Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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JIM FARRELL EDITOR LUCRETIA JONES DAVE LUNDGREN MANAGING ED AD. MNGR. EDITORIALS Attica poem The shrill is disarmed in the echoes of the long metallic hallways The footsteps are once again casual But Innocence never existed here and God never performed here Inside these bars that house man's most hideous demise The guards pass and will pass the laybys The once outraged voices have been silenced Men pushed to the last disparity Perform bloody death ritualt that only a machine gun will answer I am sure, we are sure That prisoners were prisoners before the prisons That streets of yearning-death hold far more casualties That the already wounded are but wounded a bit more inside those walls Institutions of death do not discriminate All who must be killed, must be killed The animals with blinding white skin Can reflect by now no moral apology All those men that died, they must have known so well Oh, revenge is blind, blood is cold When or where did those eyes focus upon the warmth of life Do only the denied die so well I can say no more That there is something fit in honor That the last man vomits honor in his last pool of blood Of what politic does death belong in the final or the hereforth My voice will not sanction slogans to watch men die by There are but lost words in last words Breathless does rhetoric live in the soul's of God's dead prisoners The voice of conscience. -'Tbe State University of New York at Buffalo -3tia 06'OR TROW J9 GOVERMENT . soN, r pawr [V[ NAV Insight: Dr. Jame Legislati (Editor's note: This column was written by Dr. James Larson, who is head of the Political Science Dept.) The General Assembly of South Carolina returned to Columbia this fall to apply itself to the problem of reapportionment. It is a matter of curiosity to some that it was necessary for the legislhture to re assemble for this purpose. On the face of it reapportionment is a simple enough problem, one that could easily have been disposed of when the legislature was in session last spring. Why the inconvenience and expense of an extended session? Most legislators agree that in principle reapportionment can readily be handled by anyone with good grasp of arithmetic since it requires only that seats in the legislature be reshuffled.to reflect shifts in the state's population. But even though the mathematics of reapportionment are un complicated, the politics of it are complex and sensitive. The in dividual legislator often finds it to be one of the most sensitive issues he has to face as the distribution of seats in the legislature will directly affect his political future, that of his political party, and of his fellow legislators. The South Carolina legislature presently has under consideration an act that it hopes will meet both the rigid test of voter equality required by recent Supreme Court decisions and decisions and what the legislature considers to be its minimum political needs. These political needs are, quite simply, 1) Our times Sagaof C By SMITH HEMPSTONE Columnist Like Saint Thomas a Becket and Sir Thomas More, doughty old Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, whose political life ended with his flight to the Vatican last week, was of the stuff of legends. He was not a man for all seasons, this 79-year-old Archbishop of Esztergom, this Prince Primate of the Magyars. He was proud, ascetic, irascible and stubborn to a fault. He had lived too long and meen too much and suffered too intensely to learn the facile art of compromise and accommodation. Expediency was not a word which appeared in his vocabulary. And in the end he sacrificed his *keam of dying among his people to the gentle suaslon of the only man on earth whose authority he recognized, the Pope in Rome. That authority and that suasion, applied constantly over the years in the form of numerous messages from the Pontiff delivered per sonally by one of Mindsenty's few visitors, Franz Cardinal Koenig of Vienn4l, finally induced the iron wiled Archbishop to abandon the 6 million Hungarian Catholics to whom he*was a symbol of national and spiritual resistance to Russian Communism. Behold this man: Born at the tiny village of COskimindslmen near the Austrian border, the son of the mayor, he ,wps ordained in 1915, in that bit :acwaet twilight of the Hapsburg s Larson re reappor to preserve the districts of in cumbent members to the greatest extent possible--particularly those of established legislative leaders, 2) to provide a maximum number of South Carolina counties with a resident senator, and 3) to advance political party interests. The test of voter equality demands that legislative districts, house of representatives and senate, have subtatialyequal populations for ...the mathematics of reapportionment are uncomplicated, the politics of it are complex and sensitive.. each elected member. The courts have been unyielding on this point, which has challenged the ingenuity of legislators as they have sought an accommodation of interests within the new strict standards. The problem is particularly thorny with regard to the senate. The reapportionment plan that seems likely to be adopted in its main features calls for a realignment of counties into single and multi-member senatorial districts and includes elaborate "residency" requirements in the multi-county districts, the intent of which is to spread the senate membership among the greatest possible number of counties and also to preserve re-election chances for several senior senators. Whatever provisions are in cluded in the final version of the ardinal M empire. Mindszenty learned his anti-Communism early and at first hand while imprisoned during Bela Kun% short-lived regime after World War I. The Nazis, too, arrested him in the fading months of World War II for Resistance activity. In that shadow period of semi-freedom which preceded the Communist takeover of 1948, Mindszenty, who under the ancient laws of Hungary exercised temporal as well as spiritual powers in the absence of the king, rallied his people against the threat of Marxism. It came as no surprise when the secret police knocked on his door the night after that grim Christmas of 1948. For 40 days and nights, they subjected Mindszenty to what he later described as unspeakable torments "of body and soul." He was accused of treason and currency violations; the true charge was patriotism and possession of an unbending will. In the end, exhausted from virtually non-stop interrogation and loaded with drugs, the (ar dinal signed a "confession" which he tlhanaged to invalidate by ap pending to It the Initials for two Latin words Indicating that It had been wrung frem him under tor ture. At his show-trial, Mindazenty summoned the will to toil his Inquisitors that, whatever his "confeulon" might say, "a man also gives an answer to his own sQul." He was sentenced to. life -~ I(nprisonment. '- ' ' ' Itionment act it is predictable that unless population variances are very small between districts or the residency requirements of multi county, multi-member districts are removed there will be a court challenge of the plan. A successful suit would require that the General Assembly meet again, go over its work, and devise a new plan. This plan in turn may well be subjected to a court test-adding to the delay, expense, and confusion about the fundamental matter of repre sentation in the legislature. Is there a better way to ac complish reapportionment? Clearly the existing system places the self-interest of the legislature in opposition to the interest of the people in equal representation. No legislator can be expected to vote himself out of office, nor his party out of power. A number of states have tried alternative methods for handling reapportionment through the use of commissions. Not all have been successful but this approach does offer an escape from the practice of forcing the legislature to decide its own fate. In Great Britain Boundary Commissions have been notably successful in meeting the problem of establishing satisfactory districts for parliamentary elections. A similar body in South Carolina would ease the burden now lying on the legislature and the courts. It might be worth a try. Certainly it would be less expensive. indszenty In that brief, heady moment of Magyar independence in 1956, when joyous gypsy violins were heard once again along the Danube, Hungarian freedom fighters liberated Mindszenty and bore him in triumph to Budapest. And then Russian tanks rolled,into the shell-pocked capital, 'Imre Nagy and Pal Maleter (all honor to their names) were executed, 100,000 Magyars fled the country, Radio Free Budapest went dead with the haunting admonition, "...do not forget us," and Mind szenty sought asylum in the American legation. There he remained for fifteen years in a three-room suite on the fourth floor of that converted bank building on Szabadsag Ter ( Freedom Square), a living s.ymbol of resistance to Communist tyranny and, Increasingly, an embarrassmc" to both the Vatican and the White House. An unmarked car containing three leather-jacketed secret policemen waited in bullet-headed silence for every day of those 15 years to seize Mindszenty If he stepped outside. Hungarian party boss Janos Kadar would gladly have let Mindszenty go Into exile. But the tough old prelate would not relent, he would not recant, he would accept nothing short of dismissal of all charges against him and return of all his prerogati~ves.. The times slowly changed and, mercifully, for the btptr, Kadar, (Cointinued on Pa 4n