PROHIBITIVE COST
Prohibitive Cost LIKE so many other Americans, we have taken to brooding lately over where we stand in "The Great Debate"—whether we are for Asia First. Europe First, America First, or any...
...The resulting "composite" picture was prominently displayed in a campaign tabloid, 500,000 copies of which were printed by the Times-Herald and delivered throughout Maryland the weekend before the election...
...If the case already revealed is officially confirmed—and there seems to be no doubt that it will be and more—the Senate will have no alternative but to unseat Butler, not only to right a great wrong, but to serve notice on the forces of McCarthyism that they cannot carry their gangsterism into other states and permanently corrupt the springs of American democracy...
...There are many other sordid aspects of the McCarthy invasion of Maryland, but space permits us to record only one more...
...III We can conceive of no more effective or honorable method of banishing the honest concern of countless Americans which McCarthy 6 Co...
...Tydings (right) answered: 'Oh, thank you, sir.' Browder testified in the best interests of those accused, naturally...
...Item—The news that we are moving into a relatively permanent garrison state as the Pentagon plans for a 25-year conscription program, the economic mobilizers draw the blueprints for long-range regimentation of our national economy, and the Administration presents us with a 7 1/2 billion dollar budget largely dedicated to hastening our transformation from a welfare to a warfare state...
...Once we see this and see it clearly, we can strike a mortal blow at both by clearing the soil on which they feed...
...The Administration doubtless feels that it must over-emphasize the danger of Soviet attack and understate prospects for negotiation in order to solidify public opinion behind its massive rearmament program...
...Communism and McCarthyism are noxious weeds growing in the same swamps of fear and frustration...
...Now, Millard Tydings is a wealthy, conservative Democrat whom Franklin Roosevelt sought, unsuccessfully, to purge in 1938...
...Domestic Retreat THE ups and downs, mostly downs, of our military and diplomatic operations abroad have dominated the daily headlines and deepened the nation's concern and frustration...
...The time has come for decisive action to meet this Capone-style political hoodlumism head-on if we are to prevent further debasement of American politics, crippling of the federal service, and misrepresentation of our country abroad...
...The newest exhibition of McCarthyism in action is to be found in the revelations of how John M. Butler, Maryland Republican, defeated Millard Tydings in the Senate race last fall...
...However the Russians responded, they must be wrong...
...Little space and less concern, however, are devoted to an equally bitter and costly retreat—the retreat of democracy at home even as we are mobilizing in the name of a free world...
...Both are nourished by confusion and insecurity...
...We did discover, though, that for all their seeming differences, one common denominator ran through the forests of news-print—total reliance on one form or another of military strategy and total absence of any suggestion for new efforts at negotiation with the Communists...
...But two days later, Harrison Salisbury, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, cabled that the Soviet note had been hastily translated New Year's morning (a singularly unhappy time) and its meaning misrepresented...
...But Tydings was marked for defeat by McCarthy and his clique because the Maryland Senator presided over the Senate investigation which exposed the fraudulent character of McCarthy's broadside smear against the State Department...
...The Russians, our statesmen said, made it clear they would discuss only their program for Germany and would not negotiate other differences...
...II Knowing there was nothing on the record to link Tydings with the Communists, McCarthy's private army went into a huddle with Ruth McCormick Miller, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald and niece of the Chicago Tribune's Col...
...We've read and re-read the speeches of all the orators on all sides, but have found little to light our way toward the great decision...
...The signs of our times are ominously everywhere: Item—The action of the House of Representatives in turning over to its Tory-dominated, 13-member Rules Committee the power to crush every piece of legislation seven men oppose...
...Anne O'Hare McCormick, the gifted foreign affairs analyst for the New York Times, subscribes to much of the Administration's foreign policy, but she took occasion to warn the other day that "the emphasis in American official policy has veered so far to the military side that military defense seems to many Americans the only thing worth thinking about and to many outsiders our sole aim and preoccupation...
...Joseph McCarthy and his private army of thugs and spies is no more shocking than the indifference of the press and the public to disclosures showing how the new gangsterism in politics works...
...Item—The passing of total power in the Senate to the bloc of Southern Democrats bent on preserving inferior status for the colored one-tenth of America, even as we seek to enlist the support of the colored peoples of Asia in our struggle with Communism...
...Item—The resurgence of Mc-Carthyism, with its emphasis on political blackmail, its reliance on private spies and thugs, its distortion of campaign issues, and its ruthless assassination of character...
...The 244 votes to restore dictatorial control over our lawmaking process came from Congressmen who profess to despise the Soviet practice of vesting arbitrary control in the 11 -member Politburo...
...They took separate pictures of Tydings and Earl Browder, the Communist, and pasted them together in such a way as to give the impression that the two men were chatting amiably together...
...Political Gangsterism THE debasement of American politics by Sen...
...Europe First, America First, or any combination...
...The key word, of course, was "composite," but not five readers in a hundred would know that the photograph had been faked by pasting two pictures together so they would appear to be a single photograph...
...It seems clear now that the printer who did much of the printing for the Butler campaign was hauled around in a car one night by McCarthy's private spies and threatened with reprisals if he testified about the role played by McCormick's niece and McCarthy's staff in furnishing manpower, materials, money, and muck in the campaign against Tydings...
...And it is robbing us of the support of a great many people of Europe and Asia who reject Communism and the Kremlin's foreign policy just as emphatically as we do...
...McCarthyism has flourished because there has been no great, affirmative effort to reassure the nation by an inquiry conducted by citizens whose judgment would be accepted by all fair-minded Americans...
...But this very approach deemed so necessary at home is proving prohibitively costly abroad as the people of Europe and Asia conclude to their sorrow that "The Great Debate" is not over possible terms of mediation, but rather over how, where, and when we can best make our military power dominant in the world...
...Item—The official disclosure that an unprecedented wave of bankruptcy faces American small business as the government concentrates men, materials, and money on the munitions-makers in big business...
...His anti-Communist credentials are fool-proof...
...At just about the time "The Great Debate" was getting its second wind, the Soviets replied to the Big Three proposal for a conference to discuss the issues dividing East and West...
...Two immediate steps will go a long way toward knocking the pins from under 1 McCarthyism: One—The Senate's inquiry into the Maryland election must be relentlessly complete...
...It is this official state-of-mind— shared alike by Democratic and Republican spokesmen—which robs "The Great Debate" of much of its meaning...
...Having decided to "get" Tydings, McCarthy resorted to the only kind of politics he knows—faking and falsifying...
...But the State Department showed no indication that it was more pleased with the revised interpretation than it had been with the first translation...
...Robert McCormick...
...The conspirators concocted one of the most damnable frauds in the history of American politics...
...The tragedy is magnified by the feebleness of the voices of American progressivism and for a more hopeful American foreign policy, especially in Congress...
...Actually, he reported, the Kremlin expressed "readiness to consider inclusion of any question properly raised by [any of the Big Four]," including "other European matters and Far Eastern issues...
...Short of a mighty effort to reverse the present rightward trend in domestic affairs and to smash the new gangsterism in American politics, the United States seems fated to suffer reverses on the home front as great as those which have overtaken us abroad...
...McCarthy is by no means the only offender—witness the corrupt character of the campaign in North Carolina, as reported by David S. Burgess in "Hucksters of Hate" on Page 5 of this issue—but the depravity of the Wisconsin Republican is so complete that his tactics are now generically embodied in the word McCarthyism...
...have perverted for their own sinister purposes than for such a committee of unimpeachable Americans to survey the entire field and tell the country the full story—whatever it turns out to be...
...The British Foreign Office saw "some hope" in the Soviet reply, the French Foreign Office thought it was "definitely hopeful," but the U. S. State Department turned it away with a sneer...
...Under the picture was this caption: "Communist Earl Browder, shown at left in this composite picture, was a star witness at the Tydings Committee hearings, and was cajoled into saying Owen Lattimore and others accused of disloyalty were not Communists...
...These setbacks on the home front, coming as we stumble toward war with a foreign policy which delights our enemies and dismays our allies, has brought the nation to a mood of unparalleled confusion and frustration...
...Two—President Truman should act at once to appoint a committee of distinguished Americans to examine the whole critical field of security and civil liberties...
Vol. 15 • February 1951 • No. 2
