The Charlotte News
Friday, December 26, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that the Soviet Union had warned on Thursday that Western insistence on remaining in Berlin would kindle nuclear war which would reach America. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had continued the Kremlin's campaign to force the Western allies out of West Berlin by predictions of nuclear war if they remained, boasting that Russia was well-armed for any trouble. Mr. Gromyko had spoken at the closing session of the winter meeting of the Supreme Soviet, urging a ban on nuclear weapons testing without controls which the West considered necessary. Diplomats in Washington said that they found nothing new in Mr. Gromyko's speech and there was no immediate comment from the State Department. Mr. Gromyko had said that if there was no end to the Berlin crisis, "the threat will further increase of West Berlin becoming a second Sarajevo," referring to the start of World War I. Premier Khrushchev had demanded that the U.S., Britain and France withdraw their occupation troops from West Berlin by June 1, leaving it a demilitarized "free city" surrounded by Communist East Germany. Western attempts to reach Berlin without East German permission would be considered aggression against the Soviet bloc, according to Mr. Khrushchev. The West had pledged to stick with the 2.2 million West Berliners who had overwhelmingly voted anti-Communist, contending that East Germany had no authority to control Western military traffic in Berlin. Mr. Gromyko had said that "any attempt to aggression against East Germany may start a new big war in which millions upon millions of people would find their death." He said that such a war would inevitably spread to the American continent, "for today's military techniques have virtually eliminated the difference between distant theaters of war and those close at hand." He added that Russia "has no objection to hearing proposals if the West has any—if those proposals are directed toward solving the problem and are not rejections of our solution." He again barred unofficial Western suggestions that discussions of Berlin be linked to reunification of Germany.
Members of Congress would begin soon arriving in Washington for the new 86th Congress to start January 7, which might open with battles in both houses. There would be much larger Democratic majorities in both houses than in the previous Congress. Normally, a new Congress had a slow start, but this time things looked different. In the Senate, a lengthy fight was shaping up over a move by Northern Democrats and Republicans to curb filibusters. Southern Democrats in the past had used filibusters to block civil rights legislation. Senate Republicans also were embroiled in a intrafamilial dispute, with a group which viewed the present Republican leadership as behind the times pushing a rival slate for top leadership positions. In the House, a bloc of self-styled liberals wanted to limit the power of the Rules Committee to bottle up legislation. Under present House rules, that Committee could keep most bills from the floor almost indefinitely. Unless a compromise were reached ahead of time, that fight would be settled on opening day. Another controversy confronting the House involved the disputed election of Dr. Dale Alford of Little Rock, Ark., a segregation leader, to replace Representative Brooks Hays, who had been an avowed moderate on segregation. A special House committee had recently conducted a preliminary probe of charges of irregularities in the election.
In Havana, it was reported that
Government forces in Las Villas Province, in central Cuba, were
facing increasing menace from rebels led by Fidel Castro, and had
been reinforced. Nothing to worry about. El Presidente Fulgencio
Batista has everything under control, having the backing of the
underworld bosses
In Paris, it was reported that the French Cabinet met this date to consider currency reform, with speculation being that the franc would be devalued to enable French prices to compete with the European Common Market.
In Tokyo, it was reported that the Chinese Communist Government this date claimed the greatest railroad building achievement for a single year in China's history, with the laying of 1,400 miles of new track.
In Cairo, it was reported that Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's Government this date had renewed its verbal attack on the Communists in the Syrian province of the United Arab Republic, formed during the year to include Egypt and Syria. Syrian Interior Minister Abdul Hamid Serraj said that the Communists had become "mouthpieces for the enemies of Arab nationalism."
In London, the U.S. Navy had rescued 134 persons and delivered food to 3,000 persons in flooded northwestern Morocco, according to Navy headquarters. The rescue operation, with helicopters and planes from a base nearby, had been carried out on Christmas Day.
In Amman, Jordan, it was reported that King Hussein had awarded the Jordanian Medal of Al Kawbab to Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, for his humanitarian activities.
In Paris, the Union Aeromaritime de Transports, a private French airline, said that three persons had been killed and 60 others injured when one of its DC-6 planes had crashed this date near Salisbury, Rhodesia.
In Zichem Zussen Bolder, Belgium, the death toll in the collapse of the underground mushroom farm had officially been set this date at 18, including 14 still entombed. Hope had been abandoned for those still trapped in the network of caves and tunnels three days after the cave-in.
Traffic deaths during the first quarter of the long Christmas weekend had taken a sharp upward turn on Christmas Day, running at a higher rate than the nation's all-time record for any holiday, thus far recording 263 traffic fatalities, 54 deaths from fires, and 33 from miscellaneous accidents, totaling 350. Safety experts had expressed alarm over the slaughter on the highways, indicating that unless motorists were "shocked into better behavior", a new death toll record might be set. The rate of fatalities had been more than seven per hour since the count had begun at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday. It was at present far higher than the National Safety Council's pre-holiday estimate of 620 deaths during the 102-hour holiday which would end at midnight on Sunday. The country was also suffering a faster rate of death for a comparable period during the 1956 four-day Christmas holiday, when the all-time record of 706 traffic deaths had been recorded. The Council had said: "It's up to the driver to pull down this toll in homeward bound travel. Christmas is traditionally the most dangerous period of the year because of heavy traffic and highball hilarity." The Council estimated that 40 million cars would have been on the highways when the holiday period ended, cautioning that homeward driving conditions could be much worse than during the first part of the holiday, as weather conditions since Christmas Eve had been favorable for driving in most parts of the country, with highways virtually free of ice and snow, thus sending more people to the roads. Four persons had lost their lives in a head-on collision of two automobiles near Michigan City, Ind. The dead had been a Chicago couple and their three-year old son and a Crown Point, Ind., youth. In Sacramento, a Greyhound bus loaded with 34 holiday travelers had skidded into a crowd of people on the highway, killing a woman and injuring her husband. In the one-day Christmas holiday the previous year, traffic deaths had totaled 225, with 27 others having died in fires and 26 in miscellaneous accidents.
Fires at Christmas had brought tragedy to families in many parts of the nation, as at least 54 fathers, mothers and children had lost their lives during what was to have been one of the happiest times of the year. One family of 12 had nine persons die in a fire which had destroyed a farm home near Auburn, Wash. Five bodies had been recovered two hours after the early morning blaze had erupted and fire department officers were searching the ruins for four more. Five of six members of a prominent Virginia family had perished when flames swept their $150,000 mansion in the fashionable Windsor Farms suburb of Richmond early this date. One son of the family, 22, had left the home a short time before the fire. Two separate Pennsylvania fires had each taken the lives of three children, one in Wilkes-Barre and the other in a Pittsburgh suburb, Braddock. In St. Petersburg, Pa., a father and his son had perished in their flaming home shortly after eating Christmas dinner, with the wife and four other children having escaped, a sixth child having been away from the home. Three persons had been killed early this date in a fire which had swept the Admiral Inn, a two-story wooden lodging house in Northampton, Mass.
At least 21 violent deaths had been recorded in the Carolinas since the beginning of the Christmas holiday, 15 of which had been in highway accidents, 14 of those in North Carolina. The other seven deaths were all in South Carolina, two of them having been pedestrian fatalities. The bloody details are provided.
In Cliffside Park, N.J., a couple had thought that it would be nice to spend Christmas around the roaring fireplace in the living room of their new home. The husband lit the wood, and smoke filled the room, as the Christmas tree wilted and flames burned a big hole in the wall. The man told firemen later that he had not been informed that the fireplace was only an ornament.
John Borchert of The News reports that baby inflation had hit Charlotte, as on Christmas Day, 19 sets of parents had welcomed newborn sons and daughters to their families, whereas the previous Christmas, there had only been six babies born in the city. A woman who had given birth to a girl, her second daughter, at Presbyterian Hospital, said, "The only thing I missed was my Christmas dinner." Of the 19 new babies, seven had been born in Presbyterian Hospital, six at Memorial Hospital, four at Good Samaritan and two at Mercy. Of the total, 12 had been boys and seven girls. He provides a list of those newborns and their parents and addresses. Congratulations…
In London, it was reported that the annual war of nerves with the British dustmen, postmen and holiday carolers had been fought and, as usual, lost. A new strategy was needed, as the way to beat the Boxing Day and caroling racket was to spend the Christmas and New Your holidays somewhere else. Boxing Day in Britain, the day after Christmas, was the day when the people who served throughout the year, such as the newsboy, came around with a box expecting a contribution for their overall service. Only now they did not want to wait until the day after Christmas, rather coming the day before. The Borough Council, which hired the dustmen or garbage collectors, frowned on the practice, but nevertheless, on December 24, the doorbell always rang and there stood the head dustman. He had a clipboard holding a list of the addresses at which he and his crew picked up garbage. His pencil was poised expectantly, and the person at the door, a born coward, had visions of overflowing, odorous garbage cans throughout 1959, and so contributed ten shillings, the equivalent of $1.40. As the day proceeded, one provided ten shillings to the postman, five shillings to the newsboy, ten to the window cleaner, ten to the handyman who mowed the lawn, likewise to the laundry staff, five shillings to the butcher boy. Night fell and the two small children were asleep, when the doorbell again rang, and the two small children were instantly awakened and wailing. The doorbell had been rung by a group of children, ages 9 to 11, singing "Noel, Noel". The person answering the door provided half a crown, the equivalent of 35 cents, and seconds later, realized "this is madness but it's too late now." Word had spread through the neighborhood and when the bell rang for the fifth time, one leaped out of the chair as though harpooned from the rear, being warned by one's wife, "Don't you dare strike those poor children!" The response had been: "I'm not going to strike the bloody carolers. I'm going to dismantle the bleeding doorbell!" That done, briefly, there had been peace. Then the living room door opened and in came the oldest son, 2 1/2, at 9:45 p.m., issuing, "Good morning, is it Christmas yet?"
The following Monday, the latest News Spotlight Series would feature "The Wars of Frank Sinatra", a five-part series written by Scott Lawrence, a freelance writer from New York, who had personally seen Mr. Sinatra at his best and at his worst. It assures that it would please both friend and foe of the singer-actor. It followed the current five-part series, "The Truth about Eddie and Debbie", following the recent breakup of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, once considered Hollywood's dream couple. The first in the series had been "Stars over Bethlehem". We will be sure not to miss a single syllable as inquiring minds need to know.
On the editorial page, "Please Save Us from the Liberators" indicates that "the South", treated as a uniform region by those outside who ignored the fact that a North Carolinian and a Virginian would not use the same courthouse corridor if they could help it, had its friends. One was Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, with every deviation in the region inviting his advertence, scrutinizing Southerners like a doting parent anxious to reform the region, to raise Southerners up until they were just like Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, model of brotherly affection.
It questions why he should be so absorbed in Southern destiny, as politics could not be involved, perhaps wanting to get rid of the orneriness and decadence, and "liberate" the region.
"There are many frightened people in the South, he said over a New Orleans television program—'somewhat restrained by the pressure of public opinion and fear of what may happen to them if they step out for a more liberal policy toward the Negroes.'" He had said that the Federal Government could "help liberate these people", but failed to say how it would be done.
It indicates that the South would probably admit to a need for reform and liberation, but not the sort of reform or liberation in which Senator Douglas, out of utopian fervor, believed. The Federal Government would not cure the South's silence, if it existed. For it was the silence of conscientious confusion, which would not yield to arbitrary help from the outside. It was not a season for what Senator J. William Fulbright called, "sovereign remedies".
Throughout the South, there had been the quiet firing of a teacher or preacher, the subtle crackdown of economic pressure, the sovereignty of a complacent majority at another place. "But as in Atlanta, the 'silence' is broken here and there by petitions, manifestos, and editorials, and the power of an orthodoxy is being tested against the state government of Georgia. From the Virginia line to Texas, there are many outspoken agents of change. That is true no less of North Carolina or Mississippi than of Douglas' own Illinois or Indiana where moral monitors of the South abound."
It questions whether the Senator really thought that it would "solve" or "remedy" the moral flaw of the South's racial order if a bit more verbal deviation was beaten out of the region. "The fatherly solicitations of Senator Douglas, far from chastening the South, far from awakening a deeper consciousness of its failings, rakes into that deepest layer of feeling where regionalists of all positions unite. The result is solidity, stubbornness, sullen withdrawal." It concludes that it could do without such "liberation".
"There's Some Leftover Christmas Cheer" indicates that Christmas had been a tonic in more ways than one, not only giving the nation a welcome respite from worrying about the Russians, but also performing some legerdemain with the national economy, as most Americans emerged from the holiday buying binge with a pleasant sense of optimism regarding the future. Since psychology played an important role in boom and bust, that optimism was not to be taken lightly. Present attitudes contrasted sharply with the dark mood which the country had been in a year earlier. At that time, the economic tailspin had already begun and the prophets of deeper disaster were not helping the situation, as there was frank talk of a full-blown depression.
The economic indices during the first few months of 1958 had not been reassuring. Business Week, looking back during the current week, had noted with a shudder that the economy "dropped faster and deeper than expected." But there had been no spiraling decline. "Instead, business began a recovery that has carried most economic indicators to within touching distance of their all-time highs," according to the magazine.
The Administration's contracyclical action to get the economy back on track had not been impressive. The rebound was likely more the result of shrewd business management, the fact that when the chips were down, U.S. consumers did not panic, and what some economists called "a big dose of luck".
There were new cries of alarm regarding inflation, but the problem of keeping inflation in check was a considerably nicer chore than dealing with a depression. It concludes that with repaired confidence and a fresh outlook, the nation could guard against the dangers of both conditions at present, as it was easier to prevent a fire than to put one out after it had started.
"Bread & Circuses" indicates that Government reports had forecast a 957-million bushel winter wheat crop, enough to stack new surplus on the old surplus of about 1.32 million bushels. It suggests making bread. "For the circus, we suggest the present wheat surplus control plan."
"Is Youth a Handicap in N.C. Politics?" indicates that Terry Sanford, who had his heart set on becoming the next governor of the state, was already penning letters to Santa Claus for the next two Christmases. There was, however, some grumbling in certain quarters about his youth as he would be only 42 in 1960.
It suggests that if that were the only opposition to Mr. Sanford, then they should acquire a good North Carolina history book, as they would find that Charles B. Aycock, one of the state's most famous leaders, who had become Governor at the turn-of-the-century, had been 41 when nominated. O. Max Gardner had become Lieutenant Governor when he was only 36. And Furnifold Simmons had been 32 when he had first run for Congress.
It indicates that there were also men who had started late and contributed much, but it was not necessary for a man to wait until his hair was snow white and his mind similarly bleached before tackling a major political office.
Mr. Sanford would win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1960, defeating segregationist-oriented I. Beverly Lake, and defeating Robert Gavin in the general election to become Governor. It should be noted that he was at the time just a year younger than Senator John F. Kennedy when he was elected President at the same time, in the process carrying North Carolina. The two men, whenever they met, appeared to admire and like one another.
A piece from the Mattoon (Ill.) Journal-Gazette, titled "The American Bachelor", finds that it was becoming more unsound economically and socially for a man to remain single. A single man lost out on many things which the married man was able to cash in on, having only one advantage, his freedom. But as the psychologists and psychiatrists said, having a great deal of freedom was not necessarily desirable.
Economically, the Government took a bigger bite, proportionately, from the single man's income than that of the married man. The family man spent more money on his family than did the single man on any single item. But the chances were that a married man would bring home more bacon.
Married men usually had the advantage when seeking a new job and many times classified ads would specify married men.
A single man was often thought of as a dashing 20th Century Romeo with a plush five-room apartment, two or three cars, at least a dozen girlfriends and more time than sense. It was why many employers shied away from hiring such a person.
And socially, the single man was often accepted as if he were the inventor of the common cold. At a party of married couples, the single man usually took the role of the third person in the "twos company, three's a crowd" routine.
It concludes that it was not suggesting that every single man take the big step toward marriage, "but let's face it. The gay, whirlwind of the flashy, young (or old) bachelor is not all it's cracked up to be."
Do you mean that is only the product of television and movies?
Drew Pearson, in Alaska on his annual Christmas trip to entertain American troops, has his column this date written by his assistant, Jack Anderson, who provides an impression of Premier Nikita Khrushchev given the President, received from two important observers, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, following their interview with Mr. Khrushchev.
He appeared to be a man who knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was talking about, having expert knowledge of many subjects and not going off half-cocked. If he did not know, he did not answer but rather just changed the subject. If one asked him about Yugoslavia, which was embarrassing, he would talk about China. The statements which the Premier made at cocktail parties were not slapdash or haphazard, as he knew in advance what he was going to say and deliberately planted his ideas with newsmen as they followed him about during Moscow receptions. He did not drink to excess, took an occasional cocktail, sipped wine, but remained quite sober. He had no kidney trouble as reported. During the long sessions he had with both Senator Humphrey and Mr. Johnston, he had sat in his chair consistently for hours at a time. He talked with a sweep of the hand, made grandiose gestures and was inclined to brag. He had a sense of humor, listened well, did not do all the talking. Unlike Stalin, he was elastic and seemed willing to give and take. His primary goal was to beat America. He had studied the U.S. and knew it perhaps better than many American statesmen. A digest of the New York Times was placed on his desk every morning and he could quote figures in American production, population, kilowatt hours. The previous October, he had predicted a Democratic sweep in Congress, had told Mr. Johnston that Nelson Rockefeller appeared to be gaining in New York, and had diagnosed intelligently the problems which the President would face with a Democratic Congress.
The President had been particularly interested in the fact that Mr. Khrushchev made it clear to his callers in Russia that his country did not want war but was determined to win over the Western world through trade. War, he had said, would be a terrible thing. Russia might be devastated and set back in its progress during such a war, and Mr. Khrushchev expressed apparently genuine fear that the U.S. might start a war in desperation because it was losing the cold war.
Walter Lippmann indicates that recently a leading Polish journalist had been invited to provide a lecture in the Soviet Union, his subject having been the development of Communism in Poland, and after dealing with the socialization in the industrial areas, had begun to describe what had been done in agriculture, explaining that the land was for the most part owned and worked by peasant proprietors. When he had finished, there were questions from the audience and he was promptly attacked on the ground that Polish policy in agriculture was reactionary and anti-Communist. It became apparent that he was a quick-witted person, for his answer was that the Polish agricultural system was indeed reactionary from the point of view of Communism. But the Polish Government had no choice about it as the peasants would not tolerate anything other than private property in their own land, not standing for a system of collectivism which would deprive them of their property.
When the audience was digesting that frank statement, he added: "You see, our Polish peasants would resist the setting up of your system of collectivism just as your farmers would resist the introduction of the new Chinese system of the communes." That was the clincher and there were no more denunciations from the floor regarding Poland's reactionary ways.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that he was told the story by a Pole who was high in the councils of his government, and he, in turn, had gotten the story directly from the journalist. He finds it a significant story because it illustrated a great truth about the Communist doctrine, that however uniform and standardized it might be in terms of the theoretical generalities, in real life, the application of Communism varied, often radically, from one country to another and in any one country from one time to another. Thus, in the Soviet Union, it was the current fashion to invoke the name of Lenin as if the social order which had developed in the previous 40 years had been foreseen by him and its working principles prophetically revealed by him. That was mere mythology, not unlike the claims of primitive kings that they were descendants of the gods.
The existing Soviet social order was the product of trial and error, which was continuing, and there was no such thing as a finished blueprint of a Communist society which could be used in Poland and in China, in Albania and in Czechoslovakia, much less in Western Europe and North America. What was common to all of the countries which came into the Communist orbit was that they had very powerful governments which rested not on elections and the consent of the governed, but on their proclamation of their own right and their own capacity to shape the future. On that implied contract, the case in all revolutionary movements, to make a powerful society and raise the standard of living, the totalitarian state demanded and obtained not only the passive acceptance but the active collaboration of large masses of people.
He had been quite impressed with the Soviet woman who had told him that while the flat she presently lived in was overcrowded and uncomfortable, her family was going to have a very good flat by 1963.
He regards it plain enough that once a revolutionary movement had passed the phase of liquidating the old regime, what it could do after that would be determined by the type of country with which it was dealing. Russia was a backward country 40 years earlier, but was backward only as compared with Germany or England, not vis-à-vis China or Indonesia or Iraq. For the old Russia contained the essential elements of modern technological development and the skeleton of an administrative system to operate a large and complex society. China was far poorer in those essential elements and far poorer in the fundamental capital structure of its economy.
When regarding the terrible price paid by the Soviet people so that they could overcome their own backwardness and the devastation of war, it was horrifying to think of the price the Chinese people might have to pay. "In Russia, at least among the minority who know what is going on elsewhere, there is, so it seems to me, great awe, compounded of fascination and fear, as to what the Chinese equivalent of Stalinism—of forced development and capital formation—is going to be."
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, indicates that the inn at Bethlehem where the world's hope had been born was a mean enough place and thus perhaps one should not be too astonished by the mean shabbiness of Marianfelde refugee camp, which was the birthplace of new hope for several thousand men and women every week. It was the first stop for most who "vote with their feet", as the free Berliners phrased it, against the Communist slave-state in East Germany. At present, almost all of the East German refugees came to that camp, for free Berlin was the only easy escape route still open.
In the bureaucratic age, all states, whether slave or free, felt compelled to "process" and pigeonhole their citizens. When men and women were being "processed", the effect produced was always and everywhere the same, causing a person to think of the novels of Franz Kafka and of "little man, what now?" and of Gian Carlo Menotti's Consul, and all the other works which had sardonically or pleadingly portrayed that entirely modern phenomenon of the "helpless entanglement of ordinary people in the strange, inhuman, paper-built machinery of the state."
The setting, a bleak clump of workers' apartment houses surrounded by a high-wire fence, was depressing in itself. The "processing" was worse, as everywhere there were the same long queues of ill-clad people, slumped on hard benches, eternally waiting to be registered and interrogated, assigned to dormitories and re-interrogated and assigned to new homes in West Germany, given airplane tickets and finally herded toward the buses which would take them to Templehof airfield.
But that purgatory, though painful, was probably a cheerful place because its inhabitants knew that they had escaped hell and could hope for heaven. For those reasons, Marianfelde was exceptionally cheerful. A years-long habit kept the people in the queues from talking too freely, but they did not complain, helping one another, being warm and friendly and full of the promise of a better future, not minding being "processed" so endlessly, partly because they were accustomed to worse and partly because they understood the reason for it.
A spry old woman had explained: "Back there we had a spy in every street, in every block, almost in every house. Who can tell whether they have sent spies out, along with all the rest of us?"
His day at the camp was just after a weekend and so several hundred people had already been waiting for registration to begin in the chilly darkness just before the winter sunrise. It was simplest to escape on a weekend because the worker was not missed from work and the family could tell the guards on the train that they were going to visit friends or relatives in Berlin. Once in Berlin, the time of suspense was over and all that was needed was to take one of the suburban trains which crossed through the free city at the rush hour. At that season, the flood of refugees was less because, as one young couple from Dresden had remarked to Mr. Alsop, "It is hard to leave your own place just before Christmas, even when you have decided it is all bad and you must go."
Too many of the thousands who fled each week were the best and the most valuable, the skilled industrial workers rebelling against Communist politics and Communist exploitation, young men and women with their educations just completed, and now professors, engineers, scientists and other highly skilled technicians of all kinds.
He had talked with several of them. He suggests that perhaps East German leader Walter Ulbricht would not mind greatly the gap left by the young art historian with a minor museum post who had fled "because I care only for my subject, and all the professors with whom I can pursue my studies have fled already." But then there was the signal engineer from the East German State railways, East Germany having invested seven full years in that man's engineering training, and now he and his capable wife and their two children had all come out together, only three months after he had taken over the job for which he had been so laboriously trained. The wife said that it would not be easy to obtain another job as good as the one he had, but he knew what he had to do and she remarked that it was strange that they were so cheerful to lose everything and start anew. The others in the long queue had nodded and smiled at that statement.
"At the Christmas season of 1958, when the threat of blockade again hangs over Berlin, those people in their queue make a good holiday thought."
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that Senator Richard Russell of Georgia wanted the Government to help blacks of the South to move to other states so that each state would have its proportionate share of black people. He finds that the proposal might be all right for families making a poor living in the region and who would have a better chance for a good livelihood in some other state, but that any proposal of the sort would have to be accepted voluntarily by any black families which would be affected because the black person was a free American citizen and had a perfect right to live where he wanted, provided he could make a living.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr.—whom we note has been regularly writing during the interim since the beginning of August when, for expediency to catch up, as we finally have, we have jettisoned for the most part summaries of letters to the editor—refers to a letter of December 8 commenting on Mr. Cherry's letter regarding one of his most favorite topics, Joseph McCarthy, the other letter writer having asked whether the Subversive Activities Control Board was "trustworthy", and in a footnote to his letter, had cleverly implied that the Board wasn't reliable because former President Truman had said that "a clear and present danger to our institutions" had been posed by certain provisions of the act which had set up the Board. He suggests that it was the same Mr. Truman who had labeled the affair surrounding the "traitor" Alger Hiss a "red herring" and the same who had written a letter of commendation to a Communist Assistant Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White, upon the latter's resignation from the State Department. And he goes on with his usual right-wing screed, concluding, "Pardon me a moment, fellows, while I drink a toast to some good old conservative American sanity!"
The editors note that Harry Dexter White had not been an Assistant Secretary of State but rather an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who had later become U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund, resigning from that post in April, 1947.
A letter writer finds that prosperity appeared to depend to a great extent on wars, finding that big oil companies thrived on gasoline wars such that every time a big gas war occurred, each major oil company opened a few more service stations. They had to consider their independent dealers expendable, just as the enlisted personnel in the major shooting wars. But fortunately, he finds, there was always a volunteer ready to fill the ranks when a station operator had to quit, with the station then opened under new management. He says that being a part-time motorist, he was happy to help harvest the fruit of those gas wars by using the low-priced fuel, but always felt somewhat sorry for the station operators during the gas wars when the signs showed lower and lower prices. He says that if such wars were really good for business, it would appear that other businessmen ought accept their responsibilities and make similar sacrifices. He suggests that Armour, Swift and Cudahy engage in a meat war, Biltmore, Coble and Foremost, a milk war, and the major bakeries, a bread war, or the big insurance companies, a policy war, finding, however, that it would be carrying it too far if the distilleries and breweries were to become belligerent.
What about Sealtest? We had Sealtest, just like the Big Apple—along with your Parsian gowns and Mercadees imported sports cars. We strongly suggest, however, sparing yourself the indoor barbeque, lest you become part of the barb
A letter writer does not see why everyone was so excited about Senator Hubert Humphrey and Premier Khrushchev having such a long talk. "It was only comrade-to-comrade chatter."
This individual will, no doubt, feel right at home during the 1960 presidential campaign, and, even more so during the 1968 campaign with the "new" Nixon and his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War and save the big cities from "white flight" in fear of the sporadically burning ghettos somehow reaching out to burn them—all the product of that Roosky commonism which Mr. Nixon was avowedly determined to fight clean hound's tooth and jowl.
Second Day
Framed Edition
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