The Augusta Courier

SOUTHERN "TURNCOATS"
HAVE DISGRACED US

The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville, Fla.

Webster defines a traitor as a person who betrays his country, cause, or friends. Fortunately, the United States has had few of these despicable characters in her history, but the most notorious of them all was Benedict Arnold who, on August 30, 181 years ago, branded his name in infamy for all time.

Arnold, although a general in the Continental Army, betrayed West Point by passing important papers to Major John Andre, adjutant general of the British Army. Andre was captured and hanged as a spy, but Arnold escaped and made his way to a British sloop, appropriately named the Vulture, and became a brigadier general with the Redcoats. He was perhaps the first influential American to become a "turncoat," a person who goes over to the other side or party. The term may, in fact, be traced back to him.

Our espionage laws frequently make it difficult to convict spies and traitors, but we have found the expression "turncoat" ideally suited in this age for describing persons who ostensibly call themselves Americans.

The GIs of the Korean War who remained voluntarily with the Red Chinese were immediately tagged with the degrading phrase. Another who rightfully deserves to be so classified is industrialist Cyrus Eaton, a man who got rich off this country's free enterprise system but who now sneers at it while cavorting with Communists. Next month he is expected to hold another of his "Pugwash Conferences" in Massachusetts for free world and Soviet scientists. They derive their name from his estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, but they invariably become sounding boards for Communist propaganda. Mr. Eaton himself, according to a Senate committee, "has shown strong and unconcealed sympathy for Soviet policies and hostility to American policies."

But if a country can have "turncoats," so can sections, and the South has been severely wounded by the stabs in the back dealt by her literary and political "turncoats." These are the men and women who profess to be Southerners but who write about yesterday's injustices as if they existed today, or else they preach that "integration is inevitable, so why fight it?"

They have conveyed false impressions of our way of life and of our sentiments to other areas of this country and made problems for us that a few years ago were nonexistent. If these are the sons and daughters of the South, then the South may well wish she had remained sterile.