The Charlotte News
Wednesday, August 29, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Don Huth, that General Matthew Ridgway had told the Communists that he refused to reinvestigate the alleged Kaesong bombing incident, which the previous day he had laid squarely at the feet of the Communists as a fake attack blamed on the allies and used as a pretext to break off the ceasefire negotiations a week earlier. He again reiterated that the allies would resume armistice negotiations whenever the Communists were ready to do so. He was responding to a message from North Korean Premier Kim Il Sung and Communist Chinese General Peng Teh-Huai, who had demanded that a reinvestigation take place by groups of liaison officers from each side and that General Ridgway admit the bombing. He noted that on the night of August 22 a Communist liaison officer had refused the request of General Ridgway's liaison officer to continue the investigation during daylight hours and leave all of the alleged evidence in place, and that a reinvestigation at this late date would serve no purpose other than to confuse the matter further.
The Department of Defense announced that U.S. battle casualties in Korea had reached 81,422, an increase of 416 since the prior week, including 12,113 killed in action, 57,025 wounded, and 12,284 missing in action.
The President offered a hero's burial in Arlington National Cemetery to a Korean war soldier, Sergeant First Class John R. Rice, 37, who had been denied a grave in Sioux City, Iowa, because he was an Indian, part of the Winnebago tribe. The Sioux City cemetery had refuse the burial on the ground that only members of the Caucasian race could be buried there. The widow of the soldier had purchased a plot in the cemetery without knowing of the limitation, though it had been mentioned in the contract. The President sent a message through his military aide, Maj. General Harry Vaughan, that the "national appreciation of patriotic sacrifice should not be limited by race, color or creed."
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, had recently, in executive session, told the joint Senate committees considering the foreign aid bill that it was "dangerous to try to guess" what Russia would do or what was in the minds of the men at the Kremlin. He said the best thing the free world could do would be to ready itself as fast as possible to meet Communist aggression anywhere in the world. He said that every cut in the aid appropriation would mean fewer military units and less military production to counter the might of the Soviet Union and its satellites. He urged passage of the original Administration request for 8.5 billion dollars in economic and military aid, which had been reduced by a billion dollars in the House.
Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana accused the President of having "hit below the belt" and misrepresented facts in trying to make Congress the scapegoat for high prices. He was responding to the President's denunciation of the new economic controls law, and said that the President had let inflation get out of hand.
The Senate Banking Committee planned to start hearings the following day on the President's demands for elimination of three of the worst provisions of the new law. Three Republican Senators, Richard Nixon of California, Homer Ferguson of Michigan and Herman Welker of Idaho, had introduced a bill to eliminate those provisions, stating that the President's request should be granted and that he should then be held accountable to the nation if he failed to check inflation. Their bill would eliminate the provision permitting sellers to pass on to consumers all cost increases since the start of the Korean War, would also eliminate the provision which allowed any retail or wholesale seller the same percentage of profit earned before the war, and take out the existing prohibition on livestock slaughtering quotas.
Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin, speaking before the V.F.W. convention in New York, said this date that "slanderers" within the "privileged sanctuary" of the Senate should be forced to prove their charges or face a libel suit, as the Founders did not intend the Senate to be "a citadel … to hide in from the libel laws". He further said that some Americans had forgotten that the Bill of Rights provided for a fair trial, "a trial in a courtroom, not in a political speech". He did not mention anyone by name but it was clear that he was referring to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The convention decided to invite Senator McCarthy to respond to Secretary Tobin's speech.
A representative of the New York Bar Association claimed that at least six of the approximately 90 West Point Cadets who had been expelled from the Academy for cheating had been reinstated, but a spokesman at the Academy refused to confirm the statement. The latter said that an investigation into the cheating scandal had not been completed and that a report on the cases could not be released until their work was done. The spokesman said that 82 of the accused Cadets had left the Academy and of those, 73 had received administrative discharges while the paperwork on the cases of the remaining nine had been forwarded to Washington for final action. He also said that the Academy had taken the position since the cheating scandal had first been announced that some of the accused Cadets might possibly be exonerated. The Bar Association representative had said that his investigation had shown that the accused Cadets had been subjected to "shockingly shameful treatment".
It's a terrible, terrible thing when, in the modern age, a fella can't crib an exam, knowing the questions in advance from previous exam takers. Just awfully unfair, especially if you're there to play football. What's the deal with wanting them to learn anything? That wasn't in the contract.
In Mississippi, former Governor Hugh White, 70, won his second bid for Governor of the one-party state on the basis of unofficial but nearly complete returns from Tuesday's Democratic primary. It was the second time in state history that a man had been elected twice to the Governor's office, the first having been the late Senator Theodore Bilbo who had one terms in both 1916 and again in 1928. Mr. White had been Governor between 1936 and 1940. The campaign had centered on states rights, the black vote and prohibition. Present Governor Fielding Wright, the Dixiecrat vice-presidential candidate in 1948, had backed Mr. White, while Senator James Eastland had supported his opponent, Paul Johnson, Jr.
In Richmond, Virginia, the Abingdon Barter Theater no longer would accept Confederate money, a sign formally adorning the ticket booth suggesting to the contrary having been torn up by the theater's director after a tall stranger had come to the booth recently and provided a 20-dollar Confederate note as payment for five tickets, which the director felt obliged to honor before removing the sign permanently.
In Hanover, Mass., a four-year-old boy perished in a flash fire this date, after slipping from his mother's grasp to dash back to his bedroom for something he prized, which the mother was unable to identify. The fire was blamed on an oil-burning range.
In Hollywood, actor Robert Walker, 32, died the previous night at his home while undergoing treatment for an emotional disturbance. A psychiatrist stated that he had been treating Mr. Walker for the previous 18 months and had been summoned the previous night to talk to him, which he proceeded to do for two hours before calling another psychiatrist to administer a sedative, sodium amytol, which had been given to Mr. Walker many times previously for emotional disturbances, with good results. On this occasion, however, he lapsed into a coma and finally experienced respiratory failure from which he could not be revived by an inhalator squad. Mr. Walker's former wife, actress Jennifer Jones, presently married to movie producer David O. Selznick, had been notified of the death and was flying from New York to Hollywood. Their two young sons had been spending the summer with Mr. Walker. He had been in films for eight years, having recently made a successful comeback after a lengthy illness, for which he had been treated at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, in 1948. His most recent successful performance had been in "Strangers on a Train", directed by Alfred Hitchcock, released two months earlier and the last film to be released while he was alive. In 1944, he had appeared in "See Here, Private Hargrove", based on the book by Marion Hargrove, formerly of The News.
In Charlotte, Dr. Oren Moore, 65, nationally known physician and surgeon, had died at a hospital after a long period of declining health. He had undergone a major operation on July 24 in Winston-Salem and had recovered sufficiently to return to his home, until his condition worsened the prior Sunday causing him again to be hospitalized. He received his undergraduate degree at Davidson College and his medical degree at North Carolina Medical College, graduating in 1911 and then doing post-graduate work at McGill University in Montréal, as well as at the Universities of Pennsylvania and New York. He had been an associate professor of gynecology at the North Carolina Medical College in 1911 and continued in that capacity for two years. He had since practiced medicine in Charlotte and was active in state medical, social, civic, religious and educational affairs.
In Hanau, Germany, two Hanau hotelmen were charged with damaging property and causing bodily injury by buying 30 fat bedbugs at one mark apiece and turning them loose in a rival hotel.
On the editorial page, "On Private Council Sessions" tells of the City Council possibly getting ready this date to resume its former practice of holding weekly private sessions prior to the open public meetings, a practice which it had abandoned the previous May after abuses had surfaced, a change which the newspaper had greeted with approval. Only one argument had been advanced for resuming the closed sessions, that being that some members believed they could better inform themselves about major issues by talking about them in private. It finds this advantage, however, outweighed by the shortcomings of the system.
It concludes that, notwithstanding the suggested compromise that journalists be allowed into the private sessions as an adequate safeguard, the people's business belonged to the people and the City Council should therefore transact its business in public.
"A Soldier Calls for Union" tells of General Eisenhower calling for a federal union in Western Europe as the key to resolving the security of the free world against aggression. The Senate subcommittee which visited the General in Paris had released its report, in which he had said that a lot of his professional associates were going to think that he was "completely crazy" but that joining Europe together in a federal union was the "key to the whole thing".
In a speech the previous month, he had deplored the "web of customs barriers interlaced with bilateral agreements, multilateral cartels, local shortages, and economic monstrosities."
The fact that a military leader was making such a recommendation was extraordinary, as one normally thought of military leaders favoring use of guns, divisions and atomic bombs to resolve international difficulties. He proposed that the citizens of Western Europe put their relations on a citizen-to-citizen rather than nation-to-nation basis, a proposed organizational transition similar in nature to what had occurred in the U.S. in the 1780's, moving from 13 individual colonies operating under the Articles of Confederation to a Federal union under the Constitution, forming the United States. This formula had also been tried with success in Switzerland and in Canada.
It finds that it would be interesting for the Senators to obtain the General's views on more specific parts of the proposal, such as the relationship of the U.S. to such a union and how best to achieve it.
It concludes that the prestige enjoyed by General Eisenhower in Europe would give considerable impetus to his recommended course of action.
"Bureaucracy Doesn't End at Home" tells of the Hoover Commission having found three years earlier that 200,000 employees in 96 countries, representing 40 different Federal agencies, constituted the Government's overseas services. They were overseen by 30 different Congressional committees. It was thus hard to understand the reasoning of Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, who had moved to reconsider a bill unanimously passed by the Senate which would set up a commission to study Federal overseas activities.
Business Action, an organ of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had cited the case of Wake Island when the Japanese had attacked it in late 1941, after which the Navy, State, Commerce and Interior Departments each having suspected, but without certainty, that they had charge of Wake. Finally, it had been established that the Civil Aeronautics Administration had control of the atoll. But by that time, the Japanese had taken over.
The Hoover Commission recommended creation of a separate administration of Overseas Affairs. The piece thinks it quite reasonable to conduct a survey of overseas activities as provided by the passed Senate bill, as a compilation of facts and conditions was prerequisite to remedial legislation.
"Handicapped Children Neglected" tells of State superintendent of Public Instruction Clyde Erwin having estimated that 65,000 handicapped North Carolina schoolchildren needed special instruction, but that at present, little more than a small start had been made in that direction. In 1949-50, 2,161 of these children had been enrolled in special classes taught by 54 teachers, 25 paid by the State and 29 paid by local funds. The previous year, the numbers had grown to 3,888 students and 77 teachers, 50 of whom were paid by the State and the remainder by local funds. Special classes had been provided in 15 county units and 14 city units out of the State's total 172 school units. Provision had also been made for homebound services to 46 pupils.
From these statistics, it was obvious that the program needed enlargement and a better distribution of the special services across the state. The previous year, Tom Fesperman of The News had described the remarkable progress made by handicapped children when they were given proper supervision, and, it urges, all such children should have that advantage.
Dr. Hugh Bennett, chief of the Department of Soil Conservation Services, substituting for Drew Pearson, on his way back from Europe, discusses the recent Midwestern floods having exposed the reality that the day of piecemeal flood control had to end. Truly effective flood control had to protect millions of farmers on the land and in the small creek bottoms, as well as in the great cities and major river valleys. No single method of flood control could do the whole job for a given watershed. He indicates that flood control had to start where rains first hit the earth and end only when the floodwater reached the ocean. In many cases, silt was more destructive to property than the water itself. Most of the silt consisted of eroded soil, washed out of upstream farms and overgrazed pastures. When it reached fertile bottomland, it destroyed crops and, in the case of sandy deposits, reduced the productivity of the land for generations to come.
It had been estimated that 75 percent of the overall flood damage in the country occurred along the lesser tributary streams above the bottomlands of the major channels. The greatest damage from the tremendous storms was erosion on upland farms, a problem rarely making the headlines in the newspapers. The eroded productivity of such upland farms was estimated to be worth more than 200 million dollars. That which made news regarding floods was damage to city property, bridges and highways. While that was terrible, much of that damage could be repaired, whereas layers of infertile sand spread over thousands of acres of productive bottomlands constituted irreparable damage.
Experience had shown that it was possible to control flooding on small tributary streams via good conservation measures and upstream retarding structures. The portion of the water which reached the larger streams had to be controlled by dams, levees and other measures. The problem of runoff from upland farms and small watersheds was caused by farmers not getting the technical training they needed for adequate soil and water conservation on their farms. Funds were not generally available for construction of small upstream dams and channel improvements. But if the little creeks of the upper valleys in the fields and pastures that fed smaller tributaries were ignored, only a partial program of flood control would be extant. The Department was working on thousands of farms, and floods had already been controlled or greatly minimized along many of the creeks.
Conservation measures were also increasing per-acre yields, causing water to enter the streams more slowly. Small dams and waterway improvements in the upper watersheds could further retard the movement of this water. The result would be protection of thousands of people who lived along the smaller creeks and also along the major waterways.
Marquis Childs tells of reports to the State Department which ultimately determined the nation's foreign policy being skewed through pressure on diplomats to conform those reports to acceptable pre-existing points of view. He cites a case of an unnamed State Department diplomat, reported to him by a high-ranking military officer, who had been assigned to an Asian country after having served in the Army and been several times wounded during World War II, in North Africa and Europe. He had decided to get below the superficial propaganda to which all diplomats were exposed and seek the truth for himself, placing the results of that investigation in his reports. After doing so, he was called in by his superior and given a warning that such reports could cause him to be subject to suspicion. He later discovered that in several instances his reports had been altered before being sent to Washington.
This man was in no way sympathetic to Communism but was simply trying to relate the situation which he had seen, in an accurate and honest fashion. Mr. Childs suggests that overestimation of the strength of pro-Western and pro-American governments could be just as dangerous as overestimation or underestimation of the Communist conspiracy. When decisions on foreign policy were made on such distorted reports, that foreign policy would obviously become unreliable. When the atmosphere, as it presently existed in Washington, was rife with hysteria created by the impression that the State Department was infiltrated with Communists and fellow-travelers influencing foreign policy, the resulting unreality presented a peril to American security.
Robert C. Ruark tells of Rhubarb, a
star cat which had appeared in a Paramount motion picture
Mr. Ruark says that he was bowing out of the cat picture forever and that if he contemplated a small attack of catalepsy, he hoped the reader would forgive the pun, as nowhere in the piece had he mentioned a catalytic agent.
Indeed, despite having bagged two lions in the first three days of the safari from which he had recently returned, he didn't even use the word "catastrophe".
A letter writer from Pittsboro comments on the editorial of August 24, "Lost Perspective", which he believes needed revision such that the title ought read "Lost Common Candor and Frankness", regarding freshman Congressman Woodrow Jones of North Carolina having urged ending all foreign aid as a waste of money. The writer agrees that he might have been short on perspective, but adds that there had been so much aid provided under the Marshall Plan and other forms of aid since the close of World War I that few people could keep track of it. While the aid, he allows, might be a good investment in the future to ward off aggression, he was more concerned about internal threats than those from Russia. He wants America to stop and think.
A letter writer from St. Pauls, N.C., comments on the reprinted Peabody Award-winning series from the Providence (R. I.) Journal, "Pitchmen of the Press", finds that "anyone gifted with a sense of a jackass" could conclude from the series that only "the rawest of political propaganda" was being circulated "for the purpose of glossing over the many mistakes" of the men who had been "misruling" the country since 1932. He wonders why, if Westbrook Pegler and Fulton Lewis, Jr., had, as claimed, libeled the New Deal and Fair Deal so much, there had been no legal action taken against them, only this series of newspaper articles. He believes newspapers should give facts to the public, not "garbled treatises" full of "evasive, distorted half-truths, for the purpose of creating a bad impression in regard to someone for whom they harbor a personal dislike, politically or otherwise."
He adds that recent articles on both General MacArthur and Senator Taft were without "rhyme or reason" and "prejudiced to the point of absurdity". A recent editorial, titled "From Maryland to Ohio", had been a "masterpiece of undermining political strategy, seeking to leave the impression that anti-Fair Deal dollars and not Mr. Taft's ability as a statesman was responsible for his success at the polls." He finds nothing to be further from the truth. He concludes that the country should honor Senator Taft with the presidency in 1952.
A letter writer says that he was for Lieutenant-Governor Pat Taylor for Governor of the state in 1952, that he had been a lieutenant in the 371st Regiment, and that everybody in the state knew him to be square.
Former interim Senator William B. Umstead would be elected Governor in 1952.
But the story of the convention continued to be that which was transpiring on the streets outside the convention hall, where antiwar protesters again clashed with Chicago police for the fourth straight night. (The Life issue of September 6, 1968, incidentally, unlike other issues, is not searchable, probably, extrapolating from the claims of our present "President", the result of a Google conspiracy to suppress informative investigation.)
Was the police-versus-demonstrator violence attending the convention a set-up? Was it a "dirty trick" by opposition forces infiltrating one or both sides of the "thin blue line"? Or was it the clash of milieus which refused to understand one another, refused to hear one another over the insistent, self-centered shouts back and forth, and thus refused to compromise to reach a solution to societal problems? Was it all of those things? We likely will never know.
The valiant attempt
It was a bad year for American democracy, from April 4 onward.
Candidly, when the results were finalized by the afternoon after election day, November 5, we went home to our room and quietly cried. It had been a rough seven months.
It was as if a creeping nightmare, put away and forgotten, delayed by eight years, interspersed by the pain inflicted on the country in three assassinations of great men, but which, nevertheless, had seemingly still not triumphed over the will of collective reason, now, after having gradually transformed a small but large enough sector of the former majority of reasoning adults into emotional reactionaries, had caught up finally in its creep, and changed the course of time and reality sufficiently to match that earlier dreaded scenario: Richard Nixon was going to be the President, come January 20, 1969.
All color in the world had suddenly faded by a couple of shades duller and dimmer. The misery and shock of the earlier pain now shot through the senses without any anodyne of relief, no "after all, the policies for which they stood still retain vivacity in other elected or appointed officials at the top...", only salt being poured to the earlier wounds insufficiently healed, with the knowledge that the progress in the nation of the prior eight years, though grudgingly accomplished at times, full of stops and starts, imperfections, compromises, and failure of expectations, yet nevertheless progress, was about to be reversed.
And, sure enough, retiring Chief
Justice Earl Warren—thwarted in his attempt to retire in mid-1968 by the
Strom Thurmond-led filibuster of old Dixiecrat and conservative
Republican Senators to President Johnson's Senate majority-favored nomination of Justice Abe
Fortas—, as one of the new President's first acts, would be replaced
As any halfwit at the time, not
consumed by subjective, emotional considerations, and who followed
current events and politics at all, understood, the election was not
about the war so much as about domestic policy and the desire of
conservatives to reverse the progressive trend of the prior eight
years. And, furthermore, if there was a "peace" candidate
in the race by November, it was far more likely to have been
Vice-President Humphrey than Mr. Nixon or, God forbid, Governor
Wallace and his running mate, Curt "Bombs Away"-"Buck Turgidson" LeMay...
Framed Edition
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