The Charlotte News
Thursday, August 16, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in the Korean ceasefire negotiations, the Communists agreed to the creation of a subcommittee, an idea advanced the previous day by chief U.N. negotiator Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, albeit suggesting that the subcommittee consist of two members from each side instead of one, an alteration with which the U.N. agreed. The purpose of the subcommittee was to try to break the three-week deadlock over where to place a ceasefire zone, at the 38th parallel, as demanded by the Communists, or along current battle lines, as insisted by the U.N. No press briefings would be held during the sessions of this subcommittee and the regular sessions of the full negotiation teams would be suspended until the subcommittee could make its recommendation.
The change in the number on the subcommittee was very wise, for if this subcommittee were to run into the same impasse as the five-person negotiating teams, it still left room for the jettisoning of two more from each side in two subsequent, separate stages before the impasse would be declared, of necessity, hopelessly loggerheaded and the war resumed at full tilt.
At Munsan, a large banner was erected with the slogan of a South Korean division emblazoned upon it, "Sharpen your bayonets."
The U.S. informed Russia, in a formal diplomatic note issued this date, that the Japanese peace treaty conference at San Francisco on September 4 would not be an occasion to reopen negotiations on the terms of peace, as the terms of the treaty had already been settled. Since the Russians had indicated their intent to attend the conference, the note was issued to avoid misunderstanding.
The U.S. and the Philippines announced their agreement to form a mutual defense treaty pledging each nation to "act to meet the common dangers" in the event of armed attack on either one. The pact would be signed early in September, probably to coincide with the signing of the Japanese peace treaty.
The President, at a press conference, said that while there were a number of people with ambitions to become President, they did not know what they were getting into. He did not name anyone in particular. He said that he did not think that General Eisenhower would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket, emphasizing think. He laughed at a repeated comment made by Senator Paul Douglas, that the President "is underneath the mistletoe in a position to be kissed" for another Democratic nomination. In response to an inquiry by a journalist, he said that General MacArthur would be welcome at the San Francisco conference in September to sign the Japanese treaty, but did not know about reports of his intent to attend. The President also said that he did not think the decision of the Russians to attend the conference would upset anything, that no one could upset the settled terms of the treaty.
Before the Senate Internal Security Committee, Whittaker Chambers testified that the former head of the Communist underground in the United States, J. Peters, had once told him that the Communist underground included as members Joseph Barnes, connected with a New York publishing firm and formerly a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field, the New York millionaire currently serving a jail sentence for contempt of court for refusing to reveal the names of the members of the Civil Rights Congress who had posted the $80,000 bond for the four missing convicted top Communists who failed to surrender to begin serving their sentences out of the eleven convicted and sentenced under the Smith Act. Both had been connected with the Institute of Pacific Relations, the focus of the Committee hearings.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a giant explosion occurred at the Esso naphtha treating plant in the early morning hours this date, killing two people and injuring thirteen. No cause of the explosion had yet been determined.
At Vermillion, S.D., Dr. Donald Slaughter, dean of the University of South Dakota Medical School, reported that two "human guinea pigs" had died in an experiment when a doctor on the staff picked up the wrong bottle. One of the victims had been a laboratory technician and the other, a secretary, at the school. The error occurred when another drug was picked up by mistake instead of morphine. Dr. Slaughter said that all known antidotes had been administered without effect. He said that several new drugs with sedative action had been discovered through such experiments, without any untoward effects.
Twenty English Channel swimmers
A Gastonia, N.C., fireman was a mile and a half from the Wilkinson Boulevard Bridge by 1:30 in the afternoon, tired but confident, after swimming for thirteen and a half hours during his Catawba River endurance swim, about 14 miles. The toughest part of the swim had been encountered at Crowder Creek, where he could make no progress in the upstream effort for over half an hour.
A very small hurricane was reported 150 miles south of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.
In Texas, temperatures again reached the range between 100 and 107, with no general relief in sight, following a brief respite from the oppressive heat, occasioned by a cool front passing through the Panhandle and into the central part of the state the prior day. Fort Worth had the highest temperature, at 107, while Dallas was not far behind at 106, with Tyler and College Station recording the identical high, and Waco, Lufkin and Cotulla registering 105.
By contrast, Chicago hit a high of 79, Des Moines, 74, Kansas City, 78, and Omaha, 76.
What is the high temperature where you are, today? Whatever it is, enjoy it, for school will be starting soon.
On page 4-B, the results of a survey appear regarding how different baseball players wore their uniforms, replete with pictures of models demonstrating the various permutations.
On the editorial page, "New Interest in Consolidation" tells of the Institute of Government report on consolidation of the City and County governments to save money and promote efficiency having served to spawn studies of those reports by the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters, as well as by the Chamber of Commerce. These three groups had come to the same conclusion the News had expressed when the reports were first made public the previous year, that health service offered the most logical and most feasible starting point for an examination of consolidation.
First to determine its feasibility, as recommended by the three groups, appeared to be the most reasonable course. It was important, before implementation, to study the ramifications of consolidation thoroughly. The editorial hopes that other organizations would develop the same interest shown by the three groups and either make independent studies for themselves or join with the three groups.
"Athletic Scandals Evoke a Memory" tells of Frank Graham, in 1935, then president of the University of North Carolina, in combination with presidents of five other Southern Conference institutions, having signed a plan under which, they believed, college athletics would remain amateur, avoiding overemphasis and professionalization.
The so-called "Graham Plan" was highly controversial, as alumni groups fought it while coaches and athletic departments sabotaged it. The University of Virginia flatly refused to abide by it and after a few years of trial, it was officially discarded. Critics said it was naïve, and in hindsight, given that the measure of a coach was his ability to win games, while buying or enticing talented players to the college's program to achieve that result, it certainly seemed so.
It had been, it suggests, a visionary, idealistic plan, seeking to protect colleges and universities against the "disease" that did not appear so deadly to alumni and students, but had failed because of the impossibility of enforcement, for there being no will to enforce it, even among faculty members.
It posits that, nevertheless, its fundamental objective had been sound in 1935, and remained so in 1951. "Somehow a system must be devised to keep intercollegiate athletics on a sane and sensible level lest, like Frankenstein's monster, it threaten its maker."
It finds that the college basketball scandal regarding fixed games, the recent West Point cheating scandal involving a majority of the football squad, and the developing revelations at William & Mary College, had focused attention on players, coaches and alumni, but that not enough blame had been placed on college and university presidents and boards of trustees.
It concludes that perhaps the disease had run its course and would cure itself, as many small colleges had given up football entirely because of their inability financially to compete. Others might be forced to follow, until one day only a handful of the largest institutions would be fielding teams. If so, it would only be a partial solution, for by surrendering to the primitive "'survival of the fittest'" principle, it would be "an abject confession by educators of their inability to apply such civilized instruments as intellect, reason, and determination."
"William Randolph Hearst" tells of Mr. Hearst, who had died two days earlier at age 88, having, for three generations, set his own limits in determining the "power of the press". He also had a "fabulous personality of strong prejudices, angelic devotions, and violent hates".
He had taken his wealthy father's
legacy and increased it to such a vast amount that no one had ever
been able to ascertain the full extent of his wealth. The extent of
his influence, however, had been even greater than that of his
wealth. He had sent a "war correspondent" to Cuba two
months before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, and when the
reporter cabled that it did not look like any war, Mr. Hearst wired
back, "You take care of the news, I'll take care of the war
When an attempt was made in 1910 to assassinate Mayor William Gaynor of New York, the assailant, when caught, proceeded to recite to police, practically from memory, an editorial from the Hearst papers calling the Mayor "a traitor to the Irish".
Another Mayor of New York, John Purroy Mitchell, had incurred the wrath of Mr. Hearst and the latter proceeded to destroy him.
He had destroyed the lawyer, Bill Fallon, for personal reasons. He regularly attacked President Wilson and the League of Nations.
He was full of contradictions in his prejudices, attacking with the fervor of an evangelist such men as James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, for trying to obtain a divorce, when Mr. Hearst, himself, led a personal life which included a longtime mistress, Marion Davies.
He coveted the Presidency more passionately than anyone ever had, and tried desperately to obtain it. He had served two terms in Congress but was defeated by later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes for the Governorship of New York in 1906. The Tammany Hall leaders who had given him the Democratic nomination changed course and threw the election to Mr. Hughes, a Republican, because they believed they would have more influence under him than under Mr. Hearst.
During his period of political ambition, his newspapers championed the cause of minorities, for instance carrying the Italian flag on the newspaper's masthead on Columbus Day, printing the first four pages green on St. Patrick's Day, and on Yom Kippur, running a four-column box on page one, extending Mr. Hearst's personal greetings. He was also one of the first publishers to print photographs of black leaders and educators.
But years later, when it became obvious that he would no longer achieve high political office, his editorial policy turned 180 degrees and he became the spokesman for an intense "nationalism", violently opposed to all immigration and advocating remaining out of Europe's affairs.
Only Governor Al Smith of New York had ever successfully stood up against him. In 1918, when Mr. Smith was slated to run for Governor and Mr. Hearst, for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Smith refused to run on the same ticket with Mr. Hearst, ending the latter's political aspirations. In 1928, Mr. Hearst got even with Mr. Smith by supporting Herbert Hoover for the presidency. He also supported the nomination of Governor Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 over former Governor Smith, leaving Mr. Smith a "beaten and bitter man" to the end of his days.
It suggests, however, that, in the long view of history, Mr. Hearst's prejudices and opinions would soon be forgotten, displaced by the memory of him being the greatest newspaperman of the era and one of the greatest individualists of all time. He had established a vast empire of daily newspapers and magazines, a world-wide news service, and turned the comic strip into a gigantic enterprise. He had made it possible for reporters and editors to appear simultaneously in hundreds of newspapers through syndicated journalism and was the first publisher to exploit photographs, comics, serial stories, and introduce many more innovations which had become standard practice in newspaper operations by 1951.
"Time alone will decide whether the new techniques and methods he introduced into journalism cancel out the damage his brand of editorial irresponsibility and sensationalism has done a great profession."
Drew Pearson, still in Europe, has his column this date written by staff. The column indicates that it had uncovered "shocking documentary evidence" about what had happened to the last 125 million dollars received in American aid by Chang Kai-shek, out of the total 307 million provided to Nationalist China. For instance, $444,000 had been traced to the private account of a fictitious company, when the money was supposed to have been earmarked for purchase of war surplus equipment. The man who juggled the books was Chang's top general, C. J. Chou, in charge of all military purchases for the Nationalists, that is in charge of the spending of the entire amount earmarked for military aid. It proceeds to provide detail of how the accounts were juggled.
It notes that in another case, the Nationalists went through three middlemen in an attempt to buy 2.9 million gallons of aviation fuel. Yet, the Nationalists had a procurement office in Washington which could have made the same purchase much more cheaply by direct means from the producer. One of these middlemen was a hole-in-the-wall Chinese grocery store in San Francisco's Chinatown, the South China Enterprise, Inc., which made a $100,000 profit on the deal. The grocery store appeared to have been a front for someone else.
A Pentagon team was en route to Korea to recover from the battlefields an anticipated minimum of 250,000 tons of scrap steel, vitally needed to build more tanks, guns and planes to be used on other battlefields.
"Pitchmen of the Press", in the tenth in the Peabody Award-winning series of articles from the Providence (R.I.) Journal, for the third day in a row regards conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., starting with a quote from Mr. Lewis that his integrity as a reporter had never been questioned before, corrects that it had been questioned many times.
In 1943, a Congressman called him a "hatchet man". In 1945, the War Writers' Board found his commentary "intolerant and divisive". A short time afterward, the Reverend Wilfred Parsons, then editor of the Catholic magazine America, had said that Mr. Lewis's reporting could only proceed from some "obscure ill will".
On February 14, Mr. Lewis told his audience that the plan of Wilson Wyatt, the Federal Housing Expediter, who had sought to cure the postwar housing shortage by underwriting a 50 million dollar project to produce metal prefabricated housing, had come to an ignominious end when the Government-supported Lustron Corporation had gone bankrupt. Mr. Lewis had recalled during the broadcast what he termed a "violent and indignant" attack on him by Mr. Wyatt, but that supposed attack, informs the piece, had actually been by Mr. Lewis upon Mr. Wyatt, that the latter had supposedly engaged in bribery, the investigation of which showed not only no such conduct but also that Mr. Lewis had lacked the "proof" of same which he claimed to have had. He was forced to issue a public retraction which was so deficient that four others were required, including providing Mr. Wyatt time on the Mutual Broadcasting Network which broadcast Mr. Lewis's program. He had attacked Mr. Wyatt's judgment in recommending that a Government-owned war surplus factory go to Lustron Corporation. But Mr. Lewis did not disclose that his recommendation to give the factory to Preston Tucker, whom he had termed "a good, red-blooded American", after which Mr. Tucker was indicted for mail fraud and conspiracy to violate Securities and Exchange Commission regulations in connection with his efforts to produce a new automobile. While the officers of the corporation were acquitted, the firm was presently in Federal bankruptcy. Thus Mr. Lewis, in making his allegations against Mr. Wyatt, should have known better.
He launched an attack on Oscar Ewing, head of the Federal Security Administration, for supposedly disseminating advice to parents on sex education of their children between the ages of six and twelve. He suggested that the pamphlet had advocated allowing the young children essentially to go their own way in sexual exploration. He further advised that a pamphlet prepared by the FSA for handling adolescents' sexual education and behavior had gone even further. It quotes from the two pamphlets on topics Mr. Lewis found objectionable, finding that the actual language was in fact innocuous. The Lewis attack on Mr. Ewing was by way of objection to Federal aid to education being considered by the House Labor & Education Committee. He had also claimed that the two pamphlets were anonymously prepared and purported to disclose the secret authorship, but in fact both authors were identified at the start of each pamphlet, suggesting that Mr. Lewis had not bothered to read either one or was deliberately misleading his audience.
On December 2, 1949 and the following nights, Mr. Lewis had presented a story of the shipping of secret atomic materials and information to Russia during the war, introducing to his listeners George Racey Jordan, who imparted the story of the Russians having obtained uranium compounds, heavy water, atomic blueprints, and other secrets through the lend-lease supply airbase at Great Falls, Montana, where Major Jordan had been stationed in 1943. He charged that FDR aide Harry Hopkins had conspired to arrange the shipments in violation of the country's security regulations, and that Vice-President Henry Wallace had also been involved in the approval of the shipments. An investigation by HUAC, however, showed that the uranium shipments were too small to be of use in atomic bomb production and that all of the shipments had been approved by the proper authorities. Moreover, Mr. Hopkins and Vice-President Wallace had nothing to do with the matter. While Mr. Lewis claimed each night that his story was being proved, HUAC consistently made public statements ridiculing the story. A Committee investigator revealed that the claims of Mr. Jordan that he was regularly imparting this information to high officials in Washington was disputed by his superior officer, to whom he spoke every day, testifying that Mr. Jordan never mentioned uranium compounds, atomic plans, Harry Hopkins, or any other part of the story to him. Two high officials in Washington, to whom Mr. Lewis claimed to have revealed this story, said that they had never seen or heard of him. The only thing he ever reported was after the war, while at the State Department, when he reported Russian pilots bringing furs into the country without paying proper import duties. Yet Mr. Lewis claimed that the Committee investigator had adduced two hours of documentation and affidavits substantiating the story of Mr. Jordan. It concludes that such had been his biggest story of the year.
For the ensuing three editions, the series would conclude with analysis of conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler.
A letter writer wishes that the newspaper would seek to stir sentiment against giving drivers licenses to youths under 18 years of age. She also wishes that Brevard Street, south of Fourth Street, could be widened and its noise eliminated, noting that there was not even a sidewalk in the second block of Brevard, and that smoke was a nuisance there.
But won't that widening just attract more young, rabble-rousing, irresponsible, irrepressible hot rodders uptown?
A letter writer, a captain for
Eastern Air Lines, tells of his nine-year-old son, Bob, having been
selected by Plymouth Motors to represent Charlotte and
North Carolina in their model-plane flying contest at Detroit
The model-plane flyers were handicapped, he reports, the previous year by a local rule which permitted flying only between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. He had to work for a living, just like most people, and so there were few days when he could be free during those hours to instruct and insure safety for Bob. Yet, even with this handicap, Bob had placed seventh in his age group.
He is tired of the "bellyachers" around Freedom Park, believes they were unjust. Model airplane flying brought both sons and daughters closer to their fathers, through endless hours of designing and building their planes and then flying same across the plains, maybe even unto Spain, maybe even faster and slicker than the wet Rosebud.
He concludes that Charlotte was in need of some education regarding aviation, and that model airplane building helped in that regard.
Well, for a short time there,
perhaps lasting a year or two, we buzzed around with the balsa-wood
and tissue-paper flyers, utilizing a couple of nearby fields, one at
our school, for the purpose. (We used butane, not rubber bands; and maybe it was fabric, not tissue.) The captain, in his enthusiasm for the activity, does not
reveal the dark side of this model airplane building—no, not
the glue
Framed Edition
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