The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 2, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Don Huth, that General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, concluding his visit to Korea, stated that the U.N. had enough power "to keep anyone from running over" the allies and could ultimately win a military victory should the ceasefire talks not resume. He stated that he nevertheless held out hope that they would. The allies had waited six days thus far for an answer to General Matthew Ridgway's suggestion that the talks be resumed in a new location, in the vicinity of Songhyon, six miles southeast of the previous location in Kaesong, a change necessary, he said, because Kaesong, exclusively patrolled by the Communists, was not a properly neutral site.
In air action, U.S. Sabre jets shot down six Communist MIG-15 jets and damaged two others in air battles over northwest Korea, equaling the record thus far in the war for number of enemy planes shot down in a single day, previously established on December 22, 1950. A total of 193 planes had been involved in two dogfights. All allied planes returned safely.
In ground fighting, the enemy recaptured a hill on the eastern front in the "Heartbreak Ridge" area, a hill which had changed hands three times during the previous five days, and for the third successive day stalled an allied attack in the western sector.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., told the Senate that the Joint Chiefs had formally agreed upon a vast expansion of the military during the ensuing three years, including expansion of the Air Force from 95 to about 140 air groups. Much of the expansion, he said, would be in tactical air power in support of ground forces, remedying one of the greatest weaknesses in air power. The program was to be completed in 1954. He also indicated that the Joint Chiefs had approved the activation of three more divisions for the Army and one more division for the Marines.
The U.N. Security Council agreed to a ten-day postponement of the British-Iranian oil debate, following Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb having attacked Iran the previous day and called for urgent action to protect the British stake in the Iranian oil properties. The Iranian Ambassador to the U.S. responded, however, that he had no power to take part in the debate and that his Government would need ten days to bring a high-ranking representative from Tehran to the meeting in New York. Over the protest of Mr. Jebb, the Council granted the postponement. In Tehran, the Iranian Deputy Premier stated that Premier Mohammed Mossadegh was still insisting that the 300 British technicians at the Abadan refinery had to leave the country by the following Thursday. Mr. Jebb told the Council of Britain's decision to remove the personnel the following day, at least temporarily, because of "intolerable conditions of life".
The President ordered all American trade concessions to Czechoslovakia canceled as of November 1. Trade concessions had already been suspended for Bulgaria, Rumania and 13 other Communist-dominated countries.
Senator Joseph McCarthy this date cited testimony the previous day before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee by former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen in support of the former's charge that Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup had been sympathetic to the Communist philosophy. He said also that the testimony showed the extent to which Owen Lattimore followed the Communist Party line at an October, 1949 roundtable discussion of China policy at the State Department wherein Mr. Jessup had adopted those policies completely. Mr. Stassen had testified that at the meeting, Mr. Lattimore had led a dominant group advocating a ten-point program which included recognition of Communist China, turning over Formosa to the Communists and the withdrawal of U.S. aid from the Nationalists. Mr. Stassen said that he had pleaded with Mr. Jessup not to follow that course but that the latter had stated the "greater logic" appeared to be on the side of the Lattimore group's proposal. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, also of the subcommittee, protested to Senator McCarthy that the policy followed by the State Department was not that of the Lattimore group, as the U.S. had not recognized Communist China, to which Senator McCarthy testily responded that the Senate had made it impossible for that policy to be pursued. The exchange occurred during subcommittee proceedings.
Senator William Benton of Connecticut suggested before the Rules subcommittee this date, joined by Senators Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman, that the rule requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate to impose cloture on filibuster be amended to halt the Southern-led filibusters of civil rights legislation. He suggested that money being taken from New England and given to the South might be a stronger weapon to be used by the civil rights backers than the appeal to fair play proposed by Senator Humphrey.
At the governors' conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the governors voted unanimously to approve reservation to the states of the right to decide whether their relief rolls should be made public. Governor Dewey of New York had proposed the motion after Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina demanded that the governors act on the question. Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia also criticized the secrecy rule, required by Federal law. The Senate had approved lifting the ban but the measure was still pending in the House. Federal Security administrator Oscar Ewing stated to the governors that lifting the ban would do more harm than good.
The Government had finished the first quarter of the fiscal year with a 2.6 billion dollar deficit, the largest such first-quarter deficit in the history of the country except in total-war years. Defense outlays during the quarter were 9.2 billion compared with only 3.6 billion for the same period the previous year, accounting therefore for much of the deficit. During the first quarter of the 1950-51 fiscal year, there had been a surplus of 296 million dollars. The largest previous first-quarter deficit had been 1.7 billion two years earlier, the only previous first-quarter deficit since World War II.
In Scarborough, England, Aneurin Bevan, former British Health Minister, and his fellow critics of the British rearmament program, demonstrated the support they had among the rank-and-file of the Labor Party in the vote for the party's new national executive committee, wherein Mr. Bevan and three of his supporters won four of the seven political seats. While it was the same left-wing representation as on the old committee, the size of the vote had shocked the moderates who followed Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
In Irvington, N.J., police were stumped by a six-year old burglar, too young to be treated as a juvenile delinquent under New Jersey law, the minimum age being eight. The youthful offender from Newark had been caught in a butcher shop when his rope lowered from a skylight snapped, causing him to fall to the floor with a load of stolen bologna. Two other boys with him, ages 12 and 13, initially got away but were later apprehended. The three, all from poor homes, admitted that it was the second time they had broken into the market and that they had taken $63 on the first occasion. The parents of the youngest were charged with neglect.
Winds up to 60 mph from a Gulf storm moved inland near Fort Myers, Florida, impacting Miami and the Keys, as blinding downpours fell in advance of the center of the tropical storm. There was fear of severe damage to bean, pepper and tomato crops in the Lake Okeechobee area, following 7.8 inches of rain in the previous 24 hours.
Pete McKnight, editor of the News, looks at state politics in the upcoming 1952 elections, with the progressive leadership of Governor Kerr Scott, unable to succeed himself, pitted against the resurgent conservatives who had dominated every Democratic primary in the one-party state since 1900, except in 1948. The stakes included the patronage power which was wielded by the Governor and its potential influence on the 1953 General Assembly, control of the executive machinery of the state Democratic Party, control of the North Carolina delegation to the 1952 Democratic convention, leadership in the 1953 General Assembly, and potentially the Senate seat presently occupied by Willis Smith, who would have to face re-election in 1954, (but for the facts that he would die in 1953 and the Governor William Umstead-appointed successor, Alton Lennon, would lose to former Governor Scott in the election of 1954, furthering the contest of the progressive versus conservative factions).
Since 1900, when Furnifold Simmons first was elected to the Senate from the state, ultimate power over state politics had rested with what V. O. Key had called in his Southern Politics, an "economic oligarchy", a coalition of large business and financial interests first directed by Senator Simmons and then, after 1930, by the late former Governor O. Max Gardner, producing a string of safe, acceptable governors who promulgated moderately progressive policies while rejecting the imposition of the New Deal philosophy onto State Government.
In 1936 and 1944, an avowed champion of the common man ran for governor, Dr. Ralph McDonald of Winston-Salem, providing the most serious challenge yet to the machine, almost beating Clyde Hoey in 1936 and Gregg Cherry in 1944, having formed a strong coalition among farmers, labor, schoolteachers, white-collar workers, and blacks. Those nearly successful races had inspired Kerr Scott, State Commissioner of Agriculture for 12 years, to run against the colorless, indecisive State Treasurer Charles Johnson, the machine candidate in 1948. Mr. Scott had promised the people a "Go Forward" program of better roads, schools, and health facilities. He had finished second in the initial primary but won the run-off handily against Mr. Johnson. He had then initiated a liberal revolution in the state, unlike anything in its history.
On the back page, Dr. George W.
Crane, in his nationally syndicated advice column, provides
suggestions on how to lose fat, a drag
By the way, we scored a 9 and, therefore, are "very superior", the only one missed being, predictably, the one about the nuts, as we do not usually take the measure of nuts. If you've seen one nut, after all, you've pretty much seen the mall
On the editorial page, "Iran Issue Goes to U.N." finds the decision of Britain to take its oil nationalization dispute with Iran to the U.N. Security Council for resolution to provide a slender hope that the issue might yet be peaceably settled. The British had determined to retaliate for their expulsion from Iran by forcing the political downfall of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, through encouraging a successful boycott of Iranian oil by the West. If a country did buy the oil, the British would likely take that country before the International Court of Justice at The Hague on the charge that they were receiving the product of stolen British property in the form of the oil refinery and pipelines installed by the British and expropriated by the Iranian Government.
Premier Mossadegh, however, could threaten to provide the oil to the Communists as a means of loosening the grip of the British-sponsored boycott, which was strangling the oil-dependent economy of Iran. Previously, he had refused to recognize jurisdiction of the Security Council over the dispute, claiming that it was strictly a domestic problem. But now he appeared willing to send a representative, possibly even intending to attend, himself. That fact gave rise to the hope that an amicable resolution might yet be found.
"A Flimsy Issue" tells of
James R. Walker, Jr.
The piece finds the issue to be trivial and threatening of the greater advances being made in desegregation. It opines that the students could work out the seating arrangement in the stadium on the basis of "their own social standards" and that they would do so, regardless of court decisions.
It believes that any court test would inevitably fail as the University's athletic program was financed by gate receipts and not public funding.
But the Stadium was on University
property and maintained by the University, and so would qualify as a
public facility. That argument, therefore, holds no water, even from
the water boy
Apparently forgetting the latter case, despite referencing it in an editorial when decided, it asserts that the NAACP, in raising this issue, harmed the process of adjustment of the people of the state and the South to the basic rules laid down by the Supreme Court in such cases as Sweatt v. Painter, decided the same day as McLaurin, holding that, in the case of the University of Texas Law School, a failure of the State to provide a substantially equal law school mandated acceptance of qualified black applicants to the otherwise all-white law school for such educational opportunity to pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause.
Parenthetically, Mr. Walker had been one of the four students admitted to the UNC Law School under the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in McKissick, et al. v. Carmichael, decided the prior June, consistent with the Sweatt ruling, finding the Law School at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham not to be sufficiently equal to the UNC Law School. The case had not reached, however, the argument made by the NAACP in that case that segregation per se was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, the argument which would ultimately prove decisive in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which would hold that the old separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, had never accomplished its goal of separate-but-equal facilities in public education in 58 years and so had to be jettisoned as precedent.
"Needed Athletic Reforms" approves the recommendations of the Southern Conference school presidents set forth at Chapel Hill the previous week, but cautions that they would mean little unless the presidents of the individual institutions followed through and saw that they were adopted. Among the proposed changes was that no person whose primary role was in intercollegiate athletics would be able to cast a vote for the school at a Conference meeting, returning authority to the school administrators to regulate sports, a de-emphasis of post-season football games as bowls had become too numerous, as well as bans of out-of-season practice, use of freshmen in varsity competition, and competitive bidding in recruiting.
"Revolt in Argentina" finds that El Presidente Juan Peron had achieved the status as "Champion Liar", outdoing even the Big Lies of Hitler and Stalin, when he said that the recent attempted military revolt in his country had been financed by "North American imperialism" and incited by former Ambassador to Argentina six years earlier, Spruille Braden.
In fact, the U.S. had been unusually friendly to the Peron regime, given its totalitarian nature, prompting resentment in other Latin American countries and loss of American prestige.
The real reason for the revolt was a combination of bad economic conditions in the country and unrest in its army. The workers had been upset by the high cost of flour, with the country's chief product being wheat, and the shortage of beef and virtual disappearance of butter, despite millions of heads of cattle. The problem lay in the dictator's attempt to shift the agricultural economy to an industrial base, trading abroad the domestic agricultural product for industrial equipment.
El Presidente had conveniently used the revolution as a pretext for jailing many of his enemies, especially inconvenient with an election imminent. Some American officials even believed that the revolution was generated as a hoax to provide excuse for the mass jailing.
It concludes that the celerity with which the revolution was put down indicated the control which El Presidente had over the country. It favors a stronger stand against him by the U.S., a stance which would strengthen American stature within the Latin American democracies.
A piece from Business Week, titled "Bees and Flowers", tells of beekeepers in California earning more money by leasing out their bees for the purpose of fertilization of fields than for production of honey. The trick was to keep the bees starved for food, which caused them to work harder to fertilize for their production of food. Seed yield in these fields had increased from 200 pounds to 1,000 pounds per acre.
Drew Pearson tells of having been for a long time the only newsman who had been permitted into the Czechoslovakian Embassy in Washington, that having been in relation to the American Legion's Tide of Toys the previous year, when Mr. Pearson sought to convince the Czech Ambassador that the children of his country ought receive Christmas toys from the drive. The Ambassador, however, did not wish to have the children of his country disabused of the Communist myth that the American people were their mortal enemies and so declined the offer after consultation with his Government.
Recently, other journalists had been invited to the Embassy to hear the new Ambassador state the Communist side of the case against William Oatis, imprisoned Associated Press journalist on trumped-up charges of espionage, and provide hints that his Government might release Mr. Oatis, provided the U.S. would relax its economic and propaganda pressure on Czechoslovakia.
He notes that the recent release of 11 million messages of goodwill from the U.S. over Czechoslovakia via the balloons released the prior August, in which Mr. Pearson had participated as an organizer, had, by all reports, along with simultaneous broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, considerable impact on the people of Czechoslovakia. The Czech Prime Minister had made a speech on the floor of Parliament, claiming that the balloons carried "press manure", and alluding again to the claim the previous year that the U.S. had dropped beetles on the country to destroy its crops, all demonstrating that the messages had been getting under their skin.
The previous week, the Czech railroad engineer and train dispatcher who had run the freedom train across the border into Germany to defect, went to the border and released a new balloon barrage, carrying a leaflet with the pictures of the Czech refugees aboard the train, along with new messages to the people of Czechoslovakia confuting the Communist message that the train had been steered by American saboteurs, that the crew had defected at the point of a pistol and the passengers subjected to torture. Three million such leaflets were being deployed, again through balloons.
Joseph Alsop discusses the approval by the Joint Chiefs, subject to the President's final approval, of expansion of the Air Force from 95 air groups to about 140. The primary stress in the increase was on tactical air power, and the 163-group force favored by Secretary of Air Thomas Finletter, had been cut in the area of strategic air power. The increase would be fully implemented by 1954 and would require about five billion dollars per year in additional defense expenditure for the foreseeable future. Of the five billion dollars in supplemental defense appropriations recently approved by Congress, 3.75 billion would go to the Air Force expansion, and much of the remainder to added Naval air strength.
For the first time, the Joint Chiefs had agreed on expansion of one branch without commensurate increases to the other two branches, a significant cooperative step. The achievement was largely the result of new Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, in his former role as Undersecretary.
A piece from the Congressional
Quarterly discusses the Sugar Control Act and how it was rifled
through Congress, without hearing from the consumer
Allen Raymond, writing in the Reporter, comments on the dramatic changes regarding secrecy in the United States during the previous decade which he had spent in and around the Iron Curtain countries. There were four major areas of secrecy, executive sessions of legislatures, courts and executive boards, prevention by government agencies of underlings to speak to the public on penalty of losing their jobs, sealing or impounding of official records or the failure to maintain any, and, finally, the extension of military security into fields such as private industry involving Government contracts.
In 1949, American newspapers had begun to awaken to this trend, as the executive editor of the Chicago Daily News, Basil Walters, warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors, representing about 2,000 American newspapers, that they were gradually losing their right of access to public information. The Society organized a Committee on Freedom of Information, chaired by James Pope, managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, but these editors had not gotten very far yet in curbing the problem.
He cites an example of military imposition of secrecy over private industry, whereby the Mohawk Carpet Co. had received a defense order for duck cloth, but could not reveal the yardage or the price. He maintains that neither piece of information should be considered secret as long as the Government announced the figures for the number of men in the armed forces and the number of ships, planes and tanks.
The National Security Council had directed the Department of Commerce to set up advisory censorship for business and industry, publishing a bulletin which instructed them not to make public even unclassified data on advanced industrial developments and production know-how, strategic equipment and special installations. Mr. Raymond suggests that if business were to pay strict attention to this advice, they would immediately put out of business every technical and scientific magazine in the country and render every professional society of engineers and scientists unable to function.
He allows that during the undeclared war, there was the necessity for true military security and censorship of critical information, but that job belonged with the armed forces. He concludes that once the people became inured to ceding to the Government the ability to declare what was and was not secret, the way was open to secrecy in as many areas as legislators or bureaucrats might desire and designate for their own advantage.
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