The Charlotte News
Wednesday, December 17, 1952
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President-elect Eisenhower and General MacArthur had conferred this date in the home of Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles, the meeting having been arranged in the wake of General MacArthur's statement that he had a "clear and definite solution" to the Korean War. Meanwhile, the President-elect announced plans for a series of meetings with Republican Congressional leaders to discuss methods of controlling inflation and other problems, with the first of those meetings to be held at the President-elect's headquarters at New York's Commodore Hotel the following morning with House leaders, future Speaker Joseph Martin, future floor leader Charles Halleck, and future whip Leslie Arends.
In Long Beach, California, the City Council voted to appropriate $7,600 the previous day to send the City's mounted police force on 49 palomino horses to march in the inaugural parade in Washington on January 20, to act as escort for the new Vice-President, Richard Nixon.
Were they trying to curry favor with the new Adminstration regarding the tidelands oil legislation, or on other matters?
In Paris, NATO declared this date that the French fight against the Communist-led Vietminh in Indo-China was as important to the West as the Korean War. There was no indication that NATO was planning any collective action in Indo-China. A resolution passed by the Council of Foreign Ministers declared that "resistance to direct or indirect aggression in any part of the world is an essential contribution to the common security of the free world." It went on to state that the resistance of the "free nations in Southeast Asia, as in Korea, is in the fullest harmony with the aims and ideals of the Atlantic Community." French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman had appealed to the Western allies for as much material and financial support as possible in the fight in Indo-China. The U.S. and Britain were aiding France, the U.S. with money and arms, and Britain with naval support.
The Council also heard British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden say that the U.S., Britain and France remained ready to meet with Russia to plan for free all-German elections. The Council would end their meeting the following day. They also passed a resolution urging European nations to take quick action toward ratification of the treaty which would bring West Germany's armed forces into the defense of non-Communist Europe. West Germany would contribute a half million men to the European army under the treaty.
In Belgrade, Premier Marshal Tito's Government broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican this date, after Tito had accused the Vatican, in a speech to workers the previous day in a factory, of hostile activity against Yugoslavia. He had also threatened to call off a planned visit to London because of British charges of religious persecution in Yugoslavia. A British newspaper had reported Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, as saying that British Foreign Secretary Eden would urge Tito to ease up on religious persecution when the latter visited Britain the following March. Tito claimed that the charges of religious persecution had originated with the Vatican and stated that he would not go to Britain unless at least half the British people wanted him to come. He said he would not discuss internal affairs during any such visit. The Yugoslav patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church stated this date in letters to two Belgrade newspapers that the people of Yugoslavia were free to worship where they pleased, urging friends abroad to leave them in peace to settle their own relations with the church. Tito had attacked the nomination by Pope Pius XII of Archbishop Aoljzijc Stepinac to the College of Cardinals, declaring that he would never be permitted to serve even as an Archbishop in Yugoslavia. The Archbishop had been released from prison about a year earlier after serving five years of a 16-year sentence for alleged collaboration with the Germans during World War II, and was not permitted to leave the small parish where he now lived.
The Department of Defense announced that U.S. battle casualties in Korea had reached 127,867, an increase of 209 since the previous week, no breakdown being included in the report.
The Office of Price Stabilization removed price controls over fees and charges for a wide range of services, including those of nursing homes and summer camps for children. Such services did not figure significantly in the cost-of-living.
A Federal grand jury returned an indictment the previous day, accusing Owen Lattimore of perjury in stating that he had never been a sympathizer or promoter of Communism or Communist interests, as well as regarding six other points during his testimony before a Senate Internal Security subcommittee the previous spring. Professor Lattimore, who taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had responded that he was innocent and that the charges were "pure moonshine". He was due to be arraigned the following Friday. He had been given a leave of absence with pay from the University until the charges were resolved. The indictment prompted Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota to call for a Congressional investigation to try to find out the names of the "patron saints" of Mr. Lattimore and career diplomat John Carter Vincent, the latter having been suspended the prior Monday by the State Department from his post as minister to Tangier following the Civil Service Commission's Loyalty Review Board ruling that there was "reasonable doubt" regarding his loyalty. Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah said of Professor Lattimore's indictment that it "vindicated the judgment" of the subcommittee, of which he was a member. The subcommittee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, had recommended the previous July that the Justice Department present to the grand jury the question of whether Mr. Lattimore had committed perjury during his 12 days of testimony regarding investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations and its Far Eastern policy stance, and Mr. Lattimore's relation to it.
From London, it was reported that the new American
passenger liner United States had been damaged and other
shipping imperiled this date by gale and hurricane-force winds
buffeting the British Isles, reaching gusts of more than 100 mph. The
United States had just pulled away from the Southampton
In southern Florida, frost was again predicted for the morning as the year's most prolonged cold wave continued, prompting the use of smudge pot fires in the citrus groves and on vegetable farms the previous night.
In Charlotte, E. M. Beaty, convicted by a jury of income tax evasion on December 6, would be sentenced this date in the U.S. District Court.
Also in Charlotte, Dick Young of The News reports of the formal opening of the widened and repaved 36th St. from Tryon St. to Plaza Road. A sizable crowd of citizens and businessmen from the neighborhood gathered to watch a member of the City Council cut the blue and white ribbons after Mayor Victor Shaw and members of the Council spoke briefly.
In Kinston, N.C., the du Pont Corporation announced this date that it would build a three million dollar fiber laboratory to perform research on the company's new fiber, dacron. The laboratory was scheduled to be completed late in 1954 and would be on the site of the company's new 40 million dollar plant, presently nearing completion.
In Chicago, a woman charged in a divorce suit alleging cruelty that her husband had thrown a hatchet at her in 1945 and missed, had fired a shot at her in 1946 and missed, had attempted to choke her in 1947, and had stabbed her with a butcher knife a few days earlier. Her attorney indicated that she was in fair condition in the hospital. Her husband was awaiting trial on a felony charge of assault with a deadly weapon. The judge granted a temporary injunction restraining her husband from further violence toward her.
Near North Little Rock, Ark., six children, ranging in age from nine months to nine years, had burned to death and their parents and sister had been severely burned after an explosion and fire had destroyed their three-room house early this date. The explosion had occurred when the father attempted to start a fire by pouring kerosene into the stove. The father and mother and the older sister, 12, were in the hospital, the parents in critical condition and their daughter in serious condition.
In Houston, five persons were killed, including a three-month old baby, and five persons were injured in an apartment house fire early this date. No cause of the fire is reported.
In Washington, the four-year old
daughter of Shirley Temple Black had made her stage debut on Tuesday
as a fairy in a school pantomime, "Cinderella", and would
reprise the performance the following night in American University's
gymnasium. She was one year older than her mother had been when she
had begun
In Nashville, Tenn., Clyde (Red)
Foley
Sounds like the basis for lyrics of a new hillbilly number, which might go something like this right here: "You done alienated the affections of my gal's confections, and I'm gonna sue you raw. So you'd be wise to call your lawyer and tell him everyone who rued, I done saw her. You better pay me now, if you want me to divorce her, you low down, dirty, skirt-chasing, interloping, licentious cowboy concatenation, or otherwise I'll stick around downtown and stay the course, sir, despite all this here bad luck, and continue with her my Sweet, sententious plough-coy conversation."
On the editorial page, "The Role of the General Assemblyman" tells of local State Senator Fred McIntyre wanting to make two major changes in the framework of local government, abolition of the County Police Department and transfer of its functions to the Sheriff, and abolition of the Park & Recreation Commission and placing its functions under the City Council. It indicates that until Mr. McIntyre came out into the open with his proposals and until there was indication on the part of the legislative delegation that they intended to adhere to this viewpoint, there was no point in starting an argument. But it indicates its disfavor of both suggestions and states its reasons.
"Congress Still Holds the Handle" tells of the Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report having disbanded the previous spring with the approach of the coming election season, with the idea that to continue its efforts during that time would strain the amicable relationship built up between Republicans and Democrats for its adoption. After the election, the chairman of the Committee had decided to rekindle their efforts, observing that some administrators who had resisted changes proposed by the Hoover Commission were departing Washington.
One of the first acts of President-elect Eisenhower after his election had been to meet with some of the members of the Committee, asking three of them, one of whom was future Governor of New York and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, to consider Temple University's continuing study of government reorganization to determine which of the Commission proposals were still applicable. Mr. Rockefeller had studied some of the overseas programs, which the Hoover Commission had not covered. The new President therefore might make some specific far-ranging proposals for implementation during the new Administration. A good deal of the reorganization could be accomplished through friendly administrators. Should the Congress renew the President's power to submit sweeping reorganization plans, subject to affirmative veto by both chambers, they should be approved by a friendly Congress. Other reforms would require legislation, and during the previous four years, there were plenty of examples of reform legislation which had become pigeonholed in committees.
It indicates that it did not anticipate reform in the Post Office Department, as the new Postmaster General, Arthur Summerfield, RNC chairman during the campaign, would likely not demand that postmaster appointments be removed from political patronage and subsumed under the civil service system. Congress would resist attempts to alter, as well, patronage appointments in the Army Corps of Engineers, which often built dams and levees according to the wishes of pork-barrel politics rather than on the advice of conservationists. It concludes, therefore, that while the executive branch could help the process, Congress still held the handle in many cases.
You must prime the pump, have faith and belief.
"First Step Toward Consolidation" tells of the new County Commissioners having already made their mark by showing interest in consolidation of the City and County governments. Exhaustive reports on the matter had been set forth by the Institute of Government of Chapel Hill in 1949, but those reports had soon begun to gather dust, the volumes acting, according to popular rumors, as doorstops at the Courthouse. There was complete apathy among the Commissioners and the City Councilmen to act on consolidation, along with negative resistance, instead of searching for ways to carry out the plan.
But the new Commission had instructed the county attorney to draw up a bill for presentation to the 1953 General Assembly, authorizing local government officials to consolidate overlapping services if they found it desirable to do so, permissive and not mandatory legislation. It remarks that the Commissioners could do no more than set the right example and that the City Council would have to follow it to make the move become a reality.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "History on the Dining Car", tells of the origin of Salisbury steak having been a spur-of-the-moment creation of a cook on a Southern Railway dining car from Salisbury, N.C., en route to Asheville, at least as claimed by Salisbury's Chamber of Commerce, indicating that a passenger on the train had ordered a steak, of which there was none on board, prompting the cook to send word that he could prepare a "Salisbury steak" as a substitute, just the way they fixed it in Salisbury. The cook had then become creative with some scraps of meat and thus was born that which had become popular throughout the nation.
It suggests that had the train been heading from Asheville to Salisbury, the steak might have been instead dubbed "Asheville steak". It indicates that cooks in both towns had been making Salisbury steak for many years, simply a hamburger in fancy dress. Many such terms of German origin had been renamed by super-patriots during World War I, as H. L. Mencken had set forth in The American Language, such as "sauerkraut" having been re-dubbed "liberty cabbage", "German measles" transformed to "liberty measles", and "Salisbury steak" from "hamburger", some theorists believing that the hamburger had actually been named after Lord Salisbury who had issued the "Salisbury Circular", a well-rounded and meaty diplomatic document. Such renaming had occurred, it concludes, during the same time when the Southern Railway's present passenger equipment had been entering old age.
Drew Pearson tells of the farewell dinner which the President had given for his Cabinet, at which Governor Stevenson stood in the reception line alongside the President, shaking the hands of guests. He told his brother-in-law and sister, Senator and Mrs. Ernest Ives of New York, that he had told them he would get to the White House before Eisenhower. His sister responded that she had always known they would see Adlai in the White House, but that they had hoped it would be for more than just one evening.
The most important spotlight of the new Administration would be on the Justice Department because of the corruption issue and the importance of the Department in how it prosecuted crime. The Department's appointees, therefore, would be watched very carefully, more so than any other department, as the public needed restoration of confidence in honesty in government. One of the unfortunate byproducts of exposing corruption was that everything about government was then believed to be dishonest, that no government official could be trusted, that young persons who had once wanted to serve in government would shun such service, and that conscientious officials already in government would become ashamed of their profession.
He asserts that the present Attorney General, James McGranery, after getting off to a slow start, was now doing a good job of cleaning up corruption. The Attorney General-designate, Herbert Brownell, had appointed as his chief deputy William Rogers, the former counsel for the Senate Investigating Committee, who had first received crime-busting experience under Governor Dewey, before coming to Washington when the Republicans controlled the Senate between 1947 and 1949. He had done such a good job in that latter role that the Democrats continued with him after they had reacquired control of Congress in 1948. Mr. Rogers, working under Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, had exposed a lot of the Democratic influence-peddling. He was not only honest but diligent. He had been practicing law for the previous three years and had told his clients that he could not handle court arguments for them prior to inauguration day on January 20, though there was no apparent problem with doing so as far as government ethics were concerned. He feared, however, that some judges might be influenced by the fact that he would be passing on their future promotions and so refrained from any court appearances. Mr. Pearson concludes that he was the type of person who had been recruited during the Roosevelt Administration to operate the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorneys offices throughout the country.
As noted previously, Mr. Rogers, who would eventually become Attorney General during President Eisenhower's second term and Secretary of State during President Nixon's first term, had, according to Theodore H. White in his 1975 book, Breach of Faith, counseled Vice-President Nixon in 1960 not to contest the outcome of the close 1960 election, on the premise that doing so, in states such as Illinois and Texas where there were some suspicions of graveyard voting to effect narrow popular vote outcomes for Senator Kennedy, would provoke a contest by the Kennedy camp of California, where, in the southern precincts, there had also been considerable necromantic hanky-panky to effect a close late outcome as well for the Vice-President.
Congressman Sam McConnell of Pennsylvania would be the new chairman of the House Labor Committee, and thus in a position to impact attempts to revise Taft-Hartley. He was bound to come into conflict with Senator Taft, who wanted to rewrite the Act, whereas Congressman McConnell thought it better to junk the whole Act and write a new one. The Congressman favored a "simple, understandable law that makes sense to the man in the street". He was deeply religious and believed that unfairness to any group, whether involving a labor union or racial minority, was wrong. He favored a voluntary Fair Employment Practices Commission, with power to expose and recommend against employment discrimination based on race, color or creed. He had pushed a bill for such a voluntary FEPC through the House during the 1949-1951 Congress, only to see it shelved by the Senate, and he would try again in the new Congress.
Judge Learned Hand, recently retired
to emeritus status from his regular position on the U.S. Second
Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, in republished text of a recent
address, argues that education ought include the humanities as
essential to political wisdom. He explains that by "humanities"
he meant, in addition to history, "letters, poetry, philosophy,
the plastic arts, and music
"Just as in science we cannot advance except as we take over what we inherit, so in statecraft no generation can safely start at scratch. The subject matter of science is recorded observation of the external world; the subject matter of the statecraft is the soul of man, and of that too there are records—the records of which I refer to here."
He expresses that he would rather take his chance that "some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts a rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry." He believes that a community was already in process of dissolution when each man began to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, "where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open". Such fears, he warns, could ultimately subject the country "to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only insofar as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving."
He indicates that such "mutual
confidence on which all else depends" could be maintained only
by "an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion",
that those would not suffice, but the country could not yield in
demanding a fair field for expression of all ideas. He concludes by
quoting from Ecclesiasticus, one of the books of the
Apocrypha: "Blame not before thou hast examined;
understand first and then rebuke. Answer not before thou hast heard;
interrupt not in the midst of speech." He finds that the
words, written nearly 2,000 years earlier, had come from experience
and been refined from "the fires of passion and conflict",
and that only through such wisdom would society be saved, a society
boasting of being "the apostles of a faith in the eventual
triumph of wisdom
Marquis Childs finds that the President appeared to be trying, in his last days in office, to prove that all of the things which his enemies had said about him were true. He recalls that there had been a time, early in his Presidency, where he had been truly humble, saying that a million other Americans were better equipped to be President than he. His present bitterness appeared to be a consequence of the campaign and the victory by General Eisenhower. During a pause in his whistlestop tour of the country during October, the President and Mrs. Truman had been dining with old friends at the White House, and he had remarked of his supreme confidence in victory, saying that everywhere they had gone, the crowds were bigger than ever and wanted him to come back.
Mr. Childs believes that, in hindsight, had the President refrained from active campaigning, Governor Stevenson would have been better served, able to establish his own message, free from the current Administration's considerable negative baggage.
The President's bitterness after the election had startled his more objective friends, as they had never seen him in such a mood, ready to blame everyone for the outcome. Some advisers were fearful that he might let loose with a blast during his recent meeting with the President-elect, which the latter would never have accepted.
He recounts the more momentous decisions of the President's eight years in office, the Truman Doctrine of aid to Turkey and Greece, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the intervention in Korea, all of which had tremendous significance for history. But he concludes that his "current display of petulance in the face of the fearful peril of another and larger war" had obscured all of those positive accomplishments, and that the President, as a student of Presidential history, ought realize that.
In contrast, had he a perfectly perspicacious crystal ball, he might have compared the present mess in the White House as emblematic of a "President" who is a student of only one thing, Trump, Inc., and the desire to make the country a subsidiary thereof, with each of his core supporters, something less than about 40 percent of the voters, as the non-voting common stockholders, sold on the idea of aspiring to become preferred shareholders, able eventually to vote directly on the corporation policies in some future never-never land, left in the meantime smiling for pictures beside the chief operating officer's cardboard picture in the lobby of the $30,000 course on how to become a preferred shareholder in U.S.A., Inc.—ultimately, the antithesis of everything for which Harry Truman was representative, Mr. Knight.
Joseph Alsop comments after his return from a trip touring Europe that there remained a disconnect between the realities of what he had seen abroad and "the still-fog-bound outlines of the new American administration." But, while there were still formidable problems which lay ahead, there were also bright spots to be observed in Europe, as it was emerging, for the first time since the war, into normalcy. There was no longer the pall hanging over Western Europe of expectant doom at any moment, giving rise to the ability to look for the first time toward the long-range future. There was also, however, plenty of anti-Americanism to go along with it. But the foundations for the future had been well-laid, and parts of the future were already being built.
He had found that there was great confidence in President-elect Eisenhower in Britain and in Europe, from their wartime experience with him and as supreme commander of NATO, and there was also a general feeling that with a new person as President, a new and more powerful impulse in policy-making and a bolder, more imaginative leadership could occur. He had found that during the past year, most of the allies felt comfortable with the Truman Administration because it was tired and they were tired, too, while at the same time, they resented the want of strong leadership. They now hoped for great things from the new Administration and it presented itself as a great opportunity "to strengthen and underpin the Western alliance, the Western community, the free world as a whole."
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