The Charlotte News
Wednesday, August 15, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Munsan, the U.N. chief negotiator Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy suggested that a two-man subcommittee, comprised of one person from each side, be established to penetrate the formality of the Korean ceasefire talks and settle the deadlock over the buffer zone, which the Communists had demanded be set at the 38th parallel while the U.N. negotiators insisted that it be coterminous with present battle lines. The Communist negotiators showed more interest in Admiral Joy's proposal than they had shown in any previous statement. Both delegations, when leaving the Kaesong meeting site this date, exhibited a more buoyant attitude than they had usually displayed. Communist press representatives even suggested that the Communists might consider the U.N. proposal for the demarcation line.
U.N. command headquarters in Tokyo announced that the allies would, if necessary, should talks break down, continue "destroying or driving out of Korea" the Communist forces.
In Frankfurt, Germany, the U.S. Army was untangling a snarl which placed combat troops far behind their supply units. U.S. military officials in Paris disclosed that all save combat units and their mobile service detachments would be pulled back to France. Presently, America's largest armored force in Europe was deployed along the Rhine. It was not known how many troops would be withdrawn from the Rhine line, thought to be the logical defensible line against Communist aggression in Western Europe.
Ten Senators urged Congress to go on record for "total world disarmament" so as to expose the Soviet propaganda line. Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont offered the proposal, complaining that the President's proposals for disarmament through the U.N. were not being presented with the vigor apropos to their import.
The President, speaking before the Washington headquarters of the American Legion the previous night, criticized "hate-mongers" who were "trying to create fear and suspicion among us by the use of slander, unproved accusations and just plain lies." He went on to say: "They are filling the air with the most irresponsible kinds of accusations against other people. They are trying to get us to believe that our Government is riddled with Communism and corruption—when the fact is that we have the finest and most loyal body of civil servants in the world. Those slander-mongers are trying to get us so hysterical that no one will stand up to them for fear of being called a Communist."
Senator Taft said that he thought the President was the hysterical one.
Senator William Benton of Connecticut took the diatribe to be appropriately directed at Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Senator McCarthy, accepting the suggestion, struck back by saying: "If Truman wants to make the fight against Communism—which he calls 'McCarthyism'—an issue in the campaign, I will welcome it. It will give the people a chance to choose between Americanism or a combination of Trumanism and Communism."
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota said that the President had told him in advance that he would deliver a "rip-snorting" speech. The Senator told a reporter that the speech was "something that needed to be said". He also said that he had informed the President at the White House the previous day that his name would be entered in the March 18 Minnesota Democratic primary, but that the President had not indicated whether he would run.
Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana said that the President was not going to frighten him and that "all he has to do to stop the honest criticism of 100 percent Americans is to clean house—sweep out the Communists and the Pinks in his Administration." He added that surely the President did not mean that those who had condemned Alger Hiss were "hate-mongers".
Senator Green of Rhode Island said that the State Department had tightened its guard against "hostile or subversive infiltration" both in the country and abroad. He told of a 12-point program aimed at ferreting out disloyal employees in the Department and among the diplomatic corps. The program had been initiated out of the controversial investigation the previous year into the charges of Communists in the Government lodged by Senator McCarthy.
The Senate crime investigating committee heard testimony from Irving Sherman that, shortly before the 1945 New York City mayoralty election, he had left the city at the request of former Mayor William O'Dwyer, to avoid being questioned about "a terrible blast in the newspapers". Mr. O'Dwyer, now Ambassador to Mexico, had been the successful Democratic candidate for mayor in that election. Mr. Sherman was identified by the committee as a "known gambler and intimate" of racketeers, and said that he was told by an intermediary to Mr. O'Dwyer that the latter wanted him out of town. At the request of Mr. Sherman, the committee banned newsreel, radio and television cameras from the hearing room.
House Republicans had organized a drive to cut up to a billion dollars from the Administration's 8.5 billion dollar foreign aid bill. Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, apparently anticipating the move, said in a formal report the previous day that Europe's biggest defense problem was money, not manpower, quoting General Eisenhower to that effect. The Committee had recommended a 651 million dollar cut in the foreign aid bill. The House planned a full day of debate this date. The Senate would not take up the bill until the House completed its action. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Senate the previous day that the rearmament of West Germany was key to the defense of Western Europe.
In Chicago, a convicted rapist and murderer, set to be electrocuted September 14, had escaped over the wall of the Cook County jail the previous night after beating a guard to death. Police put out a "shoot to kill" order and placed a $1,000 reward on his capture, dead or alive.
Multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 77, married a former concert pianist, Martha Baird Allen, 56, in Providence, R.I. The two families had been friends for many years.
In Asheville, N.C., the North Carolina Federation of Labor asked this date Governor Kerr Scott to call a special session of the General Assembly to enact teacher salary increases, "to provide democratic and efficient teaching conditions" in the state, the latter interpreted to mean equalization of educational opportunities for whites and blacks.
In Texas, a cool front across the Panhandle, stimulated by a 25 mph wind, began ending the tremendously oppressive heat wave which had beset the state the previous day. The temperature in Dalhart was 63, 37 degrees cooler than the previous day. The front was predicted to reach central Texas by the following day but would be considerably weaker by that point.
On the editorial page, "An Example for Tar Heelia" tells of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Highway Safety issuing a pamphlet titled "Speed: Still Public Enemy No. 1", citing the facts that in 1950, the national average death rate per 100 million miles of travel was 7.5, that in 11 states which defined the maximum speed limit as only "careful and prudent", the rate of death exceeded the national average by 5.1 to 11.5 percent, that the six states in which the 55 mph speed limit was the maximum had a death rate 8 percent above the national average, that where the maximum speed limit was 50 mph, the death rate was 20 percent below the national average, where the maximum speed limit was only 45 mph, the death rate was 41.2 percent below the national average, and in the only state with a top speed of 40 mph, that being Massachusetts, the rate was fully 49.3 percent below the national average.
In Pennsylvania, the driver had his license suspended for three months if he was convicted of driving 51 mph or more, and the state had a comprehensive automobile inspection system. Fatalities in that state had dropped 23 percent after the speed law was enacted in 1937, and had dropped by over 40 percent by 1950. Suspensions of licenses had nearly tripled between 1938 and 1950.
It suggests that North Carolinians who read daily accounts of fatal automobile accidents, as that occurring at the Pee Dee River near Albemarle on Sunday, regarding which an editorial had appeared the prior day, had to be held accountable for the State's failure to adopt and enforce rigid safety rules for the highway. Numerous bills had been introduced in the 1951 General Assembly but all of the major ones had failed passage. It hopes that by the time the 1953 Legislature convened, the people would remember the example of Pennsylvania.
We like NASCAR down heya, don't need no Yankee exampleristisms tryin' to tell us what to do in and with ouwa automobiles. We'll speed all we want.
"Shutting out the People" tells of the President openly nominating recently Senator Taft as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1952, while he, himself, had the Democratic nomination in his pocket, thus wanted to see Senator Taft opposite him in the race. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine had indicated that if the Democrats gave the Republicans the President as the candidate in 1952, they would beat him with Taft.
The piece finds these views to leave out the American people in registering their choice for the party standard-bearers in 1952 and that it was particularly distasteful at a time when every public opinion poll showed overwhelming support for General Eisenhower. It suggests that, lacking any national presidential primary, the people should make known their wishes at every opportunity in state conventions and communications with national party leaders, thus potentially forcing the party bosses to recognize the groundswell sentiment and cancel their "carefully laid plans for the 1952 conventions".
"The Secretary's Troubles" tells of Secretary of State Acheson having been a target of most anti-Communist members of Congress during the previous two years. He had likewise been assailed by the Hearst-McCormick press, right-wing radio commentators, and Capital gossip-sheets. They accused him of being pro-Communist, an "appeaser", a "pinko", too soft on the Commies, and insisted that he ought resign or be fired because the country could no longer trust him.
Now, he was the target of new charges, that he was being too hard-boiled in spurning Russian "peace" entreaties. One of the better known "news letters" said in a recent issue that the Secretary seemed clumsy in diplomacy by rejecting all peace gestures, an attitude complicated by the fact of his reputation for being pink, thus attempting to overcompensate and disprove the charge by rejecting all Russian peace moves, creating the impression abroad that America was bellicose.
It suspects that Mr. Acheson would weather the storm again, just as he had the first one, that he was well within the frame of public acceptance by insisting that Russian words be accompanied by Russian deeds.
"'Too Many Cooks...'" finds that, as many knowledgeable political observers were advocating creation of a political organization which would clear up the muddled relations between the supreme commander and the twelve governments comprising NATO, the sentiment toward creation of a Mediterranean pact organization, which would include Spain, Greece and Turkey, rather than admitting those three states into NATO, appeared reasonable. Admitting Spain, a dictatorship, and Greece and Turkey, embryonic democracies, did not bode well for ameliorating the muddled situation in NATO.
"As the U.N. has found, too many cooks—with all sorts of cookbooks—spoil the soup."
Drew Pearson, in central Europe, again comments on his proposal to launch friendship balloons into the Iron Curtain countries to spread the word that Americans sought the friendship of the citizens living behind it. He describes some of the basic logistical difficulties of developing such a program, including filling the balloons with hydrogen, keeping the operations secret from the German population, and how that was being accomplished by Harry Andrews of the Dewey & Almy Rubber Company, detailing his efforts to send the balloons over Czechoslovakia. Eventually, he had been able to complete the operation and send 2,000 balloons, carrying about 2,200 leaflets urging friendship and freedom, up into the air in record time, calculating the launch so that their anticipated arrival was between 6 and 8 a.m., just as Czechs were going to work.
Another type of balloon was called the "pillow balloon", carrying a lighter load and upon landing, bounced along the ground, designedly to arouse curiosity of the surprised observer. These balloons, pictured on the front page, bore the word "Svoboda" written on them, meaning freedom.
While sending such balloons over Czechoslovakia was not going to result in that country obtaining freedom any time soon, it was timely as supporting the effort to gain the release of Associated Press journalist William Oatis, jailed on trumped-up charges of espionage, and occurred during a time when unrest in the country was at a greater level than at any time previously. The balloon barrage, however, was merely a test of what individual Americans working separately from their Government could do to promote people-to-people friendship behind the Iron Curtain and make it into a "lace curtain".
Joseph & Stewart Alsop explain that the key fact which explained the strange occurrences in the ceasefire talks at Kaesong was not in the headlines, that the present talks, not the Berlin crisis of 1948-49 or the Korean crisis of 1950, constituted the first real showdown between the free world and the Communist sphere. The controversy over the ceasefire line had turned the talks into such a crucial showdown.
In late April or early May, the National Security Council had reviewed the situation in Korea and determined that the country would accept an armistice at a point when the enemy had been driven from South Korea. Secretary of State Acheson had testified at the hearings on the firing of General MacArthur that the "military objective of the United Nations" would be satisfied if "we stopped them at the 38th parallel … and restored peace and security in South Korea." On the basis of this testimony, Jakob Malik, chief Russian delegate to the U.N., had been instructed by the Kremlin to propose a ceasefire on the basis of "mutual withdrawal from the 38th parallel", leading to the present ceasefire talks. Thus, the reason for the insistence by the Communists on making the 38th parallel the ceasefire line had been the testimony of Secretary Acheson. But in the two months between this statement and the opening of the negotiations, the situation in Korea had changed radically, such that the U.N. forces had captured the "iron triangle", former Communist supply bastion, placing the U.N. troops at some points as much as 30 miles north of the 38th parallel.
U.N. supreme commander General Matthew Ridgway then asked Washington for advice on where to draw the ceasefire line, seeking the opinions of both the State and Defense Departments and the opinions of both the American and British Governments. The collective decision was that a ceasefire ought not occur with changes to existing troop positions and that allowing the Russians, after having directed a bloody, costly war, to have restored the status quo would be an obvious invitation to more aggression in the future.
With the issue thus settled, the ceasefire line had to be based on existing battle positions, especially as the existing positions were more readily defensible than the 38th parallel. But from the Russian point of view, acceptance of this ceasefire line would represent not only an actual loss of territory, but also acknowledgment of defeat and an open admission of failure.
None of the American and British leaders believed that if fighting were resumed in Korea, a general war could be avoided. Thus, something was happening at Kaesong which had never happened previously, with the virtual ultimatum provided to the Soviets that if they did not concede the point of the ceasefire line they risked general war. The Russians therefore had to be prepared to fight or make a sacrifice which, though small, they had never previously made.
With so much of weight hanging in the balance, the Alsops conclude that it was odd that the crises being debated at Kaesong were being taken as a matter of course.
"Pitchmen of the Press", in the ninth in the series of articles from the Providence (R.I.) Journal, relates for the second day in a row of the weeknight 15-minute radio show of conservative commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., suggesting that each night he described "a titanic battle between the good angels and the angels of the Devil," the two sides vying for control of the social and economic fabric of the United States. Some of his favorite angels were Senator Taft, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Senator McCarthy, Senator Kenneth Wherry, Senator Styles Bridges, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Senator Karl Mundt, who had once referred to Mr. Lewis as "the fairest and most accurate news commentator in America", Representative Charles Halleck, Representative Harold Velde, and Senator Richard Nixon.
There were also organized angels, such as the Republican National Committee and HUAC.
The devils on the scene included the President, Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan, Secretary of State Acheson, Federal Security Administrator Oscar Ewing, former Vice-President Henry Wallace, the late FDR adviser Harry Hopkins, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut, Representative Adolph Sabath, Wilson Wyatt, Elmer Davis, and Drew Pearson.
The organized devils included the Democratic Party, the Americans for Democratic Action, the CIO, and the British Labor Party.
The angels were those regularly
quoted by Mr. Lewis with praise and the devils, the converse. Former
FDR adviser and kingmaker, James Farley, once a devil to Mr. Lewis,
had been converted to an angel. On February 17, Mr. Lewis said of him
that he was "probably the best-loved, most respected high
political office-holder, so far as the press is concerned, in the
last 20 years." Mr. Farley had turned somewhat against FDR and
the New Deal when President Roosevelt ran for re-election for a third
term in 1940
When the Mississippi House, nominally Democratic, voted to criticize Secretary of State Acheson for his statement in support of his old friend Alger Hiss, Mr. Lewis, on January 27, said "the really stunning blow, however, so far as Mr. Acheson is concerned, came when the Mississippi House of Representatives, passed an official resolution of censure against Dean Acheson." The piece muses at the power imputed by Mr. Lewis to the Mississippi House.
Senator Chan Gurney of South Dakota, a Republican with a decidedly anti-Administration voting record, had lost favor with Mr. Lewis when an even more conservative member of Congress, Representative Francis Case, decided to seek that Senate seat, such that Mr. Lewis endorsed Mr. Case, who then defeated Senator Gurney.
Senator Millard Tydings, fiscally conservative, had also garnered the support of Mr. Lewis, until Senator McCarthy made Senator Tydings an object of ridicule during the fall Senate campaign.
On April 5, Mr. Lewis had devoted his program to three main issues, the Administration agriculture program, the Administration budget, and the Senate hearings on the charges of Communism in the State Department. He devoted a little over five minutes to the farm program, to which he was strictly opposed, including in his criticism Congressman Harold Cooley of North Carolina, over five minutes on the budget, quoting Congressman Harris Ellsworth, opposed to the budget, and then providing his own negative assessment, then the rest of the 15-minute broadcast anent testimony of the State Department representatives to Congress and his own attack on that testimony.
The following day, he had criticized the Administration's expansion of Social Security, and then switched to an attack on Owen Lattimore, following his testimony before the Senate regarding Senator McCarthy's charge that Mr. Lattimore was Russia's top espionage agent in the United States.
On April 20, Mr. Lewis devoted 20 seconds to Brigadier General Elliott Thorpe, who testified favorably on Mr. Lattimore, and 630 seconds to Louis Budenz, who gave anti-Lattimore testimony. While it would not be reasonable to assume that Mr. Lewis ought provide precisely equal time to his angels and his devils, one would expect that it would not be quite so lopsided as to "obscure the facts as they exist".
During the recent British elections, Mr. Lewis had said that the Conservatives had dealt a "resounding repudiation" to the Labor Party, despite Labor having in fact won the election, albeit narrowly.
When a reporter for the now-defunct Hearst Universal Service, Mr. Lewis had uncovered, almost single-handedly, the Government airmail contract scandals. He had also uncovered the expensive and abortive Canol oil project between the U.S. and Canada. He had disclosed the futile attempts at completing the Latin-American highway, and his criticism had also helped accelerate the synthetic rubber program.
But, at the same time, his bitter denunciation of FDR's armament program prior to World War II had delayed the country's prewar preparation.
When FBI funding was increased, Mr. Lewis said that few real Americans would protest the matter, and added that if one did find someone who complained, they should be scrutinized "carefully and suspiciously". When some members of the House voted against additional funds for HUAC, he broadcast their names, concluding, "...and, guess who, Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, of California."
If a public figure spoke in favor of
maintaining the U.N., Mr. Lewis described the person as a "member of
the Russian appeasement group". If someone had served during the
war in the Office of Price Administration, Mr. Lewis opposed the
person for any subsequent advance, as he did on March 28 with regard
to Willis Ritter of Utah being nominated to a Federal judgeship. (Senator
Nixon had worked in OPA in 1942. What about him as a "long-haired,
left-wing, star
Anyone who objected to wiretapping was also deemed of dubious loyalty. On January 19, he asked, "Why should any honest man be worried one way or the other about whether his wire is being tapped?" (Senator Nixon would not care two decades hence, while serving in the White House.) But that question mark even hung over Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, who had once called wiretapping a violation of civil rights, as well as over members of the Supreme Court who refused to recognize the admissibility of evidence obtained as a result of a wiretap. That said, it concludes, at one time or another Mr. Lewis had also indicated that he was not too sure about those individuals.
A Quote of the Day: "Wouldn't
you know we'd be threatened with a world shortage of sulphur
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.