The Charlotte News
Tuesday, January 15, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Dulles said this date that there was "a very great likelihood" that Americans would have to fight in the Middle East, unless Congress were to approve the President's program for that region. He had made the statement in response to questions posed by Senator William Langer of North Dakota, and also said that there was very little likelihood that American boys would have to fight in the region if the President's proposal was adopted. For the second consecutive day, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, meeting jointly, questioned the Secretary about the program, calling for financial aid to nations of the region and standby authority to use U.S. troops to combat any direct Soviet aggression in the region. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon had protested any pressure to shorten the questioning of the Secretary, and the chairman, Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island, said that Mr. Dulles would be called for further questioning after the following week's inauguration ceremonies. Senator Morse said that he was so frightened about the matter that he was almost speechless. Several Democratic Senators had said they wanted to question Mr. Dulles regarding proof of a statement he had made the previous day, that the Communist threat to the Middle East was the most dangerous situation faced during the previous decade. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson told Mr. Dulles that he had spoken in "generalities" the previous day, and the Secretary promised more details at closed sessions, saying that some information was guarded for security reasons. Most Republican members of the Committees refrained from comment, but Senate Minority Leader William Knowland called the testimony of the Secretary "helpful", clarifying a number of questions which members had. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington said that he was primarily interested in whether the program could be implemented with the military forces presently at the country's disposal, that thus far, they had received no evidence of any new threat, and that he did not believe the threat was as great as it had been previously.
In Warsaw, Poland and Communist China this date postponed signing a joint statement intended to put Poland on record as declaring solidarity with the Soviet bloc. No reason for the postponement was provided, but it was speculated that it could suggest a hitch in the ideological talks in progress in Warsaw since Chinese Premier Chou En-lai had arrived the prior Friday on a mission aimed at promoting Communist unity. He had arrived in Warsaw from talks at the Kremlin, bringing a new Kremlin line, that the West was preparing aggression and that the satellites had to be united under Soviet leadership. A joint statement on his talks with the Polish Premier and other Polish leaders was scheduled for this night, but a foreign office spokesman said that the signing would be postponed until the following day.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, British authorities, including 3,000 British troops and police contingents, cordoned off the Greek section of the city this date and made a house-to-house search for five gunmen believed to be responsible for attacks on British civilians, with all male inhabitants between 14 and 40 having been herded into pens for screening by special police officers, as a curfew had been imposed on the Greek quarter, the first in 101 days. Prior to dawn, British patrols toured the streets of the quarter, announcing through loudspeakers that people should stay at home and that a curfew had been imposed. Troops strung barbed wire barricades across the six bridges which provided access to the walled city and turned away pedestrians and vehicles. The curfew coincided with the anniversary of the 1950 Referendum on Enosis, union with Greece, which the Greek Orthodox Church had conducted and in which Greek Cypriots, who comprised the majority of the islanders, had voted to end the island's status as a British colony and unite with Greece. Many thought that the curfew had been imposed to prevent possible demonstrations to mark the anniversary. The previous year on the anniversary, thousands of students had paraded with Greek flags, shouting slogans and stoning British-owned cars and buildings. This date, about 2,000 workers, employed in the construction of a British military base, had gone on strike in observance of the anniversary. A police officer, however, said that the purpose of the curfew had been to find the five gunmen blamed for recent attacks on British civilians on the main street of Nicosia, scene of violence attributed to Eoka, the underground fighting arm of the movement for Greek union. The curfew was slated to remain in effect indefinitely. After each man had been screened, a mark was placed on the back of his hand with a rubber stamp, and he was then freed with the understanding that he would neither return home nor remain outside the area under curfew until nightfall.
In Atlanta, Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin this date, delivering his annual State of the State message prepared for delivery before a joint session of the Legislature, asked for "complete unity" in preserving racial segregation in the state, "no matter what any court may rule." He said that it had been about 2 1/2 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision and that "the effect of this unconstitutional and unlawful decree has not been felt in Georgia yet. That fact is no mere accident." He pledged that as long as he was Governor, "there would be no breakdown in the pattern of segregation in this state. We are going to protect our white and colored citizens in Georgia from mob violence, abuse and unbridled intimidation … by maintaining Georgia's sacred heritages and traditions." He indicated that while Georgians were sharing in an "unprecedented prosperity … unfortunately these advancements are being threatened ruthlessly through unwarranted and unauthorized interference by the federal judiciary in the purely internal affairs of the states." He also recommended a change in school financing which, he contended, would provide funds for an across-the-board teacher pay increase of $100 per year. He said that under his Administration, public improvements, for which construction had been completed, approved or let to contract, represented a total of 718.4 million dollars. He also said that there should be no new taxes levied and no reduction in the present revenue structure.
In Detroit, a police detective said
that a 38-year old bachelor had signed a statement admitting in
detail to the January 2, 1953 slaying of an 18-year old woman, whose
body had been discovered, raped and beaten, in an alley near her home
and whose case had at the time gripped the Detroit area and baffled
police through their questioning of more than 6,000 persons
In Eastbourne, England, a nurse who attended an 81-year old woman testified at a preliminary hearing this date that the woman's doctor, accused of killing the widow and three other wealthy patients with drugs to obtain bequests from their wills, had used a large hypodermic syringe to inject drugs to the widow just before she had died more than six years earlier. She testified that the syringe was not normal for the injection, that it was 5 cc. when the normal size would have been 1-2 cc. She said that she did not know what the injection was but followed the doctor's instructions and followed it three hours later with a similar injection. The nurse that the elderly woman gradually became quiet and passed away peacefully. The prosecution claimed that the doctor induced the widow to change her will while she was under the influence of the drugs he had administered. She had bequeathed to him a Rolls Royce and an oak chest full of antique silver. The court of five magistrates hearing the evidence would decide whether there was sufficient probable cause for the defendant to stand trial. The doctor had been arrested the prior month following an investigation by Scotland Yard into about 400 wills, predominantly of wealthy widows, with two bodies of former patients of the doctor having been exhumed.
In Charlotte, News reporter and feature writer Charles Kuralt had won the Scripps-Howard Ernie Pyle Memorial Award for writing and reporting adjudged to be "most nearly exemplifying the style and craftsmanship" of Mr. Pyle, the World War II reporter killed on Ie Jima by a sniper on his first day of assignment in the Pacific theater in April, 1945, after the end of the European war which he had covered since its inception, providing first-hand accounts of the fighting and the men doing it. Mr. Kuralt won the annual award, which included a $1,000 cash prize, for his "People" column for the newspaper. He shared the award with Gordon S. (Bish) Thompson of the Evansville, Ind., Press. The judges said that Mr. Kuralt's writing was "sensitive, warm with affection for obscure people, and with excellent touches of humor where that was needed." The award was presented in the newsroom of the newspaper the previous day by News publisher Thomas L. Robinson, commenting that it was "a signal honor" for the newspaper to have a writer of Mr. Kuralt's ability. Mr. Kuralt had been a member of the staff since May, 1955, following graduation from UNC where he had been editor of the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper his senior year.
Emery Wister of The News reports that a snow and ice storm had moved into the state this date, threatening hazardous highway conditions late in the afternoon and worse conditions this night and the following day, starting with light snowfall in the early hours of the morning, becoming a mixture of sleet, snow and freezing rain by late afternoon. The anticipated high temperature was 37 and the low, 27. Even by noon this date, no accumulation of snow had been recorded.
Temperatures of between 10 and 20 degrees lower than the previous day had extended from east of the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast this date, with no immediate relief in sight. The coldest spots were in northern New England and New York state, with readings expected of between 20 and 40 degrees below zero. Temperatures remained below freezing over most of the northern two-thirds of the cold belt the previous day and were below zero between northern Michigan and northern New England.
The News was sponsoring a Southern Cookbook Contest, in which a person could win $100 for submitting a prize-winning recipe. Twenty first-place prizes would be awarded in separate classifications while second-place entries would win $3 each and third-place, $2. Winning recipes would be published in the News Southern Cookbook, to be published after the contest.
On the editorial page, "The South Is Captive of a Dream" indicates that the dominant mood in the South at present was not anger, lacking the passion of Clinton, Tenn., as described on the page by Associated Press correspondent Roger Greene, and also lacking the apprehensiveness of Camden, S.C., as described elsewhere in the newspaper this date by Julian Scheer, in the second of his two-part series of articles begun the previous day on the front page.
It finds it rather "a mood of heroic disdain". There were certain neo-Confederates who spoke and acted as if they wanted to return to the world of 1861, the victims of sentimentality, fictions and obsolete values, having a tendency to justify cruelty in the name of those values. There were also a number of "bright-armored militants so infected with the morality and righteousness of their cause that they wish to overturn all of the idols of the past at once." But it finds that the great mass of Southerners were deeply and intellectually involved in neither the old romanticism nor the new romanticism, that the "race issue", while quite apparent, had not moved people to hysteria or to solutions, rather to a sense of "monumental nonchalance", fed either by deep conviction or inability to grasp the gravity of social revolution, refusing to face reality.
It finds the pattern significant, broken only occasionally by such situations as were present in Clinton and Camden. The pattern had prevented turmoil on a region-wide scale, but it did not lessen the ordeal at all. The great unanswered question of how a region could adjust reasonably to the necessities of a new era of social change loomed just as fiercely on the horizon, with the nonchalance and disdain only blurring the outlines, rendering them vague and problematic.
It finds the mood unhealthy, a creature of soft languor, "one of those sticky, sweet opiates that dull the mind and inhibit the will." It urges that the South had to sober up community by community, facing reality with maturity, responsibility and dignity, that the solutions could not be left either to the hot-headed terrorists or the blind idealists, but had to be made by the responsible citizens, the moderates, who would act with calm, constructive good will and a respect for human dignity, building a land everyone could live in with pride.
"Speedy Ruling Wanted on Channel 9" says that it was to be anticipated that the losing applicants for channel 9 before the FCC would appeal their adverse rulings, as they had expended large sums of time and money in pressing their cases through a labyrinthine Washington bureaucracy.
But it also believes that the FCC owed it to the public in Charlotte to expedite the appellate process, as nearly a decade of delay had already transpired. It hopes that the appeals would be speedily completed.
"Humphrey Bogart: Passing of a Pro" tells of the death the previous day of Mr. Bogart from cancer, saying that it was assumed that he had contributed something to the "ugly erosions of his visage", quoting him as having said, "I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink."
It finds it certain, however, that he
contributed much to the movies and the art of acting, in addition to
being a huge box office draw through scores of pictures. But like
another "tough guy", Edward G. Robinson, Mr. Bogart could
do more than just point a pistol and give a nasty sneer. "He was
a reliable actor who could grace the screen with artfully controlled
imagery and emotion
Whether he was appearing as the grease-besmudged captain in "The African Queen" or as the paranoiac Fred C. Dobbs, one of the gold prospectors in "The Treasure of Sierra Madre", he had contributed, along with a small number of other real professionals, a legitimate basis for Hollywood's claim that movies were better than ever. Despite having made a few bad movies, himself, he offered no defense for bad movies or for an industry suffering from too many such movies, saying: "I don't give a damn about the industry. If they go broke, I don't give a damn. I don't hurt the industry. The industry hurts itself—as if General Motors deliberately put out a bad car."
It finds that his only fault as an actor was that he could not escape being Bogart, that even the shifty, quaking Captain Queeg of "The Caine Mutiny" had never quite dispelled the expectation or anticipation in the audience that he was about to bring out "a .38 for his staccato wind-up to a big helping of mutiny and mental illness on the high seas."
"A fitting epitaph for Bogart ... will be carried a few years from now in a trade journal: 'Bogart re-issues big box office,' it will say."
Eric Sevareid, in a CBS broadcast, titled "$ubverting Our $ophomores", says that as chairman of the Independent Pessimists Party and self-appointed protector, not only of the public, but also of the parental weal, he indicates that he felt it his duty to pose the question of whether the Russians would take over the Middle East and consider the question of whether teenagers would take over the U.S., finding that teenage years had once been a phase, whereas now it was a situation.
He indicates that there were 16 million teenagers at present and that the number would increase by 70 percent in the ensuing decade. The Wall Street Journal had informed that American advertisers were infiltrating the teenage ranks with the modern techniques of brainwashing. Some were actually after the father, using the teenagers as agents provocateur to subvert the father's pocketbook. Some used the soft-sell and some the hard-sell. Ford Motor Co. used the soft-sell technique, telling youngsters in their magazines "how to safety-check a car in two minutes." Some manufacturers were not content with the slow strategy of sowing seeds for future harvesting. The Elvis Presley theme song had resulted in the market being flooded with Hound Dog Orange Lipstick.
Some advertisers used teenaged language. One company sold bongo drums on the basis of them being "fire tuned but city cats get good results by warming gently over the romantic flame of the gas stove," and Mr. Sevareid indicates that if someone would translate that, he would put it in the next platform of the Independent Pessimists Party and be against it.
Teenagers had once been told what to think, and now swarms of motivational researchers were going around asking them what they thought, one such pollster saying, proudly: "Parents generally have little resistance or protection against youth's bombardments. Thus, with parents rendered helpless, it becomes evident that youth is the market to reach." Apparently, the same man was responsible for the Army switching its recruiting pitch, once relying on the call to adventure, now pitching the idea that one could retire at 37.
He finds that all apparently was not lost, as the Journal had quoted one kid complaining that his father had bought a new car without even asking his opinion on the make. He suggests that perhaps a last-ditch 11th-hour parental counterattack still could be formed, with the war-cry possibly to be a paraphrase of the call of the revolutionaries of 1848: "Parents of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your shirts."
Drew Pearson tells of policymakers at the State Department having been busy trying to figure out how to spend the 400 million dollars which the President wanted for the Middle East. They had definitely decided not to finance the Aswan Dam for dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, believing it would guarantee his power for the ensuing decade, instead offering him economic aid, but only on a year-to-year basis. The first large grant probably would be devoted to clearing the Suez Canal, with the U.S. expecting to get stuck with most of the 40 million dollar bill. The State Department also expected to take over Britain's annual 35 million dollar subsidy to Jordan, considered urgent to keep Jordan from being annexed by neighboring Communist-dominated Syria. The policymakers were particularly anxious to prevent two new military airfields in Jordan, presently used by the British, from falling into Communist hands.
The present plan was to offer economic aid to all Arab states, including Syria, though it was anticipated that the latter would reject it in favor of receiving aid from Russia.
Secretary of State Dulles had been excoriated by Britain's Conservatives for softness toward Premier Nasser, and denounced by Laborites for being too militaristic. Despite that, he considered himself a hero to the British people.
Congressman Clarence Cannon of Missouri, during a secret caucus of House Democrats, had gotten in a few last licks at his old Republican rival from Missouri, Congressman Dewey Short, defeated by Democrat Charles Brown after having served 24 years in the House. Congressman Cannon had served 34 years. During the closed-doors session, the latter stated: "Missouri now presents the Eighth Wonder of the World. This is a great occasion, Mr. Chairman. For the young man I am now presenting defeated a Rhodes scholar, a man who spoke four languages, an incomparable rabble-rouser who was a great catch-as-catch-can. I am speaking, Mr. Chairman, of the accomplished, the unbridled, the irresponsible Dewey Short. Congressman Brown did the impossible. He defeated the man who had been here for 24 years, representing a district that the state legislature had gerrymandered for the Republicans. It was a remarkable achievement in a year when the President exerted such vast influence that he carried the district by the wide margin of 30,000 votes." Congressman Brown, nonplussed by Mr. Cannon's bombastic introduction, rose to acknowledge the applause and laughter, asking, "Did I do all that?"
D. S. Saund, the naturalized Californian from India, who had made history by being elected to Congress, had delayed his promised trip to India and the Middle East. He still intended to carry out his campaign pledge to visit, but would not be able to leave until the Easter recess. Mr. Pearson indicates that a few days after he had reported that Mr. Saund's Voice of America broadcast had been canceled, Vice-President Nixon had made amends by inviting him to a luncheon for Indian Prime Minister Nehru. The Voice of America had also sent a three-man crew to California to tape-record interviews with both the Congressman and his wife. He had been the first Democrat in history to win election from his district, and during his first week in Washington, had won a choice front suite of offices by beating 44 other freshman Congressmen in a drawing.
Meyer Schine, owner of the Schine hotels and theaters and father of G. David Schine, who had been at the center of the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, had been found guilty of criminal contempt recently, based on his and his family's theater chain having wantonly flouted an order to stop violating the antitrust laws, resulting in charges being brought by the Justice Department.
Roger Greene of the Associated Press, based on a special request by The News, looks closely at the town of Clinton, Tenn., scene of trouble the prior August and September following the integration of the local high school the prior August 27 pursuant to a Federal District Court order, the first such school specifically ordered integrated in the South since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of May, 1954 and its implementing decision of a year later, requiring desegregation through the Federal courts "with all deliberate speed".
Presently, there were criminal contempt charges pending against 16 white defendants in Federal District Court in Knoxville, following the acquittals in state court of John Kasper, 27, of Baltimore, head of the Seaboard Council of the White Citizens Council, in August and again in November, on charges of inciting riots. According to local residents, Mr. Kasper had been primarily responsible for fanning the flames of racial prejudice and creating the atmosphere in which harassment toward the integrating black students had flourished, culminating in a physical attack on a white Baptist minister, the Reverend Paul Turner, who had been beaten by a group of white persons while escorting the black students to the school for their protection. Mr. Kasper had been found in contempt in August by the District Court in Knoxville and sentenced to a year in jail but was free on bond while awaiting his appeal.
Clinton—which had been examined on Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now"
Mr. Greene imparts that the local police and National Guardsmen had been defied by protesters of integration, whom locals claimed were primarily "riffraff" from the outside. In one instance, when a mob had formed around the local county courthouse, a young National Guardsman had nudged his bayonet into the midriff of a husky rioter, whereupon the local man stuck his long-barreled squirrel rifle into the soldier's stomach and asked who was going to pull the trigger first. Neither man had shot.
Since 1871, the State Constitution had forbidden integrated classes in public schools. Prior to the previous August, black high school students in the community had to travel 20 miles to a high school for blacks in Knoxville after graduating from the local black grammar school.
Now, the chairman of the local school board said that everything hinged on the charged 16 defendants in Knoxville, that if they were not convicted of contempt, then the injunction issued by the Federal Court would be useless, as would be the Supreme Court's decision.
At present, the town was quiet and outwardly calm, but undercurrents of bitterness were reflected in local talk. A 71-year old black woman, whose grandmother had been a slave prior to the Civil War, stated that some black people thought that they would be better off still under slavery, that while she believed that everyone should be free, she opposed integrated schools, saying, "We'd be happier with the school of our own." Her 14-year old grandson, a freshman at Clinton High School, said that he would rather go to school with whites, that they were getting along fine at present after the trouble had passed, that no one had harmed him, but he had not done very well in his first nine weeks of studies as he was too scared with all of the mobs in the streets and white kids throwing rocks at them. He believed he would do better going forward.
A 35-year old white man who ran a local grocery store said in response to the question of what he thought of integration: "Mister, I ain't sending my kids to school with no niggers. I know that. It's not that I dislike 'em. We get along fine, most times. We believe in the Negro getting his education, but in his own school. We just don't believe in mixing 'em." He believed that 96 percent of the people were against integration.
Another man in the store at the time believed that there was money "back of this thing to keep the niggers in our school." He thought that the Supreme Court should have kept its hands off them and should not have the power "to do things to the states."
The chief librarian of the town had said that she had seen members of the mob who had attacked the Reverend Turner on December 4, and said that she recognized only two or three people among the mob, believing the rest to have been outsiders. She said she would rather not have integration but that if it was the law, she was willing to go along with it, and that her daughter, a junior at the high school, had accepted integration based on her Christian principles. She said, however, that if other towns in the South had the same problems they had, then integration would not come for another 50 years.
The editor of the local newspaper, the weekly Clinton Courier-News, stated that now that many people had realized that the order to integrate the high school was the law of the land and that the courts intended to punish anyone who would interfere with the law, many were finding that they had been misled and misinformed "by outside agitators" who had told the people that they were the law and that they could do anything they wanted. But it had not worked out that way. He and others blamed Mr. Kasper for stirring racial animosity.
The police chief said that he did not believe there would be much more trouble, though adding that he could be wrong. The 1,500-person mob which had formed on September 1 had overwhelmed his small police force, shouting "get their guns and kill them". He said that he had received hundreds of letters in both praise and condemnation for his trying to uphold the law. He showed Mr. Greene an unsigned Christmas card depicting the Madonna and Child, with an illiterate scrawl from Rossville, Ga., which said: "You fool don't you understand you are playing rite into Rushia's hands forcing your young to rub noses with the Negroes. Wate till you see little half white childrun … colored boys marrying white girls. You fool." (Perhaps not surprisingly, Rossville is contained within the district presently represented by a particularly notorious Republican Congresswoman, who is borderline psychotic, who thinks that being a one-woman freak show in the Congress is the same thing as being a responsible legislator, that the more publicity she can attract to herself, the more power she can accumulate, following the outline of her vicarious mentor, His Highness.)
Reverend Turner, who had been called a "nigger lover" by his assailants, said that he had received more than 500 letters, some of them threatening but more than 90 percent having been favorable. He said that he bore no ill feeling toward anyone, that they had clashed on a matter of principle, but that there was no color line around the Cross of Jesus. He had never expressed himself either way, for or against integration, but believed human morals could not be legislated, that if a man was prejudiced, he was prejudiced.
A letter from a group of 11 people from Charlotte serving in the Army, stationed in Friedberg, Germany, indicates that they had read in the European edition of the Stars and Stripes that Representatives Olin Teague of Texas and William Ayres of Ohio were seeking to have a peacetime G.I. bill enacted. They urge that if readers had a boy of draft age or in the service at present, it was their duty to take an interest in the bill, its main provision being for free schooling. The current G.I. Bill had expired on January 31, 1955, and so former servicemen no longer received free $10,000 Government insurance. They wonder therefore what kind of benefits they were getting for their two years of service. They urge writing Congressmen and Senators to urge voting in favor of a peacetime G.I. Bill for U.S. servicemen, and encouraging friends to write also.
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