The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 24, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that the Chinese Nationalists had said that they had shot down 11 Communist Chinese MIG fighters this date in a large air battle over Formosa Strait. More than 100 Chinese Communist planes had engaged with 32 Nationalist jets in the largest aerial battle yet reported in the month-old Quemoy crisis, according to a spokesman for the Nationalist Defense Ministry. In addition to the 11 MIG's shot down, six possible kills had been reported. All Nationalist planes, according to the spokesman, had returned safely from the ten-minute morning battle. The location of the conflict was not fixed by the spokesman. Earlier reports said it had occurred near the Matsu Islands, about 150 miles northeast of the Quemoy group and 100 miles northwest of Formosa. In the three previous air battles since the Communists had begun bombarding the Quemoys on August 23, the Nationalists had claimed 14 MIG's shot down and three damaged. None of the Nationalist American-built planes, flown by American-trained pilots, had been lost, according to the Nationalists. The bombardment had continued this date against the Quemoys from midnight to 10:00 a.m., according to the Ministry, with the Communists having fired 1,026 shells. None, however, had hit the supply beach or landing strip when a planeload of foreign and Chinese newsmen had landed on Quemoy, as reported by a Associated Press correspondent Forrest Edwards. He had said that his group of 22 foreign correspondents and ten Chinese reporters heard distant explosions. The commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Felt, said that the supply situation was getting better every day. He said that he was not overly optimistic but also not discouraged, indicating that the U.S. was helping supply Quemoy "to the greatest extent possible." He indicated that further U.S. aid was a political question which he could not answer. An American officer who had landed on Quemoy on Sunday with a Nationalist convoy said that small amphibious landing vehicles were getting supplies through the Communist bombardments.
In Warsaw, Poland, it was reported that indications were mounting this date that the Far East cease-fire talks between the U.S. and Communist China were rapidly approaching a climax.
In Beirut, Lebanon, shootings, heavy explosions, burning of automobiles and other violence had erupted in the city this date as President Fuad Shehab entered his first full day in office. By mid-morning, official sources said that six persons had been killed and 20 wounded. Under former pro-Western President Camille Chamoun, Moslems had sparked unrest and manned roadblocks, while now it was members of the Phalange, an extremist Christian party, causing the violence in the nation of Moslems and Christians. Security forces had orders to shoot on sight anyone illegally carrying arms on the streets, the toughest order given to security forces since the Lebanese crisis had begun in early May. The Phalangists ordered a general shutdown of shops and services in the predominantly Christian area of Beirut, which included the beachfront hotel district, the business district and residential districts. The previous May, it had been the rebel Moslems who had attempted to enforce a general strike. The announced purpose of the present wave of terror was to gain revenge for the previous week's kidnaping of a Phalangist journalist by unknown persons. The man's fate remained unknown. Those who led the rebellion against the Chamoun regime disclaimed responsibility for the kidnaping. A day and night curfew, imposed the prior Monday and maintained for the inauguration of President Shehab on Tuesday, had been lifted at midnight. Shortly thereafter, Phalangists began manning roadblocks in various parts of the city and trouble had begun. By mid-morning, tanks, jeeps and truckloads of security troops were dashing about the city to restore order. Twelve truckloads of American soldiers swept through the city at noon and stopped in the port area where American warships were docked. The port area was flanked on one side by the Phalangists and on the other by black-shirted Moslem Najjada Party extremists who moved into the area early during the morning. The U.S. troops had obviously been sent to the port area to protect American property. Sniping was ongoing in many parts of the city and some innocent bystanders had been shot. During a tour of the city, a journalist saw three men on the streets who had been shot.
The Associated Press reports that Southern plans to maintain segregation by changing public schools to private schools faced an early test in Federal District Court the previous day, as the Little Rock School Board had sought to have the court determine whether the Board could legally permit a corporation to lease the four high school buildings in Little Rock, which were closed by order of the Governor pursuant to state law after the September 12 ruling by the Supreme Court that desegregation would have to continue, as during the previous school year, at Central High School. The Legislature, meeting in a special session called by the Governor, had passed legislation permitting the closures, mandating a subsequent referendum, which would be held September 27, to determine whether the schools would remain closed or would be reopened on an integrated basis. A segregationist spokesman had criticized the School Board's move as unnecessary. The Little Rock Citizens Council leader said that the Board "is more interested in seeing the mixing of the races in our schools than seeing them operate." (Again, such people seemed to have had an unhealthy and even morbid preoccupation with "race-mixing", implying a level of interaction beyond merely verbal conversation assumed from going to school together, reflecting, no doubt, their own one-room schoolhouse group intercourse, required for graduation.) The Board had asked the court for a quick answer, indicating that it was willing to lease the school buildings if the court would ensure that the Board would not be in contempt of court orders. The Board could delay the plans of Governor Orval Faubus to reopen the four high schools the following week on a private, segregated basis. Governor Faubus had predicted an overwhelming vote for segregation in the upcoming referendum. Little Rock's three television stations, meanwhile, were providing six hours daily of instruction by the regular teachers at the high schools, with the first classes having been aired the prior Monday.
At Van Buren, Ark., twin white boys had been suspended the previous day from the integrated high school, a school official stating that they had refused to leave the school yard and return to classes after a reported spitting incident involving a black student. One of the twins said that the black student had spat in his face, but that student denied it.
Several Southern states other than Arkansas had private school plans as anti-integration weapons. Six white secondary schools in Norfolk, Va., faced imminent closure by Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., pursuant to state law, following a Federal judge's refusal the previous day to permit any further delay in their integration. The Governor said that he would probably order them closed after conferring with Norfolk city officials. About 10,000 students would be impacted, more than three times the enrollment at Front Royal and Charlottesville, where the Governor had already closed three schools under Virginia's anti-immigration laws.
In Lexington, Ky., at the Southern Governors Conference, the 14 governors attending were expected to debate a states' rights resolution which might be introduced by Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee. Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia, an outspoken advocate of segregation, said that the Conference ought resolve to protect states "against all Federal encroachment".
The President was reported this date to be preparing to name an above-reproach successor to Sherman Adams as White House chief of staff. But even RNC chairman Meade Alcorn, who had played an active role in events leading to the decision of Mr. Adams to resign, said that he did not have any idea of the choice of the President.
Donald MacDonald of The
News reports that a machine in Mount Airy, which had been
running 24 hours per day for six solid weeks, had finally stopped
working this date, having been in devotion to production of 600 dozen
Whirla-Hoops per day. The sales manager at the plastics company plant
said that they knew the machine could not keep up the pace and that
it was bound to break, but that they would be back in production by
Friday. The company was one of at least four North and South Carolina
plants which were cashing in on the current hula-hoop craze. Their
product went by one of at least nine hoop trade names, flooding the
markets throughout the country. The craze had begun with the Wham-o
Co. of San Gabriel, Calif., with their product officially called the
"Hula-Hoop"
In Los Angeles, it was reported that the late best-selling author John McPartland, who had written No Down Payment, had four wives, including one located in Los Angeles the previous day. That woman said that she had met the writer when he was a 17-year old clerk in a plumbing supply store in Chicago, having met him at the home of a girlfriend on January 1, 1928, asking him to marry her, and he had accepted. During their six years of marriage, they had a daughter. She said that she had divorced him when he began keeping company with another woman. She was divorced from her second husband and was unemployed, living in a Los Angeles apartment. Mr. McPartland, 47, had died ten days earlier of a heart attack in Monterey, Calif., and legal maneuvers regarding his estate had disclosed that he had seven children by at least three wives.
In London, it was reported that Moscow Radio had reported this date that a Soviet surgeon had created a dog with two heads, one of them transplanted. The broadcast said that the dog was feeling well and ate with both mouths.
On the editorial page, "Down South, a Whole Has Many Parts" indicates that newsmen covering the Southern Governors Conference in Lexington, Ky., during the week had issued headlines suggestive that Southern solidarity had been shattered regarding the issue of segregation.
It questions what the solidarity had been, indicating that contrary to journalistic folklore in the South and in the North, there never had been any real solidarity on the race question in the South, not even among the politicians, which it regards as appropriate. While there were certain strong tendencies, popular and political attitudes toward the many aspects of the problem varied from state to state and from community to community.
It finds that Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina would differ in certain essentials from Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia, that Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida would likely find much to dispute in the philosophy of Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas. Many things which were workable in North Carolina would not work in Georgia and vice versa. North Carolinians would not stand for some of the extreme legislative hocus-pocus popular in Georgia on racial matters.
It finds that the mood of the South could be described as a strange complex of ancient fears, present problems and future hopes of apathy and vigor of fatalism and determination, of permanence and change. It was a whole made up of complicated parts. Each Governor knew or thought that he knew his own state and he ought to be left free to perfect his philosophy and adapt his ideas to his own area.
Each Governor had great responsibilities and an interest which was higher than his own. It finds it significant perhaps that Governor Collins had been moved to quote Thomas Jefferson in that regard during the week: "Those who accept a great charge have a duty to risk themselves on great occasions where the safety of the nation or some of its high interests are at stake."
It concludes that a "tortured and profoundly troubled region" could ask no more of its governors than that.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in The New Republic, tells of certain events in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York being bound to disturb liberal and independent voters who had in the last generation come to regard the Democratic Party as a reliable guardian of their interests.
He concludes: "The essence of the Know-Nothing revolt, in short, is to wipe out the transformation wrought in the Democratic party by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal to recreate something like the Democratic party of the twenties. That party was a direct alliance of Northern city bosses and Southern Bourbons—a party in which the Ivy League and intellectual elements played a wholly decorative role. It was a party without ideas, program, energy or zeal. Its ceiling was Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith was, of course, a great state Governor, and in 1928 even he proved too much for the pre-Roosevelt Democratic Party. Smith's subsequent moral and intellectual collapse when confronted by the national issues of the thirties showed the feebleness of even the best of the party whose nominee he was in 1928.
"What makes this Democratic turn the more ironic is that it comes at a time when the rest of the nation is belatedly awakening to the desperate need for new ideas, for intelligence, for leadership in our public life. Men like Tom Finletter, Chester Bowles, William Benton, Richardson Dilworth would have provided such leadership magnificently.
"A party which seeks to qualify itself for responsibility in an age of national and international crisis is not well advised to begin to do so by blowing out its own brains."
While interesting, in terms of political science, from a spot historical perspective at that point in time, the "Know-Nothing", anti-intellectual candidates and issues at the local level he dealt with did not ultimately win the day in those states, and so you may read it for yourself.
The one reference he makes to current national politics in 1958 was to Senator John F. Kennedy—for whom Mr. Schlesinger would serve as an advisor during the subsequent Presidency and would later publish in 1965 an account of the Presidency, A Thousand Days—, of whom he says regretfully was staying out of local politics in Massachusetts, where the movement also had sought to make inroads.
Especially relevant to current times in 2025, as it was when originally published in 1973, he also authored The Imperial Presidency—perhaps forecast in a strange way by the hound of the tocsin in the opening scene of that new detective show the previous Monday night, sounding almost as searingly as that damned air raid siren blasting into our brain now every Saturday at noon in our new environs...
Mr. Schlesinger's younger brother, Tom, had worked for The News as a reporter between 1947 and 1951, writing a weekly column from Washington, "Capital Roundup", during the latter two years of that stint, before joining the State Department.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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