NOTES IN THE NEWS

...Eighty-four per cent of this investment is controlled by defense requirements, and there is growing concern among university administrators that the resulting heavy emphasis on the physical sciences is seriously unbalancing academic programs, weakening the social sciences and liberal arts, and depriving schools of freedom...

...Still other findings of the Friends offer clear evidence of the power of the military: % The Federal government is now supporting more than half the nation's research and development, much of which is under the direction of our universities...

...Feeling ran so high that when Rockwell appeared at a court hearing on the application he was mobbed and had to be rescued by police...

...The use of defense contracts to improve economic conditions in depressed areas not only gives the military a powerful voice in the direction of our domestic economy, but provides a built-in guarantee that arms production will not decline...

...In the last three years 53,683 children have left the city's elementary schools to attend private and parochial schools...

...The overwhelming majority of its members interpreted the storm of opinion generated by the Committee as too dangerous, politically, to attempt to weather—even if they were so inclined...

...The higher-cost housing was occupied almost exclusively by whites, seventy-five per cent of the low-income apartments by Negroes and Puerto Ricans...

...This is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the monster which the House has created: the House of Representatives cowering before its creature, quivering in fear...

...Congressmen and governors vie with one another for more and bigger arms contracts...

...It is a deeply ingrained tradition in the United States that pupils of public schools usually attend the nearest school—the "neighborhood school" principle...

...Defense spending is such a huge factor in the economy that, in the words of Michigan's Senator Philip A. Hart, it "contains within it the capacity to produce both dislocation and prosperity, to bring about both labor surpluses and labor shortages, to foster both the growth and decline of all American enterprise...

...Current military expenditures total fifty-eight per cent of the Federal budget, and when veterans' services and interest on the largely war-created public debt are added, they account for fully seventy-seven per cent of government expenditures...

...But even as the legal barriers to racial integration slowly topple, de facto school segregation is getting worse rather than improving in many of the larger cities of the North...

...The new Administration has held out little hope that there will be much change in the overall size of the military program...

...Given enough time, the segregation problems of the South may gradually be solved by the exodus to the North, where educators are already trying to avert the stain of segregation in schools...

...William F. Ryan of New York City, a promising freshman who successfully bucked the machine to win his seat...

...New York City has attempted to solve the problem, with only modest success, by modifying the neighborhood school principle, transporting some children by bus to schools farther from their homes, and by other means...

...The monumental problem of segregation in public schools is slowly moving—although admittedly at an almost imperceptible pace—toward solution in the South, in those areas where segregation has been maintained by law...

...Edith Green of Oregon...

...McReynolds concluded his commentary on the Rockwell affair by expressing a hope "that when Hitler returns to New York he will be able to speak his piece in Union Square like any other crackpot...

...Senator Paul Douglas estimates that two to three billion dollars could be saved each year simply by letting contracts on a competitive bid basis—a sum greater than the total amounts budgeted for highways, aviation, commerce, the postal service, and public housing...

...After years of a steady exodus of white children to private and parochial schools," stated Dr...

...The Big Hand In the length of time it takes a steadfast subscriber to read this issue of The Progressive, the United States Defense Department will have disposed of more than fifteen million dollars...

...Inter-service rivalry is another factor in swelling the volume of weapons production, and the companies which hold contracts join freely in this competition...

...At a suggestion of the Army's public information office, Western Electric and Douglas aircraft, producers of Nike, ran a competing series of advertisements in the same publications...

...f Waste in defense procurement is monumental...

...31 (Reuters)—An estimated 230,000 persons still suffer from radioactive diseases, ranging from burns and bleeding gums to leukemia and cancer, contracted as a result of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than fifteen years ago, according to a report by the U.S...

...My wife and I have talked for years about its abolition...

...The American Civil Liberties Union, with the editorial backing of the New York Times, Post, and Journal-American, appealed the gag on Rockwell...

...Hitler in New York (A Footnote) Almost a year ago, when George Lincoln Rockwell, the self-styled leader of the "American Nazi Party," applied to the New York City Department of Parks for a permit to hold a "Nazi Rally" in Union Square on the Fourth of July, a wild storm of protest was unleashed...

...Theobald, "approximately one-third of all city children are now enrolled in such non-public institutions...

...As non-whites, at the bottom of the social and income ladders, crowd into the older central cores of the cities, whites flee to the suburbs...

...They are all Democrats: James Roosevelt of California, who has led the fight against the Un-American Committee in the House...

...Civil liberty "is not a luxury," said McReynolds, "to be granted only to those close to the middle of the political road...

...But it's too dangerous politically for me to vote against it...

...The story is similar in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles—all the large industrial centers of the North...

...Six Courageous Congressmen Lest anyone think that the spirit of McCarthyism died with the Senator who gave his name to a doctrine of hate and suspicion, let him look at the sorry record of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the overwhelming vote of the House on March 1 giving it a new license— backed with $331,000—to pursue its inquisitions...

...The taxpayer, of course, paid the bill for both sides...

...Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission...

...The decision of the Appellate Division and the melting of New York's snows may provide a fresh opportunity to test this thesis...

...Another said, "Perhaps I will vote my principles [against the Committee], but it will be political suicide...

...There were six—only six—Congressmen who voted against the House resolution to grant the Un-American Activities Committee its requested appropriation...

...The great volume of military and related expenditures—ten per cent of our gross national product—has made some areas of the country so dependent upon defense contracts that obsolete installations and weapons programs are frequently continued only because of the tremendous political pressures brought to bear on the Pentagon...

...The Progressive welcomes the opportunity to commend these Representatives for their courage and conviction in the face of overwhelming odds, both in the vote on the resolution, which passed 412 to 6, with 14 not voting, and in the face of the danger to their political careers...

...The Defense Department is the only arm of the government with the power and the freedom from close supervision to get away with such profligacy year after year...

...163), was so situated as to serve the entire redevelopment...

...It is michiev-ous because these military machines have a capability only of fighting one another...

...In contrast, on behalf of each of our citizens, we are investing in all United Nations agencies and programs the princely sum of sixty-five cents...

...Entitled "The Big Hand in Your Pocket," it is available from the Friends for twenty-five cents...

...But this principle only serves to work for segregation in the classroom when residential segregation is widely practiced, as it is in our Northern metropolises...

...Ten per cent of the nation's labor force is dependent in whole or in part on military expenditures...

...Even more striking, their total annual income is only about one per cent of that of the United States...

...Park Commissioner New-bold Morris, backed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., banned the meeting, and New York State Supreme Court Justice Henry Epstein upheld the park department's action...

...163, preferring to enroll their children in private and parochial schools...

...Segregation in the North (Cont'd...

...An Eastern Representative told a reporter, "I hate the damn Un-American Committee...

...and Barratt O'Hara of Illinois...

...The movie, more than any single act of the Committee in recent years, has aroused nationwide controversy over the Committee's tactics and its very right to existence...

...In the same period 1,285,000 persons, most of them white, left New York City...

...When extremists are curbed then the whole range of debate is drastically narrowed...

...And in the vital area of disarmament, last year we spent one dollar for every $6,000 the Defense Department dropped on arms...

...Senator Frank Church of Idaho has sharply criticized the pouring of arms into the underdeveloped countries as "a mischievous policy...

...John J. Theobald, the upper-income parents "sent only four children to P.S...

...We have fostered the development of forces . . . beyond the capacity of the impoverished economies of these lands to sustain them...

...This powerful lobby is strengthened by supporting pressures of hundreds of retired officers employed by the firms that produce arms under defense contracts...

...little hope, too, that new frontiers in social and economic areas will be pushed back very rapidly unless there is substantial abatement of the suicidal arms race...

...the anti-racist himself could be suppressed . . . [Rockwell's] right to speak may not be cut off, no matter how offensive his speech may be to others...

...Many other Congressmen are either strongly opposed to, or simply weary of, the Committee's shenanigans—although it should be emphasized they do not constitute a majority—but they are scared to death to say so...

...The Republic will survive—and be the stronger for the experience...

...Eighty-seven per cent of defense contracts are awarded with no competition...

...But their collective population is only one-fourth that of the United States and less than one-tenth that of Communist China...

...May their number increase...

...There seems...

...The military is not solely responsible, of course, for our foreign military aid policies...

...Hundreds of prints of Operation Abolition are in circulation, and there are few citizens who have not been or will not be exposed to it...

...During 1961, the cost of the national security program—including commitments for past, present, and future wars—will run well above $160 million each day, more than $300 a year for every man, woman, and child living in the United States...

...A new school, the Alfred E. Smith School (P.S...

...Between 1950 and 1958 a total of 835,000 alien immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes from the South moved into the city...

...Thomas L. Ashley of Ohio...

...This is just a sampling of the wealth of graphic facts and figures on the military compiled recently and presented in an attractive booklet by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, 245 Second Street, N.E., Washington 2, D.C...

...But the Pentagon represents probably the most powerful lobby in Washington, with an estimated personnel of four hundred assigned to putting pressure on Congress...

...Lest We Forget Tokyo, Jan...

...The House of Representatives got the message early...

...A huge urban redevelopment project of about 4,500 apartments was divided roughly equally between privately sponsored homes for middle-and upper-income families and low-income, subsidized housing...

...According to the State Department, ". . . together these three countries maintain nearly a million and a half men under arms, or about sixty per cent of the armed strength of the United States or Communist China...

...Military needs and judgments often take second place...

...But when the school opened, reported New York's School Superintendent Dr...

...Justice Charles D. Breitel, speaking for the majority, took the same view: "The unpopularity of views," went the opinion, in part, "their shocking quality, their obnoxiousness, and even their alarming impact is not enough [to ban their presentation] . . . Otherwise the preacher of any strange doctrine could be stopped...

...It . . . must be extended to all men and all views . . . freedom for extremists is the price we pay for our own freedom . . . One cannot limit freedom and still retain it...

...Mischievous Overseas Policy Defense spending in terms of the relatively wealthy domestic economy is staggering enough, but when directed into some of the underdeveloped countries the effect becomes overpowering...

...Boeing aircraft, ninety-nine per cent of whose sales of more than a billion dollars are to the defense department, ran a series of advertisements in magazines and newspapers promoting its Air Force-sponsored Bo-marc missile in an effort to gain support in a battle over appropriations with the Army, which was pushing its Nike missile...

...More than one member of Congress has complained that foreign policy is made in the Pentagon as much as in the White House and State Department...

...Robert Kasten-meier of Wisconsin...

...Under the chairmanship of Pennsylvania's Democrat Francis Walter, the Committee sank to a new low in recent months with its sanction of the notorious moving picture, Operation Abolition, which depicts a distorted and thoroughly discredited view of the San Francisco protests against the Committee at the time of its hearings there last spring...

...But New York's upper West Side has recently afforded a striking example of the stubborn, if quiet, resistance in the North to genuine integration in the schools...

...f Defense Department land holdings are greater than the combined area of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and steadily growing...

...But not all of those repelled by Rockwell's revolting anti-Semitism and fascist ideology thought his obnoxious doctrines were cause for denying him freedom to speak...

...While other factors are of equal or greater importance, nevertheless the sheer cost of maintaining a huge military establishment has given the military a tightening stranglehold on our domestic economy, our foreign relations, and on our hopes for a world without war...

...More than half of the current two billion dollar overseas military aid is going to South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam...

...Instead, his right, and that of those who wish to listen to him, must be protected, no matter how unpleasant the assignment...

...In the December issue of The Progressive, David McReynolds, in one of the more controversial articles of the past several months, presented a case for allowing Rockwell to speak...

...But while the scandalously inaccurate picture brought into the open a strong show of opposition to the Committee, it also produced evidence of an even stronger element of approval for the Committee's witch-hunting activities...

...Property held by defense agencies is valued at $170 billion...

...When the Appellate Division of the Court ruled recently, by a four to one margin, that the park department had no right to ban Rockwell from speaking, the wording of its opinion echoed to an impressive degree the arguments presented by McReynolds...

...Several months later there were still only ten upper-income pupils in the school...