The Charlotte News
Saturday, February 10, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied tank-infantry columns had, without firing a shot, captured three targets around Seoul, the suburb of Yongdungpo, Kimpo airfield, and the port of Inchon. A patrol crossed the frozen Han River and breached the southern gate of Seoul, encountering a firefight with a Chinese company inside the city. Allied artillery and howitzers poured fire into the city and allied warplanes dropped napalm, rockets, and machine-gun fire against any observed enemy positions, including a thousand troops fleeing north across the Han. Naval guns also joined the assault off Inchon, as the allied limited offensive was in its 17th day.
While enemy defense of the western sector had crumbled, they were making a stand in the central sector against what had been the U.S. Tenth Corps, now joined with the main body of the Eighth Army.
In the area of Sinanju, Fifth Air Force F-80 Shooting Stars encountered an aerial fight with 8 to 12 Russian-made MIG-15 jets in three different fights, the MIGs showing up in force for the first time in several days.
Correspondent William C. Barnard, earlier heavily censored by the Army, conveys his belated report of the allied stand in January at the Wonju bulge, turning the tide of battle and restoring morale of the previously retreating U.N. army. In eight days of fighting in sub-zero temperatures, the outnumbered U.S. Second Division had fended off repeated attacks with counter-attacks and killed an estimated 12,000 North Korean troops, breaking the will of the enemy drive to the south. It set the pattern for the Eighth Army's new tactic of hunt-and-kill behind aggressive tank columns, pulling back to established positions at nightfall. Without the stand, retreat of the entire Eighth Army would have likely been the result, to avoid a trap on the western side of the peninsula by forces gaining control of the central road network. He notes that the Second Division had also saved the Eighth Army in November when the enemy suddenly struck, the Second's stand enabling allied escape south from exposed positions beyond the Chongchon River.
Former President Hoover, 76, said the previous night in another radio address, this one broadcast over the Mutual Network, that the nation's best weapons against Russian aggression in Europe would be bringing to bear U.S. air and sea superiority, that land war would risk loss of civilization. He also proposed that Chiang Kai-Shek be allowed to do what he wanted with respect to mainland China and that the U.S. ought furnish him with weapons. The speech appeared to modify his address of a few weeks earlier, which had favored withdrawing the nation's defenses from the Far East and Europe to the two oceans, though he did not repudiate that proposed doctrine. A Republican member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees said that the former President's view ought be heard as part of hearings by those committees to determine whether to approve sending of American troops to NATO. Most Republicans who expressed an opinion agreed with the unnamed Senator. But Democrats found the former President's advice impractical to follow.
The Defense Department's proposal to lower the draft age from 19 to 18 appeared certain to reach the Senate floor after being approved 7 to 1 by the Senate Defense Preparedness subcommittee chaired by Senator Lyndon Johnson. Only Senator Wayne Morse voted against it, saying after the vote that he would continue to fight for some changes in the proposed legislation. A change inserted by the majority would authorize Army enlistment during the ensuing five years by up to 125,000 carefully selected aliens, albeit, according to Senator Johnson, not designed to obviate the necessity of calling up 18-year olds. Local draft boards would be directed by the measure to call up initially all available manpower in the 19 to 25 age group of childless non-veterans, the current pool of inductees, and to select first the oldest of the 18 year olds. The bill would extend service from 21 to 24 months. Over the ensuing three years, 75,000 18-year olds would be allowed to enter college after completing 4 to 6 months of basic training. It would also establish universal military training on a permanent basis. It still had to clear the Senate Armed Services Committee but that appeared foreordained as the seven Senators who approved it formed a majority of that 13-member committee.
Attorney General J. Howard McGrath announced that a Federal grand jury would probe certain aspects of Senate testimony to determine whether there were grounds for perjury indictments regarding the confirmation of Anna Rosenberg, subsequently confirmed unanimously as Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of manpower. Ralph De Sola had alleged at the hearings that he had seen Ms. Rosenberg at a meeting of a Communist organization in 1935, but Ms. Rosenberg said that she was being confused with another woman of the same name, and the charge was later shown to be false. Mr. De Sola's former wife and other witnesses disputed that Ms. Rosenberg was a member of the organization or attended its meetings.
In Chicago, a Federal judge ruled that the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen was responsible for the just-ended "sick call" strike of railroad switchmen, begun January 30, and would be fined as a result $25,000 for being in contempt of the Federal court order ending the earlier strike, issued the prior December. The union also faced an additional charge of contempt, to be heard February 14. The Court dismissed charges against 40 union locals and 31 lodges. The Government had sought fines of 1.5 million dollars against the BRT and $100,000 to be levied against three of its top officers.
Southern Railway Lines East Headquarters reported that the strike was ended and that the men had returned to work, with everything rolling again on Lines East.
The auto industry was recovering from the rail strike, but with about 50,000 workers set still to be idle by Monday at Studebaker, Ford, and G.M. plants, compared to 120,000 earlier in the week. During the week, 108,000 cars were built, compared to 140,000 the prior week.
Get you one. But if you can't afford one, don't you worry about old Ike mocking you for driving around in an old Ford like some goddamned ostracized Roosky general.
In Atlanta, a 12-year old girl with inoperable cancer, dubbed by newspaper photographers in San Diego "Miss Beautiful" shortly after birth, and who had been given three months to live a year earlier, had been taken from the hospital and brought home where she gained weight. Her speech and eyesight continued, however, to fail sporadically and time was growing short. The story urges sending her a Valentine greeting, as her 13th birthday approached on February 27, although she still thought of herself as being only 11 as she had spent much of 1950 unconscious.
Sub-zero temperatures continued to plague the Northeast this date, as the mercury reached 48 below at River Bend, N.Y., and 45 below at Owl's Head, the coldest temperatures in the area in recent history. Two inches of snow fell at each of Raleigh, N.C., Knoxville, Tenn., and Dalton, Ga. Record rains and melting snow in Western Washington caused flooding along six rivers, producing mudslides resulting in heavy damage in the Seattle and Tacoma areas. Southern Pennsylvania also experienced flooding.
Meanwhile, in Phoenix, the temperature was a cool 84, the record high for the date in 55 years, with the thermometer set to rise to 87 this date, five degrees above the record set in 1930.
So there, River Bend and Owl's Head.
On the editorial page, "A Military Matter" finds it impractical to tie the hands of the President by constraining artificially the number of troops he could commit to NATO, that the fixing of a definite quota or ratio of American troops to European troops, as proposed by Senator Taft, would place Europe in a position it was not yet able to occupy, without sufficient industrial capacity to rearm and train men as fast as could the U.S., and that half-measures by the U.S. would have a bad psychological effect, nullifying the ameliorative impact on European morale produced by General Eisenhower's recent visit.
Senators Taft, Homer Ferguson and William Knowland were seeking to dictate military policy with their idea of a fixed quota or ratio and lacked the military expertise necessary to make the determination.
The piece favors instead leaving the decision regarding the number of American troops to be sent to join in defense of NATO, in the competent, knowledgeable hands of General Eisenhower, the NATO supreme commander.
"We Can Win the War" recommends a piece by Barbara Ward, former foreign editor of the London Economist, appearing in the New York Times Magazine of February 4, titled "Despair Is Both Dangerous and Stupid", in which she had analyzed the origins of the strength of Stalin's empire, had found that it rested on the weakness of the West, the inability of the fifty or sixty free nations to formulate a coherent policy of defense, the military preponderance in Russia following its postwar refusal of complete disarmament, and its insistence on promoting the idea that the Western system was outdated and that Communism was the new means for solving humanity's Twentieth Century problems.
The weapons employed by Russia, finds the piece, were tough and should not be underestimated, that the West had to unite, abandon past policy of mobilization only in crisis and reduction of the military in peacetime, plus cease squabbling among allies and convince the non-Soviet world that the future of civilization depended on democratic ideals.
Just how would that square with the recommendation set forth in your next editorial?
"The Darker Impulses" comments on the piece on the page by Bob Sain regarding recidivism of criminal offenders and states its agreement with the concept that "defective delinquents" were a breed apart among criminal offenders, but also expresses reservation with the notion of locking up such persons indefinitely for the chance of psychiatric misdiagnosis. Sentencing someone, it offers, convicted of a minor sex offense to an indeterminate term in jail was overly drastic—not to mention being a violation of the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishment, having as one criterion that the sentence not be disproportionate to the crime.
It states, however, that once a positive diagnosis was made of incurability of the sex deviant, it would support action against that individual, even though the crime was minor, that short jail sentences would not cure such a person of his or her compulsions.
You and the psychiatrists quoted by
Mr. Sain need to understand better our Constitution and why it
exists, so that a bunch of Nazi shrinks, seeking favor of the State
while earning their pathetic living with a rubber stamp, do not start
putting people permanently behind bars for being "incurable
deviants"—as the Nazis in fact did—when their crime is
actually only deviancy from the socio-political norms of the time,
perhaps, in common parlance, for as little as being perceived as a
"hippie"
Thank goodness for liberal judges who understand the law and the Constitution and are not Fascists.
"Scouts and Storm Troopers" tells of reading of a Soviet dictionary having defined the Boy Scouts of America as a military-political organization of young Americans. It got the impression from the definition that the Soviet perception of the organization was that of a group of storm troopers who spent their early years snooping on their parents to detect political deviation.
While, it suggests, the Boy Scouts were, to a degree, a military-political organization, there was much more to it than that. During Boy Scout Week, it was appropriate to ask what the Scouts were. It quotes the oath to which each Scout pledged and aspired, to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, concludes that the Soviet Union could stand some Scouts of its own.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator John Williams of Delaware having taken up the tax collection bribery scandal, first proposed by Mr. Pearson in his column of January 30, 1950, and demanded the ouster of the IRB administrator in the New York district, who had five collectors under his authority who had been convicted and sentenced to prison for shaking down tax delinquents for large bribes. Despite the head administrator for the district, which included Manhattan, having been described by the Commissioner of the IRB as "weak and ineffective", he had not resigned.
He notes that the administrator had refused to talk to Mr. Pearson and hung up the phone a year earlier. He also notes that Senator Williams had recommended a full investigation by the Senate of the method of tax collection.
Senator Joseph McCarthy had boasted recently to Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico that he did not pay his full income taxes. When Senator Anderson expressed shock at the admission, Senator McCarthy shrugged and said that no Senator had ever gone to jail for tax evasion.
At the Republican Party gathering, Senator Irving Ives resented the request by Taft supporters that Fred Waring play "I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover", the Taft theme song at the 1948 Republican convention, shaking his head to oppose it, whereupon the band played, to the consternation of the Taft people, "Way Down Yonder on the Ohio".
Intelligence reports regarding a new and important secret agreement between Russia and Communist China had reached Washington, having implications for Korea. It provided that the Kremlin would train and equip ten new divisions for Communist China, to be composed of foreign troops, half of whom would be Japanese prisoners of war plus an unspecified number of Chinese Mongolians; that Russia would provide 100 jet planes, train 1,000 Chinese pilots and 2,000 Chinese paratroopers, send 300,000 Russians troops to Manchuria, provide the Chinese army with heavy equipment and return to China 47 of the industrial plants which it had removed from Manchuria during the first year after the war.
The agreement had aroused considerable worry in Washington, despite the Korean war going well, with the allies inflicting large numbers of casualties.
Elliott Roosevelt, son of FDR, had sought to invite U.N. British delegate Sir Gladwyn Jones to participate in his mother's radio program, which Mr. Jones sought to avoid and then finally declined, prompting Mr. Roosevelt to threaten to report him to the State Department.
Bob Sain of The News, as indicated in the above editorial, discusses the criminal recidivism rate in North Carolina and the different approaches tried in other states to attenuate the recurrence of crime by released offenders or indefinitely to incarcerate them in facilities where they could receive psychiatric treatment. North Carolina had an 80 percent recidivism rate among the nearly 15,000 serious offenders incarcerated in Central Prison in Raleigh. Only 2,956 were new offenders.
Psychiatrists classified such repeat
offenders into three types: "constitutional psychopathic
inferior", which included primarily chronic sex offenders;
"psychopathic personality", also applied to chronic sex
offenders; and "defective delinquent"
The new director of the State Prisons Department, John M. Gold—formerly an FBI agent, Police Chief and shortly to become long-term City Manager of Winston-Salem—, said that many of the recidivists were in the latter category. His remedy was to segregate these prisoners from the general population, which would allow for more discipline and better morale among the other prisoners with the worst troublemakers removed, as well as to enable better supervision and rehabilitative treatment for the recidivists.
In New York and Maryland, there were movements to provide for indeterminate sentences for the recidivists in special institutions, where they would receive psychiatric treatment. Dr. William Drayton, Jr., staff psychiatrist for the Municipal Court in Philadelphia, was a proponent of indefinite isolation from society of such individuals.
Dr. Henry Keller, former clinical director of the Central Louisiana State Hospital, said that the "defective delinquent" was incurable, that the person had developed early in childhood a desire to inflict cruelty, egotism, a disregard for the rights of others, and complete indifference to legal restraint, lacking any personal responsibility for commission of illegal conduct. He had urged in the December 11, 1948 issue of The Saturday Evening Post that the psychopathic personality should be locked away for life.
Others cited the case of William Heirens, the 17-year old University of Chicago student, the alleged "lipstick killer", who, in 1946, had allegedly killed in Chicago a little girl, Suzanne Degnan, during a botched burglary, and who had started at a young age committing burglaries, convicted of nine before the three murder convictions based on his confessions—which he later recanted, claiming they were coerced by physical violence. He had been committed to prison for life—where he died in 2012.
Dr. Drayton answered the criticism that it was cruel to take a child from his or her parents at a young age with the notion that it was more cruel to allow such a personality to walk the streets where the person was capable of killing someone who did not provide whatever the person wanted. He believed that such people were incapable of learning from experience.
The pending bill in Maryland, primarily aimed at chronic sex offenders, would recognize the class of defective delinquents as being able to know right from wrong and thus not legally insane, but also incapable of amending their criminality to conform to society's laws, and then setting up a special branch of legal machinery to enable confinement for an indefinite period of psychiatric observation and treatment. It had the nearly uniform support of medical and legal professionals in Maryland.
Mr. Gold stated that while clearly not all of the recidivists in the North Carolina system fell into such psychiatric categories, it was important to be able to identify those who did, to permit the problem then to be addressed.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", examines the domestic expenditures, contained within the President's 71.6 billion dollar budget, which North Carolina's two Senators might accept or eliminate to reduce it. Senator Clyde Hoey thought that the St. Lawrence Seaway, urged by the President, was unfeasible, while Senator Willis Smith thought it was necessary for continental defense and had co-sponsored a bill to approve agreement with Canada to develop the area as a first step to construction of the Seaway. Senator Hoey said that it would take five years to construct and that by that time, the national defense emergency would have passed. He also objected that it would result in the railroads being swamped with business in the winter months while being bereft in the summer, as well as harm Eastern seaports. He believed that there were plenty of other places to develop power.
Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina said that the blame for high food prices should not rest with the farmer, that those who so cast the issue were "ignorant". Most farm commodities, he clarified, were bringing less than a fair return to the farmer as gauged by the parity index, less than they brought in 1948.
Congressman Graham Barden of the state, head of the House Labor & Education Committee, had urged drafting railroad workers to halt the railway strike and predicted that because of it, now ended, the troops in Korea might run short of ammunition. Senator Hoey wanted a resolution to prevent further bargaining rights for any union which authorized or tolerated a strike in violation of its contract, said that the "sick call" strike was a subterfuge. Senator Smith, while not favoring severe sanctions, wanted an inquiry into the strike.
Senator Smith, along with other Southern Senators, visited the President during the week to seek an exemption from price control on baled cotton. The state's Congressional offices were besieged with wires and letters protesting the January 26 order freezing the price of cotton at the gins and on the commodity markets at the December-January highest level. Senator Hoey joined in the protest.
There was surprise at Senator Smith having selected a non-Duke graduate to be his aide. Robert E. Long had graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School but had family ties to Duke.
A Pome appears from the Atlanta
Journal, "In Which A Warning
"Persons too glib
Sometimes tell a fib."
But can you discern
By the cut of their jib
Just who will burn
And who will get the Rib?
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.