The Home Front:
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn 'A Southern Moderate Speaks' A COUPLE OF months late I have read Brooks Hays' A Southern Moderate Speaks (University of North Carolina, $3.50). I have never...
...About all of these things Brooks Hays, until recently a member of Congress, has a right to speak with quiet, modest authority...
...Virgil T. Blossom, superintendent of schools, had joined his board in trying to adjust the school system in accordance with the Supreme Court's May...
...Governor Orval Faubus and the Southern Senators who participated in the civil rights debate kept talking about the unconstitutional coercion exercised by Washington...
...I have never believed that the 18 stiff and saturnine Senators from the nine deep South states truly represent their millions of constituents...
...As a "moderate," he has been attacked from both sides and has had a tough time of it...
...The Governor said there might be trouble, so he called out troops: the troops brought out a mob...
...When he was with Hays he seemed all in favor of peace and reason...
...1954, decision...
...If these people had been left alone, if our traditional American system of local control had been allowed to work, all would probably have gone well...
...But the tragic interference came, not from Washington, not from President Eisenhower, but from the Governor of the state, who turned out to be not a wicked man but a weak one...
...He is now—and has been for a long time —a citizen of Little Rock...
...Hays believes—as I do—that men and women, North and South, who have the same or similar religions, habits and political principles, can Come together on a decent set of compromises about the race question...
...Simple as that...
...Neivs and World Report on September 28 of that year, entitled 'How One Southern City Plans to Integrate,' the pattern adopted by the Little Rock School Board was presented as a 'workable compromise' likely to be adopted by both sides in the school integration dispute...
...In an article in U.S...
...The moral is that interference in local affairs is a bad thing, but it may, at times, even be the business of Washington to protect a village or a county against such interference...
...Here are a few Hays lines from this chapter of our history: "In September, 1956, Little Rock was heralded as a city whose plan for slow, gradual and voluntary integration could serve as a model for many cities in the South...
...According to their endlessly repeated views our troubles arise from the fact that the Federal Government continually departs from the principle of federalism...
...and that brought on trouble...
...But other advisers were eager to direct him in other directions...
...The purpose of this volume is to throw a slender line of understanding from reasonable people in the South to their counterparts in the North...
...Among other things, he lost the seat in Congress he had filled with distinction for eight terms...
...The magic of the President by no means offset that of Governor Griffin...
...He was born and raised in Russellville, Arkansas, a typical small town county seat where he grew, lived and learned with Negroes all about him...
...Though Hays keeps reminding his readers that desegregation is only one of the problems which must be dealt with as the Negro adjusts himself and his ideals to a changing world, the facts of history have forced him to spend most of the pages in his book on that subject...
...And, as bad luck would have it, just at this time Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin came to Little Rock to make a speech—and with him came another Georgian, Roy Harris, one of the big wheels in the White Citizens Council...
...if only the states were left in control, they continually lament, all would naturally be well...
...Except for the actions of police and troops, and the scenes in and around Central High School, the story is almost complete and very convincing...
...There must he some variety of opinion where there are various kinds of countryside, industries, churches, schools and colleges...
...There he was at the very heart of the fracas which spread this fine, respectable town on newspaper front pages all over the world...
...To future historians this book will be of prime importance...
...In all the excitement, Hays kept his mind steadily on the principles of government which seemed to be involved...
...I hope that some day we shall get a word-for-word report of that long conference...
...People could not uniformly be that stubborn...
...With a different sort of President, this chapter of the tale might have been different...
...The book is a simple, straightforward account of the author's experience in Washington and Little Rock—with an occasional flashback to Russellville...
...Under the influence of such outsiders Faubus proceeded to upset the applecart completely and give Little Rock its world-wide disrepute...
...The bitter conflict at Little Rock is sharply described from personal experience...
...The visit to Eisenhower was, of course, entirely without result...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 21
