The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 13, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that two North Carolina Congressmen had stated their belief in the Supreme Court and the need for unity in the face of international tensions as their reasons for not signing the so-called "Southern manifesto", presented before Congress the previous day by 19 Senators and 77 Representatives from eleven Southern states, advocating reversal of Brown v. Board of Education through lawful means. Republican Representative Charles Jonas, who had initially not signed the document, saying that he had only seen it the previous morning and had not had a chance to read it, added his name to it this date. Two Democratic Congressmen, however, Thurmond Chatham and Charles Deane, had refused to sign. Mr. Chatham explained this date his reasons for not signing: "I've been raised to believe that the Supreme Court is the final law of the land. When this decision [in Brown] came out, I said if they give us some time, with fairness and good will on all sides, we could work it out. I feel this resolution may do more harm than good. There is too much passion and prejudice and this will fan that." Mr. Deane, explaining his decision not to sign, said: "In connection with the ability of our people to live together as Americans and as fellow human beings and with reference to the question of concern that now exists, I've tried to reach a God-guided decision on this matter. All persons, particularly we of the United States, need to work out our lives together. There is a solution to all our problems. It is not who is right but ultimately what is right. It is my opinion that one group opposing another will not bring the answer. Instead religious, educational, political and lay leaders should sit down together and in absolute honesty approach the question with understanding minds, seeking what is right. We must approach this question in the remembrance that the hope of humanity may rest on how we decide. We might also remember our government's position in world affairs involving this global struggle with communism for the minds and wills of men. The main question we face: How can we in America live a quality of life that can win any nation in the world to a God-led freedom and just society. The serious warlike actions now taking place in Asia, the Middle East and Africa could involve our own military commitments and our young men. As a member of the Appropriations Committee of the House for national defense, I have first-hand knowledge of the critical international situation and urgent military needs of our country. These facts convince me that America faces the greatest test in her history. We must find a basis for unity and understanding among our people because in modern warfare men and nations are out-thought before they are out-fought."
In Atlanta, Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin said this date that he had offered to "personally guarantee" the education of Leonard R. Wilson, 20, the pro-segregation sophomore who had been expelled by the University of Alabama the previous day for his part in demonstrating in early February against the admission of the first black student to that University, Autherine Lucy, and for making "unwarranted and outrageous" public statements the previous week before a white Citizens Council in Birmingham, which had attacked University officials, including the president, and its Board of Trustees. Governor Griffin had been targeted by a student demonstration in December after having proposed to the State University system that it preclude any member institution from participating in college football bowl games if an opponent had a black member of their team, aimed at Georgia Tech, which was slated to play the University of Pittsburgh, with one black player on its squad, in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day, with the system having declined the invitation to impose such a restraint and Georgia Tech students having taken considerable umbrage at the suggestion, hanging and burning the Governor in effigy throughout Atlanta. He said that he was "sorry to see the University of Alabama expel Wilson." He added that he did not condone the mob violence at the University and was neither condoning nor criticizing the action of University officials in making the expulsion. He said, however, that it was a free country and that Mr. Wilson was for segregation as was Governor Griffin and that he wanted him to know that he had friends. He said that his offer was to guarantee young Mr. Wilson's education in any institution of his choice, saying he believed the people of Alabama would educate him. He commented that when the Georgia Tech students had "rioted at the [Governor's] mansion", nothing much had been said about it. (The news had only made most of the nation's newspapers.)
Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson said this date, in a speech prepared for presentation to the National Press Club, that the "real fundamental" in the world at present was American "capability of inflicting vast destruction" on any aggressor in the world, a capability which could not be thwarted, that the U.S. was "sure to surpass its potential enemies" in some aspects of missile development, but that "from time to time they will surpass us in other individual respects." He said that U.S. retaliatory force could be applied "regardless of a massive surprise attack on our country and regardless of defensive maneuvers of the aggressor." In an apparent reference to current Democratic criticism of the Administration's defense program and claims that the Soviets were ahead in new weaponry, Mr. Wilson said, "No recent development and no foreseeable development will basically change" U.S. ability to strike back decisively. He also argued against those, such as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who wanted to give the Air Force more money during the current year to purchase bombers and develop missiles, Senator Russell having suggested adding 1.5 billion dollars to the defense budget for those purposes, Mr. Wilson indicating, without mentioning names, that there did not appear to be any need to increase significantly the defense budget above the figures currently before Congress. He said that attempts to make plane-for-plane and like comparisons of U.S. and Russian military strength failed to take into account the differences between Soviet and American requirements.
Vice-President Nixon this date said, according to RNC chairman Leonard Hall, that the President's statement at his press conference the prior week, short of an endorsement of the Vice-President to continue on the ticket in the upcoming campaign, leaving it to the Vice-President to make his own decision in that regard, was "exactly right". Mr. Hall made the statement to reporters at the White House, following a half hour conference with the President the previous day, saying that Mr. Nixon had told him that "a couple of times". He said that it was his assumption that the ticket would include both the President and the Vice-President, indicating that he believed the Republican organization rated Mr. Nixon very highly. He said the purpose of his meeting with the President had been a general report on operations, including party financing. Mr. Nixon might have a few suggestions on that, including the establishment of a Committee to Re-Elect the President.
In Amman, Jordan, it was reported that Jordan had accused Israeli forces this date of attacking a Jordanian border village, killing a 70-year old woman and injuring three members of the Jordan national guard. A Jordanian delegate to the U.N. Mixed Armistice Commission claimed that the attack had been made the previous day on the village of Bartha, which straddled the boundary between Jordan and Israel.
In New York, Emil Rieve, 64, president of the Textile Workers Union since its founding in 1939, announced that he would retire for the sake of his health and would not seek re-election at the union's national convention in Washington the following May. He said in a letter to union locals that he would retain his vice-presidency in the AFL-CIO.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of the second day of hearings in Charlotte before a HUAC subcommittee, with a 33-year old Winston-Salem fish dresser, William McGirt, Jr., having been stated by the subcommittee chairman, Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, as the top Communist in the state. Mr. McGirt had told the subcommittee that he believed in the Constitution and what it said, "without apology", but subcommittee counsel Richard Arens said that he was head of the Carolina District of the Communist Party. Mr. McGirt was asked to identify Charles Childs, the former FBI undercover agent who had testified the previous day, but had declined to do so. Mr. Childs had named Mr. McGirt the previous day as an alleged party member and a student at a Walnut Cove, N.C., Communist leadership training school, located near Winston-Salem. Mr. McGirt was confronted with photostatic copies of alleged party propaganda material, but declined to answer questions concerning it. Mr. Arens had noted that Mr. McGirt had, within the previous few days, issued a press release concerning the hearings to newspapers and had written a letter the prior November to the Greensboro Daily News, in both of which he had used the word "courage", and continually baited Mr. McGirt for his "courageous" answers to the subcommittee's questions, invoking the Fifth Amendment. Mr. Arens also identified a post office box in Winston-Salem as the "mail drop" for the Communist Party in North Carolina. Mr. Arens said that Warren Williams, a Winston-Salem sheet-metal worker with a PhD in European history from UNC and had enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1942 and served as a navigator on nine bombing missions during the war until 1944 when his B-24 was shot down on a mission over Austria and spent the last year of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp, was presently "one of the top Communist leaders" in the state. He declined to answer questions, but said he had never done anything disloyal to the country. (The implications appear to relate the current incarnation of HUAC back to its prewar underpinnings, when Congressman Martin Dies of Texas had been its chairman, investigating suspected left-wing "subversives" aplenty while largely leaving the fascist groups, the Asheville Silver Shirts of Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, the German-American Bund, the Klan and the like, suspiciously alone.) A third Winston-Salem man, Eugene Feldman, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin who worked as a sales clerk in a local meat market, was named by the subcommittee as having been sent to the state to "engage in organization and publicity" work for the party and as a former "director of agitation and propaganda" for the Communist Party in Memphis and in Alabama. Mr. Scheer comments that the testimony had been dull this date and failed to provide answers for the subcommittee, as four uncooperative witnesses were heard. Viola Brown, a black domestic worker at Winston-Salem Teachers College—now Winston-Salem State University—, also declined to answer questions put to her by the subcommittee. William Binkley, on whose farm at Walnut Cove the party had allegedly held its leadership training school four years earlier, had been called as the first witness during the morning, but a physician's statement saying that he was ill resulted in his being called during the afternoon session. Two other witnesses had also been called during the afternoon.
A separate story says that Mr. McGirt was a man of many parts, not only having been accused of being the state's top Communist by Mr. Walter, but that in his 33 years, he had, by his own testimony, been a shipbuilder in his native Wilmington, N.C., a gatekeeper at Chimney Rock, N.C., a library employee at UNC, a cafeteria server at the University in the Pine Room (where we only ate one time freshman year and concluded something had to be wrong, given the poor quality of the cuisine, and now, after all these years, we come to find it was a Commie operation all along, no wonder), a meat market employee in Winston-Salem and a fish dresser in the Winston City Market—which was probably more salutary than being a cross dresser at one of the churches a few blocks away. Mr. Arens had stated that among the Communist-front organizations to which he had belonged were the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, the American Peace Crusade, the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives to the Atlantic Pact, and the union local 22 of the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural and Allied Workers Union of America, expelled several years earlier from the CIO for its alleged Communist infiltration. He had graduated from Duke in 1943. He had also refused to say whether Mr. Arens was correct in his charges. He had laughed with his attorney, whom he said he had met in New York at a "social engagement" two years earlier. He maintained a smile almost constantly. He had invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege not to testify about 100 times, while Mr. Williams and Ms. Brown had invoked it 28 times and 30 times, respectively. When he had been challenged by Mr. Walter for "running away from something this morning" and by Mr. Arens, for "courageously hiding behind the Fifth Amendment", he had responded, "Is there anything wrong with using the Constitution of the United States, or do we abide by that still in this country?" The hearing room had been crowded this date, including Davidson College professor Harold Ford and some of his students, a Catholic nun and several servicemen, plus two witnesses who had been uncooperative the previous day, Bill Evans and John Myers.
Charlotte radio station WSOC was broadcasting the hearings fully each day between 10:00 a.m. and the lunch hour, and again in the afternoon, from 2:00 p.m. until recess. The hearings would continue for a third day the following day.
Charles Kuralt of The News quotes a reporter at the hearing as having stated, "If she's a Communist mouthpiece, she's the prettiest mouthpiece I've ever seen," in reference to Rhoda Laks, who sat as counsel for Mr. McGirt and several other witnesses appearing before the subcommittee this date. Mr. Arens had asked witness Nathaniel Bond the previous day whether it was not true that Ms. Laks had been "sent down here by the Communist Party in New York", but he had declined to answer. A reporter had asked Ms. Laks following the hearing, "Was the implication that you are a Communist true?" and she had responded, "The implication was consistent with the committee's general approach to truth." Mr. Kuralt reports that she was an attractive brunette who appeared as the "Girl Next Door", that she was a member of the New York City Bar Association, and was 28 years old. "She has a smile for reporters and parries their questions amiably." Her most consistent advice to witnesses was to refuse to answer the subcommittee's questions, giving that advice dozens of times to Mr. Bond, Bill Evans and Joseph Blake, and two other witnesses this date as well. She said that she was an old friend of Mr. McGirt. Mr. Kuralt finds her the closest thing to a "Mystery Woman" which the hearing had produced.
In Kings Mountain, N.C., clues were scarce this date in a daring robbery of $14,400 from a farmer's home, the robbers having escaped with the amount, all in $100 bills, silver dollars and diamond rings on Sunday while the couple who owned the farm were attending St. Matthew's Lutheran Church services. A deputy sheriff theorized that the crime had been well-timed, to coincide with the period when the owners were away for church. The burglars had apparently entered through a back door and then had used a sledgehammer and a heavy crowbar to open a safe wherein the loot was kept. The tools had been left on the scene. The farmer said that it perhaps had not been good practice to keep that much cash on the premises, but he needed it to handle sales of livestock and other things, and had just taken most of it from his business. The sheriff had called on the State Bureau of Investigation to help solve the crime.
Near Kings Mountain, three persons had been killed the previous night and four seriously injured when an automobile had collided with another carrying a group of persons from Alabama from a family gathering at Newport News, Va. One car had sideswiped a southbound car, in which no one had been injured, and then collided with a second car after the first car had crossed the center line. As both drivers had been killed, no charges were filed.
In Houston, the City had paid $75 for the votes of two persons on a City bond issue election, the only voters in a particular precinct, with the City having paid $42.50 in salaries for an election judge and three clerks to man the polling place, $22.50 to rent the voting machine, and $10 to rent the precinct site.
Not on the front page, the 25-team NCAA basketball tournament began the previous night, with A.C.C. champion and nationally second-ranked N.C. State losing to Canisius in four overtimes, 79 to 78 in the Eastern Regional, and Temple edging Holy Cross 74 to 72 in the same regional; Morehead State burying Marshall 107 to 92 in the Midwestern Regional and Wayne State beating DePaul 82-73, with Iowa and Kentucky having a first-round bye in that regional; and Seattle nipping Idaho State 68 to 66 in the Far West Regional, with Utah, UCLA and defending national champion and undefeated, number-one ranked, the University of San Francisco, all having first-round byes in that regional. Other first-round games would occur this night, with the University of Connecticut beating Manhattan 83 to 75 in the Eastern Regional, and Dartmouth edging West Virginia 61 to 59 in overtime in that regional; SMU nipping Texas Tech 68 to 67 in the Western Regional and Oklahoma City beating Memphis 97 to 81 in that regional, with Houston and Kansas State having byes in that regional. All of the four regional semifinals would take place the following Friday night and the finals on Saturday night, the national semifinals to take place in Evanston, Ill., on Thursday night, March 22, and the finals the following night in Evanston. Stay tuned, for the Bill Russell show...
On the editorial page, "It Was a Prize Package—But Empty" comments on the "Southern manifesto" which had been read before the Senate and House the previous day, rejecting the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and vowing to use lawful means to reverse it, signed by 19 Senators and 77 Representatives, notably excluding from its signatories Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee.
It finds that it offered nothing new or startling to the public, had merely catalogued well-worn, well-known principles, but had nevertheless been significant by avoiding the angry bluster and defiant bumptiousness of some Southern political leaders, by having been careful to emphasize that only "lawful means" should be used to challenge the decision, by appealing to the people of the South to avoid violence, and by the absence of any nonsense about "interposition" or "nullification". It had been more restrained than it might have been thanks to the efforts of such Senators as Sam Ervin of North Carolina and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who played an important part in its preparation.
It finds that its weakness had been all too obvious, recommending no specific "lawful means" of contesting Brown and maintaining segregation in the South's public schools. No generally agreeable plan had been proposed and no Congressional action had been hinted at by the signatories of the document, who, after all, had been in the minority of the membership. Furthermore, there was no hope that the Supreme Court, which had been unanimous in Brown, would reverse itself.
"The manifesto expresses the sentiments of its signers beautifully but it brings the South no closer to the solution of its basic problems."
As indicated at some length yesterday, it was, essentially, a meaningless document, completely unimportant in either understanding or interpreting history of the time or subsequently. It is best relegated to the dustbins. Stressing it, teaching it, does nothing but to provide it a significance it does not deserve and never did. To understand the positions of individual members of Congress, follow their rhetoric and voting records, through time, leaving them room for amelioration and change of their attitudes on issues, not freezing them into a category of "racist" or "segregationist" merely for having signed this pointless document. Several Governors of the Deep South states during this time and into the 1960's were far more powerful in encouraging grassroots segregationist efforts, leading to violence, than were any members of Congress. And there were also numerous Republican members who were at the time just as segregationist as many of the Southern Democratic signers, but did not sign because of party fealty and the desire to use the issue against Democrats generally in the 1956 election cycle.
"'We Just Don't Let It Happen'" quotes a distinguished Swedish visitor to the U.S. recently, after having been asked by an American city engineer what they did about slums in Sweden, responding, "We just don't let them happen."
It finds that it was too bad that Charlotte did not have the good sense to invoke such a simple system years earlier, but that something could still be done and was being done to prevent runaway urban blight in the future. The Charlotte Board of Realtors deserved much credit, having renewed its support of the city's housing law enforcement program the previous day, as part of Realtor Week. Later in the day, a municipal government specialist, Howard Evans, director of the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency's urban renewal service branch, had labeled Charlotte's building inspection and slum rehabilitation agencies "probably the most outstanding in the United States."
It indicates that urban blight could not be stopped only by government action, that it also took private enterprise, and so finds it noteworthy that the Board was engaged in fighting it in Charlotte. The teamwork was dependent for success on many factors, the dynamic of moral wrath, an aroused public opinion, good citizenship, personal pride in the home and neighborhood, and an enlightened self-interest. It finds that such was just a wordy way of expressing what the visitor from Sweden had said about urban blight in that country, that they did not let it happen.
"No Poke Bonnet for Maggie Truman" endorses Margaret Truman's choice for her husband, Clifton Daniel, Jr., as he was a North Carolinian educated at UNC and had gotten his start in journalism in North Carolina before becoming assistant to the foreign news editor at the New York Times. It finds the only blemish in the whole matter to have been a radio announcer's reference to Ms. Truman as having been "a determined spinster", finding the announcer to have exhibited a lot of nerve, akin to labeling the child "a hopeless old maid".
Ms. Truman was 32, but "right bouncy". She had been quoted by the New York Times recently as saying, "I certainly do not intend to be a spinster." It finds that whether determined or not, spinsterhood was nothing more than a state of mind, that some women, confirmed misogamists, were old maids at age 18, while others resisted the label until they were too old to care, that chronological age had little to do with the matter, as one was not a "determined spinster" until they were ready to throw up their hands in final despair, "take up poke bonnets and retire to the rocking chair."
It indicates that the Bureau of the Census had said that all was not lost even at age 50, as some 6.1 percent of American women who were single at that age finally got married, that the odds against marriage did not lengthen to 100 to 1 until age 65.
It concludes that it was never worried about Ms. Truman and besides, it was Leap Year.
"Southern Food: Another Waterloo" finds that "Bar-B-Q" was the Waterloo in the good fight against barbarization of food and language, that it had appeared in the signs along the road and now had triumphed in all restaurants, as "offensive in name as in substance." Roadside stands had grown up, with the proprietors boiling pork, dousing it with ketchup and dispensing it in greasy plates to hungry motorists wanting to taste a bit of the Old South.
It had eventuated in massive indigestion and suspicion by Yankee tourists that Southerners were trying to poison them, with publication of defensive essays explaining the virtues of genuine Southern barbecue.
But the damage had been irremediable, with barbecue having forever been tainted with suspicion by the short-order cult.
It wonders whether the same thing would happen to other delectable food, whether the substance of a watermelon would change if one called it a "wattermellon" or the taste of a tomato, by labeling it "tomater". It wonders who would want to purchase a "cantaloop" after gagging up the road on Bar-B-Q, with the same question applying to "peeches", "appuls", "korn", "graps", and "skupernons". It says it would rather go hungry than eat "fried chikken".
A piece from the Columbia State, titled "Prissy Precision", indicates that much merriment had been made of the English language as written or spoken, with some of the unsuccessful efforts of those not enlightened on the subject to fathom its mysteries often winding up risible.
Yet, it finds, when one came down to it, there were few whose diction consistently coincided with the pronunciations given by the dictionaries. Looking around almost anywhere, one was likely to see the word "exit" in large letters, the piece asking what it spelled, with the pronunciation around Columbia being usually "eggsit", while "exaggeration" seemed to be spelled "igzaguhrashun".
One reason given for poor spelling in parts of the country, in addition to the new sight-reading system, was the fact that almost all vowels were pronounced alike as "uh", being rolled into one unintelligible mutter such that words like "elimination" came out "uhlimuhnashun".
But it also indicates that it would not like to hear Southerners speak in clipped, prissily precise enunciations, after the manner of a New England teacher or professor of rhetoric. Overnight, the region would lose one of its better traditions, "one that no one could copy from us, no matter how much they might envy it—that soft, Southern accent."
Drew Pearson tells of Attorney General Herbert Brownell launching some crackdowns on members of Congress, all of whom were Democrats, that in the ensuing two months he planned to indict approximately eight members, and possibly more, for income tax evasion. The first of the cases had come to a head before a grand jury in Boston the previous week when Democratic Congressman Thomas Lane of Massachusetts had been indicted. Others on the Attorney General's list included two from the South, one from California and two from Pennsylvania. One of the Congressmen whom he was targeting was William Green of Philadelphia, boss of the Democratic machine in that city, which had been Republican-controlled almost since the time of the Civil War, but which had become Democratic during the previous five years. Mr. Green was the Democratic chairman for Philadelphia and was having his taxes reviewed with a fine-tooth comb, with tax agents having found that he had failed to report $1,200 obtained from the sale of a lot. Mr. Green had told Mr. Pearson that it was an honest oversight made by his bookkeeper.
Mr. Brownell had also cracked down on one of the most potent Democratic leaders of West Virginia, Homer Hanna, having indicted him the previous week, at a time when West Virginia Democrats were seeking to pick a successor to Senator Harley Kilgore, who had recently died, with Mr. Hanna having picked a lot of the Senators from that state in the past.
He indicates that when the Democrats controlled the executive branch, their tax administrators had been far more lenient, in fact too lenient. When the attention of tax commissioner Joe Nunan had been called to the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy had been found to be $3,000 off by Wisconsin income tax officials, Mr. Nunan had said that they would not bother a Senator who was only $3,000 off. He indicates that Mr. Nunan had eventually wound up in jail, and that Senator McCarthy had been given a pass on his taxes by Republican tax commissioner T. Coleman Andrews.
Former Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, who had been defeated in 1950 with the help of Senator McCarthy and his false ads, connecting through a composite photograph the Senator with Earl Browder, former American Communist Party leader, was preparing for a comeback, which Mr. Pearson believes he would not have much trouble making.
The FBI had picked up reports that both white and black youths in Alabama had been purchasing all of the switchblade knives they could lay their hands on.
One trouble with the Cabinet's Congressional relations was that the President had once casually remarked to Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson that he did not have to tell Congress everything, the latter having taken the advice literally, with the result that he had been telling Congress almost nothing. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington had been seeking for weeks to obtain concrete facts regarding guided missiles from Secretary Wilson, but the latter had evaded the effort. He had made one appearance behind closed doors before the Senate Armed Services Committee, but had been so condescending and evasive that both Democrats and Republicans had been grumbling since that time, with some of the stanchest Republican Senators having been irked.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the decay of Rome, in ancient times, having begun when the farm-citizens had ceased to be able to maintain themselves and their families on their small holdings, that in the course of scarcely more than a generation, the family-sized farms over great areas of Italy had been swept away, making way for vast, consolidated slave-operated, absentee-capitalist holdings, equivalent in those times to what were now called "industrialized farms".
The same social change in any nation in the past had invariably marked the beginning of an end, with the evidence of prosperity being present all around except on small farms. But when the small farms had gone, it had been as if the nation's healthy roots in native soil were stricken and withered, in the end, the nation suffering likewise. They suggest that such warnings from history needed to be recalled at present, for there would be no significant farm problem in the country were it not for the plight of the family-owned farms, as the large farms were prosperous. The larger farms, for instance, could produce cotton profitably at eight to nine cents per bale, selling it at 31 cents. But the people on the small farms were so lacking in prosperity that the nation was virtually beginning to be divided into two nations, the Alsops providing a single statistic which they believed told the story, that per capita farm income had declined to $860 per year, whereas the per capita income of non-farm Americans was at $1,922.
They posit that if the condition were to persist for very long, it could produce the result that all of the ambitious and able-bodied members of farm families would do what the Roman farmers had done, give up farming and seek better opportunities elsewhere. There were signs that such a movement was beginning, as increasing numbers of large farms were appearing in every agricultural state of the nation, while the number of family-sized farms was everywhere in decline, in some states, declining with alarming rapidity. The total number of farms in Iowa, for instance, was estimated to have dropped by more than 10 percent between 1950 and 1954. In that state, farmers called their hogs "the mortgage-lifters", but with pork down from more than $20 per hundredweight to a current price of $11.50 per hundredweight, a farmer whose hundred finished hogs might have brought $4,500 a year or so earlier, would now only fetch $2,300. Thus, they find, it was no wonder that there was an accelerated movement away from the farms in Iowa, as in other farm states.
Meanwhile, none of the farm-state legislators and lobbying groups appeared to have any prescription to remedy the situation. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had been correct in arguing that high, rigid farm supports were the kind of cure which only made the disease more dangerous in the end, causing vast surpluses of crops. They suggest that he had been courageous in fighting that prescription, and that the Democrats, who had favored rigid price supports, had not fought for them with real effort.
But when Undersecretary of Agriculture True D. Morse had said that small farms would have to go to the wall because large farms were more economically viable, he made Secretary Benson's claim of attachment to family-sized farms sound hollow, which aroused the small farmers against Mr. Benson.
They suggest that in the end, the real point would have to be recognized, that family-sized farms provided a great social value, which made a national investment to sustain independent farming a paying proposition for the long-term, and that when that time would come, a distinction would have to be made between the large operations having no claim for national support, and the family-sized operations, which still constituted the nation's "roots in the American soil, over-urbanized as we unfortunately are."
Marquis Childs indicates that American policy, or lack thereof, in the Middle East was rapidly approaching a stage of crisis, that the American approach to the bitter Arab-Israeli dispute was being re-examined, with the hope that a new and positive line could be taken. He observes that the present situation was resemblant to the sudden necessity for the U.S. to have accepted responsibility for Greece and Turkey in 1946, at the advent of the Truman Doctrine, when those two countries had previously been part of Britain's responsibility for maintaining order. The British had confronted the Truman Administration with the fact that dwindling British resources had made it no longer possible to carry that burden there, and the President had responded with his doctrine of military aid to those two countries to ward off Communist aggression.
While the same stage had not been reached yet in the Arab countries, the British were bringing increasing pressure on the U.S. to join the Baghdad Pact as an active partner, not merely as a helpful friend on the sidelines. An appeal to that effect had recently been made by British officials, with U.S. officials replying with the same answer as previously, that the objectives of the West would best be served if the U.S. continued to be a friendly observer ready to provide assistance when needed.
Mr. Childs finds another parallel with recent history which was even more disturbing, the absence of a clear-cut policy on South Korea, which had contributed to the crisis in mid-1950 when North Korean Communists had attacked in force, such that within a few days afterward, the U.S. was carrying the bulk of the war burden, which eventually had cost the lives of 33,629 Americans, plus 103,284 wounded.
The West, including Britain, France and the U.S., had reaffirmed the Tri-Partite Declaration of 1950, guaranteeing the borders of Egypt and Israel, a consequence of the talks the previous month between the President and Prime Minister Anthony Eden. What it could mean was that short of any constructive steps to bolster the capacity of Israel to resist or to try to bring the two sides into a standoff agreement, Western forces, including U.S. troops, eventually would need undertake to hold the desert borders between Israel and the Arab states, eventuating in a small version of the Korean War.
Both the President and Secretary of State Dulles had talked about the urgent need for the U.N. to act. Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Abba Eban, had recently asked Secretary Dulles how the U.N. could function in the event of aggression, in view of the veto power which Russia had promised the Arab states it would use in the Security Council. Mr. Dulles had replied that the veto would not deter the West from acting, that with the vote on the Council being 10 to 1 or even 8 to 3, the U.S. would indicate that there was overwhelming support of the members of the Council, such that the West would be compelled to act, that a Soviet veto would only be considered as a "mere legalism" which ought not stand in the way of the type of action to repel aggression for which the U.N. was created. Ambassador Eban, however, drew small consolation from that assurance, indicating that while the Council was debating, Israel would be overrun with the new weapons, including jet fighters and bombers, provided by the Communist bloc to Egypt.
American policymakers had been most disturbed regarding the increasingly undisguised determination of Egypt's Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser to force an Arab alliance to resist, not Israel, but the "Western imperialists", who were represented as using Israel as a pawn. The avowed purpose of a meeting recently in Cairo between President Shukri Kuwatly of Syria and King Saud of Saudi Arabia had been to determine strategy against Israel and to bring Jordan into the alliance. Cairo Radio had, in recent weeks, been increasingly virulent in its denunciations of the Western powers and in suggesting that the Soviets had no imperialist aims. That had been a shock, as the view had been cherished that Premier Nasser might talk tough, but would, as the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt had repeatedly insisted, be willing to discuss terms which the West could accept.
Mr. Childs indicates that what the new policy line eventually would be was far from clear, with the conviction still firmly held that to provide arms to Israel in any quantity would merely set off an arms race and hopelessly alienate the Arab states, which were now merely flirting with an alliance with Egypt. He finds that, meanwhile, U.S. policy remained on dead center, while at least there was a growing awareness that such was a dangerous place to be.
A letter writer, a local high school student, says that she daily rode the city buses and that recently, after boarding one, had found that the only vacant seat was that beside a middle-aged black woman, that she was tired and had sat down in that seat, but that after riding only a few blocks, the driver had come back to the woman next to her and told her she would have to move. The woman had stood and quietly deboarded the bus. She relates of another such incident when she had once sat beside a black person, when some teenager had quipped from the rear of the bus, "Whatsa matter with you, girl, you a yankee?" She says that she was not a Yankee, that she sang, "Hurrah, Hurrah, the Old North State, Forever" with the native patriotism of any North Carolinian, but that it irked her no end to have to put up with the narrow-minded folks of her own race. She was weary of the bickering, both pro and con, concerning segregation, that the courts had handed down the decision in Brown and it was time for it to be followed. She says that people constantly disagreed with her and even frequently called her ugly names for her views. "Although I am aware that closed minds, regarding the subject, are predominant here in the South, I hope that some day both races will be able to live in harmony. I for one will do my part."
A letter writer from New York, the executive vice-chairman of the National Scholarship Service & Fund for Negro Students, indicates that it had only just seen the editorial of January 3 about its Southern Project, "Dixie's Negro: A Wasted Resource?" expresses their gratification to have received such a favorable Southern reaction.
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