Newspapers / The Franklin Press and … / April 30, 1953, edition 1 / Page 2
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?Jt* $TKukiin ani* ?ltr Jftarumatt entered at Port Office, Franklin, N C., as second class matter. TOL LXVin Number It Published every Thursday by The Franklin Press At Franklin, North Carolina Telephone 24 WHMAR JONES. ? Editor BOB 8 SLOAN - Business Manager SUBSCRIPTION RATES; Out -of -County ? One Year. $3.00 In Macon County ? One Year $2.50 Six Months $1.75 Three Months $1.00 igle Copy .10 Obituary notice*, cards af tbanlrs, tributes of respect, by individuals, lodges, sfcurcbes, orginiutiona or societies, will be regarded as advertising sno tmmmneA a regnksr classified advert iaina rates. Such notices will be ?ffrcd "adv." in cuaipb ?see with the postal requirements. APRIL 30, 1953 POW Exchange ? There is something- about the prisoner of war exchange that brings "a lump in the throat". During the current negotiations, 149 Americans, sick or wounded, have been released by the North Korean Communists. Here were men who had been in prison for months or years, with little or no com munication with their families. Freedom must .seem almost incomprehensible to them : and the joy in the 149 families, scattered over the land, must be very close to tears. But there are some 3,000 other Americans still held by the Communists. When will they be re leased? Nobody knows. How harrowing for their families it must have been as they watched the list of those released, hoping against hope that their son's or husband's or brother's name would appear! And for the fam ilies of those long since reported as missing ? "he could be a prisoner; why, his name could be on to morrow's list . . Visitors Leave Ideas It is new ideas that make progress. And we get most of our new ideas from contact with others, particularly with others from other places. That is why travel so stimulates thinking. The number of persons who can travel extensive ly, however, is limited ; so the next best thing to travel is to have thinking people from elsewhere come into a community. When they leave, they usually leave behind them some new ideas that af fect _the progress of the community. C ? ' V ? ? ? _ I This county has been fortunate, recently in that % regard, particularly in the field of education. The list of outstanding people brought here through the efforts of the head of the county schools, Mr. Holland McSwain, is impressive. In the fall of 1951, Dr. Bertlyn Bosley, head of the nutrition division of the State Board of Health, accompanied by Miss Nina Lee Corbett, nutrition ist, were invited here. As a result of that visit, nu trition education ? the importance of good balanc ed meals ? was set up in the schools, and that pro gram is now in its second year. In the spring of 1951, and again last fall.'Tavlor Dod'son and Miss Welen Stewart, of the State De partment oi" Public Instruction, held conferences with Macon Count v teachers, in an effort to. set up a better program of physical education for all the school children ? not just the members of the foot ball and basketball teams. Last year specialists from Raleigh were here for vi" workshop -lor teachers on health, and similar, workshops on the teaching of art and on mental hy giene were held this year. Last spring, of course, Macon County had a visit from Governor Scott, the late Dr. Clyde A. Krwin. state superintendent of public instruction, and I). Hiden Ramsey, then vice-chairman of the State Board of Lducation. And only last week Mr. McSwain was responsible for the visit here, of Dr. Kdward Kidder (iraham. Jr., chancellor of Woman's College and vice presi dent of the Greater University, accompanied by Miss Catherine Taylor, dean of students at Wom an's College, and Miss Julia Barrett*, vocational guidance counselor. They were here to help high school students with their vocational problems? what work they should plan to do in life, and how best to equip themselves for it. The most influential of all educational factors is the con servation in a child's home. ? William Temple. Others' Opinions QUOTING DADDY (Dunn Dispatch) i The hired man was eating with little Jerry Wllkins and he asked Jerry to pass him the salt. Looking at his mother. Jerry hesitated. "Shall I give him the salt?" he whispered. "Daddy says he isn't worth it." HOW ABOUT THAT! (Marion Progress) A lady spent three hours looking for the keys to her car and finally found them in the pocket of the dress she was wearing. A man who was devoted to his wife and' his family forgot to remember his wedding anniversary. A business man signed a contract and later found some reading in fine print that he hadn't noticed before he signed the paper and he lost a sum of money because of it. A family went away on vacation and forgot to notify the milkman, paper boy and the man who brings eggs, to discon tinue deliveries when they left, so the porch was cluttered on their return. A man who recently inherited money invested it in a "get rich-quick" scheme and lost a sum that would have supported him for years. A girl let her family persuade her to go into a profession she loathed and spent the rest of her days repenting the de cision. And then they sat down to read the home town news and said: "How can newspapers make so many mistakes?" BEWARE OF POETS, O GIRLS! (Greensboro Daily News) W. H. Auden, the English poet who spoke to students at Woman's College and Salem College recently, had some really practical advice to give the girls about poetry. If a girl gets good poetry from a boy, advised Mr. Auden in Dorothy Dix style, she had better watch out. But if she gets bad poetry from him, then he is probably sincere. There are several reasons for this. If the poetry is good, it may be just a habit, not a sign of high temperature. If it is bad, however, it indicates that the writer, impelled by strong emotion, has poured out his heart. Furthermore, as Wordsworth said, poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility," and it ought to be clear to any girl that a man in tranquility is not a man in love. One difficulty is that few girls are good 'judges of poetry, / In Accumulate* (EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Wig gins is executive editor of The Washington Post and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of News paper Editors. The following unsolicited statement by him was sent to Raleigh last week for presentation to the Gem eral Assembly's Joint Com mittee on Appropriations, at its public hearing on repeal of the recently enacted law authorising secret sessions of the Appropriations Committee* and its sub-committees.) By J. R. WIGGINS On behalf of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, may we respectfully ex press the hope that the Gen eral Assembly of the State of North Carolina will see fit to enact House Bill 1071 (Senate Bill 408i which would have the effect of restoring the 1925 statute providing for public meetings of the Joint Appro priations Committee and Ap propriations Subcommittees. When the North Carolina As sembly enacted this law in 1925, it placed the State of North Carolina in the forefront of all the states in its acknowledge ment of the right of the people to know about the conduct of their own government. It is of the utmost importance, not only to North Carolina, but to the whole country that this great tradition of your state be con tinued. The operations of the North Carolina legislature, und er the statute, long have been a demonstration that these transactions can be conducted in public efficiently and expe ditiously. The state has proved in practice what the philosoph ers have held in theory ? that when the people are kept con tinuously informed as to the details of discussion in a legis lative body, that body becomes the beneficiary of the best brains of a whole community. When the deliberations proceed upon a false premise, correc tion is forthcoming from the best informed among the public. Error is thus kept from being incorporated Into the conclu sions of a committee or a legis lature. Mistakes of fact and judgment are currently correct ed and adjusted and are kept from being incorporated in the final conclusions of a legisla tive group. When a legislative body pro ceeds in secret, errors accumu late throughout the deliberation and may be carried into a fin ished proposal where they may be discovered too late for easy and quick correction. Your committee, I am sure, is well aware that despite all precau tions, there is no such thing as a really secret proceeding in a committee or an assembly at tended by many members. When the public is denied an official access, it usually obtains an il licit one, and those who furn ish such a report are likely to be persons of selfish purpose or mischievous aim. Their faulty reports are likely to become the foundation for mistaken pub lic opinion. Legislative proceedings in pub lic ? have a virtue that Jeremy Bentham, a distinguished Eng lish law writer, has claimed for judicial proceedings in public: they prevent the reputation and character of the law makers from being impugned by false reports of their conduct and dishonest representations of their views and votes. ' Open hearings really enlist all the people of the state in the governmental process. As John Stuart Mill has put it: "By the utmost possible publicity and liberty of discussion . . . not merely a few individuals in suc cession, but the whole public are made, to a certain extent, participants in the government, and sharers in the instruction and mental exercise derivable from it." We have on many occasions learned how dangerous it is to give people authority without giving them information. There is no example in history where the people were rendered dang erous by giving ttjem the in formation needed to use their authority intelligently. The North Carolina Assembly of 1925, rightly concluded, when it opened the proceedings of its committees, that no honest law maker has anything to fear from an informed public, or anything to gain from a public that is not informed. If we may paraphrase here the Andrew Hamilton argument in the Zenger case, this cause Is more than the cause of the press of North Carolina; it is the cause of all the people of North Carolina; and it is also the cause of all the citizens of every state for, in one degree or another, the access of citi zens everywhere to the pro ceedings of their legislatures, will be influenced for good or evil by the action your com L-eG-UM? S <7HD &Af/7SS?S especially when that poetry Is written to them; their estima tion on 'the author is liable to color their critical judgment. Another difficulty is that so few boys write poetry nowadays. It is easier to pick a girl up with a car than with a sonnet. Hence the decline of poetry from the days of the Renaissance to the days of T. S. Eliot. > Sir Walter Raleigh once put Auden's speech into a couplet: They that are rich In words, in words discover. That they are poor in that which makes a "lover. Or, as the rivals of Catullus used to say, "Cave poetam, puellae!" STRICTLY PERSONAL By WEIMAR JONES I've been down in Raleigh watching the Legislature at work. The WAY I was there made it a brand new experience for me; because I went not in my usual role as a reporter, but as one of a large group of citizens from over the state trying to get the Legislature to change its mind about something. The something was the law authorizing the Joint Appro priations Committee and its sub-committees to hold closed door meetings. Those are the groups that largely determine how your tax dollar and mine is spent. For 28 years the budget act has required these committees to hold meetings open to any citizen. Last month the Legis lature so amended the act as to authorize closed sessions. And last week, at a public hear ing, the Appropriations Com mittee refused to recommend that the amendment be repeal ed. Thus North Carolina will .re main, for the next two years, the first and only state in the Union with specific authoriza tion of secret sessions written into statutory law. # # * I wrote something in this column a couple of weeks ago about the shift, in the United States, from a strictly represen tative government to a semi democracy. I pointed out that, in the early days of the United States, a relatively small pro portion of the adult males vot ed for men to represent them ? and that was about all they voted for. The idea was that these representatives should do the thinking on the issues, and make the decisions. Since then there has been a gradual trend, however, toward a semi-demo cracy; and today the people are thinking about issues as well as men, and are demanding that their opinions on issues be heeded by their representatives. Well, I saw those conflicting ideas clash in Raleigh. The hearing on the secrecy bill had been announced well in advance, and of course any citizen who favored legislative secrecy could have been present and said whatever he had to say. But no champion of sec recy showed up At the conclusion of the hear ing, however, the committee chairman announced that "the other side" would be heard the next day, and rather pointedly invited opponents of secrecy to be present. I suspect he was considerably surprised when some of us stayed over and were present. The other side was presented entirely by members of the leg islature, and I am Indebted to one of them ? Rep. Carroll Holmes, of Perquimans County ?for helping me to see that the whole thing was the clash of two opposing philosophies. Mr. Holmes called the secret legislative session "a well worn tool of democracy". He repeated that phrase so often it set me thinking. I wanted to ask him if tools don't sometimes wear out; and, more important, if we don't adopt new tools to meet new conditions. Then he described George Washington as "a great demo crat", and quoted the first Pres ident as saying some matters should be considered in secret "so they won't get into the newspapers and disturb the re pose of the people". That set me thinking some more. While I had never heard it, I took it for granted that Mr. Holmes had accurately quoted President Washington, for it was exactly the sort of thing Washington, living at that time, would have said. Because Washington was not a democrat at all ? he would have been insulted to be called one. He believed in representative government; he and most of the founding fathers, though they wrote into the Constitu tion doctrine that was revolu tionary for that period, did not trust the people ? in most cases, the ballot was carefully restrict ed to a small, property-owning class. Washington, in fact, was^ skeptical that even a represen tative form of government would long work; he would have been horrified at our pres ent ideas and practices of de mocracy. He would, that is, THEN. Great man that he was, had he lived today, he would have modified his convictions to suit the changed times. That same lear of the people showed up in the 1953 North Carolina General Assembly. Most of the proponents of leg islative secrecy referred to themselves as believers in de mQcracy; honest as most of them undoubtedly are, they mis-labeled themselves. Nobody can be a democrat who distrusts the average citizen. And it was the contention of these men "that there is -certain information, even though it has to do with the people's business, with which the people cannot be trusted. The conflict in Raleigh was one that is as old as the con cept of political freedom. On the one side was the argument that the people can be trusted with great responsi bility as well as great freedom; on the other, the contention that the less they have of both, the better. News Making As ft Looks To A Maconite ? By BOB SLOAN Were 1 a member of the Unit ed States Senate I would oppose the filibuster. I would take a position somewhat similar to that of Senator Lehman of New York in that I would al ways welcome an opportunity to vote to change the rules of procedure concerning the fill buster in the Senate. That is as long as It was a permanent change- and did not apply only to some particular act of legis lation. However, I also think that as long as the rules exist as they do which have allowed other Senators to defeat legislation which I favored when an act such as the tidelands oil bill which I was unalterably oppos ed to came along I would use the filibuster to block it. The main reason that the tidelands bill should be fought so hard is that it is the first step toward turning over our natural resources to the exploit ation of private industry. With out control there have already been introduced bills which would turn the mineral rights on all federal lands over to the states and which would turn the lands themselves over to the states. After this is accom plished private industry will then go to work In each state separately and ask that these resources be turned over to priv ate industry. This would mean that we have no areas that are set aside to develop as rec reational areas that the public can visit free or for a very nominal charge, no lands set aside to grow timber. The policy of private industry is to use the land for what profit they can* get, when the profit stops the land is cast aside. Also in cutting timber, for example there is very little thought as to how this will effect such flood control measures as stream silt, erosion, etc. Industry is there for the profit not to look after their neighbor. We have been operating in this country under a system whereby private capital develops and expands in using the na tural resources, but the federal government has kept a small portion of lands under their control as a reserve of timber and a place to show the value of conservation methods and practices. It has worked well keeping us a reserve of timber (although this is small) and Continued on Pare Three ? Do You Remember? (Looking backward through the files of The Press) 50 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK April has given us all the varieties of weather in the cat alogue ? sunshine and cloudy, warm and cold, windy and calm, stormy and serene, rain, hail, snow, frost, thunder and light ning, pleasant and unpleasant. Hon. Frank B. Benbow, who. attended court here last week, has made arrangements to ent er into partnership with Mr. Henry G. Robertson in the practice of law, and will become a citizen of Franklin about the first of August. Capt. A. P. Munday, of ^quone. rode over this way yesterday. His many Franklin friends are always glad to see him. 25 YEARS AGO T. W. Porter, G. A. Jones, and Lyles Harris are named as stockholders in a new corpora tion, The Smoky Mountain Air port, the charter of which was received here the latter past of l^ist week. Misses Elizabeth and Lassie Kelly are converting a portion of their home on Main Street into a tea room. When God made some candi dates now planning to run for office in Macon County, He spread ignorance on with a lav ish hand. 10 YEARS AGO Robert H. Bennett, of New port News, Va? ts visiting his - father, R. H. Bennett, of Iotla. Mrs. Van Frazier has return ed from a visit with her son, Robert Haywood, who is sta tioned in the quartermaster division at Camp Lee, Va. James D. Patton, 25, son of Robert A. Patten, of Franklin, was promoted last week from the rank of second lieutenant to first lieutenant at the AAF Advanced Flying School, where he is a flight commander.
The Franklin Press and the Highlands Maconian (Franklin, N.C.)
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April 30, 1953, edition 1
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