The Charlotte News
Friday, March 15, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the House Appropriations Committee this date had cut $516,993,300 from the proposed Federal budget's $5,923,195,000 in new funds requested by the President for 18 miscellaneous agencies, the largest cut made by the Committee of four bills it had sent to the floor of the House during the year, the funding being for the fiscal year starting the following July 1. If the full House approved the cuts, the full amount of cuts made in the four bills would be 660 million dollars from the President's request totaling about 10.3 billion to date. On the three previous bills, none of which had passed the Senate, the House had followed the Committee's recommendations without change. The major cuts in the current bill had been 206.6 million dollars from the Veterans Administration, 71.7 million from the Civil Defense Administration and 165.2 million from the General Services Administration. Congress had frequently cut the VA in the same manner in previous years, only to restore the cuts subsequently in supplemental bills. There had been no cut in the 702 million dollars requested for operation of the VA hospitals, numbering 173, expected to provide care and treatment for an average of 140,800 veterans in the coming fiscal year. Neither had there been any reduction in the 179 million dollars requested for outpatient medical and dental care of veterans with service-connected disabilities. In reducing funding for new hospital construction, the Committee called for an end to what it had described as the "gingerbread and waste that often characterizes VA hospital construction", with the funding allotted providing for 18 projects in the ensuing year, the two largest of which being at Nashville, Tenn., and Jackson, Miss.
Before the Senate Select Committee investigating infiltration of racketeering and organized crime within the Teamsters Union, Frank Brewster, chairman of the Western Conference of Teamsters, had this date denounced as "absolutely fantastic and completely untrue" charges that he and other union officials had conspired to control the rackets in Portland, Ore. Mr. Brewster said that he saw himself as a victim of a "smear campaign" by admitted Portland racketeer James Elkins and others. He said that the evidence against him "consists mainly of hearsay, rumor, and insidious innuendo," attacking the genuineness of the voice recordings which Mr. Elkins said he had secretly made to back up his prior testimony. Mr. Brewster contended that "with few exceptions", his accusers during the hearings had been underworld figures whose testimony could be and was used to create the impression that the Teamsters "may have engaged in illegal practices in Portland". He claimed that he had never conspired with anyone at any time or place, that there had been testimony about "trivial events which, when linked together with the perjured testimony of Elkins," had unfairly appeared to brand him. He denied that he had accepted $10,000 from Stanley Terry, a Portland tavern operator, to allow him to obtain union "stickers" for his pinball machines and to end Teamsters picketing which, according to Mr. Terry, had been preventing delivery of supplies to his place of business. Mr. Brewster said, more loudly than in the rest of his read prepared statement, that he did not even know Mr. Terry, had never talked to him or asked for or received any money from him, or from anyone else for the purpose of exerting influence to obtain a union contract. He said that he had not conspired with Mr. Elkins to take over Portland vice rackets and had thrown him out on the only occasion when Mr. Elkins had ever visited his office in Seattle. Undoubtedly, that was why Jimmy Hoffa, vice-president of the Teamsters, had been arrested two nights earlier on charges of conspiracy to bribe a lawyer for the Committee to obtain information from documents which the Committee possessed, willing to spend $18,000 per year for those services, and having been caught with bait documents after paying a lawyer for the Committee $3,000, during an undercover operation conducted with the cooperation of the lawyer, the Committee, the Justice Department, and the FBI. The Teamsters were, no doubt, as clean as a hound's tooth. Let it never be said otherwise, unless, like, you wanna maybe disappear.
In Detroit, it was reported that a three-year old girl, who had been kidnaped from her home in Pontiac the previous day, had been found drowned the previous night in a bathtub at a small hotel in Detroit. Police said that they had found her body after following directions provided by an 18-year old babysitter, who had been picked up for loitering near the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, after a guard reported that he saw her run from the prison lobby and hide under a car in the parking lot. Two State troopers said that she was undergoing routine questioning when she suddenly blurted out that she had killed a baby in Detroit by holding her under water for two hours. The troopers quoted her as saying that she always "had an urge to kill people" and gave them a room number at a hotel in Detroit where the girl's body could be found. As they were questioning her, the police heard over the police radio that she was wanted as the babysitter who had disappeared with the little girl from the home of the parents.
In Raleigh, North Carolina vocational, agriculture and home economics teachers would meet the following day to discuss a proposal which would remove a pay differential in their favor, with vocational teachers presently receiving about $11 per month more than other teachers. The publicity director for the North Carolina Association of Vocational Teachers said that they were full-time employees who worked all day, nights and Saturdays. Be sure and always teach the babysitters the first rule of babysitting: Do not harm or kill your charge.
Also in Raleigh, the General Assembly this date had completed action on the first piece of major legislation of the session, that reorganizing the State Highway Commission, which had been enacted into law after little discussion had taken place in the Senate, which had agreed to amendments made in the House. It represented a victory of sorts for the Administration of Governor Luther Hodges, as the Governor had strongly backed the bill which provided for a seven-member Commission instead of the present 15-member body and which would address the needs of the entire state rather than particular areas. But Administration forces had agreed to compromise amendments to avoid a fight over the entire bill, the amendments having been designed to keep the Commission in contact with the people and their highway needs by providing that the commissioners would come from "different areas of the state" and that the commissioners assigned to those areas would be "responsible for relations with the public generally and with individual citizens regarding highway matters." The Commission would be required to hold public hearings in various sections of the state and would have to hold at least three meetings per year at points outside Raleigh.
In Winston-Salem, six young children who had suffered burns in a fire, which destroyed the Flat Rock Elementary School in Mount Airy on February 23, remained in Baptist Hospital, with two of them, ages 9 and 10, still in critical condition. Two other students, with their hands still bandaged, had been released the previous day. Some 20 children in all had been injured in the fire, and two people, a third-grade student and a teacher who sought to rescue him, had been killed.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that fire prevention surveys were being prepared this date for both City and County schools in the wake of a series of stories in the newspaper pointing to potential fire hazards in the local schools, which had become a prime concern since the fire in Mount Airy. Some County schools were being checked by the assistant superintendent and the maintenance supervisor this date, and County School Board members would discuss fire prevention action when they met the following Monday morning. City Schools superintendent Dr. E. H. Garinger had called for an inspection of all older school buildings in the City system. The News articles had cited unsafe conditions in schools of both City and County systems, among which had been the absence of panic bolts in some of the schools. Dr. Garinger said this date that many of the buildings had been constructed under codes which had been in effect at the time, but had changed through the years, and the City had attempted to maintain the safety in those buildings, having installed panic bolts and stairwells where needed, with careful attention having been given to exterior doors to see that they opened outward instead of inward. In the County system, a program to make the schools safer had been initiated about 13 years earlier, with safety measures, according to J. W. Wilson, the superintendent, having included installation of safety locks on exterior doors, cutting of new exits, installation of fire escapes, replacement and sanding of floors which had been soaked with cleaning oil for many years, plus rewiring. Don't forget the sprinkler systems.
In Minneapolis, it was reported that a destructive snowstorm had hit the Midwest this date with winds up to 50 mph, causing hundreds of persons to be stranded and scores of schools closed. Six highway deaths had been directly attributed to the storm, which had dumped up to a foot of snow in some places of Minnesota, causing long stretches of highways to be impassable, as drifts piled up as high as ten feet in northern Minnesota. Nearly 1,000 basketball fans from Brainerd, Minn., had been unable to return home after attending a high school basketball game in Moorhead to the west, causing hotels, motels and private homes to be jammed to overflowing in neighboring Fargo, N.D., and in Moorhead. The weather, as with murder, just keeps a-coming.
In Louisville, Ky., a man who had turned 100 years old said, "I never make no plans, the Lord might have somethin' to say about that." His wife, whom he had married 65 years earlier, nodded agreement when he said: "We raised 12, 10 of them our own. Then two other kids we took in to raise." His wife said that her husband had raised 13, as he had raised her also, taking her in when she was just 15, at the point when they were married. He said he liked it better on the farm near Lewisburg, but that it was all right in Louisville, where the couple had come to reside 18 years earlier to be near their eight living children, the oldest of whom was 61. He said as his one birthday present, he would like to hear some of the things which people normally saved up to say for a person's funeral, before he was dead, as "it won't do me no good when I'm gone."
In New York, in Union Square the previous day, with spring-like temperatures prevailing, a patrolman patrolled his beat at 14th Street, finding traffic no more snarled than usual. Then, a motorist started his car and a blood-curdling screech had interrupted the balmy afternoon air, prompting the patrolman to race to the scene, finding a cat streaking from beneath the car where it had been napping, the cat's neck having been sliced by the fan blade after the motorist had pressed the starter button. A kindly female pedestrian scooped up the cat, wrapped it in her scarf and entered a taxi to rush it to an animal hospital, at which point the cat went wild inside the cab, leaping blindly between the front and back seats, causing the taxi driver to appeal to the same patrolman for help. He telephoned the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and summoned an emergency crew from his station house, the latter having arrived first. The cat was finally extricated from the cab but then ran off and disappeared. Meanwhile, the taxi's meter had been running, generating a 90-cent fare, which the woman refused to pay, with an argument then ensuing, causing the patrolman to escort the woman and the cabbie to the station house, where tempers eventually subsided and the cabbie agreed to waive the payment, with both parting on friendly words, and the patrolman returning to his beat, "trying to recapture the charm of a lovely afternoon."
In Berkeley, Calif., artists the previous night had battled to a draw on the issue of whether to exhibit the artistic creations of Betsy, the Baltimore Zoo's finger-painting chimpanzee. They only agreed to examine the handiwork of the ape, with one of its paintings to be flown from the Baltimore Zoo for critical appraisal at a meeting the ensuing Wednesday. The possibility of exhibiting the work of the chimpanzee had been broached the prior Monday by the director of the annual sidewalk art show held just outside Sather Gate at the University of California campus on June 28. The director had made the suggestion after learning that Betsy's paintings were selling for between $25 and $50 each. A Bay Area abstractionist, Charles Moedecke, had expressed indignation and said that he would not exhibit his artwork alongside that of Betsy. Before a standing-room only crowd at the Berkeley Women's City Club the previous night, artist Lorraine Crawford said that they were unalterably opposed to and could not tolerate the idea of putting local artists in competition with a chimpanzee. But others felt it was the American way at least to give Betsy a chance to display the product, and the 65 artists finally voted that the question would be resolved by a six-member jury following close inspection of the work. For it to be properly classified as abstractionist art, as opposed to random strokes on a canvas, we suggest that there must be some human conception behind the rendering so that it may be adjudged by the human perceiver on a level of exploratory examination for some experience of a common perception of the world, or at least for a novel perception of the world which may be gleaned by the observer for it representing something within the realm of human experience. Thus, we vote no, as the work of the chimpanzee offers no such possibility of a common perception, unless the perceiver is also a monkey. One could say that the cat in the New York taxi was engaged in performance art, provided one were quite insane.
On the editorial page, "Charlotte Politicians Share False Fears" indicates that when James Smith had launched his campaign for mayor during the week at the City Club, the atmosphere had been properly prim and studiously chaste.
Mr. Smith had said that he probably knew less about politics than anybody in the room, and his campaign manager said he was not a politician, leading the observer to imagine that it was a sin to be a politician.
It finds the approach as misleading as it was unfortunate, as the wholesale condemnation of public men known as politicians had an undermining effect on the functioning of democratic institutions. The politician made democracy work, and democracy's success depended on that person.
It finds the role of the politician to have been best described many years earlier by Frederick Davenport in the Harvard Business Review, pointing out that the able and useful type of politician was the person who persuaded people "to behave like rational human beings when they are in danger of milling around like muddle-headed cattle." The politician understood the management of the gregarious instinct in mankind, having a peculiar sensitivity to the mental, and particularly the emotional, processes of the popular mind, knowing how to mellow and mollify the pressure groups, molding the disparate and hostile interests into something akin to mutual understanding. Mr. Davenport had said that the politician's job was "to refine and combine the two types of energies which are ever fighting for the mastery in a democracy—the ignorance, the folly, the envy, the passion, the prejudice and the self-interest on the one hand, and the virtue, the kindliness and the idealism of the masses of the people on the other."
It finds that not every politician filled that role, with society having its share of villains, resulting in many people seeing politicians in general "as scheming, brawling, unprincipled wardheelers who deal in graft and corruption and fatten at the public trough." The goodness of politicians was seldom identified in the headlines, as the public heard only the badness, but the idea that the politician was to be despised because of being a politician was "shallow and misleading".
"The character and essential goodness of certain politicians present at the City Club the other evening—gentlemen who shun the label so fervently—will testify to that."
"The South: Opportunity in a Burden" refers to a piece by Edwin Yoder on the page this date, explaining why he was coming home again to the South from his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, a case of the heart having reasons.
It indicates that too many young men of comparable talents had left the South for good and others had sojourned in distant places and then returned out of love or compelling nostalgia, unable to answer with intellectual conviction why they had returned. It had just been the case that no other place could be considered home. They had returned not convinced that they should and not certain that the South merited their love, but only because they had to come back to feel whole again, needing to feel close to the land and have a large enough space on it to accommodate the demands of individualism, a "desire to be unmachined, unmasked and unnumbered; a wish to be free of the bending, pushing and scurrying of the metropolitan market places."
The land would satisfy those needs and they would not think about the South's morals and manners, of which they were ashamed, or of its future, in which they had no faith, or of its past, in which they had no pride. They had come back to live in the region but also to be separate from it, "to live on their own little islands of idealism."
Idealism came into conflict with the violence, injustice and unreason scattered across the region, but it finds there to be far more ultimate meaning, and even justification, in some Southern violence than there was in picket line violence in Pittsburgh or Detroit, that the question in the Southern struggle was whether a society founded on great principles could adopt itself to change and the impact of social evolutions in the rest of the nation and the world, while retaining the identity and provincial characteristics which Southerners cherished. It finds that there was no greater question in the nation and none more deserving of the energy and idealism of Southern youth. "The question burdens the South. But it also provides it the opportunity to prove democracy and individualism can co-exist."
"All Hail Charlotte's Polyglot Irishmen" indicates that the day would come when the natives would stop gaping while passing the new Coliseum, as familiarity eventually made everything commonplace.
But it finds that Charlotte was not running out of intriguing incongruities, with the first annual renewal of a St. Patrick's Day parade being held the following day, with "all of the appropriateness of a moonlit Bunny Hop in the middle of the Gobi Desert, or an Elvis Presley concert before a Woman's Missionary Society." It hopes for that very reason that the "Irish" paraders, who would represent varied complexions of religion and race, would overflow Tryon Street and sweep onlookers with them to the Barringer Hotel.
It finds one of America's dullest institutions to be the "appropriate" parade, with there being too many appropriate parades, too many watchers and too few marchers, too many expensive motorized floats which took all eyes off the pedestrian minority of marchers. Several years earlier, it had watched a publicized revival of the "old-time circus parade", with a haphazardly rehabilitated calliope providing an old-time flavor, while a Dixieland "marching band" had done all of its marching and playing on the bed of a moving truck, finding it typical of such parades.
Its trouble was that it had a purpose, had been planned, rehearsed and outfitted so well that it had given off "all the spontaneity of a dead mackerel." It finds in contrast that the St. Patrick's Day parade in Charlotte was nothing if not spontaneous, as people would go out into the street and walk together, going nowhere for no single reason, "just parading on a day that may or may not be the birthday of a man who might or might not have driven all the snakes out of Ireland."
It salutes the marchers and offers one wee suggestion, that since Charlotte's Irish were such a polyglot lot and since nobody was sure about Saint Patrick's birthday anyway, it suggests holding the ensuing year's parade during Brotherhood Week, as that observance could use a little spontaneity, as could brotherhood, itself.
Speaking of which, we suppose, in the interest of brotherhood, we should not be too harsh on former occupants of the White House trying to impart to some morons gathered before him some history of the American Civil War, which had taken place but a few wee miles down the road from where he spoke that fateful day, even if less than accomplished with polyglot, or polygloss, accuracy. After all, it is muy dificil to keep up—¿como se dice?—when it is siesta time in court or on the battlefield of yore or in el teatro sitting beside your best gal
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "'Like I Said…'", indicates that the morning mail had brought a letter from an English teacher in New Britain, Conn., accusing the Journal of contributing to degeneration of the English language because once in awhile their columns carried a "like" instead of an "as".
It suggests that it might try to explain away those slips by pointing out that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, or whoever Mr. Shakespeare was supposed to have been, sometimes did the same thing, as when he wrote, "Like an arrow shot from a well-experienced archer hits the mark."
Or, it suggests further, it might fall back on the story told about one of Winston Churchill's speeches being corrected by a secretary who was something of an English purist, because a sentence had ended with a preposition, Mr. Churchill having noted that the correction changed it back again, writing on the margin "something like, or something such as": "This is an impertinence 'up with which I will not put.'"
It indicates that it might also say, as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been reputed to have said, "When the English language gets in my way, the hell with the English language." It finds that what he had meant was that as long as he got across what he meant to say, he was not going to be bound by restrictions "like rules of English grammar."
Drew Pearson indicates that Israel could cite the complete support of American diplomats in private talks against the move of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to set up a civilian administration in the Gaza Strip. The public did not know that the statement by Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir at the U.N., setting forth the conditions under which Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Gulf of Aqaba, had been approved personally and agreed to by Secretary of State Dulles, and had also been read by the French and by various State Department officials, who had made some changes in the statement. After accepting those changes, Mrs. Meir stated that Israel announced its withdrawal based on the assumption that the U.N. force would be deployed in Gaza and that the takeover of Gaza from the military and civilian control of Israel would be exclusively by the U.N. Emergency Force. There were also other safeguarding assumptions, all reliant on the U.N. and approved in advance by the U.S.
Immediately after the statement and despite the advance approval, however, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., expressed some reservations to appease the Arabs.
But Israel thought it had a firm commitment and never would have withdrawn without the agreement by Secretary Dulles, who purported to represent the U.S.
The President and Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey were not the only ones who had their budget wires crossed. The Budget Bureau also opposed the President over construction of a new Federal dam at Bruce's Eddy, Idaho. In the President's budget message the previous month, he had recommended that the Government spend ten million dollars to draft plans for the dam, which had long been authorized by Congress but never built. Now, the Budget Bureau had asked Congress to hold off on the construction to save money. Another feud over the same project had developed between Idaho's two Senators, freshman Frank Church and veteran Henry Dworshak. Senator Church, a strong conservationist, wanted to delay the dam until the Interior Department found out how it would affect Idaho's fish and wildlife.
Edwin M. Yoder, past co-editor of the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper, and now Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, quotes French ironist La Rochefoucauld as having said, "Absence makes small loves less and great loves greater," indicating that having moved from the South to a foreign country had convinced him that not only was La Rochefoucauld correct but that the South fell under the second clause, that absence made the great loves greater.
He says that Southerners were in the minority among Americans attending Oxford, but finds that their pageantry had been borne before them and that the mythologies surrounding the South, "all the thick catalogs of splendor and hokum," had carried far. A special glint appeared in the Englishman's eye when he was told that a person hailed from the South, with the suspicion being that he pictured cotton fields "hoed by darkies in chains, a Simon Legree cracking his whip and calling up his bloodhounds, perhaps a Faulkner's Snopes, or a Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy—or even a hogshead being rolled down Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road."
Sometimes there was a hint of curiosity from disbelief that any region could sustain "both Uncle Remus and Oak Ridge", borrowing a phrase from the late W. T. Polk. The intense interest in the South in foreign places had made Mr. Yoder undertake more serious thinking about the region in a short period of time than he had ever done before, colored by a hue of nostalgia, with a detachment making the insignificant things fade away and the landmarks loom larger.
A few weeks earlier, he had received a letter from a friend who had left the South for a destination a shorter distance away and for different reasons, writing him that if there was any real social problem for the educated white from the South, it was how to return home again.
He finds that too many contemporaries looked on the South as retarded, lagging behind aggressive neighbors in the North and West without realizing that there was an opposite side, that while the region's health was bad, it spent a paltry amount of money per capita on education, committed more crimes of violence per square mile than any other region, the vices were but virtues pushed to an extreme. He finds that the problem was not so much how the Southerner could go home again, but how the Southerner could reconcile himself to the differences which set the South apart and learn to appreciate what was good in those differences.
He observes that wherever the Southerner went, he could not stop thinking of himself as a Southerner, maintaining his identity, perhaps even trying to maintain his drawl, but along with it, maintaining a certain guilt for having left, giving rise to a question of why Southerners moved away if that made them uncomfortable.
Robert Penn Warren, who had left the South to teach at Yale, had given a sample of the guilt complex in his recent book, Segregation, having toured the South interviewing old and new friends, seeing old environs, and trying and succeeding to put the race problem on a human basis. He had found that upon leaving the South, there was a sense of relief from responsibility, but revealing also guilt about leaving the region in a time of its peril and need.
Mr. Yoder suggests that the Civil War had cemented a feeling of sectional identity which could be traced not only in the years just prior to the war but as far back as the beginnings of the Union, that Southerners were notorious talkers of tradition. Yet, Southerners differed radically about that tradition. Mr. Yoder says that he differed radically from Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who appeared to believe that the Southern tradition stemmed from a powerful and noisy larynx and the intolerance to blacks, that if that was an accurate picture, the Senator and others like him missed the irony and greatness of Southern tradition, found more in the way people acted than in what they said.
Regarding race, he finds that the region had much of which to be proud in its person-to-person race relations. "The way of a bi-racial society has never in history been easy, and the South has made as good a job of her own personal feelings between white and Negro as any region cursed with racial tension ever has." He indicates that it was not to suggest an apology for legal discrimination, poll taxes, bombings of black churches or other similar acts of barbarism, but it was to say that while the Talmadges had screamed "Nigger" from the county courthouse steps, while the bigoted declarations had made it hard for Southerners to live together civilly, they had nevertheless done so, even if in an inevitably feudal way.
Despite ostensibly treating blacks as inferior, the treatment was belied in personal dealings, where a black was treated as an individual and a friend, a paradox but part of the ironic Southern tradition of saying publicly what the Southerner did not really feel.
"Perhaps this distrust of acting on abstract, impersonal declarations is only part of the South's long-standing distrust of acting in terms of mass and the abstract—which is really a suspicion of all bigness. All this is a keystone of conservative thinking, with a pedigree reaching back to Edmund Burke and beyond. It has found expression in the speeches of two great pre-Civil War southerners, John Randolph and John Calhoun. And no one would deny the ingrained conservatism of the South. Doesn't this bear out what we said earlier about southern vices—that they are but virtues pushed to the extreme?"
The South made a lot of noise about the interference of the Federal Government in internal affairs, forgetting the good done by the New Deal. It also made a lot of noise about "states' rights", and Mr. Yoder says he did not think it was wrong in either case, with some Northerners forgetting how important minority rights and sectional grievances were, just as the Federalists had forgotten when they promoted the Alien and Sedition Acts. He finds that Southern demagogues had perverted the region's instinctive concern for states' rights and had bamboozled their constituents in doing it. But the Southerner, he suggests, should not forget that the concern had important beginnings, with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison starting that which could be seen presently in the prouder moments of loose political thinking of such men as former Senator Walter George of Georgia and Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, both of whom he finds to be Southerners in the tradition. Thomas Jefferson had believed in strict construction of the Constitution, believing that it would lead to the protection of minority thinking, and some of his thought undergirded the present distrust of the Supreme Court within the region, just as Mr. Jefferson and his fellow Southern Republicans had despised the judiciary. Under Chief Justice John Marshall, the Supreme Court had become the armory of the Federalist Party, which stood for big government, weakened states' rights, and loose construction of the Constitution, while forgetting that the South was an agrarian society which depended on the land and insisted on the tariffs, which had contributed as much as slavery to the outbreak of the Civil War.
The first talk of secession in the country had not been in the South but rather in Massachusetts among the Federalists. He finds the regional concern over Brown v. Board of Education to have been born out of the old pattern of virtue turned to vice, as the doctrine of nullification had first been used by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison to fight the Alien and Sedition Acts, "a sort of 18th Century, early-American McCarthyism, which threatened civil liberties." The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, embodying the doctrine of nullification, had been the result, generated from Southern minds.
The region's concern for civil liberties had not died out, as shown by the fact that McCarthyism had gained no great following in the South, partly because of the tradition from men such as Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison and partly because Southerners were by nature trustful of their neighbors and unwilling to think evil of them without proper evidence. He reminds that the censure of Senator McCarthy in December, 1954 had been prepared with the persistent aid of Southerners, notably Senators Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina, John Stennis of Mississippi, John Sparkman of Alabama and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas.
He finds also that Senator George had spoken sensible words in the crises of recent American foreign policy, which had been heard and admired abroad.
He finds that the South by nature was slow, leisurely, conservative, as with all societies wed for so long to the soil, but that it was also generous and friendly because of the leisure which that wedding had ensured it. The South was not particularly interested in making money or it would have been wise enough to see that its race problem was incompatible with new industry which could bring riches, as in other parts of the country. But for all of the region's stubbornness, it still guarded the rights of minorities, distrusted social engineering based on abstraction. It was called, with a certain disdain, the Bible Belt, but it had resisted the secularism which had cut its neighbors loose from established family obligations and the respect of persons.
While the South had often abused the proud traditions, it still retained them and, he finds, they were still worth retaining, with the region needing greater consciousness of the proper use of the tradition of which it knew only instinctively, rather than a changeover to the ways of the world.
He indicates that some had said that there were really two Souths, or a real one with a mask on. He finds that there was a South which rioted in Clinton, Tenn., which sent men like Senator Eastland back to Congress, that which had been captured in Stephen Vincent Benet's "… The sick magnolias of the false romance and all the chivalry that went to seed before its ripening." But he says that it was only the mask, behind which stood the South which, for all its tribulations, could not take itself too seriously, which would not break its neck industrializing to make money, or be persuaded that government "out of sight and at a distance" was a pure good, and which could not convince itself that pretense to cosmopolitanism held a special virtue, but which owned, if only by instinct, the heritage of Thomas Jefferson.
"I'm sorry the mask is often mistaken as the face behind the mask. But by trying, the South may remove the mask. I want to be there when that happens.
"That is why I am, and will remain, a Confederate."
A letter from Alexander Miller, director of community services of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in New York, indicates that an editorial of February 18, "Brotherhood Week: Don't Let It End", had been one of the most eloquent pleas for better human relations everywhere which he had read in a long time. He finds the editorial's illustrations of the illogical and childish nature of prejudice to be a strong reminder for people to cleanse their minds of hate. He appreciates the newspaper bringing brotherhood to a well deserved place of honor on the editorial page and hopes the wise words would help to promote brotherhood every week of every year.
A letter writer from Zirconia responds to a previous letter writer who had explained how only God could eliminate heart disease, polio and other catastrophic diseases. She finds it true but that God's law for physical health was scarcely touched upon in the Bible, instead being written in big letters throughout nature, finding it a foolish man who would deplete the soil, then raise crops economically, then remove from the food nearly all of its vital elements and then attempt to restore a few of them artificially. She indicates that vitamin E for heart and muscle was refined away from every kernel of wheat which entered white bread, and that now some poison bleach, insecticides and preservatives were put into food for man to eat after being cooked. Meanwhile, degenerative diseases increased every year and new diseases came to the rescue as the human body revolted, while man put more drugs, more chemicals, more doctors, hospitals and asylums in place, along with more Bibles.
It is not entirely clear what her point is. We assume she wants fewer preservatives and insecticides in foodstuffs, more organic growing. She forgets, however, to instruct on the deadly sin of gluttony, that avoiding a fatty diet is a better way than gobbling down everything one sees on the platter in front of you and then calling for seconds and big, fat desserts. Hurry up and eat, and then get out of the house and exercise.
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