The Charlotte News
Thursday, November 1, 1951
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. and Communist negotiators had agreed generally on the line of demarcation to establish the eastern half of the armistice zone but that the western half remained in dispute, with the Communists still demanding Kaesong and the allies wanting to retain it, as it was just south of the 38th parallel. The negotiators were reported to be nearer agreement on the lines of the buffer zone than at any time previously, according to a U.N. briefing officer. He emphasized, however, that agreement on a zone would not immediately end the shooting and that it could transpire for a long time afterward. The eastern half of the zone had been settled as running from Kumhwa, the right anchor of the old "Iron Triangle", to the east coast. The U.N. warned, however, that the agreement could fall apart as battle lines changed with more fighting.
In ground action, 33 U.S. Marines had, on Saturday, successfully raided a North Korean guerrilla stronghold behind U.N. lines in the first true helicopter combat assault ever undertaken. They had been landed on a mountain top and hid in the peaks during the night before striking the following morning in the haze.
Light snow and cold rain fell along the line this date producing quiet on the ground, the "quietest damn thing" the troops had seen in a long time, according to the briefing officer.
In the air war, night-flying B-29s dropped 400 large bombs, 70 tons of which were dropped along the central front into enemy bunkers within the rugged hills north of Kumhwa. Forty enemy jets fought for ten minutes with 24 U.S. Thunderjets undertaking a rail-cutting mission in northwest Korea and no one was injured.
Army troops participated in the
fourth in a series of atomic tests in the Yucca Flat area of Nevada,
about 75 miles from Las Vegas, where windows of at least three stores
were cracked from the shock wave of the blast. Indications were that
the Army was satisfied with what it had learned in the experiment and
would not participate further in atomic tests. The test was designed
to determine the effect of a detonation on certain items and
equipment, as well as the psychological and physiological effects on
troops. The Army stated that there were no casualties or injuries to
any of the personnel participating. (Not yet
Shock from the blast was apparently felt as far away as North Hollywood, 225 miles from the scene, where residents phoned police about 25 minutes after the detonation to report an earthquake. The California Institute of Technology seismological laboratory at Pasadena reported that there had been no record of any earthquake. When asked by newsmen whether the reports were based on the atomic explosion, the director of the laboratory said that they should draw their own conclusions. The timing of the perceived shock coincided with the time it would take sound to travel the intervening distance, about twenty minutes.
In Los Angeles, a soldier bound for Korea was having a long visit with his four-year old son this date after receiving permission from the Superior Court, following an interim period since April during which his mother-in-law had refused to let him see his son without a doctor's certificate, because "he might have a cold". The Court ordered the mother-in-law not to interfere again in visitation rights granted to the man pursuant to his 1949 divorce from his wife, lest her daughter might be sent to jail for contempt.
General Eisenhower was flying home from Europe this weekend for conferences with the President and other top Government officials on Monday and Tuesday regarding his NATO command. White House press secretary Joseph Short said that no emergency had prompted the visit. Part of the reason, he said, was to fill in the President on the progress of Western European defense forces, in preparation for the President's messages to Congress in January. The General had not visited with the President since January 31 after his return from a tour of the NATO countries.
The White House announced that the President would recommend to Congress that internal revenue collectors be brought under the Civil Service system, as recommended by the new DNC chairman Frank McKinney.
A brief story notes that it was the first anniversary of the assassination attempt on the President by two Puerto Rican nationalists, one of whom was killed during the attempt in front of Blair House and the other having in the interim been convicted and sentenced to death, subsequently to be commuted by the President.
Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, continuing their visit in and around Washington, placed a wreath at the tomb of George Washington at Mount Vernon in Virginia. It was a gloomy day, with rain in the forecast and a chilly wind blowing. Nevertheless, a sizable crowd was waiting on the sidewalk across the street from Blair House when the royal couple departed during the morning, accompanied by Margaret Truman. Several hundred persons also gathered at Mount Vernon for the ceremony and about 20,000 persons, mostly school children, lined the route from Washington.
The Government said that Federally-inspected slaughterhouses would be ordered the following month to set aside part of their beef for the armed services. Price administrator Mike DiSalle said it was necessary because the armed services faced a severe meat shortage.
In Selma, Ala., Senator Harry F.
Byrd of Virginia, speaking before the Dallas County Farm Bureau
annual meeting, bitterly attacked the Administration, saying that
only "an immediate uprising of political virility in the South"
would save the Democratic Party. He accused the Administration of
debauching the principles of the party through political expediency,
one of the manifestations of which was influence peddling. He urged
the Southern states to be ready to take effective action to defeat
the President should he run for re-election. He used such terms as
"fiscal irresponsibility", "moral turpitude",
"wave of scandals", "political hypocrisy", and
"the disreputable Boyle
In Cincinnati, a 24-year old attorney in the law firm of Senator Taft was discovered shot to death at his home this date. He was found in his bed with a revolver in his hand and a bullet wound in the side of his head. His father said that he had been working very hard of late and appeared worried about his health. Police suggested that it was an apparent suicide.
In Mt. Ida, Ark., where wild animals had escaped after a circus truck had overturned, a single hunter killed a charging male leopard shortly after daybreak, first shooting it and then clubbing it to death. The leopard, one of two which had escaped, had killed the hunter's dog. The other leopard had been killed the previous afternoon by an Arkansas State Highway Patrolman. In addition, a polar bear, two black bears and several rhesus monkeys were also still on the loose in the Ouachita National Forest. The polar bear was said to be dangerous and the black bears, tame, should you run across them.
On the editorial page, "A Job for Local Communities" disagrees with a statement by Dr. A. M. Proctor of Duke University that it was imperative to obtain on a state-wide basis adequate school buildings and equipment, for to ensure that no district was inadequately provided with facilities for education, there was no alternative but to turn to the State.
The piece finds, however, that there were many good arguments on the other side of the issue, as many counties, especially those in rural areas, were not nearly so poor as they claimed to be, as valuable farmland was assessed at very low rates, making the property-tax base in rural counties appear much less than it actually was. Moreover, schools needed to retain strong local ties and the citizenry which voted to erect school buildings had a deep interest in those buildings and what transpired therein, more so than would legislators in Raleigh or Washington sending the local districts aid money. In addition, the system already in place in the state virtually precluded the possibility that physical plants would be poorly designed, as plans had to be approved by the State Superintendent of Education. It also believes that there had been too much surrender of local initiative to the State and Federal governments, that education was one of the last bastions of local responsibility and should be preserved at all costs.
Why don't you just come out and say what you mean, as you have in the past, that Federal aid to the schools would inevitably have integration strings attached, anathema to your world view or at least your paternalistic perception of the South's willingness to adjust to a broader world view.
"A Single Standard of Morality" finds it pleasing that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had placed in the same class of businessmen those who solicited bribes as those corrupt public officials who accepted them, a position which the newspaper had supported for several months. It finds that not until the society had achieved a single standard of morality for those within and without government would the buying and selling of influence be eliminated.
"Progress in Korea" tells of there being cautious optimism in the ceasefire talks in Korea, as the Communists had abandoned their previous demand that the buffer zone be established along the 38th parallel, modifying it now twice, most recently on the previous day proposing a line which was only two or three miles different from the battle lines proposed by the allies. Both sides still wanted Kaesong, but the latest concession by the Communists appeared as a considerable compromise and it was likely there would result from it agreement on the ceasefire line. (It does not discuss the development reported this date regarding agreement on the eastern half of the line.)
That the Communists had finally agreed to resume the negotiations and then had quickly made two major concessions showed that the policy of "strength within limits" might shortly pay off with a truce.
"Caveat Emptor" remarks on a letter from a reader published the prior Monday regarding a blackout of televised football in the area on two weekends, to avoid interference with attendance at the N.C. State versus Davidson game and the UNC versus Duke game. It finds that the writer, as owner of a television set, had every right to complain to the network, the station, the sponsor and even the newspaper about anything he did not like, but that ownership of a television set did not automatically entitle the owner to a seat on the 50-yard line of a football game, and to demand a particular service was patently absurd. It cites the rule of caveat emptor as still being applicable.
"FEPC Pro and Con" provides a report from the United Press regarding Senator Taft's visit to Knoxville, Tennessee, to open his campaign in the South, in which he was quoted as saying to a group of black leaders that he opposed FEPC, but favored anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation, whereas in the Senator's pamphlet disseminated by his office, he was quoted as saying he was for the FEPC, had introduced the bill for it in 1945 and continually had urged its passage.
A piece from the Richmond News-Leader, titled "Emeralds for the Uncommon Man", finds it novel to have encountered during a now routine flight into the big city a passenger who was taking his first night flight, finding it a thing of "surpassing beauty". It describes the view from above, "the work of some fabulous Cellini, of gold and bright enamels and precious stones."
"Small wonder that new
travelers find their first night landing unforgettable! Out of the
blackness and brightness and confusion of the street, out of the red
sign
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from various newspapers around the state, provides one from from The Pathfinder in which it quotes from North Carolina's Lindsay Warren, U.S. Comptroller General, that there was fat all over Washington. During his tenure since 1940, the General Accounting Office had collected more than 740 million dollars illegally or improperly paid out by the Government, and Mr. Warren received a salary of $17,500 per year.
The Smithfield Herald recommends keeping on hand plenty of steel wool.
Roland Beasley of the Monroe Journal finds the two major parties to be very much alike in their political views, with radical and conservative elements within both, and gravitating around local issues, personalities and historical backgrounds. "The web of which they are woven cannot be untangled."
That would prove
falsely prophetic within the ensuing 20 years of warp and woof
The Rockingham Post-Dispatch wonders whether groceries had doubled in price or the paper bags which carried them were simply stronger and thus able to carry more groceries than two years earlier, when it was said that groceries were half the current prices.
The Greensboro Daily News finds that those who were selling the Stars and Bars flags, pennants and stickers, did not regard the Confederacy as a lost cause.
Bernadette Hoyle of the Smithfield Herald relates of UNC President Gordon Gray having gone to the cash register in a restaurant to pay his check and asked whether the cashier would cash his check, producing an impressive looking White House pass, to which the cashier reportedly said that she really wanted to see a driver's license.
And so more, so forth, so on, so on, more and forth on forth.
Drew Pearson finds that the more one looked at the problems at the IRB among tax collectors, the more one realized that those with political pull treated their jobs as indirect pensions and spent more time on private business than on Government tax collection. There were, fortunately, thousands of non-political agents. He cites three examples of the former type in the Nashville office, one being a collector who had been suspended for using narcotic drugs following an illness a couple of years earlier, though the narcotics he was using were prescribed. Based on an investigation, he was found to be spending insufficient time at the office and so was suspended. The assistant collector was also under investigation for spending too much time on his realty company which owned three large apartment houses in Nashville. It turned out that he was almost completely deaf, and so his superiors had given him little work to perform, leaving him plenty of time to work in the family realty firm. The chief field deputy in the office was also under investigation, and his family was connected with a liquor distributing firm, with which he was apparently closely associated and for which he spent much time working.
The feeling at the IRB was that, while having empathy for collectors with physical disabilities, the Government budget should not be overloaded with salaries paid to persons who were not performing full-time jobs.
Mr. Pearson notes that the three collectors mentioned received their appointments through Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. To fire one of them would bring down his notorious wrath upon the entire IRB, probably resulting in curtailment of its budget. He further notes that the tax collection system needed to be placed under Civil Service, to take it out of politics.
It was standing room only, he
reports, in Washington theaters to see "The Day the Earth Stood
Still", despite the fact that Elmer Davis, H. V. Kaltenborn,
Gabriel Heatter and Mr. Pearson
Marquis Childs, in Madison, Wisc., again discusses the upcoming Wisconsin Senatorial primary of the following September, in which incumbent Senator Joseph McCarthy had to stand for re-election, with his most likely primary opponent being Governor Walter Kohler, Jr.
It was a puzzle as to how Senator
McCarthy had ever managed to win in 1946
Organization Republicans believed that Senator McCarthy had not been significantly weakened by his recent attack on General Marshall, but objective observers thought he had definitely slipped in popularity. Nevertheless, many people had come to believe that Communism was a threat within the Government and that the Senator had been working effectively to eliminate it. That notion plus his ability to whip up an indifferent or skeptical crowd into cheering frenzy would make him a formidable opponent. Also, many Republican businessmen believed that anything was acceptable as a means for driving out the Democrats, that Senator McCarthy might be an s.o.b. but he was their s.o.b., and so they were for him.
Recently, the Wisconsin Agriculturalist had taken a poll of farmers and found that they favored Governor Kohler by 41 percent to 40 percent for Senator McCarthy, with 19 percent undecided. Governor Kohler had pointed out that respondents with no more than an eighth grade education favored Senator McCarthy by 36 percent to 32 percent, whereas those with greater than an eighth grade education favored the Governor by a margin of 41 percent to 28 percent, and women favored the Governor 39 percent to 26 percent, with 35 percent undecided.
If the Governor followed the cautious approach, favored by the Republican organization, he would pass up the race and run for re-election as Governor, and then with another two-year term, he might land a Cabinet position in a Republican Administration, or run against the more vulnerable Senator Alexander Wiley in 1956.
Parenthetically, Senator McCarthy, by Mr. Childs's description, sounds eerily like a politician on the current landscape in 2018.
In any event, Governor Kohler would accept conventional advice and run only for re-election as Governor in 1952, defeating Democrat William Proxmire, to become Senator in 1957, filling the vacancy following the death of the dipso., just as calypso
Senator McCarthy was consigned, one might suggest, to history's Kohler, having widened a pre-existing crack in the American political landscape, produced before him by the likes of Martin Dies, J. Parnell Thomas, John Rankin and Richard Nixon
Joseph Alsop tells of it being no surprise that the St. Louis printing firm, which had sought and obtained an RFC loan, had hired the law firm of William Boyle, chairman of the DNC, as it was common for businesses to hire well-connected law firms to handle their business.
Such had been the case with Pan American Airways, where political operations were as efficient as its air operations. The company had close links to both parties. The Republican Senator from Pan Am was Owen Brewster of Maine, one of Senator Taft's primary lieutenants on the Senate floor. The Senator had acted virtually on behalf of Pan Am in dealing with TWA, regarding competition for overseas routes. During the course of the hearings on the matter, TWA head Howard Hughes charged that Senator Brewster had received special favors from Pan Am, to which the Senator self-righteously responded with a demand for an investigation from the Justice Department, which never materialized.
Among Democrats, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada was the primary representative of Pan Am, sponsoring the statute which established the Civil Aeronautics Board, the regulatory body for the airlines. He had cooperated with Senator Brewster when they jointly led the fight for Pan Am to have all of the country's international aviation business as the "chosen instrument".
Pan Am had long employed former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson as its Washington counsel, and Mr. Johnson had not formally separated himself from the company while he had been working as treasurer of the DNC, only doing so later when he became Defense Secretary—unlike Mr. Boyle, who had separated himself from dealings with the St. Louis printing firm when he became DNC chairman. But since Mr. Johnson had left his Defense post in September, 1950, his law firm had again become counsel for Pan Am.
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