The Charlotte News
Friday, August 10, 1951
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Kaesong, U.N. and Communist negotiators sat in complete silence for two hours and eleven minutes after resumption of the ceasefire negotiations, the reason being that the Communists refused to talk about anything other than a buffer zone located where they wanted it. Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, chief U.N. delegate, proposed several opportunities to break the deadlock, but Lt. General Nam Il, head of the Communist delegation, refused to reply. Eventually, he said, consistent with the prior position, that the only way the deadlock could be broken was for the 38th parallel to be accepted as the ceasefire line. Both sides agreed to resume "talks" the following day.
Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told the House that a 5.7 billion dollar military construction bill was necessary because Russia had the atomic bomb and planes which could deliver it to the U.S. mainland. He said that it would be the largest single military construction bill ever submitted to the Congress in peace or wartime, but was necessary to counter the Russian military buildup.
Senator Joseph McCarthy offered to allow a committee headed by a "good Democrat" determine who was correct in his latest feud with the State Department and some of his colleagues regarding his charges of Communists in the Government, suggesting that Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada and his Internal Security subcommittee be charged with that responsibility. The previous day, he again used his Senatorial immunity from defamation action to name 26 persons among State Department officials and employees "charged with Communist activities".
In response, Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland of Arizona protested vigorously against what he called the Senator's use of immunity to "smear any individual" as "a character assassin". Senator Herbert Lehman of New York said that Senator McCarthy had provided "shabby and dastardly treatment" to Ambassador Philip Jessup, one of the 26 persons named by Senator McCarthy. Mr. Jessup was not immediately available for comment but Undersecretary of State Carlisle Humelsine issued a statement accusing the Senator of "smear tactics in making this misleading list of names public", adding that two of the persons on the list did not even work for the Department. Senator McCarthy challenged the statement and declared that he was anxious to have the McCarran subcommittee decide the whole matter. He insisted that all of his files were open to that committee and hoped that it would get into the details.
The Senator's speech before the Senate had been well-publicized in advance and had drawn large crowds to the public galleries, though few Senators were on hand to hear it. At one point, Senator McCarthy received a loud round of applause from the galleries, a violation of Senate rules, when he charged that if the Democrats were to win in the 1952 elections, it would be with "the McCarran-type of Democrat" instead of those who screamed to high heaven, "You are smearing these poor innocent people."
Most of the persons named by Senator McCarthy immediately responded by denying the allegations. Those included Robert Warren Barnett, assistant adviser on Japanese affairs and his wife, consultant, and foreign affairs specialist, Philip Raine, cultural attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, John P. Davies, adviser to U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy in West Germany, Maroia R. Harrison, an economist in the office of the International Materials Policy Division, Daniel Margolies, an economist in the Department's Bureau of German Affairs, and Esther Brunauer, U.S. representative to the preparatory commission of UNESCO.
Dr. Edward U. Condon, a physicist who was an expert in atomic energy, resigned this date as director of the National Bureau of Standards, saying that he could no longer afford to accept the severe financial sacrifice involved. The President accepted the resignation, effective September 30, "with regret". He said that Dr. Condon had served the country "in a most critical position with continued and loyal attention to his duties". He was leaving the Government to take a job in private industry with Corning Glass Company in Corning, N.Y., as director of research and development at its laboratories. He had been director of research at Westinghouse prior to entering the Government in 1945. Dr. Condon had been the subject of intense investigation by HUAC three years earlier when subsequently jailed former Congressman J. Parnell Thomas chaired that Committee. The Committee had called him "one of the weakest links in our atomic security", a charge, however, from which it subsequently backed away and repudiated after several Government officials came to his defense, including Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer and former Secretary Averell Harriman. No hearing was ever held anent his loyalty despite Dr. Condon demanding one.
Individual income increased in June to a new record rate of $251.1 billion per year, advancing 1.3 billion over May. Wage and salary receipts were up about 20 percent since the beginning of the Korean War.
According to a report, while it would be necessary to have small amounts of steel, copper or aluminum handy on a construction site to build a house, all of those materials would, pursuant to Government regulations, become scarce after September 30. The National Production Authority emphasized that it did not want to discourage home-building but it had to fix strict limits on the quantities of scarce metals available absent specific authorization for their allocation and use. The piece explains what the ordinary homebuilder would need to do to comply with the regulations and obtain the small amounts necessary for a project. Read carefully should you intend to start building a house after September 30. These regulations may still be in the offing, even if no one knows about it.
In Como, Italy, flooding of five villages took the lives of 26 persons.
In Cannes, France, Egypt's King Farouk lost the equivalent of $85,700 in six and a half hours while gambling at a casino on the French Riviera. The previous night, his cousin was reported to have lost $77,100. Onlookers said that the King did not look perturbed.
Bishop Homer Tomlinson, general overseer of the Church of God, said that he would run for the presidency in 1952 on a "platform of righteousness". He intended to call upon "men of God" to fill every political office in the next election. He began a 21-day fast to last until Labor Day. Afterward, he would make a 42-state tour.
On the editorial page, "Congress Partly to Blame?" tells of Army football coach Earl (Red) Blaik remarking that high school football stars who visited West Point had their way paid by interested alumni and that those who passed the entrance examination after cramming usually received appointments to the Academy if they desired them.
The statement suggested that some Congressmen agreed in advance to appoint athletes to the Academy, even when non-athletes might have better records. One unnamed Congressman had reported that he and some others in Congress had been approached by Mr. Blaik and urged to appoint promising athletes.
It suggests that such involvement
probably influenced the investigating subcommittee chaired by Senator
Clyde Hoey in reaching its unanimous decision not to look into the
West Point cheating scandal which resulted in the expulsion of 90
Cadets, the majority of whom were members of the football squad
The episode suggested that too much emphasis was being placed on winning collegiate football teams. In earlier times, athletic prowess was more desirable in soldiers than was required currently, as many West Point graduates were filling positions of great responsibility far from the battlefield. Now, a greater premium was to be placed on the well-rounded graduate rather than the "muscle-bound fullback".
Army, having gone 8-1 in 1950 and winding up in the top five nationally, would drop a mite to 2 and 7 in 1951.
Cheaters never win and losers never cheat.
The ceiling is the basement.
"Spotlight on Charlotte" tells of Business Week in its next day's edition devoting nine
pages, with 11 pictures, to Charlotte, characterizing it as
"unsouthern, untypical", while digging into its tripled
population increase within the previous 30 years. It determined that
"distribution" had been the key, the service of
manufacturers across the Carolinas and, in some instances, the entire
Southeast. The many non-natives in the city were readily accepted by
various civic groups, clubs, and in politics. The provincialism of
many Southern cities was lacking, the report said, as such quaint and
conservative organizations as the Daughters of the American
Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy
The report also found faults, that the lack of a decent auditorium was a drawback, that the streets were too narrow without enough parking places, that the sewage-treatment system was overtaxed, and that the city did not have enough good eating places.
But by and large, the appraisal was highly favorable and the glowing report should attract, it suggests, many people to do business in the Piedmont.
"Diogenes, Here's Your Man" tells of the attorney and owner of a local aircraft company, which had leased a plot of ground owned by the Municipal Airport, having proved that there were honest people around. After the City was frustrated in being able to cancel the lease by the absence of a cancellation clause in the first lease, the attorney had found a second lease regarding the sale of gasoline, which had mentioned the first lease and set forth the right of the City to revoke both leases on proper notice. Then, the City recorder was able to find the second lease, filed under "gasoline".
The difference was that the City only had to pay $21,000 to the company and not $50,000 to obtain the surrender of the lease. It urges that the taxpayers of the city owed a debt of gratitude to the honesty of these two individuals, and that a better filing system for City documents ought be implemented.
"A Loyal Guardsman" tells of the National Guard having lost much of its luster during the period between the wars, causing appropriations for it across the states of the nation to fall off.
In North Carolina, however, the Guard was more than just a force on paper and one of the men responsible for this effort had been Paul Younts, just resigned as commanding officer of IV Corps Artillery, with the rank of colonel. Col. Younts had joined the Guard in 1916 and fought in World War I, had maintained an active interest in the Guard in the subsequent years. He had served as chief of staff of the 30th Division and subsequently as deputy chief of staff of the 13th Air Force in the Pacific during World War II. He was then assigned to command the Overseas Replacement Depot at Greensboro.
He had resigned his command of the Guard unit to devote more time to personal and business affairs, but also said that if all-out war should erupt, he would be ready to return to active duty.
"Congress Needs an Over-Hauling" suggests that the editorial on the page from Business Week merited the attention of every taxpayer, as it showed very clearly why the Congress was unable to control governmental expenditures. The reason posited was that its ancient machinery was not geared to the modern pace of government spending and that the refusal to modernize its system stemmed from jealousy between appropriations committee prerogatives.
The fact that Congress resorted sometimes to flat percentage slashes of agency budgets suggested that it was not able to discriminate between essential and non-essential spending.
The piece urges taxpayers to tell their elected representatives of the necessity for eliminating the frills of government and to vote for persons who were in favor of economy. That would be the only way, it urges, to get Congress finally to respond.
A piece from the St. Louis Star-Times, titled "Pigeon Legacy", tells of a wealthy Chicago widow leaving a $5,000 bequest to feed pigeons three times a week on two downtown street corners, finding it "a most dangerous sort of prodigality". Pigeons, it finds, were about the most arrogant birds around. They would take over public buildings, statues and park benches, as if owning a stake in them. They stalked the pavements in the parks with a proprietary air and gave the passersby only the "beadiest of beady eyes", muttered to themselves subversively.
All these things, it concludes, they had done before the referenced widow had provided them her bequest. Now, with the money in hand, their pride would reach new heights, causing mere mortals among men to have to compete against them without much chance.
A piece from Business Week, as indicated in the above editorial, tells of Congress trying to put tighter controls on Federal Government spending through establishment of a joint committee on the budget, attempting to create its own counterpart to the Administration's Bureau of the Budget. The proposed committee would be backed by a staff of experts and its intent would be to enable Congress to do a better job of appraising the Government budget.
It provides some detail of the proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, and then suggests what the Congress might do to pare it down reasonably, as well as assessing the obstacles in the way of doing so, that being primarily the "internal politics" of Capitol Hill, that is the jealousy by the appropriations committees of their authority.
Senator John McClellan of Arkansas and other backers of the joint committee idea were willing to compromise to establish the joint committee and figured it would take at least two years before any progress could be realized. His bill, the piece predicts, had a good chance to pass the Senate but not the House, where the Appropriations Committee chairman, Congressman Clarence Cannon, would likely battle against any encroachment on his authority by a new joint committee.
Drew Pearson tells, with good timing, of it being a grave matter for one Senator to introduce a resolution to unseat a fellow Senator, but Senator William Benton of Connecticut proceeding carefully to document the case against Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin before calling for his ouster.
He sets forth the reasons which had led Senator Benton to demand the investigation, with a view toward Senator McCarthy's expulsion.
Senator McCarthy had tried to intimidate his press critics, undertaking the greatest challenge to freedom of the press since the Civil War. He had charges the Washington Post with being a "Communist camp follower", the Milwaukee Journal, with being the "Milwaukee edition" of the Communist Daily Worker, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with being the "St. Louis edition" thereof. He had repeatedly taken on the Madison (Wisc.) Capital-Times as being pro-Communist. And he had also called Mr. Pearson the "voice of international Communism". On one occasion, he had even accused the conservative Saturday Evening Post of following the Daily Worker line.
These organs of journalism, Mr. Pearson says, were consistent only in attacking Senator McCarthy. He had made these charges while cloaked in Senatorial immunity on the Senate floor.
The Senator had succeeded where the Communists had failed in undermining the Government. Two primary targets of Communist propaganda were Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of Defense Marshall. Yet the Senator's attacks on both men had been more vitriolic and more damaging than the worst line the Communists had disseminated.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had proof within its files that Senator McCarthy once unwittingly worked with a Communist ring to undermine the American occupation of Germany. He had produced sensational charges that the Army had tortured German war criminals after such charges and been manufactured in Germany and mailed to the Senator in manila envelopes. He had misplaced one of the envelopes, leaving it in the Armed Services Committees hearing room. The return address on the envelope was to a member of a Communist ring which had prepared the trumped-up charges for the Senator and then circulated his speeches in Germany to stir up anti-American feeling.
His charges were investigated by a Senate committee headed by Republican Senator Ray Baldwin of Connecticut, the conclusion of which having been that more than a hundred unarmed, surrendered American soldiers had been brutally shot down in cold blood by German SS troopers at Malmedy and that not one of the culprits had been executed, though tried and convicted for the atrocity. It had also found that the Senator had been quick to accept the affidavits subscribed by convicted German war criminals after their trials, and yet on numerous occasions had stated that he believed American officers were not telling the truth under oath. Senator McCarthy responded by saying that Senator Baldwin would "bitterly regret this deliberate and very clever attempt to whitewash".
He had disregarded American principles of justice and fair play in attacking his victims. Senator Benton had nearly a hundred pages of examples of how Senator McCarthy had deliberately lied in the pursuit of headlines instead of facts. For example, the Senator charged that Owen Lattimore was the "chief architect of our Far Eastern policy". But the claim had been denied by all the living Secretaries of State since 1933, who stated that Mr. Lattimore, though occasional adviser to the State Department on Far Eastern policy, had never worked for the Department. And yet, Senator McCarthy continued routinely to assert that Mr. Lattimore was the "architect" of the policy.
Mr. Pearson asserts that Senator McCarthy's ethics, alone, were enough to disqualify him from a seat in the Senate, as he once boasted to Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico that he did not pay income taxes on all of his lecture fees, believed a U.S. Senator effectively immune from prosecution for tax evasion. In 1943, he had neglected to report $42,000 in income on his Wisconsin tax returns. He argued that he had been out of the state, and hence not a citizen of Wisconsin at the time, though a sitting judge in the state. In 1944, he had listed $18,000 in contributions from his father, brother, and brother-in-law, and yet his father did not have enough income to file a return that year and neither his brother nor his brother-in-law claimed more than $2,000 in income.
The Senator had also been paid $10,000 by the Lustron Corporation for a housing pamphlet during a time when Lustron was 32 million dollars in debt to the Government and needed friends in the Senate. The Senator had requested Walter Royal of the Housing and Home Finance Agency to prepare the pamphlet for Lustron, at further taxpayer expense.
He concludes that the above was just a portion of the sordid record belonging to Senator McCarthy.
"Pitchmen of the Press",
in the fifth article of the series reprinted from the Providence
(R. I.) Journal, regards Drew Pearson's radio show
The study made three different tabulations, one holding him strictly accountable for the prediction, a second with a more lenient standard of assessment, and a third, with a much looser standard. Under the first category, he scored 47 percent accuracy. Under the second standard, his accuracy rose to 55 percent, and under the third, 67 percent. He did make fewer errors than most other "super-dramatic and super-salaried commentators". And, also unlike some of his competitors, his reports were based on some of the best sources in Washington. He did make mistakes, but also unlike most of his commentator colleagues, sometimes admitted them.
The piece finds that 47 percent accuracy on the predictions was no better than the flip of a coin, something which a child could do and come out with an accuracy rate just as impressive as that of Mr. Pearson. Some of his predictions were 50-50. But a large number of them had a broad array of possibilities. For example, on February 5, he had predicted that the Justice Department would bring an antitrust suit against the Shubert theaters in New York. Three weeks later, the Justice Department did that. On April 2, he had predicted that Roger Lapham would be appointed to run the State Department Point Four program. Instead of Mr. Lapham, Capus Waynick of North Carolina got the nod, at least temporarily.
Giving him credit for accurately predicting a portion of each crystal ball gaze, he achieved a 55 percent accuracy rate. Fourteen of his predictions during the period of study had not yet failed or succeeded. If in the unlikely event that they were completely accurate, he would reach 67 percent accuracy.
It was possible that Mr. Pearson had achieved his boasted 86 percent accuracy score sometime in the past and was proud of it as a manufacturer was of their product when it achieved an award in some far distant year, such as 1893. But to the average listener the impression was conveyed that the 86 percent accuracy was current.
This piece appears a bit picky
The "Congressional Quiz" presents the question whether the President had signed the new controls bill after saying it was the kind of legislation which would "push prices up" and "threaten the stability of [the] economy", to which it answers that the President had said that he signed the measure to prevent the defense program from dying and that he would have vetoed it had it contained only the inflation control provisions.
Part of the law, it points out, concerned the Government's authority to control production, allocate materials, and aid business in the interest of national defense.
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