The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 27, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that an American regiment had broken through the main Communist defenses on the east-central front in Korea after American infantry of the Second Division in the same sector, fifteen miles south of Hoengsong, had smashed five fierce enemy counter-attacks in a three-hour battle, with the enemy being chased into an uncharted mountain wilderness. American casualties were reportedly light while the enemy had suffered a terrible toll.

All along the front, U.N. forces moved forward steadily but cautiously.

Former President Herbert Hoover told the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees that Europe could not be defended with less than 100 divisions and that there was a substantial chance of involving the U.S. in a land war there. He advocated building up naval and air power of the U.S. and Britain so as to overwhelm Russia in case of attack.

Governor Thomas Dewey and former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen testified against the Wherry resolution which would require Congressional approval before the President could send troops in the common defense of NATO. Senator Kenneth Wherry, sponsor of the resolution, accused Governor Dewey of engaging in smear tactics.

In Prague, the missing Dr. Vlado Clementis, former Czech Foreign Minister, was reported to be under arrest with four other erstwhile Communist leaders, accused of trying to turn Czechoslovakia to the West.

The Senate Banking subcommittee investigating the RFC heard testimony that the wife of E. Merle Young received the prior fall an expensive mink coat, costing over $8,500, charged to the account of a Washington lawyer who had handled RFC loan applications. A Republican Congressman had charged that the coat was payment for obtaining a loan. Mr. Young had testified that he bought the coat for his wife. The loan in question had been blocked by the RFC.

The Office of Price Stabilization said that it planned to extend the freeze of auto prices beyond March 1.

Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston was set to approve the 10 percent wage increase formula as it stood, but would invite back the labor members of the Board, who had walked out when the Board approved the formula the prior week, to consider modifications.

The Government sought the death penalty in the trial of Oscar Collazo, the Puerto Rican Nationalist charged with murder of a White House guard in the assassination attempt on President Truman outside Blair House the prior November 1. Juries did not fix the penalty in Federal capital cases but the death penalty was automatic for convictions of first degree murder, as sought by the prosecution. The guard who was killed, Leslie Coffelt, had fired the fatal bullet which killed the accomplice in the attempt, Griselio Torresola.

In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott said that he took full blame should the Highway Commission be accused of playing pressure politics against the bill before the Legislature to provide increased State money for maintenance and construction of streets and roads in municipalities.

Dr. Henry Jordan, chairman of the Highway Commission, said that in his opinion the measure would not affect the building of the last section of Independence Boulevard in Charlotte, as one legislator contended had been threatened. Likewise, he said, it would not impact the Durham bypass.

That's good, because we have to get to the UNC-Duke game on Saturday.

And they better win.

The bill was expected to pass without new taxes on gasoline and increased license tag fees.

A House committee was scheduled to meet on Thursday to decide whether to approve the proposed statewide referendum on liquor.

In Greensboro, Dr. Henry L. Smith, noted scientist and educator, died at age 91. A native of Greensboro, he had taken the first X-ray picture in the United States. He had been president of both Davidson College and Washington & Lee. President Woodrow Wilson had declared that he had done more to bring World War I to a close than any other person by devising a balloon message drop system behind German lines which caused German soldiers to revolt. He had received his undergraduate and master's degree at Davidson and his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.

On the editorial page, "The Great Divider" again advocates passage of the pending bill before the Legislature to allow increased spending from the State Highway Fund for construction and maintenance of urban streets and roads. It finds it only fair given that 58 percent of the Highway Fund revenue was raised in the cities and towns of the state, and thus to spend the bulk of it on secondary roads in the rural areas was not properly recognizing the fact. Governor Kerr Scott, it finds, in opposing the bill, had let his emotions tending toward the rural areas to rule his judgment and finds him doing much the same thing which he criticized the opponents of Senator Frank Graham the prior summer of doing regarding the race issue.

Woh, horsey. Those two things, roads and race relations, do not quite equate. Your apples have become mixed with your prunes.

"Poor Economy" finds that the City Government should provide the three resuscitators requested by the Fire Department rather than only one. A call of the Fire Department on Sunday to a home fire had resulted by happenstance in the only available resuscitator being on scene, such that a boy's life was saved. But if it had been in use elsewhere, his life would have been lost. At a cost of only a few hundred dollars each, to try to save the money was poor economy.

"Perpetuating a Monopoly" finds that the decision earlier in the month by the Civil Aeronautics Board to deny the Eastern Air Lines petition for a transcontinental route from the Southeast to the Far West to be discriminatory, as the North enjoyed four competing airlines on the route, United, American, TWA, and Northwest. It thus hopes that CAB would reconsider, as the Southeast deserved to have direct access to the Far West route.

"New Threat to Japan" finds the Defense Department announcement that two National Guard units were being dispatched to Japan to suggest that, in light of Russia having sent four new divisions into Sakhalin, the island occupied by Russia north of Japan, the war of nerves carried on by the Soviets continued. The Kremlin, it posits, might be preparing for a full-scale war in the Far East and the U.S. could not afford to leave Japan defenseless, with the occupation troops fighting in Korea, as Japan was the key to defense of the area, both strategically and in terms of industrial development. So, it predicts, other American units might soon follow the two National Guard divisions being sent to Japan.

A piece from the Franklin Press, titled "Industry and Pollution", tells of the ostensible support by North Carolina's industry of the pending anti-pollution bill in the Legislature, albeit proposing crippling amendments which would forbid enforcement where correction of the pollution was deemed impossible or where no adequate, practical method of disposal or treatment was known for a particular waste product, where cost of disposal would be unduly burdensome or financially unfeasible, or where existing research would justify postponement.

Thus, it concludes, industry wanted a bill which would work only when it was not an inconvenience to the polluter, and effective laws could not work that way.

Drew Pearson tells of diplomatic observers being convinced that the Big Four foreign ministers meeting would be held during April and would be held in Washington rather than Paris. It presented the best opportunity for rapprochement between East and West. That Russia was willing to participate was an encouraging sign that it wished to settle differences without war.

Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson told Congress that he intended to establish a small business office to ensure that influence peddlers would not obtain Government contracts exclusively for big business. He said that he intended to send any five percenters to jail if he discovered them.

He advocated providing trailers to house workers in defense areas rather than building temporary housing.

He also said that the copper shortage was not as bad as thought, though more was needed, obtainable from Chile by releasing the two-cent per pound duty on copper.

He said that a sound economy could be maintained while supplying defense needs over the ensuing three years.

Mr. Wilson had told Senators that he would not return to G.E. after the war, that he was through with private industry.

Investigating subcommittee chairman Senator J. William Fulbright was satisfied with the President's plan to reorganize RFC to eliminate influence peddling in obtaining loans and was willing to wrap up his subcommittee's hearings. But Republican subcommittee members, led by Senator Homer Capehart, wanted the hearings to continue. Senator Fulbright wanted the President to appoint Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve Board to be the director of RFC. The President was at odds with Mr. Eccles but it would present an opportunity to get him off the Fed.

The Army had secretly tested a new 58-ton supertank which could beat anything the Russians currently had.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the Chinese disaster in Korea having made far less probable an attack on Indo-China, whereas it had appeared likely just a few weeks earlier. There was still some possibility of it and so French General De Lattre de Tassigny, commanding the French and Nationalist Indo-Chinese forces, was still preparing for such an attack.

But time was running out for Mao Tse-Tung to launch the attack during the current year as the season of low cloud cover, the "crachin", which would conceal troop movements from air attack, was drawing to a close.

In addition to the debacle in Korea, the Chinese were now facing a tremendously improved political situation among the French and Nationalists, as General De Lattre had made it clear that the French were there only to assist the survival of the Nationalist regime and would withdraw as soon as Ho Chi Minh's forces were defeated. Moreover, American supplies to the French had begun to reach Indo-China and enable tank and aircraft support of the ground troops, allowing General De Lattre's forces to defeat decisively Ho Chi Minh's attempt to capture Hanoi and all of north Indo-China, preserving a firm French-Nationalist foothold in the Red River delta.

The Alsops find that Ho had almost certainly had his last chance at defeating the French, causing a much higher risk for the Chinese should they intervene.

But the risk of a limited war was also growing, for if the Chinese were to intervene, the French would wholly commit to fight them. And with Malaya and Hong Kong placed at risk, the British would also be inclined to fight the Chinese at their bases in the mainland. That situation was in contrast to the present in which the French and British were opposed to any move in Korea which would provoke limited war with China, involving attacks on the Chinese supply bases and utilization of the Nationalist Chinese guerrillas on the mainland, as originally favored by Secretary of State Acheson when the Chinese first intervened in Korea the prior November.

Robert C. Ruark tells of a woman he knew in New York having suffered an invasion of her third-story walk-up bedroom at 4:30 a.m. by a man, half naked, kicking in her door and walking in on her, but nevertheless being prosecuted only for misdemeanor disorderly conduct and fined. He finds such prosecutorial lenience disconcerting. The man had been well-dressed, even if only half so, and so the police took a deferential attitude toward his conduct, attributing it to his inebriated state.

His friend was bitter about the matter for her privacy being treated by the police and prosecutors in such a cavalier way. He agrees that if a stranger could bust down someone's bedroom door in the wee hours and suffer only a misdemeanor, it did not suggest a very secure environment. His friend was building her own prison to keep out any future such intrusions.

A letter writer from Gastonia disagrees with the Erich Brandeis column of February 22 in which he had suggested that in an air raid, civilians could either go to a shelter to hide from a "million-to-one" chance of being hit by a bomb, or continue on about one's business and risk dying "like a man". The writer finds him to have neglected the prospect of flying glass and debris and other such indirect blast hazards. It was a simple matter, she says, to build a shelter in the back yard and that those who used them could carry on in a relatively normal routine such that they could be fit for civil defense duty.

A letter from Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia compliments the speech by News publisher Thomas L. Robinson to the Midwestern North Carolina Press Association and finds it the kind of statement needed to keep the Government working on a solvent basis.

A letter writer from Kinston comments on the recent visit to Charlotte of Fordham University professor Louis Budenz, telling of his conversion from being a Catholic to becoming a Communist and then reconverting to Catholicism. The writer believes that the attention given to him by the newspaper was out of proportion to his importance. He says that he was an admitted traitor to his country for ten years and did not deserve to be elevated to the status of a public lecturer, that he remained suspect in his reconversion.

A letter writer addresses his letter to the members of the Legislature who opposed holding a statewide referendum on alcohol, finds it the result either of the liquor industry greasing palms or that they were afraid of the outcome, likely the latter. He finds it tantamount to endorsing Communism as practiced in Russia.

"Would you saddle North Carolina with this Russian blight? God forbid!"

Oh, come now. Your prunes are getting mixed with your bears.

Leaving the matter to local option, as opposed, under the proposed referendum, to statewide approval of ABC controlled sales or banning of sale completely and thus returning to the good old days of Prohibition in the Twenties when Al Capone thrived, is hardly to be equated with Communism. Approving of strong drink or not has nothing to do with the matter, as people will drink, as history showed, regardless of legality.

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