The Charlotte News
Monday, January 23, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.S. officials hoped to obtain agreement from British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, during his visit in Washington the following week, to hold the line for another year against seating Communist China as a member of the U.N. Officials believed that the Prime Minister would not press for changes which the U.S. did not want. Britain recognized Communist China, whereas the U.S. did not, and there had been increasing pressures within Britain for years to support Russia's effort to seat Communist China in the U.N. Each time the vote had come up, however, Britain had agreed to shelve it for the duration of each General Assembly session. The matter would likely be raised again by the Soviets the following fall and Administration leaders expected Mr. Eden to realize the problems which faced the U.S. Government in an election year and that he would not do anything to make them more difficult. While Administration officials were optimistic about the issue, they were less so about their ability to hold the line on restrictions on trade with the Communist bloc nations.
Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia had said this date that the Administration was trying to "pile up IOUs" of the type it had criticized the Truman Administration for leaving behind. He said that the President's new budget had proposed an increase of nine billion dollars in appropriations over the amount which Congress had voted two years earlier, that the appropriations in the 1954 calendar year had been 57 billion dollars, increasing to 62 billion in 1955, and now, the Administration was recommending 66 billion in the new budget. It was the first budget request of President Eisenhower which had asked Congress to appropriate more money than the Government would spend, and Senator Byrd said that the request was a reversal of Administration policy, that when the President had come into office, he and Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey had "criticized the Democrats for leaving behind a tremendous amount of commitments in unexpended balances of funds."
In Richmond, Va., the governors of four Southern states, including Governors Luther Hodges of North Carolina, Marvin Griffin of Georgia, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., of South Carolina, and J. P. Coleman of Mississippi, would meet the following day with Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley, at the latter's invitation, to discuss school segregation problems. State Attorney General W. B. Rodman would accompany Governor Hodges, along with the chairman of the Governor's advisory committee on education and an aide.
In Los Angeles, a two-car Santa Fe diesel train had rounded a curve the previous night too fast and toppled over, killing an estimated 29 persons and injuring at least 120 in one of California's worst railroad disasters, apparently caused by the engineer of the train losing consciousness. The bodies were so badly mangled and dismembered that the coroner's office had trouble identifying them and determining exactly how many victims were involved. The highest death toll in a rail accident in the state had been 32 in 1907. The train had been en route to San Diego, 125 miles to the south of Los Angeles, with 161 passengers aboard, about 40 percent of whom had been servicemen returning to their bases. The report indicates that it could be several days before the names of all of the killed and injured passengers were known.
A separate story provides eyewitness accounts by some of the passengers.
In Williamson, W.Va., the engine and four cars of a Norfolk & Western Railway westbound passenger train had derailed on a curve east of the Kentucky border town, killing the engineer and injuring about 20 other persons, 12 of whom had been treated in the emergency room and released, the other injuries also appearing not serious.
In Marion, O., three men who had terrorized a bank official's family the previous day in a failed attempt at a bank robbery, had pleaded not guilty to kidnaping and bank robbery this date. They had surrendered after trying to escape with suitcases crammed with money, estimated by the bank to be between $32,000 and $35,000. Police said that the three men had held an assistant bank cashier, his wife and mother-in-law as hostages for five hours while they sought to pull off the heist. The father of one of the three was the bank janitor, and the same man's brother was a Marion patrolman involved in the capture of the three. Police said that they were aware in advance that the robbery was going to take place and had staked out the area. The attempted robbery had occurred during the early hours of Sunday morning, with the chain of events having begun shortly after midnight when the robbers gained entrance to the bank cashier's home through trickery, then obtained at gunpoint the keys to the bank and the combination of the safe. One of the three then had gone to the bank and attempted to open the safe, but failed and returned to the cashier's home.
In Cleveland, six children of one family were in the hospital this date, five of them to have their tonsils removed and the other to undergo examination for stomach trouble. Their mother was in the pediatric ward to comfort each child upon return to bed from the tonsillectomy. The father, meanwhile, was in the emergency room with the other child. The couple had decided to have all of the tonsillectomies performed at one time to avoid having to make several trips to the hospital.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that Mecklenburg County voters would decide on May 26 whether to continue the operation of the County-operated tuberculosis sanitorium or to close it on June 30, 1957, after the County Board of Commissioners had voted this date unanimously to hold a referendum, following a recommendation of the Sanatorium Board of Managers, the Commission saying that they would abide by the will of the voters.
The latest cold wave in the Midwest had brought temperatures of 30 below zero to Bemidji, Minn., where it had been 45 below a month earlier. That low had produced the illusion of three suns shining through air so frigid it was literally breathtaking, sometimes freezing the sap inside trees, causing crackling reports as loud as gunfire when the sap expanded and split the trees. The town competed with International Falls, Minn., for low temperatures. The publisher of the local newspaper in Bemidji said that when it got that cold, the smoke from chimneys would rise straight up until it became weighted down with ice particles, at which point it would drop to street level and produce "a shimmering, glimmering effect in the air".
On the editorial page, "The Big Stall: A Political Disgrace" tells of the dean of the Wake Forest Law School, Carroll Weathers, chairman of the Commission on Legislative Representation, having announced recently that he would be pleased to receive public testimony on March 15 on how reapportionment in the state could best be accomplished.
It indicates that the State Constitution spelled it out in detail, but the problem was to convince the legislators that they should obey the Constitution, which they had ignored for years. It finds that the Commission chaired by Mr. Weathers was only part of a legislative stalling tactic, that State Senator F. J. Blythe of Mecklenburg County had sought during the previous 1955 session to have a commission of legislators draw up a redistricting plan, but that the subsequently appointed commission wound up packed with members from rural counties, with only one member, from Durham, coming from a district in a metropolitan area. Eventually, the commission sidestepped its responsibility by recommending that another study commission be appointed to report to the 1957 Legislature, with the Durham representative filing the only dissent.
Repeatedly, the Legislature had stalled on the matter and the voters had decisively rejected a proposed State constitutional amendment limiting every county to one State Senator, an amendment which would have penalized the more heavily populated areas. It finds it a shameful record and that it was to be hoped that Mr. Weathers and his commission would help to make the nature of the shame unbearably obvious to everyone.
"Farm Problem: Remember the Ratliffs" tells of a Mississippi farm boy, Lamar Ratliff, who had won national attention the previous week for growing a record one-acre corn crop, having said that there was no money in farming and so he wanted to be a doctor. It suggests that he had meant that there was no money in farming a 170-acre hill farm, such as his father's, and walking behind a mule named Dolly to plow it.
The small farmer had never made any real money, but with the Government spending billions on agriculture, he should be sharing in the general prosperity of the country. The fact that he was not was decreasing the number of small farm families, most of whom would need to be integrated into some form of industry, that if the trend toward absorption of the 50-acre to 200-acre farms into mechanized agricultural factories continued, something basic would have been ripped from the fabric of America, a point of view and theory of self-reliance, a method of raising children and a way of life which produced such young people as Lamar Ratliff.
Meanwhile, it urges, the Federal agricultural programs should be better adjusted to the pressing needs of the small farmer, finds that soil banks were fine for farmers with enough acreage to put some in the bank, and that price supports enabled the larger production-type farms to remain solvent, but that those plans placed a premium on large amounts of acreage. The previous week, local Congressman Charles Jonas had pointed out in his report from Washington that one giant farm operation in Mississippi had received over 1.3 million dollars in cotton price-support loans, compared with the $400 received by the average farmer in Mississippi. The larger farms received the bulk of the price-support funding and also continued to increase surpluses, the root of the problem in the farm dilemma.
It concludes that while Congress was
seeking to solve that dilemma, the members should not forget the
people like the Ratliff family in Mississippi, as there were a lot of
them everywhere
"Boodle Talk vs. A Quest for Certainty" tells of "the high winds of extravagantly earthy verbiage" having already commenced in the election year, six months before the start of the political conventions. Democrats and Republicans, throughout the prior week, had jockeyed back and forth with insults to one another. Adlai Stevenson had been called "cowardly", former President Truman, a "demagogue", Secretary of State Dulles, a "desperate gambler", Senator Estes Kefauver, a "city slicker in bumpkin's clothing", and President Eisenhower, a man who would turn the White House into a "home for retired old soldiers". It finds that the name-calling had devolved to the point of political phrase-making sometimes called "boodle-talk" by its "slinkier practitioners". Such people, it posits, operated on the theory that the voters always believed the worst.
It finds that "boodle-talk" had been made into a fine art by the supporters of Florida Senator George Smathers when he had conducted a campaign against incumbent Senator Claude Pepper, in which it was said that the latter was a "shameless extrovert", a practitioner of "nepotism" with his sister-in-law, that he had a sister who was once a "thespian" in New York, and that before his marriage, he had practiced "celibacy". Mr. Smathers had won the campaign easily and former Senator Pepper—who would eventually, beginning in 1963, go on to a long career in the House—had never lived down the scandal.
It suggests that the political
orator also had to be aware of a vocabulary of "good" and
"bad" words for describing both friends and foes, that
among the good words and phrases were "free enterprise, the
American way of life, constitutional government, individual liberty
It finds, however, that some of the people were showing signs of becoming fed up with the rhetoric, indicating that during the 1952 election campaign, The Reporter had conducted an informal poll among television owners and viewers in New York at the time of the party conventions and had found interesting reactions, which it quotes, such as one man having said that politicians were all crooks, while another said that he "shut the damn thing off" (actually misquoting the man, not using the expletive), as the people on the television could make a fool even of a man like General Eisenhower, while yet another said that the voter could not go by what was said in speeches, that it was all "bull to attract the voter". It suggests that it was too bad that those candid remarks could not be delivered to the candidates.
It suggests that John Dewey's "quest for certainty" characterized the aim of thinking voters, and that the name-calling became hollow after awhile, with the lies eroding over time, and thus there was yet hope for American politics.
Because of the proliferation of 24-hour news outlets over the last 30-40 years, it might be observed that "boodle-talk" now persists virtually all of the time across the airwaves, not just in quadrennial election years, at least when the 24-hour news outlets, always pressed to fill air time with verbiage of some type, are not covering the latest shooting—resulting from the "boodle-talk" by gun-rights advocates and from the assurance of the notoriety-seeking shooter of receiving bullet-in-to-bullet-out coverage by the 24-hour news outlets—, or some other disaster du jour, with the print media having long ago either ceased publication altogether for want of subscriber and advertising revenue or thrown in the towel on presenting calm, rational, non-yellow reportage and commentary, for the most part, and following the lead of the talky-talkers, driving those who assiduously follow such fare and take it too much to heart and mind to either rank cynicism of the type displayed by the orange popsicle sucking respondent to the 1952 door-to-door Reporter poll who opined that all politicians are crooks, the walking manifestation of regular viewing of the Mucker Amoralson nightly report on the state of the nation and the world, or to virtual cultural madness, the walking marionette resultant of regular viewing of the Shown N. Sanity nightly report on the state of the nation and the world.
Drew Pearson tells of Republican Congressional leaders remaining optimistic that the President would run for a second term, despite his health issues, citing as one basis for the optimism a quip he had made at a recent meeting, saying that he had been given a reason to run again after someone had told him that if he could not run in November, he ought resign at present.
Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois had withdrawn his proposal to attach an anti-lynching rider to the natural gas bill, after the Senate parliamentarian had told him that it would not be proper as the amendment was not germane to natural gas.
The civil rights Congressmen who had recently gathered in Congressman Hugh Scott's office to discuss strategy for the session on civil rights, and particularly regarding an anti-lynching bill, were maintaining secret their intentions.
The worst diehard opponent of civil rights legislation was Congressman Tic Forrester of Georgia, who held a key position on the Judiciary Committee.
Two NAACP workers, Lamar Smith and G. W. Lee, had been killed in Mississippi while seeking to get blacks registered to vote. A third person was seriously wounded.
The Air Force Thunder Jets, an aerial acrobatic team, had been invited to perform over the St. Paul, Minn., Ice Carnival, but the Defense Department had nixed the idea. The Navy's Blue Angels, however, had not asked permission of the Department to perform and had agreed to do so.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the President generally looking fit at his first press conference since the prior August 4, having suffered in the interim, on September 24, his heart attack, finding it reassuring that he was able to field questions from reporters, even if his eyes appeared "restless and even a little troubled" when he was not smiling.
They suggest that, given the wording of the quoted telegram of the President sent to the New Hampshire Republicans permitting his name to be entered in the March 8 primary, the first in the nation, it appeared clear that he was considering his long-term health prognosis from his doctors in making his decision whether or not to run again, asserting that he would weigh the likelihood of his ability to serve out a second term, that it would not be in the interest of the nation if it would appear unlikely.
They cite a study by three doctors of the Medical Research Institute of Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital, who had reported statistics, recently reduced to a table published in U.S. News & World Report, which had indicated that a man of the President's age, 65, who had survived the first months of acute immediate danger following a heart attack, had five in eleven chances of surviving another five years, which was the length of time from the present until the end of a second term. The chances were weighted somewhat against the President, however, because he had suffered his attack while resting in Colorado, while his favorable recovery counted on the positive side of the ledger. They suggest it as the best answer to the question being pondered by the President.
The President, of course, would live
until 1969, dying just two months after the inauguration of President
Nixon
Marquis Childs also considers the subject of the President's health and his decision whether to run for a second term, analogizing it to the decision faced by FDR in 1940 when considering whether, because of the war, to run for an unprecedented third term, traditionally not done in American politics—although Theodore Roosevelt, after having served nearly two full terms between 1901 and 1909, advancing to the Presidency after the assassination of President McKinley early in his second term, did run as a third-party "Bull Moose" candidate in 1912 against New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson and incumbent President William Howard Taft, coming in second to Governor Wilson in that race. FDR had played the matter coyly, remaining quiet about his decision right up until the Democratic convention, saying that he did not want to run again, enabling his supporters to construct a draft of him as the party nominee. Many prominent Democrats, notably DNC chairman James Farley, who had engineered FDR's first run for the presidency in 1932, did not want the President to run again, Mr. Farley having ambiguously announced in Winston-Salem, N.C., in February, 1940, his own candidacy because the President had remained uncommitted so long as to whether he would run again.
Mr. Childs tells of FDR having then appointed, three days before the Republican convention, two prominent Republicans, Frank Knox, who had been the Republican vice-presidential nominee with Alf Landon in 1936, and Henry Stimson, who had been Secretary of State under President Hoover, as Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of War, respectively, a move which had greatly angered Republicans.
He suggests that the Republicans in 1956 might follow the same strategy and nominate a prominent Democrat to replace Vice-President Nixon on the ticket, utilizing the justification of the need for bipartisan unity in the face of the Communist cold war threat, just as FDR had used the war in Europe as the rationale for his appointments of the two Republicans to the Administration. Mr. Childs says that such a possibility was not being overlooked by advisers to the President, who wanted to convince him to run again.
He indicates that the people around the President did not, however, need to follow the Roosevelt strategy regarding a draft by the convention, that if the President decided that his long-term health prognosis could not permit him to run again "for the good of the country", then the skilled advisers closest to him were savvy enough politically to try to name a successor nominee for the delegates to choose, although that would be more difficult than having the President run himself.
A letter writer from Pittsboro comments on the editorial, "Sen. Ives: Surrounded by a Slogan", the letter suggesting that the Senator would not only have to leave Washington, as the editorial had suggested, but the nation and a good part of the free world to escape "New Dealism". He says that everyone turned to Washington for relief from the most trivial of troubles and finds it disgusting for a person who wanted to think of his state as an independent entity and an indestructible state, suggests that the Civil War had not destroyed the states, but had merely settled the indissolubility of the Union, that leadership lacking in virility and vision, had reduced the states to virtual impotency over the previous 30 years. But he wants to know what had happened to lawyers and other professional men, overlooked by the Government giveaway program in terms of old-age benefits, says that by age, he was qualified.
Try reading the Preamble of the Constitution sometime very carefully, when it talks about its formation being for the purpose, among other things, of providing for the common defense and promoting the "general welfare" of the people. The Founders had discovered that the Articles of Confederation which had preceded it had not worked in providing for those crucial protections for all citizens. Blame the Founders, therefore, not FDR and "New Dealism" for the "welfare state", the New Deal only having made those inured to and enamored of the previous Republican laissez-faire corporate state consider, in immediate and stark contrast, the new programs as something resemblant to socialism, that FDR "breakfasted on grilled millionaire".
Framed Edition
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