The Charlotte News
Saturday, February 23, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports, via Charles Kuralt of The News, that Federal agents
had announced this date that they had seized 401 bootleg whiskey
stills in a one-month drive on North Carolina's largest illicit
industry, the largest moonshine roundup on record, with nearly every
county, with the notable exception of Mecklenburg, having contributed
to the total. The size of the stills raided had ranged from a a tiny
one-jar operation to mammoth models capable of turning out thousands
of gallons of corn liquor each week. But the Federal agents had
admitted that they had hardly made a dent in the multi-million-dollar
North Carolina bootleg business, the largest operation of any state,
with North Carolina's eastern swamps and western thickets likely in
any given month contributing about a quarter of all of the still
seizures in the country. The state stood unchallenged as the outlaw
booze capital of the world, far above Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama,
South Carolina and Florida, and such cities as New York, Chicago and
Philadelphia. About 75 agents of the Treasury Department's Alcohol
Tax Unit devoted all of their time to beating the bushes for
bootleggers, receiving help from hundreds of sheriff's deputies,
police officers and ABC enforcement officers. Yet, they never
succeeded in stopping the flow of the "water-clear dynamite",
as the lure of fast money sent most operators back to their
coke-fired boilers, to their hopped-up jalopies and their back-room
bars as soon as they had paid their fines or served their time. For
every gallon of white liquor sold in the state, the Federal
Government lost revenue of $10.50, and in ABC counties of the state,
the State and city lost their share of revenue likewise. A convicted
bootlegger had told an officer the previous week that sales in his
dry county, adjoining Mecklenburg, averaged about 3,000 gallons per
week, amounting to $31,500 worth of taxes being evaded in a single
county in one week or 1.6 million dollars per year from that county.
But in Mecklenburg, there was only a trickle of bootleg liquor to be
found, as better liquor was available in stores, and ABC counties, of
which Mecklenburg was one, had ABC enforcers, with Mecklenburg having
ten. ABC stores had cut the traffic by cutting the incentive,
removing the big-time bootleg liquor dealers, rendering no point in
the practice any longer. Yet there had still been 35 to 40 arrestees in Mecklenburg each month, most of whom were dealers in white
lightning, runners who hauled liquor into Charlotte from stills in
adjoining counties, with the product selling to those who liked their
liquor cheap and their kick unholy. In 1956, only one still had been
found in Mecklenburg, producing only a jar and a half hidden in a
slum attic. The previous week, another one had been discovered, a
"submarine" still off York Road near the Catawba River.
That could not compare with rural counties such as Wilkes, the
traditional center of North Carolina moonshining, where hardly a day
went by without a still being busted. As with any other business,
moonshining had manufacturers, transportation personnel, wholesalers
and retailers. In a recent arrest in an Albemarle Road service
station, the peddler had named the wholesaler and the wholesaler had
named the transporter, with the transporter leading the revenue
agents to a huge still in Lincoln County
J. P. Brady, in a piece special to
The News, reports from Franklin that they were still laughing
in the hills about the moonshiner who came out for supplies and had
not been able to find his still again, with the stills hidden in
inaccessible spots in the woods, requiring that the agents seeking
them had to do so on foot. Between gasps for breath, the sheriff
passed on some information about mountain still-hunting to the
reporter, indicating that some moonshiners
Julian Scheer of The News tells of Mecklenburg County having lost one of its favorites during the week with the passing of Election Board chairman Cleve Davis. He imparts of other local and state occurrences, plus a story out of Washington that according to the Congressional Record, Mr. and Mrs. Rock Hudson had been introduced to the Senate during the week and "were greeted with applause." Mr. Scheer suggests that there were no swoonings, except in the gallery.
Mr. Scheer also reports on who was likely to fill the vacant seat on the Election Board, not necessarily the choice of county Democratic chairman W. M. Nicholson, with the state Democratic Party chairman, John Larkins, having told the newspaper this date that recommendations might come from either Mr. Nicholson, the county executive committee or both, or from the public at large. He said he would not necessarily follow the recommendation of the chairman in naming the successor to Mr. Davis, nor necessarily the recommendations of the executive committee.
In Charlotte, C. M. Bogan announced this date that he would be a candidate in the spring for the City Council, with a vacancy having been created by the previous announcement of Jim Smith that he would seek the mayoralty. Mr. Bogan had been active in city and county political activities in recent years, but had never run for public office.
In Mount Airy, all save one of more than 400 terrified youngsters had scrambled out windows or dashed through doors as a quick-spreading fire had raged through the Flat Rock School the previous day, with one student having perished and about 30 having been injured, leaving the school a smoking ruin. Many of the grade-school children had teetered fearfully on window ledges of the one-story brick building and had to be helped or pushed out. The principal of the school was proud of the way the building had been cleared, but was concerned about what they could have done to prevent it from happening. He said they had never dreamed that so many people could get trapped with so many exits from the building, two at the front and two at the rear. The fire had its origin at the rear of the auditorium, which was surrounded by classrooms. The principal found it unbelievable how fast the flames and smoke had filled the building, stating that it must have been out of control within ten minutes, the stage equipment having appeared as if it had been soaked in gasoline and a match tossed on it. Firemen and volunteer firefighters said that the building had been erected around 1925 and was destroyed in less than an hour after the fire had started in the early afternoon. The only fatality was a nine-year old third-grade boy.
Funeral services for Julia M. Alexander, North Carolina's first female legislator and one of Charlotte's best-known and most colorful citizens, would be held the following day, after she had died this date in the morning at a local hospital after a five-month illness. She had been a member of one of Charlotte's oldest families, had been born in Mecklenburg County, was a licensed attorney who had attended the UNC School of Law, the University of Michigan and the Columbia University School of Law, practicing law in Charlotte for a number of years. She had been elected as the first president of the North Carolina Federation of Business and Professional Women in 1919 and had become the first regent of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1912. She had been elected to the State House in 1925 and served one two-year term. She had been appointed official Mecklenburg County historian and was one of a group of local citizens instrumental in having the historic U.S. Mint rebuilt as the Mint Museum.
On the editorial page, "'Big Stick' Tactics Can Boomerang" finds that a teachers' strike would tend to tarnish the high-minded case for better pay, and so finds it gratifying that the Charlotte Classroom Teachers Association had rejected during the week such a suggestion.
It finds understandable the frustration and dissatisfaction of North Carolina teachers, eager to go to any lengths necessary to acquaint the General Assembly with the urgency of their cause. But it also finds that hasty and hard-boiled tactics at the crucial point of the campaign could backfire against the best interests of the underpaid teachers, especially problematic as there was now every indication that they were receiving sympathy from the legislators to their plight and would likely receive a substantial salary increase.
The merit system proposed by Governor Luther Hodges had attracted little or no support and even the Governor now said that he would not insist on it.
But the most interesting indication of support for an across-the-board pay increase had come during the week in the State House via a resolution favoring a 15 percent increase, failing by five votes on a procedural matter, while receiving a substantial majority for the 15 percent raise. Most legislators appeared convinced that it was time to grant such a raise and pressure tactics, such as a strike, would only antagonize the legislators. It concludes that the teachers should tread firmly but gently, as there were other issues in education on which the state would need their advice and support.
"The Difficulties of Defining Aggression" indicates that Secretary of State Dulles, in addressing the Israeli-Egyptian dispute, had found it difficult to define the term "aggression" for purposes of international diplomacy, that regardless of which side he ultimately defended, he was inevitably accused of "rewarding aggression".
Israel was seeking guarantees against Egyptian guerrilla raids from the Gaza Strip and against a resumed blockade of its port of Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba, but if Israel were given those guarantees, according to Egypt, the "aggression" of Israel in initiating the October attack would be rewarded. But should the U.N. refuse the guarantees to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his Government would view it as rewarding the initial aggressions, the raids and blockade which had provoked Israel to invade Egyptian territory.
The U.N. had appointed a special committee six years earlier to try to define "aggression", but they had been unable to agree on its meaning, referring the matter to the International Law Commission, which also had been unable to provide a definition. It had drawn up a list of specific acts of aggression, but admitted that such a list was inevitably incomplete and thus an undesirable method of defining the term.
Secretary Dulles, thus left without authority for the definition, had no recourse to take other than a common sense approach to the problem, involving the realization that Israel had attacked its neighbor only after continual harassment from Egyptian forces, that Israel's primary objectives in the conflict had been the same as at present, assurance that the Fedayeen raids and the blockade would not be resumed, that if the guarantees were not provided to Israel, the status quo ante would eventually be restored and Egypt could be expected to resume the attacks.
While Egypt grew increasingly more impatient that the invaders would withdraw, Israel remained adamant against withdrawal without the assurances it sought. The Middle East was thus set for another explosion unless the U.N. acted soon to remedy the issue. It concludes that Secretary Dulles ought press immediately for the guarantees sought by Israel for its security or the question of a definition of aggression might prove academic, as a new flareup in the Middle East could signal the start of a third world war.
"Pick 'Em Up" tells of the Pinewood School students collecting old newspapers to enable purchase of encyclopedias for the school, that having provided an armful of old newspapers, a boy said to two girls accompanying him, "Okay, girls, pick up those papers." It concludes that they were teaching the fundamentals at the school.
"Mr. Catfish Giddy Set a Good
Example" indicates that in the 1920's, Joseph Mitchell's
According to the Rock Hill Evening Herald, the South Carolina Klan had lowered its membership age to accommodate a drive to enroll teenagers.
It finds that organized hate was
still a luxury, even for youngsters who could cover their leanness
with one cast-off sheet, suggesting that they might perceive quickly
that a mere box top sent to a cereal company
The Herald had reported that members of the Rock Hill Klavern were already objecting to Nazi-style salutes required of them by district officials.
"Only a 24-carat square would play silly games like that."
Mr. Mitchell's mythical setting for his January, 1939 New Yorker short story anent the robed order, incidentally, was Black Ankle County, N.C. Can you figure out why it was so dubbed? Were you born or bred a Tar Heel of the bluest and truest variety, somewhere in the tarsal region of the state, though the mythical portion of it to which Mr. Mitchell appears symbolically to direct his reader would be in the vicinity of Sampson and not Robeson, which, as we have previously pointed out many times, is pronounced properly Rob-a-son, not Robe-son, you should be able to figure it out no sooner than posing the question, Pilgrim.
A piece from the Smithfield Herald, titled "On Being 20 Different People", tells of a popular monthly woman's magazine having a recent feature story in which a young housewife of Louisville had said that being 20 different people rather than the perfect housewife was what she felt was her real duty, working on five fund drives per year for various organizations, working for her church, the public school to which her sons attended and at the Louisville General Hospital, arranging for volunteers to drive polio patients to the clinic for their weekly therapy, among other things.
It indicates that the other side of the picture appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, in an article by Dorothy Barclay, in which she stated that the shoemaker's child who walked about barefooted was no sadder sight than the youngsters of community-minded parents, so busy working for others that they had no time for their family life, for if one accepted a volunteer assignment, then came another, such that the plight of the parent with a social conscience was very real.
It decides that the situation called for a golden-mean between the housewife who tried to be 20 different people in the community being thereby bound to neglect her family and the situation in which every housewife refused to involve herself in the community, as in the latter scenario there would be no one to look after the educational and recreational needs of youth or the needs of the underprivileged, that cities would obtain better government and improved cultural advantages, and that women got an understanding of the larger world outside their kitchens. It concludes that instead of some willing workers being 20 different people and some unwilling workers being no people at all, the necessary community work should be passed around, including among men.
Drew Pearson indicates that Secretary of State Dulles had wavered back and forth so much during the previous ten days in his Middle East policies that both diplomats and Senators were unsure of what they were, providing a chronological record of what had occurred. On Monday, February 11, Secretary Dulles had attended a background private press conference with select newsmen, conducted at the home of a prominent Washington publisher, outlining U.S. willingness to support the principle of freedom over Israeli shipping through the Gulf of Aqaba, indicating that the U.S. would undertake to support the principle if it were violated by Egypt.
Earlier in the day on February 11, the Secretary had delivered a formal note to the Israeli Government, reportedly giving the same general assurances on free shipping.
On February 12, the Israeli Embassy, reading in the newspapers the "background" story which had come directly from Secretary Dulles, though he had not been quoted, believed that the press accounts indicated greater shipping guarantees than the official note, prompting Israeli officials to reread their note, coming to the same conclusion, causing Israeli diplomats to believe that either the press had misunderstood Secretary Dulles or he had been talking for American consumption to both appease critical Congressmen and put Israel in a position where it had to accept his compromise.
Also on February 12, King Saud, returning from his meeting in Washington, had read with consternation in Madrid that the U.S. was promising free navigation through the Gulf of Aqaba, where Saudi Arabia owned the little islands at its mouth and also the shore on the east side of the Gulf, prompting the King to send off a cablegram to his embassy in Washington, later delivered to the White House, protesting the President's failure to discuss with him the matter. Secretary Dulles had discussed the idea of keeping Egyptian troops off those islands in the future, but the King had made it clear that he had no idea that the U.S. was going as far as it had, and felt that the President had been holding out on him.
On February 14, the cable from King Saud had begun to register at the State Department, causing fears among U.S. diplomats that the missionary work during the King's visit could be undone and that the Arab world might be antagonized.
By February 15, State Department officials were putting forth the idea that American support for freedom of navigation through the Gulf of Aqaba would mean nothing more than submitting the matter to the World Court.
Joseph Alsop, in Kemerovo, Russia, tells of a group of miners who had entered the only restaurant in the city of 250,000 and were "too cheerfully tight" for the proprietor, who initially refused to seat them, until they objected that the only reason he did not want them was because they were "working class", at which point he relented rather than risk a scene. Mr. Alsop regards it lucky for the miners that he did not call up the militia, always stationed in the vestibule.
The restaurant was a bit rowdy, but at the pompously pseudo-classical "House of Culture", which the local coal trust had just built in the miners' district, the atmosphere was prim enough to please the strictest nursery governess. In the wide lobby, during the intermission of the new movie "about the loves of a boy and girl for their dear tractors and one another", the young people were dancing, mostly boys with boys and girls with girls, and those boys who had managed to dance with girls were busy buying them grayish cakes and soda pop in the buffet. Upstairs, a children's song group were singing, "Thank you Party, thank you great Party." In the big lecture hall, a small crowd were glumly watching a propaganda film on war, and in the vestibule, two irreverent miners were making a joke about the Comsumol's display of villains of the mine, a set of photographs of drunks, idlers and other uncultured persons.
The director of the House of Culture, a demobilized political officer from the Army, explained proudly that their main task was to organize the recreation of the people.
At the miners' club, with each mine and every factory having a club, the menu of activities was much the same as at the House of Culture, but the building was smaller, shabbier and looked more lived in, with an almost bar-like buffet, where bread and sausages, wine and weak beer were sold. There, a miner was having a loud argument with one of the omnipresent militiamen.
Mr. Alsop indicates that these
sketches seen in the city might help to suggest why places like that
affected the Western traveler, as though they were cities on the
other side of the moon, imparting though a sensation which was not
exactly disagreeable, Mr. Alsop indicating that he had enjoyed almost
every moment of his Siberian
He indicates that the average man's lot in the Soviet Union had been greatly improved in recent years, but the people still had the grayish look which came from eating a great deal of starch and too little protein and fat. Their clothes were inexpressibly dreary and their housing was shockingly overcrowded, but the time of real misery and real fear had receded into the past.
He indicates that the strangeness which one felt came from the fact that the Soviet cities resembled carefully organized company towns of an earlier period of American industry, with the mine or factory not only providing the club, the clinic, the dining hall and the vacation camp for its workers, but also building and owning most of the housing.
But it was not the whole story, as great efforts were also being made to keep the working masses on the path of virtue. "Governess-management, governess-municipality and governess-state all join hands to diminish the temptations to be 'uncultured' and to encourage right thinking, general good behavior and, above all, unremitting hard work." Thus far, the system had produced the desired result, with the country having not only trained a remarkable new executive class but a wholly new industrial working class with a constantly increasing level of technical skill.
Two things had struck him about the Russian industrial workers, one being their sturdy pride in "moya professy—my specialty", and the other being their unvarying habit of pointing out that "we are members of the working class." He regards the miners whom he had observed in the restaurant to be wholly characteristic of their interesting consciousness of the wide difference between "us of the working class" and "those others in business suits".
Doris Fleeson finds the psychology of the Administration regarding accusations of wrongdoing having long appeared to be that there was nothing either good or bad, but publicity made it so. Harold Talbott had quit under fire as Secretary of the Air Force, but it had been explained that he was a very honest man, and the President had given him a medal. More recently, Robert Ross had resigned as Assistant Secretary of Defense while under similar charges of improperly using his influence for private profit. The Pentagon had firmly insisted that there was no stain on his character.
But in at least two instances, the Administration had quietly recorded its own condemnation of deals and officials which in public it had defended. One was the Al Sarena mining case and the other was the speculations in oil stock made by Judge Stanley Barnes, then an assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the Justice Department. His first assistant, Edward Foote, had also been involved in the speculation.
Al Sarena had been investigated by a joint Senate-House investigating committee, finding that former Interior Undersecretary Clarence Davis had awarded a mining firm of that name 23 mining patents, covering 454 acres of timberland in the Rogue River National Forest in southern Oregon. The firm had mined no minerals but had cut timber valued by the investigators at $300,000, which the committee found to be a Government giveaway, questioning the validity of a special assay ordered by Mr. Davis, showing sufficient mineral possibilities. Mr. Davis had been defended by then-Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay and by the White House. Since that time, Mr. McKay had been defeated in his race to displace Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, with Al Sarena having been one of the issues on which the latter had campaigned. Mr. Davis had resigned the previous month.
Mr. McKay's successor, Fred Seaton, had rewritten departmental regulations and handed down decisions which would bar actions of the Davis-Al Sarena type, with the new administrative procedures, according to interested Congressmen, able to save Mr. Seaton from any such embarrassments. Mr. Seaton had never admitted fault on the part of either Mr. Davis or Mr. McKay, and similarly, Attorney General Herbert Brownell had defended Judge Barnes and Mr. Foote for their purchases of Warren Petroleum Co. stock in the fall of 1955, in which Judge Barnes had bought $12,000 worth only a few days after the Justice Department had announced that it would not interfere with the Warren firm's merger with Gulf Oil. Mr. Foote had bought $65,000 worth in the name of his wife a few days previously, with both having sold their stock about 90 days later.
In a booklet titled "You and Your Job", Attorney General Brownell had explained to Justice Department employees what they could and could not do, with one page devoted to bans on outside activities connected with the Department's work, banning speculation of any type.
Judge Barnes had since been elevated to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and when his oil stock deal had been brought to Mr. Brownell's attention, the answer had been given that the Justice Department ban on speculation had been very general and failed to distinguish between speculation and investment. But now the Department rules had been rewritten to define speculation as a stock or bond investment lasting less than six months, causing the sales by both Mr. Foote and Judge Barnes to be wrong under current regulations.
She indicates that the big beneficiary of the policy of the Administration in such matters had been Vice-President Nixon, who, with the aid of Checkers, his black and white cocker spaniel, had explained on a nationwide telecast in September, 1952 his expense fund for which he had been attacked, with the public having warmly responded and underwritten the explanation by electing him alongside the President. Thus, no new rules had to be written about such expense funds.
A letter writer addresses again the recent column by the Reverend Herbert Spaugh, in which he had praised The Crown Tree by LeGette Blythe, and had stated that from "a thorn tree … the crown of thorns placed on the head of Jesus was taken." She disputes the point and cites several authorities for her argument, argues that had Jesus been arraigned before Pontius Pilate wearing a crown of thorns, Pilate would have been enraged and provoked, as he was "a stickler for dignity of the court and letter of the law". She suggests that every lawyer was aware that for more than 2,000 years the Roman court had been the world's model for dignity and fairness, and that "an innocent and defenseless person was subjected to the insults and indignities, ascribed to Jesus, in a Roman court, presided over by a Roman governor, none but a slave of superstition can believe."
She appears to neglect the basic indignity of crucifixion, which was considered a proper punishment for all manner of heretics and lawbreakers before the Roman court and before the Roman governor, hardly to be conceived as being dignified or just as a form of punishment, to have someone die before the public in a humiliating and particularly cruel manner. Her argument, therefore, we conclude, fails miserably in its basic premise, placing myopically undue focus on whether or not Jesus was in fact fitted with a crown of thorns derisively as "King of the Jews". No one appears to dispute the historical practice of crucifixion or that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was subjected to that punishment for his charged heresy to Roman, if not also Hebraic, law.
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