The Charlotte News
Friday, July 6, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Westbury, N.Y., that the person believed to be the kidnaper of the month-old boy from well-to-do parents had called their home this date and claimed that the baby was alive and well, and the child's father had told the caller that he was prepared to meet his ransom demand of $2,000. He was reported to have said that he was awaiting the kidnaper's call, but it was not explained why the statement was worded that way, and the father revealed little else about the conversation or whether he would make a private effort to get his son back. Police said that they could not legally withdraw from the case but that their prime concern was the safety of the child and that they would do everything possible to ensure that result. The infant had been taken from a carriage at the back of his parents' home on Wednesday afternoon, while the mother had stepped into the house for a moment, with a note having been left demanding the $2,000. Police had baited a trap for the kidnaper the previous day, with packages supposedly containing the ransom money, but for the most part containing only paper cut to the size of bills—as fully revealed by the newspaper reporters the previous day after police had not said anything about the plan. Unfortunately, it would turn out that the kidnaper had left the baby beside a busy highway the previous day, later contending to police when caught in August that the baby was at the time still alive, but police, after discovery of the baby's dead body, would not be able to make that determination. In such cases, the public's "right to know" must be tempered by a great sense of responsibility on the part of the press to act in accord with the safety of the kidnap victim, clearly not done in this case.
In San Francisco, the cover of the official program for the Republican national convention, set to start August 20, had been changed to eliminate a picture of three bronze male nudes, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, titled "Les Trois Ombres", part of a group titled "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here", meant to represent "Three Shades at the Gate of Hell". The controversial picture would be replaced by a portrait of the President against a background photograph of the Cow Palace where the convention would be held. San Francisco Mayor George Christopher and Edmund O'Brien, executive director of the Republican arrangements committee, had announced the change, that the nude sculpture cover was D.O.A., following a day in which the Mayor had criticized the photograph of the sculpture. The sculpture, itself, was presently on display at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, on loan from a Paris museum, designed to illustrate a passage from Dante's Inferno. The original cover of the program had written over the figures the word "Unity", and beside them, the words "Peace, Progress, Prosperity". Mayor Christopher said that he did not believe it a very healthful picture for the Republican Party and that he would not have chosen it. He said that he had received a number of complaints from people who had seen the cover, which was already in print at the local publishing house. He had talked with Edward Mills, chairman of the San Francisco citizens' committee for the convention, after which Mr. Mills had issued a statement saying that the cover was "only tentative" and that several others were being considered for final selection by July 15. A picture of the proposed cover is on the page. It also contained an inscription in celebration of the centennial of the Republican Party, whose first presidential candidate had been John C. Fremont of California. Parenthetically, the sculpture might have suggested the trichotomous positions on foreign policy attributed to the Administration by Senator Hubert Humphrey, as contained in the Congressional Record of July 14, to which we cited yesterday, the three differing opinions being those of the President, the Secretary of State and the Vice-President, with "Unity" then standing as a bit of an ironic jest, which might have served well the Republican Party, to show that it had a self-effacing sense of humor for once.
In Jacksonville, Fla., an anonymous person who had overheard plans for a bank robbery had provided FBI agents a tip which led them to make three arrests the previous night only nine hours after $28,000 had been stolen from the Florida National Bank at Starke. Most of the money was reported to have been recovered, and a Navy enlisted man, 19 years old, was charged with the bank robbery, while another Navy man, also 19, plus a 23-year old young woman, were charged as accessories. None of them fit the description of the lone male who was supposed to be 21. It is a wonder they caught them.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges stated in a press conference that North Carolina's compulsory school attendance law would not be changed but would be modified under proposals of the State Advisory Committee on Education. He said that the law had been on the books for 40 years but the State had never spent anything for its enforcement, that the current public school problem was "the most momentous question we have had in many decades," and that State leaders had been working for nearly a year on a planned program to meet the issue. He said that there were three basic premises on which the State was working, that the State would not countenance mixing of the races in the public schools, that consideration would be given to State tuition grants so a child could attend a private non-integrated school of the child's choice, and to local option which would provide individual communities the right to close the public schools by a majority vote if conditions became "intolerable". He said that local school boards might be relieved of the compulsory attendance law if the local option were exercised to close the public schools. He said that preparations for the special legislative session, set to begin July 23, were in their "semi-final" stage. He said there would be a series of meetings held throughout the state the following week with all of the state's legislators set to discuss the proposed bills which would be introduced at the special session to amend the State Constitution. After the bills were reviewed, they would be released to the public.
Also in Raleigh, it was reported that the State's general fund revenue collections during the previous fiscal year had shown a record-breaking increase of nearly 35.4 million dollars over the previous fiscal year and exceeded by more than 19 million the 1955 legislative estimates, as reported this date by the State Revenue commissioner in a fiscal year-end report to the Governor.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that there were widespread rumors this date that the detective who was the director of the City Police Department's Youth Bureau since its origination in 1951 was leaving his position to join the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, but that the detective would not comment. Get back to us when you have clarified that story. We have better things to do than to consider rumors—kind of like the current impeachment inquiry in 2023. It is called wasting one's time in distraction from far more important matters, not dissimilar to the bulk of this date's front page.
Julian Scheer of The News provides the second in a series of reports on the Park & Recreation Commission, which you are at liberty to read for yourself should you have a special interest in the subject.
In London, a five-year old boy had a peashooter which was giving him trouble, touching off a row between British pea growers and British peashooter manufacturers regarding whether peashooters were getting too small to shoot British peas or whether British peas were getting too large to be shot in the peashooters. The boy had recently reported to his father, a major in the British War Office, that only about one dried pea in 20 would pass through his new shooter, and the major had issued an indignant statement to the press, saying in part: "In my youth, peas fitted peashooters perfectly. Have peas grown larger or peashooters smaller nowadays? Whatever it is, it shows a shocking lack of industrial coordination. We are fighting for our export markets and it is a scandal if peashooters are offered for sale which are too small to shoot peas. If such a thing happened in the Army, it would cause a terrible fuss." A colonel, head of one of Britain's largest pea-producing firms, said that it was nonsense to suggest that peas were getting larger, indicating that they sought quality, not size, that there were two principal types of British peas, the little "blues" and the larger "marrowfats", suggesting to the little boy that he should try the "blues" in his shooter. He added that he thought that peashooter manufacturers ought start making bigger guns which would enable use of the larger peas. A spokesman for the British Toy Makers Association denied that there was any shrinkage in the peashooters, contending that they were as fine in quality as they had ever been, but indicating that they would be the first to agree to consultations at a national level between toy manufacturers and pea growers to standardize both pea and peashooter dimensions.
That story and its import also is
suggestive of the current impeachment inquiry, which we suggest is a
new fall reality tv show, a vain attempt by the Republican Party to
preempt mock by "Saturday Night Live", as it is most
difficult to parody something which is already a parody of itself,
including the constantly thick-tongued lady from North Carolina
who wants to ensure preservation of funding for hunting courses,
while also bringing up Hunter and the Clinton Foundation as solid
evidences of impeachable offenses by someone, somewhere along the
line, must be, all while she goes hunting for wild turkeys in between hearings
and defers to her colleague from Georgia, when the latter isn't out hunting
wild hogs with an AR-15 from a helicopter. We have to hand it to the
Republican House. They do have some characters, many of whom appear to go hunting for wild turkeys much too often. By the way, when you conflate the names of two of the members of the Republican Political Retribution Committee, you come up with Gomer, which pretty much sums the Republican membership
On the editorial page, "Midtown's Bottleneck Is Well-Greased" tells of the just implemented peak-hour parking ban on 26 blocks of Charlotte's midtown streets having initially been a success, breaking down the major bottlenecks, producing greater mobility on Trade and Tryon Streets.
Midtown merchants had once opposed the plan, until the opening in June of a new off-street parking lot on the site of the fire-ravaged rail freight depot. But the previous day, when the parking ban had gone into effect, the midtown merchants were among those who praised the new system, along with city officials, policemen and motorists. Police were letting motorists become accustomed to the change before giving tickets for blocking streets when pausing in previous curbside parking areas.
Traffic engineer Herman Hoose, it urges, deserved commendation of the community for pushing the plan vigorously, or otherwise the City Council might have continued to frown on it.
The current trial would last 90 days and a permanent parking ban, it ventures, ought be approved if the benefits continued to be as they appeared initially. It finds progress being made in Charlotte, but because of its fast growth, it took a lot of running just to keep in the same place.
"The Senate's Tax-Paid Smear Artists" indicates that Republican employees of the Senate were putting out hate literature again and the taxpayers were still footing the bill, with a staff publication of the Senate Republican policy committee suggesting the Democratic Party as the darling of the Communists. Senate Democrats had howled with indignation and said pointedly that they did not wish to be forced to retaliate by suggesting that Moscow had reported that the Kremlin liked the President and hoped that he would be re-elected.
A couple of Republican Senators had made it clear that they did not question the motives or patriotism of Democrats, but it finds that not enough. The staff of the policy committee was paid out of Senate funds and its office was in the Capitol.
It finds publications as the one in question nothing less than hate literature, coming from a desire to play dirty political pool with no rules of fairness. The policy committee had an obligation to repudiate its staff and end the hypocrisy involved in saying what its staff did was none of the committee's concern. If that repudiation were not forthcoming, the Senate ought cut off funds of the staff at once and let it set itself up in an alley where the general atmosphere was more fitting. For the nation already had a surplus of political smear artists. "Let them concoct their idiocies on their own time."
"Everything in Congress Is Just Ducky" advises weeping no more for Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and his large surplus of grain, for Congress had figured a way to settle the whole problem by inviting wild ducks to gobble up the surplus instead of feasting on precious, pre-surplus, growing grain in California's Sacramento, Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys.
The President had signed a bill the prior Tuesday making the invitation formal, whereby farmers who were bothered by migrating ducks getting to the grain before it was declared surplus could ask the Commodity Credit Corporation for help, at which point the latter would bring in the surplus grain to serve as an alternative feast for the ducks.
It indicates that what was bothersome was how the Government would convince the ducks that they ought to be reasonable and eat the surplus grain instead of the fresh, growing grain. It ventures that they might regard any legislation not enacted by a lameduck Congress to be sheer political quackery.
It suggests that the only thing to do was for Secretary Benson to offer to pin a 4-H badge on the lead duck of every formation bound for the surplus grain, and it urges also pinning a badge on Congress, "but not where you think."
"After Seaweed, a Ballbat Sandwich?" finds that the irony of feeding surplus grain to itinerant ducks while many Asians and Europeans were going hungry was heightened by new published worries about how the earth's millions would eat in the 21st Century. Resources of the World, a "speculative projection" recently published by the California Institute of Technology, had warned that a vast increase in food production would be necessary, along with certain "non-conventional" approaches to the problem.
For instance, there would have to be greater "utilization of the woody part of the plant." Also, "the cultivation of algae as a food crop" had been widely suggested.
It concludes that when descendants were nibbling disconsolately on seaweed and old baseball bats, they would probably look back on how the country had disposed of surpluses with the same incredulity the present was reserving for the way Salem had disposed of witches.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Farewell to Ticker Tape", indicates that ticker tape, which had greeted Charles Lindbergh after his trans-Atlantic flight of 1927 and English Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle, as well as Queen Marie of Rumania, on their triumphant rides down Broadway, was running out just when it had become an indispensable part of the American scene. With the advances in electronics at the New York Stock Exchange, prices were now flashed on a board instead of being ticked off on tape, with only a small number of transactions coming from the tickers, used as reserves. It thus wonders how salutes would be provided to distinguished visitors from abroad and to heroes at home.
When Prime Minister John Costello of Ireland had received what was generally regarded as a deficient reception, the State Department had become concerned about the paucity of ticker tape and so had gotten in touch with the Stock Exchange, which then saved up ticker tape for the visit of President Sukarno of Indonesia. It had to be delivered to the office buildings along the parade route by the Department of Sanitation, which later had also to clean it up.
It finds it an artificial substitute, that ticker tape ought originate spontaneously along the route. It suggests that as ticker tape gradually disappeared, there should be some substitute for greeting heroes and heroines and urges that between the State Department and the New York City Department of Commerce and Public Events, there ought to be a way to manage it.
Drew Pearson says that the most guarded secret since the hydrogen bomb was how much it cost the taxpayers for the previous year's Congressional globe-trotting, of which only a few men were aware, and they were not revealing it. The accounts were still coming in from over 230 Senators and Congressmen who had gone overseas in the biggest junketing spree in Congressional history. But the column had been able to check the secret vouchers turned in and presents the amounts spent, acknowledging that some of the trips were important and that some of the members of Congress had done a good job for their country, while some had only taken joy rides.
The taxpayers had paid $51,000 for a special Air Force plane for Congressmen Sterling Cole of New York, O. C. Fisher of Texas, George Miller of California, Walt Norblad of Oregon, and Bill Bates of Massachusetts in their trip around the world, while the Air Force escort officers had spent another $10,300 on the Congressmen for travel expenses. Mr. Fisher had also taken a private $300 side trip in Indonesia. Those basic costs did not include the foreign currency that was provided to the junketing members for spending money. He explains in detail that process.
In addition, the members usually displaced military passengers on the planes.
Another $41,670 had been spent for a special plane for Congressmen Clem Zablocki of Wisconsin, John Jarman of Oklahoma, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Ross Adair of Indiana, and Marguerite Church of Illinois, for their junket around the world.
Another special plane to Europe had cost $21,638 for Congressmen W. R. Poage of Texas, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Harold Cooley of North Carolina, Henry Talle of Iowa, and Antoni Sadlak of Connecticut. The latter had taken his son along and Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia had arranged for his daughter-in-law to make the trip. (That was not the wife of his other son, Pat, the subsequently well-known televangelist.) Mr. Pearson notes that the trip was to visit the Inter-Parliamentary Union, attendance at which was required by law and could be classified as one of the more worthwhile junkets.
Congressman Poage and his wife had organized another junket to South America which had cost $18,915 for transportation, and going with them had been Congressman Paul Jones of Missouri and his wife.
Yet another South American junket for Congressmen Porter Hardy of Virginia, Jack Brooks of Texas, George Meader of Michigan and Victor Knox of Michigan had cost $20,998.
Walter Lippmann tells of there being general agreement among seasoned political correspondents that former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson had recovered from the setback he had suffered in the Minnesota primary earlier in the year and that, barring any accident, was virtually certain to be nominated again as the Democratic presidential candidate.
The contest during the primary season by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had not been based on anything more substantial than a claim that he was a better vote-getter, refuted in the California primary won by Mr. Stevenson. The late candidacy of New York Governor Averell Harriman had been based on the hope that former President Truman would move actively against Mr. Stevenson, and the Governor's candidacy had not gained momentum because Democratic leaders and politicians in the North and the South were opposed to his strategy, which was to gamble on splitting the party, driving the Southerners out by taking extreme positions intended to draw blacks, labor and discontented farmers in the North, a strategy obtained from former President Truman's campaign in 1948. But the Democrats in Congress and the governors had no interest in gambling for the presidency at the price of dividing and confusing the party.
Democrats dissatisfied with Mr. Stevenson had usually said that as a "moderate" candidate, he had raised no fighting and winning issue against the President, with there being behind those complaints the assumption that fighting and winning issues could be raised by a bold stand on the farm problem, labor legislation, desegregation, national defense and foreign policy. But while the Congressional Democrats and Mr. Stevenson had failed to raise such issues, Senator Kefauver and Governor Harriman had done no better, and Mr. Lippmann questions what those great issues were which they were going to raise, as the President had deflated any such issues. As soon as there had appeared a grievance which looked as if it meant votes, the President had made a concession which took the heat out of the discontent.
He had vetoed the farm bill and then conceded so much of what it promised to the farmers that it no longer was obvious how much smaller the Republican subsidy was than it would have been with the Democrats' farm bill. He had replaced Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay with a new Secretary whom the conservationists liked and trusted. He had taken most of the steam out of criticism of his foreign policy by recognizing that at least it was valid criticism, while frustrating the opposition which found itself lunging at a target no longer there to be hit.
Mr. Stevenson had shown wisdom and great political sense in not trying to pretend that there was any radical difference between the Eisenhower Republicans and the Democrats on those specific problems, as the primary question before the voters in 1956 was not those particular issues but rather continuity in the administration of the Government. The question was whether the President was of sufficient health to continue, even though the country, by and large, wanted him to do so. The other question would be that if he could not, who would replace him.
It was that latter question on which the Democratic leaders in Congress and Mr. Stevenson had addressed themselves, presenting, in combination, a formidable alternative to the President and thereby seeking to appeal to the Eisenhower Democrats of 1952, who appeared to hold the balance of power. It did not mean that Mr. Stevenson would be a direct copy of the President, though they were not far apart on problems such as farm policy, desegregation, defense and foreign policy, even though there was a difference between them about the future.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that if there was a case against the President, it was that he lived too much in the immediate present, deciding issues only when he had to do so and when they were brought to him by his staff, while not anticipating the future and preparing for it. As he was growing older, the case against him would likely become stronger, and for many voters, that would be a decisive consideration.
Marquis Childs indicates that three years after the Korean War and in the midst of the greatest peacetime boom in the country's history, the Office of Defense Mobilization was still issuing certificates for fast tax write-offs to industry, in effect, interest-free loans. The policy of the five-year tax write-off had been initiated after the start of the Korean War during the Truman Administration, to provide indirect help to firms building facilities for defense production, which might otherwise not have been built. But the program had continued to the present, with the latest report of the Office of Defense Mobilization showing that the tax amortization certificates totaled about 36.3 billion dollars, of which 22 billion could be written off within five years, with $148,000 worth of the certificates having been issued in the first two weeks of June.
New Deal Democrats were indignant over what they said was a bonanza by a business Administration for big business, one Democrat suggesting that they had "screamed about mink coats under Truman. But this is hundreds of millions and even billions for a favored few. I guess the trouble is you can understand about mink coats but the quick tax write-off doesn't get across."
But there had in fact been a sharp dispute behind the scenes within the Administration as to whether the write-off program should be continued, with the opponents arguing that the privilege was being granted to construct facilities which would have been built in the course of the peacetime boom anyway, and that the "defense" justification was, in most instances, no longer valid. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, when testifying before a House committee, called the accelerated program "an artificial stimulus of a dangerous type", finding artificial stimuli likely to become artificial controls. He pointed out that the Government's tax loss, as a result of the policy, would be 880 million dollars during the current fiscal year and could stand in the way of a more general tax reduction for all taxpayers.
The dispute was the sharpest regarding tax write-offs granted to private utilities, with public power advocates charging that it was a subsidy which had long been raised as objection to public power. The American Public Power Association showed more than 2.8 billion dollars in private utility development eligible for the five-year write-off, claiming it to be an interest-free loan, as it had been called by the Federal Power Commission, and if invested at 6 percent for the accounting period of 33 1/3 years, to become a subsidy of nearly 4.3 billion dollars. The utilities countered that it was nonsense, as what was saved in five years went to pay later taxes.
Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, argued that private utilities had to be allowed to develop atomic power with private capital. The Duquesne Light Co. of Pittsburgh was constructing the only large atomic power development at the time, and of the total investment of roughly 107 million dollars, the Commission was supplying 92 million while Duquesne, under its contract, provided 15 million. But after the contract had been signed, Duquesne applied for a five-year tax write-off, which was granted for 10.5 million, and it was charged that over the 33-year period, it would be the equivalent of nearly the amount the utility had supplied to the project.
Mr. Childs indicates that it was all so complicated that it hardly came within the scope of ordinary politics, but that if the economic climate should change, it would not be hard to imagine how the tax privileges, and the search presently ongoing for newly opened loopholes, could be exploited in a sensational Congressional investigation, with that reaction in the past having brought the restraints which business and industry had bitterly resented.
A letter writer from Houston, Tex., indicates that a University of Kentucky educator, Dr. Thomas Clark, had suggested that the Union was reunited and that the words of "Dixie" were "not good patriotism", that Southerners should stop singing it. She says that her newspaper had not arrived during the afternoon and so she did not know whether the Supreme Court had outlawed the song or not. She thinks that the only hope for peace in the South was that "time wounds all heels—without regard to race, color, creed or sex."
A letter from five teenagers says that the newspaper had its opinion of Elvis Presley, but they wanted to express their own, that they adored him, had talked to him while he was in Charlotte the prior week appearing at the Coliseum, and he had said that rock 'n' roll did not cause juvenile delinquency but that disrespect for their parents was a primary cause, telling them always to respect and obey their parents. (But in doing so, please do not split your infinitives, as you have, a most annoying habit. Candidly, we would rather see a little drag racing by teenagers who at least speak the Queen's English appropriately, even if that, of course, in the context of drag racing, is a bit of wishful thinking, at least in the South.) He had also said that no matter where he was or what he was doing, every night, he called his mother, who was the best friend a young person could have. They believe that was excellent advice for youth and ought be printed. "Elvis is one of the cleanest, nicest and best-looking boys we have ever met."
If he were still driving a truck, we doubt you would take much notice. In any event, he did not shoot his mama.
A letter from the "Elvis Presley Fan Club" finds that Elvis was "down to earth, crude and natural," "not disgusting", and that "any vulgarity or evil thoughts are strictly brainchildren of hypocritical adults." They see no reason why he should not be seen on television and would appreciate the newspaper voicing the opinions of the teenagers on the subject, indicating that they did not like the attitude of many critics and hoped that the newspaper would help them and help Elvis to return to television "as himself".
A letter from A. W. Black finds that singer Arthur Smith, "assuming a somewhat sanctimonious pose during his Tuesday night shows", had advised, "Attend the church of your choice," adding, "We will be studying our Sunday school lesson" from a specific book of the New Testament, implying that all churches, particularly those which were Protestant, studied the same lesson and scriptural text on the same Sunday, which Mr. Black says was definitely in error. He says that certain Protestant denominations had prearranged, "stereotyped" [sic] Sunday school lessons, but that was not the case with all Protestant sects.
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