The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 13, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, still on vacation in Thomasville, Ga., had conferred with Secretary of State Dulles this date by telephone regarding the Middle East situation, before the President and his host, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, had gone on another round of quail hunting. The President and Secretary Dulles talked for about ten minutes, according to White House press secretary James Hagerty. In response to questions, Mr. Hagerty had said that they again had discussed two matters which they had discussed on the phone the previous day, Russia's proposals regarding the Middle East and the continuing efforts to obtain withdrawal of Israeli troops from Egyptian territory. The White House the previous day had called the Soviet Union's Middle East program an obvious effort "to discredit or stop" the Administration's anti-communist plan for that region. Mr. Hagerty said that he could not provide detail of the latest conference. He said that the President was "feeling swell" following 6 1/2 hours of golf and quail shooting the previous day, with the President and Secretary Humphrey each having shot seven birds during 3 1/2 hours in the fields, after the President had played golf in the morning—whether he had shot any birdies in that session not being imparted.
In Berlin, Marine Captain Paul Uffelman, former assistant U.S. military attaché in Moscow, charged this date that Russian agents had deliberately staged a Leningrad "spy" incident to force his expulsion and that of a lieutenant. Shortly after his arrival with his wife by train from Moscow, he had told a press conference that he believed that his arrest on January 25 had been part of a propaganda spy-scare campaign within the Soviet Union directed against Americans. He said that he guessed that they needed another example to try to show that all Americans were spies. Russia had ordered him out of the country, along with a Navy lieutenant, charging that the two men had photographed "a building of defense significance in Leningrad." Two other U.S. attaches had been expelled in recent weeks, apparently in retaliation for the U.S. ouster of two Soviet attaches in connection with the arrest of three New Yorkers on charges of spying. The U.S. protested the arrest of Captain Uffelman and the lieutenant and their subsequent expulsion, asserting that they were completely innocent of any spying activity. The captain said that during their stroll through Leningrad, the lieutenant had taken some pictures of street scenes for his private pleasure and that no photographs had been taken of any buildings of military significance, and that as far as he knew there were no restrictions imposed by Russians on their movements. He and the lieutenant had been jumped by a group of Russians in civilian clothes, yelling "spy", as they walked through a section in which they had taken no pictures at all. About ten Russians had "pushed, pulled and tugged" at the captain and attempted to take away the lieutenant's camera, and that not until the captain had fallen to the ground had a Russian militiaman intervened, with the two U.S. officers then taken to a militia headquarters. The captain said that he and the lieutenant at first had refused to enter the headquarters, claiming diplomatic immunity, but had complied after a Russian lieutenant colonel had told them that if they did not go in, they would be forced to enter.
The U.S. had invited 27 countries, not including Russia, to send warships to the first international naval review to be held in the country since 1907. Scheduled for June 12, at the same place where dreadnoughts and torpedo boats from seven nations had assembled for a grand review 50 years earlier, Hampton Roads, Va., aircraft carriers and missile cruisers would be among the 50 U.S. Navy ships participating, with a total of 80 being expected. The occasion would be the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown. The Pentagon said that the State Department had extended the invitations on behalf of the Navy, the 350th Anniversary Commission of Virginia and the port communities of Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and Warwick. It was not immediately clear why Russia, with the world's second largest Navy, had not qualified as one of the nations which "participated in the exploration and settlement of the Americas", as the other invited nations. The Navy said that the formation would be visible from Old Point Comfort, Fort Monroe, the Naval Base, Willoughby Spit, Little Creek and beaches along Lynnhaven roads.
In New York, 45,000 East Coast ship cargo loaders had gone on strike this date, shutting down major shipping operations in the big ports, from Portland, Maine, to Hampton Roads. The longshoremen were resuming a strike which had been halted by the President's intervention the prior November to afford time for mediation, the renewal of the strike tying up scores of ships along the Eastern Seaboard. The longshoremen were members of the International Longshoremen's Association, not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, whose contract negotiations with employers had bogged down at the last moment the previous day amid optimism over prospects for settlement.
In Pittsburgh, David McDonald had forged ahead of a challenger in the slow count for the presidency of the United Steelworkers, with his challenger, Donald Rarick, a steelworker who had brought into the the open the fight against increasing union dues by two dollars per month, receiving surprising support. Mr. McDonald was seeking his second successive term as president of the union, citing his administration's record in contract negotiations, his pledge to fight for further gains and assurance that the dues increase was necessary to finance union activities. Initial returns showed that he had 12,167 votes to 9,899 for his challenger.
In Ocracoke, N.C., it was reported that choppy seas had forced more delay this date in the Coast Guard search across Pamlico Sound for the New Jersey nurse who had vanished on Saturday night from a doctor's yacht anchored nearby. Coast Guard and law enforcement officers said that they hoped to resume the search were the sea to calm later in the day. Officers said that they had found several empty whiskey bottles aboard the yacht, from which the nurse had mysteriously disappeared during Saturday night while the doctor was sleeping, according to his account. Winds up to 45 mph had raised high seas the previous day and slowed the search, forcing two Coast Guard whale boats to return to their station at Ocracoke, with a continuing search of the shoreline not yielding anything. The doctor, from Trenton, N.J., had stated the previous day that he might remain several more days while the search continued. He had theorized that the nurse might have been pitched overboard by the waves while she had been alone on the deck during the night. He told authorities that he and the nurse, who had been on a Southern cruise in his yacht, had anchored in the channel on Saturday night, that he had gone to bed while the nurse said she would remain up for awhile, and that by morning when he awakened, she was nowhere to be found. Officers involved in the search were proceeding on the assumption that she was dead, as they had nothing to indicate to the contrary. The respective spouses of the doctor and the nurse had stated in New Jersey that their marriages had been breaking up, with the doctor's wife saying she had left him the previous May because of the nurse, and the nurse's husband having indicated that he had filed for divorce on grounds of desertion. Each couple had two daughters. A sister of the nurse said in Trenton the previous night that her sister had never said too much about her personal affairs but that she understood that she and the doctor had been "getting on each other's nerves". She added that she did not think that her sister had committed suicide. You know what happened, for these are the Days of Our Lives at the Edge of Night.
In Raleigh, there were many champions of schoolteacher pay raises in the General Assembly this date. The Advisory Budget Commission had recommended a pay increase of 9.1 percent for school personnel to be provided on a merit basis, but that system, as further set forth in an editorial below, had been attacked. Mecklenburg Representative Jack Love, and two other Representatives, had introduced a bill the previous day for an across-the-board 20 percent increase, which would add 14 million dollars to the State budget. The previous week, the Legislature had rushed through a 20 percent pay increase for members of the Council of State, with some lawmakers being quick at the time to point out that State employees and school teachers would be expecting the same amount. One Representative said that he favored the 20 percent increase and noted that the cost of living had gone up nearly 20 percent during the previous few years, indicating that a 20 percent pay hike would only put teachers back where they were in 1950. Some in the State Senate expressed interest in increasing the amount of money made available for State pay increases.
Ann Sawyer of The News tells of a local Superior Court judge having delivered a stern lecture on "bringing up" children this date as he passed judgment on a teenager who had pleaded guilty to being the leader of a theft ring. The 17-year old defendant was placed on probation after she entered pleas to charges of embezzlement, conspiracy and false pretenses in connection with thefts from Ivey's Department Store, where she had once been employed as a clerk. She received on the embezzlement charge one to two years in prison, suspended for five years on condition that she abide by probation regulations, be on good behavior and pay court costs. She received a prayer for judgment continued on the other two cases. She did not take the witness stand, sitting calmly with her attorney, her mother and her minister. The judge said that he had some old-fashioned ideas on raising children, following his hearing of testimony by a City detective and an investigator for Ivey's in the case, plus a plea from her defense attorney. He said that the present trend was to explain and excuse the actions of teenagers because they were teenagers, but that he did not subscribe to that line of thinking, believing teenagers to be smarter than adults because they knew how "to work" adults. He said that when he had been growing up, "the razor strap and hickory stick were invoked," that his father would not listen to "smooth explanations" for wrongdoing, and that there was no way of explaining meanness to his father, that unless society returned to letting children understand the voice of authority, they would all be in the penitentiary. He found that if, when he was young, he had the opportunities for doing the wrong thing as much as young people at present, he would have been in the penitentiary. He referred to the stealing of sweaters, skirts and dresses from Ivey's by the defendant and ten others in the ring as "a bunch of stealing".
In Houston, a man said that the fact that the State of Texas had earmarked his house and lot as part of a freeway right-of-way had discouraged potential buyers, with no money presently available for the State to compensate him for the property because highway engineers believed it would not be until 1965 that the right-of-way would be needed, the State having originally planned to acquire it by 1962. The homeowner was not admitting defeat, indicating that he would deed the property to 1,000 individual and charitable organizations throughout the country unless the State could compensate him or find a solution to the dilemma by the following Saturday, with the resulting legal snafu of deeding the property in that manner to cost the State between one and three million dollars, according to the homeowner. He said that a doctor had advised him to move to Colorado for the sake of his health, but that the State's "freeze" on his property had prevented him from alienating it.
In Miami, Fla., it was reported that
during prohibition days, the Coast Guard had chased rum-runners with
fast boats, but that the previous day, a Coast Guard officer had run
a moonshiner ragged with his helicopter when he spied the man fleeing
through a field with a sheriff's posse in hot pursuit. The pilot of
the whirlybird had spotted smoke from a still and wherever the
fleeing moonshiner turned, the pilot had lowered his helicopter into
his path, each time, causing the fugitive to veer off in another
direction. The sheriff's office reported that when its men had
reached the field, the moonshiner was lying on his back, exhausted,
offering no resistance to arrest. That's just like what they've got on the tv
On the editorial page, "Give Teachers Satisfaction & Security" indicates that there were two compelling reasons to demand a pay raise for North Carolina teachers, first that they deserved it, and second, that increased pay was the first requirement for keeping teachers in classrooms, bringing others in and relieving the critical shortage of personnel in the profession.
It finds that in Raleigh, the Legislature thankfully appeared to be more engaged in determining how and not whether to raise teacher salaries, that Governor Luther Hodges and the Advisory Budget Commission had recommended a merit system for distributing raises, while teacher organizations opposed that procedure as unworkable and conducive to politics within individual schools by leaving merit to be determined by principals.
It finds that the burden of proof ought be on the Governor, that merit systems were fine, but that it could be argued that the time to install them was after provision of a decent living wage across the board, which the state had not yet implemented for teachers. The average North Carolina teacher's salary was $2,300 per year, $700 less than the U.S. average and almost as much behind the Florida average. Any increase which the Assembly approved was likely to be inadequate, with the state having a long way to go just to catch up and there being competing demands for the tax dollar. It finds it all the more reason for stretching salary increases to give the state maximum benefit in terms of teacher satisfaction and feelings of security. It urges that the system which best fulfilled those terms was the one to be adopted.
"Park Board: The Women Will Win" indicates that when the previously undiscovered surplus of the Park Board had been discovered the previous summer, the members had correctly surmised that the public uproar would blow over, but now, the demand that a woman be appointed to the Board would not pass so easily. It finds that the women would have their way and that there was no reason why a woman should not be appointed to the Board.
Members ought exhibit a continuing concern with the recreation program and female candidates would likely emerge with requisite credentials from among the exceptionally large group of women civic leaders in the community. Presentation of a list of qualified candidates to the City Council ought ensure selection of a woman or, at least, a better qualified man, with the women in the community being winners either way.
In the words of the president of the Junior Woman's Club, "Perhaps a woman can see things that men will never notice." It concludes that certainly a woman would have seen a quarter million dollar surplus.
"Massive Silliness at $77 a Page" finds the vehemence of Senator Allen Ellender's attack on the concept of U.S. foreign aid the previous week to have been exceeded only by its wild and woolly recklessness. The Senator had just taken a 28-nation global tour, courtesy of the taxpayers, to refresh his memory about "undesirables" abroad, having begun his junket with a point of view and having returned with his truculence undiminished. It suggests that he had found that lands across the sea remained as full of foreigners as ever.
He said that large-scale economic aid had been "an abysmal failure", earlier having referred to it as "blood-sucking".
While it finds that U.S. aid programs had their faults, denouncing the whole idea in that way amounted to massive silliness. It questions whether Senator Ellender had forgotten the Marshall Plan, how the U.S. had rescued numerous countries from the clutches of Communism and permitted weak nations to regain their strength and remain free, how the markets for U.S. goods had been restored on the Western side of the Iron Curtain. It suggests that the West would probably be quaking in fear at present had an enlightened U.S. not assumed its global responsibilities, leaving the Soviet Union in complete charge of the situation.
It also challenges the Senator on his claim that foreign aid was too costly. His overblown attack had taken up 48 pages in the Congressional Record, at a cost of $77 per page, or a total of $3,696.
"Poets Make Poor Politicians, Anyway" indicates that it had been alleged in a neighboring Ivory Tower, presumably a reference to the Charlotte Observer, that the latest utterances of Governor Luther Hodges contained a new "literary quality", that he was utilizing "poetic adjectives" and the like.
It finds that there had been added a literary touch but that it might better be filed under "Funny Coincidence Department". The Governor, concluding his biennial message on Monday, had said: "This is the vision, this the North Carolina dream." Paul Green, in the opening of his outdoor drama, written in 1937, "The Lost Colony", had stated: "This is the vision, this the fadeless dream."
It says it would prefer that the Governor leave literature to the littérateurs, as he invariably fumbled the accents and muddled the meter, being a meat-and-potatoes speaker, best known for straight-from-the-shoulder directness, with a certain eloquence in that simplicity which he had mastered. It finds any suggestion of belles-lettres to be strangely incongruous, better left to Adlai Stevenson and others like him, while concentrating on the "republic of cold-turkey facts".
"Poets make poor politicians, anyway."
A piece from the Washington Post & Times Herald, titled "Quick, Ahab, the Miltown!" finds dread in reading that scientists had pumped tranquilizing drugs into a whale using a specially constructed harpoon to administer the largest recorded dose of serpasil to a 50-foot behemoth, conducted off the Catalina Islands of California, with the purpose of making an electrocardiogram of the whale. It suggests that the whaling industry was also interested in the outcome.
It asks what Herman Melville would have thought about the notion, imagines Moby Dick rewritten with Captain Ahab pursuing the White Whale with a needle packed with Miltown, with a revised climax whereby the whale finally would be lolled "affectionately alongside the Pequod, squirting playfully, and casting moony eyes as Ahab loosed the fatal harpoon. That is, if Ahab himself were not in his cabin, happily gobbling pills like popcorn."
Some thinkers had speculated that the British Empire might still be intact had King George fed the right pills to Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and other dissidents. It thus views with misgivings the reckless use of tranquilizing drugs, finds that while they might be a boon to mental hospitals and, under proper prescription, helpful to minimize a number of nervous ailments, an aroused passion was frequently a necessary spur to change, with blissful tranquility being a mixed blessing, as Mr. Melville had found. "We were secretly delighted when the gray whale foiled the scientists and swam off to sea, hiccuping serpasil but freed nonetheless."
What about Milhous and the Sea of Tranquility of 1969?
Drew Pearson indicates that the President appeared handicapped by a lack of intimate knowledge of important events in the civilian world, that at the previous week's press conference, he had been asked why he would not apply sanctions to Egypt as well as Israel because of the fact that Egypt had also spurned a U.N. resolution forbidding its ban on Israeli ships passing through the Suez Canal. The President had said that he was not aware of any resolution which the U.N. had enacted to do anything about it, not aware that on September 1, 1951, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously adopted a resolution calling on Egypt to cease its ban on Israeli shipping through the canal, a resolution with the same force as the recent U.N. resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and from the small islands in the Gulf of Aqaba. But no sanctions had been applied to force Egypt to obey, and Israel lacked the economic power which President Gamal Abdel Nasser presently held over the West by threatening to close the canal.
Israel, in response to the ban of its ships from Suez, had developed the Gulf of Aqaba, the back door of Israel and the reason why the two disputed islands were so important. The Gulf of Aqaba was a long finger of water reaching down from southern Israel to the Red Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean. By using it, Israel could ship overland, across its own southern desert, the Negev, and reach the Orient without using the Suez Canal. The route could also be of great importance if a pipeline were laid across it. Extending all the way over friendly Israeli territory, it would not be subjected to Arab interference, and a canal rivaling Suez might be built from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba, thereby completely cutting off terrain and being quite expensive.
But President Nasser, after blocking Israeli shipping through Suez, had proceeded to seize the strategic islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, thereby completely cutting off the vital backdoor route to the Indian Ocean for Israel, the reason that Israel had refused to withdraw from those islands without guarantees that they would not fall into hostile Egyptian hands once again.
Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had suggested to Air Force generals that they might be guilty of perjury were they to testify inconsistently with previous testimony regarding limping American air power. Top Air Force brass had testified as to their needs before the Symington subcommittee the previous year, and were now being asked to return to justify the budget cuts made by the President to the Air Force. Senator Symington had notified them that if they changed their testimony, he would send the conflicting records to the Justice Department for perjury prosecution.
Joseph Alsop, in Kostanay, Russia, tells of a young pilot about six years earlier having been flying toward the town, then of about 30,000 people, when his compass suddenly failed about 45 miles away, indicative of a strong magnetic disturbance, leading to the discovery of vast quantities of magnetic iron ore at Sarbi and Sokolovsky, the beginning of one of the most astonishing enterprises Mr. Alsop had ever seen. Since that time, the Government-directed plowing up of the virgin plain had transformed the town into a frontier city of more than 80,000 people. But it appeared to him as nothing compared to the transformation brought by the discovery of the two ore bodies.
He learned the story from one of the three or four top men in Soviet iron mining who was now the director of the Sokolovsky mine. He said that the Soviet Geological Survey had moved swiftly to map the ore bodies, estimated at above a billion tons of magnetic ore with 48 percent of iron content at the Sarbi site, and an almost equal amount found in Sokolovsky. The report had been transmitted to the Ministry of Black Industry, controlling all iron and steel production in the Soviet Union. The Ministry had decided that the discovery should be exploited, ordering a project developed by its experts at the Leningrad Institute of Ore Projects. The project officer at the Institute asked for help from 14 other project planning agencies, ranging from the Leningrad City Planning Institute to the Leningrad Industrial Projects Institute. The result had been a massive combined plan for two enormous open cast iron mines at the two deposit sites, an ore enriching plant using a magnetic separation process situated halfway between the two mines, a small city and a lesser town to house the miners and workers at the enriching plant, two new railroad lines to carry the ore to the outer world, a local narrow-gauge rail system large enough to require 120 electric locomotives, plus power stations, shops, a water reservoir, recreation facilities and other facilities needed for a new mining development almost comparable in scale, cost, difficulty and remoteness to the famous Labrador mining project originally sponsored by Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey.
The man who imparted to Mr. Alsop the story was not much given to humor about his mines, but even he had smiled somewhat ruefully when he recalled how the Ministry had uprooted him from his previous job as boss of all the iron mines in the Urals, confronting him with the project plans in detail and telling him in 1954 that it was his job to develop it. He was quickly afforded a mobile power station, flat cars, and an initial cadre of skilled workers. Now, half of his new city was built and 6,500 people out of a planned labor force of 12,000 were at work, with the ore enrichment plant on its way to being constructed. At Sokolovsky, the Soviet-built excavating machines had already dug a hole in the ground which was 1 1/4 miles long, more than a half-mile wide, and about 50 yards deep.
He had said that by the beginning of 1961, the mines would be in full operation and that each year they would be shipping out 12 million tons of enriched ore with 59 percent iron content. Not long earlier, large coal deposits were found about 60 miles from the town, and when they were producing also, it would be time to think about marrying coal and ore to make iron and steel at that location.
Mr. Alsop recounts that among the many impressions he had gathered from a visit to the city was one left by the "great enterprise springing up in a wilderness", an "impression of the great and ruthless power this strange Soviet economy is able to mobilize."
Doris Fleeson tells of labor being
headed for a rough year before a special Senate Investigating
Committee chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, with its
vigorous counsel, Robert F. Kennedy. They would be tackling the house-cleaning job
Since the President had no personal connections with labor, the stage was set for an unsparing examination of its frailties. There would be political pressures brought against the White House and the Senate leadership, but they would originate in the states and large cities where the unions being investigated had solid political alliances with both Republicans and Democrats.
It appeared that the AFL, generally viewed as more settled and respectable in contrast to the turbulent CIO, both of which were now merged, was in the greatest trouble for the fact that the long-entrenched senior branch of labor had piled up the greatest collection of vested interests, especially in the cities, those interests being rich and powerful with great troublemaking potential for anyone who sought to interfere with them. Many AFL leaders, who were personally honest, had preferred to look the other way. The younger, newer CIO faction had much more trouble with its radicals and Communists, but less with financial pirates.
The McClellan Committee had begun with an AFL union, the Teamsters, whose president, Dave Beck, and dominant force, Jimmy Hoffa, were Republicans. Mr. Beck had supported President Eisenhower twice, and Mr. Hoffa had installed as Teamster boss in New York a man who had served on Thomas Dewey's campaign committee in five elections. Mr. Hoffa also had supported former Senator Homer Ferguson in Michigan, in preference to fellow AFL member, the present Democratic Senator, Patrick McNamara. That fact had given Mr. Beck a chance to complain that he was being persecuted by the Democratic Congress because he was a Republican. Labor Democrats were allowed to suggest that they were having a lot of trouble with Arthur Larson's new Republicans, Mr. Larson being the Undersecretary of Labor who had written a book defining the President's renovation of the Republican Party.
Labor was deeply uneasy, as shown when the AFL-CIO executive council had, in effect, denied union witnesses before the McClellan Committee the protection of the Fifth Amendment. Suggestions that it was setting a dangerous precedent had been met by labor leaders insisting that it was necessary from a public relations standpoint.
A letter writer indicates that during the 1956 campaign, Democratic spokesmen had repeatedly warned the nation of the impending crisis in the Middle East, brought on partly by the failures of the Eisenhower Administration to set forth specific policies for that region. But preceding the election, the public had been assured that the prospects for peace had never been greater and expansion of imperialistic communism had been halted. Now, according to the writer, they were being told that the crisis was the most serious since World War II, leading the writer to wonder when the nation would get its fill of "government by bungle and boast".
A letter writer tells of State Representative Frank Snepp coming out in support of J. Spencer Bell to fill the vacant seat in the State Senate left by the retirement of Jack Blythe for health reasons, with Mr. Snepp having been quoted in the paper as saying that just when he thought he could stop being a politician and start being a statesman, it appeared he had to go back to being a politician. The writer says that one trip to Raleigh did not make a statesman, as proved by Jack Love, a State Representative who had served in two General Assemblies. He had never heard Mr. Love called a statesman, even by himself. He suggests that Mr. Snepp was just learning to walk as a politician, was still in the diaper stage of statesmanship, but finds that in the future, there was, perhaps, a tiny gleam.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., responds to the newspaper's February 8 syndicated I.Q. quiz regarding the Bible, indicating that Revelations 20:1-2 did not give the angel's name and neither did Revelations 9:11, referring to a completely different being. According to the quiz, the angel who had descended from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit was Satan, but Revelations said that an angel had come down with the key and a great chain, binding Satan for a thousand years. Thus, he concludes that it was not Satan who had descended but an angel, one without a name.
For question 2, if you added the word "sneakers" or "rubbers" to the end, you could answer "Trump".
Framed Edition
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