The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 9, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Walter George of Georgia, who was the Democratic spokesman on foreign affairs and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, had said this date that he would not run for another term in 1956, hinting that he planned to accept a position from the President as ambassador to NATO, the two moves having been announced simultaneously at separate press conferences, the latter by the President. The latter appointment would likely result in Senator George being the U.S. representative on a proposed international cabinet which would broaden the political aspects of NATO. The Senator offered no explanation for his decision not to run again. Previously, his physician had said that he had advised the Senator against participating in a strenuous campaign. The move left the Democratic Senate nomination open to former Governor Herman Talmadge, thus virtually assuring his election in the fall in the one-party state.
Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Arthur Radford said this date that the Administration had shaped a defense program to cope with any war which might develop.
In Algiers, France this date ordered 50,000 additional troops moved into Algeria to combat Arab rebels carrying their fight ever closer to major cities.
The Senate Agriculture Committee provided tentative approval this date to a 1.2 billion dollar soil bank program for farmers, similar to that which had been requested by the Administration, which had been included in the previously vetoed farm bill.
A Federal quarantine on the shipment of fruit and produce from Florida appeared imminent, after an Agriculture Department hearing this date, in which witnesses from Florida urged it as the only effective means of controlling a threat from the Mediterranean fruit fly, discovered recently in Miami.
In St. Louis, the trial continued of Matthew Connelly, former appointments secretary to President Truman, Lamar Caudle, former head of the tax division of the Justice Department during the Truman Administration, and Harry Schwimmer, an attorney for a man in a tax evasion case, all three charged with conspiring to defraud the Government for their own profit through improper exertion of influence, civilly settling the tax case. A former Treasury Department attorney testified that Mr. Schwimmer had told him about a visit with "the chief" at the White House before discussing with him the income tax case which resulted in the indictments of the three men. He did not elaborate on the reference to "the chief". He said that he had asked Mr. Schwimmer if the man accused of tax evasion had been promised immunity from prosecution, tricked or deceived by the Internal Revenue agents or was too ill to be prosecuted, and that Mr. Schwimmer had responded in the negative to all of those issues. A letter from Mr. Caudle to the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis in 1951, which had urged prosecution of the man, was introduced into evidence this date in a surprise move by the defense.
Fox "News" had better get on the stick and follow this story assiduously to its logical end, regarding what was meant by "the chief", as we smell a Democratic scandal brewing which could shake the republic to its foundations and ensure election of Republican Presidents from now unto eternity to have a Government as "clean as a hound's tooth".
In Raleigh, during oral argument this date, in a case from Anson County regarding a sought injunction to prevent the County from issuing the remaining $750,000 of a 1.25 million dollar school bond issue on the basis that when the bonds had been voted in 1952, State law had required segregated schools, State Supreme Court Chief Justice M. V. Barnhill had said that "the most important question" was whether the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had "completely destroyed the school system" of the state, pointing out that the schools had been founded on the principle of requiring segregation and that there was no question that Brown had "rescinded the compulsory segregation provisions" of the State Constitution. State Attorney General W. B. Rodman argued that other sections of the State Constitution led to the conclusion that "education shall be preserved" and that there were reasons for separation other than race, which reasons had not been outlawed by the Federal courts. He further argued that if the bonds were forbidden, the "cornerstone of education has been pulled out." A New York bond attorney, also arguing for Anson County, contended that the State Constitution's provision requiring segregated schools could be eliminated while leaving intact other provisions for public education, essentially the same argument made by Mr. Rodman. The sought injunction had been denied in the Superior Court.
Also in Raleigh, the State Utilities Commission this date approved a sale of stock of the Piedmont Natural Gas Company, Inc., which served Salisbury, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, High Point, Greensboro, Burlington and Graham, indicating that additional capital was needed because of a 4.5 million dollar construction program to meet demands for expanded service.
Governor Luther Hodges, speaking before the Southeastern Conference of Women Leaders on Civil Defense, stated in Charlotte this date that assistance at the time of disasters had to be "prompt, generous and free of governmental red tape" to be effective. He said that ultimately the system of civil defense related to the basic responsibility of the individual and that local communities shared equally in the responsibility with Federal and state governments in survival planning and planning for natural disasters.
Julian Scheer of The News reports of Arthur Goodman, candidate for a Superior Court judgeship in Charlotte, telling the Jaycees this date that Mecklenburg County was "once again the playground for the mudslingers in the race" for the judgeship. He vowed that the "free ride" of the mudslingers was at an end and that henceforth "the riders are going to have to pay the fare". He said he would take legal action against any candidate and the candidate's workers for slander and libel as it arose, both in his own campaign and as an attorney for any candidate of any party in any election who became the victim of such smear politics. He stated that the favorite tool was "to put out rumors about the candidate and the Negro race, the Jews and the labor unions," a method used for decades but mastered locally only during the previous eight years. Mr. Goodman was opposing incumbent Judge Hugh Campbell, who said that he knew of no smear tactics in their race and would not condone any such tactics, that for many years he had counted among his "close friends in the community Jews, Negroes and members of labor unions".
Dick Young of The News tells of the City Council having ended "town hall" meetings regarding the extension of the city limits, canceling the first of a series of such meetings which had been scheduled for May 17. In the meantime, members of the Council would study the annexation report of the City-County Planning Commission.
Harry Shuford of The News reports of the City Council having this date voted to consider a $25,000 appropriation for a juvenile detention home at the time of preparation of the annual budget. The Council did not presently have funds for the project and so could not at present commit the funding for the ensuing fiscal year's budget but all members had expressed the desire to match at least the $25,000 figure set aside by the County Commissioners during the week for such a home.
In San Francisco, the body of a construction worker had been dug out early this date from the sandy earth which had killed him in a cave-in on Nob Hill the previous day in a post-hole 35 feet deep. Another man was rescued three hours after he was also caught while trying to help extricate the man who had died. He had only been down in the hole for three hours, but he said it seemed a "helluva lot longer". He was retrieved by a belt fastened under his arms and attached above. A truck driver who had also sought to free the man, had been caught in soil up to his knees, but was able to break free. More than 50 workers had continued to dig through the day and night to get at the dead man's body.
In Alameda, Calif., a man was reported killed and seven injured in an explosion and flash fire this date at a shipyard.
In Raleigh, a carnival showman had died early this date when the trailer where he lived was gutted by a fire, which officers said might have been started by a trained monkey. The man had lived in the trailer with the monkey for about five months and police officers said that the animal knew how to strike matches and regulate the oil heater, where the blaze appeared to have started.
Near Gastonia, N.C., a woman from Columbia, S.C., was found this date, according to the sheriff's department, shot to death in an automobile, with a bullet hole through her right temple. She was clutching a .38-caliber special pistol in her right hand. The coroner and sheriff intended to undertake an investigation before making a statement on how the woman had died.
In New York, Mickey Mantle dropped a fly ball and Bill Skowron dropped a throw in the ninth inning this date to give the Cleveland Indians a 6 to 5 victory over the Yankees, cutting the American League lead of the latter team over the Boston Red Sox to 2 1/2 games. (Just why that merits front page coverage in a bulletin in early May is not conveyed.)
Also in New York, heavyweight boxer Floyd Patterson was scheduled to fight Tommy "Hurricane" Jackson in a 12-round bout at Madison Square Garden on June 8, as part of the elimination to determine a successor to recently retired heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. (That is another earth-shattering event, obviously worthy of front page treatment in the "Bulletins" column.)
On the editorial page, "What We Really Need Is Variety" indicates that the City-County Planning Commission's crusade for a uniform property numbering system for the perimeter areas was to be cheered, but there remained too much uniformity in street names, with more than 170 streets in the metropolitan area with exactly the same name as at least one other street. It lists some of the confusing names and suggests that there were old Indian names unclaimed, such as Waiilatpuan and Karankwa, while such Anglo-Saxon offerings as Caitiff, Scapegrace and Teddiwink were untouched, as well as the German Klangfarbe and Pfahlbauten and the Italian Villeggiatura. It had always wanted to take from the Welsh the name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogeryghwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Street. "Anything, just anything, to break the monotony."
They have enough trouble Anglicizing such names as "Buena Vista" as "beauna" and "Versailles" as "Versails", and so...
"Timely Assistance for Tall Tasks" finds that news that the Social Planning Council would have its first full-time executive director on May 15 was particularly heartening to the community as it grew into a metropolitan area. The new director was Donald Reed of Atlanta, and the piece finds him well-qualified for the position. It praises the Council for taking the action.
It finds that the Council's influence was needed in such projects as the survey of deficiencies in black hospital facilities and in the anticipation and correction of new social needs, able to promote cooperative action between public and private agencies. It expresses special gratitude for Spencer Bell, president of the Council, for campaigning for a full-time director, as well as for the Charlotte Kiwanis Club, whose United Appeal contribution had made the hiring possible.
"He Taught Us To Tolerate Reality" tells of the centennial of the birth of Sigmund Freud being celebrated during the week. To millions, "Freudianism" represented an elaborate joke perpetrated by a clever roue. Controversy still surrounded him and his cult, largely because of the taboo nature of the materials with which he worked, such as the primacy of sex as a motivating factor in human psychology and social behavior.
Even in the 1920's, when psychoanalysis had become a fashionable science and words and phrases such as "libido", "Oedipus complex", "infantile sexuality" and "sublimation" had become part of the argot of the educated, it was often viewed as an occult fad, and that controversy continued. One leading German psychiatrist said at a scientific meeting recently, when psychoanalysis had been raised, that it was the subject "for the police". At an Academy of Medicine meeting in New York, Dr. Freud had been denounced as a "Viennese libertine".
The piece finds it time that all branches of human society acknowledged the greatness of Dr. Freud and his value to human progress, regardless of whether one accepted every one of his doctrines. He had taught modern man to see himself and to "tolerate a piece of reality."
In arts, he had inspired Salvador Dali's surrealism, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, the novels of Thomas Mann, Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner and others who had explored dreams, myths and symbols.
It finds it unfortunate that Dr. Freud's ideas had been bowdlerized, watered down and identified with 20th Century commercialism, the occurrence of which he had anticipated. In 1912, when Carl Jung had written to Dr. Freud that he was having great success in overcoming resistance to psychoanalysis by playing down sexuality, the latter had responded that Dr. Jung did not need to boast since "the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psychoanalysis, the less resistance he would encounter."
It concludes that the legacy of Dr. Freud was great, and that it would grow in significance through the years, "as it is extended by man working in the same humane, scientific spirit of the instigator of a revolution in human thought."
Phillips Russell, writing in the Chapel Hill News Leader, in a piece titled "Art in North Carolina", finds that the establishment of the new North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh had transformed the state, with a well-designed gallery filled with masterpieces from the great painters, and one of the best investments the state had ever made.
One of the most noteworthy portraits was that of Erycius Puteanus by van Dyck, being a sympathetic treatment of a gentle old man, evidently a philosopher and probably a teacher. While lacking the dramatic fire of Rubens or Rembrandt, the portrait was simple and effective.
At the opposite pole was the portrait of Charles James Fox by Sir Henry Raeburn, with politics, dissipation and corpulence standing out in the portrait.
Another noteworthy portrait was that of Dr. Theodore de Mayerne by Rubens, presenting a subject who was also corpulent and an obviously powerful figure.
Mr. Russell, hailing from Richmond County, had taken a special interest in the portrait of Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, by Sir Peter Lely, presenting him as a slender, young man of feminine beauty.
For similar reasons, residents of Chatham County and Pittsboro would be interested in the portraits of the two William Pitts, father and son.
He indicates that all of the foremost schools of European painting were represented, but wished that a Vermeer and a van Gogh had been included in the Dutch collection. He also hopes that more would be done to add to the American collection, though thankful that it contained a painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder, that of a pasture with a dreamy cow, as well as an early one by Winslow Homer, "Weaning the Calf", plus a painting by Ralph Albert Blakelock, "Sunrise", and a family group by John Singleton Copley. He hopes that painters of the South and Southwest would be represented, and expresses the belief that American paintings would not wax strong until they received more attention.
Drew Pearson tells of plans progressing for the President to invite to Washington just prior to the November election his wartime friend, Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union, together with Marshal Konev. But there was a split among the President's advisers, with some viewing such an invitation as a master stroke which would cause millions of voters to think twice before voting against the President, for his ability to talk on a first-name basis with one of Russia's top military leaders, while some of his foreign policy experts, along with his military advisers, opposed the visit on the basis that the invitation might lull the West into complacency, making it difficult to obtain sufficient military appropriations for defense by fostering the belief that Soviet leaders were reasonable, peaceful men. But the odds nevertheless were that the two Soviet military men would be invited to the U.S. sometime in September.
Southern bitterness over segregation had reached such intensity that few white Southerners with political influence had dared buck the bitterness, with one exception being former Louisiana Governor James Noe, who had nearly become involved in a fist fight in his hometown of Monroe when White Citizens Councils began disenfranchising between 4,000 and 4,500 black voters by claiming that the voters had received help in producing their registration cards, especially in fulfilling the requirement of interpretation of portions of the Constitution. Former Governor Noe had then gone to the parish registrar of voters and challenged the right of vote challengers to strike black voters from the registration rolls. He demanded to see his own registration card to make sure that he had not been assisted on the day he filled it out, saying that he did not have his glasses that day, claiming that any citizen who challenged the right of a black citizen to vote had to show evidence of a thorough investigation before the voter could be stricken from the rolls. He demanded that the State Attorney General send a representative to Monroe to protect the rights of all citizens. A special assistant Attorney General then came to the town, and Mr. Noe asked him whether he was a member of the White Citizens Council, to which the representative said that he was and asked Mr. Noe whether he was a member of the NAACP, at which point, the latter nearly took a poke at the assistant Attorney General, before calm was eventually restored. But when several blacks had sought to restore their names to the voting rolls, they were kicked out of the courthouse by the sheriff and told that only 20 blacks per day could examine their registration cards. The primary elections were only two weeks away and only about 240 black voters could thus attempt reinstatement. In the meantime, blacks were holding prayer meetings, praying for restoration of their right to vote.
Stewart Alsop finds that in an era of complacency, the most cogent warnings were being disregarded, such as that of former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Trevor Gardner, who had written two articles in Look citing undenied facts to prove that the country was losing ground to the Soviets in both air power and missile development. Mr. Alsop suggests that more attention might have been paid to the matter had it been known that the second article regarding the gap in missile development had been written in the hope that the President would read it and would then recognize its special, hidden meaning.
The prior November, the President, at a meeting of the National Security Council, after having again taken control of the Government following his September 24 heart attack, had been briefed on the major problems confronting the Administration, among which was a briefing by Mr. Gardner, together with Deputy Secretary of Defense Reuben Robertson and one or two others, regarding the missile problem, informing the President that in mid-summer of 1955, almost certain knowledge had come to the Government that the Soviets were already testing medium-range ballistic missiles and that a decision had been recently made to start a new missile program to attempt to match that achievement, with the cumbrous organization of the missile program also described to the President. Following the briefing, the President had asked certain angry questions, prompting Mr. Gardner's second article, titled "Our Guided Missile Crisis", which should have had special significance to the President.
Toward the end of the article, Mr. Gardner had asked: "Why did it take from August to November to make a decision to proceed with the medium range missile? Why is the present organization so filled with committees? Why wasn't one man put in charge of the entire program at an early stage?… Won't inter-service rivalries and the multiplicity of programs result in a slowdown of intercontinental ballistic missile progress? Why isn't the ICBM given a clear top priority over other missiles programs?" Those were approximately the same questions which the President had asked those present at the NSC meeting the prior November. And those questions remain unanswered, which was why Mr. Gardner had written the second article.
The President had recognized from the beginning the significance of the evidence of Soviet success in its missile program. Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles had written a memorandum to the President on the issue prior to the President's heart attack. In it, he had said that the Soviet achievement was important, but not decisively so in view of the continuing superiority of the U.S. in the air-atomic field, and recommended progress in missile development with "all practicable" speed—not unlike the Supreme Court's statement in the Brown v. Board of Education implementing decision in May, 1955 regarding desegregation of the public schools, that being mandated "with all deliberate speed", all of which, we venture, would somehow coalesce in October, 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when all of the school children, whether yet desegregated or not, would have to fill out body identification tags and tape them to the bottoms of their seats in case of imminent nuclear attack from nearly operational MRBM's situated and recently discovered by the CIA on the island of Cubar, all of which formed the common tie of survival as a basis for desegregation, and, undoubtedly, related back to Mr. Nixon and his help lent a friend, Dana Smith, who had suffered a gambling debt in the game of cubolo in Cubar in 1952, but we digress...
The President had revised the memorandum in his own hand, underlining the decisive importance of the Soviet achievement and changing "all practicable" to "all possible", assigning top priority to missile development.
Yet, the questions posed by Mr. Gardner and by the President the prior November still needed answering as to why the missile program remained inadequate and badly organized. Mr. Alsop concludes that Mr. Gardner's conclusions in the article suggested that the built-in resistance in the bureaucracy of the defense establishment to the needed change in the organization of the missile program had proved too strong thus far for the President to change, which Mr. Alsop regards "as about as disturbing a conclusion as it is possible to imagine."
Doris Fleeson tells of Texas having taken a stride back toward the Democratic Party, resulting in considerable relief among Democrats, alleviating the threat of a Southern bolt at the convention in August and creation of a third party, those threats all but eliminated by the more than four to one defeat by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Governor Allan Shivers and his supporters.
Most of those who had bolted from supporting Adlai Stevenson in 1952 to support of General Eisenhower in the presidential election had already more or less retired willingly from the national scene. But Governor Shivers, with his domination of the Texas state machinery, had remained a potential menace to party harmony at the convention, until Senator Johnson had taken his measure. For the first time in many years, Texas would go to the national convention firmly intending reconciliation, with Senator Johnson in the role as a favorite son candidate and chairman of the delegation.
That had raised the genuine question of whether Senator Johnson would become an active candidate for the nomination, and were it not for the fact that he had suffered a massive heart attack the prior July 4, he would certainly be a major contender at this stage. Privately, however, he continued to assure that he had no intention of jeopardizing his health by trying to run for the nomination actively, intending to help the party mend its differences and avoid extremism. But he would not encourage any effort to put him forward as a potential nominee.
Many Democrats expected that the Senator would receive kind treatment from Republicans as a potential candidate, as Republicans wanted to neutralize the issue of the President's health. Democrats were stressing the health issue, even if the primary contenders, Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver, were only lightly treating the matter, indicating only that the President's health did not permit him to do a full-time job.
Senator Johnson was something of a party hero, as was Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who had promoted the Senator as a favorite son to neutralize Governor Shivers in any repeat performance of 1952. The effort by the Senator would cost him support at home, as the big oil counties, whose battles he had fought at the expense of his national status regarding the vetoed gas deregulation bill, had resisted his efforts at the Texas meetings to establish unity behind the party nominee.
Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, because of his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was a powerful front person for the pro-segregation forces, but he was not a national figure and did not come from a large and prosperous state. He had also been keeping quiet about a third-party movement, wisely thinking that it would potentially jeopardize his chairmanship.
Alabama, in its primary the previous week, had shown a pro-segregation surge of emotion, but Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman of that state, as well as Governor James Folsom, did not want any part of a third-party movement. The Alabama vote, however, denying a convention seat to Governor Folsom, had scared Democrats regarding the potential of the same resistance to party unity in Texas.
Robert C. Ruark, in Nairobi, Kenya, says he had witnessed recently one of the saddest sights which a sentimental man might see, when Philip Percival of Machakos had stepped down as president of the Professional Hunters Association of Kenya, seeming as if a century had died. He had been president of the organization since 1934 and was the quintessential man, who appeared as a movie idea of a professional hunter. He had just conquered cancer of the throat and was over 70, had been the white hunter on whom Ernest Hemingway had based most of his African hunting characters.
Mr. Ruark thinks him to be "as tough a man as ever lived, while being the gentlest and most self-deprecating", that, as Mr. Hemingway had written, when he died, he would die "as well as any man ever died, as cheerfully, fearlessly and graciously." He regards him as one of the Titans of hunters, who loved the animals and put up with the clients. He had trained Harry Selby, the best hunter whom Mr. Ruark knew. The latter's best story of Mr. Percival concerned the time when their truck had blown a tire on the soft cotton soil of the Serengeti, at which point Mr. Percival had clapped his hands, ordered a chair and some gin, turned his back on the truck and said to Mr. Selby that he should fix it as Mr. Percival could not bear to look at the "bloody thing".
He had quit the presidency of the hunters association because, he said, he had "too many guns go off in my ears and I'm a bit deaf. I can't hear what the young blighters are saying from the back of the room. Besides, Machakos is too far out of town."
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