The Charlotte News
Tuesday, August 21, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Sam Summerlin, that as the fifth meeting occurred by the four-person subcommittee seeking to break the impasse on where to establish a ceasefire zone in Korea, the Communists had formally lodged a new protest the previous day alleging that allied aircraft had attacked and destroyed a liaison jeep of the Communist delegation between Kaesong and Pyongyang, while that jeep flew a white flag, claiming it to have been a new violation of the neutrality zone agreement, and therefore asking Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, chief U.N. negotiator, to punish "severely" his personnel. Allied headquarters responded this date that the protest called attention to the requirement that the Communists provide notification in advance of any vehicles which they wished to remain free from air attack. Meanwhile, headquarters denied the charge of the previous day that allied ground troops had attacked and killed within the neutrality zone a Chinese soldier, a charge which had resulted in bitter attacks out of Peiping radio, calling the attack "murder" by "ambush". It quoted Major General Hsieh Fang, one of the two Communist delegates to the subcommittee, as saying the incident would "surely harden Chinese volunteers' determination to defend peace". The subcommittee had met this date for a little over two hours. No progress was reported.
In ground fighting, South Korean troops attacked strongly-held ridges north of Yanggu, behind heavy artillery fire, but made little headway. They seized one ridge but were swept from two others by enemy counter-attacks. On the east-central front, battles had raged throughout the day northeast and northwest of Yanggu. On the far eastern flank, South Korean troops secured north-south ridgelines near Kansong, except for one hill recaptured by the enemy. Fog had hampered air support. Only light contacts were reported along the remainder of the Korean front.
Alfred Kohlberg, long a critic of State Department policy on China, told a press conference that his "informed guess" was that "a deal" had been made for settlement of the Korean War and that the present truce conferences were no more than "shadowboxing". He said that the supposed deal would allow admission to the U.N. of Communist China, and thereby render Nationalist China an outlaw. Mr. Kohlberg was prominent in the China lobby, a well-known purveyor, along with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk, of barnyard scatology.
In Tehran, British delegate Richard Stokes offered to the Iranian Government a new proposal to settle the oil nationalization dispute between Iran and Great Britain and provided until noon the next day to accept or reject the proposal, which was a 50-50 split of Iranian oil profits. Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh had rejected the previous compromise offer to allow British management of the Anglo-Iranian oil company at Abadan. Mr. Stokes said he believed that his efforts to construct a compromise had failed thus far and hoped that Iran would accept the offer he had just tendered, or else there was nothing for him left to do but go home.
Administration leaders and the Senate sought a compromise on funds for Voice of America, but critics continued to press for a heavy budget cut. The House had cut thirty million dollars from the requested 115 million dollar budget and the Senate had cut it even further, down to 56 million. The President again appealed to Congress the previous day to restore the requested budget for the information-dissemination agency.
The President stated that he was going to try anew to obtain from Congress the price and other control powers he had previously sought to combat inflation. He was receiving advice this date from his 16-member national advisory board on mobilization, headed by Charles E. Wilson, Defense Mobilizer.
A House Armed Services subcommittee recommended this date that $33,315,000 be appropriated for the expansion of the Raleigh-Durham Municipal Airport as a troop carrier Air Force base. Its report followed the subcommittee's inspection of sites in both North and South Carolina. A minority report, however, recommended reactivation of the Seymour Johnson Air Base at Goldsboro, N.C.
At Fort Dix, N. J., a jet plane trainer crashed into a group of soldiers the previous day, leaving thirteen men burned to death and twenty injured. It was the second worst crash at Fort Dix in the previous two years, a Navy plane having crashed in midair with an airliner on July 30, 1949, resulting in the deaths of sixteen persons.
An anonymous benefactor offered to pay the way through Notre Dame University of any dismissed Cadets from the U.S. Military Academy, following their expulsion for cheating, provided they would not participate in any form of varsity athletics and that they needed financial assistance. The offer and condition were confirmed by the president of the University.
Correspondent Relman Morin reports of three recent, startling incidents involving teenagers and young adults. First, the report had surfaced in investigations of narcotics usage that teenagers were regular users of dope. Many were confirmed addicts, possibly beyond cure, and to get money to support their habit, had resorted to such nefarious conduct as shoplifting, burglary, robbery and prostitution. Narcotics officers reported that the practice occurred in both small towns and big cities alike, and was spreading. A second disturbing report dealt with fixing of college basketball games, with players accepting bribes from gambling operatives in New York City and elsewhere. A third report then dealt with the cheating scandal at West Point, where cribbing of exam questions had transpired, resulting in the expulsion of 90 Cadets, including the majority of the football team. There was no precedent for these types of scandals among young people. Every generation worried about its children. This time, the professionals were also worried, though usually remaining detached and serene about such recurring crises in manners and morals.
The hurricane passing through the Gulf of Mexico was heading for Tampico and some of Mexico's richest oilfields, now again packing winds of up to 130 mph, as it had regained most of its force during the night after passing over Jamaica the previous Friday and Saturday, resulting in the loss of 155 lives. It was predicted to move inland near Tampico the next day before noon. It had struck the Yucatán Peninsula the previous day, where it had lost considerable strength over the sparsely-settled land before again refortifying itself in the Gulf.
On the editorial page, "Frenzied Financing" tells of it being impossible to predict accurately Federal expenditures and receipts in coming years, as changing economic conditions and new tax laws would upset revenue calculations and the changing world situation would have its impact on expenditures. Notwithstanding these complications, the Joint Congressional Committee on the Economic Report, in a recent pamphlet, titled "National Defense and the Economic Outlook", had tried to project the fiscal picture for the years 1952 through 1954. It provides those projected figures.
It concludes that in an ideal Federal democracy, the chief executive would be "an apostle of economy", would present to Congress each year a budget calling only for essential spending, and that the Congress would have the responsibility to check that budget item by item to assure the essentiality of each. But President Truman had shown that he made no clear distinction between essentials and luxuries, giving Congress a double responsibility to exercise oversight, something which it had failed to do. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas had proposed to give Congress a large, trained staff of full-time experts to aid in acting on appropriations, and it believes that measure deserved swift passage.
"A Game without Rules" finds that the press had become so focused on the role of Senator McCarthy, as found by the Senate investigating subcommittee report which had looked into the Senate campaign between incumbent Senator Millard Tydings and the ultimate victor the previous fall, John Butler, that they had overlooked a more important part of that report, that since no standards had been set up previously it would be "grossly unfair" to create them and then seek to apply them retroactively to the conduct of the campaign. It had, however, recommended new standards for the future, including: procedures for contesting elections and that use of defamatory literature in a campaign would constitute grounds for ouster of the victorious Senator; establishing rules making a candidate responsible for the acts of his aides; banning misleading composite pictures, voice recordings, and the like; causing any Senator, regardless of whether he was a candidate in the particular race in question, to be subject to expulsion should he engage in improper campaigning under those rules; studying the role of anonymous national groups in state elections; revising the Federal Corrupt Practices Act to make campaign spending limitations more realistic and enforceable; urging political parties to establish fair campaign standards; and asking the Justice Department to study the committee hearings and reports with an eye toward appropriate action.
The piece concludes that tight rules for political campaigning should be set up and enforced rigidly. "Those tactics of a Hitler or Stalin have no place in the American democracy. They should be outlawed."
Ditto for the presidential election campaign of 2016, the ostensible "winner" in the electoral college now looking more like a decided loser, given the revelations occurring on August 21, 2018 in Federal District Court in the Southern District of New York, regarding apparent felonious violation of campaign finance laws by the "President"—the same under which former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina was previously indicted and found not guilty for lack of knowledge of the payment of hush money. It was a good show while it lasted, El Presidente, but it is looking more and more like you are going to be fired by the majority of the American people who did not vote for you, and maybe sooner than later. Hope you can get back on tv with that reality show after the gig is over. Maybe they will even let you grab some more cats, and you won't even have to pay for their silence any longer.
We recommend early retirement for
age and health reasons. Do the right thing and spare the country the
mess
"Wedlock's Pitfalls" provides a question in which a woman who calculated her taxes on the calendar year had married a man who calculated his returns on the fiscal year, asking whether they could file a joint return, providing the answer that the Tax Court had said that they could not unless one or the other changed the basis of their filing.
The piece concludes from the fact that you had to check the signs of the zodiac for compatibility, then reconcile the formulation of taxes, and, after all that, still had to have a medical certificate.
"We're glad we're already hitched."
"A Plug for Electoral Reform" tells of Senator John Sparkman of Alabama having summed up in a very few words the reason why the people of the South should provide their full support to the electoral reform being promulgated by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Congressman Ed Gossett, in the form of a proposed Constitutional amendment which would allow for proportional division of electoral votes for each state based on the popular vote in the presidential elections, rather than based on the individual state formulations, which usually allowed only for a winner-take-all result.
Senator Sparkman had said that the change would allow those Southerners opposed to Democratic Party policy to have their votes finally counted, and would lead to a strong two-party system in the region, which he believed was needed.
The piece wholly agrees.
Drew Pearson, in Munich, Germany, writes a letter to his wife about their son, explaining that while driving toward the Czech border recently, he had noticed a big van behind which was a small car, the van appearing lost from their convoy and so they had stopped to inquire. Inside the car was their son, who was pushing the driver of the van "like a terrier biting the heels of a recalcitrant bull" because the van contained the most important part of their "Winds of Freedom" operation, that being the messages they were sending that night to the people of Czechoslovakia via hydrogen-filled balloons. Mr. Pearson says that he then left the car of VIPs where he had been riding and joined his son because he enjoyed his company.
He then goes on to explain that the Winds of Freedom shifted back and forth along the border and neither his son nor he knew exactly where to join the other trucks, but his son had instructions to meet a lookout in front of the post office in a little town ten miles from the border. And he goes on…
The Germans, he suggests, while supposed to be the military master race, seemed instead to be completely pacifist. German youngsters were just as unenthusiastic about raising an army as their son and other American youngsters were concerning the draft. He was thus convinced that Moscow wanted to wait a considerable amount of time before undertaking any action which would precipitate a world war, as they were aware that the people in the satellite countries were too restless to fight and would turn against the Kremlin in such case. That was why, he explains, he thought the balloons being launched into Czechoslovakia might help, carrying as they did a message of friendship from the American people and encouragement toward freedom and democracy.
He concludes by saying that he was lonesome and anxious to get back home, that it had rained a lot and he hoped it had rained some also at home, for when he had left, the pastures on his farm in Maryland were burned up.
"See you soon,
"Drew"
"Pitchmen of the Press", in the fourteenth article in the series from the Providence (R.I.) Journal, again, for the third straight edition, analyzes the columns of Westbrook Pegler, this time starting with his statement of January 19, 1950, that he abhorred "exaggeration in journalism", examining some examples of his own lack of exaggeration.
He had said, for instance, that the Department of Labor was a "colossal fraud performing no useful service for the whole public, but, on the contrary, serving only the unions and the racketeers to the public injury." The piece regrets that Mr. Pegler did not document this "unexaggerated statement" as the Department of Labor, as part of its duties, produced statistics on the number of people employed and unemployed in the country, kept a file of all labor contracts to which management and labor had access, issued a quarterly survey of industrial accidents and monthly data on billing activity, and other such valuable services.
On February 24, 1950, he had reported on an incident occurring during the inauguration 13 months earlier, in which the President had snubbed then South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who had led the Dixiecrat movement during the 1948 election, during the parade by the reviewing stand, finding from the episode the "guttersnipe in this fellow", meaning the President, to be "irrepressible".
On March 10, Mr. Pegler had described the wartime powers created by FDR and espoused by the Truman Administration, suggesting that through abuse of them, "any newspaper or press association, any radio station, any great or little business could be seized by the Army, as Montgomery Ward was, on the ground that any Communist members of any union had been kicked out for sabotage by a foreman with a son dead on Guadalcanal." The piece finds it unclear just what in the world Mr. Pegler was trying to say in this latter portion of his comment, but clarifies that the particular episode he referenced had occurred during the war when 1,000 Montgomery Ward workers had gone on strike at the Chicago plant and because its production was deemed vital to the war effort, the Government had ordered them back to work with the understanding that the dispute would be arbitrated, whereupon the workers had obeyed and subsequent arbitration resolved the dispute, albeit not to the satisfaction of chairman of the board Sewell Avery, refusing then to abide by the arbitration decision, resulting in his plant being seized and Mr. Avery bodily carried out by two soldiers while still seated in his chair.
On April 14, Mr. Pegler launched an attack on Time and Life, suggesting that Time was more harmonious with the "Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic Party than with Republican principles". It points out that the reference must have been confusing to readers who recalled that Time had carried a cover of Mr. Wallace showing him as the Pied Piper leading his party, with the implication that his followers were rats. A story in the magazine had also described Mr. Wallace as not being a man "distinguished for moral courage" and being "a weak leader driven by ambition".
The piece comments that Mr. Pegler, for many years, had espoused views in his columns which were pro-labor and the unions, that in 1940, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing the problems in the Building Service Employees International Union, whose then-president George Scalise eventually, from Mr. Pegler's revelations, had gone to jail. But, it continues, somewhere along the line, Mr. Pegler, who also had once set forth admiring phrases anent Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had become embittered regarding American unions and American politics. By 1950, when the instant study was conducted, he was devoting himself almost entirely to the "free use of epithet to attack entire institutions". He replaced his former good reporting with "colorful figures of speech", apparently believing the latter to be an adequate substitute for facts.
On February 15, he had written a column in which he stated amazement at the fuss regarding lynching in the South, finding that for every lynching or beating of a black person in the South, "union murderers under the Truman party's political protection have killed 100 and mobbed 1,000 innocent citizens in wild insurrections across the Northern tier and in bloody California." The piece goes on to take the year 1933 as example and calculate, based on Mr. Pegler's stated ratios, the number of such murders in the Northern tier and bloody California, finding that the 28 lynchings that year in the South would, if his ratios were correct, have produced 2,800 such murders, more than all the 1,761 murders and non-negligent manslaughters recorded by the FBI for that year in the entire country.
In fairness, Mr. Pegler had actually said in the column that the ratios applied to the lynchings and beatings of black persons which had occurred since 1936. But, utilizing the Tuskegee Institute's statistics only for lynchings, those most used by newspapers of the time keeping track of the number of reported lynchings—though criticized for being overly inclusive at times of ordinary killings not occasioned by mob or conspiratorial violence or motivated by apparent racial prejudice—, that would have equated to 56 such lynchings and therefore 5,600 such murders in the "Northern tier and in bloody California", or about an average of 400 per year, thus making the comparison even more ridiculous than the author of the piece suggests, though presumably entailing considerably fewer than the total murders in the country during the same period.
A letter writer, the former commissioner of the State Police and Highway Patrol of Pennsylvania, comments on the August 15 editorial, "An Example for Tar Heelia", as he had been responsible for carrying out the measures which resulted in the large reduction of highway deaths in 1938 in that state, which the editorial had cited as a positive example for what could be done with better speed laws and better enforcement of them. He suggests, however, that there was very little relation between the legal maximum speed limit and the death rate on the highways, though agreeing that speed was the greatest killer on American roads. He says that the reason for the disconnect was that the legal speed limit was not usually effectively enforced. He cannot believe, for instance, that the maximum speed limit of 40 miles per hour in Massachusetts was actually enforced. He believes that the error lay in the calculations of the death per 100 million miles of travel, based on gasoline consumed in various states, assuming a rate of consumption of 15 miles per gallon. But since the size of cities in the various states varied greatly, he believes it absurd to compare death rates across states based on miles driven, as the death rate in the cities was very low compared to that taking place on the rural stretches of roads and highways.
He also disagrees with the editorial in its placing the responsibility for the high death rate in North Carolina upon the public, as it more properly lay with the Governor and the Legislature.
He favors compulsory driver training, the value of which he had demonstrated while commissioner in Pennsylvania. The previous winter, he had prepared a bill for presentation by North Carolina State Representative James Vogler of Charlotte to present to the Legislature, but Mr. Vogler, while indicating his willingness to present the bill, was always too busy to do so, contending that it would not be passed. He believes that not to be an adequate reason for not introducing the bill for, had it been introduced, at least hearings would have taken place and facts adduced, as he had presented in Pennsylvania, which would convincingly have shown that a system of enforced traffic laws could soon reduce the death rate by half and ultimately by two-thirds.
He concludes that until the leaders of the State Government undertook their responsibility in the matter, deaths would continue unabated on the highways, and further posits that if the newspapers of the state were to place the responsibility where it belonged, some relief might occur, as existing laws were futile.
Get the hell out of the way, you ol' slowpoke! We got some business to transact, heya. Got to get on up to the races down in Cha'lotte befo' we miss the fust acci-dent of the day. Goddamnit, get the hell out the way or we'll shove ye off the goddamned road! No, we're not kiddin'. Get out the way, now. You'll wind up in the goddamned ditch ova deya.
Framed Edition
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