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The cold toughness of the Screaming Eagles abruptly put an end to violence at Roadblock Alpha—or anywhere else around Central High. The Negro children reported that they were well treated inside the school. (Arkansas N.A.A.C.P. Leader Daisy Bates had carefully coached her charges to be prepared for insults, to be dignified when vilified, and above all to reveal no bitterness when questioned by newsmen.) During the noon hour a white boy and girl, both school leaders, saw a Negro boy eating alone. They asked: "Would you like to come over to our table?" The boy smiled gratefully: "Gosh, I'd love to." And another Negro pupil recalled: "The white kids broke the ice. They talked to us." Clearly, many of the white children of Central High School were proving themselves better citizens than their elders.
Monument to Demagoguery. Orval Faubus, meanwhile, had flown back from Sea Island. Arriving in Little Rock, Faubus joked feebly: "I feel like MacArthur. I've been relieved of my job." But Orval Faubus had no intention of fading away. He holed up in his executive mansion and began working on a national television speech.
It was a monument to demagoguery. "Evidence of the naked force of the Federal Government is here apparent in these unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls," cried Faubus, holding up a photograph—but not long enough to show that the girls were merely walking, giggling, past a line of troopers. In the Faubus account, bloodied Agitator Blake was suddenly transformed into a "guest in a home." The Army had gone on an orgy of "wholesale arrests." Actual number: eight, with four fined for loitering, and four released at the police station. An "imported judge," i.e., U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies of Fargo, N. Dak. (TIME, Sept. 30), had refused permission for the Faubus side to cross-examine Government witnesses. (Faubus neglected to mention that he had refused to answer a summons to appear in Judge Davies' court, or that his lawyers had walked out on the showdown hearing.) Teen-age girls had "been taken by the FBI and held incommunicado for hours of questioning while their frantic parents knew nothing of their whereabouts." (Said FBI Director John Edgar Hoover: Faubus was "disseminating falsehoods.")
Then, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, Orval Faubus recalled that as a World War II officer in the 35th Infantry Division he had "helped rescue" the 101st Airborne from Bastogne (by the time the 35th arrived on the scene, it was the Germans who needed rescuing from the Screaming Eagles). Cried Orval Faubus: "Today we find the members of the famed division, which I helped rescue, in Little Rock, Ark., bludgeoning innocent bystanders, with bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls, and the warm, red blood of patriotic American citizens staining the cold, naked, unsheathed knives. In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, which we all cherish, what is happening in America?"