The Charlotte News
Monday, October 1, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. Eighth Army headquarters in Korea had stated that it was prepared to strike "and strike hard" should the Communists desire all-out war instead of resumption of the ceasefire talks. Meanwhile, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, visiting Korea, toured the command posts on the eastern front with supreme allied commander General Matthew Ridgway.
In that latter sector, South Korean troops had driven 500 to 600 enemy troops from the third crest of a ridgeline west of "Heartbreak Ridge" this date. They had won the other two peaks the previous night. Other South Korean troops captured a hill northwest of the "punchbowl", north of Yanggu.
In the air war, 27 U.S. F-86 Sabre jets fought 40 Communist MIG-15s in a series of dogfights lasting 25 minutes, north of Sinanju.
At the U.N., Britain and Iran addressed the oil nationalization dispute before the Security Council. A London announcement said that Britain planned to evacuate all 300 of its personnel from the Abadan refinery by Thursday, the deadline set by the Iranian Government for them to leave. The British said that the withdrawal would only be a temporary measure pending the outcome of the appeal to the U.N.
In Buenos Aires, hundreds of soldiers and political leaders were caught in a Government secret police dragnet which had moved swiftly during the weekend to crush all opposition to El Presidente Juan Peron, following the attempted coup of Friday. Some 200 officers and men had been arrested, including leaders of the Radical, Nationalist, Communist, Socialist and Conservative parties. A Government spokesman accused the minority political parties of being financed by "North American imperialism" in the attempt to overthrow the Peron Government.
Forty-one of the 104 members of the RNC gave a vote of confidence to its chairman Guy Gabrielson in connection with the investigation of him regarding influence-peddling in obtaining an RFC loan for his own company. Mr. Gabrielson had raised the RFC question, himself. Many in his own party had attacked him for continuing to represent his company before a Government lending agency while also serving as the party chairman.
Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota addressed the RNC conference, saying that the Truman Fair Deal was well on the road to becoming the "Fair Steal". He believed that it was the Republicans' obligation to drive from office "politicians who are outrageously digging their greedy hands into the pockets of the Government".
General Marshall, former Secretary of State and, most recently, Secretary of Defense, speaking to the opening session of the 43rd annual governors' conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, said that universal military training had to be instituted to avoid "disastrous and defeating economic results". He said that the Defense Department was determined that no soldier would spend a second winter fighting in Korea and had raised the rate of replacement accordingly, to 40,000 per month. He opposed the proposal in Congress to release after one year of service men who had put in 12 months in World War II, as it would tie up ships, ground planes and stop the rotation of troops in Korea.
In Weetslade, England, six coal miners were trapped over 750 feet below ground by the collapse of a shaft wall in a coal mine this date. One miner had been brought from the mine by rescue workers four hours afterward, suffering from effects of gas. The body of one miner had been recovered.
In San Antonio, Tex., the chief meat inspector, a veterinarian and former pathology teacher, who had been married nine times, was shot to death by a woman he had married twice and divorced once. The woman was arrested after she admitted to police that she had killed him. At the time of the shooting, another woman, his fourth wife, had been been hiding in the house in the bathtub. The wife who did the shooting had originally been married to the victim in 1935, then divorced from him in 1939, and remarried in 1948. She said that she loved him but he had begun bringing women home with him about three years earlier and that when she had walked into the house the previous night, his fourth wife was sitting on the table. She said that she and her husband had struggled for the gun, which was on the table beside him. No charges had yet been filed.
Pete McKnight, editor of The News, reports on the road-building program of Governor Kerr Scott, which was attracting national attention and had provided the state with a transportation network for rapid industrial and agricultural growth. Barring complete national mobilization which would take priority over the machines and material necessary to build the roads, the Governor anticipated being able to complete 12,000 miles of new hard-surfaced secondary farm-to-market roads and school bus routes, financed by a 200-million dollar bond issue, a project which was two-thirds complete. Before he had taken office at the beginning of 1949, 5,000 miles of secondary roads had been paved. In addition, 235,000 miles of secondary roads would be graded, drained, and treated with crushed stone, a project about one-third complete. Furthermore, a greatly improved 10,520-mile primary road system would also be in place. Many new bridges had been built. By the time the Governor ended his term in 1953, the total investment in the road system would be over a billion dollars, more than half of which had been spent during the Scott term.
In New Orleans, it was reported that a tropical disturbance which had shown signs of increasing its intensity, continued to maintain strength, but was not growing, as it sat 330 miles south of Pensacola, Fla.
On page 3-A, another Gallup poll is published, this time surveying how Britons felt about the upcoming British elections.
Boy chased a cat
On the editorial page, "A Timely Scolding" tells of a Superior Court judge in Charlotte having chastised a jury and directed the prosecutor not to bring any more drunk driving cases before it, after it had refused to return a guilty verdict in a case in which the judge found the evidence to be among the strongest he had ever seen. He stated that he hoped that he was not killed by a drunk driver while in the county.
The piece finds it an appropriate lecture and one which it hoped would remind the residents of the county that the traffic laws and drunk driving laws were only as good as the willingness of the citizens to enforce them. A jury had an obligation to be fair to the defendant, but also an obligation to be fair to society.
"Progress in the Piedmont" tells of Business Week, in its September 22 issue, having stated that the Federal Reserve district for the Richmond area, which encompassed the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland, was the only district of the twelve which had not shown a decline in income during at least one month of 1951, having steadily risen since the end of 1949. The magazine had offered a prospectus for the region, finding textiles to be hopeful in the fourth quarter because of a revival in demand and the need by the armed forces, that furniture was likewise hopeful, and that farm income would be close to an all-time high, despite uncooperatively hot, dry weather in recent weeks.
It finds that when a region's industry and agriculture prospered, income flowed to most of the area's inhabitants, while more local and state government spending could took place from increased tax revenue. It concludes that the Piedmont was on the move and outside industries which had not yet moved into the area were becoming increasingly interested in locating there and in Charlotte.
"One Way to Serve…" tells of the State Highway Commission being reluctant to do street work in the smaller towns and cities because it had its hands full with the program of paving some secondary roads, stabilizing others and improving the deficient primary road system. It also had no business going into the general contracting arena, as it would have to do if it did the work for the smaller towns. It thinks the Commission ought create a Division of Municipal Street Planning which would be staffed by competent engineers to enable it to advise and consult with municipalities about their street problems.
It hopes that William B. Umstead, the leading gubernatorial candidate for 1952, would urge that the Commission's resources be made available to towns and cities too small to afford their own street engineers. It does not expect action from present Governor Kerr Scott, who had opposed the bill in the 1951 Legislature which had made the State responsible for providing funds for municipal streets.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Paul Green's Mission", tells of the North Carolina playwright, author of such notable outdoor dramas as "The Lost Colony", having been sent on a mission to address the University of Tokyo, the University of Ceylon and the University of Burma, among others, under the auspices of the Rockefeller-financed General Education Board, to communicate the soul and spirit of the U.S., in an effort to woo the people of those nations from the great temptation of Communism. He would discuss the American pioneers of Roanoke and Jamestown, and the Founders. The piece suggests that it would be worth far more than the $5,000 being spent on the mission.
It suggests that when he reached Iran, he should look up a man quoted in the Christian Science Monitor recently, who suggested that the U.S. was too mechanized and that a machine had no soul, that a soul was much bigger and lasted longer than mechanized thinking or the atom bomb. He had wondered in the end whether the U.S. had a soul. The piece thinks that Mr. Green could tell this Iranian that it did, and Americans at home could make sure that what he imparted was true.
Drew Pearson relates that, according to the diplomats, the Ottawa conference regarding NATO had not nearly been so successful as the public press communiqués had indicated. The conference had ducked the most important problem, the question of deciding how much money was to be spent on European rearmament versus how much on civilian uses. The diplomats did not even bother to read General Eisenhower's assessment of Europe's military defense, but rather delayed it until the next meeting in Rome in November.
Many of the foreign ministers present stated that their countries had done as much as they could and could do no more in terms of preparing the common defense. The Portuguese delegate complained that Spain was not present, the one country which had consistently fought Communism.
Secretary of State Acheson appeared tired at the meeting, had addressed the foreign and finance ministers on the obvious fact that Russian foreign policy had not changed in several hundred years, continuing to be based on aggression and striving to obtain warm-water ports.
The former Health Minister in the British Labor Government, Aneurin Bevan, was not present, having resigned earlier in the year because he believed that the Government was spending too much on armament and not enough on the national health and other domestic policies. Other foreign ministers present, however, adopted this viewpoint about their governments. They believed that Communism inside their countries would increase in direct proportion to the money being spent on armies to resist Communism, as that expenditure produced inflation, causing the inability of wages to keep pace, thus creating fertile ground for Communist propaganda. This issue of inflation was completely ducked, as well as the issue of needing heavier taxation on the upper income brackets and revision of the tax system which placed the heavy burden on the masses.
Senators Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Irving Ives of New York had found bay-windows to be a political liability and so were going on strict diets.
Stewart Alsop, in Paris, tells of confidence in Western Europe and even in formerly skeptical France growing with regard to their ability to defend against Communist aggression. The primary reason for it was the optimism expressed by General Eisenhower, founded not on wishful thinking but on a great professional soldier's careful assessment of the military capabilities of NATO. By the end of 1951, he would be in command of 28 divisions and it was planned that he would have 50 divisions by the end of 1952. That meant that sometime in 1953, the military balance of power could theoretically begin to right itself.
But all that depended on air superiority and the U.S. would be the logical contributor to that NATO defense force, though planning in Washington did not recognize the fact. Present plans called for an American air contribution of no more than 20 percent of the total NATO air strength. Until very recently, there were fewer than 200 American Air Force planes in the NATO force and although the number was increasing, the planned U.S. contribution, even as far ahead as 1954, was not impressive, to equal no more than three-quarters of the first-line tactical air strength which the Soviet bloc countries could muster presently against Europe, representing only about 40 percent of the whole of Soviet air strength.
He suggests that the U.S. commitment to NATO was at best tentative, as bad as no commitment at all. The reason for it was that the U.S. continued to doubt that the job really could be done, despite the confidence expressed by General Eisenhower that it could.
Mr. Alsop regards it as nonsense to doubt that the job could be done, and also nonsense to doubt that American industrial might, combined with the spirit in Europe, could match the power of the slave states within the Soviet sphere. If the job could be done, the West could "really begin to breathe again".
Robert C. Ruark frets of Government advertising the military to attract young men into service. He believes that instead of using soldiers from World War II to populate the military, universal military training should have passed the Congress. But the "Mom vote" had blocked it, the same way it had caused the armed forces to be wrecked after World War II.
He finds it sickening to see 38-year old generals resigning to enter the private sector because their salaries as military officers were so low. He thinks that the Government ought raise military salaries and dispense with all the advertising for soldiers, instead being reliant on a pool of trained soldiers formed by the UMT program.
He also adds that the Government was urging the citizenry to give blood because they were not cooperating when the need was vital.
A letter writer from Greenville, S.C., says that she deeply appreciated the sports section of the newspaper, particularly the fall football schedule, and also appreciated the fact that the sports pages carried no liquor advertising.
A letter writer takes issue with the recent editorial, "Rich Men's Tax Bill", complaining about the extraordinarily high income tax rates for those earning large incomes, reaching as high as 90 percent of the amount above $150,000. He also has no quarrel with enabling taxpayers to shelter some of their income in capital investments, thereby taking advantage of the 25 percent capital gains rate.
A letter from an owner of a private swimming pool in Charlotte finds that the Senate tax bill, exempting municipal swimming pools, beaches and the like from an admission tax, to be unfair to the people living near private pools and beaches, as the latter would have to pay a 20 percent excise tax to swim. Many smaller towns had no municipal swimming pools. Most swimmers were under 16 and the rest were usually in high school or college. He thinks it unfair for the imposition of a tax on persons utilizing private swimming pools while exempting those using municipal facilities.
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