The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 23, 1951
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert Eunson, that the enemy flew 150 jets at U.N. warplanes this date and lost at least 14 destroyed or damaged, in the largest jet battle to date. Two U.S. planes, including a B-29, were shot down and at least two had been damaged. The crew of the B-29 had been rescued. The U.S. Fifth Air Force estimated that 246 jets, plus an undisclosed number of B-29s, had been involved in the three major battles. The previous record for a jet battle involved 199 jets on the prior September 26.
Air Force chief of staff General Hoyt Vandenberg said at a press conference that Russian-speaking pilots were flying some of the enemy jets in Korea.
In ground action, U.N. tank and infantry forces began enveloping Kumsong, the former enemy stronghold on the central front. The allies in the eastern mountains resisted three enemy probing attacks, and in the western sector, raiding U.N. patrols became embroiled with entrenched Chinese west of Yonchon.
U.N. ground forces had inflicted 29,275 casualties on the enemy the previous week, according to Eighth Army headquarters. Of that total, 22,000 had been killed, 6,000 wounded, and 1,275 taken prisoner.
The Communists had not yet ratified the agreement reached by liaison officers to resume ceasefire negotiations in Korea. The five-man negotiations team had reportedly, however, been reshuffled. The U.N. had ratified the agreement on Monday.
Communist Chinese radio quoted Premier Mao Tse-Tung as saying the Chinese would continue to resist America until the U.S. accepted Communist peace proposals for Korea.
The White House announced the previous day that a third atomic bomb had been detonated in Russia and stated that more such explosions would likely occur from time to time in what appeared to be a series of atomic tests.
In Egypt, mobs of several thousand people roamed the streets of Cairo shouting for arms to settle their differences with Britain. It was a nationwide day of mourning for 16 Egyptians killed during the previous week of disorders with the British regarding the unilateral abrogation by Egypt of the 1936 treaty with Britain under which the British had access to the Suez Canal in exchange for its defense and the abrogation of an 1899 agreement under which the Sudan was jointly controlled by the Egyptians and British. The British had just cut rail and road traffic in the disputed Suez Canal zone, a blockade which would continue, according to the British, until boycotting Egyptian dock laborers resumed unloading of British supply ships.
Italy formally resumed diplomatic relations with Ethiopia for the first time since Mussolini had sent his troops into the kingdom in 1935.
The President was being urged by some Democrats to pick a DNC chairman who was a Protestant, breaking with the tradition established by FDR of selecting chairmen who were big-city Catholics. The appointment of General Mark Clark by the President to become Ambassador to the Vatican had stirred controversy among Protestants, and many Democrats therefore believed that appointing a Protestant as party chairman would help placate some of the criticism.
In New York, tons of Army material and civilian merchandise was piling up on the docks in the wake of a wildcat strike by stevedores, extending to the entire port. A meeting of the executive committee of the International Longshoremen's Association was being scheduled and it was believed that the leaders would bow to the demands of the wildcat strikers and ask to reopen contract negotiations with the companies, after the previous settlement had been rejected by the strikers.
In Biloxi, Miss., Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming said that the future of universal military training was being threatened by gamblers around military bases. He conducted a hearing in Biloxi the previous day to determine the effect of gambling on the airmen stationed at Kessler Air Force Base. His committee would soon hold similar hearings at other bases. The report to be issued by the committee, he said, would show evidence that gambling interests had become so entrenched that they practically controlled the economic life of the area. He criticized the commanding officer of the base for only taking limited action to stamp out gambling by airmen under his command.
The IRB commissioner, John Dunlap, was scheduled to testify before the House Ways & Means subcommittee investigating charges of corruption among some of the district revenue collectors. Mr. Dunlap had sought the opportunity to testify.
The Literary Gazette published a letter from nine Donets Basin miners in Russia who said that they owned cars but had no place to get them serviced or repaired, wanted the big city in which they lived, in one of the biggest industrial and mining regions of the country, to provide service stations and garages.
In Winston-Salem, in a surprise move, legal liquor went on sale for the first time in 48 years. The first ABC stores, approved in a recent local-option election, had not been expected to begin to operate for several more days.
A new Gallup poll on page 8-A showed that many people believed that the Government was driving the country into bankruptcy with deficit spending.
On the editorial page, "A Disruptive National Issue" tells of the appointment by the President of General Mark Clark to become Ambassador to the Vatican having stirred a great controversy among Protestants who believed that granting recognition to the Vatican as a sovereign government was contrary to the principle of the First Amendment Establishment Clause, providing for separation of church and state.
The U.S. in the past had sent ministers and consuls to the Vatican between 1798 and 1866, at which point Congress denied further funding for the missions. From 1940 until early 1951, Myron Taylor had served as the personal representative of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. But sending those representatives had not implicitly constituted recognition of the Vatican as a sovereign government.
The Vatican was known to be a principal listening post within Europe and General Clark, having been instrumental in the Allied victory in Italy in 1944, was well equipped by background to discern important issues.
But the criticism of the precedent of full recognition of the Vatican and the method by which it had been accomplished, while Congress was not in session and thus not available for debate of the matter, appeared well taken. The purpose behind the appointment could have been accomplished by appointing General Clark as a personal representative of the President rather than a full Ambassador.
"What Is 'Available', Mr. Jones?" wonders how Representative Hamilton Jones of Charlotte would define "available" in regard to the law that non-service-connected disabilities of veterans would be covered by the Government when facilities were "available". This provision had been used as the rationale for building more V.A. hospitals. In the prior fiscal year, V.A. hospitals had received 577,715 patients, of whom only 79,965 had been treated for service-connected disabilities.
The Hoover Commission in 1947 had estimated that nearly half of the 89 new V.A. hospitals being built or planned would be in areas where it would be difficult or impossible to secure adequate staffs. But members of Congress had nevertheless swapped votes to fund these pork-barrel projects.
It concludes that Mr. Jones probably was aware of why "available" had been interpreted so loosely in this regard, that it resulted from politics and pressure from veterans' organizations. It urges the public to tell him what they thought of such waste of tax money.
"Man of the South" tells of David Ovens of Charlotte, having previously been named Man of the Year in Charlotte for 1950, having now been named Man of the South by Dixie Business magazine. The piece agrees with the honor and believes that such satisfaction would be shared by citizens of the community.
"Hugh MacRae—Builder of a Region" tells of the 86-year old industrialist, agriculturist and developer, who had died the previous Saturday in Wilmington. He had been the founder of what was now the Tide Water Power Co., the moving spirit in the establishment of the Castle Hayne and St. Helena agricultural colonies and the Penderlea farm resettlement project, as well as developer of Linville and Grandfather Mountain, Oleander, Pineywoods, Princess Place, Wrightsville Beach, Winter Park, Delco and other places.
His chief contribution, however, was in his energetic promotion of the theme, "The South will come into its own when its fields are green in winter." That concept had since been widely adopted across the state. He had been a firm believer in the notion that the South, because of its longer growing season and heavier rainfall than the Midwest, could ultimately be a greater developer of cattle. He deserved much of the credit for the expansion of the livestock and dairying industries in the South.
"A New Year for the Symphony" tells of the opening of the fall season for the Charlotte Symphony
Orchestra on October 29, starting its 19th year, its third year under
the baton of Christian Pfohl. Its first concert would include a
symphony
The piece compliments the solid contribution made to the city's cultural development by the Symphony and salutes its members, wishing them success in the new season.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Having a Conservative Baby", tells of the BBC having banned speech about "Having a Baby in 1951" on the grounds that it was political, as babies were being born in England under the National Health Service, introduced by the Labor Government.
The piece thinks that if having a baby in England was now an exclusive plank of the Labor Party, the Conservatives had been placed under a tremendous handicap. W. S. Gilbert had said that every boy and girl born into the world alive was either a Liberal or a Conservative, and the piece thinks that since there had been Conservative babies in Mr. Gilbert's day, there must also be at present.
An editorial from the Christian
Science Monitor—which should be read by every
Trumpie—celebrates the pluralism of America as its greatest
tradition, a land made up of immigrants from many nations, many
races, many traditions, and many faiths. "This incorrigible
pluralism of America is inseparable from its vitality." Those
who saw the country as a place of "mass-produced conformity"
were ignorant of its "pugnacious individualism
Yet, there had to be binding law to bring about cohesion, as symbolized by the motto, "E pluribus unum."
It posits that such was the reason why Americans were so opposed to totalitarian Communism, as the freedom which it claimed was the freedom to destroy freedom and the unity it boasted, the unity of the ant colony, its security, that of a prison. How to combat Communism, however, was the subject of great dispute. To chill free speech, as was being accomplished through Congressional investigations into matters out of the past, such as in the confirmation hearings recently on Ambassador Philip Jessup to become a member of the U.N. delegation, was the wrong way to go about it.
If each side tried to label the other as traitors or inflamed mass opinion angrily to penalize the unorthodox thinker, free debate, a hallmark of American democracy, was not possible.
"No one who knows the ebullient
American spirit will believe that it can be forced into a strait
jacket
Drew Pearson tells of the primary supporters of General Eisenhower for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1952 meeting in the office of Senator James Duff a day after the announcement by Senator Taft that he was running for the nomination. Out of the meeting came tentative decisions to enter the General's name in the New Hampshire primary, where he was thought to be a shoo-in for victory, with Governor Sherman Adams supporting him, as well as both Senators, Styles Bridges and Charles Tobey. There would probably be a full meeting of all of the powerful Eisenhower supporters within the party in the near future, at which time a formal announcement would be made that the General would be drafted for the nomination. It was expected that among those who would be in attendance at such a meeting would be Governor Dewey, Senator Duff, former Senator Darby of Kansas, Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Senator Irving Ives of New York, Senator Tobey and Governor Adams. The plan was to gather so many progressive Republican leaders that local leaders would join in support of the General. But the NATO command in Europe was at such a crucial stage that the General could not depart from it at present without undoing months of careful planning. He also believed that he could not make a political announcement before retiring from the Army.
The breweries were upset at South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston who had slipped an exemption for the temperance organizations into exceptions to the postal rates, along with religious, educational and philanthropic literature. No one had noticed the presence of temperance literature as being entitled to preferential postal rates until the bill was in conference to eliminate differences between the Senate and House versions.
Regarding the failure of the Senate to hold a vote on the confirmation of Ambassador Philip Jessup to become a member of the U.N. delegation, it had been revealed that Dr. Channing Tobias, the black alternate delegate to the U.N., had, according to HUAC, more associations in his past with Communist-front organizations than had Mr. Jessup. Senator Alexander Smith, a Republican, had determined that to vote against Dr. Tobias would be bad for Republicans in their relations with the NAACP, but that they could not vote for him and then not also vote for Mr. Jessup for confirmation, and so determined that it would be prudent also to shelve the nomination of Dr. Tobias. The chairman of the Senate subcommittee examining the confirmations, Senator John Sparkman, had urged that every member of the Senate ought stand up and vote one way or the other on the two men. Senator Sparkman and Senator J. William Fulbright, along with Senator Smith, wound up voting for Dr. Tobias, while Senators Owen Brewster of Maine and Guy Gillette of Iowa did not vote. In the end, Dr. Tobias got more affirmative votes than did Ambassador Jessup, despite the disparity in past associations.
Stewart Alsop, in London, tells of the circus atmosphere pervading American elections being absent from the upcoming British general election scheduled for October 25. The familiar huge billboards with a smiling candidate were replaced by an occasional bland sticker on a car which merely advocated voting for a particular candidate of a particular party. Political publicity was muted; for example, at Mr. Alsop's hotel, no one knew that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was about to speak at a rally in Manchester.
Underneath this calm exterior, however, emotions ran high, with some left-wing Laborites muttering about "fascism" under a potential Conservative government, while Tories spoke of emigrating should the "damned Bolshies" come back. Some quite intelligent people were suggesting that it could be "the end of the road" for Britain.
But no one could seem to define what the difference would be in government under Conservatives versus that under Labor. The consensus of opinion appeared to be that if the Conservatives were to win, it would be "the same old pill with a bit more sugar on it". Yet, the next government would have to deal with the rapid erosion of British world power and a deepening economic crisis. It was therefore essential that the government have the power to govern.
He points out that the Labor Government had solid achievements to its credit during the prior six years. The standard of living had been significantly increased since the war, no mean achievement in a devastated country. But since the death of former Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the illness of Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps and the near defeat of the Labor Government in February, 1950, the Government had become weak and without a clear, identifiable face to it. The "peace" campaign which Labor had begun out of desperation of late was reminiscent of the late Thirties and might come back later to haunt Labor. A weak government, based on a thin majority, half committed to a policy of peace at any price, could lead Britain close to "the end of the road".
But even a strong Conservative
majority might also be haunted by the past, as it was difficult to
understand how the Conservatives could deliver on their campaign
promise of "a bit more sugar
Robert C. Ruark, in Cleveland, tells of going into hibernation regarding sports until the spring when baseball came around again, as he could not abide football as it was presently being played, essentially a professional game at the college level. He suggests that a Life editorial recently which had called for abolition of this type of college football as an evil influence on education and perverter of character among the young and old alike, might have had a point, if slightly overblown.
He does not care whether college football was abandoned or not, as it had become merely a gambling device for the bookies to get rich. The game, he says, made little sense to him or anyone else, including the coaches and players. The platoon substitution practice and tailoring one halfback to a particular defense and the like, combined with penalties aplenty, had made the game intolerable to watch.
For his part, he would rather stay home than battle traffic to sit freezing in a stadium to watch such a game.
"As for the greater implications of sporting rivalry, such as the annual struggle between Army and Navy, don't bother me. While you are freezing in Philadelphia, kids, Papa here will be asleep in his easy chair before a roaring fire, with an unread, improving volume sprawled carelessly at his side."
The Congressional Quiz, from the Congressional Quarterly, tells of Senator Taft having lived in the White House as a young man during the Presidency of his father, William Howard Taft, between 1909 and 1913.
A number of Congressmen had criticized the President's recent order allowing agency heads to declare information under their control to be classified if they deemed it a matter of national security, as allowing too much authority to declare secret information which was merely embarrassing to the agency.
A House committee had held hearings the previous July on the proposed St. Lawrence Seaway but had voted to table the bill until 1952.
Congress had authorized approximately 57 billion dollars for the coming fiscal year for defense spending, the largest single appropriation ever in peacetime. The Air Force received the largest amount, 20.6 billion, while the Army got 19.9 billion and the Navy, 15.8 billion.
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