The Charlotte News
Monday, September 22, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, amid rumors that he would tender his resignation, had arranged to speak to the nation by radio and television this evening and would have ten minutes of air time. Mr. Adams had made a round-trip flight to the President's vacation headquarters in Newport, R.I., and while there, had brushed aside reporters' questions on whether he was about to resign because of the demands from some Republicans who contended that his relations with Boston textile magnate Bernard Goldfine had hurt the party's chances in the midterm elections, a month and a half away. Mr. Adams had been accompanied to Washington by White House press secretary James Hagerty. Upon his arrival at the White House, he went to his office and Mr. Hagerty told reporters of the broadcast time. The talk would be carried over both CBS and NBC radio and television networks, the Mutual Radio Network and partial radio and television networks of ABC. It was expected to be about 1,000 words long. Mr. Hagerty had told press questioners that "the President knows what's in it, of course." During the previous two weeks, since the Republicans had been trounced in the Maine elections, where Governor Edmund Muskie had won the Senate seat for a Democrat for the first time in 41 years, there had been rumors that Mr. Adams was done. Aides of the President, however, had repeatedly said that they did not know whether he would be leaving, and until this date, said that he had not given the slightest indication to the President of his plans. The aides had also said that the President would leave it strictly up to Mr. Adams and would not take the initiative of getting rid of him.
In Havana, Cuba, it was reported from rebel broadcasts this date that a third column of insurgent forces had advanced into Las Callis Province in the heart of Cuba, led by Dr. Ernesto Guevara—known popularly as "Che". The rebels earlier had reported that two columns had advanced from Oriente Province across Camaguey into Las Callis. Cuban Army headquarters had said that the rebel claims were "typical Communist propaganda" and that there were no armed rebel groups in either of the latter two provinces. Rebel broadcasts this date also reported that 11 government soldiers had been killed and ten captured in a clash near Yara in western Oriente Province. The rebels said that they had suffered two killed and one wounded. The rebels claimed that they were disrupting highway communications in Oriente, Camaguey and Las Callis by destroying bridges and engaging in shooting attacks on buses. A bomb explosion had wrecked the main electoral office in western Piña del Rio Province and wounded one man. Another bomb had exploded in the railroad yard, wounding six persons, including two children.
Eight black students had returned to classes at the Van Buren, Ark., high school this date, with only mild demonstrations from white students who had threatened to walk out. Four other black students had returned to classes at the nearby junior high school without incident. The black students had remained away from school since September 5 when white students had gathered in front of the high school and threatened to remove them by force if they did not leave voluntarily. The new integration effort had come after a U.S. District Court judge had assured black citizens and the school board that they could ask for his help if trouble were threatened. Some white boys who had threatened to boycott classes on Monday if the black students entered, joined other students in the building when the bell rang to signal the start of school. In Little Rock, where high schools remained closed to prevent integration, pupils studied lessons via television. Some Virginia towns where schools had been closed considered setting up temporary facilities.
In Lexington, Ky., at the opening business session of the Southern Governors Conference, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had told reporters that he planned to reopen the Little Rock high schools the following Monday, or as soon as possible thereafter, presumably as private institutions. He said that the Federal Government might bring legal action to block his plan "and if they do, it will be their responsibility for keeping the schools closed longer." (He sounds very much like the Republicans in Congress who have sought to blame Democrats during the last five weeks for the Government closure.) The Governor was asked who would operate the schools when they reopened, but he declined to answer, saying it depended on how the referendum to be held on September 27 would turn out. The special referendum to determine whether the schools would be opened on an integrated basis or remain closed was required by Arkansas law whenever schools were closed by the Governor to avoid integration. The Governor said that the State Attorney General of Arkansas had said that the private school plan was legal, but other lawyers in Little Rock took the contrary view that private funding of formerly public schools could not occur under the State's Constitution, especially in an effort to circumvent court-ordered desegregation at Central High School. Earlier this date, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, chairman of the Conference, said to the governors that the struggle over integrating schools, as it was presently going, could lead to a national catastrophe. He said that the issue ought be resolved in Congress, as its "first item of business" the following January, indicating: "Tragically, I see little hope of pulling out of this crisis—short of national catastrophe—if we continue to follow the present pattern of events." He said that he could not in good conscience sidestep the "overriding issue" before the nation and that, "I need not tell you that our nation is facing the most severe constitutional and social crisis since the dark days of Reconstruction following the Civil War." He said that there was no single pattern applicable to all Southern states and that, "To contend no desegregation is feasible at any level anywhere in the Southern states simply is not true. On the other hand, it is equally false to assume that some desegregation is possible everywhere in the Southern states or that mass integration is possible anywhere in the Southern states. I refuse to believe that we have passed the point where men of good will can rise above their differences." Also at the Conference, pro-integration Governor Theodore McKeldin of Maryland suggested that the Conference go on record as favoring desegregation of public schools, indicating, "If the resolution passed, it would show that we of the South recognize the Constitution as the supreme law of the land." Governor Faubus had said to the press that he had no objection to the suggestion by Governor McKeldin, but thought it improper for other states "to express opinions on our affairs in Arkansas." Governor Faubus said that integration would have proceeded peacefully and more rapidly in his state if there had been no force or threat of force by the Federal Government, and blamed the NAACP for the conflict which presently existed.
In Little Rock, the boards of two churches and ministers of two others added their voices to those opposing closure of the four high schools.
In Philadelphia, it was reported that two top officials of the International Union of Electrical Workers had described the President's position on civil rights as a "sad and shameful episode in American history".
At the U.N. in New York, India and six other Asian-African nations formally called on the General Assembly this date to reverse a decision of the powerful steering committee and to consider the seating of Communist China in the present session.
In Taipei, Formosa, it was reported that the crisis in the Formosa Strait had moved into its second month this date with the Nationalists pushing through the Communist artillery blockade once again with supplies for the Quemoys.
In London, it was reported that Peiping Radio had charged this date that a U.S. plane "intruded over the Chinese mainland" this date, as the Chinese Communist Government issued its "10th serious warning".
In Valletta, Malta, it was reported that four U.S. jet fighters had inadvertently machine-gunned fishermen on a Malta beach, which they had mistaken for a gunnery range, according to a statement from the Governor's palace this date. Three Maltese fishermen had escaped injury.
Much of the front page and a great deal of the inside pages are taken up by news of the four-week crusade in Charlotte at the Coliseum of evangelist Billy Graham, which opened the previous day, attended by 14,375 persons, approximately 390 of whom had come forward as "inquirers" to give their lives to Christ. Not reported in the newspaper, though reported elsewhere in the state, Dr. Graham had made reference to the stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a New York City department store while he was autographing his first book, Stride toward Freedom, on Saturday afternoon. The evangelist had said that "blood would have to run in the streets" if a white person had stabbed Dr. King, that a race war would have resulted such as the country had never experienced. He had led up to the comment by indicating that the nation's "social and economic problems are crying for God's help." He said that racial tensions were the nearest to the breaking point they had ever been and that the help and understanding of people of all races were needed to lessen the problems, adding: "Thank God Martin Luther King was not stabbed by a white person. If he had been, we might have seen a racial war in New York with blood flowing down the street."
While there was some rioting, confined to black business areas and neighborhoods of several cities across the country, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, there had been rioting of the type sporadically in inner cities throughout the country, especially in the summers, since 1965. Virtually all of the "blood running in the streets" was that of black citizens, some of whom were children. We find it of quite questionable taste of Dr. Graham to have made such a statement, especially since it apparently was not coupled with any general condemnation of such violence aimed at a religious and civil rights leader in the country. Dr. Graham, as would be made clear in private conversations on tape later with President Nixon, possessed a glaring blind spot regarding the issue of race and racial prejudice, a blind spot to which he was quite blind. Although his crusades were open to all people, they were primarily attended by white people, at least in the United States.
We again find it quite interesting, as suggested in the summary of the Saturday edition, that not only did The News make only scant mention of the attack on Dr. King, providing a short news column on it on an inside page this date, when many newspapers across the state, including the Charlotte Observer, had provided front page treatment of it the previous day, but also that the newspaper, despite the elaborate coverage of the crusade, understandable because of it being Dr. Graham's first crusade in his native Charlotte and his worldwide reputation having been obtained during the previous few years, did not mention this reference he had made to Dr. King. Whether it found it embarrassing or whether it was deliberately seeking to downplay Dr. King, it is quite curious, especially since Dr. King had been scheduled to talk two days hence at Park Center in Charlotte at an event sponsored by the NAACP. The News, during the previous 11 years since the departure of Harry Ashmore for the Arkansas Gazette, and the purchase from the Dowd family of the newspaper by a group of investors, with Thomas L. Robinson, originally of the New York Times, having become publisher, had become less liberal on racial issues, taking a moderate to conservative stance most of the time, though varying somewhat issue to issue as it arose. It was way off, in our opinion, in grouping the NAACP and other moderate organizations seeking integration under the Constitution as "radical integrationists", placing such groups at the opposite extreme on the spectrum from the "radical segregationists" such as the Klan and its equivalent organizations. That relativistic dichotomy certainly did not go very far to engender good racial relations in the community or understanding among the lesser lights, though hope for such understanding, no doubt, was the naïve intent of that approach.
The newspaper, however, miscalculated badly the place where the society was in time, though some of that appreciation comes from perfect hindsight. It took the stance that while the law of the land had to be respected, if communities were allowed to settle the issue of integration on their own, without Federal interference, it would occur sooner and without violence or threat of same, when that approach had already been tried for years since the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson and its separate but equal doctrine passing muster under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, and, more recently, since the 1938 case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, in which the Supreme Court had held that Missouri had to provide a black law school which was substantially equal to the white law school at the University of Missouri or admit qualified black students to the latter, pointing the direction which the courts would take, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the while as Jim Crow segregation remained the rule of the day in the South, with de facto segregation of public facilities practiced in much of the rest of the country, giving the lie to the notion that if left to their own devices, in time, communities would gradually adjust and accommodate. That view was only held by the milquetoast crowd who were "living room warriors for good will", content for delay to be the rule of the day from time immemorial to time immemorial if it took that long to "adjust". The only way to adjust race relations was to begin slow integration of the public schools and other public facilities, as was taking place, and the recalcitrant fools who could not adjust be damned in the meantime as part of social Darwinism. Most of the problems were coming from renegade parents and their renegade children, who would be renegades on virtually any issue pitting the Gov'ment against "the people", whether booze or guns or any other thing, or regarding virtually any issue involving race, as such people typically, either intellectually or socioeconomically or both, needed another group of people to whom to feel superior based solely on group identity, and on which too many had been bred by superstition and the equivalent of witchcraft, some still justifying, by the letters sometimes to the editor, especially in the immediate wake of Brown, separation of the races on self-serving interpretation of Biblical text, utter hokum in its premises.
Mr. Ashmore, incidentally, during the summer, had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing regarding the Central High School integration standoff the previous fall with Governor Faubus, having taken a stance decidedly against the Governor's position, though having more recently favored the District Court's 2 1/2 year delay of further integration, reversed on September 12 by the Supreme Court, ordering continued integration at Central, as in the prior year, refusing to allow vigilante violence and threats of violence to have the effect of countering Federal court orders.
On the editorial page, Drew Pearson's column, as written this date by his assistant, Tom McNamara, tells of a musical drama, "The Crowning Experience", having played for four months recently at the Tower Theater in Atlanta, with an integrated cast, attended by integrated audiences, totaling more than 40,000 people, without any incident inside or outside the theater. He says that the police had been struck not so much by the orderliness as by the friendliness of the crowds of white and black spectators. A newspaperman had said, "This is what the Communists boasted never could happen in the South." Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia called it "amazing".
He says that behind what had happened in Georgia was an even more amazing story of how dedicated people from all walks of life were organizing to find a solution to the problem which the political leaders had been unable to solve, the explosive challenge of Little Rock. The movement was called Moral Rearmament and its formula was human understanding. Its impact was being felt all over the world, particularly in the Far East, where Communist propagandists denounced the movement with almost the same fervor with which they had preached American "imperialism".
The movement relied primarily on the drama to foster good will between all races and religions, with its pulpit being the stage. "The Crowning Experience" censured blacks as well as whites for racial strife. Nevertheless, it had drawn the greatest audience in Washington history, 80,000 people, during an integrated run at the National Theater, following the Atlanta performances. Among the spectators in Washington had been Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, Democratic Representative John Blatnik of Minnesota, and numerous other members of Congress. Mr. Martin had been so impressed by the play that he had driven back the next evening with several colleagues who wanted to see it.
Even such committed segregationists as Governor Faubus of Arkansas had shown an interest in the "human understanding" crusade, and was present at a Little Rock showing of a Moral Rearmament film titled "Freedom", regarding the racial struggle in Africa. Later, he was asked for his opinion of it by the 23-year old grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and he responded: "This film exemplifies the only spirit that will save mankind. I'm grateful that it has come from Africa."
Mr. McNamara notes that Moral Rearmament leaders wanted to see the enthusiasm of Governor Faubus backed up with some action.
Rowland Evans, Jr., indicates that there was a touch of poetic justice in former President Truman's support of the Eisenhower-Dulles decision not to let Communist bullets dictate U.S. action in the Formosa Strait. But a single Democrat did not make party policy, even one as eminent as the former President. There were many other Democrats, including former Secretary of State under President Truman, Dean Acheson, who, out of deep conviction or a hope of partisan advantage, were raising fundamental questions about the Eisenhower-Dulles policy.
The questions had not yet reached the point of an outright partisan attack, as it was a bit early for that. The no-retreat posture of the U.S. regarding the offshore islands might, he suggests, in the end prove to be more successful than the critics feared. Neither the Democrats nor the privately complaining Republicans, of whom there were many, were going to over-commit themselves too soon.
But Mr. Truman had made it clear that he would not join his fellow Democrats in any general party assault on the Quemoy policy, notwithstanding the fact that the Republicans in 1952 had made Mr. Truman the special target of their theme of Korea, Communism and corruption, labeling Korea "Truman's war". Yet now, with a political era having passed since, Mr. Truman was the Democrat who had come to the defense of the President and Secretary of State.
He finds that it would likely not be the most weighty factor influencing the Democrats on whether to make an all-out political attack on the Republican Far Eastern policy during the midterm campaign. For opposing the former President was not only Mr. Acheson but also the entire party hierarchy from DNC chairman Paul Butler on down, including most of the Democratic candidates for office, as well as public opinion, as expressed by the overwhelming sentiment in Senate mail, opposing the Quemoy policy. During the previous ten days, Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey, whose mail came primarily from East Coast Eisenhower Republicans, had received 35 letters, all opposed to any American involvement regarding Quemoy, while Senator John F. Kennedy had received 190 letters, all except three being against the present policy, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, one of the small number of Democrats supporting the President's policy, had received letters at a ratio of 50 to 1 opposed, and Senator William Knowland of California, the foremost exponent of a tough Far Eastern policy, had received 25 letters against the Administration's position and only seven in favor of it. That mail to two Democrats and two Republicans, picked at random, revealed none of the tell-tale signs of an organized pressure campaign and had the authentic flavor of ordinary citizens.
It was thus a strong temptation to the politicians running for office during the fall, regardless of the office for which they were running, to exploit Quemoy for partisan gain. It was therefore no wonder that support by Mr. Truman was welcomed by the Administration as one of the happier episodes in an unhappy time. In the words of one top official: "You can bet your last dollar that we are glad to have Truman on our side. We need him."
He indicates that it was also no wonder that parts of the President's televised speech on September 12, explaining his Formosa Strait policy, had almost been lifted verbatim from some of the flat, earnest speeches of President Truman in 1951, when the Korean War stretched out bleakly without apparent end.
But, far more to be expected was a gradual increase in criticism and a growing demand for fundamental revisions of the country's Far Eastern policy. He suggests that the impact of the criticism on the Congressional elections remained to be seen, but it would have importance when the Democratic-controlled 86th Congress convened in January.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further comments on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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