The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 19, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date had called for an anti-recession speed-up in the spending of 2.25 billion dollars in Federal, state and local funds for construction and rural electrification projects, setting forth the program in letters to Albert Cole, head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. The plan called for faster spending of 508 million dollars in Federal funds and 1.747 billion in state, local and private funding. The money would be used for public facility loans for such things as sewers and municipal water projects, college housing loans, slum clearance projects and other aspects of urban renewal, public housing, and rural electrification loans. In advance of the announcement, Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia had joined Republicans in opposition to immediate tax cuts or "make-work" spending. At the same time, some Republicans in Congress were saying that the recession already was leveling off. Senator Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a prepared Senate speech that the Government was heading toward a 15 billion dollar deficit if Congress were to cut taxes and that any large-scale deficit spending for pump-priming would "add fuel to the inflation fire" and further cut the value of the dollar. Even in February, he said, inflation had cut purchasing power of a dollar by a third of a cent. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, assistant Senate Republican leader, said in an interview that the inflation threat was delaying a decision by the President on possible tax cuts, saying it would do the average family little good to obtain a tax cut and then find that the price of everything had risen through inflation, washing out the tax cut. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, of the Republican policy committee, said that he was certain that Congress was not going to pass either frantic spending or tax cutting of the type which would cause a 15 billion dollar deficit, indicating that the Administration would wait 30 to 60 days for signs of the "unmistakable trend" in the direction of the economy before making a decision on tax cuts. The President had passed up his regular press conference and set aside most of his schedule for the day for economic discussions, scheduling a conference with eight governors, members of the executive committee of the Governors' Conference, wanting to discuss with them his proposal for the extension of unemployment compensation payments. The House, meanwhile, had scheduled action on a 1.85 billion dollar emergency housing bill which its sponsors said would provide up to 600,000 new jobs, and on two resolutions calling for faster use of appropriated funds for military and civil public works projects. The President had told the annual Republican Women's Conference that he was opposed to what he called the "make-work approach" of jobs creation through public works.
Investigators for the House Investigations subcommittee probing the FCC had put aside its investigation into a question of possible perjury this date, calling two lawyers to testify in connection with central figures in the fight for the award of a Miami television channel, which had resulted in the resignation of an FCC commissioner, accused of having been bribed to vote for the award of the channel to a subsidiary of National Airlines.
In Baghdad, the pro-Western Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan proclaimed its constitution simultaneously in Baghdad and Amman this date. Oil-rich Iraq agreed to pay 80 percent of the federation budget for the first year.
In Taipei, Formosa, Nationalist China this day broke off commercial relations with Japan in protest against the recent private trade agreements between a Japanese group and Communist China.
In Paris, rightist opposition to concessions to Tunisia this date threatened agreement with Tunisia and menaced the life of Premier Felix Gaillard's four-month old Government.
In Frankfurt, public transport had been halted in most of West Germany and in West Berlin this date as some 250,000 municipal workers had struck for 24 hours for higher pay. Garbage piled up and even public toilets had been closed.
In Charlotte, as reported by Ann Sawyer of The News, North Carolina labor leaders had held their first statewide convention since the merger of the AFL and CIO on January 26, 1957, with the theme of the three-day meeting being the rising unemployment and ways to combat it. J. W. Holder, the state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, said that the delegates were expected to pass resolutions advocating for an extension of unemployment compensation, a minimum wage law in the state, extension of the Federal minimum wage law to cover employees such as those working in intrastate commerce and retail stores, improved state workmen's compensation laws, and a tax reduction. The chief speaker in the morning session had been Carl Megel, president of the American Federation of Teachers, calling the President's proposals for Federal aid "to limited areas of education, inadequate and many years too late." He had urged organized labor to press for an emergency school rehabilitation program to help meet the problems of shortages of classroom and qualified teachers. He said that Russian expenditure on its schools amounted to 10 percent of the national income while in the U.S., spending amounted only to 3.7 percent, adding that it was not to suggest that the U.S. ought pattern its educational system and philosophy after that of Russia and educate for the "production of military monsters rather than for strength and living in a democracy."
Richard Leonard, an assistant to Walter Reuther, vice-president of the AFL-CIO, addressed the convention, indicating that it was time to put union crooks and management crooks in jail where they belonged, but not to punish the union or the business. He said that the McClellan Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management had presented labor's enemies with a golden opportunity to seek repressive and punitive legislation under the guise of saving "the poor working man", demands which had been present since the days of the 1938 Wagner Act, establishing the right to collective bargaining, promoted through the years since as an effort to weaken and destroy the effectiveness of the trade union movement, giving big business a new excuse for seeking to destroy it.
Court action to block imposition of tolls on the Blue Ridge Parkway had been suggested this date by Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina, indicating that the state would be justified in asking the courts to prevent the Federal Government from charging fees for use of the scenic parkway. He made the statements at a conference attended by North Carolinians and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton, who oversaw the National Park Service, which had announced it would start collecting the tolls on June 1. Mr. Cooley said that Representative Charles Jonas of North Carolina had looked into legislative records and could find nothing indicating that tolls had ever been contemplated by Congress for the parkway. The highway chairman in the state during the 1930's when the parkway had been established insisted that state and Federal officials had a clear understanding that the highway would always be toll-free. Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina had told Secretary Seaton that a statement made by the state highway chairman years earlier remained true, that "Tolls will raise more hell than revenue." Governor Luther Hodges urged Secretary Seaton to cancel the toll notice, saying that as a member of the State Highway Commission at the time the parkway had been established, it had been clearly understood that the road would remain toll-free. He said that tolls would result in bitter resentment by the people of the state and that he believed the Federal Government would be breaking faith with the state by imposing them. Senator Kerr Scott and Representative George Shuford, plus others, joined in the opposition.
In New York, it was reported that
violence had broken out at one of the city's special schools for
delinquent pupils and also at a high-ranking high school. In the
first major incident reported since the special Manhattan grammar
school had opened on March 3, a 15-year old student had been arrested
after a scuffle with a teacher the previous day. Police said that the
youth had hit the teacher when he asked the boy to turn over
cigarettes before filing into class. The principal of the school
denied that any blows had been struck, indicating that the boy had
pushed the teacher and squared off as if to throw a punch. The boy
had been charged with juvenile delinquency and paroled to his
parents' custody. Meanwhile, at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan,
one of the city's leading academic institutions, a 17-year old boy
had been hit on the head with a claw hammer in the woodworking shop.
He had fallen to the floor and later was admitted to a hospital with
a fractured skull. Police had picked up a 14-year old boy at his home
and charged him with juvenile delinquency in the incident after that
boy had fled from the classroom. All of these students seem to have been
watching in earnest, empathizing with the wrong characters, third-run
showings of "Blackboard Jungle"
In Chicago, a 30-year old robber, who police had said held up four South Side stores the previous night in the span of 20 minutes, had been shot fatally by his fourth victim as he fled from the store.
In Hendersonville, N.C., bloodhounds had been sent out early during the morning to pick up the trail of a man who was wanted for questioning in the fatal strangulation and rape of a teenage waitress. A police sergeant had told the newspaper that a rural housewife had reported seeing a man who slightly resembled the description given of the man being sought, and that he had stolen the newspaper from her mailbox the previous day. Law enforcement had been searching summer homes closed off in the Mountain Home community for the 35-year old service station attendant. The theft of the newspaper had occurred about four or five miles from that community. The police were also checking on a tip that a man answering the description had been seen boarding a southbound freight train in Mountain Home. But did he have a newspaper?
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Charlotte attorney John P. Kennedy, Jr., had announced this date his candidacy for the State House in the Democratic primary.
In Washington, N.C., they had held court in an ambulance parked on the street to accommodate a defendant who could not carry his 400 pounds of weight upstairs to the courtroom. The defendant was convicted of possession of non-tax paid whiskey the previous day after the judge and solicitor had climbed into the ambulance with him to get out of the rain. The judge sentenced the defendant to four months on the roads, but suspended it on payment of costs, placing him on probation for 18 months. He should have imposed as a condition of probation that in the meantime he lose enough weight to enable himself to climb the stairs to the courtroom.
On the editorial page, "Open the Hothouse Doors, Please" wonders what was wrong with the Democratic Party in Mecklenburg County, suggesting that its most exasperating weakness was a self-imposed impotence. Active participation in party affairs was being discouraged rather than invited.
The most recent example was the chairman of the party in the county, who had denounced "outside interference" in party business, upset about political activity on behalf of "a special cause or a special candidate" in the various precincts.
It suggests that active, enlightened interest in causes and candidates was what politics was all about and that the democratic system was healthiest when that type of political activity was present in abundance. It finds that the party and the county needed the vigor of wide-open competition and more activity on behalf of candidates and issues, plus debate from an aggressive and cantankerous rank-and-file.
No party could ever avoid factionalism and that was a good thing, with a party platform always concealing a multiplicity of interests and ideas, as the democratic system was built on the idea that issues raised were susceptible to illumination by debate.
It views the chairman of the county party to be complaining actually about interference with the activities of the private club which he headed and that some enlightened "interference" would do it quite a bit of good. That it was a private club was the greatest tragedy, resembling the Republican Party in some sections of the South. It suggests that it was time for it to invite the great unwashed back to the party tables where they could actively debate ideas, issues and personalities, re-capturing its vitality of earlier years.
"Vanguard I: From Dust to Destiny" indicates that the Navy was now touting its Vanguard missile for the job of getting to the moon, and it suggests that if it could do the job soon, then by all means it ought do so.
But no future accomplishment could have greater value to the nation than the pathetic failure of its first attempt to launch a satellite the prior December, when the rocket had flamed and then fallen over and delivered its beeping satellite into the ignominy of the dust. It finds that had the whole thing been staged, it could not have cut so cleanly and deeply through the official lines which the Administration was putting out at the time or through public reluctance to believe that the nation had been outdistanced in certain vital fields. As a symbol, the earth-bound Vanguard offered a sleeping nation several other pertinent lessons, chief among which was that "crash" programs were no substitute for steady, thorough and consistent planning to meet expected needs.
The Vanguard had performed only after it had exacted of its makers every bit of care, patience, testing and correction which it required. Similarly, schools would not produce the bumper harvest of bright mathematicians and scientists needed by the nation to assure parity or leadership over the Soviets in space exploration. Rather, it would take time and effort.
For permitting the failure to be shown in public, the Pentagon had been condemned at the time by some critics who previously had complained of its excessive secrecy. Yet, in hindsight, the publicity of the failure had been a powerful incentive to the U.S. to pursue the Soviets in some fields where it was lagging dangerously behind. Now, the pride of the country in the Navy was high and it was just as well that the pride had to go very low the prior December.
"Please, Lady, Let's Change the Game" indicates that Marie McDonald, an alleged actress known familiarly in the trade as "The Body", was forever alleging that she had been kidnaped 14 months earlier, thereby teasing the public to wonder who had done it. The Los Angeles police had managed to overcome their boredom and put her several guesses to the test of whatever evidence they could muster, continuing to dig without finding anything. Every time they turned to other matters, however, and tried to forget about Ms. McDonald, she would call a press conference and get herself back into the headlines.
She had first accused her husband of plotting the kidnaping and later confessing it to her, but a lie detector test of her husband could not catch him in his denial, and Ms. McDonald declined to take a lie detector herself. The previous day, she had "tearfully denied" that her husband had anything to do with it, leaving investigators where they had started.
It indicates that it was weary with the guessing game and that it would be more fun to guess who had pushed Ms. McDonald into a sea of anonymity, if it could be accomplished.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "The Unconcentrated Subscriber", tells of a leading agricultural magazine, the Farm Journal, having some difficulty reducing its circulation, that among its 3.55 million subscribers were 300,000 whom it had cause to suspect were not genuinely agricultural. Determined to deliver to its advertisers "more of the prime farm market most effectively and most economically", it intended henceforth to screen new subscribers carefully and make sure they had specific farming interests.
It suggests that the trouble did not stop there, that there might well be an extraordinarily large number of people who liked to get somewhat close to the land but never to get any closer than reading about it, just as there were subscribers to Better Homes and Gardens who could not raise anything and subscribers to Popular Mechanics who were not actually mechanics or even popular. It foresees that the time might come when they had to prove their practice of urban living and perhaps an ability to swap a bon mot with the board of editors before they could have an application for a subscription to the New Yorker.
It finds, however, that with the emphasis on a concentrated market, some room would be left somewhere for those who were dreamers rather than doers.
Drew Pearson indicates that Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson had made an unusual private statement about Vice-President Nixon recently in a talk with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, saying, "Don't pay any attention to Nixon." The statement had been made during a tax-cutting truce arranged by the Secretary and the Speaker, aimed at halting the rash of statements and counter-statements, moves and counter-moves, which might have cut the American tax structure to pieces. Both Mr. Rayburn and Secretary Anderson were from Texas, the Secretary having once managed the 500,000-acre Waggoner Ranch and had sometimes sold calves to Mr. Rayburn's old friend, Sid Richardson, a Democrat who had supported candidate Eisenhower and had also gotten Mr. Anderson into the Cabinet originally as Secretary of the Navy.
Thus, when the Vice-President began publicly to urge a tax cut and House Democrats began the process of writing a bill to beat the Republicans to it, Secretary Anderson phoned Mr. Rayburn and they both agreed on a tax truce. But before that, there had been a running debate inside the Administration regarding the best means of remedying the depression. The Cabinet had been split on the subject, with Mr. Nixon, Attorney General William Rogers, Secretary of Labor James Mitchell and Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton on one side, wanting fast action to cut taxes and adopt other forms of job relief, while on the other side were Secretary Anderson, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and economic advisor Raymond Saulnier, all opposed.
Since the Treasury had to raise three billion dollars in cash to finance the Government for the following month and Secretary Anderson wanted to coordinate his money-raising policies with the Administration's anti-recession program, the situation was delicate. The Vice-President had shown the President a confidential political survey indicating that the recession had hit the Republicans so hard that if the midterm elections were held at present, the Democrats would win by a landslide. He thus urged a five billion dollar cut in income taxes before the Democrats had a chance to act first. That had preceded the Vice-President's statement the previous week proposing a tax cut.
Immediately thereafter, representatives of the large automobile manufacturers had sent frantic word to the White House to get the Vice-President to quiet down, indicating that his hopes for a tax cut had caused an automobile buying strike as people would not purchase cars when the excise tax, averaging about $200 per vehicle, might soon be abolished. While the automakers wanted the excise tax removed, they did not want futile talk in the meantime, depressing the car-buying market.
Mr. Pearson indicates that it was some of the backstage factors behind the call to Speaker Rayburn by Secretary Anderson and their truce that neither side would make a move on taxes without consulting the other.
Marquis Childs indicates that Secretary of State Dulles was disturbed about the question of who wrote the notes which the Soviets broadcast to the world, the latest of which had been conceded by all concerned as having been a "10-strike", seizing on such appealing propaganda devices as control of outer space by the U.N. and inspections within arms limitation agreements. It was full of ideas, and whether they were valid or merely gimmicks, he finds unimportant, as it was a propaganda war to gain the allegiance of peoples everywhere, a war in which the U.S. was losing ground constantly.
As Secretary Dulles returned from the meeting of SEATO in Manila, he would confront in a more acute form a situation over which he had often in the past found confounding. He had said recently that the U.S. had a far better case but did a much poorer job of presenting it. Shortly before he had gone away, he had named James Wadsworth to be the disarmament negotiator to replace Harold Stassen. Mr. Wadsworth had been deputy to U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. But the position had been downgraded. Whereas Mr. Stassen had sat in on meetings of the Cabinet and National Security Council, Mr. Wadsworth would be carrying out the orders of the Secretary of State. Secretary Dulles had also named four advisors on disarmament, John J. McCloy, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and former director of the American zone of occupied Germany, Robert Lovett, also a New York banker and former Secretary of Defense, General Alfred Gruenther, the President's longtime friend and national head of the Red Cross, and General Walter Bedell Smith, also a longtime associate of the President and a former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Undersecretary of State, presently a big business executive.
Mr. Childs finds all of them to be able men with long experience in public affairs, but given the best intentions, able to give but a small fraction of their time and attention to the difficult issue of disarmament. It would not be from those advisors that Secretary Dulles would get ideas if he really wanted them in prosecuting the struggle on which survival depended. One of the closest associates to the Secretary, seeking to explain the latter's thinking, had once said: "You see, Foster's trouble is that he doesn't respect the opinions of anybody who knows less than he does about foreign policy, and since nobody else knows as much as he does, this leaves him in a pretty lonely position."
More than in the past, the Secretary had begun to delegate at least a part of his burden. Undersecretary Christian Herter, who until a few months earlier had so little to do that he thought he should probably resign, had now been given areas of operation in which his abilities could find an outlet. But it was the smallest beginning in the transfer of the conduct of foreign policy from the Secretary to the costly apparatus of the State Department. If the Secretary wanted ideas and skilled assistance in the propaganda contest, he would not find it from the big names but in the growing number of persons in the universities specializing in various aspects of foreign policy. At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, the University of Chicago, Stanford and other centers of learning, there were knowledgeable specialists who had ideas, and they could also be found in organizations such as the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on World Affairs. The eggheads were now respectable again and such an untapped reservoir of ideas could now be sought.
Mr. Childs posits that the time was past for wondering about how Russia achieved its propaganda success, and the U.S. had to use its abilities to get ahead in that race.
Doris Fleeson, in Detroit, tells of economic news in Michigan getting worse faster, as the State Employment Security Commission had announced a new unemployment total of 415,000, or 14.3 percent of the labor force, the highest figure since the enforced idleness of the immediate postwar period when industry had been converting from a war footing to peace, representing an increase of 65,000 since mid-February. During the postwar layoffs, everyone had the comforting assurance that pent-up demand for goods and services existed, waiting only to be tapped by attractive goods. No such prospect now appeared and some of the most friendly observers were in a questioning mood about the structure of the dominant automobile industry.
Car sales had fallen sharply from their all-time high of 7.9 million in 1955, having dropped to 5.8 million in 1956, greeted by Detroit as being the result of election-year uncertainties, slightly rising to 5.9 million in 1957, with the comforting thought that the 1955 buyers had not finished making their 36 months of payments on their purchases. But thus far in 1958, there were no signs of upturn and the steady layoffs had resulted in predictions that new sales could go as low as 4.5 million during the year. The industry had warnings that some mood which was not temporary had struck their customers. Car dealers were coping with an estimated inventory of 900,000 cars, a crippling set of circumstances.
Notwithstanding those facts, savings were up generally and reassuring indications of business activity existed in other areas.
A vice-president of General Motors, Edward Ragsdale, general manager of Buick, following a return from a two-week tour through the West, insisted that the hard facts did not indicate a recession of the magnitude suggested, that the cash was available for consumer purchases and that business activity was better than the average person realized. The only thing he saw as wrong was that the average consumer was "steeped in gloom" and that business lacked "a formula for generating confidence among the people."
Thus far, the industry seemed agreed on two demands on the Federal Government for relief, one being to remove excise taxes on car sales and the other being a form of income tax moratorium.
Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams described the state situation as a "major economic disaster" and was preparing a state-Federal program to remedy it, wanting Federal action to pay for the cost of extending unemployment compensation benefits and more Federal highway expenditures. He was attempting to prod local communities into building projects and had suggested a 55 million dollar state building program.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, finds it difficult to believe that the U.S. would have hard times ahead, based on the number of tourists he had seen in Europe and Africa during his sojourns of the previous year. He suggested that any recession might be partially because Americans were abroad in too great numbers. He says he had never seen so many foreigners spending so much money or so many new roads with so many expensive new automobiles on them, with American makes jockeying for position with the foreign makes.
The Americans had conquered Italy, Spain and England, while the French competed with the Swiss for Spain and the Spanish competed with the Swiss for Switzerland, where the hard money grew. The tourist business had nearly always been an accurate index as to how people were doing financially at home.
He indicates that the previous few years had spoiled everyone, that no one wanted to do common labor anymore even for large amounts of money, that everyone more or less wanted to start out as a jet pilot, an atomic scientist or a television star, forgetting the need for a lot less glamorous tasks to be done first.
He concludes that Americans were not broke yet or even heading for that position, that if there were a problem, it was that Americans had sold so many things to so many people that the supply was wagging the demand.
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