The Charlotte News
Saturday, February 21, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Moscow that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had
flown to the city this date with a smile, a gentle dig at his host
and a fur hat which had wowed the Russians. Premier Nikita Khrushchev
had welcomed him to the country with a speech full of friendly
sentiment and expressing hope for "a useful exchange of views".
The Prime Minister
In Acapulco, Mexico, it was reported that the President had flown home this date, with his friendship visit to Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos climaxed by agreement that a 100 million dollar dam ought be jointly built on the Rio Grande. The project, known as the Diablo Dam, had been in the talking stage for a decade. The Diablo Dam was to be 250 feet high and 6.5 miles long, with its site 12 miles from the Texas town of Del Rio. It would back up a similar dam, the Falcon, built by the two countries in 1953. Now, the U.S. Congress would have to appropriate funds and Mexico would have to figure out how to finance its part of the dam construction. The overall impression of the two-day good will visit was that relations between the two countries had been cemented as never previously. The communiqué issued after five days of talks between the two presidents "reconfirmed that relations between Mexico and the United States are excellent and are characterized by a spirit of good neighborliness, mutual understanding and respect." The communiqué said: "The Acapulco meeting was a meeting between friends. The two presidents understood and appreciated each other from the beginning. They are determined to continue to collaborate on matters of mutual concern through their governments and through international organizations." During the talks, a number of issues affecting the two nations were discussed, but both U.S. and Mexican observers felt that the visit had done much to do away with old resentments. The President set the keynote for his talks on his arrival at Acapulco Airport on Thursday morning when he told President Lopez Mateos: "We are ready to meet you halfway, more than halfway." The thousands of Mexicans who had turned out to welcome the President had applauded him and continued to do so throughout his activities while in Acapulco. The communiqué also expressed the leaders' agreement that "economic development is an objective of cooperation between nations." That probably meant that Mexico would receive some financial aid from the U.S. or international agencies. The communiqué said that there was agreement that there ought be cooperation and consultation between the two governments on the disposal of cotton. The President had arrived back in Washington in 20-degree weather, greeted by Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter. The President had hoped to stop in Augusta, Ga., for some golf, but was told that the weather was too wet, windy and cold.
At Fort Bragg, N.C., it was reported that a gum-chewing soldier home on leave had been arrested early this date charged with slaying a teller during a bank robbery at Fort Bragg the previous day. Officers said that the man, 27, on leave from the band at Fort McPherson, Ga., was driving his mother-in-law in a new car purchased the previous day at Fayetteville. She had promptly surrendered $81 to officers which she said that her son had provided to her the previous day in repayment of a loan. The man, arrested at Fuquay Springs, about 30 miles north of Fort Bragg, was brought to Fayetteville where he waived a preliminary hearing before a U.S. Commissioner. He was charged with committing a crime on a Government reservation. The charge covered both the bank robbery and the slaying of the 54-year old teller. The body of the teller had been found next to the locked vault in the branch of the First Citizens Bank & Trust Co., and a police officer said that $13,373 had been taken from cash drawers in the rickety, one-story white frame building. After the arrest, FBI agents had taken the man to Fayetteville where they recovered about $10,000 of the loot from a suitcase in the attic of a house which the man said belonged to him. The FBI said that he had come to Fayetteville the previous morning, where he was acquitted in U.S. District Court of a charge of theft of an M-1 rifle from the Army. Officers said that several men who knew the man said that they had seen him later hanging around the branch bank on Fort Bragg. He had been arrested while driving a new car purchased in Fayetteville after the robbery. The man was held in lieu of $50,000 bond for the next term of U.S. District Court.
In Boston, four children had perished and another had been critically burned early this date when fire had roared through the second floor of a three-story tenement house in the Roxbury district. The children's parents had escaped serious injury. Police officers said that the parents had run to the street for help when a space heater in the apartment had exploded.
In Raleigh, it was reported that the specter of new or increased taxes hovered over the General Assembly during the week as lines had begun forming on money issues. Bills brought to the floor and backstage talk among legislators had made it plain that the balanced budget offered by Governor Luther Hodges had not removed the possibility of higher taxes.
Bob Slough of The News reports that members of the Mecklenburg County delegation to the Legislature during the morning had heard plans to develop Central High School in Charlotte into an industrial education center and listened to the planned building program of the Charlotte Community College System. The chairman of the System's finance committee told the legislators that they were faced with an emergency and almost had to have funds recommended by the board of higher education. The board had recommended 1.325 million dollars in capital funds for the System. The vice-chairman of the Charlotte College trustees asked the delegation to support a resolution extending the perimeter area to include the college's site off North 29, which would give the college protection of the zoning laws. Members of the legislative delegation attending the morning meeting at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce office had included State Representatives Frank Snepp, Erwin Belk, John Kennedy and Ernest Hicks. The plans for the industrial education center at Central had been explained by City School superintendent Dr. Elmer Garinger and the supervisor of trade and industrial education for the City schools. The latter said that the target date for moving industrial classes into the Central building was September 1. Included in the industrial center would be classes in electronics, drafting, printing, auto mechanics, auto body work, heating and air-conditioning, and practical nursing. A welding shop would be built, the old music building would become a sheet metal shop and the existing machine shop would be used. He said that the school would eventually accommodate between 1,000 and 1,500 students each weekday and night in classes to extend through 10:00 p.m. The legislative delegation had also met with Chamber officials to discuss plans for the Legislature to come to Charlotte and were scheduled to discuss school consolidation plans, but had not reached those topics by noon this date.
In Melbourne, Australia, it was reported that evangelist Billy Graham's Australian crusade was gaining pace. He was preaching only 35 minutes per night instead of his usual hour, based on doctor's instructions because of hsi prior eye condition, but the crowds were so large that hundreds were being turned away nightly. An estimated 70,000 persons had attended his meetings, with hundreds of thousands of others having heard and watched them on radio and television. Officials said that the Melbourne crusade, expected to last three weeks, had been a financial success during the first week. During the current weekend, 50,000 persons were expected to jam Melbourne's open-air music bowl to see the Reverend Graham. Despite the doctor's warning to him to take it easier, he looked fit, well-tanned, with fire in his green-blue eyes. The theme of the sermons was that there would not be peace in the world until man obeyed the laws of God.
The current Secretary of Defense in 2026 appears, by his statements, to believe that the "laws of God" are that the nation ought to wage peace through war, constant war, whether on friendly nations or hostile nations, cities and people within the United States or outside it, being beside the point. The aim is to establish El Presidente as dictator of the world and thus establish God's law, for instance, rooting out one theocracy in Iran and, no doubt, substituting for it another theocracy based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. That would be real smart, starting the Crusades of the Middle Ages all over again. We do not know where this ass accumulated enough respect for his academic prowess to get into Princeton as an undergraduate and then to earn a masters degree in public policy from Harvard, and we don't care, but somewhere along the line he went off the beam, probably while guzzling Jim Beam at one of his stripper parties. We reiterate that regardless of the immediate outcome of any of these unauthorized, illegal wars these idiots are waging, we do not want a reinvigoration of the Third Reich. Everything this idiot says about "Presi-dent Trump", whose name he invokes in every other breath, breathlessly, as the greatest ever, could be uttered by the most loyal of Nazis during and after the 1930's with regard to Adolf Hitler. When that can be said, you know you're in trouble and a part of a cult, carefully cultivated by possibly the greatest salesman of the past hundred years on the international scene. That is not a compliment. These people are asses. "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition…" appears to be their mantra. Preventive or preemptive wars, assuming that's what this latest operation is, are not to be tolerated under our Constitution, our tradition and our history. We must, if we are to preserve our democracy, steadily wait, on vigilant defense, to be attacked first before waging war against a perceived enemy somewhere else on the globe or within our own borders, a strong deterrent defense being the best shield against attack—that basic orientation always necessary to have and to hold the time-tested long-term coign-of-vantage, the moral high ground in any conflict. That is a basic lesson of prior wars which these asses never bothered to learn, instead thinking that might is right, first, last, and always, and that only losers sit and wait to be attacked first. That was the rallying cry of Hitler and Nazi Germany. "Diplomacy" conducted by coercive threats or bombs for disagreement was the Nazi way in their geopolitical attempt to conquer all of Europe, and then the world, based on Mackinder's "Heartland theory", later advocated to Hitler by Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, successful until they reached the intractable resistance of England and Russia. Trump tried last year to rule the world with his stupid tariff policy which was rehashed 1890 and 1930 tripe. Now that the Supreme Court majority has properly eviscerated that atavistic nonsense, he is trying to use his role as commander-in-chief to subject the world to his personal whimsy militarily. Is any of this "policy", the so-called "Donroe doctrine", which apparently is designed to extend the Monroe Doctrine beyond the Western Hemisphere to the entire world and meant to include any sui generis slight threat, not imminent, to any nation considered an ally of the U.S., except, that is, Ukraine when attacked by Trump's buddy, Vlad Putin—the Trump-Backscratch Buddy exception to the Donroe doctrine, better named the Shoe-Manure Doctrine—, in any way consistent with Christian principles in anybody's mind but that of a dipsomaniac or a megalomaniac, someone who got turned around backwards in their orientation to humanity? Trump is fond of expressing to his ultra-rightwing base nonsensically, without any evidentiary basis whatsoever, that had Vice-President Harris been elected, there would have been a world war, his way of typically projecting his own not so secret desires, presently being manifested to try to realize his deranged fantasy of becoming a world hero, onto his most recent political opponent. Somehow we missed the near-miss world war which Trump thinks took place during the Biden-Harris Administration. When was that?
Actress June Lockhart, in this date's edition of "Lenten Guideposts", indicates that she was about four years old when her mother and father had taken her for a walk one morning along a rustic country lane in Canada, and while they were walking, some birds had begun to warble in a tree above them and her father had looked up, suddenly lifted her onto an old weathered fence post and said: "Junie, I'd like to teach you a special prayer." He then taught her words which she had repeated often sense: "Hail Mary, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…" Because of that childhood experience, she had always felt a naturalness about praying anywhere, even sitting on a fence post. She knew many who felt the same way, that a prayer could be offered anywhere. But she did not believe that all places were equal as places of prayer, as there were some where prayer had always seemed more necessary and important, for example, in the home. When she was growing up, it seemed to her that their home was built of prayer. Prayer in the home was an important stabilizer, ready to sustain in times of difficulty, but also ready to steady in times of good fortune. She had still been a child when she began to notice that there was another place special as a center of prayer, the church. While she was growing up, she observed that many of the people she admired were not quite satisfied with their prayer lives unless they included regular prayers in a church. She was curious to know why those people felt it was so important to be in a special place when they prayed. One day, she learned that her father felt that way and when she asked him why, he said, "Because prayer, my dear, is a religious act." She had asked him what he meant and he said that there were a lot of people who thought of prayer as something apart from God, as a "kind of mental energy", when he felt that prayer and God were inseparable, which was why he went to God's house when he prayed. Several years earlier, while she had been visiting Lake Arrowhead, the baby of some friends had been rushed to the hospital, desperately ill with a lung infection. Everyone in the community felt a deep sense of concern. The remainder is on an inside page.
In Los Angeles, Dr. Evan Keislar, an
educational psychologist of UCLA, had introduced to students his
invention, a teaching machine
In San Francisco, it was reported that doctors had told a 52-year old man two years earlier to stop working after he had suffered a heart attack. He had done so and applied for Social Security disability benefits but was turned down, asked for reconsideration and was turned down again. Supported by his wife, he filed for a hearing on his case the prior October and three days earlier, had received a letter from the Social Security Administration, indicating that the earlier decisions had been reversed and that he was eligible for disability payments. The previous day, a retroactive disability check for $2,042 had arrived, but the man had died of a heart attack during the night.
On the editorial page, "The Little Hole that Grew and Grew" indicates that the proposal by State Representative J. Y. Jordan, Jr., to strip the state's sales tax law of virtually all of its exemptions had been as welcome in the Legislature as porcupines at a picnic, though its shock value had been considerable. The young legislator of Buncombe County, it posits, might yet be able to bring some of his colleagues to their senses about the biggest man-made hole in North Carolina's tax dike.
The sales tax was unfortunately present to stay, having been installed as an emergency measure in 1933 when the public school system had been threatened with collapse during the Depression. It was understood that a similar levy would not be enacted when the Legislature met in 1935, but that had been wishful thinking. The tax had been continued on an "emergency" basis, and by 1937, it had won general acceptance as a permanent fixture of the revenue act.
Over the years, however, one exemption after another had been inserted to it, in sum making a mockery of the ideal of equality of enforcement. At present, there were 38 different exemptions, rendering the law unjust, unfair, inequitable and discriminatory. Most of the exemptions, it ventures, ought be eliminated, with some selectivity.
For instance, Representative Jordan would find it extremely difficult to deal with the torrent of emotion which followed any suggestion that "food for the table" ought be taxed. Telegrams from widows and orphans would be sent in profusion in no time at all.
The best guide to scrutinizers, it finds, was a rule of construction written years earlier by then-State Supreme Court Chief Justice Walter Stacey: "Taxation is the rule, exemption the exception, with strict construction applicable to the latter."
It suggests that perhaps the firmest plea for a reform of the sales tax law had been made in the early 1950's by then-commissioner of Revenue Eugene Shaw when he argued that all exemptions ought be eliminated except on sales in interstate commerce, sales to Federal, state and local governmental agencies, sales to educational, hospital and charitable institutions, sales of productive equipment actually used by farmers in producing agricultural products and by industry in the actual manufacturing or processing of goods and raw materials becoming an ingredient or component part of agriculture or industrial production.
It concludes that the exemptions in the sales tax law had already reached a gushing stage and some plugging needed to be done.
"The Woes Cannot Be Wished Away" indicates that no community could observe Brotherhood Week with a completely clear conscience, as too often, the polite pieties of casual rhetoric masked heart-rending problems, the way it was in Charlotte at present.
It finds that progress had been made through the years, much of it from the excellent work of organizations such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews. But much more still needed to be done before mutual understanding and respect would become the guiding principles of all normal, everyday human relationships.
It urges that the problems could not be wished away as they were too deeply rooted in the hard rock of human history. "Each must be faced bravely and with as much cool logic as man can summon up in one of those eras that John Donne said 'are pregnant with those old twins, Hope and Fear.'"
It indicates that Charlotte was a tough-minded, stable community with a strong sense of morality and fair play, accustomed to examining its problems and searching conscientiously for solutions, the reason there was more hope than fear. Although there remained much work to be done in Charlotte in the improvement of human relations, it is confident that it would be done because it had to be done if the community was to enjoy to the hilt the full fruits of its progress.
"The P.O. Needs a Word-Battle Winner" indicates that the Post Office Department did not seem to get out of the frying pan. To the public, the agency appeared to be some sort of voracious dragon which swallowed its appropriations whole and then yelled with a financial stomachache. The householder could not see where service was improved and everybody griped when the cost of stamps rose, part of the game to complain loudly when the post office did not deliver on time.
On the local scene, there was a further dispute involving haggling over the worth of sorting mail while en route or after it arrived at its destination. The men on the trains said that they could speed delivery with mobile sorting, while the post office claimed it could do a better job in the building.
It finds that no matter who lost the argument, it hopes the public would come out ahead on service, as the department could stand some good public relations.
"Dry Land Is a Safer Spot for the ABC" indicates that the Alcoholic Beverage Control Association had made a wise move in providing tentative plans for a summer convention cruise to Bermuda, switched to promote a less costly gathering at Nags Head on the North Carolina coast.
Since the 1957 session of the Legislature, the late A. B. Carter and room 215, the Association had tiptoed. Even if members would row to Bermuda, they would draw fire from militant forces who opposed the existence of the group. It would be even worse if cruise plans had been carried out and bad weather had been encountered. It urges thinking of the reaction if members had been spotted staggering about the deck and hanging limply at the rail.
"The mal de mer would have been continued by the opposition long after the trip had ended."
The piece refers to a scandal which had erupted during the 1957 session when it was revealed that liquor manufacturers were providing free samples of their goods to legislators out of a particular hotel room, with the alleged knowledge and connivance of ABC officials.
David Tillinghast of the Greenville Piedmont, in a piece titled "A Grain of Salt, Please", indicates that a press service women's editor had written from New York what would be charming intelligence if it could be ascertained as true. She said: "Women will look like women again this spring. And not like potato sacks, pyramids or French courtesans in négligées." While regarding it as sounding good, he still wanted his grain of salt handy as it would take more than the twist of fashions decreed by designers to make women look like women.
He suggests that perhaps they would look the part in high levels of society and places of dress formality and decorum, but that would not be enough. Women on the street, in stores, and in places where others felt some formality, were "walking violators of basic conventions on womanhood or ladyhood."
"What we're talking about is the detracting mixed costumes that aggravate the eyes so often—dress coats and some of the various types of female trouser garb worn together with just about as much appropriateness as one high heel shoe and one sandal."
Come summer, some women looked like "fugitives from plain decency. Some are bizarre. Some are painfully extreme, letting the vanity of style overrun their common sense when it comes to individual comeliness." He finds that some apparently ignored the fact that they had a great natural resource, a sacred endowment which set them apart, and under the guise of being comfortable, being in style, or being different, flagrantly turned their backs on all womanliness.
"There are not many men in this world who don't deep down want women to be women by every trait that they possess."
Drew Pearson indicates that a lot of people had been wondering how the U.S., with its vast resources of money, brains and private initiative, had allowed itself to fall behind Russia regarding missiles and satellites. He indicates that part of the inside story could be unfolded the following week when, if Senators were persistent enough, they would consider the confirmation of Admiral Lewis Strauss, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, to become Secretary of Commerce. For it had been the Admiral who had instigated the purge which had knocked Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, developer of the atomic bomb, out of the Government. With the latter's exit, scores of other scientists had become discouraged or had quit the Government completely.
Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the hydrogen atom of atomic weight two, had said: "Scientists are individualists. They are considered queer people. But they will not be regimented. They cannot be ordered to make certain discoveries. We will never know how many scientists were dissuaded from working for the Government or how many discoveries remained undiscovered by the purging of Robert Oppenheimer."
He indicates that the general fact that Dr. Oppenheimer's great brain had been lost to Government service because Admiral Strauss did not approve of his free-thinking ideas was already well known. But the purge hearing which had wound up in his ouster was held behind closed doors, with Roger Robb, later counsel for Bernard Goldfine, acting as chief prosecutor. Though a censored version of the transcript was later published, the public had never received a detailed picture of what had happened at that hearing.
The Senators who would cross-examine Admiral Strauss regarding his qualifications to be Secretary of Commerce could develop that in the hearings on his confirmation if they so desired. But Senators seldom did their homework for confirmation hearings and the chairman of the committee, Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, would likely let the Admiral off with a kiss and a promise.
He indicates that the audience had not known it, but the speech which the President had delivered to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association the previous week had actually been one which Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had intended to deliver. The REA co-ops, however, would not invite Secretary Benson to speak. The Secretary had done his best to wangle an invitation but the REA co-ops loved him about as much as they did the large utilities. He had slashed their loan program and forced them to go to private banks for high-interest loans and so no invitation was provided.
As a last resort, however, Secretary Benson had persuaded the President to seek an invitation. Previously, the President had refused to address the convention, but at the urging of Secretary Benson, he reversed himself and asked to be invited. The co-ops could hardly turn him down and offered to put him on the program either on Monday or Tuesday. White House press secretary James Hagerty saw a chance to undercut a Democratic candidate for the presidency and insisted that the President be given the spot previously reserved for Senator John F. Kennedy, but instead of canceling Senator Kennedy's speech, the co-ops had given him twin billing with the President, nettling the President considerably, but he dutifully showed up and read to the convention the speech which had been originally for Secretary Benson.
Joseph Alsop indicates that only one thing made Senator Kennedy the front-runner for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, extraordinary appeal to the mass of voters, without which he would not be in contention. Some of the evidence for the mass appeal had been drawn from a series of state and city polls taken by Louis Harris, rendering results which were even worse for the Republicans than for the Senator's Democratic rivals. The results had been confided to a small circle of politicians friendly to the Senator and copies had been obtained from a member of that circle.
The Harris polls would likely be denounced as less than impartial because of their origin. But Senator Kennedy was only one of many candidates, both Republican and Democratic, concerning whom Mr. Harris had conducted opinion polls, and the record showed that his polls had been useful. The more general results of the recent Gallup national presidential poll also strongly confirmed the results of the Harris poll. Mr. Alsop indicates that he had also rung doorbells with Mr. Harris and could vouch for the care with which the latter conducted his polling. He thus concludes that if any poll deserved attention, the findings of Mr. Harris deserved it.
Senator Kennedy had been tested against the Republican front-runner, Vice-President Nixon. State by state, omitting undecided voters who generally formed about a quarter of those polled, the percentage of those favoring Senator Kennedy were 55 percent to 45 percent for Mr. Nixon in California, 72 percent compared to 28 percent for Mr. Nixon in Florida, 58 percent, compared to 42 percent for Mr. Nixon in Maryland, 54 to 46 percent in Ohio, 59 percent to 41 percent in Oregon, 57 percent to 43 percent in Pennsylvania, 56 percent to 44 percent in West Virginia, and 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent for the Vice-President in Wisconsin.
All of those state tests had been made during the last midterm elections, when Mr. Harris had been commissioned to do other political polling in those same states. In some of the states, other Democratic candidates had also been tested against Mr. Nixon, also with fairly startling results. For example, in Pennsylvania and Oregon, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had run behind the Vice-President, in both cases, by 51 to 44 percent. Senator Symington had also wound up on the losing end, 61 to 39 percent, in Wisconsin.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had been favored in Oregon against the Vice-President by a margin of only two percentage points, but then lost in Wisconsin, albeit by a narrower margin than had Senator Symington.
West Virginia had been the only state where Senators Kennedy, Humphrey and Symington were closely comparable when tested against Mr. Nixon. Adlai Stevenson had not been tested in the same state where the strength of Senators Humphrey and Symington had been tested, but in Ohio, Mr. Stevenson had lost to the Vice-President by 50.5 percent to 49.5.
Another much more recent Harris poll indicated that the support for Senator Kennedy was not just a passing mania among the people. Though farm votes had not entered into a poll taken within the last weeks in the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Phoenix, the Vice-President had fared even worse than in other polls, doing less well than New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in those cities in his home territory.
Omitting the undecided voters, Senator Kennedy had beaten the Vice-President by 61 to 39 percent, while Senator Symington had outpolled him by 53 percent to 47, and Senator Humphrey had won by 54 to 46 percent. Senator Kennedy had also beaten Governor Rockefeller by 57 to 43 percent, but the Governor had defeated Senator Symington by 52 to 48 and barely had defeated Senator Humphrey by 51 to 49.
In that poll of West Coast cities, all three of the Democrats polled had run especially well among Catholic voters, with Senator Kennedy strongly in the lead. The Protestant voters were more Republican-minded, but they also liked Senator Kennedy, a Catholic, better than they liked their fellow Protestants, Senators Symington and Humphrey. For instance, Senator Kennedy and Governor Rockefeller had run even among the Protestants, whereas Governor Rockefeller had led Senator Symington by 57 to 43 percent and Senator Humphrey by 58 to 42 percent.
Mr. Alsop indicates that one would hardly dare to present the figures if it were not for the recollection of such experiences as the doorbell ringing in Queens which had shown a decisive lead for General Eisenhower in 1952, for Averell Harriman in the gubernatorial race of 1954, and again for President Eisenhower in 1956. Mr. Harris had gone along on that occasion and Mr. Alsop had found the type of switch from Governor Harriman to Governor Rockefeller which eventually ended in the latter's gubernatorial victory in 1958. Yet in a Kennedy-Nixon test which he had not published, it had been found that Senator Kennedy led Governor Rockefeller and swamped Mr. Nixon by about 20 percentage points in Queens. There again, the Protestants included many who supported Senator Kennedy.
He concludes that the election was still far off and convention delegates were not won based on opinion polls. "But there is much to interest any political handicapper in the data presented above."
Doris Fleeson indicates that Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, newly elected as the Minority Leader in the Senate, had sent a slightly belated Valentine to the President who had supported him for the post against the opposition of the erstwhile Eisenhower Republicans, and had signed it, "Little Spender". Senator Dirksen was irked by allegations by Democrats that in truth and fact, the President had been the big spender and the Democratic Congress the economizer.
For months, the Democrats had taken in silence the charge by the President that they were a party of wild extravagance. In speeches by Senate and House leaders Lyndon Johnson and John McCormick, the worm had finally turned, with those speeches purporting to show that in actuality Congress had cut 5 billion dollars from the President's budget.
According to Republicans, the President had been stung by that switch by the Senator and Representative regarding his arguments. At his weekly meetings with Republican leaders from Congress, he indicated his feeling that Republicans in Congress ought reply. The dutiful Senator Dirksen had responded in several thousand eloquent words, plus a collection of charts handed to him by the Bureau of the Budget. Forewarned of Senator Dirksen's project, several Democratic hecklers, led by Senator Johnson, had gone to the floor while most Republicans scurried to the cloakrooms. The result had provided some merriment for the capital all too normally freighted with gloom.
Figures notoriously were prone to lie and liars to figure in the case of anything as big as the ten-pound budget, with the temptation to employ the large figures for partisan advantage being well-nigh irresistible.
Senator Dirksen, a natural-born debater who had repeatedly proved that he could be convincing on both sides of most questions, had done an expert job with very little help from his cohorts. But he was up against other experts, such as Senators Johnson, Mike Mansfield of Montana and John Sparkman of Alabama. All had served with him in both the House and Senate and knew his gambits.
In the final confusion of charges and counter-charges, Senator Dirksen had been betrayed into saying, "I have given you the figures, the defense rests." That was the position into which the Democrats had sought to place him, and realizing his mistake, he hastily added: "No, no, defense is the wrong word. We need no defense."
She indicates that they were playing a game of tag with the budget to see who could pin the big-spender label on the other, all recognizing that the budget would be large, unbalanced, and result in another large deficit. Neither party was making a genuine, sustained and consistent effort to have it otherwise. Nobody in Washington, from the President down, was setting an example of the type of austerity which would at least help to dissipate the aura of cynicism which hung over the whole situation.
A letter from the director of Region 5 of the AFL-CIO, indicates that recently a man's motel room had been forcibly entered and he had been beaten severely. When he had appealed to the local police and sheriff in Charlotte, he was denied protection and was not even permitted to use the radio-telephone to request assistance from the State Highway Patrol. The man in question had been a representative of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, lived in Greensboro, and was engaged in the lawful pursuit of his business as a union organizer because of a request from a substantial number of employees at Franklin Hosiery Mills for assistance in organizing a local union. The man had sustained serious injuries as a result of the beating by a lawless group of people in violation of his rights in the pursuit of his work. The writer indicates his concern at having failed to see a single line in either of the Charlotte newspapers condemning the mob action, or any condemnation from a single pulpit of any church in the area. He finds it apparent for some time that a great many of the daily newspapers not only condoned lawless mob action, but encouraged it by their careless use of statements about people being run out of town because they did not conform to the thinking of certain people who differed with them on their political and economic thinking. He finds it to point the way to similar situations as those which had occurred in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Falangist Spain, as well as in Communist Russia. "We cannot have the laws in this country applied to fit any particular situation; they must apply to all lawbreakers alike."
The editors note that the press was hardly to blame for what did or did not happen in Franklin, and that the writer's insinuation was "absurd".
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that he did not think Americans ought be much scared of the atomic bombs of Russia as there was much more danger that the millions of people in China would spill over into the Americas and take over the entire world by sheer force of numbers. He thinks there should be a union of all European people to protect themselves against the great horde of Chinese and to keep them from spilling into Europe and the Americas and taking charge of the entire world. "The agitators for an Atlantic Union like Wendell Willkie and others had this Chinese danger in mind when they tried to get a union of Western Europe and the United States."
A letter writer from Osaka, Japan, says that he had learned of The News through the Youth Council for International Contact in Tokyo, that he was 17 years old and attending Gardening High School. Their organization, the Youth Council, had tens of thousands of members throughout Japan. Its purpose was to create international friendship and understanding and they were seeking to introduce the United States to Japan. He wanted to have a friend in the U.S. but did not know how to get one and wishes the cooperation of the newspaper, with so many readers, to help him.
His address is listed, should you have a mind to write.
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