The Charlotte News
Wednesday, October 6, 1954
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Washington, a mass meeting of pupils at Anacostia High School had ended in confusion this date with little accomplished toward ending the protests against integration, in place for three weeks. About 700 to 800 students had gathered in the athletic stadium of the school and heard pleas from school officials that they return to their classes, while the protesting students' leaders met with school authorities to discuss the situation. A decision was initially reached that a committee of pupils would meet with the acting principal, until a good many of the protesters hooted that down, and the assistant principal told those who wanted to attend classes to do so and that the others should go home. At other Washington schools where disorders and demonstrations had occurred in recent days, tension eased. Anacostia had been the scene of the largest demonstrations. A police lieutenant said that he believed the peak of the disturbance had passed, but 2,800 students were reported absent at one time or another from three high schools and six junior highs this date. Six persons were arrested near Anacostia, with two men held on charges of disorderly conduct and the others released.
During the day, about 100 white students had congregated in front of the Supreme Court Building, but left quickly after the police ordered them to disperse. It was not clear what was behind their demonstrations, but they appeared to be imitating the recent mass protests against desegregation in Baltimore and Milford, Del.
The Justice Department's civil rights section said it had not yet encountered any violations of Federal law in the demonstrations but was keeping an eye on the situation, declining to say whether outside forces might be involved in organizing the protests.
Attorney General Herbert Brownell this date created a new unit in the Justice Department's criminal division, to handle the mounting number of cases arising from the scandals involving the Federal Housing Administration. The Department said that a special grand jury would inquire into bribery and other criminal misconduct in the Federal housing program and specifically into the conduct of Clyde Powell, the former FHA assistant commissioner, who had refused to testify before the Senate Banking Committee investigating the housing scandals. Mr. Powell's attorney filed papers in U.S. District Court this date challenging the validity of the special grand jury, as Mr. Powell was scheduled to appear before it this morning. The petition asked the court to take judicial notice of "countless predictions" by newspapers and political forecasters that there would be "political indictments returned against members of the former Administration" prior to the November elections, and asked the court ultimately to quash the subpoena as politically motivated. Testimony before the Banking Committee the previous day had indicated that Mr. Powell had demanded and received $10,000 from a Washington architect before approving an application for increasing an FHA-insured loan on an apartment house, a charge which Mr. Powell had generally denied, saying he had never received any money during his time with the FHA other than his salary. But the Committee heard testimony that he had deposited about three times his salary in banks between 1945 and the previous April during his tenure with FHA, although reporting only his salary on Federal income tax returns.
At Fort Bragg, N.C., a C-119 Flying Boxcar had crashed in flames this date and killed at least two men, with heroic action by the pilot being credited by witnesses with saving the lives of a number of construction workers in the path of the falling plane. The Army reported 14 casualties from the crash, 12 aboard the plane and two civilian workers struck on the ground. The plane had just taken off from Pope Air Force Base when its left engine had caught fire, it then having come in low over the base as the pilot sought desperately to avoid hitting men working on new barracks for the 82nd Airborne Division. A joint Army-Air Force announcement said that the pilot had picked out a street for the emergency landing and the plane had struck power lines and a fire hydrant before flipping over on its back, scattering wreckage for 100 yards. A medic of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, a private, had dashed into the burning plane and helped rescue several fellow passengers, then was admitted to a hospital, suffering from shock. A group of construction workers who said the plane was headed right for them stated that the pilot had veered the plane abruptly to avoid hitting them.
Samuel Lubell, in the third of a series of articles on the upcoming midterm elections of November 2, explains further his informal polling of Midwestern farmers regarding their attitudes toward the Administration and how it was likely to translate into votes in the Congressional elections. He indicates that control of the Senate might ultimately be settled by the price of hogs in the livestock markets of Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis, stating that he had been struck by the difference in attitudes among farmers depending on the type of farming they performed. The angriest protests came from the dairy areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota, with one farmer, typical of the response pattern, saying that they could not live on three-dollar per hundred milk when they had to spend the same to produce it as when milk was four dollars per hundred. Egg producers similarly said they could not get enough to pay for the feed they provided to their chickens, with farm wives in particular being disturbed by the low egg prices, as in many farm families the practice had been for the wife to use egg earnings for household expenses. Cattle producers also complained about lower prices. But through the corn belt, feelings were generally calm and restrained, Mr. Lubell finding in five Iowa counties only one farmer who said he was losing money, though many complained that they were making less than two years earlier. But with hogs at $20, one farmer had admitted that they were not hurting yet. A sudden drop in hog prices, however, would have a dramatic effect in Iowa and other hog-producing states, such as Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. One Iowa farmer told him that he had voted for President Truman in 1948, had switched to General Eisenhower in 1952, but was not sure whether he would vote again for the President. He said that hog prices had dropped by $1.50 during the month and that he was afraid that when they began coming to market in October, they would go down even more, that if they hit below $18, the farmers would be "in the ditch". Listening to those farmers, Mr. Lubell had gotten the impression that no campaign speech by the President or any other Republican could possibly offset the damage being done to the Administration by lower hog prices. With the Senate so evenly balanced, the difference in one seat could decide which party gained control of the body. In Iowa, Republicans had a chance of unseating Democratic Senator Guy Gillette, who was running weaker than his 160,000-vote majority in 1948, and Mr. Lubell had found a more lively response in Iowa to the appeal to back the President than from other Midwesterners, finding that about 10 percent of Senator Gillette's 1948 supporters were turning to the Republican while another 20 percent were undecided. Any reduction in hog prices, however, would virtually assure victory by Senator Gillette and might swing the balance in other states, such as Ohio, which were presently close. Many of the farmers realized that war had kept prices up and were inclined to accept some price drop as being better than being in a war, especially prevalent among those farmers with sons of military age. There was generally expressed gratitude for the President having ended the killing in Korea.
All of which again points out the critical importance of the corn-hog ratio.
In New York, the day-old strike of 25,000 longshoremen would end the following day, according to an official of the International Longshoremen's Association, after a meeting of the union wage scale committee, which ratified a peace formula reached the previous night between union and shipping representatives, with the help of Federal mediators.
In Charlotte, City police arrested a young man and his wife after a $300 safe-cracking at the American News Company early this date, at the same time County police were investigating a second nighttime safe robbery at a general store in Croft, which had netted the latter thieves only slightly more than $25, the third safe-cracking to occur in the county within less than three months, with the other two remaining unsolved, one netting the thieves $3,000 and the other, $5,000. The couple in the $300 safe-cracking had been arrested when they attempted to retrieve a bag containing the stolen cash and burglary tools. They had been married in July, following the male's release from prison where he had been serving an eight-month sentence for a safe-cracking at a local junior high school. They would also be questioned in the other safe-crackings. It was the 15th such safe-cracking or attempt inside the city since August 1. Yeggs had used nitroglycerin on August 15 to blow open a safe at Elmwood Cemetery, escaping with $300 in cash, but leaving the corpses intact.
On the editorial page, "Great Britain's Remarkable Recovery", a by-lined piece by News publisher Thomas L. Robinson, the last in a series of nine editorial page articles by the publisher, based on his recent visits to the major capitals of Europe, relating in this one of the dramatic economic recovery of Britain following the war.
No longer was West Germany monopolizing the spotlight, in many ways Britain's gains having been more striking than the highly publicized comeback of West Germany. The miracle had begun on VE-Day, May 8, 1945, and had not ended yet, with Britain's technology being its secret.
Production per capita had expanded twice as fast in Western Europe as in the U.S. between 1947 and 1952, much of which was credited to West Germany, while Britain had a far larger share in helping that expansion than was generally credited. He provides examples.
In Britain, there were 540 people per square mile, 11 times the population density of the U.S., and their standard of living was among the world's highest. But about half of Britain's food was imported, with no growth of cotton, rubber or jute, no workable deposits of aluminum, lead, copper, tin or zinc, and about 80 percent of its wood and wool having to be imported. It could only supply about half its needs of iron ore and had to buy virtually all of its crude oil from abroad. Yet, Britain was the second largest supplier of the world's needs for machinery, electrical apparati, vehicles, textiles, pottery, coal, chemicals, cutlery, whiskey, jet aircraft and fertilizers. About half of the world's trade was conducted in British pounds sterling and London held the gold and dollar reserves for the sterling countries, within and without the Commonwealth.
Since 1946, when Britain was at about the prewar level of industrial production, it had risen about 8 percent per year, until by 1950, production was nearly a third higher than in 1946. Exports made swift progress from a 1945 volume of about one-half the prewar volume, reaching prewar volume in 1947, until 1950, when the volume was nearly two-thirds greater than in 1947. Per capita income was in the second group of nations comprised of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand, with only the U.S. and Canada above that group. Britain's gross national product between 1948 and 1953 was estimated to have risen in real terms at the rate of about 3 percent per year, with the result that real national income in 1953 was about 15 percent higher than in 1948.
Aircraft, radar equipment, agricultural tractors, office machinery and petroleum products were examples of the types of exported goods which had played little or no role in British trade prior to the war. Motor vehicles, among the older industries, held out the promise of expanded export. British preeminence had been maintained in such industries as woolen goods, pottery and bicycles. Industrial production in 1953 was higher than ever before, about six percent higher than in 1952. Steel production set another record, exceeding its target of 17.5 million tons for the year. More than 150,000 more cars were manufactured in Britain in 1953 than the prior year and the building target of 300,000 homes had been exceeded. Unemployment was 1.5 percent of the total civil employment. Economists reported that the U.S. dollar exchanged into pounds sterling was at the normal rate and was being spent in Britain on the same pattern as expenditure in the U.S., with purchasing power at about 25 percent more than in the U.S.
Drew Middleton, chief of the London bureau of the New York Times, was one U.S. correspondent who had watched the astounding recovery of Britain since World War II and found that in employment, steel production, exports, coal production, automobiles and electrical equipment, Britain had exceeded West Germany. British Government economists also added aircraft, atomic energy and new products to the list.
Metals and metal-using industries, led by iron and steel, textiles and chemicals were the most important of the production and export industries. Britain had pioneered the application of coal to the process of smelting iron ore since the 17th Century and had been responsible for the technical development which led to the expansion of steel-making in the second half of the 19th Century, presently was the third largest steel producer, topped only by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was renowned for the quality of its special and alloy steels, with steel production totaling 17.6 million tons in 1953, 1.2 million tons more than the previous year.
After going through some other statistics regarding certain other industrial development, he concludes that all of the growth in Britain's economy had required a great amount of research, capital investment and skilled manpower, and that the success in the export trade had been an illustration of the way Britain's economy was adapting itself to the changing patterns of world conditions.
Sorry, but someone needed to teach Mr. Robinson how to write with a little more lively pen than his rather dry statistical analysis readily afforded. Sitting as the publisher for the previous seven years perhaps had made him rusty after having worked at the New York Times for a good many years.
Drew Pearson, in La Paz, Bolivia, indicates that Senator Allen Frear of Delaware had been attending an official dinner party in Bolivia not long after the National Revolutionary Government of President Paz Estenssorro had instituted sweeping land reforms, and had asked about the socialist program the President had started to divide up the land, to which President Paz had responded that the best way to combat Communism was to give each man some land of his own, for a landowner did not become a Communist. He convinced Senator Frear of the worth of the program. Land reform made Bolivia the most important country in Latin America at present, as providing land to the previously landless Indians could set a pattern for other South American countries, such as Peru and Ecuador, which, like Bolivia, had large Indian populations. It could also set a pattern for countries such as Venezuela and Colombia, which had small but unequal economic opportunity, tending toward Communism, and causing some governments to sit on kegs of dynamite. If the Bolivian experiment failed, however, Communism was almost certain to take over Bolivia, virtually the sole source of tin for the U.S. outside of Communist-threatened Southeast Asia. Without tin, there could be no steel production. Thus, what happened to Bolivia would be vital to every American, explaining why Senate delegations and State Department representatives were visiting Bolivia, and why Mr. Pearson was reporting from there at the present time.
He recounts that Bolivia had been controlled by three great tin barons and 1,000 ruling families, with only one of the barons being Bolivian, another being German, and the third having taken up residence in France. In contrast, 90 percent of the population was Indian, illiterate and lived under a feudal system which required them to spend 3 to 5 days per week working on their landlord's hacienda in return for the right to cultivate a patch of corn and potatoes. The Indians were paid no wages, making it a system of peonage. While Bolivia's first thousand families sent their sons to Oxford and Harvard, they sent the Indian tenant farmers a distance of 300 miles between Cochabamba and La Paz merely to mail a letter. Out of the country's nearly four million population, only 140,000 persons were permitted to vote, usually property owners. Thus, it was easy to see why the country had undergone 129 revolutions in its 129-year history, often the most turbulent country in turbulent South America.
Then three years earlier, came from exile a dynamic former professor of economics, President Paz, who instituted the land reform program, first seizing and nationalizing the tin mines of the big three barons, then instituting universal suffrage and dividing up the land among the Indian tenants who had worked it. He had also put into place less sweeping reforms, some with the aid of the U.S., such as an agricultural small-loan bank to finance the Indians in their new land ownership, a plan worked out by a former member of Nelson Rockefeller's Inter-American Corp. President Paz had also given the U.N. the green light to draft a new civil service law for Bolivia. Some of the reforms had been accomplished only with some injustice and some violence, plus a great amount of bitterness, not only at the new regime but also against the U.S., which had officially backed the movement.
Mr. Pearson had, however, seen in Cochabamba President Paz and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Henry Holland acclaimed by several thousand Bolivians, holding up signs indicating that they were not Communists but were true revolutionaries, which Mr. Pearson believed was a fact. The Government was strongly anti-Communist, while being strongly revolutionary.
He indicates that in a future column he would explore how the conservative Administration of President Eisenhower had thrown its full weight behind the liberal Paz regime, establishing an important precedent in South America.
He notes that the Paz Government had remained in power longer than any other regime in Bolivia during the previous 30 years, and again remarks that if it were to fall, it would almost certainly become Communist.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that there was publicly available evidence which strongly suggested that the hydrogen bomb designed by Dr. Edward Teller's Livermore Laboratory had turned out to be a failure during the Pacific tests the previous spring, all of which was in the public record. The evidence was not conclusive, but was worth reporting in light of the fact that an extraordinary campaign was underway to suggest that Dr. Teller was the true and only "father of the hydrogen bomb", portraying virtually every other U.S. scientist as a "fuzzy-minded fool or worse."
The Atomic Energy Commission released official information on the tests, announcing that both the Livermore Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory had been participating in the tests. Dr. Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, at a press conference on September 14 called to refute the charges contained in the book, which the Alsops had reviewed on the prior Saturday and Monday, The Hydrogen Bomb, by James Shepley and Clay Blair, Jr., had said that the Laboratory had developed every successful thermonuclear weapon which currently existed in the free world, suggesting thereby that only the Los Alamos bombs, as distinguished from that developed by Dr. Teller at Livermore, had worked.
In addition, Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, said that he wished the AEC would remove the classified label from the report of what happened to the bombs designed by Dr. Teller and the Livermore Laboratory, and that Messrs. Shepley and Blair might have asked the AEC how Dr. Teller's thermonuclear bombs had thus far worked.
That evidence combined strongly to suggest that the Livermore version of the hydrogen bomb had been a dud. The Alsops indicate that there was no shame in that fact, as failures were inevitable in such an unexplored field, and even Dr. Teller's most vehement critics did not doubt his brilliance as a scientist. There was no doubt also that he had nearly been the single-handed creator of the hydrogen bomb.
But the perspective of the book by Shepley and Blair was that Dr. Teller was very close to development of a successful hydrogen bomb in 1946, but for the opposition of the most distinguished American scientists, combined with "foot-dragging at Los Alamos", creating a near fatal delay in development of the bomb, until Admiral Lewis Strauss, currently chairman of the AEC, had enabled creation of the Livermore Laboratory, which had saved the day.
Former AEC chairman Gordon Dean had called the book a "blood-stained Valentine to Edward Teller". The scientists attacked by the book were the more bitter because Dr. Teller had not repudiated the book or sought to expose its falsehoods and distortions, when he was in an excellent position to do so.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the CIO had decided during the year to find out whether labor and its preferred candidates were talking about the things which Americans wanted to hear, and had thus engaged a reputable polling organization to poll a cross-section of the public in eight pivotal states, where the CIO believed its interests were deeply involved, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio. In all except New York and Pennsylvania, Senate contests loomed. And in both of those states, Democrats were given a chance to upset Republicans in the gubernatorial races. The poll was designed to uncover the issues rather than to test popularity of candidates.
The poll found that there was still a large undecided vote, that there was no single issue causing people to like or dislike the Administration, that for the most part, the 83rd Congress was not considered to have been a bad Congress, that incumbents had a big advantage and the Administration was generally approved by more than half of the respondents. It also found that the reaction to power policy was surprisingly conservative, although among the eight states in which respondents were polled, only Oregon and California had benefited from public power dams. A surprisingly large number of respondents preferred candidates who had been endorsed by the American Legion. Voters gave across-the-board support to the U.N. and any candidate proposing to pull the U.S. out of the organization would suffer. In addition, trade with China was universally condemned and a substantial majority favored breaking off diplomatic relations with Russia. "Liberals" were viewed with suspicion, which the CIO attributed to McCarthyism. Respondents said that the Taft-Hartley Act should be improved. They also believed the Government was not doing enough to combat unemployment and that it should help people with health problems, that Social Security advances would be welcome.
The CIO analysis of the poll could not discern results which would suggest an imminent Democratic tidal wave and warned against the party's overconfidence since the outcome of the early Maine elections, in which Congressman Edmund Muskie had upset the Republican incumbent in the gubernatorial race and the Congressional races had been determined for Republicans by less than the usual substantial margins in that typically Republican state.
Frederick C. Othman, in Caracas, Venezuela, tells of the Officers' Club, costing the equivalent of nine million U.S. dollars. A New York reporter had said a couple of months earlier, examining an acre or so of flowerbeds at the club, that the soldiers were sprinkling perfume on the posies. It was inaccurate and had caused the military great consternation. But Mr. Othman says that he could sympathize with the reporter, as in a place so opulent, perfuming the flowers would only be logical.
The military was important in Venezuela. President Marcos Perez Jimenez was an army colonel and believed that if the traditionally poorly paid men of the army were to hold up their heads in Caracas society, they needed a proper place to gather. Mr. Othman describes in some detail the elaborate decor of the place.
He indicates that all of the architects in Caracas were modernists and there appeared to be a contest among them as to who could concoct the gayest buildings, that if the Officers' Club took the prize, Caracas University ran a close second, which he also proceeds to describe.
The private buildings being constructed were also ultra-modern, describing one home in particular which jutted out over a chasm, the front door of which was reached by land, while the rest of the house was supported solely by air and a cantilever. While he assumes it was quite safe, he says he would not wish to spend the night there, at least not in his pajamas.
A letter writer agrees with "Josephus Greeley's" letter of the previous day, regarding the overblown nature of Newspaper Week, suggests swapping "all that corn for something a little more hip."
As newsprint ordinarily does not come from corn, wouldn't it make a little more clever sense to suggest doing with less pulp?
A letter writer urges that if people would gather at their churches and pray one hour for God to send rain, it would come.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.