The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 16, 1954
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at least 77 persons had died and millions of dollars worth of property had been damaged by the broad swath cut by Hurricane Hazel between the coastal areas of the Carolinas through Virginia, into Pennsylvania and eventually into Toronto, with swollen rivers rising to flood stage in Pennsylvania, causing thousands to have to flee their homes and leaving uncounted numbers in other regions homeless. In all, the hurricane had impacted eight states and the District of Columbia, with many still being without power and communications. Rising waters still threatened parts of Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers converged to form the Ohio, with a crest expected in late afternoon which would flood parts of the city, already impacted by the hurricane's winds. Dozens of other Pennsylvania cities had been impacted by the wind and rising flood waters, with Butler, a town of 24,000 in the eastern part of the state, being under five to eight feet of water, requiring rowboats to rescue marooned families. Civil defense workers, firemen and police helped 150 families from their homes in flooded Derry, just north of Pittsburgh.
The hurricane was being called one of the worst continental storms of the century, having formed on October 5 off Venezuela in the Caribbean, where it gained force for days, before then heading north across Haiti the previous Tuesday, killing more than 100 persons there, then hitting the U.S. mainland early the previous day around Myrtle Beach, S.C., where thousands of beachfront homes were destroyed and many washed away, then crossing through North Carolina, cutting a 200-mile wide swath through central Virginia, then impacting Delaware, parts of Maryland around Baltimore, and Pennsylvania, impacting to a lesser degree New York and New England, before heading into Canada, causing new havoc there this date. The known fatalities thus far were 15 in North Carolina, 13 in New York, seven in Virginia, 11 in Pennsylvania, six each in Maryland and New Jersey, four in Delaware, three in Washington, one each in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and eight in Canada. While only grazing New York's metropolitan area, the hurricane had managed to cause wind gusts of more than 100 mph.
It was feared that the death toll of 15 thus far reported in North Carolina might rise even higher after salvage operations restored communications and allowed a more complete assessment. A list of the known dead is provided on the page. Fayetteville, Lumberton, Raleigh, Durham, Rocky Mount, Wilson and Roanoke Rapids, in addition to Wilmington, were only a few of the towns and cities which had been in Hazel's path, with Wilson city officials reporting that property damage there amounted to about five million dollars. Early reports had indicated that Ocean Drive, Crescent Beach, Surfside and Garden City, S.C., had received the full force of the 130 mph winds from the hurricane when it first made landfall.
In Myrtle Beach, sporadic looting was reported following the hurricane, with the beaches from Pawley's Island north to Cherry Grove being patrolled by 300 National Guardsmen, 75 members of the Civil Air Patrol and men from the Air Force Control and Warning Squadron. Three men and a woman had been caught burying cash on the beach at Myrtle Beach, and several cases of looting had been reported in Garden City, with one man being found with a boatload of loot. The previous night, one man was caught trying to take away a cash register in Myrtle Beach.
When Hazel's remnants had reached Canada, it joined new storm centers which rekindled its slackening winds, with torrential rains having flooded streams and isolated homes within Toronto's suburbs. There was also heavy wind damage reported throughout Ontario Province, as the hurricane headed toward Hudson Bay.
Several photographs dominate the front page, showing the damage caused by the hurricane.
On the editorial page, "Two-Party, One-Party, 1-3 Party" tells of Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, scholarly but homespun, having raised an interesting point in favor of the one-party system when speaking before the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Asheville the previous week, indicating that some Senators from states which had two strong parties, for instance, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, George Malone and the late Pat McCarran of Nevada, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and Homer Capehart of Indiana, had not been among the Senate's greatest men, while Georgia, a one-party state, had two great statesmen, Senators Walter George and Richard Russell.
It suggests that Senator Fulbright could have looked toward the mountain county of Graham and made a second point, because that county had a two-party system, with winners in contests usually having less than a 100-vote majority. It posits that the closeness of those races had surely contributed to the selling of absentee ballots, as charged by North Carolina Secretary of State Thad Eure the previous week.
It also indicates that there was an infrequently mentioned argument in favor of a strong two-party system, that it aided members of Congress in tending to their business, at least inferentially to be drawn from the members' roll call voting record, as set forth in the current Congressional Quarterly, as printed on the page the previous day. Only in the ninth and tenth Congressional districts of North Carolina were there close contests between Republicans and Democrats in 1954, with the Democratic Congressman, Hugh Alexander, in the ninth district having voted on record or paired with another member 97 percent of the time, while Congressman Charles Jonas of the tenth district had done so 99 percent of the time, the latter missing only one roll call, with a good excuse for that absence. Only one other North Carolina Congressman, Woodrow Jones of the 11th district, had a comparable record, also at 99 percent. The rest of the North Carolina delegation had voted on record far less often, down to 62 percent of the time, with that record of Congressman Thurmond Chatham of the fifth district being even worse when excluding paired votes, down to about 33 percent.
It indicates in conclusion that which ever system one preferred, one-party or two-party, both were preferable to the "one-third-of-one-party" system of Congressman Chatham.
"Those Rainmakers Can Brag Now" indicates that despite dismay over the havoc wrought by Hurricane Hazel in the eastern part of the state, it was wonderful to have rain again after months of drought.
Thursday afternoon, meteorologists had said that there was no rain in sight prior to this date, but Hazel had been responsible for depositing about two inches of rainfall in the Charlotte area, and it suggests that because of the fickle nature of a hurricane, the weather forecasters should not be blamed for the lack of foresight. It feels so good about receiving rain, that it wanted to make excuses for the weather forecasters.
A rainmaker had explained to the Greensboro Daily News recently that the exact location of rain generators and the identity of their operators were maintained in secret because publicity often affected their operations adversely. But there was no doubt that the rainmakers around Greensboro would have a good story to tell when they returned to the drought-stricken West, where they did most of their business, as on Thursday afternoon, they had begun shooting billions of particles of silver iodide into clouds pregnant with precipitation, and 24 hours later, 5.75 inches of rain was reported by the weather station near Greensboro, with the rain continuing to fall at 1.5 inches per hour.
It concludes, therefore, that hiding in the eye of Hazel had not been enemy agents, as suggested by comic strip character Buz Sawyer, but rather appeared to be the agents of the Greensboro rainmakers.
"Stormy Future for Labor's Marriage" finds that healing the 19-year split between the CIO and AFL would be easier than keeping labor's house in order after such a merger was complete, one of the problems confronting labor leaders of both sides as they continued their negotiations in Washington for the merger of the two labor organizations. Four months earlier, a "no-raiding" agreement had been signed between them as a first step toward merger.
It suggests that the actual merger, however, would be as stormy a marriage as the country had ever seen, one reason being that the labor movement was filled with prima donnas, apt to engage in personality clashes, a fact well known to labor leaders, explaining some of the foot-dragging in the merger talks. The stormiest figure in the past had been UMW leader John L. Lewis, who had split the AFL into warring camps, and then had split the CIO, taking the UMW back into AFL in 1947 and then again walking out, unlikely to be invited back into a merged AFL-CIO.
It concludes that labor's future looked as turbulent as its past.
"You Said a Mouthful, Mr. Toynbee" indicates that historian Arnold Toynbee might be the most influential living person in that field, but had the knack of scaring people at times, not only because of his thesis that civilizations climbing the ladder would have to come down, but also because of his prose. It offers as example the "grotesque sentence" from his new volumes of A Study of History, published in the U.S. the previous Thursday by the Oxford University Press: "On the one hand a circum-global maritime traffic belt had now come to be sufficiently frequented to demand a global adjustment between the new contiguous extremities of a longitudinal series of regionally differentiated time zones that could not extend in a continuous chain round the entire circumference of the globe without there being a chronometrical discrepancy, of the time length of 24 hours, between the respective timings of the first and the last zone in the series at the line along which these two extremities now adjoin one another."
It finds that it amounted to saying that the world had to have an International Date Line or there would be "hell to pay".
It indicates that Winston Churchill had once written an extravagant tribute to the "British sentence—which is a noble thing." It suggests that Mr. Churchill look again.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Here, Beer!" indicates that an Englishman had invented a gadget which might catch on in the United States, but that even if it did not, it would catch the imagination of people who liked gadgets, particularly those which saved energy. It was a beer barrel which really rolled, actually two barrels, one inside the other, guaranteed not to spill a drop, as the outer barrel rolled in response to a radio signal, going to any point where it was directed, while inside, the smaller barrel contained the beer or soft drinks, or what have you.
It suggests that perhaps there would be a market for such a device, as it had "possibilities as a supplement to the radio-directed lawnmower on a hot afternoon."
Drew Pearson indicates that U.S. weathermen had expressed concern that the fallout sent 30 miles upward in the wake of the March 1 hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific might change the weather in some parts of the world. Until the previous month, they had always indicated that the atomic bomb would not have any impact on weather patterns, despite the blasts having caused heavy rainfall within the immediate vicinity in some instances, with the former chief weatherman for the Air Force, Ben Holzman, indicating that it would take 200,000 atomic bombs to start a hurricane, and two or three bombs just to start an average thunderstorm. But with the detonation of the hydrogen bomb the prior March 1, with its 30-mile high and 150-mile-long cloud of fallout, the weathermen had begun to consider the effects of the dust on weather, with it being known that a small amount of dust circulating very high up could turn summer into winter, as it created an insulating effect against the rays of the sun, an observation made previously only after the eruption of volcanoes.
In 1816, a volcano erupting in the Dutch East Indies was followed by the coldest summer ever known in New England, making that year for a long time known as "the year without summer". In 1883, another Dutch East Indies volcano, Krakatoa, was completely pulverized in a massive two-day explosion, emitting about ten cubic miles of debris into the upper air where it was spread by prevailing westerly winds and eventually blanketed the entire world, resulting in Japan having an unusually cold summer that year, with brilliant red sunsets and a dark reddish ring around the sun, known as "Bishop's Ring", after the British scientist, S. E. Bishop. In 1954, following the hydrogen bomb detonation of March 1, the Bishop's Ring was seen again in Japan, and the Japanese summer had been delayed until about mid-August.
Approaching the 1948 presidential election, Governor Thomas Dewey, by the polling data, appeared to be a shoo-in for the presidency, with the Democrats split between President Truman, Progressive Party candidate, former Vice-President Henry Wallace, siphoning off the Northern liberal vote, and Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and the Dixiecrats, siphoning off the Southern conservative vote. Then, on October 13, when Governor Dewey was making a whistle-stop in a town in Illinois, the engineer gave the train a sudden backward jolt, prompting Governor Dewey to exclaim that it was the first time he ever had a lunatic as an engineer, that the trainman "probably ought to be shot at sunrise." The remark was immediately quoted all over the country in the press and it might well have cost the Governor the election, having been quoted not only by railroad people, who were aware of how easy it was for an engineer to jolt a train when coupling it, but also by labor and white-collar workers, perceiving it as a sign that they would have an unsympathetic, perhaps even ruthless, president, were Governor Dewey elected.
At almost the same time in the current midterm campaign, on October 11, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had issued his now-famous remark about dogs and the unemployed, which Mr. Pearson posits might have the same impact.
Felix Grisette, executive director of the North Carolina Research Institute, writing in the Public Welfare News, published by the State Board of Public Welfare, tells of the state of child adoption in North Carolina, indicating that 1,200 petitions for adoptions had been filed in the state during the prior fiscal year, an increase of about 20 percent over the previous fiscal year, and about 300 percent more than the yearly average during the prior decade. About 90 percent of the petitions were filed by white people and about two-thirds involved children born out of wedlock. There were 115,000 children born in the state each year, of whom 9,000 were born out of wedlock. Typically, there were several requests for adoption for every infant available for adoption, a major reason for the black-markets in babies.
The General Statutes of the state generally provided that when the interests of the child and the interests of the adult were in conflict, it would be resolved in favor of the child, with the statutes on child welfare to be liberally construed.
He describes the procedure for adoption, beginning with the filing of the petition with the Superior Court clerk, accompanied by the consent to the adoption by the natural parents or legal guardian or placement agency, and showing that the petitioners were fit to care for the child and financially able to do so, that the child would inherit property in accordance with the state statutes, and that the petitioners wished to establish a parent-child relationship with the adoptee. The county public welfare department or placement agency would then conduct a thorough investigation of the petitioners and the child, as well as the natural parents to determine if the child was a suitable candidate for adoption, with a written report to be made within 60 days, after which the court could enter an interlocutory decree of adoption, usually issued within six months of the filing of the petition, conditioned on a final order of adoption, usually issued within a year but not more than three years after the interlocutory decree, the child remaining a ward of the court during the interim.
About 40 percent of the petitions were filed by relatives of the child, the most desirable adoption, while about 20 percent of the adoptions were placed by the natural parents first with non-relatives rather than working through the official placement agency in each county or one of the four private, licensed placement agencies, considered a practice not desirable by the welfare agencies. The placement independent of the agencies was made initially without benefit of a social worker, who was better qualified to determine whether the placement home was suitable for the child, and if subsequently determined during the adoption process that a better fitment would be available, then the initial, informal placement could become problematic. Another problem was that the natural parents could change their minds within six months of placing the child for adoption outside the placement agencies and with such informal placement, the child could become torn between two sets of parents, the natural parents and the adoptive parents, whereas the natural parents only had 30 days to change their minds with the agency placement, with placement unlikely to have taken place in a home during that short interval. Another problem was that with the independent placement, the natural parents knew the adoptive parents, whereas experts on adoption agreed that such acquaintance should not be the case, so that the adoptive parents could honestly tell the child when it was old enough to know it was adopted that they did not know who the natural parents were. It also ensured that the natural parents would not show up later, trying to reclaim the child.
Mr. Grisette concludes that the primary purpose of welfare workers was to maintain the natural family together if possible, and adoption would become the solution only if it was plain that the child's welfare was best served by it. With that determined, it would be counter to the child's welfare for the natural parents later to try to reclaim the child.
Marquis Childs, in Detroit, tells of the Chrysler Corporation holding an elaborate unveiling of its new 1955 model cars, designed to make up lost ground for the 45.8 percent drop in production during the first six months of 1954, compared to the same period of 1953, while Ford had increased its production by 40 percent. The new models were being shown in two-tone colors and, in some cases, three tones.
Ford and General Motors accounted for a little more than 84 percent of the total automobile market at the beginning of September and the issue of ever-increasing monopoly versus competition had a direct bearing on unemployment, relating to the midterm election campaign. The Democrats were claiming, not only in Michigan, but elsewhere, that a groundswell of resentment and disillusion foreshadowed a Democratic victory in Congress. They attributed no small share of that resentment to unemployment in certain industrial areas, conspicuously in Detroit, where, according to the estimate of the Michigan Employment Security Commission, 13.1 percent of the labor force was unemployed in the middle of September. Chrysler was concentrated in Detroit, one reason for the peak unemployment figure of nearly 300,000, with 209,000 claiming unemployment compensation, during the week ending September 23. The changes of the model year always meant seasonal unemployment in Michigan, where so much of the automobile industry was centered.
Chrysler had announced that it had spent more than 250 million dollars in designing and retooling its new models, including new bodies, new chassis, new colors and new upholstery. They were trying to survive in an industry which had seen 1,500 companies fail, and while Chrysler had suffered a 45.8 percent drop in production during the first half of 1954, the independent automakers had lost 64.7 percent of their production. Meanwhile, General Motors had announced a record high of 425 million dollars in profits for the first half of 1954, compared to 313 million for the same period in 1953, while Chrysler's profits had dropped from 44.1 million to 15.8 million.
Of the 84 percent of the automobile business dominated by Ford and G.M., G.M. had about 53 or 54 percent, with Ford having the remainder. Both had at their disposal such resources that they could afford to cut prices to drive out all competitors quickly. But executives of both companies had frequently remarked that it was the last thing they wanted, as they were concerned about being accused of forming a monopoly over the industry.
In addition, G.M. had the bulk of Government defense orders. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington had obtained figures from the Pentagon showing a new increase of 1.7 billion dollars in contracts for G.M. during the first 18 months of the Eisenhower Administration, with former G.M. president Charles E. Wilson serving as Secretary of Defense. That increase contrasted with a net decrease in defense contracts of 395 million dollars for the remainder of the automobile industry, with both Republicans and Democrats being concerned about the growing concentration of defense production in only a few plants.
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