The Charlotte News
Wednesday, November 15, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Communist battalions had pushed back South Korean troops at two widely separated points along the U.N. line the previous night and this date, resulting in a four-mile withdrawal near Tokchon to the Taedong River on the right flank of the western side, and in the extreme northeastern sector, a six-tank column tearing five holes in the South Korean line, 90 miles south of the Siberian border, though no ground was lost.
American troops reached the shores of North Korea's two largest reservoirs, sending patrols inside Yongbyon. British troops advanced a half mile and patrols entered Pakchon on the northwest front, where they found well-prepared but abandoned defenses. An intelligence officer at MacArthur headquarters said that he had no idea why the Chinese were abandoning their positions. It was believed by an American commander on the western front that the Chinese were using North Korean troops as a screen while they prepared stronger defense lines to the rear and reorganized the North Koreans into effective fighting units.
A divisional commander described the worst enemy as the cold. In one instance, his men had waded into the Ungi River and emerged with their clothing frozen. The forecast for Friday was for warmer temperatures than the six degrees currently being recorded, but the first snowfall of the season was expected during the weekend.
A Marine Corps officer said that the American troops did not have adequate winter clothing and that if the clothing were not provided soon to the men in the mountains, they would likely "get their heads punched in". But a brigadier general in Tokyo said that the available clothing was adequate, as it had been stockpiled early during the fight, but that the troops had outrun their supply lines with resulting difficulty in supply generally. The troops were being provided clothing at the front as quickly as logistically possible.
Thirty B-29's firebombed the large city of Hoeryong in the northeastern sector, a communications and supply base, leaving it a mass of smoke and flames.
Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder proposed a 75 percent excess profits tax on corporations to raise 4.5 billion dollars of revenue to help pay for the expanded defense budget. Such a tax would be lower than the 85.5 percent rate of World War II. Secretary Snyder said that he was confident that the measure could be passed in the post-Thanksgiving Congressional session to be called by the President.
Representative Cecil King of California said that the House Ways and Means Committee would launch an immediate investigation into charges of tie-ups between IRB officials and gamblers in California, after the California Crime Commission had said in a report the previous day that there were such connections, preventing convictions of gamblers and hoodlums for tax evasion.
In Port Arthur, Tex., a series of seven explosions occurred at a large Gulf Oil refinery, injuring three men, one critically. The cause was escaping gas reaching a fire box, starting a fire leading to the explosions. The locus was 70 miles from where the disastrous Texas City refinery explosion had killed more than 500 persons in 1947.
Near Page, Okla., six men died in the crash of a Navy plane on Rich Mountain, an area where several previous crashes had taken place.
In Philadelphia, striking Western Electric equipment installers clashed again with police as the strikers tried to block non-striking telephone operators crossing their lines. Police formed a wedge through which 15 operators were able to pass to their jobs.
Southern Bell offices in Charlotte were operating as usual after a court injunction had issued against continuation of the "hit and run" pickets by Western Electric equipment installers at the Winston-Salem and Charlotte exchanges, which had prevented operators from crossing the lines the previous day. The injunction applied to all Western Electric pickets in the state.
In Charlotte, Thomas W. Alexander, 71, prominent in the legal profession and social circles, died in his sleep from a heart attack.
Emery Wister of The News
tells of the arrival in Charlotte of movie actress Coleen Gray
The "Our Weather" box tells of the global warming trend—that's right, suicidal kuku birds of the alt-right crazies, even in 1950—being, according to some scientists, chiefly responsible for Russia's recent rise to world importance. The steadily rising temperatures of the previous century, since 1850, had freed Russians from the numbing grip of cold so that they could take part in outdoor activities for more than five months of the year, as had previously been the limit. Through mechanization and higher temperatures, they were now able to work outside nine months out of the year.
Thus, we conclude, climate-change deniers are dirty little Commie sympathizers.
On the editorial page, "City's Parking Report Gathers Dust" tells of San Francisco, realizing that private interests were not responding to the need for off-street parking, having established a parking authority with a goal of providing 6,000 spaces immediately and 14,000 additional spaces by 1970, at a projected cost of 30 to 50 million dollars. (They might need a bigger boat by then.)
In the previous 20 years, only a little over a thousand new spaces had been provided in the downtown area and new permits for spaces since 1941 had been limited to one structure with only 53 spaces.
Better get that big Yellow taxi in
there to extract some more spaces
The news of this venture had prompted the piece to wonder what had happened to the report of Charlotte's special parking committee issued in September, which had given top priority to appointment of a permanent parking commission which would study State statutes and make recommendations to the 1951 General Assembly for revision and new laws, as there would be no further opportunity until 1953.
"The Anatomy of McCarthyism" tells of "McCarthyism" being defined by the Washington Post as "reckless exploitation of popular anxiety about Communism". Senator Joseph McCarthy and others who hoped to derive political gain from the tactic of false charges to discredit the Administration were responsible for it.
The American Communist Party had only about 75,000 members, though was militant and capable of sabotage and espionage. There was evidence that some Communists had achieved prominence in the Government during the New Deal of the mid-Thirties, allowing the anti-Communist hysteria to take hold in the late Forties. But McCarthyism had thrived, it finds, because it became clear that in the event of war, these Communists would support Russia. Yet, McCarthyism would not stop them. Nor was it clear that the fact bothered the McCarthyites, as they only wanted to discredit the Democratic Administration for political gain.
It finds that to a great extent, McCarthyism had hampered the ability of the Administration to ferret out the true Communists in the country and disable them.
McCarthyism had been a factor in some scattered midterm elections, for instance in the loss of Senator Millard Tydings in Maryland, where Senator McCarthy had campaigned against the "whitewash" by the Tydings committee which had condemned Senator McCarthy's charges against the State Department as a "fraud and a hoax". It had worked for Congressman Richard Nixon in labeling "pink" his opponent, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, in the California Senate race. And in the Ohio Senate race won by Senator Taft, there were overtones of McCarthyism. The piece did not support the politics of Senator Tydings, Congresswoman Douglas, or Ohio Senate opponent Joe Ferguson, but found the McCarthyistic tactics "hysterical and hypocritical" wherever they appeared.
The anodyne to McCarthyism, it finds, was clear thinking, as it would not withstand scrutiny in the light of day. Communists had to be immobilized but that process could be accomplished sanely through the FBI.
"To allow the McCarthys and Nixons to make use of our justifiable concern about Communism to further their own personal ends is to allow ourselves to be turned away from effective action against genuine Communists."
Brother, you haven't seen anything yet. The baby may be thrown out with the bathwater before it's over. But, we feel certain, the Fourth Estate, notably the Washington Post, will have a positive impact on the outcome. For print has a tendency not to forget, as television and radio programming passes in one ear and all too often out the other, in between soap operas, commercials, game shows and yuck-yucks, all of it blending in a relativistic melange in the minds of too many, excusing the worst chicanery, until finally the chicanery crosses the line into criminality such that no one could any longer ignore it without appearing to be a blithering idiot.
But then would come the Revisionists to stoke again the fires of discord and dissension, in the hope that out of it would come their own self-interested profits.
And there we are today, ruled by Fox News and its steppin fetchits down below.
"Hardly a Mandate" suggests that the fashion of the Democratic Party in recent years had been to view election victories as mandates for one view or another, as the President had proclaimed after his 1948 victory and the return of Congress to the Democrats. The piece finds, however, that not since the presidential elections of 1932 and 1936 and the midterm election of 1934 had a clear mandate emerged. It offers the observation as warning to celebrating Republicans who were calling their gains a mandate to reverse the Administration's foreign and domestic policies.
The average GOP gains in 1938, 1942, and 1946 had been ten Senate seats and 61 House seats, whereas in 1950, they gained only five Senate seats and 18 in the House, half the average for midterm elections. It concludes that such could hardly be considered a mandate for anything.
"Poll Taxes and Prohibition" informs that in South Carolina the voters had approved an amendment to eliminate the State constitutional requirement of a poll tax. The Legislature had to ratify it, likely to occur given its large majority in passage. In Arkansas, a campaign to re-establish prohibition had lost 3 to 2. Arizona had defeated a local option law. Oregon had rejected a plan to ban liquor advertising. And South Dakota voters had defeated a proposal to prohibit serving of liquor and food in the same room.
It concludes that one of eight remaining poll taxes being eliminated and four states rejecting prohibition efforts was not a bad day at the polls.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "This Is Here, Not There", tells of the national advisory secretary of the YWCA of Syria and Lebanon, Dorothea McDowell, suggesting recently in Raleigh that the status of American women 50 years earlier was the equivalent of the status of women in the Near East in 1950. The testimony of two women was necessary to offset that of a single man in Syria and Lebanon. There were no teenage dances and men were usually well-established before marriage.
The piece begs to differ with the assessment of America in 1900, where it finds that if grandma had waited for grandpa to become well-established before marrying him, the grandchildren of today would be wealthy. Nor had North Carolina ever required the testimony of two women to equal that of a man. "Quite the contrary."
Drew Pearson continues his column of the prior day regarding the problems in dealing with European allies, with stress in this installment on some of the good points and suggestions for correcting the problems, to enable appeal to hearts and minds as well as stomachs. While the U.S. was having its problems with the perceptions of Western Europeans, the Russian were having it worse in Eastern Europe, where, in Poland, troop trains to East Germany were dynamited almost weekly, in Czechoslovakia, there was seething revolt, in Bulgaria, troops were deserting in driblets, and in all of the satellites, there was ongoing observation of Yugoslavia and the revolt of Tito against the Kremlin, in the hope that it would establish a pattern to follow.
At home, American taxpayers could expect the Joint Chiefs to seek another thirty billion dollars for defense, raising the military budget to sixty billion, compared to 1938 when the defense budget had been one billion and the total budget only seven billion. Since V-J Day in August, 1945, the country had spent seventy billion on armament, not including the Korean war. If spending continued apace at its current rate, the country would be bankrupt long before the Soviets began an all-out war. To pay the current bill would lower the standard of living for the country below that of Europe.
Mr. Pearson views the remedy as halting a defensive war and carrying instead the attack to the enemy, not through arms but through reaching the Russian people directly with positive information about democracy and capitalism. The country was so busy worrying about Senator McCarthy's Communists under every bed that it had lost its initiative and imagination abroad, to carry the information fight to the Russians. It was the only alternative to war.
There were large areas of unrest within the Soviet Union, especially in White Russia and the Ukraine. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June, 1941, 3.6 million Russian prisoners were taken, chiefly because they were ready to surrender, as shown by captured war documents. The German Army was able to advance so far into Russia, into the Crimean Peninsula, because Russian troops and peasants had nearly welcomed them.
Presently, there were top Russians in exile in America who were being overlooked for their potential value to undermining the Russian regime, just as with the 2,000 defecting Russian officers held in detention in West Germany. These persons could form a league for a democratic Russia, patterned after a committee for Czechs and Slovaks set up by President Wilson during World War I, enabling Czechoslovakia to be founded by Professor Thomas Masaryk in Pittsburgh. Politics had won that war as much as force of arms.
The job of such a venture would not be easy, but it was easier than looking forward to killing and maiming in open warfare.
Marquis Childs tells of Democrats privately voicing concern even before the midterm elections regarding trends of the party leadership, the arrogance and indifference to the general welfare by a party too long in power. From that perspective, it was not surprising that the Republicans had made such sweeping gains but rather that the victories were not even larger.
The evidence of this arrogance and indifference included the recent political payoff of the Ambassadorship to Mexico to New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer at a time when the Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee was investigating payoffs to cops by the gambling organization in New York City, the longtime crime and political corruption of Chicago's Democratic machine, and the failure of organized labor in Ohio to correct the most obvious abuses of power plus the nomination in Ohio of a political weakling to try to defeat Senator Taft.
In normally Republican Michigan, however, Governor G. Mennen Williams, with votes still being recounted, might narrowly win re-election after he had made it clear that he was working for the general welfare rather than for the party or a pressure group. The same was true in normally Republican Connecticut where both Democratic incumbent Senators had been re-elected, even if Democratic Governor Chester Bowles had narrowly lost. And in normally Republican Pennsylvania, Democrats had lost by only narrow margins after campaigning against the Republican machine in power there for years.
He concludes that the results might demonstrate only that voters were more likely to vote against positions than for them. For 1952, it might come down to the question of whether politicians had learned anything regarding representing the general interests rather than those of party and special interests.
Robert C. Ruark, in Memphis, discusses the cant of Beale Street as taught him by the first black radio disc jockey of the city, Nat Williams, who had taught school for about twenty years. He learned that to call someone "Big Boy from the gravel pits" was "dozens" terminology meaning that the object was a poor country boy whose mama "ain't nowhere".
Nobody any longer could define "easy rider", which had been an old buck gambling man.
To "knife on out" meant that one had to cut until the next day. A pander was no longer a "sweet man" but rather a man "puttin' on a slight hustle". A copy was a "roach". "Cook's Kill", a local insecticide, meant that the cops were around. Money was "ends". A quarter was a "rough" and a dime, a "deese". A good looking girl passing by provoked, "Ahhhh, but it is...," and a girl who wasn't, "Ahhhh, but it ain't."
Mr. Ruark concludes: "Well, take it easy mule—I mean man. I am just another square from nowhere, and whatever I had in mind was nothing but fine. Wellllll. ALL right, and sometimes I wonder whether jazz had to be born."
Hey, if you don't stop talking like
that, we're going to cut your cheese, man, with this heyah Big Boy
A letter writer says that Senator Taft was the man on whom to keep an eye for the GOP presidential nomination in 1952, following his re-election to the Senate by healthy numbers.
A letter writer finds the nation one of doers and thinkers rather than flag-wavers, that it was strong in spiritual unity.
A letter from Leon Gutman praises the previous Wednesday's editorial regarding the two light operas presented recently in Charlotte, hoping that such pieces would stir Charlotte from its apathy to realization of what was locally available in the arts.
A letter from the pastor of the Church of God in Charlotte questions what the minister who wrote the letter the prior week complaining of profanity and drunkenness at the Wake Forest-Clemson football game at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem was doing at the game. He questions whether he was really a minister of the Gospel for having truck with such sinful pursuits, no place for "sincere God-fearing consecrated Christians to go". He finds the world on its last legs for the many "pleasure-loving, theater-going, dancing, tobacco-using preachers to lead the people." The blind leading the blind would result in both in the ditch.
Well, you're goddamned right about that. Those goddamned Baptists at Wake Forest never have learned. Bunch of goddamned drunks. Now they plan to move over to godless Reynolda and do nothing but sit around campus smoking themselves to death while drinking bourbon and cussing out the opposition. And then Clemson...
At the University North Carolina, we drink Coca-Cola and engage only in polite speech while adjusting, now and again, our neckties when the referee chokes the call.
But there were exceptions proving the rule. Did we ever tell you about the time Dr. Ralph Scales, president of Wake Forest, stopped one afternoon behind us, even if tipsy-toeing into our bumper in the process, when we were out of gas at the entrance to Wake Forest, calling a service truck for us?
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