The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 5, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, at a press conference held this date, said that he doubted the wisdom of the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, which had limited the President to two terms in office, that the people ought be able to choose anyone they wanted as President. President Eisenhower was the first President subject to it, as the Amendment did not apply to the President in office when ratified, President Truman. The President recognized that there were objections that it might concentrate power in one individual, but he said that he had the utmost confidence in the long-range judgment of the American people. He also criticized statements by Adlai Stevenson that the Administration had not done enough regarding desegregation, stating that his Administration had ended desegregation in the armed forces, while conceding that the previous two Democratic Administrations had done something in that regard. But, he said, there had been talk about the subject for the 45 years he had been in the service and his Administration had taken the bull by the horns. He said that Vice-President Nixon, who had just returned from a 32-state tour, when discussing the campaign with him the previous day, had not specified the Republican strong and weak points but rather told him that the whole picture was encouraging. He had told the President that he had been greeted by the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of his political career, with the people appearing happy except in areas where there were questions about farm problems or in depressed areas. Regarding taxes, he said that he would not suggest that the chances were bright for a tax cut soon, even though having said in a speech in Lexington, Ky., during the week that there might be one in the ensuing year or so. He said that it would be foolish to stop unilaterally the testing of hydrogen bombs, as had been suggested by Mr. Stevenson. The President said it was imperative to have first an international agreement before any such limit on testing would occur, or Russia could otherwise go ahead with advances in the technology while the U.S. stood still. When asked whether he thought the one-dollar minimum wage ought be raised, he said that he first wanted to see minimum wage coverage for people who did not yet have it. Regarding schools, he said that it looked to him as though the best way to finance new schools was through the Federal Government putting up half the money, matched by the individual states, and that the Federal money ought be distributed on the basis of need as the first criterion.
In Harlem, Adlai Stevenson was roundly cheered the previous night by an audience of black citizens attending an outdoor rally, as he headed for the second game of the World Series in Brooklyn. His camp was confident that he had surmounted a possibly critical juncture in his campaign, with Harlem being something of a weathervane as to how he might fare in other populous black centers in the North. An outdoor crowd, estimated by police at 10,000, had applauded his contention that blacks had made their greatest gains with a Democrat in the White House, applauding again when he accused Republicans of a "brazen" attempt "to seize partisan credit for progress in civil rights." There appeared to be no unfriendly voices among the crowd. The loudest applause had come when Mr. Stevenson reiterated previous assertions that he supported the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He quoted the President as having said of the decision: "I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it." He said that the President had been "presented with an opportunity for great national leadership" in the field of civil rights but had been "virtually silent". He said that the previous Monday, the President had credited Republicans with ending segregation in the armed forces, when actually an executive order issued by President Truman in 1948 had sounded the death knell of that segregation, that the order had been issued by the President, despite testimony by General Eisenhower, then chief of staff of the Army, that complete desegregation in the armed forces would "get us into trouble". He wanted the President to stop running on the Democratic record. He also said that Republicans were claiming credit for halting discrimination in employment by Government contractors, but that actually all they had done was to continue the work of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, put into place by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.
In Oakland, Calif., a 12-year old South Dakota farm girl, who said that she must be crazy, had told police this date how she had killed her aunt with an ax after brooding over a missing five dollar allowance. (She may have gone to see "The Bad Seed" at The Fox and taken away from it the wrong moral—or perhaps, had only read a review of same in the newspaper, had no clue to the moral in the first instance, became intrigued and learned elsewhere that the character's name was Rhoda, and then, in the grip of her homesickness, with an unestablished identity within her new environment, undertook an unhealthy identification in escape with a self-obsessed and unsavory movie character, unseen save in her imagination, decided that since she was living on a street of the same name, she, too, "must be crazy".) She was being held for investigation into the slaying the previous day in the home of her aunt and uncle, where the girl had been visiting for the previous month. According to police, she had lost a five-dollar bill which her aunt had given to her for school expenses and was brooding about it as she walked home, stopping off at a Roman Catholic catechism class. When her aunt returned from her job at the Oakland Naval Supply Depot, she asked the girl what had happened to the five dollars. The police inspector quoted the girl as saying that she had obtained a short-handled ax from the garage and struck her aunt with it, then stabbed her with a bread knife until that bent, at which point she stabbed her with a butcher knife. Her uncle had returned home an hour later to find the girl standing on a washing machine, saying that she had just killed her aunt and that she must be crazy. After calling the police from a grocery store, the uncle said that he had returned to the home and found the girl sitting quietly in the living room, saying that she was crazy and homesick. Her uncle said that she was "just a plain skinny kid" who weighed no more than 90 pounds or so, that her arms were no more than two inches thick. The girl's mother in South Dakota, sister of the uncle, said that she believed her daughter had been "just terribly, terribly homesick" as she had never been away from home before, and had never been in any trouble, that the matter was a complete shock to them. She may not be going home for awhile.
In Chicago, a young wife told police this date that she wanted a baby so much that she had stolen a one-month old infant from his crib the previous night, the baby having been found unharmed with the 24-year old woman in the basement apartment she shared with her husband on the same southwest side area where the child had been kidnaped. The mother of the child said that she had met the woman in a store the previous afternoon, and the woman had worn a maternity dress and padding to make her friends think that she was expecting a baby of her own, when in fact she was not pregnant. The abduction had prompted a search of the area by 100 police officers.
In Jacksonville, Fla., a grocery store in an outlying residential and business district had been held up and robbed of $60,000 this date, according to police, shortly after the money had been delivered by armored car to the store for cashing checks. Two gunmen had forced their way into the store 15 minutes before it opened, catching the manager as he was opening four bank bags to commence the day's business. The robbers had walked into the market through a rear entrance in the receiving department and, with guns drawn, had gone to the cashier's cage and covered the manager and two other employees, telling them to sit down and be quiet. When they obtained the money, they had torn the telephone out and told the employees that they had to see them safely out of the store, and so they had to walk to the back of the store with the two men, with a female employee saying she had to try to control her boss who was cussing at the robbers the whole time. A 17-year old clerk had tried in vain to follow the getaway car.
In Tokyo, five Japanese had been killed and 16 injured this date when a bus had plunged 90 feet off of a mountain road into a deep ravine.
In Gastonia, a Dallas, N.C., warehouse worker was charged this date with murder in a Saturday night highway fatality, with police identifying him as the driver of a car which had been racing with another car on a four-lane stretch of Wilkinson Boulevard between Gastonia and Charlotte, when he crashed head-on into a third car, killing a woman and injuring her husband and two daughters.
Dick Young of The News reports that all educational requirements for Civil Service appointments to the City Police and Fire Departments had suddenly been removed this date by the City Civil Service Commission, after the three-man board at a meeting during the morning had eliminated the requirement that applicants for Civil Service posts had to be high school graduates. Mayor Philip Van Every said that he believed the move was a "regrettable decision", setting the city back at least a decade, that the City had been seeking to upgrade personnel in those two departments and that modern times required individuals of higher education if they were to perform the services required by the citizenry. Fire Chief Donald Charles, however, approved the change, saying that there were as many good men who were self-educated as formally educated and that if they were able to pass the examination, it should be sufficient, as they had encountered difficulty in finding sufficient numbers of men to fill vacancies in the Fire Department. Police Chief Frank Littlejohn was out of the city and not available for comment. One member of the City Council had no objection to the decision by the board, asserting that he guessed that they knew what they were doing, as they had been doing a fine job, and so he would go along with them. The chairman of the board had no comment on the decision.
In Charlotte, a 55-year old department store shoe salesman plunged to his death from a window in the Law Building during the morning this date, leaving behind a suicide note scribbled in pencil on an envelope, stating: "I am sorry, dear. My love to you. I cannot go on like this… God bless you." The coroner ruled the death a suicide. He was the second man to leap to his death from a Charlotte building during the week, after the previous Tuesday afternoon, a man was killed in a fall from the 16th floor of the Johnston Building, with police having said that also had been a suicide. It was the second death at the Law Building since December 23, 1952, when attorney Charles Tillett had plunged from the eighth floor attic window. The current victim was found on the sidewalk in almost the same spot where Mr. Tillett had landed. There were no eyewitnesses to the fall. Several persons had heard glass break on the fifth floor landing and one man said that he heard the body hit the pavement, but there were few people in the vicinity of the building at the early hour. An attorney in the building said that he had talked with the man shortly before he had jumped, and an elevator operator said that she had taken the man up twice. A secretary, the only passenger in the elevator on that second trip, said that the man had exited the elevator behind her on the seventh floor, just minutes before he had jumped. There were conflicting reports on the floor from which the man had jumped, with police saying that they found scuff marks on the inside window sill on the landing between the sixth and seventh floors, that glass was broken in the fifth floor window directly below, police theorizing, however, that the man had struck that window during his fall. The personnel department at the store where the man worked said that he had been in poor health for some time and had not worked the previous day. Several persons who had talked to him before his death said that they had noticed nothing unusual in his behavior this date.
Also in Charlotte, a woman had fallen to her death down a flight of stairs at an address listed as the home of the man who had fallen from the Johnston Building the prior Tuesday. The woman was identified as a cousin of the man.
In Brooklyn, Yankees catcher Yogi
Berra
In Winston-Salem, City employees could still afford to be sick, but for others, the price of illness was rising, as confirmed by the Winston-Salem Hospital Commission, which voted to continue a 25 percent discount for City employees at City Memorial Hospital, while discontinuing the discount for all others.
Also in Winston-Salem this date, though not reported in the newspaper until the following afternoon, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts had addressed a meeting this night of the North Carolina Young Democrats Club at the Robert E. Lee Hotel, acting as a surrogate for Adlai Stevenson, who provided a taped message. The Senator had been greeted warmly by Governor Luther Hodges and all present as a young, new leader within the Democratic Party, with the females in the audience and in the community at large especially impressed by his manner and good looks. Don't mind too much Roy Thompson of the Winston-Salem Journal and his snide remarks about the Senator being "the Democrats' answer to Elvis Presley" and his question addressed to the Senator regarding when he last had a haircut, as his longtime column was primarily one of snippets and humor, similar to that of Herb Caen and Stanton Delaplane of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the sort of fare one read in the mornings over breakfast, perhaps to raise a grin or, sometimes, a grimace, but all intended in good fun. We note that had the Senator been in a mood to take in a movie during the afternoon before his appearance, he might have walked around the block to the Carolina Theater and attended a showing of "The Bad Seed"—which, as we previously noted, would appear on local television, apparently for the first time in the Winston-Salem area, on November 2, 1963, the date of the military coup against the Diem brothers in South Vietnam, as well as a canceled trip by President Kennedy that date to attend the Air Force-Army football game at Soldiers' Field in Chicago, at the time announced as being because of the grave nature of the coup, news of which had reached Washington that morning. Elvis Presley had appeared in that theater the previous February, and likewise had appeared at the Carolina Theater in downtown Charlotte. How quickly things had changed in his career after he had appeared on television a few times. Yet, not everyone, obviously, even among the younger set, was pleased with his stage performances, perhaps perceived as hogging too much attention of the females—though, as portrayed at the end of "The Bad Seed", nature's retribution for the green-eyed monster can, a' times, be swift and cruel, and far more the case than even the most untoward and Draconian of man's laws applied to man's untoward acts.
On the editorial page, "Forged Telegrams & Senate Integrity" tells of forged telegrams sent to Senators and Representatives in Congress having been revealed as a favorite technique of unscrupulous lobbyists, with a great flurry of same having occurred during debate in 1955 of a bill to free the natural gas producers from Federal regulation. A Senate investigation had been conducted, finding that Standard Oil Co. of Indiana had sent some of the fraudulent telegrams.
Senators John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, reported that the pressure was similarly applied against bills offered to broaden Social Security coverage, as both Senators had received wires saying that the bills represented the "beginning of communism" and criticized some beneficiaries of Social Security as "immoral". To routine acknowledgments of the wires, the Senators had received such answers as: "To keep the record straight, I wrote no such telegram, and if I had, the sentiments would have been vastly different; apparently someone has used my name without my authorization or knowledge."
The committee was now investigating, asking 40 expert witnesses how to strengthen the lobbying laws, and the piece finds that it ought have no problem finding a remedy for the practice, providing for legislation with severe penalties for those who disseminated bogus "public opinion". It finds it doubtful that the technique was new and that the Senate's reluctance to undertake an investigation of lobbying techniques had indicated a large tolerance for same.
South Dakota Senator Francis Case had upset many of his colleagues by exposing a gas lobbyist's offer of $2,500 as a campaign contribution while the Senator was debating how to vote on the natural gas bill. It finds events justifying the Senator's belief that operations of lobbyists ought be aired publicly, and it suggests that as the investigators were examining their expert witnesses, they could benefit by calling Senator Case as an expert on integrity.
"A Problem Defined: A Dream Displayed" tells of UNC needing more money for its faculty, to expand its physical plant, and needing new leaders to take positions presently being filled by acting officials, including the presidency of the Greater University.
It finds the problems not exaggerated and needing to be solved, but fiscal matters often obscured the inspiring goal of the University as well as the idealism of the individuals who served it.
UNC trustee Victor Bryant had delivered a speech to the Faculty Club at Chapel Hill, saying that at present, America was pouring money into both secondary and higher level educational institutions at an undreamed of rate, prompting doubts as to the outcome and efficiency of the experiment. But he said that they could not dare stop, as the University had to be dedicated to excellence in teaching, in scholarship and in research, so that the faculty and the institution's graduates would be known as sound thinkers who would "probe the dark periphery of the boundaries of today's knowledge in an effort to discover tomorrow's truths."
"The Facts Speak for Themselves" indicates that irony tended to be cruel and that none needed to be added to the facts present in the latest story regarding the Cotswold School crossing. School patrons had fought and begged until they had won from the State a stop sign for the crossing for children on Old Sardis Road, but almost as soon as the sign was erected, some of the parents who had campaigned for it were ticketed for violations. It finds it a human and widespread failing.
It indicates that through the first nine months of the year, Charlotte traffic had accounted for 17 deaths and injuries to another 749, already exceeding by one the number of deaths in 1955. Statewide, the death toll and injuries were also exceeding those of the prior year. The Motor Vehicles Department, according to its own publication, stated that North Carolina drivers should be on guard, as October could be the bloodiest month of the year for traffic, as the toll had been 131 the previous October, when the Department had also predicted the bloodiest month of the year, as it had been.
It concludes that North Carolina drivers had to put themselves on guard, that no one could do it for them, and that it was worth mentioning that it was October.
The fall foliage can play tricks on the eyes, especially in late afternoon, especially when some joker on the radio tells you that a member of one of your favorite singing quartets has died. But we digress.
"Passing Parade" tells of
the population of Clinton, N.C., being 9,000, and that between 10,000
and 15,000 people had come to view the remains of the six young
children murdered by their father, a farmer, who had then killed himself, in an apparent fit of
rage against his wife who had been responsible for having served an
arrest warrant on him for assault occurring the previous night, and,
according to what police had assembled, anger also directed at his
wife's brothers. It finds the story "so typically American
"Hollywood Coins a Solid Gold
Shame" tells of "The Solid Gold Cadillac", a stage
comedy written by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann as a vehicle
for 71-year old Josephine Hull, having just been made into a movie
It finds that it reminded of Alva Johnston's story about Samuel Goldwyn, that if Shakespeare were alive, Mr. Goldwyn would have him under contract. "Some of the bad plays, like Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida and Pericles, might have been tightened up into great dramas if the playwright had had a producer over him to tell him, 'It stinks, Wagspeare. It's lousy. It's terrible. It's ghastly. You're ruining me, Wagstaff.'"
The piece does not doubt that Hollywood would have "tightened up" Shakespeare just as it had "tightened up" the work of Messrs. Kaufman and Teichmann. But it would not be able to do anything except turn the plays into something different and worse. "Any way you look at it, it's a solid gold shame."
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Little Car in a Big Fleet", tells of the City of Richmond having purchased a Volkswagen for official public use, finding it another indication of the growing popularity of small and relatively inexpensive automobiles. The City purchasing agent had discovered that he could try out the Volkswagen in the service of the city for six months and that if he was not satisfied with it, the dealer would repurchase it at the same price the City had paid for it, about $200 less than the lowest-priced American-made car which the City could afford. In addition, it was claimed that the Volkswagen was less expensive to operate than the larger cars. Motor vehicles were a sizable expense factor for a city which had a fleet of about 325 cars and 500 trucks.
The rapid increase in sales of small, foreign-made vehicles had been discussed in an article in the July issue of Changing Times, which had indicated that about 60,000 foreign automobiles were sold in the United States in 1955, more than half of which had been German-manufactured Volkswagens, and that the sales appeared to suggest that the American public would buy a small, precision-built automobile which performed well and was reasonably priced.
Richmond believed that, in addition
to the lower cost, there were other advantages, such as a smaller
area needed for parking. The car also reportedly had a high resale
value, resulting from the manufacturer's practice of not altering the
Volkswagen's appearance
Richmond, however, is likely unaware of Third Cylinder Weakness, blocked of proper air flow by oil cooler and arrangement of baffles, looming large in future of its fleet after trial period is long over. Who will foot bill for that? All that glisters is not gold.
Drew Pearson tells of the Madison Avenue advertising firms having masterminded much of the President's campaign, but having been surprised recently when they put to him the idea of answering questions in a so-called "people's press conference" on television, an idea developed by Young and Rubicam. They were bringing a cross-section of people from various parts of the country to meet with the President to ask him questions ranging from war and peace to the high cost of living. But they figured that the President would not want to answer too many questions. To their surprise, however, they found that he liked the idea and did not wish to place any limits on the types of questions asked. The people in the conference would be handpicked and would be friendly to the President, but no particular issue would be barred.
Adlai Stevenson was touring St. Louis recently and the crowds had been the best he had encountered. Beside him as he drove through the packed streets was Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, running for re-election. On one building, the Senator saw a sign which read: "The St. Louis Silent Club", to which the Senator suggested to Mr. Stevenson that both would like to join that club, the latter indicating that maybe in the last election when he had been a rank amateur, but that now he was learning.
Joe Smith, the mythical figure of the Nebraska delegation at the Republican convention in August, whose name was to be placed in nomination for the vice-presidency before it was discovered that he did not exist, was, as far as the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, a very real individual, a lieutenant general who was commander of the Military Aircraft Transport Service, which equipped plush transport planes for the use of other generals. When the Congressmen wanted pictures of the plush interiors of the planes, General Smith quickly classified them as "top secret", making it impossible for Congress to obtain them. He said that it was his service and that Congress was not going to tell him how to run it. But the Committee voted money for the MATS and so figured he might think differently when they got through with his budget.
Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee was peeving both political parties as chairman of the Committee to Investigate Campaign Expenditures during an election year. He had provided a peremptory notice to the chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic dinner for Adlai Stevenson in Harrisburg, saying that he wanted a list of everyone purchasing ten or more tickets to the $50 per plate affair. Democrats grumbled, but immediately brought their dinner list to Washington. He also served notice on the Salute to Eisenhower dinners, at which seven million dollars had been raised the previous winter, indicating that he wanted a similar list of the chief guests and contributors. While the list had been slow in coming, the Senator had obtained it, but would not say how.
Doris Fleeson finds that the dialogue between the President and Adlai Stevenson regarding Federal aid to schools to provide an illustration of how different their approaches were and had to be to the same issue. The President, with there being widespread prosperity and peace and with a Democratic Congress fit to take the blame for not passing programs he favored, was able to engage in generalities, fitting his style, as he disliked the details of political maneuvering, leaving those issues to his staff. Adlai Stevenson, meanwhile, had to demand that the voters examine the education package and consider it.
When the President blamed the Democrats for killing the Federal aid to schools, it was possible that he really believed it, which would not have been the case with Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, each of whom understood and studied the working of Congress. But the true responsibility for killing the bill, and every other bill which involved civil rights, was the conservative coalition formed primarily of Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans, who had dominated Congress since about 1938. From that arrangement, which had largely been perfected by the late Senator Robert Taft, Republicans had acquired votes for tax and money measures of principal interest to their moneyed backers, in return for which, they joined the conservative Democrats in killing civil rights measures.
The Republican-controlled 80th Congress of 1947-48 had made it harder than ever to stop filibusters, under a rule sponsored by the late Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, who was then the acting Republican Majority Leader, and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. The Senate Finance Committee was the bulwark of the coalition. With few exceptions, such as Senators Paul Douglas of Illinois and Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, there was really no majority or minority on the Finance Committee. Senator George Norris of Nebraska had once said that liberal government could not prevail without being continuously in office with Congressional majorities for 20 years as it would take that long to reform the Finance Committee.
The President could have put heat on House Republicans to vote for passage of the school bill, which had been defeated the previous July 5. Of the Republicans, 73 had voted for the anti-segregation amendment sponsored by Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York, which thus assured a solid Southern vote against it and a filibuster in the Senate. But then the same Republicans had voted against the bill when they could have passed it. The Republicans were dependent on the President being their candidate and running on his coattails, and his power over them had been demonstrated on every issue where he had chosen to take a strong stand, as on the farm bill. But on the school bill, no such pressure was applied.
Southern Democrats faced conditions at home and not merely theory when they fought against a civil rights bill. In the same way, Republicans could defend the coalition on the ground that they were the party of business and that if they neglected its interests, they might be defeated. They were innocent of hypocrisy on civil rights.
She suggests as an example, that the President had recently gone to Illinois to seek the election of the entire Republican slate. Eight Illinois House members had voted for the Powell amendment but against the school bill, several of whom the President had named in a speech in Peoria. Not one of those eight had a situation in their district where they could be politically damaged by a pro-black vote, and so, as with their fellow-Midwesterners, they could vote for civil rights if they so desired. But the President had never attempted to rally that crucial bloc, which could join liberal Democrats to pass civil rights related measures. Some of the members of the coalition did not vote with the South every time, but just enough to maintain their fiscal policies.
Liberal Democrats had relied on the social and economic measures of the New and Fair Deals to hold the black vote. The conservative coalition had not been able to stand against those bills affecting so many voters.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, says that he was answering a circular letter sent out by Doris Betts of Chapel Hill, who conducted a weekly book column and occasionally liked to focus on a particular regional writer, wanting to know in the circular Mr. Ruark's personal history, what he had published, and anything he had in process at the present time, what he considered his best work to date and why, as well as other such things, as comments and advice to other writers. She also had a "let yourself go section", in which she indicated that the respondent was free to vent spleen, including "anything original, angry, irrelevant or obscene…"
Mr. Ruark decides to respond to the latter section, saying that about once per week he received such a questionnaire, as did every other syndicated columnist, "from a bunch of loafers who want other people to work for them." Students would write that they were doing a term paper on a given subject and people with forums would write for impressions on a given subject. He found that Mrs. Betts was writing, in effect: "Bare your soul, give up your working time, tell me all your secrets so that I can pawn them in print." But he, like most other columnists, were not interested in writing term papers for eager students, "the eager forum-masters, the eager cadgers of other people's effort." They had already wasted all of their time as professionals doing other people's amateur work for them and if they hadn't, no one would have heard of them.
He explains that a professional writer started somewhere on the bottom of the barrel and if he were lucky, worked himself up a bit, and if very lucky, "a bunch of bloody drones want him as unpaid talent, to avoid work for the aforesaid bloody drones." Anyone to whom she had written would have put in a long apprenticeship on country weeklies, being a copyboy mixing paste, "cub reporting, trial and error, travel, war and peace to write one line that is salable and worthwhile. And for one circular letter, you and the likes of you want it all for free."
He indicates that he did not even tell his wife or agent what his future plans were because he did not know and that if he did, he would not confide it to strangers. He did not deal in advice other than to provide it to young writers who seriously wanted to know about the pitfalls of being a writer, that advice being only to get a job, work at it and learn from the mistakes made, eventually coming to know whether they were a bum or a professional.
"But, in the meantime, none of us are running a Lonely Hearts Bureau, Mrs. Betts, for semi-professional people. Please pardon the ill temper, but we get the questionnaires once, twice a week, and it scarcely leaves time for feeding the dogs, let alone writing anything to feed us."
A letter writer thinks that it was not enough to close movie houses during church hours, as God had commanded to keep the Sabbath holy. He thinks the country was in danger of losing the Sabbath and that when it did, it would go down. He says that there were two types of people in the world, those who loved God and honored him by trying to do his will and keep his commandments, and those who did not love him, showed no respect or regard for the commandments. Those who did not would suffer for it in the present world and in the world to come. He thinks the country was also in danger of losing freedom of speech and assembly, as he believed evidenced recently in Tennessee and Kentucky—apparently referring to the white student boycotts and other protests at schools being desegregated in those states. He also believed that freedom of religion and freedom of the press were also threatened. "But our brainwashed socialistic dictators would deny us all our rights. I wonder if the manhood of America is so far gone that people will not stand up for our rights anymore." He thinks that whenever people tried to stand up for their constitutional rights, they were branded by the press as mobs. "Well, Christ was called just that when he went into the temple and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and drove them out of the temple. It looks like the hope of the world today lies with the so-called mobs." He thinks the majority of the people had lost interest in trying to save the nation and were being too easily led by shrewd politicians. "People have been lulled to sleep by the one worlders, socialistic New Deal, Fair Deal crowd, who seem to care nothing for our constitutional rights and American way of life. Maybe when they are defeated at the ballot box they will see their mistakes."
He is obviously a progenitor of the
Trumpies today, the higgledy-piggledy blobsterhead mobsters
Framed Edition
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