The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 12, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Florence, S.C., that the Air Force was asking curiosity
seekers this date to return probably harmless but highly secret
fragments of an unarmed atomic bomb
Julian Scheer of The News reports from Mars Bluff on the incident, describing what was left of the house where the bomb fell the previous afternoon. He indicates that a Geiger counter search had borne out the earlier contention that the explosion had posed no threat of radiation. He says that the owner, his wife, three children, a niece and a maid had been on various parts of the grounds when the TNT portion of the weapon had exploded on contact. All were doing well and would be released from medical treatment this date, except the nine-year old niece who had been visiting. He provides first-hand accounts from members of the family.
Well, of course they want you to believe it was "unarmed" and perfectly harmless. The fact of the matter is that the world has ended. You just did not know it.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., the Navy had canceled another attempt to fire its Vanguard satellite rocket shortly before noon this date after hours of trying.
In Dayton, O., five Air Force officers had been sealed in a small space chamber this date for a five-day simulated satellite flight around the earth.
In Pakanbaru, Central Sumatra, it was reported that Central Government troops had parachuted into the airfield this date in the biggest action yet by the Jakarta Government to retake rebellious Central Sumatra.
In Manila, Secretary of State Dulles this date said that the U.S. Government would welcome a summit meeting which would not be just a "mere spectacle" but one which would offer prospects of solid progress toward world peace.
The Senate, debating a 1.85 billion dollar housing bill, faced a sharp fight this date over whether the interest rate on G.I. mortgages ought be raised.
Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson said this date that the Administration would make no decision on any anti-recession tax cut until "the future course of the economy has been clarified."
The House Investigations subcommittee would resume its investigation of the FCC this date amid uncertainty as to whether former FCC commissioner Richard Mack would show up for more questioning.
The UAW would have a chance this date, in testimony before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct by unions and management, to answer sworn charges that a spitting, cursing mob of union members had moved in on Kohler Co. officials.
In Newtown, Conn., three children had died early this date when fire had swept through their quonset hut home, and a fourth child had nearly been trapped in a vain effort to save their lives.
Bill Hughes of The News reports from Sanford, N.C., on the murder trial of Frank Wetzel, accused of murdering Highway Patrolman J. T. Brown the prior November 5, having already been convicted of murdering another Highway Patrolman the same night, Wister Reece, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial had adjourned early the previous day and was delayed nearly an hour and a half during the current morning when one juror told the judge that he felt dizzy, resulting in him being examined by a physician during the morning but remaining in jury service after reporting that he felt better. After the late start, the solicitor called witnesses in rapid order until the jury was sent out again as attorneys argued regarding the admission of a map into evidence, showing Mr. Wetzel's alleged route between the scenes of the two killings, occurring in different counties about an hour apart. The judge temporarily refused to admit the map and a Charlotte FBI agent was then recalled to the witness stand to retell the story related by the hitchhiker who had described the murder of Patrolman Reece at which he was present. The FBI agent's testimony and the map were to be used to show where the hitchhiker's gloves and Bible had been found after allegedly being thrown from the killer's car as it sped away from the scene. The witness had jumped out of the car when he saw the driver grab a gun from the glovebox after the car was stopped by Patrolman Reece for a traffic violation. The prosecution was scheduled to rest during the afternoon after seven days of presentation.
In Los Angeles, a little old lady
had gone to a man, thrown her arms around him and proclaimed that he
was the "spitting image" of her long-lost son, whom she had
not seen for 20 years. She apologized and then hurried away. The man
then later discovered that his billfold containing $22 was missing.
He said, however, that he was not angry, that he would like to shake
hands with the little old lady. "Everybody else waits around for
the government to take care of them in their old age and here she is
employing a real technical skill to take care of herself." She
could have thrived in and around the environs of Tombstone
On the editorial page, "The Moon and Mr. Dulles: A Dim View" indicates that Secretary of State Dulles had taken a dim view of space exploration, not surprising, as he took dim views wherever he traveled and saw no reason to believe things would be better on the moon.
It suggests that, if Mr. Dulles had his way, the Russians would inevitably get there first, reaping whatever propaganda benefits they could from the exploit, about the only thing to be gained by such an adventure.
Yet, Russian propaganda seemed to be pushing the Secretary toward a summit meeting he did not really want. It finds his distaste for propaganda to be one of the most puzzling aspects of his personality.
The Administration apparently had thought it was reasonable not to engage in a race with Russia to put up the first satellite, with the unfortunate consequences having become manifest. It thus finds the Dulles view on outer space to represent defeatism. It suggests that seeking answers to questions raised by the mind of man was not necessarily an idle task or "despotic exhibitionism", as Mr. Dulles regarded it.
"Frontiers, once crossed, have to be explored. Space will be explored, and the only question before the U.S. is whether it is willing to pay the cost of being the leader."
James Reston had noted in the New York Times recently the mothballing of the Navy's last battleship and the commissioning of an atomic-powered submarine, the Nautilus, capable of firing a nuclear missile up to 1,500 miles, also noting that the Nautilus had cruised 1,383 miles under ice to within 180 miles of the North Pole, although no ordinary submarine had ever gone more than 20 miles under ice. He stated: "Before many years, probably before the end of the Eisenhower administration, the United States will be able to put atomic missiles in submarines that can lie submerged for months close to the Soviet shores under the polar ice caps where they cannot be detected." He argued that those were the events revolutionizing the lives of men and nations. "The great news, underlying all the talk of summit meetings and economic recessions, lies not within the diplomats but with the scientists and technicians. For the time being, the issues between the great powers seem stale and endless. We seem to be lost in a world of tiresome and insoluble arguments, but the roots of these arguments are gradually being eroded, not by Eisenhower and Khrushchev but by the restless, brilliant minds of men such as Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the atomic submarine genius, and Wernher von Braun, the Army's German-born missile expert…"
It suggests that the U.S. did not need to mimic the Soviet Union, which had placed a great store in its scientists and technicians to achieve world leadership, but rather it had to lead and let the Soviets mimic.
"In Defiance of the Hosts of Darkness" indicates that Professor Norman Eliason of the UNC English department was wondering what to call the present age, whether the Age of Roosevelt, the Age of Ike, the Age of the Swept Wing, the Age of Rock 'n' Roll, the Atomic Era, or perhaps the Age of Freud. He had raised the question recently in the Faculty Humanities Lecture regarding "The Age of Bede", the Seventh Century egghead remarkable because he was the only philologist who had an age named for him.
Few eggheads since had been so honored, with Shakespeare having been beaten out by Elizabeth I, and so it wonders who might be honored in current times. Professor Eliason had said, "I should personally rest content if a philologist's name were chosen, for I would derive no small amount of satisfaction from having lived and worked and died during the age of George Lane, Tignor Holmes or Bert Ullman."
It shares the professor's respect for those three philologists, but predicts that the tag for the times would come from a condition rather than a man, probably turning out to be that suggested by poet W. H. Auden: "The Age of Anxiety". It finds that no earlier era could match the present for apprehensiveness, with anxiety having become more or less a way of life. Now, no one would be surprised if the sky, indeed, were to fall.
Peter Fleming had said: "Our age is haunted by bogeys: and they seem, to bogey fanciers, comparably more dismaying than those that troubled our featherbedded forbears who had nothing but the Black Death, or the Civil War, or a Napoleonic invasion to worry about."
It finds that present terrors were utterly incomprehensible to most Americans, including radioactive fallout, intercontinental ballistic missiles, monsters from other planets, monsters from Earth, things which went bump in the night and the recession in which the cost of living continued to zoom inexplicably toward Mars.
"The bogeys would not be so bad if they were not met by almost universal pessimism and despair. We have simply come to think of mankind as no more significant than Pavlov's famous dog—reacting on schedule to certain stimuli. It is about time that somebody decided that men are thinking and feeling creatures quite capable of making moral decisions. Whatever the source of man's anxiety it is remediable. The mind that can send rockets to the moon can send its terror to the trash heap with last month's magazines. We are more than a little weary of the soothsayers of sorrow who complain about the 'unjust and unimaginable' condition of man. A revolt is in order—an old-fashioned revolt by the individual against the unimaginable."
It indicates that if there had to be terror, it should at least be rational terror and then perhaps the Age of Anxiety would dissolve into something more uplifting and less doom-shaped.
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Tea Leaf Reading", finds that the economy would be on even keel by halfway through the year 4656, the Chinese lunar year in 1958. Everything would be all right, at least according to the elders of the Kuan Yin Temple in San Francisco who were predicting a wave of prosperity to begin to sweep the U.S. and Western Europe by June 30. The prediction had been composed in connection with the Chinese New Year, which would begin the following day, marking the close of the Year of the Rooster and the beginning of the Year of the Dog.
It finds it nice to hear that 1958 was also the year in which the economy would get out of the doghouse. It indicates that for all it knew, the beginning of the end of the recession and the end of the approach to the new boom everybody was predicting might already have started and so it did not want to make anyone believe it was deflating the predictions of the elders, and very much hopes that the celestial economists were right.
"And they've certainly got as much right to be taken as seriously as any of our better known occidental economists who are saying that things will be turned around by a certain day. For when you get right down to it, there isn't much difference between graphs and charts or joss sticks and tea leaves when a man tries to read the future."
Drew Pearson indicates that it looked as if National Airlines president G. T. Baker and Congressman John Bell Williams of Mississippi had rehearsed their testimony when Mr. Baker had recently appeared before the House Investigating subcommittee chaired by Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas. Their subject had been Mr. Pearson. He quotes Mr. Williams as having asked Mr. Baker to explain what connection he would find between an unsuccessful applicant for the Miami television channel and Mr. Pearson, to which Mr. Baker had replied that Mr. Pearson had a leak somewhere, implying that it had come from his son-in-law who worked for a law firm connected with the matter. He said he did not believe it had come from the committee or its staff. Mr. Williams had then stated that Mr. Baker appeared to imply that Mr. Pearson was not telling the truth, affirmed by Mr. Baker.
Mr. Pearson indicates that Mr. Baker was the airline executive who had written a letter to Mr. Harris describing as "pure fabrication and vicious lies" Mr. Pearson's report that National Airlines had used influence through an attorney and FCC commissioner Richard Mack to secure the television channel for a subsidiary of National. Mr. Mack had since resigned and the subcommittee presently had evidence that he had received $41,000 from outside sources, including that from the attorney in question, while a member of the FCC.
He indicates that the gibberish which he quoted from Mr. Baker and Mr. Williams did not make sense to many people, that apparently Mr. Baker was referring to the fact that his son-in-law, presently an attorney in Los Angeles, had represented Dr. Bernard Schwartz, the fired counsel for the subcommittee who was then subpoenaed to testify before it. He indicates that presumably, Mr. Baker and Mr. Williams thought that because his son-in-law was the son of Judge Thurmond Arnold, who was in turn the law partner of Paul Porter, who in turn was the lawyer for the unsuccessful applicant for the television channel, Mr. Pearson had some connection with the case. He says that while the conclusion was untrue, he wanted to remind Mr. Williams that his name, address and phone number were in the telephone book and that he was available to straighten him out on that point anytime he wanted the facts.
Marquis Childs indicates that the letter which the President had sent to Republican leaders providing a modest package of new measures to combat the recession had been largely worked out by the group within the Administration closely allied with Vice-President Nixon, who had been the focus of the pressures to get the Administration committed as quickly as possible to steps aimed at checking the upward trend in unemployment. The pressures had come mainly from Republicans running for the Senate and House in industrial areas and the pressure had become greater in recent weeks as increasingly pessimistic reports had come from Republican strategists.
Senator William Knowland of California, running for governor to succeed Goodwin Knight, had been foremost among those who were pessimistic, reporting that his hopes for success in the fall would continue to dwindle should the Administration not show signs of action. An equally urgent appeal had come recently from Secretary of State Dulles, shortly after returning from the SEATO conference in Manila, telling Mr. Nixon that it was imperative to reverse the present economic trend if the U.S. were to hold its position of leadership in the world. As American buying slowed and commodity prices dropped, the rubber from Malaya and the coffee from Colombia were not being bought at the same pace, having dire consequences.
The Vice-President was pushing for action prior to the President's weekend letter to Republican leaders. Democratic leaders had introduced their resolution calling for a greatly accelerated program of public works and the letter looked like a reaction to the Democratic initiative. Nevertheless, the President's proposals represented a considerable triumph for the activist force within the Administration as against those willing to let the natural forces of recovery keep working against the recession.
The President's budget for fiscal year 1959, an old-fashioned economy budget, had ruled out starting any new reclamation projects in the West where the recession had hit hard. Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton had been arguing for the urgent need for new reclamation starts. A leading member of the Nixon group, he had now won his point and the President's letter called for an amendment to the Interior Department budget "to allow an early start on small reclamation projects."
The Nixon group, by repealing the pay-as-you-go amendment to the Federal Highway Construction Act, favored by Senator Harry F. Byrd, believed that an additional billion dollars could be added to spending in the latter part of the year and the first part of 1959, estimating that the proposals on housing included in the President's letter would increase the estimated 1.1 million housing starts during 1958 by as much as 300,000. As Mr. Nixon had stressed in the discussions with the group, all the increases had been in the accepted spending pattern. He had also stressed the peril to the party in power responsible for fiscal policy and caught between inflation and recession and perhaps inevitably outbid by the opposition party with more generous and appealing offers. The party in control of the executive branch had to steer a narrow course between too much too soon and too little too late. With too much too soon, including a large tax cut improperly timed, a new inflationary spiral could be set in motion. The force of such inflation might be such that it could be checked only by tight controls imposed by the Federal Government.
Mr. Childs indicates that it was the nightmare threat ever present for those who had immediate responsibility for the economy, and if it should happen, according to the Vice-President, the Republicans would be finished not only for 1958 but also for 1960, involving also therefore his own destiny, thus explaining his intense interest in those matters.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, tells of the official artist of the jazz age, John Held, Jr., having died recently. He had worked for the defunct College Humor, for the dead Judge and for the old Life, with his cartoons having been as stylized as Japanese art. The flappers looked more like flappers than the actual article and his sheiks in their coonskin coats with their 26-inch pants cuffs, were "powerful sheiksy".
He says that one of the biggest days of his life was when College Humor had purchased one of his cartoons and it had run across the page from Mr. Held, whom he had emulated in his drawing efforts.
He says that in his college days there was no collective brain among them until the Depression came and sobered up Joe and Jane College. "A cheerleader was no longer regarded as a hero, skirts lengthened and the bloomer got itself replaced by the girdle. Joe College suddenly reverted to the Harris tweed coat, the gray flannel pants and the white (and dirty) saddle shoe. Anybody with wide pants and a slicker was sneered at as very corny."
But Mr. Held had continued through that period to draw his young folks as he had seen them at the height of the silly Twenties, and somehow it made the observer feel good, despite the fact that the era of "wonderful nonsense was finished, and nothing much but sweat and toil was over the hill." He bids farewell to Mr. Held and hopes that the angels in his vicinity had coonskin coats and played a very hot harp.
A letter from Davidson remarks on the March 8 editorial, "Odds Favor the Beach Towel Brigade", attempting to ridicule the legislators of South Carolina, the writer finding that it reflected little credit on the editors' "powers as masters of either irony or horse sense." He clarifies the distinction between a towel bearing a Confederate symbol and garments. "The true and not yet lost cause of the South is decency in human relations. Make your contributions by mending your manners. And buy your editorial staff some handkerchiefs, plain handkerchiefs."
A letter writer from Pacolet, S.C., responds to the same editorial, wonders whether any citizen would use the emblem of any country's flag, whether native or foreign, for a pocket handkerchief or as a towel, concluding that legislation was not necessary.
A letter from Frank Porter Graham, former UNC president, in Geneva, Switzerland, indicates that his sister had sent him the newspaper's "generous and challenging editorial", titled "UNC Must Reassert Leadership in a Region Torn by New Turmoil". He thanks the editors for placing him in the same company with Howard Odum and for their call to William C. Friday, newly installed UNC president, whom he believes would respond in good measure with such help as that of the newspaper.
A letter writer indicates that during the worst weather in Charlotte in 50 years, at least two families had their furniture piled in the street and damaged or ruined by the weather. He regards it as a mystery why citizens of Charlotte would give millions of dollars to the "so-called charitable community services organization, when they allow such things as this to happen." He wonders what they did with all the millions which had been raised when they would not help people in need.
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