The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 13, 1951
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied troops, in less than three hours of fighting, had gained another commanding mountain peak, this one northeast of Kumhwa, in their effort to drive the Communists from the hills in east-central Korea. The enemy had put up only light resistance. The same troops had gained another peak and seven surrounding ridges in the same area the previous day. An allied officer said that there had been a definite decrease in Communist strength in the sector.
In air action, three Russian-built MIG-15s shot down an American F-51 Mustang fighter in the fifth straight day of aerial battles over the northwest sector of Korea.
The Air Force disclosed that it was forming its first guided missile squadron, equipped with a new "pilotless bomber". The new squadron was being formed at the guided missile center in Cocoa, Fla., and would begin operation October 1. The missile was launched from the ground rather than deployed from the belly of a large plane.
In the Senate investigation of the charge that DNC chairman William Boyle had wielded political influence on the RFC to obtain a loan for a printing firm in St. Louis, which had paid him a fee at around the time it received the loan, which Mr. Boyle had said was a legal fee having nothing to do with the loan, a witness, the former treasurer of the company, testified that in early 1949, Mr. Boyle had planned to influence the decision of the RFC through pressure to be exerted through the White House to provide the loan. The witness, however, said that he had asked an intermediary not to go forward with the pressure as the firm had been receiving complete cooperation from the RFC, and the intermediary agreed not to do it. After Mr. Boyle had been retained by the firm, the RFC granted the loan of $645,000 subsequent to it having failed three times previously to obtain loans through the agency. Earlier during the hearings, the RFC examiner who approved the loan testified that he had never discussed it with Mr. Boyle and did not even know him.
The National Production Authority announced a new "DX" priority rating to try to break the production bottleneck in urgent military and atomic programs. The new designation, it said, would be an emergency device, strictly limited in its use and would take precedence over the current standard "DO" priority rating, meaning "defense order".
Britain's Board of Trade this date announced that it was stopping British ships from making deliveries of cargo to Iran because of the continuing oil nationalization dispute. Earlier in the week, the British Treasury had stated that it was canceling financial and economic concessions to Iran.
Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, after leaving a 40-minute conference with the President to report on his recent trip to Korea and other countries in the Far East, called for "much closer political and military alliances" among the free nations in the Pacific. He described the conversation as "cordial". He said that there was no discussion of domestic politics or General Eisenhower. A reporter, asking about rumors that the President might appoint Governor Dewey to become Secretary of State, asked whether there was any discussion of his becoming a member of the Cabinet, to which the Governor responded that there was none.
In Miami, a Dade County Court had found that a bride's trousseau included only her clothes, leading a jury to determine that a store owner had violated his lease for a "trousseau shop" by holding auctions of silver plate, jewelry and china. His attorney had argued that the word "trousseau" derived from the French for "discover" and thus included everything a bride took with her, including silver, jewelry and china.
The judge should have prepared an interrogative verdict form in which he asked only whether the groom on the wedding cake understood the cost of tea in China.
It was announced in Perpignan, France, that a French DC-3 plane was missing with 36 passengers and three crewmen aboard during a flight from Toulouse to Oran in North Africa.
Vic Reinemer of The News, in the fourth of his six-part series on the Hoover Commission report of 1947 regarding waste and duplication of services in Government agencies and its recommendations for reorganization to eliminate that waste, looks again at the Veterans Administration, this time with the focus on veterans hospitals.
In Raleigh, the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Walter P. Stacy, 66, died suddenly of a heart attack at his apartment in a Raleigh hotel, where he lived alone. A year earlier he had undergone treatment for high blood pressure but his condition had improved. A practical nurse who had been attending him said that he could not speak when she arrived and died shortly afterward. During his career, in addition to having been the Chief Justice since 1925, he had been called upon by Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman to assist in settling labor disputes. He had been appointed to become Chief in 1925 by Governor Angus McLean of Lumberton, Governor from 1925 to 1929, the latter having been a partner in a law firm in Lumberton in which Mr. Stacy's brother, Horace, had been a member since 1919. A case vitiating a judicial finding of contempt, decided the prior June, was the last decision which he announced.
On the second front page, Mary Curry of The News, because there had been so many Confederate flags flying of late, visits a man who sold them.
On the editorial page, "The Dilemma of Civil Defense" finds it problematic in a period of half-hot, half-cold war to conduct mobilization, including civil defense preparedness. Congress had provided, through the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, for the organization and training of millions of volunteer Americans and special fire, police, communications, medical and rescue squads. But the Congress had not appropriated enough money to expedite the program.
The Civil Defense administrator, Millard Caldwell, had asserted that "protection of the home front and its ability to support our defenses, whether they be military or psychological, is the keystone of the whole structure." He believed that an enemy would strike at that home front initially. The Department of Defense had estimated that 70 percent of planes in an enemy air raid would be able to pass through the network of defenses surrounding the nation.
Congressman Clarence Cannon of Missouri, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had said that if war came, the country would lose entire cities and millions would die. He posited that firefighting and hospitalization efforts would be a drop in the bucket in such an event, and that the only hope was to avoid war entirely by being so strong that no enemy would venture an attack. It finds that a weak point in his argument, however, was that part of the means of resisting attack was a strong home front, a part of civil defense.
It finds that, on balance, the degree of danger was inestimable, and so avoids venturing any answer to the dilemma.
In "inestimable", incidentally, the piece uses one of those words which ought have a different meaning, based on its positive back formation, "estimable", that is to say "inestimable" ought mean without esteem.
"Marshall's Retirement" comments on the decision of Secretary of Defense Marshall to retire, finds that the country had lost one of its "best public servants, in whom the great majority of Americans have complete confidence." He had returned to public service after retiring as Army chief of staff following World War II, with his popularity at an all-time high, then became Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, again retired, and again re-emerged from retirement at the urging of the President in the wake of the start of the Korean War a year earlier.
Despite the attacks on his loyalty by Senator Joseph McCarthy and men of similar inclination, he continued to be considered one of the greatest of all Americans, and his retirement was overdue at age 70.
"Political Prophesy [sic]" tells of two South Carolina readers venturing political prophecies in the letters column this date, and ventures to "presage the possibility of fulfillment of their predictions".
Thomas Miller, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, had indicated that he and former Governor Strom Thurmond believed that the South had "in the hollow of its hand" the power to "throw off the yoke of the bosses" in the 1948 presidential election, and he thought that the seed which had thus been sowed, would bear fruit in 1952.
The other writer believed that with Judge E. Yates Webb retired and Senator Clyde Hoey getting old, the "Shelby dynasty", the Hoey-Gardner-Webb triumvirate, was passing and that North Carolina would go Republican within a decade.
The piece thinks that neither was likely to occur, especially the former. While it was not enthusiastic about the continued tenure of many Democratic incumbents, it also believes that the likelihood that North Carolina would go Republican was remote. But, it adds, that if General Eisenhower were to be nominated by the Republicans in 1952, the state might become enthusiastic about him and vote for him. They would not be enthusiastic about Senator Taft for many of the same reasons that they would not vote for a "States' Righter".
"It will take a little more liberalism and a little less bombast than either the Taft or Dixiecrat camps have yet exhibited to wean North Carolina away from the Democratic Party."
But by 1968, former Vice-President Nixon would find the winning formula: tell them what they want to hear in the spring and then run like hell back to the center in the fall.
"How Much Is a Billion?" finds that most people could scarcely imagine a million dollars, let alone a billion. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, however, had provided a new conception of a billion dollars, saying that an old man had sent him a letter indicating that he should look at his watch and observe and consider the second hand as it moved through each interval, then think of every minute, every hour, every day, every night, every week, every month, every year, and in 32 years, the second hand would have ticked a billion times.
"Move Over, Casey Jones" tells of both Casey Jones and Steve Broady, the latter who took "Old
97" on its famous last run from Lynchburg to Danville, having
to move over, in favor of Frazek Jarda, the Czech engineer who drove
his locomotive and passenger train into West Germany from
Czechoslovakia to defect. He, like his predecessor, Steve, had ridden
"a mighty rough road" and had also made quite a "jump"
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "'Menneenochee' Dam?" tells of the naming controversy surrounding the Buggs Island Dam having now taken another turn, with the suggestion that it be named for the Menneenochee, a piece-loving tribe of Indians who had occupied part of the Roanoke Valley and taught other Indians an Algonquin language which served as a kind of intertribal Esperanto.
The Chapel Hill Weekly favored a place name for it rather than that of North Carolina Representative John Kerr, who had introduced the legislation for the dam and whose district, downstream from it, would benefit from its flood control.
For the sake of brevity, it favors naming the dam for Congressman Kerr, but notes that other places and states had coped with multisyllabic American Indian names and so would be content with Menneenochee.
It's pretty simple. Just remember "good night" in Spanish, then sound out "many" in English, skip the "buenos", drop the "s" on "noches" and voilà. Many nights with no cheese... Of course, there is always the problem of forgetting the mnemonic device or part of it.
Drew Pearson finds it peculiar that the Senate was reluctant to investigate graft in the sale of American war supplies to Nationalist China and the manner in which some of those supplies had been sold to Communist China. The China lobby had a major role in the enterprise, including huge fortunes made by Chinese in cornering the soybean market, money made by Chiang Kai-shek's relatives in selling tin to the Communists, and a phony gasoline deal attempted by the Nationalist Air Force.
Senator Lyndon "'Lying Down'" Johnson's Investigating Committee had been in possession of some of those facts for months but had done nothing.
He provides more facts, which showed how an American admiral persuaded General MacArthur's headquarters to release 62,000 rounds of Navy shells a month after the start of the Korean War, when ammunition was needed by the U.N. forces, with large profits paid to two members of the China lobby, both "five percenters", that is, paid a commission to grease the wheels in Washington. He provides the details.
General Eisenhower had told friends confidentially that he would run as a Democrat if Senator Taft were to obtain the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1952. He regarded the Taft policy of fighting Communist China as a "catastrophe". Mr. Pearson notes parenthetically that if Senator Taft were to be nominated by the Republicans, it would be likely that the President would run again, thus depriving General Eisenhower of the chance to run as a Democrat. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, Senator Taft's chief strategist, wanted to have Senator Taft go to Europe and stage a conference with General Eisenhower and then announce that he would follow any European policy the General proposed, thus neutralizing their apparent differences.
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, desiring to make a trip to Washington to see the President, was told by the White House that the President was too busy.
Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was now running the Soviet Foreign Office, with titular Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinski not having been seen around the Foreign Office for weeks.
Doctors believed that the year's epidemic of polio was about over, with about 30,000 cases, still too high but far fewer than the 42,000 reported two years earlier.
Philip Murray, president of the CIO, was not planning to step down immediately, as rumored, but would be easily re-elected at the convention the following November. He would, Mr. Pearson indicates, step down a year later, possibly to be succeeded either by Walter Reuther of the UAW or David McDonald of the United Steelworkers. Since both of those unions, however, were rivals, it would be more likely that the presidency would fall to the head of a smaller union, such as Jake Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.
Joseph Alsop finds that the testimony provided by Louis Budenz the prior week to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, regarding Communist affiliations of John Carter Vincent, former head of the State Department's Far Eastern Affairs division, and presently the American representative at Tangier, to be contrary to the facts, as elucidated by the anti-Communist report to FDR by then-Vice-President Henry Wallace in spring, 1944 after his trip to China, accompanied by Mr. Vincent, who provided him key input to that report. The report, with which Mr. Alsop had dealt on Tuesday, had recommended that General Albert Wiedemeyer replace General Joseph Stilwell and that, per Chiang Kai-shek's request for a personal emissary of the President, Patrick Hurley be appointed in that role. He ventures that had these recommendations immediately been undertaken at that time, the catastrophes of the Nationalists in China in the summer of 1944 could have been averted. President Roosevelt eventually did follow that advice in the fall but it was too late.
He thus concludes that Mr. Budenz's testimony to the subcommittee was false, as further shown by his testimony in July, 1947 to the Senate investigating committee chaired by then-Senator Millard Tydings, saying then that, while he did not deny that Mr. Vincent might be a Communist, he refused to make the charge directly as he said he had to be "careful" in his statements. But now he was saying that "from official reports" which he had received, he knew that Mr. Vincent was a "member of the Communist Party". He also stated that he had heard in "official Communist Party circles" that Mr. Vincent and Owen Lattimore were members of the Communist Party traveling with Mr. Wallace, during the trip to China in 1944. (They were fellow travelers.) But the testimony, given the decidedly anti-Communist nature of the report and its recommendations, simply was not consistent with the facts as they occurred.
He also reveals the winner of their contest of September 4, regarding the parallel in history on which quotes were abstracted with the U.S. and the Soviet Union substituted appropriately, that being one Theodore Geiger of Washington, who correctly identified it as the struggle between Rome and Carthage, as elucidated by Theodor Mommsen in The History of Rome, the Dickson translation, 1894 edition.
Wait just a minute, here. Foul of
foul deeds incarnadine!
Marquis Childs discusses the Ford Foundation, the largest philanthropic organization in the country, with a half-billion or more in accumulated funds, which could generate 30 to 40 million dollars annually, and which had a board of directors equal to the task of distributing that money wisely, headed by Paul Hoffman, former Marshall Plan administrator.
It planned a new program for India to double its agricultural yield per acre, at present abysmally low. In Pakistan, it planned a technical high school for young men and a domestic science school for young women. In the Near East, it planned to coordinate the various efforts being made by experts to raise the level of agriculture.
It also planned to establish a chair
of philosophy at the American university of Beirut, to be filled, at
least part of the time, by Charles Malik
A letter writer from Florence, S.C., a State Representative, as indicated in the above editorial, responds to the August 15 editorial, "Shutting Out the People", finding it very timely at present, but even more so had it been published three years earlier. He says that he was a presidential elector in 1948—presumably for Dixiecrat nominee Strom Thurmond who had carried the state of South Carolina. He says that in 1952, the Southern states would not vote for Truman, either in the convention or in the general election. "If they do, the country is sunk."
A letter writer from Campobello, S.C., also to whom the above editorial refers, provides his prediction that North Carolina would go Republican by circa 1960.
A letter writer tells of having been driving the previous Sunday afternoon along Independence Boulevard when, without warning, he found himself trapped in a traffic bottleneck caused by a parade sponsored by "Daddy Grace" and his fanatical followers, causing him a one hour delay. He wants to know from the Charlotte Police whether they knew in advance of such parades and whether they could block off the routes to avoid inconvenience to motorists.
The editors respond that the police knew about parades of that type and that 25 police officers had been assigned to direct traffic during the Grace parade, that the Department had advertised the time and place.
A letter writer from Milwaukee
encloses the September issue of their trade publication, Hobby-Model
Merchandising News, of which he was editor, which had carried an
editorial prompted by the model airplane ban in Charlotte in Freedom
Park. He expresses appreciation for the fight which the newspaper,
along with the Charlotte Observer, were waging, and intends to
give the matter national publicity
Framed Edition
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