The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 14, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, with a few exceptions, a frozen silence settled over the battlefields in Korea this date as temperatures hovered at six degrees on the northwestern front and were even colder in the northeast, enhanced by 40 mph winds. Many American troops were still clothed in their summer uniforms as the Eighth Army rushed winter clothing to them. Airmen registered temperatures of 21 below zero as overcast skies prevented extensive air operations, though eleven towns behind Communist lines were strafed.

On the east coast, the South Koreans secured their positions on the Orangchon River, 90 miles south of the Siberian border, by resisting a tank-led North Korean attack, with the help of the U.S.S. Rochester and rocket fire from Marine planes. Forty miles to the west, South Korean troops plodded through snow six inches deep toward Hapsu, a road junction. (Heck, we had to plod through snow that deep one morning going up Hillsborough Street to campus junior year to reach the classroom to take our final exam on the New Deal and Fair Deal—and we got an A.)

Bypassed Communist battalions attacked South Korean troops in Pyongyang, but were driven out after an eight-hour battle, and the fight continued outside the town.

The only sizable action on the west coast was on the extreme right flank, where one regiment of the U.S. Second Division advanced against stubborn resistance.

Before the winter weather halted the fighting, the U.S. First Cavalry reported having captured on Monday the high ground on three sides of Yongbyon, after a two-day battle against strong resistance.

As in Yongbyon, the Communists were digging in on the high ground west of Pakchon on the road to Sinuiju, gateway for Communist troops entering from Manchuria.

At the U.N., the plea by Tibet for U.N. assistance in the invasion by the Chinese Communists appeared headed for the shelf, as no Security Council nation appeared willing to sponsor it. Tibet was not a member of the organization and so could not sponsor the appeal. Both India and Nationalist China, though opposed to the entry, viewed Tibet as part of China and so considered the matter one of civil war rather than invasion, and thus not subject to U.N. intervention. The U.S., though consulting informally on the situation, appeared too involved in the Chinese intervention in the Korean war to take time out for the incursion into Tibet.

A majority of the Council appeared ready, given the Communist Chinese response to the invitation to participate in the discussion of the Chinese intervention, to concede the American position that it should not wait for the appearance of the Chinese delegation before going ahead with a vote on the resolution regarding withdrawal of the Chinese with assurance of preservation of the Chinese frontier and their electrical grid in North Korea. The Chinese had responded that they would insist on discussing the matter on their terms, including their premise that America was the aggressor in Korea.

The President thanked former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray for his report on foreign economic aid, released the prior weekend. The President reluctantly accepted Mr. Gray's resignation from the assignment so that he could tend to his new duties as president of UNC.

The Army would call 40,000 draftees in January.

Secretary of Defense Marshall announced the appointment of Clayton Fritchey, editor of the New Orleans Item, as public information director for the Defense Department.

In Philadelphia, pickets in the Western Electric telephone equipment workers strike battled with police for 15 minutes in a vain effort to prevent telephone operators from reporting to work at an exchange. Some claimed injury. Seven persons were arrested. It was the first violence in the strike which began the prior Thursday.

The Communications Workers of America presented to the NLRB complaints of a discriminatory lockout by A.T.&T., regarding 15,000 operators and maintenance personnel who had pledged not to cross picket lines and were locked out when they sought to go to work after the lines were withdrawn in the union's "hit and run" picket plan, rotating pickets among the exchanges across the country as there were not enough equipment workers to man all of the picket lines at one time.

The hit and run pickets reached the North Carolina Southern Bell exchanges this date, affecting thus far only Winston-Salem and Charlotte, where male supervisors took over the work of operators who refused to cross the lines.

In New York, the sentence of gambler Frank Erickson was upheld on appeal after being entered pursuant to his plea of guilty to 59 counts of bookmaking and one count of conspiracy. He had been sentenced to two years in jail and a $30,000 fine, had faced a maximum consecutive sentence of 60 years.

Near Deale, in the vicinity of Annapolis, Md., three men parachuted to safety after an engine caught fire on their Navy attack bomber during a routine training flight from the Patuxent River Air Station.

In the vicinity of Grenoble, France, French mountain guides located the remains of a crashed Canadian airliner which hit an Alpine cliff head-on with 51 mostly Canadian passengers and seven crew members aboard. The passengers were returning from celebrating the Holy Year in Rome, where the previous day Pope Pius XII had blessed them. Photographs of the event were found scattered amid the wreckage at Mount L'Obiou and miles from the scene, carried by the wind. The wreckage was spotted through a break in the clouds from a 7,000-foot point called "The Cross of the Pigne". The site of the crash was about 85 miles from where an Indian Constellation had similarly crashed into the side of a mountain at Mount Blanc less than two weeks earlier, killing 43 East Indian seamen and a crew of five.

In Sacramento, the daughter of Governor Earl Warren was released from her quarantine imposed after her diagnosis of polio, paralyzing both legs. She would be able to receive visitors the next day.

In Moscow, the Russian Army newspaper Red Star said that the Soviet artillerymen were getting better all the time. They probably used to get mad at their school for the teachers who taught them having been not cool.

In Miami, three members of the "Bra Brigade" were convicted by a six-man jury of smuggling coins in their bras from Southern Bell counting rooms, one charged with grand theft and the other two as her aiders. The defense had presented no evidence. After the verdict, the defendants' attorneys said that the three would make full restitution. Nine other defendants faced charges of receiving stolen property as part of the ring and would be tried later.

Don't worry, girls; life goes on. You might be able to land a job with B.O.A.C.

The page recommends in the upper left box Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" on the comics page for the addition of a new character, starting her sojourn from Old Dogpatch, England, to New Dogpatch, U.S.A., in search of a husband and new money on Sadie Hawkins Day. We recommend the advice given in the "Orphan Annie" panes to avoid ouching after the hunt for foxes.

On the editorial page, "Blueprint for U.S. Foreign Policy" discusses the just released report of former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray which had stated that Western Europe, the most critical area in the struggle against Communist aggression, would need more Marshall Plan aid beyond the scheduled termination date in mid-1952, that Japan, well on the road to self-sufficiency, would need further strengthening as a bulwark to Communism, that aid to underdeveloped nations had to be expanded to increase the production of raw materials for rearmament of the free world and to improve the low standard of living in which Communism thrived, and that a thorough administrative reorganization of the U.S. agencies dealing with foreign economic problems had to be undertaken.

It finds the timing of the report opportune, as the Republicans in the new Congress had made it clear that they wanted re-evaluation of the U.S. foreign economic and military aid programs. The Gray report would answer many of the questions they would raise.

"Taft & Dewey on Isolationism" quotes Senator Taft from U.S. News & World Report that no one knew, including himself, what "isolationist" meant in this time. But it was an answer, it suggests, which would not satisfy those Americans concerned with the midterm election results threatening the foreign policy of building collective strength in the world among free nations. The Senator's denial of isolationist tendencies was belied by his voting record, including opposition to aid to Britain in advance of Pearl Harbor, opposition to most of the economic and military aid postwar to Western Europe, and more recently questioning whether Europe was the first line of defense and whether it could be defended at all.

It finds that while it was good to scrutinize Truman Administration policies to assure that they were the best answers to the problems confronting world peace, no one could doubt the wisdom of the basic premise of collective security.

It hopes that Senator Taft would come to the conclusion reached by Governor Dewey, that it was incumbent upon those in positions of responsibility to fight against the retreat of the GOP toward isolationism.

"Formal Bus Action Inadvisable" supports a City Councilman who wanted the Duke Power Co., operator of the Charlotte buses, to sit down with the City transportation engineer, Herman Hoose, to discuss his plan for expanded bus service, truncating certain routes while expanding others, to enable a profit for the company. A public hearing had been held on the plan the previous week and now it was time for discussion with Duke.

It counsels, however, waiting to pass on the plan until compromises might be effected after thorough discussion with Duke.

A piece from the Chicago Daily News, titled "Opposes Trend to Grunt Age", tells of a Boston University professor having warned newspapers against sesquipedalianism, causing people to turn to radio or television for news. He had cited an experiment in which he asked students to choose synonyms for 25 words taken from newspapers, including "shibboleth", "purlieu", "peripheral", and "baksheesh", resulting in the males making an average of 11.5 mistakes.

It says that it was "as fully antagonistic to obfuscous polysyllabicity as the Boston antilapsarian", but maintains that there were instances when the uncommon word conveyed exactly the desired nuance of meaning needed for a story. Unless everyone added to their vocabularies on occasion, the average person's reservoir of words might degenerate to a "series of primitive grunts with which not even a radio announcer could make himself understood."

Watch Fox News and its functional equivalents for awhile today and one readily perceives the problems in our general societal deterioration to the primitive hunter-gatherer instincts of violence and predation, that is to say crazy idiots walking into public places to announce their support of the gun lobby by shooting people at random. They also announce in the process from whence they derive their information about daily events. It is not the newspapers.

Mary Hornaday, in the Christian Science Monitor, discusses the U.N. resolution introduced by Poland for land reform being supported by the U.S., based on its support of private farm ownership. Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, a member of the U.S. delegation, had explained the position from his perspective as a son of a farmer and a small farm owner.

In 1935, 42 percent of the nation's farmers were tenants, but in 1950, with the intervening aid of the Federal Government in the form of loans enabled by the Bankhead-Jones Act of 1937, 26 percent were tenants. Such loans went only to farmers who could not qualify for conventional bank loans. Over a third of the borrowers had already repaid their 40-year loans, in 13 years or less, with Government losses at only a tenth of one percent. The program had been especially prevalent in the Southeast and the Southwest. It had helped to improve race relations in the Deep South by raising the standard of living and education for black and white farmers alike.

The success of the program had come from efficient administration and selective lending, only extending the loans to farmers who engaged in a type and manner of farming likely to lead to profit and accepting of Government guidance in farm practices.

Senator Sparkman had explained how electrification of farms had increased from 10 to 86 percent in the U.S. and that the system was a farmer-owned cooperative through which the farmers were sharing more of their profits.

When the U.N. delegates traveled through the rural South, they would better understand what was occurring on the small farms dotting the countryside. By supporting the Polish agrarian land reform, Senator Sparkman hoped to encourage the development of the American program in other parts of the world.

A piece from the Rock Hill Herald, titled "What To Do With Your Leaves?" explains that many people were saving their leaves for profit, to form mulch and a fertilizer for the garden. Some accelerated the rotting process of the leaves with water and chemicals. It suggests that enterprising youngsters might go around collecting leaves, compost them, and then later sell them.

Drew Pearson tells of this column being a "think-piece", the type for which he was not paid to write normally. He first reviews the situation in Italy, where big Communist placards in English read, "Get the hell out and take your money with you," with such resentment also being prevalent among non-Communist Italians for the anti-immigration policy of the McCarran anti-subversive act. He then considers France, where the third largest Communist Party in the world existed, though weakened by the Marshall Plan, but remaining strong enough to stymie rearmament, possessing the remnants of the World War II underground at the ready in case of open revolt.

Elsewhere in Europe, conditions were similar. In Norway, for instance, where the people were working hard to help themselves, the Minister of Defense said privately that Norway did not want to increase its defense budget from its present four to five percent to 22 percent as desired by the U.S., as it would undo all of the good effects of the Marshall Plan and reduce the Norwegian standard of living. Thus, it might mean Norway's withdrawal from NATO if the U.S. continued to insist on greater defense spending.

Belgium, which did not fight in the war and therefore had no reconstruction problem, now was doing well, a bad sign for the future, as it told other nations that in the event of war, they should lay down arms and submit to foreign occupation.

Mr. Pearson suggests that many readers of the column might think that he had turned to isolationism but, he says, presenting these facts as they were would enable doing something about them. The next day, he says, he would provide ideas for changing U.S. strategy and getting better results. There had to be an appeal to hearts and minds, as well as stomachs, in Europe. Europeans had to be convinced that they were not being prepared to become a battleground in a future war between the U.S. and Russia.

Joseph and Stewart Alsop tell of one important official who had taken part in talks regarding Korea summing the issue regarding Chinese intervention: whether the Chinese Communists, with support from the Kremlin, were ready for all-out war in Korea being the $32 question, awaiting the $64 question in about a week to ten days. If the Chinese only wanted to protect their power grid in North Korea, then they had made it more likely that it would be destroyed by engaging in war. To encourage peace, the U.N. assured the Chinese that the U.N. troops had no such intention and that they would respect the inviolability of the Chinese frontiers, that a united, democratic Korea was intended, better for both Korea and China.

But as the Chinese provided reinforcements across the Yalu River to its existing troops while an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 troops were being mobilized just across the Manchurian border, and Soviet-made jets attacked American planes at the border, it appeared the objectives of the Chinese and the Soviets were not so limited. It was believed by officials in Washington that the withdrawal was for purposes of regrouping for an assault against the middle of the U.N. defense line, signal of intention to engage in a full war.

If that were to happen, it was believed that the response would be to form a firm defensive line north of Pyongyang to gain time to postpone an unlimited American commitment. But General MacArthur would not likely favor such a passive course, would rather engage in a full general offensive to push the Chinese out of Korea, entailing the necessity not only to bomb supply lines within Manchuria but also within the rest of China, leading to full-scale war with China.

The U.S. could not afford to accept permanently such a war with China's unlimited manpower. It would be to the advantage of the Soviets to tie down U.S. forces in Korea, enabling strike elsewhere.

Marquis Childs tells of three factions emerging in the Republican Party for contesting for the 1952 presidential nomination following the midterm elections. On the one hand, Senator Taft had become the leading contender for the nomination, while General Eisenhower, backed by Governor Dewey, represented another faction vying for the nomination. The latter were internationalists, a camp which included Senators George Aiken and Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Irving Ives of New York, Edward Thye of Minnesota, and Senator-elect James Duff of Pennsylvania. It also included liberals as Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, and Governor Earl Warren.

Senator Taft's wing, given to isolationism, was represented by Senators Eugene Millikin of Colorado, Owen Brewster of Maine, Hugh Butler and Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, James Kem of Missouri, and Arthur Watkins of Utah.

The third faction of the party were the McCarthyites, extremists who wanted not merely isolation but a stockade state. This faction included, in addition to Senator McCarthy, himself, Senators Homer Capehart and William Jenner of Indiana, Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas, and George Malone of Nevada, plus several new recruits. The Taft and McCarthy factions tended to blur together. Senator Taft would seek to preserve his own moderation on both foreign and domestic policy while wooing the McCarthy faction, necessary for obtaining the nomination. But to accept that latter support would be, opines Mr. Childs, to risk ultimate defeat. For, notwithstanding the midterm results in isolated races where McCarthyism was exploited with success, it was hard to imagine that the country as a whole was willing to accept such extremism.

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