` Tuesday, October 13, 1953

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 13, 1953

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at the U.N. in New York, Russia demanded this date that the Security Council try again to set up an international administration for the Free Territory of Trieste, with chief Soviet delegate Andrei Vishinsky calling on the Council to enter the issue forthwith, submitting a resolution for action to appoint Col. Hermann Fluckiger of Switzerland as the governor of Trieste, to set up a provisional council to help him govern, and establish complete independence of Trieste, including both of the zones, the currently Yugoslav-occupied southern zone and the British-American occupied northern zone, the latter of which was about to be vacated in favor of the Italians. The Council had rejected a similar Russian proposal in May, 1949. Russia had accused the U.S. and Britain of a "grave violation" of the Italian peace treaty by their decision to withdraw and turn the zone over to the Italians.

In Belgrade, anti-Western violence increased this date over the British-American decision to withdraw from Trieste, with demonstrators beating up an American student and a Yugoslav who had dropped into the Belgrade office of the U.S. Information Service, and the words "entrance of traitors" scrawled on the sidewalks outside the USIS office and the British reading room in the main part of the city. A reinforced ring of Yugoslav militiamen surrounded both buildings, with new protests planned for this night. A British spokesman said that between 1,000 and 1,500 "thugs" had twice invaded the reading room and seized copies of the British news bulletin, tearing them up and using them to make bonfires in the streets. The previous night had been relatively quiet, though the U.S. Embassy reported that a Yugoslav female employee of its information service had been beaten up on her way home. The previous day, demonstrators had slugged the USIS director and broken his nose.

Secretary of State Dulles would meet with the British and French foreign ministers in London the following Friday for conferences on Trieste, Korea, and Russian relations, as well as other world problems, according to an announcement made simultaneously this date in Washington, London and Paris. Mr. Dulles would leave the following night for the meeting, which would last through the following Sunday.

In Panmunjom, the Repatriation Commission said this date that it had asked the U.N. Command and the Communists to begin their explanations to prisoners resisting repatriation the following Thursday, after the Command indicated it would complete by midnight this night a permanent center for the Communists to use in interviewing the 22,300 such North Korean and Chinese prisoners. The explanations had been slated to begin on September 26 and run through December 24, 90 days, but both sides had rejected existing sites for the interviews as being inadequate.

University of Michigan student editor Zander Hollander, who, along with three other student editors, had flown to Moscow the previous month for a two-week visit to the Soviet Union, tells of their observations, stating that the American in Russia felt as a person in another world, and was never allowed to forget the Iron Curtain. They had toured Moscow's wide streets frequently, not being followed, but MVD militiamen often showing up while they toured the city. Once, when he had taken a photograph of Muscovites elbowing for a chance to buy scarce Ukrainian melons at a State-owned market, an MVD man had appeared, asking for their passports, saying that they could not take pictures. Mr. Hollander had told him that they had been given permission by the tourist bureau, and after he checked, he apologized, the crowd seeming to marvel at the fact that they had gotten away with it. It appeared to Mr. Hollander that the Muscovites spent many non-working hours waiting in line to buy such things as bagels, cheese or bread. He lined up with them on three occasions and relates of the experience. They had found the new Moscow State University, which appeared opulent, to have mostly scholarship students among its 7,000 in attendance, some obtaining preference by putting in two years of voluntary labor in the construction of the school, which had opened the previous month. The students were proud of their university. One philosophy major had asked Mr. Hollander, when they entered an elevator, how fast U.S. elevators ran, stating with precision in seconds how quickly their elevators ran. In the Moscow State Library, they noticed that the reading rooms were well stocked with American and British scientific journals and bulletins from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. Judging by their conversations with average Russians, it appeared they viewed the U.S. as holding only poverty, bankruptcy and oppression for the workers and farmers, while reserving the great wealth and power for the bourgeoisie and capitalists.

Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson this date outlined his plan to reorganize the Agriculture Department, stating that it would reduce the number of employees and cut costs while providing better service for farm families. The plan had been under study for several months. The proposal would put all of the service agencies under four main groups, consisting of Federal-state relations, marketing and foreign agriculture, agricultural stabilization, and agricultural credit, each assigned to different directors.

In Columbus, O., Democrat Thomas Burke, who had been Mayor of Cleveland for four terms, was appointed by Governor Frank Lausche, a Democrat, to replace deceased Republican Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, who had died at the end of July of cancer. The selection would provide the Democrats with a 48 to 47 majority in the Senate, with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon as an independent, having stated that he would vote with the Republicans in a close vote to provide a tie, to be broken by Vice-President Nixon, as Senator Morse said that since he had been elected as a Republican, he felt morally obligated to do so. Senator Burke would have to stand for election in November, 1954 to the unexpired term, which ran until 1957.

In Kansas City, the two confessed kidnapers and murderers of six-year old Bobby Greenlease had been returned from St. Louis, where they had been held since their arrest a week earlier. They were transported by the U.S. Marshal in two separate cars, each manacled and seated between two officers. The male of the couple said that the female had been drinking excessively during the time of the kidnaping, as much as two fifths of whiskey per day. He had already admitted to being a drug addict and to having fired the fatal shot into the boy's head, just over the Kansas state line, thus giving the Federal Government jurisdiction under the Lindbergh kidnaping law, passed in 1932, which carried the death penalty when harm came to the victim. A Federal grand jury had been convened to hear the evidence on the charge. The male said that he was resigned to the death penalty and expressed a desire to plead guilty. He said that he hoped the Greenlease family recovered the missing $300,000 in ransom money out of the total of $600,000 which had been paid, after the boy had been killed, which had occurred shortly after the kidnaping and had been planned apparently prior to the kidnaping, as the lime which the FBI had found covering his body in the shallow grave to accelerate decomposition had been purchased prior to the kidnaping. The county prosecutor, who had already initiated state charges on the murder and kidnaping, had agreed to allow the Federal Government to proceed with the prosecution.

In New York, a male Chinese cook had admitted slaying a female prostitute in a fit of jealousy and then carving her body into pieces with a steak knife. Police were continuing to search the area of Columbia University for the missing head and three fingers of the slain woman, whose torso had been discovered early on Sunday. The Chinese cook had admitted killing the woman, who was also a dope addict. He said that she had told him Saturday that she planned to marry another man on Sunday, and so he killed her following a quarrel, after which he dismembered and disposed of the body after sleeping overnight in the room with it. The man said he had come to the U.S. ten years earlier from China and had met the woman in a restaurant 18 months earlier.

In Raleigh, the director of Prisons, William Bailey, said this date that he was looking for a new medical director for the prisons after discharging Dr. John Browning the previous day, in the wake of an investigation by the director of the death in the prison hospital on October 2 of a convict who had been discovered in an isolation cell in the early morning hours "bleeding badly" from a slash on the inside of his upper arm. The director said that he had given orders that professional nurses be sought so that a nurse would be on duty at all hours at the Central Prison hospital. Prisoner-nurses, rather than professional nurses, had treated the convict, stopping his bleeding and stitching the wound, and the doctor had been notified of the patient's condition, telling him that the bleeding had been stopped. The doctor had prescribed medication, including morphine, glucose and penicillin, but did not come to the hospital at that time. About three and a half hours after the prisoner had been discovered, his condition had worsened, at which point the doctor came to the hospital, but the man had died 30 minutes later. The doctor had originally been called about 30 minutes after the discovery of the bleeding prisoner, and he was fired, according to the Prisons director, because he had not followed through, knowing of the prisoner's condition. The doctor claimed that he was being made a scapegoat for the weakness of the prison system, that he had repeatedly requested that prison personnel not be used on the night hospital shift and that there was only one registered nurse on staff, a man. Mr. Bailey, however, said that no request had come from Dr. Browning for additional nurses and that the situation had not been brought to his attention until the beginning of the investigation of the prisoner's death, adding that even if a nurse had been on duty, the situation would not have been different in the instant case.

Also in Raleigh, Claude Doughton, a former sheriff of Wilkes County and son of former Congressman Robert Doughton, was scheduled to become a State beer inspector on November 1, according to a release by the chief of the State ABC Board's Malt Beverage Division. The man he was replacing had supported Hubert Olive for the gubernatorial nomination the previous year and said that he did not know whether that had anything to do with his dismissal. The new job would police beer outlets in Allegheny, Wilkes and Surry Counties, and paid $290 per month. No, it did not entail sampling the product for consistency and content.

At Fort Bragg, N.C., a black 1st lieutenant was charged this date with raping a white woman on the military reservation. The woman was married to a white soldier and claimed that the officer had attacked her in a car following a party the prior Sunday, after a white officer had passed out in the backseat of the car. It had not yet been determined whether the officer would be tried by military court-martial or in civilian court.

In Asheville, N.C., reporters and deskmen of the Asheville Times had spent the past several weeks researching comparative football scores, injuries and other factors before submitting their predictions in the traditional office pool, only to have the society editor walk off with the prize in two of the three pools, explaining that she got hunches.

We have a hunch that UNC will beat Miami this coming Saturday, but, based on prior experience, we had better keep our hunch largely to ourselves. Our hunch, privately speaking, has the result 42 to 34.

On the editorial page, "A Dose of Inflation May Be Prescribed" suggests that it should not come as a surprise if talk about the evils of inflation ceased and a mild "re-inflation" was encouraged by Administration fiscal policy. Business leaders and publications, such as Business Week and the New York Times financial page, were promoting the latter approach.

It suggests that such advice ought give pause to persons who were cashing in their property in anticipation of an increase in the value of the dollar, as the rule of thumb of investment still held true, maintaining a portion of one's assets in "safe" bonds and cash as a hedge against deflation while investing a comparable amount in stocks, real estate or other property, which would increase in value as the nation's economy expanded and prospered under mild inflation.

"No One Wants To Take on Mr. Jonas" indicates that Speaker of the House Joe Martin might have been wearing rose-colored glasses when he predicted that the Republicans would gain 20 to 25 new seats in the House in 1954, but had been only stating the obvious when he said that the Republicans expected to hold onto its newly won seat in the Tenth Congressional District of North Carolina, given the strength and popularity of Congressman Charles Jonas, elected to the seat in 1952. Thus far, no one had thrown their hat in the ring to contest Mr. Jonas the following year. It was understandable, as he had made a good record, voting his convictions, which appeared to be in line with the general prevailing sentiment in the district. He also had not neglected his political fences back home, but had kept them in good repair and strengthened them, while building new ones. The Democratic margin was always slender in midterm elections, even against weak Republican opponents. Additionally, many thoughtful Democrats in the district reasoned that with a Republican in the Presidency, the district's interests were better protected by a Republican in Congress.

It concludes that while Mr. Jonas was not unbeatable, no formidable candidate had yet appeared on the scene from the Democrats.

"Strange Bedfellows Dept." indicates that a press clipping had stated that State Representative John Umstead, brother of Governor William B. Umstead, had said that he would support Senator Alton Lennon against former Governor Kerr Scott in the event the latter decided to run for the Senate in 1954.

But John Umstead, unlike his brother, was a solid liberal, who had fought during the Scott Administration for mental institutions, roads, schools, public welfare and expanded public services of all kinds, as sought by the former Governor. Mr. Umstead had said that he did not believe Senator Lennon could defeat former Governor Scott but that he would support him, indicative of blood being thicker than water. It wonders, however, what Mr. Umstead would say if he had to take the stump against former Governor Scott in the spring primary.

A piece from Business Week, titled "Not by Talk Alone", indicates that talk about the economic outlook in the country was almost as popular as the latest Kinsey report on female sexuality, as there had been a spate of headlines and speeches denouncing depression-mongers and deploring talk about possibilities of a downturn. They believed that the only danger of a business recession was the fear of such a recession and that the less said about it, the better.

It suggests that whether a nation could talk itself into hard times was a moot point, that the record of the early 1930's had proved that the country could not talk itself into prosperity without a strong assist from economic factors, and so it doubts also that forecasts of economic gloom could produce a depression. Pessimists had been commenting on the economy all through the postwar era, with a batting average of practically zero, and so if they happened to be right on this occasion, it would be erroneous to credit them with a major influence on the economy.

It suggests that the present was a long expected adjustment from boom conditions and that there might be greater danger in playing the ostrich than in playing Cassandra. Unrestrained optimism could lead to a resistance against making changes and if businessmen hid themselves from reality, without taking corrective measures to adjust inventories, prices and profits, then any downturn was likely to become worse than it need be.

Drew Pearson indicates that the Air Force was so hard up for funding that it had been forced to cancel orders for 955 planes and 6,000 jet engines, but, nevertheless, was spending lavishly on free transportation and entertainment for some members of Congress who had helped to slash the Air Force budget. Two dozen Congressional junkets were presently underway, examples of which he provides. He comments that most of the overseas tours were strictly vacations taken at taxpayer expense, while some were legitimate, for instance, that of Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, who had just returned from a two-month, round-the-world mission for the Senate Appropriations Committee, going to out-of-the-way places to collect 21 books of painstaking notes on what he had found.

Coleman Andrews, head of the IRB, had recently admitted behind closed doors to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation that a lot of innocent people had been hit with tax fraud penalties. Congressman John Dingell of Michigan had asked him why they were bringing so many tax fraud cases which would not hold water, to which Mr. Andrews had responded that he was not happy about the situation, that the practice was to charge civil fraud in cases where evidence for a criminal indictment was lacking, and he was concerned that many citizens had been hit with a fraud penalty without being guilty of any fraud. Mr. Dingell commented that he was aware of a situation where the intervention of a Republican Senator had helped settle a tax matter on a basis of one-eleventh of the $110,000 alleged tax deficiency, but that the Government had received more than that to which it was entitled even in the $10,000 settlement. He also said that he was aware that tax agents had misused the net-worth technique in trying to trap tax delinquents, adding up duplicate bank figures to make it appear that the taxpayer had deposited twice as much money as he had actually put in the bank. Mr. Andrews agreed and said that they were sending out a manual to include in agent training, with an up-to-date section on how to use the net-worth theory.

Joseph Alsop, in Hong Kong, tells of the Communist Chinese People's Daily, which carried official imprimatur akin to Pravda in Russia, discussing the odd things which happened when a vast, ill-trained bureaucracy struggled to force the huge masses of China into the mold of a slave state, commenting on "the disorder in the party work in the field of statistical compilation in the rural districts" being unbearable, citing the instance of statistics on mules and bees requiring the number of males and females of each, and statistics on mosquitoes, flies and lice, requiring the weight and number of insects caught.

The honeymoon period, when the Communists had been welcomed as bringing new order to the land was over, with the time of preliminary military buildup and consolidation of the new Government's power taking effect, both efforts proceeding with success. But the Communist process of forcing the population into a particular mold was alienating the Chinese people, though the regime commanded loyalty from the favored groups, the party cadres, the youth, the police and the army. The security forces had successfully eliminated all active centers of disaffection, and no one therefore ought expect any spontaneous popular uprising to free China, presently or in the future. Now that the Chinese had been relieved of the strain of the Korean War, it would be replaced by perhaps an even more severe strain of intensive national development. China was going to have to pay for an immense program of industrialization from a reduced national income, trying to do what Russia had done with far greater resources. The Chinese leaders were set on developing China into a military-industrial power at any cost, but whether they could accomplish the job was in great question. Even receipt of large amounts of aid from Russia and even if the Chinese people were driven or starved to death, China might still lack that which was needed to develop from an ancient agrarian society into a modern military-industrial state.

Southeast Asia had everything which China needed, with Indo-China, Burma, Siam and the Malay peninsula having rice, rubber, minerals, timber and petroleum. With those resources under Chinese control, they would be able to accomplish without the severe strain the task which might otherwise be beyond their reach. Mr. Alsop neverthelss regards it as foolish at the present time to conclude that the Communist high command was already planning an onslaught against Southeast Asia or that it had disentangled its armies from Korea for that purpose, but it was wrong also to ignore the possibility. If present tendencies continued, however, Southeast Asia, soft and virtually undefended two years hence, would represent an appealing target, and during that interim period, the Communist Chinese could build up their military power, however primitive, but still greater than any other military power in the region, to the point that any American policy which failed to take those converging trends into account did "not deserve the name of national policy".

The Congressional Quarterly indicates that airport attendants in Saigon had observed more Congressmen in the previous four months than many Americans had seen in a lifetime, with the lawmakers apparently believing that Indo-China was the world's most critical spot. The influx to Saigon had begun April 13 when four members of the House Foreign Affairs Committees special study mission to Asia arrived to appraise the U.S. Mutual Security foreign aid program, followed in June by Senators Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Warren Magnuson of Washington, and then in August, by Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, a member of a House subcommittee on Army appropriations, who checked on the Mutual Security program, as well on how the Army spending in Asia was proceeding. Then on September 11, Senator William Knowland of California, the Majority Leader, also visited Saigon to look at Mutual Security, military, diplomatic and political matters. Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana then arrived ten days afterward to inspect Point Four projects and the State Department's information services. Indo-China was also on the prospective itinerary in October of a Special House Armed Services subcommittee and of Vice-President Nixon, and in November, a visit was scheduled by members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Since March, 1953, the Quarterly had listed 28 official overseas Congressional investigations, tours and inspections, which had either been completed, were in progress or were planned. Ten of those matters were connected with the military, 11 with foreign aid, three with immigration, and seven concerned with other matters, such as a Central and South American trip to gather information on the Export-Import Bank, a study of Puerto Rico's agriculture, a survey of European ship-building methods and a Virgin Islands trip to consider revision of the Organic Act. A 45,000-mile, 20-nation trip had just been completed by Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who inspected U.S. embassies and Point Four projects, reporting to Harold Stassen, the director of the Foreign Operations Administration on October 6.

Representative D. Bailey Merrill of Indiana had said on October 2 in a newsletter that if members of Congress were to make worldwide decisions, they needed worldwide knowledge, and that if some members embarrassed themselves, the solution was not to abolish the trips but rather to avoid sending a fool to Congress.

But how do people avoid that when there is no test to eliminate fools from exercising the franchise?—witness the cold fact that 74 million fools voted for the clown in the White House in 2020, though thankfully exceeded by 7.1 million votes received by the winner, the guy in the shades who drives a Stingray, which we would were a Thunderbird.

Robert C. Ruark, in his last of four columns written from Casablanca in French Morocco regarding the building of Air Force bases there, again comments on the base being built at Nouasseur, says that the person in charge had been a pledge to his fraternity at UNC in 1935, when Mr. Ruark had been a senior. He comments that the man had moved a lot of dirt since Mr. Ruark had whacked him with his pledge paddle 18 years earlier, having built the expressway between Baltimore and Washington and the one between Annapolis and Washington, as well as two of the three large airfields in French Morocco. The first thing he had done when starting the latter projects had been to build a jail for the drunks of the construction crew, and when asked by the contractor's boss on what authority he could build a jail to put U.S. citizens in without trial by a constituted authority, the man had shrugged, instructing the contractor to sit on their heads all night, but that the jail, constitutional or not, would remain.

The contractor's boss who had made the inquiry had been working on Wake Island when, in December, 1941, the Japanese arrived, captured him and placed him in one of their jails, from one of which, in Woosung, he had managed to escape. When caught, he was sentenced to be shot, but his sentence was later commuted to ten years. He had also been a consulting engineer for Chiang Kai-shek, and had supervised jobs all over the Orient.

Both men, Mr. Ruark comments, appeared to have been hamstrung in their honest performance of an important job for the previous two-plus years. There was nothing to be gained by several members of the armed services competing on jobs which could be done more swiftly and cheaply by civilians. To provide the military viewpoint, the Defense Department had to do the site designation and original planning for the facilities, as well as collaborate as necessary as the job progressed, but, he finds, a commercial deal between the Government and qualified contractors, without meddling by the Government, on a straight contractual basis, would get the bases built in Spain and the rebuilding job accomplished in Korea much faster and cheaper.

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