The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 8, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Moscow, Premier Georgi Malenkov, 53, confessing failure through inexperience, especially in the field of agriculture, and stressing the need for heavy industrial development, had resigned at a joint session of the Supreme Soviet, saying that he would turn the post over to "another comrade with greater experience and state work", whereupon Communist Party chairman Nikita Khrushchev, 60, then nominated Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, previously Defense Minister, as the new Premier, approved by acclamation. Mr. Malenkov would be taking a new job, but it had not yet been announced what it would be.

In 1944, the late Joseph Stalin had placed Mr. Bulganin in charge of the Soviet armed forces as the Communist Party's political policeman, a post he held for more than a decade, having in the interim various titles, and for awhile no official title except as the unofficial Politburo member in charge of armed forces policy. His task was to keep the Army in line for the Communist Party, crushing any dissidence among the officer corps with swift ruthlessness, keeping career officers and generals from uniting on a common platform or plotting or politicking among themselves, while also having the contradictory role of keeping the marshals and generals and other veteran military officers contented, representing their interests and on occasion their views in the higher party councils, all the while watching closely over armed forces morale in general. He had been born in 1895 in what was now Gorky on the Volga River, with a middle-class background, attending and graduating from a commercial secondary school, then being swept up by the revolutionary currents which had dominated Russian life before and during World War I, joining the Bolsheviks before the Revolution of 1917.

Immediately following the change of leadership, in a 2 1/2 hour statement delivered before the Supreme Soviet, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov bitterly assailed the U.S. and declared that the Soviet Union had developed hydrogen bombs with "such success that the United States could appear backward", warning that in the case of an eventual war, world civilization would not perish but rather "the rotten social system with its blood-saturated imperialism which is being rejected by oppressed peoples." He insisted that the Soviets wanted a competition with the U.S., not in the production of atomic weapons, but in the use of atomic energy for peaceful aims. He said that the U.S. was trying to lead the world into a new war with China, condemning it for aggression toward China, which he believed the U.N. should condemn if the latter wanted to retain its respect, saying that Formosa was "undoubtedly" the territory of the Chinese Communists. He also accused the U.S. of capturing Formosa and the Pescadores. He condemned the Paris pacts to rearm West Germany, and indicated that a "joint military command of the eight countries" which were participating in the Moscow conference would need be formed "to increase our defense" against the Western military alliance being formed, asserting that when they had formed their joint command, "the aggressors will restrain themselves from new adventures and behave more quietly." He referred to the Warsaw Pact, to be formed the following May.

The developments underscored that there would be an all-out Soviet concentration on heavy arms industry rather than light industry and agriculture, of which Premier Malenkov had been an advocate, that future Premier Khrushchev had emerged with prominence in the Soviet leadership, and that the Soviet Union now had a Premier who had come, at least by title, from the armed forces, though in fact having no actual combat experience. Some Western diplomats believed that the choice of Mr. Bulganin presented further evidence of the growing strength of the Army in the Soviet Government, while others speculated that the new Premier would serve as a kind of chairman of the board rather than as a personal leader, noting that Mr. Khrushchev had received a large standing ovation at the outset of his nominating speech.

In Washington, officials at the State Department reacted to the change in Soviet leadership by suggesting that it would result in a tougher Soviet foreign policy, especially in the Far East, but were reluctant to jump to any final conclusions. Mr. Khrushchev was known to U.S. diplomats as a harder man than former Premier Malenkov and had given evidence recently of strong support for the Chinese Communist position on the Formosa issue, stronger than that provided by Premier Malenkov, leading to the conclusion that the Soviets would extend greater support to Communist China in the Formosan crisis, given that Mr. Khrushchev now stood as the strongest man within the Government and would be presumed to have the dominant influence within the ruling group at the Kremlin. The demotion of Mr. Malenkov suggested that collective rule persisted for the time being in the Kremlin and that the top men still desired to show that Stalinism was over.

From Taipeh, it was reported that civilians continued to be evacuated from the Tachen Islands 200 miles north of Formosa by Nationalist Chinese landing craft and U.S. transports this date, with the U.S. Seventh Fleet protecting the evacuation. An Associated Press correspondent had reported from the amphibious flagship Estes that two carrier-based U.S. planes had been fired upon by Communist Chinese anti-aircraft batteries on Yikiangshan Island, eight miles north of the Tachens, on Monday night and at another on Tuesday morning, with none of the planes being hit. Warships of the Seventh Fleet were under orders not to drop anchor or steam at slow speeds in darkness, to avoid possible torpedo attack. The first U.S. evacuation ship would probably arrive in port in Formosa the following day. Civilians had been given first priority in the evacuation, with women and children, along with men, some of whom were old and feeble, making their way onto the evacuation craft.

The President this date, in a special message to Congress, called for a seven billion dollar emergency school construction program over the ensuing three years, into which the Federal Government would contribute 1.1 billion dollars. It proposed that 750 million dollars in Federal funds would be used to purchase school bonds of local communities which could not sell them in the open market at reasonable interest rates, and, overall, for 900 million in Federal loans and 200 million in Federal grants. He also called for authorization of 20 million dollars for planning of sound long-term financing of the public schools, free from "obsolete restrictions" on construction, recommending an appropriation of five million dollars out of that total during the first year. He said that unless public education remained free in its response to local community needs and free from any suggestion of political domination, as well as free from impediments to the pursuit of knowledge by teachers and students, it would "cease to serve the purposes of free men." He said that at present there was a deficit of more than 300,000 classrooms, resulting, in part, from the war years and defense mobilization when construction had to be curtailed. He recommended the three-year emergency program as a means of easing that shortage.

In Dover, Del., the State Supreme Court held this date that the Milford Board of Education had "no legal right" to admit ten black students to the 10th grade classes of a previously all-white high school the prior September, indicating that the pupils had been admitted without prior approval of the Delaware State Board of Education and that the local board therefore had no legal authority to act. While taking cognizance of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the prior May 17 and its having abrogated the Delaware State Constitutional provison requiring separate secondary schools for whites and blacks, the decision found that the question still remained as to the type of relief to be granted in the implementing decision in Brown, temporarily delayed until confirmation of Justice-designate John Harlan, appointed by the President the prior November in the wake of the death of Justice Robert Jackson in October. The Court thus determined that, since the cases subsumed under Brown, including the case out of Delaware, were class action cases and not cases involving individuals, as were the graduate and law school cases decided by the Supreme Court earlier between 1938 and 1950, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337, involving the University of Missouri Law School, Sipuel v. Board of Regents, 332 U.S. 631, involving the University of Oklahoma graduate school, and Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629, involving the University of Texas Law School, in each case holding that since the state had failed to demonstrate the presence of substantially equal in-state segregated facilities for white and black applicants, the otherwise qualified black plaintiffs were ordered admitted to the previously segregated state schools, entitling the individual plaintiffs therein to immediate relief, the current case out of Delaware and its class of plaintiffs should await further determination by the Supreme Court in Brown as to the type of implementing remedy to which they were entitled, whether immediate or gradual through time. Thus, for the present, it limited its holding to state law, that the local board had acted without authority from the State Board, which had opted to await the implementing decision in Brown before beginning desegregation, holding that decision appropriate under the current inchoate status of Brown in terms of the method of implementation. The decision is a little murky in its reasoning, as the case immediately before the Court appeared to involve ten specific plaintiffs and was not a class action, but rests its denial of immediate relief on the fact that the cases pending in Brown were class actions, and, apparently, that because the plaintiffs in this case had relied on Brown for their claims of right to immediate admission to the school, they should await the implementing decision.

Julian Scheer of The News reports from Raleigh that a bill before the Legislature concerning sexual psychopaths, proposing stiffer sentencing and psychiatric treatment for those amenable to same, introduced by the Mecklenburg County delegation, had received cold treatment in a second hearing before the State House Judiciary Committee No. 1 during the morning, with three well-known State medical men pointing out that the bill was impractical given the present State facilities and treatment, and saying that it was similar to bills which had been repealed in other states. The doctors said that the State did not have facilities for treatment of sexual psychopaths, did not have the necessary trained personnel to deal with them, that the treatability of sexual psychopaths was not high, that a prison atmosphere might be better for them than the present mental hospital, and that no estimate was available at present regarding specific needs and types of facilities.

Donald MacDonald of The News tells of a 15-year old junior high school student in serious condition at Charlotte's Memorial Hospital this date, with a bullet lodged in his neck after he had been reportedly shot by his 14-year old half-nephew, the second accidental shooting involving junior high school students within the prior 12 days. The victim's half-nephew was being held by Youth Bureau officers on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, with the boy indicating to officers that both he and his half-uncle, only a year older, had been in the habit of carrying pistols while on their newspaper routes, that he did not know the gun was loaded when he accidentally wounded his half-uncle in the right jaw. He said that they carried guns on their routes because they had heard of newspaper carriers being robbed in their neighborhood. Initially, he and his half-uncle had given a false report to the police, indicating that the shooting had been done by an unidentified man seated in a telephone booth, changing the story during the morning to provide the true account. He said that while they were telephoning the Charlotte Observer offices to make a change in the number of papers to be delivered to their routes, he had been holding the gun in his hand in the telephone booth, playing with it, and it had gone off, firing through the glass side of the booth and striking his half-uncle at close range. Carrying newspapers can be dangerous in Charlotte.

On the editorial page, "Men Unwanted, by Army or Employers" tells of college and high school graduates presently asking when, rather than whether, they would be drafted into military service, with the answer not being as simple as it might seem. The natural assumption was that prospective draftees would be inducted as soon as they finished their education, whether at the college level or after high school, but such was not the case. "The armed forces of the U.S. are toying with the lives of the young citizenry like a small boy playing with tin soldiers."