The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 3, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the new 85th Congress had convened this date in tension over which party would control the Senate and faced with a momentous issue in foreign affairs. Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio, elected as a Democrat, had remained mum on whether he would vote to let the Republicans organize the body, something which he had intimated he might do. Minority Leader William Knowland of California said that the Republicans were ready to take control if Senator Lausche would provide his support. The new Congress had to determine whether to provide the President advance approval to use, if necessary, U.S. troops to meet Communist aggression in the Middle East. In a separate caucus from the Democrats, the Republicans had re-elected Senator Knowland as their floor leader and had elevated Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts to be chairman of the Republican conference, succeeding Senator Eugene Millikin of Colorado, who had not run for re-election. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois had been elected party whip to succeed Senator Saltonstall. The Democrats had re-elected Senator Lyndon Johnson as their floor leader and picked Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana as the party whip, succeeding Senator Earle Clements of Kentucky, who had lost his bid for re-election.
In Miami, a Federal District Court judge this date ruled that Florida statutes and Miami City ordinances requiring segregated seating on municipal buses were unconstitutional, with the court having refused to dismiss the petition by NAACP branches in Florida requesting an end to the segregated seating. The judge had also refused to convene a three-judge panel to hear the arguments, saying that there was no substantial question of constitutional law in view of the recent Supreme Court decision banning segregated seating on municipal buses in Montgomery, Alabama. The NAACP had filed a suit in Miami on October 12, naming the Miami Transit Co., the City and individual City commissioners as defendants. The judge dismissed the transit company as a defendant, ruling that it was a private enterprise and not an arm of the state, providing the City ten days to file its answer to the complaint. The attorney for the NAACP said that the ruling was more far-reaching than merely municipal buses, that it also extended to trains, suburban and interurban buses as well. Miami buses had signs asking black passengers to seat themselves from the rear. Dr. A. Joseph Reddick, pastor of Miami's St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had instituted the suit as president of the Florida NAACP, said that Miami blacks had not been involved in a boycott and had not used any violence in their campaign against segregated seating, that their primary concern had been to remove the segregation statutes from the books. The bus company had contended since the case had been filed that in requiring segregated seating, it had merely followed the laws of Florida and ordinances of Miami, and that it would continue to do so until those laws were changed.
At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, the last passengers to leave Munich under America's historic airlift of Hungarian refugees, dubbed "Operation Safe Haven", had landed this date, with 45 having arrived in the early morning aboard a C-118 Liftmaster. In all, 9,700 refugees had been airlifted. One more Military Air Transport craft, carrying 35 passengers who were hospital evacuees, including nine stretcher cases, five of whom were expectant mothers, was set still to arrive, having been snowed in at Newfoundland, due late this date. The President had indicated that there might be more Hungarian refugees flown in later as well. The first plane of refugees had arrived on December 11.
In Hong Kong, it was reported that Communist Chinese Premier Chou En-lai had returned to Peiping this date after a tour of five South Asian countries, with Chou planning to leave soon for Warsaw and Moscow, after completing his Asian tour in mid-January.
Near Reading, Pa., a woman and five children had burned to death this date in a fire which had destroyed their one-story tarpaper-covered dwelling in Temple, five miles north of Reading. Firemen indicated that apparently the fire had been caused by a leaking coal oil stove in the living room of the house.
In Raleigh, a 25-year old mother, in prison for slaying her husband, was awaiting the birth of her third child the following month before standing trial on another murder charge, arising on the same date, the previous July 9. Woman's Prison officials had reported this date that the woman, from Hickory, who had been accused of shooting her husband and her 17-year old stepsister because of a suspected love triangle, had been a model prisoner, having entered prison the previous August after being sentenced in Catawba County Superior Court to between 15 and 20 years for the murder of her husband. The Superior Court judge, future Governor Dan K. Moore, had ordered that her trial on the charge of murdering her stepsister be delayed until after she gave birth to the child. She had told police officers that she had shot her husband with a shotgun at their home in Hickory, then drove 30 miles to the home of her stepsister in Lincoln County, called her outside, then mortally wounded her. The baby was due sometime in February. Good luck…
In Charlotte, Federal agents had arrested four persons alleged to be involved in a check forgery ring operating in two neighborhoods of Charlotte. The arrests had involved three Federal agencies, the Secret Service, Post Office inspectors and the U.S. Marshal's office. The head of the local office of the Secret Service said that the case had been under investigation since the prior spring, turning up over $1,200 in Government checks which had been stolen, forged and cashed by the ring. All four of the men had been charged with forging and uttering Government checks. Postal inspectors said that some of the four might also face charges of theft from the mails. One of the four men had recently completed a prison term on the same charge, having been sentenced to 2 1/2 years in Federal prison in connection with a conviction as part of a nine-member check forgery ring. After being informed that a warrant had issued for him, he had turned himself in to the Secret Service.
The coldest winter weather in over a year had hit the Carolinas this date, dropping temperatures in Charlotte to 17 degrees, the lowest reading since the 16 degrees recorded on December 17, 1955. The low in Wilmington was 20 and in Asheville, 13, with South Carolina having been almost as cold. The Weather Bureau predicted fair skies this date, indicating that clouds the following day ought bring warmer air and a low of 26. The high this date was 42 and the high the following date was forecast as 50. On Mount Mitchell, the highest point in the state, the temperature had reached zero this date, having been -1 the previous day, with a high of seven.
Twice as many color comics would appear in The News in Saturday's edition. If that is the only reason you subscribe to the newspaper, cancel your subscription and go to the comic book store.
On the editorial page, "Come to the Rescue of Our Schools" tells of a five million dollar bond issue on the ballot the coming Saturday to determine the future of the community's schools, and urges that it was the obligation of every citizen to support that proposition plus another on the ballot, the assumption by Mecklenburg County of an old City-County bond obligation amounting to $280,000. It indicates that the future of the education of the children of the county was at stake and that the alternative would be decay, which was already present, as the community was losing ground in the race to construct enough classrooms to educate the children properly.
Enrollment was climbing rapidly and many of the schools were seriously overcrowded, in some areas requiring that basements and storage rooms be used as classrooms. In others, a single room might contain 45 or more pupils, many more than considered satisfactory for proper results. Eight schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg were compelled to use double sessions, half of the students attending during the morning four hours, from 8:00 to noon, and the other half in the afternoon, until 4:00, resulting in students obtaining only four hours per day of instruction rather than the usual six. (But the elimination of lunch period and playground in the primary grades, including the time necessary to transport the children orderly onto and off of the field or to and from the gymnasium, would knock off one of those two hours and so they were actually losing only one hour per day, probably fluff time anyway, watching a film strip or some educational film or engaging in painting pictures or other creative endeavor to guard against restlessness, plus fifteen minutes for ice cream break, maybe another half hour once per week for show 'n' tell, part of the six hours being institutionalized baby-sitting, after all, when we are honest, albeit part of the post-kindergarten socialization process which schools also must serve, especially for pupils who, for want of time spent with them at home by parents or siblings or are otherwise deficient in attention, do not acquire the same level of social integration, or at least not with their peer group, as might others in the school.) Still other schools might have to adopt the double sessions the following September.
It indicates that some form of educational rationing, such as half-day sessions, might serve as an emergency expedient, but the only long-range answer was the construction of new classrooms, which took money, the experts indicating that 15 million dollars was needed to bring schools completely up to standard, thus the five million dollar bond on the ballot being but a down payment. By authorizing the assumption of the $280,000 in bonded indebtedness, the County could raise its school bond debt limit to 8 percent of the assessed property valuation, making it possible for the County to issue about 20 million dollars more in school bonds, if approved later by the voters. That would provide some breathing room for the future.
"Ike's 'Doctrine': A Bone for the Wolf" finds that within the pages of the so-called "Eisenhower Doctrine" was another "bone for the wolf of crisis", one which was not very needy, and suggests that the wolf would not long be delayed by it.
In addition to a more explicit warning against Soviet aggression in the Middle East, the doctrine offered a lesson in the shortcomings of U.S. diplomacy, as the Russians were aware by this point that overt territorial grabs had to be considered in the light of the thermonuclear age, with subversion and international puppetry being their preferred tools as a result. The Soviets had used those tools to obtain entrance to the Middle East, and Secretary of State Dulles had advanced no answers to that penetration.
While there was no problem with reaffirming a warning against further such conduct, the warning could not be mistaken for a remedy, which the public build-up of the new doctrine had made it out to be. But in substance, the plan was nothing more startling than a statement that the U.S. was proceeding as previously, ready to fight if the Soviet Union attacked and ready to spend money where such aid appeared likely to thwart the spread of Communism. As such, it finds the plan worthy of Congressional approval, but the new resolve needed to extend to the State Department search for answers to the riddle of Middle Eastern politics, as more dollars did not make Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser a friend of the West, as did not the diplomacy of Secretary Dulles. Even the events in Hungary had failed to curtail noticeably the willingness of some Arab nations to be courted by the Soviet Union at the risk of internal subversion. There were reports that Syria, for instance, had agreed to place some of the Russian-armed military units under the command of Russian technicians.
It concludes that U.S. preparedness to resist such aggression and its willingness to support shaky economies overseas were necessary tools of diplomacy, but that after those were provided, the diplomats would have to use them skillfully and wisely.
"With Pluck and Luck, a Champion" finds that Charlotte, in sports, had been a "Wait-'Til-Next-Year" town in recent times. As a result, both scholastic and professional athletic circles had been living a life of fabulous frustration.
The professional baseball farm club, the Hornets, had won more than 60 percent of their games after midseason the previous year but still had been unable to catch the Jacksonville Braves in the Sally League. It remarks that they could have used Whitney Bimstein, known in boxing circles as a good cut man.
But now, the Charlotte Clippers hockey team might be able to win a championship, being nip and tuck with Philadelphia at the top of the Eastern Hockey League. It suggests that they deserved special attention and support from residents, as they were a superb team in the best "do-or-die tradition", and commends it enthusiastically as an excellent object of residents' partisan affections, as they could be the city's champions.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Death of Dialect", indicates that a person's inflection, intonation and pronunciation informed the listener of the section of the country from which the person originated, at least that having once been the rule.
The late William T. Polk, author of Southern Accent, had been fond of suggesting as a criterion for testing of accents the sentence: "Mrs. Alexander Cooper's daughter Mary was at school Tuesday." If the reader of it said something like: "Miz Ellexandah Coopuh's daughter Mayry was at school Tewsday," then the listener could assume the speaker resided somewhere in the South. (But "daughter" would have to be "dawta".) If the speaker said: "Misses Alexanderr Cooper's daughter Marry was at school Toosday," the listener knew that the person was a Yankee.
But now, television and radio, "by dint of scrambling incongruous sighs and sounds together," had made it increasingly difficult to determine the origin of a speaker. News broadcasters employed something so nebulous that the listener assumed the speaker had spent equal time "in the canebrake, on the snow sled, on the back of old Paint." You were likely to hear something like: "This noon, Miz Perkins lay-aid plyans for hur Noo Yeurs bawl!"
But it was not to be unexpected to have trouble telling where one was when the announcers with the polyglot inflections had to say so many times that a mixture behind the filter "tastes good like a cigarette should" and when the announcers so gleefully admonished the viewer "to live modern".
"People whose accents come from anywhere are now engaged in selling everywhere. That may make the language more uniform, it will not make it richer."
Drew Pearson indicates that as Congress convened this date, the Democrats had found themselves in tenuous control under the leadership of Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom were any longer leaders among the people who elected them back in Texas, where their popularity had reached an all-time low. For the first time in his life, Mr. Rayburn had been booed by his own Texas followers at the Democratic state convention the previous fall for being loyal to Senator Johnson whom he had helped to train. The Senator would have trouble remaining in the Senate were he currently up for re-election, as he would be in 1960. Yet, he would now ride herd on other Senators, trying to dictate legislation for them and for all of the people. Mr. Pearson finds it ironic that the man who had helped to lose Texas for the Democrats in the previous election now wanted to run the party in Washington when he could not be elected dogcatcher by loyalist Democrats in Texas.
He indicates that no one in the Senate was shrewder than Senator Johnson, no one more powerful in putting across a program and no one who knew better the political ropes and had more legislative know-how. He had accomplished some great things when he put his country and party first, but when putting himself ahead of the party and the country, he came into difficulty, having done both in his time. He suggests that the Senator's troubles in Texas were almost entirely of his own making, having placed a personal grudge ahead of his party.
When Texas Democrats had voted the previous May at the state convention in Dallas to select delegates to the national convention in August, they had given "Republicrat" Governor Allan Shivers the trouncing of his life, with his forces having been routed, while the Johnson-Rayburn-Loyalist forces had won. At that point, Senator Johnson could have organized a new Loyalist leadership of the party, but did not, instead appeasing Governor Shivers. There were many evenings when the Governor, despite publicly opposing Senator Johnson by day, had driven to the Johnson ranch outside Austin and spent a quiet evening dividing up political spoils of the state. Thus, immediately after the loyalists had defeated the Shivercrats the previous May, Senator Johnson had turned his back on the Loyalists and rescued the Shivercrats, keeping in power the state Democratic executive committee stacked with supporters of the Governor. The Senator and Mr. Rayburn were booed at the state convention, but got their way. That victory had, however, led to later defeats for the Senator, helping to lose the state to the Republicans in November.
As with many Pearson columns appearing daily in The News, this one was truncated to make room on the page for other matter, losing in the process, in this instance, the nuances of the personal vendetta of Senator Johnson, of which Mr. Pearson wrote. The full version is here.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the proposed resolution which the President would submit to Congress was only a first installment in a reappraisal of the policy in the Middle East. Secretary of State Dulles was not proposing to announce a new "doctrine" but rather to restate, reaffirm and emphasize the Truman Doctrine as applied in the Middle East. Since 1947, it had been the fundamental U.S. policy to oppose with force, if necessary, any military aggression by the Soviet Union, with Secretary Dulles having frequently reaffirmed that policy in strong language, notably in his statement of March 20, 1954, when he had declared that there ought be "a capability for massive retaliation without delay" against the capability of the Soviets "to strike by land at any one of approximately 20 states of Europe, the Middle East and Asia."
The need for reaffirmation of the policy had been the result of the tone of the fall political campaign and the position taken by the Government in the Middle East and in the Hungarian crisis which had erupted in the closing weeks of the campaign, leaving an impression abroad that the President was a pacifist and that on many issues regarding the Middle East, vital to Europe, he was a neutralist. While that impression was false and those who held it would find it hard to support it with fact, there was no doubt that the impression existed in every foreign office of the world. It had been fed by the Republican campaign speeches regarding the President as the guardian of peace, gaining its greatest impetus from the way the Administration during the fall crisis had followed along behind the majority of the U.N. General Assembly, that when the latter was willing to be strong, as against Britain, France and Israel when they had invaded the Suez and Sinai Peninsula, the U.S. had acquiesced, giving the impression that the President would do nothing to oppose the Soviets or to stabilize peace unless the U.N. authorized it. Because the Soviet Union had a veto on the Security Council and because the Afro-Asian bloc had an effective veto in the General Assembly through its collective vote, the U.S. appeared to be saying that its interest in the Middle East was not to be taken very seriously.
One object of the new resolution was to correct and repair those impressions, making it known that the President had not repealed the Truman Doctrine and that the country had not consigned to the majority of the General Assembly its role in the Middle East.
Mr. Lippmann suggests that the impression created during the fall had been so mischievous and dangerous that a Congressional declaration might be required to correct it, and that if the President requested it, it could not be refused without compounding the confusion. But such a declaration would not constitute a new Middle Eastern policy or replace that which had collapsed in ruins. A warning to the Soviet Union not to intervene overtly might conceivably be required, and probably could do no harm. But such a warning did not reach the real problem of Soviet penetration, as it had occurred in Syria and more particularly in Egypt.
If Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted to establish a working alliance with the Soviets, there would be no way to resolve that situation without his overthrow. Were it not for the need to correct the impression of weakness, a new declaration at present would appear to be a bold and definite statement about what was least likely to occur, open Soviet aggression, while being vague and indefinite about what was actually happening, Soviet penetration through economic and military aid. He finds there to be not much doubt that a resolution containing a commitment against overt aggression would pass Congress, with any serious debate being over the way in which military force would be authorized to deal with Soviet penetration, and on that crucial point, it was not yet known what the Administration had in mind.
Robert C. Ruark, in Nairobi, Kenya,
tells of the changes since the end of the Mau Mau uprising four years
earlier, finding that Kenya had returned to its "old smiling
self again." People had once laughed when they packed their
guns, but the laughter had a brassy sound, whereas now it was an easy
laugh and a man wearing a handgun in his belt would be the object of
snickers—as ought be the case today anywhere in the U.S., not just snickers but rueful and open mockery for Wild West
He indicates that it was his fourth trip to Kenya since the beginning of the uprising and his fifth in seven years, and there had been a difference in the people, both black and white, on each visit, with the current visit finding them more or less as they had once been, with good humor between the races, which had been missing for a long time. The official end of what they had called "the Crisis" had arrived recently when the troops had withdrawn to fight in Egypt, if necessary, and had left the remnants of Mau Mau to the cops. There was a heavy suspicion that if settlement of the trouble had stayed with the cops all along, it would not have taken so long to settle, as the cops, in the end, had proved the definitive answer.
The "pseudo" gangs had been Kenyan-born policemen who spoke Kikiyu fluently and who had gone out in black-face and rags, accompanied by turncoat Mau Mau, to move among the gangs, catching the leaders and leading troops to gang concentrations, exhibiting bravery while experiencing a lot of luck. Such men had pinpointed isolated coups and had contained natives who had been unwilling accomplices to the terrorists, especially women who had hidden Mau Mau fugitives, fed them, and housed them out of fear of sudden death.
Sometime around the prior spring, they had suddenly sealed off great communities of frightened Africans and placed them under rigid daytime supervision by armed guards. No woman had gone to fetch water alone, but worked under guard and responded to a rigid roll call each morning noon and night, leaving no opportunity for anyone to get at them. The sympathizers among the "non-Mau Mau" natives had been unable to warn of raids or extend a helping hand to the brigands. The Mau Mau had slain their own people by the thousands against each white person killed, subjecting therefore the fearful to terror.
Living in caves, with their sources of supply and communications cut off, the Mau Mau had begun to see a little light, especially when many of their own members had turned traitor and begun leading them into ambush. Deals had been made and people had started to surrender, cursing the names of the leaders of the uprising, Jomo Kenyatta, Jesse Kariuki, Stanley Mathenge and "Field Marshal Sir Dedan Kimathi", leaders apart from the "General Chinas" and other such fancifully named ragamuffins who had cattle thieves as their troops. They had corralled the field marshal recently, wounding him slightly for delivery to Princess Margaret during her visit in Kenya, having him so bottled up that they could afford to wait to knock him over for the publicity value involved. They gave him a speedy trial and sentenced him to hang for owning a pistol and ammunition, a handy technicality in Kenya. It was possible that the field marshal had engineered several thousand murders, but was hung for packing a pistol.
The nightmare was now over, with only Stanley Mathenge among the leaders still at large. Those who had been caught were in various concentration camps in the north and on islands in the Indian Ocean, charged with nothing, merely being detained. Their "stupid sheep" who had followed them were being released a thousand at a time to return to the reserves or were being resettled in formerly barren areas once ruled by elephants. All was now calm in Kenya, with more Africans and Asians in the Legislative Council.
Everyone loved everyone but Mr. Ruark wonders how long it would last when the rested prisoners would figure out what mistakes they had made and how to remedy them "when the bushbuck horn once more sounds the signal for the Night of the Long Knives."
A letter writer encourages everyone who was a church member and a Christian to make a resolution in the new year never to drink a drop of beer or whiskey, to be kind to everyone, to go to church and be a good Christian and help someone along the way, never to curse or lose one's temper, to do nothing the person would not want their son or daughter to do. "We answer to God for everything, and when we keep all these resolutions, we can lie down at night and rest in peace and have a Happy New Year."
Tenth Day
Framed Edition
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