Year 1950

U.S. troops defend a hill in Korea.

__________ 

“We’ve got a rattlesnake by the tail, and the sooner we pound its damn head in the better.” 

Rep. Charles Eaton

__________ 

MARK SULLIVAN writes: “All the standards are harem-sacrum. Children running the homes or the President of the United States barnstorming up and down the country – it’s all the same dissolution of traditional, dependable ways.” (1/119) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It would appear that people of every era think children are out of control.

 

* 

January 12: Secretary of State Dean Acheson speaks to the National Press Club. “The fundamental sources of unrest in the Far East,” he declared, “were poverty and the hatred of being treated as colonial peoples.” He described the “defensive perimeter” of the U.S. in the Pacific. That perimeter ran from the Aleutian Islands to Japan, to Okinawa and south to the Philippines. Korea was left out. (1/152-153)

 

* 

February 9: Sen. Joe McCarthy delivers a speech before the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. In those days, not every speech was captured on camera. James E. Whitaker and Paul A. Myers, news editor and program director respectively of WWVA, the Wheeling radio station that broadcast the speech, later swore that McCarthy said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 – a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.” Later, friends of Sen. McCarthy would say he said he had 57 names of individuals who might be card-carrying Communists or loyal to the Communist Party. “One man who would never be sure what he had said,” Goldman writes, “was Joseph McCarthy.” (1/142-143)

 

* 

March 26: McCarthy’s claims have made national headlines – and he continues his slashing attacks. 

Within a month after his Wheeling speech he was assailing as Communists the “whole group of twisted-thinking New Dealers who have led America near to ruin at home and abroad.” Many others had been saying these things. No one had kept naming names, dozens of specific, headline-making names. And no one had attacked with such abandon – McCarthy politicking as he had done everything else, ignoring the rules, always walking in, taking his beatings, endlessly throwing wild, spectacular punches. Shortly after the Tydings subcommittee did its most telling job on the charge of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department, the Senator closed his eyes completely and swung so hard he shook the country.

 

He would “stand our fall on this one,” McCarthy let it be known. He was naming “the top Russian espionage agent” in the United States and a man who had long been “one of the top advisers on Far Eastern policy” – Owen Lattimore. In the ensuing uproar only the most informed Americans could make out the fact that Lattimore was a non-Communist liberal… (1/144)

 

A phrase current at the time: “I don’t like some of McCarthy’s methods but his goal is good.” (1/216)

 

* 

High school students list their ten most admired persons: 

Louisa May Alcott

Joe DiMaggio

Vera Allen (singer)

Douglas MacArthur

Clara Barton

Doris Day

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Abraham Lincoln

Roy Rogers

Sister Elizabeth Kenney

Babe Ruth

Florence Nightingale

Roy Rogers - TV cowboy.

 

* 

“Would it be correct to call this a police action?” 

June 25: North Korean forces invade South Korea, touching off a three-year war. Eric Goldman sets the scene: 

Saturday evening, W. Bradley Connors, a State Department official was “relaxing with his wife and children in their Washington apartment.” A telephone call alerted him to fragmentary reports. The North Koreans had launched an attack. Connors “tried to place a telephone call to the American Embassy in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, but it was early Sunday morning on the other side of the Pacific and overseas circuits to Korea were closed.”

 

Soon, he received this message from the American ambassador: “North Korean forces invaded Republic of Korea territory at several places this morning….It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.” As Goldman adds, “An astonished Bradley Connors reached for his phone to alert an astonished officialdom.” (1/146-147)

 

A European diplomat cabled from Washington, “The time has come when Uncle Sam must put up or shut up, and my guess is he will do neither.” 

Truman soon made it clear: He would offer arms to South Korea. James Reston, writing in The New York Times, approved. “The decision to meet the Communist challenge in Korea has produced a transformation in the spirit of the United States Government. … There have been some differences in the last seventy-two hours over how to react to the Communist invasion, but…these differences have apparently been swept away by the general conviction that the dangers of inaction were greater than the dangers of the bold action taken by the President.” (1/158) 

Truman was especially pleased by a wire from his 1948 opponent, Thomas Dewey, which read: “I wholeheartedly agree with and support the difficult decision you have made.” (1/159) 

The Truman administration, 

was pressing for a resolution that unequivocally summoned the member nations of the UN to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.” Passage of this resolution would mark an epochal step. For the first time in the five thousand years of man’s recorded history a world organization would be voting armed force to stopped armed force. (1/160)

 

Senator Robert A. Taft argued that “the ‘Chinese policy of the administration gave basic encouragement to the North Korean aggression. If the United States was not prepared to use its troops and give military assistance to Nationalist China [Formosa] against Chinese Communists, why should it use its troops to defend Nationalist Korea against Korean Communists?” Taft declared that Acheson’s speech of 1950 in which he described the Pacific “defensive perimeter” of the United States as running on the American side of Korea and Formosa offered an especially obvious green light to the Communists. “With such a reaffirmation of our Far Eastern policy, is it any wonder that the Korean Communists took us at the word given by the Secretary of State?” (164) Yet he made it clear he supported defense of South Korea. “I approve of the changes now made in our foreign policy,” he said. 

“My God!” said one top Truman official. “Bob Taft has joined the UN and the U.S.” (1/165) 

A reporter asked, “Mr. President, everybody is asking in this country, are we or are we not at war?” 

No, Truman said, we were stopping “a bandit raid.” 

“Would it be correct to call this a police action under the United Nations?” another reporter asked. 

Goldman writes: “Yes, the president replied, that was exactly what it amounted to. (Thus, indirectly, Truman became associated with the phrase that was to be so bitter a part of later foreign-policy debate.” Truman hesitated to commit U.S. ground forces. Chiang Kai-shek offered up to 33,000 men, but said he would need American air and naval support to transport his men. At the time, the Seventh Fleet was protecting the island; and it was decided not to accept the offer. (1/166) 

 

There was almost no dissent. 

Meanwhile, Gen. Douglas McArthur cabled Washington D.C., 

The South Korean forces are in confusion, have not seriously fought, and lack leadership. Organized and equipped as a light force for maintenance of interior order, they were unprepared for attack by armor and air. Conversely they are incapable of gaining the initiative over such a force as that embodied in the North Korean army. … It is essential that the enemy advance be held or its impetus will threaten the over-running of all Korea. … The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later the lost ground is through the introduction of the United States ground combat forces into the Korean battle area. … If authorized it is my intention to immediately move a United States regimental combat team to the reinforcement of the vital area discussed and to provide for a possible build up to a two division strength from the troops in Japan for an early counteroffensive. (1/168-169)

 

Goldman notes that there was almost no dissent. The people supported sending combat troops to Korea. 

American acceptance of the Truman moves was bolstered by the reaction around the free world. Western representatives at the United Nations were jubilant. Delegate after delegate was telling reporters that the Truman leadership had saved the UN from going the tragic way of the League of Nations…From all over the free world came comments like that of the high French official who said: “A few days ago I was filled with despair. I saw as in a nightmare all the horrors repeated that followed the first surrender to Hitler in 1936. Now there is a burst of sun.” (1/172) 

 

Rep. Charles Eaton, an ordained minister, and a Republican, supported Truman, saying, “We’ve got a rattlesnake by the tail, and the sooner we pound its damn head in the better.” (1/173)

 

* 

August 5: The Battle of Taegu begins. U.S. troops had gone soft during the occupation of Japan, as Major General William Dean said later, “fat and happy in occupation billets, complete with Japanese girlfriends, plenty of beer, and servants to shine their boots.” Dean himself was last seen trying to rally his troops as they crumbled under attack by North Korean armor. It was soon learned that he had been badly wounded and captured. He spent the rest of the war in captivity. (1/174) 

Goldman says the story of Sergeant Raymond Remp of Pittsburgh, who fled Taegu after fourteen and a half hours of constant fire, would be typical of many GI’s experiences. 

“Someone fired a green flare, and they saw us,” the Sergeant choked out his account to reporters. “All around us in the hills, bugles started in blowing….They were right on top of us in the hills, firing down on us….

 

“Some Colonel – don’t know who – said, ‘Get out the best way you can.’ He stayed behind to hold them. As we went up at draw, they opened fire. I got my rifle belt and canteen shot off. Two men following me got hit. They were so tired they just couldn’t move.

 

“We headed South. An officer and me split up our ammo and rations into a couple of cans. I drank water from the rice paddies. Got cramps – sick as a dog – and my dysentery is awful. …

 

“We met some more guys cut off. We climbed a big mountain. The guys had machine guns strapped on their backs. One ran with his gun and stooped over. His partner fired. I don’t know where they got the strength.

 

“They ran like goats. We took off and got on top of another mountain. We ran across six of them mountain tops and killed four guys. We were out of ammo. …

 

“For ten miles outside Taegu, we were fired at. All day and night we ran like antelopes. We didn’t know our officers. They didn’t know us. We lost everything we had.

 

“These new shoes were put on me a couple of days ago. The soles are almost ripped off from running. My feet are cut to pieces. I saw lots of guys running barefooted.

 

“I can’t stand it – seeing friends get it and not being able to help them drives you crazy. I thought the Hurtgen Forest was bad and Normandy, but they were nothing like this. This was awful.

 

“How much can you take?

 

“I guess I’m lucky. I’m not hit. But what it did to me….Oh my God, what it did to me.” (1/175-176)

 

Cpl. Stephen Zeg, from Chicago, expressed his dismay. “I’ll fight for my country, but I’ll be damned if I see why I’m fighting to save this hell hole.”

 

* 

The “boomingest America in all the prosperous years since V-J.” 

BACK HOME, Goldman notes, was the “boomingest America in all the prosperous years since V-J. Virtually all of the soft spots that were still left in the economy were removed by the Korean War.” 

By August, New York State has so few unemployed the state fired fire hundred people in its compensation division. (1/181)

 

* 

August 6: The “stiffening lines of the ROK’s [Republic of Korea soldiers], new tank-killing American arms, and the murderous operation of the U.S. air forces all told.” A defensive perimeter is formed around Pusan as U.S. and allied troops are rushed into battle.

 

* 

August: Lt. Julius W. Becton Jr. recalls his experience commanding an all-black platoon in the 9th Infantry Regiment in Korea. The U.S. military was just beginning to desegregate, and Becton and all his soldiers were African American. They were ordered to assault a position known as Hill 201. 

As we learn in Becton’s obituary, 

he came under heavy fire. He was wounded, earning a Purple Heart as well as a Silver Star for valor.

 

As the war ground on and troop casualties rose, replacements were assigned to units regardless of race. General Becton’s platoon [he rose to that high rank in 1972] was sent a Mexican American soldier from Texas. “I told my platoon sergeant, ‘Don’t let anything happen to that guy, he’s our first one non-Black, we’re not going to hurt him at all,’” he later recalled. “And with that, we became integrated.” 

 

* 

“Not a member of the Caucasian race.” 

September 6: Sgt. John Raymond Rice, a decorated World War II veteran, is killed fighting in Korea. When his body is later shipped home for burial, his race becomes an issue. Goldman writes: 

The body of a casualty, Sergeant John Rice, was brought to Sioux City [Iowa] for burial and just as the casket was to be lowered in the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park stopped the ceremony. Sergeant Rice, it seemed, was a Winnebago Indian; he was “not a member of the Caucasian race.” The officials made an offer to Mrs. Evelyn Rice. Would she care to sign a statement stating their husband had “all white blood?” Mrs. Rice emphatically did not care to sign the statement and the body was taken back to the funeral home. The next morning President Truman read of the incident at breakfast. Within minutes Mrs. Rice was invited to bury her husband in Arlington National Cemetery and was informed that the United States Government would be happy to dispatch an Air Force plane to bring the body and the family to Washington. Harry Truman had rarely done anything more popular. (1/183)

 

* 

September 15: UN forces make a surprise landing at Inchon. “The North Koreans, in danger of total entrapment, surrendered by the thousands or ran for the 38^th parallel.”

 

* 

October 15: Gen. MacArthur and President Truman meet at Wake Island to discuss what must be done to win the war. 

MacArthur soon announces that he will be launching what he calls the “final” offensive. “The war,” he says, “very definitely is coming to an end shortly.” Goldman writes, “What emerges as incontestable fact is that MacArthur told Truman at Wake Island that there was little if any chance of Chinese intervention and that, if the Chinese did come in, their armies would be slaughtered…” He continues: “MacArthur launched his Yalu offensive with little thought in his own mind and no indication to Washington that it might provoke a major Chinese counter-offensive.”

President Harry Truman.

  

* 

November-December: Chinese forces do pour across the border and join the war. The First Marine Division ends up surrounded by Chinese forces. Badly outnumbered, they fight their way out of the trap in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Major General Oliver P. Smith, commander of the division, famously says, “Retreat, hell! We’re only attacking in another direction.” 

The Marines did fight with guts and wits that sent a thrill through the home country but the newspapers also had to describe the worst ordeal since Tarawa. Much of the escape route was a corkscrew trail of icy dirt, just wide enough for a two-and-a-half-ton truck and winding by rocky ridges and forested bluffs that were filled with Chinese. Sub-zero cold, violent snowstorms, and sudden wild gorges two thousand feet deep where as much of a menace as the Communists. A large part of the fighting was during the night and at close quarters, with pistols, grenades, and submachine guns.

 

The Marines had to fly out 2,651 wounded in only four days; once 117 bodies were buried in a single grave and a bulldozer used to push a covering over them – there was no time for anything else when a grave had to be blasted from ground frozen to eighteen inches. (1/177-180) 

Truman wrote in a memorandum: “I have worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is near.” 

MacArthur spoke of the “bottomless well of Chinese manpower.” By the end of November, an estimated 1,700,000 Chinese had entered the war, and they had suffered 500,000 casualties (1/181)

 

* 

In a series of steps, the U.S. military essentially erases the Jim Crow color line, though racial problems persist. General Frank McConnell was in charge of infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Training whites and Negroes separately slowed the process. McConnell summoned his staff and suggested they ignore the color line. 

In January 1950, the U.S. Army decided to assign recruits with special skills, regardless of race. McConnell now believed he had authority to integrate units at Fort Jackson. “I said that if we didn’t ask permission, they couldn’t stop us,” he explained later. The next 55 men were assigned to the same platoon regardless of color. General McConnell  remembered later, “I would see recruits, Negro and white, walking down the street off-duty, all grouped together. The attitude of the Southern soldiers was that this was the army way; they accepted it the same way they accepted getting up at 5:30 in the morning.” General Mark Clark, chief of Army Field Forces, and others, were unhappy; but the color line was blurring. By 1951, the line in Korea was barely visible. An Air Force general told a reporter he liked to look at letters from commanders, attesting the success of the integration program. “I like to go through them myself once in a while. It kind of restores my faith in human nature.” (1/183-186)

 

* 

Inflation takes hold, particularly in food prices. “The sale of horse meat tripled in Portland (it tends to be sweet, the Oregon Journal advised, so cook it with more onions and fewer carrots). The New Jersey Bell Telephone Company put pot roast of whale on its cafeteria menu.” People began hording tires, worried about rationing, as during World War II. The dollar had 59 cents’ purchasing power, compared to 1939. (1/187)

 

* 

Doctors of the 50s consider exercise dangerous for people over 40. Heart disease was then killing a record number of patients. Medical experts proscribed bed rest. Average life expectancy was 68.

 

* 

Kessing reports: “The Negro wage and salary worker earned an average of about $1,300, or 52 percent of the average for white workers, in 1950, as compared with an average of about $400 (less than 40 percent of the white average) in 1939.” (27/2)

 

* 

Althea Gibson is the first African American to play in the national women’s tennis championships at Forest Hills. Across the net, her opponent is Louise Brough, a blonde from California, the Wimbledon women’s singles champion in 1949. After losing the first set 1-6, Gibson roared back to take the second 6-3, and led the third set 7-6. Bertram Baker, a New York Assemblyman, was in the stands that day and never forgot the scene. “Beat the nigger. Beat the nigger,” he heard fans shouting. 

As The New York Times describes it: 

Then torrents of rain suddenly began to fall from the darkening skies. Fans raced for cover as a bolt of lightning shattered one of the stone eagles atop the stadium, and play was suspended.

 

“I’ll always remember it as the day the gods got angry,” said Baker, executive secretary of the American Tennis Association, an African-American organization.

 

But when the match resumed the next day, Gibson, 23, was visibly unnerved by the hordes of photographers, and Brough beat her in just 11 minutes.

 

Gibson had stepped over the “Jim Crow” divide on the court; but her path would never be easy, despite her talent. She went on to be the first African American player ranked No. 1 in the world. She was the first “Negro,” as African Americans were then called, to win a Grand Slam title: at the 1956 French Championships. She went on to win both the U.S. national championship and Wimbledon in 1957 and again in 1958, piling up 11 Grand Slam titles before she retired. 

Gibson was often called the “Jackie Robinson” of tennis. She told reporters she wasn’t comfortable with the term. “I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people,” she told a reporter in 1957. “I’m thinking of me and nobody else.” Nevertheless, she was the first of her race to accept a Wimbledon trophy from Elizabeth II, the queen of England. 

A ticker-tape parade in her honor was held in New York City on her return to the United States. Sports Illustrated and Time put her on their covers, the first black woman to so appear. 

At a time when Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others were battling on a hundred fronts to advance civil rights, Gibson showed the way forward on at least one. “Shaking hands with the Queen of England,” she wrote in I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, her 1958 autobiography, “was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus.” 

Gibson was born on a South Carolina cotton farm on Aug. 25, 1927, in the small town of Silver. Her family headed north when she was three. They soon settled in Harlem. Even as a young girl, Althea was a fierce competitor. She learned boxing from her father and won several bouts sponsored by the Police Athletic League. At age 12, in1939, she won the city’s girls paddle ball championship. Not long after she was offered a junior membership in Harlem’s Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, whose members were mostly African American professionals. “Even as a girl, Althea was in a league of her own,” Bill Davis, a top black player in those days, remembered. 

“She had unbelievable determination.” 

Again, The New York Times tells the story best: 

At age 13, Gibson dropped out of school to devote herself to street fighting, a basketball team called The Mysterious Girls and watching movies. Fearful of her father’s beatings, according to her autobiography, she lived for a while at the Society for The Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

 

At first she dismissed tennis as a sport for weak people.

 

“I really wasn’t the tennis type,” Gibson wrote in her book. “I kept wanting to fight the other player every time I started to lose a match.”

 

Gibson won her first tournament in 1942. In those days, most female players wore tailored dresses. Althea didn’t have much money and wore shorts with a collared shirt. At 5-foot-11, with cropped hair, she was sometimes mistaken for a man. 

Dr. Hubert Eaton, a doctor from North Carolina and a tennis star himself, saw Gibson play and lose a tournament in 1946. He and Dr. Robert Johnson, a Virginia doctor, both realized they were watching a star in the making. The two African American men were looking for a player who could break the color line and integrate the all-white U.S. Lawn Tennis Association competitions. 

Eaton approached Gibson after her defeat and asked if she’d someday like to play at Forest Hills. “Don’t kid me now,” she replied. The two doctors invited her to live in their homes; and under their coaching her game improved. Still, when they applied to all-white tournaments, Gibson was rejected. Or her applications were “lost.” 

In 1950, Alice Marble, a white star, wrote a letter of protest to American Lawn Tennis magazine. “If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players,” Marble insisted, “it’s only fair that they should meet that challenge.” A month later, she played in the U.S. national championships at Forest Hills, and in 1951 played at Wimbledon. 

Gibson’s faced an uphill battle, despite her skill. One of her closets friends in tennis was Angela Buxton, a British player who also happened to be Jewish. Prejudice against Jews was common in countryclub circles in that era, and they became doubles partners, “in part because other players refused to do so.” Together they won the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1956. 

“When I came on the scene the other players wouldn’t speak to Althea, much less play with her, quite simply because she was black,” Buxton, 85, recalled [in 2019]. “She was completely isolated. I was too, because of being Jewish. So it was a good thing we found one another.”

 

Whenever Gibson played at Wimbledon, she stayed at Buxton’s London apartment. The friends went to movies together. Buxton made the floral dress Gibson wore to the winners’ ball after her 1957 Wimbledon championship. 

Gibson retired from amateur tennis in 1958, having made almost no money from the sport. (Amateurs in those days could not accept any pay for their play.) 

In her later years she lived in poverty. Her health failed and the public forgot her. In 1995 she called her old friend, Buxton, “Angie baby,” as she called her. She said she was thinking of ending her life. 

Buxton cheered her up and helped organize an effort to support Gibson in her last years. Donations poured in once people heard her story. 

Gibson passed away in 2003. A group of young kids heard about her and began pushing for her to receive greater recognition from the tennis world. Stars like Venus and Serena Williams and Billy Jean King helped with the effort—King remembering that as a teen she had been greatly inspired by Gibson’s biography, which she read at least two dozen times. 

In August 2019, a statue on the grounds of the U.S. Open was finally erected in Gibson’s memory. 

“Althea reoriented the world and changed our perceptions of what is possible,” said Eric Goulder, the sculptor. “We are still struggling. But she broke the ground.” 

Gibson and Buxton in 1956.

 

* 

Louise Suggs, born in Georgia, helped found the Ladies P.G.A. in 1950. She turned pro in 1948, when she was the reigning champion in the United States and British amateur ranks. Other early founders: Babe Didrikson Zaharis and Patty Berg. 

“We figured if we could maybe get some tournaments together, we could at least pick up a little pocket change,” she remembered. “We were so dumb that we didn’t know we couldn’t succeed. We survived and succeeded despite ourselves. That first year they had fourteen tournaments and $50,000 in purses. This year there were thirty-two tour events worth $60 million. In 1949 she won the women’s U.S. Open by fourteen strokes, the most lopsided win in women’s history for almost half a century. During her career her total winnings were only $200,000. She was outspoken; and her license plate was TEED OFF. In 2007, when Angela Park won rookie of the year on the tournament she earned $983,922. Suggs said, “I wish like hell I could have played for this kind of money, but if not for me, they wouldn’t be playing for it, either.” 

In the early days, females weren’t treated very well by tournament organizers. “We were lucky if we got peanut butter and crackers,” Suggs said. Some courses were so poor they had to take tractors with discs to outline fairways. In 1957, she and a group of other female pros played top male golfers on a par-3 course. Suggs beat Sam Snead – and all the other men –and Snead was so upset he jumped in his car and peeled out of the parking lot. “He burned a quarter-inch of rubber,” she claimed. Ben Hogan admired her game. 

Mae Louise Suggs was born in 1923, her father Johnny, a left-handed minor league pitcher. Spalding was running a promotion for any pitcher who hit a homerun, the award a set of clubs. Johnny hit one, got interested in the game, built a nine-hole course, and charged 75¢ on weekdays, a dollar on weekends. At age 10, Louise was introduced to the game. She grew to 5 feet 6 inches and 135 pounds.

 

* 

Not a single big U.S. city has a black majority. New York (10%), Los Angeles (9%) and Chicago (14%) aren’t even close.