The Charlotte News
Monday, May 21, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from aboard the U.S.S. Mt. McKinley off Bikini Atoll
that a B-52 jet bomber had dropped an hydrogen bomb from an altitude
of 8 miles over Bikini during the morning, the first hydrogen bomb
dropped from an American plane. The plane was traveling at
approximately 600 mph when the bomb was dropped, hitting 7 miles
short of the bull's-eye target, with the plane about 15 miles distant
from the drop area when the bomb detonated, precisely at the targeted
time of 5:51 a.m. this date Pacific time, 12:21 p.m., EST on the
previous day. The bomb had produced a large shock wave, shaking the
bomber as it departed, hitting with a force unofficially estimated as
being at least equal to the energy produced by the detonation of ten
million tons of TNT. The McKinley had rolled slowly and barely
kept steerage, as the 15 newsmen and 16 Federal Civil Defense
officials stood silently observing the detonation on the port side.
The reporter describing it indicates that high-density goggles made
blackness absolute until a pinpoint of light pricked that blackness
and then swelled "instantly and enormously into a gigantic
fireball. No sun, nor hundreds of suns, ever equal the light of a
hydrogen bomb." Once previously, a B-52 had taken off with a
live hydrogen bomb, but had to return after a late postponement,
having to land
In Nicosia, Cyprus, one British soldier had been killed and three other soldiers, two policemen and three civilians wounded in bomb attacks and pitched battles with youthful Greek Cypriot demonstrators in the city this date. The demonstrations, the most violent for many days, had started during the morning when a crowd of school girls had paraded through the main street carrying a huge Greek flag, the second day of such demonstrations, marching along, chanting in Greek, "Hurrah for the Union of Cyprus with Greece". Others shouted slogans in praise of EOKA, the underground organization fighting British rule of Cyprus, and "the heroes of the resistance". Two military jeeps had raced to the scene and troops emerged to fire tear gas shells, then made a charge with batons to break up the parade, with the soldiers seizing the flag. But the girls had fought back until half a dozen teenage national servicemen were forced to abandon the banner, with the girls then shouting with delight. An increasing number of youths joined them in a parade down the main street, all shouting repeatedly, "Join the demonstration." Police and military vehicles then arrived on the scene and were met by a hail of stones, after which there was a sudden explosion.
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld a 1951 amendment to the National Railway Labor Act, which had authorized railroads and labor unions to enter into union shop agreements, thereby striking down the application of state "right-to-work" laws in the railroad industry. The opinion, delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, was joined by a separate concurrence by Justice Felix Frankfurter. Under union shop agreements, workers had to join the union within 60 days or lose their jobs. Eighteen states had laws forbidding making union membership a condition for employment. Taft-Hartley was not involved in the case, only the Railway Act amendment. Taft-Hartley permitted the union shop but provided that the permission did not apply in states having laws prohibiting it. The Nebraska Supreme Court had held that the state's right-to-work law had superseded the Railway Labor Act amendment. Sixteen non-operating railway labor organizations had appealed that ruling. A 1946 amendment to the Nebraska Constitution said that no person could be denied a job because of refusing to join a union. The opinion said that "the choice by the Congress of the union shop as a stabilizing force seems to us to be an allowable one." It said that Congress, acting within its Constitutional powers, had the final say on policy issues, with which the judiciary had no concern. It indicated that if the Congress acted unwisely, then the electorate could make a change. Other states having right-to-work laws included Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. All would thus be impacted insofar as those unions and employees covered by the Railway Labor Act.
The House Appropriations Committee this date approved nearly 582 million dollars for use by Army engineers on water projects in the coming fiscal year, virtually the same amount which the President had recommended in his budget, but about 28 million under the amount voted by Congress the previous year. The total bill for construction, maintenance and surveys for flood control, navigation and multiple-purpose projects was $581,901,000, compared with the budget figure of $582,377,000. It provides figures for recommendations of amounts for waterway projects in North Carolina.
In Rome, former First Lady Bess Truman had gone on a shopping trip but had not bought anything. She was accompanied by friends, including the wife of Stanley Woodward, former White House protocol chief during the Truman Administration. Meanwhile, the former President spent the morning in his hotel, meeting with the publisher of his memoirs in Italian and receiving advance copies of the Italian edition. He planned to visit the U.S. Embassy around noon to chat with employees there, prior to a luncheon with Italian President Giovanni Grochi. He visited Pope Pius II the previous day with Mrs. Truman and received a gold medal of the pontificate. He had advocated renewed U.S. diplomatic relations with the Vatican. After the audience with the Pope, the party visited the Sistine Chapel and the nearby Raphael rooms, then attended services at St. Paul's American Protestant Church in downtown Rome. Mr. Truman said that the meeting with the Pope was "most pleasant and satisfactory." He would not disclose what was said, however, indicating that when he was President and a "big shot came to call" on him and told afterward what was said in the talk, "he didn't get in anymore."
In Elyria, O., eight persons had been killed the previous night when a New York Central passenger train had hit an automobile near the town. The engineer of the train said that it was proceeding at between 70 and 75 mph when he saw the automobile approach the crossing and make no apparent attempt to stop, despite the locomotive's bell, whistle and oscillating headlight being operational. Some of the bodies and parts of the wreckage were strewn along the tracks for about half a mile before the train could be brought to a halt.
In Gaffney, S.C., laboratory reports showed no sign of poison in the deaths of two 3-year old twins of Cherokee County, according to the local sheriff. The bodies of the boy and girl had been exhumed from a cemetery near their home in Jonesville the previous week, when police expressed suspicion of circumstances surrounding their deaths within the previous 30 days. The girl had died on April 20 and the boy, on May 7, with their deaths having been listed as resulting from separate falls. Suspicion had been aroused when police said they had learned that a relative, not the parents, had bought strychnine under an assumed name prior to the deaths. Both children had died in convulsions and an autopsy showed no signs of injuries which would have been suffered in falls. The sheriff said that the investigation was continuing and that a full report would likely be made soon. We suggest study of Richard III.
In Norfolk, Va., the woman who was facing charges of embezzlement of more than a million dollars from her employer, a building and loan association, pleaded guilty this date, following the reading of a 22-count indictment, the last count of which received her guilty plea. The thefts had been alleged to have occurred between December, 1933 and December, 1955. She had been convicted the prior Thursday of making false statements to the State Corporation Commission in 1946 concerning the condition of the association and had been sentenced to ten years in prison on that charge.
Dick Young of The News reports that no official comment was forthcoming this date on the request of the Charlotte Negro Parent-Teacher Council for desegregation of Charlotte schools beginning the following September. In the meantime, year-end assignments of pupils for the following school year was proceeding as in the past. Meeting the previous day, the Council, representing 11 black PTA organizations, had adopted a resolution calling for "a definite plan" for beginning desegregation the following September. It stated: "The state statutes requiring or permitting segregation in public education, as advanced by Governor Hodges, the State Legislature and other agencies of the state government, are a complete block to all voluntary efforts to end segregation and therefore must be construed as illegal, immoral and undemocratic…" Available members of the City School Board's special study committee on desegregation had no comment. The City School superintendent, Dr. E. H. Garringer, said that the letter was addressed to the City School Board, and so he had no comment.
Emery Wister of The News reports that the multi-million dollar Charlotte Ordnance Missile Plant would be dedicated the following day with a host of government and industrial leaders in attendance, with the principal address to be delivered by Frank Higgins, Assistant Secretary of the Army. Governor Luther Hodges, Representative Charles Jonas, Donald Douglas, president of Douglas Aircraft Co., and other dignitaries would be present.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports that a center for mentally retarded children would open in Charlotte early the following month, according to the chairman of the Mecklenburg unit of Parents and Friends of Mentally Retarded Children. The center would be for children between ages six and 16 and would be housed in a converted doctor's clinic, to be supported by private fees and donations from the public. About 20 children were expected to be enrolled by the following fall, and there would be fewer until that time.
Presumably for want of an ABC Network affiliate in the area, there was no mention in either of the Charlotte newspapers of a nationally televised debate this night between Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination, and eventual running mates, Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver, live from Miami, Fla., the first televised presidential debate. The Winston-Salem Journal carried the news on the front page this date, and other newspapers around the state, in Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh, mentioned it on inside pages. The debate came in advance of the Florida primary the following week, the penultimate primary before the California primary, June 5, the last of the short and mainly inconsequential primary season. Senator Kefauver would be selected as the vice-presidential running mate to Mr. Stevenson after the latter left it open to the convention in August to nominate his running mate, with Senator Kefauver narrowly beating Senator John F. Kennedy for the second spot on the ticket.
On the editorial page, "The Case for Limited Access Roads" finds that the state's praise of limited access highways was a cry for help. The state had no law specifically covering control of access, and legislation was badly needed in that area. The State Highway and Public Works Commission had been praising the concept of limited access highways without dwelling on the legal problems associated with it.
It suggests that if the state waited too long to provide authority for such highways, it might suffer the anguish of sister states which had been belatedly awakened to the inadequacy of their road-building laws. A few years earlier, North Dakota had discovered that its highway laws had been so vague that officials were not even sure they could lend a truck to help a local government build a road or stop a farmer from planting corn along the highway right-of-way. Oklahoma, when constructing a new stretch of road to eliminate a bad curve, found that a farmer had promptly plowed up the stretch lying next to his land, and when a group of highway users sued him, the court had said that Oklahoma laws did not provide the state power to vacate roads.
It provides some of the benefits to limited access roads in the state, especially that, according to a survey conducted nationally, such roads had one-third the rate of fatal accidents and half the rate of other accidents, compared to open access roads.
It urges therefore legislative action to provide for limited access highways.
"The 'Zealot' and the 'Slicker' Retire" tells of the two men who had contributed most to creative and newspaper writing in recent state history being slated to retire in June, leaving a void which UNC would find difficult to fill. The two journalists were O. J. Coffin and Phillips Russell, the former it regards as the "zealot" and the latter, the "slicker" of UNC's journalism department, located at the time in Bynum Hall.
It indicates that until the recent trend toward over-academicizing journalism, a simple formula had prevailed at the UNC school, whereby Mr. Coffin would fire up his students to the point that they wanted to expose everything not in sight, while Mr. Russell would advise the young journalists that investigative or any other form of reporting did not necessarily have to be couched in writing without literary merit. While concentrating on polish, the latter had not forgotten his training as a working journalist, and when writing news or fiction, favored the direct approach. He told his class, "If you're writing a story about a bear, bring on the bear!"
Journalists trained by the duo predominated now in North Carolina journalism, both print and broadcast, as well as in advertising and public relations, with several running the small weeklies so vital in community life. Among the columnists trained by Mr. Coffin had been Robert C. Ruark. And E. C. Daniel, Jr., of the New York Times, recently married to Margaret Truman, had also studied under him as well as under Mr. Russell.
It points out that while reporters and journalists were virtually synonymous, journalist usually dressed sharper and made more money, adopting the title when they graduated from the police beat. "By any name, the rip-roaring Coffin and the pipe-and-tweeds Russell need not apologize for their product. Their students are proven thinkers and doers on all levels in the information business."
Many of their students had come away from the experience under them with the impression that neither was very convinced that journalism schools were worthwhile, but both had given it a fling and the record spoke for itself, leaving behind a school of journalism in which was taught know-how gained by practical experience. It finds that the emphasis now on academic background in faculty selection would be interesting to watch.
Meanwhile, Mr. Russell would continue editing the Chapel Hill News Leader, and while it did not know what Mr. Coffin would do, it assures he would not be silent.
"Beltless" indicates that no one had ever been able to provide an exact definition of the Bible Belt, until it had opened Cousins and Strangers, a book of comments on the country by Commonwealth Fund fellows from Britain. One of the fellows had said that the Bible Belt was where there was "no drinking, no smoking, no immorality, but, above all, no damyankees."
It suggests that, in that event, the South had better hunt up some suspenders, as it had been Beltless for years.
A piece from the Sanford Herald, titled "The Damyankee", tells of the Chicago Tribune noting that the word "Yankee" was given to all Americans by persons in other lands, that Southerners referred to Northerners sometimes as Yankees and Northerners referred to people from New England as Yankees, that New England applied the term to Vermonters and Vermonters replied that a Yankee was just someone who ate pie for breakfast.
It finds that the Tribune had failed to examine the term "Damyankee", suggesting that to it, the term meant a motorist with a license plate from Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire or any other Northern state, except probably New Jersey, streaking up or down U.S. Highway 1 at 80 mph, contemptuous of all of the land separating home and Florida and prepared to denounce as a racketeer the highway patrolman who might arrest the person and save his neck. It adds that the person also wore his shirttail outside his pants.
Drew Pearson indicates that the most famous economizer in Congress was Congressman John Taber of New York, a veteran member of the Appropriations Committee, who had once cut 30 million dollars from the State Department's Voice of America budget, had cut the Food and Drug Administration's budget so drastically that it could inspect poultry plants only once every 12 years, and had cut out 6,000 tax agents from the IRS at a time when the Government needed investigation of tax evasion more than ever. Mr. Taber believed, however, that economy should begin at home, as he had his son on the Government payroll at $630 per month and his brother, at $379 per month, and had spent $124,905 annually for 28 clerks, the largest Congressional staff in Washington, while he had been chairman of the Appropriations Committee.
He was no longer chairman but even so, a staff member received a salary of $4,700 per year from the Committee for which he was supposed to work, but was seldom in Washington, spending his time in Mr. Taber's home mending political fences. Although Mr. Taber consistently voted against Social Security for workers, he voted for pensions for Congressmen, and if he retired from Congress at the end of the current year, as some of his constituents wanted him to do, he would collect an annual pension of $12,780, assuming he had made regular contributions to it.
Information from London had it that the British frogman seen around the ship which had transported Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev for their recent visit to Britain, was sent to examine the hull of the vessel in Portsmouth Harbor, to see if it might be equipped with an atomic trap door. While the British did not actually suspect that a ship carrying the two Soviet leaders on a goodwill mission would deposit an atomic bomb in the harbor, the great dread of every defense department of every country was that one day a ship might do so. Additional reports from London indicated that Soviet frogmen, who were put in the water to guard the ship, had immediately spotted Commander Lionel Crabb, the British frogman, and in an ensuing wild underwater battle, had stabbed him to death, with the body probably having been taken aboard the cruiser to keep the murder secret.
Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe
Luce had returned to the U.S. after an incident in the U.S. Embassy
in Rome when she had been presented with a medallion by Embassy
staff, commemorating her three years of service, and during the
ceremony, had broken into tears and was unable to stop crying. Her
Life-Time-Fortune publisher husband, Henry Luce,
suggested that the time
Orme Lewis, former Assistant Secretary of Interior during the present Administration, who now practiced law in Phoenix, had been secretly trying to influence Interior Department officials in favor of one of his law clients, Paradise Water Co., which the previous October had signed a contract with the Fort McDowell Indians for part of their precious Verde River water rights in parched Arizona. The contract needed the approval of the Interior Department's Indian Bureau before the company could start pumping the river water to its customers in the swank country club district of Paradise Valley. The company had then hired Mr. Lewis as its lawyer, and he had been quietly seeking to persuade his old friends in the Indian Bureau to approve the contract. Phoenix was fighting the deal, while the new Assistant Secretary, Wesley D'Ewart, was playing it safe, asking the Justice Department for a legal opinion on the matter.
Walter Lippmann tells of returning to Washington after two weeks in London and Paris, finding that the U.S. might be missing one of the principal points of the Soviet decision to demobilize about a million men during the ensuing year. Secretary of State Dulles had stated at a press conference the previous Tuesday that he did not think that the Soviet move was "calculated appreciably to alter their military power." Mr. Lippmann indicates that he was implying that the Soviet move had no bearing on military policy of the NATO countries, as Soviet military power would be just as great as prior to the reduction.
But Mr. Lippmann believes that it would not be read that way in Western Europe, where the question was more likely to be that if the Soviets could demobilize about a quarter of their men under arms and still be just as powerful as they ever had been, how many men could be demobilized in Western Europe without making it less secure. The more Secretary Dulles showed that the Soviets had lost nothing by their demobilization, the more impressive would be the example for Britain, France and West Germany, short on industrial manpower and regarding military service as wasteful and tiresome. The demobilization effort by the Soviets would not be so much regarded as a gesture toward peace but as a means to determine whether it was an example of military realism, whether the Soviets were seizing the initiative in strategic thinking about the revolution in military technology.
There had been much discussion within the U.S. as to whether the Soviets had a lead in certain areas, for example, guided missiles, but what was needed was question of whether the Soviets were adapting their policy more quickly than the U.S. to new military developments. They had been ahead of the U.S. in realizing the political consequences of what had occurred in 1949 when they deployed their first nuclear weapons and broke the monopoly held previously by the U.S. They foresaw the growth as a result of neutralism in all countries which did not possess nuclear weapons, the Soviets taking advantage of that status and encouraging neutralism, increasing their political influence in Asia.
The U.S. had come around to that realization only recently. In the visit by President Soekarno of Indonesia and the upcoming visit of Prime Minister Nehru of India, the U.S. was beginning to seek to repair the damage from an ill-judged policy. Thanks to the genius of former Prime Minister Churchill, the West had been ahead of the Soviets in realizing the political consequences of the second military revolution, that of the hydrogen bomb. The second revolution had led the U.S. to acknowledge at the summit meeting in Geneva the previous July that the great nuclear powers were in a military stalemate and that they could not contemplate war as an instrument of their policies.
There was now a third phase of the revolution in strategic thinking, having primarily to do with the adaptation of Western European military policy to the military stalemate. The NATO Army was in trouble because of growing skepticism as to whether it reflected a correct estimate of the coming military situation.
Mr. Lippmann indicates his surprise to find how far that skepticism had gone in high quarters abroad as to the true military value of much which had never previously been questioned. He cites as an example a drastic re-examination in Britain of the abolition of the Fighter Command, which in 1940 had won the Battle of Britain against Nazi Germany. The argument now was that Britain could not be defended successfully by interceptor planes against the modern supersonic bombers. The same kind of skepticism had begun to reach West Germany regarding the necessity of its ground forces. It was that backdrop against which he believed the Soviet action needed to be interpreted, that the question was not really whether the Soviets were deceiving the West but whether they were going to persuade Western Europe that they knew how to show the way to security and prosperity. "Certainly in this matter of reducing military personnel, the door on which they are pushing is already ajar."
Doris Fleeson tells of the struggle having formally begun regarding civil rights legislation, the issue most deeply steeped in politics during the election year. It was the most divisive issue of Democratic unity, while at the same time holding for Republicans an enormous vote potential in pivotal states, the more important to Republicans because of unrest among farmers in normally Republican territory.
She finds that the story was broken into two separate parts, one being the merits of the legislation proposed by the Administration, for which Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who had drafted it, had fired the opening salvos. The other part was the politics of the struggle, with the Senate, with few exceptions, being mostly concerned with the second part of the struggle, where the real fighting would take place. Republican appetite for the battle had been whetted by their own and other polls regarding black voters, showing that Northern black voters were breaking toward the Administration after 20 years of near solidarity under former Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. That had occurred not because of any action by Congressional Republicans, but rather because of the President and the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former liberal Republican Governor appointed by the President in 1953.
Republican stakes were high, wanting to capture both houses of Congress again, riding the President's coattails, as had occurred in the 1952 election. As a result, Congressional Republicans were planning to break with the Southern conservatives regarding fiscal issues and follow Mr. Brownell on civil rights issues. Northern Democrats, who could never obtain enough Republican votes for civil rights until the current year, would furnish the margin to force the Administration program to the floor for a vote. Southern Democrats understood that political strategy and their adeptness at the game had given them immense power through the years despite minority status. They now expected a shrewdly timed onslaught on their prepared positions and would filibuster, even though they knew it would harm the party on the eve of the national convention and the presidential election. What they hoped to do, and probably could do with their control of the Senate machinery, was to postpone the battle until after the remainder of the legislative program had been handled. But at present, they saw no alternative to a major struggle in the home stretch before the election season.
Republicans could afford that fight as they had no Southern organization and depended solely on the personal appeal to Southerners by the President, whereas Democrats had to pay the price of being a national party.
A letter writer responds to a
previous letter writer who believed that the presence of the
Metropolitan Opera would shame the recent local performance of
Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, and cause revision of local standards
for appreciation of opera. This writer suggests that perhaps that
might be the case, but that he had seen and heard performances by the
Met which had been anything but first-class, with some better
forgotten. He suggests that one of the male leads in the local
presentation might not have had the wallop which Verdi had in mind
for the part of Radames, but that he had been musical. "I'll be
durned if I want to hear Met star Jan Peerce
Framed Edition
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