The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 4, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Communist commanders, Kim Il Sung and Peng Teh-huai, had agreed to begin preliminary ceasefire talks on Sunday in Kaesong in South Korea, to lay the groundwork for the formal talks, to begin July 10. The press would not be permitted by the U.S. Eighth Army to question the military officers prior to the Sunday talks.
An unusual quiet pervaded the 100-mile Korean battlefront in the wake of the announcement. The Chinese completed their withdrawal of the mountains within the "iron triangle", which they had lost during the week with an estimated 1,500 casualties.
The primary mission of the U.N. air war this date was reconnaissance, to observe the movements of the enemy, though 50 allied fighters spent two hours strafing and bombing Communists on the eastern front.
A report tells of a bearded little group of American infantrymen coming in from patrol after spending July 4 battling the Chinese and North Korean forces while probing their positions. One of them did not realize it was July 4 as he had been too busy ducking enemy fire after being ambushed while walking up a hill, with bullets flying so close that he could feel the breeze, escaping nevertheless without injury. One infantryman told of his carbine getting so hot that he had to spit on it to make it fire again. Behind them, however, other soldiers were able to go swimming in the Imjin River and held a ceremony at the site on the 38th parallel where the war had started a year earlier. One U.S. Army company contributed to an orphanage in Taegu about $100 it had collected.
American officials predicted that a possible armistice in Korea would be followed by efforts to reach wider agreement on Far Eastern differences between the U.N. and the Soviet bloc of nations. The Chinese Communists appeared to want to reopen the issue of their being seated in the U.N. and the future status of Korea and Formosa. Should the issues be raised in the armistice talks, General Ridgway had been instructed to refer the matters to Washington for consideration after conclusion of the fighting in Korea. The U.N. allies were determined to keep the talks centered on military matters.
In Europe and Africa, to celebrate the Fourth, U.S. troops took part in the their biggest parades since World War II. In Stuttgart, Germany, for instance, 6,500 soldiers participated. Another large parade was held in London, in conjunction with British troops. Celebrations also took place in France, Trieste, Iceland, Denmark, Austria and North Africa, wherever Americans were stationed.
The President was scheduled to speak this night at 8:30 before the Washington Monument, to be broadcast on radio and television.
Traditional fireworks displays were diminished because of bans or restrictions in many areas of the nation.
Delegates from the original 13 colonies gathered in Philadelphia to reenact the signing of the Declaration of Independence on this 175th anniversary of the event.
In New Delhi, former Senator Frank Graham, U.N. mediator on the Kashmir issue, met this day with Prime Minister Nehru of India. Mr. Graham was planning to leave the next day for Kashmir.
In Prague, William Oatis, the Associated Press correspondent accused by the Czech Government of espionage, was sentenced to ten years in prison, half of which could be remitted for good behavior. The court said that he was spared the death penalty because of his admission of guilt and assistance in exposing espionage activities of Western diplomats and Western news agencies. Three employees in the A.P. office in Prague were also found guilty and sentenced to terms ranging from 16 to 20 years. The A.P. termed the trial a "sham and a mockery of elemental justice". It said that Mr. Oatis had only been engaged in legitimate newsgathering as free people understood the idea. It vowed to do everything possible to obtain his release. State Department press officer Lincoln White said that the trial was a "hoax" and that the "confession" of Mr. Oatis was worthless as having been coerced by beatings or otherwise.
The three-day transit strike in the nation's capital ended when operators and mechanics accepted new wage and benefit terms worked out by Government mediators.
During the period between 6:00 p.m. Tuesday through mid-morning on the Fourth, 31 accidental deaths had been recorded across the nation, of which 21 had occurred in traffic accidents. One child had died and four others were injured by fireworks in Clinton, Mo., as boys tried to explode a keg of black powder. The National Safety Council predicted that 130 persons would die on the nation's highways during the 36-hour holiday period.
In New York, a man armed with a can of pepper held up a Western Union office and fled with $80. After pretending to desire to send a message, he had blown the pepper into the face of the clerk, grabbed the money and ran.
Jack Benny
In Fulton, Miss., the annual coon-on-a-log contest was going forward despite protests from the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York and by the Memphis Humane Society. The sport, which predated the Civil War, unleashed hound dogs one by one to swim into a river or pond where a raccoon was secured to a log in the middle. The object was for the hounds to knock the raccoon from the log. Judges scored the dogs on their ability. Each raccoon was rescued if a dog knocked it in the water. The Sheriff said that the outsiders were "busybodies" who wouldn't know a coon if they saw one, and the match would proceed.
On the editorial page, "The Reds Are Ready to Talk" finds that while the step by step process to set up ceasefire negotiations in Korea could wind up a cruel hoax by the Communists for propaganda reasons and to buy time to rebuild their forces, it had supplied increasing hope that it might result in peace. The stage was now set for the peace talks to commence on July 8 in Kaesong and the world would have to await the start to see what the Communists would do.
The U.N. had staked out minimum parameters: that military and long-range political issues be separated; that there would be adequate guarantees against any resumption of hostilities; and that such matters as the admission of Communist China to the U.N. and the control of Formosa would be left to higher authority.
It concludes that if the Communists were sincere, peace could be arranged. If it was only propaganda, then the U.N. forces would be ready to resume the fight.
"The 'Confession' of William Oatis" provides the account of Robert Vogeler, the American businessman accused in Hungary of being a spy and held for 16 months until being released in the spring after he had been hit, deprived of sleep and food, dumped in ice water, alternately harangued and left in dead silence, on and off for days at a time, until he had cracked and signed what they put before him as a confession.
The piece suggests that the confession to espionage by Mr. Oatis of the Associated Press, extracted by the Czech authorities, was of the same type, as he had been held incommunicado for 70 days after his arrest. He was another victim of Communist cruelty "to be rectified when the day of reckoning comes."
"You Gotta' Have Faith" tells of the current issue of Collier's having a story calling into question the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, putatively preceding the American Declaration by over 13 months.
A local historian who had seen the story suggested that it reminded him of a story which had appeared in two competing newspapers in Raleigh when President Andrew Johnson had visited his place of birth to place a monument on his mother's grave. One newspaper said that he was greeted by cheering crowds who hoisted him aloft and cheered him, urging him to speak, causing the President to become so overwrought with emotion that his friends surged forward to embrace him, knocking down a hotel balustrade in the process. But the other paper, which supported radical Republicans and bitterly opposed the President, said that he was greeted by a gang of thugs and ruffians who were drunk and boisterous, that the President had been so drunk, himself, that when prompted to speak, was unable to oblige, and then, in his stupor, stumbled against the balustrade and knocked it down.
The historian concluded that contemporary documentation was not everything, that without one of the accounts, the reader would be left to conclude that the other story was the accurate one, making the President then out to be either a great statesman or a drunken idiot, depending on which version survived. He concluded, "You gotta' have a little faith in these things."
The piece thinks it an appropriate attitude about the Mecklenburg Declaration and the Collier's article.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Unsung Saga", tells of the U.S. Technical Cooperation Administration and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization working quietly to teach better farming skills, land reform and conservation techniques to underdeveloped nations so that they could produce more food for expanding populations. The war on hunger, chaos and unproductivity was underway, whether in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ceylon, Burma, Pakistan, Portugal, Jamaica or elsewhere, and needed only to be pressed.
A piece from the Congressional Quarterly assesses the record thus far of the 82nd Congress in its first session, finds it had completed action on only 14 of the President's 47 proposed pieces of legislation, and had sent nine of them to his desk for signature, one of which had been vetoed. The other five had been killed along the way. That compared to the previous Congress at the same juncture having passed 15 bills out of 59 proposed by the President and killed one. By mid-1947, the 80th Congress, controlled by the GOP and dubbed by the President the "do-nothing" Congress during the 1948 campaign, had passed twelve of the President's 47 proposals and killed only one.
The piece goes on to describe in detail that which the Congress had passed and that on which they had yet to take action.
Whereas the 80th Congress by mid-1947 had enacted 145 public bills into law, and the 81st, 154 bills, the 82nd Congress had enacted only 58, with five more awaiting the President's signature.
Drew Pearson urges on the Fourth of July that America do a better job of selling the ideas which underlay the Declaration of Independence, to equal the job which the Soviets did with respect to Communism. For Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders supplied not only a goal of good government but a creed for the dignity of man, which made Communism appear as a patent medicine being sold at the county fair.
The Declaration essentially extolled
faith in man. It did not pit class against class as Marxism, or set
up a government more important than the individual. It expressed the
self-evident truth that all men are created equal and that life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among the unalienable
Over time, the American revolutionaries quit being "dangerous" and quit selling the Declaration, turned more toward internal development of the country than encouraging like revolutions abroad, as in France. Attention was turned from equality of man to security. Until recently, such had been the abiding position of the nation with respect to the rest of the world. Communism had thus obtained a head start on America in selling its doctrine.
Recently, Congress had passed the McMahon-Ribicoff resolution which declared the American people to be friendly to the Russian people. But this resolution would not be known to the Russian people because of the iron curtain.
To make the American creed known to the people behind the iron curtain would take revolutionary diplomacy, beyond exchange of diplomatic notes and calls by ambassadors. But if the country could apply the courage, imagination and revolutionary ardor displayed by the founding fathers when they signed the Declaration, it could find a way to communicate that document's words and principles behind the iron curtain in a way which would win the peace and make democracy live.
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*According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both forms, "inalienable" and "unalienable", had established usage before 1776:
un"alienable, a.[un-1 7b and 5b.]
= inalienable a.
1611 Cotgr., Inalienable, vnalienable; which cannot be sold, or passed away. 1641 Earl of Monmouth tr. Biondi's Civil Warres v. 125 Those countries+which for safety and reputation ought to be unallienable from the Crowne of England. 1688 Answ. Talon's Plea 27 This Monsieur Talon maintains to be an unalienable right of the Crown of France. 1743 J. Morris Serm. vii. 197 God+gives all men their being, and has an unalienable claim to their obedience. 1771 Goldsm. Hist. Eng. II. 307 Giving these petty tyrants a power of selling their estates, which before his time were unalienable. 1841 Stephen Comm. Laws Eng. (1874) II. 13 Personal chattels cannot in any instance be rendered unalienable beyond the period prescribed. 1855 Macaulay Hist. Eng. xvii. IV. 115 That all men were endowed by the Creator with an unalienable right to liberty.
______________
inalienable, a.(In"eIlI@n@b(@)l) [f. in-3 + alienable. Cf. F. inaliénable (16th c. in Hatz.-Darm.).]
Not alienable; that cannot be alienated or transferred from its present ownership or relation.
c1645 Howell Lett. (1650) II. x. 18 Their youth shall last alwaies with their lust, and love shall be satiated with onely one, where it shall remain inalienable. 1777 Robertson Hist. Amer. (1813) II. vi. 248 Inalienable prerogatives of royalty. 1809–10 Coleridge Friend (1865) 120 This right of the individual to retain his whole natural independence+is absolutely inalienable. 1884 Law Rep. 27 Ch. Div. 163 This petition has been opposed+on the ground of the inalienable character of alimony.
Hence in"alienably adv.; in"alienableness.
1727 Bailey vol. II, Inalienableness, incapableness of being alienated, or transferred to another by Law. 1769 Robertson Chas. V, I. 170 (Seager) Some of the highest offices in the empire have been annexed to them inalienably. 1868 Stanley Westm. Abb. i. 48 The ceremony of the coronation has been inalienably attached to the Abbey. 1885 Law Times Rep. LIII. 78/1 A married woman takes an interest under a settlement, vested in her inalienably.
Marquis Childs discusses the radio and television folderol surrounding the 175th anniversary of Independence Day and how the Founders would have been astonished at such a display. They had been modest men concerned about the infant republic and were not given to rhetoric. They were dedicated to the ideal of freedom of the individual and urged debate in the free exchange of ideas as the chief tenet of the new democracy, the enemy of despotism and dictatorship.
Dr. Julian Boyd, librarian of Princeton University, who had edited the papers of Thomas Jefferson, had said in a speech recently in Richmond that the glory of the Founders was not so much in what they achieved but what they sought, that erroneous ideas ceased to be dangerous when debate and argument were permitted freely to contradict them.
Mr. Childs urges that Communism sought to destroy these natural weapons of argument and debate, but that the country should also examine its own house in this regard as there was a danger that in seeking to combat Communism, the country was going too far in the direction of suppression of ideas, potentially throwing away American freedom of thought and expression.
Robert C. Ruark tells of being stuffed into a full-dress suit in Washington and finding himself to appear as a newly made sausage with the excess stuffing still hanging out of the tied end. He describes the process and appearance in excruciating detail, finding it a "hand-sewn torture chamber" to which males had clung for the prior hundred years. He did not put the formal dress suit down to vanity but believed men were just dumb to wear it.
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