With a Capital L

Pulitzer Prizewinning Editor Hodding Carter of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times (circ. 10,884) prides himself on being a "Southern liberal." Editor James A. Wechsler of the New York Post Home News (circ. 374,706) is just as proud of being a "Northern liberal." Last week Editors Carter and Wechsler, onetime staffers on Manhattan's late, hyperthyroid PM, were sniping at each other in a lively bushwhacking fight.

The feud began when Carter, in Look magazine, tried to tell "What's Wrong with the North." In heavy-handed satire of "In the Land of Jim Crow" (TIME, Aug. 16, 1948), a series done by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Reporter Ray Sprigle after a tour of the South in the disguise of a Negro, Carter drawled that as a circulation-booster he had assigned one Sherlock ("Ol' Fearless") Meriweather to do a series "In the Land of Grim Snow."

Scatter-Gun. Meriweather lived in a cellar until he developed a "skyscraper shadow complexion," and he dieted rigorously on Martinis, barbiturates and tongue-on-rye. Thus able to pass as a Northerner, Ol' Fearless invaded Manhattan. His grim findings: gangsters, muggings, class warfare, prejudice, "rapine and horrible death ... at every turnstile."

Carter added some blunt observations of his own: "There is actually more [racial and religious hatred] in the North than in the South . .. We never had a Bund or a Christian Front in the South ... I am ashamed of the discrimination which the Negro suffers in the South . . . But [we don't] pretend that it doesn't exist. That pretense is assiduously practiced in the North . . . The North has almost a monopoly on neurotics . . . dipsomaniacs, abnormal sex delinquents, divorced couples, Communists, crime-comics readers, [and] gin-rummy addicts . . ."

Counterfire. From the Post's editorial page last week, Wechsler took dead'aim at Carter's thicket and laid down his counterfire. Said Wechsler: "If he is saying that things are bad all over and that Southern prejudice has Northern parallels, we are disposed to agree . . . [But Carter] is really suggesting that we avert our eyes from the Southland because evil things also occur up North, just as the apologists for Soviet tyranny tell us we dare not attack their slave-system until we have ended oppression in Dixie.

"The inevitable impact of Carter's sermon, written by a liberal with a capital L, is to fortify the complacency and indifference of the South. [Nothing he said] could not have been written with equal ardor by a Southern Conservative."

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