The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 7, 1955
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Istanbul that violent anti-Greek riots had swept over Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey's largest cities, causing millions of dollars worth of property damage. The Government had imposed martial law in both cities the previous night after a four-hour wave of destruction and yet undetermined numbers of casualties. It had lifted the state of siege this date and issued a communiqué in Ankara saying that Istanbul and all of Turkey had become "objects of a Communist plot and incitement." It was the first outbreak of violence stemming from the dispute over the future of the strategic island of Cyprus, the British colony in the Mediterranean which once had belonged to Turkey. Greece was demanding that Cypriots be allowed to vote for union with Greece, a position opposed by Britain and Turkey. Turkey had declared that if Britain gave up Cyprus, it should be returned to Turkey. It was announced by the Turkish Foreign Minister in London this date that a nine-day conference of British, Turkish and Greek foreign ministers regarding the issue had ended without agreement.
The New York Herald Tribune reported this date that a major political scandal in the Internal Revenue Service would explode momentarily in Washington over what it described was the bottling-up of a derogatory character report on a top revenue official. The copyrighted story by Edward J. Mowrey said that the newspaper had learned of the story after a six-month investigation, saying that it would almost certainly produce repercussions from the White House. The center of the story was a lawyer and former assistant revenue commissioner of Dallas, who had reportedly charged that he was fired because of "political expediency" for refusing to "whitewash a derogatory character report", recently filing suit in the U.S. Court of Claims for some $27,000 in back pay. The newspaper indicated that it had learned from reliable sources that the report of the assistant revenue commissioner had indicated that the official in question was still on the payroll, had set up a phony dependency to avoid or delay military service, that a draft board had rejected him as a psychoneurotic and given him a 4-F classification, and that he was linked to difficulties involving possible litigation and trouble at a large university. The story said that the case involved Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, the assistant secretary and the Department's general counsel, each of whom had reviewed the case of the fired commissioner and refused to intervene. Revenue commissioner T. Coleman Andrews and the deputy commissioner had allegedly told the fired commissioner that because he had been a Democratic administration appointee, to retain him, even in a lesser post, would enrage the "Eisenhower forces", but the story had noted that the fired commissioner had actually been appointed during the Hoover Administration. It also reported that the Civil Service Commission had barred the fired commissioner from a hearing and sustained the right of the Treasury Department to fire him.
In East Lansing, Mich., it was reported that paternity tests, according to two scientists from the University of Toronto, could be made much more accurate by the discovery of a new kind of blood type, that blood had a "protein type" in addition to the usual A, B, AB, or O typology, that traditional classification being determined by the type of inherited red blood cells. The scientists had discovered that people also inherited one of three types of particular proteins which floated in the serum or liquid part of the blood, not connected with the red blood cell types, such that even if the red blood cell types were the same for both parents, the protein types might differ such that the offspring might have a different protein type while having the same red blood cell type as the parents. The scientists indicated that current paternity tests were based on analysis of the red blood cell types of a man and woman to determine whether a child could be their offspring, that such tests could only disprove that one individual man could not be the father of a child by one individual woman, but could not prove that the father was not the parent if the child happened to have a blood type which could have resulted from the union of a different man and woman with those same blood types. The protein type tests could refine the matter further, such that if the child's protein type could not have resulted from the combination of the man's and woman's protein types, it would be evidence that the man was not the father. In other words, you're going to have more little bastards running around than ever before.
From San Francisco, it was reported that one of the worst forest fires in Pacific Coast history had hit the Northern California logging town of Yreka this date, 20 miles south of the Oregon border, while other large fires had raced across tens of thousands of acres of parched timber and brush land elsewhere in California and neighboring Oregon. Klamath National Forest officials alerted the 3,500 residents of Yreka to connect their garden hoses and stand by after a three-day old fire had exploded out of control and thundered through 11 miles of dense timberland to within four miles of the town, with 100,000 acres ablaze by midnight. Firefighters said they had no chance of stopping the fire, but the Klamath Forest supervisor said that there was no immediate danger to Yreka, covered in dark clouds of smoke with dead cinders raining down on the town. More than 1,800 men battled the blaze and hundreds more, including 400 soldiers from the Presidio in San Francisco, were rushing to the scene. The Klamath Forest supervisor was pessimistic, saying that only a change in weather conditions or the fire running out of fuel would change the conditions, as the blaze had developed into a firestorm and forecasts were predicting another day of hot, windy weather. An estimated 6,000 men were battling other fires in California and Oregon.
In New York, a walkout of longshoremen had tied up the entire port this date, with the leaders of the independent International Longshoremen's Association having stated that the walkout, precipitated by a dispute with the New York-New Jersey Waterfront Commission, might spread along the entire East Coast by the following Monday. The union contended that the Commission had been harsh and discriminatory in its actions against the ILA, an accusation denied by the Commission. The president of the ILA said that he had received a report that 6,000 Philadelphia dockworkers were walking out during the afternoon to attend a protest meeting in sympathy with the New York strikers, and that another 4,000 in Boston would remain off the job the following day. The New York Shipping Association, an employer group, protested the work stoppage as a "flagrant violation" of contracts and said that it would sue to collect damages. The acting chairman of the Association said that the industry's loss in a port-wide dock strike the previous year had been one million dollars per day. As in past walkouts, supervisory personnel of the passenger shipping lines had been assigned to unload passenger luggage, ordinarily handled by the longshoremen.
Also in New York, the city was being sued for $250,000 by a teacher who had been stabbed in the back by a 15-year old boy while the teacher conducted an evening gym class the prior June. The teacher had recovered enough to take a job teaching English and dramatics in an all-girl junior high school in the Bronx, his lawyer indicating that he was unable to resume teaching physical education. The board of education had agreed previously to pay the teacher for his medical expenses and had also provided him a special salary adjustment. He was claiming that the City had been negligent in allowing the youth to come to the gym class without an admission card. He had better watch some of those girls in the dramatics class, as they might also wind up stabbing him in the back, figuratively if not literally, as they will have their eyes set on stardom, with nothing to be interposed to stop them, least of all some poor grade provided by the dramatics teacher for muffing their lines or showing the wrong facial expression or emotion while delivering them, or not properly providing to them the right phrasing or timing to communicate appropriately the original intent of the play's author. "Get thee to a nunnery, brat..."
The Associated Press reports that integrated public schools had begun the fall term in scattered sections of the South, but that most of those accepting both white and black pupils for the same classrooms were at government installations. Three Florida Air Force bases had opened integrated schools, at Tampa, Valparaiso and Panama City, with school principals in those locations having made no count of the number of black pupils enrolling. At Oak Ridge, Tenn., where public schools were financed by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Oak Ridge High School and Rogersville Junior High had been opened to black students the previous day, with about 45 black students registering at the high school out of 1,700 students, and 50 registering at the junior high school, with about 1,000 pupils. The school superintendent said that he could not determine yet whether parents would follow a suggestion that they keep their children out of school for nine days in protest against integration, after a suggestion to that effect had been made in a circular distributed the previous Monday by an anti-integration group. The principal of the high school named a black teacher to the faculty, who had come from a black high school closed the previous spring, indicating that the teacher would be assigned to teach printing, home mechanics and plastics. (What was he teaching at the previous school, classical English literature and European history?) At Ashland, Ky., six black students had enrolled at the junior college after the board of education had announced the prior Monday that the school would be opened to both races. In Birmingham, a Federal judge granted the University of Alabama a four-month stay of a court order to accept black students, with a black attorney indicating that the stay would be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The University had been ordered to lift its segregation requirement after two black women had charged that they were refused admission solely because of their race. Several Texas communities had begun integrating schools without incident on Tuesday, with about six black students having enrolled in lower grades of former all-white schools at Big Spring, and 14 black students enrolling at Austin. Nearly 200 black students had enrolled in integrated schools in Bexar County around San Antonio. In Hoxie, Ark., a small town in the eastern part of the state which had integrated its schools the prior July, schools had opened early so that they could close during the present cotton harvest, and when about 25 black students had registered with the 1,000 white pupils, a group headed by a pro-segregationist had asked the school board members to resign, with the board responding that it could not say when the schools would reopen or whether they would be integrated when and if they did. The pro-segregationist told a meeting of White America, Inc., the previous night that if the school board remained firm on its original order of July to integrate, they would not have any white children to teach, and declared that there would be no mixed classes. His organization was devoted to continuing racial segregation in the Arkansas schools, and had chapters in several Arkansas towns. (The question arises as to whether the organization was invisible on white paper.)
Donald MacDonald of The News indicates that two students at the Alexander Street School, both sisters, ages eight and six, had been struck by an automobile early this date, just five minutes before a school traffic guard arrived at the intersection where the accident occurred. The younger of the two sisters was believed to be in serious condition, suffering a possible brain injury. A female textile worker had been driving her husband's car toward the intersection when she struck the two girls.
While 10,000 ballpoint pens were reportedly being sent to 75 posts offices all over the nation, none were being sent to Charlotte, according to the local postmaster this date, saying that he did not know how the Post Office Department had selected the cities to receive the new pens, that they were supposedly being sent to post offices with annual revenues of between $50,000 and $500,000, which was much less than the receipts of the local post offices. North Carolina cities which would receive the new pens included Burlington, Hickory, Mount Airy, Randleman and Statesville, while in South Carolina, only Aiken would receive them. Charlotte would continue to have to rely on the wooden holder pens used for generations, dipping them into an ink well. Don't worry about it, as most of the time, you will find that the pens have been snatched from their chains anyway, some people apparently thinking that post office ballpoint pens have some magical quality about them which other ballpoint pens lack.
Also in the area of Charlotte, a thief apparently had swum beneath a boathouse on the Catawba River to steal fishing equipment and boat supplies worth $143.50. The property stolen was reported to the County police as missing the previous day. We have not seen it.
Charles Kuralt of The News indicates that Lister Thornton was going home, that one day the following week he would step off of a bus into the village of Cleckheaton in Yorkshire, England, for the first time in 28 years, that his mother would be present along with his brother and two sisters, and friends with whom he had attended school at Whitechapel Church School 25 years earlier. His mother would return with Mr. Thornton and his wife seven weeks hence to see her two grandsons, ages 21 and 17, whom she had never met. Mr. Thornton had come to the U.S. in 1923 at the age of 19 to work for the new Scandinavian Belting Co. plant in Paterson, N.J., and moved to Charlotte three years later when the company opened a branch in the town, which then had only two stoplights. He had gone home to England the following year to visit and had not returned since. He still worked at the plant and the company would finance the trip for him and pay his expenses while in England. His son was also employed by the company but would remain at work in Charlotte, while his other son would keep busy with school work and driving a school bus. "But when the British liner 'Britannica' sails from New York Harbor tomorrow morning, Lister Thornton and his wife will be aboard. Cleckheaton is waiting." And that's the way it is…
Two pictures show the new Charlotte Coliseum lit up for the first time. Bet you can't wait to get in there to see the new interior, set for opening in just four days, right after the tv premiere on Saturday night of "Gunsmoke". You don't want to miss that either, coming direct from "Gomorrah of the Plains", which means that Rev. Graham will have a lot to preach on come Sunday.
On the editorial page, "An 'Accepted Rule' Is in Danger" finds that for the first time since the turn of the century, public education in North Carolina was in danger, with powerful voices now suggesting that private schools might better serve the needs of the people, by preserving segregation.
It indicates that the official magazine of the North Carolina Bankers Association, Tar Heel Banker, had stated during the week that there was nothing sacred about a public school system, and that private enterprise could offer the same wide horizon for enlightenment, while making "political sociologists" forever unable "to dictate terms and procedures to the people" regarding their schools.
It finds that free universal public education was properly the accepted rule in the country and throughout Western civilization, and that it had not been won without a fight. It quotes from an article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that the great struggle for the creation of public schools had produced a great amount of feeling and aroused bitter antagonisms, perhaps not exceeded except by the argument over the abolition of slavery, and that it had taken a generation to overcome those arguments and the prejudices aroused from them. Eventually, Americans had wisely recognized that education had a proper place in the public interest, and that it was clearly the duty of the community to see that all citizens received their minimum quota of education.
It finds that North Carolina's public school system had served the state and its people well and that it had to continue, as it ensured, along with the right to vote and independence of thought and action, the means by which society could be advanced. It finds that while the state's segregation problems were large, the answers to them could not be based on negatives or fears or temporary expedients, that the state could solve them without abolishing one of its oldest and finest institutions.
"Smile on Face, Lock on Door" tells of international trade being a two-way street, that if a nation wanted to sell, it also had to buy, an old economic axiom. The President appeared to understand that rule and could talk movingly of the need for a fair exchange of goods, liberalizing the "Buy American" act originating in the Depression and issuing an invitation to all friendly nations to trade with the U.S. But in practice, the new trade policies were not as neighborly as they appeared.
It cites as example the recent rejection by the U.S. of British low bids on more than six million dollars worth of hydroelectric equipment, with an American firm getting the contract for six generators for a dam project in the Columbia River Basin, despite its bid being $878,000 higher than the one submitted by a British firm, and another U.S. firm winning a contract for three transformers despite bidding $86,000 higher than the British firm.
Prior to the liberalization of the "Buy American" act, foreign contracts were routinely brushed off, but the previous year, the President had decreased to six percent the amount by which a foreign company had to underbid a U.S. firm to win a contract. But the British bids on the transformers and generators should have qualified under that relaxed rule. Instead, the Government had taken advantage of a loophole, permitting it to ignore foreign bids for the six generators and three transformers because their acceptance would cause "substantial unemployment" in the Pittsburgh area.
It indicates that while such actions might have good intentions from the U.S. point of view, it made the British quite mad, causing them to wonder why the U.S. was prodding them to increase foreign trade while also making it as difficult as possible to do so. The President had also just raised the bicycle tariffs by 50 percent, as the U.S. urged the British to boost their exports.
It finds that the U.S. could not talk out of both sides of its mouth at the same time and maintain the semblance of dignity or integrity, urges getting the problem into the open, not saying one thing and doing another.
"Too Late for Mencken To Mellow" finds that there was a plot afoot to make H. L. Mencken respectable, as he appeared on the cover of the current week's Saturday Review and was also the subject of two tributes inside, one, by William Manchester, comparing him to Samuel Johnson, and the other, by Alistair Cooke, comparing him to George Bernard Shaw. (Mr. Manchester, subsequently achieving acclaim for his 1967 work, The Death of a President, regarding the last days in the life of President Kennedy, his assassination and funeral, had authored a biography of Mr. Mencken, published in 1950, originally titled Disturber of the Peace. Mr. Cooke had put together in 1955 a collection of pieces by Mr. Mencken, titled simply The Vintage Mencken.) There were also reports that Mr. Mencken was getting mellow in his old age, after he had denounced every President from TR through President Truman, but having been quoted recently as saying that President Eisenhower was a better than average President, "for a general".
It questions whether he was actually mellowing, as the world had never had a more cantankerous critic, none of the institutions of the country having escaped his wrath, indicating that even if he was beginning to soften some of his views at age 75, he would not be accepted in the South's family circle again, having made clear in 1920 his view that if the entire South were washed away by a tidal wave, the nation would not have lost anything of importance. But, it hastens to add, he had never liked New York either, having referred to it as "a third-rate Babylon", preferring Baltimore and "the immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay." He had also found Philadelphia to be "the most pecksniffian of American cities and probably leads the world." He had later commented that the U.S. had as its real charm that it was "the only comic country ever heard of."
He had also targeted people, once writing that the average schoolmaster "is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation." He also said that great artists of the world were "never Puritans and seldom even ordinarily respectable." More recently, he had described General MacArthur as "a dreadful fraud who seems to be fading satisfactorily." Though a journalist himself, he had stated of journalism that "all successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else." He had said during the 1920's that, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Coolidge only snores." He also observed that "nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud horse."
It concludes that it would do no good for Mr. Mencken to mellow at present, as he had already burned all his bridges behind him.
Drew Pearson's column, still being written by his staff while he was on vacation, indicates that there was slipshod Government inspection of things people ate, poultry, for instance, which would amaze the average consumer, indicating that a Congressional investigation would bring out the following year that more than a billion broiler chickens and 61 million turkeys were annually raised in the country for consumer sale, with the annual poultry and egg income running well over four billion dollars, making it the third largest source of farm income in the country. But while more than 80 percent of all red meat was processed for sale under Federal inspection, only 21 percent of poultry in interstate commerce was inspected for wholesomeness and sanitation, and that was purely on a voluntary basis, with no obligation on the part of the processor to make such an inspection. And even when diseased poultry was rejected, it could still be consumed, according to a recent report to Congress, not yet made public, from the AFL Meat Cutters and Butchers Union, which cited the sale of 60,000 turkeys by a poultry plant in Texas, from which the Army had rejected the turkeys because they had been hit by the 1954 Texas outbreak of psittacosis, but that instead of disposal of the carcasses, the processor had sold them for consumer consumption, with authorities having traced them to the East Coast while still carrying the live virus.
In addition, the Department of Agriculture was said by the AFL report often to permit the owner of a poultry business or one of his employees to serve as an official sanitarian and grader, that the part of the Department which oversaw inspection was not intended primarily to safeguard the public health, instead established to promote marketing of poultry and other farm products.
The column also indicates that the Food and Drug Administration, of the new Department of Health, Education & Welfare, had the right to seize any adulterated food, but that its hands had been tied by Congressional fund-slashing and the lack of an ironclad law for the compulsory inspection of poultry.
Sell it all to Col. Sanders.
Joseph Alsop indicates that the Fund for the Republic, headed by Robert Hutchins, which had recently issued a report on the Government's security system, demonstrated a new trend in the country which was positive, overcoming the notion that suppressing the Communist conspiracy justified unconstitutional means to do so. Mr. Alsop looks at the case of Dr. John Peters, a professor at the Yale Medical School, who had been denied on security grounds a Government security clearance for a classified project, having complained that he was denied his constitutional rights to confront his accusers. Ultimately, the Supreme Court had heard the case and sidestepped the constitutional issue, deciding in his favor on other grounds. In the meantime, the Solicitor General, Simon Sobeloff, had refused to sign the Government's brief in the matter and had sought to get Attorney General Herbert Brownell to do likewise, the latter having initially appeared to go along with the refusal, but then having been convinced by others in the Justice Department to proceed in the case. Mr. Sobeloff had since been appointed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals by the President, indicative of a change of attitude at the top toward the security program.
There was also other proof of that change, as some of the hired Government informants, who had indicated that their prior testimony in cases involving supposed security issues had been false, were now being tried for having done so. Frank Lowell Watson and Harvey Matusow were facing charges, and Marie Natzig had already been convicted. They were being charged with perjury, but not for their original false statements at trial, rather for false declarations made alleging that their original false statements at trial were suborned by Government attorneys. (The case against Mr. Matusow provides an example. He would be tried and convicted on perjury, based on his false swearing in an affidavit and subsequent hearing to set aside a prior conviction obtained pursuant to his previous false testimony. In the affidavit and hearing, he had alleged that the Government prosecutor in the original case, Roy Cohn, had suborned Mr. Matusow's testimony. It was that claim of subornation which formed the basis for Mr. Matusow's perjury indictment and conviction. Just what proof was marshaled to show that Mr. Cohn had not suborned the original perjury, other than the judge's conclusion at the hearing to set aside the original conviction procured from the perjury that the claim was made up by Mr. Matusow "out of whole cloth" is not supplied from the appellate case. Perhaps it was the belief that Mr. Cohn was such a nice, honorable, honest man that he could never, ever have done such a thing, being a friend to both Senator McCarthy and to Mr. Nixon, both nice, honorable, honest men.)
Mr. Alsop indicates that several other informants had been officially referred to the Justice Department for investigation of prior perjury, the most important of whom was probably Manning Johnson, the second most important informant for the Government, referred because of his testimony impugning the loyalty of Dr. Ralph Bunche. But no visible action had yet been taken by the Justice Department in any of the referred cases, including one in which the fact of the perjury had been officially admitted by the Justice Department. Mr. Alsop concludes that the rule appeared to be that perjury was all right as long as it was the right kind of perjury.
He indicates that those people who followed Senator McCarthy and others, who had "made a good thing out of the period of hysteria" which had produced the results he reviewed, were now bitterly denouncing the Fund for the Republic and all other persons and groups who raised the Constitution as a bar to the proceedings had under the security program. They feared that the President, who had done much to calm the hysteria, would take the next step of reforming the security system, itself.
"The Ananias Club", appearing without any byline or source publication, indicates that the national magazines were printing an advertisement sponsored by the Treasury Department to sell U.S. savings bonds, which read: "And Mr. Josephus Daniels, the Navy secretary, said he was prepared to stand bareheaded on the deck of a battleship and let Gen. Mitchell take a crack at him with a bombing airplane." It says that it does not believe that statement, as any member of the Cabinet under President Wilson who had made such an asinine statement would have been disgraced instead of Billy Mitchell, and that President Roosevelt would not have appointed Mr. Daniels as Ambassador to Mexico in 1933.
It finds therefore that the present Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, had set out to smear the memory of Mr. Daniels, a "great liberal Democrat, one of the leading architects of the New Deal", and it stands shocked at the Republican attempt to rewrite history in their own image.
It says that it was likewise shocked the previous week to read a book issued by the U.S. Naval Institute, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan—The Japanese Navy's Story, written by a Japanese officer, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had been present at Pearl Harbor and at the Battle of Midway. In it, the author had said that the Japanese had decided in 1918 to fight the U.S., at a time when it was ostensibly an ally, and that Japan had discussed at the time and debated in all of its branches and ranks of the Government an attack on Pearl Harbor, and also that it had cost only 29 planes to the Japanese to immobilize the whole Pacific Fleet when the attack had occurred on December 7, 1941. The piece indicates that he had been wrong or the country would still not be spending billions of dollars on its fleets.
He said also that the Japanese Midway force had been the greatest naval expedition since the Spanish Armada, consisting of eight carriers, 11 battleships, 22 cruisers, 65 destroyers and 21 submarines. It was then confronted with the Task Force of Admiral Spruance, which had broken the Japanese code, but that not a single ship in either navy had fired a shot, that U.S. carrier-based planes had sunk the four large Japanese carriers in four minutes, requiring only a single hit per carrier to do so, and that then a Japanese pilot had taken off with only a half-tank of fuel and damaged the U.S.S. Yorktown so severely that it was later sunk, becoming the first Kamikaze pilot. And the Japanese had then turned for home without firing a single naval gun, and Admiral Spruance failed to pursue the fleeing enemy because he was concerned about going within 700 miles of the land-based Japanese aircraft on Wake Island.
Capt. Fuchida concluded that the Japanese had lost the war because they failed to evaluate aircraft in modern warfare and instead stuck to their naval guns, that if there had been sufficient land-based planes on Midway, the U.S. would have sunk the entire Japanese Navy without using any naval vessels.
It concludes that if his contentions were correct, those responsible for building aircraft carriers at present were no better than those who had built battleships earlier or rode horses earlier than that. It recalls that former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had canceled the unauthorized construction of a super-carrier, with the result that he was fired.
It refuses to believe that the U.S. essentially won the war by default, finding that the appointment of Admiral Arthur Radford as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his authorization of the publication of the account of Capt. Fuchida, was an attempt to embarrass the Democrats. It asserts that if the new Navy Secretary continued to build carriers, "then he should resurrect Adm. Hiawatha to defend us against the next sneak attack by land-based planes in his birch bark canoe with an outboard motor."
A letter writer addresses the issue of segregation, opines that the majority of people in the South wanted it continued, and also believes that the majority in the North wanted likewise, wants "no more of that very trite expression, 'law of the land,' as propounded by the nine politicians of the 'Supreme Court' and the NAACP." He believes that the "law of the land" had been ignored and that the majority ruled and could change or ignore the "law of the land" on segregation, that "segregation is one of nature's universal laws!" He quotes Thomas Jefferson from his autobiography in 1821, saying that the slaves had to be freed but that the two races, "equally free, cannot live in the same government", that there were "indelible lines of distinction between them", that it was still within the power of the country to direct the process of emancipation "and deportation peaceably." He quotes Abraham Lincoln in a speech made in Charleston, Ill., on September 18, 1858, as having said that he was not in favor of the social and political equality of the races or of having blacks vote, seated on juries, qualified to hold office, or to intermarry with whites. On August 14, 1862, in an address to a group of free blacks at the White House, President Lincoln had said: "We have between us broader differences than exist between any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think… If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated." He also quotes Booker T. Washington, from his address at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, which had been quoted recently by other letter writers, that "agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing."
Of course, the problem with your argument is that all of your quotes in support thereof are from the 19th Century, and here in 1955, it is now past the middle of the 20th Century. Why don't you sit down and examine a calendar carefully and realize that with progress comes better understanding of society and social interaction than anyone possibly could have had, no matter who they were, 60 or 130 years earlier, before the advent of the horseless carriage, macadamized roads, the airplane, phonograph wax cylinders and flat platters, moving pictures, radio and television, resulting in steady progression of the contraction of the planet to the point of it becoming a virtual neighborhood, where people increasingly can understand one another across language barriers, ethnic barriers and racial barriers previously thought impenetrable. In other words, it is time for you to grow up and cease being a superannuated child. The same might be said, incidentally, of those who stress particular words used rather than their context and the substance of the ideas expressed, suggestive of feeble or lazy, inattentive minds unable to string thoughts together beyond the occurrence of individual words on which they obsessively focus, not understanding that being subjectively offended by something is not an objective standard for proceeding in the world as an adult citizen, rather being a slave to convention and the persistence of childhood naivete.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.