OUR LANGUID LIBERALS

...The eggheads who were interviewed have little more to offer than their sachem, Stevenson...

...Douglas, who has spent summer after summer in the Middle East and the Far East and who proposed the Point Four Program—and what ever became of it?—two years before Truman announced it, has suggested a Point Five Program whereby political and technical missionaries from the United States would encourage and help the nations of Asia and Africa to rid themselves of their colonial overlords before the Communists get to them (those the Communists haven't already got to) first...

...Not one even came up with a specific idea, save Rauh with his "massive export of capital"—and is that new...

...and striving to restore to all Americans their constitutional liberties by bringing the Bill of Rights back to life...

...The "We Liberals" participating in the symposium were all Democrats, to the best of my knowledge, except old Socialist war-horse Norman Thomas, Alex Rose of the impotent Liberal Party, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, who seems to be politically unsegregated...

...They —or We—included Stevenson, Harri-man, Morse, Meyner, Humphrey, Schlesinger, Ben Cohen, Joe Rauh, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others...

...Anyone think the Democrats would have done any better with Harriman...

...Of the Lib-Dems pumped by the Post for Lib-Dem direction-signs, two were governors...

...The opposition always has the responsibility to undertake a sustained and critical scrutiny of the Administration's program," he minces on...

...I don't speak of "civil rights" because that phrase today is used almost exclusively to refer to the rights of Negroes to vote, to go whole-hog unsegregated, to be treated equally...

...The Liberal Party's Alex Rose, after doing some lengthy deploring, is asked how he would rouse people out of complacency and replies thus: "If I was the man who had the answers, I'd be a miracle man...

...Note the "All...

...The Post did not ask me—after all, I'm not a leader of anything—but I offer them gratis, with The Progressive's permission, this supplement to their series...

...There are your issues, gentlemen, provided you've got the guts to get yourselves up off the floor and fight for them...

...It is the business of saving our civil liberties, right here at home, from an insidiously contagious attack which, in the name of national security, has all but undermined them...

...1 am no expert in the field...

...Now, there's courageous idealism for you...

...The pages of The Progressive have teemed for years past with precise specifications, drawn up by experts, for a foreign policy—in Europe, in Asia, in Africa —that makes sense...

...I mean the right of every American not to be punished, be the form of his punishment technically criminal-—being jailed or fined—or non-criminal but often worse—being fired from his job or deported—without a fair trial and a chance to answer the charges against him...

...It isn't a movement . . . The best it can do is to campaign in the language of Roosevelt or at least Truman— and that's not good enough...

...As for Joseph Clark, new Senator from Pennsylvania, he explains: "What has happened is that our social and economic realities are outrunning our political arrangements...

...Not one of them, save Lehman—and even he was a bit ambiguous—so much as whispered a protest against the official whittling away of the Bill of Rights...

...Recently, I read a series of articles in the New York Post entitled, alternately, "Where Do Liberals Go From Here...

...Makes the nation's leading liberals sound just a little bit silly, doesn't he...

...Any further questions as to why Adlai Stevenson twice lost the Presidency of the United States...

...What I mean by civil liberties is something which could be said to include the special set of rights that Negroes, long disgracefully deprived of them, are fighting for, but which is far broader and which directly affects every one of us, black or white, conservative or liberal...

...All these quotes come from a little book titled National Security and Individual Freedom...

...Please, Mr...

...True, most of those interviewed in the Post series did mention our foreign policy, but they mentioned it timidly, hopelessly, and planlessly...

...Further: "A liberal Administration is likely to be more imaginative in the foreign field than a conservative one, but it is difficult to say just what a 'liberal' foreign policy is...

...Here and in bemoaning, however accurately, that there are "so few younger men who are the moral equivalent of many people whom you could name in former generations," she herself is far less than the exuberant, fighting First Lady of old...

...And one more: "It cannot well be denied that our government officials have embarked on a fatuous policy which in effect is aiming to guide and constrain citizens as well as aliens in the exercise of liberties guaranteed to them by the First Amendment and the other provisions of the Bill of Rights...

...I mean all those guarantees of individual liberty and guards against government tyranny that are written plain in the Constitution as sine qua nons of democracy and decency among men...

...has to be adopted...

...Asked whether he is with Senators Humphrey and Morse against Johnson and Rayburn in the intra-Democratic Party battle in Congress, he replied—and you figure it out: "I never care to apply labels...

...Editor, send that man a subscription to The Progressive on me...

...If Senators wax platitudinous or cautious because of what are politely called political considerations, the heads of leftish organizations sound no more militant or imaginative...

...As for New York's Harriman, he's willing to fight but not exactly for anything...

...There is the record, written by liberals, of where liberalism is to go from here...

...A Senator named Kefau-ver was also advertised as one of the Post's interviewees, but his only directly quoted comment is: "After an election, one must have a period of tranquillity and resting...

...The Post series winds up with the words of three aged-in-the-wood political veterans...

...One man who was not interviewed by the Post recently had something to say, however, about these matters...

...Asked to outline such a policy, he says: "You can't set out a program . . . etc...

...This is not the place for me to detail an international program...

...And Norman Thomas has given up too...

...And Ben Cohen, once a top idea-man for F.D.R., says startlingly: "I'm for making our goals broad...

...Take a look at a few ol them and judge for yourself whether I overstate— Says Adlai Stevenson, leading the pall-bearers: "To inflame people with a liberal spirit at a time of cultivated complacency is very difficult, very difficult indeed"—and the cultivated complacency of his own tone exudes from even the written words...

...Said this man, of the Smith and McCarran Acts, they "imported into our law the alien doctrine of guilt by association which up to this time had been regarded as abhorrent...

...Bowles, simply by his humane and emphatic attitude toward India's people and problems, did more for Indo-American relations than could a billion dollars' worth of economic and military bribes...

...Sounding exactly like him, she adds: "I do feel a great deal can be accomplished in the clarification of issues...

...Though left unlabeled by Stevenson, Morse and Humphrey were among the Senators interviewed by the Post...

...Senate on the Republican ticket, and his name is John Lord O'Brian...

...And "we need an imaginative program . . . etc...

...those few of the Post's panel who so much as mentioned civil rights so used it...

...It is these that we are today in desperate danger of losing— or rather of tossing carelessly away— what with our Smith and McCarran Acts (more vicious even than the old, reviled, and quickly repealed Sedition and Alien Laws) and our "loyalty" programs and "security" checks and our whole spreading spider-web of laws and orders, inquiries and investigations, designed not just to catch Communists but to force, out of fcir, political conformity on all of us...

...approach to the people of that resource-rich and pregnant continent...

...Remember when the U.S...

...It exploded the Teapot Dome scandal smack in the lace ol the Harding Administration...

...Where, then, do—or should—the liberals go from here...

...And though I have long admired all these people with varying degrees of enthusiasm, when I finished reading about where We Liberal Democrats go from here, I myself went quietly to the bathroom and, in Dorothy Parker's immortal phrase, fwowed up...

...He does say, though: "I never favor starting a fight unless I can be sure of winning it...

...What the Democrats need are some techniques of their own, as to which he has "no precise suggestions...

...Not one came up with a single constructive or new or different idea...

...We've got to fight Republican complacency and smugness . . . etc...

...ADA's Joe Rauh supposes: "The liberalism of the next ten years . . . may well be trying to rebuild democracy abroad, the liberalism of federalism, the liberalism of a massive export of capital...

...Apparently, the spider-web scared the daylights out of leaders of liberalism participating in the Post series...

...He says health insurance will soon become "a fighting cry"—and I can just hear it echoing from the TV's on the rooftops...

...Well, gentlemen of a liberal persuasion, there are your issues: helping to keep the world at peace by working for a wise and humane and, perforce, radically revised foreign policy toward all the other peoples on earth...

...That issue, that awe-full problem, has as perhaps its major facet the foreign policy of the United Slates...

...Nauseating, except for Lehman, isn't it...

...Asked whether he would have favored a rather mild and gradual plan to get the Russians out of Hungary, he sticks his neck way out with: "That might possibly have worked...

...Sub-sachem Arthur Schlesinger thinks "new times call for new issues" and suggests education, health insurance, and city planning...

...With a silent nod back to F.D.R., his widow insists: "You can't do it without leadership" —but she still sticks to Adlai Stevenson as her chosen leader...

...Only the NAACP's Wilkins is bipartisanly buoyant: "We're in a better bargaining position than in many years"—and of course his We means Negroes, not Liberals—because "in the last election the Democratic Negro vote around the country dropped 13 to 14 per cent—and so now we're in business...

...1 mean the First Amendment's famous freedoms of speech and press and assembly and religion...

...That's good enough lor me—as well as being inordinately better than the evasive vagueness of the panel of liberals interviewed by the Post...

...It investigated labor-baiting and lobbying and financial finagling and even J. P. Morgan, complete with midget...

...The big issues of our time are two and two only, though each has many angles and facets and sharp, sharp edges: The first is the peace of the world...

...What all these, and others, add up to is the scrapping of the Buy, Bribe, and Bully approach that has brought us to the brink so often, most recently (as I write) in Egypt, for an approach that respects the dignity and the aspirations of other peoples and uncondescendingly offers our skills and our physcial resources to help achieve them...

...Further: "The use in practice of the Attorney General's list of alleged subversive organizations illustrates the indirect but restrictive governmental pressure in the direction of thought control...

...These mish-mashy mumblings, these restrained hand-wringings and head-shakings, these Gee-Fellows generalities...

...Then, when it got into power, it sired the New Deal and the Fair Deal, TVA's and AAA's, SEC's and social security, laws to help unions and funds to build schools, the Good Neighbor Policy and the United Nations and a lot more...

...Thomas Finletter is satisfied that "the Democratic Party has all the ideas it needs"—that's a direct quote, so help me—but the mean old Republicans have all the "techniques...

...So these are our goals, our fighting faiths, for the years just ahead, are they...

...A realist at any rate, that Wilkins...

...Whether we can succeed or not depends on how much Republican support we get," adds Humphrey—and goes on to doubt whether We can get much...

...Sixteen out of seventeen "leaders" of the anti-Communist American left, lying down without plan or purpose or punch and weeping that they are out of power, as they meekly succumb to what William S. White, in a truly magnificent phrase, has called "the mannered tameness of our times...

...period...

...New Jersey's Meyner harrumphs: "I'm inclined to believe that a liberal policy arises from the exigencies of the moment rather than from any prior planning," but he specifies not a single exigency of this moment...

...About the other big issue of our tune 1 know a little more...

...He was—and is—a highly respected elder statesman of the American bar, a one-time candidate for the U.S...

...and "Where Do We Go From Here...

...A fight is worth while," says Lehman, "even if you know you're going to lose it . . . And in the end I've seen many hopeless causes win out...

...Leon Keyserling insists we must reali'ze that "full employment is here to stay" and so his pet new issue for liberals is $200-a-month pensions for oldsters—a notion diat a man named Townsend had twenty-odd years back...

...No, its author was not Earl Browder or Eugene Dennis...

...He blasts the liberals for their "failure of nerve" that has made them "run away" from the big issues—and he lists those issues, from civil rights (mentioned by two or three others in a desultory and Negro-narrowed way) to "the Administration's grievous record in foreign affairs...

...but I have read and listened to and been convinced by people who are...

...I regret that those of Eleanor Roosevelt and Norman Thomas are scarcely words of wisdom —or of inspiration...

...Discussing "loyalty" hearings, he labeled "the use as evidence of secret information from anonymous informants regarding whose reliability or competence even the hearing officers have no information" as one of several "procedural processes . . . which until recently have been denounced as foreign to the American conception of freedom...

...It made wickedly effective fun of Coolidge complacency and of Hoover pseudo-prosperity with those apple salesmen just around every corner...

...The problem must somehow be dramatized for people . . ." Note the "somehow...

...Are you listening, young Governor Meyner and all the rest...

...Disconsolately" is the Post's description of how he said it...

...I don't know...

...What are—or ought to be—the big fighting issues around which liberals could and should rally...

...Anticlimactic once again, he adds: "Will such an approach excite people...

...For instance, Justice Douglas and former Ambassador Bowles, both of them on-the-spot intimate with Asia and her problems, have pleaded in books and speeches and in full detail for a radically revised U.S...

...Not one of them, save Lehman, called for a root-deep revision of a program and an approach that are not based on the arrogantly unpeneptive notion that we can buy or bully other nations and people to "our side...

...Opines Morse: "All the liberals can do is to lay before the American people the program that FRED RODELL, professor of law at Yale, is the author of "Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790-1955," "Fifty-five Men: The Story of the Constitution," and, soon to be re-issued, "Woe Unto You, Lawyers...

...Asked if a liberal foreign policy could be sold the voters, Harriman says: "Well, . . . etc...

...Asked where the liberal movement goes from here, he answers bluntly: "It goes to hell...

...Last fall, I heard Bowles talk on foreign affairs a couple of days after I heard Adlai Stevenson —and the difference was like coming into sunlight out of fog...

...Senate was graced and gritted by men like Robert LaFollette and George Norris (not even Democrats, these) and Hugo Black and Robert Wagner...

...I quote him here lest I be suspected of exaggerating their importance because 1 feel so strongly about them myself...

...Yes, once upon a time there was a Democratic Party...

...Yet, alone of all those the Post interviewed, the third veteran, retired Senator Lehman, speaks out with fire and with hope...

...Out or in, it was agin the Interests and for the Peepid and it was fun to belong to and fight for...