The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 11, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Parris Island, S.C., that six flag-draped coffins containing the bodies of the Marine recruits who had drowned during a forced march Sunday night had been placed in the Naval hospital at nearby Beaufort this date, with an honor guard posted over them. Military services for them would be conducted at the post chapel the following day. Meanwhile, a Marine court of inquiry continued its investigation into the deaths. About 20 of the survivors had been called to testify before the court the previous day and there was no word as to whether all of the others would be heard, but trial counsel said that he had no instructions to call everyone in the platoon. Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, who had led the platoon of 74 in the forced march into the tidal stream, had said the previous day that he had intended to "teach the platoon discipline", expressing sorrow at the result. Both General Randolph Pate, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and Maj. General Joseph Burger, the base commander at Parris Island, said that the march was unauthorized. Survivors of the march said that there was an hour of horror as their buddies had slipped and floundered, ultimately drowning, in the stream near the base.
Two scheduled witnesses before the Senate Investigations subcommittee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, had failed to show this date to testify in an investigation of alleged graft regarding the purchase of Army uniforms. Senator McClellan said that action would be taken by the subcommittee unless the missing witnesses provided good excuses for their nonappearance. Both were figures in the New York garment industry. The subcommittee had planned to ask them about $133,000 worth of bonds it contended were purchased in their names by a New York garment maker. The subcommittee contended that millions of dollars worth of bonds were bought by the garment maker using phony names. Chief counsel for the subcommittee, Robert F. Kennedy, had told the subcommittee that the two witnesses had responded to the subpoenas the previous day but may have misunderstood orders postponing their testimony until this morning, indicating that the orders had been given to a Washington lawyer whom the staff mistakenly believed was acting as the counsel for the two witnesses.
In Chicago, it was reported that the President had moved ahead of Adlai Stevenson this date in overall returns from the Illinois presidential primary, with Mr. Stevenson, former Governor of Illinois, being the only candidate appearing on the ballot for the Democratic primary, with Senator Estes Kefauver far behind in write-in votes. The President had received large gains in reports from downstate precincts, while Mr. Stevenson had a large margin in Cook County surrounding Chicago, a Democratic stronghold. The President had taken almost 55 percent of the vote in the 1952 presidential election in Illinois over Governor Stevenson. Returns from 8,797 of the state's 9,511 precincts showed that the President had 679,891 votes, to token opposition by Senate Minority Leader William Knowland of California and a third Republican candidate, while reports from 3,826 of the 4,511 downstate precincts had given the President 423,880 votes. The Democratic vote in 8,470 of 9,511 precincts had provided Mr. Stevenson with 671,237 votes to 26,306 write-in votes for Senator Kefauver. The President was expected to capture virtually all of the 50 Republican delegates to the convention, as well as ten delegates to be picked later in a state convention. The Democrats had also chosen 50 convention delegates with 23 going thus far to Mr. Stevenson and three to Senator Kefauver, with the others being uncommitted, plus 14 delegates to be selected later at a state convention. None of the delegates were bound by the outcome of the primary in Illinois.
In Birmingham, Ala., singer Nat King
Cole
In Fort Green, Fla., a Seaboard Air Line railroad passenger train had hit a gasoline transport truck this date and three of the train's coaches had burst into flames, killing two people in a large explosion which caused the engine to catch on fire. Several people had been burned badly, and ambulances were taking the injured to nearby hospitals.
Donald MacDonald of The News reports that a Charlotte woman had become the city's 10th traffic fatality of the year when her 1955 Thunderbird had slammed through a wooden barricade on Providence Road and struck a parked road grader shortly after midnight this date. The woman had received chest injuries and was dead when police arrived on the scene, appearing, according to the coroner, to have been dead for about an hour when police had been notified of the accident by passersby. The road was being widened and barricades and flares had been set up to alert motorists of the ongoing construction work. The car, a total loss, had traveled 179 feet after going through the barricade, colliding with the parked Caterpillar road grader. A small wire-haired terrier, which had survived the accident, had been in the car with the woman. There were no known witnesses to the accident.
Dick Young of The News reports that citizens who lived near the Charlotte Coliseum said that they had to check with the Auditorium-Coliseum management on the schedule of entertainment events so that they could plan social affairs in their own homes. A representative of the property owners along Independence Boulevard adjoining the facility said that the residents were asking for zoning reclassification of their properties, that because of the traffic and activities in connection with the events at the complex, they had difficulty getting in and out of their homes. The City Council and members of the City-County Planning Commission heard their petition for zoning reclassification in a joint session during the morning. They complained that heavy traffic, lights from moving cars, attendant noise and dust from the nearby parking lot, had combined to make their lives intolerable. An attorney presented petitions signed by 168 other citizens in opposition to the change, contending that the petitioners for the zoning reclassification were seeking that the citizens of the community, through their City Government, pay them damages resulting from operation of the Coliseum and Auditorium, that changing the classification in those two blocks would be like pulling the plug from an earthen dam and there would be no stopping the floodtide of business encroachment. He said it would also have an adverse effect on the Chantilly school on the south side of the boulevard, with an attorney for the City School Board appearing to ask for serious consideration of any business zoning classification in the vicinity of all city schools. He said that the Board always sought to locate schools in areas away from business districts and in the residential sections which a school sought to serve.
Emery Wister of The News reports of a storm having mixed the hard-dying winter with a strong young spring, entering the Carolinas this date, bringing some of the bad weather of both seasons, with snow, ranging up to nine inches, having fallen in the western part of the state the previous night and still coming down this date, while high winds and heavy rains had hit the coastal areas and Piedmont section. Snow had been reported in nine western counties during the morning but was not sticking to roads, and the State Highway Patrol reported that all highways were open. The snowfall had begun the previous night as rain but by early during the morning, nine inches had been reported on the ground at Mount Pisgah in western Buncombe County, while Mount Mitchell, the highest point in the state, had six inches. Waynesville, county seat of Haywood County, had reported five inches, and Canton had two inches, with 3.5 inches reported at the Asheville-Hendersonville airport and two inches at Weaverville, about 8 miles north of Asheville.
In Charlotte, the wind, blowing in gusts up to 40 mph, had caused some damage, knocking down a sign of a steel company and breaking a plate glass window in a shop, with several other signs having been blown down, according to County Police.
In Lexington, Ky., a deputy sheriff received $5,412 the previous day to pay his hospital and medical bills, saying that he had always believed in Santa Claus and now knew that he really existed. He was still recovering from critical injuries received in an automobile accident shortly before Christmas. For many years the deputy had played Santa for handicapped and shut-in children, and the money had been contributed by residents of the area.
In Monte Carlo, the Bishop of Monaco, who would marry Prince Rainier III and actress Grace Kelly on April 18, said this date that he did not expect them to "become speechless" during the religious ceremony but believed that the "ouis" to the vows would probably be a bit shaky, that if one or both of them did not get a little nervous, he would be surprised. He said he had married a lot of people and that many of them had trouble handling the part of the ceremony where the vows required affirmation, with the voices of some failing while others quavered in a high squeak, that it did matter who they were, that many had trouble. He said that he was very calm, and content to remain that way.
In Albuquerque, the firemen of the city were not joining other local males in growing beards for the city's 250th anniversary celebration during the summer, as the fire chief said that his men considered beards to be fire hazards.
On the editorial page, "Semper Fidelis Carried Too Far" suggests that discipline apparently was everything to the Marine Corps and that the tradition of Semper Fidelis was glorious, but that the Parris Island death march, revealed in news reports the previous day, had been an appalling distortion of the disciplinary requirements of a civilized society, that no tearful regrets or irrelevant discussions of Marine Corps history could explain away the death of the six young recruits who had been lost in a tidal stream after having been marched into it by their sergeant, as he said they needed discipline.
It indicates that training for war was grim and occasionally dangerous and that sometimes there were accidents with injuries and even death resulting, but the military establishment was obligated to take every reasonable precaution to protect the lives of the young recruits entrusted to their care, and it finds that not every reasonable precaution had been taken the prior Sunday night in the Parris Island incident, that it had not been necessary to run the risk of drowning recruits "to teach them discipline".
It also finds that responsibility for the incident could not be borne solely by Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, the leader of the platoon, who had made the unilateral decision to make the march. It also had to be shared by his superiors, by the entire Corps and by the system which permitted such "nonsense in the name of 'disciplinary training.'" It finds it the solemn duty of the upcoming board of inquiry which would investigate the drownings to consider all of those matters.
It also questions why the news of the tragedy had been withheld for two days if the Parris Island authorities, as they and Marine Corps commandant Randolph Pate claimed, had nothing to hide.
It finds that such incidents defeated the Government's efforts to create more attractive military services, as had been suggested by the President to Congress the previous day. The tragedy had given grim and unintended emphasis to one sentence in the message from the President: "The loss of trained personnel continues to be the most expensive and extravagantly disruptive obstacle to the strengthening of our armed forces today." It indicates that he was referring to the failure of trained military personnel to reenlist.
"The Schools: Years of Uncertainty—II" continues its look at the North Carolina schools as the special session of the Legislature to be called during the summer approached, to be concerned with the issue of desegregation. The State Advisory Committee on Education had issued its report the previous Thursday, recommending the special session so that the legislators could send to the voters for ratification two proposed amendments to the State Constitution to enable implementation of the primary recommendations by the Committee, that school systems be given the option of voting to abolish their public schools or to provide for grants to students of tuition money to attend private, nonsectarian schools. The Legislature would seek neither to defy nor obey the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education but would seek to circumvent it, requiring legal acrobatics.
No one knew whether it could be done, that it would have to await decision on the state's plan ultimately adopted. It looks at the "tuition grant" system, wondering whether it would pass constitutional muster when challenged. It suggests that the more state action there was in the concept, the less likely the Federal courts would approve of it. There would have to be proof that the private schools were not in fact public schools, being funded by public money. It questions who would operate the schools, a determination apparently awaiting implementation of the plan.
Following the Brown decision in 1954, the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill had explored the "tuition grant" concept, with the assistant director of the Institute, James Paul, concluding that it was far superior legally to a state system of "private" schools, but also finding it tangled up with unanswerable questions. He said that the state would have to abstain from passing legislation authorizing creation of private schools or authorizing a lease of public school property to private educational organizations, that each community would be left entirely on its own and that if the community voted to close its public schools, it would have to organize a school without benefit of state law or funding, with the state only paying a fixed sum as tuition for attendance of that school. The state could repeal the compulsory attendance law to further its separation from state action. Mr. Paul had concluded that such a setup might not be struck down. But it also would raise many questions, whether the state could be sure it would get its money's worth from the private schools, whether the schools would meet academic standards sufficient to enable children attending them to go to college and professional schools, who would organize and run the schools, how the classroom facilities would be provided, all of which could not be provided by the state but only by the communities which had voted to abolish their public schools.
It concludes that the Committee hoped that no community would ever face those questions, hoping that pupil assignment and voluntary segregation would keep the schools segregated and public, with the "tuition grant" plan proposed only as an escape hatch if those measures failed to work.
It indicates that the following day, it would examine the local pupil assignment plan.
"More of Eisenhower's Time Needed" finds that the President's retreat to Augusta, Ga., to play golf was politically clumsy, that at no time in the previous six months had more problems come to his desk and at no time during his term in office had there been so much confusion over such a wide variety of critical issues.
Earlier in the week, James Reston of the New York Times had said that the President was the "most popular politician since Franklin D. Roosevelt and can speak to the American people with more authority and persuasiveness than any other man alive." It finds that there was need for presidential influence and guidance on such issues as segregation, farm policy, the Middle East crisis, foreign aid, the highway construction program, health legislation and Social Security. Yet, the President had gone golfing.
It indicates that there was no disrespect intended in noting those things, but rather emphasis on how much the country depended on the President for leadership. When things had gone badly in the past, it had usually been when the President had been away from his desk and unable to run things directly, that when the trouble was foreign, it was usually while Secretary of State Dulles had been away. It was no secret that the Government's morale in Washington and its influence abroad had seriously declined since the President's heart attack of the prior September 24, after which the long absences had begun.
While the President worked while he was in Augusta, it was not quite the same as being in Washington, effectively directing the executive branch by remote control. The political implications of the long absences were obvious, already facing criticism from Democrats for not being a full-time President. It says it was more concerned, however, with the practical implications of the need for steady, aggressive leadership in an age of widespread indecision.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Sir Anthony's Mustache", tells of a special copyrighted radio dispatch from London indicating that Prime Minister Anthony Eden had never allowed his mustache to be touched by a barber who had cut his hair every two weeks for the previous 20 years.
It suggests that a vote of no-confidence could be borne by a prime minister every now and then, but one every two weeks for 20 years, without a single agreeable vote, could not, and so it finds that Mr. Eden ought relent to allow a little snippet here and there by his barber. It thinks that in that case his mustache would look none the worse and the barber would feel so much better.
Drew Pearson indicates that the previous week at his press conference, the President had shown signs of becoming extremely selective in answering the questions of reporters, as the lesser-known correspondents had made repeated attempts to obtain recognition, but that out of the 18 correspondents recognized, four had been from the New York Times, two from the New York Herald Tribune, two from the Chicago Daily News, and the others from the Associated Press, the United Press, CBS, NBC, Gannett Newspapers, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Cowles Publications, Reuters, the Sherman Democrat, the San Antonio Light, the Austin American, the Longview News & Journal, and Sarah McLendon of the El Paso Times, all of the latter publications in Texas. Of the 92 news column inches of the press conference transcript, a quarter of it had been devoted to questions from the New York Times, from which White House press secretary James Hagerty had entered into government service.
Yet it had been a question asked by Ms. McLendon which had received the big headlines the following day, she having been the only small town reporter who managed to obtain an answer from the President, despite having a hard time obtaining it. She had been trying to gain recognition from the start of the conference, but the President had not chosen her, once, when she sought his attention, having abruptly turned away to New York Times reporter James Reston, who had sat in a corner and was not noticeably making any effort to obtain the President's attention. But the persistent Ms. McLendon had persevered and toward the end of the conference, managed to put a question to the President, which he almost intuitively appeared to duck: "Would you order those Marines that were sent over to the Mediterranean and over in that area, would you order them to war without asking the Congress first?" The official transcript as released to the public by Mr. Hagerty had the notation at that point that there had been "laughter"—omitted from the final official version—, but the newsmen present at the conference had remembered no such laughter and some believed the word had been inserted as an attempt to belittle Ms. McLendon, despite it having been a most serious question she posed, and the President's reply having so indicated, saying that he got discouraged sometimes, obviously irritated. At that point, there was definitely no laughter and the transcript did not so indicate, as newsmen present saw how serious and irritated the President was.
Walter Lippmann addresses what he considers to be the fundamental question regarding U.S. and British policy toward the Middle East, that being whether and how the two Governments would come to grips with the fact that the Soviet Union now existed as a great power in international affairs of that region. The unanswered question was at the root of the hesitancy and differences between the U.S. and Britain.
The reason no firm decisions were being taken was that every decision involved the question of what the Soviets would do about it, with the U.S. not being in diplomatic contact with the Soviets regarding the region. The previous week, the U.S. had made two important moves in the Middle East, one having been to go to the U.N. and ask that the Security Council instruct Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to work on improvement of the Palestine armistice, thereby requiring the concurrence of the Soviets, which was finally obtained. Under pressure from the British, the U.S. had decided to send Loy Henderson, diplomatic officer, to the upcoming meeting of the members of the Baghdad Pact. The U.S. had given its approval to the Pact but had not joined the group and did not recognize the Soviet presence in the Middle East, the Pact being designed to exclude Soviet participation in that region.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that there were two different lines of policy being followed simultaneously, one being arms to induce the Soviets to concur in the maintenance of peace and eventually in the arrangement of a settlement, the line which the Administration wanted to follow, with the other, the Baghdad Pact and the 1950 Tripartite Declaration regarding Palestine, not recognizing the Soviet Union in dealing with the Palestine conflict or with the strategic and economic problems of the region.
He posits that the U.S. had to ask itself how long it could continue on those two incompatible lines of policy. There was a Moscow-Cairo axis which rested on the fact that the Soviets and Egyptians had a common interest, both wishing to overturn the policy of the Baghdad Pact and the Tripartite Declaration.
He asks whether the U.S. could expect to succeed both in the U.N. and at Baghdad and whether it could have collaboration at the U.N. and non-recognition and exclusion outside the U.N., that following both lines simultaneously had to lead to the frustrations being experienced and the indecision about which everyone was complaining.
He concludes that it was easier to see the dilemma of the incompatible policies than to see how the dilemma could be resolved, for the U.S. did not know whether the Soviets would, if invited, be willing to collaborate.
The Congressional Quarterly indicates that Republican efforts to place the "do-nothing" label on the current Democratic-controlled Congress was shrewd politics. The Republicans had an uphill battle in their attempt to win control of both houses in the coming Congress, and if the do-nothing label stuck, it could prove as effective as it had in 1948, when President Truman had labeled the Republican Congress "do-nothing". Republicans had to have a net gain of 15 House seats to gain control, with their chances appearing best in 31 districts won by Democrats in 1954 with 55 percent or less of the vote. Twenty of those districts had elected Republicans in 1952.
The problem might be complicated for the Republicans by losses among the 203 districts which had elected Republicans in 1954, with such losses increasing the number of wins needed in districts presently held by Democrats. Losses appeared most likely in 63 districts won by Republicans in 1954 with 55 percent or less of the vote, those districts being scattered across 29 states, with 25 concentrated in five states, New York, California, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. As a practical matter, Republicans who had the smallest margins of victory in 1954 appeared to be the most vulnerable, with 14 of the 63 seats in question having been won with less than 51 percent of the vote. One of those Representatives had already announced that because of the uncertainties of politics, he would retire rather than seek re-election.
The Quarterly had analyzed the vote in those 63 districts in terms of the relative changes which had occurred between 1952 and 1954, with the analysis suggesting that Republicans might encounter some of their toughest challenges in districts where the vote had diminished the greatest in 1954 and where that of the Democrats had diminished the least. There were 11 of the 63 districts in which the Republican share of the vote had increased on average from 49 percent to 53 percent in the two-year interim, with Republican turnout having declined by 15 percent in those districts, whereas the Democratic vote had declined by 25 percent.
Those figures contrasted with a national decrease in the Republican vote of 29.5 percent and 21.7 percent in the Democratic vote, suggesting that in those 11 districts, Republican strength might be gaining.
At the other end of the marginal districts was a group of 14 districts in which the Republicans' share of the vote had dropped from 62 percent in 1952 to 53 percent in 1954, with the total Republican vote off by 32 percent, while the Democratic vote was off by only 1.5 percent, suggesting real trouble for Republican candidates.
It concludes that averages gave only a slim clue to voting trends, as each Congressional district was in a class by itself, with local issues, personalities of the candidates and other non-party factors possibly of overriding importance in determining the outcome.
A letter writer encloses a letter he had sent to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, saying that for more than 18 months during World War II the writer had lived in Mr. Brownell's hometown of Lincoln, Neb., while he had worked for the Burlington Railroad. He says that as a Southerner, he had expected to see the people of Nebraska treat the few black railroad workers with full equality, but found, to his surprise, that the people had been against them and more hostile than he had ever seen Southerners treat blacks. At the railroad restaurant, the management had all but refused to serve blacks, treating them in an unfriendly manner so that none returned to eat the following day. Later, the managers of several of the nicer restaurants had told the writer that it was how illegal racial segregation was maintained in Lincoln and across Nebraska. Later, when he had gone to work at the Burlington roundhouse in Lincoln, he found that there were two blacks employed cleaning out track pits and wiping down engines at the roadhouse, and at no time had either entered the all-white railroad restaurant to eat. He stresses to the Attorney General that it was how blacks were treated in nearby Lincoln. He thus wonders whether Mr. Brownell honestly wanted to see racial segregation end, saying that he believed he did not, but that because the black vote was important in some key Northern states, playing politics with the race issue was a good way to obtain black votes for the Republicans, just as FDR had done for the Democrats for over 12 years. He recounts that his grandfather, who had been born in the South, had been a Union soldier during the Civil War and had fought to free blacks from slavery, while not believing in associating with them. He asks how, if people in Nebraska did not like integration, they expected it to be liked any better in the South.
A letter writer responds to a letter of April 6 which had praised the "Southern manifesto", read before the Senate and House the prior March 12, vowing to use every lawful means to try to reverse or circumvent Brown v. Board of Education. This writer doubts that many Southerners were deluded about the true nature of the manifesto, that it had been written for Southern consumption to further the careers of the politicians who had written it, that it was merely an effort for the incumbents to remain in office. He finds it "weak, political and an affront to our intelligence", believes the document would soon be forgotten, as it had been ignored by the nation, and would never have the slightest effect on the Court's decision in Brown. Regarding the prior letter writer's laudatory comments for the Legislatures of Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi, this writer says that the previous writer had to cast his gaze in other directions if he wanted to see much good in the world. He says he did not have a very good opinion of Mississippi, as they had too many unpunished lynchings and murders of helpless men, regarding darkly anything which the legislators of Mississippi might do, doing the Southern cause no justice. He also responds to the prior letter writer's statements regarding mongrelization of the races, finding it a worn-out theme deliberately calculated to stir emotions and close the door on reason. He says that there was no one who was not at present a mongrel, if mongrelization meant a mixing of different types of people, that the only people in the world who were not relatively unmixed were the aborigines of Australia and the few remaining Bushmen of Africa.
It might be noted that were it not for the busy little bees who thrive on producing irrelevancies for Wicked-pedia entries for the purpose of ignorantly or insensitively stirring controversy where there is none, the manifesto, a momentary product of its time, would have continued to lay dormant in its properly irrelevant status historically, resurrected and rescued from oblivion by the -pediaphiles a few years ago purportedly to serve as some sort of litmus test of members of Congress of the time as to whether they were racists or segregationists, an inaccurate barometer of either characterization, as suggested earlier in the week in the piece by Stewart Alsop, comparing the views of NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall with those of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, considered a liberal Southerner, despite his having reluctantly signed the manifesto after having unsuccessfully sought to dissuade his Southern colleagues from promulgating it.
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