The Charlotte News
Friday, January 11, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a Federal judge had held Virginia's plan to continue racial segregation in the public schools through a pupil assignment program to be unconstitutional on its face, that the laws conflicted directly with Brown v. Board of Education. The placement program was comprised of a series of laws passed by a recent special session of the Virginia General Assembly, designed to preserve segregation in the schools by the assignment of pupils for reasons other than race or color. Black pupils and their parents had brought suit against the Norfolk and Newport News school boards, and the court's decision had denied motions by the boards to dismiss the cases. Trial of the suits was calendared for February 11-13.
Suspension of bus service in Montgomery, Ala., continued this date following six bombings, four of which were at black churches and two of which at the homes of ministers who had led the Montgomery bus boycott, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and a white minister, the Reverend Robert Graetz, as well as a shooting, the sixth such incident since the formal end of the segregated seating on the buses on December 21, as ordered by the Supreme Court, summarily affirming the U.S. District Court decision of the prior June, finding that the segregated seating mandated by State statute and City ordinance violated the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, invalidating those laws. Alabama Governor James Folsom had offered a $2,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of those who had placed the bombs. The Montgomery Advertiser had said in an editorial: "The issue now is no longer segregation on city buses… The issue now is whether it is safe to live in Montgomery, Ala."
In Tallahassee, Florida Governor LeRoy Collins said that he would order resumption of bus service in that city when he determined that buses could operate in an atmosphere of "harmony, and peace and good will."
In Atlanta, more than 50 black leaders from Southern cities had begun the second day of a strategy meeting, with a statement of decisions anticipated for this night's meeting, at the end of the closed session.
Six black ministers in Atlanta were free on $1,000 bond each after being arrested for breaking State segregation laws on Wednesday by riding in seats on buses normally occupied by whites. Among those arrested was the Reverend William Borders, leader of the movement to desegregate the seating on the municipal buses. His picture appears as he was being booked at the Fulton County jail.
Leonard Hall resigned this date as RNC chairman, effective February 1, with the White House indicating that he would be provided a high position in the Federal Government. His announcement had been anticipated and came after a visit with the President at the White House. The President said that after Mr. Hall had completed a vacation in Florida, he hoped that he would use his experience as a legislator, judge and chairman of the party in further service to the nation in future years. It was uncertain what position he might occupy in the Government. There had been widespread speculation in New York that he might seek to run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination the following year to contest Governor Averell Harriman.
Three separate air disasters had possibly claimed as many as 24 lives this date, in two Air Force planes and a two-engine passenger plane, the latter claiming possibly 12 lives and causing injuries to at least 13, as the plane crashed and burned on takeoff from the Buenos Aires airport in Argentina. One of the Air Force planes had gone down near Austin, Tex., killing six and injuring three members of the crew, and the other had gone down near Andover, New Brunswick, on the Canadian-U.S. border, with the only known survivor of the latter having been a Charlotte man who was blown out of the plane and parachuted to safety when the explosion occurred during a training flight from Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine. Six of the crew had been killed and two remained missing.
At Fort Bragg, N.C., 1,240 paratroopers had leaped from 35 C119 Flying Boxcars onto "Drop Zone Normandy" this date in their first field test of the Army's streamlined new "Pentomac" division. It was the start of "Exercise Market II", the largest airborne maneuvers since World War II. The mass jump had been postponed from the previous day because of high winds. After the men of the 187th Combat Group, 101st Airborne Division, had parachuted, 300 tons of heavy equipment followed them down into the assault area.
In Concord, N.C., a Superior Court judge dismissed charges of attempted rape against a Fort Bragg master sergeant, saying that the case had resulted from a "drunken debauch". The court had ended the trial during the testimony the previous day of the prosecuting witness. The judge said that he did not know how the story had unfolded and that nobody did, that it had started as rape with the testimony of the prosecutrix and then had dwindled to attempted rape, and now was such a muddle that nobody knew what had happened. A doctor had testified that the complaining witness, 20, had arrived at the hospital on the night of November 29, requiring internal surgery, and that he observed that she had black eyes and a bruise behind her left ear. The judge had intervened to dismiss the case after the woman had testified that she had dated the defendant several times since she had sworn out a warrant charging him with the crime. The judge said that if the defendant were convicted of anything, he would be in a quandary and would not know what to do.
In Brevard, N.C., a ten-year old girl had wanted to win a pen and pencil set offered by a radio station for the best safety slogan, and so had written on a postcard: "Slow down before sundown or you might not see the sun rise." A few days later, she and a young female friend, had gotten into a car with the girl's mother and father to drive to Hendersonville to buy a "formal" dress. At a railroad crossing, the car had crashed into a train, killing the girl and her parents. The accident had occurred just before sundown. It was announced during the week that her safety slogan had won the radio station's contest, and the pen and pencil set which she had won would be provided to her playmate, who had survived the crash.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports that this date was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton and that no one seemed to care except a sergeant in Charlotte's Army Reserve Advisory Group. The Pentagon had foreseen the event and to that end, had prepared a long proclamation praising Mr. Hamilton for seeing "the noble and magnificent prospect of a great Republic", noting this date as "an opportunity for all of us to think afresh of his sincere efforts and inspiring leadership." The President had signed the proclamation. The Pentagon had written an even longer directive, explaining "that there will be many events and ceremonies in your community", calling on military units to provide for those events and ceremonies. The package was sent to Raleigh and Raleigh had sent it to Charlotte's Army Reserve Advisory Group, where the package was handed to the sergeant, who began running down all of the "many events and ceremonies". The rest of the story is on another page, but apparently, by the headline, the sergeant found that no such events or ceremonies were planned. And, we note again, for the sake of the Blonde, that Alexander Hamilton was not a President. He was, however, along with James Madison and John Jay, "Publius", author of the Federalist Papers, which explained to the people the various provisions of the adopted Constitution, to assist in its ratification by the states.
Mr. Kuralt also reports on a couple and their two daughters, one 12 and the other 3, who were refugees from revolt-torn Budapest two months earlier, newly arriving in Charlotte, preferring to keep their names out of the newspaper. They had found a new home in Charlotte this date after stepping off a train from Camp Kilmer in New Jersey during the morning, bearing all of their worldly possessions in two wooden boxes, a suitcase and two valises. They had been met at the station by another refugee couple who had come to Charlotte the previous month, the male of whom had flown with the male of the new couple in the Hungarian Air Force. They would live together in a peaceful city of which they had never heard 30 days earlier. The male of the couple had been sent to a Siberian prison by Russian captors in 1945, spending three years there while his wife had raised their older daughter in Budapest. From 1948 through 1956, the family had survived by hoping for the day when Hungary might emerge from beneath Russian oppression. The revolt of October and November had appeared initially to offer that opportunity, and both the husband and wife had taken up rifles and fought in the Budapest revolt. An exploding shell from a Russian tank had grazed both of them at the height of the revolution. The husband, hit in the leg and neck, had recovered sufficiently by November 21 to commandeer a truck, collect his family and drive to the Austrian border. They then waded across a swift stream to freedom, carrying their two children in their arms. They arrived in Vienna, then flew to New York and lived at Camp Kilmer until they had been invited to Charlotte by a young doctor and his wife, who had also asked for anonymity.
"What Makes Our Teens Tick?
There is an old saying, "Too many cooks spoil the broth," and it would seem applicable to the proliferation of advice columnists during the 1950's and onward until they basically faded away, as people, by and large, stopped reading newspapers. Now, of course, such people find their haven on such places as Fox Propaganda, where the self-appointed advisers hold forth daily, giving all of the fools across the country all manner of advice, from how to vote, how to think, how to arrange finances, and how to be an all around pain to most other people.
On the editorial page, "Eisenhower: The Coin of the Future" finds that the President's fourth State of the Union message delivered to Congress the previous day had been short on detailed proposals, which would be put forth in separate messages on specific issues subsequently. But he had been longer on eloquence and fervor than in previous messages.
It finds that he had admirably defined the moment and place at which the nation and world stood, a necessary understanding for knowing where to go and how to get there. He said that in the present world, the "surging and understandable tide of nationalism is marked by widespread revulsion and revolt against tyranny, injustice, inequality and poverty. As individuals, joined in a common hunger for freedom, men and women and even children pit their spirit against guns and tanks. On a larger scale, in an ever more persistent search for the self-respect of authentic sovereignty and the economic base in which national independence must rest, peoples sever old ties; seek new alliances, experiment—sometimes dangerously—in their struggle to satisfy these human aspirations." He had gone on to say that particularly in the previous year, the tide had changed the pattern of attitudes and thinking among millions, foreshadowing a world transformed by the spirit of freedom, which would last for many years to come, and that the U.S. could not remain aloof to those events, heralding a new epoch.
It finds that he had re-articulated an old challenge, but with uncommon clarity and new emphasis. In the previous year, the Suez crisis had erupted, placing the burden of world leadership on the U.S. and pitting the necessities of continued amicability with old Western colonialists with the need for recognition of the new Eastern nationalists. Stalinism had resurfaced while new weapons had reached a much more advanced stage.
It finds that the message suggested that the President was taking a more aggressive stance of leadership at the start of his second term, something required by the times. He was handicapped by the fact of being a lame-duck, losing the power of patronage and dispensation of political rewards, needing to compensate with the force of his personality and capacity to inspire support among the people at home and the masses abroad. He was more popular both at home and abroad than had been the conduct of his foreign policy by Secretary of State Dulles and Assistant Secretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr.—the latter now to be replaced by former Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter, who would later succeed Secretary Dulles at his death in 1959.
It indicates that what the President would do in the ensuing four years would be more important than what Congress would do, even if Congress would impact the President's course. "But it is in the coin of his personal advocacy, so brilliantly show-cased in his State of the Union message, that the really decisive factors of the next four years lie."
"Behind the White Cliffs, a New Hope" quotes new British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan as having stated in 1955, when announcing his support of the decision by the Churchill Government to build an hydrogen bomb: "Until the passions of mankind can be cooled by reason or by love, they must be chained by fear, and there is no other way."
It posits that he had to be aware now of the limitations of his prior rhetoric, that neither fear nor love nor reason were as important in 1957 as reestablishing a working partnership with the U.S., that the abstract, for the moment, had to yield to the practical.
Mr. Macmillan's mother was from Indiana and so he had an American connection. During World War II, he had served as a troubleshooter for his friend, Prime Minister Churchill, in North Africa, where he had met and befriended Lt. General Eisenhower, a friendship which had survived to the present. When he had succeeded Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary, when Mr. Eden became Prime Minister in 1955, he remarked that his relations with President Eisenhower would undoubtedly be pleasant, given their prior experience together.
It finds that he had a rebellious past, that during the depression, he had attacked his own Conservative Party's old-fashioned economics with considerable effectiveness, once referring to the whole Government bench as "a row of disused slag heaps", that the Conservatives were "dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters." He vigorously protested the appeasement of Italy during the Ethiopian war by the Government of Stanley Baldwin and chose the role of parliamentary independent two years before Mr. Eden had resigned as Foreign Secretary from the Cabinet of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 for the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. He had subsequently served in both the Churchill and Eden Governments, and when Mr. Churchill had been driven from office in July, 1945 in favor of the Labor Party and Clement Attlee, had played an important part in modernizing the Conservative Party's outdated doctrines.
He had once criticized the Labor Party leadership by saying that "the brave new world has turned into nothing but a fish-and-Cripps age"—referring to Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee Government. Such remarks had not endeared him to the Labor opposition.
It indicates that the times ahead would require less of that piercing criticism and more of sturdy political morality, creative leadership and hospitality to new ideas which had first brought him to prominence in the Conservative ranks. If the Western Alliance was to remain strong, it suggests, it would require fresh appreciation of its value and a fresh approach to its problems.
"The Bomber and a Peak of Punditry" tells of New York's "mad bomber", who had been planting bombs around the city for 16 years, 32 bombs in all, having stated some words about himself in a reputedly authentic letter to the New York Journal-American: "My one consolation is that I can strike back, even from the grave."
The piece finds that while it was discomforting to New Yorkers, it was nevertheless refreshing to hear "the explosive nut" talking about himself. For psychologists and psychiatrists had reached a new peak of punditry in seeking to explain his motivations, despite never having treated him. Copyrighted accounts of his id and ego had appeared repeatedly. Some said that the size of his bombs would increase with his madness, while others said that the size of the headlines he attracted provided his real motivation.
It finds that the third-party
approach to psychoanalysis was not very enlightening and had not
availed anyone so far of the simple answer to the question everyone
wanted to know: Which way did he go?
A piece from the New Orleans States, titled "Tips for Ladies", tells of a homemaking expert, who presumably was paid for the advice, suggesting to the ladies: "After a party, stack the overflowing ashtrays on the sink overnight. Makes a mess to face in the morning, but a mess is better than fire which could start in the wastebasket from smoldering butts."
It indicates that it was left wondering why the woman of the household, having gone that far, would not simply stoop and empty the ashtrays into the metal kitchen garbage container and then run some water over them, eliminating both the hazard and the mess.
Perhaps, the piece misunderstands, takes literally that which might have been some recondite advice after a party in the swinging 1950's.
Drew Pearson tells of the President, at a recent White House meeting, having blistered Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser as if he were the top irritant to U.S. foreign policy, complaining that the U.S. had saved his neck while now he was swaggering as if he had won single-handed the war against the French, British and Israelis. The President was upset regarding Premier Nasser's stalling on his pledge to reopen the Suez Canal, at the time refusing to allow British and French salvage crews to operate, and subsequently holding up the departure of 13 ships blocked in the canal. He had then announced that no British or French ships could use the canal except under certain conditions and that ships would have to pay tolls directly to Egypt, despite previous plans that they would be paid to a ship users' association or to an international body.
The primary focus on the President's Middle East proposal, the so-called "Eisenhower doctrine", was whether it would work in deterring the Arab world in joining with the Communists while offering aid at the same time. Members of Congress would likely weigh several factors before voting to approve the new policy. Cairo Radio, on October 14, 1955, had proclaimed: "Justice and logic require that we now defend Russia and attack America, which has shown falsehood, deceit, and ill-will." The statement, coming from the mouthpiece for the Nasser Government, was made at a time when Secretary of State Dulles was talking about providing a large loan to Egypt for the construction of the Aswan Dam. The U.S. was also at the time sending arms and foreign aid to Egypt. On October 2, 1955, the Cairo daily newspaper, which was required to represent the Government, had said of American aid: "America with all its millions and billions cannot win the heart of Egypt with Point 4 checks… Nor can America win the heart of Egypt with cheese, condensed milk, etc., which we know she is interested in getting rid of. America cannot win the heart of Egyptians with her worthless colored posters in which she attacks communism while she herself is not a democratic country." Such editorials had followed a pattern and were not isolated.
Congress would have to decide whether Premier Nasser was now ready to cooperate or would revert to the former pattern. He was the chief leader of the Arab world and what he did, most of North Africa and part of the Middle East would follow.
Mr. Pearson finds that the President's irritation with Premier Nasser was justified and highlighted one of the major mistakes of the Administration, as it could have had any terms with him it wanted when he was cringing in a cellar during the French-British-Israeli attack of early November. He lost the battle for the Sinai Peninsula ignominiously, his Army having held out against Israel for only six days; but now he was acting as if he had been the victor. Secretary Dulles had urged Premier Nasser to take U.S. money when he was receiving large shipments of Russian arms, with the Secretary rushing to London to side with Premier Nasser when he first seized the Suez Canal on July 26. He had even gone to bat for him against traditional allies, the French and British, and had withheld oil from them until they had withdrawn from the Suez. Despite those concessions, the Egyptian dictator was now engaged at his old pastime of playing Russia against the U.S.
A letter writer, who indicates that she lived in the perimeter area of the community and had three young children, says she was very much interested in the school situation, the annexation proposal and any other problem which affected the progress of the community, believing that it was not taking a logical approach to long-term solutions to any of the problems, delaying construction of perimeter schools until it could be determined whether they would be under City or County jurisdiction and generally confusing long-range planning because of the overlapping of City and County responsibilities and authority, among other problems. She suggests consolidation of the two governments, setting taxes according to the services provided and working toward real economy and efficiency in the local government.
A letter writer indicates that an engineer's suggestion anent the grade crossing correction on the east side of Charlotte would cause traffic to be moved to the west side and produce further congestion of all traffic. He says the grade crossings had been around for 50 years and would be present for many more, while taxpayers would be paying for years to come for the improvements as the Southern Railway, the big taxpayer, would have to pay two ways without knowing what was next. He urges the election of men to the City Council who embodied the views of current Council member Herman Brown, that there should be four or five members with his views, and that the voters should avoid electing members who looked at dollars as if they were dimes.
A letter writer wonders, with the newly proposed Middle East policy enunciated by the President to Congress, why the U.S. was supporting the U.N. in one national crisis and substituting the policy and power, including potentially military force, of the U.S. unilaterally in another, thus repudiating the U.N. He wonders whether it was because there was no oil in the Suez Canal. He says that the U.S. could not consistently recognize sovereignty in the case of the canal situation and support the U.N. in that situation and repudiate it and the national sovereignty of other nations which were rich in oil.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., indicates that Congress had been asked by the Administration for standby authority to use U.S. armed forces in the Middle East to oppose any Communist aggression, indicating that during the President's speeches of the campaign, the people had been promised that the armed forces would never be used as they had been in Korea to stop aggression. He finds that the use of force in Korea had been justified and finds that it would be justified to use force to stop Communist aggression at present, but also believes that much good could be done at home to stop trouble, especially in the South, as the states had a right to do and ought be left alone by the courts and the Federal Government to operate for the best interests of the people, as in years past. "The Negro should remember that if a court can rule against one race to please another, it can reverse itself and rule the other way." He wonders who had started the trouble in the South between the races.
He, like so many other people, does not seem to understand the 14th Amendment and why it is a critical part of the Constitution, that it is not a matter of ruling for one race against another, but balancing the playing field left unbalanced by continuing discrimination against minority interests.
A letter writer from Laurinburg, the chairman of the All-America City Award Day, thanks the newspaper on behalf of all the citizens of the town for its cooperation in their selection as an All-American city.
A letter writer recommends certain cited Bible verse as a way of conquering troubles in the world, especially those associated with liquor consumption, and urges people to vote and pray against it. He says that education and training would not do it, and that neither would church bazaars, barbecues and suppers, that it would have to be done through prayer.
A letter writer finds it to have been an impressive moment in 1953 when the President had led the nation in prayer just before his first inaugural address, indicating that Christians throughout the country had been grateful to have a President who would practice his "deep sense of dependence upon God by praying to Him in public". He finds that one of the problems at present was that there were not enough people in the country who were interested in having a public praying President and urges return to the old Christian gospel, to be saved from sin, lest people continue "down the road of modern unbelief and share the doom of other nations who have forsaken God".
What about a public preying former occupant of the White House trying to return?
Framed Edition
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