The Charlotte News
Friday, June 29, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that the fighting had virtually disappeared in Korea in the wake of the mounting talk of ceasefire negotiations. A small, fierce fight had transpired in the afternoon for a single hill northwest of Yonchon on the western front as the ridge changed hands six times before the allies withdrew, but otherwise, ground action was limited to patrol activity. U.N. patrols in the area of the southern "iron triangle" were turned back by heavy, though inaccurate, enemy fire. The U.S. Eighth Army issued its briefest communique of the year, consisting of only 108 words, to summarize the day's fighting.
Propeller-driven U.N. Mustangs tangled with Russian-made jets and one of the latter was damaged. Two U.S. jets were shot down by ground fire.
A high South Korean source predicted that the shooting war would stop in the next few days. The South Koreans were unhappy, however, at the prospect of a ceasefire based on the 38th parallel, leaving the country split. Optimism ran high at U.S. Eighth Army Headquarters. There was no comment on the prospect of peace talks, but a source said that Kaesong would be a logical place to hold discussions.
The U.S. Government sent general instructions to General Matthew Ridgway, U.N. forces supreme commander, regarding ceasefire negotiations. The instructions were not disclosed but informed sources said that they were supported by all sixteen U.N. nations engaged in the allied fighting. It was anticipated that General Ridgway would leave Tokyo for Korea soon.
Secretary of Defense Marshall told the the House Foreign Affairs Committee that because the build up on the other side was "rather ominous", it was necessary to pass, as quickly as possible, the bill to provide military aid to free nations, which, he said, would need to be extended for three more years.
A Budget Bureau official told the Senate Finance Committee that it was likely Government spending would reach 90 billion dollars for the 1952-53 fiscal year, with 40 billion necessary for the Defense Department. Senators Harry F. Byrd and Robert Taft objected to the 35,000 civilian employees at the Pentagon, with Senator Taft suggesting that more experts be hired to promote efficiency in spending on the defense budget.
The Senate passed by a vote of 71 to 10 a bill to extend economic controls for eight months but which also drastically curbed price rollbacks and did not meet the criteria urged by the President necessary to curb inflation. The bill went to the House, which planned to act instead on a thirty-day stopgap measure. Existing controls would expire the next day.
Stuart Symington, chairman of the RFC, stripped 32 field offices of the agency of loan-granting authority, to eliminate the possibility of influence in granting loans, the object of recent scrutiny by the Senate Banking subcommittee which investigated the agency, resulting in the appointment of Mr. Symington as new chairman with the mandate to clean up RFC.
In New York, the eleven convicted American Communist leaders were set to begin serving their sentences Monday, following the recent affirmation of their convictions by the Supreme Court, upholding the Constitutionality of the Smith Act.
The State Department announced that Czechoslovakia had agreed to release two Western pilots, one American and one Norwegian, and their American fighter planes, held since their emergency landings June 8 near Prague. The release was in response to heavy protest by U.S. Ambassador to Prague, Ellis Briggs.
In Tehran, U.S. Ambassador to Iran Henry Grady appealed anew to Premier Mohammed Mossadegh for concessions to insure the flow of oil to the West from the Abadan refinery in the wake of seizure of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., 53 percent of which was owned by the British Government, and the ensuing walkout of British technicians, refusing to operate the refinery. Ambassador Brady said that things did not look "too bright". He said that he would propose to the British that they keep their technicians on the job.
Off Key West, Fla., eight Navy men were killed and one escaped with a broken leg when a PBM patrol bomber crashed in the Florida Straits.
In Shelbyville, Ill., two crewmen were killed and a dozen passengers injured when a passenger train hit a track wash-out the previous night and derailed down a 30-foot embankment.
The ten-day strike of United Airlines pilots was ending after the union ordered their return to work following a truce agreement with management, whereby the National Mediation Board would attempt to mediate the dispute, primarily over flying the new DC-6B planes owned by the company, which co-pilots had refused to fly without a shorter work month for flying the bigger and faster planes. The union wanted the work month based on mileage rather than hours, but the company contended that the proposal would cut flying time by 85 to 90 hours per month.
Canadian Government authorities had refused again to withhold a $10 per ton increase in newsprint prices, despite entreaties from Price Stabilizer Mike DiSalle to do so pending further talks with American newspaper publishers.
The Wage Stabilization Board approved a wage hike of two cents per hour for packing house workers and a nine-cent hourly increase for Westinghouse workers. (Why the piece is titled "Havana Bakers Strike" is unknown, perhaps from secret intelligence passed only to the typesetter, from Garcia.)
A picture appears of the new Bell X-1A, the latest entry by the Air Force of faster-than-sound planes, set to be tested at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, N.Y., before being shipped to Muroc, California, for final tests.
On the editorial page, "Door to Peace Opens Wider" finds the allied U.N. representatives still retaining a healthy skepticism regarding Russia's peace proposal being simply another propaganda ploy. But at least, based on the clarification received in Moscow by U.S. Ambassador Alan Kirk, it had turned out that Jakob Malik's statement of it the previous Saturday had intended to include the Chinese along with the U.N. allies, the North Koreans and South Koreans in the negotiations, following an initial question of whether his use of the undefined term "belligerents" included the "volunteer" Chinese.
The country appeared willing to go along with any settlement negotiations which left Korea divided at the 38th parallel, though Congressional Republicans had generally decried such a result as "appeasement". But since issuance of the Malik proposal, which said a ceasefire would be based on a demilitarized zone around the 38th parallel, no one other than the usually rash Senator Harry Cain had spoken out against it. The people seemed to prefer a reasonable settlement over the prospect of general war with China, to which the policy of expansion of the war to include bombing of Chinese bases and blockade of Chinese ports, as favored by General MacArthur, would have inevitably led.
"Death of a Newspaper" tells of the St. Louis Star-Times succumbing to the trend in newspapers of not being able to compete in an era of substantially higher operational costs after the war, and selling out therefore to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, leaving only two competing newspapers in the St. Louis market, the Post-Dispatch and the Globe-Democrat, the former an afternoon paper. It finds it too bad but also finds that at least it was selling out to a newspaper which would uphold its high standards, as set forth by Joseph Pulitzer, once the publisher of the Post-Dispatch.
It concludes that, while, in theory, a free press allowed anyone to start a newspaper, in practice, because of the high costs of newsprint and equipment, it did not work out that way, leading to the danger that monopoly in publishing would limit the expression of viewpoints and ideas.
"Come, Come Mr. Ruffin" takes issues with National Association of Manufacturers president William Ruffin when he criticized the President for directing the end to economic controls in 1946, the piece stating evidence that it was instead N.A.M. which had directed the end to controls at that time while the President had resisted the effort, even after Congress pulled the plug on controls. Whether the President had been right or wrong, it suggests, was another matter, but Mr. Ruffin needed to get his facts straight.
A piece from the Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont, titled "No Comment", tells of a pretty San Francisco college student earning her way through school by performing at a striptease club. Her college classmates had not found it peculiar that she was so performing but the other dancers thought it peculiar that she was attending college.
Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution writes of a group of Republicans in Baton Rouge having formed to oust from the party "hide-bound conservatives" in an effort to attract Democratic voters in the South. For years, Southern Republicans had been low and corrupt. Their votes had belonged traditionally to the forces of Mark Hanna, who had come to the South in 1896 seeking the election of William McKinley and established a home in Thomasville, Ga., ostensibly for his health, attracting the state GOP political patronage bosses. When he left, he had the Solid South in the bag, and since the days of William Howard Taft in 1908, the Southern Republicans had continued in the Taft pocket, extending now to Senator Robert Taft, for whom a draft was being organized. (It has a ring, anyway: "Draft Taft", whereas Eisenhower... Which is why they came up with "I Like Ike". "Bob" does not rhyme too easily with anything positive, slob, glob and blob coming first to mind. Nor did his initials, R.A.T., improve things.)
The national party organization, however, had never been willing to spend the time or money to develop a strong Southern party organization. The group in Louisiana and its revolt against the conservatives was typical therefore of the response by thoughtful, literate Southern Republicans—all three of them.
He recaps the historical development of the GOP from its conservative Whig base, opposed to Andrew Jackson as President between 1829 and 1837. The Southern Whigs were a party of large Southern planters who looked upon the Democrats as "shabby radicals". Just as with the Dixiecrats, the Southern Whigs had been a party of expediency and not program. Its Northern wing was anti-slavery, nationalist, and pro-tariff, while the Southern wing was anti-tariff, states' rightist and pro-slavery. The events leading to the Civil War had driven the Southern Whigs into the Democratic Party, but most had held their noses while entering the door.
In the years following the war, the Southern Democratic Party was not one of Jackson or Jefferson but rather "Redeemers" who were old Southern Whigs. Many were Southern governors or members of Congress. In the election of 1876, decided by a special 15-man commission because of four states, three of which were Southern, each sending two slates of electors to decide the election which had been won by Samuel J. Tilden of New York on the popular vote, with the close electoral vote weighing in the balance, these Whigs handled the compromise to swing the election to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. During the election contest, the latter's campaign manager performed a survey of Congress and found 26 Southern Democratic members who, before secession in 1860, had been Whigs and were secretly pledged to make Governor Hayes the next President in preference to Governor Tilden. (He does not relate that the promise was conveyed, as was carried out, that as President, Governor Hayes would end Reconstruction in the South.)
These "Redeemers" represented much the same economic interests as the Republicans after Reconstruction, eventually abandoning President Hayes to align with the Eastern wing of the Democratic Party, devoted to the same economic interests, an alliance which had persisted into modern times. "It explains why some Southern Democrats so often 'act and vote like Republicans.'"
He concludes that there had been no second party in the South because the conservative GOP, as the group in Baton Rouge protested, had not allowed one to develop.
That historical analysis, with its even more circuitous route into times past 1951, also explains why one should never listen to the simple-minded idiots on talk radio, talk-tv, and social media seeking to prey on the gullible by contending, with a wink and a nod to their better-informed compadres, that the Democrats were actually the old party of slavery, states' rights and segregation, while the Republicans stood for abolition, integration and all that was wholesome and good and wonderful. There were state party organizations, regional party organizations and national party organizations, and individual politicians who only loosely subscribed to the national tenets of party identity in earlier times in both parties, as, to a less pronounced degree, in the present, which often stood for very different things, but which, most of the time, at least from the New Deal through 1964, managed, in the case of the Democrats, to unite on basic pocketbook matters, if not social issues. Yet, save for the most die-hard reactionaries and outright racists, who split off to become "conservative" Republicans in the mold of Strom Thurmond, most of these Democrats found that agreeing with the national party policy on social issues ultimately made better sense than the reactionary line of the "turncoat" Republicans, espousing something more akin to some Nazi credo—claiming to be premised on "Christian" ideals, that is to say "I but not Thou", should you be different—, than the principles which underlie the United States and its Constitution.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who had once been Governor, being frugal when it came to Government spending but objecting vehemently to the cuts proposed by Senator Harry F. Byrd to school lunches, juvenile delinquency, the Women's Bureau and the Children's Bureau. He had told Senator Byrd that with 80 million dollars being appropriated for a ship built by the Government, ultimately to be sold to a shipping company for 28 million, half the loss on which would be sufficient to cover the cuts for maternal and child welfare work. He thus questioned whether a five-year old or healthy mother had cash value.
The subpoena which the Senate crime investigating committee was seeking to serve on Governor Fuller Warren of Florida, might, it was hoped by committee members, establish a precedent which could be extended to Governor Dewey, who members wanted to explain his reasons for opting to deport Lucky Luciano at a time when he still faced a remaining 30 to 50-year prison sentence, such that he now directed the nation's drug trade from Italy.
David Lilienthal, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, told the President of his objection to the AEC now giving out too much information in its press releases, revelatory of secret information.
The belated announcement of Senator Kenneth McKellar that he would run for re-election had placed Congressman Albert Gore of Tennessee out on a limb because the Senator had made a gentleman's agreement with the Congressman that he would retire, leaving the way open for Congressman Gore to run for the seat. Congressman Gore, in turn, had agreed to give up his Congressional seat as the seat to be lost in Tennessee pursuant to the 1950 census, enabling the other districts to absorb his constituents. Now, he faced the prospect of losing his seat in Congress and not being able to run for the Senate unless he chose to challenge the long-term Senator McKellar.
Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming had the most bipartisan voting record in the Senate.
Members of the U.N. alliance had been working with other members for some time to work out a Korean truce proposal and Jakob Malik had jumped the gun on them. The most important issues to the U.S. in the discussions were that Formosa and Communist Chinese membership at the U.N. be off the table in negotiations until the Korean issue was settled and all troops withdrawn. The other U.N. members, however, had not been in agreement with those conditions.
The additional parts of the proposal, about which there was general agreement, were that there would be a demilitarized zone established to twenty miles north of the 38th parallel and that there would be no more bombings, guerrilla warfare or equipment and troops moved into Korea during the truce.
The terms were similar to those which the President had sent to General MacArthur just prior to Easter and which the General then issued as his own terms, one of the principal reasons for his subsequent ouster.
Joseph Alsop, in Belgrade, tells of the rearmament of Soviet satellites being harbinger to Yugoslavia that an attack was possible, if not probable, by the following spring. The Soviet buildup had begun shortly after the U.S. entered Korea a year earlier. The Russians launched a program to put their armies in East Germany, Poland and the Carpatho-Ukraine on an immediate offensive readiness. The result was that the armies, which had previously served as local police, had been transformed into combat-ready forces. It was anticipated that by the ensuing spring, the transformation would be complete, enabling the capability of an offensive. Such transformation was taking place throughout Eastern Europe.
He concludes therefore that anyone who rejected the Yugoslav fear of such an operation had to be "very wishful or very foolish or very frivolous or combine all three qualities."
Robert C. Ruark, on safari in Africa, in an old column reprinted this date, tells of "M.H." dispensing advice freely to the lovelorn, resulting sometimes in simple but normal individuals winding up as ax murderers. He cites the example of E. J., who related of not being able to stand his wife's preference for radio soap operas and comedy programs, and so had to go to the movies sometimes at night to escape the fare. M.H. had responded that it was a "whitewash", that E.J. was looking for an excuse to escape his wife, was dour, indifferent, uncompanionable, and his wife felt lonely, misunderstood and rejected, advised E. J. to face the fact that he was dishonest and that he was trying to present his wife in an unfavorable light.
Mr. Ruark thinks the advice was distorted and biased against the male of the couple, that if his wife read it, she could cook up a divorce suit from it, all because the husband did not care for Red Skelton and Dr. Kildaire as a means of steady relief from work.
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