The Charlotte News
Tuesday, April 3, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that American troops had moved into North Korea along a ten-mile front in the western sector. Field dispatches said the cautious but aggressive crossing of the 38th parallel was accomplished against only light resistance at the start.
U.S. Sabre jets shot down three Russian-built MIG-15s and damaged three others in a dogfight over the Manchurian border, while other Fifth Air Force planes hit Communist supply lines in 700 sorties, before foul weather prevented further flight operations by late afternoon.
General MacArthur visited the eastern front by jeep thirteen miles inside North Korea, to within 500 yards of the Communist front north of Yangyang. Upon his return to Tokyo, the General said that the enemy's weakness in the air and on the sea and their lack of artillery and heavy ground weapons were being "beautifully exploited" by General Matthew Ridgway. He said that the Communist commanders had a potential strength of 63 divisions, the greatest of any period so far in the war, but that they also had limited capacity for supply and their supply lines were vulnerable.
On the central front, American, Greek and Thai troops climaxed two days of heavy fighting by taking a ridgeline north of Chunchon, a mile south of the parallel. From the ridge, they could view the massing of thousands of Communist troops in North Korea.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Carl Vinson of Georgia, urged the House to enact the universal military training bill, which would lower the minimum draft age from 19 to 18 and a half. He said that it was necessary to convince the Soviets that the country would stand up to them. The Senate had approved a bill which would enable drafting of 18 year olds for 26 months of service and establish universal military training.
Federal mediators stood ready to enter the strike negotiations between management and 40,000 textile mill workers of the Textile Workers Union of America in five Southern states, over half of whom were in the two Carolinas. The workers were seeking a 13 cents per hour raise from the present minimum of $1.01.5, plus a cost of living adjustment and pensions of $100 per month. About 50,000 other union members across the South were covered by unexpired contracts.
In Washington, two members of the United Electrical Workers were acquitted of contempt of Congress, bringing the total to eight acquitted on the same offense and two convicted during 1951 thus far. The two acquitted had refused to answer questions of HUAC, and the Federal judge ruled that they were within their Fifth Amendment rights as answers might have been incriminating.
Senator Harry Cain of Washington asked the Senate to reconsider its vote on Friday to cite for contempt two witnesses who had refused to testify before the television and newsreel cameras during the Kefauver organized crime investigating committee hearings. He believed that the two witnesses were within their rights not to testify before cameras, that they had the right to put their best foot forward during testimony and the presence of cameras might impede them.
In Brookhaven, Mass., a 14-year old Boy Scout admitted that he had started several fires, one on Easter Sunday of the prior week causing $300,000 of damage to two destroyed buildings. He said that he liked watching big fires. No charges had yet been filed.
In Greenville, Mich., a young factory worker, 21, confessed that he had set a series of fires which had nearly resulted in declaration of martial law in Greenville. He admitted setting fire to a Methodist church, a truck, the Western Union office and a barber shop. He said that something had come over him and he picked the church as his starting point because it would make the biggest blaze, though he had nothing against religion.
In the second installment of Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, he suggests that the formula of Willis Carrier described the previous day would not prevent all worry and so one had to deal with different types of worries by getting the facts objectively, analyzing them, arriving at a decision and then acting on it. To be able to collect the facts objectively, he recommends pretending to gather the facts for some other person, eliminating thereby personal emotional bias. He sometimes pretended that he was a lawyer preparing to argue the other side of the issue such that he could collect all of the facts, including those damaging to his view. He cites an example of Galen Litchfield, manager of the Asia Life Insurance Co. in Shanghai in 1941 when the Japanese entered the city, arresting him for allegedly falsifying the accounts by leaving out a Hong Kong account when ordered to provide the army liquidator with a list of the company's assets, and threatened with imprisonment at the notorious Japanese torture chamber, the Bridgehouse.
On the editorial page, "Strategy for the West" indicates that tactics in the war of ideas between East and West would necessarily vary with each battleground, as understood well by the Soviets. But in the West, tactics could not be determined as simply as in Russia because the West was not governed by the principle of the end justifying the means.
Sidney Hook had written an article in the New York Times Magazine, titled "To Counter the Big, Big Lie—A Basic Strategy", in which he had listed four areas of differing strategic requirements for the West, dealing with the Soviet Union, the satellite countries, Western Europe, and the U.S. He urged that with respect to the Soviet Union, the plan should be to weaken it from within, pointing out that Stalin had perverted the aims of the original Communist Revolution, that with respect to the satellites, it had to be conveyed that their suffering was not forgotten and ways suggested to aid their struggle against the Soviets. With respect to Western Europe, the will to fight had to be inculcated by imparting the truth about the Soviets, the concept that Western Europeans had much to lose by not resisting. At home, democratic institutions had to be preserved, progress toward social reform continued, and isolationism and its concomitant appeasement not revived.
It suggests that it would be difficult to satisfy these requirements, that domestic policies would complicate some of it, but finds the analysis acute and recommends it to the State Department.
"On Knowing Our Enemy" commends Davidson College for holding a three-day seminar on Communism. The seminar, it suggests, could not have occurred at a State-supported institution lest it risk political condemnation. But it was important to educate people about Russian totalitarianism if it was to be defeated, that ignoring it would not work.
"Tidbit in the News" finds an hors d'oeuvre tidbit in the smorgasbord of news in an A.P. report that a man who was trapping cats to sell to doctors for experiments had been hauled into court by a woman whose cat was trapped and sold. His defense had been that he bought the cat for 50 cents from a boy, but was nevertheless fined and sentenced to 30 days in jail. The piece wonders who the boy was and what happened to him, concludes that American enterprise was not dead, after all.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Seeking the Man", finds that two primary candidates for the Presidency in 1952, General Eisenhower and Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, appeared to be genuinely reluctant to accept the nomination.
In a poll taken recently by the United Press, Senator Douglas had appeared as the choice of Democratic local and state leaders, should the President choose not to run. The Senator mixed integrity with good humor in much the same way as General Eisenhower did. He also had a scholar's background while preserving the popular touch.
It concludes that the country was fortunate to have two such men for the office of the Presidency to seek.
Drew Pearson tells of a conversation between Benny Buttenweisser, U.S. deputy High Commissioner of West Germany, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, in which the former urged West Germany to adopt higher taxation of the high income groups, similar to the progressive tax structure of the U.S. Chancellor Adenauer balked on the basis that such high taxes could not be collected, whereupon Mr. Buttenweisser said that the U.S. employed jail when necessary as the force to assure collection.
The result of the reduced tax structure in Germany was that it had a heavy deficit and was seeking more U.S. aid, which, if given, would derive from American taxpayers.
With the exception of England and the Scandinavian countries, Europe generally imposed relatively light taxes, resulting in unbalanced budgets and low standards of living in which Communism could thrive. In France and Italy, the working classes paid a disproportionate share of the taxes, as high in France as in the U.S., but the middle and higher tax brackets routinely avoided taxation. There was also a heavy sales tax in most European countries, hitting the consumer.
The Italian Ambassador to the U.S. had taken exception to Mr. Pearson's reporting from Rome during his recent trip across Europe, finding his criticism of use of Marshall Plan aid unfair. The Ambassador said, accurately, that at the end of 1950, Italian production stood at its highest point ever, 30 percent above prewar 1938. Exports had also risen to a postwar high. He says that he was glad to pass on these facts but that while in Rome, his job had been to educate the American people to the steps which had to be taken if Italy were to continue on an economically stable basis. Two of those essentials were land reform and a revised tax system. A new Italian tax bill, he comments, was a step in the right direction, though far from the system extant in the U.S. and England.
Joseph Alsop, in Bonn, tells of the effort to build Western defenses already being impeded by Soviet efforts in Germany, playing upon the political weakness of the British and French governments, coupled with threats of war while ostensibly being willing to discuss peace at the proposed Big Four foreign ministers conference.
The primary point of attack politically had been the sensitive issue of German participation in Western defense. The Soviets had transformed British eagerness for West German equal participation into a reluctance almost as formidable as that of the French, always suspicious of German rearmament, such that the grant of military and political equality had been delayed indefinitely, promised several months earlier to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer by the three allied high commissioners. Then the British balked, saying that they wished to take no further steps in that direction until after the Big Four conference. The French had long before adopted the Pleven Plan to have a European Army with German participation consisting of combat teams serving in mixed divisions, though a plan lacking support from the French General Staff and in West Germany.
The Germans had, however, sent emissaries to Paris to discuss the Plan, rejecting the idea of mixed European divisions as impractical because of language barriers and other issues but proposing a European army with German divisions serving in mixed corps. The French wanted time to consider the proposal and the work had then stalled, apparently indefinitely.
DeWitt MacKenzie tells of the Soviet Journal of Science and Life a year or so earlier having started a propaganda drive against religion and for education of the masses to militant atheism. The Journal now called for expansion of the program. The campaign had encountered much opposition from organized religions behind the iron curtain.
Bolshevism was inconsistent with religion, for Bolshevism employed aggression and demanded slave states to exist. Nazism had worked similarly, stamping out religion as dangerous to the worship of the Fuehrer. Hitler had been unable, however, to kill religion, just as the Communists were unable to do so. The Moscow Government favored persuasion rather than compulsion as a means because the Soviet Constitution supported freedom of worship, but also guaranteed the right of atheist propaganda. It was under that latter tenet that the campaign against religion was proceeding.
A letter writer comments on the March 30 letter from Tillie Eulenspiegel regarding Duke Power and the electric clock, providing the background of the German folk tale of Till Eulenspiegel, as musically stated in "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" by Richard Strauss, as conveyed by Charles O'Connell in The Victor Book of the Symphony.
A letter writer responds to the letter of March 26 anent Senator Taft's visit to Charlotte, which in turn had responded to the letter writer's criticism of the visit for the Senator appearing only at a private dinner and not at a public auditorium or the like. He says that he would take the writer's word that the money raised would go to Republicans statewide but insists that the strategy of the Young Republicans in sponsoring the Taft dinner indicated that they were only interested in Federal patronage rather than advancing Republican interests in North Carolina. He concludes that the visit was "A Comedy of Errors".
A letter writer from Pinehurst finds it ironic that Senator Willis Smith had stated that he believed complaints by Senator Millard Tydings had led to the current investigation into the campaign smear tactics used against him during the 1950 campaign and that he wished that it were possible to hold individuals responsible for what they said in campaigns. The writer thinks it interesting in light of the smear campaign conducted by the Smith supporters the prior June during the primary against Senator Frank Graham and wonders what the punishment would be for Senator Smith and his "hatchet men".
A letter writer from Washington, N.C., thinks the American Government was no longer that envisioned by the Founders but rather had become a "fossil under the guiding hand of cheap, hypocritical Fair Deal politicians and parasitic bureaucrats" who had driven out "Americanism" and replaced it with vicious "foreignism".
Fifty years ago this date, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., while leading an organizing rally in support of striking
sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., would give a speech
The forces who killed him, whether James Earl Ray or some other lone assassin, or whether a reticulation of like-minded or disparate conspirators, are documented through the history of the South and the whole of the society which he had courageously sought to change in a dangerously volatile time, through encouragement of others to understanding and patience, the non-violent resistance employed so effectively in India by Gandhi before his assassination on January 30, 1948, to shame the forces of nullification, obscurantism and atavism and bring them into the Twentieth Century in recognition of their common interests as members of a society, regardless of race, using the while his training and gift as a vital clergyman to effect that change.
He was our conscience as a nation during the latter 1950's, from the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, ultimately in response to the brutal lynching in Money, Miss., on August 28, 1955 of fourteen-year old Emmett Till, and through his death on April 4, 1968. His words and his actions in mobilizing non-violent resistance to apartheid in this country will live long in example of the better angels of our nature, regardless of race or skin color, in a continuing time of fitful, but steady, emergence from a peculiar system which had transplanted slavery after the Civil War to deny rights to a segment of the population determined only by race and skin color, so that a system of economic and political disparity could continue to provide a small segment of the population rich profits, socially and economically, so that the recognition of commonality of interests, which Dr. King later urged, could be buried in rank, demagogic appeals to prejudice and racial superiority to enable the lesser lights of a given community to have an automatic rite of passage through the portals of the fanciful "club" by their cherished divine right of kings, entry to this mythical and invisible organization assured by virtue of their very birth with white skin pigment—though often further qualified by dint of religious difference or socio-economic status, albeit sometimes offset to a degree by popularity with the boys down at the saloon.
Dr. King followed a long line of persons in the society, black and white, who taught the grand fallacy of such a self-denying, egocentric, childishly facile formula for existence, which provided superior rights to some while denying rights to others through caste and classification, through separation by an invisible barrier from privileges and rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all citizens. His voice, though silenced for fifty years, lives on in the society, still growing, still slouching toward Bethlehem, still trying to bring its lesser lights to the recognition of the common goal for any society, to have its inhabitants work together out of their individual skill sets and gifts to try to achieve the common good for all.
Framed Edition
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