The Charlotte News
Monday, June 15, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the West had warned Russia this date, as the Big Four foreign ministers conference entered its sixth week, that the time had come for decisive action on the crucial issue of Berlin. Some Western diplomats said that the conference would end during the current week unless the Soviet Union retreated in its stance demanding that the West vacate its troops from West Berlin. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd of Britain, returning to Geneva from weekend consultations in London, had declared that the negotiations could not go on indefinitely, expressing some hope that an understanding regarding Berlin might yet be reached, but leaving no doubt of his view that the talks had reached the point of action. Secretary of State Christian Herter had conferred with French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville at around noon and they had arranged to meet Mr. Lloyd immediately upon his return to Geneva for a strategy session aimed at maintaining the Western solid front in dealing with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
In Galveston, Tex., a battery of attorneys had huddled hastily this date to avoid an open hearing in which Governor Earl Long of Louisiana wished to fight for release from a Texas mental clinic. The Governor, 63, contended that he was railroaded into the hospital three weeks earlier, and had a habeas corpus hearing scheduled for the wee hours of the morning (unless the odd 1:00 a.m. scheduled time is a misprint or was intended to drive the participants insane). The court had granted the hearing when the Governor filed an application that he was brought to the hospital under heavy sedation and shackled hand and foot. But the attorneys hinted that the hearing this date might not occur, as there was scheduled a closed sanity session the following day. The Governor's three court-appointed attorneys, together with legal representatives of the Governor's wife and Senator Russell Long, the Governor's nephew, indicated that they did not want the open hearing this date. One other possibility, according to one of the attorneys, would be to limit this date's hearing to legal arguments and save Governor Long from attacks on his credibility as a witness until the closed session the following day. Attorneys said that they had not talked with the judge of the possibility of any change from the open hearing. Governor Long had shouted to newsmen from his second floor room at the hospital the previous night, telling them, "I'm no more crazy than you are."
In London, it was reported that a crew of 98, including ten Americans, had been rescued 500 miles out in the Atlantic this date when fire had swept a British cable-laying ship. The ship had been completing the first telephone cable linking the U.S. directly with the European continent. Hours after the rescue by a Hamburg-bound German freighter, the Ocean Layer was still burning. The ten Americans picked up were employees of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., supervising the cable laying operation. Among them had been the 50-year old mayor of Summit, N.J., in charge of the operation for AT&T. The ship had been stringing cable along the ocean bed toward France when a fierce blaze had broken out in its engine room and within 15 minutes, after an SOS seeking help, the captain reported, he had been forced to order the crew to take to the lifeboats. In the scramble, two men had been left aboard the flaming ship, but were spotted by lookouts aboard the rescue ship in time and were removed by small boat. The sea had been calm and there was no word that anyone had been injured. The cause of the fire had not been reported.
In New York, it was reported that a tugboat had been raised from the East River on Sunday, and the body of a crewman had been found inside. The tug had sunk on Saturday night after a hawser had snapped and two barges it was towing had rammed it. The 59-year old crewman who had been serving as engineer, had been trapped inside, as other crewmen had swum to safety.
In Houston, two men had reported to a newsman that they had been exposed to radioactive iridium 192 and that their physical condition had steadily deteriorated since the mishap in 1957, one of them, 53, having undergone surgery this date for removal of a tumor from his bladder. Both he and the other man, 38, suffered cataracts of their eyes and said that they had been unable to work. The accident had taken place on March 13, 1957 at the M. W. Kellogg Co. plant. One of the men contended that he had contaminated his family, and that his wife, 36, and son, 19, also had developed cataracts. The two men had joined in a lawsuit seeking $426,635 from Phillips Petroleum Co., whom they contended had been responsible for the accident. One of the two said that he was getting his eyes checked the following week, that his sight had been getting worse all the time and it would be the fifth different pair of glasses he had acquired since the accident, prior to which he had used glasses only for reading. He said that he tired easily and could not hold a job, had to borrow money from the bank and had spent all of his $6,000 in savings, $5,200 from an insurance company settlement and was thousands in debt. The other man said that he had perfect vision before the incident but now had ordered his second pair of glasses, and his wife was on her fourth pair. A spokesman for Phillips in Bartlesville, Okla., said that the two officials who would know about the case were not available for comment.
In Great Falls, Mt., it was reported that 40 small planes carrying about 120 physicians and their families had left the city this date for Alaska in a mass flight demonstrating the mobility of the flying doctors, members of the Flying Physicians Association.
In Anderson, S.C., it was reported that a five-year old girl of Seneca was carrying water to a big German police dog on Sunday when she stumbled and fell. To the dog, it apparently had looked as if she were lunging to attack and it bit her on the face, severely damaging her left eye. The girl's parents had rushed her to a hospital and an eye specialist had begun an operation, but the girl's heart had stopped and the surgeon quickly cut into her chest and massaged the heart, restoring life, whereupon the operation was completed. But her heart had stopped again, finally, shortly after midnight.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that three union officials and four strikers would face a hearing on Tuesday on charges of conspiring to dynamite a substation transformer feeding power to the struck Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. Boyd Payton, the Carolinas director of the Textile Workers Union of America and one of those named in the warrants, had surrendered on Sunday night in Charlotte, where he lived. Mr. Payton denied the charge, saying that he knew nothing about any conspiracy and had nothing to do with it, adding that he did not know where the substation was located. Two other union officials had not been arrested on Sunday night. Mr. Payton had identified one of them as a member of his staff and the other as chairman of the TWUA bi-city joint board at Spray, where the Fieldcrest Mills were located. State Attorney General Malcolm Seawell had announced in Raleigh that the State Bureau of Investigation agents had arrested four strikers on Saturday night "at a rendezvous where they were to meet for the purpose of carrying out their plans." Mr. Payton, who said that he heard about the warrants during a radio broadcast, had posted a $10,000 bond in Charlotte. His bond had been set in Henderson at $25,000, but had been reduced by a Charlotte magistrate. Hearings were set for Tuesday morning in Vance County Recorder's Court, and the maximum sentence which the defendants could face was 15 years. Mr. Seawell said that there was evidence that the men and probably others had entered a conspiracy to dynamite the Carolina Power & Light Co. substation transformer which provided electricity to the mills and to much of Vance County. He said that he had been informed by the SBI director, Walter Anderson, that there was evidence also of a conspiracy to destroy the main office building of the Harriet-Henderson Mills through the use of Molotov cocktails, described by Mr. Seawell as gasoline in bottles which were set on fire and thrown at a target.
Bill Hughes of The News reports from Henderson that the dynamite threat and the reported burning plots had broken the lull in routine guard duty for Charlotte Air National Guardsmen serving on strike duty and had given them their first real excitement in their first weekend. The Guardsmen had begun relaxing for what appeared to have been a quiet weekend when they were alerted that a plot was afoot to blast the C.P.&L. substation less than a mile from the Armory where the Guardsmen were staying. There had also been reported a plot to burn the main office of the mills. The first word to reach the Guardsmen was that the blast and burning might take place at any minute. The subdued Armory was thrown momentarily into turmoil as units were called out in battle dress. Within minutes of the alert, Air Police jeep patrols of the Air Guard units converged on the two threatened facilities. Guardsmen, who moments before had been relaxing, sleeping or playing games, had boarded trucks. Shortly after patrols had set up roadblocks to the power company substation, Guard trucks had arrived at the scene. Guardsmen with fixed bayonets searched the thick woods surrounding the substation and foot patrols scouted all paths by which would-be dynamiters might reach the substation. Other Guardsmen had begun a careful search of a brushy area of a field near the mill office. Within an hour, both threatened areas had been thoroughly searched without turning up any would-be dynamiters.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that Senate Bill 99, which had caused the biggest fuss in the 1959 General Assembly session, embodied changes to the state constitution, including court reform. A man who would squirm in his seat the following day was State Senator J. Spencer Bell of Mecklenburg, who had headed a committee which had drawn up plans for the court reforms. He had helped steer the bill through the Senate. The following day, it would go before the House for debate and Mr. Bell would sit in the Senate chamber awaiting word of its fate. The bill had been so amended and picked at in the Senate and would be poked at so much more in the House, that debate would be long and loud on the bill, hardly recognizable when the first reading would occur. Mr. Bell said that he was "fairly optimistic".
John Kilgo of The News reports that local realtors were finding it harder than ever to keep a house up for sale. It was not that business was so good but folks were stealing them dizzy. The little "For Sale" signs were causing most of the trouble, as local youngsters were playing a new prank, digging one of the signs out of the front yard of one house and placing it in the yard of a house which was not for sale. One realtor said this date that if the "silly stuff doesn't stop soon, I'll have to go out of business. They're stealing me blind." Police were trying to help the baffled realtors. Three Myers Park boys had been tried in City court during the morning for swiping one of the signs. They had been found guilty of trespassing and given a 30-day suspended jail sentence, and ordered to pay $13 in court costs. One real estate agent said that they had lost about 50 signs during the previous 60 days and he did know what was happening to them, but that they were losing them right and left. Another agent said that thieves were about to force him to nail a "For Sale" sign on his business. He said that they were stealing his signs about as fast as he could put them up. The signs were only part of his troubles, he said angrily, that some people had stolen two toilets out of one of his houses and had taken about the entire place on another street, where they took two bathtubs, two sinks and two hot water connections. In yet another house, they had taken two of his bathtubs. Police hoped that a new type of game would soon be coming into style.
In Washington, Pentagonese, a dialect of English, had burst the boundaries of the Pentagon, with members of Congress snorting at uniformed witnesses who lapsed into the strange tongue, with its cadences of an engineering manual, its verbs fabricated out of nouns, its phrases riveted together with plenty of extra words to ensure rigidity. But the language had cropped up presently in the speech of the members themselves and was heard in White House press conferences. It was only a question of time before Americans who wished to communicate freely with an important segment of their countrymen would have to master the dialect for general usage. For a sample, it provides the biography of a purely mythical inhabitant of the Pentagon as it might sound in the language. "The marriage 13 May 1917 of Angus Inbasket and Penelope Scruggs may be considered to have initiated action looking to the activation of Gen. Marcus T. Inbasket. Production was finalized 13 February 1912. After appropriate lead time, emphasis was shifted to a phased training program, during which a wide spectrum of possible career configurations was evaluated. The program was definitized with an appointment to the military academy in August 1929. Growth potential was apparent at an early date and typically confirmed by a standing in the upper 15.72 percent of the class of 1933. Implementation of Inbasket potential was maximized by the entrance of the United States into World War II, with attendant timewise compression of the officer promotion structure and the initial deployment of Capt. Inbasket into the first staff echelons. It was during the period under consideration also that utilization with Miss Honeysuckle, daughter of Lt. Gen. Shiloh Picketline, was accomplished. Satellization of the new establishment was initially inhibited by problems of distance and logistics. When these were solved by the termination of hostilities, increments were annualized in the following order: A domestic facility was established on the suburban perimeter of Washington, D.C., when Brig. Gen. Inbasket was redeployed to the Department of Defense. A period of steady transitioning to cognizance of matters of higher administrative responsibility followed. Outstanding accomplishments were a study of systems control of management tools, direction of a task force on paperclip procurement and its relationship to unobligated balances, and the chairing of a study group on continuous refinement of functional criteria for stenographic pools. Gen. Inbasket was deactivated yesterday by a random encounter with a civilian-type vehicle in the approaches to the Pentagon north parking lot. Funeral plans have not yet been formalized."
On the editorial page, "Is Charlotte Going To Starve the Arts?" finds that Charlotte was neglecting its cultural institutions shamefully by failing to support one of the noblest ideas ever developed by a single community to keep the arts alive. The Charlotte Arts Fund had launched its united appeal for eight separate cultural organizations three months earlier with a goal of $128,000. Only a fraction of that amount, however, had thus far been raised, and even after a long extension of the campaign, only $63,547 had been raised through the previous week. To the credit of a handful of extremely dedicated people, an effort was still being made to collect a few more dollars.
It finds the disheartening record of early failure not to be capable of disguise. It had not been a failure of effort, for scores of volunteers had worked hard to make the drive a success, but rather was a failure on the part of many Charlotte residents to appreciate the value of the arts as an essential element in the life of the community. Failing to appreciate the role of excellent organizations such as the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and the Charlotte Opera Association, a number of well-heeled citizens had failed to fulfill their obligation to support them. The goal had not been too high, representing what Charlotte ought be able to raise in a single collective effort to keep the eight organizations going. But until the citizens were taught the value of those organizations, the Arts Fund might have to be satisfied with a gradual approach to what was thought to be a minimum subsistence in funding.
Charlotte needed the kind of rich cultural heritage which those organizations could supply, if for no other reason, selfish business reasons. The community's artistic and recreational resources offered allure to prospective new businesses. Far more important was the cultural enrichment which was essential in any civilized society because it brought compassion and exaltation into the daily lives of citizens.
Howard Taubman, writing in the New York Times recently, had gotten to the heart of the problem when he said:
"We must become convinced by cultivation and experience that the arts are a vital element in any civilized society. Only if we achieve this conviction and wisdom shall we go on to integrate the arts in the fabric of everyday living. Then we shall proceed to do the things that remain to be done.
"We shall
insist that our artistic institutions have continuity. We shall make
sure that their fate does not depend on the fluctuations of business
cycles or the whims of individuals. We shall not allow them to go
about hat in hand like beggars. We shall work out techniques, using
government or private initiative or both, to employ our artistic
resources to the full
It concludes that Charlotte had taken a mincing step in that direction and the Arts Fund was an excellent cause worthy of more support than it had thus far received.
"Decline & Fall of the House of Long" indicates that two weeks earlier, the stiff-shirted and proper legislators of Louisiana had watched aghast as Governor Earl Long, brother of the late "Kingfish" Huey Long, had spewed the old words from the clay hills for perhaps the last time and was taken off to a Texas sanitarium. On Tuesday night in Washington, his nephew, Senator Russell Long, had protested in undertones of what his father and uncle had blurted outright, against the confirmation of C. Douglas Dillon as Undersecretary of State, the latter, he had contended, having lined the pockets of faraway "princes, potentates and politicians" because he "typifies … the international Wall Street tycoons."
As the gentlemen of Louisiana had ignored the Governor, the proper gentlemen of the Senate had ignored Senator Long. It was no longer possible to gain votes by simply dividing the world into the downtrodden poor on one side and the cheats and rascals of great wealth on the other. But it would be ungenerous and unperceptive to say that was all populism, or the House of Long, had ever stood for. They had flourished 60 or 70 years earlier when the redneck's land was awash with gullies and he and his half-enemy and half-brother in misery, the black man, had joined together to fight the uppercrust which ran the country. It was the impetus of the Longs and the Watkinses, the Tillmans and the Bilbos, but always since then had been going out of business like the cotton gin. When the young doctor shot to death Huey Long in Baton Rouge 24 years earlier, the perceptive had known that the assassin's bullet was not really needed to kill the House of Long, knowing that the proper disapproval of legislators and Senators was not needed to measure the totality of its death.
Demagoguery was a distasteful thing, even when it was the expression of a passion for social justice, as it had been when the Longs were in high political cotton. Yet in radical populism there was something noble and leavening to politics. Before its conscience turned bad with race-baiting and the hypnosis of power, it had been something bright, but at present in the South, where new suburbs covered the washed red gullies and a filling station stood at the old rural crossroads, the sadness in the House of Long had also brought it a certain sadness. "Unlike the second and third generation populists, they never paled to insipid 'respectability' but kept on drinking bourbon from Coke bottles and sometimes hurling a sneer or two at 'Wall Street.'"
"Be of Good Cheer, O Gloomy Joseph" finds columnist Joseph Alsop, ordinarily gloomy, had been otherwise in celebrating in a series of columns the art and intellectual boom in Poland. Elation in him was rare and ought be interpreted as exciting.
During the Stalinist era, with its emphasis on "state" art, "social realism", Iron Curtain painters had suffered a kind of Victorianism which had now lost place. If Mr. Alsop exalted in Warsaw, he took it out on the West, asking why one did not "scent in Poland the smell of Alexandrian decay" which hung over so much of the artistic and intellectual life of the West.
It finds that many of his forebodings could be discounted by force of habit about half the time. His gloom often soared to epic proportions, as it had done a decade earlier when he told a Harvard graduating class that they had to "prepare, like the Greeks, to comb their golden hair in the sunlight and be ready to die like men." Sometimes, he seemed somewhat over-stuffed with the darker pages of Grote or Gibbon, who had seen the Mediterranean world waste itself in riot and gluttony, to give the West at present half a chance.
"Well, after a guarded sniff, then a deep draught of our tiny part of the Western atmosphere, we fail to scent the 'smell of Alexandrian decay' Mr. Alsop mentions. True, we scent a beatnik here and there, or an overwrought brain wallowing like Jean-Paul Sartre in an incredible pot of Marxism, existentialism, and high religion. But no rot."
It finds that Mr. Alsop's discovery in Warsaw offered the best sign imaginable that reports of the death of Western intellect and art had been greatly exaggerated. For instance, the Polish experimental theater recalled the early dabblings of Jean Cocteau and the young Polish painters had spoken admiringly of Picasso. The infant Warsaw philosophers wandered the "labyrinth" of Wittgenstein, who had made his revolution in England. The poets and writers created with the spirit of innovation which suggested Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, all Westerners of good standing. "It is the flattery of imitation. Is it not a sign of fair health?"
A piece from the New York Times, titled "Round or Square?" indicates that dispatches from Geneva had reported differences of opinion on whether the delegations to the foreign ministers conference ought sit at a square, round or oval table. The differences had been quickly settled, but it had not always been the case. Centuries earlier, entrances and exits and the shape of the furniture had posed problems sometimes which diplomats took a long time to resolve.
In the 17th Century, special doors had been sometimes placed in buildings so that delegates, each of whom claimed precedence, could enter a conference room simultaneously.
The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which had ended the Thirty Years War, had taken years to negotiate. Fifteen months had been required to settle questions of etiquette. The difficulty in answering those questions had been so great that negotiations had been carried on in two places, Munster and Osnabruck, separated by 30 miles. At one place, the French plenipotentiaries had precedence while at the other, the Swedish representatives were so recognized.
For the Congress of Utrecht in 1712, a large round table had been constructed so that delegates could seat themselves pell-mell and avoid any question as to priority of place. In those days, an important question related to the nature of the "full powers" which delegates brought with them.
Drew Pearson indicates that a grandstand play to place 169 Teamsters on the Senate witness stand this date had been nipped by Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Senate Rackets Committee, and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The move had been planned by Committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of Senator John F. Kennedy, as a final flare before the younger Mr. Kennedy would resign to manage his brother's campaign for the presidency. The latter had issued subpoenas for 169 Teamsters, most of whom had already testified, including some of the top officials in the union, and Mr. Kennedy had planned to give them a public lecture which would result in major headlines. But when Senators McClellan and Goldwater had gotten wind of the plan, they had quietly vetoed it and as of the current writing, all except 40 of the subpoenas had been withdrawn, with the remainder in the process of being withdrawn on the ground that Senator McClellan was ill.
Vice-President Nixon was fit to be tied when the White House had announced that the President's brother Milton would accompany Mr. Nixon on his trip to Moscow the following month. The Vice-President considered himself an old hand at good will missions abroad, having made several to Asia, the Orient, two to Latin America, one to England and one to Africa. Thus, to have the President's brother tagging along meant, first, that he would have to share the Moscow limelight, and, even more important, share headlines in American newspapers. The Vice-President's mission to Moscow had plenty of overtones of presidential politics, and headlines were important. When the Vice-President showed visible irritation regarding sharing the trip with Milton, a White House emissary had explained to him that the President felt that Mr. Khrushchev would talk more freely if he knew that he was also talking to the President's brother. That had only made Mr. Nixon madder, for the White House explanation was a direct reflection on his ability as a diplomat-reporter.
Mr. Pearson notes that to White House insiders, it confirmed the belief that the President was a long way from giving his blessing to Mr. Nixon as the Republican nominee in 1960.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the presence of the President's brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, president of Johns Hopkins University, in Vice-President Nixon's mission to Moscow the following month would dilute the Vice-President's carefully planned impact on the Russians, world opinion and the press. Dr. Eisenhower stood in a unique relationship to his brother, the President having repeatedly called him "the smartest man I know." They were in constant, close communication and the reliance of the President upon his brother was a major element of the power structure of Washington.
Dr. Eisenhower's importance in the formation of the President's ideas and opinions was something which the men of the Kremlin would not ignore. The Vice-President did not announce that Dr. Eisenhower would accompany him, rather the announcement having come from the White House, in itself, a significant fact, as was the timing of the announcement. The plans for it, promising to be a full-dress safari, including a complement of more than 60 reporters, had almost been completed. The schedule included visits by Mr. Nixon with Soviet leaders, travel across the Soviet Union en route home and appearances on Soviet television, all to be covered by the numerous members of the press.
Under those circumstances, the addition of Dr. Eisenhower to the trip had intrigued Washington, with the question arising as to whether his inclusion was fact-finding, political, or both. Mr. Nixon had always seen his journeys abroad as an opportunity to impress himself on American voters as an authority on foreign affairs, keenly aware of his lack of experience in that area and trying to compensate for it on his journeys by using his campaign-learned techniques to establish what press agentry called people-to-people contacts. Those efforts had not been completely successful, as evidenced by his trip in 1958 to Venezuela, having led to demands that all American officials restrict their public appearances abroad to ceremonial occasions.
In any event, during Secretary of State Dulles's lifetime, the Vice-President's efforts to frame a European trip which would take him behind the Iron Curtain were diplomatically prevented. Secretary of State Christian Herter, whatever his misgivings might be about Mr. Nixon's presence in such explosive areas at a moment of crisis, lacked the authority and prestige to put a tight rein on the ambitious Vice-President.
Dr. Eisenhower, by his presence, was bound to have a restraining influence on Mr. Nixon and it could mean that the latter would not see the Kremlin leaders alone. What his brother would think, do and say would be of great importance to the President, as compelling as anything Mr. Nixon might do and say. Dr. Eisenhower's presence also represented a constant reminder that the Administration had 18 months to go.
Vice-President Nixon obviously could not protest sharing top billing with the President's brother, but he had to be aware, as was Washington, that Dr. Eisenhower was to the President what Col. House had been to President Woodrow Wilson for a long time and what Eleanor Roosevelt had been to President Roosevelt during his entire White House tenure, that being his eyes and ears.
Robert C. Ruark, in London, indicates that reading his mail had made him indignant and he was now writing a dirty letter to the editors, knocking himself as a bum, saying that Simon Legree was a rose geranium alongside himself, as "no man can be as nasty as me without he should get lynched, yet. Nobody can be as wrong as me. Even on purpose."
He indicates that when he had written a piece suggesting that Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas should perhaps have a passport before they allowed him to leave the state, a strange condition similar to Lower Slobbovia, he had been a hero and the letters had poured in, as they had when he had commended the Indians in North Carolina for clobbering the Klan in January, 1958, also a strange state of mind.
His black correspondents had been high in praise, as were the self-styled liberals. "To the KKK and some barely literate types I was a 'nigger-lover,' and should be lynched." He says he was afflicted with the unfortunate habit of journalistic honesty, such that when he had gone to Africa and written some columns about the various African independencies, the reading complexion had changed. What he had said from knowledge was that perhaps the wild tribes he had known and had been living with at the moment had been about 90 percent unready for what the city-slicker organizers were shrieking about as independence. Now he was labeled a bum and his former friends yelled that he had sold out to the Klan, colonialism and Awful Force-us, a pet name he had for a native of "Arkansaw", while at the same time, the Klan and a bunch of other bigots had come forward to suggest that "we need more like you to keep our country free."
He says he had only indicated that kids ought go to school, whatever their color, and that some African tribes with their grandfathers' wrist bones still in their septums were going to take a power of kicking from a bunch of city-bred, foreign-educated opportunists who cared nothing for their brethren except to use them. The fact that their brethren did not even know their names, had never heard of them, and could not care less, escaped the opportunists as they screamed for independence. And the brethren continued to kill each other while the Russians slid in and used the chaos as the Russians always did.
He had suggested mildly on one occasion that the money wasted on funeral flowers could be better spent on flowers for the living or even on such things as cancer research, since he had never known of a corpse which could smell or see a flower. The florists screeched. Meanwhile, a lot of doctors had written in to say that he was a hep young man.
He had then written a piece about it perhaps being nice to find an old-fashioned type doctor who did not rely entirely on a prescription pad and the antibiotics which rapidly went out of fashion, a doctor who might even make a house call or speak to a patient civilly on the telephone. His bones had then been consigned by the doctors to be given to the Klan, the NAACP, the morticians and the florists. All of a sudden, the AMA had joined the Sacred Guild of Witch Doctors, the psychiatrists, and the French airy-fairies who made the sack dress possible, in a united front against himself.
"Excuse me, until now I had forgotten the anti-vivisectionists and the vegetarians. With those kids I am really very big on the hate list, and the fish lovers will be along any minute."
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., indicates that he was still trying to figure out the reasoning behind another writer's letter on May 2 that "all the Negro wants is his rights and for the white man to leave his Negro women alone." The only conclusion he had reached was that the writer had made the statement without proper analysis of the subject. On the same day the writer's letter had been printed, there had been a report of a black man who had allegedly raped and slain a 36-year old woman in Louisiana. There had been a great amount of publicity regarding the Mississippi incident wherein a man accused of raping a white woman had been taken by a mob of white, masked men from a local jail and lynched. Also, a South Carolina black man had been arrested recently and charged with the rape-murders of three women in Baltimore. A 15-year old black boy was being held in Gaffney, pending trial for the attempted rape of a five-year old white girl. "See what I mean? Instead of the Negro wanting the white man to leave Negro women alone, as [the previous writer] contends, isn't it about time for Negro men to stop molesting and murdering white women?" He suggests that the previous writer perhaps could only see one side of the story, that which was based on false assumptions, "dreamy-eyed philosophy, negative logic." He says that a person could cite one case of white men molesting a black woman, such as the recent case in Florida, and he could cite 100 incidents of black men raping or murdering white women. "If the Negro wants to be accepted as a human being he'll certainly have to start acting like one." He says he had learned a lot about blacks during his tenure with the Army and could testify to the fact that the differences between blacks and whites were not merely a matter of skin color, but rather a difference in psychological makeup, in social custom, and in moral values—"and if you knew how Negroes 'played the dozens,' or how they talked about women in the Army, you'd know what I mean when I refer to their different moral values." Despite the efforts of the Supreme Court, no amount of Federal legislation would change those basic differences, that the only person who could change them was the black person, and from what he could determine, he was not making much progress in that direction. He says that he would be the last to deny equal rights, but that did not mean integration, only separate but equal facilities, such as schools, places of recreation, and living areas. Black people had the right to vote, protected by law, and the right to own property and earn a living. If he wanted acceptance as a white man, he would have to make an attempt to adjust himself to the white man's way of thinking and living, at which point the color of the skin would not make any difference. Acceptance would not be handed out on a silver platter but would require a lot of effort. "The white man had to fight to wrest this country from the wilderness; the Negro is going to have to fight in a different way to prove himself worthy of a niche in the white man's society. And rape, murder, or robbery will prove nothing except primitive instincts that have no place in a civilized world."
While professing to recognize the "rights" of blacks, he in fact recognizes them only as privileges to be conveyed paternalistically or not by whites only upon being earned by their recipients of the white man's grace, as if joining an exclusive club. He obviously suffers from an unconscious flaw
A letter writer indicates his opposition to the bond issue which would enable consolidation of the City and County schools, suggests reading I Kings, chapter 12, in the Old Testament, wherein was described the kingdom being broken to pieces and finally destroyed because the government refused to lighten the load of the people who cried out for relief. He quotes from the chapter.
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