The Charlotte News
Wednesday, December 26, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that the Communists in Korea had admitted that they had captured 1,058 more Americans than they had announced the previous week in the official list of 11,559 prisoners, but that 571 of them had died and 155 had escaped or were released. They were still trying to determine what had happened to the remaining 332. The Communists inferentially blamed allied warplanes and artillery for many of the 571 deaths, and said the rest had been caused by disease. The U.N. command called it "a shocking disclosure" and also indicated that none of the 155 who had supposedly escaped or were released had ever reached allied lines.
The Communists also rejected the allied demand for an accounting of 50,000 South Korean troops who were missing in action, and asked the allies what had happened to the 44,205 Communists, which the Communists claimed had been captured. They also claimed that the allied list of Communist captives submitted the previous week was 1,456 short of the announced total of 132,472, an arithmetic error.
In Pusan, police stated that two South Koreans had led Maj. General William Dean into Communist custody in August, 1950, for five dollars apiece. The South Korean chief investigation officer said that the two men had been arrested and freed on bail, and were being kept under strict surveillance. He said that the two men admitted receiving the reward, but said that they turned the money over to an unidentified Communist organization.
In Panmunjom, the Communists delivered to the U.N. command the first bundle of mail from allied prisoners in North Korea, after the agreement had been reached to allow exchange of prisoner mail on both sides via Panmunjom's post office. The mail was immediately sent to Japan for relay to relatives and friends of the allied prisoners.
It appeared that the Government would reject offers from private citizens to pay the $120,000 in fines for the four American fliers imprisoned in Hungary, the fines being required in lieu of 90 days in jail. Final decisions had not yet been made, but it appeared that the Government would pay the fines. The fliers' Air Force transport plane, on its way from West Germany to Belgrade on November 19, had been forced down in Hungary. The previous week they had been tried and convicted of aiding spies.
A late bulletin from Budapest indicates that it was possible the four fliers had been released or would be released this night.
In Cairo, King Farouk's clear indications that he wanted a settlement with the West to avoid the increasing threat from Communist activity in the country, had sparked violent anti-palace and anti-Western demonstrations this date. Police in Alexandria had used tear gas to break up a student mob numbering 5,000, which gathered after the King had appointed a pro-Westerner as chief of the Royal Cabinet and adviser to the King on foreign and domestic affairs. Seven police officers were reported injured by missiles thrown by the demonstrators and two students were reported hurt. In Cairo, police also dispersed a crowd of university students. The leftist and Communist-inspired part of the press increased its clamor for tougher Government action against the British.
In Mims, Fla., a bomb exploded the previous night killing a prominent black leader, Harry T. Moore, 46, state secretary of the NAACP. His wife had also been injured in the blast, reportedly not seriously—though she would die from her injuries on January 3. The bomb had exploded beneath the bedroom of their home, located in a tiny community 40 miles south of Daytona Beach. The bomb had been planted by someone who apparently knew of Mr. Moore's movements, as his job kept him on the road across the state most of the time, and he and his family were home only for the Christmas holidays. Mr. Moore had been a schoolteacher before taking the post with the NAACP, and had been executive secretary of the Progressive Voters League of Florida, which, prior to 1948, had conducted a state campaign to register black voters. Governor Fuller Warren indicated that he was sending an investigator forthwith to the scene of the explosion. A deputy said that he could not smell powder and so believed that the explosive used was not dynamite.
Another Gallup poll appears, this one finding that General Eisenhower, were he to be passed over for the Republican nomination for the presidency and then become the Democratic nominee, running against Senator Taft, he would win by a margin of 2 to 1, with 7 percent undecided. While Senator Taft was favored by 72 percent of Republicans, the General was favored by 88 percent of the Democrats and 68 percent of the independents in such a hypothetical race. The story indicates that, notwithstanding the General's recently imputed statement that he would not run as a Democrat, Democrats in New Hampshire might take steps to place the General's name on the Democratic primary ballot in March, and there had been a lot of agitation also in the Southern states, particularly in Texas, in favor of his nomination by the Democrats. If he were to run as a Republican, a recent poll had found that he would win by a margin of 64 percent to 28 percent over the President, with 8 percent undecided.
During the four-day holiday period, which had started at 6 p.m. on Friday and lasted until midnight on Christmas, 758 people had died in accidents, three-persons short of the record death toll of 761, also on a four-day Christmas holiday, in 1936. Traffic accidents accounted for 516 of the deaths, below the 600 predicted by the National Safety Council. Fires had caused 102 deaths, but none had resulted from Christmas trees. The previous year, 724 people had died in accidents during the holiday, but in a three-day period, thus actually at a much higher rate per day than in 1951. Texas led the nation with 90 accidental deaths, including nearly 60 in traffic accidents. Ice and snow in the Midwest curtailed travel and held down the traffic toll.
In Charlotte, Word Wood, 78, founder and honorary chairman of the board of American Trust Co. of Charlotte, had died during the morning at his home after a period of declining health. He had come to Charlotte in 1901 at the age of 28 to found the company with a partner, after eight years in banking in Winston-Salem with Wachovia Bank & Trust Co.
In Chicago, Smokey had to go to the
hospital after eight-year old Donald wound up his mechanical duck and
put it on the floor, whereupon it ran over one of Smokey's
appendages, with which its gears became engaged, requiring the doctor
at the hospital to take the duck apart with a screwdriver and snips
to disengage it from Smokey's appendage. Smokey
The newspaper recommends that parents steer their children during the holidays to the "Try It" feature on the Feature Page.
You do not want to do that, as they
could easily become addicted to "Try It", and then you will
never get them not to "Try It
On the editorial page, "$40,000 to Go" tells of the Memorial Hospital fund-raising campaign having another $40,000 left to reach its goal of $400,000, another $13,800 having been raised since December 20. It provides a list of doctors who had led the campaign for fund-raising from the medical profession, which had contributed $106,000 thus far. It urges contribution to this worthy cause.
"Depleted Taxpayer Repletes Oil Club" tells of the newly opened Petroleum Club of Houston, according to the Wall Street Journal, being the "swankiest in the world", with 750 members, restricted to oilmen, and 50 more on the waiting list. The ten-room club, costing $750,000, was perched atop the Rice Hotel, and included in its decor various former palatial trappings of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria and of the 16th-century Pekin winter palace. The membership fee was $900.
The new tax bill contained the phrase "percentage depletion", which depleted Government revenues by about $750 million per year while enriching the members of the Petroleum Club in the process. The phrase applied to "exhaustible resources", such as oil, gas and coal, permitting the operators in those industries to receive a 27.5 percent tax-free depletion allowance each year, based on the earnings from the resource rather than its cost, the latter the normal basis for depreciation, which was ordinarily spread over a period of 20 years for capital equipment. It provides an example to show that the depletion allowed would be perhaps 20 times more than ordinary depreciation.
A Treasury Department study had shown that percentage depletion provided huge benefits to the oil and gas industry, whereby ten owners within the industry, who earned a total of 62 million dollars over a five-year period, were left, after depletion allowances, with about three-quarters of their incomes tax-free, such that they paid the same tax as a person earning $7,000 per year. One such operator, who ordinarily would have paid 85 percent of his 14.3 million dollars in income, actually paid taxes amounting to only .6 percent.
It concludes, therefore, that the depletion allowance amounted to a Government subsidy for these industries. It suggests that the readers thus had a right to drop in at the Petroleum Club in Houston, were they in the area, as they, as taxpayers, were footing the bill.
"General Vaughan Fits the Description" tells of the director of the Federal Housing & Home Financing Agency having issued a directive the previous week to employees preventing their acceptance of gifts of any kind from any entity doing business with the agency. The President had praised the directive as the correct policy for the entire Government. But the same day, newspapers carried pictures of the President receiving a Christmas turkey from the National Turkey Federation. It says it did not begrudge him his turkey, but by strict definitions, the NTF did business with the executive branch of the Government. The President, moreover, usually donated his Christmas food gifts to patients at Walter Reed Hospital or other worthy recipients.
It concludes, however, that General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide, should be the first to go in the promised house-cleaning of the Administration, for his role in the procurement of freezers for Mrs. Truman, Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, former Secretary of the Treasury and then future Chief Justice Fred Vinson, and others, in apparent exchange for General Vaughan's opening up the White House to influence peddling during 1945-46.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "No More President", tells of the 30 percent of the voters in Uruguay who voted having adopted a new form of government, transferring the executive power of their president to a nine-member Federal Council, similar to that in Switzerland. The country was prosperous and cultivated and had a debatable "tradition of democracy".
The President had been so ready to relinquish his office that he had advocated the reform. The change, however, may have been more in form than substance. Yet, an American, it suggests, could not help but be intrigued, as there was something very inviting about the possibility of not having any more presidential election years, accompanied by all of their acrimony.
Drew Pearson tells of Price administrator Mike DiSalle having written an important confidential memorandum to Roger Putnam, the Economic Stabilization administrator, stating categorically that the steel industry was able to absorb any wage increase without raising prices. He also counseled that the Government should take a stand against any significant wage increases which would set a precedent for John L. Lewis and labor leaders in other industries. He pointed out that steel industry profits were far above the industry earnings standard which the ESA had instructed him to use as a test for decisions on price increases. He also was tough on labor and criticized its attempt to break wage ceilings.
Mr. Pearson sets forth verbatim the entire memo—an important document for setting the stage for the year to come, as the eventual seizure of the steel industry by the President would result in a prominent Supreme Court case, which would rule that the President had exceeded his authority under the Constitution in so doing, absent Congressional statutory authority, which did not exist at the time. Previous seizures of industries, including the railroads and the coal industry between 1944 and 1946, had been performed pursuant to particular statutes, including the war powers act. But we shall deal with that in due course as the story develops through the spring, before final exams.
This is Christmas week, and we simply do not feel like it, as they did not even give us Christmas day off at this lousy slave mill. At these wages, we have a good notion to go on strike on January 1. We shall see what the Steelworkers do.
Stewart Alsop tells of the American propaganda effort not reaching Europe or the Middle East. He had just returned from both regions and, for instance, in France, had been told repeatedly that American propaganda was practically nonexistent, especially compared to the Russian propaganda, which was constantly promoting the notion that Russia wanted nothing but peace while America, ruled by capitalists, was pushing toward world war. In the Middle East, the U.S. was a little less hated than Israel in the Arab states, and a little less hated than Britain in Egypt and Iran. Even in England, the impression was widespread that the U.S. was in the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy and that anyone who publicly disagreed with him was instantly suppressed.
The Voice of America broadcast regularly in Europe and the Middle East and the U.S. Information Service also employed able and energetic personnel, all doing the best job that they could within the limits of their directives. But the propagandists were concerned about selling the U.S., reinforcing the tendency to transform U.S. foreign policy into a kind of popularity contest. Instead, the policy should be concerned with the interests of the U.S.
The U.S. was at a tremendous disadvantage to the Soviet Union in the propaganda field, as it had no disciplined Communist parties and could not employ the technique of the big lie. It was also somewhat difficult for American propagandists even to tell the truth. For instance, in France, the French worker ought to have been told that he was being exploited by an irresponsible, tax-dodging owner class, but to do so and recommend following the American pattern of organizing into unions, would prompt a bad reaction from Congress.
Robert C. Ruark tells of the modern diet, aimed at making one thin at the expense of good food, not being to his liking. He would stick with his grandmother's old menu, which he proceeds to lay out in great detail. If you are interested in what his grandmother cooked, you may read it thoroughly.
A letter from the president of the Charlotte Jaycees recommends to the residents in the area of the proposed runway extension at Douglas Municipal Airport that they recognize the needs of the nation's defense effort and the concomitant need for progress in air transportation for the future. He trusts that eventually they would not shirk their responsibilities.
A letter from A. W. Black comments on the December 13 column of Robert Ruark, anent Bernard Baruch not having been the model of purity which everyone assumed, and then, on December 17, having apologized for misleading the public in what he said was intended as an ironic jest. Mr. Black believes that Mr. Ruark had given in to "pressure agents" in issuing this apology and surrendering to this kind of harassment, and in so doing had displayed "a moral and intellectual cowardice" which could never command the same respect from his readers again. He says that his sympathies were with Mr. Ruark, but that he could not condone his lack of courage to resist the "pressure combines". Mr. Black assures that he would never be issuing a "bootlicking apology for having hurled the truth into their face."
Second
Framed Edition
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