The Charlotte News
Monday, June 8, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this date had asked Congress to remove the ceilings on interest rates for Government savings bonds and other long-term obligations and to boost the limit on the national debt. He said that the Treasury planned, if Congress permitted it, to raise the rate of savings bonds from 3.25 percent to 3.75 percent. Wiping out the limit on Treasury bonds which ran five years or more to maturity, he said, would provide greater flexibility to Federal financing. The present limit was 4.25 percent. There was no ceiling on bonds of less than five-years maturity. At the same time, the President proposed that Congress hike the permanent national debt ceiling from the current 283 billion dollars to 288 billion and to boost the temporary limit from 288 to 295 billion. In a special message to Congress, he said that those steps were necessary for successful management of the public debt, presently at 286 billion dollars. The immediate reaction to the proposals in Congress had been mixed. Representative Clarence Kilburn of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Banking Committee, said that the President was correct because "if we're going to get the money we need, we've got to raise interest rates. When this Congress shows evidence of trying to keep a sound dollar by cutting spending programs, you'll find confidence in government bonds coming back and interest rates coming down." Representative Wright Patman of Texas, an influential monetary spokesman for House Democrats and vice-chairman of the joint Senate-House Economic Committee, opposed the action, saying that there was no excuse for higher interest rates "except to give the bankers and big-moneylenders a larger share of the national income." He said that higher interest rates were "the main cause of inflation" because they increased all business costs and prices.
At Edwards Air Force Base in California, it was reported that the rocket X-15, expected one day to carry a man 100 miles high at 4,000 mph, had successfully made its first glide test this date. It meant that it had been dropped at 38,000 feet from a B-52 mothership, glided for four or five minutes, and landed on a dry lake bed at 230 miles mph. Veteran engineer-test pilot Scott Crossfield had been at the controls. The craft carried no fuel and had landed on specially created skids. It had made four previous captive flights, locked under the wing of the B-52. The test program had been delayed by various failures of electronic equipment. Later in the year, the X-15 would undergo tests with jet engines and the following year, flight with rocket engines was planned.
In Jacksonville, Fla., it was
reported that the Navy this date had made the first successful
delivery of U.S. mail via a guided missile. The missile had been
launched from a submarine at sea to the Navy's Auxiliary Air Station
at Mayport, Fla., at the mouth of the St. John's River near
Jacksonville. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield had announced the
successful delivery at a hastily called press conference 90 minutes
after the Navy Regulus I was brought into Mayport after the missile
had traveled for 22 minutes. The distance traveled by the missile had
not been disclosed. The Navy said only that the 60-foot missile had
been launched from international waters off the coast, meaning more
than 3 miles out, and that the cargo of 3,000 letters had included
one addressed to the President. Other messages in the cargo, all from
Mr. Summerfield, had been intended for members of the Cabinet,
members of Congress, the Justices of the Supreme Court, the governors
of all 50 states and the territories, and the Postmasters General of
99 other nations which were members of the Universal Postal Union.
Mr. Summerfield had described the event in a telephone conversation
with the Washington Evening Star, saying that it had been a
dramatic sight. What was its payload
In Phoenix, it was reported that 16 farm laborers had been killed and 32 others injured when a crudely fashioned bus had crashed into a tree and exploded near the city this date. The Highway Patrol, which had difficulty determining the number of charred and cremated bodies in the twisted wreckage, listed those figures as official, but said that there were many more dead. All of the victims were Mexican nationals. Many of the injured had been reported in serious condition with burns and broken bones. In Chicago, the National Safety Council said that the crash might be classified as either a truck or a bus accident. Its records showed that the highest toll in the case of a truck hitting a stationary object had been four in 1950. The worst bus accident under similar conditions had caused the deaths of 23 in 1931.
In Davis, Calif., California and Nevada police were reported to be hunting for the 19-year old daughter of mystery writers Kenneth and Margaret Millar. He used the pen name "John Ross McDonald". The daughter had disappeared after leaving a Nevada gambling casino, saying that she had to return to school. She was a sophomore at the University of California, Davis, and was last seen leaving the casino at Lake Tahoe on the night of May 30-31. Two male companions said that she had told them she would hitchhike back to the school, and was to return to the campus by the curfew of 2:00 a.m. She had ridden to Stateline, a town at the lake, with two young men from nearby Woodland, one a dairy worker and the other a power company employee. Both had told a lieutenant of the sheriff's office that the young woman was worried that she could not get back to her dormitory by the curfew. The lieutenant said that both of the men had told the same story, with only minor discrepancies, and had been released. News of her disappearance had been withheld at first by police and her parents.
In Sanford, N.C., it was reported that a deputy sheriff had been killed this date while searching for an escaped convict. Two men had been wounded when they had gone to the aid of the officer, who had lain mortally wounded in a wheat field. The man sought had been in the edge of a wooded area when the killed deputy sheriff had approached and was shot by a shotgun either in the face or the heart, according to a witness who operated a nearby store. A large posse had quickly gathered to conduct an intensive search starting at noon this date. It was the second slaying of a North Carolina law enforcement officer within a week, after the sheriff of Alexander County had been shot and killed in Taylorsville the previous Tuesday while attempting to question a man after a domestic quarrel with his father and mother. The deputy who had been killed in Sanford was married and the father of a 16-year old boy, had been a member of the Sanford police force before joining the sheriff's department.
Julian Scheer of The News reports from Henderson, N.C., that it was quiet this date as the Charlotte Air National Guardsmen had taken over patrol and picket line duty at the strike-bound Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. There had been no incidents and no heckling at the picket lines in front of both the North and South mills. The Charlotte Guardsmen had met their first shift early in the morning and would meet every shift for the ensuing two weeks, maintaining a 24-hour motor patrol through the mill areas. They had shared the mill entrances with pickets beginning early in the morning. The previous day, when the Air Guard had arrived, the mills had been closed for the usual weekend layoff. About 300 members of the 145th Fighter Interceptor Group, provisionally an air police group for the duty at the plants, had arrived in Henderson during the mid-morning the previous day in two long convoys after leaving Charlotte from Morris Field early in the morning. The 145th was a Charlotte-based Air National Guard unit with members from all over the Charlotte area, including Badin and Wadesboro. They would be in Henderson for two weeks under the command of Col. Henry Byrd of Charlotte. He had relieved a Hickory-based group commanded by Col. Tom Presnell of Statesville. That National Guard unit, present in Henderson for the previous two weeks, had reported for summer camp at Fort Bragg the previous day. One member of the Charlotte group, a captain from Charlotte, had died of a heart attack at a local hospital shortly after arrival in Henderson the previous day. Guard units on duty in Henderson were being rotated every two weeks to prevent excessive personal hardship and the Charlotte Air National Guard group was the third to report.
Mr. Scheer also reports that Police Chief Ernest Selvey, who was scheduled to be relieved from his office this date by a majority of the City Council, had a legal right to fight the appointment of his successor. He said this date that attorneys had advised him that it would appear from the City Charter that he could be removed from office only "for cause" and only after being heard. He said he had made no plans, however, to appear before the City Council this date and had no plans to fight the appointment of the new chief. The new development had occurred as the City Council was scheduled to name Burlington Police Chief Jesse James as the successor to Chief Selvey. Four newly elected Council members had apparently picked Mr. James and thus had the necessary majority of the seven-member Council to vote him into office.
Dick Young of The News reports that William Veeder, City Manager of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., 36, appeared to be the certain selection as the new City Manager for Charlotte just before the afternoon session of the City Council. At least four votes were solidly in support of Mr. Veeder. There was, however, still substantial feeling among members, even in the ranks of the so-called "Big Four" new members, that L. B. Creswell, the City Manager of Meridian, Miss., a retired Marine major general, ought to be named to the position. Mr. Veeder was a native of New Amsterdam, N.Y., and had gone to Fort Lauderdale as personnel director, a fact which had convinced some members of the Council that he was right for the job of city manager. The Council had to select a personnel director also. A salary of $17,500 per year was expected to be paid to Mr. Veeder, at present receiving $15,500 in Fort Lauderdale, which had a population of slightly over 70,000. Henry Yancey, the former City Manager, had been paid $16,000 when he started 13 1/2 years earlier and had been receiving $20,000 when he retired.
John Borchert of The News reports that Mr. Veeder had been a controversial figure in the city government of Fort Lauderdale and was presently serving a 90-day probationary period imposed by the new administration, which had been elected to office the previous month. He had been popular with the people but unpopular with two members of the city government, having constant clashes with them, including the mayor, who had been elected to his second term, the vice-mayor and one of the members of the City Commission, the latter having repeatedly attacked him for failure to do good public relations work with the citizens by neglecting to answer complaints, also claiming that Mr. Veeder was uncooperative in carrying out the mandates of the Commission.
On the editorial page, "Milk Producers Can Stand Competition" indicates that the previous week when the State House Agriculture Committee had approved a bill to empower the state Milk Commission to fix price floors under milk "in emergency situations", a beef farmer from Toledo had stood among the embattled losers, saying that the bill was bad because it would be bad for "private enterprise".
It shares the feeling that the bill was bad but could not understand the argument that it was bad for private enterprise on the dairy farm when the vast majority of dairy farmers, the "enterprisers", had supported the bill. The Agriculture Committee, by a lopsided vote of 29 to 2, had confirmed again that "private enterprise" was magnificent in theory but often inconvenient for even its most vocal exponents in practice. If the bill passed the General Assembly, the real victim would be the much-harpooned consumer, who increasingly yawned at the theoretical refinements regarding "free enterprise" and cynically asked how much it would cost him. The answer was that it remained to be seen.
When a competitor began to undersell the 27 cents per quart milkman, the Milk Commission, at its discretion, could decide to place a floor under the price. It was rumored that Winn-Dixie stores were thinking about bottling milk and selling it at "reduced" prices. Other supporters of the price-fixing bill were less bold in explaining their enthusiasm. Some seemed to think it would serve as a charm to avoid vicious Yankee or other competitive underselling or "dumping" in North Carolina. But in fact, that had already been taken care of by the fact that the Milk Commission Act, amended in 1955, stated: "The sale of milk by any distributor, producer, or retailer below cost for the purpose of injuring, harassing, or destroying competition is hereby prohibited."
It could think of no measure which would more quickly injure, harass or destroy competition than enabling the Milk Commission to prop up the price of milk. In some farm staples, the hazards of nature and planning and the unpredictability of fortune from year to year made the question of supports at least an open one. A better case than for milk could be made for many farm products presently under supports. Milk production was both predictable and as able to stand the free market as durable goods, and if competition brought a lower priced quart to the home, so much the better.
"King's Heads that Haunt Gen. De Gaulle" indicates that in English history at the time when Whig partisans of the House of Orange had feared a triumphant return of the Stuarts, a "King Charles' Head" meant a political fear.
Americans had been afflicted with such a King Charles' Head when Senator McCarthy had waved scraps of paper bearing the "names" of Communists supposedly in the State Department, who had never quite materialized.
Now, while England and America were relatively free of King Charles' Heads, the French were haunted by many. In practically every balance sheet on the first year of Premier Charles de Gaulle's term in power, there was one great fear, that he would pass from the picture he had created before he could complete his work, and that if he did, the Republic would fall to the greed of his less reputable hangers-on.
It suggests that an American might better imagine the quandary of France if imagining the President in a similar fix, whereby, if he had not been elected but had assumed power at the behest of frightened Congressional leaders one day the previous June when large numbers of the Army and Air Force had rebelled against them and there was a formidable black-market and inflated American dollars in almost every large city, while at the same time, the Korean War, with its strain, continued to occur. It suggests imagining the President surrounded by adventurers of every sort on whom his power depended but whom he had to keep at bay because of their political ideas being obnoxious to him.
Roughly, that was the dilemma being faced by Premier De Gaulle. His time in office was sharply limited by his advanced years. His partisans included not only true believers in his essentially liberal principles, but also many rightists who did not find it hard 20 years earlier to make their peace with Hitler. His enemies, on the other hand, included many patriotic democrats, such as the virtually banished Pierre Mendes-France, who believed that Premier De Gaulle had rendered the Chamber where the Tiger Clemenceau had once sat as feeble and ludicrous as any rubber-stamp house in the most dictatorial country.
It finds that only the cynic who completely lacked compassion could resist putting his heart with General De Gaulle as he celebrated the first anniversary of his reign. His striving toward a mystic idea of what France ought to be, continued with much success. Nevertheless, King Charles' Heads littered the French political terrain and it rendered the Premier's task all the harder to know that the doubtful legitimacy of his coming to power had put many of them in place.
"Look out for Grandma Moses' Brush" indicates that the works of American artists scheduled for the fair in Moscow's Sokolniki Park had credentials almost too good to believe. The State Department and the U.S. Information Agency, headed by North Carolina's George Allen, had picked a four-man panel of distinguished critics and artists, who in turn had picked the works. The President had approved the art in February and Vice-President Nixon was to open the fair on July 25.
It finds that to hear Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania tell it, however, the exhibition so impeccably chosen would only confirm the Soviet propaganda offensive, charging that a good many craftsmen whose paintings or sculptures would be shown "have prostituted whatever talents they possess to the foulest conspiracy in the history of man." He was especially upset about "Welcome Home", by Jack Lavine, which he said "shows a gum-chewing stuffed-shirt American general."
Caricature, which had begun long before Brueghel had made it great, appeared to have no place in Mr. Walter's catalog of legitimate art. The Congressman had not made it clear whether his objection was to the character of the general, as such, or to the fact that the artist had flirted with Communist fronts.
It indicates that if it heeded his fumings about caricature, practically every American artist and cartoonist would be ineligible to show in Moscow. "Grandma Moses is clearly subversive, while Herblock is a Benedict Arnold."
It suggests that a compromise might be made such that Mr. Walter might be comforted if the exhibition were left intact but added to it were a few canvases which would more nearly accord with his idea of patriotic art, suggesting General Douglas MacArthur slaying a dragon, J. Edgar Hoover among the birds and flowers, or Clare Boothe Luce on the sea-shell.
A piece from the Chicago Tribune, titled "Diner's Lament", indicates that it sometimes occurred to it that restaurant patrons would be better off if the people who wrote the menus knew more about cooking in general and about their chef's cooking in particular. The qualifications of many menu writers at present seemed to be limited to a knowledge of certain French phrases and an ability to make a given dish sound like all things to all people.
It had come to its attention that a menu had announced "oven-baked fried chicken". It finds the description confusing enough, although it was informed that it was technically possible, though the informant said that when the chicken was served, it had been broiled.
"To a man brought up on Indiana fried chicken, this succession of frustrations assumes the proportions of a calamity. Chicken is either fried or it isn't; and when it is spring chicken it should be fried or else. What is more, chicken should be a chicken—not just a drumstick, wing, or breast. When an experienced diner thinks of fried chicken, he visualizes a platter giving him his choice of the segments of a whole chicken, together with cream gravy, and mashed potatoes—with lots of butter. To him, a mere fraction of a chicken is nothing but an appetizer."
It also wants to know what menu writers meant by "fresh frozen" strawberries, but it was too important of a matter to discuss in such a small space.
Drew Pearson has his column written this date by his associate Jack Anderson while Mr. Pearson was serving as a delegate to the Atlantic Congress in London. He indicates that although Mr. Pearson's reputation was built on scoops and scandals, he was at heart a crusader and was now in London pursuing his favorite cause, people-to-people friendship. He suggests that readers would not recall, because Mr. Pearson had never written about it, that he had talked to General Eisenhower as early as 1948 about a people-to-people campaign to penetrate the Iron Curtain. They had chatted informally in private at a luncheon where the President presented Mr. Pearson with the Father-of-the-Year medal. At the luncheon, Mr. Pearson had predicted that General Eisenhower would become President and tried to convince him of the need to win friends among the common people, not the commissars in Communist countries. Mr. Pearson had pointed out that dictatorships could start a war without worrying about a congress, churches, or a free press, but that even dictators had to consider their people. Consequently, the best guarantee against war, he urged, was to reach the Russian people.
General Eisenhower had shown little interest in the idea, considered revolutionary a decade earlier. It had been one reason why the late Senator McCarthy had attacked Mr. Pearson on the Senate floor. But undeterred, Mr. Pearson had continued flailing away at that idea in the column, on the radio, and among government officials. He even had taken a trip along the Iron Curtain from Turkey through to Yugoslavia to Berlin, trying to organize a European committee to help get friendship messages to the Soviet and satellite peoples.
Some thought that Mr. Pearson was becoming a crank while others, such as General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Assistant Secretary of State George Allen, had liked the idea.
Now it appeared to be paying off, as thousands of students, teachers, scientists, businessmen, artists and tourists were working at people-to-people friendship on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Even the President, a skeptic in the beginning, had endorsed the program.
He was thus quite happy that his boss was finally getting some recognition as an official delegate to the people-to-people conference.
The President had made it clear recently that he would use the hydrogen bomb if a future "little war" would become too big for conventional weapons. He disclosed it to John Mahan, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, during a private, 40-minute White House conference. Mr. Mahan had stressed the need for a 900,000-man Army and a 200,000-man Marine Corps to meet the threat of limited wars. The President had removed his glasses and slammed them down on his desk, saying: "Well, I'll tell you about limited wars. If three Army divisions, two Marine divisions and those…" At that point he had stumbled for the right word, continuing, "Those darn things that float on the water and launch airplanes—what do they call them?" An aide answered, "Aircraft carriers, Mr. President." The President echoed, "Aircraft carriers. If they can't handle it, we will throw the big one at them." It was clear that he meant the hydrogen bomb.
Joseph Alsop, in Warsaw, indicates that to get into a "speakeasy" in a tiny, two-room apartment, one only had to say, "Boguslaw sent me". It was a place unique across the world. Most of the many visitors, whether young or old, blue-jeaned or bourgeois, were content to sit on the floor. The place had abstract paintings, strange and menacing constructions of wire and masking tape, great numbers of fragments of Polish baroque church-sculpture, two damaged but still magical Polish-Byzantine icons, and the remnants of a tender late Gothic altarpiece, all hung or strewn about, hinting of what the speakeasy offered.
It was the apartment of Miron
Bialoszewski, "the most hermetic, the most experimental, and
among the youths, the most admired of the newer Polish poets."
Even before the Stalinist times had ended, he had begun to offer
clandestine readings of his poetry
He finds that the performance was a minor marvel of style and ingenuity, with sacking and black paper constituting the backdrop, designed by a leading Polish abstract painter. The curtain was also made of sacking and the menacing construction of wire and masking tape turned up as wonderful mask-headdresses which transformed the actors into faceless bureaucrats for a Kafka-touched dramatic poem.
Mr. Bialoszewski and a pretty artist-engineer actress, Ludmilla Muranska, were the chief mimes. Both, he finds, had great talent and the whole performance was marked by a strange mixture of wry near-lunatic wit, deep world-sadness, and Alexandrian hospitality to all imaginable cultural influences. But the viewer could not ferret out the true meaning of a highly experimental work in another language.
He finds the important point regarding the semi-speakeasy of culture to be not the literal meaning of the plays and poems which were mimed twice per week to a tiny but full house, but rather simply that such an institution existed on that side of the grim line which divided the world, in Communist-ruled Poland.
As Mr. Bialoszewski's poetic and dramatic writing was wholly apolitical, the existence of his apartment-theater was perhaps less surprising than the existence of the "Stodola", another theater, supported by the Warsaw Polytechnic students, erected by another brilliant younger poet, Chcinski, and housed in a bar which faced Stalin's monstrous gilt in Warsaw. Plays there were offered which mingled the most experimental writing with sharp political satire.
But that theater was still less surprising than the recent enormously successful publication of the book on Spinoza titled Antimonies of Freedom, by the leading Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski. Around the latter's study of his predecessor, he had woven a bold dialogue on freedom, morality, and government. The book reportedly was a seminal and innovative masterwork. The West would soon be able to test the judgment, as a French translation and publication of the book had already been arranged.
He indicates that it was not to say that the intellectual life of Poland under Communist rule was wholly free. The poet, Adam Vasyk, had been denied a passport to travel abroad and so had two or three other writers. The censors sometimes wielded a heavy hand, especially regarding writing that was adjudged "too sad". The party authorities, whose taste in the arts resembled the pedestrian tastes of Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, were quite visibly bewildered and horrified by Poland's rich intellectual and creative life. But it had to be admitted that the minister of culture, himself, had strongly recommended a visit to the Stodola.
By the same token, the Russian intellectuals who had come to Warsaw were either shocked and frightened out of their wits or totally intoxicated. Many Russians had learned Polish so that they could reach such writers as Franz Kafka and James Joyce, who had only been published in Polish in the Communist world. Visiting Russians continuously swept Warsaw clean of the reproductions of the modern Western painters. As for the Poles, he suggests that one wondered whether their intellectual and creative life was not so rich and vivid precisely because they were stimulated by "fear of the great desert on the edge of which we live," as one of them had put it to Mr. Alsop.
Marquis Childs indicates that the intensive propaganda campaign being conducted by the Pentagon to prevent an agreement on the ending of nuclear testing was an understandable reflex of those who believed that America's security lay in piling nuclear armaments of every type higher and higher. It was aided and abetted by certain distinguished nuclear physicists, especially Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb", and by impassioned advocates of limited war fought with small nuclear weapons. The attitudes ranged from the fatalism of an inevitable war and that good, old military dictum about "getting fustest with the mostest" to a holy crusade against communism with a nuclear showdown, in which in some fashion God would save the West and scourge the East.
With the Geneva talks on nuclear test suspension resuming, the campaign was likely to be intensified. The Pentagon was reported to be holding private briefings for those ready to carry the line that a test suspension, which included a ban on underground testing, would jeopardize the nation's security. The underground testing was the key, since limited-war advocates believed that they were essential to perfect small nuclear weapons.
As the talks were resumed, the American delegate, James Wadsworth, was likely to put forward a secret paper prepared under the direction of physicist Lloyd Berkner. That, in effect, was a scientific analysis of methods by which detection of underground testing could be improved. Much would depend on Russian willingness to agree that scientists of both sides considered it theoretical analysis. It was estimated that it could be done within 30 days. But the paper by Mr. Berkner also included an analysis of a method by which an underground nuclear explosion could be successfully concealed. Advanced by Dr. Teller, it would be done through "decoupling", a new word added to the scientific jargon formed from the enormously complex subject. Through decoupling, the seismic waves occasioned by a nuclear detonation would be muted and entirely blocked.
Some would take that as an argument against any agreement, arguing for a number of inspections, under an agreed-upon quota getting around the veto, which would be so high that the Russians would never accept it.
But the choice ought at least be made clear between the beginning of an inspection and control system as a first small step toward disarmament and an increased nuclear arms race into an indefinite and highly uncertain future. It also needed to be made clear what the risks were. To stop underground testing was to forgo the further development and perfection of small nuclear weapons, although it was not necessarily the case. The advocates of limited nuclear war argued that it would leave the U.S. with the choice of nuclear suicide or surrender, as the West could never match conventional forces with Russia. Increasingly, however, the limited-war thesis had come to be doubted.
As Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, chairman of the disarmament subcommittee which had done the only searching inquiry into such matters, had said in a Senate speech, limiting a war to small nuclear weapons was most unlikely, as each side would quickly raise the ante.
Those who knew at least as much as the best-informed sources in the Pentagon, believed that the consequences of failure of the Geneva test talks, based on an impossible demand by the West, could be grave. It appeared that the Pentagon opinion had prevailed and that it could well usher in a time of danger far greater than any known thus far.
A letter writer expresses surprise to learn of the new City Council's decision to appoint a new chief of police from another city in the state. He does not believe that the four members of the Council who had made the decision really knew what they were doing but were playing smart politics in relieving Chief E. C. Selvey. He indicates that he did not vote in the previous election as he was out of the city limits, but would be in a position to cast his vote when the Council would run again following the annexation set to go into effect on January 1. He does not believe that they were giving Mr. Selvey a fair deal, based on his experience and the amount of service he had provided to the city.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., indicates that Admiral Hyman Rickover, speaking the previous month before the National Press Club in Washington, had stated that the U.S. did "not have the best brains in this country running our educational system." He had gone on to state, "John Dewey is God, the National Education Association is his prophet, and all the teachers and colleges are his disciples." Mr. Cherry finds that he was largely correct. He says he thus did not like the ranting and raving in the editorial of May 28, "Textbooks: All Rant and Little Reason". He disagrees with the notion that censorship was implicit in Representative Rachel Davis's bill to place laymen on the previously educator-composed State Textbook Commission. He deems it not to be censorship to be concerned about the textbooks comprised of "socialist and pro-communist propaganda", "in the ugly, un-American, and liberty-suppressing meaning of the word" 'censorship'. He doesn't think that "egghead" academic "experts" ought continue to enjoy unchallenged authority in determining the textbooks. He wonders whether the editorial's point that the current method of selecting textbooks was adequate because the State Board of Education had, with blind obedience, usually rubber-stamped its approval on the recommendations of the State Textbook Commission, and he also wonders what possible educational good the State Board served regarding the all-important textbook selection, "unless one foolishly assumes that 'me-tooism' is an educational good or virtue in itself." He was sorry to see the bill "mercifully put to sleep", as the editors had described it, and hopes that the demise of it would at least snap the State Board of Education out of its apparent lethargy to the extent that individual members would begin thoughtfully reading the "socialist and pro-communist bias which, I don't question, is being written into some of the textbooks thrown in the laps of our children. If and when that happens, then perhaps we may expect in North Carolina the skids to be placed under the NEA prophets of god Dewey, his hogwash concept of education, and the alien brainwashing of tomorrow's American leaders."
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