The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 2, 1954
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. officials were favoring an emergency meeting of NATO foreign ministers in New York later in the month to seek agreement on West Germany's role in the defense of Western Europe, in the wake of the rejection by the French National Assembly of the European Defense Community treaty, which had proposed a unified army among six nations, France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries. Officials now regarded the most workable solution to be to have West Germany become a member of NATO, with some safeguards to prevent a revival of German militarism, as it was being rearmed. The U.S. and British Governments both hoped for German membership in NATO, which would require unanimous approval of the existing 14 member nations, including France. French Premier Pierre Mendes-France wanted some kind of a solution which would amount to an EDC substitute or a "little NATO" arrangement, or possibly a second-class status for West Germany within NATO. U.S. and British officials felt, however, that in letting EDC die, Premier Mendes-France had lost his last opportunity to impose any such restraint on West Germany's future position and behavior. The French rejection of EDC had produced a demand from the West German Government for complete independence from Allied occupation and a new Western defense arrangement without discrimination against West German troops. The State Department had acted with deliberate slowness to encourage the European nations, particularly France, to come up with their own plan to substitute for EDC.
The six-Senator special committee holding hearings on the resolution to censure Senator McCarthy began considering the last of their five categories of charges, "possible violations of the Espionage Act" by the Senator for having received classified information from FBI files through an unidentified officer of the armed forces during the course of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and then having publicly invited any employee of the Government to provide him with any documents which showed either corruption or subversion, whether or not it was deemed classified. The hearing moved quickly over the question of whether the Senator had engaged in the latter conduct of encouraging Government employees to provide official secrets, and on both of the points had utilized testimony taken during the Army-McCarthy hearings, reading into the record abstracts of the testimony taken on May 4, when the subject of the memorandum from the FBI had come up, with director J. Edgar Hoover later indicating that the supposed letter from the director was not that at all, but rather a condensed two and a half page document which quoted verbatim from sections of a 15-page memorandum which he had sent to Army intelligence but which was not a letter which he had ever personally written or signed. Senator McCarthy had claimed that the document contained evidence of subversion in the Army, an espionage cell at Fort Monmouth which had been headed by executed atomic spy Julius Rosenberg, and was from the director. The Senator's attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, protested that some of the material being introduced to the record was being taken out of context. Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, the committee chairman, responded that Senator McCarthy could read into evidence anything which was not clearly irrelevant during presentation of his defense. Senator McCarthy was late for the hearing, having engaged in an interview being filmed for later television broadcast, in which he had protested against the barring of television and radio from spot coverage of the hearing. He criticized Senator Watkins and the committee's vice-chairman, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, for the refusal to direct that Senator Johnson state his personal views of Senator McCarthy, after a story had appeared the previous March in the Denver Post quoting Senator Johnson as having said that he doubted whether there was any Senator who did not loathe Senator McCarthy. Senator Watkins had ruled the matter irrelevant and that Senator Johnson was not disqualified from sitting on the committee by the fact, and that the committee, in any event, had no power to remove him. Senator Johnson denied that he had ever stated that he personally loathed Senator McCarthy. Senator McCarthy, prior to beginning his television interview, had outlined questions to the reporters which he wanted them to ask.
In Washington, the American Legion, in their annual convention, overwhelmingly approved this date a proposal calling for the U.S. to meet any further Communist aggression in Southeast Asia with "immediate military retaliation". They agreed that such retaliation ought be taken "with or without the cooperation of the other free nations of the world." The Legion also voted to oppose any move to bar use of atomic weapons or to reach any agreement with the Russians on atomic matters at the present time, voted to urge the U.S. to build its air strength and establish an effective and expanded civil defense program, to provide its support for immediate rearming of West Germany, and seriously consider severing "all diplomatic relations" with Russia and its satellites. It voted overwhelmingly to adopt a report of its foreign relations committee which had said that coexistence was impossible with Russia and its satellites or puppets, who had not offered the slightest evidence of good faith. The Legionnaires heard a speech this date by U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in which he said that he had proof that the Chinese Communists were given the job five years earlier of leading "an organized Communist attempt to conquer Asia", that the U.S. was prepared to support a move during the current month's U.N. session, if Thailand so desired, to send U.N. peace observers to the Indo-China area so that potential aggressors would know that they were being watched, that nearly all of the 1,800 Americans employed at the U.N. had been given full security investigations and that there was no excuse any longer for employing any American Communist at the organization, and that former pro-Communist President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, after his resignation, had abandoned personal papers, including Communist books, which showed how Communism had sought to penetrate Central America.
The Public Health Service said this date that it appeared that the incidence of new polio cases was leveling off and that the season peak was being approached. There had been reported 2,210 new cases during the nation the previous week, only three more than those reported for the prior week, and 27 fewer than those reported in the corresponding week a year earlier. Through the prior Saturday, there been 17,112 cases during 1954, compared to 18,191 in the same period for the prior year. For the "disease year", which started around April 1, there had been 15,561 cases in 1954, compared with 16,610 in 1953. The Service noted that cases of parrot fever during the year were running more than double the previous record for an entire year, with 389 such cases reported the previous week, compared with the previous record of 169 during all of 1953, with Texas having led the states in that disease, with 149 reported cases.
New Hurricane Dolly, at present 485 miles east of Atlantic City, N.J., and moving northeastward at about 35 to 40 mph, had picked up some speed early this date and was headed toward the southeast tip of Newfoundland, well away from new England, still recovering from Hurricane Carol. Trans-Atlantic shipping, however, would be in for trouble.
In Raleigh, Governor William B. Umstead said at a press conference that North Carolina probably would ask for more time to put desegregation into effect, as part of its intended amicus brief to be filed with the Supreme Court by September 15, to participate in the recommendations for the Brown v. Board of Education implementation decision on desegregation, set to be decided by the Court during the coming term, starting in early October. The Governor and State Attorney General Harry McMullan had announced the previous day that the state would file such a brief, making the decision after consulting with three attorneys who were members of the Governor's 19-person advisory committee on desegregation. He referred questions regarding the precise nature of the brief to Mr. McMullan. The Governor indicated that the State Board of Education had decided that there would be no change in the schools for the coming school year.
In Stanley, N.C., about 75 black children had again refused bus transportation to classes in nearby Dallas, a refusal which had begun the previous day with the opening of the current school year. A lawsuit had been filed by black parents in Stanley, a mill town of about 2,500 people located in northern Gaston County, to obtain a modern school building. The black school in the town was an old, frame structure, which had been discontinued after the close of the previous school term. The Gaston County school superintendent said that space and transportation had been provided to pupils in the Dallas black school, a larger, more modern building, but that the black parents in Stanley had demanded in their suit that an eight-room building, complete with cafeteria and gymnasium for the 75 students, be provided. The superintendent said that the school board had refused the demand because of the small number of pupils who would utilize the school and because of the need for school consolidation. The superintendent said that the parents had stated that they did not want their children attending white schools. He said that two rooms had been added to the Dallas school in anticipation of the new students coming from Stanley, and that in Dallas, black students would have equal facilities to those of white students.
In Lexington, N.C., Coble Dairy Products Cooperative, Inc., filed incorporation papers in Raleigh this date with State Secretary of State Thad Eure, authorizing capitalization of stock at 9.2 million dollars. For some time, the owners of Coble had been negotiating a possible sale of the dairy either to Foremost Dairies or to a dairy cooperative. It provides details if you are interested.
Julian Scheer of The News reports on the reopening of schools in Charlotte, as 43,000 children reported on the first day.
We're not going.
On the editorial page, "The Report of a McCarthy Committee" comments on the final report of the Senate Investigations subcommittee which had heard the dispute between the Army and Senator McCarthy between April 22 and June 17 during 36 days of hearings, indicating that, as anticipated, especially as the midterm elections approached, the report had split along party lines, with the Republican majority indicating that Senator McCarthy should have disciplined his staff but that he, personally, had not used improper influence with the Army to obtain special privileges for Private G. David Schine. The Democratic minority report had indicated that both Senator McCarthy and the subcommittee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had been guilty of "inexcusable actions" which merited "severe criticism" with regard to Private Schine and the threat to intensify the subcommittee's investigation of the Army unless the privileges were granted.
One of the Republican members, Senator Charles Potter of Michigan, had joined the Democrats in criticizing Senator McCarthy's use of material from a secret FBI document during the hearings, along with his open invitation to Government workers to provide him with documents from the executive branch, regardless of their classified status, containing any information indicative of corruption or subversion.
After briefly recapping the basis for the hearings, the piece finds that the subcommittee, after using a great deal of time and money, did not get at the heart of the McCarthy problem, but instead concentrated on the periphery, dealing with relatively unimportant charges, giving them undue significance. Members of the subcommittee haphazardly had created more issues as they had gone along. The use of the unauthorized FBI files and the invitation to supply more had been, it opines, more important than the original charges.
It finds the new special committee considering the censure resolution, chaired by Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, to be proceeding in a more logical manner than the Investigations subcommittee had, and suggests that the special committee might get to the heart of the issue. But it still doubts, with an election looming, that it would render a useful verdict. It finds that the Senate had passed the buck to the present committee and that neither the full Senate nor the committee would be inclined to place principle above politics during the midterm election cycle. It thus concludes that there were too many McCarthy committees, just as there were too many Pine Streets in Charlotte.
"The South Loses a Leader" laments the death of Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina from a heart attack the previous day, indicating that neither South Carolina nor the South would soon forget him. In 1939, he had been the first Governor to be elected from Charleston since the Civil War. He was a patrician, which normally would have spelled doom to his political aspirations, as on his mother's side, he was a member of the noted Rhett family, prominent in South Carolina society since the early days of the republic, and his father had been a distinguished physician. He had also bucked tradition by winning the gubernatorial nomination on his first attempt. As Mayor of Charleston, he had been equipped with a political machine which delivered 91 percent of the ballots cast in Charleston County, but also proved himself adept at rough-and-tumble politicking across the state, receiving many votes from sections remote from Charleston where ordinarily politicians from that city would have received no votes.
While Governor, he had advocated electric cooperatives and other progressive programs, urged coordination of South Carolina's law enforcement agencies, fought for lower rail freight rates and unsuccessfully had sought the use of state highway funds for school purposes and for the support of charitable, educational and penal institutions.
When Senator James Byrnes had been appointed by FDR to the Supreme Court in 1941, Governor Maybank won the special election to succeed him. While supportive of President Roosevelt's policies, he had broken with President Truman regarding civil rights, but remained with the national party in 1952 when Governor Byrnes had shifted his allegiance to General Eisenhower.
Had he lived, Senator Maybank, it indicates, would have been a fixture in Congress for years to come. Like his colleague, Senator Olin Johnston, he had become an important figure on the Southern political scene and had earned a reputation among his Democratic colleagues for his ability to guide bills produced by the Banking Committee through the Senate. It concludes that he would be missed.
"'Thirty Days Hath September…'" indicates that August had been both hot and dull, causing it to believe that they might never make it to September. It reminds that the previous day had been the 15th anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland to start World War II. Monday would be Labor Day, and around September 12, three centuries earlier, America's first Jewish settlers had arrived in New Amsterdam. On September 16, 1620, the Pilgrims had left England on the Mayflower. September 17 would be Citizenship Day, commemorating the signing of the Constitution in 1787. On September 21, 1787, the first successful daily newspaper in the U.S. had been printed, the Pennsylvania Packet & Daily Advertiser, its most famous exclusive having been President Washington's farewell address. On September 23, the same day on which in 1789, the First Congress had passed the Bill of Rights, fall would begin. Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, would begin on September 27. The Munich Pact had been signed on September 30, 1938, and on that same date, 11 years earlier, Babe Ruth had hit his 60th home run to set a season record, which had never been broken to this point.
It also indicates that September was Better Breakfast Month, included National Sunday School Week, National Dog Week and National Day of Prayer, as well as having the Miss America Beauty Pageant.
It welcomes September, as the needed tonic.
That's what you think, you old goat. It's not so hot for people who have to go back to old school and learn about all that stuff you just reeled off.
A piece from the Sanford Herald, titled "This Russia Did Invent", indicates that the agriculture experts had said of late that filter tip cigarettes were helping to create what could become a tobacco crisis by cutting the amount of tobacco which went into each cigarette and thus cutting the public's consumption of tobacco. It tells of the Russians being behind it, as they had invented the filter tip, according to the vice-president of the American Machine & Foundry Co.'s tobacco division, who contended that around the turn of the century, a Russian manufacturer had begun inserting a cigarette two inches long into a five-inch hollow tube to reduce the amount of tobacco per cigarette and cool the smoke, resulting in hollow-ended cigarettes becoming the standard in Europe. He had also said that history was in conflict as to whether it had been a Russian or a German who had first stuffed cotton into the tube for filtering purposes. His actual point had been that it was American Machine & Foundry which had developed the first machine to make cigarettes and add the filter in one operation.
The piece guesses that it had been a German responsible for the cotton, as the Russian would have saved it as evidence for his claim that he invented the cotton gin. It finds it all in line with the tendency of the Russians to claim all manner of inventions. It adds that in tobacco country, people did not think much of the cigarette-making machine which inserted the filter in one operation.
Rufus Terral, writing in Americas, seeks to define jazz, indicating that it was often confused with blues and ragtime as it took both as its material, but that blues and ragtime were forms of music, whereas jazz was a way of playing music. Jazz had come into existence about 75 years earlier, but so gradually and anonymously that its origins remained obscure. It had been born in New Orleans, the most French and cultivated of U.S. cities of that time, and the one place on the North American continent most strongly permeated with the primitive culture of the West African Gold Coast.
The first jazz had been almost exclusively rhythmic, having sprung from the drum head. The small drum, made from bamboo, was called the bamboula, giving its name to an African dance. Then was added the banjo, then the tuba, cornet, clarinet and trombone, followed by the guitar, the string bass, and the piano.
"High Society"
He finds that the special genius with which all of the music was re-created into something new and exciting, often unrecognizable, had come from improvisation, not only by individuals but by entire groups of musicians improvising at once.
Originally, it had been spelled "jass" or "jas", "jasz" or "jaszz". The Creoles of New Orleans had used the word taken from the black patois, meaning "excite", designating a music of syncopated and rudimentary type, according to Lafcadio Hearn—who, incidentally, W. J. Cash had first proposed as a subject of a biography to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1932, which he would write while visiting New Orleans, Ireland, Wales, London and Paris, a proposal rejected.
The subjects of jazz were few and
primitive, consisting of sex, sorrow and joy. As Winthrop Sargeant
had said, "Its vocabulary does not encompass religious awe,
tragedy, romantic nostalgia, metaphysical contemplation, grandeur,
wonder, patriotic or humanitarian fervor." Mr. Terral finds that
the blues spoke of the "indomitable, unquenchable spirit of man,
who cries out of the depths to address himself to the heights; that
jazz makes use of blues with that language pretty much left out. It
appeals to the motor reflexes, so that even those who profess not to
like jazz, or actually to be offended by it, find their feet swaying
or tapping to its undismissible rhythms
In turn-of-the-century New Orleans,
brass bands had flourished as in no other city, with street marching
bands of gaudily uniformed black musicians playing for parades and
funerals, 13 of them, he notes, having marched in the funeral
procession for assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881. Accompanying a
funeral to a cemetery, they would play an appropriate spiritual, but
as the procession filed out of the cemetery gates, according to Rudi
Blesh, "the snare drums would roll, a cornet would sound its high
imperious signal notes, and before the band was three blocks away, it
would be tearing into a syncopated jazz rendering of 'Oh, Didn't He
Ramble'
During the early years of the 20th
Century, the showboats were replacing the packets on the inland
rivers, carrying jazz wherever a paddle-wheel turned. Johnny St.
Cyr's banjo, Louis Armstrong's trumpet, and Baby Dodds's drum
traveled on the various showboats
Jazz had found such an audience in
New Orleans brothels, as ragtime found it in the Missouri towns of
Sedalia and St. Louis. After the brothels of Storyville had lasted
for 20 years, they were closed by order of Secretary of the Navy
Josephus Daniels, shortly before the entry of the U.S. into World War
I in 1917, as it was operating close to a Navy base. Jazz musicians
then drifted from New Orleans to Chicago
Meanwhile, jazz had been going around the world. Its present reign, he indicates, was a recrudescence of Dixieland, a white jazz imitative of black jazz and first played in New Orleans around 1885. While Dixieland was not noticeably different from any other jazz, its ascendancy, coming at a time of a revolution in phonograph records, had proved a boon to jazz-lovers. Many old jazz records which had for years been collectors' items were now being reissued on the new microgroove records. Thus, the jazzophile could truthfully say that while the Golden Age of jazz was in the distant past, he, personally, had never had it so good.
Frank Edwards, news broadcaster, substitutes this date for Drew Pearson, still on vacation, tells of eight British scientists conducting closely guarded tests of a radically new type of automobile which might revolutionize the industry, utilizing a very small engine operating a tiny hydraulic pump which delivered power to the wheels by activating a transmission filled with mercury. It was light, fast and had surprisingly few moving parts, the British hoping that it would open new markets in areas where price and dependability were of paramount importance.
He imparts that in Brazil, a recent discovery in the fight against cancer had upset a theory and replaced it with a question mark, with biologists probing the jungles in search of a cure, studying the living habits of isolated communities where cancer was nonexistent, despite the people being underfed, lacking often even rudimentary medical care, and having poor sanitation standards. Biologists were checking their water supply, the food, the air and the soil in the hope of trying to find the factor which enabled them to be free from cancer. The fact that the isolated communities did not have it dispelled the notion that it was the result of exposure to cosmic rays from outer space.
In California, flight testing was ongoing on a ramjet plane during the previous three months. A ramjet was basically a tube with a fire inside, fed by fuel pumped at high pressure. The catch was that the ramjet could not operate until a comparatively high airspeed was reached, but designers had gotten around that problem by equipping the planes with conventional jet engines which served to get the plane to the speed necessary for the ramjet to take over and enable the plane to fly in excess of 1,600 mph.
He muses that as one passed over the Mojave Desert in present commercial passenger planes at speeds of 300 mph, one could look down and faintly discern the wagon tracks of the pioneers who had done well to traverse 300 miles in the course of a month, and those planes would soon be outmoded.
In New York, models who resembled famous people were being hired by advertising agencies, saving the cost of securing the endorsement of the celebrity. One young man who resembled a famous movie star had suddenly found himself very much in demand, appearing in one magazine issue in three different ads, for toothpaste, cigarettes and a hearing aid.
Stewart Alsop, in Louisville, discusses the campaign for re-election of Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, running in a heavily fought race with former Vice-President Alben Barkley. Senator Cooper was closely identified with the Eisenhower wing of the Republican Party and was one of the few Republican candidates who had unequivocally opposed Senator McCarthy. His defeat would therefore be regarded as good by the anti-Eisenhower underground within the party, all the more because the President had placed his prestige on the line for the Senator.
Vice-President Nixon was expected to appear on the campaign hustings for Senator Cooper, as were House Speaker Joseph Martin, Senator Everett Dirksen, and Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay, and Secretary of the Navy Charles Thomas. The President might also make a second "nonpolitical" trip to Kentucky, as he had already done once. The RNC coffers would also be open to aid Senator Cooper.
If the Senator were to win re-election in a normally Democratic border state, it would be a great victory for the President and the Administration, enough to offset expected setbacks elsewhere. But if he were to lose, the Administration and the President would lose face, potentially disastrously.
Senator Cooper did not present the image of a great campaigner, mumbling before audiences and having the look that he wished he were elsewhere, forgot names in a state where remembering names was a high art, one perfected by former Vice-President Barkley. Senator Cooper also forgot to shake hands with those whose names he forgot and also forgot sometimes to show up for speaking engagements. Yet, whereas General Eisenhower had lost Kentucky in 1952 by 700 votes, Senator Cooper had won the special election by 30,000 votes. His magic appeared to be a combination of personal charm, a genius for visiting around in small towns, evincing evident sincerity, and holding moderate political positions, attractive to Kentucky's high proportion of independent voters. Yet, the odds were decidedly against him, as Republicans historically won in Kentucky only when either the Democrats became overconfident and put up a really repulsive candidate or the two Democratic factions fought it out before the general election to the exclusion of both.
But with Mr. Barkley as a candidate, who had never been beaten by a Republican since first running for office 50 years earlier, and with both Democratic factions united behind him, Mr. Cooper stood little chance of winning.
Doris Fleeson, in Bonn, West Germany, indicates that the Western allies had long since ceased to worry about the physical condition of Germany, as the economic recovery had been so remarkable that its political freedom had to be enlarged. The Allies had virtually freed the Germans to handle the problem of their own freedom, a risk they believed they had to take so that West Germans would have a stake in their own outcome.
She indicates that Americans needed to realize that Germany was a great power presently, regardless of the next step by the Allies, but that its splendid economic recovery did not represent a guarantee of its political health.
Officially, the U.S. saw nothing wrong in Germany, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had been given a free hand and was being helped in every possible way, never calling on the U.S. High Commissioner, rather the High Commissioner always calling on him. A year earlier, Chancellor Adenauer had proved his European point of view by embracing the French concept of the European Defense Community and had won a mandate from the people in a free election, where the reactionary right and reactionary left had both been decisively voted out. The Chancellor had also received a majority mandate from Parliament. Now, with EDC having been rejected by the French National Assembly, things were more complicated for West Germany. In addition, two defections to East Germany, one by the head of the anti-subversives unit of West Germany and the other an elected official, raised serious questions about West Germany's internal administration.
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