The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 29, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that the former Prime Minister of Azerbaijan and three other top officials of that republic had been executed for treason and counterrevolutionary activity, accused of being accomplices of former Soviet police head, L. P. Beria. A newspaper account had reached Moscow this date, saying that the four had been charged with "terrorist acts". It said that the public trial had been held in Baku between April 12 and April 26 and that the chief defendant was the former secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, M. D. Bagirov, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan Republic. He had been made an alternate member of the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March, 1953, immediately after the death of Stalin. But within the Soviet Union, he had long been considered a close collaborator of Mr. Beria and had fallen from grace a few weeks after the arrest of Mr. Beria, who was summarily executed after a quick trial in December, 1953. On July 18, 1953, Moscow radio had announced that Mr. Bagirov had been dismissed as Premier of Azerbaijan, though not at the time connecting him with Mr. Beria, saying only that he had been guilty of gross bureaucracy. The newspaper account from Baku had said that he and his accomplices were guilty of treason, of using improper methods of police investigation, setting the state security organs against the Government and the Communist Party, and of counterrevolutionary activity. The account added that two other defendants had been sentenced to terms of 25 years in prison. There had been no word of the trial or the executions in the Moscow press or over the radio.
In Washington, the Government ruled this date that idle workers had to pay Federal income tax on new supplementary unemployment benefits, but that the benefits, due to be started on June 1 by the major automakers, were not to be treated as wages subject either to withholding or Social Security taxes.
Interim Senator Thomas Wofford of South Carolina moved this date to block Senate confirmation of the nomination of Charles Lowen, Jr., as Civil Aeronautics Administration administrator because of his stand on race segregation, accusing Mr. Lowen of having "exceeded any authority granted or implied by Congress" in ordering Federal aid funds withheld the previous April for segregated public facilities at Hawkins Field Airport in Jackson, Miss. Senator Wofford filed with the Senate a statement of minority views, dissenting from the Senate Commerce Committee's approval of the nomination for a full term as CAA administrator. Shortly afterward, the Senate temporarily sidetracked consideration of the nomination at the request of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. The majority report of the Committee said that it "approved this nomination with the understanding that such approval does not in any way prejudice" consideration of the pending bill which would divorce the CAA from the Commerce Department and make it a separate agency. The majority report made no mention of the segregation issue. Senator Wofford was the lone signer of the minority report. Mr. Lowen at present held the job under a recess appointment.
In Chapel Hill, eleven black students had applied for admission to various graduate schools of UNC for the term beginning the following fall, with three applications having been accepted and eight others still pending. The three accepted applications were to the Medical School, the Graduate School in clinical psychology, and to the Law School, the latter being the application of Henry Frye, future Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, a Court on which he served for 18 years before his retirement in 2001 following his defeat to election for a full term as Chief by Justice I. Beverly Lake, Jr. One other application to the Law School was pending and another student had withdrawn his application. It was also reported by the University News Bureau that four black graduate students had been accepted for summer school courses. Thus far, the University had received no applications from black students for admission to the undergraduate program during the fall semester. Three students had been admitted the previous September to the undergraduate program pursuant to a Federal Court order and were still in school. In addition, seven black students had been enrolled in various graduate schools of the University during the current school year.
Dry, warm weather this date had hastened the recovery of flooded areas of Indiana and Illinois, with a hot sun having begun to dry out the Indianapolis Speedway and thus assured the running of the Memorial Day 500-mile race the following day. Indianapolis had been placed under a state of flood emergency the previous day by its mayor, and officials had called out more than 2,100 Civil Defense workers and ordered police officers to remain on duty.
In Toledo, O., a gunman had climaxed a wild chase this date by killing a deputy sheriff, then speeding away again, striking and killing a young woman, a hospital employee, who was leading a blind man, also a hospital employee, across the street, before the gunman was finally captured. The blind man had been injured. The police said that the gunman was from Brooklyn and had been chased by a highway patrolman for speeding before a roadblock was set up to try to catch him, at which the deputy was killed. Two other men were in the automobile at the time, and detectives said that they admitted that the car had been stolen in New York. The gunman, when taken into custody, was quoted by police as saying, "I could have splattered you all over the place, but I already killed one man and I thought I had enough."
In Charlotte, a man was arrested by the FBI this date, charged with a violation of the Federal banking and larceny statutes for passing slugs for U.S. coins at a Spartanburg, S.C., bank, with the special agent in charge of the Charlotte office of the FBI stating that he passed over $200 in slugs to the bank, which the bank had reported the previous day. The FBI agent said that the slugs had been wrapped as quarters and the man had been given bills for them by the bank. He had placed a quarter at each end of the roll to disguise the slugs and some of the rolls contained all genuine coins.
Also in Charlotte, a decision within ten days on the location of the proposed City Health Center on Memorial Hospital grounds had been promised this date, with the Memorial Hospital Authority indicating that they would say whether the city could build the Health Center on either a site on Scott Avenue or on a site near Garden Terrace.
Also in Charlotte, after rejection of all bids, revision of plans for the city's Hopkins water filtration plant was called for this date. Low base bids of 5.6 million dollars for construction of the 12 million gallon capacity plant had been discovered to exceed greatly the allocation of funds, according to City Manager Henry Yancey, causing the bids to be rejected, the plans revised and the work re-advertised for bids.
Near Guntersville, La., an automobile and a cabin cruiser had collided the previous day when the boat's controls had jammed and it jumped out of the lake. Puzzled Highway Patrol officers could not decide at first whether they had jurisdiction, but they made a report on the case. Officers said that the controls of the boat, occupied by two men, had locked and the boat struck a highway causeway, bouncing partly into the road, at which point a car had struck the boat and a female occupant suffered a possible skull fracture and cuts on her face and head.
In Washington, a 16-year old high school science student from Montana this date presented the President with a gadget of the student's design, to help him make "important executive and strategic decisions," calling it a "presidential decision meter". He said it had four switches, the first to turn the gadget on, the second to erase all previous data, a third to weigh all pros and cons, applying plus or minus values for each one on five instrument dials, and the last, a "yes-no toggle switch", which enabled the machine to come up with a clear decision. The President accepted the gift, saying: "Good! Now I'll have more time to play golf." Another student from Montana gave the President a solar-powered transistor radio "to keep up with the latest news even while he's on the golf course."
On the editorial page, "Decent Sanitation—Regardless of Race" indicates that the State Board of Health records, as determined by a study of them by Raleigh newsmen, had shown that thousands of children in the state were attending grade schools which failed to meet minimum sanitation standards, with black children suffering more than white children.
For instance, 41 black schools in Halifax County were substandard and only one white school fell into that category. In Greene County, 12 of 14 black schools were substandard. In Bertie County, where there were only 36 schools, 24 black schools were substandard. In Northampton, 20 of 33 schools were substandard, all of them being black schools except one. In Pender County, 15 of 25 schools were substandard, all of which were black schools. In Warren County, with 40 schools, 19 black schools were substandard and only one white school fell into that category. Sampson County had 42 schools, with 16 substandard black schools and only two substandard white schools.
It finds it a thoroughly disillusioning record of public neglect at the local level. Dr. Charles Carroll, State superintendent of public instruction, had pointed out that sanitation was a matter for local school and health authorities, that there was no state money appropriated for the maintenance of schools. What that system had led to was quite evident and it urges state legislation requiring specific sanitation standards.
It ventures that school authorities, facing desegregation suits, could expect little mercy from the courts when educational facilities were so outrageously unequal. More important was the moral obligation of the citizenry to provide and maintain schools meeting minimum standards of decency for all races. "A shabby record needs correcting."
"The Sanatorium Needs a New Mission" finds that the shaping of a new mission for the Mecklenburg Tuberculosis Sanatorium deserved top priority on the County Commission's agenda after the voters had approved on Saturday the continuation of the facility. Tuberculosis, however, was decreasing in incidence and so there were empty beds at the Sanatorium.
There were demands that more beds be added by construction of a third wing, with many suggestions on how to fill them. It did not make sense to continue the facility only for the purpose of treating the dwindling number of tuberculosis patients at increasing cost per patient, and yet it was probable that the present facility was inadequate to support properly any other general purpose.
One member of the County Commission had stated the previous day that the Sanatorium could be used to house and care for people in the community who ought be receiving psychiatric care, presently being held in jail without treatment, defensible under state law only on grounds of "emergency" created by lack of any other facility for their detention. The piece indicates that the emergency was real, but that it had existed too long. While the County commissioner would provide only temporary treatment and attention of the mentally ill at the Sanatorium, others had suggested its use for equally good purposes, as a treatment center for alcoholics, a detention home for juvenile offenders, or for the convalescent and chronically ill at a cost below that charged by general hospitals.
All of those possibilities needed careful study before a wise decision could be made to shape the Sanatorium's future uses, and it recommends that such a study proceed.
"The Middle Class: Bigger and Better" indicates that after a faithful, dispassionate examination of what T. Coleman Andrews, director of the IRS, had said was happening to the American middle class, it was prepared to say simply, "Pish and tush."
Mr. Andrews had complained that income tax was slowly but surely destroying the middle class. But it finds that a graduated income tax was still the fairest method of taxation, provided it was administered fairly. And as for the middle class, it had never seen it looking heartier.
Most people claimed to be part of the middle class, and those who were members of the upper class generally were from older families who were rich, honored, superbly educated in prep schools and Ivy League colleges and tended to intermarry. Sociologists indicated that the number of such persons was less than 3 percent of the population. It indicates that there were lower classes, who were nice people but very poor, numbering about 10 to 15 percent of the population, with many assuming middle-class status as the "trickle-down" effect impacted them in boom Republican times as the present. Otherwise, they were not remotely interested in income taxes.
The steadily enlarging middle class was interested, but only when it was not busy partaking of prosperity, which was most of the time. Income tax might deprive people of having an army of servants, but they still had kitchen gadgets, a car, television set, and so forth. One member of the middle class might have two Cadillacs and an MG, while another might own no automobile but had cultivated a taste for scotch and other niceties unknown to the proletariat.
J. F. Cuger and W. F. Kenkel, in Social Stratification, had stated as an example that one family might have a good deal of money, with two cars and a nice house, but did not go to church, help in the Community Chest drive or attend PTA meetings. But they had gone to college, subscribed to a lot of newspapers and magazines and bought a lot of books. One would expect the man of such a household to do something better than just be a contractor for building silo and grain storage bins, but not too many people were willing to criticize openly the man because he had a lot of power in the town and could hire and fire a lot of people, and also had an "in" with the bank.
Henry C. Bush, writing of Americans in the Manchester Guardian in Britain, advised to note the wife in America, as the wife represented a label of status, that such things as whether she was upper or upper-middle-class, overdressed, quietly elegant in her dress, or expensively overdressed for her age determined whether they were proletariat of the 1940's and thus to be ignored because all they had was money.
It finds the theories and the income tax of Mr. Andrews frightening at times, but also finds that the middle class was bigger than both of them and that it would likely survive.
A piece from the Southern Pines Pilot, titled "Laying around the Clock", tells of having warned that something probably bad would result from raising chickens with artificial light, fooling them into thinking that it was daytime all the time so that they would continue to lay eggs.
Now, the hens were desperately trying to work out a method to tell time. A woman who lived in Troy reported that her hens had been producing eggs which had marks on the shells just like a clock face, with a slightly flattened surface on one side and 12 straight little marks across in a circle. There were no numerals on the eggs, but it predicts that the hens would likely catch on to that next if given time. "Who'd ever have thought a hen had the ingenuity, let alone ambition to work out such a scheme for beating the clock?"
Drew Pearson tells of the friction between Secretary of State Dulles and disarmament ambassador Harold Stassen, generating from the fact that Mr. Stassen believed that the U.S. should talk more to the Russians, while Mr. Dulles was dismissive of such talk, believing that conferences with the Russians got nowhere. The Russians, believing Mr. Stassen more sympathetic to them, were now going to him more than to Mr. Dulles, irritating Mr. Dulles. Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had tipped off their plans to Mr. Stassen to make the cut of 1.2 million men in the Red Army during the ensuing year. One of the personal press relations men of Mr. Dulles had later leaked the story to the press that the meeting with Mr. Stassen had been a vodka brawl, though there was no insinuation that Mr. Stassen had participated. Mr. Stassen had been able to convince the President that there should be a more sympathetic approach to Russia, also irritating the Secretary of State.
Murray Chotiner, the Vice-President's campaign manager and also attorney for New Jersey racketeer Marco Reginelli, had been able to use his influence in Washington to avoid the deportation of Mr. Reginelli. The deportation proceedings had begun in the Justice Department under Attorney General James McGranery during the Truman Administration, among some 100 racketeers and gangsters who were slated for deportation. It was based on Mr. Reginelli's 16 arrests between 1917 and 1942, including six convictions, three prison sentences and three fines. There had been a battle for succession of him as czar of the New Jersey underworld, resulting in the murder of five men in south Philadelphia and south Jersey. An important conviction on which the Justice Department had based the deportation proceedings was for violation of the Mann Act in taking a woman from New Jersey to Florida for immoral purposes in 1952. Immigration officials had wanted to question the woman about the trip and had subpoenaed her, after which she was suddenly found dead. The circumstances of the death had been mysterious, as she had been staying at a motel in New Jersey when she received the summons, with Mr. Reginelli present at the time. A day later, she was found dead. The coroner had ruled the death the result of acute alcoholism, but the U.S. Attorney in Atlantic City was suspicious, called in the FBI and also had written a letter to the Justice Department asking for a thorough FBI investigation. J. Edgar Hoover had also written the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, stating that the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey had asked for an investigation, indicating that his agent in New Jersey felt that there was no Federal jurisdiction for him to investigate without an approval from the Justice Department, which Mr. Hoover was seeking. Officials of the Criminal Division, after examining the case, decided that the facts were suspicious, that there might have been an obstruction of justice and that the Federal Government had jurisdiction, thus wrote a request that the FBI proceed with the investigation. The request had gone to the chief of the General Crimes Section for his approval and transmission to the head of the Criminal Division for his approval, but the head of the General Crimes Section was someone whom Mr. Chotiner had called upon when he intervened at the Justice Department on behalf of Mr. Reginelli. The letter had been routed to an assistant to Warren Olney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, but during the interim, the letter was lost, sidetracked or misplaced, despite having been marked: "Important and Urgent—Rackets". The letter had been written at a time when the Justice Department had been making a special drive against racketeers, but nevertheless, the mysterious death of the woman who was to testify against Mr. Reginelli had been held up in the Justice Department until it was too late.
A letter writer says that he was all for improvements of public park and recreation facilities and realized that it took money to do so, and that, while not a fan of stock-car racing, he was not seeking to deprive enthusiasts of the right to enjoy their sport. But he is against promotion of races in the heart of a residential section where homes with children were located less than 50 yards from the proposed racetrack at Memorial Stadium, and expresses disbelief that the Park & Recreation Commission wished to improve the parks at the expense of property owners and families who had to live within close proximity to the stadium. He indicates that the visit of the Park & Recreation people to Winston-Salem to study Bowman Gray Stadium, while showing dedication, did not render a fair comparison, because that stadium was a third higher than the Charlotte stadium, and rising above the top-most wall for 15 to 20 feet was a natural sound barrier comprised of heavy shrubbery, and was outside the city limits, not close to a residential section. He says that the proposed use of Memorial Stadium for stock-car racing would produce noise in more than mere negligible amounts, with 30 to 40 automobiles racing without mufflers. He finds some encouragement from the fact that the City Council had been reluctant to provide its whole-hearted support to the proposition with four of the members, plus Mayor Philip Van Every, voting against the proposal.
A letter writer from Monroe, 15, indicates that the newspaper was to be commended for showing the sad shape of the Mint Museum, finding it inexcusable that a city the size of Charlotte would have no better place for the display and storage of paintings, hopes that the City Council would take action to restore and renovate the building so that the city could have an art museum of which it could be proud.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter writer who had criticized the Charlotte Opera Association presentation of Aida, saying that the previous writer was not interested in enriching the musical life of the community by bringing the Metropolitan Opera to Charlotte as much as he wanted to see another social event at which the ladies could parade their wardrobe. This writer had lived in New York most of his life and had seen many Met openings "taken over" by "headline-happy society leaders overly anxious to have their pictures on page one the following morning." He says he was delighted to be in a progressive city such as Charlotte, where intelligent, devoted people were striving to enlarge the cultural potential of all of the citizens, utilizing limited funds and limited personnel. He finds that cultural groups such as the Opera Association were doing a magnificent job in making Charlotte a better place to live and should be commended.
A letter writer responds to the same previous letter writer, indicating that to bring the Met to Rock Hill, S.C., as he wanted, would require that he raise $18,000 to $20,000, and this writer would not be surprised if the Charlotte Opera Association turned out en masse to attend.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., tells of the Senate during the previous few days having taken up the House bill passed the previous year lowering the age for retirement and paying disability to those who could not work because of sickness at the age of 50. The Administration was opposed to the bill, as was the AMA and most big business. This writer wonders why they were opposed to something which would benefit the sick and elderly when the Administration favored billions of taxpayer money being spent everywhere else in the world. He thinks that charity should start at home, that it should be called the Government of NATO, with America excluded, rather than the U.S. Government. He hopes that the Senate would pass the bill.
A letter from the secretary of the North Carolina Dental Auxiliary expresses appreciation for the coverage in the newspaper given their organization before and during their recent annual meeting at Pinehurst.
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