The Charlotte News

Monday, August 25, 1952

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. bombers had delivered two blows to enemy supply areas the previous night, flying through stormy weather to hit a 40-acre supply area in northwest Korea, 100 miles north of Pyongyang, and attacking storage depots behind the battlefront.

In ground action, during the rainstorm, 40 Chinese troops attacked "Bunker Hill" on the western front but were repulsed by allied troops after 15 minutes of fighting. Otherwise, there were only patrol clashes and light enemy probes. Communist artillery fire decreased to 968 rounds the prior day, compared to 4,111 rounds on Saturday.

In Tehran, the chairman of the Cities Service Oil Corporation of New York arrived, at the invitation of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, to try to put Iran's oil industry back into operation, following the expropriation of the British oil properties and the resulting embargo placed on trade in Iranian oil by the British. The world's largest refinery at Abadan had been shut down since the British had pulled out the prior October, resulting in Iran coming close to bankruptcy for the loss of oil revenues. Previous efforts to get the oil industry up and running again had failed.

General Eisenhower had said this date, in the text of a speech prepared for delivery to the American Legion national convention in New York, that because of the Soviet master plan of conquest, the nation stood in greater peril than at any time in its history. He also indicated that he believed the Soviets were not prepared at this point to start a third world war. He then outlined a plan for counter-measures to be taken immediately, which included creation of a security force with such offensive impact that it would "haunt the Kremlin with nightmares of punishment to be visited" on Russia should it violate the peace, greater cooperative unity with every nation in the free world, and delivery of a warning to Russia that the U.S. would never recognize the permanence of Russia's position in Eastern Europe and Asia. The speech was to be broadcast from Madison Square Garden by only one New York City radio station. The speech was billed as "non-political" but contained several passages which appeared to make reference to some of the charges made by Republicans against the Truman Administration. Aides of the General indicated that he had been working on the speech for more than two weeks, without much help from professional speechwriters. The piece notes that on several occasions, the General had departed from his prepared speeches.

In Asheville, the Republican state chairman said that the General would definitely visit North Carolina later in the campaign.

In New York, the national commander of the American Legion charged this date, in a speech to the convention, that it was "an un-American approach to the facts" to call the Korean War a "police action", the term applied to it by the President. He indicated that in a period of less than a decade, the nation had talked itself into a position of becoming "an international dupe of fantastical proportions". He said that the country had become so inured to crises in the world that the war in Korea was no longer headline news. He spoke after the President's written message to the convention, urging the Legion to "put all the facts before the people" in the current political campaign.

In Springfield, Ill., Governor Stevenson returned to campaign planning this date while aides watched the reaction to his stand taken against complete state control of tidelands oil. The position was likely to incur the political wrath of Texas and other states with tidelands oil at stake. He had indicated that he believed a solution should be found to protect both the interests of the Federal government and the states. Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, the vice-presidential nominee, supported the Governor's position. After the announcement, Texas Governor Allen Shivers said that he did not believe he could support Governor Stevenson in November, but would follow the guidance of Texas Democrats. The Governor would address the American Legion convention on Wednesday. He was talking this date with Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, about the Governor's upcoming speech on Labor Day in Detroit. The Governor was reportedly upset by reports on possible cabinet appointments, such as one which suggested that Senator Estes Kefauver would be appointed Attorney General in a Stevenson administration. He issued a statement saying that neither he nor any authorized associate had made any commitments to anyone regarding any prospective positions and that he would only do so after the election.

Another Gallup poll appears, regarding the labor vote in the fall, showing that Governor Stevenson enjoyed the bulk of union labor support, with 63 percent of respondents saying they would either definitely vote for or were leaning toward the Democratic candidate, while only 31 percent supported the Republican candidate. The CIO executive council had recently recommended to its six million members that they vote for Governor Stevenson. Senator Nixon, however, had said that he doubted that the union support would deliver the rank-and-file vote to the Democrats.

The President indicated that his plans after finishing his Presidency would be to leave Washington immediately following the inauguration and begin to establish a library on the farm site near his boyhood home in Grandview, Missouri, after taking a "good rest", and then helping to educate the youth of the country on the history and principles of the government. An article in Look Magazine coming out the following day set forth the quotations.

Parenthetically, that brings to mind the long-yawning chasm on the internet caused by the absence of issues of Look, as long defunct as Life, yet not accessible, as is Life, online. Why? The answer lies probably in the fact that some unscrupulous sellers of old magazines, who wish to charge extortionate prices for their wares, have somehow managed thus far to prevent Look from appearing online. That sort of junk, plus over-commercialization of the internet generally, will eventually destroy it. Essentially, when properly used, the internet is a freely accessible public library, coming into your home, and should not be subject to the limitations imposed by bonehead commercial operators, who seek to use copyright and trademark laws to their advantage, when they, themselves, had nothing to do with production of the original publications or music or movies or what have you, involved in their silly copyright claims, usually purchased for pennies on the dollar so that they can try to make a killing off selling old stuff at huge prices. Eventually, that sort of conduct will kill the goose which laid the golden egg. Increasingly, websites are so full of advertising that the reader can scarcely find the substance in the printed material, especially at news websites, where scrolling is sometimes deliberately slowed to a snail's pace on the apparent belief that it will encourage the casual reader, at least the sufferers of attention deficit disorder, to stop and look at the ads. If a page becomes so slow in providing the content for which one is looking that it becomes useless, the person who is being targeted by stupid advertising will seek the information elsewhere, where the page comes up readily without being accompanied by extraneous images or self-opening audio files and video files. If one wants one's news in video and audio format, one does not seek printed material, bozos. Whoever is running the shop need their heads collectively examined.

The chief of Army engineers, Lt. General Lewis Pick, this date suggested that a critical Senate report accusing him and other top military officials of confusion and waste in the effort quickly to build U.S. airbases in North Africa had been "over-critical", saying that he had no responsibility in the determination of the Air Force requirements in North Africa and had no responsibility in directing the construction on a rush basis. The report had been issued the previous day by the Armed Services Preparedness subcommittee, chaired by Senator Lyndon Johnson. It criticized General Pick as being responsible for the construction job which had cost 220 million dollars and was expected eventually to total more than double that amount. The General said that it was not unusual for contractors to experience some deficiencies in accomplishing large military construction projects under extreme limits of time, as had occurred in Morocco. He had just returned from an inspection tour of the North African bases and submitted a report to Army Secretary Frank Pace, which, he believed, the subcommittee had not yet seen. He said that the report set forth a plan for correcting the deficiencies and that he had observed the work to be progressing at a satisfactory rate. The subcommittee report had said that the General had not given the subcommittee "full, frank, and comprehensive testimony about the project". It, frankly, was not up to pace.

In Raleigh, leading medical figures of the state met to discuss the health needs of rural areas. One doctor, who was president of the State Medical Society, stated that the long-term answer to the health problems of tenant farmers, laborers and unskilled workers was better and more thorough health education and improvement of their economic status. He also indicated that they needed insurance at a cost they could afford. The chairman of the N.C. State department of rural sociology said that in Wake County, rural dwellers were receiving only a fraction of the services they needed, half of the doctor services and hospital services and less than a third of the dental and eye services, less than a fourth of the diagnostic services and less than a fifth of the services of specialists, with a tenth of the needed medical insurance. The reasons for the deficiencies had to do with low farm income, low standards of living and the lack of health education and facilities. The dean of the Duke University Medical School said that in the previous decade, only four percent of the medical students at the school came from rural areas. The assistant dean at UNC said that 37 percent of its students since 1948 had come from rural areas.

In Greenville, N.C., two Marines from Camp Lejeune were charged with murdering a police officer on August 15.

In Kinston, N.C., an 87-year old man admitted making whiskey, but said that it was only to pay for his wife's funeral. He had been to state and Federal prison previously and worked on the roads as a prisoner after being unable to pay fines, and now he would have to return to the roads as he could not afford the fine because he had paid for his wife's funeral, occurring three weeks earlier. ABC officers had stopped by his home and found 14 pints of whiskey on Wednesday afternoon. His trial was still pending in Recorder's Court. Was it in plain view or did they have a search warrant?

As pictured, in Downey, California, a woman and her 2 1/2 year old son were holding off the Southern Pacific Railroad with a garden hose and rocks, preventing continued construction of a four million dollar one-mile right-of-way through a new 200-house development where the woman and her family lived. A newly issued court order, however, had enjoined the woman from continuing in her efforts.

"A slow-moving cold air mass was marching toward Georgia today after bringing the Carolinas an early taste of Fall Weather." The temperature had dropped to 55.8 degrees in Charlotte, the lowest ever recorded on the date, 2.3 degrees below the previous low set in 1923. New records had also been set all across the Carolinas. In Asheville, it had been 45, in Hickory, 52, in Lumberton, 53, at Myrtle Beach, 52, in Greensboro, 50, and in Winston-Salem, 55. The warm spot was in Columbia, S.C., at 60. No fit beach weather today. Surf's down.

On the editorial page, "Eisenhower on McCarthy" indicates that General Eisenhower had realistically faced the problem of McCarthyism and that Democrats who believed the General had equivocated should consider their position toward extremists of their own party to divine the reasonableness of the General's position. He had indicated his disagreement and disgust with Senator McCarthy's charges, especially against General Marshall, while stating that he would support all GOP nominees for the Senate and House.

It indicates that, as with the Democrats, he wanted his party to control Congress, to go with a presidential victory. But even so, it remarks, the position the General had taken, while Senator Nixon had remained "quite vague on the subject", was unsatisfactory to many who believed that the Republicans would be better off morally and politically by firmly rejecting McCarthyism. It urges stronger statements and actions therefore by the nominees.

Herblock, in his first caricature of Mr. Nixon, agrees on the vagueness of the Senator's statements regarding the subject. Yet, how could Senator Nixon, with a straight lattern-jaw, firmly reject McCarthyism, when he and his HUAC colleagues had, to a great extent, shown the way in that direction for its political advantage in 1948 during the Chambers-Hiss controversy? Senator McCarthy only followed suit in his Lincoln Day address of 1950, where his charges of Catsup in the State Department all began.

We note that Herblock's imagery of Mr. Nixon began with the bushy eyebrows usually reserved for John L. Lewis, with not nearly the pronounced nose which his later caricatures would show, as the Pinocchioism of the subject steadily increased with time.

"How's Your Voting Organization?" tells of the get-out-the-vote campaign being planned by Charlotte civic and commercial organizations, to try to increase, in a nonpartisan effort, the percentage of voting from its present state of about half of eligible voters. It urges public support of the campaign and voting in the general election on November 4.

"For Improved Traffic Law Enforcement" comments on the State Supreme Court ruling the prior Friday which had upheld the legality of parking meters in municipalities, as long as they were designed to regulate parking and not obtain revenue, while also holding that mere ownership of a vehicle was insufficient evidence on which to be found guilty of a parking violation, in the absence of a new statute passed by the Legislature to enable such an evidentiary determination.

It suggests that few drivers would take the trouble to appear in court in a parking case to contest the citation, but would instead pay the one-dollar fine. Yet, occasionally, the habitual illegal parker might take his tickets to court and so the burden of the courts would be decreased were the Legislature to follow the suggestion of the decision and pass a new law. The law could make exception for a situation where a vehicle owner could prove that his vehicle was stolen, as other states had done.

"Be Firm, Men—and Cool" tells of the Commerce Department having reported that statistics for May showed that sport-shirt production had increased by 56 percent over the prior May, while ordinary street-shirt production had decreased by 31 percent. During the first six months of the year, the total number of men's sports slacks had risen six percent over that of the prior year. Men's suit production, in the meantime, had dropped 19 percent. The production of fedora hats had also declined while sports-cap production had increased. The tie industry was barely holding its own.

A visitor from New York had recently indicated that while touring the South, he had to look hard to find a coat in a hotel dining room.

Comfort was replacing convention as the rule. Yet, any man who chose to wear shorts in a city such as Charlotte, was the immediate object of stares and backward glances, not only from women, but from other men. In Ohio, a man was arrested a couple of months earlier because he had worn shorts in a city, causing him to have to undergo physical and psychological examination.

It urges that men should be firm in exercising their right to wear shorts, just as women annually altered the length of their skirts in warm weather, thus hastening the day of "masculine equality and comfort".

A piece from the Rocky Mount Telegram, titled "Diplomats Please Note", tells of Governor Dewey having recently sent 600 small-mouth bass to Emperor Bao Dai of Vietnam, to "win friends and influence the future course of world events" in a section of the world in which the country could use all the friends it could get. The Governor had recently visited Indo-China and was told by the Emperor of his fondness for small-mouth bass.

The piece remarks that any fisherman would indicate that there was no better way to make a man one's friend than to provide them with a crack at some top-notch fishing. It was true of any man of any nationality, whether a peasant or monarch. It suggests the example set by Governor Dewey to the diplomats.

You are not going to win us over by sending us some damned fish. Indeed, we would regard it as a threat. Keep your old fish, wedding-cake boy. We'll send you a horse-head in the mail in return.

Senator Francis Case of South Dakota, substituting for Drew Pearson while he was on vacation, writes from Custer, S.D., of Mr. Pearson having written on June 29, as part of his predictions of things to come, that there would be a discovery more important than the atomic bomb, one involving the recent Congressional passage of a measure authorizing two million dollars to transform sea water into fresh water, permitting desert land to become fertile, not only in California and the Southwest, but also in North Africa, Arabia and Australia, changing the food problem of the world.

The Senator indicates that the bill Mr. Pearson referenced had been a substitute measure which he had offered in the Senate for a similar bill passed in the House on motion of Congressman Clair Engle of California—who later, as Senator, dramatically would enter the Senate chamber from his deathbed to cast the deciding vote in favor of ending the filibuster and permitting thereby the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, signed into law by President Johnson on July 1 of that year. Senator Case indicates that the revised bill provided for performing research by contract with institutions already in the field instead of establishing new government laboratories, as in the original bill.

His interest in the subject had developed out of an interest in "rainmaking" and water conservation in general. In spring, 1951, three Senate committees had held a joint hearing on bills which he and Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had jointly introduced for research on weather modification and one regarding converting of sea water, introduced by Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming. They found that 13 times more acreage was under contract for cloud-seeding operations than were under irrigation. Thus, the modified bill proposed a national advisory committee to evaluate the results of those private efforts. The Senate passed the bill and a House committee had reported it favorably, but it received objection on the unanimous consent calendar. Both houses had, however, passed the bill to conduct further research in desalinization of sea water.

The President, in signing the latter bill, had indicated that the success of the project could be of tremendous value to coastal communities, island possessions, and the whole world. The Senator finds that to be understatement, as ships could carry converter tanks rather than fresh water, enabling the carrying of much greater tonnage of paying cargo. Submarines powered by atomic energy would not have to stop for fresh water. Many towns in the West could not find good drinking water very easily, as the water was alkaline and mineralized, some of it not fit for irrigation.

The newspapers had referred to the Senator as a "rainmaker" when, a few years earlier, he had hired a plane to ride to the top of a cloud and drop dry ice, causing the cloud to boil up, forcing the plane to climb 6,000 feet to remain above it, and in about 20 minutes, produced rain, while other clouds in the same area remained normal. Later, when a G.E. scientist had testified before a Senate committee on the subject, he learned that they had not made rain but rather caused the mist particles in the cloud to coalesce and form ice crystals, acting as nuclei for other particles of moisture to coalesce and finally drop, from their sheer weight, into a warmer atmosphere as raindrops. He analogizes the situation to serving iced tea on a hot day. As the drops of moisture form on the outside of the cold glass when contacting the warm air, those drops were like "rain".

Joseph & Stewart Alsop take stock of the campaign's true meaning, indicating that it was not conveyed by the current slogans, that it was time for a change or "Don't let them take it away". They regard the survival of the republic to be the chief problem facing the next President.

They indicate that had not the country responded to the Communist aggression in Korea, the entire Far East and a good part of Europe would be likely in Communist hands. The national strength was insufficient to resume the offensive in Korea and the country could not build greater national strength without a full wartime economy. Nor could it be expected that the enemy would sign a truce unless they were punished enough to make it worthwhile. Nor could a truce of surrender be signed by the U.N. forces. Thus, the country was reduced for the present to such expedients as taking the prisoner of war voluntary repatriation issue into the U.N., not the kind of problem any president would likely enjoy solving.

But there were also problems of economic and political strains within NATO and other weak points on the periphery, such as in Iran and Indo-China, and the even greater problem of world balance of military power. The Soviets were in the process of developing sufficient stockpiles of atomic weapons and delivery devices for them to deliver a crippling strike on the country, while the U.S. was rapidly losing its power to retaliate in kind.

They conclude that "[b]y a curious fault of leadership, a situation with a touch of nightmare in it has now been produced." That would constitute the stakes in the coming election.

Marquis Childs tells of the time being one of crying doom, partly the result of the usual doomsayers in a national political campaign and in another part from the climate of the times. He suggests that the professional doomsayers were perhaps overstating the case.

The ability to deter the Soviets from further aggression was increasingly becoming a reality through the united effort of the 14 NATO nations. Much of the current pessimism was the result of the realization that the goal of establishing 50 divisions for the NATO Army would not be achieved by the end of the year, having been announced as a goal the prior February at the NATO conference in Lisbon. The goal was to have 50 divisions at a state of readiness where they could be mobilized within 30 days, whereas there would be sufficient numbers in training, albeit at 90 or 120-day readiness status. Another part of the pessimism came from the dispute between the U.S. and France regarding how much assistance the French would give their rearmament effort. The French claimed that they did not have adequate weaponry to equip an army. But the steel strike had not caused a cutback in the production of heavy tank and jet plane deliveries in June and July. So the Pentagon ascribed the problem of which the French complained to the prevailing situation in Europe, where the West Germans would be competing for military matériel and U.S. assistance. The French were aware of this situation and were determined to obtain everything they could in the meantime. U.S. officials who had reviewed the NATO troops in France were convinced that the position of the French was not as dire as they claimed.

But the drive to reconstruct the defense of the West had been slowed down, inevitable in a presidential election year when appropriations and foreign policy were entangled in politics.

Philip Cortney of the Wall Street Journal tells of the State Department, long before the end of World War II, having given considerable consideration to the problem of restoring and expanding unhampered international trade. In 1946, Great Britain had been confronted with a crisis in its international payments, prompting the U.S. to loan it 3.75 billion dollars on condition that Britain would restore the free convertibility of the pound sterling. That condition had been unrealistic because of the huge foreign sterling balances accumulated in British banks during the war and because of the traditional trade-protectionist attitude of the U.S. The British attempt to restore the free convertibility of its currency had failed, as expected. The result was that the State Department lost confidence in the possibility of restoring unrestricted, nondiscriminatory multilateral trade. The country, in consequence, adopted a policy of expedience to prop up its exports and maintain the international solvency of Western Europe through economic aid, and that continued to be the policy.

Yet the recipients of that aid were showing animosity toward the U.S., not amity. The country had spent nearly 40 billion dollars on foreign economic aid since the end of the war, yet only incurring resentment in Europe, Canada, and South Africa, as well in other parts of the free world.

He posits that the restoration of unrestricted multilateral trade required three things, international monetary reconstruction, national policies compatible with international solvency, and the possibility for the Western European countries to earn dollars. The Europeans had been forced to realize that their international solvency depended on a non-inflationary domestic policy. Their monetary reconstruction and the possibility for them to earn dollars depended on U.S. initiatives and policies to a great degree as well. Inflation had to be stopped in the U.S. and aid needed to be given to free inter-exchangability of currencies in Western Europe with return to a form of the international gold standard.

The ratio of imports to production had fallen steadily in the U.S. from 5.2 percent in 1929 to 3.3 percent in the years following the war. Imports from Western Europe had fallen more steeply and were presently less than half of one percent of the U.S. gross national product. While the productive capacity of the U.S. had increased considerably since before the war, the European countries had come to depend a great deal more than before the war on food and raw materials produced in North America.

He concludes that the long-term solution to the dollar shortage was the production of more food and raw materials in countries outside North America and in Europe, and an increase of production and productivity of the industries in Western Europe.

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