The Charlotte News
Wednesday, November 28, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via John Randolph, that ground fighting in Korea suddenly came to a halt this date, to the surprise of officials in Washington, after U.N. troops the previous night and early in the day received orders not to fire at the enemy unless attacked, the unofficial equivalent of a ceasefire. By mid-afternoon, Chinese soldiers were playing volleyball in full view of non-shooting American troops. The Communists abandoned their 18-month blackout after dark, resulting in Communist bonfires and the glow of cigarettes being observed along the 145-mile front. U.S. Eighth Army headquarters denied that it had issued a ceasefire order which an Associated Press correspondent had reported from the western front he had seen and which, upon receipt, caused the allies immediately to cease fighting. The Eighth Army issued a warning statement that there was no ceasefire as of this date. Notwithstanding the fact, there existed an assumed de facto ceasefire for the 30-day interim period during which the ceasefire zone had been established the previous day, pending settlement of the remaining three issues necessary for a final armistice.
Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department would discuss the development officially. The best indications were, however, that the decision to halt the fighting had been made by General Matthew Ridgway, U.N. supreme commander. Continuing air surveillance would enable the U.N. command to maintain a check on Communist rear areas and determine whether the enemy was seeking to take advantage of the lull in fighting to build up its strength.
In Paris, the U.S. was reported to be urging other U.N. members to send more troops to Korea so that war-weary Americans could return home. The appeal was being made particularly to countries which had not sent any troops, planes or ships into the war. Expectations were that a truce would be reached in Korea and that additional troops would constitute a holding force rather than a battle force. Presently, there were fighting units from 17 countries present in Korea. It was hoped that Latin American countries, such as Brazil, would begin sending troops.
In Rome, the twelve NATO nations ended five days of consultation regarding planning for Western defense forces in Europe, in which it was hoped they could muster 100 divisions of combat and reserve troops by the end of 1954. Earlier, the goal had been set of 70 combat divisions and so the proposal assumed an additional 30, though details had not been worked out on how many men would be contributed by each nation. The figures did not include prospective troops from Greece and Turkey, recently approved as members of NATO and awaiting ratification by member nations. Turkey could likely provide half of its 16 divisions, and Greece, another two or three. Concrete decisions on the matter were expected in January when the NATO Council would meet again, and, at that time, the numbers could change. In the interim, the President would meet with Prime Minister Churchill in Washington and would likely seek to eliminate some stumbling blocks in the matter, including the issue of the appointment of a NATO naval commander, whom Mr. Churchill wanted to be a Briton.
Former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the tax division, Lamar Caudle, again testified before a House Ways & Means subcommittee, stating that members of Congress and other influential persons, convinced of the innocence of persons on whose behalf they interceded, had placed tremendous pressures on him to drop prosecutions of tax offenders during his tenure as tax division chief, but that there was no pressure to do anything wrong. He did not name any of the persons who had persistently called or visited him in reference to these matters and his questioners did not ask him to do so.
The President fired the head of the IRB office in San Francisco from his post and shortly thereafter IRB Commissioner James Dunlap announced the firing of 30 others as being unfit employees. In total, since the Congressional investigation had begun of IRB tax collection irregularities, three collectors in charge of regional offices had been fired, three others had resigned while under investigation, and 38 lesser employees had been fired, while five had resigned.
The third part of the 12-part serialization of Senator Taft's recently published book, A Foreign Policy for Americans, appears, in which the Senator continues his look at the proper respective Constitutional positions of the President and Congress in determining foreign policy, with particular reference to the President's committing the nation's armed forces to participation in the Korean War without a Congressional declaration of war. He cites a letter from FDR on June 15, 1940, to Premier Paul Reynaud of France, in which the President had given his encouragement to the French in their fight against the Nazis, together with assurances that as long as they continued the fight, matériel and supplies would be sent to them from the U.S., but adding the caveat that no military commitments could be made without Congressional approval. Senator Taft contrasts that statement with the actions of President Truman following the invasion of North Korea across the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, when the President, without first consulting Congress, committed the country to intervention by the fact of the U.N. Security Council having approved police action in the matter pursuant to the U.N. Charter, allowing such action when it was necessary to combat a threat to world peace.
Of course, Senator Taft was playing hob with history, as the U.N. was not in existence in 1940, and had come into existence to act in the very role in which it was now acting in Korea. Moreover, the Congress had ratified the U.N. Charter and all its provisions, thus implicitly giving the President permission to undertake the action which he did in support of the U.N. resolutions in response to the invasion by North Korea. Senator Taft seeks to interpose a technical objection to the action by suggesting that the U.N. had not taken proper action under the Charter, a specious argument at best as the U.N. had voted for the action, with Russia at the time in boycott of Security Council meetings, thus not available to veto the matter, because of the refual to seat Communist China in place of Nationalist China. Obviously, without U.S. participation, the police action would have been ineffective and caused the U.N. to have been perceived as impotent, no more effective than the failed League of Nations in the Thirties, while also diminishing the image of the U.S. on the world stage, as it would have been regarded as abandoning its commitments to the U.N. in the face of its most significant undertaking thus far. Senator Taft, in short, was running for the presidency.
Former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen proposed that Senator Taft join him in a coalition to draft General Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination, so that Republicans could eliminate primary competition and begin work on the party platform.
On page 12-A, another Gallup poll appears, indicating that farmers in the Midwest believed that the Democratic Party had more to offer them than did Republicans in the coming 1952 elections.
In Charlotte, John Daly of The News reports that well-founded statements were being circulated that the Celanese Corporation of America would establish a Southern headquarters in the city, which would include construction of a four million dollar structure on a $250,000, 100-acre site, owned by former Governor and Senator Cameron Morrison.
On the editorial page, "The Airport Must Be Enlarged" tells of a dilemma on the part of the County Commissioners caused by the projected extension of one of the runways at Charlotte's Municipal airport, as one of the nation's oldest communities, Steele Creek, would be impacted by the project. The increasing number of large planes using the airport were already disturbing the residents of the community and they were correct in voicing their concern over the project. Despite the problem, however, the Commissioners could only make one choice and that was to approve the project. It provides the five-point case for the expansion. In conclusion, it finds that eventually the airport would have to be expanded, could not be moved to another site and because the Defense Department, through the Air National Guard, was prepared to pay for the project at present and that otherwise, later, Charlotte taxpayers would have to fund the expansion, it should be done presently.
"Threat to Southern Conference" tells of two complicating factors related to bowl bids received by Maryland and Clemson of the Southern Conference, the first being that the basic purpose of conferences had been subverted by intersectional contests, whereby conference members with stringent academic requirements vied with schools having inferior criteria for admission and continued study, and the second being that the Southern Conference had become an ungainly collection of schools which ranged from the "ridiculous to the sublime" in the emphasis which each placed on football. It seeks to imagine how Davidson would fare, without anyone on the two All-State squads, against Jim Tatum's Maryland team, ranked number three in the nation—Davidson having been squashed, bashed, kiboshed, scrunched and munched the prior Saturday, 34 to 7, by number six Georgia Tech.
The Conference bylaws required that the consent of the Conference had to be obtained before participation by a member in a post-season bowl game. But Maryland had gone ahead and signed with the Sugar Bowl to appear against number one Tennessee without prior consent by the Conference, prompting the editorial to favor expulsion of Maryland from the Conference for infringing the rule.
Clemson had asked permission from the Conference to play in the Gator Bowl, but after that permission had been refused, Clemson determined to play in the bowl anyway. Notwithstanding Clemson's faculty chairman of athletics having stated that the decision was not meant to be in defiance of the refusal of permission, Clemson, the piece posits, also deserved discipline.
It concludes that Conference commissioner Wallace Wade had to answer for his ineffectual role in the matter after Conference-member college presidents, at Mr. Wade's suggestion, voted the prior September, 14 to 3, against acceptance of bowl bids in 1951. Mr. Wade had responded to inquiries by refusing to comment and the piece wonders what he was good for if he was going to duck such major issues.
Well, the problem of the unwieldy Southern Conference would be resolved a year and a half down the pike, when seven of the seventeen members, soon followed by an eighth in Virginia, would break off and form the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Conference had been even larger between its founding in 1922 and 1932, when 13 of the then 23 member schools departed to form the Southeastern Conference.
But what we want to know is why UNC was not invited to a bowl game in 1951, as well in 2018. Is there no justice in the world? It was the First State University and deserves a permanent place in bowl games, no matter what the record is, to uphold the true spirit of competition in collegiate amateur athletics. When not qualifying for a regular bowl in a given year, the Ram Bowl should be inaugurated for UNC and another school, not played during the regular season, exemplifying the true spirit of collegiate competition in the classroom as much or more than on the playing field, perhaps therefore including Harvard or Yale. That is our stand and we hold to it. Oh, we know. The naysayers will say no one would show up in the cold of December to see a game involving two opponents with losing records, despite the fact that admission to the bowl would, perforce, be free. But that would be the significance of the game, to show, q.e.d., the true meaning of collegiate athletic competition within the setting of academic excellence, in an existential form where fan hoopla is secondary to honoring a dedicated work ethic even in the face of lack of success on the playing field.
Also, bring back the consolation games in March, a way of instilling in the mercurial fans the notion that sportsmanship trumps winning—a lesson which apparently some of the sore-winner N.C. State football players in 2018 have not learned very well, pushing, shoving, and even viciously beating UNC players after their overtime touchdown last Saturday. And speaking of useless sanctions by the Conference, a suspension of the players involved in that melee for only a half of play at the beginning of next season will hardly inhibit recurrence of such conduct in the future by those players or others. Those who threw punches not in self-defense or defense of others, like thugs in a brawl, one State player in particular who repeatedly hit a UNC player while flat on his back on the ground, having thrown no punch to initiate the combat, ought be charged criminally with battery, expelled from school and permanently banned from college football. If ordinary students engaged in such conduct, what would be the result?
"An Invitation to Tragedy" tells of a popular police chief in Asheville having been killed, and two other high police officials injured, when their car overturned while they were chasing a car which had sped through the business district a short time earlier. The police argued that speeding drivers or suspicious automobiles had to be chased, as they never knew whether the speeder had committed a crime, and had to seize the driver and the cargo on the spot when bootlegging was involved.
While understanding that exigent situation, it doubts that such chases ought be effected in heavily congested areas, just as no police officer would run down a crowded sidewalk shooting wildly at a fleeing robbery suspect. It concludes that it was better to let the speeder or bootlegger escape occasionally than to kill or maim innocent citizens, or in the case cited from Asheville, valuable and conscientious police officers.
Drew Pearson tells of Price administrator Mike DiSalle, though genial and fun-loving, engaged in an angry debate with his boss, Mobilization director Charles E. Wilson, regarding stimulation of production by increasing prices, in turn causing the cost of living to rise. Mr. Wilson had adopted the policy over the strenuous objections of Mr. DiSalle, increasing the price of machine tools, lead and zinc, and considering a price increase to relieve the sulfur shortage. That had resulted in increases in prices down the line, for instance, the lead and zinc increases causing the price of automobile batteries to rise. Mr. DiSalle argued that the result was a crack in the economy without fixing the production bottleneck. When the cost of living had risen as a result, a million UAW workers received an automatic cost-of-living increase based on the escalator clause in their contracts. That increase sharpened the determination of the United Steelworkers and other unions also to seek a wage boost.
Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, supposed to be sick, had nevertheless sent a two-page telegram supportive of Congressman Cecil King of California in the House subcommittee investigation of his alleged influence in tax cases in California, and then sent his own personal investigator to assist in the matter. The intervention had led to speculation that Senator McCarran might have his own influence troubles awaiting revelation. Two matters had been investigated by the Kefauver crime investigating committee involving Senator McCarran, but then stopped after Senate colleagues cut off funds for a further probe of crime. A House committee had taken up, however, where the Kefauver committee had left off and was scheduled to investigate Northern California tax matters in January. In preparation for the investigation, the House committee's West Coast investigator came to Reno, which Mr. Pearson suggests might have been why Senator McCarran, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, suddenly got well and started to do his own investigation, effectively investigating the investigator. He explains further details.
Marquis Childs, in Paris, discusses the East-West contest ongoing at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, with the same "old, worn-out words, employing the same transparent stratagems, going through the familiar motions." For many of the delegates, there was a deepening sense of disillusion as some had come to the meeting possessed of the idealistic hope that there was a new beginning afoot which would usher in an era of lasting peace.
The U.S. disarmament plan, presented to the body by Secretary of State Acheson, had served for the moment to put the Russians on the spot and provide the tactical initiative to the West. But that proposal would soon give way to discussion of Korea. Notwithstanding that reality, no one was ready to abandon the U.N.
The Iron Curtain countries were almost alone in resisting widespread harmony in the body. Yet, the unilateral veto on the Security Council prevented this super-majority from having its way on all subjects.
He concludes that it was not meant to be a gloomy forecast for the U.N. but a report on what the realities were of the moment, ignoring of which would mean the final dissolution of the U.N. One could not see a very long life ahead for the organization in its present condition, but it was also not easily remedied except by elimination of the Communists.
Joseph Alsop finds that the series of scandals being unveiled by Congress, first at the RFC and now at the IRB, with the Office of Alien Property likely to follow, might ultimately lead to investigation of the much larger influence scandals. He finds that the widespread concept that the scandals signaled moral relapse in the U.S. was not so much the case as indicating vital changes in the relationship between business and politics.
The first change in the pattern was
the monetary expense of modern American politics. Even so
late as the mid-1930's, it was still possible for a young, ambitious
Southern politician who owned an old jalopy to pick the right issue
and pay for his own campaign, as Robert Rice Reynolds had done in
1932 in defeating the late Cameron Morrison for the Senate in North
Carolina, portraying former Governor and interim incumbent
Senator Morrison as being addicted to "red Russian fish eggs",
while Mr. Reynolds offered the people a contrasting down-to-earth, proletarian image
In the North, elections had always been more expensive. Yet, in the 1920's, Truman H. Newberry was expelled from the Senate because he had spent as much as $200,000 for his re-election bid in Michigan.
Those inexpensive times were over, thanks to the cost of radio, television and other mass media. The cheapest Southern election cost several tens of thousands of dollars, "even for a professional gallus-wearer", someone seeking to portray himself as a man of the people. In the Ohio Senate campaign in 1950, the friends of Senator Taft were reported to have spent around a million dollars for his re-election bid.
The need for this increased amount of campaign money had increased the tendency of big business to pay the bills of the politicians, estimated to amount to 85 percent of the contributions, mostly made under the table. The businessmen were not to be blamed as politics was important to them, and if they could purchase influence which was worth many times that for which they paid for it, it was a good deal for them. The politicians were no more blameworthy than the businessmen, as the bills had to be paid by someone.
The results were that large numbers of Senators were controlled by the banks, the local utilities, the mining and mineral interests and other big business groups, with even a soft drink company controlling one Senator.
This practice had always gone on to some degree or another, but had now become commonplace, producing the general lowering of the standards in Congress, as shown by the Senate's refusal to be shocked by such episodes as the payment of $10,000 to Senator Joseph McCarthy by the postwar prefabricated housing company, Lustron Corporation. Commensurate with this growth in the power of influence from money injected into campaigns was the general lowering of standards as shown by the scandals now occupying the national attention.
A letter from a first lieutenant in the Air Force who had just returned from Korea indicates surprise at the attitude of the citizens of Steele Creek, who appeared to believe that the Air National Guard was unimportant. He instructs that units of the Guard were presently flying in the Korean War and some pilots thereof had been shot down and killed. Yet, an article appearing in the newspaper on Monday had quoted a resident of Steele Creek that the community did not want a National Guard unit there. He wonders if progress in aviation, stultifying training of national defense units in flying jets, should be halted by such a "backwoods attitude".
A letter from Cheraw, S.C., agrees with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, in his speech to the Southern Governors Conference in Hot Springs, Ark., recently, contrasting the present economic conditions of society with those extant during the term of President Herbert Hoover, and suggesting that while President Truman might have his faults, he was to be admired for the job he had done with "some of the sorry cooperation he's had from the Republican Party". He finds that the President and FDR had been the best friends the poor and forgotten people ever had in Washington, and that the President should thus be re-elected if he chose to run.
A letter writer expresses impatience with the debate over whether the President should appoint an ambassador to the Vatican. The writer, a Catholic, thinks it appropriate for opponents of the appointment to argue that it was unwise and contrary to national tradition, but that it should not be used to attack Catholics or the Catholic Church, as many had done. The writer says that Catholics, qua Catholics, were not concerned with whether the appointment was made, as it had little impact on the Catholic Church, but, as Americans, believed that it was in the best interests of the nation.
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