The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 19, 1955

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Bandung, Indonesia, at the African-Asian conference which had begun the previous day, Communist China's Premier Chou En-lai had said that "both in the East and in the West, the danger of war is increasing", but that "peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems can be realized." He had only referred directly to the Formosa situation by saying, "The United States continues to create tension in the Taiwan area." He said that Communist China was not interested in subversive activities but was being "subverted by the United States". He invited the other delegations to send representatives to China to see the evidence. He said that Communist China had not come to the conference to raise its own questions, such as the "question of liberation of Taiwan and the neighboring islands" and "the unfair treatment of China in the United Nations", and would refrain from doing so and comply with the decisions of the sponsoring nations of the conference. Otherwise, his speech had a conciliatory tone, emphasizing "peaceful coexistence" and indicating China's willingness to promote normalization of relations with Japan and establish formal relations with other Asian and African nations.

Secretary of State Dulles said this date that Assistant Secretary Carl McArdle had been the person who had leaked to the New York Times the Yalta papers a day in advance of their general release, on the evening of March 15. Mr. Dulles said that it was an exercise by Mr. McArdle of discretion which was his and did not involve a breach of security. The Secretary said that he had concluded by the time the copy had been leaked that the British Government had withdrawn its objections to the publication and that it would not hurt U.S. relations with allies to allow the publication. The leaked copy had occurred just a day after the State Department had said that disclosure of the record of the February, 1945 conference between British Prime Minister Churchill, Soviet Premier Stalin and the late President Roosevelt would not be in the national interest. Mr. Dulles appeared in an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Walter George of Georgia, and had read a prepared statement in which he said that James Reston of the Times had told Mr. Dulles and Mr. McArdle on the morning of March 15 that it was Mr. Reston's "impression" of a conversation had with Senator George "that the Senator wished to see the Yalta record made public by the State Department." Mr. Dulles said that Mr. Reston had urged that it was of the utmost importance that the papers be published as a whole and not in garbled form, that Mr. Dulles had then told him that such matters fell within the jurisdiction of Mr. McArdle who was a former newspaperman. After that point, Mr. Dulles had learned that Mr. McArdle had given the galley proof to Mr. Reston that evening. About 14 hours later, the British Ambassador had phoned Mr. Dulles, stating that his Government had agreed with the publication and that a confirmation cable from London was in transit. Mr. Dulles said that the Ambassador had provided his own concurrence to publication the previous day, and Mr. Dulles had stated that he would advise then-Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that he believed publication should not be delayed any longer.

In Moscow, the Soviets this date called for a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers in Vienna as soon as possible to sign an Austrian independence treaty, with Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov having called in the top diplomatic representatives in Moscow from Britain, France and the U.S. during the morning to provide each notes declaring that as a result of the exchange of opinion with Austrian Chancellor Raab and his delegation the previous week, it was clear that the possibility existed to settle the Austrian question and conclude a treaty with the nation, which had been occupied by the four powers since the end of the war.

In New York, manufacturers of the Salk vaccine against polio reported that most of the output to date had been earmarked for distribution to schoolchildren by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, with only two of the six companies producing the vaccine indicating the previous day that they were also supplying the vaccine to private physicians. The Foundation intended to inoculate nine million first and second grade students across the nation, with each child to receive two shots, the equivalent of two cubic centimeters of the vaccine. A third booster shot, which would be administered seven months later, would have to come from other sources. Of the six vaccine manufacturers, Cutter Laboratories of San Francisco and Parke-Davis of Detroit had said that part of their output already had been sent to commercial outlets for doctors. The latter company had sent a token commercial supply to druggists in 20 cities the day after the vaccine had been pronounced effective and safe on April 12. Since that time, Parke-Davis had sent its supply to the Foundation. A Philadelphia firm said that it did not expect to supply any vaccine for commercial purposes until August, by which time the Foundation expected to have inoculated all of the first and second graders. Another Philadelphia firm said that it anticipated filling the Foundation's orders before it started releasing supplies for commercial sale, indicating that to date, it had shipped more than 178,000 cubic centimeters of the vaccine to health authorities in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The Foundation had designated the South as the primary initial target in the distribution schedule because of the polio season, concurrent with warmer weather, occurring earliest in that region and because schools would recess for the summer earlier there than in other regions of the country.

In Nashville, Southern governors were holding an unprecedented meeting this date to seek to settle the regional railroad and telephone strikes which had eluded the attempts of Government mediators in Washington and Atlanta, respectively. There was good reason for grave concern about the 37-day old walkouts, which had already cost the South millions of dollars in undelivered freight and lost salaries, with ever-spreading violence marking each passing day. In Washington, officials of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad and the striking non-operating unions had agreed to accept the ruling of a neutral mediator, but remained far apart on the issues to be decided. In Atlanta, not even that much progress had occurred, with negotiating committees for Southern Bell Co. and the striking Communications Workers of America remaining on call for possible discussions with mediators, but not having met face-to-face for several days. Governor Lawrence Wetherby of Kentucky, chairman of the Southern Governors Conference, had summoned the governors of the affected states to meet in the Nashville office of Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee to discuss the issues. Regarding the L&N dispute, the company had demanded that the union end the strike immediately and arbitrate only on the health and welfare recommendations made the previous summer by a Presidential emergency board for all railroads, while the unions contended that arbitration should take only a few days, that the strike should continue until an agreement was actually signed, and that the arbitration should cover all original union demands as well as the health and welfare issue. In the telephone strike, the company had said that the union refusal to accept a no-strike clause was the major obstacle to settlement, while the union contended that the clause was secondary and that full arbitration and wages were primary.

In Greensboro, N.C., in the continuing Federal District Court trial of Junius Scales for alleged violation of the Smith Act, forbidding teaching and advocating the overthrow of the Government by force or violence, by the fact of his admitted Communist Party membership, a 24-year old UNC student testified this date as a Government witness that he had been an undercover agent for the FBI, stating that a secret school, where he said selected party members were taught how to kill a man with a pencil and how to infiltrate such organizations as the PTA, had been established by the regional party and was directed by Mr. Scales. The witness said that the school accommodated about 15 Communists from the Carolinas and Virginia and had been held in a remote dwelling on a farm owned by a couple near Walnut Cove, N.C., in August, 1952 and had lasted for eight days. He said that, among other things, the school taught that under Communism, "the Negro nation" would have the right to secede from the United States. He said that the party's district organizer for Virginia, known only as Bob, had shown them how to use a pencil as a deadly weapon. Watch out for Bob.

Charles Kuralt, shortly to join The News as a reporter and feature writer, still a UNC student and recently having completed his year as editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, reports that there were a lot of surprised faces around UNC's campus during the morning, his own being among them, after the aforementioned UNC junior had identified himself the previous day as a former FBI informant within the Communist Party. The student was a friend of Mr. Kuralt and the latter had found him to be quite undramatic, quiet, and well-liked, having made the newspapers only twice previously, the first instance having been as a result of his characteristic good humor, advertising in the Woman's College student newspaper in Greensboro for a girl he had met in Chapel Hill on a prior weekend, not having caught her name but remembering that she had been wearing a yellow raincoat. (Too bad it was not blue, as a song could then have been written about it.) The student had been no campus clown, as the second time he had made news was when he had won an award from the North Carolina Academy of Science for the best paper in physics by a North Carolina student. Physics teachers at UNC had told Mr. Kuralt that he had been one of their prize students, specializing in the behavior of cosmic rays, and was something of a prodigy in that field, having made some minor, but original, contributions to the field. Mr. Kuralt says that he was not the only UNC student who had been shocked by the news that his friend was an undercover FBI agent, as his office mate at Phillips Hall, the physics building at the time, was a Phi Beta Kappa key-holder and basketball player, Paul Likins, whom he says could have been knocked to his feet with a feather from his seven-foot height during this morning. In Joyner Dormitory, where the undercover agent lived, amazed bull sessions were starting. Politically, the student classified himself as an Eisenhower Republican, though he had openly criticized the Administration for its handling of some scientists, notably Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the transcript of the testimony regarding the security issues surrounding the latter having been ordered by the student and studied for weeks, looking for weak points in the case of the Atomic Energy Commission, which had suspended Dr. Oppenheimer's security clearance—eventually upheld by a Presidential special board of review chaired by UNC president Gordon Gray, while stating that it found no loyalty issue regarding Dr. Oppenheimer. The student had always liked to talk about politics and many times Mr. Kuralt had discussed the pros and cons of Communism and internal security with him. He had seemed well-versed on the facts of domestic Communism and Mr. Kuralt had gathered that he read the newspapers thoroughly, but there never had been any suggestion of what he had revealed in his testimony against Mr. Scales, that he had belonged to the Labor Youth League, had attended cloak-and-dagger meetings and a Communist school. Mr. Kuralt concludes that he would not have believed it if his friend had not sworn to it the previous day.

Perhaps, now we have insight to the potentially recondite meaning to be attached to the pencil head which intruded on the microfilm copying of the issue of the DTH a year earlier. Maybe Bob had infiltrated the library staff and had become the operator of the microfilm machine, such that he was issuing warning to all readers against annihilation through nuclear war, with his pencil eraser. Bob may have worked for Nixon.

In Raleigh, legislation to terminate the contracts of all school teachers and principals at the end of the current school year, based on the anticipated implementing decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the belief that numerous black teachers could not be continued in employment in the event that integration was ordered forthwith, with state law providing that teacher and principal contracts were automatically renewed if not terminated prior to the end of the school year. The bill had been passed by the State House and had been unanimously approved by the Senate Education Committee, and could come up for final action in the State Senate the following day. The bill effectively placed teachers and principals on annual employment. Legislative committees had been informed that some redistricting might result from the Brown implementing decision, which could result in teachers holding contracts with school districts which would no longer exist. There were approximately 31,000 teachers with contracts in the public schools, including 23,000 white teachers and 8,000 black teachers.

In Detroit, the president of the American Dental Association said this date, in a speech prepared for the annual meeting of the Michigan State Dental Association, that the treatment of public water supplies with fluorides to prevent tooth decay had been proved effective and safe beyond all reasonable doubt, adding that because it could be prevented, the loss of permanent teeth in children and young adults was "shocking".

In Charlotte, City Manager Henry Yancey had written to a State Representative from Lenoir who had proposed improvement in state highway signs, along the lines which Mr. Yancey had been seeking for years, that instead of marking certain areas as a "speed zone", they should be marked as a "slow zone". Mr. Yancey had written that if one cooked on a cook stove, fried in a frying pan, lived in a living room, ate in an eating house, "why in Heaven's name wouldn't one speed in a speed zone?"

You could use the approach they employ on some of the rural, private roads: "Caution: Slow Child at Play".

In Princeton, N.J., leaders of nations, diplomats and scientists this date were mourning the loss of Albert Einstein as one of history's great men and physicists. Messages of tribute had been received from persons all over the world and in many walks of life, following his death from a ruptured aorta and hardening of the arteries the previous day at age 76. His body had been cremated hours after his death without funeral services. He had left his brain and other vital organs to research. A public memorial was set to be held the following Sunday night at New York's Carnegie Hall, and a memorial service, sponsored by the Hillel Foundation at Princeton, would be held on Friday night at the University's Whig Hall. Dr. Harry Zimmerman, director of laboratories at Montefiore Hospital and a professor of pathology at Columbia University, said that he did not expect to find the cells which had made Dr. Einstein a genius when he started examining the brain within the ensuing few days, the brain having been left to Dr. Zimmerman for research. Prime Minister Nehru of India had received a letter recently from Dr. Einstein, proposing a five-year truce in the cold war, as disclosed by a member of the Indian delegation to the Asian-African conference in Indonesia. The letter had proposed that statesmen be allowed to formulate a long-term substitute for war, warning that the world would be destroyed by weapons of mass destruction if man were to fail to find a method of living in peace. The Prime Minister had been among the many who offered their tribute.

On the editorial page, "Albert Einstein, the Man & the Myth" indicates that the stocking cap, his wildly flowing hair, a shaggy mustache and his famous theory of relativity, expressed in the formula E=mc², had formed the basis for the Einstein myth. It finds that it was no exaggeration to say that his name had summed up in the public's mind all of the marvels of the 20th Century scientific revolution. He was venerated by his colleagues and neighbors, but as much revered for his great humanity as for his contributions to science. He lived without pomp or privilege, quietly, as a semi-recluse, with his books and thoughts.