The Charlotte News
Wednesday, November 1, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that two men identified under aliases, not yet known to be
Puerto Rican Nationalists
In Korea, American armor hit rallying Communist troops in the northwest sector this date and moved to within 19 miles of the Manchurian border, a tank column of the 24th Division reaching Charyongwan after repulsing Communist attacks along the Chong River the previous night. Eighth Army headquarters said that the column was moving toward the Yalu River and Sinuiju, opposite the large Chinese air base at Antung, against diminishing enemy resistance.
On the northeast front, the Seventh Division blocked a counterattack by an estimated 2,000 North Korean troops at Pungsan, 51 miles from the border. Marine fighter planes killed an estimated 500 to 1,000 enemy troops. Strong attacks against American and South Korean forces in the vicinity of Unsan included the presence for the first time of cavalrymen on horses, thought to be Chinese, numbering about a thousand. A second Chinese Communist regiment was officially reported present in the fighting, in the northeastern sector.
Russian-built jet fighters entered the fray and were battled to a draw by the slower U.S. Mustangs, with neither side losing planes. Later, three Russian Yak fighters were shot down and one U.S. F-80 fighter was downed by anti-aircraft fire. The action took place near Sinuiju and Sonchon and was the first major aerial encounter since the early days of the war.
Secretary of State Acheson announced that the NATO defense ministers had agreed that no German national army, war industry or general staff would be established. He said that there was no delay in making defense plans despite this disagreement on use of German forces, and asserted his belief that the group could eventually work out a plan for their use. The French had wanted only a limited number of German units operating under a unified European organization. The setting up of a supreme commander for NATO was postponed until the German question could be resolved. Secretary of Defense Marshall said that the U.S. wanted a realistic program before agreeing to it.
The U.N. General Assembly voted 46 to 5, with seven abstentions, to extend the term of Trygve Lie as Secretary-General for three more years despite the Russian veto of the effort in the Security Council.
At Vatican City, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the new dogma that Mary had been assumed to heaven in body as well as soul. The proclamation came after divine revelation and became part of the creed of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the first added dogma since 1870. A crowd of approximately 300,000 had gathered to hear the proclamation.
Harold Stassen, 1948 presidential candidate and president of the University of Pennsylvania, was selected by the Republican National Committee to deliver a response the following Saturday night to the President's four-network television and radio midterm campaign speech. Senator Arthur Vandenburg, in ill health for some time, had declined to deliver the speech. The President's speech would be one of the most broadcast in history, reaching 1,200 radio and 76 television stations.
Corporate profits were reported to be at a record high, 51 percent greater for the previous third quarter than the same period of 1949. They had been running 43 percent higher in the second quarter, before the Korean war started June 25. A retroactive excess profits tax could cut into the profits.
In England, playwright George Bernard Shaw, 94, was reported near death after lapsing into unconsciousness. He had broken a thigh bone on September 9 after slipping in his garden. The previous night, he had told Viscountess Nancy Astor, a friend, that he wanted to sleep.
In Raleigh, State Attorney General Harold McMullan ruled that the approximately 25,000 teachers holding "A" or "B" or graduate-level teaching certificates would be entitled to the contingent pay increase provided by the 1949 Legislature, raising pay for "A" certificate holders to between $2,200 and $3,100 annually, an increase of between $139 and $346 depending on experience. The other 1,089 teachers would not be eligible.
In San Francisco, a man received honorable mention for his Halloween costume at the Italian colony's masquerade ball. He said after the event that he was merely going duck hunting afterward and had not dressed at all for the ball.
In Troy, N.Y., an eleven-year old girl swallowed the noise-maker in her horn as she tooted at a passing Halloween parade. She was admitted to the hospital.
That'll teach you to toot your own horn.
Also in Troy, a woman answered her doorbell to trick or treaters and found a man wearing a mask and raincoat, mumbling "trick or treat". She wound up tied to her bed and robbed of $19.
He must not have liked the candy much.
On the editorial page, "New Job for the U.N." finds the most sensible explanation advanced for the presence of Chinese Communist troops in Korea to be that they were there to protect the hydroelectric dams which served key cities in Manchuria. Their presence, regardless of reason, would make the mop-up operations in Korea much more complicated.
It finds that the U.N. forces had not done anything to provoke Communist China and it had not even issued any declarations ordering a cease of threat to its well-being.
The evidence of Communist Chinese troops and supplies being present in Korea appeared to justify a U.N. investigation and listing of the country as an aggressor along with North Korea. That would at least reduce any chance of Communist China being admitted to the organization.
"Thunder vs. Lightning" finds instructive the advice of the late Earl Godbey, editor of the Greensboro Daily News for many years, that one should not call a man a scoundrel but prove he was one. It had been brought to mind by the ostentatiously worded denunciation by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in Nashville, aimed at the South's critics.
"Summer and the Indians" tells of researchers at the University of Chicago having discovered that the term "Indian Summer" dated back as far as 1778 when a writer described it as a period of "smoke and mildness" preceding a severe frost. Englishman W. Faux had described it in Memorable Days in 1823 as deriving from the firing of millions of acres of forest across thousands of miles, causing dense smoke to hang in the air, obscuring for days the heavens, and remaining until the winter rains arrived to extinguish the fires, the means by which the Indians and the white hunters trapped the game after rousting it from its habitats. But another author in Backwoods in 1832 said that this account was unreliable, that it derived from the "formentation going on of so great a mass of vegetable matter" in late October.
Albert Matthews in The Monthly Weather Review of 1902 said that the term derived either from the custom of Indians burning grasses in late October or from their doing the bulk of their hunting in that period because of the haziness of the atmosphere. Another possibility, he posited, was that the settlers were lulled by the onset of winter into a false security, at which point the natives swooped down on them during the second warm period, "another summer" for the Indians.
The Indians believed that the benevolent god Cautantowwit sent the season for reasons of his own, while others had believed that Nanahbozhoo, a general god, sat on the North Pole overlooking his people and smoked his pipe for several days, producing the season.
The piece concludes that all it knew was that the temperature stood at a muggy 82 during the week and that if it was Indian Summer, they would give it back to the Indians.
A piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, titled "Fourth Down, Twenty Miles to Go", tells of University of Santa Clara football coach Dick Gallagher being the first coach in history probably to call in a long-distance play from his home, where he had been confined in Cupertino because of a thyroid condition. He had watched his team play Stanford via television and had detected a fault in the Stanford defense and called in a play to take advantage of it, resulting in his team's first touchdown, going ahead 7 to 2.
It expresses concern, however, that other coaches might read of Coach Gallagher's success and adopt the home position by the fire from which to conduct their teams' fates.
Bob Sain of The News tells of a young man in the office, formerly equanimous in temperament, becoming unraveled at the prospect of learning how to hand-roll cigarettes. His first attempt took 22 minutes and did not result in success even then. It took another two to three days. And the product was very unsatisfactory, wet and crumbling, eventually falling apart. He had eventually reached the point where he could extract two good drags from each self-made cigarette, but it was clear that he did not enjoy them.
Mr. Sain finds the young man to be on a mission "partaking, somehow, of man's unending struggle to subjugate the inanimate."
Drew Pearson, in Harrisburg, Pa., examines the political landscape in Pennsylvania, finds two good men vying for the Senate seat, Francis Myers, the Democratic incumbent, and Republican Governor James Duff, with the latter appearing to have the edge in the election.
Governor Duff represented a shift to a moderate philosophy within the Republican Party and was considered a presidential hopeful for 1952. He was liked by Democrats and Republicans. He had followed policies similar to those of Governor Earl Warren in California, not seeking to tear down the New Deal and refraining from embracing the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunting campaign against the State Department. He had cleaned up the Schuylkill River, one of the principal rivers of the state, reformed the insane asylums, improved the schools and put the state Manufacturers Association in its place, reversing the usual practice of giving coal, steel, gas and oil what they wanted. Those interests were now trying to defeat the Governor in the Senate race.
Mr. Duff had been a Bull Moose Party supporter in 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt ran against President Taft and Governor Woodrow Wilson. He acquired his disrespect for big business from both TR and his father. He followed the principle that most people were not in favor of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
He refused to take the offer of substantial outside retainers from private utility companies while Governor, instead curtailed the family budget to fit the gubernatorial salary.
He believed, as did Governor Warren and Senators Irving Ives and Wayne Morse, that a candidate did not win votes merely by criticizing the opposition, that leadership was necessary.
Marquis Childs, in Agra, India, tells of the Taj Mahal still being an impressive sight to the visitor, standing as a white monument to a queen of the Mogul Empire four hundred years earlier.
It stood in marked contrast to the rude mud huts of the average Indian village. Sanitation was nonexistent, with the people bathing and washing clothes in the same putrid water where water buffalo waded and drank, drawing their water from nearby wells.
Returning the peasants to handicrafts had been a central part of Gandhi's philosophy, along with abstinence and cleanliness, achieved through education. Gandhi's abandonment of a lucrative legal career to live among the peasantry and perform the work of the untouchable caste had been a supreme sacrifice, comparable to a Wall Street lawyer going to the poorest part of Mississippi and living among the people.
The current Minister of Health spoke of Gandhi as a living presence for the example he had set. She cited an infant mortality rate of 161 per thousand, with a half million infants dying yearly from tuberculosis. Added to this problem were eight million refugees from Pakistan.
There was a kind of triumph, he concludes, from the fact that the people could survive in the abject conditions under which they had subsisted in the villages for so long.
Robert C. Ruark becomes somewhat hatatonic about hats, saying that they did not like him, a mutual feeling. He had consistently lost his ill-fitting hats to dogs or wind, had never found one that suited his head without third-party ridicule.
The President and John L. Lewis did not like each other but had an affinity for the same sort of country bumpkin-looking hats, too small for their heads and tipped over the eyes. FDR had fared no better, with the brim shoved up front, off the face, "while the hat, itself, seems startled to be on the head." The same was true of former New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer and Bernard Baruch.
Anthony Eden and the Duke of Windsor looked comfortable in Homburgs, but the style did not fit his head or that of most Americans. The late Mayor of New York Jimmy Walker and New York newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre were the greatest hatmen ever produced in modern America.
He resigns himself to wearing an old-fashioned poke bonnet, tied with a ribbon around the chin, made of calico as that worn by the milkmaids. It would be easily laundered and repellent to dogs.
Mr. Ruark, a native of North
Carolina, neglects to mention the football coach of his alma mater at
UNC, Carl Snavely, who wore his fedora tipped
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