The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 14, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Warsaw that the Soviet Union and seven East European allies had established a unified military command this date to rival NATO and had made Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev supreme commander. They had signed a 20-year mutual security and friendship treaty and a protocol placing their military forces under a single command. Deputy commanders would be the defense ministers or other military leaders of the participating nations, including, in addition to Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Albania, Rumania, Bulgaria and East Germany. West European diplomats believed that the actual signing of the pact did not change the existing situation, that the Soviets had been in overall command of the military among their satellites for some time, but that the pact did give the Russians a legal framework under which Soviet troops could remain in the satellite countries through individual treaties with each satellite. Politically, the Eastern Communist nations had been linked through the Cominform, dominated by the Soviets. A preamble to the treaty declared that the eight nations had decided to intensify their measures for defense in the face of West Germany's admission to NATO. The treaty would take effect when the last participating nation had ratified it. The first of the 11 articles declared that the participating nations would undertake, in conformity with the U.N. Charter, to refrain "from the threat or use of force, and to settle their international disputes peacefully and in such manner as will not jeopardize international peace and security." (The British Pathe newsreel linked above, incidentally, reporting that East Germany was not initially part of the Warsaw Pact but could become so in the future, was factually misinformed.)

In Vienna, Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov arrived this date from Warsaw to join the Big Three Western foreign ministers in the signing of the Austrian treaty of independence, set for the following day. Secretary of State Dulles held a brief morning meeting with British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan and French Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay, preparatory to a meeting subsequently with Mr. Molotov. The three Western foreign ministers discussed the significance to the Western world of the Soviet announcement that Soviet leaders would visit later during the month in Belgrade with President Tito, and informed officials said that they appeared to agree that Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev were planning the mission in the hope of pushing a drive to neutralize Yugoslavia in the Cold War and effect reconciliation with Tito, their former ally in the Cominform. The first task of the foreign ministers would be to examine the completed text of the Austrian independence treaty and if they approved it, it would be signed on Sunday shortly before noon, with no impediment expected. This night, the four ministers would devote their session to discussion of a meeting of the Big Four heads of state for some time in July, though Western informants believed that Mr. Molotov would seek a different sort of conference from that being sought by the West, that the Soviets were ready to accept in principle the Western call to explore new paths of negotiation in quest of peace, but preferred something more comprehensive than the West's idea of a three or four-day conference between the heads of state, which would then be followed by a prolonged meeting of the foreign ministers to try to reach agreement on the issues prescribed by the agenda set by the heads of state.

In Washington, Surgeon General Leonard Scheele had announced late the previous day that a Public Health Service team of investigative scientists had completed their recheck of 4,250,000 cc's of the Salk polio vaccine manufactured by Parke-Davis & Co., approving it for safety and releasing it for vaccination of more than a million additional schoolchildren, prompting several state health officers to approve immediate resumption of their mass inoculation program, some states set to resume vaccination the following Monday. One lot of the vaccine made by Parke-Davis was retained for further review of the tests. An estimated 5.5 million children had already received the free first shot, being administered to first and second-grade children, the most vulnerable to the disease. Michigan and Utah had not halted their inoculation programs following the recommended temporary suspension of the program a week earlier, in the wake of some 67 breakthrough cases of children who contracted the disease within a few days after receiving the vaccine, with it being hypothesized that it was probably a pre-existing infection which was at fault, rather than the vaccine, given that the breakthrough cases had been diagnosed within a shorter time after receipt of the shot than the normal 10-14 day gestation period for polio following exposure.

RNC chairman Leonard Hall had told an audience in Birmingham, Ala., the previous night that the Democrats were badly split and that he had "every confidence" that the President would carry in 1956 more than the four Southern states he had carried in 1952, and that the Republicans would pick up between 10 and 15 Southern seats in Congress. Mr. Hall said that former DNC chairman Stephen Mitchell had a mission to keep out of the Democratic national convention all of those "Jeffersonian Democrats who refuse to take the so-called loyalty oath," the controversial oath which had sought to pledge all delegates to the party nominee, subsequently diluted in 1952 to require that they would use their best efforts to see to it that the party slate was included on their state's ballots. Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico said in an interview, however, that the trend was unquestionably Democratic, not only in the South but everywhere else in the country, and that even if the President ran again in 1956, he would carry fewer states than he had in 1952. Senator Walter George of Georgia had suggested that in saying the Republicans would give major attention to the South in 1956, Mr. Hall might be looking more for campaign contributions than for votes from the region. The President had carried Virginia, Florida, Texas and Tennessee among the Southern states in 1952. The Republicans presently had seven members of the House from the South, including two from normally Republican areas of Tennessee.

In Atlanta, negotiations in the strike of the Communications Workers of America union against the Southern Bell Telephone Co., impacting nine Southeastern states, were reported at a virtual standstill this date in the wake of new appeals that it be settled by submitting the remaining issues to binding arbitration, as had been the case in the recent settlement of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad strike, which had begun at the same time, the prior March 14. The previous day, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida and Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had issued requests to both sides that the strike be settled on that basis.

In Galveston, Tex., State Rangers were reported looking around the city's red light district, as Mayor-elect George Roy Clough faced increasing opposition to his expressed desire to reopen the district in order to rid prostitutes from the downtown hotels. The district attorney and police commissioner had said that they would not allow it, and they were backed by the Galveston Ministerial Association. The director of the Rangers and the State Police said that the city could not operate on its own as an open town, but declined to comment when asked how and whether he planned to enforce the law in Galveston. Mr. Clough was the owner and operator of radio station KLUF and he reiterated a post-election statement: "Christ couldn't do away with prostitution. Why should I try?" He also said that he would allow gambling to operate in the city, but would not allow slot machines, mere possession of which was against Texas law. He said that Galveston was a "wide open town and is going to remain that way." He said that payoffs, however, had to stop, having charged in a nine-month radio campaign that payoffs in the city had been widespread, though the outgoing Mayor and other City officials had stated that they knew nothing about that. While prostitution and all forms of gambling were against the law in Texas, both forms of vice had reportedly operated in Galveston with little interference, but State Police officials had repeatedly stated that vice and gambling in the city had been closed down.

In London, hundreds of people filled Wembley Stadium this date, hours before evangelist Billy Graham was set to preach the first sermon of his London crusade, with several hundred early arrivals having come by buses from towns in Wales and Yorkshire, an official having stated that more than 80,000 tickets had been requested for the meeting and that arrangements had been made to accommodate 110,000 people. Twenty-five special trains, each bringing between 600 and 1,000 persons, were due in London for the opening of the crusade. Rev. Graham said that he had been preparing his sermon in bed during the morning, stating that his sermon varied according to the weather, that if it was raining, it would last only 20 minutes, but otherwise about 35 minutes. ('e was 'aving a bed-in for peace, don't ye know. Upon arrival in Glasgow, 'e 'ad greeted crowds in his p.j.'s.) When asked to comment on the large crowds which attended his crusade in Scotland and the large numbers who were seeking tickets for the London meetings, he said: "There is a spiritual awakening in Britain which I believe is probably greater that in the last 100 years. It started long before we arrived and we are only grateful to be able to make some contribution to it. The spiritual awakening is contributing to the easing of world tension." Four thousand people would sing in the choir this night, volunteers from London churches, many of whom had sung at previous meetings of Rev. Graham. (The 'otel might save 'is linen and sell little pieces of it to the faithful, as spiritual souvenirs, all for a good cause.)

In Raleigh, a female shopper was fatally shot down the previous day in a parking lot by a pistol bullet fired from a downtown hotel room, and a textbook salesman, who had graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18 with a degree in anthropology, whose father was a Harvard University anthropology professor and whose mother was a Harvard lecturer in sociology, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was held without bond and would be given a probable cause hearing early the following week. His mother, reached by telephone, expressed the firm belief, after she had talked with her son's lawyer, that the shooting was an accident. The accused had been doing graduate work at the University of Chicago and planned to marry a classmate in June. The victim was an employee of the Veterans Administration in Washington and had been visiting her mother in the nearby town of Broadway, shopping in Raleigh at the time she was killed. The accused was arrested in Chapel Hill about three hours after the shooting, and police indicated that the suspect told them that his pistol had discharged accidentally as he was toying with it in his Raleigh hotel room. A police detective described him as a gun fancier and that a German Luger, with an eight-inch barrel, had been found in his suitcase. He had checked out of the hotel within ten minutes after the shooting and had become a suspect when wadding, such as that used for gun clearing, and a bullet hole in a window screen, had been found in his vacated room.

In Charlotte, police were seeking a pyromaniac who had set fire to three Charlotte churches during the previous week, with a detective indicating that the fires also placed other public buildings in danger, possibly during the weekend. All three of the churches were within a few blocks of one another in the Oaklawn section of the city, and included the Church of God, which suffered only slight damage, the Second Calvary Church, which had $1,500 worth of damage, and the Oaklawn Community Center, used regularly for church services, which had several hundred dollars worth of damage. The detective theorized that someone with a grudge against churches had started the fires.

LeGette Blythe, author and historian of Mecklenburg County, discusses the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, on which he had been nourished since his earliest childhood, listening to his grandmother's brother relate stories told by their mother regarding it and her two grandfathers, John McKnitt Alexander and Major John Davidson, and their fellow patriots. It had never occurred to him that there should be any doubt of its authenticity and he still had none. He realizes that 44 years after it had supposedly been signed on May 20, 1775, Thomas Jefferson had written to John Adams that he believed the document was "spurious", but added: "Nor do I affirm, positively, that this paper is a fabrication: because the proof of a negative can only be presumptive." There had been many scoffers at the document since that time and the controversy over it had raged intermittently. Now that the General Assembly wanted the North Carolina Department of Archives and History to assemble materials relating to the Declaration and require the Department to display those materials in the Archives, the controversy was again raised to the forefront, especially after the director of the Archives, Dr. Christopher Crittenden, a friend of Mr. Blythe, had indicated that he would be glad to display the materials, provided the document was authenticated, as it had not been, it being based on copies made from memory in the early 1800's, following a fire at John McKnitt's home, which destroyed the purported original. Dr. Crittenden thus opposed the resolution before the Assembly. At present, the Archives displayed nothing about the document. The Mecklenburg legislative delegation, while unable to legislate history, wanted at least some acknowledgment of the Declaration made in the Archives. Mr. Blythe finds some professional historians "amazingly illogical", including his friend, Dr. Crittenden, when they asked that either the original or an authenticated copy be produced, when everybody knew that the original had been destroyed in the fire. Mr. Blythe finds it analogous to authenticating the Ten Commandments. He says that the more he had studied the facts surrounding the signing of the document, he was convinced that there had been a Declaration signed on May 20, 1775, says that he would not go into those facts at present, but hopes that the scoffers would be willing to appraise the facts.

The point is that the whole matter is rather silly, as we do have the original from Philadelphia, and whether it was signed some 13 1/2 months after the Mecklenburg Declaration is completely irrelevant to anything, save perhaps the notion that history should be treated as a football game, with local bragging rights over who got there first, hardly emblematic of the collective "Spirit of '76". It is a controversy very much akin to trying to change the names of every building or college or university and remove statuary, merely because someone is offended by what it might symbolize to a very small number of insignificant peons, who cannot get over the Civil War and so dress in Confederate garb and prance up and down like idiots in a carnival sideshow every now and then in front of the statuary, while other idiots then come out and protest the prancing, thereby lending the prancers some gravitas by virtue of the second group of idiots purporting to take them seriously. The whole thing is idiotic and suggests people with far too much idle time on their hands.

People are going to make up their own individual minds about history, in any event, regardless of what is said or not about certain parts of it, which, after all, is the embodiment of the Spirit of '76, individual, personal freedom within the boundaries of personal responsibility to the other, all of the others.

In Chicago, a grandmother, 43, was in the kitchen of her South Side restaurant early this date when she heard the front door open and, glancing through a peephole in the kitchen door, saw a man drawing a revolver from his pocket and indicating that it was a "stick-up", demanding that the woman come out of the kitchen. The woman replied: "Oh, yeah! You're not going to stick me up," whereupon she grabbed a .45-caliber pistol from a shelf and charged out to confront the gunman, who looked at the woman and her gun and ran.

In San Angelo, Tex., a 230-pound rancher from Corpus Christi paid $95 in fines for public drunkenness of four inmates of the local jail, including himself, and started home the previous day, with the rancher promising the other three jobs burning prickly pear for cattle fodder, telling the judge that the jail "stinks and is no fit place for a man." But two hours later, the rancher was again charged with public drunkenness and again committed to jail, and his three hired hands had to look for new jobs.

On the editorial page, "Raleigh: A Home Away from Home" tells of the effort by a State Representative of Guilford County having failed to permit home rule amendments to the State Constitution, so that matters which were local in nature could be decided locally and not have to be approved initially by the General Assembly.