NOTES IN THE NEWS
notes in the news Fighting Back In the current revival of the extreme Right in the United States, the clergy has been the target of mounting vilification. Individual clergymen have dared to...
...During these years more young people—products of the post-World War II "baby boom"—will enter the labor market than ever before in our history...
...It hacks away at economic plans whose aims are to relieve unemployment, generate jobs, and raise standards of health and education...
...While the poll-takers presented dismal view of the American people knowledge, they came up with a considerably brighter view of their wisdom...
...Among those watching the fray were Walter Lippmann, who observed that the Vinson Committee's "directive" to McNamara to spend the money was an unconstitutional usurpation of executive powers and should be ignored...
...Events, on the other hand, have a tremendous impact on opinion...
...Groups opposed to the United Nations often use alleged Communist infiltration or even control as a weapon in attacking this organization...
...Behind these attacks one usually finds opposition to the 'social Gospel' or to alleged modernist trends in organized Protestantism...
...Benoit's panel has laid out the bare bones of a program which might go a long way toward solving the economic dislocations of disarmament...
...Effective implementation of the Benoit panel's economic plans would require, among others, these radical changes in our society: % A complete reversal of the present psychology concerning disarmament...
...economy, in which almost every tenth person depends for his livelihood on the production of armaments...
...The Catholic statement put it this way: "Whatever their motives, they are effectively aiding the Communist cause . . ." The Presbyterian declaration came in the form of a "Letter on Freedom of Pulpit and Pew" issued by the General Council of the United Presbyterian Church...
...At the prompting of chairman Carl Vinson, the Committee "directed" McNamara to spend an additional $491 million on the B-70 in fiscal 1963...
...We are persuaded that the gospel of Jesus Christ, truly preached in our pulpits, fully heard and heeded in our pews, is the chief contribution our church can make to the preservation of American freedom against the threat of the worldwide Communist conspiracy and against the idolatry of those fearful Americans who would substitute militant anti-Communism for the gospel of Jesus Christ...
...The encyclical advocates or does not reprove many specific items rejected by extremist groups (the use of the income tax to equalize burdens, aid to undeveloped nations, government action to smooth out economic change, social insurance, aid to agriculture, housing subsidies, etc...
...When every discussion with the Communist powers is considered a sign of weakness or even treason, then we are left with only two stark alternatives: surrender or war...
...Surely our common sense should tell us that we should seek some middle course between these extremes...
...There is none in Hitlerism...
...I was still able to learn a thing or two when a friend handed me a book called The Acquisitive Society by an Englishman named R. H. Tawney and said, "If you are still ignorant when you have read this book, you will know that you are ineducable...
...Tawney in wartime Washington...
...Tawney changed men, by his writing, by his teaching, by his lifelong struggle for human opportunity...
...The support that counts in Congress comes from the B-70 contractor, the North American Aviation Company, and from all the countless subcontractors, and from the workers in [their] plants...
...In answer to a question put by McDonald concerning the degree of knowledge of the citizenry, Gallup replied: "The thing that always amazes me is how badly informed a lot of our college graduates are...
...Tawney could write like no man since Mill and few before, and with an eloquent economy that chastised Mill...
...Among the principal points emphasized by Father Cronin were these: The efforts of the extreme Right to equate liberalism with socialism and socialism with communism represent "bad logic and worse history...
...f'Some anti-Communist sources are also anti-Semitic...
...If the Catholic contribution and that made by the Presbyterians are matched by other mass organizations, civic and political as well as religious, the country may yet throw off the fear and frustration which make it so difficult today to develop creative answers to the challenge of Communism...
...We show in our polls," Roper told McDonald, "that seventy per cent of the American people do not know the length of the term of United States Senators...
...Most popular of the newest batch of quotations making the rounds is one attributed to Nikita Khrushchev...
...The quotation was exposed as a complete counterfeit, but the Rightists didn't falter for a moment in giving it ever wider currency...
...People who are afraid of the Jews and are anti-Semitic haven't known very many Jews in the first place...
...There are no men like Tawney," My Lord replied...
...He was the kind of man who serves on one Royal Commission after another and rejects a peerage by telling Ramsay MacDonald that "even dogs do not tie cans to their own tails...
...Catholics who deny our international responsibilities do so in the face of repeated papal assertions of our moral obligations to seek world order, world prosperity, and world peace...
...But when the percentage rises to fifty per cent or more," Gallup said, "the white parents begin to react pretty much the way Southern whites do...
...I'm always amazed at Washington newspaper correspondents who believe that some act taken by Congress will somehow exert a tremendous effect upon opinions and attitudes...
...While it has nothing to do with disarmament, an early indication is the uproar in New York over the Defense Department's curtailment and eventual cessation of production of a fighter-bomber, which would soon eliminate 13,000—and eventually 90,-000—jobs at the Republic Aviation plant on Long Island...
...He was a great economist because economics is a branch of morality and he was a great moralist...
...When we ask college graduates to cite the advantages of our economic system over that of the Russians, half of them cannot name even one advantage...
...In our judgment any Congressman—or any other public official— who makes a political football out of a military project is acting in a criminally irresponsible manner...
...Individual clergymen have dared to strike back, but theirs has been a lonely struggle until recently...
...10 Billion Boondoggle The strange row in Washington between the House Armed Services Committee over the Air Force's supersonic bomber, the B-70, has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it...
...h The retention of all, or most, of the creative contributions of defense spending-education, research, product development—which would put the Federal government squarely in the middle of aid to practically everything...
...Gallup to describe some of the facts his organization has brought to light...
...From none of these sources were we able to produce evidence that Khrushchev actually made such a statement...
...But he was never an economist in the "disengaged" sense, mistaking economics as a science whose first principles were immanent...
...Precisely what the Rightists have been saying all along...
...teresting way...
...They have a genius for invention that enables them to maintain a well-stocked library of quotations for instant use whenever a pet position of theirs needs bolstering...
...The central theme of Father Cronin's study is that "the basic threat of Communism is external, not internal," and that "false prophets" are preaching "dishonest" and "divisive" doctrines that seek to identify "whatever ideas they happen to dislike" with Communism...
...Out of the Rochdale evening classes for adults, which he started sixty years ago, grew the Workers Educational Association of England and a literate trade unionism and Labor Party...
...He had his files searched...
...I think it fairly safe to say," he ventured, "that about thirty-five per cent of the Southern whites believe the Negro is the object of injustice and steps must be taken quickly to remedy it...
...The economists may create the most workable of plans to ease the dislocations of disarmament...
...Yet the CIO wing of the labor movement expelled its Communist unions well before the general public became excited about the problem...
...American Ignorance There are probably no two Americans who have probed more persistently into more aspects of the national character than the two preeminent pollsters, Elmo Roper and George Gallup...
...The Benoit report deals with' the knotty economic problems of disarmament with admirable caution...
...Theophrastus Such...
...But to build an unnecessarily large war-machine as a pork-barrel boondoggle is not only wasteful but intensifies the arms race...
...Over in this corner is the Armed Services Committee, backed by air chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, demanding that the Defense Department spend up to $10 billion for B-70's...
...Gallup contributed an interesting sidelight on the racial problem when he pointed out that in Northern cities white parents generally have no objection to having their children attend school with Negroes—even if the proportion of Negroes runs as high as thirty or thirty-live per cent...
...In the other corner are the President, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and all the chiefs of staff except LeMay, insisting they don't want either the money or the B-70s, that the bomber no longer has sufficient military value to warrant pursuing the program, and that if Congress still insists on appropriating the funds, the money could not be spent anyway because much of the equipment to go into the B-70 has not yet been developed...
...The B-70 contract quite certainly helped carry California for Nixon by the narrow margin of about 30,000 votes...
...They have asked so many questions of so many people for so long that one would not expect either to be "shocked" or "amazed" at any of his findings...
...An unprecedented expansion of our forieign aid and development program...
...Thus, a year or two ago, they flooded the country with a Lenin quotation to the effect that any country that adopted national health insurance was a cinch to go Communist soon thereafter...
...Protestant churches, especially the National Council of Churches, have also been a target for attack...
...To the best of our knowledge, we believe the quotation to be spurious...
...Suggestions have already been made that Long Island be declared a "disaster area...
...Communist influence among the Protestant clergy today is virtually non-existent...
...The Politics of Disarmament The decade that lies ahead confronts the United States with the gravest economic challenge since the great depression of thirty years ago...
...Donald McDonald, director of the Marquette University journalism school, interviewed both Roper and Gallup in connection with a study of the American Character by the Fund for the Republic's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...He made the only kind of sense that can be made of socialism...
...Young man," he said, "there is some human decency in Churchill's empire...
...What we need are more civilizations like that which produced Richard Henry Tawney...
...None of this, of course, will deter the forces of the far Right from using the quotation in their relentless struggle against democratic social reform...
...Intelligent self-government is not at all the same as intelligent parliamentarism...
...Defense contracts," wrote Alsop, "are now vastly more important than both pork and patronage put together...
...During the past month, two of the major church bodies in America—Catholic and Presbyterian—provided powerful reinforcements by issuing public statements denouncing the Know Nothing movement...
...The brief (twenty-eight page) report tries to strike an optimistic note...
...In the end he changed England...
...What is clearly needed is long-range planning—and soon—to prepare the economy for the loss of jobs that would result from any degree of disarmament...
...The labor movement, and certain labor leaders, have also been the targets of special pleaders...
...The spread of anti-Communist hysteria in the country is largely the result of the frustration of impatient Americans who want to "do something" about Communism but who do not understand that the principal threat to the United States is not now subversion at home...
...The judgment of the people," in Gallup's opinion, "has often been wiser than the judgment of Congressmen or even of the experts...
...When we ask them how much profit the average business concern makes in this country, their guesses range from five to ninety per cent...
...Yet Roper struck a note of optimism in his estimate of race feelings...
...More Men Like Tawney "TJ?7hat we need," said an Eng-" lishman to My Lord Canterbury a while back, "are more men like Tawney...
...The Senator turned next to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...
...The press," said Gallup, "is far too much concerned with spot news reporting...
...In the field of race relations, Roper stated that "ignorance is the cause of most 'and' feeling in this country...
...With pseudo-evangelistic fervor and misguided zeal," the Council said, "some church members seek to convert Christians not to a firmer allegiance to Jesus Christ but to a campaign of anti-Communism based on a distrust of our free American institutions...
...For neither of these problems, both of truly heroic dimensions, is the nation adequately prepared...
...Furthermore, in spite of all the emphasis of the past several years on improving the quality of our education, Gallup maintained that "the college-trained student of today is not the equal of his counterpart of twenty-five years ago...
...A perfectly tailored job, isn't it...
...His passion for human decency—and he could be a passionate man—was his secret...
...The pork barrel produced a good deal of waste and inequity, but that was about the limit of the damage...
...Whenever Communist influence is detected by the NAACP or CORE, it is promptly removed...
...The book was beautiful to read...
...His work as an economic historian—the greatest of our time—was wonderfully meticulous, whether his canvas was large (like Equality) or small (like Minimum Rates in the Chain-Making Industry...
...In fact, if experience is a guide, they will multiply their efforts to give it the widest possible circulation...
...But the problems are too involved for economic solution...
...The quotation is attached to letters sent around the country and to members of Congress...
...More Wisdom than Knowledge Some of the pollsters' most fascinating findings lay in the realm of "political activity"—a term applied broadly to describe almost any degree of participation in the life of the community...
...Now, thirty-five per cent of Southern whites in favor of justice to the Negroes is a pretty big percentage...
...It goes like this: "We cannot expect the Americans to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of Socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism...
...The factors that are the long-term influences on opinion in this country are education, social and economic background, and religion...
...The press would do a better job if it put much greater emphasis on informing the people about the issues, giving the people the background of the issues, and interpreting the news in a thoughtful, in...
...Senator Metcalf made one last effort...
...Yet I believe those people are largely silent...
...The social revolution would be a moral revolution, or it would not be at all...
...In his life, his work, his mistakes, he embodied that decency, the self-effacing decency that the decent Englishman takes for granted...
...But if the opportunity to disarm should come, it is the political climate that will determine how far and how fast the economists can move to achieve an orderly transition...
...The organized Jewish community in the United States is strongly opposed to Communism...
...Director John A. McCone reported: "The quotation . . . does not appear in any of Khrushchev's speeches, interviews, articles, or off-the-cuff remarks which have come to our attention...
...that they haven't the vaguest notion of what a tariff is...
...He turned to the Central Intelligence Agency...
...The required measures may not have nearly enough acceptance by politicians, lawmakers, and administrators to ensure adoption . . ." A realization that the factors that created the boom following World War II are not now in effect, and that a whole new concept of national planning would be necessary to avert economic and social chaos...
...Actually, it is an amazing fact the Communists have had such little success among the Negroes...
...This was then widely publicized, "with warnings," said Alsop, "reading, in effect, 'Vote for Kennedy and lose your job...
...He did not twit back...
...I think," responded Gallup, that "statements from political leaders do not have much effect upon opinion...
...Don't tell me, My Lords, that there are no civilizations like that...
...The two statements shared a central theme—that the forces of the far Right, far from combating Communism, are serving the cause of the Kremlin...
...What would happen to the U.S...
...Roper has concluded that "only about ten per cent of the American people exhibit any noticeable degree of political activity...
...What if the great nations of the world should, miraculously, work out a program, first to halt the armaments race, and then, gradually, to disarm...
...that Americans are all in favor of selling American goods abroad but not for buying European goods (as though that were possible...
...As logic, it would make the encyclical of Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (Christianity and Social Progress), a defense of Communism...
...Most of them do not have the faintest idea of the population of China...
...Another twenty per cent can be described as 'taking some part in political, civic, and social life.' The other seventy per cent are what we would have to call 'dormant.' " What are the factors that influence the electorate most?, McDonald asked Gallup...
...I knew no man like Tawney, and now he was dead...
...The extreme Rightists "are most effective when they can quote 'experts' to bolster their cause...
...The press came in for a share of the blame for the distressingly low level of general knowledge...
...There are three types of 'experts' whose credentials should be scrutinized with care...
...Senator Metcalf decided to investigate...
...Dr...
...In one test, we asked those who had attended college to put their linger on the state of Illinois on a map of the United States and half of them could not do it...
...It has not been possible to verify the authenticity of the statement," he replied...
...Back came this reply: "We have searched the Legislative Reference Service files, checked all the standard reference works on quotations by Khrushchev, and consulted with the Slavic Division of the Library of Congress, the Department of State, and the U.S...
...Information Agency, in an attempt to determine the authenticity of this quotation...
...As a Christian socialist he avoided the cart-and-horse trouble which changes the system and not the man and produces the totalitar-ianized trappings of socialism under both Communism and the War-and-Welfare State...
...Some of these opponents are basically isolationist and use the Communist charge as a handy weapon...
...Now comes a new problem, to most of us a political dream, but to many an economic nightmare...
...At the same time, the pace of automation is accelerating at such a rapid rate that an estimated 25,000 jobs a week, so the President said recently, will be wiped out by machines, and that number will probably rise even higher...
...Said the Presbyterians: "In the name of preserving American freedom, they subvert it more effectively by their reckless attacks on the churches, the press, and constitutional government than the Communist conspiracy has been able to do...
...Radio and television people are afflicted with the same point of view...
...Counterfeit Quotations The forces of the far Right are a resourceful breed...
...It called on Presbyterians, of whom there are 3,259,000 in the United States, to shun extremist tactics and, instead, combat Communism by strengthening their love for one another and for the Christian faith...
...He asked the Library of Congress to find the origin of the Khrushchev statement...
...But the key to the report, which reflects its entire tone, lies in this sentence in a concluding paragraph: "Disarmament is and must remain fundamentally a political and not an economic issue...
...A rapid enough shift from defense to public or private projects...
...The first published official study of the problem is "Economic Impacts of Disarmament," prepared by a panel of government officials, economists, and business and labor representatives, under the chairmanship of Emile Benoit, associate professor of international business at Columbia University...
...Roper presented equally depressing testimony regarding the general level of American ignorance...
...I suppose I was embarrassed in the presence of absolute greatness...
...I met him in Washington during the last war...
...As an example of the relationship between armament orders and party politics, Alsop pointed out that in mid-Octpber, 1960, Presidential candidate Richard Nixon persuaded President Eisenhower to authorize an additional $190 million to be spent on the B-70 project in California...
...These groups are small and have little influence except among bigots...
...They are former agents of the FBI, former informants for the FBI, and persons who have had firsthand contact with the Communist Party, either as members or victims...
...I think most newspaper people are geared to think that the only thing that is important in the news is what happened in the last six hours...
...the same is true for high school and grade school graduates...
...When we go to the people, we find that very few of them even know what any given Congressman has said or done...
...that fifty-six per cent cannot name either of the two Senators from their own home state...
...Congress thrusts arms expenditures on the Defense Department to the point of choking it—the Defense Secretary has actually refused to spend all the money voted for arms...
...A complete reversal in attitude toward the national debt—the new approach would actually encourage growth of the debt as one technique to stimulate production and thereby ease the transition from cold war to peace...
...Chairman James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat, was obliged to report the same result—"no authen-tic source for the quotationMontanan tried FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover...
...The Right-wing charge that Communists dominate the struggle for racial equality is false...
...Peace, It's Political Some tentative steps are being taken in this direction...
...He was a socialist because capitalism—if it worked, it was all the worse—was morally wrong...
...But to put flesh and skin on the skeleton, the report says, would require what is, in essence, a social and political revolution of substantial proportions...
...The conservative outlook of the present Congress holds out little hope that the radical measures deemed necessary by the Benoit panel could conceivably win approval...
...The report was prepared by the Reverend John F. Cronin, assistant director of the Social Action Department of the NCWC, who has a considerable reputation as an impeccably anti-Communist student of Communist tactics and strategy...
...It is Congress which ultimately controls those political decisions that determine the economics of disarmament...
...If carried far enough, movements of the far Right would "paralyze American diplomacy...
...Vinson recalled that Congress last year appropriated $525 million for manned bombers and $180 million more than the Administration had requested for developing the B-70, but that "not one penny has been spent...
...But I do say that there have been very few instances in the last twenty-six years when the public was clearly in the wrong on an issue...
...Indeed," says the report, "this may be the heart of the problem...
...Both wings have been working for years to fight for free labor unions, and against Communist unions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...The Catholic Case Shortly before the publication of the Presbyterian position, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, central administrative organ of the country's Catholic bishops, released a forceful indictment of "the extremists of the Right," charging them with fomenting "a virulent form of disunity that is dangerously weakening the nation...
...I twitted him with trying to save Churchill's empire...
...It is absolutely shocking how anyone can graduate from college and be so ignorant about economic issues...
...We hope that somewhere along the line this foolish and dangerous appropriation will be killed off, and that Congress will awaken to the need to keep pork-barrel concepts out of national security considerations...
...In releasing his report, Father Cronin said that it signaled the start of "a campaign for sanity" in meeting the Communist threat...
...Those who have gone to college read fewer books today than college graduates read twenty years ago...
...One member of Congress who found his mail cluttered with the quotation was Senator Lee Metcalf, Montana Democrat...
...But the same Congress slashes every proposed appropriation designed to improve the general welfare and stabilize the national economy...
...In Connecticut we found we had a minority of about eighteen per cent who are anti-Negro but these people had never seen a Negro to talk to in their lives...
...With his noisome pipe and his carpet-slippers, his big moustache and his long hair at the sides and back of his high bald head, he could have come right out of The Sun in Splendour, my favorite pub in Portobello Road...
...In times past it was patronage and pork barrel legislation that constituted the main tools of the executive and Congress in dealing with the politicians back home...
...It is also printed, against a red background, on post cards distributed "as a public service" by Coast Federal Savings of Los Angeles, which has circulated thousands of copies of material endorsing the John Birch Society...
...Sometimes the quotation was accompanied by statements like this: "Your socialistic voting record leads me to believe that you are one of the elected leaders upon whom Nikita Khrushchev depends to carry out his plan...
...Yet these were the words used by Dr...
...Both have now faded into relative insignificance...
...and Joseph Alsop, who pointed out that the squabble had nothing to do with military needs in the first place...
...I would be the last to say that the voice of the people is the voice of God...
...One example given to illustrate the current state of mind is the perennial drop in stock market prices whenever the world suffers an attack of "peace jitters...
...Strong words, but not a bit too strong for me...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
