The Charlotte News
Tuesday, February 10, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Dulles, walking slowly but smiling, had checked into the hospital this date for a hernia operation. He entered the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center in the morning and was met by the hospital commandant, a surgeon who would perform the operation. The latter told newsmen that he expected that the surgery would occur either Friday or early the following week and said that there was no rush since it was not an emergency. The Secretary had undergone surgery for cancer of the lower intestine two years earlier and was treated for a colon inflammation the prior December and for a virus infection in January. The surgeon said that it would take about two weeks for Mr. Dulles to recuperate from the operation. He would die of cancer in late May.
The President said this date at his press conference that he believed that some American planes had been lured across the Iron Curtain borders by false radio signals. He said that American pilots had strict orders not to play a fox-and-hound game by flying along Soviet borders to gain intelligence information. He had been asked whether there had been occasions in which U.S. planes, such as the unarmed transport plane reportedly shot down by the Russians the prior September, had been trying to draw Soviet fighters into the air. The President replied that he had issued very strict orders sometime earlier against any such tactics and added that he believed that false radio signals occasionally had drawn U.S. planes over Soviet or satellite territory. He also said that Secretary Dulles was the most valuable man he had ever known in the foreign affairs field and that despite his new illness, he looked for no delay in negotiation between the Western allies and Russia regarding Berlin. He continued a cold shoulder to the informal invitation by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that he visit Russia, indicating again that the invitation had been put forth in the context of a speech and had been linked with criticism of U.S. leaders. Regarding employment, he said that despite a recent increase in joblessness, he looked for a business pickup later in the year, that the situation which had started with the previous year's recession was slow in improving and that there was still a good bit of spotty unemployment.
In St. Louis, it was reported that a
tornado
Other reports provide first-hand accounts of the tornado.
Near Indianapolis, it was reported that small tornadoes had hit the northern edge of Mitchell in southern Indiana and a small area south of Indianapolis this date, while the worst flooding since 1943 had been building up in the upper Wabash River Valley. More than 20 expensive homes had been damaged badly in a three-block suburban area 9 miles south of the city by a small twister which hit shortly before daybreak. There were no reports of injuries, although walls had been blown out of some homes.
In Columbus, O., it was reported
that the wholesale bartering of animals had been the top business at
Monday's convention opening of the Midwest Association of Zoological
Parks and Aquariums. The transactions by the directors of 32 of the
nation's zoos were similar to major-league club owners trading
baseball players. Three chimpanzees who could not learn to ride
bicycles or ponies, drive cars or turn cartwheels, had been traded
off by the director of the Detroit Zoo, saying: "They were
rookies who just didn't make the grade." They would be shipped
to a New York City dealer, who in turn would provide the director of
the Detroit Zoo three more chimpanzees for the spring training
season. The director of the soon-to-open Moline, Ill., zoo had picked
up a healthy 5,000-pound elephant for free, when the director of the
Philadelphia Zoo, where the 14-year old elephant valued at $3,500 had
been living, said that they had been trying to sell it, but that
there had been no takers. He said the elephant was not compatible
with their two young elephants and so he thought he would give her
away. The trading indicated that it took 24 baboons to trade for one
camel, a pair of kangaroos for a leopard cub and one giraffe for five
tigers. The bargaining session had begun with each zoo director
reading a list of his surplus animals and his needs, after which the
officials gathered in little huddles to do business. We hope that the three chimps who could not make the grade in Detroit make it in the Naked City. Perhaps one could learn how to operate an elevator efficiently, as they appear to be short one
In Granville, O., it was reported that the jail was locked up tight to keep people out. The mayor had booted eight transients out of the seldom used jail on Monday after they had become rowdy in a local restaurant. Legally, the jail could not be used for prisoners, as state fire laws required that a jailer be present when the jail was in use and Granville had no such person. Vagrants and transients had been using the two-cell jail.
Near Gastonia, N.C., it was reported that thieves had broken into a drugstore at nearby Lowell on Sunday night, ripping open a safe and stealing 200 quarter-grain morphine tablets. An attempt had been made to open a second safe but the thieves had taken nothing other than the narcotics. Thieves had stolen 900 quarter-grain morphine tablets from a doctor's office above the same drugstore the prior November.
In Asheboro, N.C., it was reported that four children, ages six through 11, and their mother had died early in the morning in a fire in their home. The father and a 13-year old son had escaped unharmed.
Bill Hughes of The News reports that parents of eight Mecklenburg County black students had filed suit this date seeking a Federal court order to abolish segregation in the County Schools. The suit specifically demanded that the eight children be admitted to Derita Elementary-Junior High School and North Mecklenburg High School. The eight had sought admission to the previously all-white County schools in the fall of 1957 and again in the fall of 1958. Defendants in the suit were the Mecklenburg County School Board, the North Carolina State School Board, and the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education, and their individual members. The suit was seeking that the local Board and all other North Carolina school boards be "forever restrained" from operating segregated or partially segregated schools. It also sought to restrain State agencies from "counseling and working in concert with the Mecklenburg board and other boards for the purpose of preventing desegregation or keeping desegregation to a minimum." Thurgood Marshall, general counsel for the NAACP, was among the attorneys for the defendants, including local attorneys. No date had yet been set for a hearing on the matter. A similar action had been filed in Greensboro. Mecklenburg County School superintendent J. W. Wilson had been informed of the action during the morning and he in turn had informed the Board at its regular meeting. Neither he nor any member of the board had any immediate comment.
During the 40 days of Lent, beginning the following day, Ash Wednesday, The News would publish the all-new "Lenten Guideposts" for 1959, 40 true, inspirational stories by 40 interesting authors, including such well-known movie and television personalities as Robert Young and June Lockhart, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, baseball pitcher Herb Score, nightclub singer Roberta Sherwood, star halfback Frank Gifford, RCA executive David Sarnoff, and others, telling of their own true-life stories of religion in action. The column had been a popular feature with readers of The News during the last Lenten season and had been popular with many leading newspapers throughout the country for the previous nine Lenten seasons. Each story in the 1959 series was new and had not appeared previously in the series.
Incidentally, speaking of driving Chevys to the levee, as Easter approaches this year, try and remember this cover art. (It is your trek to determine why we came upon that this date. It was not through Congressman Ford, though perhaps via
On the editorial page, "Budgeteers Shortchange the Colleges" finds that the colleges had been shortchanged by the hard-shelled capital improvement budget proposed to the General Assembly the previous night by Governor Luther Hodges, finding it a disappointing reaction to a developing challenge.
It indicates that a crisis of major proportions was facing State-supported institutions of higher learning. Classrooms were already crowded and enrollments were booming, with the worst yet to come.
During the decade between 1947 and 1957, enrollment in the colleges had increased by 16 percent, from 24,000 in 1947 to 28,000 in 1957, and in the ensuing decade, enrollments were expected to increase by 66 percent, from almost 30,000 to about 50,000. The latter estimates had been taken from the Governor's biennial message delivered to the Legislature the prior Thursday afternoon, but four days later, he and his economic advisers had taken the rather conservative capital improvements program of the State Board of Higher Education and made hash of it. Proper note had been taken of the long-range building needs, but the budgetmakers announced: "We feel that at the present time the state can undertake to provide for only a part of these projects."
It finds it regrettable. Six years earlier, the 20 million dollars proposed for State-supported institutions of higher learning would have been respectable. During the decade prior to 1957, the General Assembly had appropriated only 105 million for capital improvements for the colleges, helping them to get over one hump. But a bigger one lay just ahead.
Community colleges could be depended on to take some of the enrollment pressure off the state's large dormitory-type colleges. The value of community colleges was recognized in Raleigh and they had received a noteworthy salute in the Governor's biennial message the previous week. But the proposed new budget provided only 1.5 million dollars on a matching basis for buildings at Charlotte, Asheville and Wilmington. Despite the praise, the proper role of community colleges in the system of State-supported institutions of higher learning had not been properly appreciated, with some reappraisal needed.
It finds that higher education was not the only budget casualty, that many important projects had been cut completely by the budgetmakers. Unlike education, most could probably wait. But 4.5 million dollars had been included for a new home for the Legislature and $600,000 to help preserve the barrier islands on the Outer Banks. There was a clear-cut need for a new legislative building, but when the legislators measured that need against the educational crisis, it suggests, they ought put off the construction for another biennium. It agrees that every reasonable effort ought be made to save the Outer Banks. But other items would bear close scrutiny during the critical weeks and months ahead in the 1959 Legislature, with a mistake in judgment and in emphasis being costly since it met only every two years.
"Striped Pants Will Have No Wearers" indicates that Benjamin Franklin, the nation's first diplomat, had captivated the salons of 18th Century Paris in a coonskin hat. But as Chapel Hill's Phillips Russell had revealed in a popular mid-20's biography, the rustic hat had been a ruse. Dr. Franklin had been no orthodox bumpkin, but even so it had pleased the puritan self-delusion of Americana to continue thinking so.
It finds that Americans still flattered themselves with that nativist nonsense by trying to thrust bumpkinism against Babylon on foreign soil, or at least that had been the message of David L. Cohn, who had written in the January Atlantic of "Our Impoverished Diplomats". It suggests: "Swilling down our bourbon, scotch and vodka, devouring our hors d'oeuvres by bushels, we still yearn to cast our diplomats in the silly role of graceless rustics. Our politicians, many of them anyway, enjoy nothing better than prattling to the home folks about our striped-pants, cocktail diplomacy. Perhaps we are so run by the stock 3-B Hollywood image that we find alluring the American who, confronted by a wine list, cutely orders buttermilk."
Because of that fantasy, out of an 80 billion dollar budget, the diplomatic corps received a niggardly $700,000 to $800,000 or less for entertainment. The diplomats drove about in old hearses, discarded Cabinet cars and old wrecks cast off by foreign diplomats in Washington. Career diplomats went into debt, did without adequate education, medical and dental money for their families, to entertain on behalf of the wealthy United States.
The consul at Tabriz, Iran, recently had entertained the Shah while clad in morning clothes rented from a local tailor willing to wait a year to be paid. Professional or career diplomats could not ever aspire to top posts in London, Paris, Rome or other such places. The previous year, the bill for the Fourth of July party in London had exceeded the yearly entertainment handout. Those prestigious posts went to gilded amateurs, competent or careless, learned or stupid. They went to lush campaign contributors, business magnates who could not even speak French, to men in search of larks who did not know the name of the prime minister, to many who were incompetent to be ambassador to the next county.
It finds that all of that arose from the puerile illusion that the U.S., with ranch houses, moscow mules, three-tone ranch wagons, blaring "communications media", and progressive education, bore some precious affinity with the lost world of Benjamin Franklin, one-room schools, potbelly stoves, buckskins and teetotalism. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of diplomats were resigning and before long there would be no one to wear the striped pants, even if the Government paid for them, which it probably would not.
"The Clomps Fade with the Years" indicates that as taxes grew and April 15 drew nearer, it appeared to become more difficult each day to keep upper and sole together. One might take one's worn brogans back to the cobbler for a final treatment before consigning them to the junk heap.
But it finds that the brightest digit in the shoemaker's cash register was still the American teenager, as shown by five minutes at any local high school. A great portion of the students slowly glided in that "bovine stride that seems to signify rejection of the world. Many are able to embellish this by apparently wearing their shoes a half-size too large. Then they have command of the best shuffle of all, that of the dangling heel, which merits an extra clop on the pavement every time a foot is advanced."
It was hard on the heels, causing them to wear rapidly, a joy for every shoe repair person. They probably hoped secretly that the population might remain a teenager at heart for years to come, "clumping through life to the rapid erasing of heels." It finds that the age appeared to extend through college and then disappeared.
"It can only be advanced that when one pays for one's own fashions, including shoes, it makes for a brighter step—and it costs less money."
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "New Look for the 5:18?" indicates that it was almost like Christmas all over again, waiting for General Motors and O. Roy Chalk to unwrap the first of the 200 new buses of "radically different design", which Mr. Chalk had purchased for D.C. Transit Co. The unveiling would occur on February 13 in Pontiac, Mich., until which time Mr. Chalk had promised G.M. that he would be mysterious about the matter.
It indicates that almost anything would be an improvement over the "gear-grinding old smoke belchers that now ply the curb lanes bearing an arrogant warning for everyone else but unhappily failing to extend reciprocally most of the time."
Until the freeways were built, little could be done about speed, but riders would welcome whatever G.M. could produce to make the longer rides more pleasant. "Who knows, it might even build a bus from which a weary commuter could go straight to dinner and enjoy it! We wait—and hope."
Drew Pearson indicates that some important backstage by-play had taken place between the White House and the Senate just before the President had sent his proposed civil rights bill to the Congress, placing Secretary of Labor James Mitchell in the position of being the most vigorous and consistent champion of civil rights in the Administration. About 12 hours prior to the President sending the bill to Congress, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had phoned Bryce Harlow, the President's administrative assistant, to advise strongly against including the anti-discrimination employment commission in the new bill. Senator Johnson sincerely believed that a civil rights bill ought be passed and had introduced one of his own, milder than the proposal by the Administration, but argued that the President's proposed anti-discrimination in employment commission would be challenged by Southern Senators as an FEPC, probably provoking a filibuster. The Senator pointed to the Government Contracts Commission headed by Vice-President Nixon, which already ruled on racial and religious discrimination, stating that it was doing a good job and had handled more complaints in the previous year than in the four prior years, and suggested that the Administration leave well enough alone. He told Mr. Harlow that if it was money they wanted, the Senator would get them the money, but not to put it in the legislation. Mr. Harlow had immediately called General Wilton Persons who had replaced Sherman Adams as the President's chief of staff. General Persons said that it was "Jim Mitchell's baby", and that he would talk to him.
General Persons, who hailed from Alabama, had been opposed to a strong civil rights stand, but felt that Secretary Mitchell had the last word on the proposal by Senator Johnson and informed the Secretary of Labor of the latter's tempting offer. Senator Johnson was a man who delivered and Mr. Mitchell knew that money for the present Government Contracts Commission would be forthcoming. Nevertheless, he said no to removing the anti-discrimination employment commission, indicating that it had to stay in the bill.
It did remain in and the following day, Senator Johnson, though his advice had been ignored, said that he would do his best to pass an adequate civil rights measure.
Robert C. Ruark, in Meru, Kenya, tells of it being strange that he and his friend, Harry Selby, had now passed through territory which was considered nearly no-man's land five years earlier when a full-scale war was being waged by the British against the Mau Mau gangsters who terrorized Kenyans, both black and white. Six years earlier, the war had not yet been declared but the killings had started, including the massacres during Christmas and New Year's in which thugs announced that they "were wanting a dozen heads" to celebrate the Yuletide and had 13 by New Year's Day. One wore a pistol upon entry to a town or city, and looked at Africans known all their lives with some passing distrust. Guns and ammunition were guarded assiduously as losing them meant a heavy fine and generally a jail sentence.
He remembered the day they had killed a large elephant on safari, not so much for the fact of it but rather that the safari news that night reported the massacre of an entire white family at Kinagop.
Kenya had been nervous and edgy, and remained so at present, but no longer from the Mau Mau or K.K.M. or any other secret society of thugs and terrorists. It had become a sudden testing ground for race relations in Africa with the constant threat of Africans demanding more than equality with white settlers in Africa. The sophisticated Kenya Africans, led by Tom Mboya, a brilliant young Luo whose strength lay in trade unions, wanted what Mr. Mboya, recent chairman of the Pan-African meeting in Accra, called "undiluted" democracy, which meant to Mr. Mboya vote for vote, black, Asian and white. With six million Africans to 60,000 whites, the ratio was 100 to 1.
To the present, a recent plan for multiracial government had ended in disaster, with the first elected Africans walking out of the Legislative Council en bloc and the Indians threatening to do likewise.
Kenya occupied an unusual position in the "Africa for the Africans, white man scram" slogan which Mr. Mboya had set forth at Accra, as it was in the middle between self-governing Ethiopia to the north, self-governing Ghana to the west, where black supremacy was the rule, and the Union of South Africa to the south, which held its rigid white supremacy by law and force.
Kenya, flanked by Uganda and Tanganyika, was the trial case for the future, as white settlers there believed that they were the true natives of Africa and wanted to hold their lands and homes. There had been an effort for peaceful coexistence between people of different colors and cultures, but the fresh firebrands among the more sophisticated natives, fired by Ghana's independence, upheaval in the Middle East and Radio Cairo's poison, did not want coexistence, peaceful or otherwise.
He indicates that he uses "sophisticated" advisedly because the politically-minded African was in the minority of city and suburb dwellers. The nomads he would be seeing the following day, the scattered tribesmen, did not know Mr. Mboya and had never heard of the Legislative Council, were interested mainly in water and the welfare of their goats.
"It will not be the bush native who throws Central Africa into turmoil, but it will be the majority of unsophisticated tribesmen who will suffer if the white man is suddenly thrust out and the rule of this country left to the opportunists, who have in the past generally proven more ruthless against their own people than the more benevolent white colonist."
There was much talk in Kenya and England regarding the troubled times on the horizon, possibly a reason for the imminent visit of the Queen Mother during the current month, serving as a barometer of the tempo of the times, as already there was a running public battle between two African factions as to whether the Queen Mother would be bucketed or given the silent treatment or met with spurious enthusiasm. He thus finds it to be an interesting month for Kenya and he was glad to be present for it.
A letter writer from Linville Falls
indicates that a statement frequently made by segregationists about
the increasing number of Southerners who urged compliance with the
law was that they did not speak for the South and did not stand for
what the South stood for. The segregationists, he suggests, were no
doubt entirely correct. In the South, there were some 30 million
people of many colors and descriptions, having many gradations and
shadings in their beliefs. He thinks it would be quite presumptuous
for anyone to pose as a spokesman for such a conglomerate. He wonders
for whom the segregationists spoke, indicating that it was surely not
for the millions of black citizens or for the states of Kentucky,
Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Oklahoma and the District of
Columbia, all of which were peacefully desegregating their schools.
They did not speak for the Catholics, the Unitarians and the Quakers,
or for the divinity schools of the South, nor for any one of the
great denominations which had spoken on the issue. The
segregationists did speak for the dwindling number of resistant
states, who followed a policy of suspension of constitutional
guarantees, as effectively as if proclaimed by a dictator. "The
fruits of the policy have been cross-burnings, assaults, bombings and
murder." While the advocate of law observance could claim to
speak for no one except himself, he had to derive comfort from the
fact that the Supreme Court, both political parties, the U.N., all
religious bodies, labor unions and the overwhelming weight of
informed opinion throughout the world, condemned legalized
segregation. The Southern stand was in opposition to such imposing
and respected forces. He indicates that another statement often heard
from segregationists was that the opposition was disloyal to "our
Southern way of life." He suggests that there were many features
of Southern life worth preserving, the tradition of hospitality,
urbanity, good manners, neighborliness, mastery of parliamentary
procedure, an appreciation of the leisurely and the informal, and a
scale of values which minimized the sharp commercial instinct. But
when the segregationists used the expression, "our Southern way
of life", they never seemed to mean any of those things, only
referring to a system of segregation, a legally enforced caste
system. He indicates that the right of custom to survive unchanged
depended on how it impacted humanity. "Society has progressed as
it has had the wisdom and courage to abandon outworn institutions.
The only way of life worth preserving is one which is always subject
to change
A letter from the North Carolina Malt Beverage Control Institute in Raleigh indicates that on January 19, the North Carolina distributors of malt beverages, in one of a series of newspaper advertisements supporting State legal control of alcoholic beverages, had reprinted an editorial from a North Carolina daily newspaper which commented on an address made by Rev. R. M. Hauss, executive director of the North Carolina Allied Church League, to a group of Methodist ministers at Lake Junaluska in September, 1958. The quoted editorial had said in part: "He declared that any state can properly control alcoholic beverages if the people are determined and aggressive, and he urged the conferees to work for control legislation in their own communities." Since the appearance of the advertisement, the League had protested that the sentence, "Any state can properly control alcoholic beverages if the people are willing," was not made as an endorsement of the state ABC laws for legal sales, but with specific reference to bootlegging and alcoholic beverage advertising. It indicates that while the beer distributors had reproduced the editorial in good faith, they nevertheless apologized both to the minister and to the League if the quotation was misleading and not representative of their views.
A letter writer indicates that there were 13 living religions in the world at present, that Gandhi had been one of the greatest statesmen who had ever lived to serve his people, and when asked about a specific religion, had replied: "I believe in all religions." The writer says that he had come to agree with him and that if the reader only believed in his or her own religion, then they should read some of the others and would probably come to realize that all religions were simply a way for all humanity to try to better themselves and to lead a more moral life. He quotes from Confucianism, "From the Chung Yung": "To fulfill the law of our being is what we call the moral law. The moral law when reduced to a system is what we call religion." He quotes from Christianity the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." He finds that to be a religion within itself and the very foundation of all religions.
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