The Charlotte News
Saturday, July 22, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that fresh American troops had moved into the lines east of fallen Taejon this date and artillery had begun shooting the supply roads and attack routes expected to be used by the North Koreans when they continued their attempted drive southward. Some Americans had dug into a railway line east of Taejon and sent out patrols to detect the locations of North Korean troops.
A.P. correspondent O. H. P. King, covering the Taejon area, described the air of the new troops as "electric with expectation".
Other American forces on the east coast captured Yongdok and pushed forward to new and more favorable positions outside the town.
A communique from MacArthur headquarters said that the Taejon-Yongdong axis was relatively quiet on Saturday.
Overcast skies prevented aerial bombing by U.S. planes, probably enabling the North Koreans to regroup faster than usual. It had taken two days after the the crossing of the Kum River for them to regroup for their attack on Taejon.
There was still no word on Maj. General William Dean, missing since Thursday, and he was officially listed as missing in action and possibly wounded. He had personally led the defense of Taejon. In fact, he had been captured by the North Koreans and would be held prisoner until the end of the war.
William R. Moore reports from a 24th Division command post that more than 200 American soldiers had walked 50 miles from fallen Taejon along trails in Communist-infested mountains, reaching the command post safely this date. Almost all of the men had blistered feet. Three men had no shoes and one of them had walked shoeless for 33 miles. Some of the men had been forced to creep across rice fields while under enemy automatic fire. Almost all had witnessed the killing of close friends during the confused close-quarters fighting after North Korean troops broke through the Taejon defense line. Seven of the men in the first wave arriving at the post were wounded. A colonel reported having started the 50-mile journey with 80 men but finishing with only 25 as most had dropped out from exhaustion. Three times, they had fought off Communist attacks in the hills. One group of enemy soldiers had called out in English not to shoot them as they were "friendly", then opened fire, killing four of the Americans and wounding four others. One tired soldier had drowned crossing a river only a few miles away from the command post. One man had lost all of his clothes except his undershorts while crossing the river.
The Far Eastern Air Force reported that bombing by B-29's had slowed down shipment of Communist military supplies to the front. The first massive raid of 50 B-29's had occurred on July 13 in poor weather over Wonsan, port city in North Korea, hitting more than 50 percent of the warehouse and dock area.
The House Armed Services Committee, like its Senate counterpart, had voted the previous day to lift the ceiling of two million men in the armed forces. Present strength was pegged at about 1.4 million men, plus 932,000 reservists, some units of which had just been activated.
Chinese Communists began shelling
the island of Quemoy
In St. John's, Newfoundland, a weekly newspaper reported that Russian submarines had been spotted surfacing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Other sightings of unidentified submarines had been made in other Atlantic provinces, on George's Banks in Nova Scotia some weeks earlier, and near Saint John, New Brunswick, earlier in the week. It was the first report of possible Russian submarines on the East Coast, though many sightings had been made off the Pacific Coast.
Senator Tom Connally said that he did not expect the President to make any immediate request for additional foreign military aid beyond the 1.222 billion just authorized by Congress.
The President ordered 14 Federal agencies to curb construction, tighten credit and hold down buying of items made from critical war materials.
The Army announced that it was negotiating with Cadillac Motors to build tanks.
The U.S. and Great Britain signed a 25-year agreement for joint use of a secret installation in the Bahamas for tracking and controlling American guided missiles.
In Brussels, King Leopold III, following a favorable plebiscite and a favorable vote by the parliament, was out of exile and called for all Belgians to unite and end the bitter struggle which had arisen over his restoration to the throne, from which he had been absent since 1945 for the facts that he was considered responsible for selling out Belgium to the Nazis in 1940 and that he had married a commoner after the war. He had landed at a heavily guarded airport without any greeting. Only a few people were present besides the 8,000 military guards. The Socialists and Liberals immediately demanded that the King abdicate.
On the editorial page, "Of Greed and Selfishness" condemns those who would hoard in time of war and urges the community to shun and scorn such persons as callously placing themselves above the nation. Hoarding would create artificial shortages, leading to the necessity for strict price controls, rationing, and allocation controls, and the expenditure of national effort then to enforce the restrictions.
"Paying As We Fight" thinks a tax hike wise, to put the nation on a pay-as-you-go basis for the war. Higher taxes would not only contribute directly to the war effort but would also assure against inflationary spending. It also hopes that excess profits taxes would be restored to take the profit out of war.
It recommends that the Congress review as well all domestic spending and cut it to the bone. Senator Harry F. Byrd had recommended a two to three billion dollar non-defense spending cut and the piece agrees that such ought be done.
"A Reservoir of Strength" praises the courage of the reservists who had volunteered to remain on the reserve rolls despite the knowledge that in the event of war, they would be the first to be called up, before draftees.
"Peering at the Peerage" finds that the "London Staff" of the Manchester Guardian had reported that high taxes in Britain had caused the upper crust to have to forsake proper care of their estates. A committee recommended that the Government grant tax relief to designated houses, should the owners allow the public to tour them.
The piece finds such necessitous lengths of preservation more distressing than having the great homes of England decaying to ruin for high taxes, and wonders whether anything was any longer sacred.
A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "The Weather and the Pulpit", tells of the pastor of the First Methodist Church in Morganton, having heard of the local policemen suffering in 98-degree heat in their year-round uniforms, stating that people would be free to attend his church without ties and with their collars open. He found no need for people to swelter unnecessarily from the heat of summer.
The piece applauds the pastor's sympathy for the sweating parishioners.
Drew Pearson finds it regrettable that the best officers available for war were not being used in Korea, such as Maj. General Graves Erskine, who headed the First Division of Marines being sent to Korea, but under the command of its assistant commander, Brig. General Edward Craig. Another such officer was General James Van Fleet, who had gleaned, as no other military commander, an understanding of guerrilla warfare from his experience in Greece.
Meanwhile, the ground commander in Korea, General Walton Walker, was slow and methodical in his approach to warfare, as detailed by Mr. Pearson's prewar writing partner, Robert S. Allen, who had served as a colonel under General Patton, and told of General Walker's sloth in his book Lucky Forward. General Patton had once bawled out General Walker for not fighting fast enough.
Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma wondered why he was receiving support from Oklahoman dry leaders when he had a reputation as a hard-fisted drinker.
Mr. Pearson imparts that the Senator had sent an emissary to New York to buy for him soy bean oil, lard and shortening oil, as those items would go up in price because of the war. Trading via surrogates in commodities, the prices of which his speeches could affect, was one of the Senator's favorite pastimes.
Stuart Symington, head of the National Security Resources Board, and thus in charge of war mobilization, had chosen Bob Smith of Texas, head of Pioneer Airlines, as his vice-chair, turning aside requests from labor that he appoint one of their representatives. Mr. Symington said that he would have labor leaders recommend someone from labor to be his assistant. Mr. Symington was greatly impressed by the dedication shown by the heads of the UAW and International Electrical Workers Union to fight Communism and praised them for it.
Mr. Pearson notes that some had wondered whether the appointment of Mr. Smith signaled that Texas would receive a disproportionate share of war contracts, a practice followed when Jesse Jones had been in charge of war plant financing at RFC during the war. Mr. Symington assured that it would not be the case, as few war plants were to be built, that the Willow Run plant, now operated by Kaiser Automotive, would not be needed unless a global war repeated. Mr. Symington was talking to such places as Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where there were 40,000 unemployed, with a view toward putting new war industry in those areas.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop applaud the President's candor in telling Congress and the American people of the need for an additional ten billion dollars as an initial installment on increased defense spending for the Korean war and to shore up defenses at home, plus another three to four billion for the military aid program abroad. They stress that an estimated four billion of the ten billion would be devoted merely to correcting course, after sixteen months of economy on defense practiced by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. The Alsops proceed to explain how their estimate was reached.
It would take at least 18 months to train new infantrymen for the Army and it would take years to transform the tank force into the modern force needed.
Given the waste of time and money caused by the economizing of Mr. Johnson, the Alsops again question his fitness to remain as Secretary of Defense in time of war.
Robert C. Ruark tells of having read a piece in the Saturday Evening Post by military expert and graduate of Annapolis, Hanson Baldwin, which had disturbed him for the fact that Mr. Baldwin appraised the American fighting soldier as being not on par in terms of the dedication shown in World War II by the German fighting man, seeking martyrdom in a Wagnerian operatic tragedy, or the Japanese, fighting for his place in a Shinto Valhalla. The Communists, too, had an ideological dedication to the fight which the American soldier lacked. The American, wedded to materialism and a spoiled way of life, fought only to get home and for blueberry pie.
Mr. Ruark begs to differ with Mr. Baldwin, finds that the American system was implicitly being compared to totalitarian states where collective security trumped all individual security for the preservation of the state. Mr. Ruark would take someone who fought to get home over someone seeking a "nebulous hall of fame, away off in the clouds somewhere." Wishing to stay alive, he asserts, should not be a blotch on the good soldier.
Mr. Ruark says that he had finished the war as a Navy lieutenant, senior grade, and, though winning no medals for his service, had seen enough of combat to understand that unwilling heroes who won that they might return to what Mr. Baldwin—who also said in July, 1939 that Hawaii, and specifically the Army-Navy base at Pearl Harbor, was impregnable, that "it could hold out against any force Japan might send against it for months"—had called "the weakening virus of work less and make more" were preferable to those fanatics who fought only to lose the hard way, as had the Nazis and Japanese.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Senator Frank Graham having expressed wonder as to why William H. Hastie, the first black jurist, having earlier served on the Virgin Islands Federal District Court, nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals, having been tapped for a seat on the Third Circuit nine months earlier, had not yet been confirmed when a subcommittee had recommended confirmation and other nominees so recommended at about the same time had long since been confirmed.
Judge Hastie had vague allegations surrounding him for having belonged in the past to "subversive" organizations, as he identified with groups fighting racial discrimination, some of which were said to have Communist influence. Senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Forrest Donnell of Missouri had asked him pointed questions at his confirmation hearing. But in the end, Senator Donnell said that Senator Graham had analyzed the situation for him, causing him to vote for confirmation. Only Senator Eastland voted against Judge Hastie, and so Senator Graham had been able to break an impasse on the Judiciary Committee which had lasted nine months. Judge Hastie was confirmed by the full Senate on July 19. (Mr. Schlesinger, incidentally, who passed away in 1983 at age 61, was the younger brother of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)
Senator Graham had said that if one were sincere, other Senators would trust.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had told intimates that Senator Graham had been almost singlehandedly responsible for getting the electoral college revision amendment Senator Lodge had proposed out of committee, where Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada had sought to bottle it up for months. The amendment, to allocate electoral votes proportionally on the basis of the popular vote in each state, had passed the Senate but then was defeated during the present week by the House, which voted for it by a majority but not the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment to go to the states for ratification.
The North Carolina delegation voted in favor of the amendment, with the exception of two members who abstained.
Playwright Paul Green, who had written the drama on the life of George Washington for the Sesquicentennial celebration of the nation's capital, praised the new Rock Creek theater built for its presentation as the best-equipped outdoor theater in the nation.
Senator Clyde Hoey, who had been slated to be the lead-off man in the Senate filibuster of the FEPC bill, made unnecessary by the failure in advance to obtain the 64 votes necessary for cloture, could now file his note cards away for the future. He never spoke from a prepared script.
Congressman C. B. Deane of North Carolina, upon his return the prior November from the Far East, had told the President that the situation in Korea was "explosive".
We saw a group of Trumpie morons a few days ago on one of the "fake news" networks, discussing their continued loyalty to the "President" for whom they voted, finding that everything was just great after nearly six months since he had taken office and that he was doing a splendid job. They cited more jobs being created and lower gas prices, plus a higher stock market, as the basis for their feeling that everything was just hunky-dory compared to the last President's term in office.
But the facts are that gas prices, according to the AAA, are actually higher across the nation, by about a dime per gallon, than one year ago, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs created during the first half of 2017 are on par exactly with those created during the first six months of last year and are substantially fewer than created during the first halves of 2015 and 2014. The Dow is about 3,000 points higher than when this "President" was "elected" last November, but had shot up from about 8,000 to 18,000, 125 percent, under President Obama. A short term gain in the market is predicated on optimism from having a pro-business Administration in office, and has nothing to do with real-world performance of that Administration or the economy, itself, thus far. It is not known just how the markets will respond in the long-term to a failing "President" who is under investigation for potentially impeachable offenses—by no means the minor things which these idiots on the "fake news" network believed them to be, saying, essentially, "So what if he colluded with the Russians to rig the election; America does the same thing abroad," as if that made any sense. Moreover, stock market response has little to do with anyone except those with large stock portfolios, often does not translate into more jobs in the modern economy, driven by technology more than manufacturing. And short-term bubbles, spikes in the market, are more likely to burst than a long-term relatively steady climb, as during the eight years of President Obama.
Being an uninformed, Fox News-brainwashed adult dummy is no way to go through life, basing one's world view on abstracted "alternative facts". So, as a public service
Then again, since everything on CNN, from which this report emanated, is "fake news", we suppose we do not need to regard those opinions as occurring in reality. Those people were probably actors hired to say those things, just to make the Trumpies look dumb.
It worked. It was good acting.
The reason there were uncommitted or "independent" Democratic electors on the Alabama ballot was because of the spring primary in that state. These electors had hoped, in a close electoral college count, which did not materialize, that they could, along with Mississippi's eight independent electors—as explained in the far left column of page two
There were, as usual for Alabama at the time, two slates consisting of eleven electors for each party, one Democratic and the other Republican. But the Democratic electors were divided as five "Loyal Democratic" electors, who were pledged to vote for Senator Kennedy, and six "Independent Democratic" electors, who voted in the electoral college ultimately for Senator Byrd, but were unpledged on election day in 1960 and in no way distinguished from other Democratic electors on the ballot. The final vote total for Democratic electors was 324,050, of which 318,303 were cast for the top vote-getting Loyal Democratic elector, thus logically providing at least that number of popular votes to the Kennedy popular vote column.
What the revisionist factistas seek to do is either throw out the Alabama Democratic popular votes completely, as being too confusing, or apportion them in a distorted manner such that Senator Kennedy receives only 5/11ths of the 324,050 total Democratic votes, since he received only five of eleven electoral votes, ignoring the backward nature of this apportionment and the fact that the split of electors and the general election popular vote are not correlative. For the reason for the five-six split of the state's electors was not based on the general election vote totals for electors, as the listed totals show in the above-linked November 10, 1960 Tuscaloosa News article, but rather on the spring Democratic primary, as explained in the same piece. There had been 35 candidates for elector in the primary, of which eleven were "loyal" Democrats, eleven were Dixiecrats, and thirteen were independent. A runoff was necessitated among the 20 of 21 top vote-getting electors after only one of the electors, a Dixiecrat, achieved the necessary majority in the initial primary. The runoff concluded with five more Dixiecrat electors being elected along with five "loyal" Democrats, resulting in the five-six
The ballot for the general election looked like this sample from Jefferson County, encompassing Birmingham. Obviously, the bulk of the Democratic voters, roughly 318,000, voted a straight ticket of Democratic electors, while some 6,000 went to the voting booth with a newspaper sheet explaining which electors were "loyal" and which "independent", voting then only for the independent Democrats, explaining the disparity, hardly a rational basis for apportioning the Democratic popular vote.
To apportion the popular votes in the manner suggested after the fact is to ignore that the top vote-getting Loyal Democratic elector, pledged to Senator Kennedy, received 318,303 votes in the Alabama general election, as opposed to the top vote-getting Republican elector receiving 237,981, thus awarded to the Nixon national popular vote total. It is to make an implicit but false assumption that the predetermined slate of independent Democratic electors formed essentially a third party slate rather than still being Democrats and thus attracting Democratic votes to the exclusion of the Republican electors. The votes for electors are overlapping and not cumulative, as each voter could vote for up to eleven electors. Apparently, cross-party voting for electors was permitted in the general election in Alabama.
Since the top vote-getting Democratic elector was one of the independent Democrats who ultimately voted for Senator Byrd, the revisionistas would, no doubt, raise the question why the entire popular vote for that elector would not be awarded to Senator Byrd or to an "uncommitted" category, leaving Senator Kennedy with no popular votes from Alabama, or at least no better than the aforementioned 5/11ths apportioned total, thus allowing the final national popular vote total to show a Nixon victory. The answer is that Senator Byrd was not a third party nominee with his own slate of eleven electors, and Senator Kennedy was the Democratic Party nominee, thus the only party-sanctioned candidate to receive Democratic electoral votes, rendering the six independent electors "faithless", without any basis derived from the general election popular vote on which to assert their independence. They did not run as a separate slate, independent of party label or under the Dixiecrat ticket, as in 1948 with Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright legally on the ballot instead of President Truman and Alben Barkley, and carrying the eleven Alabama electoral votes.
The entire slate of eleven electors is elected, in this case, all Democrats, not just the top vote-getter among them. The six independent Democratic electors only subsequently voted for Senator Byrd and were not associated with him on the ballot, as they could not be legally, and as no elector was associated with any presidential candidate, only the party. It would have actually made more sense to give to Senator Kennedy, therefore, the entire 324,050 Democratic votes, rather than only the 318,303.
So, this revisionist "argument" winds up an interesting waste of time. The author of one of the above-referenced factista pieces, incidentally, is not Ronald L. Ziegler
The wild goose
Framed Edition
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