The Charlotte News

Wednesday, June 9, 1954

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in the 30th day of the hearings before the Senate Investigations subcommittee regarding the dispute between the Army and Senator McCarthy, Senator Stuart Symington had offered this date to testify in the hearings provided Senator McCarthy would agree to a special Senate investigation of his financial dealings, an invitation which Senator McCarthy indicated he was willing to accept. The temporary chairman of the subcommittee during the investigation, Senator Karl Mundt, interrupted to criticize both Senators for what he called "a waste of time" within the context of the hearings. He said he found it difficult to stop "this midmorning madness". Senator Symington had mentioned, among other things, a $10,000 payment which Senator McCarthy had received from the Lustron Corp. several years earlier, investigated in 1952 by a Senate Elections subcommittee of which Senator Symington had been a member, issuing an unanimous critical report of Senator McCarthy's finances, but reaching no conclusions as Senator McCarthy had refused to testify—as detailed several times in the column of Drew Pearson. Senator Symington had read into the record a letter he had prepared, setting forth the terms of his proposal, and inviting Senator McCarthy to sign it, to which Senator McCarthy responded with a refusal, calling the letter "a very vicious smear", that the television viewers could see "how low a man can sink … how low an alleged man can sink". Senator Symington's proposal had included having Vice-President Nixon appoint a special Senate committee after conferring with the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, Senators William Knowland and Lyndon Johnson, respectively. Senator McCarthy said that he would do anything he could to get Senator Symington to testify and would agree to testify, himself, about the "old smears". There is no transcript available online for the morning session.

During the afternoon session of the previous day, Roy Cohn, usual chief counsel for the subcommittee, had continued his testimony, saying that he did not regard Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens as a coddler of Communists, but did think that the Secretary had lent himself to "protecting those who protect Communists". He said that Secretary Stevens and Army general counsel John G. Adams had sought the previous fall to divert the subcommittee's investigation of the Army for subversive elements to the Air Force and Navy, indicating that there were plenty of problems in both branches and that they could supply information to assist the subcommittee in that regard. He had refused to agree, however, with the terminology used by Army special counsel Joseph Welch, that Secretary Stevens and Mr. Adams were trying to "rat on" and "turn traitor" to the other two services, Mr. Cohn stating that they were instead seeking to "spread things around" and have the subcommittee, chaired by Senator McCarthy, leave them alone for awhile. He said that Secretary Stevens and Mr. Adams had provided cooperation only to some extent in the inquiry into the Fort Monmouth secret radar facility and the claim by Senator McCarthy that it was infiltrated by Communists.

During the afternoon session this date would come the later regarded notorious exchange between Mr. Welch and Senator McCarthy regarding Mr. Welch's legal associate, Fred Fisher, after Senator McCarthy had indicated that Mr. Fisher had joined, years earlier, the Lawyers Guild, which the Senator said was on the list of subversive or "communist-front" organizations propounded by HUAC, a claim which the Guild denied insofar as having any sympathies with Communism. Mr. Welch had reacted with indignation at the insinuation regarding Mr. Fisher, asking Senator McCarthy whether, "at long last", he had any decency left.

This exchange, made emblematic of McCarthyism in later years, barely made a ripple at the time in the news accounts of the hearings, only making page two the following day, in a typically brief account of that portion of the hearing. In the ensuing days, there is not one mention of the exchange in any of the editorial columns, either the local column or the syndicated columns, as published in The News. Perhaps, there was reluctance to go into the matter out of deference to Mr. Fisher, then 33 years old, so as not to echo the words of Senator McCarthy and potentially further damage his legal career, as Mr. Welch claimed it might. The exchange was included as part of a 90-minute compilation of excerpts from the hearings, presented in 1964, titled "Point of Order", with this date's exchange beginning at the 1:10:00 mark, also committed to a phonograph recording that same year. Since that time, it has been extracted as a symbol of McCarthyism and the depths to which Senator McCarthy would go to attack people who either threatened him, or were associated with those who threatened him. While it is such a symbol, it was not, at the time, anything very significant in terms of bringing about the actual downfall of Senator McCarthy. That was well on its way, as indicated in an editorial of this date, and many editorials in The News, both local and by the syndicated columnists carried by the newspaper, extending back to the time Senator McCarthy had first begun his contentions about Communists in the State Department and other agencies of the executive branch, in February, 1950, the result of having been assigned by the RNC a routine topic for attacking Democrats in advance of the midterm elections, for a Lincoln Day speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was not the case, as is commonly perceived, that Senator McCarthy went along for a long while making his attacks, with everyone in the public and press bowing down in admiring obeisance from the beginning, until finally one day, everyone suddenly woke up, after this single, short 13-minute exchange between the Senator and Mr. Welch on this date or until the retrospective on the Senator's rise to power had aired on the CBS program "See It Now" on March 9. That was hardly the case, as evidenced by the very fact that the hearings were taking place, orchestrated by the Eisenhower Administration in the meeting to which Mr. Adams had testified had occurred on January 21, in which White House chief of staff Sherman Adams had asked John Adams to prepare a report for the Army regarding the allegations, which the latter had related to the group, which included Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, and U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., that Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn had made threats of intensification of their investigation of Fort Monmouth unless the Army acquiesced to their demands, primarily forwarded by Mr. Cohn, for preferential treatment for Private G. David Schine, that report ultimately prepared and presented to the Investigations subcommittee in early March, having led then to Senator McCarthy making his counter-charge of "blackmail" by the Army, via the report, to get him to relent in the investigation of the Army. Secretary Stevens and Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson had been concerned about diminished morale caused by the investigations at Fort Monmouth, which had ensued the prior fall, with the report finally issued by the subcommittee in December, finding no evidence of any subversion. The effort by the Administration was finally to bring a showdown with Senator McCarthy, as he had not been content only to attack the Truman Administration but had turned his sights on the Eisenhower Administration, with the perception being that he had his eyes on the Republican nomination for 1956.

In short, Senator McCarthy's steep decline began in Wheeling, W.Va., in February, 1950, and then during the days which followed in which he changed several times the numbers of persons he claimed were "card-carrying members" of the Communist Party within the State Department, and then declined steadily from that time, culminating in the current hearings. What the hearings did was to focus in a concentrated way the attention of the nation on the demagogue and his daily tactics over a period of two months, unprecedented coverage at the time of any news event or of any hearings before Congress, save perhaps the organized crime hearings of 1950-51. That process generally weakened the Senator politically both across the nation and with his colleagues, finally ending in his censure in December. It was a steady course of erosion, with every sensible person and journalist in the nation having rejected Senator McCarthy as a laughingstock and a disgrace from early on in the process of his attacks in 1950, his success only having come among the stupid boobs of the country, willing to listen to an alcoholic with a pronounced personality flaw get up and brandish pieces of paper bearing patently false claims, attacking individuals, including General Marshall and other prominent persons, who had committed no crime and had done nothing wrong or been the least bit disloyal to the country, all for the sake of gaining popularity and a national image for himself, bearing no relationship to actual anti-Communism, having been shown the way in that regard by Congressman Richard Nixon and, as a member of HUAC, his ruthless pursuit of Alger Hiss in 1948.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that this single exchange this date involving Mr. Fisher, while dramatic and therefore lending itself to later excerpt and portrayal, had little or nothing to do at the time with the Senator's downfall and fall from grace generally, it only having surfaced as being important long after the fact and years after the death of Senator McCarthy in 1957, because of its dramatic power in and of itself when abstracted from the entirety of the hearings and the long arc and plummet of Senator McCarthy from 1950 forward. Such is the power of television, to create history on the one hand through such live, extended presentations, often salutary in results, while on the other, by way of later adaptation and editing, to change or erase history, always for the worse in terms of reducing the general level of awareness of the public as to how events actually transpired, the devil always being in the details with the methodical pace of time necessary to get at them, not subject to the flash-bang sudden moment of enlightened revelation caught in the irrevocable snare of history. The latter is the stuff of movies, not reality.

In terms of recent events, as trickled down through the pixie dust of time, it is worth reflecting back to January 6, 2021 and the Capitol insurrection by Trump supporters as the Congress met to receive the certification of electoral votes, when the moron was rifling through the papers of a Senator after temporarily having self-enabled free roam of the Senate chamber, saying on the videos recorded by a New Yorker reporter that he was sure there must be something they could find "to get" on the Democrats and their "steal" of the 2020 election, though using pointed language in the moment to describe them. The pathetic stupidity of that moment probably sums up the stupidity of that entire day and the stupidity of the Trump White House Show which aired for four years on all the networks, that someone was that crazy.

In Washington, the four Puerto Rican Nationalists who were being tried for shooting five members of the House on March 1, each of the five having fully recovered, had objected strenuously when their lawyers sought to lay the groundwork for possible pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. The alleged leader of the group, Mrs. Lolita Lebron, began talking excitedly to the lawyers when cross-examination of prosecution witnesses sought to elicit answers as to whether the defendants appeared nervous after the shooting. The judge had sought a bench conference with counsel regarding the relevance of the questioning, at which the defense lawyers had said that previous cases had upheld such questioning as relevant to support an insanity defense. A police captain ultimately testified that Mrs. Lebron appeared nervous at the time of the shooting but that two of the male defendants appeared "pretty calm". After the day's proceedings, the defense lawyer said that Mrs. Lebron had whispered "no, no, no" in response to any such move for an insanity defense. The four defendants, they said, had refused psychiatric examinations and insisted on preservation of the "political character" of their defense, that they had done the shooting for the sake of gaining independence for their "country". Puerto Rico was then, as now, a territory of the United States.

In Lake Wales, Fla., a local attorney accused with a co-defendant of conspiring to kill three persons, two wealthy widows and an elderly calendar manufacturer, shot and killed himself this date, utilizing a shotgun. The attorney had been arrested along with a local building contractor on charges of conspiracy to murder for profit.

In California, James Roosevelt had won the Democratic nomination for Congress and would oppose Republican Ted Owings in the November general election. Representative Robert Condon, who had also been renounced by DNC chairman Stephen Mitchell, was renominated. Mr. Roosevelt had been urged to withdraw from the race by the DNC chairman for his marital troubles and Mr. Condon had likewise lost DNC support after he had been regarded as a security risk by the Atomic Energy Commission during atomic tests in Nevada in the early spring. Governor Goodwin Knight won the Republican nomination but received fewer votes than the nominated Democrat, Richard Graves, in the Democratic primary, California allowing cross-filing and voting. The voting in this election rejected the recent trend of nominating the same person for both party nominations, as had been the case with Governor Earl Warren, returning to a separate partisan vote. Democrats had for years outnumbered Republicans in the state, and the Democratic vote outnumbered the Republican vote in this primary election by 760,000.

In South Carolina the previous day, Lt. Governor George Bell Timmerman was nominated in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, beating a Columbia insurance executive, Lester Bates, in light voting, with blacks having been notably absent from the polls, as both candidates had endorsed continued segregation of the public schools in the state, despite the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In the one-party state, Mr. Timmerman would therefore succeed Governor James Byrnes at the beginning of 1955.

In Charlotte, in the wake of the fire which had destroyed the 25-year old Armory-Auditorium the previous day, the City Council and Park and Recreation Commission members met in special session and voted to begin studying the cost of rebuilding an armory and to enlarge Memorial Stadium.

On the editorial page, "Ruling Threatens Housing Program" indicates that the recent Supreme Court decision, (actually only a decline of certiorari on May 24 to hear a California Court of Appeal decision), making it illegal to have segregation in public housing projects, had raised a question about the President's public housing proposal presently being considered before a joint Congressional committee, as to whether whites would depart the housing projects, and whether, if that happened, further public housing appropriations could be justified as public expenditures.

The case regarded two housing projects in San Francisco and a restriction by the City that such projects would serve the same racial composition existing in the neighborhood where the project was located. A project located in the middle of Chinatown and another in the traditional Italian district of the city in North Beach were involved in the case, with the latter having refused admission to three black applicants, the Court having determined that the policy of the City had violated the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause.

In 1952, whites had comprised 90.7 percent of San Francisco's population while occupying only 60 percent of its 13,263 public housing units, whereas blacks, who comprised 5.7 percent of the population, occupied 37 percent of the units, with other races, representing 3 percent of the population, also occupying 3 percent of the units. The current issue of Architectural Forum, in an article titled "Supreme Court Ban on Segregation Gives Public Housing a Political Jolt", at page 144, which had provided those facts, had quoted an unidentified San Francisco official as saying that the whites moved out about as fast as the blacks moved into the projects, and that to abolish the pattern would mean that within about two years virtually all of the public housing would be occupied by blacks. He ventured that he did not believe it could be justified at that point as a public expenditure.

The piece indicates that all-black public housing might be justified on the ground that blacks were generally at the bottom of the income scale and thus had first priority on public housing units. Politically, it might turn out that the breakdown of segregation in public housing would mean the end of the program as it had been known and that any effort to attach non-segregation riders to legislation providing for slum rehabilitation, urban redevelopment and FHA loans might leave the whole housing program of the Eisenhower Administration "bogged down in the quick-sands of Congress."

By the way, so that there will be no grande illusion perpetuated that North Beach, also referred to sometimes as the "Barbary Coast", was a seaside resort, the area is so named, not because of it being a beach area in modern times but because it had been situated on the edge of the Bay in earlier times, before the remainder of the area comprising the modern city extant below it down to the Bay was filled in at the time of the vast expansion of the city during and after the goldrush days of the 1850's, utilizing old seized pirate ships and other discarded vessels as filler, some of which are sometimes excavated in part during street work in the area. The fact of the filler, as with other filled-in areas of the Bay, is why the area is particularly vulnerable during earthquakes, as the ground turns into churning soup under the intense forces produced by the sudden slip of the adjoining tectonic plates on occasion along the San Andreas faultline.

"Joe Won't Go Now, But Maybe Later" indicates that the effort to collect signatures on a petition to recall Senator McCarthy had failed to obtain the requisite 400,000 names during the allotted 60 days, but nevertheless the organizers had vowed to continue their effort into the future.

It indicates that about a fourth of the states had provided for recall elections, a device originating in Switzerland. The requirements differed from state to state, Wisconsin requiring that 25 percent of the number of persons who had voted in the previous gubernatorial election had to sign the recall petition. Many anti-McCarthy people had not supported the recall effort because they believed it useless, as there was considerable opinion that it could not legally be used against a member of Congress, and so many labor leaders had refrained from asking their members to circulate petitions.

As there was a new gubernatorial election in November, it was likely that the recall effort would be renewed thereafter, and if finally successful, would relegate the matter to the courts to determine whether it could be applied to Senator McCarthy. In any event, it finds, the fact that a substantial portion of Wisconsin voters were seeking the recall of the Senator was having an effect on opinion throughout the world and might also influence Senators finally to awaken to the excesses of Senator McCarthy.

"The Passing of a Landmark" indicates that since the newspaper had said in the past everything unkind about the Army-Auditorium, from its lousy acoustics, uncomfortable seats, phones ringing in the rear and football crowds yelling outside, poor regulation of heat and inadequate ventilation, it now found, in the wake of its destruction by fire the previous day, the will to say something kind about it, that it had served the community well through its 25 years of existence. People had fun there, dancing to bands, jeering wrestling matches and cheering basketball players, patting their feet to the tunes of hillbillies and relaxing to the music of great symphony orchestras and fine soloists. Religious meetings had brought people by the thousands and commencement exercises sent young graduates into the world charged with new ambitions. Businessmen had displayed their products and modern homemaking was taught by demonstration.

It suggests that the loss of the building presented the community with a problem in that it now lacked a suitable facility for groups too small and poor to utilize the new coliseum—neglecting to point out that there would also be a new auditorium next door to the new coliseum. It presented an opportunity to expand the municipal stadium into a full oval, with a modern field house. But how is that going to be a solution for the wrestlers and the basketball games not attractive of large crowds? Guess they will just have to hire a lot of p.r.-men to build up their sporting events.

A piece from the Sanford Herald, titled "Aren't These Signs out of Line?" indicates that the State Highway and Public Works Department had produced a series of large blue and white signs bearing safety slogans, similar to the Burma Shave ads, billboards set in series along the highways, each displaying a portion of the overall message. A typical such series was: "You're lucky/ To be alive/ If you're over/ Fifty-five". It provides other examples as the newest gimmicks of the Motor Vehicles commissioner Ed Scheidt and his safety campaign.

It suggests doubt as to their efficacy as it was difficult enough to pilot one's way through busy traffic without being distracted by such signs in series reminding the driver that death might lie around the next corner. One series had said: "Don't follow the hearse too closely/ The flowers in there could be yours." Another had said: "Heavy foot/ Light head/ Bad curve/ Stone dead". Besides, it finds, if one were reading the signs while dodging an illiterate or defiant motorist who did not appreciate the signs' intent, a lethal mistake might result. It thus favors adding to the signs a series which would read: "Shift your eyes/ To this sign/ Go 6 feet down/ In box of pine".

Drew Pearson indicates that General James Van Fleet, who had been called home during the middle of a Presidential fact-finding mission in the Far East, had recommended reopening the Korean War with an invasion of the Chinese mainland and utilization of atomic weaponry in the event that the U.S. was forced into a military showdown regarding Indo-China. He had made it clear that he did not favor U.S. intervention in that latter war except as a last resort. The General had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in executive session, stressing that the fighting in Asia should be done by Asian troops backed by U.S. air and sea power. If the U.S. were drawn into the conflict, the General advocated giving to South Korean President Syngman Rhee approval to attack in Korea and approval for the Chinese Nationalist troops on the mainland to engage the Chinese Communists to the extent they could, to keep them pinned down. He also favored a Nationalist invasion of the mainland of China regardless of the outcome in the Indo-China war, though he did not specifically recommend such action. He said that it would not be too late to take decisive action "within the next 12 months".

Members of the Atomic Energy Commission had regarded the final straw against the chairman, Admiral Lewis Strauss, to have been the discovery of a recording device installed by the chairman at Commission meetings. Previously, Commission meetings had been informal, relaxed and featured all sorts of fascinating philosophical discussions of the future of atomic power, but presently they were stiff and edgy, as every member knew that they were being recorded. Mr. Pearson notes that tapping of the phones of the commissioners by security officers on behalf of Admiral Strauss was also now considered routine, and so none of the three commissioners who opposed the chairman said anything important over the telephone. While not a burglar, Admiral Strauss appeared to be one of those buggers.

White House aides had hinted that the President might veto the bill to legalize wiretapping should the Senate weaken the bill with too many restrictions. The Senate Judiciary Committee had not yet taken a final vote on the bill, but it was probable that they would refuse the request of Attorney General Herbert Brownell to provide him complete discretion in determining the need, pursuant to national security, to tap telephones. Many Senators were concerned that their own phones might be tapped and so would not agree to any wiretapping without a court order, while others wanted it restricted to the province of the FBI. Such restrictions would make wiretapping even more difficult than it was under present law, pursuant to which about half of the agencies in Washington tapped phones, legal as long as the conversations were not divulged or utilized as evidence. But under the new bill proposed by the Senate, only a court order could authorize a wiretap. The White House was thus concerned that the bill might wind up curbing more tapping than legalizing it.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that a much larger and more serious version of the crisis at Dien Bien Phu was presently building in Indo-China. The reason for the turn of events had been concealed from the world by French censorship, but it could now be told that the Vietminh forces were preparing for a massive attack on Hanoi, the key to the Tonkin Delta and the entire Indochinese position. That would tend to raise once again the question of U.S. intervention in the war.

The problem was whether to make it plain to the Communists that if they transgressed a certain line, the U.S. would intervene in the war, it remaining unclear whether the French Government had so requested.

The fall of the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu on May 7 had caused a severe reduction of the once superb French Army morale as well as throughout the anti-Communist Vietnamese Army and the civil population of Indo-China, where there was a tendency now to want to reach a settlement with the Communists. Under those circumstances, the loss of Hanoi could prove fatal to the French, as even in the southern area of Viet Nam, as well as in Laos and Cambodia, the other two Associated States of Indo-China, the French and Vietnamese forces would be greatly weakened and could hardly hold against the victorious Communist regulars and the surge of civil dissatisfaction and terrorism behind the lines which would surely follow another disastrous defeat, leading inevitably to the probable fall of all of Indo-China.

Some French and American authorities believed that Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, the respective political and military leaders of the Vietminh, would be content, at least temporarily, with threatening an attack against Hanoi to influence French governmental decisions and negotiations at Geneva. But the majority of the experts believed that the Communists would follow the pattern of Dien Bien Phu and continue to fight while negotiating, in which event, the assault on Hanoi would soon likely begin, probably within 10 days to two weeks, with June 20 being the most often mentioned date.

The fall of the French fortress had released about four Communist divisions and a great amount of heavy artillery, with the divisions having been brought up to full strength anew by recruits from among the guerrilla and territorial forces. General Vo now had at least three and perhaps five additional divisions also being marshaled for the attack on Hanoi. Supply movements across the Chinese border were heavier than ever and had not been inhibited to any great degree by the small amount of airpower which the French had available. The Vietminh had been able to maintain and provide support for nearly four divisions during the siege and ultimate conquering of Dien Bien Phu, and it followed that they could do likewise with respect to eight divisions aiming at Hanoi.

The French commander in Tonkin was General Rene Cogny, a great soldier with the same verve and dash which had made General Christian de Castries, the commander at Dien Bien Phu, a world hero. But the best of the French Army forces of the Delta had already been lost, reduced to 17 skilled battalions.

Doris Fleeson finds that the unseen audience of housewives viewing daily the McCarthy-Army hearings was apparently huge and deeply attentive, just as that group had been regarding the Kefauver organized crime hearings during 1950-51. Republicans had been convinced that women had voted overwhelmingly for General Eisenhower in 1952, making his landslide victory possible and so the Republicans were concerned about the intense interest being paid to the hearings. Only two of the four Republican Senators on the subcommittee were up for re-election in 1954, both from small states, and so the Republicans were not concerned in that regard. What was of concern was the intra-party conflict exposed by the hearings, attacks on the President and his appointees and the general disorderly mess of the proceedings, far removed from the peace and good government platform which had, the Republicans believed, attracted so many women to vote for General Eisenhower.

Women doubted the cherished conviction held by men that women inherently were more noble or idealistic than men, but it was also true that women had not been tarnished in substantial numbers by political expediency and were superior realists. She posits that female television viewers probably better understood than the President that his control of his party was threatened and that it was a dangerous situation.

Prior to the beginning of the hearings, the RNC had realized that it would be difficult to transfer the Eisenhower appeal to women to individual Republican candidates in the midterm elections. In consequence, unusually heavy schedules had been set out for two principal women of the staff, who were now touring the Western states, between May 24 and July 3. One of them was consistently saying that they were the women who elected the President and it was up to them to provide the Republican Congress which he wanted.

The President's implicit promise during the 1952 campaign to effect a resolution to the Korean War had influenced women to vote for him and the question now was whether he could allay their concerns regarding the potential for U.S. involvement in Indo-China.

The woman touring the Western states handled the issue of Senator McCarthy by refusing to deal in personalities, just as the President did. The other woman touring the country for the Republicans insisted that Democratic women had come home, and reported a great deal of indignation over the hearings.

A letter writer indicates that he was a white man, a "rebel" born and raised in the South and was proud of it, that when he was 10, he had read Uncle Tom's Cabin and since had sympathized with the "colored people to the extent that I have made an intensive study of their situation." There was no doubt in his mind but that he would be called a "nigger lover" but he had been called many names, some much worse, and had lived through it, and so one more would not make any difference. He had worked with black people and been in their homes and eaten their food and found that the majority were decent and respectable. He indicates that there were some blacks who had "nasty, mean manners" but that there were also whites with the same traits. He indicates that he was shocked to have read a letter by an apparently intelligent person who had invoked God in the controversy regarding segregation. He indicates that he did not claim to be a Christian but would defend Christianity and that there was no way to love God unless there was love also for his creations. He thus asks the woman who had written the previous letter how God could be loved and the commandment of Jesus to "love thy neighbor as thyself" practiced while despising the black man. He indicates that the "neighbor" was not necessarily the person living next door but the person who did things out of love and a willing heart, such as the black woman who came into one's home and washed the laundry and performed other such dirty work. He suggests that person to be the neighbor, along with the person who nursed one in time of sickness and grief. He advises teaching the children the kind of brotherly love which Christ taught, instead of hatred, and that, in that event, interracial trouble would disappear within a few years, and the children would grow up to be decent, regardless of color, without prejudice, hatred and bitterness toward one another. He says that he did not advocate intermarriage between the races but that one could not deny that it was being done all the time, especially in the Far East. He urges both races to forget their "silly prejudices" and to pull together for the good of the country and God and start practicing and teaching brotherly love.

A letter writer indicates that he was black and proud of it, that he had been a veteran of World War II and had been wounded in action on January 1, 1945 in Belgium. He reminds that blacks had served in both world wars and that some had died while others had lost limbs, all for America, "the so-called country of democracy, land of the free." He asks whether it was really a free country. He had just finished reading a letter which had suggested taking up a collection to send a former Northerner and his "black brothers" back to the North. He suggests taking up a collection to send that letter writer to a place where people were more civilized and knew how to speak. He says that blacks were far more intelligent than that writer and that it was blacks who should be opposed to attending school with "any such dumb, low-down, uncivilized persons." He says that the truth was that such persons believed that the black children would learn faster than the white children and that blacks would find out how dumb some of the little white children were.

You should not condescend to your little, dumb white brothers. They are doing the best they can under the harsh burden of being white in a time and place where the blacks are plainly trying to take over. You ought to know this fact and feel sympathy. As we indicated previously, send the gentleman down to Cuba where he can feel comfortable on an island where everyone speaks a different language, and where he can earn better wages on a sugar-cane plantation, while awaiting the glorious day of Revolucion, coming in about five years, which will free him from his toils and make him a white Marxist savior, ready to return to Los Estados Unidos to teach all Americans the truth about Cuba. Viva Zapata!

A letter writer thinks that the Brown decision would eventually do as much harm to the sectional morale as the Army-McCarthy hearings were doing to the national morale. He suggests that a person who had not lived with the racial problem of the South could not argue against the stand being taken by the South against desegregation, and that a Southerner, who had not lived in a non-segregated society, could not understand the argument propounded by those with that experience. He suggests that those who were filling the editorial columns with "rantings" regarding segregation should perhaps hold their silence, while listening to intellectuals debate the issues and on occasion nodding their heads in agreement or disagreement.

Now, that is a rather condescending attitude, suggesting that only intellectuals have the wherewithal to debate the matter. You have to get down in the gutter and wrestle in the dirt, sling the mud back and forth a bit, get all dirty, before you can wash everything off and go home and be friends, or only exacerbate your inimical differences until you kill each other, and then laugh about it. Viva Zapata!

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