The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 4, 1951

ONE EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. forces had withdrawn from Inchon, the supply port for Seoul, as naval guns hit the path of the approaching Communist troops. The docks and railway yards were demolished by explosives to leave no benefit for the occupying enemy. Seoul was also seized this date by the enemy, after which they moved across the frozen Han River in huge numbers to the west of Seoul, forming a giant pincer aimed at pushing the U.N. forces into the sea at Inchon. Nearby Kimpo airfield was also abandoned, with the airfield and all of its supplies destroyed before the allies left.

Only a small number of bewildered civilians, including lost children, remained in Seoul.

Correspondent Stan Swinton reports that the order to abandon Seoul came as a shock to the allied troops as they had just been ordered to hold the line at all costs. Various encounters with the enemy were reported in and around Seoul before the withdrawal.

The first Congressional Medal of Honor of the Korean war was to be presented by the President the following Tuesday to the wife of 1st Lt. Frederick Henry, who had been last seen holding off the enemy near Amdong on September 1 while his men withdrew to safety. He had been missing since.

General Eisenhower, preparing to leave the U.S. to assume his duties as supreme commander of NATO in Western Europe, said that if all sacrifices by Americans were not matched equally by sacrifices by the European democracies, the combined venture could not succeed.

From Tienyen, Indo-China, came a report that the French had launched their largest offensive yet in the northern section, driving into the foothills from which Nationalist soldiers had descended ten days earlier to overrun the French fortress of Binhlieu. The force was supported by artillery and naval guns. Eight hours after the drive began, the enemy had not been encountered. If the Nationalists, as previously had been their practice, simply withdrew further into the hills, they would at least be knocked back from threatening the main coastal position at Tienyen, as an assault from the hills on the town had appeared imminent. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, recently taking over as commander of the French forces, was at Tienyen leading the offensive.

Arthur Gavshon reports from London that most British Commonwealth countries, as expressed in their just begun strategy conference regarding foreign policy, appeared to have no objection to rearming of Japan, provided its military strength could be properly regulated. It marked a change from British prior opposition to such rearming of the former enemy nation. A Foreign Office spokesman had no comment on whether there had been an official change in that policy. The conference also supported the American concept of a trustee status for the Ryuku and Bonin Islands and favored a condition precedent to a treaty that Japan agree to provide the U.S. with bases in Japanese territory.

The President told a press conference that he believed that full wage and price controls would eventually become necessary to halt inflation caused by the war. They would be implemented as necessary, but food price controls would require a change in the law based on exemptions by Congress. He said that restoration in the new Congress of allowing the House Rules Committee to pigeon-hole legislation would not serve to deter him from introducing his program as usual.

He also said that he was not seeking U.N. permission to bomb Communist China and hoped the country could negotiate its differences with Russia without war.

He engaged in considerable colloquy with Maine newspaper correspondent, originally from North Carolina, Elizabeth May Craig, regarding the point at which he would consult with Congress on a declaration of war if it became necessary. He said that there had been no change in the procedure of leaving it to Congress to declare war.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson said that Congress would be asked by the Defense Department to extend the duration of draft induction from 24 to 27 months and to pass universal military training. The Pentagon was still debating whether to lower the draft age from 19 to 18, and consideration was also being given to raising the top age of 25 for single men and those married without children. Mr. Vinson said that the Department had been instructed that Congress would exclude veterans from the draft.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York unanimously refused to grant a rehearing after earlier affirming the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury in connection with his statements to a Grand Jury in December, 1948 that he had not been a Communist at any time and did not have contact with Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist courier who claimed that he had been a Communist, after the end of 1937, at the time in 1938 when Mr. Chambers accused him of providing secret State Department documents for transcription and transmission to the Russians. Mr. Hiss had been sentenced to five years in prison. He remained free on appellate bond pending disposition of his petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court.

Near Chimpote, Peru, an avalanche, started by dynamite blasting in the Andes Mountains, killed 102 persons and injured at least 71 others, with forty still missing, at Condor Hill.

Governor Kerr Scott of North Carolina told the newly convened 1951 General Assembly that while the State needed new revenue in the coming biennium, he hoped it would not necessitate raising of taxes. He wanted it accomplished instead through elimination of certain tax exemptions and inequities, plus more uniform collections. He said that he favored a statewide referendum on alcohol, a minimum wage law, and a State constitutional amendment to give the vote to 18-year olds, each of which he had favored in 1949 but were rejected by the 1949 Legislature. He also favored a renewal of the vehicle inspection law, eliminated by the 1949 Legislature after a failed two-year experiment with it. He also wanted the Legislature to help in developing North Carolina's rivers for production of hydroelectric power.

The Mecklenburg County delegation praised the Governor's message.

In the General Assembly, a bill to have a statewide referendum on sale of liquor was offered. Under the proposal, if a majority favored ABC stores, they would be set up in all one hundred counties of the state; if voters defeated the referendum, all ABC stores presently operating under the local-option rules would be closed.

Another measure provided for mandatory jail sentences for convicted drunk drivers, 30 days on a first offense and six months on a second offense. Speeders convicted a second time for going more than 60 mph would receive 15 days, and those convicted on a first offense of going more than 65, 30 days.

Woh, hoss. You are getting carried away. You'll have half the state in jail by 1955 when the cars get zoomy-zoomed up with those four-barrel jobs, "Highway Patrol" and Broderick Crawford or no.

In Lisbon, O., a man passed a note to a service station attendant asking that he call the police because his wife was threatening him. The police stopped the car and found his wife holding a chair leg with a nail in it, which he said she held over his head and threatened to hit him every time he exceeded 50 mph. The police disarmed the woman and sent them on their way.

The "Our Weather" box says that it was doubtful that the atom bomb had any effect on the weather, as the energy from the sun varied as much as three percent in a fortnight and scientists estimated that it would take 60,000 atomic explosions per second or over five billion daily to equal only the normal variation of the sun, the source principally impacting weather conditions.

That is comforting to know. The whole earth, therefore, could be destroyed by the atom bomb and the weather would not change at all.

On the editorial page, "The 1951 General Assembly", a by-lined piece submitted from Raleigh by editor Pete McKnight, tells of the highlights of the legislation to be anticipated before the 1951 Legislature. As this is arcane material, you may read it carefully if you have a special interest in the 1951 North Carolina General Assembly or the general processes of government at the state level. We shall be covering it as it goes along and so shall provide only cursory summary of this prefatory forecast of the session.

Lawmakers were opposed generally to higher taxes to raise needed revenue and therefore favored maintenance of spending at current levels, without any expansion of the building program for permanent improvements.

There was a growing conviction among lawmakers that Governor Kerr Scott had been correct when he had advocated at the outset of his term two years earlier that the state should move to catch up on services and facilities neglected during the war.

The legislative agenda would include legislation on civil defense, the inadequacy of primary roads, relief for municipalities bearing the load of local street improvements, teacher salaries and better school facilities, more effective regulation of utilities, better utilization of natural resources, improvement of agricultural and industrial opportunities, streamlining of State Government, revision of state election laws, highway safety, and prison reform.

We told you.

A piece from the Twin City Sentinel of Winston Salem, titled "Jail Sentences for Drunk Driving", finds that mandatory jail sentences were appropriate for drunk drivers. In many cities, those being sent to jail included prominent citizens unaccustomed to spending time in jail. The Governor's Advisory Committee on Highway Safety had recommended a mandatory term of five days, as it was becoming the rule nationally. The piece thinks such sentences would curb the tendency to drink and drive. Drunk drivers had caused the deaths of 114 persons and injury to 1,218 others during 1949 in North Carolina.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from Holt McPherson of the Shelby Star, saying that someone had suggested that the H-bomb was an A-bomb dipped in Hadacol.

The Sanford Herald reports that a friend of a man told him that he should eat his lettuce as he needed more "green stuff", to which the man said that he did, more of the folding kind for his wallet.

The Moore County News says that the secret of good collard greens was to add sugar while cooking them, but not too much, just a pinch at a time.

J. W. Clay of the Winston-Salem Journal says that he was attending a Christmas party in Leaksville sponsored by the Trustees and Teachers and heard one man say to another in regard to a question about a third party's honesty, that he did not wish to say but that the man in question had to summon a neighbor to call in his hogs. Mr. Clay thinks that it suggested a good assessment of character. Some hunters called their dogs every time they ran across fresh rabbit tracks, until the dogs soon learned not to trust the hunter and refused to obey. If a farmer called his hogs only once to the trough and they found no corn, they would cease trusting him.

It appears to be words of wisdom from Animal Farm directed at Senator McCarthy.

Or, to the alt-right Fascists and the increasingly senile and crazy Republicans in Congress insisting on one more investigation of the Clintons, in the hope that this time they might get lucky and break the house, or at least distract the country sufficiently to forget the primary issue, that of the White House and its connections to the Rooskies and the obviously rigged election of 2016.

A poem appears from the Twin City Sentinel:

I'm getting big
And better muscle
From girdles that
Give me a tussle!

And so more, more so, and more.

Drew Pearson tells of a Denver doctor who was auctioning off President Truman's reply to his suggestion that John L. Lewis be appointed ambassador to Russia, provoking the response that the President would not appoint him dog catcher. The proceeds would go to the Community Chest. Washington Post music critic Paul Hume had turned down several offers, one reported to be of five figures, for his letter from the President lambasting him for his negative review of daughter Margaret's operatic performance.

Mr. Pearson informs that such letters, as long as retained for at least six months, were only taxable at the 25 percent capital gains tax rate rather than the higher rate for ordinary income, as they could be considered gifts.

He suggests that the President had been kind to provide such gifts to all of their recipients, including Bernard Baruch and James Byrnes. He wants the President one day to put in writing his "Servant of Brotherhood" remark re Mr. Pearson in response to his criticism of Presidential military aide General Harry Vaughan for his receipt of a medal from Argentine dictator Juan Peron. He thinks that such a letter will earn him a pretty penny.

Head of Selective Service, General Lewis Hershey, was going to recommend to Congress that the draft age be lowered from 19 to 18, that deferments of Organized Reserves and National Guardsmen be stopped, and that the order of taking eligible draftees between the ages of 18 and 25 be established as unmarried college students except for the top third of the class, married non-veterans without children, unmarried veterans, and then non-veterans with children.

Price controls could not be placed on farm products until prices went up higher, beyond that of parity or the prices of the previous May-June, because the farm bloc had persisted in lobbying Congress for this exemption. Price controls would raise food prices five to ten percent because of the number of commodities presently below parity.

Beef, lamb and veal would be among the meats to be subjected to price control, probably in February. Cotton, raisins, rice, flue-cured tobacco, and possibly cottonseed oil were the next most likely commodities to be subjected to control.

There was a plan being considered by U.S. strategists to use "silver bullets", inducements through gold and food rations, to get the great majority of Chinese soldiers who were not committed Communists to surrender.

Former President Hoover had cleared his recent isolationist radio speech to the nation with four-star generals at the Pentagon before delivering it. Columnist George Sokolsky, an advocate of laissez-faire, apparently in both economic and foreign policy matters, was being credited with having ghost-written most of the speech.

Ernest Kai, part Chinese, was being boosted as the next governor of Hawaii to counteract Russian propaganda that the U.S. discriminated against Orientals.

Marquis Childs discusses the statement by Senator Taft that he had no confidence in the military leadership of the country, later adding that he excluded the ground commanders in Korea, presumably including General MacArthur. Making the foreign policy subject to partisan politics was bad enough, but making military decisions so subject was worse.

Several Congressional champions of General MacArthur had made it clear that to alter the nature of the command would bring political reprisals, effectively backing the General, no matter what his decisions might be. Mr. Childs finds it a dangerous doctrine, contrary to American tradition.

While no general or admiral was above criticism, it was something else for the political opposition to declare lack of confidence in the military leadership.

Part of the complaint of Senator Taft appeared to be that the military command had told Congress either too much or too little. But the dilemma faced by the military when testifying before Congressional committees in executive session was that their testimony, while supposed to be held in strictest confidence, inevitably would leak to the public, sometimes within hours of the testimony. That led to an understandable reticence lest they would disclose matters which revealed field strategy and then have it leak to the enemy.

Thus, he concludes, confidence worked both ways and for the Congress to obtain candor, they had to assure that the disclosures were not leaked.

Robert C. Ruark imparts of the Washington hangover, a distinct hangover from that engendered by the bars of New York or Hawaii, on which he had also reported. One might wake up from the Washington hangover, instead of regretting having pinched the boss's lady, having found one's self unwittingly to have accepted a Cabinet appointment or to find Dean Acheson still Secretary of State.

"The District DT's differ from the New York quivers in that the Washington woebegone repeats passages of recent political statements to himself, over and over, while the New York is only to try to hum both parts of the Irving Berlin thing which says you're not sick, you're just in love. I AM sick, Irving, and keep love out of it.

"The Washington rang-job also seems to have more continuous malice in it than most. This is because the political and/or social rival nearly always winds up at the same wassail bowl. This ends occasionally in moused eyes as well as the bruised brain, for more than three people are unable to meet in this city without inciting each other to riot over the policies and feuds of the moment. Mistletoe has come to be regarded more as a symbol for a clout in the kisser than a kiss in the kisser."

Eleventh Day of Christmas: Eleven Hangovers Hanging...

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.