The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 3, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Eisenhower, in a speech to 9,000 persons in Tampa, Fla., at the Tampa Ball Park, had appealed to women voters, suggesting that they throw themselves into the presidential campaign "to correct the things that are wrong with us". Tampa, following the lead of Atlanta, Jacksonville and Miami, had provided a rousing welcome to the General. He suggested recalling the "spiritual and moral values of our forefathers" in governing the country. He clarified that he called the situation in Washington a "mess" because that was what Governor Stevenson had called it. He said that the Democrats were saddled with that mess, but that the Republicans wanted to clean it up. He then defined from Webster's "mess".
You only need to look at the psychological state of your running mate to find what that means—as will become more evident within the ensuing month.
In Springfield, Ill., Governor Stevenson was drafting a major speech on farm policy to be delivered to the National Plowing Contest the following Saturday in Kasson, Minn., and made no comment in response to the direct attack on his record as Governor by Senator Everett Dirksen, following a strategy, according to a campaign aide, of ignoring opposition attacks and accusations, preferring to concentrate on a series of "foundation speeches" to set forth his views on the major issues. The previous night, Senator Dirksen, speaking before the Federation of Illinois Women's Republican Clubs, had stated that the state led all the states in the union in having gambling rackets and that he was therefore not very impressed with the Governor's record of cleaning up corruption. After the speech in Minnesota, the Governor would proceed to Wyoming and Montana and then to the Pacific Coast, planning to expand further on his farm program.
Governor Stevenson, in a letter published in The Democrat, the official party newspaper, told Democratic Party workers this date that registration of voters was the first order of business, as the greater the vote, the larger the Democratic majority would be.
Attorney General James McGranery sent word through his acting Assistant Attorney General, Ellis Lyons, testifying before a House Judiciary subcommittee, that the Justice Department had plans to crack down on former Government officials who had handled claims against the Government illegally and would prosecute those persons vigorously. He said that the persons included former members of Congress, who were barred by law from receiving pay for participation in court cases concerning the Government. Previously, some Attorneys General had held that the law barred Government officials only from representing claimants against the United States in cases before Government agencies.
In New York, a young Brooklyn woman had found an overtime parking ticket on her car recently and had gone to traffic court to protest it, at which point the court officer collected a small fine. She had fallen in love with the officer at first sight and they were planning to be married the following Saturday.
In Chicago, a military engineer said that camouflage had three fundamental objectives, the first being similar to a woman's housecoat, to hide something you did not wish to be seen, the second being as a corset, to make an object look different from what it was, and, the third being "like falsies", to create the impression that something exists which really was not there at all. The professor of mechanics at West Point used the illustration in describing the history of military engineering at the centennial of engineering this date.
In Atlantic City, 52 Miss America contestants would begin their quest for the crown, "after playing wallflower roles to bosomy, blonde screen star Marilyn Monroe" the previous day. The contestants were introduced to a cheering crowd of 150,000 in a parade along the Boardwalk the prior day, but Ms. Monroe's "face and fortune" had filled most of the camera lenses, as she sat atop an open convertible as grand marshall, wearing a "scanty, form-fitting black affair that featured a plunging 'V' cut to the waist"—as pictured. She had, earlier in the day, posed for a picture aimed at attracting recruits to the women's armed services, while wearing a low-necked polka dot dress. Army officials, however, after seeing the picture, asked newspapers and wire services to withhold it from publication, as the pose, according to an Air Force major, was not in line with a program designed to convince parents that the services were proper places for their daughters.
A report from Miami indicated that Hurricane "Baker" was now packing gusts of wind estimated at 140 mph, with possible intensification to occur as it maintained its current course during the ensuing 12 hours. Near the center of the storm, sustained winds were measured at 115 miles per hour. Hurricane force winds of 75 miles per hour extended outward 75 miles in the northern part of the storm. Should the hurricane continue on its current course, according to the Miami forecasters, it would reach North Carolina in 3 1/2 days, 950 miles distant. But the Miami chief forecaster said the previous day that he believed the hurricane might turn more to the north, away from land within the ensuing two days, that hurricanes never moved in a straight line.
You better tell Dumpety that
Near South Whitley, Ind., a 20-year old man applied brakes to his semi-trailer truck the previous night to miss hitting two kittens crossing a highway, whereupon a trailing truck crashed into the rear of his truck, killing the driver.
The guy in front may have seen the two kittycats crossing the road, but the guy in back seen only the black dog...
In Raleigh, embarrassed police admitted that someone had broken into the police station on the prior Monday night, forcing the night latch on a door and entering the taxi inspector's office, taking a small amount of money. The police said that it was possible that someone had simply leaned against the door to the office too hard.
Near Louisburg, N.C., deputies came upon two individuals operating a still during a hard rainstorm and caught one individual, but the other had stripped down to his shorts and was able to get a head start on the officers, making his escape.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of some 22,000 children in Charlotte having returned to school this date, while some buildings were still being repaired or constructed. At the Chantilly School, workmen were busy performing $12,000 worth of repairs to cracks in the outside walls, broken masonry on the windowsills and roof leaks in the building, presented as a "model school" when it had opened two and a half years earlier. The engineer in charge of construction of the schools stated that while there had been a lot of talk of the needed repairs, there was no serious problem, and the building was perfectly safe for the children. He said that that such problems were common among schools built in recent years, since the trend of one-story buildings covering large areas had begun, caused by expansion and contraction issues, whereby the lateral beams had expanded and started pushing some of the corners out of the building. The repair work called for relieving the stresses on those beams. The same sort of trouble had been experienced at the Alexander Graham Junior High School, where workmen were erecting a high wire fence as a safety barricade around the condemned center section of the school. One of the students said that it was a mess inside. Barringer School was the only new building being opened for the first time, and it lacked quite a bit of work. The building had not yet been accepted from the contractor by the school system engineers, and the students were having to be careful not to disturb anything in the building. Some of the classrooms were still not ready, with some containing little more than wheelbarrows, extra lumber and masonry. Three other schools, badly in need of repairs, were still awaiting completion, and it would be a month or so before the children could begin attending those schools, Ashley Park, Double Oaks and Marie Davis. The students normally attending those schools had to begin the year attending elsewhere, producing overcrowded classrooms all over the city, with as many as 40 students per classroom, designed for 30. In the county schools, the scene was a bit more placid as some 14,000 students returned to classes.
Look, look, look, look, you can teach them little boys and girls the art of construction while them repairs is continuin'. Some of them ain't goin' to college nohow and they can use the practical education.
In Winston-Salem, 20 schools opened, but 93 high school-age students in the Old Richmond area refused to return, undertaking a sit-down strike for having been assigned to attend either Old Town or Rural Hall schools. Instead, they sat down at their old school, where high school had been discontinued by official order. A spokesman for the parents in the area urged the students to continue coming to the school each morning as if there were teachers available to teach them. Some 40 to 50 parents sat with the students in the school's auditorium, as about 350 elementary school pupils attended classes within the school.
You've got some subversive activity going on there, maybe Communist-inspired. Better crack some heads before it leads to other things.
On the editorial page, "The Burden Is on the GOP" contrasts the poignancy of Governor Stevenson's Labor Day speech in Detroit with the Milwaukee speech of the President, criticizing the Republicans for having no issue except to only throw mud at the Democrats. The President had stated in Parkersburg, W. Va., that the Republican high command had been "talking loosely about liberating the enslaved peoples of Eastern Europe".
The President had been piqued by General Eisenhower having stated, in his American Legion convention speech in New York, that the country should never "desist in our aid to every man and woman of those shackled lands", and by John Foster Dulles having stated that "any person who says we must not disturb the Communists from within is writing the ticket for World War III, and that is what the Administration is doing".
It finds these charges of the General and Mr. Dulles to have been serious and that the President had answered it by saying that the country would always work for those peoples' freedom and independence, pointing to the dangers of raising false hopes in Eastern Europe and inciting thereby uprisings which could end in a new crop of victims for the "Soviet executioners". The President believed that the country was doing all it could at present without the use of force. The piece regards this latter claim as doubtful, that more attention could be given to the subjected peoples to keep their hopes of freedom alive.
At the same time, it wished to know what the Republicans had in mind, as Republicans in Congress had not been proponents of the Voice of America and other such vehicles for sending hopeful messages to those behind the Iron Curtain, and had not been willing to provide more funds for necessarily secret undercover work in those countries. It suggests that it appeared unlikely that General Eisenhower and Mr. Dulles would have attached so much importance to the issue if they intended more emphasis on psychological warfare.
Thus, it wishes to know whether the Republicans intended to drop resistance supplies by parachute, to foment border skirmishes, or foster some other method of encouraging freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain. It concludes that the burden of proof was on the Republicans and that if they had some specific proposals, it was time for those to be made known to the public, prior to the election.
"Keep Our Chins Down" tells of some 80 U.S. men-of-war steaming eastward from the Atlantic ports to Scandinavia, where they would join with Allied ships, hundreds of planes and thousands of NATO troops to form "Operation Mainbrace", a maneuver designed to take U.S. ships up the coast of Norway past the Arctic Circle, close to the Soviet-Norwegian frontier. Meanwhile, on the Siberian border, U.S. Navy planes had blown up an oil refinery and an iron works about 12 miles from the Siberian border in North Korea the prior Monday, with Vice Admiral Clark having stated that it signaled to the Communists that the country meant business and would fight for "our way of life".
It posits that most Russians had suspected for some time that the country meant business and that if some of them believed that the maneuvers along the Norwegian frontier and the attacks close to the Siberian border were direct threats to their security, they had reason for alarm. It suggests putting the shoe on the other foot and hypothesizing the American reaction were the Russians to send planes to the Bering Straits, along with thousands of Soviet troops, to play war games across from Nome, Alaska, while at the same time a Chinese Air Force armada took offensive action in Korea against, say, Pusan.
It indicates that maneuvers in the area of possible war were militarily desirable as were the bombings of strategic North Korean targets. The low-level attacks, which the Navy had employed in the Monday attacks, were less likely to result in errors than high-altitude bombing, but, nevertheless, the jets involved in the attack were only one minute from Russian territory, flying 600 mph, and, it suggests, that that was cutting the line very thin between a cold war and a hot war. It urges, therefore, that the generals and admirals keep their chins down.
"A Childish Display" finds that the horn-blowing of paying patrons after police turned off the amplifiers at 1:30 a.m. the previous day, terminating the Griffith Park performance by the Wally Fowler all-night gospel singers convention, was a "most selfish display of childish petulance". The disturbance had annoyed nearby residents and was a violation of the City's anti-noise ordinance. It indicates that the newspaper had long been a crusader for that ordinance and urged its rigid enforcement. It thanks the police for intervening and hopes that they would, henceforth, strictly enforce the ordinance, such that loudspeakers would be turned off at 11:30. It suggests that the violators of the ordinance would realize its reasonableness if their sleep were interrupted by continuing noise.
"Give Daddy a Break" indicates that the announcement the previous day of the largest Mecklenburg County draft quota in the previous 16 months had brought to mind a detail which the local draft board could do nothing about, that being the deferments for non-veteran college students and the induction of non-veteran fathers to the draft. It hopes that the President would do something about the discrepancy, as Selective Service director, General Lewis Hershey, had recently stated his anticipation of drafting fathers, who had become fathers after the start of the Korean War, by the following summer of 1953, with the older men to be called first.
It indicates that while students who maintained good grades studying in a field which was valuable to the military were doing both themselves and their country the most good by remaining in school, mere college attendance and maintenance of average or above-average grades did not supply grounds for deferment, while a father who had either completed or never had a chance to enter college had to serve in the military. The law required a one-year deferment for students, but the President had the power to tighten the regulations for subsequent deferments, and it hopes that he would so, that there would be fewer fathers drafted. The fathers who had established a life and a family deserved the right to continue in that effort before inducting them into the military ahead of single students of college age.
A piece from the Birmingham Post-Herald, titled "Those Flying Saucers", quotes from a dialogue from Act III of Hamlet, between Hamlet and Ophelia's ill-fated father, Polonius, in which they discuss the shape of a cloud resembling first a camel, then a weasel, and finally a whale.
The piece suggests it as indicative of man's tendency to find whatever he wanted to find in the curious shapes formed in the sky, and that in 1952, apparently, he wanted to see saucers.
Stanley Andrews, administrator of the Technical Cooperation division of the State Department, substituting for Drew Pearson while on vacation, discusses the Point Four program of providing technical assistance for development of agriculture and industry in underdeveloped countries, as first put forward by the President in his 1949 inauguration address. He indicates that the program was designed to help people help themselves and was not a product of the defense effort or meant as a substitute for defense. It was, however, a source of strength for the free world. Some of the countries involved in the program lay directly in the path of Soviet expansion, but in most of those areas, the threat of Communism was not a military threat and could not be met with military response. The problems in those areas were poverty, ignorance and unrest, and attacking those problems was the only way to prevent the spread of Communism to those areas.
Point Four was a new type of diplomacy, with the diplomats wearing dungarees and blue jeans, including teachers, health officers, engineers, and farm-demonstration agents, who worked directly with the people in the villages and on the farms. U.S. technicians worked with the technicians of other countries and were not concerned with political issues. During the anti-U.S. demonstrations in Iran, American and Iranian technicians had continued to work with one another, attempting to develop more means for food production, clean water, lower infant mortality and fewer deaths of mothers during childbirth.
He indicates that the people-to-people effort of Point Four was similar to that sponsored by Drew Pearson, which included the Friendship Train and the Tide of Toys for Europe in 1947, prior to the beginning of the Marshall Plan, and which had helped to swing the 1947 Italian elections for democracy.
The Point Four program had been called idealistic and, if so, he suggests, it was hard-headed idealism, pragmatic, with sound economic reasons underlying it. The results created markets for American businessmen and jobs for American workers. Beyond this self-interest, the motives for the program lay in American democratic tradition. The peoples of the undeveloped areas of the world, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, were awakening after centuries of impotence and subjection to outside domination. Those peoples had been largely passed over by the industrial revolution, and the political revolutions of France and the U.S. during the 18th Century, and such basic measures as health and sanitation were unknown to millions of them. Hundreds of millions were illiterate and had never voted. Many of those millions were now gaining national independence and learning that hunger, disease and ignorance were not their everlasting heritage.
Thus far, Point Four had provided more than 1,000 technicians overseas working with some 20,000 nationals in 35 countries, teaching the counterparts the skills and knowledge of U.S. technicians. For example, one of the agricultural projects in India was now being run entirely by Indians. In Liberia, an extension agent from Florida had helped Liberian farmers produce a cash crop by providing 24 cocoa seeds for two cents. Point Four workers had reduced crop losses in Lebanon by showing the Lebanese citrus farmers modern ways of picking, shipping and marketing their crops. In Ecuador, Colombia and other Latin American countries, health workers had almost eliminated the tropical disease of yaws. A new disease-resistant rubber tree had been developed in Latin America. Malaria was being brought under control in the Near East.
Mr. Andrews predicts that the U.S. and the peoples of the free world would increasingly turn toward Point Four principles, not only as a potent weapon against the spread of Communism, but also because technical assistance was the diplomacy of the future, as even the Russians were imitating the program as their propaganda attacked it.
He also predicts that the cartoon-strip character, Buz Sawyer, who was helping fight the locust plague in Iran, would trap the blonde Russian agent, kill the locusts, and discover uranium in Southern Asia. Not going to happen. The locusts are going to take over Iran.
Stewart Alsop tells of plans for two huge emergency projects, comparable to the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb, based on the notion that experts predicted that by 1954, the Soviets would have the ability to deliver a crippling atomic attack on U.S. targets, at a point when the U.S. would no longer have the power to retaliate. The first such project would relate to constructing an effective air defense. The second project would restore the waning retaliatory airstrike capability.
The country had probably already entered an "air gap", as military planners called the once theoretical period when the air-and-atomic balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would begin to change sharply. The operational B-36s and the other aircraft of the strategic Air Force did not constitute an unlimited air armada, but rather were numbered in the very low hundreds, and estimated prospective average losses of the planes in missions against Soviet targets were continually being revised upward. The forecast placed the losses at between 30 and 50 percent of the aircraft during each mission, and losses anywhere close to that number would leave too few weapons to accomplish the job of a retaliatory strike, as the planes and their crews could not be replaced fast enough at those rates of loss.
Almost all of the Soviet targets were remote from their frontiers and they were developing a complex and powerful air defense, with an estimated force of 8,000 modern jet interceptors, most of which were MIG-15s. The B-29s versus the MIGs in Korea had shown the effectiveness of the Soviet air defense against the type of offensive operations which the U.S. military planners had previously contemplated. Night attacks at high altitude had always previously been primarily relied upon by the strategic air planners. Cloud-cover lay very low over the whole of the Soviet land mass at least 90 percent of the time. The U.S. strategic aircraft were designed to fly most efficiently in the higher atmosphere. U.S. planes were not fast enough to evade the MIG-15s. The Korean war experience had demonstrated that the MIGs could be vectored by ground radar to any enemy plane not protected by clouds, albeit lacking their own searching and finding radar capability. The Soviets were also producing a true night fighter, with its own searching and finding radar to complement the ground control radar.
For all of those reasons, the existing complacency about the U.S. retaliatory strike capability was becoming an illusion. The forces of the country might still be capable of doing a lot of damage presently, but that power was rapidly decreasing.
The Congressional Quarterly reports that of the 12,730 bills introduced in the House and Senate during 1952 and 1951, only 594 had become public laws. All of these successful bills had been written by fewer than 40 percent of the 531 members of Congress. Of the 401 House bills which had become law, 305 had been sponsored by 102 of the Democrats, whereas only 68 had been sponsored by 46 of the Republicans. Most of the remaining bills which became law had been sponsored by territorial delegates. Of the 193 Senate bills which became law, only 60 Senators had been their sponsors, of whom 38 were Democrats and 22, Republicans.
Eighteen Senate and 18 House committee chairmen had sponsored 254 of those respective chambers' bills which became law, and, of course, the controlling party of each chamber controlled the chairmanships of that chamber's committees, determined by seniority within the controlling party. Two committee chairmen, Senators Pat McCarran of Nevada, head of the Judiciary Committee, and Matthew Neely of West Virginia, head of the District of Columbia Committee, each had 20 successful bills. On the House side, Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler of New York and Ways & Means Committee chairman Robert Doughton of North Carolina each had sponsored 15 successful bills. Territorial delegate Joseph Farrington of Hawaii, a Republican without any committee vote, had sponsored 18 successful bills, the most in the House.
The facts were that many bills were introduced in Congress, but each house had time to consider only a small number. Many of those bills were identical or similar and the bill on which action was taken usually depended on party membership, seniority and committee chairmanship. Often a committee would revise a bill and introduce a clean bill in its place, with the new version usually bearing the name of the committee chairman and not the member who had sponsored the original bill. In the Senate, rules permitted several members to put their names on the same bill as co-sponsors, Congressional Quarterly having found up to three co-sponsors on successful bills.
A letter writer from Mt. Pleasant indicates that he was tired of the argument about when a cantaloupe was ripe, that when planting cantaloupes, one had to place a shovelful of "good old hog manure" on every hill and never use nitrate of soda on those hills. He suggests that anyone who used that latter form of fertilizer ought be "burned at the stake". He further advises that when cantaloupes were ready to pluck, the stem was almost detached from the melon.
Are you really talking about cantaloupes or something else? Maybe Rocky Ford.
A letter writer states that when the Democratic Party gravitated into groups supporting the FEPC, labor organizations, socialists and near socialists, big city machines and the "bureaucratic horde", it was "inevitable that the most discriminating element in it should head into the broader principles of the Republican Party and initiate that movement by support of Eisenhower." He indicates that non-conforming Democrats had rejected group rule in their own party, while in the Republican Party, would find factionalism. There were two factions in the GOP in Mecklenburg County, the Young Republicans and the Republican organization, the latter of which was too weak to exterminate factionalism. He concludes that the times tried men's souls.
A letter writer speaks to the parents and guardians of the "anemic and pallid-looking children of Charlotte, who are deadly in need of sunshine and whole milk." He indicates that the price of milk was soon to be increased to 26 cents per quart so that the milk producers and herd owners who had suffered from the recent drought could keep their cows in good condition. He had talked to a milk producer and herd owner, discovering that the increase in price was not enough to be passed along to the producer, that the processor and retailer obtained the entire increase, while the producer received the same 50 cents per gallon, as the hapless consumer paid more.
The editors respond that they had contacted the County Agent and he had indicated that the increase of one cent per quart amounted to 46 cents per hundred pounds of milk, of which 35 cents would go to the producer and 11 cents to the processor.
A letter writer from Norwood thinks it very unfair to attack Governor Stevenson on the grounds of his deposition in support of the good reputation of Alger Hiss during the latter's perjury trial. He finds it equally unfair to drag the fact that the Governor was divorced into the campaign and to use it as a means of seeking to discredit him with the voters. But he also doubts that the Governor was sincerely reluctant to become a presidential candidate, that his supposed reluctance had been "phony", and he was tired of reading that the Democrats had drafted the Governor for the nomination, suggesting that only three ballots to select a nominee could not be regarded as a draft.
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