Not quite so generous

Railing at syndicated columnists is generally a waste of time. But Walter E. Williams’ “Before and after handouts” column on May 10 is typical of what comes out of effete Eastern universities. He said: “There is no history of Americans dying on the streets because they could not find food or basic medical assistance.”

Such a flat-out lie cannot stand. In 1840 internationally known German traveler Friedrich Gerstaecker reported that a fellow German, “without a cent in the world,” was found to have smallpox and so was locked up without food or even drink until he “died miserably on the floor.” Little Rock, which in this century once ranked worst in the country in its treatment of the homeless, was just continuing its 19th century reputation. Boatmen sang, “Little Rock in Arkansas, the d- est place I ever saw.” Little Rock’s poorhouse bedding was “old, ragged, and filthy,” food consisted solely of cornbread and soup served with no utensils, and “nothing indicated the execution of a single sanitary measure”; “the odor of the wards was, in several instances, intolerable.”

But Professor Williams, whose out-of-state students pay $50,000 to hear him, might not even be alive today had he been found on the railroad tracks in certain Northeast Arkansas counties. Work crews, when they could catch an African American hobo, bashed his brains out and left the corpse by the track so that it would look like a train had hit the man. Yet Williams says, “Generosity has always been a part of the American genome.”

And while he was pushing his anti-welfare agenda, on the opposite page guest writer Jacob Bundrick was itemizing the millions of dollars spent to aid large corporations that were never repaid. Enough said.

MICHAEL B. DOUGAN Jonesboro