The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 9, 1951

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Communist Chinese troops began retreating from their main Korean stronghold in the "iron triangle" of Chorwon, Kumhwa and Pyonggang, falling back toward Kumsong, seventeen miles east of Pyonggang. Censorship blocked reports of exact positions of the allies. Loss of Chorwon, the first town apparently being evacuated, would make the enemy vulnerable to allied artillery and tanks through the valley, and could drive them as far back as Wonsan, 95 miles north of the 38th parallel. Two important ridges were captured by the allies.

South Koreans worried that Secretary of Defense Marshall's visit to the front signaled an impending U.N.-declared ceasefire and President Syngman Rhee declared that if such were the case, the South Koreans would "do something in desperation".

In London, John Foster Dulles confirmed that Western talks on a Japanese treaty had bogged down. He would not disclose details but a reliable source said that the problem was a French suggestion that the Western allies defer making a treaty.

In connection with questioning of Secretary of State Acheson by members of the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees regarding the pro-Nationalist China lobby, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire proposed an investigation of the lobbies generally and their pressures placed on allies of the U.S. The Secretary said that the President had ordered all Government agencies to cooperate fully with any such inquiry. He said that the State Department had, at the behest of Senator Wayne Morse, investigated the China lobby and in the process obtained hearsay information which, if true, would show the lobby not in compliance with U.S. law prohibiting recruitment within the country of armies for foreign countries. He also said that the MacArthur camp's contention that Washington wanted U.S. troops withdrawn from Korea by winter and made a scapegoat for political advantage was untrue.

General MacArthur sent a telegram to Senator William Knowland saying that any intimation by Secretary Acheson that the General had favored in December, 1945 a coalition Nationalist-Communist Government in China was a "prevarication". He said that the efforts of the U.S. to force the Nationalist Government into a political alliance with the Communists was "one of the greatest blunders in American diplomatic history", for which the world was paying in "blood and disaster". Mr. Acheson had defended efforts in 1945-46 by then special emissary to China, General Marshall, to bring about such a coalition government.

"MORE MORE MORE MORE MO"? Some printer's devil has been reading our tagline on the weekly "Turpentine Drippings" and seeking weakly to emulate it. That's alright. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

In Salzburg, Austria, the U.S. Army forcibly ejected a three-man Russian repatriation mission from the American zone this date after commandeering their black Mercedes Benz and driving them in it to the Russian zone. The Russians had refused an order to leave, issued by the U.S. on the basis that their repatriation mission had been achieved, with only 26 persons repatriated between September, 1949 and September, 1950.

In London, it was reported that the British Foreign Office had broadened its search to Italy for the missing two employees, in possession of State secrets, after a telegram from one of the men was received by family members from Rome. Speculation in both London and Washington was that the men had defected behind the iron curtain.

Tornadoes hit three farming communities in Oklahoma, destroying dozens of homes and killing two persons.

FBI agents were investigating the the biggest multiple jet disaster in history after eight Air Force jets had crashed over Richmond, Ind., resulting in the deaths of three pilots and injuries to two others while another parachuted to safety. It does not mention the other two. The FBI was looking for evidence of sabotage amid the wreckage. Witnesses said that the jets entered a cloud bank just as lightning struck and a moment later there had been an explosion. It was known that the jets had not collided with one another. Two survivors said that the thunderstorm was not the cause of the accident.

In Orlando, Fla., the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., composed of churches in sixteen Southern states, were informed that television would soon be engaged in teaching Presbyterians about the church, via the Protestant Radio Center, Inc., of Atlanta, the only cooperative broadcasting center in the country.

Bob Sain of The News reviews on the book-page Irwin Shaw's novel, The Troubled Air, regarding Communist influence via radio, a subject being investigated by a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina.

On the editorial page, "Jackals and Wolves" finds that the aid to be provided by the U.S. to Tito's Yugoslavia, to help it resist the Soviets, came with the calculated risk that Tito, still a Communist, might repair relations with Russia and thus once again become part of the Soviet sphere. But, it concludes, the State Department's logic was sound, that it was better to tolerate the jackals to discourage the wolves.

"'Separate But Equal' since 1849" tells of the concept made known by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 having actually originated in a Massachusetts Supreme Court case in 1849, Roberts v. City of Boston, in which that Court held, overruling the argument of abolitionist leader Charles Sumner, representing the plaintiff, who sought admission of his black daughter to an all-white public school in Boston, that the Boston School Committee had exclusive authority to determine whether its schools would be segregated, that the rights to equality under the law, as recognized by the laws and Constitution of Massachusetts, nevertheless allowed for laws "adapted to [individuals'] respective relations and conditions", and so separate schools were not violative of those equal rights.

The opinion was subsequently cited by numerous states across the nation, from California to New York, Oregon to South Carolina, in advance of Plessy, which cited the opinion as a principal basis for its separate-but-equal doctrine.

So what? All you have proved is that this silly, paternalistic doctrine, promulgated as a rationalization for any manner of hypocritical exception to equality in the land of liberty, had antecedents in the law at least 47 years before Plessy and 12 years before the Civil War, originating in the North. Sounds like that old Southern defensiveness coming back in there.

They done it before us. So it must be okay.

Once a doctrine is in place, it must not be disturbed, no matter how outmoded and ridiculous its application had become in modern times.

What goddamned turnip truck did you fall off of?

It should be noted that Mr. Sumner was one of the chief villians of Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots from 1903 as well as The Clansman from 1905, hence also of the "The Birth of a Nation", the film made from those novels in 1915.

Now, look heya, all this integratin' is not goin' to work 'cause you got all these little Negra boys comin' in heya slurrupin' after our daughtas and leerin' at them as if they were ice cream cones as they try to study. Young Lascivious and Sultry ova theya, supreme examples of feminine pulchritude, havin' come from superia gene pools, have to study with dedication without flirtation from some plantation descendant distractin' their cou'se, in o'der to be a credit to theya nation and obtain qualification to college without sufferin' the leerin' and slurrupin' of those who practice no restraint with theya eyes. It would be betta for the Negras, too, to be with theya own kind.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "The Diplomacy of Reluctance", finds the Western Big Three nations' continuing objection to discussion of NATO at the proposed Big Four conference of foreign ministers to be quibbling about a relatively minor point. The Russians would raise it anyway even if taken off the table and so it suggested, both by the Russian insistence on the item and the Big Three objection to it, that the Big Four apparently did not really desire such a conference. If it took place, it would probably only be because neither side wanted the blame for preventing occurrence of the conference.

Drew Pearson tells of Col. Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, having an eye on having Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois become the GOP nominee for the presidency in 1952, while ostensibly backing Senator Taft for the nomination. He in fact hoped that there would be a deadlock at the convention between the forces backing Senator Taft and those backing General Eisenhower, out of which would emerge the nomination of Senator Dirksen.

He notes that the irony was that Senator Dirksen would make, by himself, a good president, but not while bogged down with Tribune neo-isolationist policies.

The China lobby, about which Senator Wayne Morse had inquired of Secretary Acheson, was one of the most powerful in Washington, having contributed to the campaign funds of many on Capitol Hill. The question was met with a long pause amid silence, and Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the joint Committees, thereafter banged the gavel and said that Senator Morse's time for questioning had expired and would have to be resumed the next day.

William J. Kennedy, chairman of the Railroad Retirement Board, told Argentine dictator Juan Peron to his face recently that his closing of La Prensa, the independent newspaper in Buenos Aires, was a major mistake as a free press criticizing the leadership of a country was a good thing. He cited the fact that most of the press had been opposed to FDR throughout his tenure in office, and yet he had been elected four times to the Presidency. El Presidente Peron made no reply. In response to his silence, Mr. Kennedy said that Sr. Peron had a "glass chin".

He provides a lengthy quote from a story in Newsweek which tended to confirm the ongoing feud between Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson and Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston, as Mr. Pearson had reported but which had been denied by Mr. Wilson.

Robert C. Ruark launches into an attack of Secretary of State Acheson's statement to the joint Senate Committees defending the concessions made to Russia at Yalta as having been designed to induce Russia's participation in the war in the Pacific to defeat finally Japan. He had said that the leaders of the country were not certain until the Trinity test in mid-July, 1945, during the Potsdam Conference, that the atom bomb would work and so earlier in the year had conceived of the daunting possibility of a land invasion of Japan—estimated at the time to cost 100,000 American lives.

Mr. Ruark, exhibiting a very poor memory of the events occurring six years earlier while he was in the Navy and fighting in the Pacific, thus perhaps explaining his lack of awareness of the big picture as it transpired, finds Secretary Acheson's comments poppycock, that the leaders knew the war in the Pacific was already won, that he had known it was won in fall, 1944, that they were equally certain that the atom bomb would work, and had therefore simply engaged in a big giveaway of advantages to the Soviets by making the concessions of Pacific territory to the Russians at Yalta and allowing the Red Army to take Berlin from the east while the Western Allies camped at the Elbe.

Twenty-twenty hindsight is perfect, and in this case, Mr. Ruark needs some glasses to achieve foresight from the time in which the prior events had occurred. He engages in a convenient pandering to the mass of opinion in the country opposed to Secretary Acheson, making rationalization after rationalization based entirely on false and absurd premises. Of course, no one knew that the atomic bomb would work until the Trinity test proved it would. Even the scientists at Los Alamos had no idea whether the bomb would work, or, indeed, whether it might work too well and set up a chain reaction in the atmosphere which would explode the earth. The Russians had been the sine qua non for winning the war in Europe without substantially more time and expenditure of countless more Allied lives, by occupying the Nazis in Russia from June 22, 1941 through early 1944. The issue at Yalta, therefore, was not entirely one of strategy but also to avoid the perception that the Western Allies would turn around after that sacrifice of Russian lives and stab Russia in the back.

Mr. Ruark needed a history lesson, perhaps less time spent in bars with his pals and more time reading about the war in which he had fought.

Tom Schlesinger of the News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", informs that many Senators believed that the regular work of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees was being hampered by the prolonged hearings before the two Committees on the firing of General MacArthur and, while the public as a result had become better informed of the reasons for the Korean war and its strategy, nevertheless the public appeared to be growing tired of the hearings. Senator Clyde Hoey was among those so thinking. He believed that the Administration's policy on Korea had been vindicated as supported by responsible military and civilian chiefs in the Government.

Senator Hoey appeared rested after receiving his honorary degree from Bob Jones University and making three commencement addresses. He said that he received more questions back home regarding price control requirements than on anything else.

Congressman Hamilton Jones of Charlotte placed in the Congressional Record the two articles a week earlier appearing on the editorial page of The News, by its publisher Thomas L. Robinson, regarding the Atlantic Union concept.

The Agriculture Department predicted that cigarette output in the nation would likely set a new record in the 1950-51 fiscal year, with 410 billion fags sold, compared to 383 billion the prior year.

Senator Pat McCarran had named Senator Willis Smith, along with Senators Homer Ferguson and Harley Kilgore, to a subcommittee to investigate the problems of self-incrimination and immunity of witnesses in testifying before Congressional committees. Senator McCarran was reported in opposition to an Administration measure to permit the Attorney General to grant, at his discretion, immunity from prosecution in Federal courts to important witnesses appearing before Congress or the Federal courts.

Critics agreed that this year's version of Paul Green's outdoor drama in Washington on the life of George Washington, "Faith of Our Fathers", was superior to the prior year's version, and the Washington Times-Herald had found it "an impressive spectacle" but lamented the poor showing in attendance, with the amphitheater at the opening only half full, with about 2,000 spectators.

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