Correspondents' Correspondence
MANDER, John & HOPKINS, MARK & SPARKS, HILIP & ROSS, BENJAMIN
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Father of the BBC London—The British Broadcasting...
...Wren says he believes the real reason for his being fired was that "there was too much publicity about my case, and they were afraid others might get the idea to do the same...
...The U.S...
...The Scotsman cannot forget that his was for long an independent nation: intellectually and spiritually proud, and endowed with undisputed courage and perseverance...
...Coal miners have gone on strike to protest black lung, but textile employes cannot afford the luxury...
...The preparatory talks that opened November 22 have gone well so far...
...Like the Greeks, once captive, they would set out to capture Rome from the inside...
...One has only to look around the world to realize what a rare achievement that was...
...He appeared to threaten the American way of life...
...That such a character could make his way—and make history—in those strange years is perhaps significant of British society at that time...
...No wonder that Reith, upon catching a male member of his staff in a compromising position, could only splutter (repressing his natural Calvinistic fury): "Sir, henceforth you will be banned from reading the Epilogue...
...On the other hand...
...Thus it would seem that because economic issues played a smaller role than usual in this election, Democrats picked up a few votes from the rich and were buried in an avalanche of working-class defections...
...Men have been known to pass out in the plants when cotton dust becomes too thick during the steamy Carolina summers, and many have been forced either to retire "or quit breathing...
...In the New York suburbs, on the North Shore of Long Island, McGovern ran well with only one group—the stockbrokers and executives of Manhasset...
...Moscow clearly has no intention of joining a European common marketplace of ideas...
...As the delegations went through the formality of presenting brief policy papers at the closed door sessions here, it was clear that the Kremlin is eager for a conference endorsement of the status quo in Europe...
...Brown lung, or byssinoisis, is a respiratory ailment caused by continual contact with cotton dust, similar to "black lung" suffered by coal miners...
...There is, of course, an outside chance the Helsinki talks will become deadlocked...
...Nonetheless, to write off Reith as a mere snob would be quite wide of the mark...
...No wonder, then, that under Reith's regime news announcers on radio (television was very much in the future) were expected to report for duty in tuxedos...
...Manhasset has not been turning liberal...
...The main issue at present is the settling of an agenda...
...Unfortunately, the inspectors are few and far between, and workers risk their jobs by complaining to the proper authorities...
...By 1942, two decades after its founding, it was already treated with the deference due to such hallowed and ancient institutions of the realm as the Church of England, Parliament and even the Monarchy itself...
...The Occupational Health and Safety Act passed by Congress in 1970 represents the first significant attempt to compensate workers suffering from textile-related ailments...
...One of the fellows told me that folks I worked with were ordered not to talk with me...
...The final bargaining is expected to begin after a holiday recess and to continue until discussions start on mutual and balanced force reductions (MBFR) between selected Warsaw Pact and nato countries...
...The BBC has become for many nations the model of what a broadcasting organization should be: highly professional, high-minded and, above all, impartial and sturdily independent of government or big business...
...But Reith was to regard the last 30 years of his life (he died in 1971) as "a disaster...
...According to a 1970 study by the North Carolina Board of Health, about 30,000 people in that state work in "high risk" areas of the mills where it occurs...
...He did create, possibly without intending it, an organization that had the moral courage to broadcast the truth without fear of government or commercial interference...
...He was a missionary, and his mission was to bring Great Britain back to the faith of its forefathers...
...In size, he was a giant of a man ("that Wuthering Height" his enemy Winston Churchill liked to mutter...
...To assure Western agreement on a European security conference, however, it will almost certainly accept an agenda item on the subject...
...The symptoms are a tightening of the chest, coughing and wheezing...
...And the returns from at least one area suggest that a detailed analysis of the national balloting may produce a surprising answer...
...victims sometimes have to sleep sitting up because they will go on coughing in the prone position...
...Putting in 12-14-hour days of hard labor, Wren had worked in the cotton mills since he was a boy, including 20 years for the company that fired him...
...If they are wrong, it would signify a clumsy misreading by each side of the other's intentions.—Mark Hopkins Killer in the Mills Gastonia, N.C.—Doll Wren, a 55-year-old ex-textile worker who receives $65 a week in unemployment benefits, seems typical of many jobless Americans...
...But of course it is not...
...A candidate who runs well only among corporate executives is hardly the picture of an economic radical...
...and the West European countries, meanwhile, are pressing for the freer flow of information, ideas and people...
...But before the Democratic party goes careening back to the middle of the road, a long, careful look at the voting results is necessary...
...But there is another side to the Scottish nature, historically quite understandable in view of that country's powerful inferiority complex...
...A recent Ralph Nader report estimated that over 100,000 Americans suffer from byssinoisis...
...The answer reveals a good deal about the peculiar psychology of the British...
...For the rapid rise of the BBC was very largely the work of one man, John Reith, whose biography has recently appeared...
...Here was a man who believed utterly what they themselves no longer believed: that the British had a divine mission to spread truth and enlightenment around the world...
...Complicating the situation is the fact that the industry is struggling along on generally low profit margins that do not leave room for the purchase of expensive ventilation systems to prevent byssinoisis...
...This could be used as a talking point at a European security conference on the limits to exchange of information...
...His plan for income redistribution made his entire economic program an object of contempt...
...It also requires manufacturers to meet Federal standards of cotton-dust pollution in their plants...
...In March, the North Carolina State Industrial Commission awarded him a $6,500 settlement...
...There was, perhaps, a certain exaggeration here, as so often with men of his background...
...Yet his presence looms over the whole era...
...The Manhasset figures, it should be noted, are not simply an example of the Northeastern establishment's new liberalism, as described by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority...
...How was this achieved so quickly in conservative-minded Britain (the Tories were in power during most of those 20 years...
...This means not only that frontiers stay where they are—a matter of little dispute—but that East-West cooperation proceed along managed lines...
...In the precinct cited, the Democratic vote was a mere 14 per cent in 1969, the same as in 1959...
...Were this a merely parochial celebration, it would not rate much space in the foreign press...
...Further down the ballot, the Democratic vote reached 27 per cent, doubling the 13 per cent recorded in the previous Presidential contest and well above the 19 per cent of eight years ago...
...For Reith himself it lasted only until 1938, when he was lured away from the BBC to run Imperial Airlines, and his subsequent career consisted essentially of high-sounding nonjobs thought up by Churchill and his successors...
...And with only 15 per cent of them unionized, efforts by organizations like the Textile Workers Union of America have been muffled by the industry as a whole...
...The Democratic candidate was successfully tagged as the spokesman for student protesters, women's liberationists and militant welfare mothers...
...It is often said that if the BBC Russian service is preferred by Soviet intellectuals to, say, the Voice of America, it is for the same reason that Europeans in Hitler's time preferred the BBC to all other stations: It could be trusted to tell the truth, even if the truth was not flattering to the Allies...
...The Irish have dealt with this complex in their own style, as we are all fully aware...
...The answer seems clear...
...The BBC went on much as its founder had conceived it...
...once they can pin the Soviets down to concrete topics, they will agree on convening the main talks...
...Although farther out on Long Island the inherited wealth of Upper Brookville did show a steady Democratic trend through the '60s, Manhasset "remained conservative and Republican...
...Much more likely, McGovern's economic program got lost amid the discussions of "lifestyle" and Watergate...
...This, combined with a work force that feels it has no choice but to accept miserable plant conditions, has created a silent killer in the mills...
...If Reith's successors seem smaller men, it is partly because—to some extent under commercial pressurethey have substituted for his principles the debilitating gospel of news-for-news'-sake...
...But he was the first person from Gaston County, North Carolina, the heartland of the Southern textile industry, to file for workmen's compensation under a new state law extending this coverage to victims of the "brown lung" disease—and that resulted in his being fired from his job last June...
...Father of the BBC London—The British Broadcasting Corporation is now observing its Golden Anniversary with junketings of various kinds...
...New York—Did George Mc-Govern lose the election because he was too radical...
...The West wants some overlap of the Helsinki meeting and MBFR negotiations, the latter having higher priority in Washington and West European capitals than does the security conference...
...It is easy to caricature the future Lord Reith, and surprisingly difficult to characterize him fairly...
...England had finally revolted against strict Scotch nannying...
...The Scots, interestingly, have taken an altogether different path...
...Still, his name deserves to be honored...
...Yet today's BBC remains an institution to be proud of, even though John Reith would surely feel it has not lived up to his standards.—John Mander Talks About Talks Helsinki—No one seriously doubts that the 34 nations meeting here will agree in late January or early February to call a Conference on European Security and Cooperation...
...Phillips makes a careful distinction: "Granted that some of the old-line conservatives were turning liberal, much of the old-line financial, commercial and industrial establishment remained conservative and Republican...
...but his basic policy of truth-for-truth's-sake was to last long...
...But could it last...
...That he was not of the Established Church of England served to heighten, rather than subdue, his native mor-alism...
...the lovely Dipoli conference center on the wooded outskirts of the Finnish capital has heard scarcely a sour word...
...The Epilogue, in his mind, was the most sacred moment of the day, when the Word of God could reach out to the unregenerate millions...
...and his physical impres-siveness was enhanced if anything by the huge, disfiguring scar on his left cheek that he brought back from World War I. Temperamentally, he was a Calvinistic Scot to the core: a son (and grandson) of the manse, endowed with a sense of his own infallibility that could alternate with the most torturing doubts about the certainty of his "election...
...That would be a serious blow to East-West detente, simply because everyone here seems to think the time is ripe for a European conference...
...An index of their success is that since the Union of 1705 there have been (proportionately) more Prime Ministers of Scottish origin than English—Bute, Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour, Mac-donald, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, i Reith, who would have liked to have been Prime Minister, was very much in this tradition...
...Unquestionably, the 1972 election was a decisive repudiation of the "lifestyle" radicalism popularized by the media—and captured in the Republican campaign phrase "acid, amnesty and abortion...
...At the same time, of course, the BBC soon became a sacred cow in Britain itself...
...The United States and its nato allies want to dicker on an agenda first...
...In a related countermove, the Soviets and their East European satellites are backing a UN resolution that would ban direct satellite-to-TV-set broadcasts...
...That he had not attended Oxford or Cambridge only increased his desire to be seen hobnobbing with bishops and cabinet ministers at the Club of Clubs, the Athenaeum...
...Unless the Federal government provides adequate resources and staff to deal with brown lung, textile workers will continue to suffer in quiet agony.Philip Sparks As Manhasset Goes...
...then it dismissed him on the grounds that he "wasn't getting production," even though no production schedules had ever been set for his department...
...A typical Manhasset precinct (A.D...
...The North Carolina Bureau of Health estimates that it affects up to 25 per cent of all textile workers in the state...
...If this hypothesis is borne out by a study of voting patterns across the country, those who argue that the Democratic party must retreat from programs of economic reform will be standing on shaky ground.—Benjamin Ross...
...The Soviets, who seem to want the European conference more than the West does, are being vague about the items to be included, but specific about the time (next June) and place (Helsinki...
...57) gave McGovern 25 per cent of the vote, as against 21 per cent for Humphrey in 1968 and 32 per cent for Johnson in 1964...
...He was earning $2.87 an hour when he applied for workmen's compensation...
...16, E.D...
...Some of his actions were ludicrous...
...Among these voters he actually improved on Hubert Humphrey's performance in 1968, while the Democratic total (including Liberal party votes) for lesser offices far surpassed even the highs of 1964...
...It is hardly surprising that this should appeal to the conservative, but not especially pious, rulers of England in the inter-war period...
...As in Wren's case, most textile companies have ignored complaints about brown lung and have sought to discount the disease's effects...
...But whether the McGovern defeat was also a rejection of economic change, whether the voters saw the South Dakota senator as an economic Leftist, is a more complicated question...
...To be sure, there was some minor diplomatic skirmishing between East and West, but Moscow let this pass to prevent the discussions from getting bogged down before the important bargaining began...
...Government inspectors can be called in at the employes' request to check the dust levels...
...Initially, his company demoted him to a packing room job that paid only $1.80 an hour...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 25
