NOTES IN THE NEWS
Managing the News Elsewhere in this issue, James A. Wechsler chronicles the opening phase of the Senate investigation which disclosed betrayal of their public trust by significant segments of the...
...The reverse may well be true...
...But the wrong kind of people, getting access to food and medicine and shelter, are getting to be more numerous than ever...
...Their fear not only turns out to be largely unfounded, but it appears, at least on the basis of one study, that integration brings such enterprises more patronage than before...
...The fact is that we are terrified at the prospect of sharing our glut and more terrified still that the wrong kind of people will, without our help, manage to beef themselves up and move in on Fortress America...
...General Electric, which abuses tax-deductible advertising expense to crusade against social security, the income tax, Federal aid to education, and medicare...
...It was the syndicates in some cases and newspapers, magazines, networks, and film exhibitors in others that refused to carry the telltale label...
...Subsequent revelations, which came too late to be included in Mr...
...Unless there is a massive attack on unemployment, the number of jobless within a few years will be greater than the total population of New York City, and soon after that will equal the populace of New York and Chicago combined...
...Adding the figures together shows that merely to hold unemployment to its present level will require adding thirty-five million more jobs by 1970 than than there were in 1960...
...f Some Labor Department experts foresee a seven per cent unemployment rate within a few years...
...Truly, we are an unconquerable people...
...McDermott reports that complete sets of plates for printing consumer ration coupons are located strategically around the country so that in event of sudden need to begin a rationing system, they can be run off the presses quickly...
...Recalling the club's decision to integrate, manager Paul Stickney said: "We were scared to death—we could just see all our white customers walking out the minute the first Negroes walked in...
...Propaganda material prepared by the Wrights, in behalf of their Nationalist China client, was distributed as news to its member papers by the North American Newspaper Alliance, United Press International, Newspaper Enterprise Association, Central Press, and the New York Herald Tribune News Service...
...If the University of California was later than some others in restoring and reaffirming freedom of speech on the campus, it should be noted that its action was achieved in the face of heavy opposition from the Birchers and their allies, who are even more numerous, powerful, and poisonous in California than they are in Texas...
...Walls On June 26, in Berlin, President Kennedy spoke scornfully of "The Wall" as a symbol of the weakness of Communist tyranny—its fear of permitting its people exposure to the free world...
...Propaganda, Yes...
...The greatest surprise I ever had was the apparent 'so what' attitude of white customers," declared store president Fred Harvey...
...Contrast this," said Senator Engle, "to Internal Revenue's withdrawal of the tax-exempt privileges of a legitimate, highly respected interfaith organization known as the Fellowship of Reconciliation—an old established peace group...
...Well, the Federal government cares," Fulbright said...
...In carrying out their assignment, father and son produced television and newsreel shorts, still pictures, and magazine and newspaper articles...
...Kennedy, "and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in...
...But things couldn't have been any smoother...
...As a bare minimum, such action should include passage of the Administration's program with its proposals for a $10 billion tax cut, increased area redevelopment spending, the youth conservation corps, job training, and literacy training...
...These significant findings by the conservative Journal should be pondered by conservative Congressmen who fear that the Administration proposal to end discrimination in places serving the public will cause the owners financial loss...
...H. L. Hunt's various enterprises, which label everyone left of Senator Barry Goldwater "mistaken," a thinly-veiled euphemism for "Communist...
...The action by Governor Combs, in a state with Southern traditions although not in the Deep South, may well inspire other state executives, North and South, to follow suit...
...The investigation—a year-long inquiry into paid lobbying by Americans for foreign interests—is being conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the driving leadership of Senator William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat...
...It may also cheer those who recall the headaches of rationing during World War II that the queues of people waiting for ration books will be much shorter after Nuclear War I. Defense Secretary Robert S. Mc-Namara, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee this year, estimated that in a nuclear war the fatalities in the United States "would approach one hundred million...
...Virtually zero trouble (about one-fiftieth of one per cent difficulty) was felt by Harvey's Department Store in Nashville...
...Restaurants, barber shops, taverns, real estate concerns—the whole vast array of enterprises that do business with the public—will be required to serve all of the public without regard to race, as a provision of licensed operation...
...In the face of this threat to the elite, the Vassar girls were urged to step up production and save the world for democracy...
...It is also refreshing proof that the guardians of education are coming to recognize that the new generation of students are nobody's fools...
...That is, if the printers are not vaporized by atomic blasts...
...The AMA lobby has vigorously opposed all legislation designed to improve evaluation of drugs through the Food and Drug Administration...
...You think we are deceiving the public...
...A Louisville official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People acclaimed the executive order as "a great step forward" that would help pave the way for supporting state legislation...
...These measures add up to a great deal less than is needed to wipe out the gap between the number of job openings and the manpower available, but they would at least constitute a modest start on which a more comprehensive program could be built...
...We are witnessing a head-on collision," declared Wolfbein, "between advancing automation and technology and a tidal wave of manpower for whom jobs must be available...
...There is a silver lining in that mushroom cloud...
...It is painfully clear that the tax service has simply not done the job Congress gave it: to rout out the propagandists from the bona fide educators...
...Just where they are is probably classified information...
...Senator Stephen M. Young, Ohio Democrat, whose acid wit and candid tongue have skinned many a sacred cow, recently excoriated the hierarchy of the AMA on the floor of the Senate for its stubborn opposition to the inclusion of medical doctors in the social security system...
...Consumer spending is also likely to decline because, as Business Week saw it, "Consumers borrowed $7 billion last year, and just meeting the payments on a total consumer installment debt of nearly $50 billion is bound to inhibit consumer spending in the second half of 1963...
...They plan to save more and spend less as a cushion against a possible layoff...
...With possibly one hundred million persons killed, and a land pocked with huge craters like the surface of the dead moon, it stirs the blood to know that the President, thinking beyond all this, can give Americans such inspiring visions of our objectives for the period after Nuclear War I. For example, note that the survivors must be able to "successfully support any required military effort...
...There seems to be hope for progress if an increasing number of members of Congress recognize that the voice of what Senator Young terms "the spend-ingest and most aggressive of all lobbying organizations" does not always speak for its membership, and in fact may be working against the true interests of the medical profession...
...Among the unemployed Negro group alone, forty-four per cent have not completed the eighth grade...
...The Hollow Voice A year or so ago we commented in these columns that "we sometimes weary of exposing the deceits and distortions" of the leadership of the American Medical Association...
...They did the work, not me...
...Senator Fulbright deserves great credit for his patient pursuit of the facts in this long neglected field...
...The younger Wright testified he had been "bamboozled" into contributing $3,000 to The New Leader, for publication of a story regarded as friendly to Chiang's Nationalist regime...
...James Farmer, executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality, hailed it as "one of the most significant executive orders ever issued" and saw it as an example which CORE could urge other governors to follow...
...It's the old moral dodge: Attend at once to the remote and avoid the immediate...
...This objective exploration by The Wall Street Journal of what happens when Southern proprietors open their doors to Negroes stands as an excellent example of what should be common, but is all too uncommon newspaper initiative...
...f On the basis of projections from figures of the Council of Economic Advisers, economists estimate that to reduce the present unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent down to four per cent, the gross national product would have to zoom up by 8.5 per cent...
...Senator Maurine Neuberger, Oregon Democrat, pointed out recently that "you and I, unwittingly, and certainly involuntarily, as taxpayers, are indirectly financing millions of dollars of Birch-type propaganda put out by less well-known but equally vicious [tax-exempt] organizations...
...Kentucky Sets the Pace Southern resistance to racial integration seems implacable, on the surface, but almost every day some development bears witness to the cracking of what was once an impenetrable, monolithic wall of diehard racism...
...Beyond the Unthinkable Please try not to be utterly depressed by your fears of an atomic war...
...When you come to think of it, what could be more symbolic of a modern "going democracy" with its ideal of equality, and less anarchic, than the rationed equality of a ration book...
...Wright's cynical estimate of the public was never put to the test, of course, because the newspapers, magazines, networks, and motion picture firms which palmed off the propaganda as objective news consistently refused to label the material for what it was...
...I suppose—Freud aside—that the multiplication of the already too numerous poor explains the fascination the "planned parenthood" crusade has always had for rich women...
...The present hard core of unemployment will double during the remainder of this decade unless members of Congress, and a great many other citizens who have been holding steady jobs for some time, begin paying attention to the urgent warnings sounded by Federal government spokesmen and other sources...
...In 1961, these and a score of other Right-oriented propaganda organizations took in more than $5.5 million in tax-free contributions...
...And," continued the Senator, "whenever a businessman has tax-exempt income, somebody else is forced to pay more taxes —and that somebody else is you and I." Among these organizations are America's Future, Inc., which specializes in attacks on desegregation, the United Nations, and labor unions, and in book-banning...
...1 While most Congressmen show little concern over the need for action to combat unemployment, some of their employed constituents have been watching the trend with anxiety...
...How has this been permitted to happen...
...The New Leader came to me and hit me for a little money that this would be a great thing to have and I fell for it...
...But I never heard that they did...
...So the rich are in a dither about the population explosion, and America is the land of the rich...
...During the present decade, Wolfbein estimated, the nation's labor force will increase by thirteen millions...
...Senator Ernest Gruening, Alaska Democrat, and himself a former medical doctor, recently accused the AMA of doing its own members a disservice on still another front...
...Neuberger said, "There is increasing evidence that dozens of Right-wing groups are today masquerading as educational and religious organizations, and are flooding the country with the partisan, political propaganda of the far Right, financed by tax-free contributions from businessmen...
...Americans want to talk about the population explosion— and to talk about it in preference to the explosions and impending explosions that are nearer home...
...Bear down on the impossible and leave the possible to the Pentagon...
...It is charged with preparing courses of action which must be followed so that surviving Americans will have, as one press report puts it, "a going democracy instead of anarchy or a military dictatorship...
...it shows doubting Congressmen considering Federal civil rights provisions (particularly the critical requirement of equal treatment for Negroes in places serving the public) that there can be cooperation from the states...
...The Explosion Kick rpHERE used to be a statistic around showing Vassar graduates with 1.3 babies each—horrible visu!—while the non-Vassar (and non-Wellesley and non-Smith) girls were spawning like crazy...
...Green, that the voice of the AMA often does not express the views of the nation's medical doctors...
...We know of only one white couple who walked out because we admitted Negroes and they came back within two weeks...
...This lining consists of stamps (maybe green, not silver) out of the ration books that our government is ready to distribute to anyone who survives a nuclear war...
...Occupying offices overlooking the White House, he and his staff lay plans for what this country (if any) and its people (if any) will do after Nuclear War I has ended...
...Several major metropolitan dailies carried parts of the story, but they were distinguished exceptions to the national rule...
...Now, not only morality and the Constitution call for integration, but the profit motive may join in the chorus...
...the American Good Government Society, which gives awards to Americans who have contributed to good government— curiously, the recipients invariably turn out to be Southern Democrats or conservative Republicans...
...In a world where nearly all the people earn the equivalent of less than forty dollars a year, the world's per capita costs of non-productive and non-consumable weapons of war is forty dollars a year...
...But GNP rose only 3.5 per cent in the past year, a sluggard's pace which explains why unemployment is higher than a year ago...
...For many years," charged Senator Young, "a small group of political doctors have been running the American Medical Association in flagrant disregard of the welfare of its membership . . . Despite the clear and repeated expressions in favor of social security by approximately sixty-five per cent of physicians . . . the dictatorial House of Delegates maintains its opposition to social security . . . The powerful AMA lobby has misrepresented and is misrepresenting [the doctors] and has prevailed on the Congress to deny them this needed coverage...
...The reason for this is very simple...
...Our episode here concerns Hamilton Wright and Hamilton Wright, Jr., who operate the Hamilton Wright Organization, a high-powered public relations firm whose clients have included Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, which paid it $300,000 a year for three years, and the racist-ridden government of South Africa, which kicked in $150,000 on a one-year contract...
...This shocker, on the extent to which automation and increased productivity are slashing the demand for manpower, was revealed by Seymour L. Wolfbein, director of the Department of Labor's Office of Manpower, in testimony before the Senate Small Business Subcommittee...
...Peace, No You may not have been aware of it, but you are helping to pay for propaganda opposing disarmament, foreign aid, the United Nations, the Peace Corps, public housing, urban renewal, school desegregation, the income tax, taxation of industry, the National Council of Churches—well, you name it...
...The Regents' vote for freedom of opinion on the seven campuses of the country's largest state university is not only a notable gain for civil liberties...
...Many observers feel," said Senator Gruening, "if the AMA devoted as much energy and finances to drug evaluation and information as it devotes to opposing Federal legislation, American physicians and patients would be a lot better off...
...The Wrights were paid, of course, to make their clients look good to the American public...
...if it's a pet peeve of the Radical Right, you are supporting it...
...Americans now have a somewhat clearer understanding of how propaganda bought by foreign governments is masqueraded as news—or they would have a better understanding if they could only find the Fulbright disclosures in their local paper...
...he asked...
...The most noteworthy of recent advances occurred in Kentucky where Governor Bert T. Combs demonstrated that a state need not wait for Federal action but can act on its own to break down racial barriers...
...Senator Pat McNamara, Michigan Democrat, presented evidence assembled by the Michigan Medical Society that "an overwhelming majority" of doctors in his home state wanted coverage...
...Our laws, she pointed out, do not grant tax-exempt status to an organization a substantial part of whose activities is "carrying on propaganda...
...asked Mrs...
...Wechsler's analysis, paint an even more disturbing picture on a much wider canvas...
...Out of 60,000 customers with charge accounts, only thirteen have closed their accounts because the Tennessee store desegregated its lunch counters in 1960...
...Within a day they had received bookings for conventions with 3,000 delegates who otherwise would have by-passed the city...
...The University of Michigan Survey Research Center reported that a number of consumers now view the future with pessimism because of the persistence of unemployment...
...When Senator Fulbright expressed shock over this presentation of propaganda as news, the elder Wright demurred...
...Senator Clair Engle, California Democrat, recently protested "the shocking misuse and abuse of the tax laws that permit extremist groups, under the cloak of 'educational' or 'religious' activity, to enjoy the privilege of tax-exempt income...
...And now comes a distinguished writer (in, of course, the Reader's Digest) to urge the Women's Strike for Peace to forget all about the nuclear dandruff on their shoulders—and in their children's milk—and crusade instead against the population explosion away out there somewhere...
...The pressses, it is assumed, are hidden far underground in strategic locations...
...The Journal found that customers have been jamming the Wit's End, a posh Atlanta night club, one of three in town that admits Negroes...
...Our zest for the battle has been renewed again in the past few weeks by three Senators, each of whom recognized, as did Mrs...
...f While representing Nationalist China, the Wright organization ghosted articles for members of Congress, including one for Senator Paul H. Douglas, Illinois Democrat, opposing admission of Communist China to the United Nations...
...Freedom has many difficulties," said Mr...
...Congressional investigation of tax exemption policies of the Internal Revenue Service would throw much needed light— and provide the way for corrective action—in a field where reform is urgently needed...
...Our flagging spirits were revived at the time by Representative Edith Green, Oregon Democrat, who took the AMA apart for its myopic opposition to medical care for the aged, but at the same time made the hopeful observation that the spokesmen for the AMA were "unrepresentative" of its membership...
...We are spending three million dollars a day just to warehouse our rotting agricultural surpluses, and employing most of our people in the production of either superfluities or the means of mass destruction...
...Less than a week later, in Washington, the State Department revealed that it was preparing a fresh batch of regulations to "tighten" the already prohibitive restrictions on American travel to Castro's Cuba...
...The National Broadcasting Company carried an interview with C. S. Chen, commander of the Nationalist Chinese Air Force, conducted by the younger Wright as part of his $300,-000-a-year assignment, but no mention was made of the bought-and-paid-for character of the program...
...The public doesn't care," Wright retorted...
...Wright wondered...
...Vote for Freedom Another degrading relic of the McCarthy era has been consigned to the rubbish heap by the belated but highly commendable action of the Regents of the University of California...
...This is one example of the careful thinking about the "unthinkable" that is going on in Washington...
...I think it is important to note," McNamara pointed out, "that doctors of medicine are the only self-employed group in the United States today who are denied the protection of social security for themselves and their families...
...Managing the News Elsewhere in this issue, James A. Wechsler chronicles the opening phase of the Senate investigation which disclosed betrayal of their public trust by significant segments of the American press...
...Senator Douglas said he knew the article he signed was prepared by the Wright firm but did not know the Wrights represented the Chiang Kai-shek government...
...It is but a fine detail in the awesome undertakings of the Office of Emergency Planning headed by Edward McDermott...
...The total mandate of the OEP is summed up in these words of President Kennedy: "The ultimate objective of our non-military emergency planning is the development of a capability at all levels of government to manage our resources, both human and material, so that we can meet essential human needs, successfully support any required military effort, and survive as a free and independent nation...
...The Federal tax authorities have demonstrated the application of a double standard which cannot be permitted to go unchallenged...
...and we can't for the life of us figure out how the world's poor are to eat if they go on having children...
...Automation, technology, the rapid rise in job-seekers caused by the population explosion, and our laggard economic growth, constitute the recruiting sergeants for the army of the unemployed...
...Some of the noteworthy disclosures developed by Senator Fulbright as he questioned the Wrights were these: % The public relations firm financed luxury vacation trips for newsreel executives, reporters, and editors who in turn distributed unlabeled foreign propaganda to American audiences...
...The governor signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination in all businesses licensed by the state...
...f Other news services and news-reels which the Wrights said used their films, pictures, or stories without identifying them as propaganda hand-outs were the Associated Press, Columbia Broadcasting System, National Geographic magazine, King Features Syndicate, The New York Times, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount, Universal, and 20th Century Fox...
...In Atlanta, fourteen hotels recently announced they would begin accepting Negro guests attending conventions...
...Whatever its inherent reality, the population explosion is here and now a diversion from our mortal problems and a flight from our mortal guilt...
...We must also be valorous and ready to: march to the next war in the morning...
...Yes," Fulbright replied...
...The order not only provides an inspiring precedent for bold initiative at the state level...
...Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz told a House Labor Subcommittee that twenty per cent of all unemployed have not finished the eighth grade...
...By a vote of fifteen to two, they rescinded a ban against Communist speakers that had been adopted in 1951, thus making that great institution the sixteenth major university to take such a step...
...Despite this express exclusion of propaganda organs from tax exemption," Mrs...
...The Wrights insisted throughout their testimony that their handouts were properly labeled to show, as required by law, that they were produced by a paid agent of a foreign government...
...Increased racial conflict caused by greater competition for scarce jobs, higher crime rates, mounting relief rolls, and other social and dollar costs, will be but a few of the bitter fruits yielded by the rank growth of unemployment...
...We know of old that when men learn war no more, the desert will bloom as the rose and the hungry be fed...
...It will not be enough merely to survive multi-megaton blasts, fire storms, and fallout, and to line up for those ration books and exchange the coupons for the food at Fort Knox, Carlsbad Caverns, or wherever it will be buried...
...It is true that employment has reached the record high of 70,000,000, but this is no great cause for cheers in view of these accompanying facts recently disclosed: % By 1970, the nation will be able to equal its 1960 output with twenty-two million fewer workers than it did then...
...State agencies which regulate licensing have been asked to submit plans for enforcement of the order...
...Theophrastus Such...
...Seeking approval for a new literacy training program for the uneducated, Secretary Wirtz warned that "an even harder hard core of unemployment" is developing among "this severely disadvantaged group...
...f Among the 4.8 million unemployed, the plight of the uneducated, both white and Negro, is most desperate...
...Neuberger...
...Who cares...
...Among hotels, motels, restaurants, taverns, night clubs, and other establishments serving or hiring Negroes, The Wall Street Journal reported after canvassing Southern cities: "Only a few report suffering any lasting economic consequences" and "a sizeable number, in fact, declare that business has been better than ever...
...In Raleigh, North Carolina, a restaurant owner said only eight whites have walked out since learning Negroes were served there, and "We're getting plenty of customers to replace the hard-headed ones...
...Integration Pays Proprietors of places of public accommodation in Dixie have long feared that if they admitted Negroes, Southern whites would boycott them and ruin their business...
...Then, and not before...
...Head-on Collision' The number of Americans now unemployed exceeds the entire population of Chicago by about one million...
...During the past few years we have been adding about 60,000 jobs a month, he said, only one-fifth of the 300,000 needed monthly to meet the goal of thirty-five million new jobs by 1970...
...These were distributed free to major news media, which proceeded to exhibit and publish them without informing the public that the material was pure propaganda bought and paid for by the foreign governments...
...Actually, it isn't the rising birth rate as much as the falling infant mortality (and the increasing longevity) that is doubling the population of Asia and Africa every two weeks...
...Touching on one small detail of the grim possibilities, Secretary Wirtz pointed out that training a single worker will cost $1,000 but "If we don't train them, it will cost us $1,000 a year for each of them for the rest of our lives to carry them on our backs...
...Senator Young documented his charges with the results of numerous statewide polls and referenda which revealed that a substantial majority of doctors favor coming under social security...
...Counter action by Congress is long overdue...
...If food, medicine, and shelter necessarily raised the birth rate, ours would be the world's highest...
...Student audiences have the reasoning power and information to make a critical evaluation of the arguments of speakers, whether they be Communists, Birchers, or whatever...
...This privilege was revoked on the ground that peace is not a religious purpose but must be Herblock in The Washington Post "I Think He Should Have a Choice of Doctors" achieved through legislation alone...
...The ration plan is only one small but symbolic facet of the Office of Emergency Planning's total job of preparing for post nuclear war activity...
...Negroes, youths, the undereducated and unskilled of all ages and races will make up the bulk of the growing ranks of unemployed...
...Yet at the same time it has "starved" its own Council on Drugs for funds and staff, with consequent delays of as long as three years in evaluating new drugs...
...They have as many (or, more precisely, as few) babies as they want, and they don't want the wrong kind of people—the Franklins and the Lincolns—to have more...
...The hierarchy of the AMA is opposed to social security for doctors, and we here in the Congress have been listening to the AMA lobby instead of to the physicians themselves...
...As far as stirring things up around here, it's been one big zero...
...Any survivors emerging from holes, caves, or other shelters, expecting to find everything completely disorganized, will be pleasantly surprised to learn that within a matter of hours, maybe a day at most, there will be ration coupons for everyone...
...It is not the American college student who is most likely to skip down the street after the Pied Pipers of demagoguery, but some of his fearful and frustrated elders who are most readily bewitched by the pipers' tunes...
...If there is one thing Soviet spies must not learn, it is the whereabouts of the plates and presses for our ration books...
...I got bamboozled on this one," he explained...
...Leave war and peace to the government (which has always managed them so well) and tell the Africans and the Asians to use contraceptives...
Vol. 27 • August 1963 • No. 8
