The Charlotte News

Friday, November 16, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via William Jorden, that a U.N. spokesman had stated that truce negotiators were "a lot closer" to agreement regarding the buffer zone in Korea than they had been a month earlier or even a week earlier. The negotiating subcommittees met for over five hours this date, however, without obtaining any new results. The spokesman said that he was confident nevertheless that the buffer zone dispute would be settled, that otherwise the negotiations would cease.

In the ground war, Communist Chinese troops, supported by at least five tanks, knocked allied infantrymen out of an advance position north of Yonchon on the western front. At the eastern end of the battle line, a Communist company pushed allied troops off a hill with an attack which had begun around midnight and continued until dawn.

In the air war, allied jet fighters spotted about 116 MIG-15 jets in two different groups, but the enemy showed no signs in either case of wanting to engage.

Armed services radio had broadcast to American front-line troops in Korea for the first time this date the report that the Communists had slaughtered 5,500 U.S. prisoners of war, and around the world repercussions continued to come from the announcement made the prior Wednesday by the head of the Eighth Army Judge Advocate General's section in Korea. The British Foreign Office in London had disclosed that it had formally inquired whether the U.S. could support the charge and had sent along the inquiry to the unified command in Korea. In Washington, there were continuing demands from members of Congress to understand why the brass at the Pentagon had no apparent official information regarding the matter. An Army spokesman in Washington had told reporters that he had no information about the mass killings and that the Far East command was investigating. An Associated Press reporter in Tokyo said that the colonel who had released the report might lose his job. The reporter also said that an unnamed officer had indicated that the report showed what was holding up the ceasefire negotiations, as the Communists did not want to have to start answering questions about their prisoners of war. No information thus far had contradicted the report.

In Paris, at the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinski put forth a new four-point disarmament plan which included a call for reduction of armaments by a third during the calendar year following its adoption and an absolute prohibition of atomic weapons. It was designed as a substitute for the disarmament proposal put forward by the Big Three Western powers the previous week, which primarily had called for a census of the nations' armaments and provision for inspection by non-nationals of each country. The Soviet proposal also called on member nations to submit complete official data on their armed forces, weapons, and foreign military bases a month after the adoption, as well as formation of an international control organization within the framework of the U.N. Security Council to verify compliance.

In Ille, France, a non-Communist union ordered its members back to work in the northern coal mines, but the Communist-led majority of workers remained on strike regarding a reduction in their health benefits.

Editor Pete McKnight of The News tells of a former FBI agent, who had served in Charlotte while Justice Department tax division head Lamar Caudle had been a district attorney in Western North Carolina, offering to testify to the House subcommittee investigating the tax collection scandals about Mr. Caudle's record as a prosecutor. The agent was apparently prepared to testify negatively regarding Mr. Caudle, indicating his undue lenience in prosecuting serious cases involving large-scale thefts some years earlier.

Armed agents of the Alcohol-Tax Unit had been assigned to the chief of the Charlotte IRB intelligence office after he had received a telephone threat following his trip to Washington to testify before the subcommittee regarding several North Carolina income tax cases.

In Yanceyville, N.C., an all-male jury comprised of eight whites and four blacks were unable to return a verdict in the assault by leering case against a black farmer, Mack Ingram, 44, accused of assaulting a 17-year old white girl by leering at her and then following her across a field, causing her to change her route. The judge declared a mistrial and told the jurors that he could understand why they might have disagreed. The foreman disclosed that two of the four black jurors had voted to acquit while the remaining jurors had voted to convict. The judge also clarified that had the evidence shown only leering, the case would never have been brought, but that the charge was premised on the evidence of a display of violence by the defendant having allegedly chased the girl. Mr. Ingram, who did not testify at the trial, had contended to police that he had stopped at the farm to borrow a trailer from his neighbor and was seeking to ask the girl the whereabouts of her father.

Eventually, the following year, another jury, all-white, would convict Mr. Ingram on the charge, but the State Supreme Court, in 1953, would find the evidence insufficient to support a charge of assault, on the basis that a defendant could not be held responsible for what he may have been thinking, but only for his overt actions constituting an offer or attempt to do injury to the alleged victim.

In Greenville, S.C., hundreds of citizens were frightened out of their sleep by a deafening roar at 3:10 a.m. this date as windows rattled around the Furman University campus, the sound having come from the firing off of a cannon in preparation for the Furman vs. Clemson football game on Saturday. Earlier in the week, the statue of Clemson's founder, Thomas G. Clemson, was painted red and green, the school colors for Furman if the perpetrator was in his cups.

Emery Wister of The News tells of the selection of the queen of the Carolinas Carrousel at the Charlotte Armory the previous night, and actress Wanda Hendrix, honorary queen, having crowned the selectee, a high school senior from Bennettsville, S.C., who said she had not planned to enter the Miss South Carolina contest and that the Carrousel was the first such contest she had entered. A young man asked her to dance and she said that she would love to take the chance, whereupon they danced to the orchestra's selection.

In Raleigh, the Reverend Billy Graham was scheduled to hold the first of three revival meetings at William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the N.C. State campus this night, his Sunday program to be broadcast nationally.

On page 4-A, another Gallup poll showed that respondents favored General Eisenhower over the President by a margin of two to one for the presidency in 1952, in a head-to-head match between the two.

On the editorial page, "Probable Warren Strategy" finds that Governor Earl Warren of California, in declaring himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952, was likely seeking again to be the vice-presidential nominee as in 1948. He stood little chance for the GOP nomination for the presidency against General Eisenhower, Senator Taft, or even General MacArthur. Ordinarily, he would be considered the rallying point for Republican liberals but such was not the case in 1952, as the leading liberals of the party, such as Governor Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Senator James Duff, and Senator Wayne Morse, were all supporting General Eisenhower, despite the fact that the General was considerably more conservative in all likelihood than Governor Warren. Old guard Republicans found Governor Warren's endorsement of broad security and welfare programs and his vigorous opposition to the loyalty oath being required at the University of California to be unacceptable. Yet, these same positions helped him serve as a counterbalance on a Republican ticket. He not only provided ideological balance, attractive to independent voters, but also would bring with him the electoral votes of California.

At the convention, he would be a favorite-son candidate of California's 70 delegates and thus would hold considerable bargaining power to name the nominee.

Had Governor Warren again been nominated as the vice-presidential running mate, this time to General Eisenhower, questions arise as to how different history might have been. Would Senator Richard Nixon ever have been considered a serious candidate thereafter for the presidency? Would the Supreme Court, following the death in fall, 1953 of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, have taken the same turn toward liberal interpretation of civil liberties as during the 16-year tenure of Chief Justice Warren? Insofar as the landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the likelihood was that the decision would have been the same under another Chief Justice, even if it might not have been unanimous, the unanimity of that decision having been ascribed to the diplomacy and tenacity of Chief Justice Warren vis-à-vis the other members of the Court. The trend of the Court's decisions, however, in the preceding several years had been toward integration of public school facilities, starting with graduate schools, law schools and medical schools, and it was a logical next step therefore that the public schools generally would be desegregated and that the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson would be struck down finally as unconstitutional for not fulfilling its intended purpose, rather than the case-by-case basis of striking down segregation as not having met the standard of separate but equal, as in the years since 1938, when the Court decided Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, holding a failure of the State to show separate but equal in-state law school facilities for the education of black applicants to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, until Brown, holding segregation per se violative of the Equal Protection Clause.

It is conceivable, of course, that with Vice-President Warren serving in that capacity for eight years, every other event would have occurred basically in the same way as it did with Vice-President Nixon and Chief Justice Warren.

It was ironic that Governor Warren was being considered a likely vice-presidential candidate at this juncture and Senator Nixon ultimately became the nominee, as Governor Warren, according to Justice William O. Douglas in his autobiographical volume, The Court Years, detested Mr. Nixon, once commented that he was always surrounded by a cadre of thugs and disreputable people—that opinion likely having been a strong motivating factor in his decision to retire from the Court in June, 1968, presumably enabling President Johnson to appoint his successor, rather than face the possibility of enduring eight more years under the President's successor, possibly Mr. Nixon.

"Too Much Secrecy" tells of IRB commissioner John Dunlap having made the soundest suggestion yet advanced in the continuing income tax scandal probe, that being that the President and Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder ought appoint a special committee, including editors, to study the proper amount of secrecy to be employed by the IRB in its tax fraud investigations. But for the diligence of the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Pittsburgh Press, the irregularities in the tax collection process would have remained hidden from public view. The policy had been to maintain all tax investigations confidential until they reached the Federal grand jury stage of indictment, but the public's right to know of substantial alleged tax fraud militated in favor of earlier disclosure at some stage, which such a committee could determine appropriately.

It posits that once the curtain of secrecy was removed to permit a glimpse at the IRB's inner workings, the chance of future irregularities and favoritism for such certain investigated taxpayers would be minimized.

"A Break for Eastern Carolina" tells of the merger of Carolina Power & Light Co. with Tidewater Power Co. likely to provide a great benefit to the Eastern part of the state, long starved for adequate electric power. The two companies were a natural fit as Tidewater had never generated its own power and depended on CP&L for its power, which it then had redistributed and sold.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Wanted: Apprentice Diplomats", tells of the U.S. Foreign Service having trouble recruiting young persons to fulfill its needs, as staff requirements had doubled in the previous 12 years, while in the prior four years, the number of candidates taking the written examination had dropped by more than 40 percent.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was the reason for much of that loss of interest in taking a job with the Foreign Service, both from the standpoint of making it appear that the State Deaprtment was rife with Communists and also by making the prospect of employment in the Service fraught with the peril of being followed and potentially accused of loyalty issues. Also adversely impacting the number of applicants to the Service was the belief that it was reserved for the rich, the graduates of the best colleges and the politically deserving. That was not completely a misconception as Foreign Service salaries were not high, ambassadors were often political appointees and few without a private income or limitless credit could afford to be employed in an important embassy.

It suggests that less time be spent in the Senate with investigations of the State Department at the behest of Senators McCarthy and Pat McCarran, to alleviate these problems and ensure that the Foreign Service, on which the country depended for execution of its foreign policy, would be stocked with appropriately qualified personnel.

Drew Pearson tells of General Eisenhower having explained to Senator James Duff his misstatement to the press about not having spoken to the Senator in "a long time" by saying that so many questions were being fired at him at once that he did not realize what he was saying. The two men patched up their differences and the General told a press conference that he had no objection to friends who were operating on the basis that they knew them so well that they thought they knew how he would react.

Thirty Senators had left for the Congressional recess the previous month without settling their bills at the Senate dining room, and the food service which ran it had been trying to collect past due bills from the Senators for six months to a year. One Senator was carried for $500 and another, who had been defeated in 1950, still owed a bill. The secret list of the deadbeats had been turned over to the Senate Rules Committee.

The Justice Department's antitrust division had been forced to fire 25 percent of its staff because of budget cuts, which meant that small businesses would suffer from lack of enforcement of the antitrust laws.

Pentagon planners wanted a Government organization composed of longshoremen and stevedores as regular Civil Service employees, who would be prevented by law from striking, to ensure protection against a delay in shipment of military supplies, a prophylactic measure, as the recent New York dock strike had not impacted military shipments.

Immigration agents had been ordered to round up hundreds of Sicilian desperadoes, believed to have been smuggled into the country with the aid and protection of the Mafia. The original tip had come from the Army nearly two years earlier. The Mafiosi-assisted bandits were being brought by ships to every port on the East Coast and unloaded by small boats before reaching shore, then reportedly used by the Mafia as gunmen and runners. Other stowaways were being used by legitimate businessmen as a source of cheap labor.

Marquis Childs tells of the fear and suspicion pervading the American educational system regarding loyalty oaths applied to faculty members by boards of trustees. Such an oath had impacted the University of California, causing some highly reputable members of the faculty to resign instead of signing the oath, opposed by Governor Earl Warren and U.C. president Robert Sproul, thus likely to be permanently withdrawn.

At the University of Oklahoma, a more broadly worded oath was said to exclude all except native-born Americans from the faculty, also resulting in many faculty resignations.

Aside from those direct results, there was also a chilling influence on freedom of thought in teaching at all levels of education. In Pasadena, California, an attack had been launched on progressive teaching methods by forces seeking to cut costs of education, linking Communism to anything which was out of the ordinary.

The fears had been exploited by demagogues for their own political ends, distorting the domestic threat of Communism until the nation appeared to live in fear of its own shadow. The fear had been turned against teachers, just as the demagogues of Athens had turned public opinion against Socrates.

Freedom of inquiry had been impacted, and with it intellectual freedom and the whole structure of scientific development, on which the defense of the country ultimately depended.

Senator Taft had rebuked the smear of both General Eisenhower and Governor Warren by the Partisan Republicans of California, as Mr. Childs corrects his previous column which said that Senator Taft had omitted the Governor. The Senator, however, had not mentioned the smear also of Harold Stassen.

Mr. Childs suggests that much firmer rejection of such demagoguery would need take place if the trend was to be reversed and the pall removed from education. It had become fashionable merely to slap Senator McCarthy on the wrist, but even the "bumbling" Senator George Malone of Nevada, one of the leading conservatives in the Congress, had said, "McCarthy lacks finesse."

Robert C. Ruark tells of a friend named Pete who had flown B-29's out of Saipan to Japan and back during the war, passing en route over Iwo Jima, facing bombardment over Iwo, over Japan, again over Iwo, and then the peril of running out of fuel before completing the return flight, often necessitating a ditch in the ocean, that after the peril of merely making the take-off on a runway too short for B-29's. But now Pete had been called up again, despite having returned stateside and established a business and a family. The Air Force needed him to fly B-29's again in Korea.

Mr. Ruark thinks it is shameful for the armed forces to call veterans of the last war again to service when young people, especially deferred college students, were not being asked to serve.

"The situation continues, all the time, with the retreads taking the bruises. A reluctant airman is not a capable airman. A bitter airman is not a functional airman. A worried airman is not a peak performer. But back they go, these civilians, robbed of their maturity, to play a young man's game. Ragged but right, Pete said. I would say ragged."

A letter writer replies to a series of articles by Leslie Gould regarding the Savannah River hydrogen bomb plant and the Government's selection of du Pont as the company to build the bomb. The series of articles had condemned the union and criticized both union leaders and du Pont for insisting that employees be members of the union before they could be hired. He favors union organizing as having raised the living standards of people working in the mills, such as himself, and thus defends the actions of the company and the union in this case.

A letter from members of the Overhill Road Association, Inc., indicates that they would vote in favor of the proposed bond issue to provide a complete sewage system for the Sharon Sanitary District, urges other voters to do so.

A letter writer, having read comments recently among the letters to the editor regarding the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican, says that he is for freedom of worship and asks all Protestants, Catholics, Jews and others to let the country's motto be "Live and Let Live".

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