THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM The TVA Issue Dear Sirs: I have read with more than customary interest the May issue of your fine periodical. As a member of Congress from Tennessee since 1939, first in the...
...I do advocate strong intramural or independent unions, entirely controlled by the workers themselves and led by leaders of their own choosing...
...To deny this fact is to close one's eyes to what is certainly the most obvious and visible fact of Arab life today...
...R. Clyde Minor Professor of Sociology Lincoln University Jefferson City, Mo...
...a Immigration, emigration, and visa procedures which, in a democratic country, can be described only as fantastic...
...The right-to-work bills are the handwriting on the wall...
...An inability to work constructively with recognized diplomatic experts such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen...
...TVA is a monument to the ingenuity and capacity of mankind to harness nature...
...Such local, independent unions will continue to need the advantage gained through discussion and interchange of ideas with their fellow organizations, but their complete autonomy should be preserved...
...It has long been my conviction that only by labor having solidarity and responsible leadership of its own choosing can we ever hope to have democracy and peace prevail in the industrial world...
...I salute you and all who participated in the outstanding review and tribute to the accomplishment and significance of the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...Rather would I prefer the situation as it exists today...
...2) a creative economic goal (witness the folly of the present panacea through armament...
...We therefore urge that he be speedily replaced by a more competent person...
...You have told well the remarkable success of this federal agency in transforming a river valley which had known alternately raving flood waters and barren river beds into a region with comparative freedom from fear of floods, year-round navigation, efficient and economical water-generated power, fertile land, and one of the nation's outstanding recreation areas...
...It is necessary to reexamine labor's philosophy, its politics, and its posture in the brave new world previewed by the Mc-Clellan Committee...
...Rather than fearing progressive measures for positive change, the "westernized Arabs who are in control" have been in fact the leaders of such modernizing processes as have already left their noticeable impact on the structure and life of Arab society...
...Its ranks are thin...
...The articles by my Senatorial colleagues and by others on its contributions to a better life for the American people are unanswerable...
...John Sparkman United States Senate Washington, D.C...
...Shocking Mistake Dear Sirs: Month after month our government could have chosen to lead the world toward peace, but Dulles and Eisenhower, obsessed by "positions of strength," rigidly rejected that opportunity and now it is gone beyond recall...
...That is the question raised by Senator McClellan's opening gun and Senator Kennedy's balanced complicity...
...This leaves us now only a negative choice— that we avoid becoming the world's champion of mass destruction and irresponsible world-wide atomic poisoning...
...Arthur Compton has well said that goodwill is our only defense, but this is going to have to be goodwill more dramatically expressed than any man has hitherto witnessed...
...I hope this article will enjoy the circulation its penetrating insights demand and at the same time that someone among the present labor leadership will be encouraged to speak to the issues which Eby raises...
...This feverish race for arms superiority must be recognized as base insanity...
...Joseph S. Clark United States Senate Washington, D. C. Dear Sirs: Your May issue devoted to the 25th anniversary of the Tennessee Valley Authority is a remarkable and valuable review of the history of TVA...
...Labor union members are advised to ask what kind of leadership would permit the closing of labor's only daily newspaper...
...It is idle therefore to seek presumed reasons for the Arab fears of Israel when the real reasons are so obvious and so awesome in Arab eyes...
...Fayez A. Sayegh Counsellor Arab States Delegations Office New York, N. Y. Replace Dulles Dear Sirs: Since our Secretary of State holds a powerful and sensitive position as regards both our own survival and that of civilization in general, we are disturbed at the widespread and continued hostility, both here and abroad, directed at the incumbent...
...It is going to have to be commensurate with the demands of the era of man-made satellites...
...The Progressive is to be congratulated on a superb job...
...Applied to the broad spectrum of national and international problems, this kind of effort and spirit would bring about a revival of creativity in American leadership...
...They are mere truces soon to be broken as more power has been gained by the weak...
...They are aggregations of convenience for purposes of efficiency, no different in substance from the NAM—just the other side of the dollar...
...Nancy Reeves Los Angeles, Calif...
...Then, and only then, should the workers of a plant or an organization relinquish the power gained through help from fellow-workers of outside organizations...
...Whether or not it was committed to the "class struggle," it had no illusions about the basic gulf between the interests of the employer (who wanted more work for less money) and the interests of the employee (who wanted more money for less work...
...Henry L. Nunn La Jolla, Calif...
...Albert Gore United States Senate Washington, D.C...
...Arabs—leaders and people alike—realize the determination of Israel to expand into neighboring Arab territories even beyond the present lines, which in themselves represent an already accomplished act of expansion...
...As a Negro I felt deeply that President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a tragic mistake in appointing a man from the deep South to the high office of Supreme Court Justice...
...Labor unions are therefore viewed as institutions...
...Labor leaders are accordingly advised against complaining tomorrow of unfair treatment in the commercial press, and pleading the need for a daily labor paper...
...I cannot help but speculate on what might have been the attitude and behavior of labor's leadership if it had received at the hands of management a more sympathetic and cooperative understanding...
...Men whose primary loyalty is reserved for ideas and principles comprise a shrinking minority...
...Carl Sandburg speaks of the time when the union hall was called a "Labor Temple...
...Kermit Eby on labor organizations in the April issue of The Progressive with much interest...
...At the same time, if she wishes to recapture the moral leadership of the age, she can call upon other powers to engage upon a series of adventures staged to drive poverty and ignorance from the face of the earth...
...The principles and techniques that went into TVA are the kind of foreign assistance we should be offering the world...
...In this manner we eliminate the need for the mammoth organizations that create so much distance between leadership and worker that they result in the dangerous excessive concentration of power at the top...
...Propagation of ideas may meet with greater resistance but is far more in the tradition that knowledge of the truth contributes to man's freedom...
...Economic downturns and automation plus an anti-labor climate could lead to even greater distortions and invasions...
...People living in other great river basins have long looked to TVA as a model for sound development of their own water resource...
...Frank Church United States Senate Washington, D.C...
...For those who were less well acquainted with TVA this issue of The Progressive should prove most enlightening, presenting as it does the full picture of the integrated program of regional development and rehabilitation...
...We are still more disturbed that most of this criticism has a solid basis in fact...
...The Progressive's excellent presentation of the contribution of TVA to our society will surely aid our collective efforts...
...What a tragically ludicrous sight we present to the rest of the world: on the one hand insistently demanding of Russia that she demonstrate sincerity by backing up her words with deeds—and on the other hand backing up our claims of eagerness for peace and disarmament by continuing with atomic testsl Paton B. Crouse San Francisco, Calif...
...Barbour perpetrates a grave injustice to the truth when he insinuates that "the westernized Arabs" are bent on exploiting "the poor Arabs" and determined to obstruct efforts on the part of the latter to "change their status by getting these exploiters off their necks...
...Mutual trust will gradually replace distrust...
...Beyond it there was philosophical "engagement": nationalization of industry, socialism, anarchism, communism or combinations of these and other dreams for a more just and equalitarian society...
...Lawrence Seaway and related improvement of the Champlain Waterway between Montreal and New York can and will open up the entire Northeast and Middle West to extensive commercial, industrial, and agricultural development...
...I believe that labor's error is deeper than the weakening of the democratic process within its ranks that Dr...
...This concrete fear of future expansion, added to the outrage at past aggressiveness and aggrandizement on the part of Israel, underlies the complex feeling which the Arabs have with respect to Israel...
...John Sherman Cooper United States Senate Washington, D.C...
...So radicals here feel about him just as does the Franco regime...
...The legacy of four and a quarter centuries of Ottoman and European domination is being challenged by the Arabs themselves with increasing vigor and earnestness...
...It must go militantly on the offensive with a program of (1) positive political action...
...a An inexcusable interference with the freedom of the press, particularly with regard to China...
...For him this implied reverence for a cause...
...Like Mr...
...I think the experience of TVA is tangible proof that the St...
...A rigid insistence on more bomb tests, clearly harmful to world populations, and a persistent determination to spread American missiles among our allies, despite the probability that such action will increase tension and decrease the likelihood of Russia's eventual withdrawal from Eastern Europe...
...What must labor do...
...I read the critical views of Mr...
...Migratory plants trek from organized to unorganized communities...
...For in this process it sought to exchange militancy for respectability, and militancy is the lifeblood of the labor movement...
...Let us not now commit the ultimate stupidity of rigidly clinging to our mistake by continuing with the tests...
...of Milwaukee, Wis...
...In the twenty-year old words of John L. Lewis: "Let the enemies of labor be encouraged and let high wassail prevail at the banquet tables of the mighty...
...In attempting to prove its purity in the very first attacks of the McCarthy period labor weakened itself fundamentally...
...I found the entire issue fascinating...
...Arab Challenge Dear Sirs: J. Pius Barbour, in the People's Forum, May issue of The Progressive, suggests that the chief fear of the Arab leaders is "the example" of Israel and not its intention...
...There are those who would deny the American people these benefits, as we discovered in the Dixon-Yates aftair...
...Remember how the Russians and the Nazis settled an immense treaty all in 10 days of August, 1939, and in secret...
...I felt that the President was taking advantage of Senatorial courtesy to placate the solid South by a political plum to that region...
...I do not believe it is yet too late to find a better way...
...The economic climate is ominous and right-to-work bills multiply...
...Today the myth of "partners in enterprise" has been absorbed into the very fabric of the labor movement with the consequent decay of "engagement...
...Let industrial management and organized labor accept the democratic process of law, and arbitrary power loses its potency...
...Lawrence Rogers Chicago, 111...
...It led to World War II a week or so later...
...I think organized capital suffers from the same trouble...
...It has surrendered its political leverage...
...Eby's Insights Dear Sirs: The compulsive search for a sense of security in these days seems to express itself in giving blind allegiance to institutions and organizations...
...It has proven that populations of entire regions could join together with their public officials, national, state, and local, to carve out for themselves a better way of life...
...Eby, I, too, believe that organized labor has accumulated too much power at the top and consequently has lost much of the gains more democratic organizations would provide...
...As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was also pleased that your issue devoted an article to the impact of TVA upon other countries of the world...
...Labor's Vulnerability Dear Sirs: Kermit Eby's article, "What Labor Needs," seems to me most timely...
...Defense Delusion Dear Sirs: When national defense becomes suicidal offense, it is high time to try an entirely new approach...
...In calling off the tests the United States has the opportunity of electrifying the world by simultaneously announcing that she is dedicating the funds saved to some great humanitarian concern, such as the establishment of an amply endowed Middle East Development Agency under the United Nations...
...Or are they...
...Our first move out is, of course, to call a halt to the tests...
...In a time of sluggishness, under an Administration that has taken muddling through from crisis to crisis as its basic philosophy, it is good to remember that Americans are capable of sustained, imaginative effort...
...And let no one think for one second I am advocating so-called "company unions" dominated and controlled and often financed by management, as was so often the case in pre-Wagner Act days...
...Labor sympathizers are advised once again that the labor movement is young, immature, short-sighted, and sometimes cannabalistic...
...People who participated in labor struggles were by and large "committed...
...In the new spirit of cooperation between capital and labor will be found an effective antidote for Communism...
...Their members join mechanically and relate perfunctorily, and on the top lounge the labor aristocrats...
...A willingness to talk to and make substantial moral concessions to totalitarian despots such as Generalissimo Franco and King Saud, coupled with a stubborn resistance to any disarmament or peace discussions with the men of the Kremlin, except on self-righteous and unacceptable terms...
...Over the course of his tenure, he has shown himself to be the humanist of humanists as the article shows so clearly...
...But how wrong I was...
...As one who has been so intimately associated with TVA, I can perhaps appreciate more fully the effort which has gone into such a thorough and well-rounded presentation of the TVA story...
...Wayne Morse United States Senate Washington, D. C. Dear Sirs: The excellent TVA anniversary issue of The Progressive was remarkable in its correlation of the factual story of this Twentieth Century experiment in natural resource conservation and development...
...It ought not to be that man must be concerned with mere survival...
...Dear Sirs: The Progressive is to be commended for its May issue devoted to an examination of the first 25 years of the work of the TVA...
...Kermit Eby's "What Labor Needs" in the April Progressive should be taken to heart by all who feel a compulsion to defend or sell an organization, institution, or movement...
...I believe, however, that the patient is in greater crisis than the writer implies and that the treatment must be more radical (I use the word in its old and perhaps more palatable sense...
...Eby describes...
...More change has overtaken the Arab world during the brief period of independence since World War II than was forthcoming in the preceding 450 years...
...Joe Dell Modesto, Calif...
...The expansionist intention of Israel has been openly proclaimed by many Israeli leaders and some Israeli parties...
...Gerald Barnes Boston University Boston, Mass...
...Labor in the past was "engaged...
...It is an idea straight out of the mainstream of the best American thought, an ingenious blend of the real and the ideal in human activity...
...Dear Sirs: I should like to take this opportunity to commend you for commemorating the 25th anniversary of the TVA in the inspiring May issue...
...As a member of Congress from Tennessee since 1939, first in the House and later in the Senate, the preservation and strengthening of TVA has been one of my chief concerns...
...and many measures and policies pursued so far by Israel also indicate that country's expansionist potential...
...I believe the articles in the May Progressive summarize admirably the 25 years of TVA's existence...
...Dear Sirs: The May issue of The Progressive is a fine job—a valuable contribution to the documentary history of TVA...
...a An obstinate assumption, against the weight of expert opinion, that Russia is planning a massive military attack, and that our only recourse is the threat of still more massive retaliation...
...Under such conditions the mutuality of interest between capital and labor will be recognized, and cooperation, with all its benefits to the consumer, stockholder, and worker, will be born as conflict, strikes, and lockouts become things of the past...
...Tough industrial managements have reaped what they have sown...
...However, this pattern predated the "managerial revolution...
...George D. Aiken United States Senate Washington, D. C. Dear Sirs: It is certainly fitting that The Progressive should undertake a commemorative issue devoted to the Tennessee Valley Authority at its 25 th anniversary...
...Personally I am glad that we have as competent a man as Secretary Dulles, rather than an unrealistic egghead eager to give the Russians another "conference" for their propagandizing...
...Because of the dramatic contribution the TVA has made to the national welfare, we must recognize the responsibility we have to protect what has been accomplished and extend the benefits of such far-sighted programs to other regions...
...The capitalistic system will have rid itself of its greatest weakness...
...Death of 'Labor's Daily' Dear Sirs: The country's only daily labor newspaper, the International Typographers Union's five year old publication, Labor's Daily, died on March 29, 1958, from lack of labor movement interest, support, and circulation...
...In short we believe that Secretary Dulles has clearly proven that he lacks the diplomatic skill, the flexibility, the social intelligence, and the kind of idealism which his office and the situation demand...
...Mrs...
...Here are some of the better-known items on the record: • An inept handling of the Aswan Dam affair: one of the causes of the Egyptian nationalization of the canal and of the subsequent attack on Suez...
...3) education of the membership without fear...
...Tough managements have made tough and sometimes irresponsible leaders of labor...
...Desirable as this is, however, we won't be saved by mere absence of evil...
...For the TVA is perhaps the outstanding example of the enlightened and imaginative spirit of the American people...
...The workers of any one plant or any one organization seldom have the strength to combat alone, unaided by law, the power or organized capital...
...Settlements forced by the strong on the weak are not agreements...
...Boundless goodwill will never be expressed until society renounces the childish pretense, the self-deception, the utter delusion of supposing that planes, or tanks, or guns, or bombs, or shelters, missiles, or any other device can save us...
...Dulles states that Eisenhower and his top advisers rejected the idea of halting tests— just as though that, per se, made it right...
...Let us tell them it was a wrong decision— that their rejection was a shocking mistake deriving from a complete blindness to the fervent desires of the whole world...
...Justice Black promptly showed the stuff he was made of by attending Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial site allowed her by Secretary Ickes in protest to a slight by the DA.R...
...No great organizing drives are under way...
...One of the greatest principles of political democracy is law and the settlement of all differences by judicial processes...
...Yet "Notes in the News" of the same issue refers to Secretary Dulles' "sullen intransigence...
...The May issue of The Progressive should be preserved as a standard reference work for all who are, or who may become, interested in TVA...
...For no honest observer of the Arab scene could fail to see that the outstanding and paramount feature of Arab life is the revolutionary zeal sweeping the ranks of Arab peoples, intelligentsia, and political leaders, which has already transformed beyond recognition many a facet of Arab life...
...The development of the Tennessee Valley was a grand experiment in cooperative planning for human betterment...
...Thus when a fellow lawyer, author, and scholar labels Justice Black "the greatest Supreme Court Justice of the century" and goes even further to say that he stands very high among those who might be named "the greatest living American," I am happy to agree and to applaud his judgment...
...Tough Capital, Tough Labor Dear Sirs: Having had a keen interest in labor relations for nearly 50 years as a factory foreman and superintendent, as well as president of a fair sized industrial organization (Nunn-Bush Shoe Co...
...It is my feeling that we can never have real democracy and peace in industry until the principle of law (arbitration) is also accepted in industrial relations...
...and (4) outright castiga-tion of the enemy...
...Estes Kefauver United States Senate Washington, D. C. Dear Sirs: Congratulations on your exciting May issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the TVA...
...It must abandon dreams of respectability...
...This at the pork chop level...
...Ruth H. Pool Seattle, Wash...
...Although controversy may continue to rage over whether there should have been a TVA, the fact is that its accomplishments are available for all to see...
...Dear Sirs: I found your special issue on TVA extremely interesting for it gives a detailed account of our nation's most remarkable conservation project...
...In doing so, I am sure you are making a great contribution to improving the understanding of this great national asset and the ideals which it has so brilliantly expressed in its history and achievements...
...Unlike most men in top management, I am an enthusiastic believer in the principle of organized labor...
...Joe L. Evins House of Representatives Washington, D. C. Public Apology Dear Sirs: The heart-warming article on Justice Hugo Black by Fred Rodell in the April Progressive gives me the opportunity to make a public apology...
...The basic gulf between employer and employee has been bridged by enlightened self-interest and Madison Avenue—and militancy and political dreams are gone...
...The labor movement has stood by while labor's only daily newspaper died...
...Such workers must always be protected by law in their right to organize, in their right to arbitration, and in their right to solidarity which can exist only through the democratic principle of majority rule and the union shop...
...he should be looking ever forward to a realm of increasing abundance, physical and spiritual...
...Many Americans have forgotten that the idea of TVA is as great a power as the electricity which its dams generate...
...It seems to me that labor must stop retreating...
...a A signal failure to encourage honest reporting on the part of State Department personnel, or to protect such personnel from persecution by ignorant and bigoted critics...
...Arthur B. Shostak Ithaca, N. Y. Dulles Defended Dear Sirs: Lawrence Fernsworth, in the April issue article, "Blackmail in Spain," reports the insulting manner in which the Spanish Fascists treat our Secretary of State as a "nondescript fellow...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
