The Charlotte News
Thursday, February 22, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied forces, initiating "Operation Killer", had advanced northward along a 60-mile rainswept front intending to kill, injure or capture all of the estimated 40,000 enemy troops within the mountains and valleys of central Korea south of the 38th parallel. Advances ranged from twelve miles by an American division in the east-central sector, to within three miles of Pyongchang, as other units were slowed by mud and enemy mines, to eight and a half miles in the central valley, north of Wonju, encountering only sporadic resistance during the day but more as dusk approached. The primary Chinese strength was centered at Hoengsong, ten miles north of Wonju, and a tank-led American vanguard had advanced to within four miles of Hoengsong by nightfall, with exchange of fire between the allies and the mountain defenders beginning at dusk. The greatest obstacle to the allies was the weather, including rain, snow and mud.
The U.S. Air Force, along with Australian and South African planes, hit enemy targets during Thursday to make way for the initiative despite the adverse weather conditions.
General MacArthur resumed his daily press releases, suspended since December, suggesting that he was making it plain who was boss of military operations in the war. Sources at headquarters in Tokyo, however, denied that such was the motive, notwithstanding rumors circulating that he was being stripped of some authority by the Pentagon. Some Eighth Army officers appeared to resent the assumption of command of the initiative by the General, as they contended it had begun the day prior to his visit at Wonju at which time he had ordered, "Resume the initiative."
Canadian Press reporter Bill Boss revealed that 68 American soldiers had been killed by the enemy in a Korean village the allies had captured, because they had posted only one sentry and then went to sleep rather than digging in and posting a proper watch. Canadian troops advancing in the Chipyong sector discovered the bodies. The Chinese had silently established a roadblock behind the American unit and attacked from the front, mowing them down as they slept or attempted to flee.
Lt. General Ennis Whitehead, air defense commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, meeting jointly to consider the resolution of Senator Kenneth Wherry to express the sense of the Senate that Congressional approval should precede the sending of American troops to join in defense of NATO, that a long-range Air Force should receive top priority in the build-up of the country's defenses, with second priority given to preventing long-range bombers from being destroyed at their base and protecting the industrial might of the nation with "beefed up" defenses. He refused to comment on whether troops should be sent.
But Wherry is the beef?
The next witnesses to be called regarding the issue would be top Republican leaders.
Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, in Charlotte for an address to the annual convention of the North Carolina Association of Launderers and Cleaners, said that he favored sending four more American divisions to Western Europe, as recommended by Defense Secretary Marshall, to augment the two already present.
The Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission announced completion of the first phase of study designed to lead to development of an atomic-powered aircraft. The next phase would move closer to realization of the engine, understood to be under the direction of G.E.'s gas turbine division in a Cincinnati suburb. The initial phase was primarily directed by Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. and would be terminated April 30.
A director of the Reconstruction Finance Corp., William Willett, testified to the Senate committee investigating alleged political favoritism by RFC in granting of loans that he had given a special break to the loan application of a personal friend, Edward Rowe, who had recently become an RFC director, himself. Mr. Willett had personally assigned the examiner on the loan, a departure from standard practice. A Kaiser-Frazer Corp. vice-president also testified that he was told that the company could receive easier terms on a large Government loan were it to hire DNC chairman William Boyle as counsel.
Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston arranged another meeting this date with labor leaders who were hopeful he would raise the wage ceilings recommended a week earlier by the Wage Stabilization Board, prompting a walk-out by the three dissenting labor members. Mr. Johnston was seeking to heal the rift which the order had created, restricting wage increases to ten percent on those agreements made after the beginning of 1950 and through the end of the 1950-51 fiscal year.
The president of the Order of Railway Conductors proposed to the Senate Labor Committee that the Government impound profits of the railroads while they were under Government control, begun the prior August. He said that such a move would encourage cooperative collective bargaining.
In Raleigh, League of Municipalities representatives of 120 cities and towns voted unanimously to support the Senate-approved measure to provide increased State aid to construction and maintenance of urban streets, without a tax and fee increase. The League had provided its support to Governor Kerr Scott's plan to raise gas taxes and license renewal fees to provide nine million dollars for the purpose because, according to the League chairman, the Governor had made his support of the plan contingent on such increases. The Governor later accused the League of running out on the agreement by supporting the proposed measure without tax increases. Mayor Ben Cone of Greensboro, president of the League and the primary leader in the fight for the bill, said that he planned to offer his resignation as Mayor to the City Council as a result of the controversy over the matter.
In Jacksonville, Fla., a meter reader for the electric company resigned after suffering four dog bites since October, found the mental hazards of the occupation too much to withstand.
A Pogo fan from Pageland, S.C., welcomes the comic strip to the pages of The News with an "ambidextriously" written letter to the editors, appearing on the front page, telling of being unable to go fishing now without The News. "We is waitin' for de boy."
On the editorial page, "People vs. Systems" finds that the efforts of the President to reorganize the RFC with a single administrator in place of the extant five-man board had little support in Congress. It thinks it understandable though there had been some sentiment for it in Congress, for there was little difference between the single administrator and the five-man board and it might even be a worse form, smoothing the path for influence peddling, the source of the current criticism of RFC. The President adhered to a "government-by-crony" formula in executive appointments, rewarding faithful party members and contributors.
It favors, instead of a change in form, a change in the system of the President's appointments, picking the better qualified to high positions in the Government while relegating his political appointees to menial positions.
"On Limiting Presidential Terms" finds that the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting the President's elected terms to two, would be ratified soon by the necessary 36 states, and perhaps before the Legislature could ratify it. The State Senate had done so but it still awaited action in the House.
It disfavors the amendment as unduly hampering the free will of the people to elect their choice as President. It does not believe the amendment to be a slap in the face to FDR but also believes that the people, having spoken four times in his favor, should not in the future have their will impeded by such term limitation.
The amendment, first proposed by President Truman in 1945 and sent to the states by the 80th Congress in 1947, would be ratified before the end of the month, with North Carolina being the 37th state to ratify, the day following ratification.
"The Heart of Redevelopment" indicates that the power of condemnation under the Fifth Amendment's eminent domain clause, requiring reasonable compensation for property taken by the Government for public necessity, to be necessary to assure the success of any urban redevelopment project, and recommends to the Legislature that it be incorporated in any urban redevelopment scheme.
"Executive Sessions" finds the resolution of State Representative Joseph H. Warren to ban executive sessions of General Assembly committees to be a good idea, though without chance of passage, as the practice was inconsonant with democracy. There had only been two executive sessions during the 1951 legislative session, but they were two too many.
A piece from the Baltimore
Evening Sun, titled "Beautiful, But..." tells of
officers of Columbia University having found a study published by two
University of California professors testing to determine whether
there was any correlation between personal appearance and scholastic
achievement. They had found that the "beautiful" female
students had an average scholastic achievement of 1.42, that is a C+,
not quite halfway to a B, that "good lookers" obtained a
1.44, "plain" girls, 1.56, while the "homely"
scored 1.61. It concludes that there was little differential
And, "[e]ven a pedant would hardly let a few digits on the less important side of a decimal point influence his judgment as between a honey and a horror."
Bob Sain of The News examines Congressional redistricting in the state, as being proposed in the General Assembly, to accord with more democratic representation of the people and eliminate the gerrymander in favor of Democrats, as contended by Republicans in Western North Carolina had been the rule. He supplies the history of redistricting in the nation and how it affected state politics through time, starting with the redistricting of 1901 which had given the Democrats complete control of North Carolina's Congressional districts following the troublesome period of the Fusion Party coalition of Republicans and Populists in North Carolina, and the Democratic backlash against it in the latter decade of the Nineteenth Century.
The piece shows a comparison of the district maps in the state between 1891 and 1901 to demonstrate the Democratic gerrymander, orchestrated by the political machine of Senator Furnifold Simmons, elected in 1900 and remaining in the Senate through 1930.
Mr. Sain then uses the Tenth Congressional District, including Mecklenburg County, as example. In each of the 1942 through 1948 elections, he posits, the district's voters would have elected, respectively, Republicans Charles A. Jonas, Loomis Klutz, P. C. Burkholder, and Roy Harmon to Congress but for the Democratic gerrymander in the Legislature. In each such election, the Republican fell short by a thousand or fewer votes. Had Avery, Burke, Lincoln, Mitchell and Catawba Counties formed a single district, they would likely have elected a Republican to Congress.
He finds that the Democrats could congratulate themselves on the success of the gerrymander and that it would probably remain biased toward Democrats until the Republicans gained control of the Legislature.
The question might be posed, however, as to whether there would have been better Government of the people, for the people and by the people had Congressman P. C. Burkholder, with his unadulterated farm-fresh buttermilk, been their representative. Renouncing publicly his membership in the Republican Party in 1950, he ran as a Democrat the previous spring, losing to incumbent Hamilton Jones.
Drew Pearson tells of the President's troubles with labor, believing themselves left out of every major decision he had made since his re-election in 1948, despite labor solidly backing him in that campaign. A recent editorial in the newspaper of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen served as example, in which it made that statement, recommending Senator Wayne Morse as the Republican presidential nominee and Senator Paul Douglas as the Democratic nominee for 1952.
The President had turned over labor relations to John Steelman after the election and stopped inviting labor leaders to the White House for conferences. William Green, president of AFL, and Philip Murray, head of CIO, began immediately to complain of having their policy appointments sidetracked.
In the 1950 midterm elections, Democratic losses were heavy in the cities where labor was powerful. The dispute was brought to a head because of the failure of the President to consult with labor leaders regarding the price-wage freeze formula, the absence of a top labor man on the staff of Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson, and the President's statement comparing to Russians the railroad switchmen who had called in "sick" as a means of striking in time of national emergency.
The Second Division in Korea had staged a comeback after the ignominious retreat of the previous November upon the entry to the war of the Chinese Communists. The Second had been forced to hold off the enemy while the rest of the Eighth Army pulled back from the Manchurian border, resulting in heavy casualties. But under the command of Lt. General Matthew Ridgway, it had gone back into the line along the Taebak Mountains in the area of Wonju and halted the North Korean flanking movement, then withdrawn twelve miles, luring the enemy into a trap, hitting them on their flank, wiping them out.
Secretary of State Acheson had placed Dr. Henry Garland Bennett of Oklahoma A & M College in charge of the Point Four program, providing technological and agricultural assistance to underdeveloped countries. He had a simple approach to the task, that food was the key to everything as the peoples of agrarian-based economies, endemic to most underdeveloped nations, depended on it for livelihood. He compared it to the U.S. a hundred years earlier and the country's ability then to learn better farming methods to enable not only feeding of the population but also a surplus of food production, leaving two-thirds of the people to engage in industrial production. To achieve such results, the farming population had to learn to grow more food per acre per person, and the goal was to show them how to do that. He concluded that wherever peoples were able to free themselves from hunger, they could free themselves from the threat of the Communist yoke.
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