The Presidents Dilemma
The Progressive "fe Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17_October, 1953_ Number 10 The Presidents Dilemma AS it settles down to its tenth month behind the wheel, the...
...He could have proclaimed the Administration's determination to fight for restoration of the housing cuts, or he could have defended Congressional action on the grounds of economy or basic policy...
...Interviewed on the subject of the Red Menace by U.S...
...These words, taken from the official transcript, would seem to put the President firmly on record against having great bodies of citizens living in hovels, but beyond that there was nothing faintly resembling a position or a policy, even Mr...
...There are many vicissitudes in the pulling and hauling and arguments of free government, but there is a certainty, if anyone knows the heart of free America—you can't go to them and show them that great bodies of citizens are living in hovels, unfit habitations and not get help—help expressed not only from their private purses as Mr...
...He traveled up to Topanga Canyon, just outside Los Angeles, to attend a camp for underprivileged children...
...The jury found Tarantino, the radio station, and its manager guilty, assessed $25,000 against the commentator, $25,000 against the station, and $5,000 against the manager...
...a California court knocked out a San Francisco Housing Authority attempt to segregate Negroes...
...a federal court in Ohio stopped the Youngstown chief of police from censoring books and magazines...
...Eisenhower's personal popularity, dallied and ducked on a dozen major issues, in-eluding social security, farm policy, labor-management relations, the St...
...The hospital made none, and refused again to meet with the Committee...
...Undersecretary of the Interior Ralph Tudor, who announced the new policy, was asked to explain how it differed from the old...
...One day, just before his fatal illness, the late Robert A. Taft was playing golf and talking politics with a trusted friend...
...The sight of black, white, red, brown, and yellow skinned boys and girls laughing and singing and eating and dancing together within 30 miles of the City Hall of Los Angeles, where ghettoed slums are breeding places for juvenile interracial strife, was one of the most hopeful things I've encountered in a long time...
...When the Committee's report was completed, copies were sent to hospital officials for any correction of fact...
...Aren't the Administration, the McCarthys, Mc-Carrans, Jenners, and Veldes all for the Smith Act...
...James J. Tarantino, Hollywood gossip columnist and radio commentator, went on the air one night and accused Miss Fern Bruner, a school teacher, of being a "reported Communist...
...A case in point was the unveiling of the Administration's "new power policy" last month...
...As a result, Baruch Houses, among others, have been cut in two...
...The informal medical group called a neighborhood meeting, which attracted a capacity crowd, and out of it came the Committee to End Discrimination at Woodlawn Hospital...
...Lawrence Waterway, postal rate revision, and tariff policy...
...Packaged as a partnership of the federal government, the states, cities, and private utilities, the "new" policy turned out to be a return to the old, pre-Teddy Roosevelt days before the federal government began to assume leadership for the river basin-wide development of natural resources in the national interest...
...Actually, of course, there was nothing difficult about it...
...The new Congress, whose Republican majority was a clear-cut consequence of Mr...
...Studies of this kind can be enormously useful if they are designed to provide the factual basis for intelligent decisions on specific issues, but they were never meant to be a substitute for a basic political philosophy...
...But out in the country: The school board of Topeka, Kan., voted to end segregation in the elementary schools...
...the city government of Racine, Wis., refused to require a loyalty oath of its Commission on Human Rights...
...Moses made it clear he preferred private financing of housing and he felt there were limits to heavily subsidized public slum-clearance housing...
...aroused parents in Marin County, California, fought back victoriously against an attempt to bully the school system, and, in Chicago, a neighborhood struggle cracked hospital discrimination against Negroes The fight is being waged in scores of American communities, mostly without headline fanfare, often against-staggering odds, and always by men and women of courage and dedication...
...Baruch has done, but through official channels of appropriations...
...The occasion was the dedication of the Baruch housing project in New York City last month...
...The Smith Act was partly to blame, the Attorney General said, for while Communist Party membership had declined since that law was passed, "the Communists have gone underground since the Smith Act trials started...
...Wood-lawn Hospital, located in an interracial area on the South Side, persisted in a whites-only policy...
...News & World Report, Mr...
...In some areas, where the Administration does seem to have a policy, it frequently displays a curious unwillingness to explain or defend it, possibly because it is unable to reconcile its public dedication to The Last Prisoner social progress and its actual commitment to special interests...
...They organized a Citizens Committee for the Public Schools, rallied 600 parents to a meeting, voiced their approval of the school system, affirmed their conviction that teachers must be free to teach and schools must be relieved of the burden of answering irresponsible charges, and appointed five working committees to compile facts, inform parents, and provide ammunition to fire back at reckless critics...
...The judge instructed the jury that the word "reported" should not be construed as making the charge less defamatory...
...Brownell isn't stupid, as this may make him sound...
...The Committee, which will continue to function until this last objective is achieved at Woodlawn, is convinced that its experience shows Time and Tide—and Science Justus in The Minneapolis Star that agencies which discriminate follow that policy because they feel the community is behind them...
...The Smith Act, said the Attorney General, is "an excellent law" because it has imprisoned some of the top Communists and awakened the country to the Communist problem...
...By now about 250 teenage children have lived for a while in the future...
...Expensive Name-Calling Character assassins who loosely cry "Communist" and then tuck an "alleged" or "reported" before their charge of subversion or disloyalty were taught an expensive lesson in a San Lorenzo, Calif., court recently...
...The President had an opportunity, and a beautiful opportunity, to accept the challenge of this element, but he hesitated, as he has before...
...Much of the trouble stemmed from a lack of leadership, which in part resulted from the fact that the Administration was either unable to decide what its principles were, or was unwilling to fight for such principles as it thought it had...
...The Progressive "fe Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17_October, 1953_ Number 10 The Presidents Dilemma AS it settles down to its tenth month behind the wheel, the Eisenhower Administration still seems to be fumbling for a road map...
...The group went to work compiling the facts...
...I don't go along with that too much...
...The effect of Mr...
...Communist Party is "a greater menace than at any time...
...His evidence: she was an active supporter of the United World Federalists...
...Hospital authorities, denying that discrimination was practiced, refused to meet with the Committee...
...He did neither...
...Another example of the Administration's fear of the sound of its own voice was provided by Attorney General Herbert Brownell...
...The report was printed and 2,000 copies were mailed to community leaders...
...Shortly afterwards the hospital began to admit colored patients...
...Miss Bruner sued for damages...
...Taft straightened up, paused, and said: "You know, I believe you're exactly right...
...Teachers in the Marin County schools are free to go on using UNESCO materials they feel are helpful in the classroom...
...Instead, he embarked on this baffling bit of syntax: "There was some criticism, I think, a minute ago about the exact size of the appropriations made this year by the federal government for housing...
...The campers were Negro and Anglo-Saxon and Mexican and Japanese and Chinese and American Indian and Japanese descent...
...And then, suddenly aware of the tangle of contradictions in which he had snarled himself, the nation's chief law enforcement officer concluded: "But I don't think that's inconsistent with the statement that the Communists are reorganizing their forces more effectively...
...the Brookville, Fla., library board routed a self-appointed censor of "subversive" books...
...Unless he soon develops and fights for a political program consistent with many of his campaign pledges of a year ago, he may soon find himself as helpless as the trout in his creel— and as lacking in a future...
...The one area of failure has been in placing Negro doctors on the staff, but here an indirect promise has been made to consider Negro applications for the first time when the annual appointment time comes around in December...
...But this didn't sound too good, for hadn't the Eisenhower Administration come to power with a promise to banish the Red Menace, and hadn't it had more than half a year to wrestle with the problem...
...Faced with this spirited—and eminently respectable —resistance, the book-burners retreated in total defeat...
...Eisenhower's fumbling indecision has been to strengthen the position of the worst elements in his party...
...It is to be found in the staggering record of unfinished business left for a campaign year by the first session of the 83rd Congress, in the multiplicity of commissions and committees created to search for some of the answers, and in the confusion and contradictions that turn up in the public utterances of the Eisenhower team...
...The evidence to confirm this judgment is piling up at at a depressing rate...
...Living in the Future Subscriber Hugh Hardyman, writing from La Crescenta, Calif., has written us of a hope-inspiring example of teen-age children "living for a while in the future...
...Veterans groups and unattached vigilantes launched a drive to compel teachers to quit using four or five UNESCO publications in the county schools...
...The Chicago Story Hospital discrimination has long been one of the most unyielding strongholds of racial bigotry...
...When decent instincts without a firm philosophy collide with McCarthy tactics the result can easily be, as it was in this case, a declaration that 1) the Smith Act is an "excellent law," and 2) the Smith Act has driven the Communists underground...
...the Administration just didn't like the sound of its own decision to open the gates wide for greater private exploitation of the nation's natural resources...
...But wait a minute...
...The Marin County Story Like many another American community, suburban Marin County, just outside San Francisco, recently encountered a wave of local-level McCarthyism...
...Brownell asserted that the U.S...
...In Chicago a citywide organization of doctors and medical personnel of all races decided to attack the problem on the neighborhood level...
...When his turn to speak came, President Eisenhower felt the urge to clarify the Administration's position on housing...
...He refused, saying it would be too difficult...
...Great, gaping holes in its program testify to an absence of direction and a lack of destination...
...Special commissions of inquiry have been appointed to recommend to the Administration what its policies should be, in anti-trust legislation, foreign economic policy, social security, and agricultural program...
...How could it be worse than ever with the Republicans in power...
...Terrified by McCarthy and bewitched by the political dividends in magnifying the Red Menace, the Administration has no clear-cut policy of its own on the problems of McCarthyism and Communism at home...
...No announcement of the change was made, except through the instructions to internes, residents, and nurses to admit all patients who had the money regardless of color or race...
...Eisenhower was a fellow Republican, Robert Moses, hard-driving, free-speaking coordinator of construction for New York...
...Congress went home without making a single serious effort to deal with racial bigotry, and it left behind, in undisputed possession of the Washington spotlight, its most contemptible exhibit of political intolerance, the McCarthy investigation...
...W^hile the inquiry was in progress, the hospital quietly decided to hire Negro scrub women for the first time...
...Sharing the platform with Mr...
...When Woodlawn Hospital found many elements in the community opposed to discrimination, it altered that policy...
...They were attending the Ormsby Village for Youth run by Unitarians, with a staff composed of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews...
...As one of the wisest of the Washington correspondents, Thomas L. Stokes, put it: "Bob Moses put his finger squarely on the President's dilemma, which is that there is an element in his party that holds little regard for social gains which the President pledged himself to keep, and that this element is powerful in Congress...
...The friend remarked, as Columnist Marquis Childs reports, that he thought the Eisenhower Administration's principal trouble was that it had no philosophy of government...
...Unfortunately," he said, "recent cuts by Congress have indicated a deplorable resurgence of hard-boiled reactionaries to whom acreage is more important than people...
...Two developments in the current harvest seem to us especially noteworthy for pointing up the hope in local and neighborhood action...
...they are better organized . . . detection is more difficult . . . [and they] are reorganizing their forces more effectively...
...II Perhaps the best example of our point was provided by the President himself...
...Investigators for the California legislature appeared on the verge of taking a hand, too, but the aroused citizens of the county refused to be bullied...
...But, he went on, there was no justification for recent Congressional action in slashing the modest federal housing program nearly in half for this year and dooming it altogether for the future...
...Hope Chest OFTEN, when the struggle for freedom and tolerance seems to falter in the nation's capital, hope can be found quietly holding its own on the Main Streets of America...
...Moses' moderate Republican view...
...they are better organized and detection is more difficult...
Vol. 17 • October 1953 • No. 10
