The Russians and Ourselves

...One might have expected a spontaneous howl from the Democrats when this program that is not modern, but medieval, Republicanism was presented...

...Casualties of the Missiles Race "[^resident Eisenhower's budget message and related pronouncements from the White House make it painfully clear that the nation faces a period of retrenchment and retreat in the critical field of social welfare...

...Sputniks I and II merely dramatized, and made credible to an American public long deluded by wishful-thinking press and politicians, the fact that, for all its built-in contradictions, the Soviet system is capable of prodigious feats of invention and production...

...To go on insisting that peace can be achieved only by forcing Soviet acceptance of our package is one of the basic fallacies of American foreign policy, for it ignores altogether the realities of the current, and perhaps long-lasting, stalemate in strength...

...In areas we once thought ourselves paramount—the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and even Latin America—we find ourselves pressed by a nation which hardly had a friend anywhere ten years ago...

...To behave in world affairs as though nothing has happened in the past decade to alter the world power structure is to build American foreign policy on dangerous and self-defeating fantasies...

...In a period of deepening recession only the needy are singled out for sacrifice in the $600,000,000 economy wave...

...When our government embraces that sound counsel, we shall have taken a great stride forward toward developing not panacea pipe-dream answers but tolerable relations with the nation with which we must live together or die together...

...Typical of the great straddle which accommodates Democrats of clashing viewpoints was the Council's timorous call for "renewed consideration" by Congress of civil rights legislation...

...funds for hospital construction are tapered off...

...payments to farmers are cut...

...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Russians and Ourselves This special issue of The Progressive, presented as part of the observance of our Fiftieth Year of publication, is almost wholly devoted to "The Russians and Ourselves...

...land reclamation, power, and flood control projects are to be drastically decreased with no new starts on any project...

...Three—Subsidies to business interests will remain undisturbed...

...public works will be abandoned despite the disturbing rise in unemployment...

...It is this recognition, in part, that leads one of America's foremost capitalist-industrialists, Cyrus S. Eaton, to argue so firmly in this issue "The Case for Meeting the Soviets Halfway...

...In Congress, a few eloquent Democratic voices were raised against specific areas of retrenchment in the budget, but there was no organized expression of revolt or anything to indicate that the party in control of Congress—the party of the New Deal and the Fair Deal—would do serious battle against the President's plan to extract a few more missiles out of the hides of the needy, the aged, the homeless, and the hungry...

...But Paul M. Butler, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was more of the opinion that what the statement meant was that "whenever Congress in its ordinary procedures can take it up" would be soon enough...

...These assistance programs bear the entire brunt of the economy drive dictated by the demand for more money for missiles...

...New York's Governor Harriman, for example, thought the statement meant a call to Congress to act in the present session on civil rights legislation...

...The dominant conclusion that emerges from a reading of recent history, as it unfolds in this issue, is the fact that the Soviets have shattered the Western—largely American— monopoly of power and are moving everywhere with confidence and competence to hammer home their own claims to leadership and equality...

...Except for a few distinguished exceptions, however, Democrats had little or nothing to say...

...Perhaps the most alarming development in the Administration's fiscal program is to be found in the field of school construction where we urgently need to wipe out the current deficit of 300,000 classrooms and build the additional 265,000 classrooms that will be needed by 1960...

...In fields we once thought ourselves supreme—education, science, technology—we now find ourselves crowded into a corner by the giant strides of a nation that a decade ago lay devastated by the Nazi war machine...

...None of the subsidies going to business interests is disturbed—those that go to the ship builders and ship owners, the big silver interests, the wool growers and the beet sugar growers, the bankers, and the oil interests...

...and vocational education and urban waste-removal programs are to be dumped on the state and local governments...

...The public housing program is slashed...

...The fifteen articles, written by experts in their fields, tell a sobering story of two giants standing astride our world —and reaching into outer space—and pose a challenge that will be resolved by nothing less than co-existence or co-extinction...

...But another and equally important requirement is that we raise living standards here at home so that we can demonstrate to the uncommitted millions of humanity the superiority of our free way of life...

...Eisenhower spoke earnestly of national sacrifice, but an examination of his fiscal policies underscores the melancholy facts that— One—The wealthiest in the land will pay no more—for there is no provision whatever for plugging any of the tax loopholes through which great wealth escapes its fair share of taxation...

...Our own 30-pound Explorer is whirling away in outer space, but so is Sputnik II—half-a-ton heavier—and it is the latter that underscores the salient fact that the Soviets are moving ahead at a faster rate than we are...

...In fact, Wernher von Braun, technical director of the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency, estimates that only by increasing our rate of progress by 20 per cent for each of the next five years, can we hope to catch up with the Russians by 1963...

...The hard truths that emerge from the articles in this issue—and from all the other realistic reporting on contemporary world affairs—make it more urgent than ever that we subject our foreign policy to that "agonizing reappraisal" to which Mr...

...Four—Grants for assistance to the needy will be sharply reduced...

...funds for the assistance of the needy, the aged, the blind, the mentally retarded, the severely crippled, and dependent children are reduced...

...Last year, in his message requesting a $1,300,000,-000 school construction program, the President said: "Of all the problems in education, one is most critical . . . the critical shortage of classrooms...

...To refuse to negotiate because we may one day "catch up" with the Russians in ultimate weapons is to doom us and the whole world to an endless arms race which in the end would corrupt and corrode everything we thought we wanted to make secure...

...Dulles, and President Eisenhower who follows his lead, find it comforting to pretend that the Communists are not the government of China, that Russia is not becoming an increasingly significant power in the Middle East, and that the Soviets must yield to our terms for the unification of Germany...

...It is a missile-minded program the President has advanced—and one whose burden will fall most heavily on those least able to bear it...

...This meant one thing to some Democrats, quite another to others— precisely the end desired...

...Two—Home and farm owners will be required to make additional sacrifices—for the President proposes saddling the states and municipalities with obligations currently carried by the national government...

...But far more important, in our judgment, is the rate of progress the Soviets have achieved in the political and economic phases of the struggle between them and us...

...And yet much of American foreign policy, as preached and practiced by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, is based on the perilous delusion that, given time, the Soviet system will collapse from within...

...This year the President dropped proposed federal aid to classroom construction altogether, tossing the burden over to home-owners on the local and state levels...

...But the signs, however much we detest them, multiply almost daily that we no longer exercise paramount power, that we share that power with a potent Communist coalition that refuses to be treated as anything less than an equal...

...For if there is anything that is dramatic, inspiring, and hopeful that we have to offer the great mass of humanity still shopping around for a way of life, it is the concept that free men working under a free government and a free economy can provide a fuller measure of social justice, economic security, and human dignity than can the regimented society of Soviet Russia...

...No diplomat or correspondent stationed in the Soviet Union that we know about believes for a moment that the Communist system will collapse soon, or that the majority of Russians would like to see the regime overthrown...

...When the Advisory Council closed its post-budget message deliberations, there were platitudes aplenty, but no militant call to action in specific areas...

...Within the Soviet Union, life for the average peasant and worker is hard, often cruelly so, but as Daniel Schorr, CBS correspondent in Moscow, emphasizes in his on-the-spot report in this issue, conditions are measurably better than they were and getting better all the time...

...In the peaceful struggle of competitive co-existence with the Soviet Union, part of our task is to aid the underprivileged peoples of the world to harness their resources for better living standards that would enable them to resist the Soviet Union's programs of economic penetration and political subversion...

...We are backing away from our greatest source of strength in the struggle of competitive co-existence when we embark on the to-hell-with-the-general-welfare program presented by President Eisenhower...

...Outside of Congress the Democrats, through their Advisory Council, an arm of the Democratic National Committee, viewed the Eisenhower program with concern, but only in the most cautious terms...

...No one who reads the reports in this issue of The Progressive by Chester Bowles, Michel Gordey, and Representative Henry Reuss, all of whom have recently toured the areas of which they write, can escape the conclusion that the Kremlin has broken our monopoly of power and influence in most of the strategic areas of the world, and is moving ahead, spectacularly, to strengthen its new claim to a role in leadership in a world so long dominated by the West...

...Dulles referred in an altogether different connection...

...To end the cold war and seek creative solutions to the problems of peace, we must, in the words of Walter Millis, writing recently in the New York Times Magazine, "recognize that co-existence means the continued existence of both of the two great systems of social and political organization...

...There are other and equally serious casualties in the President's new budget...