The Charlotte News
Wednesday, January 23, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had reported to Congress this date that the record 1956 prosperity ought be continued into the current year, while cautioning that more inflation could come along with it. In the last of his three major annual messages, the economic report, the President stressed for the third time in as many weeks his strong opposition to tax cuts and made a sober appeal for restraint in wage increases. He listed 38 laws which he wanted from the 85th Congress, including prompt Federal aid for school construction, more enforcement mechanisms in anti-monopoly and anti-merger laws, and more help for small businesses caught in the credit squeeze. The nation's total output of goods and services had reached a record 412 billion dollars the previous year, and for the final quarter, had hit a peak annual rate of 424 billion, with the President forecasting continued good times. His basic theme had been an appeal to industry and labor unions to join the Government in blocking the advance of business costs and consumer prices. The President cited figures showing that the country had achieved a 21.5 billion dollar increase the previous year in the annual rate of production, though indicating that half the gain merely reflected price increases. He said that the increase in prices might not have run its course, as it was one of the uncertainties and problems which clouded the economic future. He suggested strongly that he thought the Government was doing all it could to curb price pressures, short of heavy-handed restraints which would regiment the economy and invite a recession. He stated that business and labor leadership had the responsibility to reach agreements on wages and other labor benefits which were fair to the rest of the community and to those persons immediately involved, rendering them consistent with the prospects for productivity and the maintenance of a stable dollar. He did not renew his direct request of the previous year that Congress consider restoring standby authority to regulate down payments and repayment terms on consumer installment credit, with Administration advisers having been split on the issue. He said that the Federal Reserve Board shortly would complete a study which would serve as a useful guide in determining whether legislative action was desirable. The report showed that Americans had entered 1957 with a record installment debt of 31.6 billion dollars, while the rate of business was only about a third as rapid as that which auto and appliance sales had brought on in 1955.
Radio Budapest said this date that three more Hungarians had been sentenced to death for inciting strikes and urging other resistance to the regime of Communist Premier Janos Kadar. It brought the number of death sentences announced publicly to at least 28 since the revolution had been put down the prior November, with 11 executions having been announced publicly. Some Hungarian and Western observers believed, however, that there had been many other death sentences and executions which had not been made public.
In Nashville, Tenn., five measures proposed to the Legislature by Governor Frank Clement, which would permit voluntary segregation and pupil assignment in Tennessee public schools, awaited this date only agreement by the State House on minor amendments and the Governor's signature before becoming law. All five bills had passed the State Senate the previous day by wide margins but with minor changes from the original proposals. The House had passed the bills the previous week but two of them had to go back for concurrence on amendments to the bills in the Senate. A bill which permitted the operation of separate white and black schools if desired, had passed the State Senate by a vote of 27 to 4. The State House had approved by a margin of 60 to 3 a second and stronger resolution denouncing Brown v. Board of Education and other Federal desegregation decisions involving states' rights. The so-called "Tennessee Manifesto", approved the previous week, limited criticism to the desegregation rulings. The two school bills which would return to the House for approval of amendments provided that local school boards would have the right to transfer pupils and to operate schools jointly with other boards. The first bill had been amended to lower the age of children affected from 6 to 5 1/2, and the second had been amended to eliminate the provision empowering school boards to levy taxes.
In Birmingham, Ala., two robed members of the Klan of the Confederacy had been wounded the previous night in a meeting at a neighborhood theater presently leased by the North Alabama Citizens Council. A homicide sergeant said that the two men, one 24 and the other 54, had been shot during a fight at the end of the Klan meeting and both were in a Birmingham hospital, expected to recover. The two men had provided an account to police, indicating that about 50 men had attended the Klan meeting, when the younger man objected to what he termed "one man rule" of the organization, at which point he was asked to "come to the office" and was then grabbed by three robed men. As they had scuffled on the floor, the grabbed man was shot in the hip and chest and the other wounded man was hit twice in the hip as he sought to come to the younger man's aid. The executive secretary of the North Alabama Citizens Council denied that he was a member of any Klan group and said that he did not attend the meeting the previous night, indicating that he had allowed the Klan to use the meeting place since nothing else had been scheduled. After the shooting, the theater had emptied rapidly and the older of the two wounded men had managed to crawl from the building, before being taken to the hospital by an unidentified person. The younger man was left in the building and was found sprawled on the floor by police. He told the police that he was armed with a pistol but had been unable to reach it because it was under his robe. The pistol was not at the scene when police arrived, and the other wounded man had apparently been unarmed. The North Alabama Citizens Council, one of several such organizations in Alabama, had been a militant foe of racial integration, and had used the theater as a meeting place for the previous several months.
In New York, a psychiatrist described George Metesky, who had confessed to being the "mad bomber" who had set 32 bombs in New York City over the previous 16 years, without any serious injuries, as a "classic textbook case of paranoia." The psychiatrist, assistant commissioner of the State Department of Mental Hygiene, noted that it had been possible to predict months in advance what type of man would be found as the culprit. Before he had been caught, the doctor said that he would be single, a lone wolf, well-proportioned physically, an immigrant or first-generation American, highly religious and uninterested in women. Police said that the arrested man fit that description. The chief psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital had told an interviewer that as paranoia spread, any two objects which had anything in common, regardless of how illogical, became equal in the mind. A feeling that one was being persecuted by a foreman could spread to the foreman's company, to anyone served by the company and ultimately to the whole world. Mr. Metesky had told police that he believed that his pulmonary tuberculosis contracted in the 1930's after being gassed during his year of employment at Consolidated Edison and the company's subsequent refusal to provide him proper treatment had been his motivation for planting the bombs, many of which originally had been planted in and around Consolidated Edison properties. Later, the bombs were planted in railway stations, theaters, the New York Public Library, and other places apparently unrelated to the utility company. Mr. Metesky's court-appointed attorney described him as having a schizophrenic, or disintegrated, personality. The attorney said that he was a man who could easily pass for one's next-door neighbor, but that in speaking with him and with the thousands of clients he had represented, he saw a man with a psychosis, a persecution complex. The attorney said that Mr. Metesky had told him that all of his grievances against the public had been satiated only by the bombings, which the attorney found to be indicative of a schizophrenic personality, and that he was not sure that he could differentiate between right and wrong. The Mount Sinai chief psychiatrist said that many normal persons had a sense of persecution but faced up to reality and the feeling dissipated, while to the diseased mind, it spread. Both psychiatrists said that sexual forces and repression played a part in paranoia, with one of the psychiatrists indicating that a paranoiac desired to escape from the real world and cover up powerful but forbidden sexual desires, while the other psychiatrist said that the process often started with an unconscious homosexual desire which came into conflict with society's repressions.
In York, Pa., it was reported that the "Little Inch" natural gas pipeline had exploded 15 miles northwest of the town this date, sending flames 200 feet into the air for more than two hours before the fire had been extinguished. There had been no casualties and service had not been interrupted. The explosion had occurred on wooded farm land three miles northeast of the community of East Berlin, with the nearest houses 1,500 yards away.
Julian Scheer of The News indicates that the 1957 General Assembly, which would begin on February 6, could be a much hotter and longer session than many believed, with a News survey of the members of the Legislature showing a sharp division of opinion on the biggest issues facing the Assembly, including taxes, reorganization of the highway commission, separation of highways and prisons, and reapportionment of the Assembly. He provides the results of the survey.
In Monte Carlo, a 21-gun salute announced the birth this date of a girl to the former Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. The baby, who would succeed her father on the throne of the 367-acre principality, unless a son were later born, was placed on a gilded wooden cradle used by her father. She would be named Princess Caroline. Palace sources said that Princess Grace, 26, had burst into tears of joy when told that a baby girl had been born. The Prince, 33, had gone on the radio soon after the birth and announced solemnly that his beloved wife had given birth to a baby Princess, who would be named Caroline. He thanked the people for their "affectionate testimony of attachment" and asked them to thank God and rejoice. The residents of Monaco were jubilant at the news. For if the Prince were to die without an heir, Monaco would become a French protectorate and its 4,000 citizens would become subject to France's high taxes and military draft.
In Venice, a wealthy playboy of Rome had testified this date that he had never met a 22-year old woman whose body had been found on a beach under mysterious circumstances nearly four years earlier following a party thrown by the playboy at his hunting lodge. He had been accused, along with a former police chief of Rome, of aiding and abetting a jazz pianist, the son of a former Italian foreign minister, charged with manslaughter in the young woman's death. The playboy stated that all of the charges against him were absurd and that he had never met the woman in his life and had never helped anyone escape justice. The pianist also denied knowing the young woman and, in his testimony the previous day, stated that he was far away at the time of her death, and had two witnesses to corroborate it. Stories that the young woman had died at a sex and narcotics party at the hunting lodge had almost caused the collapse of the Italian Government during the preliminary investigation in Rome which had lasted for 18 months. The police chief, 76, had testified the previous day that the death was the result of an accident and involved no crime, that it had merely been the result of political speculation, that their investigators had shown no responsibility by either the playboy or the jazz pianist. One of the nine defendants testified that the young woman had known a number of members of a drug peddling ring for which he sold narcotics, but that the deceased had consistently refused to join in the activities herself, that they had sought to get her to leave her family and join them, but she had refused and called them murderers. He was accused of perjury and fraud. And on and on it goes, for the paparazzi to consume and regurgitate to satiety until the next such sensational story comes along next week.
On the editorial page, "Exempt Mecklenburg from Listing Law" indicates that if North Carolina counties had their way, state law would require every owner of a car to make a personal visit to the tax lister before applying for license plates, with the commendable aim of forcing owners to declare their vehicles for the purpose of taxation while relieving counties of the expense and effort in locating tax dodgers.
It finds that it might be fine for smaller counties such as Beaufort, wherein the queues were not very long in the smaller towns. But it was more distressing in Mecklenburg, where some 112,000 license plates were annually issued. Residents did not have time to stand in two lines with 100,000 other residents of the county to prove that they were not tax cheats and to be accorded the privilege of purchasing a tag for their automobile. The plan also, it finds, went against the grain of Mecklenburg's progressive and necessary efforts to streamline tax listing to the realities of a metropolitan area, and suggests that the state should allow the counties which wanted the system to have it, but urges leaving Mecklenburg out.
"Personal Manias & Community Peril" finds that two stories, one regarding a missing stop sign and the other about a dog poisoner, had appeared side by side in the previous day's newspaper, with juxtaposition of the stories serving more than the mechanical requirements of putting a page together. It had served as a moral for three people in particular, and as a sad commentary on the stealthy satisfaction of personal manias at the community's peril.
One of the three persons had removed a stop sign from an intersection, causing a wreck in which one man had been killed.
The second of the three persons had repeatedly removed a stop sign erected to safeguard children at a school crossing, and while no one had been killed or injured as a result, the implications of the incident had nevertheless a chilling potential.
The third person was placing poisoned balogna in a neighborhood, with his apparent mission in life being the anonymous destruction of dogs, cats and perhaps birds. It finds that children shared the general hunger and trustfulness of small animals, and the poisoner could become therefore a murderer. A Charlotte veterinarian had pointed out the previous day that a South Carolina child had been poisoned in the same manner the previous year.
It finds that stop sign removers and dog poisoners had no place in a safe and civilized community, and needed isolation, which, if they did not provide it for themselves, the community would have to provide for them in the places assigned for the purpose.
"There Are No Bulwarks for the Herd" indicates that it had been discovered that a 1789 law, intended only as a "housekeeping statute", had been used by executive agencies to withhold non-security information from the press and the public. The battle for freedom of information had its champions, for instance, Representative Ben Jansen of Iowa, who had announced that he would ask fellow members of the Appropriations Committee to end their practice of holding meetings in executive session, except where matters of national security were involved. He had suggested that it might save the taxpayers some money, that if hearings were held in public, some agencies might be reticent about seeking appropriations.
It finds that it brought a lofty moral principle to an understandable level to everyone who would file their taxes on April 15. Most of the important work in Congress was done in committees and it was no longer possible for the ordinary citizen to get a good feel for the legislative process by attending meetings of the whole House or Senate, as what occurred now on the floor was usually no more than formal and final confirmation of what had been done behind closed doors in committees.
During the 83rd Congress, 38 percent of all committee meetings had been closed, according to the Congressional Quarterly. The House Armed Services Committee, where confidential military subjects were often discussed, had not held as many closed-door meetings as many other committees, having held 38 percent of its meetings in secret during the 83rd Congress, while the Education and Labor Committee had held closed sessions 92 percent of the time, Ways & Means, 70 percent of the time, the Judiciary Committee, 62 percent, Government Operations, 54 percent, Veterans Affairs, 45 percent, the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, 43 percent of the time, the Banking and Currency Committee, 42 percent, and the Agriculture Committee, 38 percent of the time. The Senate's record, with a few notable exceptions, was not any better.
It finds that the example of Congress had an unfortunate effect on state legislatures, with North Carolina's General Assembly having strengthened its committee secrecy mechanisms in 1953 and again in 1955.
President Woodrow Wilson had once written of secret committee processes, saying: "Legislation, as we nowadays know it, is not conducted in the open. It is not threshed out in open debate upon the floor of our assemblies. It is, on the contrary, framed, digested and concluded in committee rooms. It is in the committee rooms that legislation desired by the interests is framed and brought forth. There is not enough debate on it in the open house in most cases to disclose the real meaning of the proposals. Clauses lie quietly unexplained and unchallenged in our statutes which contain the whole gist and purpose of the act; qualifying phrases which do not attract attention, classification so technical as not to be generally understood, and which everyone most intimately concerned is careful not to explain or expound, contain the whole purpose of the law. Only after it has been enacted and has come to adjudication in the courts is its scheme as a whole divulged. The beneficiaries are then safe behind their bulwarks."
It concludes that the common people had no bulwarks.
A piece from the Montgomery Advertiser, titled "A Fowl Fact of Life", tells of the Bulletin of the National Geographic Society having taken note of a plaint already widely voiced in the South, that good farming, rather than good marksmanship, was the big foe of the quail. Bobwhites thrived in briar patches, weedy fields, fence rows, and grassy stretches along the edges of forests, being a ground dweller which did not like to fly and did not visit distant feeding grounds as did the dove.
Putting more land in pasture, farming larger blocks of land with modern machinery rather than small scattered food patches, turning poor soil to timber and possibly the growing use of insecticides, were listed among the factors working against quail.
There were sportsmen who maintained that one reason for smaller quail bags was that the birds were better educated, not waiting in obliging fashion until sportsmen came up and were ready to fire before taking to wing, as they had once done. Quail now were increasingly runners over the ridge or into the swamp without rising from the ground. They ran before the hunter arrived so that the hunter who blasted them on the ground had no chance. Formerly, the increased running propensities had been attributed to Mexican quail imported for restocking, but now, it was said that native quail were learning the facts of life and self-preservation.
Drew Pearson says that no one was confirming it officially, but close friends of Adlai Stevenson were indicating that he and his old friend, Mrs. Mary Lasker, would be married sometime in the spring. Mrs. Lasker was the widow of the late Albert Lasker, a member of the brain trust of President Harding and one of the campaign managers who had helped him defeat Governor James Cox of Ohio in 1920. She had been a vigorous booster of Mr. Stevenson and had known him for many years. Her efforts on behalf of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation were considered partly responsible for the large increases voted by Congress recently to experimentation in finding cures for cancer, heart disease and other diseases. Though she had been identified with a staunch Republican family, and through her late husband had served as chairman of the shipping board under President Harding, Albert Lasker had bolted to the Democratic Party some years before his death.
The criticism against the President's record peacetime budget, begun by Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, had not yet simmered down, having been built up for some time and penetrating deeply. Secretary Humphrey had indicated to Republican leaders in Congress that he might retire from the Cabinet because of it. Mr. Pearson posits that such a reaction appeared unlikely on the surface, as the President and Mr. Humphrey had been very close. Talking to a friend, however, Mr. Humphrey had used language reminiscent of what he and other business leaders had once said of FDR's New Deal: "Those people across the street [at the White House] never had to meet a payroll. They've got to cut out all this welfare nonsense."
Stewart Alsop indicates that the President's request for standby authority to use force in the Middle East in the event of Communist aggression had been described as a policy of "speaking softly and carrying a big stick," and he finds, therefore, that it was worth asking how big the stick was. He suggests that presumably, the President had in mind the limited application of force rather than thermonuclear war utilizing the Strategic Air Force. The lesson of the Korean War had been that an army was necessary to win a war, with President Truman having hoped initially to use the Air Force and the Navy before becoming disillusioned. Even the Marines could not do the job alone, despite having made a vital contribution to the war in Korea.
Because of the budget-dictated "new look" of the military, Army manpower had been reduced since 1952 by a third, to about a million men. The Administration claimed to have maintained the 19 divisions it had inherited, but if in fact the same combat power had been maintained with a third less men under a sharply reduced budget, it would have been a remarkable achievement. Instead, it appeared to be the result of a kind of shell game. At least five of the 19 divisions were not real combat divisions but rather essentially training divisions, under strength and not ready for combat. Two more were the so-called "static divisions", created by picking up various bits and pieces from Panama to Alaska and calling them divisions. That was the way the 19 divisions had been maintained ostensibly, despite reduced manpower and a reduced budget. In fact, there were only 12 full strength divisions ready for combat.
Additionally, about three weeks earlier, a "reorganization of the Army for atomic warfare" had been announced, cutting manpower of the Army divisions by some 60,000 men, a reorganization which was overdue as the World War II-style divisions had not been equipped for the mobility and dispersion imposed by atomic warfare. Even so, the ground strength was measured in divisions and he finds it patently silly to suppose that there could be an increase in combat power by reducing manpower in combat units. Had it been so, the 60,000 men from the reduced manpower of the divisions could have been reorganized into new divisions, not to be done because it would cost too much.
It had also been announced that the 137-wing Air Force program was to be abandoned, with the bulk of the reduction to come from the Tactical Air Command which directly supported the Army and had been a central component of the ability to fight limited wars, as in Korea.
The 12 actual divisions which were to lose both air support and combat manpower could not all be used in the Middle East. Five divisions were committed to NATO and another three to the Far East, which could not be substantially reduced without compromising European and Asian defenses. Of the remaining four divisions, at least one or two had to be maintained in reserve for defense of the country.
In addition, the Administration's official estimate was that the Red Army consisted of 175 divisions, the bulk of which were being reorganized and equipped with nuclear weapons, presenting, in sum, a stark contrast with the U.S. situation.
He concludes that the U.S. Army was spread very thin, from the DEW Line to Formosa, and in view of global commitments, it was admittedly difficult to maintain real ground strength.
Walter Lippmann finds that the President began his second term with good prospects at home but with much to worry about abroad. The country was prosperous and its internal problems were not critical. There was not the deep and bitter division which had existed at the beginning of his first term. He ventures that history might record that the most notable achievement of the President in his first term had been to bring about internal peace within the country and to begin an era of internal good will. The President had the confidence of the great majority of the nation and, while he had opponents and critics, he had no formidable enemies.
There were great differences between the President of the present time and the way he had begun his first term, having begun, for example, with a theory which was presumably acquired during his time at West Point, that Congress determined policy and made the laws, while the President, deferring to Congress, executed the policy and enforced the laws. The practice of that theory had very nearly brought him to disaster during his first two years in office because of passivity in the face of usurpation of power by Congressional committees. Now, the President had become a proponent of the idea that the office was the central and originating branch of the Government.
He finds it safe to predict that during his second term foreign affairs would be decisive. The basic problems of the budget were inflation and how to finance the welfare measures of what had once been called the New Deal and was now called the "new Republicanism". Those problems stemmed from the cost of the military establishment, from the overriding fact that the country was involved in an arms race and that the cold war had been resumed on a wider scale and with renewed intensity. It was not what the President had hoped for when he had begun his first term, having hoped that with the move to end the Korean War in 1953, he could arrive at a global truce with the Soviets, enabling him to disengage many of the armed forces from their far-flung commitments all over the world. Only on that basis could he have believed, as he had during the 1952 campaign, that he could reduce drastically Federal expenditures, could reduce taxes and reduce the size of the Federal Government.
As he began his second term, he found that he was extending rather than reducing commitments abroad on the three fronts of the cold war, in the Far East, the Middle East and in Central Europe, in none of which was there prospect of negotiation which might open the way to a truce. There was an atmosphere of irreconcilability in Washington and in the world which hung heavily upon the future as the new term began.
A letter from Carl Sandburg, in Flat Rock, N.C., indicates that he had enjoyed the January 8 editorial, "To Carl Sandburg on His 79th Birthday". He says that in 1941 and 1955, he had given the commencement addresses at UNC, indicating "our purebred bucks and does are scattered over the state for improvement of goat herds". He says that his books were in nearly all colleges and high schools, that he had deep roots in the state and when they made him an award as a citizen of the world, he would take it and salute them.
A letter writer suggests that man's folly and greed had produced the Western desert and asks whether man should be rewarded with more handouts, that the real need of the small family-size farmer should be aided but excluding further aid to the large industrial organizations which had become fat on tax money. He advocates ceasing further handouts and high price supports, which he finds to be the direct cause of the conditions of which farmers now complained. He suggests that there should be more people in Washington like Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia to curb waste on the part of the Government.
A letter writer says that the greatest curse in the world was liquor, but that it was licensed by the state, that the revenue raised did not pay for the deaths, suffering and crime it caused. He believes that every person who made, sold or voted for it would have to answer when standing before God at Judgment Day. He also wants to see Charlotte returned to the old aldermanic form of city government with a mayor and 12 aldermen, one for each ward or section of the city, to see that streets and lots were kept clean, as some were a mess. He wonders why there were not more people with respect and regard for God and the Sabbath running in local elections, finding that in the modern age people had lost all respect for God and for the things their fathers and mothers had taught them, that the first step of the "modernistic Communistic, one-worlders" in destroying Christianity was to destroy the Sabbath.
A letter writer from Los Angeles indicates that fines did not appear to be the answer to traffic violations, that better results could be obtained by impounding the car.
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