The Charlotte News
Tuesday, September 16, 1958
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that the Chinese Nationalists had tightened the news blackout on the Quemoy islands this date while working on new ways to break the Communist artillery blockade. New speed-up methods of unloading Nationalist planes and ships at Quemoy and the parachuting of supplies to smaller islands near Quemoy had been reported. More effective ways to get supplies through the curtain of shells were being sought, according to Premier Chen Cheng, in speaking to the Parliament. Four members of Parliament had spearheaded a strong clamor in Taipei against the U.S.-Chinese Communist talks which had begun in Warsaw the previous day and had recessed until Thursday. The talks were intended to ease the tension in the Formosa Strait, possibly bringing to an end the bombardment of the Quemoys which had begun on August 23. But the four prominent legislators said that the talks might adversely affect the morale of Nationalist troops and civilians, asking, "How can America seek peace with the Communists when the objective of international Communism is to conquer the world?" Their statement followed numerous similar statements of Nationalist leaders urging the U.S. to support military action against Communist China. Thus far, the U.S. had limited itself essentially to defensive operations while bringing in a nuclear-armed strike force just in case. The hottest plane in the U.S. air arsenal, the F-104 Starfighter, had begun to fly over Formosa as part of the U.S. protective force should fighting spread beyond the offshore islands.
At the U.N. in New York, the General Assembly opened its 13th regular session this date, facing one of the most formidable arrays of thorny issues which the body had handled, with Formosa certain to head the list. Before debate would begin, the 81-nation body expected a battle over election of a new Assembly president. Two Arab foreign ministers, Charles Malik of Lebanon and Ahmed Mohammed Mahgoub of Sudan, were top contenders for the post presently held by Leslie Munro of New Zealand. Both men claimed that they had enough commitments to obtain the required simple majority. That contest had come from July's Middle East crisis. The United Arab Republic objected to Mr. Malik because he was regarded as pro-Western. If the two Arab leaders deadlocked, the election might go to either of two dark-horse candidates, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Koca Popovic or Peru's veteran diplomat, Victor Belaunde. In addition to the Formosa issue, the Assembly was expected to provide another airing to the unsettled Middle East crisis, France's dispute with Algeria, the British-Greek-Turkish squabble over Cyprus and the controversy over South Africa's racial policies. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had made it plain that they intended to bring Formosa before the Assembly in one form or another. Secretary of State Dulles had held a series of strategy conferences the previous day with top diplomats, including Lebanon's Mr. Malik, Commander Allan Noble, the British minister of state, Luis Padilla Nervo, the Mexican Foreign Minister, and Hans Engen, the Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister. The Soviet Union was expected to make another strong bid to seat Communist China, but the U.S. was confident that the move would be defeated.
Also at the U.N., the Soviet Union had formally proposed this date that the General Assembly act at once to end atomic and hydrogen tests.
At the Atomic Test Site in Nevada, it was reported that a third postponement had resulted in rescheduling the first atomic shot of a fall test series for Friday morning. Originally scheduled for the previous day, the Atomic Energy Commission did not provide the reason for the delay. The first of ten scheduled tests would be of a less than ten-kiloton weapon detonated from a balloon at a 500-foot elevation.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., it was reported that an engine of a Vanguard satellite rocket had achieved ignition this date, but then was cut off a split-second before launching, the Navy having announced ten minutes later that the launch had been postponed because of technical difficulties and would be rescheduled in the near future. Just as the countdown had reached zero, a flash of red flame and smoke was seen but the 72-foot rocket remained poised on its launching pad. It carried a 20-inch, 21.5 pound satellite which bore instruments to study weather phenomena. The satellite contained two photo-electric cells to measure the movements and distribution of cloud cover around the world. It was the seventh attempt at launching a composite three-stage Vanguard. The program had been marked by only one success, when a 6.4-inch satellite weighing 3.25 pounds had been launched into orbit on March 17. This date's launch was stymied by a series of "holds" during the countdown when minor malfunctions had occurred. It was the first attempt to launch a Vanguard in 11 weeks and the Navy, in the interim, had made a few changes. A reliable source said that an unidentified combustible gas mixture had been added to the first-stage liquid fuel supply to facilitate a smoother liftoff and that certain minor changes had been made in the complex electrical circuits of the second stage. Two 20-inch Vanguard satellites had been launched previously, but both had been dismal failures, one having fizzled on June 26 when the second-stage engine had shut down prematurely, and the other, on May 27, when the third-stage had gone 2,200 miles straight up instead of orbiting and plunging back to earth some 7,500 miles from the launch site.
In Beirut, Lebanon, it was reported that four ships carrying two U.S. Marine battalions had sailed from Beirut this date for Morehead City, N.C., with indications that other American units might soon withdraw from Lebanon. Only one Marine battalion remained and Marine sources said that it probably would depart during the last week of September or the first week in October. Members of one of the Army's two hospital units in Lebanon said that they had already begun packing but no departure date had been announced. Other military sources said that according to present plans, some of the Army's heavy equipment would begin being loaded during the latter part of September. The Navy announced that seven helicopters and 63 men had been loaded aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Wasp during the morning, the only U.S. carrier still in the eastern Mediterranean.
In Marseille, France, North Africans
had carried their campaign of terrorism inside a military camp this
date, blowing up a tank
In Little Rock, Ark., Governor Orval Faubus had this date advanced the date of the scheduled vote in the city on the question of integrating the city's schools to September 27, from October 7, saying that time was of the essence. At the same time, a planned demonstration by students at Hall City School against the closing of the schools had failed to materialize. Only ten boys had appeared at the school grounds, preparing to stage a sit-down protest, but guards had ordered them to leave. This date was the second day of what would have been the start of the fall school term in the city, but the Governor had ordered the schools to close the prior Friday, five hours after the Supreme Court had ruled against further delay in enrolling the seven black students at Central High School, each of whom had attended the school the prior year. In his announcement this date about advancing the vote, the Governor lambasted the Little Rock School Board for a "cruel and unnecessary blow to the children" in canceling the year's football schedule and other extracurricular activities, indicating that the Board was "still working for integration just like they always have." The Board had initially determined to begin to integrate Central the previous year. He found the move to have been motivated by spite and that the Board was using the children in its own pressure campaign "in this cold war for integration". The scheduled referendum, required within 30 days by law after school closure, gave the people of Little Rock the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted the schools to be reopened on an integrated basis. The new date fell on a Saturday, while elections were normally held in Arkansas on Tuesdays. Should the people vote against reopening the schools on an integrated basis, the Governor presumably would move ahead with plans to operate them as private schools. The previous day, the Board said that it did not see how students could meet the standards of accreditation in private schools. Members said that they had written the Governor, asking him to explain. There had been indications from the beginning that sentiment was building up against leaving the schools closed for three weeks. Scores of students were trying to gain entry to schools elsewhere, but apparently few had any success because of crowded conditions in other cities. The superintendent of Pulaski County estimated that 150 to 200 Little Rock students had made inquiry to him about entering a county school, outside the Little Rock district. Adjacent North Little Rock, where there was no integration ordered, refused all applicants. Pine Bluff, 40 miles distant, turned down a request by mothers who planned a daily carpool. The Board was studying a proposal for televised classes and the city's three commercial television stations agreed to cooperate if the plan were adopted. The Board's announcement that all football and other extracurricular activities would be suspended in the city while the schools were closed was expected to increase agitation to bring the conflict to a climax. The Board said that it knew of no plan under which the four high schools, three of which were white and one black, could be reopened as private institutions and retain accreditation. The latter was important to students planning to go to college.
Attorney General William Rogers this date headed for Newport, R.I., to confer with the President on the Southern resistance to school integration. Authoritative sources reported that the Federal Government had no plans yet for any sensational or precipitate action to meet the closure of high schools in Little Rock and other delaying actions elsewhere in the South. White House press secretary James Hagerty described the conference as "a review of the integration situation to date." Washington officials saw nothing urgent in the meeting, discounting the statement of Governor Faubus, when he had ordered the closure of the Little Rock high schools the previous week to avoid integration, that the next move was up to Washington, the officials contending that it was not the case, that the next move was actually up to the Governor, that any Federal action would await his move.
Personal income was reported to have climbed to an annualized rate of 355.6 billion dollars the previous month, a record high for the third month in a row.
In Detroit, it was reported that UAW president Walter Reuther had said this date that the union definitely would strike the Ford Motor Co. the following day if no contract settlement were reached before then. He was asked about the chance for postponement as he entered another bargaining session with Ford, indicating that the strike deadline stood and that they had no intention of postponing it, but remained hopeful that they could reach an agreement. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler the previous day had made contract proposals to the UAW, calling for a three-year agreement. Mr. Reuther, who had personally taken part in the Ford talks during the previous week, described the Ford offer as "deficient in many respects", that he had made counter-proposals at a bargaining session the previous night and said that the offer provided a basis for further discussion. UAW sources said that the three contract proposals were identical insofar as economic issues and differed only on minor matters involving local plant situations. Neither side would disclose specifics about the new offers. Mr. Reuther and other UAW officials criticized the general contract offered by the Big Three and said that it proved that the three automakers were engaging in industrywide bargaining. He said that the fact that the three offers were made within 18 minutes of each other indicated that there had been consultation among the automakers. Ford vice-president John Bugas told newsmen that it was not mere coincidence that the offers were alike, that they had perfected their intelligence since 1955 and used all intelligence and information they could obtain from all sources in deciding the type of offer to make to the workers. UAW teams representing the Chrysler and GM workers had recessed the negotiations shortly after the companies had placed their contract offer before them. Ford, faced with a strike deadline, held a night negotiating session, the 91st since the contract talks had begun. Mr. Bugas told newsmen the previous night that they still had 24 hours of intensive bargaining left before the strike deadline and still hoped for an agreement.
On the editorial page, "A New South: Not So Wild a Dream" finds that the South was awash in "angry, nostalgic, pitiable rhetoric as far removed from reality as a kaleidoscope's fractured images." It suggests that a great region on the brink of unimaginable wealth and progress was in danger of drowning in the feckless wellsprings of its own cant and sentimentality, that fear had to be isolated and labeled, replaced by dispassionate scrutiny. "Fear of change, fear of the distrusted industrialization and its effect on social values, fear of the Negro, fear of trade unionism, fear of Washington, fear of northern Democrats, fear of political innovation and economic revolution: These are the nightmares of the spirit that haunt the South's consciousness in 1958."
It finds that more than anything else, it was fear of the future, with the South needing to move forward and not continuing to cultivate a cultural heritage which did not correspond to social reality. "The individual southerner in 1958 cannot continue to nourish a nostalgic wish to sit on the cool and columned veranda, sip bourbon and branchwater and converse exquisitely while the poor whites and Negroes toil for them in the hot, wide fields that spread out against the horizon. There is something new on that horizon today. Its fruits will yield a greater good than the exploitative, feudal South of the irretrievable past."
But the voices of negativism were loud and strong, obsessed by a sense of separateness. "Because of their own refusal to come to grips with reality they want us all to pay the price of isolation and alienation, to share in the anger, horror and revulsion."
Sidney Lanier, Georgia's distinguished poet, had recognized the phenomenon in 1873 when he had gone north to follow his artistic fortunes. In a letter to his brother, Clifford, who had remained at home, he had written: "Our people have failed to perceive the deeper movements underrunning the times; they lie wholly off, out of the stream of thought, and whirl in their poor dead leaves of recollection round and round, in a piteous motion that has all the wear and tear of motion without any of the rewards of progress… Whatever is to be done, you and I can do our part of it better here than there. Come away."
It finds that by his very desire to escape, however, he had also joined the naysayers, expressing his lack of faith in the region and in its people. In hopelessness and despair, he had turned his back on the South, if only momentarily.
It urges that the battle had to be fought in the South by its own people, calling on their own moral and intellectual resources to challenge and destroy the bugaboos of the past and build a new South which would be better than the old, without heeding the advice of either the negativists or the escapists.
"First, there must be the rites of propitiation, of making peace with ancestral voices, of purging the fears that haunt and inhibit the region. The South's divided and unhappy consciousness need not be sharply split in its allegiance to the past and to the future. The richness and distinctiveness of the southern heritage can be retained without doing violence to the image of a new South. The region at its best was always 'proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action,' as W. J. Cash had written at the conclusion of The Mind of the South, published in 1941. As he had continued, its characteristic vices had been violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion to new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, sentimentality, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow a concept of social responsibility, attachments to fictions and false values and a tendency to justify social cruelty in the name of those values, and it finds those vices to persist in 1958. It suggests that as long as the Southerner remained a prisoner of the past, he would have to take pot luck with virtues and vices alike, that once free, he could afford to be selective. Some ideas, it posits, had to be discarded in every civilization to make way for its larger enjoyment, and in conserving a heritage, that which was worth conserving should be the part which was conserved.
Such conservation entailed coming to grips with the race problem, rejecting "Negrophobia" as an article of faith and reaching what could best be termed as an accommodation with the region's own conscience. "The South cannot exclude the Negro. He is a part of us. He has a vital place in the economic structure today and, given an opportunity to improve his usefulness, can become an even greater asset tomorrow."
It finds that the solution to the problem lay not so much in the courtroom and the legislatures as in the essential goodness of the human heart and the renewal of a mutual willingness to work together toward a common goal. It suggests that all thoughtful Americans shared the President's insistence that law had to prevail and anarchy could not be allowed, but, as Jonathan Daniels had observed recently, if military power were the only substitute for anarchy in the country, something tragically different from the American faith would prevail. If law and not angry men were to prevail, a way out of the South's racial dilemma had to be found in a faith shaped by something better than stubbornness and steel.
William Faulkner had expressed the necessity with equal urgency: "We speak now against the day when our southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and good will, will say, 'Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time.'"
It finds that reason and understanding and good will was the answer. Race was not the only heartache in the South but only part of a larger malady, the fear of social change of any kind. "It breeds the region's deep suspicion of industrialization, its extreme reluctance to abandon agrarian institutions, its political conservatism, its hatred of 'the cities.' This strangely rural mystique, when carried to the extremes, can hinder southern progress as much as the Ku Klux Klan. In 1900 only 15 out of every 100 southerners lived in urban residences. But when the last census was taken in 1950 urban dwellers were about evenly divided. The region that has never in its history had a city of one million population may have a half dozen such centers in the next five to ten years. Yet the hot-eyed prophets of social disaster point with pain and speak of dreadful consequences."
It finds that the consequences of urbanization and industrialization would be what the people made them, that the tools were present in an age of enlightenment in the science of social planning to make a new South, if only those tools would be used.
It concludes that the time had come to halt the guerrilla fighting in the ruins of a way of life and politics which had once flourished in the South, and adopt the faith of Thomas Wolfe, "a thoughtful yea-sayer, who once confessed 'that we are all lost in America, but I believe we shall be found.'"
It suggests that Southerners would be found as long as they refused to listen to the voices of doom and perfected a faith in the future which was at least as strong as their memory of the past.
Joseph Alsop, writing from Tainan, Formosa, finds that the best commentary on the President's speech of the prior Thursday had begun with an unimportant personal experience. In the early morning hours of Saturday he and reporters Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News and Jim Bell of Time, plus some others, had set out for Quemoy. They had flown in an old C-46 and felt their age, but were cheerful at takeoff and throughout the long flight across the Formosa Strait. The word at Taipei had been that the Communist gunners were letting the airstrip on the Quemoy Beach pretty much alone, and so it had been a surprise when the veteran Chinese captain had come back from the cockpit a few minutes before landing and told them that they had been ordered to turn back, as all the Quemoy beaches had been under heavy fire for the previous 24 hours and the beach to which they were going was honeycombed with shell holes from 7,000 rounds fired in the previous hour.
They all felt mixed disappointment and relief. In Tainan, the last-minute effort to beef up the Chinese Air Force had abruptly increased the American contingent from 100 to 500 men. Hence, facilities were a bit strained. Yet, they had been received with customary hospitality of American soldiers in wartime and had been provided with plenty of coffee, after which there was an interminable wait to hear whether they could try again to get to Quemoy or had to go back to Taipei.
During the wait, the idle talk of the men waiting on the dusty airstrip turned to talk of great battles of World War II and Korea. They heard from an American pilot on training duty of the superb success of the Chinese Nationalist pilots, fighting the Communist MIG-17's with their obsolete F-86's with the tactics of General Clair Chennault invented for the P-40's against Japanese Zeroes. They heard other tales, stirring and comforting, except for the unheroic and macabre story of American policy in China in wartime contributed by Mr. Alsop.
On the surface, it had been a wasted day, following an aborted mission. But he finds that it was not completely wasted, that the failure of the mission revealed the key problem, that the blockade of Quemoy was not a simple naval blockade but a very rough artillery blockade. The Chinese Nationalists, who were significantly out-gunned, could not break that artillery blockade. If Secretary of State Dulles could not secure a cease-fire by diplomacy, the President would almost surely have to make a hard choice, either to break the blockade with American power or accept failure in the final test of America's strength of will.
He found that the day had also not been wasted in another way, that often in the past, one had wanted to write the President to say that he could do much if only he would use his powers and the power of his office, but the talk on the airstrip had suggested another letter: "Mr. President, how much the country that you lead can do, if you will only summon up its powers!"
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes regarding the front page or editorial page this date, with the notes to be sporadic until we catch up.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.