The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 30, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert Tuckman, that no progress had been made in the Korean ceasefire negotiations regarding the attempt to establish a mutually acceptable buffer zone after three hours of meeting this date at Panmunjom. The allies continued to insist on a 2.5-mile wide buffer zone along present battle lines whereas the Communists proposed a zone which would require the U.N. forces to retreat between five and fifteen miles southward from their present hard-fought ridge-line positions. The two sides would again meet the following day.

Allied infantrymen in the eastern sector had repulsed an attack near "Heartbreak Ridge" by a thousand Chinese troops during pre-dawn darkness this date and then drove ahead a thousand yards during daylight hours. On the western front, U.N. forces gained more than half a mile northwest of Yonchon, meeting little resistance. On the central front, an allied raiding party advanced two miles northwest of Kumsong, as U.N. patrols probed all through the area to determine the increased strength of Chinese positions after a fresh enemy division had been moved into the area.

In the air war, enemy anti-aircraft guns shot down two American planes, an F-80 Shooting Star jet and a reconnaissance plane, and the Fifth Air Force said that there was no chance that the pilots had survived. For the second day in a row, enemy jets refused to engage the American jets in northwest Korea.

In Tokyo, Army chief of staff General J. Lawton Collins said that the U.S. the following year would have its largest peacetime Army in history, equal to 27 divisions, after the call-up of three more National Guard divisions to Federal duty. He said that the U.S. would have to retain troops in Japan for some time as a bulwark against "ruthless Communist imperialism".

In Las Vegas, a brilliant flash was observed from 70 miles away at the Yucca Flat atomic test facility, as the third in a series of atomic tests took place. Observers had agreed that the mushroom was beautiful.

In Pittsburgh, Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson said that a steel strike had to be avoided for the sake of the continued growth of the U.S. arsenal. CIO and Steelworkers president Philip Murray had stated in a recent speech that the Steelworkers would apparently soon seek a wage increase. The situation would, the following April, eventuate in the seizure of the steel industry by the President, which the Supreme Court, the following June, would rule unconstitutional as beyond the scope of the power of the President without specific authorization by Congress, that the President did not possess any inherent power to act in national emergencies as the Government had claimed.

Wildcat strikers on the piers of New York ended their boycott of military cargo for the first time since the 16-day old waterfront strike had begun, and began unloading ships. The strike continued, however, as to other cargo.

In Egypt, the British cut traffic for five hours this date on the highway between Cairo and Ismailia, the British base at the mid-point of the Suez Canal, where recent violence had taken place. Egyptian officials linked the stoppage with Government confirmation that the Egyptians were forming underground "liberation battalions" to drive the British from Egypt, but there was no immediate explanation from the British for the roadblock. Egypt had recently unilaterally abrogated a 1936 treaty permitting British use of the Suez Canal in exchange for British defense thereof and an 1899 agreement providing for joint British and Egyptian control of the Sudan.

The President signed a bill which increased postal rates to bring in 117 million dollars in new annual revenue. The penny postcard was doubled in price and a ten percent increase in mailing charges for newspapers and magazines was also implemented, effective April 1, with two other ten percent increases to take effect in each of the subsequent two years, for a total of thirty percent increase by April 1, 1954. There would also be an increase in third class mail, which consisted mainly of circulars and advertising.

The President also signed legislation increasing benefits for more than 400,000 persons currently receiving aid under the Railroad Retirement Act, increasing benefits by 15 percent per year.

In Huntington, W. Va., a Federal judge ruled preliminarily that a man claiming conscientious objector status in the draft would be judged by the standard of his own subjective beliefs and not on the basis of his religion. The draft examiner had rejected his application on the basis that the draftee was a Catholic and the examiner, also a Catholic, concluded that the teachings of the Catholic religion did not bar military service. In the past, conscientious objector status had been determined by the religion of the applicant rather than subjective individual beliefs. The Court had not yet determined the issue of whether the man was entitled to conscientious objector status but only had enunciated the standard by which it would adjudicate the matter.

In Buffalo, N.Y., twelve members of a crew of a freighter which struck a gasoline-loaded barge and exploded in Buffalo Harbor were reported dead or missing this date. The cause of the accident had not yet been determined.

In Louisville, Ky., a man who was threatening to jump from the roof of a 19-story hotel was finally convinced to relent by a pretty young blonde whom he had requested to see out of the crowd below, after a preacher, a psychology student and police had failed the previous night to talk him from his perch. He was a former soldier, 19 years old, who had been out of the service for three months and was unemployed.

In the Northern and Western areas of the country, snow and cold air came in from Canada to Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, extending westward to the Pacific Northwest and eastward to the northern Great Lakes region. It was 13 degrees in Butte, Montana, early in the day and below freezing in much of the cold belt.

Tom Fesperman of The News tells of Alfred T. Cox of Charlotte, vice-president of Civil Air Transport, Inc., a company of which General Claire Chennault was chairman of the board. He interviews Mr. Cox, during a stopover at his home, regarding the activities of CAT, which had to evacuate under enemy fire 30 to 40 fields on the Chinese mainland, had lost several crewmen to advancing Chinese Communists, was continuing to search for an American pilot who had been captured at Kunming in January, 1950, and had moved its home offices from the mainland onto Formosa after the Nationalists had been forced to evacuate. The airline had also been involved in the Korean War. Mr. Fesperman proceeds to tell how Mr. Cox had linked up with General Chennault after the General and his Chinese wife had come to the U.S. two years earlier and sought out Mr. Cox for an executive position with the airline.

Mr. Cox had met the General during the war when the latter led the Flying Tigers and Mr. Cox was a paratroop officer charged with leading troops dropping behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Far East to organize native resistance. When Mr. Cox first joined CAT, it was principally a cargo line flying all over China, but as the Communists had taken over more territory, it began moving from endangered fields and setting up other fields. Since the Nationalists had no sizable air force, CAT filled the void and began dropping rice to surrounded Nationalist troops during the Chinese civil war.

In Chicago, three men sought to break into a liquor store but were foiled when the home-made burglar alarm tripped, prompting them to try to shut it off, finally ripping it down and taking it with them. They had given up in the process, however, robbing the store.

In Philadelphia, an eight-point buck deer, which had wandered apparently out of the northern countryside and entered the city through Fairmount Park, was shot dead by police after it had been chased through the streets for two miles before ducking inside the Broad Street subway station and running toward the change booth, at which point it was stopped in its tracks by the turnstile.

It's a good thing in the City of Brotherly Love that the police were alert and able to stop the rampaging wild beast, as those deer can be dangerous when cornered. Just goes to show the value of the turnstiles to prevent non-paying customers from trying to leap aboard the subway train without paying. But, perhaps, the deer was honest and knew that he had not brought the fare and so the jig was up. We hope that the police yelled, "Everybody down!" before letting him have it but good. That will teach his fellow deer to come to the city and then have the temerity to try to board the subway.

On the editorial page, "Sweeping Action Long Overdue" finds the removal of 22 collectors and agents of the IRB in recent months, in St. Louis, Washington, New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and San Francisco, to have been appropriate and following in the same old pattern which was "Trumanism", the product of political mediocrity leading to malfeasance in office of various low-level officials. When the late Robert Hannegan had been made head of the IRB in 1943, a system of political job appointments was instituted which had led to the corruption now being uncovered.

The Department of Justice appeared to have been slow to prosecute income tax violators, though the claim was denied by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath and Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle of North Carolina. But a Federal District Court judge in St. Louis had insisted on continuing a grand jury investigation of tax scandals, notwithstanding the apparent opposition by the Justice Department, and the investigation had turned up bribes and unethical conduct on the part of former collector James Finnegan.

It suggests that the problems at the IRB would not be completely removed until politics was removed from the agency by implementation of a civil service system of appointment of officials. Also, it was necessary to have a full public inquiry into the part played by the Justice Department in the prosecution of tax cases.

"A Flagrant Violation of the Law" tells of a strike of plumbers at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear facility, prompting 2,500 workers to stay off the job in an illegal strike. Strikes in other defense industries had cut down jet production in Ohio, California, Connecticut and New Jersey. Labor disputes were therefore hitting at the very heart of the nation's defense effort. It finds that the Government and the workers had a responsibility to achieve maximum defense production and, while unions had the right to strike for just and legal reasons, it was "unforgivable" for unions to violate the law in the manner which was occurring at Oak Ridge, and thereby harm the critical defense program.

"Early Support for 'Ike'" tells of the New York Herald-Tribune having endorsed General Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination, in an editorial which appears on the page. The newspaper had long been a voice of the liberal wing of the Republican Party and had often praised General Eisenhower and criticized Senator Taft in its editorials on foreign policy. That it would make such an endorsement was not, therefore, surprising, but that it would do so at such an early stage, eight months before the Republican convention, was novel. It had determined, however, that with Senator Taft mounting his campaign while General Eisenhower had to remain silent as long as he was supreme commander of NATO, the General's candidacy needed early aid to draw wider attention to the General's attributes.

The editorial had found that his accomplishments in war and in peace had "required the vision of the statesman, the skill of the diplomat, the supreme organizing talents of the administrator, and the humane sympathies of the representative of the people".

"Budgets and Games Won" tells of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch having noted that the Major League baseball clubs had finished the 1950 season in each league in roughly the same order as their rank in expenditure on players. In the American League, the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Nationals and Chicago White Sox finished in that order in number of games won, as well as in the overall payroll. In the National League, the same was partially true, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Boston Braves, and Chicago Cubs finishing in the same position in both number of games won and payrolls, though the League pennant was won by the Philadelphia Phillies which had the fifth largest payroll.

The correlation was not absolute with the remainder of the teams, but it assumes that the same might prove true of football and it suggests that one way to get around the professionalization of college football would be to make the schools who paid the most money play only other schools paying large sums of money to bring in star players, while the smaller schools with smaller payrolls played each other.

A piece from the Richmond News-Leader, titled "Silver's Best Friend Adopts New Cause", tells of Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada having, since his election to the Senate in 1932, been the champion of the silver miner, a major industry in his state. Now, he was taking up the cudgels on behalf of raising the price of gold, fixed at $35 per ounce since 1934. He was proposing to introduce legislation at the next session of Congress to establish a free market in gold. And Nevada was third, behind Utah and Colorado, in domestic production of gold. The piece finds it no surprise, in light of his indefensible record in support of silver subsidies.

An editorial from the New York Herald-Tribune, as above indicated, endorses General Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 and sets forth its argument for his being the best man for the job based on the current world situation.

Drew Pearson provides a letter from the administrative assistant to Senator George Malone of Nevada, in which he had proposed a year earlier to the Long Beach, California, harbor commissioners that he receive $50,000 plus expenses and taxes as a contingency fee should he successfully be able to lobby for a bill in Congress to turn Federal ownership of tidelands oil over to the states. The harbor commissioners ultimately turned him down and thereafter, Senator Malone, who had been seemingly friendly to state ownership of tidelands oil, suddenly became an advocate for Federal ownership.

Marquis Childs, in Madison, Wisc., tells of Senator Taft having promised his supporters in Wisconsin that he would enter the Wisconsin primary the following April, the only presidential preference primary he intended to enter. In consequence, backers of General Eisenhower were urging the General to allow his name to be placed into the Wisconsin contest, though opposed by Governor Dewey on the ground that he believed the Republican machine would be able to turn out the vote for Senator Taft, leading to defeat for the General in the only head-to-head contest with Senator Taft.

Former Governor of Minnesota Harold Stassen might also enter the race, as he had in 1948, introducing a wildcard factor, a possibility Mr. Childs promises to consider in a future column.

In addition, Senator Joseph McCarthy was running for re-election from Wisconsin in 1952 and might be contested in the primary by Governor Walter Kohler, who had not yet made up his mind whether he would run.

Robert C. Ruark tells of Serge Rubinstein, who managed to purchase fifteen draft deferments for himself during the last war before finally going to jail after repeatedly ducking a charge of stock-rigging on which he was acquitted. Mr. Rubinstein had used the White House extensively during the war as a gimmick for his businesses and was symbolic of the "filthiness of our times".

He had been deemed eligible for deportation, but Russia, where he was born, did not want him. Mr. Ruark suggests that he might find a haven in one of the banana republics, such as Argentina. He urges simply depositing him off a boat outside the eight-mile international limit and seeing how well he could swim, but even that, he concludes, would not be so bad as he would likely have a "fix in on the sharks, and a tidy black-market rescue rig standing by".

Mr. Rubinstein was currently free on appellate bond and Mr. Ruark assumes that status could continue for years to come.

"If you wonder why I got so wrought up about a guy that I once staged a one-man demonstration to keep him in jail, it is simply this: I knew a nice gent who caught one down the stack at Salerno at a time when this illegal foreigner, Rubinstein, had just rigged a fresh draft deferment through pull, lies and possibly bribery."

The Congressional Quiz, from the Congressional Quarterly, tells of children in certain areas only able to attend school for half a day because of overcrowding, prompting the Senate and the House on October 19 to pass resolutions calling for increased construction-metal allotments for schools and hospitals so that construction could take place. The U.S. Education commissioner had testified before the House Education Committee that the lack of classrooms had been the result of the steel shortage caused by the defense program.

It also informs that the President had been Constitutionally authorized to make a recess appointment of Ambassador Philip Jessup to become a delegate to the U.N., after the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee voted 3 to 2 against approval of the appointment, but thereafter the full Committee had shelved the nomination, preventing a floor vote until Congress reconvened in January.

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