The Charlotte News
Friday, July 5, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that the Soviet Army this date had accused in the Red Star, the official newspaper of the Soviet Defense Ministry, headed by Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the four deposed Kremlin leaders of treachery and of threatening to undermine the Soviet Union's defenses. The campaign of denunciation of the four had picked up momentum at meetings and rallies throughout the Soviet Union this date. Lazar Kaganovich, one of the four, had been singled out for new and stronger accusations, which could foreshadow legal action against him. The Army and Navy had publicly announced their endorsement of Nikita Khrushchev for his ousting of the four, including also V. M. Molotov, former Premier Georgi Malenkov and Dmitri Shepilov. The Red Star said that the four men were guilty of "fractional activity" aimed at "undermining the basis of the Soviet Union's defensive capacity, to shake the unity of the people and Army, which would have been of benefit to the enemies of our state—the imperialists and aggressors." The article had also referred to "treacherous activities" by the four leaders. The Premier of the Ukrainian Republic of the U.S.S.R., Nikifor Kalchenko, had made the accusation against Mr. Kaganovich, saying that the latter had made "grave and unfounded accusations" against the leaders of the Ukrainian Republic while he had been Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party under the Stalin regime.
In Hong Kong, it was reported via Peiping Radio that Communist China had given full approval and support this date to the Soviet Union's purge of the leading Communists.
At the atomic test site at Yucca
Flat, Nev., a giant atomic explosion
At Fort Churchill, Manitoba, the second rocket firing in the U.S. test series seeking scientific information on the upper atmosphere had ended in failure early this date, after the first rocket had gone 160 miles in altitude the previous day.
In Marburg, West Germany, General Loris Norstad had taken command of the first German forces assigned to NATO.
In Hanau, West Germany, it was reported that a fire in a U.S. Army depot at nearby Grossauheim had been extinguished this date after destroying an estimated $400,000 worth of Army furniture, with no one injured in the hours-long battle against the flames.
At Suwon Air Base in South Korea, the first up-to-date U.S. Air Force planes to land in Korea since the end of the war in July, 1953, had landed this date, with their appearance being for display only, set to return to their base in Japan later this date.
In Bombay, India, official reports this date said that 20 persons had been drowned in the Godavari River when their boat had capsized 50 miles from Ahmednager, while ten other persons were able to swim to safety.
In Cameron, La., it was reported that Senator Russell Long of Louisiana had charged the Weather Bureau this date with being 12 hours off on its prediction for Hurricane Audrey, which had hit inland early the prior Thursday morning, leading people to stay in the small village hit hardest by the storm. The Senator said that the Bureau should have told people to get out the prior afternoon and he wanted to know when the Bureau had discovered it was more than 12 hours wrong and what was done about it. The local sheriff told the Senator that at 10 o'clock the previous night, the forecast had indicated there was no reason for alarm, that the hurricane would not reach the coast until the following afternoon. He also said that the Bureau had sought to whitewash the way it tracked the storm. A forecaster of the Bureau office in New Orleans had commented: "We stand on what we said at the time. Our advisories speak for themselves." In its 10:00 a.m. advisory on the day before the hurricane, the Bureau had predicted that the center would move inland late the following day, but that because of the size of the hurricane, gales would start along the Louisiana coast that night. It had indicated that tides were rising and would reach between five and eight feet, that "all persons in low exposed places should move to higher ground." The head of the Weather Bureau in Washington praised the way the hurricane had been tracked and said, "Unfortunately we cannot take the people by the hand and lead them out." Val Peterson, former Civil Defense director who had toured the area for the President, said, "Few if any people needed to die … because the Weather Bureau did a superb job…"
In Chatsworth, Calif., a brush fire had roared from the hills above the Los Angeles suburb this date to the edge of the San Fernando Valley's rich ranchlands, with a fire official indicating that 15 structures had been destroyed or damaged.
Traffic deaths across the nation had mounted this date at a pace which safety experts said would cause the death toll to reach the National Safety Council's estimate of 535 for the 102-hour Independence Day holiday, should the rate continue. Hundreds of highway accidents the previous night had resulted in what safety officials called "an alarming spurt" of traffic deaths as motorists packed highways heading homeward. The death toll from traffic mishaps stood at 159 this date, plus 96 who had died from drowning and 29 from miscellaneous accidents, for a total of 262, with no deaths thus far from fireworks. A spokesman for the Council said that if the pace continued, the estimate they had made would be attained, and he urged drivers and enforcement agencies to work together to try to hold down highway fatalities. If the estimate was reached, it would be a new record for the Fourth of July holiday, with the current record having been set at 491 during the holiday period of 1950. The worst drowning tragedy had occurred near Leesville, La., when six persons, ages eight through twenty, had drowned after five had panicked as they attempted to rescue one of the group.
In San Pablo, Calif., a woman's scalp was torn from her head after her long dark hair had become caught in a cabin cruiser's propeller shaft the previous day. The 50-year old woman of San Francisco had to wrap her head in towels to stop the bleeding, and was rushed in an ambulance to a hospital. Surgeons sent a deputy sheriff back to the boat harbor to cut the scalp skin free from the propeller shaft and rush it back to the hospital where surgeons stitched it back onto the woman's head, hoping that the operation would result in a successful healing and restoration of her scalp and hair. The woman had been inspecting bilges in the 30-foot cruiser when her hair became lodged in the propeller shaft, and the person piloting the boat heard her scream as he backed down the boat, then stopped the engine and cut her free, ran the boat to a dock and called an ambulance. The woman pleaded to get her to a hospital quickly and to keep her eyes covered as she felt much better with her eyes covered. The hospital reported that her condition was satisfactory.
In Edenton, N.C., two diesel locomotives and the front cars of a freight train had crashed through a 5.1-mile railroad trestle spanning the Albemarle Sound early this date, and two of the crewmen were reported missing while three others had been rescued. The general superintendent of the Norfolk Southern Railway said in Raleigh that progress in clearing the wreckage had been slow and that the cause of the trestle's collapse was still undetermined. Searchers had found one man within 20 minutes after the crash and his relaying of information quickly had led to a helicopter picking up one of the two other survivors from the darkness, with the third man having washed up on a beach clinging to a piece of piling. They were all reported to be in good condition and none had received serious injury. Few details of the accident were available because of the darkness and distance separating the engines.
Max Muhleman, News sportswriter, reports from Raleigh that a spinning race car had struck down four men working in an exposed pit area the previous day when the car had gone out of control on the main straightaway during a 250-mile stock-car race, with an estimated 15,000 grandstand spectators yelling a futile warning as the 1957 Chevrolet driven by Bobby Keck of Graham and a 1956 Ford driven by Roger Baldwin of Belmont, N.Y., had locked bumpers as they came out of the fourth turn at a speed of nearly 80 mph. Mr. Baldwin's car had begun to loop toward the inside of the track, where a 1957 Mercury was parked on the track side of a 3 1/2 foot concrete retaining wall where four High Point mechanics, disregarding the racers, were located. Mr. Baldwin's car crashed into the Mercury, sandwiching two of the men and hurling the other two several feet. Three of the men were admitted to the hospital with internal injuries and possible fractured pelvises, while the fourth was dismissed after receiving treatment for a knee injury. One of the three men admitted to the hospital was in fair condition the previous night but was reported to be satisfactory this date, with the other two also in satisfactory condition. In a recent series by Mr. Muhleman carried on the front page, titled "Death on Wheels", he had noted that working on race cars while parked on the track, while an accepted practice at most speedways, was dangerous.
Bob Quincy, News sports editor, indicates that the Charlotte Coliseum had been recommended this date for the site of the NCAA Basketball Eastern Regionals the following March 14 and 15. The recommendation had come in Colorado Springs from the NCAA Tournament Committee, which normally was followed, though the final decision would come on August 25 in Denver, when the ruling body of the NCAA held its annual meeting. Dr. Tom Scott, director of athletics at Davidson College, and John Belk, head of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce sports and recreation committee, had personally delivered the bid for Charlotte. They had departed Colorado Springs without a firm commitment and were glad to hear the good news when they returned. Dr. Scott would serve as tournament director when the announcement would be officially made, though there was still some chance that their hopes would be shattered. Louisville's Freedom Hall, with a seating capacity of 17,000, was tapped for the 1958 national finals, played in Kansas City the prior March, when UNC had defeated the University of Kansas in three overtimes 53 to 52. The other three regional sites which were recommended were at Lawrence, Kans., Lexington, Ky., and San Francisco. Charlotte would finally get the 1958 Eastern Regional semi-finals and finals, with the other four recommended sites for the regionals and finals also approved.
In Dallas, Tex., a barber had cut the hair of a man more than 1,476 times in 41 years, based on their agreement that he had cut the man's hair once every ten days since 1916. Whether there were any close shaves, as characterized the 1957 NCAA basketball tournament, was not indicated.
In Philadelphia, a volunteer fire company truck had been on its way to a July 4 parade when its 75-foot aerial ladder began to rise. As the three firemen fought frantically to control the ladder and stop the truck, traveling 20 mph, it tossed the men to the ground, injuring two of them slightly. Some 3,000 people flocked to the scene to watch other firemen dismantle the $20,000 truck with blowtorches to clear the road. Someone was emulating an old silent movie, perhaps out of appetence for the good ol' days long intruded and encumbered by the sounds of the real world.
On the editorial page, "Kremlin Coup: Stalin Won't Stay Buried" indicates that in the latest Kremlin shakeup of leadership, Nikita Khrushchev had again been credited with "burying Stalin", after the ouster of four Stalinists from the ruling Presidium.
The change supposedly presaged a civilizing trend in Russian foreign policy and thus was major good news. It also showed that the Kremlin was still plagued by internal differences which tended to make it less reckless in external affairs. But it suggests that whether it was good news in the sense that the upheaval had increased the chances for peace was far from certain, finding that in some respects, the "soft" line pursued by Mr. Khrushchev had been as provocative and dangerous to peace as the ruthless and uncompromising policy of the late Premier Stalin for the fact that the Khrushchev policy had made Communism appear to be less of a threat to the countries which the Kremlin was seeking to subvert.
It finds that Mr. Khrushchev's trouble was that he had buried Stalin before to no avail. When Hungary had sought its freedom the prior fall, Stalinist methods were revived quickly to crush the revolt and renew total Russian control. Although Mr. Khrushchev had made a great show of forgiving the break from the Kremlin of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia which had occurred during Stalin's reign, he also strongly rejected Tito's suggestion that there were "many roads to socialism."
It concludes that with or without the deposed Stalinists, Mr. Khrushchev's Kremlin remained the seat of a dictatorship seeking to perpetuate itself through dictatorial means, as dictatorships, regardless of who presided over them, had no other means of perpetuating themselves.
"It's Just One Worry after Another" finds that "reach for a pill" had become the common nostrum to anything troubling a person, from bad debts to a hard job to insomnia, nagging wives, grouchy husbands, irrepressible children, and so forth. First it had been sleeping pills and now it was tranquilizers. At last count, it finds, there had been 31 different kinds of tranquilizers, all guaranteed to soothe irritated nerves.
Dr. Robert Felix, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, had estimated that 30 percent of prescriptions now contained tranquilizers. He was becoming alarmed at the extensive use of them, as he pointed out in a recent interview with the staff of U.S. News & World Report, stating his belief that tranquilizers helped in mental cases, though not getting at the root of the illness. He said that there were 7,000 fewer patients in public mental hospitals the previous year than the year prior to that, that the decrease was largely the result of tranquilizers making it possible for many patients to be sent home to their families.
But he also stated that for the person who was not mentally ill, he believed there was no use for tranquilizers, stating that anxiety was not a comfortable thing, but that pressure on a job enabled the person to perform at his or her peak. He said that he, himself, felt those pressures and that every time he got up to make a speech, he got butterflies, that when he went before Congress during appropriations hearings, he got upset. But it was part of nature's way of preparing the person for combat or contest, or for any stressful situation, enabling performance at a higher level. The tranquilizers slowed down the nervous system such that the person did not worry about doing their best.
"The automobile driver doesn't worry about whether he can safely pass the truck on the curve—he just speeds ahead. The child—and they do give tranquilizers to children these days—doesn't try to get a better report card—he just does what comes naturally. The Air Force pulled its pilots off tranquilizers because they might not be concerned about landing the plane safely." We'll just mosey on along here and glide path on in along the white line on the moonbeam.
It concludes that tranquilizer addicts had a new worry, whether the drugs which brought them peace would rob them of ambition, caution, judgment, initiative and imagination, positing that if the problem worried them enough, they would then have the dilemma of whether to take another tranquilizer or stop taking them completely.
Stop it.
"Birds Should Never Smoke in Bed" indicates that many wives had chided their husbands regarding smoking in bed and the risk of fire from it.
Recently, at the Brooklyn library, the Fire Department had been hastily summoned to extinguish a fire in the library awning, it turning out after the investigation that the firemen had found the charred remnants of a sparrow's nest in the shelter of the housing into which the awning had been rolled, with the official report stating that a sparrow had been careless about cigarette butts, as the bird had apparently picked up a discarded cigarette to weave into its nest while the butt was still lit, causing the fire.
It states that the moral was: "Don't smoke in bed. Your wife may be right. A little bird may have told her what happens."
Stop it.
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "The Fading of the Caddy", indicates that three golf tournaments during the previous few days had combined to disturb the old-timers who remembered when the jigger was a popular stick. A country clubber had beat a dentist for the U.S. Open title and a group of fine young lads, mostly from the country club set, had battled for the city's junior crown. In addition, the woman who won the city's women's title again had not been a former caddy, but the women's tournament called to mind the days many years earlier when the caddy had been king.
In earlier years on a hot day, the caddies, to liven things up some, had each bet five dollars on their golfers, without telling the ladies or the tournament committee. The caddies had accorded the golfing favorite all of the usual courtesies. The ladies had become suspicious but neither cared to speak up, instead, both taking their good luck with a smile and hitting amazing recovery shots. As the tight match had progressed, the caddies had become bolder, with a shot hit into the edge of the rough over a slight hill winding up in the middle of the fairway. Drives often carried for 250 yards, and approaching the 18th green, the match was even. After each of the ladies hit their drives, the caddies had raced down the fairway, kicking the golf balls ahead of them, with a member of the tournament committee happening to see the play and being aghast. Later, however, after a brief discussion, the committee decided to let the scorecards stand, and that the match was as fair for one golfer as for the other. Even with the help of the caddies, the scores of the two women were not phenomenal.
"But, alas, today it is difficult to get a caddie with enough interest to bet on a match, or to work for a tip. A golfer's ball more often than not, when hit into the rough, stays there. Bad lies are commonplace. The golf cart has demoralized the few boys still willing to tote a bag and learn the game. The depths to which caddie caliber has sunk can be illustrated by this account of a match in which a local newspaperman, who shall be nameless, swung a significant stick:
"Totaling up his score for the last hole, a crucial one in the match, the golfer mentioned casually that he had taken six strokes by his calculation.
"'Oh, no, sir,' said his caddie helpfully. 'You took seven.'"
What's the point?
Drew Pearson states that Congress was in the process of reducing the power of the Supreme Court, which was specifically authorized by the Constitution, to a role subordinate to the FBI, which was not authorized by the Constitution. (The latter statement is not correct, as Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, and the Article I, Section 8, "necessary and proper" clause provide the necessary authority for Congress to create executive agencies and for the President to appoint executive officers "authorized by law" , thus giving authority to establish the FBI in furtherance of its stated powers and for the President to appoint its director, as authorized by the Congress in the enabling legislation, as with any executive department. Mr. Pearson refers to a bill to abrogate or limit the recent case of Jencks v. U.S. in which the Supreme Court, based on due process and the Sixth Amendment, held that the FBI had to disclose to a defendant information contained in confidential FBI reports when the Bureau had relied on the information contained in the report in the prosecution of the defendant, in that case the statements of confidential informant Harvey Matusow, who had subsequently recanted his testimony against Mr. Jencks and others for whom he had been paid by the Government for information regarding their supposed Communist associations.)
FBI lobbyist Lou Nichols had raised the issue after the Supreme Court ruling in Jencks, and Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming had discussed it in a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which it had become obvious that only he and Senator John Butler of Maryland had read the Jencks decision, while the others, who had not read it, had become convinced that the case opened FBI files to a fishing expedition.
When Mr. Pearson had phoned several members of the House Judiciary Committee to ask them if they had read the opinion, they admitted that they had not, and yet were rushing through a bill to override the Jencks decision, largely based on the FBI's objection. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who was in charge of the FBI, did not want to go as far as Mr. Nichols.
Mr. Pearson poses the question of what the power of the FBI was and how it was able to influence members of Congress and push a bill through Congress in a few days, when other bills took weeks or months, whether that power was based on efficiency or fear. He remarks that other members of the press were hesitant to discuss the issue openly as it paid to have the FBI as a friend, with its executives being helpful as news sources or as dangerous antagonists. He indicates that it was also beneficial for a Congressman to be friendly with the FBI, as it had files on every member, their private lives and their family. No member, if defeated or desirous of another job in government, could become a judge or hold Government office without FBI clearance.
Mr. Pearson's former partner, Robert Allen, and Mr. Pearson had been on the ground floor when the FBI was being built up in the early 1920's, and so he regards his position as enabling him to report objectively on the manner in which the FBI had become more powerful in Congress than the Supreme Court.
He indicates that the build-up dated back to the Lindbergh kidnaping in 1932 and the rash of crime that had occurred at the same time. Not long after the kidnaping, then-Attorney General Homer Cummings had invited Mr. Allen and Mr. Pearson to dinner, explaining that he was concerned about the kidnapings, proposing a remedy, that being to build up the FBI to the point where the crook considered the G-man to be invincible, that if the kidnaper knew that he or she was certain to be caught, the crime wave would end. He had asked them who in the newspaper world had enough information to build up the FBI in magazines, movies, radio and newspapers, to make it appear invincible. Out of that conversation had come the appointment of the late Henry Suydam, then-correspondent of the Brooklyn Eagle and later editor of the Newark News, becoming public relations expert for the FBI.
Mr. Suydam had done a great job for the Bureau. It had been severely criticized during the Harding Administration when it was under the directorship of William J. Burns, and was scarcely noticed during the Harding-Coolidge Administrations between 1921 and 1929. Then, Mr. Suydam began promoting it, went to Hollywood, sold movie producers on the idea that there was great drama within the FBI files, and magazines began producing stories by and about J. Edgar Hoover, making the Bureau famous overnight.
An amendment was attached to the Justice Department's appropriation bill that no funds could be paid to any assistant to the Attorney General who was not a lawyer, meaning that Mr. Suydam, not a lawyer, could no longer be paid and so he resigned. No one had asked how the amendment had been attached to the appropriation bill, but they knew by then that the FBI had learned to go it alone regarding publicity.
J. Edgar Hoover had done a good job during that time and before, but had not understood publicity. Since that time, he had come to understand that crime detection and publicity worked hand in hand.
When the Nazi saboteurs had landed on the U.S. coast in June, 1942, the FBI had gotten the credit for catching them. No newspaperman, including Mr. Pearson, had published the real truth, that the saboteurs had telephoned the FBI and had given themselves up. When Elizabeth Bentley, the confessed Russian agent, had wanted to confess her sins, the FBI again received credit. The press did not publish the fact, however, that initially the FBI had not wanted to talk to her, and for weeks had refused to believe her story. When young Bobby Greenlease had been kidnaped and killed in 1953, and his kidnapers were finally caught in St. Louis, prompting Mr. Hoover to rush out with an announcement that the FBI once again had cracked the case, few in the press published the real truth, that a St. Louis cop had actually caught the pair of kidnapers, subsequently executed.
Again, we are truncating the letters column to eliminate the purely local issues, with the first letter addressing an editorial of June 25, titled "A Plea and a Warning for City Council", which the writer endorses, and another, wondering, in light of the newly-appointed Highway Commission, how long it would be before those who lived on Route 27, Albemarle Road, would get adequate service for their tax dollars.
A letter writer responds to another letter writer, a Presbyterian minister of Charlotte, who had written in support of compulsory unionism as necessary to overcome the power of the owners and managers. This writer, in light of the laws at the Federal level protecting the right to collective bargaining, thinks that a law which would protect employees equally in joining or not a union would be justified.
A letter writer thanks the newspaper for its editorial column, suggests that when meter readers and their helpers asked for a raise at the Water Department, it never got to the City Council for some reason, finds that the problem was with underlings of the heads of the departments. "The ones who make a good pay can't feel for the little fellow. They just step on him."
A letter from a minister in Laurinburg finds that a freedom fighter was not a freedom fighter when his skin happened to be black, something which he had learned studying the Western world's reaction to two revolts in which the people of two countries had sought to break the chains of a foreign oppressor by force of arms, one of the nations having been in Europe, with white citizenry, who had become a nation of heroes and had the sympathy of the whole Western world, demanding that their oppressors be tried for genocide, while the other was Kenya, where the people were black, a nation "crushed with such cruelties by the British that, according to a British officer, the Devil had to look the other way." But no one had issued any protest regarding the latter. He says that the heroic people of Kenya had been called terrorists just as were the people of Algeria at present. "So if you are going to fight for your freedom and want to be called a heroic freedom fighter, you had better have a white skin or you will be called a terrorist."
Kenya and the atrocities of the Mau-Mau, presumably to whom the writer refers, may not be the best example of "freedom fighting" to cite.
Framed Edition
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