The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 3, 1956

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the U.S. and France appeared to be engaged in buck-passing regarding the proposed sale by France of 12 jet fighter planes to Israel, the issue being scheduled for discussion the following week at the State Department by Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., French Ambassador to the U.S. Maurice Couve De Murville, and British Ambassador to the U.S. Roger Makins. The three had planned to confer this date but had decided that the following week was more convenient. State Department officials were upset because they believed that the French Government was seeking to maneuver the U.S. into a position of approving or advocating the sale and French authorities appeared upset because they said privately that the U.S. wanted France to sell the planes but did not want to take responsibility for the sale. The issue was involved in the broader problem of sales of arms by the Western powers to the Middle East under the joint American-British-French 1950 declaration calling for maintenance of the balance of power in the region between Israel and the Arab states. Many weeks earlier, Israel had asked about buying the 12 jets from France, manufactured under a U.S. contract for NATO forces. State Department officials would only say that France had raised with the U.S. the question of whether the 12 planes might be withdrawn from scheduled delivery to NATO under the U.S. contract, and the U.S. had agreed. French authorities in Washington, however, had construed the U.S. approval as covering not only diversion of the aircraft from NATO delivery but also their sale and delivery to Israel. The U.S. position was that the sale to Israel technically had not been approved because France had not raised the question and that what France did with the planes was its own business. There were strong pro-Israeli influences bearing on the French Government, as on the U.S. Government, while at the same time, France had been seeking since the previous fall to improve its relations with Egypt, to obtain Egyptian cooperation in reducing trouble with the Arabs in French sections of North Africa.

The White House said this date that the North American Summit Conference would be held at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., between March 26 and 28, with the President having received acceptances from President Adolfo Ruis Cortines of Mexico and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent of Canada that they confer with the President regarding mutual problems.

Adlai Stevenson, campaigning in Minneapolis, had stressed the previous day the President's health, saying that the temporary special arrangements made to accommodate his illness and convalescence had to be made permanent, while Mr. Stevenson's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Senator Estes Kefauver, campaigning in New Hampshire, criticized the Administration for what he called its "methods of propaganda, procrastination and postponement" both at home and abroad, waiting until the final year of his term to fulfill campaign promises made in 1952. Senator Kefauver's name had been entered the previous day in New Jersey's April 17 primary. On the Republican side, a former appointments secretary to the President had flown to California to provide a paper giving the President's signed authorization to enter his name in that state's June 5 primary, where a 70-member Eisenhower delegation was presently being chosen. Meanwhile, some leaders of a group called "For America", led by retired Brig. General Bonner Fellers, set in motion a plan designed to throw the election into the House the coming November, to elect a "conservative" to the Presidency, General Fellers stating that his group did not consider the President a conservative. In Charleston, S.C., retired General Mark Clark, president of The Citadel, said it smelled to him like a "stop Ike" movement and he wanted no part of it, though he had been listed as a member of the policy committee for the organization. In Dallas, H. Dan Smoot, the co-chairman of the group, said that the new plan was "not necessarily a stop-Ike" drive. In South Carolina, former Governor James Byrnes said that a new Southern states' rights party might be formed if Democrats and Republicans pledged "drastic action against the Southern states" in efforts to court minority votes. He said that he would not be a delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.

In New York, Autherine Lucy, the first black student admitted to the University of Alabama, via Federal court orders, stated that she would return to the South within the following week and renew her fight to re-enter the University, whose trustees had expelled her during the week because of allegations made in her complaint to the U.S. District Court after she had been suspended for her own safety on February 6, subsequently amended to eliminate the allegations, that University officials had conspired with mobs to prevent her from attending classes. Ms. Lucy's lips trembled and her voice quavered as she read her statement, saying, "I cannot see any reason to abandon my sole purpose of obtaining an education within the meaning of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States." Following her suspension by the University, she had been ordered to be readmitted by U.S. District Court Judge H. Hobart Grooms the prior Wednesday, the expulsion having then taken place almost simultaneously on the same day. Ms. Lucy had accompanied NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall to New York on Thursday to obtain "rest, peace and quiet", with members of the press not being allowed to question her at a brief news conference. She said that she had been advised by her counsel that there were legal steps available to her to test the validity or invalidity of the expulsion action and had authorized them to take whatever steps necessary to achieve that purpose.

In Birmingham, Ala., three construction workers and a truck driver had filed a lawsuit for four million dollars the previous day, claiming that they had been falsely accused of being members of the mob harassing Ms. Lucy at the University, each separate suit asking for one million dollars in damages against the NAACP, three NAACP attorneys, Ms. Lucy, and Pollie Ann Hudson, a woman who had also initially sought admission to the University with Ms. Lucy but subsequently, for personal issues, decided not to pursue enrollment. The three NAACP attorneys named as defendants included lead counsel and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley of New York and Arthur D. Shores of Birmingham. All of the allegations came out of the charges contained in the contempt of court proceeding filed in Federal Court by Ms. Lucy on February 9, naming as part of the mob harassing her the three construction workers and a truck driver, Robert E. Chambliss of Birmingham—later known commonly as "Dynamite Bob" and convicted in state court in 1977 for murder in the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four young girls on a Sunday morning as they were quietly trying to prepare for church. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1985. (It should be noted parenthetically that on January 30, the eighth anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi, the Montgomery home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was bombed with dynamite set on the front porch while his wife and their young daughter were at home, though no one was injured. On February 2, another dynamite blast had hit the home of another minister who had been actively engaged in the Montgomery bus boycott leadership along with Dr. King, and the following September, a white minister also involved in the boycott effort, would have his home targeted by a dynamite blast, also in each case, no one being injured. The home of Mr. Shores, one of the named defendants in the 1956 civil case, would be bombed just ten days before the 1963 church bombing. A motel in which Dr. King was staying in Birmingham, just a block away from the 16th Street Church, would also be bombed in spring, 1963, the same night on which the home of Dr. King's brother would be bombed. Long after the death of Mr. Chambliss, two other individuals, Bobby Cherry and Thomas Blanton, were successfully prosecuted in state court by future Alabama Senator Doug Jones in 2001 and 2002 on four counts each of first-degree murder for participation in the 1963 church bombing, for which they were sentenced to life imprisonment.) Each of the four plaintiffs in the civil suit claimed that the charges made in the contempt action were "false and known to be false" and were the result of a conspiracy between the NAACP and the other named defendants.

In Tuscaloosa, Ala., a circuit judge set bond at $5,000 each for two black brothers indicted for beating a University of Alabama student in anger over the treatment of Ms. Lucy. The two brothers were being held in the county jail after being indicted for assault with intent to murder the 19-year old student. The police chief said that the brothers had told police officers that they had beaten the white student on February 14 to "get even with somebody for what they did to Miss Lucy." One of the brothers, according to officials, was AWOL from military service and the other was appealing a conviction for grand theft for which he had been sentenced to a year and a day in jail the prior October.

Senator James Eastland of Mississippi said this date that he would be an impartial chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and carry out his duties to the best of his ability. A vigorous foe of racial integration, the Senator had been chosen as chairman by voice vote of the Senate the previous day to take over the chairmanship vacated by the death recently of Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia. Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Herbert Lehman of New York challenged Senator Eastland's impartiality, Senator Lehman having said that Senator Eastland was "a symbol of racism in America, a symbol of defiance of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court." Senator Morse had said that he was "greatly concerned about some of the utterances" by Senator Eastland, particularly his assertions regarding public school integration and the ruling on it by the Supreme Court, having called the Court "irresponsible", "incompetent" and "indoctrinated and brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups." Senator John Stennis of Mississippi replied that Senator Eastland, in his speeches, had "counseled legal approaches, lawful proceedings and orderly conduct" in opposing Brown v. Board of Education. The Senate Democratic steering committee ignored the protests by the Americans for Democratic Action and the NAACP in approving without objection the appointment of Senator Eastland as chairman of the Committee, which oversaw civil rights legislation, among other issues. Following the vote, Clarence Mitchell, Washington director of the NAACP, said in a statement: "The Senate of the United States has just voted to put an accessory to murder and treason in its most powerful judicial position," accusing members of the body of "looking the other way when a mad dog is loose in the streets of justice." (Would the statement be recalled by Birmingham police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor in 1963, when he unleashed police dogs on young students protesting continued segregation in Birmingham?) Senator Eastland declined comment and said in an interview that he would retain his chairmanship of the Internal Security subcommittee, which devoted most of its time to investigations of alleged Communist infiltration in the country. He was also chairman of the Immigration subcommittee, but said that he had not determined whether he would step down from that position. He said that civil rights matters were handled by a subcommittee on constitutional rights, chaired by Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri.

Thirty Southern members of the House, all Democrats, asked the President to forbid use of a Federal auditorium for a national assembly on civil rights starting in Washington the following Sunday, set to last three days and expected to draw the representatives of about 50 religious, fraternal, labor and minority groups, sponsored by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, chaired by Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP. The House members stated that rules for use of the Interdepartmental Auditorium in the Labor Department excluded sponsored meetings, describing the prospective civil rights session as a "mass lobby meeting which is avowedly political in nature." They said in their appeal to the President that other Government officials had "evaded the issues and ignored existing regulations" governing use of that auditorium.

The Interstate Commerce Commission provided permission to the nation's railroads this date to increase by 6 percent the rates they charged for most freight they hauled across state lines, while on many farm commodities and some minerals, the rate increase was held under 6 percent. The same increases had been authorized for domestic water carriers.

In London, air and sea search continued this date for any possible survivors of a crash the previous night of a U.S. Air Force Globemaster, crashing at almost the same location where the same plane had narrowly escaped disaster a week earlier. It carried 17 persons when it went down in the North Atlantic off Iceland. A weather ship had reported finding the first bits of wreckage from the plane. It had left Iceland the previous day, bound for New York, with most of the 17 persons aboard being U.S. airmen en route from Iceland to Goose Bay, Labrador, and then to New York.

In Everett, Wash., a 40-man search party was seeking two missing F-89 jet interceptors and the four men aboard on the snowy, 6,820-foot Whitehorse Mountain near Darrington at dawn this date, where the planes were believed to have crashed into the side of the mountain.

In Wilmington, N.C., it was reported that the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad would transfer its general offices from Wilmington to either Charleston, S.C., Savannah or Jacksonville.

For those who have not yet learned to read, two young children from San Diego, a brother and sister, were receiving animal sensitivity training with a sea lion, after having placed a puppy's head inside the center of a wheel rim in Maine, where it was caught until extricated by two kind gentlemen using a power hacksaw.

On the editorial page, "Keep Recreation's Scales in Balance" suggests that the "new vision" of public recreation proposed by a study provided to the City Council the previous day was a bold blend of neglected necessities and ambitious luxuries. The noble aims of the survey, however, could not be achieved in one fell swoop, as recreation needs would have to be correlated with other great needs of the community.

Consideration also had to be given to new problems added by the Federal court holdings regarding racial segregation in recreational facilities.

Money was also scarce and the tax rate in the community was already high, and so recreational needs had to be gauged by the community's ability to pay for them without unnecessary hardship.

It finds that if the community's mental and physical health was to be preserved under the new economic and social conditions of a rapidly growing area, major emphasis had to be given to recreation, that while strides had already been made, more could be done, and the value of the report was in its overall view of the range of opportunity.

"Santee's Sin: Amateurism on Trial" tells of Wes Santee, America's controversial amateur track star, whose suspension by the Amateur Athletic Union for accepting exorbitant expense money had been a move to restore amateur sports to some semblance of respectability, unfortunately, a necessary step.

It finds the sympathetic utterances of Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas and some major sportswriters to have been long on wrath and short on reason. Mr. Santee had been the only American to come close to breaking the four-minute mile, but that feat had nothing to do with the merits of his case, as the evidence already accumulated was probably enough to bar him from participation in the 1956 Summer Olympics at Melbourne, just as Finland's Paavo Nurmi had been barred in 1932 for about the same reason, that beating Russia in track and field competition was not worth the corruption of amateur ideals.

A court injunction had allowed Mr. Santee to compete in a meet in Madison Square Garden this night. It finds he had already received every opportunity to clear himself but that the facts spoke for themselves, that he had received expense fees of $1,200, an outrageously large amount.

An AAU special committee had noted in a report the previous December that the sponsor who solicited participation of a star athlete and persuaded the person to do so by payment of exorbitant fees under the guise of expenses had to be held legally accountable with the athlete, and ought to be banished from the amateur athletic scene, with the sponsor as guilty as the athlete.

Sports Illustrated during the current week had published a letter to the editor which reached the heart of the problem, pointing to promoters who had robbed the people of a priceless common heritage, the ideal pursuit of sport, that those promoters who had provided the money to Mr. Santee were deliberately sabotaging for their own selfish purposes one of the Western world's finest ideals, amateur athletics.

The piece wholly agrees, says that the ideal of doing something for its own sake and for the fun of it, for the physical and spiritual good to be derived from it, was being lost, asks when it would be realized that such people were stealing the country blind.

"Well-Mixed Metaphors Are Scrumptious" wants to join the ongoing alliance to bring back mixed metaphors, with a pact having already apparently been signed between Sir Vincent Tewson of Britain and the Matrix Contrast Corp., the former having lamented the demise of the mixed metaphor recently and the corporation's Uncle Mat's Letter having echoed the concern by saying that mixed metaphors, when they were heard at present, went in one ear and out the other without so much as an objection, finding it enough to make a person turn over in their grave and toss caution to the wind.

It finds the latter statement eloquent and ascribes the fault to grammarians, who, it posits, soon would be insisting that every sentence be inspected before utterance by an impartial committee of doctors, all wearing glasses, beards and spotless white smocks, with each phrase hermetically sealed, unsullied by human hands. It finds that the metaphor, when competently blended, sent "a shock of vivifying gaiety into popular speech."

It offers as example the old-time politician who said: "Meanwhile the bureaucracy is spread-eagled on the horns of a rudderless dilemma, rushing hither, thither and yon, and leaving no stone unturned in a desperate effort to find green pastures in the valley of the moon."

It concludes that the grammarians had no soul, as the mixed metaphor could produce a sublime as well as absurd effect on the reader or listener. It provides as other examples: "The British lion will never pull in its horns," and "To take up arms against a sea of troubles," finding that if the latter were good enough for Shakespeare, it "is jake with us."

A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "The Literary Portrait of the South", tells of Herbert Ravenel Sass, writing in the Charleston News & Courier, asking how many Southerners realized that the blackening of the South's character in recent years had been mainly the work of Southern writers, quoting, for example, a description of South Carolina by Thomas Wolfe in his The Web and the Rock, published posthumously, Mr. Sass contending that it presented "the spectacle of the South slandering and chastising and humiliating itself in print." He contended that because Mr. Wolfe and writers like him were regarded as great literary artists and were Southerners, that which they had written about the South was accepted by the world as a just picture and interpretation of the region and its people.

The piece indicates that there was no doubt that among the South's foremost writers of the 20th Century, including, in addition to Mr. Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, Erskine Caldwell and others, there were scenes constructed and characters created which appeared to place the South and Southerners in a less than attractive light. But it finds that if Mr. Sass believed those writers had become world famous and enjoyed so much influence only because they had written bad things about the South, he might wish to consider the contention that for every book containing unpleasant descriptions of the region by Southerners, there were probably as many with unpleasant descriptions of the rest of the country by non-Southerners.

It wonders why descriptions of the ugliness of Georgia and Louisiana received so much prominence when the brutality of Chicago and New York appeared not to have much impact, suggesting that the Southern writers showed real people in real and meaningful situations, not just the ignorant and meaningless brutality presented by the Chicago naturalistic school.

It finds the description by Mr. Wolfe of a berserk black man shooting up the town in fictional Libya Hill in North Carolina to have contained more pity and terror than in a whole book of such occurrences in Chicago, as depicted in Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm. It explains the difference by the fact that the violence in the Chicago novel was not contrasted with order, did not arise from a background of order and meaning, stemmed from no absolute values and beliefs, whereas the passage from Mr. Wolfe had come out of a community of established habits and tangible loyalties, ideals and beliefs, thus dramatic in its power to shock.

It concludes that for every passage about South Carolina which Mr. Sass quoted, Mr. Wolfe wrote five about New York and Boston, but had been unable to imbue them with the same life and meaning as those depicted out of the South, "because in the sterile world of the metropolis he could find no such meaningfulness."

Drew Pearson indicates that the biggest backstage political hassle since the President had passed the word that he would run again had been regarding his running mate, initially having been reported in the column earlier, on February 3, before the announcement on February 29 to run again. Originally, there had been those who favored retention of Vice-President Nixon and those who opposed him, while now there appeared to be only those who opposed, other than the President, himself. But as long as he favored retention of Mr. Nixon on the ticket, he would remain.

The forces on the other side were led by General Lucius Clay, former commander of the U.S. forces in Germany and now head of Continental Can, joined by former New York Governor Thomas Dewey and former Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman, among the President's closest friends and sometimes called his New York brain trust. More recently, some members of the Cabinet who liked Mr. Nixon and still favored him personally, had turned against him politically, including Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, plus RNC chairman Leonard Hall. The latter had publicly stated emphatically that he believed Mr. Nixon should be retained, but, privately, all of them understood that in November, the public would be voting as much for the running mate as for the President, given his health issues. They were aware that Mr. Nixon had charm, skill, and trained television techniques, but were also cognizant of the fact that he had made a lot of enemies and that there was no middle course with him, that people either liked him or disliked him. Thus, the consensus among those who had put the heat on the President to run again was to oppose Mr. Nixon as his running mate.

He next tells of the President having definitely decided at one point not to run again, even prior to his heart attack, and had virtually excluded the possibility in the weeks following his attack, that his change of mind had occurred "by one of the greatest sales jobs ever accomplished in political history."

He might have amended that latter statement after the 1968 general election campaign.

A letter writer comments on the new one dollar national minimum wage for businesses operating in interstate commerce, finding pity for the employee of businesses operating only intrastate, whose employers had opposed every attempt to enact a state minimum wage law, defeating a 55-cent minimum wage in 1955. He says that there were over 50,000 workers in the state who earned less than 55 cents per hour and over 100,000 who earned less than 75 cents per hour. He indicates that the increase from 75 cents to one dollar at the Federal level was a realistic step for increasing consumer purchasing power for low income groups and urges the State General Assembly to become realistic, and Governor Hodges to draw up a bill for at least a 75-cent minimum wage for the 1957 Legislature or for any special session in the meantime.

A letter writer praises the editorial regarding the Park Road situation and finds its indication that problems could be worked out through cooperation to be apt, says that the community around Park Road was indebted to its neighbor, M. W. Peterson, for his adroit handling of the situation and to County commissioner Hardison for his cooperation, as well as that of the City Council.

A letter writer praises the Charlotte Woman's Club for its courage in publicly protesting the leniency shown the woman convicted of assaulting her step-daughter, who had died the previous Christmas Eve, saying that every mother in the city shared the opinion, especially those fortunate enough to have a three-year old of their own.

A letter writer suggests that the voters would not re-elect the President and that it would be unwise for the Republican delegates to the convention the following summer to nominate a man who could only perform a part-time job, given the importance of the office. He urges North Carolina Republican delegates to find someone else, says that despite his liking Ike, he would be on the fence if he were again nominated.

A letter writer finds both major political parties in a "headlong and reckless dash for two million Negro votes in Harlem", ready to try to outdo one another at the expense of 40 million Southerners. He says that those voters who had believed the President in his public statements concerning states rights and had, in consequence, voted for him in 1952, had been betrayed, that the President had obviously "succumbed to the fuzzy-minded fever of integration" and, in his opinion, "the current crop of cheap politicians will be long and well remembered for it."

A letter from the president of the State Automobile Association finds it too bad that most motorists could look at the statistics which showed that the state had jumped from 991 to 1,165 automobile accident fatalities the previous year and suffered an increase of 2,200 injuries and 4,500 accidents, and simply say that it was too bad, that they would have to do something about it. He suggests that they might take it more seriously if they realized that the economic loss from those accident increases represented 16.5 million dollars in 1955 more than in 1954, representing a per capita loss of $26.45 for every man, woman and child in the state. He urges the responsibility for cutting down the slaughter on the highways to be that of each individual motorist.

A letter writer from Monroe says that in 1953, the press in the state had failed to win its fight against governmental secrecy in Raleigh, while in 1955, the national press had failed to win its fight against governmental secrecy in Washington, both resulting from the people having refused to support the press. He finds it a violation of the First Amendment and that a principal reason why people were not supporting the press more was that the public was bewildered after viewing the peculiar attitude which many members of the press took toward the exposure of internal Communism. He writes at length of his opinions with regard to that attitude, defending Senator McCarthy against his "groundless" censure in late 1954, his fellow Senators having condemned him for exercise of free speech, and concluding that the people were refusing to follow a press which was incapable of policing itself while, in the meantime, the government grew more powerful and more secretive, finding it not a healthy situation.

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