The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 19, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that for the third consecutive day, American pilots beat enemy airmen in a large jet battle over northwestern Korea, 35 miles from the Manchurian border, as 27 U.S. Sabre jets damaged four of 30 Russian-built MIG-15s. The U.S. had a running total of six enemy jets shot down and twelve damaged. Meanwhile, allied infantrymen drove North Korean troops from key ridges on the eastern front and penetrated two miles, the deepest penetration in that front during the year. One ridge changed hands six times in the only significant ground fighting of the day.
Vice-Admiral Oscar Badger, commander of the Eastern Atlantic Sea Frontier, testifying before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, said that he believed bombing of Communist China's supply lines should be confined to Korea for the time being and that it would not be wise at present to adopt the strategy proposed by General MacArthur, including the proposed U.S. naval blockade of Chinese ports. He did recommend, however, a U.N. blockade.
The President signed into law the draft revision bill which provided for drafting young men at age 18 and a half, required 24 months instead of the previous 21 months of induction, and laid the groundwork for universal military training. As part of the law, the President appointed a five-person commission to plan for UMT. The draft law would be in effect for four years.
House Minority Leader Joe Martin conceded that Democrats probably had enough votes in the House to pass the 7.2 billion dollar tax increase, the largest single proposed tax increase in the nation's history.
Comptroller General Lindsay Warren told Senators of a Labor subcommittee that in the forming of Government contracts there had been a weakening of moral standards both in Government and business and that Congress had to shoulder part of the blame. He said that some in the Army and Navy during World War II had used their uniforms to feather their own nests.
The Senate Banking Committee voted to ban further price rollbacks, including on beef, below average price levels for the month beginning January 24, 1951.
A committee of 16 House members returned from a ten-day inspection tour of Europe and said that American aid programs were achieving good results and should be continued.
A late bulletin from Tehran told of oil nationalization talks between Britain and Iran breaking down in bitter disagreement.
Britain said in Commons that it was taking steps to block all shipments of strategic goods to Communist China through Hong Kong.
In Havana, it was reported that the Marine sergeant found dead from a gunshot wound at the U.S. Embassy the previous day had been a suicide, following his killing of a watchman at the Embassy.
In New York, the leader of eleven million members of the General Federation of Women's Clubs sent a telegram to the President urging the death penalty for drug peddlers, to parallel the Lindbergh kidnaping law. That law had been cited the previous day in a speech at the Kiwanis convention by Senator Herbert O'Conor of Maryland, chairman of the Senate crime investigating committee, as a possible model for legislation against drug dealers.
In Detroit, streetcars and buses returned to service for the first time in two months following resolution of a municipal transit strike, agreeing to allow their wage increase demands to be settled by mediation.
Nine hundred United Airlines pilots went on strike after a two-year dispute on wages and working conditions had failed to settle. The strike would not affect Korean transport operations.
In Oak Ridge, Tenn., about two-thirds of the 1,200 construction workers on two atomic plant projects went on strike because the Wage Stabilization Board had not approved above-ceiling wage boosts. In Knoxville, 400 other construction workers at two big housing projects were idle for the same reason.
During a conversation regarding the appointment of Gordon Gray as coordinator of psychological warfare, the President informed Governor Kerr Scott that if he were selected as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 he would attend a large barbecue at the Governor's farm. The planned barbecue would be for 40,000 people and would require 250 to 300 hogs and three tons of cabbage to feed them.
He should serve elephant meat so that someone on the other side would then feel compelled to serve to Republicans...
On the editorial page, "Gordon Gray's New Job" finds that while the UNC Board of Trustees had understandably been reluctant to grant a leave of absence to the president of the University to undertake coordination of psychological warfare, the position was important as it was the first time the Government had taken realistic steps to wage such warfare with the same tenacity accomplished by the Soviets. Presently, the efforts were split among the State Department administering Voice of America, the CIA, with its information program for foreign countries, the military branches, plus other agencies such as ERP. Mr. Gray would seek to organize and coordinate these efforts.
Mr. Gray would still continue his duties as president of the University and split his time with his new job in Washington. The piece expresses confidence that he could handle both jobs well.
The undisclosed fact that Mr. Gray, publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Twin City Sentinel, was also part of the investment group which purchased The News from the Dowd family in early 1947 does not have anything to do with your unqualified confidence in him, does it?
But he may have sold his interest by this point. We don't know. And this newspaper won't tell us.
"Eccles Offers Novel View of FDR" tells of Marriner Eccles being set to step down from the Federal Reserve Board within a few days. His memoirs of his time spent first as chairman under FDR and for the previous three years as vice-chairman, was interesting as he found, uniquely, that FDR had not spent enough money to overcome unemployment and boost production in the Thirties, that he only accepted large-scale deficit spending in April, 1938 after the slump of 1937.
The piece suggests that the view would need greater documentation before gaining general acceptance, but that his criticism of the Truman Administration's "completely inadequate" efforts against inflation would not, that the policies had been dictated by political expedience rather than detached analysis of the economic realities. One such example was the forced resignation of Dr. Edwin Nourse from the Council of Economic Advisers and his subsequent charge that politics colored the Council's recommendations.
Mr. Eccles contended that the powerful Giannini banking interests in California, Bank of America, had, along with Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, forced his resignation as chairman of the Fed three years earlier.
The piece thinks that these charges of politics influencing decisions of the Fed needed Senate airing and if true, the people needed to know about it before 1952.
"Gov. Scott, Meet Mr. Chapman" finds that Governor Kerr Scott ought meet Gilbert Chapman, whose speech appears on the page, explaining why his company located a plant in a small rural town in Michigan. Both men were saying the same thing regarding the need to develop rural towns, as diversification of industry, as with agriculture, produced a sound economy. The piece shares Mr. Chapman's belief that in time more factory units would be located in such places producing a new balance between rural and industrial America.
"A Not-So-Secret Meeting" tells of Winston-Salem's Board of Aldermen, as with the Charlotte City Council, having decided recently to abandon its practice of holding private sessions. But then six hours after so deciding, the Board met with Mayor Marshall Kurfees in private. When caught by the Twin City Sentinel, a Board member said that it had been an "informal get-together".
The piece finds that the public business needed to be transacted publicly, that informal private meetings were acceptable only if no decisions were to be reached.
A piece from the Christian
Science Monitor, titled "Commencement", finds that
for the graduating class of 1951, there would always be new
thresholds and that while commencements may fade, "new
commencings"
As indicated in the above editorial, a partial transcript is presented of a speech by Gilbert Chapman, president of Yale & Towne Manufacturing Co., regarding the process the company used to locate its plant in Barrien Springs, Mich. The speech is reprinted, according to the editors, as it presented a timely message to rural North Carolina.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Hubert Humphrey having suggested at a meeting of Democrats to determine how they should react to Senator Joseph McCarthy's attack on Secretary of Defense Marshall, that they walk out on the speech. Senator Brien McMahon said that it was useless to debate Senator McCarthy because he could never be pinned down on facts. He viewed the attempt as the only way the Republicans could bolster General MacArthur, by attacking the character of the Administration witnesses.
Mr. Pearson tells of the new Military Court of Appeals, whose membership was supposed to be determined by merit without politics entering into the appointments, having wound up with Maj. General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide, selecting one appointee and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath another, while a third was a military man who had been told to resign his commission before the appointment so that he would qualify as a civilian, which the law required the judges to be.
Marquis Childs discusses General Omar Bradley's memoir, A Soldier's Story, which gave an account in unadorned language of a plain soldier who rose to be a principal General in World War II and now was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But generals had become so prominent in the nation that it suggested an abdication of civilian authority over the military in times of trouble.
During the period between the wars, the military had been treated as an unwanted stepchild. The illusion of peace and a movement toward pacifism in the country after World War I had been widespread. That made it the more remarkable that out of World War II came an array of extraordinary military leaders, such as Generals Marshall, Bradley, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, and Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz, to name but a few.
Civilian supremacy over the military had been a strong tradition in the country, a tradition which had asserted itself repeatedly during crises, as shown in The Concept of Civil Supremacy over the Military in the United States by William R. Tansell for the Library of Congress.
Mr. Childs ventures that as long as the modesty exemplified by General Bradley prevailed in the military, there would be no danger to that long tradition.
Joseph Alsop, as he prepares to depart from London, suggests that the Western alliance against Soviet imperialism could be defeated during the ensuing 12 to 18 months should the Anglo-American partnership break down. It would take that long to rebuild Western defenses, creating the danger of tempting the Soviets during that period. Internal struggles could cause countries to abandon their efforts to rebuild, as shown by the left-wing Laborites in Britain and the isolationists in Washington who opposed further foreign aid or at least wanted to pare it down to the bone. Or places such as Iran, Burma, Egypt or Indonesia could boil over in conflict, upsetting the balance of power. The Soviets or its satellites might initiate aggression as in Korea, such as against Yugoslavia. Such developments might not eventuate in a world war but could produce a situation where the only choices would be to surrender or fight.
The Anglo-American alliance was vital to maintain, to lead the way for the other Western allies. But at present the Anglo-American partners were not working together, with divisions over the Far East and the Middle East, the Mediterranean and even Europe. The divisions could cause a failure to meet some threat somewhere, as in Yugoslavia.
The problem which had festered unnoticed for some time was becoming a major test of American fitness to lead the West.
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