The Charlotte News
Monday, July 10, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the North Korean forces had battled to within 20 air miles of Taejon, the provisional capital of South Korea, after a "lost" U.S. battalion had fought its way from a trap after two days. The division which had caused the trap had fought on from Chonan to Chongan, a tiny village 18 miles south of Chonan and 25 miles by air northwest of Taejon. Another division was in contact with American forces at the rail junction of Chochiwon, 15 miles southeast of Chonan and 20 miles by air northwest of Taejon. At Chinchon, the enemy engaged elements of a South Korean force.
Seven American soldiers were found bound and shot in the face after having surrendered to the North Korean forces following their entrapment.
General MacArthur said that there
was evidence that the morale of the North Korean Communists was
slipping under the heavy air assault of the allied forces. Some 46
enemy tanks had been knocked out the day before near Chonan. Napalm
had been used with reported excellent results
Lt. General George E. Stratemeyer, head of the Far East Air Force, said that even with the reverses, the combined air, sea and ground forces of the allies had stopped the Communist advance of the previous two weeks. He said that there would be no bombing beyond North Korean targets, but that military targets within that area would be bombed around the clock.
A table of destroyed tanks and other vehicles by the Far East Air Force is provided on the page.
The Army was sending troops from the U.S. to Korea, with the Second Infantry Division and smaller units, including the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg, being prepared for transfer soon to the Far East.
At the Pentagon, a press briefing by officials struck a note of caution, that no one should expect immediate results in Korea despite weekend successes in bombing raids.
House Speaker Sam Rayburn said that after a conference of Congressional leaders this date, it was likely that more military appropriations would be passed because of the war in Korea, though the President had said he would not seek any more. Further military spending would nix the proposed billion dollars in excise tax cuts passed by the House, as conceded by Senator Taft, an advocate of the cuts. Senator Harry F. Byrd wanted to make more domestic spending cuts to make way for military spending.
In Prague, the Czech Government claimed that U.S. military planes were transgressing Czech territory and warned of serious consequences if it continued. They also claimed that they had proof that the planes had spread the Colorado potato beetle over the country and East Germany. The U.S. Embassy denied the potato bug claim.
Protest to Britain. Britain spread
the potato beetles
In Bombay, four gunmen broke into
the Temple of Malahaxmi, the Hindu Goddess of Wealth, wounded three
servants and snatched a thousand dollars worth of jewels
A Federal Court on Saturday had
enjoined the further strike of switchmen on the Rock Island line,
ending the rail strike, after the President had seized that line and
threatened to seize the other four, avoided by the switchmen having
ended their strike on those lines the prior Thursday. The Rock Island switchmen were then ordered back to work by
the union. Passenger trains
But three other rail unions, the trainmen, conductors, and yardmasters, were considering a strike over their demands for a shorter week and higher pay.
In Medina, N.Y., a widower who said he was "going on 90" married an 80-year old widow he had known for over 50 years.
Cotton rose to the two-cent legal limit this date in light of the war and a Department of Agriculture report of a surprisingly small cotton acreage, jumping from 33.80 cents per pound to 35.80.
Better get your shoe
On the editorial page, "Mobilizing the American Idea" tells of the editor of Britain Today having laid to ignorance the reason for the dangerous state of world affairs. English-speaking nations knew one another well enough to dispel any prospect of war between them in modern times. But the language barrier posed another problem. The solution thus lay in getting people across the world to effect better understanding of one another. Disseminating information about the goals and ideals of the U.S. was the best way, it finds, to achieve that goal. The Voice of America was an extant organization performing that task effectively, but Congress had severely limited its funding.
It thus supports Senator William Benton's proposal greatly to expand Voice of America, finding it as important as the mobilization of industry, economy and manpower for war.
"The Spendthrift Senate" tells of freshman Congressman Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts having set forth comparisons of spending approved by the House versus that by the Senate and found that the Senate had voted for over 18 billion dollars more in spending than the House between 1940 and 1950. Even excluding the spending of the two heavy war years, 1943 and 1944, the Senate voted for more than 12 billion dollars more. Only in 1944 had the Senate appropriated less than the House.
Mr. Furcolo found that in terms of pork, the Senate appropriated 636 million dollars more under the rubric "Civil Functions" and 502 million more for Interior Department projects, the two chief sources of pork.
He advised therefore starting with the Senate to reduce spending, seeking to inform better its members' probably incorrect perceptions that the people wanted these pork-barrel projects.
The piece agrees and thinks the plan would bring about economy at the Federal Government level, then work its way down to the grass roots. The people had to learn to forgo Federal Government handouts.
"Fascism in Italy" tells of correspondent Max Ascoli of The Reporter indicating that as the West was busy trying to kick out Communism from Italy, Fascism was creeping back in through the window. After a recent trip to Italy, he had found that despite the victory over the Communist Party in 1948, Italy still faced a threat from the Communists to democratic politics, as the trade unions, the parishes, and the government bureaus served as recruitment facilities for all of the parties, only two of which, the Catholic Christian Democrats on the right and the Communists on the left, were of significance. The moderates were being crushed in the center. The present coalition Government of Premier Alcide de Gasperi was endangered, as the Christian Democrats pressured him to abandon the coalition. But the anti-Communist strain of the Christian Democrats could easily develop into Fascism.
Many former democrats were taking the stance that democracy was not suited to Italy and openly advocated a return to Fascism and the grandeur associated with Mussolini in the Thirties. Democracy had come to connote the emasculation of Italy, plus widespread unemployment and poverty.
Mr. Ascoli advocated strict enforcement of Italy's anti-Fascist measures, that Communism be defeated by removal of the political and economic causes which permitted it to take root, and that the U.S. make it clear that it would not tolerate resurgence of Fascism in Italy.
The piece agrees with his conclusion that American power ought be as tough as it was kind.
Drew Pearson tells of Maj. General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur's chief intelligence officer, coming in for criticism at the Pentagon for not being aware of the warning signs of North Korea's invasion two weeks earlier. In a talk to visiting firemen a few weeks prior to the invasion, he had dismissed Korea as unimportant, that Iran was the place to watch for an imminent attack.
There were two errors of judgment attributed to him. The first was that the National Security Council, in reliance on the opinion, believed that the primary problem in Korea was one of "internal security" and the likelihood of attack, de minimis. That was so despite there having been advance knowledge that the North Koreans had 70 tanks, strictly offensive weaponry. The second error was that too much confidence had been placed in the South Korean Army to hold its ground, having instead fallen completely apart before the North Korean tank-supported forces.
As Jonathan Daniels had warned the President recently, the Republicans, after years of trying without success, might at last make a dent in the solid Democratic South. He told of it being the result of the compulsory FEPC, harming Southern unity, and that the proposed legislation would cause the defeat of the better parts of the Fair Deal even in the North. He informed of that issue having been the reason for the defeat of Administration-friendly Senator Frank Graham by Administration detractor Willis Smith in the June 24 runoff primary in North Carolina. Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was using the same tactic against Senator Olin Johnston in the coming Senate primary in that state, causing Senator Johnston to respond by also castigating blacks and the idea of integration. Mr. Pearson finds it doubtful that Mr. Daniels had made an impression on the President, as he had tried to talk with him about the issue the prior May and during the previous fall.
Republican Senator Owen Brewster, who voted for the FEPC, was nevertheless trying to use the issue to undermine the Southern Democratic Party. Republicans were backing Governor Thurmond and to that end, RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had visited South Carolina recently.
In the North Carolina race, Republican funding from the North had poured into the state in support of Mr. Smith, much of it raised by Senator Brewster, chairman of the GOP Senate Re-election Committee. He had, among other things, inserted in the Congressional Record a digested version of John T. Flynn's reactionary The Road Ahead, which had at one point specifically attacked Senator Graham for being a member of "subversive" organizations, implying that he was pink. The cost of some of that transcription was paid by the taxpayers. A million reprints were then mailed to North Carolina, some by the Committee for Constitutional Government, headed by Dr. Edward Rumely, an ex-convict, jailed during World War I as an agent of the Kaiser. Many had been mailed under the franking privilege of Congressman Ralph Gwinn of New York, friend to General Eisenhower, and who had loaned his frank to many pro-Fascist organizations.
On top of that, Republicans had concocted a phony organization, the "National Society for the Advancement of Colored People", and then sent out its supposed endorsement of Senator Graham. They had even signed the letter "Whitte", to resemble the name of NAACP executive secretary Walter White. Thousands of voters were fooled by the ruse and remained away from the polls in the runoff after having voted in the initial primary for Senator Graham, who had won that four-way race by 52,000 votes. Mr. Smith then had won the runoff by 20,000 votes.
He notes that Iowa Senator Guy Gillette was the chair of the investigating committee looking into the North Carolina primary spending, but that he had appointed the son of Dixiecrat Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi to be one of the investigators.
Marquis Childs discusses the fact that when General MacArthur would decide that more American troops were needed in Korea, difficult decisions would need be made in Washington, as those additional forces were not in Japan. The original decision of the President to commit American forces was premised on the belief that it would not be necessary to use ground forces at all, let alone those beyond the occupation forces already in Japan. That would require some degree of mobilization at home. Planning presently was for an operation lasting six months.
Colonel Sterling Wright, acting commander of the American military mission in Korea, which had 500 advisers, had assured, prior to the invasion, that, based on intelligence, the forces would have 24 hours advance warning of any invasion. He said that therefore mines could be laid to prevent tanks from getting far across the 38th parallel and that the North Koreans would retreat as soon as they met substantial resistance.
A "conspiracy of optimism", he finds, existed from the President on down, as the President on Memorial Day had spoken of peace being nearer than ever before in the five years since the war. Mr. Childs tells of writing in late May that there was danger in being preoccupied with the mistakes of the past, as with McCarthyism. He had viewed the present situation as being as dangerous as that in June of 1940 when France had fallen. There was too little agreement on the course to be followed in foreign policy. Decisions were not being made.
Korea had brought about superficial agreement on policy, as had the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But there were still deep divisions over goals and how to achieve them.
The action of the Senate Appropriations Committee in cutting to nothing the funding for the Point 4 program was evidence of this lack of agreement, the belief of Senators Taft and Wherry being that if money was needed for arms, there was not enough for technical assistance to underdeveloped nations, a program promulgated by the President on the premise that Communism was a harder sell to people who were not impoverished. To win the struggle, one was nearly as important as the other. For, while resistance by arms was necessary, it also was necessary to win the loyalty of the Asian peoples. If they were to become convinced that the West was only interested in use of force, then no amount of force could win the fight for democracy.
He concludes that the Korean war showed that it was late in the struggle but perhaps not too late to understand the meaning of what was taking place in Asia.
Robert C. Ruark had been to a weekend party where everything was fine until 10:00 when the parlor games began, which now included charades and canasta, not spin the bottle or craps as in former times, though the latter could be profitable. He was not fond of charades, with its rigid rules to which adherence was strictly monitored. He quit on canasta. And "the game", in which one represented someone living or dead and then provided clues to the audience to enable them to guess who it was, was for "minor league morons". (He uses the example of Paul Revere, when, properly, it probably ought be William Dawes, assuming strict rules applied in that game also.) He also could not play "20 questions" or word games.
He resents games in the living room
as he resents the television in the living room, for the placement
had choked off the art of conversation. Before canasta, the rage had
been gin rummy, and before that, bridge
He gives notice that henceforth he would be a good weekend guest but when the games began, would head for the basement to read books, for it was there that they were now kept, as literature, coming face to face with charades and canasta, had been relegated to the underground.
A
letter from an engineer, who had
worked on Mecklenburg County drainage for 39 years, responds to the
July 4 editorial, "Sugaw Creek Solution in Prospect", tells of
having written nine years earlier to the U.S. Public Health Service
regarding Sugaw Creek pollution and being referred to the drainage
engineer of Memphis to provide details of how that city had
controlled their polluted streams. The writer had provided all of the
information to the City Council during the previous nine years, but
they had shown no interest in the inexpensive, simple solution of
building a small, concrete-lined ditch to permit the creek to flow
rapidly into an old mill dam
A letter writer advocates against the proposed bond measure for the sewage plant as the residents were taxed enough.
A letter writer praises the President for going after the "stinking rat" Communists in Korea but says bitterly that it should have been done in 1945, that the country should have let Hitler do it. He wants to do all in the country's power to "exterminate" any Communists in the country and deport anyone affiliated with Communism to Devil's Island for the rest of their lives.
Anything else you want to say? Sieg heil?
Learn the historical fact that without Russia in the fight against Hitler, especially during the tenuous and critical period of mid-1941 through 1942 when America was busy building up its forces, the war might well have been lost to the Axis. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply ignorant of history—as this writer repeatedly betrays. It is not a debatable point.
And for goodness sake, don't spout off that nonsense of Patton spouting off at the end of the war that he could stimulate a pretextual war with Russia. Had the country's leaders then been so foolish as to go down that road, with it would have gone the U.N., the country's worldwide reputation, probably resulting in a hot war, instead of a cold one, for 44 years or longer, with the last country standing being in shambles and bankruptcy, while the Germans stood by laughing at the fray, hoping to reign ultimately victorious after the Russo-American war. That type of stupidity is what we need to "exterminate".
A letter from the chairman of the advisory council for the Charlotte chapter of the Order of DeMolay thanks the newspaper for its support during the prior year.
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