The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 19, 1958

ONE EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Beirut that the U.S. had flown 1,700 seasoned paratroopers from Turkey to Beirut this date to reinforce 6,300 Marines on the Lebanese beachhead. Bellicose threats from the Communist world had subsided, but an air of high tension still was felt through the Middle East. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut had said that an American plane had crashed in the Lebanese mountains, but declined to say how big it was, whether it was military or civilian or whether it might have been shot down. A large transport plane flying in more Marines from the U.S. had been hit twice by small arms fire outside Beirut, with one shot narrowly missing the navigator. The shots may have come from rebels in the city fighting the pro-Western Government which the U.S. was sworn to protect, or from excited welcomers. Cairo Radio claimed that an Arab commercial airliner en route from Syria to Egypt had been attacked by jet planes of "the occupation forces", not indicating whether the alleged attackers were U.S. or British. In another action, Lebanese rebels charged through the grounds of the U.S. mission school this date to attack the main building of the Lebanese Government, housing the office of Premier Sami Solh. The mission compound housed a girls' school, a theological seminary and a mission printing plant. Reports from the scene said that rebels had entered the compound and launched an attack on Lebanese security forces who were trying to set up wire barricades in front of the main Government building. As the crisis moved toward a verbal showdown in the U.N. General Assembly, 1,700 U.S. paratroopers had begun landing in Beirut to support the 6,300 Marines patrolling the city's ports and beaches. An authoritative U.S. source had said that more troopers from the 24th Infantry Division were almost certain to arrive in Beirut, possibly the following day, though not saying how many were due. The men had flown into Beirut Airport over the section of the city held by pro-Nasser rebels. United Arab Republic Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser had warned the previous day that bloodshed might occur and vowed that "we will befriend those who befriend us and meet aggression with aggression." He made the pledge in Damascus after a secret meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow. If the U.S. and Britain antagonized the Arabs, he warned, "we shall fight to the last drop of our blood." The Communist world had previously accused the U.S. and Britain of committing aggression by sending in the troops. Moscow and Peiping had avoided any definite promises of armed aid to Premier Nasser. The Soviet Foreign Ministry had issued a declaration warning, however, that Russia could not remain on the sidelines. The Soviet Union, they said, would have to take "necessary measures dictated by the interests of the security of the Soviet Union and preservation of general peace." The measures were not specified, though possessed of an ominous hint that Moslems in Soviet Central Asia might intervene in the adjacent Middle East. There was no repetition, however, of the 1956 Suez crisis threats of sending Soviet "volunteers" into the region. A mob of 100,000 had shattered nearly 300 windows in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and splashed ink on the lower part of the building. About 100 persons had demonstrated peacefully at the British Embassy in Moscow. Communist China had joined with a note of warning that "peace-loving nations and people will not stand by with folded arms" should Britain remain in Jordan.

In Beirut, unconfirmed reports indicated this date that a dozen MIG jet fighters with Russian markings had been seen at Damascus airport, the reports adding to the general tension gripping the area.

The U.S. this date arranged to fly out Americans who wanted to leave Iraq.

At the U.N. in New York, the U.S. and the Soviet Union this date had pushed similar proposals with rival goals for an emergency session of the General Assembly regarding the Middle East crisis. The 11-nation Security Council would take up the proposals when it would meet again on Monday to talk about U.S. Marines in Lebanon, British paratroopers in Jordan and complaints that Premier Nasser's UAR was trying to overthrow the Lebanese and Jordanian governments. The proposals had been submitted the previous night after the Council had failed to pass three resolutions regarding the situation, with one having resulted from Russia's 84th veto. The Council had defeated by a vote of 8 to 1, with Japan and Sweden abstaining, a Soviet resolution calling on the U.S. and Britain to remove their troops from Lebanon and Jordan immediately, and Russia was expected to offer a similar resolution at any General Assembly meeting. A Soviet veto had killed a rival U.S. resolution which would have sent a U.N. military force to protect Lebanon's independence and ensure against illegal infiltration of arms and men. The Marines would leave under the resolution when that force took effect, according to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. The resolution had received nine votes, with Sweden abstaining. Ambassador Lodge would offer a similar resolution to the 81-nation Assembly, requiring that two-thirds of those voting approve any measure. Experienced diplomats believed that the U.S. measure might barely pass, but doubted that the Soviet resolution would.

Winding up Middle East strategy talks, top U.S. and British diplomats faced this date the possibility of hostile moves by the United Arab Republic against U.S. forces in Lebanon and British troops in Jordan. In a diplomatic effort to head off any counteraction, the U.S. had warned the UAR that an attack on U.S. forces by Egyptian-Syrian military units would have grave consequences. Interrupting his long talks with British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, Secretary of State Dulles was reported to have told a Senate committee the previous day that he thought the Soviet Union might make some move to encourage Premier Nasser to act. He apparently did not foresee, however, any direct Russian military intervention in the Middle East. The U.S. warning to Cairo had been made Thursday about the time when Premier Nasser had been meeting secretly in Moscow with Premier Khrushchev on the Middle East crisis. U.S. officials said that they thought that Premier Nasser's sudden Moscow trip affected his international political and propaganda position, tending to prove the correctness of the U.S. contention that he was working cooperatively with Soviet Communism to subvert the governments of pro-Western states in the Middle East. Returning from Russia, Premier Nasser had unleashed a bitter tirade at the U.S. and Britain during a stopover the previous day in Damascus, telling a cheering mass meeting that aggression would be met with aggression and that no power could destroy Arab nationalism. Mr. Dulles and Mr. Lloyd, who had begun their emergency conferences on Thursday, had talked late into the evening the previous night after they had dined together with some of their principal advisors at the home of Mr. Dulles. British officials said that Mr. Lloyd would return to London during the weekend. In his appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Secretary Dulles had said in a statement made public that the Soviet Union was behind a concerted movement which had overthrown the Government of King Faisal III in Iraq and endangered the governments of Lebanon and Jordan. The Committee had met in closed session to hear a plea from the Secretary that Congress grant a total of 3.675 billion dollars in foreign aid funding for the current fiscal year.

The President was reported to have dropped a hint that he might call a special fall session of Congress if he did not get the foreign aid funding which he believed was needed to meet the present crisis in the Middle East. A legislator who had attended an emergency White House meeting the previous night said that the President, without making a threat, had told the group of eight Republican and Democratic Senators that he hoped he would not have to call the special session. The Congress was expected to adjourn the following month. Citing the Middle East crisis, the President had told the group that he urgently wanted the 597.5 million dollars which the House had cut from the 3.675 billion dollar foreign aid bill, on which the Senate had not yet acted. The White House meeting had come amid reports that the Administration might seek additional money because of the Middle East situation. Two of the Senators said that the President had been told that prospects were not good for getting more money, adding that the group had told him that they saw little hope that the House would go along with the Senate in restoring the full 597.5 million. It had been suggested that the Senate might restore between 400 and 500 million but that the House would likely balk, that the likelihood was for a compromise for 300 to 400 million in restored funds. Secretary of State Dulles, who sat in on the previous night's meeting, had also gone to bat for the foreign aid bill in an appearance earlier the previous day before the Senate Appropriations Committee, saying that events in the Middle East made it imperative that the House reductions be restored, for if the tactics of Communist imperialism succeeded, the U.S. would find itself "encircled and subject to strangulation." He said that if the cut stood, it would mean "an unacceptable risk of disaster in Turkey, Spain, Korea, Formosa, Vietnam, Pakistan and Iran." He also urged restoration of a 53 million dollar reduction in the President's emergency fund.

In Hof, West Germany, West German police had announced this date the release of nine U.S. Army servicemen held by Communist East Germany since June 7, turned over at the border checkpoint near Hof, Bavaria, by Dr. Werner Ludwig, president of the East German Red Cross, to Robert Wilson, American Red Cross director for operations in Europe. The latter had accompanied the nine men across the border and handed them to U.S. Army representatives. A helicopter had picked up the men immediately and flown them to the headquarters of their 3rd Armored Division in Hof. Agreement between the Red Cross societies of the U.S. and East Germany had occurred four weeks after the U.S. Army and East German authorities had deadlocked in negotiations regarding release of the prisoners. East Germany had called for some diplomatic level negotiations, to try to legitimize the East German government, but the U.S. had refused, saying that it would do nothing which would imply recognition of the Communist regime. The names of the men released are listed. Their plane had been shot down when it had veered over Soviet Armenia in inclement weather, coming to a crash landing after five of the crew had bailed out and the other four piloted the stricken plane to its final landing place.

In Gettysburg, it was reported that the President had flown to his farm this date for a weekend rest, but had made arrangements for a quick return to Washington should events in the Middle East require it.

In Seoul, South Korea, the Korean First Army this date ordered its subordinate commands to suspend all leaves and furloughs and restrict passes for all men and officers guarding the 155-mile truce line.

In Hamburg, West Germany, it was reported that 20 ships of the U.S. 2nd Fleet, headed by the cruiser Northampton, had arrived in the ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven this date for the biggest Naval visit to West Germany since World War II.

In Portsmouth, N.H., the Navy launched this date the new submarine U.S.S. Barbel, named in honor of the fighting submarine sunk during World War II in an engagement with Japanese bombers in the Palawan Straits.

In Provincetown, Mass., it was reported that the fleet snorkel submarine Piper had run aground on a sandbar early this date about a half-mile from shore but was pulled free about six hours later.

In Sarasota, Fla., the son of Bernard Goldfine had reportedly locked himself in a motel bathroom this date and slashed himself in the face and body with a double-edged razor blade, had been rushed to a hospital in a police car and was reported in good condition, with doctors indicating that most of the wounds had been superficial. His wife had called the police in the wee hours of the morning, reporting that he had locked himself in the bathroom and she thought he was committing suicide. When police found him, he was dressed only in shorts and was covered with blood, a patrolman indicating that he must have cut himself 80 to 100 times. He reportedly had been upset over the difficulties which his father had been undergoing with Congress regarding gifts he had provided to White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, his old friend, which Congress had indicated was in exchange for help in alleviating his difficulties with the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities & Exchange Commission regarding his textile companies in Boston. Both men had denied that the gifts were in exchange for favors, but claimed they were rather provided only out of friendship.

In Orr, Minn., it was reported that a ten-year old girl and her eight-year old brother had been returned to their grandfather's home this date after eating wild berries and drinking swamp water while lost for 52 hours in a wilderness of trees, brush and bogs. They had emerged from the woods the previous day while more than 300 men, aided by planes, a helicopter and two-way radios, had been pressing the second day of a search for them. The girl said that she was not scared but would never go out picking berries again, saying that they did not see any bears but would not have been frightened if they had because their small, black cocker spaniel would have barked at them. They had left the home of their grandfather on Wednesday afternoon to pick blueberries and had been seen the previous late afternoon trudging along a narrow road, when a man spotted them and offered them a ride to their grandfather's home, which they accepted, some ten miles east of where they had started. They had eaten blueberries, raspberries and June berries, washed down by what the girl described as "that dirty, old swamp water." They slept on beds of boughs. About noon the previous day, the girl had spotted a forest lookout tower, their first contact with civilization in 48 hours, and she climbed the tower, spied the road and they walked out to it. She said that they "prayed like mad all the time", and her mother said that they had also prayed.

In Greensboro, N.C., four City officials and three officers of the Greensboro Pool Corp. had denied the previous day that there was any collusion in the sale of a City-owned swimming pool for $85,000 to the corporation. The seven persons had made depositions in a Federal lawsuit brought by eight Greensboro black citizens in an effort to block the sale of the pool, the sale to a private entity apparently having been alleged as a means to avoid desegregation of the facility.

The President had nominated Edward Thomas and Roby Maley to be postmasters of Charlotte and Lexington, respectively.

In Reidsville, N.C., it was reported that a Charlotte woman had been killed during the morning ten miles north of the town when the car in which she was riding collided with a tractor-trailer truck. A witness to the accident told investigating State Highway Patrolmen that the car and truck had collided on U.S. Highway 29 near Ruffin in the early morning, with the impact of the collision having thrown the deceased from the car, trapping her beneath the wheels of the truck. She had been the supervisor of the accounts receivable department of Associated General Transport in Charlotte and she and her husband, the driver of the car, had been en route to New York at the time. The witness said that the truck had swerved into the path of the car when the collision occurred. The condition of her husband is not indicated.

Another weekly winner of the newspaper's Social Security Game is listed, replete with her winning Social Security number, getting her $50—and probably plenty of headaches when somebody in New Jersey or Chicago, maybe an associate of Joey Aiuppa or Tony Accardo, decides that they want to pull a robbery using her identity. Efforts to contact the winner had been unsuccessful but she could collect her money by coming to the newspaper's office and bringing her Social Security card before Tuesday. Your number is already out there and so you might as well at least get paid the $50 for giving up your identity to the world. The world may have seemed in retrospect more innocent in the 1950's, but, in fact, when penetrating into the underworld, it was anything but innocent. It was just more hidden. Is ignorance really bliss, or just waiting to be knocked off through inattention to reality? That is the existential question for the day.

Not in the newspaper this date, but in the Charlotte Observer was the report that the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management had concluded its two weeks of hearings the previous day into the infiltration of the Mafia into the Chicago restaurant trade, save for one deferred witness who would be heard July 31, having suffered a heart attack on Thursday. Reputed gangster Joseph Aiuppa, identified as supplying machine guns for the John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and Ma Barker mobs and gunman for the Al Capone mob during the 1920's and 1930's, had appeared on Friday and pleaded the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination 33 times, to each question posed to him, and was referred by Committee chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, for a contempt of Congress citation. The Committee issued a report calling for legislation to crack down on the "massive national conspiracy" by gangsters to take over labor-management relations. Senators Carl Curtis of Nebraska and Karl Mundt of South Dakota joined with the chairman in saying, "The sordid situation revealed in Chicago cries out for remedial action which is beyond the power of this committee." He said that the Committee had learned of several restaurants in the Chicago area which were wholly hoodlum and gangster-operated, and that at least one was the center at present of vice and racketeering in Chicago. The two Republican Senators objected, however, when Senator McClellan put into the record a staff document which contended that 27 Chicago restaurants were "saving" $258,500 per year by paying less than union wages. Senator McClellan, joined by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, said that the report was more damaging to the unions involved than to the restaurant operators. Senators Mundt and Curtis, however, maintained that the report smeared the restaurants who refused to pay money to gangster-controlled unions. Senator Mundt said that the House ought strengthen the Senate-approved labor reform bill by adding a requirement for secret ballot elections for union officals.

On the editorial page, an editorial book review, titled "A Confederate's Quest for Integration", reviewing The Negro Question, A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, by George W. Cable, as edited by Arlin Turner, indicates that nearing the end of an address to an audience in Boston in 1888, Mr. Cable had said: "Do not wait for the mass to move. The mass waits for the movement of that individual who cannot and will not wait for the mass…"

Mr. Cable was a former Confederate cavalryman who had been twice wounded in battle and the son of a slaveholder. He had urged his Boston audience comprised of black people to make full use of their rights and responsibilities as U.S. citizens to enable them to receive their deserved full political equality, though believing that social equality had no place in the great debate then raging on race because "it is a matter of personal preference, which preference must be mental before the social equality can begin to exist."

Mr. Cable had established a reputation as a social critic attracting a Northern following by urging Southern white audiences to extend and secure to black Freedmen full civil and political equality.

In 1885, he had said that "the greatest social problem before the American people today is, as it had been for a hundred years, the presence among us of the Negro." He did not believe that the problem would solve itself if left alone and he did not wait for the mass to move, which was the reason that the present book emerged in 1958, based on Mr. Cable's 1903 volume, The Negro Question, and other writings, and had pertinence at present regarding still the greatest social problem of the country. "For when the Southern mass did move, it moved the other way—leaving the terms of the argument until this day unchanged, to wit: Shall the law discriminate on the basis of color?"

The editor of the work, a professor of English at Duke University, had pulled together Mr. Cable's novels, lectures, letters and talks into the volume.

The South at the time of Mr. Cable was quite different. Although Jim Crow laws had been spreading rapidly, they had not come to South Carolina, and the Charleston News & Courier, presently noted for its vigorous segregationist policy, had seen no need for them. It had said: "In South Carolina respectable colored persons buy first-class tickets on any railroad ride in the first-class cars as a right, and their presence excites no comment on the part of their white fellow-passengers. It is a great deal pleasanter to travel with respectable and well-behaved colored people than with unmannerly and ruffianly white men."

It finds that it was a different South and yet the same. Mr. Cable had been fighting the coming of Jim Crow, the establishment by law of segregation, and now the South was fighting to preserve it, but the arguments had not varied. Mr. Cable had called the Biblical justification for white supremacy a device to prevent logical argument and, moreover, to make it an insult to attempt to question it. He believed that the South had no right to resent outside criticism of its racial affairs unless it could refute the criticism. He denied that there could be any such thing as the feared social equality, certainly not in the schools because "the public school relation is not a private social relation." He said that silence was "treason to the South" and argued that discrimination was teaching blacks "one of the worst lessons class rule can teach them—exclusive, even morbid, preoccupation in their rights as a class, and inattention to the general affairs of their communities, their states, and the nation."

In response to the argument that integration would lead to amalgamation of the races, he had said that no two races had ever amalgamated except where one was the oppressor.

He had waged the argument for over a decade before becoming silent, claiming to have been speaking for the majority of Southerners whom he called the "Silent South"—the title of one of his works.

"If there was a silent majority favoring Cable's views in the South, it remained silent. The more he pursued his arguments for political and civil equality for the Negro, the sharper the attacks on him became. Henry Grady, foremost apostle of the 'New South', supported Cable in his pleas for better treatment of the Freedmen. But Grady could not refrain from saying, in answer to one of Cable's essays, that Cable opposed white supremacy because of New England blood reaching Cable through his mother. Eventually, he was attacked as a traitor to his region. Cable pursued the latter phases of his argument through a correspondence club with a number of leading southern citizens he had met in his ceaseless roaming of the South. He ended his unique crusade only when the rule of Jim Crow had been firmly established in the South and when the North itself had lost interest in the question. At the end, he favored federal intervention as a last resort to secure civil rights to the Negro."

Mr. Cable had won fame in New Orleans for his leadership of blue-ribbon civic groups in successful movements for reform of prisons and asylums. He had been a thorough researcher and was recognized as an authority on penal conditions. That interest had led him into studies of almost every political and social question facing the South, and those studies had convinced him of the rectitude and inevitability of integration.

He was, according to the editor of the work, Dr. Turner, highly regarded as a novelist as well, called on both sides of the Atlantic one of the greatest novelists who had yet written in America. He said that it was not uncommon for him to be compared with William Dean Howells, Mark Twain or Henry James and to be considered better for the comparison.

It finds that he was ahead of his times and that his words remained at present ahead of his times in many areas of the South, finding it remarkable that the most fully and consistently developed case for unrestricted civil rights for the black citizenry had been made 80 years earlier by a Southerner. "One can only ponder whether the South's peculiar and burdensome problem of today would be a lesser burden and closer to solution if Cable's crusade had had some effect—instead of none."

Mr. Cable and The Silent South had been mentioned by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South in 1941, along with Walter Hines Page, as having attempted in the mid-1880's to cast the South as less than perfect, examining honestly its evils, until after bringing down "on their heads such a flood of rage that they abandoned it as hopeless and removed to Yankeedom."

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Up to Snuff", indicates that despite the recession still continuing, with durable good manufacturers still hard hit, the pickle business was doing fine, along with the pretzel bakers and glue producers, as well as swimming pool builders. Sales were up in phonograph records, perfume, safe deposit boxes, fishing rods and cameras. Candy was booming and wine and whiskey was on the upgrade.