The Test Ahead, The Issue in Korea
The Progressive "Ye Shall Know the Trufh and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17 The Test Ahead THE CAROLERS have . been stealing into our hearts again with the everlasting beauty of the...
...No," replied Bunche...
...Any other kind would be less than useless, of course...
...I work for the UN...
...It was not until Britain and Canada and some of our other allies shamed us into taking a longer look at it and warned us that we were kicking away a chance to put the onus for rejection on the Russians that we reversed ourselves—only to have the Soviet Union pulverize the last hope by rejecting the plan...
...top officials of UNESCO quit in protest against budget reduction...
...The test will come, not on how high they maintain the level of rearmament for ourselves and our allies, but on what they do to breathe new life into the challenging concept of Point Four...
...If you must betray democracy in order to save it, why bother...
...American public opinion is far less hostile to negotiation than the politicians suspect...
...It had long been established to his satisfaction that the simple theme 'it cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth' was an extraordinarily successful way to sell Colgate toothpaste...
...Meeting up with Ralph J. Bunche, principal director of the UN's Trusteeship Division, Eisenhower asked: "Is your individual place here as a member of the American delegation...
...It is clear enough that the Soviet Union's harsh insistence on having things all her own way has repeatedly gutted the hope of agreement...
...The priest was Father Leon Sullivan, O.F.M., whose righteous wrath on the subject of McCarthy-ism and the clergy who embrace it, is a refreshing contrast to the timid acquiescence of so many of the clergy, of all faiths...
...And so it would be...
...4 may not know it but they made their choice much the same way they choose their brand of toothpaste—that is, if they finally resolved their doubts in favor of the Republicans...
...The Community Development Program, dedicated to a village-to-village attack on poverty, disease, and illiteracy, strikes at the very roots of the hopelessness and frustration which drive the hungry and homeless to Communism...
...In violation of the true spirit of negotiation, we, much like the Russians, have coldly turned our backs on virtually every compromise proposed to the UN...
...Writing in Pathfinder, in response to the question, "What is the best way to combat Communism...
...Comments on McCarthy The past month produced two comments on McCarthyism—-one a carefully-phrased indictment by FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover, and the other a searing attack by a priest who reports he has seen something remarkably like McCarthyism do its corrupting work in Communist China...
...It is worth a try even if we find as a result that the Russians aren't interested in any settlement, no matter how much we give on the POW or any other issue, but prefer to keep us pinned down in Korea...
...This isn't very much—in fact, an almost invisible fraction of one per cent of the wealth we are pouring into rearmament—but the returns may well be many times more rewarding and productive in the long run...
...It was in 1952 that we embarked on the first significant venture to give meaning and substance to Arnold J. Toynbee's wistful prophecy that "our age will be remembered not for its horrifying crimes or its astonishing inventions, but because it is the first age since the dawn of history in which mankind dared to believe it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race...
...My missionary career in China ended in a Communist court in which accusations were taken as facts, charges as proofs, and in which the police announced that 'defense is not necessary...
...II Lippmann exposed another serious weakness in the American position when he wrote: "Let us remember that any extension of the war, anywhere, in Asia or Europe, is almost certain to mean that there will be masses of prisoners in Communist hands...
...The AFL Reporter documents this in Cleveland, Detroit, and Youngstown...
...On the affirmative side, there was a measure of gain, too—not much tangibly, as these things are reckoned, but in an area of such boundless potentiality that even a thimble-full is capable of firing the weary and cheering the cynical...
...Gordon Cotler told the curious story behind the master-minding of the huge GOP spot announcement fund in a recent issue of The Reporter: "Reeves' main difficulty was in keeping each spot to one idea...
...Lie is my boss...
...Gallup, that "the idea of the commission of warring nations and neutrals originated with Russia's UN delegate, Andrei Vishinsky...
...There was a paper supporting Eisenhower in every major city in the land except Atlanta...
...Equally striking is the fact that Stevenson had not a single paper supporting his candidacy in nine states, while Eisenhower, of course, had press backing in every state...
...One week after Christmas is New Year's Day, traditionally a day for stock-taking of the year just gone and brave resolution for the year that lies ahead...
...There seems to have been nothing more remarkable involved than a great deal of hard work, honest leadership, and precinct-by-precinct organization by an efficient city machine that operates without the conventional pay-offs to grease the works...
...If those of us who hold the responsibility for the newspapers of America should fail in our mission, if we should make our readers turn away from us in disgust and disillusionment, we would lose our press freedom some day...
...Unhappily, however, Sigma Delta Chi faces a serious barrier—money—for few publishers are willing to finance a truly objective survey...
...In precinct after precinct Stevenson not only held the Democratic vote but increased it over 1948, but Eisenhower captured a lop-sided proportion of the new vote which, in the labor wards as elsewhere, came largely from women and young people...
...The months just ahead will determine how much or how little the Republicans understand about the revolutionary world in which they have been chosen to lead...
...It is not the first of their great and critical blunders in the conduct of the war...
...The Progressive "Ye Shall Know the Trufh and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17 The Test Ahead THE CAROLERS have . been stealing into our hearts again with the everlasting beauty of the Christmas songs...
...T think of a man in a voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were choosing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drugstore', Reeves has since observed...
...What is less well known—given the kind of press we have—is the fact that the United States has played a far from defensible role in the long and bitter negotiations...
...Could anything be more dangerous than to make it the law that if the detaining power can induce its prisoners to 'refuse' repatriation, they may never come home...
...that tensions in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Malaya, Tunisia, Morocco, India, and Pakistan did not explode into armed conflict...
...It's the one-minute and 30-second radio and television spots that tipped them to Eisenhower, according to Rosser Reeves, New York advertising man who wrote the $2,000,000 advertising campaign for the GOP...
...Their pact led to the creation of the Indo-Amer-ican Development Fund, for which we have appropriated $100,000,000 and the Indians twice as much...
...Caught in a crossfire of Know-Knothing criticism by the Far Right in the United States and the crippling tactics of the Great Powers, the UN is experiencing what Ralph J. Bunche described as the "darkest days" of its turbulent career...
...Our officials and our press have sought to create the impression that we are legally and morally on unassailable ground when we refuse to send back to their homes Chinese and North Korean prisoners who say they do not want to return...
...Truman carried it by 6,000 votes, but Eisenhower carried the county by 2,000 as the total number of voters increased by 15,000, many of whom were children of life-long Democrats...
...As Walter Lippmann has pointed out, '"There is not a word in the Treaty about voluntary repatriation"—the principle on which we now insist in Korea...
...The Issue in Korea THE NEW YEAR opens with the United Nations, custodian of the world's hopes for peace, fighting for its very life...
...Bunche did not return the laugh, nor was there time for explanations, but perhaps the general has heard by now that Bunche turned down a top State Department post because as a Negro he did not want to expose his family, and especially the children, to the cruelties of the capital's notorious segregation system...
...Only last month a Gallup Poll showed 65 per cent of those questioned favoring a plan to have "the UN name a committee made up of an equal number from Communist, Allied, and neutral nations, to try to settle the Korean War...
...and that, generally, the Cold War did not noticeably undergo a change in temperature for the worse...
...when we arrest you, you're guilty...
...For there is nothing in the convention which expressly forbids such a humane and sensible way of dealing [with the problem...
...Some notion of the validity of Stevenson's indictment is found in a recent issue of Editor & Publisher: Eisenhower was supported by newspapers with 80.24% of the nation's readers, Stevenson by newspapers with only 14.52...
...a defense is only necessary in corrupt bourgeois society where they have corrupt officials.' "As a result of that experience, I cling desperately to a principle that is one of the foundation stones of our democratic way of life, the principle that man is innocent until he is proved guilty, and that includes people like Alger Hiss, too...
...Looking back over 1952, the realist find his crumbs of comfort mostly in the negative fact' that Korea and Indo-China did not flame into world war...
...Last summer, when he appeared before the drafters of the Republican platform, Walter Reuther said: "Until you understand the social phenomena of a deeply religious peasant who goes to high mass on Sunday morning and attends a Communist rally in the afternoon, you have missed understanding what makes the world go round...
...ADLAI STEVENSON'S scornful indictment of our "one-party press" still stings in the profession...
...God help all of us if we ever abandon that principle...
...Properly conducted, such an inquiry could shed a great deal of light on the role of the press in politics...
...II The hunger for a better life among the two-thirds of humanity who have known only fear and insecurity throughout the modern era is the central fact of life in our time...
...But it would seem to be just as indefensible to take so inNotes in the News transigent a position in negotiating the issue in view of our own costly blunders—or, by prolonging the war, to take an even greater toll in death and suffering than would be involved in sending reluctant POW's home...
...What made this verdict more remarkable than it may first seem is the fact, pointed out by Dr...
...Abraham Feller, general counsel, committed suicide in the face of relentless nagging by the McCarran Committee...
...them...
...We had become so accustomed to matching the Kremlin's "Nyet" with our "No" that we first rejected, automatically, the recent Indian proposal to settle what is popularly regarded as the one remaining roadblock to a truce—the prisoner-of-war (POW) issue...
...The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice, and the nature of the human brain is such that a one-minute or a thirty-second speech expertly crystallized gets a maximum penetration on its content.' " * * * Encounter at the UN Dwight Eisenhower played the issue of race discrimination with the greatest caution during the campaign, but he did allow himself one specific pledge—to drive Jim Crow out of the nation's capital...
...The Philadelphia chapter of Americans for Democratic Action worked more effectively than ADA has been able to function anywhere else in the country...
...We might discover, too, that the Chinese Communists are convinced that no armistice is possible so long as we are committed to Chiang Kai-shek, who is pledged to wage war to the death against the Peiping government, and so long as we refuse to allow Red China into the United Nations...
...It has burst out of its shell of silent despair...
...Its leadership has come from Clark and Richard Dilworth, district Attorney, a pair of bright, young, hard-hitting liberals who make politics a year-round career...
...Their voices ring out in joyous celebration of peace and love and hope, and for a moment that vanishes too soon our hearts seem not so heavy-laden with war and hate and fear...
...Britain and France served notice on the Assembly that Arab-Asian complaints of Great Power mis-rule in colonial areas was none of its business, and South Africa, taking its cue from the giants, blandly dismissed as "null and void" an Assembly resolution calling for an investigation of the race segregation policies of the Malan government...
...On Aug...
...It is the cunning exploitation of this hunger by the Communists that has driven us into making a modest contribution to the social and economic development of the underprivileged areas of the world...
...Rearmament and witch-hunting have claimed far more of our money and energy, although it must be clear by now that in the long run the appeal of Communism will not be exposed for the fraud it is by anything less than a greater and more appealing idea—a positive mobilization against poverty and hunger among the millions of underprivileged human beings who are today hunting for a more hopeful way of life...
...Events may soon force us to decide whether we prefer to widen the area of warfare or widen the area of negotiation...
...Their analysis of the vote in representative precincts shows that workers, for the most part, stuck with Stevenson, but that their womenfolk and children went chasing after strange Republican gods...
...Gallup Polls have repeatedly registered majority sentiment for broader and more intensive talks with the Communists...
...But what are the facts...
...This is the revolution," Nehru told a great throng of Indian villagers who had come by foot and donkey and camel to celebrate the Number 1 launching of the first 55 community area projects...
...If the Soviets have refused to budge in the interest of settlement, so have we...
...Stevenson had no newspaper support at all in such great metropolitan centers as Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Birmingham, and Baltimore...
...Its decisive action in resisting Red aggression in June, 1950, almost certainly saved the UN from the fatal paralysis that wrecked the League of Nations, but its subsequent failure to reach a give-and-take settlement is rapidly depleting the reserve of hope it built up two and a half years ago...
...The Philadelphia Story The fabulous showing of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia has sent many a political investigator scurrying into the City of Brotherly Love for "the inside story...
...Our official policy has been to ignore the fact that we are caught in a trap that is partly of our own making...
...we never make a mistake...
...The result was a 160,000-vote majority for Stevenson compared to President Truman's 6,000-vote margin in 1948—a walloping reversal of the national trend...
...Hoover replied: "Communism can be defeated by the truth—and only the truth...
...The more honest and for-waraVlooking leaders of American journalism recognize the soundness of much of the indictment and they sense the fact that the greatest menace to continued freedom lurks in the press itself...
...But Christmas is one day a year and its spirit lasts no longer...
...It was the Western Powers, not the Russians, who insisted on this provision because we were determined to prevent a recurrence of the situation which developed after World War II when the Communists detained many prisoners on the specious claim they preferred to live in the Soviet paradise...
...12, 1949, almost a year before war broke out in Korea, 59 nations signed the Geneva Convention which provided, in Article 118, that "prisoners-of-war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities...
...This is not a revolution based on chaos and the breaking of heads, but on the sustained effort to eradicate poverty...
...In a single month, Trygve Lie resigned as secretary-general after months of unspeakable abuse by the Soviets...
...Once the legal situation was realized, the remedy was obvious: it was to open the trap and to let the prisoners out by treating them as refugees...
...laughed Eisenhower...
...Vigilante attacks, irrational tirades, and forceful suppression are instruments which increase and do not decrease the menace...
...Sullivan wrote: "One thing that has appalled me since my return from the Far East a year ago is the indecent haste with which so many of the clergy run to embrace and canonize anyone who is 'anti-Communist.' "I would rather return to my Chinese Communist prison cell than avail myself of Sen...
...That Labor Vote Labor statisticians have been stewing with slide-rules and election charts to determine what happened to the labor vote in the 1952 elections...
...Let us remember how men 'confess' in Communist prisons...
...McCarthy's 'protection.' He is as great—if not a greater—threat to American freedom than the military might of the Kremlin, and, believe me, I do not underestimate either the Kremlin's might or its cleverness...
...We know of no simple formula for resolving the POW issue...
...Climbing to higher moral ground, we have argued that it would be an act of barbarism to return unwilling POW's whose names the Communists have...
...But we proceeded to send their names to the enemy as POWs, not stopping to think what this might mean to their families when the fighting ended...
...At its annual convention in Denver last month Sigma Delta Chi, professional journalism fraternity, authorized a "comprehensive survey" of coverage of the 1952 Presidential campaign...
...How," asks Lippmann, "could a State Department which negotiated the Geneva convention have failed to explain to the Pentagon the legal trap in which these deserting Chinese and North Koreans were caught...
...In a letter to The Commonweal, the distinguished Catholic weekly, Fr...
...It was just a year ago—in JanJanuary, 1953 uary, 1952—that Prime Minister Nehru and Ambassador Bowles met in New Delhi to sign the first Point Four agreement between India and the United States...
...Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner than it realizes, the Eisenhower Administration will have to face up to the question that goes to the heart of the conflict in Korea: Are we prepared to sit down and negotiate an over-all settlement in the Far East that recognizes the realities of Communist control of China...
...Although we were bound to exactly the opposite course by an agreement we had negotiated, our commanders in the field invited North Koreans and Chinese to desert to our side with the promise that we would take care of...
...We can't help but feel that there might be a better chance of resolving the POW issue if we of America would climb down from under our halo of self-righteousness...
...Toothpaste Tactics Voters who were still undecided when they made their way to the polls last Nov...
...Asked by the visiting firemen what new and unusual techniques had been developed, Mayor Joseph Clark, Jr., was obliged to blurt out an honest "I'll be damned if I know...
...Murray Kemp-ton of the New York Post confirms this conclusion with a survey of the vote in Bethlehem, Pa.,- in Northampton County, which has voted Democratic since 1928...
...It marches today as a revolutionary force surging southeastward from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and beyond...
...Barry Bingham, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, spoke for the small but enlightened minority in journalism when he wrote: "The only way freedom of the press can be destroyed in this country is by the press itself...
...A wholly unplanned dramatization of the harsh realities of segregation in Washington was enacted last month when the President-elect went calling at the United Nations...
...An enormous blunder has been committed by our own officials...
...We would then deserve to lose it...
...It isn't so black-or-white as either we or the Russians pretend...
...How the hell can America afford to let you do that...
...For the India fund is an investment in hope, a dowivpayment on a free society in the most strategic area on earth...
...Vastly more harmful than these setbacks, however, has been the failure of the UN to find a formula for peace in Korea...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
