The Charlotte News
Monday, July 30, 1956
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from London that Prime Minister Anthony Eden had announced in Commons this date that all exports of British war materials to Egypt had been stopped in the wake of the nationalization by Egypt of the Suez Canal, announced by President Gamal Abdel Nasser the prior Thursday. He had made the statement in response to a question from Labor M.P. Bessie Braddock, after the Prime Minister had presented a brief statement on the Suez situation. His response had been greeted with loud cheers. The British response to the seizure had included freezing of Egypt's sterling balance in London. Mr. Eden said that he was conducting talks with French and American officials, and that no arrangement regarding the Suez Canal would be acceptable to the British Government which would leave it under the unfettered control of a single power which could exploit it purely for the purposes of national policy. Another questioner had asked him about two destroyers recently sold to Egypt, to which he replied that he did not know where they were but believed the Royal Navy could take care of them wherever they happened to be. He declined to discuss the talks presently underway with French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau and U.S. deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy, saying that he hoped it would be possible to make a statement on the outcome of those talks the following day or on Wednesday.
In Gettysburg, Harold Stassen conferred with the President this date, declining afterward to say whether they had talked about Mr. Stassen's proposal that Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter be chosen as the vice-presidential running mate in lieu of Vice-President Nixon—which, had it been done, might have proved a blessing not only for the nation but for Mr. Nixon as well, assuming it might have tempered his later political ambitions for the presidency. Mr. Stassen had flown to Gettysburg during the morning for a surprise meeting with the President, their first since Mr. Stassen, the President's aide on disarmament, had proposed a week earlier that the nomination of Governor Herter to the vice-presidency be made at the convention. The President had made no public comment on the matter, having previously said he would be "delighted" to have Mr. Nixon again as his running mate. White House press secretary James Hagerty said that as far as he was concerned, Mr. Nixon still would be the running mate on the ticket, a view echoed by RNC chairman Leonard Hall.
It was announced that the President would hold a press conference the following Wednesday, the first since his attack of ileitis and consequent surgery on June 8-9.
In New York, a double murder,
committed gangland style, had ended a hijacking trial in Federal
court, as police were seeking the slain men's friend and codefendant.
The bodies of two of the three defendants in the trial had been found
on Saturday night in an automobile parked in front of an address on
the Lower East Side. Their heads had been battered apparently from
blows of an ax and their bodies had been wrapped in canvas and bound
with rope. Several hours earlier, six blocks away, the body of
another man had been found in the gutter in front of an address, with
a bullet hole in the back of his head. The chief of detectives said
that the latter individual had been a friend of a third missing
codefendant and one of the dead codefendants in the trial, involving
theft of furs. The detective said that the codefendants had a wide
variety of associates in the underworld but that the best leads
appeared to be within the circle of those motivated to break up the trial by their murders.
Witnesses had identified the three defendants at the session on
Thursday and all three
At Parris Island, S.C., the court-martial continued this date of Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, charged with
involuntary manslaughter in the death of six Marines under his
command as a drill instructor the prior April 8, when he
force-marched them into a tidal stream next to the base at night,
with some evidence having suggested that he had been drinking at the
time. The prosecution had concluded its case and the defense had
sought a directed verdict of acquittal, which the trial judge, a Navy
captain, had denied. The ruling could be overruled, however, by a
three-fourths vote of the seven-man court-martial panel, but there
was no indication that they were so inclined. The prosecution had
argued against the motion on the basis that there was adequate
evidence of culpable negligence on the part of the sergeant at the
time of the march, that he must have known that there were men in the
platoon who could not swim and that they would drown and could be
eaten by sharks. Defense counsel had argued that there was no legal
definition to fit the particular case regarding an additional charge
of oppression of recruits, citing Captain Bligh of the famed mutiny
on the H.M.S. Bounty as the key case regarding oppression of
men under command. He said that another definition might be derived
from the case of Nero
In Gary, Ind., a 13-year old boy from Valparaiso, Ind., had wrecked his coaster the prior Saturday in an effort to win the Soap Box Derby race in Gary, and had then died the previous day of lung cancer. It had been disclosed after his death that he had subsisted on liquids for ten days. Doctors said that there had been no chance to save his life after he had become ill the prior Christmas. He had wanted nevertheless to seek to qualify for the National Soap Box Derby at Akron, O., although he was so weak that he had to be lifted in and out of his car. He had won the Class A elimination in Valparaiso the previous July 4. During a warm-up race in Gary the prior Saturday, his racer had veered into the sidelines and he and a spectator had been treated for injuries, with the boy having returned to watch the final heat of the race from his wheelchair. The previous day, he had taken a turn for the worse and died in the hospital.
In Timberline Lodge, Ore., a group of youthful mountain climbers, roped together for safety, had fallen to the bottom of a rocky crevasse the previous day when two of them had lost their footing, with one girl, 16, having died of suffocation after being driven deep into the snow as her companions dropped into a pile in the bottom of the crevasse, with the others being injured, some of them gravely, as the teenagers had fallen one after the other down the slopes of Mount Hood. They had slid 100 feet or more down an icy chute and then plunged into the crevasse, with some indicating that the final drop had been 40 feet onto a rock-strewn floor. One climber who had observed them said that they had been joined together with about 100 feet of rope and suddenly two of them at the back of the line had lost their footing, causing the others also to fall. Doctors had worked with them on the mountainside by the light of flares, and as night had fallen, rescue parties began moving the injured to a warming hut 1,000 feet above the lodge and some 2,000 feet below the scene of the accident near Crater Rock at the 9,000-foot level.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that members of the State Advisory Committee on Education, headed by Thomas Pearsall of Rocky Mount, had told Governor Luther Hodges that they were ready to take a backseat in any drive for passage of a State constitutional amendment, which was slated for a referendum vote on September 8. The Committee had met with the Governor in his office the prior Friday and expressed the feeling that the major phase of their work was complete, but that they would continue to work as individuals, to which the Governor had expressed agreement. The previous week's special session of the Legislature had voted in favor of a bill calling for a constitutional amendment on local option and education expense grants, the bill leaving the final outcome to the voters in the referendum. That plan had been recommended by the Advisory Committee. It was not clear who would chair the campaign effort for the referendum. The Governor had told the Committee that he wanted the campaign to be nonpartisan and non-political, hoping that a person identified with education could chair the campaign. The Governor planned at least one statewide address urging a favorable vote for the amendment, and had told the Committee that he had received some offers of financial support for the campaign, but hoped that the legislators would carry the bulk of the load of informing the public and that little money would be needed.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that a vote on issuing five million dollars in bonds for City and County school construction would be held at the earliest possible date, after the County Commission this date had set up the bond election following urgent needs of both school systems having been described by school officials. The City School commissioner had said that the School Boards were faced with two major problems, a backlog of unmet needs and rising construction costs, as indicated by bids recently received by the City and County Boards.
Emery Wister of The News reports that Freedom Park Lake, which had lost a few thousand permanent residents the previous week, would lose more this week, as Park & Recreation Board superintendent Marion Diehl had said that 100 ducks had to go. Mr. Wister says that they would suffer a better fate than the poor fish which had died of poisoning in the lake the previous Thursday and Friday, as the ducks would be given away to those who got there first, the superintendent indicating that they would even catch the ducks for them. He explained that every year, the lake's duck population grew too large and had to be thinned out, that there were at present 150 to 175 ducks and that by the following Easter, they would be down to 12 or 15. Many children received ducks as Easter gifts, and would then feed them for a week or so until the task would become burdensome and the parents would realize they could not keep the ducks and so would bring them to the park for release, and within four weeks after Easter, according to the superintendent, there would be 150 ducks again. He said that it did not involve the geese in the park, that they would keep those. Mr. Wister informs readers that persons interested in acquiring the ducks would need to notify the Commission before coming out to obtain them or otherwise they might get arrested for stealing. You don't want to be known the rest of your days as a stealer of ducks from the park and so you best heed the superintendent's advice.
On the editorial page, "Congress Best in Rejecting Bad Bills" tells of the Congress having adjourned to return home to talk about each other and the record of the Congress, which in its second session, had credits and liabilities, as with any other Congressional session. It finds nothing extraordinary about it except the continued avoidance of bitter political infighting which might have been expected from a Democratic-controlled Congress sharing responsibilities with a Republican Administration. But each had saved the other from some serious mistakes and there had been cooperation, if sometimes grudging, which had resulted in some needed legislation.
Passage of the large highway construction program, after the Administration had yielded to use-tax financing, was one example of productive cooperation, and the Administration's refusal to accept return to rigid farm price supports, plus the rejection of civil rights legislation had shown the balancing force which, it ventures, killed off some bad moves.
It finds the most obvious political maneuver to have been the Congress's determined attempt to force a return to rigid farm supports and thus a surrender to giant surpluses of food and fiber. It had upheld the President's veto, however, of the farm bill and finally had passed the soil bank program designed to reduce production. While the Administration had raised supports anyway in its own political maneuver to soothe farmers, the principle of flexible supports had been salvaged. It indicates that unfortunately, however, the plight of the small family farmer was not adequately adjusted by the Congress or the Administration.
It finds that the Congress had erred politically and morally by passing the natural gas bill after the question of attempted bribery of Senator Francis Case by a lobbyist for an oil company had been revealed by him on the floor. It finds that the arguments for the bill had been insufficient to justify its passage under the circumstances, as the President had pointed out in his veto message. The Senate had talked a lot but had done nothing about a needed investigation of lobbies and campaign spending, a pertinent issue raised by the bribe offered to Senator Case and other instances of excessive pressure by lobbyists. But the proposed remedial legislation had not been seriously considered.
Lowering of the pension age for women and broadening of disability payments under Social Security had looked good on the surface, but there had been evidence of a lack of study of the financial consequences.
Federal aid to education had been properly defeated, but not on the real issue, finding that had debate been concentrated on the pressing needs of the schools, instead of an attempt to tie to it an amendment depriving aid to districts which continued to practice segregation, the states might have been stimulated to greater local support of the schools, which would be required to head off future Federal intervention.
The civil rights bill, it finds, had been politically inspired and had deserved defeat, but it had served as a warning for states to act to protect the Constitutional rights of all of their citizens.
Other measures which had been defeated were the revised Bricker amendment to amend the Constitution with regard to the President's treaty-making powers, as well as a "botched-up" reform of the electoral college.
It finds it unfortunate that the bills to provide statehood for Hawaii and Alaska had been avoided, as well as the needed changes to the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.
It concludes that although some constructive legislation had been passed in the session, the Congress had looked best in putting aside bad bills.
"Russia: The 'Bogy-Man'
Revealed" suggests that if one asked the average American what
they thought the average Russian was like, they would likely describe
a bearded bogy-man with built-in badness, a stereotype out of the
comic books, spy movies and Senator McCarthy's political almanac. If
asked for a description of life in the Soviet Union, the reply, if
set to music, would sound like "The Song of the Volga Boatmen"
Leo Tolstoy had once written: "The Russian is conceited precisely because he knows nothing and cares to know nothing, since he does not believe it possible to know anything fully."
Scholars from the Harvard University Russian Research Center had, in an important book published the previous day by the Harvard University Press, presented a detailed picture of what life was like under the Soviets, as experienced by about 3,000 men and women who had lived inside that system. The book, titled How the Soviet System Works, by psychologist Raymond Bauer, sociologist Alex Inkeles, and anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn—incidentally the father of the young man who had, the prior year, accidentally discharged his gun while cleaning it inside a Raleigh hotel, fatally striking a woman on the sidewalk below, his conviction for manslaughter as a result having been reversed by the State Supreme Court the prior January, eventually pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter in March—, had summarized the results of studies made by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, with the support of the U.S. Air Force.
It finds it a valuable contribution to America's understanding of the masses living under the Soviet system. It had resulted from the first large-scale study of attitudes and life experience of Soviet citizens who had departed Russia during and after World War II, most of whom had been moved from their homeland involuntarily by the Germans as prisoners of war or as workers.
The study had found that the former USSR citizens had expressed "intense hatred" for the people in power and for the Communist Party. They lived in fear of "the terror" of sudden arrest by secret police and resented the "politicalization" of all aspects of Soviet life. The system of collective farms was also greatly resented both by urban dwellers and by peasants, with the latter being the "angry man" of the system while manual workers shared those feelings but less intensely and with less resentment. All population groups complained about material conditions, but, in general, they liked the welfare-state aspects of the Soviet system, including health services, government support of the arts and public education, were proud of the industrial growth and military strength of the Soviet Union and accepted the idea of central control of heavy industry. They, however, wanted release of the consumer goods industries and the farms to private initiative.
For the average Russian citizen, political loyalty to the regime was "a strange compound of apathy, passive acceptance and cynicism." The study had found indications that "most of the citizens of the Soviet Union feel helpless in the face of the power of the state and desire only to live peacefully."
The authors had concluded that the pessimistic finding was that the new regime could gain more solid popular support by supplying more consumer goods and better housing, easing up on terror, making some concessions to peasants and relieving somewhat the frantic pace at which all of the population had been driven, that such a change of policy would not only alleviate many of the daily grievances of the citizens, but would also change their basic image of the regime as a harsh and depriving force.
It finds the warning to the West obvious, that the Soviet Union's new domestic "soft line" had hardened the country's strength as a competitor and opponent of Western democracy.
A piece from the London Times, titled "Improving Their Minds", indicates that an ukase had been promulgated by the Broadcasting Control Board in Australia, indicating: "The hero or heroine or other sympathetic characters should be portrayed as intelligent and morally courageous," with the purpose being to prevent children from seeing programs which might give them the wrong ideas.
It posits that on its face, it sounded laudable, but that in the literary world, the Board's decree could hardly fail to cause grave concern. The more old-fashioned type of writer had no objection to giving his hero moral courage, but it was asking too much to expect his heroines to be intelligent, as the plots depended almost entirely on the heroine being "a prize ass."
It indicates that no woman with any common sense would get into the kind of predicaments in which the heroines constantly found themselves, and so it was not surprising that the authors objected to compulsory increases in their I.Q.'s.
Other characters also had to be sympathetic and intelligent, which posed a major problem for storytellers and dramatists. Bertie Wooster would be beyond the pale and Dr. Watson, on the suspect list. Little Red Riding Hood would have to undergo an increase in intelligence and Little Miss Muffet was conspicuously lacking in moral courage.
It concludes that the command confronted the writer with new and serious problems, that if none of the nice characters were allowed to be stupid, the nasty ones would have to be even more diabolically clever than they already were, with the upshot potentially being that Australian children might renounce completely the joys of television, which it finds perhaps the object of the exercise.
Drew Pearson tells of the President having said in a meeting with Republican leaders, just before the adjournment of Congress, that he was "satisfied" with the legislative record of the current Congress, though not jubilant about his box score of accomplishments. That box score had been prepared by some of the President's Madison Avenue advisers and Republican leaders, showing in separate columns the major bills which had passed the House, passed the Senate, and those which had received the President's signature. In looking at those columns, the President had told the leaders that he wanted to thank each of them for all they had done to get the program through the Congress, that it had been a tough job and he appreciated their efforts, even though he had not gotten everything he had hoped for, but believed they were "in pretty good shape" and that Republicans could face the coming campaign confidently. He expressed disappointment regarding the Senate's restriction of foreign aid funding and the scheduling of the civil rights bill. There were laughs as he referred to the foreign aid battle in which Senator William Knowland had helped defeat the President's urgent request for aid to Yugoslavia. He expressed hope that a compromise could be worked out by Senate and House joint confreres to remove the Senate block to any new military aid to Yugoslavia. Senator Knowland reported that the "practical difficulties of the threatened filibuster" had dashed any hope of Senate action on the civil rights bill, which had already been approved by the House. Senator Knowland added that if they had taken the bill up earlier, it might have had a chance, but that there was no opportunity with other pressing measures in the closing portion of the session. The President expressed the hope that something could be done in the ensuing 85th Congress, as they could not abandon the responsibilities of protecting the rights of minorities and that the proposed bill was not extreme but rather very moderate, and he could not understand why there was so much fuss about it.
Mr. Pearson indicates that in summarizing the 84th Congress, he found it more than usually representative of the people, indicating that when people got angry with Congress, it listened and when the people were apathetic, Congress listened to the lobbyists. The present Congress had, more than most he had seen, listened to the lobbyists, some of whom were bad and some good. Few bills had passed in the current Congress without the urging from lobbyists.
As an example, he indicates that the highway bill, to cost 37 billion dollars over the ensuing decade, had been put across by the truckers, the auto and tire companies, the gasoline companies and the Teamsters Union, suggesting that it was a good bill, but that it would not have passed in the current session without the support of lobbyists. The school construction bill, by contrast, more important than the highway bill, had no lobbies behind it, as the teachers had not been effective and schoolchildren did not know how to lobby. The White House had not shown vocal support for the bill during the debate, and it had not passed.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson having narrowly prevented a civil rights fight at the end of the session, greatly impairing the strategy of the rivals to Adlai Stevenson for the presidential nomination, who wanted to use civil rights to split the convention and Mr. Stevenson's supporters. They indicate that it was shocking that the issue of civil rights always had to be treated as being no better than a political football.
If the Administration, they posit, had the slightest serious desire to pass a civil rights bill, it would have been introduced at the beginning of the session and pushed hard thereafter, while, instead, the Administration's bill had only been put forward in May, when it had no possible chance of surviving a Southern filibuster before the end of the session. The intention had been to encourage Democrats to stage an intra-party fight, a tactic for which Attorney General Herbert Brownell was known.
Yet, the delay in introducing the bill had also helped Senator Johnson to frustrate Mr. Brownell's scheme, as the House was bound to take many weeks to act on the bill, such that it could only reach the Senate in the closing days of the session. Throughout the session, Senator Johnson had been working to avoid trouble over civil rights, with the worst moment having been the Senate confirmation fight over the nomination of Solicitor General Simon Sobeloff to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, with Southerners upset with him for having argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. Senator Johnson had foreseen that a white supremacy field day in that regard would invite Senators, such as Herbert Lehman of New York, Thomas Hennings of Missouri and Paul Douglas of Illinois, to stage their own civil rights field day, and so he held debate to a minimum, reportedly getting Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina, for instance, to cut his planned two-hour diatribe to a 20-minute talk. Senator Johnson then persuaded Minority Leader William Knowland of California not to conduct a fight over civil rights, in exchange for which, the Democrats would support the President's bills on foreign aid and raising executive department salaries, to which Senator Knowland had agreed.
Thus, when the House bill on civil rights had come to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the Committee could be counted on to hold the bill until someone forced their hand, and Senator Johnson had already closed off the possibilities for that contingency. The normal route for forcing a bill out of the Committee would have been to offer it as an amendment to another bill, but legislative amendments were not in order on appropriation bills and Senator Johnson had left nothing but appropriations bills for the last days of the session. The other avenue for getting the bill out of the Committee was a motion to discharge, but such motions were not in order except during the "morning hour" which followed the end of a "legislative day", and by merely recessing instead of adjourning each session, Senator Johnson had prolonged the "legislative day" indefinitely. Thus, Senators Lehman, Hennings and others had to admit defeat.
The Alsops conclude that if a long, hot, bitter civil rights debate in the Senate had generated the usual bitterness just before the convention, a repeat performance in Chicago at the convention would have been unavoidable, whereas with such civil rights proponents as Eleanor Roosevelt and Senators Lehman and Hubert Humphrey supporting Adlai Stevenson for the nomination, and with no background of recent bitterness to stir the passions of delegates, the scheme to knock off Mr. Stevenson on the civil rights issue now appeared much less likely to succeed.
Doris Fleeson tells of Senator Walter George of Georgia having delivered his valedictory, as he prepared to retire from the Senate at the end of the term. He was claimed with pride by conservatives. President Roosevelt, in 1938, had sought to purge him because, while acknowledging him as a nice fellow, he believed his ideas had derived from the horse and buggy days. Yet, Senator George had sought to strengthen the New Deal Social Security bill, which FDR had once described as his own best claim to the affections of the American people. Senator George had voted for the original Social Security bill and had been closely connected with every phase of its evolution since. FDR's wrath had been provoked in large part by the Senator's conservative views on taxes. But present conservatives, led by Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, bitterly opposed the amendments extending Social Security help to the disabled because those amendments would mean higher taxes, amendments supported by Senator George. To present conservatives, Senator George had said that they were just trying to take a backward step and that free men wanted to earn their security, and so Social Security was timely, practicable and workable.
He also said in his farewell address regarding doctors who raised the cry of socialized medicine against all bills they believed affected their interests, that someone had to have the courage to tell them that if they continued to make their "trifling objections" to such bills, they would find something really bad would happen to them, that the doctors alone could bring on socialized medicine in the country by just such actions.
She indicates that by stressing the humanitarian issues in his farewell address, the Senator was showing the public the side of his nature which, more than his talents, had endeared him to his colleagues. He had a warm, gently courteous consideration for others, which had carried him and Senators, individually and collectively, over some rough spots. She indicates that it was the real reason that the farewell dinner to say goodbye to Senator George had been a sellout, warmly patronized by Democrats of all shades of opinion.
A letter writer from Asheville expresses gratitude for the articles by Charles Kuralt of the newspaper on water fluoridation in Charlotte, which he finds might avert blocking of the effort in Charlotte, as "the crackpots and assorted faddists with their misguided terror-stricken followers at the polls" had done in Asheville during the spring. He suggests that the crackpots read a famous essay by William Graham Sumner, titled "The Right to an Opinion", when they began voicing arguments based on not so profound knowledge of high school chemistry.
A letter writer from Moody, N.Y.,
identifying himself as an Adirondack woodsman, says that he and some
of his fellow woodsmen had been sitting around the lake cabin fire
listening to their old Carolina friend chuckle as he read Harry
Golden's "Vertical Negro Plan"—whereby public schools would issue desks without seats so that all students would have to stand
A letter writer from Morganton suggests that those who favored placing black children with white children in the public schools invariably were childless or had grown children who had finished school. He finds it curious that the NAACP had "incorrectly and ashamedly mis-called themselves, for the word, 'Negro' should be substituted for 'colored'", that if they were ashamed of being known as Negroes, he questions what right they had to claim equality with their "betters (and all sanctimonious rantings and all courts can't change the fact that all men are not equal.)" He thinks that the efforts of Governor Hodges to keep black children out of the white schools ought be upheld and supported with full vigor, concluding that his were just some thoughts of one among many in the state, "and you'll never change our way of thinking."
You call that tripe that you put down on paper "thinking"?
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