The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 11, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President this night would give a talk via radio and television to seek more support among the people of the country and of the free world for his Far East policies, according to White House press secretary James Hagerty who spoke from the summer White House at Newport, R.I. Mr. Hagerty said that the President had decided to give the talk from Washington after consulting by telephone with Secretary of State Dulles, and would return to Newport the following morning. Both Charlotte television stations, WBTV and WSOC, would carry the President's address, as would their associated radio stations, with only the latter, however, covering the speech live, re-broadcasting via television later in the night. Set your watches.
In Quemoy, it was reported that the Chinese Communists had initiated an intense saturation shelling this date and forced a Chinese Nationalist convoy to withdraw from Quemoy's beach after unloading only a few supplies for the outpost garrison close to the Chinese mainland. Warships of the U.S. 7th Fleet had escorted the Nationalist ships to the vicinity, but held back from the beach. Thirteen warships had been visible from the shore, but were not close enough to be clearly identified as belonging to the U.S. The Communist artillery had waited 30 minutes after the first two Nationalist supply ships had hit the beach. The two ships had been unloading supplies and two more had started to run for the beach when the guns began shooting. The Communist batteries earlier had lobbed in a few shells, apparently to test the range. Two columns of Nationalist troops carrying supplies from the two ships had hit the ground or dashed for cover at the start of the barrage at shortly before 4:00 p.m. Officers and newsmen who had been watching the operation from cliffs overlooking the beach had also taken cover. The nine other vessels originally in the convoy were then observed to be withdrawing. The shelling had continued long after the entire convoy had disappeared from view. A photographer said that he had counted 28 shells fired within ten seconds at the height of the barrage, which would suggest a rate of about 10,000 shells per hour. It had been the first attempt to run supplies to the garrison since the prior Monday, when Communist artillery fire had blown up an ammunition ship on the Quemoy beach and forced another to retreat after losing most of its cargo. Stormy weather prevented the sailing of convoys the previous Tuesday and Wednesday. The Communist artillery had begun firing at the appearance of the convoy this date after being silent for 21 hours. The U.S. ships had convoyed the needed supplies through the international waters of the Formosa Strait for the first time the prior Sunday, encountering no opposition at that time. The second supply convoy had sailed on Monday, encountering the stiff resistance.
An attorney for the Little Rock, Ark., School Board had argued this date before the Supreme Court that its 1955 Brown v. Board of Education implementing decision, which stated that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed", had given flexibility for suspension of integration in that city's Central High School, as ordered previously for 2 1/2 years by a U.S. District Court judge, reversed, however, by the Eighth District Court of Appeals in St. Louis, that latter decision having been stayed pending the outcome of the Board's petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. Oral argument on both whether the petition should be granted and the merits of the case if it were, were to be heard this date on an expedited basis, as the start of school in Little Rock had been delayed until September 15 to accommodate the Court's scheduling order. The Board's attorney contended that the Court's 1955 prescription for speed provided enough flexibility to warrant upholding the District Court's order, to avoid a repeat of the disorder and violence of the previous year, when the Administration had deployed Army paratroopers and had federalized the Arkansas National Guard to ensure that black students could attend classes without harassment. He had asked the Court to allow the extended time "to provide a transition from one era to another and from one set of standards to another." He was followed in the oral argument by lead counsel for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, and by Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin, both of whom were urging the Court to order the immediate readmission of seven black students to Central for the second school year and thus affirmance of the Circuit Court. One of the original nine students integrating the school had graduated the prior spring and another had dropped out of the school because of harassment. The precise legal issue before the Court was whether, once a plan of integration which had been approved by the School Board was in operation, it could be lawfully suspended based on popular opposition to it as manifested by acts of violence.
In Baltimore, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Simon Sobeloff had this date refused to delay a court order requiring the admission of 22 black students to the Warren County, Va., white high school. Virginia Attorney General Albertis Harrison had asked the judge to stay a District Court order requiring the admission of the black students to the school, the only high school in that county, located at Front Royal. With the appellate court's decision, it was anticipated that the school would be closed pursuant to the state's pupil assignment law which mandated closure in the face of forced integration. Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., had told a press conference on Tuesday that if Judge Sobeloff would not grant a stay of the District Court's decision, the school would be closed. He had stated repeatedly that any final order admitting black students to white schools would trigger automatic school closures under the law of the state.
Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had ordered a damper on Army-Air Force feuding regarding which branch's anti-aircraft missile was the better.
In London, it was reported that the U.S. and Britain agreed to meet Russia in Geneva on October 31 to negotiate for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons testing, according to informed diplomats this date.
In Mexico City, it was reported that four Americans suspected of Communist activity relating to Mexico's recent wave of strikes and riots had been deported to the U.S.
The Associated Press reports from Santa Rosa, Calif., that a jeep was used by two men to track down two horse thieves
On the editorial page, "Moderation: Not One but a Multitude" indicates that a story had been making the rounds regarding one of North Carolina's white supremacy organizations, that when it had met to discuss school segregation, one member had proposed calling in a well-known minister to advise them, but the chairman had supposedly said: "There ain't a bit of use sending for him. All he will do is give you the Christian solution."
It indicates that such organizations would at least give lip service to calling for religious help, which was merely distrusted, while the so-called moderate was despised.
Moderates were struck with equal vigor by integrationists and segregationists alike, as the extremists in both factions would have no truck with compromise, something which kept the Southern moderate going.
It indicates that Superior Court Judge George Patton had lamented publicly in Asheville during the week that there was no single spokesman for the moderates in the state and that one was badly needed to hold the middle ground between extreme segregationists and extreme integrationists. It salutes him and only regrets that he had not assumed the role himself when he had been the State Attorney General a year or so earlier. But it finds it unlikely that he or anyone else would emerge as the spokesman of moderation in the state, that what was more likely and more desirable was for the spirit of moderation to be nurtured by many people in the state who would work in their own quiet and humble ways to promote reasonable, calm and tempered local attitudes.
It finds that men such as Charlotte's Judge Fred Helms, Winston-Salem's Irving Carlyle and Raleigh's Mayne Albright had already contributed much to the cause of moderation within the state, although they would likely not agree among themselves on a single, uniform course of action. There were moderate voices on the school boards of Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Greensboro and moderation had found potent expression in the state's press, which it suggests was unique within the South. There were other voices, which were quiet, who could be depended on to answer rant with reason if given half a chance.
"We are confident that there are thousands of Tar Heels, white and Negro, for whom the extremists do not speak. Ultimately, these responsible southern voices will repudiate fraudulent leadership on the race issue. Speaking together they can give the state a new confidence in its capacity for social and economic growth."
The question, of course, is what it means in practical terms by "moderation". Based on its stance favoring delay in further integration in Little Rock, it appears to find that violent reaction from extreme rightist groups was sufficient to forestall integration, which could mean, and usually would mean as time went on, indefinitely, as long as there was enough determined resistance to it by fanatical, reactionary groups in a given community, provided acceptance and lip-service by prominent politicians in the state. It appears to suggest that "extreme integationists" were those who wanted full integration immediately, which, in fact, no one of note was counseling, all "integrationists", such as the NAACP, advocating a moderate course of limited but steadily increasing integration to achieve ultimately a percentage level in a community's schools roughly equivalent to the percentage of black residents in the given community. The piece appears to be erecting a straw man on the other side and then labeling it as being against moderation, to afford relativism to the forces it condemns in the white supremacist organizations, a viewpoint which, at base, was stultifying of progress in integration. "Both sides are wrong and so let's meet in the middle"—which was to say further delay in doing the simplest thing, integrating public schools to begin the process at a young age of interracial understanding and thus to begin integration of the society generally.
Walter Lippmann indicates that by the previous weekend it had become clear that the military actions of Communist China around Quemoy had limited objectives, that they were strictly controlled and carefully calculated. Following a two-week bombardment, the Communist Chinese had proved that they could blockade Quemoy, forcing Chiang Kai-shek's Government to admit that without U.S. intervention, Quemoy, with its large garrison, was surrounded and lost. As a result, the President had been faced with a decision which he had hoped not to have to make, whether or not to go to war for a fiction, for the pretense that Quemoy was necessary to the defense of Formosa.
Communist Chinese Premier Chou En-lai had, after making those points, turned off the military pressure for about two days while he proposed negotiation with the U.S. The President had jumped at the opportunity to put off the possibility of having to fight for Quemoy.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that it would likely be argued that what had caused Chou to propose negotiation was the decision taken at Newport by Secretary of State Dulles to fight for Quemoy, but to argue thus, he asserts, was to misunderstand the fundamental character of the Communist Chinese policy regarding Chiang and the U.S. as an ally of Chiang. When Communist China said that it would "liberate" Formosa, it did not mean that it could and that it would invade and conquer Formosa, rather meaning that there would be a revolution in Formosa against Chiang or against his successor, and that Formosa would be taken out of the U.S. sphere of influence in much the same way as Iraq had been recently taken out of the British sphere of influence in the Middle East following the coup there.
The U.S. had concentrated all its attention on defending Formosa against what could not and would not happen, an invasion and conquest of the island, which was a military impossibility. The Formosa Strait was 100 miles wide and the water was rough. Communist China had no navy and the U.S. had a great one, and the Chinese and Russian Communist leaders were not fools.
The reason the Administration was concentrating on the fictitious problem of defense of Formosa was because the President had legal authority from Congress to defend it, and everything which Secretary Dulles wished to do in the area, primarily to keep up the morale of the Chiang regime, had to be justified as being related to the military defense of Formosa. Thus, in Quemoy, the real issue was not whether the Communists were to have the island as a stepping stone to invasion of Formosa, as Quemoy had nothing to do with such an invasion or with the defense of Formosa, except that Chiang had recklessly locked up a third of his Army on Quemoy, and if he lost that Army, the rest of his Army, which was on Formosa, might overthrow him. Thus, Chiang had Secretary Dulles entangled in Quemoy, for if it were lost, Chiang's Army would be lost, and thus Formosa. If Formosa was lost, Southeast Asia was also lost.
All of it, he posits, came from founding a policy on untruths, that the Communist Chinese were planning the military conquest of Formosa, that the offshore islands were related to Formosa, and that the real government of China was on Formosa, and that the latter would one day be able to return to the mainland. American policy in eastern Asia had become a holding operation or rearguard action centered on Chiang's Government in Formosa.
According to the official apologists, the U.S. had gotten itself into a fix where its influence and prestige in eastern Asia depended on an old man who presided over a feeble Government which had been driven off the mainland. So entangled was the U.S. that it had not allowed itself to consider, much less explore publicly, what was to become of Formosa when Chiang was no longer in power. The open discussion of such realistic possibilities, it was said, would demoralize Chiang's Government, and thus U.S. diplomacy in eastern Asia was paralyzed.
In the diplomatic context within the Communist world, Communist China was able to act on the conviction that eventually Formosa would come to terms with the mainland. But the U.S. had no conviction about the future on which it could act. In defending Chiang, it was depending on him. But he was not immortal and would not let the U.S. talk about what might occur after he was gone, leaving the U.S. unable to propose anything in the way of a constructive policy. All it could do was to stand by Chiang until the day would come when he was no longer there.
U.S. relations with Chiang, Mr. Lippmann finds, were a classic example of an entangling alliance, the most far-reaching in the country's history. "Far from its being, as the official apologists say, indispensable to our prestige and influence, this entangling alliance is an enormous liability which if it does not entangle us in war, is surely and steadily losing us the respect and confidence of our friends."
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the editorial page or the front page for this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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