The Charlotte News
Wednesday, June 28, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Seoul, the capital of South Korea, along with its airfield at Kimpo, had fallen before the Soviet-built tanks of the Northern Communist invaders, and that the South Korean forces were struggling to reform their lines twenty miles to the south near Suwon. Furthermore, defense of the port of Inchon was deemed probably untenable. The Defense Department had confirmed the reports. A new Mayor of Seoul was introduced via radio by the North Koreans, broadcasting from within the city. The South Korean Government had moved 90 miles to the south at Taejon.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Far East Air Force announced that its fighters and light bombers had attacked North Korean positions 25 miles northwest of Seoul. During the previous two days, American pilots had shot down six Russian-made North Korean planes seeking to interfere with the evacuation to Japan of 700 American nationals from South Korea via Inchon. Communist broadcasts issued unconfirmed claims that guerrillas were rising up in the South ahead of the advancing Northern troops.
The President addressed the Reserve Officers Association at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and was cheered, saying that the situation in Korea was serious and expressing the hope that peace would prevail. The President returned to his normal schedule after devoting three full days solely to the Korean situation.
Former President Herbert Hoover called for unity in the nation.
The U.N. Security Council, with Russia absent, called for the U.N. members to use military force to back a ceasefire defied by North Korea.
Both Britain and Canada pledged support of the U.S. effort in South Korea. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee told Commons that Britain would place its naval forces in Japanese waters at the disposal of the U.S. Conservative Leader Winston Churchill voiced support of the move.
Chiang Kai-Shek obeyed the President's request to discontinue attacks on the Chinese mainland in an effort to foster peace in the region. The U.S. Navy Seventh Task Fleet was preparing to sail from Pearl Harbor to defend Formosa against potential attack.
Pravda in Moscow had suggested that the U.S. had "gone too far" in defense of South Korea and accused it of imperialist aggression, but gave no hint of what Russia, which had remained silent thus far, might do in response.
The Senate approved by a vote of 76 to 0 the joint confreres' draft extension bill, already approved overwhelmingly by the House the previous day, and sent the measure to the President.
In Concord, N.H., Dr. Hermann Sander, acquitted in March on the charge of murder for the euthanization of a dying cancer patient by injecting air to her veins, had his medical license restored by the State.
In Raleigh, a probe by a Senate investigator was underway of campaign spending in the U.S. Senate race just concluded between runoff victor Willis Smith and Senator Frank Graham, investigating to determine whether any violations of Federal campaign spending limits had occurred.
On the editorial page, "The Choice Is Made" finds that Russia would likely back down before war would come over Korea. It was not clear whether the attack of the South was a Soviet war move or a diversionary measure to draw attention from Europe, preliminary to a full-scale attack on West Germany. Or the Russians might be bent on isolating Japan by slowly seeking to grab little bits of land in the hope that the West would not respond. If the latter, the President's new policy of defending the Far East would interdict the effort.
The country, it warns, needed to avoid any direct conflict with Russia as that could lead to a world war. Russia had remained silent on the invasion. While the U.S. might be playing into Soviet hands by joining the defense of South Korea, it had no choice as it had promised to stand behind the South, and because Korea was of major strategic significance and a line had to be drawn somewhere against Soviet aggression.
The unity of the House and Senate behind the President's action, it concludes, should serve as an example for the people to be firm in resistance to Soviet aggression.
"The Durham School Suit" tells of the Durham suit challenging segregated public schools shaping up as a major new test in the state and elsewhere, as the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on segregation outside the higher educational setting of public colleges and universities. Generally, the lower Federal courts had ruled that the Plessy doctrine required separate but equal schools and that the schools must truly be substantially equal. It was believed that the Supreme Court would rule likewise when confronted with the issue.
Much evidence showed the Durham black schools to be inferior to the white schools. While the State Government had been scrupulous in equal allocation of funds for teachers, textbooks and school buses, discrimination had come in distribution of funding at the local level.
It reiterates its urging to the school districts to see the handwriting on the wall with regard to the need for bringing black schools up to the level of white schools to withstand scrutiny under Plessy.
Of course, in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education would find that the Plessy doctrine had not worked in 58 years to afford equality and so overruled it as no longer supplying a viable basis to meet Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, ultimately ordering, in 1955, the desegregation of public schools "with all deliberate speed".
In the meantime, the Federal District Court, the following January, would grant to the plaintiffs the injunctive relief sought in the Durham case, that equal funding be made available to the black and white schools in the district, on the ground that the plaintiffs had shown that the Durham public schools for blacks were not substantially equal to those for whites within the statutorily and State Constitutionally mandated segregated system, the district, both statutorily and Constitutionally, being required also to provide equal, non-discriminatory treatment to pupils within those separate systems. The Constitutional provision so requiring, incidentally, was an amendment to the Constitution of 1868, passed by the Legislature in 1875 and ratified the following year, eliminated in the new Constitution ratified in 1970.
"Speedy Agreement on the Draft Act" finds that when pressed, Congress could undertake quick action, following the joint confreres having quickly formed a compromise on the two competing draft measures, extending the draft for a year and giving the President authority to order inductions. As the front page reports, both houses had quickly approved the compromise measure and sent the bill to the President.
It reminded of the draft act passed in 1940 which succeeded by only one vote in the House following protracted and bitter debate, with that division having then quickly disappeared after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
While the extended debate over extension of the draft act did not look good in retrospect, the quick action in response to the emergency remedied any previously demonstrated weakness.
"Woodrow Jones Wins His Race" tells of Mr. Jones having won the Democratic nomination for Congress in the 11th district and being on track to become the first citizen of Rutherford County to go to Congress in over a century. He would replace retiring A. L. Bulwinkle from the district and it wishes him well.
A piece from the Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont, titled "Charlotte Count Tops Carolinas", tells of the population, as determined by the 1950 census, for the larger cities of South Carolina not yet having been announced save for Charleston, which registered but half of Charlotte's total of 133,000, the largest in the Carolinas. Mecklenburg County, at 200,000, would be the largest county. Winston-Salem, at 87,000, had been second, with the as yet unannounced total in Greensboro expected to rival it. Moreover, Charlotte had an increase of fifty percent in dwelling units resulting in a drop of persons per unit for its thirty-three percent population increase.
It adds that if Greenville were being counted with all its heavily populated contiguous districts, it would probably rival Charlotte and come in second in the Carolinas in population.
Drew Pearson, in Oskaloosa, Iowa, tells of his recent visit to Mt. Rushmore to dedicate its new lighting system having spawned ideas in him regarding the need for the same kind of frontier courage and resolve which had characterized Washington and Jefferson. He believes that they would not have been for the idea of European and Asian dollar diplomacy in the modern world, forsaking the notion that the handshake and the smile were of greater importance than steel, wheat, and airplanes.
The scientists had brought the nations inevitably together as one world and yet the thinking had not followed suit. He believes that the Founders would have had the foresight to go beyond the Federal concept of the nation to expand it to the world stage and create world government for the sake of peace. The country was battling against an idea in Communism, allowing Russia to win the battle of creeds without putting democracy on show as an alternative idea. The country had not been an adequate salesman of its system, especially behind the Iron Curtain.
He thinks Washington and Jefferson would not have been content to rely on material things to approach the times but would have used their native resourcefulness to end the age of fear by adapting their ideas embodied in the Bill of Rights to the world. He finds that the country needed to work just as hard to preserve democracy as the Founders had to establish it. Given that the scientists had made the world one in scientific fact, it was up to the country to make the world one in political fact.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the invasion of South Korea by the North in terms of it being tantamount to the re-occupation of the Rhineland by Hitler in 1936, find it to be a turning point in relations with the Far East, as well as Europe. Depending on how the U.S. responded, it would either be a disastrous move by the Kremlin or one by the U.S.
Thus far, the President had responded properly, ending the period of false complacency, as they see it, occurring since late 1948 after the election when the President had changed policy to disarmament in the face of growing Soviet threat, a policy underwritten by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and the Republicans in Congress, following the resignation and then death of James Forrestal, who, they believe, was against that improvident policy, placing economy ahead of actual world conditions.
This time, there was no effort on the part of the policymakers in Washington to characterize the event as trivial. The outcome in Korea would affect the perception of the U.S. in the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Indo-China, and Burma, the latter two countries beset by substantial Communist movements. If these countries were to fall in turn to Communism, then the entire Far East would crumble, and Western Europe would not be far behind. Berlin, Yugoslavia, Iran and Indo-China would go the way of South Korea if the latter were to fall.
They find that there was no use in recrimination against the Truman Administration and the Republicans for allowing the Korean invasion to occur through complacent policy decisions of the prior year and a half. It was time, however, to cease talking in terms of economy and neutrality in matters of defense and take affirmative steps to prove that Moscow had made the fatal mistake in directing the invasion of South Korea.
Marquis Childs tells of Senator Owen Brewster, prior to the Korean invasion, having sought to make the Republican Party the party of peace for the fall elections, in contrast to the Democrats as the party of war. He claimed in support of the theory that the Democrats had been in the White House at the outset of both world wars and that the Republicans had maintained the peace—not accounting for the fact that it was the Republican laissez-faire economic policy which stimulated the worldwide depression after the First World War, leading in turn to the economic conditions which brought on the Second World War, as well as the Republican opposition to U.S. membership in the League of Nations which deprived that organization of the necessary teeth to enforce disarmament, enabling ultimately the Axis triad to form.
GOP opposition to this notion of the peace party, which also implied a revival of isolationism and cutting of foreign aid, had come from such internationalist Republicans as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had echoed the same idea enunciated by Senator Brewster, saying that for fifty years the GOP had been the party of peace.
The invasion in Korea, however, quickly made these sentiments appear ridiculous, showing that the "war party" was in the Communist sphere, and that a "peace party" suggested capitulation.
Nevertheless, he concludes, the peace party concept could resonate in the fall elections. Some Democrats, in fact, feared that the Republicans would grab onto the peace party label before the Democrats. In the meantime, however, war could come between the U.S. and Russia over Korea, long a point full of tension. There would be forces at work at home and abroad pushing for that result.
A letter writer urges that the foreign aid program had to go forward if the U.S. was to exert leadership on the world stage, and that the other way had the fatal lessons of isolationism in its recent store.
A letter writer finds that the taxpayers were so busy earning money that they let certain organizations vote for their selfish interests. He urges voting.
A
letter writer from McBee, S.C.,
urges girls to marry for love rather than money as true love
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