The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 28, 1954
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Washington, Secretary of State Dulles had conferred with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer this date, with officials saying that the main topic of discussion was the general review of the state of Europe in light of the new defense arrangements, making West Germany a sovereign and rearmed partner within NATO and the revised Brussels Pact. Chancellor Adenauer would next visit with the President at the White House. Secretary Dulles had introduced Chancellor Adenauer the previous day, upon his arrival at the airport, as "one of the truly great men of our times", expressing admiration for his "vision, courage and statesmanship." Chancellor Adenauer expressed West Germany's gratitude to Mr. Dulles for "his foresight, wisdom and steadfastness" during the conferences recently in London. He also thanked the President for "his unfailing confidence in us", and said that West Germany could not have overcome "the terrible state of uncertainty, anxiety and insecurity with which we lived so long, had we not had the generous support of the American Government and American public opinion."
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Charles Bohlen called on Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov in Moscow this date to discuss the tense situation arising from an incident involving two American Embassy wives and their cameras, with informants saying that Mr. Bohlen had stressed the seriousness with which the U.S. regarded the Soviet action regarding the wife of the second secretary to the Embassy and the wife of the assistant Naval attaché. The Soviet Foreign Ministry had declared the wife of the second secretary to be personally unacceptable in Russia, amounting to a request that she depart the country as persona non grata, accused by the Soviets of "hooliganism" during an incident the previous Monday, based on her attempts and those of the wife of the assistant Naval attache to take pictures of Soviet children, and, the alleged striking of a Soviet workman by the wife of the second secretary. The U.S. contended that the Russians had the facts wrong. The wife of the Naval attaché indicated that she had actually struck the workman, seeking to free the wife of the second secretary who was being forcibly held at the door of a workers' club, to which the women had been directed when objections were made to their photographing the Soviet children, both indicating that they had no interest in seeing the club and had to engage in a scuffle to get out. The Soviet press was supportive of the Foreign Ministry and its version of events.
Samuel Lubell, in another of his series of articles on the midterm elections, indicates that in traveling around the country and talking to voters of every type, his main objective during the previous ten weeks had been to try to find out why people were voting their choice in the election, how political feelings had changed during the prior two years, and what those changes meant. He says that he was not seeking to predict the outcome and did not believe it could be done with any exactitude in any event, with both the Senate and House so evenly divided that the ultimate outcome of control could depend on one or two of a dozen closely fought Senate races or a handful of House contests. Nevertheless, he concluded that at present, if trends held, Democrats would win control of the House and also most likely the Senate. If Republicans received all the breaks in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and Ohio, which was not very likely, they might squeeze out a victory in the Senate. He explains his conclusion by having tested the political winds in his interviews of citizens in several states and closely contested Congressional districts, along the way assessing the changes in the voting patterns. But he could not determine exactly how forceful those trends were and how many Republican seats might change hands. The mood of the country was not one of stormy protests, and many persons did not even know the names of the candidates for Congress. Nor was there any urgent sense of an approaching storm or messy crisis, as had been the case two years earlier. The biggest single question regarding the outcome was the apathy of voters and how many might stay home on election day. If Republican voters poured to the polls while Democrats stayed at home, they might make a percentage point difference which could ultimately decide the fate of the closer Senate races. If the Republicans stayed away, a Democratic landslide was possible. If the latter, it would be a freakish landslide, however, without real backing in voter sentiment.
The White House announced the previous night that the President would take off the following day for a one-day campaign by plane to Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville, and Wilmington, Del. He would also appear at a campaign rally in Washington this night, staged by the Citizens for Eisenhower Congressional organization, at which he would be accompanied by Mrs. Eisenhower, to be broadcast on NBC television and ABC radio.
In New York, NBC indicated that it had granted free radio and television time for a talk by Adlai Stevenson, responsive to recent speeches by the President, and was considering a Republican counter-demand for free broadcast time to reply to Mr. Stevenson. NBC was the only major network acceding to the request by DNC chairman Stephen Mitchell, who had contended that the President's recent broadcasts had an unusual amount of partisan political content. CBS, ABC, the Mutual Broadcasting System, and the Dumont television network had all turned down the request. NBC said that a review of its broadcasts during the previous several months had demonstrated that the Democrats were entitled to the free time to respond. The half-hour address of Mr. Stevenson would be carried on Saturday evening by television, and by radio two hours later.
In Philadelphia, three ranking fire department officers had been killed and 24 other firemen and policemen injured this date in an explosion confined entirely to the rear yard of a north Philadelphia chemical manufacturing plant. The explosion had occurred minutes after a telephoned warning which had summoned the fire company to investigate the source of escaping fumes, thought to have been from ammonia. As firemen searched for the source of the fumes, a 15-foot high steel tank, mounted on a wooden platform in one corner of the yard, had exploded.
In Stockholm, Sweden, novelist Ernest Hemingway this date won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, to receive a gold medal and a check for the equivalent of about $35,000. The other prizes would not be announced until December 10. Mr. Hemingway was the sixth American-born author to win the literary award, set up by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, who had died in 1896. Previous American winners had been Sinclair Lewis, in 1930, Eugene O'Neill, in 1936, Pearl Buck, in 1938, and William Faulkner, in 1949, with St. Louis-born poet, T. S. Eliot, presently a British citizen, having won the award in 1948. Mr. Hemingway had nearly won the prize the previous year, but had been nosed out by Winston Churchill. In a grim irony, given that Mr. Hemingway would, after an illness, commit suicide in 1961, a source close to the Swedish Royal Academy of Literature, which bestowed the prize, said that since Mr. Hemingway was slated to receive the award eventually, "we might as well give it to him now, before he kills himself" in one of his exploits, presumably referring to such things as his running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Earlier in the year, when it was feared that Mr. Hemingway had been killed in a plane crash in Africa, many newspapers had criticized the Academy for overlooking him and his better novels and short stories, including A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", and The Old Man and the Sea. Among the other contenders for the award had been Halldor Laxness of Iceland, Niko Kazantzakis of Greece and Albert Camus of France. Mr. Hemingway was the fourth American to win one of the Nobel prizes during the year, as the 1954 prize for medicine and physiology, presented October 21, had gone to three U.S. scientists, Dr. John Enders of the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Thomas Weller of the Harvard School of Public Health, and their former associate, Dr. Frederick Robbins, presently at Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland, for discovering new weapons in the fight against polio.
In Raleigh, Governor William B. Umstead asserted this date that a proposed State constitutional amendment which would keep a single county from ever having more than one State Senator, on the November 2 ballot along with four other procedural amendments, "would be exceedingly dangerous to the whole idea of popular representation" and therefore was opposed to the amendment. It was the Governor's first news conference since his release the previous weekend from a hospital in Durham where he had stayed for three weeks, having been in fragile health since suffering a heart attack two days after becoming Governor in January, 1953. He said that he was feeling much better and was glad to be back. The Governor would die just ten days later, on November 7.
In Blaenant, Wales, a coal mine strike, caused by some pit-ponies with appetites like horses, had ended in a compromise the previous night. The walkout had been staged by 17 drivers who claimed that their animals were growing puny on a daily diet of 32 pounds of oats. The National Coal Board investigated the matter and determined that some overly voracious ponies were gobbling more than their fair share from the communal trough, and agreed to provide individual feeding bins, at which point the men agreed to return to work.
On the editorial page, "Eisenhower Comes out Swinging" indicates that the President, haunted by visions of a Democratic landslide in the midterm elections, had finally entered the campaign, fighting with the grim determination of a boxer who was behind on points and knew he had to score a knockout to win.
It suggests that the knockout might come within the ensuing 96 hours, but that it was more likely that the President's late campaigning would only be a case of too little too late. Whatever the outcome, the President could be credited with one major achievement, having abandoned that which Doris Fleeson had phrased the previous day in her column as a "Chief of State complex", and having become a forceful advocate of his own and his party's political philosophy.
During the first year of his term, the President had stood above the political struggle, liking to speak of the interest of all 160 million people in the country, seeming to regard himself as a mediator rather than a champion. Political commentators quickly began to speak of "weak Presidents" and wondered if Mr. Eisenhower was one of them. But in recent months, his attitude had toughened, as late in the second session of the Congress during the summer, he had campaigned hard for many of his favorite measures, unfortunately not all of them. After the recess in August, he had gone to Denver for a working vacation, and it appeared that he had again retreated to the role of a nonpartisan President. But on October 15, he had made a speech in the farm belt and had been stumping since that time.
It indicates that it appeared that the President's decision had been wise, that the American political system demanded a strong, forceful President willing to roll up his sleeves and scrap for his program, and it was the President who had to lead in terms of legislation and attempt to bring party members together to support those programs. The President had also to fight for the life of his party, and when he abdicated that leadership, there was no place in the American system for the mantle to fall. Only the President officially represented all Americans, but there was no such thing, it suggests, as a nonpartisan President, as there could be no progress with such a man in the White House.
"Cutting Costs of Catastrophic Illness" indicates that health study groups, presidential candidates and concerned citizens had for some time been calling attention to the onerous burden which fell upon families suffering from catastrophic illness, those not adequately covered by most ordinary health insurance policies. The Congress had recognized the plight of such families during the year, granting more tax relief to persons who had unduly large medical expenses.
It informs of a relatively new kind of co-insurance, designed for families who were not eligible for charity but who earned too little to accumulate substantial savings. Such insurance, which cost between $50 and $100 per year, assured the family that it would have to pay only one-fourth of any catastrophic medical bill. It suggests that the field commanded more attention from insurance men, individuals, companies offering group plans and the government.
When Chief Justice Earl Warren had been Governor of California, he had vigorously supported a public health insurance program limited to catastrophic illness, maintaining that voluntary insurance, by itself, could not solve the problem of catastrophic medical costs.
It indicates that the recent interest of private insurance companies in such coverage afforded the hope that they would provide adequate coverage at rates which were accessible to those who needed the coverage most, and if they did not, requests for programs such as those proposed by former Governor Warren would become more urgent.
"The Wonderful, Neglected Art of Satire" provides an excerpt from a satirical column written in 1900 by Finley Peter Dunne, which, it posits, had helped Americans see and chuckle about their own shortcomings in their awkward new role as a world power. It indicates that satire was an ancient device, used first by the Greek Archilochus and by Romans such as Juvenal. Reynard the Fox, by an unknown French writer, had appeared during the Middle Ages, providing comment on the foibles and chicanery of the time, as did Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the 18th Century. Alexander Pope had stated that satire was his weapon but that he was "too discreet, To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet."
It finds that satire had been sorely
neglected in more contemporary times, leaving the field almost
entirely to cartoonists, and so it finds it good news to read in the
column of Harriet Van Horne in the New York World Telegram-Sun
that a radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, was entering
the field of satire in a major way, producing an hour-long dramatic
satire, titled, "The Investigator"
It concludes that what the country needed was more laughter at itself, that it had heard enough of the pundits, historical novelists and exposers. "Bring back the wonderful, neglected art of satire."
Drew Pearson indicates that South Dakota had not voted for Democrats for a long time, but there was a certain amount of uneasiness at present regarding the future of Senator Karl Mundt, who had been acting chairman of the Senate Investigations subcommittee during the Army-McCarthy hearings. His biggest problem, the Eisenhower farm program, was not his fault, but two other problems, a cocktail party held in the Senate and the Senator's friendship with Senator McCarthy and his Texas oil pals, could have been avoided. General Eisenhower, in 1952, had made his strongest promise to farmers while speaking in South Dakota, providing himself no loopholes in categorically promising 90 percent parity farm price supports. The farmers remembered his statements, as eggs were now selling for 8 to 10 cents per dozen. Senator Mundt had invited all participants in the Army-McCarthy hearings to a cocktail party just after conclusion of the hearings, to be held in the Senate caucus room, where it was against rules to serve liquor. When the story got back to South Dakota, voters did not approve, and then the Senator denied that he had planned the cocktail party, at which point Democrats brought forth the invitation, which had stated at the bottom, "Viands and vintages." Senator Mundt's friendship with Senator McCarthy and his Texas oil friends also did not sit well with many South Dakota voters. The Senator had purchased 200 shares of Texas Gulf Sulphur stock on a tip from Senator McCarthy that his friend, Texas oilman Clint Murchison, planned to buy up all of the company stock. One heckler at a speech, when Senator Mundt had said that he was representing "the good people of South Dakota", interrupted by saying that he meant actually Texas, to which the crowd responded positively.
The Republican campaign was getting into high gear, with the RNC in Washington spending one day the previous week on long distance telephone calls to 300 people, soliciting $1,000 each from them, and receiving quite a number of positive responses.
It appeared that former Senator Ernest McFarland, the former Majority Leader, would stage a comeback as governor of Arizona. His successor in the Senate, Barry Goldwater, had spent a large part of his time at La Jolla Beach in Southern California, California being Arizona's bitterest rival for water rights, which Mr. McFarland was championing.
Erwin N. Griswold, dean of Harvard Law School, in an excerpt from an address to the Connecticut Bar Association on October 19, provides a defense to the Fifth Amendment assertion of privilege against self-incrimination, regarding it of fundamental importance in our legal and social system." He indicates that in an address the previous spring, he had outlined some of the history of the Fifth Amendment, showing that it had arisen out of the political struggles in England in the 17th Century and had come to America as part of the common law, incorporated into the Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights.
He finds that many people had approached the Amendment in recent months in a rigid and mechanical way, saying that a person claiming the privilege, either under the Fifth Amendment or a similar provision of a state constitution, was either guilty or lying. Such an approach meant that the person claiming the privilege had already condemned himself and should be dismissed from any position of responsibility and generally blacklisted, deprived of livelihood. He suggests that such a position was taken, no doubt, in good faith, but it was not true that there were only two such alternatives. A person might fear the risk of prosecution even though knowing he had committed no crime, and was entitled to claim the privilege in such a case. The inference that the person had committed a crime was therefore simply wrong.
The example was often put forward that if a bank teller was asked whether he had taken a missing amount of money from the till and then claimed the privilege, the teller would be immediately dismissed. He agrees and thinks that it would probably be, in that instance, proper, but that the example did not cover all situations involving the claim of the privilege, and he suggests that it was not so simple.
Initially one had to ask what the question addressed to the witness was which had elicited the claim of the privilege. The closer the question got to seeking political opinions or beliefs, the less significant was the claim of the privilege in terms of implying actual criminality as its basis. It was not a question of assessing how bad the acts of intending to overthrow the government might be, but rather what the conduct was on which the person was questioned. The word "Communist" was used in many different contexts and some automatically assumed its worst meaning. Some people, who in the past had been used by Communist interests, may have been tempted by the Communist lure while holding less sinister motives and intentions than intending the overthrow of the government. With the benefit of hindsight, those persons' activities might be seen in an unfavorable light, but the questions being propounded might seem to the witness to be seeking their personal beliefs and political opinions and because they were aware their response might potentially subject them to criminal prosecutions for past acts and associations, the witness could properly assert the privilege without having actually committed a criminal act.
He also asserts that the nature of the tribunal which subjected the witness to questioning had to be examined. Courts, for the most part, were well-run, without political axes to grind. But in legislative investigations, that was not always the case. And when investigations were taking place amid television and newsreel cameras, radio and press releases, the idea of a disinterested investigation had a tendency to retreat into the background, true of many controversial legislative investigations. Such investigations did not undertake to safeguard the rights of the individual witness in the same manner which courts did.
He indicates that he was not seeking to lay down an absolute rule and was not suggesting that every witness who claimed the privilege was innocent of wrongdoing, but was suggesting that the determination of the proper inferences to be drawn from assertion of the privilege could be extremely difficult and any conclusion thereon reached automatically would likely be wrong.
"The Fifth Amendment has been very nearly a lone sure rock in a time of storm." He concludes that it needed no defense, but that if it did, a good way to make it would be to use it "offensively, as a reminder of the necessity of maintaining constant vigilance for the protection of individual rights."
Doris Fleeson indicates that Val Washington, minorities director of the RNC, had said that if only the President were running in the midterm elections, "we'd bring those Negroes home!" He had in mind the civil rights record of the Administration, which had prompted New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to write recently in Reader's Digest that he had been wrong about the President, that he had "quietly started a revolution which, I firmly believe, means an era of greater promise for Negro citizens." Mr. Washington claimed that Republican candidates would receive an average increase in the black vote of 10 percent over 1952, based on polling data collected by an organization which in 1952 had surveyed the scene and warned that black voters would not depart from the Democrats.
Democrats did not argue against the President's civil rights record, but asserted that it was canceled out by high unemployment. Despite their membership in unions, blacks had much less seniority on average than did whites and so were still the first to lose their jobs during layoffs. A recent CIO poll had shown that the relatively few blacks who had voted Republican in recent years were returning to the Democratic Party, and CIO spokesmen indicated their expectation that there would be no defections from the Democrats by their black members.
Mr. Washington had conceded that many Republican candidates were not well known to blacks generally, while in all industrial areas, Democrats were well known. Nevertheless, he believed that his campaign literature, which consisted mainly of reprints from the black press describing what the President had accomplished, was making an impression on the better educated and professional blacks. He thus believed that the Republicans would be helped in cities such as Louisville, Harrisburg, Pa., and South Bend, Ind., where "excellent" black neighborhoods flourished.
Ms. Fleeson points out that about two million blacks voted outside the Solid South, and even in the latter region, the large cities were showing a significant black vote. Outside the South, about three-fourths of the black vote went to the Democrats, whereas within the South, black voters tended to copy the white pattern, apparently believing they had to be Democrats in order to make their vote count.
She indicates that the President's record on civil rights included ending segregation in the Army and the District of Columbia, expansion of Social Security to include all low-paid workers, and appointment of many blacks to Government posts to which blacks had previously not been appointed. Mr. Washington claimed that the President had forbade the party from listing the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, handed down the prior May 17, as an Administration achievement.
And, of course, though Chief Justice Earl Warren, appointed by the President in 1953, is credited with having been instrumental in achieving unanimity in the decision, he was the only Eisenhower appointee on the Court at the time, and there had been a steady progression toward ending segregation in public facilities by the prior litany of cases spanning back to 1937, though previously having refused to overrule the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, while in every case, however, holding strictly that the 1896 doctrine had not been satisfied in providing segregated facilities, thus, case by case, eroding the doctrine to the point that it could scarcely any longer be satisfied by the states. Thus, Brown was actually the culmination of a long 17-year litany of cases in which it was manifestly evident that the days of Plessy were numbered, and because of the Court's composition in 1954, the decision was equally the work product of the Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt Administrations, insofar as the policies and appointments to the Court.
Justice William O. Douglas, in a volume of his autobiography, The Court Years, however, provided insight suggestive of the notion that without the death in September, 1953 of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, whom Justice Douglas admired greatly and considered a friend, and the appointment of Chief Justice Warren in his stead, given the preliminary expressions of opinion by the Justices after the first round of oral arguments in late 1952, the Court would not have overruled Plessy—even if likely otherwise to have held the five public school segregation cases consolidated in Brown not to pass muster under the separate-but-equal doctrine. That, of course, despite the unimpeachable source, is still a matter of conjecture as to his conclusion, as the Court had already rescheduled another round of oral arguments on specific questions involved in Brown, prior to the death of Chief Justice Vinson.
In any event, the appointment of Governor Warren as Chief Justice certainly aided the cause of overruling Plessy, even if not having been the sine qua non for the outcome beyond unanimity of the decision, considered important by the Court for having the decision accepted in the South.
A letter writer indicates that he was a registered Democrat and as such, wanted to know what Senator Alton Lennon and others meant when they said in effect that people should either vote for the party or get out. He finds the tactic troubling, that if it was what "'the grand old party of the South'" was coming to, then he was not sure he wanted to remain in it. (GOPS = Southern Democratic Party?) He had always voted a straight Democratic ticket and there was a possibility that he might have done so in 1954 had there been a stronger candidate against Representative Charles Jonas and had the Democrats not begun calling supporters of Mr. Jonas, "Republicans who are ashamed to admit it." He indicates that he was still a Democrat, but a Democrat for Mr. Jonas, and finds it not worthy of such a fuss to support the best man in the race.
A letter writer from Lincolnton indicates his belief that in the six counties comprising the 10th Congressional District, there were enough voters willing to place country above party and vote for the man best qualified to represent the district, Mr. Jonas, whom he believed had, during the previous two years, looked after the interests of the district, having succeeded in locating a guided missile plant there which would employ many hundreds of people at high wages, and being alert to possible opportunities for bringing such industries to the district. He also believes that a Republican Congress would enable the Administration to be able better to look after the interests of the district.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.