The Charlotte News
Thursday, February 7, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Congressional leaders called on the President this date to put forth specific proposals if he wanted Congress to enact controls against inflation. Democrats and Republicans were sharply divided over the present need for controls, which the President had said might become necessary if business and labor failed to curb inflation voluntarily. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who had supported the Administration's "tight money" policy, said that the country might have to go to more direct controls, particularly on consumer credit, should inflationary pressures increase. He said that as a practical matter, however, Congress was not likely to do anything unless the President made some specific recommendations. Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that if the President was worried about inflation, he could do something about it himself by stopping the excessive Government spending through cutting his own budget just as he had cut former President Truman's budget by 9 billion dollars in 1953 during his first month in office. Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, chairman of the Republican conference of Senators, said that the question of controls had not been discussed in the regular weekly meeting of Republican leaders with the President and that he knew of no imminent message to Congress on the subject.
Southern Senators had stated this date that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's blockade of the Suez Canal was helping world sales of surplus American cotton. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi said in an interview that continuation of the program of past cotton surplus sales through another marketing year "might permit sales of up to a half million bales of our cotton in place of that which formerly moved through Suez." He had raised the point with Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson the previous day during questioning by the Senate Agriculture Committee. The chairman of that Committee, Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, had been urging Secretary Benson to shift his sales of surplus cotton to the same system presently used in overseas marketing of surplus wheat. Mr. Benson had promised a decision ahead of the new cotton marketing year, which would begin August 1. He said that he first wanted to learn how the new program worked on wheat before using it with some other commodity. Since the previous September, cotton exporters had been offering competitive bids for Government-held cotton stocks, which had moved at prices below the domestic market and Government price-support levels. Senator Eastland had told Secretary Benson that he had done a fine job in selling more than seven million bales of surplus Government cotton during the previous year and urged that the program be continued until August 1 of the following year.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges was inaugurated this date to his first full term, having assumed office in November, 1954 at the death of Governor William B. Umstead. Governor Hodges had retired from business only seven years earlier to enter public life, elected Lieutenant Governor in 1952, and was now the first Governor of the state in modern times to succeed himself. He had begun as a mill hand with Marshall Field & Co. and had retired as its vice-president in 1950. Although he had been Governor for only a little more than two years, he had traveled probably as much as any four-year Governor and had faced problems as perplexing as any Governor in the state's modern history, including the school segregation issue. He had brought increased activity to the office and had worked for reorganization of State Government and the tax structure, with a major aim of his Administration having been to attract more industry to the state and thus increase its low per capita income. He had been born in 1898 on a farm near Leaksville, the youngest of nine children, and had once taken a job selling Bibles door-to-door and later worked as a news butcher on a train. Working his way through UNC with a variety of occupations, he graduated in 1919 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Upon his retirement from business and prior to his entry to politics, he served in Frankfurt, Germany, as chief of the industry division of the Economic Cooperation Administration, that is the administrative arm of the Marshall Plan. President Kennedy would eventually appoint him to be Secretary of Commerce in 1961.
During his inaugural address, he had pledged his dedication during the ensuing four years "to help in the unfinished task of building a better, greater and more beautiful North Carolina." He said that he would do everything possible to raise the standard of living for the people of the state. He departed from tradition and did not discuss his proposals for action by the 1957 Legislature, instead offering what he described as "a broad look" at the state, its government, "our heritage and our future." He gave credit to education as a force in economic advances in the state since the end of the Civil War, stating, "We were the first Southern state to establish a tax-supported system of public schools, and we pioneered in the construction of a system of hard-surfaced roads." He said that the state had also taken the lead in public health work, and public welfare, and in county and farm agent work, as well as in soil conservation. Cultural advances he listed included the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, pioneer outdoor historical dramas, and the new State Museum of Art in Raleigh. He would provide his legislative program in a message to a joint session of the Assembly the following Monday night. He had taken the oath of office from State Supreme Court Chief Justice J. Wallace Winborne and then addressed a joint session of the General Assembly. The address was televised statewide. The inauguration was a month later than previous Governors, as the start of the legislative session had been moved from January to February, and the inauguration had always coincided with the start of the legislative session.
In Columbia, S.C., the State Supreme Court had reaffirmed a "long-established rule" that it was libelous per se to print that a white person was a black person. The Court reversed a lower court decision which had dismissed a libel suit against the Anderson Daily Mail, brought by a woman who complained that the newspaper had printed a story about her son in the armed forces, appearing in the "Negro News" section of the paper. Attorneys for the newspaper had argued that there was no evidence "of actual malice or special damages" in the March 11, 1954 article and that it was not actionable per se to publish that a white person was a Negro—per se defamation, as distinguished from per quod defamation, not requiring proof of actual damages to be actionable. The Court relied on a turn-of-the-century precedent which had held that despite the intervening Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments after the Civil War, it remained defamatory per se, in reliance on earlier precedents starting in the 18th Century, to publish that a white person was either a mulatto or black, as the Court determined that despite many changes, publishing the social status of a person falsely was actionable per se. What's goin' on, heyah? They got my son in the Negro section of the papah. I'm a-gonna sue their lily-white asses. They are inferrin' somethin' about the boy's parentage, as if they is some sortta miscegenation goin' on. And he's in the ahmed fawces servin' his country.
In Point of the Mountains, Utah,
rioting convicts who had taken control of the Utah State Prison for
nearly 12 hours, in a strange mixture of violent destruction and
almost tender concern for their hostages, had yielded to the firm
insistence of Governor George Clyde that he would not even consider
their demands until they freed their hostages and gave up their
weapons. During the riot, some of the prisoners had gone on a wild
alcohol-fueled binge while others had sat around nonchalantly
watching television
One of the rioting prisoners had commented the previous day when asked what was wrong at the prison, "Just about everything," listing the chow, some of the officers, and the corrections board as being deficient. Another inmate had urged fellow prisoners to quiet down so that they could confer with the Board of Corrections and the Governor. A hospital technician who had been released after being overcome by smoke, reported that the rioters had burst into the hospital and taken all the drugs they could lay their hands on, and that he had been pumping stomachs since the riot had begun. He was taken home to recuperate from the smoke inhalation. A guard said that a commotion had started just after he had begun his shift, and the prisoners told him they wanted the release of a particular convict, telling him that if they let them in to get the prisoner, they would let him out, that if they had to break in to get him, they would kill the guard. He had been released about three hours later. Following a conference among officials, the Utah Attorney General had stated that the only thing they could do was to let the prisoners simmer down and wait until they got somebody who could speak for them. Eventually, Governor Clyde was heard to remark wearily, "We've had it."
In Englewood, Colo., a coed and her date had staggered out of the snowbound Pike's Peak country the previous night and sent back rescuers for her parents, marooned in their car since Sunday. The coed had a broken ankle when she was brought to a local hospital for treatment of frostbite and sunburn, with rescuers indicating they did not see how she had managed to struggle through four-foot snowdrifts in that condition. She said that she had not realized that her ankle was broken amid the numbing cold which apparently had kept it from being painful. She and her 22-year old date had battled three days through the snow to reach a television relay station near Castle Rock. Rescuers had found her parents ten miles back along a road, huddled in their car, cold, hungry and worried. Her father was a 57-year old Denver chiropractor. The four had driven to Colorado Springs on Sunday for a visit and on their return, had taken a scenic back road, with the car having bogged down in snow and ice. All four had stayed in the car on Sunday night, keeping the car running to provide heat part of the time. The daughter and her friend had set out for help on Monday morning, with the young woman wearing her mother's fur coat and her father's shoes, while her friend took her father's overcoat. On Monday and Tuesday nights, they had huddled in crevices and lighted fires, with the temperature at around zero. She said that they were both numb from the cold.
In Milwaukee, a policeman and two physicians had combined the previous day to save the life of a nine-year old boy whose throat had been cut in an accident which had begun in a snowball fight, after a snowball thrown by another child had shattered a glass storm door at the rear of the injured boy's home, while the boy was standing behind the door. A fragment of the glass had pierced his jugular vein. His mother had heard his cries and carried him into the house, and with each step, she said the blood had pumped faster from the wound. She dashed outside the home and a few doors away, saw a patrolman and exclaimed that her boy was bleeding. The patrolman shouted to his companion to call an ambulance and raced to the home where he found the boy in a pool of blood. He stuck his right thumb into the wound and squeezed his other fingers tight around the boy's throat. After the ambulance had arrived, it was decided that the patrolman should maintain his hold during the ride to the hospital. The ambulance reached the hospital about 22 minutes after the wound had been inflicted, and the boy was immediately rushed to surgery for an emergency operation by a staff surgeon and a resident surgeon. He had received 7 pints of whole blood and 6 pints of plasma during the surgery. The physicians said that the boy had lost about 3 pints of blood before reaching the hospital and that he might have died had he lost less than one more pint, that the patrolman's actions had probably been the difference between life and death. Never throw a snowball at glass and quickly stanch the flow of blood when a person's jugular vein is cut, being careful not to strangle the person in the process. We note that today and for probably the last 40-50 years or so, glass doors are required by building codes to be safety glass, such that they do not shatter on impact, as with automobile windows. We do not recommend, however, testing your own doors to determine which type of glass is installed. When snow comes, append a note: "No snowballs from hell allowed, boy."
On the editorial page, "Hodges Must Jockey a Legislature That Is No Longer Easy To Bridle", a bylined piece by editor Cecil Prince, reporting from Raleigh, that in the folklore of North Carolina politics, the Governor's inauguration day was open season for "tiresome dramatics, rented evening clothes and feckless vaporings of sentimentality."
It had started at an early hour when a band of celebrating statesmen had sung, to a tune from "Oklahoma": "Oh what a terrible mornin',/ Oh what a terrible day;/ We got a horrible feelin'/ Taxes ain't going our way." (You know that they were behind the times, as they could not even frame their parodied lyric around "Hound Dog".) He finds that they were paying their own fuzzy tribute to the force which might keep taxes from going their way or the way to which many North Carolinians had become accustomed for generations, that force being Governor Hodges, who had, in his inaugural address this date, said that North Carolina "must not stand still", that it had to move steadily forward with a "sense of direction and infusion of important knowledge."
The following week, he would outline in detail his program to the General Assembly to revise the corporate tax structure, reorganize some of the state's political institutions and reapportion its legislative seats. He had given the 1957 inauguration and opening of the Assembly a thoroughly different tone.
He faced the problem of jockeying a Legislature which many said was no longer his to ride, but spoke with the same confidence in his own ability and his program which had already stamped his Administration, outlining his hopes and dreams for the state without reliance on puerilities, cant or twisted logic. His address was illustrative of his own and the state's reigning optimism and faith in progress, with the simple thesis that North Carolinians were the inheritors of a splendid tradition of greatness, which had to be increased, and that the state had the capacity for a new era of progress at a time when social and economic problems were festering dangerously in the state's subconscious. The state was full of moderate, but progressive people, who had, since its earliest days, faced many tough and serious problems without panic or extremes, with a characteristic stability in the people and in their approach to working out problems.
Legislators and guests had listened to the speech and applauded, but Mr. Prince relates that one could see dozens of "political pistols being loaded" for the popular Governor who expected so much so suddenly.
The previous day, the full State House had been convened, opening on a note of prayer and harmony which everyone knew was not to be binding. Within an hour, the floor had erupted in debate over a cut and dried bill covering the subsistence allowance for the legislators during the session, with about a dozen Representatives having eventually registered there discontent, as if serving notice that even the most minute matters would not escape their wrath in the current session.
"Amid the clinking glasses, the rustle of silk, the self-conscious twisting in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothing at this inauguration, there was the feeling that petulance has indeed been building up for a long time in North Carolina's political hinterlands. The old pols have been too long without a serviceable target. Some of them still miss old Kerr Scott in Raleigh, an aggressively cantankerous chief executive who seemed actually to invite a good political rasslin' match from time to time." Governor Hodges was also aggressive, but had a "vastly pious nature", shunning free-for-alls and thus far avoiding them with agility. He finds that there would be no opportunity to sidestep in the current session, as the Governor's program was too weighty. But the progress the state had to build would not come easily.
"Let Records Recommend a Senator" finds a dogfight afoot to fill the seat of retiring State Senator Jack Blythe, neither unusual nor censurable conduct among Democrats, as it served as a periodic tonic for the party to have factional infighting, appearing to stimulate truth-telling to the public. But there were points at which disinterested public service could be severely weakened by blind factionalism, and such a moment had arrived for Democrats in the current race.
The Mecklenburg State Senator had virtual veto power over local legislation, a power which candidate Jack Love, a State Representative, had indicated he would summarily exercise against pending annexation. Several candidates, it finds, had recommended themselves, but the next State Senator for the county ought be recommended by his record of community service and capabilities, and a victory for any purely factional candidate would likely be a loss for the community and Mecklenburg Democrats.
Drew Pearson suggests that if former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis should make a million dollars per year, he probably could not pay the Government all of his back taxes before he died. He had not realized how large his tax bracket was when money had come easy to him, resulting in his getting behind in payments, such that the Government was now charging him interest at the rate of nearly $100,000 per year. If he made a million dollars per year, his annual income tax would be $910,000 and he would be able, therefore, to pay the Government only $90,000 toward his back taxes, less than the annual interest bill. In consequence, he had started wrestling, and in the previous three months, had paid the Government $124,000. The Treasury had recently attached a $65,000 trust fund which Mr. Louis had left to his children, and he still had a balance of 1.2 million to pay, including principal, penalties and interest. His lawyers said they had discussed a settlement with the Government, but thus far had received little encouragement.
Meanwhile, former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, presently running a restaurant in New York, had started a fund, along with John Youngheim and George Reeves, Jr., of Chicago, to help Mr. Louis with his large tax debt.
Mr. Pearson indicates that he had scrutinized the records of the Treasury in reaching settlements with taxpayers and had come away more puzzled than ever, as it appeared in part to depend on the lawyer or accountant the delinquent taxpayer hired. For instance, the American Distilling Co. had owed 13 million dollars in back taxes, settled for a little over a million dollars or 10 percent of the bill. It had hired the firm of T. Coleman Andrews, who had later become the IRS commissioner. He provides other tax cases which were likewise settled for about the same percentage or less.
The FCC, after reversing their examiner in the Boston Herald and Traveler case to award a valuable television license to the newspaper, had now reversed their examiner again and awarded a channel to the Florida-Georgia TV Co., after the examiner had ruled in favor of the Jacksonville Broadcasting Co., until politics intervened and the Commission reversed the nonpolitical expert who had spent weeks listening to the testimony and deciding which applicant was best qualified to provide a public service for the people of Jacksonville.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the President had given top priority in domestic affairs to his proposed grant of Federal aid to the states to build public schools based on the fact that the number of pupils entering school had grown much faster than the number of classrooms available in which to teach them, with enrollment in the current year exceeding normal capacity by more than two million, resulting in overcrowded classrooms such that large numbers of children were being denied a decent education. The absence of a proper education in the early years could not easily be repaired later—witness a great number of Republicans in the 118th House, too numerous to begin to list by name, but you know who they are, having apparently suffered deficient educations during the Reagan-Bush years in the Eighties and early Nineties when they were starting school, now wanting to blame Democrats for not having come to their rescue to make brilliant students of them, as they regularly demonstrate today, during Congressional hearings, their adult aptitudes in various fields, including law and medicine, to which they were deprived of accession by their inferior grade school foundations.
He suggests that the critical shortage of classrooms could not fairly be attributed to a failure of the states and localities to meet their responsibilities, though here and there, there were such failures. But overall, the effort made by the states and localities had been impressive. During the previous year, they had built 63,000 new classrooms, a record, especially when compared with a decade earlier when the rate of construction had been 9,000 classrooms annually. But it would still not be enough to replace classrooms which had become obsolete and unusable, and to provide for new enrollees. Just to stand still, there would be needed all of the classrooms built during the previous year. In the meantime, there was a 150,000-classroom shortage.
In a recent publication by the Department of Commerce, it had been estimated that four billion dollars would be needed annually for the ensuing ten years to build adequate classrooms, causing the rate of expenditure to have to increase by 60 percent over the current level of 2.6 billion. The President was asking Congress to approve appropriations for less than a quarter of that 1.4 billion dollar deficiency, hoping that by compelling the states to match the Federal grants, the difference would be met. The Administration's program would set up a fund of 750 million dollars to purchase school bonds, but the states and localities would continue to have the responsibility to raise most of the money to pay for the new schools, as it was only a loan designed to protect them against having to pay high interest rates.
But the President's proposal faced formidable obstacles in Congress. Some objected on principle to any Federal aid on the basis of states' rights regarding operation of public schools. Some Catholics believed that the parochial schools should not be excluded from Federal aid, and some black politicians, led by Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York, wanted to have Federal aid used as a means of coercing the Southern states to eliminate segregation. There were also politicians who wanted to carry out the goal of Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey to cut the Federal budget, and would be tempted to begin with Federal aid to the schools.
While there was some truth to the notion that Federal grants in the budget were present because of special interest groups, it was not true as a general rule, and regarding Federal aid to schools, it was truer to say that the opposition came from pressure groups, while the support was national and public-spirited. There would be no special interest favored by the adoption of the President's program, as the demand for it came from teachers and school superintendents, parents and civic leaders, worried about the failure to provide classrooms for a large part of the coming generation of pupils.
Mr. Lippmann likens support of education to support of national defense, that it was a public and patriotic duty which the current generation owed to the next. During the previous 25 years, the national income had risen by 300 billion dollars while the amount spent on education had increased by a little more than seven or eight billion. He finds it thus absurd to say that the richest country in the history of mankind could not afford both to defend itself and to educate its children.
Despite our school having opened in 1957, when the 1960 election occurred, we were attending school in a trailer. Practically all of the little boys and girls sported either Nixon/Lodge or JFK/Johnson buttons. We shall let you guess which one we sported. We still recall the unique sound of rain hitting the skylights on the trailer, a plastic sound, and the long poles which had to be utilized to open and close the vents at the top of the tin can. It never blew away though. We could all empathize with the cramped conditions enforced on Alan Shepard as he blasted off from Cape Canaveral that morning in May aboard Freedom 7, as we got to watch on tv from class, the first American to venture beyond the earth's atmosphere in a suborbital space mission. We can still see it as it happened, in surrounds resemblant to the trailer from which he had emerged to enter the spacecraft earlier that morning. Thus, there were hidden benefits to education from a trailer, although akin to being aboard an aircraft each day which never left the ground, a bit closed in, but also stimulative the more of the imagination to wander in creative thinking.
Marquis Childs finds that the facts developed by the Senate Committee on Elections regarding expenditures during the fall presidential campaign to have been startling, such that the only question was whether the shock to public opinion would compel Congress to pass legislation for more effective restraints. Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, chairman of the Committee, understood that the report would be just another filed away and forgotten unless enough people were sufficiently shocked to demand action.
It was not merely the extent of the spending and the inequity between the two parties which had been revealed in the long report signed by the two majority members, Senators Gore and Mike Mansfield of Montana. It revealed an outline of a system of class parties, Republicans supported by big business and Democrats supported by big labor, contrary to the traditions of American political life. The Committee's analysis of contributions showed that a fraction of one percent of the people had provided the 33.2 million dollars accounted for in campaign spending during the fall, with much more having actually been spent through contributions under the table and given to state and local committees not required to tally contributions and expenditures. The Du Pont family had given more than the total of contributions from 13 Southern states.
The minority member of the Committee, Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska, complained mainly that it was impossible to determine the extent of indirect trade union activity on behalf of Adlai Stevenson. He complained of the manpower used by the unions to get out the Democratic vote and the threat of coercion and compulsion inherent in the big unionism. But he did not point out that corporations had the same privilege as trade unions, unquestionably using it in the previous campaign to make indirect use of their resources, including manpower, on behalf of the President.
If the present free-wheeling system went unchecked, he concludes, it was certain to encourage greater extremism within the two parties, with the Eisenhower Administration having a special responsibility which it had not met. It was an avowedly business Administration, with the top positions, including within the regulatory commissions, theoretically impartial and quasi-judicial, having been filled for the most part with men from big business.
A letter writer expresses regret at the decision of State Senator Jack Blythe of Mecklenburg County not to run again on the basis of family and health concerns. He says that Mr. Blythe had contributed much to the county. He regards as the proper successor State Representative James Vogler, who had received the largest number of votes within the county delegation in the previous election.
A letter writer agrees with a previous letter writer regarding whiskey, says that she was certain that more happy homes and well-fed children would occur had liquor never been produced, that she had heard people boast of how much they could imbibe and still be able to walk. She hopes that the day would come when it would be breaking the law to sell whiskey. She says that she knew a lot of church members, both men and women, who spent a lot on whiskey and beer and then went to God's house on Sunday.
Framed Edition
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