The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 10, 1951
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that the U.N. troops had established a bridgehead across the Han River ten miles wide and nearly six miles deep before noon, east of Seoul in Korea. Flame-throwing tanks led the troops, killing many of the enemy in their foxholes and driving many more into the hills.
On the eastern front, South Korean reinforcements moved into the line to bolster defenders of Amidong after North Korean forces had advanced to within less than three miles of the town.
The weather was mild along the front.
Correspondent Russell Brines reports of U.S. Navy troops trying to repair a navigational light on Fusshi islet off Inchon near Seoul and discovering in a house on the islet 45 orphaned Korean children with three adults left behind in the evacuation. They were gaunt and starving. The Americans reported their find to the crew of their cruiser, the St. Paul, which then dispatched food, clothing, candy and soap to the children and their wards. One of the doctors on the ship provided medicine. Other boats brought tools to repair their flimsy dwelling and another purified the water in the well. The crew also brought them an iron stove. Boats had continued to provide food for a week as the men of the St. Paul adopted the forgotten group. The Americans could not communicate with the Koreans as they did not have an interpreter and so used sign language.
The Senate, by a vote of 79 to 5, had approved a permanent program for building up the nation's fighting strength through draft revision, including universal military training and lowering the draft age from 19 to 18, as well extending service from 21 to 26 months. The bill continued the college deferment for about 75,000 young men. All five dissenting votes were from Republicans, including Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Senator Lyndon Johnson, floor manager for the bill, had appealed for unanimity on the bill but after hours of debate, the Senators demanded and got a vote. A similar measure was pending before the House Armed Services Committee.
In Paris, the deputies of the three Western Powers trying to work out an agenda with Russia for the proposed Big Four foreign ministers conference had submitted a revised and broadened proposal for relieving East-West tensions. Russia said it would reserve any decision on whether it could accept the proposal, which included "a determination of the causes of present international tensions in Europe and of the means to secure a real and lasting improvement in the relations" of the Big Four, as well as "measures to eliminate the fear of aggression, fulfillment of present treaty obligations and examination of the existing level of armaments and questions concerning Germany in this sphere."
Two U.S. Army secret agents were unofficially reported to have disappeared in Vienna during the previous week. The Army refused to confirm or deny the report.
The Supreme Soviet in Moscow adopted a record peacetime budget for Russia, 451 billion rubles, including 96 billion for defense, 74 billion of which was for the Red Army and the rest for the Navy. The total defense budget equated to 24 billion American dollars, compared to the proposed U.S. budget for defense for the same fiscal year 1951 at 41.4 billion. The two budgets did not strictly equate, however, as it was not known what other parts of the overall Soviet budget was for military purposes.
Chinese Communists in Canton executed 45 "counter-revolutionaries".
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee said that his crime investigating committee would make available records aimed at cleaning out part of the criminal element in the nation's liquor industry. He said that many former rum runners and bootleggers had gone into the wholesale liquor business after the end of Prohibition in 1933, supplying advocates of a return to the system a strong argument.
Wage Stabilizer Eric Johnston said that the report circulating in labor circles that Economic Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson had dictated or influenced decisions on wage controls was a "lie".
Government officials said that Sweden had proposed a $100 per ton increase in the price of wood pulp and that it might cause an increase in paper prices, as pulp now sold at $187 per ton.
That will cause a major problem for authors and devoted readers of the butler-did-it novels.
On the editorial page, "Call to World Leadership" finds Judge John J. Parker of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in addressing the Southeastern regional conference of the American Bar Association, to have articulated a clear concept of America's role in the world, saying that America could not reject the leadership of the free nations as it was the only nation strong enough to restore Europe, lead the underprivileged peoples of the world and halt Communism. He favored fixing of a strong foreign policy with clear separation of political and military policies and freedom for the executive branch to decide military matters. He said that it was up to America to take the initiative in Europe and not wait until the European nations had done so as they would not wish to incur the wrath of Russia before being assured that America would back them up in their efforts.
The U.S., he believed, also had to continue to support the U.N., as it was a forum in which the conscience of mankind could be heard and a world court where international disputes could be settled.
He believed that if the country failed to accept responsibility for world leadership, it would pass to Russia.
"Same Old Routine" discusses the preliminary conference to plot the agenda for the Big Four meeting of foreign ministers and its lack of progress thus far in five days. It had followed a familiar routine of Russian propaganda denouncing the West and seeking to limit the conference to discussion of the German question, resisting the Western countries' desires to discuss the Austrian peace treaty and armaments generally.
Western observers were unable to find any encouragement that an agenda could be worked out and suspected that Russia had intended all along not to cooperate. They still hoped that Russian representative Andrei Gromyko might have been performing during the first week and might get down to business the following week, as it was to Russia's advantage to work out some plan for settling Europe's problems.
The big question, it posits, was not whether the representatives could agree on an agenda but whether any agreement with Russia would be worth anything if obtained. Nothing recently had suggested that it would.
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Taking the Wrap", tells of a plan by the Agriculture Department designed to increase productivity among minks having gone awry. Minks were fed the heads of chickens, otherwise waste product. That appeared to suit the minks fine. But then the chicken farmers began providing female hormones to their male chicks and when the heads were fed the minks, the minks stopped reproducing, costing the mink industry millions of dollars in lost revenue. The fur producers were now going to the House Judiciary subcommittee which was studying their petitions for damages against the Agriculture Department.
The piece thinks they should instead go to the RFC for a loan.
Drew Pearson, in Belgrade, tells of Communism still going strong in Yugoslavia, making it a strange bedfellow for American aid. The present Yugoslav Government line was that Stalin used Communism as a cloak for imperialism and that Yugoslav Communism was unadulterated. Most of the hardcore of the Yugoslav Government were trained in Moscow or in Serbian jails during the Fascist regime of King Alexander and would support Marshal Tito as long as he theoretically remained Communist. If Tito were to fall, however, then Yugoslavia would turn back to Stalin. The facts placed the U.S. in a position of needing to help Tito remain in power to show the other satellites that it was possible to resist the Kremlin, therefore supporting a Communist regime while opposing Stalinism.
He next explains how Communism worked in Yugoslavia, that economic conditions were somewhat worse than in other satellite countries, the result of the Yugoslav ambition to build factories quickly, siphoning in the process too much money from the agricultural economy. The drought had caused problems but some of it was the result of peasant resentment of the quota system. Before it was relaxed, 11,000 Serbian farmers had gone to jail partly for failing to meet their quotas and partly for refusing to join the collectives. The Serbians were the wealthier farmers and so tended to resist more than their counterparts in Montenegro and Macedonia where collectivization had been successful.
In addition to relaxation of the quota system, more people were attending churches. Americans appeared popular, even more so perhaps than in Western Europe. There was no further press censorship of foreign newsmen or of foreign news appearing in Yugoslav newspapers, though domestic news still followed the party line.
Joseph Alsop, in Leipzig, Germany, tells of being "detained for inquiry" by the Russian-managed political police in East Germany during his second annual visit to the Leipzig fair. Another journalist had taken a picture of a Free German Youth military band at which point the political police began shadowing the whole party, including Mr. Alsop, for four hours and then detained them as they were about to depart by car to Berlin. A young policeman wanted to hold them while his older, wiser colleague was willing to let them go. They were taken to the People's Police headquarters where they were interrogated and then released after the roll of film was developed showing that the family pictures were not espionage photos.
He found interesting the presence of a Russian, German-speaking officer in the Volkspolezei as a plainclothesman for it revealed the Russian control of the satellite. He was dominant over the older, more intelligent German cohort. Once he had realized his error, he was full of self-justification in the typical vein of Soviet propaganda. He appeared indoctrinated, yet puzzled, cast into an inhuman role but not personally inhuman.
Mr. Alsop observed that conditions in East Germany had improved in the year since he had last been there. The semi-starvation was no longer generally present but the police were omnipresent. Even the shrewd veteran of the Spanish civil war, the older officer, had no room left in his mind except for slogans. The system was working well for the Soviet masters.
Robert C. Ruark discusses the influence peddling of two of Senator James Murray's son, one a lawyer for a Miami Beach hotel which had obtained a 1.5 million dollar RFC loan with the Senator's help, and the other having during World War II cornered the market on cultured pearls in the Orient, reportedly a multi-million dollar business, obtaining illegal priorities for two shrewd operators posing as members of Senator Murray's Small Business Committee and bearing credentials signed by the Senator. He suggests that father Murray keep a better check on his two sons as the cookie jar differed from the national cash register.
A letter writer from St. Pauls, N.C., opposes world government, believes the Senate had been wise in 1921 to reject membership in the League of Nations and that the U.N. had abrogated the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment, among other things—which the editors note are erroneous, including the preposterous notion that Woodrow Wilson was born in England.
A letter from a dental health officer of Charlotte thanks the newspaper for its cooperation in making the Fourth Annual Dental Health Week a success.
A letter from the president of the Charlotte Garden Club thanks the newspaper for its "Gardening in Carolina" edition.
Was Flora on hand in Streetcar?
A letter from FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover—not the first time he had written to the
newspaper—thanks it for the February 16 editorial, "Money
in the Bank", which had praised the work of the FBI field
office in rapidly resolving bank robberies in the state, including
one
Framed Edition
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