The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 12, 1957

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that the Soviet Union this date had proposed that the Big Four nations cooperate in economic aid to the Middle East, maintain peace there through negotiations, and otherwise keep hands off that region. Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov had told the Supreme Soviet, Russia's parliament, that the Kremlin Government had transmitted such a six-point proposal in notes handed the previous night to the ambassadors of the U.S., Britain and France. Mr. Shepilov said in effect that the Soviet Union was ready to stop sending arms to the Middle East, provided that the Western powers would do likewise and abandon their military bases there. The foreign minister said that the most urgent Middle East question presently was "the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Egyptian territory." He said that his Government also supported Egypt's "just demand for full compensation of the damage caused" by the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt the prior late October and early November. He also said that the Soviet Government supported the Egyptian demand that Egypt alone control and operate the Suez Canal, that "law and justice are wholly on Egypt's side." The six-point proposal appeared to be the Soviet response to the President's doctrine to stabilize the Middle East, seeking from Congress authority to send, if necessary, American military forces, including ground troops, into the region to prevent foreign aggression there and to spend up to 200 million dollars in economic and military aid for the region during the ensuing year.

In New York, the stock market had gotten off to a lower start, and then had gone into a rally in early trading this date after the previous day's sharp break, with gains running to around two dollars per share and trading so heavy that the ticker tape had fallen behind in reporting on two occasions, by a minute when the market was losing ground and by three minutes when the rally was underway. Brokers said that the market was in a crucial stage, that they were pessimistic about the previous day's nosedive in which the market had fallen below levels in the averages which had stood up under half a dozen previous tests, and that a substantial comeback was called for soon. The decline was generally described as purely technical, with brokers stating that the market was seeking a new low level which could prove attractive to buyers. But in the background were a number of developments which indicated a tightening of the economy, with the declining market having been given fresh impetus a week earlier when former President Herbert Hoover had said that current inflation showed signs foreshadowing another depression. Some brokers had been advising investors to proceed with caution and had suggested that a mild business recession could occur later during 1957.

In Boston, a 92-year old first print of a picture by a Waltham, Mass., photographer, had become a new addition to Boston University's collection of Lincolniana, the print showing a worried and war-worn President Lincoln one month before his April 14, 1865 assassination, thus but about 25 days before the cornered surrender at Appomattox, posing for a picture on the White House lawn one morning to please his young son "Tad". The picture was being displayed for the first time by the University's library in observance of the anniversary of the President's birth, on February 12, 1809. Another addition to the collection was a photograph of Boston Corbett, autographed shortly after he had shot John Wilkes Booth in a fiery barn in Port Royal, Va., on April 26, 1865, the same day of the final surrender at Bennett Place some 225 miles to the south near Durham. A third addition to the collection was an album with autographs of Mr. Lincoln, which some of his associates had sold to help raise money at an Iowa fair in 1864 for sick and wounded soldiers. The dean emeritus of the Boston University Law School had explained that his father had obtained the autographs of Mr. Lincoln, John Hay and others for the album, one of the various items collected for sale at the fair in 1864, having raised $18,451 for Civil War veterans, that when the album had come up for auction, his father had entered the successful bid and it had remained in his possession until he died in 1915. His father, rejected for war service because of a heart condition, had obtained an assignment with the War Department, and the photographer of the White House picture, eager for a chance to get a picture of the President, had approached the father, a native of Massachusetts, for help and advice. At the time, young Tad Lincoln had gone out every morning to ride his pony and one day the father of the law school dean had suggested to the boy that the photographer would take his picture with the pony, for which Tad had posed. The photographer then told Tad that he would make him a present of the picture he had just taken if he would ask his father to pose also. The President, apparently listening with sympathy to the plea of the boy, had soon emerged, gaunt in his traditional black suit, carrying a chair and appearing quite dour in the photograph thus taken. Boston Corbett had personally provided his picture to the same man, who had introduced Mr. Corbett to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and had thus helped Mr. Corbett collect his share of the reward for the apprehension of Booth. The latter photograph had been taken by Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. The law school dean emeritus who had made the gifts to the library had been a member of the law school's first graduating class in 1873 and had become the first mayor of Waltham, and had also been a trial justice in the local district court.

In Kingman, Ariz., an escaped convict had surrendered to sheriff's officers the previous night after a 73-year old spinster had ordered him out of a parsonage to which he had fled during a blazing gun battle, saying that she did not want to see him shot as he probably would have bloodied her favorite chair. Sheriff's officers said that the man had escaped from Fort Leavenworth Federal prison on June 4 after having been sentenced to the facility on an Army conviction out of Japan. The man had been accompanied by a 17-year old girl from Helena, Mont., who had told officers that she had been forced to accompany him on a four-state trip after he had abducted her at gunpoint the prior Thursday. The sheriff said that the man admitted in a signed statement that he had kidnaped the girl, who told police that he had raped her and that he had committed several burglaries en route to Arizona. The girl had slipped out of his car and run to a nearby house when a police officer in Kingman had spotted the car and sought to stop it. The man had then run into a church rectory occupied by the spinster, a sister of the resident minister who had died about a year earlier. She said that she was mad that he was sitting in her favorite chair. Outside, police and sheriff's officers had been shouting for the man to give himself up. The woman said that she had scolded the man for barging into the rectory and ordered him out of her chair. The man had meekly agreed, according to the woman, had then walked to the door of the rectory, had thrown out his pistol and surrendered. She should have been present that night in Port Royal, 92 years earlier.

In Raleigh, appropriations and tax bills to write into law the largest budget in state history were introduced in the State Senate and House this date, providing for State spending totaling 690.5 million dollars during the ensuing two fiscal years and a series of tax revisions recommended by the State Tax Study Commission, reducing State revenues by nearly 9 million dollars per year. The overall State budget for the ensuing biennium, presented to the Legislature by Governor Luther Hodges the previous night, called for 1.163 million dollars in spending, including State appropriations, large sums from the Federal Government, some county funds and receipts of State institutions, compared to approximately 929 million dollars being spent during the current biennium, with State spending estimated at 648.5 million.

A 20 percent across-the-board pay increase for school employees had been proposed this date by Representative Jack Love of Mecklenburg and two other members of the State House, set to be introduced during the current afternoon session. The measure would mean a cost of 25 million dollars greater than recommended by the Advisory Budget Commission the previous night, which had advised against an across-the-board increase. No method of appraising merit was suggested, but the Commission said that merit could not be determined in the central office of the State Board of Education, with the final decisions on raises likely to be made by local school principals. In addition to the Commission's recommended 21 million dollars for teachers, 1.4 million was set aside for raises for other school personnel and 2.4 million allotted for automatic raises under the present experience-education rating scale, with all of the figures adding up to a general 10.3 percent increase. The proposed bill of Mr. Love would set aside those limitations and grant the pay increase across the board as in the past. Mr. Love had told the newspaper this date that he had indications of some support for the bill. The question of teacher pay was expected to be one of the hottest issues before the 1957 Assembly.

Dick Young of The News reports that proposals of the Advisory Budget Commission for a merit system for school teachers had run into violent opposition among local school people this date, with the president of the Charlotte Classroom Teachers Association having stated her bitter opposition to the merit system, pointing out that "apple polishing" very well could return to vogue under such a plan. She had been echoed by City School superintendent Dr. E. H. Garinger, who stated that he was sorry that the Commission had recommended a merit system for teacher pay as it did not work, that New York had tried it but had to give it up. He said that it placed too much responsibility on the principals, who had to decide which teachers would be granted raises and which would not.

In Thomasville, Ga., the President switched from quail shooting to golf this date, hitting a crowd-pleasing 225-yard drive off the first tee, teaming up at the Glen Arvin Country Club course with the club pro, John Walter, matched against White House press secretary James Hagerty and longtime friend of the President, George Allen. He said before the drive that it was very discouraging to walk to the first tee and see a sign saying 440 yards, par four, but after the long drive, the gallery of about 50 people had murmured their admiration. The President had come to Thomasville the previous Friday for a stay of about ten days as the guest of Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. The President was casually dressed, with a gray sweater zippered to his throat, at the collar of which were the figures of two felt elephants—perhaps somehow unwittingly prophetic of the eventual FBI whistleblower to the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal, to ensue in 1972, three years after the death of Mr. Eisenhower.

Near Scranton, Pa., a cat which had a bird's eye view of the world for nine days thought that something was fishy the previous day, leaping 50 feet to safety from near the top of a utility pole, after having been spotted atop the 60-foot pole on February 3. As the cat showed no inclination to move from its perch several feet above a 23,000-volt power line, people had begun to take an interest. The Pennsylvania Power and Light Co. had not intended to do anything about the cat, as seeking its rescue would be dangerous while power was being transmitted through the line, and to cut the power would mean depriving a hospital for the criminally insane and three small towns of electricity. The previous day, the utility received more than a hundred phone calls, some people being indignant and some only curious, while others had suggestions. The power company finally made its move and a six-man crew was provided a long pole with a board nailed on the end to try to effect removal of the cat. The crew insulated feeder lines just below the main power circuit and then placed a basket of fish on the board, with the pole to be raised to the cross-arm where the cat was perched, with the plan being that when the cat stepped onto the plank to obtain the fish, the pole, complete with the cat, could then be lowered. All had gone fine as the plan neared completion, with the cat moving toward the bait, but then passed it, then climbing down the pole for about ten feet before leaping gracefully the remaining 50 feet to the ground.

In San Diego, it was reported that a collie made a daily six-mile roundtrip during the silver rush in Southern California with sealed U.S. mail bags strapped to its back. The precise year of the intrepid daily sojourns is not provided, but probably occurred sometime prior to the Fifties.

On the editorial page, "Hodges Yanks at the Old Inadequacies" indicates that Governor Hodges the previous night had presented the General Assembly with an "egg-sized capsule of change", that it had been useless to sugarcoat the pill and the Governor had not tried to do so, frankly describing his reform-packed legislative program as "one of the many facets and far-reaching conclusions."

It finds that the complexities lay less in the program's substance than in the certain difficulty of getting it passed, that most of the requested reforms were startling only by comparison with impacted inadequacies which they were meant to remove. Legislative reapportionment, for instance, would alter almost imperceptibly the makeup of the General Assembly, but the Assembly had a State Constitutional duty to conduct reapportionment after every decennial census, and had not done so following the 1950 census. Yet, the Governor's request would be opposed "with all the wily rural wrath that has sunk similar recommendations before."

It suggests that the Hodges program deserved the support of the people, going on to detail some of his specific proposals. It finds that he had wisely suggested that the Legislature refrain from further activity in the sensitive field of segregation, that the special session of the prior July and the subsequent referendum-passed Pearsall Plan of the prior September, had been entirely adequate for the present, and deserved to be tested by time and experience, that plan having provided for two State Constitutional amendments allowing public funding for tuition grants to students wishing to attend private schools and enabling individual school districts to vote to abolish their public schools, both of which were aimed at circumventing integration of the public schools.

It concludes that, in sum, the Governor had requested a common sense program of minimum progress for the state, which would upset little other than old and obvious shortcomings and would bring much improvement in prospects for the future of all North Carolinians, deserving of sympathetic and active consideration by the General Assembly of 1957.

"A New Dimension for City Classrooms" quotes Dr. Thomas Pollock of NYU, a pioneer in educational television, that it was clear that television offered the greatest opportunity for the advancement of education since the introduction of printing by movable type.

City school officials in Charlotte were now working to bring television into the classroom and eventually, it suggests, schoolchildren would be able to see chemistry experiments, symphony orchestras and great works of art on television screens from programs originating in the city or at UNC in Chapel Hill.

There were serious problems still standing in the way, with the planners of educational television needing to avoid a passive "learning-by-looking" philosophy, having to rework school organization, find funding and train skillful television teachers.

It suggests that television could bring personality and human reaction very close to those who listened and viewed, that there was an intimacy which rivaled the personal teacher-student relationship presently in the classrooms. Television had already done much to promote "common learnings" among the people and, in addition, promised to effect saving of school costs, enabling fewer teachers than would otherwise be demanded in one or two decades hence.

It indicates that the use of television in Charlotte schools ought not rule out discussion, review and interchange between teachers and pupils but would bring a new dimension to classroom teaching, justifying Dr. Pollock's comparison and offering encouragement to officials charged with giving children the best possible education.

"Cleaner Air Rates a Cautious Hurrah" finds that, as with Carl Sandburg's fog, optimism about air pollution control in Charlotte moved on "little cat feet". There was no such thing as an insurance policy against the return of smoke, smog or smaze, but improvements in the condition of the air, following exhaustive scientific tests, had been significant, indicating that the air pollution control program initiated by Charles Frost was proving itself slowly but surely. Those who had battled valiantly against heavy odds were now being rewarded by the knowledge that measurable results had justified their stand.

But smoke control, like many other things, took a lot of running just to stay in the same place, that as Charlotte grew, potential sources of air pollution would also increase, with the need for an effective program of education and enforcement to be maintained and possibly broadened. It posits that air pollution would never disappear, but understanding its nature and backing up that understanding with programs of cooperative action, would reduce it from a life-shortening menace to something which urban dwellers could take in stride.

It concludes that all in the community could be thankful that Charlotte had worked on the problem before it was too late, and it was now a safe bet that the atmosphere would never be "royal purple" in the city.

A piece from the Des Moines Register, titled "On Writing Essays", indicates that 200 high school principals had responded to a survey conducted by their national association, in which only two had found any merit in many national competitions to determine which student could write the best essay about politics, patriotism, or any other subject. They found that the contests led to dishonesty, with some students submitting as their own an essay, for instance, on honesty written by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Adlai Stevenson—a practice which today and for the last 20 or so years has, thankfully, been largely erased or at least greatly limited by the internet and the ability of instructors to compare suspiciously high-sounding rhetoric, given the otherwise usual poor or erratic scholarship of the individual student under scrutiny, with that available online.

It recounts that a girl a few years earlier had won a national contest in that way and the plagiarism had not been disclosed until she had gone to Washington to receive the award. While most of the dishonesty in the contests was not so overt, essay contestants frequently would appropriate a lot of material without crediting it to its author.

Contests were not likely to promote critical thinking and placed a premium on hypocrisy, also placing an intolerable burden on judges. It finds most of the essays were awful and the remedy was not to have more essay contests, that the quality of the essays might improve if there were more essay writing tests in the classrooms, where students were on their own, with fewer objective tests with right or wrong answers, though easier to correct and easier to read.

Drew Pearson indicates that diplomatic observers, looking over the calling list of Arab visitors in Washington during the previous two weeks, would provide a plus mark for Secretary of State Dulles and his efforts to woo the Middle East. Charles Malik, the Christian Foreign Minister of Lebanon, Abdul Iah, the pro-British crown prince of Iraq, and King Saud, the wavering, one time friend of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, all had been a part of an attempt to box in President Nasser, whom Secretary Dulles had once picked as America's best friend, but who had turned out to be Russia's best friend.

The biggest diplomatic victory had been scored by the 3 1/2 year old son of King Saud, who had received a generous outpouring of gifts and good will, warming the heart of his father more than all of the receptions and state dinner parties given in his honor. The fact that the American people had contributed presents and get-well wishes to the little boy had touched the King's heart and convinced him that the American people had no designs on his country. His staff had purchased two extra trunks to carry the load of copybooks, miniature racing cars, and other knickknacks which the American public had sent to the hospital where the little boy had received treatment.

The King was also delighted with the country, ranging from his talks with the President to Gali-Gali, a magician who spoke in Arabic at the Arabian-American Oil Co. dinner given to the King at the Mayflower Hotel, to the fact that Secretary Dulles had provided him practically all of what he wanted from the U.S.

The real problem, however, for Mr. Dulles would be after King Saud returned home. The King's influential brother, presently acting as lord chamberlain in the King's absence, was intensely anti-Western and pro-Nasser. President Nasser had infiltrated the Saudi Arabian Army with pro-Egyptian officers, thanks to the Egyptian military mission stationed in Saudi Arabia. It was why the Dulles policy of sending more arms to Saudi Arabia was so risky, as chances were that eventually they would fall into the hands of the pro-Nasser clique inside the Saudi Arabian Army, which had the support of the King's brother.

The King had gone home glowing with praise for the U.S., but he was almost blind and read only that which his advisers gave him, was thus naturally subject to all kinds of pressures. In the past, he had advanced oil royalties to help President Nasser purchase arms from Russia, as well as money to President Nasser when the Egyptian budget had been low, recently, while en route to Washington, having stopped in Cairo where he promised money to balance the Jordanian budget.

Joseph Alsop, in Kuibyshev, Russia, finds the city "singularly lacking in outward charm", with its broad sweep of the Volga frozen and snow-covered into semi-invisibility, amid deep snow. The new buildings on the outskirts were stolidly utilitarian and the old buildings at the center displayed an occasional fantasy, but were all marred by cracking plaster and peeling paint. The goods in the shops were mostly shoddy, and theater, opera, and movie houses, as well as the two expensive restaurants were bleak, cheap "dining halls", while the warrens which passed for human living space were uniformly overcrowded to the bursting point. He nevertheless finds the "almost totally graceless city" an absorbing experience, mainly because it was a boom town with vitality and dynamism, as all such boom towns, always exciting.

When the city had still been Samara and young Vladimir Lenin had hung out his lawyer's shingle there, it was an easygoing mercantile center with a population of 130,000, but now was a large industrial city of 760,000, and the boom continued unabated. The first part of the boom was attributed to the Soviet Government's stern enforcement of an unchallengeable first priority, an absolute first call on all resources for the expansion of the country's industrial base. But Mr. Alsop believes he had found two other important parts of the secret of the boom, one being revealed when he had visited a "technicum", where he found the boys and girls looking bright and alert, but in a school which had none of the glossy finish and little of the equipment one would find in a technical high school in a large American city. Only the most brilliant five percent of students were expected to go to college, and the friendly, sensible principal of the school had made no bones about it, saying that the state needed at least three qualified technicians for every graduate engineer and that the chief job of every such school was to train skilled workers, technicians.

The other part of the secret which he had discovered was found in the personality of the tough director of the city's great oilfields, employing 15,000 workers and 1,000 oil geologists and engineers, soon to out-produce Buku. He also found the same type of personality on display in the shrewd head a of the city's branch of the State Bank, who provided the city's industries and trading establishments with nearly capitalistic banking and credit facilities. He found much the same thing in the chairman of the City Soviet, the equivalent of a mayor, who had been promoted from chief power station engineer and talked knowledgeably about his urgent municipal problems of housing, water supply, sewage disposal and the like. He suggests that anyone who talked to those men who made the city tick would agree that they all appeared impressively competent and self-confident, as he finds well they might, having come up the hard way to the highest posts in the city.

He finds that the boom town combination of a growing army of skilled workers and a top echelon of highly qualified managers to be the striking aspects, but wonders whether that combination would not eventually demand some modification of the Soviet order of priorities, which would make the city outwardly pleasant as well as inwardly dynamic.

Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, suggests that the U.S. had become a nation of do-it-yourself diagnosticians and that anyone not doing so was a social outcast, that once Americans had talked of girls and baseball and now there was "less sex than syndrome, less baseball and more peptic ulcer in the cocktail chatter." He says he had known people who had given up cigarettes and alcohol and felt bad all the time because the booze and the nicotine had masked the nagging little ills which were part of the human mechanism as it approached age.

"From what I know of doctors and diagnosis, one man's meat is another man's pension, and the diagnosis is often likely to be based on how the doctor himself is feeling at the time. If the doctor's tongue is coated, the patient is bilious; if the doctor has just quit smoking, the patient is advised to cut out cigars. Diagnosis is an inexact science at best, and at worst can be criminally misused."

He says that there was to be released a vending machine which would offer the layman a kit for testing for diabetes, with the kit costing a quarter in the machines, to be placed in supermarkets, bus stations, railroad and subway stations, airports and the like. The doll industry had introduced a new sick doll which not only wet its pants, squeaked, and blinked its eyes, but also had an internal heating apparatus which gave it a fever, and came with a thermometer and flexible mouth. He suggests that it started children off young as hypochondriacs.

He indicates that judging by his own medicine cabinet and those he had observed in bathrooms of friends, adults his age had more pharmaceuticals on hand than had ever been possessed by an old-time drugstore, when drugstores had sold drugs instead of girdles and lawnmowers. There was a pill for every ill, with a lotion, potion, and powder to go with it. There were sleeping pills, getting-up pills, reducing, fattening, and soothing pills. There was even an anti-sunburn pill and enough colored vitamins to need an inventory. Most travelers carried a full bag of medicines which they took in handfuls and gulps, and pressed on their friends, giving themselves shots of liver and B-1.

He finds that everyone could not be that sick, that a box of aspirin, a bottle of quinine, a bottle of iodine, a bottle of Epsom salts, and a bottle of Bromo Seltzer had once been the stock in bathrooms in his earlier days, when everyone seemed to live longer. He says that he favors surgery, regular physicals and competent medical care, but also knew that a hangnail could assume the proportions of cancer in the wee hours, and what once had been correctly assumed to be late night icebox-poisoning now took on all the symptoms of heart disease.

He finds that the only answer for the "slot machine approach to self-healing" was another machine which would produce cards which would say that the patient was still breathing and so still alive, that it was only a hangover, and "Don't look at it and maybe it'll go away."

A letter writer says that between February 10 and 17, many Americans would participate in the observation of "Negro History Week" to promote a wider understanding of the progress black citizens had made in the society and their contributions to the culture. She says that American members of the Baha'i World Faith, responding to a directive from the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, would join in the observance, as they considered it an opportunity to assist in focusing public attention also on the more inclusive theme of the oneness of mankind. She quotes Franz Boas, the late anthropologist, as having said that the present state of knowledge justified saying that, "while individuals differ, biological differences between races are small. There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much more intelligent, endowed with greater will power, emotionally more stable than another, that the difference would materially influence its culture." She concludes that Baha'is were eager to share with others the confidence that a solution to the world's race problems could be attained during the current century, and that, when achieved, it would "bring together all peoples in understanding and cooperative endeavor, destroying the curse of war and releasing latent human powers for the building of the finest civilization the world has yet known."

A letter writer says that the people had elected to the Legislature, perhaps without realizing it, a man who advocated world government, which "would play hell with our government." He suggests that all of the little countries would out-vote the U.S. and place it into the hands of Communist dictators, that a man like that did not belong in the Legislature. He says that if the man brought it up, the newspapers "should burn him up with ridicule."

He does not indicate the person to whom he was referring, but presumably it was Charlotte attorney J. Spencer Bell, whom the Democratic executive committee had just appointed to the vacant seat in the State Senate left by the resignation of Jack Blythe regarding health issues. But the "people" had not elected him and so it is not entirely clear to whom he is in fact referring. It might be helpful to identify the subject of his short diatribe so that everyone could know that the person promoted Commie ideas.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date — Links-Subj.