The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 16, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Cairo that reliable informants had said this date that 600 to 700 Egyptian Army reconnaissance and military police had moved into El' Arish, 25 miles west of the border of the Gaza Strip, the previous day to take over defense of that area from the U.N. Emergency Force. The informants said that they doubted that the Egyptians at present would move units into Gaza, but an Egyptian newspaper had indicated earlier that Egyptian troops would occupy two points in the Strip this date.
Investigators for the Senate Select Committee looking at racketeering and organized crime influence within the Teamsters Union, stated this date that Teamsters president, Dave Beck, had told them, via telegram to the chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, that he would delay at least until Tuesday a decision on whether he would turn over voluntarily his personal financial records to the Committee, indicating that he first wanted to discuss the matter with his attorneys on Tuesday night, and that he would reply to the request immediately thereafter. Senator McClellan the previous day had sent Mr. Beck a demand for his personal records covering the period from 1949 through 1955 and asked for a reply immediately. Implicit in the request was an intent to subpoena the records unless Mr. Beck responded within 24 hours to the request.
In Portland, Ore., a vice-probing grand jury, before which Mayor Terry Schrunk had testified, had returned nine indictments the previous night, resulting in the arrest of Frank Malloy, a business agent for the Teamsters Union in Portland, who was charged with extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion in connection with the efforts of the Teamsters to move into the pinball machine industry of Portland. Also arrested was a Portland police officer, Raymond Roadnight, charged with false swearing, accused of lying when he had stated under oath that he did not offer a bribe to another officer to stop the arrest of persons accused of prostitution, gambling and illegal liquor sales. He had been previously charged the prior summer with perjury, and the present charge was a re-indictment on a lesser offense.
Skies had cleared and winds had diminished in most of the storm-stricken areas of the Midwest this date and warmer weather appeared on the way, as the storm center north of Lake Superior had moved northeastward during the night and the gale-force winds which had lashed many Midwest areas on Thursday and the previous day had subsided, after winds of up to 65 mph had been recorded the previous day in some areas. Snowfall had ranged up to more than a foot in many cities in Minnesota, with ten-foot drifts reported in some areas, resulting in several communities being snowbound and some 200 schools closed. Generally colder weather was reported east of the Mississippi River, with the lowest temperatures in the storm belt, while the chilly air extended into the lower Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley, and as far south as northern Alabama and Mississippi, with temperatures ranging from below freezing in the north central region to the 60's in the extreme south.
In Raleigh, demands for more specific information from Federal officials had come the previous day from a conference on a proposed flood insurance plan.
Julian Scheer of The News indicates that a bill passed by the General Assembly during the week, authorizing a clerk for the County Commission, would do nothing at the Courthouse, while making everything legal, "much ado about something." He provides other snippets as well.
Emery Wister of The News reports that every four minutes, a plane took off from Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte, numbering 360 per day and 10,000 per month, with it being one of the top airports in the country based on number of passengers, ranking, according to the airport manager, 19th or 20th at present, subject to change each month. The nearly 11,000 landings and takeoffs the prior January, including operations of airliners, private and military aircraft, were 23 percent more than the 8,392 of a year earlier. The field was due for a multi-million-dollar improvement program designed to keep it in the forefront of the nation's top airports, with the largest project being a 7,500 or 8,000-foot runway to parallel the present main northeast-southwest runway, with the manager indicating that it was about three years away, set to be equipped with an instrument landing system, just as the present strip had, permitting simultaneous takeoffs and landings on both runways even in bad weather.
The most trying time for air traffic controllers at the airport was between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m., when a score or more passenger planes, many of them with four engines, were typically scheduled to arrive. Passenger planes often had to wait at holding points in the terminal area before they could land, with the controllers able to handle 15 planes per hour. The chief controller indicated that sometimes the tower had all the traffic it could handle, causing them to alert other cities not to send them any more for the present, though that only happened occasionally, as they could stack up an unlimited number of planes at the holding points, with each plane separated from the others by 1,000 feet of altitude. Airlines frequently scheduled flights so that several might approach a field at the same time, with the tower giving priority to the first to call, requiring that the others wait their turn. The Charlotte airport, insofar as the controllers were concerned, could handle much more traffic than it had at present. Niner that, Roger. Over...
Charles Kuralt of The News reports on the St. Patrick's Day parade in Charlotte this date, finding that brotherhood and good will had marched down the middle of Tryon Street "wearing a smile and a shamrock"—hopefully a little more than that. Three Catholic priests from St. Patrick's had walked beside an American of Russian extraction, the Jewish editor of the Carolina Israelite, Harry Golden, father of Catholic sons, and the black president of Carver College, Dr. E. H Brown, in the parade of WBT's Grady Cole "for people who think other people are here for them to get along with." Hundreds of people had stopped to watch as the march reached Independence Square, all grinning at the unlikely procession. The black musicians of the Second Ward High School band had repeatedly played "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling". The owner of a Wilkinson Boulevard pizza establishment had carried a sign reading, "Irish Italian". An immigrant from Dublin three years earlier brought his family from Kings Mountain to march, while another Irishman carried a 150-year old shillelagh, swinging it by its strap as he paraded. A black editor, Dr. J. S. Nathaniel Tross, wore a green ribbon on his hat. A transplanted New Yorker played gay Italian street songs on a battered accordion. Mr. Golden had asked everyone he met, "How could a race-baiter do any damage in a town like this?" Mr. Kuralt concludes: "With the Irish, the Greeks, the Presbyterians from Albemarle, the Negroes from Second Ward, the Italians, the Jews marching down Tryon St., it was a pretty good question."
Speaking of the Irish and good luck, UNC had won its Eastern Regional semifinal game the previous night against number 20 Canisius in Philadelphia, 87 to 75, the number one team's 29th victory on the season without a loss. They would face Syracuse, winner the previous night over Lafayette, 75 to 71, this night in the regional final, winning the regional and their 30th game, 67 to 58. They would play number 11 Michigan State the following Friday night in the national semifinals in Kansas City. The Spartans had beaten number 17 Notre Dame 85 to 83 the previous night in the semifinals of the Midwest Regional, and would beat number three Kentucky this night in the finals, 80 to 68. In the other two regionals, Kansas, the number two team in the nation with star center Wilt Chamberlain, had beaten number four SMU 73 to 65 in the semifinals of the Western Regional the previous night, and would crush number nine Oklahoma City 81 to 61 this night to win the regional. In the Far West Regional, the University of San Francisco, defending national champions from both 1955 and 1956, had beaten number 16 Idaho State the previous night, 66 to 51, and would win the regional by beating the number 13 University of California from across the Bay, 50 to 46, setting up the other national semifinal game for Friday night between Kansas and unranked San Francisco. The national final would be played the following Saturday night. Who will win? Place your bets through Jimmy's secretary in Detroit for only a small premium, but be sure to cover your bet if you lose or you may have some broken legs.
On the editorial page, "The U.S. Radical's Road to Treason", a non-bylined editorial book review, assesses The Roots of American Communism, by Theodore Draper, indicating that when Lincoln Steffens, the veteran American muckraker, had returned from Russia in 1919, he had looked in on sculptor Jo Davidson, before whom Bernard Baruch, the wartime economic administrator, was sitting for a portrait, with Mr. Baruch commenting that Mr. Steffens had been to Russia, Mr. Steffens replying that he had been "over into the future" and that it worked.
It comments that it was little more than a casual quip, but a whole generation of early American Communists had been weaned on its seductive significance. The Bolshevik "future", of which Mr. Steffens had commented, had been a deadend of terror, betrayal and mechanistic misfires, causing the piece to question how it had attracted so many starry-eyed people in the U.S., finding that the book by Mr. Draper would provide many, though not all, of those answers in a detailed, engrossing and painstakingly objective study.
While the massive amount of material in the book failed to solve successfully the complex problem of determining motivation, it did not detract significantly from the value of the book as history or as the first definitive and factual study of the American Communist Party from its early background through its founding in 1919, to its emergence from the underground during the 1920's. In a subsequent volume—published in 1960—, Mr. Draper would complete the narrative through 1945. The work was sponsored by the Fund for the Republic.
It finds that the work exposed for the first time the awful truth "about one of the most fantastic political hayrides in U.S. history", with the author knowing his subject well because he had been swept up into that ride, having worked on the Daily Worker, the New Masses and in the Tass news agency, before breaking with Communism early in World War II. He dealt at length with the history of American radicalism, dating from the mid-19th Century, including the early anarchists, the Molly Maguires, the birth and early childhood of trade unionism, the IWW and AFL, Socialism, Populism, Progressivism, muckraking, the Socialist Labor Party, the Lettish Left Wing and other expressions of radical social action, with his principal finding being that the Communist movement had been a new expression of American radicalism transformed in its infancy into "the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power."
Even in its early years, the socialist movement had received its lifeblood from Europe, with its power largely in the hands of immigrants. Friedrich Engels had noted with dismay that as practicing socialists, America's native radicals were sadly backward in "theory", with some notable exceptions, such as John Reed and Max Eastman. Yet, the glamour of the Russian revolution and the triumph of Bolshevism was exciting to left-wingers everywhere, it being "their" revolution, for which they could believe in taking some credit because of belonging to the left wing.
Mr. Draper had found that the Bolshevik revolution had transformed the left wing, but had not created a new one out of nothing, that the leading roles had been played by men and women prepared by past inclination and experience. The revolution had come to fulfill, not to destroy, and, he opined, American Communism could be understood only in terms of the way in which the new Bolshevik influence impinged on American radical traditions. "It was born because the old left wing was famished for something new, different, more successful. But as with all newborn things, the flesh out of which it came was not new." He believed it derived from the old socialism.
The American Communist Party had reason to be grateful to Moscow, and much of its membership did not object to dictation from Moscow, enjoying the reflected glory of the Russian Revolution, the international glamour of the Comintern, the desperately needed subsidies and other technical assistance they received. Mr. Draper indicated that as the line changed in Moscow, the domination from Moscow remained, causing some American Communists to rebel, building their careers on it. The first change had been "a rhythmic rotation from Communist sectarianism to Americanized opportunism," set in motion at the outset and ongoing since. A Russian initiative had always effectively begun and ended in a superficial "Americanization" by American Communists toward a more independent policy, in reality only another type of American response to a Russian stimulus. For that reason, "Americanized" Communism had been sporadic, superficial and short-lived, corresponding to the fluctuations of Russian policy and not obeying a compelling need within the American Communists themselves.
Despite that during periods of "Americanization", the number of American Communists had increased, they had surrendered their gains to demonstrate their loyalty to Russian leadership, as was still the case at present, with American Communists embarking on another "Americanization" campaign. But the American Communist Party had not acquired any genuine Americanization because it had no connection with American life and culture.
The piece indicates that as Sidney Hook had observed, there were no longer even any innocent fellow travelers, that even in politically unsophisticated circles, there was a recognition that those who cooperated with the Communist Party at present were accomplices in the conspiracy.
It finds the roots of the conspiracy freshly revealed in Mr. Draper's work, along with "absorbing portraits of the men and women who attended and cultivated those roots, only to be crushed by them."
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Clothes and Students", indicates that educators had sounded off recently about the sloppy clothing and weird haircuts of high school students, declaring that disheveled attire was incompatible with first-class scholarship and proper classroom decorum.
It suggests that perhaps it was so, that pride and appearance might reflect pride in intellectual attainment, but also allows for the fact that successive generations of students had thought of themselves as young Turks, rebels against one thing or another, with each breaking the inherited mold to create another mold.
It finds that the student did not
have to go out of his way to attain the zenith in sartorial
indifference merely to prove individuality, nor emulate Beau Brummel
to make the honor roll
It suggests that each generation had made itself appear ridiculous to its elders and each, nonetheless, had survived, that a barber could neither diminish nor augment the priceless yearning for knowledge. "Let the youngsters wash regularly and wear what they think pleases them. Education is not held together by neckties, and besides that new styles in clothing and hairdos are right around the corner. They always are."
Naa, the Elvis look and Peggy Sue from out of Alamogordo, as with rock 'n' roll
Drew Pearson indicates that the Administration had been investigating the brother of former President Truman, Vivian Truman, causing the former President to get so angry that he had cussed out the investigator to his face in unprintable language, with the mildest name he had called him being "anthead". The investigation concerned an old Missouri feud between former Republican Congressman Jeff Hillelson of Kansas City and the former President, his kin and anyone associated with the name Truman.
Mr. Hillelson had been elected to Congress in the 1952 Republican landslide on the basis that he was a good and honest grocery clerk, when actually he had married into a fortune with the Goetz brewery. After serving an unspectacular single term in Congress, during which he distinguished himself primarily by taking a junket to Western Europe, he had lost in the 1954 election and since had been looking for a Federal job, particularly focusing on a job held by June Holloway, a lifelong friend of former President Truman, as Kansas City manager of the General Services Administration. Mr. Hillelson had been successful and Mr. Holloway was being transferred to Seattle, but only after the investigation of President Truman's brother.
Throughout his term in Congress, Mr. Hillelson had maintained a steady bombardment of Mr. Holloway, and as fast as one charge was investigated and disproved, the Congressman would raise another. After several investigations had failed, he called on then-GSA administrator Ed Mansure and insisted that there had to be some skulduggery in the Kansas City regional office. To placate him, Mr. Mansure allowed the Congressman to search the Government files for political dirt, after which the Congressman had selected 30 cases which appeared suspicious, including one involving Vivian Truman and alleged influence-peddling. Each case had been thoroughly investigated by the Administration, which had sent a special investigator to Kansas City, and after the investigator had questioned Vivian Truman, his brother hit the roof, summoning the investigator to his Kansas City office and greeting him with a verbal blast in the Truman tradition, with expletives flying so fast that the investigator could only stutter in response. In the end, the allegations proved false and both Mr. Holloway and Vivian Truman were completely cleared, with Mr. Holloway having been retained in the job and Mr. Hillelson defeated for re-election.
Mr. Mansure suspected that Mr. Hillelson had anticipated the defeat and only wanted Mr. Holloway's job. But Mr. Mansure, who had followed the merit system, had now been replaced by Franklin Floete, who had agreed in advance to hire loyal Republicans to as many jobs as he could at GSA. Mr. Holloway, being a civil service employee, could not be fired without cause, and so he would be transferred from his home in Kansas City to Seattle, in the hope that he would quit, leaving the job open in Kansas City for Mr. Hillelson.
Stewart Alsop tells of Adlai Stevenson, Senator John F. Kennedy and lesser luminaries among the Democrats engaging in soul-searching because the Eisenhower Administration had, essentially, hijacked the Democratic Party program through its "modern Republicanism".
He cites as examples three programs, one being HEW, in which the Secretary, Marion Folsom, was currently defending before Congress a program calling for a 23 percent increase in his Department's expenditures, including almost half a billion dollars for Federal aid to education. Secretary of Labor James Mitchell was defending a program, opposed by some business interests, for extending the minimum wage to 2.5 million additional workers, and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson was defending a budget approaching four billion dollars, including direct payments to farmers of more than 1.2 billion under the soil bank program.
Those ideas had all originated with the Democrats and if the Administration had not taken them over, the Democrats would be able to make political hay from the programs in the 1958 and 1960 election cycles. One liberal Northern Democrat had recently said that the Republicans had "usurped the center, and in that case the opposition can either go right or left," that Democrat choosing to go left.
Mr. Alsop questions where was left. The Democrats could demand more money for farmers and schools, and further extension of the minimum wage, as some were doing, but asking for more money when the Administration had already asked for a lot was not very dramatic. Moreover, all of the political pressure was exerted toward reduction of the budget and in a time of prosperity, Federal intervention in the functioning of the economy was not practical politics. If the opposition could go either right or left, it would also mean that the opposition might be badly split, which was occurring with the Democrats more sharply than in previous times.
There was also a sharp division on foreign policy among Democrats, a new phenomenon. Until recently, foreign policy had been an area in which Northern liberals and Southern conservatives generally agreed. But that was no longer the case. There was a new tendency toward economic isolationism in the South, being spearheaded by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, splitting the party wide open. Of the 18 Democratic Senators recorded in opposition to the Eisenhower doctrine on the Middle East, all except three were from the South or border states. Mr. Alsop indicates that the split would be further accentuated by the forthcoming battle over foreign aid, and the bitter fight to come over civil rights would further dramatize the party division.
He thus concludes that the Democrats were divided on foreign policy and did not have any important domestic issue on which to criticize the Administration, a situation in which the Republicans, provided they remained relatively unified, could have the opportunity to reach the majority in Congress again. He advises that the Republicans who were grumbling about the Administration's "modern Republicanism", therefore, ought bear those facts in mind.
The Congressional Quarterly indicates that the FCC was ready to decide on a controversial proposal for pay television, to have real meaning for owners of the nation's 40 million television sets and impacting the battle between two groups of powerful business rivals.
Most of the support for subscription television had come from the owners of three licensed experimental systems, "Phonevision" of Zenith Radio Corp., "subscriber-Vision" of Skiatron TV Inc., and "Telemeter" of International Telemeter Corp.
Most of the opposition had come from the three major radio and television networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, and the motion picture theater owners.
The previous month, an early round had been won by the opponents when the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee had agreed to put aside for the present a staff study urging large-scale tests of unsponsored fee television. But Commerce Committee chairman Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, said that he and a majority of his Committee agreed generally with the staff findings, despite the fact that they would not take any action on them, at least until the FCC made its ruling, which had been promised in the near future.
Meanwhile, the FCC was studying the staff report and could either agree with its conclusions for tests, support the subscription system or reject it. The Committee staff study urged that tests of subscription television be held in a representative cross-section of test markets over a long enough time for the promoters to set up equipment, develop programs and assess public reaction. The report had indicated that subscription television was doomed to extinction unless it could provide a new service without material damage to free television.
The three proposed systems for toll television differed in technical details but were similar in two fundamentals, that the program was coded or scrambled by the transmitting station to prevent general reception, and a device attached to the set enabled the owner, for a fee, to decode or unscramble the program. Advocates of subscription television claimed they would make available, at a fraction of box office prices, such features as current movies, plays, operas and top sports events, which were beyond the budgetary constraints of sponsored television.
The developers estimated that fees for subscription programs would vary between a quarter and two dollars each, and that the decoders would cost around $25.
But opponents to the system said that there was no real advantage to be gained from fee television, contending that it would only force the public to pay for a service which traditionally had been free, indicating that the talk about having opera and ballet in the living room was just so much talk. They also contended that the economics of subscription television would keep its producers from offering "cultural" treats of limited audience appeal, causing them instead to rely primarily on established programs appealing to the mass audience. They would seek to outbid sponsored television for top attractions, thus forcing the viewer to pay to see programs which presently were available for free.
It concludes that those arguments and others had been presented to the FCC in about 70 volumes of testimony taken during the previous two years, and at present, the commissioners were ready to weigh the evidence and determine whether to allow subscription television as an option.
A letter writer indicates that racetracks were on the increase throughout the nation and that the one he was seeing locally was on Sylvania Avenue, his place of residence, where the box car trucks were taking over, with the more trucks being present, the more damage to the avenue and danger to pedestrians took place. He thinks that in time, the trucks would take over the streets and highways, almost to that point at present. He hopes that the Legislature would "leave this idea of loading the small to get the big ones to come to North Carolina." He concludes that he and his fellow residents had bought the avenue and paid for it, and did not agree that the box car trucks ought be able to take it over while the traffic police sat still and said, "Go to it, big boy."
A letter writer indicates that as a city resident and voter, she was very interested in the upcoming May elections locally, and had thus read with great interest an article concerning the campaign of Jim Smith for the mayoralty. She says that after reading the article, she wondered why he felt that he needed the support of big political leaders, asking whether they were not the same people who had refused to support him in the previous election, in which, nevertheless, he had obtained a majority for his position on the City Council, indicating that the people had voted for him because he was an independent. She wonders now whether Mr. Smith needed the "Boys" or whether they needed him.
Framed Edition
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