The Continuing Crisis
The Continuing Crisis
...Tony Ahlstrom, "'the worst yet...
...Paul E. Parker, 80, was defeated by Mr...
...But here they confront a galling irony...
...cOn 8 August the astronauts of Apollo 15 landed in the Pacific Ocean, and on 9 August authorities in Northern ireland arrested three hundred alleged terrorists under the Special Powers Act allowing internment without trial...
...3 George F. Will: The Conservative Critique of the Welfare State...
...and to hurt most those with the least discretionary income--that is the poor...
...Two of those warts we call poverty and welfare...
...The astonishing fragmentation of the families of these poor, now supposedlv so blessed by public generosity, was even odder and a little heartbreaking...
...Most of the time the welfare state is acting as the defender of the strong against the disorganized who are being made to pay for the support of the strong...
...His reference to "high-schoolish prodding" is, shall we say, loading the dice...
...20 The Alternative was founded =n 1924 by George Nathan and Truman Newberry over a cheap domestic beer in McSorley's Old Ale House...
...When we talk about poverty in America we are talking about families and individuals who have much less income than most of us...
...18 Frank W. Blatchford III on Boss: Richard J . Daley of Chicago...
...cogor, creed, or (most redundantly of all) national origin - - the question o~ sex zs still in committee...
...Later in the month the National Organization for Women observed Women's Achievement Week (22-29 August) but refrained from calling a massive strike similar to last year's strike which paralyzed the nation• oIn India that war between Gold Spot, the Indian orange drink sensation, and Coca-Cola reached even into the august Parliament when leftist members demanded to know why the government had not at least nationalized the American corporation's mammoth syrup works in that country...
...If I understand him correctly he is suggesting that when I condemn teachers" "who don't give a damn whether or not students read" that I am somehow or other making an argument for coercion of students...
...While remaining a driving issue in this nation of intuitive Good Samaritans, poverty in America is now an increasingly complicated issue whose most exigent need is intelligent, far-reaching analysis...
...Those who began their careers demanding an immediate end to the war in Vietnam now are demanding an end to poverty -- they say they want welfare reform...
...But that claim is like Mark Twain's remark that Wagner's music is better than it sounds...
...As our nation prospers, our judgment as to what constitutes poverty will inevitably change...
...William Calley was reduced to twenty years...
...This year when the career moralists come to the campuses, caterwauling about America as if it were Victorian England and suggesting that poverty be washed away in a flood of crisp green dollars, let us remember how successful they were in ending the longest war in American history, and let us remember also what on ignominy it has become...
...Indeed it seems to produce it and it produces other things like fragmented community and broken families...
...22 > i...
...The Washington Post reported that Senator J. William Fulbright would like to be the United States' first ambassador to Red China...
...N 5e 0 X o , o N .~• C ~-~Z...
...THE ALTERNATIVE: TO BARE THE WITNESS AND THE TRUTH Published remarkably without regard to race...
...When career mo/'alists describe poverty in lurid terms borrowed from the pages of Dickens, they are not describing poverty in America...
...Steel workers received an estimated thirty percent wage increase per year for a three-year period...
...We must explain the principles and efficacy of freedom to the people...
...These motives cause it to distort the market's rational husbanding of resources...
...Here I shall only adumbrate some of the complexities of poverty and welfare which the career moralists are apt to skate over...
...3) welfarists insisted that welfare was a respectable way to make a living, and so it became...
...oThe~ Administration's war on crime showed signs of success as Attorney General Mitchell interpreted the FBI's Uniform Crime Report to mean that for the first three months of 1971 crime rose only five percent - - the lowest in five years...
...David Scotland and Lt...
...There is no reason why a free society should have to tolerate this business...
...I am seeking a court injunction to stop this business because it is driving me and my poor cat crazy...
...this fall on the campuses those slices of anti-poverty rhetoric are certain to become thicker and thicker...
...18 Jefferson Davis on Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...We are all under surveillance...
...Polon's last point is a curious one...
...16 Nicholas Lupinin: The End of the Fillmore East...
...Willimn f. guckiey, Jr...
...And after peering deeply into the mirror, the American Republic -- once held up as the most beautiful republic of them all -- has perceived a startling array of ugly creases, ominous discolorations, even warts and hair...
...Special Effects: Richard Butkus Lynn German [ ] Rick Weyna Art : Michael Burch Eric Lohnaas [ ] Sandy Weeder Janitorial Staff: Doug Cooper [ ] David Peters CONTENTS The Continuing Cris~s...
...Hughes and Mayor Lindsay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Brayings from the Barnyard...
...A Reader e Enclosed is...
...Unemployment had fallen to the unprecedented peacetime level of 3.5 percent, and America was enjoying its most lush period of prosperity since World War II...
...Jefferson Davis C.H...
...3. Mr...
...n 10 August Mr...
...Today the years 1965-1968 are designated by another epithet...
...At best the welfare state is a bland leviathan, a cumbersome, flabby, incompetent, expensive impediment to the people's energies...
...The sale of rock records continued to climb at a record rate in the United States...
...The arrests ignited a week of unpleasantness leaving twenty-six dead and many more critically ill with gunsh()t Wounds.-Russia and neutral India signed a "twenty-year "friendship pact" on 10 August while India's relations with Pakistan worsened...
...Filer said hobo is "simply the traditional name for a migrant worker...
...Leonard Goodwin, 67, in the Third National Hollerin' Contest...
...And at the Vatican, Sister Flowera collapsed while checking the hems of women visiting St...
...oSecretary of State Rogers announced that the UnitedStates would vote for seating both Chinas at the U.N., and the President morosely read of a $23.2 billion deficit for fiscal 1971...
...Confronted with the welfare state's, dismal record and confused rationale, liberals resort to the claim that the irapulse behind the welfare state is benevolent, and "therefore" the welfare state is better than its record or rationales...
...Consider The Alternative The Alternative is an insipid iournal of polarizing inconclasm whose style is intellectual, argumentative and satiric or so they :~y...
...There is a great middle ground between letting students do what they damn well please and coercing them to do what they don't want to do...
...The Ninety-Second Congress held recess for the summer, and officials in Iguala, Mexico reported Miss Feliz Calderon Montes expired in her hammock when she rocked herself into entanglement...
...H Through the middle and late sixties America was visited with one of the most dizzying sprees of welfare spending in her history...
...Admirers were struck dumb and critics choked, but Presidential aspirant George McGovern sounded the tocsin of the libertarian economists (followers of economist Milton Friedman) when he described the plan "economic madness," declaring that the President "has no confidence in our workers, our business and in the free enterprise system...
...In their theatrical screeds they tell us that poverty is ravaging the Nation's spirit...
...Louisville Courier Journal "1 predict for The Alternative a leading role in philosophical and political battles to come...
...Mike Gravel's Hour of Glory...ll John R. Coyne, Jr.: The Public Penitent...
...Elsewhere in this issue George Will arrestingly presents what he calls a conservative critique of the contemporary welfare state...
...17 REVIEWS: John Avey on First Things, Last Things...
...14 J. William Fulbright: Dialogue of a Schizophrenic...
...The Alternative is a welcome addition to the ranks of American opinion journalism...
...While in Rabat, Morocco, sociologists advised the reopening of government-controlled brothels which have been closed since 1956...
...I understand this to mean those who have by their own free will undertaken a serious study of English...
...During the sixties the number of people on relief in New York City alone quadrupled - - three quarters of that increase took place in the last five years...
...Regarding both poverty and welfare reform there is a lot of windy nonsense about...
...George Meany, head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., demanded the President institute mandatory controls on wages, prices and profits...
...For a nine-year subscription just clip this unique order form and, with the appropriate amount of money (one dollar for students and faculty members, four dollars for others), mail to: The Alternative -- Circulation Department, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...Goodwin blasted (continued to page 23) The Alternative October, 1971 23 continuing crisis (continued from page 4) a verse of the hymn, "Amazing Grace," ending with an extraordinary corn shucking yell...
...The only answer is to elect men who wil insist that the government mind its own business...
...The structure of the democratic welfare state determines its motives...
...I am sure of it, though the phone company tells me that it is not...
...for a one-year subscription (9 issues) to The Alternative Name g e q Address City i State & Zip ° ' e $1.00 Studentor Faculty [ ] New [ ] e $4.00 Other [ ] Renewal [ ] e Save by subscribing f o r two years ($7.00) or three years t ($I0.00...
...Editor-in-Chiel: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The National President of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Mrs...
...Clarifying much confusion Mr...
...Calling for some tax cuts and a ninety-day freeze on wages, prices and rents, he unharnessed the dollar from gold, imposed a ten percent surcharge on many imports, asked Congress to postpone action on welfare reform and revenue-sharing, promised to cut federal employment five percent and froze federal pay hikes for six months...
...Stanton Evans "...one of the most amusing and outrageous and interesting student journals in America...
...The fact of the matter is that I do not believe students should be forced to take "required literature courses" and my article was not meant to deal with that ugly phenomenon...
...It occurred not because famine was upon the land -- much to the contrary...
...My best, George Carey Washington, D.C...
...Lazy Joe Fish Slippery Bear Shoot, Indiana To the Editor: I think my phone is being tapped...
...After disturbing fellow convicts by pressing leaflets upon them in the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Conn., Philip Berrigan, the celebrated peace-priest, was shipped off to the federal prison in Springfield, Mo...
...The Alternative would be a fine magazine if you'd cut the cursing and name-calling...
...and big steel edged toward what looks like an eight percent price increase• Congress guar(continued to page 4) 4 The Alternative October, 1971 Fortunately the Vietnam War has ushered in a fit of national selfexamination unsurpassed in American history...
...Originally published on restroom walls, only since 1967 has ~t come under purwew of the Saturday Evening Club wh=ch publishes ~t from October through June...
...John R: Coyne, Jr...
...Neville Bonner, a parttime carpenter and boomerang maker, disgraced himself when he was sworn in as the first aborigine in the Australian Parliament...
...And we must oppose government activities which inflame those ever-present human appeties which cause men to abandon principles...
...he, incidentally, plans to take up the cloth...
...So the crisis continues...
...They intend to attract attention to our messy world by running from Long Beach, Cal...
...10 Bascom Slemp: The Rt...
...The salient point of this, of course, is that mere availability of funds does not eliminate poverty, for today in America poverty is not what it used to be...
...If they can tap me, well - - bell -- they can tap just about anyone...
...The execution of communists in the Sudan continued threatening extinction of communist leaders in that troubled land...
...One name for this middle ground is "teaching," an art sadly neglected in universities...
...Peter's basilica...
...Leroy "Satchel" Paige, the eminent baseball pitcher, was raised to the "Hall of Fame," and on 20 August the life sentence of Lt...
...Several hundred thousand Bengalis were reported starving on the Indian-Pakistani border, and in disasterridden East Pakistan the Red Cross put an apparently useless shipment of brassieres to good use by cutting them in half and using the cups to measure rations for starving people...
...They say that it is degrading us and that to eradicate it we must pump billions of dollars into our welfare system -- not revise the system, just bloat it...
...Interlarded amongst their anti-war rhetoric they have always placed just a little anti-poverty rhetoric...
...Not so...
...Robert Pierpont reported that Chicago received a black eye when Joel and Tony Ahlstrom passed through in the midst of their remarkable "Save America" run...
...what I had reference to were "'English majors...
...George Meany, head of the A.F.L-C.I.O., excoriated the President's controls on wages and prices, calling them "discriminatory" against labor...
...One day he shows up in Virginia, then he is in Tennessee, a week later in California...
...Nixon faced hurriedly gathered microphones and television cameras and announced his intention to pay his respects to the leaders of Communist China sometime next year...
...The spending took place because men of goodwill, hurried by the claims of ideologues, wished to elevatc the lives of vague congeries of their fellow Americans...
...I am writing to the Washington Post to express my deep-felt anxieties on this score...
...should be sent to The Alternative, c~) The Establishment, R R 11, Box 350, Bloommglon, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...Their presence has put a twinkle in the eye of every career moralist...
...Welfare is even more deserving of this sort of analysis...
...Nixon surprised busing advocates by stating he "opposed busing of students to achieve racial balance...
...Subscriptions cost $4.00, and all correspondence (manuscripts, subscrll:)tions, threatening letters, federal grants, etc...
...Policy-makers call them the years of "the poverty explosion...
...to Long Beach, N.Y., and they termed Chicago, in the words of Mr...
...James Irwin landed ~ on the moon where they collected 170 pounds of semi-precious stones...
...c ~ • o .-o The Continuing Crisis oIt was a cool summer...
...Simply stated, the reasons for the "welfare explosion" are: 1) it became the social workers' custom to get people on, rather than off, welfare...
...Obviously the welfare explosion was also a poverty explosion -- a very odd occurrence for boom times...
...That is to say that as Americans expended ever more money on welfare, ever more people went on relief ( mostly through Aid to Dependent Children), and this occurred in a time of prosperity and low unemployment...
...12 Henry Regnery: A Conservative Publisher m a Liberal World...
...support...
...to corrupt the practice of popular government...
...American poverty is -- though to say it is to jeopardize one's status as a human being - - a matter of relative deprivation...
...Gordon (Bud) Filer of Altoona, Pa., the Kingelect of the Hoboes, lashed out at those pundits who lump the hobo into the same category as the tramp or the bum...
...For welfare reform does not seem to eliminate poverty...
...9 George F. Will: Letter from a Whig...
...continuing crisis (continued from p~ge 2) anteed Lockhead's $250 million loan during the same week Mr...
...As for the reasons for the increase in family disintegration, obviously no family needs a father to husband resources when government does a more lavish job...
...The welfare state's habits undermine the citizens' inclination to mind their own business and to respect other people's private desires...
...I never know where Agnew is from day to day...
...R. Emmett TyrreU, Jr...
...Terry Krieger William Kristol [ ] Rev...
...In a less perilous though more expensive journey, American astronauts Col...
...correspondence (continued from page 81) have been written by a man infected with n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y p r o g r e s s i v e Liberalism...
...Publisher: Bascom C. Slemp and the Saturday Evening Club Managing [.;ditor: Baron Von Kannon Circulation Manager: Ronald E. Burr Senior Fditors...
...And no one of any significance considers these years to have been particularly salubrious, not policy-makers, not politicians and certainly not the poor...
...On 15 August President Nixon startled the nation by making a hortatory address on economics which the pundits represented as unlike any presidential address since FDR...
...Simonds [ ] Roger D. Tyrrell Contributors: John Avey [ ] Paul Bernstein Frank W. Blatchford III [ ] Bill Bowman David Friedman [-"]Jerry Gerde [ ] John Kelley John Moscow [ ] Gary North [ ] Mark Souder David Tudor [ ] Sir Arthur Wellesley Timothy Wheeler Alien Contributors: Keven Berry Nils-Eric Brodin [ ] Miss Mathews Alan Somers, M.D...
...M...
...Finally in Spivey's Corner, North Carolina, Mr...
...Spiro T. Agnew "..,stands almost alone among a welter of New Left, radical and revolutionary publications...
...Mayor Richard Hatcher begged for federal aid for Gary as thousands of steel workers were forced out of work...
...Johnson had declared the "War on Poverty...
...Nobody is safe anymore...
...and who know that the government's proper business is preserving for the citizens the freedom to mind their own business...
...Fred J. Tooze, divulged to an executive session of the World Woman's Temperance Union that last year Americans spent more than $2.5 million an hour on demon rum...
...Down under, aborigine Mr...
...15 Gary North: A Modest Academic Proposal...
...So that we do not allow the frauds in this profession, through the sheer velocity of their effusions, to establish another one of their ideologized realities, it is time thoughtful persons think in public those thoughts that many policymakers have been thinking in private...
...Women's Achievement Week failed to receive W.C.T.U...
...America's fifth threatened rail strike in sixteen months was negotiated to a happy ending, and on 31 July negotiators' last-minute negotiations forfended a steel strike...
...George Nathan AssoCiates:Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr...
...Writing in the 1967 summer issue of The Publ~d Interest, Victor Fuchs described it authentically when he said: "By the standards that have prevailed over most of history and still prevail over large areas of the World, there are very few poor in the United States today...
...2) as welfare payments rose welfare became a more economic way for the working poor and the lounging poor to live...
...And another thing...
...welfare (continued from page 8) oThird, the nature of polities in a large and pluralistic society virtually guarantees that the welfare state will misuse its vast and meddlesome powers...
...Copyright The Alternative Magazine 197l | I The Bootback Stand: Letters to Plunkitt from Sen...
...2 George Nathan: In the Shadow of Yesterday's Foolishness....3 R• Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.: Flush Times Return for the Career Moralists...
...oAs the school year drew closer Mr...
...5 Alton Heywood: The Nation's Pulse...
...It deals with national issues and personalities and offers insightful, original and sometimes offbeat reviews of current books...
...The conservative program is clear...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental, U.S.A...
...God help us...
...A researcher for the President's Commission on Pornography disclosed that young girls are often aroused sexually by rock music...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
