The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 29, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Montgomery, Ala., city buses, which earlier had been segregated, were now running normally as visitors flooded the city for the annual Blue-Gray football game, with little evidence of tension between the races despite shooting incidents which had occurred at night since the integration had begun on December 21. The previous night, a black woman, Rosa Jordan, 22, had been the first victim of gunfire on the city buses, shot in both legs and reported in fair condition in a Montgomery hospital. Investigators said said that Mrs. Jordan had been in a seat toward the rear of a bus when a bullet, apparently from a pistol, had hit the vehicle near the floor, passed through her left leg and lodged in her right leg. Other white and black passengers on the bus had escaped injury and were taken to police headquarters for questioning. Police said that some passengers had huddled on the floor in fear of further violence during the trip to headquarters. When the bus had resumed its run, it was fired on again, but no one was injured in the second attack. As a safety precaution, the police commissioner had ordered all city bus runs halted for the night. The shooting had been the most serious incident in Montgomery since the city buses had been integrated under Federal court order. On Wednesday night, two buses had been struck by shots, but there were no injuries. Football fans from the North and the South were in the city for the 19th annual College All-Star game, which had originated as a gesture of friendship between the two sections of the country.
In Tallahassee, Fla., separate transportation apparently was arranged for two white passengers who had boarded a city bus the previous day and sat behind a black minister and his wife who were occupying a front seat. The Reverend W. W. Woods told newsmen that he had kept his seat when the driver had asked him to move to the rear. Reverend Woods said that the bus driver had conferred with a police officer and finally had told the white passengers, "You get off the bus—we've got a man who'll take you."
Meanwhile, a high school band director had been beaten by hooded men near Camden, S.C. The man, who had taught music at schools in Charlotte and who was returning from an appearance in Charlotte at the time of the attack, said from his hospital bed that four or five hooded men had kidnaped him, tied him to a tree and beaten him with a board after he had stopped alongside the road to change a tire on Thursday night 15 miles north of Camden.
The President would take an inspection tour of drought areas of six states in the Midwest and Southwest between January 13 and 15, planning to make stops in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Kansas, experiencing their worst drought conditions in many years. Meanwhile, the President was in Augusta, Ga., enjoying a weekend of golf in advance of the convening of the new Congress the following week. He was looking forward to the arrival in Washington of his favorite bridge-playing partner, General Alfred Gruenther, who had recently retired as the supreme commander of the NATO forces in Europe. Just before leaving the White House the previous day, the President had awarded General Gruenther a distinguished service medal. The General was to become the president of the American Red Cross at the beginning of the year.
In Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., fast action by local and Los Angeles County firemen had brought Southern California's latest brush fire under control in only a few hours this date, with a battalion chief estimating that 200 acres of brush had burned, the fire having started just after a change in winds the previous night which had given firemen fighting other brush fires 25 miles north hope of gaining control over them soon. State officials and firemen of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties said that 65 homes had been destroyed and 27,000 acres of brush and timber had burned. The previous day, a fire had gone through Lake Sherwood, burning a half dozen homes in a matter of minutes, sending wildlife swimming for their lives in the lake and scorching the area's fire station. Another sudden blaze had flared up near Malibu on Thursday night, burning homes a few hundred yards from the Pacific Coast Highway and twice forcing deputies to begin evacuation of the sheriff's substation. The largest of the three fires, a 26,500-acre fire at Zuma Beach, north of Palos Verdes Estates, had destroyed beach-front mansions after the fire had leaped across the four-lane highway.
New Year holiday traffic deaths had climbed this date, but at a much slower rate than during the early phases of the record-setting Christmas weekend, with 37 traffic fatalities having been recorded by 11:00 a.m., the count having begun the previous night at 6:00 p.m., to last until midnight on Tuesday, New Year's Day. California police had stopped 14,421 cars and had issued 1,197 citations, hoping to curb the fatality rate. Chicago police arrested 15 drunk drivers and the chief had told his top officers that enforcement was the top tool to bring about an immediate reduction in traffic deaths. Police in Columbus, O., were burning parking lights on all police cars during the holiday period as a constant "stop" signal against reckless driving. The President appealed to all motorists to make it the safest New Year weekend on record. The National Safety Council had predicted that the traffic toll might reach 490 by the end of the four-day weekend, which would be a record for a New Year holiday, the present mark being 407 set during a four-day weekend at the end of 1952 and the start of 1953. During the three-day New Year period of 1955-56, traffic deaths had totaled 364 and during the first ten months of 1956, they had averaged 107 per day. An Associated Press survey of accident deaths during a four-day non-holiday weekend between December 14 and 18, had counted 500 traffic fatalities. The Christmas traffic toll had been 706, with another 54 persons killed in accidental fires and 124 others in miscellaneous accidents, for a total of 884, both figures having established records for holidays. The overall record for both Christmas and New Year's was 973, set the previous year.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Governor Luther Hodges, about to begin his first full term as Governor, was feeling good, looking good and was highly optimistic, acting as a prizefighter who loved combat and who could not wait for the bell to ring to begin battle. The new session of the General Assembly would begin in February and would be loaded with explosive issues, including reapportionment, the separation of the Highway Department from the prisons, the reorganization of the Highway Commission, and tax changes.
Charlotte's Man of the Year for 1956 would be announced by The News on Monday, an honor established by the newspaper in 1944 to recognize the citizen who had rendered outstanding service to the community during the year, chosen by the previous living Men of the Year. Representatives of the newspaper did not participate in the selection except when there was a persistent deadlock. Persons holding salaried elective political positions were not eligible. Residence in the city was not a requirement, although all previous selectees had been local citizens. Only the person's activities had to be in and for the city. The story lists the previous recipients, J. Spencer Bell having been recognized the previous year.
A Charlotte man had suffocated in his bed during the morning when a small fire had broken out in his home. The man, 50, was already dead when firemen found him in his bedroom. The fire had been confined to the living room, but heavy smoke had filled the house by the time firemen had arrived at the burning house. The blaze had started on a living room couch, apparently from a cigarette, early in the morning. It had apparently been burning for some time before the fire broke through the living room wall and was seen by neighbors just waking up.
In Baltimore, automation had come to the rescue of the bus and streetcar rider, as the Baltimore Transit Co. announced that work had been underway for a year on an electronic computer which would draw up schedules, with traffic load and other information fed to the Univac which then applied a formula and came up with the schedules which would go into effect on January 13. What will they think of next?
In New York, the 20th anniversary of the opening of the George Washington Bridge, which links the northern tip of New York City with New Jersey, had been marked recently. During its first year of operation, it had carried 5.5 million vehicles and was now carrying 36 million.
In Charlotte, cold, clear air had entered the area and would remain over the weekend, with the Weather Bureau forecasting fair and continued cold up to Monday, with the high this date around 40 and the low during the night at about 23. The high on Sunday would likely be around 44 and the low in the nighttime, 25. Now that it's the Fifth and Sixth Days of Christmas, it finally begins to feel like Christmas rather than spring in Florida. Put away the beach towels.
On the editorial page, "Whitney: Capitalist with a Conscience" finds that wealth was unfortunately the first prerequisite for service as U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, but that John Hay (Jock) Whitney, the President's newly appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James was not just another American millionaire. It finds that he was a capitalist with a conscience, a businessman of rare ability, a philanthropist of distinction and a citizen who had devoted much of his time and energy to public service. Throughout his life, he had demonstrated a well-defined sense of social conscience not necessarily typical of his class. It believes that the U.S. would therefore be well represented in Britain.
The British had already expressed their approval of the appointment. Mr. Whitney had attended Oxford and had spent a great deal of time in the British Isles as a sportsman, businessman and an official representative of the U.S. He possessed one of the larger fortunes in the country, variously estimated at between 50 and 60 million dollars, but had decided early in life that his fortune ought be put to work for the common good to justify its possession. He had also served in various government agencies during both Democratic and Republican Administrations, including in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Commission on Foreign Economic Policy, the Business Advisory Council of the Department of State and the United States National Commission for UNESCO. He had also served as vice-chairman of the Public Committee of Personnel of the State Department, a group named by the President to recommend steps for reorganizing and increasing the effectiveness of the Government's career diplomats. He was quite familiar with the delicate field he was entering and had ample knowledge and appreciation of America's position in global leadership. It concludes that in every respect he was a promising appointment.
"Saddle up, Tex, but Don't Ride Her" finds reprehensible the efforts to mobilize a posse of disenchanted Democrats to go after the President's emergency refugee program, seeking to make political capital out of the plight of the oppressed Hungarians.
It suggests that cooler heads within the party surely would not be swayed by Representative Omar Burleson of Texas and others who opposed the President's program of increasing the quota of admitted refugees. The U.S. had a moral responsibility to admit the refugees and could score a powerful victory against "the hosts of darkness" while also preserving its own self-respect in doing so.
Representative Usher Burdick of North Dakota had spoken for most people when he said that any time they were murdering people, he was in favor of helping the victims, that they knew more about Communism than any Americans ever would, having lost their jobs and risked their lives opposing it.
It indicates that Congress could not stop with a patchwork program to meet emergency conditions, that an entirely new and more liberal concept of refugee legislation was necessary, that the old Refugee Act was unduly oppressive in its restrictions, and the fact that they had been waived had been the only reason that a measure of progress had been realized in recent months. It favors humanization of the spirit and letter of the refugee and immigration policy, finding that too much taxpayer money had been spent on a program which excluded legal immigrants while hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants swarmed into the country each year from Mexico and the Caribbean.
It concludes that Congress would be confronted the following month with a rare opportunity to take care of the needs of the Hungarian refugees while also reforming the nation's overall refugee policy toward those who only yearned to be free.
"The Red Press & the White King" indicates that the Soviet press did not hide behind the injunction: "Ask no questions, and we'll tell you no lies." It cheerfully fed its readers ingenious fiction. A Communist organ had recently explained again how hapless Americans were being victimized by Wall Street, being allowed to own stocks so that corporations could control their savings, with working people permitted to own homes so that factories could keep them tied to one place, that automobile ownership was a ruse to create the illusion that workers actually had freedom of movement.
It suggests that such reasoning might appear sensible to Russians educated on life in America by similar distortions in the Soviet press. One such story had it that parents who wanted to determine the type of career their child would likely follow placed a dollar bill and a bottle of whiskey before the child and if he or she picked up the dollar, it was a good sign that the child would grow up to be a hard-working and prosperous citizen, but if it reached for the bottle, it would most likely grow up to be a confirmed drunkard, the story having indicated that one baby had grabbed the dollar bill and the bottle, the mother then exclaiming, "Good Lord, he'll be a politician."
Western journalists found it difficult to explain to readers of a free press the Communist "phenomenon of miscomprehension", as New York Times correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, called it. Mr. Sulzberger, in his new book, The Big Thaw, came close to conveying an understanding of the never-never world of Soviet journalism, quoting from Through the Looking Glass:
"'There's nothing like eating
hay when you're faint,' the White King remarked to Alice.
"'I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested, '—or some sal-volatile.'
"'I didn't say there was nothing better,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing like it.'"
A piece from the High Point Enterprise, titled "Those Terrible Stoppers", indicates that a lady friend had told of walking home from work when a neighbor had stopped in an intersection to offer her a ride, while the traffic light was green. She had frantically waved him on through the intersection while he had the green signal and then hurried across to catch the ride he had offered. Climbing into the car, she had explained that she did not want him to miss the go signal and then have to sit there and wait for it to turn green again. The driver said that he never got in such a hurry that he worried about missing a stoplight.
It indicates that most people, itself included, attached too much importance to making traffic lights, even at times crowding through an amber caution signal. The woman of the story had confessed that if a traffic light had just turned red when it first came into view ahead of her, she slowed to a crawl in the hope that it would turn green again before she reached it, and that if it was green, she dashed for it as fast as the law allowed, fuming if she missed it. She said she did not know why she did that, understood that it was stupid, only admitted it because she was certain that a lot of other people had the same reaction to traffic lights.
It indicates that the stopwatch, the stop light and all other stoppers designed to regulate living in current times had become such autocrats as to shape patterns of living about which people ought to pause, think and back up in the hectic business of day-to-day living and driving. It concludes that stoplights were designed to serve and not to enslave people.
Run, don't walk, for 1984 is at hand.
Drew Pearson indicates that the inside fact about the departure of Herbert Hoover, Jr., as Undersecretary of State was that he did not want to retire, and his father had made a special appeal to the White House on his behalf, without success. He blamed William Jackson, the White House expert on security affairs, for forcing his departure, and to some extent, he had been right. Mr. Jackson had considered Mr. Hoover a bad influence on foreign affairs and had done his best to get him out of the State Department.
But the man he ought really blame, says Mr. Pearson, was Vice-President Nixon, who had made a deal with Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts the previous August whereby if the latter vetoed the effort by Harold Stassen to nominate him for the vice-presidency at the Republican convention, then Governor Herter would be appointed the new Undersecretary of State. Mr. Pearson says that it was why he had been able to report on August 21 the fact that Mr. Hoover would retire and be replaced by Mr. Herter. The retirement would not become effective until February, to give time for Mr. Herter to conclude his position as Governor and then take a vacation. Mr. Hoover had already received an offer from dictator Francisco Franco of Spain to be his petroleum adviser, but had turned it down, saying that he would accept no retainers from foreign governments.
Mr. Jackson was also resigning, not to return to his stock brokerage firm, but rather to retire to Princeton to write fiction. He had served the Roosevelt Administration, had married the secretary of General Omar Bradley, her father having been chairman of the board of the Wabash Railroad.
Adlai Stevenson might become a political columnist, considering several offers to write a daily column.
Labor leader George Meany had accepted an invitation to a dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Nehru, but had threatened to tell the Prime Minister to his face that he was a friend of the Communists, and when word had reached the White House of Mr. Meany's intended statement, anxious aides had almost dropped him from the guest list. At the last minute, they had received assurances that Mr. Meany would not carry out the threat. The AFL-CIO high command was split over the question of Prime Minister Nehru, with Mr. Meany believing he was definitely pro-Communist, while Walter Reuther, the second in command, believed in the Prime Minister. Mr. Reuther was also urging labor chieftains to keep up their political activity all year round.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had 19 teams scattered around the world quietly investigating foreign aid, with the team assigned to survey Yugoslavia having been denied admittance to the country because that team was headed by William Randolph Hearst, Jr., an astute newsman, not liked, however, by Yugoslavia. Mr. Hearst had been accompanied by Senate Minority Leader William Knowland's chief assistant, James Gleason.
Interior Department engineers had discovered a unique way of irrigating the parched Texas Panhandle. At present, farmers in the Panhandle raised cotton, grain and potatoes by irrigating with underground water pumped from wells, the water being pumped out 100 times faster than rainfall replenished it, such that the water table had fallen rapidly, with the result that farming was considered doomed in the area within a matter of years. Engineers of the U.S. Geological Survey, however, had now developed a plan to collect the rainwater into ponds and then pump it underground for storage in old irrigation wells. Previously, that rainwater had been lost to evaporation.
Doris Fleeson tells of the retirement of Senator Walter George of Georgia bringing about a shift of power relationships in both foreign and domestic policy, as the President would have greater difficulty in the conduct of foreign affairs and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson would have a more difficult time maintaining unity within the Democratic Party.
She indicates that it was almost unheard of that a single Senator would leave such a power vacuum. Many Senators, such as the late Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenberg and William Borah, among others, had been far better known by the public than Senator George, but none had been so personally influential that they could control the course of the Senate in the way he had during the previous few years. He had become indispensable to the President of the opposite party and the Senate Majority Leader of his own party. In addition to great ability, he had long practical experience in national politics, which both men lacked, and his conservative views suited the domestic interests which both men were eager to pursue, being an internationalist and an advocate for collective security. He had outlived his personal ambitions which would have conflicted with the aspirations of his colleagues. To younger Senators eager to lead and wary of following, he conveyed a kindly father-image.
He was also a Southerner who had the trust of other Southern Senators, but reversing the usual trend, having become more tolerant and more flexible as the years had passed. He had achieved the peak of his power by a change of pace remarkable in a Senator of his seniority. The customary practice was for Senators to dig more deeply into the committee positions they had prepared for themselves, but Senator George had chosen to switch from the direction of the Senate Finance Committee, where he had long protected conservative fiscal interests, to leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, motivated by the loss of his son as a Navy aviator during World War II. His friends believed that he had paid for the change by the loss of support from business interests in Georgia, ironically prominent supporters of the President who would find it impossible to replace Senator George.
By himself during the previous two years, he had been able to make up the Senate's mind on matters of foreign policy, but with him no longer at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, replete with ambitious young men of both parties, it would go in many directions and raise many questions before reaching a course.
The Congressional Quarterly indicates that if campaign promises were more akin to legal contracts and less to New Year's resolutions, the nation's small businessmen could look forward to a happy 1957, able to count on lower taxes, increased Government assistance and tighter controls on big business competitors. But as things stood, the four million small businessmen of the country could not depend on those things occurring, with the tax cut being in greatest doubt. The previous August, the President's Cabinet committee on small business had recommended a four-way program to cut the small business tax by 600 million dollars in the first year, with its key feature being a cut in the base tax rate on the first $25,000 of corporate income, from 30 to 20 percent. The President had promised in August and again in October "favorable consideration" of a tax cut. The 1956 Democratic platform had also pledged "tax relief for all small and independent businesses." But odds were against a small business tax cut in the coming year.
The Suez and Hungarian crises would boost defense and foreign aid spending, causing the national budget to exceed 70 billion dollars. Influential Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey was opposed to any tax cuts which might throw the budget out of balance and trigger additional inflation. The previous March, his opposition had killed a small business tax cut proposed by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, the Senator's plan having been more modest than that indicated by the Cabinet committee. But Secretary Humphrey had said that it was "not acceptable because of the loss of revenue involved… Even if there were to be a tax reduction on any such scale, I would be opposed to have it all go to a reduction of business taxes when individuals are certainly entitled to major consideration."
The Secretary had a powerful ally in Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, the second-ranking Democrat on the House Ways & Means Committee. In a speech on December 7, Mr. Mills had said: "I must question the advisability of providing [tax] relief only for small corporations while doing nothing for the vast number of small partnerships and proprietorships."
John Davis, executive director of the National Small Businessmen's Association, had concluded that 1957 would see a "shakedown cruise" on tax proposals but "no relief" for small business, that the promises of 1956 would be fulfilled only in 1958.
One Administration source said that the President might not even propose tax legislation until the end of the 1957 session of Congress, when he would know how the fiscal picture would look. The outlook was somewhat brighter for two measures aimed at curbing the economic power of big business, both of which had been passed by the House in 1956, but had foundered in the Senate.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that one of the lights had gone out of his life when recently "a magnificently cantankerous gentleman", O. J. Coffin, head of the UNC school of journalism, had died. He had been Mr. Ruark's mentor while in school at UNC. He indicates that it was impossible to estimate how many newspapermen Mr. Coffin had created in his own image. He had left an editorship of a North Carolina daily newspaper to head the journalism school and had turned out working newspapermen at a furious rate for 30 years. He indicates that he might have created a few monsters, such as himself, but mainly his fledglings had gotten jobs and held them, progressed in them and achieved recognition.
Mr. Coffin had turned out a small percentage of amateurs and practically none of his students wound up in the advertising business, with very few having become authors of books, "a shameful profession", according to Mr. Coffin.
He had been a "humorously irascible gentleman whose hooked nose and craggy chin gave him the appearance of a truculent turtle. He had a pair of piercing blue eyes behind frosty glasses and a laugh that could be reminiscent of the croaking of ravens." Some of it was caused by his asthma, but a lot had come from his sardonic view that there was very little room in the newspaper profession for ineptitude.
He believed that a person writing a piece ought know what he was writing about so that it at least might be intelligible to the author before palming it off on the public. He had been a schoolteacher, a reporter, columnist, several types of newspaper executives, an editorial writer and an editor-in-chief before becoming a teacher. He taught his students the rudiments of a coherent, short sentence and the value of the word "ain't" for emphasis, suggested that the world was not perfect and that people in the world shared its imperfections. He thus dispatched his students to police courts, insane asylums, and state prisons, issuing assignments at the beginning of each week and reviewing the efforts on Fridays, reading the results aloud, with appropriate comment and blistering sarcasm, with very occasional praise.
Even during the Depression, students had gone to work right out of school and editors held most of the vacancies for Mr. Coffin's students, largely because they did not have to teach those students very much about covering and writing a story.
Mr. Ruark says that he had fallen under his spell in an unusual fashion, that he had not been a journalism student, but had fallen in love with a young woman who was. When Mr. Coffin had asked him during an interview why he wanted to take up journalism in the winter quarter of his senior year, Mr. Ruark replied that he was in love with the particular student and that it was the easiest way he could keep her under his eye, to which Mr. Coffin had replied that he liked a practical man, that she was the prettiest girl in the class, and so he hired him. He had given him the first job which developed in the summer of 1935 because, he said, it was "so damned awful that you're the only man I got whose ornery enough to take it. I give you a month, outside." He had lasted three months before the limits of a country weekly in Hamlet, N.C., had driven him north.
Mr. Coffin and his wife had taken in the students and they had spent more time with them than his own son, eating their food and drinking Mr. Coffin's bourbon while soaking up practical philosophy of the working press. Mr. Ruark regarded him as being an H. L. Mencken without the posturing.
While Dr. Phillips Russell, the noted biographer who taught creative writing, imbued the students with quiet culture, Mr. Coffin would adapt it to harsh practicality, the two men working together "as cynically as a thief and his fence."
"Well, he's gone now, as all the good ones go, although some several thousand of us thought he was imperishable. If he's some place where he can read his obits, he probably has already produced a blue pencil and is busy hacking them to bits."
Fifth Day of Christmas
Sixth Day of Christmas Framed Edition
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