The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 23, 1954

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Paris, the Western Allies had accepted West Germany into NATO this date as well as into the expanded Brussels Pact, after France and West Germany had reached a late compromise settlement of the dispute over the Saar. The latter agreement, formed between Premier Pierre Mendes-France and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, provided for European status for the Saar until there would be a peace conference to reunify Germany. The Big Three signed an agreement with Chancellor Adenauer to end Allied occupation of West Germany and restore its sovereignty, with some reservations. The foreign ministers of Britain, France and the Benelux countries had also agreed to expand the 1948 Brussels Pact to include Italy and West Germany. Those agreements had replaced the European Defense Community unified army, which was to include France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries, ratification of which had been rejected the prior month by the French National Assembly. The present agreement would allow rearmament of West Germany, with French mollification having been achieved through the agreement of the U.S. and Britain to maintain troops in Europe indefinitely, as a counterbalance to any threat of German resurgence through its rearmament.

In Moscow, it was reported that the Soviet Union had this day proposed a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers for the following month to take up the problem of reunification of Germany. The proposal effectively rejected a September 10 demand by the Western powers that the Soviet Union agree to sign an Austrian independence treaty and to hold free all-German elections before any such conference would take place.

The President would speak before 150 top Republicans in Pennsylvania this date and hold a luncheon for them on his farm near Gettysburg, part of his efforts to aid the Republican campaign in the midterm elections. The President would deliver a nationally televised and radio broadcast speech on economic issues at a dinner Monday night in Washington, where he would receive the first annual James Forrestal Memorial Medal from the National Security Industry Association for his "contributions to peace and world understanding." The Association was comprised of about 500 businesses working with the Defense Department on military contracts.

Vice-President Nixon said the previous night, at a Republican rally in Butte, Mt., that he had a "secret memorandum" of the Communist Party, addressed to California Communist leaders, which showed that it was "determined to conduct its program within the Democratic Party." He said that the memorandum stated that the first attempt had to be to fight out the issues within the ranks of the Democratic Party, indicating that the Communists were seeking to make their policies the policies of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the previous night, Adlai Stevenson, speaking at a Democratic rally in Milwaukee, accused the Vice-President of leading a Republican Congressional campaign which could be described as "McCarthyism in a white collar." He said that Mr. Nixon was "back at the old reliable again—Communists in government." He said that the Vice-President had repudiated the President by trying to make that issue, rather than the Eisenhower record, the major point of the campaign. DNC chairman Stephen Mitchell said the previous day that the Republicans were engaged in "a desperate last-minute smear blitz designed to stave off the defeat they feel in their hearts is facing them." He held the Vice-President and RNC chairman Leonard Hall responsible for the tactics.

New York Governor Thomas Dewey, in a radio and television talk the previous night, accused Democratic gubernatorial candidate Averell Harriman of helping engineer in 1925 a securities deal in Poland "out of which Harriman and his associates made millions of dollars and the investors lost millions." Mr. Harriman had called the Governor's charge "more distortion and smear." Mr. Harriman was running against Senator Irving Ives.

Senator William Langer of North Dakota, chairman of a Senate anti-monopoly subcommittee, said this date that the Arkansas Power & Light Co. had made a major blunder in filing a two million dollar slander suit against a witness in the Senate investigation of the controversial Dixon-Yates power contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. Senator Langer said that a "Wall Street crowd" had prompted the suit in Little Rock, with the intent of intimidation of witnesses critical of the proposed contract. He was not specific as to the people or firms he included in that group. The defendant in the suit was Arthur McLean, a Little Rock banker who had told Senator Langer's subcommittee the prior Thursday that Arkansas Power was "the most corrupt and ruthless corporation that ever operated within the bounds of the state." Officials of Arkansas Power said that the suit was not based on Mr. McLean's testimony, which was privileged, but rather on his past statements during a lengthy feud with the company. Mr. McLean said that he welcomed the suit, that they were asking "for the works" and they were going to get it. Senator Langer said that they were not going to allow Dixon-Yates or anyone else to bluff, scare or intimidate witnesses, and that the subcommittee would assign its chief counsel and hire former Governor Sid McMath of Arkansas to help with the defense of Mr. McLean, provided it could be done legally.

In Columbia, S.C., it was reported that Hurricane Hazel's destructive path through Myrtle Beach and other North and South Carolina beach resorts a week earlier would produce the largest insurance loss from any single catastrophe in history, according to the South Carolina Association of Insurance Agents. The Association said that the insurance companies were prepared to pay for all of the damage for which they were responsible, and had already paid out millions of dollars worth of claims, but would take some time to complete the physical task of adjusting the large number of claims. Because of the great amount of damage, materials shortage would prevent rapid property restoration.

In Findlay, O., a homeless 14-year old boy had hung around the Hancock County Jail this date, awaiting word whether his dog, whom he called the only friend he had, had been found. One dog found ambling along a street the previous day in Garfield Heights appeared to be "Punky". The boy had no mother and did not want to go to his father whom he hardly knew. On October 12, he had walked into his mother's home in Mansfield, finding her body and that of another man, whom police said had shot and killed the mother and then himself. The boy and his dog had then run away, traveling dark roads, walking and hitchhiking, until finally the boy came to a telephone and called the authorities, saying that it was dark and he was hungry. The local sheriff had picked him up, fed him and placed him in a bed, while Punky was tied outside, but chewed through the rope and disappeared the following day. A dozen families in the town had offered to adopt the boy, while others had chipped in with food and cash, and a store had outfitted him with new clothes and shoes. A movie operator told him he could see any movie he wanted. The boy's father was scheduled to arrive sometime during the weekend to pick up his son.

In Cleveland, O., the trial of Dr. Samuel Sheppard for first-degree murder, accused of killing his wife, Marilyn, the prior July 4, recessed for the weekend after its first five days, with a jury of 12 having been tentatively passed by both sides after completing the process of challenges for cause, with peremptory challenges set to begin Monday, each side having six such challenges, for any reason and without having to state any reason. The defense motion for a change of venue had been held in abeyance by the judge pending selection of the jury, and so that would have to be ruled on before the trial would start, after the jury was finally seated. The motion was based on the extensive local publicity given the case in all forms of mass media, with defense counsel contending that it had made it impossible for the doctor to obtain a fair trial in Cuyahoga County. The story provides the names and occupations of the 11th and 12th jurors passed for cause, as had been the case with the first four such jurors, and, presumably, in the daily stories on the other jury selections during the week, not included on the front page of The News. A photograph of the jurors passed so far appears on the front page.

If you perceive something a bit off about the reporting on the case thus far, something which makes you feel somehow uncomfortable, you have an inherent understanding of fairness and due process under the American system of justice, the right to have a jury untainted, to the extent possible, by preliminary bias. If you think everything appears copascetic, you would probably feel more comfortable in Argentina. We would like to be able to report that the news media has grown and matured out of the yellow journalistic phase by which it obviously was still immured and to which the public had become insatiably inured in 1954, but, alas, we cannot. Indeed, it may be worse today than it was 67 years ago, with the proliferation of 24-hours news and the need to fill the time too often with whatever story sensationally and scintillatingly sells advertising, exacerbated the more by the rumor-mongering and speculation which tends to drive the internet and its professional bloggers, now called "influencers", more properly termed "influencers of fascism", then picked up in sensational cycle by the tv talkers, with fairness to the subjects of the story becoming little more than an afterthought, akin to a warning label on a potentially dangerous product: "We wish to remind our viewers that a person under our system is innocent until proved guilty, but when this sucker is finally charged and goes before a jury, you already know, with all this mountain of evidence, what the truth is."

In Indianapolis, the former Atlanta school superintendent and past president of the National Educational Association, addressing the final session of the Indiana State Teachers Association, predicted that within the next 100 years, the school year would lengthen from 160 to 240 days of classroom attendance, meaning that it would go year-round, possibly including 10 days of vacation for Christmas, a week for Easter, and individual holidays for July 4 and Thanksgiving. We're going to boycott at that point.

On the editorial page, "The Saar: A Final Stumbling Block" indicates that the disputed region between Germany and France, 900 square miles within Europe's heartland, rich in coal and iron ore, presented the biggest stumbling block to Western unity in Europe. The refusal of Premier Pierre Mendes-France to sign the historic agreement regarding West German rearmament until the question of the Saar was settled could not be minimized in its importance.