The Charlotte News
Monday, July 2, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that North Korea had urged its soldiers to continue to fight until word came confirming truce talks, despite Pyongyang radio repeating Chinese and North Korean acceptance of the U.N. proposal to enter the talks. The radio message made it clear that the Communists were proclaiming victory, saying, "The Anglo-American aggressors have at last realized failure of their sinister attempt and that is why they are seeking peace."
The Communist acceptance was premised on meeting in Kaesong after July 10, whereas General Matthew Ridgway had suggested meeting aboard a Danish hospital ship in Wonsan Harbor. It was presumed that the U.N. would agree to the designated place and time for the start of the discussions, but no reply had yet been issued, though consultations among the allied leaders was taking place, with Secretary of State Acheson consulting with the President and Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk meeting separately with British and French embassy officials.
In Korea, there were heavy ground skirmishes at scattered points, especially on the western front, and allied warplanes hit Hwangju airfield in the northwest while B-29s hit barracks at Hungham on the east coast.
Secretary of Defense Marshall told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there would be no rush to bring American troops home in the event an armistice was negotiated.
Senator George Aiken of Vermont warned that an armistice might cause Congress to let price and wage controls die at the end of July, after being extended for one additional month to allow for further debate. The President had signed the temporary extension bill on Saturday, preventing any further controls from being imposed during July.
Senator Taft urged the U.S. to unleash the Nationalist Chinese troops on Formosa in an effort to oust the Communist Government on the mainland, regardless of what transpired during the ceasefire negotiations. He wanted the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees to write into a report on the MacArthur hearings the recommendation that such be done, in accord with the desires of General MacArthur. Senator Harry Cain of Washington supported the effort. Senator Taft said that it was premature, however, to order bombing of Chinese bases in Manchuria or blockading of Chinese ports, as also favored by General MacArthur.
An unnamed soldier who had served in the Air Force for two years before serendipitously being shipped to the front during leave to serve in the Army infantry and remaining quiet about the mistake until he reached the front lines, was having his status determined by the Army and Air Force, while, at his request, remaining in the infantry in the meantime.
In Prague, Associated Press correspondent William Oatis, arrested April 23 and since held incommunicado on charges of spying, issued an obligatory confession to the charges. Mr. Oatis was charged with heading a spy center directed by the Associated Press.
In New York, the Federal District Court ordered seven of the top eleven American Communists convicted under the Smith Act to begin serving their five-year sentences and ordered bench warrants to issue for the four others who had not yet surrendered. One of the defendants who had not yet surrendered, Robert Thompson, had been sentenced to the lesser term of three years based on his war record.
In Washington, a half million dollars worth of marijuana was seized from the secret compartments of an automobile, reputedly the largest single haul ever interdicted in the country. A 24-hour watch had been placed on the car on the tip that New York City hoodlums would seek to snatch it. The presence of the marijuana was the result of a tip that a large shipment had been brought into the country from Mexico two weeks earlier.
Also in Washington, a transit strike of bus and streetcar operators, seeking 30-cent per hour raises and other concessions, forced thousands of workers to walk, hitchhike or take taxis in the nation's capital. Attempts by Federal mediator Cyrus Ching to work out a settlement had transpired until midnight Saturday without result, until the parties were too exhausted to continue.
In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott, during swearing-in ceremonies for several Superior Court judges, criticized the 1951 Legislature for dragging its feet on highway safety legislation and regarding stricter enforcement of prohibition laws in dry counties. Among the judges being sworn in was Susie Sharp, who would eventually rise in 1975 to become Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, after having been appointed to the Court by Governor Terry Sanford in 1962.
On page 2-B, the results of several weeks of News reader balloting are presented to show the All Time Hornet baseball team. Don't get stung.
On the editorial page, "The Slow Processes of Peace" tells of the Communist Chinese and North Koreans accepting, just 39 hours after it had been tendered by General Ridgway, the invitation to engage in ceasefire talks. As expected, the Communist proposed to hold the talks in Kaesong, the only town in South Korea still in Communist hands, rather than on a hospital ship in Wonsan Harbor as proposed by General Ridgway.
Communist propaganda insisted that the U.N. forces had lost the war and were suing for peace, and their selection of Kaesong was confirmation of their propaganda show, whereas Wonsan was 90 miles north of the parallel and poised under allied warship guns.
Initial indications were that the U.N. commanders would not object to meeting in Kaesong or might suggest a third site.
Word was that the war would continue at full tilt until the start of the peace talks. A lull between July 10 and 15 would help the Communists who were building up forces west of Kaesong.
While hopes were higher for peace than at any time during the previous year since the start of the war, American officials were still guarded in their optimism, as the record of Communism discouraged positive thinking. The piece suggests that the American people should view the talks likewise.
"Lane Straddlers and Lane Jumpers" finds that when viewed from above within the Ivory Tower of The News, the motorists below were often puzzling, but that those who puzzled the most were the lane jumpers and straddlers, the latter oblivious to the notion that no one could pass on a downtown street while the former passed cars right and left while shifting dangerously from lane to lane.
The only remedy seemed to be strict enforcement by the police and a lecture on why the City traffic engineer bothered to paint the white lines on the streets in the first instance.
"Don't Be a Guberif!" tells of various forest conservation efforts around the country,
including that of the North Carolina 4-H clubs, planting more than
1.1 million seedlings during the year, with 1,241 members taking
part. Farmers and landowners were learning more each year about
preserving the forests of the country. One of the most productive
parts of the program, the Tree Farm movement, had just observed its
tenth anniversary at Montesano
But, it offers, there was still a lesson to be learned from a sign in Idaho which bore the title of the piece.
By unerring logic, however, should the slogan not, in hindsight, have read, "Be a guberif"?
A piece from the Arkansas Gazette, titled "Flora & Fauna, Inc.", tells of having recently taken the position that there was no noun of assembly for cats, such as a pride of lions, skein of geese, den or skulk of foxes, covey of quail, etc., so that it intended to use "pride" so to connote it until a better term came along. But since that time, the London Times had discovered the use in earlier days of "clowder", meaning "clutter", to denote a gaggle of cats, and "kindle" for a flock of kittens. It accepts the nomenclature.
It wants, however, to extend the notion to flora, such as in drifts of daffodils and rows of cotton blossoms, to include murmuration of sparrowgrass, or exultation of larkspur, herd of cowslips or yoke of oxalis, team of horse chestnuts or packs of dogwood and wolfsbane, flocks of chickenweed, clowder of catnip, kindle of pussy willows, den of foxglove, or ravigote of crabgrass and bevy of maiden fern.
It defers to the London Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had also gotten into the act, as they likely had more energy during the summer, with the piece resigning itself only to sit under a "plague of locust-blossoms" to watch "the gentle swaying of a hesitancy of bachelor-buttons".
Drew Pearson tells of U.S. officials being more concerned about the Iranian-British oil crisis than they were stating publicly because Western Europe depended on this oil and if it were cut off, the U.S., already importing a million barrels per day, would have to take up some of the slack, leading to rationing at home. Russia wanted revolution in Iran, providing the Communists an opportunity to gain control, an event made more likely with British oil royalties ceased. Moreover, trouble in one oil country could spread to others, as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, even to Venezuela.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who for two summers had ridden all over Iran, had warned the State Department months earlier of trouble brewing. The State Department, in response the previous winter, had then called in the British Ambassador and dressed him down, at a time when there was still an opportunity to act. But Britain had been slow to increase its royalty payments from 25 percent, in contrast to the 50 percent paid by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia.
The feudal lords in Iran were also reluctant to use the 25 million dollar U.S. Export-Import Bank loan for building schools or bringing about land reform. It was difficult to get Britain to increase its royalties or the Iranian landowners to reform.
A House report criticized the location of the Marine Corps Depot at inland Albany, Ga., a slap at House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia, who had obtained other military installations for Georgia as well. He had also rammed through the House a measure to provide for prior consultation with him before the acquisition of any property by the armed forces, effectively, if passed by the Senate, allowing Mr. Vinson to control the placement of military installations.
Congressman Herbert Bonner of North Carolina, which had Fort Bragg, Cherry Point, and Camp Lejeune, did not approve of the location of the Depot in Albany and so his subcommittee had issued the negative report.
Mr. Pearson notes that the report suggested how sectional politics were being placed ahead of the national welfare.
Stewart Alsop discusses the difficulty of the economic controls effort by Mobilization director Charles E. Wilson, Price administrator Mike DiSalle, and Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston. Business on the one hand was resisting the effort, wondering what had happened to the trio after they came to Washington. The three realized, however, that it was necessary to impose controls to prevent runaway inflation in time of war. Inflation was produced by the gap between production and consumption. If there was more money circulating than goods to be had, money lost value, producing loss of confidence in the dollar, increases in political tension, industrial unrest, and disastrous reduction of the defense effort for the higher cost of defense items.
To interrupt this cycle, the trio of administrators had to see to it that a ten billion dollar tax increase was passed to take money out of the spending streams, that the rate of personal savings be doubled to 20 billion dollars, further taking money from consumption, strict price and wage controls implemented, bank reserve requirements and credit restrictions increased, the latter a bane to merchants, plus non-defense expenditures reduced. All of these things were politically unpopular, with the consequence that it was tough to get Congress to vote for these measures during the Korean war, let alone should peace come.
In the latter event, the pressure would be against continued mobilization and controls. Yet, no politician wanted to be responsible for reduction of defense and so there was the danger that Congress instead would gut the controls necessary to support the defense effort. Thus a truce in Korea, he ventures, would present a tougher test for the American people than the war, itself.
Robert C. Ruark, who may or may not have returned from safari in Africa, tells of Dr. Benjamin Spock recommending to mothers that they not feed their babies on a schedule and according to a strict diet but rather tailor it to individual preferences. Mr. Ruark finds such an approach comical as he says he wanted nothing to eat as a child save ice cream, while his mother used castor oil and the back of her hairbrush to deter his appetite for the wrong foods. He says that by age ten, he was a complex of tangled emotions and frustrations, the result of torture by his mother. He could not even kick his teachers or play hooky, and was punished for bad grades. He was so disciplined and regimented that he developed excellent teeth, stood close to six feet tall, weighed 150 pounds and could lick any kid in class.
A letter writer wants the public to make their feelings known to Congressmen about extension of Regulation W, which, among other things, had set controls on installment purchases of used cars, and, he thinks, had the opposite effect as that intended.
A letter writer from Pittsboro expresses upset at the June 26 editorial, "Segregation—A State Responsibility", finding the piece a good interpretation of Briggs v. Elliott, the Federal District Court decision upholding the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine, leaving to the individual states under the Tenth Amendment the decision to segregate or integrate public schools, while also ordering the Clarendon County, South Carolina, school district to comply with provision of equal facilities for black and white students, and to report on its compliance in that regard within six months. The correspondent takes exception, however, to the last sentence of the editorial, concluding that as long as the State wanted the luxury of segregation, it would have to pay for it.
He believes that segregated schools should not cost significantly more than integrated schools, as the overall cost of the physical plant and teacher salaries would remain the same, though student-teacher ratios and transportation loads would be increased with integration.
He thinks the law was confused at this point, as on appeal, the Fourth Circuit, in the case of McKissick, et al. v. Carmichael, following Sweatt v. Painter, had ordered the integration of the UNC Law School for qualified black applicants for there being no substantially equal black segregated public law school in the state. But, he wonders, whether it would apply also to the primary and secondary schools and the undergraduate institutions run by the State.
You will have your clarification in three years.
Then, perhaps, you ought actually read Brown v. Board of Education, start to finish, including the footnotes, take notes and re-read the portions you do not understand, and thereby help to save the country sixteen years of crazy nonsense implementing the decision in the face of that being uttered by the refugees from reality who invariably refuse to recognize right from wrong, left from right and their upside from their downside.
We note that The News editorial page did not mention the passing the prior day of the tenth anniversary of the death of W. J. Cash in Mexico, as it had five years earlier on the fifth anniversary when the associate editor, responsible for editorial writing, was Harry Ashmore and the editor was J. E. Dowd, who had been editor when Cash was employed at The News between late 1937 and May, 1941. That was so, despite 1951 editor Pete McKnight having been a friend to Cash, rooming just down the hall from him in the Frederick Apartments during the period of early 1938 through latter 1940, as Cash had finished The Mind of the South while also being associate editor of The News. It was Mr. McKnight, in fact, who first imparted the news of Cash's death to a family member, brother-in-law Charles Elkins, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1941.
Perhaps the most
fitting tribute to Cash would come in the wake of Brown v.
Board, when readership of The Mind of the South
would so increase that Knopf issued the first paperback edition of the book in
1954. The book was not without significant connection to that
groundbreaking case, as the dissent in Briggs,
which ultimately formed the foundation for the unanimous opinion in
Brown, had been written by Federal District
Court Judge J. Waites Waring
Cash was not the
only influence on this landmark decision from the alumni of The
News. Indeed, Mr. Ashmore, who expressly admired
Cash's work, published his first book in 1954, The Negro
and the Schools, which apparently was consulted by the
Supreme Court during the process of considering the implementing
decision in Brown, issued in 1955. Mr. Ashmore, as editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his even-tempered editorials on the court-ordered
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