The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 28, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that tank-led American forces of the Seventh Division had pushed six miles into the battered eastern flank of the enemy battle front this date in the central front in Korea, bringing it to within sight of Amidong, 31 miles south of the 38th parallel. The patrol reported that the enemy were disorganized and moving in all directions. They were surrendering in increasing numbers.
Maj. General Claude Ferenbaugh, commander of the Seventh Division, said that the North Korean Third Division had lost pretty close to half its strength.
Other division elements pushed westward from the anchor point at Pangnim and linked with the U.S. Second Division on the highway to Hoengsong, 28 miles to the west. The Pangnim-Hoensong road was part of the highway which cut across the peninsula from Kangnung on the east coast to Seoul and was vital to the enemy.
The Defense Department announced that casualties in Korea had reached 50,675, with the addition of 1,543 during the week ending February 23. The total included 7,639 killed in action, 33,401 wounded and 9,635 missing. Including wounded who subsequently died, the number killed was 8,612. The missing included 969 men who had later returned to their lines and 110 known prisoners of war. All reports were complete only insofar as those casualties reported to next of kin.
Army chief of staff General Lawton Collins said that there was a possibility that two more National Guard units would be called up during the year to meet defense needs. He said that he had not yet recommended the call-up, however, to the Joint Chiefs. The Army had said that there were no present plans to summon any more units to Federal service. Six units were already in active service.
Senator Lyndon Johnson said that it was likely that voting would begin this week on the draft and service revision bill, which would implement universal military training and lower the draft age from 19 to 18. Senator Wayne Morse, who had opposed the revision during committee hearings, attacked the bill on the Senate floor.
The Senate Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee, in its second interim report, suggested that Charles "Lucky" Luciano, previously deported to Italy, was the czar of a vast underworld which could become the basis for a subversive movement which could undermine the foundations of the country. Mr. Luciano, it found, settled disputes between two of the country's large crime syndicates. The Committee estimated that at least 20 billion dollars changed hands in the U.S. each year as part of these operations and that millions of that money was paid as "ice", or protection money. The report concluded that there was a secret government of the underworld within the country. One of the syndicates had its axis between Miami and the Chicago Capone syndicate headed presently by Tony Accardo, the Fischetti brothers and Jake Guzik. The other had its axis between New York and Miami, headed by Frank Costello and Joe Adonis. Both syndicates had branch lines extending into many cities and areas. Mr. Luciano was considered the arbiter between the two.
The United Labor Policy Committee decided this date not to send representatives to an afternoon meeting of the Wage Stabilization Board, called to study proposed modifications to the 10-percent wage increase formula approved by the Board the prior week, prompting the three labor members of the Board to walk out, and just implemented by Wage Stabilizer Eric Johnston. AFL secretary-treasurer George Meany said that labor members would not return to the Board, "not ever". George Harrison, AFL vice-president, echoed the sentiment.
That's a long time. We need more
music
In Wichita Falls, Tex., a robber held up a squadron paymaster at the Sheppard Air Force Base and took a $33,000 payroll. He fired one shot but no one was injured. The robber was described as in his early twenties and wearing olive fatigues. He escaped in a payroll car, proceeding toward Iowa Park and took a pay clerk as hostage. The hostage, a corporal, managed to leap from the car when it slowed at an intersection about 3.5 miles from the base.
Did he use the old handkerchief-over-the-hand trick to conceal fingerprints?
In Raleigh, the State House Education Committee approved the compulsory school attendance law which would appropriate $424,800 per year for truant enforcement. A bill to raise teacher pay to a range of $2,400 to $3,600 per year and to hire teachers on a ten-month basis was forwarded to the Appropriations Committee "without prejudice", meaning without recommendation one way or the other.
A bill to outlaw parimutuel betting was introduced in the State House, after articles had appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer exposing gambling on dog races at Morehead City and Moyock.
Where's Moyock?
A bill to require banks to clear all checks at face value was killed by the State Senate Banking Committee. Present law allowed banks to charge clearance fees on all checks. Small bank representatives said that the new law would drive many out of business.
Hey, dey gotta have deir protection money, too. Ye know what we're sayin', heya?
On page 12-A, installment 19 of the serialized abstract of Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told appears, relating of Jesus's dinner with Simon and his story of the Good Samaritan.
At the Charlotte Armory-Auditorium
on Thursday at 8:00 p.m. would appear Army Pfc. Robert L. Sharpe, a
former prisoner of war in North Korea, who would relate of how God
had saved his life in Korea. The Armed Forces produced documentary, "Crime of Korea"
On the editorial page, "That $305 Million 'Deficiency'" regards the State Highway Commission's projected deficiency program to bring the primary road system in the state up to 1951 standards, suggests that it was the result largely of Governor Kerr Scott's emphasis on the secondary roads of the rural areas.
It provides facts to bolster its position and urges the taxpayers in evaluating the deficiency program to remember what had produced the deficiency.
We need them roads but we got to have whitewalls to ride on those roads in style. Where're the whitewalls? The country's goin' to hell.
"Purge in Czechoslovakia" finds the latest purge in Czechoslovakia of former Czech Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis and five others for trying to align the country with the West to reflect the need in Moscow to impose Stalinism on the satellite nationalist groups resisting the Kremlin. It hopes that the action might further stimulate such nationalism.
In Hungary, Rumania, Poland and Albania, the situation had been the same, that wherever there was deviation from the Cominform, the deviators had to be purged. The rallying point among the satellites for such deviation was Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, who had done so and so far survived.
The piece finds that Stalinism, by insistence on such rigid adherence to Party policy, contained the seeds of its own destruction. The need for such purges showed that resistance behind the Iron Curtain was stronger than suspected in the West and that cracks in the rigid structure were beginning to appear.
Finally, it meant that Yugoslavia had to be provided aid in its effort to resist the Politburo's will. For, as long as Tito's regime continued, Russia could no longer rely implicitly on the loyalty of its satellites.
"Another Amendment Now in Order" finds the new 22nd Amendment to the Constitution providing that the President was limited to two elected terms, just ratified by the 36th state the previous day, to be reflective of the will of the people despite most state legislatures having not submitted it for a popular referendum on ratification. The two-term tradition had been so ingrained in the country that it had survived from the Founding until 1940, when, but for the war, FDR likely would not have run or been nominated and elected, as was the case also in 1944.
The newspaper concurred with the arguments in favor of limiting the terms but felt that placing a Constitutional restriction on the number of terms prevented an exception in an emergency as in 1940 and 1944, when the country would be better served by continued leadership in time of war.
But now that the term limitation was part of the Constitution, it finds, another amendment, to limit Senate terms to two and House terms to four, was in order. Though it was unlikely that the Congress, itself, would submit such an amendment to the states for ratification, two-thirds of the state legislatures could do so.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Good, If—", hopes that Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina would stick to his resolve not to issue proclamations declaring particular days in honor of one group or another as no one recognized such days when proclaimed. Too many such days and weeks had caused Governors of that state to issue far too many such proclamations.
Another piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled, "What's Wrong With This?" looks at reapportionment and finds that the Republican minority of the Legislature had suggested a plan which would divide the state into twelve Congressional districts of equivalent population. It finds it reasonable to eliminate the gerrymander of the state accomplished by the Democratically-controlled past Assemblies resulting in the state having no Republican representation in the Congress despite substantial numbers of Republican voters. It concludes, however, that with the Democrats in control of the Assembly, it was unlikely to pass.
Drew Pearson, on his way to Europe, leaves behind a note to his staff in which he indicates that during his absence they might have to write a few columns, provides instructions for doing so. He says that it was their duty to right some of the news-wrongs of the nation's capital, to probe more deeply than the hurried newspaper reporters often did, to pick up where they left off. But it was also important to remember that Government was neither all good nor all bad, that it was only as good as the people who comprised it. Their job was "to spur the lazy, watch the weak, expose the corrupt", and to let the public know that these people were working for them. He admonishes that it was the little fellow who usually was kicked around and that they had few friends in high places, that it was their job to spell out the rights and wrongs so that the public could know "what cooks". Sometimes blacks or a minority religious group needed more encouragement than people doing all right.
Finally, their job was, when possible, to accelerate the world toward peace and the brotherhood of man. Sometimes, in the cause of encouraging peace, it was better to refrain from reporting on a delicate diplomatic situation. But if the diplomats betrayed their trust, it was the columnists' job to expose that betrayal, to act as the public watch dog.
He ends by saying that whenever they wrote anything, the fewer words used to say it, the better.
Marquis Childs finds the current labor dispute regarding mobilization to be an extension of the disputes between labor and industry generally occurring over the prior fifteen years. The report that Mobilization director Charles E. Wilson was surprised by labor's adverse reaction to his having brought aboard as assistants a coterie of industry men reflected, if true, at very least naivete.
Recently, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, headed by James Carey, had acquired two recently produced documents circulated among GE's management which suggested that the union's negotiated contract of the prior September, from which it got increased wages, pension and other benefits, to be too much, encouraging of inflation, and that minimum wage laws and fair labor practices generally were unnecessary. It had also attacked labor leaders for debilitating production over the years, finding it therefore remarkable that they were now lending their hand in an ostensible effort to increase war production. The second document had suggested that the walkout the prior week by the three members of the Wage Stabilization Board reflected their irritation over not being able to dominate the political side of defense production and stabilization as they had during World War II.
These letters had greatly offended labor and added to the rift with management.
As Mr. Wilson had severed all relations with GE when he became Mobilization director, Mr. Childs suggests that it would be helpful for AFL president William Green, CIO president Philip Murray or someone of their stature in labor to sever all relations with their organizations and form a disinterested partnership in the mobilization effort.
A letter from the secretary of the Merry Oaks Civic Club tells of a delegation from the Club having attended a Charlotte Board of Education meeting to obtain information regarding the promised Merry Oaks elementary school and the Chantilly junior high school. A week earlier it had been announced that they would not be built at present under the 3.5 million dollar bond issue passed the prior year. She says that the voters had been urged by the Charlotte schools superintendent to vote for the bond measure on the basis that the proposed two schools would be built from it. She wants to know where the bond money was going.
A letter writer from Hamlet expresses the general belief that at the "cross roads of world chaos", it was necessary for the stronger nations of the world to become weaker and surrender nationalism in a collective effort to assure mutual survival.
A letter from the executive secretary and Christmas Seal sale chairman of the 1950 Seal Sale campaign thanks the newspaper for its cooperation in the campaign drive and help in making it a success.
How many seals did you sell and can they balance balls on the end of their noses?
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.