The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 10, 1952

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that allied negotiators in Korea accused the Communists of trying to strengthen their forces through "forced repatriation" of prisoners of war, and said that the Communists, in so doing, were denouncing individual freedom and advocating slavery. In addition, the U.N. negotiators rejected the Communist compromise for truce supervision with its condition for continuing construction and repair of military airfields. The two subcommittees appeared still to be deadlocked and would meet again the following day.

The President formally urged the Senate to ratify the peace treaty with Japan which had been signed in San Francisco on September 8, along with its companion treaties, and the NATO agreement to admit Greece and Turkey.

Vice-President Alben Barkley said that the President's State of the Union message of the previous day had been "superb" and Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, not always in agreement with the President, said it was "one of the President's better speeches". Republicans criticized the speech for not making mention of economy.

Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress appeared determined to cut foreign aid spending and dispense with many of the President's domestic social security proposals.

Senators expected this date to learn new and secret details about the President's plan for expanding the armed forces, with particular emphasis on air power, as he outlined in his State of the Union address. Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett was scheduled to testify before an executive session of the Senate Armed Services Committee to provide a general survey of the defense program.

Senator Lyndon Johnson, chairman of the Defense Preparedness subcommittee, stated, in reference to the President's statement that the Soviets were producing more planes than the free nations, that he hoped U.S. officials would recognize the grim implications of the fact and proceed during 1952 to take the "overdue steps" necessary to strengthen the defense of the country. The President, appearing to confirm the Johnson subcommittee's criticism of lagging defense production, had stated that there had been serious difficulties and delays in designing and producing the latest types of airplanes and tanks, with some machine tools and metals still in extreme shortage.

The President, at his weekly press conference, said that he had provided full responsibility for the Government clean-up to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath and that he would continue in his Cabinet post at the same time. He added, contrary to previous statements, that there would be no special commission assigned to make recommendations on such a clean-up, that the job more appropriately belonged to the Justice Department.

The President also said that he would keep General Eisenhower in his position as supreme commander of NATO as long as he stayed in Europe, repeating his high praise for the General. He said, in response to questions, that the General would have to resign if he were nominated by the Republican Party for the presidency, but said that he would never relieve him unless he asked to be relieved. He said that he did not think the country would be in good hands with a Republican as President, but refused to indicate whether that included General Eisenhower, referring newsmen instead to the Dictionary of American Biography entry for General Winfield Scott, Whig Party candidate for the presidency in 1852, and that for his successful opponent, Franklin Pierce, for further clarification of his general opinion on a professional military man running for the presidency.

Regarding his own intentions to run again or not, he said only that he would make his statement before the Republican convention in July, and stated that despite his fondness for General Eisenhower, he would not hesitate to run against him if he thought it was the correct thing to do. He also stated that he approved Senator Hubert Humphrey running as a favorite-son candidate from Minnesota for the Democratic nomination, but said it had no significance regarding his own candidacy.

In the North Pacific, 45 crewmen of the disabled freighter Pennsylvania abandoned ship the previous night, as ships and planes sped to the area to pick them up. The ship had split open in high seas and high winds. The ship had departed Seattle the previous Saturday for Japan, after stopping to have a crack repaired in its deck plates. The crew had branded it a "jinx" ship.

Off England, the American freighter, Flying Enterprise, stranded in the Atlantic for seven days after a perilous storm of December 28 had nearly capsized it, and under tow to Falmouth for the previous six days, sank in a storm 40 miles from its destination, after its undaunted Captain, Kurt Carlsen, and his first mate, had been rescued from the ship as it went down, after four minutes in the water. The freighter took 40 minutes to disappear below the surface. The captain had sought to save the ship and its cargo, valued at around four million dollars, and so had refused to abandon the ship along with his 40-man crew shortly after the storm had caused the ship to list to 60 degrees. He watched from the rescue vessel as the ship went under.

In Chicago, the FBI arrested a 21-year old man who admitted to agents having registered 40 times for the draft in order to procure identification cards needed to cash $7,700 in stolen checks, one of which was a $60 Government check issued to a Gold Star mother. He was arraigned for falsely registering for the draft.

In Shelby, Ernest Gardner, a lawyer, announced that he would be a candidate in the Democratic gubernatorial primary the following May. He had served three terms in the State House of Representatives and was third cousin to deceased former Governor and Ambassador to Britain, O. Max Gardner.

On the fifth anniversary of the purchase of The News by the Charlotte News Publishing Co., Inc., from the Dowd family, the newspaper presents a summary of its accomplishments and progress in a full-page report on page 10-A.

Let's face it. It has slipped, slowly but surely, downhill, especially since the departure of editor Harry Ashmore in late July, 1947, six months after the acquisition.

Because of the Government shutdown currently in effect in 2019, resulting from the little boy's petulant insistence beyond all reason on his Wall to keep out the Tourists, one of our links from five years ago, to the JFK Library and the address of President Kennedy at UNC on Founders Day, October 12, 1961, is temporarily not available, and so we shall reference another speech, from June 26, 1963, by President Kennedy, a leader, not a salesman, who truly did make America great again.

On the editorial page, "The State of the Union" finds that there had been nothing new in the President's address to Congress the previous day, reaffirming the foreign policy of containment of Communism, urging that the U.N. was "stronger and more useful than ever" and that there should be free world cooperation, supporting European Union and urging more funds for the Point Four program. He also had urged the Senate to approve the Japanese peace treaty and admission to NATO of Greece and Turkey, as well as forecasting large overseas military and economic aid expenditures, particularly in Indo-China, and for the Air Force.

Domestically, he again reasserted his support of his Fair Deal program and for the Democratic Party, urging that the Congress should improve the Taft-Hartley law, pass Federal aid to education, provide home rule for the District of Columbia, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, control campaign finances, provide more stringent "anti-inflation" legislation, and ensure protection of the rights of individuals during Congressional investigations. He also offered the usual general statements of support for farmers, labor, business and veterans. He urged Congress to approve his proposed reorganization of the IRB, making tax collectors subject to the Civil Service system, and promised further recommendations aimed at eliminating unworthy public servants.

It finds that the 1952 Fair Deal program, however, had been scaled down somewhat, as he had not mentioned the Fair Employment Practices Commission in specific terms, but rather endorsed generally "wider enjoyment of civil rights". Regarding national compulsory health insurance, he said that it was the best way to bring modern medical care within the reach of all people, but allowed that if there were a better way, he hoped that his recently established commission on the matter would find it.

It concludes that the speech was direct and well-planned, providing a good script to be broadcast via the Voice of America and good campaign material for the Democrats in an election year. But that which he had omitted regarding controversial domestic issues provided weight to the speculation that the President was not anxious to retire voluntarily from office.

That shows how much you know.

Everyone in the press, in this speculation mill which transpired on whether the President would run again, failed to recall that it was he who initiated and pushed the Constitutional amendment preventing a President from serving more than two elected terms, albeit, for obvious reasons, excluding the sitting President at the time of ratification, that being Mr. Truman. No one has pointed out that it would have been highly hypocritical of the President to have so actively supported that amendment and then run for another term, which, if successful, would have meant that he would have served almost a full twelve years and also, but for the exception, would have violated the amendment's provision regarding a President acceding to the office by death or other premature termination of the office of his predecessor, preventing in that case more than one elected term, provided the successor served more than two years of the unexpired term. The reason why he delayed his announcement so long was obviously to keep the press and the opposition to his domestic program, both within his party and among Republicans, from disregarding him as a lameduck President.

"Persecution Works Both Ways" finds quite appropriate the statement of Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, recently in Hong Kong, saying that the persecution of Catholic missionaries in Communist China equalled the stories of the persecutions and martyrdoms of the early days of the Church.

But it thinks the Cardinal ought also to heed a story the previous week in Time, relating of Protestant missionaries, driven out of the back lands of Colombia by persecution, having tried to start their work anew in the cities, only to be interrupted in Bogotá by a mob which massed before a chapel being dedicated and threw stones through its windows. Ambassador Capus Waynick, of North Carolina, arrived and moved through the mob and told the minister to go ahead with his services, enabling them to be completed. A second, better organized attack had ensued the next afternoon, but Ambassador Waynick, having been tipped of the probable gathering, obtained promises for strong police protection, only to have the police detail appear briefly and then withdraw when everything appeared quiet, at which point, a Catholic priest led a group of followers carrying banners proclaiming, "Colombia is Catholic" and "We Will Not Be Robbed of Our Religion", some hurling stones at the Protestant chapel. The priest stopped before the door of the chapel and thanked his followers for denouncing "Protestant millionaires from the U.S. who try to sow disunity and uproot the true faith planted by our forefathers." He then asked the 300 in the crowd to depart peacefully.

The piece commends to Cardinal Spellman's attention that sort of persecution as well.

"Common Sense" tells of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon having established a simple but workable standard of ethics for Government officials by politely returning a $500 sterling silver tray and goblet presented to him by an Oregon business who had benefited from some of the Senator's legislation on behalf of Oregon. The Senator accompanied the return with a note saying that he was only doing the type of work he was supposed to do as a Senator. It concludes that honesty and integrity did not require a set of complicated rules, just plain, common sense.

"Solo Congressman" finds that of all the Congressional trips during the previous two months, the one which had intrigued the most was the solo flight around the world by Congressman Peter Mack, Jr., of Illinois. It wonders what he might have thought as he coursed around the world and looked down upon the many sites, ventures that he probably was able to contemplate a good bit more than would be available to most Congressmen during a year in Washington, and probably returned better prepared for resumption of his work than any of his colleagues.

"Boomerang" tells of the Winston-Salem Journal having had some fun at the expense of Charlotte recently, in an editorial referring to a recent blackjack assault on a Charlotte man, noting that some Charlotte residents, in response, were carrying blunt instruments in their cars to protect themselves against similar attacks, and adding that perhaps Lamar Caudle had not been wrong after all when he told the House subcommittee that he feared for his life every time he came to the Queen City.

It remarks that the Journal had laughed too soon, as no sooner than the ink was dry, a report of two murders occurring in the Twin City on the same night had appeared on the front page of the Journal. "Tsk, tsk."

This dashed-off piece appears to make light of murder. We are offended. They should fire whoever wrote that piece. Indeed, someone should stand outside the offices of The News with their cellphone and take their picture and start shouting obscenities at the person as they drive away, spit on their car and use blunt instruments to batter them. Then someone should go to their home and kill their dog, maybe even their parakeet. Then they should be made to ride alone down each of the two streets on which the murders occurred, late at night, in an old, beat-up car, which backfires loudly, like the sound of gunfire. They should also be forced to display a red badge on the front and rear windows of their car. And then nightly vigils should be conducted at their home, with plenty of shouts of obscenities and rock-throwing, until they are forced to leave the community and move far away, maybe to Antarctica.

Murder is no laughing matter. How would you like it if you were murdered?

You say, of course, that they did not have cellphones in 1952. How do you know? They had walkie-talkies and Polaroid 60-second cameras, as well as 8mm movie cameras. Same thing, once you connect them together with a wire or radio signal.

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Caught in a Squeeze", confesses a certain amount of sympathy the editor of Pravda, indignant, with official permission, at the sloth and waste of Soviet bureaucracy. The Russians wanted to invent an orange squeezer which could serve orange juice over-the-counter, but during the course of several years, the Government laboratory charged with the development of the orange squeezer had squeezed about 250,000 rubles from Russian taxpayers without coming up with a suitable product. Pravda had inveighed against this waste by indicating that "fifty-six persons have been engaged in pouring emptiness into an empty vessel."

The piece suggests that the Russians could simply purchase several models of orange squeezers in the U.S., albeit of the bourgeois variety, and pattern their product after it.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from Roy Thompson of the Winston-Salem Journal, in which he relates of not being able to top the people from Concord, Mass., when it came to thinking that Concord was a very fine place, as evidenced by one car which had come down for the Piedmont Bowl game, bearing a sign which read: "If you don't live in Concord, Mass., you're just camping out."

Who was playing in the bowl game?

Bill Rutledge of the Yadkin Ripple laments the fact that there was no longer homemade molasses or homemade biscuits, as fewer people were making them each year.

Dave Barber of the Valdese News tells of a mountain man whose cow roamed into his friend's still and ate so much mash that it died, causing him to want his friend to pay for the cow, to which the friend had replied in the negative, that the mash had not killed the cow, but rather it had started giving eggnog and its owner had milked it to death.

The Waynesville Mountaineer tells of an Atlanta banker, who had made a special study of words, suggesting that people use short words to make their points more effectively, just as the words of war had force, such as "fight", "shoot", "kill", "maim", "stab", "guns", "planes", and "tanks". He opined that long words veiled thoughts in both print and speech. A man seeking aid shouted, "Help", had no time for long words. The same brevity served to convey such emotive thoughts as "love", "hate", etc.

The piece suggests that while long words had their place at times, if a short word would convey the same thought, it probably ought be used. It concludes that the entire piece had been written with 226 monosyllabic words and wonders whether the reader had noticed.

How much time did you waste out of your life trying to perform that feat? And how much space does it take to say "words of one syllable", as the piece does, versus "monosyllabic words"? The briefer, the better, maybe, but not necessarily by means of the use of short words, which often complicate the thought to the point of inscrutability.

"Moron", though, presents itself as a nice, short, expressive word, even if not monosyllabic.

And so more, so more so, more forth on more on, and then some.

Those are all monosyllabic words.

Drew Pearson tells of the wives of Congressmen sometimes causing a lot of trouble, as observed by certain bachelor Congressmen and married diplomats who had participated in the trip of a House Banking and Currency subcommittee through Latin America. The married Congressmen had sought to conceal their wives by taking them as official stowaways aboard a Government plane, to avoid detection by Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, who had refused to allow wives to ride in a Navy plane on such junkets. The wives therefore trailed in a commercial plane as far as Panama, at which point the Congressmen placed a call to Navy Secretary Dan Campbell, while Secretary Lovett was in Paris, and explained that there was adequate room on the Navy plane for the wives, and Mr. Campbell gave in on condition that the wives remain out of sight. The Congressmen sought to comply with this directive and at each official stop, made sure the wives remained on the plane during official ceremonies.

Aside from this issue, he points out, the subcommittee had performed conscientiously in studying Latin America's economy, making a much better impression than a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee headed by James Richards of South Carolina. In advance of the subcommittee's arrival in Lima on November 20, the U.S. Ambassador to Peru had sent out engraved invitations to 250 distinguished Peruvians to meet the Congressmen at a certain hour. But the Congressmen, arriving from Venezuela three hours earlier, claimed that they were too tired to attend and wanted to rest, whereupon the entire Embassy staff was put on notice to withdraw the invitations from the 250 guests. Nevertheless, the Congressmen went out to local night spots.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of General Eisenhower having satisfied his backers in part, by having declared himself available for the Republican nomination, but nevertheless displeasing them insofar as he remained aloof from the pre-convention campaign.

They indicate that the announcement was the culmination of efforts by both Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, who had written a strong letter to the General explaining the need to declare his candidacy early to meet the considerable organizing effort by the supporters of Senator Taft, considered decreasingly a risk by the Republican Party leaders, given the steep decline in popularity of the President as a result of the Administration scandals at the IRB and RFC, among other things, as well as the efforts, thereafter, of Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, who wrote an even stronger letter to the General, warning him that there would be no draft at the convention and that he had to become an avowed candidate.

Simultaneously, a Democratic effort had been transpiring to enter General Eisenhower's name in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, imposing a deadline on the Eisenhower supporters, such that Senators Lodge and Duff discussed at great length these developments via trans-Atlantic phone calls with the General.

The result had been the statement by Senator Lodge on Sunday, indicating that the General was a Republican and was available for the nomination, followed by General Eisenhower's confirmation of those facts. While his continued aloofness was a setback to his supporters, his announcement of availability was a gain.

Marquis Childs tells of the President having added to the agenda of the meeting with Prime Minister Churchill the subject of Japan's place in the Far Eastern economy and Britain's role in it. John Foster Dulles, as the President's emissary to Japan the previous year to work out the final Japanese peace treaty, had discovered in December that there was an apparently deliberate effort on the part of Britain to divert the future course of Japan's trade toward the Chinese mainland. Mr. Dulles had sought to discuss the matter with the British representative in Tokyo, but he reported that he had received instructions from London not to discuss it. It was reported also that Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had protested directly to the White House regarding Mr. Dulles's efforts in this regard.

The British needed to retain at least a part of their advantageous economic position enjoyed prior to World War II in Southeast Asia. The Japanese, however, needed to find markets for their rapidly reviving industrial base to support themselves in an island habitat. Japanese trade with Southeast Asia had been reviving, but the Japanese could be paid only in sterling and the British had been able to block the conversion of pounds earned in India, Burma and elsewhere so that Japan found itself with currency it could not use for purchasing such essential raw materials as iron ore and cotton. Thus, to divert Japan's trade to Communist China would relieve the pressures on Britain in this regard.

China had the raw materials which Japan badly needed and would serve as an outlet for Japan's exports. Trade had developed between China and Japan, partly through the British port of Hong Kong and partly in direct transactions, over the previous two and a half years, albeit only to a small degree, amounting to about 1.6 million dollars worth of Japanese exports per month to China. By mid-1951, this trade had evaporated almost completely because of restraints on trade with China in the wake of their participation in the Korean War and in another part because Japan had not been receiving the type of raw materials it needed to support its industrial base.

Here, incidentally, are the destroyed links from January 9, 1947, in "Herblock": "r", "b", and "lo". The rest remain. Those who destroy are impotent to create and build.

For clarification, again, we do not give any credit to the nonsensical theory that Lyndon Johnson had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination, but the linked program under "b" does reveal some other things which are at least interesting.

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