The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 24, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Tom Stone, that a powerful allied task force had moved across the 38th parallel in Korea in a 13-mile advance through retreating enemy troops on the east-central front. Lt. General Edward Almond personally planned and led the tank-led operations in this area, observing the action from a helicopter.

Another tank-led force recaptured Chunchon, the last important town taken by the enemy during the current offensive, and moved toward the parallel, ten miles away. South Koreans, cleaning up the area south of Chunchon, advanced 6.5 miles. The Eighth Army moved north with little resistance, making four to six mile gains, along the entire 125-mile front.

Before the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, again testified, saying that the President was right in firing General MacArthur but that the method used could have been better. He also said that total U.S. casualties in Korea were 141,995, including 72,679 non-battle casualties, and 69,276 battle-related casualties. Of those, 10,680 had been killed in action and 612 had died of non-combat causes. He added that during World War II, a high percentage of missing usually were returned, but he was afraid it would not be the case in Korea. He hesitated to estimate that even as many as a third would be returned. He also said that the decision to admit Communist China to the U.N. should have no place in discussions of peace in Korea.

The President, asked at a press conference whether he intended to run again in 1952, said that the season was still open but gave no definitive response. He said that the First Lady did not want him to run and had never wanted him to be involved in politics. He said that he would alert reporters in plenty of time if he decided to take a late summer train trip across the country, as had been reported was planned. He was confident that world war would be averted.

The President informed Congress that he wanted 8.5 billion dollars in foreign aid for the coming fiscal year to thwart Communist aggression. Of the total, 6.25 billion would be earmarked for strengthening the defenses of the country's allies and 6.89 billion would go to Western Europe, with the remainder going to the Far East, South and Southeast Asia, the Near and Middle East and Latin America.

The stock market dropped sharply amid active trading, with losses running as much as $6 per share, with drops of $1.83 the most frequent. Railroads, steel, automobiles, rubber, copper companies and du Pont chemical were hardest hit.

Off Newport, R.I., a 50-foot Navy launch boat was capsized by the edge of a hurricane and two sailors perished, while 135 others of the crew were thrown into icy waters. They were rescued by other Navy liberty boats in the area and no one appeared missing.

In Charlotte, and five other cities across the Carolinas, Winston-Salem, High Point, Salisbury, and Greenville and Spartanburg, S.C., Duke Power bus drivers went on strike when Duke and the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing the drivers, failed to reach terms on the BRT-demanded wage increase. Negotiations by officials of the six cities to try to forestall the strike had lasted far into the night.

In Charlotte, the atmosphere was like that of a Sunday, without buses running. Many passing motorists picked up people who were waiting at corners where buses normally stopped, but most had already made alternative arrangements for transportation.

During peak morning commute hours, according to the City traffic engineer, 500 more cars than usual passed through downtown Charlotte during each hour. Precise figures are provided.

You need the exercise, fatso. Get out there and walk it off.

On the editorial page, "Keeping Faith with the People" tells of the strike of the bus drivers beginning after all efforts of the City and officials of the five other affected Carolinas cities to stop it had failed. Not having bus service would result in frustration and inconvenience, sometimes dire hardship.

The BRT had been offered the same Duke Power Co. contract made with Durham and Greensboro drivers and mechanics the prior December, but had refused. Duke contended that the offered wage increase was already above that of comparable Southern cities and claimed it could not pay more than a five-cent per hour increase without further loss, as the company already was operating its bus services at a loss. Wages had been increased 117 percent since 1940, 71 percent of which had occurred since the end of the war.

BRT had not challenged the company position or responded. The piece thinks more was needed to inform the public of what was transpiring. If BRT had a valid case, it would gain public support, but if not, the public needed to know that.

"Iran: New Aggression?" tells of Joseph Alsop, having recently visited Iran, having prepared a special column published this date on the pending Iranian expropriation of the British oil and its consequent crisis for the West, and instructed editors to use it instead of one already prepared because of the emergency involved. Nationalization had occurred but taking possession of the oil fields was delayed while an eleven-person committee in Tehran considered how to go about it.

The piece offers several quotes, including one from the State Department, to back up Mr. Alsop's concern that the situation could quickly deteriorate into Russian counter-aggression if the British moved to protect the oil in southern Iran, potentially resulting in world war.

The piece suggests that it was time to halt the Senate's preoccupation with the MacArthur investigation, answered for all practical purposes, and focus attention of the Congress and the people on this critical situation.

"High in the Sky", starting with a fact culled from the Reader's Digest, that bird migration varied in altitude between a few hundred and 2,000 feet for most birds, but for warblers reached 20,000 feet and some geese, 29,000, proceeds to wax poetic.

Sample: "At so many feet, through the ozone sweet/ The brave goose sails on in splendor;/ But when it's time to eat of her succulent meat/ Her stratoflights we feel fain to hinder"—winding up with a rhyme for "dinner".

Returning ms, enclosed. Day job still needs to be secure before embarking on life as poet.

A piece from the Durham Herald, titled "To the Point", tells of headline writers using of late the teaser technique rather than telling directly of what the story concerned. An example was "The Blade Itself Incites to Violence", a quote from Homer used to describe the MacArthur-Truman dispute.

The old-fashioned technique, it ventures, was preferable to many, as when Louis Graves of the Chapel Hill Weekly titled a recent piece: "The Election of the Presidency of the Man Whom Most People Want Is Made Difficult by the Rules of the Parties". It finds it precisely to the point, without requiring guesswork.

Flashing forward a few years, the clever headline writer might have formed one thus: "The Sword He Gave Them Was Twisted with Relish Against Him Whom We Liked To Call 'Tricky or Treaty'"?

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, tells of one from the Winston-Salem Journal, relating that, according to Capper's magazine, farmers were more apt than urban dwellers to pay cash for cars and other durable consumer goods.

The Florence Morning News supplies definitions for a bunch of "isms", Paternalism, Momism, Isolationism, Socialism, Communism, having Uncle Joe take care of you, and Americanism, taking care of yourself.

Ism, ism, ism.

Is "Uncle Joe" Joe McCarthy?

And so forth, on, on, on, on and so forth on—mostly off, more so than usual, this week.

Drew Pearson tells of lobbyists having a field day while the country was distracted with the controversy regarding General MacArthur. One such effort was aimed at legislative circumvention of the Supreme Court rulings in favor of Federal Government ownership of tidelands oil as against the individual states wherein the tidelands oil was present. The oil lobby, represented in the Senate by Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, recently had gotten the Senate Interior Committee, by a vote of 7 to 4, to approve a return of the oil to California, Texas and Louisiana. Four Republicans had joined with Senator Long, Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, and Senator George Smathers of Florida to favor the oil companies. Senator Joe O'Mahoney of Wyoming, the chairman, was miffed at Senator McFarland for his position taken contrary to that of the Administration.

There were reports from within Communist China that there was growing dissatisfaction with the regime, as anti-Communist guerrillas operated in southern China, a worse than usual famine, resulting in the deaths of millions, having fueled the flames of discontent; Mao Tse-Tung being torn between his rival, Li Li-San, taking his cues from Russia, and Chinese moderates who contended Mao took too many orders from Moscow; and Chinese generals not wanting to see their men suffering so many casualties in Korea. Mr. Pearson relates that the generals essentially ruled China regionally and so felt special kinship with their men.

The President's planned whistle-stop campaign in the late summer would focus on power and real estate lobbies, but many doubted he could repeat the success of 1948.

Marquis Childs tells of the Nationalist troops on Formosa, as elucidated by General Bradley in his testimony before the Senate committees, not being properly equipped and lacking transportation to Korea, the reasons why they were not wanted there. Even if they got there, they would be of dubious value.

Many months earlier, General MacArthur's own staff had made a similar assessment, when they determined that Chiang Kai-Shek's forces could not defend Formosa without the presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, as ordered by the President in the wake of the invasion by North Korea of South Korea the prior June 25, and could not defend Formosa if the Communists were to penetrate the barricade set up by the Seventh Fleet. There was thus no reason to think that the same forces could carry out any offensive action in Korea or mainland China.

The Senators wanted to examine Secretary of State Acheson on why he had nixed a proposal to send an American military mission to Formosa in late 1949. Had it occurred, at least a part of Chiang's forces would be ready to defend Formosa.

Joseph Alsop, in London, as explained by the above editorial, tells of the British having the choice of letting their oil in Iran be nationalized or moving troops into southern Iran to protect it, running then the risk of Soviet counter-intervention in northern Iran and all of the attendant risks of that move. But the British could not undertake such a venture without U.S. support in the U.N. or they would be condemned as an aggressor. The future of the Western alliance thus hung on the outcome, including seizure of power by the Communist Tudeh Party in Iran and potentially a world war.

It would take a miracle to resolve the problem, as the extremist Iranian Government appeared determined not to compromise on nationalization.

If U.S. influence or indifference caused Britain to forsake its oil, then there would be a fatal blow to the British economy which was heavily dependent on the oil. The American investment in the Marshall Plan and NATO would, in consequence, be down the drain, as the British served as the linchpin to make NATO work. The economies of Western Europe and India would also be disrupted and it would become quite costly to supply the fleets and airbases in the Mediterranean. Iranian oil expropriation would also likely then spread to Egypt, Iraq and to every other Middle Eastern oil-supplying nation.

Inaction by the U.S. thus would cause a shift in the world balance of power and shatter the Western alliance. Mr. Alsop concludes that it was not so limited a situation as the expropriation of oil in Mexico in 1938—even though he neglects to recall that Mexico's consequent need to market the oil, with the U.S., British and Dutch companies cut out of the loop, led to sale of it to Hitler in 1938-39, through a complicated series of transactions arranged by William Rhodes Davis working through the Bank of Boston, such that Germany obtained the necessary oil to power its Putsch into Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II, then arranged to circumvent the ensuing British blockade by shipping the Mexican oil via Japanese marus and the Siberian railway into Germany from the east.

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