The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 10, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a small, tank-led American and French force had fought through North Korean troops this date into the key rail and road center of Wonju, previously abandoned on Monday by the allies, and found the town empty. Allied intelligence informed, however, that the enemy had as many as 280,000 troops, 500 Chinese planes and 200 tanks amassed further north, poised for a big push into the heart of South Korea. Censorship obscured the details of the fight for Wonju, except that it involved the American Second Division, supported by French troops, attacking a strong enemy position and that the Communists had counter-attacked in force but an attempt to outflank the allies had been beaten back. The artillery barrage against the enemy was increased but bad weather curtailed air support for the second straight day.

By nightfall, a small American task force still occupied the town, 45 miles south of the 38th parallel. The attack was the largest by the allies in several days. The allied commander said that his men were in contact with the enemy and intended to "give them hell".

General MacArthur's official spokesman denied that there was any truth to the rumor, printed by correspondent Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, that the General had recommended to the Pentagon complete withdrawal of the allies from Korea.

Secretary of Defense Marshall and Assistant Secretary Anna Rosenberg outlined a proposal to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee for drafting 450,000 eighteen-year olds for 27 months of service. Ms. Rosenberg said that unless this provision were enacted, the Defense Department would have to ask Congress for authorization to draft young married men, including those with children, to meet military requirements. The program would take those eighteen-year olds nearest their nineteenth birthdays and deferments might be granted to the youngest 600,000 additional men who would turn 18 by the end of the current fiscal year. Under present law, the draft age was 19 and service was limited to 21 months. Secretary Marshall favored drafting of the young men for actual combat. The subcommittee was chaired by Senator Lyndon Johnson.

If it passes, you can go out in the street and carry a little sign and chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

Guess, when RMN was elected in '68, it didn't rhyme anymore, did it? you sorry little racist Republican son-of-a-bitch.

Secretary of State Acheson said at a press conference that he would be glad to discuss foreign policy with Senator Taft or any other Republican member of Congress. He also said that while failure of the U.N. to resolve the Korean crisis would diminish the prestige of the organization, it would not wreck it. He said that a new note would issue very soon from the Big Three regarding the proposed Big Four meeting with Russia, recently accepted by Russia but on terms unacceptable to the U.S., limiting issues to be discussed to Germany. He said that there were no differences on the matter between the U.S., Britain and France.

Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder said that the President, in his economic message to Congress to be delivered Monday, would call for increases in taxes to balance the budget in the 1951-52 fiscal year. There were indications elsewhere that as much as 20 billion dollars in new taxes, or a hike of 40 percent, would be necessary.

John L. Lewis told the wage stabilization board that the UMW opposed any wage freeze.

In New York, four brothers, ages 12 to 24, awaited death from muscular dystrophy. Ten years earlier, the second oldest, 21, had found it increasingly difficult to climb stairs and was diagnosed with the crippling disease, which would eventually attack the respiratory system causing death. The oldest brother found out he had it only after serving in the Pacific during the war. Their only hope was their family physician who was trying all of the new remedies on the four brothers to try to give them strength again. Their mother hoped for a cure, and there was no air of gloom in the home.

In Pontiac, Mich., quadruplets were born, two boys and two girls. All four and the mother were doing fine. The father, a stone mason, said, "Oh, boy," when told of the news.

In Durham, Eng., a three-year old girl received a new set of dentures for her birthday. After she had lost her baby teeth prematurely, she was toothless because her adult teeth would not normally begin to appear until she turned six or so.

In Rome, novelist Sinclair Lewis died at age 65, following a prolonged illness. Among his most prominent works were Babbitt, Main Street, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, It Can't Happen Here, and Kingsblood Royal. In 1930, he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature, four years after rejecting the Pulitzer Prize because of his disagreement with Joseph Pulitzer's will setting up the prize. His 21st and last book, The God-Seeker, had been published in 1949.

In Raleigh, two State Senators proposed a State constitutional amendment to allow the vote for 18-year olds. Another Senator proposed a measure to forbid palmistry and fortune-telling, and the practice of clairvoyance for money, with violators to be fined $500 or imprisoned up to a year, or both.

Does that mean that the weather forecasters and sports prognosticators will be going to jail?

No, you can't start making convenient exceptions, just to abide your invidiously discriminatory prejudices.

Free the palmists, now!

On the editorial page, "Urban Development" hopes that the negative attitude of the Mecklenburg County delegation to the General Assembly toward urban redevelopment was the product of misunderstanding. The 1949 Assembly had not authorized North Carolina cities to partake of an established Federal fund for the purpose and it hopes that the 1951 Legislature would. The fund was extant and so there was nothing to lose by supporting a bill to enable use of it, as favored by the League of Municipalities and the Real Estate Boards of the state.

"A Gift in Character" lauds the gift by David Ovens to Davidson College of $100,000, to be used to build a new student union. Mr. Ovens, Charlotte's Man of the Year, principally responsible for the planning of the new coliseum-auditorium complex to be constructed on Independence Boulevard, had given, the prior month, $250,000 to Queens College.

"North Carolina Speechways" recommends Bill Sharpe's Tar on My Heels, a collection of vernacular accumulated during his time as chief publicist for the State, but quibbles with his reference to "smidglin'". The word, it insists, was "smidgin", albeit tolerant of variant spellings without the "l"—which, it allows, may have occurred in the book from a printer's error.

It picks at H. L. Mencken's American Language, Supplement Two from 1948 for having omitted too many colloquialisms from the North Carolina mountains and Outer Banks, such as antigodlin, meaning sigodlin, wheewhaw, or set not true to its foundations. And while including lap-baby, Mr. Mencken had omitted porch-child and yard-baby, both included by Mr. Sharpe. Nor had Mr. Mencken included jimswinger, a coat considered improper for hangings by North Carolina sheriffs.

Mr. Sharpe had explained that cousin meant a political ally in North Carolina, that country on the Outer Banks referred to the mainland, that shoe-around was a dance, fatback, the menhaden.

And so on and on forth.

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Crippled Traders", comments on a Supreme Court case decided January 2, which said that competitors could not agree to fix maximum or minimum resale prices. It arose out of Indiana which allowed price-fixing under certain circumstances. Under fair trade laws, manufacturers could establish minimum resale prices and those who sold below the price violated the agreement.

The piece concludes that legal price-fixing to hold prices up was no better than illegal price-fixing, but when legal price-fixing occurred, the consumer was the fall guy.

Compare and distinguish the result in the Standard Oil case decided the previous Monday.

Drew Pearson tells of the trouble between the President and Senator Taft on foreign policy having been susceptible of avoidance had the President not allowed his advisers to talk him out of a personal conference with the Senator, which the Senator had sought. Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of Defense Marshall had desired the conference as conducive to bipartisanship, but the other advisers believed it a political trick by the Senator. In the end, Senator Taft was invited only as part of a group of Congressional leaders and in consequence, had told fellow Republicans that he counseled against consultation any further with the Administration.

Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada was the worst tyrant in the Senate and he did not care who knew it. In the presence of a visitor to his office, he had recently phoned Deputy Attorney General Peyton Ford and given him a tongue-lashing for not having given a job to a young Nevadan referred by the Senator. He then warned that if budgetary constraints were, as claimed, the problem, deficiency appropriations for the Justice Department might not be forthcoming from the Judiciary Committee or the Appropriations Committee, both of which he chaired. Mr. Ford promised an opening for the person within two months, to which the Senator again objected, ordering that he be hired at the first of the month. Mr. Ford finally agreed.

General Eisenhower, before leaving for Europe to assume command of NATO, said that the country had lost faith in itself and the free world, that the Russians would not be able to conquer Europe before the country was able to muster the defenses of Western Europe, as some were claiming.

Fiscally conservative Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania, who had just retired after twenty years, departed with a poem, which Mr. Pearson reprints, anent it being wise to economize, concluding: "Now I wish you joy, pleasure, health, happiness and sich,/ And on this floor now is the last of Bob Rich."

Marquis Childs finds that the "Kennedy-Hoover school" of talk regarding defense wished to "pull America into a kind of prairie dog hole behind the dikes of the Atlantic and Pacific." It ignored the true strength of the country, with the greatest industrial and productive might in world history, greater than that of the entire iron curtain bloc, even with much of the West other than the U.S. included.

But the conversion of industry to mobilization for defense had not occurred fast enough for the military and civilian planners since the invasion of South Korea by the Communists on June 25, though retarded by the military cutbacks of 1948-49. There was a danger at present that the pressure for complete mobilization might upset the calculated plans for military-industrial production. A large call up of National Guardsmen at present would result in training of men without proper equipment.

In 1940-41, Guardsmen had been called up at the rate of three divisions per month, while General Marshall was chief of the Army, training with stove pipes instead of guns, until it became apparent by the late spring of 1941 that Britain would hold, at which point pressure was exerted to deactivate.

Total mobilization also withdrew trained men from production jobs and placed them in uniform and the resulting shortage of materials closed plants, causing the labor force to move to cities to find other jobs, resulting in companies unable to fill war needs. Accelerated production also could produce chaos in industry. The objective was to double production of one-shift plants by adding two extra shifts.

If there were no general war within the ensuing eighteen months or so, the public clamor would again be for dismantling the war production apparatus.

If the Russians were to attack in 1951, the best which could be hoped was to avoid disaster in the U.S. The steps to accomplish that goal were believed to have been taken.

He urges the citizenry to do less carping and bring more understanding and effort to the struggle to hold the line against Soviet imperialism.

James Marlow tells of President Truman soft-pedaling his Fair Deal program for the coming year, as he needed all the support he could muster in an already split Congress on foreign policy. His State of the Union message regarding domestic policy was very careful not to anger anyone, far less aggressive than his approach in previous such addresses, the previous year having again urged the civil rights legislation he had first proposed in February, 1948. The only reference this time to civil rights was urging the assurance of "equal rights and equal opportunities to all our citizens".

The coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans now far outnumbered the Truman Democrats. The Republicans were the biggest obstacle on foreign policy matters and so he had to woo Southern Democrats or at least not alienate them, to avoid creation of an opposing coalition on foreign policy.

The previous year, the President had continued to urge repeal of Taft-Hartley. This time, Congress having failed to do so, he said only that the labor laws needed to provide "stable labor-management relations" to insure steady production during the emergency.

He stated vaguely that old age pensions should be improved further, having the prior year urged expansion of Social Security, which the Congress had done. It was unlikely that the Congress would do more.

This year, he said that there was the need to provide "insurance against loss of earnings through sickness and against the high costs of medical care", but stopped short of again urging his compulsory health insurance program.

Rather than urge Federal aid to education, he said that something needed to be done to aid "the states to meet the most urgent needs of our elementary and secondary schools."

He added that some of the plans would have to be deferred for "the time being", indicative of his soft-pedal of the Fair Deal.

A letter writer thinks that in ordering troops to Korea, the President was seeking to reduce the pressure from McCarthyism and the like rather than protecting the internal security of the nation. He asserts that the fight in Korea was plotted by General MacArthur and other right-wing activists to restore the Chiang Government in China.

He finds that while The News and other news organs had deplored Senator McCarthy's tactics, they had nevertheless given him a forum which served ultimately to push the President into the "immoral weakness of choosing a 'little war' in Korea to kill this pressure".

A letter writer from Campobello, S.C., finds that the Christmas music of the season past was up to standard, except for "White Christmas", the chorus of which was not up to what it had been in the past and he wonders why.

He thinks the best two New Year's resolutions would be to have a vision to do, and to change the on-the-go way of living by reading better literature, some of the older works of Shakespeare, Tennyson or Bryant, plus the good editorials in the newspapers.

A letter writer disagrees with a statement of Walter Winchell several months earlier that the reason for the First Amendment freedom of religion clause was that Catholics had fought in great numbers during the Revolution and needed the guarantee of freedom of religious belief. He says that Baptist Roger Williams had established Rhode Island as a haven for freedom of worship. North Carolina also had been established by people who fled the state-controlled religion of England. Both states had refused to ratify the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was ratified. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religious belief and, through the Establishment Clause, provided for separation of church and state.

He finds it ironic that by standing up for these individual liberties, North Carolina and Rhode Island had nearly been deprived of their stars behind the House Speaker's dais in the remodeled House chamber.

But Tom Schlesinger the prior Saturday had explained that the Capitol architect, David Lynn, had stated that the eleven stars he first proposed, instead of thirteen, assumed subsequently to be one for each state at the Founding, had only to do with symmetry in the particular location and were not intended as symbols of the states, that having been engrafted by overly diligent researchers who dug up the history and assumed Rhode Island and North Carolina had been excluded for the reasons asserted by this letter writer.

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