The Charlotte News

Wednesday, May 23, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Communist troops had retreated all along the 100-mile front in Korea this date, pursued by allied tanks and infantry, with allied gains of more than 15 miles. The Tenth Corps, overrunning Hangye, had lopped off the tip of the enemy spearhead, which had threatened to break through allied lines and outflank them. One U.S. tank column in west-central Korea had moved forward 15 miles into Kapyong, causing the enemy to beat a hasty but orderly retreat in the place where it had been expected they would make their supreme bid for a decision in Korea at the start of the drive the prior Thursday.

On the eastern front, allied forces moved through rugged mountain terrain and cut off the spearhead of the last enemy offensive force in the drive. Some of the enemy troops were retreating in that area.

Lt. General Edward Almond said that the counter-attack of the allies had made "excellent progress".

Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley again testified before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, saying that the fighting in Korea limited the U.S. ability to counter possible Russian aggression elsewhere and suggested that Iran, Indo-China, and Yugoslavia were potential points of aggression. He said, however, that he and the Joint Chiefs were unanimous in their belief that the plan of General MacArthur would not be decisive in ending the war, as the General had proclaimed in his testimony before the committees. While it might help a little, he added, it was outweighed by the potential for igniting world war three.

Secretary of State Acheson said at a press conference that there had been no peace feelers from the Chinese Communists and was unable to comment on the prospects for peace. He also said that a speech by Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk in New York the prior Friday had neither announced nor suggested any change in U.S. policy toward China, but added, in response to questioning, that Mr. Rusk, future Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had responded in a manner which, he implied, was not phrased in the best "literary composition". Mr. Rusk had said that the Communist Chinese Government was a Russian colonial regime and that the Nationalist Chinese Government received the strong support of the U.S., interpreted by Senator Taft and other Republicans in Congress to mean a change in Department policy.

Secretary Acheson also said that Britain and Iran should hold a conference to resolve the dispute over nationalization of British oil interests in that country. He denied that the U.S. was seeking to intervene in the matter.

The Communist Chinese offered 400,000 tons of grain to India, supplementing the 40,000 recently sold to India by Russia. The Chinese said that they could make a total of a million tons available. The U.S. had been planning to provide two million tons, still being considered in the House, delayed by Republicans.

Before HUAC, writer Budd Schulberg admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party for a brief time in the latter 1930's but said that he had then broken completely away from the party because it had tried to tell him how to write and what to write and because the party had suddenly switched its alliance to Hitler at the time, in August, 1939, of the Russo-German mutual non-aggression pact, convincing him of the Communists' lack of intellectual honesty and their false claims of being anti-Fascist. He had asked to testify after screenwriter Richard Collins had said that Mr. Schulberg or "perhaps" Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the "Hollywood Ten", had gotten Mr. Collins interested in Communism during the late 1930's. Mr. Schulberg said that when he returned to Hollywood in 1940, he resisted the efforts of Mr. Collins, John Howard Lawson, another member of the "Hollywood Ten", and V. J. Jerome to draw him back into party activities.

He had written What Makes Sammy Run? and, more recently, The Disenchanted, subsequently made into a play. He had also been a screenwriter.

The House Ways & Means Committee voted on a party-line vote to approve a 12.5 percent increase in individual income tax rates and an increase in the excess profits tax on corporate income. The plan substituted for the originally proposed straight three percent increase across the board, with each plan set to raise about 2.8 billion dollars of additional revenue. Under the discarded plan, the lowest bracket taxpayers would have had taxes increased 15 percent and the highest bracket, only 3.4 percent. Republican members claimed that the changes were "railroaded" through the Committee.

The anticipated rise in the cost of living index, set to be released this date by the Government, would likely result in a pay boost of at least two cents for the auto workers whose contracts allowed such a rise based on the cost of living. The Wage Stabilization Board had promised to look at its ten percent ceiling on the basis of the April 15 index for the first quarter, that which was coming out. G.M. workers were expected to merit a three-cent rise in pay as that company had agreed to a rent bias allowance set up by the Department of Labor on the basis of average rent increase for a family.

Near New Lisbon, Ind., at least six men were killed and five survived, with two missing, when their Air Force plane crashed on a farm.

The Mayors of the six affected cities in the Carolinas, including Charlotte, were planning to meet this date regarding the threatened bus strike over the dispute in demanded increases in wages between Duke Power Co., operator of the buses, and the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representative of the bus drivers. The strike, however, was considered inevitable, scheduled to start the following morning, and the Mayors were planning only to discuss the crisis related to bus transportation in the meantime, while continuing to try to negotiate a truce for the time being.

The Charlotte Merchants Association urged automobile owners to share rides with coworkers accustomed to riding buses. A plan for private motorists to be given emergency taxi permits was also to be put before the City Council during the afternoon.

Otherwise, get out your walking shoes.

On page 8-A, radio and television critic John Crosby, reporting from Paris, was in Europe to find out what Europeans thought of American radio and television.

On the editorial page, "Symington Cracks Down" tells of Stuart Symington starting his time as head of the RFC by booting out the manager of the Minneapolis office for participating in a get-rich-quick scheme which had netted him more than $36,000. Mr. Symington had turned the matter over to the Justice Department for investigation of whether Federal laws were broken.

Mr. Symington had also initiated a weekly report on all pertinent details of all loans granted by the agency, making it difficult for influence to occur as in the past on RFC loans. The future Senator, it finds, had a reputation for straight-shooting and square-dealing, and his initial activities at RFC had borne out that assessment.

"That Man Taft" finds Senator Taft all over the place in his statements critical of the Administration. The prior Sunday, he had said that the Administration had practically adopted the policy of General MacArthur in the Far East, but then on Monday told another group that the Administration had failed to fight the war with all of the means it had at its command and lacked a firm Far Eastern policy. On April 12, he had urged that the Nationalist Chinese troops be "unleashed" for an attack on the mainland and that it would not provoke general war, but now warned that if Britain sent troops into southern Iran to protect its oil interests from nationalization, it would "almost certainly" result in a third world war. He went on to point out that Russia had the same type of mutual assistance treaty with Iran as with China. Yet, he did not appear to think that they would act on the latter while they would on the former.

It provides other inconsistencies in his statements of late and concludes that he wanted a strong, worldwide stand against Communism but feared also that it would lead to war, wanted to attack Communist China but have the British stand aside while Iran took their oil. He wanted a strong military establishment but was afraid the country had reached the limit of its defense spending, urging that the military manpower ceiling be cut from 3.5 million men to three million and the defense budget pared to 20 billion dollars. He reminded, it says, of a pedestrian caught in the middle of the street, unable to decide whether to walk the rest of the way across or retreat to the curb, whether to jump right, jump left or stand still, winding up doing all three at once.

"Ham Jones' Voting Record" commends Congressman Hamilton Jones of Charlotte for his recent series of economy amendments.

He had also placed himself on the record 86 percent of the time in 1949 and 94 percent of the time in 1950. Thus far in 1951, he had answered yea or nay 96.5 percent of the time. Such was an exceptional record, as most Congressmen sought to duck record votes whenever they could, especially on controversial measures.

A piece from the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, titled "Those Carter's Little (sh-sh-h) Pills", tells of the Little Liver Pills having come into existence more than a decade before the FTC, but, following extensive medical testimony, the FTC had determined that the pills were no more than a laxative and could no longer therefore be designated "liver" pills. The company planned to appeal the ruling into the Federal courts. Carter, in the meantime, had to cease advertising the pills as the palliative for depression, listlessness and biliousness, as the FTC also found that there was no such correlation.

Carter had associated the liver and its source of bile with being the root cause of people being out of sorts, as had been traditionally believed because of etymological derivations of the term "bilious", and so capitalized on this reverse-form notion for decades. But the FTC had now knocked the "liverlights" out of it.

That'd be like a dayliver, as opposed to a nightdier, we suppose.

How many babies have you daylivered in the night?

Drew Pearson tells of a feud between top Defense Mobilizers Charles E. Wilson and Eric Johnston. Both had a solid business background, with Mr. Wilson having been president of G.E. and Mr. Johnston having been head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Johnston became Economic Stabilizer on condition that he would have control over prices, wages, credit and causes of inflation, and Mr. Wilson had agreed. But the President had never signed the executive order granting Mr. Johnston that authority because Mr. Wilson had blocked it. Mr. Johnston was angry but decided to be a team player. Meanwhile, Mr. Wilson had surrounded himself with lackeys, in the same vein as the President.

Recently, Mr. Wilson cornered Mr. Johnston about his former motion picture assistant Eddie Cheyfitz being allegedly a Communist. Mr. Johnston said that Mr. Cheyfitz had been a Communist eleven years earlier but since had been helpful to the FBI in exposing Communists and had even addressed the Army War College on Communism. He told Mr. Wilson that he did not desert his friends when he knew they were right. Mr. Johnston believed that Mr. Wilson had been trying to intimidate him.

The executive order still had not been signed.

Joseph Alsop, in London, tells of a conversation he had with a high official of the Labor Government, who stated that if war would come during the year, touched off by a Soviet attack on Yugoslavia, then it would have to come, as he wanted no Munich as in 1938. He added that it would mean the end of the British Isles and Europe as they were known and so it was to be hoped that it could be staved off for awhile until adequate defense was ready. That was the basic principle upon which British foreign policy was based. The British at present did not have an adequate air defense. It would take a year to eighteen months to build it up to an adequate level. In the meantime, Britain was vulnerable to atomic attack and that would be central in formulating policy, as during the previous year.

That caution was why the British had not denounced Communist China immediately after its aggression in Korea, as they felt that General MacArthur had been courting disaster and that the U.S. was not so concerned about the prospect of a general war as was Britain and Europe.

Mr. Alsop advises Americans to realize that the British were on the firing line and that their vulnerability represented an American failure.

Marquis Childs tells of attending a Senate hearing which was occurring with no fanfare, regarding an appropriation for the National Institute of Mental Health, which spent during the 1950-51 fiscal year about seven million dollars for training psychiatrists and psychologists and for research into mental illness. A group of citizens comprising the National Mental Health Committee was urging expenditure in the coming fiscal year of 23.7 million.

A president of a large corporation testified that in New York, a third of the state's entire operating budget went to maintain mental hospitals, with 108 million to be spent in the coming fiscal year and another fifty million for construction. He said that mental illness was, according to a Cleveland manufacturer, responsible for more absenteeism than all other diseases combined. As mobilization grew, such absenteeism became a matter of national urgency. Another witness who had been involved with the Army psychiatric program during World War II and with the V.A. after the war, said that 43 percent of all hospital admissions of men and women in uniform during the war had been from mental illness.

Despite the evidence of need for more expenditure of money on mental health care, only one dollar was spent on psychiatric research of every 65 dollars spent on other medical studies. There were only 5,000 psychiatrists in the country.

Meanwhile, 48 billion dollars would likely be spent on armaments during fiscal year 1951. Mr. Childs suggests that the country could not afford not to spend a little more on mental health.

He concludes that the song Mary Martin sang in "South Pacific" about the human race not falling apart after all, may have been right. Perhaps, the country was slowly groping toward a little more sanity and understanding.

Robert C. Ruark tells of Robert Vogeler, the American businessman who had been imprisoned in Hungary for 17 months on a charge of espionage before his recent release, being a hot commodity for the books, magazines and moving pictures and might gross a million dollars out of his ordeal.

Mr. Vogeler, however, would have to pay ordinary income tax on any such return, whereas General Eisenhower had been granted capital gains treatment on his memoirs, for which he was paid $750,000 and only had to pay therefore 25 percent of it in taxes, to the resentment of ordinary writers as Mr. Ruark. The General, on five-star general's pay plus a salary from his role as president of Columbia University, had received also this generous dispensation. But the humans who sweated five years over a book or boxers who had to end their careers for injury, as did baseball players or others whose physical strength came to an ebb, had to pay the normal tax rates.

The explanation given by Congress for the exception was that the General's memoir was the culmination of his life experience and thus merited capital gains treatment. While true, so was the writing of anyone.

He concludes that if ever anyone deserved capital gains treatment for writing, it was Mr. Vogeler after the ordeal he had suffered.

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