National Reports

...When responsible men default, irresponsible men always come to power...

...But the real issue isn't integration in education —or the intransigence of the Southern leadership...

...PROSKAUER HAILS HILLQUIT CHAIR Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, in accepting honorary chairmanship of the Lawyers' Committee to establish the Hillquit Memorial Chair, issued the following statement: I am happy to serve as an honorary chairman of the Lawyers* Committee lo establish a Morris Hillquit Memorial Giair at Brandeis University...

...You could say that this is a natural hazard of democracy—and it is...

...It was "the best that life has had to offer...

...But Art Young spent his time either sketching or sleeping...

...I am ready to take your case because I believe it involves the important principle of freedom of press and speech...

...He took it upon himself to halt the admission of nine Negro children to a white high school containing 2,000 students on the ground that their admission would constitute a threat to peace...

...His reply was a quietly passionate affirmative...

...If these words seem extreme today, it should be remembered that they were written during the Great Depression, and that it was Hillquit and other Socialist leaders who launched the ideas which later materialised as New Deal legislation...

...It was Hillquit, for instance, who in 1915 saved Morris Sigman, then president of the ILGWU, and other union officials from trumped-up murder charges...

...There the issues have been drawn and pushed all the way to the point where we see armed Federal troops on the streets of a peaceful Southern city...

...One day, the Governor of Arkansas joined in with them...

...Indeed, so far they have done much to worsen it—and I include in this indictment those on both sides of the moral issue...

...the men had so much in common...

...They have created an atmosphere in which there is even some hazard in standing up for law and order...

...they said the law of the land could not be carried out without violence...

...They have been unwilling to run the political risk that goes with asking their people to begin a process that most of them find unpleasant...

...But, at the same time, a majority of the white population accepted the fact that its choice was between admitting a handful of Negroes to white schools —and thereby beginning a slow and gradual process of accommodation— and placing the local government in defiance of the United States...

...The first one is that Little Rock is unique only in the most limited sense...

...The issue is not one of law except in the most limited sense...

...I am not interested in the fee," said Hillquit...

...Morris Hillquit asked toward the end of his life...

...But Hillquit also lived and functioned in a much wider world...

...Their conversation, as recorded in Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, shows Hillquit's devotion to the democratic process as well as his humor...

...Shelley Appleton, Hillquit Memorial Fund treasurer, manages 1LGWJJ Local 99 and serves on the Mayor's Committee on Scholastic Achievement...

...Hillquit's autobiography, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, attests to the immense satisfactions of a life dedicated to high service...

...Some have been cowed by the threat of violence—even though the threat had no more behind it than a blurred, anonymous voice on the telephone...

...It may be even longer before that record is intelligible—even to those of us who recorded it day-by-day and wrote at least part of it...

...Eastman and Dell were helpful defendants, Hillquit noted...

...He appeared for Frank Harris and his Pearson s Magazine when the Post Office sought to bar it from the mails under the World War I Espionage Law...

...Do you realize," continued Most, "that a case like mine may ruin the career of any young lawyer...

...A Hillquit chair at Brandeis will help to keep alive the spirit of responsible intellectual dissent and the desire to be of service in our >oeiety...

...Well, then," he said, "go ahead and try to defend me...

...Thus, a militant minority, calling for dead-end resistance regardless of the cost, has been able to shout down a considerable majority...

...Yet, there are some points worth being noted now...

...The resolution, then, will depend upon private leadership...

...Men who on other issues speak clearly and firmly have stood mute—and so they have defaulted, too...

...His idealism alone makes him worth remembering in an era in which idealism has gone out of fashion...

...In my view, as one who lives there and believes he knows the city well, it is unique largely because the things that have happened there would not have happened had the local citizens been in control of their own affairs...

...Although Hillquit was a leader of the Socialist party all his adult life, he was never doctrinaire, never intolerant of opposing views...

...Had it been worthwhile...

...Ours is a very poor organization...

...And you could prove the point, on the optimistic side, by noting that in Tennessee and North Carolina, states of the same history, geography and racial composition as Arkansas, there was order instead of chaos when the same sort of limited integration went forward without undue difficulty after the Governors of those states, instead of predicting and thereby inviting violence, proclaimed that there would be law and order...

...I would define it this way : A diminishing percentage of American whites are not yet willing to accept the American Negro as an equal...

...I say this on the authority of one who was born and grew up in the Deep South...

...It is an issue of morality, of ethics, of social accommodation...

...He organized classes in English for Jewish workers...

...It is not even a new issue—except that the pigmentation of those who are now seeking a higher place in our social and economic order happens to be different from that of other minorities who traveled the same road in the past...

...Young awoke, looking somewhat bewildered, then quickly sketched an amusing cartoon of the incident...

...Most's case was the first of a long series of cause celebres in which Hillquit appeared as counsel for the defense...

...Little Rock is not temperamentally, historically or ideologically of that portion of the South where dead-end resistance to the Supreme Court decision on integration of the public schools is a certainty...

...Rather, it is the handiwork of a single individual, sitting temporarily in a seat of power, who has in my judgment misread the past, misunderstood the present, and ignored the future...

...So far as the headlines are concerned, the problem may seem to have its focus in Little Rock, Arkansas...

...The successful carrying out of this process poses one of the ultimate tests of a democracy...

...It is for this reason that some of Hillquit's old friends and associates have set up a committee to establish a permanent Morris Hillquit Memorial Chair at Brandeis University...

...He helped to establish the Arbeiter-Zeitung...

...Most finally surrendered...

...An increasing number of American Negroes are no longer willing to accept anything less...

...But President Eisenhower's airborne infantry offered no more in the way of a solution to the larger problem than did Governor Faubus's National Guardsmen...

...Not the kind they want, when they think about it—which is usually too late —but the kind they deserve...

...His belief in socialism flowed from his belief in the limitless possibilities of human life...

...We probably deserved whatever was said...

...I cannot accept the ugly world of capitalism, with its brutal struggles and needless suffering, its archaic and irrational economic structure, its cruel social contrasts, its moral callousness and spiritual degradation...

...He appeared for the American Socialist and the New York Call when they were excluded by Albert S. Burleson, Wilson's Postmaster General...

...During World War I, Hillquit aided the defense of Eugene V. Debs, Scott Nearing, Victor Berger and many others tried under the Espionage Law...

...Hillquit replied that he hadn't thought he would be first on Most's list...

...Faubuss rash action are now a matter of record—not clearly understood, perhaps, but frightening to anyone who has read his nation's history...

...The most colorful of these cases was the one in which the Masses and its editors and contributors, including Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed and Art Young, were charged with conspiracy to "obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States...

...In this transformation, Hillquit, of course, played a major role...

...Given the same depth of emotional feeling on any issue in any community in the land, I am afraid you would see the same timorous reaction—and the same unhappy consequences...

...These private leaders have not been cowed by actual violence—for the remarkable truth is that there has been very little of it in the region despite the extreme provocation of the hour...

...most will not accept it, and many are incompetent to exercise it...

...Later, as a Socialist leader and as an attorney and adviser to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and other so-called Jewish unions, he was prominent in the struggle of Jewish workers to escape their economic and social ghettos...

...You are on trial for your life...

...However one regards Hillquit's political philsophy, he made a life committed to the service of a high social ideal seem richer and more creative than one dedicated to the pursuit of more material ends...

...This is the heart of the problem—and it is an American, not a Southern problem...

...Twenty-four years after his death, Hillquit remains an intriguing but woefully neglected figure...

...Harry S. Ashmore is editor of the Arkansas Gazette and author of The Negro in the Schools...

...I am a Socialist," he wrote, "because I cannot be anything else...

...In 1901, when the anarchist Johann Most was being prosecuted for some incendiary articles in his publication, Freiheit, he reluctantly went for legal aid to Hillquit, who had been the target of some of his most uninhibited diatribes...

...And it was Hillquit who wag largely responsible for the garment industry's NRA code, which enabled ILGWU leaders to rebuild their union, all but shattered by the Depression and Communist intrigue...

...And perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Little Rock picture—and that of the South as a whole—is that there has been so little private leadership...

...But most of the leaders have simply defaulted...

...It didn't—at least an overwhelming majority of its white population didn't...

...I think it should be clear now, too, that the politicians are not going to do much to solve the problem...

...There was no one more ready than he to defend the civil liberties of Americans, even when those liberties were used to disseminate scurrilous attacks on Hillquit or views which he loathed...

...They did it in a local school-board election that clearly reaffirmed the city's acceptance of the gradual integration plan which had been before them for more than three years...

...He was a founder of the United Hebrew Trades in 1880...

...This is not to say that Little Rock wanted its schools integrated...

...I do not believe this condition can or will continue...

...I deem it my duty to warn you," Most announced sternly, "that I have seen several lawyers and every one of them has refused to undertake my defense...

...But that's not an answer, either...

...Shaking him gently, he whispered, "Wake up, Art...

...But it has happened in my town—and I do not believe my town is unique...

...That is about the sum total of the practical meaning of Little Rock's showdown of force against force...

...Both possessed cool, acute, superbly gifted legal minds...

...They made dire threats...

...From a race of timid, submissive, cheerless and hopeless drudges, they have grown into a generation of self-reliant, self-respecting men and women, conscious of their social and industrial rights and ever ready to defend them...

...Hillquit commented that he would worry about his own career...

...You go back to one of those old aphorisms the political scientists preach to students who usually are not listening: that in a democracy people usually get about the kind of government they deserve...

...In the South, a minority of the political leaders have sought to exploit the region's false fears and false hopes—the false fear of intermingling of the races, the false hope that somehow the Federal Government will go away and leave us alone...

...Rarely do we have a chance to contribute to so good a cause...

...But the Governor, operating on what he believed to be valid political indications from the state at large, chose to countermand the local school board and the city government...

...The matter, in a limited sense, has come to a head in the South...

...Botli used their minds, with high degree of courage, to serve not themselves but humanity...

...Take the matter of integration in the public schools, which the Supreme Court has now declared the public policy of the land...

...But how about the fee...

...Our problem is ours—and we've got to solve it...

...The results of Mr...

...There were, of course, those in Little Rock who objected to the plan...

...Conscious of the incongruity of the situation, Most tried to discourage Hillquit from taking his case...

...I do not say that in defense of my town...

...Thus, we have Governor Faubus intervening not only against the United States Government, whose courts had declared the children entitled to attend Central High School, but against all the responsible local authorities who over three patient years had prepared the community to accept this limited compliance with the court's order...

...We cannot pass the responsibility on to our political leaders...

...A lucid and persuasive lawyer with all the equipment for a brilliant "success," he had spurned the rewards of orthodoxy to ally himself with the socialist and labor movement...

...Little Rock, by every valid test, made its choice for compliance...

...The kind of leadership that solves a really tough public question is not political, anyway...

...They have carried the day so far because few elected officials were willing to risk their jobs and few private citizens were willing to risk their dollars...

...Even in a period when the idealist is more scorned than honored, Hillquit is a better model for the young than Dave Beck...

...This article is reprinted from the Bulletin of the B'nai It'rilh Anti-Defamation League...

...Morris Hillquit Chair Set Up at Brandeis U By Shelley Appleton " Has it been worthwhile...

...Armed men can keep Negro children out of a public school, and armed men can get them in...

...It is hoped that this chair will keep before generations of young people not only Hillquit's name but the live embers of his faith...

...But most have simply flinched from unpleasantness and the possibility that taking a controversial public stand might temporarily be bad for business...

...The names of Hillquit and Brandeis belong together...

...Most pursued...

...Once, during a tense moment in the trial, Hillquit's attention was called to the artist by the rhythmical sound of snoring...

...As late as last April, by more than a 2-to-l majority, the people of Little Rock voted, not for integration as such, but against defiance...

...During the half-century of their struggles, trials, errors and experiences," he notes, "the Jewish workers in America have been strikingly transformed, mentally, morally and even physically...

...Nor do I offer this unhappy estimate in an effort to draw the fangs of the criticism that has been heaped upon Little Rock in recent weeks...

...What has happened at Little Rock, then, does not reflect the spontaneous uprising of an outraged people...

...But at any moment the focus may shift to another area...

...they reinterpreted the Constitution of the United States to their own measure...