NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES IN THE NEWS Pope and Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII are clearly irreconcilable antagonists in the global conflict of ideologies, but during the past month they...
...And right here at home, how long would the Eastlands, the Talmadges, and Thurmonds survive a true test of self-determination in their own states...
...President Kennedy, perhaps unintentionally, provided the impetus for this drive for a cutback in social legislation when, in his Berlin crisis speech to the nation, he called for greatly increased military appropriations: "Meanwhile, to help make certain that the current deficit is held to a safe level, we must keep down all expenditures not thoroughly justified in budget requests...
...It makes possible, in fact, the satisfaction of many personal rights, especially those called economic-social, such as, for example, the right to the indispensable means of human maintenance, to health services, to instruction at a higher level, to a more thorough professional formation, to housing, to work, to suitable leisure, to recreation...
...It seems to us a tragic commentary on the mood of our Congress that in the month in which it poured additional billions into the military establishment, it was powerless to act on urgently needed legislation to build schools and provide our teachers with somewhat higher salaries...
...Typical of such response as there was to the social and economic challenge laid down by Khrushchev was the statement by Assistant Senate Republican Leader Thomas H. Kuchel of California that "this latest Communist manifesto supplies all the more reason for the United States to discharge her responsibilities for world leadership"— by which he meant, he emphasized, supporting the President's request for $3.4 billion in additional defense appropriations...
...It is equally ironic that the President, who has spoken so eloquently in the past of the social and economic character of the world struggle, abandoned that concept to Pope John and Premier Khrushchev in a month in which he seemed almost totally absorbed in the military aspects of the conflict with Communism...
...Three days after Senator Fulbright spoke up, the Senate acted precisely as he had predicted...
...Sword and Plowshare What started out as a relatively minor Congressional appropriation of $95 million for the construction of electric generators at the Atomic Energy Commission's Hanford, Washington, reactor has developed into a full-scale Donnybrook over the issue of atomic public power...
...But a letter to the Washington Post by Irving Brant, noted biographer of Madison, asks the question, "If the AMA wants to know what Madison would think of the medical bill . . . why not inquire what he said and did in the actual field the AMA miscalls 'socialized medicine...
...But social planning, morally conceived and executed for the common good, he said, will do much to improve both the general welfare and the freedom of the individual...
...Khrushchev, of course, in his draft statement of a new Communist Party program, relied heavily on more massive doses of Communism to achieve a better life for the people...
...The issue is headed for a showdown in a Senate-House conference committee...
...Some of the more vocal of the power interests have themselves been the beneficiaries of $100 million of direct financial support, and one billion dollars worth of Federal-financed research and development, in constructing their privately owned nuclear power projects...
...It is clear that socialization, so understood, brings many advantages...
...The $95 million taxpayer investment would be repaid easily, with interest, within the life of the equipment...
...New Attack on Social Measures It was inevitable that this unprecedented spree of military spending would be accompanied by a demand for a slash in appropriations for social welfare programs...
...The whole concept of long-term licensing should also be examined...
...The Pope and Socialism In his memorable encyclical, "Mater et Magistra" ("Mother and Teacher"), the Pope spoke in terms more progressive than those employed by the most liberal members of the Democratic Party...
...The boys at the Journal would find themselves mounted atop a wild elephant they never meant to ride...
...The Big Question Neither the Pope's reflections on social planning nor Khrushchev's program for Soviet economic development seemed to attract much serious attention from Congress or the Kennedy Administration...
...The nuclear power reactor issue," said a recent editorial in the trade journal, Nucleonics Week, "has lit the public versus private power fuse that has long been in, the shadows of nuclear power but, despite many close calls, has never quite caught fire . . . it will have long-range effects on the power reactor program...
...But the powerful private power lobby descended upon the House, and, aided by members from coalproducing areas, knocked the appropriation for generators out of the bill...
...In historic documents released within a fortnight of each other, the political leader of world Communism and the spiritual leader of world Catholicism emphasized, each in his own way, the overriding significance of social planning for the general welfare as the dominant challenge of our time...
...The Senate put the appropriation for power back into the bill, although not without lengthy discussions, again revolving around socialism...
...Oblivious to the challenge proclaimed by both Pope John and Premier Khrushchev, conservatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties insisted on reduction of "non-essential spending," a term used to characterize appropriations for health, housing, education, and social services...
...Until now, this heat has simply been cast off into the Columbia River...
...Senator Clinton Anderson, New Mexico Democrat and member of the AEC, after reviewing the faltering private power efforts in the nuclear field, warned in a scathing Senate speech, "The whole partnership program should be reevaluated and a hard look should be taken at all aspects of government assistance...
...Senator Henry Jackson of Washington said of the Hanford plant, "There we have indeed a sword and a plowshare—a sword which will help to defend our country through the production of plutonium and a plowshare in the form of the production of electricity...
...Who, then, is against the project...
...Most of the additional power would be purchased —eagerly—by private utilities in the Northwest, which are generally in favor of constructing the Hanford power facilities...
...Large private utilities, mostly Eastern and Midwestern...
...The Pontiff warned against forms of socialization that would "restrict the range of the individual as regards his liberty of action...
...Pandora's Box In spite o? their own reluctance to invest in atomic power, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that practical considerations make the Hanford power project highly desirable, these utilities, far-removed from the Bonneville marketing area, stubbornly insist on perpetuating an enormous and senseless waste, using only the empty argument of "socialism...
...We like the idea, too, but we fell to brooding about what would happen if the Soviets accepted the principle of self-determination and insisted it be applied to the whole world, and not only Communistdominated Eastern Europe...
...Yet private development of nuclear power has been slow and hesitant, and several projects have been cancelled...
...In a month in which the United States was absorbed in a frenzied campaign to strengthen the nation's military might as our major offering in the world-wide competition of ideas, the Pope and the Premier were speaking to the world of the need to eradicate social injustice by harnessing the resources and skills of modern society for the universal enrichment of humanity...
...However, the project was dealt what is probably a killing blow when the House took the unusual action of instructing its conferees not to give in to the Senate on the power issue in conference...
...NOTES IN THE NEWS Pope and Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII are clearly irreconcilable antagonists in the global conflict of ideologies, but during the past month they demonstrated an extraordinary kinship in evaluating the nature of the struggle in which our world is locked...
...On February 27, 1813," Brant points out, "President Madison signed 'An Act to Encourage Vaccination' containing these opening words: " 'That the President . . . be . . . authorized to appoint an agent to preserve the genuine vaccine matter, and to furnish the same to any citizen of the United States, whenever it may be applied for, through the medium of the Post Office.' " Madison appointed as agent the doctor who suggested the idea, with instructions to spread the benefits as widely as possible throughout the United States...
...But what if the idea should spread...
...A distinguished dissenter from this popular position was Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...Rather, it helps to promote in them the expression and development of truly personal characteristics...
...Every expert agrees the Northwest can now, or soon, use the additional power...
...Electric production would run to 800,000 kilowatts—almost double that of giant Bonneville Dam...
...The Administration, it observed editorially, "has come up with at least one good idea—to make an issue of self-determination in Eastern Europe...
...The reactor itself requires half this amount, and the other half would go into the Bonneville distribution system...
...The big question," he said in commenting on the Soviet scheme for vast economic development, "is the maturity of our response...
...Socialization, he said—and he was speaking more of the social welfare state than any doctrinaire form of socialism— is "the fruit and expression of a natural tendency, almost irrepressible, in human beings, the tendency to join together to attain objectives which are beyond the capacity and means at the disposal of single individuals...
...Madison upon this question is against you...
...clearly and unequivocally against you...
...Madison as authority, you must submit to his authority . . . the authority of Mr...
...Much more than the Hanford generators may be at stake...
...What are the facts about Hanford...
...it voted an additional billion dollars that Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said he didn't want and couldn't use...
...Sauce for the Gander The Wall Street Journal, which doesn't much approve the Kennedy Administration's "somewhat frantic casting about for moves to counter the Soviet pressure on Berlin," found one it liked the other day...
...The Wall Street Journal, of course, didn't say it was for self-determination for all peoples, just for those in Eastern Europe...
...The principal argument: that old bogey, socialism...
...They were too deeply engrossed in increasing the nation's military strength...
...What would this do to our allies closer to home, in the Caribbean Sea, like Haiti, for example, where the present tyranny could not survive any test of self-determination...
...What would this do in Spain, where our great ally on the Atlantic, Franco's dictatorship, permits nothing resembling self-determination...
...When the AEC authorized a new reactor, to be completed next year, provision was made for harnessing the otherwise wasted heat to electric generators...
...But the power lobby may have opened a Pandora's box...
...That won't be enough...
...The reactor at Hanford has been making nuclear bomb fuel almost since the atomic age began, and in the process produces a prodigious amount of heat—an AEC member described it as the largest heat source in the United States, and perhaps in the world...
...Furthermore, Brant claims, "The whole social security and public health system of the United States stems constitutionally from a remark Madison made in the Federal Convention of 1787, that one of the purposes in levying Federal tonnage taxes was 'the support of seamen.' " Within a decade, Congress was making deductions from seamen's wages to establish and maintain maritime hospitals...
...The country can ill afford Hanford's monumental waste of power to satisfy a few men's greed...
...It not only approved every penny the President and the Pentagon had requested in their multi-billion dollar expansion of the military program...
...The aid-to-education bill was imprisoned in the House Rules Committee by a new coalition—composed of a usually liberal Catholic, Representative James J. Delaney of New York, who insisted on making aid to parochial schools a prerequisite for aid to public education, and the hard-shelled Republican and Democratic reactionaries who oppose Federal aid to education altogether...
...We must also develop our economy...
...lacking both coal and oil, the area is almost wholly dependent on hydroelectric power...
...That Old Socialist, James Madison In its desperate efforts to defeat the old age medical bill in Congress, the American Medical Association has reached all the way back to James Madison, third President of the United States, and named him as a constitutional authority who would be opposed to the social security medical aid proposals...
...The tendency in Congress is to respond to every Soviet threat by increasing our military strength...
...Mr...
...The Northwest and the nation need Hanford's plowshare as well as its sword...
...It is ironic that an Administration that came to power committed to moving forward on the home front must now, as a consequence of its own policies, fight a rearguard action to hold the line where it is...
...Kennedy may not have meant to proclaim a moratorium on social progress, but his words were quickly converted by the tories of both parties into ammunition to support their demand for cutbacks in expenditures for domestic programs like housing, health services, and education...
...How would this affect Formosa, our great ally in the Pacific, where the Formosans, the vast majority of the people, now have no right to self-determination in Chiang Kaishek's Chinese dictatorship...
...What does that leave," Brant asks, of the AMA's contention that 'under Madison's views . . . medical care would have been a state and not a national function...
...In an earlier instance of misrepresentation of Madison's position on another matter, John Quincy Adams made an observation that applies with equal force to the AMA today: "If you appeal to Mr...
...Thomas Jefferson later extended the tax and medical benefits to Mississippi River boatmen...
...No one denies that a potential of 800,000 kilowatts of power is being utterly wasted by the Hanford plant...
...What came as a surprise—and one which captured little attention in the American press—was Pope John's refusal to shrink from accepting socialism as a major instrument in the pursuit of social justice...
...It produces, too, an organic reconstruction of society...
...So long as socialization confines its activities within the moral order, along the lines indicated," the Pope declared, "it does not, of its nature, entail serious dangers of restriction to the detriment of individual human beings...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
