NOTES IN THE NEWS
The 'Jewish Vote' Is there a "Jewish vote"? Most Jewish leaders insist there isn't. The American Jewish Committee, for example, recently issued a statement sharply denying the existence of a...
...But by far the greatest cause of uneasiness over Kennedy is the belief, widely circulated among Jews, that the candidate's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, is, or has been, anti-Semitic...
...he was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted for the past fifty years...
...But it is also true that eighty-six per cent of American families own no corporate stock...
...But the settlement of the Indus River basin dispute can be described as nothing less than momentous: f The treaty is the result of twelve years of off-and-on-again discussions between two nations still steeped in the bitterness of a religious civil war...
...But this may not hold so decisively in 1960, according to a comprehensive survey of current Jewish attitudes in New York recently completed by Homer Bigart for the New York Times...
...f Food prices have risen less since 1947 than most other consumer items in the cost-of-living index...
...This comforting image has little relationship to reality...
...Douglas "was married to a man named Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Hesselberg...
...The farmer's share of the food dollar in 1959 was only thirty-eight cents, down from forty cents in 1940, and from fifty-three cents in 1945...
...One of the better-known confidential Washington business services summed up the direction of American business by bluntly stating that "the bigs are gaining at the expense of the smalls...
...The tidying-up process, however, does not extend to his lieutenants, some of whom are traveling the low road Nixon used to travel himself...
...Nor was this all...
...We spent only twenty-one per cent of our income for food last year, leaving more for housing, medical care, education, and recreation...
...Nixon and the Jews If the Jews seem cool toward Kennedy, they hardly seem much enthused about the prospect of having Nixon in the White House...
...In his reports to the German Foreign Office, von Dirksen described conversations with Kennedy in 1938...
...the resolution adopted made no mention of Cuba...
...Yet, paradoxically, the farmer himself is economically sick, and his plight is getting worse rather than better...
...Cuba taught you that...
...Reporting on an article in the Saturday Evening Post by Stewart Alsop, Battle Line, official publication of the Republican National Committee, attributed to Alsop the theory that Senator Kennedy's father "has financed and masterminded his son's drive for the White House, as a recompense for his own thwarted Presidential ambitions...
...Whatever the truth may be, it is undisputed that John Kennedy is paying for what his father is thought to have said nearly a quarter of a century ago...
...These are random bits of information plucked from a fascinating new 736-page book, Food, the Yearbook of Agriculture, 1959, available from the Superintendent of Documents, Washington 25, D.C., for $2.25...
...The Anti-Defamation League turned a seven-man team loose on the rumor in 1952, the year Nixon first ran for Vice President...
...It is one of the most hopeful—if least publicized—accomplishments of our time...
...At the San Jose conference, Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa concluded an otherwise harsh tirade against the United States with a surprise offer to negotiate all outstanding differences...
...At the other end of the scale, one in fifty families owns more than $25,000 in stock...
...f We are eating better all the time: in 1959, as compared with 1935, each of us ate 160 pounds of meat instead of 127...
...The story is not true...
...In early September, he wrote, "This group, if it is a group, continues to regard both Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy with varying degrees of distrust...
...Horn of Plenty The total investment in America's agricultural industry is equal to four-fifths the current assets of all corporations in the United States...
...It seems to us the trend in both the quantity and the nature of business mergers is related to two other trends: the rate of business failures and the rate of business bankruptcies, both of which have more than doubled since 1952...
...They were shaken when they learned of the response of the United States to Cuba's offer to negotiate with this country...
...The reasons for rejecting Nixon that turned up most frequently were his lack of liberalism and his identification with what were described as "McCarthyite tactics...
...A recent tear came in the form of a report by the Department of Labor which presented a "model budget" designed to provide a city worker, with a wife and two children, "a modest but adequate level of living...
...version for containing "a number of distortions and quotations out of context...
...For the top five per cent, it was $1,800...
...Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, one of Nixon's principal hatchet artists and a leading member of the Republicans' "truth squad," recently rose in the Senate to complain that the Kennedy Foundation, a private agency controlled by the Senator and given to good works, had unfairly competed with the State Department in picking up a $100,000 check for the transportation of African students to American universities...
...Two recent incidents illustrate how the techniques of the "old Nixon" have been transferred to the team...
...Will Maslow, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, recently cited polls and other studies which showed that Jewish voters were attracted to candidates with liberal and internationalist views...
...The New York Times hailed the Declaration of San Jose as a "notable victory" for the United States and most other newspapers played much the same tune...
...According to Department of Commerce reports, there were more than fifty-five million individuals and families in the United States whose incomes were below this figure, most of them drastically lower...
...Between 1945 and 1958, the average real income rise of the neediest fifth of our families was a meager $80...
...The feeling is widespread throughout Latin America that we are too quick to pin Red labels on Castro's program, too slow to understand and identify ourselves with the social revolution of his country...
...Senator against Helen Gahagan Douglas...
...Another, Abraham J. Multer, said he hoped voters "will realize that we don't visit the sins of the father upon the son—assuming there were any sins...
...The second illustration represents an even more flagrant violation of ethical conduct...
...An hour's work in a factory buys more food today than in 1929: seventeen pints of milk instead of eight...
...The budget is based on current costs in twenty representative cities, East and West, North and South...
...The American Jewish Committee, for example, recently issued a statement sharply denying the existence of a "Jewish bloc vote," and Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy promptly concurred in that conclusion...
...No such letter was ever turned up...
...f Per capita income of the farm population was $965, compared with non-farm income of $2,216...
...Agriculture employs sixteen million people off the farm in addition to the more than seven million workers on farms and ranches...
...It has become fashionable in the advertising and public relations activities of large corporations to emphasize the widespread ownership of stock in these giant industries...
...The major goal of the U.S...
...Many thoughtful Latin Americans complain bitterly that we have turned our back on their deep aspirations for social advances and have sought only to make them military partners in our cold war alliances against Communism...
...Caught in the squeeze of higher costs and lower prices, farmers have closed part of the gap by increasing production efficiency at an unprecedented rate—two and a half times that of industry generally...
...This was done, Scott charged, to deprive the Administration of credit for a good deed and to enable Kennedy to curry favor with Negro voters...
...In the whispering campaign imputing anti-Semitism to the Vice President the most persistent and widely circulated story dates from his 1950 campaign for U.S...
...But we don't live collectively...
...The fifth in the highest income bracket received more than forty-five per cent...
...The Republican publicists took so many liberties with the truth that the editors of the pro-Republican Saturday Evening Post, which is supporting Vice President Nixon, took the unusual step of publicly denouncing the G.O.P...
...But while the nation enjoys the benefits of a lavish agricultural economy, the farmer is paying an unfair proportion of the bill...
...In round numbers, the budget averages out at $6,000 a year— an amount above the income of roughly seventy-five per cent of last year's Federal income taxpayers...
...Why did a conference our government hoped would condemn Castro's Cuba end without mentioning that country...
...Statistics are readily produced to prove that the United States has the capacity, within this generation, not only to wipe out poverty but to guarantee to all its citizens a standard of living—in material comfort, health, and education—beyond anything the human race has ever experienced...
...Another commentator, William Shakespeare, made a more telling— and more poetic—judgment: "It is excellent to have a giant's strength but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant...
...Far from offering the transportation fund as a way of helping Senator Kennedy with Negro voters, the Kennedy Foundation had stipulated that its role was to receive no publicity whatever...
...The test of our progress," said Franklin D. Roosevelt, "is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much...
...The richest two per cent own more than a third of all our country's wealth, while the poorest third possesses only one per cent...
...it is whether we provide for those who have little...
...Nixon is supposed to have reminded California audiences that Mrs...
...One New York Democratic Congressman told Bigart: "I have a feeling Kennedy is going to be in real trouble with the Jewish voters...
...The long-range importance of the Indus River treaty can scarcely be exaggerated...
...It is this outlook that had led Jewish voters to contribute heavy majorities to the Democratic Party during the past three decades...
...f Of every $20 we spend for groceries, $1.50 to $2 goes for packaging...
...Furthermore, it is expected that in 1975, the predicted population of 230 million people will be fed from the same acreage now under cultivation...
...The fifth of the population with the lowest incomes received less than five per cent of total family income...
...But our Latin American neighbors would have none of it...
...This off-the-cuff rejection of an offer of negotiation is not only morally and politically indefensible, but self-defeating, too, for it plays squarely into the hands of the men in the Kremlin bent on making Cuba the propaganda base for operations in the Western Hemisphere...
...Emphasis added...
...The answer is simply that most Latin Americans are far less interested in Cuba's relationship with the Kremlin than they are in Castro's great social reforms of which they, too, dream for their own countries...
...Low Road Vice President Nixon's campaign conduct thus far shows marked improvement over his behavior in the past...
...To join the "Hundred Largest Club," a corporation now needs $378 million in assets, two and a half times the $141 million of 1949...
...In dollars, the lowest fifth averaged a $1,460 income, while the highest fifth received an average of $14,250—ten times more than the lowest income group...
...A spokesman for that Jewish watchdog, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, said the agency knew nothing about the existence of the letter and suggested that the rumors were based on some captured documents from the German Foreign Office...
...Collectively—and this is the most common way of citing our well-being—we are the world's most wealthy nation of all time...
...You'll give us dollars for jet fighters and tanks, but if revolution breaks out in the rural areas and spreads in the hills, all your jets and tanks will be useless...
...f The settlement opens the way to the irrigation of thirty million acres of land on the India-Pakistan border—more than all the irrigated land in the United States...
...Bigart found some Jews disturbed because they feel Kennedy was not militantly identified with the struggle against McCarthy and McCarthy-ism...
...We have grown from a nation in which one of every four workers was required to produce food (as in Russia today) to one in which each farmer is efficiently producing food for twenty-four consumers...
...You hear some talk now of Jews defecting to Nixon," said one Jewish spokesman identified with the attempt to nominate Adlai E. Stevenson, "but I predict they'll shrink back in 'terminal horror' when they confront that Republican lever...
...Nor is there any question that the two Vice-Presidential candidates are free of such bias...
...Kennedy and the Jews Democratic leaders are especially disturbed over the indifference among many Jewish voters because, in pivotal New York State, the more than 2,400,000 Jews constitute nearly fifteen per cent of the population and they have long been counted on to provide a substantial majority of their number for the Democratic Party...
...A report of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center shows that intensive advertising by business and stockbrokers has considerably enlarged the circle of stockholding families in recent years—although as yet only one in seven families is included...
...To point the disparity in income even more sharply, the top five per cent of families enjoyed more than twenty per cent of total family income, an average of $25,280 per family...
...One hour of farm labor now produces four times as much food as in 1920...
...f Forty-two per cent of companies in the hundred million dollar class bought up other firms during 1959...
...But the significance of the current trend is that increasingly mergers follow the pattern of already giant corporations swallowing up smaller ones...
...in 1959, the number rose to 1,480 firms acquired by 985 companies...
...The "average" income in 1959— $6,520—was comfortably above the Labor Department's budget...
...He himself understood our Jewish policy completely...
...f Income has risen faster than the cost of groceries...
...As we reported here in July, the overall trend since 1949 has been toward fewer people holding a greater share of all the nation's wealth...
...The seven and a half million families who "enjoy" an income of less than $2,000 a year must feel like aliens...
...more than two pounds of round steak versus one pound four ounces...
...The Mexican delegation issued a special statement calling the world's attention to the fact that "in no form does the resolution constitute a condemnation or threat against Cuba, whose aspirations for economic improvement and social justice have the strongest support of the government and people of Mexico...
...It spent five months investigating...
...The belief is based on the alleged existence of a letter in which the elder Kennedy is supposed to have indicated approval of the Hitler regime while serving as Ambassador to Britain at the time of Munich...
...f Most people of the world spend half their income for food...
...The Bank will play a major role in the ten-year, one-and-a-third-billion-dol-lar development that will result from the water treaty...
...The Big Get Bigger "The crack-down by trust-busters," said a recent issue of the business journal, Financial World, "has had little effect so far on the merger trend, which continues to gain momentum...
...The elder Kennedy, who is spending the campaign in the south of France, dismissed the Dirksen dispatches as "complete poppycock" when the captured Nazi documents were published by the State Department in 1949...
...428 pounds of dairy products as against 393...
...Perhaps it was because an agreement concerning the use of the water of some muddy old river seemed trivial...
...Others said they were troubled over Kennedy's Catholicism...
...But the editorials did not square with the news stories...
...Why...
...But when it happens nobody—or almost nobody—pays any attention...
...In this connection it was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied that purpose...
...It concluded Nixon never uttered the remark attributed to him and, moreover, that he had "manifested no anti-Semitism in the fight...
...thirty-five pounds of poultry as compared with sixteen...
...What are the sources of the coolness to Kennedy...
...Of twenty cents paid by the consumer last year for a loaf of bread, the farmer received less than three cents...
...1 In the past decade, the number of corporations with assets of more than a billion dollars soared from twelve to twenty-seven...
...Recently, in a conversation with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, the President of Colombia, Albert Lleras Camagro, underscored this Latin mood when he said: "Our greatest need is land reform, yet the United States will not lend us a single penny for land reform...
...Who Owns the Corporations...
...It is perfectly true that some of the largest corporations number their stockholders in the hundreds of thousands...
...The implication is that General Motors, American Telephone and Telegraph, and General Electric are not really colossal near-monopolies administered by a small, tightly-held board of directors for the benefit of a handful of investors, but rather large-scale, friendly businesses of which almost everybody owns a slice...
...One official of a Jewish agency put it this way: "Any Catholic who is a good Catholic might find the church's views in conflict with what he might otherwise concede as being in the public interest...
...The hard facts showed that the United States had been obliged to execute a major retreat at San Jose...
...As evidence that Jews do not even unite behind the candidacy of a fellow Jew, the Committee recalled the New York Senatorial election of 1956 when Mayor Robert Wagner, a Catholic, received greater support from Jewish voters than did Senator Jacob Javits, a Jew, who was elected that year...
...Retreat at San Jose The United States succeeded last month in wringing from its Latin American neighbors a resolution roundly condemning Communist meddling in the Western Hemisphere...
...Bigart found "marked apathy" among Jewish voters...
...There was a time when mergers consisted largely of two or more firms of small to moderate size joining together to strengthen their position in a competitive market...
...The seventy-five per cent of American families whose income falls below the Department of Labor's "model budget" must feel like second-class citizens of The Affluent Society...
...He said von Dirksen "must have been trying very hard to set himself right in Germany by telling the German Foreign Office the things he thought they'd like to hear...
...The letter purportedly written by the Ambassador, Bigart wrote, was said to have "discounted the necessity of a firm stand by the United States against Hitler and suggested that the Roosevelt Administration overrated the influence of the American Jewish community...
...American agriculture is rich, efficient, productive beyond the world's dreams, and becoming more productive at an accelerating rate...
...This seems to us the only fair and decent approach to the problem...
...In his first meeting with the American Ambassador, von Dirksen wrote home, Kennedy expressed sympathy for the Germans and said that the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted peace and friendly relations with Germany...
...The truth, as finally revealed by the State Department itself at the demand of Senator William Ful-bright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, showed that the Department had refused repeatedly to provide the funds or arrange for the use of Air Force planes, and that it reversed itself only after a campaign aide of Nixon's had exerted extraordinary political pressure...
...The trend continues . .. and a mere deploring does not stop it...
...Since 1945, the proportionate improvement in income of the lowest fifth has dropped off, in comparison with the preceding decade...
...American Jews, the statement asserted, are influenced in elections by "the positions that parties and candidates take on domestic and foreign issues which affect the welfare of all Americans...
...Some of the grains of information gleaned from Food may provide insight into, if not solutions for, this most baffling of all American economic problems...
...The brazen omission of the significant sentence was intended to convey an impression directly opposite from that meant by Alsop...
...But "averages" are dangerously deceptive...
...Data published by the National Industrial Conference Board, an employers' research agency, reveals several aspects of this trend: f In 1958, 1,116 business units were absorbed by 812 companies...
...We live singly or in families...
...three dozen rather than fifteen oranges...
...These documents were not written by Ambassador Kennedy, but by Herbert von Dirksen, the German envoy to London at the time...
...But these new holdings are spread deceptively thin: Three-fifths of all stockholders own less than $5,000 each in stocks, and a great number of these hold only a few token shares in a single corporation...
...delegation to the conference of foreign ministers of the Organization of American States was condemnation of Castro's Cuba...
...And the presence of poverty and the disparity of wealth among individuals and families within our so-called Affluent Society is glaringly revealed when an occasional knife tears through the all-inclusive fabric of national statistics...
...While it is true that there is no monolithic Jewish leadership to mobilize bloc voting among Jews, it is equally true that there is a discernible pattern showing that most Jews tend to vote alike...
...Thus, few American dailies took the trouble to report that India and Pakistan had settled a twelve-year-old dispute over the waters of the river Indus, which flows through both nations...
...But American officials, the Associated Press reported, dismissed the proposal "as a propaganda gesture designed to becloud the issues...
...By any reasonable standard, we are failing that test...
...Peace, and Rumors of Peace Wars, and rumors of wars, have become such a steady, and heady, diet of American newspaper readers that editors seem reluctant to find space for news of peace or hopeful prospects of peace...
...Statistical Affluence It has already become a part of contemporary American folklore that ours is The Affluent Society...
...This is exciting news—the kind the world has been waiting for...
...f The additional prospect of a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir dispute opens the door to an easing of the enormous military expense which has seriously hampered the desperately needed economic development of both nations...
...Food is overflowing, as is America's food supply itself, with facts about every conceivable aspect of food—nutrients, needs, quality, preparation, costs, trends, and even recipes...
...f The agreement was negotiated by the World Bank, which until recently has been a relatively neglected stepchild of the United Nations...
...f More than half of the acquiring companies had assets greater than $10 million each...
...Battle Line proceeded to omit the following sentence from Alsop's article: "The only thing wrong with the mastermind theory is that it simply isn't true...
...The Ambassador," von Dirksen wrote, "then touched upon the Jewish question and stated that it was naturally of great importance to German-American relations...
...Many Latin Americans are disturbed, also, by what they fear is the development of an inflexible hardness in the United States toward Castro's Cuba...
...Responding to questions raised with the League about the attitude of Nixon and Kennedy toward Jews, Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, said: "We believe both men to be wholly free of anti-Semitic bias...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
