The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 26, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.N. command rejected another Communist suggestion that the Korean ceasefire talks resume immediately, the allies insisting that arrangements first be made to prevent further interruptions. The conference in Kaesong between liaison officers lasted 80 minutes this date, after having abruptly ended the previous day 50 minutes into the sesssion when the Communists angrily stalked out. The liaison talks would resume the following day.
In air action, allied pilots destroyed or damaged 14 Communist planes over northwest Korea in the largest all-jet battles in history to occur in a single day, as 256 jets from both sides were engaged. Seventy-seven allied jets did battle with 120 Russian-type MIGs, in the largest single jet fight to that point in history. It was believed that American planes had destroyed one enemy jet and damaged four others, without losing any planes. In the afternoon, 24 American Thunderjets engaged battle with 35 MIGs, with one of the latter probably destroyed and eight damaged. There was no report on American losses during the afternoon.
In ground fighting, allied forces again attacked at "Heartbreak Ridge" in east-central Korea.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee sought the President's help with Britain's continuing oil dispute with Iran. Britain denounced the order by the Iranian Government that the 300 British technicians at the Abadan refinery quit by October 3. Prime Minister Attlee's statement to the President made clear the intention of the British to stay at the refinery.
John Scali reports that the U.S., Britain and France this date had declared their willingness to provide Italy a free hand to rearm as an equal partner in NATO. The Big Three were willing to lift the treaty restrictions imposed in 1947 regarding Italy's armed forces. The three nations also vowed to make every effort to obtain membership in the U.N. for Italy, which had thus far been blocked by Russia. Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi of Italy was concluding his three-day visit with the President and Secretary of State Acheson. No mention was made of whether a settlement between Yugoslavia and Italy regarding Trieste was prerequisite to changes in the treaty.
The President spoke of the dedication of four equestrian statues presented to the United States by the people of Italy, placed at the entrances to the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the Rock Creek Parkway facing the Lincoln Memorial. He stated that if Russia continued to block Italian membership in the U.N., other avenues had to be found to enable Italy to play its full role in upholding U.N. principles.
As promised the previous day, the first Gallup poll appears, sampling public opinion on the personal popularity of the President showing that 31 percent of the eligible voters approved the way the President was handling his job, while 57 percent disapproved and 12 percent expressed no opinion. The previous May-June, only 24 percent had so responded with approval while 61 percent had disapproved and 15 percent had no opinion. It presents a table of the changes between May-June polling and mid-August polling. A year earlier, shortly after the beginning of the Korean War, 46 percent had approved of the job the President was doing. His high mark in this term had come at the beginning of 1949, just after his re-election, at 69 percent approval. His high mark overall while President had been 87 percent in July, 1945, at the time of Potsdam and just after the successful conclusion of the U.N. Charter Conference in San Francisco. That popularity mark had exceeded even the 84 percent all-time high of FDR. Mr. Gallup suggests that the question was whether this recent uptick was the beginning of a long climb back to his late 1948-49 popularity. During 1948, his popularity sank as low as 36 percent, in April of that year. The increase appeared to coincide with the truce talks in Korea. Sixty percent of the voters believed that the President would run again. In a recent poll, Chief Justice Fred Vinson was shown to beat Senator Taft in a hypothetical presidential race, whereas the President was behind the Senator.
A lawyer in Washington told the Senate subcommittee investigating DNC chairman William Boyle and his receipt of a fee from a St. Louis printing firm which had obtained an RFC loan, which Mr. Boyle said were legal fees having nothing to do with the RFC loan, stated that he had purchased from Mr. Boyle 23 client cases at $150,000, which he estimated would bring in $432,250 in fees. Most of the cases involved Government agencies. The largest single case, valued at $75,000, involved a 40-million dollar railroad reorganization. He said that since Mr. Boyle had sold the law practice to him, neither he nor the Democratic National Committee had referred him a single case. He said that the St. Louis printing firm was not among the cases he had purchased. He also said that Mr. Boyle received no part of the $500 per month retainer fee which the witness now received from that company. Mr. Boyle would be testifying the next day.
In Bainbridge, Md., Seaman Bruce Hopping was restricted to the Naval Training Center after he admitted handing out mimeographed handbills suggesting that the other sailors at the base ought write their Congressman about conditions at the base, especially regarding the Navy chow. After a thorough investigation, it was determined by the admiral in charge of the Fifth Naval District that the offense did not merit a court-martial, as had been previously reported.
In Buford, Ga., four of the six escaped fugitives from Georgia's "Little Alcatraz" prison had been caught, but the other two, both brothers, remained at large after escaping from a work detail at the rock quarry. The two brothers were from the vicinity of Gaffney, S.C., and so the officers of that county were keeping a close watch on the home of one of the two, as well as the acquaintances which they had in the county.
In London, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said that the Canadian-American tour of Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been postponed because of the illness of King George VI, who had just undergone a serious lung operation.
Hurricanes, says the "Our Weather" box, leave behind outbreaks of hay fever.
Dick Dunkel, sportswriter, found that the University of Georgia had the edge over UNC in the coming Saturday football game—which Georgia would win in Chapel Hill by a score of 28 to 16.
We shall go out on a limb and say that UNC, back nearly to its full complement of players for the first time this season, will beat the University of Miami in Coral Gables Thursday night, 31 to 28—and that Georgetown Prep will lose, when the showdown finally comes, 51 to 49—because unless you are an ardent little Republican twerp unable to distinguish the forest from the trees and amorality from morality, you really ought to know better, even by age 17.
And to that idiot, former NBA boy who ran for governor of Oregon in 2010 and made the outrageous statement in reference to the current Supreme Court nominee while both attended Yale: "Did he get inebriated sometimes? Yes. Did I? Yes. Just like every other college kid in America." —You know what you can do with it, you drunk punk: take your goddamned stupor and your stupid, irresponsible, moronic arrogance, and your little ginned-up jug of punch and shove it where the moon don't shine, and then sit down and rotate on it.
A lot of us had the decency and dignity consistently to say, "No," in high school and in college, and to damn any social consequences attending it, even though we faced the pressure of a draft call-up that you little twerps never had to endure for a minute of your pathetic, useless, spoiled-brat, preppy lives. So, get lost, drunk punk. No, we will not drive you home. Walk, you stumbling drunk jackass. No sympathy, puling little creep.
Statements like that and excusing such reprehensible conduct among teenagers and young, superannuated adolescents is why we have an idiotic, superannuated adolescent in the White House, who does not know the difference between right and wrong and consequently cannot assess it properly in others.
We might find a way to excuse one aberrant episode of outrageous conduct, but not a pattern of it, no matter how long ago it was. Drunks, puling little adolescent drunks, crying in their beer, no matter what else they may have done or not done, should not be on the Supreme Court of the United States, even 35 years later. It is utterly disgusting.
Judgment becomes warped by excessive use of alcohol and this guy's judgment, as distinct from saying what is convenient of the moment to climb the ladder of success, obviously flew out the window a long time ago. Bye, Bye. C'est la vie.
On the editorial page, "Rich Men's Tax Bill" tells of the Senate Finance Committee having approved its new tax bill just a week earlier and finds that the Senators who were presently debating it, replete with its fine print, could not be expected to understand all of its contents. If the bill passed as is, the five-percenters and the get-rich-quick crowd would obtain considerable tax benefits while the low-income and middle-income taxpayers would suffer. The bill had knocked 1.5 billion dollars off the House version, though that bill would not have been sufficient to balance the budget. The Senate version also made the corporate tax increase effective retroactively only to April 1 rather than back to January 1.
It tells of other differences between the two bills, for instance the reduction in the capital gains tax rate and the extension of the family partnership provisions to enable spreading of income among extended family, not just husbands and wives, retroactive to 1939, enabling wartime profits to be shielded from taxation.
Senators Hubert Humphrey, Herbert Lehman and Paul Douglas were intent on plugging loopholes in the bill and unless they succeeded or the House confreres succeeded in retaining some of the provisions of the original House bill, the 1951 tax bill would favor the rich over the lower income and middle income groups.
"How about the Football Parlay?" suggests to the police chief that, after having undertaken his duty to rid the community of slot machines, he ought begin opening his eyes to the football parlay tickets which were being sold all over town and constituted gambling. The football parlay was operated by the syndicates out of the big cities, where they had access to all the information on the various football teams, evaluated it, and then provided a points-spread against which the bettor placed his or her wager. The cards with which to make the bets were distributed in a number of places throughout the city, and had been for years.
"That Russian H-Bomb" remarks on the prediction by Kenneth de Courcy, editor of the British tip sheet, Intelligence Digest, that the Russians would detonate a hydrogen bomb by the following July. He had announced, three weeks before President Truman had done so to the American public, that the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb in August, 1949.
It says it would not get excited about the H-bomb prediction, however ominous it was. There had, after all, been no detected subsequent blasts of atomic bombs in Russia after the first test. And the scientists maintained that it took a few practice tests before the bugs could be eliminated. So it concludes that the prospect of a hydrogen bomb was remote.
Moreover, some of Mr. De Courcy's predictions in back issues had proved not to have taken place and it would trust that if he had any actual concrete information, he would pass it on to the appropriate authorities. It believes that with winter coming in Britain where austerity was the watchword, he was likely looking for a lecture tour in the United States. And if it did not take place the following July, he could rest assured that the American public would be so consumed in politics and the party conventions by then that they would likely forget the failure of the prediction.
After four more atomic bomb tests, the Soviets would detonate their first hydrogen bomb in August, 1953. So, Mr. De Courcy was off by only a year.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "A New Piedmont Crop—Fish", tells of a report from Raleigh that a little fish pond had become as much a part of North Carolina farming as a tractor, because one could raise more fish per acre than any other type of meat, without supporting crops. One saw such little ponds everywhere. Some of them looked more like mud holes, not properly supplied or drained, while many were clear, clean and well-stocked with a variety of fish.
The average such pond extended over 1.8 acres and was built on some marginal land, costing $600 per acre to construct. The head of the department of zoology at N.C. State had said the fertilization of the pond usually cost between $15 and $30 per year. The average such pond produced 400 pounds of fish per acre.
The Piedmont section around
Winston-Salem had its fair share of these fish ponds. (We always
wondered why there were so many of those little ponds around; now we
know. There is really no one around to ask, "Why do we have all
these little ponds around town?" We always assumed they might be
swimming holes or for paddling around in a little boat on hot summer
days, as in Echo Park
It predicts that there would be many more fish ponds in the area and around the state.
An abstract from the Congressional Record presents a Senate colloquy between the presiding officer and Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming, in which the latter stated that an amendment had been amended, to which Senator Paul Douglas inquired of the presiding officer whether a Senator who submitted an amendment had the right to amend or modify it, and upon receiving an affirmative answer, said that he moved to strike out "40" and insert "20", to which the presiding officer said that the modification to the amendment had already been accepted by the Senator submitting the amendment, at which point Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina asked whether an amendment to the amendment as modified was in order, to which the presiding officer responded in the affirmative, that it would be an amendment in the second degree, to which Senator Maybank stated that he moved to amend the amendment as modified by striking out "20" and inserting "10", to which Senator Bourke Hickenlooper stated that he was completely mystified as to what the amendment of Senator O'Mahoney did to the amendment offered by Senator Douglas, to which the presiding officer stated that he would allow further discussion under the unanimous-consent agreement and instructed the clerk again to state the amendment.
The editors add: "Whatever amendment, or amendment to the amendment, or amendment to the amendment as modified (second-degree) it was, it passed."
The "Congressional Quiz" asks a number of questions and provides a number of answers. There are so many today that you will need to read them on your own. Some were self-evident and some had been answered already on the pages of the News. Examples were that war goods were still being exported from the U.S. and its allies to Communist China, but some of the loopholes were being eliminated, along with some of the evasion of the controls, resulting in more controlled trade than a year earlier, that a vetoed bill became law immediately after the veto was overridden by a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress, that the Senate had never made up its mind whether to investigate the China lobby, that the only way to stop a filibuster was through cloture, requiring a vote of two-thirds of the Senate, though the Rules Committee had planned for hearings to hear proposals to make limits to debate easier to effect.
Drew Pearson tells of General Eisenhower being committed to run, if at all in 1952, as a Republican, despite having started his early life as a Democrat. The problem, asserts Mr. Pearson, with the Republicans had been that they were supremely overconfident and believed that they could win "even with a Chinaman". At 19, Dwight Eisenhower had given a rousing Jackson Day dinner speech in Abilene, Kansas, from which Mr. Pearson liberally quotes.
Among the passages was the following: "A leader of a political party who is a clean and fearless fighter and possesses a winning manner is undoubtedly the means of attracting a large number of votes. The young man sees that the more honest and fearless leaders have become disgusted with the actions of the leaders and the party proper. He admires these men greatly but he cannot help but think and remark that they are fighting for many of the same principles which the Democratic Party advocated."
The Abilene News had stated that young Mr. Eisenhower had handled himself well and that the speech was well-received.
Bertram Benedict, of Editorial Research Reports, tells of the two-thirds rule in the Democratic Party, abandoned at the national convention of 1936, now resurfacing because of the Southern backlash to the President's civil rights planks of the platform adopted at the 1948 convention, including support for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission which would ban discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color or religion, a plank advocated only by a minority of the platform committee and eventually substituted with a milder plank which passed only by a simple majority and would not have under a rule requiring a two-thirds super-majority. The Southern delegates could have defeated the latter plank under the two-thirds rule, and even 25 percent support would have allowed effective trading on support for particular issues.
The "Solid South" states had 21.3 percent of the total delegates, but if Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kentucky were included, they would hold 27.6 percent, and if Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and Missouri were added, they would represent a third of the total delegates.
For a motion to change the rules to require the two-thirds majority, it would require a two-thirds majority to pass, though a motion to change the old rules would require only a simple majority. Such a Southern move had been soundly defeated in 1948.
The two-thirds rule had begun in
1832 when the Democrats nominated incumbent President Andrew Jackson.
The President then probably imposed the two-thirds rule to make his
choice for the vice-presidency, Martin Van Buren, neither popular nor
well-known, appear more impressive. It was retained over time by
sheer inertia
In 1932, FDR had proposed abolition of the rule, but then had withdrawn it to preserve party harmony and his own nomination. By 1936, however, there was little opposition to elimination of the rule. The South was placated somewhat by the award of more delegates in future conventions.
Marquis Childs predicts that in light of the revelation regarding influence-peddling to obtain RFC loans, the issue would loom large in the 1952 elections. The problem resulted in part from long-time, one-party rule, and in another part because of the President's lack of understanding of the distinction between proper and improper ways to conduct the public business and his too great sense of political loyalty.
"Trumanism", he maintains, like "McCarthyism", would achieve in the modern lexicon of politics a specific meaning, in the former case, indifference of high authority to favoritism in the conduct of public business, a pejorative term which would lose much of its force should the President step aside and choose not to run in 1952.
None of the favoritism with respect to the printing firm in St. Louis would have been disclosed without the dedicated reportage by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
He says that he had pointed out in early 1949 the connections of William Boyle, then just named vice-chairman of the DNC, to influence-peddling.
The President had recently expressed the belief that prosperity would win the day for the Democrats in 1952 and, posits Mr. Childs, he might be correct. Republicans had withstood the scandal-ridden Harding Administration and were re-elected in 1924 and 1928. But claiming credit for prosperity could be a two-edged sword as it was for Herbert Hoover in 1932, when he also got the blame for the Depression.
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