The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 19, 1954
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Geneva, the U.S. announced that Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden would depart the peace conference the following day and that there was no indication as to whether either intended to return. The President and Secretary of State Dulles had requested the return of Undersecretary Smith to make a personal report on the Indo-China peace talks. Mr. Eden would stop in Paris to confer with new French Premier Pierre Mendes-France. The British Foreign Secretary would, after taking part in a debate in Commons on Wednesday, depart with Prime Minister Churchill for Washington to meet with the President at the end of the week. Both Mr. Eden and Undersecretary Smith would meet in the afternoon in a secret session of the nine-party Indo-China conference, seeking common ground on Communist and Western proposals for peace in the Associated States of Laos and Cambodia. The participants in the conference planned to examine various proposals submitted by the Laotian, Cambodian and Communist Chinese diplomats.
The President had sent a letter to French President René Coty, indicating that there was a possibility of a follow-up conference between the U.S. and France regarding Indo-China, European defense and other critical issues, after the meeting between the President and Prime Minister Churchill during the weekend of June 25-26. U.S. officials had previously been critical of the ideas of the new French Premier, but diplomats regarded the President's letter as a gesture of friendship and reassurance regarding the bilateral meeting with Britain, indicating that he looked forward to resuming with the Government of France "such intimate conversations as I have had in the past."
In Paris, Premier Mendes-France named his new Cabinet, the 20th since the liberation of France from the Nazis ten years earlier. He was the 14th postwar French Premier, and the U.S. did not know quite what to expect from him, as no top figures within the U.S Embassy in France had ever talked seriously with him. The Premier retained the Foreign Ministry for himself. Two members were from the Popular Republican Movement, which had ordered its members to refrain from voting when the new Premier was confirmed by the National Assembly, and the MRP had also decided not to participate in the Government and to take disciplinary action against members who did. The two appointed members to the Cabinet from the MRP, one as minister of overseas territories and the other as secretary of state for the Navy, had voted for the new Premier. One American diplomat found it promising that the new Premier had promised as a condition of being confirmed that he would obtain a cease-fire in Indo-China by July 20 or resign, placing a major burden on him and his team at Geneva. Another U.S. diplomat, however, believed it was possible that the Communists might choose to provide him and his team better terms just to keep him in office, believing him to be less likely than other French leadership to obtain final ratification of the European Defense Treaty, providing for the unified Western European army.
In Quantico, Va., the chief of research of the Defense Department, Donald Quarles, told U.S. military leaders this date that the U.S. margin over Russia in weapons technology was narrower than a year earlier. The speech was delivered in a closed meeting and so only excerpts were made available publicly. He indicated that the detonation by the Russians of a hydrogen device the previous August 12, the launching of the first nuclear-powered submarine, U.S.S. Nautilus, the "Project Castle" hydrogen bomb tests by the U.S. in the Marshall Islands during the spring, and the May Day air show in Moscow, where the Russians had displayed jet bombers more or less comparable to the U.S. B-47 medium and B-52 heavy bombers, constituted significant developments in the previous year, on balance favoring the Russians.
Senator Karl Mundt, who had chaired the Investigations subcommittee during the hearings on the dispute between the Army and Senator McCarthy, said this date that he would agree with the demands by the three Democratic members of the subcommittee that the Pentagon provide quick answers to requests for security clearances on two of the subcommittee's staff members appointed by Senator McCarthy, which the Department of Defense had stated in a letter to the subcommittee had not received clearance. Senator Mundt said that it was his understanding that the two staff members had not been specifically denied clearance, despite a delay of 14 months in one case and 15 months in the other. Neither of the two members had been named. Senator McCarthy had responded to Senator John McClellan's demand the previous day for a "housecleaning" of the subcommittee staff by saying that it was "clever, dishonest and extremely dangerous to the country."
In Washington, Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, completing his first term, had died this date of a bullet wound, which Capitol police said apparently had been self-inflicted in his private Senate office. The Senator had been in ill health and Senator Earle Clements of Kentucky had said that he knew that the Senator had felt some concern about his own condition. He had been undergoing treatment at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for an illness which was not disclosed, friends indicating that they had not believed it was serious, although the possibility of surgery had been discussed. The death of the Democrat left the Senate with 47 Democrats and 47 Republicans, with one independent, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, who voted with the Republicans whenever there was the prospect of a tie vote, enabling Vice-President Nixon to break the tie.
In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, it was reported that two strategic Guatemalan seaports had been taken by invading anti-Communist "liberation army" forces this date, that the army was commanded by former Guatemalan Army Lt. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas—pictured on the front page the previous day looking a bit like Hitler. Two inland towns also were said possibly to be under the control of the forces, but that if the Guatemalan Army had sent reinforcements into the area, the liberation forces might have been pushed back from their initial gains, though no setbacks had thus far been reported. An NBC broadcast heard during the morning said that the invaders held about a third of Guatemala and that two planes had machine-gunned the presidential palace in the capital. The invasion was the culmination of a longstanding effort to unseat the Communist-backed Government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. A separate story provides some detail of the Guatemalan geography.
In Phenix City, Ala., the newly
nominated State Attorney General, Albert Patterson, had been shot to
death in his parked car the previous night, as he had predicted he
might be. Law enforcement officers had no leads in the shooting. He
had been scheduled to take office on January 17. According to
officers, he was shot three times by an assassin who apparently had
stood alongside his 1951 Oldsmobile and fired at point-blank range.
An associate in the anti-vice group of Russell County, the Betterment
Association, blamed what he called the "crime syndicate"
for the shooting and vowed swift revenge, as did Mr. Patterson's son,
an Army major, who was a member of his father's law firm. Mr.
Patterson had stated the prior Tuesday night that "they might
try to get me", but that there was nothing anyone could do to
help him, that the only thing he requested was that if they did get
him, they would not be allowed to get away with it. He had told a
local church group on Thursday night that he had only a one in
one-hundred chance of ever being sworn in as Attorney General. The
town had long been an area of vice, thriving on soldiers from nearby
Fort Benning. Mr. Patterson had charged during his campaign that
gangsters were spending thousands of dollars to defeat him, and his
son blamed the killing on his father's repeated expression of
determination to rid the town of the last of the gambling and vice
interests. John Patterson
Incidentally, the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, decided by the Supreme Court in 1964, holding that to maintain an action for defamation of a public official, in that case allegedly made against the Montgomery, Ala., public safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, a plaintiff had to allege and prove "actual malice" by the defendant publisher of the statement, that the alleged defamatory statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false, had arisen in 1960 during the term of Governor Patterson and briefly discusses the retraction by the Times of statements it had published in the advertisement in question anent Governor Patterson, in the context in the case of that retraction, a demand for which had first to be made under state law for the cause of action to proceed seeking punitive damages, not being sufficient to show malice against the petitioner Mr. Sullivan for the fact that the Times did not extend its retraction to him based on a distinct set of facts regarding his alleged conduct related to undermining of the civil rights movement and the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for leading non-violent protest in Montgomery, the subject of the ad., sponsored by A. Philip Randolph and others.
Just a couple of days ago, on July 2, 2021, in separate dissents from a denial by the Supreme Court of a petition for certiorari to review the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Berisha v. Lawson, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, consistent with a refrain made by Donald Trump during his tenure in the White House, indicated the desire to reconsider the actual malice standard enunciated in Sullivan, extended more generally to public figures, albeit with an altered standard, in the Wally Butts/Edwin Walker case in 1967, on the basis that Sullivan and its progeny created a First Amendment Constitutional doctrine out of whole cloth and that the matter of the requirements for sustaining causes of action for defamation should be left to the states to determine by common law or statute, especially in a modern age where social media makes publishing a falsehood about a public figure much easier than in the past when widespread publishing and dissemination was supposedly limited to those with means to hire reporters, staff and fact-checkers aplenty—though begging the question as to how much "fact-checking" went on in 1964 anent advertisements, the subject of Sullivan, and also blinking the fact that there were many small newsletters circulated off used, relatively cheap mimeograph machines and bulk-mailed or passed out as handbills on the street in the world of 1964, not that different from the internet and social media of today, where one must at least own a computer or cellphone and have access to the internet to publish anything online or through social media—, potentially, were the actual malice standard eliminated, making it easier for public figures and public officials to bring actions for defamation, irrespective of free speech and free press considerations, effecting a practical return to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts at a time when, in the age of social media and the internet, less well-heeled publishers are even more in need of protection from innocent repetition of unwitting falsehood when dealing with someone in the public eye of the moment or generally, to avoid the prospect of an ordinary person being chilled in free speech by a wealthy public figure's ability to threaten an expensive lawsuit, much as the classless, creepy, squinty-eyed Trump darlings sued a mere blogger four years ago for an online statement indicating a history of whoredom, the blogger forced to settle, the Trumpies apparently being too stupid to realize that they could have had one of their plagiarizing speech-writers quickly work up some clever response
By the way, just so no finger-painter in the first grade will seek mechanically to connect dots, via the Montgomery Advertiser and its editor Grover Hall, Jr., between the latter's endorsement of George Wallace in 1958 and W. J. Cash's praise for Grover Hall and the Advertiser in The Mind of the South in 1941, the praise in the latter was for Grover Hall, Sr., who died in 1941, and, moreover, in context, the endorsement at the time in 1958 of George Wallace obviously appeared, despite his consistent campaigning on the basis of maintaining segregation, preferable in the eyes of the Advertiser, as between the devil and the deep blue sea within untried waters in both cases in terms of gubernatorial responsibilities, to the apparently Klan-supported candidacy of Attorney General Patterson, also vowing to maintain segregation. Believe us when we tell you, without reservation, that had W. J. Cash lived, he would not have ever endorsed the policies or rhetoric of George Wallace or anyone else of that stripe, race-baiters, against whom he consistently inveighed. Indeed, as Samuel Grafton pointed out in Collier's in 1950, Federal District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, in his dissent in the Clarendon County, S.C., case, Briggs v. Elliott, forming the essential basis for the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, had obtained his self-admitted awakening to the ultimate absurdity of racial segregation in the South by reading two works, The Mind of the South and Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, published in 1944, the latter cited generally in Brown at footnote 11. You know what you can do with your little finger painting, finger-painter.
In Cincinnati, about 40 non-union
carhops walked off their jobs at a drive-in restaurant the previous
night in protest against pending discipline of an assistant manager
who had allowed workers to bring pork chops
In London, false mustaches costing
the equivalent of $2.94 each were being sold to the men attending the
swanky Ascot
On the editorial page, "The Great Hope of the Atomic Age" indicates that there was little news of atomic developments which offered hope for peaceful progress of mankind, that the destructiveness of atomic weapons was growing ever larger, with hydrogen bombs, atomic submarines, guided missiles and artillery shells equipped with atomic warheads. But it finds some small ray of light coming from a statement by the president of MIT, Dr. James Killian, Jr., regarding plans for construction of a nuclear reactor to be devoted solely to education and non-secret research in the peacetime application of nuclear power.
The Government had recently embarked on a five-year program for development of nuclear reactors for commercial power production, and the MIT reactor was another step forward in the non-governmental development of atomic energy. The New England governors had recently decided to appoint an atomic energy committee in furtherance of that goal.
Presently, there was only one privately-owned nuclear reactor in operation, located at N.C. State in Raleigh, with the University of Michigan and Penn State well along in their plans for similar reactors, and 17 other colleges and universities presently attempting to obtain approval and funds for construction of reactors. While the research was still in its infancy, within a few decades, atomic power and its byproducts might be able to produce enough power to transform the underdeveloped areas of the world into modern lands of plenty, provided the atomic weapons did not first wipe out humanity in the ensuing decade or so. It finds, therefore, the application of atomic power for peaceful purposes to make wars unnecessary, to be mankind's greatest hope.
It should have added, with perfect foresight, provided that one of them did not blow its top and contaminate a large surrounding territory.
"State Budget Picture Not All Dark" indicates that the state's revenue picture was brighter than it had been a few months earlier, as indicated by a publication, We the People, providing the details, should you be interested.
"Ground Rules for Letter Writers" refers to a letter writer of the previous day who had warned that if the more intemperate expressions anent desegregation continued in the letters column, there would be a race riot, agreeing with the sentiment, indicating that the newspaper had sought to delete from the letters all phrases and sentences which were likely to stir up racial animosity, but had inadvertently let some slip by which should have been omitted. It indicates that in trying to keep the letters column from becoming a vehicle for expression of racial hatred, it was not seeking to become a censor, that its longstanding policy had been to let readers speak their minds, short of libel and obscenity.
But on such delicate matters as race and religion, it posits that the newspaper had a responsibility to the community and the region to encourage temperance and discourage expression of high emotions, which it finds separate from the expression of strong convictions, but that the strong conviction should not include blanket insults about an entire race. Thus it advises that letters on the segregation issue should be phrased in moderate language, avoid blanket indictments and that the letter writers should state their own opinions and refrain from criticizing other letter writers.
We disagree on that latter point, because an idiot is an idiot, especially when transgressing your first two precepts, and needs to be labeled as such to avoid the notion of relativism, that all points of view are equally acceptable and rational, leading only to confusion when posed finally against the United States Constitution, which has to serve as the final arbiter of competing viewpoints. It is not a contradictory or terribly confusing document, until some idiot tries to insert his own subjective viewpoint into it, without realizing the full scope of the document and its general intent to create a society characterized by equal opportunity in all fundamental respects, for instance, voting, education, employment, property ownership and other "general welfare" concerns, that the Federal Government, in matters relative to the exercise of fundamental rights and regarding its enumerated powers under the Constitution, constitutes the supreme law of the land, trumping any state laws or state actions which contravene or limit those rights.
Educate yourself and don't be an idiot, and we will not call you an idiot. If it makes you feel any better, sometimes we believe that the editors of the News show themselves to be idiots, in certain editorials on certain days, but they enjoy the benefit of anonymity, which is as it should be for editorial writers, to enable free expression of opinion without concern for reprisal by those who might vehemently disagree. Syndicated columnists earn enough to avoid the brickbats.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "On Parle Francais in York, Pa.", finds that American children were less favored than European children in the respect of not having to learn a second or third or fourth language by dint of proximity to people speaking other languages, that York, with a population of 60,000, was taking admirable steps to do something about that difference. For the second year, it was teaching French in the elementary schools, with 60 second and third-graders being taught entirely by ear, by singing songs, playing guessing and word games, putting on puppet shows and listening to stories being read aloud in French. By the time the children reached the fourth grade, they would start trying to read French, and writing of the language would follow, with French grammar to be taught in about the seventh grade.
As a result, York had been chosen,
along with the French city of Arles, by the Bilingual World to copy
each other's customs and speak each other's language during one week
of the year, with town dignitaries and tourists to exchange visits in
each town. The previous year, such an experiment had been carried out
by the British town of Harrogate and the French town of Luchon. It
finds that the children of York, along with their community, would be
richer for the experience, more understanding of the world in which
they lived and better able to live in harmony with people of other
languages and customs, finding it no small educational achievement,
particularly in the "dissonant year" of 1954
Drew Pearson, in Amherst, Mass., indicates that it seemed only a few months since he had brought his eight year-old son to see his sister graduate from school, but now was watching the same son graduate from college to enter an "uncertain world". He had watched a cross-section of America graduating, the same who would in a few years be leading the country, and hopes that they would do a better job than their elders.
He counsels that peace was different from fighting wars, that it was like a marriage at which one had to keep working, that the hardest days began after the signing of the peace treaty. People had a tendency to become discouraged and listen to rabble-rousers, those who would divide, the hatemongers, intolerance-breeders and suspicion-spreaders. The country had been more concerned of late with 25,000 Communists within its midst, whom FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said he had under control, than regarding the gradual drift of the remainder of the world toward distrust of the U.S.
So the country was going to increase its armed forces again, vote for more billions for the military, and within a year, Vice-President Nixon's prediction might come true, that those young men who graduated from schools and colleges this June might find themselves in Southeast Asia fighting a war.
He hopes that the young men, when they got a little older and became the leaders of the nation, would do better, that they would carry out the 1952 campaign pledges to go behind the Iron Curtain and woo the people away from Communist creeds and Kremlin masters, while realizing that the seeds of war were planted through ideas and that their elders had been miserable failures when it came to counteracting Kremlin ideas and cultivating democratic ideas. He hopes further that they would not transfer the most efficient and popular Ambassador the country had to India, Chester Bowles, just at a time when India was the key to the battles in the Orient, and hopes also that they would not appoint a "very charming but unwelcome lady as Ambassador to Italy just on the eve of a crucial election to defeat Communism and despite strong hints from the Italian Government that she is not wanted", referring to Clare Boothe Luce.
Mr. Pearson concludes that those were some of the things he could not help thinking as he watched the long line of graduates, including his son who had entertained his sister's friends with a bow and arrow just a few short years earlier.
Doris Fleeson tells of the President having exercised unprecedented authority in ordering the Atomic Energy Commission to sign a 25-year contract with a private utility for the production of power to be distributed through the TVA and that the TVA cooperate. The AEC did not need the power as it was obtaining all it wanted or needed at a fair price from TVA. At least two commissioners on the AEC had informed the White House and had stated publicly that such use of the contracting power of the AEC was "incongruous … awkward … unbusinesslike" and a handicap to the AEC in the execution of its "sober and exacting principal mission." The majority of the Commission was opposed to it.
Ms. Fleeson wonders whether it represented good administration to add yet another divisive problem to the AEC, already embroiled in a controversy with its chairman, Admiral Lewis Strauss, for his attempt to grab administrative power usually reserved to the entire Commission, and the dispute over the security clearance of the best known scientist of the Commission, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer. The Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, with the task of overseeing the AEC, was attempting to shape a more flexible law to govern it, to provide it with a basis for peacetime use of atomic power, and so she ventures that it appeared imprudent to upset the orderly progress of that legislation with such a Presidential order, especially given the central importance to Congress of its oversight of the Commission, given the vital role of atomic energy.
Regardless of whether the Joint Committee had been chaired by a Democrat or a Republican, it had prided itself on acting as a non-political oversight group to AEC, and so the President's order had been unexpected and shocking to some.
The Committee had known for some time about the effort of private utilities to utilize AEC power to make 25-year contracts. The previous April 16, two of the dissenting commissioners regarding the contracts, Dr. Henry Smyth and Eugene Zuckert, had written to the Budget Office director regarding their reasons for opposing the proposal. The Budget director had sent a letter conveying the President's order to proceed on June 16, with Senators pointing out bitterly that the President had waited until after the AEC appropriation bill had been passed by the Congress to proceed with his order. They hoped to find another means for expressing their views.
Excerpts of editorial comment on the Army-McCarthy hearings appear from 29 newspapers: the New York Times, finding Senator McCarthy to have shown that he had no respect for the American system of government; the Washington Post and Times Herald, finding that neither side had made a compelling case for its charges, with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Army general counsel John G. Adams having "convicted themselves" of complacency, conciliation and cajolery in the face of interference with an usurpation of their executive responsibilities by the Investigations subcommittee; the Cleveland Plain Dealer, finding that the technique of Senator McCarthy was that since his objective was to expose Communists, everyone who disagreed with him had to be protecting Communists; the New Orleans States, finding the hearings to be "an unconscionable waste of time"; the New York Herald Tribune, finding that Secretary Stevens had been doing his best to protect the Army against abuses of Congressional power, but that the hearings had not helped to raise U.S. prestige; the Buffalo Courier-Express, finding that no American appeared to be proud of the show put on during the hearings and all appeared glad that it was over; the Des Moines Register, favoring "swift and certain removal of Senator McCarthy" from the chairmanship of the Government Operations Committee and the Investigations subcommittee; the Louisville Courier-Journal, finding the hearings a travesty of the democratic process, producing no heroes, with Senator McCarthy having shown himself to be "evil and unmatched in malice", with Secretary Stevens standing "naked as a man of weak principle and little pride"; the Mobile Register, finding the hearings to have hurt Congressional prestige, consumed time which Senators could have better used for other pursuits, at the expense of the taxpayers; the Oregon Journal, finding that the hearings had put Attorney General Herbert Brownell on the spot as to who was committing perjury and violating the law; the New York Daily News, finding that the hearings had been beneficial for alerting millions of Americans to the Communist conspiracy; the Nashville Tennessean, finding the hearings to have been a "shoddy circus and discreditable brawl from which no particpant emerged as a winner", producing for the eyes of the world what the rest of the world already believed, "with good reason", that "McCarthyism is akin to Hitlerism"; the Boston Herald, finding that the hearings had embittered both sides; the Boston Post, finding that the "anti-anti-Communists had gathered together all the considerable resources to crush and discredit the search for wrongdoers inimical to the national safety"; the Reno Evening Gazette, finding the issue to have been overly inflated and that the efforts of those who had reported it, ludicrous in the opinion of the public "beyond provincial Washington"; the Albany Knickerbocker News, finding that the "laundering job" may have cost the country unknown prestige, harmonious relations and delay in attending to greater emergencies; the Philadelphia Bulletin, finding that the hearings had not been completely wasteful as it had provided the most complete picture of Senator McCarthy in action which had thus far been available to the American people; the Atlanta Constitution, finding that the President, the Republican Party and the nation had been hurt by the hearings, but that the one gain from the hearings was that the character of Senator McCarthy had also been revealed, expressing the hope that a reform of the investigative processes of the Congress might result; the Albuquerque Journal, finding that Army special counsel Joseph Welch had ended his cross-examination of Senator McCarthy with the momentous words, 'I rest,' which, it finds, would be applauded by many Americans; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, finding that the Senate had yet to deal with a colleague whose "obsessive hunt for subversives at times borders on lunacy", and that it was imperative that it be done; the Philadelphia Inquirer, finding that Secretary Stevens had waited too long to stand up manfully against Senator McCarthy and instead had sought to appease him, that the one thing gained from the hearings was that the President had taken a firm stand against Senator McCarthy's insistence that executive branch employees turn over to him secret information, preserving the separation of powers; the Buffalo Evening News, finding that there were no clear-cut winners, only losers, ending with no charges proved or laid to rest, no one convicted or exonerated, everyone claiming that the other side had lied and no one proving cleanly that they had not done so, "with all wounds open wide, with daggers flying everywhere, with hate triumphant—and with all the participants invited to a love-feast by Chairman Mundt"; the New York Post, finding that it might not matter much whether G. David Schine held the rank of private or corporal or first lieutenant, but that it did matter that Senator McCarthy and his gang had shown themselves palpably unfit to run a Senate committee, with millions having a clearer picture of the "McCarthy mob"; the Chicago Daily News, finding that the most important thing to emerge from the hearings was a constitutional question of the President's right to direct the withholding of confidential information from a Congressional committee if he believed the revelation would compromise national security; the Chicago American, finding that the charges had been "a collection of trumped-up trivialities" against Senator McCarthy, bringing little cheer to those who realized that the only group to profit from the prolonged bickering had been the Communists, and that there was a vital job to be done by the McCarthy subcommittee, which could best take place through painstaking research and not partisan disputes; the Chicago Sun-Times, finding that the millions of television viewers, if they had not understood the fact before, now realized the disgraceful meaning and danger of McCarthyism, that the Senator had shown himself to be "utterly unfit to be a United States Senator, much less an investigator of Communist subversives who, like McCarthy, believe their particular ends justify the use of any means, a philosophy completely alien to our moral code"; the New York Journal American, finding that the effort to destroy Senator McCarthy by the Stevens-Adams charges had been doomed from the start to disappointment, that their collapse had "brought gloom to the 'liberals', eggheads and anti-anti-Communists who again must concede defeat in their all-out efforts to demolish the Senator's influence"; the New York World-Telegram & Sun, finding that Senator McCarthy was more interested in making headlines for himself than actually rooting out Communists from strategic spots in the Government, and that top Army executives had been interested in protecting the management from any hint of scandal; and the Milwaukee Journal, finding that the issues had to be settled on the basis of who was lying, that the testimony had been taken under oath, the resulting contradictions having been stark and clear, and that only if the subcommittee turned out to be a fixed jury could perjury be avoided.
Thus, of all of the commentary from 29 newspapers throughout the country, only the pitifully tabloid New York Daily News, always given to sensationalism, provides any faint praise for Senator McCarthy, along with the Chicago American, with the Boston Post providing more limited criticism of the "anti-anti-Communists", and the New York Journal American, expressing a similar sentiment. So, 25 of 29 newspaper editorial pages were, to one degree or another, firmly opposed to the methods of Senator McCarthy, with some indicating his complete unfitness to continue to serve in the Senate.
A letter from Mercer Blankenship, chairman of the 10th Congressional District Democrats, indicates that the Democrats of Mecklenburg, Catawba, Lincoln, Burke, Avery and Mitchell Counties were in a position to wield many times their natural strength in the November election, with Republicans barely having enough majority strength to hold control of committees in the House. He urges voting for J. C. Sedberry for Congress, to defeat Republican incumbent Charles Jonas and thereby to help unseat the Republicans as chairmen of House committees.
A letter writer responds to a previous letter writer who had offered to take up a collection to send this writer back to the North along with his "black brothers", thanks the previous writer for his hospitality. He indicates that the Democratic South would do well to try to cooperate and alleviate the barrier of segregation, inhibiting progress, and eliminate false illusions left from the Civil War.
A letter writer finds that the newspaper took every opportunity to smear the work of Senator McCarthy, and says that he was incapable of understanding the tendency on the part of a segment of intellectuals to favor Communists, but is sure that the American people would come out all right in the long run.
A letter writer from Lincolnton says that only the word of God could stand, says that she is Ethiopian, quotes Acts 17:26: "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the earth." She urges people to pray more and say less, lest all have to repent.
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