The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 10, 1956

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Richmond, Va., that State legislators had moved this date for opening of the 1956 General Assembly amid reports of a strong movement toward making them adopt a resolution of interposition to challenge the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, holding unconstitutional continued segregation of the public schools. The Assembly would convene the next day and by that resolution declare its belief that the decision would not be effective in Virginia until affirmed or rejected by an amendment to the Constitution. The previous day, a statewide referendum had overwhelmingly approved of a constitutional convention in Virginia to produce such an amendment. There were reports that many persons in the state believed the Legislature ought interpose and take no further action for the time being regarding existing segregation within the schools of the state, which had been one of the four states before the Supreme Court in Brown, in addition to the District of Columbia, the latter, because the 14th Amendment, under which Brown was decided, applies only to the states and not to the Federal Government, having been decided separately in Bolling v. Sharpe, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause. It appeared that the persons planning the official efforts to maintain segregation in the schools had not yet completed their strategy. Governor Thomas Stanley was expected to give some indication of their thinking when he made his State of the Commonwealth address to a joint session of the Assembly the following day.

The President and Republican Congressional leaders had agreed at a White House meeting this date that the Administration's farm program should have high priority during the current session of Congress, the Republican leaders telling reporters that the President's ten-year program of highway construction also had been stressed at the strategy session. The President, on his second day back on the job after convalescing from his heart attack of September 24, had talked with the Republican leaders for nearly 90 minutes. Senator William Knowland of California, the Minority Leader, said that the President looked fine. He and Republican House Leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts said that there had been no discussion of the President's decision on whether or not he would seek a second term. Senator Knowland said that the President's proposal for a "soil bank" system to cut back crop acreage had generally been "well received" in Congress and stood a good chance of obtaining the necessary bipartisan support for its enactment. The President also scheduled meetings of the National Security Council for the following Thursday and of the Cabinet, if enough members were in town, for Friday. In the meantime, he was working on printers' proofs of his economic report, to be sent to Congress on January 23, a week after the budget message would be conveyed the following Monday, as well as working on a special message regarding Federal aid for school construction, due to be issued the following Thursday or Friday. The President had worked a relatively short day the previous day, his first in Washington following a 12-day vacation in Key West, working from 8:00 to 4:00, with a 2 1/2 hour rest during lunch, as recommended by his doctors.

In New Orleans, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, in a speech prepared for the American National Cattlemen's Association, had said this date that "mountainous surpluses" were the principal problem facing American farmers. He said that economists had estimated farm prices to be 10 percent higher in 1955 and that net farm income might have been 20 percent higher but for the Government-owned surplus of farm goods. He said that wartime production incentives had carried on for too long and that the soil bank program recommended to Congress by the President was a "bold plan that strikes directly at the problem." (But see Drew Pearson's revelations below, regarding the Department of Agriculture's recent views on that system.) He also said that no hard and fast estimate of how much the soil bank would improve prices and incomes could be made, but that it would remove the "crushing burden of surpluses", the most serious farm problem, preventing a diversion of acreage out of surplus crops and into other crops. He stressed that it was regarded as a temporary measure only, and that in the near future, there would be much greater output of farm products than at present. He favored expansion of markets, helping farmers and ranchers cut costs, balancing of production and increasing of their incomes. He also said that the system of flexible farm price supports which the Congress had adopted in the fall of 1954, while the Republicans still controlled both chambers, was essential but inadequate to cope with the problem, indicating that the new support system had only taken hold with the harvests of 1955 and that its operation had been smothered by the pressure of surplus stocks amassed under the old program of the Democratic Administrations.

In Vienna, 13 Hungarian anti-Communist refugees, who had crawled through minefields and under barbed wire entanglements, had reached safety in Austria. One mother had drugged her year-old baby with sleeping pills so that the child would not cry out and awaken Hungarian border guards as she fled. Initially, the baby had not revived from the pills, but eventually was brought around in a hospital. The refugees included two families with seven children, who had fled from a border strip which was the same place where another group of Hungarian refugees had fled to asylum by smashing a hole through barbed wire fences with a homemade tank constructed with iron plating attached to a farm tractor. They brought no possessions with them except the clothing on their backs, arriving in an Austrian village in the wee hours of the morning the previous day, rapping on a farmer's window and begging for help, then being rushed by the farmer to the police, who transported the drugged child to a hospital.

In Philadelphia, a woman admitted to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin this date that she had arranged the unsuccessful abortion, which the local prosecutor charged had killed her daughter the previous August. Her husband was the vice-president of Food Fair stores, one of the nation's largest grocery store chains. His wife indicated that he knew nothing of the arrangements regarding the abortion. She said to the newspaper, in the presence of her husband, that her daughter, following two months of marriage, had told her that her story-book elopement on June 24 with a Miami Beach, Fla., motorcycle officer had been a "terrible mistake", and that she had urged her father to begin divorce proceedings, had then begged her mother to help her obtain an abortion, giving her mother the name of a woman who might help in finding an abortionist. The young woman had died in a north Philadelphia apartment belonging to a couple, who had also been charged with performing the abortion, the mother having been charged with being an accessory to the illegal abortion. As indicated previously, now that Roe v. Wade has been eradicated by a five-Justice majority of the Supreme Court last term, inevitably, especially among people too poor to obtain travel to other states still permitting the practice, we might expect in the future such cases, unfortunately, to come to pass again, one of the primary reasons why the Supreme Court, in its wisdom in 1973, held as it did. We again stress that it is the first time in United States history that the Supreme Court has overturned a previous decision of the Court in a way which narrows an established right, rather than expanding that right. It is anathema to everything in the Constitution, and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the 1954 decision in Brown, overturning the established precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896, expanding the rights under the 14th Amendment, not narrowing them, as had Plessy. Thus, the Dobbs case of 2022 is analogous to Plessy, not Brown, and thus a disgrace to jurisprudential judgment, regardless of how one might feel about the practice of abortion in the abstract. It is the right of privacy and the freedom to choose which are at stake, and since Roe was premised on viability of the fetus, it has absolutely nothing to do with the "right to life", that which the fringe adherents have sought desperately through the years since 1973 to associate with the prohibition movement, largely through their own ignorance of the actual case, the devil always being in the details. But, there are still a great number of people in the United States who try desperately to live in the 19th Century, not accepting that we cannot go back to that time without all of the incidents attendant to it following in train, many of which would be unpalatable and quite disgusting to most who live in the 21st Century, and so it is with the overturning of Roe. We predict that within five years, if not sooner, there will be a great clamor, even from some of the "pro-life" fringe element, to return to sense and sensibility and reestablish the right of privacy, with all of its attendant benefits, on which Roe was founded, inherent in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., a 35-year old mother and her two little daughters had been shot to death in their well-furnished new home the previous night, with police indicating that the woman's husband and the father of the children had killed them, but that they did not know why. Immediately after the killings, the husband had taken what initially was believed by police to have been a deadly poison, with police later surmising that it was phenobarbital sleeping pills. The discovery of the deaths was made after the husband had called his sister, admitting that he had shot his wife and the two children and saying that he would be with them in two to four minutes. Police then went to the home and found the wife and two children dead. The condition of the perpetrator is not indicated.

Donald MacDonald of The News reports of the law governing the sale and purchase of pistols in effect in Mecklenburg County in 1956, with no permits necessary for the ownership of rifles and shotguns. The newspaper had sought official interpretation of the local firearms laws after two recent killings in the city had prompted some citizens to show more interest in the laws. A man had been arrested January 3 on a charge of murdering a friend of his wife in a parking lot of the Merita grill, after he had secreted himself in the trunk of his wife's car and then emerged with a combination .22-caliber rifle and .410-gauge shotgun, killing the man whom he believed was having an affair with his wife, based on what he had heard from the trunk—the case which will have the surprise ending later, consistent with any good mystery. A young husband had been jailed the prior Sunday on a charge of killing his wife in their apartment, telling police that they were "just playing" and that he did not know how it had happened, his father-in-law taking his side and saying that he was a "good boy" and that he was sure he had not intended to kill his wife. He had told police that after she had set his breakfast tray next to the bed where he was lying, he had taken his pistol from the drawer and placed it behind the newspaper which he was reading, and then pulled the trigger, hitting his wife in the face from beneath the newspaper. He was now reading the family Bible in jail, but not either of the Bibles he had presented for Christmas to his two children, which, he said, the police apparently had not been able to locate. (We do not yet know how that case will turn out, having resisted the temptation to thumb forward through the newsprint, as it tends to get a lot of black ink on the hands shuffling through all of those future newspapers.) In response to the newspaper's inquiries about the local firearms laws, the clerk of Superior Court had explained this date that in order to purchase a pistol, a person had to be at least 21 years of age and have a permit which specified that possession of the weapon was either for self-defense or for the protection of the home, that the applicant had to prove good character, the ability to sign his or her name on the firearms registration book and have affidavits from at least two character witnesses living in the county for at least six months, also providing the applicant's age, address and last address before taking up residence in the county. A license fee of three dollars was charged to the applicant. Police said that they realized that traffic in sales and resales of pistols continued without regard to that law, but that enforcing the regulation was a problem. It was permissible to carry a gun, provided that the weapon was not concealed, with a statute making it unlawful to carry a concealed weapon. Dozens of weapons were confiscated by the police under the latter law. The confiscated weapons went to the clerk of court, who was authorized to hold a public sale of them, the clerk explaining that he had only conducted one such public sale of pistols during the previous 20 years. Fire up a melting pot in Independence Square every month or so and melt the damned things, donating the molten steel to artists who will then sculpt a living memorial to victims from the means of their demise.

Julian Scheer of The News tells of State Representative Arthur Goodman, a Charlotte attorney, this date announcing that he would seek a spot on the Superior Court bench in Mecklenburg County in the May 26 Democratic primary. The sitting judge, appointed the previous year by Governor Luther Hodges, had not made known his plans. Mr. Goodman had tendered to Governor Hodges his resignation from the State House.

In Leicester, England, it was reported that a series of minor earthquakes had rocked houses and buildings over a 20-mile area of the English midlands this date.

The coldest weather of the winter thus far was continuing in Florida and other parts of the Southeast this date, with damage to crops in Florida, alone, estimated in the millions of dollars. Meanwhile, more rain, snow and sleet had hit wide areas of Eastern sections of the country, blamed for more than a dozen deaths on Northeast highways and on sidewalks. In Miami, the temperature had reached a low of 43, colder than in Portland, Maine, where it was 44, with Miami suburbs reporting temperatures as low as 29. The warmest city in Florida was Key West, reporting a low temperature of 61. The coldest region was over the Northern Plains and in the upper Mississippi Valley, where readings were in the teens and near zero in some sections. The Weather Bureau in Boston predicted winds averaging between 30 and 40 mph along the New England coast, with higher gusts and tides running two to four feet above normal. The highest gust recorded the previous day in Boston had been 59 mph. Gale winds and rain had hit the flood-stricken sections of the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border and Prince Edward Island. Fifteen rivers were already flooding their banks and hundreds of families had been forced to evacuate their homes since a week-long January thaw had caused the rivers to begin flooding the previous Friday. Many towns remained isolated, with property damage estimated in the millions. In New Jersey, wind-whipped seas pounded that state's coastal areas, combining with abnormally high tides to cause extensive flooding.

Meanwhile, northeasterly winds, emanating from the North Carolina Outer Banks this date, had dropped temperatures over the entire state to about ten degrees below normal, with snow and sleet falling over wide areas, but with little accumulation. Ocean water flooding in places across a coastal highway the previous day had swept at least three summer cottages into the sea, but had mostly subsided by this date. Low readings across the state were 22 in Asheville, 27 in Greensboro, 27 in Raleigh, 30 in Wilmington and 31 in Charlotte, with the high in Asheville having been 33. That Weather, it just keeps on coming in and going out, coming in again. Need to build a dome over the whole thing.

In Long Beach, Calif., a 17-year old Long Beach State College student wanted a date with a young woman who was a clerk at the Long Beach Federal Savings & Loan Association, going to her cage the previous day and presenting a note which read: "This is a holdup. Drop your head if you will go to the show with me tonight." The object of the suit, however, had stepped away from the cage for a moment and another clerk saw the words that it was a holdup and telephoned the police, with a sergeant quickly arriving and handcuffing the young man, followed by 20 police officers and FBI agents swarming him, transporting him to the FBI office where he was questioned. The young woman to whom he had directed his note, said that she knew the young suitor but had never dated him. He was eventually released, saying that he would still like to date the object of his affections, but would no longer resort to notes to try to entreat her. His surname was Finger, with which, naturally, the piece seeks to make play. It could have gone much further, but it is, after all, a family newspaper and thus not given to prestidigitation.

On the editorial page, "Mecklenburg: A Country Boy Grew Up" tells of Mecklenburg County having grown by leaps and bounds, and so finds the suggestion by the local Bar Association that a new courthouse building be built "to house the activities of Mecklenburg County and other related municipal or state governmental functions", deserving of careful consideration. It commends the Bar Association, therefore, for the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of its survey, resulting from several years of study, and for offering its assistance in evolving further plans to remedy the County's governmental growing pains, urges that the advice should be accepted.

"Surpluses: A Presidential Challenge" tells of the 1952 Republican convention platform having condemned as a "fraud on both the farmer and the consumer the Brannan plan scheme to pay direct subsidies from the federal treasury in lieu of prices to producers," and yet now the President, elected on that platform, was proposing to the Congress that the Government pay farmers to take land out of production and pay them in lieu of prices they would receive by planting the acreage. The message committed the Administration to a contest with Democrats for the farm vote. While it had restated the Republican rejection of rigid price supports, it had armed Republican campaigners with something more substantial than the flexible price supports which had not yet had time to prove their value.

It finds that the proposal offered real and political values to the formulation of a sensible farm program, designed to supplement the flexible price supports in an effort to reduce the surplus of farm produce created by rigid price supports, standing between the farmer and an open market governed by supply and demand. The more the surplus could be reduced and production could find a place in the open market, the more the cost of price supports could be reduced. Fertility would be restored in the soil taken out of production and the farmers cooperating with the program would receive financial aid to tide them over during the adjustment period, the reduction of the surplus compensating partially for the payments to the cooperating farmers.

It finds that there were also dangerous aspects to the plan, that farmers could participate by retiring poor land and increasing production on more fertile acreage, and that the payments might not be enough to compensate the farmers for cutting production. Administration of the plan would also create a new bureaucracy.

It urges, however, that the intention behind the program had to be preserved, to try to solve, along with the flexible price supports, the basic problem of farm surpluses, and that a return to rigid price supports, as favored by some Democrats, was only so much campaign rhetoric, that rigid supports had been justified when enacted to stimulate wartime production, but had also created the surplus. It concludes, therefore, that the President's message was a challenge to the objectors, both Democrats and Republicans, to produce a plan of their own which would attack the surplus problem, rather than increase surpluses even more at the expense of the taxpayers.

The column has never met a program promulgated by President Eisenhower, whom the newspaper supported for the presidency in 1952, which it found problematic, despite his adoption of a program previously favored by Democrats and previously denounced by the Eisenhower Administration, itself, as indicated in the column this date by Drew Pearson. It never elects to use the term "political hypocrisy" to characterize any suggestion by President Eisenhower, as it was so often free in the use of such criticism to describe the programs of President Truman in earlier years—though some of the editorial personnel had changed, of course, in the meantime, and it is always unclear on a given day who is writing particular editorials or to what degree they might be team efforts.

"Medical Opinion by Popular Vote" disagrees with the effort, as published in U.S. News & World Report, to conduct a poll among 444 heart specialists, inquiring whether the President was able to serve a second term after suffering his September 24 heart attack, applauding the doctors who had not responded to the questionnaire, with only 275 of those polled having indicated a response, and some of those having stated nothing definite or responding with disapproval of the poll.

It finds it impertinent, given medical ethics, for physicians to comment publicly on a case with which they were not concerned directly. As some conscientious physicians had pointed out, the significance of a heart attack, in terms of functional capacity, depended on many factors varying from individual to individual case, quoting from one doctor who had properly declined to take part in the poll, that it would be the "the height of presumption" for any physician to express an opinion unless he had been actually in attendance of the President, who was in excellent hands, and that only his personal physicians had any right to express an opinion, that no matter what a poll would show, it could not possibly have any bearing on an individual case.

But the public has a right to know whether their President might keel over at any minute and place the Vice-President in charge, especially when a large segment of the populace had manifold issues with the particular Vice-President in office in 1956, as with few to hold that office before him.

A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled, "Good Frend, Forbeare", tells of the challenge to the authenticity of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, as perhaps having been actually from the feather of Christopher Marlowe, with the evidence possibly residing in the tomb of Sir Thomas Walsingham, where supposedly there were manuscripts suggesting as much. A descendant of Mr. Walsingham had received permission to open his relative's tomb in Saint Nicholas Church in Kent to search for the evidence.

Mr. Walsingham had been a patron of Mr. Marlowe, and it was said by some historians that on the eve of the latter's arrest for treason and heresy, when he had been supposedly murdered in a tavern brawl, he had, in fact, according to American author Calvin Hoffman, been rescued and another man murdered, in a plot to give Mr. Marlowe reprieve from the hangman, that the latter had then gone on to write the works attributed to Mr. Shakespeare, and that in Mr. Walsingham's tomb were unpublished plays authored by Mr. Marlowe.

It finds it a good plot, "but 'tis ten to one the play can never please all that are here: there are many people who believe that the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon and not Marlowe was Shakespeare, and there are quite a few who believe Shakespeare was himself." There were others who thought that "taking the measure of an ancient grave" to prove the Bard's identity was "but the fierce vexation of a dream" and that such methods could be taken too far, wondering whose tomb would be next after that of Mr. Walsingham.

It posits that Shakespeare, himself, might have thought all of that out, when he had left instruction to be inscribed on his tomb the words: "Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and curst be he yt moves my bones." The piece suggests that it ought give the disturbers of bones pause.

Actually, Marlowe was really Elvis, who flew too close to the Sun and thereafter followed His Master's Voice...

As we have ventured all those years ago, incidentally, it is perfectly obvious who writ the plays, whether by any other name, Nigel, or Mr. M'Kash.

Drew Pearson tells of a letter by acting Secretary of Agriculture True D. Morse sent the prior July 27 to North Carolina Congressman Harold Cooley, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, opposing a bill introduced by Congressman Fred Marshall of Minnesota, providing exactly the same plan which the President was now proposing in his message to Congress, favoring establishment of a soil bank. On September 30, the Agriculture Department had sent the same letter to Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Although Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had not signed the letter, Mr. Morse had stated that a committee of all impacted agencies within the Agriculture Department had studied the proposed soil bank plan and had rejected it. He quotes verbatim from the letter of July 27 to Mr. Cooley.

He next tells of a means by which cheap liquor was being provided to U.S. military bases, where tax-free liquor was banned by act of Congress. The Air Force brass hats were obtaining their liquor from Washington, where the taxes were much lower, via Air Force crews stopping at Bolling Field on official flights, playing the role of rum-runners, telephoning a man in Washington who would send out a truck to Bolling Field and deliver the liquor, carefully disguised in plain paper, with the latter collecting a tidy profit of nearly $4,000 on a single sale of Scotch to airmen at Maxwell Field in dry Alabama. Mr. Pearson indicates that the Washington man's part in the bootleg operation was probably legal, as it was the Air Force which admitted his trucks to Bolling Field and then flew the liquor across state lines. He adds that state revenue officers lacked the airplane police facilities to challenge the plane as it entered the state of Alabama.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of a Japanese internment camp during World War II in Hong Kong having been a fairly disagreeable place in which public spirit was less common than the spirit of "devil take the hindmost", where a small minority did the work of the community and the rest played the black market or made a "hobby of envy, or simply lost faith and abandoned hope". Thus, the determined man, who was busily trotting about on every work detail, was not an inconspicuous figure, being dedicated to the public service, one of the real workers among the 300-odd Americans who were in Stanley Camp along with more than 3,000 British prisoners—"the human refuse of a collapsed colonial society."

That determined man, who had spoken up for the New Deal view of the world, had shown far more sympathy for the problems of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek than the British colonial officials, understandable as he had been an expert on the staff of the Generalissimo's Chinese Stabilization Board, on loan from the U.S. Treasury Department. Such had been William Henry Taylor, when Joseph Alsop had first encountered him during the winter of 1942 at Stanley Camp, where there were Communist agents in fact, the names of some of whom the piece provides, until they had escaped early and with great bravery.

But Mr. Taylor stayed with the work detail until the Americans were exchanged. And so when he had re-entered Mr. Alsop's life some years later, telephoning him to seek help in obtaining a letter for the loyalty board of the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Alsop had willingly obliged, having witnessed him in the camp. Mr. Alsop believed that Mr. Taylor only had the bad luck to work in the Treasury Department, wherein resided the Communist agent, Harry Dexter White, fingered as a Communist shortly before his death in August, 1948, by Elizabeth Bentley, an admitted former Communist agent.

Ms. Bentley had also fingered Mr. Taylor, saying that sometimes he had passed to her confidential documents, until later revising her statements to say that she had actually only heard that charge from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, head of the Communist spy ring to which she belonged, who had told her that Mr. Taylor was a member of the Communist underground within the Government. At that point, the FBI had visited Mr. Taylor, initially in 1947, and thereafter, he had been called before four successive grand juries and before three Senate committees, two of which had been chaired by Senator McCarthy and one by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. In 1953, his case was then taken up by the IMF loyalty board, having taken employment at IMF after departing the Treasury Department, where two successive Secretaries, John Snyder and George Humphrey, had urged the director of the Fund, Ivar Rooth, to fire Mr. Taylor at once. But Dr. Rooth decided to await the loyalty board's verdict.

The board had initially closed the case in December of 1953, then had waited until spring, 1955, however, to render its first verdict, advising Dr. Rooth that Mr. Taylor had been an active Communist spy. Dr. Rooth, however, wanted particulars regarding the charges. The chairman of the board, Henry Waldman, had told Mr. Alsop that the first verdict against Mr. Taylor had revealed to his lawyer what might be needed to prove Mr. Taylor's innocence and the latter then applied for a rehearing, which was granted, and now, about six months after the first verdict, the board had determined that there was "no reasonable doubt" regarding the loyalty of Mr. Taylor.

The Alsops indicate that the courage and fairness of the board in admitting its previous error could not be overpraised. But they question the original testimony of Ms. Bentley, the Government's preparation of the case against Mr. Taylor, consisting of a "mass of smears and poison pen letters", and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who had the responsibility for preparing the Government's case. Mr. Brownell had publicly denounced Mr. Taylor as a spy, apparently on the basis of the "cheap, trumped-up stuff that the loyalty board" had subsequently discarded, wondering what Mr. Brownell had to say at present. They conclude that those were questions which had to be answered if American justice meant anything at all.

A letter writer, state chairman of the Natural Gas & Oil Resources Committee, expresses skepticism of statements recently made by two heads of local gas utility companies in the Carolinas, with the chairmen of Piedmont Natural Gas Co. and the Public Service Co., operating gas distribution systems in the Carolinas, having been quoted in an article in the newspaper of December 20 that removal of Federal controls for natural gas producers would compel "strong" increases in natural gas costs to transmission and distribution companies and to consumers. He indicates that while it was heartening to see public utility executives expressing concerns for the consumer, he questions the sincerity of that interest if their position was based on a full understanding of the facts. He says that in the 16 years prior to Federal controls on producers, the cost of gas to household consumers had risen only by 7 percent on average while the cost of living had risen by 90 percent, and so he could not understand the fear of returning producers to their former status, suggesting that the local utilities were perhaps more interested in having the Government perpetuate for them an artificial price advantage which they had enjoyed in competing with other fuels for big industrial accounts. The same article in the newspaper had indicated that the North Carolina Utilities Commission shared the views of the local distributing companies, the writer questioning whether the Commission was satisfied with all of the factors which made up the remaining 96 percent of local gas bills, beyond the 4 percent attributable to the costs to producers.

A letter writer commends the editorial, "The Case against 'Interposition'", stating that a mature individual accepted the inevitable, even if believing that it was being hurried somewhat unnecessarily and by those "perhaps blinded to practical considerations by idealism." He finds that the newspaper had admirably presented in its editorial "a note of calm logic in order not to disturb the seeds of rebellion which lie fallow (and shallow) among the lunatic fringe." He also notes that on the same editorial page, there had been a letter stating that the "Supreme Court should be jailed for an un-Christian, unethical, criminal act," for its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a piece of "literary bile" so typical of that fringe. Because it was one of many such letters to the newspaper, each such letter parroting a previous one, "each containing the same wordy, meaningless ranting which, by the process of slow poison, can precipitate an ugly mess," they needed a response, which he regards the editorial as having done admirably. He suggests that responsible editors should weed out irresponsible authors who supplied only heat and no light. While they would claim there had been censorship, he finds that the loudest such "cries come from those who refuse to grant even the most basic rights to their fellow man".

A letter writer from Caracas, Venezuela, wishes all of the workers of the newspaper a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, indicating that he used to be a carrier of the newspaper when he had been in school, and was now a "Fat Man" in the circus, a long way from home, and so sends his holiday greetings.

Does this mean that carriers of the newspaper should aspire to be fat men of the circus in Caracas?

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