The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 20, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from New York that General Douglas MacArthur had said this date that the Pentagon report released the previous day had fully confirmed that he had never been consulted concerning the Yalta Conference of February, 1945, between FDR, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. He said that the issue involved at the origin of the controversy had not been whether Russia ought to have been brought into the Pacific war, which he believed should have occurred at the very beginning, but whether the U.S. should have made vital territorial concessions at the expense of Chinese sovereignty to induce Russia to come into the war at its end. He said that he had urged on December 13, 1941 that Russia attack from the north, which he suggested would have "saved countless lives, billions of dollars and spared the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea and many Pacific islands." He said that there was no documentation even remotely suggesting that he had supported territorial concessions or anything which supported the notion that after his initial recommendation of 1941, he had advocated prior to Yalta that Russia enter the Pacific war at that point in time. The prepared statement had been issued by the General's long-time aide, Maj. General Courtney Whitney, who said that General MacArthur would have no further comment on the statement.

The Israeli sector of Jerusalem reported that voluntary contributions to a spontaneous two-day old "arms for Israel" drive were pouring into the Defense Ministry, the Prime Minister's office and newspaper offices, in response to the prospective sale of arms to Egypt by Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia in exchange for Egyptian cotton.

In Point Clear, Ala., Southern governors, meeting for the 21st annual Southern Governors Conference, were ready this date to make the first move toward a cooperative program throughout the South designed to promote new scientific and industrial development of the region, with the hope being that the region would support 30 percent of the nation's manufacturing facilities in another ten years. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had urged the governors near the end of the conference to make the first unified effort toward regional cooperation by initiating uniform reports on new plant locations, initiating a study of industries which had grown rapidly in the South after World War II, and holding a regional conference on market research. The president of the Southern Association of Science and Industry, Inc., told the governors at their final session that the South's industrial output since 1939 had increased from 11 billion dollars to nearly 60 billion. He said that the Southern Gulf area, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and northwest Florida, had accounted for one-sixth of the nation's industrial construction during the previous decade. He said that during the ensuing decade, it would be necessary to build approximately three plants per day or a total of 10,000 plants, with each state adding an average of 700 plants to its industrial potential by 1965. He ventured that the largest prospective industry for the South would be in chemicals, with about 710 million dollars having been invested in new chemical plants completed during 1954, and another 780 million dollars worth being built. He said that the South currently had one-third of the nation's chemical industry and was expected to increase to half of that industry within the ensuing decade.

Julian Scheer of The News reports that Senator Sam J. Ervin, speaking from his home in Morganton, had told the newspaper this date that the South ought insist on running a Southerner for the presidency on the Democratic ticket in 1956. He said that a coalition movement for the South at the convention the following summer, as suggested by Senator Lyndon Johnson, was "wise" and that he was still in favor of nominating Adlai Stevenson again, but with reservations, stating that Senator Richard Russell of Georgia was actually his preferred nominee. Governor Luther Hodges had called the possible formation of a coalition a "very desirable thing", but Senator Kerr Scott had stated the previous day that the suggestion "may be all right" but that "traditionally it is not the North Carolina way." Senator Ervin said that it was essential that the South have some voice at the convention, as the South had kept the party alive from 1868 to the first term of FDR, "through the years of famine." He said that notwithstanding that fact, the South had been without influence in naming a candidate for the party, despite having great influence in Congress.

In Alexandria, Ky., a pet fox terrier the previous day had led a woman to the body of her baby, 20 months old, who had drowned in a pool of rainwater on their nearby farm.

Near Greensboro, N.C., two brothers and their wives had been killed in a collision of their automobile with a dump truck this date at a newly constructed intersection which was not protected by stop signs. A 1951 Ford driven by one of the deceased brothers had approached the intersection from the east and was struck on the right side by the dump truck, which had been traveling southeast on the other intersecting road. The driver of the truck was taken to a Greensboro hospital for treatment of severe head lacerations and an injured hand. The Highway Patrolman investigating the accident said that the truck had the right-of-way.

In Goldsboro, the chairman of the State Hospitals Board of Control, John W. Umstead of Chapel Hill, this date said that he was planning to visit the Goldsboro State Hospital as the investigation continued into the accident the previous day which had seriously injured seven black women patients, after 72 of the patients had been crowded onto a small truck, the weak siding of which had given way around a sharp curve near Goldsboro. The driver of the truck had been charged with reckless driving, operating the truck without a chauffeur's license and improper registration of the vehicle. The superintendent of the hospital had stated the previous day that the cotton-picking program, which had been in operation for more than 19 years, would be suspended indefinitely. He said that all of the injured women were in satisfactory condition. Farmers paid three dollars per hundred pounds for the cotton picked by the mental patients, with the money going to the hospital's general fund. About 209 of the 3,000 patients at the institution were sent out daily to participate in the cotton-picking. Mr. Umstead said that the Hospitals Board had never passed on the matter of using Goldsboro hospital patients to pick cotton, because the practice was older than the Board. He said that no one participated in such activity unless they wanted to do so and that even then, the doctors checked the participants first.

Helen Parks of The News indicates that a recommendation that Mecklenburg Baptist churches take action to ensure continued control of church property by a majority of members of each congregation, had been presented this date to messengers of the Mecklenburg Baptist Churches. The recommendation came from a declaration prepared the previous spring by the Mecklenburg Association of Baptist Churches answering the controversial decision made by the North Carolina Supreme Court concerning ownership of the property of the North Rocky Mount Baptist Church, with the declaration, signed by leading Baptist ministers of the area, saying that the Court had erred in its decision.

In Charlotte, the president of the Carolina Motor Club said that despite the license plates for North and South Carolina being similar, the same size and the same color combination of black on yellow, there was a difference in the arrangement of the numbers, and the North Carolina plates bore the phrase "Drive Safely" above the numbers, whereas the South Carolina plates were inscribed with the motto, "Drive Hell-Bent for Leather, Buddy".

Sandy Grady, News sportswriter, reports from Columbia, S.C., that a clerk behind a hotel desk had held up a dozen orange tickets and said that he had bought them for $4.80 apiece and that he would rather have them than a handful of diamonds, that by game time there would be a mob in the hotel trying to buy the tickets for $20 each. This date was Big Thursday in Columbia, where Clemson would seek to register its first win in seven years against the University of South Carolina, and the former was a seven-point favorite. Over 35,000 people were attending the game, but it would be impossible to know how many would actually see it, as in previous years, many among the crowds had been involved in fistfights, tipping flasks and generally shedding their inhibitions. Over 5,000 male students from Clemson had gathered for a solemn burial of a gamecock the previous day and the previous night, flames had licked high around the State Capitol building as South Carolina fans burned a wooden tiger. Hotel rooms in the city were scarce, the game having been sold out since August, and motels for 50 miles around were jammed. The easiest commodity to find was a party, with alumni of the two schools keeping hotel bellhops frantic as they reveled around open jugs on the eve of the football game. A Clemson graduate said that he had been coming to Columbia for 30 years and always enjoyed it more than New Year's Day and Christmas combined. There were plans afoot to convert Big Thursday into Big Saturday in a couple of years, but Clemson alumni were loudly protesting that the game had to be played every other year at Clemson. Clemson coach Frank Howard wanted to shift it to the end of the season, as with the UNC-Duke rivalry. Mr. Grady concludes by saying that Big Thursday was not a football game, but rather the man in the cowboy hat who leaped onto the chair in the Columbia Hotel lobby and yelled: "It only happens once a year, folks—let's live it up." Clemson fans, at the end of the day yesterday in that traditional rivalry contest, were not so pleased in Clemson, with their team losing their first home game in seven years after 40 straight home wins, dropping the game, in which they had been decided favorites, by a single point.

We sincerely hope that a similar outcome might be in the offing next Saturday, when Clemson meets UNC in Charlotte for the ACC championship game. Please take pity on us poor UNC fans who have suffered through three losses in a matter of three days between two of our sports teams, more losses in such a short period of time than we can recall ever enduring, and it is getting a bit old. We cannot even enjoy cold turkey. We simply cannot endure any more, so please just step aside, Clemson, and let us have the big one this year as a consolation prize for these days of unremitting woe. The football gods will bless you. You will always have another year. Our football team, on the other hand, has not won an ACC championship since 1980. Thus, it is our year. Thank you.

Speaking of Frank Howard, we wish that college football would return to the old days when they would just simply finish with ties when tied be the score at the end of the 60 minutes. A tie is better than a loss, even if not as good as a win. But when you win after a tie, is it really so much superior to kissing your own sister? as Mr. Howard used to say of a tie, the overtime tiebreakers being rather artificial in the game of football, without a clock to delimit the temporal frame of the action. It would instill again a sense of cooperation in society and deter the notion of having to win to be satiated. Bring back the ties.

On the editorial page, "School Consolidation: Pave the Way" quotes Henry W. Lewis, an assistant director of the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, as saying, in summarizing a 1949 survey of problems involved in consolidating the separate City and County school systems of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, that "in an essentially adolescent community" it was imperative that plans for future educational development be made in terms of the geographical area and in terms of all of the children and the total resources available. He had urged merger of the two systems in 1949. Since that time, consolidation had been debated exhaustively, but despite the proposal's many advantages, the authorities of the City and County had been reluctant to take any decisive action toward consolidation. The matter had been brought up again at a meeting of the City School Board the previous day, but only in an offhand manner, with one commissioner saying that he could foresee that there might be one school system in another decade.

While there was closer cooperation between the two systems, there were many good reasons why complete consolidation would better serve the needs of the residents of the city and county, equalizing the educational opportunities for all of the children without lowering them for anyone. It finds it a constitutional as well as moral responsibility to provide equal educational opportunity for every child and that merger would make that goal more easily obtainable.

As pointed out in the report of 1949, consolidation would allow for future building programs planned from the standpoint of need for the whole area without the division caused by system lines, also affording centralization of plant operation and maintenance work, saving money by enabling competitive bulk purchasing. Overall, merger of the system would enable economy to be practiced in planning, building and maintenance.

It concludes that merger was inevitable, as the commissioner had stated, and that plans ought be made to welcome it much sooner than ten years hence.

"Negligence Caused Patients' Injuries" comments on the accident near Goldsboro in which 30 of 72 mental patients crammed onto a 1.5-ton truck had been injured when they fell out of the truck as it rounded a sharp curve. It indicates that a prudent man would not haul 72 hogs or cows on such a truck with "insubstantial siding", as the Highway Patrol had determined the truck had. At the time of the accident, the truck had been transporting the women to a field owned by the driver to pick cotton. The hospital claimed that there was therapeutic value for the patients and cash returns for the hospital in such outside work.

It indicates that if that justified the program, then it ought to have common sense in its implementation both in the methods of transportation and in the fields. News reports had said that the patients were being transported for as much as ten miles from the hospital while standing up in the back of the truck, apparently without any hospital attendants along.

It concludes that gross negligence obviously had caused the accident, similar to one which had occurred 12 years earlier. The hospital's statement that "many times 72 persons have been transported in the same manner" had merely underscored the negligence and the need for some investigation and punishment at the Goldsboro facility. The State Hospitals Board of Control, it offers, ought investigate the incident thoroughly, and suggests that the accident might be only a symptom of a greater lack of care occurring at the facility.

"The South Is Part of the Mainstream" discusses the 21st annual conference of the Southern Governors, suggesting that there was more sound than substance in the talk of creating an effective third-party or in the plan for a Southern bloc vote at the Democratic convention in 1956, ignoring the new and widespread diversity of regional thinking as well as the national ambitions of some of the South's leaders.

Texas Governor Allan Shivers embodied the frustrations of many traditional Southerners, having in 1952 supported General Eisenhower for the presidency over Adlai Stevenson, and was still waging what appeared to be a personal vendetta against Mr. Stevenson. But after Mr. Eisenhower had won, the Governor began blasting the dominant trends of both parties and recently had said that he would like another Eisenhower-type administration. It finds, however, that it was difficult to conceive of that state of affairs without President Eisenhower, and Governor Shivers could not continue to jump back and forth between the parties without getting into very serious trouble with the Democrats.

It posits that the best for which a third party movement could hope would be to receive enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives, depriving either major party candidate of a majority, but that such an event would require more votes than the Dixiecrats had mustered in 1952 and a single-mindedness among Southerners which no longer existed, except in the negative.

Now there were New Dealers in the South, such as Senators Estes Kefauver, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, Kerr Scott, and Governor Jim Folsom of Alabama. There were also conservatives who remained loyal to the party, such as Senators Richard Russell, Walter George, Russell Long, Sam Ervin and Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina. Then there were the dissidents, such as Governor Shivers, Governor Robert Kennon of Louisiana, and Governor John Bell Timmerman, Jr., of South Carolina.

Governor Hodges openly admired Adlai Stevenson, whom Governor Shivers detested, having described him the previous day as being an "extremist", little short of being an actual Communist. Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida was "not much of a coalition man." Governor Timmerman had said that he would favor "a solid front of Southern states along lines which reflect the views of the people" of South Carolina. Governor Shivers had said that it would be almost impossible to organize a coalition with any real power.

It concludes that the means by which the South would influence national policies would remain within the two-party system, and within Congressional committees, where Southerners wielded national power disproportionate to their numbers because of their seniority. Senator George, for example, had more influence on foreign policy in a Republican Administration than all of the Republican legislators combined. It suggests that to reverse the trend toward making Southern Democrats more mainstream nationally, as many sincere Southerners wanted, would be to make the voice of the South "a cry in a wilderness."

A piece from the Anderson (S.C.) Daily Mail, titled "Advertising and Rights", indicates that a person in Michigan had made history of a sort recently when an appellate court had reversed a lower court conviction of him for taping over the words "Water Wonderland" on his license plate, objecting to being forced to advertise on behalf of the state.

It indicates that states sported on their plates all kinds of such advertising, as peaches, potatoes, dairy products, sunshine and other specialties which were presumed to be exclusive to the particular state. Most motorists drove around with the plates with pride and did not mind advertising their state's particular distinction.

But some, as the man in question, did not believe in such advertising on an involuntary basis, and the Michigan case had set a precedent such that peevish persons in other states might decide to object accordingly.

Drew Pearson tells of the National Security Council having a week earlier, at a White House meeting over which Vice-President Nixon had presided, determined that the "Geneva spirit" from the Big Four summit meeting of July was dead. That decision, not imparted to the President by Secretary of State Dulles when he had spent about a half hour with the President in the hospital recently, having gone over only generally the East-West problem to spare the President bad news, had been reached in response in part to an estimate made by CIA director Allen Dulles that the present Russian leaders could not be trusted and that Russia would be able to triple its defense budget without any protest from the Russian people. Harold Stassen, in charge of disarmament, still, however, had genuine hopes for world peace and did not agree with the NSC decision. But with the President away, the Pentagon and the Dulles brothers were making decisions on foreign policy.

A committee of Congressmen who had taken a trip to Alaska during the fall had worked so hard that they could hardly go fishing, according to Representative Lee O'Brien of New York. He said that Representatives Jim Utt of California and Gracie Pfost of Idaho had arisen at 5:30 one morning to go fishing, with a hearing scheduled to start three hours later, but had returned with only one fish, about as big as a sardine. Ms. Pfost had been proud of the fish, but Mr. O'Brien had told her to catch another and she could make herself a pair of earrings, at which point she became sore.

Republican money-raisers were not aware of what they were raising in each state until the column made the secret quotas available to the public, resulting in the state finance committees being able to compare their assessments against other states for the first time. Indiana, for example, discovered that its $65,227 quota was in the same range as that of the bigger states, such as New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. At that point, the Indiana Republican Citizens Finance Committee sent out a confidential letter to Republican business and professional men, pleading for $1,000 apiece to meet their quota. The letter said that the quota gave them the opportunity to be heard at the council table in Washington, which had always been forfeited because of the state's financial record, with patronage in consequence being insignificant to the state. The letter also said that the information had come from Mr. Pearson's column, a copy of which they had enclosed.

A letter from the director of the Charlotte Mental Health Clinic indicates that about a year or two earlier, it had been reported that a child who was dying of a malignancy had not been expected to live until Christmas and so Christmas was celebrated for the child ahead of time, in October, and similar reports were not uncommon regarding children with physical disabilities or who were given only a short time to live. But such was not the case for children who had "a maiming" of the mind or spirit in the form of a psychosis or severe emotional problem. He finds it more of an oversight on the part of society at large than a matter of neglect. He indicates that the recent article in the newspaper on the lack of care for psychotic children in the state deserved special credit for raising the issue to public awareness. He calls attention to the fact that the psychoses in children, as in adults, represented in large part a social breakdown in the system and the society at large, that individual citizens could combine on a community-wide level to provide the facilities and the climate in the culture to make such mental illness impossible and that when it did occur, to ensure that it would be treated early and properly. He urges that community support of the United Appeal campaign would bring Christmas in October to the mentally and emotionally ill, and that persons wishing to help might join the North Carolina Association for Mental Health, which was the only lay organization of which he was aware which was presently interested in furthering the needs of such mentally ill persons.

But would not celebrating Christmas in October have a tendency to alienate the psychotic patient further from the reality being experienced by most of the society?—even if the stores and the tv commercials begin donning the Christmas motif right after Halloween in most places these days, it being known that corporate personnel who make such decisions are generally dissociative from reality anyway.

A letter writer urges giving a hand to Martha Evans, the only female member of the Charlotte City Council, indicating that no finer Charlotte representative could have gone to Rome, that she had returned imparting of a little boy who kept the torches burning in spite of the rain, explaining that he was a Roman and that no Roman torch ever went out, Mrs. Evans having stated that she could only feel admiration for a person so young to whom heritage meant so much. The writer says, "We who cling to our American heritage must withstand all the liberal blandishments of such as H. S. Truman, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Mr. Brownell, the Ford Foundation, Civil Righters, Hodding Carter, the Southern Education Reporting Service, the NAACP, and liberal churchmen!" She applauds J. Addington Wagner, the new national commander of the American Legion, for turning down the urging from some quarters to endorse UNESCO. She indicates that there was a report that there were Communist sympathizers within UNESCO and that, of course, Mr. Truman would say the Legion had gone "haywire". "He and his fellow liberals are playing hand-in-glove with the Russians in supporting UNESCO, which is avowedly planning to teach our school children to forget their patriotism learned in the home, and instead to espouse one-worldism. Mr. Truman, you are wrong, the veterans do 'know what they are doing.' They are standing on their traditional foundation of love of country, and they'll never sell us down the river! And the veterans are eternally right in wanting us to withhold further aid to India. Didn't Nehru go whole-hog over to the Commies on his recent visit to Moscow? Our veterans are not in politics, and please God they never will be. And Mr. Truman is wrong again when he states 'They'll get over it soon'!" She concludes that the 2,000 teachers meeting in Charlotte on Friday had been addressed by a supposed representative of UNESCO and she urges evaluating what they had heard "in terms for the best interest of their young charges."

Apparently, she is referring in the latter instance to an address by Mrs. Roosevelt. It does not really matter, as, obviously, she does not know what she is talking about, has gone haywire.

A letter writer from Pittsboro says that he was happy to note that Nell Battle Lewis of the Raleigh News & Observer, in a column appearing the prior Sunday, had suggested that people of the state be given an opportunity to express themselves by voting whether to integrate the schools or to abandon the public schools, in the form of a proposed constitutional amendment. He indicates that he had been pressing for such a vote for the previous two months, but to no avail, and hopes that Ms. Lewis would have better luck. He says that an issue existed regarding the 50 million dollars in bond issues voted for the aid of city and county schools for construction purposes, because the money was allocated for use in segregated schools. About half of that money had not yet been allocated and he thinks there ought to be a vote on the use of the remainder of the money because of the changed circumstances since the original vote had been taken. He believes that would constitute representative government.

Ms. Lewis and the letter writer had ignored the basic legal concept that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been held in Brown v. Board of Education to prohibit segregated public schools, and that the matter was not simply therefore subject to a statewide vote. It would have required an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed by two-thirds of the Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the states, repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, a completely absurd notion. As the Texas Supreme Court had recently held, all state constitutional provisions or statutes requiring or permitting segregated public schools were rendered void by Brown, as the Supreme Court's decision constituted the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The majority of that Court, incidentally, had been appointed by Governor Shivers.

A letter writer says regarding "all this upheaval about integration in the schools", that when it came to teaching dogs, monkeys, elephants and tigers, "you people are the most, but when it comes to letting 'Uncle Tom' and his children in on a few of your tricks, I must say you are but really the 'most.'" She says that one argument for maintaining segregation was that the black child would be made to feel so self-conscious that he would likely fail in his studies. She asks whether there was such a great difference between the school systems or whether it was true that only the honest student failed. "What closer contacts socially need a person other than a cook, a maid, a butler, a chauffeur and a nurse? Not to mention just being a spectator or a housewife. As Nat King Cole would say: When the buzzard tried to throw the monkey off his back, the monkey said, now listen Jack, 'Straighten up and fly right.'" She urges lowering the bars on education, opening hearts to integration, closing minds to segregation, laying aside prejudices and making Charlotte, the Queen City, the first "'King-size city of the South.'"

A letter writer indicates that international law had favored a plebiscite in disputed areas and that Cyprus was a locale where a plebiscite ought be held to provide Greece and opponents a fair chance.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.