The Charlotte News
Wednesday, June 10, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Russia had proposed to the three Western powers a one-year moratorium in the Berlin crisis, provided that the West would agree to begin working out a German settlement on Soviet terms. The U.S. spokesman for the group, Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Berding, had said at a press conference that the proposal, which would place the West under a new deadline, was "totally unacceptable" and that it must have been introduced by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko "in order to bring about the breakdown" of the Big Four conference. Mr. Berding made public the Soviet proposal put forward at a secret session on Tuesday, and added that "obviously there is no point in going on with the conference on the basis of these proposals." Mr. Gromyko, after his move at the secret session at the residence of Secretary of State Christian Herter on Tuesday, had obtained agreement to a formal Big Four session this date, serving notice that he would present the proposal there, meaning that he would make it public. Mr. Herter, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville had sought a written statement of the plan but Mr. Gromyko had refused. Mr. Berding said that the proposal "reintroduces a time limit, one year, into the Berlin situation and also reintroduces the element of threat." The Soviets had originally proposed the previous November 27 a six-month time limit which the West had referred to as an ultimatum. Mr. Berding said that the proposal as presented by Mr. Gromyko indicated that: "The Soviet Union would accept the temporary maintenance of certain Western occupation rights in West Berlin for a one-year period. During this period an all-German committee of the [Communist] German Democratic Republic and the [West] German Federal Republic on a parity basis should work out the problem of reunification, agree on the principles of a peace treaty and facilitate the development and broadening of contracts between the GDR and GFR." Mr. Gromyko, said Mr. Berding, had declared that the one-year time limit was necessary to prevent the West German Government from delaying indefinitely the successful completion of a peace treaty.
In Bonn, West Germany, it had been reported by informed sources of the Christian Democratic Party after the economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, had met behind closed doors with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for an hour and 45 minutes this date that they had failed in a private talk to settle their quarrel over the Chancellor's insistence on remaining in his position. The Chancellor had previously announced that he would not again run as Chancellor and would step down at the end of his term in favor of the largely ceremonial role as president. The discussion would continue later this date in a full meeting of the 271 Christian Democratic members of the West German parliament, the Bundestag. The main point of controversy unresolved was reported to be that Mr. Adenauer was supposed to have said to Mr. Erhard that the latter was unable to lead West Germany at this critical time because of his attitude toward foreign affairs, Mr. Erhard being the successor in waiting for Mr. Adenauer. Mr. Erhard had arrived the previous night from the U.S. angrily declaring that he was determined to kill the "historical lie" that he was unfit for the new role. Informants said that Mr. Adenauer had invited him to the Chancellery. Mr. Adenauer would remain as Chancellor until October, 1963, at which time he would be succeeded by Mr. Erhard.
It was reported this date by acting Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss and by Secretary of Labor James Mitchell that employment had risen by a million in May to a record level of 66.016 million for the month, with unemployment having fallen by 238,000 to 3.389 million. They said that the figures reflected further substantial improvement in the nation's job picture. An unusually large increase in factory employment had accompanied a May seasonal rise in farm work. The May total employed had been the largest number of Americans with jobs for any May. It compared with an all-time previous peak of 67.221 million, set in July, 1957. The new figures represented a drop of about 1.5 million among the unemployed during the previous year. The unemployment total was about 700,000 higher, however, than it had been in May, 1957. The ratio of unemployment to labor force had declined in May to 4.9 percent, compared with 5.3 percent in April and about 6 percent during the previous winter. It was the first time that the unemployed ratio had dropped below 5 percent since November, 1957. Factory worker earnings averaged $90.32 per week in May, representing the first time in history that the average had surpassed the $90 mark. Earnings among durable goods workers averaged $96 and among soft goods workers, $80.
In Washington, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this date had provided the Federal District Court with powers to enforce its clean-up orders against Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa and other officers of that union. In an unanimous decision, the Court said that the District Court had been within its rights in modifying a consent order which had terminated litigation to bar Mr. Hoffa from taking office. Under the order, Mr. Hoffa was allowed to take office, but a three-member board of monitors had been set up to watch over the union's affairs and make recommendations for restoring democracy in the union. The Circuit Court said that the recommendations of the monitors were not self-enforcing but that they could go to the District Court judge for orders putting them into effect. If Mr. Hoffa and the other Teamsters officials failed to comply with the recommendations, the appellate court indicated that the monitors could report the fact to the District Court judge. Then, after affording a hearing to the defendant, the court could take any action necessary within the scope of its decrees. It meant that the judge could take punitive action through contempt proceedings to force a clean-up of the union. The Circuit Court said that they realized the desirability of an early transition from court supervision to normal organizational management, but that the District Court was not required to step aside until conditions in the union advanced to the point where there was reasonable insurance that new elections would be in accord with membership rights under the union constitution. The original litigation which had led to the appointment of the monitors had been brought up by a group of rank-and-file members who had contended that the 1957 convention election of Mr. Hoffa as president of the union had been rigged. Mr. Hoffa had once had plans to hold a new election in the current spring, which could have returned him to office and gotten rid of the monitors. But that plan had been called off when the District Court judge ruled that it could not be held until he and the monitors said so. The judge in February had modified the original consent order in a move to effect compliance with recommendations of the monitors. Validity of the the District Court's action had been the chief legal issue before the Circuit Court.
In Tallahassee, Fla., it was reported that four white youths had gone on trial this date for the rape of a teenage black college coed. The four defendants, ranging in age between 16 and 23, had looked on gravely and attentively as the trial got underway. Three of them had come to court in shirtsleeves and the fourth had worn a dark brown suit. Relatives of some of the boys also were in the courtroom. More than 150 black citizens occupied every seat in the segregated balcony. White spectators were barred for the time being so that prospective jurymen could occupy seats on the first floor. A veteran north Florida jurist pledged that his court would function without regard to race, creed or color during the course of the trial. He told newsmen that the case of the four white youths charged with raping the coed was being treated no differently from any other. The prosecutor was considered one of the state's most able lawyers. There was an atmosphere of tension in the city as the highly publicized case had begun. The judge said that the case probably would be concluded by Saturday unless selection of a jury stretched too long. The four defendants, if convicted without a recommendation of mercy, would receive the death penalty. No white person had ever been sentenced to the electric chair in Florida for raping a black person. The selection of the jury was expected to take a day or more. Three women and several blacks were among the panel of about 170 veniremen from whom the jury would be selected. Seating capacity of the somewhat antiquated courtroom had been supplemented by about 50 chairs to provide for about 300 spectators.
In Washington, Supreme Court Justice Charles Whittaker this date had granted a stay of execution to Charles Starkweather, the 20-year old mass killer from Nebraska, sentenced to die in the electric chair after his single prosecution conviction for murder of 17-year old Robert Jensen during the killing rampage in late January, 1958, during which ten of his admitted eleven victims had been killed, the other having occurred December 1, 1957. Mr. Starkweather had been scheduled to die on Friday morning. Justice Whittaker said that counsel for Mr. Starkweather would have until June 17 to file a petition for writ of certiorari to the full Supreme Court. If the petition were filed, the stay would remain in effect until the full Court would act on it. Justice Whittaker acted on a brief petition for a stay sought late the previous day by two Washington attorneys. In Lincoln, Neb., Guy Starkweather, father of the convicted slayer, said that he expected to go into district court, presumably at the state level, this date, seeking a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that his son had not been effectively represented by counsel at trial, held in May, 1958. The two attorneys who sought the stay, said that they were not conversant with the circumstances of the trial and that it would require investigation of the claims that there had been ineffective assistance of counsel, in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, and that they might have to apply first to the state courts, and if Mr. Starkweather lost therein, then to the Federal District Court in Nebraska. That could not be done unless Mr. Starkweather was granted a stay. The basis for the claim was primarily that the attorneys of Mr. Starkweather had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, against his wishes, and introduced his confessions to the eleven killings, replete with contradictions, along with psychiatric testimony to demonstrate his insanity at the time of the killings. The claim had been rejected by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 4, on the basis that the actions of trial counsel had been within the bounds of trial strategy and did not therefore amount to ineffective assistance of counsel within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment, and that the matter had not been, in any event, raised in the state courts and thus no habeas corpus peititon could issue for want of exhaustion first of state remedies. A petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court from the Circuit Court's decision would be denied on June 22, clearing the way for the execution which would take place fifteen days hence, on June 25.
In Pawtucket, R.I., it was reported that a Memorial Hospital doctor had inoculated a seven-month old critically ill baby during the morning this date with a new serum rushed from Colorado. Doctors would need to wait 24 hours to determine if it would save the child's life. The infant suffered from eczema vaccinatum, described by physicians as a rare and usually fatal disease. The possible antidote to the ailment had been landed at the airport this date by an American Airlines flight, whereupon Warwick police had picked it up at the airport, raced through Warwick, Cranston and Providence to the Pawtucket border where police of that city took over and rushed it to the hospital where the doctor had administered it. The serum which might save the baby had come to the attention of Dr. William Cohen, head of the hospital's dermatology department, almost by chance the previous day when he was thumbing through a medical journal, coming across an article saying that the serum was being developed in Denver. He had quickly sent a plea to the University of Colorado for some of the serum and was promised a shipment by plane. He said that the little boy had been suffering from a high fever for the previous eight days and largely was unable to take nourishment. The dermatologist said that the infant had a history of eczema since he had been two weeks old. Two weeks earlier, the little boy's sister, 5, was given smallpox vaccine and her infant brother had contracted the infection. The doctor said that he had been hospitalized ever since. A three-year old brother of the infant, another of the six children of the family, had also contracted an infection and he also was at the Pawtucket hospital, though his condition was not regarded as serious. The doctor said that in his 30 years of medical experience, he had seen only three other cases of the disease which the infant had.
John Borchert of The News reports from Lake Junaluska, N.C., that ministers and laymen who had begun registering by the hundreds there this date knew that they were attending more than an annual meeting of the Western North Carolina Methodist Conference. During the evening this date, they would face one of the more important ballots of the conference's history, the selection of delegates to the 1960 General Conference of the Methodist Church in Denver. About nine ministers and nine laymen would be selected by secret ballot. The delegates would vote on such things as the continuation of the Central Jurisdiction, the category into which all Negro Methodists in the country fit. Hearings on the matter had been held across the nation since the 1956 General Conference and one of the four southeastern jurisdictional hearings had been held at the First Methodist Church in Charlotte. The general conference of 1956 had asked that each of its 100 conferences make a four-year study of Christian higher education and the local church. The Western North Carolina Conference the previous fall had completed a successful drive for three million dollars to High Point and Greensboro Colleges, Duke University Seminary and the Wesley Foundations, the latter conducting Methodist student work on state school campuses. Both of the reports would be carried to Denver by the delegates selected this night. In addition to the concern regarding the year ahead prevailing at the conference, the delegates had an important matter of their own to determine, how far the Western North Carolina Conference would go in support of Pfeiffer College. The chairman of the conference's board of education would deliver that report the following day at noon.
John Kilgo of The News reports that the traffic captain of the Police Department had promised this date a police crackdown on drivers who made turns from the wrong traffic lanes. The campaign followed the City traffic engineer's figures showing that about half of all local traffic accidents had been caused by improper turns. Engineer Herman Hoose said that the drivers were making left and right turns from center lanes. A contributing factor to a weekend traffic fatality had been a driver making an illegal turn, according to police. The traffic captain said that they had asked their men to be on the lookout for those violations and to provide drivers citations for them, hoping to prevent some of the accidents before they happened. The captain said that the three major causes for local traffic accidents at present were improper turns, red light violations and following too closely. Mr. Hoose had sent figures to the Police Department to show them what types of violations were occurring in different parts of the city, according to the traffic captain. They had shown those charts to their men and they knew what was going on in their zones, and were to patrol accordingly. The most dangerous intersection cited was at Independence Boulevard and South Tryon Street, where there were 40 accidents during the previous year, 24 of which had been caused by people making improper turns. At College and Trade Streets, in the heart of the downtown area, there had been 21 accidents caused by illegal turns. At Pecan Avenue and Independence Boulevard, 10 of 23 accidents had been caused by improper turns and at Brevard and 4th Streets, seven of 31 accidents had resulted from that cause. The traffic captain said that they were going to stop "this wrong turn business if we possibly can."
Dick Young of The News reports that most cars in municipal service were individually owned and that records showed that 136 cars belonging to City employees were used in City business, their owners receiving car allowances, usually in flat monthly sums. The acting City Manager said this date that the car allowances for May had totaled $7,785 and at that rate annualized, the expenditure would be about $93,000. The automobiles of individuals used on City business far outnumbered municipally-owned automobiles. There were 22 such City-owned automobiles which were used in the conduct of municipal affairs, not including police and fire work. There were 34 vehicles, 30 cars, a mobile crime laboratory, a "Black Maria" paddy wagon, and a station wagon, plus 18 motorcycles in the Police Department, and six cars in the Fire Department. Of the 136 cars individually owned and used in municipal service, 78 were in the Health Department where the monthly allowance ranged from $47.50 for nurses, sanitarians, etc., to $75 for the City health officer, and $105 for the director of the sanitary engineering division. In the tax office, there were four cars with $80 monthly allowances each, six in the engineering division, ranging between $50 and $80, 17 in the building inspection division with $80, and 18 in the City Water Department, ranging between $25 and $90.
On the editorial page, "Say So Long to the Bad Old Days" starts with a quote from the Bible, Isaiah 1:18: "Come now, and let us reason together." It indicates that a hush had descended on City Hall this date and that the effect had almost been eerie. Ever since the recent municipal election, the cat and dog fights between the Old Guard three and the Big Four new members had been among the briskest recorded in the archives of faunal zoology.
The atmosphere of the Council chamber often lacked any real cordiality, but the row over the selection of a new chief of police alone had contained enough fire for an entire political season. The one consolation was that such outbreaks of bad feeling were seldom permanent.
Charlotte now had an excellent new Chief, Jesse James, the former Chief of Police at Burlington, and a highly qualified new City Manager, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It finds it doubtful that better men could have been found who would be willing to fill those two important vacancies. It would serve the cause of good government and build confidence within the municipal family, provided all hands would then demonstrate by word and deed that the new officials would receive the support and confidence of the whole Council.
It would behoove them to come together, while not compromising on issues or principles, as the decisions they would make during the ensuing two years would regard a sizable part of the city's future, as the city was reaching toward metropolitan status and its citizens growing up socially, emotionally, intellectually and in several other ways, in consequence of which, the changing population would have to become a great deal harder to satisfy politically than it had been in the old days of easy promises and wholesale pugnacity.
It indicates that the challenges would try the character of the people more than the institutions and resources, and that they would present a seemingly endless array of demands upon the energy, fortitude and capacity for selflessness on the part of those at City Hall. It finds that Charlotte had chosen good members of the City Council and that they were all well-equipped to do the job which lay ahead and would do well to do so without wasting so much of their energy fighting shadows.
"Uncle Sam's Credit Falters Again" indicates that editorial cartoonist Herblock had once again this date attested to the abiding truth of the Nationalist Chinese teaching, that one cartoon was worth ten editorials.
The President bemoaned the Democratic "spenders", spoke as if putting the budget out of balance would prove fatal, and alarmed the nation to the dangers of inflation. Yet, for the third time in two years, he had asked Congress to extend the national debt ceiling, presently at 288 billion dollars. He had found that way to economic retrenchment, which he professed to want, so much easier than the way which lay through suggesting logical and realistic cuts in national expenditures.
The real center of the Administration's fiscal hypocrisy lay in the Treasury, where former Secretary George Humphrey had stamped his mark indelibly. All the time which Mr. Humphrey and the President had talked of tightening the national belt, the Treasury was in the costly process of "refinancing" large portions of the national debt at the highest interest rate it had paid since the Thirties. During the current week, the President was asking Congress to abolish the 4.5 percent ceiling on bond interest rates which had prevailed since 1918.
It finds the meaning clear, that the Government had to pay enough to sell new bonds to replace those which were falling due.
It indicates that there was little which was alarming about growing indebtedness or higher interest rates, as long as prosperity continued and the national income grew. Those conditions oppressed only when times ceased to be good. But the hardship the Administration was now experiencing in selling Treasury bonds and notes did not undercut the President's insistence that he was going to lick inflation or cut Government expenditures. If the gigantic banks which absorbed most of the fancier Government gilt edges thought so, rocketing interest rates would not be needed to entice them to buy. As things stood, the Government's credit was not good where men had millions to invest in bonds, testimony that the big-bond buyers were skeptical of the Administration's will and finesse in keeping prosperity in harness.
"'Mr. Humber's Museum' Receives a Gift" indicates that many singular institutions which graced the state bore the stamp of one man. It was not just the North Carolina Symphony, but "Dr. Swalin's Symphony". The Institute of Government in Chapel Hill had grown from a once-famous hole in the ground at the insistence of Albert Coates. "The Lost Colony" at Manteo, now endowed by the State, would always be linked with its author, Paul Green.
As the Kress Foundation came through with its lavish 2.5 million dollar gift of painting and sculpture to the North Carolina Museum of Art, it finds it a good time to note that the museum also owed most of its energy to one man, Robert Lee Humber of Pitt County. Properly, it had been State Senator Humber who had announced to the Senate on Monday night the culmination of his multi-million-dollar vision in the museum which few, if any, states could match. He had persuaded the Legislature, almost ten years earlier, to appropriate matching funds for those of the Kress Foundation, which had more than kept its word and had amply justified the State's investment in its cultural future.
Mr. Humber's love for art and learning touched the whole of his crisp character and brilliant mind. His accomplishment for art in the state was not surprising, as on his own, he had moved ahead of slower channels to purchase art for the museum. The previous Christmas, he had been able to report a fascinating purchase from under the envious eyes of the Louvre and the National Gallery in London.
The art museum was the work of many hands in a project which spoke well of all North Carolinians, but it would always be "Mr. Humber's museum".
A piece from the Baltimore Sun,
titled "Now, Cash Is Chic", provides a conversation from
the current Broadway production of "The Music Man"
It asks what was wrong with cash in 1959. "Why, it's old fash—. But wait. What's the newest card carried by the expense account swagger? An all-purpose document entitling the holder to buy everything from a wallaby to a water main on the cuff? Not at all. If the Discount Club of America succeeds with its new plan, the latest thing will be a 'Cash Card.' Flash this identification, pay cash, and get 10 percent off at stores, restaurants and other establishments participating in the plan."
Already, about 2,000 retailers in the New York area were said to have signed up for the plan and new ones were coming in at the rate of 200 per week. Credit cards had seemed to multiply to such a degree that, convenience aside, they no longer had the special snob appeal which they once had offered.
It quotes an older musical
"So, in this topsy-turvy situation, the new prestige—and discount as well—will go to the man who pays cash. Credit's old-fashioned again as the riders to River City proclaimed in 1912. But a trace of nostalgia still lingers, for the good old days when cash on the counter didn't have to be validated by an identification card."
No one knew it yet, but our ma and pa, come January, would embark on their maiden plane flight to Chicago, their first visit to that city, and therein, our ma would be treated by the organizers of the trip, our pa's new employer with headquarters therein, to attendance of "The Music Man", then playing in its touring company, our ma finding it quite enjoyable. Coincidentally, Marion Hargrove, formerly of The News when our ma's older brother was employed also by the newspaper, would write the adapted screenplay for the subsequent 1962 filmed version. How about that for trouble in River City?
The wives were also treated to "Scent of Mystery". We, of course, could not go along, being left at home in the care of our grandpa for the fact of having to continue our steady pace of learning to read and write the English language in the school
Drew Pearson, in London, indicates that the atomic bomb presently hung over Britain, that one could feel it in talks with British statesmen and could sense it in the reports from Geneva, where the foreign ministers were conferring. It had been behind British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd's determination to compromise with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and one could detect it in the speeches of British labor leaders, or when 75,000 people crowded Trafalgar Square as they had done on Easter to urge abolition of the bomb, and again when stodgy General and Municipal Workers Union members had voted as they had done the previous week, that "the next Labor government should take a unilateral action in ceasing the manufacture of nuclear weapons and prohibiting the use of all such weapons on British territory." That would ban the U.S. hydrogen bombers from British bases. One could also understand it when observing the gaping holes in blocks of the city of London, holes still unrepaired from the World War II blitz of the city and the V-2 rockets which had almost knocked out England before the end of the war.
He indicates that when he had dined with Earl Attlee at the House of Lords the previous night, he had also sensed it. "Nearby, another bomb—an old-fashioned one—had come through the House of Lords chamber in Hitler's war. The damage was slight, the chamber is now reconstructed. Also nearby, another of Hitler's bombs had completely wrecked the House of Commons. That historic chamber has now been faithfully and carefully reconstructed. But, if there had been an atomic bomb then, there would have been nothing left to reconstruct."
Clement Attlee, one-time Labor Prime Minister, now an Earl, was more stooped than in the days when he came to San Francisco toward the end of World War II to help organize the U.N. Now at 79, Mr. Attlee looked as if the burdens of Britain had dragged heavily on his shoulders. He said: "We are at the mercy of the scientists. Excellent people—the scientists. But they are always inventing something and then leaving it to the politicians to bail them out. Science has made what seemed a distant dream come nearer. I have seen many things come to pass in the last 50 years that had seemed impossible. Peace, thanks to the terrors of science, may now be possible."
Andre Maurois, famous French writer, had said, "What is possible is never very far away from that which is necessary, and it is necessary for us to avoid nuclear war."
A few blocks away, trains were pulling out of Charing Cross Station, carrying young weekenders who had forgotten the time when those same trains had brought the bloody and wounded from the battlefields of Ypres and the Marne during World War I.
"The stooped but sprightly former Prime Minister of England, however, had not forgotten. Sitting there with the burdens of Britain almost visibly on his shoulders, Attlee said: 'Science has brought the world very close together. The price of propinquity is a surrender of part of our sovereignty.'
"In other words, the peoples of the world must be prepared to work together in a common community for the sake of peace."
Joseph Alsop, in Warsaw, finds the city's life of the mind to be an exhilarating, irresistible spectacle. He had spent almost all of his time there "happily exploring the life of the mind in the new Poland," and he wanted to sketch an idea which the experience had suggested, intended to answer certain questions: what was it which set apart the artists and intellectuals of the new Poland from the Western intellectuals and artists to whom they primarily looked for inspiration; why were the Poles more exhilarated and thus vastly more exhilarating; why in Poland did one not scent the smell of Alexandrian decay which hung over much of the artistic and intellectual life of the West?
He finds the problem difficult because it was one of human style and atmosphere. Polish philosophy had something new to say in a new way. But Polish painting, despite its powerful creative surge, was not very different from modern Western painting. In varying degrees, the same was true for the other arts. He finds that the artists were different, as opposed to the arts which they practiced. He indicates that to make the problem yet more difficult, there were wretched conditions in which most Polish artists and intellectuals lived and worked. Materially, life was much better in Poland at present than in the Stalinist past, but, save the few with established reputations who held editorial posts or university appointments, those whom he had met still were living as few Americans could bear to live.
He finds that the life of the mind in the new Poland was astonishingly free, considering that it was a Communist country. One was amazed to see such a work as "Ubu Roi" by the French surrealist Alfred Jarry being played in a Polish adaptation by a university theater group to a packed house. He finds that the brilliance of the production, largely staged and costumed with string, bailing wire and assorted underclothing, was still less breathtaking than the thing itself. In the same manner, one was even more amazed to see the most coveted university appointments going to the best men in their fields rather than to those who were willing to parrot the official dogmas. But although one could go on for a long time providing illustrations, there was still the censor, sometimes heavy-handed, and there was still the threat of party intervention to impose the official dogmas, still the limits, known to all, which could not be transgressed.
Polish artists and intellectuals, though astonishingly free, were still less free than their Western counterparts, and their material rewards were poorer, too. He thus returns to the question of why they should be more exhilarated and exhilarating and why they should seem more serious and more successful. He finds the answer to lie in the simple act that, unconsciously or consciously, all of them were moved by a deep sense of historic mission, which they had to the exclusion of their Western comrades. Their sense of mission was justified and they were playing a great role. The young painter finishing his abstract picture, the youthful philosopher finding his way through the labyrinth of Wittgenstein, the poet writing as he felt with no didactic purpose, might or might not be doing work which would be remembered forever. But whether the work was good or bad, and he indicates that some he had seen seemed very good, it was always an assertion of the free life of the mind, and in Poland, that had value lacking in the West.
He thus finds that it was that which made a person feel about those people as one felt about an army with banners. They were human and not united except by their hatred of Stalinism. "For where will you find intellectuals and artists undivided by cliques and jealousies?" Some might be geniuses but some were certainly fakers, and yet all were banner-bearers.
Whether they were resigned or convinced, none of them seriously expected a change of regime in Poland. "They bear their banners, they assert the mind's free life, not to change the regime, but to keep the regime what it is today. And in this sense, even the most hermetic Polish artist or intellectual is not 'alienated from the masses.'"
Doris Fleeson finds that the wrangle over spectator seats at the 1960 Democratic national convention was subsiding in terms which she describes. The host committee at Los Angeles would receive 1,500 tickets to accommodate the local angels who had guaranteed the convention expenses, the local political dignitaries, including the Republican mayor, and assorted other luminaries of the vicinity. The Democratic state committee could count on 1,000 tickets to distribute among the party's big wheels. It was said to have plans to raise money by selling choice pairs of that selection for $1,000 each.
The host Governor, Pat Brown, a favorite-son candidate, who took his chances for the nomination with increasing seriousness, had received a relatively small personal allowance.
The DNC received a block of 750 well-placed seats to take care of its 750 Club, an elite group so loyal and/or well-heeled that its members were putting up $1,000 apiece to pay off the party's old deficits so that the 1960 campaign could get underway. The DNC also received the remainder of about 1,000 tickets for distribution among the other 49 state organizations. That arrangement had been described in detail by national committeeman Paul Ziffren in a private conference the previous weekend with Congressional Democrats. When he concluded, even his severest critics among them said that they were satisfied.
Democrats in Washington and in California had been aroused by the demand of oilman Edwin Pauley of Los Angeles for 5,000 tickets to take care of the city's host committee, which he headed. Nobody denied that Mr. Pauley had raised money in amounts sufficient to persuade the DNC that its first-ever Los Angeles convention would be a solid one. It was a potent argument for the always-broke Democrats. But the politicians did not want to put any one person in a spot where he might be tempted to pick the galleries. In addition, Mr. Pauley, though personally loyal to former President Truman, was a highly controversial party member, especially in Southern California. Mr. Ziffren had said that no one was reading Mr. Pauley out of the party, but that he could not run anything or they would have the worst fight on their hands they had ever had. "Just let him work his passage back."
Another hot topic of the conference was the relative strength of the large and growing list of Democratic aspirants for the presidency, most of whom had lately toured the state. All had been agreed that their Governor's million-vote plurality the previous fall had been transmuted into a presidential virus of remarkable intensity. Most felt that sentiment for Adlai Stevenson was still very strong and that Senator Hubert Humphrey was its destined recipient. It was also believed that Senator John F. Kennedy had a following of his own and that Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had still to make an impact on the rank-and-file members.
All convention ticket situations were potentially explosive. The Los Angeles situation was especially so because it was widely expected that the convention delegates would really decide the outcome for a change.
A letter writer comments on the editorial of May 21, "Is There a Place for Carver College?" He says that there definitely was and seeks to answer a letter from Harry Jones, executive secretary of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Council on Human Relations, who appeared to take to task the editorial writer of the piece for being in favor of both Charlotte College and Carver. He finds that Mr. Jones wanted just one college for both white and black students and that it might be fine for the NAACP and CMCOHR, but even for "progressive" North Carolina, he believes it "a mite too speedy for just now." The NAACP, and now the Mecklenburg Human Relations Council, were not satisfied with the "Modern approach," to the integration "thing", but "want everything now". He indicates to Mr. Jones that most people in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County believed that all young people ought be provided first-rate educational opportunities, but that for the present and for quite a few years into the future, "there will still be need for separate colleges."
You betta belie' a bab'. We ain't goin' school with no Negro down heya. We move down Sou' Car'lina and vote for Straum if you goin' be goin' that lib'ral way like 'at.
Framed Edition
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