The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 2, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Dallas, Tex., that a new disaster area had been declared on the lower Sabine River, as the flooding had surged downstream at record heights this date, threatening to inundate for the second time in four years the small community of Deweyville, where its 1,000 residents, ten miles north of Orange, were standing by for evacuation if necessary. The town had been hit by a flood also in 1953. Heavy cloudbursts had soaked the Trinity River watershed in north-central Texas, causing flash flooding in the Dallas area, with a new flood warning issued for the Trinity as it began to rise rapidly. On the upper Sabine, several hundred oil wells in the petroleum-rich Gladewater area had been flooded and shut down, as high water had crept around the southwestern edge of the town, though officials indicated that they thought the peak had been reached. A police sergeant said that the situation was under control in the town, although scattered rain had fallen again the previous night. Possibly two drownings had been blamed on high water, making a total of at least 16 drownings since the heavy rains had begun two weeks earlier in Texas. A 17-year old boy and his horse had drowned while swimming in rain-swollen Paradise Creek near Vernon, and a 16-year old boy had disappeared while fishing in flood waters of the Sabine south of Longview. More than 9,000 persons had been forced to flee before rising waters, and State disaster headquarters had estimated that more than 35,000 acres of land had been flooded. Officials had designated the entire area of Newton County, the location of Deweyville, as a disaster area. The river there had crested at 14.37 feet the previous night and was expected to rise to 15.5 feet this date and to 16.3 feet the following day. The executive vice-president and general manager of the Sabine River Authority said that there was no immediate threat to the city of Orange. A Gulf Oil Co. employee at Deweyville said that they were sweating it out as long as they could. More than 2.5 inches of rain had soaked Dallas the previous night, flooding at least 34 streets and low-lying underpasses, with more than 150 persons having to be evacuated for temporary shelter when the hard rain had flooded a small section in East Dallas. The Weather Bureau said that the Trinity River in Dallas was rising rapidly and was expected to hit 34 feet this date, six feet above flood stage, but below major flood stage, which was at 38 feet.
The President had directed special Ambassador James Richards, formerly a Congressman from South Carolina, to end his tour of the Middle East without visiting Egypt, Syria and Jordan, where the Eisenhower doctrine for the Middle East had become bitterly controversial. The State Department announced this date that the President had asked Ambassador Richards to return home as soon as feasible to confer with him on preparations for the new mutual security foreign aid bill. He would arrive in Washington on May 8 and attend a meeting of Congressional leaders on foreign aid at the White House the following day. Meanwhile, he would visit Israel, Tunis and Morocco, which would make 15 Middle Eastern nations he had toured for the declared purpose of explaining the Eisenhower doctrine, designed to counter any Communist aggression in the region, offering U.S. aid in that regard. There had been reports that Egypt and Syria, both friendly to Russia, would be willing to receive Mr. Richards, but some officials in Washington had decided that the two countries might use his presence as an excuse for anti-American demonstrations and incidents, setting a trap for the U.S., with his return home avoiding that possibility.
In Columbia, S.C., the moderator of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., had confirmed the previous night a South Carolina Klan statement that the church had provided $10,000 to the NAACP to help pay off a damage suit. The Klan had stated the previous day that the church, which was the Northern branch, had provided the money to the NAACP to use in an out-of-court settlement of a suit brought by an attorney of Sumter, S.C., with the moderator indicating that he had given the money with the authority of the assembly. The Klan statement said: "Few Americans and fewer Presbyterians ever thought they would see the day when the Presbyterian Church would sink so low in the mire of social gospel politics as to raise funds for the race-mixing activities of the Communist-dominated" NAACP. The NAACP had stated that it had no Communist influence within its leadership. The Klan had based the statement on an article in the January 6 issue of Presbyterian Life magazine. The Sumter attorney had sued the NAACP for $120,000 for libel and had accepted the out-of-court settlement, indicating that he would return the money to black contributors to the fund, provided the NAACP would furnish a list of its donors and would not file any school desegregation suits in Sumter County within the ensuing decade, placing a six-month deadline on his offer, to expire May 20. He said that otherwise, he would provide the money to the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children at Greenville, S.C., and to the Sumter First Presbyterian Church, a member of the Southern branch. Criticism of the Klan by the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala., the previous day had touched off the Klan statement, with the assembly having censured the Klan as an organization "whose purpose is to gain its point by intimidation, reprisal and violence."
In New York, the general counsel of the Textile Workers Union of America had said this date that a trial examiner for the NLRB had ruled that the Darlington Manufacturing Co. in South Carolina had violated the Federal labor law by closing a plant after its employees had won a collective bargaining election, causing the closure to avoid collective bargaining with the TWUA following the vote of the employees the previous September 6 to be represented by the union. The NLRB, according to the union's attorney, required that in the event the company would reopen the plant, all 550 discharged employees would have to be rehired and the company would have to bargain with the union. The company was a subsidiary of Deering-Milken & Co., a textile chain which operated some 30 plants, mostly in the South. The findings of the NLRB trial examiners could be appealed within 20 days to the full Board.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the long-sought decision on Charlotte's annexation bill was expected late in the afternoon at a special meeting of the Local Government Committee of the State House, following a public hearing during the morning lasting two hours and 15 minutes, after which the members voted to consider the measure at the special afternoon meeting.
Also in Raleigh, the bill to keep the McDowell County sheriff from being tried in Rutherford County had cleared another legislative hurdle this date in its quick course through the Legislature after receiving a favorable report from the Senate Judiciary Committee No. 1. The sheriff was under indictment on a charge of first-degree murder for the fatal shooting the previous January of a man at Marion. His case had recently been transferred from McDowell County to Rutherford County on the order of a Superior Court judge, and the trial was scheduled to start May 17. The bill had already passed the House, which would forbid the transfer of the case for trial from the home county of the solicitor who had to prosecute the case for the State. A State Senator of Carteret County, a former Superior Court judge, told the Committee that if the bill were passed, they would be passing legislation in contravention of a judge's order. But a State Senator of Cumberland County said that the issue had been overlooked in the past because the problem did not arise often, and he felt that the Legislature ought go ahead and pass it because "it's good legislation". You cannot defeat that kind of logic.
In Charlotte, a man accused of blackmail was captured by police this date, just as he was given an envelope containing $250 in cash, part of $1,500 which police said he had demanded in an extortion scheme. The 41-year old man had been arrested as he received the money from his intended victim, a 67-year old retired railroad man. The arrest took place in an office immediately across from the county courthouse. The man arrested at first demanded $1,000 by April 27, accusing the elderly man of misconduct with the man's 18-year old daughter, that if he did not pay the money, he would expose him to the public. He had then threatened his life. The elderly man was supposed to deliver the $1,000 to the man's home and when he failed to deliver the money, he told police he had received another telephone call, demanding $1,500. The elderly man complained that he would not have enough time to get the money from the bank, and then was contacted the third time the previous morning and was ordered to have the money in cash at the office of a justice of the peace by a specific hour during the morning this date. Police Chief Frank Littlejohn said that the magistrate had cooperated with police in capturing the suspect. After contacting the police, the elderly man had gone with a detective to withdraw $250 in cash, and the detective took down the serial numbers of the small bills, which were then placed in an envelope and sealed. One detective waited across the street at the police headquarters while another detective hid in the office of the justice of the peace, and the elderly man then gave the envelope to the man who had made the threats, saying that he wanted the extortion suspect to leave him alone, at which point the detective stepped from his hiding place and made the arrest.
In Charlotte, someone had been leaving baby buzzards at a home, one each morning for three successive mornings, the first of which had smelled worse than Sugar Creek, found in a brown paper bag inside the family's screened porch the previous Monday. On Tuesday morning, the second young buzzard was found in the same place, with the owner of the home then locking his porch door. But on Wednesday morning, the third baby buzzard was discovered in a brown paper bag on the porch steps. Detectives did not know what to make of the deliveries, any more than did the homeowner and his family. They said that two of the baby vultures had been given to a local biologist, while the detectives had taken the third, near death, into a wooded area in the country, with a detective saying that the smell had been awful.
In Santa Monica, Calif., comedian Red Skelton had been admitted to St. John's Hospital with what his physicians described as an "uncomplicated virus infection superimposed on fatigue." His doctor said that he would likely be ready to return to work before the show the following week. God bless…
Last call for those 12 years old or under to get your contest entries in to the newspaper before midnight to win the cash prizes, for the best entries briefly completing the phrase, "I love my mother because…" in celebration of Mother's Day on May 12. There is yet nothing in the newspaper regarding the biggest news of the day, that the Witch of Wisconsin has died, and so you can arrange your thoughts around that, perhaps, should you be listening carefully to the late news on the television or radio, and hustle on out to the post office, assuming Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield has not ordered its closure early, and obtain a postmark sufficient to win the first prize of $25, which surely you will for your extraordinary augury.
On the editorial page, "City Must Survey a Vast Opportunity" revisits the August 5, 1953 resignation by the members of the Redevelopment Commission of Charlotte, believing that it was no longer possible for them to carry out an urban redevelopment program under the existing State legislation.
The resignations had been accepted and the redevelopment program had failed because the General Assembly had refused to permit cities to meet requirements for Federal aid. Now, four years later, it was possible not only to revive the program but to broaden it into a major effort at municipal redevelopment.
Enabling legislation had been passed during the week by the General Assembly, based on coastal hurricane damage which made Federal aid a matter of self-interest to rural legislators and thus had smoothed the way for overwhelming passage of the bill.
The tools thus provided to Charlotte and other cities would require some acts of municipalities, including a detailed study and analysis of the changed situation. Charlotte's slums had changed little since 1953, but the redevelopment program had changed quite a lot such that it was now an urban renewal program, with the differences being summarized by the Christian Science Monitor, from which it quotes, distinguishing urban redevelopment, where a city government with the help of the Federal Government, would sweep away all of the shabby areas and build anew, while urban renewal consisted of neatly taking out structures here and there, removing the bad and leaving the good.
It indicates that what once had been a Federal-municipal program for slum clearance had now been enlarged to slum prevention and slum rehabilitation. Federal aid might be extended under the program to planning, elimination of congestion, restoration of buildings, adding parks, playgrounds and other public improvements. The cost ratio of two dollars in Federal funds for every one city dollar remained the same. It finds that opportunities for enriching urban life by means of the program were vast and exciting, and that no comparable program had ever been fashioned for aiding cities to remove its diseased parts and stimulate healthy and orderly growth.
The requirements for participation, however, were stiff, requiring proof that the city was able and enthusiastically willing to undertake a face-lifting effort. It concludes that it was too early to know specific benefits to Charlotte from the program, but not too early to find out, and that the city should address itself to that task immediately.
"Ike Should Fight for His Program" quotes Richard Rovere from his Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years: "One hesitates to attribute political adroitness to a man who has revealed as much political ineptitude as Eisenhower, but it happens to be a fact that he has achieved, through luck or good management, a number of things that are commonly thought to be the product of skill."
It suggests that the President needed all of the luck and managerial finesse at his command at the present critical moment in his political history, as his program was flailing helplessly amid apathy, with his budget being attacked on all sides, his monetary policy unpopular, his foreign policy drawing new fire, his farm policy unpopular in the Midwest, and his party, split.
The previous day, Republicans leaders in Congress had called at the White House, principally concerned about the budget and foreign aid, with Senate Minority Leader William Knowland having told newsmen afterward that the President had been advised to seek support from the people, and that he thought it would be helpful on that issue and other issues as they arose.
It regards it as excellent advice, suggests that the President ought immediately come out swinging, as he could not live in semi-retirement, remote from the political arena and serve the best interests of the country or his party. The budget and the question of foreign aid would require the best which he had. It was now obvious that the budget estimates had been carelessly prepared and miserably presented, with Congress taking advantage of the leadership vacuum to cut away recklessly at essential programs, ignoring the expendable fat in rivers and harbors spending and other pork barrel items. Congress had also found it convenient to ignore the manner in which U.S. foreign policy rested on economic development aid, requiring less money in 1957 than a single fully-equipped aircraft carrier, but launching a gleeful effort to kill economic development aid entirely.
It suggests that the blame for Congressional irresponsibility could not be given to the President, but that some of the tomfoolery could have been avoided had he demonstrated the type of vigor and dauntlessness of which he was capable, and that it was not too late for that kind of leadership.
"Warmed-Over Corn Pone Is Not Fittin'" tells of Representative Robert Jones, Jr., of Jackson County, Ala., continuing to drool in Congress regarding cold corn pone which his mother airmailed to him from Alabama every week, heating it up and coveting every crumb of it, and, "heaven have mercy, eats it."
He said that it was not just cornbread, but corn pone, and not just Alabama corn pone but Jackson County corn pone, from the hard dent corn grown in north Alabama, making the best corn pone in the country.
It suggests that he did not know much about any kind of corn pone, that the cold pone which he got off an airplane ought to have been disposed of in Jackson County, either to the dogs or the chickens, that the best corn pone in the country was any corn pone two seconds out of the oven, already served, and busily soaking up a slab of butter. "The only conceivable way to make the cold corn pone fit for human consumption is to crumble it up in a glass of cold buttermilk."
It finds that his practice of heating it up and then eating it suggested that he was a fit subject for a Citizens Council investigation for doing violence to a fine Southern tradition.
It all sounds pretty corny. And as far as eating anything soaked in buttermilk, take it and shove it.
A piece from the Montello (Wis.) Tribune, titled "A Supercolossal Cast", suggests the casting for a movie from names and photographs which frequently appeared in the newspaper.
It suggests that it would include Secretary of State Dulles as the principal of a high school; Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, as the suave but dangerous mob leader; Vice-President Nixon, as a go-getting insurance agent; British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as headmaster at a British boys' school; Queen Elizabeth, as a nice young suburban housewife whose subscription to Vogue had run out several years earlier; the Duke of Edinburgh, as a small-time travel lecturer playing the ladies' club circuit; former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as the wealthy owner of a cigar factory; Prince Rainier of Monaco, as a hopeful movie extra hired to play the walk-on part of a central European prince; former Prime Minister Anthony Eden, as a floor-walker in a swank department store; Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, as a country doctor who had just delivered his 2,000th baby; Senator McCarthy, as a bartender in a tough neighborhood; Henry Ford II, as a young man just hired to coach high school basketball; UMW head John L. Lewis, as a cult leader in southern California, because he would look good in a toga; former King Farouk, as a short-order chef in a third-class beanery; Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, as a quack doctor selling a patent cancer cure; Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, as the trigger-man for the syndicate; and Joe Adcock of the Milwaukee Braves, as a taciturn cowboy.
Drew Pearson, away on a news gathering trip outside Washington, had his column handled this date by his associate, Jack Anderson, who indicates that a Senate probe of the Northeast Airlines stock scandal had uncovered tracks pointing to the office of Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, and yet the chief investigator following those tracks was a political appointee of the Senator, Don O'Donnell of Manchester, who had been brought to Washington by the Senator. He had already let one key figure in the investigation, whose testimony might embarrass Senator Bridges, leave for South America on the eve of the Senate hearings. Mr. O'Donnell's job was to find who had leaked word prematurely the previous August that the Civil Aeronautics Board had granted to Northeast the profitable New York to Miami route, enabling insiders to make a killing on Northeast stock the morning after the secret CAB vote. Among those who had rushed out to buy the stock, before it jumped from $9.15 to $12.50 per share, were three aides of Senator Bridges, who had made modest purchases through the Paine, Weber, Jackson and Curtis brokerage firm. Bigger windfalls had gone to two other henchmen of the Senator, who obtained a free ride on the stock market that same morning, with one reportedly having bought 500 shares early in the morning while the price remained at rock bottom.
It was not known how the office of the Senator had received the advance tip, but it might be significant, he ventures, that another of the Senator's men had been present when the CAB had reached its secret decision, that being the Board's chief investigator, Jimmy Anton, who formerly had worked for the Senator. Though the latter's testimony was considered important, Mr. O'Donnell had given him permission to take a two-week junket to South America while the hearings were ongoing. Sources close to the investigation charged that Mr. O'Donnell was seeking to shift the spotlight away from Senator Bridges and focus it on others who might also have had inside information.
One man who represented a New England combine had been trying to buy a millionaire's controlling interest in Northeast, and the morning of the stock market leak, that individual had made three long-distance calls to New England, one of those called having purchased stock. An attorney for Delta Airlines had also made several phone calls to Georgia, and at least six speculators in Atlanta had cashed in on Northeast stock, including Georgia's Republican boss, Robert Snodgrass.
Mr. Anderson concludes that Mr. O'Donnell had denied to the column that he was trying to protect anyone, but that it would be interesting to see how deeply he would investigate the office of Senator Bridges.
Joseph Alsop, in Amman, Jordan, again examines the drama surrounding the effort either to eliminate or to reduce to puppet status young King Hussein, as he had examined the previous day, explaining that he had ridden "out the storm with incomparable dash and courage", as the plotters against him had initially been overwhelmingly confident until they were then ready to flee in all directions, while the Arab Legion, torn by intrigues and divided loyalties, had rallied to the King in the nick of time. Mr. Alsop finds that no news story in his experience had been quite like it.
He indicates that the wild drama in Jordan might later be remembered as equal in significance to the Suez Canal crisis of the prior fall, which he regards as the starting point for placing the Jordan drama in its proper context. The Suez crisis had been initiated in July, 1956 with the seizure of the canal by Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the wake of a calculated humiliation by Secretary of State Dulles in backing away from support for the Aswan Dam. The Soviet role had been far more important than the U.S. role, however, as Premier Nasser had obtained the courage to nationalize the canal from the fact of being supplied Soviet arms and the promise of Soviet support. The final outcome of the Suez crisis had been the high watermark thus far of Soviet political success in the strategic Middle East, which supplied the necessary oil for Britain and Western Europe.
The Soviet policy was not to promote communism for the sake of communism in the Middle East but rather to use Nasser-style Arab nationalism to strike at the oil of the Western alliance. The final outcome of that crisis was the transformation of Premier Nasser's shameful military defeat in the Sinai Peninsula into a political victory of extreme brilliance, seeming to provide the ideal opportunity for the next move planned by both Premier Nasser and the Kremlin for their different reasons, that move being the planned coup in Jordan.
Jordan's extreme Arab nationalists, controlled by Egypt, its small but well-organized Communist Party controlled by the Kremlin but placed under the command of Premier Nasser, and the disloyal elements within King Hussein's Government, had all combined to hand over Jordan to Egypt. That coup had nearly occurred. Had it taken place, the way would have been ideally prepared for an attempt to subvert the Iraqi Government of King Hussein's cousin, King Faisal, with the first of the oil-producing Arab lands then to have come under Egyptian control. But with Iraq lost, it would have been time for Premier Nasser to think of the oil-rich Gulf Coast sheikdoms, dominated by Britain and Saudi Arabia, allied with the U.S. With Egyptian-dominated governments installed in all of those vital regions, the time would have been ripe to seek to divide and control the Western alliance by depriving it at will of oil.
The attempt had failed in Jordan not only because of King Hussein's energy and verve, but also because King Saud had noticed the important role being played by the Communists in Jordan and had begun to become aware that his own fate was already being prepared.
Mr. Alsop concludes that if a stable, independent government could finally be organized in Jordan, the change of calculations would be radical, that instead of a pro-Western Iraq being imperiled, the example of events in Jordan would seriously imperil Egypt's satellite government in Syria, with its hearty group of fellow travelers. At that point, the tide would have turned in deadly earnest, but it would be many months before anyone could say that King Hussein could possibly organize such a stable and independent regime in the "tormented, infiltrated little nation" of Jordan.
Doris Fleeson tells of Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson soon to leave Washington, and, thanks largely to his wife, would do so a winner. Jessie Wilson had become a heroine and the President, a boss who had not treated the help right. The Women's National Press Club the previous week had formalized those characterizations with a party in honor of "the spunkiest woman in Washington." The working press among females had turned out en masse for the party, and the Secretary accompanied his wife and everyone else in singing.
Mrs. Wilson had said that she and her husband had hated coming to Washington, leaving their family and friends in Michigan, where Mr. Wilson had been the head of General Motors. Now that they had found friends in Washington so that they could be themselves, they had unexpected regrets over leaving.
Ms. Fleeson indicates that the story between the lines was apparent, that Washington and the Wilsons had been failing each other but their relationships had been saved. The Eisenhower administrators had arrived in Washington with the notion that there was nothing wrong in American affairs that a good dose of business administration would not cure, that they would fix things up quickly and then return to more important matters back home. But Washington had reacted sharply, being a place of singularly mild political temperament, tending to pamper the "ins" while never forgetting that the "outs" had previously been "ins" and might return to power soon enough. It saw all Administrations as the usual mixture of virtue and vice, a contest between passion and reason.
But confronted with a harsh look, it reacted with clichés about the millionaires and their indifference to the common lot. The formal parties had gone on as previously, with even more of them, but there had been little heartiness to them until Mrs. Wilson had taken the field.
Even before the President's illness, the White House had made little contribution to the friendly social understandings which greased the wheels of government. Except for formal affairs and the stag dinners of the President, there had been very little mingling at the White House.
She regards it as unlikely that Potomac fever would occur to a prominent Eisenhower supporter and that Washington would not concede that government was an avocation instead of a vocation. But Mrs. Wilson had proved that the common ground was there, with much to be gained on all sides by achieving it. "The Wilsons will leave behind a permanent and happy impression on the collective recollection of Washington."
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., urges passage of daylight savings time, suggesting that residents of the Carolinas were being robbed of 160 "God-given daylight hours" because of legislative stubbornness. He had heard many arguments against daylight savings time but was unconvinced by any of them, and urges people to write to the legislators to get them to act.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., indicates that people of the South who had spoken on behalf of the Republican Party in both 1952 and 1956 were now complaining of the giveaway and high taxes of the Republican program. He indicates that former Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, head of J. P. Stevens, in an address at Greensboro on April 18, had remarked that the American people were spending too much on houses, cars, appliances, etc., and were going around sloppily dressed, claiming that it was not right or just to the textile industry. He regards it as true to some extent, but wonders whether Mr. Stevens thought that the people should not spend their earnings as they saw fit, as he did with his company's money, that they were in need of things as much as he was for his clothing business. He indicates that the people deserved homes, cars and other things for their homes as much as anyone else, whether an industrial leader or a butcher. He says that everything was higher in price at present than ever before, that the national debt was larger than at any other point in peacetime, and that the labor-saving devices and machines to save cost of operation, fine in time of war, were counter-productive when people were out of work and needed jobs to buy the products being manufactured. He predicts that the operations of production would soon come to a halt and that taxes would have to be raised to take care of those put out of work. "So why cry on the people's shoulders?"
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.