The Charlotte News
Friday, February 2, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that tank-led allied forces advanced through thick fog the prior night to points north of Anyang, only 8.5 miles south of Seoul. Two to 2.5 miles south of Anyang, however, two companies of Chinese Communists, possibly comprised of 400 men, counter-attacked at 10:00 p.m. and still were fighting at midnight. Enemy opposition to the nine-day allied drive had been diminishing daily. Some allied patrols had reached to within seven miles of Seoul.
On the allied right flank, near the juncture of the western and central fronts, French and American troops emerged from a trap set by thousands of screaming enemy troops engaging in hand-to-hand combat twelve miles north of Yoju. About 6,000 men of two enemy regiments had been killed. The allies had broken the back of the charge when air power and reinforcements reached them at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday.
In Washington, some Pentagon officials were reported to favor stopping the offensive at the 38th parallel. The Eighth Army would not confirm the report.
An Eighth Army spokesman said that 6,650 enemy troops had been killed between January 25 and 31. Air reports listed 1,462 enemy casualties for that period, but some reports, it was acknowledged, might be duplicated. According to captured prisoners of war, typhus had appeared among North Korean troops, with as much as 50 to 100 percent of some companies being infected. Tuberculosis, trench foot, frostbite and other such wartime diseases were reported to be taking their toll among the Chinese troops. Typhus was spread by rats and no cases were reported among the U.N. troops and had not been a problem among the Chinese troops.
General Eisenhower told a meeting of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees that some additional U.S. units would have to be transferred to Europe as part of NATO defense requirements. He said that one unit sent soon would be the equivalent of two or three sent later because of the physical and psychological impact on Western Europe. The General did not provide the precise number of troops to be required. (Sorry, Dick.) He said that he was encouraged by the news that Holland intended to double its defense effort, and was confident that the Western nations could build an effective defense force within a reasonable amount of time.
The General would give a radio and
television
In Las Vegas, residents felt the jolt and saw the flash of a fourth atomic bomb blast within a week at the Nevada test range. Windows in stores bulged in and out like balloons, according to one eyewitness. The sky was lit up with noontime brilliance in the predawn hours and was visible within a radius of 400 miles, seen as far away as San Francisco. The concussion came in three waves, with one small one and two larger ones, lasting longer than during the previous three tests. The Atomic Energy Commission said only that a test had taken place.
The President asked Congress for a ten billion dollar tax increase to put the higher defense spending on a pay-as-you-go basis, and said he would seek another hike later. The proposal included four billion in increased individual taxes, a three billion dollar increase in corporate income taxes, and a three billion dollar increase in excise taxes to be concentrated on "less essential consumer goods", increasing the total tax revenue to 64.2 billion, a third more than the record of 43 billion raised in 1945 during the last year of World War II. The further increase announced by the President, according to members of Congress, would add another 6.5 billion. He also called for closing of loopholes which allowed under-taxation of the oil and mining industries, and taking away the preferred rate for capital gains, allowing for 25 percent taxation on profits from the sale of property held for more than six months, whereas ordinary income rates varied progressively between 20 and 91 percent.
White House press secretary Joseph Short declared, in a statement authorized by the President, that the railroad strikes were directly injuring the national security and could not be allowed to continue. The strikes, which had begun in Chicago and Detroit and involved switchmen calling in sick, continued to plague shipments of vital materials throughout the country. Twenty-five major trains between New York and the West were canceled. Commuters were stranded in New York and Pennsylvania. Some switchmen were reported to have returned to their jobs in Chicago, where 153 switchmen were doing the job normally done by 261. A Ford plant in Detroit had to shut down for want of parts and materials, laying off 12,500 workers.
In Boston, a woman had quadruplets, two boys and two girls. All were doing well.
In Richmond, Va., Chief Justice Fred Vinson, with duty over the Fourth Circuit, denied a final stay of execution to four of seven black men on death row in Martinsville, allowing to proceed the execution of the four for the rape of a white woman two years earlier. The three others convicted in the incident were to be executed on Monday. The last of the four to die was the 49th black man to be electrocuted for rape in Virginia since 1908 when the electric chair had been installed. A white man was also electrocuted for the rape and murder of a 14-year old girl. It was the largest single-day execution in state history. All five men went to their deaths calmly.
In Raleigh, the House Roads Committee formally buried the pending legislation to revive the State vehicle safety inspection law, passed in 1947 but abrogated in 1949 because of producing long lines at the DMV. Another bill to provide more State-operated inspection lanes, supported by Governor Kerr Scott, was given an unfavorable report.
The State Senate passed a measure to prevent the search of dwellings and private businesses without a warrant and providing for suppression of evidence obtained in derogation of the prohibition.
Newsflash: The Fourth Amendment comes to North Carolina.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of Rear Admiral R. W. Hayley and Army Lt. General John R. Hodge, commander of the Third Army, telling a large group of 252 reserve officers and civilians, along with business and industrial leaders present in Charlotte for the closing exercises of the Field Economic Mobilization School, that economic mobilization at home was just as essential to national security as the work of the armed forces.
The nation remained in the grip of a cold wave, with zero degree weather recorded as far south as Arkansas and Texas, reaching 42 below at Lone Rock, Wis., and minus-zero temperatures in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, with 19 below recorded at Louisville.
The "Our Weather" box tells of the concept of the groundhog as a weather prophet having come from Germany, which used a badger for the purpose. The groundhog hibernated from fall until March. Whether or not he would cast his shadow on this date, it remarks, would be of no climatological significance.
On the editorial page, "Here
We Go Again" tells of the House Appropriations Committee having
killed the single omnibus spending bill system which had been tried
in the 81st Congress with success. The problem with it, in the eyes
of many in Congress, however, was that it could not disguise the
overall spending of the Government by piecemeal spending legislation
for each program. The practical criticism of it had been that it took
longer to debate than successive measures, but Senator Harry F. Byrd
had said, in response to that argument, that it ought take six weeks
to debate the spending of 47 billion dollars. The Senator regarded
the House Committee action as a "step backward in fiscal
reform". The piece regards it as an understatement, finds the
committee bloc of 18 Republicans and 13 Democrats who had voted to
end the omnibus system to have done so to remove the brakes
"Smith University—A Worthy Cause" praises John C. Smith University in Charlotte, an all-black school at the time, and urges contribution to its fund-raising drive to build new, much needed facilities on the campus, at a financial disadvantage vis-à-vis the larger colleges and universities.
"A Reminder" again urges the General Assembly to pass the authorization for the cities of the state to receive Federal urban redevelopment funds, as the Legislature had declined to do in 1949. It would not obligate any city to receive such funds, only provide that it could partake of the existing fund, which had already been budgeted and thus would not cost additional taxpayer money. The authorization had been blocked in 1949 by the real estate interests, but now was approved by the League of Municipalities and the North Carolina Association of Real Estate Boards.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Meritorious", finds that Comptroller General Lindsay Warren of North Carolina practiced what he preached in terms of economy, paring down the personnel in his agency from 15,000 to 7,000 and even being willing recently to share his office space with the staff of the new Office of Defense Mobilization, headed by Charles E. Wilson. The piece suggests that he be awarded "The Federal Working Man of the Quarter-Century".
John Gould, writing in the Christian Science Monitor from Lisbon Falls, Me., tells of Uncle Wilbur, a laborer who laid 175 yards of stone wall one afternoon and then won the prize for best waltz that evening, who had told the story of how the Stone of Scone, stolen on Christmas Day from its place of investiture below the British throne at Westminster Abbey, had originally been in his family's possession, was accidentally broken into pieces by the children, some of it winding up in Scotland.
Mr. Gould therefore offers a stone in replacement of the missing Stone of Destiny, in the tradition of the original, as Uncle Wilbur had also lifted that one. But, he says, he would require the strength of ten or twelve men to help him lift it, "or if one is handy, a single Scot wi' a braid leuch and muckle micht; one who kens that a rock is a rock, for a' that."
Drew Pearson tells of Tony Accardo and Jack Guzik being the new bosses of the Chicago underworld since the death of Al Capone. They filed income tax returns which only vaguely stated the sources of their income, under such headings as "other income", and only approximated the income, nevertheless leaving IRB agents, with limited manpower, incapable of tracing any further the legitimacy of the income or its accuracy. They also falsified business expense deductions on the basis of payoffs to cops and officials for the purpose of staying in business. He provides the details of the returns and suggests that Mr. Guzik should be glad that the IRB was not as assiduous in its dedication to finding out tax issues with underworld figures as it had been in the 1927-29 era of Al Capone's dominance, when the Government sent Mr. Guzik to jail for tax evasion for concealing a million dollars in income on which he owed $250,000 dollars in taxes for that three-year period.
The South was getting so many defense plants, including the hydrogen bomb plant to be located in South Carolina and an atomic bomb plant to be situated in North Carolina, that Congressman Gary Clemente of New York had suggested to Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, that the South must be rearming for a civil war. Mr. Vinson assured that it was not the case.
Marquis Childs tells of being invited to speak at Miner Teachers College in D.C., one of the oldest of the nation's black normal schools, only to have the speaking engagement suddenly canceled by the College without explanation. He had dismissed the matter until the Washington Post had done some research and brought to his attention that the College had contacted HUAC which had provided Mr. Childs's name along with three other prospective speakers as having been found listed as subversives, whereupon the cancellation of all of the speakers was issued.
Mr. Childs was outraged by the finding and had called HUAC to learn that the reason for inclusion of his name was that he had supposedly, in 1937, sponsored the "American Writers Congress", something of which he had never even heard, and that in 1938, he had joined the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, listed as a subversive organization by the Attorney General in 1944. He explains that in 1937, he had been sent as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to cover the Spanish Civil War and while there became deeply compassionate for the plight of the Spanish people, joining, upon his return to the U.S., the organization in question as a means to fight Fascism in Europe. Such organizations were later taken over by Communists.
He suggests that if the country persisted in the way it was going, it would become like Russia. "We shall descend to the dumb and stricken submissiveness of the totalitarianism that George Orwell described so devastatingly in his book '1984'."
Robert C. Ruark tells of celebrating, along with his friends, the demise of one of the last of the diehard bachelors, who was succumbing to marriage. He explains why he had served as such a necessary symbol of independence for married men, while those same married men ruthlessly mocked his plight out of defensiveness and jealousy for his freedom.
Framed Edition
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