Notes in the News
NOTES in the NEWS New Chance for Peace The people of South Vietnam, battered into despair by a quarter-century of war, went to the ballot box last month and voted for peace. This is the...
...The President apparently felt free to make this cynical appointment of a twenty-nine year old former law student because the Board no longer had anything to do...
...Then events ganged up...
...The ACLU report, combining appreciation of current gains with timely warning of the need for renewed vigilance, should be read and pondered by progressive-minded Americans...
...Sponsored by the AFL-CIO, the poll was conducted by the John F. Kraft Company among 1,700 union members in a scientific sampling of twelve international unions...
...Johnson, to whom public opinion is so dear, should remember that it was he himself who said, "In the end the evaluation of me will depend on the kind of appointments I make...
...The report cited, among other cases arousing concern, the Army's court martial of an officer for demonstrating against U.S...
...An amendment which would have permitted the teaching of evolution but also would have required Bible courses in the high schools was defeated...
...Now there is increasing concern over the manipulation of our own tax laws, and the question is how long the public will continue to put up with it...
...The repeal relieved the state of a reputation for backwardness not altogether deserved...
...Another which would have permitted teaching of evolution but not as a "fact" was passed but rejected by the House...
...Gains in Civil Liberties The Forty-sixth Annual Report of the American Civil Liberties Union, in assessing the civil liberties climate during the eighteen months ended last January, provides grounds for cautious encouragement...
...The two gravest threats to civil liberties in the months surveyed were "the social problems inherent in the urban crisis" and the "pressures arising from the Vietnam war...
...in the conduct of the elections and in over-all administration with its entrenched, inefficient bureaucracy...
...The poll provides considerable supporting evidence of the long-suspected merging of union members into the middle class and suburbia...
...Lefkowitz, who worked for passage of the law last year, said, "New York's charitable wealth has been estimated at $50 billion dollars and there has been nothing to show how the funds were being used or administered...
...What I want now is information on this important subject," he said...
...The Senate, however, wrestled mightily with its conscience and its prejudices...
...Johnson's Vietnam policy, has struck a crippling blow to his bridge-building program by banning Export-Import Bank financing of exports to nations trading with North Vietnam, and specifically ruling out a Fiat automobile plant for the Soviet...
...Vietnam policy while off duty and in civilian clothes...
...thirty-two per cent earn between $5,000 and $7,500...
...Scarcely any aspect of civil liberties escaped the impact of Vietnam, the ACLU emphasized...
...numerous passport revocations...
...The Board had not even held a hearing for two years...
...The other civilian candidates, and finally Thieu himself, had urged peace negotiations but less forcefully than Dzu...
...It was in this healthier climate that a Nashville, Tennessee, grand jury recently refused to indict a Negro SNCC worker who had been arrested on a state sedition charge for saying that "black people should achieve power by any means necessary...
...Nearly half the members live in the suburbs...
...during the fundamentalist period of the 1920s several states passed similar legislation...
...The first 500 financial reports filed from among the 20,000 groups covered by the state law have turned up many cases of improper manipulation of assets...
...Incredibly, only one out of three mentioned civil rights as an important problem...
...Now the Senate, which has provided the stiffest opposition to Mr...
...The appointment was mysteriously missing from the Senate calendar...
...Bryan lost the battle—to the consternation of his Bible Belt supporters he admitted that the Seven Days of Genesis might have been indeterminate periods, not twenty-four-hour days—but he won the war...
...Unquestionably some of these foundations were set up as tax dodges," said Assistant Attorney-General Julius Greenfield...
...Ten thousand miles away, and a week before the election, the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information expressed a parallel anxiety over these problems...
...The Subcommittee reported that it was "deeply concerned about the lack of meaningful progress and reform in the lagging and floundering pacification program...
...The foundation contributes more money to charitable causes than Dr...
...The youth trend is evidenced in the statistics that one-fourth the members are less than thirty years old, and nearly half are under forty...
...New York Attorney-General Louis Lefkowitz, empowered by a new law to register and supervise most of the state's charitable foundations, has found that some of them are not using their funds for charity...
...The next step is an education program designed to bring rank-and-file workers more fully into the mainstream of progressive action...
...Thieu and Ky, with a large army vote at their disposal, their strongest opponents disqualified, and their surviving opposition splintered into ten civilian slates, drew less than thirty-five per cent of the vote, significantly less than the forty to fifty per cent Thieu had predicted...
...The suit languished, but it was enough of a storm signal to alert the legislature...
...a poll taken among unionists now would probably reflect some of this decline in his standing...
...But Tennessee hit the limelight in the Scopes trial at Dayton, Tennessee, with its dramatic clash between Clarence Dar-row, the agnostic defense attorney, and William Jennings Bryan, the champion of fundamentalism...
...A national consulting organization called Americans Building Constitutionally, with headquarters in Barrington, Illinois, is paid handsome fees to advise clients how to set up foundations to relieve them of some or all of their tax burdens...
...The 'Charity' Loophole Some day the average taxpayer may raise such a furious clamor that the lawmakers in Washington and the state capitals will abolish some of the myriad devices which permit the wealthy to escape their fair share of taxes and thus shift the burden to those lower in the economic scale...
...Biological study in Tennessee schools can now take up again where it left off four decades ago...
...With the backing of civil rights and national educational organizations he filed suit, challenging the statute and asking restoration of his job...
...In the weeks following the Vietnam election Washington and Saigon were alive with rumors of "peace offensives...
...Politically, fifty-eight per cent identify themselves as Democrats, sixteen per cent as Republicans, seventeen per cent as independents...
...Dirk-sen's bill would side-step the Supreme Court's veto on registration by giving the Board authority to hold hearings on charges of subversion and expose publicly those it deemed guilty...
...By such double-talk and votes cloaked in anonymity, the House displayed a repulsive mixture of contempt for and fear of public opinion...
...Thirteen per cent of the union members are Negroes, four per cent are Mexican, Oriental, or other minority...
...more generally, it cast a pall of self-censorship over teaching in the public school system...
...The governor was wrong, of course...
...This is the principal conclusion that emerges from analysis of the September election results...
...Higher wages, more job security, new technology that has eliminated many forms of arduous and dangerous labor and replaced some blue collar jobs with white collar jobs—all these have brought remarkable changes in the lives, the status, and the attitudes of union members...
...While fundamentalist Baptists and Methodists vied in clamoring for passage, the state's educators, from the president of the University on down, were discreetly silent when a firm stand might have prevented its passage...
...Forty-three per cent endorsed it and eleven per cent were uncertain...
...The liberal arts faculty—but not the University officially—petitioned for repeal...
...in dealing with the problems of refugees, inflation, and land reform...
...If unions are to become the vital force for national and international progress they should be, their leaders will have to bestir themselves and arouse their members to some new commitment to their fellow men...
...With jocular arrogance, Representative Otto Passman, Louisiana Democrat, offered this Janus-like statement: "Mr...
...The appeal of Senator William Proxmire, Wisconsin Democrat, to "slash every cent possible from this wasteful extravagance"—the Board's $330,000 annual budget—went unheeded...
...Whether the bigger bombing advocates, rather than McNamara, will have their way with President Johnson remains to be seen...
...The corruption of the tax systems of some foreign countries has long horrified Americans...
...That is why, as one of a Senate panel looking into this summer's city riots, he was willing to bet that "the Communists are in this some place...
...Revealing the significance of their role as home-owners, forty-six per cent of the members opposed open housing...
...And it really was unnecessary...
...Senate has forbidden Export-Import Bank participation in the financing of a proposed automobile plant to be built in Russia by the Italian Fiat firm...
...An ABC trustee has boasted that the organization was "Henry Fordizing," or mass producing, tax expertise long available only to the wealthy...
...We have no objection to the measure itself if Congressmen will take advantage of the increased travel allowance to spend more time with their constituents, exchanging views on the issues and problems of these critical times...
...It would be criminal lunacy for the Johnson and the Thieu Administrations not to launch an all-out and completely honest peace initiative immediately—beginning with an unconditional halt to the bombing and including a willingness to negotiate directly with the National Liberation Front, as well as Hanoi, and a commitment to revive and revitalize the Geneva Accords of 1954...
...Millions of South Vietnamese have voted for peace, beginning with an end to the bombing...
...aircraft now strike within a minute's jet flying time of the Chinese border and against more heavily populated targets than before...
...It was a logical consequence of the Administration's implacable anti-Communist policy in Southeast Asia...
...Johnson forty-six, Romney thirty...
...Younger members are also less likely to attend union meetings...
...The Kraft poll revealed, Barkan reported, that union members widely accepted the President's "legislative achievements and goals, most of which are supported by the AFL-CIO...
...Insult to Americans President Johnson's recent appointment of Simon F. McHugh to the Subversive Activities Control Board is a shocking abuse of Presidential power...
...Forty-seven per cent said they relied most on television for information (three out of five spend at least ten hours a week in front of the tube) and thirty-one per cent depend on daily newspapers...
...Dirksen's worse-than-useless proposal, furthermore, was endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as an emergency measure, while desperately needed legislation to heal our crippled cities and rural slums lies untouched...
...Saxon continues to treat the same patients in the same office building as before, but now patients pay the foundation, which pays him a salary as "medical administrator," pays his wife, a nurse, as assistant administrator, and provides them with a house, a car, a retirement plan and insurance—all tax free...
...Chamber of Commerce, most large American industries, and such impeccably capitalist financial interests as the Rockefellers...
...Today the average union member, and particularly one who lives in the suburbs, has been thoroughly homogenized into the middle class...
...The generational gap that has become so significant in politics is now turning up in the ranks of labor...
...NOTES in the NEWS New Chance for Peace The people of South Vietnam, battered into despair by a quarter-century of war, went to the ballot box last month and voted for peace...
...Middle Class Unionists Generations ago many union members considered themselves part of the American working class, struggling to wrest from "Capital"—the all-embracing label for employers and financial interests—a better life for themselves and their families...
...Advance Verdict In his twenty-five years of "red-hunting" in the Senate and House, says Senator Karl E. Mundt, he has made the brilliant discovery that "the Communists fish in troubled waters...
...It would seem obvious to almost everyone that the Subversive Activities Control Board should be abolished...
...Ninety-one per cent backed truth-in-packaging and truth-in-lending legislation, sixty-seven per cent favored greater Federal aid to education, and seventy-one per cent wanted minimum wages increased...
...Then came the climax: A county school board fired Gary L. Scott, a young science teacher at Jacksboro, Tennessee...
...This kind of appointment can result only in further shrinkage of the President's stature...
...But the governor reluctantly signed it, saying, "Nobody expects it is going to be an active statute...
...And the revival of the spirit of McCarthyite inquisition can only bring further discredit on Congress...
...Nor have the union leaders opened any common ground with young people, both within and without the labor movement, who once joined in labor's crusades for social and economic justice...
...The Senate capitulated...
...Finding out what makes the rank and file tick is a useful beginning...
...Why did Dzu run so well...
...Johnson sixty, Reagan sixteen (union members voted for Johnson over Gold-water by sixty to twelve in 1964) ; and Johnson fifty-five, Rockefeller twenty...
...As if the Vietnam election—with its revelation of that country's vast hunger for peace—had been conducted on another planet, U.S...
...three out of four of those under forty are suburbanites...
...Whether Dzu would have defeated Thieu in a run-off to determine the real choice of most South Vietnamese voters can only be conjectured...
...The civilian candidates repeatedly assailed corruption and the lack of reform...
...Still, the organization could report, "the climate of repression only faintly echoed the era of McCarthyism —many legislators, newspapers, organizations, and individuals spoke up in defense of free expression, as though the lessons of McCarthyism had been learned...
...The Butler bill had gone through the legislature with virtually no vocal opposition...
...If a Presidential election had been held in January, the percentage division of union votes would have been: President Johnson fifty-five, Nixon twenty-two...
...Instead, a coterie of members of Congress headed by the ubiquitous Senator Everett Dirksen, Illinois Republican, is attempting to breathe new life into the Board by turning it into a McCarthy-style, witch-hunting agency...
...ninety-four per cent wanted Federal measures for water pollution control and ninety-one per cent were for air pollution control...
...This, apparently, is supposed to cure the troubles in our urban ghettos...
...Senator Stephen Young, Ohio Democrat, charged that the Board is "a truly un-American institution...
...He paid ABC a $7,000 membership fee and, in return, a non-profit foundation was set up for "health, education, and welfare...
...It sometimes was overtly invoked...
...The trustee told Wall Street Journal correspondent Byron E. Calame that ABC, now little more than a year old, has helped more than 800 client members in nearly all fifty states to establish non-profit foundations and related trusts to lessen the income, property, and estate taxes which members pay...
...The Internal Revenue Service says it is "apprehensive" about ABC but, with its customary gingerly approach to foundations, has taken no position on it...
...Dzu, an obscure lawyer, received half as many votes as Thieu...
...At the time Kraft polled the union members, the President's rating in national polls was higher than it has been recently...
...If McNa-mara's counsel against a further intensification of bombing fails to deter the President from that course, the Defense Secretary, as Joseph Harsch wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, would have little recourse but to resign...
...The 1967 legislature, after considerable squirming, repealed the Butler Act of 1925 which forbade the the state, from the University of Ten-teaching of evolution in the schools of nessee on down...
...Jack Thompson, foreman of the Scopes jury, expressed four decades ago the disappointment of the jurors because the judge ruled out scientific testimony...
...If it were not for the alert reporting of Jerry Landauer of the Wall Street Journal, perhaps the true reason for the President's choice for this plush non-job would never have come to public attention...
...The lines of communication with, and therefore influence upon, younger members appear to be weakening steadily...
...The Senate compounded the outrage of this appointment by confirming it without even a hearing...
...Now, at last, one hopeful development can be reported...
...ABC's operations are being closely studied by Representative Patman and some state officials...
...Yet complacency is not in order...
...The University was less affected, but officially it remained extremely cautious on what would appear to be a matter of academic and intellectual freedom...
...A sign of the generational gap could be discerned in the fact that Governor Romney (a new face to many young members) actually outpolled the President, forty-seven to forty-two, among those under thirty...
...So the legislature passed the bill, with some members hoping to be rescued by a veto...
...This class concept faded in the booming Twenties, flowered again in the Depression Thirties when the Wagner Act and the CIO produced the most phenomenal growth of union organizations in U.S...
...One of five unionists is a woman...
...Forty-two per cent included Vietnam as a "big problem" on their minds, "with the largest percentage of these supporting the President's policies there," Barkan said...
...The Johnson Administration was warned by the Congressional investigators that unless the Saigon government makes a basic commitment to social and economic reforms "the advisability of U.S...
...The failure of unions to capture the interest of their young members could be seen in the fact that only half of those under thirty pay "a lot of attention" to their union journals, while two-thirds of those over thirty said they do...
...Survey figures reported by Alexander E. Barkan, director of the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, in an article in the AFL-CIO American Federationist, disclose that forty-six per cent of union member families earn between $7,500 and $15,000 a year...
...This judgment, rendered before the investigation begins, strikes us as hardly an open-minded approach to fact-finding...
...The survey indicated more concern among unionists over such domestic economic problems as taxes and the high cost of living than over the most discussed issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, and law enforcement...
...Closing this gap alone would provide half the new Federal taxes President Johnson seeks, but the oil interests are as sacred to him as they are to most leaders of Congress...
...position...
...One startling figure in the poll concerned open housing legislation, which the AFL-CIO leadership has supported as part of a new Federal civil rights measure...
...Tennessee Catches Up After forty-two years the state of Tennessee finally got the monkey off its back...
...There were significant gains in a number of areas, but there were danger signals too...
...Only last May the House Banking Committee had approved a $50 million loan to advance the project...
...Although the poll figures were published in the August Federationist, the survey was conducted in January...
...But President Johnson and his Administration must share the blame for the Senate's rejection of their aims in Eastern Europe...
...Then in June we published "The Free Wheeling Foundations," Representative Wright Patman's article exposing the maneuvers many tax-exempt foundations use to provide tax havens for their wealthy founders...
...It has been many months since the Administration has had so hopeful an opening toward peace...
...House hypocrites refused to permit a roll-call vote...
...Scopes was convicted, and Tennessee was inevitably tagged as "the Monkey State...
...generals and admirals, supported by hawks in the Senate and House, redoubled their demand for escalation of the war through expanded bombing...
...At the same time, the increasing percentage of younger persons in the population has produced a youth trend on union rosters...
...The Senate's action reflects many ironies...
...President Johnson and his Administration have pursued an admirable policy of building bridges between the United States and the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, chiefly through trade in non-strategic materials and goods...
...and the attempt to punish students protesting the draft by drafting them...
...But it is typical of the kind of inquiries Congress is conducting on the summer riots: hunting for scapegoats instead of solutions ¦—and bringing in the verdict before the trial begins...
...North Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Van Dong recently said, as other Hanoi spokesmen have before, that there will be no peace negotiations until the bombing is stopped...
...We hope they have more substance than such rumors in the past which were promptly followed by more escalation...
...Speaker, I arise in opposition to this bill and I certainly hope it passes...
...involvement is questionable and could lead to a reassessment of the U.S...
...The Vietnamese may be more tired of war than either official Saigon or Washington care to admit...
...The major question now is whether General Thieu and Marshall Ky, the elected President and Vice President, and President Johnson will respond meaningfully to the Vietnamese cry for peace...
...They have won the recent rounds: President Johnson has escalated the bombing to the point that U.S...
...The Supreme Court, in three rulings, had stripped it of its original function of requiring Communist and other allegedly "subversive" groups to register with the Justice Department...
...A minor irony is that the $50 million involved would have been spent in the United States for machine tools to equip the factory...
...Only six per cent rate radio as their most reliable information source...
...an insult to all Americans...
...But the biggest surprise of the election was the strong showing of the "white dove" candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, the most vigorous advocate of peace proposals which included an unconditional halt to bombing North and South, immediate negotiations with Hanoi, and meetings with the National Liberation Front, most of whom he characterized as "true nationalists...
...history, and has withered steadily since the end of World War II...
...Another Bridge Bombed The poison of the war in Vietnam has again permeated the well of hope for a thaw in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...The U.S...
...Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara counter-attacked with the documented argument that North Vietnam cannot be "bombed to the negotiating table...
...The law beclouded education in the state for more than forty years...
...In the most comprehensive poll ever made of union members, a clear picture of today's rank-and-file unionist emerges...
...The Secret Vote After less than half an hour of "debate" the House of Representatives approved a bill that would increase from five to thirteen the maximum number of round-trips home that a Congressman may make each year at the taxpayers' expense...
...The Wall Street Journal's veteran Saigon correspondent, Robert Keatly, wrote: "A deep urge for peace, more widespread than most analysts believed and surprisingly strong in the rural Mekong Delta, seems to have been an important factor...
...The President's appointment to this useless Board is also an insult to all Americans...
...In 1966, a Knoxville attorney, Martin Southern, filed suit, with the support of the East Tennessee Civil Liberties Union and the parent ACLU, asking the local Chancery Court to declare the statute unconstitutional...
...Twenty-five per cent of the members have belonged to their union for five years or fewer...
...The Senate has done a grave disservice to the cause of peace by its shortsighted and narrow-minded action...
...Calame described the case of Dr...
...Secretary General U Thant once again urged a bombing halt as an indispensable preliminary to negotiations...
...Corruption in the Thieu-Ky government, notably in the military establishment, appeared to be the second important election issue...
...In repeated attempts to hasten that day, The Progressive has hammered away for years at such tax loopholes as the oil depletion allowance...
...The appointment was nothing but a $26,000-a-year wedding gift to an unqualified man who married one of the President's former secretaries, who, the Wall Street Journal reported, "remains a particular Presidential favorite...
...The House quickly voted for repeal (curiously enough, the delegation from Knox County, seat of the University, voted six to one against repeal and furnished nearly one-quarter of the opposition from the entire state...
...In 1959, for example, its news service refrained from announcing, much less publicizing, a public program on campus with visiting scientists commemorating the centennial of publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and its highest officials have never publicly supported any proposals—the last one was in 1961—for repeal...
...The civilian tickets together accounted for sixty-five per cent of all votes cast in the presidential race, making Thieu decidedly a minority choice...
...In addition, the Saxon's four children attend college on a "grant" from the foundation...
...There are sufficient indicators," the ACLU cautioned, "to suggest that eternal vigilance [remains] the price of liberty...
...It would have been an opportunity to find out something about how we came into the world...
...The measure was passed by voice vote, which meant that a majority of House members voted themselves more travel funds while concealing their individual positions from the taxpayers back home...
...His military junta had seen to it that a run-off was prohibited under the election law...
...M. R. Saxon of Aurora, Illinois, a general practitioner...
...It is comforting to have such an alert watchdog as the ACLU—now at its largest membership strength ever—to warn and protect us against the erosion of our democratic freedoms...
...One of the fruitful effects of the law, he reported, is that charities are now "getting millions upon millions of dollars they would not otherwise have gotten...
...What does rankle is the failure of House members, who profess to strong commitments to economy when socially needed programs are under consideration, to stand up and be counted when their own travel increase was voted...
...Saxon did personally, but he ends up, he conceded, paying "substantially" less in income taxes than he did before...
...Seventy-four per cent favored expansion of Medicare...
...This policy has had the enthusiastic support of so conservative an organization as the U.S...
...Elsewhere, tax-rigging is on the rise...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
