The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 25, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Kansas City that a panel of experts meeting at Rockhurst College, including Dr. Edward Teller, University of California nuclear physicist popularly known as the "father of the H-bomb", Col. Thomas Lanphier, Jr., decorated World War II fighter pilot and vice-president of one of the nation's leading aircraft and missile makers, the Convair division of General Dynamics Corp., and Lt. General James Doolittle, the famous airman and war hero who presently was chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, had been asked the hypothetical question that if the Soviets were to blow up a small Pacific island with an ICBM and then demand the surrender of the United States, could it reject the demand and defend itself. Col. Lanphier had replied that he believed the question would be asked the American people in the ensuing three or four years—which, it might be noted, would embrace the Formosa crisis of 1958 and nearly the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—adding that he believed that if the country continued at the present rate in its missile development, it would not be strong enough to resist. General Doolittle said that he would want to know whether the Russians had one missile or thousands, that if they had a limited number, the U.S. could protect itself, that if they had thousands and the U.S. had no ICBM's, the answer would have to be considered carefully. Dr. Teller said that it was important that the U.S. construct passive defense systems such as shelters so that the country would not be terrorized completely by such a demand, that in every war there was considerable uncertainty on both sides as to who would win. He also indicated that there was little doubt that if the Russians had an intercontinental ballistic missile, they also had the capacity to figure out how far it must travel to hit any given target in the U.S. He said that the Russian earth satellites had undoubtedly provided them with data needed to make accurate measurements of the earth, impossible to make from the surface. He indicated that it was logical that the Russians would know by calculations from their satellites how far it is, within a very small margin of error, from a point in Russia to a point in the U.S.
Jimmy Hoffa, president-elect of the Teamsters, whose presidency was temporarily on hold because of a Federal District Court order based on the claim by 13 rank-and-file members from New York who brought suit contending that the election of Mr. Hoffa had been rigged at the union's Miami Beach convention the previous October, had said that he would give "serious consideration" to the views of three Court-appointed monitors who would oversee the scandal-ridden union, to be named the following Tuesday as part of a compromise settlement of the lawsuit. Under the compromise, Mr. Hoffa would be permitted to take office while the monitors made sure he followed the straight and narrow. They would report back to the Federal District Court judge. The union was to select one of the monitors, the members who had brought the suit to pick another, with the third chosen by the other monitors or by the judge. Mr. Hoffa said: "We're going to run the union where everybody can see it. The monitors are only advisers. They're limited as to certain things they can say or do. The ordinary operations of the union don't come under their review. But certainly as long as they'll be here we'll give serious consideration to any views or recommendations they may bring to our attention." There was nothing in the settlement to force Mr. Hoffa or the Teamsters to follow any advice provided by the monitors, but a complaint from the monitors to the judge could bring to public attention practices which were not in accordance with the law or union by-laws.
In Detroit, the UAW, it was reported, might strike one of the big-three automakers two months ahead of the time when talks were scheduled to get underway on new contracts, as the UAW executive board the previous day approved the calling of a strike at Chrysler's Detroit Dodge main plant in a dispute over layoffs and work standards, the union serving a five-day strike notice on Chrysler Corp. The threat was announced during the final session of the union's special three-day convention which had approved 1958 bargaining demands, including a profit-sharing plan and setting up of a 50 million dollar strike fund. The 3,000 delegates to the convention had been adopting a resolution regarding how to deal with what the union called "speed-up practices" in the auto industry when UAW vice-president Norman Matthews had announced that they would have a showdown at Chrysler. Mr. Matthews, director of the union's Chrysler department, said that a strike at the Dodge main plant would shut down all Chrysler plants, as that plant was a major supplier of parts for all Chrysler divisions.
Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois said this date that it definitely would be the fault of Congress if something was not done during the year about proposals for determining presidential disability. It, in fact, would not be done until the 25th Amendment was passed by Congress in 1965 and ratified by the states in 1967.
In Burlington, N.C., it was reported that a Klan rally would apparently occur as scheduled this night, but with a different group of Klansmen sponsoring it. Reporter Howard White of the Burlington Times-News said that he was convinced that the original sponsors, from the Burlington-Reidsville area, had withdrawn and that Klansmen from Greensboro would present the rally. The rally site had also been changed to a field four miles west of Burlington on U.S. 70A. Mr. White said that a man, identifying himself as a Klansman from Rock Hill, S.C., and who gave his name as James Shaw, had telephoned him this date and told him, "There had better be no Indians or Negroes or anyone else at the meeting to cause trouble or they will be taken care of." He said that Robert Hodges of Columbia, S.C., secretary of the Association of Ku Klux Klans in South Carolina, would attend and had predicted a large turnout, some from Little Rock, Ark., Dallas, Tex., and Alabama. The Rock Hill police chief said, however, that his office had no record of Mr. Shaw and that he was not known to him. The Alamance County Sheriff in Burlington said that he would attend the meeting, to be held on private rented property, and the Highway Patrol said that it would have extra men standing by. The Rev. James Cole of Marion, S.C., who had led the Klan gathering the prior Saturday night near Maxton in Robeson County, precipitating an armed reaction by Indians of the area who had been harassed by Klan activity during the previous week, with the burning of at least two crosses on the private property of Indians, a rally which culminated in the Klan members running away, had said the previous day that the rally would go on as scheduled in Burlington, though he would not be present because he had been threatened with arrest by the Robeson County solicitor if he set foot in North Carolina, as he was charged with inciting a riot the prior Saturday, facing extradition from South Carolina for same. Doubts had been raised the previous day that the Klan would hold its scheduled rally in Burlington, about 100 miles north of Maxton. Walter Anderson, director of the State Bureau of Investigation in Raleigh, had announced that he had information that the owner of the rally site had withdrawn from the plans and that the rally had been canceled. But Mr. Cole, when so informed of Mr. Anderson's statement, said that the meeting would go ahead. At the abortive Maxton rally, countless rounds of ammunition had been fired, but only four persons had been slightly injured. State police had dispersed the crowd with tear gas and then hustled the Klansmen away from the scene.
In Hong Kong, it was reported that three American mothers who had spent three weeks visiting their sons, imprisoned by the Communist Chinese Government for allegedly spying, had arrived by plane in Canton today en route home from Peiping.
Near Selmer, Tenn., one crewman was killed and at least seven persons injured this date when the last six cars of a Chicago-bound Illinois Central passenger train had derailed.
In Jackson, O., gas from a blast furnace had overcome 24 men the previous night, with one of them dropping 15 feet from a platform and fracturing his skull.
In Nancy, France, a 37-year old priest had been convicted this date of killing his young mistress and her unborn child, and was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.
In Hickory, N.C., a controversial beer-wine election had been held this date, climaxing two years of debate on the subject. Presently, Catawba County allowed sale of beer and wine and had ABC stores, but the dry forces had petitioned for the referendum.
In Goldsboro, N.C., a tenant farmer, charged with murder, followed his six-year old daughter to the witness stand and denied the little girl's testimony that he had shot to death both his wife and mother-in-law. The 31-year old man was on trial for murder in the mother-in-law's death and had told the jury the previous day that his wife had been shot and killed by his father-in-law while the latter was aiming at him. The father-in-law, mother-in-law and the man's wife had all died from shotgun blasts on November 1 in the farmhouse home which the two families shared near Goldsboro. The defendant testified that after his wife was shot in the back, he got his own shotgun, that his father-in-law was still pointing his weapon at him and he then fired twice at his father-in-law. The six-year old daughter had testified that she saw her father shoot her mother and grandmother, then wipe blood from the floor and carry her mother's body to a bed. The jury was expected to receive the case late this date. Two agents of the SBI had testified late the previous day that they were given three shotgun shells to examine, one of them testifying that one of the shells was a 12-gauge no. 4 buckshot, that another was a 12-gauge, not indicating the type, and that a third was a 16-gauge. They indicated that an autopsy had disclosed that all three persons had been killed by no. 4 shot. Previous testimony in the trial had been that a 12-gauge shotgun had been found near the father-in-law and that the defendant had used a 16-gauge shotgun. The agent said that the father-in-law had been killed by a blast which struck him in the top of the head and had gone down into his shoulder, indicating that for the shot to have taken that trajectory, the man had to have been bent over or the slayer had to be towering over him.
In Sanford, N.C., an American Legion officer described by a friend as "kind of disgusted" with business conditions, was charged with stealing $13,000 of Legion funds. The sheriff said that a warrant had been issued for the finance officer of the Legion post, accusing him of disappearing nine days earlier with the money from the post's building funds. The wanted man had been born in Spain and was a charter member of the post, having served in the elected post of finance officer for the prior four years. He had owned an auto parts service and the man left in charge of that business quoted him as saying that he was going to Florida, indicating that he had not made any money in the business in a year, that he had $12,000 owing to him on the books and seemed kind of disgusted. The man had last been seen in Charlotte on January 15 where he had sold his car and told acquaintances he was going to Florida. Legion officials said that all post financial records had vanished, but Legionnaires had discovered a shortage of $6,500 from each of two building funds after the wanted man had failed to provide his regular financial report the prior Monday. He may actually be headed for California, with a planned stop off at California Charlie's to trade cars again, only to find that heavy rains would force him to stop off at a wayside motel for the night, where all the embezzlers wind up bogged down with car trouble.
In Charlotte, the "mild epidemic" of flu and influenza-like disease had picked up steam during the current week, according to the weekly sample taken by the City-County Health Department. There had been 1,860 cases of sickness reported in an incomplete check of City and County schools, physicians' offices and local businesses, with 34 schools and four physicians' offices not included. The wave of illness, characterized mainly by intestinal symptoms rather than respiratory ailment, had first been noticed statistically the previous week when 1,465 cases had been reported in the spot-check. The figures for the previous two weeks had been 184 and 866, respectively.
Harassed Charlotte residents, drenched by heavy rains and tossed by winds ranging up to 36 mph, were receiving relief this date, as the weather man was forecasting no further rain until Tuesday. The previous day's downpour of 1.81 inches of rain had been the heaviest to hit the city since August 18, 1957, when 1.9 inches had fallen, that having been the most in a single 24-hour period during 1957. The rain the previous day had caused flooding in low-lying areas of the city. The low the following day was forecast to be 28 during the morning, followed by a high of 50, with this date's high forecast to be 52, 11 degrees above the 41 high reading of the previous day, with a morning low of 36. It was forecast to be "quite cold" through Wednesday, with the chance of rain on Tuesday. In the western portions of the state, the rain had turned to snow, with about 7 inches reported on the ground in the Grandfather Mountain area. Up to 20 inches of snow had fallen at Jamestown, N.Y., and in the western part of that state up to a foot was reported. The heaviest snowfall in Pennsylvania apparently had been in Erie County, reporting 13 inches.
The News would start the "Family Guide" on Monday for guidance of family financial planning. It urges readers not to miss it, as they would have never read anything quite so helpful.
On the editorial page, "Organized Labor's Cancer Is Curable" indicates that organized labor's high command had winced visibly when the President had outlined his ten-point program to eliminate labor-management "corruption, racketeering and abuse of trust and power."
The proposed measures were stern but fell far short of the rigorous demands of those "who would boil the entire trade union movement in its own perspiration". It finds that there were rational and appropriate limits to government interference in union activities and wisdom counseled forbearance and restraint in enacting controls, with care to be taken not to handcuff the unions in the financing of strikes or organizational campaigns, even if certain legislative safeguards could reasonably be provided to protect the rank-and-file from a Dave Beck of the Teamsters, who sought to plunder their contributed dues and set-aside welfare and pension funds for the benefit of the union officers.
While protection was admirable in principle, it might need some tweaking to perfect in practice. The President's insistence that union financial reports be filed with the Labor Department, that welfare fund operations be fully disclosed and that most union officers be elected by secret ballot, was not an unreasonable demand. The merged AFL-CIO had made a vigorous and intelligent effort to infuse a healthier moral climate into the labor movement, but its policing efforts were necessarily limited to its own members while the public interest required more assurance.
A program such as that of the President would not destroy the labor movement, as only the unscrupulous manipulators would have anything to hide. The self-seekers, political hucksters and financial charlatans present within trade unions had raised a moral challenge as fundamental as that raised by the "robber barons" which organized labor had battled from the late 19th Century into the early 20th Century. They had succeeded largely because of the docility of the rank-and-file and the ignorance of the public. The necessary reforms were simple but fundamental in their application, intended to place the spotlight of publicity on the operations which had given the crooks their opportunities in the past.
James B. Carey, president of the Electrical Workers, had said recently to a labor audience that "the American labor movement today is faced with a moral and ethical problem as crucially important as the problem that produced the CIO and the second 'American revolution' in the mid-1930's. The cancer of labor racketeering, of corrupt unionism … threatens the very near future of our development as a free labor movement."
The piece finds him correct, that when the cancer was removed and when appropriate preventive measures were undertaken to prevent its return, organized labor would be much healthier.
"Whatever Became of 'Individualism'?" indicates that many credited the coinage of "rugged individualism" to former President Hoover, with Bartlett's Familiar Quotations attributing it to one of his 1928 campaign speeches.
But the spirit of rugged individualism, if not the phrase, itself, dated back much further, as the most American of all revolutionary theories, emphasizing the worth of human individuality and rights as against the authority of the group. Mr. Hoover had associated it solely with laissez-faire economics, but it was more properly something broader and bolder, the spirit of democratic constitutionalism at its rough and ready best.
Poet Robert Frost and former Secretary of State for external affairs in Canada, Lester Pearson, winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize, had both voiced concern for the health of individualism within the U.S. and the world. Mr. Frost had proposed the banding together of all men and women in the world who wished to stamp out "togetherness", not the type of good company of free men, but the "huddleness" of what David Riesman would call the lonely crowd. Mr. Frost had indicated that the glory of America had been its pioneers who celebrated "separateness" and were not always seeking security.
Noting that Soviet policy was founded on compulsion rather than consent, Mr. Pearson had asked the question: "Are we sure that our own social purpose, derived from the right of the individual to make his own choice, is steady, strong, constructive, and based on enduring values?" He said that the very word "freedom" had lost some of its earlier, angry meaning of stern and sturdy resistance to pressures and persecutions from men or mass opinion. He said: "The current popularity of that awful expression 'the organization man' and the vogue for dissecting our motivations and desires so that we may fit into a group, whether as executives of a corporation or as purchasers of soap, are depressing portents. Surely we are not going to escape total state control in order to seek security in the 'big organization' type of social and economic conformity."
The piece suggests that there was little to fear if individualism and freedom could somehow be resurrected in their earlier forms, that the Soviet system could offer nothing to match them as they contained a dynamism of the spirit which was all-conquering. It finds that there was no substitute for a society of free individuals, refusing to be pushed around, but consecrated to a worthy purpose and willing to accept the disciplines, the sacrifices and the concentrated effort necessary to achieve it. Individualism might no longer exist in its economic form, but remained the best test of social striving in the country. "Americans understand that while the social ends must be collective, the end product must be the fulfillment of individual life. When that understanding is dulled or diluted by 'huddleness' and blind conformity, America has lost the best security of all."
"On the Beach, Sights for Sad Eyes" indicates that when it was growing up, popular male attire for the beach included a one-piece, chest-covering model complete with porthole effect on either side, made of wool and being quite itchy. It came with beach shoes of rubber and a sailor hat with a snapped down brim.
After viewing the current dictates of women's beach fashions, it wishes it had saved its red and black striped model, long since ventilated by moths to a point beyond modesty. It finds female fashion for the water during the season to be straight from somebody's sandcastle in Disneyland. "There is only one reason the sack or bag has not blossomed in full for the beach. The wearer would come from the ocean wearing about 20 gallons of water."
It finds that it would be difficult to note female architecture, whether at home or on the strand, anymore. It predicts, therefore, a rebirth of the men's "bag-seated wool model with the built-in itch. And some enterprising manufacturer could even run a series from 'special' through 'roadmaster' which would have four portholes per side."
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Winter Rain", tells of rainy days in winter in different parts of the country, as if you did not already know of it.
We take a moment to comment on the absurd and stupid lies being put forth, some of which by people who ought to know better, regarding the recent fires in the Los Angeles area, continuing to seek to politicize the matter by suggesting that responsible officials are to blame because they should have been able to predict the fire and do something about it in advance. That is easy enough to say, but rather difficult to accomplish. It is not, as El Presidente suggests, a matter of "releasing the water", not at all an issue, as His Dumbness would know if he would bother to read or investigate without an eye strained on his own political aggrandizement and Fox Propaganda listeners.
It is also not a matter of simply sweeping away the brush and undergrowth, as that can precipitate mudslides in areas prone to it, to which many of the rolling hills of California, without large stands of trees as in the East, are susceptible. One "fix", seeming simple to the unthinking, can lead to another disaster in time if the "fix" is undertaken without proper study of its potential environmental effects. Moreover, because of the vast amount of acreage involved and because the fires often begin in isolated areas from wind-blown electrical towers causing knocked down high-tension wires to strike dry vegetation below, there would be no practical way to clear out the dry undergrowth. That which is dry this year might become green and lush the next, preventing mudslides. Cut it and there is denuded earth which eventually will slide in heavy rains.
El Presidente needs to realize that a large part of California receives no rain at all for about half the year, sometimes, as in the current La Nina year around Los Angeles, very little or none since last spring. That leads to dry conditions which are not seen in the East. The dry conditions work to create kindling for fires, which spread fast in Santa Ana winds after being sparked by a small electrical fire. El Presidente and his stupid followers need to spend more time studying the issue and less time listening to ill-informed actors toadying to El Presidente and spreading misinformation among the already stupid little Nazis who support El Presidente. For it is getting old, fast.
You stupid, little Nazis would be better served just to shut up and tend your own gardens, by driving less, buying a vehicle with a smaller carbon footprint than your huge pickup truck which you drive proudly and empty to your Nazi rallies with El Presidente, which contributes as much to the Los Angeles fires as going out and striking a match in the remote, dry areas. Stupid is as stupid does…
Drew Pearson indicates that Ohio had adopted a 20-year minimum sentence for anyone selling narcotics, as explained by drug enforcement commissioner Harry Anslinger, commenting that as a result, narcotics addiction had almost been ended in that state. He advocated equally tough laws in other states such that he might not have anything left to do. He paid tribute to former Governor Frank Lausche, now in the Senate, and Governor C. William O'Neill, the former State Attorney General under Governor Lausche, both of whom had cracked down vigorously on narcotics. Mr. Anslinger had held high office about as long as any public servant in Washington, beginning with the Hoover Administration in 1930, and had a chart which Mr. Pearson suggests ought make some states think twice about law enforcement.
The chart showed that New York City had 43 percent of all narcotics addicts in the country, that Illinois ranked second with 15 percent, practically all of whom were in Chicago. California was third with 11 percent and Michigan, fourth, with 6 percent.
Mr. Anslinger had said that when the addicts started going from Ohio to Pennsylvania, Governor George Leader of the latter state had put through a law with a tough penalty for pushers, after which they had stayed out of Pennsylvania, then moving to Detroit and Chicago instead. He said that he hoped that the people of Michigan and Illinois would wake up.
Mr. Pearson notes that the pusher was responsible for most narcotics addiction.
Mayor Robert Wagner of New York was so surrounded by secretaries that he would not take telephone calls from the Senate.
The Movers Conference of America had horned in on Washington's tribute to one of its grand old men, Arthur Clarendon Smith, whose motto was "don't make a move—without calling Smith," one of the most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats in Washington. But many Republicans had turned out to pay homage to him, including the Treasurer of the United States, Ivy Baker Priest. The Conference wanted to make it clear that the total annual business for all moving companies in the U.S. in 1958 would approximate a billion dollars, one reason being the new multi-billion-dollar highway program of the Administration.
In New York, a prominent railroad brotherhood leader was having lunch with A. E. Perlman, president of the New York Central, who bemoaned the slump in rail revenues. The brotherhood leader had asked what the President had done for the railroad industry by putting across the highway bill for truckers, prompting Mr. Perlman to go to Washington shortly thereafter to seek remedial railroad legislation.
We shall never forget the moving van
operator, when our family moved in 1958, telling how the whole load
of the family belongings had nearly fallen into the river below when
they had crossed a particularly shaky bridge
Remember President Joe Biden and his bipartisan infrastructure measure next time you make it across a bridge without it feeling rickety.
Marquis Childs tells of the present strenuous effort to reorganize the Department of Defense and the military establishment having stirred a political storm reminiscent of 1947 when the Department had been established.
Following the talk of Admiral Arleigh Burke at the National Press Club, in which he had attacked the concept of a single chief of staff for all of the services, the White House had placed a censorship directive on all of the services, with the Assistant Secretary of Defense Murray Snyder, formerly an assistant White House press secretary, having ordered one of the top commanders to cut out half of the speech he had planned to make. The commander wanted to know whether he was thus prevented from making a speech defending the present law and set-up of the Joint Chiefs, to which the response had been that he was correct, that the law was not going to be around much longer. For the particular veteran of two wars with four stars, there was no recourse except to accept his censored speech. Whether the censorship would work was another question, for the Navy was as aroused at present over what Navy spokesmen insisted was an attempt to impose a dictatorial system, as it had been ten years earlier.
They cited two suppressed reports which they believed sustained their argument for continuing the system which gave each of the three services a voice in determining plans and strategy under a non-voting chairman of the Joint Chiefs. One was a report of a group of officers from three services named by Joint Chiefs chairman, General Nathan Twining, the prior early December to evaluate the present method. According to the Navy, the report had found that on the whole it was working well, and General Twining tended to agree. But the report had been concealed under a top-secret stamp. The second suppressed report had not even been seen by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, chairman of the Senate Preparedness subcommittee. It was Joint Strategic Objectives Plan, 1961, showing that each service had separately reported beginning in 1956 that with anticipated budgets and present defense planning, they could not assure the security of the country in 1961. The Navy cited the failure to plan sufficient submarine construction to counter Soviet construction of 400 to 500 submarines. The Army cited the failure to equip diminished divisions with modern weapons, and the Air Force indicated cutbacks in production of bombers at the same time that missile development was being held back.
J-SOP-61, as the plan was called, was said to have angered the President's military advisers who offered it as a prime example of the failure of the three-man chief of staff system. But the Navy implied that the plan really showed what happened when military budget ceilings were imposed for reasons of economy and politics.
The President, with considerable support from the Army and the Air Force, believed that the public was fed up with the interservice rivalries and was ready to accept a drastic reorganization. His reference in a speech in Chicago to his determination personally to bring about that reorganization had drawn perhaps the most applause of the evening.
The present intent was to send to Congress, under the reorganization power of the Hoover Commission, a comparatively moderate plan which would create a military planning staff independent of the Joint Chiefs and responsible to the Secretary of Defense. But to those in Congress who were implacably opposed to the single chief of staff, it was considered to be only the first step toward the "Prussian system". Foremost among those in opposition was Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who said with the confidence of years of experience that he could block such a plan if the President sent it to Congress. In agreement with the opposition to the plan was the ranking Republican on the Committee, Leslie Arends of Illinois.
Mr. Childs concludes that the political battle lines were thus drawn for a contest which was certain to explode into the headlines regardless of the efforts to suppress it.
Walter Lippmann indicates that White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, by his speech in Minneapolis the prior Monday, had made it more difficult for the President to enact his program, because the diminished strength of the President had made necessary an unusual and likely unprecedented delegation of powers to the White House staff, led by Mr. Adams. There was a complete contradiction between the speech of Mr. Adams and that of the President the same evening, raising questions of how faithfully the President's will was being carried out by those to whom he had delegated powers. On an issue of national importance, Mr. Adams had directly contradicted both the letter and spirit of the President's speech. If that could occur publicly, the question arose as to what was going on in private.
At present, the Government was being carried on under a special dispensation which could work only if there was a general and complete confidence in it. There had to be confidence that the officials who exercised the President's powers vicariously were men who knew him so well that they could act as he would act if he had the time and energy to do so. There would be demoralization from political uproar about who exercised power in fact if that confidence were seriously undermined.
The outward evidence of the country's confidence had been that Congress, the press, and the public had accepted the theory that Mr. Adams and his assistants were confidential agents of the President who could not be questioned by committees of Congress or in press conferences. Such immunity from inquiry rested on the principle that their relations with the President were confidential and that their acts were to be treated as his acts. For those acts, the President was accountable to the people, but his agents were accountable only to him. (Note for stupid little Trumpies who do not read so well: Mr. Lippmann is talking about White House staff, as distinguished from Cabinet personnel in charge of executive departments, in need of active Senate advice and consent for confirmation, per the Constitution, for a reason.)
It was a complex theory which had been developed to meet an unusual difficulty, making it not easy to continue to believe in it, given the President's absences from the White House and the great amount of evidence that he was not always well-informed. The country could not continue believing in it if it turned out that the confidential agents of the President were playing politics on their own, contrary to the President's political beliefs. The position which Mr. Adams occupied and the immunity from inquiry which he claimed meant that he should not make speeches at all or nourish any political ambitions of his own, and that he should acquire or at least simulate what had once been called a passion for anonymity.
Mr. Lippmann ventures that the answer to the substance of the question of whether defense was a legitimate party question was that honesty would be the best policy, it thus being the duty of the Democrats in Congress to examine the Administration's defense proposals in light of the best intelligence available and of the testimony of experts. It was not only their right but their duty to decide whether the Administration's program was adequate and how it could be improved. The Democrats would be expected to develop their own program of amendments which Congress could then debate.
Partisanship might show itself in the effort to lay blame as to who was responsible for the country falling behind in the armaments race, and he suggests that the country would do well to be skeptical and suspicious of all attempts to fix blame on one party or the other, as there had been too many Democrats and Republicans involved in the complicated history of missile and other strategic weapons development to fix the blame on one party. He suggests that if there were to be an inquiry into the matter, it should be made by a group other than a Congressional committee composed of members who had to run for re-election in the fall, but rather by a commission with a judicial spirit which would inspire general confidence and composed of those who personally had nothing to gain and nothing to lose by the outcome of the elections.
A letter writer indicates that her
son was a 12-year old seventh grader at Sedgefield High School and
she had been surprised to learn that starting on Thursday, he would
start a cooking and sewing class. She had called the school to talk
to the principal about the matter but he had not been available, and
so she spoke with the seventh grade counselor and was informed that
the class was known as the Home Living Course, that children were
taught manners, cooking, sewing
But, insofar as teaching manners, you have to consider the Lumpy-Dumpy Dons of the world, who, despite the best intentions of parents, simply do not get it and grow up self-anointed, privileged bullies vis-à-vis their school comrades, which only encourages antisocial conduct of other children being bullied by the bullies, a neighborhood bully concept which can then later be extended to adult relations, eventuating, should Lumpy-Dumpy Don become a world leader, in Hitler-type conduct.
Thus, it would appear that the school had exhibited quite a bit of reason in this age of juvenile delinquency, including spitting on new students entering school merely because their skin was of a different color from the white students, which type of conduct, as anyone who has ever attended elementary school or junior high school could probably attest, is not limited to interracial conduct and is as often, if not more so, exhibited against members of the same race, it being a function of lack of maturity and judgment, and failure to inculcate respect sufficiently at home for the other person. Thus, the teaching of proper manners in high school, while perhaps leading to some ennui on the part of students who already know how to behave, could be profitable for those who do not. And it was evident in 1958 that many young people of that age group had not yet learned proper manners, as demonstrated by the black student who had sought to enter formerly all-white Harding High School and had to drop out and move to the North because of her bad treatment in the early days of the term.
Manners, in all likelihood at this juncture in time, would have included, if subtly, how to treat students who were different from one's self and one's own background. While it was something picked up naturally by students engaged in organized athletics, not all students participated in team sports other than in the brief 40 minutes or so in physical education class. Thus, the necessity of teaching manners was only in response to a nationwide problem which had come to the fore in the wake of World War II, during which, with fathers away at war and mothers working in war factories, or being displaced to other regions of the country to obtain better jobs at higher pay, the consequently unsupervised children had become somewhat unruly in many cases rather than embracing the independence and making the best of it, with unruly behavior often passed from older siblings to younger siblings down the line, until you reach the problems of 1958, sociologically and psychologically among some of the young people. It was manifested in the rock 'n' roll craze of the time, the feeling engendered by the music that, at least as long as the music played, a sense of freedom from parental authority and authority in general pervaded the mind, not necessarily a bad thing unless taken too far by some such that, when some authority figure unplugged the jukebox or the record player, that person was perceived as asking for it for being thoroughly wretched.
Thus, teaching manners, or, actually, the mutual respect engendered by respecting others, was not a waste of time, as witness today Lumpy-Dumpy Don, the Despot, who respects no one but himself, exhibits manners to others only grudgingly while placing conditions on his continued politeness, just as do all dictators. He was obviously never taught true and proper manners in the schools he attended, where he only learned Machiavellian technique, how to "smile and smile and be a villain".
Speaking of bullies and despots, here is a pretty fair microcosm
Those who plot the downfall of others, however, even if by aiding and abetting which proves unchargeable for the too tenuous causation as determined by prosecutorial discretion, eventually, in the way of things, receive their just deserts
Framed Edition
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