The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 9, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President was recovering "most satisfactorily" from his emergency abdominal surgery the previous day and White House press secretary James Hagerty said that he expected no interruption of his duties, with a rapid recovery anticipated. Mr. Hagerty reported that the President's spirits were good and his morale high, but declined to provide medical details, indicating that the President was sleeping. He said he did not know how long the President would be hospitalized after the emergency surgery during the wee hours of the morning, with the doctors indicating that they had relieved a non-cancerous intestinal obstruction caused by ileitis. There was no connection with his prior heart attack of September 24. Mr. Hagerty said that there were no plans at the current time to change the President's attendance of the conference of American Presidents at Panama City on June 26 or to reschedule his meeting with Prime Minister Nehru of India on July 7, but said he did not know whether there would be any change of plans for his scheduled meeting with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany the following Wednesday.
Dr. Burill Crohn, discoverer of ileitis, known in Europe as "Crohn's Disease", said that the President's case was the "most common and safest type" of the ailment and "the most easily amenable to successful surgery", and that if the operation had been successful, as he assumed it had been, he felt that the President ought be restored to full health without diminution of his working efficiency. He said that he would probably be confined to bed for about two weeks and then gradually resume his regular schedule, indicating that about 80 percent of the cases were of the type which the President had, localized ileitis involving only about 8 to 12 inches of the lowermost small intestine, in all thirteen feet long. He said that surgery removing the short segment of intestine caused no impairment of the patient's processes, nourishment or general health. He also said that surgery of the type was successful in 65 to 75 percent of the cases and that the difficult cases were those with "more diffuse involvement" affecting a greater portion of the intestine. Possibilities of recurrence of the disease was about 30 to 35 percent at regular intervals of time, but that in the case of the President, even if there should be recurrences, they would be rather mild. He cited one case where there had been a recurrence after 21 years, but said they could also recur within a short time. He described it as being in a similar category with stomach ulcers or duodenal ulcers and that its cause was unknown, just as the cause of ulcers was unknown, but that strain and nervous tension were believed to be contributing factors. He said that the surgeon in charge of the team who performed the operation was very good and that, while he had not been in touch with doctors of the team, he believed the operation had been a success.
Correspondent Martha Cole of the Associated Press tells of the excitement surrounding the President's entry to Walter Reed Hospital the previous afternoon, quoting a female patient who was awaiting surgery two doors away from the President's room, equating it to Grand Central Station.
Correspondent Warren Rogers, Jr., also of the Associated Press, relates of having observed the operation from a distance during the early morning hours, able to see the doctors moving about and gesturing under the operating room light as he stared through the window of the operating room.
Stock market investors had kept a close eye on the President's condition, as word of his illness had sent prices downward the previous day in the sharpest decline since October 10, 1955, though a rally at the close of trading had improved prices greatly above the worst of the day. It was not yet known whether the rally would continue on Monday, as much would depend on word from Washington regarding the prospects of the President's full recovery.
Jack Bell of the Associated Press reports that the Republican presidential nomination, and possibly the outcome of the November election, might depend on how long the President remained bedridden and how he felt after his surgery, that he had promised to report to the American people "instantly" any time he felt he was not physically up to the job of the presidency. He had already accumulated 960 of the 1,323 Republican convention votes, with 70 more held for him by favorite son candidates, and needed only 667 for the nomination. It had been hoped that all of the other potential Republican candidates had been placed in cold storage until 1960, but if the President should bow out of the race, the scramble for the nomination would be intense. The President could designate his own choice for the nominee and thus automatically push one aspirant to the fore. But even such a designation might not settle the matter. Few would expect him to designate Senate Minority Leader William Knowland of California and likewise no one would expect Senator Knowland to let the nomination go to any other party member without a fight. Vice-President Nixon would be certain to be on any such short list for the President's choice in light of all the praise which the President had heaped on him, and even if the President declined to make a choice, Mr. Nixon's strong position within the national Republican organization would make him a top contender. Several other Republicans were also possibilities, including Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts, Paul Hoffman, the former Marshall Plan administrator, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey and 1944 and 1948 nominee, former Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. Democrats had joined Republicans in expressing the hope for a quick recovery of the President. Adlai Stevenson had said that he shared "the concern of everyone and their hope that the President will recover speedily and completely." Senator Estes Kefauver had said that he hoped and prayed that the President was not seriously ill, and Governor Averell Harriman of New York, named by Mr. Stevenson as his chief rival for the nomination at the convention, said that the President had his prayers and good wishes for recovery. Mr. Bell adds that if the President decided not to run again, the chances of the Democrats would considerably improve for winning the general election.
In New York, Governor Harriman announced that he was an active candidate for the Democratic nomination, telling 200 delegates to the Hat Workers Union convention that his hat was in the ring, tossing an old gray fedora into the air. At the same convention the previous day, David Dubinsky, the influential head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, had urged Governor Harriman to abandon any thoughts of seeking the nomination and work for the good of the party, endorsing Mr. Stevenson for the nomination. Mr. Harriman said that he believed in the unity of the party but also believed in the unity of the party as a liberal Democratic Party.
The House this date was awaiting a final vote on Monday on a foreign aid bill which was a billion dollars smaller than requested by the President. The House the previous night had tentatively approved a foreign aid program of 3.8 billion dollars for bolstering free world countries against Communism, whereas the President had sought 4.9 billion for the coming fiscal year. The House had declined efforts by both the Administration and House leaders of both parties to restore 600 million dollars worth of the cuts. The approved bill set an authorization ceiling and the actual money would be voted later in a separate bill. The White House the day before had signaled an intent to try to get the Senate to restore the cuts. Notwithstanding the failure of the effort to restore more than half the cut, the leadership of both parties in the House had won a series of victories the previous day, the biggest of which had been to defeat a strong effort to cut off all U.S. aid to Communist Yugoslavia in light of the recent reconciliation by Marshal Tito with the Soviets. A revised amendment would allow that continued assistance.
Administration officials predicted this date a polite rejection of Russia's proposal for a "new approach" to disarmament, including a reduction in Russian and Western armed forces in Germany, a proposal made during the week in a letter from Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin to the President, which the White House had made public the previous night, as Moscow radio had also broadcast its contents. The U.S. would consult Britain and France regarding the Russian move and the President and Secretary of State Dulles were expected to discuss the maneuver with Chancellor Adenauer during his visit to Washington the following week. Insofar as a reply to Premier Bulganin's suggestion, however, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, with officials in Washington stating that the proposal regarding disarmament included no safeguards against violations, a point which the West had long insisted as being of supreme importance.
In Brady, Tex., a man who had been involved in 40 G.I. land scandal indictments, and his wife, were summoned for a post-midnight interrogation early this date by officers looking into the car bombing the previous day of a key witness to the scandal. Sam McCollum III, the lawyer who had been critically injured in the car bombing, had been expected to be a principal witness against the man being questioned. Following 2 1/2 hours of questioning, the man had emerged from the office where the district attorney and a Texas Ranger had conducted the questioning, with the land promoter stating afterward that he had no statement to make. He had been indicted on counts of theft, conspiracy and forgery in the veterans land scandals.
In Warrenton, N.C., doctors had grafted an 11-year old girl's hair back onto her head after she had been "scalped" the previous day by a neighbor's Doberman pinscher, the girl's father indicating that the "vicious animal" had attacked her and a playmate while they had been playing with it on the neighbor's front porch, indicating that the other little girl said that her friend had petted the dog and that all of a sudden it had pounced on her friend and pulled her off the porch, sinking its teeth into the little girl's scalp and dragging her around the yard until a passerby beat the animal with a chair until it released the child. Doctors had grafted an eight-inch circle of scalp, found in the yard after the attack, back onto her head.
On the editorial page, "Get Mecklenburg off Dilemma's Horns" addresses the question of what to do with the Mecklenburg Tuberculosis Sanatorium, indicating that it ought be settled, that there was a feeling in the courthouse that the voters, in approving continued County funding for the Sanatorium, in lieu of offered State funding to move the patients to State-operated hospitals, had provided the basic structure for resolving the problem and that all which was needed was for County officials to follow.
It finds, however, that the solution was not quite so simple, as the patient load had dipped to an all-time low of 64, leaving at least 30 empty beds in the facility. A plan to transfer some non-tubercular chronically ill or convalescing patients from local hospitals to the Sanatorium had been a flop and a new building for white patients had been left two-thirds completed while an old building prevented full utilization of the new structure.
Doing nothing meant that the County was punishing itself unduly and plans ought be developed to treat the tuberculosis patients as inexpensively and efficiently as possible, probably requiring the razing of the old structure and concentrating care in the new facilities. Meanwhile, if it would be within the range of legal, financial and medical possibilities to utilize the left over facilities for other purposes, then that should be done, but plans should be made presently, not left for the distant future, as a status quo policy was unreasonable and therefore unacceptable.
"Are There 'Solutions' to Nightmares?" suggests that consideration of the farm problem was akin to a visit to a three-ring nightmare, in one ring being an unstable ratio balancing on a marginal deficiency, while in another, a flexible incentive was chased by a galloping deficit, as in the center ring, a recurrent fluctuation was busily restoring its fundamental equilibrium. All of it proved that nothing was ever quite as simple as it appeared in American farm economics.
Yet, one North Carolina editorialist had proclaimed that the farm problem was "apparently solved", offering as proof that farm prices had stopped declining and had in fact risen for five straight months, that in mid-May, had returned to the level of May, 1955.
It concedes that price support increases in the new farm bill, imposed administratively by the President, would continue that trend, but suggests that another side of the picture existed, that farm surpluses were increasing despite disposal efforts, that according to the Department of Agriculture, combined stocks of corn, oats and barley were the largest ever, that the cotton carry-over on July 31 would be about 14.7 million bales, also a record, that the wheat carry-over at that same point would be a record of nearly 1.1 billion bushels. The Government's investment in support prices of farm products had risen to 8.7 billion dollars by the prior April 1, an increase of 1.5 billion during the previous year.
It posits that the hope for a reduction in stocks of farm commodities appeared to lie in the "soil bank" program which had just been authorized by Congress but still had to prove itself.
It concludes that it was too early to suggest that there had been a "solution" to the problem, that the nation had barely made a start and that it would take a large amount of time and wisdom before the nation solved the farm problem in a manner satisfactory to all Americans.
"A Single Heartbeat" indicates that the nation had reacted in a bipartisan manner to the news of the President's intestinal illness, showing that emotional attitudes toward the presidency and toward Mr. Eisenhower personally were powerful, but also providing a grim reminder of the frailty of the human condition and the agonizing uncertainty which underlay the nation's destiny.
"All America prays for the President's swift recovery. But all America is duly impressed once again with the knowledge that a single heartbeat can change so much."
"Charlotte Culture: Season in Retrospect" reviews Charlotte's season of culture in terms of music and fine arts activities, finding it to have been one of quality or at least the most which could be expected from organizations and individuals appearing in Charlotte during the season, believing that the quality of the imported ballet group, the local chorus, the regional chamber music players and madrigal singers had given what should have been provided considering what they were.
The assessment of quality depended on what the expectation was, which was why News music critic Edwin Bergamini might be harder on the Boston Symphony than on a local group. Yet, quality was an ideal to which aspiration had to be made, and some of Charlotte's musical organizations had been more successful than others in approaching that ideal, though all still had work to do.
The previous season had seen the first use of the new Ovens Auditorium, and in the last regular series, the Community Concerts, Opera and Symphony had offered 14 events in the Auditorium, including the annual performance of Handel's "Messiah", the Symphony's fashion show and a handful of other attractions. It questions whether that was enough, however, during the 240 days of the eight-month season lasting from October through May.
It suggests that I Musici
It concludes that everyone had a stake in that presentation and they had a summer to think about it and plan.
Don't ye worry, now. Elvis 'll be coming to the Coliseum in just a couple of weeks and will fill the seats such that the Auditorium management can afford to book the long-hairs' fancy
A piece from the Washington Post
& Times-Herald, titled "The Unmentionable Poet",
tells of panty raids having become springtime folly on college
campuses, with one having occurred at the University of Maryland,
where 1,000 male students swarmed through coed dormitories "in
quest of silky souvenirs"—or, perhaps, performing a silkie
It suggests that many pungent
remarks could be offered regarding panty raids and that vexed college
officials had probably voiced most of them, but wants to add one
comforting observation, that the intimate association of spring and
panty raids had come about a century after the great age of romantic
poetry. "If Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for joining in
a panty raid, the impact on poetry would have been devastating."
Instead of "Ode to the West Wind",
there might have been "Ode to a Pink Unmentionable", Tennyson might have set down
"The Charge of the Panty Brigade", or "La Belle Dame
Sans Underwear
But instead, there was little
evidence of poetic genius among the Maryland undergraduates and
chances were slim that the panty situation
Drew Pearson indicates that not only had the Kremlin fired V. M. Molotov as Foreign Minister a day before Marshal Tito had arrived for his visit in Moscow, but the Kremlin, based on reliable diplomatic sources, had sent word to Tito in advance that Mr. Molotov would be fired and that the reason for the firing was for Mr. Molotov's part in conspiring against Tito in 1948. Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had warned the President to be wary of new Russian moves in the Near East now that Dimitri Shepilov had replaced Mr. Molotov as Foreign Minister, receiving the warning prior to his recent press conference in which he had stated publicly that Russia's new rulers continued to follow dictatorial methods. Mr. Shepilov had negotiated the Communist arms deal with Egypt when he had visited Cairo the previous year, and so the U.S. Embassy reported that he would probably not be satisfied until the last Westerner was kicked out of the Near East and all of its oil belonged to Russia.
The Americans for Democratic Action had quietly dropped Congressman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., as their vice-president at their recent convention, while Eleanor Roosevelt, an honorary ADA leader, had sat on the rostrum. The nominating committee had notified Mr. Roosevelt in advance that the ADA could no longer retain him as an officer as long as he acted as attorney and registered agent for dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who was being criticized for his hired killers allegedly having murdered anti-Trujillo Dominican refugees on U.S. soil. New York authorities were presently conducting probes into reports that Columbia professor Jesus de Galindez had been thrown into the boiler of a Dominican steamship.
The U.S. was following the British-Greek dispute over Cyprus with a great deal of interest, but with no urge to become involved in it, the President having recently informed the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of that fact, when the latter had called at the White House to report on his recent trip to the Near East, saying that he had come away much wiser but not convinced as to who was to blame for the crisis or of the best way to settle it, reporting that the Greeks wanted self-determination for Cyprus through NATO machinery but could provide no assurance that it could be accomplished with stability. The President had agreed that it would not help matters for the U.S. to intervene at the current point, "would be like walking into a house and trying to stop a quarrel between a husband and wife. The chances are we would only succeed in making enemies of both without bringing peace to the family."
Walter Lippmann indicates that in reading the speech of Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in which the latter had denounced deceased Premier Joseph Stalin, he had found himself fascinated by the tale of cruelty, treachery and cowardice, but unconvinced and puzzled by his theoretical explanation of Stalin. Essentially, Mr. Khrushchev had put forth the idea that Vladimir Lenin, the infallible leader, had thought that while terrorism should be used to win the class war against members of the old regime, it should never be used against factions within the revolutionary movement, itself. He had gone on to say that by the time Stalin had come to power in the mid-1920's, the Communists had won the class war and there was therefore no further need for terrorism against non-Communists and no excuse at all for using that method against Communists, that after Lenin's victorious revolution, leadership and persuasion should have been the methods used within the party. Stalin, by contrast, had overruled the Communist Party hierarchy and conducted terror campaigns through his secret police based on his lust for power.
Mr. Lippmann finds puzzling and unconvincing, however, Mr. Khrushchev's assumption that the terror which had prevailed in Russia was an aberration solely originating with the deranged personality of Stalin, begging the main issue, which was whether the transformation of Russia during the 1930's could have been conducted without terrorism. He does not doubt that Stalin was the monster which Mr. Khrushchev had described, but that the forced industrialization of Russia and the agrarian revolution which had been carried out in the space of one generation had been a monstrously abnormal undertaking, subjecting Russians to an ordeal to which there was no parallel, and he views it as highly unlikely that the transformation could have occurred without ruthless and persistent terrorism.
While Mr. Khrushchev had suggested that the Communist revolution had been victorious by the time of Lenin's death in 1924, the fact was that the transformation of Russia into an industrial state had not seriously begun until the first five-year plan in 1928, that plan having called for sacrifice and hard labor, capable of being extracted from any people only under fierce compulsion. One historian, Richard Charques, in the recently published A Short History of Russia, had stated: "Since the volume of investment in industry, which it called for, could come only from production itself, notoriously low standards of living were reduced to the barest level of subsistence… In the vast new factory encampments in the Urals and beyond, men and women from remote parts of Russia worked and starved and in winter half-froze. Labor discipline was maintained by stringent penalties… The basic tasks of socialist construction were achieved by the blood, toil and tears of peasant labor diverted to industry. It was in the wilds of peasant Russia that the real revolution effected by the first five-year plan came with most shattering consequences… The horrors of collectivization is no empty phrase. The second and much greater Bolshevik revolution was waged with implacable cruelty and resisted with the extreme of desperation."
Mr. Lippmann thus views Mr. Khrushchev's argument as being false regarding the notion that the undertaking could have been accomplished in some other way than through Stalin's reign of terror, that it had come about through the decision to sacrifice a Russian generation to transform Russian society, and that Stalin's character had been a complicating element in an undertaking to which the entire Communist hierarchy was dedicated.
He thus wonders what ground there was for thinking that the reaction against the Stalinist terror regime could be lasting in view of the fact that it was an integral part of the violent and abnormal revolutionary transformation of Russia after 1928. The post-Stalinist rulers of Russia were behaving as if they believed that there was an equilibrium reached whereby they no longer needed to operate through terror, that Soviet discipline, along with ordinary incentives, could serve to operate the system henceforth, explaining why they would dare relax, but giving rise to the question of how long that would last. He suggests that it would only last until there was a serious crisis in Soviet society, whether deriving from an internal or external source.
He suggests that what was occurring was not a revolution against Communism but rather an historic dispute within the Communist world, not about dictatorship versus democracy or a government of laws and not of men, or in contemplation of a two-party system, but rather indicative of the fact that the anti-Stalinists, who continued to have a radically different concept of government from that of the Western democracies, differed from Stalin only by the fact that he had distorted their conceptions of government, not that he had violated the conceptions of the West.
Doris Fleeson indicates that Adlai Stevenson, having finished the presidential primary campaign in style, now faced the question from leading Democrats, including House Speaker Sam Rayburn, as to whether his rivals could stop him at the Chicago convention in mid-August. After an unimpressive overall performance in the primaries, Mr. Stevenson seemed to have won the war by his performance in the second largest state in the union, California, the prior Tuesday. His landslide there and the ease with which he had defeated Senator Estes Kefauver had transformed a feeling among Democrats that perhaps they ought to shop around among other candidates to the notion that it was time to close ranks around Mr. Stevenson.
The California primary had demonstrated that Mr. Stevenson could attract votes in pivotal states where elections were won and lost, industrial states which were large, rich and varied with potent minorities, a farming population and a large professional class. No presidential candidate without appeal in such states could be elected. The politicians were impressed by the large vote and the size of the Stevenson following. He had been hurt previously by the light vote in primaries, leading people to conclude that either no one cared very much for him or that everybody had decided to vote for the President's re-election.
Mr. Stevenson had given his supreme effort in California and if he had won by only a small margin, it would have suggested defeatism regarding his ability as a campaigner. As it was, spokesmen for the South in Washington insisted that Mr. Stevenson was the candidate about whom Southerners would be the least unhappy, indicating that he had received a large black vote in California, possibly the result of Eleanor Roosevelt's zealous campaigning for him. But the fact remained that Mr. Stevenson had stated that he would refuse to use Federal troops in the South to enforce integration, and one astute Southern Senator had stated that to provide him Southern support would be sufficient to get him elected and that alternatives to his candidacy would be most unpromising.
By contrast, Senator Kefauver had emerged from the California primary in bad shape, following his attacks on Mr. Stevenson during the Florida and California primarie, especially as they may have left scars on Mr. Stevenson and had certainly hurt the party, criticizing Mr. Stevenson's stand on civil rights as vacillating between his speeches in the South and those in California and elsewhere, as well as his veto of a bill while Governor of Illinois which would have increased old age and welfare benefits.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter writer who had stated that the Constitution provided no support for separation of church and state, finding his statement to be designed to deceive and confuse rather than edify, that the Founders had established the nation on a philosophy of secularism, excluding from the Constitution deliberately the word "God" and providing in the First Amendment the Establishment Clause, which provided for separation of church and state.
A letter writer from Atlanta tells of the Atlanta Constitution on June 4 having quoted the News from an editorial, indicating that there were no grounds for not fluoridating water, this writer offering some grounds for not doing so, suggesting that fluoridated toothpaste would adequately substitute for the positive effects on dental health from fluoridation while the evidence showed that it only impacted children between ages six and 14, and so wonders why everyone had to drink it. He indicates that it was harmful and cumulative in its poisonous effects, dangerous to anyone with kidney trouble and that no medical science had shown that it was good for any purpose other than preventing tooth decay in children.
The editors note that research studies had led to endorsement of fluoridation by the American Dental Association, which served as the official mouthpiece for more than 70,000 dentists, and that the AMA had also adopted a statement on the desirability and safety of fluoridation. Other organizations which had adopted favorable policies on fluoridation included the American Public Health Association, the American Water Works Association, the National Research Council, the State and Territorial Health Officers Association, the U.S. Public Health Service, the American Association of Public Health Dentists, the State and Territorial Dental Health Directors, plus hundreds of other state and community health and civic groups.
A letter from the president of the Charlotte YMCA thanks the newspaper for its help in making its recent campaign for funding for a new building a success.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.