The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 22, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. negotiators in Korea this date had suggested an immediate exchange of sick and wounded prisoners of war and had disclosed that 37,500 South Korean civilians who had been held in U.N. prison camps had been reclassified and would be released. The Communists stated that they would think over the exchange proposal, but a U.N. spokesman stated that he believed there was less than an even chance that they would agree to it. The Communists had demanded an explanation for why 44,529 names reported by the Red Cross had not been included on the prisoner list submitted by the U.N. the previous Tuesday, after which came the announcement of the reclassification of the 37,500 South Korean civilians, a matter of which the allies had already apprised the Red Cross, the discrepancy resulting from slow notification of the Communists from Geneva.
Also on Saturday, staff officers abandoned their attempt to reach agreement on supervision of an armistice and referred the problem back to the official subcommittee, having made no headway. Hopes dwindled for accomplishing an armistice before the provisional ceasefire line agreement, good for 30 days, would expire the following Thursday. Another meeting was scheduled for Sunday for both subcommittees.
The Communists, meanwhile, claimed to have caught the allies in an arithmetic error after counting every name on the U.N. list, which purported to contain 132,472 names, but which the Communists said actually contained only 131,081 names, prompting the U.N. command to recalculate the figures.
In the air war, allied planes and ships attacked Communist supply and communication lines. The U.S. Fifth Air Force flew 477 sorties on Friday, most of them directed at supply lines out of Manchuria to the front lines.
The Far East Air Forces announced that 14 U.N. planes had been shot down over Korea during the previous week, 13 by ground fire, the largest number of losses to ground fire in any week during the war, the other having been lost in an air battle with enemy jets. The total U.N. bag for enemy jets since they first appeared in the war, stood at 185 destroyed, 51 probably destroyed and 304 damaged. The total for all types of enemy planes stood at 320 destroyed, 100 probably destroyed and 360 damaged.
In the ground war, U.N. infantrymen raided a Communist position northwest of Chorwon on the central front. Far behind the lines, South Korean forces continued their drive against enemy guerrillas and bandits, having killed 297 of the enemy and captured 238 on Thursday and Friday.
The President was expected this date
to reveal steps he would take to try to avert a nationwide steel
strike involving nearly one million workers, set to occur at the end
of the year when the current contract expired. Attempts at Federal
mediation had collapsed the previous day when both sides had
demonstrated no disposition to budge. Those close to the President
said it was likely that he would turn the matter over to the Wage
Stabilization Board for recommendations. The president of U.S. Steel,
Benjamin Fairless, had stated that a walkout would produce "a
national calamity" for the defense effort, and stressed again
the steel manufacturers' position that the demanded 18.5 cents per
hour wage increase would produce an increase in steel prices and
thereby trigger an inflationary spiral. Counsel for the Steelworkers
Union, and future Supreme Court Justice, Arthur Goldberg
The Navy announced the resignation this date of William Willett, who had been working on personnel and housing matters in the office of the Undersecretary since the previous October, indicating that he was tired of all the criticism which had been leveled at the Department. Mr. Willett had previously been an RFC director and lost the post following a Senate investigation and blockage of his appointment in committee. The previous day, Senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma had demanded a Congressional investigation of his appointment to the Navy post.
One of Moscow's trusted Czech administrators had been named vice-premier in the Czech Government, following the arrest the previous month of the once-trusted Kremlin henchman, Rudolph Slansky—whose nose had not been red enough to help lead the sleigh.
In West Frankfort, Ill., 60 or more coal miners were trapped in an underground explosion and were feared dead, as rescue efforts continued to try to reach them. The explosion was believed to have been caused by methane or marsh gas. Concrete air locks had been destroyed in the blast, preventing fresh air from getting to the location where the miners were trapped.
In Waterloo, Ia., John Rath, 79, co-founder of the Rath Packing Co., died at his home early this date of coronary thrombosis.
This date, the millionth traffic death in the United States was recorded, putatively ascribed to the death of a woman in Cleveland, though the actual millionth death could not be ascertained because of the proliferation of deaths on the highway each day. The count had begun September 13, 1899 with the death in New York City of H. H. Bliss. The traffic toll thus far in 1951 was the highest since the record year of 1941. At the current rate of death, it would take only another 30 years to reach the two million mark—actually surpassed only 23 years later, in 1974. According to the Association of Casualty and Surety Companies, deaths among Americans fighting in all wars in which America had participated had reached the million mark the prior September 3 or 4 in Korea.
In Charlotte, a man offered to help push a stalled automobile the previous day, and then snatched a purse from the female driver after the car had been started. Her husband and another male occupant of the vehicle had gotten out to push, when the unknown man had offered his assistance. Once the car was started, the woman offered to pay him, at which point he snatched her purse and ran toward a house, with the two men in pursuit. When they cornered him, he pulled a knife and slashed the husband in the stomach and then escaped, producing an injury which required eleven stitches.
If you see the desperado, you will know him, because, as the piece points out, he is black. If you see any black man with a purse, looking about furtively, do not approach but call the police.
The first official day of winter produced more snow and cold in the already snow-covered and frigid Midwest. Thousands of motorists in the region were forced to abandon automobiles along snowbound roads. Bus schedules as far west as Omaha had been canceled the previous night by most of the major bus companies operating out of Chicago. In South Dakota, where blizzards had occurred for more than two weeks, farmers, ranchers and snow crews sought to clear roads of drifts which measured up to 15 feet.
A. M. Secrest of The News tells of pre-Christmas travelers at the bus station in Charlotte, a heavily crowded scene which, he imparts, had been repeated at the Southern Railway station and Douglas Municipal Airport, as thousands of Charlotte residents sought exodus from the city for the holidays. Travel, according to transportation facilities, was up by 50 percent. The booked facilities meant, according to a striking bus driver at Carolina Trailways, that some of the soldiers from Fort Bragg, Fort Jackson, Camp Lee, and Fort Benning, who had been issued Christmas furloughs, would not be able to get home. Eastern Airlines had a waiting list of over 500 for the 52 north and southbound flights scheduled for this date. Servicemen spent all night in the waiting room hoping for a cancellation. It was expected that traffic would reach its peak this night and the following day and then recede until New Year's Day.
Sports editor Bob Quincy explains on page 8-B how the Charlotte Hornets, after winning the Tri-State League baseball pennant while drawing more than 109,000 fans during the season, nevertheless lost $50,000 in 1951.
On the editorial page, "U.N. Membership Should Be Universal" tells of reports coming from the Paris General Assembly meeting of the U.N. that there was growing support for providing membership to all countries which applied for it, an idea which Secretary-General Trygve Lie had long supported.
As things stood, the Russians proposed a plan whereby they would vote for admission of a Western-oriented country in exchange for the West supporting admission for a Soviet-sphere country.
The U.N. Charter declared that membership was open to all "peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present charter and which, in the judgment of the organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations."
It suggests that non-member states, such as Hungary, Albania and Jordan, fit the definition as well as member-states, Czechoslovakia, Argentina and Lebanon. Communist China probably met the requirements as well as Russia. Yet, the U.S. took the position that Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria did not qualify for membership, and opposed the membership of Communist China, on the basis that the addition of Communist countries might imperil the working majority in the General Assembly, the Security Council and the newly organized Disarmament Commission.
The piece finds, however, that this voting majority would not be so imperiled, as repeatedly in the General Assembly, over 50 nations sided with the U.S. on particular issues and against the Soviet bloc, which usually consisted of only five votes. In the Security Council, each of the five permanent members, including Russia, had the power of unilateral veto, and so if Communist China were seated on the Council, it effectively would only increase the Communist-bloc countries by a single vote among all members, even if Communist China displaced Nationalist China as a permanent member. The fact of two potential Communist vetoes was no more powerful than a single veto. Some matters determined by the Council, which involved only procedure and not substance, were subject to a majority vote of seven of the eleven members. The new Disarmament Commission consisted of the Security Council plus Canada. Even before the election of Greece to the Security Council recently, the West had a comfortable majority, as the Soviet Union was presently the only Communist country on the Council.
It concludes that the U.S. wanted to make the U.N. a vehicle for American policy. The organization in its current form could not be expected to accomplish much and it had been argued that a non-Communist U.N. be formed. NATO had become the keystone of U.S. foreign policy as the organization through which real action would be accomplished. The U.S., it finds, therefore, had nothing to lose by permitting, and even urging, universal membership in the U.N., which would greatly enhance the country's image among countries which wondered, with suspicion, what the U.S. was doing.
"The 'Lincoln Plan' Pays Off" tells of the Lincoln Electric Company of Cleveland, the world's largest manufacturer of arc-welding equipment, having distributed to its over 1,000 employees, for the eighteenth straight year, a bonus based on individual worker production, which amounted to an average of 104 percent of the worker's regular earnings during the year, making average earnings per worker $7,446 in 1951.
J. F. Lincoln, as described in his new book, Incentive Management, had originated this plan, and indicated that it was neither a gift nor profit-sharing, as it rewarded the individual worker for all the work he had performed to help the company and penalized him if he did not do as well as other workers.
The company paid moderate but industry-average wages and set up production scales for various jobs. The high average worker income for the year demonstrated the success of the plan in providing workers with more money while also producing more goods, and enabling the company, according to Mr. Lincoln, to undersell its competition.
While the plan was not adaptable to
some businesses, it was well-suited to industrial manufacturers and
included all executives except the president. The piece finds it
comparable to the cooperative, where members received payments in
proportion to the amount of business they performed, or their
productivity. In both cases, the money which would ordinarily go to
stockholders was paid to the producers, giving them more incentive to
produce than under the usual corporate setup. That, in turn, produced
greater gains not only for the workers, but also for the stockholders
and the company. It recommends a study of the plan by other
businesses
"Make Coffee 'One for the Road'" relates that about 50 years earlier, on September 13, 1899, a man had stepped from a trolley in New York City and was run over by a horseless carriage, becoming the nation's first traffic fatality. On average, about 100 Americans died on the highways of the country every day, while others involved in traffic accidents lingered in hospitals. During the ensuing two-week holiday period, that rate would increase, having resulted the previous year in 849 dead and more than 10,000 injured in automobile accidents during the two three-day holiday periods.
It urges drivers not to drink, but
that if they did, to make the last "one for the road"
coffee
A piece from the St. Louis Dispatch, titled "Uncle Sam's Iron Curtain", defines the "asinine workings" of the McCarran Internal Security Act having placed the United States in the role of an international ventriloquist, whereby one voice espoused intellectual freedom and the free exchange of persons across international borders, while in the other, that of the Act, the country completely contradicted itself by seeking to protect Americans from "undesirables", thereby preventing many foreign scientists, thinkers and experts in many fields from even temporary admission to the U.S., for having been at one time or another in the past connected with totalitarian causes, no matter how vague that connection might have been.
As a result, the U.S. had been bypassed as a site for three world meetings because many foreign delegates might have been unable to obtain visas under the Act's vague definition of "undesirable". Two of the meetings were to have been sponsored by the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the third, by the Red Cross. The result was senseless and hurt the U.S. on the world stage, communicating to the world that the country was afraid to expose itself and its people to a few foreign visitors of uncertain political persuasion or associations.
"What is happening in the land of the brave and the home of the free?"
Drew Pearson provides four illustrations of how tax injustice operated under the present system of wire-pulling to settle tax-fraud cases without suffering criminal penalties. A warehouse worker for a Washington department store, who had been charged by Treasury agents with receiving a $150 dividend from stock in a utility, had been able to demonstrate by affidavit from the utility that he had never owned the stock, that it was owned instead by his deceased father, but, nevertheless, the IRB had demanded that he pay the tax on the dividend, despite the fact that his salary was only $28 per week and he had a wife and two small children. At two dollars per week, he paid $18.92 toward the outstanding tax. But the IRB had placed a lien on his salary for the remaining $15.59, which got him in trouble with his employer who did not wish to continue to employ a tax dodger and so he was fired, was unable to find full-time work, and his youngest child had become ill in the meantime and died, buried in potter's field at Government expense. Mr. Pearson notes that the burial expense was nearly as much as the total of $34.51 tax which the IRB had sought from the man. Finally, the IRB even apologized for its mistake and told the man that if he were assessed again, he should ignore it.
The second illustration occurred in Chester County, Pa., involving the mushroom industry, whereby five small mushroom growers had been found guilty of tax fraud for amounts ranging up to approximately $60,000 and were given jail sentences for same. Another mushroom grower, however, who also had been recommended by the IRB for criminal prosecution, had hired a smart tax attorney, who was a friend of Ohio Congressman Clarence Brown, a major supporter of Senator Taft, and when the matter was referred to the Justice Department, managed to delay the matter for more than a year. This mushroom grower already had been found guilty of misbranding mushrooms and fined $1,100 in Federal Court for violation of the Pure Food & Drug Act, the misbranding having provided him $375,000 in illegal profits. Nevertheless, he escaped criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for tax fraud because he was elderly and it was determined that the trial might injure his health.
The third illustration involved the head of a petroleum company in Wichita who had been indicted on four counts of income tax evasion involving about $37,000 in taxes, had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, plus a two-year suspended sentence on probation. The previous year, the same Federal judge had sentenced two boys to two years in prison for stealing a car and taking it across the state line.
The fourth illustration had occurred after the President, in January, 1950, had urged full collection of income taxes and vigorous prosecution of tax fraud. But when a prominent Missourian who operated a shoe company in St. Louis had a case referred by the IRB to the Justice Department, where Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle was about to send it to the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis for prosecution, the White House suddenly intervened to stop it, pending a conference with the man's attorney. While that appeared innocuous enough on its face, the man had hired a Kansas City attorney who was close to the President's most intimate Kansas City friend. The case was then held up on the ground that a trial would seriously impair the man's health, a reason often cited in recent years for delaying or dispensing with criminal prosecution in tax cases.
Marquis Childs discusses the prisoner-exchange issue in Korea as demonstrating the difficulty in finalizing an armistice. One problem had been the vast discrepancy between the U.N. soldiers missing in action and those reported on the list by the Communists, as well as the fact that many of the prisoners held by the U.N., especially the Chinese, had determined to join the U.N. side, with many of the Chinese prisoners having gone so far as to have tattooed the Nationalist emblem on their arms, which would be a sure death warrant should they be returned to the Communists. The latter fact was a principal reason for the U.N. not being willing to engage in a blanket exchange of prisoners.
The Communist prisoners had been treated well in the U.N. prison camps and given better food and clothing than had U.N. prisoners by the Communists, one reason for the defections. The greatest discrepancy between the two sides was the record-keeping on prisoners, with the Communists being woefully deficient, just as the Russian forces had been during World War II. That fact helped to explain the great discrepancy between the list released by the Communists and those recorded missing in action by the allies, although there was some hope that some of those not listed had escaped and were trying to make it back to the U.N. lines.
How a truce would be enforced remained a matter of concern at the highest levels in Washington and there was some disposition to require a pledge that if the terms were violated, then retaliatory measures would be taken against the Communists. But such a commitment could prepare the way for yet another war, and might convert a limited war into total war, including the millions of troops capable of being marshaled by the Chinese.
Robert C. Ruark finds O. Henry to have captured best the Christmas spirit in his story, "The Gift of the Magi". He briefly recaps that story, which, if you have been attentive, you will not need to read again.
The Christmas spirit had been
defined in recent years as a function of what one needed or by a duty
performed without enthusiasm, followed by a succession of bills for
gifts given. "Me
He imparts his own Christmas story of a press agent, four actresses, and a lot of poor children. The press agent, he notes, though earning his living by placing other people's names in Broadway columns, would not allow his name to be used. The four actresses, one of whom was so down on her luck that she was studying typing during the mornings, also would not allow their names to be mentioned. The children were 64 boys and 62 girls of the Children's Center of the New York Welfare Department, ranging in age from 12 to 16, with the younger dominating. Their needs were more psychological than material, and so the four actresses had been seeking help from their friends to obtain good clothing for the girls and sports equipment for the boys. The press agent had gone to work on the matter without fee, all of which Mr. Ruark regards as a "modern miracle of the Yule."
He says that he was naturally
suspicious of this goodwill, as the New York league of press agents
and actresses was full of angles while being short on angels. But in
this instance, there did not appear to be any angles, "which is
almost like discovering the milk of human kindness in a shark."
He wishes a happy Christmas to the four anonymous
A letter writer urges the newspaper to keep up its fine reporting on Lamar Caudle and the tax scandals, and urges it to keep the heat on Attorney General J. Howard McGrath and Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark as, says the writer, they were guilty, too.
A letter from a corporal in Korea indicates that he had seen an article in Stars & Stripes about the News and had been seeking to locate a newspaper to which he could write, as he had not received enough mail from home and could not write to his hometown newspaper as his girl might become aware of it. He provides a description of himself and seeks letters from Charlotte's female population, if possible, those between the ages of 16 and 25. He says that if he did not receive any replies, he would buy some Korean real estate and work the rice paddies after the war. He had received a "Dear John" letter right after he had arrived in Korea from a girl with whom he had been going "pretty steady" before leaving the states. "Therefore, I didn't know very many women to write to. So now I try this."
Well, he sounds like a nice young man who is willing to work the rice paddies, and so you might wish to send him some correspondence just to be a good sport, and tell him that you really like rice. He will then take the hint that you want to be his bride ultimately, and thus you can test whether he is in the game for the sincere reasons, or something else.
A letter writer finds that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had often advocated the doctrine of states' rights and had insisted upon it when they were in the minority and ignored it when they were in the majority. He suggests that no state had any right to perpetuate a system which impacted the happiness and prosperity of another state or subjected innocent individuals to "unspeakable suffering and woe".
A letter writer recounts that she had applied for a driver's license at the State Highway Patrol building on Wilkinson Boulevard and was surprised when the man to whom she gave her completed written examination answers immediately crumpled it and threw it away without even looking at it. She had previously studied the booklet on highway regulations and thought that she had most of the answers correct on the test, though she had not been sure of some and so was anxious to ascertain the correct answers. During her time at the Patrol office, at least one other applicant had his test treated likewise, and she wonders whether the examiners believed they could tell by looking at the applicant whether or not they had passed the test. She urges that the State Highway Patrol check its own household.
The editors respond that the man in charge of the office had stated that questionnaires should be corrected and questions answered incorrectly explained to the applicant by the official who was grading the questionnaire.
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