The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 31, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that a Democratic attempt to accelerate defense spending had
appeared likely this date after Senate testimony that more money was
needed to match Soviet space and missile advances. Two days of a
wide-ranging Senate inquiry into the status of U.S. preparedness had
touched off speculation that Senate Democrats might try to expand the
President's defense budget. The President was recommending slightly
more than 40 billion dollars in defense spending for the fiscal year
beginning July 1. Both he and Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy
contended that it was adequate to cope with any Soviet threat. As the
Senate inquiry had gone into recess until the middle of the following
week, Representative Overton Brooks of Louisiana, chairman of the
House Space Committee, announced hearings paralleling the Senate's,
to begin on Monday. A possible hint to Democratic plans for defense
spending had come on Friday as Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had
recessed the inquiry by the combined Senate Space and Preparedness
subcommittees. Senator Johnson, chairman of both groups, said that
public testimony thus far by top defense, space and missile officials
indicated that there were deficiencies which had to be explored
behind closed doors because of military secrets involved. (For those au courant, that means that one of those Venezuelan discombobulators would be revealed
Farm income might be cut by hundreds
of millions of dollars during the ensuing few years by new changes in
figuring agricultural price supports pursuant to changes announced by
Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson in a surprise
administrative action late on Friday. The President had told Congress
in his special farm message on Thursday that price supports were too
costly and were encouraging production of farm surpluses. The change
was expected to have repercussions in the Democratic-controlled
Congress and in some farmer groups. Cotton producers were the first
to be affected, as their income from the 1959 crop faced a potential
cut of almost 60 million dollars. Other products which were likely to
feel the impact during the year included tobacco, peanuts, rice and
dairy products. The development could influence the year's returns
from such other crops as soybeans, cotton seed, flaxseed and dry
beans. In 1960 and subsequent years, it could affect income not only
from those crops but from wheat, corn, oats, barley and sorghum
grains as well. The action involved a revision in the Department's
formula for determining parity prices of farm products, which were
price standards declared by law to be fair to farmers in relation to prices
charged them. Under farm law, price supports for most products were
based on the parity prices. The new formula had the effect, according
to officials, of reducing parity prices by about 3.33 percent and the actual
price supports for most supported products from about 2.25 to 2.75 percent.
In times of surplus supplies, such as those at present, price
supports tended to fix market prices. Usually, any reduction in
supports was reflected in a somewhat similar reduction in market
prices. The prospect of lower farm returns was based on the
assumption that market prices would continue to be determined largely
by price supports and the further assumption that the revision in the
parity formula would be maintained in effect. Within minutes after
the change in the method of determining parity had been disclosed,
the Department had announced price supports for the current year's
cotton crop, which would average, according to officials, about $4.50
per bale less than would have been the case had the parity revision
not been made. On a 13-million bale crop, it would amount to almost
60 million dollars. The effect of Secretary Benson's action would
show up for rice, tobacco, peanuts and dairy products as soon as he
announced the 1959 supports for them, assuming that he would set the
supports at minimum percentages of parity permitted by law. They had
been at those minimums the previous year and the continued presence
of surpluses was expected to influence him in keeping them at the
minimum. Wheat would not be affected during the current year because
the support for it already had been announced. The support for the
year's corn would not be determined on the parity formula but on
market prices during the previous three years. (Meanwhile cattle prices would be determined by how far the drovers were willing to drive them to market in the Wild
In Richmond, Va., it was reported that State Senate supporters of Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., said that they believed that they had enough votes to pass this date a program to ease the impact of school integration. A ruling had been expected soon, possibly this date, from Chief Justice Earl Warren on the Arlington School Board's request for a delay of enrollment of four black students at a junior high school. Justice Warren had promised Arlington swift action on its request for a delay. Arlington school officials said that plans had been completed for enrollment of the black children and that no trouble was anticipated should a delay be denied. To make certain that no incidents occurred, the police would block off an area of a half-mile surrounding the school on Monday morning. In Norfolk, school officials said that everything was in readiness for integration on Monday of six schools which had been closed since the prior fall. Norfolk police said that they had no present plans to show police force at the six schools and expected no violence. Governor Almond's program, granting tuition payments to those who did not want to attend integrated schools and repealing compulsory school attendance under state law, already had passed the State House of Delegates. It was now before the State Senate Finance Committee, the membership of which included most of the Senators who had been seeking stronger action than the Governor had sought from the special session. The tuition grant bills had passed the House of Delegates by an unanimous vote and the school attendance repeal had passed by a vote of 89 to 3. The House had also approved a bill making it a felony for a person over 14 to threaten or communicate a threat of a bombing. The Senate's only action on Friday had been to reaffirm an earlier resolution pledging continued fight against what it called usurpation of state authority by the Supreme Court.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, it was reported that President Sukarno had flown to Bab this date for his third resting holiday since September, having been reported unofficially to have been advised to have a medical checkup by foreign doctors for suspected kidney trouble.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, high seas and whistling polar winds had hampered a search this date for a Danish ship, feared lost after hitting an iceberg off the tip of Greenland. A small German trawler reported that it could find no trace of the cargo-passenger ship with between 90 and 130 persons aboard in the area given by the vessel in its final SOS the previous day, which had said that the ship was slowly sinking. A U.S. Navy radar patrol plane circled the area beset by 20-foot waves in the North Atlantic and found no trace of the ship or lifeboats. Several other vessels were en route but had little hope of reaching the scene before darkness would again close in. The Greenland Navy Command had advised the U.S. Coast Guard that the ship had carried life rafts equipped with radios which sent out a continuous beacon signal but that none of the ships in the area had reported hearing any such signals. There had been only silence after the Danish Government-owned ship had sent out its last signal late the previous day. In Copenhagen, King Frederick IX summoned Premier H. C. Hansen to report on the progress of the search, and the Premier then called his Cabinet into extraordinary session. The ship had hit the iceberg shortly before noon on Friday and had radioed less than four hours later that it was "slowly sinking and needed immediate assistance." The German trawler had reached the area about an hour after that last message but the wind had been blowing at 60 mph and icy waves were 20 feet high, with fog cutting visibility, and then darkness had fallen. The German trawler had combed the area through the night and just before daylight had still seen no trace of the missing vessel. The trawler radioed the approaching U.S. Coast Guard cutter that it had searched and found or observed nothing, no lights, lifeboats or ship.
In Mayport, Fla., it was reported that for eight days, two men had sat in a ten-foot rubber dinghy thinking and fishing, not catching any fish, only floating helplessly in the open Atlantic. They said that they were thankful to be alive on Friday night in an interview aboard a Netherlands aircraft carrier which had been en route to Florida for maneuvers with the U.S. Navy, finding the shipwrecked pair east of Bermuda. During the eight days in which they had been adrift, they had lived off a can of tuna and a small bottle of grape juice each day. They had enough rations to last for about a month. They had started from New York City on January 9 in the 47-foot sloop, desiring to go to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands to look them over because the wife of the owner of the sloop and he had been planning to settle in that area. His wife was going to fly to San Juan to meet them. It had been a fairly good trip until they encountered rough weather on January 19 about 465 miles east of Bermuda. In winds up to 65 mph, the sloop had begun to leak and sink. They had a radio on the sloop but it was out of order when they needed it. The two men gathered up a few possessions and rations and got into the ten-foot rubber dinghy. The owner of the sloop said that after he was rested, he planned to head back to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and might start out by boat again. The other man said that it was his first and he hoped his last experience of being in trouble afloat.
In Follansbee, W. Va., two large chemical tanks had blown up and turned into flaming torches the previous night at the Koppers Co. plant near the town. No one had been hurt and company officials were investigating to determine what had caused the explosions. No damage estimate was available. Whether the Klappers were saved is not told.
John Borchert of The News reports that machinery for a major political campaign against the present City Council in Charlotte was believed to have been discussed during the morning at a closed-door meeting of leading businessmen and bankers of the city. Approximately 20 men had attended the session at a restaurant, having been noncommittal about the purpose of the meeting. One of them told a reporter that they might get into serious discussion over certain matters and might just go up the street and get a drink. There had been much talk about businessmen in the city forming an opposition slate of seven men to oppose the Council incumbents. A press delegation was waiting in the lobby of the restaurant after the session. Those at the meeting had been asked to attend by letter said to have been unsigned. It sounds like "Ten Little Indians". We hope that all 20 survive.
In Columbia, S.C., a young mother who had died after drinking mistletoe tea had been the victim of "an almost unheard of poison", according to a toxicology report this date. Despite her husband's objections, the 28-year old woman of Lexington had drunk the tea the previous day as a cold remedy and had quickly become ill and was dead on arrival at a Columbia hospital. Specialists at Columbia's Poison Control Center said that the mistletoe contained a poisonous semi-protein substance called "flavin", for which there was no specific antidote. You can kiss under it but don't drink it.
In Sacramento, Calif., it was reported that 76 wine-tasters, 75 of whom were male and one female, had been tested on Friday as potential judges for the State Fair. Twenty would be selected. They had begun in the morning by identifying varieties of white table wine and eight hours later were still straight-legged and clear-eyed as they evaluated the relative qualities of the brandies. Dr. George Marsh of the department of food technology at the University of California, Davis, had been a wine judge since 1935 and when asked whether wine tasters ever overdid it, he said that he had never seen a taster drunk on the job, but that after the testing was over, when they relaxed, anything could happen. The lone woman among the potential judges, of Alameda, had been shocked at the thought, saying, "Everybody in my family has been a wine drinker all my life and I've never seen any of them drunk." (Sure, that's because you were drunk, too.) The tasters came from all over the state to match palates. Dr. Salvatore Lucia, head of the department of preventive medicine at the University of California, said that "it's all a matter of taste. Just like with girls. Some like blondes, some like redheads." Dr. Marsh, when asked why he participated, shrugged and replied: "Darned if I know. I just like it." Dr. Maynard Amerine, chairman of the University's departments of viticulture, the study of grapes, and enology, the study of wine, located at Davis, had arranged the tests. The tasters had gone through 30 cases of wine and brandy. What does the chairman of the department of phrenology have to say?
On the editorial page, "Excellence Is a Seamless Garment" indicates that Dr. James Conant, distinguished chemist and past president of Harvard and U.S. high commissioner to Germany, had indulged in no "devil theory" about the American schools in his The American High School Today.
His report would be particularly disturbing to those who assumed that American diversity stopped at the edge of the schoolyard. It would also disturb those who assumed that any one idea, set of ideas or group were the satans frozen immovably in the center of the educational system, an assumption which led to the easy conclusion that when the satans were purged, there would be a superior system of education.
Dr. Conant did not accept any of that, finding that there were no devils and that there was no such thing as a typical American high school, that it was impossible to draw a blueprint of an ideal high school. High schools in America directly reflected their milieu, whether it was suburbia, the laborer's ghetto, the immigrant's slum or a gigantic wheat field.
Among the many detailed criticisms
which he had gleaned from his investigation, one, he said, stood out:
"If the fifty-five schools I have visited, all of which have a good
reputation, are at all representative of American public high
schools, I think one general criticism would be in order: The
academically talented student, as a rule, is not being sufficiently
challenged, does not work hard enough, and his program of academic
subjects is not of sufficient range… As I have indicated …
correction of the situation in many instances will depend upon an
altered attitude of the community quite as much as upon action by a
school board or the school administration." (It might be noted that one of those schools he had visited was Hibbing High School in Minnesota, from which Robert Zimmerman would graduate in spring, 1959
He had underscored some hard truths
Still another truth was that if the bugaboo of seeming "undemocratic" or creating a superior elite haunted the society, then the schools would continue to bury the "academically talented student" under a curriculum which bored him or her, workloads at which the student laughed and a conventionality finally accepted in weary acquiescence.
Dr. Conant had not prescribed a panacea for the American high schools and had said that without radical changes the good might become excellent and the mediocre, perhaps, good, but that there would have to be some reconciliation to the worth of superiority, which was where the peace had to be made.
"'Schizophrenia' that Was Felt Abroad" suggests that the President had a split personality as demonstrated at his press conference of the previous week. Drew Middleton of the New York Times had stated, "Few incidents have caused deeper or more widespread irritation in Britain." The incident of which he spoke was the English Electric Co.'s low bid, 19 percent lower than the nearest American competitor, having been rejected in Washington. The British company's turbines were to have been used in a dam in Arkansas, but on grounds of "national security", the bid had gone to a Pennsylvania company. The evidence was fairly conclusive that the switch had been made as early as the prior November 1 for the benefit of ultimately successful Republican candidate for the Senate, Representative Hugh Scott, whose campaign had been undermined by Pennsylvania unemployment.
It indicates that in its sober moments, the Administration had evangelized for "trade not aid", a motto which the British had begun to take quite seriously, but a motto ironically enough which had been conceived in the 1952 campaign or earlier to throw bad light on Democratic aid policy, calling it a "giveaway", etc.
Split personality, in the case of manic depressives, was said to involve an inability to weigh the relative importance of things, an imbalance of inclination. "Was the salvation of one badly pressed Republican senatorial candidate enough to justify jeopardizing trade relations with Britain? Someone in the administration thought so." It concludes that it was schizophrenia, with imbalance to the manic side.
"Everyone Will Watch but Rip Van Winkle" offers in verse some relevant topical thoughts.
Sample: "Perhaps we'll bridge the missile gap/ If we can awaken from the national nap./ But the unconquerable gap, for all intentions,/ Is the astonishing boredom with Science inventions."
It concludes: "Only one thing worries us about these new wrinkles:/ The inevitable presence of Rip Van Winkles./ Super-duper Hudson Valleys, with science unenthused/ Will be jammed with reactionaries who always snoozed./ Blasé humans reading Rousseau and Shelley,/ Stone-age romantics whose ideas are smelly,/ Committing the black crime in a world purged of ills,/ Of crying, 'To Hell with your anti-sleep pills!'"
Well, it need not expect the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
We can try for an update: With the gap in the generations/ Spanning the gap in the Uher's reiteration/ Covering up that which was taboo, for national security/ Over the meadow and through the Northwoods/ Beyond fences bartering credos for lay-away pay plans/ And the Sleepy Hollow Men for Crayoned Sketches of the callow pens/ The Grand Mal kettle always percolating in the den/ Where stranded petals fall helplessly into My Sin,/ The cologne of war, sweet with the due of the dead/ While columns of caissons sweep on up the way/ To explain the raison d'etre of those who failed to pay/ Their keep and board as they claimed that Eastcheap's barkeep
A piece from the Baltimore Sun, titled "Menus and Budgets", indicates that the Tour D'Argent in Paris was an unusual restaurant, stating that on some other occasion it would discuss the unusual excellence of its cuisine and the unusual view from its windows, but now wished to discuss its unusual way of presenting the menu to its clientele. From the outside, the menu presented to the lady and the one presented to the gentleman looked identical. But inside they were different. The gentleman's menu included the prices, which were staggering, but the lady's copy discreetly omitted the prices, so that she could weigh her choices without being concerned about how much it would cost. That was left entirely to the gentleman.
It finds an analogy with current attitudes toward budget-making. Some people thought that the way to proceed was to order everything on the menu which tempted the appetite and let the cost go hang, while others, such as those in the present Administration, were unable to disregard those large figures and sought to keep the cost of the meal within the capacity to pay. The first method was more fun but could be needlessly expensive while the second method, though stodgy, avoided future embarrassment and was better for the digestion.
Drew Pearson, writing from New Orleans, indicates that the city was famous for its oil, beautiful Creole women, the French Quarter, the Mardi Gras and for the Mississippi "Mother of Waters" which poured 406,250,000 tons of Midwestern silt into the Gulf of Mexico every year. Less famous was a resident of New Orleans who had affected the lives of millions, Dr. Alton Ochsner of Tulane University, who about 20 years earlier had begun looking at the theory that cigarette-smoking caused lung cancer. No one had paid much attention to him at the time and even most of his medical associates had doubted his research. But he continued to read papers to medical meetings showing what happened to rats when subjected to cigarette smoke. Now, as a result of his crusade, the U.S. Public Health Service had officially warned American smokers that cigarettes were conducive to lung cancer. The British Medical Society, the American Cancer Society and others had gone on record regarding cancer and cigarettes. When Mr. Pearson had talked to Dr. Ochsner in the Boston Club in New Orleans, he had said: "I am so proud of the American Cancer Society. One year ago it passed a resolution that it was its duty to call attention to the effect of cigarettes not only on the lungs but the heart. The American Heart Society proceeded to criticize us for invading its territory. But the Cancer Society stuck to its guns. It's the tobacco tars which cause cancer of the lung and it's the nicotine which affects the arteries. Tobacco can be grown today without nicotine, but the cigarette companies won't use it because it's the nicotine which gives the cigarette smoker a lift."
Though a long resident of New Orleans, Dr. Ochsner had been born in South Dakota and was watching a bill introduced in that state's Legislature by Don Stransky which would require a skull and crossbones to be stamped on every package of cigarettes sold in that state.
Former Governor and Senator Huey Long, who had been dead for more than 20 years, still had his ghost hanging over Louisiana, as his brother, Earl, still sat as Governor and his son, Russell, was a Senator, while his former associate, Allen Ellender, was the other Senator. Until his death, his brother had served in the House, indicating that the magic name of "Long" could enable a person to be elected to anything in Louisiana. Huey had once said, "I don't care what the cities think about me, as long as the country folks are with me." The country folks, who had elected him Governor and Senator and would have kept on electing him indefinitely had he not been assassinated in 1935, were still with him. The bridges he built, the free schoolbooks he had instituted were still remembered. "The harangues, the filibusters, the clowning, the grotesque grandstanding are forgotten."
Joseph Alsop indicates that in public and private, the President, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, and Joint Chiefs chairman, General Nathan Twining, were now "pouring the usual floods of soothing syrup about America's defense posture," only this year's soothing syrup had differed from prior years in that, for instance, it had a higher content of outright untruth. Even the President had indulged in flat misstatement of facts, though doubtless unwittingly, when he had told his press conference that "our missile program is going forward as rapidly as possible."
He finds, however, that the "soothing syrup" of 1959 was memorable not so much for the untruth as for the "harsh, disagreeable, indigestible facts that are left out." As an illustration of the latter, he offers the "diversified means of delivery" argument used before the Senate Armed Services Committee by General Twining and Secretary of Defense McElroy. Even by making the most transparently over-optimistic estimates of Soviet progress, they could not wish away the Soviet lead in ICBM's. Secretary McElroy had admitted that the U.S. was conceding the Soviets a 3 to 1 lead in ICBM's by 1962, but in reality, it was almost certainly the case that it was worse than that. But General Twining and Secretary McElroy argued that the Soviet ICBM lead would be counter-balanced by the U.S. "diversified means of delivery".
Thus, they were comparing the U.S. smaller number of ICBM's and its Strategic Air Command, plus the IRBM's being sent to the nation's allies to the Soviet lead in ICBM's and suggesting that the results ought be satisfactory to everyone.
In the Senate hearings, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had asked General Twining how many IRBM's the Soviets would have among their own "diversified means of delivery", and the General had responded that he did not know and would have to look into the matter. Mr. Alsop finds the answer plain, that the Soviets had to be assumed to have either already in operational squadrons or soon to be operational between 600 and 1,000 IRBM's to cover the Strategic Air Command bases in Europe and the Mediterranean, plus enough additional numbers to cover SAC's Pacific bases.
The regular Soviet IRBM testing rate of 15 per month, fired as though by clockwork, implied test-firings to train operational IRBM squadrons. The identification of whole Soviet IRBM-trains, including specially designed cars to serve as launching pads, also implied the number. Another fact was the enormous number of Soviet IRBM tests which were identified in the earlier period before the U.S. had tested even one IRBM at full-range.
He finds therefore that the truth was that the Soviet IRBM lead was vastly greater than the Soviet ICBM lead. Secretary McElroy had not been allowed to count the Soviet IRBM's on a special guided tour so that he could say that he was not "positive" that the Soviets had any which were operational. But it was worse than playing Russian roulette with the intelligence estimates if U.S. policy was not based on the assumption that the Soviets presently had or would soon have the type of IRBM capability outlined by the piece above. That capability was simply omitted from the balance sheet.
Meanwhile, the mere eight squadrons of 120 IRBM's which the U.S. would eventually send to Britain and elsewhere had been used on the credit side of the balance sheet, omitting the fact that the nation's allies would absolutely control the use of those IRBM's. The whole striking power of SAC had also been used as a credit, omitting that SAC's striking power could be reduced by at least 50 or even 60 percent by surprise attack by the Soviet IRBM's on SAC's overseas bases. Thus, he concludes, the balance sheet had been cooked in a flagrant manner.
He indicates that the question remained as to why General Twining and Secretary McElroy were willing to delude themselves and then willing to delude the public by cooking the balance sheet, finding that the answer lay in the Administration's belief that it was better not to look hard facts in the face because the richest country in the world could not afford to defend itself. As General Twining had gloomily remarked, "irresponsible spending for military hardware" could result in the country losing, without ever firing a shot, the very things for which it was now fighting.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the President of Argentina, Arturo Frondizi, had come to Washington and gone. Unlike the recent visit of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, Sr. Frondizi had made a state visit in which the whole ritual for such occasions had been observed. But he had left behind for the American people to ponder what could be fairly called the most poignant, and perhaps the most embarrassing, question in the country's foreign relations, that being whether the U.S. was ready to recognize the principle that rich nations in the world community, as with rich individuals in their own communities, had a duty to help the poor to raise themselves from poverty. He had said that it could not be ignored that millions of beings in Latin America suffered from misery and backwardness and that when there was misery and backwardness in a country, not only freedom and democracy were doomed but even national sovereignty was in jeopardy.
That principle was not presently part of the U.S. official philosophy of foreign aid. The U.S. had made substantial contributions, not all of which had been wise and effective. But in relation to the country's wealth, the contributions had not been very great. What mattered most was that Congress had voted those contributions based on a self-defeating principle, not that the rich had a duty to the poor but on the theory that the U.S. was subsidizing its allies in the cold war. Because Latin America had not been on the front line of the cold war, the U.S. had done comparatively little about the "misery and backwardness" of Latin America.
President Frondizi had challenged the concept that foreign aid was an instrument of the cold war and would not otherwise be necessary or desirable, indicating that there were people in high places who were prepared to understand him, notable among whom was Undersecretary of State in charge of economic affairs, Douglas Dillon. On January 16, before the Foundation for Religious Action, Mr. Dillon had made a speech which had received little attention at the time but was of great and far-reaching consequence. After saying that there was no need to spell out the full dimensions of the Soviet challenge, he had gone on "to examine with you the demand being made upon our resources and upon our consciences to help raise the living standards of the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America. These are the areas where most of mankind lives and where the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism may ultimately be decided. The need to help these peoples forward on the road to economic progress would confront us even if communism and the Sino-Soviet bloc simply didn't exist."
The gap between the rich peoples of Western Europe, North America and Australasia on the one hand, of Asia, Africa and Latin America on the other, was enormous. Worse still, the gap was widening such that the richer peoples were getting richer faster than the poorer peoples were overcoming their poverty. The rich countries, with a total population of about 400 million, had an average income per capita of about $1,000 per year. In the U.S., it was more than $2,000 per year. The underdeveloped countries, excluding Communist China, had a population of over a billion and an average income of only $60 per year. During the previous 50 years, the per capita income in the West had doubled and it was rising appreciably each year. In the poorer countries, the per capita income had increased very little, and in many places had deteriorated.
He suggests that those were the overriding facts of the times in which people lived and of the world in which the U.S. had to play a major role, and that it was not too much to say that on the nation's response to those facts would depend the prospects in the cold war and the country's position in the ensuing decades as a world power. It did not mean that the U.S., only about 7 percent of the world's population, could eliminate the immemorial misery of half of the human race, but could raise considerably the amount of investment or lending to the key countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which the country could afford to set aside, up to approximately 5 billion dollars annually, for development and reconstruction, not much more than a percent of the nation's gross national product.
The way the U.S. made its contributions was at least as important as the amount of the contribution. For insofar as it treated the contributions as a subsidy to buy allies in the cold war, they did as much or probably more harm than they did good, for it presented the U.S. in the guise of a great imperial power seeking to buy dependents, a principal reason why the country had been losing and not gaining friends in the world, despite its foreign aid.
The whole operation of foreign aid would have a different face if founded on the principle set forth by Mr. Dillon, that the contribution was because it was the simple duty of the rich to help the poor. It would be a noble act which would pay large dividends in self-respect at home and good will abroad if the Government would declare the principle that to fight against poverty was a duty, not an instrument of military strategy.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that he did not believe it was wishful thinking that Congress and the people, who were presently bored with foreign aid as it was presented and administered, would respond more readily if it were inspired by a big idea, rather than by small and calculating notions of how to score points in an international contest.
A letter writer finds that a person in Raleigh was complaining that the chief qualification for the appointment of a new Federal judge in the Eastern District of the state was apparently that the person had served the Republican Party very ably. He indicates that even if it were true, the individual who had complained, who was apparently a Democrat, had not complained before about appointments on a political basis, indicating that all judicial appointees were first examined to determine their undying loyalty to the Democratic Party. Recently, two of the people who had been most instrumental in bringing aid to Carver and Charlotte Colleges had been rejected as members of the board for those colleges, one because he was a Republican and the other because he had supported Republican Congressman Charles Jonas. He thus finds it not surprising that the Republicans would nominate a person from their own party, which had many capable lawyers who would have long earlier been appointed or elected to high office had they been Democrats.
A letter writer indicates that he had noticed in a recent edition of the newspaper that hungry schoolchildren had been an increasing problem in Charlotte and in Mecklenburg County. He had noted the suggestion that perhaps ABC liquor funds could possibly be used to feed the children. He believes that if liquor interests were required by law to feed all of the children, the hunger problem could be solved.
Well, as long as they do not require that their product also be included on the school menu as a quid pro quo, as that would inevitably lead to a lot of drunken children exacerbating the already problematic displays of discipline in the schools and juvenile delinquency outside the school. We do not need or want drunken children. You may laugh, but believe us, there were plenty of them in this period of time, starting as early as the seventh grade, maybe even in some cases earlier. It was chronic.
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