The Charlotte News
Thursday, July 18, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Knoxville, Tenn., that the charges of criminal contempt
against four of the defendants in the "Clinton 14" trial
for violating a Federal Court order the prior fall not to interfere
with the desegregation efforts at the Clinton High School, had been
dismissed this date, with the defense counsel for the other
defendants promptly moving for acquittal also. The U.S. District
Court judge ruled, following the close of the Government's case, that
there was insufficient evidence put forward to warrant conviction of
the four men against whom he dismissed the charges. One was a school
bus driver, another a house painter, a third a utilities firm
employee, and the fourth a carpenter. During defense arguments for
the acquittals, the jury was out of the courtroom. Ross Barnett,
former president of the Mississippi Bar, and future Governor
Supporters of the Administration's civil rights bill had fought this date against mounting Senate sentiment to confine the measure's provisions to only the protection of voting rights. An influential Senator who had asked that he not be quoted by name, had said that leadership polls indicated that a majority of the Senate presently favored an amendment put forward by Senators Clinton Anderson of New Mexico and George Aiken of Vermont to narrow the scope of the bill. They had proposed eliminating a section which would authorize the Attorney General to seek injunctions to enforce all civil rights. If the amendment were adopted, the proposed authority of the Attorney General to intervene would be limited only to cases involving voting rights violations. Senator William Knowland had told reporters that he believed the vote on the amendment would be close but that he did not believe the section regarding other civil rights would be stricken. He joined with Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota the previous day in a move to chip away one portion of the controversial section, offering an amendment to repeal a post-Civil War Reconstruction law authorizing the use of Federal troops to enforce court orders, the old law having been linked in the bill to the proposed new authority for the Attorney General to enforce all civil rights—as further detailed in an editorial below. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia said that the move constituted an admission that he had been correct when he told the Senate two weeks earlier that the House bill would authorize "bayonet" enforcement of integration in the South. Senators Knowland and Humphrey had acted after the President had told his press conference the previous day that he could not imagine any circumstance in which he would ever be induced to use Federal troops to enforce court orders.
In Washington, a Government prosecutor told the jury in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, charged with conspiracy to bribe an attorney working for the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of the unions and management, that Mr. Hoffa had "cooked up a scheme to subvert and destroy the usefulness of the Senate Rackets Committee", with lawyer Hyman Fischbach of Miami, who had been temporarily dismissed from the case because his attorney had become ill during the course of the trial. The Government attorney opened final arguments in the case, acknowledging that lawyer John Cye Cheasty of the Committee had "deceived" both Mr. Hoffa and Mr. Fischbach. The Government alleged that both had sought to bribe Mr. Cheasty to obtain confidential data from the Committee to provide to Mr. Hoffa. The admitted deception involved Mr. Cheasty having initially reported the matter to the Committee and agreed to cooperate with the Committee, the FBI and the Justice Department to obtain evidence against the pair, while posing as their ally. The Government's attorney said that if the plan had succeeded, it might have destroyed the Committee. He argued that it was clear that the evidence showed that Mr. Hoffa wanted a spy in the Committee. Mr. Hoffa had testified in his defense that he hired Mr. Cheasty to help represent the Midwest Conference of Teamsters, headed by Mr. Hoffa, and that not until after he was arrested, did he realize that Mr. Cheasty worked for the Committee. The bridge in Brooklyn is still available, marked down now to 12 cents just for you.
The AFL-CIO ethical practices committee this date had called new hearings on charges that the Teamsters and Bakers unions were corruptly dominated, with the chairman of the committee having set July 31 as the date for the hearing of the charges against the Bakers Union, and August 1, for the hearing on the charges against the Teamsters. The ultimate penalty for corrupt domination was ouster of the union from the AFL-CIO, but it was believed that the leaders of the organization were seeking to encourage the unions to eliminate leaders questioned in testimony before the Senate Committee so that unions themselves could remain within the organization. The Rackets Committee had wound up hearings the previous day regarding the activities of the president of the Bakers Union, James Cross, who had refused to take a lie detector test as proposed by union rivals who had told the Committee that Mr. Cross had helped to beat up a union officer and his wife, accusations which Mr. Cross had denied. He also had declined to call a special union convention to review his activities. The AFL-CIO had earlier ousted Teamsters president Dave Beck as a vice-president of the organization and as an executive councilman, but Mr. Beck remained the president of the Teamsters. A number of other Teamsters officials had been questioned in the Senate Committee hearings regarding alleged mishandling of union funds. It was believed that the ethical practices committee wanted to finish the hearings on the two unions so that they could make at least preliminary findings before a meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council on August 11 in Chicago. That council was expected to take action intended to spur the two unions to clean up their leadership.
Also in Washington, a final House vote on the Administration's embattled foreign aid bill had been deferred this date until at least the following day because of the death of Representative James Bowler of Illinois, resulting in the House canceling its business for the remainder of the day.
The House Civil Service Committee had overridden Administration objections this date and voted for an 11 percent, 532 million dollar pay raise for a million Government workers.
In Cairo, the Government of Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser this date had written into the law its promise not to discriminate against any Suez Canal users, and to adhere to the 1888 Constantinople Convention, which it had used to bar Israeli shipping from the waterway.
In Aden, a newspaper reported this date that the Yemen Army was bringing modern war equipment and anti-aircraft guns to posts on the disputed Aden-Yemeni border.
In Taipei, Formosa, a Chinese rescue team this date had reached the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force plane with 16 aboard, finding, according to police, no survivors.
At the Atomic Test Site in Nevada, the Atomic Energy Commission this date postponed the detonation of the eighth shot of the current test series because of adverse wind conditions.
In Newport, R.I., it was reported that the President and Mrs. Eisenhower probably would arrive in mid-August and remain for three or four weeks, according to White House press secretary James Hagerty.
In Miami, Fla., it was reported that a Navy airplane had left San Juan, Puerto Rico, this date to investigate what the Miami Weather Bureau had described as an "easterly wave" in the Atlantic Ocean, about 2,500 miles from Miami. A forecaster said that a report had been expected by the afternoon, when the plane would reach the area.
In Red Bud, Ill., most of the 2,000 residents of the town had been evacuated this date when ammonia fumes from a broken line at a fertilizer plant had spread through the area, with two or three persons reported to have been temporarily overcome by the fumes but none requiring hospitalization.
In New York, a 24-year old Milwaukee
heiress had plunged to her death the previous day from the 28th floor
of a Park Avenue penthouse, indicating in a short note that she was
taking "the only way out". She was the socialite daughter
of a man prominent in Wisconsin Republican circles and the
granddaughter of a former Governor of the state. She left a 13-word
note addressed to "Hon", with no clue as to the identity
of that person. Her body had been found on the seventh-floor terrace
roof of an adjoining office building. For the previous two months,
she worked as a secretary to John Roosevelt, the youngest son of the late President, at the Allied Public Relations Associates,
of which Mr. Roosevelt was
a board vice-chairman. Her co-workers had been stunned by the news
and said that they were unaware of any despondency,
describing her as a "cheerful, pleasant and nice—marvelous
person who mixed very nicely." There was no explanation as to
why she was in the penthouse, which was maintained by an investment
and securities firm for the convenience of out-of-town guests. Her
body was fully clothed, although one shoe was missing. Whatever the cause, had she waited, her depression might have benefited from a scene in a movie
In Long Beach, Calif., a gamble whereby two beautiful girls had pooled their money to back one of them in the Miss Universe contest had paid off this date for Leona Gage, 21, who had become the new Miss United States of America. She had traveled west with her 24-year old cousin, along with a $45 gown and high hopes, winning the crown the previous night, now qualifying her to compete in the international phase of the pageant. Two months earlier, she and her cousin, who had lived together, had put together $45, which they had made modeling, and had gone shopping for a gown so that Leona could enter the Miss Maryland contest. They found a dress marked down from $90 to $45 and so they bought it, and she had won the Maryland contest. They were out of money when she won that contest, but the pageant had given Leona a two-way ticket to Long Beach, which they used up so that her cousin could come along, and now she had won again. They had figured that if she did not win, they could get some work and earn their way back home, but now believed they could use the winnings to do so. The cousin said that Leona had been staying in a tiny place down the street and living on fruit during the contest. She had been loaned a white dress for the final night of the contest by a Long Beach dress shop, placing confidence in her to win. In the final balloting, she had won out over four other lovely representatives, from Salt Lake City, St. Albans, W. Va., Las Vegas and Sydney, Neb.
In Raleigh, the salary of the state's Adjutant General had been increased by nearly $2,000 per year the same day on which Capus Waynick was appointed to the post by Governor Luther Hodges, according to the Budget Bureau. A Bureau official said that the salary had been raised from $9,200 to $11,000 per year by the Advisory Budget Commission the prior Friday, the same day on which the Governor had announced the resignation of Maj. General John Hall Manning, a veteran soldier, from the post, and had appointed Mr. Waynick, a civilian with some military background. The 1957 Legislature had raised the salary for the position from $8,910 to $9,200. Bureau officials said that the salary had been raised even further because it was necessary to get the man the Governor wanted for the job, with the raise having been made retroactive to July 1. The Governor had broken precedent by seeking an Adjutant General outside the officers of the National Guard, whom the person would command. A retired colonel of the Guard, an officer of the Wake County Veterans Service, had stated that the appointment of Mr. Waynick was "the worst thing that could happen to the Guard." He feared that the appointment might push the Guard into politics, indicating that in some states, a person had to check with a ward boss before commissioning anyone, hoping that such a system would not come to North Carolina. Another retired colonel, of Henderson, called the appointment "one of the most vital mistakes the Governor has made." He said that he would hate to see the Guard "messed up in politics", that feeling was running high in the Guard, but that he hoped the members were better soldiers than to resign.
The City of Charlotte had 7.2 million dollars in the bank at the end of the fiscal year on June 30, and a special committee of the City Council was studying the distribution of the money among local financial institutions, the special committee meeting the previous afternoon with the City Treasurer for a general discussion of the situation.
The News was placing the answers to the new NewsWords puzzle, which was starting the following day in the newspaper, within a bank vault of the Wachovia Bank & Trust Co for safekeeping. The initial pot for the contest would be $200, advancing $50 each week until there was a winner.
In Valley Forge, Pa., a chubby 13-year old Boy Scout from Pasadena, Calif., had personal pinups of Jayne Mansfield after having gone to her Hollywood studio sometime previously and posed with her, receiving 50 autographed still photos, and so now was in business to trade them during the Jamboree. He said that he had swapped them for troop patches and neckerchiefs because they were his favorites. He indicated that he had a few pictures left and was ready for a last-minute rush.
On the editorial page, "Take Troops out of Civil Rights Bill" indicates that the President had said at his press conference the previous day that he could not imagine circumstances in which he would send Federal troops to the South to enforce civil rights, and the piece indicates that neither could it, that the President had been commendably restrained in his utterances and actions regarding the process of desegregation.
Yet, he continued to support a civil rights bill which would bring the use of troops into the realm of possibility. Proponents of the bill found that the idea of calling in Federal troops was nonsense, but they could not speak for the future, as they could not conceive of the political pressures which might be brought to bear on their successors in the future. (As indicated, it would take less than a month after the bill passed and was signed into law September 9 for the President to federalize the National Guard to guard black students integrating Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.)
It urges that if the Administration had no thought of using military force, there was no need to make it easy for future administrations to consider it, and no need to enact into law the possibility that platform writers at party conventions might be tempted to pose such use as a probability to win an election.
The civil rights bill did not mention troops, but the potential was there. The New York Times had said that there was a potential for invoking in the text of an amended statute a law already on the books, which in turn invoked a number of others. Said the Times: "In the Administration bill now being debated in the Senate, the statute invoked for enforcement of racial desegregation" was 42 USC 1985, which had been incorporated into the bill by a single reference. That statute invoked three other statutes, one of which, 42 USC 1903—presumably referring to sections 1987 and 1989 as there is no applicable section 1903—, had been passed by the Reconstruction Congress in 1865 as a punitive measure toward the South, authorizing the President to call out troops to enforce the execution of judicial process, which would include decisions of the Supreme Court, such as Brown v. Board of Education.
It finds that the President would contribute more to the Senate debate by demanding that the bill be framed in such concrete language that there would be no room, on his or anyone else's part, for imagining the use of troops.
"Do Bomb Blasts Really Have Sex Appeal?" quotes from an Associated Press dispatch from the Atomic Test Site in Nevada: "The explosion, seventh of the current summer test series, was described by newsmen as one of the most beautiful they had ever seen."
It finds that the nuclear device "Diablo" had a certain charm, as it had not detonated the first time they tried it, and two weeks had elapsed between the scheduled and actual detonation. The fallibility of the device suggested that it was still possible to hope to be hit by a dud should warehouses full of atomic and hydrogen weapons ever be taken into the air and dropped.
It suggests that unless the wire services were prepared to refer to snakes and black widow spiders as "beautiful", they should take care of their use of that adjective. The dictionary defined it as: "Having the qualities which constitute beauty: full of beauty: exciting sensuous or aesthetic pleasure." It asserts that surely the day had not come when a bomb blast also had sex appeal or when one should consider hanging a color photograph of it on the living room wall.
It also finds the phrase "clean bomb" to be equally anomalous, tending to create the impression that nuclear warheads would be on sale in the toy departments before Christmas. "But we doubt that U.S. development of a bomb that does not cause radioactive fallout is going to make it a hero in the packed cities of the world."
Someone in Washington had observed that a clean bomb was one that killed a person but did not harm the person's pallbearers.
It concludes: "Starting with 'ugly,' the dictionary is full of adjectives fitting for bomb explosions. But in our book, neither 'beautiful' nor 'clean' qualify."
"Talk about Brains Costs Too Much" discusses the "puerile polemic" of two Senators regarding the quantity of the President's brains, one of whom had been Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr. Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana had been attempting to defend the President against the charge that he was empty-headed by saying: "I'd rather be a friend of the President of the United States without brains than a friend of the Senator from Oklahoma with brains." It suggests that the President could not use many defenders like Senator Capehart.
It finds that talk flowed from Senator Kerr in about the same quantity and state of refinement as crude oil from the Senator's Oklahoma oil wells. It finds that Milton Berle had drifted into much-deserved obscurity saying more clever things.
It suggests that an occasional display of crabbiness did not do the Senate harm, probably serving as an antidote to the fulsome praise which Senators always lavished on one another. But such statements going into the Congressional Record, at so many dollars per page, at least ought to be possessed of wit, wisdom, plain meanness or some quality other than just dullness. It concludes that the two millionaires, Senators Kerr and Capehart, would do well to remember that in their case, talk was not cheap.
"The Fair Lasses of Anson County" tells of Miss North Carolina, Elaine Herndon, having won a talent competition and also a swimsuit competition, but despite the fact that she might do well in the Miss America contest, a friend had sadly noted that the state's winning beauties appeared to come from the Eastern portion of the state, whereas Ms. Herndon was from Durham, and her runners-up had been Miss Henderson, Miss Kinston, Miss Winston-Salem and Miss Fairmont.
It suggests that Miss Winston-Salem could be squeezed into the Piedmont section of the state but none of the others could. It points, however, with pride to the Piedmont's Anson County, from which hailed Ann Carter, from Wadesboro, who had been crowned Queen of the Carrousel in Charlotte the prior year. Moreover, Peggy Dennis from nearby Lilesville, and Patty McQuague of Wadesboro, had been runners-up for Pageland's queen honors—whatever that is.
It concludes that perhaps there were beauties scattered all over the East, but that the place for prospecting was in Anson.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "Casey's Fireman", indicates that Casey Jones had died 57 years before the prior April in the wreck of his locomotive somewhere between Memphis and Canton, Miss., aboard his Cannonball locomotive. While he had been mortal, that which was not mortal was a song written about him in 1909, which was still around, having been composed by two railroad men, T. Lawrence Siebert and Eddie Newton.
It suggests that those who knew the words would recall that when Casey had come head-on against No. 4, he turned to the fireman and said, "Boy, you better jump, cause there is two locomotives that's a goin' to bump." The fireman had been Simeon Webb, and he had been obeying Mr. Jones's orders to "Put in your water and shovel in your coal, put your head out of the window, watch them drivers roll." But when Casey had said to jump, the fireman jumped, and so had lived many years after the wreck, making an honorable record but little money, having died in a Memphis hospital the prior Sunday at age 83.
During the course of the years, the legend of Casey Jones had spread far beyond Tennessee and Mississippi, the song having been sung in vaudeville and recorded on scratchy phonograph records years earlier, having Casey in almost every part of the country, including speeding up Reno Hill trying to reach "Frisco", and wanting, even as he lay dying, to ride rails which were still new and strange to him.
It wonders whether anyone would ever write a song about an airline pilot which would live as long as the song about Casey Jones, finding that it was not only a kind of requiem for a brave engineer but for a vanished time in history when romance rode the rails.
Drew Pearson tells of one of the most skillful jobs of Senate maneuvering in years having been conducted by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and Southern leaders in the civil rights debate, that even before the current week's vote to take up the bill, they had come close to arranging private deals whereby they would win about 90 percent of their points on the bill. Southern leaders still had two opponents, Vice-President Nixon on one side and an embattled group of Northern liberals, led by Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, on the other.
The Vice-President, who wanted to attract the large bloc of black votes, which he believed were almost within the grasp of Republicans, was determined that there would be no compromise on civil rights, earning the undying enmity of Southern Senators who said privately that they could get along with Minority Leader William Knowland, who the prior January, had voted with them on ending filibusters, and they expected him to compromise at present. But Mr. Nixon was tougher and the bitterness against him was intense.
Mr. Pearson finds that the irony was that the liberal Democrats, including Senators Douglas, Pat McNamara of Michigan, Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, John Pastore of Rhode Island, and Paul Neuberger of Oregon, now found themselves led by Senator Knowland, whom, previously, they had always opposed. If the latter were to compromise on civil rights, then they might have to support Mr. Nixon, whom they had always opposed even more. They had always for years championed civil rights, but now they found the play being taken away from them by Republicans, who had entered the fray late.
Meanwhile, there were shrewd moves being made by Southern leaders to strip the civil rights bill to a skeleton even before the real debate began. Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader, was ready to introduce a jury trial amendment to the bill, and many Republicans and several Northern Democrats were secretly prepared to go along with that, despite many cases inevitably to involve a trial by white-only juries.
Section 3 of the bill covered all civil rights, not just voting, including enforcement of school desegregation. The President and Senator Russell had now cut a lot of the support out from under that part of the bill. After Senator Russell had told the Senate that it would permit the Federal Government to force segregation on the South with bayonets, the President had announced that he did not "participate in drawing up the exact language of the proposals" and that his only objective had been "to prevent anybody illegally from interfering with any individual's right to vote."
Mr. Pearson indicates that the President was obviously not familiar with his own power, and apparently had not read the bill, which had been under consideration in Congress for two years and under active debate for the previous nine months. Among other things, he had not known that as President, he always had the right to send troops into any part of the country, and that other Presidents had sent them into portions of the South during the previous 50 years. The President's confusion about the "exact language" of the bill had bolstered Senator Russell's charge that the bill was "an example of cunning draftsmanship" and had helped another proposed compromise. Many Northern leaders now agreed that the bill ought not pass unless it made clear that military power would not be used to enforce civil rights.
Southern leaders also wanted language in the bill confined strictly to protection of voting rights, and had lined up enough backstage votes among Republicans so that such a compromise might pass. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota was picked by Southern leaders to spearhead that compromise.
All of that had happened before the civil rights bill had even come up for debate in the Senate.
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was planning to introduce a bill to make the commissioner of Internal Revenue completely nonpolitical, serving a 15-year term. The Senator said that the IRS had been in politics deeply and he suspected it had been threatening Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem with tax prosecution to make him take the side against building the Hells Canyon dam. He notes that Mr. Powell's three secretaries had been either convicted or indicted on kickback charges.
Stewart Alsop indicates that even while the "so-called 'disarmament' talks" were in progress in London, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were engaged in a deadly arms race, even if, in the era of complacency, no one appeared to care very much about it. The object of the race, which Mr. Alsop indicates would not be halted by the London conference, was to achieve superiority in missiles, "the new weapons which will in the future surely dominate the world's air space, and thus the world." A decisive Soviet victory in that race might bring true the boast of Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev—"We will bury you."
The President was considering and might already have approved a proposal to hold all expenditures for missile production to an arbitrary ten percent of the total of the defense budget. If he finally approved the proposal, it would mean a sharp cutback in the entire U.S. missile development effort and thus virtually ensure a Soviet victory in the deadly missile race.
At the same time, large amounts of money were being handed out at high official levels to justify the proposed cutback. The New York Times had reported that the U.S. was comfortably ahead of the Soviets in missile development, a standard line which had it that although the Russians fired more test vehicles than the U.S., it was nothing to worry about, but could be regarded as good news as it had "stimulated the belief by experts [in Washington] that the Russian electronic devices are not as advanced as those available in the United States."
Mr. Alsop regards that as an example of official complacency, that the more missiles tested by the Soviets, the greater the U.S. lead in the missile race. He suggests that if that reasoning were accepted, then the U.S. should be very far ahead, as the Soviets had been firing intermediate range ballistic missiles in large numbers for at least 18 months, even according to those officials who were seeking to placate worries. The rate of testing had reached more than five per month, whereas the U.S. had successfully tested only one non-operational IRBM, the Army's Jupiter missile. The Air Force Thor had aborted on its first test and the Navy's Polaris was still a long way from the testing stage.
He suggests that to anyone who was not an official dispenser of the soothing line, those facts had to mean what they appeared to mean, that the Soviets, as Premier Nikolai Bulganin had repeatedly implied in his threats to various Western European countries, had stocks of operational IRBM's, which the U.S. did not have.
As to the ICBM, the grand prize of the missile race, the official line was that the Soviets were "in a very early motor-testing stage", and that anyway, the Soviets were not really interested in missiles capable of reaching the U.S., though the U.S. was regarded by the Soviets as their primary enemy.
Mr. Alsop indicates that there was evidence flatly contradicting that soothing line, but that evidence was classified. There was, however, convincing overt evidence which pointed in the same direction, as the Soviets had publicly and officially announced that they intended to launch 30 satellite vehicles into space during the current year and 40 more the following year. Those advance boasts by the Soviets had always in the past proved accurate, and it was to be assumed that the boasts were accurate on this occasion, lest the Soviets might unnecessarily lose prestige, which probably also meant that they were significantly beyond an "early motor-testing stage" in developing the ICBM.
A successful satellite launch required a missile with the power to attain "escape velocity", a higher velocity than required for an IRBM, and it had been reliably reported that the Soviets would use their ICBM model, known as the "T-3", to launch their satellites. The experts agreed that the anticipated Soviet satellite launchings would prove beyond doubt that they had made giant strides toward an operational ICBM.
He indicates that it did not necessarily mean that the Soviets were unchallengeable in the missile race, although the best expert opinion had it that they were about a year ahead. It also did not mean that U.S. skills and resources were insufficient to win the race. But it did mean that a combination of official lines of reassurance and arbitrary budget ceilings would not win for the U.S. the race which, regardless of cost, had to be won.
A letter from Harry Golden, editor of the Carolina Israelite, indicates that if News editor Cecil Prince, having written an editorial during the week about his encounter with a young Egyptian, for whom he had provided a false name for his own protection, encountered the young man on the way back home, it would be wise to tell him a story which Mr. Golden relates, regarding the legality of Israel. He quotes the statement of the young man contained in the piece, in which he posed a hypothetical whereby an Indian chief came to the home of Mr. Prince in Charlotte and said that he was a living on the land of his ancestors and that he would have to leave, and that if he did not, he would have authority under the U.N. to drive him off. Mr. Golden finds that the analogous suggestion had as much relation to Israel and the Arabs as Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser had to Benjamin Franklin. According to the Book of Joshua in the Bible, about 1220 B.C., the Israelites had entered Palestine, and in 70 A.D., Jewish statehood had come to an end after the Roman conquest. In 638, Palestine had become an Arab country, lasting until 1517, when the Ottoman Turks had conquered it. The Arabs did not regain sovereignty until British General Allenby had wrested the Holy Land from the Turks. The Arabs had gained sovereignty over their lands in the same postwar settlement under which the Jews were restored to a portion of Palestine. He says that Lord Robert Cecil had stated, "This is not the birth of a nation but the rebirth of a national civilization." Winston Churchill had said, "Another Jewish state in Palestine will have far-flung consequences, which none of us can foresee, on the future history of our race." The League of Nations had approved the British action. The Arab leader Emir Feisel had said: "We shall give the Jews a hearty welcome home." Josephus Daniels, speaking for the U.S. Government, had said: "And what new wonders will come from those hills of Judea." Thus, the Jewish state had been re-established in an area of Palestine of which the Moslems had said in 1517: "Not even the birds can live here." The story of the Arab refugees was long and tragic, but had to be solved. The problem, however, had not arisen as the Egyptian youth had related to Mr. Prince. The Arabs had not been driven from their homeland, and no one yet had been able to point to a single person who had suffered such an involuntary exile. The Arabs had been ordered to move out by their invading troops. On April 26, 1948, the British Police Headquarters in Haifa had sent a dispatch to London which said: "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab population to stay and carry on with their normal lives…" The Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, Monsignor Hakim, had written: "The refugees had been confident that they would return in a few days, within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the Zionists very quickly." Mr. Golden indicates that the Soviet dream was to obtain a foothold in the Middle East which Premier Nasser had opened to them, following an old dream of the Russian czars. That dream was essentially that whatever desperate attempt to win mastery of Europe, it had to be kept, at all costs, from likewise controlling the Middle East. He finds it all to be a smokescreen to cover up the true aggressor, Premier Nasser, who had waged war against Britain, France, and Israel by propaganda, gun-running and by the infiltration of murderous bands. He had stirred up the rebels in French North Africa and seized the Suez Canal by force, scrapping a treaty in the same manner which Hitler had done. The smokescreen hid even more than his aggression, hiding the fact that 187 Arab children out of every thousand still died in childbirth, and that an outside enemy served the purpose of keeping the minds of Premier Nasser's people off their own misery, amid feudalism, poverty and trachoma. Mr. Golden indicates that for 2,000 years the Jews and Christians had looked to Jerusalem in search of their antecedents, had looked eastward to find, first, their Creator, and then their heritage. The Arabs had nothing whatever to do with it and it had already been centuries old when it was written in Ezekiel: "And they shall dwell in the land I have given unto Jacob my servant…"
A letter writer indicates approval of the editorial from the previous Saturday, urging defeat of the civil rights bill, finding the piece "more nearly based on reason and intelligent, sound arguments than any approach to the question" that he had seen lately. He regretted to see the matter degenerate to a filibuster, but believes the proposed bill was fundamentally wrong in so many other respects than merely the question of race.
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