NOTES IN THE NEWS

Memo to the President President Kennedy has shown a heartening willingness to appoint, or reappoint, some of the ablest men who served under his predecessor— Charles E. Bohlen, C. Douglas Dillon,...

...Speaker: "In the last few days twenty-six members of this House, from both parties, have joined me in introducing a newly written bill to create a National Peace Agency...
...We do not know...
...The Not-So-Republican Farmer One of the most broadly-accepted myths germinated by the outcome of the last election is that the farm vote 26 Members of the House Join Kastenmeier In Sponsoring Peace Agency Bill "Mr...
...Petitions were circulated, boycotts were threatened, long-time friendships were ruptured, and the entire silk-stocking district was engulfed in a fog of emotion...
...An affirmation of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, accompanied by the President's statement of intention to use his Presidential power to enforce desegregation in public schools...
...Montana (Olsen), New Jersey (Ro-dino) and West Virginia (Staggers and Zelenko...
...What kinds of rearrangement of our national economy would we undertake, if the armaments burden upon our budget were to be reduced...
...The Council's demonstration of the wide range of initiative the President has in the civil rights field is impressive, especially when contrasted with the few acts or statements attempted by his predecessor: ^Appointment of an adviser on race relations, with a staff to review compliance with government policies of non-discrimination...
...Enforcement of laws enabling Negroes to vote...
...The hope, for all to see, lies in President Kennedy...
...A stunning example of this economic and moral confusion is the statement of F. F. Loock, president of Allen-Bradley Company, who pleaded guilty to the charges: "No one," said Loock, "attending the gatherings was so stupid he didn't know [the meetings] were in violation of the law...
...It was the non-farm rural vote that threw so many of the "farm states" into the Nixon column...
...When looked at in this light, Pat-ton's contention holds up quite well throughout the farm belt: Kennedy gained over Stevenson's 1952 vote, or held more of it, in actual "farm" precincts than in the neighboring villages and small cities in rural counties...
...Drew Pearson reported that even John Kennedy, wryly sizing up the election returns, remarked that it seemed the farmers would like to have Ezra Taft Benson reappointed Secretary of Agriculture for another four years...
...Ironically, it was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has so often been accused by these same electric corporations as being a threat to free enterprise, that initiated the action which ultimately opened the gates to the prosecution, and perhaps, as an aftermath, to at least a semblance of freedom in this segment of the economy...
...The recommendations of the Council's thoughtful report, entitled "The Federal Executive and Civil Rights," are based on the advice and consultation of more than forty experts in the civil rights field, in addition to the contributions of the Council's gifted and experienced staff...
...We could try to answer these questions if an independent agency to explore new approaches to peace were to be created...
...One of the more glaring examples of sweeping the problem "under the rug" turned up recently in, of all places, New Rochelle, New York...
...In a recent press conference he quietly yet firmly pledged to use the "moral authority" and "influence" of the Presidency where court desegregation orders are being defied and sabotaged...
...Such an agency is necessary to discover the hard facts upon which our State Department can build sensible policy in negotiating with other nations...
...Robert W. Kastenmeier Wisconsin Democrat went to Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon, thereby affirming farmers' approval of the Eisenhower Administration's farm policies...
...But the myth was rudely punctured and the hypocrisy of the NAM glaringly exposed by the recent conviction of twenty-nine companies in the electrical equipment field, along with scores of their executives, of wholesale criminal violations of the Sherman anti-trust act...
...Others, including some who had expressed concern about the language problem involved in sending their children to a public school which included many Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican children, enrolled their children in French-speaking and other foreign language schools...
...In the first Federal court order of its kind handed down in the North, Judge Kaufman ordered New Rochelle school authorities to present a desegregation plan by April, and to desegregate its schools at the opening of the fall term...
...However undeserved it might be, this acceptance of the G.O.P...
...If so, let us face the fact, and change our laws and our mores to accommodate this new development...
...A Whale of a Difference Eight years ago, when President Eisenhower's ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, went to the Security Council to present his credentials, he refused to shake hands with the late Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet delegate...
...Democratic leaders generally were acutely disappointed in the apparent ineffectiveness of "the farm issue...
...The term "robust" obviously has a two-way thrust—a regret and a hope...
...Democratic farm leaders drummed hard on the "farm issue" in Minnesota...
...He is convinced of this, "because Northern cities sweep [the problem] under the rug and run—to the suburbs...
...Under the Rug The direct assaults of the Southern Regional Council's incisive and pertinent report reverberate against the rigid walls of segregation in the South...
...An exception which proved all the rules was Minnesota—one of the few "farm states" which Kennedy carried...
...And even though many farm votes were diverted from Kennedy by the peace and religion isue, the Democrats still won a majority of the farm vote...
...And the consumer and taxpayer are as badly off as they were in the days of the Nineteenth Century robber barons, when W. H. Vander-bilt said, with more candor than the latter-day barons, "The public be damned...
...This is why he carries so much weight when he says, as he did in a farewell press conference: "The Soviet government has every intention of living up to any agreement it may make from the standpoint of nuclear tests or on broader disarmament issues...
...But while the corporations talk piously about the role they play in keeping the economy "free," and spend millions of advertising dollars honoring the spirit of competition, The Wall Street Journal reports a widespread philosophy among these same corporate executives "that collusive activity was ethical, illegal though it might be...
...New Frontiers' in Civil Rights The timing could not have been better...
...As we reported in these columns in November, 1959, it was a TVA protest against scores of identical bids, often on million dollar items, that led Senator Estes Kefauver's anti-trust subcommittee to launch an investigation which terminated in the successful criminal prosecution by the Justice Department...
...Lutheran Farmers Union leaders, themselves morally reinforced by state Democratic leaders, sternly lectured their hard-up Protestant neighbors against giving in to the temptation to vote anti-Catholic and thus give Benson farm policies a boost in the process...
...That bill would mobilize the creative power of American ideas to solve the great problems of disarmament and of reducing international tensions...
...These problems are many and complex...
...These figures indicate that you and your farm policy have increased the Democratic proportion of the total vote of 1952 by an average of thirty per cent in heartland Farmers Union states...
...The schools were integrated, most parents who had withdrawn their children returned them, and almost everyone who had opposed integration found his fears were groundless...
...Memo to the President President Kennedy has shown a heartening willingness to appoint, or reappoint, some of the ablest men who served under his predecessor— Charles E. Bohlen, C. Douglas Dillon, and Llewellyn Thompson are three notable examples...
...The issue was compliance with a standard Board of Education directive which re-drew the boundaries of an existing school district upon completion of a new school in the neighborhood...
...The Minnesota Farmers Union, an effective grass-roots organization backed up by a complex of grain marketing and farm supply purchasing cooperatives, mobilized experienced and responsive local leaders in every precinct to mount a drive to "make-every-farm-vote-count...
...Democrats would have enjoyed an agrarian landslide if the "farm policy" issue had been dominant among farm voters in Iowa and Wisconsin...
...Lodge snapped at Vishinsky as he turned his back on the Soviet spokesman...
...Some reacted by such childish measures as falsely changing their address in an attempt to avert the transfer...
...But it is the only way a business can be run...
...We know The Progressive is read in the White House, and we direct this plea to the President and his associates: find a significant post, if possible, for James J. Wadsworth, who served with great distinction for many months as our chief delegate to the Geneva talks with the Soviets on the banning of nuclear tests and thereafter as our ambassador to the United Nations...
...Not all businessmen uphold the notion of an economy grounded on free enterprise...
...It is against this background that Senator Kefauver and others have suggested public representation in, and more direct regulation of, administered industries...
...It would involve physical and social scientists, teachers, public officials, and private citizens in an attempt to bring imagination and thought to bear on the problems of achieving peace...
...Recently, when President Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations turned up to present his credentials to the Security Council, he sought out the Soviet ambassador, Valerian A. Zorin, for a warm handshake...
...The program of the Southern Regional Council, designed for executive action, involves no fewer than eighteen major actions that the President might pursue without the necessity of prying further civil rights legislation out of a recalcitrant Congress...
...Overwhelmingly Protestant, and solidly rooted in the traditions and nationality origins of "isolationism," Minnesota Democrats pulled their voters—and particularly their farm voters—into the Kennedy camp against all the drag of the tidal issues running for the Republican Party in the remainder of the farm belt...
...The suburb is appealing the decision...
...Just when President John F. Kennedy let it be known that he was willing to let the Senate work on his economic, social, and foreign programs in exchange for leaving civil rights problems to his own devices, the Southern Regional Council came out with a handbook of executive procedure...
...Yet an accurate measurement of the real "farm vote," as Patton's analysis indicated, can be made only by examining returns in the precincts where farmers live, rather than generalizing from aggregate returns from "rural counties," which usually include more village and city residents than actual farmers...
...Are there any new ideas for reducing the tensions that plague our international life...
...Perhaps capitalism has evolved beyond the "free" enterprise stage...
...As we observed here last month, Wadsworth is a conservative Republican with unassailable anti-Communist credentials who has had unparalleled opportunities to observe the Soviets at close range...
...A bitter campaign, reminiscent of some in the South, was waged throughout the neighborhood of largely wealthy, well-educated residents...
...Farmers Union President James Patton, in a letter to Kennedy after the election, detailed "some tabulations of voting figures that disclose the tremendous impact you have made in winning farm votes away from the Republican candidate...
...This testimony is all the more impressive when one realizes that he was our principal negotiator through 240 meetings with the Soviets...
...It seems that New Rochelle had, many years ago, established, and subsequently sustained, a school—ironically named after Abraham Lincoln— which somehow has always managed to contain within its district boundaries all, or nearly all, of the Negro students in the community—while freely transferring to other schools white children whose homes were within range of Lincoln...
...Publication coincided almost precisely with Senator Hubert Humphrey's statement that President Kennedy planned to pursue civil rights by way of executive decree, presumably rather than risk the failure of progress in the incinerator of the Senate's Southern-commanded committees...
...much of it springs from the high personal regard and even affection in which the Chief Executive is held...
...A Punctured Myth One of the most cherished myths in the folklore of capitalism, and the one most ardently reiterated by American big business, is what its prophet, the National Association of Manufacturers, has termed the "rigorous competitiveness" of the free enterprise system...
...There is hope, as Sevareid said, because Stevenson can "bespeak the America that thoughtful men everywhere want to hear once more, the American accents not heard at the United Nations" for a long time— "our fundamental peaceableness, our straightforwardness, our creative sympathy for the dispossessed of this world...
...Polls on pocketbook issues rate the Democrats over the Republicans by a four to one margin...
...Silk Stocking Integration One of the bitterest battles over school integration was fought—in this Centennial Year of the Civil War —not in the South, but in an upper class residential area in the heart of New York City...
...We do not know...
...The new divisions, which mixed the all-white district with an adjoining heavily Negro and Puerto Rican district, roused many an unhappy white parent to revolt...
...President Kennedy seems to be rising to the challenge...
...This all adds up to the conclusion that on economic issues alone, farmers were overwhelmingly opposed to the Republican Party and Ezra Taft Benson's disastrous policies...
...In Wisconsin, Catholics who voted Democratic for governor in 1958 were ninety per cent for Kennedy in 1960, whereas Protestants who voted Democratic in 1958 were only sixty-six per cent for Kennedy in 1960...
...Yet the undertones echo with persistent force against racial discrimination north of the Mason-Dixon line...
...In Wisconsin, more than one-third of farmers scored the Republicans as better qualified than the Democrats to head off war, a score twice as high as the Democrats' sixteen to seventeen per cent...
...The policies of the Farm Bureau have been effectively vindicated as accurately reflecting the thinking of farm people...
...If they did, it would somehow mar their self-image as well-informed, intellectual people...
...As he walked out of the United Nations building for the last time as our ambassador, "Jerry" Wadsworth said: "I would not have traded these last eight years for anything else that I could possibly imagine, even though some of the moments have been frustrating and others downright enraging...
...An unpublicized post-election survey by Kennedy headquarters revealed about a ten per cent lead for Kennedy in "farm" precincts over his vote in the "village" and "city" and "rural non-farm" precincts in the same counties...
...Such an agency could also train the experts whom we will need to man the inspection posts in any international disarmament agreement...
...Don't you know there has been a change of Administration in Washington...
...A survey by the Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association showed that eighty-two per cent of the eligible farm vote actually voted—sixteen per cent more than in 1956, and the biggest proportion in Minnesota's history...
...Those members are the gentlemen from Wisconsin (Kastenmeier and Johnson), California (Clem Miller and Roosevelt), Maryland (Friedel), Connecticut (Kowalski), Minnesota (Blatnik and Karth), New York (Pike, Ryan, Cellar, Multer, and Halpern), Alaska (Rivers), Missouri (Moulder), Pennsylvania (Rhodes, Nix, and Toll), Ohio (Ashley), Massachusetts (Donohue and Lane), Illinois (O'Hara and Shipley...
...Minnesota farmers kept the farm policy issue in realistic perspective...
...But the National Farmers Union, arch-rival of the Farm Bureau and staunch supporter of the Democratic farm plank and Kennedy's campaign stand, looked beneath the surface impressions of the election outcome, and claimed to find evidence of strong farmer support for Kennedy...
...The Lutheran clergy, almost solidly Republican, openly exhorted Lutheran congregations to vote against Kennedy, but in Minnesota the Democratic parishioners for the most part ignored the pastors' political advice...
...Competitive" bids were all pre-arranged, and deliberately rigged to provide an excessive profit margin...
...In contrast, in similar Wisconsin and Iowa communities which do not have the efficient Minnesota political organization and esprit de corps, Democratic Lutheran farmers—and particularly their wives—swung to Nixon away from pro-Democratic voting trends of the "Benson years...
...At the same time, the "religion" issue was met head-on down to the precinct level...
...Therefore, a President of robust conviction will lose no occasion, however trivial, to show by purely personal action his admiration of principles of equality...
...The American Farm Bureau Federation, chief organizational backer of Benson's farm policies, was quick to turn this public reaction to its own ends...
...Peace and Religion Even an accurate reading of the election returns, however, does not furnish a fully dependable referendum on any single issue...
...The general counsel of the United States Steel Corporation, testifying before the Kefauver subcommittee a few years ago, stated frankly that it was his estimate that all but twelve per cent of the economy was "administered," rather than in free competition, and that most of that twelve per cent was the stock market and farm products...
...However, both the "peace" and "religion" issues tended to offset the Democrats' strength with farmers on strictly farm policy issues...
...Peace among the nations of the world, he said, in his opening remarks, "begins with peace among the members of this Council...
...It is free enterprise...
...We hope to discuss before the House, during the next few weeks, the provisions of our bill...
...Look magazine, which reported the affair in a brief gem of an article, concluded that "segregationist feeling is still very much alive in this area, although many of the people do not express it openly...
...Whipsawed by the antagonists in the cold war, the United Nations urgently needs the helping and moderating hand of an Adlai Stevenson...
...Above all, however, the religious issue, more than any other single factor, took away from Kennedy votes he might have won on other issues...
...The Justice Department presented an airtight case that, far from maintaining "rigorous competitiveness" among themselves for the billions of dollars of business involved, the electrical companies had conspired to create a tightly-knit, nationwide control over prices and allocation of sales...
...Such demonstration may be worth fully as much as executive orders and formal pronouncements...
...In a decision resulting from a suit brought by the parents of eleven Negro students, Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman made it known to the residents of this New York suburb that the 1954 Supreme Court ruling applied to children and schools in the entire United States, including New Rochelle as well as the South...
...51 A constant review of Federal employment on racial grounds, and the appointment of Negroes to high level administrative posts, both here and abroad...
...as the guardian of "peace" is one of the major and most persistent factors in its ability to retain a hold on farm voters in the face of an overwhelming conviction that the Democrats are "better for farmers" economically...
...As impressive as anything in the Council's report is its evaluation, in a brief foreword, of the President's potential influence in the field of civil rights: "Presidential authority greatly exceeds constitutional or legal definition...
...Stevenson faces a Herculean challenge—one greater than that faced by any American statesman except perhaps President Kennedy—to achieve the near-miracle of reviving and restoring the machinery of the United Nations, now, in the words of Eric Sevareid, "sputtering closer to complete paralysis than at any time in fifteen years...
...Harry Truman fired a characteristic broadside at the "damn farmers" while the ballots were still being counted...
...Our emphasis...
...Farm Bureau President Charles Shuman declared: "This election should end for all time the fiction that farmers want more government regulation and price determination in their business...
...Adlai Stevenson had made the start his friends had expected of him...
...John A. Hannah, chairman of the President's United States Civil Rights Commission, said at hearings in Detroit recently that he is "convinced the most difficult civil rights problem is in the larger cities of the North...
...Sanctimonious Fraud i* If this Alice in Wonderland concept of "free" enterprise prevails widely—as we fear it does, judging from the Kefauver subcommittee's investigations of administered prices in other industries, such as automobiles, steel, and drugs—then the business world is indeed in a state of advanced moral decay...
...Surely Wadsworth's eight years of invaluable experience should be placed at the service of the Kennedy Administration...
...We do not know...
...For instance, can we work out a way to detect tests of chemical and bacteriological weapons...
...What a whale of a difference eight years and a change of Administration make...
...We have been, perhaps, not listening to each other as much as we might...
...In words that seemed to indicate that he had encountered about as much resistance and frustration from Washington as from Moscow, Wadsworth said: "We [the United States and the Soviet Union] have been talking at cross purposes...
...Stevenson can do it, if he is given his chance by the White House, as we feel confident he will...
...Elimination of segregation in the National Guard, and equal opportunities for advancement in the armed services for non-whites...
...But the New York Board of Education, which has done a creditable job of integrating its schools in the face of great resistance, stuck to its guns...
...A declaration of policy of nondiscrimination in any housing in which the Federal government has an interest...
...For these reasons, twenty-six Members have joined in introducing Peace Agency bills identical to HR 3186...
...Most of the misunderstanding of the farm vote is based on the simple, large-scale fact that Nixon carried such Midwestern "farm states" as Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana, the entire Great Plains except Texas, and almost all the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states...
...But in any case, we can no longer tolerate the sanctimonious fraud of "free" enterprise that business and its spokesmen are still trying to perpetrate upon an awakening public...
...We share Sevareid's conclusion that if Stevenson can't do it, no American can...

Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.