The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 25, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that South Korean troops advanced to within 32 miles of the Manchurian border as enemy troops fled in oxcarts and on foot before five allied divisions. No resistance was encountered other than small arms fire in a few spots. Nor was there any evidence of a big enemy convoy moving southward.

Informed sources said that U.S. and British troops would stop at least 20 miles short of the Manchurian border while South Korean troops would proceed to the border.

The Air Force confirmed that anti-aircraft fire from the other side of the Manchurian border had hit an American F-51 fighter plane on Tuesday flying three minutes south of the border and forced it to land at sea. Two Marine pilots had been fired on similarly Monday but had not been hit.

Radio Peiping broadcast a report that Chinese Communist troops were moving on Tibet, to free it from "imperialist oppression". The Indian Foreign Ministry said that it had received reports of troop movements along the border between China and Tibet but no sign of an incursion. Neither Washington nor Hong Kong had any word on the matter.

Secretary of State Acheson rejected a proposal by the Soviet bloc for a four-power effort to establish a single German government, a proposal developed in Prague the prior weekend by the Soviet bloc nations. Secretary Acheson blamed the problems of Germany on Russia's post-war actions and said that Russia could make the Potsdam agreement of July, 1945 applicable to all of Germany merely by adopting it for the Soviet sector.

At the U.N., Australian Foreign Minister Percy Spencer told the Political Committee that because international aggression was the most heinous crime against humanity, use of the atomic bomb to repel it was justified. He made the comment in speaking against the Soviet peace plan based on the Stockholm peace treaty, calling for reduction of armed forces by one-third and for the U.N. to declare any state which initiated use of the atomic bomb a war criminal.

The President attended a meeting of the National Guard Association and urged its support for universal military training to eradicate the problem of men not being physically fit to serve in the military.

Better physical education in the schools is all you really need. Climb that rope, boy, and touch the top of the gym.

Congressman Hamilton Jones of Charlotte called for immediate release of restrictions on consumer installment buying, claiming that the Federal Reserve Board had exceeded its legal authority in doing so absent an emergency.

Governor Kerr Scott, speaking in Charlotte before the Board of the State Department of Conservation and Development, said that the power and telephone monopolies had failed to recognize their responsibilities to the public. He cited unfulfilled demand for telephone service in rural areas and the undeveloped potential for power resulting in shortage of electricity. Two speakers from the Federal Government also said that there was a shortage of power.

Duke Power and Carolina Power & Light responded to the criticism by saying that there was no shortage of electric power in the state or refusal of service to any industry. Their representatives contended that the two Federal Government representatives relied on erroneous statements and half-truths.

The Governor said that he was fed up with public office, would not be a candidate for the Senate or any other office after 1953.

He would, however, run successfully against interim Senator Alton Lennon in 1954 and serve in the Senate until his death in 1958. Senator Lennon would be appointed by Governor William B. Umstead in 1953 upon the death of Senator Willis Smith, who had just defeated interim Senator Frank Graham in the June runoff primary.

Former Charlotte Mayor Herbert Baxter was selected as commander of the North Carolina Civil Air Patrol Wing, headquartered at Morris Field in Charlotte. Mr. Baxter was a veteran of World War I and would hold the rank of colonel.

On the editorial page, "Roads Are Streets and Vice Versa" tells of the State Municipal Roads Commission having recommended to Governor Scott that the State take over construction and maintenance of all city streets, as the State owed the same responsibility to urban areas as to rural. The Commission had conducted a thorough analysis of the problem before reaching its reasonable conclusions and it hopes that the 1951 General Assembly would approve the recommended action.

"Accentuating the Alternative" finds the President's speech the preceding day to the U.N. to have been noteworthy for stressing the alternative to armaments, improving the lot of mankind, to provide true meaning to the Biblical phrase, that "swords shall be beaten into plowshares and that nations shall not learn war anymore." He believed that such peace could be accomplished though the U.N. He said that the country did not wish to arm itself but given that Russia was arming, it had no choice. He did not imply confidence that Russia would accept his challenge for a "fool-proof" peace determined by a means of checking compliance with disarmament, and there was no evidence to support such confidence.

It concludes that the rest of the world could heed the President's words, even if Russia would not.

"How Many People Per Car?" tells of an automobile accident the prior weekend in the county, in which one car had carried eleven persons and failed to heed a stop sign at Little Rock and Tuckaseegee Roads, crashing into another vehicle. The driver was charged with running the stop sign and assault with a deadly weapon. It posits that it was callous and reckless for a driver to permit so many persons to be carried in his car.

The prosecutor will have his work cut out for him, as assault requires an intentional act, that is an act which the actor knows is substantially certain to produce, in the case of assault, the attempted offensive touching of the person. But, we suppose, it does not hurt to scare the little buggers, to convince them not to sit on each other's laps next time. Maybe they were Klansmen.

"A Champ in His Field" tells of parodies having been made of Al Jolson's black-face routine on his knees singing "Mammy", but the performance was nevertheless recognized as a trademark of show business, as Harry Lauder's crooked blackthorn cane, Ted Lewis's battered top hat, Bobby Clark's glasses or Groucho Marx's greasepaint mustache. (See, el stupido? the paragraph, indeed the whole piece, does not once use "iconic" or the equally hackneyed "back in the day", which we actually saw applied recently, without a hint of irony, to a time 6,000 years ago.)

Regardless of how he was most remembered, as an entertainer of the troops or as a singer, or as someone portrayed in movies by Larry Parks, his voice would live on in memory.

During the Thirties, it muses, it had appeared that his career was over, that no one would care when he died. Yet, he came back after his popularity had waned and made a new generation of friends.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "What's a Penny Worth?" tells of the U.S. Mint working overtime to produce enough pennies to meet demand, even though the lowly coin bought little on its own. It was a necessary complement, however, to a 12-cent or 18-cent bus fare.

Some merchandisers had suggested a coin of 7.5 cents, in between a dime and a nickel, perhaps, it suggests, to be called a "dickel"—maybe to be coined with the visage of Mr. Nixon embossed on its face and a pair of eaten corn cobs on the obverse.

That would lead to awkward situations, as persons asking the attendant at the candy counter whether they could buy three Kisses for a dickel, and, inevitably, would cause people to dicker to save their dickels.

Junius S. Rose, superintendent of public schools in Greenville, N.C., provides three suggestions for saving time in the state's educational program, to make way for universal military training and the two years of mandated training it proposed. One was to allow children to enter school when five years old if closer to their sixth birthday than their fifth. The second was to allow finishing primary and secondary schooling in 11 years rather than 12, as previously was the case in the state. Under such a plan, the junior high grades would be compressed into two years. The third suggestion was to reduce the college undergraduate curriculum to three years, as some universities and colleges already were offering as an option.

That would be just great. Supplant two years of education with military training. That way, we can keep all the Tourists out.

Drew Pearson, on the West Coast, praises the late Henry Stimson as the man who maintained hope for peace after others had given up. He considered him a great man while he covered his career as Secretary of State under President Hoover, albeit sometimes heckling him with embarrassing questions as a reporter.

Secretary Stimson had undertaken a four-year struggle to rectify the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and try to prevent a second world war. He sought to make a reality of the idealistic Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war in 1928, that which his predecessor, Frank Kellogg, had brought into existence. But he faced an uphill battle against his fellow Republicans and their isolationist tendencies. He foresaw that Japan's intrusion into Manchuria in 1931 was a prelude to an attempted grab of all of Asia. He tried to enforce the Nine-Power Pact guaranteeing the sovereignty of China and attempted, without success, to impress upon the heads of Europe the gravity of the situation in Manchuria. He had gone to London to try to obtain a consultative pact, pledging the U.S. to consult in case of threatened war, with no obligation to use troops or diplomatic pressure to resolve the threat. But President Hoover had rejected the proposal.

Though failing in his pursuits earlier, he saw the U.N. put into action his dream, as in the multilateral consultation leading to the resolution immediately after the invasion by North Korea of South Korea.

He had quietly passed away serene in the knowledge that he had pioneered in bringing peace to the world.

Stewart Alsop tells of mass starvation set to hit Yugoslavia by February without large-scale aid. If that were to take place, then the Tito regime would succumb to Soviet pressure to conform. Secretary of State Acheson had thus said that some immediate aid had to be gotten to Yugoslavia.

The crisis had developed out of the worst drought in the country's history, resulting in the peasants slaughtering their cattle. An airtight blockade on trade with Eastern Europe imposed by the Kremlin had also impacted the situation adversely. Political and military pressures from Russia and its satellites had complicated matters further, as Tito's armaments had dwindled to the point that it was believed the Belgrade plains could be overrun by the satellites.

He had recently said, however, that he had thirty-two divisions, enough to defend Europe against Russia, based on the thirty-division estimate of Winston Churchill, and that he stood ready to fight if attacked. Yugoslavia continued to have the largest European ground force not in the Soviet sphere.

The survival of Tito was in the interest of the West, as he split the Soviet sphere and caused dissension elsewhere. Yet no plan had been developed to provide the needed aid.

Mr. Alsop urges Congress to get busy getting food to the country, either through the Consumer Credit Corporation or the Marshall Plan, or some other means.

Marquis Childs, in New Delhi, finds no easy generalizations fitting India. Many American observers found a strong anti-American current, similar to that pervading all of Asia. He defers, finding it too difficult to assess this judgment during a visit.

The people of India were constantly being reminded of the power of America and never saw any Russians at all, as even the diplomatic presence of Russia was confined to the Embassy, though some propaganda was available in books.

Many of the Indian intellectuals were impressed by reports of transformation worked by the Soviets regarding the primitive peoples of Asia, a major inducement, as colonialism was seen as the villain and America suspected of engaging in "economic imperialism". Such a view in India was encouraged by the aid America was providing the French in Indo-China. By resisting Asian nationalism in Indo-China, the French appeared to be giving the Communists the opportunity to foster that impulse.

But the British were also winning acceptance in a way not possible a decade earlier. Prime Minister Nehru had been educated in Britain and had inculcated in him the British upper class point of view on matters both cultural and political.

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