The Charlotte News

Friday, May 18, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that trapped elements of an American division fought southward through massed Chinese troops in the east-central sector of Korea, as the enemy pressed a gigantic offensive along the entire front in complete disregard of the slaughter of their own troops, as thousands of them died. One officer said that he believed the Chinese were doped as they kept coming in the face of machine gun and artillery fire.

The greater numbers of enemy troops were pushing back the allied lines and had gained as much as twenty miles in three days. In the west, the enemy reached to within ten miles of Seoul, approaching from two directions.

It appeared that this fifth offensive since the Chinese had entered the war the prior November was shaping up as the strongest yet. Communist prisoners had informed that the aim of the drive was to force the allies from Korea by June 25, the first anniversary of the war.

The allies used barbed wire barricades for the first time, one unit stringing two thousand miles of barbed wire. Dead Chinese were hung all along the wire from the artillery and machine gun fire.

At the U.N., the General Assembly voted 47 to 0 for the embargo of war materials against Communist China, with the Soviet bloc not participating and eight other countries, including India, abstaining.

In London, informed diplomats said that Russia had informally suggested to the U.S. that there be new talks on ending the Korean war and reaching a Far Eastern settlement. The American reaction, according to the informants, had been cool as the inclination was to view the Soviet move as merely a ploy to blunt the effort in the U.N. to impose the embargo on war materials to China.

The White House said that the President had first considered firing General MacArthur the previous August when he had written the controversial letter to the VFW regarding Formosa, in contravention of U.S. policy to neutralize Formosa for the duration of the Korean war. The President had ordered the General to withdraw the letter, which he did but only after it had been widely disseminated in the press. The President had said at a press conference the previous day that he had been considering the dismissal for about a year, prompting questions then as to why he had appointed General MacArthur supreme commander of U.N. forces in Korea. White House press secretary Joseph Short clarified that the President had been speaking only in a general way without meaning to be precise as to time and that no consideration to dismissal had been given prior to the previous August.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington served notice on Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer and nine others, eight of whom worked for the Government, that they would be cited for contempt and jailed if they did not comply with the Court's order to relinquish from Government ownership 92 percent of the stock in the American President Lines, Ltd. to the Dollar Co.

In Bryn Mawr, Pa., at least eleven persons had been killed and 60 others injured, eight seriously, in the crash of two Pennsylvania Railroad trains this date, one hitting the rear of the other and telescoping a rear car holding 24 passengers.

In Philadelphia, six men were missing and 35 had been injured as a fire spread through a pier and a moored ship during the morning.

In Waterloo, Iowa, a judge sentenced a female juror in a murder trial to six months for contempt of court for refusing to take the juror's oath because she said she had no one to care for her two young children. She had not understood that she could not go home during jury service to care for them and so had not stated the problem during jury selection.

In Charlotte, the search persisted for the murderer of a Charlotte woman who was killed by an intruder with a knife the prior Monday afternoon as she napped with her four-year old daughter. About 50 men had been questioned as suspects but no one had been arrested. Police had still not found the murder weapon or a motive for the brutal crime.

Also in Charlotte, Dr. Marvin Scruggs, 61, one of the leading surgeons in the Carolinas, had died at his home after concluding a busy day of surgery. He had been in bad health for several months. He had been a surgeon since prior to World War I and had served as a surgeon in the Army. He had also set up an educational fund at Mars Hill College, of which he was a trustee.

Also in Charlotte, the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing bus drivers, and Duke Power Co., operator of the buses in Charlotte and six other cities, met for three hours trying to resolve the ongoing wage dispute in which the BRT sought a ten percent increase plus other benefits. No announcement was made after the session ended.

On the editorial page, "A Cheap Political Maneuver" finds Mobilization director Charles E. Wilson's statement during the week that the whole controversy over General MacArthur's dismissal was "foolishness" to be ill-chosen in that context, but that it did apply well to the Senate committees' quarrel over General Omar Bradley's assertion of a confidential privilege protecting his conversations with the President and his refusal therefore to testify about them. The joint committees had upheld the privilege the previous day by a vote of 18 to 8, after Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the committees, had ruled in favor of General Bradley. Six Republicans voted with the Democratic majority and two Democrats, Senators J. William Fulbright and Guy Gillette, voted against it, though Senator Fulbright saying that he did so only to prevent the Republicans on the committees from charging a whitewash.

Republican Senators William Knowland, Alexander Wiley, Bourke Hickenlooper, Owen Brewster, Styles Bridges and Harry Cain made an issue of it. The piece finds it hard not to denounce their efforts as a "low and shabby political trick", unworthy of the Republican Party.

"Parents and Their Wayward Children" tells of superintendent of Public Welfare in Charlotte, Wallace Kuralt—father of Charles Kuralt—having made a timely observation at a meeting with Mayor Victor Shaw, when he said that of the 22,000 school children in Charlotte, not more than 250 came before the juvenile authorities each year, that most of the children were therefore doing all right, as were their parents. The compliment came in the face of Charlotte parents being criticized for the waywardness of the local children, leading to the conclusion that sometimes the public generalized too easily from the most spectacular occurrences of unwanted behavior.

There was clearly a problem, however, with juvenile delinquency in the community, as across the nation. The means of dealing with it had to be manifold, from within the home, the school, the churches, and the community at large. It also favors effective enforcement of the laws, as was being attempted in Charlotte in a 30-day experimental program.

The session at the Mayor's office, it concludes, had developed many meaningful suggestions for combating the problem.

"Armed Forces Day" finds that General MacArthur had, in his testimony before the Senate committees, stated that unification of the three military branches in the Far East had been exemplary, finding that they had been working as a team. Thus, as Armed Forces Day was being celebrated, nearly four years after unification was first implemented, it appeared, finds the piece, to have been achieved, resulting not only in a more efficient armed forces but also one which saved money by lack of duplication.

A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Man Friday", finds irritating the fact that General MacArthur continued to issue comments only through his spokesperson, Maj. General Courtney Willoughby. It suggests that the public would not tolerate such a routine intermediary from any member of Congress or the President and should not for a General.

Recently, General Willoughby had said that General MacArthur's statements to Congress regarding the needless heavy casualties in Korea had a positive rather than negative effect on troop morale, that the President's directive to the General on January 13 not to make public statements on policy without clearing them first with the State and Defense Departments had been mere advice rather than an order, and that General MacArthur was gratified by the general strengthening of American and British attitudes toward China as a result of his publicly stated position.

The piece concludes that these matters were of such importance that they deserved comment directly from the General, not his surrogate.

Drew Pearson tells of American businessmen in some instances shipping war materials behind the iron curtain, just as were European nations. Among these firms was Rolfe G. Grote of New York, sending chemicals to Switzerland and then to Russia; the Pacific Trading Corp. of Boston, shipping steel plates to Communist China; and Harris Chemical Corp. of New York, shipping chemicals to Belgium and then to Czechoslovakia. Alcoa had also shipped three million pounds of aluminum to Czechoslovakia and a million pounds to Poland. Nationalist China and Japan had also sent materials to Communist China.

Harry Lundeberg, head of the Seafarers International Union, was working hard to purge Communists from the seagoing unions. Recently, after testifying before the NLRB, he approached the chairman, Paul Herzog, and stuck his jutting jaw close to the chairman's jaw, asking what would happen if the decision went against SIU, to which the chairman said that he was more worried about the decision going in his favor such that Mr. Lundeberg would then kiss him. Mr. Lundeberg then left.

There were stormy dissents before the House Ways & Means Committee approved a three percent hike in individual income taxes. Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas protested that it was unfair imposition on the lower-income brackets as most of the new revenue would come from those taxpayers. Likewise, Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana thought it unfairly imposed on the lower brackets, as did Congressman John Dingell of Michigan. The latter objected because the committee recommended only a raise from 52 to 58 percent on corporate taxes while the big corporations were making record profits. Mr. Dingell also opposed the excise taxes on automobiles and other consumer goods, saying that if the automobile industry was crippled, then the whole economy would suffer. Congressman Dan Reed of New York, a Republican, said that he was willing not to raise individual taxes at all, instead favoring cutting of all non-essential spending to the bone. Mr. Reed and all other Committee Republicans, however, eventually voted for the across-the-board tax hike on individual incomes.

Joseph Alsop, back in Washington, finds two sentences by General Bradley in his testimony to the Senate committees to be illuminating: that every effort would be undertaken to confine the war to Korea but that failing that, then "other measures" would have to be undertaken.

The first part of the statement suggested a realistic possibility of limiting the war. The Soviets had intimated to both the Americans and British that there was some possibility of settlement. There would transpire a feeling-out process to determine to what degree these suggestions had real meaning behind them.

If the settlement proved impossible, then the "other measures" might lead to general war. The Soviets would be confronted with that choice.

If the current renewed Chinese offensive were defeated as the initial offensive, then the Chinese armies would be incapable for some time of inflicting serious offensive action.

At that point, the U.N. forces might be firmly established on a line which would permit a statement that further action transgressing that line would be considered an act of new aggression, in consequence of which the full MacArthur program would then be put into action.

He regards such a unilateral settlement to have only an off-chance of success, but that either the fighting in Korea had to be ended soon, without another winter campaign, or general war appeared inevitable. At least, he concludes, General MacArthur's dismissal and the ensuing debate on his program had awakened the Soviets to the inherent danger in the situation and provided the best hope for avoiding general war.

Robert C. Ruark finds the excise taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, cars, refrigerators, televisions and other such "non-essential" items to be an inroad by the Government which would gradually increase as time went on, until consumers could no longer afford to purchase these items and industries, especially the essential automotive industry, would suffer. He thinks it was killing the goose which laid the golden egg with heavy taxes on the goose.

A letter writer from Bladenboro, N.C., comments on the murder on the previous Monday afternoon of the Charlotte woman by an intruder as she took a nap with her four-year old daughter. The writer, a black minister, says that the person who committed the crime should be apprehended and brought to justice. But he also wonders how it was that the police and the newspaper concluded that the man was black solely on the basis of the little girl's statement. He says that it was impossible for black men to obtain justice after newspapers had already condemned them prior to trial.

He only wants to see that the right man was brought to justice, whether white or black.

A letter writer from Monroe, Louisiana, finds the "little men" leading the Government wanting to negotiate a peace with the Communist Chinese, believes that General MacArthur had the right idea—which had been to negotiate peace with the Communist Chinese, his publicly communicated invitation to the Chinese field commander to meet with him to discuss peace before the U.N. approved air strikes on Chinese bases being the straw which broke the camel's back leading to his dismissal.

Next time, read beyond the end of your nose.

A letter writer says that while the President had the right to fire General MacArthur, he had not gone about it in the right way and thinks he ought call the General back to Washington and, along with Secretary of Defense Marshall and the Joint Chiefs, apologize—to His Highness—and ask him to assume command again.

A letter writer from Greenville, S.C., a minister, thinks that, with the Korean war, rampant crime, disintegrating marriages and less than 25 percent of the country attending church, the country was "morally corrupt and sinfully wicked" and that a world revival was necessary to remedy the problems.

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