The Charlotte News
Friday, July 6, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the allied command assured the Communist commanders that they would have safe conduct passage to Kaesong, site of the preliminary talks to begin Sunday, with formal ceasefire talks to start Tuesday. Allied bombers and fighters were ordered to stay away from the road down which the emissaries would travel and to maintain a distance of at least five miles from Kaesong.
Lt. General Edward Almond had been awarded an oak leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism and leadership of the Tenth Corps in Korea, cited for his actions between May 16 and 25 when the Corps halted an attack by three Communist armies. Among other acts of bravery, he made six flights in an unarmed plane to or over the front.
The Army estimated that enemy casualties in Korea had risen to 1,191,422 by June 25, an increase of 5,958 over the prior week. Of the total, 606,219 were North Korean and 585,203, Chinese.
The Senate confirmed former Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews to become Ambassador to Ireland. He would be succeeded as Secretary by Dan Kimbal, Undersecretary of the Navy.
The State Department announced that it was canceling all American tariff concessions on goods which Russia and its major satellites shipped to the U.S.
Congressman Charles Bennett of Florida told a Senate subcommittee studying ethics in Government that two weeks earlier he had been offered a substantial bribe to help defense contract seekers meet the right people in Government agencies. He said that he rejected the offer and gave the person a stern lecture. The man had appeared surprised, said that he had participated in the practice during the war. The Congressman did not name the person involved.
In New York, millionaire Frederick Vanderbilt Field was jailed by the Federal District Court for contempt for refusing to reveal the names of the persons who had posted the $80,000 appellate bond for four missing Communist leaders who had failed to surrender to begin their sentences after conviction under the Smith Act and affirmance of the convictions by the Supreme Court. His sentence was for 90 days or until he revealed the names. The court had given Mr. Field overnight while out of custody to consider the matter after finding him in contempt the previous day.
In Tokyo, the 19 Japanese soldiers, who had only recently realized that World War II was over and surrendered on an island in the Marianas, were flown home to Japan and would shortly be repatriated.
The U.S., in two State Department notes, urged Russia to settle its outstanding eleven billion dollar lend-lease account from the war.
A spokesman for the American Retail Federation told the Senate Finance Committee that a retail sales tax would be the best way to finance defense costs, rather than the proposed individual and corporate tax increases.
According to a defense agency bulletin, under the Government allocation plan, only eight percent of the country's steel might be allotted to consumer goods, about 1.7 million tons for the quarter, half that estimated by the agency the prior week.
The DNC intervened in the price control battle, urging Democratic leaders to rally around the President, making it an issue for the 1952 presidential race. House Republicans indicated that they would make it an issue right up to the election.
In Hetton-Le-Hole, England, seven coal miners were killed and two injured in an explosion at Eppleton colliery early this date. About 600 miners escaped the blast which may have been caused by accumulated gases.
A woman whose heart had stopped for twelve minutes during surgery in Boston and was revived, returned home to San Francisco. Doctors said that few people had been revived after having their heart stop for such a period.
Dr. Charlton Jernigan, head of the Department of Classics at Florida State University, had been named to become the president of Queens College in Charlotte, starting August 1. He said that there was a possibility that the Presbyterian women's college could become coeducational. Dr. Jernigan had been born in Dunn, N.C., and graduated from Duke University, where he also received a master's degree and a Ph.D. He had also done graduate work at the University of Chicago. He had taught at both schools and had authored Incongruity in Aristophanes, based on his doctoral dissertation at Duke, "Comic Incongruity in the Eleven Plays of Aristophanes".
On the editorial page, "Death in the Ring" tells of 17-year old M. L. Chandler, Jr., dying in an amateur boxing match in Charlotte on Wednesday. It finds it the result of "gross neglect" that no medical examination had been made of the amateur boxers prior to the event.
The fight had been sanctioned by the AAU but no doctor was present. The Charlotte Boxing & Wrestling Commission denied that it had responsibility, though the City Charter which authorized the Commission specified that it had power to make proper rules and regulations as it deemed necessary for boxing and wrestling. Though the Charter did not distinguish between amateur and professional matches, the Commission appeared to have adopted such a distinction. It had required a complete physical for professional matches.
It finds that while it was too late to save the life of young Mr. Chandler, it was not too late for the Commission to set forth the same rigid standards for amateur fights as it did for professional matches. It suggests that the law might be strengthened by the 1953 Legislature.
"A New Artery for the Piedmont" tells of U.S. Highway 29, opened in the 1920's, passing through the industrial Piedmont of the two Carolinas. New sections had been built and other sections widened, along with new bridges. But only during the current week had there been a realistic proposal to reshape the road to fit modern needs.
Governor Kerr Scott had allocated 7.1 million dollars from surplus highway funds to make it a four-lane highway from Greensboro to Kings Mountain, bypassing the cities along the way. It applauds his decision to spend this money where it was needed most, despite political pressure to spend it elsewhere in the state.
"South Asian Shivaree" tells of a young newspaper editor from Pakistan visiting The News and informing of the issue at stake in the contest between Pakistan and India for control of currently independent Kashmir. Kashmir, he said, would have become part of Pakistan at the time of the partition in 1917 had it not been ruled by a Hindu. At present, only a plebiscite could make it part of Pakistan and a fair vote could not be held as long as Indian troops occupied Kashmir.
He said that the Communists were seeking to discredit the democratic Government of Pakistan by saying that they could not solve the Kashmir issue and were advising the people that the only way to gain Kashmir was to take it by force. That would result in a war between Pakistan and India, weakening all of southern Asia and leaving it open to Communist aggression from the north.
Such were the stakes, it concludes,
as Frank Porter Graham undertook his "impossible" mission
of trying to resolve the crisis. It wishes him success
"Southern Cooking" takes
issue with those who believed that there was no such distinct thing
as Southern cooking. Martin Rywell had published the Tennessee
Cookbook in defiance of that notion, providing recipes for such
concoctions as Chestnut Soup, Catfish Stew, Pork and Greens, Hopping
John, 'Possum and Chestnuts, Tennessee Cracklin' Bread, Chattanooga
Popovers, President Polk's Strawberry Pudding and Knoxville Never
Fail Cake, among other things, including Syllabub
It suggests that such cuisine
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Unbeatable Combination", tells of the amendment offered by Senator Paul Douglas for price rollbacks having been defeated by a vote of 61 to 26, with 36 of the defeating votes coming from Republicans, responding to pressures from manufacturers, and that of the 25 Democratic votes, 20 had come from the South, where cotton prices were at issue, four from the mountain states, where beef was at issue, and one from the East.
It concludes that beef, cotton and manufacturing appeared to be an unbeatable combination of interests.
Drew Pearson tells of the President pathetically appealing to the attorney for Arthur Godfrey to ask the radio host to urge the people to support continuation of price controls. It was signal of the President's own failure to muster support for controls from the people or the Congress, though the Congress knew they were necessary to avoid inflation which could produce depression. But they also knew that the President had no ammunition to fire at them if they failed to support him on the issue, having spent it all on such personal battles as criticizing Paul Hume, the music critic for the Washington Post, for his critique of daughter Margaret's singing performance the prior December, and against Bernard Baruch, the Marine Corps and others.
It was why Senators Ernest McFarland, the Majority Leader, Mike Monroney, who had once championed OPA during the war, and Joe O'Mahoney, supposedly an Administration leader, all turned their backs on the President on this issue.
Three Congressmen had been caught by the column accepting salary kickbacks from bogus employees. Two, former Congressman J. Parnell Thomas and current Congressman Walter Brehm, had been brought to trial and found guilty, but the third, Congressman Victor Wickersham of Oklahoma, had not been.
A construction firm in Florida, Maultsby & Sutton, which had been repairing the lighting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, had been swearing false payrolls and taking kickbacks on Government contracts. He provides the details. The firm had been engaged in "irregularities" on Navy contracts in 1949 but the Navy at the time decided that there may have been some excuse for disregard of provisions of the law.
Marquis Childs discusses the control of the Senate by the Southern Democrats, as Senator Harry F. Byrd had delivered a Jackson-Jefferson Day dinner speech which sounded like a conservative declaration of war on the Administration.
Senator Richard Russell, as chairman of the joint committees which investigated the MacArthur firing, had done a service to the President by keeping the hearings public. Senator Byrd had played an important role in the rescue of the President by steering other Southern Democrats toward a vote for public hearings, a vote which turned out close, 41 to 37.
But now the Southerners wanted to rein in price controls to the point of rendering them meaningless, while cutting defense and foreign aid spending. The Senate had passed a controls bill which was full of holes, gave breaks to the special interests and would be hard to administer. The House decided to throw up its hands and pass a 31-day temporary extension, with which the Senate finally concurred.
For the Southerners to show the same responsibility which they had with regard to the MacArthur hearings would mean passage of at least the controls provided in the Defense Production Act, extended for a month, passage of the House-passed tax increase of 7.2 billion dollars, and holding firm on rebuilding the armed forces in cooperation with NATO, even if an armistice stopped the shooting war in Korea. But no one believed that the Southern Democrats would so vote.
Senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was reported ready to cut one or two billion from the House tax increase. Holes were to be placed in the controls package, allowing for price increases on cotton and other commodities produced in the South.
Senator Byrd looked forward to capturing the party machinery in 1952, a possibility. But, Mr. Childs suggests, if it came by way of revenge and reprisal, it would not be worth much.
Robert C. Ruark tells of moving from a neighborhood which had been too rich for his blood into a "dirty little dead-end street" in Greenwich Village. Whereas the people in midtown East Side just sneered at one another, those in Greenwich Village hollered and cussed and belted each other in the eye when something displeased them.
One night recently he had been tapping away at his Underwood typewriter at 2:00 a.m., when a woman across the court ordered him to shut up the noise, to which he responded, "Drop dead," to which she responded by threatening to call the cops, which, after he said to go right ahead, she did. The cops arrived and shined a flashlight into his office, which prompted him to complain about the fact. He engaged in argument with them regarding civil liberties, which was "still pending".
He believes that he had as much right to type at 2:00 a.m. as a drunk to bawl obscenities on the sidewalk or couples to argue to top of their lungs until dawn or the blaring of radios or fireworks going off during religious festivals. One neighbor threw pails of hot water on people, another played Italian opera recordings for hours, another played the piano loudly, plus an endless parade of panhandlers and bums, all "enriching the general din".
So, since he earned his living by banging a typewriter, he saw no reason not to do so with the windows open on a hot summer night at 2:00 a.m., and until 5:00 a.m., if he so wanted. He resolves to write poems, columns, novels, magazine articles, radio scripts, plays and dirty limericks, if he felt like it.
"Clatter-clatter-bang crash! The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickle peppers! They'll never take me alive!"
A letter writer finds that the China lobby Republicans feared peace in Korea "more than the devil fears holy water", that they were bound to be embarrassed by having portrayed the Russian peace proposal as a trick and the President and Secretary of State Acheson as its dupes.
A letter writer wonders who was a real American and whether a true answer could be given, beyond adherence to the principle of freedom. He finds the New Deal and Fair Deal not representative of true Americanism, that their chief effect was to hold the nation in fear of something.
Whatever you want to believe, you may. That's freedom, brother.
A letter writer says that whether or not there was peace in Korea, the Government would find a way to spend the taxpayers' money.
Framed Edition
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