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Page TWO THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 196(1 ILOT “Good Grief, Maii-You Want To Break His Back?” Southern Pines North Carolina “In taking over The Pilot no changes are contemplated. We will try to Iceep this a good paper. We will try to make a little money for all concerned. Wherever there seems to be an occasion to use our influence for the public good we will try t6 do it. And we wiD treat everybody alike.”—James Boyd, May 23, 1941. ‘The bulwark of our liberty.. What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlementsj or our bristling sea-coasts .... Our re liance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN Lincoln Knew Last week President Eisenhower appointed a commission whose purpose appears tO be to find out, and presumably in due time to pro claim, what are the aims of the United States and how they may be achieved. This has been a great administration for commissions. We have had a commission to find out what is wrong with education, a com mission to find out what is wrong with the defense effort. The committee for the explora tion of outer space, the Council of Economic Advisors, these and other bodies are engaged in similar studies. We have had the Rocke feller Brothers’ Report, the Hoover Report, the Conant Report, the half-secret Gaither Report. From these efforts have come a series of rep^orts on their findings and of various ideas on how things may be put to rights. Now we have the biggest commission of all, in aim and stature of personnel: the commis sion to find out what are the goals of the United States—or even, one suspects, if it really has any goals—and how we may, in the President’s words: “press onward towards these goals in an era of vast technological change and development” and so “fulfill our world role or, most basically, be true to our selves and to the ideals on which the Nation is based.” This is a large order; it is also a strange or der. The implication—a strong one—that the nation does not know where it is going inevi tably carries the connotation that the Party and the President, now at the head of the gov ernment, do not know either. Mr. Eisenhower asks the commission to “develop a broad out line of coordinated national policies and pro grams for the next decade or longer.” This commission, staffed Dy some of the , finest minds of the nation, will do a good job. Its report should supply the President with Safer Railroad Crossings Needed Within the past decade, four elderly women pedestrians have been struck and killed by trains at Southern Pines railroad crossings. Installation of the present automatic blink er and bell system followed other fatal acci dents at the crossings in previous years. Ironically, all the pedestrian deaths of the past decade—including one last week—took place at the crossings with bells and lights— one at Vermont Ave., one at New Hampshire Ave. and two at Massachusetts Ave.—not at the unprotected crossings. Readers may recall that the Seaboard Air Line Railroad installed the expensive auto matic light and bell system at most of the crossings with the understanding that the Town would close the New York Ave. and Illinois Ave. crossings. The crossings were never closed. In view of this background, it is fortunate that none of the pedestrian deaths have occurred at the unprotected crossings. ' Any pedestrian death at any of the crossings seems inexplicable, in view of the racket made by the warning bells and the trains themselves—yet here is this tragic record of four lives snuffed out in 10 years. Is there any reason to think that, unless additional pro tective measures are installed, this average will not continue? Can the Town or its citizens face that outlook serenely? Southern Pines is becoming increasingly popular as a home for retired people and the number of people retiring is also increasing. There is the prospect, too, of the Episcopal Home for the Aging which will house many elderly persons who will be able to be up and around town. It is obvious that the haz ard at the railroad crossings will increase, rather than decrease, as time goes on. People in Southern Pines are deeply dis tressed about the lethal potentialities of the crossings as they now stand. Whatever the outcome may be, the town council should take the matter up with the railroad and see if some solution can’t be found. How Best Approach Illiteracy? If Moore County runs anywhere near the State average, there must be several thousand persons in the county who cannot read or write-r-persons who never went to school or who dropped out of 'school at such an early age that they have lost or forgotten the rudi mentary training they once received. The Literacy Program now going on, to teach reading by television, has produced neg ligible results in this county, despite much effort by the county home economics agent’s department to enlist students and teachers. Only one person has consented to take the course, at latest report. The TV project may not be a good test, as its classes are given from 6 to 6:30 a. m., pre sumably on the theory that this is about the only time when many working people would be able to attend. Actually, rpost manual workers are already up and getting breakfast at this hour and can hardly be expected to leave their homes then to attend a class around a TV set elsewhere in the community, or in their own homes if there happens to be another literate person in the home to help them. There has to be a trained teacher to work along with the students as the classes come over TV. Persons who tried to recruit students for the literacy classes report great reluctance by illiterate persons to volunteer for the class es or even to admit they can’t read or write. In other cases, the persons trying to form a class were advised not to approach an illiter ate person with the proposal, for fear of of fending or embarrassing him. Two such per sons in this county were described as success ful businessmen. The Literacy Program came up with some shocking figures on illiteracy in North Caro lina—derived, as we recall, from census in formation. These figures were reinforced re cently by a survey by the State Motor Ve hicles Division, in connection with driver’s license applications. The survey showed that a fifth of the persons applying for driver’s licenses in this state can’t read. This has led some Tarheel commentators to question the policy of giving driver’s licenses to illiterates who, though they can memorize' the shape of highway signs as meaning “stop,” “caution,” or whaf* have you, are faced on modern express highways with more compli cated signs that do require, or should require if safety is considered, some reading ability. Making reading, ability a requirement for driver’s license would be a powerful incen tive to illiterate persons—and also to stop school drop-outs. Perhaps some system could be worked out whereby an illiterate person could be given a temporary driver’s license that would not be renewable unless he learn ed the elements of reading within say, three years, at the end of which time a simple read ing test would be part of the examination leading to a full-fledged driver’s license. Whatever may be the approach. North Car olina must becpme concerned about illiteracy and must somehow make education attractive ly and practically available to its illiterate adults. And, to prevent the problem from con tinuing ad infimlum, the state must enforce its school attendance laws. igKfeS many stirring ideas for that farewell speech to the nation which another year will bring. What more will it do? The nation has already had all the previous “reports” made by commissions equally well- staffed, equally well-heeled from the coffers of this or that of the great private foundations. Besides this hardly a day goes by that a book is not published on various phases of the great issues, either foreign or domestic, that con front the nation. There is plenty of material available to the President and his staff for study as they chart the course towards those goals of which he wrote. As for the goals themselves: is a commssion needed to tell the people and the President what they are? There are many who can de scribe them: men alive today and men whose strong and confident voices echo in rolling periods from the past. Woodrow Wilson could tell him, so could the two Roosevelts and Harry Truman, with his close knowledge of American history. Washington, Jeffersoh, Adams, any of the Founding Fathers could tell him. Abraham Lincoln, the great leader of the President’s own party, could tell him. Friday is Lincoln’s birthday. It would be a a good idea to stop, for a moment, and think about Lincoln. Think about his great heart, his simplicity, his quiet strength of character; his tirelessness, working late at night, alone at his desk—he was so alone. He never lost faith, he never failed his people; his heart was with the fighting men in their pain and in their fearful effort; and his heart and his courage, kept them going, kept the country going, saved the Union. Lincoln speaks today, as he has spoken in every crisis of this nation’s history. This na tion needs, the President needs, to listen to him. & (0 \ “Qoo •'hi THE NEW FOREIGN POLICY' Will Russia Rejoin The West? The Pilot is reprinting, with permission, a series of articles on the "New West ern Foreign Policy" by Jo seph C. Harsch. special corre spondent of The Christian Science Monitor. In the fol lowing article Mr. Harsch discusses the relationship of Russia to the West against the background of the new policy. Most maps to this day show Europe as being a part of the v/orld that stretches from the At lantic Ocean to the Ural Moun tains. But map-maker habits do not accord in our times with our own mental concept of Europe. The contrast between past and present concepts of Europe and Russia’s relationship to it is one measure of the enormous import ance in history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It severed Russia proper and the Ukraine from Europe to which they had mentally belonged for centuries and either attached them, to Asia or set them adrift in a no man’s land in between. The frontier between East and West was moved westward from the Urals to the Carpathians.. Mentally our generation has ac quiesced in the loss from Europe and from the stream of Western civilization of classic Russia and the Ukraine. So contracted is our concept of Europe that we even are satisfied to talk only wistfully about some day regaining Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia for Europe. That is the limit of our hopes. Even that exceeds our serious expectations. Possibility The New' Foreign Policy does not consciously seek to undo the results of the 1917 earthquake. Yet there is inherent in it the germ of a possibility that some day, probably not in our time, there might be an end to the isola tion from Europe of the lands Moscow rules. It is merely a passing fact that Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev re- o^ived a warmer welcome in Washington than he did in Pe king on his last visit there. It is merely a passing fact that traffic in people, ideas, and goods be tween Moscow’s lands and the West is slowly and slightly revi ving. It is merely a passing fact that Moscow this past week did not seize the opportunity of the French crisis to cause fresh trou ble for old Europe. The chances are that Stalin would have ex plored the opportunity. It is also a fact that in advance of and during the Suez crisis John Foster Dulles, then United States Secretary of State, did some thinking about ways and means of bringing the Soviet Union back into the concert of Europe and that his own chang ing ideas about relations with Moscow were fundamental in his behavior toward Britain in that issue—the behavior which came as such a devastating shock to Anthony Eden. The essential thing which comes out of the Eden memoirs is that he conceived and execu ted the Suez venture within the context of cold war thinking. Had Mr. Dulles been thinking in the same terms, he certainly would have backed Mr. Eden who, after all, was trying to keep Moscow out of the Middle East. In a certain sense American policy destroyed Mr. Eden po litically. Mr. Eden’s basic mis calculation was his failure to ap preciate that while Mr. Dulles still was talking in the language of the cold war, he already was groping for ways and means of ending Moscow’s isolation from the West. None of these gropings for re- Ps^ociation between West and Moscow begin to equal yet in w eight the dominant fact of these times: the Chinese-Soviet al liance. Moscow’s orientation is toward Asia, its essential alliance with an Asiatic country, its ideol ogy and propaganda still hostile toward the West. Yet in the broader historic and cultural sense it is not entirely fanciful to think of the trouble between Moscow and the West since 1917 in terms of a civil war within the European community. Some of the most violent and bitter struggles in history have been civil, and at times they have ended in reconciliation. And the new Western foreign policy provides an opportunity to discover whether in truth Mos cow someday might ' reassociate with the Western community. Probably the best argument that could be made for the policy is precisely this. We never shall know whether there survives in Moscow an ata vistic urge to reunite Europe as our forefathers conceived Europe unless we enter upon the experi ment of offering the opportunity. There is inherent in the new policy, subconsciously if not con sciously, the idea that perhaps Moscow’s estrangement and iso lation from Europe since 1917 is temporary and unnatural, not permanent and natural. High Price If, and it is a very large and very long if, the West has aban doned the cause of Eastern Euro pean liberation as the price for re opening the door to a larger con cept of Europe, then the price in time may not seem to have been too high. At the moment the price seems very high and the pros pects of a return very slender. We must come back to the fact that it was not for such rea sons that Washington embarked on the new policy. It did so to save money on the military bud get. Will Moscow, perhaps also for wrong reasons, respond con structively to the olive branch which, we might almost say, has been extended unintentionally? (To b« continued) ‘Alive and On the March... Rep. Chester Bowles of Connecticut — former Gov ernor of that State and for mer .ambassador to India— spoke in Chapel Hill this morning at the World Afifairs Conference being held there. wi£h several Sandhills resi dents attending. Below are excerpts from his recent book, "The Coming Political Breakthrough." Perhaps the most significant fact of our times is that the rev olution which shaped our own history is alive and on the march again in Asia, Africa, in the Mid dle East and in Latin America. It may wander into .wayward paths or keep to a steadier course. It may be led by saints or sinners. But whether it is wayward or steady, whether dedicated men or imposters march at its head, it is carrying everything before it. And all those who would influ ence its course must speak its language. At every public conference in these awakening continents it is the traditional idea of freedom first written into our own Dec laration of Independence which emerges as a stated, agreed-upon national objective. A new leadership in Washing ton must reassert in a new inter national context the political, so cial, and economic principles which have furnished the strength and driving force of our democratic society. Our task is no more and no less than to dem onstrate, in practical terms, that the American Revolution, as Jef ferson once said: “belongs to all mankind.” 'The world which was always round has suddenly become very small as well. And in that small round world there are four fun damental questions that demand our immediate and dedicated at tention. The first refers to our capacity to live together in harmony and effectiveness. The second relates to our ca pacity for sustained economic growth. The third relates to the quality of our culture, of our communi ties and of our living. The fourth relates to our ca pacity to understand the sqope and thrust of living in a twen tieth-century world and to create a practical basis for common ac tion with other peoples who, like us, cherish freedom and the right to develop in their own way. Grains of Sand Dan Loves It “Dan Shaw,” the mysterious verse-writer who is not listed in the telephone or city directory and who has mailed items to GRAINS from both Pinehurst and Southern Pines weaves gar lands of praise for our commu nity in (his? her?) latest contri bution: Some towns one visits Then forgets. But Southern Pines Is diff’rent. Retrospectively it’s Etched In thfe mind Persistent. When one comes back to Analyze Its spell that holds Forever; One finds the answer is the Pines Plus civic-wide Endeavor. Its pleasant folks. Its clean, neat roads. Its fox and hounds. Golf, gardens. Its quietude and bright Sunshine— No town’s as nice as Southern Pines. Hound-dog At The Opera “Carmen” went off with a bang: the other night. That is: judging by the comments heard at Weav er Auditorium at the Sandhills Music Association concert. The voices were line; exceptionally fine. The acting just got by but they played the fine old melo drama right up to pitch and up to time and everybody got car ried along, audience as well as actors. Chief carrier was the “orches tra,” the director-pianist, play ing like mad; even taking one hand off the keyboard perilously to beat time yildly, then crash ing down again. And on the right note, too. “He deserves a special cheer,” said many. All this goes to show that opera can be fine and can be fun, even if it isn’t at the Met. Speaking of opera, GRAINS re ceived a clipping the day after the concert, with the comment: “There’s more than one way of enjoying the opera.” The clip was an excerpt from an article by the late famous music critic Deems Taylor, telling about what hap pened one night at Wagner’s “Tannhauser”. As follows: “I remember a glamorous per formance of the hunt scene in Tannhauser at the Metropolitan years ago when one of the hounds slipped his leash and wandered around the-stage. “He sniffed one of the trees in Joseph Tirban’s superb forest set, Joseph Uirban’s superb forest set, rest of the pack with an expres sion that plainly said, “Hey, fel lers, look, a real tree!” and per formed the customary ritual, to the vast entertainment of the au dience but to the ruination of the mood of that scene of the opera.” I Love a Lassie Sandy and Jock met on the High Street. “Well, Sandy,” said Jock. “And what for are you riding on a las sie’s bicycle? What’s come over you, man?” “Ah, Jock,” Sandy replied, “It was like this. I and my Jeanie we were out on the moor. She was telling me as how she had a new bicycle, and I—well now, Sandy, I was telling her about how pretty she was, as fair as the heather and as bonny as the lily in the dell. ‘Oh, Jock,’ she says to me, ‘When ye talk like that,’ she says, ‘I love you so I’d do anything you asked,’ she said. ‘I’d give you anything, I would, when you talk like that!’ “ ‘Will you, rtoo,’ says I. ‘How about your bicycle?’ says I. And so, Sandy, here it is. And mighty hEindy, too, when ye’re wearin’ the kilt.” The PILOT Published Every Thursday by THE PILOT, Incorporated Southern Pines. North Carolina 1941—JAMES BOYD—1944 Katharine Boyd Editor C. Benedict Associate Editor Dan S. Ray Gen. Mgr. C. G. Council Advertising Mary Scott Newton Business Bessie Cameron Smith Society Composing Room Dixie B. Ray, Michael Valen, Jas per Swearingen, Thomas Mattocks and James C. Morris. Subscription Rates: One Year <4. < mos. S2. 3 mos. $1 Entered at the Postoflice at South ern Pines, N. C., as second class ^ mail matter. Member National Editorial Assn, and N. C. Press Assn. #\ r
The Pilot (Southern Pines, N.C.)
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Feb. 11, 1960, edition 1
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