The Charlotte News

Friday, September 8, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. forces had made slight gains at opposite ends of the rain-soaked 120-mile defense arc in Korea against rebuilding North Korean forces, especially on the southern approaches to Pusan in the area of Masan, while little fighting actually took place this date. Battle Mountain, 12 miles northwest of Masan, was taken by the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, the ninth time it had changed hands during the war. The enemy drive on Taegu by 50,000 troops had largely ended, probably, according to MacArthur headquarters, because of exhausted supplies and manpower, after reaching a point within seven miles of the communications hub. Enemy pressure continued in the northern sector but had diminished. Allied forces continued to hold Yongchon, after it had changed hands twice on Friday, and advanced against slight resistance. An effort by American and South Korean troops to close a five-mile gap between Yongchon and Angang, eight miles west of Pohang, had not yet been successful in rugged terrain and rain, reducing air support.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas, in a radio broadcast, said that the President might have to limit the amount of steel available to the automobile industry during the war. The ability to produce steel had risen so rapidly, however, in the postwar years that there would be no necessity to shut down production, as during World War II in February, 1942. Part of the industry would, however, need to shift to production of war equipment.

In advance of the meeting of the foreign ministers of the U.S., Britain, and France the following week in New York, the U.S. was being urged by some of its top advisers overseas to press for quick formation of a joint army under a single supreme commander for defense of NATO. The advisers were also recommending that the U.S., as well as Britain and France, substantially increase their occupation forces in West Germany to meet the military build-up in East Germany.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts told the Senate that the country ought put 30 Army divisions into service in 1951 and send a third of them to Europe, that under current plans, the country would have only 18 divisions available by June 30. He complained that the President's plan to induct three million men into the Army, while good in the abstract, had not specified a date by which it was to be accomplished, that it was necessary by mid-1951. He said that 60 divisions might become necessary to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe, with the U.S. ultimately furnishing a third of those troops. He estimated that it would take 15 divisions to defeat the North Koreans, while five divisions had to be maintained on reserve in the U.S. He wanted the Congress to amend the Selective Service Act immediately to provide for the three million additional men.

The President signed the bill providing for $85 to $165 per month to dependents of enlisted servicemen.

Senator Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas demanded and was given the right by the Senate Interior Committee to call his own witnesses in support of his contention that Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman had Communist ties which impacted the Alaskan statehood debate. A man whom the Senator accused of being a Communist agent, on the payroll of the Polish Ambassador to the U.S. as a public relations man, while working for the Alaskan statehood committee, denied the claim, adding that Senator Schoeppel and 25 other Senators had signed a letter which he had drafted on behalf of another client, demanding that the U.S. back Indonesia's fight for independence from The Netherlands, suggesting it as showing that a claim of guilt by association could work both ways. Secretary Chapman denied that he had anything to do, in any event, with the retention of this publicity agent to lobby for Alaskan statehood.

Backers of the excess profits tax on corporations blocked temporarily the 4.5 billion dollar tax increase bill, prompting House Ways & Means Committee chairman Bob Doughton of North Carolina to warn that such tactics might kill the measure, already approved by both houses and being reconciled to eliminate differences.

The Marine Corps League meeting voted to recommend ouster of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, condemning his "shortsighted, inefficient and dictatorial policies" of economy in defense, resulting in an inadequate military even to defeat North Korea. The League, however, defeated a proposal to fire Secretary of State Acheson. It also voted that the President take action to oust every Communist and sympathizer from the Government, as exposed by Senator Joseph McCarthy earlier in the year, and that the Congress make the commandant of the Marine Corps part of the Joint Chiefs—the issue which had led the President to make his controversial remark on the Marine Corps not needing any separate representation on the Joint Chiefs beyond the Navy and that it had a propaganda arm equal to that of Stalin, for which the President had apologized in person to the League the previous day.

The Agriculture Department forecast the year's cotton crop at 9.8 million 500-pound bales, 426,000 less than the forecast a month earlier, compared to 16.1 million bales in 1949, and a ten-year average of 11.6 million bales.

In Udine, Italy, fourteen children were killed and 56 injured when a trailer truck taking the children, between ages six and twelve, on an outing, plunged down a mountainside road.

In Charlotte, the Chamber of Commerce directors unanimously approved the City's plan to construct a three-million dollar coliseum-auditorium complex. An election to approve a bond issue on the matter would take place October 14.

The hurricane off Bermuda was stalled 200 miles southwest of the British island, still packing 140 mph winds. Future movement of the storm was unpredictable. It had hit Antigua and Puerto Rico a week earlier, causing an estimated million dollars worth of damage.

On the editorial page, "Bold Attack on Parking" supports the recommendations made by the Mayor's special Parking Study Committee regarding the problems of inadequate downtown parking in Charlotte. It provides the recommendations and expresses trust that the City Council would adopt them and urge passage before the 1951 Legislature of any necessary enabling legislation to put them into action.

"'Nyet' for the 44th Time" tells of Soviet chief delegate to the U.N., Jakob Malik, having vetoed the U.S.-backed resolution before the Security Council, which would have condemned North Korea for not obeying the June 25 resolution ordering cessation of hostilities and banned member nations from aiding North Korea or engaging in actions which might spread the conflict. The vote for the resolution on the Council had been 9 to 1 with one abstention, that of Yugoslavia. Russia's resolution to force withdrawal of American forces from Korea for constituting "aggression", was defeated 8 to 1, with Yugoslavia and Egypt abstaining.

Next would come consideration of the vetoed resolution by the General Assembly, which could effectively override the veto when it met later in the month.

The action by Russia, the 44th time it had exercised its veto since September, 1945, suggested, it posits, the need for reorganization of the U.N. to eliminate the unilateral veto of the Big Five permanent members of the Security Council insofar as matters bearing on aggression. Such veto power as it existed, it opines, would inhibit the full development of the U.N. as a peacekeeping organization.

"Presidential P's and Q's" finds it no surprise that the President, as reported the previous day by Drew Pearson, needed his personal physician to engage in psychotherapy, given the daily pressures of the office. The President and his doctor would likely have to hash out his recent conflict with the Marines, winding up in an apology for his comparison of Marine publicity to the propaganda of Stalin. It predicts that given the result, the President would likely rely less in the future on off-the-cuff remarks, in this case, in writing, addressed to Congressman Gordon McDonough of California in response to his urging Marine representation on the Joint Chiefs apart from that by the Navy.

"The Gifted Child" tells of Northwestern University Professor Paul Twitty having stated that a great gap in education existed for developing curricula geared to challenge gifted pupils, though their contribution to society was the greatest resource education had to offer as a product. The deficiency left inchoate the full educational development of a lot of potential leaders in society.

It posits that one answer might be extracurricular study, independent of the classroom, in areas of particular interest to the student. School boards could make provision for an honors program—a good idea, if involving supervised independent development of a theme and a year-long subsequent study of it and offer of proof of the study's conclusions before designated faculty members with expertise in the field of study, in the form of a senior thesis for selected students who had demonstrated the ability to engage in such study independent of particular assignments, an heuristic endeavor in applied scholarship as opposed to the run of the mine, assigned regurgitative from within the narrows, not a review of the literature on a subject, though that inevitably would form the foundational element, but rather an original, scholarly argument derived from it. If developed on a broad enough scale nationally, such contributions could be used by colleges and universities in their selection process, as being far more predictive of productive and useful scholarship at the college level than such things as high school class rank, variable from school to school and system to system in terms of its reliability as a predictor of academic achievement in college, as opposed to mere academic competitivity.

It might also help to redefine the concept of "gifted", especially in the early development of childhood education, to embrace the intellectually creative, beyond the abilities to be recitative, important, if not imperative, though those latter abilities are to develop sound foundation for reasoned, not merely fanciful, creative scholarship.

The premise for such an endeavor would be that the reflective student, following eleven years within the institutional framework of education, has, if unwittingly, become an expert, perhaps, for being party to its continuity through time, more so than even his or her instructors or school administrators within the local bailiwick, in at least one thing, that being the educational framework of the time through which the pupil has migrated, though the theme by no means need be limited to the educational framework, itself, but would stand as a testament to the extent of its success in instilling in the better students the ability to think outside the lines, to advance the ball down the field in the broader societal context, thus providing as a collateral benefit to the perceptive instructors and administrators a form of feedback, echoing down the tracks to the beginnings of the curriculum at the first grade level, regarding strengths and weaknesses within the local and statewide educational system.

Drew Pearson tells of an attorney, who recalled being called before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee in 1940 and being questioned extensively by Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire regarding payoffs made by RCA to halt an antitrust action against RCA, NBC and affiliates in 1932, telling Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine that he and his friends were going to defeat Senator Tobey in the upcoming GOP primary. President Hoover and Attorney General William Mitchell had refused to favor RCA in 1932, whereupon Senator Dan Hastings of Delaware was paid a $7,500 fee, a third of which was passed to the U.S. District Court clerk in Wilmington to fix the antitrust case. The clerk then induced Federal Judge John Nields to postpone the case, following which the Justice Department let RCA off with a consent decree.

Now, a decade after Senator Tobey had uncovered that scheme of bribery, the attorney whom he had grilled in a hearing in 1940 was determined to make him pay politically.

In Utah, the National Association of Manufacturers was out to defeat Senator Elbert Thomas and might succeed. Senator Thomas, as chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, had drafted the repeal of Taft-Hartley and championed labor interests. Big business was now retaliating.

The efforts of similar forces had resulted in the defeats of Senator Claude Pepper in Florida and Senator Frank Graham in North Carolina, both of whom had fought for civil rights for minorities, which took courage in those Southern states.

He continues recounting the enemies aligned against Senator Tobey, as covered by Marquis Childs the previous day.

Marquis Childs finds that the President's faux pas regarding the Marine Corps having a propaganda arm equal to that of Stalin could not have come at a more inopportune time, as more Marines were being sent to Korea where they were badly needed.

The Marines, though central to victory in the Pacific in World War II, as recounted vividly by Robert Sherrod in Tarawa and On to Westward, nevertheless felt under-appreciated. Their chief resentment was directed at General MacArthur, who was said to have never acknowledged the Marines' contribution to the defense of Corregidor in 1942.

Several Presidents had clashed with the Marines, prime among them being Andrew Jackson in 1829 and Theodore Roosevelt around 1908, both of whom wanted the Marines subsumed under the Army. Both times, the Congress had prevented that attempt.

The President prided himself on knowledge of military history, even once taking the time, in written response to an inquiry by a reporter, to recount how Hannibal had difficulty utilizing elephants to carry supplies across the Alps. Mr. Childs concludes that he therefore should have known of the stubborn pride and persistent memory of the Marines, being twice that of any elephant.

Robert C. Ruark responds to a questionnaire developed by Samuel and Esther Kling, to determine how nice a person was, finding that he had flunked. He was not usually cheerful or courteous, was not generally sympathetic, did usually see the humorous side of things, but in a purely sardonic or cynical way, finds most people, including himself, not free from envy or jealousy, was only optimistic to the extent that things had to get better because they could get no worse, was not democratic in manner, did not refrain from burdening others with his troubles, laughed at the troubles of others, was not neat, was not tolerant, was only considerate to dogs and children, etc.

He concludes that the Klings had proved that he was a cad.

A letter writer finds the Republican Party in North Carolina having devoted too much attention to national issues and not enough to active contest of local races.

A letter writer from McBee, S.C., tells of inquiring of a judge as to the waiting period for marriage after acquiring a marriage license and finding it was only 24 hours. He counsels that couples ought get to know one another before getting married and then solemnize the occasion with a church wedding, surrounded by friends and family.

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