The Charlotte News

Monday, December 29, 1952

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Communist Chinese, stung by one of the heaviest allied airstrikes against a single North Korean target since the previous August, had struck back with a ground assault on the central front the previous night, but dug-in U.N. troops had driven them back in pre-dawn darkness during the morning. This date, the war slackened to a verbal offensive in which the Communists urged allied soldiers to surrender and enjoy a "big New Year's celebration" in North Korea.

Cloudy skies and snow squalls grounded most U.N. warplanes this date. The previous day, there had been a 200-plane raid on a Communist supply center near Pyongyang. Protecting Sabre jets destroyed two enemy MIG-15s, probably destroyed a third and damaged a fourth.

The Navy announced that a four-engine flying boat had crashed in the Sea of Japan on Friday night, and that ten of its fourteen crew members were dead or missing, with four survivors having been picked up by a U.S. destroyer. The Navy PBM had crashed about 50 miles east of Kosong, off the east coast of Korea. The cause of the crash was believed to have been mechanical difficulty.

Senator Joseph McCarthy said this date, in an interview published in U.S. News & World Report, that one of the first things he would do in the new Congress would be to investigate the nation's colleges in a search for subversive influences. He said that he expected "all hell" to break loose in such an investigation and that there would be "screaming of interference with academic freedom". He said that he nevertheless believed it to be of pressing interest to root out "Communist thinkers" from the nation's colleges. The Senator would be chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and of the permanent Senate Investigating Committee, in the new Senate. Representative Harold Velde, who would chair HUAC in the new House, expressed a similar desire to weed out Communists from the nation's colleges and from all fields of education.

In Wakefield, England, Dr. Alan Nunn May, the West's first convicted atomic spy, was released from prison this date. He was an admitted Communist scientist who had never publicly repented having given to the Russians samples of uranium material used in making the first atomic bomb in the U.S. He served six years and eight months of a ten-year sentence, having been provided the maximum one-third good time credit required by British law. He had been convicted in 1946 of communicating official secrets to an unknown person, possibly of use to the enemy. The trail from Dr. May had led to the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, another British scientist, who was serving a 14-year sentence, and to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Mrs. Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass, the latter receiving a 15-year prison sentence in the U.S. for his cooperation in testifying against the others in the spy ring, while the Rosenbergs were set to be executed at Sing-Sing in New York in January.

The first in a series of four articles by Sterling F. Green regarding atomic energy indicates that the new Congress might give atomic energy a position in civilian life within two or three years, according to official estimates, as atomic plants could be producing limited quantities of electric power for industry in that period. In five years or less, a large central atomic plant could be built, which could produce both atom bombs and electricity, but there were no current plans for such a plant, as private industry was not ready to risk millions of dollars in building the necessary experimental plants, which held little promise of profits for many years to come, and the Atomic Energy Commission was not ready to divert the money or resources from defense. Such a proposal and others were likely to be heard early in the new year before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Experts estimated that it could take from 10 to 50 years before atomic-generated electric power could be made cheaply enough to compete with energy from coal, oil or water power, that time period capable of being shortened by building experimental plants.

The Senate Internal Security subcommittee headed by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada issued a report to the Senate on a four-day hearing held the previous October in Salt Lake City regarding the leadership of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, urging the union to rid itself of its present leadership, and calling for a Federal law to bar Communists from holding office in or being employed by any labor organization, and permitting employers to fire workers who belonged to organizations designated by the Attorney General as subversive. The union accused Senator McCarran of "acting on behalf of big mine operators in a campaign to behead and dismember" the UMMSW, in the same way he had sought to wreck the U.N. The union claimed that there had been errors and omissions in the subcommittee hearing transcript, and it intended to request that the Senate take appropriate steps to find out whether those errors and omissions were deliberate or inadvertent.

HUAC, in its year-end report to Congress released on Saturday night, denounced Communism in some trade unions as "a national disgrace" and recommended repeal of the requirement of the Taft-Hartley Act that union officials file non-Communist affidavits to be able to partake in collective bargaining through the NLRB, indicating that it was now working to the benefit of members of the Communist Party involved in labor, as an individual could swear to non-Communist affiliation on the date he signed the affidavit, but could then join the Communist Party afterward with impunity.

A Federal District Court Judge in Buffalo this date declared the injunction provision of Taft-Hartley to be constitutional, granting the Government an 80-day injunction to restrain workers from continuing a strike at the Dunkirk plant of the American Locomotive Co. The United Steelworkers Union had contested the issuance of the injunction, and it was the first direct court test of the constitutionality of the injunctive provision of Taft-Hartley. The Government sought the injunction to keep the supply of nickel-plated pipe, vital to atomic energy, in production at the Dunkirk plant. The court ordered the workers to remain on their jobs until March 2 under the injunction.

Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer and a team of Government and private economists, in a report titled "Markets After the Defense Expansion", predicted good business in the new year, a possible downturn in 1954, and a sharp economic test in 1955. The report said that the economy had strong built-in safeguards against a depression in coming years, that the chief peril, as defense spending slacked off, was fear and uncertainty, not economic weakness.

President-elect Eisenhower would meet the following day at his New York headquarters with Senator Taft and other Republican Senate leaders to discuss the new Administration's legislative program, including the question of whether to continue wage-price controls. Senate leaders indicated that they would discuss with the new President the subject of filibuster limitation and civil rights legislation, though press secretary James Hagerty indicated that he had heard of no such items being on the agenda for discussion.

Seasonable temperatures prevailed over most of the nation this date and skies were clear from the Rockies to the Atlantic Seaboard.

In Washington, a cabdriver told police that two men who had hailed his cab the previous day and asked to be driven to a point outside Washington, had attempted to rob him when they reached the countryside, after initially handing him a ten-dollar bill as if to pay the fare and then suddenly demanded his money, at which point the cabdriver set off a teargas pencil which he carried in the cab, and after all three jumped from the cab, the two would-be robbers fled the scene, and the cabdriver eventually got back in and drove home, still with the $10 cab fare, about what he would have charged.

In St. Louis, Dr. William Kaufman, a physician and psychologist of Bridgeport, Conn., explained to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that wives who resented their husbands sometimes served them none of the foods they enjoyed, and that if her resentment reached a point of intense hatred, meat would be scorched, bread stale, vegetables served cold and soggy, with the husband beginning by criticizing her food and ending by paying her alimony. He said that women who envied the interesting time which men had at work often exaggerated the kitchen martyrdom involved in preparing homed-cooked meals in order to obtain concessions and rewards. He said that he knew of one woman who had on that basis obtained an extra television set, a fur coat, a small car and a separate bedroom. He said that many women enjoyed cooking, housekeeping and sex. Such women gave "their families pleasure through properly planned meals which had that extra something which stimulated the eye, the nose, the palate—while at the same time giving relief from hunger—thus creating feelings of emotional security for the entire family group."

On the editorial page, "Electricity and the Farmer" tells of a great change having taken place on the American farm by virtue of electrification. The annual report of the North Carolina Rural Electrification Authority had just been submitted to Governor Kerr Scott, and it showed that in 1935, there had been only 1,884 miles of rural electrical lines serving 11,558 rural customers in North Carolina, with 3.2 percent of rural dwellers having electricity, about one-third of the national average at 10.9 percent. But in mid-1952, there were 72,673 miles of lines serving 481,113 rural customers, with 90.4 percent of all rural dwellers having electricity, above the national average of 88.1 percent, with 17,000 more customers soon to be added in the state.