The Charlotte News
Friday, June 5, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had reportedly hinted this date in secret talks that the Soviet Union might be willing to concede the rights of the Western allies to maintain their military garrisons in West Berlin indefinitely. It was said to be one reason why Secretary of State Christian Herter and the other Western allied diplomats persisted in thinking that the Big Four conference might yet produce an East-West agreement on Berlin leading to a summit meeting later in the summer. The unguarded, underlying optimism apparently had not been shaken by Mr. Gromyko's flat refusal on Thursday to begin detailed negotiations to ensure the free flow of Western traffic between West Berlin and West Germany. The Western foreign ministers had sought a guarantee of free access to West Berlin as a test of Soviet willingness to reach a compromise agreement in the Berlin crisis. Mr. Gromyko had said that he would give the requested assurance provided the West agreed to convert West Berlin into a demilitarized free city, a proposal which the Western allies had rejected because it would leave West Berlin defenseless.
In Atlanta, it was reported that a Federal District Court judge had ruled this date that Atlanta schools could not remain racially segregated, but indicated that he would not order immediate integration which could lead to closing of the city's schools in September. Instead, it appeared that he would allow municipal authorities time to work out an integration pattern. Under present state law, any integration could result in school closures. In making the ruling, he said, "Even the most ardent segregationists in the land, though bitterly opposed to such a ruling, now recognize that racially segregated public schools are not permitted by law." His tentative order was provided at the start of a hearing in which ten black parents sought to eliminate segregation in the city's schools. The case was being heard by two Federal judges without a jury and both had ruled against segregation in recent cases. The judge allowed attorneys a recess to discuss the preliminary order but it was considered unlikely that the city's attorneys would be able to change the position of the judge, which was concurred in by the other judge. The two judges had been hearing the suit in tandem but the judge issuing the order this date said that there was no provision of law by which two judges could decide an order, but that there was a provision for another judge to confer on such an order and the other judge had done so in the case. The order noted that the Federal District Court was bound by the decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny. He also said that even the legislatures of Georgia and other states recognized that the ruling of the Supreme Court constituted the law on the question and that the various legislatures for some years had been passing laws to meet the problem created by such decisions.
In Galveston, Tex., it was reported that a probate judge this date had set a sanity hearing for Louisiana Governor Earl Long for June 16, after the Governor's wife earlier had signed documents asking that the judge hold a hearing aimed at committing the Governor for mental treatment. His formal order said that the hearing was "for the best interests and protection of Earl K. Long as a mentally ill person." His wife's action had come after the Governor had shown signs of wanting to leave the hospital in Galveston where he started mental treatment the prior Saturday following a surreptitious trip from Louisiana. The petition of his wife sought commitment for him for 90 days or less. The judge earlier had committed the Governor to the protective custody of the hospital. The hearing would follow Texas law such that the Governor could be present and represented by counsel. The judge appointed three Galveston attorneys to represent the Governor, but indicated that he could also choose his own attorney. The Governor's nephew, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, had told newsmen in Baton Rouge that his uncle "might be back within a month." The Senator had just returned from Galveston, where he had conferred with attending physicians of his uncle.
In Philadelphia, it was reported that a father, sick with grief over the senseless slaying of his three-year old daughter, this date had written an open letter to the people of Philadelphia offering to help the 15-year old honor student who had confessed to the slaying. The father, 31, a mathematics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed the thoughts of his tortured mind in a copyrighted article in the Philadelphia Bulletin, saying: "Dear people of Philadelphia, I write to you this morning at the rise of dawn, still in the midst of a tormented wake, the most terrible grief which has ever seared my soul. Yesterday afternoon I lost the most precious thing that life ever gave to me—a 3 1/2-year-old girl child… She was murdered at three in the afternoon, in the basement of a house only a few doors away from ours… Had I caught the boy in the act, I would have wished to kill him. Now that there is no undoing of what is done, I only wish to help him. Let no feeling of cave-man vengeance influence us. Let us rather help him who did so human a thing." In the 1,300-word letter, he said he was motivated by "an irrepressible wish to contribute my share of understanding of what has taken place in the hope of thus slightly increasing our understanding of one another." The letter had been written only a few hours after the body of the little girl had been found stuffed in a toy closet in the basement of the home of her teenage slayer. The boy had admitted the crime after confessing to his priest and had led authorities to the location of the body. He had cried that he did not know why he had done it. The boy had told police that he had strangled the child when she had resisted his advances. The father of the little girl had also written: "You will understand that I am not lecturing to you for the pure joy of sounding wise. I am hurt to the depths of my being and I cry out to you to take better care of your children. The point I am arguing goes, of course, well beyond the question of children's education. Our habit of thinking in terms of villains and heroes extends well beyond our family management, but expresses itself in political attitudes and to conduct of foreign affairs. It is very hard to admit, but there are simply no villains on whom to blame it all. There are simply lots of human beings, all with a similar set of fundamental drives, all needing control and love in order to function in society. Some of these human beings have had their basic drives so profoundly inhibited—often by being overwhelmingly goodies for much longer than health and sanity will permit—that the problem of their control poses the most serious problem for society, thus making police departments and armies an unhappy, weighty necessity until we can, as a race, grow some more, and make them less weighty accordingly."
In Raleigh, it was reported that the State Senate was prepared this date for final action on a compromised court reform bill and a proposed new State constitution. Both measures required three-fifths majorities in the Legislature before they could be presented to the citizenry for ratification. After the judicial bill was approved by a vote of 40 to 7 on the second reading on Thursday, its chief promoter, State Senator J. Spencer Bell of Mecklenburg, had told reporters: "I'm as happy as a pig in a cow wallow. It's still a good, sound bill." Senator Lindsay Warren, a major opponent of the proposal, objected to a provision which would give the State Supreme Court administrative control over the court system. His amendment, enabling the Legislature to veto the Supreme Court regulations, had erased most of the opposition to the proposal, a watered-down version of the court reform program recommended by a State Bar Association committee led by Mr. Bell. The Senate had defeated an amendment by New Hanover County's Cicero Yow to enable the General Assembly to modify or amend Supreme Court rulings. Mr. Bell had fought that suggestion. The Senate had passed the revised constitution on the second reading on Thursday by a majority of 43 to 2, after an amendment had been passed limiting the big counties to one State senator. The amendment passed 40 to 7 with big-city Senators lined up in solid opposition. A similar amendment was approved by the Assembly several years earlier, but the people had rejected it in a statewide referendum. The proposed constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, increased legislative pay from $15 to $20 per day and outlined a plan of succession should the governor became incapacitated.
The chairman of the North Carolina Magistrates Association, W. J. Thomas, had reiterated its stand against appointment of judges, saying that the people of the state were competent to judge the judges who judged them. He had made the statement on Thursday regarding a feature of the court reform bill before the Senate this date, which would require that magistrates or justices of the peace be appointed rather than elected. He said that the Association hoped that the House would "see fit to adopt an amendment preserving the popular election of all judicial officers."
Bob Slough of The News reports that Charlotte units of the North Carolina Air National Guard had held their 8:00 a.m. formation this date on a flight line, flanked by sleek jet planes. On Monday, the Guardsmen would be on the picket line in Henderson, maintaining peace in that town at the struck Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. During the morning, the Guardsmen had picked up equipment at ANG headquarters and had been issued steel helmets and M-1 rifles, with some receiving olive-drab blankets, which smelled to them as mothballs. When they would begin the first of a two-day training period, they would go to classes, listen to lectures and attend drill periods. When the Guardsmen would depart early on Sunday morning, they would, in effect, be infantrymen. The Air Guardsmen would relieve Army National Guard units for the latter to attend summer training encampment. The Army Guardsmen had the job of maintaining the peace at Henderson since May 12. The Charlotte Air Guard unit would be the first Air Guardsmen to go to Henderson. They faced a two-week period of virtual isolation. They would not receive passes except in emergencies and would not be allowed to fraternize with civilians in the town. Support units provided mess facilities and the motor pool would maintain the vehicles while other units of the Air Guard would provide supplies. The task force would be commanded by Col. Henry Byrd, Jr., and had been designated the 145th Air Police Support Group (Provisional). They had gotten their first taste of Army life during the morning when they picked up the heavy infantry equipment and would receive their second test early Sunday morning when they climbed aboard borrowed Army trucks for the convoy trip to Henderson.
John Kilgo of The News reports that Ernest Selvey was a plump man who was rapidly losing his hair, a jovial fellow, but finding it a little hard to smile at present. As the present Charlotte Police Chief, he probably would lose his position after the following week. When he talked of the chain of events which had made a political football of him, tears filled his eyes. He was named acting chief on August 13, 1958, and was given the post permanently on November 26. He said that he would be lying if he said that he was not hurt, deeply hurt. He had been a policeman for 24 years and had pounded a beat for five years and then worked his way up to captain in January, 1958. When Jesse James, Police Chief of Burlington, would take over later in the month, Mr. Selvey would probably go back to being a captain, a contingency to be determined by the new chief. He was given a leave of absence from the Civil Service Commission when he had taken over as chief and his rank of captain was still open. He left the position with a sad heart and his friends did not think he had been given a chance, and neither did he. He said: "I would have loved to have had the chance to make good. I don't feel like I have been given the chance. I think I could have made good." He said he had not had the chance to put his plans into operation, that he had been ready to reorganize the department by naming more chief officers, that he had a lot of plans which he probably would not get a chance to use. He said that a lot of things needed to be done to improve the department and that the man who took the job would have a chance to make good. He was sorry that the job carried with it so much controversy and said that he did not want to see a big fuss about the thing.
On an inside page appears the fourth and final article in a series on D-Day
On the editorial page, "The Council Runs on Four Cylinders" finds one consolation for City Hall's woefully depleted Old Guard, that it could still get quick action of a sort. City Council member Steve Dellinger on Monday, when the Big Four members had blocked another Old Guard attempt to reappoint E. C. Selvey as the chief of police, had challenged them to trot out their man, and some 48 hours later, they had put forth Jesse Roland James, Chief of Police in Burlington, as the candidate, selected by the Big Four.
He would definitely be appointed, since he had the majority will of the Council behind him
As long as the Big Four operated as a team, they would rule the roost, a fact of political life to which the Old Guard and the people of Charlotte generally would have to become accustomed. Thus far, the Big Four had used their power prudently.
It finds the choice of Mr. James as the new chief to have been excellent, as he was an experienced lawman with a superb record of achievement, highly qualified both personally and professionally.
It finds that it was probably not the Big Four's intention to offend anyone's sense of political propriety by forming an opinion in advance of a regular session of the Council. But there was always the possibility that all seven members of the Council could explore an issue more thoroughly and productively than by only four members in the future, as ideas were not necessarily limited to the majority faction.
"Rep. Frank Snepp Drafts a Bad Bill" finds that any resemblance between the state's Alcoholic Beverage Control system and a house of cards was hardly coincidental, as both were strangely susceptible to false moves. It fears that State Representative Frank Snepp had just made one in the 1959 General Assembly.
He had introduced a bill the previous day designed to provide blanket authority for towns of more than 1,000 population to vote on established ABC stores, in other words, extending to municipalities provisions presently limited to counties for calling liquor elections. The measure invited the wrath of militant dry forces who would cheerfully shut down all ABC stores allowed under the wise and proper county unit system. The prospect of liquor stores in any and every town, without even the necessity of obtaining a local bill from the Legislature, would appear to many in the state to be too much of a good thing.
The ABC system, it opines, ought be preserved, but ought to be preserved on the basis of countywide elections. The county was not only the traditional unit of local government for an ABC vote but also was the fairest. Those who lived just outside the city limits ought not be denied the right to vote on a matter of such great importance to the moral and social climate of an entire community. Those people were more than likely members of the community, whether or not they actually were citizens of the municipality served as its center.
Ideally, the ABC system ought exist solely by majority consent of any county in which it operated. It did not make sense that a village located in a populous county would be permitted to operate liquor stores if the vast majority of people in the county objected to them. It was the will of the whole community which mattered most and it meant, in most cases, the will of the whole county.
"Fill the Leadership Vacuum First" indicates that the necessity for a strong, united front on City-County school consolidation had been driven home to both boards of education and the Chamber of Commerce the previous day and finds that it ought mean the end of an unfortunate era of drift on perhaps the most important educational issue which Mecklenburg County had faced in decades.
Oliver Rowe, one of consolidation's earliest advocates, had put the problem in focus for assembled school officials and Chamber representatives, that there was a dangerous confusion among voters who did not seem to know where the school boards and the superintendents themselves stood on the question. The uncertainty had spawned unwarranted fears and suspicions in both the city and county. Obviously the time had come to answer the apprehension with reasonableness and candor, precisely what the school officials intended to do.
Strong statements in favor of merger were being prepared and would likely eloquently emphasize several compelling reasons why consolidation was so necessary, for the need to equalize educational opportunities for children throughout the entire metropolitan area, for the need to equalize teachers' supplements throughout the area, and for the need to avoid a bitter struggle for possession of the perimeter area, to be annexed at the beginning of 1960, an area which the City system had to have to make ends meet and yet one which the County system could not afford to surrender.
Joint declarations and strong individual statements would not suffice. There had been a leadership vacuum on consolidation since Mr. Rowe had completed his volunteer crusade among county PTA's in 1958. The vacuum had yet to be filled and until it was, hopes for a large affirmative vote on June 30 for the school bond issue to effect consolidation appeared fragile. It concludes that the team's greatest need at present was a quarterback.
"Cousin Wayland & Le Marquis de Sade" indicates that Mecklenburg's Representative Ernest Hicks might have persuaded the State House to pass his "spanking bill", but as one who had obviously grown up in the innocent age when Santa Claus might leave switches instead of Freud, he could not have foreseen the comedy it would evoke.
Some critics had put Mr. Hicks down as a fossil who, in proposing to legalize the paddle in the state's classrooms, had submitted a proposal only slightly less onerous than that children be punctured in iron maidens or stretched on the rack. "School marms and principals stood revealed: A pack of Beelzebubs, eager to pitch-fork their victims; molls and toughs who learned how to sling a lead pipe on Chicago's south side."
"Cousin" Wayland Spruill had no doubt come closest to alarming public indignation over the proposed bill by raising the biggest possible bugaboo, psychological injury. He had drawled to the House, "If you make a practice of whupping a child for everything he does, he'll grow up with that very stuff in his system and you'll make a sadist of him."
It finds the alarums to be improbable and a bit absurd, especially Cousin Wayland's suggestion that an occasional paddling might drive children into the haunted world of the Marquis de Sade. It finds it also the case with alternatives to spanking which the avant garde child psychologists had offered. For instance, the teacher, seeing a child splash another with purple tempera paint was urged by one advocate of psyche-soothing to "hug" the child or wink at him or her and "try to draw his attention elsewhere". If the child's next caprice was to cut the other child's curls off, perhaps, severe "disapproval" ought be imposed by the "withdrawal of affection".
It finds it unfortunate that the bill of Mr. Hicks was more than likely to pass in the face of the comic horror suggested by its enemies.
"We care little for fanatics, we are opposed to sadism; we view brutality with alarm. Yet we harbor a vague fear of the grown-up child who was in his minority emancipated from the rod so long that his character is neutralized." It indicates that it was a little fearful for him also, supposing that he decided it would be fun to splash a neighbor's face with house paint, and the neighbor might be one of those "sadists" of whom Mr. Spruill had warned, perhaps so sadistic as to give the emancipated one a slug in the jaw, bad for the psyche.
Having grown up, starting in junior high school, not in elementary school, around male teachers, some of whom delighted in administering the paddle to anyone straying an iota from given rules, especially in gym class, in some cases clearly exhibiting a sadistic urge to apply the paddle for little reason at all, we sit on the fence with regard to this form of mild corporal punishment in the schools. Perhaps, it had an ameliorative effect, but somehow, we tend to doubt it, as some of the more frequent recipients of the paddle wound up not in such good straits vis-à-vis society, some of whom went to jail later for various crimes.
We state our position without any particular personal bias, as we never were deemed so violative of any rule that we had occasion to meet the paddle, and so, we suppose, it did have a deterrent effect on those who did not wish to have it applied to them. But really, paddling a child because he happened to forget his gym clothes on a particular day, as was often the cause for the holed board to be applied hard against the back side of the offender, seemed a wee bit ridiculous to us at the time, especially given that it was applied before the whole gym class. We did, however, take special care in consequence always to remember to pack our gym clothes, requiring special care since gym class did not occur every day of the week, only on alternate days. We also had to remember our combination for the lock on our gym basket, as well as the separate combination on the lock on our locker in the school, proper. There was an awful lot to remember, starting in junior high school, outside the ordinary course work, all while budding adolescent hormones performed funny activities to one's phys. and thus requiring physical adjustments as well to avoid mental distractions in school. Adults sometimes tend to forget these things.
Tom Turner, writing in "The American Seen … by Others", in a piece titled "It's All a Masonic Plot", indicates that Georges Ollivier, a Frenchman who saw a Freemason, "for him an envoy of the devil", under every politician's bed, examined FDR by his particular optics in Franklin Roosevelt: L'Homme de Yalta. The work, according to the Australian review Edge, had been translated into Italian and Spanish, but had yet to appear in English, except for excerpts in Edge.
M. Ollivier asserted that "nearly all Americans of any importance belong to the Freemasons," and that President Roosevelt in particular "was a member of numerous secret societies: the Eagles, Phi Beta Kappa, the Royal Order of Elk…," all considered sinister by M. Ollivier.
The piece indicates that history abounded with such villains, for as M. Ollivier confidently revealed, all three French revolutions, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the American Revolution of 1776, and the New Deal, had all been the work of the Freemasons.
Drew Pearson indicates that Vice-President Nixon, who had become Vice-President in a relatively short period of time, had sat not far from Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who also had shot up to the important post he now occupied in Russia in a short period of time. They had been at the foreign ministers' luncheon given by the President after the funeral of John Foster Dulles the prior week. The Vice-President had said: "Mr. Gromyko, I am sometimes mistaken for you. Traveling abroad they sometimes think I am the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union." Mr. Gromyko had replied: "And I am sometimes mistaken for you. They say 'there goes Vice-President Nixon.'"
That's funny. In his post-Presidency years, Mr. Nixon, in our view, came more to resemble Leonid Brezhnev, with his eyebrows for some reason having become much heavier with age. Does one eventually develop the facial characteristics of a person one admires?
Mr. Pearson indicates that even before the long and painstaking hearings had been published regarding Admiral Lewis Strauss's confirmation to be secretary of commerce, most Senators had made up their minds on how they would vote, many having personal reasons entirely disconnected with the record. He presents the opinions of some of those Senators who had made up their minds and some who had not, plus the background for their motives. Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had said: "Adm. Strauss is a social friend. It would be embarrassing not to vote for him." Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon said, "He's a personal friend of my family." Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia favored confirmation, always following Senator Harry F. Byrd of the same state, who was definitely for confirmation. Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, who had formerly been vice-president of Capital Airlines, which had transportation problems before the Government while acting Secretary of Commerce Strauss was trying to bring the whole field of transportation under his authority, denied that the position influenced his decision on confirmation, as he wavered. Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee was for confirmation, as his great friend and political benefactor, Bernard Baruch, favored confirmation, and Senator Gore voted with Mr. Baruch. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was wavering. He did not say so, but in the back of his mind had been the possibility that if he were to become President, he would have confirmation troubles for his appointees also. But his fellow Catholic colleague, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, had warned that any presidential hopeful who voted for confirmation of Admiral Strauss would stamp himself as a tight-control president, not likely to cooperate with Congress.
Governor Price Daniel of Texas had been considered a dyed-in-the-wool champion of the oil and gas companies when he had served in the Senate from Texas. Now, the oil and gas companies were fuming against their one-time friend. Governor Daniel had demanded that the big pipeline companies pay their share of the tax load for the state of Texas. Compared with the pipeline companies of Louisiana, the Texas pipeline moguls had gotten off with a mere tax slap on the wrist. If they paid taxes at the same rate as in Louisiana, Texas would have a 100 million dollar surplus in its treasury.
Joseph Alsop, in Warsaw, starts with a quote: "In the Stalinist times, we all made the journey to the end of the night together. So now you must not be surprised if we enjoy the light of day." He indicates that the returners from the journey to night's end were the artists of Poland, the painters who were presently producing a creative explosion in the country. He says he had enjoyed a long day with some of them, a day set apart from any ordinary day by its special combination of gaiety, easy companionship, and serious intellectual passion. At the close of the day, the remark he had quoted had explained that "quite wonderful combination".
The organizer of the occasion had been Prof. Urbanowicz, "a gentle, wise man who teaches fine arts at Warsaw University and is also an abstract painter of note." The only member of the party who "still paints the objects", as he had put it, was Jan Cybis, but he painted the object in a manner which could cause something close to apoplexy in Moscow when his paintings had recently been shown there. For the same reason, the others had called him "our father and forerunner". The rest had been younger men, such as a shy, strikingly talented abstract expressionist, Jan Lebenstein, and the experimental Alexander Kobzdej.
He indicates that their day together had begun around a luncheon table at the best restaurant in Warsaw, which sadly proved at least half of the truth of a glum pronouncement by the leading Soviet writer, Ilya Ehrenburg: "Alas, comrades, socialism with all its virtues cannot produce good cooking or good pastry." But the greasiness of the cutlets had not impeded the effervescence of the conversation.
He had first been struck by the gaiety and comradeship. "The art world of the West tends to be cattily uncompanionable as the sourest old maids' tea party. But these men, widely different in age, fierce rivals in their work, were still united by their shared past trials. And that trial had ended in daylight, and not in the gray prison-twilight of Budapest."
With the vodka, there had been jokes, but joking of friends reunited had soon been forgotten when Mr. Alsop had asked the question about the fate of the arts in Stalinist times. All except one of those present had tried his hand at official Communist painting. Only Mr. Lebenstein had stopped painting for a time and quietly subsided into the derelict life of a Warsaw bum. Mr. Urbanowicz said: "At the beginning, we were impressed when the party told us, 'You are outside life, divorced from masses; and now you must paint differently.' We asked ourselves, was it true or not?"
Long before Wladyslaw Gomulka had come to power in Poland, they said they knew that the socialist realism was not art, that it was "worse than sawdust". When the Stalinists had still gripped Poland in 1955, the first pictures had been shown which flagrantly defied the official convention, and those who had shown them, such as the tragically dead Wrobleski, were still considered heroes. Yet, by rejecting the official realism, Mr. Alsop had questioned whether the Polish painters felt cut off from the masses at present. That question had provoked a babble of deeply serious talk. Mr. Lebenstein said: "For an artist, it is the personal truth that matters. When I do work that seems true to me, then I feel in accord with others, and if some who see my work also feel this accord, it is enough." Mr. Kobzdej said: "In war, in a great revolution, the individual is lost in the great struggle of the mass. But in art, the individual must rediscover himself, so for good art the individual cannot be submerged." Thus had begun a discussion of modern art which lasted for a series of visits to studios and through the storage place of the Polish pictures chosen for a major exhibition in Brazil.
The talk had revealed that the American painter, the late Jackson Pollock, occupied almost the same place in the imagination of those Polish artists as the late James Dean occupied in the imagination of some young people. "Seeing his pictures, even in reproduction, was a true liberation," they said. Pablo Picasso, they indicated, was "not a true painter, but a great intellectual who paints—and may be more important for that reason." Henri Matisse was considered "all painter through and through", and was another of their heroes.
As to the future of painting, they said: "The lessons of the past, the conditions of the present, the inspiration of the future, are what make a style in painting. What we do now is true for us, but the serious painters of the next generation will surely find another way. So it is, always!"
Mr. Alsop indicates that for many hours the truly memorable day had continued, with jokes, teasing and astute commentary regarding the pictures in each studio interspersed by passages of deeper talk. He finds the deeper meaning of the day had been given by Mr. Cybis, when he had described the storm touched off in Moscow by "our rather conservative little Polish show there." It had been a high storm, but, he added with a grin, "the youths were on our side, and to the youths belong the future."
Robert C. Ruark, in London, indicates that he did not care very much for a piece of "bootlicking public relations" which someone had told Attorney General William Rogers to make recently when he had sought forgiveness from a few thousand Japanese who were uprooted from their West Coast residences and thrown into relocation camps just after Pearl Harbor. He finds that the fact that they were called "relocation centers" and had not made lampshades of any of those confined there had made them nonetheless concentration camps. Mr. Rogers, speaking in the name of the Government, had said that a program to restore citizenship to about 6,000 Nisei who had renounced their citizenship as a gesture of anger after Japan had lost the war, had been "an attempt to make up for a mistake our nation made" toward a group of its citizens, numbering about 72,000. Assistant Attorney General George Doub hoped that the Nisei "would have the charity to forgive their government."
He says that he also hoped so, but he hopes that the Government would beseech a lot of Americans to recall the inconvenience, not to mention death, torture and brutality, which the Japanese had caused a great many people all over the world. People who had been caught in Malaya and Singapore and who died in death marches and under the clubbed butts of guns had suffered far more than the impounded Nisei.
"Everybody is so prone to fall in love with Germans and Japanese these days that I must painfully reconstruct a few facts. The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We engaged in battle with the Germans for quite a spell, after having been unofficially at war with them for some time. This war took a good few years out of the lives of many millions of us, and it took more than a good few lives away from many millions of us. As I recall, Hitler's chosen people exterminated about six million Jews. This apart from folks that merely got bombed to death in London, sunk at sea, or mangled at Remagen."
He says that his memory was not clear, as he had been trying to learn how to be a naval ensign at the time, with little success, as the Japanese were "roaring around about the Philippines and to the Solomons, and Hawaii was a mess. California was pretty close to the Pacific Theater, which was wrong of course, since according to congressional thinking, California should have been located in Lake Erie, for safety's sake."
There had been a threat of actual attack on the Pacific Coast mainland and the brother of General Eisenhower, Milton, had been delegated the task of removal of some of the Japanese from strategic areas as much for their own protection as for the possibility that "blood would be thicker than foreign water" and that a good solid "banzai" might rouse the beast in a "cook-boy or gardener." He remembered that clearly, as he had gone to interview Milton Eisenhower about the time his brother had been named the top commander for the Allies in Europe and just before he had joined the Navy.
"We interned these people since, after all, we were at war and until 'Susie Wong' and 'Flower Drum Song' came along, Orientals had a decided faculty for remaining Orientals in heart and head. This was considerably before Japan was discovered to be a gallant ally which did not attack Pearl Harbor at all. This was a time of the great double-cross when old Kurusu was conning Roosevelt while the Japs hit Hong Kong, Malaya, Guam, the Philippines and Pearl Harbor all in one great smack. And Japan had recently signed a nonaggression pact with the Russians."
He says that he had many Australian friends who had lived through Japanese internment and were not quite right yet, and so believes that the indignant Nisei did not have much to complain about in their internment. "I saw some Occidental skeletons, barely alive, coming out of various occupied portions of the East when the Japs started losing their conquered ground. They weren't very pretty."
A letter writer says that as one of the oldest citizens of Charlotte at age 80, he protests paying any new city manager more than $15,000 to start, that if he proved his worth, then the salary could be increased by $2,500 after two years, that unless anyone applying for the job was a wizard, that was all the person was worth at the start. He says they had a fine group of men as Mayor and members of the City Council and that they should start slashing wherever it could be done to reduce taxes for all of the citizens.
A letter writer, president of the Mercy Hospital Auxiliary, thanks the newspaper for its cooperation during the previous year, indicating that the publicity given their meeting notices for the Mercy Hospital Guild and the dramatic way the newspaper had told the story of their activities had been greatly appreciated.
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