The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 14, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via William Jorden, that Communist negotiators in Korea had challenged the U.N. negotiators this date to agree to a ceasefire line presently or end the truce talks. The allies refused, on the same basis as previously, that agreeing to a ceasefire buffer zone presently would take the pressure off final resolution of the remaining issues necessary for a final armistice. The Communists, according to the U.N. spokesman, had made it clear that their proposal would mean a present ceasefire.

In the ground war, U.N. troops repulsed two company-sized enemy probing attacks on the western front and scattered a Communist platoon on the eastern front, the only significant action of the date.

In the air war, allied warplanes flew without challenge and dealt new blows to the crippled Communist rail system.

The head of the U.S. Eighth Army's legal section said this date that the enemy had killed at least 5,790 U.N. soldier prisoners of war, about 5,500 of whom were Americans, plus some 250,000 Korean civilians in atrocities since the beginning of the war. As many as 200 captured U.S. Marines had been killed in a single day the previous December 10 near Sinhung in northeast Korea, by order of the commander of the 23rd Regiment, 81st Chinese Division. He said that 17 Turkish war prisoners had been killed by the Communist Chinese the prior May 15 near Yanggu, and 12 others on April 10 near Yonchon. He described the killing of 700 Korean civilians by binding and gagging them and then dropping them down a vertical gold mine shaft on September 26, 1950, leaving them to die. An additional 400 had been killed in the same manner on October 9, 1950, and yet another 400 had been bound, gagged and buried alive in three large holes on October 6. He said that the enemy had made a sham of the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners of war. By contrast, he added, the U.N. treated their prisoners in complete accordance with the requirements of the Convention.

In Paris, at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, India called on the Big Four foreign ministers, all present at the meeting, to meet with one another to ease the tensions in the world.

France announced a drastic cut in imports, caused by a shortage of dollar reserves.

The U.S. and Yugoslavia signed an agreement covering terms by which U.S. military aid would be extended to the Communist country, including that an American advisory mission at Belgrade would check on the use made of munitions supplied under the aid program.

In Pakistan, the Government announced that an atomic research laboratory was being set up in Lahore in Punjab Province.

The Congressional subcommittee investigating the IRB tax collection scandals said that the President had assured that the subcommittee members could see all Justice Department files on tax fraud cases. IRB Commissioner John Dunlap ordered an investigation of his own into the IRB's Alcohol Tax Unit, to be conducted by outside agents.

The Providence Evening Bulletin and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were publishing stories this date indicating that Lamar Caudle, head of the Justice Department's tax division, had tried to discourage prosecution of a $400,000 income tax evasion case in Alabama. The stories indicated that he had sought to discourage Assistant Attorney General John Mitchell—presumably no relation to the subsequent Attorney General and CREEP commander in the Nixon Administration—from prosecuting the case involving partners in the Gulf Coast Tobacco Company. Mr. Mitchell had nevertheless persisted and obtained a conviction in the case, but then, according to the story, Mr. Caudle refused to assign him any more tax cases. Eventually, Mr. Mitchell had sought and obtained a transfer to the criminal division. The stories indicated that a reliable source had communicated that the pressure not to prosecute the case had originated from Congressman Frank Boykin of Alabama.

A late bulletin from Sacramento indicates that Governor Earl Warren, vice-presidential nominee in 1948 with Governor Dewey, had, as expected, entered the 1952 presidential race. Speculation was that he was entering so that accumulated delegates could be saved for General Eisenhower at the convention.

In Pontiac, Michigan, where 11 children had been orphaned when their parents had both been killed in an automobile accident the prior weekend, a court ordered that the orphans be maintained in the care of relatives and two court-appointed guardians, effectively rejecting an adoption plan for the time being.

In New York, casual men's dress was giving way to a formal look, according to the Custom Tailors Guild of America, in releasing its list of the 10 best-dressed men in the country. In public life, General Eisenhower led the list, followed by Bob Hope, Winthrop Rockefeller, baseball manager Leo Durocher, bandleader Freddy Martin, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, Detroit chain grocer Herbert Hart, singer Lauritz Melchior, New York City Mayor Vincent Impellitteri, and actor Robert Taylor.

In Charlotte, B. B. Gossett, 67, a nationally known retired textile manufacturer, had died suddenly the previous afternoon in his office.

Emery Wister of The News tells of the arrival in Charlotte of actress Wanda Hendrix, the honorary queen of the Carolinas Carrousel, to be held the following day. She had been sent to the celebration by the Treasury Department to promote the sale of defense bonds and it was her first visit to the Carolinas. She would return to Los Angeles on Friday morning for an appearance on a television show, and indicated in response to a question that her latest film was a western, "Montana Territory", which had not yet been released.

Well, we shall await that with bated breath, because no one wants to miss a single presentation by one of the greatest actresses of all time.

On page 16-A, sports editor Bob Quincy interviews UNC football coach Carl Snavely, object of criticism in 1951 for his team's poor record, providing his side of the situation. Despite prior success until the 1950 season, he had one more poor season at the helm at UNC, before resigning and taking a job as head coach at Washington University in St. Louis.

On the editorial page, "'Bombastic and Provocative'" tells of General MacArthur, speaking in Seattle the previous night, deploring "bombastic and provocative statements which settle nothing". The piece, however, finds his own address, full of factual distortions, to have fallen into that category.

The General had stated that some in high Government circles believed that the Pacific Coast marked the practical western boundary of the country's immediate national interest. The piece finds that any such leaders had long been silent and overruled, for the country had firmly declared and stood by the Pacific "defense perimeter", including the Aleutian Islands, Japan and the Ryukyus, and the Philippines. That perimeter had been extended to South Korea when it was attacked June 25, 1950. General MacArthur had acknowledged as much in his speech, right after his false statement regarding the supposed leaders in high Government circles.

It goes on to detail and refute several other of the General's claims in the speech, including the contention that Europe held a competitive advantage over Pacific trade and the consequent need to focus the country's economic future on trade with Asia, and the belief that the country was on the same path which had caused its involvement in previous wars, ignoring the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Pacific Pact, and the firm stand against aggression in Korea, all directly opposite the isolationism preceding the two world wars. The General had also deplored "the indefinite continuation" of the Korean war when, since the entry of Communist China a year earlier, the country had the means of bringing the matter to a prompt and victorious end. The only interpretation the piece finds to that statement was that atomic war with China was the proper course.

It concludes that General MacArthur, from his recent speeches, had little knowledge of or regard for the facts of recent history.

"Vaughn Cannon Gets Off Light" tells of the Asheville jukebox king having received only a year and a day jail sentence for defrauding the Government of income taxes, a probationary condition along with settlement of his back taxes to his suspended two-year sentence and fine of $10,000. Yet, it appeared as a stiff sentence compared to most of the tax evaders prosecuted by Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle, in charge of the Justice Department's tax division. Mr. Cannon's sentence was the largest provided out of a list of 54 North Carolina income tax prosecutions.

Mr. Cannon, also prosecuted for a slot machine charge in Buncombe County, had been sentenced to 42 months on the roads and fined $5,000 in police court, but appealed the conviction to Superior Court, where he was allowed to plead guilty to illegal possession of a slot machine and got off with only a fine of $5,000.

Mr. Cannon had come to Asheville in 1941 and purchased a jukebox franchise business for about $34,000, and, within four years, had managed to make bank deposits totaling 1.5 million dollars, of which only $1,000 remained in the bank account when IRB agents began looking into his activities in 1948, a discrepancy which he explained by the many bank failures in the Western part of the state in the 1930's. The IRB had sought back taxes for $119,000 during a four-year period. The Government wound up claiming, however, $56,000 for only 1946, and dropping the other three years, per, according to Mr. Caudle, their normal policy.

The piece questions the leniency shown Mr. Cannon in both cases.

"Committee Stumbling Block" tells of Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder having promised complete cooperation of the IRB with the Congressional subcommittee investigating the income tax collection scandals, while the Justice Department had not been so cooperative, consistently refusing to make available to committee investigators its files regarding tax fraud prosecutions, which had, in many cases, been delayed. It had offered to digest the requested files for the committee but nothing further.

The piece finds that without full Justice Department cooperation, the subcommittee could not get very far in its investigation, that while the identities of the persons who were the subjects of the files had to be protected against public disclosure, the subcommittee had been zealously responsible in protecting the rights of individuals under scrutiny, much of its preliminary work having been done in executive session or by counsel. It therefore regards as imperative that the President order the Justice Department to reverse its position and fully cooperate.

As indicated on the front page, the President had assured the subcommittee full cooperation by the Justice Department in showing the members its tax fraud case files.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Missouri Mule Report", tells of the Bureau of the Census having issued a news release which purported to show that the number of mules in Missouri had decreased by about 100,000 per decade since 1920, such that the number had fallen from over 389,000 in 1920 to 63,000 in 1950.

The piece thinks that it was more important to determine what each mule could do rather than the number of them, and that a proper census would show how much more the 1950 mule might pull and haul than in 1920.

Drew Pearson tells of First Lady Bess Truman making no bones about the fact that she did not want her husband to run again in 1952, confiding recently to a friend at a White House reception that life in the White House was a terrible existence, leaving no privacy at all, that if she wanted to visit with her husband or her daughter, she had to get dressed up just to walk across the hall at Blair House, where the First Family resided while the White House was being renovated. She said she would be glad to get back to her home in Independence where they could live like human beings. She believed that the Government ought provide private living quarters for the First Family away from the White House. Since the attempt a year earlier on the President's life while they resided at Blair House, Mr. Pearson notes, security had been stepped up such that guards were now stationed on every floor of the temporary residence.

He again addresses the award by the Government to the Anaconda Copper Company of access to cheap public power through the Hungry Horse, Montana, power project for manufacture of aluminum, finds that the Justice Department anti-trust division's scrutiny of the deal had shown that powerful Montana newspapers and Montana Power & Light had bitterly opposed the Hungry Horse project originally, along with Anaconda, but that now Anaconda wanted to share in the public power, which the National Production Authority had approved. These newspapers had criticized the Harvey Machine Company's methods of lobbying for the aluminum-power contract and obtaining an RFC loan, but were supporting the same company now that Anaconda was involved. The Justice Department found that Anaconda controlled most of the published news in Montana. He also lists the holdings of plants and mines in several other states across the country by the giant copper company, then third largest in the world. Yet, with all of its monopolistic holdings, the Government wanted to put it in the aluminum business.

The backers of Senator Taft for the presidency were angry at his brother Charles for announcing as a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio in 1952, so much so that they were considering placing on the ballot Congressman George Bender as an opponent in the primary. The GOP leaders in Ohio felt that having two members of the same family on the same ballot would prove confusing to voters. Moreover, Charles had not been a party regular, having been a friend of FDR, voting for him at least twice and serving under him in the Federal Security Administration and later in the State Department during the war. He had also helped elect a Democratic mayor in Cincinnati. He had turned down President Truman's invitation to be ambassador to the Vatican, and because he had been a president of the Federal Council of Churches, a strong Protestant organization, the positions tended to place him on the Protestant side of the bitter controversy over appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican. Catholic sentiment was already none too friendly to Senator Taft, based on the anti-Catholic campaign literature distributed by his organization against his opponent in 1950, Joe Ferguson.

Roma K. McKnickle, of Editorial Research Reports, tells of a black market in babies of unmarried mothers, being sold to childless couples for amounts up to $4,500, according to grand jury investigations and indictments recently handed down in New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland against a Brooklyn lawyer, as well as against five doctors, several nurses and a hospital superintendent, alleging that the ring grossed $500,000 in a period of four years. Many other undercover adoptions were being arranged in a gray market by reputable doctors, nurses or clergymen seeking to help unwed mothers.

These types of placements often went wrong, as the child wound up physically or mentally unsuited to the adoptive home and parents. To safeguard adoptive parents, the children and the biological parent, several states had enacted laws requiring that children be adopted only through social agencies equipped to investigate properly the situation. The U.S. Children's Bureau believed, however, that more stringent requirements in more states should be adopted.

Marquis Childs tells of the country generally believing that it was time for a political change in leadership, but the question remained whether Republicans would give the electorate "half a chance" to make that change to a leader the people could follow. The concern was that the professional GOP politicians would nominate Senator Taft.

Recently, Western state Republican leaders met in Seattle to consider the issues and candidates for 1952, shortly before which Republicans in California who followed the lead of Governor Earl Warren had drafted a fairly comprehensive statement of major interests in the West, such as irrigation, electric power, and more highways. Yet, those meeting in Seattle had ignored this platform and come out strongly for the gold standard and against every innovation of the previous two decades.

California voters were less tied to political parties than in most other states, with up to 30 percent usually stating in polls that they were independents. Generally, the leaders of the Republican Party showed no signs of trying to woo such independent voters, rather trying to solidify the party's hold on the old and rigidly faithful stalwarts. Senator Taft, speaking recently at a fund-raising dinner in Chicago, had scorned "me-tooism", emblematic of which had been the two candidacies of Governor Dewey in 1944 and 1948, essentially adopting New Deal-Fair Deal policies but saying he could administer them more efficiently than the Democratic Administrations. Senator Taft also referred disparagingly to the independent voters.

Governor Warren had told Mr. Childs that within the Republican Party organization, Oregon, with a long Republican record, had nearly an equal representation to that of Louisiana, where there were few Republicans. The South generally wielded power within the party quite disproportionate to the number of Republicans in the region.

Mr. Childs suggests that victory might come to the Republicans through the Taft route, by dint of the fact that Democrats were disillusioned with the Truman Administration, just as disillusioned Republicans who did not vote in 1948 had contributed to the victory of President Truman.

A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., suggests that the next time the newspaper decided to eliminate a comic strip, it should replace it with "Alley Oop".

He concludes that he was not interested in a vote for "Ike, Harry, or Bob; just in casting one for Alley."

Boop, boop—boop, boop...

A pair of letter writers representing the North Carolina School Food Service convention, held in Charlotte in October, thanks the newspaper for its columns and photographic section, helping to make the convention a success.

What will help the convention become a genuine success would be to serve better food in the schools, the only thing reasonably edible at our elementary school, beyond the milk, having been the rolls and the chess pie. And little boys and girls cannot grow big and strong on a diet of rolls, milk, and chess pie.

A letter from A. W. Black, with deer season underway, urges consideration of a recently published report regarding tragic hunting accidents among "trigger-happy hunters", which had said that in some years almost as many people as deer were shot. He stresses that a firearm was not a toy and that those who were irresponsible in their use of them while hunting deserved to be in the same cell with those who deliberately misused firearms.

Mr. Black finally makes some sense. During his three-year hiatus from writing, after suggesting in late 1948 that UNC president Frank Graham was sympathetic with Communists, together with other earlier outlandish, even Clannish-sounding claims, perhaps he had received a miraculous brain transplant, removing his cone.

A letter from Avondale says that during the month of October, 1949, when a Charlotte resident was serving on the North Carolina Woodmen of the World, which had instituted a program for entertaining the orphans of the state during the Christmas holidays, the organization had appealed to the state for voluntary contributions which raised enough money to make the Christmas parties a success. In 1950, the program had been enlarged and the money spent per child increased by 25 percent. The drive for 1951 had just begun and the writer urges support for this worthy cause to make Christmas a joyous season for the orphans of the state.

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