The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 16, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a tank-led allied combat team had driven into Suwon, seventeen air miles south of Seoul on Tuesday and then had withdrawn after dark to defensive positions, the fourth and largest objective taken by the Eighth Army's reconnaissance force in the western sector of Korea. The bulk of the enemy garrison at Suwon had fled on Monday in the face of allied air attacks.

On the central front, allied forces pulled out of the Wonju wedge, where they had held off massed North Korean attacks for sixteen days.

Near the east coast on Monday, twenty miles northwest of Samehok, allied troops dispersed 200 enemy troops.

Two Russian Yak-type fighter planes jumped two Fifth Air Force B-26 bombers near Pyongyang and one enemy plane was damaged, disappearing in flames behind a hill at Chinnampo. Sixteen B-29s dropped 130 tons of bombs on Pyongyang this date from overcast skies, encountering no opposition. Allied fighter bombers killed or wounded about 150 enemy troops in strikes in the Suwon and Seoul areas. In northeast Korea, Australian Mustang pilots spotted two enemy fighters over Wonsan, but they turned and fled when the Mustangs gave pursuit.

Two French mobile task forces had halted new attacks by 30,000 Communist-led Vietminh Nationalist troops in their objective to seize Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh had committed 10,000 new troops to the fight. The front extended 12 miles, about 30 miles northeast of Hanoi. Thirty Vietminh battalions were inviting full frontal combat for the first time. In the Vinhyen area, opposing forces had dug in, facing one another along a four-mile front. The French outpost of Baochuc, four miles northeast of Vinhyen, remained isolated. Vinhyen had been isolated but the French mobile reserves had broken through to the village in time to prevent the Vietminh from destroying a bridge over a river at its edge. Correspondent Kenneth Likes reported that the fighting was bloody and often at bayonet point.

Senator Lyndon Johnson, during hearings before his subcommittee on defense preparedness, scolded Defense Department officials for delay in presenting a legislative draft of their proposed universal military training program, including the proposed lowering of the draft age from 19 to 18. He told Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg, recently confirmed to the position, that the Department had been promising such draft legislation since September but had produced nothing. Ms. Rosenberg responded that she would ensure that the bill was presented to the subcommittee no later than Thursday.

Republicans on Capitol Hill accused the President of pushing his Fair Deal agenda under the guise of national security for inclusion in the budget of such proposed legislation as the Fair Employment Practices Commission and other social programs, which the Republicans termed part of his "tired Socialist program". Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cellar of New York, a progressive and proponent of civil rights, admitted that it would be hard to get any action on civil rights legislation out of the new Congress. He said, however, that the President could, by executive order, set up a temporary FEPC for businesses with Government war contracts, as had FDR during World War II. The previous day, Senator Hubert Humphrey had proposed giving the President that authority.

Six American B-36s had crossed the Atlantic to England, arriving at Lakenheath Airdrome, 70 miles from London, after a one-stop flight since Saturday from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. The flight was part of an instructional program in navigation and conservation of fuel during prolonged flights. The planes and crews were scheduled to return to Carswell during the following weekend.

James Byrnes, former Supreme Court Justice, War Mobilizer, and Secretary of State, was sworn in as Governor of South Carolina, saying that the country should withdraw from Korea unless the U.N. declared China an aggressor, authorized air strikes on Chinese supply lines in China, and joined in a blockade of its coast. He said that he believed the country's first priority had to be Europe, as Russia appeared to be preparing for war. He also favored immediate implementation of wage and price controls.

The Governor was sworn in with an antiquated oath which required the swearing that he had not engaged in dueling since 1881 and would not while Governor. The last duel fought in South Carolina had been in 1880, before the practice was made illegal, between Col. E. B. Cash and William Shannon, the latter coming out on the fatal end of the contest.

The railroad industry asked the ICC for a six percent increase in freight rates, which, if granted, would be the ninth such increase since the end of the war. Rates were about 57 percent higher than in 1946.

In San Diego, desperado Badman Bill Cook, suspected of killing eight persons during a twelve-day rampage from Blythe, Calif., to Oklahoma to his home in Missouri and finally to Mexico, blamed his plight on a Christmas night drunken spree in Blythe. Authorities found near his Joplin, Missouri, home the dead bodies of a family of five whom he was believed to have murdered in Oklahoma on January 3. All five, three of whom were young children, had been shot to death. He had been caught in Santa Rosalia in Baja California, south of the border. He was being charged with murder, kidnaping and robbery, with the kidnaping charges stemming from the abduction of the family, charged as a Federal crime out of Oklahoma and subject to the death penalty because of harm to the abductees.

In Charlotte, three mechanical engineers were injured and narrowly escaped death when a small plane in which they were riding crashed near Cannon Airport in the early morning hours of this date. For unknown reasons, the Stinson craft failed to gain altitude properly on takeoff.

In Raleigh, anti-pollution legislation for streams was introduced in the State House, along with a new vehicle safety inspection law and a measure to increase workmen's compensation payments.

State Senator Alton Lennon, to be appointed in 1953 by Governor William B. Umstead as interim U.S. Senator at the death of Senator Willis Smith, introduced a bill to require wholesale beer salesmen to receive permits from the State ABC Board, with strictures excluding "undesirable persons" from receiving such permits.

You have to have good moral character to sell beer in the State of Nor' Ca'lina. No less than the best will do.

The State Senate Judiciary Committee No. 2 voted to recommend approval of the bill to ban fortune tellers, palmists, and clairvoyants, with criminal penalties for violation. It exempted amateurs performing for school and church socials.

You had better also carve an exception for weather forecasters and sports prognosticators, lest someone take a mind to put one of those buzzards in jail.

On the editorial page, "Everybody's Responsibility" recaps the President's State of the Union message of the prior week, his budget message of the previous day and the economic report of the prior Friday. It finds the plans for expansion of the Government to be so staggering that few could comprehend it. The need for increases in defense expenditures to combat Soviet aggression was understandable. The need to aid Western Europe through NATO and the Marshall Plan was also understandable. So was the need to work out international disputes. The present emergency would require sacrifices, economic controls to curb inflation, and higher taxes to pay for the defense and foreign aid increases.

But beyond those basic things, it finds that the country would question the wisdom of the leadership to make the right decisions to thwart Communism, as many wrong decisions had already been made.

The President's approach, as outlined in the State of the Union, was logical and sound and his pay-as-you-go formula for defense made sense. If the Congress stuck to constructive criticism, as suggested by the President, then a balanced program would likely result. The survival of the country in the present crisis, it declares, depended on the President and the Congress meeting their respective responsibilities and on the individual loyalty of Americans to the Government and its decisions.

"Fair Deal in Disguise" hopes that Republicans and Southern Democrats who would ordinarily not support the Fair Deal, would remain mindful of Fair Deal programs being pushed off during the emergency as essential to defense of the country. The President, in his budget message, had touched on the Brannan farm plan, the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Federal aid to schools, Federal compulsory health insurance, and housing for low income groups. The piece finds that since the country was preparing for a Spartan existence, it expected that the Government would do likewise.

"New Life for Consolidation" finds that after the Institute of Government had performed a study of consolidation of City and County services to promote efficiency and economy, the matter had been left to languish by local officials not willing to give up or dilute their political power. The Mecklenburg County legislative delegation, however, was now receiving briefings from the Institute on its findings and would then proceed to determine what it could do to energize the move toward consolidation as recommended by the Institute's study. The piece hopes it would have a positive effect so that local taxpayers would be relieved of the burden of paying for inessential, duplicated services.

A piece from the Baltimore Sun, titled "Spalding's Way", suggests that while the British had been unfairly branded as being unable to take a joke, ironic for their having produced some of the world's greatest comic literature, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Max Beerbohm to Charles Dickens, the town of Spalding in Lincolnshire had proved the claim wrong. To collect outstanding monthly fees of 35 cents for parking, the local police had adopted the practice of letting the air out of all the tires of the offending party's car. The piece thinks it not only humorous but practical, as it required no court process or expenditure of significant time and money to get the offender to pay.

John P. McKnight, brother of editor Pete McKnight, writing from Chapel Hill in the Baltimore Evening Sun, tells of a London restaurateur writing the North Carolina News Bureau to find out what the state's favorite dish was and thereby sparking a controversy. Answers had ranged from hog tripe or chit'lings to angel food cake to "hushpuppies"—so called, he instructs, as hunters used the fried cornmeal pats to quiet their hungry hounds.

Mr. McKnight had just returned from a tour of the state after being absent for some time and reports of having relished its native cooking along the way. After doing so, he nominates the young pig, pit barbecued in the open air, as the state's favorite dish. He proceeds then to supply his recipe for cooking it.

He adds that the Londoner who made the request would have difficulty acquiring a pig to barbecue as the austerity program in England had only recently allowed restoration of a soupçon of pork to its sausage.

You could just go out in the backyard and round you up one and fry you some possum, raccoon, or horse.

Drew Pearson tells of exposing a year earlier four IRB agents who were shaking down businesses in the New York area, taking bribes in lieu of collection of back taxes. The four agents had since each been sentenced to prison terms of five years, two and a half years, two years and eighteen months, respectively. He points it out as higher taxes to pay for defense relied on honest and appropriate tax collection.

The American Legion Tide for Toys drive had collected a shipment of toys bound for Europe through CARE. He provides the collection totals for Toledo, Miami, Denver, Memphis, Omaha, Wilmington, Del., Boston, and that of the largest campaign so far, in Buffalo, N.Y., from which 80,000 toys were being shipped via eight boxcars to Philadelphia for shipment abroad.

A report had come from Communist China that General Lin Piao, commander of Chinese troops in Korea, had been shifted from Manchuria to central-south China, bordering Indo-China, suggesting an imminent attack on that country.

The Nationalist Chinese general who the U.S. had hoped would lead a guerrilla revolution against Communism, Mohammedan General Ma Hung-Kwei, had evacuated and was seeking haven in the U.S. When Communist soldiers marched into his domain, he took his family and fled in a private plane to Hong Kong and from there to Mexico City, where he hoped to immigrate to the U.S.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the British chiefs of staff urging their American counterparts to spare no effort in holding the line in Korea, as a delaying action could prevent the Chinese Communists from attacking Indo-China, Hong Kong and otherwise in Southeast Asia, as well as forestall Russia in attacking Western Europe. Such an operation justified action in Korea which otherwise might be meaningless.

Yet, even so, a holding action would not prevent the Soviets or the Chinese from ultimately moving toward their respective goals of domination in Europe and Asia. The two programs were interconnected. Mao Tse-Tung had reached an accord with the Kremlin whereby his intervention in Korea would be repaid with restoration of Chinese control over Manchuria instead of through Chinese puppets of the Kremlin, as had been the case, as well as yielding Russia's former primacy in Korea. The mere fact of this bargain, the Alsops conclude, showed the Kremlin's approval of the whole scheme of Chinese expansion in Asia. It also proved that the Mao regime retained a measure of independence from Russia.

But, were Russia to falter in its conquest of Europe while China proceeded with its conquest of Asia, an imbalance would result, intolerable to Moscow. China would be forced to demand of Russia raw materials to feed and protect its empire interests, to which the Soviets would turn a deaf ear, causing in time a split.

The entire program of mutual conquest could be upset by firmness of action from the West in deterring aggression at every opportunity, before it was too late.

Robert C. Ruark favors shooting some draft dodgers to set an example, as deserters from the armed services were shot. Five years in prison, as Alfred Bergdoll, son of the most notorious draft dodger of World War I, Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, had received from the Federal court seemed, though the maximum allowable by law, hardly fit when to go into service meant giving up one's personal freedom, being potentially shot, maimed or killed.

"We can subject [the draftee] to hunger and cold and heat and fear and insanity and boredom and such unpleasant things as blindness and paraplegia. We can send him anywhere, and bring him back at our leisure!"

He thus questions why the lightness of punishment for the draft evader. If death was good enough for the soldier, he asserts, it ought be fitting also for the draft resistor.

Mr. Ruark had served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II and had seen combat firsthand.

He fails to reflect of the moment that the enemy shot, maimed and killed American soldiers, and the courts would hardly wish to be placed in that position with respect to American civilians for draft resistance. Actual desertion in the face of the enemy, immediately endangering one's fellow troops, is a different scenario.

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