The Charlotte News

Friday, July 28, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an estimated nine divisions of North Koreans troops, consisting of 90,000 men, had launched an attack on the American divisions holding the line in the southeast corner of the peninsula. The heaviest attacks had been in the west-central sector, northeast and southeast of Yongdong. MacArthur headquarters said that "a savage fire fight" was in progress, with concentrated assaults on the U.S. First Cavalry Division area southeast of Yongdong. Twenty miles further northeast, elements of the North Korean 15th Division drove a small wedge between the U.S. 25th Division and the South Korean Sixth Division near Ichon village. Efforts were being made to restore the breach. (Starting this date, all 1950 maps of the war published on the front pages of The News are available via the button at the top of the page.)

A First Cavalry Division spokesman said that the battle covered the entire 200-mile front and that the battle was critical, especially over the ensuing few days as the North Koreans could not continue to fight a war of attrition because of their increasing supply problems. The fighting was taking place without much allied air support because of overcast and rainy weather. The Americans had sought to block the corridor to Taegu, the temporary South Korean capital and supply line hub 45 miles east of Yongdong and 40 miles above Pusan, the vital supply port.

The attack was being waged under the heaviest enemy mortar and artillery cover of the war. A veteran of both Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge said that he had never seen so much enemy artillery. American artillery was responding.

An American counter-attack had been made to ease pressure on the central sector, but A. P. correspondent O. H. P. King reported that it was not on the scale originally ordered and no immediate word was available on how it had fared.

Tom Lambert, with the 25th Division, reports that the enemy drive had begun in the center of the line before dawn, at 3:00 a.m., and the counterattack took place in a driving rain during the morning. The fight forced a withdrawal from the regimental command post.

In the far south of the peninsula, the enemy forces gained another ten miles along undefended roads, to carry them to within about 60 miles of Pusan.

B-29's hit North Korean communications for the sixth straight day, as bad weather cut down on effective fighter support of ground troops in the battle zone. The B-29's observed a jammed up North Korean rail yard between Pyongyang and Wonsan resulting from the previous day's raids. They hit the target again, as well as a rail-highway bridge. No allied planes were reported lost.

Hal Boyle, at an advanced "hot spot", reports to the veteran of World War II how things were in Korea, saying that the main need was for more men to win a quick decision, that with enough men, victory would be inevitable.

The Army boosted its September draft call from 20,000 to 50,000 and said it would call up another 50,000 in October. Even that would fall short of bringing manpower to the 800,000-man goal. On June 30, manpower had stood at 591,000. The goal for total military strength was just over 1.9 million within the ensuing few months and 2.3 million by the following June.

Senator Lyndon Johnson said that his military oversight committee would maintain a hands-off approach to free busy military men and other officials from having to appear before Congress.

The Senate Banking Committee was considering the plan of Bernard Baruch to grant immediate authority for implementing wage and price controls and hoped to vote on it later in the day. The House Banking Committee had defeated the plan by one vote the previous day.

President Syngman Rhee of South Korea promised via radio broadcast that soon the Northerners would be pushed back.

At the U.N., diplomats were divided and puzzled over Russia's actions, whether it meant the end of its six-month boycott of the Security Council over the failure to admit Communist China and unseat the Nationalists. Russia stated its intent to challenge on the following Tuesday the legality of the Security Council's Korean resolution, which was passed without the presence of Russia. Several possibilities were being considered, including that it was merely a propaganda drive or that the Soviets were planning another aggressive move, either in the Balkans or against Formosa, and wanted to be around to veto any U.N. action against it. U.S. chief delegate Warren Austin said that he would have no comment until he went to his home in Vermont and consulted an old apple tree.

J. Edgar Hoover recommended to the public that they call the FBI as soon as they spotted any sign of sabotage but not to impart malicious gossip or idle rumors, nor what a person thought might be the case.

In Chicago, a woman of 32, who had been married at 14, had become a grandmother, as her 17-year old daughter gave birth to a daughterwho was threatened with making her grandmother great any day.

On the editorial page, "The President's Tax Message" finds that the President's tax message, seeking five billion dollars in increased taxes to prevent inflation by draining surplus purchasing power and to pay for the cost of additional defense, would not fully accomplish either goal.

Rolling back individual income taxes to 1945 levels would provide about three of the five billion sought, a wise policy, thinks the piece. But, as the New York Times had found, there was a disproportionate burden being borne by the upper 5.1 percent of taxpayers, who paid almost as much tax as the remaining 94.9 percent combined, though the upper level income amounted to a total of only about one-fourth of that of the remainder of the taxpayers. That ratio would not be changed by rolling back individual taxes to 1945 levels. Moreover, it was in the lower brackets where the greatest tendency to purchase existed and so greater taxation should occur there to accomplish the goal of stemming purchasing power.

The President's suggested scale for corporations appeared fair but might not go far enough.

Unless the Congress would be willing to reduce non-defense expenditures, unlikely in an election year, the deficit would likely become at least 9.5 billion dollars, four billion more than previously estimated for the 1950-51 fiscal year. Added to that might be as much as five billion more for foreign military aid.

It urges the Congress to put aside political considerations and devote their time and attention to maintaining the national economy during the war.

The piece neglects to realize that the upper income brackets, individually, still had substantially more absolute income at their disposal, obviously, after taxes, than the lower brackets, individually. Thus, as the piece appears implicitly to favor, imposing a higher tax burden on the lower brackets to compensate for some of the disparity in taxation would not only drive down consumer purchasing power but might conceivably produce a recession. The 1945 wartime standard was deemed, without requiring study, an adequate quick fix to avoid inflation during the Korean war because there had been no significant economic problem during World War II, albeit with wage and price controls in effect and few consumer goods made from steel or other crucial war materials, as automobiles and refrigerators, being produced to be purchased by consumers, who were, in consequence, with wartime wages higher than normal, able to save and invest, usually through the purchase of war bonds. And the Korean war was not a world war and was therefore not expected to produce the same kind of strains on the economic system as had the world war or to last nearly as long.

"Saturday's Bond Election—IV" supports the fourth of the four bond issues on the ballot the next day, this one, for 1.5 million dollars, to develop underpasses in roadways for railroad tracks to avoid congestion downtown at certain intersections. The matter had been a problem for nearly a hundred years.

"The End of the Controversy" tells of a judge, in the Latta Park recreation center controversy, opposed by local residents as a nuisance, having ruled that the Parks and Recreation Commission had authority to erect buildings and that if the building proved a nuisance in the future, then future proceedings would need to be held. So construction could proceed.

The piece finds sympathy for nearby residents but states that such facilities were, by their nature, going to create some nuisance in terms of noise and extra traffic for a neighborhood. But their benefits outweighed their downside.

Drew Pearson tells of General Walter Bedell Smith imparting to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee how a Russian propaganda film, "Rusky Vaprosk", an indictment of the American press and foreign policy, had backfired. It had played in 500 theaters throughout the Soviet Union but lasted only two weeks. The reason was that the pictures of the poor tenement housing from the U.S., represented as the average American dwelling, showed housing superior to the average Russian dwelling. A picture was shown of the Westchester home of a journalist who supposedly had lost his job for writing something favorable about the Soviet Union. But the audience was only interested in the modern appliances in his home.

Large amounts of money were pouring into Senate primaries, the latest being in New Hampshire, where Senator Charles Tobey was facing a challenge from former Senate secretary to Senator Styles Bridges, Wesley Powell, the latter having an abundance of funding for the campaign despite resigning his job a year earlier and having no visible means of support otherwise. There were a number of people upset with Senator Tobey, including former DNC treasurer Ed Pauley for Senator Tobey having led the attack to derail his nomination as Undersecretary of the Navy in 1946, and David Sarnoff of RCA, whose operations the Senator had once exposed. Another was Textron Corporation, also investigated by the Senator.

Senator Guy Gillette had been requested to investigate campaign funding in the state but it was unlikely that he would do anything as he was too easy-going and Senator Tobey had once ruffled his feathers in 1940, when Senator Tobey wanted to investigate Boss Frank Hague's machine in Jersey City, but the White House had told Senator Gillette to lay off.

National Security Resources Board chairman Stuart Symington, in charge of economic and industrial mobilization for the war effort, planned to vest authority in individual existing departments, as Labor and Commerce, rather than creating new bureaus. While sensible on its face, a drawback was that the departments had the interests of particular sectors of the economy in mind rather than the interests of all and thus the Labor Department might have trouble fairly mediating a wartime wage dispute, or Agriculture, with the interests of the farmer in mind, might have a bias against keeping food prices down for consumers. Another drawback was that many departmental employees were scattered about the country, making it difficult to deal with such things as allocation priorities or price controls. But since the war might taper off by the coming winter, Mr. Symington believed it foolish to build up large bureaus.

Marquis Childs discusses the need for positive and truthful propaganda for the U.S. to counter that being put forth by the Soviets, including carrying through with the information and education service established for the military six months earlier but not yet implemented by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. The President had even appointed a committee on religion and welfare for the armed forces.

Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune reported of having found that among enlisted men and some younger officers there was a lack of knowledge as to why America was fighting in Korea or for what they were fighting. An officer to whom Mr. Bigart had talked estimated that a fourth of his men were barely literate, with the equivalent of a fifth-grade education.

The information and education program was essential to establishing morale in the military by informing the men on the root causes of the war as well as the basic concept of democracy versus that of Communism.

Robert C. Ruark discusses the tendency in the modern military to coddle soldiers during training, developed from the numerous complaints emerging during and after World War II regarding treatment of the enlisted men by the officers. He finds it to be the rresult of a mother standing guard over her son by writing a complaint to her Congressman or Senators after receiving a complaining letter from the son re his treatment.

In consequence, sergeants were supposed to give orders by first saying "please" and were never supposed to violate the civil liberties of the enlisted men. Democracy was now the rule in the military.

There were bad officers and bad enlisted men but someone, he asserts, had to give orders and, based on his Navy experience during the war, there was no room in combat situations for democracy or equality between officers and enlisted men. The men who were coddled during training would have a lesser chance of survival during combat.

During the war, he imparts, the soldiers had an axiom: keep your mouth shut, your digestion in good order, and never volunteer for anything. To that the French Foreign Legion had added the advice to respect all sergeants and realize that when things were bad, one had to refrain from making them worse, as the chances were that they were bad enough already. He recommends to the fighting men to keep these basic rules in mind and forget about the sergeant tucking them in each night and giving them a kiss while a "motherly psychiatrist" hovered nearby.

But we instruct the "President", who today told some police officers not to be "too nice" with arrestees, that we are not in combat in this country and the streets are not a war zone. The more you stimulate and condone that sort of mentality, already running rampant in the country, the more you stimulate bloodshed of the type which appears regularly in the news where an improperly trained police officer who perhaps lacks the self-control from the start to be a street-duty officer, becomes shaky in a situation which does not merit it and shoots first and asks questions later, too often ending the life of someone who was only an innocent bystander at a wrong address or the complaining party who called the police.

That statement of the "President" is not only foolish, as with most of his statements, but is reprehensibly dangerous to every citizen's safety and Constitutional rights, especially in the current atmosphere. For implicit in the statement, in which he elaborated that he does not favor giving head cover to a suspect accused of murder as officers place that person in the squad car, is that the officers on the streets are to be judge and jury of the suspect's guilt or innocence. It conveys to his political base the notion that all arrestees are guilty or they would not be arrested in the first place, at the instance of complaining parties and police possessed of unassailable judgment, perception, and credibility.

So the next time you read of an innocent, unarmed person getting shot or killed by a police officer, think of these outrageous and politically motivated remarks by the "President" and realize that he not only condones it but encourages it.

The job of a police officer, under stress in the streets on patrol duty in a large city or urban area, is hard enough without the "President" telling young, inexperienced officers that it is quite alright to take out their inevitable frustrations in "not too nice" treatment of suspects who are "guilty", obviously thereby actually encouraging illegal conduct. To the great credit of the particular department before whom he made the remarks, it thereafter issued a statement saying that it would not tolerate or condone roughing up prisoners. The best thing for police officers generally to do is ignore this "President", no matter what he says. That way you can stay out of trouble with vigilant attorneys who will now be looking that much more carefully at your actions because of the "President's" crazy and irresponsible advice.

Of course, what he and his staff are desperately trying to do is create distractions for the press to pursue, apart from the story regarding Russia's involvement in impacting the 2016 U.S. election and his campaign's direct ties to it. He signed the bill on sanctions against Russia, which he had actively opposed, only because the vote in both houses for it was so overwhelming that it was a veto-proof majority.

A letter writer from Pinehurst compliments the newspaper for its editorials, "In Which Credit Is Given", from July 19, and "Of Greed and Selfishness", from July 22. Since the June 24 primary when the state had rejected Senator Frank Graham, whom he regards as a man of outstanding ability and integrity, many things had happened. The Korean war had begun the following day.

On June 30, Dick Young, Sr., (who, we correct, was the former city editor of the newspaper), had exposed victor Willis Smith's great weakness. Tom Fesperman of The News had asked Mr. Smith for his opinion on Korea and he responded that he had been so busy with the campaign that he had not had a chance to assess it. The writer finds that unbelievable, as the crisis was only part of the overall Communist picture and something of the kind had been expected for nearly five years. He wonders whether Mr. Smith did not approve of the President's reaction and, instead, favored appeasement of Russia.

A few days later, Senator Graham had given his full appraisal of the situation while one of the spokesmen for Mr. Smith lashed out at the U.N. Mr. Smith, himself, had still said nothing about the crisis.

Hodding Carter, writing in Collier's a year earlier, had said that he did not know what Frank Graham's magic formula was but that his influence extended through his students and his own activities throughout the South and beyond.

Tom Schlesinger, on July 22, had explained how the Senator had twice recently broken deadlocks in committees, once to get the electoral college reform amendment to the floor for a vote and the other time to bring the nomination of William H. Hastie to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to the floor for confirmation.

Moreover, there appeared no compromise available from Mr. Smith in favor of civil rights as there would have been from Senator Graham.

Finally, he comments on a letter of June 30, in which comparison was made between the Senate race and a World Series in which the Philadelphia Athletics had beaten the New York Giants. He notes that the analogy, however, broke down because the Athletics had conducted themselves in a sportsmanlike manner in the process.

Perhaps it was unfortunate that in neither event there was an earthquake intervening to topple the MacArthur Freewaythough we feel constrained to add out of sensitivity to victims, of whom but for serendipitous circumstances we might have been one, that we mean the latter in a purely figurative and not literal sense.

A letter from the chairman of the American Legion convention committee thanks the newspaper for its support of the convention, which had taken place in the city between June 24 and 27.

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