The Charlotte News
Thursday, April 3, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Havana that El Presidente Fulgencio Batista's Government
this date had authorized workers to kill if necessary to remain on
their jobs when rebel leader Fidel Castro would issue his
long-threatened call for a general strike. It was one of three of the
harshest decrees in the history of Cuba, issued by Sr. Batista and
his Cabinet after an all-night meeting. A second decree had virtually
scrapped the nation's judiciary, barring any judge from issuing a
ruling against a Government official or agency or against any
Government or legal opposition leader, with judges who failed to obey
it being immediately dismissed. A third order said that any employer
who ordered a work stoppage of any kind would be jailed between 30
days and six months. All Government ministers had been authorized to
issue licenses to bear arms to Cuba's 160,000 public employees and
all other workers. The decree absolved workers of criminal
responsibilities for any steps they thought necessary, including
killing, to prevent being forced into joining a general strike. The
Government also decreed that anyone joining a general strike would
lose their job permanently, a penalty, which, when applied in 1935,
had quickly broken a general strike. Despite solid support of labor
union leaders for El Presidente, Sr. Castro claimed that the workers
were secretly organizing to follow him, threatening that if his
rebellion succeeded, he would try for treason any officials who
continued working after his call for a general strike had issued.
Meanwhile, two columns of rebels were reported moving toward
Santiago, attacking communications as they advanced. A rebel
communiqué said that one column of guerrillas was approaching
from the rebels' mountain headquarters to the west in the Sierra
Maestra toward Santiago, Cuba's second largest city and the capital
of the easternmost Oriente Province. Another force led by Raul
Castro, brother of Fidel, had destroyed communications around the
sugar mill city of Sagua de Tanamo and had apparently moved toward
Santiago, 50 miles to the southwest. In contrast to the small bands
which had previously swept down from the mountains, the rebels
claimed that 1,000 persons were in that column. Both columns had shot
up and wrecked motor and rail transport as they advanced. The
communiqué said that thousands of armed men from the Oriente
countryside would soon march on Santiago. El Presidente's Army had
reinforced its 5,000 or more men in Oriente, and officers had
expressed confidence that they could defeat Sr. Castro if he risked
an open battle. Thus far in his 16-month campaign to overthrow El
Presidente, the rebel leader had stuck to hit-and-run guerrilla
tactics. Clashes between Government troops and the rebels continued
on a small scale, with the Army indicating that 12 rebels had been
killed in one clash. Time to test food for poison
The President this date had sent to Congress a six-point Pentagon reorganization plan, which he said would give Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy authority for "truly unified" military operations.
Secretary McElroy had said this date
that non-military space projects could be transferred quickly from ARPA to the
new civilian agency proposed to Congress the previous day by the President, once the organization
was set up. That, of course, would be NASA
The House this date had passed and sent to the Senate a compromise 1.8 billion dollar anti-recession highway construction bill, and the Senate appeared likely to approve the measure promptly and send it to the White House before Congress would begin its ten-day Easter recess later this date. House passage had been by roll call vote. Previously, the House had defeated by a vote of 222 to 109 an attempt to send the bill back to the Senate-House conference committee for further consideration. The major differences between the original Senate and House versions had been the inclusion by the Senate of a provision intended to curb erection of billboards along interstate highways, a provision retained in the compromise measure. House rejection of the compromise would have precluded further action on the measure until April 14, after the Easter recess.
In Cairo, the newspaper Al-Shaab reported this date that the United Arab Republic had obtained three more submarines from the Soviet bloc.
In Paris, French atomic experts this date said that France had produced enough plutonium to build its own atomic bomb. The giant reactor located in Marcoule in southern France had been producing an average of about 1.3 ounces of plutonium daily for several months, and that stock now amounted to about 22 to 26 pounds.
In Frankfurt, West Germany, Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard had flown home from a ten-day visit to the U.S. this date and said that the American recession was primarily psychological.
In Colombo, Ceylon, police had shot and killed two demonstrators and injured several others this date in a clash in central Ceylon's tea plantation district.
In Rome, a strong earthquake had shaken parts of southern Italy early this date, with no reports of damage, experts estimating its epicenter to have been some point outside of southern Italy, about 300 miles from Rome.
Heavy rains, snow and floods had
battered northern California and the mountain region of the country
this date while pounding winds and tides had caused damage losses
into the millions of dollars in coastal New England. Sections of
Texas and Oklahoma surveyed widespread damage caused by tornadic
winds. Heavy surf and rough seas had continued along the New England
coast this date in the wake of destructive winds which had whipped
the area on Wednesday. It was the 18th storm to hit New England since
December, many calling it the worst spring storm during the previous
21 years. California Governor Goodwin Knight had declared his state a
disaster area this date. Rains and snow had stranded trains,
marooning 200 in the Sierra Nevada, and sending rivers flooding over
their banks. Four persons had died, two by drowning and two others in
accidents attributed to the storm. A Southern Pacific passenger train
with 97 persons aboard had been stranded in a snowshed near Donner
Summit in the Sierra 165 miles northeast of San Francisco. Two
avalanches of snow had buried a 22-car mail train on the track ahead,
stalling the westbound passenger train which had followed. All 25 on
the mail train
In Paris, it was reported that when an ex-G.I. from Missouri had been arrested the previous week on charges of desertion from the Army during World War II, everyone had wondered how he had been caught. Everyone in the village of Mont D'Origny had known that he had hidden for 13 years with a dark-haired woman and their increasing family, including now five healthy children who spoke French and English with a Midwestern twang. But in the interim no one had informed on the man. A Paris reporter finally had revealed that the man had trapped himself by watching the street one day from a curtained window and being the only eyewitness to an accident, providing the investigating police short and furtive answers about it. Later, officers had begun to wonder about the mysterious man, checked the records and found that he was a deserter. He was now in the Army stockade at Verdun, awaiting a court-martial.
In Glasgow, a New York-born woodcutter, 31, this date had pleaded not guilty to murdering three teenage girls, three women, a man and a boy. The killing wave had spanned more than two years. He was ordered to be tried later in the month, probably on April 14. His lawyers had not disclosed the nature of his defense, saying only that it would be a "special defense". He had been born in New York to Scottish parents and had been returned to Scotland when still a child. He had been arrested in January at the home he had shared with his parents in a suburb of Glasgow.
In Medina, O., a loaded coal truck, the driver of which said he was unable to stop, had smashed into a diesel engine of the Baltimore & Ohio's Chicago-bound Capitol Limited early this date, derailing 15 cars and injuring at least eight persons.
In Charlotte, it was reported that a 20-year old Davidson College junior from Asheboro had died early in the morning after being shot in the neck by another student, 21, a senior from Burlington, who had been charged with murder and released under a $1,500 bond. Officers had quoted the arrested student as having said that he was showing his .38-caliber pistol to the victim and two other students in the victim's third-floor dormitory room shortly after midnight, that the arrested student had pointed the pistol at the victim and started snapping the trigger, and after the second snap, the gun had fired, hitting the victim in the neck. He had died about 20 minutes later. Two roommates of the arrested student had witnessed the shooting. The arrested pre-med student said to police that he had sought to stop the bleeding when he saw that the victim was hurt. An ambulance had been called but the victim had died before reaching the hospital. A preliminary hearing was set for the following Monday in County Recorder's Court.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that County Commission member Ernest Brown this date had officially entered the Commission race by paying the filing fee, the last of the four-man Commission to make his intentions known. He said that he stuck by his original promise to the voters that he was in favor of an economical government, but did not believe in false economy.
Hal Cooper of the Associated Press
reports from London that the average "cool fool in the U.S.
platter-chatter biz may have it made for moola," but questions
how that person was stocked for dignity. A deejay in the U.K. found money
only secondary or even tertiary, "but you call him a square with
fair hair and its fountain pens at 40 paces." That was why four
of the "gone gals" at a high school had been "slinking about
lately with their knees in the breeze, a sight which would go down in
school annals as 'Jack Payne's Revenge.'" Mr. Payne was a deejay
on the BBC television show, "Off the Record"
On the editorial page, "Cut-Rate Leadership? No Thanks" indicates that Mecklenburg County was a ten million-dollar per year business with 268,000 individual stockholders, and yet paid its top executive an annual salary of only $9,000, less than the more successful plumbers made. There was now a proposal that the position be paid even less.
It urges that, instead, the position ought be paid more, as the job of chairman needed always to attract the best administrator who could be found, as good government could ultimately come only from its conduct by exceedingly able and intelligent leaders. It concludes that the people would have to pay what good leadership was worth.
"Truth Wins When It Is in the Race" indicates that the Soviets were making such obvious gains in their current "peace" offensive that the Administration no longer attempted to put a good face on U.S. defaults in the field of propaganda and information.
The President had suggested that the Kremlin's nuclear test "ban" was a gimmick not to be taken seriously, in the same vein as he had reacted to the first Russian Sputnik the prior fall. As with the Sputnik, the Administration had sufficient warning in time to act, but had decided to do nothing. The result, as even Secretary of State Dulles now conceded, was that the latest "gimmick" was making an impact on world opinion, profitable to the Kremlin.
Some weeks earlier, Mr. Dulles had said that the Soviets probably were selling bad policies better than the U.S. was selling good policies, then likened outer space research to the despotic exhibitionism which had led to the building of the pyramids, suggesting that the U.S. retire from the race to the moon and let the Soviets have the propaganda spoils.
It finds that the truth was that the satellites had their "gimmicky" aspects and that the Soviet nuclear test ban was a pure and simple fraud. The Administration, meanwhile, which had once talked so much about waging psychological warfare against the Soviets, was not presently engaged in the contest to any meaningful degree. The Administration considered, but had decided against, beating the Soviets to the punch by announcing a U.S. ban on further hydrogen bomb testing. Instead, it pointed to the limited radioactive waste from the "clean" bomb it would test during the current month in the mid-Pacific, while underscoring the fact that the Soviets had just completed a series of tests before announcing their ban.
The U.S. had told the world nothing, however, about the dirtiness of the weapons involved in the Soviet tests. Marquis Childs had stated that so effective had been the Western system of detection, worked out under U.S. leadership, that every detail of the tests conducted by the Russians had been known, where they were conducted, the yield of radioactive fallout sent into the atmosphere, the chemical makeup of the weapons tested and the exact number, all of which had been labeled secret.
A report on the way the Soviets had poisoned the atmosphere just before assuming the guise of humanitarianism and proposing the test ban, could have had a sobering effect on the growing popular demand that the West unilaterally and without safeguards cease nuclear testing.
The President had said that he could have been mistaken in deciding to do nothing about the Soviet propaganda coup, of which, it finds, there was not much doubt.
"Charlotte Salutes a Victorious Warrior" indicates that Charlotte's Frank Phillips seemed to have a formula during his 16 years as chairman of the Mecklenburg County Chapter of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a position from which he had stepped down the previous night amid much sadness and many tributes. It indicates that it shared in the sadness and that the tributes had been somewhat inadequate for so fine a leader in so great a cause. It hopes that he would leave his magic formula behind for others to use against whatever menaces to health and happiness of the community in the future.
Mr. Phillips had known, first-hand, the dark polio epidemics between 1944 and 1948, with intermittent flareups before and since, when there had been so many to help but so little money. In 1955, the Salk vaccine had offered the first hope to a waiting world. He had labored long, well and imaginatively, and his labors had benefited countless numbers of people, with personal satisfaction having been his only reward. It indicates that it had been a job well done and that he richly deserved the community's salute.
"Life in America" indicates that a Florida inventor had developed a toy knife which spurted red liquid, according to the New York Post. The manufacturer said that the user would derive additional pleasure from the "realistic effect of bleeding."
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "The History of Toothache", indicates that jaded viewers of television might envy the caveman his carefree evenings, that a recent article in the British Dental Journal, however, had thrown a different light on the subject, being a survey of the incidence of dental caries in geological prehistoric times, striking the reader with the image that the father, if he had any teeth at all, could never have gotten through a steak without howls of pain.
The earliest record of human caries had been found in the skull of Rhodesian Man, with 10 of its 15 teeth having been carious and many showing signs of root abscesses. By Neolithic times, things had been a little better, and a recent report had found that early Red Indian teeth had been found with perfectly preserved cement fillings, seeming to bear out the theory that there had been some early primitive dentistry. In some prehistoric Greek skulls, some of the teeth had obviously been extracted, with the ancient Greeks appearing to have been in a worse state than anyone else at the time, far worse than the savage ancient Britons. Twenty-two skulls found at Coldrum, Kent, showed no signs of decay at all, causing a person to believe that it must have been the climate or something to do with the woad.
Drew Pearson indicates that U.S. experts on public opinion had admitted privately that Moscow had scored the top propaganda victory of the year with the announcement of the unilateral ban of hydrogen bomb tests, almost equaling its top victory of the previous year, launching of the two Sputniks. The Moscow announcement, coming after the steady Russian drumbeat urging a summit conference and the banning of missile bases in Europe, had more than ever pictured the U.S. as a warmonger and Russia as the disciple of peace. He indicates that the real inside story of how badly the U.S. had muffed the situation on banning hydrogen bomb tests was known only to a few people.
As early as September 11, 1956, the President and the National Security Council had decided to propose more or less what Moscow had proposed during the week, a ban on hydrogen bomb tests. What had actually occurred at that meeting was that the Secretary of State had urged a moratorium on the nuclear tests, pointing out that it would win friends for the U.S. abroad and would provide the diplomatic initiative, helping convince the world that the U.S. was more peace-loving than the Soviets. Harold Stassen had immediately agreed with Mr. Dulles, while Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson and Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the AEC, did not. They warned that Russia might violate any agreement, would test small atomic weapons, admitting, however, that the U.S. could detect all large explosions. In the final vote, then-Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey had agreed with Secretary Dulles, as had the President finally. As was customary in National Security Council meetings, the decision was then made unanimous.
While the final details were yet to be worked out, the tentative plan was to ask Russia to join in suspending hydrogen bomb testing for a year as a "peace experiment", to be coupled with a "moral agreement" to outlaw the ICBM in the same manner poison gas had been outlawed after World War I. Approximately a week after the meeting, the President's political advisors had warned that Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson had made speeches as early as April of that year proposing the end of hydrogen bomb testing, and that he had made another full-dress proposal in early September, the advisors urging that it would be a political mistake to play into Mr. Stevenson's hands by going ahead with the Security Council's decision of September 11. The President had then reversed himself and on September 19, produced a statement attacking Mr. Stevenson's hydrogen bomb proposal as "a theatrical gesture". In speeches thereafter, the President attacked the proposal as political grandstanding, making it clear that he did not consider Mr. Stevenson to be qualified to discuss atomic energy.
On October 26, the President had entered the National Security Council meeting angrily, lecturing them about leaks, indicating that he had heard that the September 11 decision regarding hydrogen bomb testing had become known to people outside the Council, and as a result was ordering a full investigation. On October 29, Mr. Pearson's column queried the White House as to whether the Security Council had made a decision and then reversed itself, with the reply having been "no comment". A day or two later, four Democratic Senators had made the same inquiry and received an unqualified denial.
Walter Lippmann indicates that in traveling about Europe as he had been doing, it had been obvious that there was a great decline in American influence, with its immediate cause being the debility of the President's role in world affairs and the concomitant negativism of Secretary of State Dulles.
He had learned in Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Britain and France that the compelling cause of the decline of American influence was that the American view of the principal European issues was becoming passé, bypassed by events, that the U.S. sounded like old codgers when talking about the past in discussing Europe, Germany and the captive states vis-à-vis Russia. He had become most aware of that complex when he began to realize how different the official American view of Germany was from what one found virtually everywhere in Europe, with the U.S. having been taking it for granted that the hope of the future in Europe turned on the reunification and revival of Germany, when the truth was that World War II was not forgotten and was reviving in memory, that to understand the European situation as a whole required taking into account the growing fear of German domination. The spectacle of West Germany's economic recovery plus the growing knowledge that there was also a remarkable recovery in East Germany had revived the memory of the war and played a big part in affairs. He had not realized that before he had gone abroad on the most recent occasion.
Until that time, he believed that Germany, even if reunited, was too small to be a world power again, failing to realize that all things were relative and that relative to the rest of Europe, excluding the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a reunited Germany would presently be the foremost power.
In London, as well as in Warsaw and the neutralist countries, there was a deep anxiety that the powerful reunited Germany would become an ally of either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, or that it would hold the balance of power between them. The practical effect of that situation was that it was hard to find anyone who did not want to put off as long as possible the reunification of Germany.
Those who were affiliated with the West clung publicly and officially to the position of Secretary Dulles and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, that free elections should occur to reunify Germany, not because they believed in the formula but because they knew that Germany could not be unified under that formula. Those who were affiliated with the East supported the Russians in German affairs, counting on the Russians to protect them against a reunified Germany. He found that Poland, for example, longed for the withdrawal of the Red Army and yet, because of fear of Germany, hoped that until there was another type of settlement of the German question, the Russians would remain in East Germany.
But it was in West Germany that the official American-German policy appeared particularly antiquated. The great mass of West Germans were not dreaming of domination by a unified Germany, rather worrying about a unified Germany, some because they feared a revival of German nationalism and many more because a unified Germany would probably be predominantly Socialist, while others feared it because it would be extremely difficult to integrate the collectivist economy of East Germany and the capitalist economy of West Germany. For such reasons, the Adenauer-Dulles formula had a receding role among Germans, with few expecting it to work and few wanting it to work.
He suggests that there would be negotiations between the two German governments, with negotiation already ongoing about currency and trade, all of it nominally at a technical rather than political level. Those negotiations would almost certainly broaden into something which might one day take the form of a dual state. The West Germans would not break with the Western powers and the East Germans would not break with the Soviets, but would seek to obtain the practical advantages of reunification without the serious political and psychological disadvantages.
The process in the two parts of Germany, he believed, promoted and would be accompanied by a thinning of the military forces in Germany and Central Europe. There was every reason to believe that the future of Central Europe lay with the principle of disengagement, but the application of the principle would be gradual and the full application of it might not come for many more years than anyone could calculate.
He believes those developments would have great momentum in about three years, because at the end of that time, Chancellor Adenauer was not likely to be in power because of his advanced age, and there would be new governments in Britain, France and the U.S. The postwar governments would have been replaced and with them the postwar policies which were becoming antiquated.
He concludes that the decline of American influence in Europe would continue as long as the fundamental conception of the future in the two sides of Germany and in Eastern Europe consisted of the illusions and stereotypes which the Administration inherited from the Truman Administration. "For they belong to an era when the balance of power and the technology of war and of diplomacy were quite different from what they are today."
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that he had been reading some pieces recently on what was known as the "Beat Generation", "the boy-and-girl disenchanteds as opposed to the actual young hoodlums." Those were the typical types who considered themselves lost, "unless they are playing hobo, reciting poetry to groups, writing bad books that seldom see a publisher's light, writing worse plays, smoking marijuana, listening to jazz that must be 'cool,' seldom shaving, rarely washing, always indulging in fraudulent intellectuality and what another generation used to call 'free love,' which is another name for rather messy and certainly promiscuous sexual habits."
He suggests that if "beat" meant defeated, he did not know what they were defeated by or for what reason, any more than he understood lost generations and existentialists, and the current cult of Colin Wilson's and John Osborne's in London. He gathered only that they were mad at something, liked to wear high-necked sweaters, avoided haircuts and talked "top-lofty".
He finds that the old Greenwich Village-Soho-Left Bank type was uncluttered by talent, which was perhaps what made them sore or beat. Occasionally, a writer of talent or a musician of note, might climb from the clutter, but primarily what they created was "garbage". "Their unpublished symphonies, their high thoughts on 'life,' their refusal to 'conform to society,' their impossible paintings, all seems more predicated on lack of talent than real rebellion. They wallow in the sordid as subject matter, which is all right if you draw with Hogarthian skill or write as well as James Farrell. But these people seem to want NOT to achieve anything that's acceptable to the world of clean necks and hot water."
"When they explain their
frenetic search for 'kicks,' whether it's drag-racing or
chicken-dares on hot rods or marijuana or just plain vagrancy,
nothing comes out. A man will be an occasional dishwasher for fun
when he could possibly work equal hours at a decent, if manual, job,
and have as much time for his kicks. The current High Priest of the
Beat Cult, one Jack Kerouac
Mr. Kerouac had been quoted as
saying that "he was hopping freights, hitch-hiking, working as
railroad brakeman, deckhand, and scullion on merchant ships and
government fire lookout and hundreds of other jobs." Since that
time of aimlessness, he had spent his time in "skid rows or in
jazz joints or with personal poet madmen
Mr. Ruark wonders why a person in his early 20's or younger would turn to being a hobo to stimulate his edgy nerves, indicating that he was not a member of the Beats. He suggests that there might have been an excuse for his crowd during the Depression, who had taken to the road and the sea and washed dishes from necessity, as there had been no good jobs even for the person who managed somehow to scrape through college.
He says that he had spent two years
at various types of hard labor before he ever received $25 per week,
after receiving his undergraduate degree at UNC. A person who got a
job earning $15 per week was considered rich and a person who got $18
was a plutocrat. He had managed to purchase a car and get married on
$30 per week. He had known some law graduates who had been pleased to
work for five dollars per week or even nothing for the experience,
while interns received $20 per month plus bad food and laundry. His
group had been involved in two rough wars, with whatever they had
managed to build being interrupted by World War II and Korea. "These
present punks have come from childhood to young manhood in times of
unprecedented prosperity, and very few were subject to more than
token military service. They have enjoyed advanced medical skills, a
welfare state, tremendous entertainment, and they're still either
beat, delinquent, or downright hoodlums—for kicks
"It's a good word—'kick.'
And where the whole sniveling lot needs a kick is right in the
pants
A letter writer suggests that the voters of the Tenth Congressional District, and particularly the Democratic voters of Mecklenburg County, had nothing to show for switching their allegiance three times in succession for Congress, with 6,000 being out of work the only result. He suggests that they had exercised poor judgment, but would have another chance to redeem themselves on the May 31 ballot in the Democratic primary. He urges voting for the Democratic way so that they could say to their friends that they had returned from the wild and woolly. "Be yourself. Let's put the majority in power again."
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