The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 31, 1951

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that an American tank column had crossed the 38th parallel by a half mile, north of captured Uijongbu, challenging the enemy buildup in North Korea. It was an extension of the paratroop drop of a week earlier, which had led to the capture of Uijongbu. The scene was eight miles east of where the Communist Chinese had broken through allied lines on December 31 and began pushing the allies back from the 38th parallel. Per the instructions of General MacArthur, the tank advance would be tactical and not the opening wedge of a full offensive.

The enemy meanwhile were holding positions forty miles away, about a mile from Chunchon, in American hands.

South Korean troops operating about eight miles above the parallel on the east coast, above the village of Yanayang, had encountered resistance for the first time the previous day.

In Paris, Russia's latest proposal for an agenda for the proposed Big Four foreign ministers conference, which included discussion of the Italian peace treaty and the treaties with the Balkan nations in addition to democratization of Germany and Austria, NATO and the presence of U.S. defense bases in England, Norway, Iceland and other European countries and in the Near East, had caused new pessimism to arise regarding whether an agenda could be worked out.

In Bonn, ratification of the Schuman plan by West Germany appeared assured through allied acceptance of a German compromise plan for breaking the Ruhr's coal and steel cartels. German industrialists had demanded the modification before they would agree to the Schuman plan, which would pool West Germany's coal and steel output with that of five other European nations. The compromise would allow West German steel companies to retain ownership of coal mines producing 75 percent of their coal needs, would dissolve the German Central Coal Sales Agency gradually over a two or three-year period rather than immediately, and also provide for the breaking up of 13 of the larger prewar coal and steel combines into 26 units. In so doing, the compromise provided for breaking up of the old German cartels while not dealing a death blow to German industries in international trade. The British withdrew their objection to the plan on the basis of the compromise, worked out by the Germans and U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, and accepted by the French.

At the Inter-American Conference in Washington, a committee of representatives of the 21 nations approved a "Declaration of Washington", declaring unified purpose economically in defending the western world from Communism, and it was expected that the conference would adopt it.

In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito's official newspaper reported that armed groups of anti-Communist Albanians from Italy were being parachuted into their Soviet-dominated homeland, with leaflets being also dropped, and were fighting there. The article, not identifying its sources, said that the Russian policy regarding Albania had been dictated by the Cominform, based on fabricated accusations that Yugoslavia was planning to attack Albania.

The Senate Banking Committee, in a 91-page report to the Senate, recommended that many of the 25 billion dollars worth of defense plants and some communities built during World War II to support those plants would have to be discarded because of changes in the size and designs of modern weapons. It also urged speedy approval of a 1.5 billion dollar bill to build housing for workers in the projected new defense plants.

Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the joint Atomic Energy Committee, said, in response to a question of Senator Bourke Hickenlooper as to whether the President had authority to deliver an atomic weapon to NATO, that, as a practical matter, only the Strategic Air Force was trained to drop an atomic bomb and so would have to be the force to deliver it, that there was no question that the President had authority to use atomic bombs in the event of war with Russia but that if the act forbade transfer of atomic weapons to foreign countries, then he obviously had to abide by that law, though, he said, only a straw man issue raised by Senator Hickenlooper.

Senator Estes Kefauver said that he expected to propose a method of continuing the inquiry into crime by his special committee. He did not elaborate but said that he opposed the effort of two Republican members to extend the committee investigation until the following January 15.

The Kefauver committee won unanimous approval on the Senate floor of its contempt citations issued against gambling kingpins Frank Costello, Frank Erickson, Joe Adonis, and nine other gambling figures, for refusing to answer questions of the committee. The charges would next be turned over to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Former Congressman Joseph Casey, who had testified to the Senate Banking subcommittee that he and unnamed partners had made 2.8 million dollars on a $100,000 investment by purchasing and leasing back two merchant ships from and to the Government, said that he and his partners would answer Senate questions regarding the matter in their own time. Admiral William Halsey and deceased former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had been named among the seventeen partners by the Maritime Commission. There was no allegation of any criminal wrongdoing, but questions had arisen regarding profiting from the Government while in Government service or shortly after departing it and the potential need for legislation to prevent such practices. Questions had also arisen as to whether the former Congressman should be cited for contempt by the subcommittee for refusing to identify his partners.

General Lucius D. Clay, entering the private sector, predicted that shortages would hit the civilian economy "hard and heavy" late in the year. The steel supply to car manufacturers and manufacturers of other steel goods was about to be cut twenty percent starting the next day and, he said, would be cut another ten percent in the third or fourth quarter.

That means your car will be thirty percent shorter by the end of the year and your refrigerator thirty percent smaller. You better go buy those larger ones while you can.

A strike by the Textile Workers Union of America appeared certain to begin this night at midnight after the wage dispute and other union demands had not been settled. It would affect some 90,000 textile workers in six Southern states, including about 50 mills in North Carolina and eleven in South Carolina.

In Los Angeles, a blind 70-year old woman from Chicago was claiming in a court proceeding that she was once married to comedian W. C. Fields, having married him in 1893 when she was thirteen, and thus entitled to a widow's share of his estate, valued at over $770,000. His widow, Harriet, whom he married in 1900, had already established her right to over half of his estate.

On the editorial page, "The Theory of the Apple" tells of the enlightenment of Lincoln Steffens to big city political machines and corruption in government generally during his career as a journalist, as chronicled in his Autobiography. It quotes liberally from its pages, telling of Tom Johnson explaining to him that it was not big business which corrupted but rather those seeking privilege from those able to extend privilege which caused the problems. That could occur at any level of business, big or small, and with any individual. Once, Mr. Steffens had addressed an assembly in San Francisco and a bishop stood up and asked him to explain when the corruption began in history. He replied that most said that it began with Adam, but then Adam had blamed the temptation on Eve and Eve had sought to place the responsibility on the snake, Satan. "Now I come and I am trying to show you what it was, it is, the apple."

The piece counsels that if enough people read Mr. Steffens's Autobiography, they would not be shocked by the revelations of favoritism at RFC, the exertion of influence to obtain Government contracts revealed in the five percenter probe, or the big city graft exposed by the Kefauver hearings. For at the heart of it all was "The Apple—the desire to make money and to get the help of Government, either through positive privileges or a negative 'hands-off' attitude, in making money."

The American voter, it suggests, ought always choose the government which acted in the general interest rather than on behalf of special interests.

"The Man Who Wouldn't Die" tells of H. L. Mencken having defied his doctors' predictions the previous October when he suffered a heart attack and was given up for dead. He had recently been released from the hospital. Book reviewers had thought a new biography on Mr. Mencken, released while he was in the hospital, would be the final word on his life and writing career. They debated and found it too early to determine whether he was a great man or just someone who delighted in "stirring up the animals" for entertainment. It says that it had tossed away the prepared obituary made up the prior fall and admitted happily that, indeed, it was too early to tell.

Mr. Mencken, 70 years old in 1951, would live until 1956.

A piece from the Durham Herald, titled "Franco's Deeds Deny His 'Virtues'", counsels against providing American aid to Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. He was not a man of his word, having been neutral in World War II despite having come to power in the Spanish civil war with the help of Hitler and Mussolini. Such aid would damage the prestige of the U.S. abroad, given that Franco, the "tyrant", stood opposed to all basic individual freedoms for which America reputedly stood. It would discourage the efforts of those living behind the iron curtain seeking to escape their bondage from tyranny, "to cast their lot with those who profess their belief in freedom but deny it by their action."

Drew Pearson discusses reasons for indefinitely continuing the Kefauver committee investigation of organized crime, that U.S. Attorneys in the various big cities across the country were appointed on the basis of politics and patronage by the President, often at the behest of a given Democratic Senator or Democratic political boss, and thus prosecutions were necessarily governed to an extent by who was in power. FDR had appointed good prosecutors for the most part while bucking Senate pressure, but President Truman, while bucking the Senate on occasion, had also followed political bias in many instances, as when he fired Maurice Milligan as U.S. Attorney for Kansas City the same week he became President because Mr. Milligan had prosecuted the late Tom Pendergast, boss of Kansas City, who made Mr. Truman a Senator. Local law enforcement on the Federal level was thus left largely up to the local political machine set up by Democratic Senators, governors, or political bosses. Many Senators therefore had opposed the creation of the Kefauver committee.

While there were many U.S. Attorneys doing a good job, he cites examples of those who were slack in their prosecutions, sometimes with apparent political motive. In Prince Georges County, Maryland, the former Sheriff was taking protection money and the Treasury had caught him at it, but the U.S. Attorney found the case to lack sufficient evidence. Then the Pearson column published facts about the matter, after which the former Sheriff confessed and pleaded guilty.

Another case, which he had often cited, was that of the police lieutenant in Washington who was attached to the staff of the U.S. Attorney and had wiretapped Howard Hughes at the behest of Senator Owen Brewster, a friend to rival of TWA, Pan Am and and its president, Juan Trippe. The police lieutenant had also broken into the bedroom of the Ambassador to Argentina while doing private detective work on the side. Yet, the U.S. Attorney took no action until the column published the facts, after which a grand jury was belatedly called to investigate the matter, but only just before the statute of limitations was about to expire.

Such was why Senate committees were so important to expose graft and corruption in Government.

Marquis Childs finds that the lesson of the seizure of La Prensa by the Argentine Government of dictator Juan Peron to hold lessons for the U.S. As a once powerful independent newspaper, La Prensa was now silenced. The same could happen in America if the McCarthys had their way. Senator McCarthy, for instance, had urged all advertisers to abandon the Milwaukee Journal for its negative press on the Senator. Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia had sought to get a bill through the Legislature which would have made it difficult for the Atlanta papers to comment on politics without risking criminal sanctions for defamation. The late Huey Long had tried to control the New Orleans newspapers. Such was a hallmark of the dictator.

He reminds that a free press had to be a critical press. The will to destroy that freedom had to be met with the will to preserve it or not even the strongest institutions or individuals could survive.

Robert C. Ruark says that his recent acquisition of a baby grand piano had caused his house to become a magnet for musicians late at night, such that no one any longer got any sleep. Joseph Bushkin had dropped by and so had his cronies, Tallulah Bankhead and Arthur Godfrey, the latter two singing a duet while Mr. Bushkin accompanied on the baby grand, as Mr. Ruark's ears suffered from the lack of harmony.

He had taken to talking like jazz musicians and tapping his feet in rhythm, such that he could tap out "Honeysuckle Rose" like Fats Waller, using four toes.

He thinks that if it kept going this way, he would wind up an underpaid sideman in St. Louis, "wearing a be-bop beard and puffing heavily on a stick of tea", which, he informs, was marijuana, he thinks.

That's going to lead to heroin and hoodlumism, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics.

A letter writer from Pittsboro praises the editorial, "The Shaky Foundation of Segregation". He had been angry when he first read of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision ordering the admission to UNC Law School of four qualified black applicants on the basis that the N.C. College for Negroes Law School at Durham was not substantially equal to that of UNC. For he believed that the State had worked to bring the College Law School to its accredited status, which it was expected to achieve soon. Moreover, UNC and Duke had loaned professors to the College Law School during its early stages of development. He finds therefore that the State had behaved in good faith.

He hopes that the University would file a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court, but says that he had only adopted that belief after reading the editorial, having initially felt that it would only provide the Court with another opportunity to slap the State in the face. He thinks that the opinion of the Court of Appeals would mean the end of segregation and that if "we are to abandon one of the cherished institutions of the South by compulsion, we might as well be so informed promptly." He favors instead an evolutionary process of change—when, no doubt, black people can evolve into white people.

A letter writer from Concord takes "definite exception" to the editorial, "A Muzzle for MacArthur", finds it to have forgotten that the General had brilliantly directed the Pacific campaign of World War II, that many American lives had been saved by his strategy of island-hopping, as well as his excellent job as military commander of Japan during occupation. He had also taken a relatively small and outnumbered force and was winning the war in Korea, fighting it with large handicaps from home and abroad. He believes that the General, in making his statements of the previous week that he was open to peace negotiations with the Chinese commander, had been merely trying to "clean up the mess" on his own and that he was far more capable of doing so than the President. He thinks the country would do well to hang onto General MacArthur as long as it could while placing a muzzle on President Truman.

A letter writer from Chesterfield, S.C., wonders how the "saintly" Secretary of State Acheson had gotten sucked into appointing as Ambassador to Mexico former New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer, recent object of Kefauver hearings into whether he took payments from a firemen's union head for support of the City firemen as well as whether he let slide certain investigations into organized crime and gambling while he had been District Attorney for two and a half years before becoming Mayor. He thinks The News and Harper's had been rationalizing the matter for the benefit of Mr. Acheson.

A letter writer tells of recently attending a school program at which the young male students had been so unruly that the program could scarcely be heard. She counsels that people should live like Christians and not drink and curse and gamble and then call themselves Christians.

It was probably one of those drunkard pre-school programs.

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