The Charlotte News
Monday, January 21, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President's formal inauguration for his second term took place this date in Washington, following the private three-minute ceremony the previous day, in accordance with the Constitution, the public celebration delayed to this date because the 20th had fallen on Sunday. In his inaugural address to the nation, titled "The Price of Peace", the President pledged that his second term would be dedicated to "the building of a peace with justice" to thwart "international Communism and the power it controls." He described America as being prosperous and strong, attributes which, however, he asserted did not describe the whole of the world, that in too much of the world there was "want, discord, danger." He said that new forces and new nations were stirring and striving with power "to bring by their fate, great good or great evil to the free world's future." The "divisive force" in the world was "international Communism and the power that it controls" and the "designs of that power, dark in purpose, are clear in practice. It strives to seal forever the fate of those it has enslaved. It strives to break the ties that unite the free. And it strives to capture—to exploit for its own great power—all forces of change in the world, especially the needs of the hungry and the hopes of the oppressed." The speech, delivered, in accordance with tradition, from steps of the Capitol, before thousands of onlookers, was broadcast nationwide on radio and television.
Vice-President Nixon had also taken a new oath of office in the private ceremony the previous day at the White House.
After the ceremony at the Capitol, the President and First Lady, plus 202 guests, watched the inaugural parade from the reviewing stand outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a bit of rain, but for the most part, the pale winter sunshine shone through the clouds, albeit with a chilly wind blowing, forcing people to huddle together in blankets, with temperatures in the high 30's. A seat was reserved for former President Herbert Hoover on the Presidential reviewing stand, and though former President Truman had been invited, he had indicated that he would be unable to attend. The parade was set to last for at least 2.5 hours and probably would last longer. The President had requested that it be shorter than it had been in 1953, when it lasted 4.5 hours. The line of march provided places for 40 governors, 33 floats, 65 bands, a dozen drum and bugle corps, an elephant, and a 408-foot float, passing from the Capitol to the White House. Delaware, the first state in the Union, led the state displays and others followed in order of their entry to the Union. Stands along the route had been built for 61,000 people, with room for 700,000 standing along the curb. Army technicians had determined that the pace of march needed to be 120 30-inch steps per minute to accommodate the 2.5 hours for the procession to pass. The Army had cut 6,000 persons from the number of those participating in the 1953 inaugural, to reduce the time of the parade. The theme of the parade was "Liberty and strength through consent of the governed." A White House ball would take place at 9 o'clock this night.
It was, perhaps, only fitting that
this program
In Warsaw, more than 60 percent of Poland's voters appeared to have endorsed Communist Premier Wladyslaw Gomulka, in the first popular test of his "communism without tyranny" policy. About 16 million voters, nearly 90 percent of those qualified, had voted the previous day in the election of 459 members of a new parliament. Both the existing regime of Premier Gomulka and the Roman Catholic Church had called for a large turnout. The Communist leadership had warned against exercising the right to cross names off the Communist-dominated single list of candidates, and more than 70 percent of those who had voted apparently had cast the straight official ticket. Official results were expected by Tuesday. Those who had refused to go along with Premier Gomuka had struck off the names of candidates they did not like, uncoerced by any direct official measures. Their protest vote did not alter the fact that the Communist party would have a substantial majority in the new parliament. Ballots which were unmarked were automatically credited to the Communist candidates, who headed the lists. Winners in the other parties admitted to the National Front ticket, the Democrats and the United Peasants, were committed to the Communist line. Only scattered demonstrations against the National Front were reported, and there were no indications of disorders. Precautionary patrols had been placed in some potential trouble spots, but did not have to go into action. Premier Gomulka, 51, had advocated a course of some independence from Moscow. He had been swept into power three months earlier in the upsurge which had kicked outright Stalinists from the party's Politburo. The previous week, he had joined visiting Communist Chinese Premier Chou En-lai in lambasting U.S. policy in the Middle East and endorsing the Soviet-installed regime of Premier Janos Kadar in Hungary. Despite the lopsided result, the election enjoyed more of an atmosphere of free voting than had the two postwar rubber-stamp parliamentary elections of the Stalinist era. It had been feared that voters might use the new freedom to strike names from the official list of candidates, granted as a concession to democratic principles. The Premier, in an election eve appeal which had been rebroadcast repeatedly, had warned in effect that a defeat for too many Communist candidates would invite Soviet intervention.
In Knoxville, Tenn., pro-segregation elements had begun what a white Methodist minister had described this date as a "campaign of intimidation" against several clergymen of the city. The Reverend Ted Witt, pastor of Lincoln Park Methodist Church, said that he and at least a half-dozen other ministers had been victims of "abuse by anonymous telephone callers." He said that he supposed they were trying to silence them because the Knoxville Ministerial Association had been actively supporting integration efforts. He said that the previous day, he and members of his congregation had left morning worship services and found on their cars typewritten pages referring to Reverend Witt as "one of the chief agitators of the Communist social revolution in the Knoxville area," the leaflets having been signed by "Tennessee White Citizens Council, Knox County Division." The reverend said that he had no comment on the attack on him, that he would not want to dignify it with any statement. He said that for the previous two weeks, he had not had a good night's sleep because of a campaign of intimidation and abuse by anonymous telephone callers. He said that the callers had not threatened him other than to say that they were going to run him out of town. The Ministerial Association had adopted recently a resolution urging school authorities and others to comply with Brown v. Board of Education.
In Durham, N.C., surgeons at Duke Medical Hospital had postponed for a week or more an operation which would stop the heart of an eight-year old girl for about four minutes so that they could completely renew her blood supply. She had been scheduled to undergo the surgery during the morning, but doctors said that she had developed a sore throat necessitating postponement of the operation. Enough donors to supply about 21 pints of blood had been alerted that the operation would take place this date, before it was decided to delay it, but would be available when the operation was rescheduled. Surgeons would remove during the operation a growth from the girl's heart and then seal off a hole between two of the chambers of her heart. Only fresh blood could be used during the operation. She had a relatively rare type of blood, O-Rh negative, ruling out the use of plasma and liquid blood from blood banks, resulting in a media appeal for donors from all over the state. Hospital corridors outside the Duke Hospital blood bank had been crowded the previous day with volunteers and several donors had been selected from among them, including 14 persons from the girl's hometown of Rocky Mount. Eight women from the town had also stood ready to travel to Durham if their blood was needed. Her stepfather indicated that while her heart would be stopped, an artificial heart-lung would be used to pump the fresh blood into her body. She had undergone an operation in February, 1954 to remove the obstruction, but it had not been possible to complete the operation at that time without endangering her life.
In Los Angeles, it was reported that somewhere in the Pacific, a large gray and somewhat relaxed whale was recovering from a tranquilizer dose, believed to be the largest one-shot dosage in medical history. Researchers believed that the whale would be getting back to normal at present, but that for awhile the previous day had probably been the most happy and carefree mammal in the seven seas. In the interest of heart research, members of "Operation Dumbo" had shot 500 mg. of a strong tranquilizer into the 50-foot-long whale as he swam with three other whales in the choppy waters off Santa Catalina Island. The normal human dosage was 2.5 mg. The hypodermic utilized was a specially constructed stainless steel harpoon which discharged the drug under gas pressure. The head of the expedition said that they hoped to take an electrocardiogram of the whale, the heart of which beat 10 to 15 times per minute, compared with the 70 to 80 beats in human beings. They hoped to find something which could be used in cardiovascular research.
In the mumbo-jumbo of scientific nomenclature, should they not have perhaps come up with a more apropos name for their experiment, such as "Operation Moby" or something of that sort? Or was it a subliminal reference, transmitted via the grapevine
On the editorial page, "North Carolina: A Portrait in Focus" suggests that most North Carolinians would indicate that their existence as such was like being in love, "never blindly but with all the more passion for seeing and forgiving faults."
North Carolinians found pedestrian poetry in the flaked blue windows of textile mills and patterns of grace in red clay. Occupationally, being a North Carolinian meant that a person could be almost anything from a shrimper to a coupon clipper, a shepherd or a harmonica-playing professor. North Carolinians honored all of them and anybody else making their way either successfully or eccentrically.
North Carolinians were busy people and the landscape was lively. Mothers were constantly having their portraits painted by their sons, such as those by the late Thomas Wolfe, the late William T. Polk or currently, by Ovid Williams Pierce, who had contributed a picture of occasionally intuitive truth to the February issue of Holiday magazine. Mr. Pierce's story, it indicates, had noted the "final humiliation" of the proud Cherokee race and their pseudo-"chiefs" selling trinkets and feathers to tourists and existing in a gaudy vacuum, "belonging neither to the world of their forefathers nor to that of their neighbors outside."
Regarding Chapel Hill, he had said:
"For fifty years the university has held the intense affection of its people, a fact suggesting that there no longer exists a single school but, perhaps, the myth of many, made out of the needs and the imaginings of different men. Old students not only want to return to Chapel Hill to live but many of them do. Elderly couples, retired and well to do, have found the village charm. Writers have made there a considerable colony.
"But the really important thing … is that the university has survived as a great liberal institution, in an area where one wouldn't expect to find it. No one man can do it, could make a university. The university was the sum of all of its people living in pursuit of ends unseen and knowing the purity of freedom of search.
"Taking the winding road downward, away from the town, was like returning to an everyday world which had—quite surprisingly—known how to protect its citadel on the hill."
It finds that the writing of North Carolinians was too long on description and too short of definition, that the Piedmont and the coast had their "strolling poets, sensitive to obscure outcroppings of beauty and truth and quite capable of nourishing the people's long love affair with the face of their state." But, it observes, incisive journeys into the mind of the state, such as that which Mr. Pierce had made in his magazine article, had been too few in occurrence, perhaps because of the sharp geographical divisions which had divided North Carolina's mind and manner.
Other than the Chapel Hill myth, such common denominators as the flexible conservatism of state politics existed, finding a leanness in North Carolina political thought, a relative freedom from the "puffy fact of old prejudice, a pragmatic approach that is peculiar to the state." Different ideas were allowed sympathetic hearing. The Legislature was dominated by rural members who nevertheless voted appropriations to support a State symphony and an art gallery. Freedom of the press at a college newspaper would come to the fore when anyone suggested a limitation of it.
It concludes: "North Carolina is more handsome by far than she is generally painted by her ardent admirers. But much of the stuff of her distinctiveness is behind the face of things, and it takes study and care to bring it to the surface. Among her strolling poets, she needs a few more philosopher types."
"The Inauguration of Ike's Reputation" quotes from Theodore Roosevelt upon the occasion of his "second inauguration"—the piece forgetting that he had assumed the Presidency in 1901 following the assassination of President William McKinley and thus, though serving almost two full terms, had only one inauguration, in March, 1905—stating, "Tomorrow I shall come into my office in my own right. Then watch out for me!"
It finds it timely from TR, but hardly appropriate for President Eisenhower's thoughts as he came into office in his own right after having been first elected as a popular general in 1952. It finds a comment from President Grover Cleveland to be more suitable: "I am honest and sincere in my desire to do well, but the question is whether I know enough to accomplish what I desire."
It finds that such a question would haunt any President at the current time, given the state of the world and the burdens on the President "to charm or conjure the fragments of a disintegrating order of things into orderly patterns of peace and security". Other Presidents before him had the same task, but it had grown in magnitude until it took on an aura of "eternal desperation".
The President also had the job of remaking the "new Republicanism" while old Republicanism remained entrenched in the Congress to such an extent that he could not be upset by the fact that the opposition party was in control of both houses. While Eisenhower Republicans were being elected to Congress with the help of the President, because of the seniority system, they were low in the pecking order on committees, where they had only votes and not the same power as ranking members or chairmen.
It finds that the President was more popular than either party and yet remained suspect in both parties, among Republicans for philosophical reasons and among Democrats for practical political reasons. His popularity at home and abroad was the only basic asset which he could use to develop his reputation as a President in a way which history would recognize as enduring. While it was a major asset, he would have to use it to its full extent if he were to shape events rather than being shaped by them in his second term.
A piece from the New Orleans Item, titled "Unwelcome Words", indicates that the Age Center of New England, a Boston research and service organization, had announced that after interviewing hundreds of aged men and women, it had found that they did not like being called such things as "senior citizens", "oldster" and "golden ager".
It indicates that it was not surprised and was pretty sure they did not like "old folks" or "elderly" any better, concluding, "Who the heck, for that matter, ever liked being called 'middle aged'?"
We don't like being called "youthful" in 1957, and so just stop that, too.
Drew Pearson finds that as the President began his second term, there were evident some changes, that he had learned a lot in his first four years, among other things, not to be afraid of Congress. He had become a master politician, also no longer afraid of the press, able to handle a press conference with "the skill that a musician fingers a keyboard." He also liked the job, as he had not in the beginning. He was also determined to make a name for himself in history as a man of peace, and wanted to develop new political leaders to rejuvenate the Republican Party.
But in other respects, he had not changed, as he was now 66 years old and unlikely to change fundamentally. He had not lost his personal touch, despite the burdens of the Presidency. He liked people, liked to phone his friends directly without going through a secretary, liked to scribble longhand notes and still liked to be called "Ike" by friends. He might interrupt the most important business session to do something personal and would much rather meet the champion truck driver of the year than a group of Congressmen. He still lost his temper quickly and was still too trusting of friends and executives, still delegated too much to those around him without checking their operations, and still liked to have decisions made for him.
But now he felt completely at home with business advisers, who had criticized his stand at one point when he shocked Republican intimates in a speech before the F Street Club in Washington by saying that in wartime, business should be taxed proportionate to the sacrifice of the individual who gave up his life. He felt more comfortable with them than with labor advisers, none of whom were close to him at present.
During the ensuing four years he hoped most to bring about an era of peace. He was aware that major events had been taking place behind the Iron Curtain, and while he did not know completely how he could take advantage of that ferment, he relied on his ability to be on the job at the right time. Mr. Pearson indicates that the average person might call it Eisenhower luck, while historians might call it being a man of destiny, but just as the President was the right age when Pearl Harbor had occurred in 1941, and just as the weather had been right on June 6, 1944 at D-Day, and just as fate had chosen to let Joseph Stalin die while the President was beginning his first term, so the President felt that he might be the right man who had come along at the right time to bring about peace in the world. (Had his memory been entirely accurate, incidentally, he would have recalled that the D-Day landings had been originally scheduled for June 5, delayed because of unfavorable weather.)
Joseph Alsop, in Moscow, indicates that after a week in the "drab, fascinating and singularly mysterious city", he could say one thing with firmness, that the Kremlin walls were not at the moment falling down. Nevertheless, the disasters which had recently overtaken the policy and interests of the Western Alliance, referring to the alliance between Britain, France and the U.S. following the November invasion of Egypt by France and Britain without first consulting the U.S., had inspired a curious reaction in the U.S. Government and elsewhere. The highest U.S. policymakers and their publicists were stating that the Soviets had their troubles, too, as though it excused the troubles of the West. He finds that the impression given had been ludicrously exaggerated.
He notes that while the Soviet troubles were highly unlikely to prove crippling, they were very real, especially the trouble in central Europe, which he finds appearing to approach a climax. Publicly, the process had begun with the Chinese Government on December 29, when it issued its statement condemning Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, labeling it "small nation chauvinism" and recognizing the "leading position of the Soviet Union in the peace." The Kremlin had previously announced the "fraternal equality" among Communist parties. But the Soviet party had now turned out to be primus inter pares, as the Communist Chinese had suggested. Thereafter, Premier Chou En-lai had returned home from an Asian journey and set out again for Moscow.
Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders had attended a meeting of Eastern European Communist leaders in Budapest, from which Yugoslavia and Poland had been absent. In Moscow, the leaders of the Presidium met at length with Chou. On the last day of that meeting, Hungary's Premier Janos Kadar, who had just met with the Soviet leaders in Budapest, arrived in Moscow, probably to provide Chou a first-hand account of the menace of "counterrevolution" in Hungary. After the briefing, Chou went to Warsaw, where he probably warned Poland's Premier Gomulka not to go too far along the path of liberalization and to be ready to eradicate any "counterrevolutionaries" who might appear at the previous day's Polish election. Next, Chou visited Budapest.
The several conferences showed the agitation which the ferment in Eastern Europe had caused, while the statement from Communist China revealed the theme of the meetings, that no nonsense would be tolerated. At all costs, Communist regimes would be maintained in Eastern Europe. The hardness of will had been revealed to the foreign community in Moscow by Marshal Zhukov following the crisis in Poland which had brought Premier Gomulka to power. There had been troop movements at that time, and afterward, Marshal Zhukov stated to diplomats in Moscow that a real counter-revolution could have and would have been rapidly crushed had it arisen. The popular theory in Washington that the Red Army was more tolerant of "counter-revolution" than other sectors of the Soviet hierarchy was, Mr. Alsop concludes, pure nonsense.
With that being the approach, Hungary might endure a long agony but would not be permitted to get out of hand again. A greater danger was an eruption of revolt in Poland during the election. Yet, the Poles had received their warning and stern anti-revolt devices had been prepared.
Doris Fleeson indicates that Republicans were headed toward the realm of political paradox and sectional tension under which the Democrats had lived uneasily for long. In a parting message to Republican women, RNC chairman Leonard Hall, who was resigning as of February 1, had declared that "the real hunting ground of the Republican Party is in the South." He had so concluded from recent elections, which showed the Republicans slipping badly in their former stronghold in the Midwest but carrying Southern states for the national ticket.
Mr. Hall had a hand in choosing his successor and was looking ahead to having a major voice in the party in 1960 by way of election as governor of New York the following year and possibly then seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency. His sentiments about the South coincided with renewed demands from black leaders, especially ministers, that the President visit the South and dampen down the effort to preserve segregation there, with each day bringing new stories of violence and tension regarding desegregation.
Mr. Hall's headquarters indicated that no Republican leaders in the South had joined in demands for the visit of the President there and those who advised the party in Washington indicated that they would presently not favor such a visit. They were confident that the new Congress would pass the Administration's civil rights program with a majority of Republican support and expected both the President and the party to obtain the credit for it, which they believed would be sufficient for the keeping of many black votes which had been cast for the President in 1956 in both the North and the South, after years of loyalty to FDR and President Truman.
She finds that it was true that blacks had not yet learned how to use the same strategy on Republicans that they had with Democratic liberals to obtain action on civil rights. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee, continued to be a bogeyman to blacks, though for years it had been true that solid Republican support for civil rights would have defeated Senator Eastland and his fellow Southerners. Instead, Republican Congressional leaders had maintained their alliance with Southern Democrats, trading votes on behalf of cloture and against civil rights for Southern support on tax and fiscal policy.
Mr. Hall's suggestion of a Republican move into the South threatened that conservative coalition which had controlled Congress since 1938, and Ms. Fleeson finds that it would be a momentous change in the direction of politics if that coalition were now deemed expendable in the interests of the "new Republicanism" favored by the President.
A letter writer from Davidson comments on a letter published in the January 15 edition of the newspaper, signed by 11 young residents of Charlotte who were in the Army, stationed in Germany, urging passage of the new G.I. bill of rights, after the old one had expired. He finds it not so much a bill of rights as a bill of privilege, that it had been justifiable to grant the privileges to men who had served their country in time of national emergency, but to grant it to all peacetime servicemen would amount to saying that the Federal Government owed everyone four years of college. He finds it laudable but impractical, as most would not get any good from a college education. He indicates that the postwar years found many taking advantage of the G.I. Bill while others wanted a college education but lacked the ability to obtain one at a good school, taking advantage of the bill at second-rate schools, teachers colleges and junior colleges, as well as those who were simply taking advantage of the giveaway. He was upset that those men got the same from bachelors degrees for four years of nothing as a student at a first-rate college or university as they got from four years of hard labor. Thus, he concludes that the G.I. Bill should not be revived, as the Government did not owe anyone "four years of freeloading". He finds that college standards had been lowered enough during the previous decade to accommodate the "influx of imbeciles" and he did not think it should be lowered any further.
A letter from Elmer Garinger, superintendent of the Charlotte City Schools, indicates that at its regular meeting on January 9, the Board of School Commissioners had unanimously passed a resolution thanking the newspaper and its staff for its splendid work in helping the electorate understand the importance of and need for the school bond election of January 5. The successful completion of the election, he indicates, was the result in great measure of the education program by the newspapers, the radio stations, and other groups in the city.
A letter writer proposes to the City Council, in the interests of taxpayers and motorists of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, for those using the westside railroad crossing, that there be a westside bypass for the long trains. He says that he was sending a copy of his letter to the City Council. He mentions needing some of an unspecified 27 billion dollars to build the westside bypass—which would equate to a good portion of the 71 billion dollar proposed Federal budget for the ensuing fiscal year, and so we assume he meant 27 million dollars—unless perhaps he was proposing a skyway for jet trains into the future. He may have been referring to that budgeted initially for the 13-year superhighway fund, but his failure to state what he was talking about renders it unintelligible.
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