The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 5, 1952
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Communist negotiators in Korea had admitted that they held unreported prisoners and tried to use them as a wedge in the truce negotiations. They indicated that they would supply the names of the prisoners "in due time", but only after the allies furnished the data which the Communists had been demanding on prisoners. The U.N. negotiator responded that it would furnish additional data on an exchange basis or not at all. The U.N. had demanded information on a total of 1,621 American soldiers and 50,000 South Korean troops, none of whom had been listed in the original list of 11,500 prisoners provided by the Communists on December 18. The allies had just added 174 names to their list, four of whom were believed to be from the Carolinas, based on Communist radio broadcasts, letters to families, Communist periodicals and other sources. The Communists wanted information on the 44,000 Koreans originally listed by the allies as prisoners but who had been reclassified as South Korean civilians or troops. The Communists claimed that the 50,000 South Koreans did not exist and that the claim was based on boasts by their radio channels regarding the number of prisoners captured. The U.N. insisted that the Communists had indoctrinated these prisoners and taken them into the North Korean army. The U.N. negotiator said that no progress had been made regarding voluntary repatriation, the primary remaining issue anent prisoner exchange.
Staff officers working on truce supervision met for only 14 minutes, with each side saying that it had nothing new to offer regarding the issue of Communist insistence that Russia be a neutral nation on the truce inspection commission, the final sticking point in that area.
U.S. warplanes surprised a flight of Communist MIG-15 jets this date and shot down at least five in a half-hour battle near the Yalu River. Another MIG was listed as probably destroyed. It was the largest bag of enemy jets since January 25 when ten were destroyed. Another enemy jet had crashed beyond the Manchurian border without a shot being fired at it.
Fighting on the battle front continued to be light but the enemy stepped up its artillery and mortar fire in some sections.
The Defense Department added eleven U.S. casualties to the list, eight wounded, two injured in battle-zone accidents and one missing in action.
The Truman Administration had determined, according to Assistant Secretary of State John Allison in a speech in Philadelphia the previous night delivered by his assistant, not to carry the Korean War into China even if the truce talks collapsed. But the Defense and State Departments also recognized that public opinion might force a divergence from that present policy.
The previous night, the House voted 236 to 162 to shelve the Administration's plan for universal military training of 18-year olds.
A Senate Rules subcommittee chaired by Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa voted this date to ask the Senate whether it would continue its inquiry into demands that Senator McCarthy be ousted from Congress. Senator Gillette declined to provide the breakdown of the vote but said that it was divided. The matter is covered on the editorial page by Marquis Childs.
Secretary of State Acheson said this date that he was reversing the finding of the State Department loyalty board that career diplomat Oliver Edmund Clubb was a security risk. The Secretary said he was taking full personal responsibility for the action, permitting Mr. Clubb to retire from the foreign service on a pension. He had been director of Chinese affairs in the Department and resigned from the post on February 11 after being cleared, indicating that the investigation had seriously damaged his future career prospects. The Secretary indicated that his decision was based on the recommendation of one of the most experienced and trusted foreign service officers, unnamed, who had reviewed the findings made by the Department's loyalty board.
The Justice Department refused this date to provide detailed information on the handling of Government prosecutions to a Congressional committee investigating Attorney General J. Howard McGrath's conduct of the office. A House Judiciary subcommittee had written to the Attorney General on February 22 asking him to list all cases referred to the Justice Department for action during the previous six years, where action was either declined, the cases were returned to the originating department, or were still pending in the Justice Department. The Assistant Attorney General acting for the Attorney General stated that the request was outside the scope of the resolution adopted by the full House Judiciary Committee authorizing the investigation. He also said that it would impose an intolerable burden on the Department. He stated that the Department would honor all reasonable requests with respect to definite cases.
The Senate Expenditures Committee this date disapproved, by a vote of 7 to 5, the President's plan to reorganize the IRB. The matter would now go to the Senate floor for debate and vote the following Tuesday. Among those supporting the resolution of disapproval were Senators Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, Joseph McCarthy, Karl Mundt, and Richard Nixon. In the opposition were Senators Hubert Humphrey and Margaret Chase Smith. Opponents of the plan said that they were sure that a majority of the Senators voting would reject it but they were not certain of receiving the required majority of 49. The House had already approved the plan and the failure of the Senate to reject it would mean the plan would become law.
Another Gallup poll appears, showing that Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was running ahead of Senator Taft in a trial heat, by 47 percent to 41 percent, based on Senator Kefauver's greater appeal among independent voters, representing between a fourth and a third of all voters in the country. Among only independent voters, Senator Kefauver led 48 percent to 35 percent over Senator Taft. Among Republicans, Senator Taft led 79 percent to 15 percent, and among Democrats, Senator Kefauver led 75 percent to 13 percent. The story points out that the Gallup poll had been successful in seven of the previous eight national elections in predicting the winner, with an average error of 3.8 percent, the one exception having been in 1948.
In Walla Walla, Washington, a milk truck ended a tunnel escape attempt from the state penitentiary when inmates fell 30 feet short of freedom the previous night, two weeks after the prisoners had been honored at a dinner for digging no tunnels during the previous year. The men were believed to have worked for 18 months digging the 100-foot tunnel, discovered by prison officers when the milk truck caved in a spot while it was traveling along the north wall roadway. The warden stated that he would be willing to bet that some of the men had been digging the tunnel while the banquet honoring them was occurring.
On the editorial page, "A Few Words for France" tells of the French Government having fallen the previous week after the National Assembly had voted four billion dollars in arms appropriations but then refused to increase taxes by 15 percent to pay for it, requiring the Premier, who had asked for the tax increase, to resign.
In the U.S., it points out, the Congress followed that general pattern often, but the President continued in office and the national debt merely increased.
In consequence, France was without a government at a time when Congress was considering voting on foreign aid and Senator Tom Connolly had reflected the prevailing opinion in Congress that France had to do its share in support of the defense of Western Europe or have its aid from the U.S. severely cut.
It points out that France had suffered more casualties in Indo-China since 1946 than the U.S. had thus far in Korea and had spent an amount at least equal to all of the aid which the U.S. had provided France since the end of World War II. Inflation was high and the Government was now asked to raise taxes to contribute to the defense of Western Europe, a greater contribution in troops having been promised by France than any other of the NATO nations. It suggests that if the shoe were on the other foot and such conditions applied in the U.S., Americans would be shouting down any proposed tax increase.
The situation was grave and the ultimate solution, it offers, might be a reduction in the NATO defense goal. It finds that France, as the U.S., was doing a good job of strengthening the Atlantic community, despite inflation and war in Asia, and the U.S. could not afford to abandon its allies under the present world conditions.
"Prosperity in Tar Heelia" tells of the state's revenue having soared by 29.25 percent over that of February a year earlier, with income tax revenue having more than doubled and the sales tax having brought in more than $83,000 over that of the previous February. Highway Fund collections were up more than a half million dollars. And it was not a temporary spurt. Revenue had been rising steadily since the beginning of the fiscal year eight months earlier. Inflation had been one factor in producing these results, but it was a relatively minor part. The primary change was a sound economy in the state such that the citizens were earning more and buying more in result. New industries were occurring all over the state.
It suggests that when the next General Assembly met the following January, there would be a temptation to reduce state taxes, as other states had done during the previous year. But since state taxes were not oppressive, it recommends that any surplus remaining be reinvested in the future of the state by building the institutions and providing the services needed by the people.
"A New Status for Puerto Rico" tells of the territory being divided between those who wanted full independence and those who wanted statehood, while the vast majority desired something in between those extremes, permitting local control over the government while retaining their traditional bonds of citizenship, political allegiance, and economic relations with the U.S.
Gradually during the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, the U.S. had eliminated its control and supervision of the government, allowing the territory to elect its own governor and generally run its affairs. Now the voters of Puerto Rico had voted to ratify a new constitution which, if approved by Congress, would establish the territory as a Commonwealth of the United States. In that capacity it would govern itself, including levying its own taxes, while retaining economic relationship with the U.S.
While there were critics in the United States of the move, the example reaffirmed the basic principles of the American Revolution, that men everywhere should be the masters of their own destinies. It recommends broadcasting the change via the Voice of America to the peoples behind the Iron Curtain that they might be inspired thereby to seek their own freedom.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Very First Obligation", tells of Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota indicating that the Government was losing 4.5 billion dollars per year in revenue from tax loopholes, primarily benefiting those who earned more than $10,000. The piece hopes that the Congress would do everything within its power to close such loopholes and to ensure that everyone paid their fair share of taxes, with special emphasis on tax collection and enforcement.
Drew Pearson, in St. Thomas, tells of his father having been the first civil governor of the Virgin Islands and relates some of its history before his father had taken over during the Depression in 1931. President Hoover, who had appointed him, made a visit to the islands in 1931 and publicly branded them "an effective poorhouse". He indicates that the effort to try to revive the bankrupt islands had eventually broken his father, and he departed four years later, criticized and reviled. The white plantation owners had conspired against him and the black politicians lampooned him, and he was even accused of stealing four bags of cement.
Yet, the previous week, Mr. Pearson had been invited to St. Thomas to dedicate the first public housing project in the islands, named for his father, Paul M. Pearson Gardens. Mr. Pearson had not been in the islands for 21 years and had not wished to return, though his father had not become embittered by the treatment he had received, which brought an early end to his life. He indicates that he was glad that he had returned, however, as he was able to observe landmarks to the dreams of his father all over the islands, with St. Thomas now bustling with tourist trade and the Bluebird Castle, once the purlieu of pirates, which his father had bought on behalf of the Government and turned into a hotel, so crowded that no one could get a reservation.
Half the population of St. Croix had been unemployed when his father began as civil governor and the Red Cross had been sent from Washington to feed the people. But now he saw a factory run by the Virgin Islands Corporation, which his father had organized, producing sugar from sugar cane and going strong, after the local plantation owners had scoffed at his father's organization of the cooperative. The son of the plantation owner who had most strenuously opposed it was now operating it.
Some still lamented the policies of his father, did not like the fact that he had established universal suffrage in the islands, removing the requirement that only property owners could vote. A few deplored the fact that educational standards had risen and new schools had been built, his father having persuaded Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, Howard, Hampton and other black colleges in the North to grant scholarships to Virgin Islands teachers, most of whom then lacked even a high school education. Even these critics, however, admitted that his father had done a good job on such things as the Virgin Islands National Bank and a cooperative which presently sold thousands of straw hats, handbags and native mats.
His father had become Public Housing administrator under the Public Works Administration when he left the Virgin Islands in 1935, and had, in that capacity, persuaded the California Legislature to change the law which banned receipt of Federal funds for public housing, shortly before he died.
His father had asked that no marker be placed on his grave as he only wanted to be remembered in the hearts of men, and so his ashes were scattered off the Golden Gate of San Francisco. He indicates that nothing would have pleased his father more than to have the public housing project dedicated in his name.
Marquis Childs tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy running for re-election from Wisconsin in 1952 and Congressman Alvin O'Konski appearing as the strongest potential Republican challenger, with strong anti-Communist credentials. In the meantime, Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa was planning to put the matter of the Senate investigation of Senator McCarthy to a vote before the Senate to determine whether the investigation should proceed. It would need an unanimous vote by Republicans to block the investigation, and that was unlikely given the split in the party.
Senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma had been working quietly to assure a thorough investigation, which he suggested might not follow the pattern of the charges brought against Senator McCarthy by Senator William Benton of Connecticut. The stress would be on the $10,000 fee which Senator McCarthy received from the Lustron Corporation at the time that company was obtaining a 37.5 million dollar loan from the RFC.
Since Senator McCarthy had encouraged advertisers to boycott Time Magazine for its attacks on the Senator, conservative publications had begun to realize that there was a direct attack on their rights of free press.
Wisconsin Democrats had shown an inability to put forth an effective opposition candidate and to try to do so might produce an intra-party squabble which could divide the party for the general election in November.
The Department of Justice had not acted on referrals of potential campaign finance law violations by Senator McCarthy in the 1950 Maryland Senate race, in which incumbent Millard Tydings was defeated by John Butler, after Senator McCarthy stumped the state for Mr. Butler and was responsible for distribution of a composite photograph of Senator Tydings supposedly with former American Communist leader Earl Browder. The Department had indicated that what might be considered unethical or immoral in politics was not necessarily illegal under the lax election laws in effect.
Regardless of the controversy swirling around the Senator, he was receiving numerous contributions of funds from supporters, who believed that he was being attacked for his anti-Communist views by Communists.
But others felt equally strongly that the Senator had created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, threatening fundamental American freedoms, and they blamed him for the excesses of the Senate Internal Security Committee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, and its investigation into Owen Lattimore, who denied the charges brought against him of being sympathetic to Communism, but was being treated as a convicted criminal. Mr. Childs finds it "a political vortex where passions are stirred as rarely in our political life."
James Marlow tells of the President getting ready the next day to send a message to Congress to seek additional billions of dollars in foreign aid to assure that Western Europe would be strong against potential Communist aggression. He would take a kindlier stance than Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had earlier in the week when he angrily demanded that France take greater responsibility in raising its taxes to support rearmament and depend less on American aid. The President would, nevertheless, raise the issue, as the French Parliament had the previous week turned down the proposal to raise taxes by 15 percent. The French did not have a stiff tax program, and the heaviest part of taxation fell on the poor. With France facing the brunt of any Soviet aggression in Europe, the rich and middle classes would have the most to lose economically. Thus, France needed protection through NATO as much as NATO needed France to be the central part of the European army. France had promised more divisions for the Army than any other NATO country.
If the Communists were able to take over France internally based on an economic collapse, the European army would also collapse. It was therefore to the interest of the U.S. that France not collapse and, despite the indignation of Senator Connally and others, American aid would have to continue.
A letter writer from Marshall complains that another criminal term had passed in Superior Court without the grand jury having been allowed to review the SBI evidence collected regarding the 1950 election charges in Madison County—which he does not bother to explain.
A letter from a minister in Matthews commends Solicitor Malcolm Seawell of Lumberton for his "fearless patriotism reflected in his vigorous action against the notorious Ku Klux Klan," referring to the recent arrests of 16 Klansmen under an 1868 statute preventing a clandestine organization from undertaking police powers to effect political purposes. He indicates that the idea of white supremacy was a false doctrine, subversive of American democracy. He suggests that while professing to be a democracy, the country was really Fascist at home while fighting dictators abroad, despising Nazis while smugly discriminating against minorities regarding social, political, economic and civil rights. He finds racial segregation "revoltingly nauseating" and posits that the country could demonstrate its sincere faith in human dignity only by providing democratic equality to all people.
The 1868 statute being applied, incidentally, was NCGS 14-10, albeit as amended subsequent to 1952. The area of regulation was considerably supplemented by the 1953 Legislature to add a series of statutes, NCGS 14-12.2, et seq., regulating secret societies and the wearing of masks and disguises, burning of crosses, etc., designed to reach Klan activity, meeting the 1952 Klan Klaim of Imperial Wizard Thomas Hamilton of Leesville, S.C., that the 1868 statute was obsolete for having been passed by a "carpetbag, scalawag" Legislature during Reconstruction, and that the Klan was not a "secret political organization", being
And though we have tried mightily to resist making comment on this piece of garbage, since we first saw it a couple of days ago, drafted anonymously by someone in need of a history lesson or at least a fresh change of glasses to cure their tunnel vision, we must state again the absurdity of trying to reduce civil rights and the honorable legacy of those efforts made toward achieving same in the 1950's and 1960's, onward and before, by those who risked their very lives to bring it about, to a trivialization of that movement by attempting in latter days to associate with it such junk as seeking, because of myopic views through the stereopticon of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, to focus on individual college campuses to change the names of buildings or other structures because of supposed association, by dint of dedicated name, with the segregationist past of the nation—which, to be cleansed, would require across the nation the change of name of about every building dedicated before around 1930, along with most organizations earlier named, starting with Nobel and Rhodes, but for some reason targeting only the most liberal institutions in the South, suggesting the political agenda being actually fomented from the right, not the left, using emotion, false Wicked-pedia promoted "history", drafted and researched in many instances by junior high school kids, and utilizing perhaps unwitting puppets on and around the campus, in some instances, we suspect, paying same for participation in "demonstrations", to transact that rightist, reactionary political agenda.
It is so trivial that it scarcely deserves attention, but since it has garnered much, we do feel the need to state that such trash as the cited piece of work has no business on the official UNC website as it certainly does not speak for the broad mass of UNC alumni, is not a neutral, informative statement regarding the campus and its buildings, rather speaks to a political agenda, probably not representative of the current student body.
Free speech and press are hallmarks of the political and constitutional fabric of the nation, and we do not advocate any suppression of it, but this piece belongs on some other website, dedicated to a particular organization or individual desiring such changes, or perhaps as an op-ed piece in The Daily Tar Heel or some other newspaper, where it can be appropriately countered and challenged to debate as an arbiter of truth. It is personal political opinion offered by an unknown author, suggestive of speaking for the University and the University community at large. It mixes undeniable statements regarding white supremacy in the era of 1900 with outrageous suggestions pointing to more contemporaneous times, that UNC somehow helped effectuate, institutionalize and perpetuate same through the decades, when the converse was true, UNC having been a leader in the South in the effort to desegregate, though held in check for a time by conservatives on the Board of Trustees, such as the segregationist John W. Clark, referenced herein in recent days. As we have mentioned previously, University president Frank Porter Graham was an advocate for ending segregation in higher education during the 1930's. There is no Clark Building on campus and if there were, such persons could more properly attack such a dedication, especially as it would have been undertaken in more modern times than 1920 and earlier.
But to besmirch the honorable name of Josephus Daniels in that effort, regarding the Student Bookstores building established in 1968, is reprehensible and absurd, and indicates the very flawed and superficial understanding of history possessed by such individuals, and regardless of their ostensible credentials. There, we said it, and being a graduate of the University twice over, we believe we have that right.
As we have suggested previously, if you want to get rid of all the Confederate memorials dotting every courthouse square in the South, fine. Have at it. But don't be picky and selective in your targets, just because some are easy. Start in Shelby, N.C., home of racist Thomas Dixon, and get rid of that Confederate statue and really make a statement. Then move on down to small townvilles of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, the heart of the matter in any modern context after 1950 or so, and get them to take down their Confederate monuments. But, apparently, those engaged in this movement are too chicken to do that, choosing instead to try to disgrace liberal Universities, for some odd reason.
Parenthetically, we are perfectly aware that Josephus Daniels attended the funeral of Thomas Dixon in 1946. So what? He also presented the Mayflower Literary Society Cup on December 5, 1941 posthumously to W. J. Cash for The Mind of the South, plainly, by its statements, antithetical to everything for which Thomas Dixon stood, representing, according to Cash, "the most rabid Southern viewpoint, and a bitter attack on the Negro."
Whatever else you do, henceforth, leave the names of the buildings in place. They are, if nothing else, for those who really care—certainly few in number, most students never giving a hoot in hell for whom a building is named, as long as they enter the portal, get to class and make it to exams—, educational tools to show the progress of the University through time. (We, for instance, went through three years of law school without ever knowing or caring who Van Hecke-Wettach were or was, and not even certain as to the correct pronunciation of same.) And Josephus Daniels, himself, just as with Malcom X, is a proper study for such change in attitude through a lifetime. Read their autobiographies and cease reliance on Wicked-pedia and its generally kindergarten-level understanding of history, geared to pop culture and perpetuation of pre-existing stereotypes, to inform your ideas about time and its passage.
We might note also that the above-linked 1963 article by long-deceased UNC Professor Joseph L. Morrison, Cash's first biographer in 1967, was uploaded to the web on December 22, 2014 and the above-linked piece which we criticize was apparently originally drafted in 2015 and updated as late as 2017. Where is the excuse for lack of diligent research on the entire arc of Mr. Daniels's career and views, including his editorially fighting the Klan "openly and without stint" during the Twenties, as noted by Professor Morrison? Perhaps, we are being too charitable in assuming the writer did not know of this background, and did not simply choose conveniently to omit it as being incongruent with the constructed premise casting him as an unreconstructed Southerner for whom closet white supremacists on the Board of Trustees sneakily named the Student Bookstores in the placid, passive, apathetic societal year of 1968, when everyone was so oblivious and insensitively insouciant to civil rights and segregationists, during, as it was, the tenure of one of the more liberal presidents of the University to that time, William C. Friday, and one of the more liberal chancellors of the Chapel Hill campus to that time, J. Carlisle Sitterson.
G. K. Chesterton's 1921 comment anent "the ignorance of the educated", as once recalled circa 1977 by former UNC Law School professor and Institute of Government director Albert Coates, comes again to mind.
A letter writer responds to a letter which had condemned Charlotte as a Sodom and Gomorrah, more so than any city the previous writer had ever visited in North America. This writer suggests that the visitor to the city respond to the invitations regularly printed in the newspapers by the churches to attend services. He thinks that the writer was irrational when he had written the latter, admits that there were a few big liars in Charlotte, but that when the prior letter writer shook the dust from his boots, as he had promised to do, there would be one less in their midst. He concludes, "God bless Texas and North Carolina."
A letter writer tells of reading a story in the newspaper regarding Mayor Victor Shaw's efforts to encourage a civic organization to clean up the old city founders' cemetery downtown, and approves that effort. He indicates that he would be glad to join a group of 1,000 citizens of the community in contributing $10 each toward that goal.
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