DAVID LAWRENCE

...But by introducing its reports with such phrases as, "Many white people are saying," it manages to commit its news columns to an extraordinary volume of bigoted mouthings...

...Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation...

...The principle of equality was established in zoning, in primary elections, and in university education without resort to Congress...

...Lawrence himself is wary of racialism...

...Constitutionalist Lawrence would not accept the statute cited by the President, under which he is specifically authorized to call a state's militia into federal service and to use such of the armed forces as he considers necessary "to enforce the laws of the United States" against "unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages . . ." He argued that a court decree, such as the order to integrate Little Rock schools, could not be held a "law of the United States" under the terms of the cited statute...

...For this is the week in which an intolerant majority in Congress is to take away one of the most important rights given to the states by the Constitution...

...he declared, "There Is No 'Fourteenth Amendment...

...He accused Eisenhower of having acted illegally in ordering federal troops to escort the Negro students into the high school...

...In that 1896 case the Court held that separate but equal accommodations for a Negro on a railroad car were sufficient to meet the requirements of the law...

...But there is at least one consistent and vocal exception...

...He writes admiringly of conservatives-—even going so far as to indicate that he is sympathetic with the "liberal conservatives" to whom he sometimes refers (he always puts the word "liberals" in quotation marks to suggest that those described by that name are not really what the word connotes...

...Lawrence, who in 1936 happened to agree with the Court's decisions, wrote a book entitled Nine Honest Men in which he declared that the opinion of the Court were "being made the football of partisan politics and class conflict...

...To the everlasting credit and praise of the nine noble men who rendered the unanimous opinion it should be written in indelible letters on the tablets of history that they met the issue courageously and fearlessly...

...This position too has been refuted with a wealth of historical details by legal scholars such as Paul A. Freund of the Harvard Law School, who has observed: "It is the very essence of the Constitution that it speaks in generalities like 'equal protection of the laws,' and it is the very essence of the judicial process that it must apply the generalities to the concrete facts of experience...

...Though he is not a lawyer, Lawrence has no hesitancy about wading into the thick of a legal battle...

...As bayonets of Arkansas guardsmen, under orders from Governor Faubus, were barring nine Negro students from Central High School in Little Rock, David Lawrence was writing of the Governor "carrying out his state responsibility in maintaining order...

...But the history of the amendment shows that it is self-executing...

...The crux of his charge was that there was no Congressional statute authorizing the use of military force in such a situation...

...For six consecutive weeks in September and October, his editorials in U. S. News were addressed to the same subject...

...The 274 newspapers which carry the Lawrence column" (208 of them outside the South) have a total readership of about 55 million, which indicates— according to one Lawrence paper's survey—a readership of perhaps 14 million for the column itself...

...For good measure he has lobbed some heavy verbal projectiles of his own devising, including a gibe at the U.S...

...Today, evidently, Lawrence does not recognize that his 1936 comment might aptly serve as a reply to those who sneer at the Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka...

...While the federal-state clash was at its height in Little Rock, Lawrence verbally flailed the President and saw the Governor as simply doing his duty...

...Lawrence made no attempt to reconcile the Governor's position with the Supreme Court decision in Sterling v. Constantin (1932) in which Chief Justice Hughes wrote that the proper use of the Governor's power to bring military force to the aid of civil authority is "to maintain the Federal Court in the exercise of its jurisdiction and not to attempt to override it...

...If this seems paradoxical, it is typical of the man...

...DAVID LAWRENCE The South's 'Lawyer' In the Court of Northern Opinion by JOHN LOFTON The new battlefields of the old Con-federacy are the legislative halls, the courts, and the press of the nation...

...What has happened in the past two decades to change a tribunal that David Lawrence once regarded as the guardian of "sacred" and "immutable" principles into a despised institution...

...the South have not given maximum play to Dixie's shrill imprecations against the Supreme Court...

...judiciary by Russian prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski, whom Lawrence quoted to demonstrate the "dictatorial function" of the Supreme Court...

...Eternal adherence to precedent is not mandatory in American law...

...The opinions expressed in his column and magazine mark him as a candidate for congenial membership in a group which Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter classified several years ago as pseudo-conservatives...

...The Civil War was a resort to military force after ordinary constitutional processes failed...

...Moreover, the Southern case, when it is presented in magazines of national circulation, is usually identified as such...

...It is probably true that the great media of news and opinion outside JOHN LOFTON, lawyer and newspaperman, is a native of South Carolina, where he was educated, and worked in Little Rock as associate editor of the Arkansas Gazette...

...U. S. News revisited Little Rock in its January 31 issue, found fresh evidence of racial tension to vindicate Governor Faubus, noted that nothing fundamental had been settled by the use of federal force—as if the curbing of mob defiance of a court was not fundamental...

...In his fervent defense of parents' rights and states' rights Lawrence seems to be totally oblivious to the right of free citizens to be spared degrading treatment under the law...

...How this is to be accomplished other than by open defiance of the United States, he did not say...

...Prominent Southern spokesmen do not, of course, have to depend on Lawrence's column or on U. S. News to reach Northern readers...

...In both U. S. News and the column Lawrence has backed the move to suspend integration at Little Rock...

...Apparently not to Lawrence...

...There was another period 20-odd years ago when David Lawrence was concerned about "passion and hysteria" in connection with rulings of the Supreme Court...

...Twenty-two years ago Lawrence had nothing but scorn for those who would have overridden the Court, and he derided Congressional action aimed at limiting the jurisdiction of the judiciary...

...As early as 1946 the tribunal had invalidated, as an interference with commerce, a Virginia segregation statute applied to passengers in interstate journeys...

...David Lawrence's pleading of the Southern case has not been limited to the school issue...

...This statement, based on the claim that the amendment was not properly ratified by the states, suggests the nature of Lawrence's frequently exhibited desire to turn back the flow of history...

...Another Lawrence broadside aimed at the Fourteenth Amendment is that its framers did not contemplate the prohibition of segregated schools and that "nowhere in the Constitution is education placed within the jurisdiction of the federal government...

...But even if these decisions had not presaged the upsetting of the Plessy precedent, the court could have justified an abrupt change on the ground that the original Plessy rule did not apply to education and that, after trial in that area, it had proved unsatisfactory...

...This contention is based on Section 5 of the Amendment which says: "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article...

...Lawrence has echoed some of the South's most novel legal arguments both in his magazine and in his column...

...U. S. News claims more than a million subscribers...

...Historically and currently, segregation is a device used by the white group to project its feelings of superiority onto the Negro and to express its notion that the Negro is unfit to associate with...

...Regardless of the weight of the authority against his view, Lawrence is not easily discouraged...

...The nature of Lawrence's clientele is indicated by the names that appear favorably in his column, like Senators Ellender of Louisiana, Robertson of Virginia, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi...

...They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word . . . Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways . . ." So it often seems to be with David Lawrence, who, strangely enough, is close to the first choice of American newspaper editors as an interpreter of political events and who, because of this editorial preference, has access to a broadly representative "jury" of American readers...

...Two years later it held that enforcement of a restrictive covenant based on race or color amounted to a denial of equal protection by the state...

...He has argued dogmatically that the Fourteenth Amendment can be implemented only by Congressional legislation and that, since there has been no act of Congress calling for integration of the public schools, the Supreme Court cannot require it...

...They will ever be remembered as the honest men who withstood intimidation and threats of legislative reprisal, the men who saw their duty in the finest traditions of Anglo-Saxon justice and pronounced their verdict with a responsibility only to their consciences and their God...

...In David Lawrence, newspaper columnist and editor of U. S. News and World Report, the South has a "lawyer" in the court of Northern opinion...

...As the 1957-58 school year drew to a close, desegregation had been effected in only 138 of the 2,076 Southern school districts having pupils of both races...

...The Fourteenth Amendment was forcibly extracted as a part of the price of peace...

...It noted tha,t there are qualities in a school "which are incapable of objective measurement...

...He thunders against big union leaders (particularly Walter Reuther) and is solicitous about tax and management privileges for business...

...A consistent thread running through Lawrence's writing on government in recent years is his reiteration that the Supreme Court has been overstepping the bounds of its authority and that ways must be found to curb the power of the judiciary...

...Though the Plessy doctrine ruled for some years in school cases, this was hardly a justification for Lawrence's suggestion that the Constitution was "changed overnight" by the Brown decision's abandonment of the doctrine...

...Lawrence then referred to the states' right to control voting procedure...

...Obviously the words of personally-involved Southerners can not carry as much weight as those of a presumably disinterested outsider...

...And he wanted to know how the Supreme Court can control attitudes of inferiority or superiority by outlawing segregation...

...In his column he stresses constitutional and political arguments...

...He has given aid and comfort to the Southern effort in Congress to curb the authority of the Supreme Court, accusing the high tribunal of usurpation of power...

...Were he a student again, said Lawrence at that time, he would not hesitate to attend an integrated school...

...The magazine bills its features under the noncommittal label of "complete and authentic" reports...

...Last year he campaigned tirelessly against the Civil Rights bill...

...Their speeches castigating the Court are reported by the wire services and the reports are carried in Northern newspapers—though it is doubtful that any one of them can command as much space as does columnist Lawrence in practically every large city in the country, including Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Washington...

...He is a crusader for military preeminence —to such an extent that he has endorsed preventive war (verbally camouflaged by another name) and has campaigned for continued nuclear testing, refusing to grant any validity to expert testimony on the dangers of fallout...

...After citing works of history to show that the Fourteenth Amendment is invalid because Southern ratification was secured under military pressure, Lawrence last September declared that this "so-called" amendment "should be considered as null and void" until a new amendment is adopted to prescribe the right of the federal government to control education...

...He has said the highest tribunal "violated the Constitution" by its desegregation ruling...

...He demands the suppression of Communists, paying little heed to the cost in democratic values...

...But the Court is properly concerned when the machinery of the state, to which the Negro contributes in service and taxes, is utilized by the white group to foist upon the Negro its own peculiar ideas on compartmentalizing public facilities according to the color of the users...

...Amendment Fifteen reads: "Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude...

...At that time the Court was incurring the wrath of the Roosevelt Administration and its supporters because of its decisions invalidating New Deal legislation...

...He is inclined to become even more vehement or to shift to an area of argument where he cannot be pinned down...

...Useful as these strategems have been, however, Southern tacticians consider them deficient without a channel of communication to explain them to the rest of the country...

...During recent months he has given strong support to the Jenner-Butler bill aimed at "reversing" through Congressional action several landmark decisions by which the Supreme Court spoke out for individual rights...

...But no detailed argument should be needed to deflate Lawrence's flight of legal fancy on the silence of the Constitution...

...For Lawrence the question boils down to "the inalienable rights of parents to freedom of association for their children...

...The South's devices for implementing its strategy of obstruction have included federal legislation to limit the authority of the Supreme Court, the interposition of state power between the federal courts and local school boards, and the institution of new constitutional challenges in the courts...

...He has noted that he is a Democrat...

...to aid in making its process effective and not to nullify it...

...The Supreme Court cannot do anything about the private practice of such a notion...

...Yet Democrats generally seem to be his preferred targets...

...He is now an editorial writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette where, among his other duties, he handles the Lawrence column...

...What have been some of his other causes of recent years...

...For two and a half years he welcomed the recent renomination of Governor Faubus...

...But Lawrence is really neither a true conservative nor a true liberal...

...The inclination of Lawrence's views on civil rights matters is suggested by the reception he gets in the South...

...The New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, which distributes the column, says Lawrence is the nation's most widely syndicated political columnist, with the possible exception of George Sokolsky...

...Yet a court order is the normal means of enforcing a provision of the federal Constitution, which says: "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land...

...It should be enough to point out that the framers of the Bill of Rights did not contemplate motion pictures, nor does that document mention freedom of the screen...

...In the three years since the Supreme Court ordered an end to compulsory segregation in public schools, the South's leaders by one tactic or another have outmoded the apparent meaning of the words "deliberate speed" and have transformed them into a synonym for delay...

...To gain some insight into Lawrence's attitude on the segregation issue, it may be useful to take note of the mental orientation from which it springs...

...Early in his campaign for Governor Faubus, he called attention to his (Lawrence's) Pennsylvania birth and to the fact that he attended integrated public schools in Buffalo, N. Y., where a Negro student athlete was his friend...

...In the campaign to stay the course of judicially ordered integration, Lawrence has been active on all fronts...

...Example: "Privately, many white people are saying that the end result of home rule [for the District of Columbia] would be a Negro mayor and council, Negro Congressmen representing the district, Negro functionaries welcoming distinguished visitors to Washington...

...Applying the Lawrence logic, one might as well demand that the effects of the Civil War be erased because the conflict was not fought according to a constitutional formula...

...Are not the personal freedoms embodied in the Bill of Rights and the equality before the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment as "sacred" and "immutable" as the economic principles covered by the NRA decision...

...One of the columnist's chief complaints against the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (the leading school case) is that it failed to perpetuate the 58-year-old precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson...

...Although the members of this group believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, they show signs, said Hofstadter, "of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions...

...This means, according to Lawrence, that the amendment is not self-executing...

...Even if Lawrence's comments on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment are accepted (and there is no denying the extraordinary political tactics that were employed during the Reconstruction period), it is hard to see that they could lead to any fruitful conclusion...

...Segregation is not simply an instrument employed by an impartial arbiter to draw a dividing line between equally recognized elements of the citizenry...

...Hence, he said, "it is more than ever necessary to mark out for what they are all insidious attempts either in high places or in low to undermine the prestige of the Court and the efficacy of our constitutional system...

...Last year the University of South Carolina awarded him an honorary degree...

...Should it be necessary to do any more than quote the Constitution in answer to the "week of infamy" charges...

...Last fall, while Governor Faubus' revolt against the United States was in full cry, Lawrence, for more than three weeks, devoted every one of his five-day-a-week columns to the evils of enforced integration...

...Having chosen these as the grounds on which to make its Twentieth Century stand, the South has mobilized a wide assortment of political and legal weapons adaptable to the need of the particular front on which the opposition presses...

...In a series of rulings prior to 1954, the Court had struck down compulsory segregation, thus signaling a limited life expectancy for the separate but equal criterion...

...It is perhaps the latter leaning that draws him to the Southern cause...

...During the week in which the measure was adopted, he said: "This may turn out to be the week that future historians will call 'The Week of Infamy' in American history...

...Southern editors often play his columns on their front pages...

...Writing early last September about the "arbitrary-minded federal judge" in Little Rock, he visualized "how easy it would be for impassioned opinion to uphold a dictator in America today . . . judging by the widespread indifference to what is happening in Arkansas...

...Dipping into his well-stocked arsenal, he came up last fall with what is by all odds the South's most bizarre weapon...

...For a region which chronically complains about not being able to get its views aired in the nation's press, Lawrence is no insignificant spokesman...

...to remove, and not to create, obstructions to the exercise by the complainants of their rights as judicially declared...

...He intervened vigorously on behalf of Governor Faubus in the Little Rock dispute and spoke of "Eisenhower's war against the states...

...whereas in 1957 he wrote approvingly of schemes by which Congress might kick the Justices out of office or curtail the jurisdiction of the high bench...

...His numerous comments deploring the Supreme Court's desegregation decision are prompted, he explained, by a belief that the tribunal "really violated the Constitution and actually accepted the doctrine that the Negro, despite his educational attainments in recent years, still feels 'inferior' to the white man...

...He was a passionate pleader for Mac-Arthur and McCarthy in their hours of trial...

...Section 5 obviously was included, not to give the task of implementation exclusively to Congress, but simply to provide an extra device for effectuating the rights which the amendment established...

...For those who sneered at the Court's unanimous decision in 1935 invalidating the National Industrial Recovery Act, Lawrence had a ringing declaration: "The issue is clean-cut...

...One of the fram-ers of the amendment actually warned against leaving to "the caprice of Congress" the substantive rights to be conferred by the instrument...

...Yet motion pictures have been held to come under the protection of the first article of the Bill of Rights...

...In Sweatt v. Painter the Court decided in 1950 that Texas' segregated law school for Negroes was not and could not be "equal...

...In a long line of decisions the Court, without any action by Congress, applied the equal protection clause to secure rights for the people whom the amendment was designed to help...

...He wondered how "anyone with pride of color" can accept such a feeling...

...If any themes emerge from Lawrence's commentary on events and people, they are a chauvinistic preoccupation with his own brand of American ascendancy in the world and a favoritism for privilege—not a privilege of intellect or merit but of wealth and caste...

...Philadelphia-born, Princeton-educated David Lawrence has the requisites of an outsider, but he pleads the South's cause with the passion of an insider...