The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 1, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that American Marines had wrested in short order two key heights, Hills 315 and 438, north of Hoensong, from the enemy in hand-to-hand trench combat operations. Correspondent Stan Swinton had recounted that allied officers considered the Hoengsong front the strategic key to the war at the moment, as a Chinese offensive would more likely occur in this central terrain than in the mountainous eastern sector or in the flat, exposed plains of the western sector.
In the western and eastern sectors, similar allied advances took place, as U.S. Third Division infantrymen fought at the western end of the line and Seventh Division infantrymen battled at the eastern end.
Allied tanks, artillery and planes hit the enemy all along the 60-mile enemy front.
Tom Bradshaw reports from Tokyo that the Chinese might launch an offensive in the coming three weeks, which could include 3,000 planes and artillery units, missing from their intervention thus far, along with adequate transport. The Eighth Army's supply lines were vulnerable to air attack and there was substantial evidence that the Chinese needs for artillery and transport were being met.
The State Department said that it was still uncertain, pending study of the latest Soviet response, whether a preliminary Big Four meeting would take place in Paris the following Monday to plan the agenda for a subsequent Big Four meeting of the foreign ministers.
Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado was going to attempt to narrow the draft revision bill, lowering the draft age from 19 to 18 and providing for universal military training, while expanding service from 21 to 24 months, by reducing it to its "emergency features" and leaving the long-range UMT for separate consideration. Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland and Senator Lyndon Johnson, floor manager of the bill, said that they expected to defeat the attempt. Meanwhile, Senator Wayne Morse was seeking to fix the minimum age at 18 and a half and to maintain service at 21 months.
Secretary of Defense Marshall told the House Armed Services Committee that unless 18-year olds were drafted the veteran-reservists called to duty in Korea could not be released, as the military did not have sufficient manpower otherwise.
The House was hoping to vote on its version of the draft bill by the following week.
The Commerce Department announced that special licenses would be required henceforth to ship any article to the Soviet bloc nations. Prior to the order, only scarce articles with "war potential" use were included.
The White House, according to negotiator John Steelman, worked out a wage dispute settlement with the non-operating railroad workers, which included a 12.5 cent boost in pay per hour to their average $1.48 per hour wage, plus cost of living adjustments, retroactive to February 1. The dispute had been ongoing for four months. The agreement stipulated that no further increases would be sought before October 1, 1953.
Charles Molony reports that if the previous day's Kefauver Committee's second interim report was accurate and 20 billion dollars was exchanging hands yearly in the nation's gambling rackets, then more money was being spent than on clothing and shoes, on cars and parts, including oil and gas, or on the aggregate prices of purchased housing, and a third as much as total retail spending on food and drink.
The Office of Price Stabilization was reported ready to allow a 3.5 percent hike in the price of automobiles. The prices had been frozen at December 1 levels since December 18.
The President said at a press conference that Charles E. Wilson would remain as Defense Mobilization director despite labor's departure from the program, based on a vote the previous night by the United Labor Policy Committee, which referred to the Wage Stabilization Board's "unjust" curtailment of wage increases to ten percent and "legalized robbery" in price control through "big business domination" of the mobilization program. The President said that he did not regard the situation as being very serious, that it amounted only to a disagreement over policy. He had no comment as to whether the mobilization program could function without the support of labor.
The President was set to depart for Key West, Fla., for three weeks and saw no reason to postpone his working vacation.
Testifying before the Senate Banking subcommittee investigating RFC influence peddling, Carl Strandlund accused RFC director Walter Dunham, Washington insurance man E. Merle Young, and Detroit manufacturer Rex Jacobs of trying to wrest control from him of the Lustron Corp. prefabricated housing plant in Columbus, O. Mr. Strandlund had borrowed 37 million dollars from RFC for the company to build cheap, post-war housing, but the company then went bankrupt after RFC foreclosed on the loan. He claimed that the company was destined to be a success when the foreclosure occurred.
In Los Angeles, Gary Davis, convicted of grand theft of $60,000 in connection with his promotion of a three-wheeled automobile, was sentenced to two years in county jail as a principal condition of his five years of probation.
In Raleigh, the State House killed the bill to hold a statewide liquor referendum designed to end local option and either allow liquor to be sold by ABC stores statewide or not at all. A bill was then introduced to increase taxes on liquor and fortified wine by between 8.5 and 20 percent.
In New York, the composer of the tune for "Sweet Adeline", Harry Armstrong, died at age 72. Richard Gerard, who had composed the lyrics, had died in 1948.
On the editorial page, "Death Traps—with Bars" tells of a bill killed by the State Senate for an attendant to be on duty at all times in North Carolina's jails, to avoid the tragedy occurring the prior year in Leaksville when a mattress fire caused the deaths of seven prisoners. The bill had died because so many counties asked to be exempted that the bill was rendered worthless, the main objection being the claimed hardship to counties where there were small, remote jails.
Such an objection, it posits, lacked merit when weighed against human life. To permit the danger to continue, after having been forewarned by the Leaksville tragedy, showed a "brutal and callous disregard for human life and the humane values of our civilization."
Look, look, look, look, look. We gotta
throw these boys in heya how'vah we cain. They is subhumans anyways.
You oughta see somma ways they behave evah theya. Lib'ral
city-slickahs don't know what's goin' on down heyeh
"Ike's Faith in Europe" tells of veteran reporter Walter Kerr of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had accompanied General Eisenhower on his recent tour of Western European capitals, having recounted that the Europeans held the General in high esteem for having led the them during the war, that General Eisenhower reciprocated, and that on that mutual respect hung the answer to the burning American question of whether the Europeans would fight.
The piece finds that the expression probably could inform Americans such that they could look to the strong points of the allies, as did General Eisenhower, rather than stressing their weaknesses.
"Salary Hikes at City Hall" finds that some City Councilmen would be overpaid at a dollar per year while others were worth far more than the meager $200 per year salary they were paid. A happy medium had to be reached by the Mecklenburg County legislative delegation which fixed the sum. They decided to increase the salary to $600 per annum, averaging out to about $12 per meeting of the Council. They had also decided to double the Mayor's salary to $2,400 per year, a reasonable sum given that his role was largely ceremonial, with the City Manager handling the governance of the city along with the Council.
It proposes that while the positions should never become so lucrative as to be attractive to those who would seek the jobs for money, they ought be paid enough so that the public and the newspapers could cavil at them from time to time without feeling shame.
"Ah, That Virginia..." tells of former News reporter C. A. Paul writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch a piece about Virginia's roads and tourism, finding that North Carolinians headed the list, accounting for 14 percent of the state's tourists. No similar survey existed to show reciprocity by Virginians, since Bill Sharpe had found in 1947 that of the out-of-state visitors to the Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginians came in sixth.
The piece suggests that the affinity of the state's residents to Virginia might be explained by their more than academic interest in relics of the past or by the fact that one could not get by land to Washington without passing through Virginia.
A piece from the Christian
Science Monitor, titled "How Now, Cahow
The piece wonders whether the cahow,
however, wanted to be roused from its long extinction to encounter
the modern world. Paraphrasing its opening quotation of a quatrain
from Ogden Nash for Camille Saint-Saens's "Carnival of the
Animals"
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, recounts one in which a letter to the editor appeared anent "Turpentine Drippings" in the Smithfield Herald, which had recounted from the Morganton News-Herald of a minnow which caught fish by swimming into the bigger fish's mouth so that the fisherman could lure in the catch, the minnow even going so far as to swim through the gill and tying the line in a knot.
Having read of that one, he wished to know if the editors had ever heard of the man who owned a crew of trained oysters which could catch rats by lying in ambush outside the hole and closing their shells on the culprit's tail when it appeared outside its cloister. The rat would scurry about with the oyster on its tail, raising such a terrible clatter, that the man was alerted, obtained a club to clobber the rat dead in its batter. The oyster would then let go of the tail and go to the next hole.
The Elkin Tribune says that "[b]ars are something which if you go into many of, you are apt to come out singing a few of, maybe land behind some of."
The Reidsville Review, quoting from an unidentified source, discusses boys.
The Greensboro Daily News
adds to the similes on coldness set forth by The News, citing
John Keats's, "The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;/ The
hare limped trembling through the frozen grass," Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's lines from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner",
"...Ice, mast high, came floating by,/ As green as emerald,"
and Shakespeare's, "and milk comes frozen
The Sanford Herald relates of a man who had just gotten out of the Navy and was headed to Miami, where one of his buddies told him to look him up. When he asked how he might find him in a city the size of Miami, his buddy told him to step inside any of the bars and if he was not there yet, he would be.
What if he drowned first?
Harold Booker of the Camden Chonicle tells of a story recounted in the Saturday Evening Post of a high school tennis court bordering on the grounds of the rectory of a church, and the players often hitting balls onto the greens of the church, forcing the players to enter the grounds to retrieve them. One day, they encountered a sign which said, "No trespassing", whereupon the tennis players erected their own sign, "Forgive us our trespasses."
And so forth, on, so and so, so, so.
Drew Pearson, writing from Adrianople, Turkey, tells of visiting the southernmost segment of the Iron Curtain where Turkey bordered on Communist Bulgaria. The fields of barley, he says, were just as green on both sides of the barbed wire barricade, but the free exchange of human intercourse was something else.
He describes the experience in detail, driving to the border, where they were met by an iron gate, bearing the word in English, "Stop". There were blockhouses for troops on both sides of the border. He climbed to the top of a tower where a Turkish soldier scanned the other side through field glasses. They saw a Bulgarian guard looking back at them through field glasses. Otherwise, there was virtually no movement on the frontier.
He was told that sometimes the sheep or water buffalo got under the barbed wire and crossed into Bulgaria, where they were shot by the Communists. Two or three times per month, Bulgarian political prisoners also were able to sneak under the barbed wire at night and seek asylum in Turkey. The escaped prisoners told of being harassed and suppressed in what once had been a relatively democratic country.
The question on everyone's mind was whether another war for control of the Bosporous would start the following spring, whether the Russians would attack before NATO had a chance to build its defenses.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of Joseph getting ready to depart for Western Europe, and in the meantime examining the likelihood of peace with Russia. In December, it was clear that Russia was planning active aggression in the Far East and in Europe, with planned attacks on Yugoslavia and by the Chinese in Indo-China. But preparation for these attacks had diminished. The Soviets were building up troops on Sakhalin, north of Japan, however, and that could mean that they planned direct intervention in the Far East to rescue the Chinese from their problems in Korea.
The wave of despair in the West after the Chinese intervention in Korea had now subsided, supplanted by the hope that the deterrents being put in place would work.
The Russians appeared genuinely to desire the Big Four talks, though their ultimate desire would be to split the Western alliance to halt rearmament. It was possible, however, that the Big Three could turn the Soviet gamble in this regard to their advantage diplomatically.
The West had survived many previous perils since the war, the Iranian crisis, the Berlin blockade, the Chinese intervention in Korea and the threats to Yugoslavia and Indo-China. They advise the country to be stout, resolute, and wise, and that in the end, the future perils might turn out to be "no more disastrous than the perils of the past."
Marquis Childs discusses the split in the Republican Party, between the Dewey wing, favoring internationalism and sending troops to Europe, and the Wherry wing, favoring neo-isolationism and withdrawing defenses to the two oceans or at least checking the President's authority to send troops abroad. Governor Dewey's support of sending troops to Western Europe was endorsed by Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania in a radio broadcast the prior Sunday. Former Governor Harold Stassen was also so aligned.
If the split continued into 1952, it could deprive the Republicans of their return to power after twenty years of Democratic rule, something which the country seemed otherwise ready to embrace. Yet, Senators Taft and Wherry and other members of the party who thought likewise appeared determined to make a Republican victory impossible.
Even the solidly Democratic South appeared ready for change and, many Southerners said, if provided the right Republican candidate, they might vote for that person. That person, they usually meant, was General Eisenhower.
The Taft faction, however, held the levers of the Republican Party and the way they pulled them would determine how the votes would be cast the following year.
Framed Edition
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