The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 8, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Ravensburg, Germany, that a leading German scientist, Dr. Hans Karl Paetzold, said this date that Sputnik, launched the prior Friday by the Soviet Union, appeared to be losing altitude and might strike the earth's atmosphere this night and disintegrate. He said that he based his belief on signals from the satellite not having been heard in Germany this date, theorizing that it might have come in contact with denser air, resulting in friction which would cause the satellite to heat and destroy its radio transmitter.
Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina this date urged an immediate public hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding the state of the U.S. program in missiles and satellites. He protested the "silence from the White House and the Administration", in a telegram to Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, urging that the inquiry take place.
In Cambridge, Mass., a top Navy satellite authority, Dr. Whitney Matthews, head of the applications branch of the Solid State Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said the previous night that the U.S. had a satellite "ready to put up right now", after it had been tested thoroughly for the previous six weeks, undergoing tougher tests than it would ever face in outer space.
In Moscow, a Soviet labor newspaper, Trud, in a dispatch from its London correspondent, stated that a second satellite, "more perfected than the existing one", would be launched into the stratosphere on November 7, the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Communist regime.
Associated Press correspondent Relman Morin, in the second of a five-part series of articles on the crisis in Little Rock, explains how the crisis had developed, indicating that Virgil Blossom, superintendent of public schools in Little Rock and architect of the "Little Rock Plan", designed to integrate the city's schools, was thoroughly angry at the present situation. He had worked on the plan for three years, the hardest job of his life, and two months earlier had thought he had the problems solved. But on the night of September 2, the night before Central High School opened for registration for the fall term, Governor Orval Faubus suddenly ordered National Guardsmen to surround the high school, and on September 4, the first day of classes, ordered the Guard to block the entry of the nine black students seeking to integrate the school. Thus, the "Little Rock Plan" had gone up in flames and it might not be salvaged. The U.S. District Court had thereafter issued another order for integration to proceed forthwith and then, about two weeks later, the President sent paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock and federalized the National Guard to enforce the order, after disturbances had erupted in front of the school and the nine black students had to remain at home. After that, the black students had been escorted by the troops into the school each morning with little incident. But in the process, the fine community of Little Rock had been wounded to the quick, with people who had no significant feelings about integration previously now taking sides, such that there was polarization and little doubt that the segregationists' point was "bigger and hotter". Mr. Blossom's plan was thus certain to encounter resistance which he thought he had bypassed or neutralized. The Capitol Citizens Council, a hard-core segregationist organization, liked to harp on the fact that Brookfield, Mo., from which Mr. Blossom hailed originally, was "right next to the Iowa line", making Mr. Blossom a "Yankee", a foreigner who did not understand Arkansas, despite his having gone to the University of Arkansas and having lived in the state for more than 20 years. Mr. Blossom was a stubborn fighter and paid no attention to the criticism, stating that his plan was "airtight legally", preserving educational standards for all students and designed to maintain good community relations. He said that the PTA organizations were ready to stand up and be counted and that they thought it was the best plan yet put forward, and would thus certainly be advanced in other communities across the South, which he believed was the reason that segregationists were fighting it so hard as it left them with no valid arguments. He had started working on the plan in May, 1954, right after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. At that time, the Little Rock School Board announced that it would comply with Brown, but stated that time was the all-important factor, as it would take time, according to Mr. Blossom, to remove "the psychological barrier present in both races". The two key points of the plan were to phase integration into the school system over an unspecified period of years, beginning with the high schools and then applying it to the junior high schools and finally to the primary grades, as well as scheduling it in terms of finances, facilities and problems which would develop as the process would move forward. There was also a unique third feature to the plan in that any student, white or black, who, by reason of his or her address, would normally be assigned to a school where the race of the student was in the majority, that student would continue to attend that school.
In Little Rock, U.S. Army paratroopers began their third week of duty at the high school this date, along with the federalized National Guardsmen, escorting the nine black students into the building to attend classes. Six Guardsmen accompanied the nine students through a crowd of about 100 white students gathered at the main entrance to the school and there were no incidents. Governor Faubus had said the previous day that some of the soldiers were accompanying female pupils to dressing rooms where they changed into gym clothes, though that accusation was vigorously denied by the White House, the Army and school authorities. The White House said that the claim was "completely vulgar" and "completely untrue". A school official called the Governor's claim "ridiculous". The Governor had responded to the White House by saying: "What does the White House know about it 2,000 miles away? We'll prove it when the time comes." (Whether he meant that he would prove that it was 2,000 miles away rather than the actual distance of about 1,000 miles is not entirely clear.) A number of the female students at the high school said that they knew nothing about any such trespass in their dressing rooms. The Governor stated that his information had come from parents. He had made the charge in a letter to Maj. General Edwin Walker, who was commander of the military units at the school and the reserves nearby, and he had made the letter public. General Walker returned the letter unopened because, according to White House press secretary James Hagerty, it was addressed to the "commander of the occupation forces". General Walker issued a statement saying that the Army and school staff had received no such complaint and that "the soldiers … are precluded by orders from activities which might be subject to criticism as described by the Governor."
This first reference in the press
coverage of the crisis carried in The News to the later
notorious General casts a whole new light on the fact that 5 1/2
years later, General Walker—after having been arrested in 1962 for
his role in agitation against integration at the University of
Mississippi in the Government's effort to get James Meredith enrolled
as the first black student at the University, and subsequent to that
arrest, sent for a time to the booby hatch, all after having forcibly
resigned from the Army in 1961 after referring to former First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt and former President Truman as fellow travelers of
the Communists, among other John Birch propaganda disseminated to the soldiers under his command in West Germany—, would, at least ostensibly, become the target of a
man who, while in the Marines from 1956-59, had achieved "Maggie's
drawers"
The editorial page is here. "The South Must Preserve a Principle" finds that the Little Rock crisis had become a milestone in Southern politics and that sensible Southerners had to pass it safely and sanely, that if it were muddled and if thoughtful leadership were not asserted, extremists and demagogues would wind up ruling the day.
It finds that one effect of the crisis was that the underpinnings of the Republican Party in the South had been seriously weakened, as throughout the region, areas where New Republicanism might have thrived had surrendered to ancient fears and frustrations, making it doubtful that the President could now carry a single Southern state.
It also finds, however, that the Democratic Party in the South as well faced uncertainties which were nearly as bleak, with regional rifts and recriminations becoming again apparent. Southern Democrats were castigating the party's Northern liberals for "urging Ike on" and there was talk in both the North and the South of the possibility of Southern Democrats finally going their own way. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, when asked if he thought the South might bolt from the party, snapped, "I hope so."
"Whether we are dealing with
stark tragedy
It finds it tragic that the time
when a vigorous two-party system in the region could be fostered had
now been seriously jeopardized, and that angry men in both the North
and South were willing to imperil the two-party system and thus risk
fracturing and distorting a system of political democracy which had
worked smoothly for many years. It also finds it tragic that
moderates of both regions and both parties were being shouted down by
hotheads at a time when reason and thoughtful leadership were needed.
The two-party system, it finds, served the interests of the South and
of the nation, with sectionalism only widening the gulf of
misunderstanding and hate in the country. It also finds that a
separate Southern party would deprive Southern Democrats of their
Senate seniority, which gave Southerners the key committee
chairmanships, and would probably deprive the South of the security
of Rule 22, the Senate rule which made filibusters
It urges that the South could not afford to waste its time and energy in fighting shadows and championing lost causes, with the region bound ever closer economically and culturally to the mainstream of the nation, with its best hope being in a strong, vigorous two-party system. It believes that the great task ahead for Southern leadership was to nourish and preserve that principle.
Incidentally, there appears an interface between the front page story regarding the claim of Governor Faubus, based on reports of parents, that the Army paratroopers were entering the girls' gym dressing rooms, the comments later of General Walker seeking to proselytize his troops to the dangers of Communism by asserting, among other things, that Mrs. Roosevelt
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