The Charlotte News

Thursday, March 24, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called this date for new efforts to achieve free-world unity as a prelude to a possible Big Four meeting of the heads of state later in the year regarding world peace. He called for such a meeting as soon as the Paris treaties to rearm West Germany as part of the Western European alliance were ratified. He stated that the President's comments the previous day at his press conference indicated that the latter was willing to meet with the heads of state of other governments "if there is a reasonable hope of getting something done." He hoped that such a meeting could be developed by fall, after ratification of the Paris agreements. He said that he believed that the U.S. did not know enough about what the British or French were thinking and that a conference would thus help the Western allies. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland agreed that such Western unity was needed and suggested in a separate interview that a preliminary Big Three conference to iron out policy differences between the allies might be useful prior to talks with the Soviets. He also asserted that there should be a canvass of Congressional sentiment about what American representatives to such a conference would be prepared to discuss with the Soviets.

Army chief counsel John G. Adams, testifying before the Senate Investigations subcommittee, said this date that the charge by Senator McCarthy was false that he and top White House aides had "conspired" at a Justice Department meeting to block Senate investigation of the case of the Army Reserve dentist who had been promoted and then allowed to receive an honorable discharge, after he had pleaded the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when testifying about his past associations with subversive organizations before the subcommittee, then chaired by Senator McCarthy. Mr. Adams said that a meeting attended by Attorney General Herbert Brownell and others high in the Government, on January 21, 1954, had not been a conspiracy to call off the hearings on the dentist, or a conspiracy to call off the hearings investigating the situation generally at Fort Monmouth, or a conspiracy to attack Senator McCarthy. He said it was exactly as he had described it at the McCarthy-Army hearings the previous spring, when he said that he and the others at the meeting had discussed only two other subjects, the ultimatum of Senator McCarthy, demanding the right to quiz Army loyalty board members about security cases, and the charges of Mr. Adams that Senator McCarthy and others had sought special treatment in the Army for Private G. David Schine, formerly of the staff of the subcommittee. The subcommittee was now seeking to identify responsibility for Army actions in promoting and discharging the dentist after he had been identified as a security risk. An Army report of the previous January said that Mr. Adams and Lt. General Walter Weible, a deputy chief of staff, had made the final decision on the discharge of the dentist on February 2, 1954. General Weible had testified before the subcommittee the previous day that he had never recommended an honorable discharge for the dentist and that he believed the decision had been made in the judge advocate general's office, that if he had known then what he presently knew, he would have recommended a court-martial for the dentist, but did not specify any particular charge. Brig. General Ralph Zwicker, the former commander of the dentist at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, had testified the previous day that he had absolutely nothing to do with the decisions to promote the dentist or to give him an honorable discharge. As he had the previous year, he again tangled with Senator McCarthy the previous day during his testimony, and each man shouted heatedly at the other for a few moments, until present subcommittee chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, restored order. General Zwicker had described as untrue statements made by James Juliana, an aide to Senator McCarthy, regarding conversations between Mr. Juliana and General Zwicker.

In New York, Paul McNutt, 63, former Governor of Indiana and former envoy to the Philippines, died this date after an illness of six months which had begun in the Philippines, resulting in his having been flown home from Manila about two weeks earlier, interrupting an around-the-world cruise with his wife. Both his wife and daughter were with him when he died at his Fifth Avenue apartment during the morning. The precise cause of death was not disclosed. Mr. McNutt had not been actively involved in public affairs in recent years, but had maintained interest in Democratic Party affairs. His business interests had been mainly in the insurance field and he was counsel to several international insurance agencies. He had first come to public prominence in 1928 when he was chosen commander of the American Legion, then elected Governor of Indiana in 1932 and subsequently became a presidential aspirant, primarily in 1940, during which Mr. McNutt had toured the country, expounding his theories of government. His candidacy, however, had been conditioned on FDR not seeking a third term, as he had done. At that point, Mr. McNutt had dropped out of the presidential race, and urged renomination of the President because of his "preeminent ability" to deal with the critical war situation in Europe. During World War II, Mr. McNutt had served as Federal Security administrator, director of defense, health and welfare services, and chairman of the War Manpower Commission. President Truman had awarded him a medal for merit for his wartime services. He was High Commissioner to the Philippines during 1937 to 1939 and again in 1945-46, was then appointed the first U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines after the islands had gained their independence following the war, and, in that capacity, had hauled down the American flag at the independence ceremony in 1946. At the conclusion of his ambassadorship, he entered the private practice of law in New York City and Washington.

In Charleston, S.C., doctors stated that there was little hope for recovery of John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee and counsel for the Clarendon County school board of South Carolina, part of the Brown v. Board of Education case, as argued before the Supreme Court in December, 1952, and reargued in December, 1953. His doctor said this date that he had not improved during the previous 24 hours. He had entered the hospital on March 13 after his third bout with pneumonia during the winter. Although he lived in New York, he was spending the winter in Charleston.

In Raleigh, the State House Agriculture Committee this date approved a bill calling for the vitamin enrichment of cornmeal and grits, following a hearing in which a Duke University nutritional expert had described dietary deficiencies caused by eating plain cornbread. The amended bill was approved by a vote of 19 to 5. The nutrition expert testified that a lack of niacin in the diet caused pellagra, and the doctor said that he had never seen a person suffering from pellagra who did not have a cornmeal background. He said that cornmeal did not have sufficient niacin and that eating it caused an increased need for iron or niacin. For 16 years, pellagra had been a leading cause of death in seven Southeastern states, and never occurred in the North. The doctor said that while pellagra had disappeared as a cause of death, malnutrition was still present, and pellagra had been proved to be a nutritional problem when it had occurred in Italy, Spain, Rumania and Egypt, after cornbread was introduced in those nations.

Also in Raleigh, the State Senate Education Committee this date approved the elimination of continuing contracts for public school teachers as a part of the legal steps to meet the segregation issue. The proposed bill would provide for the employment of teachers under a contract for one school year only, and was one of the more controversial of the proposed revisions to the laws governing schools. A memo from the State Attorney General's office stated that without the elimination of the continuing contract provision, the State might find it necessary to employ teachers which it could not use, with the memo having pointed out that it might be "impractical to continue to employ" many of the 8,500 black teachers in the state if the Supreme Court made it impossible to continue operation of segregated schools. State superintendent of public instruction Dr. Charles Carroll approved of the legislation, stating it was essential to implement the legislation recommended to meet the segregation issue, turning over pupil assignments to the local school boards. He pointed out the chief objections among teachers to the proposal, that they would be left without a contract during months when school was not in session and would not be eligible during that time to receive benefits under the State retirement system. The Committee agreed to follow Dr. Carroll's suggestion that an attempt be made to remedy the situation. Dr. Carroll said that the provision contemplated redistricting of school districts by the State Board of Education, and the State Attorney General had ruled that teacher contracts were with school districts, that since some districts were set up on a biracial basis, there was a legal question whether they were constitutional in view of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown, and therefore whether teacher contracts made by those districts were valid. One State Senator, John Kerr of Warren, voiced the opinion that the proposal was a temporary measure to see what could be done and that it might be possible to return to the continuing contracts, if the state could circumvent the Court's ruling and maintain segregated schools.

Perhaps, he had in mind repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment or the traditional challenge by some to its post-Civil War ratification procedure; otherwise, just how he proposed to circumvent the ruling, short of abolition of the public schools, as being advocated at the time in Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi, is a mystery. If the election cases had been any guide for their thinking, those in the aforementioned three states would have realized the futility of their efforts, just as with the attempt to make primary elections private functions sponsored by the political parties, to which invitations to voters had to be extended by the parties to vote, defeated in the Federal courts, holding that collecting and counting of ballots in state primaries was a state function which could not be delegated to private entities to try to circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as each citizen has a fundamental right to vote. While education is distinguishable from voting, given the longstanding presence in the country of private schools and the continuing question as to whether there is in the Constitution an unenumerated right to education, the 2020 Gary B. v. Whitmer opinion, holding, by 2 to 1, such a right to exist, having been subsequently vacated for en banc review by the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel and thereafter settled before such review could take place, though the reasoning of the opinion is still available for other courts to consider, Bolling v. Sharpe, the segregated public schools case out of the District of Columbia, decided the same day in 1954 as Brown, but necessarily based exclusively on Federal grounds, under the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause, as not involving one of the states, might have carried instructive implications for defeat of such a maneuver, potentially to be considered violative of Due Process by the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, depriving students of a fundamental liberty interest in education, based on similar reasoning to that employed by Sharpe with respect to the Fifth Amendment. In any event, there are obvious practical problems with abolishing the public schools, lest a state wind up at the very bottom among the states in educational rank and because doing so could trigger Congress to deprive the offending states of a panoply of Federal benefits in response, impacting adversely every aspect of life. It was an inherently stupid idea. Of course, there are those who believe that you don't need no education in Amurica, that all's you need is a gun to ward off the Tourists, and a little red hat.

In Charlotte, Harry Shuford of The News tells of Judge Willard Gatling, of the Domestic Relations and Juvenile Court, stating that there were "potential murderers, rapists and thieves" walking the streets of Charlotte because the court did not have any place to send youthful offenders. He said that he was referring primarily to the two training schools for black boys and girls, and that the state should be ashamed of the whole program of juvenile correction. He said that the three training schools for white offenders offered good cooperation, sometimes admitting youths in particular cases before the social investigation and medical reports required admittance. He said there was no cooperation, however, with the officials of the training schools for black youths, that he regarded it as a "big joke". He said that they sent black offenders to the training school after they had exhausted every other alternative and had used every other resource they had, that it was a last resort, but that when the court made the recommendation for admission, the training schools turned them down, and, in consequence, the offenders were allowed to walk the streets because of lack of facilities at the schools. He said that there had been no individual admitted to those schools for a long period of time. The offenders then continued to break and enter places, steal and commit other crimes as a result, that every so often, police officials would ask the court what was wrong, as they had picked up a certain boy three times since he had been committed to one of the schools, and the judge believed they had a right to ask that question. He stated that in some juvenile courts, the judges had stopped signing commitment papers as they knew that the individual offender could not get into the school, despite the need for the person, for his own good and the good of society, to be there.

The first interior photograph of the new Charlotte Coliseum, expected to be finished by the fall, appears on the page. Bet you can't wait to get in there and see some basketball or hockey. It has no supporting columns on the inside. Hope it don't fall.

On the editorial page, "Charlotte's Role in Aviation's Future" tells of Charlotte's aviation-minded City Council, (a much better way of putting it than it had in a previous editorial, referring to them as "air-minded"), having provided striking support to a thesis put forward by the late Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, that airports were just as important to air travel as the airplane, itself. The Council the previous afternoon had, by a unanimous vote, ordered a long-range master plan for the development of Municipal Airport in Charlotte. An airport consulting engineer was to be hired at $1,500, with the time limit on the study to be 75 days. It finds it probably the best investment in civic progress yet during the year.

It compliments the Chamber of Commerce for prodding the Council into action on the matter, and states that the airport was vitally important to the economic health of the city and to the stability and growth of the whole metropolitan area. It hopes that future airport decisions would be made without so much uncertainty and negation as a result of having such a master plan to solve future problems regarding expansion of the airport, both as to its public and private facilities.

"A Funeral without Tears" tells of only 35 State Representatives in the General Assembly having voted in favor of the bill to limit use of "whammies" to detect speed on the highways, the bill having provided for maintaining them in plain view, effectively defeating their purpose, even if in the process deterring speeding, at least temporarily until the whammy had been passed. It finds it a victory for Motor Vehicles commissioner Ed Scheidt and his highway safety program, which had already saved many lives, and congratulates the Assembly for its stand.

It finds that the result was an indication of how effective public opinion could be when properly applied, as the bill had nearly sailed through the House without significant opposition several weeks earlier, having come to the floor with the favorable recommendation of the influential Judiciary Committee. A motion to re-refer it to the Committee on Roads had been defeated by a 2 to 1 margin and passage by the full House was expected by a substantial margin, until State Speaker of the House Larry Moore became involved in the battle, insisting that the bill be re-referred anyway, and persuading a reluctant majority to agree. The bill had been referred out of the Committee a second time, but by a narrower vote, after public pressure had been brought to bear and the press had nearly unanimously fought against passage of the bill. The sponsor of the bill, after its defeat, had made some bitter remarks about "intellectual sadists" in the editorial rooms of the state and "trial by newspaper" and "rattlesnakes".

The final vote against the bill was 74 to 35, even after the original bill was considerably softened by amendment. It greets the defeat with pleasure, and finds that speeders would receive no aid or comfort from the General Assembly.

"Poor Quarterbacking on Ike's Team" indicates that after suffering embarrassment the previous week over several changes of mind in connection with the publication of the record of the Yalta conference of February, 1945, the Administration was in another quandary this week over the proposal by Senator Walter George of Georgia to hold a Big Four conference among the heads of state. The prior Tuesday, Republican Minority Leader Senator William Knowland of California, following a conference with the President, had assured reporters that the President opposed such a meeting. Then, the State Department issued a prepared statement which stated that Senator George's views were in harmony with those of Secretary of State Dulles, but then White House press secretary James Hagerty told newsmen that he saw "no consistency" between the position of Senator George and that taken by the President and Secretary Dulles.

Then at the press conference the previous day, the President had said that there was no great difference of views between his and those of Senator George. At another point in the conference, in response to a question about the differences, the President said that there might be some.

It finds it the worst demonstration of official confusion over high policy seen in Washington in some time. It showed a disturbing lack of liaison between the White House and the State Department, and even between the President and Mr. Hagerty. It thus finds it "poor quarterbacking on Ike's team." (Perhaps this notion is why President Kennedy, when he took office in 1961, tapped his brother Robert's old Harvard quarterback and defensive back, Kenneth O'Donnell, to be his appointments secretary and top adviser, with Dave Powers, on political matters. Especially in the nuclear age, someone reliable had to be in charge of carrying the football, to avoid fumbles and interceptions of the playbook.)

It indicates that the pressure for a high-level conference with the Soviets was growing abroad, and top observers reported that the internal political demands of Britain, France and West Germany made agreement on holding such a conference essential to the future of the Western alliance. The release of the record of the Yalta conference at the present time had complicated the problem, but had not diminished the demand for the Big Four talks.

It finds that the U.S. was naturally not anxious to meet with the Soviets until convinced that the regime was ready to negotiate realistically about such long-stalled issues as the Austrian peace treaty. But neither the President nor Secretary Dulles could refuse to take part in such a conference if it offered any means toward a firmer peace.

A piece from the Carolina Israelite, titled "The American Heritage", tells of Capus Waynick of High Point, former publisher and a former ambassador, having told the writer, presumably Harry Golden, that he was on his way to make a speech on "The American Heritage", and inquired what the writer thought it was, to which he responded with the opinion that it was the right to dissent even to the point of eccentricity. It offers that all of the founders had been eccentrics.

During the short term of 25 years, between 1775 and 1800, a dozen of the greatest men who had ever lived were forming the United States. It was fortunate to have the right men at the right place at the right time, practically a miracle. He counts among them George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams and his son, John Quincy, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Robert Morris, Charles Carroll, and others. He suggests that if the events leading to the Revolutionary War had occurred 25 years earlier, the country might still be fighting for the basic human rights which were established by those founders.

In 1814, the British had burned the Congressional Library, and former President Jefferson had offered his books to the Congress at its own price as the nucleus of a new collection. There had been opposition to the purchase on the ground that the collection contained a book by John Locke of North Carolina and another by Jean Jacques Rousseau, thought at the time to be a Frenchman of questionable reputation. It was argued that it might present an evil example for Congress to purchase such books and make them accessible to the public.

Drew Pearson indicates that the British had gotten so far ahead of the U.S. in development of peacetime atomic power that the President was appointing another commission, comprised of businessmen and atomic scientists, to study peacetime use of atomic energy. The U.S. had been stressing atomic weaponry, while the British would, in 1957, begin obtaining electricity from the world's first successful atomic power plant.

Since the 84th Congress had convened in January, neither Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn nor the majority leaders of the House had been invited to the White House to confer. During the Republican 80th Congress in 1947 and 1948, President Truman had invited the Republican leaders to the White House every Monday.

Naval Intelligence had positively confirmed that Russia now had an atomic submarine.

Ambassador to Moscow Charles Bohlen reported that former Premier Georgi Malenkov was being shoved further into the background by the new Russian regime, with Nikolai Bulganin as the new Premier and actual power residing in Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. It was reported that Mr. Malenkov was being watched all the time by the secret police and was so worried that he was losing weight.

Prime Minister Churchill was getting worried over the sweet talk presently being exchanged between Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and the new Russian regime, having urged the British Foreign Office to be wary of a double cross by Tito.

Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Oveta Culp Hobby, had maintained herself so aloof that Dr. Martha Eliot of the Children's Bureau had not been able to consult with her boss for the previous six months.

Wesley Roberts, who had been fired as RNC chairman by the President after he had lobbied the Kansas Legislature, had a new job on Wall Street as representative of Lehman Brothers, wining and dining members of state toll roads and thruway commissions to obtain financing of some of the thruway projects for Lehman. Thus far, he had not gotten his old friends in Kansas to change finance managers, but had persuaded Republican friends in Indiana to reduce Smith Barney and Halsey Stuart from dominating the financing of Indiana thruways and to substitute Lehman Brothers as primary financier instead. He had also attempted to get the Stuart firm and Glore Forgan, both large financing houses of Chicago, reduced in their financing of Illinois state thruway projects, but a former judge, head of the Illinois thruway commission, would not allow it, wanting Illinois bankers to handle Illinois bonds. Mr. Pearson notes that the previous RNC chairman from Kansas, John Hamilton, had ended up as attorney for Joseph Pew of the Sun Oil Co. of Philadelphia.

A new chapter in financing had begun with the advent of the high-speed state thruways, with New York State alone floating nearly a billion dollars worth of bonds for their construction, and New Jersey floating 600 million dollars worth, with Ohio, Illinois and Indiana each having about 300 million dollars worth, and varying amounts in Oklahoma, Kansas, Kentucky and Maine. The banking houses were fighting for the lucrative business, at 2.5 percent for financing costs. The bonds were tax-free and since a lot of large investors were looking for places to put their money without paying income taxes, bonds had jumped above par immediately after they were sold, bringing in additional profits.

He presents some deletions from the record of the Yalta conference of February, 1945, published the previous week by the State Department. A wisecrack by President Roosevelt had been deleted, wherein he had said that as a concession to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, he might give him the six million Jews in the U.S. General Walter Bedell Smith, former Undersecretary of State, had recommended its omission, but it had been leaked by Republicans to Newsweek just prior to the previous November's midterm elections, in the hope of hurting FDR, Jr., in his race for State Attorney General of New York against Congressman Jacob Javits, the latter having won the election.

Another omission was an important reference to obtaining an American corridor to Berlin in lieu of leaving Berlin isolated from the rest of allied Germany as it presently was, the failure of which having caused the U.S. to have to stage its historic Berlin airlift in 1948-49, after the Communists of the Eastern sector had blockaded West Berlin in the hope of obtaining it. The omitted matter was a paper by a junior officer, urging the U.S. to insist on such a corridor, but the Joint Chiefs present at Yalta had ignored his advice and warning.

Bruce McNaughton, writing in the New York Times Magazine, explores some of the mysterious argot of the stock market, some of it, such as "wise money" and "rake-off", having entered general usage but other terms being less familiar to the general public.

An "Airedale" was a Wall Street gentleman. A "back-off" was a sudden sinking of a stock after a rise in price. A "baffle board" was a Stock Exchange blackboard where current prices were shown. A "bear" was a trader who counted on the market going down, while a "bull" was the exact opposite. "Bessie" was the diminutive name for Bethlehem Steel. Other companies had similar diminutives.

And it goes on defining such terms in alphabetical order, which you can peruse for yourself as your interest inclines, directly proportional to the value of your stock portfolio or inversely proportional to it, as the case may be.

Robert C. Ruark again relates that his happiest memories as a newspaper writer had been as a sports reporter, finding spring training in baseball "the fairy-godmother season of sports for the young, and the coach-into-pumpkin season for the old." The writers generally left winter slush, basketball and track, to head south on an expense account, free of the boss's clutches. There was not much work to do and no real yardstick by which to measure copy. Days accommodated golf and fishing, and the nights, such activities as crap shooting.

He goes on to recount his memories of covering spring training in Florida. "I suppose it was youth, because Mickey Mantle wasn't born when I started flying south, but never, it seems to me today, was the sun so warm, the air so balmy, the smell of oranges so keen, the Florida girls so tan and pretty. Nor shall I ever quite forget the sadness with which the late Jack Miley, leaning on the Tampa Terrace bar the year before we went to war, sighed and said, 'We will never see these wondrous days again.' For himself, Jack was right."

Every generation, to one degree or another, of course, sees things generally that way during middle age, until reaching a somewhat older age and realizing that every generation sees it pretty much that way until realizing…

A letter from Dr. W. D. James, vice-chairman of the State Senate Insurance Committee, writes of State House bill 132, to regulate the handling, sale and distribution of barbiturates in the state, indicates that more rigid control and supervision of the drug was necessary and that the bill was a good one, providing the necessary control which would stop some of the trafficking in "goof balls" and "yellow jackets". He reports that another bill, known as "the codeine bill", had been passed by the State Senate and enacted into law the previous week. He finds that bill, however, to be a step in the wrong direction, as it facilitated the dispensing by druggists of medicines containing codeine. He suggests that readers contact their legislators, especially the members of the Senate Health Committee, and express support for House bill 132.

A letter writer from Marion indicates that those parents, as the writer, who did not have the money to send their children to college had to pay for the education of the children of those who were fortunate enough be able to do so, suggests that those who paid the taxes to support the public colleges and universities of the state were the most unable to pay. He finds that the state was always appropriating money for schools of higher learning, benefiting the children of those who had the money to send their children to college. An average man earning $250 per month, with two or more children to support, however, could not afford to send his son or daughter to one of the State institutions. He finds that a rule was being sought to prevent the "rich man's son and daughter" attending public universities and colleges in the state from bringing their cars to campus to ride around "day and night", indicating that the taxpayers were not going to appropriate more money for the rich ones "to ride around in Cadillacs." He thinks the state ought make those who were financially able, to pay for their children's education, relieving the parents who could not afford to send their children to college.

You're just generalizing and don't really know what you are talking about, as there are numerous financial aid programs available if you will only write the college or university to which your son or daughter seeks admission and then read about them and make application accordingly. Of course, if your children tend to shoot from the hip as you obviously do, they might be generally uneducable and be excluded for that reason, having nothing to do with your exiguous pocketbook. If you see any of the students at the State-supported campuses driving around in Cadillacs, incidentally, or Lincolns or even Packards, be sure and take a picture.

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