The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 7, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that Nationalist Chinese anti-aircraft guns on Quemoy had punctuated the cease-fire in the Formosa Strait area during the afternoon, firing on eight Communist planes which had flown over the offshore island. The Nationalist Defense Ministry had said that the Communist aircraft did not attack the island and were not hit by the Nationalist fire, and had returned toward the mainland. The Quemoy antiaircraft batteries had been the first guns to fire in the area since the Communists proclaimed a seven-day cease-fire, effective 40 hours prior to the shooting. Observers in Taipei did not consider the Quemoy truce to have been necessarily broken because the earlier Communist announcement had spoken only of halting the artillery bombardment against Quemoy and the neighboring Nationalist islets. U.S. Navy ships had escorted more supplies to Quemoy this date, defying the Communist demand that the cease-fire be accompanied by a halt of American convoys of Nationalist supply ships. The Communists had announced that they would halt their attacks on the offshore islands for a week beginning Sunday at midnight, provided that the Americans stopped escorting the Chinese Nationalist supply ships to the islands. But on Monday, and again this date, they had offered no opposition to Nationalist convoys, still shepherded by ships of the U.S. 7th Fleet to the three-mile international limit off Quemoy. Supplies also had been dropped on Quemoy from Nationalist C-46 transports. Reports from Washington said that it was expected that the American escort operations would be suspended in a day or two and that the suspension would continue as long as did the cease-fire. The Nationalists had virtually no expectation that the Communists would prolong the truce beyond the one-week period they had set. Local rumor in Taipei was predicting a major Communist military action when the seven-day period would expire the following Sunday at midnight or before. Nationalist intelligence sources reported that the Communists had been commandeering motorized junks along the China coast from the Hong Kong area northward for a possible invasion of the Quemoys. Communist China's Foreign Minister Chen Yi said this date that the U.S. would have totally miscalculated the Communist cease-fire if it interpreted the suspension of the Quemoy bombardment as a sign of weakness. Radio Peiping announced that the Foreign Minister had spoken at a reception given by East German Ambassador Paul Wandel, honoring the ninth anniversary of the founding of Communist East Germany. Chen said that the U.S. should not "misinterpret this [suspension of bombardment] as meeting its demand for a cease-fire." He said that the Chinese people remained determined to liberate Formosa, the Pescadores Islands, Quemoy and Matsu, and that "no foreign interference will be tolerated at all."
In Castel Gandolfo, Italy, Pope Pius XII, 82, reportedly had rallied this date from his comatose state of the previous day and was lucid, his fever having abated and his respiration normal, consuming solid food, after having suffered a cerebral stroke the previous day. He recognized persons in his sickroom, had spoken a few words, and when his temperature was taken, had removed the thermometer from his mouth himself to read it. Physicians said that he had eaten cereal broth and shredded chicken. The medical bulletin indicated that he showed tremendous continuing resistance to his second serious illness in four years and there were cautious expressions of hope that he might recover. He had asked to be taken to the Vatican as soon as possible and his doctors had first planned to do that the previous day, but changed their minds when the gravity of his condition had become apparent. His private physician had described him as having "the heart of a lion". The morning bulletin indicated that the previous night, the Pope had a fever of 99.5 Fahrenheit, which had returned to normal by the morning. His pulse reading was 82 and his respiration was normal, with treatment being continued.
In Washington, President Eisenhower had sent Pope Pius a personal message expressing hope for his early recovery.
In New Delhi, Britain, West Germany and other nations had thrown their support this date behind the U.S. proposal to increase the International Monetary Fund, as had been encouraged by President Eisenhower.
In Beirut, Lebanon, a club-swinging mob of several hundred people this date had attempted to grab control of the coastal village where new President Fuad Shehab resided. Lebanese security forces reportedly had smashed the attempt with armored cars and infantrymen.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, it was reported that in a rising tide of terrorism by Greek Cypriots, two British soldiers and a Turkish Cypriot police officer had been killed during the night, with seven other soldiers having been wounded in four ambushes in different parts of the island.
In Bangkok, Thailand, the Foreign Ministry had announced this date that a Soviet Embassy attaché and the Bangkok correspondent of the official Soviet news agency, Tass, had been charged with subversion and ordered to leave the country.
In Miami, Fla., it was reported that Hurricane Janice had hit Nassau in the Bahamas and then headed northeast into the open Atlantic this date, missing the East Coast of the U.S. Heavy weather had broken ships against rocks in Nassau Harbor and had killed one man, the skipper of a boat. As it drove across Nassau Harbor, it carried peak winds of 60 mph.
In Detroit, it was reported that General Motors and the International Union of Electrical Workers had reached agreement this date on the overall national contract covering the union's 25,000 members in six G.M. plants.
The Associated Press reports that plans were being made to provide educational facilities for about 17,000 students not able to attend school because of school closures in Arkansas and Virginia by those states' governors and the dynamiting of a high school, previously integrated since 1956, in Clinton, Tenn. Fourteen schools were shut down in the three states and in several areas legal sparring continued between state and Federal authorities, while statements on the integration crisis had emanated from Washington and Florida. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter had asked the previous day for constructive use of time in school integration in general, but indicated that lawlessness, if not checked, would be the forerunner of anarchy, making the statements in a concurring opinion just published in conjunction with the Court's unanimous decision on September 29 in Cooper v. Aaron, holding that, as had been preliminarily decided without formal opinion on September 12, integration of Central High School in Little Rock by the admission of seven black students again during the current school year, as during the prior school year, would have to continue immediately, and also indicating that evasive actions, such as closing of public schools by state and local officials, still involved discriminatory state action by state and local officials such that the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause was implicated to prevent such actions to circumvent required desegregation.
In Little Rock, Governor Orval Faubus expressed the belief that private all-white schools would be in operation by mid-October, making the statement a few hours after a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis had extended until October 15 the temporary restraining order which banned operation of the four closed Little Rock high schools as private, segregated institutions. A hearing this date had been scheduled to determine whether the temporary restraining order would be made permanent and that was continued to October 15. The president of the Little Rock Private School Corporation said that his group planned to begin operation as soon as possible in private buildings with private donations without waiting for the October 15 Federal court order.
In Clinton, Tenn., Anderson County School Board members drafted this date a statement to be forwarded to the President, requesting an audience to discuss what the Board called "the Clinton High School problem." The school superintendent said that the statement would be forwarded to the White House sometime during the day and would ask for a conference during the current week. The Board, in a called meeting on Monday night, had authorized a delegation of county officials to seek the audience with the President at the earliest possible date. When asked what the Board had meant by the "problem", the school superintendent said that it had to do with the dynamiting incident which had occurred on Sunday, forcing closure of the school. He said that beyond that, he preferred not to say anything at the present time. Meanwhile the white and black students of the school had returned to makeshift classes in temporary quarters pending transfer, probably the following Thursday, to a vacated school building at nearby Oak Ridge. The high school had been integrated by Federal court order two years earlier and several incidents had occurred during the first year, but the situation had quieted down after segregationist John Kasper was given a Federal sentence for contempt of court for stirring violence in the community because of the integration of the high school.
In Virginia, the chairman of a citizens' committee, which had formed an educational foundation in Warren County, said that juniors and seniors of the closed high school at Front Royal would begin emergency classes on Wednesday. Eight other schools in Charlottesville and Norfolk remained closed.
In Miami, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, speaking at the triennial general convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, appealed to church leaders for "new ideas for resolving the racial conflicts."
John Kilgo of The News, in
the second of a series of reports on Charlotte juvenile delinquency,
indicates that hangouts for Charlotte's young toughs were located in
every section of the city, with police indicating that trouble was
brewing behind drugstores, at drive-in restaurants, service stations
and community recreation centers. One police official said that most
of the hoodlums had their hang-out headquarters in Charlotte's
wealthiest areas. One of the city's most popular drive-in restaurants
had been dubbed "as the place where the most trouble starts."
One police officer said: "At this place, the kids congregate and
think up bad things to do. We are kept on the go answering calls that
they are racing out of the lot, or are stealing from cars or
bothering other people." One such drive-in had hired a police
officer for Friday and Saturday nights to reduce the number of fights
and disturbances. Police said that drugstores were also places where
teenagers hung out, drank and got into trouble. An officer said:
"They take their cars behind the drugstore and get out the
bottle and start drinking, sometimes even take their girlfriends with
them. When this happens, the trouble is about to start. We try to
break this up before it gets started good." Police prowl cars
watched the drugstores carefully and if they saw a gang gathering
after the store closed, they would run them off. Another major worry
for police were the fights which often started after high school
games. Police had to issue stern warnings to students at Central and
Myers Park High Schools during the year after disturbances had
occurred the night before the two schools had played each other in
football. Police had recalled only too well a bloody brawl after the
Myers Park-Harding high school game at Memorial Stadium the prior
fall. The solution, of course, is only too obvious, to turn the gang members' devious obloquies to iambic pentameter soliloquies by having them, instead of going to the roads to dig drainage ditches, dumping their guileless wiles and wagers for rhyme, to alleviate their load of slime carried in raging knives and daggers, substituting bows and understanding of vows for magpies
In New York, it was reported that a
six-day strike of ship deck officials had ended and the issues in
dispute would be arbitrated by AFL-CIO president George Meany,
who said that the 1,300 strikers would resume work this date. There
are eight million stories in the Naked City
On the editorial page, "Onward and Upward with Mr. Dulles" indicates that if Secretary of State Dulles was bound and determined to make the logical worst of his uncertainty about the Far Eastern situation, it had a suggestion for a way out, that obviously, as Chiang Kai-shek had lost face in U.S. eyes as the "true" ruler of China and since recognition of the Mao Tse-tung regime would be un-American, the thing to do was to dump both of them and recognize the Manchu Dynasty.
In 1911, China had a perfectly good boy Emperor on the throne when the roof had fallen in and Sun Yat-sen's revolution had invited the Manchus out. It suggests that surely a few members of the imperial family still existed, that possibly a provincial capital could be set up in Rhode Island, and a Manchu lobby quickly established in Congress, such that the whole dynastic order could be "unleashed" to invade Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.
"If the Manchus weren't classy enough for Mr. Dulles, perhaps we could even stretch a point and recognize the Ming Dynasty. This one turned out a lot more vases and was probably even conservative enough for Sen. Knowland."
It says it wants no credit for the idea as Mr. Dulles deserved all of it, as it was his logic which permitted the U.S. to pick and choose from the past the regimes it wished to recognize as the de facto government of the present large nations.
Drew Pearson, in Norfolk, indicates that Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., was getting pressure from both sides, from parents with children out of school demanding that he reopen the schools state law had automatically closed to avoid Federal court orders to desegregate them, and resume the education of their children, while from the other side, the most potent figure in the state, Senator Harry Flood Byrd, apple grower and head of the Byrd machine, was pressuring the Governor to continue massive resistance, a pressure, while not publicized, more effective than that of many thousands of parents, as it had been the Senator who had made Mr. Almond Governor. Thus, the latter was between the man who had made him and the parents who threatened to unmake him, the reason why the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot had described the present school crisis in Norfolk as a test of the Byrd machine. Political observer George Kelly of the Virginian-Pilot had written: "The powerful Democratic organization must watch lest it get caught in a power-shattering trap."
Some observers believed that the Byrd machine was already caught in that trap while others disagreed. Legislators who had voted for massive resistance had been going to Richmond and admitting to newspapermen confidentially that people in their area were disturbed, as people had never thought that the schools would be closed, believing that the Governor and the Byrd organization would be equal to any emergency, but now saw that the organization had no aces up its sleeve. Recently, Lt. Governor E. A. Stephens had admitted to newsmen: "People throughout the state are suddenly wondering what has hit them. They are wondering what all these bills they passed for massive resistance mean. It seems to mean that the schools are closed, and they never realized this would happen. So massive resistance is being quietly evaluated."
Governor Almond was further caught in a trap between the four big counties of the state and the rural counties, the four big counties embracing Norfolk, Charlottesville and the Alexandria-Arlington area just across the Potomac River from Washington, where the Federal courts had ordered integration and where a considerable number of white people, though not a majority, were willing to accept it. But the Virginia Legislature had been elected primarily from rural communities. As with nearly every state in the country, the farm areas and small towns, not the cities, controlled the state legislatures. And those people were quite against the four counties where integration had been ordered. In 22 counties of southeastern Virginia, the population was more than half black, and there, opposition to integration was vehement, vitriolic and unrelenting, with the opposition going deeper than only the schools.
Joseph Alsop, in San Francisco, indicates that a stern resolve to depart the Far East, where he had visited, had abruptly melted away "in the heat generated by the current public talk of worthy persons who have never seen China, know no Chinese leaders, and would rather take a physic than read Chinese history." He finds that from the talk, one might suppose that Chiang Kai-shek's remaining fragment of China on Formosa was a species of island cesspool, ruled by an aging tyrant who had hankered to entangle the U.S. in a great war by a foolhardy reinvasion of the mainland. "Yet by any practical test, Chiang's Formosa is considerably more respectable than Nehru's India, to cite the most obvious and most loudly admired example. The lot of the common man is immeasurably better. The country is immensely more prosperous, the educational and welfare systems are infinitely more extensive. The government is substantially less corrupt. Only the unearthly Indian self-righteousness is lacking."
He also finds that Chiang's old talk of reinvading the mainland had about as much present meaning as the old talk of Secretary of State Dulles about "liberation". For Chiang had no more intention of attempting a serious "reinvasion" than did Secretary Dulles an intention to attempt the "liberation" of Hungary.
He finds it, however, more important to try to be more realistic about the Chinese Communist mainland, for there was not much point in trying to undo the superstitions about Chiang, whether for him or against him. Communist China was presently entering the blood-stained phase which the Soviet Union had entered when Joseph Stalin had launched his massacres of the peasantry for the same reasons. The Chinese Communist rulers, as with Stalin, had learned that they could not finance their forced industrialization without brutally depressing the standard of life of the peasants. But although the reason was the same, the circumstances in China were much more grim, as the standard of life which had to be depressed was much lower. "The pool of untapped resources is very much smaller. The goods and commodities available for export are very much fewer. In every way, the Chinese problem is incomparably more difficult than Stalin's was, except that limited Soviet credits are available—which have to be repaid with interest."
He finds that the greater difficulty of the Chinese problem was easy to gauge if comparing Stalin's collective farm system with the new system of "People's Communes" which the Chinese Communist leaders were presently ruthlessly imposing on the peasantry, as the collective farms at least had some outer trappings of humane Western thought, while the communes intended to transform the whole countryside of China into a series of vast slave farms, of a character without modern parallel. The probable horrors of the new phase in China went beyond the bounds of normal imagination. "Secrecy, plus idiotic sentimentality about 'this great Chinese experiment,' will no doubt conceal the full extent of the horrors for a long while, as happened in the Russian case."
He indicates that if Stalin massacred 20 million people, as he had, it was reasonable to forecast that the Communist massacres would surpass 100 million. The question remained whether the Chinese people would suffer and submit as the Russian people had.
Mr. Alsop ventures the opinion that they would not, that they were more vital, tougher and more dynamic than the Russians. Their history showed that they were somewhat like camels, capable of bearing enormous burdens but also capable of sudden, unshakable, unmanageable resistance when the burdens became unbearable. Both of China's previous revolutionary dynasties had lasted less than a generation, because they imposed unbearable burdens. Mao Tse-tung, he ventures, must have had the memory of the fate of those predecessors very much in mind at present.
One way to relieve China's internal pressures, diminish the need for massacres and ease the situation generally, was to add the resources of China's rich neighbors to the south to China's own inadequate resources. "And in these circumstances it is unwise to ignore the possibility that the attack on the offshore islands is the first, tentative venture of a much more ambitious scheme of conquest."
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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