The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 23, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date at his press conference said that it was just as sensible to say that Congress was going nuts and would abolish the Defense Department as it was to contend that the President wanted a single military service. He angrily responded to a question regarding his defense reorganization plan, under bipartisan attack in Congress, saying it would not weaken the individual services. He said that he was asking for certain operational command authority for the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs, but that those services would not be weakened by the change. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had told Congress, shortly before the press conference, that he could not live with the limitation on the size of his civilian staff advocated by Congressional critics of the reorganization plan. He made the statements at the start of the second day of hearings before the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, regarding the White House proposal. The effect of the rival Congressional plan would be to shift greater emphasis to the separate branches.
Incidentally, President Eisenhower understood, as every other President has understood, at least until 2025, that the executive branch does not create or destroy executive departments and agencies, that being the sole province of Congress under the "necessary and proper" clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. The nuts in the current group either do not understand the Constitution or are deliberately eschewing it and pursuing their own ends, not yours as an American citizen bound by the laws and the Constitution. They respond only to MAGA-ville and what the nuts who inhabit it desire. The little bald-headed fellow, who, without any law degree or training, appears most prominent in advising His Highness on the "law" in MAGA-ville, while emulating Herr Doktor Goebbels, and who studied as an undergraduate at Duke, apparently has never cared to read the Constitution, stressing instead the art of propaganda.
Rising food prices had sent the Government's cost-of-living index up seven-tenths of one percent in March to a record high, the largest monthly advance since July, 1956.
In Jakarta, it was reported that Indonesian Government forces had pressed closer to the rebel center of Bukittinggi this date, but that progress was slow.
In Colombo, Ceylon, police this date spotted four sticks of dynamite wired to Colombo's main railroad bridge a few hours after the Communist-dominated workers federation called the vanguard of 180,000 public servants to strike.
In Tokyo, some 30,000 teachers from the city's primary and junior high schools had gone on strike this date against the Government education policy. Smaller scale walkouts had taken place at other points throughout Japan.
In Ljubijana, Yugoslavia, the ambassadors of Russia and its European satellites angrily left the Yugoslav Communist Party Congress this date rather than listen to the governments being accused of "sharpening of the old and rusty weapons of the Cominform" against Yugoslav President Tito.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, the Turkish minority of Cyprus this date observed Turkish Parliament Day throughout the island, with rallies and demonstrations in support of partition of the British colony.
In London, Queen Elizabeth had turned down her invitation to the year's royal command film performance, ending an annual tradition at which the world's movie stars met Britain's royal family.
In Denver, Colo., it was reported that winter held portions of Montana in an icy grasp this date. Red Lodge, Mt., was covered by more than 30 inches of snow and the snowfall had continued this date.
Near Summerton, S.C., a five-year old boy had been crushed to death when a tornado hit a concrete block wall where the boy, his four-year old sister and his mother had been watching the storm through the window of their concrete block tenant house on a farm. His sister, sitting beside him, suffered only a scratch on her leg. The tornado had blown a hole through the house. Frightened residents said it sounded like a railroad train or a hundred planes, carrying hailstones as big as baseballs. The local police chief described it as a black cloud shaped like an ice cream cone. He said it had passed within 150 yards of his car when he drove out to meet it, but did not shake the car. Elsewhere across the Carolinas, tornadoes and violent weather had hit, inflicting damage notably to the South Carolina peach crop, estimated in the thousands of dollars. In Darlington County, winds had smashed farm buildings and strewn trees and branches over Darlington. Trees had been uprooted and buildings wrecked across the county.
In Warm Springs, Ga., the black woman who had cooked President Roosevelt's first and last meals at the Little White House had died. Daisy Bonner, who had cooked for FDR for 20 years whenever he was in Warm Springs, had died 13 years and 10 days after the President's death, having been in ill health for several years. She had once scribbled on the kitchen wall of the Little White House that she had cooked "the first meal and the last" for the late President. Guides still pointed out the inscription to visitors.
In Washington, Ernest Norris, 76, former president of the Southern Railway Co., had died unexpectedly early this date. He had been the president of the railway from 1937 to 1951, and had been a director following his retirement from the presidency.
In High Point, N.C., a mother of three had shot and killed a would-be robber of her husband in their front yard the previous night as the hooded man had crouched over her husband with a ten-pound shotgun barrel clutched in both hands. Police credited the woman with saving her husband's life, as the assailant probably would have otherwise clubbed him to death. The woman credited a higher power, saying that the .25-caliber pistol she had used had been left in the house by her husband only the previous morning for the first time since he had obtained it. The attempted robbery had taken place in the evening as the husband had returned from closing the service station which he operated. He was attacked while getting out of his car in the driveway. Officers had arrived at the home about five minutes after the attempted hold-up, where they found the bandit lying on his left side facing the house about ten feet from the front door. The medical examiner arrived a few minutes later and his examination of the unknown bandit showed that a single .25-caliber bullet wound had entered under his right eye, causing instantaneous death. The husband was immediately rushed to the emergency room of the local hospital where he was treated for deep head lacerations, with attending physicians indicating that he had evidently been struck repeatedly with the gun barrel, suffering several deep slashes where jagged metal edges had ripped open his scalp. The 12-gauge shotgun barrel had been found lying next to the body of the man's assailant, with its stock separated from the barrel.
Dick Young of The News reports that the 200-year old Spanish cannon, which had been slated for Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, Fla., would instead continue in Charlotte, on the lawn of City Hall. The City Council had approved the location after ownership of the cannon had been discovered in a letter in the City Clerk's office from the chief of Ordinance in Washington, dated April, 1900, indicating that the latter had been ordered by the Secretary of War to ship the cannon to the Mayor of Charlotte from the Arsenal at New York City. It confirmed the statement of County Commission member Sam McNinch that the cannon had been given to his father, who had been Mayor from 1905 to 1907, by President Theodore Roosevelt. Recently, the National Park Service had sought to secure the cannon for transfer to the fort at St. Augustine. The Stonewall Jackson Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy, had recently voted to swap the cannon for an authentic Confederate cannon. The cannon had first been mounted in 1906 in front of the post office, and then stood for nearly 30 years in the yard of the D. H. Hill School.
John Kilgo of The News reports that County Police Chief Joe Whitley had said this date that murder warrants would be signed against a Gaston County man and a woman in connection with the mysterious death of her three-year old boy early on Sunday. They would also be charged with occupying a room for immoral purposes, with false registration as husband and wife, and with neglect of a minor child. The county coroner had said that tests showed that the child had barbiturates in his system at the time of death. They did not yet know the amount. The coroner said that the pills which the man and woman had in the motel room on Sunday were technically known as secobarbital, commonly called "Red Birds", fast-acting pills which tended to make most people drowsy and sleepy. He said they dissolved rapidly in water and even faster in alcohol. The male of the couple had said that the boy's mother had taken about seven of the pills and that she had been drinking beer. She had told a News reporter the previous day that she did not even remember checking into the motel room. The doctor who performed the autopsy said that there were two types of barbiturates, one, like the Red Birds, being fast-acting, while the other was slower, and that it would not take many of those pills to kill a young child. He was still conducting other tests this date, but said that it looked as if the child had a bad heart, and possibly pneumonia. Police were questioning other doctors who had previously treated the child. A doctor had been called to the home of the child the prior Friday to see the boy's sister, and checked on the boy's throat, telling police that he found it "slightly irritated". A Belmont doctor, who had treated the child in his early months of life, had told police that the boy was undernourished when he was about three months old, but that the condition had cleared up by February, 1955. Officers said that the doctor told them that, as far as he knew, the child was normal. The male of the couple had said that he had several of the Red Birds in the pocket of his shirt lying on a table near the bed on which the boy lay, but that he did not think the child had taken any of the pills from the shirt pocket. The funeral for the little boy had been held the previous day and police had escorted his mother to the funeral.
Elizabeth Prince, News medical writer, reports that a five-year old girl was full of life at present, whereas two months earlier, she had been nervous and irritable and would not eat, frequently throwing what her mother had called "frightful temper tantrums", weighing only 35 pounds. It was the third case on record where there had been an extra blood vessel of the heart. The child's parents had known from the time she was born that her heart was not normal, and doctors had said that she could live at most a year, later giving her three years. Her heart, pounding furiously, was literally wearing itself out. When the family had moved to Charlotte from Colorado, advances in surgery made it possible to operate on the child's heart. Doctors in Charlotte said that an operation could be attempted, that it was her only chance. The pre-operation diagnosis was that there was a hole in the heart between the two upper chambers, the auricles. Doctors believed that somewhere in the process of development, the tissue dividing the two auricles had failed to grow completely. That would not have been as rare as what the doctors actually found while operating on March 26, the presence of an extra blood vessel, one-fourth to one-half inch long, connecting the right coronary artery and vein. The coronary artery took blood to the heart muscle to keep it pumping, and the extra blood vessel was shunting some of that needed blood to the vein, which took it back inside the heart. In effect, the little girl was having a partial heart attack all the time. Her heart was not getting all of the blood it needed to work and to try to get more blood, it had to beat faster. The extra blood vessel was tied off at the end and then severed, cutting the bridge between the artery and vein, the result of the surgery having been to make the girl completely normal. The little girl indicated that she felt ten times better now than she had prior to the surgery. Her mother said that she was not so nervous, that her speech had slowed, whereas previously, one could hardly understand her because she talked so fast. She did not eat well before, but now ate like she was starving all the time. She had gained weight from her pre-operation high of 35 pounds. She said she ate everything, as everything tasted better. Her mother had a new type of problem, keeping her quiet. She wanted to play with her three-year old brother or her year-old brother. The following September, just prior to her sixth birthday, on September 23, she would begin school as a normal first grader. Keep the paste pots away from her.
On the editorial page, "World War II Won't Be Fought Again" indicates that the President's military reorganization plan had run into opposition from Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and thus would face a hard fight. Mr. Vinson had great power and long seniority, acquiring much influence over other House members. He was also a devoted friend of the Navy, visible in the number of naval installations which dotted his district.
There could be no doubt that Mr. Vinson actually feared the greater concentration of power in the Secretary of Defense, as recommended by the President as a means of making the nation battle-ready. The present system, however, as Mr. Vinson had pointed out, had been good enough to win World War II. He regarded strictly discrete services to be a barrier against the possibility that a "man on horseback" might reverse the military's subordination to civilian authority. In a speech before the House, Mr. Vinson had provided other reasons for continuing the status quo, but rested his defense of it mainly on the argument that the present command setup had won the late war, which would not be fought again except in the clubs of retired officers.
The President and Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, however, did not believe that a future war could be won without more centralized authority for the Secretary and more streamlining of the services. Mr. McElroy had said in an interview with U.S. News & World's Report: "We think the present setup is not good enough for the warfare of the future, which looks as if it may be practically a half-hour-notice kind of warfare and, for that reason, demands the kind of streamlining which very short warning time requires. Think back to the time that we had to work out our military response to Pearl Harbor. We didn't know whether the Japanese were coming in and going to put troops in California or not. But if they had so intended, they were going to have to take several days to transport them, so we had at least several days to consider certain things that we might do. But you can't compare that kind of thing with the possibility of having airplanes—perhaps several hundred of them—approaching the country, then perhaps a couple of hundred ICBM's, and the ICBM's coming at a pace of some thousands of miles an hour with the time from launching to delivery of some 25 or 30 minutes. This is a new dimension of warfare…"
It indicates that there were possible dangers in the President's plan, among which was the fact that the nation had not had an unbroken string of brilliant defense secretaries and might not in the future, and that in a democracy, there was some peril in centralization. But against such threats lay the possibility that the U.S. might lose a total war because of a command structure which the President said was outmoded, wasteful and inefficient. As the President had pointed out, he had considerably more experience in fighting wars than any of his opponents in Congress, including Mr. Vinson.
It finds that the layman's interest in the military was that it protect the nation, not being qualified to pass on military plans or strategy. But as between the fears of an internal military dictatorship and of defeat by an external dictatorship, there was no doubt that the layman believed the latter was to be prevented.
"Pound Can Now Pursue '2,7 , Hooo'" indicates that the Government had held poet Ezra Pound in a mental hospital for 12 years on a charge of treason for making pro-Fascist broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Recently, the Government had withdrawn the charge and released Mr. Pound with the hope that he would return to Italy and disappear into obscurity.
It had been a humane decision and legally justified because of competent testimony that Mr. Pound would never be sane enough to stand trial. The passage of time had added to the difficulties which the Government would have in proving the charges.
It finds that there was larger significance, involving the tolerance of a free society for error. The Government had not tried to rehabilitate Mr. Pound, to force him into confessing of error, nor had it been frightened by the possibility that once out of reach of U.S. authority, he might resume his anti-American activities, but simply had released him.
It finds it testimony to freedom's strength in a world where the pen was increasingly guided by government. Even in France, authorities had been engaging in suppression of newspapers and magazines which dared discuss some of the hidden chapters of the war in Algeria.
Now, Mr. Pound was free to write such poetry as:
"(interlude entitled: periplum
by camion)
"and Awoi's hennia/ plays hob/
k-lakk … thuuuuuu/ making rain/ uuh/ 2, 7, hooo
It indicates that as one critical study of Mr. Pound's work had said: "He will never be widely read."
"Party Line Poops on Bathing Suits" indicates that a deadly serious propaganda contest between Russia and the U.S. underlay the glitter, gaiety and glamour at the Brussels World's Fair.
The U.S. had budgeted 13.4 million dollars for buildings and displays at the fair. The Russian budget was estimated at between 50 and 60 million dollars, some of which was being spent on a statue of Vladimir Lenin. The aim of the effort and spending was to impress on the millions of Europeans who would visit the fair the marvels of life in America and in Russia.
In its effort to appear the most marvelous, Russia had made a big thing of a model of its Sputnik, a couple of dogs which allegedly had returned in a missile from the wild blue yonder, and all manner of machinery, from jet planes to oil drills. On a smaller scale, the U.S. also had undertaken some flashy projects, including a scale model of Philadelphia featuring 45,000 buildings and 12,000 trees. Both countries had promoted the peaceful atom.
At the opening of the fair, the U.S. pavilion had immediately outdrawn the more expensive, more elaborate Soviet exhibits. The drawing card turned out to be a group of American girls modeling bathing suits around a pool. "The Soviet must regret that Lenin and Marx never told them about girls and bathing suits."
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "A Real Lahv Subject", indicates that a Cornell University phonetics professor, C. K. Thomas, had rushed into a field of American speech where many of his colleagues had feared to tread, having undertaken to delineate on a map ten major regional speech areas of the country, believing that he could spot the area in which a child grew up by listening to his speech as an adult.
The April issue of Aramco World, a publication of the Arabian American Oil Co., discussed his findings. He relied in part on listening to a few key words: barn, orange, marry, grease, bath and forest. In the Southern Coastal Region, which included most of Virginia, a barn was spoken of as almost, but not quite, a baion. The "ao" diphthong occurred, as in "We will naow go to taown." The letter "i" became "ah", such that "live wire" became "lahv wah".
The piece indicates that in its observations, the distinctions ascribed by the professor were steadily fading, finding it regrettable. In Charleston, S.C., columnist Ashley Cooper had compiled an engaging dictionary of Charlestonese, but in another generation, the glossary likely would be a thing of the past. There had been a time when the soft Charleston "g", as in "gyarden", was widely heard in Richmond, as well as in Boston, with which both Charleston and Richmond had much affinity. It finds that it seldom encountered a "gyarden" anymore.
The most interesting finding made by the professor had been that in identifying speech habits and pronunciation, it did not matter greatly where a person lived as an adult, that what counted was the speech learned as a child from other children. The New Englander, transplanted to the South, might lose some of the precise snap of his final consonants, but would seldom lose all of it, and if the New Englander picked up some of the Southern slur in his speech, he would not pick up much. Southern-born children, however, were likely to shock their grandparents back in Pawtucket. "What is the New England oldster to say of a visiting teen-ager who is interested in getting a purty gull on a dayance flow, and is thinking, one of the days, of getting merried?"
Drew Pearson indicates that sometimes it was healthy for the people to take a look at the aftermath of Senate investigations, it having been a year since the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct by unions and management had smeared Portland, Ore., as the vice capital of the West and made a convicted dope peddler, James Elkins, the hero of Capitol Hill. Mr. Elkins, the Portland underworld czar, had been given free rein before the McClellan Committee to make charges against the Mayor of Portland, the Teamsters Union and others, despite his long criminal record and the fact that a Federal psychiatrist at Leavenworth Penitentiary had reported on March 9, 1939 that he was "evasive and untruthful". Later, a Portland psychiatrist would inform a jury that Mr. Elkins was a "criminal psychopath … he will lie at any time if it is to his advantage."
A parade of prostitutes
Following the sensational testimony, a runaway grand jury in Portland had indicted those named in the hearing, handing down a total of 116 indictments.
During the testimony, however, Mr. Pearson's column had reported the true record of Mr. Elkins, plus the fact that he had been close to a member of the City Council, Stanley Earl, a "clean-government" witness imported by Mr. Kennedy to testify against vice in the Teamsters. Mr. Pearson had reported that Mr. Elkins was actually "out to retaliate against the elements that knocked him out of the pinball racket—namely the Teamsters", and that he and his friend, Mr. Earl, were using the hearings as a publicity means to help take control of Portland. Subsequently, Mr. Earl had sued the column for libel.
The previous week, the U.S. Court of Appeals had reversed the conviction of Frank Brewster, the Western head of the Teamsters, for Congressional contempt before the McClellan Committee and directed the District Court to dismiss the case, (a decision from which retired Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, sitting specially, dissented); and the previous week a jury in Coos Bay, Ore., had found for the Coos Bay World and against Mr. Earl in a suit which involved the truth of Mr. Pearson's column of a year earlier regarding Mr. Earl's friendship with Mr. Elkins. Of the 116 indictments brought against Portland officials and Teamsters, 88 had been dropped, and there had only been one conviction and one plea of guilty, the latter by a prostitute who was fined $250. The only conviction was that of District Attorney William Langley, who had attended a paint dealer's association bingo game for the benefit of the Jaycees, leading to a charge against him for failure to prosecute the bingo game, of which he was found guilty on a misdemeanor and fined $100. In the six cases which had gone to trial, Mayor Terry Schrunk of Portland had been acquitted of the bribery charges alleged by Mr. Elkins, but he had suffered great humiliation in Washington during the hearings. Clyde Crosby of the Oregon Teamsters had also been acquitted of major charges, despite having been pilloried before the Senate Committee. Meanwhile, Mr. Elkins was convicted of wire-tapping and received 20 months in Federal prison. His stooge, Raymond Clark, who, according to sworn evidence, was on the payroll of the Portland Oregonian, while working for Mr. Elkins and while married to a famous prostitute, had also been convicted. Both Mr. Elkins and Mr. Clark were appealing.
The runaway grand jury which had
brought the flood of indictments had been conducted by erratic Arthur
Kaplan, who had ducked out of Portland later to join Robert Kennedy
as his assistant counsel for the Committee, where, in that capacity,
he had pulled a gun while collecting Senate evidence in Detroit—as alleged by Teamsters attorney William Bufalino
Joseph Alsop tells of Soviet Ambassador to France Sergei Alexandrovich Vinogradov being probably happy at this juncture, though he smiled all the time, carefully directing his broadest smiles at members of the more extreme French Rightwing groups in business and politics. His themes were that the Soviet Union was a friend of France, recognized and approved its historic position in North Africa, and that, in contrast, the U.S. was France's secret enemy, wanting to get possession of the oil of the Sahara and replace France in North Africa, that in reality the entire difficulty for France in Algeria was the result of an American plot. Thus, he advocated France breaking its alliance with the U.S. and seeking Soviet support in North Africa and on other matters, returning to an old link with Russia which had existed in the past.
Before Mr. Alsop had left Paris, the Ambassador had enough success with that line of talk to produce a minor scandal. He had been invited to a shooting party by the bearer of one of France's great old names, outraging some of the other bearers of great old names who were not only anti-Bolshevik but often still pro-Romanov of the Czarist regime. Since then, the Ambassador, espousing his pro-Soviet and anti-American lines, had found a much wider audience arising from the defeat of the Gaillard Government regarding the Tunisian issue, with its accompanying anti-American sentiment.
He suggests that it was not just another Soviet "propaganda victory", to be dismissed as such, as had Secretary of State Dulles so often. At the climax of the Indo-Chinese situation, there had been another anti-American storm of the same sort, without any Soviet intervention, though replete with the same charges that the greedy U.S. was plotting to steal France's birthright.
He indicates that in politics, the famous "French logic" often tended to consist of two propositions, that France not only could but must have its cake and eat it too, and that France had been betrayed by its friends and allies and not by its enemies or its own weaknesses. The effort to have its cake and eat it too had been glaringly apparent from the beginning of the Tunisian crisis. Shortly before the crisis had begun, the French chief of general staff, General Paul Ely, officially informed the French Government that the re-conquest of Tunisia would cost 400 billion francs per year and would require national mobilization, a price which everyone thought was much too high, including those of the Rightwing parliamentary leaders who wanted to reconquer Tunisia. At present, even among the most extreme Rightwingers, the price of re-conquest was still thought to be too high, but prevented no one from demanding the practical fruits of a reconquest of Tunisia with extreme insistence and indignation. When the U.S. failed to back those demands to the hilt, the U.S. Government was violently blamed.
Ambassador Vinogradov's smiling efforts had made great progress during the previous week and would likely make more progress in the immediate future. The only Soviet purpose was to separate France from the Western Alliance by using the North African problem, which excited the deepest emotional reaction in France.
In Britain, the Soviet appeal was to the Left, utilizing the strong tide of British emotion on the issue of nuclear disarmament.
The breakup of the Western Alliance was entirely possible, which could occur at an early date. The Western nations would hang separately if they did not hang together. But after years of feeble leadership in France, Britain and the U.S., hanging together was becoming more difficult, and hanging separately was becoming more probable.
Doris Fleeson indicates that if Dr. Robert Oppenheimer would only be patient a little longer, he had it on the word of White House press secretary James Hagerty that a Government job was about to open for a person of his intellectual caliber. Speaking at the Women's National Press Club dinner for editors the prior weekend, Mr. Hagerty had undertaken to show how life could be beautiful even for reporters by describing "the next White House press secretary", sketching a type which resembled Dr. Oppenheimer of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, thinking for everyone except Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
According to Mr. Hagerty, that person ought know at least one foreign language and enough science and economics to guide reporters on their coverage of worldwide instantaneous broadcasts relayed around the world via satellites by 1960. He said that the next president would be busy traveling the world on jets, handling matters of vital importance to the whole human race. It appeared that his view was that night school could not start too soon for the type of reporters with whom he was accustomed to dealing.
Ms. Fleeson indicates that Mr. Hagerty would be forgiven for not understanding the Gaither Report if he would arrange to have the White House release it, that reporters would explain to him the economics of the AEC acting as a power broker in the Dixon-Yates contract situation if he would persuade White House chief of staff Sherman Adams to discuss with them the part which Mr. Adams had played in that arrangement. No one expected the press secretary to be a doctor but they would like to have access to the physicians who had treated the President in his previous two illnesses and were still treating him.
The increasing extent to which Mr. Hagerty acted as a maker of news and policy rather than as a conduit for it had long distressed many reporters. He remained efficient in the technical aspects of news gathering and dissemination, but increasingly, reporters were shut off from the type of give-and-take with Administration officials which enabled them to achieve insight to the news.
She indicates that information was not too hard to obtain in the bureaucracy and that Mr. Hagerty was an expert at disseminating it. What counted was the opportunity to dig for what was left unsaid and the demeanor of the witness as he explained the position. "It is indeed a new world and reporters need to be reminded of it, but some problems of their trade remain the same."
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that the Puerto Ricans in New York had intrigued him as a sociological experiment and he hastens to add that the piece was pro-Puerto Rican. Many of them, coming from the peasant class and many of mixed Spanish and African blood, had suddenly been flung into the most difficult metropolis in the world, New York City. He had read that legislation was afoot to make New York a legal bilingual city, that in such a simple thing as PTA meetings, for instance, all English statements would be translated to Spanish and all communications from that school would arrive in both English and Spanish.
He finds that the city was, perhaps unknowingly, doing a great disservice to the newcomers, by giving them Spanish as a crutch, further distinguishing the Puerto Ricans from their new neighbors. He suggests that it would only add to complications if the Latins hung together as foreigners in a strange land.
Better economic conditions, which included better housing, less concentration, less contact with Spanish cousins, less delinquency, less crime, would depend on making Latin Americans into North Americans, which leaned heavily on swift acquisition of English, the accepted language. Until the Puerto Ricans learned English, they were bound to be second-class citizens economically, as the better jobs would be closed to them, and socially, because their lack of diffusion in industry would force them to live in warrens, with the resulting problems of the temptation of crime as a necessity as well as an avocation.
Most immigrants had spoken another language when they reached Ellis Island, but necessity had forced them to learn English, even if rudimentary and with an accent. They had to learn the local jargon, which they proceeded to do in record time. Latins, he observes, were particularly adept at languages, as they were musically minded and had good ears. A child could learn any language quickly, and so he believes New York to be wrong in the bilingual approach.
He indicates that a Puerto Rican in New York did not necessarily want to be a Spanish expatriate from the Caribbean, really desiring to be accepted as a New Yorker, even if having trouble with syntax on occasion.
In his touring of the world, he found that his feeble effort to speak French, Spanish, Swahili, English-English, Italian, North Carolinian, New Yorkese, Bostonian, or two versions of Australian, carried him far more than if he had leaned on English as a crutch and expected people to understand him. He recommends that people try it if they traveled internationally, that they ask the concierge of the best, or worst, hotel in town where a nice place to go to commit suicide was, or where one could buy a quick murder, and he would say: "Yes, very easy, kind sir. The gentleman's room is that way and I will have a taxi for you if you wish to buy some clothes."
A letter writer indicates that the recent story of the sordid love-life of a famous actress, Lana Turner, climaxing in the fatal stabbing by her 14-year old daughter of her mother's racketeer boyfriend led sympathy naturally to the daughter, who was the child of a broken home and the innocent victim of a vile environment. He suggests that many young people were prone to pattern their conduct after the lives of screen idols, which he finds to be a national tragedy when the careers of such stars could thrive on filth. He says that while censors did an excellent job of eliminating objectionable photography and dialogue, they might also bar from the stage, screen and television people guilty of immoral conduct. Foreigners known to be guilty of moral turpitude were barred from entry to the country and it could not be good for the country's morals to bring characters equally bad into the theaters or into living rooms via television.
He would, no doubt, love today's
"cancel culture", treating adults as children to be
"protected". Strangely, during the late campaign in 2024,
many of the naïve Trumpy-Dumpy-Do's voiced concern over "cancel
culture" and thought that Trump would be able to eliminate it
somehow, when, in fact, he and his entourage of Fascists, seeking to
create alternatively a royal palace out of the White House or a
dictatorship modeled on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, would seek,
just as in those latter two societies, to make "cancel culture"
emblematic of our society. Of course, the culture which they seek to
cancel is all of that which does not subscribe to Trumpism
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