The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 1, 1959
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, at his press conference this date, said that the matter of inflation would be one of the principal issues of the 1960 presidential campaign, that he not only looked for a balanced budget in the new fiscal year starting this date but expected to start on paying off the 286 billion dollar national debt. He said that he believed that the Democratic-controlled Congress also expected the Administration to start paying off the debt during the ensuing year. He noted that Congress had just approved legislation which he had signed on Tuesday, providing for a new permanent debt ceiling of 285 billion dollars. The legislation also set a temporary limit of 295 billion. Final figures had not been released on the Government's deficit in the previous fiscal year, but it was in the neighborhood of 13 billion dollars. The President, in reply to a question, said that he had no knowledge of any confidential Government report predicting a 3 percent increase in the consumer price index in 1960. On other topics, he said, regarding a potential summit conference with the Soviets, that he still believed there was no point of his going to such a conference unless there was adequate preparation in advance by what he called the legitimate diplomatic agencies of government. Regarding politics, he said that the Republican Party had many able and qualified potential candidates for the presidential nomination, adding, in response to a question, that while it would be too much to expect him to be neutral regarding a candidate, he definitely never would disclose privately or publicly any choice he might have. He appeared to qualify that response to some extent by saying that he had no intention of ever indicating the procedure to be followed regarding detailed selection of a candidate. In a related area, he stated emphatically that he had no political motives in mind in picking Vice-President Nixon to represent the U.S. at the opening of its trade fair in Moscow later in July. A reporter had told the President that there had been some speculation that he had chosen the Vice-President in an effort to give him political advantage over Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York for the nomination. The two generally were regarded as the top potential Republican candidates for the nomination. The first question of the conference had brought a big smile to the President's face, a request that he set forth his formula for 43 years of successful marriage. To a round of laughter, he replied that he had no formula, that his marriage had been a very happy experience, adding that a successful marriage became happier as the years went by. This date marked the 43rd wedding anniversary of the President and Mrs. Eisenhower and despite the sweltering heat, the President turned up for the press conference wearing a vest with his gray business suit.
In Berlin, it was reported that Heinrich Luebke, 64, had been elected President of West Germany this date, presently serving as Agriculture Minister. He had been the candidate of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Party, defeating Carlo Schmid, the Socialist candidate, and Max Becker, the choice of the liberal Free Democratic Party. Mr. Luebke had won on the second ballot, with 526 votes of the 1,038-member electoral college, six more votes than needed. He initially had 517, three short of the required majority on the first ballot, and Mr. Schmid had 385 with Mr. Becker at 104. Mr. Luebke had been Minister of Agriculture for six years, but was little known outside farming circles. He had served in the Kaiser's armies during World War I and then had become a member of the Catholic Center Party. When Hitler had risen to power in 1933, the members of the Catholic Center Party had come under suspicion and Mr. Luebke had been jailed for 20 months. During World War II, he had worked for a Berlin construction company.
In New York, it was reported that the United Steelworkers Union this date had ordered an immediate end to scattered wildcat strikes which had erupted the previous night and this date, idling more than 20,000 of the industry's 500,000 workers. The walkouts had been staged against the wishes of the President and, for the most part, orders of top union officials. Union and industry negotiators the prior Saturday had bowed to a plea from the President that the current contract, set to expire at midnight the previous night, be extended for two weeks to afford further negotiations. Union president David McDonald, heading the union's four-man team in New York seeking to negotiate a new contract with the major steel producers, said of the wildcat strikes: "The international union has taken prompt and vigorous action to honor the extension agreements with the various steel companies. Telegrams have been dispatched, signed by the international officers, directing immediate withdrawal of all unauthorized picket lines and resumption of operations." His action came with local officials already at the gates of some struck plants, urging union members to resume work. Mr. McDonald expressed confidence that the union's strike-ending orders would rectify the situation. Talks between the 12 largest steel companies and the union were being resumed this date after a weekend recess. Two negotiating sessions were scheduled daily, in place of the single meeting held in previous weeks.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the state's two largest school systems would consolidate one year hence, with the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County voters the previous day having approved a merger plan involving nearly 70,000 students. By a 2 to 1 margin, a 54-cent tax levy, tantamount to consolidation approval, had been passed, and by the same margin, the voters had agreed to an 8 million dollar school building bond issue. The two major steps had come in a relatively light vote. The tax levy would increase the County rate from 40 cents to 54 cents per $100 of real property valuation and the City rate from 50 cents to 54 cents. The bond issue had passed by 7,025 to 2,714, and the tax rate increase by 7,052 to 2,632. As was typical in most local elections, it was the "big-city boxes" which had carried the election. Myers Park and the Eastover section boxes in Charlotte had voted heavily, but the perimeter area boxes in Sharon had recorded the largest number of favorable consolidation votes, 1,343. The Myers Park section recorded 1,301 votes for consolidation, with the bond voting about the same. Other city boxes had been heavily behind consolidation and the bond issue, including Dilworth, Elizabeth and Piedmont Junior High, as well as Sedgefield Elementary and other precincts. Deep county boxes had shown a slight mixture of voting, with two of four Paw Creek boxes having voted against consolidation and one of four against the bond issue. Huntersville had been close in the voting, but had approved the bond issue and missed by a single vote favoring consolidation. Lemley, Long Creek No. 1 and Morning Star had voted against consolidation. The State Board of Education had to approve the school merger before it would become official, but the Board had been consulted on the steps during the planning period. The new consolidated school board, which would take over on July 1, 1960, would be called the Mecklenburg County Board of Education, to be comprised of present members of the two boards, while the number to be elected in nonpartisan primaries would be reduced to nine by 1964 from the starting membership of 12, by elimination of one member per year starting in 1961. The consolidation vote climaxed a long and hard campaign, surveys having been made as early as 1949 and recommendations for consolidation following periodically. The Chamber of Commerce had set up a special study commission the previous year and its recommendation had much to do with the start of the consolidation bid. Oliver Rowe, a member of that committee, and Richard Thigpen, the chairman, had been leaders in the movement. The bond issue had become necessary, according to school officials, as enrollment continued to climb during the current year. The new bonds brought to 42 million dollars the amount of school bonds which voters had approved during the previous 12 years.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that the responsibility for feeding needy hungry schoolchildren in the county had been placed on local school officials. A Social Planning Council committee studying the problem since the prior December had concluded that any further action had to rest with the responsible school officials. The plight of the hungry children had been revealed by the newspaper the previous December. A 14-point program of recommendations to City and County School officials would be provided by the Council early the following week, part of the final report drawn by the Council's committee. When appointed, the committee had been charged with a three-part job, to determine whether a need existed for additional free school lunches, to fix responsibility for meeting the need, and to obtain constructive action. In a letter to Herbert Hitch, the planning council chairman, the committee had said that they were of the opinion that they had a fair, complete and objective survey of all relevant factors, had established the need, and had made specific recommendations to meet that need, that any further action had to rest with the responsible school officials. The committee pointed out that the school systems, in receiving Federal subsidies for their lunchrooms, had agreed to require each school to "supply lunches without cost or at reduced prices to all children who are determined by the school authorities to be unable to pay the full price thereof." In view of that agreement, the committee asserted that no part of the Federal subsidy ought be used by the schools for other purposes until they had first met their obligation to furnish free and reduced price lunches to those children who could not afford to pay the full cost. Neither the City nor the County furnished reduced priced meals. The committee had worked through December and January establishing the need for more free school lunches and determining the responsibility, having worked with school officials since February in attempting to solve the problem.
Dick Rigby of The News reports that the end of Charlotte's worst heat wave in seven years had come this date when a mass of cool Canadian air had brought the city and the Southeast a protective cover of clouds. Afternoon and evening showers were expected this date, while the following day was to be partly cloudy and "not so hot" according to the Weather Bureau. A high reading of 90 degrees was expected for the following day. The end of the heat had not come in time to prevent a heavy toll being taken on North Carolina's crops. Five days of 95 and above temperatures and a vicious hail and thunderstorm the previous day had caused heavy crop damage in nearby areas. Not since 1952 had the airport Weather Bureau reported that Charlotte had three days of 100-degree readings, July 25-27 of 1952 having reached 100, as had July 21-24 and 27-29.
Hail and thunderstorms the previous day had brought a break in the heat wave to some areas. Sanford had recorded two inches of rain the previous night during a two-hour period, causing extensive crop damage and at least one barn being destroyed by fire. The entire Eastern Seaboard had a rough time the previous day. While Charlotte had 102 as a high with high humidity, Washington and Baltimore had each registered 100. In the midst of the city's bout with the heat, another record had been established the previous day, the previous high for June 30 having been 100.8 degrees. This date's full forecast called for a high of 95 during the afternoon, with 72 the following morning. Scattered showers and thundershowers were expected late in the afternoon and this night. The following day would be partly cloudy and not so hot. The previous night, when breezes had hit Charlotte signaling the end of the heat, gusts had been recorded at up to 25 mph by the Weather Bureau. The weather man, in adding up figures for the month of June, said that temperatures had, however, averaged about normal. Low readings at mid-month and normal temperatures in early June had brought the average down to normal.
The newspaper had asked around and had sent out an expeditionary force to test the air around the once foul-smelling blight running through the city in Sugar Creek, to find out how it smelled during the torrid summer days or whether it smelled at all since the City had prohibited firms from dumping industrial waste in it since 1956, with the results on page 1-B, should your olfactory curiosity be piqued to an irresistible need for that information, as inquiring noses want to know.
On the editorial page, "Consolidated School System Can Open New Era of Progress in Mecklenburg" indicates that voters who had overwhelmingly endorsed the consolidation of the City and County School Systems the previous day had raised the curtain on a new era of significant progress in metropolitan Mecklenburg County.
Even though the turnout had been small, the results had indicated a revision of tired attitudes and a sounder understanding of needs, with a clear appreciation of mutual benefits. Together with the approval of the 8 million dollar bond issue for new classrooms, it represented a good day's work for the residents who cared about the future of their children.
Meanwhile, the community owed a debt of gratitude to its leaders who had recognized both the need and the opportunity afforded by consolidation. It had been a decade-long struggle but through vigor and persistence in knocking out the inevitable kinks and doubts, they had finally triumphed over the status quo. A system of public education could now be organized in accordance with the best interests of all of the county's children, regardless of where they lived.
Lewis Mumford, the famed planner, had once warned that Americans were as unprepared to understand their country's head-long metropolitan growth as the inhabitants of Ur or ancient Babylon. It does not believe that it was true any longer, certainly not in Mecklenburg, where there was a new awakening and awareness that Charlotte was outgrowing its artificial boundaries, with the realization that no overall governmental authority existed to provide for the needs of the metropolitan area population.
It indicates that the situation was not unique to Mecklenburg, that everywhere, conflicting jurisdictions were the rule. Two years earlier, the Bureau of the Census had reported that 102,353 separate governmental units shared authority across the country. The obvious solution was to dissolve the artificial barriers, expensive to maintain, and to accept a policy of positive and coordinated action, as the residents of Mecklenburg County had chosen to do in public education.
Consolidation in other governmental areas would also become an instrument of progress as the city grew, but much would depend on the success of school consolidation. Early experiments in joint administration, in health and planning, had not offered a dramatic example of mutual benefits. Public education was a perfect testing ground. It meant that school administrators would face responsibilities of more than ordinary significance, being called on to prove conclusively that consolidation was an essential instrument of progress and offered the sounder solution to problems which two separate school systems would find unbearable. It believes that they could do the job and ventures that they must.
"Is the American Economy Hibernating?" indicates that the President's Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth had released its first report during the week, and the public climate had been right for it. The previous day, the fiscal year had ended, a year which had begun in recession and ended in boom, but with an estimated budget deficit of over 12 billion dollars.
Elsewhere, public concern regarding price stability had grown. In Albert Lea, Minn., the bugles of war had been sounded against inflation. Newspaper readers were clipping and sending coupons which read: "Let's stop inflation! I, the undersigned, urge you in 1959 to negotiate for price decreases, not wage increases."
Along with bill payers everywhere, it worried about the rising cost of living and agreed with Vice-President Nixon and the other members of the Cabinet Committee that ideally the budget ought be balanced for the coming fiscal year. That, with other measures the report had recommended, would help curb inflation. Yet economists, who normally dealt in those mysteries, had made repeated use of a Latin phrase, ceteris paribus, meaning "other things being equal", when they talked about isolated parts of the economy. It suggests keeping that in mind when talking about the price level or about "inflation". The price level was vitally important, but was only one of many signposts indicating health or sickness of the economy, delicately related to other, equally important, signposts.
The President's Cabinet Committee, as with the President, himself, had failed to keep that in mind. For instance, nowhere did the Nixon Committee's report discuss the main reason why the Government had a 77 billion dollar budget in the current year, a gigantic bill which could not be completely covered by income. The main reason had been that 40 billion dollars, over half of it, was devoted to national armaments, which had as its objective guarding the country and the Western world against military blackmail by the Soviets. That was one of the "other things". If there were a way the country could get rid of the Russian threat or redesign its defense program, then it might get rid of some of the "spending", but there was no easy way apparent to do so.
The Committee granted that "in the long run … the most effective antidote to inflation is increased efficiency and productivity in the economy." It finds that true but wonders why then the Committee had nowhere pointed out that the national economy had grown on the average by less than 2 percent per year during the previous five years, that being another of the "other things" which had to be considered in any sensible talk of inflation, not just wage increases or banking and budget policies. The stagnation of the country's economy was particularly alarming when considering the Communist nations, against whom the U.S. was "competing" economically, those nations reporting growth which was four times the rate in Russia and had risen to the unbelievable figure of over 60 percent in Communist China during the year.
It finds the truth to be that the American economy, as with a hibernating bear, was living on the fat it had accumulated in the halcyon days of 3 to 4 percent annual growth while at present it was growing little. It suggests that perhaps Congressman Chester Bowles was correct when he had charged that the national economic fears, which the President had expertly used in his fight against "inflation", had resulted from "the atmosphere … created by the stagnating economy."
It indicates that a national economic program, to be true, accurate and sensible, had to take into account every sector and index of the economy's health, assigning priorities, determining whether price stability at the risk of stagnation was preferable to continued growth at the risk of inflation, whether national defense and domestic welfare or price stability at any cost ought come first. Those were questions requiring answers and the President's Committee had not provided the material to answer them.
A piece from the New York Herald
Tribune, titled "A Little Brook and a Big Pool",
writes of a farm brook. "A countryman sometimes wishes that his
brook was a bigger stream—that it had more room for trout or
bullfrogs, that it had more pools like the one the stars find so
handy on a hot night. But there is no easy way for a man to grow a
brook into a creek or a small river. Water, he knows, is a valley
seeker. A creek or a river is a thing of lower valleys. It is a hill
country farm that has the little brooks that come down a mountain,
thread a meadow and offer now and then a good-sized pool. If a brook
can have a wide pool which is big enough for a star to swim in, it
ought to satisfy anybody. Probably when it comes to a brook, a
countryman doesn't know when he is well off. He has seen sluggish,
muddy creeks that never had his brook's clear and silvered water.
What star wants to bathe in a muddy stream? What trout wants to be
kept awake by too many bull
Drew Pearson tells of the Senate having met until 1:00 a.m. the previous week to vote on taxes scheduled to expire at midnight on June 30. The debate had been preceded by a secret huddle between Senator John Carroll of Colorado and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson at which the latter emphatically agreed that the liberal Democrats ought bring up for a vote certain tightening of tax loopholes and tax provisions favoring big business.
There had been three such proposals voted down, including that of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, seeking to cut the oil-depletion allowance, that of Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, seeking to plug the loophole permitting taxpayer deduction of yachts, private airplanes, World Series boxes, and other such entertainment, and that of Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, seeking to put those who received dividends on the same withholding basis as wage-earners whose taxes were withheld from payrolls.
One such proposal, that of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, had won, that being to abolish the 4 percent deduction for those who made their money from stock market dividends as against those who earned it from salaries or government bonds. That so-called George Humphrey amendment, named for the former Secretary of the Treasury, who had proposed the 4 percent deduction originally to stimulate the stock market, was abolished.
But a day later, the Joint Committee of the House and Senate had wiped out the Senate vote, reinstating the favorable tax deduction for stock investors despite the fact that it cost taxpayers 335 million dollars annually.
The closed-door Committee action was important, he indicates, because it followed a pattern of what had been happening during the entirety of the 86th Congress, as both houses would carefully debate and pass a bill on housing, unemployment compensation or taxes and then a joint committee, usually stacked with conservatives, charged with reconciling differences in the bills out of each house, would completely rewrite the bills which had been passed.
Watts Hill, Jr., State Representative from Durham, provides the third and last in a series of articles on the recently concluded 1959 session of the Legislature, this entry stressing the issue of education, both higher education and at the secondary and primary level. Again, as the issue has been thoroughly covered in the column and on the front page, and because virtually all of the issues connected with the problems, primarily overcrowding of the schools from the baby boom of World War II and its decade-long aftermath, perhaps in some respects making up for wartime losses in families, the consequent need for new facilities, and the need for higher teacher pay, have long since been addressed, at least to a point, though teacher pay always remains topical, we shall not summarize the piece, and you may read it for yourself. It is not to minimize the importance of the topic at that time, in 1959, but rather recognizes its temporal nature.
If you're a dumbbell, incidentally, don't blame your school or your teachers. Place the blame where it belongs, on your own lazy, dumb ass. No teacher has the ability to open your head and funnel in the knowledge being imparted dutifully. Yes, there are gradations of teachers and some may not be worth spit, but it is still your own personal responsibility to dig for the proper knowledge on your own, if necessary, and obtain thereby the requisite preparation for higher education, where hopefully most of the instructors will be up to snuff and not snuffing you. But placing the blame on the school and its teachers is just a convenient crutch for being a dumb ass as an adult.
Of course, most people, when they get older, are able to process knowledge better than when they were young, when interference of various factors, home life, nutrition, lack of sleep, excessive noise, physical and mental, tension from peer competition, sometimes tendered in the spirit of camaraderie and other times venally or in petty fashion, and sloth in normal development of basic reading and learning skills, perhaps in consequence in part of some of the foregoing factors, intruded on a smooth functioning mental environment. That is the natural process of having accumulated experience by which to measure and adjust prior experience, as well as to ameliorate if not eliminate the intrusive environmental factors of an earlier age. But that does not mean that you were not a little dumb ass in earlier times, incapable of receiving instruction because you were an immature, little, dumb ass at heart. Nor does it mean that you have equaled or surpassed those who outran you when you were a little, dumb ass. For most of them grew older and wiser, too. Bear it in mind.
Speaking of the command performance for the Queen and Prince Philip in Stratford, Ontario, the following day of As You Like It and its seven ages of man
Framed Edition
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