The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 6, 1952
SIX EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that the committee addressing the final instructions to belligerent governments had received a proposal from the Communists that within 90 days after an armistice, a five-person committee from the U.N. and a five-person committee from North Korea and Communist China would meet to settle through negotiation three points, the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Korea, peaceful settlement of the Korean question, and other questions related to peace in Korea. The third proposal had not been anticipated, and was interpreted to include issues related to Indo-China, Formosa and the Philippines, likely not acceptable to the U.N. negotiators. The allies said that they would consider the proposal.
The subcommittee working on prisoner exchange agreed that inspection of prisoner-of-war camps could be done by Red Cross teams of belligerent nations and then turned over their discussions to staff officers to work out remaining details. Previously, the Communists had insisted on neutral nation inspection teams.
The staff officers working on truce supervision made no progress after meeting for only ten minutes.
The Department of Defense announced that American battle casualties in Korea had reached 105,271, an increase of 270 over the previous week, including a total of 16,333 killed in action, 76,324 wounded and 12,614 missing. As usual, there was no break-down provided of the week's casualties.
The House Armed Services Committee this date approved a compulsory Universal Military Training bill, by a vote in a closed session of 27 to 7. The full House would take up the bill later in the month. It would provide for induction for six months of training of all eligible males when they reached age 18, and after the six months of training, they would be liable for reserve duty for 7 1/2 years. The program would be supervised generally by a civilian-dominated commission and exemptions and deferments would be held to a minimum. The Pentagon had recommended 18 months in the regular services after the training. Opponents of the measure predicted that the full House would kill it.
Before a special House subcommittee, a witness whose face was covered by a pillowcase, testified of witnessing Polish officers being shot by Russian soldiers in October, 1939, in Katyn Forest, scene of one of the largest mass executions in history, involving some 10,000 Polish officers. The male witness said that he, along with two companions, saw 200 Polish officers executed. He said some Polish officers were thrown alive into a large pit of corpses. He was identified as an escaped prisoner of the Russians and former Polish soldier. Earlier witnesses had also ascribed the killings to the Russians, but the Soviets had always blamed the massacre on the Germans.
In London, it was announced that King George VI, 56, had died in Sandringham
this date
Weeping crowds had gathered at Buckingham Palace as word of the King's death spread and flags were lowered to half staff as the nation's radios went silent except for news bulletins.
He had been the first king to visit the United States, arriving with Queen Elizabeth in 1939, where they were treated to frankfurters by the President and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
The new Queen, the second youngest in history, Victoria having been 18 when she assumed the throne for 63 years, had been in Kenya to start a five-month tour of Africa, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand, when she received the news of her father's death. She had wept when told. Prince Charles, three years old, would now assume the position of first in line of succession as Prince of Wales, followed by his younger sister Anne and then Elizabeth's 21-year old sister, Princess Margaret. The courtesy title of Queen Mother would likely pass from George's mother, Mary, to his widow, Queen Elizabeth. The new reigning Queen was scheduled immediately to fly back to London with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. The formal coronation would likely occur during the early summer.
Because of prosperous times for the Empire during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, there was a general belief in Britain that a female monarch brought prosperity.
The Duke of Windsor would attend the funeral of his brother, but the Duchess, Wallis Simpson, would remain in the U.S., having never been received by the Royal family since the marriage. The Duke's secretary indicated that he was shocked and surprised over the passing of his brother.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill called an emergency meeting of the Cabinet to set in motion the machinery which would lead to the formal coronation of Elizabeth.
Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan fired two Department officials in Dallas in connection with shortages of Government grain, for "administrative deficiencies and inadequacies".
The President was scheduled to attend this date the funeral of former Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes in Washington, who had died the prior Sunday.
In Hollywood, actress Hedy Lamarr said that her fourth marriage was a flop after eight months and planned to seek an immediate divorce from her husband, a former bandleader. She said that it was really never a marriage and that the two had been lonely and believed they had found what they apparently were looking for, but that it was not the right choice for her.
On page 9-A, the fifteenth installment in the serialization of The Greatest Book Ever Written, by Fulton Oursler, tells the story of Ruth.
They skipped over a bunch of folk
songs since the last reference the prior Friday. What gives?
On the editorial page, "The King Is Dead—Long Live the Queen" indicates its sharing in the sorrow of Britain in the loss of popular King George VI. The death, it suggests, would, for a time, strengthen the bond between the English-speaking peoples. King George had played his symbolic role on a plane above partisanship and would be missed throughout the British Commonwealth, as well, in a different way, within the U.S.
The new Queen Elizabeth II had won the hearts of Americans during her prior October visit to the U.S. and Canada as Princess. Her symbolic rule would be different from that of her father, with the passing of the old British Empire from the scene.
"But in her winning ways she can be expected to add to the lustre of Britain, which has prospered mightily in centuries past under its several lady monarchs. Long live the Queen."
Well, she is still here 67 years later… So, the piece must have known whereof it spoke.
Be it known, however, that we do not recognize monarchs in this country. To us, she is just another lady.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
What ye gonna do, send us to the Tower like ye ancestor, Old Bald Battleaxe I, did to Raleigh?
And as to that prosperity business, ye might want to take a poll down the road among the former employees of British Leyland, for instance, anent that prospectus.
"New Interest in an Old Office" tells of the lieutenant governor's office being important in North Carolina, as the position had as much influence in the State Senate as the Speaker of the State House of Representatives. The position had not been in the spotlight for the previous two decades prior to the current Administration of Governor Kerr Scott, because there had been few conflicts between the executive and the General Assembly until the current term.
It indicates that there was now extant a struggle for the Democratic nomination for the office, with two strong contenders having been in the field prior to the current week, State Senator Roy Rowe and Mayor Marshall Kurfees of Winston-Salem. Now joining those two was industrialist Luther Hodges of Leaksville, and there were rumors that others, even including Governor Scott, might join the race.
The piece finds it a good development as the more candidates who joined the race, the more public attention would be focused on it, and it was possible that it would become a stepping stone to higher office instead of the "political graveyard" it had long been considered.
Mr. Hodges would win the race and, seemingly bearing out the editorial, would become Governor in 1954, upon the death of Governor William B. Umstead. Mr. Hodges, by the fact of that succession, and election on his own hook in 1956, would serve for more than six years as Governor, the longest tenure ever served by a North Carolina Governor until the state allowed Governors to serve for up to two consecutive terms, the first Governor to succeed himself being Jim Hunt, winning his second term in 1980, ultimately serving for two more terms between 1993 and 2001. Governor Hodges would be tapped by President Kennedy in 1961 to become Secretary of Commerce.
"All This and Truman, Too" remarks on the President reversing his position and allowing his name to remain in the New Hampshire primary, set for March 11. Having previously stated that he could win the nomination if he sought it without entering any primaries, and referring to that process as "eyewash", he now said that he favored a nationwide presidential primary, but stopped short of trying to bring that about. So, the first primary would, on the Democratic side, have the President pitted against Senator Estes Kefauver, and on the Republican side, General Eisenhower versus Senator Taft, with former Governor Harold Stassen also in that race.
It posits that if Senator Taft were to win the primary, General Eisenhower would likely remain in Europe as supreme commander of NATO, and that even a close race would cause problems for the viability of the General's candidacy. The outcome would forecast how Republicans saw foreign policy. On the Democratic side, interest would be in whether the crime-busting outsider from Tennessee could beat the "mink and mediocrity" of the insider, acting as a measure of voters' disgust with corruption in government.
It concludes that it was good that these major candidates would be pitted against one another in that first primary and that it was a shame that the same would not occur in all of the few subsequent state contests.
"'Low Blow Joe
The piece concludes that it had taken quite some time for Col. McCormick, apparently afraid that such a boycott might ultimately extend to his own publications by ripple effect, to find out what others had found out a long time earlier about Senator McCarthy.
"Memo to Letter Writers" reminds of the rule in the letters column that the letters be brief and be accompanied by a name and address, that libel and obscenity would not be printed, but that almost anything else would pass. It indicates that most of the contributors followed those rules, but every week, a few letters failed to provide the identity or address of the writer, the latter necessary so that identity could be verified.
No, you are planning to send out a hit-man to the address of writers with whom you violently disagree. That's why all them people in the neighborhood is being disappeared and transported away in the spaceships.
"Remember This" relates of John O'Donnell in the Knoxville Journal telling a story out of the Dakotas, wherein an old farmer announced that he was going to vote for Governor Dewey in 1952, to which a poll-taker responded that Mr. Dewey was not running, the farmer then retorting that he would vote for him anyway, as he had voted for him in 1944 and 1948, and had never had it so good.
The piece finds that despite taxes, inflation, scandals regarding mink coats and tax evaders, a lot of people in the country were of that same opinion, the major obstacle to a Republican victory in 1952.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Courts and Bootleggers", tells of two news stories, one from Greensboro and the other from Durham, being worthy in the first instance of the title, "How to Break up Bootlegging", and, in the second, "How Not to Break up Bootlegging". The Daily News story had told of a local judge continuing his war against bootleggers by sending nine of ten confessed retailers to the roads for a total of 600 days and imposing fines amounting to $1,600. The Durham Morning Herald had told of nine defendants arrested on 17 liquor charges having been convicted in Recorder's Court and fined $50 plus costs in each case.
It predicts that the approach in Durham would encourage bootlegging, whereas the stiff road sentences in Greensboro would discourage it.
A piece based on remarks by West Virginia Senator Matthew Neely, reprinted from Tax Outlook, tells of the prolixity of members of Congress, costing the taxpayers great sums of money to reprint their voluminous statements within the Congressional Record. For the compilation of remarks, speeches and added matter just during the previous year, the Record weighed 38 times more than the Bible, and was six times longer, with 7,920 pages.
On average, each Senator had taken up 78 pages of the Record, though a third of the membership, including Senator Neely, had consumed fewer than 16 pages, and a half dozen had taken up less than ten pages. Three Republicans and three Democrats had been responsible for more than 100 pages each, while one Republican had filled 184 pages, plus other material consuming an additional 125 pages. One Democrat had filled 132 pages plus 27 additional pages.
The cost of printing each page was $35, meaning that the average cost for each Senator was $6,638.50 and the cost for all Senators, $646,272. The cost for the record holder of 309 pages was $26,265.
A large majority of Senators had not abused the privilege by talking subjects to death.
"Anyone who will invent, discover, formulate or find a proper solution of the problem of restoring to the Senate the measure of the world-wide esteem in which it was formerly held—but much of which verbosity, loquacity, and prattle have banished in recent years—will win the gratitude of the nation."
Drew Pearson tells of members of Congress and others having the impression that they could run the Voice of America much better than those who were presently running it. But the State Department, in charge of the Voice, had welcomed ideas from all sorts of people, including Congressmen, as to what should be part of the Voice's programming. The Voice now was suggesting a program in which schoolchildren of the nation would broadcast to the schoolchildren behind the Iron Curtain.
The most important objective in winning the peace and preventing war, he ventures, was to convince the people of the nations behind the Iron Curtain that the American people truly wanted peace. Moscow radio daily poured forth propaganda stating the contrary, seeking to convince the Soviet people that the American people wanted war, necessary indoctrination to justify the Russian preparation for war amid virtual slave labor within the armament factories. Soviet propaganda had been especially directed at the youth, who, according to recent interviews with Russians, demonstrated the greatest susceptibility to Soviet propaganda. And so it was a good idea to have schoolchildren of the U.S. broadcasting via the Voice to establish the contrary idea. The project was currently being discussed with state school superintendents and tentative plans were being formed to have local school officials select the most appealing messages written by the children of a particular school district and then have them transcribed for transmission via the Voice.
Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa,
chairman of the subcommittee charged with investigating Senator
McCarthy's charges of Communism in the Government and whether he was
fit to continue to serve in the Senate, privately opposed the probe of his old
friend. He had argued to subcommittee members that Senator McCarthy
would have his revenge on the membership and that he partially agreed
with him. When it became apparent that the other subcommittee members
disagreed, he voted with the majority, but not enthusiastically. Part
of his reluctance appeared to be based on the fact that Col. Robert
McCormick's Chicago Tribune, a strong supporter of Senator
McCarthy, had a large circulation in Iowa and could hurt Senator
Gillette's chances for re-election. Yet, a recent editorial in Col.
McCormick's New York Daily News had attacked Senator McCarthy,
describing him as "low
Mr. Pearson notes that Senator McCarthy had also used his Senatorial immunity to label the Saturday Evening Post pro-Communist, when that publication had criticized him.
Marquis Childs, in reliance on an unnamed source versed in practical politics, relates that Senator Taft had accumulated about 400 delegates across the country, 150 from the Midwest, 100 from the South, and another scattered 150 from other parts of the country. By contrast, General Eisenhower, a month after he had indicated his availability for a Republican convention draft, had accumulated about 200 delegates. The total required for the nomination was 602.
These facts suggested that Senator Taft still exerted power over the party managers despite the declaration of General Eisenhower, and that the decision by those who controlled the party machinery had not yet been finally determined. These managers within the Taft wing of the party showed signs that they were prepared to read out of the party anyone who did not subscribe to Senator Taft's positions or reactionary stances generally on the central issues of the campaign. That fact posed a danger to the Senator's personal ambition and for the chances of a Republican victory in the general election, a problem for the future of the two-party system nationally.
Whereas some claimed that the "me-tooism" of Governor Dewey had lost the election of 1948 for the Republicans, "me-ism", the "self-centered concentration on the prejudices and predilections of one limited group of voters", could lose the election in 1952. Such had been demonstrated recently in the House when Representative Thomas Werdel of California had attacked Governor Earl Warren, demanding that the Republican delegation from California go to the convention opposed to Governor Warren's candidacy. Yet, Governor Warren was one of the chief assets of the Republican Party, having shown repeatedly in California that he could win the all-important independent vote and had proved himself an effective administrator. But many Republicans would seek to read him out of the party. Governor Warren had addressed the meeting of Republican national committee representatives in San Francisco recently, indicating that such people who would slam the door on progress would condemn the party to suicide.
Mr. Childs regards it as the product
of hubris, leading to tragedy and ultimate downfall, not just for
individuals but whole groups of people. He suggests that General
Eisenhower might become the rallying point for those in the party who
refused to accept such a position and who realized that the world had
changed since the turn of the century and the days
Robert C. Ruark tells of nearly everyone he knew always being broke, from the constant rise in the cost of living and increasing taxes. People were again watching their finances closely. Miami was an example, where winter vacationing had lost its luster, leaving plenty of rooms to rent and the nightclubs having trouble finding patrons.
He concludes that while the representatives of the Government in Washington might state that employment was at a peak, savings at a new high and income greater than ever, the average person would only use profanity and the word "busted" to describe present conditions.
You've been hanging around the bars again where that refrain is an idee fixe to provide excuse for lack of ingenuity and industry, to establish a good excuse to slake one's thirst via the spirituous inebriants. (If you can't say the foregoing fast without slurring words, you should not drive home, even if only tired and not having drunk so much as a thimbleful.)
Framed Edition
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