The Charlotte News

Saturday, January 27, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that South Korean sailors, supported by the American cruiser St. Paul, the Canadian destroyer Cayuga, and the U.S. destroyer Hawk, had driven ashore at Inchon and raided the port for four hours, suffering no casualties while killing 40 North Korean troops and capturing two. They encountered no Chinese troops. To the east, three allied tank columns led troops through ankle-deep snow 4.5 miles north of Suwon, to within less than thirteen air miles of Seoul. Only moderate resistance had been encountered. U.N. troops fought during the predawn darkness against enemy patrols which had sneaked back into Suwon, recaptured by the allies; but the enemy was cleared by dawn.

Air attacks hit the enemy hard in the daytime, killing them by the hundreds, but then the survivors, who had dug into frozen holes, would return by night to wage attacks on allied positions.

On the central front, allied patrols had fanned out north and east of Yongwol, a center of enemy resistance earlier in the week, and occupied Pyongchang.

Musical notes were added to allied maps of the western front, to denote places where the Chinese had blown bugles. If you wish, for your own amusement, you may add your own to the newspaper maps provided at the above link.

Admiral Arthur Radford, commander of the Pacific fleet, said that the allies would have some more amphibious assault operations if the war lasted long enough. He said that the Communist Chinese had slowed down their attacks, probably because of their increasingly long lines of communication to obtain supplies and reinforcements, as well as for their inadequate winter clothing. Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, for whom one of the two American ships involved in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents would be named, said that he believed the blockade of the Korean east coast had been completely effective and that the blockade of the west coast was nearly as tight.

The Economic Stabilization Agency announced the prior day institution of wage and price freezes, including freezing of 77 farm products selling below parity whenever they might reach the parity price, otherwise exempted from the freeze under current law. Those products included eggs, beans, corn, oats, wheat, peanuts, chickens, butterfat, milk, and burley tobacco. Wages were frozen at levels of the prior Thursday, January 25, and prices were frozen at the highest level reached between December 19 and January 25. Violations of the regulations subjected the offender to a $10,000 fine, a year in jail, or both. ESA said that for every two percent increase in the price level, the cost of defense rose by a billion dollars per year and that for every one percent rise in the cost of living, consumers paid two billion dollars per year more for goods.

The freezes caused protests from farm and labor groups but were supported generally by business. They resulted in the shutdown of several commodities markets, in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, where trading in cotton and byproducts was suspended. The stock market rose in active trading after the announcement, with some leading stocks rising between $2 and $4 per share. The Associated Press average of 60 stocks rose $1 to $93, 30 cents under the 1950-51 high mark. The trading volume of 1.5 million shares was the highest for a short session during the fiscal year.

The Atomic Energy Commission said that one of the periodic tests of the atom bomb was held at the Air Force bombing range near Las Vegas during the early morning hours, visible and felt in Las Vegas. The test had been announced on January 11. It was believed to be the second such test conducted at the base.

The Big Mushroom sunburst.

Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota proposed that the Senate's five-percenter inquiry be reopened to determine whether influence peddlers were obtaining a cut from defense contracts and to determine how the defense money was being spent. The original 1949 inquiry had been handled by a committee chaired by North Carolina Senator Clyde Hoey and led to the conviction for perjury before the committee of John Maragon, associate of General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide. An Army major general had also been forced into retirement by revelations regarding his handling of defense contracts.

General Eisenhower had returned to the U.S., visiting West Point, on his way to Washington on Wednesday, after touring the NATO capitals for two weeks to determine their needs and capabilities in the common defense of Western Europe.

An Italian airliner, en route from Paris to Rome, crashed, killing thirteen and injuring four.

In London, Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was improving during his bout with pneumonia, after spending a restless night.

Alger Hiss petitioned the Supreme Court for review of his conviction of perjury and five-year prison sentence, recently upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. His petition contended that there was insufficient evidence to warrant conviction. It said that the motive for Whittaker Chambers lying about Mr. Hiss may have been to protect his actual source in the State Department, to protect himself with evidence designed to incriminate an alleged accomplice or because he suffered from a mental ailment.

In Asheville, N.C., a three-alarm fire swept through the Kahn Co. textile plant. Seven firemen were overcome by acrid fumes and smoke.

In Gastonia, a $1,000 reward was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a person who had robbed at gunpoint the Akers Motor Lines of $18,000 to $20,000 the previous night. The lone gunman had escaped the scene in a 1940 two-door gray Nash and fled toward the South Carolina line. The car had a North Carolina plate partially covering a South Carolina plate. The bandit was described as 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weighing about 150, wearing a brown overcoat and brown gloves. If you know who it was, call and collect the Big Loot.

On the editorial page, "The Council and the Bus Problem" looks again at the consideration by the City Council of the changes to the bus routes, recommended, after study, by the City engineer, but questioned by an independent expert hired by Duke Power Co., which operated the local buses. The Council had asked Duke to accept three other extensions to the plan proposed by their experts, which had incorporated only superficial changes to the existing routes. Their response had not yet been received but, the piece counsels, the Council ought reject the Duke plan and impose the City engineer's plan, if it had found, as it appeared, that there were inadequacies in the service which were addressed only superficially by the Duke plan while the City engineer's plan was better. And if it thought otherwise, then it ought simply stop addressing the issue.

The City Council to date, it finds, had acted on very unsure ground with regard to the problem, unwisely asking the City engineer, who, admittedly, had no expertise in bus routes, to examine the matter in the first place, but who had, nevertheless, performed an exceptionally thorough job by all accounts.

"Exit 'Gook'" tells of columnist Hal Boyle informing that the soldiers in Korea, having witnessed the resolve of the South Koreans fighting alongside the American troops in the war and the fortitude of the civilian population in the face of being forced to leave their homes, had abandoned use of the derogatory term "Gooks", once used during World War II, not for Asians, but for the natives of the Caribbean, South America, and the Isthmus of Panama.

It finds that the concept of the "master race" or "chosen people" had caused problems throughout history, dehumanizing those not part of the chosen tribe. America was the only country which had made "stranger" a welcome addition rather than a malediction. Yet, Americans were also prone to think of themselves as the "chosen people" and the land as "God's country". Italians had once been called "wops", Hispanics of the Iberian peninsula, "dagoes", French, "frogs", Central Europeans, "bohunks", and Englishmen, "limeys". That such terms were in rare usage in 1951 was encouraging evidence that the country improved in understanding over time. Mr. Boyle had observed appropriately that "in this narrowing world," Americans had to "realize the vital need of understanding the peoples whose destiny will be linked with theirs."

Why did you leave out "niggers", "crackers", "kikes", and "spics"? Are you prejudiced or somethin'?

"Job for Parents and Teachers" finds that the State Judiciary Committee's consideration of the Woodland Junior Women's Club pronouncement that there were some comic books which constituted a threat to the youth was a waste of time and money, that the job of policing comic books belonged to responsible parents and teachers and not the State. Censorship was censorship in whatever form it appeared, whether of questionable movies or advertising. One could not have just a little of it before it began eroding free speech.

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Seven Democrats, and None Deserving", discusses Armstrong County, S.D., wherein there were only 52 people living, the only county in the country with no Federal employee. In the previous election, the seven people who voted were all Democrats. So it finds it remarkable that none of the seven had received a Federal job.

Drew Pearson tells of the libel suit for $350,000 filed against him by former California Attorney General Fred Howser, and the scuttlebutt attending it, that he would have to sell everything to pay the judgment when it was done. He says that the only way to handle a libel suit, hazard of the newspaper business, was to battle it out when one knew he was right. The hardest one he had ever battled was that brought by Congressman Martin Sweeney after the column had said that he was the spokesman for Father Coughlin. Mr. Sweeney had sued Mr. Pearson in 70 jurisdictions, the biggest chain libel suit in the history of American journalism. He quit, however, after losing 35 of the cases. As in that case, there were others pushing the litigation of Mr. Howser, in an attempt to put the column out of business.

He thinks the origins of it went back to a book he and his former partner, Robert Allen, had co-authored in 1937, Nine Old Men, about the Supreme Court and how whims of fate sometimes determined American jurisprudence, such as the delay of the minimum wage for nearly two decades, until 1938, when a Federal judge had fallen from his horse and was not sitting on the D.C. Court of Appeals when the case was heard and upheld in 1921 as constitutional. The judge recovered and demanded a rehearing, delaying the case for two years, during which time three liberal Justices of the Supreme Court retired, eventuating in the minimum wage law being held unconstitutional.

Then, Mr. Pearson's daughter had moved to California and had children, causing him to visit the state often. There, he observed that the state had become a haven for gamblers and hoodlums, with law enforcement lax. He thus felt compelled to write of the situation in several columns in 1948, reporting in the process that Mr. Howser, while candidate in 1946 for State Attorney General, had accepted twelve one-hundred dollar bills in protection money from a Long Beach gambler.

Mr. Howser subsequently was criticized by the California Crime Commission for the Attorney General's office being overly close to the gamblers and for one of his assistants having attempted to bribe the Sheriff of Mendocino County to protect slot machines with payoffs to the Attorney General's office, the Sheriff having arrested the assistant who was now serving time in San Quentin.

Mr. Howser then received a letter from his Washington attorneys informing that the statute of limitations was about to run on his libel suit against Mr. Pearson, to which he replied that the prosecution and conviction of the assistant in question had caused an issue to be raised regarding the validity of such a suit. His attorneys advised, however, that the matter was of no moment as far his case was concerned, whereupon he sued. The attorney who wanted him to sue turned out to be the son of the Court of Appeals judge about whom he had written in Nine Old Men.

The most recent chapter was the attack on Mr. Pearson, starting the prior spring, by Senator Joseph McCarthy. But he did not directly attack him on the Senate floor until two weeks before the Howser case was scheduled to go to trial, and had last attacked him on the same day the jury received the case. Mr. Howser's attorneys were also the attorneys for conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis who had been working closely with Senator McCarthy.

In the end, the jury ruled during the week that Mr. Pearson acted without malice, a requirement for libel against a public figure, and that even if the information had been untrue, that the broadcast had not injured Mr. Howser's reputation.

Marquis Childs tells of the President having appointed a commission, headed by Admiral Chester Nimitz, to examine internal security in relation to rights of the individual. There were large gaps in internal security with respect to war plants, where security was in the hands of the individual plant managers, as Federal protection had been abandoned after the war.

Originally, the FBI had been in charge of plant protection but in 1943, the Army took over that responsibility. After the war, that protection was allowed to lapse and the only agency with authority over the defense plants currently was the Munitions Board, which only disseminated a pamphlet telling how to protect war contracts from sabotage and espionage.

In some war plants, Communist-dominated unions were recognized as the sole bargaining agents under Taft-Hartley. In Schenectady, N.Y., for instance, at the G.E. plant, with 90 million dollars worth of war contracts, an alleged Communist headed the local union with bargaining rights for the plant. Two hundred others in the union were said to be Communists as well. Yet, no one in the Government had sought to correct the situation. Former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, had instructed G.E. that no defense work could be carried out in plants where such Communist-dominated unions were the bargaining agents, but the union then brought a lawsuit to obtain an injunction against interference by management.

The commission would have to weigh the genuine threat of sabotage and espionage in defense plants against the protection of civil liberties, with the security of the nation at stake in time of war.

Robert C. Ruark tells of attending a hat show displaying the designs of well-known hat designer, Mr. John. The women wore little other than the hats and in one instance, the model carried the hat under her arm, as it was called "Bird in Hand". Mr. Ruark questions how a hat could be a hat if it was to be carried under the arm, wonders whether shoes could become a hat if worn on the head and pants could become shoes by wearing them on the feet.

He had also learned that for $1,000, a woman could buy a set of contact lenses which would change the color of the eyes. With brunettes becoming blondes, he could not tolerate blue eyes becoming brown or vice-versa, and wondered whether red ones were available for hangovers.

From Hollywood had come the "TV vest, sleeveless, V-necked, open to the waist, and worn with nothing underneath. 'Strip tease' ensembles, in some of which a girl can shed her duster, topper, overskirt, bolero and apron and still not hit bottom." He finds that when a "semi-naked woman, wearing a stuffed rooster under one arm, walks in and blinks three separate colors of eye at [him], [he was] going to follow the advice of the bra manufacturer who just 'rounded, more feminine bosoms,'" and eliminated the "ice-cream cone". He says that he does not know what the "ice-cream cone" was but that it would remain two furlongs behind him and would not be shrieking and tearing its hair—whatever he means by that.

You are like squaresville, daddy, if you don't know of the ice-cream cones, which are always plural, riding in tandem. Visit the ice cream parlor and ask the soda jerker for an explanation, with a cherry on top.

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Southern Democrats sitting in the driver's seat in Congress, with leadership positions in eleven of the nineteen committees, including four major ones, and holding coalitions with Republicans in the rest. In the Senate, the Southern Democrat-Republican coalition controlled strategic committees and held sway on the floor. It was unlikely, however, that it would affect anything except the President's domestic policy.

He provides the four House committees which North Carolinians chaired, including Ways & Means.

Congressman Charles Deane of North Carolina was receiving pressure from Congressmen to exert influence on the Burmese Government to gain the release of hero surgeon Dr. Gordon Seagrave, recently convicted in Burma of treason. He had done so by suggesting implicitly that ERP aid might not be forthcoming without the release of Dr. Seagrave, to "avoid strained relations" with the U.S. He said that he had found in a visit to Rangoon that American missionaries were being unduly pressured and harassed, and said that he would ask the President to urge the Burmese Government to release Dr. Seagrave.

One North Carolina Congressman said that the President's Fair Deal programs did not stand a chance in the new Congress.

Members of the delegation did not regard Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina as a leader of the Southern conservative revolt against the Fair Deal.

Both North Carolina Senators, Clyde Hoey and Willis Smith, were among the group of eleven Southern Senators who had a poll tax proposal of their own to present should the Administration again push for banning of the poll tax, considered the least controversial of the President's civil rights proposals. Their proposal was to submit to the states a constitutional amendment on the matter.

Both Senators voted for the resolution, passed 91-0, expressing the sense of the Senate that Communist China should not be admitted to the U.N., though Senator Hoey said that the time would come when the U.S. would have to recognize the Chinese government.

Senator Smith sided with Nevada Senator Pat McCarran who wanted his Judiciary Committee to study further the issue of whether gamblers who refused to answer questions before the Kefauver crime investigating committee should be recommended for contempt of Congress citations. Senator Smith believed that a recent Supreme Court decision, re refusing to answer questions before grand juries, had raised serious questions regarding contempt for refusing to answer pursuant to the Fifth Amendment privilege. Senator Hoey voted with the majority which voted 59 to 12 in favor of the referral to the Justice Department.

Query why, a mere eight months before the decision in the above-referenced Blau case, had the Supreme Court declined to hear the petition for writ of certiorari submitted by Hollywood screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, designed as test cases for the remainder of the so-called Hollywood Ten, convicted of contempt for refusing to answer HUAC questions in fall, 1947 regarding whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party, also subjecting them theoretically to prosecution under the Smith Act, had they answered affirmatively. The answer appears to be that Messrs. Lawson and Trumbo had made their cases below dependent on the right of free speech under the First Amendment rather than raising their claims on the basis of the cases cited in Blau pertinent to the Fifth Amendment privilege. The high Court will not supply counsel and litigants with the correct stance of the case if the briefs in the lower courts and thus the petition for cert., unable to raise issues not litigated below, fail to provide it.

It was possible, even had the issue been framed as in Blau, that the courts might have distinguished the factual settings in which the refusal to answer occurred, that refusing to answer questions posed by Congressional committee, with a mandate to inquire on matters pertinent to the security interests of the country or into any matters pertinent to that for which the particular committee was properly formed and constituted, was different from refusing to answer questions before the grand jury where inquiry is being made directly into potentially criminal acts, with the direct power of indictment, the "hot breath of the law" thus breathing more directly on the person before the grand jury than in a Congressional inquiry. Yet, given the principle of Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, the particular context would not appear to matter. (But see Miranda v. Arizona, decided in 1966, where the Court held that the now-familiar Miranda warnings required pursuant to the Fifth and Sixth Amendments are not Constitutionally mandated unless there is a "custodial investigation" focusing on the accused as a suspect in a crime. "By custodial interrogation, we mean questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way.")

On the other hand, any one of the Hollywood Ten defendants might have, in the wake of the Blau ruling, raised by petition for writ of habeas corpus the principle enunciated in Blau, contending that their appellate counsel had been incompetent in not raising the issue in the correct manner.

Unfortunately, in this time, the representation of criminal defendants, anywhere in the country, was not always as thorough and effective as contemplated by the Sixth Amendment and later required by the courts, regardless of reputation of the counsel in question. Attorney reputation does not usually win cases.

And no, smart aleck, the distinction is not that in Blau, the defendant was true Blue and in the Lawson and Trumbo cases, the defendants were Red.

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