The Charlotte News
Friday, March 2, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that tank-led U.S. First Division Marines had swept through abandoned Hoengsong this date after a two-day battle with the enemy, dominating nearby ridges, and moved deeper into the heart of the enemy defenses on the central Korean front.
Communist resistance stiffened, however, all along the line, as North Koreans wearing South Korean uniforms pushed through American positions northeast of Amidong and fought U.S. Seventh Division infantrymen in hand-to-hand combat for an hour on the east-central front before scattering.
On the western front, U.S. patrols in rubber boats moved across the Han River and probed enemy defenses of Seoul.
Enemy jets challenged U.S. jets near the Manchurian border.
The Senate agreed to conduct a test vote the following Monday on an amendment to the draft revision bill to lower the minimum age of the draft from 19 to 18, extend service from 21 to 24 months and to implement universal military training. The amendment, sought by Senator Wayne Morse, would lower the age only to 18 and a half.
The Defense Department was reported to have told the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees that it would have only six American divisions in Western Europe by July 1, four in addition to the existing two.
The State Department discounted the chances that any real peace could develop from the slated Big Four conference of foreign ministers, with preliminary planning for the agenda for the conference to begin the following Monday in Paris. Officials believed the Soviets only wanted to set the stage for a new diplomatic and propaganda offensive against the Western defense effort. The preliminary conference was expected to last about two weeks. Ambassador Philip Jessup would represent the U.S.
Ambassador John Foster Dulles, just returned from his special mission for the President in Japan, said in a radio broadcast the previous night that Japan had to be strengthened against potential Russian aggression, that the Russians had designs on Japan's industrial capacity. He said that concluding a peace treaty with Japan, on which he was working, would be an essential part of the process of making Japan a "dependable friend".
Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston was seeking to form a new board, reportedly to be comprised of 18 members, to replace the nine-member Board from which the three labor members had departed over the order to allow only ten percent increases in wages during the period January, 1950 through mid-1951. He relaxed this order by allowing workers to obtain cost-of-living adjustments to the end of the fiscal year, and appointed a three-member board to study hardship cases.
Price director Mike DiSalle, who had just allowed a 3.5 percent increase in price on new cars, was reported to be working on an order regarding used cars.
Better buy those suckers while you still can. Some of them might even have whitewalls still on the rims.
Railway wage talks were resumed on the heels of the settlement with the 15 non-operating unions.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had shown no improvement after a setback in his health earlier in the week.
In Sioux City, Ia., a DC-3 Mid-Continent Airline plane crashed while landing and burned this date, killing 14 persons aboard, including the pilot and co-pilot. Eight persons survived. Visibility was fair but a sudden snow squall had enveloped the plane just before landing. The flight was en route from Kansas City to Minneapolis. The prior week, a Mid-Continent plane crashed in Tulsa, Okla., but all 29 passengers and the crew of four walked away just before it burst into flames.
The President was flying to Key West, Fla., to begin his three-week working vacation.
On the editorial page, "Labor Takes a Walk" finds the President's wait-and-see attitude regarding labor's walk-out of the mobilization program to be perhaps the best approach to the problem, as opposed to a tongue-lashing, as he had given recently to the "sick" striking railroad switchmen.
The United Labor Policy Board's decision to walk out was based on its claims that the mobilization program was dominated by big business and its dissatisfaction with the 10-percent wage increase formula approved by the majority of the Wage Stabilization Board and then implemented by Stabilizer Eric Johnston.
The three industry representatives on the Board had wanted to limit wages to an eight percent increase and the three labor representatives had sought 12 percent. The three public members were responsible for the ten percent compromise which won the day.
The cost of living had risen 7 percent during 1950 and so the allowed increase appeared fair. Conditions could change, but at present, the piece finds, there was no cause for labor complaint. The working men and women of the country would have to decide whether to follow their bosses. They stood to lose more than anyone else if they unleashed inflationary pressures which could send the cost of living soaring higher.
"Dr. Henry Louis Smith" laments the passing at age 91 of the former president of Davidson College and Washington & Lee, who had been the first scientist in the United States to take an X-ray and had developed a method of dropping propaganda messages by balloon on German soldiers in World War I, prompting many to revolt against their commanders and causing President Woodrow Wilson to commend Dr. Smith as having more to do with the Allied victory in that war than any other single person..
He had once driven by horse and buggy in Mecklenburg County to use an X-ray machine to locate a thimble stuck in a young girl's throat.
In 1947, he had written a book, titled This Troubled Century. While he was born in Greensboro and died there, Mecklenburg also had a claim to him, as he had been educated at Davidson as an undergraduate and was married in the town.
"Governor Warren's Logic" commends Governor Earl Warren's statement to Republicans everywhere, that if the Joint Chiefs and Generals Eisenhower and Marshall could not determine a proper decision to send troops to Western Europe, then he did not know how anyone not informed on the matter could do so, and that nothing would please Stalin and company more than to have any such decision subject to debate in Congress. He thus agreed with Governor Dewey and Senator James Duff, rejecting the "hemispheric defense" arguments of former President Herbert Hoover, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Senator Kenneth Wherry and others.
"This Plan Suits Everybody" tells of all of the interested parties endorsing City Engineer Herman Hoose's plan for truck routes through the city. Yet, the City Council had not yet taken action to approve it. It finds no reason to move slowly on the matter when the truckers themselves had approved the plan.
A piece from the Idaho Sunday Statesman, titled "Alas, Poor Caboose", laments the passing from the American scene of the smoke-piped caboose, the whistle of the steam engine, and the abandonment of depots, as at Kuna and Horseshoe Bend. The caboose was giving way to the fancy club cars. The Diesel engine had spelled the doom of the "iron horse", with all its sounds and smoke. And no longer could people, as they had for years, go down to the depot to see the trains go by.
Drew Pearson, still in Adrianople, Turkey, tells of having just interviewed a Bulgarian refugee who had lived for six years behind the Iron Curtain and then fled across the Turkish border an hour before he interviewed him. The man did not know exactly what the U.N. was and thought the Korean war had been won by the U.S., having heard of a Voice of America broadcast that General MacArthur was bringing the troops home by Christmas. He had also heard that the people of Greece and Turkey had been starving under the Marshall Plan, living on grass and leaves. He said that the Communists had informed the village of Oreno the previous week that the U.S. and the British were coming to attack them and that the villagers must fight for their homeland.
He was a moderately well-off farmer of Turkish heritage, and thus had been harassed by the Communists. He said that his country had changed overnight after the Russians entered. Everyone had to turn in their money and a crop quota was provided, failing which, the farmer had to buy the difference from someone else or go to jail for a year. The crop quota had to be turned over to the Communist Government. They did not see many Russians now in Bulgaria, as had been the case earlier, as they had trained Bulgarian Communists to take over the duties. The Communists, he said, comprised about 5 to 10 percent of the population and were mainly people who wanted to obtain good jobs in case of war.
He also said that the Bulgarian Army probably would not fight much if war came. Only the Communists wanted war.
He had not listened to the Voice of America because all radios were confiscated, but he had heard what was said from others who had hidden their radios. Nor did he listen to the Moscow radio, as one had to be a party member to do so and also be invited to the clubhouse where they had a radio.
He said that most Bulgarians viewed America and Britain in friendly terms and were waiting for them to liberate the country.
He had decided to try his luck in Turkey, despite the rumors of starvation.
Marquis Childs tells of General MacArthur now being of the opinion that henceforth the war in Korea would be a stalemate and that the time therefore had arrived for diplomatic action to try to negotiate a peace with Communist China, that the great toll of around 700,000 casualties in the Chinese Army had been devastating, especially as it included China's best-trained divisions.
But the threat of Russia also loomed in the Pacific from the four divisions it had recently sent to Sakhalin, north of Japan. The possibility of internal Communist revolt in Japan was also very real, as it was in the Philippines. While General MacArthur had rated the chance of such a revolt negligible in Japan, John Foster Dulles, who had just returned from his special mission for the President to prepare for the peace treaty with Japan, had found it more important as a factor.
Armed strength, as in Korea, remained important, but economic rehabilitation in areas devastated by war was also necessary.
Robert C. Ruark tells of not many people in the country knowing much of Maj. General Bryant Moore, who had been killed the prior week when his helicopter crashed in Korea, but that he had likely been a future Army chief of staff. He had been superintendent of West Point until just before being appointed to his position as commander of the Ninth Corps, only a short time before he was killed. He had fought in World War I and at Guadalcanal and around Antwerp in World War II.
Mr. Ruark remembers most the job he had done in 1947 in Venezia Giulia on the Morgan Line, which divided Italy from Yugoslavia. Morale of the Army was bad in the area around Leghorn and Rome because of the special officers' privileges doled out by Lt. General John C. H. Lee. But General Moore's command around Trieste, in contrast, had been run smoothly. The G.I.'s there were satisfied and prideful. Mr. Ruark's faith in the Army was restored when he saw General Moore's command.
He had been happy, therefore, when General Moore was made superintendent at West Point and also when he received command of the Ninth Corps in Korea, as he knew already of his competence. He had felt close to General Moore, which he finds strange, as he had never met him.
A letter writer from Ahoskie tells of the rural people of the state being ready to support the cities receiving their share of the Highway Fund for urban streets, finds too much being made of the city versus rural fight.
The editors respond that the letter was from an old friend of The News and a respected newspaperman of Eastern North Carolina, Roy Parker, and had not been intended for publication but that they were printing it anyway, as it added another dimension to the argument regarding State aid for city streets. The newspaper's position, it clarifies, was that the entire system of primary and secondary roads was interrelated and so there should be no division per se between rural roads and city streets in terms of providing funding from the State, and that the Governor's demand for more revenue prior to the increase in funding shifted the focus unfairly to the city streets.
A letter writer responds to the letter of February 27 from a writer in Kinston who objected to honoring Louis Budenz by providing him a municipally-owned venue in which to speak. This writer thinks that had the prior writer been present at his address in Charlotte, he would have seen and heard the humility of the man and been impressed by his genuine reconversion to Catholicism. She advocates forgiveness of Mr. Budenz for his past renunciation of his faith in favor of Communism.
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