The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 6, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that thousands of New Yorkers had gone into air raid shelters in a civil defense drill this date, but quite a few had been slow in doing so, with nine pacifists arrested for refusing to participate. Five minutes after warning sirens had been sounded in the late morning, people were still sauntering along Fifth Avenue in the Rockefeller Center area, some obviously unaware of the situation. An air raid warden had appeared and shooed them into a building entrance. A man had inquired of a warden as to whether they were expecting something, being assured that it was only a drill. Windows of numerous buildings were filled with office workers watching what was happening on the streets, contrary to what they were supposed to be doing. During the ten-minute sheltering period, all vehicular traffic, including funeral cars, had been required to halt, with drivers permitted to remain in their cars, trucks and buses, but passengers directed to the nearest shelter by wardens. In Washington, the President, along with his small staff who would accompany him in case of an actual attack, had gone to an underground command post. At the same time, most Government employees in the District had taken part in building evacuation exercises as part of Operation Alert 1958.
In Los Angeles, John Beckler of the Associated Press reports that the inducements of jobs in the tropic isles where the U.S. tested its most devastating nuclear devices included food served fit for a king, drinks costing two cents each and the ability to bank $10,000 in a year. But there were no women. Holmes & Narver, Inc., a Los Angeles engineering firm hired by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 to turn Eniwetok Atoll into a proving ground, operated the enterprise. On the atoll's Parry Island, 5,100 miles from Los Angeles, the company had maintained an all-male community since 1949, ranging between 500 between tests and the 3,200 presently working on the forthcoming test series, with some having been there for seven years. The tests were held about every two years and it took a year to build up for one, about six months to clean up afterward. Men were paid the going scale in Los Angeles for their specialty, but guaranteed at least eight hours of overtime per week and provided a $10 per week bonus. They only saw $20 of it per week, the rest being deposited for them or sent home. If a man stayed 18 months, his income was considered earned abroad and he did not have to pay income tax on it. Mr. Beckler provides the menu for the three recent days in a row, including for breakfast, orange juice, ham, fried eggs and hash browns, grape juice, fruit, link sausage, boiled eggs, tomato juice, fruit, bacon, omelette; for lunch, minestrone soup, breaded shrimp, spaghetti, bean soup, potato salad, cold cuts, tomato soup, frankfurters and chili; for dinner, crab Louis salad, roast beef, mixed vegetables, steak, French fries, peas and corn, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and combination salad. There was a full, highly organized sports program and some of the best fishing in the world. A company executive said of the men on the island that he believed they were as happy as men could be, "without women".
In London, it was reported that Britain had announced this date that it had concluded its latest nuclear weapons tests in the Christmas Island area of the Pacific. A Foreign Office spokesman said that all interested countries had been notified that the area no longer was dangerous to shipping.
Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey had called this date for a decision on whether Congress was going to cut income and excise taxes, but Senator William Knowland of California, the Minority Leader, said that he did not believe any Administration decision was imminent. Senator Case, one of a group of Republicans who had been urging greater efforts to counter the economic recession, said in a statement that he believed the uncertainty about tax cutting "has undoubtedly contributed to hesitation on the part of consumers and investors which has had a cumulatively depressing effect on the economy." He said that despite anti-recession measures already undertaken, he had not found any significant indications of a business upturn. He indicated that April unemployment figures suggested at most a possible stabilization, and that while consumer income and individual savings remained at high levels, compensation of employees, gross domestic investment and expenditures for new plant and equipment had dropped off significantly.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson said this date that Congress had to create an agency unlike any other in the Government to direct space developments and keep close supervision over it.
A move to start Senate hearings on new civil rights legislation had been nipped in the bud, after several bills had been introduced to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1957, over opposition from Southern Senators. At a closed meeting the previous day of the Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, the chairman, Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, announced that he planned to begin hearings in two weeks on those and other civil rights measures, but Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina had countered with a motion to postpone any civil rights hearings until such time as a majority of the subcommittee would approve, the motion having carried by a vote of three to two, with a similar vote defeating a motion by Senator Hennings to start the hearings on May 13. While the votes of the individual members were not announced, Senator Ervin reportedly had the support of the subcommittee's two Republican Senators, Arthur Watkins of Utah and Roman Hruska of Nebraska. The position would be in line with the stand taken by the Administration in favor of a cooling-off period on civil rights legislation in the current year. Senator Hennings had said in a statement later that "the possibility of Senate civil rights hearings this year depends upon obtaining a majority vote in the subcommittee to schedule them."
In New York, it was reported that a Senate investigator had said this date that the forthcoming probe of the insurance industry would be broad in scale, including a look at the role which big insurance companies played as money lenders.
The Navy announced this date the establishment of a new "selected reserve" program to train civilian sailors for immediate action in fully readied ships and aircraft in the event of war.
In La Paz, Bolivia, President Hernan Siles Zuazo had asked the U.S. for 200 million dollars in aid over the ensuing four years to buy time for Bolivia to solve its economic problems.
In Vienna, Austria, it was reported that a dozen patients in a suburban hospital this date had refused to eat, in support of doctors striking for higher pay. Hospital authorities feared that the hunger strike would spread.
In Shreveport, La., flood threats along the rain-swollen Red River had eased slightly this date, but the Air Force had sent in 400 men to battle against rising streams and seeping backwater.
In New York, a woman of Hartsville, S.C., Mrs. May Roper Coker, was named "American Mother of 1958", as announced by the president of the American Mothers Committee, Inc., at the opening of the annual Mothers' Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She had been chosen from among nominees by state groups throughout the country, and had been cited for being, among other things, "a consecrated and tireless worker and leader in promoting programs for improving race relations." She was the daughter of David Roper, who had served as assistant postmaster general, commissioner of internal revenue and Secretary of Commerce.
In San Francisco, it was reported that a berserk janitor had fired a shotgun into a neighbor's crowded apartment late the previous night, wounding three adults and six children, with one of the children having been hurt critically. The 37-year old man said that he was out of his mind and did not mean to do it, but "they vexed me so bad." He had fled the scene initially but called police 45 minutes later to surrender. He was booked for investigation of assault with intent to commit murder. The shooting had climaxed a longstanding neighborhood feud in the Potrero Hill housing development. Police, upon arriving at the scene, found the man's wife, 29, weeping in her apartment and witnesses said that she held a revolver at one window of the neighbor's apartment while her husband had fired a 12-gauge automatic shotgun four times through another window. She said that the neighbors had been bothering their family of five boys and a girl for months and that it had gone too far, that her ten-year old daughter had been "jumped on" at play by a ten-year old girl visiting the neighbors, a child who had been shot in the back and critically injured by the gunfire. She said that they figured they had enough and so had gone over there to get it settled. She was not held, as investigating officers had determined that apparently she had not fired the pistol. The man who shot into the apartment had offered no resistance when police arrested him. Three ambulances had taken the victims to Mission Emergency Hospital.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the County School Board had received overwhelming support for City-County school consolidation from the county residents this date, and the Board had quickly promised to start immediate negotiations with the City School Board on the issue. More than 50 members of county PTA groups had presented resolutions in favor of consolidation from 30 of the county's 32 PTA groups, and most of the resolutions had passed unanimously at the heavily attended meetings.
City school officials this date had welcomed the interest of county PTA groups in the consolidation of the City and County school systems. Three members of the consolidation study committee of the City School Board had been pleased that the county residents had moved for consolidation. The belief was expressed that the approach to consolidation would be action by the Legislature calling for an election to permit citizens to express their view of whether the two systems ought be consolidated.
In Hollywood, Argentine actress Linda Cristal, 23, said that she was engaged to oilman Robert Champion of Caracas, Venezuela, brother of dancer Gower Champion.
In Lincolnton, N.C., the paintings of Lem Nolen of Crouse were on display in the lobby of the First National Bank. You will wish to go out of your way to see those. It provides good cover, should you wish to case the joint in advance of a robbery.
On the editorial page, "Education's Sickness Can Be Cured" refers to opposing viewpoints on the editorial page, as condensed from addresses before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, regarding the intensity of conviction in professional educational circles, indicating that the ultimate caretakers of education in the country were not professionals at all but ordinary citizens, patrons of individual schools and school systems, who supplied the leadership and support necessary to any public enterprise in a democracy. It posits that in the end, they had to furnish the willpower, the ingenuity and resourcefulness to solve the current problems.
It suggests that public education in the country was not as bad as its sternest critics said it was, that improvements would have to be made but those improvements would not be made by trying to make little engineers of all of the children while boarding up the teachers' colleges or returning to the Little Red School House. The same program should not be required of all children or all required to proceed at the same rate, as a democratic education was one which made it possible for each individual to develop to the full limit of the pupil's potential. It meant equality of opportunity but that if a particular student's potential was greater than that of another pupil, the former should be able to venture beyond the latter in educational development.
Paul Woodring, a consultant to the Fund for Advancement of Education, had stated: "We are wasting a major portion of America's most important natural resources—the brainpower of our most talented youngsters—by our failure to make special provision in all our schools for these boys and girls." The piece suggests that the condition had to be corrected.
It finds it an oversimplification to state that, insofar as teacher education, the decision was simply between "subject matter" and "methods", that while the teacher had to know the subject matter, the teacher also had to have broad, scholarly knowledge and be generally educated well enough and broadly enough to be able to see the subject being taught in relation to the whole world of knowledge. The teacher also had to have a professional understanding of the nature of the child and of the learning processes, and be equipped with certain professional skills in organizing instruction and managing a classroom, though the latter factors had been overemphasized at the expense of a broad academic background in "subject matter", but could not be ignored.
Curricula had to be strengthened and certain frills had to give way to basic values. The sciences had to be given their proper emphasis, but room also had to be left for the humanities. Opportunities for talented students to go on to higher education had to be improved and there had to be some new, hard thinking regarding the problem of finding enough able teachers and holding them against the competition from the private sector.
It concludes that "Great Debates" were fine, but wonders when the talking would stop and the work would begin.
"The Democrats: Anyone for Unity?" indicates that a surprisingly wide streak of vitality in the precincts had given the local Democratic Party a temporary lease on life, but there remained further and stiffer tests of that new potency. The turnout for the precinct elections the previous week had offered proof that rank-and-file Democrats were ready for revival of party activity, among whom had been many newcomers willing to make political cause with their neighbors more often than every two years when the precinct committees were chosen.
But it questions whether revivalists could be chosen to lead the revival, whether the two crippled wings of the party were ready to admit their own leadership failures by agreeing on a party chairman capable of cultivating the evident grassroots interest.
Governor Luther Hodges held up the Mecklenburg party as an example of how not to operate a political party. Rank-and-file Democrats deserved better than the unproductive squabbling between party caretakers, and had demonstrated at the precinct meetings their willingness to work for something better. Whether they would depended on the caliber of the party chairman to be elected the following Saturday.
"James Ardrey Bell: The True Measure" laments the death at age 91 of Mr. Bell, the county's oldest attorney, finding that his true measure of distinction was his service rather than his longevity.
"With notable firmness and a deep sense of personal dedication, Mr. Bell served his community and his state well during a particularly demanding period of growth. He and his fellow builders gave this developing metropolis the unique personality it was to retain over the years." Service had been a way of life and his service had not been limited to the boundaries of the county, as he had been a member of the State Senate between 1934 and 1938 when the state was experiencing some of the bleakest days of the Depression. He had been a member of the Advisory Budget Commission in 1937-38 when the state's economy was being newly patched and mended.
He had served Duke University with earnest devotion and eventually was named vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. He was equally active in the affairs of the First Methodist Church of Charlotte, serving as chairman of its Board of Trustees. As a trustee of the Western North Carolina Methodist Conference, he labored long and valiantly for an endowment for retired clergymen, and was also active in numerous local civic endeavors.
It concludes that he would be long remembered by the community he had helped to mold into an image of greatness.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Old Story Retold", indicates that the swimming hole remained precious in the memories of older men, despite the advent of swimming pools, and remained exhilarating for many little boys, the creek representing freedom of individual action. Supervised swimming was to some boys what a lesson in poetry writing might be to Carl Sandburg.
"You go to a swimming pool to swim and to get cool. You go to the secluded hole in the bend of the creek for swimming and coolness but even more so for wild berries and nuts, for flying squirrels and bullfrogs, for trees to ride and for low 'monkey' limbs to perform on. You have to have a paper sack to tote home the loot, the little petals of poems and the obdurate physical immensity of arrowheads that are actually oddly-shaped rocks." The boy treated the swimming hole as the mountain climber did the towering peak. "It is there. It must be conquered."
Drew Pearson indicates that members of the House Appropriations Committee had agreed that Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks deserved a trophy in the "How foolish can you get?" category as a result of his recent closed-door testimony before that group. Representative Prince Preston of Georgia had asked him whether he wanted to comment on the current economic recession, of which he had made no statement thus far, with the Secretary responding that he did not know why there was concern as there was no depression or even a recession, just a "business lull caused by the Russian Sputnik and recent severe winter weather." That initially had produced laughter from the members until it dawned on them that Secretary Weeks was serious and had not appreciated the laughter. When asked by Representative John Shelley of California whether he meant that statement, he replied that the news regarding the Sputnik launching the prior fall had caused some public alarm and affected the business economy, that such alarm had produced a reduction in spending, and that the winter weather always slowed down business. Mr. Shelley responded, "You have given us a good illustration of the kind of thinking in this Administration on the problems of our people."
The late Senator Herman Welker of Idaho still had influence through relatives in the Interior Department. He had an interesting working arrangement with former Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay when it came to nepotism, an arrangement which had only increased under Secretary Fred Seaton. The late Senator had three brothers-in-law on the public payroll, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, an area administrator of the Bureau of Land Management with headquarters in Denver, and a special assistant to his brother-in-law who was the director, until recently when that person retired because of an accident. The director had branched out by putting his son-in-law on the payroll in the Denver office.
Arthur Bestor, professor of history at the University of Illinois, indicates that the crisis in American education at present was that while the American people had built a magnificent public education system, most of the professional educators had "let the American people down by failing to develop the school system into a powerful instrument of intellectual training, with high standards and serious, democratic purposes." By frittering away resources on trivial and short-sighted programs, they had deprived the masses of the children, bright and average alike, from having intellectual opportunity, intellectual stimulus, and high intellectual achievement.
In the U.S. at present, virtually every child between six and 16 was in school and 60 percent had graduated from high school, half of those then attending college. Schooling had been universally available for so long that the last census reported that a third of the entire adult population possessed high school diplomas.
He questions whether the means of education, provided liberally by the public, had been used to good effect by the professional educators, indicating that statistics which would measure intellectual achievement were quite inadequate, an inadequacy he believes which was not accidental. On November 13, 1957, the President had broadcast a summary of Soviet accomplishments in education, indicating that when a Russian graduated from high school, the student had five years of physics, four years of chemistry, one year of astronomy, five years of biology, ten years of mathematics through trigonometry, and five years of a foreign language. The professor indicates that neither the President nor anyone else could make a statement about the intellectual achievements of the American public school system capable of comparison with that factual statement about the Russian system. The U.S. Office of Education could tell how much students in Russia knew when they graduated high school, but could not say what students knew when they graduated American high schools.
In December, 1956, the professor had received a letter from the director of Publication Services of the Office of Education, asking him to explain certain criticisms he had made, and he had replied in a seven-page letter of December 29, 1956, wherein he urged the regular publication of information concerning the programs of study which each year of high school graduates had actually completed, including the number and percentage who had completed programs including all three standard high school science courses, biology, chemistry and physics, the number and percentage who had completed four years of mathematics through trigonometry, the number and percentage who had studied a foreign language for four years, or for fewer years, and, above all, the number and percentage who had completed a balanced four-year program including all of those things.
We done done it. You got nothing on us, cowboy. We even done had two foreign languages and five years of the higher mathematics, though not up to the speed of them Commies.
He posits that answers to those questions were essential if the people were ever to know how the American school system ranked alongside the education systems of the rest of the world. He had, however, never even received an acknowledgment of the letter from the Office of Education. Because of the lack of complete information, anyone wanting to evaluate the standards and achievements of the public school system was forced to draw inferences from meager statistics available, principally figures showing total nationwide enrollments in particular courses or subjects, with alternative methods of comparing statistics leading to differing conclusions based on the alternative methods of analysis. Professional educators would not admit that there could be honest differences of opinion concerning the conclusions to be gleaned from those statistics, as any conclusion with which they disagreed was automatically branded false and the person rendering the conclusion denounced as dishonest—much as is generally the case in Trumpville, whether regarding wrestling in the public schools or other important data relative to public education or, for that matter, any other topic, with everything negative blamed on Commie Democrats and everything positive attributed to His Highness.
Professor Bestor indicates that
American schools offered physics for one year to those in the 12th
grade, while Soviet schools required physics for five years beginning
with the sixth grade. (A ha, we done took that in the 11th grade,
replete with lab. He lies!) School attendance was now virtually
universal through the seventh grade in Russia and thus even the pupil
who dropped out after that grade had two years of physics. Professor
Harold Hand of the American Association of Secondary School
Principals believed that only the top one-third
William G. Carr, executive secretary of the National Education Association, addresses the same general issue, but resists some of the recent pessimism while redressing the present lack of balance in education and not denying that there was ample room for improvement. He indicates that he did not question the right of citizens to evaluate the schools and believed it actually to be a duty to do so. He was proud to assert that the American school system was one of the truly great achievements of the country, having provided elementary education for every American child and secondary education on a scale 50 years ahead of most of Europe, giving every educable child the basic tools of literacy, suggesting that if it were not the case, newspapers would not be in business.
It had cooperated with homes and churches to develop moral and spiritual values and had developed aesthetic and cultural interests on a large scale, distributed widely throughout the population. As evidence, he cites as example the circulation of good newspapers, books and magazines or attendance at symphony orchestra performances. It also had increased the productive skills of the American people to the extent that a rising standard of living had been achieved despite the enormous drain on the economy required by nearly 20 years of war and heavy defense expenditure. It had taught American youth the knowledge, the loyalties and the civic skills required by people who could and did govern themselves. It had sent into the professions a large body of highly competent scientific leaders, technicians, scientists, engineers, physicians, technical experts, who were unsurpassed, with their knowledge and skills being sought in every part of the world in U.S. colleges and graduate schools.
He also finds that the schools were controlled by local boards composed primarily of public spirited persons chosen by their fellow citizens.
But he doubts whether the collecting and absorbing of knowledge was or should be the sole or even the most important function of the schools of the nation. Schools were asked to teach health and safety, skills of vocational effectiveness, the ability to work with others, and abiding and informed loyalty to free institutions, helping students adjust their personal drives and impulses to the requirements of democratic group living. He asserts that storing the memory with knowledge was not the controlling aim of the schools, though it was of crucial importance to have well arranged knowledge. But a person with much knowledge and no social adjustment was at best an unhappy misfit and at worst a dangerous one. He concludes, therefore, that local control of education was principally a good policy, having served the nation well and protecting it from rash and doubtful action.
He finds that the issue provided a good illustration of the difficulties educators presently faced. Admiral Hyman Rickover said that the control of education was in the hands of local school boards whose members were seldom qualified as educational experts, and he had been correct in that assertion. Professor Bestor, by contrast, had written a large book, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools, complaining that the control of education was too much in the hands of educational experts.
He asserts that he was proud to say that both public and private schools were preparing graduates to succeed in college. He deplores the effort to exalt public schools at the expense of private schools or vice versa, that there was a respected place in the country for both systems. Yet, it had been shown that on average graduates of private schools attained college records superior to those of graduates of public schools.
He also indicates that the schools were serving all of the children of all of the people, though some talented pupils had been imperfectly taught in some schools. But it was also true that average and inferior students had suffered the same fate. Educators generally wanted to adapt education to individual differences, one of the controlling objectives of the teaching profession. They knew how to do so, but the reason they did not do better in that regard was not lack of know-how or desire, but rather of resources.
He says that the schools were not
only good but getting better, though in direct contradiction to the
recent article by Dt. Bestor in U.S. News & World
Report, which had proclaimed on its front cover that the country
was less well educated than 50 years earlier. Numerous studies had
compared present schools to those of previous generations, and the
weight of the evidence was that students were doing better at present
than their predecessors on the same tests. He finds that reading,
writing and arithmetic were being stressed more than ever before,
contrary to the assertions of some. Professor Bestor had said that
many American high schools did not even offer courses in geometry and
algebra, when the fact was that 94 percent of American high school students
did have an opportunity to take those subjects, with the remaining 6 percent
being in very small and rural schools—Trumpville, U.S.A.
A Gallup poll in the spring of 1954 had revealed that people between 18 and 20 were the best read of all age groups in the society, and the best informed. An Army report at the close of World War II stated that discipline of soldiers was the best ever under any military command. Army tests provided in World War I and World War II showed an average increase of nearly four grades for the latter. The remainder of his abstracted address is also on page 7-A. Unlike Dr. Bestor, he does not leave you hanging in a brainteaser, the answer to which, after quite a lot of cogitation on the matter, must be Trump.
Dumb-Dumb continues to brag on having carried about 83 percent of the counties in the country, not bothering to inform foreign audiences and audiences foreign to American democracy, including about two-thirds of those who voted for him, that in America we vote state by state by population, the electoral system being quite anachronistic enough in modern times, never by land area
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