The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 13, 1954
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Hanoi in Indo-China that the French Union troops, backed
by tanks and an artillery barrage, this date had routed Vietminh
troops blocking France's vital north Indo-China supply route. The
Vietminh had swept into the heart of the Red River Delta the previous
night, blasting five gaps in the main line railway linking Hanoi with
the coast, and had also blown up bridges and captured, burned and
destroyed many watchtowers and small forts along the route. The
64-mile railway and road paralleling it were the pipeline for most of
the U.S.-supplied war equipment entering Haiphong by ship. The French
said that the coordinated Vietminh attacks appeared to have been an
all-out attempt to smash the supply line. Fighting had spread almost
to the outskirts of Hanoi, with fierce clashes between the French
troops and the Vietminh's Regiment 42 having taken place in a village
just eight miles from the city, the Vietminh having entered the
village after blowing up a long stretch of railway, and for a time
having threatened to cut the highway over which about 6,000 French
supply trucks moved daily. The Vietminh had launched heavy mortar,
machine gun and rifle fire against French tanks, armored cars and
mobile artillery. The French artillery barrage had been one of the
largest of the eight-year war and at times, fighting had been
hand-to-hand. The French armored units finally forced the Vietminh to
break off the battle and flee into the rice fields and bamboo
thickets. French tanks and armored cars this date patrolled the
highway all the way to the coast, to keep it open for war traffic.
Without the road and the railway, all supplies would have to be flown
to the main French forces in northern Indo-China. This date marked the start of the key battle in the war in Indo-China, that for the French fortification at Dien Bien Phu
Near the Czech-German border the previous day, two American Navy carrier-based planes had been attacked by a Communist MIG jet. Czechoslovakia charged immediately that the two planes had flown over its vital uranium-producing center, 35 miles inside the iron curtain, and had fired the first shot. The Navy said that one of the two propeller-driven planes had been damaged but that both pilots had brought the aircraft safely in for a landing at the airbase in the American zone of Germany near Munich. A Navy spokesman in London said that an investigation into the shootings had been ordered by the U.S. Sixth Fleet, and first reports showed empty aviation ammunition cartridges had been found on German soil after the attack. One U.S. spokesman said that the planes, however, had inadvertently crossed into Czech territory, as clouds had covered much of the frontier area over which they had been flying. The Czech broadcast said that one Czech jet had intercepted the U.S. aircraft and demanded that they follow it to a landing inside Czechoslovakia, but that the American pilots had refused to follow the demand and attacked the Czech plane, which then used its weapons in self-defense. General Alfred Gruenther, NATO's supreme commander in Europe, said, in a speech before an Omaha centennial observance, that the attack provided new evidence of Russian hostility to the free world and that there was no "new look" by Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov.
Soviet Premier Georgi Malenkov said the previous night that Russia took a strong stand against the policy of cold war because the policy was preparation for a "world slaughter" which would destroy civilization. The Premier was campaigning over Moscow Radio for a Parliament seat in the following Sunday's one-party election, unopposed for the seat on the Supreme Soviet. He said that, while the Soviet Union was in competition with all capitalist countries, including the U.S., the Soviet Government consistently followed the view that any controversy or question, however difficult, could be solved by peaceful means. He said that 1953 had brought some easing of world tension and that the Soviet Government stood for a further reduction, that it was only a myth that it planned aggression. He said that there was Soviet recognition that with the modern means of destruction, a third world war would result in destruction of world civilization.
The Italian news agency, Ansa, reported from Trieste this date that several U.S. soldiers had been killed and several others wounded in an explosion in a barracks located near Trieste. No other details were provided.
Vice-President Nixon would provide this night the equal-time televised rebuttal to Governor Adlai Stevenson's speech before a Democratic group in Miami Beach the prior Saturday night. The Vice-President said that he would not dodge the issues in the night's broadcast on CBS television and radio networks, and on NBC radio, which had carried Governor Stevenson's address.
Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and the Army's general counsel, John Adams, responded to Senator McCarthy's accusation made the previous night on radio that Mr. Adams had told him several months earlier that a report embarrassing to the Investigations subcommittee which the Senator chaired would be made public unless an investigation of the Army were ended. The Senator had said that the report by the Army amounted to "blackmail" of the subcommittee, especially as it referred to the Senator and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, having allegedly obtained lenience and favors for Private G. David Schine, who had been drafted after being an aide to the subcommittee. The Senator claimed that the Army's report was designed to divert attention from revelations by the subcommittee of supposed Communists in the Army and spies at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, a critical radar development facility, a charge denied by Mr. Adams.
In Caracas, Venezuela, the Inter-American Conference this date voted 17 to 1 in favor of an American-sponsored resolution to condemn the activities of the international Communist movement as foreign intervention in Western Hemispheric affairs. Guatemala was the only dissenting vote, and Mexico and Argentina had abstained. Secretary of State Dulles planned to leave for Washington this afternoon following the vote, a majority of the nations having thrown their support to the proposals for united action to prevent international Communism from gaining a foothold in the Americas. Some had demanded amendments to the U.S. draft resolution, to spell out more specifically a guarantee that it would not permit intervention into the internal affairs of any given nation, with Mexico leading the way to obtain an amendment that joint action would only occur if a country were threatened by outside agents. Several countries had wanted assurances that the citizens of individual nations would have the right to choose their own form of government and economy without outside interference. Most Latin American delegations attending the conference believed that economic issues were more pressing than a resolution against Communism, and they wanted demands for U.S. economic aid and guarantees of good prices for raw materials exported to the U.S., but Secretary Dulles had made it clear that the best answer to the economic needs in Latin America would be through private investors, both domestic and foreign, rather than in a type of price support from the U.S.
In Tehran, an official source said that Iran's Nationalist former Foreign Minister, Hosein Fatemi, who had been on the "most wanted" list since the overthrow of the former dictator Mohammed Mossadegh the previous fall, had been arrested this date in a suburb. He had fled during the bloody Royalist coup which had overthrown the Mossadegh regime the prior September 19 and restored the briefly exiled Shah, and initially had been reported "torn to bits" by an angry mob, but was later reported to have escaped to Egypt or Syria. He had been the primary aide to the former Premier in pushing through the nationalization bill which seized the petroleum industry from the British. The former Premier was serving a three-year solitary confinement sentence on charges of treason.
In Singapore, a BOAC Constellation airliner crashed and burst into flames on landing at the airport, killing 32 of the 40 persons aboard, including two Americans and one Canadian. One of the Americans was believed to be the vice-president of the Shaeffer Pen Co. and the other, the Far East supervisor of Warner Brothers Studios. The plane crashed at the end of the runway after skimming over rooftops on a normal approach for the landing. Apparently, based on eyewitness reports, only one of the plane's landing gears was deployed at the time of the attempted landing.
In Seattle, three bank robbers who had shot their way through three police officers, killing one and wounding the two others, were being sought throughout the Pacific Northwest this date. The police had never fired a shot the previous morning when they were shot by the three men who had just finished robbing a bank of $97,700, $90,800 of which one of them dropped during their getaway. The bandits had worn horn-rimmed spectacles and false noses, which some bystanders had first thought were part of a joke. An employee pressed a concealed alarm bar with his foot and three policemen in different patrol cars responded with their sirens blasting, prompting one bandit to say to another that somebody had sounded the alarm, whereupon they ran into the front lobby, encountering one of the police officers who had his shotgun at his side. One bandit then shot him in the neck. Another patrolman arrived and jumped from his car, then ran toward the parking lot beside the bank, at which point a second bandit fired through a window, hitting him in the head, mortally wounding him. The third officer arrived just as the two gunmen broke through a side door, one of whom then fired quickly and hit the third officer in the chest. A third bandit then kicked out a plate glass window and jumped through it, dropping a sack containing the $90,800 as he fled. He likely was dispatched by the other two before dark. The getaway car was subsequently discovered a few miles away from the bank with its motor still warm and a .45 caliber bullet on the front seat. No other clues existed, other than that one of the robbers had referred to another as "George".
In Syracuse, N.Y., a 50-year old man stepped up to the cashier's cage of the Internal Revenue Service office this date to pay his 1953 income tax, and then slumped to the floor, dead, having suffered a heart attack. It begs the old adage, "death and taxes…"
In Dallas—unclear whether Texas or North Carolina—, the justice of the peace said that he had installed a tape recorder in his court so that he could play back proceedings for his 74-year old mother, who got "quite a kick" out of him telling her about things which happened in court.
In Charlotte, Judge Willard Gatling,
of the Mecklenburg Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court, said this
date that he would not be a candidate for the Democratic nomination
for Congress in the 10th Congressional District, presently held by
Republican Congressman Charles Jonas of Lincolnton. Thus far, Marvin
Ritch of Charlotte, an attorney, was the only Democrat entered in the
race. The headline could have read: "Roper and Gatling out, Ritch In
A snowstorm moved northeast out of Colorado and Kansas this date, wetting down clouds of dust which had reduced visibility to zero in parts of five states, with the blizzard dumping up to ten inches of snow in its wake in western Nebraska. The Weather Bureau in Kansas City said that the storm would move northeast through Iowa and Minnesota into Wisconsin and Michigan, and eastward out of Oklahoma and Texas. Hail borne by a howling wind and accompanied by lightning hit Grand Rapids, Mich.,—home of Congressman Gerald R. Ford.
Weather, it just won't stop
On the editorial page, "Open Door for Reds and Wetbacks" indicates that the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had stated the prior December to a House committee that it had recently been discovered that approximately 100 percent of the present and past members of the Communist Party had been crossing daily into the U.S. via the El Paso area.
It suggests that the situation deserved more attention as it posed a threat to the internal security of the country, made a farce of immigration laws, and pointed out the difficulty of administering those laws while revealing exploitation of cheap foreign labor at the expense of American workers. It indicates that about 200,000 Mexicans came into the country legally each year, under contracts which provided that they would get the prevailing wage in the community, often a substandard wage of between 50 and 65 cents per hour. But they were lucky, compared to those who did not obtain a contract. The non-contract workers knew that some cotton, lettuce and melon growers would hire them, because they would work for less than the going wage. Thus, they were smuggled across the border and the U.S. ranchers paid $25 per head to the smuggler. It points out that the term "wetback" came from the fact that in earlier days, the illegal immigrants had swum across the border.
During the first eight months of 1953, almost 700,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico had been apprehended, and no one knew exactly how many others had entered the country unnoticed. Some worked for a few cents per hour or just for food and a place to lay down. The ranchers who encouraged the illegal immigration argued that native workers would not do the "stoop labor" which their crops required, which appeared to be true, at least not at the low wages the ranchers wanted to pay. Thus, the Mexicans flocked in, taking jobs which American workers could and would do, particularly during the present period of rising unemployment.
California Attorney General, and future Governor, Edmund G. Brown had
recently said that what appeared to be an economic problem of getting
"stoop labor" to handle the year-round harvests had "grown
into a grave social problem, involving murder, prostitution, robbery
and a gigantic illegal narcotic infiltration." Parenthetically, why is it that a certain segment of the California population appears unwilling or unable, during the past 60 years, to accept for very long any Democratic Governor outside the Brown family without a recall effort? ¿Que es la problema, imbeciles?
Guatemala was pro-Communist and agents commuted regularly from there to Russia. Guatemala bordered Mexico on the south and any Communist agent would not wish to enter the U.S. through normal channels and so proceeded through Mexico from Guatemala illegally.
It indicates that a partial solution to the problem was difficult but it could be eased if employers were required to hire native workers when they were available, at standard wages, and if the INS were given more funds to enforce the immigration laws and crack down on the contractors and farmers who connived to import the poor Mexicans illegally. It suggests that beyond that, the problem pointed out how ludicrous it was barely to open the front door to immigrants, referring to refugees from Eastern Europe, while the back door stood wide open.
"Unequivocal" indicates that having finished annual taxes at a wee hour of the morning, it was in no mood to say a kind word for anything or anyone in any way connected with tax collection. But, nevertheless, it notes commendation, grudgingly given, to the North Carolina Revenue Department's new short form, used for the first time in 1954, one of the best and simplest tax forms it had seen. It indicates that many taxpayers who could not use the Federal short form for want of qualification, could use the State short form, and briefly explains. It indicates that it was simple and clear.
"A Weak Answer to Murrow's Charge" indicates that Senator McCarthy's answer to Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" program of the prior Tuesday night had been "old stuff" to North Carolinians, who had seen the same false allegation used against Senator Frank Porter Graham in the 1950 Democratic Senate primary runoff with Willis Smith, wherein the supporters of Mr. Smith charged Mr. Graham with sympathies to Communists and also sympathies to integration. It indicates that in Senator McCarthy's appearance on the radio program of conservative commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., the Senator had quoted from a 1935 newspaper the charge that Mr. Murrow was on the national advisory council of the Institute of International Education, sponsoring a summer school exchange program of international students at Moscow University, which taught "the violent overthrow of the entire traditional social order". Senator McCarthy suggested that Mr. Murrow smeared the Senator continuously because he was perhaps worried about exposure of some of his own friends.
The piece indicates that in the spring primary of 1950, the young publicity man for the late Mr. Smith—not clear whether this person was Jesse Helms, who was an assistant to Mr. Smith—had placed an ad in North Carolina newspapers tying Mr. Graham to the same summer session of Moscow University in 1935. (Indeed, as we pointed out yesterday, the same 1935 Hearst-owned newspaper had tied, in bold-face print, Mr. Graham to the same advisory council in 1935 while president of UNC, along with his predecessor in that role, Harry Woodburn Chase, who had since become president of NYU, and UNC sociology professor Howard Odum, plus others of similar stature in the educational community.) The ad had said that the purpose of the session was "an effort to get American youths to go to Russia and study communism under Russian teachers."
The piece indicates that was not the case, that the May 5, 1934 issue of School & Society had made it clear that the purpose of the school was "to provide American educators an opportunity to observe educational methods in Russia." The magazine had gone on to say that the advisory committee was not forced to "sell" the summer session. It was designed to enable Soviet authorities to learn the American reaction to the new Russian educational system at the time, and so the national advisory council had been established for that purpose. Moreover, Russia had canceled the session before it was ever held, as Mr. Murrow had pointed out in his response to the Senator.
The piece points out some of the others who had been on the council, including Mr. Chase, Hallie Flanagan, John Dewey, and Robert Hutchins—who, following his time as president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago and then eight years as an associate director of the Ford Foundation, would, in 1959, found the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., for which former News editor Harry Ashmore, departed in 1947 for the Arkansas Gazette, would go to work in 1959—, and indicates that the ad had served no purpose other than linking Mr. Graham's name with Moscow just before the primary of 1950, just as Senator McCarthy's distortion of the story had served no purpose other than to try to smear Mr. Murrow, "whose loyalty, ability, and integrity need no defense from us."
"Calling Moscow" indicates that oranges from Israel, according to the New York Times' Moscow correspondent, were selling for four and five rubles apiece in the Soviet Union, and that the Soviet Government, at that rate, would make a gross profit of more than 100 million dollars on an investment of only 2.5 million dollars, a 4,000 percent return. It indicates that labor was cheap in Russia and middlemen were scarce, and so the Government should net at least about a 1,000 percent return. In the U.S., 6 percent was not considered bad, and so the piece asks who were the capitalistic exploiters.
A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "Appreciation from the Reds", indicates that there could be no more stark warning about Senator McCarthy and his legislative activities than the words of Vladimir Lenin, which Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas had asked to be inserted into the Congressional Record the previous week to illustrate McCarthyism. It then proceeds to quote at length the statement, part of which was:
"When the French bourgeoisie
makes bolshevism the central part of their election campaign, abusing
the comparatively moderate or vacillating Socialists for being
Bolshevik, when the American bourgeoisie, having completely lost its
head, seizes thousands upon thousands of people on suspicion of
bolshevism and creates an atmosphere of panic, spreading broadcast
alarming stories about Bolshevist plots; when the British bourgeoisie
… founds the most richly endowed 'societies to combat
bolshevism', creates a special literature on bolshevism and engages
for the struggle against it an extra number of scientists, agitators
and priests … we must bow and thank messieurs the capitalists.
They are working for us."
Drew Pearson indicates that if Senator McCarthy's attacks against most of his major targets were traced, they would lead back to a motive of revenge, reminiscent of totalitarian tactics in Europe before the war. He had attacked Senators Millard Tydings of Maryland and William Benton of Connecticut because the former had questioned his charge of there having been 205 Communists in the State Department, when he first asserted the charge in February, 1950, and because the latter had introduced a resolution asking for a probe of Senator McCarthy. Senator McCarthy now sought to defeat Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine because she had initiated the "declaration of conscience" which reflected on the Senator. His running feud with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens had developed after the latter refused to admit that Fort Monmouth in New Jersey was riddled with Communists, as charged by the Senator.
The most brazen recent case of vindictiveness by the Senator had come against former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, presently head of Chase Bank. Mr. McCloy had been out of government for some years after a distinguished career in the War Department and as head of the World Bank and High Commissioner to the U.S. occupation zone of Germany after the war. Senator McCarthy, however, had suddenly accused Mr. McCloy of destroying records of Communists in the U.S. Army, a charge which was so untrue that the Senator finally had to retract it publicly, but still accused Mr. McCloy of writing a wartime Army order which the Senator claimed had permitted Communists to be commissioned in the Army. Mr. Pearson indicates that the public was not aware of the motives behind that attack, dating back to a famous speech made by the President at Dartmouth the previous spring, condemning the book-burning in the Information Service libraries abroad, a speech bitterly resented by Senator McCarthy, as it had been aimed at him. Since that speech had been extemporaneous, the Senator was determined to find out who had inspired it and had sent an investigator to Hanover, N.H., to seek out the inspiration, the investigator finding that it had been Mr. McCloy. The latter had been receiving an honorary degree from Dartmouth and before the ceremony was talking to a New York attorney about the books which had been burned at the insistence of Senator McCarthy, and hearing only a fragment of the conversation, the President leaned forward and asked about it, to which Mr. McCloy responded with clarification for the President, prompting the President to say that they were not burning books in the libraries, to which Mr. McCloy stated that they were and he had the evidence. He said that the books in question had been sent to U.S. troops right after the war, books their parents and friends had wanted them to read, books which were uncensored about American life, and books which the Germans had, therefore, avidly read, containing nothing subversive. The President had listened intently and then talked about it in his speech, hailed by the press as the President's first crackdown on Senator McCarthy. The Senator was so upset about the speech that he pulled wires at the White House to prevent it from being broadcast over the Voice of America and had also persuaded the President to issue a statement that it had not been intended as a reflection on the Senator. He nevertheless resented it and when he found out that Mr. McCloy had accidentally inspired the speech, the Senator began investigating everything Mr. McCloy had done, sending two investigators to Germany to dig into his records while he had been High Commissioner, even probing the records of the carpool to see how many times his wife had used the official limousine to buy groceries, finding nothing damaging in the process.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that there was something oddly reassuring about a discussion with Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, "an eminently sensible man", reassuring that American voters could elect someone that sensible. He had not attracted a great deal of attention in his eight years in Washington, but had done so a few days earlier when he gave a speech on the Senate floor, severely criticizing Senator McCarthy for bitterly dividing the Republican Party, in the meantime making fun of the Senator, something which had rarely been done in the past. The Alsops believe that his best passage might become a classic, that Senator McCarthy donned his war paint, went into his war dance, emitted his war whoops, and then went forth to battle and proudly returned with the "scalp of a pink Army dentist".
One of the Alsops had asked him what gave him his idea for the speech, and he said it was strictly his own, realizing it was a very serious thing to say how he felt about the Senator on the Senate floor.
They indicate that Senator McCarthy was nearly universally disliked in the Senate and yet his bullying tactics had been so successful that few Democrats, let alone Republicans, had dared breathe a word of criticism against him. Senator Flanders said that the Republican leadership had been trying for over a year to get the McCarthy followers and the Eisenhower followers into the same camp, that perhaps that might have been done, as no one on the Eisenhower side wanted to split the party, but that repeatedly, Senator McCarthy had indicated it had to be all McCarthy or nothing. As that stance became clear, it appeared that a matter of principle was involved and so Senator Flanders had stayed in Vermont for an extra day the prior weekend to think matters out, and in the end, made up his mind to speak. He believed that the President had to assert his leadership and authority more, but was not certain about what the President ought to do specifically. He suggested that it might have been better for the President, rather than Vice-President Nixon, to have delivered the answer this night to Adlai Stevenson's charge, made the previous Saturday before a meeting of Democrats in Miami Beach, that the Administration had sold out to McCarthyism, but it still appeared that the President was under the influence of the political advice of those who thought he could hold himself apart from Senator McCarthy.
Senator Flanders said that there was no use kidding themselves, that even in Vermont, there were a surprising number of people who looked to Senator McCarthy as a gift from heaven, but that the majority of them would never vote Democratic under any circumstances. Some might remain home in the midterm elections should the President make his position on Senator McCarthy completely clear. He believed that a clear-cut split would help more than it would hurt, at least in Vermont, that many people would vote Democratic if it appeared that the Administration had surrendered in any way to Senator McCarthy.
Senator Flanders had spent 50 years in business before entering politics and said that he had learned a lot about politics by losing in his first attempt to run for the Senate, learning not to "rise to every fly in the pool, wet or dry", not to take too much advice, and that the best rule in politics was to be yourself. The Alsops conclude that it was a sensible rule and one which the President should ponder.
Marquis Childs, in Bonn, West Germany, indicates that the hard work of the German people to rebuild postwar Germany suggested that they wanted to be done with the past, and yet one could still detect "beneath the surface old attitudes, old fears and suspicions evoked by the memories of past grandeur and past defeat." A significant touchstone in Germany was Senator McCarthy, who had become for all of Europe "the chief apparition on the Western horizon."
Mr. Childs had talked to a number of Germans and many foreign observers to try to discern the effect of Senator McCarthy and "McCarthyism" and found two different reactions. Those who genuinely wanted Germany to become part of a unified Europe realized that the U.S. had to share in that undertaking and help to underwrite it, and were fearful that Senator McCarthy would so divide the U.S. that there would be a reversion to isolationism. The attitude was particularly prevalent among young people, many of whom were working actively to increase international cooperation. They were also fearful that demagogic tactics would encourage forces within Germany to turn again to authoritarianism. Neo-Nazis, however, were believed to be comparatively few in number and confined to the extremist fringe. A second reaction was from those Germans who were glad to see the U.S. suffering embarrassment over a Senator who flouted the rules of law and order and garnered sensational headlines, an attitude germinating partly from somewhat concealed resentment of the occupation of the country and the restraints the occupation had imposed on the defeated people.
Senator McCarthy's name had first come to be known in Germany when he had investigated the treatment of the German soldiers imprisoned for shooting disarmed U.S. soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944, at the Malmedy massacre. The Senator had done everything he could at the time of the Senate investigation to make it appear that the American Army investigators had mistreated and even tortured the German prisoners. Former Senator Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut had sought to bring out the facts which refuted those charges, but Senator McCarthy's sensational accusation found wide public appeal in Germany, supporting a self-pitying view that all of the world had turned against the German people. That attitude concerned serious Germans, fearful of a revival of the spirit of revenge, reminiscent of the spirit of 1919 and the belief that the Versailles Treaty had stabbed Germany in the back, that the German army had not lost the war but that German soldiers had been betrayed by traitors behind the lines, claims encouraged by the German generals and taken up by Hitler and the Nazis, using it with great effectiveness to discredit the struggling democracy known as the Weimar Republic. Observers who had followed the Federal Republic, founded in 1949, believed that something like that same theory, to explain away defeat in World War II, might again grab a segment of the population.
Steven C. Swett, in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, indicates that during the previous few years, Harold Stoke, dean of the graduate school at the University of Washington, had surveyed the sporting scene in American colleges and universities and been angered and embittered by what he had seen, that instead of finding athletics run for educational and character-building value, found sports as a major entertainment in colleges and universities. His observations had been contained in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
After reviewing Mr. Stoke's suggestion of separating athletics from normal educational functions and having athletes attend college solely for the purpose of being athletes, he indicates that nine years earlier the same sort of relationship had been discussed by the eight presidents of the Ivy League schools, who complained of professionalism, commercialism and over-emphasis on big-time athletics across the country. A formal agreement between the eight schools had established a sporting code, the spirit of which contradicted the proposals of Mr. Stoke. Known as the "Ivy Pact", the new agreement denied that big-time athletics had any rightful place in undergraduate athletics, and forbade athletic scholarships, spring football practice, and bowl game participation. The agreement was based on the principle that academic authorities ought control athletics. One paragraph of the Pact, the preamble, stated: "Players shall be truly representative of the student body and not composed of a group of specifically recruited athletes."
The conditions of the Pact required that "undue strain upon players and coaches be eliminated and that they be permitted to enjoy as participants in a form of recreational competition rather than as professional performers in public spectacles." (They are not going to be in public spectacles as long as they can pass an eye examination.)
Mr. Swett indicates that the conflict between the analysis of Mr. Stoke and that of the Pact concerned definitions of liberal education, fund-raising, and obligations of educational institutions to the nation. Each dealt with fundamental conflicts between athletics and education. Because the Stoke proposals dealt with the sports world at large, they could not be called poppycock. The problems, he finds, with which Mr. Stoke had dealt were being addressed by the Ivy League, which had become the "ivory tower for athletic amateurism", and were in the process of being solved.
Mr. Swett's piece loses some of its authority as he refers throughout to Mr. Stoke as Mr. Stokes.
In any event, all we know is that there it was, on January 2, 1967, with UNC 9-0, in its best basketball start since the undefeated national championship season of 1957, and Princeton then comes to town and spoiled everything, all of Christmas past, New Year's present and return to school future—everything gone. No going back. But, they got them back in March, when it counted. So, it was all right.
Framed Edition
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