The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 5, 1954
THREE EDITORIALS
Site ed. Note: The front page reports that in Geneva, the U.S. had opened direct negotiations with Communist China this date, in an effort to obtain the release of an estimated 83 American civilians and military personnel detained by the Chinese following the Korean War Armistice and disposition of war prisoners. The exact number was not known by the U.S. delegation, but an official breakdown had shown that 54 civilians and 29 military personnel were either under arrest or refused visas. It represented the first direct contact which the U.S. had at Geneva with Communist China, the U.S. having previously refused to deal with any regime it did not diplomatically recognize. A member of the U.S. delegation made clear that the meeting did not involve recognition of the Communist Chinese, that the country had always sought to negotiate with its enemies regarding prisoners of war. An American source described the meeting as "very friendly". There was no comment regarding whether there had been any resolution reached. The meetings would continue.
Also at the conference, the Vice-President of the Philippines, Carlos Garcia, rejected Communist plans for unification of Korea, calling them "fantastic", and instead supported the 14-point proposal of South Korea, which, he said, would support U.N. control and supervision of general elections to unify Korea while the Communist plan would weaken the U.N. The South Korean proposal also insisted on withdrawal of Chinese troops from North Korea a month prior to the elections, while U.N. troops would be withdrawn in stages, with some remaining until the election results were certified by the U.N. The North Korean proposal would place the election under the control of a joint organization of North and South Koreans, formed in such a way that the Communists would have veto power. The conference had returned to the Korean question for the first time since May 28 after the nine-party Indo-China portion of the conference had stood in recess until the following Tuesday.
Senator McCarthy said this date that the story communicated by the long-secret monitored telephone calls between Senators, including Senator McCarthy, and Army officials, had blown up the Army's case against him, which consisted of charges that he and his aides, Roy Cohn and Francis Carr, primarily Mr. Cohn, had placed pressure on the Army to provide favors for Private G. David Schine following his draft by the Army the previous October, threatening that if those favors were not accorded the Private, the subcommittee, chaired by Senator McCarthy, would intensify its ongoing investigation at that time of the Army for harboring subversives, especially at the Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, secret radar research facility, operated by the Signal Corps. The Senator was about to depart Washington for Wisconsin, where he would deliver a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Republican Party. The transcripts of the monitored calls had been placed in the record of the Army-McCarthy hearing the previous day, quoting Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, from a March 8 conversation with Senator Stuart Symington of the subcommittee, occurring shortly before the filing of the Army's report on the pressure tactics of the Senator and his aides, saying that the reports of preferential treatment for the Private "were very much exaggerated". (Secretary Stevens appears to have been talking only about the actual preferential treatment accorded by the Army to Private Schine, that he did not think there was any serious problem for the Army in that regard, and not the efforts by Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn to obtain favorable treatment for him.) Senator Symington was quoted as advising Secretary Stevens to seek advice from Clark Clifford, a former top aide to President Truman, and that Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, eventually to become, in 1957, Attorney General, later, in 1969, Secretary of State under President Nixon, was "one other fellow that is on your side." Senator Symington said that he had taken sides with the Army in an effort to help stop Senator McCarthy's reported abuse of Army witnesses, but had not talked to any of the principals in the case outside the hearing room after the subcommittee had determined to take up the investigation of the dispute, and that he did not know whether Secretary Stevens had ever sought the advice of Mr. Clifford. Senator McCarthy had previously contended that Mr. Rogers had been among Administration officials outside the Army who had a hand in the case. Mr. Rogers had been present at a January 21 meeting, at which were also present White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, and U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., at which, according to Army general counsel John G. Adams in earlier testimony in the hearings, a directive was made by Sherman Adams for the Army to prepare its report on the matter of the preferential treatment sought for Private Schine, a report which Senator McCarthy charged was an attempt to "blackmail" him into ending his investigation of Communists in the Army.
In Raleigh, Governor William B.
Umstead this date appointed State Supreme Court Justice Sam J. Ervin
Here, incidentally, to provide some flavor of his jurisprudence, are the last three opinions he delivered on the State Supreme Court, handed down the previous day, all of which were civil cases. Here, also, are a pair of the last criminal cases on which he delivered opinions, both dealing with evidence of prior instances of conduct, in one case, among other issues, held to establish an admissible evidentiary basis for the State to establish intent, malice, motive, premeditation, and deliberation for the alleged first-degree murder and thus resulting in affirmance of the conviction, in the other case dealing with evidence of other crimes unrelated to the alleged crime or any element of it which the State had the burden to prove or other exception to the general rule forbidding other crimes evidence, held inadmissible and prejudicial to the verdict, resulting in reversal. Nothing in them forecasts the issues with which he would deal during the summer of 1973 as chairman of the Senate Select Committee investigating Watergate, for which he would become best known during his 20-year Senate career, ending with his retirement in 1974. He was a strict constructionist when it came to interpretation of the Constitution, and that view unfortunately colored his views on the issue of segregation, which he believed was a matter to be left to the states, though, by no means, can he thus be grouped with the virulent Southern politicians who not only supported segregation but engaged in rhetoric designed to give free rein to violence in the name of preserving that outmoded system. Senator Ervin, in that respect, was a student of his time and place of raising, both in his youth and in the law, and it would be a serious historical mistake to lump him with those virulent racists and segregationists of the South, especially the Deep South, who came to the fore in the 1950's and 1960's. Senator Ervin was not among them, favoring a more moderate approach to race relations, believing that Federal intervention was a mistake which would only breed violence from the reactionary elements. He was a proper student of the Bible, and, as became evident during the Watergate hearings, did not forget that part where Jesus, in a fit of pique, expelled the money-changers from the Temple. His training in the law led him to believe strongly in the separation of powers stated in the Constitution. He also believed that ordinary crimes of burglary and wire-tapping, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, had no place within the law, in the name of preservation of "national security", the while being pretexts conjured by the executive branch to get at political enemies.
Yet, not dissimilar to the case of
Justice Hugo Black and those who, precisely because of his liberal
record as a Senator, cynically raised objection to his brief foray
into Klan membership during the 1920's shortly after his quick
confirmation in 1937 to the Supreme Court, the same type of cynicism
dogged Senator Ervin regarding his earlier views on segregation,
raised up by those cynics, who, themselves, had no record of
achievement in race relations, only after it became evident during
the summer of 1973 that he would not sugarcoat or accept the behavior
of the President or his agents in the Watergate break-in of the DNC
national headquarters to attempt a wiretap, its attempted cover-up, or the general conduct of
the Administration, indicative of an attempt to make the executive
branch virtually omnipotent, a law unto itself, that "when the
President says it's right, it's right", as President Nixon
Senator Ervin was, indeed, a bridge over troubled water, that being the Potomac, when the country needed him and his country-lawyer wisdom, honed and refined by UNC and Harvard, more than at any other time in its history since the Civil War. The Watergate hearings inevitably led to other investigations by the Senate and the House into political shenanigans and abuse of Government power by the FBI and CIA, including creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. If one was not alive and witness to the daily skein of events during the 1960's and 1970's, it is very difficult, we trow, fully to appreciate those times and what they meant to the average citizen in terms of government accountability after a long period of unchecked abuse by the executive branch, that the very framework and fabric of our democracy was in danger of being shredded by those seeking to usurp power of the type only available in totalitarian dictatorships. But for the bold action, largely bipartisan in nature, of the members of the Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Ervin, the country, then, to great degree, languishing in its lapdog, lackadaisical state of mind, as shown by the overwhelming vote for the re-election of President Nixon in 1972, might have succumbed to the tyrant. It was close.
President Nixon-"P"—"I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in. They didn't have to do it. If we had had a very close election and they were playing the other side, I would understand this. No—they were doing this quite deliberately and they are asking for it and they are going to get it. We have not used the power in this first four years as you know. We have never used it. We have not used the Bureau and we have not used the Justice Department but things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go."
—from White House Tape Transcript of September 15, 1972 conversation between President Nixon, Bob Haldeman and John Dean, Oval Office, 5:27-6:17, p. 63, as published by the New York Times, May, 1974
In New York, Adlai Stevenson, speaking to a bicentennial conference at Columbia University, said this date that America was suffering from a "national neurosis" of self-doubt and might be at the crossroads of democracy and totalitarianism. "That we are not invulnerable … is, I think, demonstrated by the many symptoms of which McCarthyism … is only one." He said further that he was disturbed "by what seems to me that chorus at home and abroad of irrational criticism, abuse and mistrust of America, its motives and its peoples." He said that he did not mean only the attacks on academic freedom, the pressure for conformity, the country's failures in the field of foreign affairs or the "wretched manifestations in Washington of our national neurosis", but rather was talking "about malice, distemper and the new fashion of being cynical, sarcastic and skeptical about America, or about fellow Americans in large groups…"
In St. Louis, the Southern Baptist
Convention the previous night voted to support, "in the spirit
of Christ", the resolution in favor of the Supreme Court's
decision in Brown v. Board of Education, decided May 17,
finding the decision to have been "in harmony with the
Constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens, and with
the Christian principles of equal justice and love for all men."
Out of some 9,000 persons attending the convention, only about 50
opposed the resolution, which had been recommended by the
convention's Christian Life Commission. Loud applause greeted the
decision, after which the delegates sang "He Leadeth Me"
In Washington, the Navy was investigating three midshipmen, graduates the previous day of the Naval Academy, before they could become commissioned as officers. The father of one of the midshipmen said that he was to blame for the investigation of his son because 17 years earlier, he had purchased an insurance policy from an organization which was now on the Attorney General's subversive list, the International Workers Order, to which, he said, he had never belonged, and about which, his son had known nothing. He said he purchased the policy only because it was cheap and he needed the health benefits. He said that he dropped the policy when he learned that the Government was investigating his son regarding the matter.
Near Pusan in Korea, 27 Koreans were believed drowned the previous night when a ferry boat had capsized and sunk in the Naktong River, the boat having overturned when passengers, frightened by sudden leaks in the vessel, crowded to one side. There were 25 survivors who had swum ashore despite a strong current.
In Hickory, N.C., safecrackers, avoiding a burglar alarm system, blasted open the door of a large safe in a supermarket this date and made off with about $12,000 in cash and checks, having entered the store via a large ventilating fan in the rear, avoiding the burglar bugger-bell, utilizing explosives to blast open the safe. The local merchants association had issued a warning against cashing checks from that store.
Britons began the three-day
Whitsuntide
On the editorial page, "Are Security Regulations Too Rigid?" indicates that one of the more significant paragraphs in the majority report regarding Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, with which the Alsops this date also concern themselves, was that which, while refusing to reinstate his security clearance with the Atomic Energy Commission, had stated that an alternative recommendation would be possible if they were allowed to "exercise mature practical judgment without the rigid circumscription of regulations and criteria" established for them.
It finds that statement to have been an implied criticism of the new standards of security established by the Administration, that otherwise they would have cleared Dr. Oppenheimer if allowed "to exercise mature practical judgment". It suggests that the security regulations for the AEC remained rooted in the 1945-49 period when it had been assumed that the U.S. had a monopoly on atomic power, and that the monopoly would be preserved if the country maintained its secrets. That "mania for secrecy" in the atomic field had prevented the country from making use of the talents of scientists from allied nations, the same type of scientists who had contributed greatly to the development of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Now, such a program threatened continued service from those who were considered the most brilliant nuclear scientists in the country and perhaps the world.
It questions whether such rigid security restrictions were wise at a time when the national security depended not on hoarding of secrets but on full utilization of all of the best minds available to the country. It posits that the answer could not be found in the majority report of the three-person committee which had reviewed the case of Dr. Oppenheimer, that no one below the President could answer it, as it had been the President who had promulgated the rigid standards which had resulted in the denial of continued security clearance for Dr. Oppenheimer, apparently against their better judgment if not so constrained by the established standards.
"Doctor of Humanitarian Service" indicates that when Catawba College awarded an honorary doctorate in humanitarian service to Charlotte's I. D. Blumenthal at a recent commencement, it was the right degree for the right man. He had served on the Chamber of Commerce, the Mecklenburg Historical Society, the Park & Recreation Commission, the Carolina Spastics Association, United Community Services, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the local Humane Society, the local Symphony Society, and the local Opera Association, in addition to being an active Civitan, Mason and Shriner, and member and leader of B'nai B'rith. As a devout Jew, he was honorary life president of Temple Israel, president of the North Carolina Association of Jewish Men and originator of its new project for a circuit-riding rabbi to minister to the smaller Jewish communities of the state, as well as being the organizer and life director of the Charlotte Federation of Jewish Charities.
It thus finds the tribute to him by Catawba to have been well-deserved.
"A Bow to Alexander and Bell" indicates that the Social Planning Council was completing a year of solid accomplishment, having undertaken a comprehensive study, nearing completion, of black hospital needs, having helped to obtain jobs for temporarily unemployed persons, having made plans for a city-county recreation survey and devoting attention to other matters in which concrete benefits might soon be realized, including the care of unwed mothers, camping facilities for youths, and prisoner rehabilitation, while also maintaining its regular chores of the Christmas Bureau.
It praises the retiring president of the Council, H. Y. Alexander, and finds his successor, J. Spencer Bell, who had already contributed substantially to community service, to assure another year of substantial achievement.
A piece by Louis Graves, appearing in the Chapel Hill Weekly, titled "Outside Experts", indicates that experts outside the state who provided advice on some phase of government had become a familiar figure within the state, and usually consisted of an organization.
He recalls that the Brookings Institution, some 20 years earlier, had been summoned to formulate a plan for the University's consolidation, the plan ultimately proving a shock to Governor O. Max Gardner because it called for the concentration in Chapel Hill of activities which the Governor wanted at N.C. State in Raleigh, and so the plan was discarded in favor of one more palatable to the Governor.
In another instance, the McCormick Commission made a study of the state's prisons, proposing a plan of reorganization, ultimately ignored by the Governor and the Legislature.
Now, he indicates, the State Highway commissioner, A. H. Graham, was bringing in an outside expert to study the state's highways and recommend what ought to be done about them. Mr. Graves suggests that it would be a safe prediction that the recommendation would call for the expenditure of a large sum of money, as everyone recognized that to put the state's highways in proper shape would require a large expenditure. The question was whether the Legislature would approve of submitting a bond issue to the people which would be as large as that inevitably to be proposed by the experts, and that if it did, whether the people would then approve it or, ultimately, again reject the expert advice.
Mr. Graves concludes that, in his opinion, the advice by the outsiders had been good and that the fault was in the state's not following that advice.
Drew Pearson tells of the "two junior G-men", Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, having barnstormed Europe the previous year, while investigating for Senator McCarthy the Information Service libraries and whether the books on their shelves were subversive or by subversive authors or promoting of Communism, "holding conspiratorial conferences with a motley collection of informants, including a suspected Communist spy, a German politician fired for embezzlement, and a discredited journalist making a living circulating anti-American, anti-Eisenhower throw sheets."
Prior to their arrival, Arthur Noyes, who had formerly worked for the pro-McCarthy Chicago Tribune, had gone to the Frankfort Information Services library and searched through the catalogs for controversial authors, collecting information from an ex-Nazi, Fred Rudl, who had been sent by Hitler to Prague after the annexation of Czechoslovakia to "Aryanize" the Orbis publishing house. A few weeks later, Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick had passed through Germany and handed $1,000 to Mr. Noyes for his efforts, praising him for a good job.
He indicates that Messrs. Cohn and
Schine had appeared unusually preoccupied with investigating alleged
homosexuals, including one prominent U.S. official, and also made a
show of registering in separate hotel rooms, remarking loudly that
they did not work for the State Department. They had a
well-publicized quarrel in a Frankfort hotel corridor, as reported by
Mr. Pearson the previous year and by the United Press representative
in Germany, a story then killed by the U.P., which he suggests may have been in
line with the sympathy displayed sometimes by the press associations
toward Senator McCarthy. He indicates that what had occurred was that
Mr. Schine had discovered his notebook missing and dispatched their
driver back to the hotel to search his other trousers
He indicates that Messrs. Cohn and Schine had paid superficial visits to only two of the 48 American libraries in Germany before announcing to the press that they had found Communist books in "virtually every" library. They had spent only 30 minutes in Frankfort searching through the bookshelves and card files of the library there, answering questions from reporters as they supposedly conducted their investigation, then barged into the library director's office, whereupon Mr. Cohn conducted an interrogation while lying on a couch with his legs on the coffee table, after stating that he was tired.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop question what is "national security", the question raised by the 2 to 1 decision of the Presidential commission chaired by UNC president Gordon Gray regarding the loyalty of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the decision determining that while he had not been disloyal and had in no way ever compromised secrets of the Government, while being instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and in his position with the Atomic Energy Commission since that time, there was sufficient ground to deny him further clearance as a member of the AEC on the basis that he was a security risk, based on his prior dabbling in Communism in the 1930's.
The Alsops find the decision therefore anomalous, on the one hand extensively praising Dr. Oppenheimer for his service to his country, but then concluding with a contrary result.
They indicate that the Soviet Union was rapidly catching up to the U.S. in weapons design and development, as proved by the detonation by the Soviets of a hydrogen bomb designed around the use of lithium hydride in its core, surpassing the science of the U.S. hydrogen bomb for its compactness, making it more susceptible to transport by extant long-range jets. The AEC had to scurry to try to catch up with the design, resulting in the recent tests in the Pacific.
They find those circumstances to be the real threat to the security of the nation, something which had to be considered in the context of "national security". For with the denial of clearance to Dr. Oppenheimer had gone both his tendency to be contemptuous of the Government's stagnation in nuclear technology and the loss of his expertise as one of the leading nuclear physicists. The Gray board, they find, had concentrated on the little things, Dr. Oppenheimer's conflict with AEC chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss, while losing sight of the larger picture. Furthermore, they had inhibited others from wanting to serve the Government in such roles, as no one would wish to serve, despite being loyal, in a capacity which nevertheless subjected them to being deemed a security risk for disagreement with Government policy.
The Congressional Quarterly, in the third in a series of special articles on the Brown v. Board of Education decision of May 17, holding that segregation, per se, in the public schools was no longer Constitutionally viable under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, indicates that during the 19th Century, segregation had been the general rule wherever black populations were located. Separate schools had been established in Boston at the request of blacks whose children had been barred by prejudice from the regular schools. In 1846, when blacks petitioned for the abolition of that segregation, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the practice on the basis that the prejudice, "if it exists", was not created by law and probably could not be changed by law. Thereafter, in 1855, the Massachusetts Legislature, however, abolished segregation in the public schools.
After the Civil War, many Northern and Western states, including California, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan and New York, passed legislation authorizing maintenance of separate public schools, and in many Northern states where there was no specific law, segregation was continued, regardless of challenge in the courts.
In Illinois, separate schools were declared unconstitutional in 1874, and exclusion from a public school on the ground of color was reaffirmed as unconstitutional in a series of cases around the turn of the century. Yet, the last of the segregated schools in Illinois had not gone out of existence until the previous five years.
In abandoning the 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine established with respect to segregated railway cars in Louisiana in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court had relied on testimony by educators and psychologists that the learning process was inhibited and that students were damaged psychologically in their personal development by being forced into segregated schools. That part of the decision recalled the use of economic findings by Louis Brandeis, then representing the State of Oregon before his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1916 by President Wilson—a century before the McConnell no-election-year appointment rule of law suddenly, out of the right-field bats' grandstands, came into being—, in a 1908 decision concerning the Oregon law covering work hours for women who worked in laundries, emphasizing the actual prevailing circumstances, rather than being strictly constrained to established legal principles to trump common experience.
Brown had gradually developed since the Gaines case of 1937, following through to the 1950 case of Sweatt v. Painter, holding that the University of Texas Law School had to admit the otherwise qualified plaintiff regardless of his race, on the basis that Texas did not afford a substantially equal law school for black applicants. That case and other cases in the same lineage, consistently holding that states had failed to show the establishment of substantially equal facilities between the races in the field of public education, led inexorably to the Brown holding.
It should also be stressed, not in the Quarterly piece, that the Court was making, effectively, a practical determination to try to squelch the endless case-by-case determination of whether facilities met the "separate but equal" test, by simply eliminating that test from the law permanently. The ad hoc approach had not only been burdensome to the courts but also tended to frustrate equality as the plaintiffs were being constantly forced to foot the bill for expensive litigation, most of it carried on only through the NAACP. As indicated, the 1955 implementing decision, Brown II, and its unfortunate use of the phrase "with all deliberate speed", opened a panoply of new litigation which would ensue for the next 20 years, seeking to delay and stultify, or completely defeat, in some cases, the practical integration of schools where states sought to show that they had abolished segregation by law, while de facto segregation, because of the arrangement of neighborhoods, remained in force. That led to the various schemes to accomplish Federally acceptable integration, including "freedom of choice", cross-town busing, even extending into the Bush II Administration, the so-called "school voucher" system, which was nothing more than a veiled attempt to enable continued segregation with Federal funding as its source, even if theoretically racially unbiased, in further denigration of the public school system, a throwback to the 19th Century when most schools in the country were private—just as the 5 to 4 Supreme Court majority decision in Bush v. Gore was such a hundred-year retreat from the 21st Century, enabling that Administration into being. We have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight in this respect, which the Quarterly, of course, did not have in 1954.
If that last paragraph stings and pricks some readers, that is good. Some of you need stinging and pricking to remind you of certain things. We live in a democracy. It is time to stand up for one-man, one-vote, finally, and get rid of that antiquated electoral college, which, if any institution in the law today stands for the royal notion of white supremacy, that one surely does, the lone survivor of the country's long ago past when only white male property owners were allowed to vote under state laws, when free black citizens were considered only 60 percent of a human being for purposes of counting their votes, 60 percent citizens, because of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution regarding the apportionment of slaves to determine the number of representatives each state would be allotted in the House, the so-called grandfather clauses of state laws, that only those whose grandfathers could vote were accorded the right, then used to deny freed slaves their voting rights. Concentrate on that, for a change, getting rid of that white supremacist electoral college, and less on useless, silly symbolic gestures, which only waste time and distract from the real issues, and the country might actually get somewhere for a change.
The right to vote and to have one's vote count in the general popular-vote election is fundamental to democracy. The fundamental Bill of Rights is the proper foundation, along with the other amendments to the Constitution ratified since, for our country. Certain of the quaint notions, however, that were extant at the time of the Founding, long ago abandoned, are no longer acceptable or palatable and have not been for more than 150 years to all save the disloyal and even treasonous adherents to the long-distant past, which not one of the Founders supported, even if constrained to their practices by the practicalities which they faced in those times, that to manumit slaves in Virginia, for instance, where General Washington and Mr. Jefferson lived, would have potentially subjected those freed slaves to far worse treatment at the hands of ignorant whites than maintaining them under a paternalistic plantation system, where at least they had a modicum of security and provision in the way of food and shelter from the storm. Once you understand that history better, in its original context, not suddenly juxtaposed to and cast whole into modern times in a narrow-focused comparison, and release yourself from the propagandizing which, unfortunately, has gone on in this country for many decades regarding that past, coming to white-hot heat in recent times, you will be truly free, and not until that time, not by all of the symbolism in the world.
You cannot repeal, by act of Congress or state legislatures or edict, the inevitable laissez-faire accompanying hot weather. Pardon our French
Symbolic gestures, empty of any substance, only permit those who would deny persons their right to vote to say, effectively: "See, now look heya, we voted for that theya and so we are not prejudiced. It's just that we can't have all of the Democrats voting, especially those inner-city Democrats, as there are more of them and therefore they will win every election, (just as they have since 1992, save 2004), and that, of cou'se, would be unfaya. But look, look, lookie heya, I voted faw dis heya. I'm not prejudiced, nawsuh. Cain't hang dat on me, no mo'. It's states' rights. States have the right to determine you' voting privilege, not the Fed'ral Gove'nment. We believe in decentralized Gove'ment, faw the people and of the people."
A letter writer comments on an editorial, "City Limits Extension Offers Much to Those Who Are Now Opposing It", indicating that it brought forth a number of points which deserved careful consideration by those impacted. But, the writer indicates, there was no mention of the most important advantage to those living in the area outside the city limits who might be annexed, the free transportation of children to and from school.
A letter writer from Myrtle Beach, S.C., observes that in the recent Senate Democratic primary race, which former Governor Kerr Scott had won over incumbent interim Senator Alton Lennon, Governor Scott had claimed that he had gone into the red, while tabulation of the votes would indicate that "he went heavily into the blacks."
You may have been lying in the sun too long on the beach and can only see red, following the Supreme Court decision of May 17. Or you just may be lying.
A letter from A. W. Black indicates that "such inept terms as persecution, witch hunter, Red baiter, etc.", were familiar phrases to every anti-Communist "whoever had the courage to oppose and impede the conspiracy of the Communist Party." He finds that it would be "foolish speculation" to think that Senator McCarthy could escape such attacks by "the Red smear bund". He thinks that the Communists, aware of the sympathy of Americans for the underdog, had taken advantage of that tendency, as well as the "pathetically ignorant" average American regarding Communist techniques and tactics, and that to counteract and prevent such subversion in the country, Senator McCarthy and HUAC had been investigating the Communist conspiracy "and their bleeding-heart sympathizers who, under the Roosevelt-Truman mis-deal succeeded in infiltrating strategic departments of the government, including the Army, to say nothing of religious bodies and educational institutions."
Once again, Mr. Black shows himself
to be a gullible idiot, if not a willing consort to the worst sort of
pro-Communist propaganda, that which sought to restrict the freedom
of speech and thought of American citizens by trying to label any
form of liberal speech and thought as "Communist-inspired".
No one but an idiot thought that Senator McCarthy and crew were doing
anything of any benefit to the country or beyond their own
self-aggrandizement politically, "protecting" the country from "twenty years of treason"—to put you on the dayshift
A letter writer, the corresponding secretary of the Charlotte Chapter of Hadassah, thanks the newspaper for its courtesies extended to the chapter during the previous year.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.