THE FAITH OF A LIBERAL
Humphrey, Hubert H.
The Faith of a Liberal by Hubert Humphrey THE ISSUES for the 1960 political campaign must be the great issues which confront America in the Sixties. We cannot afford to take a shorter view,...
...f Production goals set so as to satisfy the true needs of the American people, the commercial export market, necessary reserves, and foreign policy purposes...
...Yet, through local prejudice and custom, a substantial number of our people are deprived of any voice in these decisions...
...What we have made, we are surely capable of making better...
...There is other urgent, unfinished business requiring our attention...
...This is a fact which the present Administration, blinded by the wrong-doing of a minority of union leaders in a minority of unions, seems utterly unable to grasp...
...We need a careful exploration of the areas in which high-priority government programs could take the place of defense procurement and defense employment...
...Our unemployment compensation system should provide more adequate benefits—at least one half of wages, as originally intended in the Social Security Act—and it should cover longer periods of unemployment...
...Our free enterprise system has yielded a standard of living such as no other peoples have ever enjoyed, and no one in his right mind would propose substituting bureaucratic controls for the workings of the market economy...
...We cannot claim that welfare is general when it stops short of the seventh of our people who are submerged in poverty...
...In particular, I believe that—as Senator Paul H. Douglas has proposed—technical and financial aid should be made available to those communities throughout the South which are prepared to face up to compliance with the law of the land...
...And we need on the part of both the executive and the legislative branches of our government a willingness to take their full share of responsibility for putting this historic decision into full force and effect...
...The bugles must be blown, and the giant awakened...
...In serving their own members, the unions have also served the general welfare, by broadening and deepening the basis of mass purchasing power upon which our economy rests...
...Through it, also, we strike a balance between public and private investment and between private and social consumption...
...It is only through vigorous and far-ranging debate that we can hammer out new policies for the new decade, and rally the people's support for them...
...We win national elections only when great issues are propounded by a Wilson and a Roosevelt and a Truman...
...We need to assure to all of our citizens the first right of their citizenship—the right to vote...
...What we need to dis cuss—with all the sobriety and sin cerity it deserves—is how to attain it...
...They should have the full benefit of the experience of school districts, large and small, which have achieved integration or made a serious beginning toward doing so...
...Coming from a great agricultural state, I am particularly conscious that no group in the American economy has suffered so much from the stubborn stupidity and dogmatic short-sightedness of this Republican Administration...
...In fact, we need action on civil rights all along the line...
...If that means being controversial, we liberals should welcome it...
...It is through the budget that we can give vital national purposes the high priority they should have in the allocation of our national resources...
...There should be advance planning...
...The general welfare also requires that the benefits of technological progress be promptly and widely shared...
...has been a disastrous decline in their incomes...
...T o the question, "Can the Ameri can economy adjust to arms reduc tion...
...The most notorious of these loopholes is the mineral depletion allowance, which leaves a great part of oil income tax-free...
...We must open up the way to employment and promotion for everyone on the basis of ability, without regard to race, creed, or color...
...The human species must be wise enough to plan, if we are to avoid being buried under our own abundance, as ancient civilizations were under their debris...
...I am simply stating that we should not let the market make the key decisions of public policy...
...We must stop thinking of "planning" as a dirty word, and accept it as the necessary application of the best available human intelligence and foresight to the solution of national problems...
...f Employment goals which afford farm families the opportunity to be fully and usefully employed...
...They are not, as some early economists maintained, the consequence of natural causes...
...but with an im portant proviso, which I quote from the NPA study: "This reasoning should not be in terpreted, however, as suggesting that the transition from an armament race to disarmament would be an easy matter . . . Our estimates imply shifts of production from one industry to other industries, often also from one region to another, with all the ensu ing problems of readjustment...
...We must give everyone assurance that his right to be secure against personal violence and indignity will, always and everywhere, be protected by government...
...There should be advance planning in each of the crucial areas in order to prevent hardship and serious dislocations...
...The general welfare, as I understand it, comprehends not only the community as a whole but all of its members...
...As a result, the only reward for the spectacular increase in their productivity (about six per cent a year...
...There is no "war party," since all Americans deeply long for peace...
...It is high time we took planning out of the doghouse and put it into the White House...
...The way we treat one another is more expressive of the reality of our democratic commitment than any words, however eloquent...
...We must recognize that the great beginnings in social and economic security achieved by the New Deal were only beginnings, and that this generation has the urgent responsibility of perfecting existing tools and forging new ones to wipe out poverty in America...
...We must keep step with the march of mankind— or forfeit its respect...
...The most effective way to accomplish this is through federal minimum standards applicable to all states...
...Only the government, responsible to the electorate, should have and exercise this right...
...If we are ever driven to admit that a free people cannot plan to secure their common defense and to promote their general welfare, we shall indeed have wandered into a trackless wilderness...
...f A "Food-for-Peace" program that will make our farm resources an asset for peace rather than an economic albatross...
...We must get the federal government out of the sordid business of subsidizing discrimination through its mortgage, loan-guarantee, and urban renewal policies—and into the promotion of open-occupancy housing...
...Our public assistance system needs modernization, so that grants are enough to permit people in need to live at a minimum standard of decency...
...we lose them when they are muted by an Alton B. Parker or a John W. Davis...
...We need what we have still not heard, after almost six long years— a clear affirmation from the White House itself of the moral rightness of the Supreme Court's historic decision against segregated schools...
...I hold that only liberal government—dedicated to economic growth, human dignity, and a just and enduring peace—can bring America back from the brink of being a second-class world power to the front rank of world leadership...
...The overriding political issue today is whether conservative or middle-of-the-road government — which knows cost but not values, which understands things but not people—can meet the challenges of the Sixties...
...A more united Europe is arising from the rubble of old battlefields...
...There was, for instance, not even a hint of appreciation for the services of free unions to a free society in the nationwide telecast of President Eisenhower which caused the House of Representatives to adopt the "Eisenhower-Landrum-Griffin" bill last summer, and drove the full Congress to accept a bill which included harsh, unne cessary provisions with needed reforms...
...The more the facts about integra tion, where it has been substantially achieved—notably in our capital city of Washington—become widely avail able, the less excuse there will be for dreading it as a leap into the un known...
...Overshadowing all our domestic concerns, of course, is the great ques tion of the means of establishing peace with justice...
...Communist China poses new challenges both to free nations and to Russian leadership of the Communist bloc...
...Neither in human decency nor in national interest can we afford the indefinite postponement of the full functioning of democracy...
...And it calculates that substantial sums will still be available to boost our own standards of living...
...The Faith of a Liberal by Hubert Humphrey THE ISSUES for the 1960 political campaign must be the great issues which confront America in the Sixties...
...Where compliance with the Supreme Court decision still is not forthcoming, the Attorney General must be given power (as in Part III, deleted from the 1957 Civil Rights Act) to bring suit to enforce constitutional rights...
...The American people will respond if the great issues of progress, people, and peace are brought home to them...
...The Democratic Party has obtained the allegiance of a majority of Americans in this century only when it has been both controversial and liberal...
...We can no longer risk sleepwalking into the future...
...Meanwhile, we Americans, heirs to the most dynamic tradition in history, seem—after the nightmare of McCarthyism—to have fallen into a deep and almost dreamless slumber...
...Ending these glaring inequities would net the government billions of added revenue without changing tax rates...
...But for this, our top-heavy economy might long since have tumbled into depression...
...Inflation and recession—the fevers and chills between which our economy enjoys only intermittent spells of normal health and growth—need not be inevitable...
...If we need planning now—and we do—we shall need it even more when, as I devoutly hope, effective and enforced disarmament is achieved...
...Our task is not to change the image of the Democratic Party to satisfy an alleged complacency on the part of the American people...
...HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, United States Senator from Minnesota, is a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President...
...they are built-in defects in a man-made sys^ tern...
...Unlike the Marxists, we profess to reject the straitjacket of dogma—but we are self-imprisoned by what Walter Lippmann has justly called "The dogma that defense and public improvements must be tailored in order to balance the budget at the 1954 level of taxation...
...A multitude of new nations are finding their place in the world community...
...The tax system provides the balance wheel in our economy, restraining it when inflation threatens and stimulating it in depression...
...Yet a rapidly-expanding, full employment economy, with tax loopholes closed, could provide all the revenues necessary for defense, aid to education, and other social welfare needs...
...Our old-age insurance system should provide benefits more nearly adequate to the needs of retired workers and their wives, and should, moreover, include insurance against the costly medical expenses of older people...
...I therefore wholeheartedly support proposals for federal registration, where necessary, so that men and women can, freely and without fear, qualify to cast their ballots...
...We face a period of move...
...The Russia of today is vastly different from the Russia of Stalin...
...This will require, in the first place, that we plan what we want to do—so that we make our fabulously productive economy our servant and not our master...
...The industrial workers have fared well on the whole, because they have built unions strong enough to win for their members a fair share in these gains...
...Just as important as a healthy and expanding economy is the achievement of full human dignity for every American...
...Some way should be found, through food stamp plans or otherwise, to use our morethan-adequate food supplies to provide enough to eat for all people, no matter how low their incomes...
...Both sides have ven tured forth from the Maginot lines of implacable suspicion and hostility which they had erected against one another...
...The bonding, "no-man's-land," picketing, boycott, and related provisions of last year's labor bill should be debated and amended as soon as the punitive nature of these provisions is brought home to the people, and through them, to the Congress...
...It is the misfortune of our farmers—truly America's forgotten men— that they have not been able to organize effectively in their economic defense...
...We cannot afford to take a shorter view, because we must live throughout this decade with the consequences of the decisions we make this year...
...The National Planning Association— in whose deliberations business, labor, and farm leaders achieve a fruitful merger of minds—has recently published its expert views on this question...
...I am not proposing a "regimented" economy—far from it...
...Others include the failure to withhold taxes on dividends and interest and the preferential treatment of dividend income, which is taxed at a lower rate than are wages and salaries...
...We need not, if we are wise, fear that the outbreak of peace will bring an economic holocaust...
...Progress and growth on the economic front are vital both to our defense and to our well-being...
...It suggests $10 billion a year toward the mount ing deficit in our public investment program—schools, highways, urban renewal, water supply, hospitals, ac tion against air pollution, and the other vital public services which have been starved of funds while the chromium-plated private sector of our economy has flourished...
...However, it is in urgent need of reform so that it will be more equitable at any level of revenue—particularly by closing loopholes through which billions of dollars escape...
...So, as our economy grows, we must take positive steps to channel a fairer share of its benefits to the aged, the sick, and those marooned in economically depressed or "automated" areas and industries...
...I say "the means" because I do not for one moment rec ognize peace itself as an issue between our major parties...
...NPA envisages more adequate aid to the developing countries—and it is worth noting that both the United States and the Soviet Union have pledged themselves, when disarma ment is achieved, to launch an inter national crusade to banish poverty from the earth...
...I welcome our commitment to a series of summit meetings with the Soviet leaders...
...I answer a confident and de termined "Yes...
...NPA estimates that some $25 bil lion a year may be released in the first five years of disarmament, and cites facts and figures to show how this slack may be taken up...
...Knowledge casts out fear— and the facts demonstrate that inte gration does not demean our cher ished ways of life, but rather enriches them with new dimensions of human understanding...
...f An adequate agricultural resources program...
...We have to find ways of maintain ing full employment in an everexpanding economy and, at the same time, preventing inflation...
...The decisions of our federal government affect the welfare, the property, and even the lives of all of us...
...rather it is to arouse the people to a realization that only a liberal America can be happy and secure in the days ahead...
...For too many years, America has marked time in a rapidly changing world...
...These shifts will not come about easily...
...We need to build a creative farm policy on these firm foundations: % The determination of fair prices for farm commodities and a fair income standard for farmers...
...We must recognize that our most powerful and effective instruments of economic national policy are not the control of credit and interest (although this has its uses—and abuses, as in the Administration's "tight money" policy) but the tax system and the national budget...
...Within the next few years, virtually all the non-white peoples of the world will have obtained their full civil rights...
...I repeat and emphasize these words...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
