The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 6, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from London that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had declared this date that Soviet rocket bases would be set up in Albania and Bulgaria unless the Balkans were turned into a "rocket-free, non-atomic zone under mutual control." Addressing a large Moscow rally after flying home from a visit to Albania and Hungary, the Premier said that the bases would cover any rocket sites which Italy and Greece allowed on their territory. It was Mr. Khrushchev's first mention of Bulgaria as a possible base for Soviet missiles, although he had previously threatened to establish them in Albania. He said that any attack on Albania would be an attack on the Soviet Union, itself. He stated, "Therefore if anybody tried to attack Albania or another socialist country, a destructive blow would be dealt to the aggressor by all means at the disposal of the countries of the Warsaw Pact." He said that Romanian proposals for an atom-free Balkan zone had been supported by Yugoslavia, as well as Communist nations in the area. He stated: "It would seem that the most favorable conditions have been created for consolidation of peace in the Balkans. But unfortunately these sensible peace-loving Romanian proposals did not meet with support from the governments of the non-socialist countries of the Balkan Peninsula. The Soviet Government believes it would be most sensible to set up in the Balkans a rocket-free, non-atomic zone under mutual control. If this proposal meets with no support and the aggressive policies of the Western powers is carried on in the Balkans, the Soviet Union, together with all the countries of the Warsaw Pact, will be forced to set up rocket bases closer to the bases of the aggressors." He also said that the Soviet Union could cover opposition bases from its own territory. The 45-minute speech in Lenin Stadium had been reported via Moscow Radio.
In Geneva, it was reported that Andrei Gromyko and the Western foreign ministers of the U.S., Britain and France, debated the future of Berlin for two hours this date, according to informants, but had gotten "absolutely nowhere". In a secret session held at the residence of British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, Mr. Gromyko stood pat on Russia's demand that the Western powers give up their occupation rights in West Berlin. Mr. Lloyd, Secretary of State Christian Herter and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville were understood to have told Mr. Gromyko that they would never give in or compromise on that issue. Another secret meeting was scheduled for Monday afternoon. East-West negotiations regarding the future of Berlin appeared stalled at the end of four weeks of negotiations, both those held in the open and behind closed doors. Western diplomats believed that Mr. Gromyko probably would make his final offer for a Berlin agreement and a summit meeting later in the summer during the last 48 hours of the conference, believing that he was awaiting new instructions directly from Premier Khrushchev. Mr. Gromyko said that he did not plan to leave Geneva during the weekend but speculation continued in the Western camp that he might fly to Moscow to consult with Mr. Khrushchev personally. The four ministers had arranged a secret session at the residence of Mr. Lloyd. The three Western ministers were expected to continue pressure for a Soviet guarantee of free access to West Berlin. Western officials said privately that the three held out slight hopes of any immediate progress for resolving that and related issues regarding Berlin. They believed Mr. Gromyko could not give a final answer to their insistence that the Soviets remove the threats to West Berlin until he received further high policy instructions from the Kremlin. The three Western foreign ministers had agreed among themselves before the beginning of the conference that they would wear down Mr. Gromyko in his own waiting game.
At Omaha Beach in France, taps had been played this date in memory of American soldiers, sailors and airmen who had died on D-Day 15 years earlier. Veterans of the first hour of the historic assault on Normandy had mingled with French residents, official representatives and relatives of the dead during the ceremonies marking the anniversary. Wreaths had been placed and prayers said at an impressive memorial at the American Cemetery at St. Laurent, where 9,386 graves were present in neat rows sloped toward the landing beach. The ceremony had been a moment of honor and respect for Lawrence Bekelski of Pennsylvania and Foster Nickerson of Virginia and all of their comrades buried there. The former, of the 29th Division, and the latter, of the 1st Division, had fallen on D-Day and were buried side-by-side, their graves marked by simple marble crosses, as with all of the graves.
In Washington, it was reported that
in the Sahara Desert of Libya, 300 miles south of Benghazi, a World
War II B-24 bomber, which had a crew of nine, had been found, last
seen 16 years earlier when it had taken off from a Libyan base on a
bombing raid over Naples, Italy. The bomber had lain there in the
sand, preserved almost perfectly in the hot, arid desert air, during
the interim. Although the fuselage was snapped in two at the tail,
the plane appeared undamaged otherwise. Its radio was still in
working order. There was not a trace of the crewmen who had flown on
the mission in 1943, no clothing and no written records. Water
bottles, presumably tightly capped, had been found still filled in
the cabin of the plane. Had the crew crash-landed in the desert and
started walking toward civilization, it was only reasonable to
assume that they would have taken all of the available water with
them. If they had been killed in the landing, which caused little
damage to the plane, their remains would have been present. A
question arose as to whether they had bailed out somewhere else, as
the Pentagon believed likely. But that did not explain how the
airplane had flown on for hundreds of miles to a soft landing in the
desert and why, apparently, none of the crew had survived. The father
of one of the crewmen said that he had received a letter in 1946 from
the War Department, saying that the plane was returning from the
bombing mission when it lost radio contact with its base and was
presumed down in the Mediterranean. Thus a question had arisen as to
whether the crew had bailed out over the sea for some reason while
the plane had flown on safely to the south. The Pentagon had
identified the airplane from its serial numbers and released on
Friday night the names of the crewmen and their next of kin. Despite
the passage of time, relatives of all nine crewmen had been reached
Friday night and they said that they had been notified by the War
Department in 1943 that their loved ones were missing in action. It
sounds like a fit subject for "One Step Beyond" or,
perhaps, that new series set to premiere in the fall, "The
Twilight Zone". We shall have to wait and see
In London, it was reported that crimes by young men between the ages of 16 and 21 in the country had jumped 57 percent between January, 1956, and the end of 1958. During that same time interval, the prison and reformatory-school population had risen from 21,000 to more than 26,000.
John Borchert of The News reports that the team of evangelist Billy Graham, the most successful evangelistic organization in contemporary religion, was planning a major change in its crusade technique. The Reverend Leighton Ford, one of Reverend Graham's three associate evangelists who had returned during the week from Australia, said that the change would involve simultaneous major and minor city crusades in a single state, placing the associate evangelists as preachers for the smaller city crusades, and leaving Dr. Graham as evangelist for the major city crusades, thus exposing more people to the gospel teachings of Dr. Graham. He said that Pennsylvania would probably be the first state to be exposed to the new team crusade technique. It had been tried twice outside the continental U.S., during the Caribbean crusade, which had preceded the San Francisco crusade, but not on the scale it would be tried in Pennsylvania, as there had been no major city crusades. Instead, the associate evangelists had gone from city to city with one and two-week crusades, which the Reverend Graham had climaxed with one or two-day appearances. In Australia, the larger effort of the new technique had gone into operation and the team was actually forced into the plan during that crusade because of the tremendous, unexpected response to the message.
In Los Angeles, it was reported that two delivery men, entrusted with an armored truck from which $113,200 had vanished the prior Thursday, were not saying anything except to a lie detector. Police said that they had submitted voluntarily to the test the previous day and that their account had been verified. Records showed that the delivery men had loaded cash into their truck from the Bank of America vault at 11th and Figueroa Streets on Thursday morning and had then had started on a 6.5 hour trip, unloading cash at Bank of America branches and other business locations. At five of their 17 stops along the route, the vehicle had been left unguarded for periods varying from 2 to 5 minutes, but investigators said that there was not the slightest evidence that the truck was robbed at any of those stops. At the end of the route, when the truck rolled up to the Bank of America's Slauson Avenue branch, the money was gone. The FBI said that it could not recall such a large sum having just vanished from an armored car, and agents were checking each stop along the route. A spokesman for the bank said that if the money had been delivered by mistake to one of the branches, it was certain to turn up soon, but that if it had gone by mistake to another business, it might take longer to find. He said that they were insured and so was the armored truck company. He considered it the worry of the armored truck company. The money was in $2, $5, $20, $50 and $100 bills, insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. An investigator for Bank of America summed the situation by saying: "Somebody goofed. It's one of those things that just can't happen."
In New York, as explained in a caption accompanying a photograph of a woman with a horse, the woman depicted had flown to the city to see her horse, Royal Orbit, run this date, and had claimed that on the way to the track, the cab driver had gotten fresh with her, then modified her statement, saying that it had been his manner, not his remarks, which had bothered her. The cab driver initiated a slander suit for $100,000 on Friday.
J. A. Daly of The News reports that industrial progress in the Carolinas would be spotlighted on August 1 when the 30 million dollar wood pulp producing plant of Bowaters Carolina Corp. would begin operations at Catawba, near Rock Hill, S.C. The management there had said this date that all of the Bowater interests in the U.S., Canada and England were anxious for the Carolina plant to get started. The plant, and the 6 million dollar hardboard plant, the latter presently in the early stages of construction on the same extensive site, were properties of the Bowater organization based in England. Already its Carolina operation was rapidly piling up cordwood at the Catawba plant preliminary to the start of pulping operations on the August 1 target date. Present plans of the corporation were to ship the pulp to England for processing into paper and cardboard products. A report from Charleston said that the South Carolina Ports Authority there was looking forward happily to the approaching date when shipments of the plant's pulp would strongly increase the tonnage of ocean-going traffic from the Port of Charleston. When operating at capacity, the pulp mill at Catawba would require around 250,000 cords of wood per year. North and South Carolina already had tremendous wood-pulp producing capacity, which was represented by great plants of a half dozen or more nationally known corporations. Those plants were sustaining a correspondingly broad and active market for hardwood and softwood, and especially for the softwood pines. Development of the Catawba plant had begun two years earlier, and since that time, a steady stream of new capital had been pouring into the area of South Carolina. Employment in construction of the pulpwood plant had been decreasing though in recent months, consequent of the rapid approach of completion of the mill. At the same time, the steady expansion of construction activity on the nearby hardboard plant was sustaining the employment related to the Bowaters operations in the Carolinas. Officials of South Carolina at Columbia, who were intimately concerned with industrial progress and diversification, had cooperated through those previous two years to assure the utmost speed in the development. Also, the South Carolina Highway Commission had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into construction of new bridges and new highways to accommodate the expanded traffic incident to the stimulation of the Catawba area's economy. At Shelby, N.C., there was also a Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. plant of Pittsburgh, in the early stages of its growth toward capacity production. Five of the 16 furnaces of the Shelby plant were in operation and when fired, those furnaces had to be operated day and night six days per week. The glass-making sand was in that manner started through the fiber producing process and soon the resultant glass had attained a temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit—1,549 degrees above the temperature necessary to burn paper, including pulp fiction and assorted classics alike. Operations were being expanded steadily and when capacity production had been attained, the Shelby plant's employment would be at around 800 persons. Glass fiber, as with all of the many products of wood pulp, was experiencing a strong and rapidly expanding market which extended into many nations, as well as into many divisions of U.S. business. Glass fiber being produced at the Shelby plant varied in diameter and other quality factors, in keeping with the desires of the consumer industry. As the plant management explained, the plant could produce for any buyer any form of yarn possible through ring twisting operations. In other words, the glass yarn could be varied almost as widely in its quality as was done at mills spinning cotton yarns.
Well, that was quite a yarn, but not
nearly so full of ring twists as this one
On the editorial page, "Why Write Minority Rule into Law?" finds that the history of court reform in the State Senate had been very sweet but would turn very sour if the issue were packaged on the ballot with another proposed constitutional amendment to deny the populous Piedmont its fair share of legislative representation.
A constitutional provision for a uniform judicial system administered by the State Supreme Court, it finds, was essential to progress in the state, but the proposition ought stand or fall on its own merits when submitted to the voters. It urges that it would be unfortunate if court reform were offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis with the proposal to limit every county to one State Senator regardless of whether its population entitled it to more.
That plan was roughly the same one rejected by the voters in 1954, having been a bad idea at the time and remaining so.
It indicates that if every county in the state were limited to one senator, a non-representative minority would be able to control the General Assembly's upper house permanently. It would simply write into law the type of inequity from which the state's more populous counties had been suffering for years.
Whereas at the Federal level, the Senate had two Senators from each state and the House was roughly proportional in the number of people represented from each district, in the North Carolina General Assembly, those roles were reversed, whereby each of the state's 100 counties, no matter its size, was entitled to one representative with the remaining 20 seats scattered on the basis of population and the 50 Senate seats, theoretically, were apportioned according to population, similar to the U.S. House. A reapportionment was supposed to take place after each decennial census, according to the present State Constitution, but there had been no reapportionment since 1941. As a result, the citizens of the greater populated counties, such as Mecklenburg and Guilford, were grossly underrepresented at present and would continue to be so if no county could ever have more than one Senator.
It finds that if the gimmick were placed in the new state constitution, the state could wind up with something like the Georgia system in which Atlanta had one representative for each 131,000 inhabitants, while a neighboring county had one representative for each 3,000 inhabitants. Rural-dominated legislatures throughout the nation had used their power to perpetuate that disproportionate representation and it urges that it not be allowed to occur in North Carolina.
Mecklenburg had voted against the amendment by more than 6 to 1 in 1954. Guilford County, dominated by Greensboro, had done so by a margin of 4 to 1 and Forsyth County, dominated by Winston-Salem, by three to one. But many smaller counties had also registered their dissent, among them, neighboring Anson, Union and Stanly, proving that the concepts of equal representation and justice were not determined according to population. It expresses confidence that the citizens, if given an opportunity, would again vote against such a plan.
"Too Much Apology Kills an Old Friend" indicates that John Motley Morehead, industrialist and a primary donor to UNC, had been the central figure of a pleasant but sad scene as its trustees had met recently in Chapel Hill. Mr. Morehead had been set to be installed as a lifetime trustee, having entered the University 72 years earlier with "little Latin". "Prof. Winston found my Latin was very deficient," said Mr. Morehead.
It refuses to guess what deficiencies illustrious old graduates would lament in the year 2021, 62 years hence, "but Latin will scarcely be one." (Maybe simple arithmetic, as it actually counts the interim years as being 72—which would have made us all a decade older during the pandemic, perhaps, in some sense, true, and so perhaps the error was the product of unwitting augury. Or was it quite deliberate? the writer able somehow to sense that, by 2017, the way things were going, the country would "elect", albeit by a minority popular vote and a manipulated electoral college through devious political operatives focusing propaganda in certain "swing" precincts of three swing states, a national demagogue with no political experience whatsoever, not as a general or even a little corporal, to the White House, one who, through aides Stone and Cohn of the earlier demagogues, had adopted the playbooks of Mr. Nixon and Senator McCarthy, plus variants of others, including the Long brothers of Louisiana, as well as of Hitler and Mussolini and thus Machiavelli.)
Therein lay the sadness, says the piece, that until a few weeks earlier, the academies had glimmered with the hope that Latin might one day be downstage again. But that had been before the best hope had fallen away, before word had come from England that Oxford and Cambridge might no longer require Latin for entry.
The New York Herald-Tribune had said that it was "incredible". Virgil might exclaim, "Mirabile dictu!" It finds that it appeared to be a case of "Et tu, Brute?" Oxford had stabbed an old friend which was not likely to recover. Yet it had been pronounced "dead" years earlier.
It had examined many theories as to how or why Latin had once been vital or why it might be made so at present. "Could it be a leisurely quest for 'the best that has been known and said in this world'? Much of the best has been said in other languages. Could it (in today's educational jargon) be 'a discipline'? There are equal disciplines, like math or logic."
It finds that those who were fortunate enough to have been educated in Latin, such as Chancellor Robert House at Chapel Hill or the late journalist Elmer Davis, had worn the learning lightly, graciously, not with defense or pretense. "They did not think of their knowledge of the ancients as a bludgeon of snobbery with which to swat the moderns. To them, Caesar had been a politician with style, a soldier with brevity. Cicero was an orator whose passions were as familiar and as real as Burke's. Tacitus was the familiar historian, fascinating, but with a touch too many political axes to grind."
It finds that the world of Latin called for no apology, for no drawing of lines, having been as full of touch and feeling as the latest newspapers, "but went on when they went to the garbage can."
The relevance of Latin study is apparent to anyone who has taken it, as it is the basis for the Romance languages, including much of English, and provides the student thus with insight into vocabulary derivatives and semantics like no other language study. You will be improved in your comprehension and use of English by dedicated study of Latin, even if you will never speak it or read it unless becoming a priest in the Roman Catholic Church.
"Pass the Salt" indicates that the General Assembly's well-publicized laments about the length of the 1959 session could be taken with a grain of salt, as the previous week, the House had devoted a full hour to debate on a bill which passed by a vote of 100 to 4.
"Togetherday: 48 Hours of Freedom" favors abolition of Saturday. It indicates that it worked on Saturdays, unable to break the chains, and that the only hope it had was to erase Saturdays from the face of the calendar.
It favors instead Togetherday, recognizing a national trend with brightness for the nation's families. It would last for the whole weekend. Churches could move their services to the latter hours of Togetherday and catch people who would be out of town during the old Sunday morning.
It urges that the nation's business would come to a mandatory halt for Togetherday and the decree would also bar all crime and commerce. People would have time to relax and think of the great Monday sales to be held by the stores. Without news media on the day, there would be a vacuum, to avoid the fate of the world or the City Council.
It would require vigilance as some enterprising merchant might open his doors and if that were to occur, the movement might grow and before one knew it, drugstores would be selling groceries on Togetherday. That would create a need for advertising and weekend newspapers, and soon, everything would be back to where it had started.
Some nut in Congress, naturally a
Republican, just suggested here in July, 2026 abolition of weekends,
but did not suggest, as the piece, any substitute dubbed Togetherday
or its equivalent. Instead, this nut simply wanted workaday people to
work seven days per week, better to enrich him and his contributing
buddies of the oligarchic, authoritarian extreme right-wing of the
Republican Party—or he would huff and puff and blow every
ordinary person's house down, or burn it down, with his demagogic
leader's climate-change denying policies and his Big, Beautiful
Barnyard Discards spewed daily, including the Drown America Act, aka Facilitate Unmarked Costumed Klansmen in America Act, meant to prevent as many members of Democratic-aligned demographic groups as possible from being able to exercise their franchise by forcing production of a passport or birth certificate, not just a driver's license or other photo-bearing identification
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "Comestible Currency", finds that Fiji seemed to be suffering from a shortage of pennies again, judging by reports from news agencies, this time blaming tourists. It finds that there might be truth to the accusation as Fiji pennies were silver and had a hole in the middle, being about as large as a half-penny and providing an exotic touch to a charm bracelet or key-ring.
The previous week, 60 cases of pennies had arrived at Suva to replace the missing souvenirs. During the war, however, it had been Fiji's dogs which accounted for the disappearance of pounds of pennies, as the dogs used to eat them, as they were then made of paper, the only paper pennies in the world. A shortage of coins had forced the Government to print pennies locally. They measured about 2.5 x 1.5 inches and looked like little bank-notes, which they in fact were. The color was a sort of grayish-green with the king's head on half of the penny and an engraving on the other half. They wore quite well considering the handling they received, with the one hazard having been the ubiquitous Fiji dog. For some reason, those animals found a penny irresistible, and the humans soon discovered the remarkable canine taste.
One of the chief pastimes in the Suva bars had been feeding pennies to the dogs, and the amount in currency which any given dog could hold was often the subject of bets.
Drew Pearson indicates that word had gone to the nation's steel workers to be ready to walk off the job at the end of the current month, with only formal ratification remaining of the strike by the union's wage policy committee. At least one wildcat strike had already been reported by Jones and Laughlin, though the news had been kept out of the newspapers. That firm's Chicago plant had been emptied for one afternoon until the union persuaded the workers to return to their jobs. Meanwhile, White House aides had advised the steel companies that the President would not intervene in the strike unless national security were threatened. That was suitable with the steel tycoons who had stockpiled enough steel to last for 3 to 4 months.
Congressman Alfred Santangelo, who represented part of Manhattan, had introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act which could save the taxpayers a lot of money. He wanted to bar defense contracts to any company which was employing a retired general or admiral who had been out of the service for less than five years. The Congressman believed that when a retired admiral or general went back to the Pentagon to talk to his former subordinates, he enjoyed a favored position in winning billion-dollar contracts, and with most big defense contracts let on a noncompetitive, cost-plus basis, there was more favoritism in the Pentagon than in Tammany Hall in New York. The list of retired Army, Air Force and Naval officers working for big corporations read almost like the membership of the Army-Navy Club. Mr. Pearson finds that it would be interesting to see what the budget-balancing Administration did about Mr. Santangelo's amendment.
Democratic candidates for the presidency were giving each other the "after-you-Alphonse" treatment. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, one of the top farm experts in the nation, bowed to Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri when it came to investigating the Agriculture Department, allowing Senator Symington to become chairman. The latter Senator had said: "I'm certainly honored to have Hubert sit on my committee."
Walter Lippmann indicates that the report of the President's Science Advisory Committee, chaired by Dr. James Killian, had been published about ten days earlier, receiving general approval from the President, who said that he hoped it would be read widely and that it would stimulate wider understanding of the importance of excellence in the educational system.
Among the crucial ideas which needed a wide understanding was the conclusion of the report that "doubling our current annual investment in education is probably a minimal rather than an extravagant goal." That did not mean that if twice as much was spent on the schools, they could automatically become twice as good. The sponsors of the report were among the most distinguished persons in American science and had made it clear that to improve American education, important reforms were necessary in the recruiting of teachers and in the curricula which they taught. They said those reforms would have to be paid for and that anyone who was serious about improvement of education would have to think about raising more money.
He indicates that the best discussion of the problem of money in education was in the Rockefeller Brothers Report, under the title "The Pursuit of Excellence". That report indicated that it had to be realized that since 1870 "we have heaped upon our educators one of the most heroic assignments a society could have invented." That had been to educate the whole mass of the American people. Between 1870 and 1955, the population had been multiplied four times. But the number of students in the public high schools had increased approximately 80 times. In the course of 75 years "we have taken into the school system a greater proportion of our youngsters and we have kept more of them in the system longer than any other nation." Size and mass were not the only reasons, but were the principal ones causing the U.S. educational system to fall far short of being excellent.
As of 1955, the most recent year for which expenses of education were available, the total spent in the country was 14 billion dollars per year, 9.4 billion of which was for public elementary and secondary schools, 1.2 billion for private elementary and secondary schools, 1.5 billion for public higher education and 1.9 billion for private higher education. (The first two constituent figures could be reversed as the piece relates both 9.4 billion and 1.2 billion to "private elementary and secondary schools".)
The President's Science Advisory Committee and the Rockefeller Brothers Report agreed that the total of 14 billion dollars would have to be doubled if education were to be good enough for the present times. As the two groups which concurred in that conclusion were composed of eminent, highly qualified and widely experienced men, it could be assumed that they knew whereof they wrote. Mr. Lippmann believes that no one had seriously disputed their conclusion.
But the real question was how to raise the necessary money. Between 1930 and 1957, the expenditure on education had been more or less stable at about 3.5 percent of gross national product. It had now risen to about 4 percent. As the gross national product had risen since 1930, the amount spent on education had also risen. But it had not risen enough to keep pace with the rise in enrollment. Thus, less money was available for each pupil and consequently a growing shortage in facilities, classrooms, and teachers to deal with the expanding population.
If the conclusion of the President's Committee were adopted, the country would have to be prepared to spend by about 1967 something on the order of 30 billion dollars on education. It was generally estimated that by that time, the gross national product would be about 600 billion dollars and thus the expenditure for education would rise from about 4 percent at the present time to about 5 percent of gross national product.
In the previous 25 years, there had been a drastic shift in the burden of school support from the local governments to the state governments. Whereas in 1930 the state governments carried only 17 percent of the burden, by 1954, they were carrying 37 percent. There was no use expecting or hoping that the whole new burden of cost could be borne by the states. The Rockefeller Report had said, "state and local tax systems are in some respects archaic," primarily because of their dependence on real property taxes.
He indicates that there was no escape from the conclusion that if the new and necessary costs were to be met, much of it would have to come from Federal taxes, bound to occur, and the sooner faced, the more likely the society would be prepared to act with deliberation and awareness of the hazards, and with wisdom.
A letter writer from Waynesville indicates that the graduation exercises at UNC had been, in the eyes of many, an exciting and inspiring affair, but finds that in those same exercises, there had been an error of omission. Seated in Kenan Stadium on the prior Monday evening had been former UNC president and former Senator Frank Porter Graham who had come from New York to participate in the 50th reunion of his class. The writer finds that only a handful of people in the University's history had bridged the gap between mediocrity and greatness, and one of those was Mr. Graham. He had been a leading figure in both the state and the nation, having served for about 20 years as president of the University and had succeeded in planting and growing in that time the laurels upon which the University now "too comfortably and complacently" rested. Upon his appointment by Governor Kerr Scott to the U.S. Senate in 1949 upon the death of Senator Melville Broughton early in the latter's term, he had served the state "with the wisdom, candor, and dignity that earned him a place of highest respect among his colleagues." His re-election campaign in 1950 remained a standard example for political science students and was indicative of his stature and the depths which some people would sink "to defeat goodness and preserve their narrow horizons." [The writer refers to the race-baiting and Red-baiting campaign of his opponent in that election, attorney Willis Smith, whose campaign was managed by Jesse Helms.] Since his service in the Senate, he had served the state, the nation and the world through the U.N. and had earned the respect of many leaders of the world. He had not come to Chapel Hill on Monday to be honored, and yet the writer finds that it would have been nice, fitting and proper had the University, which he had served so well, seen fit to acknowledge him in some way at that memorable milestone of his life. "The debt that the state and the University owes to Frank Graham can never be repaid..." But a simple gesture of realization of the debt would have been gratifying to Mr. Graham and "the only honest and decent thing which the University could do with respect to itself." He finds it unfortunate that the error could not now be corrected.
A letter writer finds that the "same gang of smear boys who fought and smeared the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy are now fighting, smearing and belittling the governor of Arkansas, Mr. Orval Faubus." He finds that a piece by Ed Creagh of the Associated Press, which had said that in Governor Faubus there was spiritual kin to Joseph McCarthy had been "the tipoff that the character assassination machine is to be opened upon the fearless governor of the sovereign state of Arkansas." He suggests that the spirit of "poor Senator McCarthy" would "eventually win the battle", that the reason why his enemies had hated him so much was that he had done "more than any other man in America to find America's Communist traitors and cause their arrest. But the Earl Warren-Felix Frankfurter Supreme Court has since turned them loose to carry on their dirty work." He ventures that the reason that the President and others were afraid to have America know the real truth about the terrible condition of its "defense equipment" was that they would be forced by revealing the reports to admit that Senator McCarthy had been right when he warned America. "Governor Faubus, by standing up alone in the face of smear and persecution, has stopped the integration campaign in its tracks, so much so that even the northern politicians are afraid to discuss it." And he goes on, concluding, "Peanut politicians have taken the place of real statesmen in America."
This pro-McCarthy diatribe is not by J. R. Cherry, Jr., though definitely rendered in his barnyard discards style of artistry.
A letter writer indicates that three times recently people had made appeals for translation of foreign language letters and that in two cases help could be provided. He suggests that Charlotte have a school of languages, using as interpreters any and all who understood newcomers' foreign languages, and letting it be known that help would be given wherever and whenever needed. One of the colleges and one of the newspapers could serve as a clearinghouse, keeping on file names of anyone willing to help in case of need. He finds that contacts and association with newcomers to Charlotte were not warm enough and that they would be of greater help through something like the plan he mentions. "Americans might be a bit bolder in evidencing desire to help timid newcomers."
Trump advocates using masked thugs patrolling in unmarked cars, not unlike Hitler's SS, shooting them dead in the streets of American cities with impunity to demonstrate Der Fuehrer's absolute power over all of us peons not billionaires.
A letter writer says that he had noticed in a newspaper published in one of the New England states recently that all county lines had been abolished and all county political functions ordered transferred to the state. He says that the last thing which the bureaucrats ought meddle with were the schools. The North Carolina Legislature had returned schools to local control and he believed the child, the parent, the school and those who administered the schools ought be in close relationship. He disfavors consolidation of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg City and County schools, as the price tag for it would increase the tax rate and also "the minds of little children and older ones too will be cast in a rigid mould and thinking will be stereotyped and regimentation will begin and end in the schools of a bureaucratic headquarters and the spirit of learning will be told to conform or die." He believes that the City and County schools were doing well enough and favors voting against consolidation on June 30.
Why, that's damned right as rain. You consolidate them schools and first thing you know, they'll be tellin' the little school's children in the canny that they got to go to school with the Negroes in the city. It's just not right. They crazy, all these lib'rals.
Framed Edition
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