The Charlotte News
Monday, July 13, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Secretary of State Christian Herter had told the Soviet Union this date that the U.S. hoped for sufficient progress in working out an East-West agreement in the Big Four foreign ministers conference to warrant a subsequent summit meeting. At the same time, Mr. Herter had challenged Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to provide specific assurances for the protection of Western rights in West Berlin during a Soviet-proposed moratorium in the Berlin crisis. The Big Four foreign ministers conference resumed meetings at the Palace of Nations following a three-week recess, with Mr. Herter as chairman for the day. In a reversal of their earlier stand, Secretary Herter, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville were reported ready to negotiate with Mr. Gromyko regarding his offer of a Berlin moratorium agreement. But they wanted the proposed moratorium to run for at least 30 months, instead of the 18 months offered by Mr. Gromyko, and they wanted a pledge of Soviet respect for Western rights in Berlin. Mr. Herter was designated in the Western strategy meeting to lead the Western campaign when the Big Four conference reopened. Western diplomats said that in his lead-off speech, Mr. Herter would offer certain inducements to the Soviets, such as a cut in troop strength in West Berlin. Mr. Herter and his colleagues wanted to know whether, in accepting a moratorium with a deadline, they would, in the view of the Soviets, be agreeing to give up their rights when the deadline expired.
In London, it was reported that the Soviet Union had launched two dogs into space on July 10 and returned them to earth safely, according to Moscow Radio this date. The broadcast said that the dogs had been carried aloft in a ballistic rocket weighing 4,845 pounds. Quoting an official Tass dispatch, the radio said that a quantity of equipment had also been parachuted back to earth. The first announcement had provided no details of the altitude attained by the rocket. One of the dogs, Daring, was making its fourth ascent into space, according to Tass. Another dog, named Snowflake, and a rabbit named Marfooshka, translated as "Little Martha", had been launched in a 4,009-pound rocket on July 2 and had been recovered, according to an announcement made a week earlier. The Tass announcement this date said that the latest rocket was the same type as that of July 2 and had been launched in the wee hours of July 10. Tass described the program as including "measurements of infrared radiation of the earth and the earth's atmosphere, photographing of clouds over a vast territory, simultaneous analysis of the ion and neutral composition of the atmosphere and measurement of the electrostatic fields." The announcement described the experiments as having resulted in valuable data collected on conditions for man's travel into space. The July 2 launch, they said, had provided valuable information on the composition of light gases such as hydrogen and helium in the outer atmosphere, ultraviolet rays, micrometeor showers and direction and speed of air currents at various levels. The U.S. had sent two monkeys, Able and Baker, into space the prior May. They had been recovered safely after a journey of 1,500 miles, reaching an altitude up to 300 miles, but Baker had died after being recovered from the nosecone, the result of a minor operation to remove parts of a recording apparatus. Three mice, Mia, Laska and Wickie, had been launched into space by the U.S. Laska had traveled 6,000 miles in 1958 and was alive when the Thor-Able rocket had hit the water in the Atlantic, but the rocket had never been recovered.
In Washington, it was reported that strategy to bypass the Senate Judiciary Committee on any civil rights legislation had received added support during the weekend, when Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois had told reporters that he would support a move to intercept the civil rights bill, if one were to be passed by the House, and place it directly on the Senate's legislative calendar.
The Senate Internal Security subcommittee had prepared some answers for arguing the virtues of capitalism over communism, having published a booklet obtainable through the Government Printing Office, titled "Contradictions of Communism".
In New York, it was reported that stalled steel negotiations had gotten underway again this date at the bidding of the White House, but with scant prospect of any agreement to avert a strike at midnight the following day. The Steelworkers Union had promised to make "an all-American try" in negotiating a strike-saving settlement. R. Conrad Cooper, chief industry negotiator, had thrown cold water on settlement prospects and showed irritation in posing with union president David McDonald for photographers. Mr. Cooper said that there was only one possible way that a strike could be avoided, that being if the union would extend its contract. Mr. McDonald ruled out any further delay in a showdown, after the union had earlier granted a two-week truce which would expire at midnight Tuesday. Mr. Cooper said that the union already had caused the industry injury by the fact that many firms had to close down some facilities in the costly preparation for an orderly industry shutdown. Mr. Cooper said that they were not the aggressors causing the strike. The peace talks had broken off completely on Sunday with no further negotiating sessions scheduled. President Eisenhower, during the morning, had urged both sides to resume the meetings to try to reach a strike-saving solution. Mr. McDonald had met briefly with the union's executive board and then had telephoned Mr. Cooper to arrange the resumption of bargaining talks. Prospects for a new contract agreement before the strike deadline appeared exceedingly dim. The industry had insisted on obtaining more management control over various operations to cover any pay or other concessions which might be offered. The union had refused to yield on that subject, indicating that the industry had refused to make any specific wage increase offer. Mr. McDonald said that the union agreed with the President that there was opportunity in time for settlement to be reached before the strike deadline, and that they were notifying the industry's negotiators that they were prepared to resume negotiations at once for that purpose. The industry was already banking furnaces and slowing production, ready for the expected strike. Three days were normally required for a big steel plant to make an orderly shutdown without damaging equipment. The union had rejected a renewed proposal by the industry that the contract be extended beyond Tuesday at midnight.
In La Follette, Tenn., four dynamite explosions this date had wrecked mining equipment at the White Oak Coal Corp. mine at Morley, 16 miles north of the town. The operator of the mine said that the blast had heavily damaged two power shovels, a bulldozer, a fuel truck, a 1,000-gallon fuel tank and other equipment, estimating the loss at about $115,000. No one had been injured. The operator said that he had not attempted to operate the mine since his contract with the UMW had expired on March 14. State police said that bloodhounds had followed a trail from the scene to a creek about a mile and a half away. The mine operator said that they believed that the dynamiters had gotten into a car at that point. The incident was the first reported in the east Tennessee coal field in about a month. Three previous dynamitings and numerous incidents of sniping and coal-dumping had been reported in the area since the UMW had begun in March trying to organize non-union coal operations and to renew contracts with some firms.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that a battery of defense attorneys, including the son of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, this date had sought dismissal of dynamite conspiracy charges against union leader Boyd Payton and seven others. The attorneys also sought a change of venue for the case. A special 150 member venire, from which a jury would be selected, had been excused until the afternoon this date. Mr. Payton, the Carolinas director of the Textile Workers Union of America, and the others were accused of plotting to blow up property of the struck Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. The charges had been filed the previous month following a lengthy probe by the State Bureau of Investigation. In arguing for a change of venue, one attorney representing the defendants told the presiding judge that he was informed by SBI agents that the State's case was founded on a conversation which allegedly had taken place among the defendants at a Roanoke Rapids motel in Halifax County. The attorney questioned the jurisdiction of the Vance County Superior Court, arguing that no overt acts had occurred in that county. The prosecutor predicted that the trial would go well into a second week. He also hinted that there might be additional charges resulting from the SBI activity in connection with strike violence. Mr. Payton had denied the conspiracy charges and his lawyer, of Charlotte, said that it was his opinion that any conspiracy was the work of persons trying to get the union leader "out of the way". The seven other defendants included an aide to Mr. Payton, chairman of the TWUA bi-city joint board at Spray, and five members of two striking locals in Henderson. The strike had been in progress since the previous November 17, but no violence had erupted until the company had launched an attempt to get back into production the prior February. Highway Patrolmen had first been called to aid local police officers in maintaining order, but the previous May 12, National Guardsmen had been deployed to take over the task and were still on duty.
In Little Rock, Ark., it was reported that the School Board might visit Charlotte during the coming weekend to study school integration in the city. A story in the previous day's Arkansas Democrat said that the Board would meet the following night to decide on trips to Charlotte and Norfolk, Va. Charlotte School superintendent Dr. E. H. Garinger, said that he had received a letter from the superintendent of Little Rock schools asking for material and suggesting that his Board might want to visit Charlotte. He had not heard of more definite plans. In Little Rock, the speculation was that its Board would be represented on the trips by the superintendent, Terrell Powell, probably one of the Board's attorneys, and the Board president.
John Kilgo of The News reports that a City Council majority had said this date that they thought that some city departments ought have the responsibility to check abandoned buildings for dangerous fire hazards. They also said that property owners ought notify fire officials when they abandoned buildings and left fire hazards and explosives behind.
In Naples, Italy, it was reported that a 13-year old boy, the son of an Army sergeant, had written directly to the general and as a result the boy would be off Tuesday as the head of an airborne safari carrying about $400,000 worth of medicines to Dr. Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa. Lt. General Richard Lindsay, commander of NATO's air force in Southern Europe, would personally see the boy off. The boy's father, a staff sergeant of Waycross, Ga., was stationed in Naples at General Lindsay's headquarters. The previous month, the son had begun thinking about the men waging the battle for peace and remembered his father often speaking of the "peaceful purposes" of NATO, and remembered reading about Dr. Schweitzer, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher who had worked in Africa for almost half a century engaged in missionary work. The boy had put those thoughts in a letter to General Lindsay, saying that he wanted to help Dr. Schweitzer and had asked his father to purchase medicine and his father told him that he would purchase as much as he could, provided there was a way found to have it delivered to Dr. Schweitzer. Thus far, he had not succeeded in finding any other solution and so thought that planes commanded by the general, if they went to the area where Dr. Schweitzer was, could deliver the medicine for him. He closed the letter with an apology for not going through channels. General Lindsay was impressed by the letter and an Italian officer on his staff had told Italian state television about it, with an appeal having gone out over the network, pretty soon stimulating gifts of medicine, with some people sending only a bottle of aspirin. An Italian pharmaceutical firm had provided $350,000 worth of supplies, according to a NATO spokesman. French and Italian air force officers in Naples had arranged for two flying freighters, one French and one Italian, to carry the 9,000 pounds of medicines to Dr. Schweitzer. The medicines purchased with the boy's contribution had been packaged separately in a shoebox-sized container. The boy and about 30 officers and newsmen would go along on the journey with the medicines, but the boy's father would stay behind. They would reach Libreville in French Equatorial Africa on Friday and then would go by truck to Dr. Schweitzer's hospital at Lambarene. Dr. Schweitzer was expecting them and had already sent his thanks to the boy and General Lindsay.
In Miami, Fla., it was reported that the nation's first bomb-shelter honeymooners had housed this date in fortress-like privacy ten feet underground. The couple, from Tampa, hoped to spend two weeks in their room-sized, steel and concrete shelter to publicize bomb shelters and civil defense. If they stuck it out, sponsors of the stunt promised them a second honeymoon in Jamaica. The couple had entered the shelter during the late afternoon on Sunday, and by mid-evening, telephone callers reported that they were asleep and none too happy over being awakened for a check on their well-being. The president of Bomb Shelters, Inc., said that the couple said that they were very tired. The husband said that the shelter's temperature had dropped appreciably from 89 degrees which had been its temperature when they entered, and said that they were now "feeling very comfortable". The wife wanted to know whether all the people had gone, and she was told that they had. There had been many people, including pickets, topside as the couple recited their vows and had then gone underground. Five placard-carrying women had identified themselves as members of the Greater Miami Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, one of whom said the underground honeymoon was "a promotion for financial gain that prepares people psychologically for war." The quarters measured 8 feet by 14 feet, was 7 feet, 7 inches high, equipped with cooking and toilet facilities, food, electricity, and a telephone. They had a radio but no television. The president of the bomb shelter company sponsoring the event said that they wanted to keep the conditions close to what they might encounter in an emergency. No television? How will they survive? Better off dead.
On the editorial page, "Here Is a Chore for Home Folks" indicates that college doors would be closed to dozens of Mecklenburg's finest high school graduates the following September because of financial limitations. Some of the county's most promising youngsters could not afford the "luxury" of higher education.
The notion expressed in Charlotte the previous week, that the National Defense Student Loan Fund would take the edge off the problem, was rosy, but it finds it to have been too rosy. Charlotte's share of Federal money was small and only a few students would benefit. Any significant effort to solve the problem would probably have to come from private, local sources.
The situation in Mecklenburg was not unique, and, if anything, conditions were better there than in the state's poor counties.
William C. Friday, president of the University, had summarized the situation during a speech in Raleigh several years earlier, when he said that fewer than a third of North Carolina's promising high school graduates actually attended college, that fewer than half of the technical personnel needed by industry and agriculture in the state at present were being trained in the state.
It indicates that only 5 percent of the state's population 25 years or over in age had completed four or more years of college, ranking the state 39th in that respect. It finds the irony to be that many doting fathers sent ill-trained youngsters into higher education simply because "going to college" had become the thing to do. Often, they were students without any real conception of higher education or the ability to profit from it. They took up space which ought be occupied by young people who were qualified for college but could not gain admission.
It finds that there were two problems, the familiar one of preserving the quality of higher education and the less familiar and more difficult one of making sure that higher education remained open to all students capable of absorbing it.
Mecklenburg had a vital stake in that latter problem. It suggests that individuals, corporations, professional organizations and civic groups could help by making regular contributions to nearby institutions of higher learning, enabling them to bolster their loan funds and scholarship programs. Individual scholarships could also be established for qualified students who would not otherwise be able to attend college, preferably without too many limitations on fields of study. Locally, both Charlotte College and Carver College were sorely in need of scholarships for needy students. A few had already been established but others would help greatly.
It urges that the job could not be left to the Federal Government, as it was a job for home folks.
"Charlotte Corrects Some Illusions" indicates that the city had been treated to a vivid glimpse of the abstractions by which Americans were known on Tuesday when youths from Pakistan, the Philippines, Argentina and Italy had stumped the city on a "People-to-People" tour organized by Rutgers students. It finds the reactions, if not new, startling.
The Italian, a political science student, had looked for Americans to be "rich, superficial, and spoiled by easy living." Instead he found them in bondage to the same problems which bothered Italians.
The Pakistani, convinced that Southern racism was a matter of "hatred", had decided "if I had to pick out a single cause for the racial difficulty now, it would be fear instead of hatred." At a Charlotte hospital, he had found young people, "supposed to think only of money", working as volunteers to serve the ill and handicapped.
The quickly dispelled stereotypical notions had been discomforting, and indicated that even in a day when a jet could span either ocean within a few hours, most people lacked not only insight but even accurate observation of other lands. It questions what was so strange about Americans worrying about paying for houses and cars or doctor's bills or fearing payroll competition from blacks, more than they hated blacks, or volunteering occasionally for charity work, indicating that it was all so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Yet foreigners were amazed.
It suggests that such abstractions were so ingrained abroad because most travelers to the country from abroad who returned to report what they had seen were, in the majority of instances, the highly refined and wealthy who could afford the high cost of tourism. Toward the U.S., there had been no poverty of cultivated reaction, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. But the country had lacked the reactions of those more modestly placed in their own countries, such as the Dutch garbage collector whom the same touring group had brought to Charlotte on an earlier tour. Abroad, travel was so much the prerogative of the established that the flood of American tourists there made friends and enemies think of Americans as boundlessly wealthy.
The fixed ideas that Americans were mean, spoiled, money-mad and uncharitable, were startling, but they did not stand up to observation. The "People-to-People" travel, it suggests, ought be encouraged by resources bigger than those of a few college students with imagination.
"Finally! Bugaboos We Can Deal With" indicates that a friend, who had been taking the curative liquids in some obscure mountain resort, had returned home recently and had made an alarming observation, that "The beasts are taking charge." He described them as the size of collie dogs, with pointed ears, woolly coats and bulging eyes, that they were being seen, according to the newspaper, all over the place, and suggested an editorial of alarm.
It realized that he was referring to the strange animals which had been reported in the vicinity for several weeks. There had been one which left four-toed tracks in Iredell County, a big-headed one with white rings around his body reported in South Carolina, the "Critter of Mecklenburg", which looked "like a gorilla" and was once seen strolling up Trade Street, or the "bear" which had been roaming the rural precincts. It had told its friend that they were comforted by the reports, and when challenged by him, responded: "Beasts, not monsters. You yourself call them beasts and that's what they are—bears, gorillas, four-toed hippopotami and the like—flesh-and-blood beasts that growl and leave footprints."
It had continued that a year earlier, people had been seeing flying saucers, strange lights on Mars and brooding about Strontium 90 and massive retaliation. Now, people had lived so long with unimaginable danger that they were turning gratefully to the comparative commonplace of strange animals which prowled the night, stampeded cattle, trampled vegetable gardens and flashed their fangs at women and small children. "In an era of universal havoc, we have simply learned that to be alive is to be in peril. But we have also learned to discriminate between the different degrees and varieties of peril. We refuse to be frightened anymore by the unimaginable and turn instead to the imaginable—the beasts. It's comforting."
The friend, in response, again asked why it was comforting, and it responded that because people could deal with the beasts by calling the cops, but could not do so regarding flying saucers and Martians.
At that moment, the telephone had rung, and it told its friend: "It's another one. Somebody saw a lion last night west of Huntersville." The friend said, "I feel better already."
A piece from the Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, titled "Mr. Hicks' Law vs. 'The Green Years'", indicates that the old saw about sparing the rod and spoiling the child might be put to the test in North Carolina, as its General Assembly recently had passed a bill which would provide school teachers in the state the right to spank unruly pupils. Several representatives had expressed fears that the bill, if passed, would turn students into sadists, while others had voiced similar warnings.
Representative Ernest Hicks, author of the bill, said that the courts had held that a teacher could use reasonable force to restrain a pupil to the same extent as a prudent parent would use, and he contended that the bill only spelled that out in law.
The piece indicates that it did not know the fate of the new law, nor had it attempted to speak out for or against it. But it suggests that with integration problems, talk of a 12-month school year and now a spanking proposal, "the serious-minded eighth grader may rightfully ask himself: 'These are the green years?'"
Green, in terms of the hickory stick.
Drew Pearson indicates that Secretary of State Christian Herter had sat down once again in Geneva with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko under anything but favorable auspices. He provides the instructions and diplomatic conversations which had made it so.
The President had told Mr. Herter to permit no prolonged conversations or filibusters, that if no agreement was in sight within two weeks, Mr. Herter had been instructed to come home. Mr. Gromyko had always served notice to the same end and had sent word that he wanted the foreign ministers meeting to be short so that he could return to Moscow by July 22 to welcome Vice-President Nixon, leaving only ten days to negotiate. The President had received a confidential report from CIA director Allen Dulles, just before Mr. Herter had departed, that the U.S. and Russia could be closer to war than at any time since the Bolshevik Revolution. That warning had been based on the belief that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was in a reckless mood and had decided that the Western allies could be bluffed out of Berlin.
The President, listening to the report of Mr. Dulles, could not believe that Mr. Khrushchev would be foolish enough to risk a showdown which would plunge the world into war. Mr. Pearson suggests that perhaps it was why the President had resisted advice by the Joint Chiefs and Secretary Herter to take military precautions in advance. Mr. Herter wanted the Strategic Air Command to put on night and day alert, and perhaps the National Guard to be called out.
Those were some of the unhappy backstage events as the foreign ministers met again in Geneva.
Ambassador John Hay Whitney, the new owner of the rock-ribbed Republican New York Herald Tribune, had finally picked his new editor, Robert White II, a Democrat, publisher of the Mexico, Mo., Ledger. The fact that Mr. Whitney had gone to Missouri to select his editor and the fact that Mr. Whitney's assistant in London was the son of Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri could mean that the Herald Tribune would provide editorial support to Senator Symington in his still undeclared but definite candidacy for the presidency. He suggests that it could also mean that the newspaper, which had unwaveringly supported the Republican Party for roughly a century, would become independent. A completely Republican newspaper seemed to have rough sledding in Democratic New York City, and the appointment of Mr. White, a Missouri Democrat, could mean a change in editorial policy. Mr. White would serve as editor and president, but not publisher.
Walter Lippmann indicates that, once
again, the country was seeing that it could not be governed by
Congress. With the Democrats having large majorities in both houses,
they could not mobilize to impose a positive program on the
President. They could deny him what he sought and he could deny them what they wanted, but the center of authority could not be
transferred from the White House to the Capitol. Only the President
could govern. The Congress could oppose him, obstruct him, and stop
him from governing. It was why Woodrow Wilson had said in his book 75
years earlier that Congressional government was bad government. (Lest some quick-trigger Trumpy-dumpy-doer jump up and down with instant excitement and say: "See? Right on, my man, gov'ment by the Presi-dent—as long as the Presi-dent is the one I done voted for and not one of them Commie leftists," we hasten to add that the work referenced was published in 1885, when Senators were still elected by the state legislatures and not by popular vote, when only males over age 21, as determined state by state, had the vote, when Grover Cleveland was just starting his first term, and when no one, save perhaps a Charles Guiteau or Leon Czolgosz, conceived of a person in the White House who would actually seek, by regular exercise of his Sharpie, to govern wholly apart from the Congress through executive ukases issued daily, with not just a theoretical bent toward authoritarianism and dictatorship, usurping all powers of the Constitution provided to the Congress and the courts to himself, and also seeking to trump the residual power granted to the states as well, to become one-man rule. It must also be borne in mind that while Dr. Wilson held his doctorate in history and was a distinguished professor at Princeton prior to being elected to the presidency in 1912, he had never studied law. That which is being discussed is not literally rule by the President but rule by Congress without regard to the policy proposed to it by the President, with the legislative body seeking to act as the entire Government, creating a decided imbalance in the Constitutional framework, every bit as pernicious as rule by one man or solely by the executive branch, thus trumping the will of the people as expressed more nearly and more frequently and by closer proximity by the Congress. The two branches are meant to act in reciprocal concert, with the Federal courts, without bias and partisanship, refereeing any constitutional showdown
The Congress could not take the place of the President to govern instead of him. He posits that it was the reason why Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had deferred to the President so much on bills dealing with expenditures. The Democrats with their large majorities could not compel the President to spend more than he was willing to spend. They could compel him to spend less, but they could not compel him to spend more. Spending was a positive act of governance and Congress could not, itself, govern. If, therefore, Congress voted money bills which the President vetoed and if neither then yielded to the other, there would be a deadlock of mutual obstruction which brought the government in that area to a standstill. A responsible party leadership would not, under Senator Johnson's philosophy, bring the government to a standstill.
The Democratic critics of Senator Johnson's leadership were for the most part aware that those were the facts of life, knowing that in the housing bill, for instance, they could not compel the President to spend more than he was willing to spend and that in the final showdown, they would have to choose between letting the President have the smaller bill which he wanted and getting no housing bill at all. The critics said that they would have Senator Johnson use the Democratic majority to pass bills which they believed in and then let the President veto them, making the demonstration for the record.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that in discussing that proposed tactic the previous week, he had pointed out that it was insincere and unconvincing in a time of boom, as the present, to enact a bill to spend more money unless it was accompanied by a bill to raise taxes. If the tactic was insincere and unconvincing, it was also not good politics and Senator Johnson had been correct to avoid it. He also suggests that the political tactic proposed by the critics of the Senator would be a mistake, but that they were not wholly wrong in their feeling that somehow a Democratic Congress ought be doing something of its own other than choosing between obstructing the President or giving in to him.
He suggests that they ought be preparing public opinion for the future, which was not yet extant but was near at hand, preparing that opinion for the decade of the 1960's which, assuming that there was no war, was bound to be an era of great innovation and development of public activities in the nation. It was inconceivable, to cite a few examples, that a country which could spend what it spent on luxuries would tolerate much longer the shameful neglect and starvation of public education, would tolerate inadequate medical care, blighted areas in the big cities, pollution of the air and water, inadequate airports and failing railroads. The public facilities of the country were not keeping up with the growth of the population, the congestion in the cities, and the rising standards of private life.
In the decade of the 1960's, it was certain that there would be a great modernization and expansion of public facilities. That would undoubtedly require more taxes out of a rapidly growing economy. He finds that it was there that Senator Johnson and the Congressional leadership were missing the bus and failing to hold the confidence of the new generation of Democrats in Congress and across the country. Not only did they accommodate themselves to the Old Guard Republicans on spending bills, which was correct, they had given the effect of thinking and talking like the Old Guard Republicans, which he finds to be a pity. "For while the Democrats in Congress cannot, and should not try to, govern the country, they should be leading and teaching the people to realize what the future is going to be like."
Edward R. Murrow, in a CBS newscast from New York, indicates that "conformity" had become a nasty word, with writers and speakers deploring it while continuing to conform. "We talk about the dignity, the independence, the freedom of the individual, and yet in hot weather the poor miserable male cannot free his own neck or his sleeves. In hot weather in the city of steam, scurry, and scamper, he goes about attired in garb that is an offense against nature and logic. He may be a rebel, a dissenter, a spirit soaring free—but he lacks courage, he is a conformist, and his attire proves it."
He suggests regarding for a moment
the neck of the average city dweller during the hot months of summer
He suggests that men of mettle ought appear on the street or in the office in open-shirts and shorts, and if a person's knees were knobby, so be it, and if the stomach had undertaken an independent career, the shirt should be worn on the outside, thereby softening the lines of the contour. No one had yet contended that it was un-American to be comfortable. People suffered because they were unwilling to depart from the herd.
"We deliberately inconvenience ourselves, in an age when it is possible that each one of us may be turned into a radioactive cinder. Humans have devised a method of destroying humanity, but they lack the courage to be comfortable while waiting to see whether that destruction will be accomplished."
He suggests that lest the commentary be regarded as an effort to undermine the flourishing and imaginative necktie industry, he would be willing to wear two neckties in the winter if none need be worn in the summer.
"So having uttered these futile words, in an air-conditioned studio, this reporter will now swathe his neck in those 10 or 12 layers of cloth, and depart—a beaten man, one of the herd—lacking in courage. Conformity, thy symbol is clothes."
He's advocatin' some kind of commonism.
A letter writer indicates that after treatment at the Doctors' Building, he had exited into the hallway, limping along with thoughts of thankfulness for the doctors and nurses and appreciation of spotlessness. Twenty feet away, at the elevator, had stood a mother with her baby, which began smiling at the writer, and he smiled back. He thanked the mother for letting him acknowledge the smile, and she said that the baby smiled at everybody. "But this one was for me—undisguised, unprotected, priceless!"
A letter writer from Salisbury indicates that every worthwhile person became angry at times over something, but the most worthwhile person was the one who could be angry and keep himself under control. To refrain from saying the wrong thing was a strength which showed up real manhood more than any other strength. "The angry words that are not spoken soon dry up and are blown away by the winds of good will. But angry words that are spoken make wounds that may take a long time to heal."
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