Monday, March 5, 1956

The Charlotte News

Monday, March 5, 1956

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Jerusalem that a new Syrian-Israeli clash had brought war closer to the Middle East this date, after two Israeli policemen had been killed as the two sides exchanged fire on the shore of the Sea of Galilee the previous day, less than 48 hours after Jordan's King Hussein had fired British Lt. General John Bagot Glubb, the veteran Arab Legion chief since 1939. The Syrians had also captured two wounded policemen. The enraged Israelis had branded the incident "a wanton attack". Western diplomats expressed concern that the clash might set off a chain reaction at a time when tensions were already at their highest in the region since the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. They feared that Israel might use the incident to launch a preventive war while it still enjoyed military superiority. There was also concern that Arab nationalism, fueled by the firing of General Glubb, might cause the Arab states to go into action. Syria's Premier Said el Ghazzi had flown to Cairo with his defense minister and chief of staff and were planning to confer with Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser regarding the Egyptian-Syrian defense pact. El Ghazzi had said earlier that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, all linked by mutual defense pacts, would come to the aid of Jordan should Israel attack it. Meanwhile, Britain Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who visited New Delhi en route to the SEATO meeting in Karachi, had repeated Britain's proposal that Israel and Arab forces withdraw from Israel's frontier, recommending that the U.N. Palestine truce commission be increased to patrol the demilitarized zone and prevent incidents.

Britain recalled the remaining senior British officers in Jordan's Arab Legion this date, in retaliation for King Hussein's dismissal of General Glubb. Prime Minister Anthony Eden made the announcement in a tense session of Commons, amid mounting demands for a hardened attitude toward the Arabs. The Prime Minister stated "resentment" at the firing, as General Glubb had built the Arab Legion into one of the finest fighting forces in the Middle East. He said: "In our opinion, officers and executive commands cannot be asked to continue in positions of responsibility without authority. We have, therefore, asked that such officers should be relieved of their commands." He said that the active list of the British Army within the Legion included about 15 officers and that the future of those on contract with Jordan would be discussed with that Government. General Glubb had said on his arrival in London on Saturday after departing Jordan that there were about 50 British officers serving in the Legion under contract to the Jordanian Government.

Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said this date that the presidential campaign discussion of foreign policy might be shunted aside by public absorption with the President's health. The Senator had been highly critical recently of Secretary of State Dulles. He said that the important issue at present was whether the country was losing out to Russia in the undeclared areas of the world and that while there was discussion of the President's health and whether there was lasting prosperity, the country might be losing Asia to the Russians. He said that the Democrats would tell the people about what they thought were "blunder policies", but that how much attention they would obtain he did not know. Senator George Aiken of Vermont, also a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said that he did not believe the Democrats would attract much attention with criticism of the Administration's policies, saying that he believed the American people were convinced they would never become involved in a global war as long as President Eisenhower was in office, that Secretary Dulles had been correct in saying that Russia's past policies had failed and that the Soviets were presently trying to change direction. Senator Fulbright had called that evaluation of Moscow's moves by the Secretary "fantastic" and that by taking such an optimistic view of Russian actions, Secretary Dulles was making it more difficult to obtain Congressional approval of foreign economic aid.

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said in an interview on ABC television the previous day that he had accepted a campaign contribution from a member of the Keck family which controlled Superior Oil Co. of California, and did not think it should affect his membership on a special Senate committee planning a broad investigation of lobbying and campaign contributions, that he could name four or five Democrats who had received contributions from the same source. He said that if Mr. Keck liked the way he voted, he had a perfect right to give him money. The special investigating committee had been set up after Senator Francis Case of South Dakota had disclosed that he had rejected a $2,500 campaign fund contribution which had been traced back to Howard Keck, president of Superior Oil. The committee was now trying to determine whether the same lobbyist who had offered the contribution had also offered funds from the Keck family to Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, with the committee having heard conflicting testimony on the point the previous week. The apparent design of the contributions had been to influence voting on the recent natural gas deregulation bill which had passed both houses but was vetoed by the President based on the taint to its passage by the natural gas lobby money.

Ann Sawyer of The News reports that at least a two-day investigation into the Charlotte Welfare Department's role in the case of the death of the three-year old girl after her stepmother had brutally assaulted her on several occasions, would be conducted by the Board of County Commissioners, with newspaper reporters excluded, while four of the commissioners said they favored an open investigation. The Welfare Department had previously investigated the home and found no problem.

Julian Scheer of The News reports of a committee of 32 persons at Raleigh's White Memorial Presbyterian Church ready to give its answer to five eastern North Carolina communities the following day, and that one would be pleased while the others would be disappointed at the decision on the location of the Presbyterian Church's new four-year college. It would be a consolidation of Flora MacDonald, a four-year college for women at Red Springs, Presbyterian Junior College, a two-year college for men at Maxton, and Peace Junior College, a two-year college for women in Raleigh. It would cost about 5 million dollars and 5 years to set up the new campus and the consolidation would come after ten years of planning.

A seafood company employee of Winston-Salem disclosed this date that he had been subpoenaed to appear on March 13 before the HUAC subcommittee holding hearings in Charlotte for three days, starting March 12. The man told a reporter that he could not imagine why he was subpoenaed, but during the trial of North Carolina Communist Party leader Junius Scales on Smith Act charges the prior April, an undercover informant for the FBI had said that the man from Winston-Salem had attended a one-week school for "selected Communists" near Walnut Cove in August, 1952. The man declined to say what answers he might provide to questions by the Committee. Bet you didn't know that Walnut Cove was a seething hotbed of Commies. Mt. Airy is even worse. Gomer was the local leader, Wally's Garage being a front for a pumpkin exchange.

In Charlotte, youngsters, angry because they could no longer start the engine on a small bulldozer, were blamed this date for damaging the bulldozer, which belonged to a construction company and was being used on a job at Hawthorne Junior High School. Company workmen had recently learned that children during the night had been starting the bulldozer's motor and so the company installed a new type of switch to discourage the practice. The previous night, according to company officials, someone had poured dirt and water in the bulldozer's gas tank and had broken an oil pressure gauge on the instrument panel. Another bunch of Commies.

A man told County police this date that he had visited his place on the Catawba River during the weekend to go boating, only to find that thieves had stolen the boat and had also torn down the boat house, leaving only a pier. It is just like those Commies.

On the editorial page, "Extremists Must Be Answered Clearly" tells of an address by Judge Fred B. Helms to the Charlotte Civitan Club, which had brought the South's reaction to its desegregation dilemma into sharp focus, expressing the thoughts of a Southerner who assisted his state in seeking a different decision and disagreed with the one which was rendered in Brown v. Board of Education. It finds it to have been an honest evaluation of the South's position at present.

Judge Helms was disturbed by the anger, defiance, mounting violence, threats and preaching of the false doctrines of amalgamation, integration and nullification, but was more concerned about the absence of the influence of the majority of constructive, reasonable Southerners. He was fearful that "another catastrophe comparable to the tragic era following the Civil War is in the making," because men of good will and courage were silent. He urged that if the moderate was going to speak, that person should do so at present, that it would be the only way to counteract the violent extremists.

Governor Luther Hodges, whose moderation, it finds, had kept North Carolina relatively free of the dangerous tensions present in other states, was conscious of that need, and there was a strong indication that he would call a special session of the General Assembly. The Governor had assured that he disagreed with the Brown decision and that no child should be forced to attend a school of mixed races against the wishes of the parents or the child, but, it opines, those assurances had not been enough and he needed to make his solution concrete and readily grasped. It finds that his basic purpose was to conserve the state's institutions and the peace and good will between the races, that he was the state's best hope for achieving that purpose and that moderates had to rally around him.

"All That Literature and Riboflavin Too" indicates that the Daily Oklahoman was amazed that anyone should low rate America's culture quotient, stating, "With a view to the possible transmission of acquired characteristics it's been suggested that future generations may arrive at birth with television antennas growing out of their heads and power brakes attached to their ankles." It also sought to undermine the "widespread impression" that Americans were losing their taste for reading, stating that at present, the American people were buying more than 56 million newspapers per day, an estimated 58 million magazines every week and hundreds of millions of books each year, thus finding that it was hard to believe that people would be spending that much money on the printed word if they had no intention of trying to absorb it.

The piece indicates that it was not how much one read, but what one read, that the test was quality, not quantity. Reading 100 pages of True Confessions was not the same as poring over an equal number of pages in the Partisan Review, for example. Mickey Spillane was not the same as William Faulkner.

It indicates that there was nothing wrong with the quality of American writing, that while America had perhaps not given the world a James Joyce, a Marcel Proust or a William Butler Yeats, all of Europe acknowledged that the two decades between 1920 and 1940 had comprised what French critic Claude Magny called "the age of the American novel." It had included Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, changing the course of European fiction. W. H. Auden had said recently that American poetry was more vigorous and interesting than any other he had known, and Lewis Galantiere had said that in England, America's Edmund Wilson was considered to be the best of the living literary critics, while Lionel Trilling and the late Professor F. O. Matthiessen of Harvard were held in nearly equal regard.

It observes that many of America's finest writers had needed to look abroad for their greatest popularity and appreciation. At home, there was the much-heralded "mass culture", but too often it simply meant an absorption in watered-down culture, producing digests, serials, and writers whose sole ambition was to make the book clubs, Reader's Digest and the 25-cent reprints. It suggests that if the trend were to go on, some entrepreneur would no doubt print popular fiction in books made of a chocolate-flavored soybean derivative fortified with iron, niacin, thiamine and riboflavin, that when one got tired of reading it, one could simply eat it.

It indicates that the danger was that "mass culture" would encourage a general leveling of the arts in favor of the mass markets, that it had not yet occurred, as excellence had not been killed, even if appreciation of it was limited.

It concludes that if the Daily Oklahoman would provide figures on serious reading, it would "saddle up old Paint and silently ride away."

"Better the Toga Than This Nonsense" indicates that to its horror, it had learned that certain female fashion designers were urging wider use of perfume among men, claiming that it was not sissy, that in earlier times, gentlemen of the court sprayed themselves generously with flowery scents and wore ribbons.

It suggests that the thought of such had to send cold chills down the spines of many males, that powdered wigs, plumes, lacy blouses, ruffles and pantaloons had also once been the fashion. Males had emerged from such fashions into modern times, still having to put up with neckties but having as the only concession to a hankering to smell good fragrant tobacco for the pipe or faintly scented aftershave lotion.

It indicates that for the modern male to use perfume would be unthinkable, that he would "sooner climb back into the celluloid collar, pin an ostrich feather on his headgear or revive the toga."

A piece from the Toledo Blade, titled "The Rose Tattooer", indicates that recently a defense official in Washington had suggested that every American should have his or her blood-type tattooed on their person so that in case of an atomic attack, they could be more readily provided medical aid.

A tattoo artist in Washington and his colleagues were approving of the suggestion, but some of them might become too approving and try to make a production out of what should be no more than a simple initial of the blood type. One Washington artist said that maybe they could enclose the blood type in a design or throw in a flag or perhaps a few flowers.

The piece suggests that it would take only the salesmanship of a few tattooers to start a national fad and so if the blood-type tattoo was ever required, it would not be surprising to find millions of Americans with the initial on their arms or chests in the center of the great seal of the United States, the mainsail of the USS Constitution, the sun setting below the Golden Gate Bridge, or a flower decked heart graced by a scroll reading "Mother".

Drew Pearson indicates that Republican Senators had met behind closed doors recently to settle the farm question and while it was supposed to have been a secret, Mr. Pearson had learned that they had left the question more unsettled than ever. Senator George Aiken, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, had not only left the question unsettled but had also left the meeting, walking out in a huff during an impassioned plea for high farm supports by Minnesota Senator Edward Thye. Both Senator Aiken and Senator Thye were raised on farms but were quite opposite in their views of farm legislation, with Senator Aiken, a fruit farmer, believing in Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson's flexible price supports, while Senator Thye, a chicken farmer, was just as adamant in favor of rigid 90 percent of parity payments. Senator Thye warned fellow Republicans that the plan of Mr. Benson would remain an issue with farmers for years to come and would be held against the Republicans. At that point, Senator Aiken left the room.

Earlier in the discussion, North Dakota Senator Milton Young warned against the Benson program, claiming that flexible price supports would have disastrous political repercussions for Republicans in the farm belt, a point on which South Dakota Senator Karl Mundt agreed. Senator Young urged fellow Republicans to desert the Administration and vote for the Democratic-sponsored high-parity farm bill, saying that the only thing the Senate could do to relieve the farmers in the current year would be to pass the 90 percent price supports. An objection was raised that the program would pile up surpluses, to which Senator Young pointed out that the Agriculture Department had acreage limitations on the basic crops and that there would be the same number of acres at 90 percent as under flexible supports.

Iowa Senator Bourke Hickenlooper noted that corn farmers habitually ignored acreage restrictions and dumped their excess corn on the open market, suggesting that the solution was not flexible supports but more realistic acreage allotments.

Michigan Senator Charles Potter asked whether the President would veto a high-support farm bill and Senate Minority Leader William Knowland suggested that it would depend on the language of the bill.

Mr. Pearson notes that instead of adopting a Republican policy on farm legislation, the Republican Senators had ended up in more disagreement than ever, agreeing only on the notion that the final farm bill would be a patchwork of amendments.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that those who were saying that the President was going to dump the Vice-President from the ticket were even more wrong than those who were saying that the President was far too fond of Mr. Nixon to tolerate any other vice-presidential nominee, that the real story of Mr. Nixon was much more complicated, that it was true that the President had a warm affection for him and that it was also true that, given the Vice-President's loyalty, the President would much prefer not to change the ticket. They conclude, therefore, that those who were betting that Mr. Nixon would again be the nominee were more than likely correct.

Yet, they acknowledge that the President had shown that he could be cold-blooded about members of his team who ceased to appear as assets. They suggest that President Truman would have fought to the end for any crony as close as Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott had been to President Eisenhower, and yet Mr. Talbott was fired for his conflict of interest. The President had also not rushed to the defense of Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby, when she got into trouble regarding distribution of the Salk vaccine. Thus, they conclude that the President's affection for the Vice-President was not a guarantee of his future.

They indicate that his real status was implied by the President's statement at a press conference that the choice of the vice-presidential nominee would have to await the Republican convention, while at the same time praising Mr. Nixon in the highest terms. The President thus, while appearing to want Mr. Nixon on the ticket again, was not foreclosing the possibility that he could change his mind.

There were obstacles ahead for Mr. Nixon before the convention, the first being that he was unpopular with the type of Republicans who would prefer a nominee such as Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts. Mr. Nixon had also not been faring well in the polls, though the Alsops indicate that they viewed the polls as virtually meaningless until the eve of the election. But politicians scared easily when polls appeared to show that a person was not a winner. They suggest that the polls alone could cause Mr. Nixon to be dropped from the ticket if they showed that an Eisenhower-Herter ticket was much stronger. But no one yet could determine how the voters would weigh the vice-presidential nominee given the President's health issues. (As we have suggested earlier, the little boys and girls of West Germany might have gotten a shock from an Eisenhower-Herter ticket. The East German Government would have only cited it for propaganda purposes.)

The Alsops indicate, however, that Mr. Nixon had a lot of assets on his side, that he had gotten in hot water when he began to sound too much like a partisan politician, but that partisanship was precisely why the President, who wanted to remain above politics, had delegated the political in-fighting to the Vice-President. They suggest that Mr. Nixon had more ability and judgment than his detractors supposed and would be capable of striking a less partisan stance in the ensuing six months if the President wanted him to do so. The great majority of Republican organizations outside the Eastern states preferred Mr. Nixon to any other nominee and there was no ready substitute for him on whom the President's personal advisers could easily unite.

Former New York Governor Thomas Dewey would prefer himself, as would Harold Stassen, and so on through the list of hopefuls, whose friends were similarly divided.

They conclude that Mr. Nixon, therefore, had the edge by being the incumbent Vice-President, unless the polls were to go too drastically against him or he made some serious mistakes in the ensuing six months.

A letter from two mothers who lived in Mecklenburg County indicates that they believed it was their duty to come to the defense of the deceased child after her stepmother was found guilty of assault on her by various means of cruel treatment, the child having died the previous Christmas Eve. They indicate that a visit with Wallace Kuralt, superintendent of the Welfare Department, had determined that a more thorough investigation of the home could have been made following the referral of the family by a doctor, and they request that a thorough evaluation of the social workers on the staff of the Department be made. They also indicate that had the neighbors who witnessed the atrocities reported their knowledge to the Department, it would have assured a thorough investigation. They also believe, as other letter writers, that a sentence of 2 to 4 years was grossly inadequate for the stepmother and want to know why an autopsy had not been performed to prove the cause of death of the three-year old girl.

A letter writer responds to the February 29 editorial regarding Park Road, praising the spirit of cooperation and compromise. She says that as a resident of Providence Road, she believed that the piece should have apprised of certain facts when comparing the controversies of the Park Road widening with that of the widening of Providence Road, which she puts forth regarding the widening of Providence Road, saying that the people who lived on the latter were not cantankerous and were not opposed to progress, even though it meant the loss of trees, shrubbery and so forth, that they were probably more conscious of the need for a wider road than anyone else and welcomed the idea of a reasonable extension, that what they objected to was the desire on the part of some to foist their ideas on the property owners and taxpayers with little regard for them, as well as the unjust exploitation by the city's newspapers.

The editors respond that the earlier comparison between Park Road and Providence Road had not been meant to imply orneriness of anyone but to express gratification at the swifter solution of the Park controversy.

A letter writer from Hamlet refers to a letter of February 25 in which the writer had said that the Civil War had settled the issue of slavery, "after the South had bucked against constitutional processes!" He says that slavery was "constitutional under the Constitution", and he goes on… He asks: "Did representatives of the Negro race use interposition on the question of segregation in schools?" He answers that they did and so the white people of the South had a right to interpose relative to the 1954 decision in Brown.

Whatever you say… Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star…...

A letter writer from Zirconia says in response to those who favored letting the people decide on integration, that if slavery had been put to the people to decide in the South, they would have voted in favor of the institution. She asks: "Was Christ not put to death by the voice of a 'worked up' people?" She indicates that the suffragettes were ridiculed and that most of their sisters were quite willing to lead a life of pots and pans with no voice in anything but pots and pans. "We may try to pull the forerunners of progress down to our level, but whether we do or not we can only delay man's destiny to be ultimately free without conditions."

A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that a previous letter writer had stated that the State Department had blundered in shipping tanks to Saudi Arabia. He indicates that it was not a blunder but the filling of a contractual obligation previously made in June, 1951, when the U.S. had signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia specifying that the Saudis would provide the U.S. the right to build airfields within their borders, provided the U.S. would allow them to purchase the necessary arms for their internal security. He says that unlike Russia, the U.S. did not view its treaties as mere scraps of paper and that the Government could not be expected to back down from such an agreement.

A letter from the chairman of Muscular Dystrophy of Mecklenburg County indicates that the local campaign in the county completed the previous November had reached its goal of $8,794 to combat the disease, and thanks the newspaper for helping publicize the campaign. He says that they had not reached the funding they had anticipated but had been successful in educating people to the deadliness of the disease.

A letter from the director of Distributive Education thanks the newspaper for its help in publicizing their program during Distributive Education Week, making it one of their most successful, receiving favorable comments from businessmen and educators.

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