The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 28, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., that the President had
bid farewell to Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and Canadian
Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent this date following a two day summit
conference at the Greenbrier Hotel, then departed for Washington by
special train, convinced that his experiment in armchair diplomacy
had been a great success. The ease and informality of the first North
American summit conference, free of the ceremonies of Washington,
apparently had set a preferred pattern for President Eisenhower's
future international conferences, such that he might hold a similar
talk with Indian Prime Minister Nehru at the same location in July,
according to officials, though no particular location had yet been
picked, and that another North American conference might also be held
in the same manner at some future date. The President had told both
heads of state that he hoped that they could do it again at some
point. When the President departed, about 200 townspeople and hotel
guests had applauded him as he entered his car, and at the railroad
station, he received a reception from a 413-member student body of
the local high school, which had turned out in whistling, cheering
excitement to see him off. The President bent down, grinning broadly,
waving to the students from his private railroad car as it moved down
the tracks back toward Washington. Originally, he had been scheduled
to fly but pending bad weather had forced cancellation of the flight.
The President of Mexico, meanwhile, utilized the President's plane to
fly back to Mexico City from Charleston, W. Va.—apparently pending
thunderstorms not being a problem for him. Or, did the President have
something else in mind…
In Moscow, it was reported that the Soviet Government had announced this date that Prime Minister Tage Erlander of neutral Sweden, as part of his trip to the Soviet Union, to start the following day with his arrival in Moscow, would tour Georgia and neighboring Armenia, where rioting had been reported as a result of the current Kremlin denunciation of the late Joseph Stalin, an indication that all had quieted down in the two southern republics and that the Soviet Government felt it had nothing to hide there. Reports of disorders in Georgia had chiefly involved Tiflis University, where students, according to the Tiflis newspaper in its March 24 edition, had been cutting classes at a high rate for more than a year and some had been guilty of "hooliganism", that is anti-social activity. The director of the University said in a telephone interview, however, that classes were continuing normally at the school, despite reports that a student parade on March 9 had featured banners and pictures of both Stalin and Lenin. The trip of Prime Minister Erlander was announced less than 12 hours after the Communist Party organ Pravda had published the first broad-scale Soviet newspaper denunciation of Stalin, saying that his drive for glory had taken "monstrous forms" which harmed the Communist cause.
The Administration this date passed word that it would submit new civil rights legislation to Congress, but then changed its mind without any official explanation. Justice Department officials were reported to be redrafting the language of the proposals such that the proposals would be delayed until after the Easter recess, from which members of Congress were slated to return on April 9. The proposed bills to be offered by the Department were reported to include creation by Congress of a Civil Rights Commission, as proposed in the President's State of the Union message the prior January. It was believed that the proposal would suggest that the group ought have subpoena powers which it would use in looking into all types of complaints of denial of civil rights, while another idea from the Justice Department was to have Congress create a new special division within the Department, to be headed by a new assistant attorney general, supervising all civil rights matters. Presently, there was a civil rights section within the criminal division. The Department was also reported to have discussed legislation which would permit any citizen to go into Federal court with a complaint against any person or organization which had purportedly denied or sought to deny the right of suffrage in any state.
This date was designated "National Deliverance Day of Prayer", a demonstration stemming from the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Organizers of the prayer day, led by a Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York, who was also a clergyman, had urged both whites and blacks to offer up prayers, which, according to Mr. Powell, would be "for the deliverance of all who suffer from persecution and … for the salvation of all who are afflicted with racial prejudice." Among the cities he listed for major observances were New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Galveston, Tex., and Columbus, O. He said that it was a movement, not an organization and explained that the Massachusetts Legislature had voted to halt work at noon to pray, that a proclamation by California Governor Goodwin Knight had designated the date as a day of prayer, and that backers of the prayer day represented ten million black churchgoers, with the meetings being interracial, interfaith and interdenominational. Sponsors had arranged to have a participant in the Montgomery boycott attend meetings in the major cities.
Donald Moysey, the New York regional IRS chief who organized and carried out the previous day tax raids on the Communist Party and its newspaper, the Daily Worker, in five cities across the nation, explained his actions this date to top Treasury officials. The raids had been a complete surprise to his bosses in Washington, according to a number of informed officials. The raids had padlocked the premises and equipment was seized at the offices. Mr. Moysey had held the position only for six weeks and had coordinated the nationwide raids through cooperation of other regional tax officials, reportedly putting the plan into effect the previous day without informing IRS commissioner Russell Harrington, the Treasury or other interested Government agencies, such as the FBI. Mr. Moysey's superiors demanded that he appear in Washington before them after they learned of the nationwide sweep via newspapers. He apparently claimed that the Communist Party had never filed an income tax return but should have done so whether or not it owed taxes, and that the Daily Worker had underpaid its taxes. It had been determined that Mr. Moysey had conceived the idea of the raids himself.
From Denver, it was reported that a wall of dust had enshrouded a six-state area of the West this date along an 800-mile path from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Waco, Tex., as the first severe windstorm of the year had sent grimy clouds to 20,000 feet and forced rerouting of some airline flights. Untold damage had been done to spring crops, grazing land and range animals, and in eastern Colorado alone, Federal agriculture officials estimated that up to 75 percent of the state's 3.4 million acres of winter wheat had been blown aloft. The area was the same as that inspected the previous year by Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson on a plane flight to the West and much of it was in the same desert wasteland area left by the Dust Bowl era of the 1930's.
In Callands, Va., police, aided by bloodhounds, early this date had captured asleep in a creekbed a berserk man who had held them off with gunfire for ten hours and then escaped into the darkness. The bloodhounds had found him a short time after being placed on the trail near a farm home from which the man had escaped, fleeing when a police armored car had smashed down the walls. He was sought for battering his aged father critically with a hammer and wounding four police officers in the ensuing flight. When the bloodhounds had discovered him, he started to reach for his deadly four-pound hammer and chain with which he had beaten his father, but two state troopers grabbed him and shackled his hands behind his back with double handcuffs. The man was a former mental hospital patient and became meek after capture, suffering from a wound to his right eye from shotgun pellets and a wound in his right leg. He was charged with two counts of attempted murder and three counts of malicious assault. The prosecutor said that he would attempt to obtain a court order to have the man undergo psychiatric examination. His father, 87, was taken to a hospital in Lynchburg the previous night with critical head injuries, including a fractured skull.
In Charlotte, it was determined that the two children who had reported to the County Police that a woman had approached a private lake on the previous Sunday afternoon with a baby in her arms and then returned to her truck without the baby and then sped off with another man driving, had made an unfounded report. The mystery had ended late the previous day when the man and woman, contacted by County Police, explained their visit to the lake, revealing that her remark about "killing" a baby might have been misinterpreted by the two children. She explained that her husband was a grading contractor and had been asked by the owner of the private lake to fix another pond near the lake and they had driven there Sunday to look the place over, accompanied by their small boy. Their truck had then become stuck on the road and after walking down to the lake and returning, the family attempted to move the truck by pushing it. The woman feared that the truck would roll backward and strike her son, at which point she had remarked to her husband, "You could have killed that baby." The two children had overheard the remark and had run to their grandmother's home and reported what they thought they had heard and seen, whereupon the grandmother reported the incident to a neighbor, who contacted the police. Thus, the dragging of the lake and the effort to drain it had all been for naught. They need to turn those two children onto their sides and poor some cod liver oil into their ears, to open them up to make them hear things more accurately, and then make them walk around with toothpicks holding open their eyelids for a few hours to teach them to see things clearly without blinking. In any event, we are glad that the poor little thing did not suffer by drowning in the lake. Poor thing…
In Pomona, Calif., 14 fourth-graders of St. Paul's Episcopal Day School participated in their Easter egg hunt in Lincoln Park, as two room mothers wrapped the candy eggs in paper so that they would not get dirty. Before the hunt, the children had their lunch, and while they were eating, squirrels had unwrapped 20 of the eggs and carried them off. The papers were left behind for the children. If you are participating in an Easter egg hunt in the fourth grade, you might want to stop and consider things a little more deeply. Maybe the squirrels were trying to impart that lesson.
On the editorial page, "Due Process Is Worth Preserving" finds that the nation could find consolation in the fact that the Administration was planning not to appeal to the Supreme Court a lower Federal court decision condemning the use of "secret informers, whisperers and talebearers" in loyalty proceedings.
The issue of whether an accused security risk had a constitutional right to confront his accusers had been at stake, with the Justice Department having previously contended against the right when involving informants because their names had to be maintained in secret in the interest of national security.
The newspaper had always contended that without due process of law, basic constitutional guarantees were violated and a fair trial or hearing denied.
It recounts that the Justice Department had simply not filed a petition for Supreme Court review by the deadline, after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had issued its decision in Parker v. Lester, holding that the Coast Guard's security program for maritime workers was unconstitutional because the workers were not told the sources of charges against them. Solicitor General Simon Sobeloff had described the ruling as having "obvious far-reaching implications for the various governmental security programs." He had requested and received a two-month extension for potentially filing a petition for review to the Supreme Court the previous January, with that extension having expired the prior Saturday without the filing of any petition.
It finds it doubtful that the Government could have won the appeal, as the case involved private employment, not Government jobs, with the appellate court having indicated that the liberty of the workers to follow their chosen employment was a right more clearly entitled to constitutional protection than the right of a government employee to obtain or retain a job.
It indicates that it would have preferred that the Supreme Court had settled the matter but also finds that the surrender of an unfair weapon by the Government was welcome, and that the Parker case would no doubt be cited in the future regarding all secret informers.
It finds that the decision of the Court of Appeals called to mind a statement of retired Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Learned Hand, speaking at the American Law Institute some six years earlier, saying: "My friends, will you not agree that any society which begins to be doubtful of itself; in which one man looks at another and says: 'He may be a traitor,'—in which that spirit has disappeared which says: 'I will not accept that, I will not believe that—I will demand proof. I will not say of my brother that he may be a traitor, but I will say, 'produce what you have.' I will judge it fairly, and if he is, he shall pay the penalty; but I will not take it on rumors; I will not take it on hearsay. I will remember that what has brought us up from savagery is a loyalty to truth, and truth cannot emerge unless it is subjected to the utmost scrutiny'—will you not agree that a society which has lost sight of that cannot survive?"
"A New Finger Will Point to the Sky" finds that the Charlotte skyline would be enriched by the 15-story building to be constructed for Wachovia Bank & Trust Co., set to be occupied within about 18 months. Based on the architect's drawings, it would be a dramatic departure from neo-Georgian style of so many other Wachovia structures, "an imaginative expression of the best in modern architecture." It would present an important symbol of the huge banking institution's expanding role in the New South.
As designed by A. G. Odell, Jr. & Associates of Charlotte, and Harrison & Abramovitz of New York, it harmonized with the style and character of other notably modern public buildings of postwar vintage and the Odell trademark. "And its functional fitness might delight Le Corbusier himself."
It finds that by 1958, the average man in the street would raise his eyes in Charlotte with added pleasure.
Not if you're a baby killer who puts your baby in the lake. Poor thing...
"Hitting the Trail with H. Krajewski" tells of Henry Krajewski having gladdened many hearts, running for president in a red, white and blue campaign car, full of conviction that Britain ought pay off its war debt by giving Canada to the U.S.
It indicates that some might view him as a crackpot, a fair impression, but that he might have a better idea than annexing Canada, such as annexing Texas.
He was looking for attention and talk which, if his vehicle wasn't mistaken for a mobile mailbox, he would get, wanting to give the American voter a choice between a peppy idea man and a President who seemingly held whistle-stop campaigns in disrepute while visiting the voter only via television.
It indicates that it was with Henry, maybe not on election day, but up until that time.
It had all been very well for Warren Harding to have campaigned from his front porch in Marion, O., in 1920, with the voter having viewed him as a homebody and elected him. But now, with the help of historians, the public knew better. Campaign advisers had wanted to keep Senator Harding at home to avoid having questions asked of him as he was "just the sort of damn fool that'll try to answer them."
Since the ad man had started packaging political personality, it finds that it was silly to argue any longer against electronic campaigns, but is glad that some men would not fit into that package and insist on letting the voter take a good look at the person, as did Henry. "And we'll bet a Landon button if anybody asks Henry how he's going to annex Canada, he'll tell 'em."
"She Found Some Symbols in Frost" relates of a woman who had found signs in the frost impacting the peach blooms, suggesting that peace was like a peach tree, as was brotherhood, that every time the blooms came, the frost came in one form or another, and there were blooms, but not much fruit.
Taking the form of an interrogation by Joe Friday, it had remarked: "You mean communism and hate are sort of frost-like too? Is that it?" After she responded that was it, the writer of the piece had said, "Yes ma'am, now what's next?" Her response was, "Well, don't you see, it's a mess." The woman then asked what the writer was going to do about it, to which the writer responded, "Nothing, leastwise no more than you're going to do about frost on the peaches."
She then said, "But April's going to save the peaches." The writer responded, "Yes and peace, too, if April ever comes."
Drew Pearson continues his previous two-day look at Brown & Root, suggests to IRS agents that if they wanted to get somewhere, they should not seek to tangle with a large corporation or a potent member of Congress, providing a record of Internal Revenue agents in Texas when they had sought to investigate the taxes of the biggest contracting firm in the South, Brown & Root, which had built the Corpus Christi Naval Air Base, the Marshall Dam, part of the present U.S. Naval and Air Force bases in Spain, and whose partners dominated the Texas Eastern Pipeline, the Algonquin Pipeline and Texas Eastern Production, an oil and gas company.
He indicates that on June 22, 1942, tax agents had first met in San Antonio, and on October 23, after many weeks of digging, had discovered evidence of a false profit distribution by a Brown & Root subsidiary, Victoria Gravel Co., in the form of fictitious lawyer's fees which an attorney used for contributions to the Senate campaign of Lyndon Johnson in 1941. He proceeds to provide a calendar of events in that investigation, largely redundant of what he had been indicating the prior two days, culminating in January, 1944, when agents were warned by another agent to be "extra tactful because of complaints which were being registered in Washington relative to investigation of political donations." On January 13, then-Congressman Johnson and Alvin Wirtz, an attorney for Brown & Root, had gone to see President Roosevelt, and on January 17, a new agent was sent to Dallas from Atlanta, and after a series of conferences, the Brown & Root tax assessment was scaled down from more than a million dollars plus a fraud penalty of more than $500,000 to a total of $372,000, and previous proposals for prosecution were dropped.
Dr. George L. Simpson, Jr., associate professor of sociology at UNC and a member of the staff of the Institute for Research in Social Science in Chapel Hill, in excerpts from a speech, suggests some of the choices which the South had to face in determining its future. He first states that few areas of the world had changed as much or as fast as had the South during the previous 20 years, as its people had moved toward the cities at a rate of 60 percent, with industrial employment increasing between 1939 and 1953 by nearly a million people, and manufacturing salaries and wages having increased by over 5.5 million dollars in that time. Agriculture had also changed on all fronts for the better, impacting every area of life.
He suggests that perhaps the greatest economic change had been in personal terms, with Southerners no longer living under an intolerable burden of personal debt, with new homes being built in the region, appliances being bought and children in unprecedented numbers attending college.
The South had come only part of the way toward its stated objective of achieving reasonable national equality in its economy and providing itself with adequate public and private social services. He finds the region presently at a critical time, with it needing to face squarely the realistic advantages of having started late toward industrial development, that its resources, both economic and social, were limited and so the region had to handle itself maturely and make hard choices. The region could fall backward or remain stationary.
Southern industrial development had not altered the national industrial picture and resources in the region were not compelling on a broad industrial basis. Hydroelectric power offered some further promise, but was not the attracting force it once had been. Wage differentials were becoming smaller vis-à-vis other regions, but many thousands of potential industrial workers were also leaving the region annually. The region's development over the previous 25 years had not increased its proportion of the national industrial machinery very much, as other regions had also been growing.
Personally, the average Southerner received less than the national average in per capita income, about three-fourths of the national average generally and two-thirds of the farm income, about three-fourths of the national average industrial wages.
During the period of development, farm communities had been altered considerably and new city communities had been created and expanded rapidly to accommodate the movement to the cities. With social change there was always necessary adjustment and concomitant problems, and the South had adjusted very well, compared to other rural areas of the world making such adjustments.
Blacks were attempting to change their place and participation in the life of the region, as there were many racial, cultural and religious groups, in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, also seeking to change their place and participation in the life of their societies. The race problem in the South, he finds, presented a challenge within a challenge, and it was necessary for the problem to be settled for at least the present and the next generation for either whites or blacks to move forward, that such a settlement needed to be somewhere between the present extremes, which he finds would be worked out in time, though no one knew how soon and at what expense to the South's efforts to move ahead.
He suggests that the greatest threat of continued and increased racial controversy in the South was to that individual leadership which the region needed desperately, as it could not depend on the discovery and exploitation of any compelling natural resource nor could it wait for plants to spread out from the industrial centers of the nation. What was required was great individual enterprise, "bold men in the financial institutions and enterprisers in industry and trade, who are willing to gamble on national and world markets."
He indicates that the South and never lacked for able leadership, but that a great part of it had been diverted into political and racial controversy. The generation born after World War I had great advantages over its predecessor generations and the effect of the cumulative changes in the region might well have given that generation a sense of the future as well as the past. The present tense situation could not be allowed to deprive the region of its potential leaders again.
He indicates that as Harry Golden of Charlotte, editor of the Carolina Israelite, had pointed out, the white Southern Protestant, for all of his faults, had borne within him the seeds of freedom, the most precious thing in the modern world. Yet change was inevitable in any culture and especially so in the modern world. The South would change and might change radically in certain respects and yet maintain not only an unmistakable identity, but also the basic values of democracy and freedom which at present were characteristics of the South.
Walter Lippmann discusses three proposed amendments to the Constitution presently pending in Congress, the old Bricker Amendment to limit the treaty-making powers of the President, one which he regards as potentially embarrassing to the President and not needed at all, the second being the revision of the electoral college, and the third being what happened if the President became disabled. He regards only the latter as requiring immediate action.
As to the electoral college, he indicates that while there might be ground for reform, the reformers could not agree on what that reform should be. The principal proposal put forward was that of Senators Price Daniel of Texas and Karl Mundt of South Dakota, proposing two options for the states, both of which they already had available to them, that the electoral votes would be awarded on a proportional basis to the popular vote received by the top three candidates, or that the electors would be chosen as Senators and Representatives in each state, with two electors determined by the statewide vote and the rest by Congressional districts, which some states had already used. Senator Mundt had also proposed, though there was nothing being said about it, the right to keep the general ticket system provided the state also elected their Representatives at large, rather than by districts.
Mr. Lippmann finds that the only thing that amendment would change would be to prohibit a state from electing its Representatives by districts and its electors on a general ticket, that if the state wanted to have a general ticket system for electors, it would, as in New Mexico and North Dakota at present, have to elect its Congressmen on a general ticket. He finds that the temptation to do that would be strong, especially in the smaller states, because with all of the electoral votes counted as a unit, the state had greater impact on the ultimate choice for the presidency.
He finds that whatever might be said of the proposed reforms, nothing could be said in favor of an amendment which would invite each state legislature to consider before each presidential election how it would have the popular vote in its state counted, though that was what the Daniel-Mundt Amendment really did, deciding nothing.
He concludes that Congress was not ready to propose a reform of the electoral system, for what was now before it was only an elaborate pretense, simply passing the buck to the 48 state legislatures.
Framed Edition
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