The Charlotte News
Tuesday, April 8, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date had urged the Soviet Union again to join in stopping manufacture of nuclear materials for war purposes and in an attempt to bring about a dependable and agreed disarmament program. He made the proposal in a letter delivered in Moscow to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in reply to an April 4 letter from Mr. Khrushchev, in which the Premier had proposed that the U.S. and Britain renounce nuclear testing, a move which the Russians contended that they had already undertaken unilaterally. The President warned, however, "The timing, wording, and manner of the Soviet declaration cannot but raise questions as to its real significance." The letter from Premier Khrushchev had said that the Soviets would have to reconsider its suspension of testing unless the U.S. and Great Britain followed suit. It had also indicated that the Soviets would be free to resume testing at their own will.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that a 12 million dollar nuclear reactor, the second largest of its type in the country, would be built in Anson County, N.C., by a newly formed Charlotte company. Possibly to become a 20 million dollar investment, it would be located 12 miles east of Wadesboro on Blewett Falls Lake on the Pee Dee River. Ground was expected to be broken within 90 days and a target date for critical operation of the facility was April 1, 1960—though that may prove to be an April Fool's joke. It was expected to employ approximately 500 persons with an annual payroll of more than a million dollars. Governor Luther Hodges had announced the project in Raleigh, and the firm building the facility was the newly formed Industrial Testing Reactors, Inc., chartered in North Carolina and headed by H. Haywood Robbins and Edwin L. Jones of Charlotte, with five other men of Augusta, Ga., as possible later associates. The plant site had been purchased from the Regal Paper Co. and was expected to include about 15 acres to be used for the actual six buildings to be constructed and several hundred more for security measures. It would be the nation's first engineering test reactor operated by a service organization rather than a manufacturing company. It would generate 50 megawatts of heat and would be second in size only to the Atomic Energy Commission's 175-megawatt reactor at Arco, Ida. Although the test facility would be located on the Pee Dee River, some 85 miles from the heart of the North Carolina Research Triangle, it would be linked with that project, linked in turn to UNC, N.C. State, and Duke. It would be similar to a materials testing reactor presently under construction at G.E.'s Vallecitos Atomic Laboratory near Pleasanton, Calif., but would be considerably larger. It would be used for testing materials and fuel elements to be utilized in equipment which had to withstand exposure to nuclear radiation, examples of which were atomic-powered submarines and atomic-powered aircraft of the future.
The mayor, representatives and residents of Wadesboro were ecstatic about the prospect of having the reactor in their midst. Wait until it starts leaking into the groundwater…
In Hiroshima, one of the 24 survivors of the atomic bomb blast of August 6, 1945, who had undergone plastic surgery in New York in 1956, had died this date from stomach cancer. A spokesman said that her cancer had no direct relationship to the atomic radiation.
In Los Angeles, it was reported that the ketch "Golden Rule" was halfway to Hawaii, en route to Eniwetok to protest the forthcoming U.S. atomic bomb tests.
In Miami, a heavy influx of Cubans seeking political asylum had been reported this date by immigration officials, as between 250 and 300 such persons had arrived, according to the district director of immigration and naturalization.
In Rome, it was reported that the Defense Ministers of France, West Germany and Italy had met this date to discuss standardizing arms production for those three countries.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, it was reported that Indonesia this date had countered the State Department's criticism of its arms deal with the Communists with a new request to purchase 120 million dollars worth of American small arms, planes and warships.
In Omaha, it was reported that an Air Force KC-135 jet tanker had landed in the Azores during the morning this date after a flight of 10,228 miles, a new world distance record for a jet aircraft. The Stratotanker had been 1,259 miles short of its intended goal in Madrid and an overall distance record, after predicted jet stream winds had failed to materialize. The plane had established a record time of 13 hours and 35 minutes for its first leg of the journey, a 7,662-mile flight from Tokyo to Washington. The crew had not shown much fatigue after more than 16 hours in the air, but the general leading the flight had said that he expected them to be a little tired after landing.
In New York, former President Truman had stopped overnight on his way to New Haven, Conn., for a three-day visit at Yale. He stayed at the home of his daughter, Margaret, wife of Clifton Daniel. He said that he had come to see his new grandson. Announcing that he would not take his usual early morning constitutional, he said: "I'm giving the reporters a break, as I feel it would be too early for them to get up."
In Cologne, West Germany, former Queen Soraya of Iran was reported to be sailing for the U.S. on April 14 for a three-week stay, following her divorce recently from the Shah of Iran because she had not produced a child in seven years of marriage as an heir to the Shah.
In Taylor, British Columbia, one man had been killed and two seriously injured the previous night in an explosion-punctuated fire in a petroleum installation.
In Chicago, one of the biggest assembly jobs in the history of the Natural Museum, reconnecting the 300 bones of a 30-ton dinosaur, had been completed. The first showing of the 72-foot long fossil skeleton of the brontosaurus would be in the museum on April 18, 57 years after the first bones of the prehistoric beast had been discovered. It represented a composite of two brontosauruses of similar weight and height, the first bones of which had been dug up in 1901 near Grand Junction, Colo. Miners had found the torso, hind legs and parts of the long tail, and the pieces had been sent to the museum and mounted, the only artifacts available for 41 years. The neck, forelegs and tail bone of the second brontosaurus had been found in Utah in 1942 and sent to the museum, but the bones had remained in storage until 1956 because they were broken into thousands of small pieces and had to be glued together, reinforced with iron and finally added to the original mount. The brontosaurus was one of the largest land animals which roamed the country 145 million years earlier, according to the chief preparator of the museum.
In Charlotte, County Commission chairman Sid McAden this date filed for his tenth two-year term as full-time chairman. He had first been elected to office in 1940 and said that he would run on his 18-year record of an economically-operated government. He was a graduate of UNC in the class of 1909 and had been a veteran of World War I, serving in combat with the infantry. Before his election as chairman, he had been involved in real estate and the textile machinery business.
In New York, CBS announced this date
that all of its live television programs from New York would continue
as scheduled despite a strike of 1,300 technicians. The Red Skelton
Show
On the editorial page, "This Little Issue Went to Market" indicates that the Bell Committee had provided its preliminary recommendations for judicial reform in the state on Saturday, in time to provide campaign fodder for legislative candidates in all 100 counties. It offered the voters a way to gauge the courage, candor and wisdom of the candidates who would ultimately sit in judgment of reorganization of the courts in the ensuing General Assembly of 1959.
It finds the challenge inescapable that either the state would have a unified court system or limp along with a baffling hodgepodge geared to the conditions of Reconstruction when it had been last revised in 1868 with the adoption of the post-Civil War State Constitution.
The general outline of what the North Carolina Bar Association special committee would propose appeared now fairly clear, that there would be three divisions, one being appellate, consisting initially of the State Supreme Court, a trial court, consisting of the present Superior Courts, and the local courts, consisting of the district courts.
It suggests that it was in the local courts where the greatest amount of housecleaning would be accomplished. The district courts, one for each county, would replace some 1,400 lower courts established since 1868, which had formed the hodgepodge network, with overlapping and conflicting relationships. The district courts would try crimes below the grade of felony and civil cases involving not more than a fixed amount.
There would still be magistrates, who would serve as arms of the district court, able to try petty civil and criminal cases, issue warrants, conduct preliminary hearings and act as committing magistrates in criminal cases. The abuses possible under the present justice of the peace system would be ended. The fee system, whereby costs and portions of fines were pocketed by the justices of the peace, producing obvious bias toward finding guilt or civil liability, would be abolished. The magistrates would be appointed by the Chief Justice upon recommendation of the senior resident Superior Court judge in each judicial district. The magistrates' activities would be subjected to strict supervision and regulation. The three divisions would be under the administrative authority of the State Supreme Court.
It indicates that the preliminary report contained other recommendations designed to streamline and improve the judicial system, while protecting the rights and privileges of the people. Other proposals, dealing with judicial selection and tenure, practice and procedure, and the jury system, would be released later in the month, and it promises to examine them critically and in detail. It finds the emerging pattern to be promising, a broad and significant contribution toward better administration of justice, long needed. The citizens would be given an opportunity to consider the matter, close to the heart of constitutional government, and it urges that they should approach the subject with forthrightness and candor or be false to the traditions of democracy.
"A Jocular Guide to Political Philosophy" indicates that citizens had a right to expect during the Easter vacation of Congress some surcease of gloomy pronunciamentos regarding the economy and the injunctions to smile unemployment away, with their having been among some of the more optimistic the thought that the economy might cure itself through positive thinking.
It finds that it would not be the case, that where the politicians had left off in their prescriptions, the hired propagandists had taken over, with the DNC and RNC swinging at each other with a lustiness unmatched since they had signed and later scrapped a "fair play agreement" a few years earlier. Committee spokesmen for both parties not only were being abusive of each other, they were excessively wordy, when the only point each wanted to make was that the other was responsible for the recession. It finds that their points could be made with less wind and more humor, injecting a couple of jokes.
It suggests, for instance, that the DNC could rest its case on the story of President Calvin Coolidge's fishing expedition, in which he fretted because he was having no luck, inquiring of a small boy who was catching fish at will, the boy having explained that he used "whole worms".
The RNC could counter with a story of two Maine farmers who met on the road and pulled up their teams, one saying to the other that he had a mule with distemper and wondered what the other farmer had given to his mule which had been similarly ill, to which the reply was turpentine. A week later they had met again, and the farmer with the sick mule said that he had given it turpentine and it killed him.
It finds that those were fair definitions of the positions of the two parties on the economy and that remembering them, one could easily and safely skip what the party propagandists were saying during the ensuing few days or weeks.
"Some Easter Eggs for Khrushchev" indicates that while much of the free world had centered its attention on the cross and the resurrection on Easter the prior Sunday, Mr. Khrushchev had been campaigning in captive Hungary for the greater glory of Communism. Instead of attending church, crowds of children had gathered around the Kremlin's boss and presented him with flowers and Easter eggs. But the Communist Party had felt it necessary to issue a statement: "It is not true that crowds and enthusiasm presented for Comrade Khrushchev and his delegation are artificial. It is not true that people are dragooned into presenting some semblance of enthusiasm for our honored Russian guests. This is genuine love."
It finds that the contrast seemed to be that while Christians were rejoicing in the resurrection, the Hungarian Communists were fearing another insurrection against the "beloved" Mr. Khrushchev.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Nobody Walks to Work", finds that walking to work was almost as unknown to the present generation as the tricycle had been to the famous Seventh Calvary, that even in the small town of Raleigh, the man who lived within hollering distance of work would be appalled at the thought of walking. Everyone in town had a new car except the railroad engineer, and he had a station wagon and a car. The few nonconformists who really wanted to walk to work were precluded from doing so by the weather, as it was too cold in winter and too hot in summer, and when the weather was just right, one expected rain. It finds that the only people who needed legs at present were the show girls, postmen, golfers, and high-wire artists.
A few years earlier, especially in the small towns, everyone walked to work except the doctor and the banker, with the doctor having to ride and the banker hearing enough hard-luck stories in his rail car without having to hear more on the streets. Several men in the neighborhood would meet on the corner and discuss the joys and vexations of the night as they proceeded uptown. They walked rapidly, swinging their arms as if to enunciate the joy of just being alive and being able to work. They would again gather at noon on the way to a homecooked meal at lunch time. A slow kind of morbid philosophy returned after dinner, as one had to walk off the big meal and some innocuous sermonizing helped put in perspective the problems of the afternoon. At suppertime, there was laughter and joking.
While a car would get a person to where they were going quicker, it was not the "same deal", as walking whetted zest inside and did for the shoulders and chest all which General Patton could ever require.
Drew Pearson relates that late in World War II, a minister of Bly, Ore., had taken his wife and some of the neighbors' children, along with his own children, on an outing in the woods in southern Oregon, when an 11-year old child spotted a huge balloon snagged in a tree, whereupon one of the children tugged at the balloon and there was a sudden explosion, leaving six persons dead, with the minister being the only survivor. The Japanese had taken advantage of the prevailing winds to float the balloon across the Pacific to try to set fire to the wheat fields and forests of the Pacific Northwest. After the war, the Japanese testified that they had launched 9,000 such balloons against the U.S. during the war, though none other than the one in Oregon had caused death.
He indicates that the same winds, blowing from the west to the east because of the rotation of the earth, were now carrying something more deadly than the Japanese balloons, that being radioactive fallout, seeping into the bones of children with the prospect of future illness. Thus, the fallout from the testing grounds of Siberia was blown toward the U.S., as was the fallout from U.S. testing in the mid-Pacific, as well as from the testing conducted in Nevada. A representative of the Weather Bureau had revealed that fallout did not drop uniformly across the globe, but in a fairly narrow band stretching across the Northern U.S. The previous summer, measurements showed that accumulated fallout around New York City was 2 to 3 times greater than in the South. Siberian winds blew across Canada and the Northern states, and rainfall was generally higher in the North, with rain deposits being more poisoned by fallout than at ground level. Thus, the most populous part of the country received the most nuclear fallout.
Fallout from U.S. testing in the Marshall Islands did not hit the U.S. mainland as much as it did Central America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia. The Atomic Energy Commission took some consolation in the fact that those parts of the world were less densely populated, true except for Southeast Asia, the rice paddies of which were packed with people.
Strontium 90 penetrated the bones when consumed as part of food intake, causing leukemia or lung cancer. Tests at Perry, N.Y., had shown that cows which ate hay stored in barns provided milk containing very little Strontium 90, but cows which had eaten fresh grass subjected to radioactive fallout provided milk which had considerably increased amounts of Strontium 90, with the amount of the poison having gone up since the increased incidence of nuclear testing in 1954.
Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the AEC, claimed that fallout from atomic bombs had not added to "natural" radiation. While that was true, the word "natural" was deceptive, for Strontium 90 was not natural and could only be created through nuclear explosions. Thus, nuclear explosions did not add to natural radiation but produced Strontium 90, and thus the AEC was begging the point.
Marquis Childs indicates that the question bedeviling politicians and economists alike was whether to cut taxes and if so, where, when and how.
Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois had been saying since the previous February that a quick tax cut might end the recession. Meanwhile, Bernard Baruch was not only opposed to a tax cut but believed that taxes ought be increased. Along with Senator Harry F. Byrd, he warned of the peril of inflation and a large Federal deficit. Between those extremes was the wait-and-see approach, which included the President and Democratic leaders in both the Senate and the House, who had restrained their followers pressing for a tax cut. But restraint might not work much longer as most members of Congress had returned home for Easter and would hear from constituents, particularly in areas hit hard by the recession, demanding action.
Just ahead was the April 15 deadline for filing income taxes. While automatic payroll deductions had made it easy for many, it would still be for millions the day of paying their taxes.
The returning Congress would thus be largely preoccupied with taxes in the short time remaining before adjournment for the midterm elections. Where and how those taxes might be cut was as important as when. In previous years, loopholes through which some large taxpayers managed to obtain special privileges had been attacked, foremost among which was the 27 percent oil depletion allowance on the theory that oil producers sold a "wasting asset". That attack was being readied again, with data accumulated to try to demonstrate how a few oil billionaires struck it rich, with one of the primary attackers being Senator John Williams of Delaware.
Only once had the IRS lifted the veil of legal secrecy to show for the year 1951 how, with certain individuals identified only by a generic references, the oil loophole worked. The 27 percent plus allowable deductions for development costs, more generous than in most businesses, had made it possible for oilmen to pay comparatively small taxes on large incomes. Some examples given by the IRS were that one oil company had a total income of 14.3 million dollars, resulting in taxes of only $80,000 or .6 percent of income. In another case, a total income of 4.4 million dollars had resulted in $150,000 in taxes or 3.4 percent. In yet another case, the total income had been 6.4 million, with taxes paid of $500,000 or 7.8 percent. In the top bracket, for married couples making more than $400,000 per year, taxpayers not receiving the oil depletion allowance paid 91 percent in taxes.
Standard and Poor's Corporation Records showed that Kerr-McGee Oil Co., in which Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma was a partner, had in 1955 a net income prior to taxes of 2.5 million dollars on which a Federal corporate tax of only $18,090 had been paid, amounting to .72 percent. The previous year, Kerr-McGee had a net income of 7.9 million dollars and paid tax of 1.7 million or 21 percent. The Amerada Petroleum Corp. had an income of 28.1 million dollars in 1955 and paid taxes of 2.8 million or 9.86 percent. For the period 1955 through 1957, the Superior Oil Co. of California paid no income tax at all, while in the previous year it had an income of 18.9 million dollars, in 1956, five million and in 1955, 3.4 million. That company had provided the "bribe" offered to Senator Francis Case of New Jersey during the fight over deregulation of natural gas, seeking to get his vote in favor of deregulation, instead the Senator having blown the whistle and reported the attempt.
The corporate tax rate for those without the oil depletion allowance was 52 percent for income above $25,000. Those fighting the depletion allowance claimed that scaling it back could bring an additional 500 million dollars per year in revenue. But any change to the oil depletion allowance would be resisted strongly by Senator Kerr. He was generally in favor of cheaper money and lower taxes. Other powerful Democrats from the Southwest supported his position. Mr. Childs concludes that the lines were thus being drawn for another battle in the longtime struggle over taxes.
A letter writer responds to Robert
C. Ruark's recent column on the "Beat Generation", finding
Mr. Ruark's mind to have flipped and suggesting that he remind
himself of some of the things which his own generation had done
during the Roaring 20's. The writer suggests that he had been doing
the same things in his generation that the "Beat Generation"
were presently doing, with only different clothes and in a different
atmosphere. The anonymous writer says that the Beat Generation had at
least the good sense to be dressed
A letter writer indicates that at the recent trial of the so-called Derita Gang in Recorder's Court in Charlotte, observers had an opportunity to see the judicial system in operation before an eminently fair judge, as confirmed to the writer several times in conversations he had with friends and parents of the accused young men. He urges that lenient sentences ought to be imposed following recommendations from the probation department and that the parents could help, along with the schools, employers, Sunday schools and churches, but not until each individual came to grips with himself and asked fundamental questions regarding who the person was, what he was doing with his life, and how he could learn more about himself. He concludes with the advice to those involved in the case: "Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you."
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that he had just returned from Frankfort, Ky., and had found the mountains of North Carolina quite beautiful in various ways which he describes.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., responds to a letter in the April 5 edition from the chairman of the Loyalty Security Study of the Charlotte League of Women Voters, which he finds to have endorsed "one of the most dangerous thoughts which can confront this republic—that of weakening the existing loyalty-security programs and minimizing the need for such programs." He suggests that they write a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and ask him whether or not the loyalty-security programs were still needed in the country. He says that if Mr. Hoover responded that they were not, he would crawl into the "nearest reactionary hole" he could find, but that if he responded that they were still needed, then the League should forget about the matter and not again publicly suggest "that the American people can now minimize the rotten as ever international Communist conspiracy as it relates to our internal security."
Mr. Cherry continues his undying fealty to the late Senator McCarthy and all who saw a Communist lurking in every dark corner or behind everything which went wrong in the country or anything which was protested regardless of source.
It is, of course, the same mentality which now protrudes gaudily, as much so as his fascination with gold, every day from Trump and his legion of misfits who hate everything about democracy, wish it to end so that they can be without restraint in plundering the country for all they can get and remake the world in their own image as demigods during the next four years, using handy scapegoats wherever they might find them for the nation's many problems already brought on by Trump in his second tenure, claiming the while "weaponization of the Justice Department" and "censorship" under Bi-den whenever their own interests were at stake, while finding not the least inconsistency in now actually weaponizing the Justice Department against Democrats and anyone not onboard with the current fascism and oligarchy, including the arrests of peaceful protesters and trying through Fox Propaganda and Propangandamax to justify it by labeling legal, authorized inspections by members of Congress of detention facilities for aliens as "storming" the ramparts when only peaceful entry was sought and obtained, resulting in an arrest of a mayor after members of Congress properly sought to surround him to prevent an unlawful arrest outside the facility on public property where they had a right to be, an arrest authorized apparently by the kook now appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the district, the same kook who quite unsuccessfully defended Trump against civil liability for defamation in New York, who has no prior experience in criminal law and apparently skipped most of the classes on constitutional law. Kooky is as kooky does. It is of course the Trump way, projection of his own worst behavior onto his enemies, accusing them of like intent and behavior to justify retaliation and thereby try to stay out of jail.
Accuse falsely, for instance, the other side of "stealing" an election to provide ground during the past four years for ardent, fanatical supporters to nix from the voter rolls in key battleground states thousands of Democratic voters for their having suspect addresses and duplicate names to dead people, probably explaining why in the 2024 election there were three million fewer voters who turned out than in 2020, despite the absence of the risk of contracting a deadly disease by voting in person as in 2020 and despite historical trends being to the contrary, usually showing increased raw numbers of voters with each quadrennial election.
In four years, however, this
craziness will be done and he will no longer have any prospect of
protection offered by the White House. Then what? And what about his
obsequious minions and followers who will no longer have the benefit
of pardon to protect against their continuing felonious conduct?
These people are incapable of seeing beyond the ends of their noses
in gauging their own actions outside their current cloak of power and the likely consequences thereof
which inevitably, sooner or later, will follow. They appear incapable
of seeing the ruin already of many lives of those who followed Trump
off the cliff into the abyss along with the other lemmings
A letter writer from Phoenix, Ariz., finds that the real sentiments and heartbeats of decent people in the country were boxed in by the present-day system of politics, with the will of the majority having no means of expressing itself, reminding that Senators and Congressmen were sent to Washington to represent the district, state and citizens and not the people of the world and the minority pressure groups who were their enemies.
He fails to understand that the country, state and district could not live alone, isolated from the rest of the world in the age of the printing press.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.