Though The Carroll News has made headlines covering its surrounding communities and the world for decades, the news and its coverage changed rapidly with the 1960s.
The first demonstration of this was in the opinion article “Lost Republicans” by then Editor-in-Chief James Wagner, who used this article to recap the Democratic and Republican conventions of the summer of 1960. Wagner began by writing “The 1960 Democratic convention stepped further to the left than any major American political party before it.” Wagner also compared this to the floundering Republicans, who in selecting Nixon as the presidential nominee copied the Democratic candidate in a “Me too” attitude on foreign policy and civil rights.
This game of catch-up, to Wagner, would only lead to disaster for Republicans as they had lost their reason for being and by November of that year, Wagner would be proven right when John F. Kennedy would win the election by over 84 electoral votes. Wagner not only predicted the outcome of that election, but the direction of the nation which would be defined by its external and internal conflicts.
Internally, the battle for the passage of the Civil Rights Acts was covered extensively. In 1968, James McConnell of John Carroll University attended “Emphasis ’68” a young voter’s conference at the University of Alabama where speakers, including Senator Robert Kennedy, stressed the importance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and how the Civil Rights Act of 1968 must be passed. McConnell specifically related his experience discussing the matter with Representative Charles Weltner whose voice in the South for desegregation was one to be listened to nationwide as he stressed “white supremac[ists] are impeding progress” of the United States.”
This message was acted upon here in Cleveland, as students broadly assisted in understanding local desegregation, as the sociology department offered opportunities for students to work with the State of Ohio in gathering desegregation data, as described by News Editor Joseph R. Wosdovich. Wosdovich wrote “Student research work is also helping the Ohio Civil Rights Commission by interviewing area hotel and restaurant managers” to quantify perceived compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which in his words was “An innovation in the Sociology Dept.’s curriculum.”
This hands-on experience also applied to the nation’s external conflict, namely the Vietnam War.
In an April 1969 letter to the editor, James Germaile explained why he and others should refuse the draft. Germaile decried U.S. imperialism stating, “I will refuse induction on April 17 because l claim the military kills people in two ways. The first way is the direct method, by bullets in a battle situation… I believe the second way in which the military kills is by diverting money away from feeding and developing starving people and using it to build up our armaments.”
Germaile goes on to say that the clergy, the teachers and the Catholic church hierarchy, the officials involved in operating John Carroll University, should support conscientious objections. This would help create a better, Christian world for both the draftees and those in poverty robbed of opportunity by the military-industrial complex.
Despite this letter, and the many like it, many at the university, and on The Carroll News staff, disagreed. In the same edition, Columnist Chris Streifender wrote in his article “On Campus Disorders” that those protesting the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard, Oberlin and Kent State Universities dishonor veterans, and encourage flag burnings, putting a “shudder… through the cemeteries at Arlington, Gettysburg and Vietnam!” Streifender wrote this line only weeks before the tragic Kent State massacre where 4 students were killed by the Ohio National Guard.
Through these trying times, The Carroll News, the university and the nation survived. As the 1970s began, so did the end of the era of counterculture and protests. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s would pass, despite the rocky road to real desegregation still being walked today. The Vietnam War ended, too, with the “peace with honor” promised by President Richard Nixon failing to keep South Vietnam from collapsing in 1975.
In the 1960s, The Carroll News covered it all, keeping the pulse of a divided community and sharing it in every edition, a skill it would continue to hone in the next decades of its coverage of Cleveland, the greater community and the world.
