The Charlotte News
Friday, April 5, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Soviet Union had carried out another nuclear weapons test on Wednesday, according to the Atomic Energy Commission. There was no further information in a brief statement from AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, except for identification of the blast as part of a series which Russia had begun the prior August. The announcement was the first in more than a year regarding Russian tests. The British Defense Ministry had made a similar announcement, using even fewer words. Both the U.S. and Britain had issued statements on March 21, 1956 regarding such a Soviet test.
In Los Angeles, six persons had died when a bar was bombed shortly prior to midnight. Three men, apparently enraged at being ejected earlier from the bar, had returned and poured a bucket of inflammable liquid on the floor, then ignited it with a match. Most of the dead had been trapped where they were seated, with their clothes catching on fire and consuming them. One man, a gas station attendant, said that a phone call had saved his life, as he went to the rear to answer it after stopping in for a beer. He saw a man open the front door and empty a five-gallon pail of liquid which smelled to him like kerosene, and then he saw another man strike a match and throw it toward the liquid. He then bolted to a back room and stood facing an open window, hearing the screams of the patrons unable to escape. Another man felt liquid on his leg and was not in the mood for a joke, until immediately afterward seeing the place aflame, barely able to escape.
In St. Ignance, Mich., an automobile ferry was stranded in an ice jam in the Straits of Mackinac for 18 hours with 66 passengers aboard after it had run onto a mud bank in a heavy fog, 100 yards from its dock at Mackinaw City. The passengers had been fed two hot meals and were warm in the large cabins aboard the ferry, and blankets had been distributed during the night. The water level in the straits had been below normal because of winds and strong currents, and the high winds had jammed the straits with ice the previous day, in places to depths of 25 feet. The ferry route stretched over six miles. An icebreaker reached the ferry shortly after daybreak and began the slow task of breaking a pathway to Mackinaw City, a mile away.
In San Francisco, three children had spent 1 1/2 hours trapped in a deserted mansion's walk-in safe the previous night before firemen could tear open the door and rescue them. The children did not say who had locked them into the safe as they were playing in the partially demolished building in Pacific Heights. The firemen had knocked the dial off the safe's door to provide an entryway for an oxygen tube, but that had prevented use of the combination which had turned up shortly afterward. A professional safe mechanic had managed to jimmy the door open enough so that the firemen could pry it fully open, after efforts to pierce the massive concrete and steel walls had failed. The three children, two boys and a girl, were from prominent families and were between the ages of 11 and 16. The 13-year old sister of one of the trapped children had sounded the alarm when she found the door of the vault shut tight. The children said that they had agreed not to talk so as to conserve oxygen while they were trapped. Their attempts to tell jokes had failed at the point when firemen reached them with the oxygen tube, as they could not think of any. The oldest of them was an Eagle Scout, and he said they could not believe anyone could have locked them in. They heard someone outside say that the safe was locked and they had asked the person to go for their parents. When the firemen had begun using jackhammers, they had sat down and held their hands over their ears.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of there having been bad April weather in the Carolinas and across the South this date, leaving death and destruction behind. The Weather Bureau in Atlanta had issued a severe weather warning this date, which included tornadoes and severe thunderstorms forecast for eastern North Carolina and eastern South Carolina, with the storms expected during the afternoon. A tornado had been reported near Augusta, Ga., during the morning. In western North Carolina, the two-day downpour had washed out roads, damaged bridges, flooded farm lands and forced the closing of public schools in Henderson, Buncombe, and Madison Counties, and parts of Haywood County. Slight flood damage was reported in the western part of the state. The French Broad River reached its highest stage in eight years and water seeped into some basements in Asheville, with rain still falling in many sections. Asheville had received 4.22 inches of rain, while other areas in the western section received over five inches. One man was killed around midnight, seven miles southeast of North Wilkesboro, when his convertible had overturned in a field while he was traveling through heavy rain. A connector road between Wilkesboro and North Wilkesboro was under four feet of water after a sudden rise of the Yadkin River.
Emery Wister of The News reports that a torrential downpour over Charlotte, depositing 1.46 inches of rain between 10:30 the previous night and noon this date, had given the city its wettest time since Hurricane Flossy the prior September, the rain producing flash floods in many neighborhoods, turning many yards into lakes and flooding many low-lying streets. Briar Creek had overrun its banks near the Coliseum and homes on Independence Boulevard had flooded backyards and basements.
If the A-bomb, fire, entrapment in a safe or some other man-made disaster does not get you, the weather surely will. When do we put a stop to it?
Charles Kuralt of The News, in the fourth in a series of articles on parks in the community, indicates that the Social Planning Council committee had this date applauded the Park & Recreation Commission for going a long way toward meeting recommendations of the Allen Report, a blueprint for development of recreation resources in Charlotte delivered a year earlier by the County's hired recreation consultants. Many of the report's suggestions had been backed by such private agencies as the League of Women Voters. The report had recommended the establishment of a "Metropolitan Recreation Commission" to serve the county as well as the city, and the Commission had come a step closer to manifesting that recommendation during the week when a majority of the Social Planning Council committee announced their support of immediate legislation to establish it. The report had also recommended strengthening the "unique" Nature Museum with greatly increased funds, on which there had been no action thus far. The report had recommended the formation of citizens' recreation councils in neighborhoods so that people could have a voice in park and recreation affairs, and some 18 of those councils had been formed, partly as a result of a suggestion from the Social Planning committee to the Park & Recreation Commission that something be done about it. The report had also recommended formation of a "committee on coordinating plans", made up of city planners, school officials, the city engineer, and public and private planners of recreation, on which no action had yet been taken, as well as raising the tax levy for recreation to a dime throughout the county, on which no action had been taken, and hiring additional park administrative personnel, which had been done.
In Charlotte, west side residents, rebuffed in their request for a park, were going ahead with a do-it-yourself playground plan at Seversville School. Park & Recreation Commission officials had agreed to furnish equipment and to conduct a training program to teach parents in the community how to supervise family recreation, and school officials had agreed to pave an area on the school grounds for skating, bowling, shuffleboard and the like. Once again, we suggest that you check the notion of bowling on a paved surface, unless you want to replace bowling balls every 15 minutes. You can probably have ice-skating though, as well as pole-vaulting. Be sure also to hire a shot put catcher to avoid breakage of school windows.
On the editorial page, "New Mechanical Inspection Bill Meets Standards of Logic and Convenience" indicates that after two months of artful dodging and furtive fidgeting, the General Assembly was finally facing its responsibility to act on a motor vehicle inspection law, with such a bill to be introduced the following Wednesday.
It finds it a reasonable and feasible proposal designed to overcome the principal problems of the 1947 law, which had resulted in long lines at the limited number of State-operated inspection centers. Any discovered defect had to be remedied and the owner had to go through the inspection process again, with many believing that the inspection standards had been too strictly imposed, going beyond what was necessary for basic safety.
Most people in the state appeared now to desire safety checks, as the state had led the nation in its response to voluntary inspections the previous year, with nearly 200,000 automobiles and trucks having been inspected in 102 cities and towns across the state during a single week of the prior May, amounting to an eighth of all motor vehicles registered in the state. Of the 31,000 cars rejected in that inspection, 13,000 had been returned for rechecks after the defects were corrected.
The new plan would not involve State-operated inspection centers, but would utilize garages and service stations which people usually patronized, with the motorist then able to tell the mechanic to fix whatever was needed for approval, to obtain a sticker for a one dollar charge, with repairs costing extra.
It concludes that a system of periodic mechanical inspections was a necessity in the state to save lives and money and that the bill to be introduced would provide the basic minimum program, having the blessing of the Department of Motor Vehicles, and ought be enacted.
"Postal Service Must Be Maintained" finds nothing un-American about Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield's threatened cutbacks to postal service unless he received additional funding to carry on through the end of the fiscal year. Many people remembered when mail was delivered via horse-drawn buggy.
But that was an earlier time and the horse-and-buggy aspects of the emergency plan outlined by Mr. Summerfield had no place in modern society, where fast and efficient postal service was no longer a luxury but an industrial, commercial and personal necessity, particularly to such distribution centers as Charlotte.
Mr. Summerfield's plea of insufficient funds to maintain the present service appeared justified in some respects, as rapidly spreading residential areas had necessitated increased spending for personnel and machinery.
It indicates that Congress ought determine whether the Post Office Department had spent wisely and whether there had been excessive experimentation in the use of gadgets, and budget accordingly, meanwhile, providing the necessary funding to continue service, as Buffalo Bill was defunct.
P. G. Procktor, writing in the Manchester Guardian, in a piece titled "Rest Cure—Russian Style", indicates that Sochi, in the Soviet Union, was a health resort on the Black Sea, which Mr. Procktor had visited.
But instead of having hotels, the town consisted exclusively of sanatoriums, meaning in Russia, a place where people rested in the sun and air, followed diets and engaged in physical exercise, were attended by medical staff, and sat on segregated beaches where they prepared themselves for the coming year's work. The atmosphere, in spite of the beauty of the surroundings, was dead, however, with the people showing no sense of gaiety which one might normally associate which such surroundings.
Later, Mr. Procktor discovered what he thought was the reason for the apparent lack of joy. While he was sitting on the mixed part of the beach attached to the sanatorium, beside a blonde Russian woman who had informed him with some pride that she was an "ordinary" railway worker, he asked her whether she was staying there by herself, to which she replied that she was, and then he asked whether most people staying there had their families with them, to which she indicated they did not, that families were back at home on their jobs, that the workers had to apply for permits to come and rest, but could not bring their families.
Thus, he concludes that henpecked husbands and children-weary wives came from all over Russia to the sanatoriums, of which there was one for every profession, even one for artists of all sorts, to get away from it all.
Drew Pearson indicates that on the floor of the Senate recently, two Senators, John Williams of Delaware and Paul Douglas of Illinois, had sought to obtain a roll call vote on a move to reduce the tax concessions provided big oil and gas companies, but had failed to attract the necessary ten Senators to join. And those ten Senators, had they joined, would not have been voting against oil companies, but rather merely to record a vote either for or against oil. But 87 Senators had refused to vote for a roll call vote, thus falling short of the needed ten.
Mr. Pearson indicates that when coupled with the hundreds of thousands of dollars dumped into the Presidential and Senate campaigns of the prior year, it indicated a political circle of great importance to the American people. The oilmen received tax concessions, which they used to elect their friends as Senators and their man as President. Then their Senators would cooperate by voting for continued tax concessions. Little of that, however, had been recorded for the public to read and know about. Mr. Pearson provides the full story of what had occurred.
Senator Williams was a staunch Republican turkey farmer and feed dealer who, coming from the du Pont state, could not easily be elected were he not a conservative. He had been waging a longtime campaign for honest taxes and honest tax collection. For a time, he had received some support from Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who had stated publicly that the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance provided the oil industry was excessive. Before the corporate tax bill had come up for renewal the previous week, Senator Williams had appealed to Secretary Humphrey to support a reduction in the oil depletion allowance, which the Secretary declined to do. Senator Williams, nevertheless, moved to reduce the depletion allowance to 15 percent, got nowhere. Two fellow Republicans, Senators George Aiken of Vermont and Charles Potter of Michigan, whispered advice to Senator Williams to try a compromise at 20 percent, which he did, but that had also failed.
Those leading the chorus against it were Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, friend of the oil lobby, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, who owned underwater oil lands in the Gulf of Mexico, and Senators Frank Carlson of Kansas and Everett Dirksen of Illinois, both Republicans.
Senator Williams had then tried for a show of hands to obtain a roll call vote, but received only the votes of four Senators, Senators Douglas, Paul Neuberger of Oregon, Aiken and Williams, himself. At that point, Senator Douglas, a former economics professor at the University of Chicago and a tax expert, proposed a further compromise, urging that little oil companies with a net income of less than a million dollars be allowed the full 27.5 percent depletion allowance, while companies with a net income of between one million and five million dollars would have a 20 percent allowance, and those companies making over five million would obtain a 15 percent allowance. Senator Johnson, however, led the chorus in opposition to that measure.
At that point, Senator Douglas sought a roll call vote but only received assent from nine Senators, including three Republicans. While Senator Williams and Douglas made repeated pleas for a roll call vote, Senators Long, Carlson, Dirksen, and Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, together with Senator Johnson, urged colleagues to keep their hands down.
Afterward, Senator Kerr confided to Charles Murray, son of the elder-statesman Senator from Montana, that if the roll call vote had been called for, the opposition could have received 40 votes against the oil companies. Senator Kerr, through his company, Kerr-McGee, owned ten million dollars worth of oil and gas lands, on which he had received a gross income as high as 14 million dollars. His 1950 net income had been 1.2 million, on which his company had paid a tax of only $6,949, as a result of the generous tax benefits provided the oil industry.
Mr. Pearson adds that a Senator who had a pocketbook interest in any legislation was not supposed to vote on it, let alone lobby for it, but Senator Kerr had been busy blocking any roll call vote on the oil depletion allowance.
Doris Fleeson, in two separate pieces, looks at Senator John F. Kennedy and Michigan Governor G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams.
As to Governor Williams, who had the previous fall won re-election to his fifth term, she describes him as a liberal, young Democrat who had demonstrated impressive coattails in the recent off-year elections in the state. Even his opponents were admitting that it was the Governor who had enabled, in his statewide campaign, the sweep of victories for Democrats. It gave him increased national stature which would force Democrats to reassess his 1960 presidential or vice-presidential possibilities.
The Governor's rise was accompanied by a comparable collapse of the Republican state organization, with Michigan observers suggesting that Republican Senator Charles Potter would need a miracle to win re-election the following year. It was believed generally that Governor Williams would not oppose Senator Potter but would run instead for his sixth term as Governor and would win, which would make him the senior among the state governors in terms of service.
Of the 48 Governors, 29 were Democrats, who would head their state delegations to the national convention in 1960 and thus carry weight in selection of the national ticket.
The probable opposition to Senator Potter would be Lt. Governor Philip Hart, like Senator Potter, a wounded World War II combat veteran, who, unlike many Democrats, had good connections with the business community of Detroit.
Governor Williams had always enjoyed the constant support of labor in Wayne County, including Detroit, and his ability to win re-election showed that he had wide public acceptance even beyond labor. He had also built an effective state organization under state chairman of the Democrats, Neil Stabler. Mr. Stabler's work in Michigan had attracted the attention of the DNC, which had made him head of a committee on organization to teach fellow Democrats how it was done, with the report of that committee now with DNC chairman Paul Butler, who had said he would promote its general acceptance.
Michigan Republicans appeared to be undergoing factional strife and were putting forward uninteresting candidates, despite their ticket which had just been defeated having been said to be as good as that of the Democrats who had won. Blame was placed on Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield by some observers, who contended that he was trying to run the state from Washington, a maneuver which rarely succeeded in politics. As the Republican quarrels multiplied, the major contributors had disappeared, a normal reaction in politics.
As to Senator Kennedy, Ms. Fleeson indicates that the 1960 Democratic national convention would demonstrate what precise planning and unlimited means could do for an attractive politician who wanted to become President. As a young World War II veteran, Senator Kennedy, who was in his first term as a Senator after having been elected in 1952, defeating Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of the entrenched Lodge political family in Massachusetts, and having served prior to that for three terms in the House, had nearly won the vice-presidential nomination in 1956 when presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson had thrown the selection process open to the convention. An alliance formed between the big-city leaders and Southerners opposed to his principal opponent for the nomination, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, had almost resulted in Senator Kennedy's nomination. The drama associated with it on television and the Senator's sportsmanship in accepting defeat had made him one of the most sought after speakers of the 1956 campaign. With a shrewd eye on the future, he had made himself and his smart staff available to Democratic candidates all over the country.
The demand for the Senator continued, having received 668 written invitations during the first three months of 1957, with virtually every state represented, in addition to similar requests by telephone at the rate of one or two per day. He had accepted 38, 15 of which were in Massachusetts. The balance were discreetly distributed among Democratic gatherings elsewhere, including Missouri, Alabama, California, Ohio, Nebraska, Delaware and New Mexico. The high percentage of Massachusetts engagements reflected the Senator's immediate goal, which was to prove himself to be the greatest vote-getter in the state's history when he would be up for re-election in 1958.
A landslide victory at that time would gain him prestige and also provide an extra dividend toward obtaining the 1960 nomination for the presidency.
Democrats regarded Vice-President Nixon as the person most likely to be nominated by the Republicans in 1960, and they perceived that he was already directing an unabashed appeal at minorities, especially blacks, who held the balance of power in the large states where elections were won or lost. Democrats had learned twice against President Eisenhower that the hold on minorities enjoyed by FDR and President Truman had been relaxed, and they feared it had been dangerously relaxed. As a result, Southern Democrats had been induced to moderate their adamant stance against Federal civil rights legislation.
Massachusetts was a big state with vocal minorities, and Kennedy partisans were working toward the kind of landslide of Democratic votes the following year which would enable them to argue that Senator Kennedy was the answer to Vice-President Nixon.
Stewart Alsop again looks at the biography of Secretary of State Dulles by John Robinson Beal of Time magazine, recently published, containing a long and passionate defense of the Dulles Middle East policies, a book which the author had stated benefited from personal interviews with the Secretary, providing insight to his official actions, thus being a type of White Paper, or lawyer's brief, for Dulles policies based on facts and interpretations supplied in large part by Mr. Dulles, himself.
His review of the book earlier in the week had described how Mr. Beal revealed that Mr. Dulles consciously brought on the Middle East crisis by withdrawing the U.S. offer to aid Egypt in building the Aswan Dam, doing so in the most brutal and insulting way possible. The remainder of the Middle Eastern section of the book was designed to prove that, by forcing that showdown, Secretary Dulles had conducted successfully "a truly major gambit in the cold war," greatly benefiting the U.S.
Because of the apparent authority with which Mr. Beal wrote, the thesis deserved further scrutiny. It claimed that Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt had reacted violently to the calculated slap in the face, as Secretary Dulles had expected, nationalizing the Suez Canal in late July, 1956, and thus precipitated the "sharpest crisis the Western powers had faced in the Middle East, and before it was over produced a tremendously shocking split among the Western powers themselves." The split had occurred because the British, after much "wavering", had joined the French in a "plot which the French had already cooked up with the Israelis." In so doing, British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd had consciously "misled" the U.S. Government. The "Israeli-French-British plot to seize the canal" had made President Eisenhower "angry clear through". Throughout the crisis, however, Secretary Dulles had followed a "consistent and purposeful" policy. "Facing a weak and misguided neutral, Dulles believed that the best course was to swing moral opinion to bear on him and show him, if possible, in what way he was misguided. Despite British-French rejection of this theory, the Dulles method prevailed in the end." The method had prevailed because the Secretary had "wielded the influence of the United States so vigorously that fighting was stopped within a week. This was 'waging peace' with genuine skill." The end result of the forced showdown in the Middle East had been a big gain for the U.S, creating "a completely new understanding of motives in 'neutral' parts of the world which added immensely to the stature of the United States as moral leader in the fight for peace."
Mr. Alsop indicates that it was a remarkably hopeful version of the crisis, but that there were a couple of gaps in it, the first being that the British decision to join the "plot" may have been an active folly, but not an active insanity, with the British having become convinced, with reason, that the Dulles policy, regardless of how "moral" and "consistent and purposeful" it was, would not prevent the hostile Premier Nasser from gaining total control of the Suez Canal, a prospect which they regarded, also with reason, as intolerable.
That intolerable prospect was now a reality and, henceforth, Western Europeans would have to become accustomed to the unhappy feeling of Premier Nasser having them in his grips economically. His policy, from his point of view, had not been misguided, but had been triumphantly successful.
Mr. Beal's brief for Secretary Dulles left unanswered a key question, as to why the influence of the U.S. had been wielded in such a way that Premier Nasser had been relieved of all pressure from Britain, France and Israel, while at the same time, no American influence was brought to bear on him for a commitment on the canal or on anything else.
Mr. Alsop urges giving Secretary Dulles credit for energy and perspicacity, while U.S. allies deserved blame for folly. He concludes that until the above question was answered, however, it would be hard to accept the theory that the decision of Mr. Dulles to force a Middle Eastern showdown had been actually quite the brilliant diplomatic gambit which Mr. Beal had claimed for him in the book.
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