The Charlotte News
Saturday, April 4, 1953
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that allied and Communist liaison officers were expected to meet late this date or the following day in Panmunjom to put finishing touches on plans for a Monday meeting which could pave the way to a truce in the Korean War. The meeting would first deal with the plans for exchange of sick and wounded prisoners of war. Meanwhile, preparations were being made to care for those prisoners upon their return. After they were received, given initial medical care and put through a decontamination process, they would be evacuated to the rear and then home.
Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens said this date that the ammunition supply in Korea had been good everywhere he looked in the forward areas and in the rear, during his just concluded tour of the battlefront.
Secretary of State Dulles told a press conference the previous day that nothing so far expressed in the Communist peace offensive had changed the basic situation of the Soviet aggressive threat, that Kremlin policy was essentially unaltered and remained hostile. The Secretary's views appeared to be at odds with those of the President, who had said in his Thursday press conference that Soviet peace talk should be taken at face value until proved unworthy of consideration. The Secretary believed the peace overtures were, at least in part, responses to the "strong policies" of the Administration in both Asia and Europe. He called for continued defensive strength and progress toward developing the proposed European Defense Community, under which West Germany would be rearmed. He said, in response to questions, that foreign aid for the coming fiscal year could be appreciably reduced from the 7.6 billion dollars proposed by former President Truman, without impairing U.S. objectives, through increasing efficiency, elimination of unnecessary spending and purchase of more goods abroad. He provided no details.
In Rome, the Italian Cabinet dissolved both houses of Parliament this date and called a general election for June 7. The action removed the possibility that Italy would ratify the European Defense Community Treaty prior to the elections. Premier Alcide de Gasperi hoped to return to office with enough strength to push ratification after the Parliament would reconvene on June 25.
In Moscow, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs had informed the British and American embassies that contrary to previous requests, they did not need to move from their present sites to new buildings. Western diplomats said that they associated the gesture with a series of conciliatory actions which the Russians had been making in recent days.
A difference of opinion between Senate Majority Leader Taft and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as to when Communist teachers should be removed from faculties had come to light this date, with Mr. Hoover having said to a House Appropriations subcommittee considering the FBI budget that there was no room in America for Communists or Communist sympathizers in the educational system. Senator Taft had said on February 21 that he would not favor firing a college professor for being a Communist unless he was certain that the person was teaching Communism and having some effect on the development of the students' thought. It quotes heavily from Mr. Hoover's testimony.
Former Representative Leonard Hall of New York indicated, following a White House conference this date, that he would take the Republican national chairmanship if offered to him. He said that the matter had come up during the conference with the President, but only incidentally to discussion of his main purpose, inviting the President to speak in June at Oyster Bay, N.Y., when a national shrine would be dedicated at Sagamore Hill to its former resident, the late former President Theodore Roosevelt. He said that the President would consider the invitation. A high Administration official said that Mr. Hall was on his way to becoming the RNC chairman.
In Istanbul, Turkey, a former U.S. submarine, presently a Turkish vessel, had sunk in the Dardanelles after a collision during the morning, with 70 men aboard lost. Five men on the deck at the time of the collision had been saved, but one of them later died from injuries. There had been 22 survivors trapped in the sunken hull in water-tight compartments at the stern of the vessel, but there was not much hope for them because the submarine had been badly damaged and deep water and a swift current were hampering rescue operations.
In New York, the President had said, in a letter the previous day to the chairman of the annual observance of National Sunday School Week, the following week, that the nation's Sunday schools should pass along to children the abiding values challenged by the enemies of freedom.
In other words, challenge everything represented by Senator McCarthy and his ilk?
In Charlotte, Floyd Kay resigned his position as executive vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce, accepting a position as executive director of the Tennessee Tourist and Development Association, headquartered in Nashville, a position he would begin on May 1. His successor had yet to be named.
An Associated Press story reviews the prospective Easter celebrations across the country set for the following day. Thousands would ascend the steep trails and pathways to the base of a 103-foot tall, flood-lit cross atop Mt. Davidson in San Francisco, for worship and song as the sun would arise. There would also be large gatherings in stadiums, including the Hollywood Bowl and Rose Bowl in the Los Angeles area and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where singer James Melton would provide part of the vocal music. In Cherokee, N.C., a sunrise service would include hymns which Indians had sung 120 years earlier when they were driven from the East along the "trail of tears". More than 100,000 people were expected at services in Camden, N.J., and about 40,000 in Winston-Salem, where a 440-piece band would accompany chorales and hymns in the traditional Old Salem sunrise service.
In Wilton, Calif., a man told police that he found his home in a mess after returning from church services, but discovered nothing missing, finding the residue of lunches and some coffee grounds in the kitchen, the intruders having only borrowed the coffee, apparently having brought their own lunch.
It was probably just the Easter bunny.
On the editorial page, "Killing Two Bills with One Veto" indicates that State Senator Fred McIntyre had given reasons for blocking the perimeter zoning bill and for exempting Mecklenburg County from the "home rule" measure, and the reasons had left much to be desired, which it proceeds to explain at some length.
"Logrolling in Reverse" tells of North Carolina Congressional Representative Thurmond Chatham having come up with a new version of the logrolling tradition in Congress, which went: "You slap my face, and by golly I'll slap yours." He had been angered by a House Ways & Means Committee bill to establish a graduated tax on cigarettes, believing that it would give the economy brands a boost and harm North Carolina cigarette companies, driving down tobacco prices at market. He was also angry that some of the proponents of the tidelands oil bill, which he and other members of the North Carolina Congressional delegation supported, were also behind the new cigarette tax measure. He therefore sought the support of other tobacco state Congressmen in reconsidering their position on tidelands oil and the oil depletion allowance as a retaliatory move to obtain opposition to the cigarette tax.
The result was that the tidelands oil bill passed in the House. It suggests that logrolling, whether forward or in reverse, violated a basic principle of good legislation, that the merit of any bill should be its measure, and not the result of political deals, whereby a member agreed to support one measure in exchange for support of another, or the reverse, as practiced by Congressman Chatham without success. It indicates that he had brought public attention, at least, to the "ancient evil" of legislative assemblies, and so had rendered a public service, even if unintentionally.
"Quick Death" indicates that the State Senate Judiciary Committee 2 had killed two measures involving creditors and debtors, both having called for amendments to the State Constitution, the first which would have permitted creditors to garnish up to 10 percent of a debtor's earnings, and the second, which would have authorized the General Assembly to pass a law allowing citizens to waive their $500 homesteading exemption when incurring debt. It indicates that in killing those two proposals, it saved the expense of submitting them to statewide election, where both would have been defeated.
"The Hucksters Turn Fiction Writers" tells of new opinion samplers who had come in with the Republican victory in the fall, who were "hucksters" from the advertising offices of Madison Avenue in New York, forming an organization called Research Associates, advising the President on his public relations. Their findings had wound up on the bedside table of the President and in the hands of Vice-President Nixon.
Philip Geyelin of the Wall Street Journal had reported that the researchers believed that publicity not only affected popular opinion but could be used as a yardstick of opinion, thus using the column inches respectively allowed to Republicans and Democrats in representative groups of newspapers to predict the outcome of elections, having determined thereby that General Eisenhower would receive 54 percent in the fall election and Governor Stevenson, 46 percent, which had been closer to the actual results than the major pollsters, with the General receiving 55 percent of the vote.
The piece suggests that it was difficult to believe that the advertising men actually believed in the formula, and counsels the President instead to pick up a Wild West novel from his bedside table rather than the fancy brochure which the organization had prepared, that if he were going to read fiction, he might as well have the genuine article.
A piece from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, titled "On Unnerving Parents", indicates that it used to be thought that psychiatrists did not become consternated easily, that they became perhaps a little dismayed but only superficially. So it had been dumbfounding when Dr. Edgar Doll, a nationally known psychiatrist, had told a convention of psychiatrists in Detroit that he was scared of what they were doing to parents, giving them pediphobia, a new neurosis possessed by parents afraid of doing or saying something which would later cause their children to go nuts. He had suggested that a good spank now and again to the posterior would preserve "both posterity and parent".
The piece finds it a heart-warming confession from an expert, producing cheering from parents, and the verdict of children: "There's a fungus among us."
Drew Pearson indicates that a Treasury spokesman, Undersecretary Marion Folsom, had backed down recently from the President regarding the question of cutting taxes, the President being firmly against any cuts at the present time until the budget was on its way to being balanced, having made it clear that he opposed House Ways & Means Committee chairman, Congressman Daniel Reed of New York, in his efforts to reduce taxes by 10 percent by July 1, effectively negating an 11 percent hike in income taxes to support the Korean War effort. Mr. Folsom, the former treasurer of the Eastman Kodak Co., had been kept after a Committee hearing to answer questions about tax cuts. He said, in response to questioning by Committee member Hale Boggs of Louisiana, that the position of Treasury was that the excess profits tax, set to expire at the end of the year, had been very bad and they would like to be rid of it as soon as they could—though in direct opposition to the President, who had expressed that the excess profits tax, regarding corporations, should be retained until individual income taxes were reduced, to avoid the appearance of the Republicans favoring big business. Mr. Folsom then said that Treasury did not want to take any position regarding the Reed bill cutting income taxes, but would not say that they opposed it.
Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania was not happy about the treatment he was receiving from the White House, having been one of the first Eisenhower supporters during the campaign, when most were saying that the General would not run. But since the election, despite those considerable campaign efforts, he was not only not appointed to the Cabinet but was seldom invited to the White House, and rarely consulted on policy matters. While not having asked for any favors, recently he had asked Sherman Adams, the President's chief of staff, to request that a fellow Pennsylvanian, the widow of former Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, who had served under President Woodrow Wilson, be continued in her job with the General Services Administration. Mr. Pearson recounts that when FDR became President in 1933, the Democrats had found some Republicans in sinecure jobs, such as President Warren Harding's old secretary and Florence Harding's brother, as members of the Shipping Board, originally set to be fired, but continued by FDR out of sympathy for the depressed conditions of those individuals. Subsequently, former Senator Sam Shortridge of California, a Republican, had been found half-starving on the streets of San Francisco at the age of 65, and was also given a job by the Democrats. Yet, Senator Duff received little response in his request regarding Mrs. Palmer. Though Mr. Adams had appeared to agree with the request that she be retained, she was fired two days later, her phone cut off and her desk moved out of her office. The experience had led Senator Duff to conclude that he would probably run for governor of Pennsylvania the following year. If so, the Democrats had in mind two potential replacements for him in the Senate, and the President might be short a Senator in his slim Republican majority.
Nevada Senator George Malone was in such a hurry to turn the public range lands over to the big Western cattle and sheep men that he announced the firing of the Government's land management boss, appointed by President Truman, before the President had done so. The Senator had made disparaging remarks on the individual, that he knew nothing of how the stockmen west of the Rockies made a living.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that the Soviet rulers probably did want to end the fighting in Korea, and the new move toward resolving the remaining issue of prisoner of war repatriation probably portended a new Soviet policy which would subject the West to a test at least as severe as the Korean War, at least according to the majority view of the experts who had studied the recent moves from Moscow. The theory most generally favored as to why the Soviets wanted to end the war was that the death of Stalin, an old man with his roots in the period of Russian revolutionary ferment, had taken away the doctrinaire rigidity of the old revolutionary, which had repeatedly saved the West, as a less ambitious policy, without violent repression, might have enabled the Communists to achieve power in Western Europe following the war, as Stalin could have wrecked the Marshall Plan simply by joining it when he was invited to do so. The Soviet-engineered Czech coup had awakened the West and the Korean War had done so again during the period when Louis Johnson had been Secretary of Defense, and had reduced considerably the defensive capability of the nation.
By contrast, new Premier Georgi Malenkov was a relatively young man and not a revolutionary, but a practical expert in seizing and exercising power in the modern slave-state, having nothing but contempt for doctrine. None of the experts believed that Mr. Malenkov's objectives would essentially differ from those of Stalin, but might differ in the means used to try to attain them. The Korean War represented a threat to the Malenkov regime, as he lacked the prestige accorded Stalin within the Soviet empire. He did not want the new Administration to bring increased military pressure to end the war and enlarge the conflict, making him have to choose between dishonoring commitments made by Stalin to China or becoming directly involved in conflict with the U.S. Either course might fatally weaken his hold on power, and the new policy of withdrawing American ground troops in Korea had reduced the practical value of the war to the Soviets.
Mr. Malenkov's ultimate objectives were to weaken the West and eventually rule it, just as had been the case with Stalin. Moreover, if the fighting ended in Korea, the Western allies would relax their ban on negotiations directly with the Soviets while the fighting was ongoing, such as the call by the Soviet commander in Germany to have a four-power conference to negotiate a German treaty.
There was also the chance of a U.S. depression resulting from slackened defense spending.
The minority of experts held the view that the Soviets were not serious in their truce proposal but hoped instead to buy time and sow dissension, a view seemingly supported by Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov having coupled the extraneous issue of Communist China's admission to the U.N. with a Korean truce proposal.
The Alsops conclude that the test ahead was nevertheless good news and a tribute to the steadfastness of the country as leader of the West, but that if the fighting ended in Korea, it would be harder for the U.S. and its allies to remember the simple truth that "words of sweet wisdom from the Kremlin do not affect the vast military power of the Soviet Union, nor the constantly growing Soviet stockpile of atomic bombs, nor the ultimate purposes of the man in the Kremlin."
Judge John J. Parker, Chief Judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the third and final abstract of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee recently regarding the proposed Bricker amendment to the Constitution which would change the ratification process for treaties, to include the necessity, in addition to the extant requirement of two-thirds approval by the Senate, approval by majorities of both houses of Congress, and including executive agreements not arising to the level of treaties, indicates that more objectionable than the abolition of "self-executing" treaties under the proposal would be the provision outlawing any treaty which would permit any foreign power or international organization to supervise, control or adjudicate "matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States". That provision, for example, would, he says, outlaw the control by an international organization of the production of atomic energy, as proposed by the plan of Bernard Baruch. It would also preclude agreements with allies giving them control over their troops quartered in U.S. territories, would impair U.S. power to make agreements with allies for the unification and direction of armed forces, would eliminate agreements for arbitration or judicial settlement of controversies of an international character, would outlaw arbitration, such as that under which citizens of the U.S. recovered an award in the "Black Tom" litigation, and would outlaw the agreements for juridical settlement contained in the Convention on International Civil Aviation. He indicates that for the country to refuse to permit arbitration or juridical settlement by an international tribunal over which it had jurisdiction was not different from an attempt by one of the states to preclude adjudication in a Federal court of a dispute over which its state courts also had jurisdiction. He believes such restraints would prevent the country from achieving successful world leadership.
He asserts that possibly the most objectionable provision of the proposed amendment was that relating to executive agreements, that if the country were to wage war as a member of an alliance, as in Korea or elsewhere, it was absolutely necessary that the executive have the power to enter into executive agreements about unforeseen matters which daily arose and which could not await legislation or the slow process of treaty-making.
He finds that the criticism of existing treaty ratification procedure was the result of fear, not characteristic of how the foundations of the country had been laid, that it was no reason for retreat to isolationism that the world was in a "disordered condition", rather presenting a challenge to world leadership which could not be burdened by unwise restrictions on the treaty-making power. He concludes that under the existing provisions of the Constitution, the country had got grown to greatness and there was no reason to think that, "now that we are great, we can no longer trust in them. The President and the Senate have not betrayed us in the past. Why should we think that they will betray us in the future?"
Robert C. Ruark finds it nice of the President and Mamie Eisenhower to revive the Easter egg rolls on the White House lawn, putting the people back in touch with the "throne", with which they had been out of touch for awhile, since the Easter egg roll had been suspended for the war in 1942. (Maybe that was because there was no "throne" in either the Roosevelt or Truman Administrations, you stupid dolt.)
He goes on and on and on, and we see no need to try to summarize it further, leaving it to you, if you desire to waste your time, to read his gin-soaked commentary on the Trumans and the Trumans and the Trumans and the Trumans, and the Roosevelts and the Roosevelts and the Roosevelts, ad nauseam. He has been hanging out at bars again, obviously, after returning from his stupid, little safari in Kenya.
Lest we forget, Eleanor Roosevelt was largely responsible for the 1939 Easter Sunday concert of Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, after she had been denied access to perform at Constitution Hall by the D.A.R. for her skin color—perhaps having been that, and like acts in both Administrations, which, in fact, stuck in the craw of the seemingly embittered Mr. Ruark.
We really are tired of this guy and we wish the newspaper would get rid of him. When he isn't boring, he writes as a boorish lout, nine columns out of ten.
A letter writer comments that thousands would go to some church to worship the following day on Easter and that everyone ought to thank God for His son who arose, and for the blessings bestowed by God, and have Easter as a day of prayer for peace on earth. She reminds that no one knew when he or she would be called to meet God and that He could do better without us than we could do without Him.
Well, while we basically agree with your salutary message regarding a prayer for peace, how do you know this latter point? Did God come down to talk to you recently? You seem to be saying that God prefers social distancing from us disease-riddled humans. Maybe that is not what you meant. We are responding as a function of our present times, which you, no doubt, would not believe, after enduring a couple of world wars and a depression, not to mention, we assume, the flu pandemic of 1918—to which our current occupant of the White House continually refers, apparently having seen the movie recently, as having been in 1917, when U.S. involvement began directly in World War I, but not the great flu pandemic, just a small example of the moron's perversion of history, which takes place almost daily.
In any event, have mercy on us, as we are experiencing a national nightmare, along with much of the rest of the world given to travel and mobility, only apt to become worse as the months pass on, but hopefully at least nailing down in this country, for the fools who have fallen for the Super Salesman's gimmicks, that we cannot suffer fools at the head of state, that things do rapidly fall apart when a journeyman apprentice is suddenly set in the shoes ordinarily occupied by a master. It did not work, and it cannot work, as anyone with any common sense should have realized in 2016. You cannot run the Government as a business. Yet, these clowns continue to try to do so, even in the face of the nightmarish pandemic.
Now, we hear from the Administration that the Department of Justice will issue some kind of statement regarding the states' efforts to curtail attendance of in-person religious services, which are only attempts to prevent idiots from spreading the disease to all of us when they exit the irresponsible "churches" insisting on holding in-person services despite the threat consequent to all of us from that self-centered approach to "religion". It seems that the Administration supports states' rights, when it is convenient to have the states fend for themselves with regard to stockpiles of hospital supplies to deal with the pandemic, when there was a call early in the process for utilizing Federal power to impose uniform national standards for interpersonal behavior during the height of the virus's attack rather than leaving it to piecemeal state-by-state efforts, only applicable within a given state's borders but not with respect to neighboring states where the border wall obviously prevents Mr. Corona Virus from entry without proper papers, but seeks to intercede to limit states' rights, when it comes to clear and appropriate exercise of the local and state police powers to protect health and safety by merely limiting inessential in-person activity, the Administration apparently seeking to equate attendance in person of religious services for a continuous hour or more with going to the market for a few minutes to buy food. Nothing more stupid could be imagined. But of course we now have an Attorney General who thinks his primary role is to serve his master and the latter's low-grade, limited constituency rather than justice and the laws of the United States and all its citizens, similar to the approach of the subservient sycophants occupying most other major positions in this stupid Administration—which is going to end in just a few months when the voters, at long last, have their opportunity to register their opinion on the head of the ticket.
Happy Easter—which, in point of fact, as anyone who is not a dolt already knows, is not actually a Christian holiday in its origins, but rather a pagan ritual recognized long before the time of Christ, celebrating the beginning of spring, the rebirth of nature, hence the eggs and the bunnies. The crucifixion and resurrection are merely afterthoughts engrafted onto that tradition, following in line with the pagan tradition of cyclical rebirth in nature after death in the winter. It is best to keep things straight and then you won't lose your mind, like some of these nuts in the Administration, including the head nut, who really likes those bunnies, paid one off through his lawyer just before the election in 2016 to remain mum about his bunny affection. Now, they are eager to protect religious observance rights notwithstanding a threat thereby posed to the health of the general population. Isn't it precious? Draconian legal punishment is quite alright, but not "Draconian" imposition by states and localities upon religious practices in right-wing Republican-leaning territory, which could not be had with the same quality in the age of television and the internet without in-person attendance, the laying on of hands.
Draco, we trow, would have applauded this Administration with lusty vigor.
Framed Edition
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