Notes In The News
Notes of the News The Profits Inflation The family needing a new or used car, the newly-married couple in the market for a refrigerator, the housewife purchasing groceries-these are among the...
...Change always comes in evolution the first time people get very close together...
...Ford said its price rise would be $107...
...The absence of Peking from the United Nations is inexcusable, but it is not an adequate justification for total inaction...
...In the first half of 1966 the auto industry's profits after taxes, said the United Auto Workers Union, "represented a phenomenal annual rate of return on stockholders' investment of 20.9 per cent-the highest of any U.S...
...The Arkansas Democrat said, "We are apparently trying, singlehandedly, by executive fiat, to change the face of Asia...
...If the industry had been satisfied with the average manufacturing rate of return, it could have cut the price of every car produced by $251 at wholesale, equivalent to a reduction of about $350 on the consumer price...
...Blackout on Thailand The Administration's military adventures in Southeast Asia grow more incredible-and dangerous-with each passing month...
...Some 35,000 U.S...
...adoption of a two-China proposal, retaining the Taiwan seat in the United Nations while offering a seat to mainland China...
...The intemperate attacks on Howe by some members of Congress were raw racism, a last ditch effort of demagogues to perpetuate a lily-white school system...
...the expanding war in Vietnam is a fact, ominously threatening World War III...
...This refusal to disclose publicly before a Senate body what was already known in Peking and Hanoi, and to television watchers in Peoria and Podunk, made it obvious that the Administration had not ordered the blackout for purposes of military security but for political and diplomatic reasons...
...Twenty years later World War II began...
...If the United States agreed to that, Thant might hope to move on to an agreement for a general reduction of the conflict, and finally bring the issues to the conference table...
...Tow-headed, blue-eyed mountain children and little Negro boys and girls bore small baskets of flowers and dishes with pins to give carnations to the Smith friends-middle-aged fashionables from Southern cities who had come to Miss Lil's Laurel Falls Camp as girls, a white gardener in work clothes, a Negro college president, a country preacher, a New York publisher, writers, musicians, colored domestics and laborers, mountain farmers and their families...
...proposal for a two-China solution-even though China most likely would turn that invitation downwe propose to continue to alienate some of our most important allies by refusing to make the first gesture toward ending the dangerous isolation of Peking...
...It is not something to dread...
...Integration rhymes with segregation, but that is about all it has to do with it...
...Twenty years later the war in Vietnam underwent a fundamental change in degree and kind: we cannot see the end...
...The diplomatic reason, Administration spokesmen informed newsmen, was that the Thai government did not want the United States to admit that Thailand was permitting air attacks on North Vietnam to be launched from its territory...
...It has opposed the attempts of Chairman J. W. Fulbright to hold a public hearing on Thailand developments before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...The twenty-first General Assembly is now in session...
...The reaction to them makes it seem probable that the United States i~ no more immune to world opinion than is the Soviet Union, but one will have to wait for the longer run to judge...
...The minor triumphs of the United Nations will be meaningless in the face of that total disaster...
...The Georgia author of the powerful novel, Strange Fruit...
...Instead of showing statesmanlike maturity by supporting a U.N...
...Furthermore, the handing-down of an inferior education from one generation of Negroes to the next has been transferred to the Negro ghettos of the North...
...The League of Nations was founded at Versailles in 1919...
...Grant is the United Nations correspondent for the St...
...I wrote in the revived Killers of the Dream that man is evolving and participating in his own evolution, now that he has a mind, and that it is increasing rapidly in brilliance, as it is pushed and polished by other minds...
...It is something to prepare for by increasing our knowledge, polishing our intelligence, cultivating our love and compassion and humor and patience and fortitude...
...Behind the ringing editorial rebukes of the "Soviet veto" one used to read in American newspapers stood the fact of Soviet isolation and disadvantage...
...American support for the United Nations is reduced to a spurious species of philanthropy...
...Both the American advantage and the Soviet disadvantage have lessened with the passage of time...
...The parochial concerns of the smaller states will not be furthered if World War III engulfs them...
...Negotiations at the United Nations led to the limited nuclear test ban treaty...
...We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and . . . " So run the opening words of the Charter...
...Our fears still govern in the case of the United Nations Charter...
...Hungary was a failure which history turned to success, as all of Eastern Europe came to enjoy a lessening of repression...
...efforts...
...And, with Republican Congressman Howard "Bo" Calloway, a slick and simpering textile mill heir, as the alternative candidate, we could only be thankful that Miss Smith did not live to know the state of our politics...
...Until very recently the United States has been able to play the role of first champion of the United Nations simply because that body could be counted on to implement American policies with fair regularity...
...If Senators and Congressmen do not raise an immediate demand for the facts about our Thailand military enterprise, they will share the responsibility with President Johnson should that country become another arena of conflict like Vietnam-and we are dragged another great step toward a general war in Southeast Asia...
...For there is no present shortage of goods to force up prices, nor such inflation-feeding behavior as scare-buying or hoarding...
...Before that, in 1956, came the dramatic U.N...
...Our military presence there has grown far too large to conceal but, nevertheless, the Administration has for many months conducted a blackout of information on what it is doing in Thailand and why...
...Bundy, who had revealed on a television program that there were, several months ago, 25,000 U.S...
...The truth is somewhat different...
...The Civil Rights bill lay dying in a backlash of white fear and anger at rioting Negroes in the North...
...Notes of the News The Profits Inflation The family needing a new or used car, the newly-married couple in the market for a refrigerator, the housewife purchasing groceries-these are among the millions of Americans who have been paying all the traffic will bear to provide record-breaking profits for the country's largest corporations...
...Both experiments in collective security passed their minor trials, though one overlooks the small successes of the League of Nations, blinded by the unholy glare of its final failure...
...Chrysler first announced an average price rise of $92 on 1967 models as compared with 1966 cars...
...the United Nations will have passed its present test...
...Senator Fulbright charged that the Administration was "weakening our democratic processes" by its secrecy on our involvement in Thailand...
...The Negro failure rate was highest in the Southern states, running to a shocking 85.6 per cent in South Carolina-which also has one of the highest segregation rates...
...servicemen are manning American air bases there, an increase of between 5,000 to 10,000 men in the past two months...
...The stubborn reaffirmation of our seventeen-year-old policy of isolation of China makes no sense...
...Office of Education that 67.5 per cent of Negroes fail the armed forces qualification test...
...Still, old habits persist...
...the United Nations, for that moment, was more of a partisan than a peacemaker...
...And, again, in her written acceptance (she was too ill to leave Clayton) of the 1966 Charles S. Johnson Award at Fisk University, she reminded us of the hope and promise ahead: "What I have tried to do these many years has been to give vision . . . to arouse hope that the future holds a wondrous challenge for our children...
...DONALD GRANT (Mr...
...Such a power and such a personality are not, of course, lost, even in the senseless setbacks of this troubled year...
...efforts-in Greece, Cyprus, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Palestine, Indonesia, Kashmir, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, among other places...
...He warned in a Senate speech that "Congress is in danger of becoming the instrument of the President and is becoming so easily and compliantly-if not enthusiastically...
...it must not be permitted in our communal life...
...As it happens, there are several great powers in the world and each is the prime nuclear target of the others...
...It has had some triumphs, some defeats, and endured much...
...The Iceberg Policy There were moments last spring and summer when it appeared that the Administration might be entertaining a few thoughts about developing a rational China policy...
...but integration may not be the best and only answer as we search for ways of relating ourselves to one another...
...Integration is, and will continue to be, painfully slow, and Howe's guidelines would seem the absolute minimum the nation's conscience would permit in eventually providing our Negro fellowAmericans the educational opportunities to which they are morally and constitutionally entitled...
...Twelve years after the historic Supreme Court decision, less than ten per cent of formerly segregated schools are integrated, many of them on only a token basis...
...Apparently the plea of Secretary-General U Thant for the "universality" of the United Nations, which means the admission of China, has been shrugged off by Secretary Rusk and President Johnson...
...neither North nor South Vietnam is a member...
...Miss Smith's pains and punishment vvere considerable...
...this would permit U.N...
...Otherwise, the gap between the rich, and those of modest means and the poor, will continue to grow wider and wider-and the hopes of the Great Society will fade even farther...
...Ambassador Arthur Goldberg that we might modify our position of all-out resistance to China's admission to the world body...
...In the first half of 1966, as compared to the first half of 1965, profits rose an additional eleven per cent, both before and after taxes, and dividend payments to stockholders went up another 13.5 per cent...
...And the gap explains why labor unions are ignoring the Administration's proposed 3.2 per cent limit on wage increases and are aiming at wage increases of five per cent or more under contracts to be negotiated with the automobile industry and other major employers in 1967...
...Korea was, of course, an anomaly...
...Not satisfied with the quagmire it has built for itself in Vietnam, the Johnson regime is rapidly developing another one in Thailand...
...To be effective, he would need the prior agreement of most of the members, including all of the great powers -and first of all, the United States...
...Between 1960 and 1965, corporate profits soared fifty-two per cent before taxes and sixty-seven per cent after payment of taxes...
...Education Commissioner Harold Howe were indicative of the facts of school integration, one could only conclude that integration is proceeding at a gallop, with an iron-fisted dictator in Washington holding the reins...
...Old black-white friendships shriveled in the anger of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's cries of separate Black Power and incitements to riot, and shocked Atlantans regarded their proud "showcase" city's liberal and peaceful name smeared by eruptions of violence in two teeming Negro slums early in September...
...This search is the big job of our age...
...session when there was a tie vote, which defeated the proposition because a two-thirds majority is required for adoption...
...Racism in Congress If the Congressional roasting given U.S...
...Time, meanwhile, is running out in Southeast Asia...
...servicemen in Thailand, refused to disclose the same information in public before the Committee, but only in a private session...
...If a tax increase is sought-and the soaring costs of the Vietnam war more than the dangers of inflation would seem to make it inevitablewhat form should it take...
...Basing his Congo policy on this assumption cost Hammarskjold both his political fortune and his life...
...To harmonize the policies of the great powers is not the least important function of the world organization, both in the interest of the common tranquility and of the survival of the great powers themselves...
...There is a dangerous gap between the liturgy and the reality...
...Both were conceived by men jealous of unrestricted power but recognizing the right uses of power...
...What has been done in the last one hundred years is the most critical point," she said of man's long journey toward thought, proximity, and brotherhood...
...The United Nations is not the universal world organization intended...
...She bore her persecutiom bravely, with understanding and sometimes gaiety, with the support of her family and more faithful friends, and in association with intellectuals and artists attracted by her writing...
...bases in Thailand...
...It is our belief that any new tax measure should be designed primarily to "take the cream off the top" with by far the largest increase applied to excess corporate profits and to the wealthy, with only modest increases for the middle income bracket, and no tax increases for families in either the lower income or poverty brackets...
...To endure these cruelties and follies with the essential optimism which illumined Lillian Smith's thinking, writing, and story-telling, it is helpful -to Georgians, anyway-to recall the intelligence, perspective, and faith of her reflections and promises in a Progressive interview in 1965...
...The first point in Thant's plan is an unconditional cessation of bombing of North Vietnam...
...Far from reducing prices, Detroit is jacking them up...
...These figures taken from U.S...
...In May, 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced the sending of 5,000 troops to Thailand...
...As of this writing, the White House has permitted only Assistant Secretary of State William P. Bundy to testify-in private...
...intervention what might have been a direct clash between the United States and Russia in Africa did not take place...
...as we search for unity while still maintaining diversity, as we search for means of collaborating as human beings for human ends...
...There has been a nose count of U.N...
...It is an inflation which is clearly the result of artificial price boosts, if not price rigging, or to use the nice-Nelly term, "administered prices...
...We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it now...
...Secretary-General Thant, who addressed the Security Council as "a human being" in the Cuban missile crisis, might well address the General Assembly in the same capacity-to urge unanimous authorization, without a vote, to implement his own plan for peace in Southeast Asia...
...In Chicago, for example, a recent Urban League study revealed that fewer than ten per cent of Negro children are in integrated schools...
...The Berlin blockade CrISIS was resolved as a result of negotiations begun at the United Nations...
...The British view is less restrictive, but also less important just now...
...The sunny service under the trees was short, affirmative, and solemn: a cello solo, readings from The Journey setting forth her idea of the aims of living and the immortality of work, thought, and love, and a friend's contralto hymn, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth, whose words took new meaning from Miss Lil's works...
...At twenty-one the United Nations has come of age...
...Howe has been enforcing "guidelines" designed to speed up this snail's pace, but the mildness and flexibility of the rules are indicated by the fact that more than 2,600 school districts in the South have complied with them, while only thirty-seven have been denied Federal funds, and seventythree others have had funds deferred...
...Justus in the Minneapolis Star "Can you spare a dime for world peace...
...The gap between the rich and poor of the world still widens but no doubt less rapidly than if the United Nations economic development program did not exist...
...Doubtful as we are that these ideas on tax programs based on ability to pay will become law, their underlying principle of equity must be given significant weight in any tax changes made next year...
...Lillian Smith Atlanta "It's all of a piece," lamented a young Georgian the day Lillian Smith died and Lester Maddox was nominated for governor of Georgia in the Democratic primary...
...The reverse has been true of the Soviet Union...
...he said that country's government had invited them there because Communist forces in Laos had moved toward the Thai border...
...The Soviet Union remains suspicious of anything more than a narrow construction of United Nations Charter powers and this suspicion tends to be shared by France, remembering Suez and Algeria...
...This is testing the United Nations as the League was tested, and found wanting...
...But in Southeast Asia the fact of war is palpable in heat and blood...
...Soviet policies have softened...
...intervention which resulted in the withdrawal of France, Britain, and Israel from their invasion of Egypt...
...But in the same period factory workers' weekly take-home pay increased only twenty-one per cent...
...There is great heat in our proximity, our crowding together, and this is the heat that transforms us...
...Department of Labor and Department of Commerce sources disclose a huge and ever-widening gap between profits and the worker's purchasing power...
...In the State Department and the White House they think otherwise-to the dismay of millions of Americans, including some pillars of the business community, who believe we must seek ways to reduce the hostility between the United States and China...
...at 21 The United Nations Charter, like the Constitution of the United States, is an instrument capable of broader purposes than a timid reading would suggest...
...A curious variation of the Hammarskjold error has arisen in Washington, where one sometimes is told that the United Nations is good enough for the smaller powers but that the great ones have their own means and devices...
...We are going to continue our relentless hostility to China, which it will match with vituperation against the United States...
...In truth, the increased productivity of the industry and its workers and other cost savings should have been passed on by the Big Three to the public in the form of a real "rollback" of car prices to levels lower than the 1966 prices--even with the new safety features provided in 1967 models...
...But on other occasions they see it as a nuisance if not worse...
...Dag Hammarskjold, an uncommon man, as U.N...
...The basic situation," said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "remains very much the same...
...there is every reason why the United Nations should end the war...
...Narrow nationalism, it turns out, has triumphed at least as completely In the minor capitals of the world as In the major ones...
...In the United States," said Business Week, "labor argues that wage restraints are unjust because prices haven't been checked-they've shot up in the past year-and profits and dividends have been high...
...manufacturing industry, and one-anda-half times as much as the average for all manufacturers...
...But when GM stated its boost would average $56 a car, Chrysler and Ford then cut back their price increases to about $60 higher than their 1966 models...
...Like two pugnacious adolescents, the two great powers will confront each other, each with a nuclear chip on its shoulder...
...The nation has dared to make use of the Constitution, freeing the Federal government from too-rigid restrictions by the states, to act in the common good...
...After twenty-one years, an age at which men are said to reach maturity, the world organization is a fettered giant...
...While the auto industry keeps stoking the fires of inflation with abandon, the steelmakers, the food processors, and some other segments of business have, to a lesser degree, contributed to inflation...
...If the injustice of school segregation is ever to be set right, Congress must strengthen, not weaken, the hand of its Education Commissioner, and constantly search for fresh ideas and new techniques to achieve genuine educational integration-pupil and teacher, in the North and in the South...
...Contrast this with the highhanded decision of the Johnson Administration to hide the truth about our Thailand buildup and the reasons for it...
...MARGARET LONG (Miss Long, a native Southerner, is well known for her work in the civil rights movement and for her editorship of South Today, which Lillian Smith founded...
...The schools just are not doing the job for the Negroes," said one of the authors of the survey...
...Hammerskjold died, but as a result of the U.N...
...These consumers are the victims of an inflation produced in significant measure by the insatiable demand of big business for more and more profits...
...facilities in existence or under development in that country, reportedly, can take care of as many as 100,000 of our GIs...
...Whatever handicap the Negroes begin with tends to increase as they go further along in school...
...The United States notified the United Nations of the troop commitment and SEATO issued a public statement...
...In between came the Congo...
...And in recent years of change, our prophet knew honor in her own country, as longtime devotees and new converts made pilgrimages to Old Screamer Mountain to see "Miss Lil" in her periods of strength and eagerness between attacks of illness...
...Secretary-General made the common error of believing that the smaller countries so needed the United Nations that they would selflessly serve it...
...Whether the Kennedy decision was wise or unwise, it was publicly announced...
...Other failures took place in the Caribbean: at the Bay of Pigs, in Cuba, and in the Dominican Republic...
...Still, the movement away from ultimate disaster in the Cuban missile confrontation in 1962 did not begin until U.N...
...Justifications for inaction come readily to mind...
...For writing of the South's sins of segregation with honesty and art, Miss Smith was insulted, ignored, and persecuted as perhaps no other well-born, highminded woman in the South has been...
...Georgia voters chose to undo years of liberating change and good feeling by rejecting an intelligent and experienced candidate, former Governor Ellis Arnall, in favor of an appallingly simpleminded racist, Lester Maddox, the notorious restaurateur who drove Negwes from his Pickrick eating places at pistol point and with axe handles, and sold out rather than integrate...
...No doubt it is convenient for the people in Washington who devise power plays on paper that representatives of the American dependent, Chiang Kaishek, sit in the Chinese seat in the United Nations, but it does not permit a useful dialogue on the future of Asia...
...Thus the immediate catastrophe will have been averted, for the United Nations and for the world...
...At the same time the Administration and the new Congress can further reduce the present glaring inequities of our tax structure by abolishing, or at least reducing, the scandalous 27.5 per cent oil depletion allowance, by increasing the capital gains tax, and enacting other tax reforms which would both produce needed revenue and prevent millionaires from escaping their just burden of taxes...
...sources have said that eighty per cent of our air strikes against North Vietnam are launched from U.S...
...The "ifs" of history are full of tricks...
...The U.N...
...Such frightful spasms of folly, hatred, and savagery at home and afar suggested to many of us that our Southern artist and prophet, Lillian Smith, might have spared herself the pains and punishment of preaching to a people who fear change and freedom enough to elect a dangerous clown like Maddox or a glib candidate like Calloway, who terrorize Negro voters and watch grown men beat children with chains in Mississippi, who meet marching Negroes with blows and insults in Chicago, who refuse to share habitable neighborhoods with colored people, and who seek peace while showering bombs and fire on Vietnamese...
...a purpose we should commit ourselves to, whether we are artists or scientists or technicians or teachers or religious leaders...
...Racial oppression increases in South Africa but human rights are better respected in some other places because of the United Nations...
...U.S.A.F...
...As one writer, I have tried only to work toward this end...
...The absence of Peking is only the most obvious shortfall...
...The Vice President proposed that we revise our policy of containment and isolation of the world's most populous nation to one of "containment without isolalation...
...the beautiful paean to human love and growth, The Journey, other books, and scores of articles and essays, was buried in a garden at her mountaintop home at Clayton, beside a tall stone chimney which survived one of three fires her enemies set to destroy manuscripts and household valuables...
...And the human temperature has gone way up...
...Secretary-General U Thant intervened in the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...The balance of terror is a phrase...
...That, to the world's peril, is being decided elsewhere, and by the force of arms...
...The world's gone crazy-and now she's dead...
...Burck in The Chicago Sun·Times Back to the Lunch Counter The price the Negro-and the nation-pay for the inferior education he receives in segregated schools was revealed in a recent report by the U.S...
...In that same 1966 period the after-tax weekly take-home pay of factory employes increased only 2.7 per cent...
...The United Nations, too, has had its moments...
...In Grenada, Mississippi, half of a white Methodist congregation walked to the altar to kneel with the pastor and asked God's forgiveness for permitting white men to beat and bloody Negro children going to school...
...Most of our present complement in Thailand consists of Air Force units...
...Later it was hinted by U.N...
...The United Nations was founded at San Francisco in 1945...
...A more likely reason for the refusal to permit public testimony of Administration officials before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was that it might be politically disastrous if the American public learned, before the November election, that the White House may be taking us-in Thailand-down the same road that led to the bloody war in Vietnam...
...world opinion, focused in the United Nations, was a contributory factor...
...The suspicions of the Russians and the French are understandable, but a weak explanation for letting the war in Vietnam continue at an ever-quickening pace...
...As we pointed out in these pages last February, "Avoidance of a major war is worth every peaceful experiment we can think of to try to thaw out China -no matter how long it takes...
...Louis PostDispatch...
...Building on this success, one might hope that the nations of the world would grapple more seriously with the fundamental task defined by the Charter, of ensuring "by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest...
...The automobile industry's Big Three -General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler -have been leading the national profits parade...
...All nations, and not only the United States, tend to see the United Nations as an ally of national policy on some occasions, and at such times to be embraced...
...After twenty-one years that task has still to be accomplished...
...London is preoccupied with the pound and with Rhodesia...
...And a writer of letters to the editor chose Georgia's primary election day to remind us that American napalm burns the flesh of Vietnamese children to the bone in support of our "commitment" to Asian allies...
...A galaxy of new nations was led to statehood, in part at least, by U.N...
...Only 23.3 per cent of white teachers were assigned to Negro schools...
...Lillian Smith, analyst, artist, and prophet of the South, has left us a legacy rich in the means by which we can pursue this search...
...The evil is compounded by the assignment of ninety-two per cent of the system's Negro teachers-many of them the victims of an inferior education themselves-to teach in Negro schools...
...Numerous local crises have been reduced by U.N...
...It did, indeed, appear that September morning that meanness and madness prevailed everywhere we looked...
...New nations have come in...
...The family held memorial services beside her flower-covered grave the day after a private funeral, and the neighbors and out-of-town guests showed the variety and intensity of her affections, her blazing respect for each person, and the personal sweetness which was the other side of her anger and protest...
...Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey went so far as to call the public hearings on our China policy that were conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "a new omen, scarcely imaginable a few years ago," and said that this inquiry headed by Chairman J. W. Fulbright had "shaken the iceberg of frozen opinion on China...
...Stockholders' dividends rose forty-three per cent...
...No one can say that anyone of these might not have burgeoned into a general war...
...members, and it seems that we have more votes against China's admission than we did at last year's U.N...
...the classic analysis of the South, Killers of the Dream...
...Only 18.8 per cent of whites fail the same test...
...The Administration undoubtedly is weighing various tax increase proposals as a preliminary to deciding which to submit to the new Congress in January...
...Now the Administration has frozen the situation again by announcing that it is still implacably opposed to China's entry...
...There is no reason under the Charter why it should be so...
...Segregation must go...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
