The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 5, 1954
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Rome, it was announced that Italy and Yugoslavia had formally settled their nine-year dispute over the Trieste free territory this date, agreeing in London to its division between them, virtually coinciding with the occupation boundaries established in 1945, with Italy obtaining the Adriatic port of Trieste and Yugoslavia retaining the zone which it had occupied since World War II. Both Italy and Yugoslavia were strongly anti-Russian, but had refused in the past to cooperate militarily because of their rivalry regarding Trieste. The agreement was a triumph of U.S. and British diplomacy, both countries having prodded the two neighbors to reach such an accommodation through long negotiations in London, Washington, New York, Rome and Belgrade. At mid-morning, Italy was taking the news calmly, despite Fascist and Communist opposition to the settlement, the Fascist opposition based on the fact that Italy did not get all of the territory and the Communist opposition based on Moscow's refused approval of the agreement. The next step might be inclusion of Italy within the Balkan anti-aggression alliance which Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey had signed the prior August.
In Washington, demonstrations against racial integration within the public schools spread this date, but the situation had eased in Baltimore, scene of disorder during the previous several days in response to the integration of the public schools there. Strikes and picketing occurred at eight Washington schools, including two high schools where students maintained a defiant attitude despite pleas from school officials and police patrols on duty to desist and return to classes. The demonstrations at those schools had begun the previous day, with new demonstrations staged during the morning at an all-white high school, in which several hundred students had taken part. Strikes also were occurring at five junior high schools. At one of the high schools, with 598 white pupils and 419 black pupils, the principal had met some 150 strikers the previous day and agreed to name a committee to examine their grievances starting this date. Police said that at that high school, two students had been treated for minor injuries after a scuffle with six black students. At another high school in Washington, with 1,228 white pupils and 43 black pupils, there were some 400 pupils at a demonstration, some carrying signs saying, "Let Us Choose Our Own Friends", shouting down their acting principal when he had asked them to return to classes, none of the striking students having returned and about half having drifted away, with the others clustering around school entrances, jeering black and white pupils coming and going during lunch period, some of the demonstrators indicating that the walkout had been approved by their parents. In Baltimore, school attendance increased following student strikes, picketing and mass protests.
Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall, special counsel for the NAACP and future Supreme Court Justice, asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell to make it clear that "the full force of the Federal Government" was standing behind efforts to desegregate the schools. Mr. Marshall said that demonstrations over desegregation of the Milford, Del., Baltimore and Washington public schools were designed to threaten local school officials and prevent black children from exercising their constitutional rights to attend desegregated schools. He said that the unlawful action had developed solely by reason of the "provocation of an organization known as the National Association for the Advancement of White People." The State Attorney General of Delaware said that he would seek to have the charter of the NAAWP revoked this date, telling newsmen that he would bring a court action on the grounds that the organization had violated its Delaware charter by opposing integration at Milford High School.
Senate investigators planned this date to look further at Clyde Powell, who had been ousted the previous April as Federal Housing Administration assistant commissioner during the reported multi-million-dollar housing scandals involving overstatement of values of FHA-insured construction loans, with the builders then able to take the difference between actual costs and the loans as substantial profits. Mr. Powell had appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on two occasions, each time refusing to answer questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment. He had been with the FHA for 20 years, having been in charge of the agency's postwar rental housing program, wherein the huge profits were allegedly made. A special deputy housing administrator had testified on September 12 that Mr. Powell had accepted more than $100,000 from apartment builders who dealt with FHA, a charge which Mr. Powell had denied, saying he had never received any money during his tenure of office in connection with official business. On June 29, he had refused to answer before the Committee questions as to whether he had ever received any income during the previous five years from sources other than his Government position. The chairman of the Committee, Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, said that Mr. Powell would be given another opportunity to testify at the current hearings, which would continue through Friday of this week and conclude the current phase of the committee's investigation.
Samuel Lubell, informal political pulse-taker who had successfully predicted early the Eisenhower landslide of 1952, in the second of his series of articles on the midterm elections to occur on November 2, indicates that in recent months most of the political news had come from the agricultural states, headlining the angry "revolt" of farmers over the lowering of farm price supports, but that of far more lasting political significance was a quiet revolution which had taken place in the voting habits of the farm belt. That revolution, occurring among farmers in such states as Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, was that two-party politics had fully developed, no longer adherent to the Republicans, as they had been during the Twenties, now using both major parties, playing one off against the other in furtherance of their own interests. Currently, the new two-party politicking was taking the form of many farmers voting deliberately Democratic for the Senate or the House as a hedge against the Republican President. That preference for a "two-way house" was, posits Mr. Lubell, perhaps the number one obstacle to the President's efforts to maintain a Republican Congress to enable him to pass his program. He provides examples of sentiments he had encountered in nine farm counties he had visited thus far, finding that people wanted an even balance, not too much in favor of either party, as a Wisconsin dairy farmer had stated the preference.
In New York, longshoremen struck for the second time in six months, regarding a wage dispute, tying up New York's port. Tugboats still operated and major liners were able to dock, but there was no one to unload cargoes. There was no immediate prospect of a settlement between the International Longshoremen's Association, an independent union, and the New York Shipping Association, representing steamship lines and stevedoring firms. Baltimore and other East Coast ports were planning to handle cargoes expected to be diverted from New York, as they had been during a 29-day strike the previous March and April. All 159 piers along the port's 350-mile waterfront, except military docks in Brooklyn and Staten Island, appeared to be affected by the strike. Strikers wore hastily-written sandwich-board signs, reading, "ILA officially on strike", picketing all of the piers at which ships were berthed, with the exception of the military piers, exempted from the strike. Anthony (Tough Tony) Anastasia, boss of the Brooklyn locals, with 2,500 dockworker members, reported an unanimous vote to strike, and other locals throughout the port thereafter fell into line shortly before midnight, with 19 locals having followed the union's wage scale committee recommendation without a dissenting vote.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Henry Kaiser signed a contract early this date to manufacture cars, trucks and jeeps in Argentina, forming a partnership with El Presidente Juan Peron's Government. The Kaiser firm would invest ten million dollars in machinery, representing about a third of the capital investment. Mr. Kaiser would manage the manufacturing for the new company, which he, in combination with the Argentine Government and Argentine private investors, would own. The agreement permitted him to manufacture automotive equipment for Argentina, starved for cars and trucks, with machinery he owned in the U.S., where it was useless because the automotive market was oversupplied and independent automakers were being squeezed out by Ford and General Motors. It was the first large industrial investment agreement accomplished by the Peron Government, under the dictator's plan to attract foreign capital and make Argentina industrially self-sufficient, aiding the nation's lagging economy—no doubt accomplished in major part through virtual slave labor. The goal of Kaiser was to produce 40,000 units annually in Argentina, with Mr. Kaiser promising to build the plant within a year and start producing cars by the end of the second year, reaching full production in three years. Bet you can't wait for the 1958 Kaisers to drive all around Argentina and see all of the progress made by El Presidente.
It was reported from San Francisco that the 11 men aboard a Navy Neptune patrol bomber had thrown all of their baggage in the ocean and removed part of the plane to help the craft limp on one of its two engines for half of its 2,400-mile flight from Honolulu, the plane having landed safely the previous day at Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. When the engine had gone out after an engine fire 400 miles out in the Pacific, 50 miles beyond the "point of no return", only a quick adjustment of fuel mixture prevented a crash into the sea.
As pictured, in New York, at the Hotel Taft, a 66-year old woman fell to her death onto the marquee of the Roxy Theater, the photograph showing her in mid-fall, past the sixth floor window, as a policeman watched, helpless to aid her.
In Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe was
intending to seek a divorce this date from former New York Yankees
star hitter Joe DiMaggio, after her attorney, Jerry Giesler
Also in Hollywood, George Burns and
Gracie Allen invited 16 friends to their house the previous night to
watch their first filmed telecast in color
On the editorial page, "The Party's Outstretched Palm" indicates that party chieftains had flinched visibly when news had leaked from Winston-Salem about State Highway Patrolmen being asked to contribute to Democratic campaign coffers, after which it was announced that it was an old custom and there was nothing improper about it.
The piece finds the first reaction appropriate and the second explanation wrong. State employees had been approached previously by the party which indirectly controlled their destinies, and, in some cases, reaching down to county and municipal levels, but that did not make it ethically right.
It commends Governor William B. Umstead for saying that he would not tolerate workers being threatened or pressured into contributing to political parties, but, it finds, pressure was implied if not expressed. Even if the practice were not abused, it could be, as it was a test of party loyalty. Few State employees could afford to make such contributions to any degree, as they did not earn the type of income allowing it.
It encourages, therefore, that party organizations raise their cash elsewhere, that the state needed first-rate employees in government service and such careers should be made more attractive to intelligent young people, that government needed more enlightened civil service, better rules for tenure, and more schools of public administration, and that incidents, such as the one recorded, discouraged anyone from entering government work.
It suggests that committees and commissions be formed to tackle political ethics and disintegrating political machinery, to enable attraction of able men and women, that it did no good merely to wring hands over occasional evidence of bad practices within the government, that rotten government in a democracy meant that the people could become tainted themselves, a problem nationwide. It finds it a place to start discontinuance of the practice of seeking political contributions from State employees.
"Trouble in an Untouched Land" indicates that the overwhelming approval by St. Louis voters provided to a municipal tax on individual and business earnings the previous Thursday had been a major development in the desperate struggle of America's debt-ridden cities seeking financial security, creating a stable fiscal base for a long-deferred program of public improvements, freeing city administration from the fear of periodic financial crises. The approved levy in St. Louis was for one-half of one percent of the gross earnings of individuals within the community and of the net earnings of businesses, levied for two-year periods over a total of six years, with one long lapse, enabled by reluctant permission from the State Legislature, to yield 8 million dollars per year toward the operating expenses of St. Louis. It was to be paid not only by residents of the city on their personal income earned within the city and elsewhere, but also by non-residents on that portion of their income earned within St. Louis.
It finds the latter part especially significant, as Americans increasingly were moving to the suburbs, outside the city limits, while continuing to work in the city.
The tax on earnings was a symptom of the times, an unpleasant symptom for many Americans, with the big metropolitan centers having become so overpopulated and industrialized that they were uncomfortable as residential zones, prompting millions of Americans to escape for the relative peace and quiet of the suburbs. Outsiders contributed to the city's wealth through purchases from business enterprises within the city, and suburbanites were much more inclined to consume such things as home furnishings, appliances, and outdoor supplies than were city dwellers in a similar income bracket. Many suburban residents also owned and operated city businesses, which paid their full share of city taxes.
It concludes that it was not enough, according to the tax experts of St. Louis and several other big cities, adding up "to trouble for an untroubled land—that quiet, airy paradise just outside city limits."
"Luncheons vs. Press Conferences" indicates that Charlotte's luncheon clubs, most of which were always hoping to increase attendance, should take notice of that which Attorney General Herbert Brownell was doing, that he had a formula certain to increase turnout, good for politicians as well. Most government officials with something important to say or something to say which they hoped would sound important, called a press conference. But Mr. Brownell shunned the press, instead going to lunch, where he made important pronouncements before an audience which did not ask questions as did the pesky press.
In Chicago at an Executives Club luncheon about a year earlier, Mr. Brownell had created a sensation by announcing that former Treasury Department employee, the late Harry Dexter White, who had suddenly died in August, 1948 after being charged before HUAC as a Communist spy by Whittaker Chambers, had repeatedly been promoted to high office during the Democratic Administrations despite responsible officials knowing that he was "a Russian spy".
The previous week, Mr. Brownell had made an announcement that the Justice Department viewed the proposed merger of Bethlehem Steel and Youngstown Steel and Tube Co. as violative of the Clayton Act for tending to lessen competition within the industry, an announcement made at Toots Shor's Restaurant in New York before some public relations men.
The piece indicates that it had no objection to Mr. Brownell's choice of forums, but expresses the wish that if high Government officials had big news to impart, they ought make themselves available to the press more frequently, while those who sought to make big news merely by holding a press conference "would go to lunch or some place."
A piece from the Hartford Courant, titled "You Scream, Etc.", indicates the need to pay tribute to the ice cream cone, which had been invented 50 years earlier at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 by a Syrian who had passed a rolled wafer from his booth to an adjacent ice cream vendor, never realizing what he had invented, with the nation now consuming four billion cones per year. The original cone had been an adapted zalabia, a Syrian pastry baked on a waffle iron and served with other sweets. When the supply of dishes for ice cream had run out at one of the booths, a zalabia was twisted into a cone, allowed to cool, and then provided to customers to hold the ice cream.
It also adds that the ice cream soda dated back to 1874, having been banned on Sundays in Evanston, Ill., in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, with one entrepreneur deciding to sell instead ice cream with syrup, calling it a Sunday Soda, the name subsequently changed to sundae.
As we said during the Army-McCarthy hearings of the prior spring, never have a butterscotch sundae on a Monday, and preferably not with a cone—or a conehead. (Just as with the people in Baltimore depicted on the front page, "Jack Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance" don't make for gooder English—even if Private Schine and Mr. Cohn appeared to use proper English, themselves.)
Drew Pearson, in Chochabamba, Bolivia, tells of two loans, one made 26 years earlier, which had helped to contribute to the worst war in Latin American history, and the other made 10 years earlier, helping to contribute to the battle against Communism and toward the peaceful integration of Latin America. The first loan had never been repaid, and the second was already being repaid. The first loan had been negotiated with the Bolivian Government in 1928 by Dillon, Read & Co., and amounted to 23 million dollars, on which the Bolivian minister of finance received a substantial commission. It was doubtful that many people in Bolivia knew anything about the loan or that for which it was being used. Five million dollars had been immediately paid to a company in London for arms and ammunition, and a part of the sum was used to pay a German firm to train the Bolivian Army and to pay Ernst Roehm for the service, later becoming famous as the organizer of the SS within the Nazi regime. The first SS had been organized in Bolivia and shortly thereafter, the country began an attack on its neighbor, Paraguay, to obtain possession of the jungle prairie called the Chaco. Secretaries of State Charles Evans Hughes and Frank Kellogg during the Harding and Coolidge Administrations had thoroughly supported diplomatic efforts designed to stop that war, and when Mr. Pearson had been a young reporter covering the State Department at the time, he had watched them as they worked diligently toward that end. Later, during the Hoover Administration, Secretary of State Henry Stimson had done the same. But all had failed. That war had continued until 1935, ending only when both sides were exhausted.
The second loan, for 28 million dollars, had begun in 1942, when Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles developed the idea of building a highway from the low lands of Bolivia in the Amazon basin to the upland plateau, two miles above sea level. An American construction firm had built that road. The previous week at Santa Cruz, a town older than New York but with only 30,000 population, the President of Bolivia had opened a 300-mile stretch of mountain highway. Mr. Pearson had stood in the rain watching the ceremony, standing beside Richard Thompson, head of the construction company which had completed the work. Near the Bolivian President was the commercial attaché whom Mr. Welles had sent to Bolivia to plan the highway. When the highway was opened, the link between the Amazon basin and the Pacific via the Andes at long last had been established. For two days, they had driven along the highway, taking a long time because every few miles they had been received at every village by local Indian delegations featuring reed instrument bands and bouquets of jungle flowers thrown into their car. Mr. Pearson relates that he had never experienced a more thrilling and blood-curdling drive, but they got there. They were greeted by an Indian chief who greeted the Bolivian President, saying that they had waited for him for 300 years, then carried him triumphantly up the hill on their shoulders.
Bill Loftus of the Associated Press, in Milford, Del., tells of Bryant Bowles, Florida-born former Marine, president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, leading the drive in southeastern Delaware against desegregation of the public schools. Mr. Loftus relates that he would tell his rallies in a level, calm voice: "My three-year old daughter will never attend the school with Negroes as long as there is a breath in my body and gunpowder will burn."
Enrollment in the NAAWP had been a regular item of business at many of the south Delaware meetings called by Mr. Bowles, where he had spoken. Circulars distributed by the organization listed four types of membership and their associated dues, five dollars for one year, $12 for three years, $25 for a "Silver card", and $50 for a "Gold card". The latter two memberships did not specify a time limit. Reporters had seen many persons paying the membership dues.
The Delaware State police, who had been closely patrolling the Milford area and had been present at many of the meetings at which Mr. Bowles had spoken, had issued a statement concerning him the previous week, indicating they had conducted an investigation of him in the public interest and for the public protection in view of the prominent role he was taking in organization of an NAAWP group in Sussex County, revealing that he was arrested by the Baltimore City police in May of 1953 on five charges of false pretenses, on which he had been fined $25 and costs on each charge, that at the time of that arrest, he was wanted in Tampa, Fla., in connection with check fraud, but Baltimore was later notified by Tampa that he had made restitution in those cases and so was no longer wanted. Warrants were also on file in the sheriff's office at Belair, Md., on two counts of paying employees of a company in which he was an officer with bad checks, that case having been nolle prossed by the prosecutor in April, 1954. When a reporter inquired about the latter matter, Mr. Bowles said that it involved five black employees who refused to come to his office to collect their pay "as the white workers did," that he had paid $216 in fines.
Mr. Bowles indicated that he was raised on a farm in Florida and then had gone to the city when he was 15, learning all there was to know about city ways in about ten months. He said that he had married "a girl from Texas who knows the score about Negroes attending school." He had entered the Marine Corps in 1939 and served 7 1/2 years in World War II and in "Truman's police action" in Korea, and when he had gotten out of the service, he had spent two years looking for a "big shot" to start his NAAWP organization, "but the big shots aren't too concerned apparently." He said that they could send their children to private schools and did not have to worry about blacks attending the classes, and so he started the organization the previous year, incorporating in Delaware, putting up $6,000 of his own money and thus far having received nothing in return. He had run a contracting business from Alexandria, Va., before starting the organization, which was now his full-time occupation.
He spoke in a level, well-modulated voice which rarely rose, and intermixed humor with his statements, for instance: "I imagine if Truman knew I was part of his police action he would have made me a police chief. But I would have been so far back in the brig that the chief's badge would never have seen the light of day."
His wife was present at every meeting and sat beside him when he was not speaking, watched attentively when he was.
He contended that the organizations backing integration were "organized agitating groups", whereas members of his group had to be "rock-bottom, red-blooded Americans who will not be brainwashed by Communists or self-styled liberals."
He said that in attempting to integrate, blacks were "cutting off the hand that's fed them." They might, he continued, have to start looking out for themselves and he did not know whether they were capable of doing so.
He published a periodical titled, "The National Forum", indicating that its primary function was to offset "the propaganda being poured into Southern newspaper editors by self-styled liberals who got $75,000 to do the job from the Ford Foundation."
He said: "Any so-called white who joins forces with another race may call himself a self-styled liberal but he is still a traitor to the white race." He believed that the best weapon at present for fighting integration was not violence, because that is what the Communists and the opposition wanted them to do, but rather boycotts, such as those which had spread through the southern half of Delaware during the week. He said that it was against the law to keep children home from school, but that if anyone were arrested, his organization would furnish a lawyer to handle the case. He had conveyed in his speeches that he did not believe, in any event, they could obtain a jury from among members of the community who would convict "another one of you".
The Progressive Farmer, in an editorial, indicates that farmers and farm programs were being grossly misrepresented by many magazines, radio commentators and newspapers. A few weeks earlier, Life had stated that the "system (rigid 90 percent parity supports) guarantees the six basic crops—corn, cotton, wheat, rice, peanuts and tobacco—a fixed price no matter how much is needed or how much is produced."
The implication was that a farmer could grow all the cotton or wheat or peanuts he desired and receive a 90 percent parity support price for unlimited production. Nothing was said about production control and nothing was said about the fact that when there was a surplus of a basic commodity, the farmer had to reduce acreage and comply with an acreage allotment to qualify for the price support.
A Dallas, Tex., columnist had said that agricultural price supports had made the producers of supported products better off than any other working group in the country, that the amount which had been paid out of taxes for commodity loans would soon reach the total of 7.5 billion dollars, that Western farmers, who could produce wheat for less than a dollar per bushel in a normal year, were guaranteed a price support of $2.40 per bushel, while at the same time, the per capita consumption of wheat in the country had dropped from 200 pounds to 120 pounds because people were eating less wheat.
In 1949, the average net income per farm person was half the average of the non-farm person, at a time when farm prices were at 99 percent of parity, whereas in mid-June 1954, they had fallen to 88 percent. In 1951, when farm prices had been 107 percent of parity, the average net income per farm worker was only $1,718, compared to $3,416 for an average industrial worker. It provides a short table of the per hour farm prices on various types of farms, 75 cents on a cotton farm, 74 cents on a dairy farm, 93 cents on a tobacco-livestock farm, and $1.13 on a hog-dairy farm. The minimum wage was 75 cents per hour, and so it did not appear that the farmers were better off than any other working group in the country. Also, the complaint about taxpayer money was not just, as the Government had not lost the money, and there was no way of determining how much, if any, loss would be incurred on the loan program, until it disposed of the commodities which were under loan, the commodities being security for the loans. It was conceivable that those commodities could be sold for as much as the 7.5 billion dollars being loaned, or even more.
A large number of farmers, because of their efficient methods and large acre yields, were able to produce a crop at considerably lower costs than the average farmer, and while some growers might have produced wheat at one dollar per bushel in 1954, it would be misleading to suggest that the average Western wheat producer could produce wheat at that cost, and thus make $1.40 per bushel in profit.
Costs had increased, with U.S. farmers having to pay $1.40 to produce a bushel of wheat, and in 1954, the average cost was closer to two dollars per bushel. Meanwhile, per capita consumption of wheat had been dropping for the previous nearly 50 years, with the decline having no relationship to the price of wheat. The piece produces a table showing from 1917 through 1951 the price of wheat versus wheat consumed per capita in pounds, demonstrating that decline, not commensurate with changes in price. It concludes that people had changed their eating habits and were now consuming more fruits and vegetables, more meat with times being good, and would not return to consuming 200 pounds of wheat per capita, even if wheat were sold for less than a dollar per bushel.
It concludes that the country was flooded with such misrepresentations about farm prices, and very little was being done to counteract such statements, the national farm organizations, which were expected to fight for the farmer, being so divided on the farm program that their efforts to carry the truth to consumers had been futile.
A letter writer indicates that every
year when National Newspaper Week occurred, he, calling himself
"'Josephus Greeley'", guarded against the impending
propaganda barrage by the "holy and sanctified American press."
He finds the assault especially terrific in this year, wonders if
"this frenzied orgy of self-adulation has not been prompted by
the realization on the part of the press that the public has grown
apathetic over the allegedly noble calling of journalism." He
points out that it had not been too many years since lying editors
had been publicly horse-whipped on the streets, a custom which he
believes ought be revived. (We would support that for the
"journalists" at Fox "News" and other such
organs of lies and disrepute, disserving the public at every
opportunity with the most sensationalist take on the most ordinary of
stories, most deserving no attention at all in the national press, dragging the country and its collective psyche down repeatedly into the abyss of someone's miserable, nightmarish personal soap opera, feeding only the most insidious part of human nature, bathing in sordid moroseness designed to massage the lonely into believing their own miserable existence is not so bad after all, meanwhile forming somewhere out there the next mass shooter among the insane viewers who become obsessed with the morass of nonsense purveyed to sell more cornflakes and, while accusing the rest of the world in terms culled from psycho-babblosity of being "narcissistic", to feed the front actors' necessity for their daily hairdos, phony tans and false teeth, through which they disseminate little but lies
A letter writer indicates that when he had been a boy on the farm in dry weather, the Christian people would call a prayer meeting in the church and pray for rain, that God had promised to supply all the needs of his children, but that in the modern age, people waited until the crops were destroyed and then called on the Government for relief.
Framed Edition
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