The Charlotte News
Friday, December 21, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Montgomery, Ala., that racial integration on municipal buses had begun smoothly in the city this date, bringing to a close the year-long boycott of the buses begun on December 5, 1955 in the wake of Rosa Parks having refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger after being directed by the bus driver, in accordance with a City ordinance and State statute, to do so. The laws had since been struck down by the Federal courts as violative of Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, in accordance with the principles enunciated in Brown v. Board of Education, the special three-judge panel of the District Court having so held the previous June in Browder v. Gayle and summarily affirmed recently by the Supreme Court, the formal end of the boycott having only awaited receipt in the mail of the final Supreme Court order, received the previous day. Black riders boarded the buses calmly, taking seats where they chose, with some taking seats at the front this date while white passengers in some cases sat behind them. There were no reports of violence, but four carloads of white men and others in a pickup truck had remained close to a downtown bus stop, with the occupants paying close attention to the transition to integration. On one occasion, a white man had alighted from a vehicle and converged on a street corner, and later, one of the cars had driven away at a signal from three heavy-set white men in another car which had paused at the bus stop and then drove on. One unidentified white man, watching black passengers board a bus, shouted to photographers, "Go ahead and get that black ______'s picture." The black passengers standing nearby let the racial epithet go unchallenged, having been coached by their leaders to refrain from violence and ignore such incidents. Black ministers, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and the Reverend W. J. Powell, rode the buses as an example to the people. Reverend King and Reverend Abernathy had commented, after stepping from a bus downtown: "That was a mighty good ride. It was a great ride." A young white girl, who had given her name to a Montgomery Advertiser reporter, stating that she was 18, had boarded a bus in a residential area and had sat alongside a black woman, despite there having been many empty seats toward the rear. The reporter quoted the girl as saying, "I figure if they stay in their place and leave me alone, I'll stay in my place and leave them alone." One of the first black passengers, as the buses left the downtown area at the start of the runs this date, had been a 64-year old man who was a pressroom employee of the Advertiser, saying that he had walked two and a half miles home from work each morning during the boycott. He had been the only passenger on that particular bus. Dr. King, the spokesman for the meetings of the Montgomery Improvement Association during the year, had said the previous night that everyone had to remain calm and provide no excuse for violence, indicating, "Violence must not come from any of us." About 2,500 persons had attended two meetings, at which riders were instructed how to conduct themselves. Dr. King said that no matter how much instruction they were given, ultimately they would have to instruct themselves and counseled them to pray for guidance. The Reverend S. S. Seay urged another meeting to be sure to ride the buses this date. The leaders were making sure that at least one minister or lay leader would be aboard each bus. A pamphlet suggested that riders should not deliberately sit alongside white passengers unless there were no other seats available and that in sitting down, they should address the passenger next to them, regardless of color, by asking courteously, "May I" or "Pardon me", Reverend Powell having added that that they should make it clear that they were not asking permission but just being polite. Reverend King said that "if we become victimized with violent intents, we will have walked in vain, and our 12 months of glorious dignity will be transformed into an eve of gloomy catastrophe."
In Vienna, it was reported that Vice-President Nixon had met with Austrian Chancellor Julius Rabb and most of the Austrian Cabinet for an hour and a half this date, discussing hard facts and figures of the problems created by the 140,000 Hungarian refugees. The Vice-President was seeking first-hand information to guide the President and Congress in dealing with the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution. Although Mr. Nixon and members of his small party had declined to discuss with the press the meeting with the Austrian leaders, authoritative sources had disclosed that the Austrian Government would have spent more than 7 million dollars caring for refugees by the beginning of the year, not including spending by provincial and local governments or private donations. The Austrians hoped that the U.S. would help pay the bill and take more of the refugees off their hands. Newly arrived refugees reported that they had experienced "great difficulties" in reaching the border area. Only 688 Hungarians had crossed into Austria during the night, compared with 1,000 or more nightly earlier during the week. They said that strict checks were being made on Hungarian trains and that most of those who had sought to leave the country had to hitchhike or walk to the border. The Hungarian Government of Soviet puppet Premier Janos Kadar had announced the previous day that entry to the frontier zone would be limited to persons with special identification cards. Mr. Nixon had hurried from the meeting with Government officials to a makeshift home for 424 refugees in a four-story schoolhouse, and after shaking hands all around and chatting with many of the refugees, visited with Interior Minister Oskar Helmer, recuperating from a minor operation in a hospital, watched U.S. immigration officers interview an Hungarian family preparing to go to the U.S., and visited the office of the International Committee for European Migration, where refugees were processed and assigned to planes and trains for transportation to the U.S. and other countries.
The President received an 800-pound fruitcake this date, baked in the form of a red brick fireplace with Christmas decorations, a gift from the Young Men's Republican Club of Niagara Falls, N.Y. A five-year old girl and her grandmother had baked the cake, and the young girl was accorded the privilege of taking the first piece, nodding affirmatively when asked whether she liked it. She would not talk except to say that she lived in St. Louis. The cake had taken three weeks to make, and was laced with two gallons of rum. It was destined to be passed along to Washington's home for the aged.
In Trenton, N.J., another hunt was underway for a church firebug after two additional blazes had broken out in churches the previous day, less than three hours after a man had been jailed on arson and murder charges in five earlier church fires. The priest of the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church had grappled with a man he had seen running from his burning church the previous night and had noted part of the license number of the vehicle in which he escaped. After the man had fled, the priest tried to put out the fire with his overcoat and suffered a wrist burn, treated at a hospital. The fire had burned drapes, a chair, two tables and a light fixture, with an estimate of the damage not having yet been fixed. Within 40 minutes, a fire had broken out in the altar boys' sacristy of Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church, with damage estimated unofficially by police at $750. Police said someone had poured gasoline from an antifreeze can on the furnishings and then ignited them at the latter location.
In Belleville, Ill., an Illinois Central passenger train had plunged 20 feet down a muddy embankment early this date when a rain-weakened roadbed had given way, resulting in two passengers being injured fatally and 18 others hospitalized. The train had been bound from St. Louis to New Orleans and had been crawling through a foggy, misty night toward Belleville, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, when the train had derailed.
In Raleigh, a special study committee had recommended separation of the State prison system from the State Highway Commission, to become effective the following July 1, the report having been released to Governor Luther Hodges during his press conference this date. In an accompanying statement, the Governor had provided his unqualified support for the recommendation, saying that it would avoid budgetary difficulties which would follow the change if made in any other time than at the beginning of the coming biennium for the 1957 legislative session. The Governor expressed optimism that the session would not be long, hoping that the General Assembly would complete its work by June. It would convene in February, rather than in the traditional January. The Governor predicted that the tax study report, the Highway Commission report and the prisons separation report would be approved in their basic forms by the Legislature. He said that seven reports on reorganization of State Government had been submitted and that three more were yet to come. Although the proposed changes in the State's tax structure would reduce revenue, it would not reduce the needs of State departments or a pay raise slated for State employees and teachers, according to the Governor.
Jim Scotton of The News reports of two little boys found early during the current morning asleep under a house, one being five and the other six, now receiving hot meals by way of police officers, plus clothes and a few toys, supplied by a local department store. The older boy had told the police that they had been sleeping under houses near their home since the prior Sunday when their father had told them to get out of the house where they lived in the Brooklyn section of the city. He said that their mother had also told them she did not want them anymore. Detectives this date picked up the father of the boys and charged him with neglect of minor children. He had denied that he had told the boys to leave, saying that the boys had stayed at home on Tuesday night and at his sister's home on Wednesday night, but that he did not know where they had gone the previous night. He told police that the boys sometimes stayed out at night but always came back the next day. He stated that he made between $50 and $56 every two weeks at his job with the City schools. The boys said that they had slept under a particular house the previous night because it was hilly and the water ran off when it was hilly, that they were not too cold as they had covers, consisting of a ragged quilt which the older boy said he had found on a clothesline the previous day. They said they had eaten the previous day, obtaining a loaf of bread from a store where the owner had allowed them to have two cans of beans on credit. They were dressed in dirty, torn clothing and the soles on one of the boy's shoes were only half attached. Detectives gave them milk and egg sandwiches for breakfast. One detective had taken the boys into a shower at police headquarters and scrubbed them down while other officers called their homes to collect clothes for them, as still others had sought to round up new shoes and a few toys. The local Sears store said that it would provide clothes for the boys. The father said that the mother and eight other children in the family, some of whom were married, were living in other places in Charlotte. When detectives asked the boys what they wanted for Christmas, the older boy had said that he would like a bike or maybe a little fire engine, with the younger boy having asked when was Christmas.
With the temperature having reached
64 the previous day, forecast to reach 70 this date and 72 the
following day, it still did not seem much like Christmas, but,
nevertheless, there were only three shopping days remaining until Christmas
On the editorial page, "Backing Off the Brink with Mr. Dulles" finds that Secretary of State Dulles was "sympathetically considering" a proposal to invite Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia to visit Washington.
It finds that not long earlier, to have suggested an invitation to a Communist leader would have equated to an endorsement of his ideology and earned the opprobrium of McCarthyites, but that recent events had suggested that piecemeal destruction of Communism offered the West a safer, more humane course than to try to do so in one fell swoop.
Hungarians had made a priceless sacrifice to ultimate freedom, but, unaided by the West, had found only agony for themselves. The Poles, whose attack on methods stopped short of challenging doctrine, had won some freedom from Kremlin domination. It finds at work the assurance by Mr. Dulles that the U.S. had no ambition to make of the satellites an arc of enmity to the Soviet Union, as the U.S. feared that another Hungary might involve the whole world in a war.
It finds that Marshal Tito, while remaining a Communist, had reduced the long-range threat of Communism as a design for world conquest, that in addition to having become the first satellite to break openly from Moscow, Yugoslavia had also sought to fasten the stigma of the Hungarian slaughter to Moscow, that the fact that Tito was attempting to save his own neck had not lessened the value of his contribution. Insofar as Tito's example might stimulate other satellites to seek national independence, the honors implied by an invitation to the U.S. would be helpful.
It finds that Secretary Dulles had found in the past that however much applause greeted preachments against Communism at home, nothing served diplomacy more than a policy in touch with the world, and that if he was applying that lesson now in considering the visit by Tito, "he has come a good piece from the brink of war."
"Untold Blessings Are Still, Alas, Untold" indicates that now that Mecklenburg County's legislative delegation was to learn about annexation, it was time for the five-man delegation, who represented the entire county and not just the city, to share their knowledge on the subject.
It had been suggested that the City Council figured that if little was said about the subject, suburbanites would not be moved to wrath, but it finds that the Council was surely not naïve enough to believe that the people were oblivious when it came to matters involving their pocketbooks and geography. The situation would be discussed and it would be better if the City took the initiative, organizing its considerable powers of persuasion and compiling an attractive package of facts and figures, taking the case directly to the people who would be most directly impacted. That was the strategy which City Council member Herbert Baxter had urged for some time, initially rejected, then gradually recognized as desirable and finally allowed to gather dust. It finds it still a sound idea and a fair one.
"Sucker-Bait: the Whammy Won't Bite" indicates that the Department of Motor Vehicles had produced a list of attempts by motorists to avoid whammies to detect their speed, such as strips of tinfoil attached to bumpers, slamming on the brakes as the motorist approached the cable, so as to break it, and fastening a full-scale cardboard cut-out to an automobile in an attempt to make troopers lose track of the chase while debating which way the car was going, all of the methods being faulty.
It concludes that there was only one way to cheat the whammy, and that was to obey posted speed limits.
"Pass the (Ugh) Grasshoppers, Please" finds that ever since Vicki the elephant had turned Charlotte overnight into an elephant jungle, it had been incurably blasé about the city's passion for the bizarre, and thus was not surprised to learn from News staff writer Dick Bayer that residents were buying and presumably eating canned grasshoppers and salted worms.
It suggests that Greensboro might smirk, Raleigh might rant and Winston-Salem might continue to chew its cud in ignorance, but Charlotte would be teaching the nation how to survive when the bread would run out and the meat would not stretch. "Malthus, you have been outwitted. The world is not going hungry; it's going native."
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Please, a Little Snow", tells of New England having hogged all of the snow on the Eastern Seaboard during the winter thus far, suggests that some of it should have been saved to enhance the Christmas joys of the people in North Carolina, where people loved to see at least one moderate snowfall each year.
"A gentle snow fall is a wondrous tonic for most of us. Snow, like love, can be too much of a good thing, and we are not applying for an inundating influx that makes the front door impervious to motion or so criminally assaults the trees and bends them over into hump-backed gnomes that you would think they are pilgrims bent in fearful prayer."
It hopes that the weatherman would
fling some snowflakes
Drew Pearson, taking a tour of the Far Northern bases, leaves his assistant Jack Anderson to write the column, indicating that counter-intelligence agents were investigating the possibility that Soviet submarines off the Florida coast might be throwing out of control U.S. guided missiles with electronic jamming equipment, one explanation for the misguided missiles which had been plaguing the scientists at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Many more test missiles had careened out of control than the public had been told, so many subsonic Snarks having plunged into the Atlantic that personnel at Patrick referred to the ocean around it as "Snark-infested waters." Scientists had traced the cause in most cases to mechanical failures, but other misfirings had been so mysterious that they suspected electronic counter-measures.
He indicates that Russia was known to have jamming equipment which could freeze the electronics of U.S. missiles, and he suggests that they would like to test their equipment against the latest missiles of the U.S., which might be going on off the coast of Florida. Air Force bombers, testing U.S. electronic counter-measures, had been able to blur radar scopes and jam communication facilities.
Biscuit baron George Henry Coppers, whose Nabisco had collected nearly $109,000 from the Government on an illegal cheese deal, was now advising the President on agricultural matters, including, presumably, cheese. Mr. Coppers was serving on an agricultural commission at the same time the Justice Department was suing Nabisco to get back the $109,000.
Congressman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, who had just returned from investigating the Hungarian refugee program, could not get the White House to complain to the President. Mr. Walter wanted to tell the President of the mess which the refugee program was in, but aides at the White House were waiting for Vice-President Nixon's report and did not want Mr. Walter to get in on the act, causing the latter, who was key to refugee legislation in the House, to be furious.
Walter Lippmann finds that all of the available evidence suggested a sharp conflict within the Kremlin, with the question being how far the conflict involved the regime itself. It was certain, however, that it involved the basis for Soviet foreign policy.
The revolts, first in Poland and then in Hungary, had demonstrated that in Eastern Europe, there might be satellite governments but not satellite nations, as well that the Soviet Union was presently faced with the fact that the East European armies had become grave liabilities—as many from the Hungarian Army had defected to join the revolt. The whole strategic position in Eastern Europe was thereby undermined. The lands lying between the line of the Iron Curtain on the west and the Soviet frontier in the east, that between the Baltic on the north and the Balkans on the south, had been looked on as vital parts of the Soviet military system, but were no longer so, having become danger spots within the system, a strategic upset which was bound to have profound effects on Soviet foreign policy.
The problem for the Kremlin was whether the military occupation of Eastern Europe could be relaxed and eventually terminated without a popular uprising not only against Stalinism and Communism, but against Russia as well. The Kremlin was faced with the question of whether Eastern Europe, which Stalin had incorporated into the Russian empire, could be prevented from becoming implacably hostile. There was, no doubt, evident in the competing factions within the Kremlin that in Eastern Europe, the nations were opposed to the Soviet presence and that the military occupation was inevitably to run into increasing popular resistance. There had been an old Stalinist faction which had been dominant in the Hungarian crisis, which undoubtedly was now arguing that the Soviet position in Europe would be lost without stern totalitarian use of military force.
It was also to be supposed that a younger and more moderate faction, arguing that Stalinism would not work, was also present, contending that the vital interests of Soviet security could now be best protected by making settlements on the principle of national freedom.
There were precedents for those settlements, as in Austria, which had become a neutralized national state, in Finland, which was a free country within the Soviet military system, in Yugoslavia, which was an independent national state while remaining Communist, and in Poland, which had achieved a large measure of national freedom but within its military alliance with the Soviet Union. The common principle in those cases was that the countries were all self-governing and that their internal affairs were not ruled by Moscow.
The moderate faction in the Kremlin, which could be assumed to exist, had to be aware that if the principle of national freedom was not extended to Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Rumania by Soviet consent and under Soviet auspices, the same tendencies which had produced revolt in Hungary would erupt in those countries and spread.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that it was in American interest and in that of the Western world that liberation of Eastern Europe be achieved not through revolts but by negotiated settlements, the view of the Administration and of the NATO powers.
He posits that there were two things which could be done by the U.S. which could assist the process, one being to keep making it clear that the U.S. hoped for peaceable negotiated settlements between the Soviets and the East European satellites, the other being to keep alive and in the field of open public discussion all over the world the idea of a general settlement in which NATO would enter, based on the reunification of Germany and the withdrawal of foreign troops throughout a belt of broad neutralized security extending from Scandinavia to the Balkans. He finds that it was not necessary at the current stage to take care of every detail, which could be done later when the time was more favorable for actual negotiations, but that what could be done was to open the paths of hope.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that he was feeling slightly depressed. "Vodka has removed the jubilant stigma from the fellow who used to bust loose over the Yule boozing, inflating his ego and cocking a figurative snook at the boss man, the bride of bosom, and any man, the bride of bosom, and any to a scented week of wassail."
He indicates that vodka had changed the office party—in ways which you will have to figure out for yourself in between his double-speak.
He says that in his boyhood, a person had taken up a dry martini made with honest juniper juice, thereby taking his future into his own hands at 100 proof, with sour mash bourbon whiskey soon separating the boys from the men. "There was a gentle effluvium attendant to Scotland's export pride that marked a man as a non-conformer, and corn liquor of the Orange County, N.C., recipe was not a plaything for children. The pig could tell."
He suggests that now the vodka people had retooled their distilleries for some of the old diehards and injected a little smell and a suspicion of taste into their strong waters, because at present, it only tasted like water, and not very strong, at that.
A letter writer from Waupaca, Wisc., urges that during the Christmas season, people give thanks to the Creator for the unlimited blessings bestowed on the Americas, and give thanks for being born in the free world and having many blessings in America. He urges thanking the Creator most for the wonderful immigration laws and enlightened leaders who thought them up, and were constantly amending them to keep out immigrants, who were "exactly similar to the ones who peopled this country in the early days of our founding, adventuresome pioneer spirits fleeing from tyranny in their own lands." He goes on in that sardonic vein, concluding: "Think of the horrible shock to our Presleyan culture that we are being spared by keeping out all those foreigners with their outdated folk-music, art-forms, literature, and other simple customs anchored in antiquity! Let our leaders and immigration laws be praised."
Well, now, look a-here. There's no call to blame the whole cultural deficit on Elvis, and here at Christmas. We have acquired, a year in advance, one of his Christmas recordings to come. Give a listen
A letter from the chairman of the Mecklenburg chapter of the American Red Cross tells of the Red Cross Hungarian Relief Fund campaign quota for the county, $8,258, having been reached, and expresses gratitude to the newspaper for bringing before the public the humanitarian aspect of the need for the funds to relieve the hardship and suffering in Hungary and Austria. It also expresses appreciation to the many people who had contributed generously to the campaign.
A letter from the general chairman of the Shrine Bowl, the annual high school all-star football game played in Charlotte, expresses his appreciation for the service rendered by the newspaper to the bowl organization in the promotion of the 20th annual event.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.