The Charlotte News
Tuesday, July 7, 1959
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that Democrats had aimed a budget-cutting drive at the
President's foreign aid program this date, the immediate target
having been the 1.6 billion dollars which the President had sought
for military arms aid abroad. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana
wanted to cut that amount by 550 million dollars in the first of a
series of fund-cutting amendments which Democrats had proposed.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen
Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, had suggested that annual overall campaign contributions by an individual be limited to $10,000. Existing law placed no real limitation on campaign contributions by individual contributors. The Committee was considering legislation to revise Federal election laws.
In Moscow, it was reported that the Soviet Union claimed that the flying menagerie which it had launched into space the previous week had been the most powerful single-stage rocket launch from either side of the Iron Curtain. A leading Soviet scientist, Dr. Grigory Khrushchev, corresponding member of the U.S.S.R.'s Academy of Scientists, had declared over Moscow Radio, "It won't be long now before we see people flying into space." He said that after recovering the two dogs and a rabbit safely following their space flight, it was "an important step in solving the problem of space flight by men." Moscow Radio had first reported the launch of the two-ton missile on Monday, four days after it had gone up. The nosecone and its passengers had separated from the propelling rocket and parachuted back to earth, returning the animals safely, according to the Soviets. It was not announced whether the propelling rocket had gone into orbit around the earth or whether it had burned up on return to the earth's atmosphere. Soviet announcements had not given details of the rocket but a commentator on Moscow Radio said: "It is the most powerful single-stage cosmic rocket sent up so far. It is much stronger than anything the Americans have." The satellites which the Soviets and the Americans had sent farther into space had been powered by multi-stage rockets. Soviet officials had not disclosed how high the animal-bearing missile had gone, but the Soviet Union previously claimed that one of its single-stage rockets had reached a record altitude of 294 miles. The Soviets said that the animal launch had reached a great height. Dr. Khrushchev said ballistic rockets of various range had long been used in the U.S.S.R. for scientific research, indicating, "They furnished much valuable material on the upper layers of the atmosphere, on cosmic rays, on magnetism of the earth and on behavior of living organisms during cosmic flight."
In London, the Daily Mail had coined a name this date for the Soviet rocket which had carried the two dogs and a rabbit into space, "Noah's Arknik".
In St. Paul, Minn., it was reported that a high-altitude balloonist who had pioneered in the space age had become one of its first casualties on Monday. M. Lee Lewis, 46, who had once shared the manned balloon altitude record, had been killed standing in an open-basket gondola just 3 feet above the ground. He had been hit by a 15-pound steel pulley which fell 65 feet while Mr. Lewis was testing the gondola's stability. He had been the flight engineer for Winzen Research, Inc., of Minneapolis since he had left the Navy two years earlier. With his partner, Malcolm Ross, a naval commander, he had gone to 76,000 feet during a 1956 flight from near Rapid City, S.D. That had been a world record, but had been surpassed the following year by Maj. David Simon of the Air Force, at 102,000 feet. Mr. Lewis and Comdr. Ross had subsequently gone over 80,000 feet a couple of times.
In Fort Lewis, Wash., it was reported that an Army sergeant and a specialist 5.C were in the stockade because the Army said that they had peddled choice overseas assignments for prices up to $200, ongoing for 2 1/2 months. The Army had broken it up six months earlier, but had not told about it until the previous day. Officers said that they were not sure how much the pair had taken in, perhaps $2,000 or more. The two pleaded guilty to a half dozen violations and were awaiting review of their court-martial convictions. The sergeant, an Army career man with 13 1/2 years of service, was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor and was dishonorably discharged. The other man, who had joined the Army in 1953, had been sentenced to three years at hard labor and received a bad conduct discharge. Both men had lost all pay and allowances and were broken to the rank of recruit. The sergeant had been the contact man in the scheme, according to court-martial testimony, having sounded out the prospects. The other man, an assignment clerk handling paperwork for overseas assignments, had done the rest. Officers said that the latter had doctored papers and juggled priorities to obtain customers the assignments of their choice. Eleven soldiers had testified that they had paid fees for the service.
In Chicago, it was reported that Queen Elizabeth had bid goodbye to the city on Monday night after 13 exciting hours amid the roar of cheering millions in one of the triumphs of her life, which she described as "an unforgettable day". She was resuming her tour of Canada with Prince Philip this date, heading north aboard the royal yacht Britannia for Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. They would be on the yacht until noon on Wednesday. Chicago had provided her a warm, generous, typically American reception, and it had been a case of mutual admiration. The Queen had quickly caught the spirit of the crowds and smiled, beginning to wave with genuine feeling. She kept turning to Prince Philip, chatting and laughing, as the thunder of the applause pursued them through the streets. She said, "We shall carry with us on the next stage of our journey, and for many years to come, a memory of the generous hospitality of Chicago which will long warm our hearts." She had spoken the words to 1,400 guests at a banquet thrown by Mayor Richard J. Daley in her honor, the last event on her long program. The police commissioner estimated that 2 million people had seen the Queen during the day, massing around Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, where she had stepped ashore, even before the Britannia was in sight outside the breakwater. The people had stood for hours in the streets during the day and were still waiting late on Monday night to see her, escorted by 40 troopers riding black horses as she came and left the hotel where the banquet was held. People had held children on their shoulders as her cortège had passed and those in the rear had turned their backs and lifted mirrors to enable them to catch a glimpse of her. Everything had gone according to schedule in the tight arrangements. Two unexpected events had been added after the Queen had lost a filling in one of her back teeth, spending 20 minutes in a dentist's office while she received a temporary filling. Next, a police bomb squad had scurried to the Museum of Science and Industry after an anonymous telephone call had said that the building would be blown up while the Queen and Prince Philip were inside. The police commissioner said that it was a phony, that someone had just decided to make a telephone call. Throughout her tour of Canada, she had been sounding the same theme, unity in the Commonwealth. Her appearance in Chicago, the only major visit to an American city, had been for the same purpose, to strengthen the bonds between the Commonwealth and the U.S. It had been a brilliant success. Admiring comments had come from people as she passed, such as, "Isn't she lovely?" or "She certainly looks like a queen." Chicago newspapers were even more extravagant, reporting that she had captured the city, calling her visit "a day-long love affair."
In Monroe, Wash., it was reported that 38 hostages held for 13 1/2 hours by four "kill-crazy" young convicts had been freed without harm at the State reformatory this date in a surprise teargas attack. Armed officers had carried out the rescue in the wee hours of the morning, two hours before the third and latest deadline set by the rebelling prisoners. Reformatory officials said that it had gone like clockwork. The rebels, who had armed themselves with butcher knives and long forks in the kitchen on Thursday afternoon in an abortive escape attempt, had threatened violence only to the three guards held hostage. One of the guards said that the prisoners had told the officers to start praying because they would be thrown out of the window dead if their demands for freedom were not met. Twenty-four visitors, many of whom were women and children, and 11 other prisoners who had been visiting relatives, also were held hostage in the late afternoon and night in the barricaded visitors' room. They had been treated fairly well. The four prisoners were quickly subdued as the teargas had sent the occupants stumbling, weeping and choking, from the room. The four were ordered placed in isolation.
In Charlotte, an employee of the City Water Department had been killed this date in a freak accident in the University Park section of the city. The 25-year old man was a shop foreman at the Department plant on Beatty's Ford Road. Police officers said that the hand brakes on a 1959 pickup truck had become jammed and the man was trying to repair them, lying under the truck when the brakes became free and the right rear wheel had run over him. He had been pronounced dead on arrival at Memorial Hospital shortly before noon. What brand was the pickup truck? We should know so that people can be forewarned.
John Kilgo of The News reports that local police officials were having a tough time filling vacancies which had been open within their departments for months. County Police Chief Joe Whitley said that he had been trying since November to fill four openings, that they had given three individuals tests since November, but had not been able to hire anyone. City Police Chief Jesse James, newly hired, said that he was having a hard time filling the five positions he had open in his department. That could pose a problem as they would have to start patrolling the annexed perimeter area on January 1, an area of 31 square miles. His predecessor had estimated that 70 new men would be required to patrol adequately the perimeter area.
On the editorial page, "Is the Supreme Court in 'Retreat'?" indicates that some observers found that the Supreme Court was on the run at last, as much was being made of various "retreats" on fundamental legal questions. They had been attributed to Mr. Dooley's observation: "No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' Supreme Court follows th' iliction returns."
It finds that, actually, the "retreat" was more in the nature of a holding action and that any other interpretation was presumptuous at the current time.
The most dramatic development of the term, which had ended the previous week, was not an "about-face" in the Court's philosophy but the developing split in the Court's membership. The term's decisions reflected considerable disagreement but also considerable restraint. Several important cases had Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas and, occasionally, William Brennan, in dissent. Despite those conflicts, there was remarkable unanimity on the race issue and important agreement on questions dealing with loyalty and security.
The Court had not retreated from Brown v. Board of Education regarding desegregation in the public schools. A special session, before the regular term had opened, had resulted in an unanimous decision reaffirming the 1954 judgment and making it clear that Federal court orders would not be abandoned because of strong local resistance. But later, the Court had taken a more moderate approach to the question of compliance when it had upheld Alabama's pupil placement law.
It finds that latter decision of great importance to North Carolina since its pupil assignment act resembled closely that of Alabama. Any discriminatory application of the principle of local pupil assignment would be subject to judicial scrutiny. But it was important to Alabama, as well as North Carolina, that some local flexibility had been allowed in complying with Brown, and that gradual compliance was not by its nature unsatisfactory. The virtual endorsement of gradual desegregation represented a triumph of moderation and had saved Charlotte's own desegregation process from being overturned in favor of sudden and massive integration at every level. It finds that all the Court had actually done was to find that the pupil assignment principle, as outlined in the Alabama law, was not unconstitutional on its face. The application of pupil assignment laws would determine their final fate. But the South had at least been given an opportunity to demonstrate that it could be applied in good faith. It finds it an example of the Court's restraint without retreat.
It finds that there was also no retreat in the case which had upset the Government's industrial security program. In a decision, decided 8 to 1, the Court had ruled that neither the President nor Congress had authorized the denial of security clearances to defense plant workers without giving them an opportunity to confront and cross-examine their accusers. The Court was properly mindful of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of the right to be confronted with witnesses, and it was strongly hinted in Chief Justice Warren's opinion that some degree of confrontation would be necessary in any new industrial security program as a part of basic Fifth Amendment due process.
In an important unanimous decision involving freedom of speech, the Court had struck down New York's pre-censoring of a movie based on the D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. It declared: "The First Amendment's basic guarantee … is not confined to the expression of ideas that are conventional or shared by the majority."
There were sharp disagreements on decisions related to the powers of legislative investigating committees, but the Court had been unanimous in three other important decisions insisting that investigators employ scrupulously fair techniques. Anthony Lewis, who covered the Court for the New York Times, had summed up the Court's attitude: "Frequently … the court was willing to tell government, "You can't do it this way; you must use a fairer method.' But a majority was unwilling to put up absolute substantive barriers against government action by saying, 'You can't do it at all'."
Decisions of the Court affecting double jeopardy and inspections without warrants, it indicates, was not to its liking, but those had not been illustrative of the dominant mood of the Court during 1959. That mood had largely been one of restraint and of unusual effort to maintain a tolerable balance between freedom for the individual and protection of government as the guardian of society. The occasional conflicts and disagreements on the Court represented, it finds, healthy differences of opinion strengthening rather than weakening democracy.
"Boon to Tar Heel Patriots & Pockets" finds that even Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would have been hard put to solve the case of the conflicting missiles which had sprung to life some weeks earlier, or so it had thought. But by some miracle, the Nike-Hercules-Bomarc rivalry had ended, to the state's satisfaction. Some of the nation's best strategic minds had blessed the Western Electric-Douglas Aircraft Nike program, a boon to North Carolina patriotism and to its pocketbooks.
It finds that even if that case was solved, it was no time for Americans anywhere to drop their vigil on the Pentagon, where muddle and multi-mindedness still prevailed. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had jeopardized the Nike missile, manufactured in Greensboro, Burlington and Winston-Salem, and assembled in Charlotte, when he had urged Congress to force some choices on the Pentagon by cutting funds. Now his "Master Plan" for air defense had put the Nike back in good standing, but the rival Bomarc program had yet to be killed. General Thomas Phillips, military writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had reported: "It is accepted that the Bomarc is an obsolete, and even if successfully developed, an ineffective air defense weapons system." The newspaper had asked why it was not dropped and had been told that heads would roll if it were canceled, that it would be hard to explain an expenditure of more than 2 billion dollars without a useful result.
So the Pentagon had reconciled itself to the already-operational Nike series for air defense and appeared to want the Bomarc effort scotched. The Pentagon had a case of cold feet but it still reflected the public's unyielding lack of sophistication, encouraged by the Administration in its anti-spending campaign. Without endorsing waste, it indicates that the public would have to drag itself into the missile age and realize that the costliest weapons were apt to be outdated before they were operational.
It finds it no wonder that Premier Nikita Khrushchev felt free to talk tough to former Governor Averell Harriman in his Kremlin office, given the Pentagon's timidity, the public's confusion and Mr. McElroy's failure to streamline defense priorities. Mr. K had seen that the U.S. weapon-producing program was building a "missile gap" because it was often geared to save face for Pentagon brass or to save political skin in Congress by guarding the pork barrel of defense spending.
It asserts that the country could make sure that the signs of feebleness were eagerly and craftily read in Moscow. The Russians had to note that such defense thinkers as General Maxwell Taylor and Dean Acheson were disturbed about the erosion of the country's conventional forces of strength. In Berlin, the muddle had the country over a barrel, as it did not have the ground forces to fight a limited war over Berlin, and its "policy", that it would start a nuclear war to save Berlin, rang false. It asserts that for all its importance, Berlin was not worth starting a nuclear war over and that surely those facts had accounted more than adequately for Mr. Khrushchev's "Hitler-like" talk to Mr. Harriman.
North Carolina had its Nike funds back, but in Washington, the fight for a realistic defense policy was only beginning.
A piece from the Tampa Tribune , titled "Union Bikini", indicates that Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, speaking to the convention of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, had said that he had found a problem which the union had not foreseen when it had recently undertaken a drive to promote the union label. He said that the previous afternoon, while standing at his hotel window watching the bathers, he had wondered where they would put the union label on a bathing suit as there did not appear to be much room.
The piece offers a simple solution. "Just let the bathers wear the label instead of a bathing suit. Few onlookers would notice the difference."
Drew Pearson indicates that the lobbying efforts of South Carolina Congressman Mendel Rivers to get $173,000 extra for a Northern ship repair company had been largely stymied. Mr. Rivers had been pressuring Vice-Admiral John Will of the Military Sea Transportation Service to obtain more money paid to the Power Equipment Corp. of Brooklyn for the overhaul of the U.S.S. Randall, which operated under MSTS. Admiral Will had approved an additional $104,394 for extra work on the ship after Congressman Rivers had telephoned him. In addition, the Power Equipment Corp. had demanded an additional $173,150. During the course of pressuring Admiral Will, Congressman Rivers had also buttered him up. On June 5, he had inserted in the Congressional Record praise of the Admiral, which Mr. Pearson relates verbatim. Then, he had suddenly praised the Admiral for favoring private contractors, as he also sets forth verbatim.
Mr. Pearson's associate, Jack Anderson, had upset the Congressman's tactics, beginning to bird-dog the story to find out why extra money was being awarded to a repair company despite the opposition of subordinates, and was also interested in knowing why the Congressman from South Carolina would help a Connecticut Yankee working in Brooklyn. Mr. Anderson had made so many inquiries that Mr. Pearson could now report that the Navy had refused to give the Power Equipment Corp. the additional $173,150 and had finally decided to award only $16,000, which was less than a tenth of the amount demanded for the alleged "extra work".
He notes that Admiral Will was now retired to become president of American Export Lines, a company which received considerable military cargo from MSTS.
Joseph Alsop, in Fisher's Island, N.Y., indicates that IT accepted signals from thermocouples, flow, pressure and other transducers, measured those signals, digitized them and printed their values. A thermocouple reference oven could also be supplied to permit IT to accommodate three types of inputs, which were automatically linearized over their entire range within .1 percent of accuracy.
He indicates that the foregoing was not a visiting Martian's first murderous attack on the English language or from any deep and abstruse work of science, but rather had been penned on Madison Avenue by a hard-selling man in a gray flannel suit, their publication having been paid for with a great corporation's carefully budgeted advertising dollars. The IT of the mad drama was something called a logger-scanner. IT also had pinboard programming and could log all variables automatically, could scan off-normal alarm points between logging cycles.
He records the facts because he finds that it ought to be news when even advertisements became hermetic and incomprehensible and even when the intended audience for the advertisement was special. In an increasingly vain effort to keep abreast of the complicated times, Mr. Alsop had read The Scientific American. Catching up on the most recent issues during the holiday weekend, he had found the prose quoted above, aimed at scientists and technicians with an itch to have their variables automatically logged. He says that if one had read The Scientific American regularly during the previous few years, there were two things learned, that on one hand, there was no end to the beauty and surprise of the strange world of modern science, while on the other, as the years went by, increasing provinces of the strange world were passing beyond the understanding of ordinary men. The beauty and surprise were the sufficient rewards of the unchained explorer of that strange world.
The riddle of an ancient lump of bronze, sea-corroded by more than 20 centuries in the Aegean, could be read at last, and from that lump of bronze, it was discovered that the old Greeks could also make computers.
Or orphaned monkeys were offered the choice between a mother with breasts, who provided real milk, or a milk-less but soft and warm surrogate mother made of heated toweling, thereby discovering that psychologists had been wrong all along, that an infant's love of its mother did not derive from the material need for nourishment, but from a deeper need to be cuddled and softly reassured.
Or rockets bearing telescopes and spectroscopes, fired aloft to acquire new data on the inner make-up of the sun. Or other telescopes soaring in balloons, bringing back the news that the sun's gaseous inferno boiled with the surface pattern of paraffin heated in a shallow dish. Or someone mingled disassociated cells from mouse embryos and chick embryos and thus learned that despite the most unexpected mixture, cells meant to build kidneys and cells meant to make cartilage would go on doing their proper duties.
He finds that even to the layman, there was something stirring in that unending, painstaking, fantastic exploration of all the many universes simultaneously inhabited, from the infinitely great universe of the cosmos to the infinitesimally small universe of the life process itself. But to the layman, there was also something genuinely upsetting in the tendency ludicrously illustrated by the advertisement of the logger-scanner. That was a tendency which had also caused grave concern among a few wise men of science, such as Sir C. P. Snow and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the tendency of the once united culture to break up into two quite separate cultures, first there being the culture of ordinary men who might learn to read archaic Latin or ancient Chinese but who could hardly hope to read the writing of scientists in their own language, and then, increasingly set apart, the culture of the scientists who wrote, thought and worked for one another, and even had their own advertising copywriters with a special hard-sell couched in the jargon of the scientists.
He observes that the separation of the culture would not be so disquieting were each not blindly using the other, that left to themselves, the scientists would only use their rockets to explore the cosmos, while the ordinary men, left to themselves, could not make ICBM's or any of the other instruments now possessed to change the balance of nature.
But rather than think any longer about the blind interaction of the two cultures, Mr. Alsop decides that it was probably better to go swimming.
A letter writer from Zirconia
indicates that Dr. Herbert Spaugh, in "How European Girls
Differ", had provided some superficial quotes from Arlene
Francis
A letter writer indicates on behalf of the education committee of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce their thanks for the coverage which the newspaper had given the issues involved in the consolidation vote of the City and County School Systems. He finds that Ann Sawyer of The News had done a magnificent job in writing her stories and the editorial support had given the campaign help to clarify the issues so that a favorable vote on June 30 had resulted.
A letter writer says that every time she picked up a newspaper, she could not help but wonder what was going to happen to the world and what would happen to the U.S. "Will man ever go to the moon or any of those other planets? There is one thing we can be sure of and that's if the other planets have people living there God isn't going to permit sinful man to go there…"
Trump, we hear, is planning a trip to the surface of the sun with his remarkable spaceship which he, himself, invented, the "Trump Steamer", and will agree to finance the whole venture out of his pure largess for the benefit of the American people, provided everyone agrees to call it henceforth "Trump's Sun" and that it will be so designated on all astrological charts henceforth for eternity, on penalty of death to anyone who refers to it otherwise without his name attached, as he was the man who showed to all that it was safe to look directly at it during a solar eclipse without lasting damage to his eyes or brain, thus demonstrating that there are supermen among the mere human specimens.
A letter writer indicates that the revenue bill enacted by the 1959 General Assembly, which the newspaper had supported editorially, had been a "vicious low blow deliberately landed to the wage and salaried workers" of the state. He says that its effect had been that of garnishment and attachment of wages and salaries, arbitrarily ignoring due process of law, wrapped in a vicious package deceptively labeled "pay-as-you-go withholding". He challenges the editors of the newspaper or any other supporters of the bill to produce evidence to the contrary. "It is a licensed looter masquerading under a deceptive title. Its approach is stealthy, its acts are vicious and its spirit is evil. It should not be permitted to become effective unchallenged."
A letter writer indicates that it must have been a great disappointment to the state's many textile manufacturers when Governor Luther Hodges, "himself a worn-out tool of a large textile machine", had visited a recreation area in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, and only then had remembered that he had forgotten his bathing suit. "But laughing Luther Hodges was not to be outdone. He playfully plunged into the salty surf and plowed around among the petite bathers in a business suit, white carnation and all, thus giving his Red hosts an unscheduled demonstration of North Carolina-made drip-dry fabrics."
Framed Edition
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