The Charlotte News
Saturday, April 7, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had said this date, following a White House conference, that the new farm bill was not acceptable to him in its present form. There was no indication whether the President had reached any final decision about the compromise measure drafted by a Senate-House conference committee. White House press secretary James Hagerty told reporters before the meeting had broken up that the President would not make up his mind on the bill until it had passed both houses and was sent to him for action. Mr. Hagerty had described the meeting between the Secretary, Undersecretary True D. Morse and the President and White House staff members as an "initial discussion" of the newly completed proposed measure. Secretary Benson said that there would have to be some changes made in the bill to make it acceptable to him. The compromise bill contained some features requested by the Administration, but also contained a one-year restoration of high, rigid price supports, opposed by the President and Secretary Benson. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana and Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina, the chairmen respectively of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, predicted quick approval of the compromise measure in both houses, with Senator Ellender commenting that the President would either have to accept the bill or accept the fact that there would be no farm bill during the current session.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges said at a press conference this date, in the wake of the release on Thursday evening of the report of the State Advisory Committee on Education, that the proposed private school plan as one solution to desegregation of the public schools did not envision elimination of the state's public schools and replacing them with private schools. He said that he was "heartily and thoroughly" in accord with the Committee's recommendations, but added that he would be foolish to believe that it would solve the problem forever. He said that he would call a special session of the Legislature during the summer to act on the Committee's recommendations. He also indicated that he wanted the special session to confine itself strictly to school segregation issues and not become sidetracked by other matters, such as increased pay for teachers or limited access highways. He said that Senator Sam Ervin had discouraged him from proposing that Congress limit the power of Federal courts to rule on school matters. He said that segregation issues should not keep the public from voting for bond issues for school construction and indicated that he thought the segregation issue would have little, if any, impact on the state's efforts to obtain new industry. He emphasized that the report relied on voluntary separate school attendance and the power of local officials to assign pupils to maintain separate schools. The special session would concentrate on passage of two amendments to the State Constitution to send to the people, one of which would allow children who objected to attendance at integrated schools to receive payment of public funds for tuition for nonsectarian, private schools, while the other would allow local school units to vote on closing their public schools.
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of the chairman of the State Board of Higher Education, D. Hiden Ramsey, speaking by telephone from Asheville, cautioning that his Board was just beginning its study of how to meet the coming tidal wave of students. He hinted that one possible solution was to locate a state-supported college in Charlotte. The state presently had about 50,000 college students and by 1966, was expected to have about 75,000. The Board was expected to find answers to the problem posed by that large increase. In a speech at a meeting of the Board in Raleigh the previous day, Mr. Ramsey had called Charlotte "the most under-colleged big city in the South." He said this date that every large city in Texas, for example, had at least one major college. Charlotte had Queens, which was small, and nearby Davidson, which had placed a reasonable limitation on its own growth. For years, the Chamber of Commerce college improvement subcommittee had sought to attract State funds to support Charlotte College—eventually becoming in 1965, UNC-Charlotte. The unresolved question was the extent to which the Board would recommend decentralization of education in the state, with many educators favoring enlarging the three existing state schools, the Chapel Hill campus of UNC, N.C. State in Raleigh and Woman's College in Greensboro, to take care of the growing student population. But Mr. Ramsey said this date that the trend in such states as California and New York was toward a network of community schools. With Wake Forest having moved to Winston-Salem, Charlotte was the only large city in the state without a major school—though Wake Forest and Davidson were of comparable size and academic quality, Davidson usually considered superior in rank. The Chamber of Commerce claimed that there were 5,000 high school graduates in the Charlotte area every year, but that only 1,200 of them went to college, and that many more would do so were there a state-supported school nearby.
In the northern Midwest this date, wintry weather had returned with snow, cold and strong winds, supplying near blizzard conditions in the Red River Valley section of Minnesota and North Dakota. Duluth had received more than 6 inches of fresh snow, making a total of 21 inches on the ground, with the snow generally falling all across northern Minnesota, accompanied by strong winds, headed for sections of Wisconsin and Michigan, with temperatures ranging between 15 and 25 degrees lower than the previous morning in many parts of the upper and middle Mississippi Valley. Freezing temperatures extended as far south as Oklahoma, with Kansas City's 39 being 26 degrees lower than a day earlier.
A tornado had hit Union County, neighboring Charlotte, the previous day, striking also in parts of Mecklenburg, along a quarter-mile path cutting diagonally across old Highway 74, leaving no building, tree or telephone pole standing in its path. Two other tornadoes had also hit the Carolinas, one near Belmont and the other in the Abbeville-Greenwood area of South Carolina. Heavy winds and rain were reported virtually everywhere in the Carolinas. Clean-up of the damage was underway.
A Weather Bureau forecast center in Kansas City had predicted the likelihood of tornadoes in the Charlotte area the previous day, having issued a tornado warning the previous morning, saying that one or more tornadoes was likely, the warning having come four hours before the storm had ripped through Union County.
In Charlotte, the Commercial National Bank Building had been doused with water when a two-inch water main had burst during the morning, sending a 30-foot geyser into one side of the building, causing no damage.
In Tucson, Ariz., a woman drove into a gas station with a flat tire and asked the attendant to fix it. Inside the tire, he found a glass ashtray which had been present for several months, lodged between the tire and the tube, the ashtray carrying advertising for a tire firm. The woman said that the ashtray was in better shape than her tire.
In Passaic, N.J., a magistrate stated that one could not be a good lover and a good driver at the same time, providing the advice to a man, after suspending his license for 30 days and fining him $30 for careless driving. He had been charged with kissing his girlfriend while his car was zig-zagging down the road, offering as his defense that he was kissing her while she was kissing him.
On the editorial page, "Getting John Q. Citizens into the Act" suggests that Charlotte and North Carolina ought find sudden inspiration in the report submitted the previous day to the President by the Committee for the White House Conference on Education. The city and state were naturally preoccupied with the question of segregation in the public schools, but educational woes were bigger than the immediate racial issues.
The size and shape of the national situation had been brought into a somewhat frightening perspective by the Committee's report, placing the fate of the schools in the laps of individual citizens, emphasizing the urgent need for informed public opinion and for improved communications between the people and their schools. The report was the clulmination of many local, state and regional conferences held the previous year and its findings represented a composite national view. The burden was shifted back to local communities by the report, requiring local citizen movements organized in support of the schools across the country.
Citizens could no longer afford to be disinterested spectators, as education was closely related to social and economic progress. It indicates that it was not suggesting meddling in purely professional matters, but rather support and encouragement of better schools, providing assistance in teacher recruitment and meeting building needs. The overall aim ought be discussion between educators, parents and citizens working together at all levels to strengthen every aspect of education. It concludes that if there were enough discussion, the schools would obtain the teachers, the buildings and the money needed, as well as the type of education needed for a strong country.
"Hammarskjold Casts a Small Shadow" suggests that it would be nice to think that U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who had departed on a peace trip to the Middle East, might end the division in that part of the world, but that he would cast a small shadow on the desert. While it was inconceivable that a war would be triggered during his visit in search of peace, and while he was a skillful, respected negotiator whose very presence offered a measure of hope, having been credited with talking the Communist Chinese into releasing a number of the held American airmen the previous year, he was no more than a conduit through which the belligerents could talk to one another, and such pipelines had already existed throughout the time that the threats of war had been building.
The Secretary-General could not settle the issues which had brought the Israelis and Arabs to the brink of war, and it was not certain that the Arabs wanted settlement of the boundary and refugee issues left unresolved by the 1949 armistice, perhaps content to let Mr. Hammarskjold buy a little time while their armories were filled with Communist weapons and the allies sought to maintain friends all around.
It suggests that until there was a genuine desire to settle the issues through negotiation, and recognition by the Arabs that Israel was present to stay, Mr. Hammarskjold could hope for nothing other than to buy time. It concludes that the primary question, which was unanswered, was what the allies intended to do with the time remaining.
"After John White, Riches Galore" suggests that those who scoffed at North Carolina culture liked to remark that the last painter who had stirred any interest in the state had been John White, who had arrived with his pallet and brushes on Roanoke Island in 1585 and departed in 1587. It suggests that such detractors were wrong, that North Carolinians marveled at art in present times with the same appreciative grace as a visitor to New York's Metropolitan Museum.
Since the mid-Twenties, the North Carolina Art Society had nurtured and encouraged interest in painting and sculpture, and galleries had been opened in more than a dozen cities and towns of the state. All of the citizens could now enjoy joint ownership of one of the most important collections of paintings in the nation at the new State Art Museum, formally opened the previous night by Governor Hodges.
It was the first museum to have a collection fully subsidized by state funding, with more than a million dollars having been appropriated by the General Assembly to purchase its initial paintings, plus another $341,000 having been spent to renovate the old highway building which would house the museum.
It indicates that North Carolinians could be proud of the collection, comprised of some 200 major and minor old masters, including paintings by Rubens, Van Dyke and Rembrandt. It finds they could also be proud of the wisdom of the legislators who had made the museum possible, recognizing that the virtues of a civilization included cultural living as well as practical necessities. The same legislators made possible the survival of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and "The Lost Colony" outdoor pageant.
It also finds that North Carolinians could be proud of what others were saying of its good works, with Art News editor Alfred Frankfurter having stated that it was "the only important public collection south of Richmond and east of the Pacific," adding that Texans, who boasted about giving away Cadillacs as souvenirs at dinner, "had better sit up and take notice. They've nothing to match it."
It concludes that the quiet ceremony in Raleigh the previous night had given an upward lift to the civilization.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Whistle Stop Airport", tells of Marlena Dietrich's daughter, Maria Riva, suggesting that Charlotte was a whistle-stop airport, finding it perplexing as the Charlotte airport gave the Greensboro-High Point airport an inferiority complex.
It dramatizes an interview by Emery Wister of The News taking place in the new Charlotte terminal, with Ms. Riva, the star of "Tea and Sympathy" and "Ticket Agent", in the cast of characters. It titles its brief play "Whistle-stop Airport: A Tragedy in One Act". You may read the play for yourself, as we do not like to spoil such masterpieces.
It concludes by indicating it would be hard to maintain its old respect for Charlotte, as Ms. Riva's remarks had dashed their moody dreams of Charlotte's greatness.
Drew Pearson tells of the President having ordered all Army, Navy and Air Force junkets for members of Congress canceled until the August adjournment. It had resulted from a protest by House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who had found so many of his top committee chairmen out of town shortly before the Easter holiday that he could not get any work done. There had been a Navy junket to Guantánamo in Cuba, and then after transporting them to the island, took them for a cruise on the supercarrier U.S.S. Forrestal. Mr. Rayburn had been so upset that he telephoned White House press secretary James Hagerty and asked him to have the President warn the three branches against taking members of Congress away from their work on such junkets. The President had immediately cooperated, resulting in the Air Force canceling invitations to fly Congressmen to California for the unveiling of the supersonic jet fighter, F-104. It was suspected that the brass hats had purposely staged the junket to Cuba to get members of Congress out of town, just as the House was scheduled to vote on two generals whom General Joseph Swing wanted employed by the Immigration Service. Many members of Congress had objected to too much militarization of civilian agencies. General Swing had, however, won out in the end.
Vice-President Nixon had gone out of his way to ask for a transcript of a court hearing involving his uncle, H. H. Nixon. The transcript was somewhat long, but the Vice-President had asked for the full text for his own personal scrutiny. Ordinarily, what Mr. Nixon's uncle did in California would be of no interest to the rest of the country, but as the Vice-President had been a pioneer in establishing guilt by association, it was understandable why he was worried about his uncle, as he might be accused of guilt by relation. His uncle had been castigated by a Superior Court judge for cheating the Government out of taxes, summarizing Mr. Nixon's strategy by suggesting that he was not going to pay taxes on $10,000, leaving the judge "as cold as a mackerel". The uncle's son had an incurable disease and to avoid state inheritance tax and Federal estate taxes, the uncle had devised a scheme whereby he sold property belonging to his son, with part of the proceeds to be paid in cash, the cash in turn to be distributed to various relatives and friends of the son and thus not becoming part of the latter's estate. The son had executed a power of attorney transferring the property to his father, after which his father arranged with a third party to buy the property with a down payment of $10,000, with the amount issued, at the father's request, in nine checks, the largest of which had been $2,000, with no payee named on the checks. They had been deposited in various banks, some of them without any endorsement, and some backdated to appear they had been written a month prior to the actual transaction. Subsequently, the uncle had gotten into an argument with the third party, resulting in a civil suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, at which the uncle had made some rather amazing admissions. The judge had found against Mr. Nixon in his opinion, using language which would not help the Vice-President, should the Democrats exploit his own theory of guilt by association.
Joseph Alsop, in London, tells of the visit of Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, known to most Britons as "Bulge and Khrush", finding that it told a great deal about current Soviet policy and indicating that if the Eisenhower Administration was not careful, the visit could also tell a lot about the long-range future of the Western Alliance.
The British leaders swore that their invitation to the two Russian leaders was simply impulsive, not meant to be acted on. At the summit meeting at Geneva the previous summer, the French had already agreed to visit Moscow and Prime Minister Anthony Eden was being pressed by Premier Bulganin and Secretary Khrushchev to visit Moscow also, which he had no intention of doing. He responded to that invitation by offhandedly suggesting that the Russian leaders visit London, recalling the months of fruitless effort to persuade Joseph Stalin to make such a visit during the war years. The two leaders responded that they would love to do so.
Lord Salisbury, probably the most respected politician in England after Winston Churchill, was known to have detested the idea from the beginning. Messrs. Khrushchev and Bulganin had stated during their visit to India that the British had been close collaborators with Hitler, adding complications to the visit and nearly leading to a withdrawal of the invitation. Initially, the Soviet leaders said that they would like to come for two weeks but were told that they could only visit for eight days. Finally, former Premier Georgi Malenkov came as head of a technical mission without being asked to do so, acting as a forerunner for the present visit.
The theme at present in London was how tough the British Government meant to be with their Russian visitors. Long official talks had been scheduled, partly to reduce the amount of time that the two Russian leaders could spend in the manner of Mr. Malenkov, whom Mr. Alsop suggests had acted somewhat like Senator Estes Kefauver running in a particularly difficult primary. Soviet operations in the Middle East were to be a prominent topic of the talks and some members of the British Cabinet hoped that the talks would end without the usual amiable communiqué, but rather in public disagreement.
Mr. Alsop suggests that under those peculiar circumstances it was questionable what the Russian motives for the visit were. He questions why Mr. Malenkov should have been quoting Robert Burns and handing out candy to children, ingratiating himself with Hugh Gaitskell and others among the anti-Communist faction within the Labor Party. Now, both Premier Bulganin and Secretary Khrushchev were putting on a similar act, with the explanation obviously being the Middle East and Malaya, where the Soviets were probing for Britain's vital interests. If the Middle Eastern oil sources were ever shut off, Britain would be publicly bankrupt within 30 days, with inevitably ensuing political chaos in which almost anything could happen. If British leaders and the people believed they had been badly let down by the U.S. Government, a British defeat in the Middle East would be accompanied by anti-American feeling in London, something for which Messrs. Bulganin and Khrushchev were trying to prepare.
They could not suppose that they could do much business with Britain at present, but were seeking to convince the British that they would be able to do business with the Soviets later should Britain get into desperate straits and feel deserted by the U.S. Mr. Alsop regards it as a long-shot gamble by the Soviets, but one which did not cost the two Russian leaders anything other than eight days of their time. U.S. policymakers, meanwhile, appeared to be doing everything possible to improve that gamble.
Walter Lippmann tells of a great deal being said abroad and at home about how necessary and urgent it was that the country provide firm and clear leadership to the non-Communist world, something which was easier said than done. He wonders, however, whether the President and Secretary of State Dulles had not in fact come to think of the world situation in terms other than of leadership, and whether they were in fact trying to lead. During the previous few months, Secretary Dulles had found himself entangled in an extraordinary series of dilemmas regarding issues on which he was damned if he did and damned if he did not.
He had been caught in the Goa dilemma between Portugal and India, in the Jakarta dilemma between the Netherlands and Indonesia, in the North African dilemma between France and the Algerian Arabs, in the Palestine dilemma between Israel and the Arabs, in the Baghdad dilemma between Iraq and Egypt, in the Cyprus dilemma between Britain and Greece, in the Persian Gulf dilemma between Saudi Arabia and Great Britain, and so on.
During the pre-Geneva phase of the cold war, the issues had been between Communists and anti-Communists, with the line of leadership being self-evident. But now the issues which plagued Secretary Dulles were often primarily between U.S. allies and the peoples the U.S. was courting.
As Mr. Dulles had said in his Life magazine interview regarding "brinksmanship", he believed in taking a clear position so that foreign governments would not miscalculate. Yet, in actual practice, beginning with Quemoy and Matsu and proceeding on to Palestine, he had devoted an immense amount of energy trying not to make clear choices in the dilemmas which confronted him.
Mr. Lippmann says that he was not attempting to criticize or judge Mr. Dulles but only to describe a large part of current U.S. policy, which was seeking to work out ways of straddling the horrid choices with which the country was confronted. The earlier, simpler days, when there was one great adversary and leadership consisted in opposing him, were now replaced with a situation where, while there was still a great adversary, it was playing a secondary role in the troubles of France in North Africa and of Britain in the Middle East.
The President and Secretary Dulles gave the impression of not so much trying to lead any great alliance as trying to disentangle themselves from its quarrel and to become, if possible, mediators. They took that line in Cyprus, Palestine, and effectively in North Africa, trying not to become involved or to offend either side too much.
He wonders where the "straddle" policy was heading and what conception of America's role in the world was implied by it, whether the Administration was seeking to accommodate themselves to the idea that there was an irresistible revolutionary tide of anti-Western passion rising in Africa and Asia which they could not hope to resist, but might, in some places, manage to appease. He concludes that it sometimes looked that way.
A letter writer says that while he had been driving down W. 6th Street on Wednesday morning, he had discovered one reason why cleaning crews could not keep up with the litter on the streets of the city, seeing a large, unmarked garbage truck pulling away from the side of a building and driving down the street with paper and cardboard flying all over the place. He suggests that there had to be some City ordinance requiring garbage trucks to have coverings of some sort, and if there was not, there ought be.
A letter writer says that he had noticed in the paper recently that former Mayor Ben Douglas had given a talk and someone wanted him to "give 'em hell". He thinks that North Carolina already had enough "hellism" with liquor stores and beer joints, that when politicians did that sort of thing, it was too much like former President Truman's speeches. He responds to a previous letter writer who questioned whether the President had done anything, suggesting that he had stopped the Korean War, which was more than President Truman had done or sought to do, as he had known what would occur if he did stop the war. He concludes that there were a lot of people who wanted "to get rich off the blood of our young men."
A letter writer says that public apathy was often responsible for such inexcusable action on the part of high government officials as had been reported by Drew Pearson in his April 4 column, in which he examined the cheese deal. He says he realizes that there might have been extenuating circumstances which Mr. Pearson had not reported, but that if the facts as reported were accurate, a thorough investigation ought be made and appropriate action taken. He suggests to the editors that a public service would be provided if they were to editorialize regarding the "great cheese scandal".
A letter writer compliments City
Coach Co. for carrying people to and from church on Easter Sunday,
indicating that they had won friends by donating a Christian deed.
She says that money did not make people happy if not used to help
others by kind deeds. She finds that there were some of the nicest
bus drivers anywhere in Charlotte and suggests that if people would
appreciate their bus drivers
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