The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 30, 1959
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Earl Mazo's book about Vice-President Nixon, the subject of an editorial book review in The News the prior Saturday, had said this date that Chief Justice Earl Warren had called him a "damn liar". The author confirmed reports that the Chief Justice, in a personal exchange at a Washington cocktail party, had taken angry exception to parts of the book, titled, Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait. The Chief Justice was reported to have felt that the book promoted Mr. Nixon at the expense of the Chief Justice, who had no comment on the matter. Mr. Mazo said that the whole affair was really "just a misunderstanding because he hadn't read the book." The writer said that after things had cooled down, he and the Chief Justice had a long talk and parted good friends with a cordial invitation from the Chief to visit him. In answer to questions, the author specifically confirmed that at one point, the Chief had told him: "You are a damn liar. It is a dishonest account to promote Nixon." That had been reported as the Chief Justice's rejoinder to a contention from the author that he had written an objective, honest report of political affairs involving Mr. Nixon and the Chief Justice. The complaint of the latter, in part, had been reported to have been that the book represented Mr. Nixon as the victor over Mr. Warren in the 1950 California political contest in which Representative Helen Gahagen Douglas had run for the Senate against Congressman Nixon, and James Roosevelt, son of the late President, had opposed Governor Warren in the gubernatorial contest. Mr. Nixon had defeated Mrs. Douglas and Mr. Warren had won the gubernatorial election.
A huge military construction bill tailored to the Administration's new air defense program would go before the Senate this date for debate. The large measure would authorize hundreds of military installation projects, covering a wide range from missile bases to housing construction.
In Sapporo, Japan, it was reported that 37 Japanese fishermen had returned home this date after a year in Soviet captivity facing charges of trespassing in Russian waters. The Japanese Foreign Ministry had announced that another 28 Japanese fishermen would be returned on July 2, leaving about 50 still in captivity. Meanwhile, Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko had warned that Japanese fishing boats would not be safe in northern waters until Japan signed a World War II peace treaty with Russia.
In Covington, La., it was reported that Governor Earl Long's bundle of troubles had swollen this date when his wife had filed a counter divorce action in which she demanded $2,500 monthly temporary support. The Governor, 63, who had been released only the previous Friday from a State mental hospital, had asked for separation from his wife the previous week, claiming defamation and abandonment, among other contentions. Mrs. Long's petition, filed in family court the previous night, contended that she lived in fear of bodily harm after an outburst by her husband late the previous month. In another development, one of the Governor's aides had said this date that his wife's bank safe deposit box had been opened on orders of Federal IRS agents, apparently checking on how much of the Governor's "campaign" money she was holding. A public relations advisor for the Governor since 1952, Cora Schley, did not reveal how much of the Governor's money the agents had found in his wife's safe deposit box, but said, "It wasn't a lot." Meanwhile, there had been reports that the Governor would file for divorce in his hometown in Winnfield, where he had spent the weekend on his "Pea Patch Farm". The Governor had told reporters on Sunday that he would have divorced his wife, whom he described as "the most jealous woman God ever created", years earlier if he had not been in politics. He revealed during a recent session of the State Legislature that the IRS was checking on his income. He had made a trip to Washington where he had asked the IRS agents to delay action on the probe until after December 5, when he planned to run again for governor. Doctors attending the Governor at his temporary headquarters said the previous night that he had no mental illness, contending that he was suffering from a nervous breakdown. During his recovery, the Governor carried plans to chop at least 20 persons from State payrolls, some of whom were allegedly involved in his being committed to two mental hospitals during the previous five weeks. At present, the psychiatrist said: "The Governor is rational, with no intellectual impairment. We agree with the Governor that he is better mentally than physically."
Bob Slough of The News reports that voting had continued to be light at noon this date as Charlotte and Mecklenburg County voters had gone to the polls to decide the fate of an 8 million dollar bond issue which would effect school consolidation between the City and County schools. A spot check of polling places in the county revealed light voting at most of the precincts. It was estimated that by the time the polls closed at 6:30, between 8,500 and 10,000 persons, about 10 percent of those eligible, would have voted. Two ballots were to be marked, one calling for a countywide school supplemental tax not to exceed 54 cents per $100 of property valuation and the other one dealing with the bond issue. A vote for the countywide supplemental tax was a vote for consolidation. It provides numbers of voters for several precincts by noon and suggests that the extremely hot weather probably had accounted for the slowdown in voting as the morning had worn on. One precinct official said that voting had started rather heavy during the morning but had slowed down considerably as the temperature had risen.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that one could hear an echo in Charlotte and Mecklenburg polling places during the day, that it was so quiet that one could hear a ballot drop. Musty schoolrooms and stuffy church buildings serving as polling places "had their revelry broken only by the whir of electric fans. And it was sure hot." One official at Eastover School said that they had put in a 12-hour day and then 2 to 4 hours afterward, meaning two days of work and no voters. She had found it "really discouraging". A hundred people had voted at Eastover, a precinct with a heavy registration, by noon. At Avondale Presbyterian Church, precinct workers noted that voting had been light and that a number of "older people" had voted, voters obviously too old to have children in the public schools at present, though one worker noted that they had grandchildren. At Sedgefield Junior High and other precincts, workers had come equipped with thermos jugs of tea and lemonade, fans and reading material. Time had hung heavy as there was little to do in most of the precincts. School buildings were stuffy and closed after having been shut down for a month. Workers were also cut off from civilization, since the school telephones had been disconnected in a number of places.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that a financial maneuver to cut the City tax rate by nine cents had been approved by the City Council the previous day following an explanation from the City treasurer. By the plan outlined by the treasurer, $400,000 would be cut from the debt service funds. He said that it would be done by refunding bonds which would not be sold.
John Borchert of The News reports that evangelist Billy Graham would come to Charlotte on Friday morning following his six-month crusades through Australia and New Zealand, after which he had made a tour of Europe and Russia. He was scheduled to have a luncheon at the Charlotte City Club on Friday. This night, he would appear as a guest on the Jack Paar television program and the following morning would be a guest on Dave Garroway's "Today Show". The previous Sunday, he had held worship services aboard the S.S. United States on which he had been aboard en route from Europe, with one of his associate evangelists, Charlotte's Grady Wilson, presiding over the service. During the sermon, Reverend Graham had spoken on world conditions and told of his most recent travels in Europe, indicating: "During the five months abroad, I have sensed a deepening of world tension and also a deepening hunger for God that penetrates even behind the Iron Curtain. That gives cause for hope and optimism. People of all races are responding to the Gospel in greater numbers than at any time in history." The evangelist had held a major crusade in Charlotte during the fall of 1958 and had gone from there to Australia and then to New Zealand. During the current fall, he would hold an evangelistic crusade in Indianapolis. His trip to Europe was designed to enable him to talk to people where he had held previous crusades. He had gone to Moscow on the invitation of Baptist leaders there, but had refused to commit himself to holding a major crusade inside the U.S.S.R. In 1960, he was scheduled to go to Africa for evangelistic efforts, but no date or locations had yet been scheduled. While in Europe, he had been accompanied by his wife, Ruth, and by the Rev. and Mrs. Wilson.
In New York, it was reported that Dr. Graham had said this date that "in spite of the fact that the Communist Party is avowedly militantly atheistic, they have not been able to stamp out belief in God" in Russia. In Montreat, N.C., the evangelist's home, after returning from his tour, he said he had gone to a number of services in Russian churches and had estimated that at least a fifth of the audience were teenagers. He said that only 3 percent of the Russian people belonged to the Communist Party and for that reason, "a distinction should always be made between the Russian people and the Communist Party which controls the country." He said that although he had spent only a week in Russia, "I was there long enough to hope and pray communism never controls the United States." He had been greeted by more than 200 persons assembled behind a banner which proclaimed: "Christ lives. Trust Him."
Emery Wister of The News reports of another day of 100-degree temperatures, the fourth such consecutive day in Charlotte. The Weather Bureau said that there would be little relief from the scorching heat until cool air would filter down from the Ohio Valley, predicted to be by the following night at the earliest. But the difference would not be enough to cause the air conditioner to be turned off, as a low of 72 was predicted for Thursday morning, having had a low of 76 in the current morning. That had been the highest low temperature during June and another such low was forecast for the following morning. By 8:00 a.m., it had been 84 and by noon, 96, with the high still several hours away. The previous day's 100.3 degree high had not been recorded until 5 o'clock, at a time when the power of the sun was often waning. Summer-weary Carolinians could console themselves with one fact, that they were suffering from heat and not humidity, which was burned out of the air by heat of the sun. The weatherman did not even mention rain for the state, with none in sight, not even a rain cloud.
Somewhere in these days, down in Shelby, we ran undoubtedly the highest fever we have ever run, somewhere around 200, causing us to suffer hallucinatory dreams in the middle of an afternoon, being shaken awake by our mother, obviously seeing us fighting the monster in our dream, and, momentarily awakening to believe that our mother was an extension of the monster, fortunately, not having at our disposal any sharp instruments to ward off the creature, or we might have contributed another of those bizarre headlines which proliferate in this time, a time, notwithstanding the fact that many idiots think it was such a great period of lackadaisical, devil-may-care lack of concern for anything but the sun going by on each day down by the fishing hole in mythical Mayberry, not quite yet on the tv, in fact, however, having been a very tension-packed era for adults and at least sensitive children alike. Anyone who disputes it either was not alive then or has a very poor memory, carefully protected by the childhood frame of reference which everyone more or less has, believing that their childhood just must have been when Amurica was Grrrrrate, and that if we could only collectively get back to that precious state—of childhood innocence—why everything would be just hunky-dory. Wake up, dumbbell. You are having a bad dream. By the way, our mother did not awaken us that way, only gently. And please, please, please, try to avoid the irresistible impulse of some to engage in some amateur psychoanalysis of that true event. No, we had no secret desire to do away with our mother, only the monster which we had conjured in our woolly fever-stricken dream. It did grate. Whether it was compounded by the intense heat, we haven't the foggiest. We got over it and the fever subsided. Magaville, we recommend, do likewise with your sickness.
On the editorial page, "Rockefeller Foundation Chooses Well" finds it just that the Rockefeller Foundation had granted $190,500 for a three-year study of "the changing position of the Negro in the United States" at Chapel Hill's Institute for Research in Social Science. It finds it appropriate for the grant to be awarded to the Institute which the late Dr. Howard Odum and Dr. Rupert Vance had made great.
It had been 25 years earlier, when the current Foundation's outpourings had not been known, that the Institute had mustered its own Depression-crippled resources and brought a new spirit of analysis and criticism to the "Negro's position".
"With a ruthless, yet human, compound of science and disinterestedness, unique for their day in the South, Odum and his circle moved in. They soon had dream, romance, and Sir Walter Scott in a full retreat which continues to this day."
Yet then, as at present, many had said that in asking the South to look at itself and its legends objectively, they had been asking no less than the serpent had asked of Eve. "Knowledge would surely unlock a casket of escaping evils that would destroy the South's legendary repose forever. An opposition developed who would have preferred Southerners to dream on concealing from themselves the tortures of truth. Let Dixie's imagination range on undisturbed, they said, seeing in the Negro by shifting moods Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, and Jim Crow and not a human being. W. J. Cash tells, in 'The Mind of the South,' how the more vigorous guardians of the status quo tried to cut appropriations at the state university 'in the hope of starving the new spirit out.'"
It finds that far from being starved, however, the critical spirit had endured to fan out from the Institute to Chapel Hill and from there to the entire South. It existed at present in the Institute with greater vigor, as the latter now had the tools of 25 years of history and retrospect to aid it in its newest and most challenging undertaking. "Possibly the 'position' of the Negro in American life today is more nebulous than it ever was; but we are confident that the sociologists of Chapel Hill are more than equal to the task of defining and documenting it for a waiting region and nation."
"The Tar Heel from the Afrika Korps" suggests that North Carolinians had doubtless thought they had heard the first and last of former German Afrika Korpsman Kurt Rossmeisl, alias "Frank Ellis", when he had given himself up to the FBI the previous month. He had told of how he had escaped from a prisoner of war stockade at Camp Butner near Raleigh 14 years earlier and how he had lived as a fugitive, making his living as a waiter, an unskilled laborer, and elevator operator, until poverty and arthritis had forced him to surrender in Cincinnati.
But that had not been the last of him. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, he had set himself up as an ersatz Tar Heel, saying that he had a Southern accent to prove it. He had used his "Southern accent" first to obtain a Social Security card in Chicago, explaining: "… I told the first person I encountered in the Government office I went to I wanted a working card." When the person asked why a man of his age had not obtained a Social Security card previously, he said he had turned on the Southern accent, saying: "Ah'm from No'th Ca'lina. Been working on my folks' farm and jist decided to cut mahself in on the gravy in the big city." It had worked and he told of how he had gone on from that triumph to make a circle of charmed friends "who seemed to enjoy stories of my boyhood in North Carolina."
He said that he had often entertained them with tales of back-breaking labor on tobacco plantations or lying in the fields at night tending smudge pots. "My accounts of shooting and skinning squirrels also were popular. I never touched a squirrel in my life."
It indicates that it scarcely knew what to conclude about the bamboozling he had employed, "except that some Yankees remain as gullible about drawls, tobacco plantations, and smudge pots as any Irishman about leprechauns and blarney. But even an ersatz Tar Heel merits some notice from the state of his voice he assumed as a prisoner here—and at last report this bogus moonshiner of southern lore sadly needed it. The immigration authorities threatened to deport him as an alien. If so, he will be a man without a country, since his original home lay in what is now East Germany and he has no wish to go back."
It suggests that it would be humane if Governor Luther Hodges could find a niche for him in the Department of Conservation and Development, that if he had learned enough about North Carolina in a year to pass for the genuine article in Chicago, there was no telling what he could learn in a few years of bona fide residence. "A tale or two about 'skinning squirrels' would probably gain more Yankee investment dollars for North Carolina in a week than all of authentic officialdom could in a year of brochures."
"Higher Education" finds that the Soviet challenge in education was still being met brilliantly in the U.S. Teachers College of Columbia University had recently awarded a doctor of education degree to a candidate whose dissertation was titled, "The Nature of the Sports Page in Relation to Intercollegiate Athletics". It concludes, "That'll show 'em."
"Who Do Those Apes Think They Are?" indicates that it had read of America's pioneering space monkeys receiving medals, one of which had been awarded posthumously. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had presented the awards the previous day in Pensacola, Fla., and it suggests that it must have been a touching ceremony.
Before it had the opportunity to telegraph congratulations, it had begun to brood about the other little heroes who had gone undecorated and unhonored during man's long quest for scientific enlightenment. No one had awarded medals to the mosquitoes who had helped Major Walter Reed with his yellow fever experiments in Cuba in 1899, and there had been no decorations for the rats or their deadly fleas in the Bombay experiments to determine how the plague was transmitted. The mice which had lost their lives in the nosecones of earlier rocket launchings had not even been accorded the courtesy of a one-cent commemorative postage stamp. And then there were the fruit flies who had invented heredity.
It finds it rank discrimination worthy of a Congressional investigation. It favors establishment of a "Society for the Advancement of Mosquitoes, Wharf Rats and Other Unsung Heroes", and that the Supreme Court ought be alerted.
"It's just like George Orwell said. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. They get medals."
"Major Discovery" indicates that after considerable personal research, it was prepared to announce to the world a scientific discovery of no small moment: "A dandelion is another thing which, if given an inch, will take a yard."
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "A Right To Whistle While You Work", finds the world a drab enough place at present and that few parts of it were more dismal than the commuter trains which conveyed New Yorkers by the hundreds of thousands to and from their work. "Suburban travelers resort to all sorts of devices to relieve the tedium of their daily ordeal. Some carry on continuous card games. Others bury themselves in a book or newspaper. Many gaze out of the window onto a featureless landscape, enduring in solitary boredom the minutes of travel that add up to a total of months and even years in the course of a working career."
Into that situation had entered a railroad conductor with an instinct of human pity. His daily run was on the cars of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and he possessed a talent for whistling. He had indulged it as he had gone about his duties on a commuter special, his captive audience hearing "a series of warbles, trills and birdlike chirps, reminiscent of the innocent countryside that used to exist where the iron rails and the endless box-like buildings now prevail."
Most of the customers liked his efforts or at least tolerated them in good humor, even known to have soothed fretful babies to sleep. But there had been some misanthropes among his listeners who disliked his daily performance so much that they complained to the management of the railroad, resulting in an official quietus being placed on his warbling.
But then dozens of the New Haven's customers had written to the head office to say that they missed the impromptu entertainment and wanted it restored. The top management had decided to defy the few sourpusses who had complained and the conductor had announced with relief: "I intend to start whistling again." It finds by that one effort, "that one break in the dreary wall of conformity", the world was a happier place.
Drew Pearson indicates that while most U.S. diplomats were worrying about Geneva and Berlin, the powder keg in the Caribbean had become more explosive. Approximately 800 Spanish mercenaries, supplied from Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's military jails, were presently in the Dominican Republic, ready for an attack on Cuba. With Fidel Castro already having launched an attack on dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the latter now had an excuse for retaliatory invasion.
Also churning the cafés and streets of Trujillo City were a great many Cuban Army officers, exiled by Sr. Castro, with more arriving every day. They were determined to stage a comeback. A paradoxical development was that they had been demanding that former dictator, El Presidente Fulgencio Batista, presently in exile in the Dominican Republic, lead them, but he had refused. As an old Army commander, he had shown them, in terms of detailed strategy, how an attempt to retake Cuba would only lead to a blood bath. Recently, Sr. Batista had been given a veiled threat by an emissary of Sr. Trujillo that he would either have to help lead an expedition to invade Cuba or be surrendered to Sr. Castro to stand trial. Sr. Batista had refused to encourage the expedition. What would happen to him at the hands of his own former Army officers and Sr. Trujillo remained to be seen.
There had been a bitter, closed-door debate inside the House Ways & Means Committee over the question of whether the Treasury would be allowed to increase interest rates on the Government's long-term bonds to the highest point since World War I to persuade large investment houses to purchase them. House Speaker Sam Rayburn had been attacked by Republicans because he had held a secret caucus with Democrats regarding the President's request for increased interest rates. Republican Representative Richard Simpson of Pennsylvania had complained: "I thought it was the province of this committee to deal with this question. But there seems to be little point in the committee discussing it here if you fellows have already decided to reject the President's plan under orders from Speaker Rayburn and John McCormack, your Majority Leader." Mr. McCormack had replied that they had met with the Speaker, and Democrat Wilbur Mills of Arkansas asked what was wrong with that as the Republicans did a lot of conferring with Charles Halleck of Indiana, the House Republican leader, regarding legislative policies, but that the Democrats did not complain about it.
He notes that the Republicans did not know it, but the Democratic caucus with Mr. Rayburn had come to no definite agreement, except that Mr. Rayburn appeared anxious to help his fellow Texan, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, increase interest rates.
Joseph Alsop indicates that Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas had advised Secretary of State Christian Herter to bring back Charles Bohlen from the Manila Embassy to the State Department and use his knowledge of the Kremlin's ways, giving him the special rank as the President's personal representative, for instance, and then to let him carry the day-to-day burden of negotiating with the Soviets, instead of dropping all other tasks to talk to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko for weeks on end as had been the case in Geneva recently at the foreign ministers conference. The suggestions had not been offered in his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the Secretary of State, but simply as advice privately passed from one friend to another.
He finds that the good sense of the idea could hardly be challenged, that as Secretary of State Mr. Herter had authority next to the President and responsibilities covering the whole world. He suggests that it was monstrous to allow the Kremlin to checkmate the Secretary for a month and a half, as had just happened in Geneva, by the simple device of sending Mr. Gromyko to the foreign ministers conference with no more real authority than an upper-level government clerk. Having special standing both with the Soviets and U.S. allies, Mr. Bohlen could easily carry the day-to-day negotiating burden under the continuous direction of Secretary Herter after the latter had formally opened the discussions.
He finds the chances, however, to be against the idea of Senator Fulbright being carried out in full. Ways to avoid the Secretary of State being interminably checkmated in the future were being discussed by Mr. Herter and his highest subordinates, but the use of Mr. Bohlen as a substitute for the Secretary was not being currently considered. The other part of Senator Fulbright's advice, bringing Mr. Bohlen back to Washington and making better use of his knowledge of the Kremlin, coincided with Secretary Herter's own desires and intentions.
Mr. Bohlen's prestige as a wide judge of Soviet purposes was so high with the other Western allies that more than one of the allied negotiators in Geneva had pleaded with the Secretary for Mr. Bohlen's recall to Washington. If there were to be a summit meeting later, it was said, Mr. Bohlen ought be there. To that suggestion, Secretary Herter had replied that he had already decided to bring Mr. Bohlen back to the State Department if the latter could be induced to do so. That had been more than 45 days earlier.
In the interval, the Department had offered Mr. Bohlen a transfer from Manila to another important embassy. The offer was made without Secretary Herter's knowledge, apparently in the normal course of the departmental game of musical chairs. It was refused by Mr. Bohlen, who wished to retire from the foreign service and enter private business.
But another embassy was different from a post at the center of affairs, where Mr. Bohlen's special knowledge of the Soviets would be used in full. The State Department high command thus hoped that he would at least agree to put off his retirement so as to become one of the Secretary's highest staff officers for the duration of the present crisis. Mr. Bohlen's return to Washington, were it to occur, would have symbolic as well as practical meaning, implying a wise reversal of the worst error ever committed by Secretary of State Dulles in wishing to be a one-man State Department and thus distrusting and even fearing independence of spirit and boldness of imagination in the Foreign Service. In the view of Mr. Dulles, Mr. Bohlen was the summation of those disturbing qualities and he had been known to complain that "there were two State Departments, a Dulles State Department and a Bohlen State Department."
Even at the end of his career, therefore, Mr. Dulles had given his confidence to very few of the more able foreign service officers. Assistant Secretary of State Livingston Merchant and State Department Counselor G. Frederich Reinhardt had belonged to that small group whom Mr. Dulles was willing to use as technicians.
State Representative Watts Hill, Jr., of Durham, in the second in a series of three articles on the recently concluded 1959 session of the General Assembly, assesses the failure to provide for court reform. Because that issue has already been thoroughly dissected in the editorial column and because it is a bit of an arcane issue 67 years later, we shall not summarize it, and you may read it for yourself, should you have an abiding interest in the matter.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., suggests a comedy in one act at Yankee Stadium, a few days before the fight between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson, which had resulted in the latter scoring a technical knockout against the reigning heavyweight champion in the third round. He provides an imaginary conversation between Mr. Patterson's manager, Cus D'Amato, and Mr. Johansson, with Rocky Marciano and various sportswriters chiming in, along with News sportswriter Max Muhleman and barroom bouncer Charlie Norkus, plus some others. It ends with Mr. Patterson supposedly saying: "Wha' hoppen?" You may read it for yourself.
A year later in the rematch, incidentally, it would be Mr. Johansson who would be saying: "Wha' hoppen?"
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