The Charlotte News
Wednesday, February 5, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Cape Canaveral, Fla., that the Navy's second attempt to
launch the Vanguard rocket bearing a satellite had failed
John Barbour of the Associated Press reports that the Vanguard rocket was of such an advanced design that it was both a hazard and an advantage. Army rocket expert Dr. Wernher von Braun, whose Jupiter-C rocket system had sent up Explorer the previous Friday, compared the Vanguard with the Jupiter-C, indicating that the Vanguard was superior, needing only a third of the thrust and weight of the Jupiter. But he said that in practice, the Vanguard was so sophisticated that it was a little difficult to launch, while the Jupiter was based on older and more proven, even if more obsolete, designs. Everything about the Vanguard was designed for close to peak efficiency, including the way it burned, its fuel, the amount of fuel it burned, its guidance system, its alignment, weight and the way the various engines separated in flight and fell away. While some rockets were allowed margins of error, the Vanguard allowed for little. In the firing of a rocket, the smallest error could be magnified and manifest itself in flame and destruction. "Go with throttle up."
Vern Haugland of the Associated Press also reports on the ill-fated attempted launch of the grapefruit-sized satellite, atop a rocket with six propellants regulated by 680 valves, which had been greeted by great expectations, only to be quickly dashed.
The President said this date at his press conference that Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy would direct all outer space programs at the current time.
The President had also said this date that it could be that the Administration would recommend a tax cut if an expected business upturn failed to develop by around the middle of the year.
In East Berlin, the first of 21 German scientists being released by Russia had been reported this date to have arrived at the East German-Polish border. East Berlin officials said that there were 12 persons in the group, including wives and children.
In Tokyo, a huge U.S. military transport plane had landed safely at Yokota Air Base this date after losing a wheel, having then circled for 6.5 hours while it used up its fuel supply and jettisoned cargo in preparation for a crash landing. There were seven men aboard.
In Colombo, Ceylon, native resentment was reported this date to be threatening Britain's newest Indian Ocean airbase in the Maldives Islands, with islanders being forced out of their homes to make way for the base.
In Melbourne, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan this date had denied a London report that he might stop in the U.S. on the way home from his Far Eastern tour.
In Columbus, O., the polio vaccination would be required of children under ten years of age enrolling in Columbus public schools for the first time during the following fall.
In Lake Grove, N.Y., one student had perished early this date and two had been injured as fire destroyed a boys' dormitory at Lake Grove School, a private coeducational institution which drew most of its students from the New York City area.
In New York, the Board of Education, with the approval of Mayor Robert Wagner, had announced a program to curb crime in the city schools. Every point in the program had been under public consideration previously, including a key proposal that six more special schools be opened for disturbed youngsters. While Board officials had been busily making minor changes in their report before making it public, school violence had flared anew the previous day. A 16-year old white student said that he had been robbed of his wristwatch and 70 cents by a husky black boy on a third-floor stair landing of Manhattan's High School of Music and Art. In Brooklyn, a public school librarian had been pummeled by three black public school girls when the librarian had accused one of them of using a forged library card. Meanwhile, several of the girls' male schoolmates, also black, had been stealing $1.50 from the library fine money. The librarian, a white woman, had suffered cuts on her neck and wrist, and the girl who had caused the incident had been arrested as a juvenile delinquent. The six proposed special schools would hold about 1,200 pupils. The previous week, the Board, in its budget request, had asked for $500,000 for the schools. Five such schools were already in operation. The Board also proposed expansion of attendance, guidance and counseling services and said that teachers ought be assured of full support "in the strict enforcement of reasonable disciplinary measures." The Board had asked New York State to provide additional correction facilities for minors who required removal from normal society, and it called for immediate consideration of what to do with children convicted of delinquency who were returned to school on parole or probation. It was estimated that less than a percent of the schools' regular enrollment of 950,000 made up the hard-core delinquent pupils. The Board's program announced the previous day made no mention of the heated dispute between the school system and a special Brooklyn grand jury investigating violence in the Brooklyn schools. The president of City College, Dr. Buell Gallagher, had stepped into the controversy the previous day and accused the jury of furthering "hysteria" and "demagoguery". Rapes and assaults in and around school properties in Brooklyn involving both black and white pupils had aroused the grand jury.
In Paducah, Ky., the four-day
manhunt for a kidnaper had ended the previous night as he ran into
police headquarters and surrendered because "the pressure was
too much". Two policemen had chased him as he ran, hands in the
air and a fully loaded revolver sticking in his belt. It had been a
dramatic climax to one of the area's most intensive searches, begun
when the man and his male companion had kidnaped a Missouri State
Trooper at Van Buren, Mo., on Saturday night. The man said at the
police station that he was glad it was over, that he knew he could
not get away and had to quit running. Police from four states had
converged on the area when the pair, holding the trooper hostage, had
smashed through roadblocks in the trooper's police cruiser. The two
men, both of Redwood City, Calif., had fled to a remote area of
McCracken County late on Saturday night, where they had holed up at a
farm home and held the trooper and a couple hostage for 24 hours. One
of the two men had cracked under the pressure and shot and wounded
himself, before being captured, while the other man had fled to the
river bottomlands on Sunday, leaving the couple and the trooper
unharmed. Police had set up massive roadblocks within a 50-mile
radius of the farm, and a misunderstanding had caused the death of a
young woman at one roadblock when her car, driven by her brother, had
gone through the roadblock, prompting a civilian, who had stopped to
help the troopers, to fire a shot, which apparently had hit the young
woman in the back, killing her. An investigation of that incident was
still underway by the State Attorney General to determine whether
charges would be filed. (Forget it, Jake, it's…
In Detroit, a 90-year old woman had told police that a person had stolen her purse containing her $92 pension check, describing the culprit as "young, tall and thin", estimating the age to be between 16 and 17, then quickly changed the assessment to say that he had been about 60. She may have been reading too much Dickens of late, artfully dodging reality.
On the editorial page, "The Coroner's Duties Should Be Shared" indicates that Mecklenburg County was too big for a one-horse coroner system, that the burdens of office had to be shared by two or more officials if there would be fair and efficient administration achieved in such a metropolitan area. One modestly-rewarded individual could not cope with the many duties and responsibilities of the office. It finds that it was not a question of providing a deputy for the county's present coroner to persuade him to seek re-election, but rather a matter of providing the minimum resources necessary to operate an essential office in the manner in which the law required.
It thus favors enlarging the office, whether or not Dr. W. M. Summerville sought re-election. It finds it important that the county have a pathologist as coroner and also that he be provided with the expert assistance needed to do an efficient job, recommends to the General Assembly when it would meet next in 1959 to provide for that assistance, and in the meantime, for the County Commission to prepare a special act authorizing the formal appointment of a deputy coroner for presentation to the Assembly at that time.
"How To Explode Myths & Lure Industry" discusses how the New South could bring industry from the North, indicating that the newspaper had undertaken to undo some of the worst legends about life in the South, but had never had as much success as G. Randolph Babcock, president of Pelton & Crane Co. of Detroit, which had moved south to Charlotte a few years earlier, had enjoyed the previous day before Charlotte's Industrial Development Council.
Mr. Babcock had said that despite the fact that the Civil War had been over for almost 100 years and that Richmond had the previous week presented the keys to the city to U.S. Grant III, there was still a great deal of prejudice in the North toward the South, indicating that the best definition of prejudice he had ever heard was "being down on something you ain't up on." He said that there were a lot of people in the North who were not up on the South, that their principal concern, industrially, came from the popular misconception that Southern workers were too slow and easy-going, still believing that the skill and pace of the Northern worker was superior, a conception he had found to be wrong, then setting forth statistics which proved his point.
He said that his company's Southern labor force had out-produced Detroit labor by quite a bit and that direct labor costs of his company had gone down sharply although its employees were actually paid more in the South than in Detroit. He had nothing but the highest praise for Southern workers, whom he said learned readily, appreciated their jobs and were anxious to provide a day's work for a day's pay. Within six months after their workforce had been hired, it had been producing at a greater efficiency than they had ever experienced in Detroit. He said that the majority of the workers, moreover, were operating machines that they had never seen before and doing jobs completely foreign to most of them.
The piece concludes that it would be worth a great deal to local industry hunters if they added that unsolicited testimonial to their collection of lures for Northern industry, smashing a myth that perhaps had harmed the South more than many thought. Too many had promoted "cheap labor" in the South, and while some sections of the region might have such an advantage, it was ephemeral and one which tended to disappear as industrialization increased. The permanent advantage in the region lay in the productivity of its labor rather than in its "cheapness". For in the long run, "cheap labor" was likely to be inefficient and therefore costly. It finds that Mr. Babcock and the record he had imparted had dispelled the conception also of "lazy labor" in the South.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Barren Winter Fields", tells of the barren winter fields this time of year.
We have seen them, both from the air and the ground. From either perspective, they are not very pretty, being hard, crusty things on cold days and muddy mire on more temperate days. Winter in such environs is a time for reading and study, or easy contemplation, not work in the fields.
Drew Pearson indicates that two military men of contrasting disposition, position, and whereabouts had rejoiced when the American satellite Explorer had gone into orbit, those being Col. John Nickerson, court-martialed for opposing former Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson's ruling that the Army could not launch a satellite or work further on intermediate range missiles, that which had launched Explorer, and Maj. General John Medaris, chief of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala.
The latter had rejoiced in public before the photographers after the Explorer launch, while Col. Nickerson had rejoiced in private in exile in Panama. Most people had now forgotten that General Medaris had been the only officer who had testified against Col. Nickerson at his court-martial. He had told the court that the colonel had "violated the fundamental military code. He does not have any further value to the military service." When asked whether, if he was allowed to remain in the service, he would be willing to have him back in his command, he had replied that he would not. "I tried to temper his impulsiveness, but failed. I question today whether his judgment can be tempered. I have no idea how much he has learned that the end does not justify the means." For some weeks after his testimony, fellow officers had been so outraged at the General that they would not speak to him except in the line of duty.
Had the colonel not bucked Secretary Wilson's decision, however, the U.S. satellite might not have been launched the previous week, for the colonel knew at the time that he wrote his confidential memo that the Army had six small satellites in a Huntsville warehouse, gathering dust, because it had been ordered to cease that type of work. Mr. Pearson had published the fact, as had others in the press, and it led to the belated White House decision to let the Army launch a satellite.
The colonel had gone outside the line of duty in taking his confidential memo to Congress and placing it indirectly in Mr. Pearson's hands. But he had known what the Administration also knew, but would not reveal it to the public, that Russia was far ahead of the U.S. both in missiles and satellites. The memo had caused his court-martial, which indirectly might have been Mr. Pearson's fault. The memo had no name on it, but it was packed with so much dynamite-laden security information that for fear some of it might hurt the security of the U.S., his assistant, Jack Anderson, had taken it to the Defense Department for advice on what could be published, whereupon it had been confiscated and an investigation begun to ascertain the author. Col. Nickerson had promptly admitted writing it. Mr. Pearson had never met the colonel and had only talked to him on the telephone, after the court-martial, to tell him how sorry he was about the matter.
He concludes that history would decide, but he believed the colonel did not deserve the condemnation which General Medaris had heaped on him.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that young Hank Taylor had written a good piece recently about the increasingly good public relations between American tourists and the Russian people, to whom a visit in current times seemed less painful than earlier. He fears that he was being hopelessly strictured, mentally, about the idea of going to Russia and the moon, that perhaps one might like the idea of having a guide-translator following set routes between cities and reporting daily to the police, but that such was not for him.
For one thing, he found the climate unaccommodating, the hotels, lousy, and the people mostly afraid to talk to strangers. They were also short on such things as whiskey and across-the-board eating, and had bedbugs. It was a dusty country, reduced to tattletale gray from fear and privatization and lack of freedom. He suggests that perhaps the Bolshoi Ballet was the best in the world, but what had made ballet possible in the old Czarist time when Moscow was possibly the gayest capital in the world, had been ground under by Communism. "Perhaps the most deadly commentary on the entire system of living was portrayed in the film 'Ninotchka', which later became the musical 'Silk Stockings'." In the film, the character played by Greta Garbo had almost been pathetic as a commissar who found out in Paris that life was for living and that even more pathetic had been the security police who discovered the same thing. The violent contrast to what most of those who were free accepted as normal, if exaggerated fun, had hit "like the flat of an ax" when Ms. Garbo's character took off her silk stockings and had gone back to the Kremlin.
He says that he had known a great many White Russians, exiles from the old days when St. Petersburg was a fun town, full of sparkle despite the snow. Almost without exception, they had been charming, witty and gay, despite privatization. But it had been a long time since 1918, and the Russians he had met outside Russia at present were as dull and as badly tailored in personality as in their clothes. The effort which had gone into Sputnik had put a sorrowful stamp on the people. The whole idea of Russia depressed him, as did the thought of vacations on the moon.
While both Spain and Portugal were run by dictators, the foreigner would never know it if he came as a guest. He had been living in and out of Spain for the previous five years and the only evidence of police that he had ever seen was the cop on the corner who was his friend, and the Guardia, who kept an eye on his house when he was gone and stopped in for a drink when he was present. The people made good-humored jokes about Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the latter did not seem to mind. "As a wonderfully humorous, industrious, gentle but mentally disciplined people, the Spaniards are hard to beat."
He finds that no pride had been crushed in Spain, that his cook had as much dignity as the mayor. People used the possessive pronoun "our" to refer to everything, but it did not preclude a biting piece of sarcasm or a loud guffaw when somebody goofed.
He found the Portuguese to be likewise as well the Italians, although a bit more comic opera in their approach to living. Even the "crazy mixed-up French at least still consider themselves as individuals, as witness the cabinet changes and the tyranny of the concierge."
The picture he got of the average Russian was that of a faceless man in a crowd, afraid to fight city hall, living sparsely and rapidly in a sort of Sargasso Sea of boredom, fear and indoctrinated thinking. No one told off a cop or wrote a dirty letter to the editor, and the charm of daily living had all been stolen and dedicated to more guns, more tanks, more missiles, more bombs, more everything which was useless to personal happiness. (Query whether during the cold war, by fighting so hard against the Russians in terms of technical and weapons superiority, that the U.S. had slowly taken on the same aspects of Russian Communist culture, explaining perhaps today the severe paranoia of a large subset of the American people and the tendency to blame whoever was in the White House or in control of Congress or their least favorite media, or any other handy scapegoat for the problem, when, in fact, the problem is mainly in the collective mind of those Americans, still not adjusted to the end of the cold war since 1989, the manifestation of which has been the election of an oligarch and his oligarchical minions, in the desperate hope that they would somehow fix the problems, when in fact those elected are the devil making the problem the worse, cozying up to North Korea and Russia and planning to dismantle NATO, all to the delight of Vladimir Putin, who apparently is calling the shots in the head of Trump. If you think that equates to "America First", whether in the Nazi sense of the late Thirties or whether in some never-neverland of the future, you are not dealing with a full deck of cards and are not seeing things the way they are. You are instead engaged in hopeless fantasy, the stuff bred of watching far too much "reality television".)
He concludes: "No, the Russians, amiable or not, have no fear of any personal invasion from yours sincerely—not so long as they have spaghetti in Italy and bullfights in Spain. I see no point in spending any time in a subway station when the flowers are blooming in the park."
A letter writer finds that the news stories on the unexpected agreement of the USSR to establish cultural exchange with the U.S. would be cheering news were it not for the fact that some believed that, while personal exchange between nations was one of the most useful instruments in development of understanding, the belief that the 35,000 foreign students presently in American colleges and universities would go home to help their fellow countrymen know what the U.S. was really like remained dubious. He finds that whether it would be true of the young Russians sent to the U.S. was especially doubtful, as they would be selected because they were docile followers of Communist ideology, making them unable to see clearly. He says that some people who had contact with German exchange students during the Nazi regime knew that some of them had been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they were incapable of seeing Americans except in the way they had been taught. He also wondered how many high schools and colleges in the state offered instruction in Russian, such that Americans chosen to go to the Soviet Union would, for the most part, go being ignorant of the language. Charles Bohlen had been selected as the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow because he had been one of the very few of the diplomats who knew how to speak Russian. He finds that with the greatly increased exchange of businessmen, scholars, farmers and members of other groups with their opposite numbers from abroad, it was simply foolish not to have a large number of young American citizens studying the languages and cultures of other lands, that the public schools ought provide instruction to those who were qualified and interested.
Lee Oswald was interested.
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that there was a constant battle for the new Christian against the old habits which he found undesirable in his new life, that through study, meditation and prayer, that person filled the mind and soul with the new materials of the kingdom of God, a process which continued until bad habits, old desires and old habits were drowned out with the new kingdom's ideas and habits, that some of the old habits would break through and seek to make a comeback but that they could be flooded out until their roots and seeds were destroyed and the person was in full possession of the new life.
A letter writer from Clinton, S.C., says that all the religion he had ever known had been a scare. "Now that science can scare hell out of hell it's anybody's guess where it will end."
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., finds that the newspaper, its own "eggheadedness" being not enough for readers to contend with, had occasionally dragged onto its pages "the mouthings of any 'more hollow than thou' egghead—such as Harry S. Ashmore, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette,"—and former associate editor and editor of The News until departing for Little Rock in mid-1947. He indicates that on January 17 the newspaper had devoted nearly two-thirds of the editorial page to a speech by Mr. Ashmore which had glorified, in effect, "in the degenerate principle of racial integration. If any ordinary, conservative citizen had asked for that much space for a sober, comprehensive appraisal of the subject, you'd probably think the idea preposterous." He proceeds to attack Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court, "with its erstwhile (at least), anti-Japanese racist chief justice wielding much influence in the disgraceful 1954 decision." (He refers to the fact that Chief Justice Earl Warren, while Attorney General of California in 1942, had implemented the Federal Government's program, ordered in turn by the Governor, to displace Japanese living near the coastal areas of California—leading ultimately to the Korematsu v. U.S. decision in 1944, upholding the displacement as being justified by national security in a wartime emergency.) He contends that the South had, for years, been progressively complying with the established 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson in education. (The fact that it had not complied for the most part with it and the fact that segregation, per se, implied second-class citizenship for black citizens, was the point, after 58 years, that "slowly" to many Southerners really meant "never" as long as they were alive.) Mr. Cherry goes on in his usual ultra-right-wing diatribe, bringing up "states' rights" under the 10th Amendment, and so on, ad nauseam. He concludes: "Mr. Editor, you can have in the South your southern apologist editors like Harry Ashmore, Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter and C. A. McKnight"—the latter also a former News editor, now editor of the Charlotte Observer. "Stalwart and proud Southerners, like Thomas Waring (Charleston News & Courier) and James Jackson Kilpatrick (Richmond News Leader), can teach our people more about the warp and woof of true American principles in a single hour, than all the aforementioned eggheads can teach in a lifetime!" He says that it had been his privilege and honor to meet Mr. Kilpatrick several weeks earlier and wonders if the newspaper would be willing to grant him the same space it had to Mr. Ashmore.
The editors reply: "Sure."
Don't worry, Mr. Cherry, you will be hearing plenty from Mr. Kilpatrick on a CBS News presentation a few years down the road, in the same vein as Edward R. Murrow's Sunday afternoon "See It Now", called "60 Minutes", and he will be issuing to your heart's delight the kind of stuff you want to hear, if the overt racism will be toned down somewhat for commercial television. But you will understand, wink-wink, won't you, Mr. Cherry?
It is constantly to be remembered that Mr. Cherry, when an undergraduate at UNC back in 1948-49, had written a letter to Senator Clyde Hoey, turning in a graduate student who was studying in the physics department, albeit having nothing to do with military secrets, under an AEC scholarship, for being the lead Communist on campus, outspoken in the student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, having dueling letters to the editor with Mr. Cherry, leading eventually to that student's loss of his AEC scholarship after a Senate inquiry was launched by Senator Hoey. Mr. Cherry was thus empowered to go after anyone he did not like in the old, now completely discredited McCarthyite vein, a method actually originated and perfected in 1947-48 by HUAC and Mr. Nixon, simply taken to another level by the late Senator McCarthy and his catsup bottle, starting in February, 1950.
Framed Edition
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