The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 5, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via William Barnard, that allied troops had moved to within artillery range of Chorwon, key to the Communist "iron triangle" in North Korea, as 6,000 Chinese troops blocked their advance from the east in the vicinity of Hwachon Reservoir, while most of the allied forces moving from the west and central fronts moved closer to the triangle. Enemy resistance diminished along the Yonchon-Chorwon road as allied troops moved two miles through mud, reducing the distance to eleven miles and enabling artillery to come within range of Chorwon.
The Fifth Air Force flew 430 sorties in the rain and two fighters crashed and burned, their pilots killed. A third had been shot down Monday, but the pilot had parachuted behind allied lines. Meanwhile, two enemy jets bombed allied positions near Yanggu, their deepest penetration of Korea.
Secretary of State Acheson, speaking again before the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, said that the U.S. would consult the U.N. before making any armistice in Korea and maintained the position despite insistence by Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa that the country should act independently. Senator Gillette also objected to the President committing troops in Korea without Congressional approval. Secretary Acheson had said that the U.S. commander in the field had the right to bring about an armistice only after consultation with the other U.N. member nations involved in the fighting. Senator Gillette believed the U.S. could act unilaterally and then provide a report to the U.N. Security Council.
The Secretary said that if the U.S. ever found itself in the minority on the Council with regard to membership of Communist China, it could ask the World Court to determine whether a veto could bar seating Communist China. He also said that Russia had complete domination over North Korea and that bombing of Manchuria would have a greater chance of enlarging the war than permitting Nationalist troops to attack the mainland.
A late bulletin states that the Secretary testified that General MacArthur had disapproved the prior November of creation of a demilitarized zone on the Korea-Manchuria border.
Discussion at the State Department of a possible Korean truce was expected this date between the 16 U.N. nations engaged in the allied fighting.
The South Korean legislature unanimously approved a resolution opposing any ceasefire agreement which did not guarantee unification of Korea under a republican government.
In Hanoi in Indo-China, the Vietminh forces had suffered 1,600 killed, 2,700 wounded and 300 taken prisoner in the battle with the French along the Day River, while the French had suffered 150 killed, including six officers, 200 wounded and 60 missing. The French estimated that French planes had probably inflicted another 2,000 Vietminh casualties. Meanwhile, French forces from the Ninh Binh stronghold crossed the river fifty miles south of Hanoi at dawn this date and, under air and naval support, began a drive on Vietminh positions on the south bank. In fighting the prior week, two French generals' sons were killed, including that of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, commander of the French forces.
Senate and House confreres worked on the compromise bill for sending grain to India and final action was expected later this date, as the Senate had agreed to the House proposal regarding elimination of the requirement of repayment by strategic materials from India.
The attorney for the seven Nazis sentenced to death in Germany for war crimes sought a stay of execution from the Supreme Court, after it had already refused review of the case. The Court denied the stay as it recessed for the summer the previous day. The principal contention of the defendants was that the new West German Constitution forbade capital punishment.
In Nuremberg, three Germans were killed and twelve seriously injured when an aerial bomb left from the war exploded while a demolition team was trying to remove it from a building.
In St. Louis, a last minute agreement between the Communication Workers, representing 51,000 employees, and Southwestern Bell Telephone averted a strike in a six-state area. The union accepted a ten percent increase in wages, ranging from $3 to $8 per week.
AFL president William Green told the House Banking Committee that if price controls were abandoned, wage stabilization would also have to be abandoned. He recommended that the President be given authority to use subsidies as a last resort.
Unemployment dropped to the lowest level since World War II had ended, at 1.6 million in May. Employment was at 61.2 million, the highest in six months. Over seventy percent of the 1.1 million new jobs were in the farm sector.
In Dayton, O., two two-plane formations collided in midair and two Air Force pilots were killed and a third injured, while a veteran flier who had flown 111 missions in Korea escaped without injury.
North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott said that the pressure for building bypasses around cities and towns had become great but that the road building program in the state would have to be curtailed as the war had produced a shortage of materials.
In Cleveland, N.C., a housewife pleaded not guilty to slugging a junior high school principal with his own paddle and insisted the principal be charged with assault after she and the principal had engaged in a fracas in his office when the woman complained about the principal spanking her 14-year old son and kicking him on a separate occasion, resulting in bruises and black eyes, a broken nose and split lips.
He deserved it and you know it. If
you had kicked him around more at home, this would never have
happened. We would have shoved him down the stairs
An Army private from Massachusetts told of being chaplain by day and tending bar by night while stationed at Camp Perry in Texas.
Same set of skills, is it not?
The "Our Weather" box suggests that there is no such thing as bad weather, only different types of good weather.
We shall remember that next time we are stuck in a snowdrift with frostbite or fighting enemy troops in Korea in the spring mud and rain...
On the editorial page, "Blueprinting the City of the Future" tells of the Planning Board having released its supplement to the master plan of 1949 for Charlotte's future. It showed knowledge of the needs of the city and the piece thus compliments the members of the Board, says it was now up to the City Council and the people to study the recommendations and see to it that they were implemented as soon as possible.
"Plummer Stewart" laments the death of the Mecklenburg County resident who had contributed greatly to community life as a lawyer and city alderman, vice-mayor and member of both the Charlotte School Board and Mecklenburg County School Board. He also had been county food administrator during World War I and served the Department of Justice during World War II.
"In a Washington Elevator" tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Secretary of State Acheson having wound up by chance in an elevator together recently in the Senate Office Building. They introduced themselves to one another and then "smiled for the birdie". The piece approves of such rides by persons of conflicting viewpoints. Should the elevator break down, it offers, some camaraderie might develop in the commonly shared crisis, as being adrift on a lifeboat in the ocean.
It suggests the remedy for the British-Iranian oil crisis, between Premier Mohammed Mossadegh and Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
But remember the travail of poor Gus... Somebody might get frustrated for the lack of water and push another overboard, down the shaft. It might not wind up the life of Riley, after all.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Try the Towhee", recommends the bird for birdwatching.
Drew Pearson tells of a secret session of the Senate Banking & Currency Committee discussing whether the columnist should go to jail for releasing the minutes of the suppressed 1947 report on the 1944 B & O Railroad and Jesse Jones matter. Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana was the chief promoter of sending him to jail, as Senator Capehart was stated to have been the acting chairman of the Committee in 1947, who suppressed the report of the matter because his own cronies had been involved in the 1944 RFC permission of B & O to default on its 87 million RFC loan by way of a false bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Marshall waited half a day to testify before the Committee as Senator Capehart was pressing for an explanation of how Mr. Pearson obtained the minutes of the 1947 meeting of the Committee and the report itself. He wanted to call the columnist before the Committee and if he refused to answer, send him to jail for contempt.
Other Senators, as William Benton, protested that it would give Mr. Pearson huge publicity. Senator Blair Moody, a former newspaperman, said that he would simply refuse to reveal his source and then the Committee would be stymied. Senator John Bricker agreed. Senator J. William Fulbright added that if Mr. Pearson were subpoenaed, he wanted also to subpoena another party of the Chicago Tribune, suspected of receiving leaks from Senator Capehart. Only Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia supported Senator Capehart in the move and so finally the latter suggested that they "invite" Mr. Pearson to testify on the matter in executive session, but the members also nixed that move. They also refused to endorse a statement that Senator Capehart had not been responsible for suppressing the 1947 report, as the minutes of the Committee did so attest.
In the end, after Senator Charles Tobey, who was the chairman of the Committee in 1947 but was away because of his wife's illness at the time the report was swiftly suppressed at the instance of Senator Capehart, strongly protested what had happened and suggested influence having been exerted by B & O lawyers on Senator Capehart to have it done, the Committee chairman, Burnet Maybank, finally moved that the whole B & O matter and the report's suppression be investigated, a move which was seconded by Senator Paul Douglas, then so ruled by the chair.
Joseph Alsop, writing from London, may give you a sense of deja vu, in which case you are not alone or going bats, as it is, verbatim, without any explanation from the editors, the same editorial which appeared in The News on May 23, and so we defer to the prior summary for your edification, and our quasi-vacation.
Sometimes, we get the impression that the editors do not always read all of the editorials on the page each day, as we do, or retain that very long which they do ingest.
Perhaps there was a glitch in the wire, as the next one is offbeat also, usually consigned to the front page.
Alton L. Blakeslee, A.P. science reporter, discusses a book, Human Fertility: The Modern Dilemma, by Robert C. Cook, managing editor of The Journal of Heredity, in which he had stated that the world was becoming overburdened with population, exploding because of advances in medical science, prolonging life, while the birth rate was remaining the same. He predicted that the world population, 2.5 billion in 1951, would be four billion by 2000. (It was actually about 6.8 billion.)
With that increase, the world was getting dumber in each generation, as the lower socio-economic scales tended to reproduce at a higher rate than those in the more educated groups. In the U.S., one-sixth of the population, primarily in depressed rural areas, were responsible for half the births.
A royal commission in England concluded in 1949 that British intelligence quotients were declining by about two points on average every generation, with the same pattern, said Mr. Cook, found also in the U.S. If the rate continued for a century, England and the U.S., he said, would be well on their way to becoming "nations of near half-wits". The solution lay in more equality in the reproduction rates among all levels of intelligence and restraining unbridled fertility.
In Puerto Rico, he found, the population had doubled in 50 years and stood at 2.2 million after U.S. medical science cut the death rate in half. Slums began appearing and as a result, immigration to the U.S. occurred apace. At the current rate, the population would double again in another 24 years. (By 1975, the population of Puerto Rico was about 2.9 million and, as of 2010, was at 3.7 million.)
In Japan, the death rate had declined during U.S. occupation since 1945 and it was estimated that between 500,000 and 750,000 abortions were performed per year to avoid overburdening the food supply. The Japanese Diet therefore approved abortions, as it did birth control, but the latter was not so utilized.
In India, five million persons had died of starvation in one year, and Asia's population could explode if death rates were reduced there without commensurate controls on fertility.
Don't worry. We got us a war going, to the rescue.
In 1845, Ireland had more than eight million people and then the potato famine struck and millions emigrated or died, such that Ireland in 1950 had a population of but three million. And the Irish, Mr. Cook said, lived better than their British neighbors. Stabilization of the population had occurred through few and late marriages.
Mr. Cook held out hope that the people of the world could solve this dilemma once they were presented with the honest facts, that they would understand that it was better to control fertility than to have their children later die of starvation and disease.
This
date fifty years ago, Senator Robert Kennedy lay dying during the day
on Wednesday, June 5, before passing away, unconscious, at 1:44 a.m.
on June 6. Another man of peace, able well to articulate his views
Reports on the assailant, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a native of Jordan, continued to emerge.
The country was sick. The world was sick. But who was to blame? Was it the President, doing his best under trying circumstances? rising early every morning to go to the war-room to receive casualty reports from Vietnam, while hoping to effect a peace settlement in the Paris Peace Talks before the self-determined end of his term. Was it the people, beset by an unpopular draft for an unpopular war, not to mention the ordinary burdens of life in the mid-Twentieth Century, trying to adjust to an ever-increasing panoply of new inventions and machines designed to make life easier, while only bringing new and increased hardships, pollution, speed, death on the highway, death in the air, death underneath and on the high seas, world wars, and the consequent fear of nuclear annihilation generated to stop world war, the ability to achieve nearly overnight, through radio, television and other mass media, a form of mass hypnosis, and its resultant perception of loss of an easier, more innocent time before the industrial revolution made life so complicated by comforts and stoked a kind of guilt, seemingly in need of expiation, arising from those comforts? Was it Ho Chi Minh, urging his countrymen to fight for independence from colonialism, acting in the mold of his role-model, George Washington? Was it Lee Harvey Oswald or other "loners", as James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, who allegedly picked up guns and fired, affecting millions? Who was to blame?
Maybe it was time, the times out of joint, and the inherent need for man to progress, while also stumbling in the effort, to regain that which he believes to have been lost in the Fall from the Garden, ages ago, beyond the remembrance of anyone's existence or that of progenitors—that which can, in truth, when viewed reasonably and philosophically, only be experienced in the womb and in death—peace without fear and achievement of the four freedoms.
It was a problem through the ages, but perhaps had been more accelerated, brought to man's consciousness more clearly and with greater burden as a result, by the modern age of invention, as was the solution to the dilemma: that we can only strive to approximate it, never achieving it, as that, in itself, presupposes a state of heaven on earth. Yet, there is no need to complicate the matter, to resign one's self, once realized that heaven cannot occur on earth, to create a hell by use of the gun to resolve the argument because of present inability to articulate the cause.
It was the last full day of school in the ninth grade. We awakened that warm spring morning to the sad news, imparted from a soft voice: "They've shot Robert Kennedy."
The school year had begun with the airing of the last two episodes of "The Fugitive", now a trivial matter, long forgotten in the intervening events of the months spanning years.
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