THE MOOD OF AMERICA

...Hubert Humphrey raised any question, and he failed to say openly that this language was an insult to all democratic Socialists, including our allies in Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries...

...A new Board of Special Inquiry held a three-day hearing in December...

...After interviewing Mrs...

...No river valley authority has been established...

...both the Federal and World Councils of Churches, they do not contain theologically or rhetorically the ringing challenge which some delegates hoped would come from Detroit...

...It was to help churches prevent a third World War, more than to state the position of the Church if an atomic war should come, that 16 unofficial peace fellowships within various Protestant denominations, led by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, convened the Conference on the Church and War in Detroit May 8-11...

...Their marriage bore the sanction of the U.S...

...They spoke up...

...Besig points out that the critical point in the Gardner case or in any other alien entry case lies in the power given by law to the Attorney General...

...In domestic policies, Mr...

...Most of these bitter anti socialists indulge in some queer mathematics...

...Conference delegates also fasted during the last mealtime before adjournment as a means of disciplining their spirits and committing themselves to carry the purpose and message of the Conference to every church and churchman in America within the next year...

...clergymen such as Albert Edward Day (conference chairman), Henry Hitt Crane, and Allan Hunter...

...Gardner has never been in the Soviet Union, having spent most of her life in Japan...

...We are committed to indefensible deficit financing in prosperous years, and little reform in our outrageous tax structure...

...Remembering their disillusionment in cooperating with "popular front" groups (and their refusal to cooperate with America First and the Bund) early in World War II, delegates did some soul-searching when emissaries of the controversial Midcentury Conference for Peace privately urged some delegates to cooperate in its endeavor to prevent World War III...

...Whatever the legal interpretation of this gobbledegook, it will have the effect which the reactionaries want, namely, of scaring off all critics of free enterprise among displaced persons—and they are the most stalwart friends of democracy in the DP camps—or else forcing them to lie about their beliefs...

...In domestic matters we continue to make some progress toward better race relations, but with that progress goes many a disquieting set-back...

...When they talk about capitalism they do not mean anything in Britain, which apparently can only be saved by conversion to their particular type of free enterprise capitalism—a type which doesn't actually exist even in America...

...This attitude of bewilderment is touched with a fatalistic acceptance of war, but there is considerable doubt about the nearness of The Day and still greater doubt about any line of action either to prepare for it or—perchance—to prevent it...

...She had an eighth-grade education in a Roman Catholic convent...

...II The Gardners were married in Tokyo where she, a White Russian, had been employed in the mail room of the American Red Cross, and he, a GI, was stationed with U.S...

...Truman acts like a man who would rather keep issues alive for campaign purposes than fight for statesmanlike solutions...

...3. War is never justifiable and the Christian should refuse military service of all kinds and serve as an absolute witness against war...

...Because the Conference had faith in international reconciliation (which it defined as "self-giving love" and carefully distinguished from appeasement or "self-centered evasion of responsibility"), the delegates dramatically held a 20-minute silent prayer service when news reached Detroit that UN Secretary Trygve Lie was on the last lap of his air journey to confer with Joseph Stalin to find some basis of saving the United Nations—and peace...

...Just to make the appeal would enormously improve America's position in the world...

...Communism, they say, is a complete denial of liberty...

...Knauff, who worked for the RAF in England and the American Army of Occupation in Germany, was ordered deported from her adopted country—without formal charges, a public hearing, or an explanation of any kind—until several alert papers and politicians forced a formal inquiry...

...2. War is necessary as a sanction of law and the Christian cannot refuse to participate in such sanctions...

...Informally discussed, however, was the relation of churchmen to peace organizations which do not bar Communists and Communist-orientated individuals...

...23, the last work day before Christmas...

...While it must be understood that the message is directed to the Christian churches, there is little basic recognition of the deeply-rooted sources of peace in other world faiths and indeed in secular culture...

...In foreign policy, he steadfastly refuses to make that appeal for disarmament under a strengthened United Nations in which—as I have so often argued in these pages —is our only hope...

...Her English was poor...

...The Board asked her only one question...

...Yet the victor over the Republican 80th Congress has got so little from his own 81st Congress as to justify the atrocious pun "the 80-worst Congress...

...At the end of the war, at her father's insistence, she and the rest of her family procured Soviet passports, but none went to Russia...

...ther left than any view they themselves hold...

...A bill for aid to cooperative housing was defeated, and the Taft-Hartley Law still stands untouched...

...Humphrey said that he and many of his colleagues rejected...

...Comment on this specimen of youthful idealism seems hardly necessary...

...Gardner was entitled to admission "if the Attorney General after consultation with the Secretary of State" felt the same way about it...

...A third hearing was held Dec...

...I can think of no other outstanding example of similar action...

...That was fine, so far, but that was not all...

...I finally told Mr...

...The Strange Case of A Russian War Bride By Joseph Gunterman San Francisco MOST informed Americans know now of the celebrated case of Ellen Knauff, the German war bride of an American combat veteran...

...Gardner was allowed out only briefly under guard, on Sundays, to go to mass at a Greek Orthodox church...

...economic, and moral causes of depression, dictatorship and war...

...In a short Summary of its message, the conference declared: "Man in the moment of his greatest scientific achievement faces the possibility of total self-destruction...

...But in doing so it paid the dangerous price of laying down the principle that displaced persons may be excluded from America if ever they were Communists, no matter how sincere their repentance, or if ever they were disbelievers in free enterprise...

...Or could he be excluded under either provision...

...When I was in Washington earlier in the year I was told that these liberal Senators had not even got together for one conference on a program of domestic and foreign affairs...

...Since then, Sen...

...Churches and War By Homer A. Jack Detroit IN WORLD War I, the churches placed "Christ in khaki" and "preachers presented arms...

...It took terrific popular pressure to make the President, at the last moment, veto the Kerr bill for which a majority of Democratic Senators had voted...

...Theological difference played relatively minor roles, although two amendments favoring world government and unilateral disarmament caused much debate in the plenary session...

...He can exclude any alien without a hearing on the basis of information of a confidential nature...

...Upon the ACLU's appeal to the Washington office of the Immigration Service, the Board of Special Inquiry was ordered to reopen its hearing, to decide whether Mrs...

...Thirteen months is a long time to be cooped up on the top floor of the Assessor's building in San Francisco —without being given a reason—but that was precisely Mrs...

...One trouble is that each Senator shoots off his own speech like a Roman candle on a dark night...

...In particular, they claim that Britain, which has increased its production by more than 30% since 1938, is doing nothing but living on American charity...

...Thereupon the local Immigration officials refused to release their victim even for Christmas Day...

...Occupation Forces...

...In the name of security the police state justifies its arbitrary oppressions on evidence that is secret, because security might be prejudiced if it were brought to light in hearings...

...Even today she cannot tell you—nor can her attorney nor anyone else fighting in her behalf—why she spent more than a year in Immigration Service detention...

...That is where the Gardner case stands today, with no decision in 18 months...

...THE MOOD OF AMERICA Our Bewildered Country By NORMAN THOMAS IF THERE is one word to describe the mood of America as I have seen it on my extensive travels north, south, east, and west, that word is bewilderment...

...Several days later—and many thousands of miles away—I read that a students' supreme court had ruled against the submission of the referendum on grounds of public policy: if it carried, it would alienate the majority of Texans from their University, and if it should be defeated it would provide propaganda for Communism...

...In Japan, she and her girl friends were interested in such subversive matters as "dates," parties, and jobs...

...In November there had been 11 similar deaths in one county followed by 28 in December in the same county...

...Less well known is the comparable case of Valentina I. Gardner...

...These same men gloat over the fact that in England, Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party have stopped Socialism by substantially reducing its majority, and yet the Conservative platform of England is vastly farNORMAN THOMAS, six times the Socialist Party's candidate for President, has just completed another of his frequent speaking tours of the country, during which he spoke and debated some of the foremost spokesmen of conservative thought in the nation...

...At the end of the hearing the new Board decided that it had no jurisdiction to pass on the merits of the case...

...The insistent and absolute call of Christ is to His Cross...

...It is true that the heaviest burden of guilt for blocking constructive legislation falls on the informal but effective coalition of the majority of Republicans with Southern Democrats...

...II There is an interesting interaction between public bewilderment and the situation in official Washington...

...For example, I was speaking at the University of Texas on the day it was announced that a referendum would be put to the student body concerning admission of qualified colored students to graduate schools...

...However, the historic peace churches have kept the spark of pacifism alive in Christianity for centuries and this became one of three positions recognized by the World Council of Churches in 1948...

...Mrs...

...So continues the case of the Russian war bride, who has never seen Russia and whose Soviet passport expired while she was held for 13 months on secret charges in an American detention cell...

...The Christian Church was pacifist when it was a small, persecuted sect...

...Several FOR executives announced that American Communists are today trying to infiltrate the pacifist movement...

...Gardner's return to Japan for Oct...

...of limited world government" and also their hope that the U. S. would disarm unilaterally if efforts at universal disarmament failed...

...And Bridgeport has a Socialist mayor...

...Gardner is a religious person...

...And how do the liberals like that...

...I suppose the real wonder is that our President, graduate of the Pen-dergast School of Practical Politics, has come along as far as he has...

...She knows absolutely nothing about economics or politics or communism...

...Gardner got out on bail over the Christmas holidays on a Federal court order, and the Immigration Service has extended that bail until July...

...Food price support legislation is a scandal...

...The line of questioning concerned her attitudes toward Russia and Communism...

...Some are duds, and even those which temporarily illumine the sky do no damage to the ramparts of reaction and inertia...

...Delegates prayed, each in his own way, that the love of God would surround both Lie and Stalin and that their meeting might be the beginning of creative negotiations to stop the rapid drift toward war...

...There has been no civil rights legislation, no Federal aid to education, no program of public health...

...Indeed, some liberals who prefer smart politics to the championship of right and justice boast that they succeeded in getting confused language under which a critic of free enterprise might be admitted if he did not believe in violent overthrow of representative government, providing that, like most Fascists, he would profess nominal devotion to free enterprise...

...Once, men like Bob LaFollette and George Norris, even in a minority, made the Senate a forum for social progress...

...We believe that another way, grounded in the will of God, is open...

...and denominational executives such as Clarence E. Pickett and E. Raymond Wilson...

...Thomas, President of the Post War World Council, is the author of many books on current issues, including "War—No Profit, No Glory, No Need," "Socialism on the Defensive," and "Keep America out of War...

...McCarran replied that he personally believed a displaced person could be excluded under either or both standards—an interpretation which Sen...

...On the contrary, I can cite what I consider a despicable failure of American liberalism...

...16 in the case of Ellen Knauff...

...Among the delegates were university professors, theological students, laymen, including be-whiskered, rural Mennonites...

...To many, war seems the only answer...

...If Fosdick stuck to his pacifism, the Church—including Niebuhr— did not resist World War II a quarter of a century later, although few clergymen outrightly blessed war...

...Justice Jackson's dissent in the Knauff case applies equally to the Gardner case: "The menace of the security of this country, be it great as it may, from this girl's admission is as nothing compared to the menace to free institutions inherent in procedures of this pattern...

...Counter Intelligence Division...

...Trumanism, they say, equals socialism...

...The State Department, it said, had issued a preliminary exclusion order...

...The dissenting justices of the Supreme Court, Holmes and Brandeis, largely shaped our present judicial policy...

...Delegates finally voted their "whole-hearted support...

...If it were not for the ever-present remembrance of Gandhi, Christian pacifism would be even more theologically exclusive and provincial than it is today...

...Paul Douglas was able to rally the liberal forces against the Kerr bill effectively...

...When Gardner was able to leave for home, he made arrangements, under the War Brides Act, for his wife to follow him to Buffalo, where he found an apartment...

...Gardner's experience.During those 13 months Mrs...

...Those questions were explained to her, but the explanations on which she based her answers were not included in the transcript...

...The law as it stands will create a precedent for excluding immigrants from America simply for their economic and political opinions, no matter how loyal is their belief in democratic methods of change...

...On my swing through the country, I found that to a certain extent Republicans are getting away with their reckless anti-British, anti-Socialist, anti-truth propaganda, and in the process worsening our relations with the only elements in Europe on which we can depend to oppose Communism...

...So continues the case of the girl cleared by a powerful and secret Counter Intelligence Division, cleared by an Immigration Service hearing, but still kept from entering the country and establishing a home with her husband—by whom...

...The plea that evidence of guilt must be secret is abhorrent to all free men, because it provides a cloak for the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome, and the corrupt to play the role of informer undetected and uncorrected...

...It was not until February 1949 that a Special Board of Inquiry held a hearing...

...Instead, the Immigration Service scheduled Mrs...

...This is a direct result of the curious capitalist-feudalist land system in California...

...A bewildered public does not raise up first-class leaders, and the men we have sent to Washington have tragically failed us in leadership...

...In various debates, I have discovered that my Republican or capitalist opponents don't think it necessary to bother about the facts on conditions either in America or Britain...

...They are bewildered leaders of the bewildered...

...In my debates with men like John T. Flynn, author of The Road Ahead, and Herman Steinkraus, then president of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, my opponents have agreed that Churchill and British capitalism generally are socialistic...

...The World Council after first condemning war as "contrary to the will of God" and "incompatible with the teaching and example" of Jesus, nevertheless recognized three separate Christian positions in relation to war: 1. War, as fought today, is never an act of justice though it may be a Christian's duty to fight...

...Socialism equals or soon will equal Communism...

...Many delegates urgently advocated every possible negotiation with Communists in Russia and yet just as urgently advocated no cooperation with Communists in America...

...II It was to strengthen and increase this third position that 500 delegates and observers from the United States and Canada met in Detroit for nearly four days...

...During the postwar reaction, Reinhold Nie-buhr said, "I am done with this business," and Harry Emerson Fosdick exclaimed, "I do not propose to bless war again, or support, or expect from it any valuable thing...

...The Senate, by bi-partisan action, finally passed a new Displaced Persons bill which in many respects represents a victory for liberty and decency...

...Steinkraus that what he meant by capitalism was only what he had in Bridgeport where his plant is located...

...Pat McCarran, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whether one must both disbelieve in free enterprise and believe in revolutionary overthrow of representative governments in order to be excluded...

...On the floor of the Senate, only Sen...

...We advocate that individual Christians and the Church support the use of the methods of reconciliation and non-violent action, such as Gandhi has demonstrated in our time . ., ." Ill While this summary and the whole messages are definitely in advance of similar statements of...

...Months dragged by, but no hearing was granted...

...We, therefore, appeal to the Church of Christ throughout the world to break with war—to repent of warmaking now...

...The attitude of a large audience which I addressed, and the testimony of well-informed students, suggested that the referendum in favor of the Negroes would carry by a substantial majority...

...They did not contribute to the popular bewilderment after the manner of those notable liberals in whose election in 1948 even a Socialist like myself found premature hope...

...The ACLU obtained from Federal Judge George B. Harris an order reopening the case...

...This power was upheld by the Supreme Court on Jan...

...30, 1948, where Immigration authorities held her without charges...

...It was then that the Gardner case came to the attention of Ernest Besig, director of the San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union, and of Wayne Collins, ACLU attorney...

...It is a call to repentance and commitment—repentance for our involvement in war and commitment to the power of reconciling love...

...We appeal to individual Christians to refuse to make or to use weapons of destruction, and to devote their energies to the removal of the social...

...With its growth in numbers and power, the Church abandoned its pacifism and developed a doctrine justifying war...

...We appeal to the American churches to take the initiative in this crucial witness...

...But the Truman leadership has been unusually bad in the House and the Senate...

...If ever a man and party were handed a mandate by the American voters, they were President Truman and the Democratic Party in the 1948 election...

...In its "Findings," the Conference clearly opposed "loyalty oaths, guilt by association, over-emphasis on secrecy, threats to academic freedom, and Congressional immunity for unsubstantiated charges," and went on record specifically against the pending Mundt-Nixon bills...

...she didn't understand some of the questions...

...Witnesses testified Mrs...

...Upon the basis of all the evidence presented before this Board of Special Inquiry, the applicant's entry would not be prejudicial to the interests of the United States...

...Perhaps the "whom" is the Attorney General...

...This is the outrageous paragraph: No visas shall be issued under the provisions of this act, as amended, to any person who is, or has been, a member of the Communist Party, or any person who adheres to, advocates and follows, or has adhered to, advocated, and followed the principles of any political and economic system or philosophy directed toward the destruction of free competitive enterprise and the revolutionary overthrow of representative governments...

...Yes, and what free competitive enterprise really means—a doctrine whose adequacy is denied, paragraph after paragraph, in the Republican as well as the Democratic platform of 1948, both of which include demands to be found only in the Socialist platform as recently as 1928...

...Gardner's entry would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States...

...This apparent inconsistency was resolved for some when it was pointed out that experience had shown that while top Russian Communists were free to negotiate, even top American Communists were slavishly carrying out every twist of the line and could not negotiate and honestly cooperate with pacifists, even when at this moment of history the Communist line superficially parallels pacifism in some respects...

...The rush to the earthly paradise of California continues, but when I was there, newspapers reported 17 more deaths of malnutrition, which in this case means hunger, among the children of farm hands in the fertile San Joaquin Valley...

...Even if liberal cleverness has made it possible for critics of free enterprise to sneaK in, they have forced themselves to pay a great price in their utter failure to educate the American public to what civil liberty means...

...She got as far as San Francisco Nov...

...The Senator, however, did ask Sen...

...The Board added that Mrs...

...Gardner had no counsel at the hearing...

...Gardner and examining- the transcript, Besig declared that "the hearing was obviously rigged" and demanded a new hearing...

...Therefore, Trumanism is a denial of liberty...

...The majority of the evidence at hand is such that it would cause a reasonable person to doubt that the applicant has ever become indoctrinated in the principles of Communism," the Board finally decided...

...That secret is locked up in a Government "secret file...

...Sen...

...What profoundly disquiets me is the failure of the able liberals in the Senate to give us the leadership we had a right to expect...

...In this hour of confusion and turmoil, the Church is called to speak a distinctive and steadying word, drawn not from the judgments of the secular world, but from its gospel...