Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE NEW LEADER welcome comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. FAILURE OF NERVE I have just read with great interest William Henry...
...While I do not recommend unilateral disarmament for the United States, I am a member of the National Committee For a Sane Nuclear Policy and as such I take it frankly as a personal and insupportable insult when I hear it suggested that my activities grow out of personal cowardice or "lack of nerve...
...Use your imagination, gentlemen...
...I see frequent repetitions of this view, that those who hope to awaken the world to the suicidal madness which is nuclear war are activated by personal fear...
...Local 134, IBEW in Chicago, this year reduced its initiation fee two-thirds to recruit non-union Negro journeymen, and took in 23...
...As far as it goes, it is an eminently fair and well informed article...
...Not that I find anything insulting or deprecatory in that label...
...While my article stressed the need for greater speed and urgency in winning full equality for Negro workers, it also listed many specific examples of progress toward union equality since the 1955 AFL-CIO merger (if space permitted I could add more illustrations) : • The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen voted by four-to-one to wipe out the union's 65-year-old ban from its constitution...
...Today the gap has narrowed to less than twice as much, although it is still far too wide—$2,652 fur the median Negro worker, $4,569 for the white...
...In the hullabaloo and day-to-day-ness of an election, it might be well to remind ourselves that this very thing, imperfect yet, to be sure, existed as early as in old—or rather late—Rome where there "were not lacking those who say that he"—the Emperor Verus, no-good brother to Marcus Aurelius, who wrote his own Meditations—as regards his speeches and even his poetry, "was aided by the wit of his friends, and that the things credited to him, such as they are, were written by others...
...This was a "secret clause," so to speak, carefully withheld from those members who had come to Machajski from the anarchist camp...
...Nevertheless, he insists that "much of the success of the fight of the Negro community for civil rights in the federal, state and city governments is due to the consistent cooperation and support of the AFL-CIO and the leadership of President Meany...
...What he questions is my claim that this has been occurring "at precisely the moment that Negroes have been making substantial gains in opening the gates to union and job equality...
...Is my claim accurate...
...Can you not conjure up a respectable reason why so many millions of people all over the world today regard the prospect of nuclear war with deep loathing...
...What bothers me most about Hill's attitude is his consistent failure to recognize that membership composition of unions is determined primarily by the hiring policy of the employer, and that the major attack on discrimination must be against employers' discriminatory practices...
...1-8) and feel compelled to communicate to you my reaction to his views...
...Hill echoes Benjamin Aaron's appeal for an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act "which would forbid the recognition or certification as exclusive bargaining representative of any union that discriminates in the admission or representation of minority groups...
...The president of the new Negro American Labor Council, A. Philip Randolph, top Negro labor leader in America, is also sharply critical of the AFL-CIO for not doing enough to wipe out union bias...
...Negro unionists, as A. Philip Randolph pointed out, have been elected to the executive boards of city central bodies and state federations even in the South...
...PETER F. JORDAN...
...When this latter quality is explained by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...But there is no denying that Hitler was an ardent student and admirer of the way the British built their Empire and that concentration camp genocide for naked gain was introduced into "modern times" by the British...
...Sherman, Conn...
...If that is not a substantial gain, I'll eat my hat—union label and all...
...That certainly does not sound like anarchism...
...Machajski rejected the State in theory—just as Marx did—as an instrument of exploitation and oppression, but at variance with the anarchists, he neither "ignored" it nor preached its immediate abolition "on the morrow after the revolution...
...I fail to note any attacks by Hill on the use of racist propaganda by employers to defeat unions in the South, or the insistence by some national industries on abiding by "local custom" in maintaining segregation in their Southern employment patterns...
...I do not see how he could possibly substantiate his basic observation that the activities of pacifists, near-pacifists, relative-pacifists, and other peace-makers (whether misguided or not) are motivated by "failures of nerve" or "nerve crack-ups...
...The fact is that the Russian anarchists (he was active exclusively among Russians) were not on speaking terms with him because of his violent attacks against their theories...
...Nor was it in accordance with anarchist concepts that—without ever admitting it in so many words—he expected his own group to conquer power in the course of that struggle...
...In the NAACP Labor Manual, written by Hill, he puts Negro membership in the American Federation of Labor, as late as 1933, at less than 6,000...
...A candidate in modern politics is not a Candide, the innocent man in his singleness...
...Yet this would affect only unions and still leave employers free to discriminate...
...What Hitler never succeeded in understanding is, how the British could get way with what they did in South Africa, or during the World War I, or elsewhere...
...Hill notes that in 1939 the Negro worker earned an average of $364 a year while the average white worker earned $956—two and a half times as much...
...Perhaps this very fact is what made Hitler so furious...
...But that has little to do with what he did...
...Denver, Colorado...
...New York City MAX NOMAD NEGRO UNION RIGHTS I note that Herbert Hill agrees with the assertion in my article, "Labor and the Civil Rights Revolution," (NL, April 18), that relations between labor and Negro groups have been deteriorating, but this does not seem to disturb him...
...Lutherville, Md...
...Personally, I have found considerably more active civilian (and civilized...
...Ditto for a new Rubber Workers local in the Delta region of Mississippi...
...as "cool" and "cerebral," does that not remind us altogether too much of the collective cerebrum that works night and day for Kennedy...
...As an old friend of Machajski's, I wish to take exception to the designation "anarchist" applied to him...
...Even before then, the union had accepted more than 1,000 Negro members in states with Fair Employment Practice laws—laws put on the books of 16 states in large part due to drives won through union money and manpower...
...On the contrary, in his writings, he at first advocated the immediate establishment of a revolutionary anti-capitalist dictatorship, thus anticipating by many years the ideas of Trotsky and Lenin...
...anti-semitism in Baltimore than I ever noticed during my youth in Germany, and including the war...
...The Oregon Building Trades, Metal Trades and Service Trades Councils worked with the state's Apprenticeship Council to train Orientals and Negroes, who have since become tool and die makers, optical technicians, auto mechanics, body and fender repairmen, carpenters and brick masons...
...I am, I assure you, as ready as Chamberlin to die in the defense of my country and am perhaps, because I am a young man, more likely to do so if war should come...
...Today, he concedes that there are about 1,500,000 Negro members in unions...
...The American Federation of Musicians merged separate locals in such diverse areas as Seattle, Washington...
...Even after the last war, when my friends and I came to England, we were shocked by the frequency with which we were told there by the "man in the street": "Hitler had one big fault...
...STEVE ALLEN 'COOL CATS' What Robert E. Fitch (NL, June 6) found wanting in Senator Kennedy is probably the complete absence of anything like spontaneity in this, the youngest of the Presidential candidates...
...This may stamp Machajski as a Machiavellian crypto-Blanquist using "anti-political" quasi-syndicalist and quasi-Gompersian slogans coupled with attacks agains the intellectuals and against Marxism as a non-revolutionary philosophy...
...At its 1958 convention the National Postal Transport Association, spurred on by the AFL-CIO civil rights committee, voted by better than two to one to amend its constitution to admit Negroes and since then has enrolled a substantial number...
...In his later writings, he advocated revolutionary general strikes for forcing the State to provide jobs for all the unemployed and to undertake public works for that purpose, this revolutionary pressure for higher wages to be kept up until all industries have been nationalized and all incomes equalized...
...I was at Niagara Falls 22 years ago when the inexorable pressure of the frozen Niagara River crushed, twisted and broke the bridge that joined the USA and Canada...
...I have heard a member of Kennedy's staff assert that at least he wrote his own "poetry," Profiles in Courage...
...While I am not a pacifist I spoke to one the other day who in the last war served his country with great bravery as a fighter pilot...
...something may or may not bring him into close neighborhood to Nixon, the next to him in age, the next to him, it might appear, in syntheticness of character and expression...
...Winning civil rights demands Negro and labor unity...
...Hill charges that "there has been a significant absence of leadership within organized labor on civil rights matters...
...But is anyone so un-candid as Kennedy, in the function, mathematically speaking, of his own brain trust...
...FAILURE OF NERVE I have just read with great interest William Henry Chamberlin's "The New Failures Of U.S...
...Orlando, Florida...
...He let some of them get away...
...Would it not be much wiser, and prove just as easy to accomplish, for Negro and labor groups to join with other civic bodies for a massive campaign for a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act which could effectively ban bias by both employers and unions...
...Sherman Oaks, Calif...
...In the same manual...
...Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, has reminded us that the conservative Detroit Free Press "editorially chuckled with glee recently over the prospect of a split between labor and NAACP and does not conceal its relief at the possibility that the public will not have 'arrayed before it allied organizations fighting for Negro civil rights...
...His reputation for having been one can be explained by the fact that non-Marxist ultra-leftists are often incorrectly classified that way, apparently because anarchism is a medley of the most contradictory theories whose only common denominator is supposed to be the "negation of the State...
...A local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Columbia, South Carolina is integrated and has Negro and white officers...
...ALFRED VACTS MACHAJSKI In his brilliant analysis of the social forces behind the Cuba Revolution, Theodore Draper (NL, July 4-11) refers to the ideas of the Polish-Russian revolutionary thinker Waclaw Machajski on the role of the intellectual workers in the modern social movements...
...The fact is simply that Machajski never was an anarchist...
...and in fact it is said that he did keep in his employ a number of eloquent and erudite men" (Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Verus II.8...
...Nerve" (NL, Aug...
...New York City HARRY FLEISCHMAN Director, National Labor Service AUSCHWITZ I refer in particular to "The Final Solution" by Constantine FitzGibbon, (NL, June 13...
...But he has drawn the line at the immoral weapon that is the H-Bomb...
...On the other hand: is it so difficult to understand that a nation that experiences daily deliberate attacks from the air on open cities and on individual civilians on the road, made obviously with the one purpose of getting Hitler to hit back, and thus to bring America into the war—that this nation does not have much energy left to inquire into rumors about what might be going on somewhere in the East...
...and San Francisco, California...
...But, at any rate, it shows that it is inexact to call him an anarchist...
...I should hate to see frozen attitudes on the part of Negro and labor groups crush the attempts to bridge the current gaps between them...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 32
