The Charlotte News
Friday, April 4, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that Cuba's Government this date had offered amnesty to Fidel Castro's rebels if they disarmed. Meanwhile, the series of decrees by the Government had stopped talk in Havana of a rebel general strike. Sr. Castro had made no immediate reply to the offer of a general amnesty, announced the previous night by Prime Minister Gonzalo Guell. But the rebel leader already had refused to support any Government which included El Presidente Fulgencio Batista. Sr. Guell had asserted to foreign newsmen that the rebels were a minority group going against the desires of the Cuban people, but he said that the Government would negotiate with all elements to restore peace, again pledging full guarantees for all opposition parties in the presidential election presently set for November 3. He added that the Government also would agree to international supervision of the elections by a group such as the Organization of American States, one of the demands which Sr. Castro had made from his mountain headquarters in Oriente Province. Although his troops probably numbered less than ten percent of the Government's forces, he had been threatening to call a general strike in an effort to unseat El Presidente. The latter had revived a series of strict measures which had been used to halt a 1935 general strike, including granting of authority for workers to kill anyone who urged them to leave their jobs. Businesses, stores and industries had been closed this date for the Easter holidays and might not actually be closed by a strike, but because of the tension, churches had canceled all Easter processions.
In New York, it was reported that there had been a steady increase in the fallout of radioactive particles from the atmosphere over New York City during the previous four years.
In Budapest, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev this date called on the U.S. and Britain to follow the Soviet Union's example and halt testing of atomic and hydrogen bombs.
A group of scientists, churchmen and others filed a lawsuit this date in Washington seeking to halt U.S. nuclear testing. The plaintiffs contended that the Atomic Energy Act was unconstitutional. The press release said that similar suits would be filed in British courts and that attorneys would seek visas at the Russian Embassy in Washington to enter Russia to prosecute a suit there. The first reaction of lawyers was that the suit had little chance of success. While Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy and the five members of the AEC were named as defendants as individuals, the Government was expected to contend that the suit in a fact was against the United States. Suits against individual Government officials could not be maintained in the courts without the Government's consent, unless the officials had acted unlawfully without delegated authority or the act under which they functioned was unconstitutional. The action was taken as anti-bomb groups demonstrated at the U.N. in New York and in England. At the same time, propaganda pressure for the West to join in Russia's announced plan to cease nuclear testing for the time being had been stepped up in the Communist bloc nations and in some other countries, notably in Japan and India. The assistant in charge of the civil division in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said that he would file a motion asking that the anti-testing action be dismissed. No early court action was indicated since no preliminary injunction had been requested. It meant that the complaint would take the usual slow route to a judge for a hearing. Dr. Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize-winning chemistry professor of the California Institute of Technology, veteran Socialist leader Norman Thomas, and British philosopher Bertrand Russell were among those listed as plaintiffs. Dr. Pauling said that he thought the country should call off future testing, set up a system of checking stations under the supervision of the U.S., and then say to Russia: "This is what we have done. Why don't you do what we have done?" The U.S. was about to open a long series of nuclear tests in the mid-Pacific. Russia had conducted an extensive series at its Siberian and Arctic testing grounds. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had said the previous day that those tests had "literally poisoned the world's atmosphere with radioactivity." Also listed among the Americans as plaintiffs in the suits were Dr. Leslie Dunn, a geneticist of Columbia University, and Dr. Carl Link, biochemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin. The British plaintiffs included the Rev. Canon John Collins of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Dr. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian former director of the World Health Organization, and several Japanese religious and fishing leaders were also among the plaintiffs.
The President announced this date that the Veterans Administration was removing immediately the 2 percent down payment requirement of VA-guaranteed home loans. The action and six others also announced by the President were intended to help fight the recession, according to the White House. Five of the seven actions carried out provisions of the 1.85 billion dollar housing bill which the President had signed earlier in the week. Elimination of the 2 percent down payment requirement on VA-guaranteed home loans was not a part of that bill, but was an administrative action requiring no legislation. The down payment elimination restored the situation to what it had been in 1954. In 1955, the 2 percent down payment requirement had been put into effect. Under the new program, veterans would continue to have to pay in cash the expenses of closing on a home loan.
House investigators said this date that "questionable conduct" by some members of the FCC and segments of the broadcasting industry had seriously undermined public confidence in the FCC.
In Algiers, it was reported that French authorities had said this date that 130 rebels had been killed or captured in a battle on the Algerian-Tunisian frontier. French units were pursuing the remnants of a strong band which had been surprised at the frontier 400 miles south of the Mediterranean coast.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, the Ankara News Agency this date reported that eight Indonesian Army men had been killed and six badly wounded in a clash in West Java with a 200-man band from the fanatic Darul Islam movement.
Rains splashed on soggy California again this date, threatening to spill more river water onto the crop-rich flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley, but calm, sunny weather had returned to New England. California was drenched from Mexico to Oregon, but the main danger to crops appeared to be in the Central Valley. Governor Goodwin Knight had asked the President to declare the entire state a major disaster area and make available Federal funds. The Governor estimated that damage to roads, bridges and levees was 12 million dollars, not including the estimated millions of dollars in crop damage. The Red Cross had established nine shelters throughout the state, the largest of which was at Stockton, where 1,100 persons had fled from their residential area threatened by high water. All three Southern Pacific Railroad routes in the valley had been cut, as well as the coastal route, and all Southern Pacific trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles had been halted. In addition to its north-south problems, the Southern Pacific had to detour its east-west trains between San Francisco and Chicago over the Western Pacific's tracks. The rails of the railroad in the Sierra Nevada had been blocked by snow avalanches which partially derailed a mail train. U.S. Highways 40 and 50, the main east-west arteries, had been closed by snow slides, although one-way traffic was moving on alternate 40 through the Feather River Canyon. An estimated 500 travelers and skiers remained at Sierra lodges and ski resorts. An attempt to fly milk to stranded children at the Donner Summit Lodge had failed when the pilot of the plane had to turn back. The death toll attributed to the storm had reached nine, five in northern California and four in southern California. The seldom-seen Mojave River had reached bank-to-bank proportions, threatening some 250 persons near Barstow. Police alerted them to be ready to move on a moment's notice.
In Westport, Conn., police this date arrested novelist Roswell Ham, charging him with six counts of arson in connection with a series of fires at the home of his father-in-law.
In Los Angeles, the nude body of a 15-year old girl had been found in an automobile in the suburban San Fernando Valley this date, detectives indicating that an 18-year old youth had telephoned police and told them that he had killed her.
In Philadelphia, the father of Princess Grace of Monaco had attended Gulfstream Park racetrack in Florida recently and had failed to pick a winner in six races. In the seventh race, in the seventh post position, there was a horse named "Happy Princess" and Mr. Kelly and a fellow Philadelphia businessman had placed a bundle on it. It finished second and the fellow businessman told Mr. Kelly that they had forgotten that the new Prince now came first.
In Konnersreuth, Germany, a long line of praying pilgrims had shuffled through the modest home of Therese Neumann this date to see the stigmata on her hands and body. She would be 60 the following week and said that the stigmata had appeared every Good Friday for the previous 26 years. In consequence, each Good Friday, thousands of persons prayed outside her Bavarian village home and some had gone in to see her. The crowd this date was estimated at between 3,000 and 4,000, many of whom were U.S. servicemen. Visitors who filed by her bed said that they saw blood ooze from her hands, around her eyes and from her forehead. She appeared to be in a trance and unaware of those around her.
In Centerville, Ill., a woman who had lost her sight 13 years earlier looked forward to each Easter Sunday because youngsters of the town brought her flowers which she could "see" with her hands. There was a special reason for her anticipation of the day this year, because for the first time in more than a decade, she would attend Easter services at the tiny Primitive Baptist Church where her husband was pastor. The reason she had not attended previously was because she was the switchboard operator for the town, but on this Sunday, her place would be taken by a neighbor and no calls would be made except in an emergency. The woman had lost the use of her left eye when she was 11 years old, after being hit by a rock in a schoolyard. In 1944, her son, then 10, had been playing with a slingshot in the yard and shot a rock which struck her in the right eye, rendering her totally blind. Undaunted, she had faced life with a smile. She could still "see" the telephone switchboard, her house and its furniture, the flowers in her backyard and those which the youngsters of the town brought her, knowing of her fondness for them. She did her housework with a bell system. She attended to the switchboard all hours of the day and night for emergency calls, though officially closed it at 8:00 p.m. in the winter and an hour later in the summer. She was paid only $120 per month for the service but her husband said it was helping others which counted. The woman said that they got a wonderful feeling of satisfaction out of serving people day and night.
In Charlotte, Joseph Benjamin Ivey, 93, the founder of J. B. Ivey & Co. and a leading merchant in the South, had died in a local hospital this date. He had been born on June 8, 1864 in Shelby, the fifth of eight children born to a Methodist preacher and his wife. The hard times which had plagued the South in those times, coupled with the frugal life of the Methodist circuit rider and his family, meant that the boy's early life was not easy. He had become accustomed early to the family moving every four years, accomplished by covered wagon, often taking days of travel, although the distances were little more than 20 to 30 miles. When he was about five, the family had moved to the Morganton circuit, where he had begun school at the age of seven. He was quickly taken out of that school, when his mother learned that the teacher disciplined her pupils by knocking their heads together. He then entered a private school but always claimed that he did not learn anything there because he developed late and paid scarcely any attention to his studies. When he was eight, his father had been reappointed to the Lenoir circuit and so the family moved back to that location. There, he entered Davenport Female College Day School, and when he was nine or ten, he developed a bad case of the measles, seriously injuring his eyes, thereafter having trouble with them. His eyes had been further injured by improper glasses with which he had been fitted by untrained persons. In 1876, when he was 12, the family had left Lenoir for Denver, N.C., where the children entered the Piedmont Seminary, where the young J. B. had first begun to study in earnest and where he believed he got the only education he ever received.
The "Dear Abby" column of Abigail Van Buren, providing advice to the lovelorn, would begin on Monday in the newspaper. Don't miss it.
On the editorial page, "Will Military Unity Remain a Phantom?" indicates that House Speaker Sam Rayburn had praised his colleagues for "one of the most imposing programs of far-reaching legislation that has been enacted in many years in so short a time." Almost all of the 27 bills and resolutions which had prompted Mr. Rayburn's praise had involved the appropriation of money.
It finds that spending money, however, during a business recession was hardly a fair test of statesmanship of Congress. One such test would be waiting when Congress returned from the Easter recess. The President had stated it forcefully the previous day in his measure requesting reorganization of the Pentagon to equip the nation with a truly unified fighting force. The statement of what had to be done was a foreboding index of what had not been done in years of tired talk about military unification. The President had said: "Strategic and tactical planning must be completely unified, combat forces organized into unified commands, each equipped with the most efficient weapon system that science can develop, singly led and prepared to fight as one, regardless of service." He also said that "separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever" and that operational commands had to become "truly unified, efficient military instruments."
It finds the President to be wedded to the concept of push-button warfare, the advent of which Congress was hastening by expenditure of billions of dollars on missiles, satellites and nuclear-powered submarines.
The achievement of the goals set by the President would place a great strain on an election-year Congress primarily interested in making economy for the electorate. The President wanted a reduction not only in the independence of the separate services, each of which had patronage-sweetened alliances with powerful Congressional chieftains, but also a lessening of purse power over military affairs by Congress.
If the President considered that his duty had been done after he had proposed his program, however, leaving Congress to do with it as it pleased, another President in future years would be making the same plea to Congress. Before Congress moved to reorganize the Pentagon, it had to reorganize some of its own most treasured political notions about the military. Until some evidence of its ability to do that was demonstrated, Mr. Rayburn's happy estimate of the Congress would have to remain open to serious question.
"Get Up, You Lazy Frogs, and Jump" tells of it being too cold for spring festivals, with Washington's Cherry Blossom Festival having occurred without blossoms and the Azalea Festival at Wilmington having taken place without blooms. The Dare Coast Pirates Jamboree was scheduled to hold a frog-jumping contest on April 26, but the frogs had not awakened in time for training for the contest.
Orville Baum of Kitty Hawk, who had trained "Atom Baum", the winner of the previous year's contest, said that if they could get the local frogs awakened in time for training before April 26, he believed they could send a winner to the international jumping-frog contest in Calaveras County, California.
It remarks that Charlotte was fortunate to hold its big festival in November.
You could have a Zombie Jamboree and
not have to be bothered with the vicissitudes of spring
"Must We Beware of Ballerinas, Too?" finds that the dourest "miserabilist" had to be Secretary of State Dulles, not only given to "agonizing re-appraisals" of past perils, but also to a comfortless kind of fatalism about whatever the Russians were up to at any given moment. A "seventh sense" appeared to warn him that no matter what it was, it was bound to be extraordinarily successful in the bleakest way possible for the U.S.
Now, he viewed dancers with alarm, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently that Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet was being used "primarily" to strengthen the efforts of international Communism.
It indicates that those not familiar with the Secretary's curious addiction to wretchedness might wonder why his Department had so recently negotiated cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, including the ballet, if that was the way he felt.
It cannot conjure up a satisfactory vision of anyone being converted to Communism by a performance of Swan Lake or La Sylphide, or even The Nutcracker. And the classical gestures of Russian ballet were the products of Czarist Russia, not Soviet Russia. The history books recorded no instances of young Americans rallying to the cause of Nicholas II when Pavlova and Mordkin had thrilled New York in 1910-11 with the Imperial Russian Ballet.
It finds that the nice thing about the arts was that one could lose oneself in them to such an extent that wars were forgotten, along with politics, platforms and even secretaries of state.
A piece by Ditchwater Caiman, from the Milwaukee Journal, titled "After the G. O. Fizzickle Year, What?", writing from Perloo in the Okefenokee Swamp, indicates that "The Year of Man", to follow the G. O. Fizzickle Year, was being considered and viewed with suspicion and/or delight by the best animal brains in the land of Pogo, as it was expected to start on March 39. It would be a year in which the animals would study man.
A spokesman for the group, a possum, had said: "We are not so much interested in outer space as in inner space. We feel that we animals have neglected what is under our noses, namely MAN, in order to study what is essentially over our heads."
Walt Kelly, known to millions as the oldest cartoonist, would serve as consultant to the group, inasmuch as his experience with humans covered nearly 50 years. He said he had had many experiences with humans and that those who did not believe in humans were in error, as he knew that they existed, notwithstanding science.
Drew Pearson indicates that the trail of the late Gerald Lester Murphy, the American airplane pilot who disappeared mysteriously while working for the Dominican Republic, had turned up equally mysteriously in Cuba, with Cuban intelligence circles checking on whether Mr. Murphy was also responsible for some of the revolutionary difficulties plaguing El Presidente Fulgencio Batista. Mr. Murphy was credited with carrying Professor Jesus de Galindez of Columbia University from Long Island to the Dominican Republic after the professor was allegedly drugged or murdered. He had been a critic of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Intelligence agents in Cuba had ascertained that Mr. Murphy had landed at an airport near Havana on March 13, 1956, in a small airplane, had unloaded his cargo of arms and immediately returned to an airport in Florida.
Cuban circles stated that Mr. Murphy sometimes carried arms and on other occasions transported currency to finance revolutionary activities against El Presidente. He had disappeared shortly after December 3, 1956. It was reported that the investigation presently being made into Mr. Murphy's connections with Cuban revolutionaries might lead to surprising revelations involving some big names in Cuba and the U.S.
He indicates that some of the snow which had fallen two weeks earlier was still unmelted in the shadow of his farmhouse. The snow had been so heavy that it broke all of the electrical lines, and many people in that part of Maryland and Virginia had no heat or water for days, causing them to realize how dependent they were on modern conveniences and how helpless they would be in the case of a nuclear attack. The U.S. had never been attacked on continental soil for more than 100 years, since the British had landed in Washington in 1814. All wars since had been fought abroad when involving foreign powers. He suggests that if there ever were an atomic war, such attacks would occur at home.
He ventures that while it was not a happy thought at Easter, it was much better to think about it than to be unprepared, finding that some of the leaders were going around with their heads in the clouds, saying that there was nothing to worry about from Russia as it was a nation of peasants. He indicates that they were, however, intelligent people and, he believes, peace-loving people. If the peoples were to become better acquainted with each other, they would not have to hate or be suspicious of one another.
Recently, the Russians had been surprisingly good about letting people into their country, appearing anxious and willing to get acquainted with Americans. When a friend of his had gone to Moscow, he said he could not buy a meal for himself on the train because so many Russians wanted to entertain him and make him feel at home. Getting acquainted with people who were a long way from home and spoke a different language was not easy, but easier than fighting a war. "And what all of us have to realize is that either we work at peace hard, very hard, or else we are going to have our water and electricity shut off, with crowded hospitals also shut off, in the worst war in history. Russia will face the same shutoffs and the same bombings, but they don't have so much electricity and so many people depending on modern conveniences as we do."
Stewart Alsop writes a letter to his brother Joseph regarding their separation after 12 years of writing the column together, indicating the history of their writing. He says that he had learned in the interim something about reporting, that when they began together, he had never written for a newspaper, that when aspiring young newspapermen asked him how to become a columnist, he always answered that they should have a brother who already was one.
The first thing he had learned was that reporting was hard work, though not all of it was hard. He recalls what fun they had "putting salt" on the "highly exposed tail" of former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson under former President Truman in 1950, as he had cut back the military budget considerably. He says that while the Secretary always believed he was the victim of Pentagon leaks, in fact, they had received 90 percent of their information about how he was destroying the nation's defenses simply by examining his own budgets.
He says it was rarely that easy, as often they had to piece together a story from very scant beginnings. Not all of the time had been enjoyable, as they had written nothing important which the Russians did not already know, but nevertheless had been the subject of at least five security investigations. The worst time, however, was in the dog days after Congress had adjourned, when there seemed to be nothing about which to write. There had also been times of frustration when they had both felt that they were crying in the wilderness with no one listening.
They had their differences with one another, but they had been on matters of detail and interpretation, while on the big things, they had always agreed.
When they had begun their partnership on January 1, 1946, the two great processes which had dominated all of the years which followed had already been visible, one being the creation and growth of the vast new Soviet-Communist empire, and the other, the development of new weapons which would make it possible for the end of life on earth. They had always agreed that their function as newspapermen was to report seriously and write seriously about those two processes.
Because they had done so, they had been called pessimists and doom merchants, but he feels that they had been more open to the charge of excessive optimism. They had generally underestimated the capacity of the Communist world to expand and consolidate its power, to increase its military-industrial base, to withstand such shocks as Joseph Stalin's death and the Hungarian revolt of 1956. They had also underestimated the rate of scientific progress towards the point where another great war would destroy all forms of life. In that sense, he believes, they had been Pollyannas, as well as in another sense, for they had always felt in their hearts that if the people of the country and the West were firmly led and intelligently informed, both freedom and civilization would somehow survive.
"And so, as we prepare to carry on separately with the kind of reporting each of us likes best, hail and farewell, and the best of luck, from one Pollyanna to another."
Doris Fleeson, in Milwaukee, indicates that Wisconsin Republicans were panicking in a state where the Democrats had given them little trouble since the Civil War. Republican officeholders were making the most of the hard political news with their outcries against the Republican Administration, their displeasure having expanded from Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to Secretary of State Dulles and the President, himself.
The party factionalism, which had its start in controversies engendered by the late Senator McCarthy, was on the increase. Most Republicans who were safely in office, including Governor Vernon Thompson, were planning lone-wolf campaigns in the fall. No local Mark Hanna had shown up behind the scenes to take the place of Tom Coleman, the soft-spoken, tough-minded Madison industrialist who for years had beaten the politicians' heads together with one hand and filled the party coffers with the other.
The recession, following the steady drop in farm prices, was the last straw for the party. The industrial areas and farm trading centers both reported the pinch. It was a rich and diversified state and the drop in prosperity was estimated at between six and eight percent overall. But there was still widespread well-being. The loss of confidence about which the President complained seemed nevertheless to be present. Individuals said that the President said savings were up, but they wondered whose savings, for it was not theirs. In such a situation, the party out of power had nowhere to go but up.
That it had started upward had been disclosed in the dramatic upset Senate victory scored the previous summer by Democrat William Proxmire, who won counties Democrats previously had always given up as hopeless, scoring heavily in small towns and cities which represented bedrock Republican strength in the state. Political observers believed that with his terrific campaigning ability, Senator Proxmire would win again. Some believed he would win so big that he could help into office the probable opponent of the Governor, State Senator Gaylord Nelson, popular among Democrats, probably more so than Senator Proxmire. But Democrats privately complained that Mr. Nelson was lazy.
The Republican effort to offer competition to Senator Proxmire had gotten off the ground when a respected State Supreme Court Justice, Roland Stinle, had resigned from that court to enter the race. Other possibilities were former Governor Walter Kohler, who had been trounced in the special election the previous summer by Mr. Proxmire, and former Representative Glenn Davis, the McCarthyite who had lost the Republican nomination to Mr. Kohler and sulked during the election campaign.
She finds that it seemed that either a Kohler or Davis candidacy would reopen old wounds, and yet not everyone believed that Mr. Stinle, who was in his sixties, could be effective on the hustings against Senator Proxmire.
Except for a vocal but small minority, Wisconsin appeared to prefer to forget Senator McCarthy, for the brief but substantial controversy he had aroused, giving the nation a synonym for the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850's. Plans made for an elaborate McCarthy memorial service in the state Capitol had never materialized. Some Democrats wished that it had, as they believed that, while reviving his memory would provide Democrats no votes, it would lose about 30,000 for the Republicans who had abandoned him.
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., wonders how one taught economic crises when the classic picture failed to materialize. He suggests that such a time ought be characterized by restriction of credit, falling prices, attempts to liquidate, numerous business failures, but that none of those symptoms were visible. He indicates that Bernard Baruch echoed his 1932 cry to stop Government "make job" programs and the Hoover Republicans were playing back the record heard in the Great Depression: Do Nothing. He thinks it might be better to have in Washington men who simply admitted that they did not know, but every politician had to sound off as if he were an Adam Smith or Thornstein Veblen. He believes that if all of them would admit that they would have trouble making a living in the economic dogfight and realize that jobs and more jobs were the cure and that make-work got the houses built, widened and straightened roads, built more hospitals, printed more newspapers, made more cotton goods and nylons, so that the merchants could put more goods on the shelves to sell and banks could keep the money moving, then the nation would be headed for better times.
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