The Charlotte News
Saturday, July 7, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Gettysburg, Pa., that, according to the President's doctors, he was steadily getting better from his June 8 attack of ileitis, and they were pleased with the marked improvement he had shown during the week. It was the first medical report provided since the President had arrived at his farm on July 1 to continue his recovery. White House press secretary James Hagerty said that the President had discussed politics for the first time with chief of staff Sherman Adams and with Mr. Hagerty the previous day, "both personal politics and general politics", but did not state whether the President had indicated that he would stand by his February 29 decision to run for a second term or whether he had reached such a decision. But the smile on Mr. Hagerty's face when he volunteered the information suggested to newsmen that he did intend to continue to run. He also said that the President's diet was being continued at 2,500 calories per day, compared with the pre-operation diet of 1,800 calories, to get the President's weight back up to around 170 pounds.
Democrats sought $300,000 this date for an exhaustive restudy of the use of American funds abroad, as Congress approached final votes on the Administration's foreign aid program for the current fiscal year. Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana said that he would ask the Senate Rules Committee for endorsement of the amount to finance an inquiry by independent investigators under the direction of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senate and House confreres had reached final agreement on a new four billion dollar foreign aid authorization bill, including 2.3 billion for military assistance to free world allies, nearly 900 million below the 4.9 billion program of military and economic aid originally proposed by the President. A committee of the House the previous day had made an even more drastic cut, to 3.6 billion in foreign aid appropriations to finance the spending on which the authorization set the ceilings. Both the House and the Senate still had to act on the money bill.
In Bonn, West Germany, the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, had approved conscription for the country's new Army this date, over bitter protests by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Social opponents. The controversial law would next proceed to the upper house, where a solid Government majority assured final approval. The law would make 12 million German men between ages 18 and 45 subject to compulsory military service. The Bundestag had passed the bill by a vote of 270 to 166 on its third and final reading, following 16 hours of stormy debate, with the vote scheduled in the upper house on the following Friday. Chancellor Adenauer, normally greeted with respectful silence by lawmakers, was interrupted by jeers and laughter when he urged that the draft was the only means of building the 500,000-man Army pledged to NATO. Opponents of the draft had argued that large armies were unnecessary in an age of streamlined armed forces and nuclear weapons. In the showdown, the three parties of Chancellor Adenauer's coalition Government had voted solidly for the law and Socialists and Refugee Party members had voted against it. The opponents had plentiful public support from West Germans who recalled the losses and devastation of World War II, expressing opposition out of fear of rebirth of German militarism.
In Hong Kong, an American priest, the Reverend John W. Clifford, 39, following his return from three years of imprisonment in Communist China, this date said: "My Communist cell can only be described as a place of no hope, but I put my trust in God." He said that he was forbidden to say the rosary or pray during his time in prison, that his guards told him there was "no freedom of religion in prison. Your church is bad and so are all priests." He had arrived in Hong Kong with another priest, the Reverend Thomas Phillips, 52, who had also been imprisoned for three years. Both priests were from San Francisco and were the first Americans freed by the Communist Chinese Government since two Presbyterian missionaries had been released the previous December, leaving 11 other Americans still imprisoned. Father Clifford said that when he was first imprisoned in June, 1953, the prison cells were occupied by 19 Chinese and foreign priests, and that the Communists had questioned him repeatedly in an effort to get him to confess to charges of slandering the state and "disrupting the activities of the state". He said that he had never confessed to anything. Father Philips said that he had undergone at least 150 interrogations and had been taken on a 25-day tour, covering some 3,000 miles in China, with three other imprisoned Americans, visiting construction projects, dams and buildings in various cities. He said that a named bishop with whom he was imprisoned was suffering from high blood pressure and that other named priests appeared in good health, while one suffered from asthma attacks and another with spinal trouble. An American businessman from New York, serving a life sentence, appeared to be in fair health but was suffering from high blood pressure.
In Westbury, N.Y., two men were being held in custody this date as detectives continued to search for the five-week old baby who had been kidnaped from his carriage situated in the backyard of the parents' home on July 4. Police did not comment about the two men in custody, except to admit that they had been picked up the previous night, questioned during the night and were being maintained in custody. A police spokesman, however, said that the chief of detectives had stated that the two men had no direct connection with the kidnaping. It had been reported that one of the men had telephoned the parents of the child and presumably that call had been traced, while the second man was reported to have been loitering near the parents' home. Police said that no ransom money had thus far been paid. A man had phoned the previous day from a New York City pay station to assure the father that the baby was alive and well and to increase the ransom from $2,000 to $5,000, to which the father had stated that he was ready to pay and would await a further call. The father said he was convinced that the anonymous caller had been the kidnaper, but police cautioned against overoptimism and said that it was problematic as to whether the baby was still alive. In fact, as indicated, the kidnaper would later confess when caught in August that he had left the baby beside a busy highway on Thursday, the day after the kidnaping, and the baby would subsequently be found by the police in that location, dead.
Near Oxford, Pa., five persons had been killed, including two young children, in a two-car head-on collision before dawn this date on a fog-enshrouded highway, the collision having occurred between a station wagon carrying six persons and an automobile driven by a 17-year old boy. The remaining pair of passengers, both children under ten, were reportedly in a semiconscious condition in a nearby hospital. Police said that the young driver of the automobile had swerved to the left and smashed into the station wagon in the fog.
Julian Scheer of The News reports, in the third in a series of articles on the Park & Recreation Commission, telling this date of the proposed and actual spending for various projects out of the $999,000 bond issue of 1949, leaving at present $89,000.
In London, Dame Irene Ward, Conservative M.P., served notice in Commons this date that she was going to uphold vigorously efforts of British Army women to escape wearing of Government-issued panties, which the women called "baggy bloomers". She said that women liked to choose their own underwear and she would bring up the matter formally in Commons the following Wednesday by asking Defense Minister Sir Walter Monckton to give the Army women a pantie allowance so that they could buy their own and not have to wear "those horrors presently supplied by the Women's Royal Army Corps." The problem had been simmering for two years and the Army women were supported by the service chiefs of both sexes, appearing united in their demand for an allowance to purchase their own underwear. But the British Treasury had stated that the Government could not afford the allowance, while stating sympathy on the issue. Two WRAC women, interviewed at a London service club, gave their opinions, one stating that the "khaki bloomers are so long that they would show beneath our skirts—if we wore them. Not one girl in 50 wears them. We buy our own." The other said that no one could feel well-dressed in "baggy bloomers". The problem was that the underwear had been designed for World War I and no one had thought of changing it. Perhaps, it is the source of the phrase "Maggie's drawers", denoting a poor shot in the Army.
On the editorial page, "Security, the Senate and Mr. Wilson" indicates that Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson's Senate critics had failed to prove their charge that the Soviets had the better of the U.S. in air power. Indeed, it had been clear from the beginning that, because the Soviets had the figures on their own air power, there was no rational means of comparison. Even Air Force chief of staff General Nathan Twining, after having visited the Moscow air show recently, and returning encouraged by what he had seen, still did not have the figures.
But it finds that the burden of proof still rested with Mr. Wilson, as the Senate had no responsibility to prove that the U.S. was endangered by possibly insufficient Air Force spending, that it was up to Mr. Wilson to discredit the Senators' expressed fears if he could. It was also up to him to spend or not the additional one billion dollars proposed to be added to the Air Force budget, which Mr. Wilson said he did not need.
The actual controversy was between Mr. Wilson and key military and research officials of the Air Force, from whom the information came which was being used by the Senators to prod the Secretary.
It was possible that some of the Senate criticism was politically motivated and also that budget balancing had unbalanced the strength of the Air Force. It finds, however, positive value in the hearings even if they could not result in a verdict, serving as a reminder to the nation that there was great peril in addition to the current "peace and prosperity", as well as a reminder to Mr. Wilson that he would be in trouble if he did not keep the security of the country at the highest possible level.
"Age of Anxiety Lives on—And On" indicates that it had been brought to its attention by a chronic alarmist of its acquaintance that all was really lost, that a large cigarette manufacturer had launched a new series of ads based on the one triumphant theme: "Gone are the days when fear restricted the full enjoyment of living." For on the very day the tobacco company had first proclaimed an end to the Age of Anxiety, the front pages had headlined the latest hydrogen bomb blasts, scaring the devil out of practically everyone. Its friend had assured that it was a bad omen and gave the Age of Anxiety about six more years to run, unless total disarmament occurred or somebody discovered a better cigarette filter.
It had decided that fear had become a necessary ingredient of modern living and therefore fully enjoyable, that if it were banished, half the world would be up in arms. It suggests that in an era of universal havoc, Americans had developed a remarkable ability to enjoy what W. B. Yeats had called the bright face of danger, that ever since World War II, they had been scaring the daylights out of themselves with thoughts of massive retaliation, brinkmanship diplomacy, McCarthyism and the nuclear detonations at Eniwetok and Bikini.
The postwar reading habits included mayhem in fiction, the more disturbing, the better, and in nonfiction, spine tingling adventures of daredevil authors on the bottom of the sea, the Kon-tiki, icebergs in the Arctic, Anapura and Everest, as well as in the green hell of Brazilian jungles. The society had revived equally terrifying books on the human mind, with there having been renewed popularity of Sigmund Freud's The Origins of Psychoanalysis, a probe into the subconscious where he had obtained his "first glimpses into depth of the instinctual life of man", seeing "things calculated to sober or even to frighten" him.
The old Frankenstein, Dracula and
Wolf Man movies were still being reissued and the suspense melodrama
was considered tasty television fare, while the most discussed
episode of the first Cinerama film was a scary ride on a roller
coaster
Younger members of the family enjoyed Halloween masks, jack-o'-lanterns and "Ghostly Stories".
It concludes that fright was a highly commercial commodity, as much so as what caused people to purchase chlorophyll toothpaste or tickets to rock 'n' roll extravaganzas. "If you ain't scared then you ain't with it. In the perilous '50s, well-bred fright is a badge of sophistication."
We'll say it again for those who did not live in the period or whose memories are colored only by nostalgia and not reality: The Fifties were certainly not the "good ol' days", despite certain movies made since making it seem far less stressful than it actually was. In fact, it was one of the most stressful ages in modernity, which was why there were so many new fads and escapes from the reality of the times, of the Cold War and its potential for nuclear annihilation at any moment. Any dolt who thinks that the present times are "the worst" has certainly not lived very long or, if they have, not been very sensitive to the past, and has somehow escaped studying history with any degree of close discernment and imagination beyond the page of dryly recited facts. Indeed, by contrast even to World War II and its threat to home life domestically, the threat was not so immediate as that during the Cold War, and so everyone had to find a way to cope with the tension to avoid going crazy. Unlike the war, where daily reports told of concrete defeat or victory in a battle somewhere, the daily reports now only provided guesswork as to what the Communists were planning or not for the West, with the stark reality continuing of constant nuclear threat, waxing and waning with the potential rapidity of the next morning. And not to mention the continuing threat to all males of military age and younger that a letter from the President might interrupt at any time, at present or in the future, the peaceful splendor of youth with a rude awakening: "Greetings:..."
No age is perfect by any stretch, and the dolts who walk around with their little "Make America Great Again" caps adorning their heads expose to the world their complete naïveté regarding history as it actually took place, not as one would view it through the prettified stereopticon of television or sentimental movies, whether produced now in retrospect or then as momentary escapes from the harsh tensions of the age.
"Charlotte's Thirsty Suburban Nevergreen" tells of there being a story every day or so that Charlotte's water consumption was breaking a new record.
It finds that, while there were many more people within the city, the greatest consumption of water had to be the thousands of new shrub and vegetable plots dotting the city and suburban landscapes, with people aplenty hosing down their plots. It suggests that probably the thirstiest plant was the nevergreen, also called evergreens in the old, established sections of the city, but which were not the same as the new nevergreens, which were brown and thrived in the subdivisions where the writer lived. They received a lot of water but did not grow.
Someone who read garden columns said that topsoil would be good for them, but whatever it was, thorough search had failed to reveal any. One man, who thought that the topsoil might be under the clay wherein the nevergreens were planted, did some excavating and found various materials within the ground, but no topsoil, and would not know it if he saw it. There was another theory that the nevergreens found the fluoride and the chlorine in the water distasteful, but no one in the water department would do anything about that, and so everyone continued to pour on the water hoping for the best.
During the previous few days, it had noted a change for the better in its own four plants, turning a much deeper shade of brown, with some of the needles falling among the rocks and straw which were keeping the roots cool, adding to the mulch, of which one could not get too much. It concludes nevertheless that four nevergreens were too many and they required entirely too much water and did not grow much, if at all.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Old Time Religion", indicates that modern politics, according to what a disgruntled old man had told the writer, had about as much "gizzum" as a croquet match.
It finds that an essential ingredient was appallingly absent, the earth-quaking voice. The bugle had been "replaced by the piccolo, the silver-throated hound by the turtle dove."
The old man of its acquaintance had admitted that radio and television could be blamed for the uninspiring "mud puddle". "The hypnotic voice is nurtured by waves of open air and land breezes. It requires a wind-soaked grove hard by a clucking, lickety-split creek—with food and drink and big bass drum oratory. Leave dialecticism in the studio. Hark back to the open spaces and an impassioned advocate with martial music pouring lava-like from his throat."
Yet the old man believed that pip-squeak speeches were present to stay, as each graduating class of lawyers more closely resembled "a bunch of highly competent undertakers. Their tea party perorations couldn't hang a jury of free-masons and Irishmen, much less charm a bird on a limb." It favors drowning television in soap suds.
Drew Pearson indicates that rarely did the House Foreign Affairs Committee hold an open meeting, as it was one of the most secretive committees of Congress. Thus, its members spoke freely, figuring that what they said in closed meetings would not leak to the press, as it seldom did. But at a recent closed-door meeting, wherein the subject was the press, Democratic Representative Wayne Hays of Ohio had proposed to invite columnists and commentators who dealt with foreign affairs to present their views to the Committee. Members had mentioned the names of Walter Lippmann and one or two other commentators, when someone suggested Mr. Pearson, to which Mr. Hays had said he did not think it a bad idea, as Mr. Pearson had traveled widely and had good ideas, such as the peace balloons, which Mr. Hays believed should have been followed up more by the Government. Eventually, Representative Walter Judd of Minnesota spoke up angrily, expressing disagreement, saying that he knew Mr. Pearson's family and that they were sweet people, but that Mr. Pearson, himself, was a "skunk". Mr. Hays responded that he was just talking that way because Mr. Pearson had been a little rough on Republicans, adding that he had also been rough on Democrats, recalling that former President Truman had called him names. He added that Representative Judd might be sore also because he had been telling the truth about the health of the President. Referring to the fact that Representative Judd had a degree as a medical doctor, he said that doctors could not abide medical opinions from outsiders.
The President had sent a friendly letter to R. B. McLeaish, ousted Farmers Home administrator, thanking him for his "valuable assistance" and wishing him "health and happiness", but apparently overlooking the fact that Mr. McLeaish had been fired for excessive drinking and that on September 20, 1952, during the presidential campaign, Mr. Eisenhower had said in St. Louis: "From the beginning we will bring into the government men and women to whom low public morals are unthinkable. Thus we will not only drive wrongdoers and their cronies out of the government, we will make sure that they do not get into the government in the first place."
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the National Security Council having discussed in detail the events occurring recently in the Soviet empire, reaching two basic conclusions, one being that the "cataclysm", as described by Italian Communist boss Palmiro Togliatti, within the world Communist movement was real, not a carefully pre-arranged fake, and that Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues had greatly miscalculated the effects abroad of the denunciation of Joseph Stalin as a murdering tyrant. The experts had explained it by the fact that during his lifetime, Stalin had exclusive personal control through a special section of the secret police over all contacts with the foreign Communist parties, such that the present Soviet "collective leadership" had virtually no contact with or knowledge of the foreign Communist movements, causing Mr. Khrushchev and company to misjudge the reactions of the foreign Communists. Mr. Khrushchev had made his denunciatory speech of Stalin to a very selective audience, the aristocracy of the Soviet party, who were psychologically prepared for what he said as they knew it to be true based on their own experience, that terror and torture had been part of the way of life they had always known under Stalin.
But foreign Communists had relatively little direct contact with the realities of Soviet life under Stalin, to a considerable extent prisoners of their own Stalinist propaganda, such that the effect on them was genuinely "cataclysmic". Such an effect did not necessarily need to weaken the world Communist conspiracy fatally and might even strengthen it in the end, but the U.S. Government was operating on the assumption that the cataclysm was real and not fake.
The second conclusion reached by the NSC was that the changes within the Soviet structure of society were also real, as far as they went. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had testified in Congress the day after the NSC meeting that the Soviets might be "moving towards a more liberal society", accurately reflecting the hopeful but tentative conclusion of the NSC. They had based their conclusion on the fact that the present Soviet leaders had lived constantly in fear of death at the hands of Stalin's secret police and consequently were united in the desire to avoid repeating that experience. When French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau had visited Moscow recently, Mr. Khrushchev had told him that he would rather cut off both arms than see his country again ruled by the secret police.
With the secret police terror largely removed, somewhat higher living standards and a little color in the drab lives of the Russian people had to be offered. But more such events as the bloody riots in Poland could reverse the whole process and even lead to the downfall of Mr. Khrushchev. The policymakers had no illusions that the Soviets were on the point of abandoning Communist doctrine. It was hoped instead that the newly emerging Soviet bureaucratic upper-class would increasingly dominate the system and that the first interest of the regime would be decreasingly doctrinal and increasingly concentrated on practical internal problems. It was hoped that the "erosion of despotism", forecast some years earlier by Soviet experts, had begun within the Soviet power structure. But it was no more than a hope which was very cautious. Yet, there was the faint encouragement that the highest policymakers had concluded that the recent changes in the Soviet empire were real and not merely stage-managed illusions.
A letter writer from Hickory suggests that a recent letter writer apparently had no respect for teenagers, as in her letter she had suggested that all teenagers, especially those who liked Elvis Presley, were base and savage, a type of thinking which made the writer "see red". She says that she believed she was speaking for teenagers everywhere. She agrees that rock 'n' roll was merely a craze which would pass in time, but did not agree that anyone who liked Elvis and his type of music was the lowest type of individual. "Have you ever felt like screaming or tearing your hair, just out of frustration? Surely not, for if so you would realize that Elvis' music is the same release from tension. His so-called 'gyrations' are vulgar only if viewed with a dirty mind. It does one good to let his hair down and lose a little 'dignity' once in awhile. Were this not true there would be more people in State Hospitals than there are now." She says that just because she liked Elvis did not mean that other types of music did not appeal to her, that she could relax with Beethoven or jump with Elvis, and that she was not considered a base individual, and neither were her friends who felt as she did.
She appears to have been moonlighting in the R&B section of the record shop
A letter writer also discusses Elvis, indicating that the clothes he wore while performing and the motions he went through were part of rock 'n' roll, that people appeared on television in tights and low-cut gowns, and so she could not see why there was such a fuss about Elvis. The Kinsey Report and articles in newspapers about low morals of different actors and actresses appeared constantly, and so, in her opinion, the actions of Elvis were part of rock 'n' roll, which would not be rock 'n' roll at all if he appeared as he recently had on the "Steve Allen Show"—wherein he had been forced to tone down his act, after the controversy arising from his hip-gyrating appearance earlier in June on the "Milton Berle Show". She says she had not heard anything different and so believed that "Elvis is a nice boy", that if he were not, the gossip columns would have been full of gossip about him, "rather than catty remarks." She urges that people who did not like Elvis or rock 'n' roll did not have to go to see him or listen to him, and that there were plenty of others who would, that he was just a boy who had become successful on his own and she hopes that he did as well in the movies if he decided to go into that field.
But you can't escape him, for he is
everywhere now, omnipresent, saturating radio
A letter writer also comments on Elvis and the letter writers who had made unkind statements about him, suggesting that if they did not like him, they should leave him and his many fans alone. She had found that those who did not like him were jealous of him in one way or another and she felt sorry for those people.
See? It's a cult.
A letter writer also comments on Elvis, responding to the June 29 letter writer who had indicated that she was a mother who had attended the recent performance at the Coliseum and complained afterward about the conduct of a particular policeman, this writer indicating that she was certain that no one on the police force would harm a boy or girl if the latter were trained right at home such that they would not be rowdy in public. She wonders how many mothers who had taken their children to the show would take as many pains getting them to church on Sunday. She believes that a show "like that is nothing to be proud of. It is like being in a madhouse to hear Presley sing." She hopes that the police officers about whom the letter writer had written would tell the world what had happened that night, to see who was actually brutal.
A letter writer also responds to the same previous letter writer, finding that it was about time that someone used a strong arm on "some of these wild teenagers", that things had reached the limit when performers could not come to a town without people tearing their clothes off and trying to kiss them. He feels it was about time people learned some sense, that some teenagers, when they got in a group, acted worse than "wild animals", that when some people were treated roughly, it was their own fault. He indicates that there were some very nice young ladies and gentlemen among teenagers and he is certain they did not have trouble with "bad tempered cops".
That's not true at all in our experience. There are some cops, no matter how nice you are, who are just spoiling for an argument or a fight, will actually try to entice you into some reaction they can use as an excuse for repressive conduct. Look at them wrong, and you are in instant trouble. And apparently, the mother who recounted in detail her experience, had encountered such a cop.
A letter from A. W. Black indicates that Jack Kiser, News sports pundit, evidently had tried to heal wounds inflicted by the barbs of criticism recently directed by Mr. Black in his earlier letter at the ill-directed casting contest sponsored by the Parks & Recreation Commission, alleging that "some local Skish experts are still laughing at … caustic comment on recent tourney here… They also wonder where you'll get a more widely recognized expert to direct the affair, having had 15 years experience in this sort of thing." He responds that conceding that some may have found his comments laughable, it did not detract from the fact that the event was poorly and irregularly conducted, and that the officials had little regard for rules and procedures, that the man with 15 years experience did not necessarily qualify as an unquestionable authority on the subject of angling. He says that a casual rundown of the National Association of Angling and Casting Clubs roster of consistent annual casting award winners would furnish a host of legitimately recognized experts who were aware of the rules and conducted the contests accordingly, and that among them had not been the man with 15 years of experience.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., indicates that the two national political conventions would soon assemble in August, and that the Democrats had chosen a stockyard in Chicago as the locus for their convention while the Republicans had chosen the Cow Palace in San Francisco, finds it a natural for each party which shot a lot of bull and milked most of the taxpayers dry to satisfy those who only recognized them when they wanted a handout free of charge. He points to Tito visiting Moscow again while still receiving money from the U.S., leaving many people in need at home. He urges that voters should remember to vote for people who were dedicated to the welfare of the people at home first and allies second.
Trumpies have been around for a long time. You're nothing new, just wearing little red caps now to identify your lack of understanding of the nuances of complex issues and events, as well your forgetfulness of history as recent as just three years ago, willing to follow demagogic leaders wherever they take you, including right over the cliff into the broad expanse of the sea.
Framed Edition
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