The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 13, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the crisis-ridden four-power foreign ministers conference could wind up the following week. Western officials this date saw only a slender chance that some Berlin agreement might be salvaged from the talks. Advisers of Secretary of State Christian Herter expected the Soviets to launch a propaganda offensive blaming the West for failure of the talks and marshaling world pressure for a summit conference anyway. There was a possibility that the Western foreign ministers might seek a recess of the conference and leave the way open to get together again. The President had made it plain that he had no intention of meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit conference unless the foreign ministers showed enough progress to justify such a conference. With sessions of the foreign ministers recessed during the weekend, the showdown was anticipated to come early the following week. The French had reportedly shared the gloom of the Americans about the chances of success from the conference. But the British clung to the hope that the Soviets might back down on their demands that the West leave West Berlin, and seek an interim agreement to dispel the crisis surrounding Berlin. British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had flown to London on Friday night to visit with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had been the leading advocate in the West for a summit conference later in the summer. Mr. Lloyd said that he believed they had to be patient, telling newsmen that they had to be firm about essentials but nevertheless patient about the negotiations. Should Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko stand firm when the talks would resume on Monday, the conference could break up by the middle of the week. Mr. Herter, Mr. Lloyd and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville preferred a recess rather than an adjournment if a break became necessary. They could then reassemble sometime in the future without the necessity of setting up a completely new meeting. A recess for a definite time might be fixed, provided that the Soviets agreed. There had been talk of setting it three weeks to two months or more hence. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Andrew Berding had said that Mr. Herter would remain in Geneva during the weekend. Soviet officials said that Mr. Gromyko would not leave Switzerland but indicated that he might make a trip out of Geneva.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee would vote on Monday on whether to outdo the House Foreign Affairs Committee in slashing military assistance money from the foreign aid bill. There was strong sentiment for cutting deeper than the House Committee, according to the chairman of the Senate Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, on Friday. But he added that he personally felt that deeper cuts might be dangerous. The President had asked for 3.9 billion dollars for foreign aid in the fiscal year beginning July 1, of which 1.6 billion was listed for military aid and 835 million for defense support. The House Committee had reduced the military aid figure to 1.44 billion dollars and the defense support amount to 750 million. The House would begin debate on the bill the following week. Military aid was the actual hardware, such as jet planes, tanks, and bombs, which the U.S. gave to its allies. Defense support was economic aid given to countries to support bigger armed forces than their economies normally would permit. The Senate Committee was expected to vote on the military and defense support amounts on Friday, but had postponed the vote until Monday. In other action, the Committee had adopted an amendment designed to pressure Latin American countries into forming an international police force under the Organization of American States, had rejected an amendment by Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon that military funding be denied to the Dominican Republic and to Paraguay because they were governed by dictators, and had rejected an amendment by Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana to bring the International Cooperation Administration completely into the State Department, instead of its current status as a semi-independent agency. The President had asked for 96.5 million dollars for military assistance to Latin America.
The Administration's new master plan for air defenses had met with little enthusiasm among some Senators who had been critical of defense policies. The plan, outlined by Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy on Friday, involved a shift in emphasis from defense against manned bombers to defense against the ocean-spanning missiles of the future. It would cut back funding for the rival anti-aircraft missiles of the Army and Air Force, the Nike-Hercules and the Bomarc, respectively, and would add funds to the Army's Nike-Zeus program, aimed at eventual development of missiles to knock down enemy ICBM's. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had given his general approval, the Committee having prodded Pentagon officials into defining the new strategy. The Senator estimated that about 1.5 billion dollars would be saved by the Nike-Hercules and Bomarc cutbacks. But Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, frequent critic of Administration defense policies, called the new plan ridiculous and "a continuation on a reduced basis of the previous master compromise of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." He said that there had been no real effort to deal boldly with a very difficult defense problem, adding that it should not fool the public into believing "we have a defense against nuclear attack, either manned or ballistic."
In New York, it was reported that the Federal Government would move on Monday in an attempt to prod stalemated steel negotiations. The director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service would meet at that time with David McDonald, president of the United Steelworkers Union. The following Monday, he would meet with Roger Blough, chairman of the board of U.S. Steel Corp., both meetings to take place in Washington, with Mr. McDonald and Mr. Blough there to outline their positions at dinner sessions before a group of Democratic Senators. Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania had taken the lead in arranging the dinner meetings. One of his aides said that he anticipated the pattern would be for an opening statement of position by the guests, followed by a question and answer period. Senator Clark had invited all of the other 63 Democratic Senators to attend. With less than three weeks to go in the steel talks, agreement was apparently as far away as ever. The present contract, covering half a million steelworkers, would expire on June 30. A strike would shut down 90 percent of the nation's steel production.
In Ottawa, it was reported that Canada's exports to the U.S. during 1958 had totaled 2.832 billion dollars, about a percent less than the previous year.
In Rome, it was reported that at least 40 Italian ships had been idled in ports around the world this date by a seamen's strike presently in its fifth day. Although most of the strike-bound vessels were in Italy, some of the largest, including the flagship of the Italian Line, were in New York. The walkout by seven Communist and non-Communist unions had caught Italian liners in Dakar, Africa, Melbourne, Australia, Karachi, Pakistan, Cristobal, Panama, Istanbul, Turkey, and elsewhere. Some 10,000 passengers were impacted. More than 30 of the strike-bound ships were owned by companies in which the Italian Government had large stock holdings. In a move which could worsen the strike, owners of four ships obtained a court order on Friday night permitting them to decommission their ships temporarily, temporarily discharging the crews who, they said, planned to join the strike. The unions did not comment immediately on that action. Once earlier, shipowners had temporarily decommissioned their ships during a contract dispute and the unions had then charged that the crews had been locked out and called a week-long work stoppage on other ships. Operators from both the Government-owned and privately-owned liners had obtained decommission permission under an Italian maritime code provision allowing such action if the owners could show that their ships had been idled for reasons beyond their control. At about the time the decommissioning had taken place, the unions had announced that they would call off the strike provided the owners would resume negotiations, but the owners had not accepted the bid. The unions were asking for a 30 percent wage increase and the owners had offered a 6 percent raise over present wages, averaging slightly above the equivalent of $100 per month.
In Tallahassee, Fla., defense attorneys for four white youths charged with the rape of a 19-year old black freshman coed at Florida A&M University, said that they were ready this date with additional testimony that the coed had submitted to them voluntarily. The attorneys said that there was no legal proof that the coed had been raped. Two of the defendants had testified on Friday that no force had been applied when they had sexual relations with her in a lonely wooded area on May 2. The coed, whose name could not be publicized under Florida law, had testified on Thursday that she had pleaded in vain while she was raped repeatedly at knife and gunpoint by the four white youths. She said she had started crying and they had told her to shut up. "There wasn't anything I could do with four men with a knife and a gun but do what they said to do." Testimony by the defendants had referred to both a knife and a gun, a knife drawn and a shotgun brandished when the coed was abducted. The four-day trial had worked to a close after a 16-hour session on Friday which was concluded abruptly a few minutes before midnight when the sister of one of the defendants had broken down on the witness stand. The judge called for an overnight recess at that time. The sister had been relating to the jury the story of her early life of poverty in a small west Florida town. Her brother was married and had two children and would be the last of the defendants to testify in the trial. If convicted and the all-white male jury did not recommend mercy, the defendants would face the death penalty.
In Boston, it was reported that an escaped mental patient with the knowledge of homemade bombs was being sought this date for questioning about an explosion in a rapid transit waiting room in which 38 people had been injured on Thursday. Police had identified the 23-year old man who had escaped on Tuesday from a mental hospital at Wingdale, N.Y. The man had been committed for having a homemade bomb in his possession at a recent rally in New York for visiting Fidel Castro. The bomb had been described as an 11-inch explosive device filled with sulphur and zinc. Police said that the man had exploded two such bombs in New York City's Central Park within a year. The bomb in a coin locker at the elevated North Station in Boston had shattered a waiting room and part of the platform. Some of the persons injured had been thrown 30 feet to the street below by the blast. Others had been struck by debris on the street below and six had been injured as they sat in an approaching train. Three of the persons were listed in serious condition. A conference of fire department officials and ballistics experts on Friday had agreed that a large quantity of black powder, possibly 25 pounds, had exploded. Some dry cell batteries had been found in the wreckage, which, according to authorities, might have had some part in the explosion. Police appealed to the public to come forward with any information they might have regarding the explosion. A special telephone line had been set up at police headquarters to receive the information. The Boston Daily Record, the Boston American, and the Sunday Advertiser of the Hearst chain of newspapers had offered a $5,000 reward for exclusive information regarding the blast. Police, meanwhile, had been pestered with telephone calls reporting bombs planted in various public places, but a half-dozen places had been checked with no sign of any bomb.
Also in Boston, it was reported that a seven-year old girl had died the previous day when she had entered a disconnected refrigerator and the door had slammed shut, causing her to suffocate. Her cousin, eight, who had also entered the refrigerator, had been revived by relatives and taken to a hospital.
In Rock Hill, S.C., it was reported that the City Council said that it would follow "existing policy" and allow businesses to operate on Sunday unless warrants were signed charging violation of the state's blue laws. The announcement, made at a special meeting on Friday, had left the way open for a man from Charlotte to open at least one of the two drive-in movie theaters he operated in the area. The man said during the morning that he had made no policy decision as yet on opening the drive-in theater inside the Rock Hill city limits on Sundays, but said that he would not open the theater the following day. He said that he would open his other drive-in located just outside the city limits on Sunday in a test of the blue laws. The Council had also passed a resolution on Friday calling for revision of the blue laws.
In Compton, Calif., it was reported that television, as an instructor, was strictly a one-eyed monster from nowhere among the crewcut set at Compton College. They said that they were tired of being guinea pigs in a pioneer television education project. Video instruction had all the fascination of an hour-long commercial. Audiences on the campus had rated it with a zero, compared with an old-fashioned professor with whom the students could interact. On Friday, more than 200 had cut classes and picketed the campus with placards protesting "automatized education" and "robot classrooms", having also hung in effigy a headless figure called "pioneering spirit". A 20-year old sophomore, leader of the Student Organization for Better Education, said that when a student viewed television, he expected entertainment. "He's expecting 'Gunsmoke', not algebra. And there is no instructor to ask questions of and clear up misconceptions. It destroys the entire concept of student-teacher relationships." Ask Chester.
In Dallas, Tex., police were seeking to round up 150 electric irons valued at $1,275, having had one break when those who had broken into a parked truck and helped themselves had left behind 9,576 irons.
In London, it was reported that a cavalryman had fought with his frightened horse this date to keep it from charging into Queen Elizabeth during her official birthday celebration. The cheers of thousands of spectators had frozen into one great gasp as the big black horse reared and plunged toward the Queen, only ten yards away. The cavalryman, in glittering silver breastplate and flowing plumed helmet, had been in the last row of the mounted escort. Just behind had been the Queen, riding sidesaddle on a chestnut police horse. Dressed in a close-fitting scarlet jacket, blue sash and black tricorn hat, the Queen rode out of Buckingham Palace and into the wide, tree-lined mall. About 20,000 spectators had cheered her, but the roar had frightened the cavalryman's horse, causing it to shy and rear. Two more horses in the cavalry escort had become unsettled. As the cavalryman sought to regain control of his horse, the Queen just looked straight ahead and not a royal eyelid had blinked. The cavalryman had finally quieted the horse and got back into line and the parade continued.
In Charlotte, youngsters were reminded this date that those who entered the News "My Pop's Tops" contest could receive free passes to the Plaza Theater. The manager of the theater said that the passes were good any time until September 1, except on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The contest had 15 prizes, a $100 savings bond to go to the father and a $50 bond to the winner, with a second prize including a $50 savings bond for the father and a $25 bond for the winner. There were also 13 more prizes. The winning contestant would be announced in the newspaper on Saturday, June 20, the day before Father's Day. Contestants between the ages of six and 16 could enter by writing a letter of 25 words or less telling why "My Pop's Tops". Entries would be judged on originality, sincerity and neatness, and had to be received not later than noon on Tuesday, June 16. What if you can't write?
Following tomorrow night's episode
On the editorial page, "Summerfield, Sen. Smoot and Smut" indicates that Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, when he had banned the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover from the mails, had done more to stimulate sales of the D. H. Lawrence novel than critics could have accomplished with roughly a billion words of praise. Since 134 copies had been impounded in New York, approximately 45,000 other copies had been distributed to bookstores in one way or another. That non-postal distribution would continue unabated and the publishers, booksellers and perhaps even the reading public, would benefit accordingly.
Aside from stimulating the economy, Mr. Summerfield had merely made himself look foolish. Lady Chatterley's Lover was definitely not for children, as they would be bored to tears by most of it. But adults hardly needed to be "protected" from the facts of life by a Michigan Chevrolet dealer who also happened to be in the Cabinet.
The book was a literary classic and
competent critics throughout the world had found it to be a novel of
serious intent and artistic achievement, whose predominant appeal
could by no means be called prurient
It asks who was competent to sit in judgment on such matters, finding that it was certainly not Mr. Summerfield and that it was not safe to invest any politician with the power to determine what was or not obscene. If the American public ever conceded that it was not fit to be free and responsible, then it ought leave those matters to the judiciary to determine after receiving competent testimony from recognized critics and scholars. In the final analysis, what was obscene was determined by the prevailing moral climate and self-appointed arbiters seldom exercised any important influence.
If Mr. Summerfield was remembered at all in literary history, it finds, it would probably be in about the same way that Senator Reed Smoot of Utah was remembered, having been immortalized in a fashion by poet Ogden Nash in 1930. A part of the verse, first published in The New Yorker, had gone something like: "Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)/ Is planning a ban on smut,/ Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut./ And his reverent occiput,/ Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut./ Grit your molars and do your dut.,/ Gird up your l-ns,/ Smite h-p and th-gh,/ We'll all be Kansas by and by…/ Senator Smoot is an institute/ Not to be bribed with pelf,/ He guards our homes from erotic tomes/ By reading them all himself…"
"The Cross of Lorraine Grows Heavy" indicates that tipsy with Gaullism, France had veered off in a direction which might make reappraisal of Western defenses necessary. Premier Charles de Gaulle's abrupt removal of the French fleet from NATO proved a harbinger of more to come. It looked now as if, recalling something which Winston Churchill had written years earlier, that the Cross of Lorraine, General De Gaulle's personal symbol, would be the heaviest cross NATO had to bear.
At the moment, France was trying to crash the exclusive "nuclear club" maintained by the U.S. and Britain. The French had all but said that the U.S. airdromes would be chased from French soil if the U.S. did not share its atomic secrets with France. British and American statesmen might ordinarily rely on the tactic of giving in, as Mr. Churchill had done in his "empty chair" speech. Even the haughty Premier De Gaulle could not bear to face that. But since the "empty chair" threat had worked, the political aim had changed as much in Britain as in France. That was what made the French "blackmail" effective at present.
Memories of the Luftwaffe's bombs falling on England had always lingered in the British attitude toward nuclear weapons. In the previous two years or so, steps which the U.S. did not consider debatable had become public issues in England. One was unilateral disarmament and the other was renunciation of the hydrogen bomb, both having been taken up by the left wing of the Labor Party.
If bombers had to be removed from France, they would likely have to be installed in England, where public demonstrations against U.S. defense emplacements were small at present, but frequent.
With an election coming up, the Labor Party could make any addition to U.S. weaponry or reopening of U.S. air bases a major issue against the Conservative Government. Fifty Labor MP's had tabled a motion opposing that transfer, and a trade union, whose notions the Laborites had to weigh, had resolved for complete American withdrawal.
Unless Premier De Gaulle relented, there were no simple answers. Americans faced an uncomfortable schooling at the moment in the sensitivities of European allies. It suggests that the U.S. might come to understand the frustration which Britons had felt in 1956 when Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt had held the Suez Canal, but Secretary of State Dulles had refused to make any moves to open it until the President was safely re-elected. With Premier De Gaulle pitching a nationalist tantrum, Britons disputing nuclear weapons among themselves, and the West Germans flexing their muscles, tending the Pax Americana grew harder every day. It called for inspired and complex diplomacy.
"Discrimination?" indicates that the General Assembly would not be taken in by the whoop-de-do about "discrimination" in applying the tax withholding system to individuals and not to most businesses, finding that the only discrimination would be against individuals who were presently dodging their state income taxes. Businesses could not get away with it, whereas individuals could and did.
"Taking Coach Howard at His Word" indicates that News sports editor Bob Quincy had called Clemson football coach Frank Howard a "quipster" when the latter had opined that college professors "should mind their business and we coaches should mind ours…"
It suggests that Coach Howard's brainstorm deserved more than a passing chuckle, that in an era of periodic verbal knifings of coaches by professors, and professors by coaches, it might clear the air. It agrees with Mr. Howard and likes the way he had laid it on the line. It finds that there ought to be a sharp distinction between the professor's "business" and that of the coach, whose goals were dissimilar. Professors aimed to produce learned alumni and coaches produced happy alumni. The game of producing happy alumni was related only incidentally, if at all, to the learning game.
In the present times of killer schedules, coaching was not serving tea at cricket and the alumni thought it a bad joke if a person reminded them that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
The only persons who would possibly suffer from taking the two "businesses" apart would be a rare Pete Dawkins, tenth in his class at West Point and also an All-American. There were others like him, who could be vice-presidents in both "businesses".
It indicates that far from taking Mr. Howard as a quipster, it takes him at his word. "We do admit, though, the real question is whether he would take us at ours."
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Pother over Pigment", finds that the insensate squabble over whether black and white pigs and rabbits as characters in fairy stories were an encouragement to miscegenation had provoked enough bitter mirth without any artificial help. There had been one point, however, which it feels compelled to call to the attention of the segregationists who were attempting to ban "The Three Little Pigs". The principal strains of white pigs were Yorkshire and Chester White, both Anglo-Saxon in nomenclature. One of the black strains, Berkshire, appeared to have the same antecedents, perhaps by way of New England. But the other black strain was Poland China. "Unless the current pig crop has been able to perpetuate allegiances to Mikolajczyk and Chiang Kai-shek, it bears the label of not one but two nations which are incontestably Communist. And if that doesn't make the segregationists see Red, nothing will."
Drew Pearson, still serving as a delegate to the Atlantic Congress in London, has his column written this date by his assistant, Jack Anderson, who indicates that the Jewish community was in an uproar over the way the supporters of acting Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss had injected the religious issue into the fight over his confirmation. It had first been introduced into the public record by Congressman Steve Derounian of New York, who, as a key Republican on the House Commerce Committee, had been close to Admiral Strauss. The Congressman denied to the column, however, that the Admiral had put him up to it. He said he had not seen Admiral Strauss in a month, except to say hello once at dinner, and that no one had asked him to raise the religious question, that it was his own idea.
The opposition to Admiral Strauss had not been on religious grounds. Many prominent Jews had opposed him because of his treatment of his fellow religionists. They suspected that he did not want to share his national prominence with any other Jew. They pointed out, for example, that he was active in the campaign against former Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal, and later had driven Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, from the Government. More recently, he had tried to play down the achievements of Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the atomic submarine. All three men were Jews who threatened to overshadow Admiral Strauss in the atomic energy field.
No spot in the Pentagon was more strictly guarded than the secretariat where the military chiefs planned their secret strategy. How they were protected could not be revealed, but at one time, the clerks had been armed with pistols disguised as fountain pens. General Omar Bradley, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been more nervous about the protection than the danger and so he finally had gotten rid of the lethal fountain pens to prevent a clerk from hurting himself.
Joseph Alsop, in Warsaw, finds it a city of strange contrasts, with the ugliest building in the world, a gift from Stalin, the Palace of Culture, and one of the most enchanting urban prospects in the world in the quarter where the superb palaces of the Polish aristocracy had been rebuilt by the Polish Communists. The city had both shabbiness and glamour, squalor and beauty, excitement and the mundane. Life could be bizarre or passionately interesting, or dully workaday. But among the contrasting elements was one which made Warsaw stand apart, its light of new hope of human evolution in the iron Communist society which already gripped almost half the world.
In that regard, the outlook was more encouraging at present than it had been a year earlier or two years earlier. When Mr. Alsop had first come to Poland in 1957, the ferment of Poland's new-won freedom had been so uncontrolled that the freedom seemed unlikely to last. That effervescence could not go on without imperiling the regime, it seemed, and yet the regime could not be imperiled without risking another Hungarian tragedy on a more dreadful scale than that which had occurred there in November, 1956.
In 1958, by contrast, Wladyslaw Gomulka and his Communist colleagues had begun to take the situation in hand again and one then wondered whether the process of getting the situation in hand would not, in itself, end the new freedom in Poland. But now, a seemingly stable equilibrium appeared to have been achieved. There were limits which no one was allowed to transgress, whether artists or intellectuals, priests or peasants, or members of the new class of small entrepreneurs whose tiny but smart shops along the Marshalkowska were one of the more curious sights of the city. Yet those limits which no one could transgress left the life of the individual citizen and the larger life of the mind substantially free. As the worst enemies of the regime would say, in all of Communist Poland at present, no one was held in jail or camp for a political offense.
He suggests that perhaps the curious equilibrium between the Communist Party and the Government on the one hand and the Polish people on the other would be considerably less stable under less favorable economic conditions. The economic conditions were only favorable by comparison with the bleak past.
A meat shortage had begun because the planners failed to realize that the goods-starved Poles would first spend their money on clothing and then would increase their spending on food. For the long run, there was also a serious agricultural problem as small plot-peasant agriculture could not indefinitely feed Poland's fast-growing population. Yet Poland's national product and income were rising faster than the population. Real wages had increased by 20 percent since 1955. Life was not good, but life was much better.
He finds that such were the elements of the Polish compromise, and one got the feeling that the compromise could last for a long time, or at least as long as Mr. Gomulka lasted. The real question was not what would happen in Poland, but what would happen because of Poland and the Soviet Union and throughout the Communist bloc. The Poles had their own answer to that question, viewing China, going through its ultra-Stalinist agony, as one magnetic center in the Communist bloc, and Poland, with its exciting differences from the Soviet Union, as another magnetic center. One Polish Communist had told Mr. Alsop: "China is vast and Poland is small. Yet we believe that the Soviet people and the Soviet leaders, above all Khrushchev, want their country to develop in the Polish direction. So we believe that the Polish model will have great influence in the end."
He finds that much would depend on the correctness of the Polish judgment of Mr. Khrushchev, whom it was fashionable to describe in Poland as "the number one revisionist". He suggests that perhaps Mr. Khrushchev secretly felt about what was happening in Poland the way John Calvin would have felt about dancing in the streets of Geneva. Perhaps he was just waiting to pounce.
One of the wisest American experts on the Soviet Union had indicated that "any true Russian Stalinists must regard Poland at peace as far more dangerous than Hungary in full revolt." Mr. Alsop finds that it summed up the problem, that there was no promise in Poland of a defeat for the Communist system, but there was a possibility and the hope for the kind of change which would make many millions of human lives more tolerable and decent. Even if that change was quite unlikely to end the world struggle between the Communist and free societies, no human could fail to pray for it.
Walter Lippmann indicates that there was a strong probability that after the investigations and the big talk, the present Congress would fail to do anything about the regulation of labor unions. If that happened, the reason would not be the opposition of Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa or United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, but would be that the Senate, which had been set to enact a useful bill, had been stampeded by political demagogues who wanted an issue and not a bill. The result was that unless the mischief could be undone in the House, a major opportunity would be lost.
In April, after prolonged hearings and study, the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare had reported out a bill which the majority of the Committee believed would "drive criminals from the labor movement" and "deal with breaches of trust and other shady transactions" which were incompatible with a strong and honestly run labor movement. The bill had been remarkable in that it provided powerful remedies and yet had the support of the AFL-CIO.
One basic principle of the 39-page bill, usually referred to as the Kennedy bill, was that reform of the abuses disclosed by the McClellan Rackets Committee had to be founded on comprehensive reporting and disclosure of the financial transactions of the unions. The section of the bill dealing with reporting and disclosure was substantially the same as the bill introduced by Senator Barry Goldwater on behalf of the Administration. The difference between the two bills was in the penalties imposed for a violation, although both called for criminal penalties in the event union officials did not make full and accurate reports. The Kennedy bill provided criminal penalties for at least six other abuses, including embezzlement of union funds, tampering with or destroying union records, bribing employee representatives, corruption in union elections, and in the so-called trusteeships.
The bill reported to the full Senate was not a soft or timid bill and yet it had the support of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO. It was not often that a powerful special interest would be found supporting laws to regulate itself. It was not often that a powerful special interest invited public disclosure of its intimate and internal affairs. When such an extraordinary thing occurred, one might expect Congress to seize the opportunity to get the agreement signed and ratified. But that was not what had happened. On the Senate floor, without hearings or study in committee, amendments were added containing bits and pieces of the so-called Bill of Rights. Those rights, as Mr. Meany had pointed out, were legitimate and were included in most union constitutions and bylaws. But the amendments would make those rights enforceable in the courts. Mr. Meany viewed that as opening the prospect of endless litigation and thus opposed the amended bill.
Whether the amendments were good, bad or indifferent, was not the main point. The bill, prior to it being amended, had been the strongest bill which could receive union support, though no doubt was not the best conceivable bill. It was not a panacea, but it compelled real reforms and was the best bill which was possible to enact. He finds that it would be a great pity if Congress passed up the opportunity to enact a good bill to give itself the pleasure of trying to write an even better one, and also a pity if the President and those who supported him were so insistent that the Kennedy bill be strengthened that they prevented the significant labor reform which was now possible. He indicates that it was still conceivable that the labor reforms could be saved if the leadership in Congress and the President wanted to save them. But they had to reckon with the demagogues who did not want a bill because it would deprive them of an issue to beat their breasts about.
A letter writer from Clinton, S.C., indicates that President Syngman Rhee of South Korea wanted the U.S. to use its military might to whip North Korea and turn the whole of Korea over to him. All that Chiang Kai-shek wanted was for the U.S. to whip China and turn all of China over to him. All which West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wanted was for the U.S. to whip Russia and turn all of Germany over to him. "Boy. If we ain't lined up with some jokers! The three fellows mentioned above have now begun to lose patience. I'm afraid that we're going to lose them. But we still have Spain. We have already taken over every other defunct government; we might as well have Spain."
A letter writer from Henderson indicates that in the "occupied city" where most civil rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights had been crushed "under the iron heel of Luther's Legions, the people are forced to appeal for aid to other citizens of North Carolina." As for Governor Luther Hodges, after loading the state with a costly military operation against the people of Vance County, at an expense estimated at more than 2 million dollars per year for the taxpayers, and after trying to get them to assume half of the cost to pay for the occupation themselves, the Governor had announced that he would soon go to Russia. He wonders why, whether he was going to learn or teach the Soviets new methods of crushing the people of occupied countries. He asks for help from the people of the state to get rid of "this Soviet system in Vance County. The locked-out workers of the textile mills have never asked for anything except the right to survive and keep their union. The company demanded that the union be destroyed. Gov. Hodges sent the Army to protect the scabs who came from Virginia and distant areas to steal the livelihood of 1,000 citizens here."
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that a thinker did not make friends, that those who would be his friends thought he was a fool. "The thinker has very little time for anything except to think. He never stoops to try to be popular. He cannot afford the time it takes. Anyone can think but very few are willing to pay the price." He finds it fortunate for mankind that there was at least one person in every thousand who did think to some degree and one in 10,000 who was "a thinker all the way."
Framed Edition
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