The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 28, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Sam Summerlin, that for the second straight day, Communist truce negotiators hinted that the Communist armies in Korea would stage a new offensive based on allied handling of captured Communist prisoners of war. The U.N. delegation, however, again dismissed the threat as propaganda. No progress was made regarding the last stumbling block to a truce, the issue of voluntary repatriation of prisoners and the Communist insistence that at least 132,000 of the Communist prisoners, all of the Communist troops held, be returned, despite the allied claim that their screening of the prisoners had shown that only 70,000 wished to be repatriated.
Lord Alexander, Britain's defense minister, stated this date that Communist forces in North Korea had almost been doubled since the truce talks had begun the previous July.
The President, in a statement in the Rose Garden before a delegation from the American Action Committee against Mass Deportations in Rumania, said that the Kremlin had been "passing out the lies" that the U.N. had used germ warfare in Korea, when there was no truth in that charge and they knew it.
In ground fighting, tank-supported U.N. assault groups threw Communist troops from three hills this date on the western front, near Korangpo. The three U.N. units then returned to their lines, after killing or wounding at least 30 enemy troops. On the central front, allied tanks damaged 81 bunkers, 12 communications trenches and six weapon emplacements. Scattered patrol skirmishes were reported from the eastern front.
In the air war, U.N. planes continued to strike at Communist rail bridges and supply routes.
In Tokyo, a 34-year-old sergeant from Richmond, Va., who probably had flown on more bomber missions than any other flier in the Air Force, stated that if he had the choice of having a date with a Hollywood movie actress or busting a couple of Communist trains from the air, he would take the trains. As a gunner on a night-flying B-26 light bomber, he had been in on the destruction of 11 locomotives, the primary target for the B-26s. He had flown 132 combat missions over Europe during World War II and 114 during the Korean War, which Air Force officers believed was a record.
In Berlin, East German authorities issued orders to the Communist police to shoot to kill anyone who was caught without a proper pass within the new three-mile no-man's-land along the West German border. It was the latest in a series of moves in reaction to the Bonn Government's alliance with the West, and all but sealed off Berlin. Regular civilian traffic continued to flow normally, but a new formula for transit visas adopted by the Communists the previous day could cut off traffic between West Berlin and West Germany at any time. The new visa formula effectively ended an agreement between the Big Three and Russia, which had allowed West Berlin and West German authorities to issue interzonal passes for transit travel through the Eastern zone in either direction. The Communists allowed a three-truck U.S. Army convoy to pass along the highway, but continued to stop allied military patrols, designed to aid motorists.
In Paris, the Big Three Western powers had agreed the previous day that any aggression against Berlin would be regarded as a threat to their own security.
At the U.N., the Big Three Western powers agreed on a proposal to place a ceiling of 1.5 million men each for the armed forces of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and China, provided that all three governments and the U.N. would concur. The proposal was scheduled to be presented late this date to the U.N. Disarmament Commission and was the answer to Russia's demand for a flat one-third reduction of all armed forces of the major powers. The Big Three proposal called for strict safeguards to see that no country violated the limits.
The Senate rejected, by a 41 to 33 vote, a further reduction of 500 million dollars from the 6.9 billion dollar foreign aid bill, already cut by a billion dollars from that requested by the President. Senator Herman Welker of Idaho, leader of the effort for the additional cut, indicated that he found it hard to know how it would go henceforth. Senator Tom Connolly, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and leading the fight against any further reductions, indicated to a reporter that he thought they would win if they could get all of the Senators present who opposed further cuts. The bill would now proceed to a reconciliation conference with the House, which had voted the previous week a 6.1 billion dollar bill.
The Associated Press reported that the new tally in the Republican race for the presidential nomination was 404 delegate votes for Senator Taft and 382 for General Eisenhower, with 604 needed to nominate. In the Democratic race, Senator Estes Kefauver had 122 committed delegates, Averell Harriman, 85 1/2, and Senator Richard Russell, 86 1/2, with 616 needed to nominate. The new tally included results from Connecticut's state convention and Florida's state convention, the latter in which the Democrats had provided 19 delegate votes for Senator Russell and five for Senator Kefauver, based on primary returns.
Texas Republicans met at Mineral Wells to name a 38-vote delegation, and many Eisenhower supporters, having been denied seats at the meeting, walked out to set up their own state convention.
In Fort Worth, a giant B-36 bomber exploded and burst into flames as it hit a runway at Carswell Air Force Base shortly after noon this date. There was no immediate report on casualties.
North Carolina gubernatorial candidate William B. Umstead would visit more than a dozen rural communities in Mecklenburg County the following day, as he wound up his campaign for the Democratic nomination, with the primary set for the following Saturday. His itinerary is printed, in case you wish to attend one of his speeches. In a statewide 15-minute radio talk, he stated that he was against a State bonus for veterans and accused his primary opponent, Judge Hubert Olive, of trying to deceive the people on this issue, indicating that if elected governor, he would provide a $4,000 bonus, which Mr. Umstead termed a "delusion".
Judge Olive was also actively campaigning across the state. His campaign manager charged that state Democratic chairman, future Senator B. Everett Jordan, had been actively and openly supporting Mr. Umstead for at least a year, against the tradition in the state that the party chairman did not take sides in a primary campaign.
Near Leesburg, Virginia, a woman and two men, one of whom was an airline pilot, had been slain the previous night in a farming section, and an escaped mental patient, the son of one of the slain men, had been arrested and charged with the murders. The man had escaped two weeks earlier from the mental institution at Staunton, to which he had been committed the previous fall. The woman had been bludgeoned to death and the two men had been killed with a shotgun.
In Mt. Holly, N.C., it was reported that American and Efird Mills was formed this date by the merger of two yarn organizations, and that the headquarters for the new 22-million dollar corporation would be in Mt. Holly.
On the editorial page, "No One Bothered To Ask Susie" tells of an address by the president of the Woman's College at Greensboro, Dr. Edward K. Graham, Jr., the transcript of which appears on the page, in which he discussed the need for revision of the college curriculum requirements for State certification of teachers, to alleviate the shortage of teachers in the state, especially at the elementary school level. The entry level salaries for teachers was about the same as for women entering other walks of life after college and so money was not the problem in attracting young teachers. Rather, it was the fact that the extensive curriculum requirements for certification took up too much of the four-year college curriculum, overly limiting the courses which the student might otherwise wish to take, many of which might better prepare the prospective teacher for teaching than those required.
Dr. Graham had used the hypothetical figure of "Susie", a bright, idealistic college freshman who wished to major in English and take a variety of courses she would choose, to explain his points. Susie had entered wanting to be a teacher but was deterred from doing so by the required curriculum, which she found, by and large, not relevant to her becoming a good teacher.
The piece thinks that it was time to try Dr. Graham's approach of revising the entire curriculum requirements for State certification of teachers so that more young students such as Susie would be inclined to enter teaching as a profession.
"Our Ambivalent Tar Heel Democrats" tells of North Carolina Democratic convention keynoter L. Y. Ballentine having praised to the skies the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, ticking off a number of programs, both domestically and in foreign policy, for which the Democrats could claim as major successes. After doing so, the delegates applauded him, then proceeded to express their loud approval for top party leaders who criticized the Truman Administration. At the end of the convention, they "endorsed" Senator Richard Russell for the Democratic nomination, despite the fact that Senator Russell had in recent years formed a successful coalition with Republicans against many of the measures which Mr. Ballentine had listed. The piece finds the state Democratic Party, therefore, ambivalent.
"It's Chairman Connally Again" tells of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Tom Connally pushing through the foreign aid appropriations bill, indicating that it was probably his last great effort before he would retire at the end of the year. Yet, in March, before he had made the decision not to run against his strong opponent, Texas Attorney General Price Daniel, he had criticized the foreign aid budget proposal for the coming year as using support of defense efforts in Europe as a device to prolong the Marshall Plan, which was supposed to have ended during 1952. He had stated that France needed to do more to pull their own weight and that the country had no duty to continue to provide large sums of money to France and Britain.
It concludes that it was reassuring that it was Senator Connally, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, rather than as a candidate for re-election, who was shepherding through the mutual security bill.
"The Breaking Point" indicates that after Congress had raised the excise tax on legal liquor from nine dollars to $10.50 per gallon, despite the protests of American distillers that the higher prices would prompt a drop in sales, the prediction had come true, with the Government having collected 1.75 billion dollars in liquor taxes the prior fiscal year, while it was being estimated that it would collect only 1.68 billion in the current year. The warehouses, meanwhile, were bulging with unsold whiskey, as moonshiners were doing a booming business. The piece concludes that the results indicated there was a limit to what the Government could charge for any excise tax, just as there was for the total tax to be levied on the incomes of the people. It hopes that Congress would bear that in mind in the future.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Humpty-Dumpty and the Housewife", suggests that the Federal Trade Commission was as Humpty-Dumpty, making words mean whatever they wanted them to mean, while the American housewife stood in the position of Alice. The FTC had charged two grocery store chains, Safeway and Kroger, with tending to "lessen competition" and to "create a monopoly", based on their purchasing of groceries for lower prices than their competitors, enabling them to sell for less. The piece thinks it did not sound like "lessening" competition, but rather stimulating competition, and did not sound like a monopoly but rather a means by which the American housewife could purchase groceries more cheaply, with other chain stores pushed by Kroger and Safeway to follow suit.
It concludes that there was not much the housewife could do about the FTC's efforts, but she could rest assured that sooner or later Humpty-Dumpty would have a great fall.
As indicated in the above editorial, an address to the North Carolina Editorial Writers' Conference by North Carolina Woman's College president, Dr. Edward K. Graham, Jr.—son of Edward Kidder Graham, the late English professor and president of UNC during World War I before succumbing at age 42 to the flu epidemic of 1918, after which the younger Graham, then 7, was raised by his uncle, Chapel Hill Weekly publisher and editor Louis Graves, and his wife—regards the pressing need for elementary school teachers in the state and the primary reason for the shortage, that the extensive teacher certification requirements too greatly limited the choice of the curriculum of the prospective teacher, to the point that young students entering college did not want to take up their entire four years with over half their total curriculum dictated by the required courses.
He indicates that the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Clyde Erwin, had reported the prior year that, with the student population burgeoning during the prior decade, the state needed 1,200 new elementary school teachers each year just to replace those retiring or resigning, while fewer than 500 had graduated from the state's institutions of higher learning in 1951.
He proposes starting over with certification, designed 30 years earlier and out of step with the times, most of it not relevant to making a good teacher. He suggests that the certification requirements be designed so that they could be fulfilled in one academic year spread over the junior and senior years of college. Then, special subjects essential to the teacher in the primary grades would take up about two-thirds of one academic year.
He also indicates that children who attended kindergarten for a year were much better equipped, in terms of their socialization process, to enter the first grade than those pupils who had not. But North Carolina at the time was not among the 18 states which provided funding to the kindergarten system. He urges, therefore, the state to take responsibility for the kindergarten system.
We found it important for the fact that there were interlocking cardboard blocks painted with faux brick with which we would, in cooperation, utilize to build little rooms in which to play, and also story-telling time, fingerpainting, plus nap time for which each of us had to bring our own towel upon which to lay down to cushion the hard linoleum floor. That is to say that all of the kindergarteners slept together in the same room for about 20 minutes each day.
Drew Pearson tells of the President being both jovial and paternalistic in receiving a California delegation led by State Attorney General Pat Brown, who had come to the White House to make a plea to the President that he change his mind on Federal control of tidelands oil, with his veto imminent regarding the legislation designed to give control of the tidelands back to the states. The President agreed to study a memo prepared by California lawyers, but indicated that the process reminded him of an old judge in Missouri who said that they would give the man before the court a fair trial and then hang him. The President enjoyed talking about the Democratic presidential candidates with Mr. Brown, who was running as a favorite-son candidate for the nomination against Senator Estes Kefauver in California, and commented that Senator Richard Russell of Georgia would be the ablest among them if his stand on civil rights were correct. He said that Averell Harriman was "a wonderful man" but that he could not imagine a Wall Street banker becoming President.
Senator Taft would not be flattered
if he read a letter written by the Los Angeles real estate lobby
which termed the Taft Housing Act "socialistic". The lobby
Incidentally, the brother of chairman Frederick C. Dockweiler of the Committee Against Socialistic Housing, Henry I. Dockweiler, perhaps not surprisingly, was a prominent member of the Democrats for Nixon in former Vice-President Richard Nixon's unsuccessful 1962 California gubernatorial campaign against incumbent Governor Pat Brown—after which Mr. Nixon took his leave from politics, so that the press would not have him to kick around anymore. He would have been better advised to have stuck by that exit...
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