The Charlotte News

Saturday, February 3, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Assistant Secretary of the Army Earl D. Johnson had visited U.N. troops situated closer than seven miles from Seoul. Battles were raging on Saturday along the western defense line in the tenth day of the allied limited offensive. Mr. Johnson said that he saw "Chinese bodies all over the place" during his inspection tour.

One tank-led U.N. task force of American and Puerto Rican infantrymen drove through Samgo to Samgari, seven miles south of the Han River and ten miles below Seoul, six miles behind enemy lines. Scores of Chinese soldiers were killed. They were guided by a captured Chinese prisoner of war. Correspondent Stan Swinton tells further of the engagement, that Task Force "Myers", named for the tank commander of the unit, had engaged during the drive in a 5.5 hour "shoot 'em up" behind enemy lines. Three individual Chinese soldiers had charged and blew themselves up in an effort to destroy the tanks with dynamite. An enemy rifle grenade had temporarily disabled one Sherman tank.

Other allied troops drove to within a mile and a half of Anyang, gaining more than a mile against tough enemy opposition.

It was reported that the enemy launched three attacks in the western sector on Saturday night, against which the allies were holding firm. An enemy force attacked Turkish troops northwest of Suwon at dusk on Saturday in an effort to drive the U.N. force from the hard-won high ground, and the battle still raged on Saturday night, forcing the withdrawal of the force later. A second attack took place nine miles northwest of Suwon, and a third, eleven miles northwest of that city. Both of those engagements were still ongoing Saturday evening.

On the central front, the enemy was reported to have massed its forces northwest of Sinchon, in the area where French and American troops had battled their way out of a trap forced by two Chinese regiments two days earlier. According to a Tenth Corps briefing officer, the report of the massing of troops in the area, however, remained unconfirmed.

Communist China's Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai said that he would ignore the U.N. good offices committee and the Assembly's resolution labeling Communist China an aggressor in Korea. He insisted that the U.S. and "its accomplices" wanted war and were blocking the path to a peaceful settlement.

In Philadelphia, the President dedicated a chapel to the memory of the four interfaith chaplains, one Jewish, one Catholic, and two Protestant, who had died trying to save men from the sinking transport Dorchester during World War II. The chapel had been built by 10,000 individual donations, organized by Rev. Dr. Daniel Poling, father of one of the chaplains.

In Belgrade, one Yugoslav was sentenced to death and fifteen others were given sentences ranging from six years to life for plotting the overthrow of the Tito regime and planning to restore exiled King Peter II to the throne. The person sentenced to death was accused also of wartime atrocities against Tito partisans and postwar espionage against the Government.

More railroad switchmen called in "sick", as the strike continued to spread across the country, impacting defense transport, despite a Federal court considering a contempt action for violation of its previously issued injunction the prior December and the President urging the workers to return for the benefit of the fighting men in Korea. The switchmen wanted 48 hours of pay for 40 hours of work. The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen continued to contend to the judge that the union was not responsible for the strike. But the Government was trying to show that some of the same switchmen now calling in sick had done so in the December strike and that it was a well coordinated effort by the union, seeking to circumvent the court's injunction.

The Office of Price Stabilization rolled back the price of steel and iron scrap, designed to prevent future increases in steel prices.

In Dillard, Ga., eight persons burned to death in a farm house while six children of the family escaped. It was believed that the fire started from an overturned stove causing stored gasoline to explode on the front porch of the dwelling.

In Columbia, S.C., the search continued for Nathan Corn, who had escaped the State penitentiary the previous day in a pasteboard box loaded on the back of a prison truck. Mr. Corn was in prison for the murder in June, 1948 of George Beam, Jr., his employer. His mother, who believed her son to be innocent of the murder, refused to ask him, via The News, to surrender.

David Ovens, vice-president of Ivey Department Store, donated $50,000 to Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, in aid of construction of a new $859,000 six-story building for nurses. The project could not have been completed without the gift.

Despite frigid weather through much of the South, with even Florida suffering ice and snow, local airline service in Charlotte operated nearly normally. The spreading rail strike, however, was curtailing passenger and freight rail service.

Thirty-two people had died in the South in the six-day ice and snowstorms. Across the nation, 175 had died thus far from the winter weather. Illinois lost its 1951 peach crop and the weather killed buds and fruit trees in Indiana. In Florida, the citrus crop was in peril. It snowed in St. Augustine for the first time in memory. Firemen built a snowman four feet high in front of the the city building.

Four feet... We done built one six foot tall once. It coulda reached up to seventy-three foot, four inches, if'n we'd wanted, by virtue of desiderative appetence.

On the editorial page, "For Defense Only—No Frills" finds that few would question the need for increased defense spending, behind the President's request for ten billion dollars of new tax revenue, to be supplemented later by another request. But, it finds, there was plenty of reason to question the need for many of the non-defense programs, favors the Administration cutting those costs to the bone.

Yo, boy, we gon' be a military nation rather than a edrucated one. Yo?

What "non-defense spending"? The five percent or less of the budget? The civil rights program the Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress had refused to pass? The 300 million in Federal aid to education out of the 42 billion dollar budget, which the same coalition had blocked in the previous Congress because of fear that the badly needed aid to schools would come ultimately with the strings of integration attached?

Blockhead moron.

Speaking of which, have you noticed how the "President" in 2018 has begun to look like the "human blockhead" at the fair? It's true. Look at his picture of late. He looks like a block of wood sitting on top of a stump. All he needs to do is take a hammer and drive some nails into his head and he would be a sideshow.

"Economic Mobilization School" praises the local Board of Education and Chamber of Commerce for organizing the school for civilians from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee as well as for military officers of the Third Army, the 14th Air Force, and the Sixth Naval District, regarding the subject implied by the school's title. Defense needs and abilities of the country, as well as those of the nation's allies, were outlined by the speakers.

"An Old Complaint" finds the Truman Administration inconsistent in advocating compulsory health insurance while not urging Congress to pass a bill to allow for a tax deduction of medical expenses—which, because of the progressive tax rates at the time on ordinary income of between 20 and 91 percent, would have meant that the poorest taxpayers would have been able to deduct twenty percent of their medical expenses while the richest would have been able to take 91 percent, while those who paid no taxes for want of sufficient income would pay the full-tilt boogie at the doc's office.

Maybe, it is you who are hypocritical for opposing consistently the President's program for health care, finding it to beckon "socialized medicine".

More Saturday News editorials of the reactionary variety.

It's show time...

"An Unwelcome Visitor" tells of the cold morning being greeted with irritation and surprise by people on the streets of Charlotte. But others had done better with expressions regarding cold weather, as Beaumont and Fletcher, the Elizabethan writers, who first provided the expression, "cool as a cucumber", and Shakespeare, who used the simile, "cold as any stone".

Robert Herrick had said:

"Here a little child I stand
Heaving up my either hand.
Cold as paddocks though they may be..."

It wonders what the author intended by "paddocks", whether cold as a pasture or as a sort of sledge for carrying stones, or "cold as a toad", [the "meat" be it venison, albeit mayhap of the deep's denizens jettisoned from the phosphorescent line to let us in], from archaic Scotch, usable as an expression of contempt for large persons. It concludes that whatever the case was, the child's hands were cold.

The cast die, however, were hot, hot as the nozzle of a rocket ship to bars on Mars.

A piece from the Charleston News & Courier, titled "Big Taxes for Little Man", favors a national sales tax to raise the necessary revenue for increased defense spending, to even out some of the tax burden being borne primarily by the wealthy of the country. The danger, it warns, however, would be that once enacted, it would never be repealed. It finds that the Truman tax program would have the same effect as a sales tax, as the Council of Economic Advisers had recommended that most of the source for increased revenue come from middle and lower income taxpayers. It also recommended new excise taxes and corporate taxes, the latter inevitably to be passed to consumers in higher prices.

It finds that the day would come, as in England, when the rich would be soaked to the bone, leaving the revenue burden to the poor and persons of moderate means. A sales tax was the end reached by all "high spend" governments.

A statement by the State Board of Education regarding the "School Situation" appears on the page, in which it states that the "public school line" could not be held, based on the recommendations of the Director of the Budget and Advisory Budget Commission during the coming two years until the 1953 Legislature convened. Increases would be necessary, a few of which it provides. The Board had requested 104 million for the coming fiscal year and 107 million for the next fiscal year, whereas the Advisory Budget Commission had recommended 92 and 93 million, respectively.

The $2,200 to $3,100 annual teacher salary range recommended by the 1949 Legislature could not be maintained and could only exist, in any event, by increasing the pupil load per teacher. The present load was penultimate to Mississippi as the most per teacher in the nation and the recommended appropriations would provide only 169 and 730 additional teachers, respectively, in the ensuing two fiscal years, versus the 558 and 1,684 requested, just to allow for the same student load per teacher. Heavy birth rates in 1946 would predict 12,000 additional schoolchildren entering the first grade in 1952-53, adding to the increase of 115,000 during the prior five years since the end of the war.

More school buses would also be required than allotted by the Commission, as well as gasoline, oil and greases—not even including that for the boys' flattops to stay properly coiffured in the wind.

More money for fuel, water, light, telephone, power, janitors and janitorial supplies would also be required.

In addition, more money for clerical assistance would be needed.

It concludes that unless the additional money were appropriated, serious consequences would result, impairing the education of the state's children. The public school line, it predicts, would "buckle" as a result and it hopes only that it would not do so "disastrously".

Red rover, red rover, send those baby-boomers right over. We'll show you who's going to buckle and not hold the line.

Drew Pearson tells of the Yugoslav delegate to the U.N., upon seeing Ambassador Warren Austin talking to a group of people, inquiring what they wanted and being told by the representative of the U.N. Childrens Fund that they were a lobbying group for peace in Korea, whereupon the Yugoslav delegate appeared astounded that anyone could come to the U.N. to lobby an American delegate. He was now reading Dorothy Detzler's Appointment on the Hill, in which she described lobbying for better international relations.

He next provides suggestions from several readers to help the Government prepare for general war, including the printing of a stamp bearing a message of hope, use of civilians presently working only 40 hours per week, dropping Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs behind the Iron Curtain as propaganda, allowing justices of the peace, notaries public and aldermen to volunteer their services for preparation of violations of price control, holding a minute of silent prayer for peace at noon daily, creation of an organization to combat Russian propaganda, organizing of licensed hunters for domestic self-defense—(no, please not that), organizing in advance a temporary government in the event of atomic attack, and persuading the best pianist in the country, H.S.T., to make a benefit record for the U.S., with its sales promised to outstrip "The Thing".

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his "Capital Roundup", tells of the Senate having voted $75,000 to fund a seven-person committee to be headed by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada to investigate Communism in the country. Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina would be on the committee, a position, he said, which he had not, in his "wildest dreams", hoped to hold as a freshman Senator. He attributed the appointment to his longstanding friendship with Senator McCarran—who obviously shared the Senator's imagination outside his wildest dreams. Senator Smith said that every effort should be utilized by the Government to "clean out" Communists, but that he did not want it to degenerate into punishment of those who merely slightly differed in their opinions from the "usual order".

The Senate voted $100,000 for the continuation of the work of the Expenditures subcommittee headed by Senator Clyde Hoey, a successor subcommittee to that headed by Senator Truman during the war. Senator Hoey planned to continue investigation of five percenters, agents who received a percentage fee for procuring Government contracts for clients. He mainly would stress whether the system caused the small businessmen to be eliminated from the process. He would also monitor spending by the armed forces. He reminded that at the end of the war, there had been twelve million men in service but 53 million blankets and 90 million pairs of sunglasses stored in warehouses.

Senators Hoey and Smith said that they would oppose all non-essential domestic spending in this time of national crisis. Senator Smith added that he was opposed to spending of a "socialistic nature" included in the President's proposed budget. Congressman Hamilton Jones of Mecklenburg also said he opposed non-essential domestic spending, as did most of the North Carolina Congressional delegation—save Representative Graham Barden, who sponsored the 300-million dollar Federal aid to education bill in the previous Congress and was renewing his support for it in the 82nd Congress.

The entire delegation favored free $10,000 life insurance for G.I.'s, as recommended by the President.

Senator Smith's new administrative assistant, Robert E. Long, had graduated from Yale in 1937 and the Harvard Law School in 1940.

When is the WRAL sleuth of sleuths coming onboard the team? He might not have gone to Yale and Harvard, but he has high, high maural characta...

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