The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 3, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Murray Chotiner, the 1952 campaign manager for Vice-President Nixon, had testified this date before the Senate Investigations subcommittee that two White House officials had made telephone calls for him on behalf of his legal clients, but denied that he had ever used his connection with Mr. Nixon or any other Government officials to seek favor for persons he represented in dealing with Government agencies. He said that on one or two occasions, phone calls had been made for him at the White House to obtain information about his pending cases or to set up appointments with Government officials, that the calls had been made by Maxwell Rabb, the President's assistant in charge of minority problems, and Charles Willis, Jr., former White House patronage aide to the President. The subcommittee was examining alleged graft on military clothing contracts and had called Mr. Chotiner after it discovered that he had represented some of the garment manufacturers.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the first of a series of six area meetings had been held this date in Charlotte, following numerous requests from school officials and their attorneys throughout the state for suggestions on implementation of the 1955 Assignment Act, passed by the General Assembly. At the meeting, State Attorney General W. B. Rodman, and other state officials, had explained in detail the Act to school leaders from all over the Piedmont. He was accompanied by State Senator Lunsford Crew, a member of the State Advisory Committee on Education, and two other men. Mr. Rodman had told the newspaper that the Act might be strengthened in the special session of the Assembly to be called during the summer, as the law might need administrative clarification. He said that the state was not trying to evade the law but that there were other factors besides race which would impact the assignment of pupils. Senator Crew said that responsibility and authority for the assignment of school children under the law would reside in the board of education of each local administrative unit, and so there would be the need for continuing study by the boards of their local situations to make equitable assignments of all children. The meeting had been attended by school authorities from all over the Piedmont, including members of the Charlotte City School Board and the Mecklenburg County School Board.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges said this date at a press conference that although studies were not complete, he believed that separation of the Prisons Department from the State Highway Commission might be feasible, that if it was necessary to finance the Prisons Department, he would not hesitate to recommend appropriations from the State's general fund. In the past, the Department had been supported entirely from the State's highway fund. The Governor said that with the Highway Commission paying the bill, the Department had little incentive in becoming self-supporting, but that much could be done to render the Department self-supporting, such as limiting the large number of short-term prisoners who flooded the prison system. The Governor favored the "Wisconsin plan", whereby short-term prisoners were allowed to work at their regular jobs by day and were confined only at night. He said it might not work in rural areas but would in areas of larger population. The Governor also praised a statement by Wake County Superior Court Judge Hamilton Hobgood during the week that he intended to consider maximum instead of minimum sentences in punishing traffic violators, the Governor indicating that he hoped other judges would do the same kind of thing, as he believed people would demand it. The Governor also said that the revenue collections report had shown that the general fund for the fiscal year might exceed estimates made by the Legislature by as much as 20 million dollars, with estimates already having been revised upward by ten million. Income and sales tax revenues had increased by nearly 32 million during the first ten months of the fiscal year over the same period the previous year.
n New Orleans, a 43-year old automobile salesman was deliberately run down the previous day, according to police, in a car driven by his former girlfriend, and had died this date. Police said that the girlfriend had, after hitting him the first time, rolled over him with the car two or three more times. She was charged with attempted murder the previous night, with officers indicating that the charge probably would be amended later this date to murder. Witnesses told police that she had swerved the car to strike the man as he was trying to get into his automobile, then turned around and ran over him twice more. Police said that she would only tell the witnesses that the man had taken advantage of her. The incident had apparently been the outgrowth of a love affair which was broken off when the victim became reconciled with his wife. An auto mechanic had lifted the hood of the girlfriend's car and torn loose the ignition wires finally to stop her.
In Gastonia, N.C., a man was reported released from prison in Atlanta the previous day following 15 days of incarceration. He had been known by a different name by his Gastonia neighbors for 14 years. He had killed a Georgia policeman in 1936, had been convicted of murder but then had escaped a road gang in 1940 and remained on the lam, until police had walked into his home 15 days earlier and identified him by his real name, at which point he put on his coat and walked out the door to the police car. He did not know who had provided the tip to Georgia authorities, but wanted to thank the person, as he had been under anxiety and worry about being caught during all the intervening years. During the interim, he had been married and had become a hard-working father of two children. In Atlanta, the Georgia Pardon and Parole Board had reviewed his case, recognizing strong public sentiment favoring his release, as 10,000 names had been attached to petitions presented to the Board. It had weighed the evidence, cited the man's outstanding life since his escape, his poor influences when he was a boy, and, in the end, freed him on parole, allowing him to return to North Carolina under the jurisdiction of the North Carolina Parole Board. Meanwhile, his previous job as superintendent of Gastonia's Myers Mill was still awaiting his return. He hoped soon to make permanent his assumed name.
In Charlotte, memory expert Sigmund Blomberg, whose series, "How's Your Memory?" had been appearing daily in The News, held a demonstration at the Piedmont Junior High School the previous night, to demonstrate his system for remembering names and faces, facts and figures, with the audience having been convinced that it worked by six of his students from Central High School. As a result, hundreds who attended the demonstration, sponsored by The News, signed up for the two-night memory course which would begin this night. He introduced a female student who had met more than 150 persons in the audience prior to the performance, and, using no notes of any kind, had been able rapidly to identify each person by his or her correct name. Mr. Blomberg contended that the ability would mean more than any other one thing in winning friends, gaining the good will of customers and prospects, and social standing.
In Charlotte, police learned that thieves had driven an automobile into the two glass front doors of a drugstore, had then entered the store and stolen nearly $160 in cash, plus a quart bottle of champagne, 18 ballpoint pens, an electric razor, three quarts of wine, and a quart of beer, the merchandise totaling $228 in value. Police had arrested two teenage suspects who had been driving a 1950 black Ford, when stopped shortly after the break-in had been discovered in the early morning.
In Ogden, Utah, a 39-year old man said that he was only trying to help when he had thrown a rock at two nuns, telling a judge that he had thrown the rock because the women were checking their gas tank to see if it was full and had just struck a match so that they could see better, and he wanted to warn them of the danger. He said that it was a large rock as it was the only one he could find, that it had missed the car and struck a man who was quarreling with his wife, glancing off his head and going through a grocery store window. The man had become upset and had come over to make trouble, according to the defendant. The judge sentenced the man to 30 days in city jail on a disorderly conduct charge. Next time, just let the nuns blow themselves up. Ignis fatuus...
In Louisville, Ky., the Jefferson County Police Department would get three dictionaries to help their officers in spelling, after the police chief had complained that some of his men could not even spell "Oak Street", causing reports from district offices to be difficult to read. A member of the fiscal court had first suggested providing the officers with county maps listing streets and roads, but the county road engineer had said that it would not work because "some of the roads are spelled wrong there, too."
On the editorial page, "Charlotte's Moral Responsibility To Act" finds that the community had a moral obligation to provide suitable detention facilities for juvenile delinquents, that a real social problem existed, made no less real or less dangerous because the "proper authorities" at the State level had not attended to it.
The community's welfare was at stake and its people were affected, such that "to do nothing would be a ludicrous form of self-punishment."
Mayor Philip Van Every had appealed to the community's conscience the previous day in proposing that both the City and County earmark half of their surplus ABC funds for establishing local detention facilities, and it suggests that if those funds were not available for the purpose, another way had to be found to accomplish the same thing.
It finds that by sidetracking the problem to a committee headed by County Board of Commissioners member Sam McNinch, an avowed opponent of the Mayor's proposal, little had been accomplished except to construct a political roadblock. City Council member Claude Albea had been correct when he asserted that the purpose of the committee was "to do nothing".
Two children, ages 13 and 15, had already been locked up illegally in a jail cell by Charlotte Police Chief Frank Littlejohn, acknowledging that it contravened state law but indicating that his responsibility as a law enforcement officer to the community was more important, and that he, in good conscience, could not release the two "incorrigible" delinquents, as declared by the Juvenile Court, which would suggest to them that their continuing course of conduct could recur with impunity. The piece indicates that there was no doubt that other juveniles would also be locked up in jail cells, exposed to hardened adult inmates, until facilities were made available.
The Mayor's committee on juvenile delinquency had recommended just nine days earlier that a detention home ought be established if the State failed to meet its obligations, with the State training schools typically not having space for months at a time. While demands for action by the State ought continue, it urges not being fooled, as the rural-dominated Legislature liked to think of juvenile delinquency as an urban problem and so was likely to continue to ignore it.
If Charlotte was going to have the problem solved, it would have to do it itself, and urgently.
"Drag Racing and Box-Top Gadgets" tells of traffic officers being only a hair-breadth behind Dick Tracy in having electronic aids for their work. They had received a movie-clock for use in Mecklenburg by a Highway Patrol car, enabling an easier task in convicting speeders, as the whammy had enabled catching them in wholesale lots.
But the inventors could not keep up with the schemes of speeders, and a movie-clock would be of scant help if a patrol car was confronted by two cars traveling at 100 mph next to one another, as the patrol car would have to move into the ditch or be obliterated. The drag racers, according to the Highway Patrol, were bringing such situations about on the main thoroughfares, as well as on the back roads. Officers, particularly in the Piedmont area, said that groups of 12 to 15 persons might engage in a drag race on a public highway, pulling up to pre-selected spots in powerful cars and dispatching scout cars to decoy law enforcement, sometimes barricading roads adjacent to the designated racing strip. Then, two or more of the cars would line up side by side and within a half-mile from the start, might reach 90 mph.
Amid that "organized madness", speed detection devices such as whammies and movie-clocks became as "toys sent in exchange for box tops."
The Highway Patrol felt justifiably that the General Assembly had erred in ordering it to withdraw a fleet of unmarked cars from the roads where they could mingle undetected in traffic and thus have a better chance to apprehend speeders. The piece urges that the law should be abrogated and the unmarked cars allowed to return to the roads, as the Patrol needed a free hand in combating highway slaughter, with surprise being a better weapon than gadgetry.
"How Much Time and Education?" tells of it being all too easy to blame Good Samaritan Hospital and its personnel for long, anxious waits in the emergency room, but it was difficult to believe that there would be willful neglect of duty when human tragedy was involved, as doctors did not tarry when death lurked.
It finds that the problem lay largely in the increasing difficulty of a small hospital with limited facilities and personnel to meet the requirements of a growing black population, underscoring the need for better facilities and additional medical personnel at the hospital.
It is reminded of the sloth with which the citizens of Charlotte were acting to improve that situation, with the need already great and growing greater. The previous October, Mayor Philip Van Every had said that time and education were prerequisites for building adequate hospital facilities for blacks in Charlotte. The piece questions how much time and how much education, indicating that time was running out, that Charlotte residents were well enough educated to the problem to respond favorably to its practical and moral necessities.
"Confederate Ammo: A Precise Memory" tells of the discovery during the previous two days by a road crew of projectiles from the Civil War, which had been manufactured by the Charlotte Naval Arsenal of the time, indicating that while human memories were often inaccurate, the memory of the earth was more precise. "Earth under concrete remembering trees, and shoving through a fissure in mortar alongside the Bank of Commerce a dwarf of a cottonwood tree. It cannot become a tree, but the few leaves are true, and they will last as long as those on a tree with roots in free earth."
The Civil War bullets for rifles and cannonballs, manufactured for the Confederacy, had been preserved precisely, "with ugliness of shape and danger in design." Those projectiles could be changed by polishing and buffing, mounting them on a study wall where they could conjure up excitement, romance, adventure and the gay tunes of a great war in the memory of a man looking at them. "The earth remembered them as they were—cold, deadly and dark like the war they were meant to be used in."
A piece from The Sanford Herald, titled "Charlotte: Wet and Dry", tells of the recently published study by two Yale researchers having shown that Charlotte and Austin, Tex., had the lowest rates of chronic alcoholics per 100,000 adult population among communities with over 100,000 total population.
It finds that Charlotte was known as much for its churches as for anything else, and that the area around it was the early capital of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the country. Charlotte also had ABC stores.
It wonders whether the blending of spiritual advice and practical control of alcohol sales constituted a superior approach to the liquor problem. It concludes that it could draw no other finding from the study.
Drew Pearson tells of the story of how Russia was overtaking the U.S. in air power, having been unfolding behind closed doors of the special Senate Air Committee, chaired by Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who had been the first Secretary of the Air Force under President Truman. The details of the story had been maintained in secret thus far, but the column had obtained complete details of the U.S. lag behind Russia, with security experts in the Pentagon having been consulted as to how much could be revealed in the column, which he indicates could show only part of the story, but even so providing a shocking revelation of the lag in air power.
The Soviet Air Force had already outstripped the U.S. in building fast, modern jet planes, with Russia having 12,500 jets assigned to combat units, while the U.S. had only 9,000. Soviet engineers had developed more powerful jet engines than those of the U.S., with the engines for Russia's intercontinental jet bomber, the Bison, producing an estimated 16,000 to 18,000 pounds of thrust, while the J-57 engines powering the U.S. B-52 long-range bomber developed only 10,000 pounds of thrust. At the scheduled rates of production, the Soviet Air Force would completely outclass the U.S. Air Force in jet power within the ensuing two years, with U.S. procurement schedules calling for 2,500 new planes in fiscal 1956 and only 2,300 in fiscal 1957, barely replacing the 2,000 aircraft normally rendered obsolete each year by attrition.
Air Force strategists were convinced that U.S. air procurement had to be nearly doubled to keep pace with the Soviets.
The experts had projected recent Soviet production schedules into the future and believed that the relative strength of the Soviets and the U.S. would be, by 1958, in accordance with a list Mr. Pearson publishes, including twice as many projected Bisons as B-52's, 13 times as many light jet bombers, 2.5 times as many subsonic fighters, eight times the number of transonic jets, nine times the number of supersonic jets and nearly six times the number of all-weather interceptors, with the U.S. leading only in fast medium bombers, having 1,800 B-47's to the Soviets' 1,000 Badgers.
The Congressional Quarterly, in the third in a series of reports on the Southern states' rights advocates and Northern nationalists having formed a coalition to try to throw the 1956 presidential election into the House, indicates that leaders of the coalition were mustering forces for their first test of strength in Congress, with Clarence Manion, the former dean of the Notre Dame Law School and co-chairman of the nationalist group, For America, the Northern part of the new alliance, having said: "Any congressman or senator who does not go all out for the speedy passage of this bill is either numb to the constitutional wickedness of judicial legislation or in league with those who were determined to destroy states rights. In either case such congressman or senator is disqualified for service in this emergency and should be retired by the voters." He was speaking of a bill pending in the House and Senate Judiciary Committees which would codify states' rights against encroachment by the Federal judiciary—which, on its face would present a separation of powers issue. The bill was sponsored in the House by Representative Howard Smith of Virginia and in the Senate by Senators William Jenner of Indiana, John McClellan of Arkansas and 11 other Southern Senators.
The sentiments expressed by Mr. Manion were shared by members of the Federation for Constitutional Government, the coordinating group for white citizens councils in 11 Southern states, the Southern wing of the alliance. Both organizations had been described in the first two articles in the series, appearing in the editions of the previous two days. The Southern Federation had been formed to fight the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and yet Representative Smith said that his bill had nothing to do with segregation, being, nevertheless, the focus of the new coalition's first legislative effort. The Smith bill had been prompted by a 1954 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision invalidating that state's anti-subversive law, which had been affirmed as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania v. Nelson on April 2 by a six to three majority opinion, holding that Congress had intended to occupy the field of sedition legislation, leaving no room for the states to supplement it, although noting that the states still had authority to legislate against sedition in areas not preempted by the Federal Government.
The piece indicates that since the early 1800's, the Supreme Court had assumed the power to decide in cases such as Nelson whether Congress did or did not intend to exclude concurrent legislation by the states, with the critics of the practice referring to it as "preemption by implication" and "judicial legislation". The Smith bill was aimed at that practice.
Mr. Smith had been the author of the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a criminal offense to teach or advocate the overthrow of the Government by force or violence. That Act had been one of those cited by the Supreme Court in Nelson as indicating an intention by Congress to occupy the field of anti-sedition legislation. But Mr. Smith had said that he had never dreamed that the states would be precluded from enacting a law to protect themselves. He said that the case was a symptom of the "dangerous disease that threatens to destroy completely the sovereignty of the states." His bill said that the courts would not assume that an act of Congress was intended to bar state legislation on the subject "unless such act contains an express provision to that effect" or there is a "direct and positive conflict" between Federal and state law "so that the two cannot be reconciled or consistently stand together." The bill would protect states' rights not only in the area of anti-sedition laws but also in the broad areas of public welfare, commerce, public power and natural gas, aviation and labor legislation.
The Northern and Southern coalition movement welcomed outside support for the bill, but had their own reasons for supporting it, to strike a blow for states' rights, thereby attacking the Brown decision and demonstrating the success of their collaboration, while encouraging their backers to other such political ventures inside and outside Congress.
Doris Fleeson tells of the Eisenhower Democrats in Texas in 1952 having invaded the country club atmosphere arranged for the presidential primaries in that state by Taft Republicans, with the pro-Eisenhower invasion having continued to gather momentum through the November election, giving Texas to the General by a margin of 1.1 million to 969,000 for Adlai Stevenson.
The result had left Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn outraged against the Democrats who had led the movement for General Eisenhower, particularly Governor Allan Shivers, which had set the stage for a new drama in the current year's Texas primaries, which would begin in the precincts the following Saturday. Mr. Rayburn had found his weapon in Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, proposing that Senator Johnson go to the Chicago Democratic convention as a favorite-son candidate from Texas and thus chair the state's delegation, to freeze out Governor Shivers. Senator Johnson, who had worked for Governor Stevenson in 1952 but had tried consistently within the state to unite the warring factions, had taken a deep breath and cast his lot with his old mentor, Speaker Rayburn. The Senator was home during the week, calling his political options in all quarters and hurling back at the Governor the variety of hard charges which the Governor had thrown at the Senator.
The apparent efforts of Attorney General Herbert Brownell to save Texas for the Republicans and discredit the Democratic Congressional leaders had formed a major issue. Governor Shivers was invoking segregation against both Speaker Rayburn and Senator Johnson, attacking them for not signing the "Southern manifesto", read before the House and Senate on March 12, attacking Brown and urging on the white citizens councils, of which there were about 100 in Texas. But Governor Shivers was a lame duck whose term would expire at the end of the year and so he was no longer in a position to punish defectors. Scandal had also hurt his gubernatorial administration and the tide in the state for the President had also ebbed. While still admired in Texas, the President had been unable to attract the same support as in 1952, which had propelled the Governor's efforts.
Cautious optimism pervaded the camp of Speaker Rayburn and Senator Johnson as the showdown neared, with neither knowing how or in what form Republican support for the Governor would be forthcoming. It was possible for Republicans to invade the Democratic primaries in 1956, just as the Eisenhower Democrats had invaded the Taft Republican primaries in 1952. In Dallas, for example, Republicans had set 2:00 p.m. for their precinct meeting, which would enable them to go to the Democratic primary five hours later. While, according to one Texan, it would be illegal, the law carried no penalties and thus was generally ignored.
Nevertheless, there were not many avowed Republicans in Texas, but the Administration had worked closely with Governor Shivers.
Speaker Rayburn would invite the "Shivercrats" to turn Republican, in a speech he would give the following night. The Speaker's temper was boiling, after Governor Shivers had likened him to Mexican General Santa Anna, who had fought against Texas independence.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., finds that the newspaper was "all torn up" about the possibility of Richard Nixon serving another term as Vice-President, as he had gleaned from an editorial appearing April 30, titled "Richard Nixon: The Wahoos Can Wait". He says he had never realized that "young Dick" was as bad as the newspaper would have readers believe, such that he was unqualified to become President. He believes that the newspaper had overlooked "the glaring fact that the genuine scum on the bottom of the political barrel was nearly scraped off in 1944 when the dying Roosevelt chose Harry Truman as his running mate." He says that he held no special brief for Mr. Nixon, that he had held him in high esteem when he had been in the House, liking his traditional brand of patriotism and Americanism. But four years of "cavorting with the genial 'me-too' Ike and his crowd of Republican New Dealers has made me allergic to a degree that will not be easily cured." He believes that the decline of the country had to be halted, that there had to be executive leadership capable of aiding markedly and halting that decline, and that they had to be Republicans of the "peerless caliber" of Senators William Knowland, Karl Mundt, and Everett Dirksen, or Democrats such as Senators Harry F. Byrd and Richard Russell. He suggests that he might be dreaming by believing that any of those Senators would be nominated for either the presidency or vice-presidency in 1956 by their respective parties, but finds that the Supreme Court had not yet declared dreaming a violation of the 14th Amendment and thus unconstitutional.
A letter writer indicates that of all the professions a person could follow, none seemed to be greater than the ministry and yet the requirements for the profession demanded everything, that the person be a good preacher, a student of nature, a good business person and to live an exemplary life in the manner of Christ. He knows of no man who had lived and died and stuck closer to the doctrines of which he had preached than C. C. Benton, born in Tennessee in 1895 and having attended Tennessee Wesleyan College, Vanderbilt University and Duke University, serving some of the best appointments offered by the Western North Carolina Methodist Conference, before being called back to the Central Avenue Methodist Church to serve there a second time, making him one of the oldest Methodist ministers in terms of service within Charlotte. In the last five years of his ministry, he had suffered a terminal illness, but his congregation and closest friend could not detect it. The writer recalls that two months before his end, he had paid him a visit and carried an autographed copy of the writer's new book of humor, to which the minister had said that as he grew older, he was convinced that one ought laugh more in life, seeming to be the way to greater happiness. Both the writer and the minister had shared an interest in epitaphs, and in looking around for an epitaph to describe the minister, he had resorted to Shakespeare: "Your servant, My Lord has paid a soldier's debt. He only lived to little more than reach his prime, then which no sooner had his powers confirmed in the unshrinking station where he fought, but like a man he died."
A letter writer finds that the remarks of other writers critical of the humane decisions of the Supreme Court banning racial segregation, reflected neither vision nor good citizenship, that the people should be thankful for a Court comprised of men with both intelligence and integrity. He finds that the system of appointment of Justices by the President and confirmation by a majority of the Senate, with the Justices serving for life, provided they were of "good behavior", discouraged political decisions by the Court and encouraged impartial justice without fear of reprisal at the polls. He indicates that the Court was presently comprised of men from both the North and the South, of Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and believes it remarkable that nine men with such diverse experience had agreed unanimously that discrimination based on race was unconstitutional. "Reactionary extremists may cry 'political decisions' until doomsday, but calm, reflective Americans of all creeds and colors, aware that the court has expressed the enlightened conscience of a nation, shall respond to each outburst with reverent thanksgiving: 'Praise God for our great Supreme Court.'"
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