The Charlotte News
Tuesday, September 4, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via John Randolph, that U.N. headquarters had confirmed that the allies had been engaging in a new offensive for the previous 17 days, the "Battle of the Hills" in east-central Korea, to oppose Communist forces of 400,000 men in the front lines, backed by armor and 1,000 planes, preparing for a new offensive. The allies had advanced five miles during the fighting. Three American divisions formed the main U.N. assault force, the Second and Seventh Infantry Divisions and the First Marine Division. An equal number of South Koreans were also engaged in the battle against between 30 and 40 divisions of Communists. The most intense fighting since the prior April had taken place over the ridges on Tuesday, where allied troops were continually battling 83,000 Chinese and North Korean troops for control of the ridges and mountains up to 4,000 feet in height.
In the air war, U.N. warplanes supporting the allied ground forces hit Communist supply lines in 333 sorties. U.S. Fifth Air Force planes knocked out more than 460 Communist vehicles on Monday night, adding to the 600 vehicles and 275 railcars destroyed or damaged during daylight hours on Monday. Warship artillery supplemented the air war.
The ceasefire negotiators on each side traded six accusatory, uncompromising notes this date, both sides claiming that the other had been guilty of distortion. Neither side proposed a resumption of the ceasefire talks, broken off two weeks earlier amid Communist claims of violations by the allies of the neutrality zone around Kaesong, the conference site. Pessimism now hung in the air regarding the likelihood that the talks would resume.
The President, in San Francisco for the Japanese peace treaty conference, skipped his usual early-morning constitutional, despite about 20 San Francisco journalists having arisen before dawn to join him on the walk. No reason was given for the departure from his normal schedule.
At the conference, behind-the-scenes
negotiations convinced American leaders, including the President,
that they had the votes to defeat any Russian attempt to disrupt the
conference, set to begin this night. The President this night would
address
The Senate held an eight-second session this date, with two lawmakers in attendance, including Vice-President Alben Barkley, who agreed by unanimous consent to meet and immediately recess until the next day as a means of prolonging the Labor Day weekend.
The President's three-man Board of Inquiry, just appointed the prior Thursday, was due to submit a report clearing the way for a Taft-Hartley Act injunction to end the nationwide copper strike. The strike had ended, at least temporarily, for 9,400 employees of one company which had reached an agreement the previous Friday to a 15-cent hourly wage increase, but the other major producers had not yet agreed to those terms. The average pay in the industry was $1.54 per hour, and a 10-cent increase had been granted a year earlier, so that ostensibly only a 4.4-cent increase could be approved under the 10 percent ceiling on wages. If an injunction were granted, it would provide 80 days for the Wage Board to rule on the settlement reached with the one company.
During the Labor Day three-day weekend, at least 456 persons had been killed in traffic accidents, with 97 drowned, and another 97 in miscellaneous accidents. The number of dead in traffic accidents was more than twice the 225 estimated by the National Safety Counsel for a normal three-day non-holiday weekend period. The Council had predicted 390 traffic fatalities during the 78-hour period, starting at 6:00 p.m. the prior Friday. The previous record for Labor Day had been 410 traffic fatalities, established in 1949, and the overall death toll record had been 559, set a year earlier. The president of the Council said that the traffic death toll was "tragic and shameful".
In Flemington, New Jersey, author Louis Adamic was found dead this date under mysterious circumstances, in his burning farmhouse, with a bullet wound in his head and a rifle across his knees. The State police said the death might have been the result of an accident, foul play or suicide. The fire had been deliberately set, utilizing kerosene-soaked rags as an incendiary. Mr. Adamic's secretary said that he had been working on a new book about the nation of his birth, Yugoslavia, to be called The Eagle and the Rock, with only one chapter left to completion. He was best known for his books on the problems of foreign-born immigrants and their children in America. One of his better known works had been What's Your Name?, which explored the tendency of many immigrants to anglicize their names once they reached America. Another of his well-known works was Dinner at the White House, in which he described an evening at the White House with FDR and Winston Churchill during the war.
A hurricane in the Caribbean veered westward, sparing Jamaica, and lost strength, dropping in wind velocity from 100 mph to 60. A storm in mid-August had claimed 150 lives in Jamaica, mostly in the vicinity of Kingston. The current hurricane was the fourth of the season, therefore labeled "D", or "Dog". "Easy" might form out of another storm in the Atlantic, 1,100 miles east of Antigua.
In Louisville, a large section of the city was without water for five hours after a water main had broken.
In Pottsville, Pa., some 62 teachers of the Cass Township and Culpmont school districts left their jobs this date as the new school year opened without their back salaries being paid. A spokesman for the Cass Township teachers said they would return when the salaries were paid, which he estimated to be $52,000 owed to 31 teachers. The other district owed $10,000 to the same number of teachers.
What's happening out on the
Mainline, man?
In Lincoln, Illinois, Smoky gave birth to one infant on the seat of the pumper truck.
Note well, Republican climate-change deniers, the "Our Weather" box of the date, which indicates that during the previous 35 years, one great Alaskan glacier had lost 1,000 feet in thickness, and another had retreated northward about 18 miles, that in the previous 19 years, the Arctic Ocean had reduced in size by 600,000 square miles and during the previous 50 years, its thickness had decreased by one-third, that over the previous 25 years, water from melting glaciers and ice domes had raised the level of the world's oceans by more than an inch—that in 1951, 67 years ago.
Don't you feel small? It happens to us all.
On the editorial page, "One Link in a Chain" tells of the sound and fury attendant the San Francisco Japanese treaty conference during the week likely to become a little confusing to the American people unless they recalled certain fundamentals of the developing U.S. foreign policy toward the Far East. The forging of this treaty was but one link in a chain to check further Communist expansion in that region of the world. The previous Thursday, the U.S. and the Philippines had signed a mutual defense pact, and on Saturday a similar pact had been signed between the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. All three agreements in combination were designed to secure defenses against Communist expansion.
It was to be expected that Russia would seek to rewrite the treaty to prevent Japanese rearmament, and some Americans were not entirely satisfied with the work of John Foster Dulles on the treaty. Romney Wheeler, director of NBC's London office and former chief of the book-translation program in Japan under General MacArthur, had said in the forthcoming issue of The Reporter that the treaty gave Japan a substantial "down payment on her price for peace", which would enable it to crack the whip for future concessions from the West. Mr. Dulles had stated that while no one was completely satisfied with the treaty, the dissatisfactions which did exist were "inherent in the situation".
The genesis of the new policy toward the Far East came from the failure to stop the rise of Communism in China and had developed slowly during the Korean War and the controversy over Formosa, as well the resulting controversy at home. It was a policy of unyielding firmness which sought to maintain unity among the allies in the face of a common threat. While it might not succeed, it was conceived in generosity for a former foe and nurtured in a growing awareness of the dominant role of the United States in world affairs, and represented victory for the diplomatic processes.
"Memo to Durham Residents" tells of the Winston-Salem Journal wondering why the fluoridation of Durham's water supply had stirred such controversy, while in other places, such as Winston-Salem and Charlotte, it had been accepted quietly. It says it had wondered the same thing about the District of Columbia fluoridation project, which had also been controversial, but that it never got around to writing an editorial about it.
It relates that when Charlotte had fluoridated its water, complaints began flooding in by the dozen, with one woman claiming that washing her hair in the newly fluoridated water took the curl out, while another complained that her child would not drink it, and yet another said that someone's pet canary had died after sipping a little of the water, another that a goldfish gave up the ghost, and yet another, that clothes could not be cleaned in it. But, eventually, the complaints quieted down after a couple of weeks, at which point the City revealed that while publicity had attended the supposed event, it had not actually fluoridated the water at all. When it finally did, it was received in complete silence.
It passes the story along to Durham "for what it's worth".
"A Note of Welcome" finds it good news that Bill Sharpe had joined Carl Goerch in publishing The State Magazine, now "bigger and sprightlier" than ever in its new incarnation. Its lead editorial, "Larnin' Time", stated that in 18 years, Mr. Goerch had established the magazine as a valued and welcomed publication in thousands of homes across the state and that the new associate publisher, Mr. Sharpe, came on the job fully aware of the achievement and hoping to make contributions of his own, yet without presumptions as to his ability to do so. It related of the mountain boy who watched a successful bass fisherman, saying that he could not cast so well, but that he bet he could if only somebody would "larn him how."
It concludes that nobody would need "larn" Mr. Sharpe how to write, as anyone could see on reading the piece on the page this date, and trusts that he would spend much of his time henceforth writing, through which he would add "a full measure of peartenin' to a mixture that is already heady." It welcomes him back to the writing business.
"Watch That Loose Talk, Senator" tells of Senator William Langer of North Dakota being unhappy about the record of the Democrats, whereupon Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina rose and said that Senator Langer talked of the whole Democratic platform and the whole Republican platform, telling the body what should and should not be done, while knowing what a platform was for. Senator Langer then interrupted to say that he knew what Republican platforms were for but not what Democratic platforms were for, to which Senator Johnston responded, "It is something on which to ride into office."
It suggests to Senator Johnston that he be more cautious with his frankness, as his colleagues would come up for reelection the following year, even if he was not up for reelection again until 1956. It concludes: "It's soon time for that platform to become 'the mandate of the people' and the 'will of the gre-a-t membahs of the pahty of Thomas Jefferson'."
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled, "The Nephew Test", tells of Congressman Adolph Sabath of Illinois having hurt his reputation as a good Congressman with his comment that the President's appointment of his nephew, Joseph J. Drucker, to be a Federal judge in Illinois, was a reward for his own political service rather than for his nephew. He said that he requested the appointment for his nephew who had come up the hard way.
The piece observes that such matters had nothing to do with a lifetime appointment to the Federal bench and asks rhetorically what if every Senator and Representative sought and obtained a Federal judgeship for a close relative.
When Woodrow Wilson had been President, he declined to appoint his brother as postmaster at Nashville because he did not want to provide even the appearance of nepotism in an appointment. It concludes that a member of the Congress for 45 years, as was Congressman Sabath, ought to know better.
Bill Sharpe, in a heretofore regularly published weekly Sunday column from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Murphy to Manteo", explains that the column would, with the reversed title adorning this piece, shift its locus to The State Magazine henceforth. The reason for the reversal was to enable the reader to read from west to east. He says no one knew where the phrase originated to describe the breadth of the state, though Hatteras was more easterly than Manteo. It might have been called "Hatteras to Huntersville", the name originally given to Murphy, named for Thomas Murphey, father of public education in the state. Suit was more westerly than Murphy and Salvo more easterly than Manteo, and so... Rodanthe was the most easterly town and Wehutty, the most westerly, and so...
Some North Carolinians thought that there was a focal point binding the regions of the state together, which some had identified as either the state capital, the University, the Democratic Party, or some other thing, but, he ventures, it was not true. Raleigh was neither symbolic nor typical of the small towns of the state. There was a "strenuous cult of old grads" who made the same mistake about Chapel Hill, which they revered as both a cultural shrine and laboratory where the destiny of the state was worked out by a "moderately super race of humanitarian tinkerers", most probably not true, but even if it were, he says, it would have little to do with the average North Carolinian, relatively few of whom had ever visited the University, while hundreds of thousands of them did not even know a football team was located there. (Add us to those hundreds of thousands this past Saturday afternoon in Berkeley, as we sat under the hot sun to see what had been advertised as a "college football game", but which, in the first half, hardly lived up to that billing, insinuating itself as something a little more juvenile in its level of performance. Indeed, had things not gotten much better in the fourth quarter, we had half a mind to open up a can of whup and come on down out of the stands and let go with it. But, fortunately, things did get better, though still not good enough.)
Mr. Sharpe says, "Not Raleigh, nor Chapel Hill, nor the sales tax, nor white supremacy, nor the cash crop system, nor any such thing is responsible for a remarkably integrated people."
And so forth, and so on, on and on, and so forth onward, ho.
He concludes: "North Carolina has matured mightily. But it has never gone back on its raisin'." Whether that was a pun or not, we leave to the reader to discern.
And we had looked forward to
attending that game for the entirety of the last five years, since we
first became aware of it on the schedule. Thirty-nine yards of
offense in the first half is not going to cut it. We thought for
awhile that we had been kidnaped somehow into a time warp and
transported back to the era of Jim Hickey—the suffering through
most of which we still recall. Time to get a move on. The stadium has
no ceiling or roof. In the end, the referees stole it with a
ridiculous "illegal block" call on a recovered onside kick with 1:13 to go and the
momentum going our way, but that first half hardly deserved much
better than the final score.
Thomas K. Finletter, Secretary of the Air Force, substitutes for Drew Pearson, returning from Europe, relates of several problems being faced by the Air Force, including, the perennial problem of "lead time", that is the time between when a decision is made to buy planes and the actual production, testing, and making them part of the air complement, a process usually taking two years. Military planning therefore had to be made two to four years in advance.
It was difficult to estimate changes which would become necessary two years down the road, though some things were more susceptible to that kind of planning, such as atomic weapons resources, gauged by what the estimates were of potential enemies having in their arsenal. The Strategic Air Command would not be diminished by the development of tactical nuclear weapons, but rather would have its role increased thereby, with more weapons to use.
Another problem was that the term "unification" of the military was misleading, as the armed services were not unified in the sense of there being one service wearing one uniform and under one operational command. Rather, Congress intended coordination between the branches, operating under the central authority of the Secretary of Defense to enable common planning without interference with the morale of the individual forces. He believes that unification was working quite well, with the responsibility lying with the service Secretaries and the Joint Chiefs to keep them so. He believes there should be a healthy rivalry between the services, as long as it did not get out of hand.
A third problem was that it seemed peace was not the business of the military establishment, a position with which he disagrees. One of the primary objectives of the military force was for it to be a deterrent to war, an aspect which affected all planning, tactics and strategy, the types of planes which the Air Force had to have and the techniques which it had to use. At the same time, there had to be built a force which would protect the country from disaster if war should come.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop this day, not the prior day, as the box at the top left of the previous day's front page had announced, provide their puzzle for a $100 prize to any reader who could guess the source of the historical parallel to the current crisis between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., as provided by the Allsops in several distinct quotes from that source, altered to accommodate either the U.S. position or the U.S.S.R. position. Under the headings, "The Resources of the Contenders Are First Compared", "On the Other Hand", "Concerning Relative Military Power", and "Concerning the Influences that Shaped the Course of the Struggle", they present the relevant amended quotes.
They provide the clue at the end that the final victory had been gained by the nation which was substituted by the Soviet Union and that the "distant victory" still influenced the shape of the world in 1951. They advise that readers send their answers to Dumbarton Avenue in Washington, and that the solution would be provided on a suitable day the following week.
We are pretty certain that we have it figured, and therefore have already picked out our helicopter. You can just send the helicopter down from Dumbarton instead of the 100 bucks.
And we would like the editors to be more on the ball, as we wasted a good 15 minutes locating this Alsop column in the Wilmington Star yesterday—made the more unfriendly and time-consuming by some idiot at Google who has suddenly decided to make users of the Google Newspaper Archive repeatedly prove they are not robots, something we have not encountered in several years of prior usage of that excellent resource. Hey, Idiot, we are not a robot and it is painful enough to one's hands to have to click uselessly on the internet at times for compliance with silly rules hauled down from the sky by Idiots like you, without compounding the situation when all one is trying to do is access some old newsprint. Why put the material online if you are going to play games with people and interrupt their access, repeatedly so, about every three or four pages of material viewed, forcing them to close the page they were reading halfway down the column, as it suddenly turns blank, and click away to place a check in your stupid box and then also have to check which boxes have cars or signs or some other dumb-bunny thing in them, often ambiguously created, or created deliberately with ambiguities, by some Idiot without a brain, all to make the user prove non-robotic structure? What sawmill was your robotic head graduated from? "Dumb" is too kind a word to describe the asininity which led to use of this device.
We are not here to play games, Moron. We are here to browse the internet and help pay your ridiculously high salaries, and so make the browsing experience more pleasing, not an exercise in insanity because, apparently, you have nothing else to do in life but complicate the lives of others.
Go to a mental health facility and get some assistance before engineering software in this user-manipulative and time-wasting manner.
It is not dissimilar to the Idiots at Microsoft who insist on mandating involuntary uploads to one's computer of updates for Windows 10 whether one likes it or not, never minding that those updates foul up other software, slow down performance, and, in the end, are far worse than some mildly annoying virus which can be easily interdicted by non-Microsoft products which are free. Hey, Fascist Punk, yeah you, mad programmer. We decide if we want updating loaded to our computer, taking up 20 to 30 minutes of our precious time without warning, not you. You do not have the right to invade our personal computers, you Stupid Moron from hell. When we go into the "services" menu and turn off "Windows updating", it is supposed to stay off. When we even go into "regedit" and change the settings to turn it off permanently, as one can do, it is supposed to stay off, not challenge you, you invasive Punk Moron, to find a wormy little way to turn it back on, just to show how cute you can be. You do not program a computer to change one setting on our personal computers. You may have manufactured the operating system but you do not own the copy once we download it, or our computers or our homes. Stay the hell out. No entrada. No trespassing. Comprende?
There is such a thing as invasion of privacy and criminal trespass. You do not have the right actively, from without, to alter software or an operating system once it is downloaded to an individual's computer. That, without consent of the owner of the computer, consent made actively known at the time of purchase or download, is criminal. It is the same as breaking into someone's home or office.
Oh, but it is like government mandate for inoculation for virus when bad disease strike whole people...
No, Moron, it isn't, and you are not the government and cannot make your own rules and laws. We have to contract by agreement, not by subterfuge or coercive manipulation of users.
Robert C. Ruark blows a kiss to the New York State Bar Association for having been responsible for legislation pleasing to small businesses, professionals and artists, who had not formerly been allowed to declare depreciation on their bodies. A bill was before the Senate Finance Committee, which would provide for individual retirement accounts, enabling postponement of taxes on a portion of yearly earnings. He proceeds to explain in greater detail what everyone for years now understands.
Mr. Ruark for years had been seeking this sort of allowance and praises Senator Irving Ives of New York for introducing the legislation as part of the Revenue Act of 1951, but, thus far, it had attracted little interest in Congress and he hopes that it would get some action.
Don't worry, it will—in 23
years. Unfortunately, Mr. Ruark, as you will die in 1965, it won't do you much good. But that was a lot quicker than Congressional attention
provided to global warming...
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