Notes in the News
Notes in the News Significant Triumph Democratic Party victories in New York and New Jersey commanded most of the front-page headlines, but the decisive election of Henry Gonzales of San...
...official refusal to recognize the validity of constitutional amendments ("the Fourteenth Amendment was never adopted")— these are only some of the techniques used to keep Negro citizens "where they belong...
...Even our free press is exploited by Communist propagandists...
...Here, it seems to us, is an effective instrument to combat discrimination in the unions...
...defective voting machines...
...The Commission concluded from the evidence that there was apparently no limit to which segregationists would not go in their efforts to keep the Negro off the polling lists...
...with the vote he would have too much power...
...strategy "and it failed...
...In the last decade or so, the number of Southern Negro voters has doubled, and in some urban areas their votes are decisive...
...Republican Senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and John Tower of Texas, two of the most triggerhappy characters in Congress, pounded the same theme in speeches they delivered in Goode's behalf...
...It reminds us, somehow, of the trick Joe McCarthy used to play on the sawdust circuit...
...The liberals in Congress have been asleep at the switch in allowing the Rightwing crowd to seize the initiative...
...In a letter to civil defense director Pittman, Kastenmeier requested that evacuation route signs be removed from his Congressional district because "they give a dangerously false sense of security...
...The deficiency, it turns out, is the inability of the American boy entering the armed forces to grasp the fact that we are already at war...
...The ballot is a powerful weapon in the Negro's fight for freedom and the Southern segregationist is determined the wall will not be breached...
...But, as even The Wall Street Journal conceded, this was the dominant G.O.P...
...We have never seen Welch with his hat on, or hat in hand, for that matter, but we can see that hat now in our mind's eye—a wide, roomy, Texas job, perhaps twenty gallons, from which he pours the names and numbers and percentages of Comsymps without benefit of a jigger...
...Now this somewhat pathetic agency finds itself almost the last straggler to get aboard the shelter bandwagon—an approach to nuclear war about as dubious and unconvincing as its predecessor, a point we developed in these columns last month...
...This is an unlawful act, and it would have been equally unlawful, of course, if Walker had exhorted his men to judge candidates by the yardsticks of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action...
...The very day the press announced that civil defense had shifted its emphasis from running to hiding, a Rockefeller Institute report contended that bomb explosions in the high megaton range greatly reduced the effectiveness of shelters except in areas far removed from the blast...
...It was in San Antonio that the Republican Party unveiled its strategy for 1962— an all-out attack on the Kennedy Administration as "soft on Communism" and "appeasement-minded" in its conduct of foreign affairs...
...Here, too, is a timely opportunity for labor leadership to demonstrate good faith in support of its good intentions by pressing for such legislation when the AFL-CIO Convention is held in Miami Beach this month...
...The pamphlet contains instructions for digging trenches and covering them with logs and earth, and a reminder to be sure to wash everything upon emerging—including the family pig...
...The young men who came to us from America's schools and homes and churches were uninformed about their enemy...
...An analyst for the Rand Corporation, for example, recently testified before a Congressional committee that the Soviet Union "for the last ten years has been engaged in an extensive and expanding civilian defense program . . .," including lengthy training programs that reach as many as 100 million Russians, the publication of more than 100 different handbooks and instruction manuals on civil defense, and widespread shelter installations...
...In Madison Parish, no Negro has turned out to vote in more than thirty-seven years, according to the testimony of the registrar...
...Its findings and recommendations during the first two years of its life, under the chairmanship of John A. Hannah, president of Michigan State University, resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which strengthened the hand of the Federal government in protecting Negro voting rights...
...individuals, even though resident in the community for years, were challenged to prove their identity...
...The hearings brought to light wholesale purgings of Negroes from voting lists...
...It may be true that the AFL-CIO is, as it claimed in its rebuttal, "a major and foremost force for the elimination of all race discrimination . . ." but it is equally true that it has not moved far enough fast enough to wipe out the considerable pockets of discrimination that survive in key labor areas...
...One of the arguments frequently advanced for pursuing a vigorous shelter and civil defense program is that the Soviets are working extensively in this area...
...The sheriff's last statement reveals the motive behind the Negro's drive to gain his voting rights...
...f In Ouachita Parish, in northern Louisiana, more than 5,000 Negroes received mailed notices that their right to be on the rolls had been challenged...
...They were given ten days to answer or have their names stricken...
...How About the Russians...
...Given the variety of factors and forces involved in the campaign, it would be a mistake to conclude that the Gonzales victory represented a complete repudiation of the "soft on Communism" humbug to which Republican planners seem committed...
...The new statutes went further...
...others did not have telephones...
...King is president...
...They asked for particulars...
...T h e training and preparation they should have been getting had been sadly neglected...
...Walker is a member of the John Birch Society, which believes that Dwight Eisenhower is "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," that Milton Eisenhower is his brother's "superior and boss in the Communist Party," that John Foster Dulles was and Allen Dulles is a Communist agent, and that Chief Justice Earl Warren should be impeached as a traitor...
...It sells for about ten cents, but "there are no indications it is a best seller...
...Notes in the News Significant Triumph Democratic Party victories in New York and New Jersey commanded most of the front-page headlines, but the decisive election of Henry Gonzales of San Antonio, Texas, to Congress strikes us as a considerably more significant triumph...
...Kastenmeier criticized the evacuation signs as not only ineffective but "dangerous, since they deceive people as to the real danger they would face in a nuclear war...
...The persuasiveness of the argument eludes us, but in any case the premise is based on fragmentary and highly contradictory reports...
...This is a pretty small percentage for a man who thinks the Eisenhowers and the Dulleses sold out to the Kremlin, but still it troubled Catholic leaders...
...Even some Federal district judges have moved only reluctantly to protect the Negro until ordered to act by a higher jurisdiction...
...It also describes the fear behind the segregationists' bitter resistance...
...In recent years, the general complained, "Troop commanders have been working under severe handicaps...
...misdemeanors except traffic and hunting law violations...
...the time had not come for Negroes to vote in that parish...
...The published report of the Commission, based on a mountain of evidence acquired in scores of hearings in the South, reveals the magnitude and the intensity of Southern resistance to Negro participation in the political life of the nation...
...Preston Glover, of the Associated Press, filed a story from Moscow emphasizing he had made "a sustained but unsuccessful hunt to find either a bomb shelter or anyone who has seen one...
...I stood there for three hours and fifteen minutes, not a single Negro voting, but the whites were continuing to go in and vote...
...Its dominant theme, ignored or overlooked by the press, is that the military establishment must take over the education of American youth, in civilian no less than in military affairs, because parents, schools, and churches have proved themselves unequal to the task...
...Specifically, The Pilot, official publication of the Boston archdiocese, asked the pandjandrum of the rabid Right how he had come by his figure...
...I disagree...
...The Hat Trick Robert Welch, founder and proprietor of the John Birch Society, recently estimated that one-half of one per cent of the Catholic clergy in the United States are Communist sympathizers—"Comsymps" as he puts it...
...Referring to alleged secret information on civil defense in the Soviet Union, Caruthers concluded, "Nothing that can be seen, heard, or read here in Moscow gives even a hint of support for such reports...
...Our great hope is that President Kennedy, who reads election returns, will feel somewhat more secure in the knowledge that the Republican strategists' drive to equate negotiation with appeasement does not begin to command the support claimed for it...
...Signs of Danger Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier, who so ably represents The Progressive's home district in the House, delivered the coup de grace to the evacuation nonsense...
...We found it necessary to remedy this deficiency...
...I. S. Ravdin of the University of Pennsylvania said that if the cut is sustained, clinicians may not be able to use twenty-three promising new drugs which have been tested in the laboratory stage at the National Institutes of Health...
...In scores of other counties, especially where Negro population is heavy, Negro voting, like school segregation, is little more than token...
...But does the shelter program offer any more security than the disc edited evacuation plan...
...Hide, Don't Run Now that so many Americans across the nation—from the President and the Pentagon brass to the editors of Life and a depressing number of ordinary citizens—have pinned their faith on fallout shelters, civil defense officials have decided to tag along and adopt them, too...
...He won comfortably by 10,000...
...We employ its [Communism's] agents in the teaching profession," declared Walker...
...The first agency to respond was the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...Prepared for the nonpartisan Scientists' Committee for Radiation Information, the study concluded that a twenty-megaton burst over Manhattan would kill six million New Yorkers, sheltered or not, plus many tens of thousands of suburban dwellers...
...New Role for the Military Major General Edwin A. Walker's 5,000-word statement explaining his recent resignation from the Army is one of the most disturbing documents we have seen in many a month...
...But more than anything else, it is the new determination of the Southern Negro to secure his rights which holds the greatest hope for success in the most crucial movement yet to develop in the South...
...One Negro who tried to register and was referred to the sheriff was the Reverend William J. Neal of Tallulah...
...locked doors to a voting booth at the end of a long line of prospective Negro voters...
...The Commission unanimously recommended that Congress amend the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (the LandrumGriffin Law) to provide that no union deny membership to, segregate, or expel any person because of race, color, religion, or national origin...
...This strikes us as the most selfdefeating kind of economy—the kind we hardly expected to encounter on the New Frontier...
...Few Negroes, and in some instances none at all, are registered in one hundred counties in eight Southern states...
...Soldiers come to us from civilian life and sooner or later will return to civilian life...
...Little or no emphasis is placed on private shelters, according to the Rand expert, but the subways in the larger cities are equipped to house two million persons...
...Walker is on record as regarding Harry S. Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson as "definitely pink" and Edward R. Murrow, Walter Lippmann, and Eric Sevareid as "confirmed Communists...
...The Negro's hopes have brightened now that the Civil Rights Commission has exposed the opposition's illegal, ruthless, and often ridiculous tactics...
...In succeeding elections Negroes won an apparent but transitory victory...
...It is a lusterless, self-serving document that winds up blaming Randolph for "the gap that has developed between organized labor and the Negro community...
...The Battle for the Ballot The Negro's fight for freedom in the South is now concentrating on a front which may well develop into the key battle in his long and painful campaign for equality...
...King reported that of five million eligible Negroes in the South, only a fourth could now vote, largely because of stubborn, and so far successful, resistance of white officials to Negro registration...
...It was a complete guess . . . simply pulled out of a hat," he explained...
...Yet the wall is being breached...
...The Civil Rights Commission began functioning four years ago under the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1957...
...Its activities culminated in the so-called "segregation law package," a combination of constitutional amendments and new statutes that even attempted to define disqualifying "bad character" as opposed to "good character...
...Hardest hit was the Public Health Service, which was cut 176,806,000, of which some $15,000,000 had been earmarked for cancer research by the National Institutes of Health...
...Walker, who commands a considerable following among the radical Right in Congress and the country, drew a picture of subversion run rampant in the United States that rivals some of the headline-hunting chillers of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...The truth is that almost no one except civil defense officials ever placed much reliance on evacuation...
...He needs to understand, as does every citizen, that we have long ago crossed the beaches and the water's edge and that we are in a death struggle now, on the high seas, in the air, on the land, in outer space, and in every local community where the agents of those who hope to conquer the world seek to undermine us...
...segregated voting machines with no assurance that their votes would be counted...
...The Louisiana state legislature and executive branch, county and city officials, white citizens' groups, landowners, merchants, bankers, and in some measure state courts, have all joined forces to deprive the Negro of his vote...
...Democrats prayed Gonzales would squeeze through by a thousand votes...
...Civil defense director Stuart L. Pittman announced recently—with obvious reluctance— that his agency had officially switched to advocating fallout shelters rather than evacuation as the first line of civilian defense...
...Signs which suggest that evacuation is a real possibility only breed an optimism which is cruel and misleading...
...threats of violence...
...insults...
...It was instigated by the forces of the far Right, determined to come to the defense of characters like General Walker...
...For example: f In Louisiana, two months after the Supreme Court's school segregation decisions, the state legislature established a joint legislative commit-, tee empowered "to provide ways and means whereby our existing social order shall be preserved and our institutions and ways of life maintained...
...Said the sheriff: It "wasn't advisable" for Negroes to register just now...
...to the extremists, the fundamental democratic right of choice is "too much power...
...Bad character" now includes common law marriage, historically recognized in the state...
...He would jump onto the platform with a briefcase which he implied was bulging with damming documents, launch into his expose of Communist infiltration of the highest echelons of government, and turn his eyes for confirmation to the briefcase— which he never opened...
...In 1954 voting machines were provided, but the machines segregated for use by Negroes kept breaking down, entailing long waits...
...It has been suggested," he said, "that discussion and consideration of domestic civilian matters are not within the province of the military...
...In Atlanta, for example, Negro voters recently defeated a segregationist candidate for mayor— who commanded a slight majority of white votes—by a substantial margin...
...Dr...
...Common law marriage became a felony...
...Secretary Abraham Ribicoff announced a slash of nearly 1102,000,000 in appropriations for the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of Education, the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, the Public Health Service, and the Social Security Administration...
...John Goode, the Republican candidate who embraces the philosophy of the far Right, lashed out at Gonzales, a militant Democratic liberal, and at President Kennedy for not being more aggressive on foreign policy issues...
...Be Sure to Wash Your Pig On the other hand, New York Times correspondent Osgood Caruthers found that "nowhere in Moscow or any other city visited by foreigners can one find signs pointing to shelters . . . no practice alerts are held . . . posters are extremely rare . . . [and there is] no such thing as an effort . . . to organize block crews or house wardens for civil defense...
...An investigation of charges that military officials have been "censored" and "muzzled" by the Administration is about to be launched by a Senate Committee...
...Keeping Them in Their Place The Louisiana story, as developed at the Commission's New Orleans hearings, provides the most complete picture of the variety of devices used to prevent the Negro from voting, although the same techniques are used throughout the South in varying degree...
...The Office of Civilian Defense tried for years to sell the idea to an apathetic and skeptical public, but there were few buyers...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., announced recently that a drive has been launched to double the number of Negroes registered to vote in Southern states, a movement backed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which Dr...
...having illegitimate children...
...Such "misdemeanors" as refusing to leave a public place when ordered, or obstructing a public passage, became "criminal mischief...
...They infest our entertainment media...
...Twenty-four hours after the AFLCIO hierarchy had cleared itself of Randolph's charges, the United States Civil Rights Commission issued a somewhat more objective report that concluded: "Most international unions have failed to exhibit any profound concern over civil rights problems" and several craft unions, "including those in the building and construction trades, have clung to their historic attitudes" of denying Negroes work in their trades...
...Department of Justice and the U.S...
...They long ago have infiltrated our government so that a scheme of subversion can be traced through three decades...
...Labor and the Negro A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, has fought a long, lonely, and often losing battle to break down the barriers of racial discrimination within the labor movement...
...What disturbed us most about General Walker's extraordinary statement of resignation was his revelation that "troop commanders" are moving in to "remedy" the "deficiency" created by the "neglect" of parents, schools, and churches...
...The Justice Department has already undertaken several positive actions to stop these practices, and has given evidence of taking further steps...
...illiteracy...
...His hard-hitting charge that the AFL-CIO had failed to come to grips with the problem recently resulted in a twenty-page rebuttal by the Executive Council...
...Yet prospects for progress are brighter than ever before—not only because the "new Negro" is more insistent on obtaining his rights, but because he now has two powerful allies eager to fight in his behalf: the U.S...
...It seems to us inconceivable that the richest nation on earth, now spending more than fifty billion dollars a year on armaments, must pick the pockets of its cancer research program of fifteen million dollars as a gesture to economy...
...What is urgently needed is a wideranging investigation of the extent to which the military establishment, playing on the fears and frustrations generated by cold war tensions, is attempting to reverse the traditional American adherence to the concept of the supremacy of the civilian establishment over the military establishment...
...collusion among registrars, election boards, sheriffs, and other law officers...
...The reasons were varied and frivolous: some could not write legibly (proved by failure, for example, to put a dot on an "i...
...displays of arms...
...We simply can't afford that kind of economy...
...We often wondered if it contained his laundry...
...Glover does report publication last December of a pamphlet— one of a series—on fallout protection...
...In 1956, the report quotes a Negro voter, "The door that the Negroes entered into the polling place was closed and locked...
...Victories won by the sit-in movement and the Freedom Riders have encouraged the Southern Negro to win for himself freedom of the ballot, but this fight promises to meet more formidable resistance from segregationists than any of the inspiring movements so far aimed at changing "the mind of the South...
...Liberals Asleep General Walker is entitled to his idiocy, but the official report of the Inspector General of the Army reveals that he sought to inflict his political views on his troops, principally, as we reported in this space last month, by urging the men under his command to be guided in their voting for Senators and Representatives by the evaluations published by Americans for Constitutional Action, one of the most relentlessly reactionary organizations in the country...
...Civil Rights Commission...
...We can conceive of nothing more perilous for the preservation of our democracy than for the military establishment, perhaps even now the most dominant force in the country, to usurp the roles of parents, schools, and churches...
...the Negro progresses too fast...
...It went into action in all parts of the state, in conjunction with a newly formed "Association of Citizens' Councils of Louisiana...
...The Old Frontier The bulging budget for armaments has led the Kennedy Administration to "reevaluate" its spending for nonmilitary purposes...
...A Negro who goes to the courthouse to register is told he had better talk to the sheriff...
...But, the record shows, the General is far less interested in making it possible for the boys to know "what is going on at home and abroad" than he is in indoctrinating them with his personal brand of Right-wing lunacy...
...I submit, therefore, that they should be permitted to know, without interruption, what is going on at home, and abroad, for their interest and the interest of the home they protect...
...For many years," said Pittman, "reliance has been placed on evacuation . . . a new emphasis is clearly necessary...
...General Walker would not stop with educating the American soldier to understand all this...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
