The Charlotte News
Friday, September 12, 1952
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via George McArthur, that U.N. artillerymen this date had directed a barrage at the valleys north of "Capitol Hill", preventing the Communists from launching new assaults on that central front hill. South Korean scouts had reported at dawn that the valleys were covered with Chinese bodies, the allied artillery having scattered enemy units of varying size, from a few squads to a battalion of about 750 men.
U.N. fighter-bombers assisted the artillery in knocking out enemy guns which had been harassing the South Korean defenders of the hill. The U.S. Fifth Air Force said that Sabre jets had shot down one enemy MIG-15 and damaged two others, during a fight between 24 Sabres and 29 MIGs south of the Yalu River.
The Fifth Air Force said that the toll of this date raised the September bag to 29 enemy jets shot down, one probably destroyed and 29 others damaged.
The Defense Department disclosed this date that the Selective Service system would call up 47,000 men in November for assignment to the Army, whereas the other services would not call up any new men. The Army's November call-up figure was the same as for October and was based on maintaining approved strength, after allowances for enlistments and re-enlistments. The call-up would bring the total number of men drafted since resumption of the draft for the war in September, 1950, to 1,107,430.
Senator Taft said this date that he and General Eisenhower, after a meeting at the General's Columbia University home, were in substantial agreement on all issues and that he would speak anywhere he could in support of the Republican ticket. He expressed his belief that the General would carry out the policies of the Republican platform and was satisfied that he would provide a good administration for the country. He contended that Governor Stevenson was a representative of the "left wing", even if not a left-winger, himself. He conceded that he did not necessarily agree on all of General Eisenhower's foreign policy positions but insisted that their differences were only in degree, primarily regarding spending. He said that he and the General agreed to reduce drastically Government spending to the point where the Federal budget would be down to 70 billion dollars in fiscal year 1954 and 60 billion in 1955. He also said that the General was supportive of the basic principles of Taft-Hartley and opposed its repeal. In response to a question, he stated that the suggestion by Col. Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, that a new American party be established, was not feasible in 1952.
Governor Stevenson, in Los Angeles, denied that Democrats, alone, were responsible for corruption and misconduct in the Federal Government, indicating that it was the fault of the people, that the public servants often served them better than their apathy and indifference deserved. He said that there had been cases of corruption, bribery, and venality involving a minute fraction of the tens of thousands of Federal employees, and that many of those cases had been discovered by Democrats in the Congress, keeping watch over the spending of the public funds. He indicated that he was reminded that during the Administration of Warren Harding, former Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Republican presidential nominee in 1916, later Chief Justice, had said that neither political party had a monopoly of virtue or of rascality and that wrong should be exposed and punished without "partisan pecksniff", affecting a "holier than thou attitude", that guilt was personal and knew no party. The Governor stressed that there was not going to be any clean-up of crime and corruption until the people took responsibility for cleaning up American civic and political life.
In a second speech in Los Angeles, he contended that the Republicans were afraid of the future and that it had been seldom that a bold idea for building a stronger future for the country had been put forth which was not nixed by the Republicans. He identified the Democrats as the party of progress.
He would next travel to Arizona and New Mexico, returning to Springfield late the following day.
Another Gallup poll appears, taking the pulse of New York voters, the state with the most electoral votes, showing that 50 percent of the respondents favored the Republican Party to win the presidential election, whereas 43 percent favored the Democrats, with 7 percent undecided. General Eisenhower thus received 4 percent greater support than had Governor Dewey in the 1948 election. Analysis of the past behavior of the undecided voters showed that they would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. New York had cast 13 percent of the total national vote in 1948, resulting in Governor Dewey winning the state by 46.3 percent to 45.4 percent for the President, with former Vice-President Henry Wallace polling 8.3 percent. It was the first time that the Republicans had carried the state in the previous five presidential elections since 1928, but it occurred only because of the split of the Democratic vote for Mr. Wallace. It provides a chart of the outcomes from 1932 through 1948 in New York. A recent Gallup poll, sampling sentiment throughout the Middle-Atlantic section, including, in addition to New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia, had shown that General Eisenhower was running about 5 percent stronger than Governor Dewey in the election of 1948.
Attorney General James McGranery announced the indictment in Washington for evasion of income taxes in 1946 of a former Indiana brewer who had been named in Congressional complaints regarding Government tax irregularities. The indictment alleged a large sum of under-reporting of income and taxes.
The Attorney General relieved Ellis Slack as acting head of the Justice Department's tax division and replaced him with Charles Lyon, who had been chief counsel of the House committee investigating tax scandals. Mr. Slack, who had been under fire by the House Judiciary subcommittee investigating the Justice Department, for his handling of tax cases before the St. Louis grand jury the previous year, would return to his former post as chief of the appellate section of the tax division.
UMW president John L. Lewis summoned the policy committee for a meeting on the following Monday to review contract negotiations and prepare for a possible strike of the miners on September 22. The UMW contract with the Northern bituminous mines would expire September 20, a Saturday. Talks had been transpiring with some signs of progress, but with no conclusions yet on major issues.
In Undine, Italy, a correspondent for the Communist newspaper, L'Unita, was upset that Communist correspondents had been virtually barred from observing fall maneuvers of Southern European NATO land forces, observing sarcastically that the blue forces were beating the red, "naturally", and complaining that the maneuvers had caused cancellation of a proposed Communist Party rally in the town.
In Hamburg, Pa., three prison escapees held up a roadside diner this date and fled with $240, then broke through a police roadblock in a stolen vehicle after holding a family of seven captive for 19 hours in their suburban Philadelphia home. FBI circulars described the three as "desperate and extremely dangerous". They had escaped on Wednesday morning by climbing over the wall of the Federal prison at Lewisburg, where they were serving long terms for bank robbery. While holding the family captive, they had displayed six shotguns and seven boxes of ammunition, apparently stolen during a break-in of a sporting goods store at West Reading the previous morning. No one in the family had been harmed. They were the object of the largest manhunt in eastern and central Pennsylvania in many years.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of W. Cleve Davis, a Charlotte attorney, having been recommended by the Democratic Party this date as chairman of the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections, succeeding John G. Newitt, who had resigned during the week. The recommendation was tantamount to appointment by the State Board chairman.
In Houston, a woman told her six-year old son all summer that he should not worry about going to school, as it would be just like Sunday school. But her son did not find it so, returning home after his first day, telling his mother that his teacher did not know anything as she had not even learned a prayer.
On the editorial page, "A Local Responsibility" tells of a Southern physician doing some plain-talking to his fellow-Charlotteans in a letter to the editor this date, having seen and helped to remedy some of the results of poverty and ignorance in the city. He had concluded that provision of equality of economic opportunity for all citizens was fundamental to the solution of those problems. He had suggested the formation of a voluntary local commission to create a more favorable climate for the growth of economic equality. He believed that the establishment of more adequate housing, equality of educational opportunity, with particular emphasis on technical and business training in the high schools, more recreational facilities for blacks and more representation of the black community on policy-making bodies to be essential to the creation of such a favorable climate.
The piece reminds the doctor of the city's considerable progress in the field of slum clearance, with plans for urban redevelopment. There were also a number of parks and other recreational facilities set aside for blacks, and there was rapid improvement in the black schools during the previous few years. It indicates that the black community's leaders had not been particularly effective and that the lack of interest in voting in the black community could be the chief reason why no black citizen held elective office. But, nevertheless, it regards the doctor's case as having been stated clearly and forcefully as to what still needed to be done, and finds his views in line with those of General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson, and of many thoughtful legislators. It suggests that if equality of economic opportunity were accomplished on a local level, there would be no need for a compulsory FEPC.
It suggests that persons who favored voluntary action rather than compulsory action should assume leadership and undertake the responsibility as businessmen to hire blacks for jobs which were previously not available to them, that City officials should appoint qualified black citizens to responsible positions, as had officials in other North Carolina communities, including at least one such case in the so-called "Black Belt" of the eastern part of the state.
It opines that ignorance and poverty were the problem, and educational and economic equality the answers.
The problem, however, in the complex of caste poverty and ignorance, went beyond just one side of the segregated community, and extended also to poor whites of lesser education, with the segregated living and educational environments effectively raising a barrier to understanding across the vast racial divide between the poverty-stricken and educationally-deprived black and white subsets of the community, wherein the greatest chafing was apt to occur, for fear of competition for working-class jobs and relatively cheap housing, as well as psychological factors involving lower socio-economically positioned whites needing a subset with lower economic advantage at which to point as inferior, to enable some vestige of pride to remain. Elimination, therefore, of those barriers, not just in the workplace, but from the formative stages of sociability, in the schools, had to be the first object to have hope of eliminating the prejudice which marched apace with pride in the beating breasts of those opposing forces in the lower socio-economic strata, preventing the kind of progressive ideas suggested by the letter writer from taking root in the community. For how could one hope to achieve equality of economic and educational opportunity in a system of segregated business and educational environments, extending even so far as having black and white newspapers, black and white radio stations, black and white music stores? The twain had to meet at some juncture to effect any hope of mutual understanding, and, while that understanding is always a matter of personal choice to overcome any past prejudices developed and nurtured by the perspective-limiting happenstance of spending the first five or six years of life in a family of one race or another, that place had, ultimately, to be in the schools, then only secondarily naturally extending into the workplace and beyond.
"Truman's Contribution to History" suggests that the Truman Administration had a paradoxical history, on the one hand having made bold international moves, even bolder than those of FDR in certain respects, backed by a majority of the conservative Congressional coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. On the other hand, its domestic programs under the Fair Deal, similar to those proposed by FDR, which had been backed by Congress prior to World War II, had been rejected after the war by the same conservative coalition. The "do-nothing" 80th Congress had actually cooperated with the President more than the ensuing two Congresses, according to Congressional Quarterly.
The Republican 80th Congress had completed 23 of the President's 57 requests, provided emergency aid to Europe, approved the Marshall Plan, and approved the U.S. joining the International Refugee Organization and the World Health Organization. But it had also set the pattern for disapproval of the domestic program, shelving public housing, slum clearance, urban redevelopment, the Brannan agricultural plan, the civil rights legislation, requests for wage and price controls, controls of commodity speculation, and rationing authority. And, over the President's vetoes, that Congress had passed Taft-Hartley, reduced taxes, exempted railroad rate agreements from antitrust laws, and narrowed the coverage of Social Security.
The ensuing 81st Congress, again under nominal Democratic control, had approved the President's Point Four program, albeit on a smaller scale than originally proposed, ratified NATO, begun foreign military assistance—actually begun in 1947 by the 80th Congress with approval of aid to Greece and Turkey, and liberalized the displaced persons admission program. It agreed with the President on increasing taxes after the beginning of the Korean War, provided some funding for housing and slum clearance, and for crop storage and farm credit facilities, as well as expanding Social Security. It nixed, however, Federal aid to education and medical training, national health insurance, Federal scholarships and expansion of unemployment insurance.
The current 82nd Congress had approved most of the President's foreign policy agenda, including military and economic assistance and ratification of treaties and security pacts. It increased veterans' benefits but rejected universal military training. It approved the President's request for mine safety legislation, Federal aid for highways, and the IRB reorganization plan, but turned down U.S. participation in the St. Lawrence Seaway project, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, home rule for the District of Columbia, reorganization of the post office, and dispersion of government agencies to make them less vulnerable to enemy attack. It also rejected river valley development, flood insurance, and any major revision of Taft-Hartley, as well as the FEPC.
It concludes that the Fair Deal had, for the most part, failed of accomplishment, and that the President's foreign policy would be his lasting legacy.
Of course, it should be said that the Fair Deal laid the groundwork for the more far-reaching legislation of the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations in the area of civil rights and combating of poverty.
"Spare the Rod and Spoil the Fishing" indicates that there were 10,000 farm fish ponds in the state, most built in the previous few years, good news for fishermen. In addition, the National Wildlife Association had reported that heavy fishing of ponds and lakes had increased, rather than decreased, the potential supply of fish, for the fact that fish were prolific creatures and, if left to themselves, would quickly overpopulate a pond and exhaust its food supply, resulting in a battle for survival in which many of them would die. Thus, the Association advised pond owners to allow open fishing in their ponds.
It indicates that conservationists had abandoned the old rule of throwing the little ones back, as they would only have to struggle with the others for the available food supply, and so it was better to use the little ones as bait for the bigger ones.
It urges fishing away, that people could have their fish and eat them, too, provided they could catch them.
We don't fish.
A piece from the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, titled "Charlotte Advances, but Winston's Loud", tells of The News having revealed on its local page that Charlotte was advancing on many fronts, including the creation of a second Kiwanis Club for the city, a move by the City Council to use $100,000 from Charlotte's ABC store dividends to lower the tax rate by three cents, the receipt by a Charlotte man of a commission as an admiral in the Nebraska Navy (whatever that was, sounding as a fish story), the establishment of the Republican state headquarters in Charlotte, the visit of four Chinese generals in Charlotte during a tour of the country, the formation of a committee to seek establishment of an educational television station in the city, and the presence of a plethora of relatives of Governor Stevenson.
It indicates that ordinarily a competing city, such as Winston-Salem, would be green with envy, but the people of the Twin City were maintaining a "calm placidity" and even a slightly smug sense of unlimited power under control. The reason for the equanimity was that Winston-Salem was about to invest $20,400 in 24 air raid sirens—one of which nearly blasted out our ear drums and seared our brain in the process when we first heard the dad-blamed thing in 1958 on a Saturday at noon time, not knowing what in the hell was breaking loose, being, as we were, accustomed to the relative quiet of the swamp. It says that the sirens would be loud enough to wake up the populace at any hour of the day or night—an understatement, loud enough to wake the dead, especially one night about 10:30 p.m. while "Naked City" was playing on the tv, when the damn thing short-circuited during the height of the Cold War, circa 1961, prompting everyone to emerge from their homes and look up at the sky, ready to say goodbye at the first glimpse of an inbound missile.
So, it concludes, Winston-Salem would be able to make more noise than any other city in the state, from a decibel standpoint. You got that right.
The dogs will howl and the birds
will sing, but those air raid sirens, still in our ears, forever will
ring. If you have never heard one at close range, you do not wish to
do so. It conveys the sound of death
Drew Pearson tells of serious friction having erupted between U.S. troops and South Korean natives in Korea, and some areas being so bad that local guerrillas, operating behind the allied lines, were not so much pro-Communist as anti-American. The Army, for example, had noticed a direct relation between the guerrilla raids and U.S. troop behavior, in many instances taking out their frustrations on the natives for being stuck in the war. A few drunk and disgruntled such American troops had been pushing and slapping the South Koreans around in their own country, this distinct minority seriously doing injury to general relations. President Syngman Rhee of South Korea had given strict orders to South Koreans not to resist, such that some of the natives had, rather than getting in trouble with the South Korean police, joined guerrilla bands who then raided American command posts and supply centers. In one instance, all of the Korean mess boys mysteriously disappeared from an American radar station several hours before a guerrilla raid, and not one of them had bothered to alert the Americans of the approaching danger. Many of the South Koreans were taking out their resentment by leaking security information to the Communists. The result was that the Army was tightening discipline and trying to teach more respect for the South Korean allies.
Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada had suffered two defeats, the first having been the victory of Tom Mechling over the Senator's law partner, Alan Bible, in the Democratic primary for the Senate seat presently occupied by Republican George Malone, and the other having been that the White House had held up the appointment of a McCarran-picked U.S. Attorney for Nevada, even after the Senator had obtained his confirmation by the Senate. It was almost unprecedented for the White House to withdraw an appointment after confirmation by the Senate, but the President had done so, angering Senator McCarran.
The situation had come about, starting the prior summer, when a Federal Judge issued an injunction against the Senator and a group of gamblers for conspiring to kill advertising in the Las Vegas Sun, after that newspaper had criticized the Senator. The Judge said that he was turning the matter over to the U.S. Attorney, who had shown recent signs of independence from Senator McCarran, though owing his appointment to the Senator. Suddenly, on July 1, the U.S. Attorney resigned, with only the Senator knowing in advance that it was to take place. A few hours afterward, the Senator announced that he was appointing one of his political henchmen to the position. He then rushed the nominee through the Senate Judiciary Committee in record time, gaining the approval on July 3, and the confirmation by the full Senate on July 4, when normally such appointments took ten days for an FBI report to be prepared. Such had been the rush that it had appeared questionable whether the name of the nominee was ever properly submitted by the White House, with inquiries indicating that no record of the appointment by the President was available. Given that during the previous two months, the White House had held up the appointment, Mr. Pearson concludes that the President had apparently become wise to Senator McCarran.
Marquis Childs, in Boston, tells of former Mayor and Congressman James Michael Curley, at age 77, again stirring up an issue, not because he was trying to make a political comeback, having found that difficult after serving time in prison for mail fraud, but rather because the State Legislature had voted to give him an annual pension of $12,000 per year. The Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate had also voted themselves an increase in pension and a stipend for lunches and carfare. That followed a customary tradition in Massachusetts, but this time, the taxpayers got wise when Norman MacDonald, executive director of the Massachusetts Federation of Taxpayers' Associations, showed that an individual legislator, for $225 per year, could purchase a life annuity which would cost $2,923 per year from a private insurance company, whereas the cost to the State for the passed pensions could reach $350,000 per year, significantly higher than in any other state.
The result had been the familiar cry heard across the country, "throw the rascals out".
Governor Paul Dever, running for a third term, who had been the keynote speaker for the Democratic national convention in July and had become known to millions of television viewers as the outstanding heavyweight orator of both conventions, understood the revolt and called a special session of the Legislature, wiping out by executive order some of the surplus jobs and job increases provided by the Legislature, and limiting the agenda to what he wanted to take up in the special session. Mr. Curley said that he never wanted his pension anyway and so was content to give it up.
Mr. Childs indicates that how much of that sentiment would spill into the presidential and Senate contests was as yet unknown. Massachusetts had not voted for a Republican candidate for president since 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was running for re-election. But the voters of the state were known for their independence, and had elected two Republican Senators, Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the latter running for re-election for a third term, albeit from two different seats in the state, after he had resigned his first seat in 1942 to fight in North Africa.
Neal Stanford, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, indicates that the Administration's containment policy regarding Communism had not been the total failure which Republican critics had claimed, but it had neither been the total success which some of the spokesmen for the Administration claimed, the truth lying somewhere in between. It had been a success in some areas and a failure in others. Part of the problem was that "containment" meant different things to different people.
John Foster Dulles, the chief foreign policy adviser to General Eisenhower, had said that containment was immoral, suicidal and unworkable. He regarded it as having failed because Eastern Europe was behind the Iron Curtain, and because China and Czechoslovakia had become Communist. He regarded it as immoral because its aim was to contain slavery within bounds rather than to eliminate it. It was suicidal because he perceived it as negative, material and passive. Yet, he did not contend that no American effort to contain Soviet expansion should have been undertaken. He was not against the policy where it had succeeded but rather only where it had failed. He believed that had things been handled correctly, Eastern Europe could have been maintained as free and China would not have been lost or Czechoslovakia Communized. He did not favor using force to push back the Iron Curtain by utilizing the NATO army to liberate Eastern Europe. Nor was he calling for the enslaved peoples of the satellite countries to rise up against their oppressors. He wanted instead the U.S to lead a global attack on the Soviets in the moral and spiritual areas, using psychological and propaganda techniques. He believed that the Administration had been too reliant on armed force alone, dependent on the number of divisions, tanks, planes and atomic bombs the West could muster.
The Administration's view of containment was different, with the spokesmen saying that it was succeeding, while not denying that Eastern Europe and China had fallen to the Communists. But they did deny that Washington was responsible for those latter developments, that Eastern Europe was not lost at the conference table but rather during the war when the Red Army overran it. The view stressed that the Soviets threw their weight around without asking permission of the West. The Administration spokesmen indicated that they had saved Iran in 1946, Greece and Turkey with the Truman Doctrine in 1947, and Western Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948. They pointed out that containment did not mean merely holding the line, but also entailed strengthening the line, that where it had worked, as above indicated, it had immeasurably strengthened those areas.
A letter from a local physician, as indicated in the above editorial, urges equality of economic and educational opportunity for the community, making several suggestions for accomplishing the appropriate atmosphere in which that opportunity could thrive, as set forth in the above editorial. He urges that those who would cast the first stone at those living in poverty should try living in their situation for just a week. He complains that news articles on the subject never mentioned why the situation existed in a prosperous, growing community with an apparent commitment to principles of democracy and Christianity. He indicates that segregation was morally indefensible if one applied the Judeo-Christian ethic of the dignity and worth of every individual before God. The unfair practices which had grown up within the segregated environment regarding repression, designed to keep an entire race in economic subjugation, constituted that which he condemned. He asks what the value of adequate housing, better education or indoctrination of religious teachings would be if equality of economic opportunity were withheld. He hopes that the editors, who had shown evidence of a sincere desire to correct the shameful situation in the community, would take the lead in establishing an interracial commission composed of civic and religious leaders committed to the program which he outlines.
A letter writer from Denver, Colo., indicates that a few days earlier, he had received clippings from several North Carolina newspapers, including The News, pertaining to the supposed disappearance of the writer and his wife, who had been married in Shelby on July 6 and had sold his half interest in a radio and television shop the prior week, then left immediately for Baltimore, where they had stayed for three weeks, and, finding that television had gone on the air in Denver, decided to move there, where he had been employed by a radio and television shop until he could start his own business. He explains that about two weeks after their arrival, his wife had written to her mother, at which point they first understood the commotion they had caused by remaining incommunicado in the interim. He clarifies that no loan had been made to him, that the money sent to him in Baltimore had been for the purchase of his radio and television shop. He apologizes for the trouble they had caused and expresses special sorrow for being unable to attend his mother's funeral, after she had died in the interim period.
The news reports indicated that the parents of the two had believed that they might have met with some accident while they remained out of communication. Whether that contributed to his mother's demise was never reported.
The editors indicate that they would be happy to publish a letter written under the pseudonym "J. P. Balse", provided the author would supply his name and address, which they would withhold from publication.
We can hardly wait. We hope it's some more about the dogs.
Framed Edition
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