Tuesday, April 23, 1946

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 23, 1946

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone had died the previous evening at his home of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, following an attack on the bench during the reading of opinions the previous afternoon. The Chief Justice had been nauseated after being escorted from the Supreme Court by Justices Reed and Black and had been taken home. Hours later, his secretary called to announce that he had passed away.

The Chief Justice died a year and ten days following President Roosevelt from the same cause and in much the same manner, save that President Roosevelt slumped in his chair while having his portrait painted and lapsed into unconsciousness before dying two and a half hours later at the Little White House in Warm Springs.

Mr. Stone had been a Justice of the Court from 1925 to 1941, originally appointed by President Coolidge, and was elevated by President Roosevelt to become Chief Justice in 1941 at the retirement of Charles Evans Hughes from the Court, an appointee in 1930 of President Hoover, following the retirement of former President William Howard Taft, appointed Chief by President Harding. President Taft had originally appointed Mr. Hughes to the Court as a Justice in 1910, before the latter resigned the Court in 1916 to run for the presidency against President Wilson, narrowly suffering defeat in that crucial election.

Chief Justice Stone was considered generally liberal in his opinions, supportive usually of the New Deal and expansion of the executive powers undertaken during the Roosevelt years, dissenting for instance to the historic 6 to 3 ruling in 1936 striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act in U.S. v. Butler, 297 US 1—positions, along with his stands for civil liberties, which had endeared him to FDR and led to his appointment as Chief Justice despite his being a Republican.

That, notwithstanding the fact that he had joined the unanimous Court in Schechter Poultry v. U.S., 295 US 495, in striking down the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935 as improperly ceding exclusive Congressional powers to the Executive Branch and for the Congress attempting to regulate intrastate commerce.

As noted in the article, two of his dissents eventually became the majority rule within a short time, that striking down compulsory flag salutes by school children, decided in West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), reversing Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), and the striking down as violative of the First Amendment the imposition of a city tax on sale of religious literature, as held in Jones v. City of Opelika, 319 US 105 (1943), reversing on rehearing a previous 5 to 4 decision in the same case the previous year, reported at 316 US 584.

The fact that Mr. Stone was a Republican had stimulated speculation that the vacancy on the Court would be filled by a Republican, perhaps Secretary of War Robert Patterson, and that one of the seven Democrats would then be elevated to Chief, perhaps either Justice Douglas, Jackson, or Frankfurter.

It would not be so.

Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson of Kentucky, a former Federal Judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, would be appointed Chief Justice and assume the position in June. President Truman had just appointed in the fall Republican Senator Harold Burton of Ohio to replace retiring Justice Owen Roberts, the only other Republican on the Court. With division in the Democratic Party already rife and the Southern Democrats especially in need of satiation, President Truman, no doubt, had these issues in mind in appointing a conservative Democrat and border state Southerner to the post.

Chief Justice Vinson would die in September, 1953. Significantly, his death came during the course of deliberations on Brown v. Board of Education, originally heard in spring of 1953. The case was then re-argued to the Court and eventually unanimously decided in 1954, after Governor Earl Warren of California had been appointed to become Chief by President Eisenhower, striking down the controversial 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and its rule that separate-but-equal public facilities for the races constituted sufficient equivalency to pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, requiring that no state engage in invidious discrimination which deprives a citizen of rights, privileges or immunities under the law.

Some have speculated that had Chief Justice Vinson lived, the outcome in Brown would have been different. It is a quite unprovable thesis, of course, and one which begins to beg desperately for reason in light of the earlier decision in 1950 in Sweatt v. Painter, holding that the State of Texas had not afforded an equal law school facility to blacks as that afforded whites and thus ordered that blacks be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. Sweatt, while, for the factual posture of the case, not needing to disturb the precedent established in Plessy, provided the underpinning for Brown four years later and was an unanimous opinion delivered by Chief Justice Vinson. In all likelihood, therefore, the Court would have come out in much the same posture in Brown under Chief Justice Vinson as it did under Chief Justice Warren, even if perhaps not unanimous, the unanimity of the controversial decision, always difficult of achievement by the very dynamic of the Court when a prior precedent is being overturned, having been credited to the persistence of Mr. Warren.

It is fair to say that Mr. Vinson may attract an unfair degree of criticism for his having been a Southerner, neglecting at the same time to realize that Justice Hugo Black, a former Klansman and Alabama Senator, had become quickly, after his 1937 appointment, one of the chief protectors of civil liberties on the Court and one of the staunchest allies of those liberties ever to serve in the history of the Court.

Often it is so, that someone's past before coming to the Supreme Court serves as little or no predictor for their opinions and positions on the Court, indeed might prove counter-intuitive, the nature of the institution and the nature of the practice of law being what it is, a role in a grand argument which may lead to legal decisions quite apart from a person's personal beliefs. That is the way it should be, of course, courts of law, not of men and women subjectively opining simply what they believe, apart from the history and development of the law through time; courts which consistently recognize that the entire society is affected by their decisions, thus with a collective stake in the outcome, yet never subject to the vicissitudes of political winds and whimsy of the times, always cognizant of the basic rule of stare decisis, but also aware that either plain error in constitutional or statutory interpretation in a decision, the primary reasons, for instance, for reversals in the mandatory flag salute case and the tax on religious literature, or changing trends in time which render a rule of law either out of step with the conscience of the nation or simply impracticable of fair implementation, the case in Brown v. Board of Education, requires setting aside prior decisions.

The four decisions, the article indicating erroneously only three, which were delivered, incidentally, by Chief Justice Stone the day he died were: Heiser v. Woodruff, 327 U.S. 726, a case holding 6-2 that a bankruptcy petitioner who had sought successfully to undermine a prior judgment of a creditor because it had been obtained by perjury was not prevented by the principles of res judicata, that is the same matter having been previously decided between the same parties, from doing so because the basis of attack of the judgment had never previously been raised or adjudicated in another court; U.S. v. Rice, 327 U.S. 742, holding 5-3 that a Federal Court of Appeals could not, pursuant to an 1887 Federal statute, review on mandamus an order of the Federal District Court that a case be remanded to the county court as having been improperly removed to the Federal Court; Wilson v. Cook, 327 U.S. 474, reversing in part by a vote of 7-1 a lower state court decision holding the plaintiffs not liable for a tax on timber from Federal land premised on the erroneous notion that the State of Arkansas did not have authority to impose a tax on Federal land within its state borders; and Swanson v. Marra Bros., 328 U.S. 1, holding 8-0 that the limitation of remedies afforded by the Jones Act and Longshoremen's Act to injuries received by employees while working on ships operating in navigable waters could not be extended to injuries suffered while on land, in the instant case to an injury from a life raft falling from a ship onto a stevedore working alongside the ship on a pier, leaving the available remedies to state workmen's compensation law.

One of the two dissents authored by Chief Justice Stone delivered the previous day was in Seas Shipping Co. v. Sieracki, 328 U.S. 85, a case in which the majority held 5-3 that ship owners were liable to stevedores for unseaworthiness of a ship while they worked on board the ship, regardless of the fact that the stevedores were employed independently by a stevedoring company to load and unload the ship and not directly by the ship owners, Mr. Stone's dissent finding the majority holding to be contrary to existing maritime law and Federal statutes, and the Swanson case just decided that day, limiting liability to injuries of employees suffered while the ship operated in navigable waters, not finding persuasive, given the actions of Congress in the field, the distinction made by the majority between a stevedore working on the dock and one working on board ship as determinative of the applicability of the Federal law.

The other dissent was in Girouard v. U.S., 328 U.S. 61, the last read opinion by the Chief Justice before his attack, a 5-3 decision which, by virtue of a 1942 Federal law allowing citizenship to conscientious objectors, provided that it was not therefore violative of an earlier Federal statute for applicants seeking naturalization to agree to all requirements of the oath of citizenship with the exception of refusing to agree to take up arms in defense of the country in any conflict which they thought not morally justified, overturning three prior decisions of the Court made more than 15 years earlier, from two of which Mr. Stone had joined in dissents with Chief Justice Hughes, and Justices Brandeis and Holmes. Mr. Stone thought the intervening Federal statute of 1942 had not implicitly altered the prior statutory requirement for adherence to the complete oath as prerequisite to naturalization.

According to the report the previous day, Justice Stanley Reed had just finished reading the opinion in Burton-Sutton Oil Co. v. Commissioner of Int. Rev., 328 U.S. 25, at the time the Chief Justice collapsed.

The report this date, however, conflicts with that statement, saying that Mr. Stone faltered during the reading of the first of his delivered majority opinions of the date, following the reading of his two dissenting opinions.

President Truman learned of the death of the Chief Justice while aboard the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, reviewing the Atlantic Fleet. He termed it a "grievous loss to the country" and expressed his shock at the news.

We remind again that, other than the appointment of Chief Justice Stone, a Republican, and Chief Justice Vinson, there has not been in the country a Democratic-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court since Melville Fuller, appointed by Grover Cleveland in 1888, though Edward White, a Southern Democrat, originally appointed to the Court also by President Cleveland, was elevated to the position in 1910 by President Taft. Put another way, Democratic-appointed Chief Justices or Democrat Chief Justices have served in that capacity on the Court for only 23 of the past 103 years of American history, and, including Chief Justice Fuller, for 45 of 149 years, since Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, appointed Salmon Chase to the position in 1864.

President Johnson, with the assistance of an early retirement by Chief Justice Warren in 1968, fearing the election of Richard Nixon, whom he personally detested as a crook surrounded by crooks, was thwarted by the Republican-Southern Democrat coalition in his attempt to elevate liberal Justice Abe Fortas of Texas to the position.

Some distance up the Yangtze River from Shanghai, a nineteen-year old sailor, William Z. Smith, a native of Asheville, N.C., went berserk during the middle of the night on board an LST, opening fire and killing nine of his shipmates, wounding a tenth, catching all of them while asleep. He then stabbed himself three times in the stomach. He was subdued and disarmed by two sailors, one of whom had been mortally wounded in the attack. The sailor, who had left the United States only in February, was given a 50-50 chance of survival.

He ate alone.

On Mindanao, Japanese Army units who had not yet surrendered were reported by an American priest, just returned from an inspection tour, to be consuming the bodies of villagers slain in raids in remote districts. Father Edward Haggerty, author of Guerrilla Priest, who had spent three years on Mindanao during the war, reported that 151 villagers had been killed and eaten since the end of the war by some 400 to 1,000 Japanese soldiers. Philippines Army officers had been assigned the task of rounding up the Japanese but harsh terrain had delayed the operation.

In Manila, the opposition candidate in the presidential election, Manuel Roxas, went into hiding after a reported plot had surfaced to kidnap him. He was said to be leading in the balloting against incumbent President Sergio Osmena.

The election had drawn three million Filipinos to the polls, being the first election for leadership after the coming independence, to become effective on July 4.

In other voting day problems, the Governor of Camarines Sur Province had been wounded seriously along with two members of his party in an ambush during the afternoon. Communications had been severed with Nueva Ecija Province, the center of the Agrarian movement. In another province, voting inspectors accused police of not letting voters into the polling places. The supervisor for the commission on elections claimed that inspectors for the Roxas campaign had removed the ballot boxes and their keys from eleven polling places in Calatrava on Negros Island.

Chungking radio stated that several units of Soviet troops had departed Vladivostok for various destinations in Korea.

In Milan, the body of Mussolini was reported removed during the night by unknown persons from its burial place in an unmarked pauper's grave in Maggiore Cemetery. Only three or four persons knew the whereabouts of the grave, revealed to journalists two days earlier by a local lawyer and municipal official.

Minister of Coordination for Greece, Stephanos Stefanopoulos, future Prime Minister in 1965-66, announced that the United States was providing a credit of ten million dollars to enable purchase of surplus Army stores. The credit would be repayable in 50 years.

Secretary of State Byrnes flew aboard "The Sacred Cow", the President's plane, to Paris for the four-power foreign ministers conference, a last ditch effort to try to resolve remaining issues between the West and Russia. Mr. Byrnes stated that he had no mission but that provided by the hymn, "Standing in the Need of Prayer".

An unidentified informant stated that the first order of business would be to place before the conference a proposed treaty with Austria, to restore its sovereignty and provide for removal of the four occupation armies, enabling normalization of international relations. Austria was not deemed a nation which had been at war with the Allies because it had been annexed in 1938 by Germany.

The Senate Military Committee approved the legislation to merge the armed forces into a Department of Common Defense. It had all the provisions recommended by the President.

The Senate Finance Committee voted, with the approval of Secretary of the Treasury Vinson, to reduce the allowable national debt limit from 300 billion dollars to 275 billion, to put, according to committee chair Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, Treasury borrowing on a pay-as-you-go basis. The Secretary explained that ten billion dollars of the reduction could be had from simply reducing the nominal value of outstanding war bonds, the Treasury being required by law to carry on its books the maturity value of the bonds, $25 each, rather than the actual current value.

Hal Boyle, in Rome, tells of the liner Vulcania heading to America with hundreds of war brides aboard.

But Julia was not to be one of them. She was a real-life Madame Butterfly, who, at 19, had lost her heart to a G.I. two and a half years earlier. She had never before dated and naively fell in love with a captain who was married but convinced her that he would divorce his wife and marry Julia.

She had followed him to Rome and gave birth to their child, which eventually became ill and died.

The captain had returned to America six months earlier, saying that he would return in six months for her, or never. He had not shown up and had sent her only two letters, contending that his wife was ill and that he feared asking her for a divorce. Her own letters to him went unanswered.

She brooded for weeks in her room, finally pulled out a revolver and shot herself twice, the second bullet killing her. She explained in a note to her sister, asking for forgiveness for what she knew was a cowardly act, that she could wait no longer for her beloved, that the six months had passed and she knew he would not return, was in love with his wife.

A photograph shows actress Joan Crawford with daughter Christina in identical bonnets. Ms. Crawford had denied rumors that a trip to Las Vegas was for the purpose of obtaining a divorce from her third husband, Phil Terry.

Probably just mother and daughter happily going to the Easter Parade in Las Vegas, with all the nice dresses hung neatly back home in the closets on coat hangers.

On the editorial page, "It May Be Practical, But—" criticizes the local apathy demonstrated by voters in the face of a decision by local bar members and politicians to have the sole opponent, Mr. Whiting, to the interim Solicitor, Mr. Whitener, withdraw from the race and become Mr. Whitener's assistant. Both men were well qualified and it might be a practical solution, especially since it had been determined that a separate judicial district could be created without having a Solicitor from Mecklenburg County, Mr. Whitener being from Gaston.

But the opposition had at least broken with the precedent of the previous quarter century whereby, under informal arrangement, the resident judge of the Superior Court came from Mecklenburg and the solicitor from Gaston County. Now, by informal agreement, without consultation with the people, that precedent was being restored. As long as the people showed no protest, they could not expect democracy to flourish.

"Mr. Bowles Nurses a Forlorn Hope" expresses the belief that Chester Bowles, while correct in asserting that the majority of the people wanted to retain price control, was grasping at straws when he predicted that they would rise up in a single loud voice and demand that Congress provide legislation in extending the life of the agency which would not have, as the House bill, restraints which rendered the attempt at price control meaningless—in this instance the requirement that "reasonable profits" be taken into account in establishing price ceilings and also the removal of food subsidies to farmers, requiring a rise in farm prices. The people were too apathetic to make such a plea, says the piece.

Evidence was, however, that the Congress well knew of the opinion of the American people, given the circuitous method which the House used to render OPA powerless.

Mr. Bowles was not going to be able to convince the Senators who were operating hand-in-glove with powerful lobbies for businessmen and farmers to change their attitude on price control, but might be able to convince those who held the sincere but misguided belief that increase in production could be achieved by removing controls, preventing inflation by enabling production to equal unleashed demand pent-up from wartime restraints.

"It's a Parody, Satire That Is", comments on an editorial by Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch protesting in mild terms the stereotype conveyed of Southerners by the portrayal on the radio of the mythical Dixiefied-fried Senator Claghorn, who never met a Yankee he liked or allowed the word "north" to pass his lips without washing the resultant bitter taste from his mouth with soap.

The editorial caused the liberal Mr. Dabney to be labeled in some quarters a reactionary. But he had written an article for The Saturday Review of Literature, titled "Is the South That Bad?" which had hopefully put the matter to rest.

Mr. Dabney was still convinced, however, that the South would be better off were Senator Claghorn to retire from public life, either voluntarily or by an act of impeachment, to sip his mint juleps in private under the magnolias and weeping willows and crepe myrtles, perhaps down in Myrtle Beach, listening to the soft, lilting maidens singing their Siren song of sweet devoirs made to the South of Olde, swinging low.

The editorial believes that the other characters on the Fred Allen radio show which brought Senator Claghorn's voice to the people dispelled the notion of him being a stereotype in isolation. Titus Moody, a Yankee farmer, Mrs. Nussbaum, Jewish and distinctly bearing a sharp New York accent hinged to that of the old country, and Falstaff Openshaw, an eccentric poet and intellectual, all were satiric cartoons of the same stripe appearing in "Allen's Alley". Yet, no one had raised any hue and cry against the latter three. Indeed, no one save Mr. Dabney had complained of Senator Claghorn. It was a safe bet that most Southerners laughed more heartily at Senator Claghorn than did those of other regions of the country.

The piece ventures that Fred Allen was performing a service for the South by enabling a view through the eyes of a clever satirist. While true, as Mr. Dabney inveighed, that there were few men of the Claghorn stripe left in the South of 1946, even a few were too many and the humor which the stereotypical unreconstructed Confederate elicited far and wide every Sunday night would assure the relegation of the type finally to the Confederate Relic Room where he belonged.

The editors unfortunately jump the gun a bit on that one, though the sentiment was honorable and understandable. More Claghorns existed in the wings, the extreme right white wings, than they dared imagine, waiting to take up the fallen and discredited Rankin and Bilbo banners with gusto, the only difference being that they were a lemon-sucking lot, some from California and elsewhere in the West below the extended Mason-Dixon Line, without any hint of the humor and charm displayed by Senator Claghorn, even less palatable than Mr. Rankin or Senator Bilbo.

Truth be known, little had changed since the account of W. J. Cash in 1941, concluding with the caveat that unless the South got about the task of healing itself, it would face a violent upheaval in the streets to bring about the changes which were inevitable. While there were those many editors and politicians and statesmen of the South who genuinely sought to bring about that change in honorable ways, in the end, those agents of reactionary resistance would not allow it to be, as the hucksters who took to the stumps for personal power would resort to the old manner of appealing to the entrenched and easily excited fears of people, based as they were on the handy-dandy of projection of all sins and ill besetting them onto the most visible and vulnerable scapegoat, those thus excitable by the frenzied rush of rhetorical flourish being not too well-staked in sensitivity, perception, or worldly experience to provide a basis for comparison and elimination of false ideas.

The war had intruded to provide a new view of black men to many Southern white men, fighting as they had been side by side in a life and death common struggle. But that new view would prove transitory, as time and societal changes began effectively to erode memories, such that when it came time to have integration of public schools, white children and black children attending side by side, all of the old fears and emotions, and handy-dandies, welled up in certain burgs and hamlets, coalescing often in violence.

Though not pervasive, it was enough, with the advent of television to bring it into every living room in the country, to create the perception that it did pervade the South, and perception quickly became, for all intents and purposes, a reality which, for a time, made things worse in reaction before they became better in reflection and understanding.

As we have suggested before, however, this entire process, replete with the violence, replete with the occasional sacrifice of leaders, probably had to take place for change to occur generationally. Had it not been so, it is unlikely much change would have occurred in attitude, as indeed such changes continue to occur only slowly, by fits and starts, and steps backward in the meantime.

But, change does occur as man slowly, step by step, emerges from the primordial ooze which holds him on occasion only a half-step from the monkeys from which he ascended.

Incidentally, while about referencing Mr. Dabney's article from the newly discovered online resource which provides all of the issues of the Saturday Review of Literature, a favorite periodical of W. J. Cash and one which will provide any student of a particular period during which it was published with a good and astute overview of the literature which was being read at the time, we reference this article, abstracted from The Mind of the South by Cash for the December 28, 1940 issue of the weekly magazine, titled appropriately "Literature and the South".

You may also read a review of The Mind of South by David Cohn, which appeared in the February 22, 1941 edition of the magazine.

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Too Much Democracy?" finds rationale in Southern Democrats asking for party harmony on their terms after linking arms with Republicans on the President's reconversion program. That rationale was provided by the outcome of the Georgia Cracker Party election in Augusta where Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, Roy Harris, had run a white supremacist campaign and nevertheless was soundly beaten by a newspaper editor with no experience in politics.

Such an outcome surely signaled the takeover of the country by the Communists and CIO, and there was no telling where this campaign for getting everyone the right to vote might end in providing too much democracy, trickling in from the big cities.

Drew Pearson comments on a secret conference at Blair House between Secretary Byrnes and Senators Tom Connally of Texas, Walter George of Georgia, Wallace White of Maine, and Warren Austin of Vermont, regarding diplomatic recognition of Argentina, the Senators desiring it. The following day, Mr. Byrnes had announced the shift in policy to recognize Argentina.

Mr. Pearson notes that U.S.-Latin American relations were probably at their lowest ebb since American troops landed in Nicaragua in 1927.

He next tells of a proposal by future Senator and 1956 vice-presidential candidate with Adlai Stevenson, Tennessee Representative Estes Kefauver, to have matters of party harmony determined by the Democratic Congressional Committee rather than the House caucus. The Southerners found it a challenge and voted it down. But it had at least slowed for the time the bandwagon which had formed against the continued DNC chairmanship of Robert Hannegan.

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn told his fellow Democrats that they must be unified to win the majority again in the fall and that support of Democrats, even ten-percent Democrats, was better than having a Republican majority. Liberals, however, were not accepting of this notion, thought that there were too many ten-percenters already in the party.

Congressman George Sadowski of Michigan drew loud cheers, even from Southerners, when he challenged his fellow Democrats to rein in John Rankin of Mississippi and his penchant for attacks on Northern Democrats.

Also provoking rancor was the discovery that invitations to the caucus had gone out to some Republican members, sent by the Southern Democratic leaders.

He finally reports that Edward Stettinius had proposed to write a book on the creation of the United Nations and had sought and obtained approval for it from Secretary Byrnes. But when Mr. Stettinius then sought to hire a ghost writer for the purpose out of the Government payroll, he was met with a refusal.

Marquis Childs describes the grim testimony of one of the German defendants in the Nuremberg war crimes trials who had testified with a kind of satisfaction regarding the efficiency with which mass murders had been transacted at Oswiecim. Executions had been increased from a few hundred per day to thousands, men, women and children herded into the gas chambers, believing the while that they were going simply to be de-loused, though occasionally suspecting their fate, causing riots and screams for mercy, resulting in use of force to compel their entry to the showers.

There were 1.5 million Jews remaining in Europe, with an uncertain fate. A campaign was ongoing among Jewish organizations in the United States to raise 100 million dollars for their aid. Mr. Childs suggests that the responsibility ought be shared by Christians alike.

He posits that the conscience of the world had been dulled by the mass murder committed by the Nazis during the war, part of Hitler's plan, to commit a crime of such immense proportions as to be unfathomable to the human race, desensitizing the masses by its very enormity.

The crimes of the concentration camps, he further contends, were the crimes of all mankind, not just the Germans. He mentions the fate of the St. Louis in June, 1939, refused access to American ports and forced to depart Cuba and return to Europe. Now, the Fede was seeking to sail to Palestine with Jews aboard, but was being detained in an Italian port because the quota for Palestine was filled.

He reminds in the season of Easter that Jesus had been a Jew and urges contribution to the cause of establishing a refuge in Palestine.

Samuel Grafton suggests that a feeble, short statement by Edward Stettinius to the Security Council, to the effect that America disapproved of Franco and his regime but wanted no internal trouble in Spain, was indicative of the role the country had adopted with respect to Spain. It fit the concept of negatively resisting Communism rather than affirmatively seeking to spread democracy. Yet, no one could make speeches against the Communists in Spain as it would ring of Franco, himself. The result was, as Mr. Stettinius had done, to speak of it only briefly and in hushed, guarded tones.

The only thing at stake before the Security Council was continued diplomatic recognition of the Spanish Government for as long as Franco remained in power. Such could not realistically lead to war unless the act weakened Franco, suggesting that America was afraid to weaken him.

The audience in the Council chamber had begun to laugh, once when the Australian delegate suggested that the U.S. had an open mind and on another occasion when the same delegate had asked for the facts on Spain and the Soviet delegate had waved a piece of paper loaded with them in front of him.

The world was only perceiving "no" coming from the lips of Americans, while exhorting at the same time, with words which rang hollow, the oppressed to rise and oust Franco.

A letter writer, wife of a veteran, writes to protest an ad run by the Citizens' Committee urging a no vote on the bond issue, with the advice: "Veterans Want Homes—Not Public Buildings". She finds no proposal being offered, however, to provide veterans with homes. Nor would the tax dollars saved from the bond work to build them.

A letter states that the right of individual bargaining was as sacred or more so as the right of collective bargaining. He finds the concept that all men are created equal to be the root of all that plagued the country and threatened civilization itself. He believes that people were free to become equal, equal opportunity without special privilege.

He advocates therefore that the states award to some citizens more than one vote each for life or limited periods, as rewards for specific achievements of citizenship, with forfeiture of those rights for disservice. He suggests in this regard that a Bronze or Silver Star from the war would entitle its holder to one extra vote for five years, that each graduate of an accredited high school be given an extra vote for life, that each graduate of an accredited college receive an extra vote for life, that each journeyman in a trade receive an extra vote for life, that each businessman with an invested net worth of $5,000 receive an extra vote for life, that each person with an annual income of $5,000 or more be accorded an extra vote for a year.

Each state then could, for "egregious works of supererogation", award its citizens with five votes each for the period until the next legislature would convene, not to exceed ten such individuals in any one term.

The editors note that the writer had written more but that they had been forced to cut its length. "Whatever else it may be, it looks like the basis for a good argument."

He might wish to rethink at least his concept of "egregious works of supererogation" and, instead, simply call them outrageous acts of super-arrogation and super-irrigation, affording an arrayed congregation of ten extra votes in the aggregation, that is to say, to state it more plainly, solid gold water.

Whether, incidentally, President Kennedy had read this letter or one similar to it before he provided his University Day address at the University of North Carolina on October 12, 1961, or whether the Belgians had before adopting their Constitution, we leave to your higher discernment and imagination.

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