EDITORIAL
LOOKING BACK Times have changed. We were looking through some old papers the other day and came across a report of testimony given in 1969 by Gunnar Myrdal before a House committee. What the...
...Gardner particularly deplored was a lack of leadership at every level in every segment of the nation's society...
...Myrdal and Mr...
...Americans suffer, he said, from delusions that have seriously hampered efforts to correct the nation's social ills, chief among them the notion that cities would experience a rebirth through cosmetic efforts or other purely ameliorative action...
...Back in 1969, our newly rediscovered, now yellowing clippings were probably set aside for some kind of editorial comment...
...Almost a decade later, the views of both men seem to have stood the test of time remarkably well...
...Was he mistaken in his estimate of the voracious appetite of the military establishment...
...Myrdal's testimony was another clipping, this one an account of remarks made by John W. Gardner as he accepted an award from the American Jewish Committee...
...What is really needed, Myrdal said, was a massive drive to transform the metropolitan areas, to break down the wall that confines the poor to the urban slums and, very importantly, to educate the poor so they could enter the skilled labor market...
...Does the Myrdal plan seem exorbitantly expensive in the light of that fact...
...I don't think America can stand de facto apartheid for much longer," he said...
...Without leadership we will never generate the will to tackle our problems," Mr...
...We will avoid the hard tasks of reshaping governmental machinery that will ensure that our money is well spent...
...Myrdai called for a comprehensive attack on urban social ills, dealing with white migration from the cities, slum housing, education, poverty and environmental problems...
...Then current governmental attacks on poverty Myrdal dismissed as "spurious, badly administered and underconceived...
...What the United States needed, the famed Swedish economist and sociologist said at that time, was a Marshall Plan to aid American cities and the poor, a plan that "would not cost less than a trillion dollars and take a generation to carry out...
...As Mr...
...A trillion dollars, in case you have forgotten, is a thousand billion, about as much as our current defense budget for eight years...
...These domestic needs were then so pressing, Mr...
...Unless the American people exercised "a very strong public pressure," he warned, the money demands of the nation's military establishment would continue to take priority over domestic needs...
...The whole trend of modern industrial life, he said, is to make the unskilled poor superfluous...
...Gardner said...
...We will continue to wring our hands about poverty and discrimination and pollution, but we won't do anything...
...Gardner noted, the growing danger of environmental pollution, racial tension, demeaning poverty and rising crime rates all cried out for attention—attention that would take money, and the military area was the place to look for that...
...Nothing is more dangerous for the unity of America than to put the Negro in a separate place—do for him what you won't do for the white American...
...Gardner had harsh words about the lack of leadership in this country, but was he wrong...
...Unless radical changes were made in urban society, Dr...
...What Mr...
...Until the present dip, unemployment has consistently been running around 7 percent, which meant the loss in output of $420 billion a year...
...Attached to the report on Dr...
...The really poor Negro Commonweal: 67 makes up only one-third of the destitute people of America," he continued, citing the other minorities and poor whites who do not share the wealth of the nation...
...Have not events since then tended to vindicate them...
...The United States Bpent approximately $17 billion for the Marshall Plan to help the European economy recover from World War II...
...Given the present climate, that is saying a great deal...
...The Negro problem is only one side of the American problem," he said...
...The program envisioned by Dr...
...Myrdal warned, American democracy would be threatened by tensions generated between whites and blacks and between the rich and the poor...
...Myrdal proposed concentration on education for the poor so they could enter the skilled labor market...
...Gardner at least did not suffer from a failure of nerve...
...Gardner said, that we must exercise "unsparing examination" of every aspect of military spending—spending that was eating up billions of dollars that would be better spent elsewhere...
...I don't think America can live with this type society...
...It is against the vision of America...
...Now, as the nation stands well nigh immobilized by the fear of increasing unemployment on the one side and of worsening inflation on the other, it can certainly be said that men like Dr...
...We will talk, but we won't put up the money...
...Plans much more broad were needed, he said, expressing particular dissatisfaction with schemes aimed only at assisting blacks...
...Myrdal's vision was daring and expensive, but was he wrong...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 3
