The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 6, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via John Randolph, that thousands of tank-supported Chinese troops had surrounded an allied unit in a surprise attack on the western front in Korea, but the allies had fought their way out after an 18-hour battle. U.N. infantrymen and supporting airmen said that they killed more than 400 of the 3,000 attacking Chinese troops. It was believed by at least one officer that the attack might be the beginning of a new Communist offensive. At the opposite end of the front, North Korean troops drove U.S. Marines back 400 yards on the northern edge of the "punch bowl", 20 miles north of the 38th parallel, but after the Marines regrouped, they had counterattacked and regained the lost ground.
In air action, the Fifth Air Force flew 200 sorties before noon, including many attacks on front-line enemy troops.
The Defense Department raised its October draft call from 41,000 to 44,600 men, with the additional 3,600 to go to the Marines, which had asked for 8,600 draftees during the month. The remainder would go to the Army. It also announced that a call for 33,700 draftees would be made in November, of whom 29,000 would go to the Army and 4,700 to the Marines. During the prior year since inductions had been resumed, 712,480 men, including the October and November calls, had been drafted. The Marines had only begun drafting in August for the first time since World War II, and through November, would have called up 26,480 men.
At San Francisco, Russia, having been frustrated in its attempt to stall the Japanese peace treaty conference the prior day, angrily denounced the U.S.-British rules adopted by a vote of 45 to 3 for the conference and indicated it would not sign the treaty. The other nations at the conference predicted that everything would henceforth proceed smoothly and that the treaty would be signed on Saturday, as scheduled, as under the rules each of the 51 nations present was limited to a one-hour statement. Andrei Gromyko, heading the delegation from Russia, called the treaty "an aggressive military alliance with the United States" and said it was "preparation for a new war in the Far East". Western delegates believed that anything henceforth was possible, from a walkout by the Russians, along with the Polish and Czech delegations, to stronger threats of war in the Far East.
The U.S. and Portugal signed a new agreement which was expected to enable NATO countries to use bases in the Azores for the purpose of common defense. It took the place of a postwar arrangement under which the U.S. was using a field in the Azores. The new agreement provided certain new rights to the U.S.
The head of the British Treasury, Hugh Gaitskell, discussed his country's financial and economic problems with two U.S. Cabinet officers this date and subsequently told reporters that he was asking for no new aid from the U.S.
A Senate Commerce subcommittee quickly rejected a proposal made by a local Washington radio station to televise or broadcast Senate sessions. Majority Leader Ernest McFarland of Arizona said that broadcasting the sessions "would play up the showmen in Congress, rather than the workers." Senator William Benton of Connecticut said that it would "completely ruin" the Senate.
Mobilization Director Charles E. Wilson told a press conference that the arms buildup was reaching the quantity-production stage and that the "pinch" was now on the civilian economy, referring to the announcement the previous day of cuts of the use of steel, copper and aluminum for civilian production.
In Bainbridge, Md., a sailor at the Naval Training Center possibly faced a general court-martial because he made known his dislike of the food. He had said it was good when it was brought to the base, but when it was processed for meals "they do something to it that makes it not fit to eat." So he threw it in the garbage. He had written foot-long handbills which advised other sailors to take their troubles to their Congressmen or have their parents do it for them. He was placed under base arrest and was told the prior day that he was being recommended for a general court-martial. The 1951 draft law expressly allowed military service personnel to write letters to members of Congress, but in this case, according to Congressional sources, the sailor's action was so general and so well-organized that it raised the question of whether it was mutiny.
In Mount Vernon, N. Y., Frank H. Schwarz, 57, whose murals decorated the U.S. Senate and House chambers, died the previous day at his home, apparently from an ongoing heart condition.
In York Harbor, Maine, the Information Director of the National Safety Council wondered whether the country could get as excited about highway safety as it was about Dagmar and her late-night television program.
Two hurricanes were moving westward over the Atlantic Ocean this date, the nearest one being 1,300 miles southeast of Florida. It would be named "Easy", based on the fifth letter of the alphabet, and was packing 135 mph winds, moving west-northwestward at about 16 mph. "Fox" was about 1,400 miles east of the Lesser Antilles, or 2,900 miles southeast of Florida.
In London, a former British Army sergeant, who had been shot in the head while leading his men in a charge at the battle of Spion Kop in the Boer War in 1900, died of his wound. In 1900, doctors had given him only two years to live, as the bullet had entered his brain.
In Wilson, N.C., an accused forger paced the narrow ledge of the Wilson County Courthouse for more than two hours this date, while police sought to coax him back to the main roof of the building. Finally, he was talked into grabbing a lowered ladder by which he was pulled to safety, after which he was taken to a hospital. He had broken from two jailers as they were taking him from the jail to the courtroom. A crowd of more than a thousand onlookers had gathered and some were shouting for him to jump. Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, the trial proceeded without the defendant, as his attorney argued his client's innocence to a jury, with the defendant on the ledge in plain view of the jurors at the time.
We trust that his lawyer moved for a mistrial or at least a recess, but in North Carolina in 1951, one never knows. Maybe that was why the man took to the ledge. Maybe it was why some in the crowd advised him to jump. Perhaps, they had already been defendants in the county.
On the editorial page, "Rebuff for Russia" finds that Andrei Gromyko's scheme to wreck the Japanese peace treaty conference had gone awry and that unless some new, unforeseen tactic were undertaken, the treaty would be signed on schedule the following Saturday. The conference had voted 45 to 3 to adopt the American-British rules of procedure, effectively issuing a reprimand to Russia and the other two Communist delegations from Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Under the rules, each delegation had one hour to present its views about the peace treaty. Mr. Gromyko had used up his hour the previous day without ever getting to the topic of the admission of Communist China to the conference. It was too late for remedy by Poland and Czechoslovakia.
John Foster Dulles and Secretary of State Acheson had laid the groundwork for the conference very carefully and had done an excellent job. Russia's habit of overplaying its diplomatic hand at prior conferences had backfired.
"'Crazy Fools' on the Loose" reflects on the national Labor Day weekend death toll in traffic accidents, totaling 461 out of the total 658 deaths by accident or violence. The president of the National Safety Council had called the number of traffic deaths "shocking" and "tragic", and the piece agrees with the application of those adjectives.
He also had said that many of the victims were "innocent bystanders who died because they had the misfortune to encounter the crazy fools who infest our highways these days." That had struck home with the accident occurring in Union County the prior Sunday night, in which a pastor and his family were proceeding in an automobile toward Monroe when another automobile which was speeding entered the highway at an intersection and crashed into them, killing both drivers, including the pastor and his wife, and the wife of another pastor in their car. The driver of the car which caused the crash had in his pocket a speeding ticket issued the same day in Virginia.
Three weeks earlier, in Albemarle, five women from New York had died when their car was struck head-on by a speeding vehicle crossing the Pee Dee River bridge.
It suggests that the speeding driver appeared to be the primary cause of such fatal accidents, as in January through March, 1951, speeding had been a factor in 68 of 202 fatal accidents occurring within the state.
It finds that previous Legislatures had been apathetic about highway safety and it hopes the 1953 Legislature would meet the growing public demand for more rigid enforcement of traffic laws and for heavier penalties for violations.
"One-Way Indoctrination" tells of several French labor leaders having been brought to the country by the Marshall Plan administration to study collective bargaining and U.S. industry, receiving a full briefing on their recent tour of the South. They had been taken around nearby Gastonia by the Textile Workers Union of America representative of Salisbury. The North Carolina CIO director had described the Southern organizing campaign during their tour of Charlotte. The following weekend they would attend a labor conference at Lake Junaluska.
It finds that while it was understandable that they would want to spend most of their time with American labor leaders, it also believes that the other side of the picture ought be given to them from management. Management and labor overlapped and intertwined in many places. If the foreign industrialists only heard from management and the foreign labor leaders, only from labor, they would leave the country with a jaundiced idea of the American labor movement.
"On with the Law Suit" tells of Thomas L. Hamilton, the Grand Dragon of the Carolinas Ku Klux Klan, having threatened to sue the North Carolina Junior Chamber of Commerce for calling the Klan "un-American". It hopes the lawsuit would be filed and would come to trial, as it would be interesting to see what a jury would say about an organization which was listed among the subversive organizations and publications maintained by the Attorney General, as transmitted to the chairman of the Loyalty Review Board on October 30, 1950. It, along with the other organizations listed, was described as having adopted a policy of "advocating or approving the commission of acts of force and violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States".
It concludes that if that was not un-American, then it did not know what the term meant.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Until Oatis Is Free", discusses the case of Associated Press correspondent William Oatis, imprisoned in Czechoslovakia on trumped-up espionage charges. The President had said that the case would not be closed until Mr. Oatis was free. It thinks it a good thing for freedom of the press and for Mr. Oatis that Harry Truman was the President. "Some people call it courage, others call it stubbornness, but everybody agrees that an outstanding trait of President Truman is that he does not give up easily and never runs away from a fight."
It ventures that he was not engaged in mere dramatics when he informed the new ambassador from Czechoslovakia that there would be no friendly relations between that country and the U.S. until Mr. Oatis was free.
The U.S. was prepared to use every economic and diplomatic weapon at its disposal to effect that end. Czechoslovakia had the choice of retiring gracefully from diplomatic relations with the U.S. or meeting the full consequences of its actions. It appeared clear that Great Britain, France and other countries would go along with the U.S. in this matter. The fact that the Czech ambassador had said the Oatis case was closed meant nothing; it would not be closed until he was free.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, provides one from the Morganton Pocketbook, telling of a railroad conductor who signaled his engineer to proceed and responding to a woman passenger who asked him why he had waved his hand at the engineer, that it meant, "Get the hell out of here!" A little while later, after his anger had subsided, the conductor went to the woman to apologize for his remark, to which the woman simply waved her hand.
The Sanford Herald advises that it took $1.16 to buy the same goods which a dollar had purchased a year earlier.
Sam Ragan of the Raleigh News & Observer finds it not surprising in the "carburetor civilization" that a panoply of phony automobile accessories existed as a major industry in the country. There were phony taillights, phony exhaust pipes, phony fender streamers, and even phony markers which bore such words as "Supercharged", which could be affixed to the car. All of it was in addition to foxtails, "which no sporty motorist would do without."
Penn Sewell of the Moore County News tells of the previous Sunday having marked the anniversary of the birth of one of the "great men" of the county. He goes on to extol the many virtues of this individual, before finally advising his reader that the man was 38 and that he was talking about himself.
The Camden Chronicle tells of an absent-minded professor who had called on his old friend, the family doctor, and after they had chatted for a couple of hours, got up to leave, whereupon the doctor asked how his family was, at which point the professor snapped his fingers and said that it reminded him that he had come there to tell him that his wife was having a fit.
And so forth onward, so, so, so forth and forth on.
Guy George Gabrielson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, substitutes this date for Drew Pearson, returning from Europe, tells of receipt by the Committee of several letters making comment on a magazine editorial titled, "Here Is a Voter Who Wonders If the GOP Really Wants Him", written by Dr. Glenn G. Eye of the University of Wisconsin. The editorial said that he wanted to become a Republican but nothing had happened when he approached known party leaders with an offer to ring doorbells and make a five-dollar contribution, causing him to wonder whether the party was interested only in large contributors. He suggested that the Republicans might win a general election by accepting a few million small contributors, but warned that with the rising cost of living under the Democrats, it would be difficult for him to contribute even a dollar. Some letters in response had reported similar experiences, while others found it a reflection upon the tens of thousands of industrious Republican workers throughout the country and that if Dr. Eye really had wanted to be a Republican he could have found a way.
A neighboring county Republican chairman had invited Dr. Eye to take charge of their precinct and reminded him that their organization was financed principally by one-dollar contributors. Mr. Gabrielson hopes that he would be effective and lets it be known that the Republicans welcomed all such Eyes.
He points out that 75 percent of the contributions to the Committee were in the range of one to 99 dollars during 1950. In Massachusetts, the Republicans averaged $14.80 per contributor, whereas the Democrats averaged $410 per contributor.
He says that more than anything else they needed doorbell ringers.
He finds that in crossing the country back and forth, the vast majority of Republican officers at all levels were sincere, conscientious and hard-working. But any organization which had suffered defeats five times in a row in national elections was bound "to have some rust on the machinery which needs chipping off." He says that 1951 was the year in which they were building the Republican Party as one of inclusion rather than exclusion, which welcomed recruits whatever their political allegiances previously. "The times are too critical, and the stakes too great in 1952, to permit any other course."
One correction: You don't need any more ringers, for you've got plenty, starting with that goddamned Senator McCarthy, with Senator Nixon not far behind.
Riddle: If there was rust after five straight national losses, how much rust would there be after six of seven popular vote losses in a row?
Do we not see evidence of that multi-layered oxidation in the Draconian rules of desperation set up by the Republican Senators for the present Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018, severely limiting access to existing documents on the nominee, such that only about ten percent of those available are being presented to the Senators and the public, and those being cherry-picked by a lawyer for the George W. Bush Administration, former employer of the nominee, not by the usual impartial screener, the National Archives?
Is this any way to run a Ship of State, except in third-world dictatorships?
Do you, Clowns, really believe that, henceforth, anyone in this country, save the "deplorables", in an extreme minority, are going to hold any respect at all for five-to-four decisions of a Supreme Court thusly constituted when those five turn out to be the five Republican appointees? Grassley, McConnell and Co. are apparently assuming that most of the country is as intellectually challenged as they are, unable to see the forest for the trees. When they say henceforth, "the fix is in", it will be synonymous with that five-Justice majority in 5 to 4 decisions, on the most politicized Supreme Court in the history of the country, an utter and complete disgrace to anything resembling democracy as it is supposed to function under our Constitution. (And don't be so incredibly smug and small, Republican shill, as to dare say, "Well, this is not a democracy but rather a republic." You know where you can put that, Peronista. And by the way, being a "deplorable" is not an immutable condition; one can educate one's self out of it and, voila, mutatis mutandis, light appears.)
Had the present nomination and even its absurdly limiting rules not been preceded by the outrageous and unprecedented Republican refusal in 2016 to hold hearings on the nomination by President Obama of Judge Merrick Garland following the death of Justice Scalia, we would not hold this view, but, as it is, there is no other view to hold.
Marquis Childs, in San Francisco, discusses the lack of boldness and imagination in formulation of American foreign policy, as exhibited in the backstage story of how the President's speech to the Japanese peace treaty conference was developed. It had started out as a speech drafted by John Foster Dulles, chief architect of the treaty, and indicated that the U.S., unlike Russia, was helping to build the defenses of the free world both in Europe and in Asia for defense purposes only. The U.S., with the consent of the other nations, had distributed its land, air and sea forces around the world. This distribution was in contrast to Russia, which hoarded its defenses at home and within its satellites, poised for offensive strikes.
The President's speech writers liked the speech so much that they decided to adopt it for the President. But when it was passed to the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Security Council, changes were made. The colonels at the Pentagon who advised the Joint Chiefs decided that it was wrong to admit that America could not use its own forces for any and all purposes and so wanted the defense-only phrases struck.
The result was a watered-down speech consisting of friendly statements and platitudes.
He concludes by quoting from a foreign minister of one Western power at the conference who had said that the impression had been created that American foreign policy was being made by Congress and the Pentagon, wondered when the State Department would assert its own prerogatives again.
Robert C. Ruark advocates renaming
baseball teams to match their television sponsors, such as
substituting the Chesterfields for the Giants and a certain beer for
the Yankees. He also favors changing terminology within the sport to
match the cigarettes each feat was worth. For instance, a homerun
should be called a "Ballantine blast"
The game needed also a drama coach to help with acting before the TV cameras, especially for third base coaches and umpires. He finds the acting atrocious. The players had become so camera-conscious that he had observed one pitcher develop a deliberate limp on the way to the showers. He thinks Stanislavsky would be shocked. He suggests therefore that one summer be taken off while players are serving their apprenticeship in the bush leagues so that they might attend summer stock.
He thinks another thing needed was a
dramatic critic and nominates Dorothy Parker
Framed Edition
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