The Charlotte News
Monday, January 12, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President would meet with Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan at the White House the following Saturday. The conference would take place in the President's office during the morning, starting at 9:00, according to White House Press Secretary James Hagerty, and no time limit had been set for the meeting. Secretary of State Dulles and perhaps some other officials would be present. No further details had been provided, but the meeting presumably would be a general review of East-West relations, with emphasis on the Berlin situation. The President was expected to impress upon Premier Nikita Khrushchev's top deputy that the Western allies had no intention of abandoning West Berlin or creating a neutralized Germany.
In Washington, it was reported that McDonnell Aircraft Corp. of St. Louis had been selected this date to design and build a space "capsule" to carry the first American men into space. NASA said that negotiations for a formal contract with McDonnell would begin immediately. Twelve firms had submitted bids to NASA on the basis of specifications set forth in a meeting with 38 manufacturing and research organizations the prior November. NASA said that a single satellite capsule with its connected equipment was expected to cost over 15 million dollars. It said that the space capsule, to be launched into space by a powerful booster, would be designed to carry a human passenger through the atmosphere into orbit and return the person safely to earth. "The satellite system will provide a means of studying the psychological and physiological effects of space flight on men," according to the announcement. "The research will include man's reaction to weightlessness during orbital flight, high acceleration during launch and high deceleration during reentry into the atmosphere."
Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri challenged Vice-President Nixon this date to prove that the U.S. was now ahead of Russia in ballistic missiles. The Senator told the Senate that Mr. Nixon had made an observation to that effect, indicating, "It is not correct, and I do not know a single impartial expert in the missile field who would support it." As former Secretary of the Air Force under President Truman and as a member of the Senate Armed Services special space committees, the Senator took issue with information given to the press the previous day that Mr. Nixon said that the U.S. was ahead of Russia in developing military missiles and was catching up fast in other areas of the space race. The Senator called on Mr. Nixon to provide in percentages the number of operational ICBM's which the U.S. would have by the end of the current year, compared with the number which U.S. intelligence estimated that the Soviets would have. Senator Symington said that if Mr. Nixon did not release those numbers and other percentages by the end of the week, he would release them himself.
In Lewisburg, Pa., it was reported that Democratic Congressman William Green, Jr., accused of taking a $10,000 bribe and participating in a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Government, would have his trial in Federal District Court begin this date. Mr. Green had denounced the two-year old charges and described them as politically-inspired lies. He was one of the most powerful political bosses in Pennsylvania and ranked high in party circles by virtue of his chairmanship since 1953 of the Democratic Committee in Philadelphia, one of the nation's largest cities. The Congressman, 48, had been an insurance broker since 1937, and would stand trial with six other co-defendants who had been linked by the Government in the same conspiracy. The Federal charges had stemmed from alleged irregularities uncovered in a grand jury investigation of construction of a 33 million dollar Army Signal Corps depot at Tobyhanna, Pa. That investigation had resulted in eight other indictments and two men had already been convicted of fraud. Mr. Green was accused of receiving $10,000 in cash, plus lush insurance business from the contractors working on the facility, in exchange for favors and influence by the Congressman while a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which had handled details of the depot's construction between 1951 and 1953. Conviction would force Mr. Green to resign from Congress, where he had served for 12 years, the previous Tuesday, having begun his seventh term.
In Taipei, Formosa, it was reported by a Nationalist Chinese Government news agency that the Chinese Communists planned to take complete control of small children in communes by making the day nurseries round-the-clock affairs. At present, mothers left their children in the nurseries while they were at work, but the news agency said that the Communists would extend the nursery time to exercise stricter control over education and to get even more work out of the mothers.
In New York, it was reported that a mother of eight children had been booked this date on a kidnaping charge, stemming from the taking of a newborn infant from St. Peter's Hospital nursery in Brooklyn on January 2. The infant, now ten days old, had been found unharmed and well in a Brooklyn apartment. The woman, 43, was booked at a Brooklyn police station after stubbornly claiming her innocence throughout the night. She had claimed to have self-delivered her own infant on January 2, but the chief assistant district attorney said that there was no doubt, on the basis of scientific evidence, that she had taken the child that date from the hospital nursery. She had apparently maintained the infant in her furnished flat in Brooklyn since that time. She had quit her $45 per week job as a credit department clerk in a Brooklyn department store on the day of the baby's disappearance. The baby's footprints taken at the hospital after birth matched those of the recovered baby. Police had found in the woman's apartment a long black coat with an inverted "V" outlined in back in velvet, corresponding with descriptions given by nurses and a night watchman at the hospital who had seen the person abducting the child. The woman had been married in 1933 and divorced in 1940, and had married again in 1942 or 1943. Her second husband had died in 1956 and the woman had been living alone since that time. She had children who were living elsewhere, including four at orphanages or foster homes. The father of the infant, a lawyer for the Port Authority of New York, said that he had recognized the baby on the basis of a "general family resemblance" and a small birthmark over her left eye, which he had noticed during the one and only time he had seen his newborn on the night of her birth. He said he felt very happy as he left the hospital to rejoin his wife, who had been staying with her parents in Brooklyn since her release from the hospital after the abduction. The assistant district attorney said that the woman had taken "good care" of the baby as she had plenty of experience caring for children of her own. The baby weighed 7 pounds, 1 ounce, when returned to the hospital, and had weighed 7 pounds at birth. Police had been operating on the theory that the kidnaper was a woman who had taken the baby out of a longing for a child of her own. Initially, the father had been reluctant to press charges, being so thrilled by the return of their child, but had been convinced by police and prosecutors to go forward with the kidnaping charge. The mother indicated that she had never given up hope that her daughter would be found, indicating that her first faith had been in God and her second, in the FBI and the police. The 26-year old high school teacher, who had been on maternity leave, said that she first learned of the baby being found alive and healthy from her husband, who had telephoned from the hospital in the early morning hours. She said that she did not know when she would be reunited with her child, but as long as she knew that the baby was being cared for, she could wait for awhile. A holiday atmosphere pervaded the house where the mother was staying with her parents in Brooklyn. Friends and relatives had come by and embraced the couple and each other, many having stayed with the mother during the anxious hours before the discovery of the child.
In Dallas, Tex., evangelist Billy Graham had gone ahead with his plans for his world crusade this date in the face of advice by physicians to curtail his activities because of an eye ailment. Dr. Graham had told reporters that he intended to go to Australia, Indonesia, Malaya, Cairo, Jerusalem and Berlin during the current year. He had been interviewed after making a zealous talk before the second Combined Texas Baptist World Missions and State Evangelistic Conference in the packed 11,500-seat Memorial Auditorium. The illness had earlier caused the evangelist to cancel a scheduled appearance at the Dallas First Baptist Church. He had announced previously that he would go to Rochester, Minn., on Tuesday for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic instead of leaving for the West Coast en route to Australia. He insisted that he felt all right but that there was something wrong with one of his eyes. He did not know what it was exactly, though the doctor had told him of a condition with a long technical name. "But," said Dr. Graham, "I think he's as confused as the Republicans are these days." He said he did not have cancer, had not had a heart attack, had not had a stroke and was not blind. A cable sent to Australia said that the medical examination had shown "angio spastico edema of the macula", the macula lutea being the small yellow spot on the human retina, the most sensitive area of the retina. The description suggested a spastic congestion of blood vessels serving the macula.
In Clayton, Ala., Circuit Judge George Wallace was expected this date to turn voter registration records over to grand juries in two Alabama counties in defiance of a Federal District Court order. Judge Wallace had called for a grand jury to be impaneled in Barbour County this date and was expected to call a jury into session in Bullock County the following day. The order convening the grand jury in Barbour did not say what the purpose was, but Judge Wallace reportedly was ready to turn voter registration records over to the jurors. Whether agents of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, who had subpoenaed the records, would be allowed to see them in connection with their investigation of black voting complaints would be a matter for the grand jury to decide. The U.S. District Court judge in Montgomery had ordered Judge Wallace to make the registration files in the two counties available to Federal agents either this date or the following day. Judge Wallace, runner-up in the Democratic gubernatorial primary the prior spring to present Governor John Patterson, had refused to release the records to the Commission except for the file on four black citizens who had charged that they were denied the right to vote. The District Court judge had ordered all registration and voting records in the two counties turned over to the Federal agents for inspection. Attorneys for Judge Wallace had hinted that the District Court order would be appealed. The District Court judge had set a hearing for Wednesday to see if Judge Wallace had obeyed the decree to show the files to the Federal agents. Investigators had told a Commission meeting on Friday that Judge Wallace had failed to comply with a Commission agreement providing that his and Macon County records would be examined. They said that Macon officials had cooperated. The chairman of the Commission, John Hannah, acting through the U.S. Attorney General's office, had then obtained the ultimatum from the Federal District Court. Under the compromise the prior Monday, agents were to see relevant records. Judge Wallace contended that he had agreed to show them only relevant records, those of the four blacks who had charged discrimination in Barbour and Bullock Counties. The agents wanted access to the entire file.
As it is said, a deal's a deal
In Wadesboro, N.C., it was reported that North Carolina's juvenile laws, designed to protect the rights of children, ironically had helped make an international cause célèbre out of the North Carolina "kissing case", involving two black boys, ages eight and ten, accused of kissing a young white girl against her will, and being held in a reformatory in the meantime. The silence in which statutes enshrouded cases involving juveniles had led to the furor which had preceded this date's habeas corpus hearing before a Superior Court judge. The NAACP had charged that the rights of the two boys had been flagrantly abused. They had been sent to the reformatory after accusations that they had assaulted three young white girls by holding them prisoner until one of the girls kissed one of the boys. At least 200 persons in the U.S. and abroad had indicated by letter and telegram to Governor Luther Hodges that they shared the view of the NAACP. Canon L. John Collins of St. Paul's Cathedral in London had cabled the Governor: "Millions the world over will be shocked by what has happened. Such inhumanity and injustice surely belies professions of belief in liberal and Christian values and the charter of human rights and makes a mockery of claims of the West to stand for justice for all regardless of creed, race or color." Such protests had prompted the Governor to obtain a report of the case from the juvenile court judge in Monroe who had handled the matter. That judge had steadfastly refused to discuss the case, referring questioners to the state statutes which required that juvenile hearings and records be maintained in private. In the meantime, however, the Governor complained that the world press had published "misinformation and actual misstatements of facts" in reporting on the case. The juvenile court judge reported to the Governor that the boys had been in trouble several times previously and were on probation at the time of the kissing incident. The judge said that the boys were jailed while awaiting disposition of the matter because the county had no juvenile detention facilities and community feeling had been running high. Robert F. Williams, president of the Union County chapter of the NAACP, had filed the habeas corpus petition, asserting: "The acts of these children could in no way be considered a crime under the laws of the State of North Carolina," and that the boys had been tried "without any accusers or witnesses being present; the prisoners were denied the opportunity of counsel and were convicted upon no legal evidence and were thus completely denied due process of law under the Constitution..." The statutes indicated that children were not "indictable as criminals but must be dealt with as wards of the state." A veteran juvenile court judge explained that by inference, the acts of a child could not be considered criminal.
In Poughkeepsie, N.Y., it was reported that a doe was
afloat on a floe of ice, trapped with no place to go. A Coast Guard
lasso had brought the doe in tow and that had been the end of its
woe. The deer had been observed floating down the Hudson River on a
cold Sunday afternoon, spotted by a Coast Guard cutter on ice patrol,
which set out on a rescue mission. Alarmed by the 180-foot ship, the
doe had kept skipping from floe to floe, and it was more than an hour
before the lasso had found its mark. A seaman scrambled onto the floe
and tied the deer's legs so that it would not hurt itself when it was
hauled aboard. "And then back to the woods she did go." The question of course remains, however, as to whether the doe was picking its cloven toes while on the floes
In London, it was reported that Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, facing freezing temperatures in London, had left by air this date for a six-week stay in the sunshine of Morocco.
On the editorial page, "Cold War on the Psychiatrist's Couch" begins with a quote from The Ugly American: "… Others might think that communism was a result of class conflict, of long-range economic change or political fanaticism; but Finian knew that communism was the face of the devil … put on earth to test against the morality of men."
It indicates that like Father Finian, the Jesuit who had trekked alone into the imaginary Asian land of Sarkhan to spike native communism, many knew that Soviet designs thinly masked the machinations of Satan. If communism was Evil, it could be nothing other than treacherous, and if treacherous, if "the enemy", it could be done in only by final all-out war.
Dr. Jerome Frank, professor at John Hopkins Medical School, had dealt with those questions in a revealing article, titled "The Great Antagonism" appearing in The Atlantic. He had no illusions about communism as tyranny or as a political force and would not want the U.S. to lose influence to Russia. Nor did he relish the forfeiture of individual political liberties in the West. But his psychological training led him to see startling likenesses between contesting power states in the present world and the psychotic patients whom he treated daily as a psychiatrist.
Both the U.S. and Russia, in facing the common peril of a nuclear war, had yet, he believed, to come to grips with the danger. As with psychotics who refused to acknowledge the existence of a problem of overwhelming size, both nations were engaged in denial. The U.S. denied to its consciousness that the world could be reduced by war to a wisp of radioactive smoke. Politicians and many scientists in both nations talked blandly of "deterrence" and "massive annihilation" with the casual air of children disputing who had been "killed" in a game of cowboys and Indians.
Dr. Frank had written: "Russia wanted to ban atomic weapons when we alone had them; we want to ban outer space as an area of conflict now that Russia seems to be ahead in this field. We ring Russia with bomber and missile bases, she treacherously crushes Hungary and develops ICBMs, each thereby strengthening the other's fear of attack and increasing the probability that it will occur."
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy and the piece questions whether the "balance of power", originally a geographic concept, meant anything now that the East and West had missiles. If the U.S. had 35,000 nuclear bombs stockpiled to Russia's 10,000, it questions what "catching up" in the arms race meant. If the atmosphere could be poisoned anywhere by anyone, it asks what "national security" meant. With nuclear weapons, there were no boundaries, no balances of power and no real "catching up" to be done.
Putting the cold war under psychological analysis would not automatically end it, nor would the analysis of Dr. Frank release the East from viewing the West as "the enemy" or vice versa. But he had made a telling case against the vanity of verbal warfare.
It finds that the greatest danger was not armament, itself, but the view which believed that somehow states were predestined to fight each other and that there was no way out of the vicious circle of the rocket-building contest. Nations, as with individuals, needed the kind of self-awareness which had escaped the Russians. Their devotion to a framework of dogma made the U.S. automatically "the enemy", and in reaction to it, the U.S. was quickly coming around to the view that Russia was the "enemy".
If the cold war were not seen in black and white terms, perhaps the suggestions for negotiating a territorial swap in Central Europe would make sense. If Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan were not blasted inhospitably during his visit to the U.S. as a "murderer", perhaps the U.S. could take advantage of his visit to work out useful trade schemes. If the Middle East were not seen as the theater for a contest of communist and capitalist allegiances, perhaps both the U.S. and Russia could collaborate on economic development. Every step in the concrete economic and political arrangements, where cooperation and not mutual castigation were involved, would help to avert war.
The U.S. and Russia were committed to vastly different economic and political ideas, the U.S. to some, Russia to others. Competition and rivalry were inevitable. But, it finds, Dr. Frank's question was worth thinking about: "Need the devil be involved?"
"Life in America" quotes from a press release from John Wiley & Son, advertising in The Changing American Parent: "Interviews with parents of nearly 600 children in the Detroit area indicate that mothers and fathers are coming under the influence of a welfare bureaucracy which affects their attitudes accordingly. As time passes, parents of the predominant middle-class will spank their youngsters more often."
"Leave Problems Alone; Move People In" indicates that Governor Luther Hodges, "The Lionhearted", had swapped roars with the Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Canon John Collins had roared first when he read in the British press of two North Carolina boys, ages eight and ten, who had been sent to Morrison Training School because they had "kissed" a white girl. He had sent a protest cable to the Governor, but about the time that cable was due, Canon Collins released the text of it to British reporters.
Piqued, Governor Hodges wondered whether the Canon did not seek notoriety more than information, and said so by return cable.
It indicates that perhaps the Governor was correct, but it was more interesting to speculate on human beings' insuppressible urge to solve faraway problems. Canon Collins was worried about two black children in North Carolina and Americans were worried about Boris Pasternak because the Russians would not let him have his Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. Bertrand Russell and a group of politically conscious Englishmen were raising money for dissenters on trial for "treason" in South Africa. Southern editorial writers had leaped with relish a few months earlier on the Notting Hill race riots in London. Tears of lament had flowed, but many of them had been crocodile tears. No one was malicious, but there was an audible sigh of gratitude that someone else had roughly the same problem as did those in the South. West Indian immigrants and white Londoners feuded in their pubs and so Birmingham, Ala., bus boycotts were not unique.
It regards it as much a mystery of the psyche as the frantic search for the lost penny or the wandering sheep, as the greener pasture across the fence, as Pandora's urge to open the forbidden box.
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia had proposed Federal funds to move blacks to other parts of the country, to distribute the "race problem". But it offers instead that perhaps a vast plan to move those who had no problems of their own onto the scene where their favorite problems abounded might be a better suggestion.
"We could re-settle the Canon of St. Paul's in North Carolina and send the editor of the New Republic to Boris Pasternak's side.
"We're putting in for Paris. The sidewalk cafés need our help. We feel sure of it."
The notion in earlier times had been called "Afghanistanism".
"Life in China" quotes from a report appearing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The film deals with China's rectification campaign in which parents denounced children and children denounced each other. The Peiping review says this movie 'is 20 minutes of sheer comedy.'"
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Winter Morning", tells in detail of an instance of that terrible thing indicated by the title. It concludes: "The children prance out to slay dragons with paper and pencil." You may read for yourself how it got to that point, typical of any household on a cold morning, we suspect. We use to scrunch up against the heating register in our bedroom, book satchel at the ready nearby, catching a few final winks in the warm comfort, before the last call came from our papa, our mama having already departed for the school where she taught. The last call would always come as a bit of a rude awakening, an interruption of the waking sleep which would likely pervade for most of the morning unless there was a test in the offing, in which case there was no drowsing by the register, only tense, repeated mental recitation of the memorized facts on which the test was to examine.
Drew Pearson indicates that a strange income tax case indirectly involving the brother of General Wilton Persons, who had replaced Sherman Adams in the White House, had been killed by the Justice Department and might have large political reverberations. The case involved payoffs by Northern liquor companies to two Alabama politicians, Jimmy Thrower and Emery Solomon, close political cronies of Gordon Persons, the former Governor of Alabama. It also involved seven front men used to conceal the payments. Former Governor Persons admitted to the column that he had received the money from Messrs. Thrower and Solomon, though he claimed that they were political contributions and that he did not know where the money had originated. He denied emphatically that he had asked his brother in the White House to intervene in the tax case, though he said that his brother must have known about it.
Mr. Pearson regards the most significant fact in the scandal to be that the Treasury Department officially had recommended criminal prosecution, but that someone near the top had intervened and the prosecution, which would have been quite embarrassing to the brother of General Persons, had been stopped.
During the Truman Administration, Congress had instituted an investigation of cases in which the Treasury Department had recommended prosecution, but which the Justice Department had failed to prosecute. When a case had been terminated by Treasury and sent to Justice for prosecution, it was considered airtight. Rarely did the Justice Department refuse to carry out a recommendation by Treasury.
After Mr. Persons had become Governor in 1950, he had appointed Mr. Thrower, the former Mayor of Dothan, to the ABC liquor board, which ruled on what liquor could be sold in Alabama. Mr. Thrower had worked with Mr. Solomon, who was one of the leaders in the Alabama Legislature for the Governor. Since the ABC liquor board could ban arbitrarily any brand of liquor from the state, the big liquor distributors not only flooded them with free liquor, but in the instant case, paid political tribute through front men. Mr. Thrower, working with the political henchmen of the Governor, proceeded to set up a network of friends and relatives as "company representatives". For the most part, their salaries had been paid over to Messrs. Thrower and Solomon. Adding to the conspiracy, which the tax agents had uncovered, had been the fact that the money was deposited by Mr. Thrower in the names of the front men, who never knew that they had the bank accounts. Since the money was both deposited and withdrawn without their knowledge, presumably their signatures had been forged. Mr. Solomon had admitted that he had set up the bank accounts for Mr. Thrower, but claimed that it was common practice in a country bank.
Mr. Pearson indicates that it was just part of the amazing story of how certain big liquor companies had funneled an estimated $250,000 to Alabama as payoffs for having their brands sold in that state and how the recipients, after failing to pay income taxes on the money, got their tax cases fixed in Washington. The remainder of the story, with a roll call of those involved, and the explanation of former Governor Persons, he indicates, would follow soon in another column.
Joseph Alsop examines the decision of House Republicans to elect Congressman Charles Halleck as their leader instead of Joseph Martin, who had been the leader for the previous 20 years. He indicates that given their frustration with the results in the midterm elections, they would have turned on the President if that option had been open to them. Instead, they had risen against the existing leadership in the House and Senate.
Mr. Martin was kindly, loyal, hard-working, but less tough and efficient than the leaders in the Senate and so became the scapegoat for the party's misfortunes of late. Party loyalty was his whole creed, preventing the brusquely dismissed leader of the House Republicans from blurting out such crude, unfashionable truths as that which Mr. Alsop had put forth. But his dismissal had left him quite visibly rueful and hurt. He said sadly, "If you'd done everything Ike ever asked you, wouldn't you think he'd stand by you? All he had to do was pick up the telephone, but he didn't. That's his way, of course, and I don't blame him personally. He was very kind after the result, really very kind. I'm sure he wasn't in it, but some of his people were; and so were Nixon and the Dewey crowd. They had to be. A man like Charlie Halleck can't come up and beat the leader all by himself. They said I didn't fight the Democrats hard enough. Well, I had to get votes from Sam Rayburn and [John] McCormick to put Ike's program through, didn't I? You can give 'em hell safe enough, if you have the votes. But we're a minority as Halleck will find out soon enough. The truth is, I'm glad to be out. The next two years are going to be very rough. That's another thing Halleck will find out. But I wasn't glad to be beaten. I've never been beaten before in my whole life. And you don't like being left by fellows you've always depended on and tried to help. I didn't like that, either."
Mr. Martin, 74, had shook his head, as though to shake unpleasant thoughts out of it, and turned to talking of the past. Mr. Alsop indicates that no American would ever again have the same sort of career as the small-town blacksmith's son who had gone to work at $10 per week when he left high school, saved half his salary and joined in purchasing the local newspaper with the thousand dollars he had in the bank at the end of four years. Small-town editing had gotten him into politics and he had managed the last campaign of the first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts. He had come to the House as a marked man in 1924, because he was a friend of the enigmatic President Calvin Coolidge. Nicholas Longworth had first brought him into the narrow circle which ran the House and he still looked back on that time of Mr. Longworth and John Nance Garner as a halcyon era.
He said that those had been times of bipartisanship, when Mr. Longworth and Mr. Garner would get together and settle things over a drink. They were his friends and he was proud of it, though he did not drink with them nor play poker with them. All he had ever done was work. That had been his life, the work of the House, and he regarded it as a good life. In the last week of the last session of the 85th Congress, he had put in 96 hours, according to his secretaries.
He had a blood clot in his leg, but six doctors said the leg was all right, though the illness worried him for he had never really been ill before. He said he would take a little vacation to "get really cured". After that he would come back "to be an independent member", adding that he did not mean "politically independent. I'll always be a regular Republican. I mean free to do what I like it, which the leader isn't."
Speaker Sam Rayburn, his old friend, had offered him any office he chose in the Capitol. He had a committee, the Space Committee, which did not really interest him greatly. But he would find work somehow because, as he repeated, "the work of the House is my life, and I guess it will be to the end."
A letter from the General Council of the American Jewish Congress in New York indicates that The News had rendered a public service in its excellent editorial of December 13 supporting proposals by Governor Luther Hodges for the 1959 General Assembly to increase the penalties for those found guilty of bombing public buildings and those who perpetrated bomb hoaxes. It indicates that they were pleased that the editorial had referenced the American Jewish Congress statement some weeks earlier condemning "panic" action in the wake of recent bombings and the professional marketing and mailing of hate propaganda. North Carolina Senator Sam J. Ervin had announced that he would introduce Federal anti-dynamiting legislation which would make it a Federal offense to transport explosives in interstate commerce with the intent to use them unlawfully against commercial buildings. He says that they believed that such legislation ought be extended to cover private residences and places of business as well. In a tabulation prepared by the American Jewish Congress of 72 bombings and attempted bombings in the 11 Southern states since January, 1955, it had been disclosed that 41 attacks, more than half of them, had been directed against private residences and places of business, including those of two white clergymen.
A letter writer thanks the Good Fellows Club, the Welfare Department, and friends of the church for giving her children and her a very wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year, that without their help they would not have had a Christmas.
A letter from the secretary-treasurer of Local No. 71 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters indicates that as a truck driver employed by Associated Transport, with whom he had worked for more than 20 years, he was proud of the company for which he worked and was equally proud of being a member of Local 71, indicating that since becoming a member of organized labor and realizing that it was for the common good and not for any individual or group of individuals, he had worked hard for the union. While continuing to drive his truck, he had been honored in April, 1958, by being elected to a five-year term as secretary-treasurer of the local. There were over 3,000 members of that organization and the percentage of those voting was far above that of any city, county or national election. He regards it as important that the election was conducted in the best democratic manner with no duress, coercion or purchase of votes. That being true, he wonders how the press could continue to refer to the Teamsters as belonging to Jimmy Hoffa or any other individual. "As a group I do not believe there can be found any finer men or more patriotic citizens than the members of my local. If given an opportunity to do so, I am sure that Mr. Hoffa will make the International Brotherhood of Teamsters just as 'simon-pure' as it is possible to make any group of men. Certainly, he will do more for the truck driver than could or would their enemies or competing unions."
A letter writer indicates that the biggest problem in accounting for warrants at the City Recorder's Court was not bookkeeping, but preventing malicious prosecution. Many people came to police headquarters seeking to use the power of the law for personal revenge instead of justice, having an insane desire for civil and criminal litigation. Those warrants had been handled by the police unofficially. That type of warrant simply got lost, for the good of all concerned. Forcing the police to account for every warrant, he opines, meant that the prosecutor would have to do in public what the police had been doing in private, screening out embarrassing, malicious prosecutions. He finds that malicious prosecution by solicitors went on all the time, in part from political pressure on prosecutors. He feels the best insurance against malicious use of the law was an independent reporter, that the price of justice was eternal publicity, advocating the mixing of some common sense with the college boys' theories.
Framed Edition
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