The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 24, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. command this date, in an official radio broadcast from Tokyo to Korea, accused the Communists of "playing the waiting game" in the truce talks, hoping that the allies would "capitulate out of sheer exhaustion". Meanwhile, no progress was made in either subcommittee in the truce talks, with an allied negotiator accusing the Communists of planning to use sick and wounded prisoners as leverage to force the allies to accept armistice terms favored by the Communists. The issue of airfield construction during an armistice remained a roadblock to the other subcommittee, considering enforcement of the armistice. Both subcommittees would meet again the next day.
In the meeting of staff officers regarding prisoner of war camps, the Communists turned over a map showing the exact locations of ten of the North Korean camps and promised to pinpoint the location of another camp later. Previously, the Communists had only reported the general areas where these camps were located. The allies had wanted the locations in the wake of a Communist complaint that a U.N. plane had bombed a camp the previous month, killing twenty American prisoners and wounding many others.
In ground action, on the western front, west of Chorwon, U.N. tanks and infantrymen fought for six hours against Chinese troops entrenched on a hill, part of a series of strikes into the enemy defense lines this date. The fight was continuing. Another U.N. force hit the Chinese northwest of Korangpo and withdrew to their lines after killing twenty enemy troops in a fight lasting an hour. On the eastern and central fronts, there was little action after heavy allied tank and artillery attacks the previous day. On the central front, the allies sent more than 1,600 rounds into Chinese bunkers over a period of nearly four hours, one group reporting that 60 Chinese bunkers had been damaged. Chinese troops damaged four allied tanks, all of which were able to return to allied lines, a fifth having been damaged the previous day west of Chorwon. Another allied raiding party fought for 20 minutes with the enemy northeast of the Punchbowl on the eastern front.
In Tunis, the French delivered a stern warning to the Bey to restore order in the protectorate after ten days of rioting which had resulted in the loss of 50 lives, including three French gendarmes. The French warning indicated that they would be compelled to take stiffer military measures than were presently being carried out unless order were restored. The Bey had been sympathetic to the Nationalist demands and earlier in the week had refused to see the French resident general on the excuse of illness. The Nationalists were seeking independence for Tunisia.
The House Expenditures Committee rejected a resolution which would have disapproved the President's plan to reorganize the IRB by placing tax collectors under the Civil Service system, among other things. It meant that the Committee would recommend the reorganization plan. The vote in the Committee had been unanimous. It would be subject to a vote by the full House the following week. The plan would go into effect March 14, unless one house disapproved it in the meantime.
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had officially thrown his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination for the presidency the previous day, but there was still no word from the White House as to whether the President would seek re-election. Senator Kefauver said that the paramount issue was "peace in the world" and complimented the two prior Administrations for advancing "foreign policy in the interest of world peace", but also stated that there had to be clean government, to be a central focus of his campaign.
The Office of Price Stabilization approved increases in dealer prices on 1952 Hudsons, ranging from $90 to $143, and for 1952 G.M. cars, from $50 to $222. The increases reflected higher factory wholesale costs recently approved by OPS as a ceiling factor, required by the Capehart amendment to the economic controls law.
In Philadelphia, the port was tied up, idling some 6,500 AFL workers, after a shutdown of stevedore operations, in what union leaders termed "a lockout". The companies which hired the longshoremen said that the union had violated the labor contract and thereby forced the cessation of longshore operations.
We need to sort that out.
In Charlotte, a fire the previous night had left one dead and 40 homeless as welfare agencies and the Charlotte Housing Authority sought to provide necessary aid, offering the new Southside Homes, a Federal housing project for blacks, to those residents displaced from the burned slum settlement off York Road, dubbed "Stump Town", just south of the city limits. Eight "crackerbox" houses had been destroyed by the fire. It was rumored that one person whose body was discovered in the ashes from the fire had been murdered prior to the start of the fire, but County police were placing little stock in those rumors. The body in question had been "burned to the bone", according to eyewitnesses, and so it would likely be difficult to prove any such murder.
In Manila, five men and a woman were charged with passing counterfeit $50 American bills, when two of them tried to sell them to an undercover police agent.
A member of the U.S. Olympic team was sent home to Salt Lake City from Norway the previous week because she was pregnant. She complained that she had been treated "rather shabbily" by the Olympic Ski Committee, later receiving an apology from the Committee and told that she would receive an Olympics uniform.
They must not have wanted to face the prospect of the added expense of being forced, in the spirit of Olympic competition, to hand out two medals, one for her and one for her incipient passenger on the slopes.
Bitter cold struck the Midwest and colder weather spread eastward to the Atlantic seaboard, but the Western section of the nation enjoyed warmer temperatures.
On page 3-A, the fourth chapter in the serialized The Greatest Book Ever Written, by Fulton Oursler, relates of the Tower of Babel.
On the editorial page, "Kefauver Tosses His Coonskin" finds the announcement by the Senator that he would be a candidate for the Democratic nomination to be good news for the Democrats, but not necessarily for Republicans. Senators Hubert Humphrey and Brien McMahon, the latter of Connecticut, had entered the Minnesota and Illinois primaries, respectively, as favorite sons to hold delegates for the President, until he made up his mind whether to run.
It finds that there was a distinct possibility that Senator Kefauver might wind up the vice-presidential nominee on a ticket with the President, if he did decide to seek re-election. The Senator, as chairman of the widely publicized and televised hearings of the prior spring and the itinerant hearings during the summer and fall before that, regarding organized crime and gambling in the country, had become a champion of clean government and therefore could, as part of such a ticket, lend counter-balance to the scandals which had recently been publicized within the Administration.
It finds that the Senator, if nominated for the presidency, would be a powerful candidate and would probably make a good president. He would carry on the Administration's foreign policy, had the support of most labor leaders, and was one of the Senate's primary defenders of civil liberties, although opposing the primary components of the proposed FEPC while also bolting from most of his Southern colleagues in supporting limits on Senate debate, which would prevent future filibusters useful in stopping civil rights legislation. He also had fought to plug tax loopholes and several of the recommendations from the report of his committee on crime had been implemented.
It finds that a Kefauver administration would be similar to an Eisenhower administration, but that the General had more administrative experience and would be a more inspirational leader, and would likely have the desirable effect of establishing a two-party system in the South. The drawback to the election of the General, however, would be that a number of reactionary Senators and Congressmen would probably be elected along with him. Senator Kefauver would follow a domestic policy somewhat to the left of the General.
It welcomes the candidacy of Senator Kefauver and concludes that anyone who believed that the Republicans would easily win the White House in November needed to examine the field more closely.
"How to Solve a Problem" discusses the Air Force proposal the previous year to build a multi-million dollar base for a troop carrier wing at the Raleigh-Durham airport, to which Congressman Graham Barden and Charles Deane had objected, Mr. Barden favoring use of the existing facilities in his district at the Seymour Johnson Field at Goldsboro, left over from World War II, and Congressman Deane favoring the facilities at the Laurinburg-Maxton base in his district. Congressman Carl Durham believed that the Raleigh-Durham facility was best, it being in his district.
Eventually, Congress had canceled the proposal entirely and had withheld the appropriation of the funds. But recently it had been announced that the Air Force would instead build two bases, a troop carrier wing at Raleigh-Durham and a base for two fighter-bomber wings at Goldsboro, at a total cost of 40 million dollars, which the piece suggests as a new twist to the old saw about making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. It finds that in consequence, everyone would be happy, with the exception perhaps of Congressman Deane and the taxpayers.
"What Say You Asialationists?" tells of Winston Churchill having reminded Congress in his address to the joint session during his recent visit that Britain had a 50,000-man force in the Suez Canal zone in Egypt and would welcome at least a token force from other U.N. nations. Time had recounted that the French had been fighting in Indo-China since 1946, with more casualties suffered than by the U.S. in Korea, including three entire classes from that country's military academy, including ten sons of French generals, with the resulting economic burden equal to the aid which the U.S. had provided France since the end of World War II.
The piece indicates that while France was defending its own territory in Indo-China, differing therefore from American contributions in Korea and elsewhere, France was also warring against the Communists, sponsored and supplied by the Chinese, thus preventing expansion into Indo-China, Malaya and Burma, vital to Western interests. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, in his speech at Harvard, had indicated that there was complete Anglo-American agreement on a firm policy should the Communists undertake new aggressive action in Indo-China or elsewhere.
It opines that it was time for the Asialationists in Congress to express their opinion regarding U.S. policy in the event of a Chinese push into Indo-China, on whether they would support a land war or call for air attacks against mainland China along with a naval blockade of the Chinese coast, with the consequent risk of igniting a third world war. It wonders whether the same critics who had blamed the President and Secretary of State Acheson for losing Communist China would now publicly associate themselves with a warning to China that an invasion of Indo-China would bring immediate retaliation. It indicates that failure to do so would lead people to believe that they lacked the courage to face this new threat in an election year or conclude that they were not so worried about losing the Far East as they were about losing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists on Formosa.
"Stepping Lively" tells of The State magazine reminding that no shortage of power had developed during the previous year in the state, despite predictions of that result. It provides quotes, predicting that the power-generating capacity in the state would increase even more in the ensuing three years. The piece concludes that while Governor Kerr Scott had accused the power companies of dragging their feet, it appeared that they were "stepping right lively".
Live wires... Which can be dangerous after a hurricane, so beware the high-tension wires.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Quote, Unquote", provides two quotes from Senator Taft, one stating that he believed in states' rights, and the other, advocating the establishment of the FEPC, an anti-lynching bill, and abolition of the poll tax. It concludes that the Senator had never been wrong, as he had always been on both sides of every issue.
Drew Pearson tells of the Democratic Party undergoing some of the most important realignments in the previous 30 years, beginning to split the party as at no time since the former Catholic-Protestant struggle at the Democratic convention of 1924 between the forces of Governor Al Smith of New York and Senator William McAdoo of California. The President wished to control who the party would nominate, and so had established favorite son candidates, such as former Senator Robert Bulkley of Ohio and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, each dedicated to saving those states' delegates for Mr. Truman or the candidate he might decide to support should he ultimately opt not to run. Some of the party leaders, whom he lists, were becoming restless at the President's delay in his decision.
Senator Kefauver was challenging the President's favorite-son candidate in Ohio and would challenge the President elsewhere, attracting in the process Democratic leaders all over the country, and becoming the most potent threat to both the President and the Republicans.
Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, whom the President reportedly was now supporting for the nomination, though Governor Stevenson, himself, had remained aloof from that discussion, was an able potential candidate.
Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut was also testing the waters, probably with the idea of becoming the vice-presidential candidate. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was not seeking the nomination, but his friends, including Senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma and House Majority floor leader John McCormack of Massachusetts, were pushing him to enter the race. Vice-President Alben Barkeley was not speaking on the topic, but some of his friends wanted to push him forward in the event of a deadlock at the convention.
Some members of Congress had used their offices as living quarters, as means to promote personal enterprises or as propaganda mills for lobbies and, during prohibition, as the locus for bootlegging operations on the part of some members of the House. Congressman Pat Sutton of Tennessee had, however, established a new twist on this arrangement, selling men's suits from his office after getting them wholesale through his father-in-law who had a store in Tennessee. He and his male secretary took measurements of prospective customers in the Congressman's office, which took on the appearance at times of a tailor shop. Recently he had received a shipment of 15 suits in one day and his colleagues said the price was reasonable and the suits, a good buy.
The Congressional Quarterly reports of the sharpest battle lines for the Republican nomination, among the four top candidates currently in the race, General Eisenhower, Senator Taft, Governor Earl Warren, and former Governor Harold Stassen, being in the field of military and foreign policy. The General had supported the present Government programs in most cases, while the Senator had, for the most part, fought them or urged considerable modification, as in the case of universal military training in peace time, NATO, and more aid for Europe.
Domestically, the General had made several statements which showed he was more strongly opposed than the Senator to programs which had developed in recent years under the Fair Deal, such as Federal aid to education. The four candidates had differing views on labor legislation with Governor Warren, former Governor Stassen and Senator Taft also disagreeing on government medical care, the FEPC, and public housing, as General Eisenhower had taken no stand on those issues. All four candidates opposed corruption in government, undue pressure by special interests, government waste, increased bureaucracy, excessive taxation, Communism, and isolationism.
Governor Stassen had backed the position of General Eisenhower regarding Europe and Governor Warren had stated that the Republicans were committed to a bipartisan foreign policy, urging aid consistent with the "security and solvency" of the U.S.
Whereas Senator Taft and Governor Stassen had wanted to stress the Air Force in defense of the country, General Eisenhower had cautioned against dependence on air power. Only the General had advocated universal military training in peacetime. The General had endorsed the President's decision to enter the Korean War, whereas Senator Taft and Governor Stassen had viewed it as the result of blundering in the Far East by the two succeeding Democratic Administrations. Governor Stassen and Senator Taft had urged more military aid to the Chinese Nationalists. Governor Warren had favored aid to the Far East, particularly to help nations in that region build up their economy to thwart Communist encroachment, whereas General Eisenhower had not taken a public stance on that theater beyond Korea.
The primary differences in domestic policy were in labor and aid to education, on the former, Senator Taft and Governor Warren having approved the Taft-Hartley Act but desiring modifications, while Governor Stassen had asked for "voluntary profit-sharing plans by corporations with their employees", and General Eisenhower had stated that there was no basic conflict between the interests of management and labor.
Marquis Childs discusses doubt on the foreign policy to be followed in the ensuing months varying widely between the British and Americans, especially with respect to the course to follow in Korea, should the truce negotiations break down or the terms of an eventual armistice be violated. The British were very concerned that the war in Asia would expand because of potential U.S. decisions, such as the bombing and blockading of Chinese ports, roads and waterways, which could bring retaliation in areas where the British position was precariously balanced, such as in Malaya, which, if it fell to the Communists, could result in Britain's bankruptcy.
The British were also concerned with the emphasis in Congress on military rather than economic assistance, a concern also voiced by Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, who had argued that a plough in India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia would be a more effective weapon against Communism than a gun. When he made a similar statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was given a cold and disdainful reception. He had lectured the Republicans on the Committee that as they had stated their concern about the spread of Communism in Asia, they had the chance in this instance to win friends among people who wanted to follow the Western methods but were facing a struggle to build the resources to sustain a free society. Some Republicans, such as former ERP administrator Paul Hoffman, John Cowles, publisher of Look Magazine, and former Governor Harold Stassen, had attacked the Administration for not doing more for India. But given Prime Minister Nehru's determination to maintain neutrality between the West and Communism, it appeared that approach would face great resistance in Congress.
A letter writer from Greenville,
S.C., wants the newspaper to have the courage to refuse liquor
advertisements and sends along a copy of a book published by the WCTU
which she hopes could be supplied to the Board of Education regarding
the issue of smoking
The editors reply that there had been no recently published liquor advertisements and, as a matter of policy, the newspaper did not accept them.
You don't need to, as Life
and Look publish plenty for you, replete with the little
curlicued ghoulies hidden in the ice cubes, the owly-eyed creatures staring out at you, beckoning into their world within, for all the dipsomaniacal
tipplers to be subliminally induced to tipple; at least so said the
psychologists by the mid-1960's. Blame
A letter writer remarks on four police officers having been suspended in Charlotte for allegedly assaulting a black man recently, suggesting sarcastically that the City Council abolish the police department, as it would not be needed anymore if every time they arrested a suspect, the police would be afraid that charges of assault would be filed against them. He asserts that force was necessary sometimes to effect arrest, had witnessed several arrests during his stays in Charlotte, and believes that the officers in question would have been stabbed or worse, had they not applied force. He relates of one such arrest, which he had witnessed on Trade Street in Charlotte, in which an officer had attempted to scare a black man who had drawn a stiletto knife, by firing his pistol several times in the air until exhausted of bullets, at which point, the man began advancing on the officer, whereupon the writer sneaked from behind, hit and knocked the man down, enabling time for other officers to arrive, needing to use force to hold the man down.
What if the suspect was white?
Speaking of mysteries, for those who must read ahead for the ending of Agatha Christie stories or forget the premises in the meantime, the outcome of the homicide mystery of the week, that out of Mt. Clemens, Mich., occurring Tuesday night, as reported in The News yesterday, the young boy who fatally shot his father in the back with his 16-gauge shotgun, after the father, a deputy sheriff and former minister, abruptly terminated the "mystery" program on tv for it being inappropriate, based on "religious grounds", for the three young ones of the household to watch, would be acquitted in April by a jury after 20 minutes of deliberation, on the basis that the shooting was "justifiable manslaughter", the jury apparently having concluded that he acted in a fit of pique regarding the alleged beating of his mother by his father after their argument about his sudden cessation of the show.
We have to observe, having watched that which in all probability was the show in question, assuming the shooting occurred around or shortly before 10:00 p.m., any time span much afterward tending to confute the scenario provided by the boy and his family, the "Suspense" presentation of Ms. Christie's "The Red Signal", that perhaps the prosecutors were a bit remiss in not reviewing the content of the program before undertaking their case, which, with a little interpretation, tracked a little too well the tragic outcome which took place in the living room of the Sikon family—perhaps with the boy having misinterpreted the lipstick case found on the kitchen floor, as we did initially, for a shotgun shell, never resolved for the premature ejaculatory intercession by the father. Either that or the prosecutors were acting with knowing lenience, given the boy's age and the circumstances of justification, corroborated apparently by the mother and the two siblings.
Whatever the case, if you get into trouble in Mt. Clemens, you would be well advised to consider hiring the boy's defense attorney, who, in our estimate, did a hell of a job. Had we been the prosecutor, we would have subpoenaed the kinescope of the program and sought permission to show it to the jury as demonstrating premeditation and tending to undermine the veracity of the family's corroborating evidence of justification, or allowed him to stipulate to a judgment of not guilty by reason of insanity induced by the program, with a few years of treatment ahead, with stress on understanding the new medium and its capability of virtual hypnotic influence with the right stimuli at hand in one's immediate vicinity as a means of acting out pre-existing untoward, primordial impulses, unleashed by sudden provocation in the form of the program content, which otherwise might cool into rational self-restraint and lay dormant indefinitely or forever. But, perhaps the prosecution did, he rejected the offer, and the jury ultimately was not sophisticated enough to understand the psychological implications at work or simply engaged in nullification based on a premature termination of the outcome of the show, such that the boy could not have properly aimed his moral compass other than with the loaded shotgun to his father's back.
By the way, we did not mean to imply with our additional link on the subject that he literally forgot his mother, or had anything to do with Harlem, but were merely suggesting some of the Oedipal nuances possibly at work, in a general psychological manner, in the matter, for purely pedagogical reasons, to avoid recurrence. Just a hunch...
And, always beware of Ms. Christie. She was a compelling author.
Incidentally, the verdict of acquittal by "justifiable manslaughter" makes little sense under traditional legal concepts, as manslaughter implies some level of criminal culpability, even if attenuating the more serious culpability implied by murder, that being a killing with malice aforethought and, in some instances, premeditation, depending on degree, the first of which requiring evidence of at least some planning, if only for a split second, the absence of which leaving the remainder, where malice is expressed or implied by the attendant circumstances, in the category of second degree; but perhaps Michigan at the time had such a possible verdict, or the verdict was mangled by the press, and it was simply the usual "justifiable homicide" based on defense of others, i.e., his mother, after the boy had been charged with voluntary manslaughter, a "heat of passion" killing committed under extreme provocation with insufficient cooling time to attenuate the heat of the moment, or the night, as the case may be
A letter from a minister of St. John's Baptist Church in Charlotte commends the editorial "Persecution Works Both Ways", anent the Catholic protest of the dedication of a Baptist chapel in Bogotá, Colombia, and appreciates that the newspaper had seen fit to view religious persecution from both sides, Catholic and Protestant.
A letter writer from Hamlet finds that the reaction of Congress in opposing the President's new budget was merely for the purpose of being opposed to the President and asserts that they would have also been in opposition had the budget been less. He thinks that the President would not ask the people for more money than he thought was needed for the coming year and so the Congress ought treat him with deference to avoid making him look like a fool.
The same goes for all those lib'rals
in the House who won't give our Pre-si-dent the money to build his
Wall to keep out all the Tourists. Listen to that blonde lady. She
knows ever'thing there is to know 'bout ever'thing. Just like 'at fat
guy on the radio and Judge-woman over on Fox, and 'at Hanimurty
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.