The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 1, 1953

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at Panmunjom, the prisoner exchange program entered its fifth and possibly last week this date, with 100 additional Americans released, and another 100 promised the following day, along with 200 South Koreans, which would account for the smallest daily released total since the program had begun 28 days earlier. In addition to the 100 Americans released this date, 250 South Koreans, 25 British, 20 Turks and five Australians were freed. Among those released were two high-ranking allied officers, Lt. Col. James Carne, commander of the first Battalion of Britain's Gloucestershire Regiment, all but wiped out when cut off in the Imjin River battle of April, 1951, and Lt. Col. Paul Liles of the U.S., who had spent nearly three years in captivity. The latter told of systematic Communist pressure on prisoners to sign confessions and deliver propaganda broadcasts, indicating that he and a group of prisoners had been nearly starved to death and then forced to broadcast over Pyongyang radio, facing the alternative of a 100-mile march over frozen highways, which he termed a death sentence.

Thus far, the Communists had returned 2,927 of the promised 3,313 Americans, with indications the previous day that 50 additional Americans would be added to that total.

An American airman liberated this date said that he was questioned by a Russian who showed him plans for new U.S. warplanes and maps of American airbases, after his B-26 bomber had been shot down in March, 1951. He said the Russian had pulled a gun and laid it on the table, then showed him the drawings. He said some of the aircraft were not recognizable to him and he could not answer questions about them, but some were familiar, among them drawings of B-51's and B-47's.

Pyongyang Radio in North Korea said that six top North Korean officials, including Premier Kim Il Sung and Foreign Minister Nam Il, had left by train for Moscow this date, at the invitation of the Soviets. The broadcast did not provide the reason for the trip.

In Bonn, the West German Government said this date that it had uncovered a Communist plot to wreck the national elections of September 6 by destroying voting stations throughout the country. It said that it had captured Communist agents in an attempted mass sneak invasion of West Germany during the previous three days, and that they had admitted the plot to send squads of riot-trained toughs to attack election officials, destroy ballot boxes and frighten away voters. The "terror plan" called for groups of 20 hardened Communists to descend on each voting station. Federal border police and local police had arrested 4,500 of the agents along the interzonal frontier separating West and East Germany, most of whom had already been returned. Border police said that hundreds of others might still be coming in through isolated points on the frontier. The 10,000-member border police force was supplemented by 10,000 regular police, and would remain on a state of alert until the voting ended the following Sunday night.

We again hate to make this comparison, but it sounds very much like what the current occupant of the White House has been stimulating for months among the far right kookoos of this country in advance of our November 3 elections, in the hope that somewhere out of the chaos might be dragged a victory from the jaws of certain defeat, a foregone conclusion at this point unless one discounts every poll in the country, including Republican internal polls. Nevertheless, the anti-democratic Republican majority of the Senate appears hell-bent on confirming to the Supreme Court a justice-designate who refuses to say what her positions are on such common-sense issues as climate change, playing a stonewall game of "I know nothing", "It's not my job to be informed on common-sense issues when they are controversial", for that would violate the Canons of Judicial Ethics. Such barnyard fertilizer we have scarcely ever heard in the history of this country.

You will never hear more succinctly put what is actually going on in our country than as stated by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island during the confirmation hearings this week. Pay close attention. If you want your country bought and sold by a bunch of right-wing kookoos, you are well on your way.

We again state that the far more sensible thing to have done in this process, as occurred in October, 1956, an election year, after the retirement of Justice Sherman Minton from the Supreme Court, announced in early September, would have been to have adjourned the Senate and allowed the current occupant of the White House to have made a recess appointment, subject to confirmation or not by the new Senate in January, with the recess appointee able to serve at least a year, regardless of subsequent action by the Senate. The Senate was in recess in the fall of 1956 when President Eisenhower made the appointment of Justice William Brennan, effective in mid-October, subsequently confirmed by the Senate the following year. Justice Brennan, a Democrat, had full bipartisan support, and there was little doubt at the time that President Eisenhower would be re-elected—quite the opposite scenario from that at present. And the present scenario is quite unprecedented, despite all of the lies being told by McConnell and the Sing-Along Gang. The object is to steal the lifetime appointments to the Federal courts, most especially the Supreme Court, for a White House occupant who has been thoroughly repudiated by the American people, impeached by the House for high crimes and misdemeanors, which could have included solicitation of a bribe from a foreign head of state, and who should have been removed from office earlier this year, would have been in any just, bipartisan form of our democracy.

The only remedy to halt this madness appears to be reform of the Supreme Court, adding at least two and preferably four justices, a long overdue expansion to reduce the workload of the individual justices and potentially enable some expansion of the very limited caseload which can be heard before the nation's highest court. The size of the Court has been frozen since the time of President Grant when there were fewer than one-eighth the present population of the country, and is, therefore, in its present status, quite as antiquated as the convention of the electoral college, quaint, but no longer serving modern democracy, relics of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the meantime, the various circuit courts of appeal have been expanded, and there is no earthly reason, save political control, to resist expansion of the Supreme Court. The Republicans do not own the majority of the Court, as they seem to think that they do, ever since the Nixon Administration, having controlled the majority of the Court for 50 consecutive years, since 1970, an outrage in any democracy, even in the present Trump virtual dictatorship, with an obeisant Senate majority as weak as McConnell's chin. Again, since 1969, at the start of which there were five to four Democratic to Republican appointees, having at that time swung back and forth between that balance after 1958, there have been four Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court, while there have been 16 Republican appointees, including the present nominee, counting twice Justice Rehnquist, first appointed in 1972 by President Nixon and then elevated by President Reagan in 1986 to Chief. Republican Presidents have in the past 52 years, in other words, appointed 80 percent of the Supreme Court Justices. Is that fair in a democracy? especially when two of the last three appointments have occurred through theft of those seats, as was the case with the first two appointees by President Nixon, and when during that 52 years, Democrats have been in the White House for 20 of those years, with two more terms won by the popular vote, arguably one of those terms won also in the electoral college, a result the accuracy of which will never be known because of the intervention of five Republican-appointed Justices to stop the recount in Florida in 2000.

We reiterate that no one with any decent sense of judicial ethics would even participate in such an unjust, hypocritical procedure, which disgraces this country throughout the world and renders it no longer a beacon of democracy, but rather a laughing stock. Is it not a violation of Canon 5, indicating that a Federal judge should refrain from participation in political activities, for a sitting Federal judge to participate knowingly in such a highly partisan, politicized process so close to the presidential election? the very announcement of her nomination, in addition to having been a "super-spreader event" for the coronavirus, plainly having been calculated for political purposes in the presidential campaign, a very good practical reason for not putting forth a nomination so close to the election in which the incumbent is running. Those idiots who try to claim that if the Democrats were in this position, they would be doing the same thing, do not speak from any precedent, for there is none. The Republican claim that there is nothing unusual about the timetable of the hearings on the nomination, that this Justice or that Justice was confirmed within x number of days after nomination, conveniently sidesteps the principal issue, that at no time in the country's history has a nomination been initiated and considered by the Senate within 90 days of a presidential election, vacancies having occurred by death or retirement three prior times during that period, in 1828, in 1864 and in 1956, in each case with the incumbent President seeking re-election. These deceivers about historical precedent seek to appeal only to the fools and idiots of the country who have no sense of its history and cannot see beyond their own noses far enough to realize that their democracy is being bought and sold by corporate interests, having little to do with their pet peeves regarding prior Supreme Court decisions.

At the U.N. in New York, the four-member U.N. tribunal for the U.N. staff restored the jobs to four employees and provided damages totaling $122,500 to seven others, all American citizens, who had been fired because they refused to answer U.S. Government questions regarding Communist ties. The tribunal held that an employee could invoke the Fifth Amendment and did not thereby violate U.N. staff rules. The tribunal upheld the firing of nine others, seven of whom were involved in Communist inquiries and two others for non-political reasons, because they were "temporary-indefinite" employees, subject to dismissal by the U.N. Secretary-General if he thought such action was in the interests of the organization. An eleventh permanent employee had admitted having been a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but had been fired by former Secretary-General Trygve Lie because the employee refused to identify to the Senate Internal Security subcommittee the person who had invited her to join the party in 1935. The appeal of another permanent employee had been referred back to the staff joint appeals board for another hearing, after he had appeared before a Federal grand jury investigating subversion, in which the U.N. had found, as grounds for his firing, that he had not provided a candid account of former employment as required by U.N. regulations. A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold said that he was studying the decision, and particularly the order of reinstatement of the four employees. If he refused to restore their jobs, they could demand more damages.

The Atomic Energy Commission announced the previous night that Russia had produced another atomic explosion on August 23, but that all evidence gathered thus far indicated it was not a hydrogen blast, though appeared to have considerable power. It said that it had the power about equal to recent tests of the U.S. in Nevada and that no further announcement would be made unless intelligence indicated information of greater interest. The last of the tests in Nevada, on June 4, had an estimated power 24 times that of the Hiroshima bomb dropped in August, 1945, and could be observed up to 500 miles away, had been described as the largest atomic explosion ever set off in the continental U.S. On August 19, the AEC had announced that the Russians had detonated a hydrogen fusion-type device on August 12.

In St. Louis, the American Legion convention conducted a parade through the downtown streets for about ten hours, the highlight of the four-day event. Vice-President Nixon, pictured on the page, was present, along with veterans of World War I and II, and the Korean War.

In San Antonio, it was reported that General Jonathan Wainwright, 70, hero of Corregidor in early 1942, had suffered a second stroke and was in critical condition at Brooke Army Hospital. He had first been hospitalized on July 6 and had suffered a cerebral thrombosis on August 13, but since had shown marked improvement. He had retired from the Army exactly six years earlier, after having been decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross for valorous actions. He had served 35 years before retirement.

In Galena Park, Tex., an Army private whose sister had two death certificates for him, one signed by former President Truman, showing that he had been killed in action on May 18, 1951, but who nevertheless was quite alive and had been released as part of the prisoner exchange program in Korea, faced a dilemma. His 23-year old wife had a one-year old son by her second husband, the child having been born seven months after her second marriage was annulled. The sister indicated the previous night that she was certain that her brother knew that his wife had subsequently married but was not clear that he understood she had a child, though she had reported everything to him in many letters, not all of which, she believed, he had received, as he had never mentioned the child in writing back to her. He had said he would do whatever his wife wanted to do. The wife did not wish to speak with newsmen and had not revealed any plans to her sister-in-law, but did say that she was anxious to see her husband, whom she could not legally divorce until he returned to the U.S. The couple had been together only five days after their marriage in April, 1950, when the private was ordered to the West Coast, and then subsequently shipped to Korea. He was identified as a war prisoner finally in late 1951. He may need to punt as he is way behind the chains and it's fourth down.

In Peekskill, N.Y., a high school football player collapsed and died this date while practicing in 100-degree heat.

The Commerce Department reported this date that employment had climbed to a record high in August and that unemployment had dropped to a post-war low of 1,240,000. More than 63.4 million persons were employed, dropping unemployment to 308,000, which officials considered a bare minimum at 1.9 percent, compared to 2.5 percent a year earlier.

Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, speaking in Mineral Springs, S.C., said this date that Government farm programs provided the farmer with too little income and security at the cost of too much dependence on Washington. He said that there should not be surpluses of stored food while American products were priced out of normal markets. He wanted improvement in Government programs without resulting in lower prices or lower farm income. He said that the Agriculture Department was seeking ideas on those improvements through grassroots studies and the views of the best professional people in agriculture. He indicated that they had discovered that not every farm commodity should be treated the same, and that some commodities ought have a domestic and export market plan, based on two price structures. He ignored a suggestion by Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina that he discuss an order requiring anti-discrimination pledges from banks which participated in the farm price support program, which the Senator had addressed in a letter to the Secretary the previous day, hoping that the section would be stricken from the contracts and that the Secretary would so urge.

Tom Fesperman of The News indicates that the City Government and three railroads had reached an agreement this date to share equally the cost of constructing a new bridge on E. 11th Street between N. College and Brevard Streets in Charlotte, whereby each of the four parties would pay a quarter of the cost.

On the editorial page, "How the Press Handled the Kinsey Report" quotes from several sources regarding the presentation of the analysis by Associated Press science correspondent Alton Blakeslee of the report of Dr. Alfred Kinsey on female sexuality, which had appeared in many newspapers, including The News. The Birmingham News had called it "a highly important science story about vital human relationships", while the Jersey City Journal described it as "arrogant bunk". The Tampa Daily Times found that the secrecy procedures surrounding the report were akin to those normally reserved for Presidential messages and the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel believed they were designed to whip up "pornographic interest". The Rock Island Argus asserted that public interest amounted to "morbid curiosity", while the San Francisco Chronicle described it as "an honest and desirable quest for knowledge where knowledge is especially important."