The Charlotte News
Monday, June 10, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an "upset stomach" had consigned the President to bed this date, but that three examining physicians had said shortly after noon that there was "no indication" that the illness was related to the President's September, 1955 heart attack or his June, 1956 attack of ileitis. White House press secretary James Hagerty said that the President was "progressing very satisfactorily". The President had been stricken about 10:00 p.m. the previous night and was nauseated and vomiting during part of the night. His personal physician, Maj. General Howard Snyder, was summoned and remained with him all night. Other physicians, including heart specialist, Col. Thomas Mattingly, who had attended the President during his 1955 heart attack recovery, had been called in for consultation this date as a precautionary step. A reporter had quoted Secretary of State Dulles as having said at the Capitol that the President's minor stomach upset was the result of his having eaten some blueberry pie, and Mr. Hagerty confirmed that the President did have some blueberry pie the previous day. Stay away from the blueberry pie, as it may be poisoned.
Vice-President Nixon said to reporters this date that he expected to see the President back in the office the following day and that he regarded the President's illness as minor and of short duration. He said that when he or others had a cold or upset stomach, it was not news, but that when the President had a cold or a stomach upset, it was a different matter. The Vice-President said that he intended to carry out his routine schedule of presiding over the Senate and working in his Capitol office this date and did not plan to visit the White House. He said that this night, he and Mrs. Nixon would be guests for dinner at the home of Senator and Mrs. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky.
A chronology appears of the President's health episodes since his 1955 heart attack.
In New York, the stock market had declined sharply following the news of the President's upset stomach, but had made a partial recovery this date as news of the President's recovery was disseminated. Pivotal issues of stock were down between a dollar and three dollars per share at midday after losses had ranged to around five dollars per share at the worst. The ticker had been running 14 minutes behind in the early morning in reporting floor transactions amid heavy trading. Oil stocks had been the hardest hit.
How was the golf course stock doing?
In Washington, an Illinois auto mechanic arrived with 6,800 signatures contained in more than 300 petitions from mothers across the country backing his appeal to the White House that his older brother, William Girard, be tried by an American court in the claimed accidental death of a Japanese woman while Mr. Girard had served as an Army Specialist 3rd Class in Japan, protecting, by order of his commander, an Army firing range from scavengers seeking scrap metal, as had been the woman in question when killed by Mr. Girard, who claimed he had only been trying to scare her and others away from the range. The brother and his wife had an appointment to meet White House counsel Edward McCabe, hoping to win reversal of the decision by the Government to allow Mr. Girard to be tried in a Japanese civilian court. The brother, when asked by reporters, said that he believed his brother would not get much of a fair trial in Japan. This night, the brother and his wife were scheduled to appear on the ABC television program, "Press Conference".
In Algiers, a terrorist bomb had exploded under a bandstand the previous night as French couples had danced the cha-cha in a fashionable seaside casino, killing seven young people and wounding 83 others, many of whom were members of prominent Algiers families. Limbs had been blown from about a dozen of the 300 persons attending a tea dance at the casino.
In San Francisco, new type of influenza, which had been sweeping Asian countries, had reached the U.S., with patients describing it in stronger language than doctors had used. U.S. Public Health Service doctors who had examined passengers and crewmen arriving from Manila the previous day on the American President Liner President Cleveland, had agreed that it was a mild variant of the A-type virus known in the U.S. The chief quarantine officer said that 96 passengers and crewmen who had contracted the new type of flu during the 20-day voyage did not care whether they lived or died and ran fevers as high as 104 degrees before the malady had run its course in three to five days. The ship's surgeon said that he had contracted the flu after treating patients for it for nearly 3 weeks, and while his case was quite mild and no worse than ordinary American flu, he indicated that antibiotics did not do any good, causing him to fall back on aspirin and codeine. Ten of the passengers who had recovered had volunteered blood samples, and the chief quarantine officer said that they would be used to search for a new vaccine. Some 500,000 people had contracted the new variant in India since April, forcing schools to close there. In the Philippines, 300,000 cases had resulted in 185 deaths, according to health officials. In Japan, the epidemic had been reported to be on the decline, after an estimated 400,000 cases. A passenger aboard the President Cleveland said that she was down with the virus for three days, running a 104-degree fever. She said that she had gotten the flu before but nothing like the variant she had this time, that everything had hurt, including her head, which felt like "somebody was beating on it with a ball peen hammer."
In Asheville, N.C., a witness testified this date in the murder trial of the sheriff of McDowell County that the mortally wounded victim shot by the sheriff on January 28 had pleaded with the sheriff to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery. The witness, positioned inside a café drinking coffee, said that the sheriff stood over the man lying on the ground and argued with him as he was dying. He said that the sheriff had entered the café, looked around and then walked out, and immediately thereafter, there had been an explosion and he saw the deceased lying on the ground and the sheriff standing over him with a gun in his hand. He heard the victim say, addressing the sheriff by his first name, "Ashby, you're a dirty man. I didn't have a thing in my hand," with the sheriff having then responded, "Well, you were going to get me." The trial was entering its second week.
In Raleigh, a State House-Senate joint conference committee was scheduled to meet this date again in an effort to reach agreement between the two teacher pay raise bills passed separately by the House and Senate, the Senate having provided a 15 percent pay raise and the House having passed a 16.09 percent raise. If an agreement could be reached this date, final adjournment of the 1957 session of the General Assembly would come the following day, according to House Speaker J. K. Doughton. The conference committee had also met on Saturday, but had yet to reach agreement between the two figures.
Also in Raleigh, it was reported by Governor Luther Hodges in special press conference that Wilmington had been chosen as the site for a new industrial plant to produce titanium metal, involving a total investment of 40 million dollars. The Governor said that the company's decision to select a site in the state had been a direct result of changes just made by the General Assembly to the state's corporate income taxes. The plant would be located on a 15-acre site a few miles outside of Wilmington, with a two-mile frontage on the Cape Fear River, and would provide employment for 500 persons when reaching full operation. Titanium was in increasing demand from various industries concerned with electronics, nucleonics, aviation, electrical and other products, as the metal strongly resisted heat, melting only at a temperature of 3,700 degrees.
In Plymouth, Mass., the Mayflower II, tossing in rough seas, had moved close to the "Crossroads of the Atlantic" at Nantucket lightship this date, in its repetition of the voyage of the Pilgrims in 1620. A position report said that the tiny vessel was 65 miles south of the lightship and was making two knots in practically no wind. Beyond the lightship, the vessel still had about 130 miles to its destination at Plymouth. The Coast Guard reported at dawn that the seas were "rough" in the area of Nantucket Island, where the Mayflower II was last reported. The captain of the vessel said that he expected to be off Provincetown late this night or early the following morning. From there, it would have to cross Massachusetts Bay and enter Plymouth harbor at high tide, a distance of about 24 miles.
In Piacenza, Italy, it had rained eels the previous night, with dozens of them about four inches long having been sucked from the sea by a miniature tornado and dumped over the town at the point when the twister had exhausted itself. The locals had only one complaint, that the eels were an inedible variety.
On the editorial page, "The Assembly Has Done a Good Job" finds that the State General Assembly had turned in a surprisingly good record, both in terms of what it had done and in terms of some of the things it had refused to do. Although the legislators had remained captive to some of their old shortcomings, they had escaped some of the stultified conventions of the past, and even where legislation had fallen short of passage, there were encouraging signs of conscience. The overall result had been several pieces of progressive and needed legislation in various fields of government, economic and social activity.
The session had been billed as the end of the honeymoon for Governor Luther Hodges, with many observers predicting that the prior close cooperation between the Governor and the Legislature would come to an end. The Governor's support of tax reorganization measures, designed to attract new industry to the state by reducing the business tax bill, would, according to the pundits, cause the Legislature to engage in partisan strife, but those predictions had been wrong. The tax program had been passed and the Governor had stuck by his promise that industrial growth would more than make up for the tax relief to be given to the state's present industrial community.
But unfortunately, the Assembly had ignored the necessity of passing a state minimum wage bill, which would have been a more direct method of increasing the pitifully low per capita income of North Carolina wage earners. The Governor had energetically supported that program, thus clearing himself of any charge that he sided only with big business interests.
The Assembly made a better showing from the beginning on the crucial issue of strengthening the teaching profession, with its insistence on a realistic salary increase having brought the Governor to a realistic, if still inadequate, compromise figure of 15 percent. Although the state had not paid its teachers enough in the past and would not do so under the new schedules, the raises which had finally been agreed upon at the session would represent an important step forward toward giving the profession an adequate salary. Further efforts were needed to provide schools in the state with more and better teachers, with the pay raises of the session only a beginning to restore the sagging prestige and attractiveness of the teaching profession in the state.
The Assembly had made a substantial contribution to the efficiency and humaneness of state government in its approval of the Governor's reorganization proposals, with separation of the prisons and highway departments being long overdue and desirable for the best operation of both, with a separate prisons department expected to do a better job of rehabilitation and reform while making better use of modern penological techniques. Reorganization of the highway department under an administrative director should permit greater emphasis on a statewide concept of highway planning and construction and reduce the political influence on planning and construction which had been inherent in a department run by district commissioners.
Although the Assembly had lacked the courage to pass a badly needed automobile mechanical inspection law, its attitude toward highway safety generally was much improved over previous sessions. It had approved support of a statewide driver training program, had authorized the use of unmarked patrol cars to trap speeders and reckless drivers, and had stiffened penalties designed to discourage drag racing on public highways.
Its passage of an urban redevelopment bill provided municipalities with a valuable tool to eliminate and prevent slums, and also provided the eastern part of the state with the means of repairing hurricane damage, a decisive factor in the passage of the bill. Urban areas, particularly Charlotte, also would benefit from provision of state grant-in-aid funds for construction and operation of community colleges.
It finds that the refusal still to reapportion the Assembly's seats under State Constitutional provisions requiring it after every decennial census, though not done since the 1950 census, had been a shameful failure, refusing to adopt even a compromise measure which would have permitted future reapportionment under a virtual guarantee that urban areas could never be so adequately represented that they could gain control of the Assembly over the rural counties.
But in other instances of refusal to act, the legislators had shown courage and wisdom, for instance in the defeat of a bill designed to permit sterilization of women who had two or more illegitimate children, and a bill designed to harass the NAACP by opening its membership list to inspection, permitting reprisal against the organization. It finds both measures unworthy of the state and that both had deserved the defeat which they received.
It finds that in sum, the 1957 General Assembly had served the state well, generally conducting itself out of a sincere and productive concern for the welfare and progress of the state, even if, in some instances, showing timidity, shortsightedness and even arrogance. It concludes that the members deserved to go home feeling that they had done a good job for the state, and it recommends that they do so as soon as possible.
"Party Politics: The Situation's Confused" tells of White House chief of staff Sherman Adams having recently assessed the state of affairs in both the Republican and Democratic parties by indicating that the Democratic opposition suffered from "a chronic and incurable political schizophrenia. Schizophrenia, you remember, is split personality. Indeed, their party is irreparably split—and down its very middle, both geographically and philosophically—and the split is so deep that the party simply cannot put itself together again."
He found the Republicans to "have the stalwarts, the irreconciled, and the irreconcilables. We have the liberals, the liberal-conservatives, the conservative-progressives, and the reactionaries. We have the moderns and the 'un' or anti-moderns, the old fashioned and the traditionalists—each resoundingly the oracle of the true meaning of Republicanism."
It indicates that it had suspected as much about both parties and wants to know who was supposed to be in charge.
Mr. Adams, in ascribing Humpty-Dumpty attributes to the Democrats, might more properly have made the metaphor applicable to his own party, perhaps by drawing the crack in the eggmen as a dichotomy between vicuña and cloth coats, Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles, a preference for chess or checkers.
A piece from the Knoxville News-Sentinel, titled "Gloves for a Dip", tells of Ed Murphy, Chicago pickpocket, having loved to attend the baseball games of the White Sox, currently leading the American League, but having been banned from Comiskey Park by the police for his pick-pocketing endeavors, unless he agreed to wear 16-ounce boxing gloves at all times while attending a game. He was ordered to keep them on, laced tight, or he would be tossed.
The piece suggests that the situation called for some understanding or armchair psychology, as it was impossible for a person to go straight under such circumstances. There had to be others like him with unsuspected frustration, such as an arsonist who doted on a silver lighter just to keep his pipe going or a safe cracker who was absorbed in time-locks for their own intricacies.
"Look at it this way: Everybody rates a day off occasionally, even if his diversion happens to coincide ever so slightly with his work."
Drew Pearson indicates that a budget cut of 2.1 million dollars for Federal meat inspectors would cost housewives many times that much in the increased price of beef, lamb and pork chops. Parsimonious members of Congress had chopped that amount from the meat-inspection budget, which translated to the firing of 150 meat inspectors, consequently slowing production lines in meat-packing plants, thus increasing the cost of meat. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had requested 18.7 million dollars for the Meat Inspection Service in the coming fiscal year, including funds to hire 192 additional inspectors, needed to inspect meat in 1,241 packing plants in 49 cities, as the population grew and meat consumption had increased. Just four years earlier, there were only about three-quarters the number of packing plants, 992, in 390 cities, which were being inspected. Nevertheless, about the same number of inspectors were assigned to the task as in 1953. But the House had not only refused to vote funding for the additional meat inspectors, they had cut the budget for the coming year to 16.5 million dollars. The head of the Meat Inspection Service reported that in the previous seven months, meat production lines had been shut down for short periods in 18 packing plants because no replacement inspectors were available when some of their number got sick. Packers had lost profits, union members had lost wages, and housewives were paying higher prices for meat. Mr. Pearson lists the cities where recent shutdowns had occurred because of the lack of inspectors.
It appeared that White House press secretary James Hagerty and his assistant, Murray Snyder, could dish it out but could not take it. They had curtly declined an invitation to discuss government censorship with Representative John Moss of California on the ABC television program, "Open Hearing". Mr. Moss had been supporting the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Sigma Delta Chi journalism fraternity in demanding less news suppression by the Administration. Messrs. Hagerty and Snyder said that the reason they had declined was that they did not want to get into a debate with Mr. Moss and that by appearing on the same program with a crusader against censorship, they might imply that they favored censorship. Mr. Pearson notes that cantankerous Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan finally agreed to appear on the program in their stead.
The President's lingering hopes for enactment of a civil rights law in the current session of Congress had received another setback at his last meeting with Republican Congressional leaders, which had shown that the House would vote to approve the measure but that the Senate would defeat it. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland of California told the President that he would do his best to put it across but that, to be realistic, the outlook for civil rights in the Senate was "not encouraging" and that he was afraid that the bill would either die in the Judiciary Committee or be reported too late for favorable action on the floor, even assuming that they could overcome a Southern filibuster.
Stewart Alsop indicates that Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn were beginning to appear as the leaders of a large, well-disciplined army which had nowhere to go and no one to fight. They had made two assumptions as Democratic leaders, that the conservative Republicans who were in revolt against the President's budget were not to be allowed to monopolize the economy issue, and that it was more important to hold the Democratic Party in a semblance of unity than to stir trouble or make issues against the Administration.
Those two assumptions had been largely accepted by most Democrats in both houses and they were logical assumptions on their face, yet involving risks which might be more serious than appearing on the surface. The only area on which to make a politically palatable record was in national security, involving defense and, to a lesser extent, foreign aid. Thus had there been a party-line vote by House Democrats, engineered by Mr. Rayburn, reducing the President's defense budget by 2.5 billion dollars. Part of that cut might be restored by the Senate, but the present best guess was that the increase would be relatively minor, perhaps as little as a tenth of the total cut.
The price for the Democrats making their economy record was that the President had automatically been transformed into a last-ditch defender of the security interests of the country, a position uniquely suiting the President, given his personal history as a war commander. Yet, the Democrats, primarily through Senator Stuart Symington's air power investigation the previous year, had conclusively demonstrated that the U.S. security position relative to the Soviets had rapidly deteriorated under the Eisenhower Administration.
In the present national mood of complacency, nobody other than Arthur Godfrey appeared to care very much. Even Senator Symington had been talking a lot more about cutting taxes and the budget than about the need to match the Soviet defense effort. But the national mood could change with the world situation, and if some emergency were to occur, the Democrats would have kicked the defense issue, potentially their strongest issue, down the drain. Republicans also would need only cite the roll call vote in the House to shift the burden of blame onto the Democrats.
The other primary issue for the Democrats, the school construction bill, was dead for the current session, as was the civil rights legislation in any effective form. Both bills were politically important for Northern Democrats, and yet the Republicans would be able to claim, with some reason, that both had been killed by the Democrats.
The hope by some Democrats that the "tight money" policy of the Treasury could be made into a major issue against the Administration were flickering, with that issue having been complex in any event and difficult to exploit. But now with Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey having resigned, there was no longer a personal devil to attack for the tight money policy, making that issue almost impossible to exploit for Democrats. His successor, Robert Anderson, was close to Senator Johnson.
Thus, the Democrats, despite being brilliantly led in both houses, had nowhere to go, despite the semblance of party unity being maintained and that being no easy task. But Democrats would not obtain a lot of votes by claiming that they had kept their party together, and it appeared unlikely that they were going to make much political hay by trying to out-shout conservative Republicans on the economy issue.
Mr. Alsop ventures that perhaps the Democrats, paralyzed by internal division and with their favorite domestic issues shrewdly undercut by the Administration, never did have anywhere to go in current times. Democrats had generally been identified by voters as the liberal party devoted to experiment and change, and if, as the evidence suggested, it was now a smugly conservative country, having had enough of experiment and change, the question remained as to where the Democrats could go.
A letter writer from West Columbia, S.C., the secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen general grievance committee of the Southern Railway System, says that he had received a letter from the chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, Southern Railway System, containing a clipping from the newspaper, titled, "Senate Should Clean Its Own 'Glass House'". It had apparently been a letter to the editor intended for print in the "People's Platform". He indicates that the chairman had written across the top of the piece, "Can you imagine this coming out in a Charlotte paper?" While it had only been the opinion of a reader of the newspaper, it deserved the amazement expressed by the chairman for being given space in any Charlotte newspaper. He says that he had often commended the Charlotte newspapers for their fair reporting of labor activities and reading such a piece in The News would not have surprised him as it had the chairman, finding that the newspaper fulfilled its obligation to its readers to report fairly all of the news, deserving commendation in his opinion for doing so.
A letter from a minister at St. John's Baptist Church in Charlotte says that he had enjoyed the story recounting the consideration given to a bill to keep ABC Board employees from lobbying activity, when it had gone before the State House Propositions and Grievances Committee. There had been unanimous approval of Frank Sims for keeping his hands off liquor legislation as an unpaid lobbyist. But he had paid for the room in the Sir Walter Hotel wherein cases of sample liquor had been delivered for distribution to legislators during the session, according to a report by the Raleigh News & Observer two weeks earlier, acting on information supplied by a minister. He finds that it had presented an amusing, though puzzling, picture of Mr. Sims, apparently an "ineffective lobbyist, working sacrificially at his own expense in behalf of his great cause—more liquor for everybody, especially legislators." He finds it either a new high or a new low.
A letter writer from Pittsboro says he had received a copy of The African Observer of Cape Town, South Africa, where the fight for the integration of the races was as bitter and furious as in any part of the U.S. or Canada. He says that there was no reason why a moderate approach could not be taken to resolve the issue, that he had always been in favor of a moderate approach and was "ready to help the Negroes or other races find their places in the sun. There is nothing to this second-class citizenship argument among the whites or Negroes, for the classes run to the Nth degree in both races." He believes in granting equal opportunities so that "non-white races do not have to produce a hybrid or a mongrel race", which to him made no sense, Christian or otherwise. He wonders where the argument had derived that there had been no segregation at the Cross, when the gospel of Luke had indicated that Christ and the two thieves were "thoroughbred Jews", with one of the thieves having mocked Christ by asking him to save himself and them if he was really King of the Jews and could perform miracles, while the other had reprimanded the thief, saying that they were being crucified for their crimes while Christ was without sin. Thereupon, according to the gospel, Christ had said that the thief who had exhorted Christ to save them was forgiven of his sins. The writer says that by amalgamating all the races into one, it would not assure peace on earth, as the Jews and Arabs were half-brothers but had never been able to get along with each other, and that everyone knew that family feuds were the meanest ever, and so it was with nations or peoples. He urges readers to think it over with common sense before it was "everlastingly too late."
A letter writer indicates that at recent commencement exercises at Carver College, she had seen a member of the City Council marching with the class as a student graduate, though not having spoken on the program, sung or danced, just marching, sitting and smiling. She wonders whether it derived from a sudden desire to be with the members of the darker race or from love for them, or as a publicity stunt to gain their favor and votes. "What some will think up and do to gain votes!"
She does not identify the member of the Council in question.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.