The Charlotte News
Monday, April 14, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that Army planes had pounded the mountains of Oriente Province this date with bombs and bullets, but rebel bands operated freely in the northern coastal area. Fidel Castro's guerrillas continued shooting attacks on trains and buses, causing most rail and highway transport in the Province to come to a standstill. No trains operated between Oriente's capital of Santiago and the rest of the island. Freight and passenger trains from Havana ran eastward only as far as Camaguey, in the heart of Cuba's cattle-raising country. Transport which moved from Santiago was escorted by heavily armed soldiers. Workers were erecting temporary railroad bridges to replace half a dozen spans blown up by the rebels. Army headquarters had announced that rebels had suffered many casualties in fighting with troops while attempting to advance toward Guancanamo in the central part of the island. The announcement appeared to confirm the claim of Sr. Castro that a large rebel band had moved eastward out of the Sierra Maestra hideouts of the rebels. The rebel leader said that the group moving eastward was commanded by Juan Almeida. Rebel forces led by Raul Castro, the brother of Fidel, were operating along the coast of Oriente. Army planes bombed and machine-gunned rugged mountain terrain believed to conceal rebel hideouts. But there was nothing to substantiate a rebel charge that foreign planes had been attacking them. Twelve passengers aboard a Cuban airliner which was diverted to Cuba on Sunday had returned to Havana the previous night, with the pilot indicating in Miami that he had refused to fly over rebel danger zones and risk the lives of the passengers. A plane flown by the same captain had been hit by rebel machine-gun fire at Varacoa in northeastern Oriente two weeks earlier, but no one had been injured. Soldiers continued to put up reward notices in rebellious Oriente offering $100,000 for Sr. Castro, dead or alive. The rebels continued to take the posters down. Dissension had split the rebel command in Havana, with a dozen officers who made up the high command indicating that they would no longer take orders from the personal lieutenant of Sr. Castro, Fuastino Perez, whom they accused of bungling the previous week's abortive call for a general strike and uprising. The U.S. Embassy reported that no further moves by any of the 12,000 Americans in Cuba had been made to depart the country.
Secretary of State Dulles said this date that preparatory talks aimed at a summit meeting might begin within a few days, disclosing the expectation before 200 editors and writers of the International Press Institute. He said that extensive preparatory work was urgently needed to establish a solid basis for any meeting by the heads of state. He added that it was quite illusory to believe that world leaders could sit down and make meaningful decisions without prior detailed examination of problems by lower-ranking aides. His remarks hinted that the Western Big Three, the U.S., France and Britain, might agree to begin talks at an ambassadorial level on Thursday in Moscow. The West, however, would almost certainly insist that those discussions leading to a summit conference be broadened more than the Soviets had yet proposed.
In Bukittinggi, Sumatra, it was reported that a Government invasion fleet was off the rebel port of Padang this date, with landing forces poised for a knockout blow against insurgent headquarters in central Sumatra. The attack was expected within hours and the revolutionary command had placed its troops on a 24-hour alert, calling on them to prevent a landing at all costs. The alert had gone out as the vanguard of the Jakarta fleet, a destroyer and four corvettes, had loomed three miles off Padang. A rebel spokesman said that he expected the fleet to lay down a barrage to soften up key shore points for the landing troops believed to number more than 7,000. Officials believed that Jakarta soldiers and Marines would attack west Sumatra within 24 hours from two sides under cover of air and naval bombardment. The main thrust was expected around Padang where the rebel government had originated two months earlier. In an appeal to the rebels to stand fast, their commander said in a broadcast that they should make sure that President Sukarno's forces did not land, that they should destroy them wherever they were found, as they were "fighting now for the unity of our nation." He indicated they were fighting against a dictator and to save the people and religion, their sacrifices would not be unavailing. The rebel premier appealed to the people of his native West Java to join in the revolt against Sukarno, encouraging them to act and not to compromise with the Sukarno regime. He said that the rebels had enough supplies to carry on war with Jakarta and added that arms and ammunition were still arriving.
In Washington, former President Truman this date proposed a five billion dollar tax cut for low and middle income taxpayers to fight economic recession, and urged a big increase in Government spending. He described himself as a retired Missouri farmer, delivering a wide-ranging discourse on the current economic situation to the House Banking and Currency Committee. During his presentation, he made jabs at the Administration, indicating that the country would not be in the shape it was had the Administration taken quicker action. He said that he saw no need for periodic economic downturns and that both plans and policies of the Government ought be directed toward constantly expanding the economy. He stated: "We might not be altogether successful in preventing economic downturns, but at least we can make that our goal and not try to brush recessions aside by pretending that they are a good thing." The Committee hearings marked the return of Congress from its ten-day Easter holiday for the last half of a session which had to cope with the problems of unemployment and a business slump. Mr. Truman contended that the tax structure ought be changed both to provide more purchasing power after taxes and to take special privilege benefits out of the tax laws. His proposed tax cut for middle and low income families was, he said, the quickest way to put more spending power into the hands of the average American home. He proposed an immediate increase in national defense spending for fiscal 1959 by three billion dollars above the budget proposed by the President, and an increase of another 5 billion or more annually by 1964. He also proposed an increase in foreign technical assistance and economic development from the 972 million dollars recommended by the President, to 1.5 billion dollars in fiscal 1959, with an increase to 2.5 billion by 1964. He also proposed an increase of about a billion dollars for fiscal 1959 in domestic spending, the bulk of which would go toward education, public health and public assistance.
The President would deliver a major speech on the nation's economy on May 20 in New York, according to the White House, the announcement indicating that the President would address the concluding dinner session at the annual meeting of the American Management Association conference on economic mobilization.
In Cambridge, Mass., scientists said this date that Sputnik II, which had carried a dog into orbit the prior November 4, had apparently fallen apart over the West Indies the previous night, indicating that a single sighting from Denver stated that the heavy rocket motor of the Soviet satellite might have made one more orbit than the rest of the satellite, that sighting having been made about 90 minutes after the supposed crack-up over the West Indies. A representative of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge said this date that the best evidence that the satellite was down was the total lack of further sightings after the one the previous night from Denver at shortly after 10:00. The satellite had orbited six times beyond its predicted final break-up into the earth's atmosphere. Any pieces remaining which had not been burned up by the friction of re-entry would have fallen into the jungles of Brazil. The rocket had been seen glowing like a hot poker from air friction over New England at 8:47 p.m. Eight minutes later, it was reported in flames over the West Indies. Moonwatch teams in Milford, Conn., Millbrook, N.Y., and Bryn Athyn, Pa., reported sighting the satellite the previous night, with the latter two groups indicating that it had appeared to be glowing with a luminous tail of sparks. The Smithsonian said that the satellite would normally have been invisible in the shadow of the earth on its passage over the Northeast. Goodbye, old, faithful Laika. You were a brave doggie for science.
In Ankara, Turkey, Turkish customs officers had clashed with Syrian police on Turkey's southern border the previous day, with one Syrian having been reported as wounded.
In Johannesburg, South Africa, a pre-election, no-work protest called by the African National Congress had fizzled this date. African workers had streamed into their jobs as usual and there was only a smattering of violent action.
In Washington, Samuel Devieux, the Haitian Embassy's minister-counselor, had been shot and killed this date by Andre Toussaint, first secretary of the Embassy. An Embassy official said that the shooting probably stemmed from a letter ordering the dismissal of Mr. Toussaint.
In Colombo, Ceylon, the leader of a civil disobedience movement among Ceylon's large Tamil-speaking minority was under arrest this date for defacing license plates on an automobile.
In Accra, Ghana, six foreign ministers and two heads of government from eight independent states in Africa would assemble the following day to discuss coordination of mutual foreign policies and foreign assistance.
In London, it was reported that the British Labor Party had piled up more sweeping gains this date in county council elections, underlining what Labor leaders described as the declining popularity of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's ruling Conservative Party.
In New York, it was reported that seven teenage defendants had listened this date as a judge charged the jury in one of the city's longest and costliest murder trials. The youths were accused of slaying a 15-year old polio cripple during a gang rumble in Highbridge Park in Manhattan the prior July 30. The State had demanded the death penalty. Defense lawyers had called the youths products of underprivileged backgrounds, more sinned against than sinning. The all-male jury was expected to receive the case after a day-long charge by the judge. Nearly every spectator seat in the courtroom was filled as the case approached its climax. The trial had begun on January 10 and selection of a jury from a special panel had taken three weeks, with testimony having been given by 65 witnesses, 42 for the State and 23 for the defense. A record total 27 court-appointed attorneys had defended the accused boys. Each lawyer received a $500 fee from the State. Among evidence introduced had been the confessions which the police obtained from all of the defendants, and a number of weapons allegedly used in the attack, including two knives, a stick and a dog chain. The defendants ranged in age between 15 and 19. Two were white, two were black, two were native Puerto Ricans and the other was a native of the Dominican Republic.
In Canon City, Colo., it was reported that a young convict had been stabbed to death on the outdoor basketball court of the Colorado Penitentiary the previous day while a score of yelling, shoving convicts had concealed the action from four guards. The group had scattered at the approach of one of the guards and left the 23-year old victim bleeding from 13 stab wounds in the chest. The victim, a convicted rapist, had died Sunday in the prison hospital without identifying any of his attackers. He was the eighth convict who had died at the hands of knife-wielding inmates since 1906. The warden said that the convicts apparently had doomed the man to execution for some reason unknown to prison authorities, and then arranged the slaying with cunning and precision. The warden said that a guard had recognized some of the convicts involved and that all would be questioned, indicating that one convict, whom he did not identify, had been singled out for questioning because his prison uniform had a sleeve ripped off. A matching sleeve with bloodstains on it had been found discarded in the exercise yard after the slaying. A six-inch knife fashioned from a file had been found on a handball court adjoining the basketball court minutes after the stabbing. The victim had been serving a 10 to 15-year sentence for conspiracy to commit rape and for statutory rape, having entered the prison in July, 1957 and was among 1,000 convicts who had been released from their cells after the prisoner count late the previous day. The guard said that he had noticed commotion on the basketball court a few minutes later and approached the group of about 30 men, who then fled when he approached.
In Morehead City, N.C., State highway officials were searching for the owner of a hit-and-run tugboat, wanting to bill him for damage done to the Morehead City-Beaufort drawbridge. Witnesses said that as the tug had gone through the drawbridge Saturday, the boom of a crane on a barge being towed by the tug had hit the bridge, causing three steel girders to break loose, indicating that the tug had backed up to unsnarl the boom and then continued on its way. Damages had been estimated at several hundred dollars and highway officials said that the tug's owner would be billed for the repairs when a check of Coast Guard files revealed his identity. Highway officials said that they expected to get the bridge repaired by the following day, in the meantime traffic having been limited to one way.
In San Francisco, it was reported by a University of Wisconsin researcher this date that just as blood clots caused heart attacks in humans, a vascular disease plugged the circulatory system and caused strokes in tomatoes, cotton and other crops. The biochemistry professor, Dr. Mark Stahmann, told the American Chemical Society that the same disease mechanism was believed to occur in oak wilt, the killer of many trees in the Midwest, Dutch elm disease, and Panama disease of bananas, costly to the banana industry. The discoveries on the nature of fusarium wilts by the professor and another professor, J. C. Walker, a Wisconsin colleague, were expected to lead to control of the diseases which posed a serious threat also to such vegetable crops as cabbages and peas. The professor described the course of the disease causing stroke-like attacks in plants as fusarium fungi, which lurked in the soil, invading a plant's vascular system. Once in the plant's circulatory vessels, the fungi produced an enzyme, an accelerator of biochemical processes, which attacked some of the pectin in the vessel walls. Pectin fragments then broke off into the vascular stream, forming gelatin-like masses which plugged the circulatory vessels, just as a clot blocked human blood vessels. He said that the work appeared to be the first to demonstrate clearly that the fungi caused pectin gels which blocked the transport of water and nutrients to the whole plant. He said that the studies indicated that control of the banana disease would be accomplished best by selection and breeding of resistant varieties, which had already been successful in tomatoes with the closely related fusarium wilt.
In Butte, Mont., an 80-year old man and a 77-year old woman were married in church the previous day, and her son, 54, and his daughter, 50, had been wed at the same time.
On the editorial page, "It All Started with a Deputy Sheriff" comments on the 63 publications which had been blacklisted by a Buncombe County vigilante committee, leading a deputy to nominate 23 other titles to be banned, which the deputy refused to identify as he said he did not want to give publicity to obscene publications.
The piece suggests that for all it knew, it could include some North Carolina newspapers which had been running the collected love letters of Lana Turner. The custom in Buncombe was to censor in secret, passing the word along to distributors and newsstand operators who completely cooperated with them.
Smut-sleuthing was a full-time job for the deputy, as he personally reviewed all publications which looked "suspicious" and passed along his findings to a five-member committee for action. After the secret blacklists were compiled, he checked all of the newsstands to be sure that none of the banned publications were being sold.
It finds that it was without doubt that some of the publications found objectionable were in fact offensive to a lot of people, and some were offensive to the editors, but that the safest method of dealing with the problem was by ordinary due process, with there being penalties for obscenity which ought be enforced by duly constituted authority under which accused persons and firms would enjoy their constitutional right to defend themselves and their property.
Buncombe's special variety of blacklisting on the advice of a deputy had unfortunately spread to other counties, and a good many magazine distributors had been panicked into blindly accepting the judgment of the blacklisting committee as to what was good or bad based on titles rather than contents. It suggests that if the type of foolishness was permitted to flourish and spread, there was nothing to prevent other types of censorship. If deputies and distributors could conspire to freeze a photography magazine from being sold today, they could tomorrow conspire to freeze a Republican or Democratic newspaper from being sold. That was the real danger, when individual prejudices, resentments and moral judgments of a few self-appointed vigilantes were permitted to abridge the public's right to read what it pleased.
"Freedom to read is a rather precious privilege. Like any other freedom, it can be used wisely or foolishly. There is nothing at all wrong with efforts to improve the quality of choices through which that freedom is exercised. But efforts by individuals or groups to limit, by pressure or similarly distasteful tactics, the freedom of choice of others, or to impose their own standards or tastes on a community at large, should be opposed. Likewise, the reading public should oppose formal or informal governmental actions to abridge the freedom to read, except through enforcement, by due and open process of law, of constitutionally valid statutes not involving elements of prior restraint."
We note that in the State of Oklahoma, the "tomorrow" of which the piece speaks has arrived, as the schools are being forced by the State school superintendent to teach that the 2020 election was stolen and that in fact the lying moron won. The head of education in Oklahoma is obviously an insane person, probably escaped from an insane asylum. When we saw the report on Fox Propaganda, it appeared at first that the hosts were merely humoring their guest, as one might a not-too-bright child who tenders an absurd suggestion, such as that everyone ought wear their underwear on the outside of their clothing; but, no. The hosts, also obviously insane people escaped from a lunatic asylum, were genuinely sympathetic with the notion, agreeing that it was good for children to be exposed to "critical thinking", that such is needed in present times.
Well, who is better fitted to run things, Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse? This is an inquiry which the Oklahoma schools should also consider, along with who actually won the 2020 election by 7 million popular votes, at least as viewed by anyone sane, dealing with fact and not wild fictions, the indulgence in which has resulted in numerous criminal convictions, fines and imprisonment, and ruinous lawsuits.
Speaking of which, we recommend to any parents in Oklahoma who might object to their children being indoctrinated in a grossly absurd political viewpoint, unbelievably partisan to the point of being an outright lie, that they sue the hell out of the State of Oklahoma for promoting such garbage. We recommend suing the State in Federal court under 42 USC 1983 for violating civil rights under the First Amendment, by constraining students to be taught dishonest lies. The Neanderthalics of the state will inevitably counter, of course, as they always do, that they, too, have freedom of thought and speech, and thus a right to be taught about the "stolen election" of 2020. The counter, legally, is that defamation of character is not protected speech, except in insane asylums. Teaching the lie that there was some factual basis for the Trump lie about the 2020 election being stolen is, inevitably, to defame the character of election officials in numerous states won by former Vice-President Biden, and, moreover, to defame the 81 million people who voted for him, implying that any one of them or all of them were engaged in voter fraud. And, no one is constraining the idiots and fools of Oklahoma or elsewhere from saying and believing what they want about politics and elections, in school or out. But to require the teaching of the defamatory lies is to offend the First Amendment by attempting to indoctrinate the students to a particular political belief system, reminiscent of Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union, as well as present-day Communist China and North Korea.
It all started, of course, way back in 1925 in the notorious Scopes case in Dayton, Tenn. If we were a teacher in Oklahoma constrained to teach such garbage as the lie of Trump's tromp through the tulips, we would refuse, and then, when fired or even prosecuted, would take the same stance as Mr. Scopes took in 1925 and resist.
Oklahoma has a bad enough reputation educationally, ranking only above Alaska and New Mexico, and with its current representation in Congress, does not need any more. We suggest getting rid of the insane people whom you've elected.
"New Glory for the Garden Clubbers" indicates that one of the more curious aspects of the current political scene was the power of women who watered the nation's petunias and cultivated its roses. Garden clubbers were getting a major share of the credit for Congressional passage of a bill to encourage state regulation of billboards along the new 41,000-mile Federal interstate highway system.
The accuracy of the estimate had been confirmed when opponents of billboard control had begun to attack the "ass-thetic pretensions" of garden club members. Doris Fleeson had reported from Washington that few agreed on how the defeat of the billboard lobby had happened, but "the home-going legislators feel generally that they have pleased their women constituents."
The billboard control legislation in the previous session of Congress had failed even to get out of committee. Earlier in the year, it had been announced that billboard interests had obtained a $300,000 war chest to fight the controls and yet when the showdown had come in Congress, a control bill was passed, at least partially, to please the ladies.
The fight was not over, as Congress had merely offered incentive payments to states which adopted the billboard control standards which it prescribed. The issue had not been joined in North Carolina. In neighboring Virginia, it had been joined in January, with the billboard interests having sent letters to farmers and other property owners saying that "a very small group of people, mostly ladies' garden clubs and city people…" had been backing billboard control. It went on to say: "The members of these garden clubs and other similar clubs have written or talked with every member of both houses of the General Assembly. They have done such a good job that a great many members of the General Assembly think that the rest of the people in the state feel the same way as the small group of ladies!" The letter had intimated that if the "few ladies" were successful in promoting billboard control, they would next interest themselves in telling farmers the color to paint their barns and outbuildings. Nevertheless, the ladies had been successful and the Virginia General Assembly had passed a strong control measure.
It finds that it would be interesting to see how the ladies and the billboards fared in North Carolina when the question arose, as all members of the state's Congressional delegation had voted against the control bill in Congress, and Governor Luther Hodges had not yet declared the course which the state should take.
"Spreading It Thick" indicates that the Department of Labor had refused to release statistics dealing with military purchases of peanut butter, according to a report on security precautions prepared by a House subcommittee on Government information. It had been argued that the Communists would use them to work out the strength of the armed forces.
It suggests that if the Soviets were that handy with figures, it was no wonder that they had launched the first Sputnik.
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "Anthems, Anthems, Anthems", indicates that the ever-lengthening list of the world's national anthems had now received one more new one, for Ghana, having a tune well known to millions of Ghana residents, but not outside West Africa.
It suggests that the best-known tunes in the world were least known to those outside their tribal ambit. The national radios were full of "unknown" anthems, such as "Salve, Liberia, Salve", "Oben Am Deutschen Rhein lehnet sich Liechtenstein", Haiti's "Pour le pays pour les ancetres", and Hawaii's "Hawaii ponoi".
It finds that few anthems had been written by great musicians, but often there was a touch of something like poetry, as in Czechoslovakia's national anthem: "Where is my home? Where is my home?/ Water rushes through the meadows,/ Breezes murmur in the pine-groves/ In the springtime full of blooms/ An earthly paradise to view,/ This is the fair land of Bohemia,/ Bohemia is my home."
In Communist China, the traditional Chinese national anthem had been replaced by one which, when translated, stated dryly: "The Three Principles of Democracy Which Our Party Does Revere".
"God Save the Queen" traced its ancestry to an old English "galliard" or dance-tune by the Elizabethan composer John Bull. It had plenty of critics who had felt it dull and unimaginative, but it had been adapted by countless famous composers, including Beethoven and Bach. It had also been parodied in many ways, including three years after it had first been publicly performed at Drury Lane, with the Jacobites on their way to London, serving as a 1748 advertisement for fish: "O may this market thrive,/ While there is a fish alive,/ Nature's best treat."
The anthem had been saved by royal indignation from a sad fate in 1887, when Queen Victoria had angrily declined an inventor's gift of a bustle in which he had fitted a machine to play the national anthem every time she sat down.
Drew Pearson indicates that in a recent closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had been questioning Assistant Secretary of State William Rountree about the Middle East, asking him how they were planning to rescue American prestige in that region and for his plans for combating the growing power of Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Reluctantly, Mr. Rountree had admitted that the State Department had no plans. Senator Humphrey then asked him about the pipeline they intended to build across Turkey from Iran to the Mediterranean, and he responded that they were not building it because the oil companies said it was too expensive. Senator Humphrey expressed surprise at the Department letting the oil companies run the policy of the country, indicating that the Senate did not want policies dictated by a few oil companies on the basis of money, that the Government had provided all types of support to the oil companies and had practically supported Iran, such that there was no basis for having them tell the Government what to do. "Our pussyfooting, procrastinating policies have let the whole Near East fall away from us, and now you tell me that the oil companies say we can't build a pipeline from Iran across Turkey to safeguard us in case of war."
Mr. Pearson notes that the State Department policy in the Near East had almost always been dominated by the oil companies, not dictated to the oil companies. Herbert Hoover, Jr., former Undersecretary of State during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, had been the former top executive of Union Oil of California, and various oilmen had served in the State Department to advise on Near Eastern affairs, that the oil companies had advised bringing King Saud of Saudi Arabia to Washington, which had worked all right until the King was virtually ousted by his brother, Crown Prince Faisal, who hated the U.S.
A report on how the American public had contributed millions of dollars allegedly for handicapped veterans was about to be issued by Congressman Olin Teague of Texas, telling how the National Association of Veterans Employment Councils had sold ballpoint pens through the mails to raise money to help disabled veterans find jobs. His investigators, however, had found that the organization, headed by Harold Keats, had located jobs for only 180 veterans, though in 2 1/2 years had collected 3 million dollars. Mr. Teague would have stern words also for the Disabled American Veterans, which the previous year had collected 4 million dollars by selling miniature automobile license tags for key chains, and after collecting that amount on the ground that it would be used for charity for disabled veterans, the DAV had used part of the money to produce the Hidden Treasure television show on which $300,000 was lost. Mr. Pearson indicates that the license tag idea was sold to the DAV several years earlier for 3 million dollars by Abraham Koolish, presently under Federal indictment in Chicago for mail fraud in connection with his various fund-raising activities.
Congressman Teague had found so much abuse in fundraising for veterans that he had urged the House Government Operations Committee to look into the field of tax-exempt charitable money raising, and would urge a new law making it a Federal offense to sell or rent "sucker lists" of people who had contributed to one charity and were considered soft touches for other allegedly good causes.
The U.S. Embassy was trying to prevent President Syngman Rhee of South Korea from following through on his offer to put the entire Korean Army, Air Force and Navy at the disposal of the Indonesian rebels. President Rhee believed that Western countries which refused to help the rebels were cowards who would not stand up against Communism when it counted. But the U.S. Embassy in Korea, on instructions from Secretary of State Dallas, was urging him to take it easy.
Congressman Noah Mason, dean of Illinois Republicans in Congress, had cracked down on Congressman Tim Sheehan of Chicago, also a Republican, for being too pro-Eisenhower, with Mr. Mason objecting to the fact that Mr. Sheehan had supported some of the President's legislative proposals.
Doris Fleeson tells of trouble on the horizon for Democrats in Texas, as conservative and wealthy William Blakley of Dallas had announced during the week that he would run for the Democratic nomination for the Senate against incumbent Senator Ralph Yarborough, who had won a special election the previous April following three unsuccessful attempts in gubernatorial elections. Mr. Blakley had been assuring his friends that he would not take on Senator Yarborough and a report had become current that he had learned that Mr. Blakley would instead switch to the race for governor. Those who credited the report said that Mr. Blakley could not beat Senator Yarborough but would be a powerful contender against the other candidate whom the loyalists could put into the Democratic primary.
Mr. Blakley was an Eisenhower Democrat but had become disillusioned with the President and the trends in Washington. For several reasons, Democrats had been able to believe and hope that they could minimize their regional differences as the next presidential campaign approached. Nearly all of the strong-willed leaders who had fostered anti-Truman sentiments had faded from the scene and Senator Yarborough's victory had encouraged all the Southerners of more liberal views.
A victory by Mr. Blakley, however, would re-emphasize the party's differences and rally the right wing to new efforts in 1960. Whether Mr. Blakley possessed the capacity for political leadership of the kind once held by such men as former Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina could not be determined in the few months he had been in the Senate, after being appointed briefly by Governor Allen Shivers to occupy the seat now held by Senator Yarborough. But Mr. Blakley's practical abilities were admired by Texans.
Senator Lyndon Johnson was the leading Congressional advocate for the type of moderation which would enable all Democrats to gather under the same tent, including civil rights, in 1960. The Senator had held the Senate to a moderate course, too strictly for Northern and Western Democrats. His personal problem was not to get too far from the right for Texas. His liberal colleague, Senator Yarborough, was a boon to him in that respect, making Senator Johnson appear to Texans more conservative despite his having sometimes to yield to Northern and Western sentiments within the party.
The effect of Mr. Blakley in the Senate would be the exact opposite, making Senator Johnson seem more liberal at home while at the same time representing pressure on the Majority Leader to take more conservative positions nationally. The apprehension of liberal Democrats that the policies of Senator Johnson would hurt them in a presidential race against Vice-President Nixon in 1960 would be sharpened by any move the Senator might make in the direction of the beliefs of Mr. Blakely. Senator Johnson did not admit that he was a candidate for the presidency, but reporters interpreted his actions as signifying that he was, not expecting him to be resigned to his fate but to take action.
Ms. Fleeson concludes that some of the answers from Texas would be available soon, since the filing date for the party primaries would be on May 5.
Joseph Alsop, in Dearborn, Mich., again looks at the Ford Motor Co., as he had on Saturday, finds that there was only one other experience to compare with the day spent at Ford's gigantic River Rouge plant, that being the sight of the Yangtze River flying into the western Chinese province of Szechuan. Some 2,100 years earlier, a Chinese emperor had impounded the river so that it flowed over the green plain and the multitude of life-bringing channels, and then collected the water again to pour into the Yangtze gorge, such that for 50 or more generations the green plain had nourished the people of the myriad of little villages perched on the channel margins, a people numbering ten million at the last count.
In the same way that was the best symbol of China's immemorial civilization, the Rouge plant was also a marvel, the result of only three generations and yet the prototype and symbol of modern American industrialism.
He had taken a tour of the plant with an old-timer of the company who pointed out the landmarks, the old executive building with the famous corner office "which we used to call the torture chamber" because there "were some pretty painful scenes there" when Edsel Ford had taken over his father's desk and began his struggle against Harry Bennett and the others, a struggle which revivified the Ford company, presently presided over by Henry Ford II. He had seen the even more famous overpass bridge, the scene of "The Battle of the Overpass", in which Walter Reuther's UAW was effectively born out of the violence. There was the immense workers' car-park which the Russian visitors had thought a fraud. Finally, there was the plant, itself, "the wide harbor with its ore-ships; the mountains of red-stained iron ore; the blast furnaces and fuming coke ovens and power plant piercing the sky with its tall stacks; the glass plant and tool and die works and assembly plant and so on seemingly forever."
Every building was nearly a mile long and each space had its own sound and rhythm. All were overwhelming, but the most overwhelming was the vast plant where Ford engines were built. The overhead monorails which carried parts from one line to the next looked like vast processions of gently agitated mobiles. In the noise and grayness, the color code system struck notes of brilliant lightness, with Thunderbird engines painted peacock blue, for instance, while Ford Fairlane engines were painted jade green. There were miracles, as with the fantastic lathes which simultaneously machined the many counter-slanted surfaces of a crankshaft.
Among the miracles was another thing, that all of the men on the assembly lines tending the machines were at least middle-aged, with some seeming almost too old for their tasks. Under the seniority system, only those workers remained, for there had been layoffs at Ford, as there had been in all of the major automakers, with the younger men having been the first to go. When Mr. Alsop noticed that the younger men were gone and ascertained the cause, he first thought of the comparison between the plant and the Szechuan irrigation system. "Both, in their different ways, teach what great triumphs are within the range of man. But as I went through the big gates again, I cannot help wishing that we in America could find a way to make triumphs as placidly, fruitfully and unremittingly productive as the incredible maze of water-channels in the Szechuan plain."
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., responds to a previous letter writer who had objected to the practice of Secretary of State Dulles telling the American people that certain Russian pronouncements were believed to be more "propaganda" or "lies", which the writer had interpreted as being synonymous. Mr. Cherry commends the Secretary's honesty and forthrightness in so advising the people of his opinion and believes that if he were any less honest and forthright, it would amount to a betrayal of the sacred public trust he held. He asserts that most Americans already knew that Russian spokesmen were liars, even if known in the trade as "prismatic" liars. He finds that as part of the criticism of Mr. Dulles, the letter writer had stated that no one won a debate "by simply calling his opponent a liar", something which Mr. Cherry finds to be true, but advising the writer to consider whether he had ever known anyone to win a debate by conceding that his opponent spoke the truth. He does not concede the writer's point that calling someone a liar who was bigger than oneself to be "damned foolishness", referring the writer to the memoirs of the late Ethiopian sage, Senator Sam, who had said: "If you calls a man what's biggah den u is a lye, jus mak sho u is tot'n a two-foot piece of pipe, an den u mos lakly will gitaway widit."
A letter writer from Havre de Grace, Md., indicates that the announcement by the Soviets of halting of nuclear testing had appeared in newspapers all over the world, announced by Andrei Gromyko, and read by hundreds of millions of people. He wonders how many of those readers noticed the date on the newspaper, April 1, April fool's day, "an institution well known in Russia".
Framed Edition
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