The Charlotte News
Monday, October 15, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the Israeli sector of Jerusalem that Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, 70, had told the Israeli Parliament this date that they would continue to demand of the U.S. Government defensive arms in the air, on land and at sea, to deter the enemy. In a major policy speech, he said also that Israel had received assurances from several governments that its right of navigation through the Suez Canal "would be safeguarded by the laying down of a regime of free navigation for all the peoples." He said that the U.S., to whom Israel owed its thanks for much political and financial assistance from the day of the founding of the state, recognized in principle the need to rectify the arms balance between Israel and the Arab countries, and had encouraged their allies to supply Israel with defensive arms. He said that Israel, however, could not be content with that encouragement alone and would continue to demand of the U.S. Government the arms to deter the enemy, while at the same time, did not belittle the value of the encouragement, which had rendered substantial results. He further said that in the face of the threat of Egyptian arms from the Soviet bloc, Israel had made superhuman efforts to acquire arms and keep the peace, had succeeded thus far in the current year in avoiding the tragedy of war and would be devoted to strengthening the defense forces, concluding that they had not yet received all the arms they needed.
Adlai Stevenson advanced Vice-President Nixon higher on his list of targets this date, as the 1956 presidential campaign entered the final critical three weeks. A top campaign strategist had told reporters that the Democrats had found sufficient public feeling against Mr. Nixon to make him a "prime issue". Mr. Stevenson would strike out again this night, in a nationwide broadcast over ABC radio and television from Chicago at 9:30, centered on the issue of a proposal that ways be found to halt the testing of hydrogen bombs. Meanwhile, he sought to dramatize the following day's national solicitation of small contributions for the Democratic campaign by agreeing to ring the first doorbell himself this date on a visit to a neighboring home in Libertyville, Ill., where he had his farm. Aides of the candidate said that he would outline this night in his speech the reasoning behind his insistence that the country's best hope for peace lay in finding ways to put a stop to hydrogen bomb testing and persuade Russia to do likewise. The previous day, he received support from two sources for his suggestion that the U.S. take the lead in framing an international agreement for halting the tests.
The President would leave the following day on a trip to the West Coast, taking the lead during the week in stepping up the tempo of the Republican campaign. For the first time since beginning his re-election campaign, he had political speeches scheduled, either recorded or live on the stump, for five days in succession. The quickened campaign pace started this night, with two filmed five-minute talks to be presented on nationwide television, the first to be broadcast by NBC at 9:25 and the second by ABC at 10:25. The following night, he would be on a nationwide television broadcast again, also for five minutes, via CBS.
Meanwhile, Vice-President Nixon had toured Ohio this date, with speeches at Dayton, Toledo, Defiance, Warren and Youngstown. After recovering from a sore throat, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Estes Kefauver had gone to Republican Vermont, charging in Burlington that Mr. Nixon was "trying to get into the White House on false promises, a false front and a false face." He also gave talks at Essex Junction and Winooski, after which he flew to New York City for five speeches in Queens and Nassau County.
In West Babylon, N.Y., police planned to count this date the hundreds of crumpled bills and tarnished coins which they had found scattered through a ramshackle house of a retired cabdriver and his recluse sister, indicating that patrolmen had stumbled on the treasure horde Saturday after the 58-year old retired cabdriver had telephoned and said that two men had robbed him of $12,000 at his home. When police had arrived, they found money littered through the nine-room Long Island house like so much trash, with each room also stuffed with old newspapers, rags, boxes and bottles. Rats had nibbled on some of the bills lying on the floor and other bills were worn thin from passing feet. Two thugs, who had posed as deliverymen, had talked the man into letting them into his house, where they hit him over the head and dug out an estimated $12,000 from under a mattress, stuffing the cash in a feed bag and fleeing the scene. The first estimates were that they had missed as much as $50,000 in the house, but later, the police chief said that he could not determine how much there actually was. The man's sister, 64, said that he maintained the large amount of money in the house because of Hitler, her brother having thought that the dictator would take over the whole world and that if he kept his money in the house, Hitler would not look for it there. Neighbors had been startled to learn that the shabby house was crammed with riches, some saying that they had lived in the area for 30 years and had never seen the sister. She said it was not true, that she had gone out ten years earlier, that she stayed in because of her feet which always hurt her.
In Raleigh, it was reported that seven convicts had escaped from the Currituck County Prison Camp the previous night about 24 hours after 16 prisoners had pulled a daring mass escape from the Nash County Prison Camp, with all 23 of the escapees having been white felons. Four of the Nash camp escapees had been captured early this date in Seat Pleasant, Md., chased down in a stolen car after a burglar alarm had frightened them away from an automobile agency. Under questioning by Maryland police, they had admitted the Saturday escape. The superintendent of the Nash camp had told the newspaper this date that there had been no trace yet of the other 12 escapees, who had conducted the largest mass escape from a North Carolina prison camp in recent years. They had sawn through bars of a toilet window to effect the escape, resulting in two guards being fired by the Prisons director, William Bailey, for "pure neglect". The Currituck escapees had tediously dug a tunnel from their cellblock to a point outside the prison camp building, apparently breaking through the concrete floor of their cellblock with a screwdriver and part of an ax, hiding the dirt in their mattress covers and pillowcases. Mr. Bailey said that a guard had been supposed to check inside the cellblock and had not done so because if he had, he would have found the tunnel. That guard also had been discharged.
In Miami, Fla., 13 years of separation had ended in an incoherent embrace at dawn this date between a mother and her 18-year old son. The mother had sorrowfully placed her son up for adoption at the age of five, when her marriage had broken up and she was unable to keep him. He had alighted from a bus this date and dashed into her waiting arms, and they embraced, heedless of the gathered photographers snapping their picture, while other passengers stared. Later, her son presented her with a cedar box for her jewelry and she placed on his finger a ring containing her picture, which she said she had made a long time earlier, saving it until she saw him again. The ring would fit only on his little finger. They planned to spend the ensuing few days getting acquainted, and the son said that he wanted to try working, but that his mother was the boss. He said that he had looked for two years for his mother and that the big break had come a few weeks earlier when he received the list of her relatives from his foster parents. He had finally asked a New Jersey newspaper for help in locating her, and the search had managed to find her through the Associated Press, which located her through the Florida driver's license bureau.
Also in Miami, the Weather Bureau reported that a storm centered 120 miles south of the city had drifted slowly northward this date while it was being watched closely for signs of growth into a hurricane, though at present lacked most of the characteristics of a tropical storm, while partly being the cause of 60 mph winds which had buffeted south Florida the previous day.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that concern for schoolchildren who had to cross the North 29 Bypass had moved the County Board of Commissioners this date to insist on help from the State Highway and Public Works Commission, following a father having said that it would be murder for a child to cross the bypass. The County School superintendent, J. W. Wilson, who had toured the bypass and cloverleaf site the previous day, opined that it looked to him like a child did not have much of a chance getting across the busy thoroughfare. He found the safety problem the most serious he had seen and warned that it would not be the last in the county. Another father stated that he had a seven-year old boy in a cast from having been hit by a car at the location, despite his son having been careful, as had been the motorist who had hit him on September 16. The previous week, a Federal engineer from Raleigh had looked over the bypass location and cloverleaf site and recommended a crossover.
Emery Wister of The News reports that the Highway 29 Bypass presently being constructed around the city would be extended to tie in with an interstate highway project in South Carolina, with plans being made to extend the bypass around Gastonia and on to South Carolina.
On the editorial page, "Give Early! Good Neighbors Don't Wait" urges providing contributions to the United Appeal, the united annual charity fund drive for the community. It relates of one older gentleman who had said that he knew that the drive did not start for quite some time yet, but that a good neighbor did not have to wait to be asked, and so provided a dollar bill, turned around and walked slowly out of the newsroom. Some ten days later, when the United Appeal had begun collecting donations for the new year, the newspaper contributed the money to the fund, while wondering if the old gentleman had been able to share that modest amount. But he had taught them in an instant more about the meaning of neighborliness and the essential oneness of the community than having read it in all of the philosophy books on the library shelves, that good neighbors did not wait to be asked.
It indicates that the current year's donations would be divided among 35 separate agencies which worked for the community, with a total goal of $990,493, just enough to meet their minimum needs. The previous year, 58,533 people had contributed and it hopes that even more would do so in the current year. It urges not to wait to be begged for a contribution.
"This Community's Collective Failure" finds that the community had always reached the verge of saving many lives through a traffic safety campaign, but that the promised support for it faded away and the effort eventually failed, amounting to a collective failure of the community. It indicates that a few people could not do the job, and that a few committees were futile, that the community had to will that traffic accidents be reduced, as its will determined the attitude of judges, police, educators and citizen volunteers who dealt with the problem.
The organizers of the current campaign had challenged the community to spend $25,000 annually on a safety program with a paid director to reduce the traffic toll, which had cost the previous year 2.16 million dollars in financial loss in the city, and in 1956, had included 37 deaths in the city and county.
It indicates that the traffic menace was not unbeatable, that the ways and means to do it were known and had been presented to the community in the form of a blueprint by the National Safety Council, that what was lacking was the will to put those ways and means to work. It finds that the new Citizens Traffic Safety Association of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County offered itself as an instrument for doing the job, but that its success or failure depended on whether individual citizens were willing to underwrite the effort with their interest, support and encouragement. It urges speaking at present or continuing to live in jeopardy.
"Jobs for Kids & Dogs, Saws & Cats" celebrates autumn in a way you may read for yourself. Sample: "Laugh, child! Run, and leap and fall. Roll in leaves. Skip the rope. Throw the ball. Shiver in the wind, but laugh and be heard laughing. And let there be autumn."
It does not, however, warn to stay out of the leaves piled in the street or immediately adjacent to it, lest the child add to the traffic toll.
Simeon Stylites, writing in the Christian Century, in a piece titled, "The Bores and the Bored", tells of having six months earlier signed up for a cruise of a few months duration on a swanky cruise ship, with a large number of passengers right out of the Social Register and Dun & Bradstreet, devotees of pleasure, determined to have a good time if it killed them. Every evening, there had been the sound of revelry by night, while in the daytime, there was a continuous obligato made by the clinking of glassware, prompting the writer to recall the statement of Lord Byron: "Society is now one polish'd horde,/ Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored." He observes that the only difference was that on this cruise, the two tribes were the same.
He made the discovery that the people whose only aim was pleasure paid a terrible price for it, by becoming "the most tiresome bores on earth".
He had wandered to the quarters of the crew, however, and found it quite different, full of real people who did not have to bluff or put on either a front or a side, spent all of his time with them, ate with them and had a "real cruise in human nature. It was of course an old discovery—that people who work for a living are a lot better company than the poor drudges who have to spend their time trying to run away from themselves. Rudyard Kipling made the same discovery on his world cruise in 1881. He records that he spent most of his time 'with the crew in pajamas, sitting abaft the funnel, swapping lies.'"
Drew Pearson indicates that the biggest political bonanza of the presidential campaign had been provided to former Congressman Jacob Javits of New York, presently running for the Senate, after he had come to Washington to speed up a 75 million dollar loan to Israel. Mr. Javits, presently the Republican Attorney General of New York, was running for the seat of retiring incumbent Senator Herbert Lehman. One day after Mayor Robert Wagner of New York, his opponent in the Senate race, had urged that arms be provided free to Israel, Mr. Javits had gone to Washington where he met with the President and urged him to speak in New York, then met with Secretary of State Dulles, then went to the State Department press room, corralled apathetic reporters who had not paid much attention to his conference with the Secretary and told them that he had urged Mr. Dulles to grant the 75 million dollar loan to Israel. The loan had actually been in the works for some time, the Government of Israel having applied to the Export-Import Bank for the loan, with every expectation that it would be approved, as irrigation in Israel was a sound and important investment. But thanks to the frantic appeal of Mr. Javits and the Republican desire to win the Senate seat for which he was running, the loan not only was being announced earlier but was being announced by Secretary Dulles, who had little to do with the Export-Import Bank. It had initially been proposed that the President would announce the loan to Israel when he went to New York to speak on behalf of Mr. Javits, but that had been ruled out as too political. Mr. Dulles had also aroused much bitterness among Jews, and so it was considered expedient to let him make the announcement.
Mr. Javits had surprised New York voters by defeating FDR, Jr., in the race for attorney general in 1954 despite the fact that Averell Harriman and the Democrats had carried other state offices. Mr. Javits had received a large Jewish vote, even though the Roosevelt family had carried almost all of the Jewish vote in the past.
Louis Bean, the statistician who had predicted so many elections, had applied cold statistics to the President's health issue and come up with the sober conclusion that the President had only one chance in four of surviving a second term, his analysis having been based on a Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. study conducted ten years earlier regarding whether the presidency shortened the lifespan of the occupant of the office, finding that despite a general increase in life expectancy, Presidents had been dying at an earlier age than previously. The study reported that the Presidents who had taken office prior to 1850 had outlived their life expectancy by an average of 2.9 years, while Presidents who had served between 1850 and 1900 had fallen short of their life expectancy at inauguration by an average of 2.9 years. It found that the Presidents who had held office thus far in the 20th Century had established an even poorer record, with their life expectancy at inauguration having been, on average, eight years less than their general life expectancy at the time they took office.
Mr. Bean, in expanding the Metropolitan study, had concluded that in view of the downward trend, the statistical equivalent of a President at age 66 would be about 70 in the time of Abraham Lincoln and about 85 in the time of George Washington. It provided a basis for noting how many Presidents attained the equivalent of age 66 and how long they lived beyond it. There had been 12 who fell within the upper age bracket, and only three of those 12, John Adams, James Buchanan and William Howard Taft, had lived more than four years beyond the equivalent of 66, while the other nine had died within one to three years later. He thus concluded that the statistical answer to the question of the chances of the President surviving the ensuing four years was only one in four.
Walter Lippmann tells of there having been no serious discussion yet regarding foreign policy between the President and Adlai Stevenson. He indicates that insofar as there was an issue between the two men, it centered around the fact that the President's contribution to the making of peace had been unique and indispensable but very limited, his role having been that of a liquidator of old and sterile conflicts, as in Korea, Formosa and Indochina, rather than a shaper and builder of what was to come. He had played a great part in the process, not yet complete, of bringing to an end the Stalinist phase of the cold war, but had been so lacking in ideas on the next phase of the process that the initiative had been taken over, without serious challenge from the President, by the Soviet Union.
The previous Tuesday at Pittsburgh, the President had said that "the full turning … on the road toward peace … seemed to come three years ago" when the Korean Armistice had been made. Mr. Lippmann indicates that the President did not cause that turn, however, but rather had made acceptable to the American people the concessions and compromises which the turn had involved, including the partition of Korea in July, 1953 and the partition of Indochina a year later by the peace concluded between the French and the Communists, plus the containment and confinement and the de facto neutralization of Nationalist China in Formosa. It involved the reversal of the central principle of the Republican platform on which the President had run in 1952, the replacement of that policy of liberation of the satellites by a policy of acceptance of the status quo.
The turning of the road, he posits, which had required the compromises, had coincided with the advent of the Eisenhower Administration and the death of Joseph Stalin in March, 1953. Both events had made it easier for the turning to take place, but the causes of the turning lay much deeper than the individuals, and, he suggests, no one understood them fully. He finds it the result of the fact that the military incidents of the cold war had all ended in stalemates which could be broken only by the type of big war that no one dared to fight, for the risk of atomic annihilation. It was true not only of Korea, Formosa and Indochina, but also of the Greek civil war of 1946 and the Berlin blockade of 1948-49.
He finds that the President's great contribution, which had brought him fame as a peace-maker, had been to induce the American people to accept the unpalatable consequences of those stalemates. The U.S. had not recognized the Communist Government in China and was still able to prevent it from acquiring the Chinese seat in the U.N., but was negotiating with Communist China with a view toward reaching some kind of formal truce, while the U.S. no longer challenged its existence.
Such policy was not limited to the Far East. In the Middle East, both regarding Palestine and the Suez Canal crisis, the determining element in preserving the peace had been the President's acceptance of the Soviet Union as a great power in that region.
Mr. Lippmann finds that the President had been acting correctly, doing what was necessary, and that no one else other than a celebrated general and Republican of unimpeachable conservatism, could have kept the country united while doing it. But he cautions against self-deception by the country, that the process of disengagement and withdrawal from commitments and positions which had become untenable was bringing into existence a world order far different from and much less favorable than the one previously known. The Western Alliance, of which the U.S. was the core, now had competitors and adversaries in every corner of the world. That which disturbed Mr. Lippmann about the prospect of another term for the President was that he had done so little to prepare the Government and the country for the kind of competition it now faced. Virtually all of the Eisenhower policies had been handed down from FDR, President Truman and the Stalinist phase of the cold war. Regarding the paramount question of the era, working out a new relationship between the Atlantic powers and the nations of Asia and Africa, there was no Eisenhower policy, not even an intimation of the kind of invention and constructiveness which produced the U.N., the Marshall Plan and NATO.
Doris Fleeson, in San Francisco, indicates that one thing missing from the current campaign was a vocal outcry from labor, that nearly full employment and the internal problems attached to the merger of the AFL and CIO were the apparent reasons for it. The unions, especially in states where their friends in the Senate were up for re-election, were engaged in getting out the vote and bearing down in their publications and meetings on the need to register. The actual physical effort to get out the vote had been made the subject of criticism in previous years and had been ineffective, and so the emphasis was now on registration.
Very little was being said about the Taft-Hartley Act, though union heads still believed that some of its provisions would be deadly to organized labor during anything less than widespread prosperity. They had settled for inaction on it in Congress and they were settling for inaction in the campaign.
Labor leaders had discovered in 1952 that the President's promise to end the Korean War had drawn wives of union members into the Eisenhower camp in large numbers, but that appeal now appeared to have run its course and their present view was that while the President remained more popular among women and labor groups than among men, labor's vote would nevertheless be substantially Democratic everywhere in 1956.
Labor spokesmen were pressing the issues of Administration opposition to raising the minimum wage to 90 cents, approved by the Democratic Congress, the Administration's opposition to the expanded Social Security bill, approved by Congress, and the President's nominees to the NLRB, whom labor branded as being unfriendly.
Representatives of organized labor had accompanied both Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver on their campaign travels, but were publicly unobtrusive, with one such representative indicating that in prior campaigns, they had talked too much and it had not helped the unions or their candidates.
She indicates that in some states, the concentration of labor's effort was clearly apparent, helping, for instance, Senators Warren Magnuson in Washington and Wayne Morse in Oregon. Richard Stengle, who was running in opposition to incumbent Senator Everett Dirksen in Illinois, found the unions more zealous thus far than the Cook County Democratic machine around Chicago.
Labor would count heavily also in distressed areas, receiving some Federal aid but nothing substantial. In the closing days of Congress, the Administration had missed the boat when it failed to push in the House helpful legislation which Democrats had managed to get passed in the Senate. Mr. Stevenson had hit on that blunder in his Pennsylvania tour recently and invariably received good applause for it.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., comments on the IQ quiz appearing in the newspaper on October 8, in which there had been a question from the Bible as to why there were no descendants of Cain and Japheth left on earth, with the provided answer having been that they had been wiped out by the flood. This writer says that there was no one who knew whether Noah's wife or the wives of his three sons were descendants of Cain, that the Bible provided a list of Cain's descendants, and the time had been approximately 1,600 years from Cain to Noah, which had provided plenty of time for many generations and much intermarriage. Japheth had been one of Noah's sons, safe in the Ark during the flood, and, according to the Bible, the earth following the flood was populated by Noah's three sons, including Shem and Ham.
The other answers are: 1. Neither. The feet. 2. Neither. The Germans. 3. All three. 5. No. It is related to Saccharib, who was one of the little known Biblical scholars of the 3rd Century, who studied methods of artificial sweetening of tea.
A letter writer expresses appreciation for Charles Kuralt's "People" column of October 11, indicates that she was a teacher of ten and twelve-year old girls in the junior department of the Statesville Avenue Baptist Church and that they had provided several lessons on how the junior boys and girls could make the world a better place in which to live, finds Mr. Kuralt's piece a lesson in itself. She says she felt very small after reading the article because she had been that businessman or housewife or lady with the fur many times, too busy and unconcerned to notice the less fortunate. She hopes that others had the same feeling she did and would do something about it, says that she would do so and would be richer for it.
That is a nice sentiment, but we hope the man in the alley takes heed of local tv fare for the week to come and guards against the possibility that someone, with other than eleemosynary intent in mind, might get an idea to emulate this program
Along the same lines, incidentally, but with a somewhat different tick to it, is this date's column by Mr. Kuralt.
A letter writer from Winston-Salem responds to a recent crack of another letter writer regarding Vice-President Nixon, wonders why people did not admire "this fine American. Next to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, he is the greatest living American. He should be running for president."
Presumably, he referred to this letter of October 1.
Mr. Kuralt, by the way, had also taken a look at the campaigns, from a local perspective, on October 8 and 9, respectively.
A letter writer from Zirconia indicates that a previous letter writer had used about a foot of space in the newspaper to try to prove that discrimination was an all-American virtue. "Don't we all know anyone is free to 'just hate niggers' or to hate Liberace or Elvis or to state so? All this is fine as long as it remains on a personal basis but the law must be equal for all."
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