The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 14, 1951
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, in a piece by correspondent Olen Clements, that South Korean Marines had landed this date at Wonsan, 90 miles north of the 38th parallel, in a surprise raid on the east coast port, under cover of naval bombardment. The troops fought to the city's outskirts and seized two islands off the port, against reportedly light resistance. A large enemy force was observed moving south on the port from Hamhung, 50 miles to the north.
On the central front, where the fiercest action was occurring, American, French, and Dutch forces had inflicted a high toll on the enemy seeking breakthrough to the south along a 20-mile wide sector. A field dispatch said that the enemy lay dead by the thousands on all sides of surrounded Chipyong in a "welter of blood, bombs and shellfire". More thousands of enemy dead were recorded in the valley eight miles west-northwest of Wonju.
On the western front, American troops killed 1,152 enemy soldiers who had crossed the Han River and slipped inside allied lines, and captured nearly 250, with allied losses reportedly small. The 25th Division wiped out two enemy patrols of about 60 troops, using Korean civilians as shields, seeking to cross a sandbar in the Han between Seoul and suburban Yongdongpo. A second patrol was wiped out as it raced across the Seoul city airport located on the sand flat.
At least seven Russian-built MIGs attacked U.S. B-29s during a bombing raid on the enemy barracks at Tokchon. The B-29s all returned to base safely, landing in a snowstorm. Bad weather hampered air operations, but some clearing around noon permitted 100 sorties over the central front.
Secretary of State Acheson said this date in a press conference that any Communist attack on Yugoslavia would dangerously strain world peace. He also said that until he received reply from Moscow to the most recent Big Three diplomatic note proposing the terms of a Big Four meeting of foreign ministers, he could not yet say whether Big Four deputies of the foreign ministers would hold any preliminary meeting to the proposed Big Four meeting, as reported by an unnamed French official the previous day would take place in mid-March. He said also that the policy of rearming West Germany as part of NATO had not changed, despite the recent remarks of General Eisenhower that he did not want any unwilling troops involved in NATO.
The Senate Armed Services Committee was expected this date to approve universal military training and lower the draft age from 19 to 18. Senator Lyndon Johnson, chief sponsor of the bill which had emerged from his Defense Preparedness subcommittee, with only Senator Wayne Morse opposing it, hoped for unanimous approval on the Committee.
A report by correspondent John M. Hightower indicates that it was unlikely that General MacArthur would receive the additional manpower or the authority to bomb Chinese supply bases in Manchuria, both of which he deemed necessary to achieve complete victory over the Chinese Communists in Korea. The need for troops for NATO and the widespread desire for a settlement in Korea made the prospect dubious. Britain wanted to keep the Korean war within strict limits and did not want it to extend to a general war with China, thus would disfavor the bombing of Chinese territory.
Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina, speaking in Asheville to the convention of the North Carolina Farm Bureau Foundation, said that he believed the U.S. should not send troops to Europe without Congressional approval. He said that the country was, wisely or unwisely, in the war in Korea by direction of the President and the obligations to the U.N., that many wanted the country to withdraw from it and many others had not wanted the country ever to become involved in it, but that the country was in the war.
The Federal Loyalty Review Board, chaired by former Republican Senator and Governor of Connecticut Hiram Bingham, sought the power to dismiss Government workers or to bar applicants from employment if it found reasonable doubt of loyalty. Formerly, there had to be an actual affirmative showing of disloyalty before dismissal could occur. A majority of the 26-member board favored the change. The President would likely refer the matter to his newly created commission headed by Admiral Chester Nimitz, reviewing the balance between national security and civil liberties, before making a final decision. Board members said that the recommendation had nothing to do with the recent conviction for perjury of former Government employee William Remington for denying he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, accused by admitted former Communist courier Elizabeth Bentley of passing secret documents to her for delivery to the Russians. Mr. Remington, two years earlier, had been cleared by the Loyalty Review Board, the then chairman of which had defended its action after the indictment of Mr. Remington.
New Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston urged the House Ways & Means Committee to adopt a "tough and steep tax" to control inflation and that controls could probably be eased within two to three years.
In Raleigh, the State Senate passed the bill to increase State aid to city streets without levying new gas taxes or raising license fees, and to assume all responsibility for city streets. An amendment would allocate a half-cent of the present seven-cent gas tax for the purpose, and another would provide that half the money be distributed bases on population and the other half on street mileage in a given locality. The State House killed a bill which would have repealed the law banning the closed shop, union shop and involuntary checkoff of union dues in the state.
In Wallace, Idaho, an unidentified gunman went berserk, killing one man and wounding three others after he had barricaded himself in a store. The dead man and the wounded, including a friend of the dead man, were passersby on the street. Police sought to force the gunman out with teargas.
There are crazy people everywhere, always have been. Get rid of the guns, making it easier, when they go crazy, to exert their will on the rest of us willy-nilly. Guns of any type are not going to protect you from the "gov'ment", with its tanks and airplanes and helicopters and SWAT teams. Nor do they have any utilitarian value for hunting in modern times. Get a life and observe reality as it occurs in nature.
Oh, oh, oh, will a law prevent it?
Well, stupid, let's try one, a tough one, for a change and see...
You're not in good hands with the small-hands people of the gun lobby.
A local optometrist, commenting on the new Corona 8-point type being used by the newspaper, contended that easier reading made comprehension much the better as it relieved nervous energy. He said that all one had to do was to read a copy of the newspaper printed before the prior Monday and compare it to one this week and observe the difference.
You couldn't prove it by us. It looks like the same old stuff we have been reading now for 20 years. The supposedly extra white space in the new version does not provide, as the optometrist claimed, more contrast for the eyes to interpret the print more quickly. If anything, it is slower. But, we do make room for it having been copied to microfilm, reducing thereby the quality which undoubtedly was superior in the original newsprint version—of which we have had the experience of perusing only with regard to the Sixtieth Anniversary edition of December, 1948 and a handful of editorials, about thirty-seven editions of the editorial column only, from the Cash era, 1937-41.
So it is. Two-dog sun. Throw a little salt on it and eat it.
Who does Johnny love
On the editorial page, "Schools—The Big Money Problem", a by-lined piece by Editor Pete McKnight from Raleigh, finds that everyone was in agreement that the General Assembly would need to appropriate much more than the 185 million dollars recommended by the Advisory Budget Commission for education. But finding the resources for the additional money and determining how much more was needed were the two questions not yet answered.
The State Board of Education recommended 15.1 million dollars over and above that recommended by the Budget Commission in the first year of the coming biennium and 18.4 million more in the second year, holding teacher salaries only at their current levels without allowance for increases in the cost of living. The United Forces for Education, a lobbying group, wanted salary increases from the current range of $2,200 to $3,100 annually to $2,400 to $3,600, requiring an additional 17.9 million in the coming year and 21.4 million the next year. But there was little chance the Assembly would approve that much.
It was likely that North Carolina's revenue would be greater than the 146 million estimated for each year by the Advisory Budget Commission, and the additional revenue would allow for making permanent the current level of teacher salaries, presently permitted on a contingent basis, provided there was enough money to support it.
There was general agreement, however, within the Assembly that something needed to be done about improvement of the quality of education in the state into the future, with higher attendance assured by the increased birth rate since the war. To appropriate enough money at least to keep it on par with its current levels was the minimum job for the Assembly.
State School Board superintendent Dr. Clyde Erwin said that the state was raising another "generation of illiterates" and part of the problem was high truancy. Part of the proposed budget would go to hiring truant officers for every school district. Another part of the increased expenditure would be for bus transportation for students who lived more than 1.5 miles from their school within city limits.
"Take Your Choice" finds that judging by the Lincoln Day oratory of Republicans, the party was as divided on foreign policy as the Democrats were on domestic policy. To one extreme was Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, who did not want any soldiers sent to defend NATO. House Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts wanted to concentrate on helping the Chiang regime on Formosa regain control of the mainland of China. At the other end of the spectrum was Governor Thomas Dewey of New York who wanted a worldwide Monroe Doctrine and favored warning the Russians that any aggression would result in war. In the middle was Senator Taft, who believed in the obligation to aid Europe but wanted to limit U.S. participation to a fixed ratio of troops to those supplied by the European nations. Meanwhile, former President Hoover advocated withdrawal of the nation's defenses from Europe and Asia to the two oceans and stressing air and naval power rather than land forces. Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Leverett Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, followed the Administration policy. Senator William Knowland of California supported Administration policy in Europe but wanted a tougher stance in the Far East.
Until the party became unified in its approach to foreign policy, it could not hope, the piece suggests, to lead the people in 1952.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Postscript", reprinted from July 27, 1950, tells of Bernard Baruch having gone before the Senate Banking Committee and obtained "polite attention" but "scant sympathy" when he had advised that the country was mobilizing too slowly, that immediate full mobilization would reduce the chance of general war, and that it was "futile and illusory" to believe that the war crisis would end with Korea.
The piece files away the prediction for future reference and suggests that at that time, someone might say that it was Mr. Baruch who had warned the nation.
The Goldsboro News-Argus, in a piece from two weeks earlier, remarks on the coming of spring, with the first signs already making an appearance in the form of the bright yellow bells in Mrs. Hicks's yard, of which Mrs. Hicks had provided the writer a few. Putting them on the back porch, they were fine even after the temperature dropped below freezing that night and froze the water, and when the ice melted the flowers were as fresh as ever.
Did they still ring true?
Drew Pearson tells of Carleton Smith, director of the National Arts Foundation, having probably been the only American ever to have met Stalin's mother, who lived in a mud hut dug from the side of a hill. She had told him that she had raised her son to be a priest and that when she was told he was now running Russia, she did not believe it. A year later, Mr. Smith was in Moscow and interviewed Stalin. When he told him of the interview with his mother, Stalin assumed an icy silence.
General Matthew Ridgway, commander of U.N. ground forces in Korea, was credited with turning the defeat in Korea of December, the most humiliating in 85 years of U.S. military history, into gradual victory. He had done it with no reinforcements and against larger enemy forces than those encountered when General MacArthur had been in direct command from Tokyo. For all practical purposes, fighting command had been taken from General MacArthur, though he remained supreme commander of U.N. forces. But he had essentially washed his hands of command after Washington refused his request to send four National Guard divisions. General Ridgway was more independent than the field generals who had served under General MacArthur before the debacle of November-December. The Pentagon reported no friction between General MacArthur and General Ridgway, that the latter had merely used different tactics.
It was now less than two months before General MacArthur would be relieved by the President and called home.
The President and former President Hoover, the only living former President, appeared to have developed a close bond. President Hoover had once paid sincere tribute to President Truman at an annual Gridiron Club dinner. President Hoover appeared grateful that he was no longer forbidden from the White House as during the FDR years. Some friends of the President believed that he had made a mistake by ingratiating Mr. Hoover to the White House as he could injure foreign policy. But President Truman disagreed and recently invited President Hoover to discuss the contribution of requested grain to India to relieve the famine.
High level officials at the meeting, including Secretary of State Acheson, were in favor of the aid to India, but Secretary of Transportation James Knudsen said that the railroad tieup from the recent strike, now resolved, could make it difficult to transport the wheat to ports and that ocean shipping was also tight because of the war.
The South Korean courts had sentenced the South Korean transport driver who, in December, had crashed into the jeep carrying General Walton Walker, resulting in the former field commander's death, to three years at hard labor. Three American soldiers in the jeep with General Walker had survived the accident.
Marquis Childs discusses President Truman as he approached the end of his sixth year in office, the White House standing with only its outer walls intact while being reconstructed being, he suggests, somewhat symbolic of the President. He was no longer his usual buoyant, optimistic self since the start of the Korean war on June 25. Added to the burdens of his office was the assassination attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists on November 1 of the prior year. The head of the Secret Service had testified to the House Appropriations Committee that in 1949, 1,900 threatening letters had been received at the White House, while the number in 1950 had risen to 2,600 and that rate continuing to increase during the first month and a half of 1951.
The added tension may have produced the President's sensitivity to criticism, as when he sent the intemperate letter to Washington Post music critic Paul Hume the prior December regarding the unfavorable review of daughter Margaret's operatic performance or the statement the prior week that Senator William Fulbright had left town when told that the President wanted to meet with him regarding the "asinine report" of Senator Fulbright's committee on the alleged influence of a Presidential aide on loans being provided through the RFC. The Senator said that he had sought several times to present the RFC picture to the President to enable correction of the agency's errant course but that he had refused to listen. The President had also referred recently to the "sick" strike by railroad workers as behavior like a "bunch of Russians" in walking out on their December agreement.
It was increasingly believed by close observers of the President that he had already decided not to run for another term. Mr. Childs suggests that it was improbable that he had already reached that decision, but that it was likely he did long for a return to private life.
DeWitt MacKenzie discusses the Shah of Iran having joined with other Asiatic leaders in recognizing that poverty was the root cause of most of the unrest in that part of the world. He had announced recently that he would sell his large land-holdings to the peasants on easy terms and that his royal marriage ceremony would be stripped of the usual pomp as a means of national economy.
Less than 300 families controlled most of the wealth of Iran, with the Shah owning an estimated thousand villages and surrounding lands which supported a quarter million peasants. The landowning class would fight this effort of land reform by the Shah but he saw such a fight as the lesser of two evils, as across the northern part of the country, the Russians were striving to win the peasants to Communism. Poverty and hunger were conditions which enabled such propaganda to thrive.
He adds that heavy taxation in Britain had caused the landed estates to be broken up, and that the same kind of movement was ongoing in Italy.
A letter writer tells of two-thirds of the drivers causing auto accidents not going to high school and so finds the recent proposal by the AAA that driver education in the schools be implemented as a means of reducing the accident and death rates on the roads would have little effect. Only about twenty percent of the students in high school graduated, with the rate being 17 percent in Charlotte. He presents further statistics, without providing their source, to bolster his argument.
He favors conducting the driver education courses in special schools provided by State Government, as a function of the DMV. He also favors imposition of a one dollar per year safety tax to pay for it.
Framed Edition
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