THE MOOD OF AMERICA
THE MOOD OF AMERICA Notes on Curbing Intolerance, Trends in Rural Voting, and How fo Moke a Best Seller How Some States Combat Bigotry by L. L. & J. V. HOPKINS One of the most dramatic displays...
...San Francisco State Professor Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of The Ox Bow Incident, said "Howl" is "the work of a thoroughly honest poet who is also a highly competent technician...
...International Harvester, G. Fox and Co.'s department store in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Penn Fruit Co.'s chain stores in Philadelphia are among the most distinguished firms which ordered non-discriminatory policies in their personnel departments without waiting for either the comfort or the force of the law...
...A second amendment made it unlawful to discriminate in places of public accommodation or to use discriminatory advertising concerning such places...
...Before the 1956 election, the Wallace-Homestead Poll asked Iowa farmers: "Which party, the Republican or Democratic, do you think is likely to do the better job in helping to raise farm income...
...Conciliation without privacy would be a farce, and if the commissions were forced to court to settle each complaint, the burdens of time alone would be crushing...
...I mean filthy words that are very vulgar...
...Figures like these are worrying Republican candidates and especially Republican members of the House of Representatives...
...Italics mine...
...She said of "Howl" that "you feel like you're going through the gutter when you read that stuff"—precisely the author's honest intent...
...The Court, declaring a Michigan obscenity law unconstitutional, had ruled a book could not be banned for a lack of juvenile fitness...
...California's heavy-handed law hit hard at bookdealer-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his clerk, Shigeyoshi Murao...
...Ten weeks before the police raid, Collector of Customs Chester Mac-Phee, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "overzealous and notably prissy," confiscated the second shipment of "Howl" sent to the city by its English printer...
...This was one theory advanced after the election...
...After a trial of several months in which the alleged obscenity of "Howl" was debated, Judge Horn ruled the book of poems could be sold in the city...
...The usual guessing on this point has been speeded up by the Proxmire triumph in Wisconsin...
...Connecticut's commission, established in 1943 but granted its first real powers in 1947, is a good case in point even though its executive secretary must have felt apprehensive after his first complainant rang in...
...2. Will farmers continue to picture the Republicans as the guardians of peace and preparedness...
...The laws also vary greatly in scope...
...After FEP statutes were enacted hundreds of companies hired their first Negroes without persuasion or coercion, because they wanted to and now had the strength—and excuse—of the law behind them...
...While the youngest of the commissions still face problems of organization and technique, the oldest can look back on a record of achievement that is both obvious and substantial...
...Others are broadening their control...
...Only three per cent thought Benson was doing a good job while 72 per cent thought he was doing a poor job...
...New York and New Jersey have long had these powers and in 1955, the Washington commission obtained them...
...In 1952, the Iowa farm vote (measured the same way as in Wisconsin) was 68 per cent for Eisenhower...
...Captain Hanrahan reported, after a personal check of downtown shops, that "the big stores did sell those books but they took 'em off the shelves the day of the raid...
...Suppose we go back to Wisconsin and see what happened in the special election in August of 1957...
...Book Editor William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle, pointing out the law in such cases was laid down in the 1933 finding for James Joyce's Ulysses, noted "a book could not be judged by its words, one by one, but must be read in its entirety . . . presumably neither by children nor by a totalitarian 'Big Brother' watching over us...
...Conferences are held, the law is explained, and, in New York, a Negro is hired by a large law firm...
...And it should also be remembered that many farmers preferred the Democrats to the Republicans on farm issues in both 1952 and 1956, but a majority still voted for Eisenhower...
...THE MOOD OF AMERICA Notes on Curbing Intolerance, Trends in Rural Voting, and How fo Moke a Best Seller How Some States Combat Bigotry by L. L. & J. V. HOPKINS One of the most dramatic displays of the power of the states to overcome racial prejudice has been unfolding quietly for more than a decade in four Northeastern states...
...Of voters for Eisenhower in November, 1956— 27 per cent of the men shifted to Proxmire...
...At least two of the Republican farm Congressmen beaten in 1956 said to their constituents, "I hate Benson too...
...It is the difference between a tribute to free speech cut in marble and a policeman standing at the corner seeing to it that a man can speak out without interference...
...One significant advantage in the Massachusetts FEP law is the grant of power to order payment of back wages, upgrading, or hiring...
...An executive order by President Roosevelt established an FEPC on the federal level and barred discrimination in companies working on federal contracts...
...In November 1956, farmers recognized Eisenhower and the Republicans as the peace party...
...Attorney in San Francisco...
...What actually did happen...
...At the heart of their success is the strength of the laws: the fact that orders by the commissions can be enforced in the courts...
...Too many Eisenhower voters of 1956 shifted to Proxmire in 1957...
...Of those who voted for Stevenson, 70 per cent of the men and 68 per cent of the women credited the farm income issue...
...New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have handled a combined total of 6,967 cases but have had only 13 hearings...
...This is the way the Eisenhower voters responded: Men Women Raising farm income 12% 7% Preventing war 54 62 Other issues 34 31 Stevenson voters were asked the same question...
...If the discrimination is apparent—and the offending party refuses to acquiesce in conciliation sessions— the matter goes to a formal hearing...
...17 per cent of the women stayed home...
...Here is what the Poll found: Of the farm people who voted for Ike in November, 1956— 23 per cent of the men stayed home in August...
...On the average, some 50 per cent of all complaints handled are dismissed because of lack of probable cause or jurisdiction and yet, as the commissions readily admit, this does not always mean there was no discrimination...
...Oregon, for example, notes that in 57 satisfactory settlements, the complainant in 28 benefited directly by "being offered the job . . . [or] . . . the union membership previously denied . . ." But in the other 29 satisfactory settlements, presumably the accomplishment was less positive...
...Italics mine...
...Even so, in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the best Ike could do was to split the vote almost evenly...
...No one was guilty of any law breaking and, in his most pointed comment, he said, "Evil to him who evil thinks...
...that refusing a Negro a job because he is a Negro is as much an illegal act as stealing his paycheck...
...As firemen in three cities, although only Bridgeport had hired a Negro before FEPA...
...the American Civil Liberties Union, which later supplied Ferlinghetti counsel...
...The Minneapolis Tribune Poll shows farmers of Minnesota a little more Democratic than in Iowa...
...Under California's severe obscenity statute, anyone writing, composing, publishing, keeping for sale, advertising or distributing an "obscene" or "indecent" book is liable to fine and imprisonment...
...Kirk claimed "Howl's" literary merit was "negligible," and the poem a "weak imitation" of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass...
...Massachusetts, with its wide statutory powers, offers a good description of this strong-armed approach...
...William Carlos Williams...
...The customs collector complained that for "the first time in four years a decision of ours has been overridden...
...Arrested on the "Howl" obscenity charges, they went on trial facing a $500 fine and six months in jail after a raid on Ferlinghetti's City Lights Pocket Book Shop, publisher and distributor of the poem...
...Of those who voted for President Eisenhower, 58 per cent of the men and 69 per cent of the women credited the peace issue...
...The authoritarian face glared down on a window full of once-banned books, an excellent cross-section of the world's greatest literature, including the Bible...
...In 1956, in these same townships, the Eisenhower vote dropped to 55 per cent...
...the San Francisco State College Poetry Center...
...Several of the state legislatures have granted their commissions power to act in public housing discrimination...
...to the point that it presents a clear and present danger of inciting to anti-social or immoral action...
...The most succinct commentary came from Ferlinghetti, who hurried to his store without a word and stacked the windows with copies of Howl and Other Poems...
...Novelist and critic Mark Schorer, professor of English at the University of California, led the defense parade with testimony that the poem used "the rhythms and language of ordinary speech—necessarily the language of vulgarity, the language of the man in the street, which is absolutely essential to the poetic theme...
...But in August of 1957, the Republican (Kohler) vote in these townships dropped to 30.5 per cent...
...A postelection survey by the Wallace-Homestead Poll nailed down this point...
...Michigan and New Mexico, for example, have power only in the area of employment...
...How 'Howl' Became A Best Seller by DICK MEISTER William Carlos Williams concludes his introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems with the warning, "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell...
...The most recent are Wisconsin's and Colorado's...
...Howl,' " Judge Horn said, would have to be "entirely lacking in social importance" to be held "obscene...
...It is one of four —Connecticut, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are the others—which allows its commission to initiate complaints...
...Six days later two police inspectors entered the City Lights book shop, bought copies of "Howl" and The Miscellaneous Man (a magazine MacPhee had also confiscated, though a different issue), arrested sales clerk Murao, and issued a warrant for Ferlinghetti's arrest...
...in New Mexico, a Mexican-American at a copper mine is given integrated company housing...
...The answers came out much the same way...
...In August of 1957, William Proxmire, Democrat, ran against Walter J. Kohler, Republican and former governor, for the seat vacated by the death of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...Note the political background of this special election: In 1952, the farm vote in Wisconsin was 66 per cent for Eisenhower...
...If preventing war seemed more important, they voted Republican...
...A banner over the display, proclaiming "banned books for sale," and the publicity given "Howl" and City Lights, brought hundreds of new customers to the store...
...Earlier, Anthony Boucher, speaking for the Mystery Writers of America, a group far removed from the avant garde school of Ginsberg, had complained of much the same thing...
...And the Democratic candidate for the U. S. Senate, although beaten in the state as a whole, carried the farm precincts by a narrow margin...
...As sales clerks in smaller towns like Stamford and Greenwich as well as in the cities, for a spectacular increase from nine in 1944 to 202 in 1950...
...Of the farm men and women who voted for Stevenson— 21 per cent of the men stayed home...
...Only New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts have powers to prevent discrimination in educational practices, and only Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have yet experimented with outlawing discrimination because of age...
...Ferlinghetti, who had earlier "thanked" MacPhee for seizing "Howl," "thereby rendering it famous," something "it would have taken years for the critics to accomplish," placed a "Big Brother" image in his store window...
...In ten years, commission researchers and conciliators have become familiar with a "straw man" that appears sooner or later in most negotiations...
...This has the look of a farm landslide...
...The clue may lie in another question: "Which party, the Republican or Democratic, do you think is likely to do the better job in preventing war...
...Big Brother" sought other targets, outside the bohemian community...
...One mid-west GOP recommendation is to get rid of Benson...
...None of the women interviewed shifted to Kohler...
...As integrated members of the Connecticut National Guard since 1948, and since 1951, on an equal footing in the Federal Organized Reserve Corps, making complete the integration of the armed services within the state...
...Kenneth Rexroth called it "a prophetic work which greatly resembles the Bible in purpose and language . . . the most remarkable poem published by a young man since World War II...
...The Wisconsin Agriculturist, a widely circulated farm paper, interviewed a representative cross-section of farm voters in one of its regular polls of farm opinion...
...Working Negroes—who now number about 21,000 in Connecticut —have turned up quietly in hundreds of places: • As school teachers in 51 Connecticut towns out of 169...
...A few, like Congressman Melvin R. Laird of Wisconsin, have urged that Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson be fired...
...Where it was necessary, the commissions went to work, applying persuasion in conferences with offenders, and, if the plea fell on deaf ears, putting the case to hearing tribunals and the courts...
...Anything not suitable for publication in newspapers," said the juvenile bureau's Captain William A. Hanrahan, "shouldn't be published at all...
...Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey can enforce equality in employment, education policies, public accommodations, and in publicly assisted housing...
...But before analyzing it, let's see what has been happening in another farm state, Iowa...
...in Oregon, a Japanese-American wins a civil service job...
...Macintosh summed up his feeble case: "Would you," he asked, "like to see this printed in your local newspaper for your family...
...With farmers more emphatic about raising farm income and more doubtful about the Republicans' claim to peace and preparedness, what will happen...
...Although speaking for the prosecution, Miss Potter seemed more on the side of the defense...
...The "Howl" case was the nation's first obscenity test since the Supreme Court ruled last June that California's obscenity law was constitutional...
...That is what worries Republican candidates...
...But doubtless this security of information is a virtue as well as a barrier to evaluation of the commission's work...
...Kenneth Rex-roth, unofficial leader of the San Francisco "renaissance...
...Others announce loudly that they disagree with the Administration's farm program...
...The judge said, in short, that if a reader didn't approve a publication the reader alone had a right to censor it, by merely refusing to read the offensive material...
...The anti-discrimination laws vary in age...
...Judge Horn ignored much of the futile speculation over a book's "obscenity," an insoluble question in any case, and ruled that the test is that "the material must have a tendency to deprave or corrupt readers...
...Of voters for Stevenson in 1956— One per cent of the men shifted to Kohler...
...The farm vote is estimated by taking townships where 85 per cent of the residents are classified by the census as rural-farm...
...Farmers who had thought the Republicans the best protectors of the nation and guardian of the peace may now have other ideas...
...While the social experiment continues in the thirteen states, their records of achievement will, do much to convince other state legislatures that racial and religious discrimination is not the concern of private parties alone but of the state too...
...To Proxmire...
...In 1950, it banned denial of work because of age, defined as between 45 and 65...
...The Wisconsin Agriculturist Poll tried to find out how "shifters" felt about the Eisenhower farm program and about Secretary Benson...
...Howl," called by many the most significant single long American poem since World War II, was banned from San Francisco bookstores for reasons contrary to a 1957 Supreme Court ruling...
...What about other states in the Middle West...
...and The Nation...
...The San Francisco police concern for youthful morality was equally unappreciated by Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn...
...Did Proxmire win because the Republicans stayed home and the Democrats turned out...
...MacPhee, too, said "Howl" was unfit for children but a little less than ten weeks later was overruled by the U.S...
...The arresting officers said the publications "come right out and use vulgar words...
...Judge Horn's decision may provide some salve for the sting of that ruling, in which Justice Brennan, in the majority opinion, held the test for obscenity to be "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest...
...The four oldest are those of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, enacted between 1945 and 1947...
...The Kohler vote was hurt by the stay-at-home Eisenhower farm women...
...24 per cent of the women shifted to Proxmire...
...These states have the oldest and the most powerful of the state commissions against discrimination...
...But police also admitted they were "going on publicity given the collector of customs when he tried to keep the books out of this country...
...And, only since the mid-1940's, as engineers, draftsmen, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, social workers with jurisdiction over non-colored cases, accountants, and in a host of other professional and skilled jobs over the entire state...
...Only a few years before, in 1940, out of a working Negro population of 11,919, there were just 16 Negro stenographers, typists, and secretaries, and 17 clerical and similar workers on record in the entire state, most of them in Negro companies...
...And in nine other states, younger commissions are widening the experiment in anti-discrimination laws...
...It might be named "imaginary bad results...
...States which have attempted non-enforceable compliance—Indiana and Kansas are two —have made only minor progress...
...Their laws and anti-discrimination records are at least a partial answer to civil rights critics who claim the North has only been a pot calling the kettle black...
...Echoing late New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, he supposed "no girl was ever ruined by a book...
...DICK MEISTER, Associated Press correspondent in San Francisco, covered the case of "Hdwl...
...But since then, Sputnik has appeared...
...In February, 1957, Iowa farmers were asked to comment on their November, 1956 vote...
...The real damage to Kohler came in another way...
...Women "shifters" to Proxmire showed much the same trend...
...But this authority gives them control over only a negligible fraction of all the residences in a state...
...Fifteen years ago only four cities employed them...
...In 1957, Washington brought public accommodations and publicly assisted housing within its scope, while neighboring Oregon added publicly assisted housing powers...
...This extended non-discriminatory employment policies over an enormous territory...
...J. W. (Jake) Ehrlich, famous criminal lawyer who donated his usually high-priced services...
...Other early protests had come from Henry Rago, editor of Poetry...
...Many personnel officers and foremen, in refusing to hire Negroes, have done so not because of personal prejudice but because of what they imagine will happen down in the shop or out in the office...
...In the last session before Judge Horn's decision, the prosecution presented its witnesses, David Kirk, an assistant professor of English at the University of San Francisco, and Gail Potter, a "recognized authority in voice production...
...Yet statements of this kind have not proved to be adequate political insurance...
...Officers from San Francisco's juvenile bureau promised if action against "Howl" proved successful, they would pick up other books containing "dirty words...
...Both states had had only FEP statutes for eight years...
...The other nine commissions must wait for private citizens to present them with charges of discrimination...
...What the commissions need and have been seeking is legislation making illegal the refusal to sell, rent, or lease housing because of race, religion, or national origin...
...41 per cent of the women stayed home...
...But nobody knows yet just what they think about the Republicans as the peace party...
...As telephone operators and skilled workers with the Southern New England Telephone Co., all since 1947...
...But they lost anyway...
...As office workers, from sixteen in 1940 to 71 in 1946 (34 of whom were employed by the state) to 807 in 1950 when FEPA had been on the books only three years...
...Iowa farm women gave the Republicans a vote of 53 per cent with only six per cent for the Democrats...
...There is evidence of vigorous action as well as good intentions...
...Yet Eisenhower carried the farm districts...
...Common to all 13 states are administrative agencies which are empowered to open jobs, training schools, residences, and public facilities to people who have found them closed in the past...
...For if there is widespread, discrimination in the North, there has also been notable improvement...
...But if there are Negroes in 13 states who have found a long lost ally in the statute books, there are others among them who have seen the law fall woefully short of their misery...
...This makes it look as if some Republican Congressmen have reason to be worried about 1958...
...Wisconsin's was on the books for some years but was unenforceable until 1957...
...It might seem that these anti-discrimination laws merely duplicate constitutional guarantees, but there is a real difference...
...The Northern California Booksellers Association called it "insufferable" that a bookdealer could be arrested "at the sole discretion of a police officer, regardless of his qualifications" to judge literature "and regardless of his knowledge of judicial precedent...
...Of the men interviewed, 52 per cent named the Democrats and only 22 per cent named the Republicans...
...This time the Philistines lost...
...L. L. & J. V. HOPKINS are free lance writers living in Connecticut...
...When the trial began, Ferlinghetti and Murao waived a jury...
...The Democratic candidate for governor, with a stronger farm majority, was elected...
...and Albert Bendich from the American Civil Liberties Union...
...To put it plainly: the North is beginning to put its house in order...
...The New York law firm which rejected the Negro to spare the feelings of other workers, the Oregon state agency which barred a Japanese-American because "as an identifiable member of a minority group he is unsuited for dealing with the public," the Washington medical clinic which rejected the application of a Jewish doctor because "we just don't have enough Jewish patients to keep you busy"—all these are part of a single, monotonous refrain...
...By law, commissions are bound not to reveal the content of conciliations with discriminating parties, and the record can be misleading...
...It was a Negro woman, employed as a domestic, who wanted to know whether the commission could force her to work for Jewish families...
...The best method of censorship," Judge Horn pointed out, "is by the people as self-guardians of public opinion...
...Their husbands were somewhat less emphatic, but the trend was the same way...
...So far as we can tell now, a majority of farmers think they'll get a better deal on farm income from the Democrats...
...They probably won't be...
...At the same time, segregation and discrimination were forbidden in public housing...
...In 1946, it passed a Fair Employment Practices Act which made illegal denial of work because of "race, color, religious creed, national origin or ancestry...
...Equally important was the critical labor shortage...
...But not fatally...
...As policemen in fourteen towns, although only Hartford and New Haven employed them before the 1940's...
...Only four per cent of the women "shifters" thought Benson was doing a good job...
...Colorado's Fair Employment Practices statute, negligible because it applied only to state agencies, was broadened in 1957 to cover private employers as well...
...His ruling seemed to relieve police from censorship duty and place it with the individual reader...
...Necessity mothered equality in thousands of "lily white" occupations, and Negroes broke through their own patterns of habit and began seeking jobs in companies and offices they would not have dreamed of entering before the 1940's...
...The Massachusetts commission is empowered to receive, initiate, and investigate complaints of discrimination...
...The Negro, even in Connecticut, had a long way to go, and in the ten years since the state enacted anti-discrimination statutes, the civil rights commission has hurried on a social revolution without anyone really noticing...
...What normally happens is that commissions and offenders meet each other halfway...
...Political Trends Down on the Farm by DONALD R. MURPHY Des Moines How will farm people in the Middle West vote in 1958...
...With the exception of New Mexico and Colorado, all of the 13 states are well north of the Mason-Dixon line, and most traditionally have been associated with advances in the field of social legislation: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin...
...In 1956, the Eisenhower vote in the same farm townships was down to 53 per cent...
...Yet it should be noted that in some city Congressional districts, the farm vote isn't important—even in a farm state...
...The shift all went one way...
...The commissions will also propose legislation, as they have in the past, in the areas of age and education...
...They answered: Men Women Raising farm income 66% 66% Preventing war 8 9 Other issues 26 25 The Wisconsin Agriculturist Poll did a similar post-mortem on the 1956 farm vote in Wisconsin...
...Another hope is that hog prices will be at least as good in the fall of 1958 as in the fall of 1956...
...The Massachusetts law is powerful in another respect...
...The impetus for passage of state anti-discrimination laws came during World War II...
...The defendants had three attorneys, Lawrence Speiser, who had charged the California obscenity law was contrary to the state and federal constitutions...
...Less satisfactory check-ups in Illinois show those farmers less Democratic than in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin...
...To a good many farm people, the 1956 election issue seemed as simple as this: "Which do you think is more important, preventing war or raising farm income...
...In his dissent, Justice Douglas noted this made for "community censorship in one of its worst forms [creating] a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win...
...In his decision Judge Horn laid down a set of rules which, he made clear, should guide San Francisco police in future prowlings for "dirty books...
...Even with the speed of successful conciliation, complainants may go weeks without work and paycheck...
...Government should be concerned with anti-social conduct, not with utterances...
...This is what the Poll showed: Of the men who shifted from Ike to Proxmire— Only 14 per cent approved the Administration's farm program while 66 per cent disapproved it...
...After finding out how the farmer voted, this question was asked: "If you voted for Eisenhower, did you have in mind mostly (1) Raising farm income (2) Preventing another war (3) Other issues...
...New York's law merely permits injunction for such violation...
...If raising farm income seemed more important, they voted Democratic...
...So the election questions in the Middle West farm regions may be these: 1. Will farmers continue to picture the Democrats as farm income raisers...
...Waiting beyond the hearing are the courts and the ultimate force of their contempt powers...
...Most critics agree it is a worthwhile trip, but the San Francisco Police Department, poking a blue nose into the poems last year, declared the journey "unfit for children...
...As graduate nurses, 104 where there had been only six in 1944 when only two nursing schools in the state would accept them...
...But this has been infrequent...
...It merely means the commission either didn't have a good enough case, or lacked power to act...
...and in Massachusetts, three Negroes return to a cafe which no longer refuses to serve them...
...Two weeks later Judge Horn announced his decision before a packed courtroom...
...DONALD R. MURPHY is director of editorial research for Wallaces' Farmer and Iowa Homestead...
...Murao was released on $500 bail supplied by the American Civil Liberties Union and Ferlinghetti, out of town at the time, promised to give himself up on his return...
...He said "punishment is inflicted for thoughts provoked, not for overt acts or anti-social conduct...
...First, the Wisconsin Agriculturist Poll sorted out the farm people who had voted for President Eisenhower in 1956 but who stayed home in August, 1957...
...The dramatic session came when a group of renowned authors, critics, and teachers paraded to the stand to defend "Howl" and make the prosecution look ridiculous as it faced the experts with its feeble argument that the work contained "dirty words...
Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2
