GOALS FOR AMERICA
PROGRESSIVE 'YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE" Goals for D URING THE past month President Eisenhower fired a volley of statements at Congress and the country...
...Not a penny of public funds was to soil the project...
...The American educational system is the best in the world, but "inadequate classrooms, underpaid teachers, and flabby standards are weaknesses we must constantly strive to eliminate...
...It did not seem to occur to the President that there was something utterly debasing about having the richest nation on earth beg a few millions from private charity...
...The President's philosophy was expressed for him by Dr...
...The result is that while echoing the President's blissful estimate of how we are faring and whither we are tending, Nixon lets on now and then that perhaps things could be better than they are and will be if he gets to occupy the White House...
...Two examples: American agriculture, the Vice President said, is the most productive on earth, but "there is no higher priority than a complete overhauling of obsolete farm programs...
...It must have been this kind of performance that led Adlai Stevenson to observe that the Eisenhower Administration is like a tranquilizer pill factory...
...It was this same obsessive commit ment to the private sector of our na tional life, to the exclusion of public planning and government participa tion, that dominated his thinking in the preparation of his message to Congress...
...There is nothing in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence that enshrines consumer goods as our ultimate goal or outlaws public service and planning for the general welfare as repugnant to the free way of life...
...It is to use our wealth and power to provide equality of opportunity in building a decent society for all our people...
...down twelve per cent...
...Replying to critics who believe we must achieve a "greater tempo" in our national development, the President snapped that to do this we shall have to "take our country and make it an armed camp and regiment it . . . and get people steamed up like you did in wars...
...President Eisenhower is happy that consumption is increasing and profits are rising...
...The Eisenhower Administration's serene assurance that all is well in the land and there is no need for the nation to raise its sights is shared, of course, by Vice-President Nixon...
...Eisenhower, be witched by the notion that any enter prise in which the government partic ipates must be suspect, insisted on two limitations—that every member of the commission must be "outside of government," and that the three to five million dollars required to finance the study come exclusively from private sources...
...Most of the press, generous to a fault, as always, with America Mr...
...down sixteen per cent...
...steel up fifty-seven per cent, U.S...
...It seems only yesterday that the United States was supreme in science and weaponry...
...More than a year ago, in a message to Congress, he proposed the establishment of such a commission composed of "selfless and devoted individuals" to make "the necessary appraisal of the potentials of our future...
...Per capita production increased seventy-one per cent in the U.S.S.R...
...and eleven per cent in the United States...
...It is he who is saying that our system of liberty is so fragile that it is not tough enough and durable enough to keep up the pace in the great contest of national power...
...But Mr...
...Building homes and hospitals and schools and recreation centers as public enterprises is at least as helpful in maintaining "rights and freedoms" of which the President spoke as encouraging the private consumption of consumer goods...
...oil up 145 per cent, U.S...
...In his budget message, for example, he slighted or ignored ur gent needs in the fields of education, housing, urban renewal, health, social security, public works, and resource development—not only because he is wedded to a balanced budget, but also because of his abhorrence for ex panding the public welfare domain of the federal government...
...Eisenhower, slept on the story...
...The President has appointed his Commission on National Goals...
...In four messages to Congress—on the budget, the state of the union, the economic report, and agriculture— the Chief Executive recurringly circumscribed the government's role in favor of the "free forces" of private enterprise...
...The important thing, the President said in dismissing pressure for federal aid to education, housing, health, and the like, is to think and talk more about the "values . . . which we do believe"—"our own individual freedoms and rights . .. Our people ought to have greater faith in their own system...
...No member of Congress and no representative of the executive branch of government, however close they might be to the heart of the subject of inquiry, were to contaminate the study...
...Raymond J. Saulnier, chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, when he said: "The ultimate purpose of the American economy is to produce more consumer goods...
...It is the President who is saying," Lippmann wrote, "that with a $500 billion economy, the American nation will lose its freedom if it devotes to public purposes a somewhat larger share of national power...
...If we ourselves believe in the ideals and spiritual aims about which so much is said, we have something else to do besides maximize the enjoyment of consumer goods...
...This is the object of everything that we are working at— to produce things for consumers/' His emphasis on consumer goods drew this reply from Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat and one of the most consistently liberal voices in Congress: "The goal of our economy is to provide an environment in which every American family can have a good house for living and shelter, a good school to send their children to, good transportation facilities, and good opportunity for cultural and spiritual advancement...
...Here, surely, was a public enter prise—the shaping of "goals that stand high and so inspire every citizen to climb toward mounting levels of moral, intellectual, and material strength...
...These figures, of course, are not quite so dramatic as they seem...
...and 0.3 per cent in the United States...
...power up ninety-seven per cent, U.S...
...It doesn't seem to matter that the national unemployment rate stays at six per cent, that the annual rate of economic growth slumps below three per cent, that we urgently need more than 130,000 new school rooms, or that our health facilities are woefully inadequate...
...It is...
...Even as Mr...
...Hardly a week later, Nixon broke a tie and killed a Senate bill providing federal aid to education...
...There is nothing very convincing or inspiring," Lippmann said, "in loving our liberty to enjoy consumer goods so that we cannot afford to educate our children...
...In a major speech in Chicago recently, for instance, he went down the line extolling our supremacy in major fields, but in each case he craftily added, for the independent vote, that much remains to be done...
...Last month, when he announced the composition of the commission at long last, it turned out that he had experienced great difficulty getting private citizens of eminence to serve on his strictly private commission, and that he had encountered even greater resistance in passing the tin cup among private foundations for the invisible fraction of one per cent of the national budget required for the project...
...The important consideration, it would seem, is to increase consumption...
...Eisenhower was trying to exalt stagnation as a way of life, the Soviet Union's Premier Nikita Khrushchev was delivering his own state of the union message to the Supreme Soviet...
...Few incidents illuminate more graphically the President's philosophy of government than his curious handling of his plan to establish a Commission on National Goals...
...But the Vice-President is also a candidate for President, which means he cannot afford to be as smug as his chief...
...His messages betrayed an extraordi nary complacency, and with it a dis turbing resignation to let the na tional economy limp along as it is, expanding at a rate of less than three per cent a year instead of the five per cent which most economists, includ ing those who prepared the report for the Rockefeller Brothers, believe is not only possible but vital if we are to build a healthy economy and keep ahead of the Soviet Union in the all-important non-military struggle of competitive co-existence...
...Now the Soviets have caught up with us, and passed us in some fiendish fields...
...coal up fifty-eight per cent, U.S...
...All through 1959 no embarrassing questions were asked about whatever had happened to the President's plan, announced in January of that year...
...Russian iron production went up fifty-seven per cent, American sixteen per cent...
...More than a year went by without much happening...
...Walter Lippmann, certainly no rabble-rousing radical, writing in the arch-Republican New York Herald-Tribune, lashed out at President Eisenhower for "talking like a tired old man who has lost touch with the springs of our national vitality...
...PROGRESSIVE 'YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE" Goals for D URING THE past month President Eisenhower fired a volley of statements at Congress and the country emphasizing more sharply than ever before his dislike and distrust of government as an active partner in the shaping of the national economy...
...The United States is still well ahead of the Soviet Union in production achieve ments, but it is the trend, the direc tion, the driving purpose, the rate of expansion, the use to which increased production is put that count so much now...
...Between 1953 and 1959, he reported, "gross national production increased ninety per cent in the U.S.S.R...
...But it is the President who lacks faith in the American system, whose Constitution directs the government to "provide for the general welfare...
...The object of our economy is not to become fat with consumer goods...
...His only concern, it seems, was that the participation of the people, through their elected government, would somehow innoculate the project with a fatal virus...
...With each speech and each public appearance, it seeks to "lead us gently and expertly into an unreal, delightful, trivial world, without veracity, without dignity, without humanity, and without purpose except, of course, the purpose of balancing the budget...
...It is the President who forgets that the Declaration of Independence, after dealing with freedoms and rights, goes on to assert that "to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
...With all due respect, he has sunk into, he has resigned himself to, an attitude of defeatism in which there is no faith that our people have the will, the energy, the resourcefulness, and the capacity to close ranks, if they are summoned to make a greater effort...
...up nine per cent...
...It is the Chief Executive, he rightly pointed out, who has so little faith in our democratic system that he cannot see how we can meet the Soviet challenge and respond to the social and economic demands of our rapidly rising population while still retaining "our own individual freedoms and rights...
...up fifty-six per cent...
...There is nothing in either document to suggest that our system is safeguarded or its cause advanced by denying to the government of the people the right to expand their economy beyond the level attained by the "free" market in the making and selling of consumer goods for private profit...
...What is fundamentally at fault is a lack of faith by the President and his Administration in the capacity of a free people to accept responsibility and exercise discipline in an effort to advance the general welfare...
...It isn't too pre posterous to wonder if the Soviet Union might not, given its startling rate of growth, open up an economic gap which, in the long struggle of competitive co-existence, might prove more decisive than the current "mis sile gap" which preoccupies so many of our politicians and publicists...
...Eisenhower betrayed this absence of trust in the people at a recent press conference...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
