The Charlotte News
Friday, May 15, 1953
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. Sabre jets destroyed three enemy MIG-15s and damaged five others this date, as Turkish infantrymen and a tank and artillery barrage had cut down 400 of 2,000 attacking Chinese troops on the western front, in the largest enemy assault since the Korean truce talks had resumed on April 26. In addition, more than 200 Sabres, Thunderjets and British Meteor jets had flattened nearly 100 buildings at a large military training center of the enemy.
At Panmunjom, there was no progress in the truce talks, as both sides refused to retreat from their recent proposals on exchange of war prisoners, the only remaining issue blocking a truce for the previous year. The session lasted 80 minutes, but only involved restatements of rejection of each other's views on the proposed exchange of prisoners. Another meeting was scheduled for the following morning. Lead U.N. negotiator, Lt. General William Harrison, indicated that the Communists had either "misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted" the latest proposed plan by the allies submitted two days earlier and sharply rejected by the Communists the previous day.
U.N. officials had decided to probe the present Communist position to determine whether there was any basis for hope for a truce in Korea. As to the prospects for a broader resolution of East-West differences, optimism in Washington was waning, as the Soviet exploitation of the differences between U.S. and British officials arising during the week had caused some diplomats to say they were right all along in assuming a sinister design afoot in the Kremlin's recent peace drive since the death of Stalin on March 5. They believed that the effort was simply designed to split the Western powers at a time when their united strength presented a serious barrier to Soviet ambitions, in Korea, Indo-China and Western Europe.
In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer won reluctant approval this date from the upper house of the German parliament for the European army treaty, the first such legislative body to ratify the treaty to set up a six-nation, two-million man Western defense force. It also approved the peace contract with the NATO Allies, by a compromise formula under which the upper chamber approved two lesser sections of the treaties and voiced no objections to the two major sections. The lower house had already approved the treaty and the contract.
Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley, in an Armed Forces Day address prepared for the Women's National Press Club in Washington, said that there was no sign of Russian relenting in military preparations and that the U.S. had to spend heavily on military readiness as far into the future as could be seen. He said that those who would put the economy ahead of the nation's security and were wishfully hoping regarding Communist intentions had gloomy prospects. He indicated his intention to discuss long-range costs of keeping the peace as long as military power was required to maintain it, and was not aiming his statements at the Administration's currently proposed cuts to the military budget.
The President arrived in Yorktown, Va., aboard the yacht Williamsburg, on his way to the College of William and Mary to receive an honorary degree and make a speech. After he would use the yacht during the weekend, to prepare his Tuesday radio address with advisers, he would turn it back over to the Navy for decommissioning as a needless luxury. A crowd of several hundred persons, with Virginia Governor John Battle at the forefront, had welcomed the President, who was accompanied by the First Lady and Senators Harry F. Byrd and Willis Robertson of Virginia. The President spoke briefly in the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg and said he thought that no American could stand in the hall without feeling a great sense of the debt owed to the stamina and faith of the forefathers, noting that the early Virginians had recognized the relationship between the country's form of government and religious faith, recognizing that unless that relationship was stressed, the form of government made no sense.
We have to note at this juncture that one has to be a particularly moronic jackass, with an historical intelligence quotient of very nearly zero, to engage in the pulling down of a statue of Thomas Jefferson as a "racist", without whom, there would likely be no recognition of equal civil rights in this country at all. Such vandalism generally has gone on for too long with impunity. The people who engage in it are idiots, spoiled brats who have too much time on their hands. We can at least understand and empathize with the complete absurdity of honoring Confederate generals over 150 years after the Civil War and the desire to remove such statues, have thought they were a blight on the landscape of the South for decades, long before the vandal-brats were born. But when it comes to the Founders, such idiots are, perhaps knowledgeably, only playing into the hands of the re-election efforts of the Trumpie Dumpies and the far right in the country, the Rushing Lamebrains, who will try to blame "liberals" for such activity, claiming that the "liberals" want to tear down the country and its Bill of Rights and stimulate anarchy. Such vandals ought to be treated as vandals and put in jail. They are not politically aligned with any cause except their own vanity. They feed off the right wing and without it, lose personal power, so secretly wish its continued sustenance.
If you want to work to try to get proper authorities to remove a statue, fine, that is your right as an American. But it is no one's right to destroy property, public or private. That will only, with time, result in severe reaction. We have seen and lived through that kind of oppressive reaction before, in the 1970's and 1980's, and it was no fun. It took a lot of effort by a lot of people to get the country back from that reactionary precipice. We suspected then, when the current of street violence began in the 1960s, that many of those, if not most, who were engaged in such property destruction and other such outrageous activity, were, in fact, secretly supporters of Richard Nixon and his political cadre. Their ilk apparently survives.
If you want to do something constructive, vote, volunteer, or run for office. But if your plan is destruction, to wreck the Constitution, don't you know that you can count us out?
Pulling down a statue, whether in London or in Chapel Hill, is not going to change one thing one iota. It is just a campaign to get your self-centered faces before the media, so that you can say, "Hi ma, look what I did. I made the tv." Start identifying these vain idiots and putting their dumb asses in jail for about six months to cool down. That also ought go for looters and arsonists, who are also just common thieves and vandals who take advantage of peaceful protests to engage in lawlessness, dragging the protest into the gutter of absurdity.
One thing is certain, such vandals and thieves are not liberals.
The House Appropriations Committee this date cut deeply into funds requested by both President Eisenhower and former President Truman for the Labor Department and the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare, sending to the floor of the House a bill to appropriate just under two billion dollars for the two departments and related agencies for the ensuing fiscal year, cutting their budgets by 17 percent from the Truman budget and nine percent from the revised Eisenhower budget.
Attorney General Herbert Brownell this date announced the arrest for deportation of a British citizen, Fredric H. Belfrage, editor of the New York publication, The National Guardian, who had refused the previous day to disclose to the Senate Investigations Committee whether he was presently or ever had been a Communist.
In Boston, Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey was among the notables assembled for the commissioning of the U.S.S. Mitcher, a new type of destroyer, with a displacement of 3,650 tons, compared with the 2,250-ton displacement of World War II destroyers, and equipped with more electronic equipment than many larger warships, with nearly automated target designation and push-button and finger-tip steering controls. Many of the ship's developments were top secret, and its power plant could furnish electricity for a city of 50,000 people.
In the vicinity of Heppenheim, West Germany, two U.S. Air Force Flying Boxcars and an American jet fighter had collided and crashed, and German police said that at least two bodies had been found near the scene, while a third airman had been taken to a hospital with serious injuries. At the time of the crash, a flight of 18 Flying Boxcars had been traveling south in formation and met 16 jet fighters headed in the other direction, when one of the latter group left the formation and veered toward the transports, causing the collision.
In Pusan in Korea, a ferry captain and owner were sentenced to prison the previous day on charges of mismanagement in the sinking of an overloaded ferry the prior January, which had resulted in 200 persons dying when the vessel capsized. The captain received three years and the owner, two years, with 11 other co-defendants being acquitted. The prosecution had sought the death penalty for five of the defendants.
In Cairo, a set of quadruplets were born on Wednesday night, but one of the infants, a boy, had died early this date.
In a town 150 miles west of Tokyo, a fire burned down a restaurant and three houses, killing six persons.
In the vicinity of Belgrade, rescue workers freed a Yugoslavian miner who had been trapped for 2 1/2 days by a landslide in a stone quarry. He suffered only exhaustion and minor bruises.
A Charlotte resident was killed in neighboring Cabarrus County in a two-car collision the previous night, after the man's car struck another car driven by a 16-year old, injuring two in the latter car and leaving one uninjured. The cars had collided in an intersection and the dead man's car had skidded and hurdled a ditch, then hit a tree, causing the driver to be ejected. About 5,000 persons had gathered at the scene of the accident, according to a patrolman, who said he had never seen such a large crowd for an accident, that there was a solid line of cars on the highway between Concord and Harrisburg. Investigation as to the specific cause of the accident continued.
In Laurinburg, N.C., the judge in the trial of the defendant accused of murdering an off-duty Fayetteville police officer at a dance at the Laurinburg-Maxton Air Base the prior Christmas night, instructed the all-male jury that it could return one of five verdicts, guilty of first-degree murder, with or without a recommendation of mercy, guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter, or a verdict of not guilty. The defendant claimed self-defense, that he believed that the police officer was reaching for a weapon to shoot at him when he fired, whereas the decedent's widow had testified that her husband had actually been reaching up to his head to brush his hair back. According to testimony, a fight had preceded the shooting.
In Wilson, N.C., a mistrial was declared in the murder trial of a young widow after several members of the jury were reported by law enforcement officers to have become drunk and unruly while sequestered at a local hotel. One of the officers had observed four or five members of the jury staggering in the wee hours of the morning, one cussing and complaining that his head hurt, all clad only in their underwear. One of the jurors wanted to swear out a warrant for his brother, another member of the jury. A box of tablets was found on one of the jurors and the officer believed it to be some form of narcotic. He said that it took more than half an hour to quell the disturbance. A deputy indicated that a fight had broken out apparently when one juror had asked another to take a drink, which the second juror refused, whereupon the offering juror threatened him with a chair—which is better than threatening him with the chair. The defendant, accused of murdering her husband the previous August, was quoted as saying that one time was bad enough and that she hated to go through another trial.
In Denver, presumably N.C. and not Colorado, it was discovered by the local librarians that a scholarly-looking youth had checked out 29 books on photography since February 23, practically the entire stock of such volumes within the library. The youth had given a fictitious name and address in obtaining his library card, and the librarians told the police that he had not been carrying a camera.
In Morris, Ill., fish in the
Illinois-Michigan canal would be the target of archers who planned to
gather on Sunday with bows and arrows for what was billed as a "carp
On the editorial page, "Cutting Remarks Won't Sever the Bond" indicates that the President, at his press conference, had said that he did not think the rift between the U.S. and Britain regarding Korean policies was as wide as it might seem and that he did not present himself as a judge of the motives behind what other people said, but had not met anyone in the country who did not want peace, a reference to the statements by former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, that certain persons in the U.S. appeared not to want peace in Korea or in Europe.
In New Delhi, former Governor Adlai Stevenson had answered a question about Mr. Attlee's statement by saying that he had met no such element in the country who did not want peace and did not know where they might reside.
The editorial indicates that members of Congress who had whipped themselves into a lather of excitement about the Attlee statement had displayed neither dignity nor wisdom. Mr. Attlee was the opposition leader and did not express the views of the Churchill Government, often said things for home consumption, just as did members of Congress. Republicans who had decried the statement, Senators William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, and Congressman Dewey Short, ought recognize those tactics, it offers, as they had used them often enough in recent years when the Democrats had controlled Congress.
It urges recalling Western unity in both World Wars and in the Korean War, and in many enterprises between those wars, that Britain had been a firm and faithful ally. On both sides of the Atlantic, there were politicians who were "either thoughtless, naïve, selfish or just plain stupid", and their deeds and words often appeared to strain the alliance, but the bond was too strong and had withstood such stresses in the past, would continue to do so into the future.
"From 'Sound Money' Advocate, a Warning" indicates that during the first few months of the new Administration, several steps had been taken in the battle against inflation, including a reduction of the number of Federal employees, slashing of budgets, raising of bank interest rates for prime short-term commercial borrowers to 3.25 percent, the cessation of Government purchase of home mortgages as a precautionary measure, the raising of interest rates on mortgages insured by the FHA and VA, the issuance by the Treasury of long-term bonds at an interest rate of 3.25 percent, the highest since 1933, and the increase by the Federal Reserve System of the re-discount rate, increasing the cost of borrowed reserves. The result was that "easy money" had become a thing of the past. All of those steps helped to check inflation, although some home buyers and installment purchasers might get hurt in the process.
Business Week, however, had stated in its current issue that "events in the money market last week seem to us to be saying pretty plainly that we may be overdoing this tight money business." It indicated that the price of Government bonds had dropped during the previous few months from above par to 92, that the Treasury saw its first big refunding issue, the new Humphrey bonds of the Treasury Secretary, go to a discount before they had ever even been issued. It had said that it was glad to know that the brakes worked, but did not want the country to go through the windshield. The piece agrees.
"Spring in Paris" indicates that since the previous winter, the Mutual Security Agency public advisory board, the Fulbright Committee, the MSA "evaluation teams" selected by director Harold Stassen, representatives of the Hickenlooper Committee, the McCarthy committee representatives, Roy Cohn and David Schine, and two teams from the Senate Appropriations Committee had all visited Paris, prompting it to question whether it would not profit Congress and the taxpayers to eliminate the duplication among the teams investigating duplication in the overseas information program.
"Job Security at City Hall" indicates that in many areas of government, change of administration meant a large shakeup in the lower officials and that in a two-party system, the practice had merit. One of the best things, however, about Charlotte's non-partisan municipal primary was that it had produced through the years the equivalent of a career service for City officials. It had not resulted from any law but from the de facto concept that an appointed public official ought be left on the job of providing faithful stewardship. It lists several public officials and when they were appointed, between 21 and two years earlier. It concludes that it was a compliment to those officials that they continued to merit the confidence of succeeding City Councils, and to those Councils for refusing to make those jobs political footballs.
"The Scarcity of Solitude" indicates that in the year 986, Eric the Red, a promoter and a sailor, had changed the name of Gunnbjorn's Land to Greenland, to entice settlers. He had arranged to bring several boatloads of colonists to the island, but not much had happened there since, until a few years earlier when the U.S. airbase was established at Thule during the war. Now, big airplanes were flying from the new airport there and the harbor was filled with ships, disturbing the natives and scaring away the fish, the seals and walrus, prompting a couple of Greenlanders to travel to Denmark, which still owned the island, to asked that the homes of Thule inhabitants be moved to a quiet place.
It sympathizes with the residents of Thule, as with other such persons who had their homes and lives disrupted by encroaching civilization. In South Carolina, farmers were forced to leave their old homesteads to make way for the new hydrogen bomb plant, and others had to make way for new roads and the like. It also reminded that there were few places left in the world where a person could be left alone in solitude. Tiny Ascenscion Island, just below the equator in the South Atlantic, the Pacific atolls and the Yukon country, once refuge to poets and adventurers, along with the natives, had also become airfields, naval bases or boom towns.
It concludes that civilization and progress would march on, but that there was some resentment for its intrusion upon the faraway places which had once been "benign solitude's last stronghold."
A piece from the Richmond News-Leader, titled "How To Sell Poetry", tells of a story out of Chicago recently, as told in the American Bibliographer, that the Chicago Sunday Tribune had reported the discovery by columnist Delos Avery of a two-dollar bill in an old book of poetry purchased from Jerrold Nedwick, who, hearing of the story, wrote a letter to the finder indicating that he hated to disillusion the person but that the finding of the bill as a marker was not accidental, as poetry had always been hard to sell in bookshops, prompting Mr. Nedwick to place two-dollar bills in his books of poetry to enable a "land office" business, adding that any question regarding how he was able to make money by giving away two-dollar bills with a one-dollar purchase was answered by "Volume".
News editor Pete McKnight provides his second installment on the Ford Motor Company's 50th
anniversary
By 1958, Ford expected to have invested 80 million dollars in its Research and Engineering Center, including its Dynamometer Building, where engines were tested for performance under load, dedicated the previous year. A new 11.5 million dollar Styling Building, under construction for 2 1/2 years, would soon be completed, and two other structures, one for maintenance and the other for vehicle testing, had been finished. The Ford proving grounds had also been enlarged by the addition of a 4,600 foot straight roadway, and a ride and handling road with pavement hazards, plus a silent road with sound-reflector walls to magnify squeaks in the cars.
The journalists had seen two new
cars of the future, one at a distance and one close-up. The
experimental X-100
Henry Ford II, like his grandfather, was a man of imagination and boldness, as the company's current president. Two of his brothers, Benson and William Clay, held responsible positions in the company, and around them was a group of alert, aggressive executives who were giving the company a new look. Mr. McKnight had found it interesting to watch them in operation at the press conference which ended the three-day program. Questions were addressed to Mr. Ford, who answered most of them, and called on one of his associates, when he did not have the answer. All of the questions were answered except one regarding the personal relationship between the three boys and their grandfather, and Mr. McKnight regarded it as a new high in industrial public relations.
He concludes that one reason private enterprise had stayed in the public doghouse for so long was the penchant of businessmen and industrialists to be secretive about their operations, but Ford had opened its doors, as ought be the case in all spheres of public interest, to enable appreciation to grow in direct proportion to public exposure.
Drew Pearson indicates that the Supreme Court had decided to review a case recently which, while having nothing to do with the pending but temporarily postponed Rosenberg death sentence for atomic spying, had a great deal to do with Federal District Court Judge Irving Kaufman who had sentenced the couple to death. The case regarded keeping track of lobbyists and went back to a period just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Ralph Moore, an "ebullient, back-slapping, fast-talking" man from Texas who had extensive cotton holdings, had been lobbying members of Congress on a first-name basis. He bragged that he never had to bribe anyone as it was bad practice, just showed them how to make money. When the column had asked him whether he had handled the grain speculation for any Senators, Mr. Moore had said that he had not but that several of the Senators had speculated and usually operated through a company in Washington or one in New York. He said that making money was easy if one knew what the market was going to do. He said that he could make money for anyone who would go easy on him, but that he was afraid that Mr. Pearson would put it in the paper, that if he could trust him, he could enable him to make a few thousand dollars in a hurry.
There was a time when he had sent word that he wanted to shoot Mr. Pearson if the columnist continued to dig into his commodity-market speculation on behalf of Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma. It was about that time that Judge Kaufman had entered the picture, prior to becoming a judge. He was an attorney in charge of enforcing the new Lobbying Registration Act and had taken up the case of Mr. Moore enthusiastically when it was given to him, making it the first test case of the new Act, leading to the indictment of Mr. Moore, Tom Linder of Georgia and J. E. McDonald of Texas for failing properly to register as lobbyists while pulling wires and seeking to influence Senators. Mr. Kaufman's work on the case was largely responsible for his appointment to the U.S. District Court in New York. But after he had become a Judge, Judge Alexander Holtzoff of the Washington District Court ruled against his position in that first test case, holding that the Lobbying Act was unconstitutional and that Mr. Moore and the other defendants did not have to register. The Supreme Court had just agreed, however, to review the case.
Marquis Childs discusses new Joint Chiefs chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford, indicates that he was brilliant and clever and understood how to make the most of opportunities, as he had when he had accompanied President-elect Eisenhower and Defense Secretary-designate Charles E. Wilson on their Korean tour the previous December, returning with them aboard ship and impressing both, so much so that Mr. Wilson had asked the President to make the Admiral Joint Chiefs chairman. Even so, the support of Senator Taft turned the key for Admiral Radford. The Senator wanted a clean sweep of the Joint Chiefs, which was why Admiral William Fechteler was being replaced as chief of Naval operations, though his term had two years remaining. Present Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley had warned the President that to remove the Admiral would make the new appointments appear political, as the other members' terms were set to expire later in the year anyway. Nevertheless, that decision had been made.
Admiral Radford had been in the center of the controversy between the Air Force and the Navy as to which branch would be central in the delivery of an atomic bomb in case of attack, and had been the spearhead for the Operation 23 move by the Navy in 1949, seeking to discredit the B-36 bomber and otherwise undermine the advocates of air power in favor of the Navy and the supercarriers. He also favored no compromise with the Communist Chinese, even if they were to break from Moscow in a Tito-like move. That viewpoint was welcome news to members of Congress who favored an Asia-first policy, placing precedence on that region over Western Europe. The Admiral had testified before the House Armed Services Committee that he favored waging war against China, even if it meant one of 50 years duration.
Under the plan of reorganization of the Defense Department submitted by the President, the Chiefs would have new policy-making authority not possessed by the current Chiefs, and Admiral Radford, as chairman, would have extraordinary decision-making power, on the theory that power created responsibility.
James Marlow indicates that Prime Minister Churchill's sudden proposal for the Western leaders to hold a conference with the Soviet leaders had been made before Commons without first consulting the President. It represented a change in the Prime Minister's position, and that he made the statement without first consulting the U.S. did not speak well for the closeness of his relationship with the new Administration. It indicated that the Russians, under the new direction of Premier Georgi Malenkov, had accomplished something by being nice, driving a small wedge between the Western Allies.
The Prime Minister well knew that the President had stated his position that he would be glad to meet with the Russians, provided they first showed some sincere move toward peace, as expressed in their words. Such moves, the President had indicated, would include, in addition to a truce in Korea, a peace treaty for Austria, free elections in East Germany, unification of Germany, and freeing of the Soviet satellites, as well as a genuine commitment to arms reduction with international inspections. The President had said at his press conference the previous day that he had not seen any evidence of Russia's good faith in that regard. Thus the present difference between the two stances appeared to be that the Prime Minister was willing to accept peace talk as peaceful intentions, while the President wanted concrete proof of such intentions.
Prior to the British national elections of 1951, Prime Minister Churchill had said that he would seek a talk and understanding with the Russian leaders, but had backed away from the idea once the Conservatives won the election and he was installed as Prime Minister. Labor had sought to push him to carry out his promise of such a meeting, but he had repeatedly said that the time was not right. Now, he was saying that the events of the previous few months, starting with the death of Stalin on March 5, had created a change of mood in Moscow, making the situation ripe for a conference.
Though Mr. Marlow does not comment on it, it might be noted parenthetically that Mr. Churchill had a profound dislike for Stalin, and during the World War II conferences of the Allies, FDR was constantly having to act as peacemaker between the two. President Truman had shared that personal dislike of Stalin, lecturing him for being late at the start of the Potsdam Conference in mid-July, 1945, just before Mr. Churchill was displaced as Prime Minister by Clement Attlee in the first British national elections in ten years.
Former Prime Minister, leader of the opposition, Mr. Attlee, had, in his own speech to Commons a day later, praised the Prime Minister's proposal and said that he thought the President was a captive of forces in the U.S. which wanted no settlement with Russia or in Korea. He had been critical of the U.S. and, suggests Mr. Marlow, may have been short-sighted in that criticism. The speech had been denounced in Congress, and the time might come again when Mr. Attlee would be Prime Minister and have to depend on Congress for help.
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