The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 11, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Jim Becker, that, according to a U.N. briefing officer, ceasefire discussions were progressing in Kaesong with "cold military formality" coupled with optimism. The officer said that an armistice was much nearer after the second day of talks than 24 hours earlier. A less optimistic official communique said that the five Communist generals had changed their attitude to one more conducive to a better understanding between the parties, less stiff and formal. Allied delegates said that they would not discuss one of the three Communist demands, that all foreign troops leave Korea immediately, because it was a political question, deemed off the table. Negotiators were still discussing the agenda for the discussions and it was hoped that they would begin substantive discussions on Thursday.
Twenty allied press representatives would be allowed for the first time into the Thursday session, previously banned at Communist insistence.
Armed Chinese guards told allied press photographers who went to Kaesong after the session that they were present to protect the peace delegates from guerrillas.
Meanwhile, American Sabre jets shot down three MIG-15 jets and damaged another in a 20-minute air battle between 24 allied planes and 30 MIGs over northwestern Korea, south of Sinuiju. The fight began when the Sabre jets approached the Yalu River to cover 21 F-80 Shooting Stars which attacked an ammunition factory south of the river.
While the ground war had quieted considerably with the start of peace talks, with light to moderate enemy contact reported with U.N. patrols all along the front this date, there had been no deceleration of the air war.
The Department of Defense announced that U.S. battle casualties had increased by 616 since the prior week, to a total of 768,726.
In Tehran, Premier Mohammed Mossadegh sent a message to President Truman accepting the invitation to have Averell Harriman mediate the dispute between Iran and Britain regarding seizure of the oil properties of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., 53 percent of which was owned by the British Government. Yet, there appeared no sign that Premier Mossadegh was prepared to compromise on his nation's determination to seize the oil.
Administration leaders in the House had suffered several defeats the day before on the economic controls package in the face of a Republican coalition with Southern Democrats regarding farm price amendments. Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina, chairman of the Agriculture Committee, said that the group had taken a "no compromise" attitude in opposition to price rollbacks. An anti-controls tide had begun to sweep the chamber.
The Budget Bureau assistant director, Elmer Staatz, presented to the Senate Banking subcommittee a proposal to make income and property damage payments in the event of enemy attacks on domestic targets. It would authorize the President to assist in the interim restoration of community services and essential production in war-damaged areas. The President would be authorized to provide public assistance payments for individuals whose financial resources and livelihood had been destroyed by the enemy. It also would provide, within limits, for indemnification for destroyed and damaged private property.
An AFL representative testified to the Senate Finance Committee that the AFL supported the Administration's ten billion dollar tax increase package and suggested that 6.4 to seven billion be raised from increases in individual income taxes, especially regarding those with higher incomes.
In Washington, a former reporter for columnist Drew Pearson was named to HUAC as a member of the Communist Party. Mary Markward, who during the war had been an undercover agent for the FBI, named Andrew Older as a Communist. Mr. Pearson said in a statement that Mr. Older had worked for him on a part-time basis prior to spring, 1947 and that he had fired Mr. Older after hearing the reports of his being a Communist and confirming same with the FBI. Mr. Older had died in October, 1950.
Precautionary evacuation of low-lying areas of Topeka, Kans., took place as new floods occurred along the Kansas River and tributaries in the wake of torrential rains overnight. The Red Cross predicted that nearly 20,000 persons would be homeless by the next day in Topeka. A major flood had occurred in Topeka in 1903, taking 38 lives. The city was bracing for a near-record crest of 30.5 feet on the Kansas River the next day. The worst problems were along the Cottonwood River, where Marion and Strong City were under water, as well as at Manhattan along the Kansas.
In Hiawatha, Kans., a bank president discovered through an apparent miscount of $500 that six new five-dollar bills had been printed with ten-dollar bills on their obverse. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington said that the error was conceivable but it had never heard of it happening previously.
In Charlotte, a night watchman and former Charlotte Township constable, 63, was murdered during the night by an unknown assailant with a gun. The body was discovered early in the morning at the H. E. Pennigar Wholesale Plumbing Supplies on Dowd Road. He had been shot once in the face and beaten over the head with a flashlight. Police believed the intruder was caught in the midst of an attempted burglary after smashing the glass on the front door. The watchman customarily was armed with a .32-caliber pistol. It was not yet known whether he had been shot with his own weapon or another. His pistol was missing. Nothing was taken from the warehouse.
On the editorial page, "A Time for Firmness" finds that in the first session of the peace negotiations in Korea, the Communists were up to their old tricks of trying to dictate the agenda and achieve a precise wording to their advantage. While the reports did not indicate what the Communists set forth, the statement of U.N. chief negotiator Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy that the agenda would be limited to military matters in Korea, not military matters elsewhere or economic or political matters, such as admission of Communist China to the U.N., implied that the Communists had sought to broaden the agenda.
It advocates that if the first few sessions were to be spent arguing about an agenda, Admiral Joy ought let the Communists know that the U.N. delegation did not intend spending days or weeks arguing over the scope of the conference. It would be better to break off the conference, it concludes, than to yield to Communist desires to fix the agenda.
"The New City Salary Scale" tells of the City Council voting to raise City employee salaries, without reference to any other cities as a benchmark. It had followed a similar procedure in the past in giving pay raises. It sets forth the salary scales and finds that Atlanta, for instance, whose city employees ought have higher pay as a larger city, had a somewhat lower scale for comparable jobs, some, such as stenographers, as much as 32 percent lower than Charlotte's new salaries.
The piece favors adequate pay for City employees but believes that they should not get more than in other cities of comparable size and tax base.
"Mr. Cooley on Rollbacks" tells of Congressman Harold Cooley of North Carolina finding price rollbacks to be unconstitutional as depreciating or taking property without due process. The piece finds him wrong, that in an emergency as the nation faced, it was necessary to freeze certain prices to prevent undue inflation because of the war, just as it was necessary to draft young men to send them to the fight. During the initial period of the war, some prices had risen as much as four times and many producers had raised prices as much as possible to establish a base line as high as possible in anticipation of rollbacks. Not to roll back prices would penalize those retailers and producers who maintained their prices low in obedience to the law and Administration exhortations, and reward those who had been guilty of greed.
"Duplication" urges the Charlotte Housing Authority to select another name for the new white housing project in the city, dubbed Belvedere Homes, as it conflicted with Belvedere Avenue at the opposite end of the city.
Call it Whitey Villa...
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Lost and Found at Manteo", tells of Bill Sharpe, Aycock Brown, and Ben Dixon MacNeill having sent out a story from Manteo that two escaped convicts from a prison camp had been apprehended backstage at "The Lost Colony" when the husband of the actress portraying Queen Elizabeth spotted the pair and informed the theater manager, who grabbed a Very flare gun used in the performance and used it to corner the two escapees near the theater dressing rooms.
Missing from the story, however, were the names of the escapees and how they were identified in a darkened backstage area. It suspects the trio of reporters to have magnified the episode for the sake of publicity for the outdoor drama.
Recently, before the start of "Unto These Hills" at Cherokee, a pilgrimage along the Trail of Tears was undertaken from western North Carolina to Oklahoma, where the Cherokee of North Carolina met their kinsmen from Oklahoma and the latter helped light the Flame of Eternal Friendship in the mountainside theater. That was another way to garner favorable publicity.
A speech is presented by Irving Dillard, editor of the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made at the symposium of the University of Chicago Law Review, in which he discusses the relationship between the press and Congressional investigations. He finds press coverage of the investigations to be problematic, with news pages playing up sensational charges of disloyalty while denials of those same charges and even proof of innocence of them received less attention.
A second problem was that editors knowingly had to print lies in the newspaper when those lies were spoken by prominent officials. The only discretion to be exercised was whether to devote less attention to it by its placement and size of headline. The editor could not label each story as truth or lie and many times did not know for certain what the truth was. He presented the news and did not render opinions on it within the news pages. The responsibility fell on editorial writers to comment on truth or falsity.
Many editorial pages, to their credit, had criticized the techniques of Senator Joseph McCarthy regarding his unproved charges of widespread Communist influence in the Government. The Milwaukee Journal, one of the largest newspapers in the Senator's home state, had been one of the first to denounce both what he had said and his methods. Yet, because of the source, it had to present the stories of the Senator's charges prominently.
While Mr. Dillard saw the inconsistency in this practice, he saw no other alternative than to follow it.
The newspaper editorially had the responsibility to denounce the Congressional investigations it found irresponsible. But in some instances, as in the case of an investigation into Teapot Dome by Senator Thomas J. Walsh during the 1920's, many newspapers of high repute had denounced him and discredited his intentions, whereas in the end, because what he revealed turned out to be true, he was widely applauded.
The quality of Congressional investigations, he found, reflected the type of men who were elected to Congress and it was up to newspapers editorially to guide the voters in electing men of high purpose and scruples to public office. Insofar as the free press failed to undertake these basic responsibilities, he concluded, they were in default, and when democratic institutions were under attack around the world, newspapers could so default only at their own peril.
Drew Pearson tells of a French Embassy representative telling the State Department that the Chinese Communists were massing troops on the Indo-Chinese border, while the Yugoslav Embassy representative had informed that Rumanian troops were participating in maneuvers and that Tito believed that there was an even chance that an attack would be launched against Yugoslavia in the fall.
The Kremlin might launch such offensives because it knew the U.N. would not come to the rescue of either Indo-China, because many delegates believed the French had bungled things by hanging on too long to imperialism, or Yugoslavia, because it was Communist, not a member of NATO, and hard to defend. It also was aware that the Korean peace talks would cause a relaxation in the U.S. of the mobilization program. And Congress seemed willing to acquiesce in this latter desire of Russia.
The top assistant to Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Dr. Husain Fatimi, who had masterminded the nationalization of the British oil, was secretly on trial for misappropriation of funds.
One of the great speeches in the debate on price controls had been delivered at 3:00 a.m. by Senator Herbert Lehman, former Governor of New York. Senator Lehman, who had not been in the Senate long, told his colleagues that he was sorely disappointed that they were playing politics with the security of the nation by producing a bad, watered-down economic controls bill while young men died in Korea. At the conclusion of his speech, from which the column liberally quotes, many Senators hung their heads in shame.
Marquis Childs tells of Britain's Labor Government taking a dim view of European union, slowing progress in developing NATO. General Eisenhower had given a speech the prior week encouraging unity in Europe, which was having a positive impact. Under a unified concept, individual countries could undertake specialized tasks suitable to their production stream. France could produce trucks, half-tracks and other vehicles for all of NATO. Holland could produce destroyer escorts, sub-chasers and other small craft plus electronics equipment, while Belgium could produce small arms ammunition, and Italy, airplane motors, etc.
Yet, such specialization was being resisted, a reason that so few defense contracts had been let for NATO in Europe. This fact, plus shortage of materials, would likely result in unemployment in key industries in Italy and France.
Moreover, there was evidence of a clique in the U.S. trying to stymie the efforts of General Eisenhower to bring about unity of Western power to resist a Communist attack. These neo-isolationists, haters and fanatics were motivated by the popularity of the General, seeing in him a political threat, especially should he run for the presidency in 1952. Some believed that the recent attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy on Secretary of Defense Marshall had been but a prelude to a concerted attack on General Eisenhower to neutralize him politically.
Mr. Childs believes that such an attempt would be unsuccessful as the General's hold on the country was too great. But it did not mean necessarily that he could capture the nomination of either major party. The professional politicians, to whom great power had been ceded by the American people, were demonstrating a preference instead for "safe mediocrity and blind loyalty".
Robert C. Ruark tells of Chief Rising Cloud, a self-described child psychologist, seeking recoupment of a block of midtown Manhattan for 24 dollars, the price for which Peter Minuit paid the native Indians for the whole island. Mr. Ruark had always thought the original sale was a plot to drive the white man nuts, as the island then was a pastoral place, not infested with striptease joints or hotel doormen.
But the squaws had hollered for teepees overlooking the park and Manhattan was so centrally located that friends and relatives were constantly dropping in, demanding food and lodging and tickets to the big pow-wows.
Twenty-four dollars had seemed in those earlier times a fair price. The Indians knew that it would not be long until the British took over from the Dutch and the Americans would then knock off the British. They had a good idea of what was coming, that there would be crowded trails, underground tunnels, visiting tribesmen, dissatisfied squaws with little dogs too expensive to eat, iron horses, and the high cost of stew meat.
He concludes that the Indians got the best of the bargain, for the city was no place in 1951 for a peace-loving warrior to dwell. "Too many tribes in it, all out for each other's scalp, and noisy to beat the band."
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