewarding of the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City for the conviction of Boss Tom Pendergast, the political mentor of Harry Truman in the early Thirties.

Party patronage had once been dispensed from the Post Office Department, but that had largely come under civil service, leaving allocation of patronage to the Justice and Treasury Departments. Mr. Hannegan and the other city bosses who had been responsible for making Senator Truman Vice-President, and thus, ultimately, President, decided that they wanted a Justice Department which would do their bidding, and so, despite the fact that the President had been obligated to Mr. Biddle for his having provided much of the inside research on the Nazi cartels' links with Standard Oil of New Jersey, Alcoa, Bausch & Lomb, and other such revelations to the Senate Truman investigating committee during the war, providing Senator Truman with the favorable press which ultimately led to his selection for the ticket, the President had gone ahead and dumped him.

Mr. Biddle had told the President at the time in 1945 that Mr. Clark, in his opinion, was not a suitable successor and that he had decided to fire him as chief of the criminal division because of his easygoing attitude toward criminal prosecutions, described him as a "fixer". Nevertheless, Mr. Clark became Attorney General and during his tenure had not acted as a "fixer", in fact, had been more vigorous in his prosecution of antitrust cases than had Mr. Biddle. He was, however, easygoing, politically minded and cooperated with the party bosses. During his tenure, most of the forthright men in the Department departed, and, while there was nothing dishonest about the Department, it began an era in which the dominating theme was to take care of friends.

Treasury adopted this same theme in substantially greater measure and the great majority of tax cases were handled by the Treasury, long before the Justice Department ever received a referral. The party bosses therefore aimed their efforts at Treasury, where, under former Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the IRB had been one of the most forthright agencies in government. But Mr. Hannegan came in as IRB commissioner in 1943 and chose men under him as collectors who had since caused the problems which led to the current scandals. Most of those men had been selected by the big-city bosses. Mr. Morgenthau had objected to bringing in such men, and after disagreement with the President, resigned in mid-1945 after over eleven years as Secretary, after which the "complacent, sleepy" John W. Snyder was appointed as his successor.

Thus had transpired the route to the present lapse of strict ethical standards in both the Treasury and Justice Departments.

Stewart Alsop, in London, continues his examination of the paralyzed American policy vis-à-vis the Middle East, indicating that leverage was necessary to avoid the region falling to Communism, leverage of the type supplied by the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey in 1947. At that time, Loy Henderson, presently Ambassador to Iran and in 1947, head of the State Department's Middle East section, had strongly advised that Iran should be included in the aid package. But because Iran, as well as Egypt, were within the province of British responsibility, the U.S. declined to do so. The policy, however, with British power in those countries since breaking down, appeared, in retrospect, short-sighted.

The U.S. had adopted in the meantime a policy of attempting to balance its support of Israel against that of the Arab states, a policy which could be fatal to American and Western interests in the Middle East, as it had the net result of leaving a vacuum of power in the Arab states. As long as the Arab states could not be strengthened beyond the level of Israel, the U.S. could have no leverage within the Arab world. To halt the prospect of a Communist takeover in the Middle East, such leverage would be vital, requiring a change in the Anglo-American relationship in the region and a change of American policy toward the Arab-Israeli problem.

Mr. Alsop advocates a pooling of American and British power in the region, politically, militarily and economically, so as to aggregate power sufficient to offer the only possible real assurance against the outbreak of another Arab-Israeli war. Within that partnership, American power then had to be brought to bear to achieve mutually agreed objectives, prime among which would be to create "reasonably enlightened authoritarian regimes" in the region, "capable of dealing with the West on a rational basis, and capable above all of forcing change in an area where change is absolutely inevitable."

Robert C. Ruark apologizes to Bernard Baruch for his column the previous week in which he, tongue-in-cheek, stated that Mr. Baruch had gone into the moonshine business and cheated at canasta. Neither was true, he confides. Someone had poached on Mr. Baruch's estate to establish a still, a fact which Mr. Ruark had found laughably ironic, given Mr. Baruch's strait-laced attitude toward alcohol, and so had decided to produce the piece which he thought was quite funny, but which had turned out to be so subtle in its approach to humor as to be misconstrued by serious-minded readers. It had wound up hurting the feelings of a man he truly admired and so offers his deep regrets.

"I feel more or less today like a small boy who has just shot Santa Claus on Christmas, under the mistaken idea that he was a burglar."

A letter writer thinks that the City's office of smoke engineer ought be abolished as unnecessary, urges that before furnace inspectors were hired, they should have to have at least ten years of experience in firing all types of furnaces and boilers.

A letter writer seeks to make clear that Catholics had not sought to have the President appoint an ambassador to the Vatican, referring to the recent appointment to the position of General Mark Clark, withdrawn until after the Congressional recess. She says that most Catholics did not care whether such an ambassador was appointed or not. She decries those who participated in attacks on religious beliefs and assures that she was led to the Catholic Church only after a great deal of soul-searching.

A letter writer from Lincolnton says that while he still bought the News, he had increasingly become disappointed in the editorial page since the time of FDR and World War II, when there had been some "colorful editorials" and the newspaper had won its crusade against the continued service to the state of Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. Now he found that whenever he wrote anything for the letters column, it was either deleted or "toned down" until he hardly recognized it. He thinks that any public official ought be subject to criticism.

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