NOTES IN THE NEWS
notes in the news Our Obsession with Castro It was just a year ago that the Editor of The Progressive traveled 20,000 miles through eleven countries of Central and South America searching for...
...Quite apart from its infringement of constitutional rights guaranteed in the First Amendment, the House restriction could cripple research in Communist activities by denying our scholars the right to receive publications vital to their understanding of life behind the Iron Curtain...
...He went on to warn: "The people of Latin America are determined to share in the benefits of modern civilization—to obtain social and economic justice—and if they can't get it under present governments, they will turn to Castroism and the false promises of Communist doctrine...
...The Millionaires Multiply A curious factor concerning Lamp-man's study is the unusual impact it has had on economic analysts and commentators...
...The goals on which we had set our hearts when we promoted the calling of the conference—the diplomatic and economic isolation of Cuba through OAS sanctions—did not reach a vote, so great was the opposition...
...McCarthy was a gambling liar who put little stock in bis own stuff...
...Yet only a few weeks ago, in a message asking for a broad expansion of public welfare programs, President Kennedy could point accurately to a pressing need to end "the poverty that persists in the midst of abundance...
...When President Truman decided to let Senate investigators examine the confidential files, McCarthy knew he was trapped, knew the files would not support any of his charges...
...With holdings of more than a million dollars, McCone is the second largest stockholder in Standard Oil of California, one of the four American companies owning the Arabian-American Oil Company, which has enormous stakes in the Middle East, one of the most significant and sensitive areas of CIA operations...
...Very important 83% Fairly important 9 Not so important 4 No opinion 4 Here, clearly, is an extraordinary vote of confidence in the face of recent U.N...
...Almost every moment of the lengthy sessions was devoted to haggling over words and ways to condemn and isolate Cuba...
...The ultra-conservatives—a description that fits most of the richest one per cent—like to draw a picture of an America where a power-hungry government promoting creeping socialism is destroying free enterprise, robbing the hard-working rich to support the indolent poor, and reducing its citizenry to robots drained of initiative...
...But then the figure began to rise again...
...and Senators Quentin N. Bur-dick, North Dakota...
...Now, an investigation has exposed this notion as a myth--a myth shattered by the revelations of a ground-breaking study by Professor Robert J. Lampman, chairman of the economics department of the University of Wisconsin, published by Princeton University Press...
...Robert Byrd, West Virginia...
...We hope—and our hopes are high, given the consistently superior performance of that body in recent years—that it will act with greater respect for the Constitution and with deeper faith in the American people by striking out the censorship provision and standing firm when the measure goes to conference for adjustment of differences between the two chambers...
...border on fanaticism...
...The vast majority of Americans, most of whom, unhappily, never write their Congressmen, warmly endorse the world organization, so much so that they regard it "as the best hope—if not the only hope—for peace in the world today," according to studies in depth recently concluded by the American Institute of Public Opinion...
...But we would go on to add that part of the blame rests on the United States as well...
...Last fall, Welch charged there were a few thousand Communists "concentrated in key departments" of the Federal government...
...The People and the U.N...
...See the difference between limiting yourself to giving advice and engaging in combat...
...And this, of course, is what he did in his short but spectacular career...
...The House does not believe that Americans are mature enough to choose their own reading materials, wise enough to detect Communist propaganda, or strong enough in their commitment to democracy to resist being corrupted by the counterfeit claims of Communist propaganda...
...Creating New Tensions The outcome of the Punta del Este conference was presented to the nation by the Kennedy Administration as a great victory over Castroism...
...From Saigon, close to the scene of hostilities, the Associated Press sent the following report the same day: "U.S...
...With all the statistical attention we give to our society, little of this data on who owns what has ever before been available...
...In three separate surveys by the Institute's Gallup Poll, these were the questions asked and the responses given by a representative cross-section of the nation: "Do you think the United States should give up its membership in the United Nations, or not...
...In voting to reinstate interception and censorship of the mails, the great majority of the House betrayed the same disenchantment with democracy and distrust of the people that run as common denominators through most of the organizations of the far Right...
...We have grave doubts that this is true...
...These responsibilities, under the House amendment, are handed over to an all-knowing censor, the Attorney General...
...A year ago, he announced "discontinuation immediately of the program of intercepting Communist propaganda from abroad...
...McCarthy we knew as a man who had none...
...it can't be automated...
...Or so we are told...
...Joseph Clark, Pennsylvania...
...We set up the Defense Department circa 1917 to make the world safe for democracy...
...military advisers accompany Vietnamese units into battle...
...Frank Lausche, Ohio...
...The importance of the post to which McCone was appointed can hardly be exaggerated...
...On December 8, 1961, the Department of Justice called on Welch to turn over to the FBI "such facts as may be in your possession and the sources thereof which you believe establish that certain government employes are members of the Communist Party...
...Good or fair job 78% Poor job 12 No opinion 10 "How important do you think it is that we try to make the United Nations a success...
...It wouldn't work in wartime, of course, but in the next wartime there won't be anybody to deliver a letter to anyone...
...Now that the Administration has had its fling denouncing Communism and Castroism, we hope it will settle down to the tougher and far more meaningful task of providing creative leadership in pursuit of the social and economic reforms which are the heart of the Alliance for Progress program designed to prevent the spread of Castro's tyranny...
...Our overall impression is that, despite a skillful performance by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, we succeeded mostly, in our emphasis on the negative, in creating new conflicts and tensions in Latin America at a time when we need urgently to unify Central and South America behind a program that accents the positive...
...Welch, for all his idiocy, strikes us as a man of considerable integrity...
...military personnel man the machine guns at the helicopters' doors in case of attack...
...Case quoted testimony by the U.S...
...Furthermore, Lampman's researches show that ninety per cent of the adult population, which includes the newly "affluent" middle class, accounts for less than half of the total wealth...
...reverses and the increasing ferocity of the attack on the world organization...
...Maurine Neuberger, Oregon...
...William Proxmire, Wisconsin, and Stephen Young, Ohio, all Democrats...
...today they number some 10,000...
...What if the Defense Department had to show a profit on its operations...
...Congressmen with an ear to the ground and a finger wet to the wind will find more accurate guidance in the scientific sampling of public opinion conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion than they will in the "flood" of mail turned on by the fanatical forces of a minority pressure group...
...Censoring the Mail The House showed its colors again when it roared approval, with only two dissenting voices, of a provision in the postal-rate increase bill that would bar the mails to any materials from abroad that the Attorney General may rule are "Communist political propaganda...
...Or to write one...
...When the annual appropriation for the House Un-American Activities Committee—$350,000—was before the House recently, only two Representatives, William Fitts Ryan of New York and James Roosevelt of California, both Democrats, dared speak up in opposition...
...A Puzzling Appointment John A. McCone is now securely installed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but his appointment by President Kennedy, followed by overwhelming Senate confirmation, continues to puzzle and disturb us...
...On a more fundamental issue—the exclusion of Cuba from the agencies of the Organization of American States—the United States was able to muster the votes of a bare two-thirds of the nations required...
...They deserve to be mentioned for distinguished service: Senators Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Francis Case of South Dakota, Republicans...
...The same small group of extremely wealthy individuals holds thirty-two per cent of U.S...
...Welch is a sincere crackpot who believes deeply the position he drones away at in his interminable speeches...
...Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a man of considerable caution in his choice of words, evaluated the scope of the job this way: "In this period through which we are passing this position in many respects is second in importance only to the President...
...But the Post Office is the world's worst and costliest...
...Fear in the House The House of Representatives, once the legislative citadel of liberalism, has become the bastion of Right-wing reaction in recent years...
...All the other liberals sat silent, surrendering to the prevailing political fear that the $350,000 operations of the HUAC are above and beyond the pale of public discussion and debate...
...Our suspicion is strongly grounded...
...But the Post Office has got to pay its way...
...McCone is an arch-conservative Republican, with a hard-line concept of foreign policy in conflict with the President's more creative approach, with immense private holdings in areas of business enterprise closely related to his public responsibilities, and without the slightest experience in the difficult and sensitive field he now commands...
...Why not deliver the mails free—think of the money we'd save on facilities, equipment, wages, and printing and engraving—and let the Army do the delivering...
...After reading Lampman's statistics, Sylvia Porter, the informed syndicated writer on economics, reported, "I freely admit they stunned me...
...Its deliberations are dominated and its decisions controlled in large measure by a coalition of the senior members of the one-party South and the rural "rotten boroughs" of the North— "rotten boroughs" because of the failure of state legislatures to reapportion on the basis of population, thus giving rural districts a much greater voice, proportionately, than urban centers, which are usually far more progressive in outlook...
...It is true that factors in the economy such as the reforms of the 1930's and the rapid growth of unions in the two decades that followed appreciably increased income from wages and social security programs, creating the greatest middle class in history, and markedly alleviating the privation of those below the middle class...
...The conference, of course, was called to take action against Cuba, but it seems inconceivable that a gathering of the top statesmen of Latin America could not have given some time and energy to discuss what needs to be done for Latin America to build bulwarks of freedom and social justice that would prevent the spread of Castroism...
...There is nothing wrong with the mailman...
...What's wrong is the system...
...Unlike Welch, who gave no source for his charge, McCarthy, always the gambler, claimed his figures came straight out of "the State Department files...
...The move was intended as a slap at President Kennedy...
...Teodoro Moscoso, the gifted Puerto Rican who is director of the Alliance for Progress, recently acknowledged this potentially fatal weakness in the program when he criticized the "leader class" in Latin America for not recognizing and accepting the imperative need for reform...
...Paul H. Douglas, Illinois...
...And the reason is not far to find...
...Should not 90% Should 5 No opinion 5 "In general, do you think the United Nations is doing a good job or a poor job in trying to solve the problems it has had to face...
...We can recall no controversial issue on which the Gallup Poll has conducted surveys that has yielded such massive support for one side as the UN...
...Mail delivery is a deficit operation by nature...
...Evidence of the extent to which the leadership of the House is committed to the far Right has been piling up for more than a decade and needs no enumeration here...
...McCarthy would have handled it all quite differently...
...We heartily approve the sentiment, but we can't see how this resort to rhetoric makes the slightest contribution to creating the conditions that would prevent the spread of Communism...
...Theophrastus Such...
...Comptroller General showing that "McCone and some others during World War II put $100,000 into a shipbuilding company, used facilities which cost the government $25 million, and made quick profits of $44 million...
...A particularly disturbing finding in Lampman's detailed report is the disclosure that the percentage of wealth held by the top one per cent of adult population did indeed decline during the depression and the war-marked years between 1929 and 1949...
...One of the ironic aspects of this lluctuating but little-changing pattern of ownership of wealth lies in the nature of corporate stockholding...
...Lamp-man's data reveal that not only is wealth as unevenly distributed as in the early Thirties, but the current trend is toward even greater concentration in a few hands...
...Welch and McCarthy Robert Welch, founder and boss man of the John Birch Society, is a colorless character quite unlike his swashbuckling predecessor, the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...The President reported that a study revealed the program served "no useful intelligence function," but instead hindered "our efforts to improve cultural exchanges with Communist countries...
...The telephone and telegraph are money-makers everywhere, and everywhere in the world but here they belong to the Post Office...
...On the other hand, Welch is a staggering bore while McCarthy was a beguiling scoundrel...
...With its fifty-two-billion-dollar-a-year subsidy it ought to be the world's second best Defense Department, at the very least...
...Showrman to the last, he cried out that "the files have been raped" —even before he had had a chance to examine them...
...Capitalism was once described as the wonderful bird that flies backward, like the jayhawk...
...Moscoso's estimate of the situation confirms our own judgment...
...There was no probing of the causes of inaction since the last conference at Punta del Este and no discussion of what needs to be done to make the program effective...
...In contrast, the poorest "one third of a nation," whose plight was dramatized by Roosevelt in depression days, now owns only about one per cent of America's privately-held material assets...
...Eugene J. McCarthy, Minnesota...
...reaffirmation of the principles of the Alliance for Progress was considered worthy of only a routine vote...
...In the three months that have elapsed, Welch has stood silent, neither complying with the government's request nor retracting or modifying his charge...
...He charged first that there were 205 Communists in the State Department, dropped the figure to eighty-one when the heat was on, reduced the total to fifty-seven to keep the story on the front page, and finally promised to prove that there was one Communist in the State Department —which he never did...
...commands in these polls...
...Fifteen Senators, led by Senator Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota Democrat, voted against confirmation...
...Ernest Gruening, Alaska...
...And yet, incredibly, no member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which conducted hearings on the McCone appointment, asked a question about his views on foreign affairs...
...Conflict of Interest The Committee, and a preponderant majority of the Senate itself, showed an equal lack of concern that a serious conflict of interests might be involved in the appointment...
...Inflation of 400 per cent is a lot of inflation...
...The only significant resolution on which we were able to command a unanimous vote (except Cuba's) was a declaration that the principles of Communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American political system...
...His report, entitled "Latin America: Dynamite on Our Doorstep," chronicled the desperate poverty and surging discontent among the great masses of people, warned that time was running out in the struggle to prevent the kind of violent upheaval sought by Communism and Castroism, and urged swift and effective implementation of the Alliance for Progress program of social and economic reform as the only hope for democratic development...
...The Wonderful Bird The penny postcard of my misspent youth is going up to four cents...
...Some months ago the Wall Street Journal acknowledged that despite high taxes "more individuals have become millionaires since World War II than in any comparable earlier period...
...And yet, less than a year ago, President Kennedy demanded strengthening of the law to eliminate any conflict of interest "not only in reality but in appearance...
...Its present bulwark is the socialistic production of armaments, whose sole use is the prevention of use (by somebody else...
...One year afterward, the Alliance for Progress program remains more promise than performance...
...Here they belong to the holy domain of private enterprise—and the private enterprisers are delighted to have the mails socialized...
...Because he had no convictions, he would have found little difficulty in switching stories from day to day to keep the charge alive and his name in the headlines...
...William Fulbright, Arkansas...
...Why the Post Office...
...In discussing the issue of conflict of interest, Senator Francis Case, South Dakota Republican, pointed to Mc-Cone's vast shipping interests, largely acquired during the wartime boom...
...Viva la Difference...
...government bonds, and virtually all state and local bonds...
...Wayne Morse, Oregon...
...But the six nations which refused to concur— Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador—contain seventy per cent of the total population of Latin America...
...Of course he has no evidence, but he is genuinely convinced that there must be a few thousand Communists in key posts in the government...
...A considerable portion of the responsibility rests on the Latin American countries which have failed to produce and legislate the programs of internal, social, and economic reform without which the whole concept of the Alliance for Progress is meaningless...
...In 1953 there were 2,113 individuals whose wealth exceeded $5 million each...
...it lias now reached predepression proportions and is still rising...
...From Washington, the Associated Press sent the following report one day recently: "The Pentagon spokesman stressed 'we are not in combat [in South Viet Nam].' He said efforts are limited to supporting and strengh-ening the pio-Western South Vietnamese government with additional equipment, training, and advice...
...If it hasn't done the job by now, we ought to put it on pay-and-tote basis immediately or get rid of it...
...How else account for the supremacy of the Communist conspiracy in Washington...
...But when Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Maine Republican, asked McCone what training and experience he could bring to his assignment, he answered in one word: "None...
...An objective, scientific analysis like Lampman's study of the distribution of wealth exposes the glaring fallacies of this interpretation of recent American history...
...On no other occasion in American history, whether in wartime or peacetime, the Comptroller General said, "have so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of the taxpayers not only of this generation but of generations to come...
...The Defense Department ought to be pretty good...
...For all our fine phrases about the need for affirmative action to cope with the causes of Communism and Castroism, we remain obsessed with a psychological need to emphasize the negative course of punishing Castro's Cuba...
...During the Eisenhower Administration, the National Security Council's Planning Board had unanimously recommended discontinuing the program...
...For years we have been subjected to a barrage of skillful advertising, sponsored mainly by the largest of corporations and stockbrokers, which has attempted—with considerable success—to persuade the nation that ownership of American corporate stock is now so widespread that our system has evolved into a "people's capitalism...
...Some members of Congress who oppose President Kennedy's request for United States purchase of $100 million in United Nations bonds report they are "flooded" with mail running a hundred to one in support of their position...
...I misspent my youth by not spending it writing more postcards when they were a penny...
...But at the moment, Business Week's forecast seems based more on the business interests' fear of public reaction to the news of continuing inequality than on firm economic evidence: In 1953 there were 27,000 millionaires in the United States...
...Nearly three decades after the New Deal began, the wealthiest one per cent of American adults once again own twenty-eight per cent of the nation's entire personal wealth, only a minute fraction less than that held in 1933, and their share is increasing...
...The House-approved bill is now in the Senate...
...What we find depressing now are the ease and speed with which the membership is succumbing to the leadership with hardly a fight...
...The truth is that the very persons who complain most bitterly about the direction they claim the nation has taken are among its chief beneficiaries...
...The recent Inter-American Conference of Foreign Ministers in Punta del Este, Uruguay, dramatized our over-emphasis of the negative...
...notes in the news Our Obsession with Castro It was just a year ago that the Editor of The Progressive traveled 20,000 miles through eleven countries of Central and South America searching for understanding of the forces at work in that vast area south of the border...
...The Rich Get Richer One of the impressions widely held by both liberals and conservatives of our generation is that the social reforms launched nearly three decades ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal have resulted in a steady trend toward the equalization of the ownership of wealth in the United States...
...Lee Metcalf, Montana...
...For the House prohibition of the use of the mails for "Communist political propaganda" from abroad is a term so vague and loose that it could include just about everything we need to keep informed of developments in the Communist camp...
...military pilots fly the helicopters [into action against the Communist guerrillas...
...The bitter resistance to reform by the powerful oligarchies which dominate the countries of Latin America has proved decisive up to now...
...We don't know what constitutes a flood of mail, but if flood there has been, we suspect the faucets were turned on by a comparatively small group of far Right organizations whose fear and hatred of the U.N...
...The CIA, as Senator William Ful-bright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, emphasized, "exerts a powerful influence on the character and conduct of our foreign relations...
...But it can't, for the life of it, figure out how to produce something as useful as a postage stamp...
...It is cheaper these days, as well as safer, not to communicate at all...
...Similarly affected, apparently, was Business Week, which led off its review of Lampman's book with the defensive headline, "Rich get richer—but not for long," and concluded with an apprehensively hopeful forecast that the richest group's share of the wealth "would again start to decline...
...today there are more than 100,000...
...Yet Lampman's painstaking researches show that while in 1929 ownership of 65.6 per cent of corporate stock was concentrated in the hands of the top one per cent of wealth-holders, that figure had risen to seventy-six per cent by 1953, and estimates place the percentage even higher now...
...Just about enough to inflate me out of the market...
Vol. 26 • March 1962 • No. 3
