The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 26, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, in a press conference this date, said that he believed the country was going through the worst of the economic recession at present, and that many factors implied that the bottom of the slump was close or even had been reached. He said that the American people ought be buying on the basis of what products were worth and that there should be better salesmanship, better packaging and better advertising by businesses to get the public to buy when it thought it had a bargain, instead of worrying about what would happen in the future. He said that he had never excluded the possibility of a situation arising which would make a tax cut seem desirable, that every thoughtful person, including leaders of both parties, regarded a tax reduction as a serious step and they would not be stampeded into it. He declined to speculate on the timing of any possible anti-recession tax cut. He said that the important thing was not to do anything which would be harmful to the economy in the future and that it would be wrong to become frantic regarding the recession, as he indicated some people had wanted to do when Russia had first launched a Sputnik the prior October. It was his first press conference in three weeks.
He had also announced that a group of foreign scientists, probably including Russians, would be invited to observe a large U.S. atomic explosion in the Pacific in the ensuing summer, the purpose being to show a big cut in radioactive fallout produced by an hydrogen bomb. He said that "a representative group" of American and foreign correspondents would be invited to observe and report on nuclear testing in the ensuing Pacific series. In response to questions, he said he did not fear the results of a possible visit to the U.S. by Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and still believed that a summit conference could be held in the U.S., that comment contrasting with word from other Administration sources during the current week that the U.S. had decided against a summit meeting in the U.S. because officials did not want to see Mr. Khrushchev visit the country. He also said that with proper inspection, it ought be possible to assure detection of all except very small nuclear tests. His comments indicated that he now supported advisers who said it was possible to suspend nuclear testing as a step toward disarmament and make sure in the process that there was no cheating. He added that some very small tests might occur without detection. He indicated his awareness of the possibility that without waiting for agreement with the U.S., the Soviets might suspend atomic testing when their present series ended, indicating that he did not know what they would do but that anything was possible. He stated that the U.S. was trying to maintain a reasonable and clear position in summit conference negotiations but had to avoid tacitly approving everything the Russians wanted out of such a conference. Secretary of State Dulles had said the previous day that Soviet terms were "too high" and the U.S. could not go to the summit conference under conditions which would imply approval of all which the Russians sought.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., the Army had sent aloft another Explorer satellite aboard a Jupiter-C rocket this date, with the intent being to place the 80-inch long and six-inch diameter tube plus its 31-pound satellite into an orbit 200 or more miles above the earth. The Army hoped to be able to announce within little more than an hour whether the attempt had been successful. It was the third Jupiter-C launching in less than two months. The rocket team from Huntsville, Ala., had fired Explorer I into orbit on January 31, and on March 5, a Jupiter-C had propelled Explorer II into orbit, but that satellite had failed to attain orbital speed because the 50-pound rocket in its fourth and final stage had not ignited.
William Ryan of the Associated Press reports that speculation was mounting in Western circles that a new premier might be installed instead of Nikolai Bulganin in Russia when the new Supreme Soviet convened the following day in Moscow. Rumors had been developing for more than a year that Mr. Bulganin was on the way out, with some diplomats reasoning that a session of the Supreme Soviet would be a logical place to open the trap door if the 62-year old veteran Bolshevik had been marked to go. If he were to be dropped, his successor might be Alexei Kirichenko, 50, former first secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party and long one of the top aides to Mr. Khrushchev. Speculation that a shakeup was nigh had heightened when Moscow Radio broadcast a list of Soviet officials attending a dinner for U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, with Mr. Bulganin left off the list. The Kremlin, itself, however, had not provided any hint of a shakeup. Doubt over Mr. Bulganin's future had risen anew in connection with the election the previous week of the more than 1,300 members of the new Supreme Soviet. Under party tradition, each Soviet leader was offered a number of candidacies from which to seek his support from his Soviet seat, picking his district, with the number of candidacies being a measure of his prestige. Mr. Khrushchev had received more than 600 nominations. In second place was 77-year old figurehead President, Klementi Voroshilov, and third was Mr. Kirichenko, who got more than 200. Mr. Bulganin was virtually out of the running, and instead of the Moscow district which he had previously represented, he wound up as a candidate from a remote area. Many believed that Mr. Bulganin might face belated punishment for his reportedly lukewarm stand in the previous year's "antiparty" purge, with reports indicating that he had not been very firm in support of Mr. Khrushchev during the crisis.
Secretary of Labor James Mitchell this date asked Congress to tighten picketing and boycott provisions in the Taft-Hartley law and to legislate labor anti-corruption curbs. He was the first witness before a Senate Labor subcommittee looking into labor legislation. The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said that the hearings would be confined to the anti-corruption suggestions made by the Senate Select Committee, of which he was a member, investigating misconduct of labor and management, and would not be concerned with the whole area of labor-management relations covered by Taft-Hartley. That appeared to rule out, for the time being, the proposals made by Secretary Mitchell on behalf of the President for picketing and boycott bans. The Secretary said that the President's proposals, made to Congress in January, had not been intended to weaken the labor movement but rather to strengthen the Federal law for protection of organized labor, management and the public. Senator Kennedy said that the subcommittee would devote its attention primarily to the Senate Select Committee's recommendations for legislation to safeguard union funds from corrupt leaders, curb union bossism, restrict influence of labor-management middlemen, and clarify Federal-state jurisdiction in labor disputes.
Members of the Senate Select Committee voiced surprise this date at the "smear" charge leveled by AFL-CIO president George Meany in the wake of the Committee's report condemning top leaders of five unions. Chairman of the Committee, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, said: "Honest, decent unionism should be appreciative and grateful for the service the committee has rendered rather than condemning the committee." The report, approved by seven of the eight Committee members, had been critical of the Teamsters Union more than any other, accusing the Teamster bosses of corruption, misusing union funds and conniving with New York and West Coast racketeers.
This date before the Select Committee Herbert Kohler would testify regarding the four-year old strike at his plumbing fixtures plant. Senator McClellan said that the Committee would hear Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, on Thursday as possibly the final witness in that part of the investigation.
A compromise 2.86 billion dollar money bill, including an extra 250 million for soil bank payments, was now awaiting the President's signature.
In Paris, it was reported that thousands of police this date carried out their biggest roundup thus far of suspected supporters of the Algerian rebellion, swooping down in areas northeast and northwest of Paris in the early morning hours on scores of hotels and dormitories housing North African workers.
In Madrid, it was reported that the U.S. this date granted Spain 15 million dollars to finance imports of industrial raw materials, with the grant bringing American aid to Spain during the current fiscal year to 56 million dollars and total aid under the mutual security program to 356 million.
In Warsaw, a mass grave containing the bodies of 5,000 to 6,000 Allied war prisoners this date was reported discovered at Szprotawa, in the former German area of western Poland.
In Jakarta, the Indonesian Navy this date announced that it had mined a 60-mile stretch of Sumatra's west coast centered on the rebel headquarters port of Padang.
In Columbus, O., and Tamaqua, Pa., nine persons, eight children and a young mother, had perished in two fires this date. The young mother and her five children had died in an early morning fire in a two-story frame house in Columbus, while three girls, ranging in age between 11 and 16, had suffocated when trapped in a third-floor bedroom after a fire had broken out in their frame home in Tamaqua. No cause of either fire is reported.
In Miami, Fla., it was reported that a carefree day of shopping in the Bahamas had ended the previous night with a plane crash which drowned three adults and two children, with the only survivor having been rescued from the Atlantic 2.5 miles off Hollywood by a fishing boat. He said that he and his wife and a family from Florida had taken off from Fort Lauderdale in a rented single-engine plane, had spent the day shopping in Bimini and Nassau and had started their return trip around sundown, that the father of the family who was piloting the plane commented that it looked like they were out of gas, at which point the plane began to lose altitude, hit the water and sank within five minutes. The husband and wife, their seven-year old daughter and 18-month old daughter and the survivor's wife were all drowned. The survivor, who was hospitalized with shock and exposure, said that he had held up the 18-month old infant until his strength had failed him. He said he could find no life preservers aboard the aircraft.
In Kinston, N.C., a Marine private first-class of Columbus, O., denied from the witness stand this date that he had raped an 18-year old woman in her automobile the prior November 24. He was being charged with the capital crime of rape and was the first defense witness after the State had rested its case during the late morning. The alleged victim the previous day had identified the Marine, based at Camp Lejeune, as her assailant.
In Wilmington, N.C., officials of the Azalea Festival were using infrared lights on a 24-hour basis in the hope of getting a few azaleas to bloom for the festival opening the following day in Wilmington. Because of cold weather, only a few flowers were blooming. Officials estimated that the peak of the blooming would come a week to ten days after the festival closed the following Sunday. The infrared treatment was being tried on a few selected plants in Greenfield Gardens, where a foot-bridge across a lake would be dedicated during the festival. It looked like the effort might work. Television star John Bromfield would be the King of Festivities, and was scheduled to arrive this date. Movie stars Esther Williams, Queen Azalea XI, and Scott Brady, King of Hospitality, would arrive the following day. The four-day festival would include a PGA-sponsored golf tournament and a giant parade on Saturday. Which giants will appear?
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the Blue Ridge Parkway tolls battle had been won by North Carolina, as Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton had told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that plans to collect tolls on the Parkway would be abandoned. The National Park Service, under the control of the Interior Department, had earlier announced plans to impose tolls on travelers on the Parkway beginning June 1. The plan, which was not new to North Carolina, had evoked heated protests from North Carolina's Congressional delegation and from Governor Luther Hodges. The Governor had led a delegation to Washington a week earlier and at that time, Representatives George Shuford and Charles Jonas had suggested that the state ought go to court if necessary to prevent the collection of tolls. Mr. Jonas had informed the newspaper from Washington that the fight had been won and that he anticipated a formal order to abandon the toll plan within the ensuing few days. The North Carolinians who appeared at a special hearing the prior week had contended that the imposition of tolls would be a "breach of faith". (It is kind of like Newfound Gap between North Carolina and Tennessee in the mountains—which would, in a way, become famous in 1973 with the release of the Watergate tapes. The only difference being that with the 18.5 minute gap in the tapes, there would be a significant toll to be exacted the following August for the "breach of faith". Ye Fala?)
On the editorial page, "A Very Strange Crutch for Kerr Scott" indicates that Senator Scott had just limped into the battle for the billboard lobby on a states' rights crutch, being legalistic in his attacks on a proposal before Congress to regulate billboards along the 41,000-mile Federal interstate highway system, which he regarded as an invasion of states' rights by making the Secretary of Commerce "a czar over the regulation of outdoor advertising…"
It indicates that no one wanted another czar such as in the Department of Agriculture, which administered the Federal farm subsidies which Senator Scott was wont to champion. The Senator's primary concern appeared to be the matter of states' rights. He had not mentioned the rights of property owners along the highway system and the rights of the people whose tax money would build the highway system. The property owner had a right to take a fee from a billboard firm, and the firm had a right to place its advertisement after paying the fee. But neither the property owner nor the firm could profit until taxpayers built a road. It finds it eminently fair that the citizens who provided the basis for the billboard business by building the roads to have a right to be protected against an unsightly and possibly dangerous distraction placed along those roads.
The states could regulate and were urged and offered an incentive to do so by the proposal which was being attacked by Senator Scott. The states also had the right to build the highways but had agreed that the Federal Government would pay 90 percent of those costs. Congress had declared that the roads were a "national system of interstate and defense highways", and it finds there ought be a national pattern for roadside advertising to preserve the beauty and character of the natural landscape.
It concludes that states' rights were not an issue but rather a gimmick designed to defeat what Senator Scott's ally, Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr, had referred to as the "ass-etic" pretensions of citizens who wanted to observe and admire America as they drove over of its roads.
It indicates that the previous night, the Senate thankfully had voted for billboard regulation.
"Charlotte Chases the Blues Away" indicates that Charlotte's automobile dealers were on the warpath, putting up a "You Auto Buy Now" campaign as an inventive scheme to get money moving locally, finding it a lesson for other businesses.
It would be a week-long cooperative sales drive in April, decorated with special promotional material, special incentives and zeal. The purpose of the program was to sell more cars but its effect on the community's overall economy would be even broader, as by putting more dollars back to work, residents would be pumping adrenaline into sagging markets all down the line, enabling other businesses to benefit.
The automobile dealers promised quick bargains to consumers who had been getting along with a beat-up jalopy. A similar program had been tried in Cleveland recently and 6,800 cars had been sold in a week after three weeks of special promotion. Dealers had done approximately 15 million dollars in business and the whole economic climate of Cleveland had brightened almost overnight.
It finds the most refreshing aspect of the venture to be that an industry was rallying massively to its own cause. It finds admiration for the automobile dealers for their enthusiasm and effort, suggesting that such a spark could touch off bigger business blazes all over the country.
That's an idea for Tesla to boost sagging sales amid controversy and a bad Trump economy: Sell those suckers for $2 each, with free fire insurance thrown into the bargain.
"Teach American Diplomats To Talk" indicates that the President had learned recently that his ambassador to Turkey might be able to talk turkey with the Turks, but could not speak Turkish. He had also learned, reportedly with some irritation, that the situation in Ankara was only a minor part of a larger incongruity plaguing the State Department, whose business it was to make friends and influence people in foreign lands.
Of the entire number of Foreign Service officers, only about half had a speaking knowledge of any foreign language. Of the new personnel coming into the service, only 30 percent possessed that knowledge, and in only one Communist country, Russia, was there a U.S. ambassador who spoke the native language. The same situation prevailed in the nine Arabic-speaking countries, and in the non-English speaking countries of NATO, U.S. ambassadors had no facility with the language in Belgium, France, West Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey and Greece. It was the same in the Asian countries. James Reston of the New York Times had listed those percentages and reported that the President was on the verge of anger when he learned of them from the Advisory Committee of the Foreign Service Institute.
It suggests that it would take anger from the President to move Congress toward action to improve the language skills of the State Department, with an adequate budget needed for the Institute, which provided language training for foreign service officers but had a budget which was cut perennially in the House. The Department, itself, shared in the blame and it was up to the Administration to fight for the necessary funds to operate it.
It indicates that it was not easy to impress Congress with the seriousness of the problem when the Administration nominated as ambassador to Ceylon a man who did not know the name of the country's Prime Minister. He had learned the name before he left the U.S. after the Senate had insisted that he know at least that much about the country before it confirmed him.
It finds that it was at least comforting that the President recognized the problem, as that was some progress.
"Gobbledygook" indicates that Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah had found a 212-word sentence in the Government's income tax instruction booklet and was offering a copy of the book Simplified English to anyone who could explain the meaning of the sentence to him.
In case he had any copies left over, it wishes he would mail a few to the Department of Agriculture which had issued a pamphlet titled: "Cultural and Pathogenic Variability in Single-Conidial and Hyphal-Tip Isolates of Helminthosporium turcicum Pass".
A piece from the New York Herald Tribune, titled "Machine Gossip", says that no one need feel astonishment at the announcement that the Bell Telephone System had developed a device called the Dataphone which enabled "machines to talk to machines", the immediate objective being to permit the transmission of business machine data over ordinary telephone lines.
It predicts with gloomy confidence that it would not be long before the device was made to carry other conversations also. It finds it inevitable that machines would start talking to each other, as for many years, people had been talking into machines, dictating letters, memoirs and other material, and machines had also been talking to people via phonographs, radio and television.
People talked about people and machines would thus likely talk about machines, concerning tubes, transistors, transmitters and other things of strictly professional interest. It finds it to sound rather dull and uninspiring, not worth eavesdropping on. It was just as well as it felt it was best to let the machines figure out their own problems in their own way, as they would soon find out that which humans had discovered long earlier, that it was a lot easier to get into the talking business than to get out of it.
Drew Pearson indicates that one of the most interesting members of the FCC was Robert E. Lee, a Republican and no relation to the Civil War general, who had been a Democrat. He had been appointed to the post as a reward for his help to Senator Joseph McCarthy in two pieces of backstage business which all good Republicans now wanted to forget. Mr. Lee's record showed that he had continued to operate backstage in the FCC, as sworn Senate records were available regarding much of that background. He had gone down the line for National Airlines, whose New York counsel, Roy Cohn, had also been counsel for the McCarthy-chaired Investigating Committee.
Mr. Lee had reversed himself on a television station in Fresno, Calif., after Murray Chotiner, the campaign manager for Vice-President Nixon, had gotten into the picture. He had reversed himself on a television channel in Jacksonville, Fla., after Monsignor Maurice Sheehy had intervened in the case. Mr. Lee was of the same faith as the Monsignor. He had also voted for Thomas Tinsley of Baltimore to receive a television license in Petersburg, Va., after being entertained by Mr. Tinsley at the very time the Petersburg case was under consideration.
Mr. Pearson indicates that the early part of Mr. Lee's record went back to 1950 when Senator McCarthy had made the amazing charge that there were "205 card-carrying Communists in the State Department known to the Secretary of State", then Dean Acheson. When he could not prove that charge, Mr. Lee had come to his rescue by giving the Senator a list of 81 security-risk cases on file with the House Appropriations Committee, of which Mr. Lee was at the time minority clerk. The names were under lock and key and were referred to by case numbers so that Congressmen knew the numbers but not the names attached to them. Mr. Lee supplied Senator McCarthy with the secret code and the names. Most of those on the list had already been fired from the State Department by Secretary of State Acheson. Many of them were alcoholics, "sex unfortunates", etc., and Senator McCarthy had never been able to find a single Communist in the State Department, that according to the subsequent testimony of Senator McCarthy's friend, Scott McLeod, who became the security officer for the State Department.
Having done that favor for Senator McCarthy, Mr. Lee had entered the 1950 Maryland Senatorial campaign to defeat Senator Millard Tydings, who had the courage to challenge and investigate Senator McCarthy's charges against the State Department. There had ensued one of the dirtiest election campaigns in recent history, during which Senator McCarthy had collected thousands of dollars from Texas, Illinois and Michigan and had circulated a composite photograph of Senator Tydings showing him putatively in a friendly pose with American Communist leader Earl Browder.
Mr. Lee had been in the thick of that campaign, with his job having been, according to sworn Senate testimony, to pick up checks in Baltimore, deposit them in his wife's account in a bank in Washington and then pay for addressing 300,000 postcards. As a result, a large part of Maryland had received two days before the election what they thought was a personal hand-written card from the Republican candidate which read: "I shall be deeply grateful for your vote on Tuesday—John Marshall Butler."
Joseph Alsop indicates that the whole policy in the Middle East would presently founder as the anchor of it, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, had abdicated in favor of his brother, Crown Prince Faisal, according to a report from Radio Mecca. He had done so by granting to Faisal "full authority to formulate the internal, external and financial policy of the state" and to execute that policy.
At the meeting a year earlier in Bermuda between the President and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Secretary of State Dulles had described King Saud as "the anchor" of U.S. Middle Eastern policy. Since the Suez Canal crisis of October, 1956, the King had taken a strongly pro-Western line, and had been opposed by his brother. Crown Prince Faisal had left the country more than a year earlier to seek medical treatment in the U.S. and also as a mark of disagreement with the King's pro-Western tendency. On his way home from the U.S., Faisal had stayed in Cairo for several months as the guest of Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser. His return to Saudi Arabia only a couple of weeks earlier had been coordinated with Premier Nasser's venomous personal attack on King Saud and since that time, a palace revolt had been ongoing in Riyadh.
Against that background, the announcement by Radio Mecca had to mean that the King had finally surrendered almost all of his power as a result of the palace revolution, and so the "anchor" of American policy in the Middle East had slipped and Saudi Arabia's policy would henceforth be anti-Western and pro-Nasser.
Mr. Alsop suggests that perhaps Prince Faisal would be cautious, but he was likely to reverse Saudi Arabia's alliances and might soon do something dramatic to indicate his change of sides, such as expelling the U.S. Air Force from its base at Dahran. If Faisal were to openly change sides, the palace revolution in Riyadh would almost certainly be remembered subsequently as an event with the cataclysmic character of the Suez crisis. It would first affect the whole grouping of the pro-Western Arab governments, to which Saudi Arabia had belonged until the present. All of those governments were precarious in varying degrees. The previous spring, for instance, King Hussein of Jordan had only saved himself from a pro-Nasser, anti-Western coup, saved by his own courage and the outspoken support of his "older brother", King Saud.
If Faisal's triumph meant that Premier Nasser had now won over Saudi Arabia, the tenuous political balance in Jordan would be automatically upset. The Premier had already begun his preparations to exploit just such an upset by proclaiming a new "statute of Gaza", which would make the Gaza Strip into a seat of rump-Palestine. The 200,000 Gaza refugees would no doubt be used to start the 500,000 Jordanian refugees on the march against King Hussein. And the latter would not have King Saud's aid and comfort this time. Mr. Alsop thus concludes that the next item on the schedule ought be another attempt to stage a pro-Nasser coup d'état in Jordan, with much better chances of success on this attempt.
Trouble in Jordan would automatically involve Iraq, where the old strong man, Nuri Pasha, had lately resumed the helm in obvious anticipation of coming storms. In the new circumstances, any attempt by Nuri to save King Hussein in Jordan would endanger Nuri's own regime in Iraq. The tide of events was already visibly endangering the pro-Western regime of President Chamoun and Prime Minister Sami Es-Solh in Lebanon.
Mr. Alsop thus finds that the tide of events now threatened to supplant all of the pro-Western Arab regimes with anti-Western regimes which were also pro-Nasser. The vital Middle Eastern oil sources were only protected from nationalization by the existing pro-Western Arab regime, and if those sources were nationalized, the anti-Western tide would cause ruin in Britain, dependent on those sources, and thus the fate of the Western Alliance itself might be determined by the palace revolution which had taken place in Riyadh.
Marquis Childs indicates that Republican strategists, by advance indications, intended to pitch another political campaign on the issue of peace, while seeking to cast the Democrats as the party of war. It had been a major appeal in 1952 when General Eisenhower had promised to go to Korea to try to end the Korean War—as he had done a month after the election. With less success, it had been used in an all-out version in many states in the midterm elections of 1954, with Republican campaign committees spending large amounts of money to advertise the casualties in "three Democrat wars", contrasted to peace under Republican presidents.
RNC chairman Meade Alcorn had characterized the principal issue in the midterm campaigns of the ensuing fall as being based on peace. The latest Gallup poll made the imperative of that choice clear. With the President's popularity at an all-time low and 56 percent of those responding favoring Democrats over Republicans, a large number of those samples had given the recession as the reason for the shifting allegiance. Prosperity thus would be a dubious claim, particularly so since Administration economists were presently more or less agreed that the upturn in the economy would be postponed at least until the beginning of the fourth quarter of 1958, if not later.
Until recently, the expectation had
been for a sharp reversal of the present economic trend by early
summer, as Vice-President Nixon had been confidently telling his
visitors as he outlined the steps which the Administration was taking
to end
Part of the peace strategy turned on a potential summit meeting with the Soviets, with hints from official sources that it could come as late as September or even early October, placing the President in a position where he would be negotiating with the Russians for peace and truce in the cold war just on the eve of the midterm elections. The hope was that it would go a long way toward restoring the image of the wise and patient leader determined to resolve the tensions of a divided world. It would show him meeting his pledge to go anywhere to meet with the Russians if it would advance the cause of peace. Upon his return, he would hold a few high-level talks to appeal for election of a Congress to support him in his search for a solution.
News stories inspired by official sources had indicated a considerable reduction in the minimum terms which the Government would require for a meeting with the Russian heads of state. The discussion of disarmament was likely to be limited to possible agreement on a suspension of nuclear testing. Regarding Germany, the proposal would be a compromise between American insistence on unification through free elections and Russian willingness to discuss a German "peace treaty".
Ambassador to Russia Llewellyn Thompson was expected to return from Moscow in early June, ostensibly for a long-overdue home leave, but he would be in Washington when Prime Minister Macmillan conferred with the President and presumably at that time, agreement would be reached on the terms of the summit meeting. Ambassador Thompson, one of the ablest diplomats in the foreign service, was reported to be having informal talks with Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev regarding the summit meeting.
The current Republican line was not to make it seem that a summit meeting would be welcomed, rather playing hard to get, with the U.S. demanding that Moscow meet its terms. That was to preclude any cry of appeasement from those opposing a summit meeting.
While peace would be the major theme, Republican orators would also warn, as in the past, that the Democrats, if returned to power, meant to take the country "down the road to socialism", with such official devils as UAW president Walter Reuther, Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams, and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey cast as Pied Pipers. Former President Truman and "Trumanism" would also be targets again. Mr. Alcorn, appearing before a Republican Day for him at Ohio Wesleyan University, had said in answer to a question that the party would "run against Truman as long as he lives."
But those were sideshows and they had a somewhat tired look. The main theme would be peace and the principal figure would be the President on whose rehabilitation the strategists counted heavily.
A pair of letter writers indicate that if the government buildings located throughout the country were in the condition they had found existing in the government offices in Charlotte, they believed it was time for corrective action. The post offices were in dire need of paint and repair, as well as cleaning. They suggest that if the government would spend money at present to correct those conditions, they would be providing employment to people and larger expenditures in the future could be avoided.
A letter writer indicates that Marvin Ritch was the only man with guts enough to oppose the Republican candidate for Congress, incumbent Charles Jonas. The Democratic Party had made no attempt to put up a candidate until Mr. Ritch had announced himself. The writer believes that but for the farsightedness of Mr. Ritch, Mr. Jonas would have had no opposition in the coming November election. He urges voting for Mr. Ritch in the May primary.
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