The Charlotte News
Saturday, September 21, 1957
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Little Rock, Ark., that Governor Orval Faubus had withdrawn the National Guard from Central High School the previous night and the President had called it "a necessary move in the right direction." The withdrawal came shortly after issuance by the Federal District Court of a preliminary injunction commanding the Governor to cease use of troops to block integration of the school, as previously ordered by the District Court. The attorneys for the Governor began the process of assessing grounds and procedures for taking an appeal of the injunction. Representative Brooks Hays of Arkansas, who had been acting as intermediary between the Governor and the White House, was en route from Oklahoma City to Little Rock to appraise the situation and report to the President. Meanwhile, less than an hour after the order to withdraw had been given the previous night, all troops had been withdrawn from the area of the school and only one police car with two officers was parked at the school, indicating to newsmen that they just happened to pass by and were not there by order. An anonymous police source said that Little Rock police would be at the school on Monday but that exact plans had not been determined.
The superintendent of the Little Rock schools said, following a meeting with the School Board, that they would be open "to all children" on Monday and that all adults, including the press, would be asked to remain outside the Central High School building when classes resumed. Events inside would be relayed to the press should black students show up for classes. One of the nine black students who had originally sought to enter the school on September 4 when they were prevented by the Guard from doing so, said that she and the others had not yet decided whether they would attend the formerly all-white high school. The head of the Arkansas NAACP said that she had no information yet on the matter of attendance. A spokesman for a group of segregationists said that he and some others planned to be present at the school on Monday to continue a peaceful demonstration but he did not know anything about plans for a student boycott.
In Miami Beach, Fla., Teamsters Union president Dave Beck and vice-president Jimmy Hoffa, who was likely to succeed Mr. Beck in the upcoming Teamsters election scheduled for their convention on September 30, said in a letter addressed to AFL-CIO president George Meany that they would not attend an AFL-CIO executive council meeting in New York on September 24 to answer charges of improper conduct, denying the charges and leaving it up to the convention to decide whether they should meet with the AFL-CIO committee at all. The committee had charged that the union did not meet the ethical standards required for membership by the AFL-CIO constitution.
The editorial page is here. "Sweet Taters and Constitutional Law" quotes heavily from the Time articles on Governor Faubus and the Little Rock crisis, to which we linked in the note on the front page of September 18, indicates that the Federal District Court Judge, Ronald Davies, who was from Fargo, N.D., on special assignment in Little Rock, had misused the word "flaunted" for "flouted". It was not the first time this weighty issue had arisen at The News.
It concludes by suggesting that the more recent Time piece had caused readers to wonder which was the "greater vulgarity", the duly chronologued belching by Governor Faubus in the privacy of his home after consuming his bowl of rice with milk, arroz con leche—yuck—or "the broadcasting of it throughout the world by far-flung Time."
Incidentally, that probable bestseller for the current year which, based on then-extant historical trends, we predicted back in May, 2006 in the note accompanying the above-linked 1938 editorial on "flaunting" and "flouting", has never, to our knowledge, materialized. But there is afoot, among some nominal "Republicans", who are actually of some other party affiliation altogether, maybe call them the Rumpugnacans, an effort consistently to rewrite their own history, wherein Don John Trump is the omniscient, omnipresent vessel into which they may reposit every wish, good or ill, corrupt, beneficent or even criminal, they ever had since their infancy and preserve it under their pillows in the hope that during the night, some night, some spirit, whether malevolent or not being of no moment, might come along and grant it, while knowing full well none of it will come true in any rational universe, but making themselves feel better the while about having had nothing better to do in recent years than to invest their time in following their grand poobah around pitifully from rally to rally, to which they may carry or utter, without shame or consequence, every ugly, mean-spirited sign or expression they can think to conjure to bash someone, that other whom they definitely cannot stand for variance by even an iota from the conclusive certitude which they have reached about the nature of reality and the physical world around them, about which they are certain their master agrees completely, and thus fulfill their feeling that in so doing they are free and permitted to be so by the man they anoint standing at the podium.
"'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries."
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