The Charlotte News
Wednesday, June 27, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that as the enemy began pulling out of one area of buildup in Korea and poured fresh troops into another, U.N. officers were not concerned. Enemy screening blocked allied patrols in four areas of enemy strength, even on the flat lands south of Pyonggang, to protect their buildup, where the enemy was sending new men and materiel. A secondary buildup was taking place near Kumsong, east of the "iron triangle", after a four-mile advance by the allies endangered that town. Enemy machineguns, mortars and artillery opened fire on allies seeking to approach the other two buildup areas, near Inje in the east and Yonchon in the west.
The Department of Defense announced a jump in U.S. war casualties by 3,145 since the previous week, to a total of 76,749 for the war, based on casualties reported to next of kin by June 22. Of the total, 11,254 had been killed in action, an increase of 421 during the week, 53,227 wounded, an increase of 2,537, and 12,268 missing, an increase of 187.
Belman Morin of the Associated Press was touring Army camps and tells of a visit to Camp Kilmer, N.J., where he recounted the arrival of a new group of 60 draftees and their first taste of being in the Army. The best officers knew not to baby the draftees but did help them over the first rough spots. The Warrant Officer told them that they would be at Camp Kilmer for about a week before being assigned to another camp for basic training, probably then sent to Arizona for the summer and Alaska for the winter.
At the U.N., the West pressed Moscow to spell out the particulars of chief Soviet delegate Jakob Malik's peace proposal which he had laid forth in general during a radio broadcast on the prior Saturday night. Mr. Malik had proposed only that troops of "belligerents" be evacuated from the 38th parallel area so that a ceasefire could be arranged. The West wanted to know who Moscow considered the "belligerents" to be and what guarantees would occur to prevent re-initiating of the fighting. According to Ambassador to Moscow Alan Kirk, who met with Soviet deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko for twenty minutes, clarification of the position was expected by the end of the week.
Secretary of State Acheson told the House Foreign Affairs Committee this date that the U.S. would demand as conditions of a ceasefire that the Chinese Communist troops withdraw beyond the Yalu River and provision be made for a phased withdrawal from Korea of all foreign troops after an armistice. He said that after such an armistice, a violation of it would be a "very dangerous step" which would "endanger world peace". Representatives of all sixteen U.N. nations fighting as allies in Korea were scheduled to meet at the State Department this afternoon to discuss the situation.
U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, having arrived from his native Norway in New York to oversee potential peace negotiations, said that he was hopeful for a peaceful settlement of the Korean conflict.
In Tehran, a showdown appeared near in the British-Iranian oil dispute over Iranian Government seizure of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. in which the British Government had a controlling 53 percent interest. Reports had it that Britons were about to be evacuated from the oil fields, causing the Abadan refinery, largest in the world, to be shut down. The British had also dispatched a war cruiser to the refinery. Premier Mohammed Mossadegh made a public appeal to the British technicians to remain on the job in operation of the refinery.
A Federal narcotics agent, a Sicilian descendant, testified to the Senate crime investigating committee that Charles "Lucky" Luciano was the kingpin of drug traffic in the U.S. and Italy, to which he had been previously deported. Mr. Luciano had gunmen, he said, in the U.S. who enforced his orders and his profits were delivered by international messengers. The agent recommended tougher narcotics laws to combat the problem, with tougher sentences for drug peddlers and cancellation of citizenship of naturalized citizens involved in the drug trade.
The cost of living index for May 15 rose to a record high of 185.4 percent of the 1935-39 average, over a point higher than in mid-April. As a result, railroad workers were entitled to a one-cent cost-of-living adjustment in wages.
In Indianapolis, a man, after telling his wife that he was going to shoot a couple of cops and force them to kill him, proceeded to shoot two officers with a shotgun at short range and then was shot dead by three other officers. One of the shot officers died a half hour later. The other was in critical condition. The wife said that she and her husband had quarreled shortly before he issued the threat and that he had been drinking heavily. He then phoned a police station and said that he had killed a man and when the officers arrived in response, the shooting ensued.
In Greensboro, internationally known scientist, educator and president emeritus of Guilford College between 1918 and 1934, Dr. Raymond Binford, died at age 75.
Near downtown Charlotte, four persons were injured, one seriously, in a wreck in which the driver of one vehicle was ejected from the car and pinned underneath the wheels of another car when the cars collided at the intersection of S. Tryon Street and Park Avenue.
The "Our Weather" box informs that it sometimes rains frogs. Why not?
On the editorial page, "Let's Learn about Communism" tells of Dr. Theodore Greene, professor of philosophy and head of Silliman College at Yale University, having testified recently to the Senate subcommittee studying ethics in government, that he was appalled at the lack of teaching in first-rate colleges and universities regarding Communism, that there was nothing to fear in having students see a comparison of the Communist system to that of democracy, as the latter was so clearly preferable.
The piece agrees and finds instruction lacking for hesitancy that such teaching might invite the wrath of anti-Communists who confused teaching about Communism with teaching and advocating Communism. Davidson College, which conducted a seminar on the subject the prior spring, was in the minority. It hopes that with an apparent return to sanity being evidenced in the land regarding the Red scare, colleges and universities would begin to show wisdom and teach comparative analysis of the competing systems and economies. Without thorough and unbiased knowledge of Communist Russia, it posits, there could be no hope to dissolve its threat to the national existence.
"Federal Sanction for Gambling" tells of Senator Estes Kefauver opposing a Federal occupational tax on gambling for concern that it would legitimize illegal gambling. The piece agrees and hopes the proposal would be defeated. Taxes already existed on slot machines and illegal liquor in dry areas and it had tended to legitimize that which was ostensibly illegal.
"The Troubles of a Champion" tells of middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson having to avoid pop
bottles being thrown at him in the ring by a displeased crowd
recently in Berlin
The Associated Press report said that the disqualification and crowd reaction suggested a political bias. The piece thinks it the result primarily of fight fans being historically rowdy, whether in Kokomo or Krakow.
"The Saga of the Prairie State" tells of the U.S.S. Illinois having been laid to rest beside a New York City pier in 1920 and turned over to the New York Naval Militia after long service in the Navy on the high seas. It had been rechristened with the inglorious name, "Prairie State", indicative of a landlubber, and had been moved only one time since. Now, it was being moved again, from a pier on W. 136th Street to a new berth off 25th Street.
It concludes: "Sic transit gloria mare."
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer , titled "Worried Republicans", quotes from a letter to the editor from a Republican featured on the editorial page of the New York Herald Tribune the previous Sunday, which said that Republicans, for all the problems with the Democrats and the Truman Administration having been in power for too long, were giving voters little choice for 1952, in light of the constant smear campaigns of decent people, including the Chiefs of Staff and State Department personnel.
He had found that the problems brought out in the Kefauver crime investigating hearings regarding big city Democratic bosses protecting crime rackets and other graft appeared trivial beside the prospect of "national suicide" at the hands of the Republicans, lacking judgment, restraint, and the patriotism which came from putting country above party.
The Herald Tribune correspondent, the piece finds, had a lot of company.
Under Trumpety Dumpety and the other morons, the bulk of Republicans, especially given their performance collectively yesterday in response to the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court and their insistence on moving forward in a mid-term election year despite the McConnell booby-hatched effort in 2016 to block President Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland because "the people first had to be heard", the letter to the editor of 1951 would find, no doubt, some parallel in the world of 2018.
We shall say it again, and we have confidence that the Republicans are soon going to learn this lesson: You cannot govern a country for long from a minority position by adopting policies which are opposed by most of the country, without an electoral revolt in response. The poor response that the Republicans are in the majority in Congress has to be tempered by the reality that much of that majority in the House is the product of gerrymandering and that the Senate, by its very nature of having two members from every state, does not purport to represent "the people" in the strictest sense of that term, and never has under the Constitution. It is supposed to be, as a body, wise.
But the average Trumpie does not understand how the Government works, that it is three counterbalancing branches never meant to line up in perfect lock-step, to guard against despotism, thinks it ought be a one-man show, with the Republicans in Congress kowtowing to His Lordship, and the Democrats locked out on the outside of Congress and from the Government completely, while the "President" curries his fan club's favor by encouraging their continued ignorance. That is the way His Highness has thus far governed in a year and a half.
We can only hope, insofar as the Supreme Court is concerned, that the dynamic of the Court, itself, historically tending to right itself to the middle, will prevent the predicted sea change—which we regard as overstated by pundits—in the face of a second Trumpety Dumpety nominee. That is to say that moderating forces from within the remaining four Republican appointments to the Court will prevent that sea change, should, as anticipated, the "President" appoint a "conservative" ideologue to the Court and the spare Republican Senate majority then confirms him or her.
To politicize the Supreme Court, as the "conservatives" want to do in this country, is contrary to the Constitution and the notion that the courts, as the final arbiter of law in the land, and the Supreme Court as the final word on that law, are supposed to be independent of politics and political winds, including the influence of special interests, whether corporate or individuals combined into groups. The courts are supposed to decide cases on the basis of law and fact, not fiat. To do otherwise is to erode respect in the country for the courts, a dangerous result, as the people then are left with no recourse.
Unfortunately, in the land of the legacy of that decades-long politicization, beginning under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and now continuing under Trumpety Dumpety, and the notorious 5 to 4 decisions of the Supreme Court in that now long history's wake, during which Republicans have insisted, even against the pressing vicissitudes arranged by fate and death to right the tilted bench back to center, on their precious five-person lock on the Court majority for the past 45 years, as if they owned special divine rights of Kings to control the majority of the Supreme Court, that is not the case a large part of the time.
A rigged deck on a rigged bench will not long last in this country, against the majority will of the voting populace. That is not the way of the Constitution. This is not Argentina. The Republicans are running into another stone wall. The people will not be governed by Fox News and their Fascist ilk brainwashing a lot of fools into following their suicidal path into the sea, all, ultimately, not for overturning of Roe v. Wade and other such transitory, touchstone social issues, but rather for corporate power and return to trickle-down economics, reducing the individual to a mere automaton who can go out in the street and shout to their heart's content in echo off the stone walls of corporate America but with no effect, just as in the Nixon years and in the Reagan years.
Blotting out 49 members of the Senate and relegating them to a position of powerlessness is not the way to govern a democracy, especially when it is plain that the "President" enlisted the willing Russians to impact the electoral process in the 2016 "election"—which he lost by nearly three million votes and over two percentage points.
Now he gets to appoint a second Justice to the Supreme Court. We shall not forget the rigging of the deck, any more than it was forgotten after the tawdry events of 1968-1969.
It was fifty years ago last week that Chief Justice Earl Warren, a detester of Richard Nixon, announced his retirement from the Court in time to allow President Johnson, not running for re-election, to appoint his successor, initiating the disgraceful filibuster of the nomination of Justice Abe Fortas, led by Senator Strom Thurmond and others, to block it, despite a majority of the Senate favoring confirmation, and allow President Nixon to appoint in 1969 the successor Chief, Warren Earl Burger. Thus began the rigging, which has since, whenever that Republican-appointed majority of the Court has been threatened, continued to this day. It is time to stop the rigging.
Justice John Paul Stevens, honorable throughout his service on the Court, sought to help stop that rigging when he retired during the term of President Obama, despite having been appointed by President Ford, a Republican, albeit moderate in tone during his brief Presidency, to replace in 1975 retired Justice William O. Douglas, who had suffered a stroke. The same was true of Justice David Souter, who retired in 2009, having been appointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 to replace retiring William Brennan, a liberal Justice appointed by President Eisenhower.
If this "President" truly, as he claimed during the campaign in Indiana, respects the legacy and memory of President Truman, then he ought take a leaf from his book when, at the time of his first appointment to the Supreme Court, he appointed moderate Senator Harold Burton of the opposing party. But do we expect such bipartisan magnanimity, fairness and grace from this tacky, tawdry moron? Not likely.
We shall depend on the good graces
of two or three moderate Republican Senators to protect the country
from the worst of His Highness's reality-show, three-f
A sermon of June 24, 1951 by Reverend Henry H. Rightor, Rector of Christ Church in Charlotte, is reprinted, in which he told of it being the day set aside to celebrate the birthday of St. John the Baptist. He conveyed his message: "Repent ye: for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
He suggested that while Charlotte was reputed to have the highest per capita church attendance in the country, it also had one of the higher murder rates and crime rates in the country, higher per capita than even big city cesspools of crime such as Chicago and New York. But the citizenry appeared loath to devote taxpayer money to help to eradicate the problem, as the city had the next to lowest tax rate in the country, less than one-third the average. He cited the fact that 700 school children in the community did not receive any lunch.
He concluded that he was not suggesting that Charlotte residents quit going to church but rather that they attend, in accordance with the Psalm, with "a broken and a contrite heart".
Many, at least by repute, attended to sober up from the Saturday drinking escapade. They probably did not, therefore, take in much of what the Reverend said, probably thought he was talking about Chicago and New York.
Drew Pearson describes the House Banking Committee executive session debate, similar to the treatment the previous day of the Senate Banking Committee version, regarding price controls, providing the list of those members for and against controls and how they came to their positions, ultimately reaching a 12 to 11 vote in favor of an amendment proposed by Congressman Tom Fugate of Virginia, after a couple of Congressmen had changed their positions, which blocked price rollbacks.
He points out that House Speaker Sam Rayburn could have altered the result by putting pressure on W. R. Poage of Texas to vote for controls and by convincing Wright Patman of Texas, in favor of controls, not to leave town for medical treatment during the crucial vote.
Marquis Childs discusses the Malik peace tender and suggests that it raised the question whether the U.S. was prepared to negotiate should Communist China show even a small willingness to be reasonable. While Mr. Malik had not attached conditions to his proposal, he, and the Communist Chinese in response to it, had said in his statement that the U.S. effort to continue to aid Nationalist China "unlawfully" kept the legitimate government of Communist China from exercising proper control over Formosa. It was a "poor preface", therefore, to negotiation.
In his statements to the Senate joint committees, Secretary of State Acheson had said that the future of Formosa was not negotiable and that the U.S. had sent a military mission consisting of 600 officers and men to Formosa on April 20 and that there was no intention of allowing Communist China to replace Nationalist China as representative at the U.N., hinting that the veto power on the Security Council might be exercised by the U.S. for the first time to prevent it.
In his speech in Tennessee, the President had said that the U.S. was continuing to aid the Nationalists on Formosa and that the aid would be effective provided they were now willing, contrary to the past when they failed on the mainland, to do their part.
Robert C. Ruark, on safari in Africa, relates in an earlier column, reprinted this date, that every time he put his hand into the hardware drawer in the kitchen searching for a can opener, he had the feeling that Salvador Dali had designed the kitchen utensils. There were gadgets for everything, from simonizing a cake-top to dismembering lettuce to cutting melon balls. There was even a pre-cooled roller for dough and a master key for sardine cans. He had the feeling that one day the gadgets would combine into a Frankenstein robot monster and proceed to cut, baste, scoop, snip, infuse and scallop all human life within reach and then lay him out finally with the pre-chilled rolling pin.
Let's hope so. If not, there's always the tiger.
Framed Edition
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