The Charlotte News
Monday, December 24, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Vatican City that Pope Pius XII had proclaimed the morality of defensive war and called on the world to give the U.N. "the right and power" to prevent aggression. In some of the strongest words of his 18-year reign, he condemned Communism, albeit not by name, in his annual Christmas message, for trying "to impose on all peoples, in one way or another, a special and intolerable way of life." The message, addressed to the College of Cardinals, had been carried by radio to hundreds of millions of people in countries around the world. The Pope made it clear that, in the eyes of the Church, the freedom fighters of Hungary had the moral right to resist Russian force with force. He said: "It is clear that in the present circumstances there can be verified in a nation the situation wherein, every effort to avoid war being expended in vain, war—for effective self-defense and with the hope of a favorable outcome against unjust attack—could not be considered unlawful." He further said that "only the unanimous and courageous behavior of all who love the truth and the good can preserve peace, and will preserve it." He said that nations, such as Hungary, which refused to admit U.N. observers, ought be refused membership in the organization. He said that the U.N. should have "the right and power of forestalling all military intervention of one state in another … and also the right and power of assuming by means of sufficient police force, the safeguarding of order in the state which is threatened… Only in the ambit of an institution like the United Nations can promises of nations to reduce armament, especially to abandon production and use of certain arms, be mutually exchanged under the strict obligation of international law." For the second successive year, the Pope had endorsed President Eisenhower's "open skies" disarmament plan, which provided for mutual aerial inspection to assure observance of disarmament pledges, and he also backed the West's demands for disarmament with ironclad controls.
In Port Said, Egypt, it was reported that the question of using British and French salvage crews to clear the Suez Canal had again this date delayed work on the clearing, as a U.N. salvage fleet, including British and French ships, was ready to go to work but for Egypt not providing its permission. It was thought that salvage operations could be started south of Port Said as soon as British and French troops had completed their withdrawal from Egypt, the last of those soldiers having left the prior Saturday. Some British and French ships remained behind as part of the U.N. salvage fleet, with their crews wearing civilian clothes and the blue and white U.N. flag flying in place of their national flags, at the insistence of Egypt. But the fleet had not moved from Port Said harbor, as an Egyptian Suez Canal authority official had told newsmen that there was a problem remaining in the use of British and French salvage crews, that U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was expected to come to Cairo to talk over the use of the British and French vessels. There was, however, no such announcement from U.N. headquarters. The U.S. general in charge of the U.N. clearance operation, Lt. General Raymond Wheeler, said that the situation regarding use of the ships was "in a very critical state at the moment." He said that he hoped to move some salvage equipment into the canal this date. The canal remained blocked by sunken ships and bridges destroyed during the invasion of Israeli, British and French forces in the wake of the seizure of the canal by Egypt on July 26 and the subsequent failures to resolve diplomatically the disputed passage of ships through the canal to transport oil, crucial to the survival of Britain and Western Europe.
Highway traffic accidents across the
nation had accounted for 411 deaths thus far through early this date
and the total deaths in all accidents had reached 491, with 26
persons killed in fires and 45 in miscellaneous accidents, as about
44 hours remained in the four-day, 102-hour holiday weekend. The
National Safety Council reported early this date that unless drivers
used greater caution during the remainder of the holiday period, the
forecast which the Council had made, that a record 660 would be
killed in highway accidents, would be exceeded. The previous year's
three-day Christmas holiday weekend held the present traffic death
record, at 609, with 782 having been killed in all accidents, 23 less
than the all-time holiday record during the four-day Independence Day
weekend of 1955. The Christmas record toll was 789 during the
four-day holiday weekend of 1951. A mixture of snow, fog, freezing
drizzle and rain made driving conditions hazardous on Saturday and
Sunday over much of the Eastern portion of the nation, with safety
experts citing the poor weather and drivers who drank alcoholic
drinks
In one instance, in a head-on collision near Watertown, S.D., on Saturday night, a father and mother and their three young children had been killed, and two others injured, in a crash which hurled the two automobiles into ditches on opposite sides of the highway. In another accident the previous day, four persons had been killed and burned while trying to land a small plane at an unlighted airport at Del Norte, Colo., with police having indicated that the aircraft apparently had overshot the runway, had attempted to gain altitude and then crashed.
At least 30 persons had died by violent accidents in North Carolina thus far during the holiday period, the worst accident having been a collision of two cars which killed four persons at an intersection of U.S. 29 near Concord, occurring during a rain which made the roads slick and reduced visibility. Traffic deaths for the year in the state neared the Highway Patrol's predicted 1,100, with the toll the previous year having been 1,165.
In Dover, Tenn., Highway Patrolmen had used helicopters, boats, patrol cars and roadblocks on Sunday to round up six escapees from a Texas jail, who had robbed a motel and wounded a State trooper in Dover. The six men had slugged a jailer in escaping from their cells in Georgetown, Tex., the prior Friday and were accused of a string of offenses in effecting their escape toward New York, including locking up the Texas jailer and his wife, looting the jail of cash and firearms, breaking into an apartment to obtain a woman's automobile key at gunpoint and taking her car for their escape, robbing a Texas couple of cash and their car and leaving them locked in a closet of their home, robbing a motel near Dover at midnight on Saturday and leaving two men and a woman bound and gagged, taking a Tennessee patrol car at gunpoint, wrecking it and shooting the patrolman, and stealing and abandoning three other cars. After they were caught, the six men were arraigned before a magistrate in Dover and bound over to the grand jury on charges of armed robbery and attempted murder.
Flash fires which swept through a Minneapolis hospital and a Meridian, Conn., apartment house had left 11 persons dead and at least eight persons critically injured this date, the hospital fire having apparently been caused by a Christmas tree chain of lights which had short-circuited. An infant boy rescued from an incubator had died a few hours later, but from a congenital heart condition, not the fire. Doctors fought to save the lives of seven patients listed in critical condition.
In Gastonia, N.C., a 37-year old man had told his three-year-old son to go ahead and pull the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun which sat on the man's lap along with his son, saying that the gun was not loaded. The man's wife, who was expecting a fourth child, told the sheriff that she had warned her son not to touch the trigger, but the boy had done so, and now her husband was dead.
The winds of an approaching cold front had swept the remnants of a weekend rainstorm from the Charlotte area this date, after 2.44 inches had fallen in the city for almost 48 hours in succession. The previous day, 1.08 inches fell in Charlotte on top of .80 of an inch on Saturday, with precipitation after midnight the previous night having totaled .56 of an inch. The rain had raised the month's precipitation total to 3.14 inches, above normal for the first time since December 1. Yearly precipitation was about 5.5 inches below normal. The Weather Bureau, predicting several days of sunshine hereafter, said that the temperature would drop to about 36 in the morning, rising to about 60 in the afternoon, with the low this date being 53 against a high of 66 for the afternoon, with skies remaining cloudy most of the day.
Well, it may be looking a little
more like Christmas in Charlotte from the standpoint of temperature,
but still no snow, only wet and soggy weather, encompassed by clouds.
Sounds pretty dismal
In Baltimore, the Navy was offering for sale the USS Pike, a 21-year old submarine, with bids having to be received or postmarked before January 8, with the successful bidder required to remove the submarine from the Naval Reserve training center within 15 days after the sale and having to guarantee to have it scrapped within a year.
Also in Baltimore, a woman, while shopping in a local variety store, had her purse snatched along with the $50 inside. She reported the loss to police and had gone home with nothing for her two children's Christmas. But a few hours later, a policeman stopped at their home and pulled from his police wagon a large box splitting at the seams with a load of Christmas goodies.
In Boston, the Veterans Administration said that nearly 8,500 persons would spend Christmas in a dozen New England VA hospitals, but that none would be forgotten, as the chaplains would hold special Protestant services and Catholic masses would be celebrated at all of the hospitals. All patients would have turkey dinners, various types of entertainment and family visits.
In Bethlehem, Pa., a 20-year old Hungarian-born G.I. was flying back to the U.S. this date on a month-long "morale" furlough from Korea for a reunion with his parents, Hungarian refugees for only 11 days. It would be the first time the private had seen his mother and father since he had come to the U.S. seven years earlier. His parents and an adopted daughter had arrived at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey on December 13 and now were living in a Bethlehem apartment arranged for them by the woman's aunt.
In Detroit, four youths had stolen a loaded beer truck while the driver sipped coffee in a restaurant. In another incident, a thief took 20 gaily wrapped presents from under the tree at the home of a man, but did not touch three bottles of gift whiskey.
In San Francisco, the chief electrician on the freighter Japan Transport had taken a bearing on the gangway and charged full steam ahead, but wound up in San Francisco Bay, a longshoreman having tossed him a line and a policeman having commented that the man came up "old, smiling and sober."
In Kuna, Idaho, some children, all in their early school years, had gotten out of line while putting on a Christmas pageant in church during the week as four of the 13 of them, each of whom was supposed to walk across the stage carrying a letter which would spell out "Bethlehem Star", had gotten reversed, such that the letters spelled out "Bethlehem Rats".
In Santa Cruz, Calif., it was reported that someone had broken into the house of Santa Claus at an amusement park and stolen his red suit and the candy and toys he was planning to distribute to girls and boys the previous day at a Christmas program. The 750 youngsters had nevertheless received their presentation after a costume shop owner had provided a new Santa suit and a pet shop had produced a menagerie of live animals for display. What about the gifts?
In Colorado Springs, Colo., it was reported that the Continental Air Defense command had provided official word that Santa Claus was on his way, having begun tracking him on radar early during the morning.
On the editorial page, "It's Christmas: No Question about It" begins with a quote from Margaret Fishback: "Christmas cards confuse me so—/ Why the kittens? Why the doe?"
It says it does not know and might ask also why the pagan mistletoe and why had Massachusetts once nixed a celebration of the holiday, as well why did it not snow on the Carolinas during Christmas and why a banker did not give a dollar to a man out of luck and collateral. It further wonders why the green pine was painted white and pink and why children became confused and perceived the ruse, after seeing Santa on CBS.
It goes on, rhyming the while, concluding: "There really isn't any question about Christmas. It comes, as long as man can hyphenate his hates and fears, and let it in to work its charm."
"A Tar Heel Vote for 'Old Bullion'" tells of the Senate having appointed a committee, which included Senator John F. Kennedy, to determine the five greatest Senators in U.S. history and to hang their portraits in the Senate chamber in the Capitol.
It urges that there were saner ways to cover a blank piece of plaster, suggesting a "small, squirming mural of the Mississippi, several lame ducks stuffed and mounted, a handsomely lettered, self-composed testimonial to the Senate's enduring wisdom, or even a yard or two of wool well-used in recent elections."
It wants the committee to reach a compromise by drawing lots to choose one Senator each from the five regions, North, South, East, West and Texas, but finds that the committee would likely pursue the task as assigned. Missourians had already heard that Daniel Webster was a leading candidate, recalling that he had taken a retainer from the United States Bank while serving in the Senate. The Missourians favored native son Thomas Hart Benton, who had nicked Andrew Jackson in one duel and killed Charles Lucas in another. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recalled that General Jackson had forgiven Mr. Benton, but an earlier newspaper, the Missouri Register, had once called the latter "the greatest egotist in Christendom." He had once told the publishers of one of his books to determine the number of copies to be printed by ascertaining "from the last census how many families there are in the United States, sir."
It indicates that if "Old Bullion", as he was known, had a giant ego, his courage was no less monumental, with his duel with Mr. Lucas having been at 9 feet. He had once offered to help a lobbyist get a ship subsidy if "when the vessels are finished they will be used to take all such damned rascals as you, sir, out of the country." He had told a younger Senator who had called him quarrelsome: "I never quarrel, sir. But sometimes I fight, sir; and whenever I fight, sir, a funeral follows, sir."
It says that it was prepared to support the move of the Post-Dispatch to gain "Old Bullion" a spot on the Senate's walls, provided Missouri would accept the burden of his ego and give North Carolina, which had educated Mr. Benton at Chapel Hill, credit for his courage and massive intellect. "That, Post-Dispatch, sir, is a firm offer, sir."
"Atomic Censorship Has Its Limits" indicates that the unreasonable and unrealistic secrecy surrounding data regarding peaceful uses of nuclear energy was beginning to lift slightly, with an announcement by Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Admiral Lewis Strauss, that a new classification guide by the U.S., the U.K. and Canada had been formulated, resulting in the classification of some 30,000 documents. The guide, itself, would remain secret on the ground that publication of it would reveal the categories of information which were to remain classified.
It hopes that a more intelligent censorship program was being developed, finding that blanket bans on virtually all new data in the past had undoubtedly interfered with the nation's rapid utilization of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Genuine military secrets had to be protected, but there was a limit to the extremes to which government ought go in suppressing and classifying scientific information of no use to enemies and which they already might have anyway.
It posits that some of the most ridiculous examples of AEC censorship involved the classification of data which was in the public domain in Japan, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland, published freely in scientific journals in those countries. Only U.S. scientists were deprived of the information. The AEC had also developed a type of censorship which reversed the conventional military theory under which the press was permitted to publish anything not proscribed, such that under the AEC system, nothing could be published unless specifically permitted.
An intelligent system of classification, it concludes, was long overdue, and reforms were welcome in a self-governing society.
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "Bees in the News", tells of bees having always fascinated man, recounting that Aristotle had thought that they carried stones for ballast when they flew. Isaac Watts had inquired as to how the bee improved each shining hour. The noise of bees was among the attractions of the Big Rock Candy Mountain and the bee had provided science much ground for research and speculation.
It was known that bees had a sense of direction, sensitive to polarization of light waves, and could communicate direction to each other by means of a dance performed on the comb of a hive. They could tell time and make allowances in their calculations of direction for the changing position of the sun.
According to the science correspondent of the London Times, a British scientist, Dr. H. Kalmus, had recently discovered that even more mysterious things were true of bees. He had taken some beehives to Brazil and compared them to other beehives which had been resident in Brazil for between two and four hundred years. He had discovered that the counter-clockwise movement of the sun in the Southern Hemisphere baffled the newly transplanted bees, causing them to take off in the wrong direction to search for honey supplies they had been trained to expect. The Times had said that it showed the bee's innate ability to allow for the movement of the sun, that it was not taught, and also that the innate ability could be modified in a relatively short amount of time, as shown by the fact that bees in Brazil for between 200 and 400 years had made the proper adaptation. All of it had taken place in an insect, the brain of which was about one-tenth of an inch in diameter.
It suggests that Professor Kalmus, when he finished his study of bees, might devote his attention to the problem that homing pigeon fanciers were having during the year, that for some unknown reason, the pigeons, instead of flying back home, were taking off all over the landscape and not returning, with everything from hydrogen bombs to the growing frequency of television channels having been proposed as a possible cause.
"Strange things are going on in our universe, what with bees making solar compensations, pigeons going awry, dogs biting postmen in record numbers, and Republicans carrying the Solid South. Any morning now we expect to find Gen. Lee's statue facing northward or snow falling in Richmond in the wintertime."
The piece sounds like the
bee
Drew Pearson, in Sondre Strom, Greenland, continues his account of his trip through the Far Northern bases, visiting servicemen stationed in the Arctic along with a troupe of entertainers, indicates that it had taken five hours of steady flying from Goose Bay, Labrador, in a big Air Force Constellation to reach southern Greenland. Sondre Strom was located up a narrow fjord where 1,000 American troops were stationed to fuel and repair U.S. bombers for practice maneuvers or to help the Scandinavian Airlines, if necessary, on their polar hop from Los Angeles to Stockholm. All American bases in Greenland were operated by courtesy of the Danes and if they were to get tired of hosting the U.S., they could kick out the personnel. Thus far, relations with the Danes had been good and American troops there were well behaved, though without much contact with the outside world.
There were only 25,000 Greenlanders in Greenland, an area almost four times as large as Texas, and most of the population lived in the extreme south or on the east coast. The center of Greenland was an ice cap, in some places 10,000 feet thick. It never melted, even in the summer and no person could live there. In the extreme north, the total Greenland population was only 360. He notes that a Greenlander was the name given to the mixture of Danes and former Eskimos, as there were no pure Eskimos remaining and they no longer lived in igloos made of blocks of ice, but in some cases, modern houses, according to what they could afford.
Sondre Strom was under the command of Col. William Jowdy, a native of Rainier, Oregon, but now an adopted Texan. He smoked long black cigars, was proud of the base and seemed genuinely glad to see Mr. Pearson and his entourage. The first thing he had done was to try to persuade them to give two shows instead of one, as his troops had not seen any entertainment since the prior September and the theater was too small to hold all of his 1,000 men. They had not arrived until 4:30 and were supposed to leave at 5:00 to reach northern Greenland in time for a night's rest, but, being softies, they gave two shows anyway.
Walter Lippmann indicates that with the substance of the talks between the President and Prime Minister Nehru in Washington having been maintained secret and only a non-communicative communique issued at the conclusion of the four days, there could be no measure of what had been accomplished, but that it was fair to assume that no specific decisions had been made beyond a broad area of agreement within which both men acknowledged the same general principles and expressed the same general intentions. He finds that there was no doubt that it was a very good thing, but that time alone would tell how the general agreements were construed by officials in Washington and Delhi, and at the U.N.
It was nearly certain that the two men had more in common than Secretary of State Dulles and Indian Foreign Minister Krishna Menon, leaving one to wonder whether the two leaders had agreed on how they could carry forward consultations which had begun at the President's farm in Gettysburg, where the two consulted in private for a day. He indicates that most people recalled that the private wartime meetings between FDR and Winston Churchill as the bellwether for such private consultations. Those meetings had set the precedents for summit meetings in the age and habituated the U.S. to an expectation that great and important business would be transacted at such meetings. FDR and Mr. Churchill had brought along with them their highest military and diplomatic agents, made agreements and reached decisions on which the two countries then acted. But he finds that image quite misleading, especially in dealing with the recent meeting between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Nehru.
For those two men would not if they could, and could not if they would, publicly adopt and pursue a joint policy. Prime Minister Nehru's policy was that India would make no entangling alliances and have no fixed alignment with the Communist orbit or with the West. It thus followed that nothing in the nature of a joint program could have come out of the talks.
Mr. Lippmann says that he had gleaned from various tidbits that Mr. Nehru had been completely convinced of the President's sincerity as a man of peace, a notion widely held in Asia, fed by some foolish speeches made in the U.S. to the effect that the ultimate purpose of the U.S. was a preventive war. He says that Mr. Nehru could be relied upon as a powerful witness in Russia and Communist China, as well as all over Asia in favor of the U.S., and had pretty well disposed of the idea that he was a crypto-Communist. Practically no one who had known him and was informed of the manner in which he governed India had that prejudice, but there had been much talk by enemies in the U.S. that his appearance in Washington was salutary and had done much to clear the air.
At the level of practical issues in foreign affairs, three fields could be distinguished, in China, the Middle East and Russia-Europe, Mr. Lippmann's impression having been that the highest priority for India was in its relations with China, the population of which was growing greatly and the industrialization of which was proceeding at a rapid pace. In the Middle East, he had gotten the impression that India's action was not unaligned, moving in a channel of sorts, with one bank of the channel being the living memory of the old European colonial system in Asia, tending to confine India to the role of a partisan of the former colonies and inhibiting it in becoming a mediator between the East and the West, while the other bank was in India's difficult and dangerous relations with the Moslem world, particularly with its own Moslem population and with Pakistan. It appeared that Mr. Nehru was in no position to take any serious risks when Moslem sentiment was involved, inhibiting him again from occupying the role of mediator.
Regarding Europe, Mr. Lippmann's impression was that India did not regard the grave problem of Germany, of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as within its field of effective influence, not regarding itself as a world power in the sense that it could or should play a principal part such a distance from home, and Mr. Lippmann thinks that the U.S. should not expect India to take a leading role in Europe.
He concludes by saying that the column consisted of his impressions and inferences and that nothing in it ought be regarded as more definite or more authoritative than that.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that he had always come down with a severe attack of the fuddy-duddies around the Yule season, "a common complaint of us ex-bobby soxers who complain that things ain't like they used to be, and are probably right, at that. The main theme would be that there are some things that don't need improving, and certain substitutes won't do."
He says that they did not have to hold out for a sleigh ride through the snow to grandma's farm, with the bells jingling and grandpa's nose matching the sunset, but there was still no system of steam heat with ersatz electric logs which could match a six-foot birch log with a fat pine kindling base as a dispenser of cheer, and that the scent of holly and mistletoe in an open-fired house had not been produced by the Du Ponts.
And he goes on, comparing the accouterments of earlier days with the new-fangled equipped households, concluding: "You can make anything out of synthetics these days, including silence. But the new plastic silence isn't nearly as good as the old-fashioned silence, which was golden."
A letter writer from Rockingham says that Christmas was almost here again and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year throughout the world, asking God to grant many Christmas days ahead, filled with blessings of peace on earth, goodwill toward men, through all the world, and that he would be allowed to share those gifts with his children throughout the world and so keep Christmas in his heart through all the years.
A letter writer from Marshville says that in front of the Parthenon in Nashville was a manger scene surrounded on both sides by shepherds seeking the Christ child and cherubs singing joyously of the birth of the Prince of Peace, with thousands of glittering lights changing colors at frequent intervals illuminating the Babe of Bethlehem, Mary, Joseph and the Wise Men, the same lights revealing shepherds wending their way over Judean hills toward the City of David and the angels triumphantly proclaiming the birth of God's son. She says that anyone who viewed the scene was impressed by its grandeur and magnificence, but that any Christian who was familiar with Luke's account of Christ's birth was startled by the striking contrast between the apostle's account and the spectacular pageantry presented in the manger scene, for Christ had been born in a stable with but a few kerosene lamps to enable the Wise Men and shepherds to place their gifts at his feet. People in Bethlehem had been unaware of the monumental event, and the birth was devoid of pomp and circumstance, yet had been the most epochal event the world had ever known. "As we celebrate the birth of Christ this year, let us remember that our Saviour's birth was not marked by flashing lights and breath-taking beauty, but rather by the simple, unadorned beauty of a stable. Christmas will hold added meaning for us if we remember the birth of Christ in this manner."
It's a nice thought, but the mode of lighting was by tapers and wicks fueled by olive oil and via small fires, not by kerosene lamps, unless the Judeans were far more advanced in their petroleum exploration than history records.
A letter writer says that he had just finished talking to an old man in his seventies with nothing to eat and no place to stay because the little money he received from the Welfare Department was not enough to feed, clothe and shelter him for a month. He says that maybe he was too dumb to understand why Mr. Eisenhower, in all of his generosity with other people's money, turned a deaf ear and a blind eye toward Americans in favor of some other nation, seeks explanation of the difference between a starving American and a starving Hungarian.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., comments on the December 12 I.Q. column in the newspaper, which had asked whether most Arabians claimed descent from Cain, Abel or Seth, indicating that the answer was obviously Seth, explaining why.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.