The Charlotte News
Saturday, May 25, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had resolved final Administration differences on disarmament policy this date and put forth new instructions for negotiations with the Russians, approving efforts to restrict the possession of atomic weapons to the powers which now possessed them. Secretary of State Dulles had announced those plans following a 2 1/2 hour meeting at the White House, indicating that the U.S. would consult with its allies in all phases of new U.S. policy involving allied interests, that the consultations would include talks with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was scheduled to meet with the President the following day. Secretary Dulles described the U.S. position as "flexible", indicating that it was so designed to permit real negotiations, but within limits which would safeguard the vital interests of the United States. Harold Stassen, the President's special disarmament adviser and chief negotiator, would depart for London the following day to resume the disarmament negotiations between five nations on Monday, following a ten-day recess. The President presumably had resolved personally any outstanding differences between Mr. Stassen and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur Radford, who had publicly stated that the U.S. could not trust the Russians on disarmament, while Mr. Stassen had privately been arguing for a flexible negotiating position.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the chief of the Haitian police, Col. Pierre Armand, had taken over leadership of the Army from Brig. General Leon Cantave in a sudden coup this date. High-ranking officers at Army headquarters near the presidential palace in the heart of the city had confirmed the seizure of power by Col. Armand, indicating that they understood that General Cantave had "resigned", and that the Army had seized control of the country "to save the nation from anarchy." General Cantave had issued a proclamation stating that the Army would rule until a provisional president would be elected, who could guarantee free and honest elections, with the elections scheduled for June 16. The seven-man executive council, which had been ruling, had sought to oust the General on Monday night and place Col. Armand in charge, but General Cantave had defied them. Haiti had been in turmoil since the prior December, with three Presidents forced from office by strikes, after General Paul Magloire had attempted to stretch his term beyond the constitutional limit, the first of the Presidents forced from office, presently in exile. Since the Army had taken over the prior Tuesday, the political partisans had again been using the strike as a weapon. The previous night, Haitian troops had to beat off widespread stone-throwing attacks, using teargas, rifles, pistols and machine guns to do so. The Army called the stone-throwers partisans of Louis de Joie and Daniel Fignole, two leading candidates for the presidency and members of the ousted executive council. General Cantave had many partisans outside Port-au-Prince and the story indicates that just what the future held depended on what those partisans would do, whether they would support Col. Armand or resist his leadership.
In Taipei, Formosa, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek held the city under strict military rule this date in the wake of violent anti-American rioting which had wrecked the U.S. Embassy and injured 13 Americans, arising out of the acquittal by a U.S. court-martial of a soldier charged with voluntary manslaughter in the death of a Chinese citizen, accused by the soldier of peeping into his home. Authorities were seeking the mob leaders while 33,000 Nationalist troops swarmed the streets ready to put down any new eruption of violence. The mob had consisted of between 20,000 and 30,000 Chinese and Formosans, and some arrests had already been made. On the Chinese mainland, the Communists launched a propaganda campaign, calling the disorders proof that the people of Formosa opposed Chiang's alliance with the U.S. The Communist press issued several extras in British Hong Kong, proclaiming in large type: "Chinese brothers boil over against Americans… Chinese brothers revenge long years of hate." Peiping radio urged Chinese in Formosa to "intensify their efforts to work for the liberation" of the island. The Chiang Government had formally apologized to the U.S. and indicated that it would pay compensation for the damage to American property. In the long run, however, the U.S. apparently would end up paying at least indirectly for the damage, as the Government on Formosa had a deficit economy and U.S. aid made up that deficit. The 9,000 Americans on the island included advisers to the Nationalist Army. The riots, which were the first against Americans on Formosa, had strained relations with the U.S.
In Vienna, a hundred Hungarian students who had spent several hours in jail for demonstrating in front of the U.S. Consulate, had been released the previous night and sent back to their refugee camp. The students had gone to the Consulate to demand visas to emigrate to the U.S. Austrian police had arrested them for staging a public demonstration without police permission.
Dozens of tornadoes had cut a wide path through the middle of the country the previous day, with the Weather Bureau calling it the worst outbreak of tornadoes in recent years. At least four persons had been killed and a fifth death was attributed indirectly to the storms, with several persons having been injured and property damage running into the thousands of dollars. In Oklahoma, four persons had been killed when a tornado hit a rural area six miles south of Lawton, and a fifth death had occurred when a man was stricken by a heart attack while running for a storm shelter. Five persons had been injured when a match, struck to light a kerosene lantern, had exploded gas which had accumulated in a storm cellar. In Texas, more than 20 tornadoes hit scattered areas of the Panhandle and South Plains. At least ten persons had been injured and hundreds of homes destroyed or damaged in the areas. In Colorado and Wyoming, a government forecaster had credited light rain showers with tempering the destructiveness of eight tornadoes which had swirled through southeastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado, which he said would probably have been much more severe had the ground not been cooled by the rain. There were no injuries. Missouri, which had been hit by deadly tornadoes earlier in the week, also had more storms but no tornadoes were reported. Flooding from rains, however, was anticipated. Flooding was also a problem in Texas and Oklahoma as a result of torrential rains which had accompanied the storms in those states. Elsewhere across the country, showers and thunderstorms were anticipated from Georgia through the Carolinas and along the Florida Gulf Coast.
In San Francisco, the Bay Area Joint Council of Teamsters, representing some 67,000 members of the union, had voted unanimously the previous night that president Dave Beck of the union ought resign or be removed, while smaller units of the Teamsters had made the same demands. It was the first major unit of the 1.5 million-member union to issue such a blunt statement. The 200 representatives of the 44 Teamster locals in San Francisco had passed the resolution, charging that Mr. Beck's "intolerable position has adversely affected" the union.
In Gaylord, Mich., a five-year old boy had awakened in pain all alone this date, after his father, mother, brother and sister had been killed the previous night in a collision between their automobile and a train, only 100 feet from their two-room cabin home. The little boy was reported in fair condition, with head injuries and a wound caused by a stick driven into his right hip, as the family had been thrown from the car along the right-of-way as the car disintegrated. The family had been en route to town to obtain a haircut for the little boy when the collision occurred. He had a brother in the Lansing area and his wife's father and two brothers lived in another town. The family had lived near Gaylord for only a couple of months and the police had difficulty locating the relatives, who said that they would come to Gaylord to take care of the little boy. But none had yet arrived when the little boy had awakened under an oxygen tent in the hospital this date and no one had yet told him what had happened to the other members of his family, leaving it to the relatives to break the news. State police said that the enginemen on the train had told them that no one in the car had ever given any indication that they suspected any impending danger as the car drove onto the track ahead of the diesel locomotive. Only four or five trains per day ran on the railroad which split the middle of Michigan's lower peninsula.
In Charlotte, the Air Defense Filter Center would be discontinued on July 1, with the announcement of the plans to discontinue operation of the center having been contained in a letter to Mayor Jim Smith from the commander of the 85th Air Division at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, the letter pointing out that recent technological advances had permitted development of a semi-automated surveillance system, called SAGE, which needed fewer filter centers and permitted the combination of filter center areas, in consequence of which the Charlotte Filter Center would be absorbed by the Durham Air Defense Filter Center.
John Jamison of The News reports that an enraged husband during the morning had shot down and seriously injured a neighbor accused of molesting his wife, firing four shots with a .38-caliber revolver at the 24-year old at a service station where he worked, located at a busy intersection, after the young man had been released from the County Jail the previous night on a $5,000 bond authorized by a Superior Court solicitor, after he had been initially held without bond for first-degree burglary by the County Recorder's Court judge. A State Highway Patrol officer cruising in the area had come upon the scene of the shooting while the man was still firing and had stopped him before he could fire a fifth shot. The young man had been charged with breaking into a bedroom occupied by the assailant's wife on the previous Monday night. The assailant worked at a textile engraving firm. The man accused of the burglary had returned to his job at an Esso Station, where the shooting had occurred. On his way home to his trailer park, the assailant, leaving his baby with a friend, had gone to his home and obtained the pistol, returned to the service station in the morning, where he found the accused burglar, and fired the four shots at him, according to police. One of the shots had hit him in the lower back and exited through his abdomen, with two of the stray bullets hitting a parked car and the other hitting a vending machine. The man was taken to Memorial Hospital by a Highway Patrolman and went into surgery, with no further report on his condition. The assailant was brought to County Police headquarters and questioned for about 40 minutes. The assailant and the alleged burglar lived in the same trailer park.
Julian Scheer of The News provides various snippets of local and state politics.
In Dallas, Tex., a man was sprayed with flames and sat on a bucket of fire the previous day to model a fireproof suit. He represented the Guardian Safety Co. of Tulsa, and was one of several models who showed what was fashionable and safe to wear in the oil fields. One of the models of Fort Worth wore an inflatable life jacket described as a "cunning cummerband", and another showed coveralls "artfully designed with alternating fullness and snugness in all the right places." The audience, consisting mostly of oilmen, replied with ribald laughter, comments and leering whistles, much to the discomfort of the models.
In Palmetto, Ga., a traveling salesman was trying hard not to let a sudden bump separate him from a fragile cargo under his left front fender, a nest of wren eggs, which he had found two weeks earlier. He believed that the sun beating down on the fender, together with the heat of the engine, had provided ample warmth to incubate the eggs by day, and the mother wren took her place on the nest each day as soon as he returned home. He said he planned to make it easier on the mother during a trip to Florida the following week by leaving the car parked at his home, hoping that the eggs would be hatched by the time he returned.
In Chicago, a champion possessed of a pair of the fastest hands in the country, had been trying all season to see the Chicago White Sox play baseball, six times having gone to Comiskey Park and each time having been thrown out. He was going to try again on Monday night, wearing a pair of boxing gloves, which he said would be for the protection of other fans. The 70-year old pickpocket had been thrown out of Comiskey Park by two large detectives, who said that they would relent if he wore the boxing gloves. He said that there was no other way he could see the White Sox, being unable to convince the officers that he was not working unless he wore the gloves. The detectives said that he would have to keep them laced tight or he would be tossed.
On the editorial page, "Integrity of American Politics at Stake" indicates that there was a hard-boiled commercial drive behind most large campaign contributions and it could not be camouflaged by either idealistic gobbledygook or the imagined security of leaky laws, as the big donors naturally expected a return from their investments.
It finds that nothing had illustrated that rule better than the financial offer made to Senator Francis Case of South Dakota the previous year from a backer of the natural gas bill, with a special lobbying and corrupt practices committee having been set up to investigate the incident and others. That committee was scheduled to issue its final report the following week and it indicates that the occasion could not be wasted, that Congress should take the opportunity to fashion some badly needed reform.
A Senate subcommittee, headed by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, had already addressed campaign financing, reporting that in 1956 alone, 33.2 million dollars in expenditures had been made on campaigns, and that the total campaign expenditures far surpassed that figure. The subcommittee had concluded that "the need for remedial legislation in the field of federal elections is imperative and immediate."
The difficulty was that high campaign costs had forced parties and candidates to depend increasingly on fewer large contributors, with the Gore subcommittee finding that the process posed a threat to the integrity of the American political system, finding that the limits on spending in present law had failed miserably and could serve only to demoralize the political climate, that limits on individual corporations were "for all practical purposes meaningless", and that reporting and disclosure requirements were "hopelessly inadequate".
Senator Gore had introduced a bill which would raise the limit somewhat on that which candidates could spend, but would close the loopholes in existing laws which enabled them to evade all limits by forming numerous local and temporary committees beyond the reach of Federal legislation, placing a ceiling of $1,000 per year on an individual's total contributions to candidates for Federal office and restricting interstate shipments of campaign funds, as well as making the candidate responsible for authorizing and reporting all spending made on his or her behalf.
It indicates that the Gore bill might not be the complete answer to the complicated problem of campaign financing, but did tackle several parts of the problem and would close loopholes which made the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 a farce and a sham. It finds the integrity of the American political system clearly to be at stake, and that the bill, or a suitable variation of it, ought be passed by the 85th Congress.
"This Safety Standard Long Overdue" indicates that in Campbell, N.Y., two young sisters, ages four and six, during the week had suffocated inside an abandoned refrigerator when the door had apparently shut while they were playing in it, trapping them for an hour. The interior of the refrigerator had shown signs of their struggle.
There had been a wave of such accidents several years earlier, prompting both the press and general public to demand that something be done. Many local governments had responded by cracking down on the owners of abandoned refrigerators. But the problem had not been addressed at its source, the manufacturers, who were not being required to produce refrigerators which could be opened from the inside.
But during the current month, the Department of Commerce had adopted a new safety standard requiring that all new refrigerators for households crossing state lines 15 months hence would have to be equipped with a device which opened the door from the inside by outward pressure or by turning a knob.
It wonders why it had taken so long for such legislation, indicating that infrared studies of children inside simulated refrigerators had shown that they usually sought to escape by pushing on the door or turning a doorknob.
A magnetic catch was truly an innovation.
"For an Unfortunate Measure, R.I.P." indicates that there were few mourners at the graveside during the week when a State House committee had quietly buried the unfortunate bill of State Representative Frank Snepp which was designed to prohibit certain officers of the state from appearing before the Congress or any of its committees to urge the adoption, rejection, amendment or repeal of any Federal law. It would have permitted such appearances only at the written direction of the Governor or General Assembly, and its violation would have been punishable by a maximum of a $50 fine or 30 days in jail, plus dismissal from State service. A convicted offender would not be able to hold any State position for five years.
The bill was aimed at Dr. Ellen Winston, who occasionally was invited to Washington to testify on welfare legislation, and with whom Representative Snepp did not always agree.
It indicates that House Judiciary Committee No. 2 had possibly saved the state a lot of embarrassment by quietly giving the bill an unfavorable report, and it hopes that it would rest in peace.
"South Counterattacks at Gettysburg" indicates that a tourist guide, whose identity could not be revealed, was considered to be a bold strategist capable of reversing propaganda to the effect that the North had won the battle of Gettysburg.
According to the Washington Post & Times Herald, the guide had directed the attention of the tourists following him by saying: "See that hollow over there? That's where a squad of eight Confederates routed a whole Union company. And over on that rise, a Southern platoon wiped out every man in a Yankee regiment. And if you look down the road a piece, you'll see the spot where a Confederate division turned back the Union army."
A tourist had protested, "Say, I was under the impression that the North won the Battle of Gettysburg," to which the guide responded, "Not so long as I'm conducting these tours."
A piece from the Charleston News & Courier, titled "Archy and Mehitabel", wonders why, with the news full of hydrogen bombs, skyrocketing taxes, crime waves and so forth, newspapers could not tickle people more. The New York Herald Tribune, it finds, must have been pondering the question recently when it reprinted some of the verse written during the 1920's by columnist Don Marquis.
The verse had concerned the antics
of the cockroach, archy, and the office cat, mehitabel. They were the
basis for a new musical play, "Shinbone Alley"
"i heard a couple of fleas talking the other day/ says one come lunch with me/ i can lend you to a pedigreed dog/ says one i do not care what a dogs pedigree may be/ safety first is my motto/ what i want to know is whether he has got a muzzle on/ millionaires and bums taste about alike to me."
It finds that the late Mr. Marquis had brought a great sense of humor to his columns, and when stories of guided missiles and radiation sickness had become more than one could bear, a little bit of the verse of archy would brighten the day.
Drew Pearson indicates that the portraits of two great North Carolinians, the late Governor and Ambassador to Britain O. Max Gardner of Shelby and his brother-in-law, also of Shelby, the late Senator Clyde Hoey, had been presented to the State of North Carolina during the week, and he was grateful to Governor Luther Hodges for honoring Mr. Pearson with appointment to the committee which had made the presentation, regretting that a previously scheduled speaking engagement in Los Angeles had prevented him from being in Raleigh for it.
He recounts some pleasant memories of the public service provided by Governor Gardner and Senator Hoey. The former had been offered many high offices but had turned most of them down, loving people more than position, wanting to know about other people's problems whenever he talked to them.
He had first met Mr. Hoey in a sweltering schoolhouse in eastern North Carolina in 1936 while he had been campaigning for governor. Despite the heat, he had been immaculate in his swallow-tailed coat, high-starched collar, and flowing bow tie, with a red rose pinned in his lapel. He had been famous in Washington to those who did not know him for his old-fashioned attire, and to those who did know him well, he was still famous for his fair and scholarly manner in which he conducted investigations.
Mr. Gardner had a great deal to do with starting the New Deal while Governor, as FDR had been Governor of New York at the time, between 1929 and 1933. Governor Gardner had written to Governor Roosevelt: "The American people are on the move. If I were you I would become more liberal, because I tell you the masses are marching and if we are to save this nation, it has got to be saved by the liberal interpretations of the sentiments now ruling in the heart of man. I am satisfied we're in the day of a new deal and that many of our preconceived ideas and formulas are going to be thrown into the discard. We are more than blind if we think the American people can be hitched to the status quo. The camp fires of the past are now abandoned and the frontiers of thinking have extended beyond the limit heretofore held sacred by the conservative minds of this country." Mr. Gardner had believed in that creed not only in 1932 when he had written to Governor Roosevelt, but held to it to his death, just before boarding a ship for England in early 1947 to begin his ambassadorship, to which he had been appointed by President Truman.
Mr. Pearson suggests that he could have run for the Senate and been elected, but had instead stepped aside in favor of his brother-in-law, Mr. Hoey. The two were good friends, though differing somewhat in their political point of view. Mr. Gardner had once told Mr. Pearson a story about a trial of a case in Shelby, which took place just before he was set to take the oath as Governor in 1929, involving the wrongful death of an engineer and brakeman against the Southern Railroad, representing the families of the two men who had died in the wreck. Mr. Hoey represented the railroad. Mr. Gardner had told the jury that he felt he had been "just and honest" in asking for $75,000 for the plaintiffs, indicating that sometimes he asked for $100,000, only expecting to have his clients awarded $10,000, but on this occasion, just before becoming Governor, he wanted to ask only for a "just and honest amount", emphasizing the point several times. When Mr. Hoey began his argument to the jury, he said: "I've been sitting here listening to my opponent tell the jury how just he was and how honest, and I've kept score on this piece of paper of how often he said he was just and honest. He's told you he was honest just exactly 22 times. And he told you how just he was 28 times. Now my father—who was a Confederate soldier—taught me to beware of any man who went around telling people how honest he was. The chances are, he told me, that such a man ain't honest at all. I've been studying this complaint, and I can see that my opponent wrote it out himself, on his own typewriter, and I can just see what he did. The first key he punched on the typewriter was the dollar sign. Then he started to put down $10,000. Then he rubbed it out and figured to himself that wasn't enough. So he wrote in $75,000. That's the way he arrived at this figure he says is so just and honest. And any man that tries his law cases that way, and puffs up his chest telling you how honest and just he is, and what a great man he's going to be when he gets down to the Governor's Mansion in Raleigh—well, a man like that ain't nothing but a damn rascal and doesn't deserve a cent."
The jury had awarded $37,000, after which Mr. Gardner, following his term as Governor, had turned around and gotten his brother-in-law elected Governor in 1936, and later as a Senator.
Robert C. Ruark, writing from his hometown of Wilmington, N.C., indicates that a local iconoclast had come up with an idea which was quite intriguing, after two North Carolina counties had converted to Daylight Savings Time the prior Sunday night. The iconoclast was against it, wanting a "daylight wasting time" instead. His plan, only obtaining in the fall and winter, would provide an extra hour in bed when the warmth of same was most needed.
Wilmington was solidly opposed to abrupt change. "When the late and hallowed F.D.R. made up his own Thanksgiving, which was presumptuous even for a Groton graduate, my people down here ignored it. For that matter, they generally managed to ignore the entire New Deal."
He says that they were contrary, that Brunswick County, across the Cape Fear River, had always been basically Republican when the Democrats were in and often managed to vote Democratic when the Republicans were the in-party. As his grumbling grandfather had once said: "When I say no, I mean no. And very frequently when I say yes, I still mean no."
He had just had a talk with his father in Southport and had asked him what time lunch was going to be, and he had responded, with considerable dignity: "God's time. I ain't changed my watch. I go by the sun and no newfangled meddling with the sunrise and sunset is going to change my notions. If they want to save an hour, let them get up earlier. Then they can shut up shop an hour earlier. It's all a lot of dodlimbed foolishness."
Mr. Ruark agrees with his father, indicating that he had been fishing off Wrightsville Beach recently and the fish had paid no attention to the new hours. The captain of the vessel had said: "I find that fish bite when the sun is slanting. When the sun is straight up, they go somewhere and hide. I don't know if a fish sleeps, but they go some place to rest from the heat of the day, like any sensible critter."
He says that he traveled considerably around the world and was always running into time changes, did not understand and never had the business of tampering with time. He says that the international date line left him cold, having endured two Friday the 13th's in succession flying back to the United States from Australia, and once, during a trip from Honolulu to Guam, was cheated out of Christmas Eve, making him quite mad because he had figured on hanging up his stocking on the plane.
He says that if there was the necessity of making artificial adjustments to time, he followed the rules set by his father and Oscar Pearsall, who wrote letters to the editor, that if they were going to change it, it should be "intensivo", as the Spanish said, that all shops should close at 2:00 in the afternoon during summer months when the sun did not set until 9:00. "The Spaniard gets to work at 8 a.m. and he might sit up until 4 a.m. doing the flamenco, but since he quits at 2 p.m., he has better than half a day to catch up on his rest, or deviltry."
He had a personal improvement on the "intensivo", as he got up at 2 p.m., and did not do any work at all.
A letter writer, who says that he was born in St. Louis and was not a descendant of a signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and not related to any such signer by marriage, was nevertheless proud of the town where he made his home and could not understand why the newspapers of the city had continued to ridicule the Mecklenburg Declaration. He says he would think that the local newspapers would be very proud of that great event in history, when the Declaration was putatively signed on May 20, 1775, 13 1/2 months before the Philadelphia Declaration. He says that well-known and reputable professional historians supported its authenticity, that Professor William Mallalieu of the University of Louisville, in a recent issue of the Historical Quarterly, had stated, "The Mecklenburg Declaration must be accepted as a historical fact." Some historians were skeptical, but he finds that some of the historians with whom he had talked had not even bothered to read the facts. He indicates that in 1819, there had arisen a debate in Congress as to which state, between Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, had been the first to sign a declaration of independence. The Congress had decided in favor of North Carolina on the basis of the Mecklenburg Declaration. He would like to hear a rebuttal to the fact that in the archives of the Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, there was an original manuscript written in German and completed in 1783, which had included the statement by the author: "I cannot leave unmentioned at the end of the 1775th year that already in the summer of this year, that is in May, June, or July, the County of Mecklenburg in North Carolina declared itself free and independent of England, and made such arrangements for the administration of the laws among themselves, as later the Continental Congress made for all. This Congress, however, considered these proceedings premature." The writer says that his purpose was not to argue with the newspaper but did not understand why they did not have the loyalty which readers had the right to expect.
The editors respond that the newspaper would not think of ridiculing the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.
A letter writer finds that the criticism of City Council member Martha Evans during the previous few days had gone too far. She says that she was not a follower of Mrs. Evans, did not know her, and had never met her, but resented the inference by the other members of the Council, communicated through the press, that a member of the Council should always only shake their head up and down and from side to side. She thinks that the people of the city deserved to hear in open meetings all sides of questions and not just a conclusion reached at a closed session preliminary to the public meeting.
A letter writer from McBee, S.C., tells of the sycamore tree being one of the easiest trees to propagate from seed and from cuttings and stump culture, one of the best lawn and street shade trees as well as a valuable timber tree. He tells in some detail how to raise it from a seed or cut limb or stump, should you be interested in propagating a stand of sycamores.
A letter writer finds that the annexation of Charlotte would be passed and was a another Trojan Horse. There were now approximately 31 square miles within the city limits and the proposed extension would add approximately 32 additional square miles, more than doubling the total area of the city, thus almost doubling the sewer lines, water lines, garbage collection, fire protection and almost all other city services, thus probably almost doubling city taxes. Yet, he finds, only the owners of large tracts of land in the perimeter areas to be annexed would benefit as their land would be worth much more with city services. He finds it would be more logical for the City to take in Selwyn Park and perhaps the Thomasboro area and wait 10 to 20 years before annexing the remainder of the perimeter area, that too much vacant land was being taken into the city, yet containing only about 30,000 people. He thus disagrees with the City Council which favored the annexation.
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