The Charlotte News
Saturday, September 30, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur would demand the unconditional surrender of North Korea the following day, with a broadcast to that effect in Korean to take place at noon—10:00 p.m. Saturday, EST—, to be repeated hourly. Four heavily-armed South Korean divisions were deployed along the 38th parallel ready to strike across the border. The precise terms of surrender were not disclosed, but it was assumed that the threat of immediate action otherwise by these divisions would be included.
In Pusan, the South Korean assembly urged the U.N. forces to cross the parallel and eliminate all obstacles to unification of the country under a free and independent government.
The South Korean troops at the border were reported to be anxious to cross, awaiting word from the U.N. Political Committee considering the eight-nation proposal, opposed by India and by Russia and its satellites. Russia had attempted to engage in a filibuster of the proposal this date but it was quickly shut down through an adjournment. By a vote of 48 to 0, the Assembly gave the Korean question priority on the agenda.
Marine fliers delivered their heaviest strike of the war, at Uijongbu, 12 miles north of Seoul and a gathering point for fleeing North Korean troops. The missions, which dropped 1,000-lb. "Tiny Tim" bombs, left the town a flaming rubble. American Marine armored columns then pushed toward the town, which would lead to Chorwon, across the border, 48 miles north of Seoul. In that area, according to a South Korean Army spokesman, there were gathered about 100,000 North Koreans.
In Cologne, Germany, police officials had obtained plans for 10,000 young Communists to crash through police barriers into the city the following day. Similar outbreaks were expected in a dozen West German cities throughout the Ruhr industrial area, as the protests would decry rearming of Western Europe. An estimated 30,000 persons had come from East Germany, posing as visitors, to participate in the protests and storm the barricades.
Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup, speaking at Middlebury College in Vermont, described the Soviet leadership in Moscow as "a group of cruel and selfish men intent only upon the perpetuation of their own power." He described Soviet officials as a favored elite who lived in comfort or luxury but also always in fear.
The White House announced a settlement with the railroads under which yardmasters would receive a wage hike of five cents per hour and an automatic adjustment for cost of living increases.
Cyrus Ching, the Government's head mediator in labor disputes, was reportedly tapped by the President to administer any wage controls which might be implemented during the war. He was said to be considering the offer.
Officials of the FCC and other agencies believed that a court test was going to be waged before color television could become a commercial reality. It had been controversial for more than a year, as some in the industry believed color was not ready for general use, though the color system of CBS had been designated by the FCC's recent tentative ruling as the official system. The television manufacturers were upset about the FCC's call for quick change of set designs so that all future sets could receive both color and black and white broadcasts. The Commission had warned that if the manufacturers failed to undertake such action, it would go ahead and permanently designate the CBS system as the official system. RCA, whose color system had been rejected by the FCC, claimed that the Commission's methods were coercive. Admiral also complained of pressure tactics.
It's time
Emery Wister of The News tells of Broadway columnist Earl Wilson coming to town to cut a ribbon to open the county fair and to look at local girls to see who would be crowned Queen of the Fair, in between stops at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg to write of the Marines and soldiers. Recently, he had dropped in at Toots Shor's in New York and spotted Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner at a table, reported that Mr. Sinatra appeared crazy about her.
From Columbus, O., fifth grade school children were alerted the world over by My Weekly Reader, published in the city, that flying saucers existed. Tom Trott, a fictitious character, provided an article on the subject, in which he said that he had seen the saucers at an Atlantic Coast airport, that they belonged to the Air Force. The staff of the Reader said that they allowed the publication of the article because they were convinced that flying saucers were experimental aircraft of the Air Force, and felt it was necessary to calm hysteria on the subject among children, of which they had received widespread reports.
They're
here and they're in color
On the editorial page,
"Beyond
the Freedom Credo" tells of the "Crusade for Freedom"
having as its goals to mobilize civilians in the country in a
grassroots movement for world freedom and to finance the operation of
a new voice, to be called Radio Free Europe
It suggests that the smear tactics evident in the country in recent months had served to debase the dignity of the individual, and wonders whether the second phrase referred to freedom without barriers imposed by race, religion or creed.
The third part of the credo was a pledge to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appeared. It wonders whether it included, beyond armed aggression, attacks on civil liberties and the tyranny of conformity which some groups demanded from Americans.
It urges that everyone signing this Freedom Scroll consider the implications of the vow and realize that those pledges had not yet been fully realized in America.
Well, now, wait just a minute. We must stand and place our right hands over our hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school and sing the National Anthem before every organized sporting event. That's in the Constitution. Anyone who does not is, by definition, spitting on the national heritage and should be jailed forthwith and refused all employment. That's the American Way. Also, if you dare utter one word that is contrary to the prevailing opinion and accepted parlance of the American people, as determined by all the tv and radio programming, you should forfeit henceforth all citizenship and employment and be sent to Gitmo.
"The Army's Intelligence Test" tells of the director of North Carolina's Selective Service finding it disgraceful that one in three men failed the Army's intelligence test. But Tom Fesperman, in a series of three articles during the week, had suggested that the Army was now only inducting top level men to train the large number of draftees to be expected in the coming six months or so. If that was the case, it posits, then the North Carolina men were not so dumb after all.
It needed first to be determined what questions were being asked by the Army and what was a passing grade. But the Army was refusing to answer either query.
"Yesterday, Ah Yesterday" finds that with the Notre Dame-Carolina and Furman-Davidson football games on tv during the afternoon, there was a feeling of nostalgia in the air. A physician known to the editors claimed that the feeling could be triggered by a vague earache or sore feet, in any event, something physical. Another acquaintance contended that atmospheric conditions caused the drift into the past, while another claimed that sounds produced the tendency to recollection.
Whatever the cause, the editors were suffering from it this date, precipitated, they think, by editorials of late on nostalgia, including their own, as when a few weeks earlier they had commented on the absence of June bugs during the summer. Soon afterward, the Greensboro Daily News had made the same observation. Then the Christian Science Monitor waxed regretful that there were no more top spinners in the neighborhood. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch lamented the passing of Messrs. Murrie and Truesdell, who, respectively, had invented the chocolate bar and gumball.
This day's nostalgia, it continues, related to hitching a ride on the back of icewagons and swiping a chunk of ice to lick during the summer mornings, and other such things. But with nostalgia also came the sadness of realization that in those earlier times, one could run around the field three or four times without becoming out of breath.
That's not part of nostalgia. That's failing to keep pace with the times through regular exercise.
"And if you pursue it far enough, you get around to thinking about how yesterday—even the near yesterday—was a different age, sans atoms, ulcers, jet planes and jailed Congressmen.
"Or was it, after all?"
A piece from the New York Times, titled "First Silence", tells of the nights becoming silent for the first time since the spring, with the katydids and crickets not making a sound following the first chill. But it was a temporary silence, as warm days and temperate nights would follow the chill, and deep frost remained weeks away. The night singers would resurface until the leaves fell and the hard frosts struck, at which time the "Deep Silence" would come to stay.
Drew Pearson tells of Army-Navy unification working pretty well of late at the Pentagon, while behind the scenes the old feud between the Navy and Air Force had been been revived in Korea, with explosive notes having been exchanged between the Admirals and Generals. Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of Naval operations, had stepped in, providing stern orders to Rear Admiral Ed Ewen in Korea to stop criticizing the Air Force.
Navy pilots had become upset that their carrier-based planes were not getting a fair shot at Korean targets, blaming the Air Force which had command of the air war. The problem was that the floating base moved up and down the Korean coast and it was thus hard to fit the carrier planes into bombing patterns, plus the skies were so overcrowded with planes that the Air Force and Navy pilots had to wait in line for assignments.
The Navy leaked a story that the Marines had moved faster, with fewer casualties than the Army, at Chinju because the Marines had better air cover. But the truth was the opposite, as the Army units, fighting side by side with the Marines, suffered fewer casualties and had to wait for the Marines to catch up. Other news stories criticized the Air Force F-80 jet while few spoke of the Navy Panther jet, nearly identical to the F-80.
The anti-Air Force stories irritated Air Force Lt. General George Stratemeyer, who protested to General MacArthur. He also sent a sharp note to Rear Admiral Ewen whose carrier pilots had been spreading most of the stories in the press. Admiral Ewen had responded that he could not control the press or the complaints of his men. General Stratemeyer sent another note to ground commander, Lt. General Walton Walker, eliciting his comments, and received the response that air and ground forces had been better coordinated than during World War II, though finding it might have been more effective, if possibly not practical, to have specific planes assigned to each ground division.
Air Force chief of staff General Hoyt Vandenberg consulted with Admiral Sherman about the feuding and they agreed to put a halt to it.
A meeting of radio network representatives and the Rural Electrification Administration was upset when an REA representative suggested that to publicize rural telephone service, they would tap the telephone conversation between the President and a Virginia farmer and record it for radio broadcast. Some asked whether that job should not be assigned to Senator Owen Brewster, who had been responsible for the taps of Howard Hughes and others in 1947.
Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina recently had called Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge, his cousin, to invite him to the Southern Conference of Governors at Fort Sumter. Governor Thurmond asked him how things were, to which Governor Talmadge responded, "Fine, but the niggers are trying to take over our schools down here and most of the white people are oiling up their rifles and shotguns." Governor Thurmond said that he didn't think the blacks would win their lawsuit to integrate the public schools of Atlanta. Governor Talmadge said that he was prepared to spend ten million dollars to fight it.
Joseph Alsop, in a delayed report, tells of the September 15 landing at Inchon with the Marines of 1st Platoon, Baker Company. As they made their way from the destroyer via Higgins boats to the beach, there was talk among the non-commissioned officers of their experience in the landings at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima. But when they got to the beach, they found no greeting party, all of the trenches and gun emplacements having been abandoned. They arrived at dusk and spent the night lost, trying to locate the other Marines, from whom they had become separated.
They spent the night in a rocky trench dug by the enemy and in the morning reconnoitered, flushing out ten more hidden, starving North Koreans. They then prepared to join the big attack inland.
It had been quite unlike Tarawa where the landing amid the coral reefs had resulted in the men being cut to pieces by awaiting enemy fire. It was confused, as war often became. But his hosts for the night seemed fresher and more enthusiastic than ever as they gathered their gear for the larger battle.
Robert C. Ruark tells of going to Toledo to view the celebration of the opening of the New York Central railroad depot, erected at a cost of five million dollars. The city had produced a week-long event, with Admiral Nimitz, press agents and newspapermen aplenty, plus Hollywood personalities. He had never seen so much fanfare for the opening of a railroad depot, but thinks it somehow comforting in an atomic age to see the permanence of the railroad still doing business, in disregard of surrounding hysteria.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Senator Frank Graham saying his farewells to fellow Senators. After Thanksgiving, when the Senate reconvened, Willis Smith would be occupying his seat. Congress, he posits, had lost a man of "great good will, patience and clarity." He had been persuasive in a quiet way and in his 18 months as Senator had pushed out of committee two pieces of important legislation which had been stuck, the electoral college reform bill, sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and the displaced persons bill.
Mr. Schlesinger recommends reading a portion of the Congressional Record of September 22, in which Senator Graham had set forth his opposition during the prior twenty years to Fascism, Communism, imperialism and other forms of special privilege and tyranny. He had expressed the hope that smear tactics would not cause persons to refuse to take part in "the struggles and hopes of the people for a fairer world". He told of joining committees to help defeat Hitler, Tojo, and then Stalin, when each in succession had become the aggressor.
He had also had printed in the Record the three-part series recently appearing in The News by John P. McKnight, regarding the Durham test case on free speech, after the Durham Recorder had ordered the arrest of anyone found distributing the petition for the Soviet-backed Stockholm peace treaty.
The Senator was misty-eyed after saying goodbye, following the attempted filibuster of the veto override vote on the anti-subversion bill. One of his final farewells was to fellow members of the bipartisan Bible breakfast group, which met every Wednesday morning.
Willis Smith never did get around to making a courtesy call on Senator Graham during his visits with Senator Hoey to learn the Senate ropes.
Senator Graham recommended Jonathan Daniels's recent book on the President, The Man of Independence, after reading the first two chapters.
In Senator Graham's last Senate speech, which he never actually delivered but which was inserted in the Record, he urged statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. Senator Clyde Hoey opposed statehood for both territories based on their sparse population, lack of contiguity to the 48 states, and remoteness. Most Southern Senators viewed it as a move to get four additional Senate votes for civil rights.
Senator Clyde Hoey said that the investigation by his committee into the employment of homosexuals in the Federal Government showed the need for stiffer laws to deal with the fact, one being a central listing of such undesirables so that one person fired by one department would not be hired by another.
Congress had now recessed for the fall campaigns and the legislative chambers were undergoing extensive renovations.
Framed Edition
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