NOTES IN THE NEWS
Mad, But No Tea Party Entering the strange, distorted world of Robert W. Welch and his John Birch Society gives one the feeling of having stumbled into the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland's mad tea...
...The closing of Highlander is a tragedy, and the liberal spirit everywhere is damaged until it is reopened...
...A lower court revoked the school's charter...
...The law has powerful support from farm organizations, although only 45,000 of the millions of farmers use braceros...
...Its full power may not yet be known, but from all the evidence, it must be awesome indeed...
...and they keep down, to a pitiably low level, the rate of pay of migrant workers...
...Glenview, Illinois, presents an excellent case history of the effect the John Birch Society can have on a community...
...Probably the greatest single obstacle in recent years to the improvement of the migrant workers' dismal life is the importation of Mexican bra-ceros—farm workers brought from Mexico under arrangement with the Mexican government...
...the ultimate goal is one million...
...I have seen paychecks for a week's work that amounted to only seventeen cents, or three cents, after deductions...
...Since the great majority of them are large "factory" farmers making substantial profits, they would not be seriously hurt by having to pay the higher wages that would most likely result from stopping the importation of farm labor...
...Eventually it reached such a size and encompassed such a range of activities that exposure and publicity became inevitable...
...A Dangerous Test "One test of Eisenhower's warning," concluded Congressional Quarterly, "may be in the making, with the resumption of negotiations for a treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear tests...
...The bracero program is scheduled to end December 31, unless it is renewed in the current session of the Congress...
...An attempt to shut them up or to harass them by Congressional investigating committees does no service to democracy...
...In most cases, workers who have already moved into new jobs like them better than those they lost...
...Its theme is "Hate Communism," and its view of the Communist threat to the United States is, "The danger is almost entirely internal, from Communist influences right in our midst and treason right in our government...
...Yet there is no evidence in Washington that this powerful lobby was even winged by the retiring President...
...At this writing, we do not know what, if any, further legal steps will be, or can be, taken...
...In April the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the action, and ordered the school closed...
...President Kennedy has said that even with economic recovery this summer we may still have seven per cent unemployment in the fall...
...We see no good that would be accomplished by an investigation...
...There are 261 retired generals and admirals on the payrolls of the top one hundred defense contractors...
...A reasonable estimate might run as high as two million...
...It may be a painful and drawn-out process, but it is the only democratic way—and in the long run the only effective one...
...Named with them in the conspiracy are former Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen W. Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, scores of other high government officials, and one-third of the ministers of American churches...
...On the surface, this is a good—and a new—deal for the Mexican worker...
...Or forty-seven in Texas (in all but three of twenty-two districts...
...One more base would sink the state," a brave genefal once told Vinson...
...So we work five weeks without pay," commented an employe...
...Right now, it is the Soviet Union that is acting badly in Geneva, and hopes for a test ban have dimmed...
...the United Auto Workers Union has lost more than 200,000 members...
...in chemicals, 36,000...
...Robert Welch is the leader of a highly organized, ultra-reactionary organization, with chapters in at least thirty-five states, in which membership is expected to reach 100,000 by the end of this year...
...No Place Possibly the most neglected people of our "affluent society" are the migrant farm workers...
...In rubber, the drop was 25,000...
...Morale among workers is higher than ever, reports a veteran employe, and management says business is better than ever because of publicity about the plan...
...According to law, braceros may not be brought into an area unless local labor is not available at the prevailing wage rate...
...That's better than working no weeks...
...If the Kennedy Administration succeeds in negotiating a workable treaty, it will still have to secure Senate ratification...
...That may mean bucking a 'military-industrial complex' whose full power remains unknown...
...Its membership and "endorsers" include Congressmen and industrialists, housewives and cabinet makers—in one Texas city there is a chapter for bricklayers, one for financiers, and one for Negroes...
...have even seen a check for one cent...
...Their presence here serves two major purposes for United States' agriculture: They see the crops through to harvest...
...Something for Everyone It is only a few short months since President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, surprised almost everyone by firing a parting shot at the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex" that plans and manufactures and buys and sells our enormous volume of national defense materials...
...In the transportation-equipment industry, production rose, but the number of employes declined— by a quarter-million...
...Their work is so erratic that the migrant worker's family income—this usually includes a working wife and often working children—adds up to an average of less than $1,000 a year...
...These contractors and the competing armed services work closely together in a highly organized lobby to sell their programs to Congress...
...The John Birch Society was founded in Indianapolis in December 1958 by Welch, a retired candy manufacturer and former director of the National Association of Manufacturers...
...Some conservative newspapers and political leaders, embarrassed by being classed with Welch, have called on the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Senate Internal Security Committee to launch an investigation of the organization...
...To Welch, ". . . democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud," and, anyway, the United States, as long as two years ago, was as much as fifty per cent controlled by Communists...
...But millions of our own miserable migrant workers would enjoy a slightly brighter life...
...The Society was named after a young missionary to China who joined the United States military forces there and reportedly was killed by Chinese Communists ten days after the war ended while on an official cloak-and-dagger mission...
...There was a big splash in the press when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the closing of fifty-two military installations here at home and twenty-one overseas—not as an economy move, but to meet changing defense requirements...
...Secretary Goldberg has stated that while labor and management can do much to ease the strains of automation, "the government has a key role that has not been developed...
...The Communist Daily Worker quit publication "because the 'line' taken by the New York Times long ago made it unnecessary, superfluous, and probably embarrassing to the Times...
...And so it goes, in banks and bakeries, in textiles and shipping...
...In a devastating series, the Chicago Sun-Times exposed the havoc the Birchers have wreaked in this suburb of Chicago, in the heart of the gold-plated North Shore, where scores of John Birch chapters flourish...
...They number close to 400,000...
...He is, theoretically, protected—far above his home standards—by a minimum wage, health and housing guarantees, and assured work opportunities...
...Or that there are 108 installations in California (in all but five of the state's thirty districts...
...But how does the system work...
...Ironically, because they are working under an international agreement, braceros are more protected in matters of wages and living conditions, as bad as they are, than are our own citizen farm workers...
...Their hourly pay, on the average, makes the Federal minimum wage, even without the proposed increase, look like heaven...
...Ironically, the latest demand on the Senate committee for an investigation came from Welch himself...
...Long an object of hate and suspicion because of its open racial policies and—to many Tennesseans—"radical" ideas, the forces of bigotry finally nailed the school on flimsy charges that the director had operated the school for "private gain," and spirits had been sold on the premises...
...Bigotry Wins A Battle The courageous little interracial Highlander Folk School, near Mont-eagle, Tennessee, has finally lost its two year battle against prejudice...
...Mad, But No Tea Party Entering the strange, distorted world of Robert W. Welch and his John Birch Society gives one the feeling of having stumbled into the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland's mad tea party...
...Only the government is big enough to retrain and relocate workers and to reorient our educational system to offset the hardships of automation in advance, by training young people for jobs where they are needed...
...Pains of Automation A year or so ago we reported in these columns that a far-sighted, humane program had been launched by the Armour meat packing company in cooperation with the two major meat workers unions, a program designed to ease the impact of automation, advancing at a gallop in the meat industry, by retraining displaced workers for other jobs...
...The Red hunters have set church against church, and split congregations . . . Americanism has become a prime issue in the village election . . . Protestant and Catholic leaders are quarreling in public...
...There is the Mad Hatter, or Robert Welch, to whom "Milton Eisenhower is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior boss within the Communist party . . . My firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt...
...Within recent weeks Welch and his followers exploded onto the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast, on the floor of the Senate and the House, and in numerous state legislatures...
...Representative Carl Vinson, Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, described the bill as having "something for everyone...
...At this point there is a temptation to leave the Mad Hatter and his March Hares, and, like Alice, awaken from the dream...
...For excesses, there are already existing laws—courts throughout the land have held uniformly that unjustifiably calling someone a Communist is in itself grounds for a libel suit...
...The pay is almost invariably less, but the program has given a decided boost to the morale of workers who would otherwise have been dumped on the labor market after as much as twenty-five years at a trade of little use elsewhere...
...They have been joined by a fair sprinkling of liberals and liberal publications, including some who for years have been denouncing these pernicious committees and denying their right to investigate...
...Save the Employers In an unusual reversal of the employment problem, four hundred employes of a meat packing plant in Pittsburgh saved their employers' jobs—and their own—when the firm was threatened with bankruptcy, by voluntarily and spontaneously giving up five weeks wages this year...
...But there have been several occasions in the past when this powerful military lobby successfully threw roadblocks in the path of the United States' negotiating team...
...Their fear is that even with a new skill there may be no new job...
...Until recently, they were frequently used as strike breakers, or to defeat attempts to unionize migrants...
...Men have been retrained as retail meat cutters, real estate brokers, auto mechanics, tailors, and women as beauticians and in other fields...
...If the Walter and Eastland committees' investigations of left-wing groups is cause for protest, so too is that of the right-wing John Birch Society...
...The new Administration, in a provision in the Depressed Areas bill, has taken the first tentative step toward solving the human problem of automation—the problem President Kennedy says "may be the most serious domestic problem of the next ten years...
...But a close estimate of the braceros imported from Mexico can be made because, unlike United States-citizen migrant workers, both the U.S...
...Congressional Quarterly, that admirable watch-dog of the Washington scene, made a survey of the defense program under the new Administration and could see no signs of change in the relentless drive for contracts, bases, and always more military hardware...
...It is hardly a coincidence that Georgia, the home of Military Affairs Committee Chairman Vinson, has nineteen defense bases...
...Other newspapers have published similar exposures — including the arch-conservative Los Angeles Times, which denounced the John Birch Society as "subversive...
...Their children have only minimal schooling...
...government and the Mexican government keep track of the Mexicans who cross the border...
...Congress Cooperates One of the great sources of strength of this lobby is the eagerness of Congressmen to get as large a piece of the rich military pie as possible for their home states and districts...
...Creditors were so impressed they made long term repayment plans to keep the company afloat...
...He would have passed unheralded into history were it not for the fact that he is now memorialized in the John Birch Society as "the first casualty in the third world war...
...With an estimated one in eight citizens dependent upon defense spending, the military program has become such a vital factor in sustaining the economy that politicians are afraid to attack the lobby for fear of economic disaster...
...The organization grew quietly as an underground movement, operating much like the Communists— secret membership, front groups, infiltration of existing organizations, and the like...
...These deluded people have a right to speak their minds, however obnoxious their doctrines may be...
...The law goes under the title, Public Law 78, and it comes within the jurisdiction of the House Agriculture Committee, to which protests against extension may be addressed...
...They have no homes, in the accepted sense of a home as a place where a person spends most of his time...
...There is a better way to fight the John Birch Society, and much of the press has made a good start: expose the Society relentlessly, hold its absurd doctrines and divisive activities up to the ridicule they deserve—but defend, at every opportunity, the Society's right to speak...
...Nor is it a tea party, however mad it may be...
...At a time when new workers will soon be flooding the labor market at a record rate, the pace of automation is knocking workers out of jobs in soaring numbers...
...It is flying just as high as ever...
...We are already ten years too late in starting a large-scale, coordinated effort to solve a problem which has been accelerating since World War II...
...The way we look at it, working forty-seven weeks with pay is better than fifty-two weeks with no pay...
...Since 1956, employment in the automobile industry has dropped twenty per cent...
...Furthermore, the defense budget is a political sacred cow, with members of both parties vying with each other to prove their patriotism by supporting ever larger appropriations...
...But the pain was eased by a bill authorizing $808 million in construction covering 790 installations in all fifty states...
...Only a greatly quickened pace now can avert misery for millions even in a period of rapid economic growth...
...Big Problem, Big Solution Other industries have developed plans similar to Armour's in an effort to answer the question put by Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg: "How do we protect human values while we automate...
...But the unions are being cautious about appraising the overall effects of the retraining program...
...The publications of the service "booster" organizations are supported in large part by the advertising of missile and plane manufacturers...
...Neighbors spy on neighbors," reports the Sun-Times, "lifetime friends avoid each other, and men and women speak guardedly in the fear of being branded either Reds or Fascists...
...Migrant workers are specifically exempted from almost all the welfare provisions that the rest of our citizens have enjoyed since the New Deal days of a generation ago...
...Most unions have taken a responsible approach to the problem, but with jobs and members disappearing at such a rapid rate, the problem appears to have reached a magnitude beyond the capacity of the unions—or management—to handle...
...But we hope this is not the end of the fight...
...But the Eisenhowers are far from lonely in their underground Communist cell...
...Now some early returns are in concerning the effectiveness of the program, and it appears so far to be a modest success...
...A Catholic priest who has spent many years with braceros in California says: "The bracero program is only a legal way of continuing to exploit the migrant worker...
...There are varying reports on how many migrant workers roam up and down these United States in search of sustenance...
...But this is no dream...
...And these fears are well grounded...
...The bracero, the citizen farm worker, the grower, and the nation would be in better condition if this misused legislation were allowed to die quietly...
...But in practice the braceros' low wage rate all too often determines the prevailing wage...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
