The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 17, 1956
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House Foreign Affairs Committee this date had voted to deny the President's request for long-term foreign aid authority, which he had sought to enable making commitments for up to 100 million dollars in aid for a decade in advance. The Committee had agreed instead on a statement of intent to continue foreign aid as long as necessary to fight Communism. It voted to cut in half the 200 million the President had sought for special economic aid funds for Asia and the Middle East, saying that those funds ought be distributed in the form of loans or surplus farm goods, and not given away as grants. The chairman of the Committee, Representative James Richards of South Carolina, had announced the decisions after a closed Committee session, indicating that the vote on long-term authority for specific foreign aid projects had not been unanimous but was quite lopsided against the President's request. The Committee was still deciding on whether to cut the President's request for three billion dollars in foreign aid for arms, three times that voted by Congress the previous year. It was the largest part of the 4.9 billion foreign aid program proposed for the coming fiscal year. There had been predictions that the Committee would cut up to 1.5 billion off the overall total.
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee said this date that a new shipment of military goods to Saudi Arabia showed that the Administration "clings to a bankrupt foreign policy." He said that it was true despite "a crying need for the United States to demonstrate imaginative leadership in lending its prestige to a peaceful solution of Middle East tensions." He said that once again the Administration had attempted to operate under a veil of secrecy in sending a shipment of munitions to Saudi Arabia, which could only serve to upset further the precarious balance of arms in the Middle East. He referred to a shipment which had left Sunny Point, N.C., aboard a freighter late the previous day, carrying what the State Department had said was less than a million dollars worth of goods for Saudi Arabia, but the Defense Department had said was comprised mainly of ammunition and spare parts, and that the sale had been approved the previous August 25 along with an order for 18 M-41 light tanks, the shipment of which in February had caused a furor. The new shipment had been confirmed by officials after the New York Post had reported the previous day that a new cargo of military goods was being loaded at the North Carolina port. Wilmington Shipping Co. officials said that Sunny Point was primarily an ammunition loading terminal.
In Raeford, Fla., several hundred inmates of the State Prison had rioted this date regarding their food, and three had been reported slain and eight wounded. A ban had been placed on telephone calls into and out of the prison "for security reasons" and thus no information could be obtained in that manner from journalists there or from prison officials. The warden had been talking to some of the prisoners concerned and a statement had been promised as quickly as that intercommunication was complete. The riot was reported to be under control not long after it had begun in the early morning.
In Raleigh, Superior Court Judge Fred Helms of Charlotte, during the afternoon, as the keynote speaker for the Democratic state convention, praised the "calm and moderate, but firm and intelligent" handling of the segregation problem by Governor Luther Hodges. He called for the North Carolina Democratic Party to work for the preservation of public schools and equal rights under the law, indicating that "all such false ideas, doctrines and disturbances as 'social equality', with which neither constitutions nor courts have any power or authority whatever, will disappear. With their disappearance will go most of our fears, misunderstandings and problems. We must not allow the extremists on either side to lead us along the wrong road." Judge Helms had served on the original advisory committee which had studied the segregation problem. He praised the steps which the state had taken, saying that the Democratic Party of the state could be "especially proud" of the way the Administration of Governor Hodges had handled the problems. He lambasted the Republican Party in general, the President, the Vice-President, Secretary of State Dulles and other Republican leaders in particular. He stated that the President had "tacitly approved the irresponsible utterances and the false accusations" of Mr. Nixon that the Democratic Party had been "guilty of 'Communist coddling.'" He said that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had been friends to General Eisenhower but that the President was "strangely silent" when Republican leaders called the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations "20 years of treason". He said further that the President had appointed eight of his ten Cabinet members and three-fourths of all others he had appointed to office from the ranks of big business and that the bipartisan foreign policy of the preceding two Democratic Administrations had disappeared, that the farmer had become the "forgotten man" and was so "heavily blanketed with losses and mortgages" that nothing but a Democratic victory could revive him. He said that the President had been unable to achieve unity or maintain effective working control of the Republican Party, except when an election was approaching. He contended that the President and other Republicans had been intimidated, that the Senate had been disgraced, that the influence abroad of the country had been seriously impaired and that the very foundations of the republic shaken and threatened by Senator McCarthy, pointing out that it had taken North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin and other Democratic Senators to stand up to McCarthy and put an end to McCarthyism—referring to Senator Ervin's service on the censure committee in fall, 1954. The judge predicted that the Democrats would win the presidential election and that the Democratic Party would take the national government away from the "princes of privilege and restore it to the people to whom it belongs."
Also in Raleigh, Julian Scheer of The News reports that four busloads of "new" Mecklenburg County Democrats had enthusiastically dominated a 10th District caucus this date at the state Democratic convention, led by State Representative Jack Love, electing Congressional candidate and former Charlotte Mayor Ben Douglas and Mr. Love as two of the district's four delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the following August. John McDowell of Charlotte had been named a district alternate delegate. Three of the four delegates were supporters of Adlai Stevenson, while the fourth was presently uncommitted. Party stalwarts, prominent in earlier years, were absent, and the Mecklenburg caucus, as well as the district caucus, had been ruled by the team of W. M. Nicholson, the new county chairman, and Mr. Love.
Harry Shuford of The News indicates that people on Camp Greene Ave. were fed up with the condition of their street, with one unidentified resident placing a new sign at the corner of that street and Freedom Drive, which read, "Next 3 Blocks Unsafe For Traffic", though someone had removed the sign. Eight months earlier, a ditch had been dug for new water mains but since that time, huge ruts had remained in the street. A resident said that every time it rained, the street had washed out, as they had not been able to put down a firm bed for that side of the street, though the contractor had tried. A minister at the Calvary Baptist Church next door was very disturbed about the street's condition, calling it a disgrace, that it had not harmed his church attendance but that people were coming in by putting life and limb in jeopardy. He believed the sign had been a good idea and should have been bigger, as it certainly had told the truth.
Donald MacDonald of The News
tells of a judge explaining that when moonshine consumers in the
county were caught by law enforcement, they invariably came up with
one of three alibis, that they had found it in a field behind their
house and just stumbled upon it, that they had given a bring-your-own
party at their house and someone had forgotten to take their whiskey
with them when they left, or that some stranger had given the whiskey
to them. Usually, the stranger turned out to be the woodman. The
judge believed that ABC agents ought arrest every woodman in the
city, as typically a woodman sold more whiskey
A cold air mass from Canada had
sneaked into the Carolinas during the morning to bring a chill
reminder that winter
On the editorial page, "Segregation Decision: Two Years Later" indicates that on the second anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, 160 million Americans were more deeply enmeshed in the social crisis than ever, with perplexities on a national level having deepened noticeably in the previous six months. On the race issue, it finds the mood of the country to be no longer one of studied indifference, as neutral stances had disappeared and emotions had been aroused in both the North and the South, with no longer orthodox safety zones for the timid. The conscience of the entire nation was now involved and it finds no hope that the hard-core resistance to desegregation would soon dissolve in the Deep and Mid-South.
"The court's decision in 1954 came like a clap of thunder and the rattle of hail. Its suddenness and its decisiveness seemed to stun the South. It was too big and brutally simple for quick digestion."
A year earlier, 14 of the 17 Southern and border states affected by the decision were still marking time in anticipation of the implementation decision, which was handed down at that time. Only Delaware, West Virginia, Missouri and the District of Columbia had gone ahead with desegregation. The implementing decision of May 31, 1955 had underscored the original decision, while following the general lines of argument advanced by several Southern attorneys general by setting no specific time limit for compliance, stating that it should be accomplished "with all deliberate speed", based on local circumstances to be ultimately determined by the various Federal District Courts in each district.
Executive director Don Shoemaker of the Southern Education Reporting Service had stated in Charlotte later that over most of the South, there had been a collective sigh of relief and remarkable unanimity of opinion that the Court had acted wisely. Yet, there was unrest in its wake and even violence in some Southern locales.
The country had entered a "tumultuous time of litigation and legislation, of pride and prejudice, and of fear and ferocity." The cases of Emmett Till, murdered in Money, Miss., on August 28, 1955, and whose killers, who had since admitted the murder in Look Magazine, had walked free, the riots which had accompanied the admission of Autherine Lucy as the first black student matriculated to the University of Alabama, the assault recently of singer Nat King Cole while he performed on stage in Birmingham, the Montgomery bus boycott and other boycotts, the clamor in some Southern states, notably in Virginia, for interposition, and the rise of the White Citizens Councils, it finds, had all been symbols of new unrest in the country. The knowledge that the situation might be worse did not ease the national conscience.
But in the border states, there had been much peaceful desegregation. In addition to Delaware, West Virginia, the District, Maryland had desegregated eight of its 23 counties plus the City of Baltimore, and desegregation was in effect in 40 of Kentucky's 184 school districts, in 270 schools in Oklahoma, in 65 Texas districts, in three Arkansas districts, in one Tennessee area, the Federally-controlled Oak Ridge, and in St. Louis and Kansas City, plus other Missouri communities and rural areas impacting 85 percent of that state's black pupils.
Statewide plans for private tuition had been proposed in Virginia and North Carolina to avoid "forced integration", with North Carolina having passed a placement statute in 1955, with a special session of the Legislature to convene in the summer to devise new legal devices to meet the challenge of desegregation.
In the deeper South, in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, there was harsher resistance in locations where passions had been more deeply inflamed and official action to maintain segregation sterner. But everywhere, there had been an increase in militancy, on the part of white supremacists, on the part of blacks and black groups, even on the part of unorganized individuals possessing strongly held convictions. Added to that was the emotional pressure of an election year and the frequency of other rulings from the Federal courts attacking segregation, resulting in "all of the raw materials for turmoil."
Professor A. D. Albright had suggested that at the very heart of the trouble was a simple truth, that "integration is more important to Negroes than the white man realizes, and segregation is more important to whites than the Negro realizes."
It concludes that with those facts in mind, the reader should be able to appreciate the enormous importance of maintaining communications between the races, suggesting that there were no problems before the nation which could not be solved by responsible citizens getting together in peace to share attitudes and ideas. It finds that there had been too little sharing of such ideas during the previous two years and that the lines of communication had to be restored between areas and people, with appeals to fear and hatred put aside. The apathy of the first year and the emotion of the second had to be "replaced by the elements of a lasting era of understanding and reason."
"The Better Business Opportunity—II" provides the second in a series of editorials on the local Better Business Bureau, seeking to increase its membership through a drive the following Wednesday. It indicates that every reputable business firm in the city was already profiting from the existence of the Bureau, standing as warning to sharp dealers, gyp artists and con men to stay out of Charlotte.
A paint store owner, for example, would have accepted a stock of paints based on what he thought was a consignment agreement, when actually the contract was a promissory note. Several firms would have contributed to a charity whose only recipient was the man soliciting the donations. Others would have bought ads in a magazine having little or no circulation in the city. Fraud prevention was a trademark of the Bureau, but was only one of several services which it performed for the business community and the public.
It also reported on the clean records and good reputations of reputable business firms, analyzed fund-raising programs and appeals and provided performance records which businessmen needed in dealing with outside firms and professional men. It served as an intermediary in stopping harmful chain reactions of unfair competition. For member firms, the Bureau provided an employee educational service designed to maintain workers on the job, their production at high level and their paychecks protected from ill-advised financial ventures. All of those services were of direct benefit to businessmen, saving money and guarding against exploitation.
It indicates that the third editorial would concern public confidence and free enterprise.
A piece from the Memphis Press-Scimitar, titled "The Dickens You Say!" indicates that a University of Tennessee professor, Clyde Crobaugh, had written a book, Abusive Words or How To Cuss Effectively, having no plot and being simply an academic compilation of cuss words and cuss forms. He claimed that there were 800 cuss words and 70 cuss forms.
It indicates it did not wish to challenge his scholarship but could not help but wonder if the professor had gone deeply enough into the subject. It remembered a parrot of perhaps 200 years earlier which could reel off more than 700 cuss words without prompting and also recalled an infantry first sergeant of World War II who could cuss each of any 100 assembled recruits in a totally different and devastating way.
It finds that there was hardly a word in the English language which could not be given a turn such that it became a cuss word for an accomplished cusser. One of the most ladylike women of its acquaintance could make the most delicate word sound like a cuss word.
Drew Pearson tells of the Senate Investigating Committee having been amazingly gentle when it delved into the law practice of Vice-President Nixon's right-hand man, Murray Chotiner, who had managed his campaigns for the House, Senate and Vice-Presidency and had formulated the idea of the 1952 Checkers speech which had saved his spot on the ticket. He presents the mild-mannered cross-examination of Mr. Chotiner by Senators of the Committee when the name of Marco Reginelli, the notorious czar of the south Jersey numbers racket and a law client of Mr. Chotiner, came before the Committee.
Senator McCarthy had said that if Mr. Chotiner was the attorney for Mr. Reginelli, he did not think that the Committee should force him to answer questions about him, asking the chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, whether he agreed, responding that he should answer only to the extent that Mr. Chotiner was employed by him and within that scope of employment, that there should be no details demanded. Mr. Pearson points out that both Senators had been fiercely unrelenting in cross-examination of others who had refused testimony for a given reason.
Robert F. Kennedy, brother of Senator John F. Kennedy and counsel to the Committee, was not so mild, trying to pin Mr. Chotiner down regarding any connection between Mr. Reginelli and the Government uniform contracts which involved other clients of Mr. Chotiner, the clothing manufacturers who were accused of defrauding the Government. Once again, however, Senator McClellan had come to the defense of Mr. Chotiner, saying that the chair would not require him to go further if he said that the Government was involved and had an interest in the litigation or the subject matter of his being retained, thus limiting the inquiry to the uniform contracts and not other Government matters handled by Mr Chotiner. Yet, the latter had admitted that he had handled the deportation case for Mr. Reginelli, which had inevitably involved the Government, and might well have involved influence-peddling.
When Mr. Kennedy had sought to develop how Mr. Chotiner had visited Government officials to persuade or pressure them into not deporting Mr. Reginelli, Senator McCarthy had objected that Mr. Kennedy was "embarking on a fishing expedition."
Meanwhile, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, who had once been considered a great district attorney, sat on the sidelines while the two Senators protected Mr. Chotiner.
Most of the current books on the Eisenhower Administration were pure pap, with an exception being a book by Richard Rovere, The Eisenhower Years. Mr. Rovere covered Washington for The New Yorker.
In a time when magazine readers had moved to television sets, a group of literary pioneers had come out with a challenging new publication, Bounty, an American satirical magazine, the board of which included Quentin Reynolds, Ilka Chase, Henry Morgan, Leon Pearson, and Sigmund Spaeth.
U.S. agents reported that Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had made a second, much stronger speech against the late Joseph Stalin in secret, and that in that speech, Mr. Khrushchev had accused Stalin of being more anti-Semitic than Hitler, indicating that just before he died, the dictator had planned to ship all Russian Jews to Siberia.
Joseph Alsop, in Arbil, Iraq, tells of it being Arbela of history books, near the locus where Alexander the Great defeated Darius, King of the Persians, who fled alone into the wilds of Khorassan, where he was murdered. Arbil had already been old when its people saw the Macedonian phalanx and was probably the most ancient inhabited place in the world. It had literally built itself up from the surrounding plain on its own ruins and the "modern" city walls, which were only a couple of centuries old, had sprung from the "dizzy verge of a man-made mesa a hundred feet in height."
Another battle was now proceeding in that Northern Iraq province, fought between East and West, a race between the destructive effects of social change in the ancient land and the constructive effort of the new country's boldly conceived, oil-financed development program. The race was of vital importance, for Iraq, with its Western orientation, was the chief protection of the oil resources on which Britain, Europe and NATO depended. If Iraq were to change sides, the whole Western position in the Persian Gulf and even in Arabia would soon become untenable. It was the development of the modern program which was counted on to keep Iraq on a steady course.
The aim of the program was to undo the damage done by the heirs of Genghis Khan, who had found what was now present-day Iraq a rich, well-irrigated land supporting a population of 25 million people, but so ravaged the irrigation system with their battles that 80 percent of the people had died of hunger. The canals which could be traced out in the time of Hammurabi, the law giver of old Babylon, and which were destroyed by Hulagu Khan or Timur the Lame, were now to be put to use again, such that Iraq's total productive acreage would be almost doubled.
In Arbil Province, the vital waters of the Tigris and Euphrates were beyond reach and thus new acreage had to be opened for cultivation. But irrigation was only part of the development program showing its effects. The province had an energetic Governor, Ishmael Hakki, and below the mesa, where the modern city was spilling out onto the plain, his construction projects dotted the landscape. In one location, there was a new 200-bed hospital being constructed and in another, the headquarters of the German refugee doctor, whose mobile clinic was the first of three motorized health units to serve the more remote villages. Several schools had been finished and two more were under construction. There was even a small park, where the suburban citizens could get outside and schoolboys study their books. All were signs of change in a way of life which had hardly changed since the time of Timur.
But there were other signs of difficulty, as the old system was essentially feudal in nature, with the landlords often dictating through force what the Baghdad Government might do. But there had also been something like a peasant uprising in the province two years earlier, forcing the grandee to plead with the Government for protection against the rifles he had once used as a threat to get his way.
Communist organizers, inspired by the Tudeh Party in Iran, had been in many villages at that time and there was a movement to take the land from the rich Agas who lived in Arbil City. There was even one deputy in parliament from the province with known Communist leanings. With much persuasion and pressure, Governor Hakki, however, was able to restore order and all was, at present, outwardly peaceful.
But beneath the surface, pressures and tensions still existed, as the peasants still wanted the land owned by the Agas and there were still aspirations for better things which could not easily be satisfied immediately. The development program was slow, so slow that five more years might pass before large new farming acreages were open to Iraq's people. It caused a race between the forces of construction and the forces of destruction.
Mr. Alsop had asked Governor Hakki which was likely to win the battle and he had answered, "Who can tell the winner of any race with real certainty?"
Doris Fleeson tells of Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Arthur Radford having lent his prestige to those who contended that the Russians were beating the U.S. on the political and diplomatic fronts of the cold war, expressing satisfaction with the country's military posture, saying that since 1950, it had generated very great military strength which had prevented the spread of the Korean War and an attack on the U.S. proper. He had added, however, that it was in the political and diplomatic field that the country had to worry, that the new Russian approach of talking sweetly, disarming criticism, had posed new problems in critical areas, far greater than in just the military area.
In responding to a question by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Admiral Radford had said that he knew of no promise of aid to any nation made by the Soviet Union that it had not kept, and that he hoped the Russians would run into trouble as they expanded those promises. But he agreed with Senator Humphrey that it would be an "unwise assumption" to suggest that they could not deliver on their commitments.
At issue in the hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the Administration's expanded foreign aid bill of 4.9 billion dollars. It was now admitted that the cuts in the program during the previous two years had been achieved by emptying the diplomatic pipelines which now had to be filled again. But while other hearings had attracted much attention from spectators, the hearing in question had more reporters than spectators among the public. The present apathy could be due in part to the fact that Americans now accepted foreign aid as one of the disagreeable necessities of the cold war era.
It was also illustrative of the role which the U.S. presidency played in the creation and expression of the national will. As long as the President refused to admit concern, the public refused to get excited, especially true of President Eisenhower in the military and foreign affairs area, where his experience had been so great, tending to instill public reliance thereon.
The Administration witnesses appearing before the Committee had conveyed a simple message, that the Russians were doing fine with their new approach and that the U.S. had to devise a product to outsell them. Military leaders were not necessarily in agreement with Admiral Radford that the Pentagon was more than holding its own. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had said in so many words to the Senators that the Administration recognized the new trend but had not been able to make up its mind where the trend was carrying the U.S.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., tells of having read an editorial with "the two-bit vaudeville caption", "Talmadgeism Overtakes a Statesman", indicating that after it had paid a deserving tribute to Senator Walter George, who had just announced his retirement from the Senate at the end of the present term, it had proceeded to castigate his probable successor, former Governor Herman Talmadge, whom Mr. Cherry finds to be the current target of the "leftists". He finds that Doris Fleeson had called him a "demagogue" and that the News had called him a "reactionary"and "race baiter". He says he had not read the Communist Daily Worker lately but would lay odds that the identical descriptions of Mr. Talmadge could be found in its "treasonable pages". He finds that the same smear campaign by the "jackal press" had been leveled against Representative Martin Dies during the 1930's, Senator McCarthy a couple of years earlier, and Senator James Eastland and Representative Francis Walter at present. He says that the "pack" would discover early that patriots did not come any tougher than Mr. Talmadge, that those who sought to blacken his character were unfit to blacken his shoes. Many in Georgia believed he had served the state well as Governor and there was no reason to believe he would not do so in the same vein as Senator. He finds that Mr. Talmadge would enter the Senate "at a time when the Communist-inspired doctrine of 'internationalism' is still riding high." Mr. Talmadge, he says, was a nationalist and an "America Firster", and was neither afraid nor ashamed to proclaim it. "As is the practice with the usual run of fuzzy thinking internationalists, Talmadge would never subtly drown his country's glorious heritage in the cesspool of an 'amalgamated world,' nor sell its reputation for a potion of arsenic often deceptively labeled, 'international brotherhood.'" He would also come to the Senate when segregation in the South was under "unprecedented attack", and the region would have no greater champion of "this cherished and sound tradition" than Mr. Talmadge. He wants the "leftist cult" to rail against the next Senator from Georgia because "their railings ain't worth the shortest bristle on a hog's back no how. 'Cause I had a 'vision' a fortnight ago and from high Olympus, the spirits spoke softly but with extraordinary confidence, Spakest They: 'Hummon will make an outstanding Senator, and Georgia, the South and conservative ranks throughout the republic will be justifiably proud of him.'"
He appears to have something against the truck drivers.
A letter from the pastor of North Side Presbyterian Church in Gastonia states that he had just read the editorial by Doris Fleeson, titled "Why George Decided To Quit", stating that he was a Georgian who had lived all of his life in that state until the previous November when he had moved to North Carolina, while remaining in close touch with the politics of his former home state for more than 30 years. He had supported the Talmadges, father and son, since the early 1930's and knew Herman Talmadge personally. He says he resented the insinuations made by Ms. Fleeson in the editorial, saying he did not know anything about her but that she needed to inform herself of the facts regarding the Talmadges, as the editorial had displayed complete ignorance of the facts of Georgia politics. He concludes that Mr. Talmadge was "a most capable man and will do much to help solve this 'nigger' question."
Is this how you address your congregation on Sunday mornings? "Now, let us pray. Help us, O Lord, to solve our'n Nigger problem before dusk, cause y'all know that Sundays are our'n Chosen days to act in defense of our'n rights down hyeh. The white choir uniforms will be available just after dark outside the church, heya. Please contribute $20 to the church fund for their use in defense against the Nigger problem. Amen."
No, his name was not Edgar Ray
Killen, but the sound of the animating impetus
Framed Edition
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