Raleigh, May 12—Lawyer Tom Johnson of the Lumberton bar doesn’t think exact justice has been done his distinguished townsman, A.W. McLean in allowing the news to go forth that members of the Parkton school community objected to J.W. Bailey’s commencement speech there because of a damage which might result to Mr. McLean’s candidacy for governor.
The attorney, fresh from kluckerdom, says the kluckers of the klan are getting credit for this coup because they have come to a very cordial dislike for Mr. Bailey who has had some hard things to say of them. The fact that Mr. Bailey broke loose on them after the recall isn’t regarded as important. The Roberson klansmen are uncommonly wise and they have known of the Bailey hostility long, so the narrative goes.
Mr. Bailey and Br. Johnson are great friends. When they boxed once at Wake Forest, Mr. Bailey, then being a seasoned religious editor taking law, and Mr. Johnson, just an amateur fresh from academic ranks, Mr. Johnson broke one of Mr. Bailey’s ribs. They are thick. Johnson would vote for Bailey of all the McLeans and Max Gardners would get out of the way when Bailey runs. The twain are chummy. The Robeson lawyer is speaking by the book. Mr. Bailey says he is getting the klan stuff, insults and the like, so it is no longer a secret that he has drawn the klan’s fire.
How the klan got to the schoolboard of Parkton, Mr. Johnson seems to know very well, but that’s another story. That body of regulators does not mean to subject itself to the blandishments of Bailey and it just shuts up the hall on him. The shutting up Mr. Johnson and his associates would have properly placed. No Mclean man of responsibility and gentility sought Bailey’s disadvantage by closing the school doors on him.
An effort was being made to justify the act on the ground that this was a school occasion, and Mr. Bailey is distinctly a political occasion? But these things all are negatived by the news that the klan sympathizers chose to shut off what Mr. Harding would call “canditorial” talk.
Governor Morrison’s mysterious reversal of petition on the state prison investigation yesterday had not thoroughly soaked into the state observers here today who found it so difficult to reconcile with the story that the governor is plastering J.W. Bailey every day and in every way and preparing his excellent self for eventual stumping against the Raleigh lawyer.
Mr. Bailey believes that Mr. Morrison will take the rostrum in advocacy of A.W. McLean, albeit the news which the capital hears is almost too good for truth. If his excellency would only get into the campaign following the capital caper of yesterday, Bailey would not have to worry about campaign expenses even though the greatest fat frier since Aaron were in the field in the interest of the governor.
The conservative newspaper men at the capital, and for that matter the wildest ones, do not know how to handle this course of Mr. Morrison yesterday. Half of the profession here has been counted hostile to the governor most of his tenure. The other half has been won over to even greater hostility int hat time, if the impartiality with which the gubernatorial club descends upon journalistic heads, is a fair sign. The afternoon paper yesterday having to handle the story much as the out of town correspondents did by mail—in a hurry—was impartial and impersonal. The morning paper made it a sharp of a thousand strongs, editorial and otherwise. But for all that, nobody seems to have a plausible reason for the several lightning changes which his excellency has executed and as yet very little writing has been done.
One thing was settled today—the council of state did not join the governor in his statement. Neither did it run from responsibility. His excellency desired that it absolve itself and let him take the full responsibility. It merely said nothing and set the executive a fine example in restraint though under attack. There was a conference of the council and the executive, but like most of these convocations, this was mostly a monologue. His excellency asked to say that he alone is responsible and has not consulted anybody on this prison position. The council didn’t let him say it. This is the dope from two state sources.
The fact that the court reporter doesn’t get this and drops into the general observation that the council and the governor discussed this aspect of the prison controversy, casts a slight suspicion on the information given the correspondent, but the story hangs. Folks in Raleigh asking what the council of state can mean. It can mean almost anything, but chiefly it means that it isn’t excited about the business and is willing to be raw-hided for sins that it has committed by no overt act.
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From the front page of The Durham Morning Herald, Sunday, March 13, 1923
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