The Charlotte News
Thursday, February 23, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Montgomery, Ala., that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
whose home had been bombed three weeks earlier while he was actively
leading the bus boycott in that city, had been arrested this date for
participation in an illegal boycott. The 27-year old pastor of the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in downtown Montgomery had been among
those indicted by a grand jury two days earlier on charges of
violating the state's anti-boycott law, Dr. King's indictment having
been maintained in secret under Alabama law until his arrest. He had
returned this date from a series of speaking engagements in Tennessee
and the local sheriff said that he had surrendered voluntarily, was
then released on $300 bond after being booked
Charles Kuralt of The News reports that 19 people were rendered homeless after a fire destroyed the bungalow in which they lived in Biddeville, shortly before noon the previous day, with everything in it having been lost. It had been occupied by two brothers, their wives, their mother and 14 children. The families were now looking for temporary quarters, after deciding to tear down the remains of the home and rebuild it anew. The house had nine small rooms and the children had slept three to a bed. It was about the size of a normal five-room dwelling and the reason 19 people were living in it was because the home of one of the families had burned down about two years earlier. The education director of Pritchard Memorial Baptist Church, where one of the wives was employed, moved this date to give the families temporary help, and some church members had contributed money, with the education director providing them with enough food for lunch. A church truck was being used to pick up furniture from contributors and a small amount of clothing which had been collected for them.
Julian Scheer of The News reports of a day at the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot in Charlotte, the last day it would be in operation, as a guard said that they were "giving it back to the Indians". The Navy was deactivating Charlotte's most famous military installation, news of which had only just arrived. The property contained seven million projectiles, six miles of conveyor track, 900,000 square feet of covered building space, and other military equipment worth between a total of seven and eight million dollars, and so the commanding officer did not understand how "immediate" the closure could occur. Word had not yet come from Washington officially to the 135 civilian employees and three Navy personnel at the Depot. They knew that the Navy was proud of the job they were doing at the facility, on a budget of about $600,000 annually, having salvaged and assembled about 49 million dollars worth of non-live 40-mm. shells during fiscal 1953-54, and 52 million dollars worth the next year. When U.S. Rubber Co. had operated the Depot, 10,000 employees had been on the payroll, and suddenly, within two weeks, it had dropped to only 500 employees after the company had left. Production had stopped, but orders previously requested still had been filled. Then, at the time of the Korean War, there was a need for 40-mm. shells and the Depot again swung into action. The salvage program consisted of reworking parts and assembling them, and orders were presently going out to installations in other parts of the country, until they had received the message this date that it was the beginning of the end.
Emery Wister of The News reports that Congressman Charles Jonas had told the newspaper this date that Navy officials had informed him that the military installation was of no further use to the armed service. They had set a date of June 30, 1957 as the time when the Navy would release the Depot. It ended rumors that the Navy was planning a secret super-weapon base at the facility, but started new speculation that another branch of the armed services or private industry might put it to use. Army engineers had surveyed the Depot several months earlier, but the Pentagon would not comment on it.
Both Charlotte Mayor Philip Van Every and the chairman of the County Commission, S. Y. McAden, received the news with delight that the facility was closing, as it might become available for private industrial use, the two men finding it to have possibilities for greater growth of the community.
Also in Charlotte, a National Guard pilot landed an airplane on the unpaved parking lot at the Coliseum during the afternoon, as the Home and Flower show was opening in the facility, with men, women and children arriving in large numbers. Children just released from school broke into excited shouts as they watched the plane glide over the big dome and head for the lot, but the pilot did not immediately land, making sharp turns until alighting on the center of the unpaved lot. The pilot told the large crowd of assembled greeters that he was just making certain that a plane could be landed at the location, as the National Guard planned a large equipment display on the lot the following Saturday, National Guard Muster Day, and among the equipment to be displayed was the light plane which he had landed. To demonstrate how easy it was, he took off and landed again, then took off again, saying that he would return on Saturday morning. The pilot was also the electrician for the Coliseum and parked on the lot every day in his car.
Also at the Coliseum, it was announced that a schedule of 11 days for public ice-skating would occur between March 20 and 31, with adults to be charged a dollar and children, 50 cents, with spectators paying 50 cents as adults and 25 cents as children, and skate rentals being one dollar for both adults and children. Plan accordingly. The whole country is skating on thin ice. You might as well join the crowd.
Please don't believe what popular media tries to tell you about the 1950's, as having been such an innocent, wonderful time to be alive. It really wasn't so, except in the selective memories of people who were children then, knew little of their surroundings and never bothered to find out or contemplate the truth thereafter. Most of us think of our childhoods as having been idyllic paradises where there were few, if any, problems, compared to today, because we were all, more or less, shielded from those realities by the relative innocence of childhood, especially early childhood, before we had to attend school and become worried about homework and tests and such. Associating such periods with rosiness for everyone, adult and child alike, is a purblind, myopic view of history after one becomes an adult. Sorry, but it really wasn't all wonder and light, bop, do-wop and the "golden age" of television. It was really pretty awful, daily fear aplenty of the thermonuclear blast and constant concern over a troubled society being split asunder by interracial tension, mounting juvenile delinquency, increasing incidence of crime, among other societal problems, hence the constant need for the escapism afforded by "innocent" tv, movies and rock 'n' roll.
In Chicago, a woman made a purchase and walked out of a dry goods store, leaving her purse behind, containing $1,430, the store owner having then turned the purse and money over to the police. Subsequently, when the woman appeared at police headquarters, she explained that she always carried large sums of money because she did not trust banks.
On the editorial page, "Camp 703: Symptom of a Social Ill" tells of the alarm about the disorder in the Huntersville prison camp being genuine and justifiable, that there had been five rebellions in the course of seven months and it was unreasonable to expect a peaceful community to live in a constant state of uneasy emergency. Hardened prisoners had been sent to the camp, which was not designed to handle such cases. State prison officials had been doing the best they could with the limited tools which a parsimonious Legislature had given them.
The four troublemakers of the current week had been transferred to another camp in Asheville, more capable of handling them. But, it suggests, the danger of future uprisings remained, as the "bad actors" among the state's convicts could not all be maintained in Raleigh's Central Prison—or on television—, intended as a maximum security institution, while it was not that, housing too many potentially dangerous prisoners for its meager facilities. Even there, 400 to 500 men came out of the prison each day to work.
It finds it doubtful that the problem would be solved to the complete satisfaction of penologists, humanitarians or society as a whole, when the limited maximum-security facilities were completed at Ivy Bluff, near the Virginia border.
It indicates that there were more prisoners of the class which State Prisons director W. F. Bailey referred to as "psychopaths" than the state could presently care for satisfactorily. Mr. Bailey referred to a "psychopath" as "a man who is a troublemaker not only in prison but on the outside as well. He is a man with an emotional disturbance. Psychiatrists tell us that there is little we can do for them at this time. It is in these camps where psychopaths are located that the pressure will build up and after a while it explodes… The majority of your psychopaths have above normal IQs. It is not a question of their being mentally deranged." He also indicated that once released, 98 percent of them would eventually return to prison, that they could not be placed in asylums because they were not legally insane.
The piece asks why such psychopaths were placed in camps, that if 300 or 400 of them were housed together in a place such as Central Prison, the explosion could be terrifying. "Psychopaths" could do thousands of dollars worth of damage to equipment, kill and maim several guards before anything could be done to placate them, as had been demonstrated in prisons across the country. The answer to that problem had been decentralization, classifying the men and sending them to camps in small groups, diminishing the danger.
But, nevertheless, danger had arisen in the camps and so there was a need, in addition to decentralization, for maximum-security institutions fully equipped to curb the problem with appropriate discipline.
Some prisoners would not respond to what penologists referred to as "proper treatment", and until science could provide better techniques for such cases, the only answer was decentralization, maximum-security institutions, special surveillance and discipline. Hardened prisoners were not the only problem, however, within the prison system, as there was a great need for more specialized institutions to take care of the mental cases, the inebriates, those with special medical problems, such as epilepsy, and the homosexuals. The need was mounting daily and crime rates, meanwhile, were rising.
As the state's population was rising, so were its social ills, requiring the thoughtful attention of legislators when they were to meet next in the 1957 biennial session.
"Soviet Valhalla: Exit Joseph Stalin" finds that the stay of Stalin in the Soviet Valhalla had been incredibly short, given the top dog status he had for so long held, that in less than three years since his death, all of his ideological works were being repudiated by the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress, while only the previous year, Pravda had observed his birthday by hailing him as "the true disciple and continuer of Lenin" and praised his "masterly" interpretations of the latter.
Now, the Soviet Congress had decided that he had manipulated dogma with arbitrariness and dictatorial decisions, which the piece finds was true. But it finds little comfort in the new treatment of Stalin, as it was a common belief that the "smile-awhile" present leadership in the Soviet Union had actually intensified the threat of Communism, having succeeded in realigning Tito's Communist Party in Yugoslavia with that of the Soviet. Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had been referred to by Tito the previous summer as "gentlemen" and "comrades".
The foreign appeal of the new approach was varied, making Russia appear less truculent than it was, removing the stigma of Stalinism from Communist parties in other countries and making them appear therefore more eligible for participation in government. Within the Soviet Union, the maneuver suggested that the current leadership was in sympathy with and had concern for the masses. It finds it possible that the new attacks against Stalin were intended to mask great internal divisions and trouble within the satellite nations.
On the surface it suggested a shrewd effort to implement penetrations of Communism in the countries which insisted that there was a difference between Mr. Khrushchev's smile and Stalin's frown, concluding that if there were a difference, "it is that the smile is infinitely more dangerous."
"Flying Commas on a Verbal Trapeze" tells of the apologists for Vice-President Nixon trying hard to deny that he was using the desegregation issue for partisan advantage, while the fact was that his own press release had referred to Brown v. Board of Education as a decision by a "great Republican chief justice", which the piece finds as a patent attempt to inject the decision into the campaign as a fulfillment of every Republican promise from 1952.
Syndicated columnist David Lawrence, "in a dazzling demonstration on the verbal trapeze", had come to the rescue, saying: "Speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court (pause) a great Republican (pause) Chief Justice Earl Warren (pause) has ordered an end to racial segregation in the nation's public schools," adding the pauses as if the Vice-President were delivering a verbal speech rather than a written document. He had contrasted that form with how it was actually presented to the press, just before the speech: "Speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court (comma) a great Republican chief justice (comma) Earl Warren (comma) has ordered an end to racial segregation."
The piece indicates that whether the Vice-President had actually paused during the speech, as indicated by Mr. Lawrence, was irrelevant, for, regardless, it was a shrewd piece of demagoguery, that the important punctuation mark to remember in reading his words was the question mark, that if one put one at the beginning and at the end of each of his speeches, the person could not go wrong.
It seems that would turn it into Spanish—which probably it was, as he aspired to be an El Presidente.
Drew Pearson indicates that the reason for the Israeli concern over the shipment by the U.S. of the 18 light tanks to Saudi Arabia was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia operated virtually under the same military command, the Egyptian military mission in Saudi Arabia being larger than the American military mission and the new Egyptian Constitution proclaiming that Egypt was "an integral part of the Arab nation", which Premier Abdul Nasser defined as stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf of Persia, with the inference being that Egypt was building up an Arab super-state which it would dominate.
Egypt, for instance, had fomented the riots in Jordan and against the British and American embassies, because of Jordan's adherence to the Baghdad Pact. Intelligence reports indicated that Egyptian agents were presently working to woo King Saud of Saudi Arabia, who had thus far resisted the effort, with the result that Premier Nasser's agents were wooing the King's younger and disgruntled brothers in an effort to foment a palace revolt.
Egypt was one of the poorest nations in the Near East, and given the tremendous wealth of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, wanted to wrap an enveloping arm around the entire region. Thus far, they had succeeded in getting King Saud to advance some of his oil royalties to pay for part of the Communist arms imported from Czechoslovakia, in exchange for Egyptian cotton and money. It was also suspected that the 18 tanks from the U.S., part of a shipment of 36, would be transferred immediately after arrival from Saudi Arabia to Egypt. Egypt had sought to buy 40 tanks from the U.S. several months earlier and had been turned down, shortly after which, Saudi Arabia had ordered the 36 tanks.
Despite that background, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, during his talks with Secretary of State Dulles in Washington recently, had urged that Israel cede the southern part of the Negev to Jordan, which would for the first time create a land bridge connecting Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Pearson finds that it was easy to understand why Egypt should want such a land bridge, but hard to understand why England was advocating for it.
The President deserved a lot of thanks for bolstering the deteriorated morality of the Senate by putting his finger on the gas lobby with his veto of the natural gas deregulation bill, a veto which had been urged by Attorney General Herbert Brownell. He notes that the most surprising opinion within the Administration had been that expressed by Vice-President Nixon, who had also favored the veto despite the fact that 15 California oilmen had contributed to his $18,000 personal expense fund following his 1950 Senate victory, the expense fund which caused the scandal in September, 1952, which nearly resulted in his being dumped from the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee, resolved by the success of what became known as his "Checkers speech"—however idiotic that seems in hindsight, given the insincere theatrics of that speech and its corny presentation, even by the standards of television in 1952, though television was definitely in its developing stages of infancy, having, by 1956, developed probably into its early adolescence, now having reverted, in accordance with the seven ages of man, to its puling infancy for about the last 20-30 years.
Joseph Whitney, who provided the
"Mirror of Your Mind" advice column for the newspaper, in
the fourth in a series of six articles on growing up, examines the
stage of "puppy love" among teenagers, finding that it
was often a "heart-burn for harried parents", the more
serious it was for the young, the more mortifying for the parents.
One of the most poignant of the heartaches was the realization by the
parents that they were no longer the most important persons in their
children's lives. The wise parent would recognize that teenagers also
had problems. "The awkward inanities that feature so many of
their love affairs are manifestations of their doubts and anxieties.
Most teenage fears during the dating period revolve around feelings
of personal inadequacy
He says that most of the erratic behavior of teenagers came from their fumbling efforts to defend themselves against secret fears of inadequacy, that young persons who believed they were too tall, too short, timid, awkward, scholastically superior or retarded, suffered more or less during the early years of "boy-girl consciousness".
He relates of a case of an only
child, a girl, "Mary J."—whether double-jointed or not,
he does not say—who, at age 12, began to develop her breasts, prompting her father, a jokester, to joke about them on an occasion,
in front of guests, calling attention to her burgeoning womanhood,
humiliating the child, causing her to become so self-conscious in
relation to her body development that she dressed and undressed in a
darkened closet, wrapped towels around her breasts to make them less
noticeable, and although a talented student, began to hate attendance
of school, becoming practically a recluse
He indicates that parents could contribute much to their children's emotional stability in such instances by finding other satisfactions to keep them occupied until they were ready to obtain the things they wanted. Fears and anxieties could be reduced when adolescents had activities through which they could sustain their self-esteem. Making them feel loved and admired at home could foster that process.
But parents with rigid ideas on behavior often added to the emotional burdens of teenage children in love. "Fixed ideas of how a son or daughter must react and behave on all occasions will create a rocky road for both parent and teenager."
A young person would feel unloved at home if forced to follow authoritarian, puritanical principles of behavior, out of step with the accepted norms of contemporaries, producing secretiveness, "sometimes to the exploration of furtive and unhappy sex experimentation."
He says that adolescent affairs, from puppy love to blind adoration, were a normal part of growing up, that any young person might go through a half-dozen crushes during the teenage dating time, and that each such infatuation which left a happy memory was a further step toward the kind of maturational level which led to happy marriages.
He suggests to parents trying to see
their children's problems through the children's eyes and thereby to
help them solve them through the parents' greater knowledge and
experience, going a long way toward helping teenagers become happy
and emotionally healthy youngsters, and the teenage dating time, a
period of education, fun
A letter writer thinks that the concern over the $2,500 campaign contribution from the natural gas lobby offered to Senator Francis Case of South Dakota and being investigated by the Senate, along with the general issue of lobbying influence on Congress, was possibly only a "political trick to take our minds off the burden of high taxes and our influence in the eyes of the people around the world as directed by our diplomats". She says that mature men were needed "to pierce through the tinsel of the useless into the heart of the useful", "not former U.S. attorneys weeping over an alleged $500."
A letter writer urges that the
sellers of beer, wine and whiskey had the people where they wanted
them, that such alcoholic beverages would kill people, as he read
regularly about in the newspaper, such as in the case of drunk
drivers. He refers to I Corinthians 6:10 and Proverbs
23:29-35, to obtain a true picture
A letter writer says that the idea that blacks desired, more than anything else, amalgamation with whites was "nothing but vile racist propaganda spewed forth by distorted mentalities to be believed and voiced by many proponents of segregation." He says that it would be a great compliment to white people if the colored people of the world wanted to lose themselves in the "'white' bloodstream", but that the fact was that colored people everywhere were content with their color, wanting only to be accepted as individuals and human beings. American blacks wanted their constitutional rights and could hardly be respected if they wanted anything less, wished to be free from discrimination in voting, unequal treatment by the police and courts, job opportunities, and so forth, as well as to be free from the humiliation caused by legalized segregation in public life. "The Negro does not want to push himself into some exclusive 'society'—and, surely, even the most misguided among us cannot maintain, with any true devotion to the principles of Christianity and Americanism, that public life in the U.S.A. should be an exclusive society, excluding from the membership or free participation in that society because of race, creed or color whole groups of citizens. Shades of Adolph Hitler!"
Framed Edition
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