The Charlotte News
Monday, October 14, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Little Rock, Ark., that the fourth week of integration of Central High School, following the federalization of the National Guard and deployment of the Army paratroopers on September 24 by the President, had begun quietly with seven of the nine black students entering the building still under the protection of the soldiers. The two other students were absent. One of them had missed classes on Friday because of flu, and the other was reported also to be ill with the flu. The calm atmosphere on the campus and throughout the city had made some black leaders uneasy, with L. C. Bates, a newspaper publisher and husband of the Arkansas president of the NAACP, having said, "It's too calm to be comfortable for us." He had said the previous night that he thought there might be trouble "with the present tension as it is" if Federal troops were immediately withdrawn. A settlement of the dispute appeared no closer than in recent weeks, as the President continued to want assurances from Governor Orval Faubus that he would keep the peace and obey Federal court orders to integrate the school. The Governor had said that the deadlock could be solved only by withdrawal of the black students from the high school. The Governor remained confined to the mansion with flu, indicating during the weekend that it "was his understanding" that a Southern governors' committee representative might contact him during the current week for a new attempt to resolve the crisis.
In Cambridge, Mass., Russian and American scientists had arranged to exchange information resulting from moon watch observations of earth satellites, with the director of the moon watch program, just returning from a conference in Barcelona with his Russian counterpart, having said this date to the press: "We made arrangements for swapping moon watch operations between the Smithsonian and the Russian Academy of Science. Details are to be worked out." He said he had been told by his Russian counterpart that there were between 66 and 68 moon watch teams organized in Russia on a voluntary basis, with about 33 organized in the universities around either an astronomer or a physicist, and between 25 and 30 members on each team. He said that the Russians were using a system which closely followed the system used in the U.S., using mainly time signals recorded on tape recorders, and where radio was not available, using telephones to send the time signals. He said he had last talked with the Russian astronomer in Barcelona the prior Friday afternoon and at that time there had been three visual observations of Sputnik in Russia, at Leningrad and Moscow and by a team in the south, the location of which he did not recall.
Meanwhile, it was reported in London
that Sputnik had stopped burring and started beeping again, according
to BBC
Stewart Alsop, appearing on the
front page, tells of a mounting body of evidence being taken quite
seriously in the Washington intelligence community that Sputnik could
see. If so, it was a major propaganda and scientific achievement for
the Soviets, as well as a military triumph. The previous Wednesday,
in Belgrade, a Soviet scientist, Dr. Aleksandar Sherban,
vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Scientists, had said
proudly that Sputnik carried certain "elements" which made
it possible in effect to record the terrain of the earth below. There
were reasons to believe that what he said was true. If so, the
President's hopeful statement that Sputnik had no military
significance in itself was nonsense. For an ICBM to do its job, it
had to be launched several thousand miles and land within five miles
of a specific target, a tough job in any event, but made tougher by
the fact that existing maps were unreliable. Cartographers used a
transit to determine latitude and longitude by celestial observation,
the transit containing the equivalent of a carpenter's plumb bob to
determine the vertical, theoretically pointing to the center of the
earth but in fact slightly diverted by local topographical formations
such as high mountains. It was also slightly inaccurate anyway since
the earth, flattened at both ends, was not a true sphere. Thus, if
Sputnik could in fact see the earth below it would be an immense
achievement in terms of map-making for the purpose of aiming ICBM's.
As first reported in the New York Herald Tribune, high
intelligence officials in Washington suspected as much even before
the Soviet scientist's boast that the satellite was mapping the U.S.
with infrared devices to locate targets. It was possible to use
infrared devices to locate cities, rivers, coastlines and the like,
by measuring the intensity of light. Telemetering instruments could
then be used to communicate that information by code. When it became
known that Sputnik contained telemetering devices which were sending
coded information to the Soviet scientists, a fact which had been
confirmed by the Soviets, the suspicion that the satellite was not
blind had eventuated. It was reinforced by the guarded hints in
Pravda that "the satellite has light sensitive elements."
The weight of Sputnik, which had amazed U.S. scientists, was another
element in the equation, as it was logical to assume that the
satellite was so heavy because it contained numerous miniaturized instruments
In Washington, a Federal District Court judge this date barred Jimmy Hoffa from taking office the following day as president of the Teamsters Union, issuing a restraining order at the request of a 13-man New York rank-and-file Teamsters group, who contended that Mr. Hoffa had been elected at the recent Teamsters convention in Miami Beach through rigged delegations designed to support him, in violation of the union constitution. The order not only barred Mr. Hoffa from taking office, but also barred others elected with him from taking office, the order to be in effect for ten days subject to extension for another ten days. The order also directed Mr. Hoffa and the others elected with him to show cause why the entire proceeding of the Teamsters convention should not be rendered void as contrary to the Teamsters constitution and why Mr. Hoffa and the other officers should not be permanently barred from taking office. The Teamsters attorney had asked U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, subsequently becoming well-known for his role as a judge in the Watergate cases, to order an immediate trial of the case. Judge Sirica had turned down the request but ordered the trial expedited as soon as the Teamsters attorney filed an answer to the complaint brought by the rank-and-file Teamsters. The attorneys for the latter group said that they also wanted a quick trial but wanted the benefit first of the answer to the complaint.
The Supreme Court refused to review the 1956 conviction for criminal contempt of John Kasper, the segregationist who had stirred up trouble the prior fall in Clinton, Tenn., regarding the attempted integration of the high school there, and had also been engaged in trying to stir up trouble in Little Rock. He had been convicted for disregarding a U.S. District Court judge's order not to interfere with the integration of Clinton High School.
In Asheville, actor Robert Mitchum, present to make a movie about bootlegging, received some advice in a letter from a whiskey-maker in nearby Wilkes County, indicating that people around Asheville did not know how to make good white whiskey and so offered to come to Asheville and set up the best liquor still which could be built. He had asked that his name not be revealed.
The editorial page is here. Whatever
you do, maintain "The Hunter's Moon" from the Raleigh
News & Observer on the hush-hush and qt., or that crazy woman
from Georgia will surely go back to the former wrestling guy who
wants to investigate everything done by a Democrat or a Democrat's
relatives since Grover Cleveland was President, while managing to
ignore all Republican sins, especially those of Trump, and then she
and he will again go assiduously digging through laptops adduced by
computer technicians, to find pictures which they can display in
committee hearings, to show the American people the Truth about
whether man really landed on the moon, and other sordid tales of
ignominy through time, perpetuated by the Deep State which George
Orwell predicted in 1949. They're on the beam and on the ball,
working tirelessly for thee and we, knowing just how to spend the
taxpayers' money in pursuit of remedial legislation for horrible
abuses of power for, good heavens, what is it? more than 50 years!
And they wanted to send this blameless man Trump to jail. Have you
ever?
Recall, incidentally, that Marion Hargrove had worked for The News before the war, after which and the success of his wartime book, See Here, Private Hargrove, produced in 1944 as a movie, he became a Hollywood screenwriter.
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