The Charlotte News

Monday, February 12, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the enemy had thrust a wedge seven miles into the allied central front on Monday, isolating some American and South Korean units north and northeast respectively of Hoengsong, 55 air miles east of Seoul. The drive had been launched late Sunday and continued throughout Monday, with an enemy force numbering an estimated 60,000 extending along a 30-mile front.

Hand-to-hand combat was engaged by the enemy against allied defenders in Hoengsong. The enemy was attempting to set up a roadblock on the road south of Hoengsong, blocking the way to Wonju.

Late Monday, the enemy charged across the frozen Han River and attacked the U.S. 25th Division in Seoul's suburb, Yongdungpo, but was repelled and forced to withdraw in about fifteen minutes.

A South Korean patrol which entered Seoul was forced out by small arms fire from the enemy.

On the east coast, a South Korean patrol encountered an enemy company a mile south of the 38th parallel and was forced back south after a fight.

Correspondent John Randolph reports that Chinese troops had used white flags and handshakes in an attempt to wipe out U.N. tanks and infantry during a contact patrol about a mile and a half north of Hoengsong, where tank-led G.I.'s were stopped by about 60 Chinese waving white flags and handkerchiefs. But when the infantrymen sought to take the men prisoner, one advanced to shake hands and then threw a hand grenade behind one of the allied troops, at which point the grenade tosser was shot by the man with whom he had just shaken hands. The tanks then opened fire with their machine guns while the outnumbered G.I.'s fought their way back to a little stream, as enemy troops swarmed down from the hills around them. Three soldiers hid beneath ice in the stream to avoid being hit. One Chinese soldier had walked right by their positions and nudged one of them to see if he was alive and then moved on. When they returned to the tanks, their boots were frozen to their feet and their clothes to their bodies.

Senator Lyndon Johnson, chairman of the Senate Defense Preparedness subcommittee, said that the draft revision bill was the most carefully prepared such bill ever produced, a sentiment with which Senator Styles Bridges of the the subcommittee agreed. Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, sent out notices for a closed-door session of the Committee to act on the bill on Tuesday, with approval assured by the fact that the seven who had voted for it on the subcommittee formed a majority of the Armed Services Committee. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon had been the lone dissenter on the subcommittee. Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, who opposed sending 18-year olds into combat, agreed that the subcommittee had done a "fairly good job" on the bill, but said that he would continue to seek an amendment which would prevent anyone under nineteen from being assigned overseas to a combat role and would seek to increase the 25,000 foreign troops over the ensuing five years, allowed under the measure.

The President told his new, nine-member security commission, headed by Admiral Chester Nimitz, to conduct its inquiry into how best to protect national security while protecting individual liberties, in a manner which would stop "witch hunting and give us the acts" of disloyalty. The commission would have direct access to FBI loyalty files.

Mike DiSalle, price controller, said, in an interview with U.S. News & World Report, that he expected the level of prices to rise another five to six percent or more before some stability could be achieved, hopefully by June or July, when specific controls could be implemented.

In Springfield, Ill., the National Legion commander, Earle Cocke, Jr., of Dawson, Ga., speaking at the annual program at Abraham Lincoln's tomb on the former President's birthday, said that the "pink cowards of procrastination we call our diplomats" had laid a "china egg" over the Korean issue. He advocated that the State Department be "reconstituted". He accused the Department of keeping the people in the dark with a "reasonable facsimile of an outright double-cross", that calling Red China an aggressor, as the U.N. had done recently, was another example of "pussyfooting" and that China should be condemned instead as a criminal, with economic sanctions immediately imposed on both China and Russia, not waiting for the action of the U.N. good offices committee to seek a ceasefire arrangement.

The Navy Bureau of Ordnance in Washington reported that the plant in Charlotte used during World War II to produce 40-mm. antiaircraft shells for ships had been prepared for resumption of use but would not be ready to resume full-scale production in the "predictable future". It had employed 13,000 persons during the war. Such large shells had not been required for use by the Navy since the war.

A search of the area between Charlotte and Kannapolis was being conducted for three armed and unmasked men who had robbed the Farmers & Merchants Bank of Granite Quarry during the afternoon and fled in a 1936 black Ford Fordoor, not a Tudor, reportedly abandoned near Beal's Store in Rowan County, about five miles south of Salisbury, where they commandeered a second car at gunpoint from a passing motorist. They then ditched that car in Kannapolis, where they then hopped in a 1948 Mercury and headed toward Charlotte. The three men were in their early twenties and each had a handkerchief wrapped around one hand, apparently to prevent leaving fingerprints. One of the robbers addressed another as "Jake" during the robbery. One said to the tellers, "This is a stickup."

Pretty smart to guard against fingerprints like that, while allowing your faces to be seen, to confuse the eyewitnesses, get them focused on your hands rather than your faces, probably also using aliases.

The News began use of its new type-face this date for news reports, switching to 8-point Corona for easier reading, allowing more space between the lines.

Candidly, if you had not told us, we would not have noticed. And our eyes feel the same after reading this print as they did on Saturday. The slightly larger space may even slow down reading perception.

But thanks for the sentiment. It's the thought that counts.

The price of a subscription to The News was set to go up to 30 cents per week starting February 24, precipitated by the rising costs of production, especially that of newsprint, which had increased in price 112 percent since 1941 and 46 percent since 1946, when the subscription price had last been changed.

You just want to be able to afford an extra dog on your sun, so that you can have a two-dog sun.

On the editorial page, "Mr. Hoover's Second Address" finds this second speech via radio by former President Hoover to have been more restrained and convincing than his first on December 20, in which he had advocated pulling in the nation's defenses from the Far East and Western Europe to the two oceans. This time, he advocated air and sea superiority to combat Russian aggression and that land war would only lead to the destruction of civilization.

The piece finds the approach to be hoping for the best scenario while ignoring the possibility of the worst, that push-button warfare might not work, necessitating a land war. He also, says the editorial, had ignored the strains within Russia, with the many defections reported from the Communist countries to the West. The Hoover policy would leave Russia and China to expand their empires without check, across the Eurasian super-continent.

It advocates continued pressure to counteract the aggression, producing problems in the meantime within the empires and keeping the free states on the side of democracy.

"Fast Action Called For" disagrees with the Raleigh News & Observer that the bill to provide funding from the State for local streets was being moved too quickly through the Legislature. The piece finds that it was long overdue and that quick action was the order of the day, that it had already been delayed too long by the 1949 Legislature's deferral of the matter.

"A Clear Choice" finds the present scheme proposed by the City Council for administering the proposed coliseum-auditorium complex to be fraught with the possibility of becoming embroiled in politics. It favors either having administration, pursuant to the City Charter, by the Park & Recreation Commission, or creating a new authority for the purpose. It finds logic on the side of the first proposal because of the Commission's track record for staying out of politics.

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "The New Competition", tells of the cotton state Congressmen having called on the President to urge placement of controls on cotton at the mill rather than on baled cotton from the farm. Should that become the rule, as it likely would, then it was emblematic of the problem with price controls, that they were placed on the end product of the manufacturer or at the retailer rather than on the raw material and wages. But a modicum of controls was an impossibility. There had to be either a free economy or a controlled one.

It says that it did not mean to criticize the farmers or the Congressmen for exerting the same pressure which labor unions and other pressure groups exerted for their self-interests. But competition was not eliminated by controls. They merely changed the competition from that for the consumers' dollar under the normal market incentives to that for political influence. Victory went to the group which could get the most from the Government.

Drew Pearson tells of the first cargo of the 1950-51 American Legion's Tide of Toys sailing this date from Philadelphia, bound for the children of Europe. The previous year, the Tide of Toys had sent three million toys to Europe and this year the total had reached seven million. Businessmen in New York, led by Lewis Rosenstiel, had collected $50,000 to cover the shipping costs.

The German-Swiss chemical corporation G.A.F., formerly associated with the notorious I. G. Farben of Germany, had become a pawn in the game of Democratic politics. It was supposed to be operated by the Alien Property custodian of the Justice Department, but it had been farmed out to various friends of the President. Several political appointments had been made to the board of directors of G.A.F., including Morton Downey, the singer, Colvin Brown, a publisher of the Motion Picture Daily and a friend to former Postmaster General Frank Walker, William J. Mahaney of San Francisco, who had contributed $5,000 to the Democrats, and Donald Lincoln, who had contributed $1,000 to the Democrats and was law partner to former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. G.A.F.'s earnings had dropped during this board's tenure. The Government had adopted a policy of selling off properties seized from Germany during the war, but G.A.F. remained unsold.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the changing policy with respect to Soviet satellites Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania, that instead of intending to punish Russia for directing their actions should any one of them attack Yugoslavia, the intent was to treat each satellite as an independent state and forewarn them that each would be punished for participation in such aggressive action. The belief was that such a warning might encourage the satellites to defy the will of Moscow.

In Czechoslovakia, where former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis had just fled the country, probably to the American zone of Germany, Sovietization had taken place, as it had some time earlier in the aforementioned satellites. In the face of such a transformation, to treat the satellites as independent states, they venture, was a "polite but dangerous farce." If these satellites waged future aggression, they would not be to blame and if they were to be deterred, then the sanctions would have to be levied against Russia, the source of the stimulus for the aggression.

Marquis Childs tells of Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson having been present when the President met recently with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the White House, and he had said during the conference that he favored construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a project he had formerly opposed, as had most big businessmen for the belief that, like TVA, it would be more Federal control of public power development. He said that Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman had convinced him, however, of the value of the project, for providing 8,000 miles of new coastline for both Canada and the U.S., creating a new resource of hydroelectric power and aiding the nation's defense. The development of iron ore in remote Labrador was especially crucial as that in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota was nearly exhausted, and the Seaway would provide a means of cheap transportation for delivering the ore from the new source, otherwise not profitably to be mined.

The Seaway would take a minimum of four to five years to complete and cost 800 million dollars in 1948 construction costs. Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire said that the project would be self-liquidating in 40 years based on tolls and sale of hydroelectric power. He also said that the Government had guaranteed to Alcoa to pay the cost of electricity above a certain base amount for its plant in northern New York to increase production of aluminum for the needs of the military airplane industry. To have cheaper hydroelectric power in the region would therefore save the Government a large amount of money.

The Seaway would be opened in 1959 after construction would start in 1954.

A letter from a representative of a sales agent for the Hushpuppy Corp. of America, Inc., comments on William T. Polk's article from the Greensboro Daily News, reprinted February 7, finds his attention drawn by mention therein of hushpuppies. He provides the legends of how they got their name, either in the Revolution or the Civil War, in either case to quiet the dogs by feeding them the bits of fried cornmeal, henceforth known as hushpuppies.

He concludes by saying that his company was sending Mr. Polk a can of hushpuppies and votes for them as the favorite food of the state, hopes that Mr. Polk might thereby acquire a taste.

They have a funny aftertaste, actually, a little bitter, which is why they are best eaten only with oysters or shrimp. Calabash restaurants usually do a good job with them. But don't bother with the ones at the cafeteria. You might die from resulting heartburn or lose a couple of teeth biting down on them.

A letter from the pastor of the First Methodist Church in China Grove thanks the newspaper for reprinting the serialized form of Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told, hopes that it would encourage good over evil.

A letter from the post chaplain at Fort Bragg also thanks the newspaper for republishing the book during Lenten Season.

A letter writer from Greenfield, Mass., says that he collected newspapers from every city and asks for a copy of the newspaper to be mailed to him collect, that when he lived in Monroe, he was a daily reader of The News.

What was the purpose in that?

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