The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 5, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had said at his press conference this date that a summit conference would be a foregone conclusion if the foreign ministers conference would open the way to easing East-West tensions. He said that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was the only man who could deal authoritatively for Russia. He was asked how much progress there would have to be at the Geneva foreign ministers conference, which would begin the following Monday, to justify a later meeting at the summit, and he had replied that he was not in a position to give a specific reply, but hoped for some progress at Geneva. Any development there which provided enlarged hope for decreasing East-West tensions would mean, he said, that a later summit session was a foregone conclusion. The conference brought comments on other matters as well. Regarding steel, he said that in the long run, the United States could not stand idly by and do nothing about any new wage-price spiral which might stem from the industry's negotiations with its workers. He said anew that he deplored the idea of any government interference or move to control wages and prices as being contrary to the American system. But he added emphatically that all 175 million Americans were vitally interested in the situation and were not going to stand aside and see themselves hurt. He urged that both labor and management in the steel industry had to act with good sense and wisdom.
In New York, it was reported that crucial steel industry labor negotiations had begun formally this date with only two months remaining before a scheduled July 1 strike deadline. Mass negotiating teams from U.S. Steel Corp. and the United Steelworkers Union had sat down together in the Roosevelt Hotel. Talks were also set to start this date with Bethlehem, Republic and Kaiser Steel companies. Eight other sets of talks would begin the following day and Thursday with other top industry firms. Neither the chief U.S. Steel negotiator nor David McDonald, president of the union, had any comment as they began formal bargaining. The outcome of the negotiations was expected to have an important impact on national wage and price levels. The industry was standing firm against any new concessions to the union, warning that they would be inflationary. The union was also demanding a larger share of industry profits, including a wage increase, shorter hours, pension and other improvements. The U.S. Steel part of the negotiations had found nearly 100 union negotiators pitted across a long table with nearly as many U.S. Steel representatives. Both sides had expressed hope that the strike could be averted and pledged to work toward that end. Mr. McDonald was optimistic about the chances for union gains, even before the beginning of the talks. He had pledged that the 500,000 workers in basic steel, already among the best paid in the nation, averaging $3.03 per hour, would emerge with their best contract in history. He said that steel profits warranted worker gains without requiring any steel price increase. But the industry was resisting any contract changes, arguing that increased labor costs would cause steel price increases and thus spur inflation. The chairman of U.S. Steel told the corporation's annual stockholders meeting at Hoboken, N.J., on Monday that the company intended to avoid a price increase if it could. The President had called on both the industry and the union to reach an agreement which would avoid any price increase which might disturb the price situation. The President said that he could not sit idly by if negotiations started pointing to price increases, but he had not spelled out what he might do in that event. The talks were beginning two weeks early at the suggestion of Mr. McDonald.
The radiation-charged debris from nuclear weapons tests conducted thus far could cause between 3,500 and 7,000 additional bone cancer cases in 70 years, according to testimony before Congress this date by Dr. Charles Dunham, director of the Atomic Energy Commission's division of biology and medicine. His testimony opened a broad inquiry by an atomic energy radiation subcommittee into the reportedly rising threat from radioactive fallout. The scientist quickly qualified his figures, saying that they only represented findings under "one current theory" and that there might not be any additional cases at all. Scientists disagreed among themselves on how much fallout there was and on the menace it presented to people presently living and their unborn children, the reason for the hearings. The legislators were trying to find answers to guide Congressional policy toward such matters as the nation's own weapons testing and any precautionary measures which might be taken, as well as the U.S. approach to negotiations presently ongoing for a pact with the Soviets to halt testing. The extent of the disagreement among scientists and others was highlighted in a court case in Washington the previous day, in which 39 persons, including Nobel Prize-winning chemist of the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Linus Pauling, sought a ban of any further U.S. weapons testing. Contending that there was no constitutional authority for the testing and that the tests presented a grave menace to both present and future generations, they applied to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington to reverse an earlier District Court ruling against them—the Court, including on the three-judge panel future Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, ultimately dismissing the appeal for want of standing in that there was no justiciable controversy before the Court. (Another case involving Dr. Pauling would arise the following year with respect to an order by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee that he turn over certain materials relative to his petition to the U.N., seeking a resolution to ban atomic testing, filed with the U.N. Secretary-General in 1958. The D.C. Court of Appeals, in September, 1960, also refused to hear that appeal, finding again no justiciable controversy yet occurring, as Dr. Pauling had not been found in contempt by the subcommittee for his refusal fully to comply with its order and thus faced no imminent peril of a fine or imprisonment, the so-called "hot breath of the law".)
In Richmond, Va., it was reported that the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals this date had reversed a lower court ruling and ordered Prince Edward County to integrate its schools in September. A lower court had given the county until 1965 to effect desegregation. The case was one of five which had been consolidated in the original Supreme Court decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, finding segregation per se to be violative of the 14th Amendment. The court's ruling was on an appeal by the NAACP, which had contended that the District Court in Richmond had abused its discretion when it set 1965 as a deadline for desegregation. The NAACP sought a reversal of the ruling and a start to integration of the public schools in the southern Virginia county, heavily populated by blacks, in the ensuing fall. Counsel for the county and the Virginia Attorney General had argued that the delay granted by the District Court was a fair and reasonable approach which had some chance of success. The judge had reserved the right to accelerate or further delay the time of integration, depending on conditions at any given point in the county.
In London, it was reported that the Shah of Iran this date had begun an official visit in Britain, reportedly with two unofficial problems on his mind, a future wife and closer ties with the West. He was greeted at the flag-draped Victoria railway station by Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and two of his Cabinet ministers. Princess Margaret had seldom looked lovelier and had met the Shah with a low, deep bow. He had taken her hand and looked her in the eyes, and then she stepped back from the formal presentation of the Shah to her sister, the Queen. For a second, the Shah's eyes had roved. No one had ever accused him of having a perfectly static eye. It fell on pretty Princess Alexandra, cousin of Margaret and the Queen. Then he returned his attention to Margaret. She stepped back and Prime Minister Macmillan was presented, then Home Secretary R. A. Butler and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd. The Shah took a quick glance at Margaret, standing alone in the center of the carpet, and it looked as if he might move toward her, but the Queen produced a general for him to meet instead. At that point, Prince Philip had edged up to Margaret and whispered something in her ear and smilingly escorted her behind the Shah and the Queen, to their royal carriages. How quaint the reporting of little or nothing of any consequence whatsoever—even if submitted by a former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter twelve years earlier.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Charlotte voters stayed home in large numbers in the city's municipal elections, with turnout being light at noon and possibly to fall short of the predicted 20,000 if a late afternoon flurry did not jam the precincts. A check of most of the city's precincts had shown light, very light or average voting in most of them. Only a few were equal to the previous Monday's balloting in the municipal primary. Particularly weak had been the predominantly black and mixed precincts.
Bob Slough of The News reports on particular precincts and what some of those at the precincts were saying.
A box presents the precincts and the overall registration for each, plus the voting thus far this date, showing a total turnout thus far of 4,444 against registration of 53,789.
In Enid, Okla., a man started a 15-day jail term the previous day for allowing his one-eyed dog Oscar to roam free. The city dogcatcher had seen Oscar running loose and issued a complaint against the man, and the judge had given him his choice of a $15 fine or 15 days in jail, the man then stating that since he was not working anyway, he might as well stay in jail. It does not indicate what happened to Oscar in the meantime, whether he was left to roam free.
On the editorial page, "When Expediency Is a Bad Counselor" finds that the General Assembly's curiosity had been too casual regarding a bill to allow National Guardsmen to exercise the power of sheriffs in enforcing civil laws. The measure had been railroaded through the State Senate in less than 24 hours and an amended version had been passed by the House the previous night.
It finds that one might be tempted to suspect that Bolshevik undercover agents were being landed by submarine at Nag's Head or that Martians were trying to register Republicans in some of the western precincts. But the reason was the Henderson strike and the violence which had attended it. National Guardsmen had been sent to restore order in North Carolina communities before and they might have to be sent again. But it finds the prospect not to be so fearsome that traditional limitations on the power of the military should be carelessly stripped away.
The nation's founders were as suspicious of military power as they were of a strong executive. Consequently, they had taken enormous pains to see that any authority, once given, would not be abused.
Certain safeguards were written into the Constitution, and most, if not all, had been duplicated in the bills of rights adopted by the states. They included the prohibition against the quartering of troops, the stipulation that habeas corpus would not be suspended except in extreme emergency, and the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Furthermore, the crime of treason was defined, and indictment in a civilian court was assured, even in a military area.
In addition, in North Carolina's Constitution and every state constitution except that of New York, there was a provision to the effect that "the military shall, in all cases and at all times, be in strict subordination to the civil power." That was an ancient and honorable principle and ought be guarded well. The proposal to provide civil powers to military personnel might constitute a threat to the spirit if not the letter of that mandate.
It thus advises careful study of the whole problem of civil and military separation before extreme and unusual action was taken to disrupt the balance, that expediency was a bad counselor and the intrusion of troops in civil affairs an extremely harsh measure. It urges that nothing ought be passed in the form of a law to make that intrusion a common occurrence.
Take note, residents of Magaville, U.S.A.
"Don't Jeopardize the Eagle's Feathers" indicates that Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell might have just been politicking when he warned the U.S. in a May Day speech against interference in the upcoming British election, citing American sources which intimated that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's leadership regarding the prospect of a summit conference had been a political charade designed to curry votes from nuclear-conscious British electors.
Mr. Macmillan had supposedly privately assured American leaders that the summit was a political necessity, but that he would continue to adhere to Washington's more cautious policy toward Russia. Another five years in office was so important to him, so went that theory, that he would practice political trickery. It finds it implausible, as polls showed the Conservative Party in high favor and many of the Prime Minister's Conservative friends had urged him to call an election in May. Yet, he had put them off and appeared to be waiting until October, when the results of the summit would be known. He had thus turned down a bird in hand for an uncertain one in the bush, not the act of a man so hungry for power that he would merely pretend to negotiate with the Soviets to obtain it.
It thus finds logic to argue against the theory of trickery, and yet where there was political smoke from the Labor leader, there almost certainly was a spark, and probably a flame of American partisanship on British politics. It finds that probably 98 percent of the Americans who ever noticed the British hustings would favor the Conservatives, if only because the Labor Party was Socialist, and socialism was regarded as sin. More reasonably, some Americans would fear the neutralism of the prospect of Laborite foreign minister Aneurin Bevan.
It indicates that however political Mr. Gaitskell's warning, or however dim his sources, it had to agree with him that any American interference in internal British politics was undesirable. If there were any collusion between Washington and London to keep Conservatives in office, there was no telling how much British politicians would poke at the U.S. From what it knew of the British public, they would not fancy partisan trans-Atlantic politics and would react against it. The attention given to Mr. Gaitskell's vague remarks the prior Friday ought be warning enough.
"A La Carte Order" indicates that members of the Board of County Commissioners had become amateur short-order cooks the previous day, with their first chore having been to fry the fat out of a 14 million dollar budget served up by the County Auditor. It wishes them luck and indicates that it would take theirs lean and medium rare.
"Spring Fever Rules the Sunny Pond" tells of a "quarter-acre of flooded suburbia" laying tranquilized by the sun with only the willows appearing to move, brushing as at surface crumbs, with a pair of ducks napping in harbor.
Children had come and assaulted the silence and driven it far back into the trees. "Around the tiny lake they ran, bright colors flashing past the brooding background, forcing the ducks to swim away. At length, tiring of their sport, they vanished as quickly as they had come. The pond was still again except for the white feathers, now sailing for the far shore and a sunset breeze as the shadows took command."
Harry Golden, writing in his Carolina Israelite, in a piece titled "The Golden Pogo Stick Plan", indicates that in Detroit, there was a motorists' holiday during which no tickets were issued, enabling cars to pass with impunity through red lights, make U-turns and even bowl over pedestrians.
It had begun after policemen, black and white, patrolling their beats, had maintained order and lived in amiable professional harmony. But lately when black policemen had come up for promotion, they had been assigned to the police scout cars and the white policemen had objected. They did not want to ride side-by-side with a black policeman. So all of the Detroit cops had gone on strike, refusing to issue traffic tickets. That had made Police Commissioner Hart hot under the collar, announcing, "Integrate or quit!"
But force had not been the answer.
"If the white policemen will work with erect but not the
sedentary colored policemen, the answer is to make all the policemen
in Detroit vertical again. Since they cannot patrol the whole city on
foot, let Police Commissioner Hart issue pogo sticks
Drew Pearson indicates that the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee room was a solemn and decorous place, with Senators peering from an impressive rostrum down on the impressed witness below. On the witness stand had been a scientist from one of the Government's top atomic projects, the Argonne Laboratory, Dr. David Inglis. After several days of discussion with his fellow scientists, he had summoned the nerve to testify against the proposed Secretary of Commerce, Admiral Lewis Strauss, who, as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, had purged another scientist, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer. Many scientists had considered testifying against the Admiral but only two had finally agreed to do so. The others felt at home in the laboratory and not in the Congressional limelight. They also knew the risk which they ran of losing their Government jobs if they testified against a member of the Cabinet.
Dr. Inglis could not see a neatly typed paper in front of Admiral Strauss, marked "Top Secret", pertaining to him. He also could not see that a similar report was in front of Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, once the chairman of the RNC. But the scientist soon felt the impact of that paper. The Senator asked him whether he had ever been a member of the Citizens Independent Committee of Arts and Scientists, to which Dr. Inglis replied, after hesitation, that he thought he had been a member of it for a year. The Senator then asked him whether he knew that the Committee was listed by the Attorney General's office as subversive, and the scientist replied that he did not know that. Senator Scott then asked him whether he had ever defended Alger Hiss, to which Dr. Inglis replied that he had defended him in private statements, as had a great many other well-known people, indicating that he felt that Mr. Hiss had been persecuted. Eventually, Senator Gale McGee of Wyoming, asked whether the scientist had any political affiliation, and Dr. Inglis replied that he was a Republican.
Marquis Childs, in Paris, tells of France being summed up by one man, Premier Charles de Gaulle. He had made an heroic effort in undertaking to rebuild a center of authority for reasonable government, freed of the splintering factions which had plagued France following World War II and given the Communists an opportunity to make as much trouble as possible. But all of his efforts had been under the handicap of the continuing war in Algeria, which had continued to drain away blood and treasure, with 400,000 French troops pinned down in the drawn-out "pacification" of the Moslem nationalists and their National Front of Liberation.
In a small village near Bougie in Algeria, a group of French settlers had been seated in a bar recently about to celebrate the election of a new mayor. As they raised their glasses in a toast, a bomb had exploded, killing seven and wounding 12, among whom were several French soldiers from a nearby base. That kind of horror, which had occurred repeatedly, filled the French with fury and frustration. They tended to retaliate with torture and summary execution of captured rebels.
Recently, Roman Catholic chaplains with the French forces in Algeria had written a letter of public protest against the methods of torture used against Moslem prisoners. News of that letter was treated in France with only a few lines in the press, illustrative of one of Premier De Gaulle's problems. Public opinion, as it would normally operate in a democracy, was virtually nonexistent. The moderate center which Premier De Gaulle hoped to build as a buttress for his drive to reshape the destiny of the country had not materialized.
During his year in office, he had done many things, including revaluation and strengthening of the franc, increasing of taxes and cutting of subsidies, including veterans' pensions, putting in a new constitution curbing the excesses of the National Assembly and concentrating much power in the presidency which he occupied. Under his apostle, Deputy Premier Jacques Soustelle, Sahara oil development had been pushed so intensively that the latter claimed that in five or six years, France would supply its own oil needs, thereby saving several hundred million dollars annually in foreign exchange.
In foreign policy, the Premier had teamed with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to assert a strong position for a Europe of sovereign powers united but not integrated. The French were saying that the agreement of the Western foreign ministers to present an all-or-nothing negotiating package in Geneva, as it was represented by the French, meant a victory for the De Gaulle line and a rebuff to the British.
Mr. Childs indicates that there could be no doubt that France was stronger, though also true that the military cards in the French hand were weak, with virtually all of France's forces pinned down in Algeria. But that strength was provisional. If within six months to a year, the rebels would be so reduced that French troops could be returned home in some numbers and if the Premier lived out the full seven years of his term so that he could carry out further reforms, then what was still a potential could become an actuality. But if he should go then, the result would be disaster.
At 69, the Premier drove himself hard. On speaking tours throughout the provinces to explain his domestic policies, which had not won him popularity, he shook hands and kissed babies like a Congressman running for office. The disquieting rumors about his health were officially denied and it might be that his strong sense of personal destiny, which both among his followers and his critics were those who believed that he saw himself as the ultimate peacemaker in an heroic personal confrontation with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, would carry him over all obstacles, including the infirmities of age and the inexorable demands of power in a time of trouble. That was the faith of many Frenchmen who saw nothing else on which to place their hopes.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, finds it not curious that Kenya's Tom Mboya had invaded America at almost the same time that Jomo Kenyatta had been released from jail, such that three African groups were also clamoring for him to be released from banishment in Lodwar, in the remote Northern Frontier of Kenya. The latter, the architect of the murder of 6,000 of his own countrymen, would find few spells to bind in Lodwar.
He says he had just come from that area and there was not much there other than lava rocks and an occasional hyena, plus a competent camel corps of elite Kenya police and some native askaris who would shoot a person's eye out if they found him armed on the wrong side of the Abyssinian border. For them, the British were being reasonably intelligent about the containment of Mr. Kenyatta.
He suggests that they could send him back to England and hope for a reconciliation with the white wife and child he had deserted or they could send him to Moscow, where he had learned most of the preachments which made Moscow synonymous with Mao Mao. He doubts, however, whether London or Moscow would want him very much, and they did not need him in Nairobi going around playing Hamlet with his successor, Mr. Mboya, to fan him into another flaming spearhead.
He finds that the Kenya cowboys had made a grievous mistake with Mr. Kenyatta, that they should have shot him, just as the late Field Marshal Sir Dedan Kemathi had been hung for carrying an illegal weapon. He finds it ironic that it accounted for the last Mao Mao chief, because the revolver had undoubtedly been planted on him. The fact that he had killed 1,000 of his own people with his own hands for the pleasure of it was not readily available as evidence at the time. The reason that Mr. Kenyatta was not shot early on was that when he had been arrested, there had been a flock of private bodyguards guarding his home and it would have meant considerable shooting. He wound up dismissing his armed guards and meeting the cops smiling on the lawn. The British still had qualms about shooting an unarmed man and so he was brought into the courts.
At the time, there was no capital penalty for oath administration, such as was later invoked when the brush fire became a war designated as "the emergency", so he had gone to jail for seven years for "running an illegal social organization". That had been reduced to five years and he was now in kind of an open-house arrest in the NFD.
Chances were they would get him for the mass murder he had committed because he was a great drinker and, like many Africans, suffered from cirrhosis of the liver from a protein shortage. Brandy was cheap in the Indian dukahs and boredom was great, and he imagines that the combination of them would remove Mr. Kenyatta from active consideration of anybody except the other hyenas which infested the area.
He expresses surprise that the American Committee on Africa had not tried to fetch him to speak on the same bill with Mr. Mboya, who employed the same political tactics which preceded Mao Mao. If Mao Mao was underground anywhere, it could be found in Mr. Mboya's Kenya Federation of Labor, at least in principle.
He cannot imagine how the American people could lionize such a person as Mr. Mboya unless it was because of the pathetic ignorance which they had of what actually existed in Africa, that being a half dozen tinpot politicos such as Mr. Mboya, Kwame Nkrumah, and Sekou Toure, whom the Russians had already captured in Guinea, all selfishly striving literally to enslave millions of their own people without any consideration about the welfare of the simple savage.
He indicates that the late President Woodrow Wilson had said: "Liberty in itself is not government. Unless it is in practiced hands, it is incompatible with government." He finds that the people who had presently promised the world to 180 million ignorant savages could not govern a cattle kraal with any degree of success, being basically too busy stealing the cattle in the name of what they called "democracy" or "independence". He indicates that it had taken the Russians less than three months to move in on Guinea just after Mr. Toure had made the cover of Time Magazine, although 95 percent of his subjects could not read what it said about him and had never heard of Russia.
In the view of Mr. Ruark, Mr. Kenyatta apparently shared the residual primordial instincts of this girl
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., indicates his agreement with the recent editorial, "Fortune Picks a Man at Poplarville", regarding the specific point that the disappearance from the Poplarville, Miss., jail of an untried black man accused of rape was not in accord with desirable and usual American standards of justice. He indicates that neither was rape of a pregnant wife by a black man the usual crime in Mississippi. A young white woman had claimed that she was raped by the man, and he indicates that the piece had not intimated the possibility of his guilt, but that it should not overly tax mental and moral faculties to state that possibility and then endeavor to understand in some measure at least the outrage of those in Mississippi and their violent reaction to such a heinous crime. "If a people considered basic human relations as much as they consider (and try to foster) much absurd, chaotic modern racio-social theory, then perhaps biracial rape-lynch situations would become fewer, and could be judged more realistically than is usually the case." He says he was not apt to develop ulcers over the "disappearing act" at Poplarville. "Just gonna sit back and watch the liberal crowd develop 'em."
We thought for a minute that Mr. Cherry might actually demonstrate a more open-minded stance than his usual letters espoused, but he could not resist the temptation to pronounce the man guilty of the crime alleged and proceed from there then to find some rationale for the lynch mob's actions. As we have stated many times before, Mr. Cherry would find a comfortable home today in Magaville, U.S.A., where projection of the desired position is always the hypothetical which is readily accepted to justify practically anything which occurs, no matter how untoward the act. "Well, if there actually was election fraud, which clearly there was, why, the rioters at the Capitol were justified in trying to preserve the democracy against a stolen vote. Now, can you possibly disagree with that? It was simply 1776 all over again. What's the problem? I'll tell you what's the problem. It's all these liberals who steal our votes."
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