THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Admonition from Isaiah Dear Sirs: Potomacus states in "The Word from Washington" in the June issue that "The President met the Dominican challenge more in the spirit of Caesar...
...I am one of those North American democrats who have allowed a wish for nonviolent change to supersede the ever-mounting evidence that the oligarchical and military powers will not permit any diminution of their power...
...On the contrary, it may well be that our interests would be better served if there were more Communist countries in the world, instead of fewer...
...We intervene against democratic revolution (in violation of our heritage), not because of any willful desire to assist the forces of evil...
...The United States is fast becoming the world's greatest war threat...
...Is war the greatest contribution we have to offer the world with its many problems and its millions of hungry, frightened peoples...
...Your appeal to the Geneva accords is really ludicrous, for they stipulated free elections (North Vietnam as well as South, as you seem to have trouble recalling) without any machinery for implementation...
...P. W. Williamson Ipswich, Massachusetts McGovern for State Dear Sirs: I wish heartily to "second the motion" of Potomacus in your May issue that Senator George McGovern be appointed Secretary of State...
...But is there a different kind of threat— one against our politico-economic system...
...It makes no sense to call for debate and then to offer no facts...
...2. Abe For-tas once handled some legal business for Johnson and later for Bobby Baker...
...The fact is that the recent Gallup poll gave President Johnson a sixty-seven per cent favorable vote...
...In 1949, when the Communists came in with their new currency, it was looked upon with the greatest distrust, and government banks were fanatically avoided, with the result that this new money also began to lose value...
...Since LBJ has deserted FDR for TR, and the pseudo-liberals have followed, your magazine is all that is left for an intellectual liberal...
...Wrong...
...This is indeed a vote of confidence...
...John E. Jardine Nashville, Tennessee Dear Sirs: It is unfair to accuse the United States of constant intervention in the revolutionary affairs of other nations...
...Aaron Katz Brooklyn, New York All That Is Left Dear Sirs: The Progressive is the only magazine with which I agree fully...
...If so, it is hard to see how we can defend ourselves against this danger by military intervention in the lesser countries of Asia or Latin America...
...Despite the cries of the East-lands, the Wallaces, and the Ku Kluxers, charging that "equal rights" is a Communist plot, our government is moving forward...
...Foreign Policy Dear Sirs: U.S...
...A realistic foreign policy on our part will cease to view the Communist world as one vast conspiracy against us, and recognize it for what it is: a loose group of economically depressed states, whose Communist leaders have a desperate determination to lift them out of their morass by violent revolution, but who retain a strongly independent, nationalistic bent, and who are destined to become gradually more moderate in their policies as they gain literacy and economic and social well-being for their peoples...
...I wonder if we realize our debt to this man for his penetrating analysis...
...But this did not happen until last January, more than six months after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...
...If the United States can do no better than sponsor death, maiming, and destruction on other continents to promote its war-geared economy and to satisfy the selfish ambitions of those who are looking ahead to future reelections, then the world should take drastic steps to restrain the United States...
...The fact that Communists favor equal rights does not make President Johnson and the Congress yield to the racists...
...The Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek occupied the city and the airfields, and held the roads between, and the Communist forces held virtually everything else, including the sympathies of the people...
...The Kuomintang did nothing to control the economic situation after the war, and when, in 1948, they belatedly issued a new currency, they fleeced and cheated the people out of their pitiful savings...
...On such a controversial issue you owe it to your readers...
...6. Dale Miller served as chairman of the inaugural committee (probably without pay...
...Paul Tennant Washington, D. C. U.S...
...They did not begin until the state was all but bankrupt fiscally— it has long been bankrupt morally—and, more important, was beginning to grasp the seriousness of the Congressional challenge of the seating of the state's five Congressmen...
...The final impetus will come from the increasing awareness that conditions are man-made and are not preordained...
...They intend to see that non-Mississippians get the facts as Mississippians see them...
...Since this would be a government of popular support, and in view of the tragic plight of these war-weary people who had so recently been our staunch allies in the war against the Japanese, I fully expected my government to recognize the new government when it came to power and extend to them the helping hand so desperately needed...
...Just how is he able to say that "Selma is better than a thousand other towns in the South" unless he means better at cracking skulls, denying Negroes the right to vote and the use of public accommodations, and denying jobs to those Negroes who try to exercise their rights...
...I was in Washington, D.C., during April for the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors...
...However, you fail to explain the tremendous amount of captured Russian and Chinese arms and the testification of defectors that at least 37,000 men have moved South on orders from Hanoi since 1959...
...Secretary Rusk not only permits this to happen but, through lack of leadership, seems to encourage it...
...Marine Corps Miami, Florida Dear Sirs: James S. Duncan's excellent article on "Communist China Today" in the April Progressive is indeed objective and reasonable...
...I strongly urge that you print the opposite side of your position on Vietnam...
...Why do they blow up cafes in Saigon...
...It was in the spirit of Caesar, Wessin y Wessin, and Isaiah...
...We must act as our conscience and beliefs, traditions and values dictate to us...
...Reynolds Moody Lieutenant Colonel Retired U.S...
...and from the Circuit Clerks Association, the registrars who have been denying Negroes the right to vote...
...and Texas Gulf is being investigated by the SEC...
...We now seem intent on drawing them into a new war as a pretext to crushing them still further...
...For the greater their number, the less monolithic and the less dangerous will be the international Communist movement...
...Those of us who supported the Johnson-Humphrey ticket actively are beginning to view with dismay the policy of drift in foreign affairs...
...In international affairs, too, we must free ourselves from such thought-paralyzing anti-Communism, before it manages to destroy us and our world...
...Just what is meant by "national security" and precisely how it is threatened are never clearly stated...
...O. Edmund Clubb New York, New York...
...City and county officials completely stifled the movement to a greater and longer extent than racists have been able to do anywhere, with the possible exception of McComb, Mississippi...
...But events prevent a continuation of self-delusion...
...We have not only not helped the Chinese people in their time of desperate need, but we have harassed them in every possible way to prevent their helping themselves...
...from the Mississippi Sheriffs Association, which at one meeting cheered Lawrence Rainey and Cecil Price...
...4. One of Dale Miller's clients (Texas Gulf Sulphur) is allegedly involved in a scheme to manipulate stock prices...
...But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword...
...When World War II was over, Marine Corps Night Fighting Squadron 541, which I commanded, was ordered to Peking, China, for the purpose of accepting the surrender of Japanese forces there...
...State leaders are afraid that adverse publicity will strengthen the Freedom Democratic Party's position...
...We did not interfere in 1963 when the Dominican military dictatorship overthrew the Bosch government, the island's first popularly-elected government in generations...
...I found him affable, intelligent, possessing an amazing grasp of affairs, and, above all, a man of courage on the basic issue of our times: peace...
...Haynes Johnson, in his article in that May issue, writes on Mississippi with the same lack of alertness...
...There was a time when drastic reforms, strictly administered, might have produced enough change in economic structure, income distribution, and public services...
...After VJ Day, while posing as China's saviors, they removed a large amount of machinery from Japanese factories in Manchuria and carried it off to Russia...
...3. Dale Miller is another lobbyist...
...Yet McCartney is simply unable to point to a single instance in which a client of either of these men received preferential treatment for any reason...
...We have been trapped by the straitjacket of anti-Communism, and it is this hysteria which so tragically allies us with Batista, Trujillo, Chiang, Syngh-man Rhee, Diem, and their ilk, and against the forces of democracy and progress...
...Alfred Landmann Columbia, South Carolina Dear Sirs: President Johnson, by adopting the overbearing foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt, has set back the progress of the world at least sixty-four years...
...All of this hardly constitutes overwhelming evidence of corruption in high places...
...Communism gains a secure foothold only where there is abject poverty, autocracy, illiteracy, and denial of basic human rights...
...Frank A. Salamone Rochester, New York China after Chiang Dear Sirs: James Duncan's April article, "Communist China Today," was of particular interest to me...
...The threat is just taken for granted...
...The conclusion follows that the supposed threat to our national security is an illusion and does not justify our foreign policy...
...The U.S.S.R...
...But this, too, is an imaginary bogey man...
...Many who had salvaged a few silver dollars or some gold dug up their hoards and sold them to the banks for the new currency, which immediately began to deteriorate in value...
...Bank deposits were guaranteed in value...
...Your rantings have, unfortunately, taken on the appearance of tactics used by some extreme left and right wing groups...
...As for the support (not to be confused with appeal) the Vietcong enjoys in the countryside, let it not be forgotten that it was purchased in largely the same manner used by the SAO [rebels] in Algeria with much less success...
...THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Admonition from Isaiah Dear Sirs: Potomacus states in "The Word from Washington" in the June issue that "The President met the Dominican challenge more in the spirit of Caesar and Wessin y Wessin than in that of Isaiah, his favorite prophet...
...I was most disappointed therefore to discover that the only solid evidence in the article consisted of the following points: 1. Abe Fortas is a lobbyist...
...I think it is time that we admit to ourselves and the world that they have the right to a place under the sun just the same as we do...
...has far too much at stake at home to risk a full-scale war against the awesome might of the United States...
...but by the time the leaders of that country have reached a stage of nuclear power where they might hope to cope with us, they, too, will have so great an investment in industrial equipment, and an economic organization so painfully built up over several decades, that they, like the Russians, will be unwilling to risk its destruction...
...Eula M. McNabb Dallas, Texas Dear Sirs: Most of Latin America is in desperate need of thorough-going revolution...
...If we are patient they may even accept it, despite their past bitter experience...
...They maintained this system with honesty and regularity—and it worked...
...Within one week that month, every SNCC leader in Selma was arrested, most of the movement's cars were impounded, and, finally, after threats failed to prevent mass meetings, an injunction was issued banning meetings...
...We can dismiss as ridiculous the idea that an attack could come from such puny antagonists as North Vietnam, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic...
...In our domestic relations, we have broken out of this anti-Communist smog, to a great extent...
...Benedict Martorana Kearny, New Jersey Dear Sirs: Throughout recent months you have attacked from all conceivable positions the Administration's policy on Vietnam...
...Moderate sounding words do not necessarily imply that moderation is the way of life in Mississippi...
...Since these "moderate" statements were first made in January, hundreds of arrests, continued beatings and nighttime shootings, and eight fire-bombings all show that little has changed in Mississippi...
...On the other hand, maybe your information, in your editorial on Vietnam in the May issue, came from newsmen as well-informed as those who predicted a long struggle between Gbenge and Tshombe in the Congo...
...When the Chinese were able to take over Manchuria they found that their "saviors" had looted these great plants bare...
...This is surely one irritant in China's relations with Big Brother...
...Haven't we already hurt them enough...
...The value of a deposit was reckoned as what it would purchase on that day of certain basic commodities—rice, salt, oil, and cloth—and banks guaranteed that when the depositor withdrew any of his funds he would be given a sum that would purchase a proportionate amount of those commodities...
...5. Another of Miller's clients (the city of Dallas) is seeking a Federal appropriation for the Trinity River Project...
...If by national security is meant the territorial integrity of the United States, there is not the slightest danger of an attack against it from Communist countries...
...I suppose that many of your crotchety readers are going to take violent exception to his remarks, but to them I offer my best wishes for a speedy reincarnation...
...When Negroes attempted to desegregate places last July they were arrested by county police and beaten by mobs and posse-men...
...As one who lived for many years in China, including twenty-seven months under the Communists, I would like to add two items...
...Stephen M. Fortson The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland Mayer and Selma Dear Sirs: Though Milton Mayer was in Selma during the Thirties, it is obvious he has not been there within the last few years...
...The United States is at war on two continents, for at least the second time, and the world knows not where the United States will open another war, nor when...
...I can no longer imagine how the horror and destruction of revolution can be avoided...
...My second point is that the Communists performed the feat of checking a runaway inflation...
...But I think The Progressive can do better...
...Mrs...
...The President's admonition, "Come now, and let us reason together," is from Isaiah I, verse 18...
...Later Russia sold these same machines back to the Chinese at a stiff price...
...He fails to examine closely the Mississippians' statements of "moderation...
...If the Vietcong is so altruistic, why do they single out agricultural and sanitation advisers to execute as enemies of the people...
...You hint and sometimes seem to claim that the war is simply a popular revolution and is not being waged by North Vietnam...
...That is why I was eager to read James McCartney's article ("Washington's Shadow Government," in your May issue) which I hoped would expose the mercenary basis of Johnson's "consensus...
...Why do they strike at field hospitals...
...William H. Fisher Associate Professor of Education Texas Western College El Paso, Texas Correction from Clubb Dear Sirs: In my article, "The Second World Revolution," in the June issue, the editorial change introduced into the paragraph beginning "Like a Titan" to make it read "from Korea in a great crescent swinging south and then east to Western Europe" has the crescent going the wrong way to do a good job of containment, I fear: the direction should have been WEST...
...I made a special point of looking up Senator McGovern as one who has consistently represented a program that thoughtful people can support...
...Other pleas for "moderation" have come from Erie Johnston, who as chairman of the State Sovereignty Commission sees to it that segregation continues to prevail...
...If you need hard evidence on that subject you might get in touch with an Indian, a Tibetan, a South Korean, a Soviet border guard on the Sinkiang frontier, or a Laotian...
...Instead of helping them, we have continued to help Chiang in his fight against the people of China, even after they had driven him from their mainland...
...Finally, you should reread your editorial...
...policy on Vietnam, on Cuba, and on the Dominican Republic is based officially on the premise that the spread of Communism to these countries and elsewhere would be a "threat to our national security...
...Raymond T. Bye Emeritus Professor of Economics University of Pennsylvania Moylan, Pennsylvania Dear Sirs: Perhaps you have access to some referendum on the popularity of the government of South Vietnam that was conducted without the knowledge of the government of the United States...
...Is that the most we can achieve...
...One of Fortas' clients seems to have received the smaller slice of pie in its dealing with Phillips Petroleum...
...reform is no longer sufficient...
...You have twisted polls to your own advantage...
...Military invasion by the Soviet Union or Red China is a conceivable possibility, but it is most unlikely...
...The supposed threat is a myth...
...Apparently the reader is supposed blindly to follow McCartney as he leaps from these flimsy scraps of evidence to the conclusion that Washington is reeking with lobbyists who have access to the Administration and who will sell to the highest bidder...
...The following two verses read, "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land...
...Poverty, hunger, and death were commonplace, and it was apparent that it would be only a matter of time before the Communists would control all of that part of China...
...The real disaster is that the one power which could prevent the holocaust is unwilling to accept the decisive role...
...Extraordinary measures were necessary to establish popular confidence...
...A revolution is difficult to make, but it will be made so long as living conditions continue to decline, population continues to mount, urbanization grows more intense, and political inequity goes unchanged...
...Arthur J. Allen Houston, Texas McCartney on Lobbyists Dear Sirs: Like many liberals, I, too, am suspicious of Lyndon Johnson's cozy relationship with members of the industrial-financial complex...
...Our policy was strictly "non-intervention" when the Franco forces, aided by Hitler and Mussolini, overthrew the democratically-elected Loyalist government of Spain...
...But that time has now passed...
...We were instructed not to take sides with either Chinese political faction of the civil war then in progress there...
...For the danger lies in propaganda that comes mainly from the Soviets and mainland China, not from their satellites...
...Jerry DeMuth Atlanta, Georgia Dear Sirs: I finished reading Milton Mayer's "The Last Time I Saw Selma" (May Progressive) and thought, "Wow...
...Is it not time to admit our error and extend to them the hand of friendship for a change...
...China is potentially a more dangerous aggressor, perhaps...
...The Hotel Albert is desegregated, as are the theaters and some, only some, of the restaurants...
...As for your suggestions, perhaps you would like to say where you would stand and fight Chinese expansion...
...In South and North Vietnam, where nobody, despite their claims, knows the true beliefs of the natives, there can be no other course but action against the aggressor...
...The people had the worthless paper and the government banks had the metal...
...The country needs muckraking journalism more than ever...
...After VE Day, many Russian troops were rushed across to the Eastern Front to get in on the credit for the Japanese surrender which was obviously imminent...
...after battling for years, the city of Dallas has yet to see an appropriation for the Trinity River Project...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
