The Charlotte News
Tuesday, April 16, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence on labor and management resumed hearings this date, after about a two-week recess, hearing from Paul Bradshaw, former boxer and decorated World War II veteran, who told the investigators this date of a series of beatings and rigged elections in the Scranton, Pa., Teamsters local number 229. He said that in a 1954 local union election, he and others had voted six or seven times to re-elect the local's incumbent officers, that he and other stewards of the local were instructed to cast their votes for a particular individual as the president of the local and for another as its business agent. He said they had quite a number of extra receipts, representing dues payments and eligibility therefore to cast ballots, which had been passed around by the business agent among the members such that they voted six or seven times for the individuals he had identified, both of whom were elected. He testified that from time to time, the man they elected as business agent, in charge of the local's construction department, had given orders to "beat up fellas" in and out of the local who were "troublesome". Such fights would be provoked deliberately, as by feigning offense at some member having called the provcateur a Jew when the other person had not said anything, followed by a shoving match and then a fight. He further indicated that the man frequently used a particular local member to beat up others. He said that he, himself, along with two others, had been ordered by the business agent on one occasion to beat up an individual, but that he had balked and the proposed beating had never occurred. Mr. Bradshaw had been convicted sometime earlier on charges that he had dynamited a home being constructed with non-union labor and had lost his union steward job, indicating that he now owned a small dump truck and did odd jobs around Scranton. He said that after the war, he had gone to work on construction jobs and driving trucks, and eventually had been elected a Teamsters union steward by prearrangement through the union officials, eventually holding a rigged vote to have the stewards appointed by the business agent rather than elected. He also testified to various forms of intimidation used to get drivers who were Teamsters members of a rival local to join the Scranton local, all of which had been directd by the business agent.
In Amman, Jordan, Bedouin troops and security police held Jordan under tight control this date as the moderate new Government began the hard work of restoring stability to the country following a six-day Cabinet crisis from which King Hussein had emerged with a decisive victory over extremist elements. The first job of the new Government would be to clean the Communists and their sympathizers from key posts in the Government and in the Army. Only two minor demonstrations had been reported this date, one in Old Jerusalem, where students and teachers staged a parade in which members of the Moslem Brotherhood waylaid them, followed by a brief skirmish in which a few persons were injured. The other demonstration had taken place in Nablus. In Amman, leaders of leftist groups had been warned that drastic action would occur against them if they started trouble. The future of Maj. General Ali Abu Nuwar, the 34-year old chief of staff of the Jordanian Army, remained in doubt, according to informed sources. Brigadier Sadik Sharaa, the deputy chief of staff, was returning from London. Maj. General Ali Heyari was acting chief of staff, as General Nuwar had officially been provided 14 days of leave, and based on the most recently available information, remained in Syria. He had switched his loyalty during the crisis when it appeared that the National Socialist Party of Suleiman Nabulsi, whom King Hussein had ousted from the position of Premier the previous Wednesday, would be victorious. Whether General Nuwar would be forgiven remained to be seen.
The Senate quickly passed this date and sent back to the House a bill to provide 41 million dollars in additional funding to the Post Office Department for resumption of normal postal services ordered curtailed by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield for lack of funding to finish the fiscal year. Republican Congressional leaders, following their regular Tuesday morning meeting with the President, reported this date that the President was willing to settle for the 41 million in the additional funds for the Department, whereas Mr. Summerfield had originally sought 47 million dollars. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland indicated that he expected the Senate to pass the House bill such that it would reach the President's desk this night or the following morning. The bill passed by the House also provided for 481 million dollars for other purposes. Both Senator Knowland and House Minority Leader Joseph Martin indicated that the bitter fight over the weekend regarding the need for additional funding for the Post Office Department would not jeopardize the chance of winning approval in Congress of an increase in postal rates, although appearing dim for the current session. The House had sent the bill to the Senate by voice vote late the previous day after several hours of debate during which some of the members had criticized Mr. Summerfield for ordering the curtailment of service. No effort was made in the House to increase the amount to the 47 million requested. Two efforts to reduce it to 19 million dollars had been defeated decisively.
In Tulsa, 20 high police officials and a newspaperman were set to have their trials begin this date in U.S. District Court on charges that they plotted to break Federal liquor laws, with selection of the jury expected to be swift under an agreement reached the previous week, such that testimony would likely begin this date. The defendants included the Tulsa police commissioner, his suspended police chief, and a Tulsa Tribune reporter, a veteran specialist in crime and political news, plus six other police officers, all of whom had been suspended, seven bootleggers, a billiard parlor operator, a grocer-political worker, a professional bondsman and a Joplin, Mo., liquor store operator, all charged with conspiring since January 1, 1948 to import liquor into State Constitutionally dry Oklahoma and sell it without paying Government taxes.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the State House of Representatives wanted to pass a 261 million dollar higher tax bill for the ensuing biennium, representing the amount the Federal Government would provide the state in the form of grants in aid, which the House frowned on. The 261 million increase would represent 25 percent of the entire state budget for the ensuing biennium. The House had unanimously passed a resolution ten days earlier requesting that the Federal Government refrain from enacting new grant-in-aid programs and to re-examine all such existing programs, a resolution which would be transmitted to the President and other high officials in Washington, as well as to members of the North Carolina Congressional delegation and presiding officers of the 47 other state legislatures. The resolution had received strong support from Mecklenburg County Representative Frank Snepp and others, Mr. Snepp then using the resolution as a springboard to introduce a bill to prohibit certain officers and employees of the state from appearing before the Congress or any of its committees and urging the adoption, rejection, amendment or repeal of any Federal law, without clearing it first with the Governor or the Legislature. The Snepp bill, introduced the previous week, was aimed at the State Welfare head who was appearing before a Congressional committee in Washington at the time, advocating Federal spending to curb juvenile delinquency. At the same time it had passed the resolution, the House had been seeking passage of an urban redevelopment bill requiring Federal funding, contemplating hurricane and disaster relief from the Federal Government, and contemplating a vast interstate highway building program sponsored by the Federal Government. Mr. Snepp said that he had introduced his bill to control state employees' appearances before Congressional committees to see if "the House meant" its grant-in-aid resolution. Governor Luther Hodges told a press conference during the week that because Mr. Snepp was a first-term Representative and a good man, he could not reconcile what the House had done on the resolution with what had occurred later, that if he remained a couple of terms, it would not bother him. The Governor also called the House resolution on grants-in-aid "a little rough". A cut of Federal funding to the state would dig deeply into the highway, welfare, health and education budgets, the piece listing the amounts which the Federal Government planned to send to the state during the ensuing biennium, totaling over 261 million dollars, nearly all of which came to the state on a matching basis. The state's budget was 1.1 billion dollars, and the 261 million thus represented 25 percent of the budget. Highway funding was on a matching basis for new construction with some matched 50-50 and some 90 percent Federal to 10 percent state, while other projects were 60 percent Federal and 40 percent state. Welfare funding was matched about two to one.
In Raleigh, a bill to establish a 75-cent hourly minimum wage in the state, weakened by amendments, had received the approval this date of the Senate Committee on Manufacturing, Labor and Commerce, with the Committee also approving amendments to exempt workers in hotels and laundries, workers and businesses employing five persons or less, and those who worked 18 hours or less each week. On a voice vote, it also approved an exemption for school children under 18. An amendment to exempt employees of theaters had failed. One State Senator stated that it he believed it was unjust to exempt laundries and hotels while not exempting theaters, indicating that all three groups had been represented at the hearing opposing the bill. Governor Hodges had strongly endorsed minimum wage legislation. Similar bills in the past had been defeated.
Charles Kuralt of The News reports of quiet having descended on the 16th floor of the Johnson Building this date, after the previous day had seen 1,000 people in the hallway filing their income taxes. This date, there was only one sleepy farmer hesitantly inquiring as to whether he could still pay his small tax. The agent said that they were back in their normal job at present, checking income tax reports to find honest mistakes or crooked evasions. But in Greensboro, to which everyone had mailed their income tax returns, the storm was still raging, as thousands of tax returns had to be processed. During the previous two months, the elevator operators at the Johnson Building had carried some 23,000 people up to the filing office, most of whom had come during the previous two weeks. It was the third year on which the filing deadline had been moved from March 15 to April 15, and the audit division supervisor said the change had not altered the load of tax collectors at all, that the same people who had once waited until March 15 now waited until April 15 to file. The procrastinators had been lined up to the Southern Railway station the previous night in bumper to bumper traffic to reach the post office. Those who had not made it could be required to pay an additional 5 percent penalty and those who did not file at all could face a 25 percent penalty if caught. Meanwhile, the people in the tax office were yawning this date.
We hope those who do not meet the
requirements of the tax officials do not wind up having abnormal,
surreal experiences in time warps which are unfathomable
On an inside page, Emery Wister of The News continues his look, in the second of a three-part series, at the happiest couple in Hollywood.
In New York, a mother who lived on Park Avenue said that she had to sell a pint of her blood to obtain grocery money for her three children while their scholarly father remained idle. The information was elicited during a hearing before the State Supreme Court the previous day in which she was granted separation from her husband, an honor graduate of Yale. The judge said that it was established that after the wife's confinement resulting from the birth of her third child in February, 1956, she had no earnings for a period of time, that her small reserve was ultimately depleted and there had come a time when there was no money available with which to purchase food for the family, such that in desperation she had sold a pint of her blood for $15 to enable her to buy food.
In Lawton, Okla., a classified ad in the Lawton Constitution-Press had behind it the fulfillment of a prayer offered by a 23-year old masonry contractor, the ad having stated: "Man or boy 18 to 23 years old. Must have court record. Prefer man who is on parole. Bring paper and apply in person…" The man who placed the ad said it was part of a promise he had made at the Englewood, Colo., Federal reformatory eight years earlier, when, kneeling in his cell, he had prayed that if he got out, he promised to help others like himself. The following day, he had been paroled. He was the head of a rapidly growing company which he had started five years earlier, and hired only former prison inmates like himself. He estimated he had employed between 400 and 500 parolees or former convicts and had helped many others find jobs. After his parents had separated, he had run away from home when he was seven, was picked up in Albuquerque and sent to a training school in Oklahoma. While at the school, he learned that his mother was ill and when prison officials refused permission for him to visit her, he had escaped. His mother had persuaded him to return voluntarily, and afterward, he was sent to the Federal reformatory at Englewood when he was 12 years old. After his parole at age 15 in 1949, he returned to Duncan, Colo., where he went to work for an electrical company, later becoming an apprentice with a brick layers union and in 1952, had started his own company. He said that he hoped to show prison inmates that they could return to outside life and become useful citizens. He hoped to found something akin to Boys' Town, a clearinghouse for former convicts and parolees needing work. He said that most men out of prison were eager to work, to do anything to get back on their feet, but too often they were not provided a chance.
In Epworth, England, two brothers, after seeding a half-acre strip of land, suddenly realized that the land belonged to a neighbor, with one brother explaining that only a deep furrow divided their land from his, that there had once been a mound which divided the two parcels but they had forgotten that they had leveled it during the spring. The neighbor, however, agreed to swap his seeded half-acre strip for the unseeded keel strip during the current season.
In Salt Lake City, a man bought some "cracker balls" for his children the previous day, thinking that they were candy. His three-year old son bit into one of them as the family left the store, whereupon the pellet exploded, burning and lacerating the boy's mouth. It was the third such injury of the day and Utah police had moved swiftly to confiscate the small pellets, which they said resembled candy. Salt Lake City police confiscated about 14,000 of the pellets found in four local stores. A similar accident had occurred in Provo, chipping the teeth of an eight-year old boy and inflicting burns and cuts to his mouth. A Salt Lake City housewife had received tongue and mouth burns.
On the editorial page, "After the Ordeal, a Plea for Pity" indicates that after an inordinate amount of sympathy had been summoned during the week for the painted Easter chicks, it could not help noting the absence of any compassion for taxpayers.
It indicates that it was not that the income tax was unfair in principle, finding it superbly fair, as if a person made no income, they paid no tax. But the form and character of the income tax system had undergone many changes through the years, with the innovations applied piecemeal without too much consideration for the whole, resulting in inequities which made the April 15 jokes somewhat less than laughable.
It finds that ultraconservatives who had suggested abolition of the income tax were allowing their fancies to run dangerously amuck, as the difficulties in finding ways to supplant the income tax would be too formidable. But it could be reshaped with careful emphasis on overall consistency.
It suggests that the clearest thinking on such revision had come from the Committee for Economic Development which had suggested a broad-based tax, taxing persons with equal incomes equally insofar as possible, that while taxing larger incomes at a higher rate than smaller ones, it should not impose rates so extremely high as to distort economic activity so much that it induced legislators to create legal avenues of tax avoidance or to impede the flow of savings and investment, and to impose a tax which would provide the largest single source of Federal revenue.
It offers as example of current inequities in the individual tax system the shielding by Congress of several categories of taxpayers from the full impact of rate structure through a host of exclusions, exemptions and deductions, while others had to take up the slack. There was discrimination between a person who owned their own home and those who rented, discrimination among various types of bondholders, and allowance of the self-employed to write off as business expenses certain expenditures which other taxpayers had to regard as personal expenses. It indicates that tax consciousness had become a matter of first priority in the use of money, and that both savings and investments were channeled in directions where tax burdens could be reduced. It finds that in many tax brackets, marginal rates on personal income were far higher than the rate of tax on income which could be manipulated in such a way as to be counted as capital gain, creating a strong incentive toward investment in activities likely to result in capital gain.
It concludes that it was time to stop tinkering and start planning the overall tax system, if the income tax would ever become a logical, honest and perfectly coordinated system of raising revenue for the common good, and it urges that the present was the time to start on it.
"Take the Dollar out of Justice's Scales" tells of a new move to abolish the justice of the peace fee system in the state having been initiated in the General Assembly by State Senator Perry Martin of Northampton County.
It finds the effort to suggest that the Senator had an optimistic and logical turn of mind, and subscribed to the adage that enough drops of water would dissolve a hunk of rock, as his was the latest drop of water to strike the moss-covered rock of the justice of the peace system, which had changed very little despite inadequacies and invitations to injustice which still flourished.
It suggests that no one in the General Assembly would likely consent willingly to trial before a judge who would profit personally from the conviction, and yet, continually, the Assembly perpetuated just such a system among justices of the peace for the sake of appeasing the minor political satrapies.
In 1955, under a bill similar to the one proposed by Senator Martin, at least 70 of the 100 counties of the state had been exempted from its provisions by the time it reached a point close to a vote, leading its sponsors to give up.
Senator Martin's proposal was to have all of the justices of the peace placed on salaries fixed by senior resident Superior Court Court judges on the recommendation of county commissioners, and that judges could remove the justices of the peace found guilty of improper action. The result would establish at least a semblance of experienced supervision for the activities of "politically-appointed, cracker-barrel courts, plus removal of the temptation to make a buck by a prejudiced judgment."
It commends Senator Martin's persistence and his proposal, suggests that if the rock could not be worn away by water, or its flaws removed by reasonable efforts at reform, perhaps dynamite would eventually junk the whole system. It indicates that it was fundamentally wrong for the profit motive to figure in the scales of justice.
"Senate Should Probe the Norman Case" finds the buck-passing following the suicide of Canadian Ambassador to Egypt E. H. Norman to have brought a charge of callous slander back where it belonged, on the doorstep of the Senate. The President, the State Department and the FBI all denied connection with the Senate Internal Security subcommittee which had revived the discredited charges against the integrity of Mr. Norman, claiming that he was a Communist or a Communist sympathizer.
The Canadian Government had reaffirmed its rejection of the charges and had threatened as a consequence of the statement their revival of stoppage of sharing of security data with the U.S. Senator James Eastland, chair of the subcommittee, said that the subcommittee had sound reasons for publicizing the old charges, but that they were reasons he could not discuss.
It regards the primary question as to why the subcommittee had not quietly passed the information along to Canada as still unanswered, complicated by the fact that on April 12, Senator Eastland had told the Senate that Canada "has a very fine and efficient Government" which had been "zealous" in protecting itself against Communism.
It finds that the explanation would not ease Canada's sense of outrage, or that of Americans who lacked faith in the wisdom and judiciousness of the Eastland subcommittee. It urges that the Senate investigate the subcommittee's action either to justify it in understandable terms or apologize for it. It suggests that nothing less would relieve a regrettable strain on relations between the U.S. and Canada or on the system of exchange of security information transacted by the accredited law enforcement agencies of the two nations.
A piece from the Sanford Herald, titled "Oh, No!" tells of everyone talking about Africa at present, even the New Yorker, wherein appeared a cartoon showing a group of cannibals sitting in a circle listening to the chief, with the caption readng: "Now here's the plan. We let the word out that we are in a state of political ferment. Russia smells an opportunity and makes overtures. The West gets worried. They make overtures. Russia asks to send cultural ambassadors, and we let them. The West asks for equal representation, and we invite them. Then when we've got them all here, we eat them."
Drew Pearson indicates that Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri had drafted a resolution of apology on behalf of the Senate to Canada for making public the secret security data which had resulted in the suicide of Canadian Ambassador to Egypt Herbert Norman. The Canadian Government had wanted such an apology as it regarded the Senate, and not the State Department, as having been responsible for breaking the confidence and publicizing the information which had been debunked by the Canadian Government in 1951. Mr. Pearson indicates, however, that there was little likelihood that the Senate would pass the resolution unless it were drastically watered down.
About 90 of the 96 Senators might favor such an apology privately, but publicly, few were likely to support it, for the same reason that the Internal Security subcommittee, which had made the statement, was allowed to operate almost at will. The chairman of the subcommittee was Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, also chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and, as such, influenced private bills for pensions, immigration permits, citizenship, damages, etc., which every Senate had to squeeze through Congress to obtain re-election, constituting the great bulk of every session's legislation. Because Senator Eastland was also head of the Judiciary Committee, he could block such private bills or facilitate them. Thus, only a few Senators wanted to antagonize him by pushing an apology to Canada which would reflect on Senator Eastland as chairman of the subcommittee which had made the revelation.
It was also why few would interfere with the way Senator Eastland ran the Internal Security subcommittee. Though a Democrat, the Committee was actually run by Republicans, and Senator Eastland had been consulted by the Administration on job appointments in Mississippi, having more power with Republicans than with most Democrats, undoubtedly more power than he ever had with a Democratic Administration.
Senator William Jenner of Indiana, a Republican, worked with him as virtual co-chairman of the Internal Security subcommittee, with both having appointed as counsel for the subcommittee Republican Robert Morris of New York, the man who had published the security data on Ambassador Norman. Mr. Morris was given complete freedom to do almost anything he wished and even had Government stenographers type Republican speeches on Government time to be delivered at Lincoln Day dinners blasting Democrats under whom he served. His associate counsel was William Rusher, another arch-Republican, and the clerical staff included Roy Garcia and Eleanor Melaney, also Republicans. Mr. Pearson remarks that it was unusual, as when Democrats controlled Congress, they usually insisted that personnel be Democrats.
He indicates that other Senators had sought to curtail the Internal Security subcommittee without success, that early during the year, the Rules Committee had voted to cut the subcommittee's funding, whereupon Senator Eastland and his Republican friends had quickly overridden the effort on the Senate floor, resulting in the full amount of funding, over $289,000, being approved.
Joseph Alsop, in Gaza, indicates that under the sunshine of the southern Mediterranean, the Palestinian refugee camp a few miles from Gaza City did not appear too bad. The town was well laid out and clean and the mudhuts were solid and well built. The leaders of the camp, Supervisor Midbah Mekki, Dr. Anwar Anthony and the others, were fine, hard-working people who did their best for the 20,000 or more persons committed to their care.
Outwardly, the camp almost conveyed the impression of a town with a life of its own, as the women gossiped while they worked at the little embroidery center, and through the windows of the big school, sounds of chanting Arab recitation emanated. At the food warehouse, a large crowd of men, women and children were gathered to draw their rations of flour and oil, beans and sugar, and they talked and laughed while they waited for their names to be called.
But if one paused among the crowd for even a moment, a near riot automatically ensued, the same reaction when any foreigner stopped among the crowd in one of the refugee camps. The people had no past except the memory of their homes long lost and no present purpose except to rot in the camps, with no future except the hope of return and revenge, existing day to day on their poor rations, which had been insanely set at a level not quite sufficient to prevent hunger. Thus, pouring out their grievances, which were well justified, was to them irresistible. That was the reality, with the tidy exterior appearance of the camp being an illusion, as the 220,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip led lives of the living dead.
They were permanent reminders that new Israel, like the Israel of old, had been born in blood by driving out the simple people of the land. Anyone who was mealy-mouthed on that point was either engaged in self-deception or was a hypocrite. But it was almost equally wrong to be mealy-mouthed about the leaders of the surrounding Arab states, especially the leaders of Egypt, who were using the tragic refugees as pawns in their political game. They were such useful pawns that any improvement in their lot was resented and opposed.
In the Baghdad Pact riots of the previous year, for instance, Egyptian and Communist agents had led the attack on the admirable agricultural cooperative established near Jericho by Musa Bey Alami because the latter had developed a decent livelihood for too many refugees. There had been similar episodes in Gaza. Everything was done to make the refugees and their children continue to live the lives of the living dead and thus to keep them as political leverage.
At present, Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser was using the refugees as leverage in the Suez Canal negotiations, indicating that he would not abandon his "right of belligerency", that he would not permit Israeli ships to pass through the Canal unless Israel undertook satisfactory steps to settle the refugee problem. The failure of the Israelis to offer reasonable compensation to the refugees they had driven out and their refusal to let those who wanted to do so return constituted a standing reproach to Israel, even if very few of the refugees, if any, would actually want to return to Israel as it existed at present. What Premier Nasser meant by satisfactory steps to settle the refugee problem was simply the re-partition of Israel and the liquidation of Israel as a viable state.
There were some reasons to believe that the U.N. authorities might not press the Israelis to make the kind of territorial concessions which Israel could not make and remain as a nation. "By the lunatic logic of our times, Hitler's crime against the Jews was expiated by a crime against the Palestinian Arabs." That second crime, according to the theory, could be expiated by still another crime against the hundreds of thousands of simple Jewish people who had put down new roots in Israel through their labor and sacrifice. Any such U.N. pressure on Israel similar to that of Premier Nasser, would be more ritual maneuvering. The Arab nations did not presently have the strength to liquidate Israel and the great powers would not use force to liquidate the nation. The Israelis would fight first and so the refugee problem would not be solved by the liquidation of Israel.
Mr. Alsop concludes that in a more practical, less passion-ridden world, plans might be attempted which would at least compensate the first generation who were determined to return to an Arab Palestine or die in the camps, while saving the second and third generations from the life of the living dead. But he finds it too much to hope for the present.
A letter from the director of public relations of Zenith Radio Corp. in Chicago indicates that subscription television was not designed as a substitute for regular free television, as suggested by the newspaper's recent editorial on the pros and cons of subscription television, but was rather an added broadcast service. Those who wanted subscription television did not quarrel with anyone's right to see free television programming offered by sponsors and did not intend to take over television. Subscription television, he indicates, would include Broadway openings, grand opera, sports of the type which were increasingly blacked out, in sum, the blue ribbon events which advertising sponsors could not and did not include in their programming. Those events would be available over commercial stations to those who wanted them and were willing to pay for them but could not have them without subscription television.
Likely story. As with all the rest, it will eventually turn into complete crap, cooking shows and shopping shows, car shows, junk shows, people hiking in the woods and a bunch of other crap. As much as it will enhance it, it will also destroy college sports insofar as any remaining element of true amateurism. We don't subscribe to your subscription television, taking the long view, not the short one.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., responds to the editorial regarding the appointment of Scott McLeod as Ambassador to Ireland, regards it as "baloney" when it referred to "witch-hunting Senators", "McCarthyism", and the "nasty old crowd who allegedly has done 'a wrecking job on the reputations of able and innocent men'", which he regards as a shortcoming of the entire "liberal press", finding it unbearable unless all government officials were "weak-boned, egg headed liberals". He says that he could tolerate Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, former President Truman, and the "Eisenhower cult", as long as there were Senators such as William Knowland, William Jenner, Harry F. Byrd and Herman Talmadge "to challenge the incompetency and downright stupidity of the former with some good old typical American common sense." He finds that the editorial, in referring to Senator Knowland as "eminently respectable", only did so because he had made a statement which the editorial took as a rebuke of Senator McCarthy over the matter "having a vague connection with the McLeod appointment." He recalls an editorial of about a year earlier in the newspaper in which the editors had expressed the belief that Senator Knowland was pretty much a scoundrel for advocating a blockade of the China coast until the Communist Chinese released Americans held in Chinese jails. He found the editorial to regard Senator Knowland as a warmonger and referred to him as "the Senator from Formosa", which he regards as a phrase concocted by Communists and sympathizers with Communist China because of the Senator's well-known sympathy for the Government of Nationalist China. He indicates that the Communist Daily Worker was generally credited with coining that phrase which the newspaper had borrowed and publicized. He finds the contemporary liberal mind to be one of the most ludicrous and pathetic phenomena of the century. He thinks it would be interesting to see how many days Senator Knowland remained "eminently respectable" in the newspaper's estimation. He says that by invoking the "famous and 'real cool' liberal doctrine of 'innocence by association,'" he believes that Mr. McLeod would make a good ambassador, as he had a good Irish name and there were many people in Ireland with good Irish names, with whom Mr. McLeod was bound to associate and therefore bound to be a good ambassador, "ain't he?" He says that if there were readers who questioned such logic, they should contact the first street corner liberal and it would be amplified and explained "in really first class gobbledygook!"
We shall see what Mr. Cherry—a longstanding supporter of Senator McCarthy and who had made his name at UNC during 1949 while a student by turning in a graduate student for being a self-professed Communist from Germany, who was studying in the physics department under an Atomic Energy Commission scholarship involving nuclear physics, though not enabling him to have access to any classified information, leading nevertheless to the student's scholarship ultimately being withdrawn after Mr. Cherry made the report to then-Senator Clyde Hoey, who brought the matter up before his committee—, will say, if anything, upon the death of his hero on May 2. No doubt, he will suggest that the Senator was hounded to his grave by these liberals, or worse, that some secret cabal of liberals managed to murder him without being detected. But, maybe not. We have not looked ahead to see.
A letter writer from Pittsboro indicates that since a ban had been placed on carrying his communications in the newspaper, he was making his last request. (The editors note parenthetically, "What ban?" And, indeed, this letter writer appears in almost every edition which carried letters to the editor. Perhaps he is upset because his letters are not on the front page.) He indicates that the newspaper had carried his recent letter relating to the integration of UNC, in which he contended that "this great old institution became a veritable integration incubator and the home of a Red cell, known and defended, from which all the Reds in this area stemmed, under the administration of Dr. Frank P. Graham." He says that he had proved his contentions, as there was an integrated recreation center in operation at a property under lease in Chapel Hill and that when the issuance of corporate bonds for purchase of the property had been placed before the voters of Chapel Hill, they had voted it down by a margin of more than two to one, but that the University was not affected, remaining "integrationist". He says he had further ascertained that the Protestant churches of America, barring the Primitive or Freewill Baptists, "under a species of emotional insanity, to me incomprehensible, have united to mongrelize the white race in order to prepare it for Heaven… The fact that there is no evidence in the life of Christ and His teachings to the effect that He favored amalgamation of the races matters not to this … group of churchmen, for that was determined before the laymen of the churches knew what was up. Obviously, you can desegregate but even the God of us all can't de-integrate." He says he does not contend that such truth would make anyone free or happy or that the people of the nation had a right to know the truth or that it was the duty of such independent journals as The News to convey the truth to them.
His was a Nineteenth Century conception of the world, the century into which he had been born, without much understanding, it would appear, of the notion of progress in human relations, despite his University degree and law degree. The formula, to his mind, was simple: integration=sex between the races=amalgamation of the races=destruction of society, without regard to the notion that simply attending school together did not, in modern times, entail having sex with all fellow students—which, after all, at a major university as UNC, with thousands of students and only a handful of black students at the time, would have kept the black students pretty busy such that, undoubtedly, they would not have been able to keep up with their studies. His conception was based on the freewheeling sexual mores of the post-plantation era during and after Reconstruction, extending out of the freewheeling plantation era. But that, dear Scarlett, was gone with the wind...
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