The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 22, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an American tank-infantry patrol with mine-hunting engineers shot its way out of an enemy ambush less than three miles from the 38th parallel in Korea, north of Chunchon along the Pukhan River. The tanks then pulled back to Chunchon. An estimated 6,000 enemy troops were dug in six or seven miles north of Chunchon but the bulk of the enemy forces appeared to have withdrawn north of the parallel.
By contrast, in the western sector, the enemy, numbering about 60,000, were getting set for a strong stand fifteen miles south of the parallel.
American F-86 Sabre jet fighters probably shot down a Russian-built MIG-15 jet and damaged another after four Sabres drew six MIGs into combat just south of the Yalu River border city of Sinuiju over northwest Korea.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg told the Senate Small Business Committee that the Defense Department hoped to be able soon to stop calling up inactive reservists, unless the world situation became worse or the reservists had rare qualifications.
In Buenos Aires, a committee of the Argentine Congress branded Dr. Alberto Gainza Paz, editor and publisher of the Congressionally-seized newspaper La Prenza, a fugitive from justice after he had not been located for fifteen days following a finding of contempt of Congress.
In Washington, James J. Carroll of St. Louis denied to investigators of the Kefauver organized crime investigating committee that he had done business with bookmaker Frank Erickson of New York or that they were members of a nationwide "betting syndicate". He said that he did not know racketeer Frank Costello or gambler Mickey Cohen. The assistant counsel for the committee read testimony taken earlier from Mr. Erickson that he was friendly with Mr. Carroll and conducted business with him. Mr. Carroll, however, said that Mr. Erickson did business with Mr. Mooney and did not deal with him directly. He also claimed that a twenty-million dollar per year gambling operation in East St. Louis produced only around $750,000 in gross profits in 1949.
Mooney must have gotten the rest.
Senator Charles Tobey declared during the hearing that by accepting telegraph messages from gamblers in certain states, Western Union had become an accessory after the fact to illegal gambling operations.
In New York, the Water Commissioner,
James Moran, resigned his lifetime $15,000 per year post after being
told by Mayor Vincent Impellitteri that he would have to quit or face
suspension for allegedly receiving a $55,000 "goodwill"
gift. Mr. Moran accused the Mayor of persecuting him since he had
been appointed by former Mayor William O'Dwyer shortly before the
latter resigned his office to become Ambassador to Mexico. John P.
Crane, a city fireman, had testified the previous day to the Kefauver committee that he had provided $10,000
to Mayor O'Dwyer and $55,000 to Mr. Moran, as evidence of support of
the Uniformed Firemen's Association
Midnight prowlers had gained access to confidential files of the RFC, though the date of the intrusion was not given. The report was in explanation of the presence of new locks and alarms on the files. It had not been determined whether any documents had been stolen.
—Yeah, Bob, that's an idea to tuck away for the future, in case we need it when the going gets rough.
—Yeah, they'd do it to us with relish, you bet, and so we'll do it to them first. Good thinking, Bob.
The railroads announced to the Senate Labor Committee rejection of a union proposal for settlement of their two-year old dispute with the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. The Trainmen wanted John Steelman replaced as arbitrator. The railroads wanted to keep him. The Trainmen also wanted a working condition rule related to coupling of air hoses left to negotiation between individual railroads and the unions, but that, too, was opposed by the railroads.
In Raleigh, the executive committee of the Greater University Board of Trustees recommended the admission of black students to professional and graduate schools in the University system. The recommendation said that applications for admission to professional and graduate programs should be processed without regard to color or race and the applicant rejected or accepted based on the approved rules and standards of admission. Insofar as graduate schools were concerned, the recommendation only extended to situations where the State did not provide graduate programs for black students and where the black student was scholastically qualified. The recommendation would be submitted to the full Board on April 4—seventeen years before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.
The case of Floyd McKissick and three other black applicants to the UNC Law School was pending in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals after they had lost a decision in the Federal District Court, which found the North Carolina College for Negroes Law School in Durham substantially equal to that of the University in Chapel Hill. Recently, a black student had sought admission also to the UNC Medical School.
In New York, Alger Hiss, convicted early in 1950 of two counts of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison, reported to begin serving his sentence following exhaustion of his appeals, the Supreme Court having denied review of his case the prior week.
Also in New York, it snowed on the second day of spring.
Not reported on the page, at Madison Square Garden this night in the N.C.A.A. Basketball Tournament Eastern regional semifinals, Illinois beat N.C. State, 84 to 70, the latter operating without three of its seniors, including future Duke head coach Vic Bubas, because of an N.C.A.A. ruling barring fourth-year eligibility. In the other semifinal, Kentucky beat St. John's, coached by future UNC coach Frank McGuire, 59 to 43. Coach McGuire, always the realist, had predicted his own team's defeat. In the Western regional quarterfinal games being played this night in Kansas City, Oklahoma A&M, national champions in 1945 and 1946, beat Montana State, 50 to 46, and Washington shellacked Texas A&M, 62 to 40.
Incidentally, Kentucky, eventual national champion, would beat Kansas State, winner of one of the other two first round Western regional games the previous night, for the championship. Those who thus had their bets on a repeat of history in the unlikely pairing of the two schools in the South regional semifinals this date in 2018, need to consult with Frank Costello, or Moe out in Las Vegas, to get their money back.
And, we have to wonder how it is that Texas A&M beat UNC last Sunday in 2018 by 21 points and yet fell to Michigan this date by 27 points, Michigan having been vanquished by UNC in Chapel Hill in late November by 15 points, though that game was a lot less close than that, UNC having had a 25 point lead with only six minutes to go and having led in the second half by as much as 29. We suppose the explanation runs parallel to that given by Billy Packer once upon a time when he was an assistant coach at Wake Forest, explaining his theory that Wake Forest, then hugging the cellar of the A.C.C., would beat conference leading North Carolina, then No. 3 nationally, because Wake Forest had beaten team A which had beaten team C which had beaten team D which had beaten North Carolina. It did not work out that way then either. We went to the game to make sure.
Anyway, we now want Loyola of Chicago to win it all, because they were the school in 1963 which solidified our love of the game by beating in overtime two-time defending national champion Cincinnati for the national championship.
On the editorial page, "Another 'Powderkeg'" cites several instances of violence and revolt in the Middle East of late, in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, all suggestive of it being a powderkeg.
New York Times reporter Clifton Daniel—originally from North Carolina and eventual husband of Margaret Truman beginning in 1956—had written on March 18 that in Cairo, there had been talk of nationalizing the Suez Canal and denouncing the treaty under which the British maintained bases in the Canal zone, and that in Iraq, Baghdad newspapers had commented favorably on Iran's nationalizing of its oil industry and the deputy leader of the Nationalist Party had asked the government whether it was thinking of nationalizing Iraq's oil.
There also had recently been demonstrations in Kashmir in protest of the U.S. and British efforts to end the feud between India and Pakistan over control of that province.
Earlier in the month, Justice William O. Douglas, returning from a trip through the Middle East, had written in the New Republic that revolution was brewing in every village.
It concludes that if the year ended with the West still in control of the oil resources of the Middle East, it would indicate a miraculous job by the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office.
"Give Them a Chance" tells of the Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program of the State Hospitals Board of Control giving a chance to alcoholics to recover and become functioning parts of the community again. Wounded veterans and mental patients had to have a chance to reintegrate to society before they could be helped. So it was with alcoholics.
Yet, too often the attitude toward the alcoholic was the same as toward ex-convicts. Employers were reluctant to hire them if aware of their past and, if not, once the employer found out about the past, they were fired. The director of the program was trying to get community leaders to understand the basic cruelty of that attitude, seeking to get them to urge employment for those who completed the month-long rehabilitation program at Butner.
While the alcoholic needed psychiatric and medical treatment and guidance, he or she also had to be given an opportunity to take part in the life of the community.
"Discovery of Spring" finds that on the first day of spring, though a search had to be conducted for the signs of it, they were there, in the stars of Bethlehem, the dandelions, the pigeons seeming to be of more pleasant aspect, a youngster sitting in a tire swing, the first hints of foliage appearing on the trees. The calendar was right, after all. It was spring.
A piece from the Pascagoula (Miss.) Chronicle-Star, titled "Economy for Others Only?" tells of a New Orleans newspaper having printed an editorial titled "Economy Wins Friends", stating that among the recent converts to economy in government spending were Senators Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, both "professional liberals". The piece takes issue with so classifying Senator Douglas or that he had only recently come to economy. It finds that he was one of the few sane realists in Congress, who had opposed pork-barrel politics since his arrival. He had sought a year or so earlier to get the pork out of the rivers and harbors bill, without success.
Everyone, it ventures, wanted economy, but typically only for the other fellow's district or state, not their own.
Bill Sharpe, in his "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one by John Wesley Clay from the Winston-Salem Journal, in which he relates of an old woman full of complaints who found no remedies, told a new doctor in town who had a reputation for curing diseases that he might be good at that but could not cure complaints.
The Roxboro Courier-Times tells of an old man who had caused all the youngsters at Central School to lose their marbles.
The Camden Chronicle tells of a German visiting the country preferring mutton to venison because the former was better, to which the listener wondered then why venison was so much more expensive, to which the German responded, "...[I]n dish world the people alwaysh prefer vat ish deer to vat ish sheep."
And so more, more so, more, more,
much, not so
Drew Pearson, in Berlin, tells of that city, during an earlier visit in 1923 having been one of despair, full of hunger and beset by inflation. In 1936, during a subsequent visit, it was entirely different under Hitler, to whom the people had turned in desperation after the World War I Allies had failed to support the Weimar Republic. Hitler had occupied the Ruhr, built up a German army, and was well on his way to occupying the rest of Europe. Wall Street bankers were pouring loans into the country and German industrialists placed their bets therefore on Hitler. Berlin stood "cocky, confident and supreme."
In 1951, Berlin was still a city of ruins, though other German cities had made great progress since the war in rebuilding. In the Russian zone, there were piles of neatly stacked bricks and scrap iron, as the Russians had taken apart the ruins for shipment of the scrap iron back to Moscow.
He finds the biggest problem facing the U.S. and the world to be avoidance of the mistakes of both 1923 and 1936, to avoid crushing Germany as after World War I and to avoid rebuilding its military to the point where it could again achieve the power it did in 1936. U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy had the job of guiding that delicate process. Some Americans believed he had coddled the Germans while the Germans believed he had been too tough. He said that about half the time he believed they were doing a good job but during the other half, not so good, and that it would not be for another 25 years until history could tell what kind of job they had done. He said that the power being relinquished back to Germans was not to former Nazis, except perhaps occasionally in the case of some low-level official, but rather to those who had fought against the Nazis at great risk to their personal safety. He had stationed an American resident in every county of the American zone so that they could mingle with the Germans and hold town meetings every two weeks to hear complaints and encourage debate of government problems. Mr. McCloy had, at times, participated in the meetings and received questions from the Germans.
Mr. McCloy found conversion of Bonn officials to democracy to be a tougher problem. He had not yet persuaded them to revise the German civil service system which allowed every German bureaucrat to be a quasi-dictator and tolerated arrests and jailing without warrants. Nor had he been able to persuade the Germans to revise their school system which afforded free public education only through the tenth grade. The Bonn government also appeared to be siding with the big industrialists, those who had financed the arming of the Nazis. That, suggests Mr. Pearson, was Mr. McCloy's biggest problem, to avoid repeating history.
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of the Western sector being an island of freedom amid slavery, which had caused many Germans and Russians to flee the Eastern sector for the Western sector. But after being there for eighteen months or more under consistent interrogation while in displaced persons camps, most of those who had fled regretted doing so. They had anticipated a new life in the free world and had found only that they were in worse condition than in the Soviet sphere, now, in many cases, not only without their freedom but also divorced from friends and family. He cites several examples of persons, from different walks of life, to whom he had spoken.
He concludes that the West was making a huge mistake in not using these defectors for positive propaganda, that had they been so used, it might have virtually crippled East Germany because of those who would have followed. Instead, the defections had reduced to a trickle. He wonders why all governments, even those with the best of intentions, appeared incapable of generosity or kindness, finds it one of the marks of the time.
Robert C. Ruark finds the Government's proposal to increase the tax on liquor from $9 to $12 per gallon to be only encouraging of bootlegging as the average person would be unable to afford the increase and would turn to the tax-free bootlegger for his alcohol. The reality was that people drank and, as Prohibition had demonstrated, efforts to enforce sobriety were without effect. The President and Vice-President drank. Athletes drank. Diplomats drank. Mr. Ruark assures, however, that he never touched the stuff but was exceptionally noble and immune to most fleshly temptations.
He concludes therefore that it was not sensible to try to raise increased revenue from alcohol, pricing it out of the reach of the average drinker, in the end costing the Government the revenue which would ordinarily be received on normal taxation. England, he says, had taxed its citizenry to death only to destroy the merriment which had been characteristic of the country and replace it with a dull, grey atmosphere, a miserable place in which to live in the land which he loved.
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