The Charlotte News
Monday, August 6, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the ceasefire talks at Kaesong in Korea had ceased for the nonce, but would in all likelihood resume on Wednesday. The U.N. negotiations team, under the direction of Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, flew to Tokyo to confer with U.N. supreme commander General Matthew Ridgway, who had called off the talks on Sunday for "flagrant violation of Kaesong's neutrality" because of the presence of armed Communist troops again in Kaesong on Saturday, a violation of a previous agreement on conditions for the talks.
General Ridgway was, according to an aide, preparing a message in response to an apology by the Communists for the breach, which they described as an "accident". When resumed, the talks would again center around the dispute over the location of the ceasefire zone, whether on the 38th parallel, as demanded by the Communists, or along present battles lines, as demanded by the U.N.
A statement issued by General Ridgway from headquarters nullified a press release on Saturday by the education division of headquarters, which said, among other things, that the allies demanded a ceasefire zone between the Yalu River and the present battle lines.
We have a feeling that whoever committed that blunder ought to stock up on severe-winter clothing as the next duty post might prove to be in Alaska.
A record 56 billion dollar peacetime military budget for the 1951-52 fiscal year was approved by the House Appropriations Committee, 1.5 billion less than that requested by the President, and did not include 4.5 billion in public works construction to be considered later in the year or the financing for the Korean war since the end of the 1950-51 fiscal year. The report provides the breakdown of the appropriations.
Correspondent Elton C. Fay reports that the Navy was building up its fleet strength in the Mediterranean, perhaps one of the reasons for the U.S. seeking an arrangement with Franco's Spain to use naval and air bases, to serve a greater role in defense of the trans-Atlantic communications, control of the Mediterranean, and the areas of Northern Europe.
In Tehran, British Cabinet and Iranian Government representatives were meeting this night to start anew negotiations on the oil nationalization dispute. The first session would seek common ground for further discussions. Mediator Averell Harriman, who had arranged the meeting, would not participate. At least one day would pass before the next meeting.
East Berlin was crammed with Communist youth, present for their "world peace festival", the main themes of which was hatred for the U.S. and loyalty to Stalin, themes enunciated by East German President Wilhelm Pieck. The 50,000 blue-shirted youths assembled to hear his speech yelled, "Long live the Soviet Union, which gives the great example of peaceful construction to the peoples," and also a similar chant regarding Stalin.
You need something a little more terse and catchier, maybe. Try, "Make Russia and Germany Great Again!"
In the area of Seattle, near Whidbey Island, a Navy patrol plane had crashed into Puget Sound during a training mission with nine men aboard and there were apparently no survivors.
After DNC chairman William Boyle conferred with the President regarding his receipt of payments from a St. Louis firm which had been approved for an RFC loan, which Mr. Boyle said were for unrelated legal fees, he said that he had no intention of stepping down, said he had always conducted himself honorably.
The President urged in a letter to CIO president Philip Murray that the Midwest needed to elect more "forward-looking, liberal-minded members of Congress" to assure creation of the Missouri Valley Authority, similar to TVA. The President's statement was in response to the recent disaster in Missouri and Kansas, where record floods had occurred beginning July 13. He suggested that the flooding could have been avoided or diminished with the proper flood control project in place.
Republican Representative Murray of Wisconsin urged Congress to order a 30-day cooling-off period before the Army expelled 90 West Point Cadets for cheating, a decision already rendered by a special board led by retired Judge Learned Hand of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Murray urged, referring to Congress, that people who lived in glass houses should not thrown stones. He suggested that Cadets could not find it inspiring to see the Army hauling Vice-President Alben Barkley around in a plane while he made thousands of dollars making speeches. Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado said that more than two million dollars in officer training would be wasted in the dismissals.
Earl (Red) Blaik, head coach of the Army football team, accounting for the majority of the dismissals, said that he would welcome a Congressional investigation of the matter so that the "true character" of the members of the team could be brought before the country.
You might want to think that over some.
In Austin, Tex., two unexpected guests dropped in for lunch at the home of Homer Parker, when an Air Force plane crashed into the family bedroom. The two aboard suffered only slight injuries and no one at the home was injured.
Did the soldiers sit down and have lunch? How about some corn on the cob for your swollen lip?
But be it known that knocking by the Government is required before entry unless the imminent destruction of evidence, escape, or danger to the occupants is reasonably suspected, assuming, of course, that there is no "hot pursuit" to the location. Moreover, the Third Amendment forbids the mandatory quartering of soldiers in peacetime. Throw them in the cornfield.
In Raleigh, the Council of State approved this date an emergency appropriation for the N.C. College for Negroes, as further explored in the editorial below.
Columnist Earl Wilson was experimenting with the Atomic Diet, as he relates on the Feature Page.
On the editorial page, "Cadet House Cleaning" recaps the story of the 90 West Point Cadets expelled from the Academy for cheating on exams by obtaining questions from others who had already taken the exams. The majority of those expelled had been on the football team.
It finds it entirely appropriate for the expulsions to have occurred for violations of the highly esteemed honor code at the Academy and that Congress and the Executive Branch should likewise employ similar standards to expel persons who violated the code of conduct, as further explored below by Drew Pearson.
But it was laudable that the Academy and the Cadets had lived up to the honor code in bringing about the expulsions of the violators.
"A Theme Worth Repeating" recaps the Saturday report regarding the education division of allied headquarters having released a statement that the ceasefire line desired by the allies was above the present battle lines, that the Russians were seeking to weaken the Chinese and that China could eventually become as Yugoslavia, breaking with Moscow. The statement had been released as "background" to the press. It was not yet clear whether it was intended as an official release. (As the front page indicates, it had been nullified by General Ridgway.)
The piece wants to hear more, however, about the Tito-type movement in China, as there were many such indications, as outlined by the Alsops this date and the prior week.
The idea that Russia was not the friend of the people was gathering momentum in many Communist satellites and it was something the Soviets did not want known. It urges that it should be transmitted to the satellites by every means possible.
"The Best Solution" finds that Governor Kerr Scott's proposal for consolidation of State-supported colleges and universities to have a good deal of merit and that it should receive consideration from the 1953 Legislature. It also urges, however, that it should not alter the decision of the Council of State in its consideration of the request by the UNC Board of Trustees and Trustees of the N.C. College for Negroes in Durham to appropriate $271,000 to expand the undergraduate program of N.C.C. and establish a separate but substantially equal graduate school there in education. The latter, it suggests, would relieve the burden on the UNC graduate education program as a disproportionate number of black applicants would seek admission there because of the greater opportunities for black students in education than in other fields. If the graduate education program at UNC were placed on the same footing as the other UNC graduate and professional programs, admitting qualified applicants without regard to race, creed, or color, there would be an inordinate burden placed on the existing program because of having to admit a greater number of qualified black applicants than the few likely to be admitted in the other programs.
The editorial approves the move and urges the Council to approve the request. (The front page reports that it had.)
Underlying the decision, however, was the continued absurdity of separate-but-equal doctrine, freighted as it was with centuries of irrational superstition and fear ahout race-mixing in schools and other public facilities, rationalizations in the more educated for racially-motivated bias, that to integrate fully would cause "trouble", a complex of fears and rationalizations sometimes extant on both sides of the color line, however illusory and artificial that line was in a society which prided itself on equality of opportunity under the Constitution.
A piece from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, titled "Attention, Senator Byrd", tells of the Government about to subsidize exports of apples to specified foreign markets at the rate of 50 percent of the export price, but not more than $1.25 per bushel, because the domestic crop was too large. The program was predicted to bolster domestic prices.
It states sardonically that the nation could expect a solid protest from apple-grower Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia for such unwarranted expenditure and interference with private enterprise.
A piece from the Baltimore Evening Sun tells of Texas being so big and producing so many millionaires that it seemed to matter little that the Legislature had rounded off a decimal point from 4.5373 to 4.6 percent in computing the rate of the State's oil production tax, amounting to 1.5 million dollars in actual additional revenue.
Drew Pearson tells of Yugoslav war warnings becoming acute because of the accumulation of Communist medical units along the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border, as those units did not participate in ordinary military maneuvers. The Bulgarian army was well-equipped by the Soviets. In addition, a strip of land all along the Rumanian and Bulgarian borders with Yugoslavia had been cleared and pillbox emplacements constructed. It could be part of the war of nerves against Tito or a genuine sign of impending attack during the coming harvest season, a time when European dictators became trigger-happy.
Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, had not acted on requests to provide appropriations for the committee investigating organized crime, now chaired by Senator Herbert O'Conor. Without his approval, the appropriations could not be made. The result was that the committee had withdrawn its investigators from New York and other areas and it would have to complete its work in September.
He implies that some pressure may have been brought to bear on Senator Hayden from political elements influenced by hoodlums based around Phoenix, one of the centers of the narcotics trade out of Mexico. By contrast, Senator Hayden continued to allow money to go to other Senate probes.
Washington observers were wondering whether the White House would follow the precedent set by the Army in removing from command of the Detroit Arsenal Brig. General David Crawford for accepting gratuities from war contractors. Applying the same standard, he suggests, Presidential military aide General Harry Vaughan, the President's doctor, Maj. General Wallace Graham, Presidential aide Donald Dawson, and the President's appointments secretary Matt Connelly, ought also to be canned. He thinks that perhaps Secretary of the Army Frank Pace ought run the White House for a few days.
Friends of former Navy Secretary Francis Matthews, who was presently Ambassador to Ireland, had advised him to see the well-received play on Ireland's North and South conflict, Border Be Damned by Eddie Dowling.
A Federal District judge in New York had written a 13-page opinion as to why he would not set aside a guilty plea to treason entered by Lt. James Monty, who had been exposed by Mr. Pearson's column for working with the Germans in Italy during the war.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop again look at Communist China's break from doctrinaire Communism as preached and mandated by the Soviet pattern. As told in the 1951 book, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, by Bernard Schwartz, beginning in 1927, Mao Tse-Tung favored a revolution founded on the rural peasantry, contrary to Marxian doctrine of starting the revolution among the urban proletariat. Mao found the rural Chinese more likely to be able to carry out revolution against the Chiang Kai-Shek regime, as the central government did not extend into the countryside and the urban workers in China were relatively few in number in a generally agrarian country.
But, he was rebuked by Moscow for straying from established doctrine and Russian-trained Li Li-san was dispatched by Moscow to China to become the new leader of the Chinese Communists. His efforts to organize the urban proletariat as Communists failed badly as Mao continued to organize the rural peasantry into an army. In 1930, Mao had his first successes against Chiang and in 1931, Li Li-san was dismissed in favor of Mao as chairman of the "Chinese Soviet Republic". This change of power came not by Moscow's orders but because Mao controlled the real sources of power in the Communist Party in China.
Now, as discussed in the column the prior week, Mao had developed his own theory of the Chinese Revolution, which he implied was a greater contribution to Marxism-Leninism than that of Stalin. His theory was to be a guide to Communism throughout Asia, calling for "armed struggle in the countryside".
The Alsops suggest that the Soviets might accept for the time being a coequal Communist partnership with Mao, the Kremlin might capture the Chinese Communist apparatus, or Mao might die and be replaced by a moderating force as Li Li-san. But it was reasonable to assume that Mao's revolt had shaken the doctrine of Stalin's infallibility as much as had Titoism in Yugoslavia.
The first article in a series of articles on four "pitchmen" of print and radio, Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, Fulton Lewis, Jr., and Westbrook Pegler, appears from the Providence (R.I.) Journal, based on a study performed of their programs and articles during a 15-week period between January and April, 1951, excluding the newspaper columns of Mr. Pearson and Mr. Winchell, analyzing only their radio shows. The series, originally appearing in The Journal between June 25 and July 11, had won the Peabody Award for journalism in 1951. The first article introduces the study and explains its analytical criteria, and the next installment would be on Mr. Winchell.
The study looked for a pattern of false statements which tended to glamorize or sensationalize the news to fit a larger audience, not just aberrant errors which all members of the press occasionally made.
It points out that the columnists and commentators also attacked each other on occasion, Mr. Pearson accusing Mr. Lewis of fabricating a spectacular story for commercial gain and Mr. Lewis accusing Mr. Pearson of telling a lie, while Mr. Pegler had called Mr. Winchell a gent's-room journalist and Mr. Winchell had referred to Mr. Pegler as a "louse in the blouse of journalism".
That's bad, maybe close to one of those sons of Brotherhood awards which Mr. Pearson was fond of issuing. Sounds monkey-itchy.
The "Congressional Quiz" reports that Congress during the first half of 1951 conducted most of its business, 42 roll-call votes, during the period of Tuesday through Thursday each week. According to reports out of Congress, price-cutting took place in only 43 of 123 leading trading centers in the country. Seventy percent of the stores cutting prices were located in three cities, New York, Detroit and Denver.
You probably didn't know that.
Here is our Quiz for the Day: What group of individuals registered 43 percent approval to a poll question asking for agreement or disagreement on whether to give the President, at least the current El Presidente—a.k.a., Primero Entre Iguales Idiotas—, in 2018, the power to shut down media outlets for "misbehavior"? The answer is rather disturbing. If you said, "Well, naturally, some group in a third-world country, or maybe Argentina or North Korea," you would be wrong, at least insofar as this poll measured responses.
The methodology, as with any poll, may have skewed the results somewhat, but given the general tenor of the divisive and anti-First Amendment political climate stimulated by El Presidente over the past three years, including the time prior to the stolen and Russian-tainted election, it is hardly surprising—that is to say anti-First Amendment except for His Highness and his political retinue of obeisant lackeys.
We would like a follow-up question addressed to the same sample of individuals, as to what the First Amendment says in their view and how, if among the 43 percent
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