The Charlotte News
Friday, November 28, 1952
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that millions of South Koreans appeared to believe that President-elect Eisenhower was going to drive the Chinese Communists back into Manchuria. An official Government spokesman said that General Eisenhower represented "the last great hope" of their 22 million people, and that any man on the street would say that he believed the General would drive the Chinese Communists completely out of the country, and so they welcomed him. Seoul was full of anticipation of the General's visit, as more banners than ever were spread across buildings and the gutted skeletons of buildings, and national and metropolitan police guarded main thoroughfares. The Government spokesman said that the Korean people would never tire of parading and practicing every day for the General's welcome. He said that the people were sick and tired of waiting for the war to end, were sick of armistice negotiations which were not getting anything settled. They wanted the division of the country ended and a united Korea. They believed that General Eisenhower would save it. They intended to shower the General with gifts. A welcoming committee of 15 Government officials and 15 civilians would present him with the South Korean flag, Korean costumes, gold ornaments, the nation's highest medal and other gifts, to be presented by President Syngman Rhee.
Be aware that all the gifts in the world from a foreign country could do little but generate sympathy as they all have to be turned over to the U.S. Government.
At the U.N. in New York, the General Assembly's Political Committee this afternoon pushed toward a vote this date on India's compromise plan to end the Korean War after the U.S. had pledged its support, causing adoption to be expected by an overwhelming majority despite bitter Soviet-bloc opposition. The U.S. delegation had accepted changes made to the resolution by the Indian delegation, indicating in more detail the final destination of prisoners who would resist repatriation to their Communist homelands. The U.S. had demanded those changes before supporting the plan. As amended, it would call for creation of a repatriation commission to take charge of all prisoners after an armistice was concluded and for the U.N. to take over resettling of all prisoners not repatriated within five months after the truce. U.S. support ensured that the 20 U.N. allies in the war would support the resolution, assuring its passage by a wide margin. The U.S. spokesman said that the delegation would favor a Danish amendment shortening the period to four months but would not press for it.
Officials of the CIO discussed labor problems with President-elect Eisenhower at his headquarters in New York this date and said in a statement later that the CIO would "react vigorously to any effort to cut living standards or to attack labor". The officials said that they did not make any recommendation for appointment of a Secretary of Labor, one of the two Cabinet officials, along with the Secretary of Commerce, not yet named. They pledged support for the new President in his "constructive endeavors". Among the group was UAW president Walter Reuther.
In Tacoma, Washington, a four-engined C-54 military transport traveling from Alaska crashed in a fog, a mile short of its destination, shortly after midnight, killing 36 of 39 persons aboard in the explosion and flames. The passenger list included servicemen and their dependents, including seven women and nine children. The only survivors were two airmen and an eight-year old boy. Two of the women killed had been in the military service and several of the children were babies. A total of 198 dead or presumed dead, including the 36 from this crash, had been recorded in this and four other military plane crashes from Korea to Alaska and Montana during the previous three weeks.
In New York, Thomas "Three-Fingers Brown" Luchese, reported successor to jailed gambling kingpin Frank Costello, had been served with papers initiating denaturalization proceedings. The FBI had been hunting for him and the service had been effected by a representative of the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. He was charged with lying about his criminal record when he had taken out naturalization papers. The wealthy garment manufacturer had balked at appearing before recent public hearings of the New York State Crime Commission, though he had appeared in private some time earlier. Following a court battle, the Commission decided not to continue its efforts to have him appear and promised not to call him again, an action which was criticized by civic groups and individuals.
In Phoenix, Ariz., the so-called trunk-murderess, Winnie Ruth Judd, had escaped for the sixth time from the State Hospital for the Insane, sawing through a window screen the previous night. It was her second escape during 1952 from the hospital, where she had been confined since 1933, after killing two girlfriends in 1931 and shipping their dismembered bodies to Los Angeles in trunks. She had been sentenced to hang but was found insane 72 hours before scheduled execution. Hospital authorities said she had help from others in the escape and a search was underway for Ms. Judd and her accomplices.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, between 6:00 p.m. Wednesday and midnight Thursday, 122 persons had been killed in traffic and miscellaneous accidents, 99 of them killed on the roads. Cold weather and snow-packed and icy highways had prevented thousands of motorists from traveling, holding down the traffic toll. A year earlier, 102 persons had died in traffic accidents during the holiday, 94 in 1950, 123 in 1949, 86 in 1948, 107 in 1947, and 69 in 1946. National Safety Council records showed that during the first nine months of 1952, 99 persons had been killed in traffic accidents every 24 hours, but that total included those who had subsequently died after being injured, and so was not directly comparable to the Thanksgiving holiday number of fatalities. Several states reported no fatalities during the holiday, but Texas, California, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania had high death tolls.
In Santiago, Chile, the Federal police this date announced that the reported birth of septuplets to a Chilean woman the previous night had been a "vulgar hoax". The reported births had generated great excitement in Santiago, with every newspaper, save one, hailing the event in banner headlines and extra editions. Angry newsmen who had spent the night in front of the clinic said that they planned to protest to the new President, General Carlos Ibanez, because the head of the Federal police had originally released the information as true and later denied it. The head of the police said that the authors of the hoax had sought to gain publicity for a spring festival and had picked the figure seven to represent seven candidates for queen of that festival. He did not immediately identify the culprits. Some newsmen indicated that police had aided the perpetrators of the hoax, which even took in Senator Salvador Allende, president of the Chilean Medical College and vice-president of the National Senate. Sr. Allende rushed to the hospital and told newsmen outside that only medical personnel would be allowed to see the babies to prevent infection.
Emery Wister of The News tells of Carolinas Carrousel officials having estimated that a half million people had stood 10 to 20 deep along sidewalks overflowing in the streets the previous evening to see the parade, some bringing their own chairs and front row seats. They whistled and cheered with approval as the 50-odd floats passed before them. The Queen City Coach Company float, elaborately decorated and brilliantly lighted, won the sweepstakes award, and the J. B. Ivey float won the Carrousel president's trophy. The floats were considered the most beautiful and colorful of the event's six-year history and were sandwiched in between 24 high school bands and drum and bugle corps, a host of horses, marchers and comedy attractions. The biggest hit was the Charles Poplin funny car, which hissed steam and spouted water as it weaved down the street, frequently rearing up on its back wheels, sometimes with force enough to push the lady passenger from the backseat to the front seat. The parade had opened with a Marine color guard, followed by Knights of the Carrousel, dressed in their medieval costumes, followed by the Rambling Robs, a crack drum and bugle corps from Gastonia. There were jesters turning handsprings and cartwheels down the street, and there were Miss North Carolina and Miss South Carolina, plus 35 princesses from towns all over the Carolinas.
Did Hal Block make off with any of them?
The new Queen of the Carrousel was
Phyllis Finger from Kannapolis, a senior at Kannapolis High School,
who won over the 34 other contestants. Her ambition was to be a buyer
of fashion clothes. After the judging, she posed with "Hopalong
Cassidy" and Mr. Block
On the editorial page, "No Reason To Juggle This Hot Potato" indicates that the City Council appeared overly cautious in its approach to a solution of the Firemen's Retirement Fund problem. It favors a sound retirement system for all public employees and indicates that if it were not sound presently, it ought be made sound without further delay.
"A Big Job Well Done" indicates that, after all, the United Appeal had not only met, but had surpassed its $738,000 goal, reaching $766,000, after being originally short of the goal when it was extended for an additional five days. It thanks the community and congratulates the personnel of the Appeal.
"More Attractive Foreign Investment" indicates that when Harold Stassen would become the new Mutual Security administrator in January, he would discover several plans presently being drawn up by the outgoing Administration, designed to stimulate private investment abroad to diminish the necessity for foreign aid. Already in operation was a modest program to provide private investors overseas with government insurance against expropriation and refusal of foreign governments to allow conversion of currency into dollars. It was proposed that the insurance be extended to 20 years, rather than just until 1962, as at present, and that currency devaluation be listed as an insurable risk.
Some MSA officials reportedly believed that the Government might as well make the loan itself as the private investment could not be readily encouraged. The Wall Street Journal quoted an official, however, as saying that the alternative appeared to be continued aid, that the Government might as well try to stimulate private investment and take a chance on the investment paying off, rather than pouring in billions in aid each year.
The piece suggests that the answer might be found in the services of the World Bank or in establishing an international banking institution similar to it. The World Bank made money while making loans to underdeveloped countries for such things as power generation and distribution, irrigation, flood control, transportation, communications, improved cultivation and crop storage. But it was limited in the amount which it could lend and could not make equity investments, necessary if the private investment scheme was to expand and flourish.
It concludes that stimulation of private investment was worth a try and that the new Administration, with fresh blood, might be helpful in that regard.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Below Pro Standards", indicates that two items in the recent sports pages, both emanating from the University of Tennessee on the same day, showed how far those who sought to clean up intercollegiate athletics had to go.
One item related that the captain of the current Tennessee football team, which had already played eight of its scheduled ten games, had been declared ineligible for further competition because it had been discovered that he had used all of his four years of eligibility prior to the current year. There had been a plan in his sophomore year to redshirt him, but he had slipped into one game in 1949 without the knowledge of his coaches, however difficult that might have been.
The other item concerned the replacement of this player, involving a freshman from Raleigh who had starred in high school and was sought by several collegiate programs, including Duke and UNC, before deciding to go to Tennessee. While visiting Chapel Hill, he had taken a job in a category reserved for actual and prospective students, but was lured away by an assistant coach of Tennessee. Those practices were below the standards adopted by the professional football organizations, which only sought college players after they had graduated, and once one team secured their services, no other professional team could seek the player.
In college, players could use five years to exhaust their four years of eligibility, a rule intended to favor those students who had to drop out of school for a year for one reason or another. It finds that if limited to those circumstances, it would be a good rule, but that it was not so limited and appeared abused more frequently than used for its intended purpose. It also observes that some colleges recognized no restraints on recruiting, with reports of "kidnapping" players from one school to another being common.
Morroe Berger, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, analyzes the compulsory state Fair Employment Practices laws and finds them to be successful. He indicates that if they proved unsuccessful, the advocates of a Federal version could argue that such a Federal law was necessary to eliminate employment discrimination based on race, national origin and religion. But the opponents would argue that if these compulsory laws could not succeed in the seven Northern and Pacific Northwestern states where they existed, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington, then they could not succeed at the Federal level either.
In all, 11 states and at least 25 municipalities in nine states had some form of Fair Employment Practices laws, but only in the seven listed states were those laws compulsory, with the others involving voluntary compliance and education only. The legislation covered about a third of the nation's total population, about an eighth of the non-white population and more than two-thirds of the Jewish population. He limits the study therefore to the seven states plus two cities, Minneapolis and Philadelphia, with compulsory laws in operation long enough to permit some judgment on their effectiveness.
An examination of the records of the agencies administering those laws showed that they had reduced employment discrimination. They had found nearly 2,800 individual cases with some form of discrimination which had been eliminated, out of the 5,200 cases of alleged discrimination. In only seven of those cases had the agencies found it necessary to go beyond the stage of informal conciliation. The great majority of the complaints, 79 percent, had been lodged against employers as alleged violators of the law, with additional problems found among private fee-charging employment agencies which had helped employers evade the discrimination law. Some labor unions, also, had discriminated by excluding blacks from membership or by admitting them but with limited privileges or inferior status. About 75 percent of the complaints involved discrimination based on race or color, with complaints based on religious discrimination, primarily against Jews and Catholics, appearing to be most serious in New York, Massachusetts, and in Minneapolis.
That measure of success of the laws did not, however, provide the full effect of such laws, as each case might affect hundreds or even thousands of employees, and lead to considerable reduction of discrimination in a whole industry or type of work. Such laws also tended to have an impact just by virtue of their enactment.
He cites an example of an insurance company operating in New York which had no black women in clerical jobs prior to enactment of the Fair Employment Practices law in 1945, and in the six years of the law's existence, according to the New York State Commission Against Discrimination, the same firm had employed more than 350 black women in those jobs.
He indicates that the states and municipalities without compulsory laws showed not much success in eliminating employment discrimination.
Invariably, employers had opposed the enactment of the compulsory laws, but their attitudes had softened when the laws had been put into effect, as they realized that the agencies, which moved cautiously, were not trying to harass the employers or to restrict their freedom to run their own businesses, and the laws tended to benefit the employers by enlarging the labor market.
He concludes that the Fair Employment Practices laws in the states and cities had opened many opportunities for workers previously barred because of race, color, religion or national origin, from certain occupations, industries and firms. There was not yet enough evidence for more precise evaluation of the effects of the laws, and to do so, he posits, would require special studies of employment patterns in otherwise comparable areas, with and without an anti-discrimination law, as well as in areas before and after enactment of such laws. Such studies, he counsels, could be made only on the basis of much more data than had yet been compiled or made public by the agencies administering the anti-discrimination laws in the states and cities.
Drew Pearson indicates that President-elect Eisenhower's kingmaker was not either Governor Dewey or Senator Taft, as believed, but rather the former U.S. commander of West Berlin, General Lucius Clay. During the President-elect's recent vacation in Augusta, Ga., General Clay was at nearby Sea Island meeting with the big industrialists and shuttling back and forth to meet with General Eisenhower. In doing so, General Clay had met with G.M. president Charles E. Wilson and proposed that he become Secretary of Defense. He also had met with George Humphrey and proposed that he become Secretary of the Treasury. Senator Taft had proposed Senator Harry F. Byrd for the latter position. General Clay had also recommended John Foster Dulles to become the new Secretary of State. General Clay, after leaving the military, had become a conservative big businessman as board chairman of Continental Can. A former campaign manager for Senator Taft had informed Mr. Pearson that he was delighted with the appointment of Mr. Dulles.
General Clay indicated that he could not speak for General Eisenhower, but he foresaw that defense spending would continue at the present high rate for at least another year, as the money was already committed and could not be reduced. He promised, however, that new appropriations would be reduced, permitting some tax cuts not too far in the future.
At the recent birthday party for Mamie Eisenhower, the subject of the frequency of press conferences under the new President came up inadvertently, after journalist Merriman Smith, who had covered the White House for years, inquired of the General whether he would hold regular press conferences, to which the General had replied that he had considered quite a number of problems but had not gotten to that one yet. Ed Folliard, another veteran White House correspondent for the Washington Post, asked whether or not the General had press conferences in Paris while supreme commander of the Allied forces during the war, in which he had made a statement with the understanding that no questions would be asked, to which the General responded that he could not remember any such conferences. Mr. Folliard insisted that he recalled such press conferences, but the General stated that Lord Tedder of the British Royal Air Force had once attended one of his press conferences and remarked afterward that there had been a free exchange of questions. The General said that he did not like to hold press conferences unless he had something to say. Eventually, press secretary James Hagerty suggested that the conversation return to a purely social basis.
Mr. Pearson notes that Mr. Smith's question had been prompted by continuing reports that in the new White House, press conferences would adopt a system of having written questions submitted in advance. He states that though the General did not remember it, he had not permitted oral questioning by the press while he was in Paris as supreme commander of NATO the previous year and had no on-the-record press conferences during the latter part of the presidential campaign.
Marquis Childs, on Palomar Mountain, California, tells of the need to escape the jaundiced and distrustful eye he had developed regarding the human race while covering the political campaign, doing so at the Palomar Observatory. The 200-inch mirror, which required 13 years to grind, polish and install, was trained on the farthest frontier of the universe. Precise machinery moved the 530-ton telescope to enable it to photograph fixed areas of space. The mirror caught light which had been traveling for a billion years, with the photographs showing far more than could be seen with the naked eye applied to the telescope. There were two clocks on the master control board with illuminated dials, one recording star time and the other Pacific time. The astronomers, after four or five days of photography, took their plates to Pasadena, while another shift of astronomers took over at the Observatory. In the astrophysical laboratory of Cal Tech at Pasadena, the work of analysis began with spectroscopy showing the composition of the remotest planets.
For four years, the telescope had been in use, extending the frontier from half a billion light years, the range of the Mount Wilson Observatory, to a billion. The astronomers had discovered that there were millions of new galaxies, but, thus far, had not discovered any element not found on earth.
Man appeared as a tiny speck by comparison to these vast reaches of space, but had the courage and boldness to look across a distance that would be unimaginable if it did not exist. The astronomers spoke of 500 to 600 years of work still ahead mapping the universe with the large telescope, causing the observer to "understand just how transitory are the conflicts of the moment down below."
Robert C. Ruark, in Newport News, Va., tells of looking out the window of his hotel room at Hampton Roads, with its ships and shipyards and uniformed men around the airport, causing it to appear as it had in 1942, at the start of direct U.S. involvement in World War II. There was probably more military activity, he observes, in the area where the Chesapeake met the Atlantic than at any place else in the country. There were enough soldiers and sailors, he ventures, to have won the Korean War if they had been allowed to fight.
The area had a Naval operating base, Naval air station, an amphibious base, the Army field forces of Fort Monroe, the transportation center of Fort Eustis, and the Langley Air Force Base. It was all a reminder that the country had been to war for 30 months, though few people in the country were aware of it. The cities around Hampton Roads were jammed with military personnel, causing one to brood about war as an industry, keeping the country over-prosperous and over-inflated for the previous 12 years.
He indicates that the prosperity was nice, but that it was predicated solely on preparation to fight, "a small, side-corner fight that we have been waging fruitlessly for the past two years and more."
He suggests that it would be wonderful for once to see a burst of prosperity not founded on the military activity in the country. The catch to the present prosperity for the civilian was that it was artificial, and a ghost town would inevitably result unless there was a bigger war in the offing. He indicates that it was fine for the country to prepare and to have full employment, but it made him "a touch morose", as he had seen the activity before, including the victory arch for World War I.
Framed Edition
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