The Charlotte News
Friday, May 24, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date had challenged the Congress to give him the line-item veto for appropriation items, indicating that he could then do some serious cost-cutting. He had set forth the challenge in a telephone message to a Republican Party rally at Trenton, N.J., stating that the power, held by governors of many states, would allow the President to cut out of appropriations bills some expensive and unnecessary projects, including new public works projects not approved by the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors. Many such projects were primarily local in nature and approval of them always meant a great deal to individual lawmakers, to curry favor with their constituents at home.
In Taipei, Formosa, Chinese mobs on an anti-American rampage had wrecked the U.S. Embassy this date and destroyed the U.S. Information Agency building. Later, a mob of about 20,000 or more had besieged police headquarters, demanding the release of agitators seized in the anti-American rioting. This night, martial law had been declared and three divisions of Chiang Kai-shek's troops had poured into the capital to maintain order. Many of the 11,000 Americans on Formosa were in danger at one stage, with at least nine having been injured by mob action. Two American airline employees had been reported to have been beaten when they came out of a restaurant on the main street of Taipei. The Nationalist Government expressed regrets for the incidents, with the Formosan Ambassador to Washington indicating to officials that the riots were "an outbreak of emotion" and did not represent deep anti-American sentiment. The riots had been the outgrowth of the acquittal on a charge of voluntary manslaughter by a U.S. court-martial of an American soldier who had shot to death a Chinese citizen allegedly caught peeping into the soldier's home. The riots had started when the acquitted soldier had departed on a chartered flight for Manila. Thousands of Chinese stoned the U.S. Embassy and stormed it, hauling down the American flag and tearing it to pieces, then tossing furniture and documents through the broken windows. The Information Service building had been ransacked in much the same way as the Embassy. Furniture, papers, typewriters and equipment had been wrecked and tossed out of the windows. The U.S. military communications office had also come under attack but was not entered, as about 100 Americans there had managed to close the storm gate. The three-story municipal police headquarters was besieged, with members of the mob seizing pistols from four policemen and had shot and critically wounded two policemen. Police fired repeatedly into the air, as the mob stoned that building and smashed its windows, with the siege lasting about six hours before troops regained control. Police restraint apparently saved the city from a bloodbath and U.S. authorities advised all American personnel to stay indoors, with the British consul issuing similar advice to Britons.
In Clifton, N.J., the majority of teachers in the city's five high schools and junior high schools had called in "sick" this date and the Board of Education said that several thousand students would be sent home. The elementary schools had not been impacted. The secretary of the Board said that between 160 and 225 high school teachers had failed to show up for work. The Clifton United Teachers Organization had been seeking a $700 per year pay increase effective the following September, and the Board had voted to hike pay by only $200. Teachers with bachelor degrees presently received between $3,700 and $6,200, between $4,000 and $6,000 with a master's degree and between $4,300 and $7,000 with a Ph.D.
In Tallahassee, Fla., Governor LeRoy Collins the previous day had granted sanctuary to a couple who were the Jewish foster parents of a six-year old girl born to an unwed Catholic mother. Massachusetts had sought for four years to take the child from the foster parents under a law requiring adoptions within religious faiths where possible, and had charged the foster parents with kidnaping the child. Governor Collins called the charge "synthetic" and said that the real issue was simply whether or not the custody of the girl should continue with the foster parents or whether she should be placed under institutional control and direction. He said that God granted to every child first the right to be wanted and second the right to be loved, that the child's mother had denied both of those rights to her and admittedly had not wanted her in the first place, though the mother now claimed that she loved the child, but "love can only result from the giving of one's self to another." He thus found that the foster parents had been the persons "through whom God has assured" to the child those first two rights, and it was the foster parents who wanted her to be born and also had given of themselves to her as only parents could understand. The ordeal had cost the foster parents a home and a successful dry cleaning business in Massachusetts.
In Raleigh, State minimum wage legislation, which had been tied up in the House by a committee, came up again in the Senate this date with the introduction of a new bill, which would cut the originally proposed minimum hourly pay from 75 to 70 cents for workers engaged in intrastate commerce, not therefore covered by the Federal Wage and Hours Act. There was no state minimum wage at the time.
John Jamison of The News reports that the prisoner in the Mecklenburg County Jail who had reported the previous day to be on an extended hunger strike, contending that he would never go to trial on the forgery charges against him, said this date that he had been "misunderstood" by reporters and had a meal late the previous day. He said in a hand-written statement to the newspaper that he would go to trial and hold his head high and accept his punishment like a man. When he had been arrested in Florida, he said that he wanted nothing more than to sit down and die, but that the feeling expressed to his wife had resulted from his humiliation and self-disgust over what he had done out of concern for his family. He was charged with cashing checks he had written illegally to several Charlotte firms, amounting to about $1,600. The jailer said that he was not on a hunger strike and had eaten substantially from a basket of food brought to him the previous day by his wife.
In Danbury, Conn., prison officials were foiling the 13-day old hunger strike of a Brooklyn pacifist by force-feeding him. The warden at the Federal Correctional Institution said that a 26-year old prisoner serving a year and a day for refusing to register for the draft was receiving a special formula through a nose tube. The warden said that he was fasting as a protest against being vaccinated and that his condition was good.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the newspaper had received a message this date seeking a man, "wherever you are, whoever you are, if you are". The note had been signed, "Sincerely, Undergraduates of Duke University". He had been listed on page 270 of the UNC Yackety Yack yearbook, but the message had said that the persons writing it knew who he was and that he was not a senior at UNC, who had earned a B.S. degree in business administration, but rather an undergraduate from Duke. The newspaper had placed calls to both campuses this date and everyone was getting a large chuckle out of the situation, but no one had come up with the answer as to who the student was. One UNC official said that apparently a prank had been pulled on them, as the named individual was listed on page 270 of the yearbook but a check of the registration books at Duke and Chapel Hill turned up no such student, despite the fact that he had his picture in the yearbook together with a list of his claimed campus accomplishments and his degree in business, but they could not find who had posed for the picture. Apparently, it had been some clever Duke students who slipped one of their number by with a fictitious name and waited for months to reveal the plot. It was explained by the yearbook that their photographer took the pictures in the student union at Graham Memorial, and a student merely filled in a card listing name, hometown, class, degree and campus activities. With several thousand pictures to take, the editors of the yearbook did not have time to check each individual card, and the mystery student had apparently ridden from Durham, got in line, filled out a card and had his picture taken with all the information on the card included. The name was "Samuel Clement Schultz", which Mr. Scheer finds smacked of Samuel Clemens, possibly explaining the prank. A member of the Duke registration staff said that Samuel Clement did not sound right, sounded more like a name picked as a gag, as the Schultzes they had listed had "regular" names, such as Andrew Johnson Schultz.
They were just mad because UNC had become the first ACC team and the first North Carolina team ever to win the national championship in basketball on March 23. It would take another 17 years until another ACC and North Carolina team would win it, N.C. State in 1974, another 25 years before another UNC team would win it, and 34 years before the first Duke team would win it.
Parenthetically, we also have to wonder whether Clem Harry Shankle on the same page was also an imposter in the "To Tell the Truth" lineup, as he lists among his achievements, "G.M. Board of Directors" in the junior year, and also shares membership in the "Student Party" with Mr. Schultz, albeit in different years. He was not, however, a member of the Cardboard, as Mr. Schultz.
In Los Angeles, a woman who was weight-conscious thought she had lost about five pounds in less than half an hour after getting stuck on an electric bicycle in a weight-reducing salon, with one of her legs having become caught between the seat and the handlebars. For 20 minutes she had tried to steady herself by doing a little dance on her free leg while the motor-powered seat moved back and forth. The management had called an emergency hospital crew, a police detail and the fire department rescue squad, with the latter able to free her by dismantling the seat.
On the editorial page "Don't Stretch the Charter Too Far" finds the City Treasurer's hesitancy to approve financial transactions between the Park Board and City Council members to be a commendable public service.
The City Charter appeared to have the intent to prevent City officials from profiting from their position, whether by selling to the City or an agency thereof, such as the Park Board. It suggests that stretching of the Charter might serve a good purpose, as some cities had found that refusal to purchase from officials had forced them to go outside the city for certain supplies and pay higher prices, and the volume of sales by three members of the Charlotte City Council to the Park Board during the year indicated nothing approaching abuse of the public trust or proper ethics.
But it finds that the Charter provision was there for a good reason and while it might be stretched somewhat occasionally in the interests of convenience or efficiency, it ought never be stretched to the point of breaking. It thus finds that some publicity occasionally given to the total transactions between City agencies and public officials would ensure that they were kept within proper bounds.
"Road Safety Hangs from the Rafters" indicates that the State House the previous day had come upon the hapless vehicle safety inspection bill and decided that it was "working on the wrong end of highway safety", voting to provide it with a negative recommendation.
Sponsors of the bill had never contended that mechanical failures caused more than 5 to 10 percent of the accidents in the state, as the bill was only one feature of the Governor's overall legislative program to reduce highway accidents and consequent death, but was a vital feature. The Department of Motor Vehicles estimated that if mechanical failure had caused only 5 percent of the accidents in the state the previous year, more than 50 people could have remained alive.
The Legislature recalled public outrage from the first clumsy attempt at inspections ten years earlier, resulting in long lines from limited inspection stations, and thus constituents, they believed, did not want its renewal. And the fact that about one-eighth of all vehicles registered in the state which had been submitted voluntarily to inspection the previous year had not eased the Assembly's fear of adverse public reaction to such a bill.
It suggests that if it were made known that 50 lives and about a million dollars could be saved by passage of the law, causing negligible expense to vehicle owners and little irritation, it would likely pass. It finds the House committee's negative vote on the bill, therefore, to have been the result of a significant failure of leadership and responsibility.
"Daylight Saving Dies at the Branchhead" indicates that the State House had killed daylight savings time for the state on its third and final reading, as farmers could not abide people tinkering with their clocks and had opposed daylight savings time since it had first come into being.
English farmers had fought such a time change when first proposed in 1907 because they said that their milkers would be forced to get up in the dark most of the year and because the fields would be wet with dew, the difference of opinion between urban and rural residents appearing to go deeper than that.
The city dweller had to regard time as functional, as he was a slave to it, forever needing to be somewhere at a certain time, with time eventually becoming a dictator controlling his every movement. Thus it was logical for the city dweller to try to manipulate time to make it more responsive to his desires for rest and relaxation, thus the effort to "save" time because the city dweller did not have enough of it.
But the farmer had plenty of time, preoccupied with its present progression and the changes it wrought on the fields and woods, while time was a friendly thing and well regarded by the farmer, thus resenting anyone tinkering with it and so would continue to vote against changing it.
A piece from the Reporter, titled "Our Own Bestiary", tells of it being the time of year to try to distract readers from the bomb and the budget with such things as animal stories, and so offers that platypuses were both stupid and nervous, as shown by a pair at the Bronx Zoo, too stupid or nervous to reproduce themselves. The yak in the zoo at Central Park with one horn curved under its chin appeared to want to hang itself on it. Swallows examined bird boxes a long time before renting them, liking to read the fine print. Moulting animals were very unhappy about themselves, looking like women just before a permanent.
The captain of the Mayflower II had sent a signal to London which included the following: "Felix, the month-old cat, caught first flying fish to fly aboard and now maintaining constant patrol in scruppers for more such fishes."
It concludes: "Feel better now?"
Drew Pearson indicates that the previous week, the Senate had spent almost a whole day harassing and curtailing the U.S. Information Agency which combated Russian propaganda, while at the same time, the Kremlin was staging another world peace conference at Colombo, Ceylon, the following month, and sending mobile exhibits of Hiroshima victims around India and Southeast Asia to show the horrors of U.S. atomic warfare. It was also preparing for the sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow in July, with large delegations of young Africans expected to attend, with all expenses paid by Moscow. It was also filling the airwaves with charges that the U.S. was preparing for aggressive atomic warfare, and was spending 125 million dollars on documentary films, compared to the total budget of U.S.I.A. voted by the Senate of 69 million, the Senate having voted to cut the funding by 15 million.
He then provides a list of things which the Senate had voted in favor of a few days later, including a $30,000 subsidy for cheap lunches for Senators, 100 million as an indirect subsidy to bankers by giving them Government deposits interest-free, a 30 million dollar subsidy for mines and mining companies in the West, and appropriations for various public works which would help individual Senators get re-elected but would not help them to wage the cold war against Russia.
He concludes that if Russia were not laughing, they must not have a sense of humor.
The President had told Congressional leaders privately that if they really believed in economy, they would let him veto pet projects in their home states, advocating for the line-item veto to enable killing of pork without killing whole appropriations bills. But the pork helped to re-elect members of Congress, and House Speaker Sam Rayburn had replied that Congress had no intention of abdicating its fiscal power.
U.S. diplomats reported that there was confusion among Soviet bureaucrats regarding the drastic reorganization of Russian industrial planning and management, with up to 100,000 Soviet officials to be moved to the hinterlands in a desperate effort to obtain more efficiency, causing Soviet bureaucrats to grumble openly, sure to hurt industrial production for months to come. Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, however, was pressing ahead with the plan, as his prestige was at stake, and he would fall if his plan flopped.
The boss of Communist China, Mao Tse-tung, had made two secret speeches denouncing bureaucratic bungling inside Communist China. Alarmed at the mounting criticism throughout the country, Mao blamed the unrest, not on the defects of Communism, but on subordinates who were not doing their jobs.
Commercial airlines had reported on so many near collisions with military planes that Civil Aeronautics Administration head Jack Pyle had called on the Air Force to do something about it, wanting civilian jurisdiction over all air traffic, including military traffic. But the Air Force claimed that it had to have complete freedom of navigation to guard the country against air attack. There had been over 500 near collisions reported in the previous year and hundreds more unreported.
Irving Carlyle, Winston-Salem attorney and former member of the State Legislature, in excerpts from an address titled "The Law and Human Relations", delivered before the Human Relations Council in Charlotte the previous night, spoke of "definite progress" being made in the state toward elimination of compulsory segregation. He said that it was mainly the law which caused people to act with decency toward one another, that religion, education and democracy helped some, but the compulsion of the law was uppermost. The law needed to be held in high esteem in the local community, large or small, as it was there where humans came face-to-face, day in and day out.
He quotes from a Latin proverb, that "Wherever there is society there is law." He indicates that law and society were inseparable and interacting, with neither able to exist without the other. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had said, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." With every new experience came new law, which explained why there was no end to making of laws. Justice Benjamin Cardozo had written that the law was "a principle or rule of conduct so established as to justify a prediction with reasonable certainty that it will be enforced by the courts if its authority is challenged." Justice Holmes had spoken in the same vein when he had written, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."
Several years earlier, North Carolina Chief Justice Walter Stacey had made a speech in which he had said that the purpose of government and the goal of society was the doing of justice among men, the giving to every man his due. Mr. Carlyle thus finds that the ultimate purpose of the law was not alone the maintenance of the social order, but also the assurance of the conditions of social progress. Thus, the law was a social force of the first magnitude, against whose just decrees all barriers must yield, the most powerful force for the improvement of human relations.
There was one principle to which all good citizens of North Carolina subscribed, the supremacy of law, that principle first having been established during the clash in England between the courts and the Stuart kings, out of which was born the power of the courts to pass on the legality of executive acts and of the acts of government, itself. In America, where the courts had been required to pass on the validity of colonial legislation respecting colonial charters, the idea had been familiar at the time the constitutions of the various states had been adopted, and thus passed into the Federal Constitution.
As a result, every public official in the country acting in discharge of his or her duties without authority of law could be restrained when illegal acts might result in irreparable damage to any person. The wrong committed by a public officer in exceeding that authority could be dealt with and punished by the courts. That doctrine had been a contribution of Anglo-American law and represented the final step in the establishment of supremacy of the law. That principle had finally dealt a death blow to the centuries-old doctrine that "the King can do no wrong."
Against that background had come the decision in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954, finding that segregation in the public schools was, per se, unconstitutional, overruling the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the so-called "separate-but-equal doctrine". In the wake of that decision had come various schemes to try to circumvent or delay implementation of the ruling, to preserve segregation in the public schools, even going so far in North Carolina as to permit people in local communities to vote to convert the public schools into private schools and operate them with public funds. The constitutionality of that maneuver had yet to be finally decided. Its proponents had regarded it as legislation to buy time to implement desegregation plans.
Mr. Carlyle indicates that it was plain to him that the adoption of the plan, including the pupil assignment plan of 1955, had not yet settled the legal problems or the moral problems regarding school segregation, that the solution to those problems had merely been postponed. He indicates that if expediency rather than principle became the controlling factor in the legal process, the outcome would inevitably be injustice. "We do great injury to ourselves when we seek to bolster our claims to superiority by compelling others to surrender their legal rights. And the damage done is far greater when the surrender is coerced by punitive measures taken under color of law. The use of intimidation by law is a backward step unworthy of a great state that is committed to the supremacy of law and to improving the administration of justice for all men." Respect for law ought not be predicated on fear, but only on a sense of justice.
He says that his position had been and still was that the state could not escape compliance with Brown, that obedience to its terms was inevitable and that a moderate and gradual approach to the elimination of compulsory segregation in the public schools of the state had to be taken.
He finds occurrences within the state which showed that it would take steps to comply in good faith with the decision, including the fact that there had been no violence, that increasing numbers of private citizens in responsible positions were saying publicly and privately that they had to live within the laws that applied to all phases of compulsory segregation. When there was an initiative for isolated compliance with the decision in a few communities, a large part of the battle to keep the law supreme would have been won. The state had also not adopted the pattern of extremism followed in some of the other Southern states, but was trying to moderate in its own way. The courts were also showing great courage in the segregation cases. The belief was growing in the state, particularly among the young people, that no citizen ought be denied legal and constitutional rights because of their race, and further, that freedom guaranteed by the Federal Constitution "to all citizens knows no color line." Conscience was making many people in the state uncomfortable about the continuation of segregation after it had been outlawed by the Supreme Court. Increasing numbers of groups of people in the state were calmly sitting down together and facing the facts of the situation in an attempt to reach a solution. There was also developing throughout the state, in slow stages, the conviction that discrimination by government or law against any citizen or group based on race, creed or color could no longer be justified or excused.
He says he did not anticipate any easier early solution of the problems created in the state by Brown, but was convinced that definite progress was being made and that within a reasonable time, the people of the state would find the way to live together in peace under the law prohibiting the compulsory segregation of the races.
A letter writer urges the people of Charlotte to support the Charlotte Hornets baseball team when they were in town, finding it to be the best Hornets team produced in many years, and undoubtedly would win the South Atlantic League pennant.
A letter writer finds City Council member Martha Evans to be a person with courage and conviction, that whether she was right or wrong was not important as she had been elected on the strength of her judgment and integrity. He finds that natives of Charlotte had been accustomed to a situation where the Bar controlled the grand jury, the courts and the Legislature, as well as all of local government, whereas in other states, the judiciary was controlling of the bar. He finds that the judges locally were dependent on the support of the Bar to hold their jobs, which explained why lawyers could abuse the processes of justice with impunity, and believes that a lot could be learned from the expression of honest opinion of outsiders, such as that of Mrs. Evans.
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