The Charlotte News

Friday, November 5, 1954

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site ed. Note: The front page reports that at the U.N. in New York, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., told the General Assembly this date that the U.S. was prepared to begin talks with other countries on bilateral agreements to furnish atomic materials for research reactors overseas as part of its proposed program to share atomic knowledge for peace. In outlining a program of action for the ensuing year, Ambassador Lodge said that the U.S. was prepared to train persons to operate nuclear reactors, to offer courses in nuclear safety, and to invite 150 foreign cancer experts to visit American cancer research facilities and exchange views with American doctors. He said that the U.S. was prepared to give to the principal technical libraries of cooperating nations ten libraries of data on nuclear energy, plus sets of cards abstracting 50,000 scientific and technical publications from all countries. There was no indication from the Russians as to whether they had changed their determination not to participate in the proposed "atoms for peace" program, as suggested by the President the previous December before the U.N. Ambassador Lodge made it clear that the door was still open to the Russians to participate in the program. He said that the U.S. had been discussing the program with Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Belgium, South Africa and Portugal. He said that an international agency could be established on a basis similar to the specialized agencies of the U.N., operating under their own budgets and constitutions. The Administration wanted the program maintained without close entangling ties with the U.N. Ambassador Lodge said that small research reactors, which could be built within a year for well under $500,000, would help in the practical application of atomic research regarding medicine, farming and industry.

The President this date invited Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders to a briefing at the White House regarding foreign affairs on November 17. Bipartisan consultation on foreign policy had been undertaken periodically during the first two years of the Administration, but the meeting for November 17 appeared to underscore the stated desire of the President, made clear at his Wednesday press conference, to cooperate in every way possible with the new Democratic leadership in the Congress. The new Senate Majority Leader, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, had promised to meet the President "more than half way" in approaching the nation's problems. Outgoing Majority Leader, Senator William Knowland of California, said that the President wanted to have good relations with the Democrats in the interest of the national welfare.

In New Jersey, top Republican leaders met behind closed doors this date to discuss a Democratic request for bipartisan action to impound all ballots in the New Jersey Senatorial race of Tuesday between Republican Clifford Case and Congressman Charles Howell, with Mr. Case having a 3,300 vote majority. The possibility of a recount loomed, despite a re-canvassing of votes in all except three of the state's 21 counties having produced an additional 1,000 votes for Mr. Case.

Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, testifying before the joint Atomic Energy Committee, stated to colleagues this date that the proposed Dixon-Yates power contract with the Atomic Energy Commission reeked of government subsidy and guaranteed profits and that there was no private enterprise in it, that it could not be clothed with respectability by asserting that it was executed in the name of private enterprise. The Committee was reviewing the proposal to provide private power through the lines of TVA for West Memphis, Ark. Senator Gore urged the Committee not to accede to the requests of the Administration for execution of the contract. By law, the contract had to be delayed until both the Senate and House had been in session for 30 days, unless the Atomic Energy Committee waived that provision, meaning that the contract could not be executed until early February absent the waiver, which had been urged the previous day by the AEC and the Budget Bureau. The power to be supplied to the Memphis area by Dixon-Yates over TVA lines would replace a like amount of power which TVA furnished to atomic plants at Paducah, Ky., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The Defense Department this date raised the tentative total of U.S. battle casualties during the Korean War to 142,091, 24 more than the number reported the prior July 22. The new summary would be the last to be issued by the Pentagon until all casualty books on the war were closed several years hence. Twenty-four Americans were still listed as missing, of whom 15, all Air Force fliers, were definitely known to be alive, while the remaining nine had been crew members of a Navy plane which had been shot down in the South China Sea in January, 1953, with the Communists having since denied holding those fliers as captives, though reports had been received that they had been paraded through the streets of Swatow, China. The latest report placed the total number of killed in the war at 23,300, a decrease of 45, and the total wounded at 105,785, an increase of 17, with the new total of men missing being stated as 13,006, an increase of 52. The audit would continue until all possibility of error was removed.

In New York, the stock market put up strong resistance to a hard selling wave this date, but gradually was forced to decline in the early afternoon, after it had staged the largest two-day rally in 15 years in the wake of the midterm elections, with the better than expected Republican showing. This date, however, many traders apparently wished to take their profits and get out of the market, but the selling wave was quickly neutralized by renewed buying, and, on balance, the market remained higher, although with many leading stocks being lower and the best gains cut back. On Wednesday, the Associated Press average of 60 stocks had set a 25-year high at $139.10, gaining an average of $1.80.

In Paris, residents were unable to purchase bread this date following a 24-hour strike by bakers, closing down virtually all shops. The strike was in protest of Government retail price ceilings, which the bakers said were too low to cover rising costs—the dough rising slower than the dough. Some families, forewarned of the strike the previous night, had stocked up for the day, with some bakers having stayed open later than usual the previous night to serve their regular customers.

In Washington, singer Dick Haymes lost his appeal this date on a deportation order before the Board of Immigration Appeals, but his attorney said that they would continue to fight the order in U.S. District Court.

In San Francisco, as pictured, a man who threatened to shoot his mother-in-law and then turn the gun on himself following an argument between the two, was coaxed to surrender by police officers and was taken to a hospital for observation.

In Norwood, Mass., the semi-nude body of a 15-year old girl, apparently the victim of a sexual attack, had been found this date in the doorway of a garage in her own backyard, after having been reported missing late the previous night, failing to return home after a double date with a friend from school and their two boyfriends. The other three said that they had let the girl out of their car the previous night at a corner about 75 yards from her home. The girl's sister had spotted the body from a window of their home in the early morning. A string of beads had been pulled tightly around the girl's neck. An autopsy was ordered after no external wounds were found, with State police indicating that she was apparently the victim of a sexual attack. Police said that there were several complaints of men molesting young girls in the neighborhood during recent months. The town was only 15 miles from Walston, where a 10-year old girl had been found stabbed at least 75 times and bitten on the legs on the night of October 24, after being taken captive by a man posing as a police officer, who had held her in his car for 2 1/2 hours. The assailant in that attack remained at large. On September 28 in Springfield, a 14-year old girl and a four-year old boy for whom she had been babysitting had been stabbed to death, allegedly by an 18-year old neighbor, who was awaiting trial on the charges.

In Cleveland, O., the defense lawyer for Dr. Samuel Sheppard, accused of the first-degree murder of his wife, Marilyn, the previous July 4, cross-examined the deputy coroner, asking whether he had drawn a conclusion as to the location a weapon had first struck Mrs. Sheppard's body, to which the coroner had said he had not. He had testified during direct examination the previous day that she had been struck 35 times on the head, face, shoulders and hands. The jury had been shown seven color slides of Mrs. Sheppard's battered body, projected on a screen. One of the slides had shown that one of her fingernails had been nearly torn off the ring finger of her left hand. The defense attorney asked the deputy coroner whether he had noticed any rings on her finger and he said that he had observed an official of the coroner's office remove rings from her hands but did not notice from which fingers they had come. Dr. Sheppard the previous day had broken down crying as the jury examined the slides, but during this day's testimony, had remained largely stoic. Defense counsel had asked the deputy coroner whether or not he had made any tests of Mrs. Sheppard for poisoning, and if not, why not, and whether he should not have made a microscopic examination of the wounds and the blood to determine if they contained foreign objects, the deputy coroner responding that he had made a visual examination which had satisfied him that there were no such foreign objects. During a recess, the assistant defense attorney had informed reporters that they were trying to cast doubt on the work generally of the coroner's office in producing its report, and of the bungling on the part of everyone connected with the case.

In Pittsburgh, the driver of a car, with its rear wheels over the brink of a cliff above a chasm of 500 feet, remained behind the steering wheel early this date until six female passengers had gotten out of the vehicle and police had arrived to pull it back from its precarious perch. The man was taking six women home from an evening of bowling when the motor had stalled on a steep street and the car began drifting backward until its rear wheels were over the cliff edge. The driver had pressed hard on the brake, managing to hold the car in its tenuous position while the women had clambered out. Eventually, a tow truck arrived on the scene and pulled the car back onto the roadway.

On the editorial page, "Skilled Hands for a New Tool" indicates that planning for orderly metropolitan growth in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County was highly specialized and was not a job for part-time politicians or full-time bureaucrats, that it required professionally trained and experienced personnel. It tells of the City-County Planning Commission having made an important move to give the community such expertise by selecting the new director of planning, William McIntyre, from Cleveland, with an excellent background in the field, which it details. He would begin his duties at the start of the year and it was to be hoped, it indicates, that he would be able to organize his staff quickly and get right to work. Many weeks earlier, Charlotte and Mecklenburg County had provided the new tool of the planning commission and during this week, had found the skilled hands needed to use that tool effectively.

"How Reds Reap What Americans Sow" indicates that more than half of the human race was illiterate and Americans were teaching hundreds of thousands of people how to read and write. But when they became literate, Communists, in many cases, began educating them to Communist doctrine.

Dr. Frank Laubach, an American missionary who had gone to the Philippines 39 years earlier and after 14 years had believed he had been a failure because he could not communicate with the natives, who had no written language, had begun charting the Moro language, possessed of only 16 consonants, finding that he could teach natives to read. During the previous 25 years, he had taught 239 languages in 88 countries. Presently, he and artist Philip Gray, plus a few helpers, were developing illustrated primers for use by the natives. Mr. Gray had recently returned from six months in the Near East, where he had found that Communists were following the Laubach crews through villages to determine which basic words were being taught and sending the lists back to Communist officials, whereupon the Communists would print lessons based on the primer vocabulary, which were then distributed free or sold cheaply to the natives. The State Department, according to Mr. Gray, was not doing anything in the way of follow-up work with the natives.

But the Department had been unable to obtain sufficient appropriations for President Truman's Point Four program of technological assistance, and very few members of Congress or Administration leaders had supported the idea of the follow-up. Thus the work of Dr. Laubach and Mr. Gray, supported primarily by American church groups, had sometimes ended, at least temporarily, in benefiting the Communists.

It indicates that it was doubtful that Congress would soon become interested enough in that foreign policy failure to finance an adequate follow-up program, which would mean that private citizens and organizations would have to do the job if it was to be done at all, suggesting an opportunity for church groups and foundations.

"Votes, Like Women, Are Powerful" indicates that the midterm elections had shown more dramatically than any other in recent times the power of the individual voter, with the election of Richard Neuberger in Oregon to the Senate over incumbent Senator Guy Cordon, having been decided by fewer than 2,000 votes, in turn deciding control of the Senate by the Democrats. In New Jersey, Republican Senator-elect Clifford Case had also won narrowly over his Democratic opponent, Congressman Charles Howell. In Michigan, Democrat Pat McNamara had won by a narrow margin over incumbent Senator Homer Ferguson. In New York, Averell Harriman had won the gubernatorial election by a close margin over Senator Irving Ives.

The Democrats wound up controlling the Senate by only one seat, that of independent Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, who had pledged to vote with the Democrats regarding organizational control, a flip of his position at the beginning of the 83rd Congress, after he had become an independent during the fall of 1952, when, under the same scenario of a one-seat Republican majority, he had pledged to vote with the Republicans for organizational control and in tie votes, with Vice-President Nixon supplying the tiebreaker. It indicates that if fewer than 6,500 voters for Democratic candidates in Oregon, Montana and Wyoming had not voted, the Republicans would have a 50 to 45 Senate majority. It therefore concludes that one should never underestimate the power of a vote.

"Red, White, Blue" indicates that one of the better suggestions resulting from the midterm elections was the proposal that in future elections, ballots should be of distinctly different colors and ballot boxes colored to match. It suggests that it would save time and reduce the prospect of some ballots winding up in the wrong boxes when polling places were busy. It commends the suggestion to election officials.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "A Southern Reconnaissance", indicates that in the South there had been various approaches to the problems raised by Brown v. Board of Education, decided the previous May 17, holding continued segregation of public schools unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. Oral arguments from the states impacted by the decision would be heard by the Supreme Court on December 6 regarding the implementing decision in Brown, whether desegregation should be implemented gradually or all at once. Non-cooperation had been the answer in some states while open hostility to the decision had been exhibited in others.

North Carolina had been one of the Southern pacemakers in studying the implications of the decision, with Governor William B. Umstead having appointed for the purpose an able, nonpolitical commission, composed of state leaders in education, business, the social sciences, and professionals. The Institute of Government in Chapel Hill had made a report to the Governor dealing with the interracial life of the state, which, historically and statistically, was almost without parallel for its educational value.

Reconnaissance in the South was being furthered by the Southern School News—edited by News editor on leave Pete McKnight—, published by the Southern Education Reporting Service. The piece indicates that the publication, aided by the Ford Foundation and published under the auspices of a group of Southern editors, headed by Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was objectively factual and expressed no opinions of its own. It indicates that facts were the first requirement regarding the Brown decision to lead to understanding and simplification of its complexities, and that the South was searching for that understanding through some of the region's most skilled hands.

The South, unfortunately, because of some of its least skilled hands, would detract from its progress in race relations through a combination of Deep South racial hatred run rampant among the lesser lights and lesser light juries who insisted on nullification in well-publicized individual cases, such as the murder of Emmett Till the following August 28 and subsequent acquittal of the two brothers who admittedly committed the brutal slaying because the 14-year old had given a wolf-whistle and been sassy with the wife of one of the brothers at their general store in Money, Miss., or the later case of the murder of the three civil rights workers, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney outside Philadelphia, Miss., by a group of Klansmen acting in concert, enabled and led by the deputy sheriff, Cecil Price, in June, 1964, the State, however, in that latter case refusing prosecution despite strong evidence of guilt uncovered by an FBI investigation of the matter, leading to Federal prosecutions of 18 men, seven of whom, including deputy Price, subsequently found guilty of civil rights violations in 1967 and sentenced to modest terms of between three and ten years, the maximum sentences then allowable under the Federal statutes, with the State finally in 2005 prosecuting "Preacher" Edgar Ray Killen for his role in organizing the lynching party, a jury finding him guilty of manslaughter, leading to imposition of the maximum sentence of twenty years on each of the three counts, run consecutively. The tendency continued even into the early 1980's, as exampled by the 1980 acquittal in Greensboro, N.C., of five Klansmen who killed five individuals, four of whom were Communist Workers Party members, and wounded six others during a rally designed to organize textile workers, the jury finding self-defense notwithstanding the scene having been videotaped and demonstrating plainly that the Klansmen had committed unprovoked murder and assault in November, 1979, a Federal jury in Greensboro also acquitting nine defendants in 1984 of alleged criminal civil rights violations arising from the same incident, two of the five persons killed, one of whom was not a CWP member, having been physicians, and another of whom was a medical student. (We mention the CWP membership of some of the victims in the latter case, not because it in any manner changes the gravity of the mass murder committed by shotgun and pistol wielding Klansmen with impunity in broad daylight in Greensboro in 1979 but because right-wingers, including people who believe themselves "moderate" while in fact having become so inured to such rightwing views that anything short of outrght fascism seems to them moderate, will inevitably bring it up in connection with any mention of that incident, as if the fact should lessen the culpability, a fact which no doubt impacted the juries in both prosecutions.)

Today, in 2021, the trend toward nullification appears alive and well, in Kenosha, Wisc., after the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, of the murders of two victims and the assault of a third 15 months ago, the jury finding he acted in self-defense, despite it being undisputed that neither of the dead victims were armed or sought to use any deadly force against the AR-15 wielding nut, Mr. Rittenhouse, who claimed he came to strife-ridden Kenosha to help "preserve the peace" with his loaded AR-15. No one could have reasonably reached the conclusion that the acts of shooting four times the AR-15, each bullet hitting the first victim, including a fatal shot to the head, constituted self-defense, only on the pretext of feeling threatened by being chased initially by the first unarmed victim, who eventually reached toward the muzzle of the weapon, after Mr. Rittenhouse demonstrated his intention to fire, with the victim having evidenced the clear intent only momentarily to deflect the rifle from firing at him, and then in a second shooting spree four minutes later a few blocks away against two individuals, who were trying separately, after learning of the first shooting, to act as good citizens in attempting to disarm the maniac with the AR-15, the second homicide victim having hit Mr. Rittenhouse a glancing blow to the back of his neck with a skateboard which did not faze or deter him, and the third victim, shot in the arm by Mr. Rittenhouse, having then, after Mr. Rittenhouse shot the second victim, pointed a pistol at Mr. Rittenhouse to try to get him to stop pointing and shooting his AR-15, which he subsequently said he brought to Kenosha from his hometown in Illinois because he thought it looked "cool". Whereas this boy deserved a long prison term to think about his misdeeds, he has been freed by a jury which decided obviously to nullify the law of self-defense in Wisconsin, there being no rational basis, on the evidence presented, for finding the defendant not guilty, if not of intentional homicide, at least of reckless homicide.

Thus, no gomer had better take from this acquittal some license to kill in self-defense, just because someone starts chasing an open-carrying nutbag with a rifle, looking for trouble in a public place, causing bystanders obvious and intentionally inflicted distress, feeling reasonably threatened by the gun-carrying nut. That is not a ground for self-defense against a charge of homicide, even in Wisconsin. Nor, even if so, could it possibly be grounds for self-defense in the second round of shooting four minutes later, just a couple of blocks away from the first scene after Mr. Rittenhouse fled the first scene, still carrying his rifle at the ready, not offering to disarm, claiming falsely to bystanders as he ran away that he had shot the first victim because "he had a gun", the second and third victims clearly having acquired the right of defense of others to try, with non-lethal force, which was all either initially employed, the third victim resorting to production of a handgun only after Mr. Rittenhouse fatally shot the second victim, to disarm this little maniac after he had evidenced his intent to shoot a person.

One positive thing, perhaps, which might emerge from this travesty, as a lasting reminder, is that the face of the Second Amendment is now etched firmly in the country's rational mind as the whimpering, little mama's boy, Kyle, carrying his big, bad AR-15 like the little sissy that he is, whimpering with his little puffy face like a four-year old child. His tears during the trial amid insistence that he did not want to kill anyone in August, 2020 when he came to town "to help", suddenly disappeared in his arrogant post-trial assertion to Fox News, his champion throughout the case, that self-defense is a valid defense, positing himself as Kyle the Lawgiver. That is true when the defense applies properly to the facts in evidence, that lethal force is available to defend reasonably against an initial aggressor exerting or threatening immediate lethal force, not against non-lethal force, or when the initial aggressor has clearly withdrawn from the combat and expressed that intention, here requiring that Mr. Rittenhouse lay down the weapon before shooting anyone.

No one at any juncture exerted any deadly force or threatened great or serious bodily injury to Mr. Rittenhouse, as no one was armed except the third victim, becoming evident only after the killing of the first victim a few blocks away four minutes earlier, and immediately after the fatal shooting of the second victim in the presence of the third victim, giving the third victim clear resort to defense of others in an attempt to disarm Mr. Rittenhouse through use of deadly force, if necessary to prevent further use of deadly force by Mr. Rittenhouse. Any threat of lethal force or threat of great bodily injury to Mr. Rittenhouse was strictly in his paranoid mind, made evident by his having armed himself to the teeth in the first instance. There was no evidence whatsoever that anyone present intended to disarm him to enable use of the weapon against him, the only evidence having been that they had the intent to prevent his further deadly use of the weapon.

This little boy is likely headed for some rough times ahead in the future, because he is mentally unbalanced and will seek to kill again when challenged, as inevitably he likely will be as time goes on. He came to Kenosha spoiling for a fight, looking for trouble, and killed two people, wounding a third. He walks free, but how far? To say that he did nothing wrong, that he only defended himself against the threat of death or great bodily injury, from a chase, first, by an unarmed man and then, in response to shooting his first victim, by a second victim who only grazed him in the back of the neck with a skateboard, is to deny the reality shown by the digital recordings of the incident, that is when one bothers to understand the law of self-defense and defense of others as it is written, not as your individual bias would like to have it, that self-defense only applies to people whose personal opinions you like and respect, while those of a different persuasion take their chances, even as unarmed bystanders seeking to disarm a little lunatic. Anyone seeking to emulate Mr. Rittenhouse and his homicidal conduct had first better study assiduously the law of self-defense in their jurisdiction and realize that but for a bad jury who decided collectively to nullify the laws of Wisconsin or simply did not understand the law of self-defense, he would be in prison, rightfully, for a good portion of the remainder of his worthless life.

It appears that the new Old South and its racially motivated justice system has been recreated, through Trumpism, in some of our Northern and Midwestern towns and cities, right down to the old racially loaded jury nullification system, serving to acquit, despite his being caught in the act on camera, a homicidal maniac in bad need of psychiatric help. We fault neither the prosecution nor the defense for their able work in the matter, nor the trial court for its rulings and instructions. But we can and do fault a jury who, either deliberately or ignorantly, misapplied the law to the danger of every citizen walking the streets of the country when confronted with some open-carrying lunatic such as Mr. Rittenhouse. We can and do also fault Fox News and their functional equivalent for politicizing this case, raising it to the level of a Second Amendment rights case, trying to justify vigilanteism strictly in defense of property, rather than treating it as the simple murder case it was, completely warping in the process the theoretical basis for self-defense, that it is never justification for use of lethal force against non-lethal force except in circumstances where the person resorting to lethal force reasonably perceives that lethal force or force likely to cause great bodily injury is about to be used against him or her and has no means of apparent escape from the exertion of that perceived force.

Don't bring your AR-15's or handguns to our town, or you will not be departing anytime soon, whimpering little mama's boy needing your gun as a replacement surrogate for the teddy bear chewed to shreds by the family dog when you were a little baby boy. Reconnaissance of the type with which the above piece was concerned does not mean, ever, armed reconnaissance in the face of no lethal threat, but reconnaissance instead of the mind, such as in the registration of voters in the Deep South in the summer of 1964, mindful reconnaissance of which each person after the age of infancy is capable in considerable coign of vantage over the omnipresent threat of the mindless environment, lacking consciousness, the sine qua non of humanity and the ultimate reason why the frail, fragile human being has survived against that foreboding environment through the ages. A gun never stopped a hurricane, earthquake, typhoon or forest fire.

Drew Pearson indicates that New York newspapers during October had featured front page stories calling attention to the fact that it had been exactly 25 years since the 1929 stock market crash which precipitated the Depression. After recalling the billions lost to big and little investors all over the country, those newspapers had noted that the stock market had now rebounded to the same high peak of 1929, speculating whether another crash could happen. Meanwhile, a Senate subcommittee had been looking at possible answers to that latter question. The committee, chaired by Senator William Langer of North Dakota and on which Senator Estes Kefauver was the ranking minority member, had pieced together a story of how some of the safeguards erected to prevent another crash had been ignored, including creation of the Securities & Exchange Commission, to police the stock market and protect the investor, and the Public Holding Corporation Act, which required large utilities to abandon the rule of Wall Street and place it in the hands of the local consumers who purchased the power and paid the electric bills. But the Langer-Kefauver committee had instead found that the SEC was working with Wall Street rather than policing it, and its chairman, Ralph Demmler, appointed by the President, was a partner in a Pittsburgh law firm with the late Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who had fought the SEC and battled against the Holding Corporation Act, which the SEC was supposed to enforce. That law firm had represented the Mellon interests plus various Pittsburgh banks, and it was difficult to understand how a man picked from such a background could enforce the SEC law with any enthusiasm. He provides a synopsis of how the SEC had operated with regard to the Mississippi Power & Light Company, part of the Dixon-Yates combine which had been awarded the Government power contract with the AEC by direct authority of the President, despite opposition to it by TVA and a majority of the AEC.

The Langer-Kefauver committee had brought out that SEC officials admitted they had sent no one to Mississippi to investigate charges made by the longtime secretary-treasurer of Mississippi Power & Light that a statement filed with the SEC by the company and its parent company had been false, which should have told the SEC to hold up the sale of stock proposed by the company and its parent company. But the SEC did nothing and the stock flotation was approved the following day.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop indicate that out of the midterm elections, if the Republican Party was half-way sensible, the biggest gainer would be the President and the biggest losers would be Senator McCarthy and Congressman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the latter having lost the New York attorney general race to Congressman Jacob Javits.

Despite the Republicans having lost control of both houses of Congress in the elections, the in-party had not gained an off-year election except twice in the 20th Century, and the shift in the House was trifling while that in the Senate was "infinitesimal". The House shift had occurred because in 1952, Republicans had run behind General Eisenhower in Congressional elections. They had done much better than most had expected in 1954 because of the great asset of the President.

The Alsops suggest that if anyone doubted it, they should consider the number of governorships lost by the Republicans as a good index of popularity of the party, or consider the biggest upset of all, the defeat of John Carroll by Lt. Governor Gordon Allott in Colorado, where the President had spent a large part of the two months prior to the election. It was also clear that the anti-Eisenhower type of Republican had suffered in the election.

Congressman George Bender, though a late convert to support of the President, had carried Ohio in a close Senate race over Joseph Meek, for the seat vacated by the death of Senator Robert Taft in July, 1953. Other Senate races showed the same type of pattern, with the showing of former Congressman Clifford Case in New Jersey being especially conspicuous.

In the House races, the adherents to Senator McCarthy, who had not been active in any Senate contest, had been in three House races of great importance, and had figured prominently in a fourth. In New Jersey, Fred Shepard, a follower of the Senator, had failed to capture a usually Republican seat presently held by Congressman Harrison Williams. In Wisconsin, Charles Kersten, another supporter of the Senator, had been defeated. In Michigan, "loud-mouth" Kit Clardy had been handily defeated by a local professor, Don Hayward, who had founded one of the Michigan ADA chapters. In each of those races, the Democrats had charged their Republican opponents with McCarthyism and asked the voters to choose between them on that basis. In a fourth race, Fred Busbey of Illinois was not so directly challenged by his opponent, James Murray, but Mr. Busbey's defeat completed the pattern.

The issue of having cleaned out Communists from the Government, as promoted by Vice-President Nixon during the campaign, had not succeeded, despite the Vice-President's effectiveness as a campaigner. The only exception was in Colorado, and that could be credited to the President's presence there.

Among Democrats, FDR, Jr., was the biggest loser because of his defeat, while the biggest gainers were Averell Harriman, who had narrowly won the gubernatorial race in New York over Senator Irving Ives, and former South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, because of his unprecedented write-in victory in the Senate race to succeed deceased Senator Burnet Maybank. Other Democrats whose stock had risen greatly were Governor G. Mennen Williams in Michigan and Governor Frank Lausche in Ohio.

As for the future, Republican response to the elections was more interesting than Democratic response, as Republicans could respond to the setbacks by adopting counsels of despair, despite the realities of midterm elections for the party in power. But if they were venomous and desperate because of the setback, they would be misreading the signs which indicated that the Republicans could still win in 1956, provided they followed the President, which was their choice lying ahead.

J. R. Wiggins, managing editor of the Washington Post and Times-Herald, indicates that the President would not lack precedents in dealing with the opposition party in control of Congress, as nine of 15 post-Civil War Presidents, from Ulysses Grant through President Eisenhower, had done so with at least one chamber controlled by the opposing party, six times involving the Senate and three times, the House, with four having dealt with both houses being so controlled. He presents a table showing the Presidents and those Congresses, with President Rutherford B. Hayes having had two such Congresses during his single term and President Grover Cleveland having had three, two during his first term and one during his second separate term, while Presidents Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Harry Truman each had one such Congress.

In the 1874 midterm elections during the Grant Administration, the Democrats had obtained control of the House by attacking corruption during President Grant's first term, as well as the bad economic times brought on by the 1873 panic. During that ensuing Congress, the Democrats uncovered frauds in the Treasury and War Departments, with the House proving extravagance, favoritism, inefficiency and jobbery in nearly all departments, laying good groundwork for the 1876 elections, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidential race in the disputed electoral college vote with Samuel Tilden, who had won the popular vote, but having to face a Democratic House in the first two years of his term and both chambers in Democratic hands during the second biennium. The Democrats regularly sent to the White House appropriation bills with riders bearing on election supervision in the South, as President Hayes had ended Reconstruction, and had vetoed a number of those bills. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878, requiring the Treasury to purchase two to four million dollars in silver each month, had passed over the President's veto. Despite the opposition, the record of the Hayes Administration had not been bad, as scandals were eliminated and the South was put back on its feet. Party feuds had subsided and the President could claim credit for healing Civil War wounds. He had also successfully ended Congressional usurpation of presidential prerogatives which had gone unchecked during the Grant Administration.

President Arthur, succeeding to the Presidency following the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, the first year of his term, had inherited from President Hayes and President Garfield the patronage quarrels with party stalwarts, coming out for the merit system and persuading Congress to pass the Pendleton Civil Service bill. The midterm elections in 1882 had given the Democrats control of the House and in the ensuing two years, the President had engaged in an indecisive tariff battle, with Democrats trying to put forward a 20 percent tariff cut in the House, as 40 Democrats deserted to the Republican side. But generally the time was politically placid, followed by the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland over James G. Blaine, with President Cleveland having to deal with a Republican Senate in both Congresses of his first term, his legislative accomplishments having nevertheless been substantial, including the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Dawes Act of the same year, establishing more effective regulation of railroads and better administration of Indian affairs. The Republican Senate had blocked President Cleveland's tariff reforms and made protection the issue of the ensuing presidential campaign, between President Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, resulting in the defeat of the incumbent.

President Harrison had a Democratic House after the midterm elections of 1890, rebelling against Republican rule in the chamber during the first two years, in which no serious business could be transacted because of division, speeches regarding the tariff and free silver taking up most of the time.

When President Cleveland was again elected over incumbent President Harrison in 1892, he had Democratic majorities in both houses, the first time the President's party had controlled both houses since 1853, during the term of President Franklin Pierce. But the panic of 1893, President Cleveland's insistence on repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, supported by Western and Southern Democrats, his opposition to veterans' pensions, intervention in the rail strike of 1894 and sale of gold bonds to private bankers had provoked reaction, such that in the elections of 1894, Republicans had captured the House decisively and the Senate by a margin of four seats. The Democrats were split by the money issue and the tariff, and President Cleveland's latter two years of the second term had been without significant legislative achievement. His foreign policy, however, had been supported by the Republican Congress when he had demanded arbitration of the Venezuelan boundary dispute, which had brought the country to the brink of war with Britain.

President Taft, beginning his term in 1909, had to deal with a Democratic House after the midterm elections of 1910, following his alienation of progressives in the West by stand-pat policies and conservatives in the East for his liberal tariff proposals. The midterm elections had produced a House which was decisively Democratic. The divided Congress had embarrassed him with tariff legislation which he refused to sign and had otherwise imposed a stalemate. He had one legislative achievement, the tariff reciprocity treaty with Canada, plus the creation of the parcel post system.

President Wilson, serving between 1913 and 1921, had to face the worst opposition Congress in the history of the country between 1919 and 1921, facing a Republican Senate majority by two seats and a House majority by 50 seats. The defeat of the ratification of the Versailles Treaty and its League of Nations by the Republican Senate was the outstanding event of that Congress.

President Hoover had a Democratic House in the second two years of his term, following the onset of the Depression. Speaker and future Vice-President under FDR, John Nance Garner, led the Democrats to pass President Hoover's depression program in short order, but that period of cooperation did not last long and ended with the President's veto of the Democrats' public works bill, which the President labeled the greatest pork-barrel measure ever devised.

President Truman faced a Republican Congress beginning in 1947, and during the 1948 campaign had labeled it the "do-nothing Congress". But, notwithstanding the label, it had passed measures which laid the groundwork for the President's chief claims to fame, while major foreign policy measures were passed on a bipartisan basis and the conduct of government had proceeded more effectively than in some Administrations under one party control.

Mr. Wiggins indicates that the experience with Congresses and opposition control had been so varied that it was impossible to reach any generalization as to how the 84th Congress would work.

A letter writer comments on the recent anti-cat letter and suggests that the author was a person who simply would not admit inferiority to cats and so detested them. She asks whether the reader had ever seen a household with a cat where it was not the master. She cannot imagine any true cat-lover being worried about paying a licensing fee for the privilege of giving a home to a kitten or cat, but asks how one might think the "cats would react to being brought down to the human plane".

A letter writer from Waxhaw responds to the same letter, the writer of which she regards as a "cat hater". She says that cats were helpful around the house in catching mice and rats, that the previous writer would apparently rather live with dirty mice and rats rather than have a nice, clean cat around, which took more baths than most people. She also resents being called "fuzzy-minded", says she had two cats presently and at one time had four adult cats and eight kittens, all of which had been well behaved and well-trained. She indicates that she wished that her cats would do something about the birds which were continually plaguing them, but were well-fed cats and did not harm the birds, that if they were hungry, they would catch birds to eat. She assumes that the previous writer did not eat meat. She says that her cats had never scratched or bitten a little child, regardless of how rough the children had been, but that she had heard of dogs biting and maiming little children. She agrees with the letter writer that cats should be licensed like dogs and that she would be glad to obtain a license for her cats when required by law. But she thinks that it would be only fair that if unlicensed cats were to be exterminated, as the previous letter writer had urged, then all unlicensed dogs should also be exterminated. She thinks it was better, however, to take them to the Humane Society so that some little child could have a loving pet. She indicates that there were plenty of unlicensed dogs in her neighborhood which chased her cats, turned over the garbage and did a lot of damage, something which no stray cat had ever done.

Cats cast spells, however, which dogs do not.

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