The Charlotte News

Friday, July 13, 1951

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Nate Polowetzky, that allied supreme commander General Matthew Ridgway informed the Communists this date that the ceasefire talks would be resumed only when the U.N. delegates had unrestricted movement in an area free of armed guards. He demanded that either the meeting occur elsewhere or that the Communist remove the armed guards from Kaesong, end unreasonable restrictions on the movement of his negotiators, and accept anyone he named as part of the delegation, referring to the ban of allied journalists. The Communists had rejected the demands of Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy of the previous day, that Western journalists be permitted to accompany the delegation henceforth, after the trucks carrying them had been refused entry to the site by the Communist guards. The Communists said that no press of either side would be allowed into the site until both sides agreed.

The Voice of America, operated by the State Department, accused the Communists of bad faith for their refusal to allow press to cover the negotiations, for their use of armed guards, and for their continued buildup of land and air power in Manchuria and Communist China. The broadcast urged the Communists that if they truly wanted a ceasefire, they should drop the propaganda campaign and get down to the business of negotiating.

The President saw Averell Harriman leave Washington from National Airport, bound for Tehran, where he would act as mediator in the oil nationalization dispute between Iran and the British.

Presidential press secretary Joseph Short informed that Ambassador Henry Grady had requested to be relieved as Ambassador to Iran, in which role he had served for more than the year to which he originally committed, and that the President was going to grant the request at the "appropriate time".

In Kansas, surging flood waters at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers in Kansas City caused officials to order the immediate evacuation of the central industrial district, the first time that had occurred since the flood of 1903. The Kansas River had inundated the Armourdale and Argentine districts of the city on the Kansas side, as levees protecting the Missouri side began to crumble. Thus far, nine had lost their lives in Kansas and two in Missouri, but there was no new loss of life in the previous 24 hours. About a quarter of the 80,000 population of Topeka had been forced from their homes into shelters. The Little Arkansas River was expected to flood Wichita this night. Many small communities were completely flooded.

In Cicero, Ill., some 600 National Guardsmen and police maintained an uneasy peace after rioting had injured seventeen persons and resulted in 70 arrests. A mob of several thousand had been throwing stones at the Guardsmen and police the night before from about 10:00 to 1:00 a.m. It was the most violent action since Tuesday, when Harvey Clark, Jr., a black World War II veteran, had attempted to move with his wife and children into a Cicero apartment in an all-white neighborhood. Officials were aware of no black residents in all of Cicero, a Chicago suburb of 70,000.

Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson ordered out the Guard late the previous day at the requests of the Sheriff of Cook County and the first assistant State's attorney. Police had been unable to keep the mobs in check on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, a large group of teenage vandals broke into the Clarks' apartment, burned the family's furniture and tossed fixtures out third-floor windows. The previous night, the mob had turned over two sheriff's squad cars and set one on fire. A flying wedge of the mob pushed back the 400 Guardsmen who arrived on the scene and one mob member tossed a fire bomb onto the roof of the Clark apartment building, after which the blaze was quickly extinguished. By 1:00 a.m., the Guardsmen had established a no-man's land in an area of two square blocks.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that it would be necessary to create a 150-group Air Force within the ensuing three years if the U.S. wanted to have a superior Air Force to that of the Soviet Union. Under current plans to have a 95-group Air Force, he said, it would be in second position, placing the Western world at risk. He said that to form such an Air Force would cost 74 billion dollars, ten in the current fiscal year, 27 in 1952-53 and 37 billion the year following.

Far Eastern relations expert and occasional State Department consultant Owen Lattimore, after testifying in executive session before the Senate Internal Security Committee, told reporters, in response to questions, that the Institute of Pacific Relations never had been Communist-dominated or a Communist front. Mr. Lattimore's attorney, future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, said that the hearing involved a lot of questions regarding minutiae surrounding the Institute, was routine and at times nearly put him to sleep. Mr. Lattimore had been the object of charges by Senator Joseph McCarthy the prior year that he was a Communist sympathizer and that his being a trustee of the IPR, alleged to have been a Communist-front organization, proved it.

In New York, the Federal District Court complied with the order of recently retired Judge Learned Hand of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals to release the fifteen Communist lieutenants indicted under the Smith Act, after the judge had previously revoked bail because he deemed the Civil Rights Congress, which posted the bail, to be untrustworthy.

On the editorial page, "Good Luck, Mr. Harriman" finds Averell Harriman, former Secretary of Commerce, Ambassador to Russia and Britain, and ERP roving Ambassador to be well qualified for mediating the oil dispute between Iran and Great Britain. It wishes him success after Premier Mohammed Mossadegh had accepted the offer of his services from the President, but suggests that given the attitude of the ruling class in Iran and the unreasonable, fanatical, nationalistic attitude of the Premier, Mr. Harriman's advice would likely fall on deaf ears.

"'Socialistic!'—A Convenient Epithet" finds the House excuse among Eastern and Midwestern Representatives for defeating a plan to disperse defense plants, because they thought that it rang of socialism, not to be appropriate or persuasive. Their real reason was that the bill might prevent location of defense plants in their districts. They had not even debated whether dispersal was appropriate to national security. To these Congressmen, it was not socialism to build defense plants or to lend money to private industry to do so and then allow the operators to amortize the investment over the course of five years. But it was "socialistic" to locate plants for strategic reasons in the South, Southwest or Far West to be safer from potential attack by an enemy force. It finds the application of the term in this instance to have been ridiculous.

"Opposition for Ham Jones?" finds that Dr. T. C. Johnson, the State paroles commissioner, was unlikely to defeat Congressman Hamilton Jones in the 1952 primary should he run for the Congressional seat in the Tenth District, as he had suggested he might. After making the statement, however, he had received apparently little support for the idea, as he subsequently said that he would likely not run. As an ardent supporter of Governor Kerr Scott and as a newcomer to the district, he would receive little support from voters. It suggests that while Mr. Jones was vulnerable, Dr. Johnson was not the man to defeat him.

"The Abuse of State-Owned Vehicles" supports the State assistant budget director's campaign to try to induce cooperative compliance with State policy against not using State-owned vehicles for private purposes. His informal approach, however, was not working and so he had suggested that he might have to resort to the courts. It finds that both the people and Governor Scott, who had been critical of the practice, would likely applaud such effort.

"Raleigh Stirred by Life Story" tells of the below editorial being mailed to the News by an unidentified editorial writer for the Raleigh Times, eager to have it reprinted, says it was pleased to oblige. It wonders, however, where Life got the idea that Charlotte was trying to copy Raleigh in its debutante ball, as the Queen City had never set its standards by the "backward Capital City", and, it hopes, never would. It thinks that what had upset the Times editorial writer was the fact that the story told of the quality and quantity of debs in Charlotte being equal to those at the Raleigh ball, though Raleigh had a statewide pool from which to choose, and that it was just cause for getting him riled.

Not much goin' on today in the world, is there?

A piece from the Raleigh Times, titled "Not Even a Decent Race", tells of a story appearing in Life regarding the debutante ball in Charlotte, two years old and presenting 27 debutantes, making a run on Raleigh's 25-year old Terpsichorean Club debutante ball which presented four or five times the number of those in the Charlotte affair and invited debs from all over the state, not just locally as in Charlotte. The piece wonders therefore why Life had titled the story, "Raleigh Papers, Please Copy", asks what they were supposed to copy.

Drew Pearson tells of his former employee, Andrew Older, who had died in 1950 after having worked for him part-time after the war and was fired when Mr. Pearson learned he was identified by the FBI as a Communist, confirmed two days earlier to HUAC by a former FBI informant. He had worked for some conservative trade journals during the war and for Mr. Pearson part-time at the end of the war. He was a "nice boy" who worked hard and Mr. Pearson had never dreamed he might be a Communist, though he became suspicious as he wrote more critical stories about Russia, prompting argument from Mr. Older, especially regarding the column's reports on the 1946 exposure of the Russian spy ring in Canada.

When a friend reported to Mr. Pearson that Mr. Older had been observed with a member of Tass and the editor of the Soviet Information Service, he went to J. Edgar Hoover and asked if he had any information on Mr. Older, to which Mr. Hoover responded a week or so later that he was listed as a member of the Communist Party in Washington. On confrontation with this information, Mr. Older admitted the membership to Mr. Pearson and, because he had told the truth, the latter listened to his reasons for joining.

He had joined in 1940 under the influence of Ruth McKenny, editor of The New Masses from 1937 to 1946 and who later broke with Communism. Mr. Older's father had been born in Russia and so he had been anxious for peace between the U.S. and Russia. He had found it hard to accept, however, the party line in 1939, when Germany and Russia had a mutual non-aggression pact, which opposed U.S. preparedness for war, a policy which switched completely in mid-1941 after the German invasion of Russia. He had been trying to get away from the party since 1944 and did not any longer like the party's tactics. But he was subject to blackmail and so it was hard to depart. He found Russia to be the primary disrupter of the peace and just as imperialistic as under the czars.

Mr. Pearson says that he considered trying to wean Mr. Older from Communism and get him to tell his story publicly, but being aware that the Communists had planted an informant on the staff of Walter Lippmann, he decided to fire him.

He had seen him subsequently and had reason to believe that before his death the prior October, he had managed to break with the party as he had become a small-scale capitalist, operating a laundry. So, he wishes to clear the air because Mr. Older could not defend himself, and concludes that he was a young man who had gotten off to a bad start under the influence of others but had straightened himself out before his death.

Marquis Childs tells of it appearing increasingly likely that the President was going to run again in 1952, as evidenced by his attitude toward Federal judicial appointments. He had appointed Governor Luther Youngdahl, a Republican, to the D.C. Federal District Court on the pretext that a good man was necessary to fill the seat, vacant for less than a month. There was no doubt that the Governor was qualified, but by taking the Republican Governor away from Minnesota, the President left the Republicans vulnerable in the 1952 Minnesota gubernatorial election.

Meanwhile, three Federal judicial openings had gone unfilled in Illinois for nearly a year, despite Senator Paul Douglas having recommended four men with impeccable credentials. But the President was reported to be at odds with the Senator, and DNC chairman William Boyle had sought to intervene to resolve the impasse, complicated by the desire of veteran Congressman Adolph Sabath to have his nephew appointed to one of the spots.

Mr. Childs suggests that a President concerned about his legacy would wish to appoint judges who were above reproach and not subject to charges of politics in their appointment. The President was not behaving in that manner and so he finds him likely to be considering another run.

Robert C. Ruark finds short-cropped hairdos on women to be a thing of horror, worse looking than his own shorn look when five years old, looking just as good on a French poodle.

From Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads on down, short hair had always been associated with unpleasantness. Head-shaving had been common in France and Italy during World War II as punishment for female collaborators. It was also what they did to mad women when they put them in the booby hatch. Likewise, it was a badge of the convicted criminal.

The French Foreign Legion had a disease called le cafard, meaning that the cockroach had burrowed into the brain and caused insanity, with an initial symptom being to shave one's head, paint it red, white and blue and call one's self a barber pole. He would not be surprised to see such a scalp beneath a bonnet on Fifth Avenue.

He had no need for Rapunzel but favors leaving enough on top to distinguish a woman from a man. "The close-clipped thatch has ever been the mark of the female misfit who wears dungarees, writes bad poetry in Greenwich Village, and nicknames herself Tony or Mike." The only short-haired romantic heroine he could recall was Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Spanish Fascists had cut her hair as an insult.

A letter from Charlotte City Treasurer L. L. Ledbetter provides a copy of a letter to City Attorney John D. Shaw, in which he responds to the editorial of July 10 criticizing Mr. Shaw for not challenging the County for failure to undertake its duty under state law to assume the repayment of debt incurred in building City schools. He finds the criticism unfair.

A letter writer responds to another writer who had described the New Deal as not American. He tells of a speech to Congress in 1933 by arch-conservative Republican Congressman Bertrand Snell of New York urging his fellow Republicans to vote for giving the new President broad economic powers to extricate the country from the Depression. If the previous writer, he says, viewed planned economy as un-American, then he had to include also all of the Republican Administrations after 1872, including GOP establishment of the ICC and TVA, the subsidization of railroads, steamships, and experimental laboratories, and institution of protective tariffs to benefit private industry. All of these things were part of planned economy. The New Deal, he finds, had restored dignity to men who had begun to lose all hope.

A letter from the chairman of the Charlotte Jaycees fire prevention commission praises the Fire Department and the Fire Prevention Bureau for the unusually low fire loss figure of $5,300 for the month of June, appearing as nearly a record for a city the size of Charlotte.

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