The Charlotte News
Thursday, February 5, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date had called on Congress to strengthen civil rights laws by making it a Federal crime to use force or threats of force to obstruct court orders in school desegregation cases. As part of a seven-point legislative package, the President said that the proposal would give the Government a valuable enforcement power to deter mob violence and such other acts of violence or threats which sought to obstruct court decrees in desegregation cases. The program had been labeled by the President in advance as a moderate one designed not to raise temperatures. But it might not please either Southern segregationists or Northern liberals of both parties in every respect. The package provided for additional investigative power for the FBI anent crimes involving destruction or attempted destruction of schools or churches and made it a Federal offense to engage in interstate flight to avoid detention or prosecution, provided authority for the Attorney General to inspect Federal election records and required the preservation of such records for a reasonable time to help preserve the right to vote as "the keystone of democratic self-government." It also provided temporary authority to provide for educating children of members of the military services whose schools had been closed because of integration troubles. It would extend for two years the life of the Civil Rights Commission, created in September, 1957 pursuant to the Civil Rights Act, but not having gotten underway until the prior fall because of held up appointments to the Commission. Without the extension, the Commission would automatically expire in September, 1959. It would also convert the committee on government contracts to a commission on equal job opportunity on a statutory basis. Presently, nondiscrimination in employment under Government contracts was required only by presidential executive orders rather than under specific statutes enacted by Congress. Reportedly being eliminated from the proposed program at the last minute, though the Vice-President had supposedly wanted it, had been a proposal to allow the Federal Government to intervene more directly in school integration suits, to have been done via suits filed by the Attorney General in instances in which the Government could prove that individuals were fearful of reprisals if they sued as individuals.
In Herleshausen, Germany, it was reported that Communist East Germany this date had released a U.S. Army pilot and four other American soldiers held in East Germany for several weeks. The 27-year old American pilot from Washington had parachuted into East Germany on December 3 after he had become lost and his small plane had run out of gas. The four soldiers had disappeared in Berlin during November and December of the previous year. The five returnees had crossed into West Germany at the frontier post on the border of Communist East Germany at Herleshausen shortly after noon this date. The pilot looked pale, wearing Army fatigues and a felt cap, but said that he felt fine.
At Fort Bragg, N.C., it was reported that General George C. Marshall, 78, who had suffered a mild stroke three weeks earlier, continued in satisfactory condition.
In Indianapolis, Ind., it was reported that for the first time in a week and a half, a mother and father were together with their family again. They had been taking turns going to jail, but were tearfully reunited on Wednesday evening when the mother was freed from jail. She had been there since Sunday, serving her shift in an unusual alternating week sentence imposed by the local juvenile court judge when they did not pay the $21 per week support of their son at a private correctional school near Wabash. The couple still had to return to court to decide how much they could contribute to keep the boy, 12, in the private institution. He had been sent there originally on a theft charge to avoid contact with older offenders at the State school.
In Houston, it was reported that a former airman from Michigan and his British-born wife had sought to sell their eight-year old twin boys for $500, but that the prospective buyers had been undercover investigating juvenile officers, resulting in the arrests of the parents. Police the previous day filed charges against the couple, both 24, after the undercover officers, posing as a married couple, purchased the boys, complete with a bill of sale, with marked money. The man said that he had been unable to obtain a job since his release from the Air Force. The wife said that they were doing it for the good of their children, that it "would have torn my heart completely, but it would have meant giving the kids a home and things they needed." The boys said that they never wanted to leave their mother but that their parents said that they had to do so to enable them to have a better life. The police had begun an investigation after receiving a tip that the couple was trying to give the twins away.
In Raleigh, it was reported that Governor Luther Hodges had presented to the Legislature a program to keep the state growing, including needs for public education, economic development, health and welfare, natural resources and other fields. He said that some might consider it a program too ambitious for a Governor dealing with his last session of the General Assembly, but that his approach was based entirely on his desire to do the best he could for the state and its people in the time he had left as Governor. There was little in the program which surprised lawmakers as it was drawn largely from recommendations of study commissions whose reports had already been made public. An exception had been a proposal to give the Governor authority in times of unemployment to extend for an additional 13 weeks the period for payment of jobless benefits, the Governor indicating that it would aid in dealing with periods of prolonged unemployment such as that experienced in 1958. Some of his other recommendations included repeal of the civilian absentee ballot law and a shift of the days for party primaries from Saturdays to Tuesdays, consideration for a mandatory polio vaccination law, a program to preserve the ocean barriers of the Outer Banks, a 75-cent hourly State minimum wage, and a requirement for pre-admission tests at State-supported colleges. He also asked the Legislature to study carefully highway safety recommendations from the Motor Vehicles Department, welfare proposals which the State Board of Public Welfare would offer, and legislation to provide for constructive employment for prisoners. He left money details for his budget message, which was scheduled for the following Monday evening.
Julian Scheer of The News writes an open letter to the General Assembly, inviting them to Charlotte to meet during the legislative session, the invitation ultimately being extended on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, arranged by a committee headed by Col. Paul Younts. The Chamber wanted them to come to Charlotte between March 4 and March 8 when the Ringling Brothers Circus would be performing at the Coliseum. The Chamber president had said that the trip would give them the opportunity to observe "some of the problems of metropolitan areas in North Carolina." Plans called for a short session, probably at Ovens Auditorium or in the Coliseum, enabling local schoolchildren to have an opportunity to see the lawmakers at work. Mr. Scheer suggests that they might even pass a local bill. He says they had the money to foot the bills for them and that while it would cost plenty, the Chamber felt the whole idea was worth it. "Come see how the other half lives. We've just got one head, too. You'll see that those rumors about Mecklenburgers aren't always true."
Emery Wister of The News reports that an organization to promote Charlotte's downtown area had been formed during the morning with Charles Crutchfield, vice-president and general manager of the Jefferson Standard Broadcasting Co., as temporary chairman. He had been selected by over 200 businessmen and civic leaders following a report by nominating committee chairman, M. W. Crosland. The meeting had been held at the Carolina Theater.
In Gastonia, N.C., it was reported that a 78-year old woman from Bessemer City had been killed and six persons injured when an automobile had pulled from a side road and collided with a milk delivery truck in heavy fog this date. The 18-year old driver of the car had been injured critically and five others in the car were less seriously injured. The woman who had died was also a passenger in that vehicle.
In Salt Lake City, a State legislator, Representative Wallace Peterson, said that he would introduce a measure this date which would call for cigarette packages to be marked with the warning: "Contents of this package contain poisonous ingredients." He modeled the proposed law on one introduced in the South Dakota State Senate providing for placing a skull and cross bones on cigarette packages.
On the editorial page, "One Crying Need Outshouts the Others" indicates that as the legislative session opened, Governor Luther Hodges, a mixed assortment of governmental study commissions, private pressure groups and individual legislators all wanted their particular issue to receive top priority, always the case in a legislature which only met once every two years.
It finds that the state minimum wage proposal was one which could not wait. A bill which would set a 75-cent wage floor had been among the first legislative proposals introduced as the House had convened. It was sponsored by Representative Dwight Quinn of Cabarrus County, essentially the same proposal, with a few modifications, as a bill defeated by the House in 1957 after passing the State Senate.
Pressroom cynics already were predicting that the bill would fail again. It finds that the arguments against a decent state minimum wage were some of the best which had ever come out of the 19th Century, but had lost much of their Old World charm.
The proposal of Mr. Quinn would guarantee workers a minimum of only $30 per week, gross, before Social Security, taxes and everything else had been deducted. It would even exempt workers in agriculture, domestic service, salesmen on commission, those whose pay was in the form of tips and gratuities, as well as many others.
The state had 1.1 million people employed in non-agricultural work at present and about 600,000 of them were covered by the Federal minimum wage law because they were employed in interstate commerce. Of the half-million North Carolinians not covered by the Federal law, nearly half worked in the state's retail trade and service-industry establishments and had no wage protection. Thirty-seven percent of those employees earned in 1957 less than 75 cents per hour.
Thus, the proposed minimum wage would help North Carolina obtain higher purchasing power for its people, increase its very low per capita income and build a healthier future for the state as a whole. It thus urges the legislators not to turn their backs again on those social and economic realities.
"Everybody Else Has a Pressure Group" indicates that the Cincinnati Enquirer had tweaked the noses of North Carolina newsmen recently, causing considerable anguish in the "corn pone belt", having to do with the annual Dixie Classic basketball tournament held each December in Raleigh. The University of Cincinnati the prior December had come to the tournament ranked number one in the nation but had left in a disheveled condition following two jolting defeats.
Dick Forbes of the Enquirer had stated: "It is doubtful Cincinnati will ever go back to the Dixie Classic as long as the racial problem exists. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say as long as the North Carolina press keeps it a hot potato." He had accused North Carolina newsmen of taking "digs" at Cincinnati's All-American Oscar Robertson and other black players in the tournament.
It had raised eyebrows in North Carolina. "Not being sociologists, Tar Heel sportswriters profess boredom when confronted with the intricacies of ancestry. The only thing that really seems to move them is performance and they were hurt when it was suggested that their failure to appreciate Cincinnati's performance was mistaken as a 'dig' at young Robertson's race."
It wonders whether a lot of Americans were not getting overly sensitive and unreasonably protective when it came to race, not only regarding sports but also in the editorial columns, the "walnut cubicles" of Hollywood, the television studios and even in the "steamy prose" of much contemporary literature.
Recently, tv critic John Crosby had raised a similar point in a piece on "tolerance dramas". He had written: "For a score of years now, the only permissible villains have been white Protestants of Anglo-Saxon stock. During the war, of course, we could also sneer at Germans and Japanese and since the war it's been open season on the Russians. Mostly, though, the bad guys are simply ourselves. Everyone else has a pressure group. Brown, yellow or black-skinned folk are automatically virtuous—or, if there is a fall from virtue, there are strongly extenuating circumstances, usually intolerable social pressures. The result is that writers are forced to be fundamentally dishonest in their perceptions of people of any other color or creed than white and Protestant."
It finds the point well taken and asks why people could not be simply represented as people and not as "plaster saints". "Meanwhile, we've been moping around all day trying to think of something new to tolerate. We think it's going to be the Cincinnati Enquirer."
Cincinnati would wind up number three in the NCAA Basketball Tournament in March, as they would the following year, the senior season of the "Big O" Oscar Robertson. In each of the next two seasons, 1961 and 1962, Cincinnati would win the national championship.
But insofar as the plaint of Mr. Crosby, he appears to have been myopic, ignoring, for instance, "Zorro"
"A Change of Pace for Hibernating Fans" suggests that every year about this time, a break from the dreary weather was provided by the first reports from baseball's organized minds, and already the stories had begun, as hibernating fans perceived it as surely as the twinges from a divining rod.
The general manager made his report. "The Blasters look better this year. If old Knucklehead can deliver on the mound, and if Zip Clabber can find his batting eye with those new contact lenses, watch our smoke!" It finds that such eternal optimism was the beauty of organized baseball, mattering little whether Knucklehead left his arm at home five years earlier or that Zip's batting average would maroon itself in the 150 regions. They could get better. That made for brighter thoughts, and before the first pitch, everyone was a winner.
"Now if the Charlotte Hornets get some lefthanded chunkers this season and one good slugger…"
A piece from the Asheville Citizen-Times, titled "That Excess Weight", finds that according to a pair of eminent investigators, Dr. Albert Stunkard, psychiatrist at the University School of Medicine, and Mavis McLaren-Hume, M.S., member of the staff of the New York Hospital nutrition department, men did a consistently better job of losing weight than did women. They had reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine that three separate studies showed that "a far higher percentage of men than women were able to achieve the modest success of a 20-pound weight loss," and that the discrepancy between the results was even more pronounced if 40 pounds was considered as the reducing target. They had offered no reason for the greater success of the males.
It suggests, however, that men were naturally more determined than women, that men were naturally more anxious to look well than women, and that husbands had wives to blame and so would see to it that weight came off if a doctor said it needed to do so, indicating that the reason that the latter rule did not work in reverse would need another investigation by 17 underweight psychiatrists and 17 overweight nutritionists.
Drew Pearson indicates that the President had been allowing some interesting tidbits to drop at his breakfasts with Republican Congressmen, ranging from portrait painting, the balancing of the budget, to the sometimes dour visage of former President Herbert Hoover. Regarding the budget, he had let it be known that he was not as optimistic in private about budget-balancing as he had been stating publicly. Republican House leader Charles Halleck of Indiana had precipitated the President's views on the budget by reminding him that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to thwart Democratic demands for greater spending for missiles and defense. He said that here would also be trouble holding down Congressional spending for housing, rivers and harbors, flood control, and farm price supports.
One breakfast guest had said that everyone in Congress wanted to economize at the expense of the others and that no one was willing to sacrifice his own pet projects, the chief problem in keeping the budget balanced.
The President had not appeared to appreciate that philosophy, saying that Congress was out of tune with a recent Gallup poll showing that the general public favored cuts all down the line in non-defense spending and that the public wanted the budget balanced.
Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts had informed the President that she had been so anxious to be on time for the breakfast that she did not wait for her alarm clock to go off but had awakened at 3:30 a.m. She asked him whether his efforts to encourage the arts, by giving painting kits to the White House staff, had been successful, as she saw no evidence of it around the White House. The President had replied that, except for his own amateur efforts, he had not heard of any budding artists among the White House staff. He had indicated that while on the subject, they might have observed the new portrait of former President Hoover in the White House. He said that the old portrait, which had been present when he became President, had never appeared to him as a true likeness of Mr. Hoover and so it had recently been removed. Mr. Pearson notes that the old portrait of the former President had been painted when he looked as if he was worrying over the depression which had marred the latter days of his Administration.
R. H. Shackford, Scripps-Howard Newspapers correspondent, in the fourth in a series of reports on Communist China, indicates that the Communist Chinese, in their latest new trick, planned ultimately to abolish money for the people to use by supplying the people everything which the State decided they needed. In that way, according to Mao Tse-tung, there would be a Communist utopia without personal greed. But it would also deprive the individual of any opportunity to exercise choice and make it possible for the regime to suppress "inappropriate desires". The path to that goal had started with a "wage-plus-supply" system, whereby in the more advanced communes, the member received a tiny "wage" in money and the remainder of the basic necessities "free" from the commune, including housing, food, clothing etc. That system was based on the Marxist principle that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The Bolsheviks in Russia had never tried to implement such a system, even if continually promising it and Vladimir Lenin having once promised "free" bread.
Some of the Chinese communes already included seven major items in the "supply" portion of the system, food, clothing, medical care, education, housing, marriage and funerals. Few peasants ever had that much "guaranteed" to them in the past and so even the smallest additional token "wage" had impressed many, a scheme which wooed many peasants into the communes "voluntarily".
Mr. Shackford reminds, however, of how Mao had wooed so many followers by promising to distribute the land among the peasants, which he had done in 1949-50, but then had taken it back from them to form collectives in 1955. Now, he was taking it from the collectives, where the peasants retained small private plots, and giving all of it to the communes, the agents for the absentee landlords in Peiping.
Peiping's own statistics disclosed that "more than four yuan per laborer per month", the equivalent of about $1.60, was actually getting to the people, with everything else going to the central regime.
Once communes were organized to supply everything, even the small amount of wages in money would be abolished. At present, however, the ambitious peasant or worker theoretically could earn a bonus under a "bonus and punishment" system, which imposed punishment for laggards. To qualify for the bonus, the worker had to fulfill certain requirements: being obedient to leadership and working hard and enthusiastically; filling or overfulfilling production quotas "with regard to quality"; loving and protecting public property; fighting "against bad men and bad things at all times and in all places"; thinking progressively; studying hard and playing a leading role in the technical innovation movement; and working at least 28 days per month. The punishment provided that unenthusiastic workers, absentees, etc., would be "educationally criticized", issued "basic wages at a discount", or demoted in their wage grades.
The regime claimed great success for that system, "a great event without parallel in history for the peasant to have free meals for his family and regular income… When wages were distributed for the first time, some of the peasants were moved to tears."
But Mr. Shackford indicates that all was not serene, as hardly an official document or statement had been issued which did not harangue the poor and lower middle-class peasants to "wage unceasing war" against the upper middle-class and rich peasants and landlords, that is, the remnants of capitalism.
Mr. Shackford indicates that the following day he would examine Moscow's strained silence on the "left deviationism" of the Communist Chinese communes.
A letter writer hopes that the legislators would be fighting as hard for the perimeter residents of the Charlotte area as they had during the last session. He indicates that he had lived in the city for ten years and was presently buying a home in the perimeter area, but was still interested in the affairs of the city. He says that they were not particularly dissatisfied with what had happened but wanted to have a chance to have someone represent them in the plans which were being formulated for them.
A letter writer indicates that Charlotte voters elected the City Council for public service, but received a 5 to 1 action. All police officers wanted was to get together for some decent working conditions, but their union had been outlawed. He thinks new personnel were needed on the Council and hopes that a new Council would be elected in May which would have good will for City employees.
A letter writer, who remains anonymous, indicates that for the previous three months he or she had been a member of a group of 12 to 14 people who called themselves the Recovery Club, meeting every Friday night in the main Public Library for the purpose of training themselves in the practice of mutual help and self-help, with the goal of mental health. They learned to recognize and handle the symptoms of their nervousness, with tension, fear, fatigue, panic and outbursts of temper being some of those symptoms. They learned how to handle them and became less intense. The writer says that he or she was visually handicapped which complicated performing activities in life as his or her work depended on normal eyesight. The help forced on him or her caused unhappiness and produced feelings of tension, frustration and resentment. But the Recovery Club had enabled him or her to learn to look at the handicap objectively and no longer count the things unable to be done but to concentrate on what could be done, to realize that the person did not need to be perfect but could be satisfied with reasonable achievements, as sighted people sometimes made mistakes, such as spilling a glass of juice or stumbling. Tension, nervousness, sensitivity and fear had undermined the person's efforts toward adjustment, achievement and preservation of mental health, and the person was learning how to overcome those debilitating symptoms. The writer encourages others to come to their meetings on Friday night.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., indicates that despite the newspaper's "evasive, narrow remarks" in its editorial of January 26, Americans owed a debt of gratitude to Dr. E. Merrill Root of Earlham College in Indiana, who had published Brainwashing in the High Schools, a study of 11 American history books used as text or collateral reading in many high schools, showing how the "Marxist-inclined authors attempt to interpret the history of our country in terms of materialistic dialectics." He believes that the newspaper had been unfair to the work, as shown by the small amount of space devoted to it. Because Dr. Root was a conservative, he believes, the "liberal" newspapers did not have space enough to provide the work a fair shake. There was only space enough for "marveling over the literary talent of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and his ilk."
A letter writer welcomes Alaska as the new 49th state and wants to send the Civil Rights Commission to it, to show the same courtesy shown Alabama recently. He also wants to show the same courtesy shown to Arkansas when 1,100 paratroopers had been sent to it in 1957 to ensure peaceful integration of Central High School in Little Rock, believing that such paratroopers could help integrate all of the Eskimos. He urges not sending Jimmy Hoffa to Alaska to get the dogsled drivers to join the Teamsters Union. He hopes that Alaskans would discover new gold and send it to Washington so that the huge national debt could begin to be paid off.
A Pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which A Piercing Question Is Asked While A Difficult Rhyme Is Being Achieved:
"Didst thou have fun when thou
wentist
Last to visit with thy dentist?"
At least it uses the correct tenses,
Not, for instance, "No, he gone
to play tennis."
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.