The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 5, 1957
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from St. Louis that former appointments secretary for President Truman, Matthew Connelly, and former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Tax Division of the Justice Department, Lamar Caudle of North Carolina, had been sentenced this date to two years in prison and fined $2,500 each for conspiring to defraud the Government. Each defendant could have faced five years in prison and a fine of $10,000 each. Before imposing the sentences, the Federal District Court judge had denied a motion for new trial from both defendants, based on the conviction by a jury in the trial the prior June presided over by the late Federal Distirct Court Judge Rubey Hulen, who had subsequently shot himself, with motions for a new trial and sentencing still pending, though a coroner's jury had not fixed the cause of death as being suicide or accidental. The current motions had alleged that Judge Hulen had been in "no proper mental and physical condition" to preside. The replacement judge, who had merely read through the record, found nothing to indicate that Judge Hulen had suffered from mental disturbance at the time of trial. The defendants each remained free on $5,000 appellate bonds. Both had made statements to the Court, seeking leniency, as also argued by their counsel. Mr. Caudle had previously stated that he had been reluctant to prosecute the tax dodger whose case he was accused of trying to fix, because the man was an epileptic. This date, he said that he had not been party to a conspiracy, that thousands of tax cases had passed through his hands, and "lightning has struck all around, but never hit me," adding that in 1950, four people had died because he had approved of tax evasion prosecutions against them, and that he would never take the life of another person just by the stroke of a pen. The defendants had been convicted the prior June 14 on the basis that they conspired to attempt to avert the prosecution of a St. Louis shoe manufacturer, who had paid a $40,000 fine but did not go to prison for tax evasion after he pleaded guilty to same. A third co-defendant, Harry Schwimmer, a former Kansas City attorney, alleged to have arranged the leniency on behalf of his client by arranging gifts for Mr. Connelly and Mr. Caudle, had become ill during the trial and a mistrial had been declared.
In Columbia, S.C., 12 airmen congratulated each other this date after a perfect bail-out during a night-time rainstorm as Air Force investigators probed the wreckage of the "Flying Boxcar" from which they had jumped. The captain of the ill-fated mission said that "good military discipline" had saved the lives of the eight passengers and four crewmen. He said that he had lost his left engine about 15 minutes out of Columbia the previous night, on a flight from Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois to Charleston Air Force Base, indicating that he did not know why he had been unable to maintain altitude with the remaining engine. The crew had jettisoned about 1,000 pounds of cargo and personal baggage in an effort to lighten the aircraft, but found that it still continued to lose altitude at the rate of 1,000 feet per minute, falling eventually about four miles south of the Columbia airport, landing belly down and remaining fairly intact. The crew had been scattered over a one-mile area after bailing out, narrowly missing a landing in big Lake Murray, ten miles wide at one point. They were taken to Fort Jackson, where medical officers said that one of them complained of a sore shoulder while the others had suffered no injuries. A staff sergeant aboard the flight said that it had "scared the hell out of most of them." Another airman said that he only needed some dry clothes, while a third said that all he needed was a drink.
In Reidsville, Ga., a man convicted of killing a police officer had cut both of his wrists with a razor blade and attacked one of five guards before being electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison this date. He had reportedly obtained the blade from a refuse bucket and inflicted the self-injuries while talking and praying with a priest after being led from his cell toward the death chamber. A doctor had sewn up both of his arms before he was electrocuted. The warden said that five guards had been needed to place him in the electric chair, and in the process, he had hit one of the guards in the mouth, requiring stitches for the guard's lacerated lip. The warden quoted the prisoner as saying: "I love everybody. I want to meet everybody in heaven. I want everybody to forgive me for cutting myself. I did not mean to do it. I want everyone to forgive me." It was the seventh execution date for the former aircraft worker, following a 3.5-hour appeal the previous day having failed to change the minds of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.
In Raleigh, two proposals, which had failed in the State Legislature in 1955, were now back before the present session, one aimed at lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, and the other streamlining laws in the field of building regulation and inspection. A State Constitutional amendment would have to be approved by the voters in the next general election, as well as by the Legislature, to lower the voting age.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the chances of Mecklenburg County's courts comprising a separate solicitorial district looked bright this date, as State Senator Pat Cooke of Gaston County, a key figure in the proposed change, had told the newspaper that he supported the notion, an important development because previously, Gaston County officials had balked at the idea, with Gaston and Mecklenburg presently comprising one solicitorial district. Senator Cooke had introduced a bill the previous week which would make changes in the solicitorial set-up statewide, including separation of Guilford County to comprise a new solicitorial district. Senator Cooke was the chairman of the Senate's Courts and Judicial Districts Committee, which would hear arguments on the bill.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports that as a grand jury investigation of the Myrtle Beach, S.C., jukebox trade had begun this date, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Loris Sentinel, Horace Carter, had charged misconduct at the Horry County sheriff's department, telling the newspaper that he had "many, many" affidavits charging some members of the department with illegal activity. The sheriff had responded by saying that he wanted Mr. Carter "to put up or shut up". The sheriff had not been directly implicated by the accusations. The grand jury was slated to hear from amusement operators, jukebox salesmen and law enforcement officers, but not from Mr. Carter, who had sent a letter to the grand jury foreman saying that the hearing was "premature", that all of the evidence available was "not in the proper form". For three weeks, he had been criticizing the sheriff's department in his newspaper, though not making specific charges. He told Mr. Kuralt this date that he had been specially requested by investigators not to divulge the sources of his information, the names of witnesses, the names of officers under investigation and other pertinent information. He said that a subpoena served on him the previous week to appear before the grand jury was illegal, as it had been served in North Carolina, outside the county in which the grand jury was situated, and so had to be signed by the clerk of court, when it was signed only by the sheriff. He had asked the grand jury to consider a postponement of its proceedings until the June term of court, at which time he said he would appear and present all of the facts at his disposal.
Mr. Kuralt also reports that Charlotte relief agencies had revealed this date that there was a serious shortage of funding to meet rising unemployment in the city, that a Social Planning Council committee had been named to recommend emergency aid measures, and after a meeting the following day, would join with the Mecklenburg County Welfare Department and private agencies to seek a solution. Unemployment in the city was at its highest peak in recent years, according to the Employment Security Commission head, who blamed much of the increase on rainy weather which had laid off hundreds in the building trades and also impacted salespeople, farmhands and self-employed yard workers. Mr. Kuralt's father, Wallace Kuralt, head of the Mecklenburg Welfare Department, said that if they moved in promptly to meet emergency and continuing needs in families with unemployment, they would need a million dollars more than they currently had. The head of the Salvation Army said that the agencies had a very limited amount of money for emergency relief and were considerably overdrawn, using money they should be saving for later usage. The Family & Children's Service director said that her agency, set up to offer casework assistance and not direct relief, had nonetheless to provide emergency funding. It took a week or so from first application for unemployment for recipients to get their checks, and many employees were not eligible, while others, who had quit jobs or were fired for good reason, could not qualify. The Salvation Army budget was 76 percent depleted in just four months, and the Family & Children's Service had spent 42 percent of its budget in the same period. The Welfare Department was set up to aid those who could not work, not those who could work but could not find a job. Generally, an individual's own resources had to be consumed before the Welfare Department could enter the case. The elder Mr. Kuralt had said that for the previous several years, people in the building trades, for example, could go out and find another job if they were laid off, but now not all of them could, with the result that there were far more demands for the Department's aid than in the previous decade, with the volume of applications up 50 percent over that six months earlier. The Social Planning Council committee would seek a solution to the flood of requests for emergency help, with everyone agreeing that spring weather would bring some relief, but also finding that the "leveling off" of the business boom might be part of the reason for the increased demand for emergency relief, as bad weather in previous years had not resulted in quite the effect of the current winter's crisis.
Beginning Wednesday, a special Lenten feature would run in the newspaper, a 40-day series titled "Memo to Caesar" by Ken Woodman, concerning the events of nearly 2,000 years earlier, the story of Christ's ministry from baptism to resurrection. It consisted of a series of confidential memoranda from Pontius Pilate to Caesar, transformed into modern language. The first report, for example, began: "With your permission, I dispense with the customary greeting and come immediately to the business at hand. Our confidential agent, Junius, operating in the Jordan district, reports that a wildish sort of man has come out of the wilderness and is preaching to large crowds along the river bank. This man's name is John. So effective a speaker is he that even publicans and soldiers go to hear him. He performs a ceremony called baptism with the waters of the river." According to the "Memo", that was how Tiberius Caesar had first learned of the activities of the followers of Jesus. It had been written by Mr. Woodman as an answer to a challenge from his church editor. He was editor of the Mansfield, O., News-Journal, and believed that the story of Jesus would make a top news story presently, which the church editor had then encouraged. Mr. Woodman sought to tell the story through Roman eyes as if occurring contemporaneously.
In New York, comedian Jackie Gleason had been bounced from the celebrated Stork Club, joining other celebrities who had suffered the same fate. He had staged an impromptu off-camera performance which had been a bit too much off-color for the club proprietor, Sherman Billingsley. Witnesses said that Mr. Gleason's act closely resembled that of the character, "The Loudmouth", whom he often portrayed on his shows. Mr. Billingsley had said that Mr. Gleason had overdone the part when he played the role at the club late the previous night, being both loud and obscene. After a tussle, it was said that the comedian was escorted from the premises, with Mr. Billingsley stating, "We don't welcome that caliber of person as a patron." He said that Mr. Gleason and a blonde accompanying him had become loud and boisterous as soon as they had been given a table, at which point it was requested that they depart, whereupon Mr. Gleason refused, then was ordered to leave, still refusing, with a tussle then resulting until Mr. Gleason and the blonde were outside. And away we go...
On the editorial page, "Teacher Pay: Gov. Hodges Faces Facts" finds that the Governor had made a wise decision on teacher pay increases, having indicated that higher increases than had been recommended by the Advisory Budget Commission were inevitable, as the General Assembly supported higher increases and the teachers had been insistent, that although he still hoped for greater local support of the public schools through teacher salary supplements, he could offer no guarantee that local communities would be able to do so.
It finds that the present fact was that the financial plight of the teachers had become a problem of the State, with morale in the profession low, as teachers were being lost to other professions and other states, and not enough entered the profession to fill the gaps. If local communities could not or would not provide supplements, the State had to do so. The Governor, in his acceptance of political facts, had spoken of placing "emphasis on short-term necessity" while adjusting "long-range plans to the short-term emphasis". It finds that the "short-term necessity" of increasing teacher pay was closely related to the "long-range plans" of inducing communities to shoulder a greater share of the education bill.
It indicates that public interest was the first requirement for any successful public school program, and that there was much interest in preserving and strengthening the teaching profession, an interest on which the Governor would have to capitalize to advance his program to the communities. Meanwhile, however, increased State minimums had to be used to bolster the profession while long-range plans were being developed and explained by the Governor.
"Happy Choice for the Highest Court" tells of the appointment by the President of Charles Whittaker of Kansas City to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the retirement of Justice Stanley Reed, praising the President for having chosen a member of the judiciary rather than a politician.
It indicates that Judge Whittaker had enjoyed a commendable career as a trial lawyer, trial judge and as an appellate judge, thus well-qualified by background and experience to sit on the highest court. It finds it regrettable that other distinguished judges with high qualifications could not have had a similar opportunity.
It stops short of arguing that only veterans of the judiciary ought be appointed, as such fine judicial minds as Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo would not have been included under such a requirement—murky as to its meaning as Justice Holmes had served for two decades on the Massachusetts Supreme Court and Justice Cardozo, for 18 years in the New York courts—, and others had been well-known professors of law, such as Justice and later Chief Justice Harlan Stone, actually appointed as Attorney General under President Coolidge, William O. Douglas, actually appointed from his position on the SEC, and Felix Frankfurter, former Harvard law professor. Justices Reed and Robert Jackson had been members of the executive branch, and Justices George Sutherland and Hugo Black had been Senators. Justices Stanley Matthews, also a former Senator, Melville Fuller, Pierce Butler and Owen Roberts had been practicing attorneys achieving great financial success. Several famous Chief Justices, notably John Marshall and Charles Evans Hughes, would have had difficulty meeting the tests of "qualifications" often set forth by Senator Sam J. Ervin and others.
Selection of judges for the Supreme Court did not usually ensure that the appointee would have "judicial temperament", but even more important was erudition. Historian Henry Steele Commager had written that "for every Brandeis familiar with economics, for every Holmes versed in literature, for every Cardozo learned in philosophy, there are a dozen judges who regard such learning as esoteric if not irrelevant."
It finds that to be a true judicial statesman, a member of the Supreme Court had to possess broad and deep knowledge, together with their practical experience with people and affairs, and that there was every indication that Judge Whittaker fit that mold.
Now, it appears, at least as to relatively recent appointments by His Lordship, heir apparent to the mantle of Christ, erudition is not nearly as important as passing certain litmus tests in private, while proclaiming publicly that previous Supreme Court decisions are "the law of the land" and should not be disturbed absent extraordinary circumstances, in other words that skillful mendacity to achieve confirmation is prized over judicial integrity, at least among the new order of Republicans, His Lordship's own, having sold their souls to him in undying fealty, completely destroying in the process the concept of judicial independence, on which the third and arguably most crucial branch of Government, for it being the last resort to avoid despotism on the part of elected politicians and an intemperate, ill-informed rabble who elected them, was founded. Pr-haise the Lo-horde and pa-hass the aim-muni-hessian.
"Soft Ride" quotes Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia as having said, "At the rate the Federal Government is spending money, we're going to hell in a Cadillac."
It finds that he was more comforting than he intended to be, as it had the continuing impression that the journey was to be made in a five-year old jalopy with 13 payments still owing.
"Uplift Needed on the 'New Frontier'" indicates that following his tour of the U.S. in the 1830's, Alexis de Tocqueville had returned to France to write his tome on American institutions, speaking of "a small distressing motion, a sort of incessant jostling of men, which annoys and disturbs the mind without exciting or elevating it." At the time, cultural enterprises were having a difficult time, barely able to survive among the people "accustomed to the struggle, the crosses and the monotony of practical life."
It finds that times had not changed much in the intervening 125 years, such that a valuable cultural institution as Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art was now fighting to keep its head above water amid new commercial and industrial opportunity in the country, having to beg for support. Its 1957 membership campaign had set a goal of 5,000, but as the campaign had ended the previous week, only a few more than 700 new memberships had been added, a disappointing total. Extension of the campaign, however, could provide Charlotte residents an opportunity to make amends.
It says that Charlotte needed the opportunities which the Mint offered for busy minds to be elevated by the very esthetic values which de Tocqueville had in mind during the early 19th Century, and it urges all who had neglected to contribute in some way the previous month to support the Mint, to do so during the period of extension, making a contribution "to a better way of life on the new frontier."
"Head of a Pin" indicates that, according to William Faulkner, North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe had been modern America's greatest writer, because "he ventured more and tried hardest to inscribe the whole history of man's heart on the head of a pin."
It finds that Mr. Wolfe had indeed been great, "but remembering the undisciplined torrents of prose he unleashed, we can only conclude that the head of his pin was roughly the size and depth of Lake Okeechobee."
A piece from the New York Times, titled "A B C", tells of the one thing which George Bernard Shaw had never lacked having been a sense of publicity, and now reading that a British court had invalidated the clause of his will which had directed that a large sum of money be paid to the adoption of a 40-character phonetic alphabet, having shown his ability to make people talk about him.
He had sought for most of his life to develop a more efficient English spelling system and perhaps believed that his good sense in the matter would eventually be accepted and that his money would accelerate that acceptance after his death. But money could not change language, a fact which Mr. Shaw understood. The only way language would change was through usage. It thus finds that perhaps the only way Mr. Shaw could have eventually influenced the language was to have his prose printed in a 40-character alphabet, as long as publishers did not wait until copyrights expired to revert to the conventional 26-character versions.
It indicates that many people believed that the European metric system of linear measurement was superior to the U.S. system because of its arithmetic efficiency. Yet, architects such as Le Corbusier had pointed out that the inch-foot-yard system was better for creative uses because of its non-abstract, organic base. "Well, maybe the ancient, fumbling spelling of English, and of Shaw, has creative advantages for the same reason."
Drew Pearson finds that there was more than met the eye behind the parade of narcotics addicts, underworld characters, petty gamblers and prostitution madams which Senator John McClellan of Arkansas had brought before his subcommittee probing the infiltration of racketeering and organized crime into the Teamsters Union. Tape recordings of alleged conversations linking the Portland District Attorney, William Langley, to alleged Teamsters representatives, plus testimony that he had taken contributions from convicted narcotics smuggler and user James Elkins, provided one of the most interesting and inexplicable features of the investigation thus far. Mr. Langley was a Democrat who came from a family of Democrats, who had been Democrats when it was not too profitable to be such in Oregon. His father had also been District Attorney and both had excellent reputations and were considered somewhat anti-labor, labor, with one exception, having never supported them.
Mr. Pearson says that he happened to have known Mr. Langley's family about 30 years earlier, and the story of Mr. Langley having accepted money and conspired with petty cardroom operators and Teamster errand boys had thus sounded fishy to him, prompting him to address the story to Mr. Langley. He believes his response to have been true. Mr. Langley told him that his opponent for district attorney, John McCourt, was a liberal Republican who had been strong for labor and always received labor support, and toward the end of his previous election race in October, 1954, the Teamsters had phoned Mr. Langley's father to say that they had discovered that Mr. McCourt was backed by James Elkins and so they were going to support Mr. Langley and did so. He said that he had accepted no money from the Teamsters, but they had spent some money on his behalf and handed out literature for him. But the probable difference in the election was his promise to solve the murder of a teenage babysitter by a Chinese man and his white wife, a case which he did solve, securing a conviction by getting Tom Maloney, who had figured in the Senate hearings, taking the Fifth Amendment, to go to Chinatown and find a key witness. Mr. Maloney was a kind of poolroom hanger-on, an errand boy for Frank Brewster of the Teamsters, used by Mr. Langley to obtain information on the underworld, including houses of prostitution. That was why he had paid Mr. Maloney money and why it was easy to record telephone conversations with him. Mr. Maloney in turn was using Leo Plotkin, who sold lingerie and cheap jewelry to the girls in the Portland brothels, to obtain information for Mr. Langley.
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, finds Soviet society to have the same sort of intense interest which the "harsh, drilled, policed, planned society of Sparta" once had for the free Athenians, comparing it to the secrecy and stability of Sparta, as well as with its long record of military successes. He says that the comparison was in his mind in the concluding weeks of his long visit to the Soviet Union, to keep his own reasoning in check to avoid distortion of his judgment by his interest and the novelty of the experience he had undergone, and to avoid being struck too much by the successes and too little observant of the failures.
In sum, he had found Soviet society to have brute power, as manifested in its huge military forces and massive industrial production. But he finds that the real story was in its growth and creativity, whereby Soviet leaders had taken a backward nation largely populated by illiterate peasants and in less than 30 years since the first five-year plan had begun in 1928, had created from nearly nothing a strong, technically progressive managerial class, along with a second new class of millions of skilled workers, the combination of which had multiplied many times the country's national product.
He finds that many Westerners tended to forget the reality of the achievement because of their horror at its methods, forcing people to make the greatest sacrifices to secure the funds needed for investment in military defense and capital improvement, with the vast changes probably not attainable without those sacrifices of the people, including blood purge and terror. Without ever forgetting the methods, the achievement could not be overlooked either, producing the vast changes in Soviet society.
The police persisted everywhere, but the blood purges and the terror were in the past. The quality of life was very low by U.S. standards, but was conspicuously improving, comparable to the second stage of the Western industrial revolution, when, for example, the worst horrors of Britain's "Black Country" had begun to be mitigated and the workers' share in the total product somewhat increased. Yet, that comparison did not prove entirely valid, as even when the mills of the Black Country had been in their darkest and most satanic time, the workers in those mills were let alone when the long working day was completed. In the Soviet Union, however, they were not let alone, with governess-management, governess-municipality and governess-state all combining and contriving together to limit the ordinary man's freedom of choice. They sought to try to ensure that anyone who wanted any pleasure, recreation or relaxation had also to swallow twice as much propaganda and Communist uplift intended to promote the Soviet brand of virtue and eliminate dangerous thoughts.
The effort was all pervasive, with its effects seen everywhere, in the arts and intellectual life, even more dramatically than in the average person's existence, all producing significant results, that things which would seem ordinary in the West took on an extraordinarily dramatic and revolutionary status in the Soviet Union. He recalls in Moscow a subway rush in which crowds were flocking to a conservative picture exhibition simply because the young artist had at least rejected the more extreme variety of "socialist realism". He recalls also going to the ice cream parlor-beer hall, the favorite rendezvous of Moscow youth, and observing everyone perfectly well behaved, with no one talking of politics while having a normal Western-style good time with no uplift intermixed, appearing shocking against the Soviet background.
But on the other hand, the students, intellectuals and average people of the country were more and more visibly bored by the uplift and "governessing", with that fact raising important questions about the ensuing stages of Soviet development.
The Congressional Quarterly tells of illness having calmed one of the stormiest men of the Senate, William Langer of North Dakota, who had been seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy since February 4 when he had entered the hospital. Other Senators said that his illness had robbed them of their most faithful audience of one, as Senator Langer usually sat in front of any Senator making a speech, no matter how dull or long, and stared at him with the intensity of a lip-reader, often being the only Senator in the chamber.
He was also considered by his colleagues to be unpredictable, with his party affiliation often doubtful, often paying less attention to the President's legislative requests than any other Senator, despite being nominally a Republican. He broke all of the political rules except one, taking care of his voters back home. He had voted against the Marshall Plan and the U.N., but never against North Dakota's interests.
His first taste of politics had come in 1890 when he was not yet four years old, at a time when his father had become a member of the first State Legislature in North Dakota. Later, at Columbia University, he had been named "the biggest politician, most popular man and the one most likely to succeed." He received his law degree from the University of North Dakota before entering Columbia and had passed the state bar exam when he was only 18. He obtained his liberal arts degree from Columbia in 1910, and had been class president and valedictorian. His first election to public office had come in 1914, becoming the District Attorney for Martin County in North Dakota, and then State Attorney General in 1916, with the backing of the Non-Partisan League, at the time a newly formed farmers' political organization which controlled the Republican Party. He had run for governor in 1920, losing, but subsequently was elected to the post in 1932 as the only Republican Governor elected in a state which had supported FDR.
As Governor, he had made national headlines with one of his first acts being to declare a moratorium on farm foreclosures, also embargoing the state's wheat crop and fighting New Deal farm measures at every turn. To combat newspaper criticism, he started a newspaper of his own, which led to a Federal grand jury indictment, charging him with soliciting subscriptions from State employees, some of whom were on relief.
In a speech before the West Virginia Bar Association in 1956 he had stated that he was up for disbarment on two occasions, was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison, a sentence which he did not serve because of the State Supreme Court. The trials had forced him from the Governor's office in 1934, but he was elected to it again in 1936. He ran for the Senate for the first time in 1940 and won, but his earlier problems had forced him to wait 15 months before he could take his seat after a group of North Dakotans had filed a sworn petition in February, 1941 alleging that he had long been corrupt in his official and public life, with the Senate subcommittee which heard the charges concluding that he was guilty of "gross impropriety, lawlessness, shotgun law enforcement, jail-breaking, violation of oath as an attorney, rabble-rousing, civil disobedience, breach of the peace, obstruction of the administration of justice and tampering with court officials."
On one occasion, Mr. Langer had held up a telephone office to make sure it did not tip off a house of prostitution which his men were raiding. On another occasion, he had talked a divorcee into remarrying her husband so that she could not testify that she saw her husband shoot her lover.
Nevertheless, eventually, the Senate voted 52 to 30 to seat him.
A letter writer comments on the ongoing controversy within the letters column regarding the Reverend Herbert Spaugh's review of LeGette Blythe's The Crown Tree, and whether the crown of thorns reputedly placed on the head of Jesus was fact or fiction, this writer finding fault with the previous writer who had said that the Romans had two sets of laws, one for themselves and another for their subjected peoples, a statement which she finds to be completely false—as, obviously, she lived under ancient Roman rule herself. "Every historian of notes belies the falsehood of discrimination in the Roman courts." She says that another letter writer had assumed that the crown of thorns was true because the Bible said so and that "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God," indicating that aside from the question of authenticity and mistranslation of texts, the previous writer had referred to the Old Testament only, which made no formal claim of divine inspiration, as neither did the New Testament. She finds that even if they did, "the contradictory and unscientific character of the writings would refute the claim. The idea of inspiration was a church dogma invented by fallible men, motivated by superstition, expediency and questionable veracity and integrity."
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., writes on the same topic, indicating that if people "doubted the recorded testimony of holy witnesses, who God ordained to be witnesses of all these things for the hope of our salvation," and preferred instead to take anyone's "comments rather than God's inspired word, they have entered upon very slippery ground." He says that Dr. Spaugh's thorn tree was "mind-made stuff", as the Bible did not say where the thorns had originated or whether they were short or long, but simply referred to it as a crown of thorns, which he deems true. He finds that Pontius Pilate had done everything he could under the circumstances to free Jesus, but it could not be done as the time had come for Jesus to fulfill the foreordained Scriptures, "and no power could deliver him." The Book of Luke had been written by one who was not an eyewitness to the crucifixion, but he had written of things which eyewitnesses had told him. The Books of Matthew, Mark and John testified to the truth of the crown of thorns and to the spitting on Jesus and smiting of him with a reed.
Still, none of the writers on either side of the issue seem to accord the very obvious notion of the inherent cruelty within Roman rule of Judea at that time behind the public, ultimate punishment of crucifixion, preferring to stress the details and failing to see the forest for the twigs.
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