The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 13, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Big Three conference of foreign ministers in London, in the final day of talks before the other NATO foreign ministers would join the conference, gave urgent consideration to strengthening the Middle and Far East economically and militarily to ward off Soviet aggression. It was considered possible that the U.S. might aid anti-Communist forces in Burma and Indo-China, but was unlikely that anything would be done about China, as Britain had recognized the Chinese Communist Government while the U.S. and France had not.

The State Department ordered the ouster of 22 of 33 Czech diplomatic corps employees in the U.S., in retaliation for the ejection of about 40 Americans from Czechoslovakia. Only five of the 22 ousted employees were actual diplomats. The Czech Government was also ordered to close their consulates in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The U.S. had atomic bombs small enough to be carried on jet fighters while still as powerful as the larger ones. The weight of the bombs was secret but probably was about a half ton, the maximum load able to be carried on each wing by Air Force fighters.

The President, at Fort Peck Dam, Mont., during his cross-country train tour, said that the Government's flood control and power program was helping build a "stronger and more prosperous United States", upon which depended the world's best hope for peace. He said that people who criticized the Federal budget often overlooked the fact that spending on such projects such as the Fort Peck Dam was an investment in the future of the country. He said that the recent floods in the Midwest showed that the country needed more flood control projects. He emphasized that the Fort Peck Dam had cost 50 million dollars when built in 1937 and that experts had estimated that had it not been built, as much damage would have occurred to the Missouri River valley from the recent rains.

Whether, incidentally, Peter Piper was in the audience, was not told.

Democrats met in convention in Chicago, where they would be addressed by the President on Monday night.

The striking Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen extended its strike to the Union Pacific Railroad and also set up picket lines in an attempt to extend the effort to the Eastern and Southern operations of the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the four railroads struck on Wednesday, regarding the demand for an extra fireman aboard multiple diesel-locomotive trains. All four of the roads were now offering some skeletal service.

The railroad strike had boosted employment at Washington's Union Station by necessitating the hiring of 200 extra dispatchers to handle the additional mail being rerouted through the station to avoid the struck lines, doubling the number of employees laid off as a result of the strike.

In Knoxville, Tenn., three railroad switchmen confessed and were charged with the Thursday shooting into a locomotive, slightly injuring one Southern Railway employee and grazing another. It was not made clear whether the shooting was connected with the strike.

In the Carolinas, the Southern Railway's Eastern lines, east of Asheville and Atlanta, continued to move with little delay.

In Bridgeville, Pa., explosions at the American Cyanamid Co. plant could be heard from ten miles away, but only two persons were reported injured slightly in the accident.

In Los Angeles, a slight earth tremor was felt in the southwest section of the city, near the International Airport.

Columnist Bruce Barton tells of British historian Henry Thomas Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England, published in 1857, having written that the same natural forces in any society would produce the same results in any given time period, a shocking conclusion at the time for history having previously been written from the perspective of the kings and rulers, military leaders and popes. He said that even the number of marriages was determined, "not by the temper and wishes of individuals, but by large general facts over which individuals can exercise no authority", that it was controlled by the price of food and the rate of wages.

Pilloried for the statement, he nevertheless stuck to his guns.

In 1930, Ortega Gasset authored The Revolt of the Masses, in which he stated that for the twelve centuries prior to 1800, Europe's population reached about 180 million, wheras during the period 1800 through 1914, it suddenly exploded to 460 million, and that this phenomenon would continue exponentially, allowing power gradually to pass into the hands of these masses until they controlled a socialistic world.

The U.S. was now engaged in making food cheap and money plentiful across the world, but, while humane, the program would also lead to exacerbation of already extant overpopulation and become eventually self-defeating in its effect.

He finds no American politician talking about this issue but that they should, as it portended problems for foreign countries when the U.S. subsidies stopped.¹

In Thomasville, N.C., a young truck driver was freed from his mangled cab by fire fighters on the scene after his truck had collided with a car and been hurtled over an embankment, leaving him dangling from the cab with his legs pinned inside the wreckage. Once freed, he was found not to be seriously injured. Both he and the driver of the other car were charged with reckless driving.

The Senate contest in the special election for the North Carolina Senate seat occupied by Frank Graham had turned into a two-way contest between Mr. Graham and opponent Willis Smith, as former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds had been unable to match his colorful campaigns of earlier years and so had not mustered much support. Mr. Reynolds nevertheless continued to insist that he would win the primary race on May 27. Former Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall of North Carolina had just announced his support for Senator Graham.

On the editorial page, "Congress Versus Crime" tells of the Kefauver Committee finally having been set up with $150,000 in funding to investigate organized crime and gambling in the country, after languishing in Congress for months since first being proposed by Senator Estes Kefauver the prior January. The committee of Senator Ed Johnson, who wanted the investigation to be conducted at that end, had waded into the problem by interrogating a few major gambling kingpins, as Frank Costello, but got nowhere in result of their stonewalling, even if some perjury charges and contempt of Congress citations might flow from the investigation.

But Attorney General McGrath had declared during the week that there was no proof of any operation in the country of a central organized crime syndicate with a single czar at the top.

Yet, even without such a syndicate, the piece urges, there were gambling operations extant in areas of the country where it was illegal. If the Kefauver Committee could ferret out the working agreements between these operations and plug the loopholes in the law necessary to prosecute them, then it would have performed a public service of great value.

"Quantity Plus Quality" finds quite appropriate the request of Chief of Police Frank Littlejohn for sixteen additional patrolmen for the city, but also suggests the need for a top administrative assistant to train the men and insure that they would be used properly in service after training. For some of the officers, it finds, were deficient in dealing with the public appropriately. Such easily correctable habits as standing on street corners, sloven dress, or dangling cigarettes from their mouths were problems to be addressed. An overarching problem appeared to be lack of esprit de corps, which could be remedied by a good administrative assistant for the Chief.

"The Name Goes On" tells of the Charlotte Pipe & Foundry Co. celebrating its golden anniversary and 150 plumbing supply men visiting the city for the celebration, able to inform the public as to the nature of such esoterica as a "double-wedge-locked jointcast [sic] iron soil pipe hub", patented by the company in 1936. It was the oldest cast iron soil pipe manufacturer in the country, despite most of which being concentrated around Birmingham and Baltimore.

The current president of the company, Frank Dowd, Jr., was quite active in the civic life of the community, serving, as had his father, founder of the company, as president of the YMCA. He was also a member of the Central Building Committee of the Wake Forest College campaign regarding moving of the campus to Winston-Salem, in addition to other civic groups.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Dixiecrats from Door-to-Door", tells of Dixiecrats in Jackson, Miss., announcing their initiation of a door-to-door campaign against the Fair Deal, to "educate" Democrats regarding the perils of the "welfare state".

It suggests that the Dixiecrats of the Gulf region were not so concerned about states' rights as about such issues as tidelands oil rights. It finds that they would be far more effective if they were to link with Republicans so that the South could then have a genuine two-party system. Three parties, it offers, was one too many for traditional American politics.

It predicts that the door-to-door campaign would supply the answer to the Dixiecrats.

Drew Pearson tells of the Peasant Party leaders in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, after World War I, being regarded as Socialists and radicals by the rulers of those countries, but having eventually risen to power as leftist leaders, similar to the British Labour Party of 1950. But when the Stalinist regime took over in Moscow, they had lined up the Peasant Party leaders and shot them, as Moscow perceived the Agrarians to have been the greatest threat to successful Communism.

During the week, the hundred or so exiles of the International Peasant Union Congress had gathered in Washington to try to form a skeletal organization which one day might develop into a party which could overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe. They had reported that in Hungary, less than one percent of the farmers had joined the Communist collectives, that a concentration camp, replete with torture, had been located on an island in the Danube, and that the independent peasant of the Balkans was the chief enemy of Communism.

He notes that Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal was the hero of the exiled leaders, as he had been one of the first persons to recognize the importance of encouraging peasant independence, a realization which he had deduced while conducting a study in the Balkans for the State Department.

A Federal Judge of Baltimore had spoken to a meeting of sportsmen and wildlife authorities, advocating non-prosecution of the anti-baiting laws with respect to duck hunting as it was, he had found, an unenforceable law. He also favored lengthening of the season, increase of the bag limit, and permitting shooting after sundown. But a representative of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service cautioned that with such regulations in place, there would soon not be any ducks left.

At a recent dinner party, Congressman A. L. Miller of Nebraska challenged GOP Minority Leader Joe Martin for not conferring enough with other Republicans in the House, finding it signal of poor leadership. The confrontation was emblematic of the dissension and division afoot among Republicans.

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of a compromise in the offing regarding the FEPC bill, that if the 20 Southern Senators filibustering the bill would agree to limit debate, then the compulsory aspects of the bill would be removed. It had little chance of passing the House in any event with the compulsory provisions intact, as those had been rejected by the House earlier, and a bill finally reported under which compliance with the proposed law was voluntary, with study provisions included.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas said that the new cloture rule would be tested on the bill the following Monday, at which point the first showdown would take place.

Senator Clyde Hoey believed that a voluntary FEPC "would give no end of trouble".

Senators Estes Kefauver, Frank Graham, and Claude Pepper had not been invited to the Southern caucus on the filibuster, as they were not prepared to join it. Senator Kefauver, however, said that his position had been misunderstood by the caucus, though he was generally in favor of FEPC.

The debate on the bill was characterized by complete apathy, as only three or four Senators appeared on the floor at any one time.

Senator Hoey favored lifting rent controls, whereas Senator Graham wanted them retained.

House Ways & Means Committee chairman Robert Doughton was concerned about not being able to find the revenue to offset the recommended reductions of the excise taxes, totaling in excess of a billion dollars. He had also opposed the reduction of the excise tax on economy cigarettes versus regular cigarettes, which the Committee narrowly voted to recommend. The opposition had argued that it was the only way to loosen the monopoly held by the major brands. But it would also result in loss of an estimated 90 million dollars in revenue each year.

He provides a summary of the votes by the North Carolina Congressional delegation during the week on various issues.

A piece from the Raleigh Times recounts observations of six cars with a single dimly lit taillight and a faulty headlamp on the Raleigh-Chapel Hill road Sunday night, as well as four other cars with faulty headlamps, along with three speeders. It wants to know whether these observations were typical of the traffic on the road.

A piece from the Carlsbad (N.M.) Current Argus tells of a woman hearing a fire truck siren and promptly pulling to the side of the road per the law, but finding that the place where she had stopped was in front of the Fire Department, made apparent to her when the firetruck exited the garage and plowed into the side of her car.

A letter from an instructor in English at Carver College thanks the newspaper for its editorial, "Training Household Workers", favoring training of domestic help, finds it packed with commonsense and conducive to better race relations.

A letter writer complains of the newspaper misrepresenting the facts and reaching inaccurate conclusions regarding its criticism and dismissal of the candidacy of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds for the Senate seat of Frank Graham.

The editors ask for specifics.

A letter from a doctor finds the May 5 editorial endorsing Willis Smith for the Senate over Frank Graham and Mr. Reynolds, to have engaged in "intellectual contortions" in reaching its conclusions, for its endorsement of Senator Graham's integrity while finding Mr. Smith a better present fit for the Senate for his opposition to the Fair Deal.

A letter writer responds to the writer who had worried about leaving behind a country where her young son could grow up free, given the "welfare state" and "socialism" afoot, relating that she had discovered that she could vote for Willis Smith and alleviate this concern. This writer finds that writing an occasional letter to the editor in support of Mr. Smith or Senator Robert Taft for the presidency would also help to leave behind a free country. She could also have her preacher come to dinner and then tell him of her political views, pressuring him to expound from the pulpit regarding same. She could, furthermore, give to the "American Way" by supporting such organizations as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

He says that he was certain that the writer was of "gentle aryan birth" as himself, and finally adds that all her son really had to worry about was being born to rich parents and, in such event, would get by, Frank Graham or no Frank Graham.

A letter writer complains of the great crisis socially and politically facing the country for the "present Socialists", the "piano players" and "five and ten percenters", never being able to extricate the country from the present "economic international chaos".

A letter from a doctor thanks the newspaper for the May 5 editorial on the Senate election.

A letter writer from Pittsboro tells of growing up on a farm before attending and graduating from UNC in 1908 and then turning down a scholarship to Yale to return to Oak Ridge Institute where he tutored for four years. He had never received any financial aid during his schooling, earned his way through by waiting tables, running a boarding house, acting as assistant librarian and selling clothes.

His father had been an advocate of the New Deal long before FDR came into the picture. The difference had been, he says, that his father had applied it to the barnyard level where it belonged.

A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., of Chapel Hill, thanks The News for its endorsement of Willis Smith, and expresses pleasant surprise at the fact.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Just why the newspaper this date chose to lay forth so many letters to the editor at once on various topics while eliminating the usual two columns from the syndicated columnists is neither stated nor readily discernible by inference from the letters or the circumstances of the day. If, by the fact that most of these letters related to politics, the newspaper hoped, on the last day available for voter registration in the county before the May 27 primary, to encourage more of it, of which it had complained twice editorially for its dearth, it was a day late, as the newspaper did not hit the newstands or the front yards generally until late afternoon.

In any event, it is a first, at least since fall, 1937, insofar as the corn we recollect.

¹For reasons you might discern from a good sneeze, Bruce Barton, in his column of this date, might have concluded that the problem of overpopulation to which he referred was the product of Murphy's Law—which, if you recall, albeit with a "hey" rather than a "hy" on the end, is directly across the quadrangle from the old history building at UNC, formerly known as Saunders Hall, now changed, as of March, 2015, to Carolina Hall, for the fact that Col. William L. Saunders, for whom the building was originally dedicated in 1920, had been, putatively, the head of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, or "The Invisible Empire", as it was then known as a variant thereof. That fact had lain dormant for about 90 years and no one cared, knew or gave any attention to the matter, certainly never broadcast it around campus in the least, in scuttlebutt or otherwise, during our tenure at the University, or, to our knowledge, in our papa's tenure at the University beginning in 1928, indeed Saunders Hall not in any respect having been at any time a prominent building on campus—until some students, with obviously too much time on their hands, found out the history surrounding Col. Saunders, apparently from too much assiduous attention paid to the entries in Wicked-pedia, and went to town with it, starting around 2014.

But was Col. Saunders, or had he ever been, a member or leader of that notorious organization? To that question, along with several others of the same type, phrased in exactly that language, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to answer in 1871 before the Joint Select Committee Investigating the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, including Klan activities in North Carolina, basing his refusal on the fact that at the time in North Carolina, as he explained, one could be held accountable for the acts of all members of the Klan or a similar organization by virtue of mere membership, as had been the case in a murder for which a Dr. Tarpley was held to answer as an accomplice, though not a participant in any criminal act. He did affirmatively answer, "No", when asked whether he had any personal knowledge of the persons who had committed certain murders and whippings which had taken place in Orange County, N.C., locus of the University, as charged against members of the Klan at the time. No one else called before the Committee implicated Col. Saunders in Klan activity or mentioned him by name or was asked about him.

Fair? Is it right to conclude, because a person asserts his or her privilege against self-incrimination, that adverse inferences are to be drawn from the fact? That is not what the law says we should do, in fact, says the exact opposite. What if we change the scenario from the Klan in the latter 1860's and 1870's to being a member of the Communist Party in the latter 1940's and 1950's? Are you now or have you ever been? The framework for addressing the issue, insofar as the Constitution is concerned, is precisely the same. Both scenarios tread on the Constitutional right to freedom of association. Both groups, the Klan in the 1870's and the Communists in the 1950's, had been labeled subversive. Indeed, unlike Communist Party membership, it was a felony in North Carolina in 1871 to be a member of the Klan or a similar group. Thus, pleading the Fifth Amendment had a genuine justification in law and did not necessarily thereby suggest membership or leadership.

The kicker to the story is that the attribution of Klan leadership to Col. Saunders is based entirely on the brief case for it made by Dr. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton of the University in his 1914 work, Reconstruction in North Carolina, in which he cites a 1903 letter sent to him from Col. Joseph Webb and the above-linked testimony of Col. Saunders as the sources for his conclusion. Dr. Hamilton, for whom Hamilton Hall, the social sciences building, was named in 1972 when it opened, was also an ardent segregationist who approved of white supremacy, according to the UNC Board of Trustees in 2015, (see 19:15 in the video), when they approved the name change of Saunders Hall. Dr. Hamilton appears to have concluded from the exercise by Col. Saunders of his Fifth Amendment privilege that he was in fact the Klan leader.

Also, no one has explained how, if Col. Saunders could not speak properly for having been shot in the throat during the Civil War, either, depending on the source, at Fredericksburg charging toward the stonewall or in the Battle of the Wilderness, he managed to testify before the Joint Select Committee in 1871 and be heard and understood without apparent difficulty.

The Board of Trustees, in making the name change, placed great emphasis on the fact that a card used in the dedication of the building in 1920 had among the list of the achievements of Col. Saunders that he was "head of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina". While that does suggest that the Board of Trustees in 1920 considered this shameful attribute in naming the building, it does not go beyond Dr. Hamilton's conclusion in rendering the attribution of the title more than hearsay. It is more an indictment of the 1920 Board of Trustees than Col. Saunders, who had died 29 years earlier.

Why not obliterate the names of all of the buildings which that Board named, starting with the Upper Quad dormitories, all therefore being highly suspect? And that now notoriously reprehensible attribution was only listed among his more notable achievements, prime among which was his collating and editing The Colonial Records of North Carolina for the State Archives. He had also been a member of the UNC Board of Trustees from 1874 through 1891 at his death.

Sometimes, it is better to leave such things alone as they developed through time, to provide an historical tour of progress through campus history, any campus or any town, as one would find in probably any campus in the nation which has been extant since the Eighteenth Century, as UNC, or even since the mid-Nineteenth Century, whether in the South or elsewhere, buildings, other facilities or endowments named for individuals, who, upon probing, would be found to have clay feet of one sort or another, if not vestiges of the segregated history of the nation in an earlier time, then some other issue, such as the exploitative Cecil Rhodes, who endowed the Rhodes Scholarship. How about the Nobel Prize? If a place, as some are, is named for Malcolm X, is it named for the Malcolm who hated the "white, blue-eyed devils", as taught by Elijah Muhammad, or the Malcolm after he went to Mecca and realized that white people, per se, were not his enemy but that hate and institutional racism constituted the problem? To target UNC in this regard, when it was the leader in the South in integration among colleges and universities, starting toward that goal under the presidency of Frank Porter Graham during the Thirties, causes the effort to remove merely a name from a building, in place for 95 years, to be of even more dubious merit.

What if ten or twenty years from now, some students, with rightist leanings of the Jesse Helms stripe, decide, after digging back through 1950 newsprint, that the Graham Memorial, named for Frank Porter Graham, on McCorkle Place, next to Franklin Street, formerly the student union until 1970, is named for a Communist or Communist sympathizer and therefore insist that it be renamed the Willis Smith Memorial? That would be deemed rather stupid and ridiculous.

Just food for thought, next time you want to start changing things of little consequence and less effect, just to get your names in the newspapers for fifteen minutes and feel like you have accomplished something, even though it is no more than a grand distraction from the real issues confronting the society, complicating those issues the more rather than being salutary, creating backlash where none needed to have been stirred. Because, after all, the result of this sort of nonsense in recent years is the Grand Nonsense, in reaction, which we now have before us in the White House in 2017. How many people said that they were voting for the Republican in the election of 2016 because they were tired of "political correctness"?—even if that was a nonsensical statement. Was it enough to have turned the electoral college the other way? It did not take but around 78,000 votes in three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to perform the trick.

Symbols and names get lost in history and change nothing one way or the other by trying to obliterate them. No one was ever walking around the UNC campus between 1920 and 2016, silently thinking, "Ha, ha, Saunders Hall is named for the old head of the Klan, good ol' boy, ho, ho." People walk by buildings, promenades, and the like every day and never give a second thought to the person for whom they happen to be named. How many people even know for whom Dealey Plaza, the most darkly notorious green space in the nation, was named in the 1930's, and that its namesake has a very direct connection to the Belo House in Old Salem in Winston-Salem? Until recent years, we did not.

We only hope, college humor being what it is, that twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years from now, or perhaps sooner should a Duke student be of such a mind, Carolina Hall does not have painted over its initial letter a "K", to stab home the point regarding the Kollege of Musical Knowledge.

And, likewise, nobody cares about "Silent Sam" with his Civil War musket nearby the Graham Memorial, standing before the stone wall at the leading edge of the campus, who has never shot his gun off, so far as we know, to this day. Go down to Shelby, home to Thomas Dixon, and get their Civil War Confederate off of the old Courthouse Square, now their Cleveland County Museum, and, likewise, from a thousand other courthouse squares across the South, before you bother with a standing joke for decades on the UNC campus. He, according to legend, fires his salute only for passing Carolina virginal coeds. So, most have nothing about which to worry.

If, by the way, you should think for one moment that we defend the Klan or the Confederacy, you have not read much of this site's content or read it very well. But we do believe in freedom of association and free speech for every citizen and that silencing debate on a topic or trying to obscure it as if it never existed only sends it underground where it then becomes quite dangerous. It is likewise dangerous, indeed, to our system of justice to assume that pleading the Fifth Amendment implies guilt of matters imported by the questions. That is the way of HUAC and Fascism and Inquisitions. And that is the case, no matter who pleads it and no matter who is asking the questions. No one holds a royal prerogative in this country. We must teach of the past, honestly, and place it in perspective, not engage in obscurantism or an attempt to hide it or give it a little make-up and seek to prettify it in cheap sentiment.

We believe that before any building not generically named on any campus is renamed, especially when contemplated for political reasons at the behest of a small, vocal group, however amorphous it may be, every single living alumnus should be consulted by mail on the topic, with full arguments laid forth for each side of the issue, (cf. the average California voter pamphlet on propositions, indecent or no), and a plebiscite held, expense or no expense. We do not wish to visit our alma mater one day and not recognize any of the old familiar places on campus for all having new names, and think therefore that we have arrived in someone else's life, out in Kansas somewhere beyond the rainbow.

Maybe, it should be renamed eventually Justice Hall, after Charlie Justice. That might be somehow poetic, as it is the case, as we have pointed out previously, that Gerald Ford attended a summer Navy pre-flight training program at the University during the war, in Manning Hall, then the law school, located immediately at a right angle to the Hall formerly known as Saunders. Chew on that for awhile.

While about it, we should ask whether the four South Campus dormitories, constructed in the early to mid-Sixties in the form of X's, as seen from the air, known by some in an earlier time as the "Jock Dorms", somehow subliminally reference super-pornography of the 42nd Street variety, miracle or no, or some other nefarious cult sigil?

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