The Charlotte News

Wednesday, August 22, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that the four-man ceasefire subcommittee held its sixth session in Kaesong this date without any sign of the impasse over the location of the ceasefire zone being broken. The negotiations were complicated by a dispute over the latest charges by the Communists that U.N. forces had violated the neutrality zone around Kaesong, with the Voice of the United Nations Command radio broadcasting from Tokyo that the "Communist charges border on the ridiculous", and that the Communists were making "a universal symbol of bad faith" out of the talks, that it was now obvious that Kaesong had been picked by the Communists to "intimidate" the U.N. delegates with a "show of force". Air Force Maj. General L. C. Craigie replaced for the second time on the allied two-man subcommittee team Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke during the two hour, ten minute meeting this date.

In ground fighting, South Korean infantrymen, attacking behind the most concentrated sustained artillery barrage of the war, captured a dominating hill in eastern Korea this date. At the top, the South Korean troops were able to "look down the throats" of the enemy located on other hills north of Yanggu. The South Koreans seized two other hills on the eastern front, recapturing one from counterattacking enemy troops. Communist forces, however, retained three other hills in the area which they had seized in counterattacks on Tuesday. A briefing officer estimated that the enemy had lost about 2,000 men during five days of fighting north and northwest of Yanggu.

U.N. air forces flew 450 sorties this date through rain showers and cloud cover, concentrating on enemy efforts to resupply their front lines.

The Defense Department stated this date that U.S. battle casualties in Korea had reached 81,006, an increase of 256 since the previous week, the smallest increase in casualties since the weekly summaries had begun in August, 1950.

In Tehran, the upper house of the Iranian Parliament gave a vote of confidence to Premier Mohammed Mossadegh regarding his rejection of the latest British proposal for settlement of the oil nationalization dispute, a 50-50 split with the British in oil profits from the predominantly British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. The lower house, however, urged the Premier to continue the negotiations. Meanwhile, chief British negotiator Richard Stokes, in light oif that indication of desire to continue the talks, extended his previously imposed 24-hour deadline for acceptance of the proposal to 3:00 p.m. this date.

White House press secretary Joseph Short stated this date that the President had decided to ask Congress again for stronger price control powers and hoped to send a message to that effect to the Congress by the weekend. The President had signed the Congressionally-approved economic controls extension measure reluctantly on July 31 to avoid the expiration of all controls.

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York unanimously reversed the perjury conviction of William Remington, former Government economist at the Department of Commerce in charge of exports to Russia and its satellites. The conviction had been based on his denial that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party and he had been sentenced to five years in prison and a fine. The decision largely rested on improper instructions by the trial court to the jury regarding the definition of membership in the Communist Party, leaving the definition too indefinite. The trial court had instructed that while the act of joining the party was crucial, the jury did not have to find "evidence of the very act of joining the party", but rather that he was a member of the party and was accepted as such by the parties. The evidence had failed to show that he possessed a membership card but did show that he had used a party post office box to receive mail. The Court of Appeals rested its decision on the peculiar requirements of proof in perjury cases. The case was remanded for new trial.

Mr. Remington would be retried, again convicted, and this time would have his conviction affirmed by two members of the same three-judge panel of the Second Circuit in late 1953, with retired Judge Learned Hand dissenting based on prosecutorial misconduct in the examination, during the grand jury phase of the first case, of Mr. Remington's wife, the only witness establishing Mr. Remington's perjury, plus the fact that her testimony was prevented by the marital privilege. He would have not only reversed but also ordered the indictment dismissed. The majority found that because the alleged perjury in the second case took place in the first trial, it was not significant that the first trial might have been premised on a defective indictment because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Major General Charles Willoughby, former Army intelligence chief for General MacArthur in the Far East, told HUAC that he believed the same kind of Communist spying and intrigue disclosed in Japan in the Sorge ring during World War II was ongoing in the U.S.

Yeah, and his brilliant intelligence had failed to recognize the threat of the North Koreans gathering before the 38th parallel in Korea in the weeks preceding the June 25, 1950 attack on the South, as well as the threat posed by the Communist Chinese the prior October and November, before the entry in force to the war by the Chinese and their bloodily forcing the retreat south of U.N. forces who were camped in the vicinity of the Yalu River along the Chinese border and otherwise north of the 38th parallel after General MacArthur's "home by Christmas" offensive strategy had miserably failed.

Before the Senate Internal Security Committee, Louis Budenz testified that he was a member of the Communist Party until 1945 and that the Institute of Pacific Relations, focus of the Committee hearings, was "completely under control" of the Communists, who spoke of it as "the little red schoolhouse". He said that he knew from "official communications within the conspiracy" that Owen Lattimore and Frederick Vanderbilt Field were Communists. Mr. Lattimore had denied the charge and Mr. Field had once refused to answer Congressional questions regarding his political views.

Senator Tom Connolly, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced that he would propose a one billion dollar cut in the economic aid section of the Administration's 8.5 billion dollar foreign aid bill. The House had cut the total aid proposal by one billion dollars, of which 711 million was economic aid. Senator Connolly said that his Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee jointly considering the foreign aid bill, had reached two tentative decisions, one to retain within the State Department the Point Four program of technical assistance to underdeveloped nations, rather than placing it under a new agency, as proposed by the House bill, and also to seek in a separate bill twelve million dollars as the nation's contribution to the International Children's Fund.

In New York, the 45,000-ton battleship Wisconsin became stuck in the Hudson River mud opposite Manhattan this date, until thirteen towboats pulled it free, as thousands of onlookers observed.

In Decatur, Ga., following hours of questioning by police, a 48-year old black man admitted raping and strangling a woman who was his landlord.

The hurricane which had passed during the weekend over Jamaica and had roiled within the Gulf of Mexico after hitting the Yucatán Peninsula, hit Tampico this date with somewhat diminished force, packing 78 mph winds, having dissipated from its maximum strength of 130 mph just 60 miles east of Tampico. Early reports said that fifteen persons had been injured by debris. Electric power was cut to avoid harm to persons from fallen wires. It was described by veteran journalists as the worst storm to hit the city in 15 years, the prior storm having resulted in many lives lost and great damage.

The Great Northern Paper Co., one of the producers from which The News obtained its newsprint, announced this date an increase of $10 per ton in the price of paper, effective September 1. It followed the same increase by another company which also served as a source of newsprint for The News, which had become effective July 1. The increases boosted the price from $109 to $119 per ton.

That means that your cat or dog floor-awareness mat, following by a day your intensely attentive intercommunication with the print, would be that much more valuable. Make sure that your pet understands and fully appreciates that fact.

On the editorial page, "The Engineers Are at It Again" tells of the Army Corps of Engineers being up to their old tricks, as a House subcommittee, chaired by North Carolina Congressman John Kerr, had charged that the Engineers had estimated the cost of its flood control, rivers and harbors projects at 5.9 billion dollars, whereas the original estimate given by the Corps had been 2.6 billion. Much of that 3.3 billion dollar increase could be attributed to higher prices but the subcommittee had estimated that 800 million of the increase was the result of "insufficient engineering and planning and estimating" along with "omissions".

It finds that for years the Corps of Engineers and its arch-rival, the Bureau of Reclamation, had been competing for pork-barrel river development projects. Because of this competition, each agency had submitted plans and estimates below cost and then, after the project was approved, undertook to resurvey and then increased the bill. Because of lack of control of the two agencies, they often made duplicating surveys.

The Hoover Commission on efficiency in government had recommended that the rivers, harbors and flood control activities of the Corps of Engineers be transferred to the Department of Interior, and that a Drainage Area Advisory Commission be established to coordinate water development and control projects for each major drainage area. It finds that recommendation to make sense. It therefore compliments Congressman Kerr for airing of the latest bungle by the Corps, but also urges that if he really wanted to get to the point he would place pressure on the House for adoption of the Hoover Commission recommendations.

"More on the Brimley Affair" tells of the North Carolina State Federation of Labor having adopted a resolution at its Asheville convention, strongly criticizing both Senators Clyde Hoey and Willis Smith, as well as Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina, for their defense of Dr. Ralph Brimley, superintendent of Forsyth County schools, after he had stated to a group of local teachers that he disapproved of their contemplation of formation of a union, in consequence of which, the Army, after the AFL had complained that Dr. Brimley was unfit to serve on an Army-sponsored educational mission to Japan, removed him from that mission.

No one had questioned the right of the AFL to protest anything it chose, but the Army's action, in relieving Dr. Brimley without any investigation of the charge, was totally indefensible. Secretary of Defense Marshall had written to Senator Hoey that the Army had not sought to evaluate the merits of the issue involved but only wanted to eliminate anyone from the mission who was the subject of any controversy. Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, also in a letter to Senator Hoey, had made a similar statement.

The fact that the Army had made no investigation of the claims of AFL, and that no protest had arisen from the educators, students, or citizens of Japan regarding Dr. Brimley, the entire decision rested on the Army not wanting anyone involved in controversy to be part of the mission. Such a reaction, it posits, made a mockery of democratic education, which had as a hallmark the free debate of ideas and the right to one's own opinion.

It comments that the President's recent words denouncing irresponsible "smear attacks" were made suspect by the Army's action in this matter, bowing to the whims of the American labor movement. It finds the Army's defense of its action to be "pathetically weak", and not strengthened by the statement of the North Carolina Federation of Labor.

"Uncle Sam to the Rescue" finds that two recent developments involving Government assistance to cotton growers had posed interesting precedents. The first was that the Department of Agriculture had announced a price support program for cottonseed meal, oil and linters. It wonders what the end of support prices would be once they went beyond the basic agricultural commodity. If cottonseed oil was to be supported, it asks then whether also its byproducts, refined cooking oils or mayonnaise, ought be included. If wheat was to be supported, why not flour?

The second precedent-setting development was the agitation among the cotton state members of Congress for a support price for cotton higher than the present loan level, based on 90 percent of parity. To give cotton a support price higher than parity was to establish a precedent for other agricultural commodities.

It hopes that such action was simply "window-dressing" for the constituents back home, for to lift cotton support prices higher than parity was "sheer folly", especially at a time when all restrictions on production had been ceased because of the Korean war.

Drew Pearson, en route through Europe, provides some spot observations gathered in various parts of Germany regarding one of the most problematic issues in preventing war or winning a war after it was started.

In Frankfort, High Commissioner John J. McCloy, who he regards as performing a "remarkably fine job", was supposed to be the top U.S. representative in Germany, able to set aside German court decrees, give or withhold American money, and able to order the U.S. Army to get out of one area or another. But, he notes, when it came to Russians escaping from behind the Iron Curtain, Mr. McCloy had about as much influence with the Army as a Communist youth demonstrator in East Germany. The military simply ignored his orders.

Young, seemingly callow C.I.A. agents were so successful at alienating these Russian refugees that many of them had decided that Russia was a better place than the West and had returned home. Just outside Frankfort was a top-secret camp, of which even Mr. McCloy had no knowledge regarding its exact whereabouts or the number of Russians in it. Mr. Pearson reports that there were at one time about 2,000 Russians officers who had fled the Eastern sector to the American zone, anxious to help the U.S., but for many months had simply sat, ate and been interviewed by young counter-intelligence agents.

In East Berlin, there were about 300,000 members of the Red Army who had to camp behind barbed wire to keep the Russian soldiers from deserting. Even so, many had done so and more would have, had there been encouragement of any kind regarding favorable treatment after their arrival in the West. He suggests that the fact that these soldiers lived near the West was a major problem for the Red Army, as Russia was completely aware of the threat of desertion. Russia also recalled, undoubtedly, that the Kaiser's army had not defeated the Czar in 1917 but rather that defeat resulted from the shrewdness of the German general staff in sending Trotsky and Lenin in a sealed train from Switzerland into Russia, leading in turn to the start of the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately placing Stalin in power. Stalin did not want that process to occur again, in reverse.

"But the dapper young counter-intelligence agents and [CIA director] General Bedell Smith's cloak-and-dagger dicks are either too young or too dense to remember it."

He closes with a prediction that if the U.S. arranged with Brazil, Paraguay, Kenya, South Africa and other unpopulated countries to set up a system for handling Russian refugees, and if word were to be broadcast to the Red Army in East Germany and Austria, it would be impossible for the Kremlin to keep an army in both of those latter countries. He suggests that such a refugee resettlement plan could be a Point Four program which "might save the peace of the world".

Marquis Childs tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy writing to the Republicans of the Senate Rules Committee that he would not ask them to sign his minority report regarding the investigation into the Republican Senate campaign in Maryland the previous fall. But the other Republicans on the Committee had already indicated they did not intend to sign it, having decided to side with the Democrats in condemning the tactics used in the Maryland campaign, fed by the stump speeches of Senator McCarthy seeking to align incumbent Senator Millard Tydings with Communist sympathies. Senator Kenneth Wherry, as Minority Leader, had already told Senator Margaret Chase Smith that he approved the majority report, but in the end had adopted the middle position by stating that he favored a broader investigation than just the Maryland campaign, a safe stance with which no one would disagree.

Mr. Childs indicates that it was the second time that the Republican leadership had backed away from Senator McCarthy, the first time having been when a behind-scenes effort had occurred to block placing him on the Senate Republican Policy Committee, with which the other Republicans had gone along. Senator Smith had at that time drafted a Declaration of Conscience, warning against the danger of the smear technique, and had asked six Republicans, and only six, to join her, which each did. She had then, on her own initiative, made a speech on the Senate floor in connection with that declaration, and without prior knowledge of the other signers.

He concludes that the political winds had shifted, such that what had been popular a year before regarding Senator McCarthy's technique had now been shown to have backfired politically, and the President, never accused of being an inept politician, appeared determined to make McCarthyism a major issue in the 1952 elections.

"Pitchmen of the Press", in the fifteenth and last installment from the series originally published in June-July, 1950 in the Providence (R.I.) Journal, for the fourth edition in a row regards the column of Westbrook Pegler, finding that in its 14-week study of the column conducted between January and April, 1950, Mr. Pegler had invoked several times his own peculiarly illogical syllogism, contrary to the traditional form: "1) All lemons are sour; 2) This fruit is a lemon; 3) Therefore, it follows that this fruit must be sour."

On March 4, he had used this new brand of logic in the following manner: 1) "Mr. Truman is demanding a law from Congress which is called an anti-lynching law." 2) "All good citizens oppose lynching." 3) "It follows that Mr. Truman is not a good citizen because he insists on excusing all lynchings of innocent victims by mobs of union goons." 4) "So, obviously, its advocates favor lynching by their own cohorts." 5) "The principle here is practically identical with that of the Nazis in their ferocious eradication of the town of Lidice in the war."

Thus, with this form of logic, Mr. Pegler had proved that because the President had asked for an anti-lynching law, he was endorsing the principle by which the Nazis had wiped out a whole town during the war, (for supposedly harboring the individuals who had fatally shot Reinhard Heydrich in late May, 1942 in Prague).

He had gone on to say that if Selma, Ala., had a lynching and it seemed to a Federal authority that the police and sheriff were remiss, "then all Selma would have to pay", that in contrast to his hypothetical extended to Flint, Mich., which, should it have another criminal insurrection under the auspices of the CIO, "that would be no lynching."

He had also said that if unions were to succeed totally in the country, then every worker would be a member of some union and competition would die.

Launching into a corollary of this principle, Mr. Pegler had believed he had turned up a scoundrel from the Confederacy from whom Eleanor Roosevelt had descended, one Rufus Brown Bullock of Georgia. But her actual kinfolk in Georgia, whose surname was spelled "Bulloch", then took considerable umbrage, indicating that Rufus Bullock was a Yankee and no kin to the Bullochs of Georgia or Mrs. Roosevelt. On March 23, while admitting the error, he counted it reasonable for the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt had not disclosed in her memoir the Pegler-supposed affair between FDR and Mrs. Winthrop Rutherford and her Pegler-deduced extramarital relationship with Earl Miller, the omissions of which, Mr. Pegler asserted, had led him to believe that she had also concealed her Confederate progenitor. He had even gone so far as to say, "… I make few mistakes and never lie."

Similarly, he also tended to engage in guilt by association, a weapon "so admired by certain other columnists". In describing a psychiatrist who had appeared in the Alger Hiss trial, Mr. Pegler reported that he was a crony of a doctor who had come from Russia after the Kerensky and Lenin revolutions, suggesting that those revolutions were Communist, and that because this doctor had been in Russia at the time and was known to be friendly to the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist was in sympathy somehow with Communists.

On another occasion, he used similar logic to show that Marshall Field was pro-Communist, because he had a lawyer whose sister, also a lawyer, had represented Communists in court one time.

In his open letter to Secretary of State Acheson regarding homosexuals in the State Department, Mr. Pegler had said, after repeatedly using vulgar terms regarding homosexuals: "By the way, have you checked with Harvard lately on the courses which are offered for young men of distinction who have heard the call of the Wilde and are thinking of taking up careers in the Department of State? Is there a course in millinery there? What about flower arrangements? Fair Harvard must keep in step. I think I will write to the proper official just to check up. What is his title? Duchess?"

He had engaged in this sarcasm based on the Loyalty Review Board having released from the Department 91 homosexuals, thus leading him to the conclusion that Mr. Acheson necessarily must also be a homosexual and that because he had attended Harvard, Harvard had to be a homosexual institution. But, it indicates, the fly in the ointment was that Mr. Acheson had actually attended Yale. It adds that had he gotten the institution correct, he could have turned his indictment on yet another enemy, Henry Luce, who had also gone to Yale.

He also engaged in quite a bit of contradiction. On February 24, he commented on the exclusive interview which New York Times columnist Arthur Krock had obtained from the President. He confided that he had attempted to obtain the same exclusive interview, but was turned down because he had not promoted the President in the 1948 campaign. He then immediately said that neither had Mr. Krock.

On January 10, he had written that he still found himself referred to as "a labor baiter by men who were demonstrably harsh and greedy enemies of labor" and winced because he believed some of the rank-and-file "and even some of the people who are supposed to be intelligent" might believe them. Having thereby insulted the rank-and-file, he went on to say: "I hope the foregoing, respectfully submitted, will not be construed as an admission that unionism in any of the forms that we have seen in this country is fit for anything but to be blown to hell."

Also in January, he had attacked the Washington Post for an editorial which indicated that during the Thirties there were widespread illusions about Communism, questioning with incredulity how widespread those illusions were, stating that he was never victimized by them and asking his readers rhetorically whether they were. Then, three days later, on January 31, he stated, in seeming contradiction: "It is possible that many influential men and women were victims of those widespread illusions about Communism." It points out that during the Thirties, Mr. Pegler missed an invitation from the Communist magazine New Masses to do an article, but wrote to them, "Hope there'll be a return date." In 1935, he had given an interview to the Daily Worker, in which he said that he thought the latest plans of the Communist Party for a farmer-labor movement was a good idea.

He had called the late Heywood Broun, once his best friend, a Communist, as Mr. Broun, newly converted to Catholicism, lay dying of pneumonia in December, 1939. (Mr. Broun, whom Cash dubbed the "pink walrus", died on December 19, eight days after the piece appeared, after having wandered into the freezing New York night some days earlier and caught pneumonia.) Mr. Pegler had also called Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom he had once played croquet at the Hyde Park estate, a pro-Communist. In 1940, he had called William Randolph Hearst, not yet Mr. Pegler's employer, a "never to be adequately damned demagogue and historic scoundrel".

The piece finds from these facts that it was "fascinating to ponder what Pegler would do if he ever went to work on a man with a background", in terms of "Communist" and demagogic connections, such as his own.

Well, utilizing his syllogism, there would only be one thing to do and that would be to form one's own chapter of the John Birch Society, preferably deep in the heart of Texas, or up on Bear Mountain.

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