The Charlotte News
Friday, February 3, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, in a 45-minute press conference this date, said that his Government favored "a step-by-step" easing of the West's trade controls on Communist China, to place them on the same level with those of Russia. He said that Britain believed that "it might be desirable to station more United Nations observers" along the Arab-Israeli borders, but that any final decision on the matter would have to be left to the U.N. truce supervisor in that area, Canadian General E. L. M. Burns. He also said that he and the President took very seriously the possibility of joint U.S.-British-French action in the Middle East to keep any border disputes from erupting into war, but declined to state what those steps might be. Mr. Eden said that he had not yet had a chance to study the latest note to the President from Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, but had "every confidence" that Britain would agree with the anticipated reply by the President. He said that he saw no value in signing another 20-year friendship treaty with Russia, as the note by the Soviet Premier had proposed, since a Soviet-British treaty had been "torn up" by the Russians only the previous year. He also indicated that Britain had made no new commitments regarding the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores, should they be attacked by Communist China. He said that the U.S. and Britain had to do everything possible to raise the standard of living in underdeveloped areas, to counter Russia's switch from military to economic penetration tactics. He concluded that the conference with the President had exceeded his expectations and that progress had been made on all points, with a large area of agreement. The Prime Minister was preparing this date to return to England following the end of the four-day bilateral conference.
In Durham, England, the Archbishop of York, Dr. A. M. Ramsey, the new no. 2 prelate of the Church of England, accused evangelist Billy Graham this date of giving "a very distorted view of the apostolic gospel." He had said, in a diocesan quarterly magazine article, titled "The Menace of Fundamentalism", that Rev. Graham was "a man of utter humility and simplicity", that there was evidence that he genuinely claimed to preach only the first steps of Christianity and directed his hearers to churches for the rest, but that he had also apparently taught the "grossest doctrines" and "flung his formula 'the Bible says' over teaching which is emphatically not that of the Bible." The article attacked the Protestant movement for its insistence on the infallibility of the Scriptures and such Biblical miracles as the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Christ. He said that fundamentalism had been on the rise in Britain before the crusade by Rev. Graham, and that he was not certain how completely the evangelist was "at one with our English fundamentalism." He continued that Rev. Graham's description of the Bible as a "book written by God through 30 secretaries" represented an error "analogous to the error of the doctrine of transubstantiation where the supernatural part supplants the natural part thereby overthrowing the notion of sacrament." "The theology of 'Christ bore your punishment; believe and be saved,' when accompanied by the fundamentalist's pulpit cliché 'the Bible says,' is a very distorted view of the apostolic gospel." Rev. Graham was presently conducting a revival tour through India, with attendance reported to be the largest he had ever had.
In London, it was reported that Western Europe's worst cold wave of the 20th century had thus far taken 100 lives and caused property damage in the millions, with government forecasters indicating that there was little relief in the forecast for the ensuing few days. From Turkey to Britain, from Scandinavia to the shores of Morocco, countless millions were shivering in the grip of ice or snow continuing into the fourth day. Subzero temperature gales had hit exposed coasts and endangered at least two ships. Southern Greece, just outside the cold belt, had been hit by a disastrous rainstorm, with floods sweeping away roads and bridges and hundreds of families having spent the night on rooftops or clinging to trees. France had been the worst hit, with 30 known dead, 17 in Britain, and ten in Turkey, among others. Even the normally balmy French Riviera during winter, had subfreezing temperatures. Most rivers were covered in ice across the Continent, halting boats carrying badly needed fuel and food, and the cold had ruptured water and gas mains, as well as disrupting electrical power.
Winter weather gripped the Midwest and Plains states west to the Pacific Coast in the U.S., with below freezing temperatures reported across most of Texas and the cold weather threatening vegetable and citrus areas in the Rio Grande Valley, with more snow having fallen in western Texas and freezing rain hitting central sections, following two days of stormy weather in that state, with six deaths attributed to the storms in Texas and six other deaths reported in New Mexico, New York and Michigan.
Donald MacDonald of The News tells of a masked gunman having been arrested minutes after firing shots in a pre-dawn holdup at a Spur service station in Charlotte this date. He had also confessed to robbing two other all-night service stations the previous weekend. In the hold-up the previous night, he had fired at least four shots from a .22-caliber pistol as the service station manager had fled, but neither of the two hold-up victims, the manager and a customer, had been injured. He had stolen $56.75 from the two men, after forcing one into a back room and ordering the station manager to walk outside at gunpoint. Just as he was doing so, a cab driver happened to be driving by and heard a shot, looked up and saw a man shooting at another, swerved his cab toward the curb, trying to hit the man with the gun, but found he was not far enough off the curb to be hit. The cab driver had immediately contacted his dispatcher by radio, asking that the police be summoned to the scene.
In Charlotte, 4,000 people had turned out the previous night for the latest home game of the Baltimore Clippers hockey team, set to take on the Johnstown Jets. But the visitors had been delayed in their travel by fog over Charlotte, preventing their landing at the airport, causing the crowd to have to sit and listen to the organ playing while eating hot dogs and receiving reports on the travel progress of the visitors through South Carolina. The game had finally gotten underway shortly after 11:00 p.m., as if nothing had happened. Travel plans had been arranged by the Governors of both North and South Carolina, the Highway Patrol, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, head of Eastern Air Lines, and buses from Queen City Trailways, dispatched to airports in Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem, Spartanburg, Greenville and Columbia, in addition to Charlotte. The next best landing field other than Charlotte had been at Columbia, S.C., and buses had to transport the 30 players from there. The crowd had elected to wait, with hardly anybody grumbling, just sitting and staring at the ice. It had been one of the biggest concession stand nights in the short history thus far of the new Coliseum. Baltimore won the match, concluding at 1:32 a.m.
The thick fog in Charlotte had prompted police departments to join with the Weather Bureau to warn motorists and pedestrians to use extreme caution on the streets and highways this night. The fog was accompanied by rains which reached the downpour stage at times, with 1.01 inches having fallen since Wednesday by noon this date. A high of 55 was expected for this date and 47 for the following day, with a low of 42 in the morning.
In Huntersville, near Charlotte, a Huntersville police car, operated by the police chief's son, had been involved in an early morning accident with a County-owned pickup truck, with damage to the police car having been estimated at $350 and no personal injuries having occurred. The Huntersville mayor admitted that it was irregular for anyone to be driving the police car other than the chief, except in an emergency. He explained that the chief had been ill and may have been sending his son for medicine. Sounds like a major scandal erupting. Let's get to the bottom of it. Let's have a Congressional investigation. Maybe there is something very sinister involved. The son may be using the car for moonshining, with the chief getting part of the profits. Come on, do your jobs!
Also in Charlotte, the Ronson Corp., one of the nation's foremost manufacturers of precision metal products, announced this date that it would erect a plant in Charlotte, with the New Jersey aircraft parts division to be relocated to the city. The building would be one story, a precast, pre-stressed concrete structure with masonry walls, and having 20,000 square feet of area, with a "curtain wall" permitting expansion. Can't wait to see that. Will they give tours?
On the editorial page, "Ruffianism at School Games Must End" finds intolerable the reported riots and rowdyism at high school athletic events in Mecklenburg County, urges that if educators, law enforcement officers and parents could not control the disorders, the games ought be canceled and the gymnasiums reserved for intramural sports, as the incidents of violence had been too numerous to overlook or attribute simply to boyish enthusiasm.
It indicates that if students were involved, the responsibility lay on school authorities to do something about it, even though it was occurring after regular school hours. If outside hoodlums were to blame for the trouble, those persons should be deemed persona non grata at school athletic events, which could be enforced by the police. It finds that some schools were doing an acceptable job of control, while in others, discipline was a problem.
While high spirits at athletic contests were normal, fights, threatening of officials and mobbing of players, was not, and the public's patience was wearing thin on the matter. It suggests that another outbreak of violence would bode ill for the future of interscholastic athletics in the county.
"White House Talks: Some Reminders" tells of Britain and the U.S. remaining divided on the issues of trade with, recognition of and U.N. membership for Communist China, following the talks between the President and Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Nor had there been any significant steps undertaken to lessen the threat of war in the Middle East.
But, it finds, the conference had enabled the two leaders and foreign secretaries to explain to one another why they differed on those matters, while striving to make their policies serve the same ends, though not the same. For instance, Britain would not support admission of Communist China to the U.N. as long as the U.S. resisted it, despite having recognized Communist China diplomatically in 1949. The U.S. would not withdraw its embargo on trade with Communist China, but would consider relaxing of trade restrictions which could bolster the British economy. While minor, those concessions did stop a policy drift between the two nations which had accentuated their differences.
It finds the second notable achievement of the conference to have been the joint closing declaration which warned Communist China against "aggressive expansion" and identified Russia as a promoter of war in the Middle East. The statement had not specified joint steps to keep the peace, but did promise concerted planning toward that end, cautioning neutral nations of the danger involved in dealing with the Soviets.
It concludes that the conference had served to remind the U.S. and Britain of their mutual responsibilities to world freedom and to remind the world that the two nations intended to take those responsibilities seriously.
"The Language That Separates Us" tells of Prime Minister Eden having fielded questions from U.S. newsmen which he found "unintelligible", finding it not surprising as the press had been speaking Americanese, which increasingly diverged from the Queen's English. It reminds that George Bernard Shaw had once quipped that "England and America are two countries separated by the same language."
It questions what could be done when Americans insisted on wearing "suspenders" while the British wore "braces". Railroad tracks in England were "metals"; a freight car, a "goods wagon"; an automobile hood, a "bonnet"; a battery, an "accumulator"; a trillion, "a billion"; a truck, a "lorry", and so on down a lengthy list of such variations.
H. L. Mencken had contended that the American language of the present was more honestly English than the language of the mother country, that it retained the character of the Elizabethan tongue and had not succumbed to the "policing that ironed out Standard English in the 17th and 18th centuries."
It suggests that the British would not devise anything so daring as "rubber-neck", "ticket scalper", "lame duck", "pork barrel legislation", "bootlegger" or "steamroller", all being Americanisms. It attributes it to the pioneer spirit when elegance in speech had been naturally disdained, allowing for the coinage of such words as "backwoods", "hoe-cake", "popcorn", "landslide", "half-breed", "mossback", "crazyquilt" and "stamping-ground".
It concludes that the English could produce a dependable cup of tea, but for linguistic resourcefulness and derring-do, Americans were the masters. "Do you dig us, Sir Anthony?"
"A. A. Milne: The Toys Still Speak" tells of Mr. Milne, who had died in England the prior Tuesday, having written plays, novels and essays, but his popularity having derived from his light verse and the characters he had developed in Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore, the donkey who had existed first in the mind of Mr. Milne's son, Christopher Robin, before entering the minds of generations who read his books.
Others of his creation included James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, who: "Took great/ Care of his Mother/ Though he was only three./ James James/ Said to his mother,/ 'Mother,' he said, said he:/ 'You must never go down to the/ end of the town,/ If you don't go down with me.'"
The Furry (stuffed) Bear had said: "If I were a bear,/ And a big bear, too,/ I shouldn't care much/ If it froze or snew."
It indicates that Christopher Robin Milne had grown up, had been wounded in Italy in World War II and married in 1948, but his father, nevertheless, had preserved his stuffed toys and provided them tongues with which to speak to all children who could understand what toys said.
A piece by J. Van Chandler, from The Rotarian, titled "Boys, BB Guns and Birds", tells of one of his friends who lived in a small Texas town having loved birds and being disturbed by the air guns of boys driving the birds away, such that one day he held a picnic for the boys in the middle of his bird sanctuary, learning the name of each boy, and as a bird flew nearby, would use a name of one of the boys to call it, explaining that he had named the bird after that boy. From that point forward, not only was the safety of the birds around his home secured, but also those within the entire community, that as soon as any new boy came into the gang, he was taken immediately to his friend to have a bird named after him.
But if the boy's name happened to be Robin, for instance, how would that work without appearing disingenuous?
Drew Pearson tells of the moral standards of the Senate having sunk, as it was not only unlikely that any Senator would invoke Rule 12 and refrain from voting on the natural gas bill based on personal self-interest in the outcome, the same was true also of the sugar bill. Senators from Florida, Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arkansas, were reported to have financial interests in gas-oil lands or gas-oil companies, but there was no indication that they were planning to abstain in the voting on the bill to deregulate natural gas. The debate on the sugar bill, which would ensue that on the gas bill, would likewise infringe Rule 12, as Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana owned four acres of prime sugar land which he had purchased from a sugar company in Louisiana at a fraction of its actual worth, a price at which the company had refused to sell to others, the fact that the land faced the Agricultural Experimental Station making it especially valuable. That company was actively engaged in lobbying for the sugar bill, which would increase domestic cane sugar quotas, the president of the company having testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee, chaired by Senator Ellender. The Senator had claimed that he had obtained the land at the cheap price because of forgoing oil rights. But the Senator's behavior during testimony on the sugar bill the previous summer told a different story, as he had not only pushed the bill personally but demanded that Congressman Harold Cooley of North Carolina, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, act on the sugar bill or the Senator would not act on the parity price support bill impacting other farm commodities. In addition, the Senator had invited two sugar lobbyists into the executive sessions of the Finance Committee to discuss the sugar bill, the same conduct which had been the grounds for censure of Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut in 1925.
Mr. Pearson finds that ethical standards of behavior in the Senate had been higher in those earlier times, as Senators were more honest and had more courage, with no one at present moving to censure Senator Ellender, though they were aware that he had invited the lobbyists to the executive session of the Finance Committee. Nor was there any Senator willing to challenge the right of Senators Robert Kerr of Oklahoma or Russell Long of Louisiana or others to vote on the natural gas bill despite their considerable investments in gas.
He concludes that it represented the depth to which the prestige of the Senate had sunk, noting that Senator Walter George of Georgia had helped to lead the censure vote against Senator Bingham.
Thomas L. Robinson, publisher of The News, discusses U.S. foreign policy in an address to Davidson College, indicating that he had served as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper 15 months earlier, flying to five countries in Western Europe and then to England and Scotland, concentrating on the capitals of the European allies, talking to government officials, military leaders and officials in U.S. embassies.
He recounts that in the recent State of the Union message to Congress by the President, he had defined the purpose of U.S. foreign policy as "the waging of peace, with as much resourcefulness, with as great a sense of dedication and urgency, as we have ever mustered in defense of our country in time of war." He indicates that the U.N. was only one method of waging that peace, that until the U.N. became a stronger organization and more cohesive, the nation had to act unilaterally in finding answers to many problems. The country had to maintain a strong military defense at enormous cost, while at the same time seeking ways to stabilize the peace in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It was a complex task, to avoid having either the Soviets or the Communist Chinese push the nation into a position from which there was no other course than war.
He indicates that the recent controversy over the article in Life, in which Secretary of State Dulles had described three occasions during the course of the Administration in which he claimed the country had been brought to the brink of war and had averted it, was a case in point, pointing out that the Secretary had traveled more than a quarter million miles on diplomatic missions directed toward maintenance of the peace in the face of the recurring crises. The three he had named included the threat of resumption of the war in Korea in June, 1953, the threat of the Communists to take the whole of Indo-China in April, 1954, and the designs of the Chinese Communists to conquer Formosa. (Drew Pearson, it is fair to point out, had recently contended in his column that on all three counts, the contentions of Mr. Dulles were faulty, as war still threatened in each context.)
He discusses the Bandung Conference in Indonesia and the Geneva summit conference of the previous July, where he believes there was a shift of emphasis such that the outlook for a durable peace had brightened, the optimism, however, having been short-lived.
In reviewing the most recent meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, he regards several things to have stood out, indicating that Francis Wilcox, Assistant Secretary of State, had described about three weeks earlier that at the meeting, the Soviet leaders had given the impression that they would like to maintain the appearance of cooperative relations, while not being willing to create the indispensable conditions for a secure peace. Mr. Robinson points out that the record of the previous few months appeared to suggest that the U.S. had to come to grips with a new flexibility on the part of the Soviets, that there was zigzagging not only in their conduct at the U.N., but also in the letter which Premier Bulganin had recently sent to the President, requesting a so-called "friendship" treaty, to which the President had replied courteously but firmly that a "change of spirit", and not merely "a stroke of the pen" on a bilateral pact, was needed to promote world peace. The President also viewed the pact proposed by the Russian Premier to be possibly counter-productive by creating the illusion that all was well in the relations between the two countries.
Mr. Robinson believes that the Soviets were merely trying to keep their people convinced that the Government was doing its best to promote peace and that the "imperialistic Americans" were the warmongers. He says that when he had been in Munich, he had studied the ridiculous radio responses made by the Russians to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, obtaining a clear impression of the diligence with which the Soviets distorted, confused and generally misinterpreted all of the earnest efforts of the U.S. to present a true picture of democracy. He asserts that their purpose was to divide the non-Communist world and gain some universal acceptance in the uncommitted areas to a conviction that only Russia was truly interested in improving the conditions of the underprivileged, indicating that the Soviets had sent their scientists to countries in Asia, Africa and South America to drive home that message.
He contends that for that reason, the Point Four program, initiated by the Truman Administration, had been accelerated such that the country was in direct competition with the Communists in that effort to win for democracy those nations such as India, before they fell prey to the Soviets trying to woo them. He urges reading The New Dimensions of Peace by Chester Bowles, former Ambassador to India under President Truman, a book he believes had presented, with incisive clarity and conviction, the challenge to U.S. foreign policy at present.
He declares it his own personal judgment that the country could not rely too heavily only on military answers to the problems facing it on the world stage, or too heavily on foreign economic aid, that diplomacy remained the foundation for constructive foreign relations. He indicates that by diplomacy, he meant understanding and getting along in a peaceful manner with people of an entirely different heritage, outlook and economic status, not just involving professional diplomats but also ordinary people who were willing to study the problems and aspirations of others abroad, including visiting those countries and mingling with the people in such a way that there was a feeling engendered that their problems were the problems of the U.S. as well.
He urges the students at Davidson to plan their careers in such a manner that it would allow "taking the light of our American democracy into some dark corner of a foreign land where through the inspiration of your personality you can brighten the life of less fortunate and less privileged people."
He tells of the free nations of the world having given to the Soviet Union and Communist China warnings that any armed aggression would be met by collective action, as it had been in Korea, that they had advised Russia that deterrent military forces were being strengthened and held in readiness to repulse any aggression, that NATO had warned the Soviets that if they attacked any one of the members, they would have to attack simultaneously all of the members. He says that 15 months earlier, he had visited NATO headquarters just outside Paris and was quite impressed with what he learned about the military plans for the defense of Europe, that the supreme allied commander, General Alfred Gruenther, and his Air Force aide, General Norstad, had explained to him in detail the plans for the integration of the land, sea and air forces of the 15 nations, convincing him that each of those nations was playing a major role in the defense of virtually all of the free countries of Western Europe, which he believes was the greatest deterrent to a threatened attack on Western Europe and on England or the Middle East. Yet, NATO had not prevented the attack by the Communists on South Korea in June, 1950.
But now, he assures, the political warning system on a global basis, with the exception of countries practicing neutralism, had been perfected, with mutual security treaties having been established between the U.S. and the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Nationalist China, plus the ANZUS Pact and SEATO. There was also the Balkan Alliance of Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, and the Baghdad Pact between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. All of those pacts represented "the inherent right of collective self-defense" as set forth in the U.N. Charter. He cautions that with 20 nations bordering the 20,000 miles of the Iron Curtain, it was impossible to have impregnable defenses to withstand a sudden, unexpected attack from Russia, but that the prospect of an immediate counter-attack was a deterrence.
He indicates that Secretary of State
Dulles, in a speech the prior December, had declared that such a
political warning system, coupled with "selective retaliatory
power" constituted a "firm foundation for peace".
(The text of the address is continued on page 9-A, juxtaposed to which is the kernel of the new American diplomacy to be exported abroad in years hence, and, in turn, to be imported from Hamburg, via Britain, repackaged and again exported, to encourage brotherly love and mutual self-interest in reciprocal preservation among the nations of the world, set to appear for the first time, but not the last, in Charlotte at the Carolina Theater, albeit unclear as to whether it was this afternoon and evening or the following Friday. Phone Mr. Robinson, personally, for clarification. You do not want to be caught waiting, like the hockey fans, without a show to see, munching on popcorn and dill pickles until 11:30 p.m., chewing on your ice without resolution of your conflicts—stuck in the fog-upon-Charlotte. He will be glad to hear that you also read his words. The short announcement also muffs the native state of the diplomat, that being Mississippi, not Louisiana, and also the program on which he was weekly appearing, that being the Dorsey brothers' "Stage Show"
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