The Charlotte News
Monday, November 6, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that American troops in northwest Korea during the afternoon had recovered a half-mile of ground lost during the morning to a Communist attack north of Anju, and had fought hard for no gain in the northeast sector against enemy troops newly identified by headquarters as Chinese Communists. In the latter fighting, Marines just south of their target at Changjin reservoir beat back a fierce Chinese assault with hand-to-hand combat on Monday, after the Marines failed to gain ground for the fourth consecutive day. Elements of the U.S. Seventh Division in that sector dug in on the south banks of the Ungi River and sent out patrols in two-degree weather. South Korean troops at the farthest point in the northeast sector moved 18 miles north of Kilchu, 105 miles from Soviet Siberia, the only appreciable allied gain of the day. Five Russian-made Yak fighters strafed South Korean troops at Kunu in the northwest sector but without effect.
General MacArthur announced via written message to the U.N. Security Council that the reversal of events after allied victory appeared within grasp until the prior week, was the result of introduction of Chinese Communist troops to the fighting front. He said that the first Chinese troops, about 2,500, had crossed into Korea on October 16. On October 30, a task force of about 5,000 had entered and by November 4, elements of at least four Chinese divisions were present. Through the prior Saturday, 35 Communist Chinese had been taken prisoner.
After the message was read to the Council by chief U.S. delegate Warren Austin, the U.S. called for a special Security Council meeting on Wednesday to consider the Chinese intervention.
The U.S. was considering giving an ultimatum to the Chinese, to stop sending troops to aid the North Koreans or have destroyed the Suiho dam on the Manchurian side of the Yalu River, a major source of power for China.
In Kansas City, the President discussed by telephone with Secretary of State Acheson the worsening situation in Korea, with the President, according to an anonymous source, expressing concern over the movement of Communist Chinese troops into Korea from Manchuria. Officially, the President remained silent on the development.
Britain was considering canceling its diplomatic recognition of Communist China as a result of the Korean intervention. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was said to oppose such a change.
On Wall Street, the turn in fortune in the war caused stocks, amid a flurry of selling, to plunge between one dollar and four dollars per share. Steel, automobile, rubber, rail, radio and television manufacturers' stocks were the hardest hit.
Foreign policy dominated the last-minute campaign speeches before the midterm elections the following day. Conventional wisdom had it that the Democrats would retain control of both houses of Congress, but those predictions were tempered by the presence of an unknown factor among independent voters, given the adverse turn of events in Korea.
Senator Taft in a speech broadcast throughout Ohio said that the President had killed the bipartisan foreign policy shortly following the 1948 election.
King George VI was reported to have suffered an attack of lumbago at Buckingham Palace, was in pain but not in serious condition.
In Atlanta, six members of a family burned to death in a fire at their farmhouse. Three other persons present escaped with serious burns.
A 31-year old woman was revived after between six and eleven minutes of being clinically dead at the Columbia Hospital in Washington. She had shown symptoms of eclampsia, a condition suffered by women during pregnancy. She had failed to give birth normally in 36 hours and doctors had sought the delivery by cesarian section. After injection of a spinal anesthetic, her vital signs ceased, at which point artificial respiration and heart stimulation began. The doctors removed the child during a "postmortem" operation. At that point, the woman showed returning signs of life. Both patients were in good condition. The longest previous period of revival of a clinically dead patient of the doctor who headed the surgery had been four or five minutes, but, he said, she had died twelve hours later. He said that he did not believe anyone had been revived after ten minutes.
In Raleigh, a young taxi driver drew a pistol in Wake County Superior Court and fired three shots at his father, under indictment for assaulting his wife, in a courtroom with a hundred people present. No one was injured and the judge found the man guilty of contempt, fined him $100 and sentenced him to 30 days in jail.
Pardon us for asking, but will there be any more charges pending?
Also in Raleigh, the Assistant Paroles Commissioner, who was being pushed from her job, charged that the Paroles Commissioner was handling recent cases in a way inconsistent with office policies. The Commissioner replied that he set the office policy and thus saw no inconsistency.
According to News publisher
Thomas L. Robinson, actress Colleen Gray, costar with Bing Crosby in
"Riding High"
On the editorial page, "Tomorrow's Election" tells of there being a dearth of predictions on the outcome of the elections, given the disaster for the prognosticators in 1948. President Truman was predicting a Democratic landslide, but no one else was venturing bets. It would only be a landslide if the Democrats gained seats, an anomaly for the party in power in an off-year election.
In response to frequent calls from the audience of "give 'em hell, Harry", the President in St. Louis Saturday night had departed from his prepared text several times, lashing out at the Republicans in the manner he had employed with effect during his whistle-stop tours of the country in 1948. This time, he was being broadcast via television and radio nationally.
A few minutes afterward, Harold Stassen gave the Republican reply, albeit over only one network as the GOP could not afford to buy time on all four, as had the Democrats. He was not an effective spokesman for his party, stressing the Roosevelt-Truman record on foreign policy.
It was not clear whether the two had changed votes. It was generally believed that there was a "silent voter" among independents who might decide the key elections. The composition of the 82nd Congress would be decided the following day. If the Democrats won big, it would pave the way for the Fair Deal. If the Republicans gained control of Congress again, it might interrupt the foreign policy which appeared finally to be getting somewhere.
It concludes that it would probably be in the best interest of the country if the current balance remained until 1952.
"Product of the One-Party System" tells of voter interest to be minimal in the South in the midterm elections because of the one-party system. In most places, turnout would be in the low thousands. There was no point in voting when the Democrat was bound to win.
The St. Louis Post-Disptach had recently compiled a study of the 1946 election, finding that in three states, Montana, Delaware, and Illinois, voter turnout had been at least 60 percent of those of voting age, while seven states fell between 50 and 60 percent turnout, twelve at 45 to 50 percent, six at 40 to 45, nine at 30 to 40 percent, and finally the Southern states, all falling below 30 percent. It provides an index, with North Carolina topping the Southern states at 23 percent turnout among two million eligible voters. The remaining states were at 15 percent or less, down to three percent for South Carolina, or 26,000 out of a million eligible voters.
The national average was 38 percent turnout.
It wonders how long it would be until the South rid itself of the one-party system.
"An Investment in Charlotte" finds the plans for a bigger Christmas Festival in Charlotte than in prior years to be a good investment for the community. The plan was for the 1950 "Carrousel"—which it is careful to point out was a merry-go-round, not, as people initially thought, a time to carouse—to be the largest such event on the Atlantic seaboard. It would cost a lot of money and it urges the public to contribute to the campaign to raise it.
A piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, titled "Death of an Era", tells of the 30 burros of Children's Playland in Golden Gate Park being retired after 30 years of carrying children for a nickel a ride, replaced by "effete" Shetland ponies. It finds the latter to have been in use to pull little carts carrying well-bred children during the Victorian era of Lewis Carroll in England. While it says it had nothing against that era, Lewis Carroll, or Shetland ponies, in the Western U.S., the lore was steeped in a different legend, including Stetson hats, riding boots and spurs, and it thinks that the children would miss the burros.
You musta been down 'ere in Los
Angeles for awhile, buckaroo. Did you run into him, down there?
Drew Pearson again discusses the letter from Joe Hanley, Lt. Governor of New York, who had withdrawn from the gubernatorial race to make way for a draft-Dewey movement. The letter, which contained the pledge of Governor Dewey to take care of Mr. Hanley's debts and his financial condition into the future, was transmitted to Congressman Kingsland Macy, who made several copies, most of which he retained. He had refused to tear up the letter despite Governor Dewey persistently urging him to do so.
Stewart Alsop tells of everybody in the Midwest being against the Fair Deal, rendering it therefore a non-issue in the midterm elections. The only programs for which the Fair Deal stood in the Midwest were the Brannan farm plan and the Ewing health care plan, the latter sponsored by Social Security Administrator Oscar Ewing. Everything else was considered a leftover from the New Deal.
Mr. Ewing, from Indiana, had planned to campaign for Democrat Alexander Campbell against Senator Homer Capehart, until Mr. Campbell urged him not to do so as he believed it would hurt him.
In Illinois, Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas, in a tangle with former Congressman Everett Dirksen, made it clear in his speeches that he was against both the farm plan and the health care proposal.
In Iowa, Democrat Al Loveland, former Undersecretary of Agriculture, was running away from the Brannan plan, though it was the brainchild of his former boss.
The two plans would have been vote-getters in Depression-era America but not in prosperous postwar 1950.
One of the principal assets of the Democrats under DNC chairman William Boyle was its national organization, better than in the times of FDR. The other primary asset was the support of labor, which now coalesced, both as to CIO and AFL, around getting voters to the polls.
It was hard to escape the impression that the "anti-me-too" campaign of the Republicans was stimulating the fears which were the basic asset of the Democrats, fear of another depression and fear of a return to isolationism.
Robert C. Ruark, in Columbus, O., finds one institution of higher learning in Ohio which did not regard football as something of a religion, as at Ohio State. It was Capital University which had lost all of its five games thus far by lopsided scores, scoring just one touchdown and otherwise producing blanks. The coach did not have but 16 players on the squad for his previous road trip and so had no ability to play offensive and defensive units. The team had lost 75 to 0. Nevertheless, the coach claimed that the team enjoyed itself every day—except Saturdays. Even the freshman team had beaten the varsity 2 to 0 in a recent scrimmage. The coach was not even sure what formation his team ran.
There were no athletic scholarships at Capital and no other inducements to get athletes to attend. Half the team had never played high school football. The other half had never made the first team.
The coach received sympathetic phone calls from alumni, unusual for a state where coaches were fired for their teams merely being tied. The coach of Capital said his team had never even tied a game. He had recently predicted that his team could beat an overconfident Kenyon College. But they wound up losing 39 to 0.
His team was healthy and well-conditioned, as they had to be to play the entire 60 minutes, on both sides of the ball.
The coach said that the boys were convinced that they would beat somebody before the end of the season but he wondered wistfully who it might be.
A letter writer urges everyone to vote the next day, that every time someone did not, they made suckers of the founding fathers of Mecklenburg County and the other patriots of the colonies.
A letter writer finds something insidious occurring in Puerto Rico, that for some of the inhabitants Americanism was not good enough. The Nationalists, responsible for the attempted revolt and the assassination attempts on both President Truman and Governor Luis Munoz Marin, wanted independence. She finds the good citizens of Puerto Rico deploring such conduct. She favors firm treatment of the Nationalists to deter such uprisings elsewhere, as in Indo-China.
A letter writer says that a letter published from her on October 27 had not been intended for publication and appeared under a title, "We're a World of Screwballs", which she had not provided. She also says its meaning was changed by omissions, in its consequent printed form appearing as criticism of all psychologists. She says that she had the greatest respect for their work and had consulted with them many times, had studied psychology for eight years. She had written the printed letter as private correspondence to a nurse in Boston and sent another letter to The News at the same time, believes that she must have inadvertently switched the envelopes.
Well, you're some kind of an obsessive-compulsive nut, aren't ye?
The editors respond that any psychologist who would take offense at the writer's "sprightly satire" would have to be an "insufferable bore".
That was satire? You are obviously engaged in truth avoidance.
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