The Charlotte News
Friday, March 30, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that American artillery had stalled the first Chinese Communist counter-threat in six weeks, along the western front in Korea, after discovering the enemy lining a mountain trail north of Uijongbu. The enemy had not been able by dusk to push through the artillery fire after bitter close-range fighting had transpired all day. Americans had won a commanding hill position with a hand grenade attack.
The allies had been forced to give ground at several points along the front south of the 38th parallel as the enemy had moved 30,000 fresh troops into the area with 2,000 vehicles. Indications were that the Communists had stopped their retreat and were making a stand along a 60-mile front north of Chunchon, eight miles south of the parallel, perhaps massing troops for a spring offensive during the April rainy season.
About 70 American and Russian-built jets clashed over North Korea in high altitude dogfights, with one kill and two jets damaged by the Americans. No damage was done to American planes.
The Army estimated enemy casualties in Korea were 760,300 through March 22, an increase of 136,300 since the last estimate of February 20. The total was comprised of 543,000 battle casualties, 76,000 non-battle related casualties and 141,300 prisoners. Of the battle casualties, 260,000 were estimated to have been Chinese. Of the prisoners, 139,000 were North Korean.
An informed military source told of North Korean civilians and soldiers dying by the thousands of smallpox, typhus and typhoid, putting more troops out of action than allied combat operations, though worse among civilians. Most medical personnel in Korea had been drafted into the military and those few remaining were making no pretense of treating the civilians.
In Berlin, the Russians contended that the Americans on the four sightseeing buses, which had been fired upon by East German Communist Police, were responsible for the attack, which left no one injured. The Russians claimed that the Americans were "trying to incite western sector rowdies" against the Communist people's police, claiming that the American buses had knocked down two policemen. The U.S. commandant had delivered a note to the Russians the previous day describing the action as "irresponsible and outrageous". Aboard one of the buses, hit by three of the 12 to 15 bullets fired, was the wife and thirteen-year old daughter of General Lauris Norstad, commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe.
Elton C. Fay reports that the
Air Force had announced that it expected before the end of the year
to fly a new experimental supersonic rocket plane, the X-2
Can we take a ride sometime? We'll bring our own Beeman's.
The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen accepted a rail management proposal under which the President would name an arbitrator in the two-year dispute over rules changes. There was no indication, however, whether the other three unions involved in the dispute would agree to the proposal.
Price Stabilizer Mike DiSalle said before the Congress on Negro Business that he expected to roll back some prices but that there would be no across-the-board cut, and did not anticipate rationing.
Senators investigating the profitable purchase and lease-back deal involving merchant ships, between the Government and a partnership in which former Congressman Joseph Casey had been involved and into which the names of Admiral William Halsey and deceased former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had been injected, decided to air the matter fully and announced that they might call the former Congressman to testify after he had refused to disclose to the Senate Banking subcommittee investigating favoritism in government who his partners in the enterprise were.
In New York, Elizabeth Moos, the former mother-in-law of convicted perjurer William Remington, was arrested for failing to register as a foreign agent, after she arrived on a plane from France. As an officer of the Peace Information Center, she had been indicted on February 9 along with the Center, responsible for circulating the so-called Stockholm Peace Petition. W.E.B. DuBois was also indicted as an officer of the organization.
In Raleigh, a State Senate committee killed three bills which had called for reapportionment of Senate membership. Two of the proposals would have given Mecklenburg and Guilford Counties two senators each and realigned other counties, while one would have given Forsyth County two senators. The committee also proposed a State constitutional amendment which would prohibit any county from having more than one State Senator. The House Roads Committee killed another proposed automobile inspection bill.
General Assembly leaders backed down on the proposal to change control of two important state funds from the executive branch to the legislative, an action which Governor Kerr Scott had deemed contrary to the State Constitution.
Two days of heavy rains had caused flooding over thousands of acres in the Deep South, damaging highways, farms and homes, from Mississippi to western Alabama and northern Georgia. Two persons had drowned.
In Pasadena, California, the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, a Korean war veteran Marine, was engaged to marry a princess of the parade, whom he had met a few days before the event.
On the editorial page, "A Flank Attack on Gov. Scott" finds not inappropriate the Legislature's proposal to give to the Legislature power to spend the surplus from the Highway Fund, currently the province of the Governor, as the Governor enjoyed too much latitude in the spending of this money. The other proposed change, taking from the Council of State and the Governor the control of the million-dollar emergency and contingency appropriation in the General Fund, however, was not sensible as the Council of State was not political in its orientation and did not owe allegiance to the Governor.
Moreover, Governor Scott had a point, it finds, in questioning the validity of the proposal under the State Constitution and in urging therefore that the matter be submitted to the State Supreme Court for an advisory opinion. Even if constitutional, it views it dubious for members of the General Assembly to have the power both to appropriate and spend money. If they wanted to bring the Highway Fund under closer supervision, the better way would be to develop a new highway budget which would detail expenditures more precisely and restrict the Highway Commission's broad powers.
"Counting Their Chickens, Etc." finds that Charlotte would receive $400,000 from the bill to apply increased State Highway Fund money to construction and repair of city streets. It suggests that heavily burdened taxpayers might therefore expect some reduction in local taxes as a result, as they paid a greater share of State taxes for the Highway Fund than did rural residents. The City Council was suggesting new street projects which were worthwhile, but the piece maintains that the city's residents would likely prefer instead a tax break and utilization of the new money from the State to maintain the streets of the city, as currently the City budget had set aside $449,000 for street improvements.
"Postal Rate Increases" comments on a letter to the editor requiring a footnote, that the newspaper did not oppose necessary increases in the mailing rates for newspapers and magazines, believed the Post Office ought operate without a deficit and favored its reorganization to enable it to do so, as recommended by the Hoover Commission. But it did not believe that the blame for postal deficits was primarily to be placed on the break given to newspapers and magazines in their bulk mailing rates. Raising those rates primarily hit the small local publications which relied on mail for sending out subscriptions. The only way to recoup the higher rates was for these publications to raise subscriber rates. It suggests therefore that the letter writer apparently did not mind paying more for his magazines and newspapers by favoring the postal rate increase.
A piece from The Reporter, titled "What's in a Word", tells of Time and Life pushing the idea that war was happening now, not sometime in the future—at least until a recent issue of Life had editorialized that war was not inevitable and asked what "war" meant, finding the current world situation instead to be a "struggle" "for our lives, a struggle to the finish, a struggle now."
The piece finds struggle to be a
constant companion of life and growth and that therefore the
redefinition of war by Life was quite reassuring such that
everyone could now relax. It suggests that it was as if someone had
shouted "Fire!" and then corrected by saying, "Light!"
For fire substitute was light, a controlled fire
Drew Pearson tells of the lobbying efforts by the slot machine manufacturers to defeat the bill regulating slot machines while distancing themselves from organized crime and gambling, as exposed by the Kefauver committee hearings. He provides quotes from their strategy memo. He notes that a watered-down version of the bill had, nevertheless, passed, but its enforcement was still delayed within the Justice Department.
The Washington Times-Herald had demoted its Capitol Hill reporter, Bert Wissman, to a cub reporter's beat in the city room because he had reported the unvarnished facts objectively regarding the hearings into the smear campaign undertaken in the Maryland Senate race the previous year, connecting Senator Millard Tydings with Communist Earl Browder by means of a fake photograph. Two substitute reporters were assigned to the story, who presumably would report it the way the Times-Herald wanted.
The 8,700 letters which President Truman had obtained from the RFC files, written by Congressmen and Senators recommending loans for friends, were just the tip of the iceberg, there reportedly being 6,000 such letters in the files.
A reactionary radio commentator had sent an assistant to William Boyle's home to see if he could dig up dirt on the DNC chairman.
The House Armed Services Committee held hearings in executive session regarding Chanute Field, Ill., an Air Force base, but, notwithstanding the secret testimony, all they heard was favorable evidence.
Marquis Childs tells of the efforts of the fourteen U.N. nations contributing troops to the Korean war having been toiling to construct a peace acceptable to the Communist Chinese, only to have all of those efforts undermined by the statements of General MacArthur a week earlier, challenging the Chinese to continue in the war lest they be vanquished should the U.N. approve bombing of bases inside China and its coastal defenses. The challenge was especially appalling as General MacArthur well understood the importance in the Far Eastern world of saving face.
The Canadians and British already did not think much of the General's diplomatic and political abilities and now were beginning to believe that he knew that his statements would back the Chinese away from the negotiating table permanently, leaving them no room except to accept humiliating defeat.
The Chinese had been in a process of withdrawal and it was believed they were going to allow the war in Korea to wither because of the high losses of their top troops. Their strategy appeared to be instead to commit their considerable manpower reserve to an attack on Indo-China which could be effected by land, and let go of Korea and forgo an attack on Formosa, which could only be reached by crossing water with a practically non-existent navy and air force.
Should that attack on Indo-China take place, the U.S. would have to make new decisions, whether to continue to support the French forces in their attempt to put down the guerrilla actions of the Vietminh of Ho Chi Minh, where the French had been making gains since the infusion of new leadership and American weapons.
He concludes that in that event, some force would still have to be committed to Korea to prevent repetition of the same incursion as the prior June. The real sufferers would be the troops still stuck there in "the mud and blood and filth of that unhappy land. To them it is no comedy, grim or otherwise, nor is it to the wretched Korean people who have seen war smash everything flat."
Robert C. Ruark finds nothing making sense in the world. Frank Costello's apartment was approached by gunmen who had apparently acted on a cue from the televised hearings that Mr. Costello had $40,000 to $50,000 in his safe at home, an approach which in normal conditions "not even a coked-up moron" would attempt.
He finds himself numb to events, that there was no more right and wrong, black and white, good and bad—just a broad gray area. Police and politicians protected organized crime. The President was the butt of many bad jokes and the Congress was a cuss word. Compromise and expediency seemed the watchwords of society. Hoodlums wrapped themselves in the Constitution to avoid testifying on their pals and to save themselves from jail.
He thinks the country needed a "dose
of mental and spiritual sulphur and molasses, and a fresh
indoctrination based on the Rover Boys and Horatio Alger. I would
like to see it once more where a boy can marry the banker's daughter,
by dint of hard work, instead of achieving fame and fortune by
throwing basketball
A letter writer from Spartanburg, S.C., as mentioned above, thinks that the postal rate increase for newspapers and magazines proposed by the President ought be approved, but finds building pressure in Congress against it. The newspapers, he posits, howled about the Post Office deficits but did not appear to support the proposed postal rate increase for their own publications. He adds that the newspaper in Greenville, S.C., chose not to publish his letter after editorially denying that newspapers and magazines were largely to blame for the Post Office deficit.
A letter writer says that after reading Tom Fesperman's story about starving children, he thought he would enclose a copy of a list of Government surplus packages available through CARE out of New York City. He thinks that if some of those making contributions to the richest colleges would look around, they would see starving children nearby, that 78 black children were living in eleven shacks near Davidson College, just a month before the Smith-Graham primary the prior June.
A letter from Tillie Eulenspiegel wonders whether Mr. Duke could make up time lost by electric alarm clocks, "either by doubling the cyclical rate for a period or by having the American Trust Company's time-teller robot rouse all households with electric alarm clocks and school children", or by the power company keeping its wheels turning.
Whether this letter was from Mary Cash Maury, widow of W. J. Cash, who once had written for The News during the latter Thirties and submitted occasional letters to the editor under that pen name, we don't know. The letter is addressed from Charlotte, and Ms. Maury, who had remarried since the death of Cash on July 1, 1941, was living in Silver Spring, Md., at the time. The letter does, however, appear to be indited in her general style and so perhaps she was visiting relatives or old friends in Charlotte.
A letter writer from McBee, S.C.,
finds that only one type of man could appreciate women, the bachelor.
The bachelor had such refined taste in women that he had never been
able to make up his mind who to marry. As a young bachelor, he
proceeds to detail his ideal woman, which included that she be "soft
and dainty and smell like a rose", that her hair be "soft
and velvety", that she should be "shapely
When he met such a woman, he says,
he would settle down
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