Timmerman’s remarks were resounded in News and Courier editorials which observed that while Thurmond had made himself unpopular with many Americans and his fellow Senators, he spoke for the overwhelming majority of South Carolinians. “An occasional sneer that Senator Thurmond was putting on a personal play to the grandstands merits no attention,” said the Charleston paper. “When personal conviction tallies with the demands of the people, why shouldn’t a senator stand up and say so even though he stands alone?” The News and Courier, like the Morning News, hesitated to say that the other Southern senators had compromised with principle, as had Governor Timmerman. But it did not believe that “others should blame Thurmond for acting alone.” The State’s editor, Samuel Latimer, seemingly caught with his editorial directive down, could muster only a brief nine line comment on Thurmond’s filibuster, the gist of which was that it was a futile but creditable performance.[492]
From Anderson, however, came a bitter blast against Thurmond from the Independent: “The very junior senator from South Carolina, Mr. ‘Stand-On-Head’ Thurmond was all steamed up this week in opposition to the Ike, Nixon, Brownell civil rights bill. All his ‘oratory’ in the Senate will not erase the fact that Thurmond helped put the present anti-South Republican Party in power. He can change his colors—and his speeches—but the folks back home will always remember that he is one of the forces that have plunged a dagger into the heart of the South. South Carolina voters will be waiting—and ready—when ‘Stand-On-Head’ comes up for reelection. Any good Democrat can trim him and he knows it. That’s why all the smoke at the moment. Something is urgently needed by the little man to divert attention from his support of the Republicans....”[493]
Passage of the civil rights bill did not mean its acceptance in any way, manner or means by South Carolina leaders. Governor Timmerman immediately let it be known that he would not co-operate with any civil rights investigation commission that might come to South Carolina.[494]
The worst crisis in the current “war of Yankee aggression” on the South came, of course, in the early autumn of 1957 with the Little Rock affair. South Carolina resounded with praise for Governor Orval Faubus and condemnation of President Eisenhower. As in all of the deep South states, white South Carolinians were aghast at the President’s use of troops to enforce the integration decree of the “northern judge,” Justice Ronald N. Davies. The state’s press, its politicians, and its self-appointed spokesmen joined in a crescendo of verbal abuse on President Eisenhower, Attorney-General Herbert Brownell, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann of Little Rock, Vice-President Richard Nixon, Presidential aide Sherman Adams, and Adlai Stevenson—the last named for supporting the President.[495] Governor Timmerman made the state’s outstanding gesture of protest by resigning his commission as an officer in the United States Naval Reserve, a gesture which apparently did not disturb the Navy in the least.[496] Someone scrawled “Ike is a nigger-lover” on the door of the children’s entrance to the Richland County library in Columbia. In university classrooms, students who only a year before had “liked Ike” were asking professors how they “could get rid of him.” If Little Rock had been in South Carolina, white South Carolinians could hardly have been more concerned.
In placing the hero’s laurels upon the brow of Governor Faubus, his admirers rarely if ever were willing to face up to the fact that the Arkansas chief executive, by calling out the state’s national guard to prevent Negro children from enrolling at Central High School, was preventing the execution of the law of the United States. Nor was it acknowledged that his utterly reckless statements had anything to do with creating the atmosphere of tension that nourished the violence which engulfed Central High School on the first day of the new term. South Carolina post-mortem editorial comment criticized resort to violence but, with a curious twist of logic, those guilty of violence were less condemned than those who allegedly had created it. The thugs who kicked and beat Negroes and newsmen and the sideburned adolescents whose faces reflected their hatred as they jeered or struck at the Negro students were never really denounced outright. Instead the villains of the piece were declared to be the leaders of the NAACP and the “Northern agitators” who were accused of inciting the violence. South Carolina editorialists in deploring use of violence, as they invariably did, always left an escape door for those who resorted to it. Illustrative are the following editorial comments:
The News and Courier deplores terror tactics in any cause. Yet men have used them to promote all kinds of efforts both worthy and unworthy—including religion. People of good will do not want violence and bloodshed over integrating the schools of the South. Yet many of those people would rather be dead than integrated. Shall white people be exterminated to make room for colored? They outnumber the colored and they will not give up easily. (Sept. 19, 1957, p. 8-A.)
Efforts to enforce the court’s integration edict already are resulting in violent acts by hoodlums, bedsheet gangsterism and vandalism. This is deplored by the vast majority of Southerners as injurious to the cause of the South.... Yet it does not seem to have gotten through the thick heads in Washington and elsewhere in the North and West that Southerners will not quail in the face of bloodshed, if bayonets are directed against them by hogwild racist South-baiters. (Anderson Independent, Sept. 21, 1957, p. 4).
Decent citizens everywhere abhor violence; [the] South is not lawless.... The South has a right to try to maintain its way of life by any and all lawful means. It has done so for a hundred years despite the outcome of the war that prevented them [sic] from seceding from the Union, when that seemed to many of them the only way to uphold it. (Florence Morning News, Sept. 19, 1957, p. 4).
The State cannot condone violence. It never has, and never will. Neither can it condone the actions of agitators and others who bring about violence.... There was no disorder until the judge caused the Arkansas Guard to be removed. The disorder came after the judge and Mayor Mann of Little Rock took charge.... We want to keep the record straight as to under whose auspices the rioting occurred. (Sept. 26, 1957, p. 4-A).
No thinking citizen of the South will condone the violence that erupted in Little Rock when federal, city, and school authorities and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disregarded Governor Faubus’ advice to allow for a cooling-off period before attempting the integration of nine Negroes into Little Rock’s Central High School. Mob violence is not the answer to anything anywhere, except as an instrument of revolution. It solves nothing. (Record, Sept. 25, 1957, p. 4-A).