The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 9, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Cairo that Egypt had rejected a Western Big Three proposal for a neutral agency to collect Suez Canal tolls and split the proceeds with Egypt 50-50, according to Egyptian information director Abdel Kader Hatem this date. He said that the Egyptian Government would not accept any such proposal because it violated Egypt's rights under the 1888 convention on the Suez Canal. The U.S., Britain and France had told U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold the previous month that they favored payment of tolls to the World Bank or some other neutral international agency when the canal would resume normal sea traffic. Under their plan, the collection agency would then provide to Egypt half of the income for operating costs and maintain the rest until the toll issue was finally settled. Prior to the closure of the canal, the tolls had grossed about 100 million dollars per year.
The President this date signed the Middle East resolution declaring the country's readiness to fight if necessary to block any Communist aggression in that region. He said in a statement that the resolution, which he had recommended to Congress two months earlier, marked "an important forward step in the development of friendly relations between the United States and the Middle East area." He called it a "further demonstration of the will of the American people to preserve peace and freedom in the world." The resolution provided him authority to use U.S. forces in the region, if necessary, including ground troops, to resist Communist aggression, and to spend up to 200 million dollars per year in financial aid for the region.
Portland, Ore., Mayor Terry Schrunk faced a lie detector test, for which he had asked from the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence on the Teamsters Union, focusing for the moment on Portland. The lie detector test would possibly be administered this date by the Secret Service, offered to support his denial that he accepted a $500 bribe, as set forth in testimony during the previous two days, to call off a raid which Mr. Schrunk, as Sheriff, had conducted on a night club on September 11, 1955. Robert F. Kennedy, counsel for the Committee, stated that he was seeking to arrange the polygraph. Mr. Schrunk, a Democrat, had sworn the previous day that he had never accepted such a bribe, though admitting that he had possibly gone to a certain water fountain to get a drink of water, with other testimony from three independent witnesses, including two of his own deputies, indicating that they had seen him approach the water fountain area and pick up an envelope, which had just been dropped by Clifford Bennett, owner of the joint in question, minutes after the Sheriff's raid of the night spot had begun. The Committee chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, said that it was apparent that someone had committed perjury during the testimony and he wanted the Justice Department to investigate the conflicts. The hearings were in recess until Tuesday.
In Miami, Fla., John Casper, anti-integrationist from Washington, executive secretary of the Seaboard White Citizens Council, had told an applauding audience of about 200 the previous night that segregationists would "maintain racial integrity, even at the point of a shotgun." Following the talk, Mr. Casper was subpoenaed to appear on Monday before a Florida legislative committee investigating the NAACP. He spoke in a nightclub from a platform decorated with U.S. and Confederate flags, indicating that segregation was "a plan of nature established by the Creator in the heavens", and that integration had destroyed nations. He said that black campaigns for integration had been led by Jews, that he was not anti-Semitic, "but facts are facts and I don't think it's bigotry to say them."
In Camden, S.C., it was reported that one of the most complicated cases in the state's history would go before the State Supreme Court on Monday, regarding the questions raised by the flogging case of Camden bandmaster Guy Hutchins as to whether it should be heard in a magistrate's court as a misdemeanor assault case or returned to the grand jury for potential further indictments, and whether the grand jury could change bills of indictments. The State Supreme Court had issued the previous day an order staying all action in the magistrate's court regarding the case of the four men presently accused of assaulting Mr. Hutchins the prior December 27, as he was on the side of the road trying to change a flat tire, with six men having approached him wearing masks, ordering him into their car, taking him to a wooded area where they proceeded to flog him, claiming that he had made pro-integration statements before a Lions Club auxiliary meeting, an allegation which Mr. Hutchins had denied. The solicitor had asked the grand jury to return indictments charging two of the six men with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Mr. Hutchins and the four others with aggravated, felonious assault, susceptible to ten-year sentences. Following two days of hearings before the grand jury, it had tossed the conspiracy charges and charged the other four men only with simple assault, a misdemeanor exposing them to a maximum of 30 days in jail or $100 in fines each. A week later, the solicitor said that he would nol pros the indictments against the four men for simple assault because if Mr. Hutchins had been a victim of such mob violence, "the alleged assailants should not be tried for simple assault... They are either guilty of assault of a high and aggravated nature, carrying a maximum sentence of ten years, or they are guilty of nothing." Defense attorneys for the four men had appeared in the clerk's office on February 28 and requested that he pass the indictments to a magistrate, but the clerk refused to hand over the warrants. Eventually, after a change of venue at the instance of defense counsel, the case appeared before a magistrate the same day that the order came down from the Supreme Court, obtained by the solicitor, to show cause why the temporary restraining order against further trial before the magistrate should not be made permanent, with the solicitor having indicated that he was going back to the grand jury with the original charges.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of the people of Camden waiting without fear, tension or timidity, while being aroused and indignant, with 700 signatures on 30 petitions having been collected to demand punishment for the men responsible for the flogging of Mr. Hutchins. The ministers, Jaycees, and the ordinary people of the community were essentially saying that they were not going to have any more foolishness in the town. But there were many unanswered questions while many citizens were speaking out for the first time, waiting with optimism the State Supreme Court's decision. After the flogging incident, tension had gripped the community, with the citizens immediately seeking to link the attack with other incidents in the community during the preceding six months, including cross burnings and the burning of black churches. Word had spread quickly that the beating of Mr. Hutchins was the work of a group of Klansmen who had gone beyond the Klan to indulge in personal vengeance, with the race issue merely raised to provide an excuse for the attack.
Mr. Scheer also reports in a separate piece that South Carolina State Senator John West, who had been publicly quiet about the flogging case, was being contested for his seat by the Camden mayor, who was defending the four accused men in the case.
In Charlotte, State Representative Jack Love had made clear his stand on Charlotte annexation, indicating, via a postcard sent to county residents the previous day, that he intended to fight the annexation proposal in the committee and on the floor of the State House. Previously he had always qualified his statements on proposed annexation. The postcard is reprinted for your edification.
Mr. Scheer reports that with his pronouncement, there was nothing for the rest of the Mecklenburg delegation to the Legislature to do but see that the measure passed without Mr. Love's support. His new stand was surprising as he had been set to vote for it.
Snow and rain had buffeted Eastern states from Maine to Maryland the previous day and early this date, extending southward to Tennessee, causing at least three fatalities. In New England, heavy rains in Massachusetts and Rhode Island were expected to end before noon this date, with the Weather Bureau forecasting heavy snow for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, possibly up to between four and eight inches in the northern portions. Tides between two and three feet above normal were predicted along the Maine and New Hampshire coasts. Heavy snow, up to six inches, had hit upper New York state the previous night, with police reporting numerous minor accidents on slippery highways, but no fatalities. In Albany, a mixture of snow and rain had fallen and in New York City, it had rained. Heavy slush on runways had caused flight cancellations at upstate New York airports and the weather forecast was for partial clearing this night, albeit with western New York expecting possible snow flurries. It had rained all of the previous day in eastern Pennsylvania, while snow had fallen in the western and central sections, with up to nine inches in some central mountain areas. In New Jersey, rain at night had begun mixing with snow early this date as the temperature had fallen toward freezing. In West Virginia, two highway fatalities had been attributed to the weather, and up to seven inches of snow had hit western Maryland and West Virginia the previous day, with more expected this date. In eastern Maryland, heavy rains had been expected to change to snow ending before noon. In western Tennessee, it had snowed the previous night, with the middle of the state scheduled to receive snow this date, but not expected to be as much as the four inches which had covered middle Tennessee on Thursday. Warm weather was forecast for this date, expected to melt this date's snow rapidly. At least one fatality was attributed to slick roads the previous day.
In Charlotte, the weekend weather promised fair skies, as would be the case throughout the state, with snow flurries in the mountains expected to stop by noon. Temperatures this date ranged between the 30's in the mountains and the 40's elsewhere across the state. Peach growers in the area through Spartanburg and the Sandhills said that there was little, if any, damage to the multi-million-dollar Carolinas crop. The News garden editor, Cora Harris, said that the present situation did not portend permanent damage to flowers and shrubs, but that the situation was unpredictable. A problem could occur, however, if a warm spell caused sap to flow in the plants, followed by a cold wave, which could kill the crops and flowers, as had been the case on March 27, 1955, with wind also being a potential damaging factor.
And that is all the weather fit to print, the rest being too slippery to handle.
In South Point, O., clouds of toxic fumes from a chemical plant's burning fertilizer pile had spread over a wide area of the community this date, threatening thousands with nose and throat irritations. Some 45,000 tons of mixed fertilizer, stored loose in a one-story building, was smoldering at the Allied Chemical & Dye Corp. plant. No one was reported to have been injured and there were no reports of anyone seeking treatment for the fumes. The toxic vapors had spread over an area as far away as Huntington, W. Va., 12 miles to the east. There was no indication from officials that the fumes could prove fatal to humans and they indicated that the fertilizer was not classified as an explosive substance, but warned that "products of the combustion were toxic."
In Montréal, Quebec, a weirdly masked young bomber, having enough dynamite to wreck a city block, was shot down by police the previous day as he threatened to blow up a bank building. He told police, "You may have me now, but at 4:45 p.m., three places in the city are going to be blown to kingdom come." There had been no explosions at that hour, but a key found on the youth had led police to a time bomb overdue to go off at Montréal's Central Station. The 21-year old was shot through the neck and wounded seriously after he had held a gun on employees and patrons of the bank branch for 20 minutes. Waving his gun, he threatened to blow up the building with 39 sticks of dynamite which were fastened to his body and attached to a wire contraption on his head. He had a nylon stocking mask pulled down over his face and was wearing a false nose, dummy glasses and a bathing cap. Police said that he carried enough dynamite to destroy the bank building and damage all of the other buildings in the vicinity. Police and bank officials said that he had driven to the bank in a stolen taxi, entered the building, ordered the employees and four patrons to stand still, then told the bank manager to lock the front door. The manager offered the gunman money if he would leave, but he opened his coat and revealed the sticks of dynamite in his overalls, telling the manager to bring two chairs and get two "police chiefs" to sit in them. He had then shoved his revolver into the back of the manager and tried to push him into the vault, but as he did so, the manager had jumped aside and thrown the alarm switch, the signal bringing police to the building within a few minutes. The gunman had then shot into the ceiling, yelling to "tell the police to drop their guns and come inside." The police had fired through the glass front of the bank, hitting the gunman. A police bomb expert dismantled the explosive device found in a parcel locker at the railway station, saying that it was still "live and dangerous" but apparently had misfired because of some mechanical defect.
In Selden, N.Y., a mother of three children was under observation after failure of an alleged plot to dynamite her husband for his $5,000 life insurance proceeds. She had been committed the previous day to the State Hospital in Central Islip, after police said she sought to hire a man to rig up a dynamite charge on the family car to kill her husband. The truck driver she had sought to hire had gone to authorities, saying that she had approached him the prior Wednesday, promising him $2,000 if he would wire the family station wagon with dynamite so that her husband would be blown up when he stepped on the starter, indicating that she had given him $22 which was needed to purchase the dynamite and wires.
As indicated in a photograph and caption, the Army's flying platform was demonstrated at Palo Alto, Calif., with the Army asserting that the platform held promise for the ability to carry many more people than the present one-man unit, based on a ducted fan principle which held the device airborne by blowing air straight down to the ground. Look for that to be the nation's new secret weapon against the Rooskies.
On the editorial page, "The 'Silent Generation' Raises Cain" indicates that disgruntled pundits had labeled America's latest crop of teenagers "the silent generation", presumably because they no longer rioted in the streets for social reform and radical politics, as during the Thirties.
But it finds that the students at both UNC and N.C. State had demonstrated an inherent talent recently for not always remaining silent and participation in riots, with all the spirit and gusto which adolescents had been exhibiting for roughly 5,000 years, albeit with their minds having been only on panties at UNC and parking at N.C. State, rather than manifestoes and Marxism.
It finds that historians might consider it a comedown, but to police, a mob was a mob and given sufficient stimulation, could become dangerously unruly. That had occurred at the ACC Tournament in Raleigh during the week when rioting students from State had started overturning parked automobiles blocking the student parking lot near Reynolds Coliseum, where the tournament was being played, slashing tires and smashing windshields, with hundreds having participated, winding up with 27 students arrested for breach of the peace after the demonstration had been quelled by police using tear gas.
It dissents from the notion that it was wrong to punish such boys for being boys in their younger years, indicating that it was old-fashioned enough to believe that youth, for its own good, as well as for the good of society, ought be compelled to respect law and order, that by winking at such episodes, society would merely encourage a prevailing disrespect for all law and constituted authority. "Young college men who criminally and maliciously destroy private property are not too young to be taught that they are fully accountable to society for their misdeeds. It is true that boys will be boys. But boyishness is not necessarily synonymous with criminality."
It does not make room for the fact that the students' ardor would be urged on implacably by the fact of the loss by the Wolfpack in the first round of the Tournament on Thursday to Wake Forest by nine points, after N.C. State had won the first three ACC Tournaments in 1954 through 1956, albeit able to play on their home floor. Added to the heartbreak was the fact that State had begun the season ranked number 8 nationally, only to finish in nowhere-land at 15 and 11. Surely this could be argued before any impartial judge in Raleigh, even if a graduate of Duke or UNC, or even Wake Forest, as a mitigating factor warranting dismissal, as everyone knows, who has ever been part of such a mob, that the better portion of wisdom will often be overcome by overwrought emotions as soon as some "other" enters the fray and provokes confrontation by saying such unseemly things as, "Go to Hell, State, go to Hell," or framed to fit any of the other eight-member conference schools, more often than not, however, being the product of the Demonic forces at work at Wake Forest, even more so following its move to Winston Salem the previous year from its suburb of Raleigh, losing much, in the process, of its Baptist underpinnings.
The previous night, incidentally, UNC had narrowly gotten by the Demon Deacons, 61 to 59, ranked 18th in the final Associated Press poll, though only fourth in the conference with a regular season .500 record, enabling the Tar Heels to achieve their 26th victory of the season without a loss, and South Carolina had continued its unlikely Tournament run by vanquishing Maryland 74 to 64, having upset Duke in the first round. South Carolina would face UNC, therefore, for the championship this night, with UNC easily coming away with the Tournament trophy, 95 to 75, and the only bid, in consequence, to the NCAA Tournament. Had they lost, despite the perfect season and number one ranking nationally, they would nevertheless have been forced to return to Chapel Hill with only a one-way ticket to Palookaville and 437 River Street as a thank you.
As one of several notes of irony from the season, Frank McGuire, after leaving UNC in 1961 to coach the Philadelphia Warriors for one season before quitting when the team moved to San Francisco, would take over as head coach of South Carolina in 1964, where he would remain until resigning after the 1980 season, with 1971 being the only other time one of his teams would win an ACC Tournament, that one having come on a fluke tip by UNC center Lee Dedmon toward the South Carolina rim, during a jump ball against the much shorter Kevin Joyce, in those days had after each tie-up, at the nearest circle, going right into the hands, in that instance, of South Carolina forward Tom Owens, who laid the ball in at the buzzer for the one-point win, 52 to 51—at which point we almost broke the television set, as UNC was then relegated to the NIT despite winning the regular season conference championship and having an overall record at that point of 22-6, being ranked number 13 in the final A.P. poll of the regular season, while South Carolina was number 6.
Mr. McGuire, who, not surprisingly, despised the whole concept of the conference tournament determining the conference representative in the NCAA Tournament, led South Carolina out of the conference at that point into independent status starting in the 1971-72 season, probably the worst move any school has made in conference history, save perhaps Maryland more recently—caveat to schools contemplating wistfully some greener grass elsewhere now.
He was, of course, routinely booed by UNC fans throughout his tenure as head coach at South Carolina whenever the two schools met in basketball, though we never did so, out of respect for his earlier accomplishments and for the fact that he had hired Dean Smith as his assistant in 1958, a fact which many fans had forgotten by the mid-Sixties or perhaps booed for that, too, at least until 1967; and for our being taught proper etiquette and respect for the past, not negating the present, even if it was somewhat difficult in the face of some rude and slightly out of their cups South Carolina and Clemson fans at the North-South Doubleheaders in Charlotte through the years—but we digress...
"The Community Loses a Leader" indicates that the civic accomplishments of Jack Blythe, who had died the previous day of a cerebral hemorrhage, could be catalogued efficiently and impressively in neat rows of newspaper print, but finds that there was a coldness in facts and figures which could not transmit the rich significance of the man, himself, and his total impact on the community. He had done many things for Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, having served ably as a State Senator, as a leader in the business world, as a molder of worthy community projects, as an active participant in the city's religious life, and as a contributor to the nation's war effort.
Those contributions had been made the more noble by the spirit in which he had provided them and the vigor and dedication with which he worked, not so easy to tabulate in the newspaper's columns, but vastly important in evaluating the worth of a citizen. His major contributions to the general welfare of the community had occurred during a critical era of transition, when leadership was needed of a particularly sensitive and enlightened type, with which Mr. Blythe had always been ready.
It concludes that his death had robbed the community of a civic leader of rare ability and dedication and that he would not be forgotten, his achievements in the interests of the commonweal to live on, with the people having lost a good friend.
"Tar Heel Talent: The Big Investment" indicates that John Motley Morehead had given his alma mater, UNC, millions of dollars in gifts, including the Morehead Planetarium, the Morehead Sundial, and with his cousin, Rufus Patterson, the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower.
It finds that the greatest gift of all, however, was the opportunity to acquire knowledge through a Morehead Scholarship, which he had endowed since 1951 for young scholars. The 32 Morehead scholars for 1957-58 included Rhodes Corbett of Charlotte, who had just been selected from among 14,000 eligible high school seniors. The award granted $1,250 per year without regard to financial need, with the object of selecting outstanding young talent scholastically, athletically and with a view to mature character and personality traits, training that talent for future leadership in the state and the nation.
It finds it an extremely worthy investment on the part of one of the state's most distinguished native sons, in its greatest natural resource, its youth, with all North Carolinians able to share in the dividends.
"When Literary Mayhem Was in Flower" indicates that the horrified indignation which had followed poet John Ciardi's spirited criticism of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's latest book of verse had merely suggested how pitifully "sissified and hypersensitive" the literary world had become. In the Saturday Review, Mr. Ciardi had stated that Mrs. Lindbergh had written an offensively bad book—"inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept any shriek as a true high-C."
It had provoked astonished reaction, such as had been common in literary circles in a more spirited era, when Thomas Carlyle had said of Charles Lamb: "A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering Tomfool I do not know… Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius!" Earlier, Dr. Samuel Johnson, asked whether he considered Robert Herrick or Christopher Smart the better poet, responded: "Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea." Sometime later, Samuel Butler had denounced Rossetti—presumably in reference to the father, Gabriele, although possibly the son, Dante—by saying: "I dislike his face, and his manner, and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends."
Mr. Carlyle had also said of Herbert Spencer that he was "the most unending ass in Christendom." He had refused to meet Charles Swinburne, saying that he did not care to be introduced to anyone "who is sitting in a sewer and adding to it." He described the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with equal derision: "He mounts scaffold, pulleys and tackle, and gathers all the tools in the neighborhood with labor, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse—and sets three bricks."
Richard Hanser had catalogued many examples of lively literary criticism in a 1953 essay titled "A Plea for Literary Mayhem", in which he related of Mr. Swinburne having told Edmund Gosse that he was quarreling with Ralph Waldo Emerson by mail, with Mr. Gosse commenting, "I hope your language was quite moderate," to which Mr. Swinburne had replied: "Perfectly moderate! I merely informed him, in language of the strictest reserve, that he was a hoary-headed and toothless baboon, who, first lifted into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, now spits and splutters from a filthier platform of his own finding and fouling. That was all I said."
It concludes that by comparison, Mr. Ciardi's criticism amounted to merely a love pat.
Here is the title poem of Ms. Lindbergh's collection of poems which Mr. Ciardi critiqued. It might be offered up to the young man who had strapped the dynamite to his chest and threatened to blow the works in Montreal. Maybe he should have taken a flight
A piece from the Washington Post & Times Herald, titled "Boring from Within", indicates that the prerogatives of Senators were imperiled, with the upper level chamber being challenged and the checks being out of balance, a plot being afoot to undermine the Congress with subway trains to the offices of the House.
It urges Senators to think of what that meant, that mere Representatives would be trampling constituents underfoot as they leaped aboard to answer roll calls, with more fathers displaying the monorail to their children on weekends and a new and reckless pace beneath the Mace as the Speaker with impunity would call and recall his mechanized millions. "Hordes of liberated MCs suddenly pouring through the Capitol, demanding joint committee sessions and luncheon dates with another body they just discovered does not reside in Heaven. (And do you realize how many congressmen there are?) Stop this madness now, senators, or it will be electric voting machines next!"
Drew Pearson indicates that the most important stock manipulation in years had been going on under the nose of the SEC, charged with policing the stock market, but holding no public hearings. The agency had however collected a lot of interesting data available to the public. The manipulation in question involved the proxy battle between Hitler-refugee Leopold Silberstein and his Penn-Texas Co. on one side, and the old-line American family firm of Fairbanks-Morse on the other. The latter, manufacturers of scales which were familiar on railroad platforms, farms and factories for half a century, had been fighting against being swallowed up by Mr. Silberstein, who had fled from Hitler to Holland in around 1932, had then gone to England, Australia, and Shanghai, before coming to the U.S. some ten years earlier, having since that time built up one of the 500 largest industrial concerns in the nation, presently trying to take over Fairbanks-Morse. Mr. Silberstein was likable and his status as a refugee had aroused sympathy and won him friends. But his financial wizardry had raised the question of whether he was practicing the same tactics in the U.S. which had given capitalism a bad name in Europe.
As head of Penn-Texas, a holding company he had developed which owned a dozen firms, most of which had defense contracts with the Government, he had drawn a $75,000 salary plus expenses and a house, also operating a company called UNO Equities Corp., of which he owned 96 percent, a brokerage firm which was actually not much more than a telephone and a set of books.
SEC records showed that UNO had sold securities which were being acquired by Penn-Texas, taking a commission on the sale, such that Mr. Silberstein was operating a brokerage company with inside knowledge available from him, which could then make money from his transactions on behalf of Penn-Texas. The only problem was that the average investor did not take the time to go to the SEC and read through the available records.
Mr. Pearson indicates that some of the transactions admitted by Mr. Silberstein, officially recorded by the SEC, were that between February 3, 1956 and January 31, 1957, he had bought for UNO 50,600 shares of Fairbanks-Morse stock for something over 2.5 million dollars, then reselling the stock to Penn-Texas, with a commission paid to his UNO Equities; that another transaction involved Mr. Silberstein's son-in-law, a customers man with the brokerage firm of Francis I. DuPont and Co.
Doris Fleeson indicates that in the current issue of Life, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, "a rising Democratic star", had expressed the view of his party and its problems, aligning him with the supporters of Adlai Stevenson, calling for "new ideas, new policies and new faces." He warned that Vice-President Nixon would not be a pushover in the 1960 election for the presidency, indicating that the Democrats had to start rebuilding their fences at present.
Mr. Stevenson, drawing on his own "bitter experience", had said the same thing. He and the Democrats who shared his views had created a new advisory committee to the DNC to help do that which Senator Kennedy was suggesting was needed if the party was to make a comeback. She indicates that Mr. Stevenson's gifts, even more than his services, ensured his influence with the party. But Senator Kennedy, who would turn 40 the following May, was one of its potential waves of the future, and what he did and said was of great importance. (Presumably, by saying so, Ms. Fleeson means no association with the dark philosophy of the Lindberghs' "America First" and "Wave of the Future" movement of the late Thirties, early Forties, to which John F. Kennedy was quite antithetical, as shown by his published Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, from 1940, not to mention his solidly internationalist stance throughout his political career.)
She posits that readers of the article in Life would find it cogent, well-reasoned and interesting, as would be expected from the author of Profiles in Courage, published the previous year. She indicates that it was filled with the historical lore the Senator had gleaned while writing his best-seller.
The young Senator was stepping out as a leader of Democratic thought and action in a manner tantamount to announcing his availability for the presidency or the vice-presidency—the latter for which he had narrowly missed the nomination in 1956, in the end losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. She says that there would be Kennedy forces at the 1960 national convention and the probability was that they would be long in forming. They would be well-heeled, not a drawback in politics, as former Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, the Senator's father, was not only very rich but had wide interests, and his years inside the Roosevelt Administration, having been chairman of the SEC and the Maritime Commission prior to becoming Ambassador, had given him a clear look at political operations. His largess to his family was well known and one of his close associates had said: "When Joe really wants anything, he takes the zipper off his pocketbook and throws it away."
Ms. Fleeson suggests that it was a fair guess that Senator Kennedy had welcomed the opportunity to pen the article for Life, affording a chance to shake off any impression that the South was unduly influential on his thinking. At the 1956 convention, Southerners, hell-bent on stopping Senator Kefauver for the nomination for the vice-presidency, had made a sudden alliance with big-city leaders who supported Senator Kennedy and had almost won for him the nomination.
She relates that during the previous weekend, a smash-hit skit at the Gridiron Dinner in Washington had portrayed Senator James Eastland of Mississippi as cracking the whip over Senator Kennedy, his caricature wearing a gray flannel suit and a baby bonnet, while the chorus sang "Baby Face". She says that while the skit was very funny, it smacked of the unfairness which Gridiron members had moaned about in the "bitter" speech of Mr. Stevenson at the same dinner, adding that Senator Eastland had no hold on Senator Kennedy. He had occasionally been independent of the Southern leadership of the Senate in ways the leadership had thought unjustified. But in the current Life article, he took pains to "goose-grease" both House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.
She indicates that a Kennedy candidacy in 1960 would have its problems, in that he was a Catholic, with it still having to be proved that such no longer mattered for a presidential nominee—it having been cited as one aspect, along with his support of abolition of Prohibition, for the loss by Governor Al Smith in 1928 to Herbert Hoover, especially in the defection of most of the South from the traditional Democratic column.
She suggests that the Senator could not get into his own book on the basis of his attitude toward Senator McCarthy, who was popular in Boston. The party conservatives would fear Senator McCarthy and its liberals found it hard to forgive him. The so-called eggheads within the party were not as powerful as some people thought, but, she concludes, they were important.
Paul Engle and Warren Carrier are briefly quoted from their "Reading Modern Poetry", indicating: "Modern poetry is full of things which many readers never saw in verse before: a brickyard, the evening compared to a patient etherized upon the table, politics, rats on a city dump, the terms of psychology. To the modern poet there is nothing in the world which cannot be put into poetry as long as it can move the reader. For the purpose of poetry is not to provide a soft bed for the tired reader to rest in when he hasn't the strength to do anything more energetic. The purpose of poetry is to expand and intensify your sense of life by giving you examples of one man's look at the intensities of his own life as the intelligence in his head has ordered them into the shape of the poem."
A letter writer from Pittsboro indicates that he was in accord with the lead editorial of March 5, indicating that Governor Luther Hodges had made a "wise decision on teacher pay increases." He says that the Governor had a grandiose complex, liking display and choosing the most inapt time for such a display, as everyone wanted more money and many people needed it badly, especially the public servants, finding that when he permitted the members of the Council of State to have a pay raise in spite of a provision in the State Constitution which prohibited same during their current term of office, he had left himself open and without defense to deny other State employees a similar raise. He says that he had supported Governor Hodges in his 1952 race to become Lieutenant Governor, but could not approve of his recent conduct and indicates that when and if he recovered his equanimity, the writer would again pull for him.
A letter writer wants two men running for the mayoral race in Charlotte so that the voters would have a choice, as well as having enough persons in the race for the City Council with the necessary business abilities so that seven persons could be elected who could form the greatest City Council of all time. He urges qualified people in the city to run for the offices.
A letter writer from Myrtle Beach, S.C., indicates that he had read with great interest columns about the danger of "mosquito republics" to the south demanding that the Panama Canal be deeded to the Republic of Panama and obtaining same, correcting that it did not belong to Panama at all, that the U.S. had built it and it belonged to the U.S., despite it having to pay both Panama and Colombia for it. He says that unless Secretary of State Dulles left the post, it could be expected that further blunders and mistakes in dealing with friends and allies would occur. He seriously doubts that either Mr. Dulles or former President Hoover ever considered the British or French as the nation's friends, as Mr. Dulles regarded the Arabian oil companies he represented as friends. He says that he would purchase the Bahamas, Bermuda and the British and French West Indies for the protection of the U.S. as outlying outposts of air warnings against attacks, giving them a liberal form of parliamentary government and congressional representation. He finds Britain determined to destroy itself through gradual attrition and loss of colonial control, but that there was nothing to compel the U.S. to do likewise. He says that in the meantime, the Panama Canal belonged to the U.S. by right of treaty and it should be permanently made plain to everyone that the country intended to hold onto it forever, that anything else would be suicide for the national welfare in wartime, that in fact, the canal was inadequate for the larger ships at present or nearly so. "Everyone seems determined to allow foreign interests to tell us that we are sucking their blood while at the same time transfusions of our money flow into their veins, financially speaking."
A letter from A. W. Black responds to a previous letter writer, finding the latter in error when he said that the "polio vaccine is making millions of dollars for those who discovered it," pointing out that Dr. Jonas Salk had received nothing from his invaluable discovery of the vaccine, his primary reward having been the satisfaction that he had made possible the complete elimination of the dreadful malady. The previous writer had predicted that polio, heart disease, cancer, tuberculosis and other catastrophic diseases would never be banished until God did so, Mr. Black finding that sentiment without merit, that medical science had already, through research and development of vaccines, conquered smallpox, typhoid, typhus fever, cholera, diphtheria, bubonic plague and thousands of other diseases which had taken a heavy toll on human life, with polio on the way out. He says that almost all bacterial diseases, such as pneumonia, which claimed at least 25 percent of its victims, had been conquered through antibiotics. All of it had been done without the aid of supernatural intervention and there was no reason to doubt that medical science would conquer all of the other major diseases as well.
A letter writer indicates that many people said that they were getting ready to go away for the weekend, but she wonders how many of them were prepared and ready for their last trip, without a ticket for heaven, having their souls saved and in God's hands so that when he called, the person could be prepared to meet him. "It's so sad to hear of so many people getting killed who didn't prepare for a sudden trip. So today as we go on and wait for the most important trip we need to prepare. For we should think about getting ready and live so that when our call comes we can answer with Christ in our hearts."
Wethinks she is advising not to trip
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.