THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Egypt Is Withering Dear Sirs: I have just come from a visit to Egypt. I admit I am confused. So many conflicting statements. Some say that Nasser is a dictator, a Hitler, a...
...And an essay like Mr...
...In December 1956 I had a letter printed in the Friends Journal on the picture Friendly Persuasion...
...Dear Sirs: Milton Mayer's "Box-Office Quakers" certainly does probe the heart of the matter...
...Doesn't he see that an eye for an eye, though biblically accepted, is blinding the world...
...That Friends are human no one will deny, but don't get the idea that they are "peacetime pacifists...
...But now we know this was not a complete misrepresentation...
...Shannon's essay between the same covers with Mr...
...In brief, I saw a family with high standards living in a world with much lower standards, and I saw the anguish of soul they went through as they continually reevaluated their beliefs in the light of surrounding conditions trying to be sure of the way of God...
...the real bases for Quaker non-violence are never shown...
...Janice Holland Washington, D. C. Dear Sirs: I am most appreciative of Milton Mayer's article on "Box-Office Quakers," for I had failed to see just why many Quakers did not like the movie...
...Bixler please reread the article thoughtfully...
...What would life be like if we could not laugh at our failures, mistakes, and glaring inconsistencies...
...Now I see that the disagreement among us Quakers about the value of the movie depends upon what we saw in it...
...But it is the same viewpoint Cardinal Spellman reiterated from the pulpit in his recent condemnation of the movie Baby Doll...
...Dorothy Rice New York...
...And I really believe this simple picture is going to be a money-maker...
...Many of us may prefer rigid piety, but I felt the movie was of great value, for it showed that people of high ideals are not always stuffed shirts but rather are often people in the stream of life finding their way the best they can among heart-rending problems...
...I am also tired of this sentimentalizing of the moral opposition, this jargon of tragedies and heroes...
...He shows ,the inner struggle which the conscientious pacifist has when faced with the possibility of doing some good by resorting to violent action...
...Milton Mayer saw something quite different from what I saw...
...Sex did have its little play...
...Mayer's...
...Has President Nasser the wisdom to realize that the wrongs of others do not give him rights...
...Dear Sirs: Hurrah for Milton Mayer's dissection of Friendly Persuasion...
...But no one will step forward...
...I cannot but wonder about the author, William V. Shannon...
...This rule does not commit us to any hard and fast course of action...
...Some say that Nasser is a dictator, a Hitler, a tyrant...
...he sidles up to the budget-cutters though he knows better or should...
...This is true...
...And the dear, charming audiences chuckle fit to kill...
...or, if too obviously mad, little George Washingtons who simply cannot tell a lie...
...I don't think God wants us to be morbid over our failures...
...But, sorrowfully, we watched each character carry out his or her particular bit of sneakery...
...Knowland is big, bluff, straightforward, righteous...
...beralism is truth and sanity...
...Bixler consider it too trifling to bother about...
...Winston Churchill called our Civil War "the last war fought between gentlemen...
...If a foreign army of occupation should take over 232 million acres of our farm land for their military installations, would Mr...
...But I do know that all through the country new schools, new housing projects, and new hospitals are springing up...
...And boy, is that solid satisfaction...
...Think of an example in which reason utterly fails to justify the pacifist position...
...Mayer's parallel drawn from the life of Christ was apt, but it did not tell the whole story...
...And even the youngest, nothing could have delighted more, it would seem, than wringing the neck of the pet goose...
...It might have been relevant to point out that these views were expressed in an opinion refusing to enforce a censorship order...
...Helen Mears New York, N. Y. 'Extraordinary Distortion' Dear Sirs: The U.S...
...Give me the soft-tongued, gray-flannel hypocrites like Nixon...
...The officer, nobly limping from his attempts to lay out a few rebels, pokes his cane into several stalwart youths and makes them squirm about why they are not at the same business...
...the whitewashing of stupidity, greed, and malpractice...
...There is no work...
...The important point is people —and in Okinawa we dispossessed around 250,000 people...
...Without doubt many other members feel as I do that the film is far from being a true picture of our attitude toward non-violence...
...No one reminds him that the whole bunch on both sides are invoking the name of the Deity upon their activities, and suggests that His Son said something about loving your enemies, blessing them that curse you, doing good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you...
...The greatest danger that confronts us today is that callousness may become a predominant attitude...
...Not the boy with the "sound and praiseworthy moral impulse" (if "moral" seems an excessive use in this letter, count it up in the Shannon article) who may not mind risking a nuclear war, but will never whittle down one single moral principle...
...genuineness, good or evil...
...The point of view is the usual one of uncritical conform-ism to the latest twists and turns of medical science's "party line...
...A stuffed shirt is one who hasn't dared live his own life, but has filled his shirt with ideas and beliefs of others and lets them lead him around—certainly without vitality and adaptability...
...Economic conditions in Egypt are frightening...
...Egypt with so much to offer is withering...
...These "two favorite quotations" of the energetic and blunt and moral Senator summoned to my mind distressing visions of some of the members of his—and, thanks to him and others like him, our— fellowship: Chiang, Rhee, Saud, even Hussein, the courageous boy-king pictured by Time and Life as in single combat against Evil, as if there were no Jordanian people that would prosper or suffer one way or the other...
...One hopes that a few will pause to examine the institutional reasons, reasons of procedure and of jurisdiction, and of the proper allocation of power among the branches of the government that underlie every decision the Court makes...
...Someone—if only Mr...
...I am less troubled, however, by what your author omits than by his concluding remarks on the opinion: "This approval of censorship where a show counsels vice and voluptuousness' is not advocated by Catholics alone...
...These movie Quakers are dear, charming eccentrics, busy still, as Mayer says, scuttling principles with every reel...
...And how can Mr...
...The highest praise I can give it is to say that I wish I had written it myself...
...Is this true...
...Egypt is resentful...
...the corruptors and the beneficiaries of graft-ridden political machines...
...His central failing is his unsophisticated righteousness...
...Supreme Court in an opinion by that distinguished non-C tholic, Benjamin Cardozo...
...Good and evil are easy enough to tell apart, just as the straightforward rhetoric of the blunt Senator seems on every occasion ingenuously to claim...
...Let us examine the validity of the principle of the code of strict non-violence...
...farmland would be around 232 million acres...
...Shannon...
...For those students of the Court who regard the institution as a principal bulwark of our liberties, but who are not blind to the fact that every institution is also a collection of human beings, with Individual attitudes and prejudices, each crisis of the Court's existence presents a challenge...
...Know-land's foreign policy views among the echoes of Lincoln on freeing the slaves and Second Corinthians on eschewing the fellowship of unrighteousness...
...Yet instead of trying to attract sound investors, every obstacle is being placed to bar their way...
...Shannon is mistaken...
...and they are also of course rigid, narrow, and provincial...
...No, all the Quakers sit there in the meeting, mute as mummies...
...Shades of the Al Smith campaign...
...The idea that the Supreme Court is a political body, and that the political and social views of its members find some expression in their judicial opinions, is at once too important and too little understood to suffer such extraordinary distortion...
...Then a hatchet-faced old cuss gets up and violently vows that no one could make him violent...
...No one mentions the historic success of the Quaker method in Pennsylvania, where, during Quaker government, there were none of the Indian massacres which terrorized the other frontiers...
...And deep down in the cellars of their subconscious, the chuckles reverberate endlessly...
...The justly famed and respected qualities of your magazine were evident in this article...
...It needs partners and friends...
...Fewer Mayers Dear Sirs: I pray that our country may have many more Adlai Stevensons and fewer rattlebrained Milton Mayers...
...What rule, then, must we apply...
...The Middle East is going by default...
...Shannon's makes me fear that soon the sun—even at The Progressive—will finally be going down on the likes of Mr...
...The author of your article argued that a restrictive attitude towards the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment "gives weight to the argument that Bren-nan's religion will temper his judicial attitude...
...his moral fervor has simply taken a few moments off...
...Surely both Mr...
...its spokes-when voices of sanity in the political wilderness...
...His point of view is of course insular, unrealistic, over-rigid, self-righteous, chauvinistic...
...But a state court could scarcely take issue with that holding, which was announced for the U.S...
...Justice Brennan is acclaimed as a hero by liberal publicists...
...Where in winter-bound Europe is there a golden climate to compare with that of Egypt...
...Data cited by Miss Mears herself points up the concern of the military and the Congress for the welfare of these natives...
...Actually this would comprise about two townships or approximately one-third of one of our smaller counties here in Michigan...
...Always somewhere near the end of the piece, when the reader's eye has begun to wander to the article beginning on the opposite page, there will be a little something about Honest Bill's occasional lapses from austere honesty...
...we have enough of that sort of thing...
...The daughter, in the wartime spirit of hero worship admired a soldier...
...Can he restore her lost prosperity...
...For might not the fault lie with the principle, and not with the man who failed to live up to it...
...a concern for the effect on domestic processes, a feeling for the social good, and a clear and full marshaling of facts...
...No one tells the old recruiter that they would be only too glad if their self-appointed defenders would lay down their arms...
...It is my hope that The Progressive will continue to attract new writers who can add the fresh insights we all need and look for in one of the few journals of independent opinion...
...He played McCarthy's game (McCarthy himself is beginning to develop the posthumous image of an Innocent who got tripped up by his fervor) as Bob Taft himself did...
...Ernestine W. Brehmer Sheboygan, Wis...
...To an outsider, the whole situation is incredible...
...Would he consider a rental of $20 a year adequate recompense should he lose his home and livelihood...
...If there are many other situations -where Big Bill has shown something less than fervor for moral principle, these are so much to be taken for granted in the political games as not to be mentioned...
...Egypt does not need charity...
...Egypt should be the tourist's paradise...
...Although it was a comfort that some of the adults knew and practiced the peace testimony, their children, the future of Quakerism, were in danger of losing it...
...Jack C. Stehnbach Staten Island, N. Y. 'Box-Office Quakers' Dear Sirs: Allow me, a member of the Religious Society of Friends, to express great satisfaction with Milton Mayer's "Box-Office Quakers...
...Franklin Jones Marshall, Tex...
...Sinister propaganda is being greedily digested...
...Surely he is neither so innocent himself, nor so dull-witted, as honestly to expound Mr...
...Bixler feel that his comparison with the land area of Michigan is relevant...
...Great titter from movie audience...
...But, as a Friend, I am not so very proud of it...
...It may be worth recalling that only four months ago he was criticized in your columns as an instrument (unwitting perhaps) of the Catholic Church...
...We can not destroy totalitarianism by practicing totalitarian methods...
...The scene in which the recruiting officer enters the Quaker meeting was typical of the whole movie...
...Your author was also inclined to relate the Justice's views on prior censorship of obscenity to his religious convictions...
...According to his account, "Brennan held that the Fifth is not as fundamental as the First, and applies only in federal courts...
...Could it be that . . .? No, never...
...Where in Europe are more treasures, more splendors, more wonders of the past...
...Here is what I said: "I could not feel the enthusiasm of the editorial writer for the motion picture Friendly Persuasion...
...Dear Sirs: In the American political folklore, the Right is almost always characterized as bigoted, evil, medieval, demagogic, antidemocratic...
...Economic pigmies are reaping the harvest...
...He has given her her sovereignty...
...One looks in vain for a sign of willingness to subject Big Business or Southern white supremacy to the "fiery trial" he is ready to chuck the rest of us into...
...The rural scenes were charming...
...It is a little difficult to discover from the report of the case whether the Justice was concerned with the fate of the seminary or with the degree of respect to be accorded to administrative decisions by judicial authority, since, in fact, he wrote no opinion at all, but rather concurred in the dissenting views of two other justices...
...There is an old proverb: When the stomach is empty the mind will swallow anything...
...Because isn't it obvious that ideals are silly anyway, and the guy who keeps his arm strong and his powder dry and his scruples under the rug is the guy who knows what's what...
...Ernest L. Bixler Sturgis, Mich...
...We are in danger, in these days of institutionalized and well-mannered public amorality, of rushing into the embrace of any sort of (seeming...
...And now Knowland, in, of all places, The Progressive...
...Americans are distrustful...
...I am not calling all who saw the movie as Milton Mayer did, stuffed shirts, but we have our share...
...If it ever prevailed America would be doomed...
...Your author found further evidence of the influence of Mr...
...I have been told that he is building these to ingratiate himself with the people...
...No employment...
...It seems the military ejected the natives from approximately 40,000 acres of land in order to use this area for military installations...
...Gertrude Collison East Canton, Ohio...
...Could it be that if the film had given their ideas a voice, someone might have taken them seriously...
...What a picture...
...Egypt has been grievously wronged and cruelly attacked...
...Lest we be tempted to shed our collective crocodile tears for the Okinawans let us not forget that a few short years ago in a defensive war against a ruthless aggressor these two townships were acquired at a ghastly cost of American blood, and that millions of American dollars are being spent on this spot of land to safeguard the freedom, not only of Americans but of Okinawans and Japanese as well...
...Shannon or Mr...
...E. Whealdon Medford, Ore...
...But no tourists come...
...A good law enforcement officer does not necessarily become bestial when he restrains criminals...
...I am tired of these blunt, straight-JPsaking ethical giants—Truman, Wilson, Dulles, even the President at those moments when Robert Montgomery has him take off his glasses and gaze sincerely through the public relations rhetoric into the wide telefocused eyes of his millions of elected children...
...I am thinking, of course, of the time Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip...
...Adam Yarmolinsky Washington, D. C. Karl Meyer's Freshness Dear Sirs: Lately I have felt a certain sameness in the style and tone of some of your articles on national affairs—perhaps due to an overexposure to your limited number of contributors in that area of magazine reportage...
...I submit that the rule of "Reverence for Life" is applicable in all cases...
...Many instances in the late great wars, however, tried the souls of pacifists much more severely than any incident described in Friendly Persuasion...
...its spokes-fakirs and fakers...
...To one who knew the book Friendly Persuasion, and had not yet seen the moving picture of it, advertising it with the passionate kiss method of Hollywood seemed odd...
...Absolute pacifism is, it seems to me, too broad a blanket to get under...
...When the officer accuses the Quakers of letting other men fight to protect them, the whole meeting just sits there looking as though they had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar...
...Won't you follow this series with another, more within your special province— that is, the exposure of tight control by the AMA, the high-pressure methods of the pharmaceutical houses (for a shock, read the ads for drugs in any medical journal...
...Richard Foster Department of English Syracuse University Syracuse, N. Y. Mears' Article Criticized Dear Sirs: Helen Mears' July issue article, "Our Blindspot in Asia," concerning our acquisition of land for strategic bases on Okinawa, was perhaps her most pathetic effort...
...Added to this, and most welcome, is the verve and incisiveness of the style and approach, providing the needed element of freshness and newness to The Progressive...
...The soothing syrup of the Greenberg articles is not at all needed...
...Mayer...
...Liberalism which, on the other hand to almost always represented as forward-looking, courageous, idealistic, and humanitarian, is somehow almost always represented by vain, petty, inconsistent opportunists, who every always bound to show themselves up as eiher too timorous or too reckless, as self-wekers and snobs, easily seduced by for' and ideologies, always either playing to the croud or talking over its head...
...At the same time its chief spokesmen are often held to be men of principle, ruggedly honest (too honest if anything), consistent, rock-ribbed (maybe a little rock-headed) protagonists of a somewhat naive but always essentially native point of view...
...An examination of that criticism suggests the continuing need for dispassionate analysis of the Court's performance...
...they are firm, tough, and uncompromising...
...Mary Rogers Miller San Pedro, Calif...
...Nothing ahead but dread...
...Their defects always serve the good cause of their virtues which in turn too often (by a kind of perverse historic immorality) serve the evil cause of their doctrines...
...Looking back gets one nowhere...
...They are easier for everybody to spot—even for the simplest journalist, like Mr...
...N. Y. Protests Greenberg Series Dear Sirs: First assuring you that The Progressive is my one indispensable magazine, I want to make a mild protest against the series of medical articles by Selig Greenberg now, running...
...Supreme Court today is under heavy attack...
...Mark E. Peery Bryn Mawr, Pa...
...We call this the right of eminent domain which, incidentally, is standard procedure in our democratic scheme of things and not just in totalitarian governments as Miss Mears glibly asserts...
...Whether or not we have a moral right to invoke the principle of eminent domain on foreign soil may be best considered in the light of what we are paying for this land...
...Dear Sirs: Again, Milton Mayer has come along with the right answers—this time with "Box-Office Quakers...
...Reaction is either a perant lie or a form of madness...
...Everyone is afraid...
...While it is true that 40 or 50,000 acres would be relatively little land in our great country, in Okinawa this land included around 20 per cent of the farm land...
...Should he be censured for housing and educating the poor and caring for their ills...
...But it will not prevail because its chief protagonist, like his predecessors, will always be too honest and too innocent to corral enough votes to prevail...
...Someone at The Progressive must have felt the embarrassment of putting Mr...
...The matter of filibuster control and civil rights legislation, for example...
...Miss Mears Replies Dear Sirs: Won't Mr...
...it is to be hoped that in the future she will do so...
...Helen Mears has the ability to put better thought into an article...
...Justice Brennan and the Court deserve better at your hands...
...Shannon on Knowland...
...The area involved in the Oki-nawan situation, forty or fifty thousand acres, sounds like a lot of land...
...That one cannot build a prosperous future on bitterness and hate...
...don't have one intelligent reason for feeling as they do...
...The comparable figure in terms of U.S...
...I should like to add a few strokes from a somewhat duller but just as ruthless knife...
...The former tenants are being compensated for this land on the appraised value of $330 per acre, with right to appeal the settlement...
...He adds that the Justice "wrote a strong [dissenting] opinion telling why the seminary should be permitted to be enlarged...
...I don't know...
...Rose Vollmer San Diego, Calif...
...William Shannon's portrait of Senator Knowland in your June issue is in this tradition...
...But when this kind of thing happens, it is an inconsistency from his fundamental over-consistency...
...Mayer's Geography Dear Sirs: Doubtless Milton Mayer made a point on seggagation" in his July issue article, "Deep in the Heart...
...It is, therefore, a real pleasure to have read "Oil: Unbridled Giant," by a new contributor to The Progressive, Karl E. Meyer, in the May issue...
...So far, there has been absolutely nothing in the articles other than what one can read in dozens of ordinary magazines...
...Then the officer gives forth with all the threadbare cliches about the nobility of violence, couched in the usual euphemisms...
...It would involve so little outlay— less than the sponsoring of one of our TV programs—to supply a trial amount of the necessary machine tools and technicians to demonstrate the marvels of our system of free enterprise...
...Lot's wife proved that...
...Alien philosophies are inching in...
...We have seen what tourism has done to build the precious dollar reserves of France, Greece, Italy, and Spain...
...Only those who have little or nothing to lose are risking the gamble...
...Today Mr...
...Your space is too valuable to waste on such commonplace, hackneyed material...
...Compared to the average movie, this was quite good, but not good enough as an advertisement of the Religious Society of Friends...
...Okinawa is nor a state of our Union, and the land taken by our military is not taken to "serve the need of the majority" or by the consent of the majority...
...Those within and those without...
...It appeared for a while that we had reached a high-water-mark of hysteria with the publication of the Southern Manifesto, but recent decisions of the Court seem to be provoking a new round of abuse...
...Mayer...
...Of course every last man in the audience sure knows what's what...
...I submit that he did not necessarily become bestial in the act...
...Here in America landowners are dispossessed by local, state, and federal governments everyday when their land is required to serve the need of the majority for highways and sundry other uses...
...But if he truly believes he can pass through the Texas Panhandle in traveling Southwest from Dallas to San Antonio, he simply does not know his azimuth from a hole in the ground...
...Imagine, if you can, a situation in which a madman were trying to blow up our stockpile of H-bombs...
...So it goes, all the way to the end...
...Certainly there was humor in the movie...
...Would not any man, in such a situation, be justified in trying to restrain that madman by force...
...Justice Brennan's Catholicism in his vote to uphold a zoning board decision in favor of a Catholic seminary...
...The future of Egypt lies in the hands of her president...
...It does seem a pity that the United States with its need for expansion does not take a gamble...
...Depending on the social consequences of the decisions that produce the crisis, some observers will applaud, and some will hiss and boo...
...Ben Shrago Cincinnati, Ohio 'Odd and Slippery' Dear Sirs: That was a most odd and slippery article on Senator William Knowland to find in the pages of The Progressive, in the June issue...
...Why hasn't Simple Heavy-footed Bill ever in his innocence stumbled into opposition to Chamber of Commerce positions on the domestic issues on which, according to Shannon, he is no more conservative than the White House...
...The Quakers (strange, isn't it...
...The son had to try his hand at mass killing...
...The giveaway, for another...
...die pliant voice of Big Business, the Military, or the Big Plantation Owners...
...Has he the power to proclaim a moratorium on hate and start looking forward for guidance...
Vol. 21 • August 1957 • No. 8
