The Charlotte News
Monday, May 6, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that the Senate chaplain this date had eulogized Senator
McCarthy as a "fallen warrior" in the cause of Americanism,
as part of his funeral service in the Senate chamber, provided at the
request of his widow, as was always available to any Senator upon the
request of a relative. The ceremony had become unusual, however, in
recent years, with the last having been in 1940 for Senator William
Borah of Idaho. The ceremony had followed a solemn funeral mass at
St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Cathedral, where a crowd of more than
1,100 had overflowed the pews—to honor the worst demagogue to
that point in American history, and probably to this day, second only
to Trump, whose political mentor was the loyal counsel to Senator
McCarthy, Roy Cohn, thus it being no coincidence that Trumpism comes
out very much akin to McCarthyism, only using "illegal
immigrants" as the dog-whistle for its effort to undermine
American democracy, producing division for the sake of it in the hope of emerging as the great savior of "democracy", just as Senator McCarthy sought to do by yelling
"Communist" and "traitor" whenever someone
disagreed with him, purely to achieve political power, stopped only
by the Senate in December, 1954, when it censured him, after which
his fall from grace had been quite as meteoric as his rise in 1950,
after making unproven and never proven allegations
The AFL-CIO ethical practices committee this date demanded that the Teamsters Union international board find out whether its president Dave Beck had misused union funds. The Teamsters were dominated by corrupt influences, according to the committee, issuing a bill of particulars making accusations against the union, itself. The principal point of the accusations was "the apparent failure of the international union to investigate" charges against Mr. Beck and other officers. The bill of particulars was provided to reporters soon after the five-member committee had begun its closed-door session with the Teamsters board, of which Mr. Beck was a member. The board had called the general charges "malicious and unfounded slander", in a statement provided also to the press as the members had gone into the meeting. In addition to Mr. Beck, the committee's bill of particulars had specifically named two Teamsters vice-presidents, Frank Brewster, head of the Western Conference of the union, and Sydney Brennan of Minneapolis, regarding the failure of the union to take action on charges against them. The report noted that Mr. Beck repeatedly had invoked the Fifth Amendment during questioning by the Senate Select Committee investigating the influence of racketeering and organized crime on the Teamsters, specifically asking him about his handling of union funds, which allegedly had gone substantially for his personal benefit. The bill of particulars recognized his right to do so, but said that the union had apparently not undertaken or proposed to undertake any investigation as to whether Mr. Beck was in fact guilty of personal corruption in the handling of the union funds and in the conduct of union affairs, and whether he had invoked the Fifth Amendment to conceal that fact.
Relman Morin of the Associated Press reports, in the first of a series of articles, regarding the relationship of the Federal Government to organized labor, indicating that to many leading figures, in and out of the unions, it appeared that organized labor was nearing a new crossroads in its relations with the Government, management and its own membership. Not since the debate over the Taft-Hartley Act, passed over President Truman's veto in 1947, had a sharper controversy arisen over questions of new legislation to meet the problems of unions and employers. Questions of how to supervise pension, welfare and union funds, the issue of whether to pass a Federal "right-to-work" law banning the union shop, the issue of penalties for corruption initiated by either management or labor, and the question of rules to govern financial contributions and political activities initiated by unions were all being looked at by Congress. Also, some state governments, in different ways, had already taken action in those same fields. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, focusing on the Teamsters, had highlighted the problems, resulting in such public statements as "betrayal of public trust", "scandal", "serious crisis", and "shock". Those statements had come from union officials describing themselves as friends of labor, as well as from many newspapers. In Detroit, Frank Rosenblum, the secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, had said: "The labor scandal will prove to be a Roman holiday period for labor haters and reactionaries… Already a barrage of anti-labor bills has been submitted in Congress and the various state legislatures." In Atlantic City, a Catholic priest had told the UAW convention: "The labor movement is confronted with perhaps the most serious crisis in its entire history… Labor is now discovering that no particular class of people has a monopoly on virtue, not even the workers…"
House Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee investigators said that some farmers had collected Federal insurance for crop failure on the same land for which they had received soil bank payments not to grow crops. In a report on their hearings made public this date, they indicated that there were other instances of "lax handling" of Federal soil bank funds the previous year. Agriculture Department officials replied that the soil bank law was passed late in the season the previous year and rushed into effect, with the result that some unusual payments undoubtedly had been made, calling it a "1956 peculiarity" which they indicated would not happen again. The subcommittee report said that in other instances, farmers were paid for not planting corn on land on which they were legally forbidden to plant corn. In some cases, farmers were paid for taking land out of one type of wheat and then were paid a premium for planting it in another type of wheat. The reports were the subject of sharp criticism from subcommittee members considering Department of Agriculture requests for a billion dollars to pay farmers during the 1958 fiscal year to place part of their surplus producing cropland in the soil bank.
In Wayne, W. Va., a 15-year old boy had told police that he had heard a noise outside his farm home the previous night, picked up a rifle and asked who was there, and, receiving no answer, heard a door slam on the family's parked car whereupon he fired, at which point his aunt was fatally hit. Being a deaf mute, she could not have heard his inquiry or replied to it. A State Police corporal said that he would investigate further this date, while the nephew was being held in the juvenile section of the county jail. The deceased aunt, a divorcee, lived with her mother, her two children and the nephew on a farm near the Kentucky border. The police corporal had been told that the family had been "nervous about thieves" recently because gasoline was stolen from their car.
In Winston-Salem, a 29-year old Baltimore mother of five children had told police and FBI agents this date that she had been abducted near her home by three men on Saturday night and released in Winston-Salem after a night-long ride in their car from Baltimore. She said that she had been forced into the car with the unidentified men about two blocks from her home the prior evening as she was walking to a movie, with all three men in the car being armed, one with a pistol and two with knives, and one having sought twice without success to assault her sexually before they released her. She had kicked the man during the second attempt and he had struck her with his fist. At around noon this date, they stopped at the entrance to Wake Forest College, and a man in the front seat had told her to get out if she did not want to get killed. She got out and ran away as the car sped away from town. She said that she had run along the road until a passing motorist had given her a ride. The motorist had taken her to his garage after she had told him of her plight, and there summoned the police. She identified the car in which the men had abducted her as a light blue and cream-colored four-door DeSoto. She said that during the ride the men had addressed each other as "Rich", "Buck", and "Lefty". She provided descriptions of each of them, indicating that their ages were approximately 17 and 18, with one of them, "Lefty", having a dark complexion, appearing to be "a Mexican".
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that a 91-cent county-wide tax rate per $100 of property valuation had been set this date by the County Board of Commissioners, with the new rate being seven cents higher than the 1956 rate.
In Minneapolis, a stratospheric balloon flight, designed to test high altitude parachute equipment, had been frustrated by a scientific snafu, ending with a crash of the equipment in a tree in northeastern Iowa this date. A spokesman for General Mills, Inc., builder of the balloon and gondola, which carried a dummy named "Sad Sam", had risen to 30,000 feet before either the gondola or the balloon or both had fallen to earth. "Sad Sam" had apparently ridden with the gondola to its end, though he had been supposed to parachute to safety. Engineers had been sent to the scene to examine the gondola's equipment. The dummy was supposed to have been used as a guinea pig in a test preview of actual manned Air Force experiments from approximately 90,000 feet to take place later in the year. But failure of the release devices had prevented Sam from bailing out. The balloon had been sent aloft from a point near St. Paul early the previous morning, with the balloon visible over Red Wing, about 55 miles from the launching point, before the skies turned dark the previous night. The point of the crash was about 140 miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Call in the Senate chaplain to provide some obsequies for poor "Sad Sam", who is more deserving of them than Senator McCarthy. A professional character assassin is no more entitled to such kind remarks at his death than an actual assassin.
On the editorial page, "Approval of the Hospital Bond Issue Is Essential to Charlotte's Well-Being" urges approval the following day of a four million dollar bond for expansion of Memorial Hospital, indicating that failure to do so would condemn the community to a time of privation during which its security and well-being would be threatened by dangerous shortages of hospital beds, operating rooms and supporting medical facilities.
After explaining the various improvements which the expansion would enable, it indicates that Memorial could no longer keep up with the demands placed on it by a growing population, and that its expansion had suddenly become the city's top civic need. It thus urges a vote of approval of the hospital bond issue.
"Ponder Well Those Ballots, Charlotte" indicates that civic responsibilities would hang heavy on the residents of the city the following day in its general municipal elections, with expansion of hospital facilities being but one of several major matters on the ballot. Bonds for street improvements, water and sewer installations, grade crossing elimination, and fire-fighting facilities had received little publicity but were of great importance, being the standard tools of municipal growth, and ought also be approved by the voters.
They would also be voting for seven members of the City Council and three members of the School Board, and it urges pondering carefully their choices.
It indicates that Charlotte was at present in an era of transition and had not yet realized the full benefits of greater growth, and was also not aware of all of the additional responsibilities of a large metropolitan area. It thus urges voting wisely the following day.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Shop Talk on 'Shop'", wonders when "shop", which it defines as "to buy", had become a transitive verb, with radio announcers advising, "Shop Bullworth's first", without ever placing a preposition in the phrase.
It realizes that it branded them as reactionary or at least conservative, but says they were determined to resist the trend, refusing to knuckle under to Madison Avenue. It says that grammar required that a verb was transitive when used with an object to complete its meaning, such as, "They fought the whole gang." A verb was intransitive when it did not have an object, when the recipient of the action was not named, such as, "They hid in the tall grass." (What were they doing there? That was the question, not whether they were transitive or intransitive, which was a wholly private affair between them.) It advises that "shop" was defined in the dictionary as "to visit shops for the purpose of purchasing or inspecting goods", and was listed as a transitive verb.
It thus wonders where the ad men were getting their authority to use "shop" as a transitive verb, without inserting prepositions. It allows that they could go on doing so as long as they wanted, but they would continue to fight them to the bitter end. "And that's enough shop talk for today."
Drew Pearson indicates that he and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had a friendly argument sometime earlier about the Nickerson memorandum on guided missiles, which Mr. Wilson had won. The Pentagon had confiscated the secret memo when Mr. Pearson and his staff had shown it to a public relations official for guidance on what could be published without harming national security. After delay and considerable effort, they had now secured another copy of the memo and would publish certain portions of it, with some parts withheld for security reasons.
Colonel John Nickerson, top officer of the Army's ballistic missile base at Huntsville, Ala., had been ordered to be court-martialed for writing the memo, though his name was not on it. Mr. Pearson had never met the colonel and had no way of knowing that he was involved, when his associate, Jack Anderson, had taken the memo to the Defense Department for approval. The memo involved Secretary Wilson's decision to concentrate guided missile development in the Air Force, shutting down the work thus far accomplished by the Army, also involving the most important potential weapon of modern warfare, the ICBM, capable of carrying a hydrogen warhead to Moscow within a half hour.
The secret memo by the colonel was long, and he begins setting it forth verbatim, starting with his recounting of the November 26, 1956 publication of a memorandum by Secretary Wilson for "Members of the Armed Forces Policy Council", related to "clarification of roles and missions to improve the effectiveness of operation of the Department of Defense." It stated the background of the intermediate range ballistic missile, indicating that in early 1955, the President's Scientific Advisory Group, ODM, had recommended that a 1,500-mile ballistic missile be developed, with the Army, Navy and Air Force expressing operational requirements for it and requesting authority to develop it. Mr. Wilson had referred the matter of the operational requirements to the Joint Chiefs for resolution.
By the fall of 1955, the Joint Chiefs were still unable to agree, and the Air Force and Navy agreed to each other's requirements but not to the Army's requirements. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur Radford, had forwarded the views of the Joint Chiefs to Mr. Wilson with his recommendations, which coincided with those of the Air Force and Navy. Secretary Wilson's basic operating procedure apparently was to listen to the man responsible and follow his advice, listening primarily to Admiral Radford for formulating his military decision. The memo indicated that Admiral Radford was a "rather bitter enemy" of the Army and had made a long series of recommendations to Mr. Wilson which were hostile to legitimate Army interests.
The Army, at Redstone Arsenal, the report continued, had the best ballistic missile team in the country and had been successful in convincing defense officials of that fact. The Army offered the services of that development team under Dr. Werner von Braun—the rocket expert who had cut his rocket-development teeth on the V-1 and V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany during the war—, to both the Navy and the Air Force, stating that a single missile would be developed which could satisfy both the land and sea-based requirements. Mr. Wilson had then overruled Admiral Radford and established two IRBM programs, the first, later named Thor, was to be developed by the Air Force, and the second, later named Jupiter, was to be developed by the Army, to meet both land and sea-based requirements.
That meant, according to Colonel Nickerson, that the Army operational requirement for such a missile had been officially recognized, and the Army had established its ballistic missile agency at Redstone Arsenal to execute the task. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for guided missiles, Dr. Eger Murphree, had determined just a few months earlier that the Jupiter design was superior to that of the Thor, and was preparing a recommendation to discontinue the Thor. But when the Secretary of the Air Force requested a general settlement of Army-Air Force differences, that latter action was discontinued, and the request of the Air Force Secretary had resulted in bringing the roles and mission question before the Joint Chiefs for a second time.
A disagreement had again arisen on essentially the same basis as a year earlier, with Admiral Radford again presenting his views virtually unchanged to Secretary Wilson. On that occasion, however, Mr. Wilson had decided to support the position of Admiral Radford, resulting in the November 26 memorandum, stating that the land-based IRBM system would be the sole responsibility of the Air Force. The recommendations of Dr. Murphree, along with those of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for research and development, the Secretary of the Army, Wilber Brucker, and General Maxwell Taylor, Army chief of staff, were all ignored.
The second section of the memo was titled "Policy Changes Dissipate Effort", indicating that the approval of the Army's operational requirements in November, 1955 and its withdrawal the same month was an unbusiness-like reversal of policy, according to Colonel Nickerson. The Jupiter program had been set up on the highest national priority, along with Thor and the two ICBM programs, to which 35 million dollars of Army funding had been obligated in fiscal year 1956 and 150 million in fiscal year 1957 was being obligated. The colonel indicated that it took six or seven years and about 500 million dollars to develop a large guided missile, and that it was obvious that major policy reversals would delay the availability date of the weapon and waste large amounts of money. "The Government must know what it wants before it starts such a program and must adhere steadfastly to the objective throughout the long period required to do the work."
Doris Fleeson tells of wholesale changes in the Cabinet being imminent, with no more than two or three current members still to be around by the end of the year, with a new Cabinet to be installed fairly quickly provided appropriate replacements could be found. But that was proving to be a difficult task, as there were few prominent applicants coming forward to seek the jobs of such men as Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey and Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson. The heads of corporations, who got along so well with the President on the golf courses, seemed content to maintain their relationship only in that personal realm.
An effort would be made to reduce the median age of the Cabinet and the White House staff was seeking only "modern Republicans", that is people subscribing to the President's philosophy of government, narrowing the field. The Administration was aware that the battle between the left and right-wing elements of the Republican Party already had begun and that the fight, which would reach a climax but not an end during the midterm elections of 1958, would be hard. No divided opinion within the Cabinet was desired.
The difficulties faced by the President in recruiting Cabinet members was repeated at lower levels in the Government, as Cabinet changes would almost automatically trigger changes further down the chain of authority. Undersecretaries, deputy secretaries and assistant secretaries had proliferated in recent years, with scores of such positions in the Federal Government at present, many of those jobs having proven to be almost as difficult to fill appropriately as the top positions.
The situation was in part a reflection of the lame-duck status of the President. President Truman, in the latter months of his last term, had similar difficulties in filling important jobs, and often complained of his inability to attract top people to high Government posts, often having to accept lower level choices, producing a consequent decline in the quality of government. The President's problems in that regard appeared to be starting earlier than for his predecessor.
Some of the problems of filling the top jobs could be solved by promotions from within and it was quite likely that Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles would succeed Secretary Wilson. But it was unlikely that Treasury Undersecretary W. Randolph Burgess would succeed Secretary Humphrey, as there was an effort afoot to find a replacement for the latter.
Secretary of State Dulles, who had no known ideological differences with the Administration, as some of the other members of the Cabinet had, was known to have planned to have made 1957 his last year of service, and his leaving would be easier if his policy for the Middle East proved successful, permitting him to part on a note of triumph. She posits that only time would tell whether his Undersecretary, Christian Herter, who would be his obvious successor, would be tapped to fill the post. (Secretary Dulles would remain until his death in 1959, and Mr. Herter would succeed him.)
The only Cabinet positions which had not been the subject of recent speculation were those of Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, who had fit within the new Republicanism without much effort, and Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare Marion Folsom.
In addition to the Cabinet jobs, others also would open up soon on the independent boards and commissions, and filling those would be equally troublesome. On May 18, for example, a directorship on the TVA would become available, enabling the President to make his second appointment to the three-man board and bring it under the firm control of the Administration, but the Administration was aware that a fight was in store should the appointee be displeasing to TVA advocates in Congress, and so far no agreement had been reached on a nominee.
Robert C. Ruark, in Raleigh, says
that he was in the peculiar position of having written several books
without ever plugging them, and had also something to do with movies
without ever plugging them, was not hunting anything at the moment.
He says he had written a bestseller a couple of years earlier, which
had become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, had made the cover of
Newsweek, had an enormous sale in paperback edition, and was
also bought by MGM, which had made it into a movie of the same title,
"Something of Value"
He says that MGM had paid him a lot of money for the movie rights and he had no further financial interest in the movie, regardless of whether it did well at the box office or not. He indicates that having said that, he felt free to review the movie, the screenplay of which had been written by Richard Brooks, who also directed the picture, with hundreds of actors. It dealt with a black-and-white problem with less than pure objectivity, being about the Mau Mau in Kenya, and on his presentation insofar as his experience with it and the lack of experience by MGM. He says that the movie was not the book as he had written it, but that no movie was as the author had presented it. He nevertheless finds it a daring picture, the most daring he had ever seen, as it made very little effort to cater to audiences, either black or white, and broke most of the rules concerning pandering to an audience.
He indicates that there were times when he would have hurt the director bodily for what he had done to his book, but now admitted that Mr. Brooks was possibly the best director in the business at present, whether he stuck to the script or not. He had even avoided the usual African-movie cliché, by refusing to use color film, as he found it to be "a black-and-white problem, so we might as well shoot it in black-and-white."
In the book, Mr. Ruark had sought to convey the idea that both the white man and the black man in Africa were wrong and that violence was not the answer, that brutality brutalized everyone, regardless of color, with very little being solved in the process. Mr. Brooks had taken up that theme and made the author's point very well.
The movie had been shown to a predominantly black audience in New York and to an all-white audience in Raleigh, within the anti-integration belt. Mr. Ruark found it most amazing from those pilot audiences that neither the Northern black attendees nor the Southern white attendees objected to the gentle idea that both sides of the same argument could be wrong while still possessing individual, if misguided, correctness.
He says he had asked MGM to show the movie in the South in advance of its formal opening in New York, as a favor to some friends and also to see whether or not anyone who felt strongly on racial problems would be in favor of lynching the author. He had found that the movie could be shown anywhere in the South without a riot or incitement to mayhem, and that it might even have a salutary influence on the whole problem of racial antagonism within the country. Both audiences had agreed that people could not "kill each other into loving togetherness."
Most also agreed, as he did, that
the young actor, Sidney Poitier, was the best actor, "weight for
age, in the world." (It is too bad that Mr. Ruark would die in
1965, just a couple of years after Mr. Poitier had been the mainstay
of "The Lilies of the Field", for which he would win the
Academy Award for Best Actor in 1963, probably tied for his best
picture to that point with "The Defiant Ones", for which he
would be nominated for Best Actor, to be released in 1958, and just
about three months before the release of "The Bedford Incident"
in October, 1965, and a couple of years before he would hit his best
stride in "In the Heat of the Night" and "Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner", though, oddly, after his powerful
performances in those two films in 1967, his parts in his remaining
films seeming to lack the same vitality and seldom rising above more
than mediocrity. He would get his first recognition as a major
serious actor in 1957 with the release of "The Edge of the
City", though having turned in a credible performance, among a
host of young actors who would go on to have good careers, in
"Blackboard Jungle", also written and directed by Mr. Brooks, and before that, in 1950, "No Way Out". In any event, because Mr. Ruark's
drinking habit eventually got the better of him and led to his
relatively young death at age 49, he never got to see all of the best
work of Mr. Poitier, whether dealing, strictly, with racial and civil rights issues,
with which he became quite identified
Mr. Ruark begs the readers' indulgence for having dealt with a personal commodity, "but a conflict between black and white certainly seems to be in the public domain, and I just happened to write a book about it, and the movies made it. And if it'll be of any aid and comfort to the moviemakers, nobody slept through it."
Bowling Green... sewing machine
A letter writer from Roanoke, Va., indicates that for the first time since the progressive income tax rates had begun to soar 25 years earlier, a bill had been introduced in Congress which would bring major reform to the income tax structure, introduced by Representative Antoni Sadlak of Connecticut, to reduce individual and corporate income taxes to a maximum of 42 percent, through an annual reduction made over five years, which he further details. As the president of a varnish company, he finds it a common sense approach to tax deduction and urges the Congress to schedule open hearings on the bill, rather than settling it in a political caucus.
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