The Charlotte News
Monday, January 30, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had arrived this date in Washington for strategy discussions with the President regarding combating Communism in Asia and the Middle East. They would also seek a formula for peace in Palestine during their three days of conferences. At a press conference aboard the Queen Elizabeth in New York, before flying to Washington, the Prime Minister had said that he found "admirable" the President's reply to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin's proposal for a 20-year peace pact. Secretary of State Dulles was on hand to welcome the Prime Minister, who was accompanied by Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd.
The Atomic Energy Commission reported this date, in part of its semi-annual report to Congress, a big expansion of its research program aimed at eventually harnessing the hydrogen bomb for peaceful development of power, but stated that it might be many years before the problem could be solved. AEC chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss had announced the research program, named "Project Sherwood", at the Geneva international atomic conference the previous year. The research was being conducted at AEC laboratories at the University of California at Berkeley, at Livermore, Calif., Los Alamos, N.M., and at Princeton. Smaller projects were ongoing at the AEC's Oak Ridge, Tenn., plant and at NYU. The report said that the Los Alamos and Princeton programs had begun in 1951 as experiments to try ideas for controlling thermonuclear reactions at temperatures comparable to those existing in the sun. It said that tapping that source of energy had long been intriguing to scientists, but that some of the problems to be overcome were extremely difficult. It also said that the program for developing industrial, naval and aircraft plants had made significant progress during the last six months of 1955, that the atomic aircraft engine program had been accelerated during that time and construction of test facilities at the national reactor testing station in Idaho had been completed and some test work had begun, with no details provided.
In Paris, it was reported that William Judd, a 40-year old TWA pilot, had brought his Cessna single-engine airplane in for a smooth landing near Paris, beaten by icing conditions and fatigue in his attempt to fly nonstop from White Plains, N.Y., to Cairo, Egypt, after being in the air for 24 hours, 11 minutes, and obviously exhausted. He was greeted by his wife and young son. He said that he had run into six hours of ice between New York and Gander, Newfoundland, and had another six hours of instrument flying in bad weather off the coast of Europe. By way of explaining why he had cut the flight short, he said that every pilot had to know his limitations. He had flown the Atlantic 120 times as a TWA pilot. He had hoped to break the nonstop record for light planes set in 1949 when the late William Odom had flown 4,957 miles from Honolulu to Teterboro, N.J., with the planned flight to Cairo having been 5,643 miles.
In Baltimore, at least ten women had died in a mad dash for the exits, and nine other persons were reported missing, the previous night, after fire had caused a panic in a hall jammed with a church crowd of about 1,000 people. More than 200 had been injured after the swiftly spreading flames had consumed Arundel Park Auditorium on the south edge of the city. Red Cross officials said that 111 of those injured had been released after treatment, and that 18 persons had been admitted to hospitals, with about 100 others having been treated at the scene. Al Barthelme, former professional basketball coach of the old Baltimore Bullets and one of the survivors, described the scene at one window as "real panic", that it was "pretty brutal", "with everybody trying to get out of that window".
In Parsippany-Troy Hills, N.J., investigators were questioning relatives this date in a continuing effort to learn why a 48-year old civil engineer and churchgoer, described by neighbors as a kindly and devoted family man, had killed six members of his family, including his wife, two young children, his in-laws, and his mother, with a shotgun and then committed suicide. The family had been preparing to go to Florida for a two-week vacation.
In Philadelphia, the man and wife who had been charged with performing an illegal abortion resulting in the death of the 22-year old daughter of the vice-president of Food Fair stores, pleaded nolo contendere this date to the charge, as did the victim's mother to a charge of being an accessory before the fact of the abortion. The young woman had died the previous August 24 in the Philadelphia apartment of the couple, about two months after she had eloped with a Miami Beach motorcycle policeman. The attorney for the mother said that she was near the breaking point and that to extend the ordeal might be too much for her and so asked the judge to permit a plea of nolo contendere, which he allowed. The maximum penalty on the charged crimes was ten years in prison and a fine of $6,000. The medical examiner had determined after an autopsy that the cause of the young woman's death had been the unsuccessful abortion.
In Greensboro, N.C., a judge convicted six black men of trespassing on Gillespie Park golf course, saying that such acts would do much to thwart and defeat efforts to seek universal solution to human problems, a decision which he read in open court. He fined each of the men $15 plus court costs, and their counsel immediately gave notice of appeal to the Guilford County Superior Court. The men had been arrested after playing nine holes of golf on the white-only golf course on December 7, after being denied permission to play there when they appeared at the clubhouse and offered to pay the greens fee. The judge concluded his decision by saying: "Nowhere in our heritage do I find any sanction for a breach of the peace, for a usurpation of the law by an individual or for a violation of the criminal code to assert an assumed personal right or privilege." Ultimately, the defendants would again be convicted in a trial de novo before a jury in Superior Court and while the matter was awaiting appeal to the State Supreme Court, the defendants brought suit as plaintiffs in Federal District Court, alleging that the leasing of the golf course by the City of Greensboro to a private firm, which in turn had denied the plaintiffs the right to use the course, continued as state action insofar as the violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. The Court, in Simkins v. City of Greensboro, would hold in 1957 that the leasing arrangement could not work to deny the plaintiffs their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause without rendering constitutional rights generally a sham, granting the injunctive relief sought of prohibiting the course from practicing racial discrimination. The decision was affirmed by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. On the same date the latter decision was filed, the State Supreme Court overturned the convictions on the basis of facial defects in the amended charging warrants and remanded for retrial. On retrial, the defendants were again convicted by a jury, notwithstanding explicit instructions by the judge that the defendants could not be excluded from the golf course because of their race. The North Carolina Supreme Court, in 1958, then affirmed the convictions, despite approval of the trial judge's instruction regarding the inability of the course to exclude the defendants because of their race. The Court recognized the Federal Court's published opinion in the civil case but not its unpublished findings, which were not properly before it regarding other incidents of conduct to determine whether or not the defendants had been excluded because of their race. The Court did not decide whether it was bound as a matter of law by the Federal Court decision in the civil case, basing the decision solely on state grounds. The criminal case was eventually decided in 1960 by the U.S. Supreme Court against defendants, upholding their convictions by a 5 to 4 decision, the majority opinion, delivered by Justice Potter Stewart, appointed to the Court in 1958, holding that the State Supreme Court, while it could not sidestep Federal jurisdiction of constitutional questions by deciding a case solely on state grounds which were without "any fair or substantial support", had done so only "because of the requirements of rules of state procedural law within the Constitutional power of the States to define, and here clearly delineated and even-handedly applied." The Court determined therefore that there was no proper Federal question before the Court, as there was no question, given the trial court's instruction disallowing racial discrimination against defendants in use of the course and recognition of same by the State Supreme Court, that the jury's verdict had to have been based on a finding that there was no discrimination at the golf course based on race, that the defendants were found guilty of simple trespass without regard to race. (It might be noted that the State Supreme Court decision had not discussed whether the defendants had offered to pay the $1.00 use-specific club membership fee required by the by-laws of the club, in addition to the greens fee, but as that was never raised in the case, it is apparent that they had, and so could not have been excluded on the basis of the by-laws or on any other basis than their race.)
The dissent of Chief Justice Earl Warren, joined by Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and William Brennan, the latter to be appointed to the Court later in 1956, found that there were no adequate and independent state grounds for the North Carolina Supreme Court's affirmance of the convictions. "In view of the federal court finding that the appellants were excluded from Gillespie Park because of their race, these convictions give rise to serious constitutional doubts. Unless dismissal cannot be avoided, the appellants should not be deprived of their liberty without being heard on their federal question. Our own precedents require that we either remand the case or decide the questions which it presents."
The defendants in the case might as well have been playing through a dozen sand traps and water hazards, all on the same hole—perhaps spread over five supremely difficult holes
In any event, the civil case holding, never disturbed, shot holes in the interposition theory being promoted by Richmond News Leader editor Jack Kilpatrick and others, taken up by four Southern governors recently on a plan to establish private schools with state funding, in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, Virginia having already conducted a referendum, overwhelmingly approved, to hold a state convention to amend its State Constitution to allow state funding of private schools.
Parenthetically, and not without relevance, we dedicate this next number
In Charlotte, the Mecklenburg County School Board continued wrestling this date with the problem of the rapidly increasing school population in the county, with the superintendent naming nine schools, including two senior high schools and two junior highs, which he said might not be adequate in size by the beginning of the following school year, with the possibility that additional rooms would be added to one of the five elementary schools he had named. He said that the overcrowded situation in the two junior high schools might be solved by holding seventh graders in nearby elementary schools for an additional year. Five new elementary schools in the County system were expected to be finished late in the year or in the following year, with construction on one having begun the previous week. The superintendent said that double sessions were possible the following year at three of the elementary schools. New housing developments all over the county were pressing school officials to stay ahead of the potential demands for schools in the new neighborhoods.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Governor Luther Hodges had arrived in Charlotte during the morning from Raleigh, accompanied by his wife and the president of the North Carolina Business Development Corp., the Governor being in the area to sell stock for that firm. He said that the Atlantic Coast Line Railway, which had announced plans to leave its Wilmington headquarters in favor of a new location, had not made definite plans to depart the state and that seven North Carolina cities were vying for the headquarters, not including Charlotte as it was off the ACL main line. He said there were, in all, 33 cities under consideration. The Governor spoke to more than 100 business and civic leaders at the Gaston County Club about the thriving Business Development Corp.
In Charlotte, the new Coliseum would host its first ice hockey game this night, with the Baltimore Clippers meeting New Haven, before an anticipated near sellout crowd of about 10,000 people, the first of six scheduled matches. Baltimore's arena had been destroyed by a $170,000 fire the previous week, forcing the owner of the team to move his remaining home games to Charlotte. About 6,000 general admission tickets remained on sale at the Coliseum, should you wish to attend.
In Fort Worth, Tex., a man the
previous night instructed customers in a cafe to line up against the
wall, that it was a stickup, repeating the demand three times, but
finding that no one complied. Finally, a 73-year old female customer
threatened to sic her dog on the man, and a woman at the counter
picked up a coffee mug to defend herself. The bandit said: "I
guess I've changed my mind. Just give me a cup of coffee
In Cleveland, O., someone had left $8,637 in cash, mostly in small denominations, wrapped in an old newspaper dated November 11, 1955, on a bench of the confessional booth at St. Boniface's Roman Catholic Church, the money having been found by a priest who took it to the police.
On the editorial page, "The 'Reds' Probe: Driving Some Stakes" addresses the 2 to 1 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion handed down the prior Friday, reversing the conviction for contempt of a union official who had appeared before HUAC in 1954 and had refused to answer questions about his time regarding union activities during World War II which inevitably had involved dealings with Communist Party members, specifically refusing to name people, while answering that he was not at present and never had been a Communist—a decision which would ultimately be overruled by the Court sitting en banc, affirming the conviction, only to be reversed by the Supreme Court in 1957, finally reversing the conviction on the basis that the hearings did not concern Communist infiltration of unions and so the questions on which he had been found in contempt for not answering should not have been asked as not within the scope of the purpose of the inquiry, denying the witness the rights of due process.
It indicates that witnesses had been so grilled for years by Congressional committees regarding Communist activities committed in the past, without any legislation having been passed as a result. It finds the hearings to have been politically inspired on many occasions, and that they would continue as long as they were tacitly permitted.
It finds that the three-judge Court of Appeals decision had the virtue of "driving down some stakes in the jungle" in which individual rights had often been set upon by "political headhunters". It hopes that the appeal inevitably to the Supreme Court would finally set the boundaries for the investigative power of Congress.
The dissent in the case, which would become the majority decision in the Court sitting en banc, had objected to the majority opinion, which would be the later dissent, placing the Court in the position over Congress and its committees, limiting the scope of inquiries to what the Court believed they ought to be.
The piece finds the trouble with the view to be that the responsibility of committees was often determined by periodic hysterias in which individual rights of opinion and dissent were swept away, that afterward the hysteria cooled and the McCarthys receded, as reason returned. But damage to individuals could not be remedied. It finds that the appellate decision was confirmation that Congressional committees had gone too far and asserts that if it were to elicit a decision from the Supreme Court on how far Congress could go, it would have served a good purpose.
"Bulganin's Dry Water and
Wooden Iron" quotes the late Joseph Stalin, that good words were
a mask for the concealment of bad deeds, that "sincere words"
were no more possible than "dry water or wooden iron
It finds that in rejecting words alone and demanding deeds to back them up, the President had taken a wise course, that perhaps the cause of world peace had not been helped by the exchange of notes, but that the tender by Mr. Bulganin could only be viewed as sincere by the very gullible, as "the Russians, as always, were promising dry water and wooden iron."
"The Bowie Wrangle: Massive Silliness" finds the case of Robert Bowie, nominated as an assistant secretary of state, to be controversial, having aroused the ire of the China lobby because of his supposedly having favored the diplomatic recognition by the U.S. of Communist China, angering such Republican leaders as Senators William Knowland and Styles Bridges.
Secretary of State Dulles, nevertheless, had told the press that he had no intention of withdrawing Mr. Bowie's name, which it finds commendable, as Mr. Dulles had not been steadfastly loyal in the past, as in the case of John Paton Davies, often abandoning career diplomats who came under fire for flimsy reasons.
Another reason asserted for suspicion of Mr. Bowie had been that he had supposedly associated with Owen Lattimore on one occasion, when Mr. Lattimore had addressed a meeting which Mr. Bowie happened to be attending, a meeting of a conservative organization.
According to the Washington press, Mr. Bowie had never favored recognition of Communist China or its admission to the U.N., but had cautioned against blind devotion to any policy, however noble, urging that recognition and admission be discussed rationally in terms of U.S. interest. Joseph and Stewart Alsop had described him as a "sharp-tongued realist" who had "made it his business to ask inconvenient questions and to question the realism of comfortable assumptions." Some of the questions he had posed concerned the wisdom of defending the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu for Nationalist China, as well as the correctness of the policy toward West Germany. He had also questioned whether the Baghdad and SEATO pacts were all they were cracked up to be, and whether the balance of air-atomic power was turning against the West and what ought be done about it.
The piece suggests that he was the
type of tough-minded realist whom the State Department needed, that
his only fault appeared to be that he had an irritating habit of
being honest. Moreover, there would be little change in his actual
duties at the State Department, only a change of titles, as Mr.
Dulles had explained. The piece thus finds it "massive
silliness"
"Dogtags for Children: A Tiny Chafing" indicates that the issuance of dogtags to Mecklenburg children was to provide for identification in case something were to happen to the child, specifically a military attack. Civil Defense officials had pointed out, however, that the tags were a good thing anyway, as in a mechanized, crowded world, something could always happen to a child, even on peaceful days.
It indicates that the chain around
the neck might chafe some at first, but after a brief period of
getting used to it, the child would forget it was there. It hopes
that parents would make certain that their children wore the tags as
it was a sensible thing to do, and it was also sensible to label them
as they were, not "identification tags", but rather
dogtags
Drew Pearson tells of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, during his trip to Washington, expecting to talk to the President about how the Arab-American Oil Co. needed to be clamped down, as it was stirring up trouble in Saudi Arabia against England and the U.S., that it was American royalty money which had paid for part of the Communist arms deal which Egypt had made with Czechoslovakia, part of which was based on a barter for Egyptian cotton but another part paid for by money which the Egyptians had borrowed from Saudi Arabia. King Saud had offered 280 million dollars to the Government of Jordan over the ensuing ten years if it would stay out of the Baghdad alliance, which England had organized to combat Soviet Communism, money which the King was obtaining from Aramco.
The Prime Minister was in possession of intercepted messages showing how the Saudis had been seeking to stir up trouble and using the American oil royalties to do it, including a message regarding the delivery of a 25-year old slave to the King.
Aramco consisted of a combination of U.S. oil companies, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard of California, Socony, and Texaco. It had been charged by the Senate Investigating Committee in 1948 with overcharging the Navy many millions of dollars during World War II by making it pay $1.05 per barrel for oil after agreeing to sell it for 40 cents per barrel, after FDR had provided Saudi Arabia 99 million dollars worth of lend-lease on condition that the oil companies sell to the Navy at that price. Instead, as found by the Committee, the companies had offered the Navy fuel oil at the price more than 2 1/2 times higher, exploiting the Government despite the assistance given Saudi Arabia at the behest of the companies, to protect the concessions of the companies. The Committee had sent the report to the Justice Department, with a recommendation for action against Aramco, but nothing was ever done. Mr. Pearson suggests that Prime Minister Eden might take a look at that Senate report.
Two more conflicts of interest had been discovered within the Administration, both in the Securities & Exchange Commission. The first was of William Marshall, head of SEC's regional office in Washington, who had simultaneously been a director of a private firm which had planned a stock issue the previous summer, falling within the jurisdiction of the SEC office headed by Mr. Marshall. In consequence, SEC chairman J. Sinclair Armstrong had advised Mr. Marshall that it would be proper for him to resign from the private firm and Mr. Marshall agreed to do so. But five months later, Mr. Armstrong had discovered that Mr. Marshall had not resigned, telling Mr. Armstrong when confronted that he had changed his mind, prompting Mr. Armstrong to ask Mr. Marshall to resign from the SEC immediately. Mr. Marshall did not believe he had done anything wrong and was eventually called before a full meeting of the SEC on January 6, where his resignation was formally requested. Mr. Marshall had told Mr. Pearson that he was disturbed about the matter but was trying to forget it and had nothing to say.
Prior to that episode, John Bowser, executive director of the SEC under former chairman Ralph Demmler, had a conflict of interest but had never been disciplined for it, as he had been the owner of a firm which, in March, 1955, had merged with the same firm of which Mr. Marshall had been director, and despite the latter company planning a new stock issue which would require SEC approval, Mr. Bowser had not resigned from the Commission at the time of the merger and had not sold his interest in the merging firm. He quietly resigned when the former chairman, Mr. Demmler, resigned.
Victor S. Bryant, a member of the UNC board of trustees, in a talk recently at the Oxford, N.C., Rotary Club, discusses academic freedom, in the wake of the dismissal recently of a professor from the faculty at the University of South Carolina based on expression of ideas with which the administration of the University and South Carolina officials had disagreed.
He indicates that academic freedom stood for a teacher's full freedom in research and the right to publish the results. It had to be anticipated that the results would challenge at times orthodox beliefs and that sometimes unorthodox beliefs would emerge, perhaps unpalatable to both the university administrative officials and the trustees, but that it had to be remembered that the heresies of one age frequently became the accepted standards of the next, as exampled by the U.S. Supreme Court and its dissenting opinions through time.
He tells of Roger Bacon, who had dared maintain that God's rainbow could be explained by the laws of physics, having been imprisoned for 14 years, and Galileo, who discovered that the earth moved around the sun, was arrested, threatened with physical torture and coerced into signing a sworn retraction.
A professor doing research in the humanities and natural sciences would probably not encounter much unpopularity, as the average layman was not very much interested in newly discovered physical formulas or highly aroused by a translation supplying a new interpretation of Euripides or Marcus Aurelius. But in the area of social sciences, things were different, as there was perhaps less tolerance for original thinking in those areas, while, because man understood little about getting along with his fellow man, those areas probably most needed research and vision.
He also indicates that a faculty member ought be absolutely free to teach the subjects which he or she had been assigned to teach, although the teacher should not take advantage of the position to introduce provocative and irrelevant discussions on matters not related to the subject. The university ought protect the teacher in that regard and in the honest and free expression of his or her opinions. He ventures that neither inside nor outside the classroom had the teacher any right to teach immoral precepts or subversive doctrine, explaining that by "subversive" was meant teaching the overthrow of the government by fraud or force.
A third privilege was that outside the classroom and beyond the field of teaching, the teacher had the same right to formulate and express opinions as any other citizen, but in doing so, should disassociate remarks from the institution so that it was not represented as concurring in the beliefs and opinions. He recommends that any board of trustees ought forgo any attempt to try to censor or dictate what a professor might say outside the institution, as a private citizen, that such an attempt would do far more harm than by leaving the professor free and trusting in his or her good judgment and that of the listeners.
He says that UNC, in 1856, had discharged a science professor because he had advocated publicly the abolition of slavery, and that he could not help but speculate how fortunate the nation might have been had he and others like him prevailed and the Civil War had been avoided.
He indicates that the rights he outlined were the unalienable rights of the teaching profession, which were neither granted nor bargained to the faculty by a board of trustees, but rather were guaranteed by the Constitution or were prescribed by statute. He doubts, however, that they were universally accepted and had been established only through long and patient efforts by members of the teaching profession and their allies, requiring constant vigilance for their perpetuation by both the university administration and its trustees.
He indicates that they could be forfeited, if the professor did not properly show integrity, competence and citizenship, the faculty being a reflection of the university. A professor who misused the classroom or other relationships with students for dissemination of subversive propaganda, commission of wrong for personal purposes or was guilty in outside relationships of subversive acts which disqualified the person as a citizen, when found guilty and after a proper hearing, ought be dismissed from the institution. Notwithstanding that fact, the institution should refrain from any spying or anything which had that appearance, and from any type of inquisition or intimidation of the faculty, as even the threat of such activity compromised academic freedom.
Moreover, when fear stalked the classroom, the stimulation of adventurous thinking would vanish, with professors ceasing to lead their students into inspired thinking, becoming conventional and innocuous, with discussion trite and colorless, and so worthless. Free inquiry would be stifled and discussion would end where it began. "Intellectual vigor and quickening of the youthful impulse to learn are inspired from the clash of viewpoints rather than the conforming of opinions. Perhaps a certain amount of heresy on a campus should be both normal and healthy."
He concludes that academic freedom was a matter of noblesse oblige, carrying inescapable responsibilities, with the teacher having the obligation to differentiate truth from falsity and to expose the fallacious, regardless of how firmly entrenched it might be. Nor did the teacher have the right to forsake truth and seek the comfort of silence through fear of offending, although refraining from substitution of offensiveness for diplomacy. He says that he was more fearful that teachers would not use fully their academic freedom than that they would abuse it, urging teachers to check carefully their research and make sure that they had their facts straight and that a truth discovered was in fact that before proclaiming any novel ideas.
He says that teachers too often were unthanked benefactors and that nearly 2,000 years earlier, "a kind and wise Man promised freedom to those who found and accepted the truth."
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