The First Sowing
The Progressive 'Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17 March, 1953 Number 3 The First Sowing IT WILL be mid-summer before the Eisenhower Administration produces the...
...his call for extension of old-age insurance to cover the millions of Americans not now protected...
...Bully-Boy In the People's Forum, on Page 31 of this issue, a Wisconsin clergyman tells how the fear of Sen...
...or Archbishop Cushing of Boston, who demanded revision of the law to "purge it of several unchristian and un-American provisions...
...Eisenhower was indifferent to the need for stand-by legislation to become effective only if the inflationary spiral soars out of sight again...
...The crop prediction on this basis, it seems to us, ranges downward from good in a few fields, through fair in several others, to downright bad in the rest...
...his promise to drive race discrimination out of the Army and the nation's capital (although he indicated a regrettable unwillingness to go beyond "persuasion" and "education" in the struggle for civil rights in the rest of the country...
...It was told recently by Lindsay Hoben, chief editorial writer for the Milwaukee Journal, in Nieman Reports, the publication of the Alumni Council of former Nieman Fellows at Harvard University...
...There has been no conference at that level since just before the end of World War II...
...Morse predicted: "The time is not far distant when there will be a call for a new party...
...Pat McCarran's inflexible custom of dismissing all his critics as Communists, or at least leftists or crackpots, bounced back and hit him where it hurts recently...
...Certainly there is every prospect that the President's power to lead will never be greater than during his first month in office...
...But the melancholy fact seems to be that we have succeeded 1) in causing more consternation and alarm among our friends than our adversaries, and 2) in driving China and the Soviet Union closer together...
...The magazine had born the name, proudly, for 40 years...
...He recognized the desperate plight of the schools, but wondered if the states and localities couldn't meet the need...
...In last month's Progressive Willard Shelton reported how fear of McCarthy paralyzed the Senate of the United States into inaction in the face of an investigating committee report that the Wisconsin Republican had engaged in the most flagrant financial shenanigans, including the acceptance of payments, loans and tips from private interests with a stake in federal legislation...
...Left-Wingers' Sen...
...He opposed "existing inequalities" in the tax laws, but he didn't indicate whether he meant the excess profits tax, so despised by his big business Cabinet, or the shocking loopholes through which wealth escapes its share of the tax load...
...The standard argument against negotiation—that it is useless to try because the Soviets have torpedoed conference after conference by refusing to engage in genuine give-and-take—has considerable validity if applied to every level of negotiation but the very highest...
...O'Grady, "that many Italians, on the basis of complete disillusionment in regard to our immigration legislation, may vote for the Communists in the next election...
...Newspapers which have criticised his un-American tactics have been threatened with boycotts and smeared as local editions of the Daily Worker...
...I asked those Democrats—what about the country...
...Both spoke of the crises in the Far East and the Middle East as though Communism were the only problem...
...Meet the Press" has a deserved reputation for asking tough questions its guests would prefer to ignore, but on this occasion the reporters preferred to play characters in a soap opera...
...Yes, but true...
...Neither paid even passing notice to the insistence on independence and the hunger for a better life which are the dominant driving force in the tension areas of the world...
...Wayne Morse poured out the bitter loneliness of his struggle against the big business domination of the Eisenhower Administration in a little publicized speech before leading Democrats in Washington recently...
...Eleanor Roosevelt, who has sat through hundreds of brawling, time-consuming UN debates with Soviet delegates, agrees that the latter are too terrified to be real negotiators or to budge "a kopeck's worth publicly or over the confidence of a teacup...
...Edward P. Morgan, formerly chief inspector of the FBI in charge of anti-Communist investigations, has been pilloried as an "influence peddler" and summoned to appear before McCarthy's investigating committee because he had the patriotism to expose the fraudulent character of McCarthy's charges in the Wisconsin campaign last fall...
...should be confirmed in the hope that these officeholders would embarrass the Republican Party later on...
...The Administration has implied its purpose was thus psychological rather than military, that its order was largely intended to keep the Communists guessing and worrying...
...Guilt by Guess Mrs...
...Even if negotiation were unpopular with the people—and every poll of public opinion has shown the contrary to be true—it is clear that the nation, at the very least, would have tolerated a genuine effort by the man to whom it had just entrusted its votes and its hopes...
...He rejected the notion of Senate Democrats that Wilson & Co...
...The Slippery-Elm Club The source of McCarthy's power to terrify critics into silence is not hard to find...
...Morse said, adding he thought they were "gutless wonders...
...Only Lawrence Spivak, who owns the show with Miss Roundtree, ventured to ask a probing question, and that came only as the clock was ticking out the last minutes of the show...
...Press and • public in Britain and France have expressed alarm over the possibility that the effect of egging Chiang on may be a tragic widening of the war in Asia...
...Kennan, quite rightly, has no faith that negotiation will produce "sudden global results," but— "We have all learned that negotiation from weakness is worse than futile...
...This newest shift in the party line is good news for The Progressive as a publication, but there's trouble ahead for progressive organizations...
...But in the month that has followed the new regime has succeeded only in speeding up the process of self-entrapment...
...Notes in the News FIVE years ago, when the Communists launched their Progressive Party, we of The Progressive were exhorted by many of our friends to change our name lest we be confused with the Red comrades...
...Leon Keyserling, wife of the Fair Deal chairman of the President's Board of Economic Advisers, has finally had her good name restored after a year and a half of nagging harassment had failed to turn up any evidence that she was a Communist as charged...
...or Bishop McVinney of Providence, who said he was "shocked to see Hitler's principles retained in our legislation, particularly after we have fought a war to eradicate his ideas...
...Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune, Jack Bell of the Associated Press, May Craig of the Portland Press-Herald, and Martha Roundtree, who runs the program, smothered McCarthy with affectionate embraces and tea party chit-chat...
...With many of his Democratic Senate colleagues in the audience, Morse denounced them for failing to help when he was fighting for a place on Senate committees and for standing silently by while Charles E. Wilson and other Eisenhower appointees were confirmed...
...The pessimism in this prophecy has mounted as the Administration has moved from the general to the specific, from, for example, the universally acclaimed generalities of the President's inaugural address to the disturbing particulars of his State of the Union message...
...Actually, the crazy quirks in the line being what they are, they might today find a more hospitable recep-tionxin the camp of Smith & Co...
...The first seeds of the Eisenhower Administration are not good...
...It would be an affront to our democratic theories and sensibilities if he were to tear up the script on which he campaigned for office and pursue the opposite course from the one he pledged when he sought and won a mandate from the people...
...A few days after release of the Senate report exposing McCarthy's contemptible conduct the Senator appeared on "Reporter's Round-Up," a Mutual program in which a public figure is interviewed by a group of Washington correspondents...
...Marshall Field had a lawyer, now dead, who was married to a woman who was the sister of the wife of the chief editorial writer of the Milwaukee Journal...
...Only Stalin is free to give and take, which means that "if East and West are ever to come to any living terms, it will have to be done on the highest level...
...During the late campaign he yearned out loud for a chance to beat some sense into Ad-lai Stevenson with a slippery-elm club...
...There is nothing in the pronouncement in the Daily Worker to indicate that the Communists plan to infiltrate the anti-Semitic organizations run by characters like Gerald L. K. Smith, but that may come later...
...It is in the high-tension area of foreign affairs that the words and deeds of the new regime are producing immediate results—almost all bad...
...This is all the more necessary from the standpoint of our relations with our allies and other associates among the peace-loving nations...
...and his determination to end Congressional policing of loyalty in government and clear the air of "unreasoned suspicion that accepts rumor and gossip as substitutes for evidence...
...They had an unprecedented opportunity to reeducate the nation to a more creative course in foreign policy, but they chose instead to surrender without a scrap to the "get tough" crowd in the Republican Party...
...Lest the Republicans assume they are inoculated against contamination, the national committee of the CPUSA has blandly directed that "we must also associate ourselves with the many millions who voted for Eisenhower primarily because of their peace aspirations...
...It is essential, if we are to retain their confidence and support, that they be convinced that our policies are directed toward the gradual development of world conditions, not the holocaust of another war...
...but many of us have still to learn that strength is not a substitute for negotiation and that it is idle to press your adversary against a closed door...
...Keyserling at the house of friends, where nothing very much happened...
...In this country, however, large segments of the press shamelessly abdicated their responsibility to tell the whole story...
...Dulles was the total lack of the slightest awareness that revolution is raging over more than half the earth...
...Assistant^ Secretary of the Navy for Air John F. Floberg has been threatened with reprisals because he told the simple truth that McCarthy recently got a fist-full of medals as a result of applying for them...
...The conclusion...
...He didn't get the chance, but he has wielded the club of brutal revenge on others who have dared cross his path...
...Channels must be left open into which he can move, as when a clearer appreciation of realities comes upon him...
...Not a single correspondent dared ask a single question of McCarthy regarding the disclosures in the Senate report...
...The economic aspects of the President's program are not likely to change conditions so long as our war boom continues...
...There is another true story just as good—and just as frightening...
...The Communists have now justified our faith in the transient character of their enterprise...
...Speaking at a Franklin Roosevelt Day dinner, the Oregon Independent didn't let the occasion keep him from tearing into the "doctrinaire liberals" who learned what to believe under F.D.R...
...His order to the Seventh Fleet to cease preventing raids from Formosa against the coast of Red China has angered and frightened our friends, with no discernible dividends for us except to appease U. S. disciples of Chiang Kai-shek...
...As we noted some 2,000 words back, it is much too early to pass fair judgment on the coming harvest, but seeds obviously reproduce their kind...
...Their national committee has "confessed" in the columns of the Daily Worker that it was a mistake to have created the Progressive Party to begin with, and an even greater mistake not to have admitted the original mistake much sooner...
...you say...
...The "evidence" which smeared her name over the front pages of the country was too frivolous, the Loyalty Board decided, to warrant disciplinary action...
...The President and his Secretary of State possessed unusual freedom of action when they took command, but they proceeded to squander it away with extraordinary recklessness...
...The Journal is eminently respectable and relatively conservative, in fact almost stodgily so—and it has had the decency and courage to oppose McCarthy...
...In our February issue we expressed the friendly hope that the Eisenhower Administration would use its great freedom of maneuver to break clear of the chain reaction of threat and counter-threat, move and counter-move, in our relations with the Soviet Union, in which the Truman Administration had been trapped for so long...
...He saw the need for federal protection of our natural resources, but temporized a moment later by speculating whether the states, communities, and private individuals shouldn't have a share in their control...
...There is a great danger," said Msgr...
...In contrast with these evasions, the President was a model of clarity and vigor in calling for a free market economy, in which planning for full employment and economic expansion are sacrificed to the gods of competition and "natural economic laws...
...This has happened to Miles McMillin, editorial writer for the Madison Capital Times, who has done a brilliant job of ferreting out some of the most sinister aspects of McCarthyism,' and Robert Fleming, political writer of the Milwaukee Journal, who was first to expose the fact that McCarthy received his widely publicized "war wounds" not in military action but as the result of a drinking bout during the ceremonies which attended his crossing of the Equator in the Pacific...
...Faced with mounting protest against the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, which denies asylum to those who need it most by retaining the national origin quota system, the Nevadan has angrily insisted all the criticism was coming from "left-wingers" and "ready colleagues of out-and-out Reds...
...None of them showed the slightest interest in discovering what McCarthy had to say regarding the serious questions about his fitness to serve in the Senate raised by the Senate investigating committee...
...For instance: • He had nothing specific to say about health or housing programs...
...democracy is a fraud...
...President Eisenhower's first official act in foreign affairs has advanced this central aim of the Soviets...
...II It was fashionable in the Truman Administration and it is still in style with the Eisenhower Administration to talk of the need to build military strength as a prior condition to negotiations, but to act as though military might were an end in itself...
...Several weeks later the Senator was a guest of the "Meet the Press" program on NBC radio and television...
...The original and compounding mistakes became clear to the comrades when the 1948 vote of 1,000,000, less than a fifth of the total they expected, trailed away to a miserable 140,000 in 1952...
...Even more menacing than McCarthy's slippery-elm club of vengeance is his curious capacity to turn up with other people's private mail— especially when the other people are his critics...
...Newspaper men are reputed to be a tougher breed, but they, too, seem to have knuckled under McCarthy's bully-boy tactics...
...But it would seem at least equally relevant to hope, now that the campaign is long over, that the Administration might dispense with the kind of exaggeration and headlines-hunting which are the traditional currency of an opposition party seeking political power...
...The shocking fact about the many thousands of words uttered by the President and Mr...
...Specifically marked for infiltration are the Americans for Democratic Action, the Liberal Party of New York, the Democratic Party, the AFL, the CIO, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, all of which are militantly anti-Communist...
...Marshall Field owned PM...
...It was the perfect moment to call for a new slate and propose high level negotiation in order to determine, for the first time since the end of World War II, whether it is possible to reach a live-and-let-live agreement with the Kremlin...
...In the realm broadly known as social welfare— health, housing, education, and civil rights—the new Administration has doomed ancient needs to continued neglect...
...India, whose support is crucial in the struggle for the friendship of Asia, reacted so bitterly, the New York Times reported, that "not since India gained her independence has a President of the United States been criticized in such biting terms as were heaped on President Eisenhower...
...it would continue to wear it, we hoped, long after the Stalinists abandoned their scheme to lure innocents and well-meaning liberals into the Red ranks by purloining the Progressive label...
...by listening to fireside chats and now lack either "the brains or the guts" to act for themselves...
...The Senator has retaliated by accusing the Journal of following the Communist line, and here is how he proved his case: The late New York daily PM was "pro-Communist...
...Price, wage, and most rent controls were quickly doomed, which surprised no one, but there was considerable astonishment that Mr...
...Keyserling was a Communist...
...The Progressive 'Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17 March, 1953 Number 3 The First Sowing IT WILL be mid-summer before the Eisenhower Administration produces the first full harvest we can fairly inspect and judge, but it is possible to formulate a tentative estimate on the basis of at least one major ingredient—the quality of the seeds sown in this first month of planting...
...The Journal, Q.E.D., is Communist-controlled...
...If there were any surprise in the domestic program unveiled by President Eisenhower, it was the lack of clear-cut conviction on many of the major issues...
...Members of the staff of the Senate committee which investigated him have been fired, and this goes for the girl who typed the report...
...For the new line, which is an old line, directs the comrades to wiggle their way into non-Communist and anti-Communist organizations in order to "re-establish contact with the masses...
...On the credit side were the President's emphatic demand for reform of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act...
...Incredible...
...After much brooding, we decided against surrendering so ancient and honorable a name to the enemies of progressivism...
...The central emphasis of [Soviet] policy lies not in the prospect of head-on confrontation, but . . . the development and exploitation of divisions [within the free world...
...And neither seemed even casually interested in the idea that a new Administration has an exceptional opportunity to reopen direct negotiations with the Soviet Union...
...Most papers were disinclined to inform their readers that Chiang Kai-shek, with our un-publicized blessing, has been conducting all the raids he could manage against the coast of Red China from the Pescadores and other islands much nearer the Communist mainland than Formosa...
...Joseph McCarthy cowed a community...
...It is absurd, of course, for liberals to expect President Eisenhower to act differently from the rock-ribbed conservative he is...
...But two years later, this man testified, he had gone to the same home and met three other people who, he felt, had not condemned the Soviet invasion of Finland...
...The folly of such a course was best described recently by George F. Kennan, our former ambassador to Russia who is widely regarded as the best informed American on the Soviet Union...
...The wide-ranging repercussions of the McCarran-Walter Act were reported from Rome recently by Monsignor John O'Grady, who warned that the Communists are effectively exploiting the restrictive provisions of the law as clear proof that U.S...
...But Catholic journals which have lashed out at the bigotry in McCarran's law promptly demanded to know if the Senator's sweeping characterization included Cardinal Mooney of Detroit, who denounced the law as "discriminatory," and its quota system as "undemocratic and ridiculous...
...He liked the reciprocal tariff idea, but wanted industry, agriculture, and labor "protected...
...One-Man Band Sen...
...than they will by crawling under the tent of organizations like ADA and the NAACP, whose members know from experience what mayhem can be committed in the name of "solidarity" and the "popular front...
...One of the charges against her, believe us, went like this: A man met Mrs...
...William T. Evjue, crusading editor of the Madison Capital Times, who has militantly led the fight against McCarthy in Wisconsin, found his application for a television station opposed before the Federal Communications Commission by McCarthy...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
