The Charlotte News

Monday, November 26, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that the liaison officers in Korea had agreed this night to the full 145-mile ceasefire line across the peninsula to become effective within 30 days, provided the other three terms for the final armistice were concluded in that period. The two subcommittees would meet again the following day to approve the proposed line and the full five-man committees would then meet an hour later to adopt the proposal formally.

In Rome, General Eisenhower warned NATO chiefs of staff in a talk before them this date to stop haggling over command appointments, forget individual national glory and "attempt the impossible" by building true Western security against aggression by pooling sovereignty.

During his talk, qualified sources said that Britain had again turned down acceptance of an American admiral to head the North Atlantic naval command and insisted that at least the appointment should be delayed until a British commander were named to the projected Middle East command. The NATO defense ministers were recommending that such action be delayed until Greece and Turkey were formally accepted into NATO, probably in January. The same sources also reported that the Churchill Government had thus far refused to accept the American Garrand .30-caliber rifle as the standard for NATO, preferring the new .280 rifle.

Senator Taft, testifying before a Senate elections subcommittee investigating spending in his 1950 Senate campaign, denounced as "completely false" an assertion by the President that "special interests" had poured money into Ohio to re-elect him to the Senate in 1950. He said that he had been outspent by his opponents three to one. He believed the campaign against him was a "sinister conspiracy", much of the activity of which was being directed from the White House. The Senator's opponent in the race, Joseph Ferguson, would testify the following day. Senator Guy Gillette, chairman of the subcommittee, made it clear that the investigation proceeded from complaints made by both campaigns and did not involve a contest of the election. The investigation was designed to provide remedial legislation governing elections.

The News begins this date a serialized presentation, in 12 parts, of Senator Taft's recently published book, A Foreign Policy for Americans, the first part of the first chapter appearing on the front page, in which he describes what he considered to be the ultimate purpose of U.S. foreign policy, to protect the liberty of the people of the country and to maintain peace. He asserts that the traditional policy of the country, "neutrality and non-interference with other nations", had been based on the principle that it was the best way to avoid disputes with other nations and maintain U.S. liberty without war. He indicates that the policy had never been isolationism but was designed to avoid alliances and interference in foreign quarrels. He believed that the theory of waging a preventive war, as in Korea, was "dangerous", and that the fact that the U.N. supported it showed that the organization had failed to protect the peace because it had been organized on an unsound basis with a unilateral veto power granted each of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

He states that just as the country could be destroyed by war, it could also be destroyed by political or economic policies at home which destroyed liberty or broke down the fiscal and economic structure of the country. He opposed high Government spending on foreign policy, while not opposing extension of charity or assistance to those countries in need or alignment with the advocates of freedom across the world. But he distinguished such aid in extraordinary situations, such as drought, famine or refugee crises, from a "global plan for general free assistance to all mankind on an organized scale". He found the Marshall Plan justified for meeting the emergency rebuilding of devastated countries after World War II, but regarded the policy of raising the standards of living of people throughout the world so that those peoples would not turn to Communism as being without evidentiary foundation, as recent wars had not been waged by poverty-stricken peoples, as in China or India, but by prosperous countries led by dictators, such as Germany. He believed, however, that a program like Point Four, for providing technical expertise to enable industrial and agricultural development of underdeveloped nations, was justified to a limited extent even if the Communist threat were not present. But he also believed that such a program should be sound economically and undertaken primarily by private enterprise, with only limited Government contribution.

He also agrees that the U.S. had the primary postwar role in the world of providing moral leadership, not only abroad but also at home, and should use that position to improve the international organization for peace.

Lamar Caudle, former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the tax division, testified for the first time publicly this date before the House Ways & Means subcommittee investigating his prosecution of tax fraud cases, saying that he had been afraid for his life because of his efforts to stamp out rackets in Charlotte while he had formerly been the U.S. Attorney. He stated that he had been the victim of the "malicious intent" of Charlotte police chief Frank Littlejohn and two Federal agents, describing the "hatred and bitterness" they had for him as "incalculable", as the chief had allowed the rackets in Charlotte to continue with impunity. He said that friends had warned him that there was a danger that he could be run over by a car while in Charlotte, and that he had barely escaped such a fate the last time he was in the city, in consequence of which, he rarely visited Charlotte anymore. He said that the police chief and an FBI agent had made the complaint against him regarding an allegedly inadequate investigation of allegedly stolen Office of Price Administration ration coupons from a bank in Charlotte, involving one of the two individuals in the city who later came under investigation for tax fraud. Mr. Caudle said that there was never a case against that individual regarding the OPA matter, but only a complaint. He also stated that he had disqualified himself in the tax matter pertaining to the individual when he became head of the tax division. He denied having received any substantial gifts or favors from the person. He said that in the second case, also an OPA matter, he had learned that friends who brought the matter to his attention had been mistaken.

Chief Littlejohn described Mr. Caudle's claims as "pure poppycock", saying that the only time Mr. Caudle had ever mentioned rackets to him was when Mr. Caudle asked him to examine the "divorce mill" operations in Charlotte, which the chief had done, resulting in one individual having gone to jail.

Price administrator Mike DiSalle testified to a joint Congressional committee on defense production that higher price ceilings resulting from existing laws would be harmful to the economy. Chairman of the committee, Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, stated that the President had commented recently that the inflationary spiral had begun again, greatly increasing the cost of the defense program and nullifying recently passed higher taxes.

On pages 4B and 5B, interviews were presented with the Duke and UNC coaches and players regarding the 19 to 7 victory of Duke in football the prior Saturday in Durham. The season-ending game left Duke with a respectable record of 5-4-1 in coach Bill Murray's premiere season, while UNC suffered a second consecutive dismal season, finishing 2-8, having been 3-5-2 the prior year. Because of his prior success in two coaching stints at the school, coach Carl Snavely would be given one more year to revitalize the UNC program, an effort which would not succeed, as the record would be 2-6 in 1952. As indicated, his teams would lose in his last three seasons a total of 19 of the 35 losses suffered during his ten seasons at the school. His final record would average 5.9 wins, 3.5 losses, and .5 ties per year.

We have often referred to coach Snavely as the "man in the fedora" during his second tenure at the school since the 1945 season, the first after the war, because he was often pictured wearing a fedora on the sidelines, and in obvious coincidental reference to the fact that Larry Fedora had taken over the coaching reins at UNC in 2012, coincidental with 1945 in our continuous daily real-time presentation of The News six days per week since 2007. We are sorry to see coach Fedora leaving UNC after a frustrating pair of seasons, following on the heels of prior success at the University, and whose team in 2015 provided more wins at the school, 11, than in any prior season, and whose 2016 team also enjoyed a good season, albeit with a disappointing finish. Much as a polio outbreak in Chapel Hill had caused the cancellation of two games in the 1952 season, the program in the past two years seemed eerily beset by problems, an unprecedented number of injuries last year and injuries to quarterbacks this season, plus the four-game suspensions of several key players for selling gifted shoes improperly prior to the season. Notwithstanding the problems, this season's team could have had a respectable record, had it won even most of its seven lost close games, two settled adversely in overtime, but c'est la vie in sports.

Football is a rough and tumble game, not meant to be played by the faint of heart or those wanting to play pattycake, and coach Fedora understood the sport well, bringing a brand of excitement in his hurry-up offense to the school. Fortunes change with the best of coaches sometimes and we wish him success in the future at another school. He was loyal to the program and did not depart despite lucrative offers at the end of his first season and at the end of the 2015 and 2016 campaigns and that loyalty should be honored.

At the same time, we welcome back coach Mack Brown, who has been away somewhere for 21 years, unaccounted for, with no one associated with North Carolina able to ascertain his whereabouts since he left the program suddenly at the end of the 1997 season for parts unknown, following another of the most successful and storied seasons in the history of UNC football. Some say he moved to Nepal in the interim and became a sherpa for expeditions on Everest. Others say he became a missionary in the jungles of Peru, fighting for preservation of the Brazilian rain forests in his spare time. But we don't know. Perhaps he will explain his long absence at some point.

We are glad he is back, however, as obviously at the University of North Carolina, we, as fans and alumni, enjoy kicking around our football coaches, churlishly, as often the more successful they are, the more abuse they are forced to take, having satiated a long hunger for success only to find they created a monster by establishing high expectations among fans and alumni unaccustomed to more than erratic success in the sport. Perhaps, that was one realization by coach Brown which caused him to flee into splendid isolation in the wild country at the peak of his coaching success at the school at the end of the 1997 season.

By way of contrary example, Jim Hickey, who took over the coaching job after the sudden death of coach Jim Tatum in the summer of 1959, should have been fired by his fourth season, having been hung and burned in effigy by then on campus more times than games had been played, but, having generated no particular expectations until his fifth season, was allowed to remain through eight seasons, all but one of which, 1963, was miserable, and each of which we remember all too well through the tears, 1963 having concluded of course in somber recognition of the nation's loss on November 22. But, in those days, winning was not deemed everything, as proved by the University sticking by Dean Smith in basketball, though his first five teams were less than spectacular, and, he, too, having been burned in effigy on campus a time or two during that stretch.

UNC has never been consistently a strong football school, but as we suggested earlier in the season, before the Virginia Tech game, when our prediction of narrow victory, seemingly improbable at the time, nearly, but for a fumble with first and goal at the one-yard line with two minutes remaining and the team leading, came true, hope springs eternal...

We hope that coach Brown can take up where he left off and usher UNC finally to the peak of Everest, as reportedly he did with others while in the wilderness, rather than into the depths of a dark rain forest or impenetrable jungle, and that in doing so he will be given latitude for a season or so of valleys amid the peaks, lest UNC be deemed a University of ingrates.

On the editorial page, "First Step in Regulating Trucks" tells of the City Council having designated certain truck routes through the city and passed other restrictions on trucks, while putting aside the remainder of the City Traffic Engineer's recommendations for the present. The piece finds it to have been a sound move, to implement the plan gradually based on further increase in congestion.

We are certainly glad that this earth-shattering issue has been successfully resolved and hope it never comes up again.

"High Ethics" finds the determination by a member of the City Council not to vote on the controversial truck-routing plan to be a refreshing demonstration of high ethical standards. He had been opposed to the plan from the beginning, but instead of casting a negative vote when he had the opportunity the previous week, he had disqualified himself on the grounds that he operated a trucking company and owned property on one of the streets which was proposed as part of the truck route. The piece finds the self-disqualification commendable.

"Slow Awakening" finds meritorious the proposals to have the IRB tax collectors placed under a Civil Service system, as recommended by the President and various members of Congress, and to have an independent audit conducted of the IRB, as recommended by Senator John Williams of Delaware.

The Hoover Commission, two years earlier, had recommended that the IRB be placed under Civil Service and removed from the political appointment process, and the piece suggests that if members of Congress meant what most of them said regarding the desire for economy and efficiency in government, they would have long ago adopted the remaining recommendations of the Commission, which instead lay dormant.

"Dr. Cornelius Miller Pickens" laments the death of the Methodist minister who had served several pastorates during a 50-year career in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He had also been president of a college and served on the boards of trustees of three colleges, and was superintendent of the Methodist Home in Charlotte, where he had died at age 84. He was well respected and loved in the community, had lived a good life, following true values.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "T'Other Half", discusses the academic loyalty oath imposed on the faculty at the University of California two years earlier and recently eliminated. It finds that while there was good reason to scrutinize the credentials of those who shaped young student minds, there was no reason for an oppressive policy based on suspicion and suppression of academic freedom.

Governor Earl Warren, Admiral Chester Nimitz and other members of the University Board of Regents had opposed the loyalty oath, which required professors and instructors to provide a statement of loyalty or resign their employment. Many had chosen to resign rather than submit to such an indignity and the University had been blacklisted by some learned societies. Eighteen members of the faculty had filed a lawsuit for reinstatement after refusing to sign the oath and 48 had refused to sign the oath in the current term, but continued to teach without pay.

It hopes the California case would set an example to other academic institutions which imposed or were contemplating imposition of such an oath. It claims to quote from James Russell Lowell's The Biglow Papers—actually from A Fable for the Critics:

And I honor the man who is willing to sink,
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak.

Drew Pearson tells of Congressman Walter Norblad of Oregon, while in Europe investigating U.S. military bases, having decided to obtain some first-hand information regarding the food being fed to the overseas troops and so had a meal in the mess hall at a U.S. base in France and questioned some of the G.I.'s at length about their regular menu. He was told by a group that the food was first-rate and they had no complaints about either the food or the way it was prepared. Mr. Norblad then asked them what they did around the base and they replied that they were the cooks.

The bitterness regarding the massacre of some 6,000 American prisoners of war by the Communists in Korea had opened old sore memories among military leaders regarding the December, 1944 Malmedy massacre of 150 American prisoners of war by SS officers during the Battle of the Bulge. Had those Germans been properly punished, it was believed that a precedent would have been set to discourage such massacres in the future, but that Senator Joseph McCarthy had intervened on behalf of the 43 Nazis condemned to death, on the basis that their interrogations by U.S. officers had been unfair, coercing their confessions. A lengthy hearing had been conducted before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee to investigate the charges and during the hearings, the American officers who had conducted the interrogations were treated by Senator McCarthy more like war criminals than the Nazis. The Senator had referred to the American judges who condemned these Nazi officers as "morons" and demanded that the American officers who had performed the interrogation take lie-detector tests. When the subcommittee voted not to conduct those tests, Senator McCarthy stalked from the hearings, denouncing them as a "shameful farce, and a deliberate and clever attempt to whitewash the American military."

The speeches during those hearings were cabled daily to Germany and picked up by the German press, then used by the Communists to inflame public opinion. Every member of the subcommittee eventually signed a statement praising the integrity of Senator Ray Baldwin of Connecticut, the chairman, and condemning Senator McCarthy's "unfair and utterly undeserved comments" when he had condemned Senator Baldwin of being "criminally irresponsible". Eventually, German public opinion had been so outraged that the death sentences of the SS officers were commuted, effectively opening the door to other such massacres with virtual impunity promised down the road, many believing that it had opened the door to the enemy atrocities in Korea.

Marquis Childs, in Paris, states that he would relate the picture as nearly as he could regarding General Eisenhower's political intentions in the coming months. In the months ahead, the General would not make any negative or affirmative statement regarding politics and if his backers entered his name in the New Hampshire primary of March 11, he would take no steps to remove it. It was unlikely that the General would make any public political statement, however, before that primary and so it would be a matter of faith for the voters to cast their ballots for him.

The General genuinely believed that it was necessary to keep politics out of the NATO command. The initial phase of his command had been to persuade and sell the need for Western European rearmament both at home and within the NATO powers themselves, and that job was largely complete. Generally, the job had gone faster than anticipated, despite the economic crisis in Britain and France and the slowdown in shipment of arms from the U.S.

The General was officially scheduled to receive 70 members of Congress between mid-November and mid-December, and another 60 members unofficially. Such a schedule kept him quite busy. Most of the visitors wanted him to express his political intentions, but he had managed thus far to put those inquiries aside and appeared naively astonished that so many people were interested in his political intentions. During his recent visit in the U.S., he demonstrated no intent to disturb the effort to get him nominated by the Republican convention.

He was a great admirer of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., believed him to be the most knowledgeable person in Congress regarding NATO. Senator Lodge was one of the chief backers of the General for the presidency.

As a result of the smear tactics directed at the General, he had become less thin-skinned and knew that if he received the nomination, he would have to withstand even greater abuse, but did not appear disturbed by the prospect.

Pressure would be placed upon him to take an affirmative stand regarding entry of his name into the Wisconsin primary the following May, to contest Senator Taft, but thus far he had resisted such pressure and would not be placed in the position of affirmatively seeking the presidency, even though he knew it would mean that he probably would never win the office.

Robert C. Ruark tells of wanting most of his career to write a column about newspapermen and the people who beset them. Now, with Hollywood intending to make a movie about the newspaper business and soliciting opinions from people within it, he had his chance. He says that in his earlier career, he never turned up his hat in the front nor wore a press card in its band, seldom even wore a hat for want of means to afford one. Likewise, he had never screamed, "Stop the presses, we're going to bust the town wide open!" and informs that the line was originated by actor William Gargan, who, before becoming an actor, had been an incompetent private detective. In 15 years in the business, he had never used the word "scoop" or referred to the newspaper business as a "game".

During his career, he had not met that many "interesting people", had met more bores than he likely would have met as a bank president or professional salesman of brushes. He had also met more crackpots, people who were predicting the end of the world or offering a cure for cancer. He relates that one woman who nearly knocked down his hotel room door one day to tell him that she had seen the Lord in San Francisco, then sought to dive out his window, was saved by his being able to grab her foot.

He also says that all newspapermen did not dress shabbily and drink up all their pay, that some dressed well and were teetotalers. Most were just average people. City editors, as a group, were prone to be quarrelsome because of their association with dumb reporters and civic groups demanding banner headlines for various minor events. But, he relates, the nicest man he ever knew had been a city editor for about 20 years and remained as nice when he became managing editor.

A letter writer from Durham applauds the previous letter writer who insisted that the newspaper not eliminate "Pogo" from the comic strips. She received The News daily from her mother, who resided in Clinton, S.C., and was happy to receive "Pogo" as part of the newspaper. She perceived a threat from "Alley Oop". She says that several months earlier she had written a letter to the editor of another newspaper, for which she had a subscription, suggesting that the latter strip be replaced by "Pogo", and suggests to the fan of "Alley Oop" that they might exchange newspapers.

A letter writer from Indianapolis wonders what had become of the old Democratic Party and the old reliable Republicans, those party leaders who had placed the best interests of the country above all else. He wonders whether honor had gone down the drain and hoped those questions would be answered in the coming election of 1952.

Well, we have it on good authority that the new Vice-President, to be elected next year, will set a new standard for ethics in government.

A letter writer from Abilene, Texas, thinks that the Congress or the Attorney General should declare it unconstitutional for any city in America to annex land without the landowners' consent.

That would be fine and good but the Congress and Attorney General do not declare things constitutional or unconstitutional, that province belonging exclusively to the courts. He must have received his civics lessons at Trump U. in Vegas.

A letter writer says that he had missed A. W. Black's original letter regarding his dislike for hillbilly music, but that he had read one of the responding letters, appearing November 21, which expressed enjoyment of hillbilly music.

He thinks hillbilly music was good for the hillbillies and for those "vast numbers" who had never had the opportunity of learning the difference between hillbilly music and good music. He thinks that hillbilly tunes were good when "dressed up" by such musicians as Sammy Kaye and Guy Lombardo, but when sung through the nose and supported by cheap fiddles and steel guitars, he thought it should be left back in the hills so as not to befoul the air of every café in town. He concludes by saying that he had studied music and played everything from classical to hillbilly.

That puts us in kind of a blue mood.

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