NOTES IN THE NEWS
Fading HUAC The House Un-American Activities Committee no longer strikes terror to the heart of everyone on whom it casts its shadow. This was amply demonstrated during the Committee's recent...
...The Committee's chief quarry, Dr...
...Consideration of an interstate welfare compact designed to make available welfare aid now denied to migrants by state residency restrictions...
...We are concerned here with a committee," he said, "that has had a long tradition of abuse of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution...
...Newspapers carrying such carboncopy versions of editorials—whether the material emanates from one of the "canned opinion" services run on a fee basis, or from the National Association of Manufacturers' editorial mailings to newspapers in every state—are practicing deceit because they do not give the source of the prefabricated opinions but present them as their own, independent positions...
...Some 600 daily newspapers have run NAM editorials in recent years—usually "verbatim," reported Ben Bagdikian, an authority on the press, writing in Harper's, and "most often without attribution to the NAM as source...
...Every other week "one editorial praised Pan American Airways, the New York Stock Exchange, REA [Railway Express Agency], the American Meat Institute, the American Medical Association, the Committee of American Steamship Lines, chain stores, and the timber industry...
...The Court ruled the law invalid as an invasion of the Constitutional "right of privacy...
...f Doubling the funds authorized under the war on poverty for those programs affecting migrant workers...
...If the editor wants to parrot the views of the National Association of Manufacturers," said Senator McNa-mara, "or the chamber of commerce, he is at full liberty to do so...
...Not all doors are open, by any means...
...an investigation into power company propaganda, conducted a generation ago, showed INR getting $84,-000 a year from the utilities...
...Extension of the National Labor Relations Act to agriculture, with the goal of providing collective bargaining rights to the workers of farm employers whose interstate shipments exceed $50,000 a year...
...Supreme Court, in a seven to two decision delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, has struck down the Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives and the giving of advice about birth control devices...
...A Jesuit on HUAC One of the most stinging indictments yet made of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the "national paranoia" which keeps it alive, has come from Father G. G. Grant, a Chicago Jesuit...
...Angered by HUAC's sleazy carnival in Chicago, Father Grant roundly condemned the Committee in a speech before members of the city's First Congregational Church...
...Senators Pat McNamara of Michigan and Lee Metcalf of Montana recently called the attention of the Senate to the frequency with which prepackaged opinion turns up in the weeklies and some daily papers...
...Jeremiah Stamler, rather than testify or, alternatively, "take the Fifth," simply walked out, as did two others of those subpoenaed—one of whom is his assistant, Mrs...
...A survey at the University of Wisconsin in Madison last year revealed that there were fewer than a hundred American Negro students, graduate and undergraduate combined, in a student body numbering almost 25,000...
...Stamler had behaved improperly during those seven years...
...The invalidation of this law, enacted in 1879 when Protestants dominated the Connecticut legislature, should lead to the scrapping of laws in other states that hinder family planning...
...The John Birchers and the Minute Men merely represent an extreme form of this fear, but it is very widespread throughout America in a lesser degree...
...Yolanda Hall...
...Representative Sidney Yates, a Chicago Democrat with a liberal record, introduced a resolution in Congress to abolish HUAC and transfer its functions to the House Judiciary Committee...
...Migrants' Progress Senator Harrison A. Williams, New Jersey Democrat, presides over what is surely one of the most persistent and productive committees in the nation's capital—the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor...
...HUAC's Midwest performance resembled a shabby road-show revival of the McCarthy period...
...Of 167 companies queried by the American Management Association, 162 declared they had not faced as many problems as they had expected when the first white-collar Negroes were hired...
...The crudest effect of all is that high birth rates among the poor deliver too many new victims into the maw of poverty each year...
...The U.S...
...What Jenner is saying is that there is a constitutional protection against the power of HUAC to frighten, that there is something to fear in fear itself...
...But we agree with Senator Williams that the prospects for making progress are brighter than ever before...
...The way is open to our final goals...
...You see it in otherwise sane men whose mental processes freeze when the topic of Communism is brought up...
...f Coverage of migrants under workmen's compensation...
...But enough doorways have opened and remain empty to reveal the awesome dimensions of the problem of bringing the Negro at last into the mainstream of American life...
...Some utilities now contribute more than $1,000 each to INR annually, Senator Metcalf said...
...They found Negroes employed as home economists, meter readers, telephone installers, salesmen, laboratory technicians, data processing clerks, bank tellers, dieticians, and machinists, to cite some examples...
...An important basic cause is the fact that the migrant farm worker has been systematically excluded from practically all the social advances of the past generation that have brightened the lives of most working Americans—a national minimum wage, unemployment compensation, collective bargaining, workmen's compensation, child labor regulation, and social security...
...Supreme Court decision against the Louisiana version of HUAC, a precedent that prompted Jenner to assert that HUAC's "overbroad sweep inhibits and deters the exercise...
...In one eloquent passage, the Academy scientists declared that "the freedom to limit family size . . ." is "in our view a basic human right...
...In the spirit of the mandate of the late Pope John, he urged his audience to work for a strong United Nations and "for world peace through enforceable world law...
...Among the clients of such "press services" are the American Medical Association, the American Petroleum Institute, the Association of American Railroads, the banking and oil industries, the private utilities, and numerous other corporate interests...
...Fertility and Poverty Weighted down by ancient laws and attitudes—and public apathy—the country has moved toward family planning at a snail's pace while population growth has been racing ahead at sonic speed...
...In a reflection of this trend, 500 private employment agencies in Chicago agreed three years ago to drop all references to race and creed from application forms and to make job referrals solely on the basis of ability...
...Contraception is practiced least among Negroes in the rural South or among Negroes with a rural Southern background...
...Lawrence Hofer, a partner in the Industrial News Review (INR), has acknowledged that the AMA is a client and is "one of several professional and industrial groups that we have worked with...
...Only in a few states do small numbers of migrant workers benefit from some of these social and economic gains...
...The Committee, Jenner asserted, was without legislative purpose but rather pursued a program of "exposure for exposure's sake...
...This is hardly an original proposal, but it is one more sign that the old black intimidation magic is fading...
...While Americans of higher education and income exercise this right "many of the poor and uneducated are in effect deprived of the right...
...To be sure, Dr...
...One important reason for this relatively tranquil atmosphere is that in recent years many companies developed a conscience on discrimination in jobs and voluntarily opened their doors to Negroes at all levels...
...This sampling, the AMA contended, proved that the public is hostile to Medicare—a finding, incidentally, disproved by the public opinion polls...
...The cure for this national illness, Father Grant asserted, is establishment of "a world federal government that can oversee and compel disarmament and establish security, not only of our people but of all of the peoples of the world...
...But during those five years my office has not received one complaint about FEPC operation, only compliments...
...Between 1950 and 1960 our population grew nearly three times as rapidly (nineteen per cent) as it did in the 1930-40 decade (7.2 per cent...
...A few years ago, passage by Congress of even a fraction of this program would have been only remotely possible...
...We have scorned the propaganda trials of Moscow and yet at times the open hearings of some Congressional committees have approached these propaganda trials in their atmosphere of fear and in their results of ruined reputations...
...Governor Edmund G. Brown of California has reported that five years ago, when the state's Fair Employment Practices Commission was established under a law enacted by a slim margin, "FEPC was feared as a new government control unit that was going to push businesses around...
...Viewed against this stark background, the alert citizen can take some, but not unlimited, cheer from recent indicators of what may become a quickened pace toward family planning...
...Another hopeful indication that HUAC's hold may be weakening was a proposal by Representative Donald Rumsfeld, a Republican from Chicago's suburban North Shore, an area laced heavily with Birchites, that Congress take a new look at HUAC to determine whether it violates the constitutional rights of citizens and "serves a legislative purpose commensurate with its cost...
...While among the population as a whole "the proportion of couples who have not used and do not expect to use contraception is about fourteen per cent," among white couples "in which the wife had no more than a grade school education, the proportion is twenty-eight per cent...
...Eric Oldberg, a strong-willed civic leader but no flaming liberal, kept him on...
...they were related to a Federal district court case Jenner initiated, on behalf of Dr...
...In a strong denunciation of the Committee's procedures, Jenner said the time had come "for loyal citizens to stand up and resist the high-handed, un-American tactics of this Committee...
...Oldberg asked Dr...
...But the law is only a beginning which must be followed by vast job-training and educational programs designed to upgrade the Negro from the depressed state in which the white community has held him for so long...
...Altogether, at least six different versions of AMA-slanted editorials show up in the AMA's collection," he told the Senate, "and these were used by more than fifty newspapers...
...Although Jenner has not been identified with civil liberties cases, his credentials awed the Committee, especially Chairman Edwin E. Willis, Louisiana Democrat, who took pains to identify himself as a fellow lawyer and a law teacher (he once taught in night school...
...The U.S...
...Stamler affirmed he was innocent of "subversive activities" during his seven years with the Board...
...It was on Tenner's advice that Dr...
...A group of Baltimore businessmen, organized as the Voluntary Council on Equal Opportunity, surveyed fair employment practices in their city and concluded that "much more progress had been made in the field of Negro employment than had been supposed, and that neither the Negro nor the white community was aware of this...
...Now the old inertia is gone,* some of the work has been done...
...But instead of firing him according to the old script, the eight-member Board, headed by Dr...
...He may not have been aware of it, but by 1919 the Industrial News Review already had been selling prefabricated opinion for thirteen years...
...Perusing the AMA collection of editorials, Senator McNamara found that an editor in Mesa, Arizona, "seems to have hit on the very same words to denounce Medicare as an editor in Aiken, South Carolina...
...If not greatly slowed down, such growth rates on top of a present population of about 194 millions will, within a relatively short span of years, drastically overtax our dwindling resources of land and fresh water and far outstrip the laggard expansion of health and school facilities...
...Now, after several decades of guilt-by-citation at legislative trials, the Chicago hearings provided further evidence that the forces assaulting HUAC are gaining recruits and ammunition while the Committee is becoming touch-ily defensive—when it is not glassy-eyed with boredom...
...Senator Williams' Subcommittee has now proposed a broad program designed to eliminate the "stockpile of misery and deprivation" the migrant worker has inherited from decades of exploitation and neglect...
...The Michigan Senator pointed out that as part of its campaign to block Medicare, the AMA sent members of Congress a booklet containing reprints of newspaper editorials opposing the health program...
...With the signed statement in hand, the Board resolved that there was no proof Dr...
...Neither the walk-outs nor Jenner's peroration resulted from sudden impulse...
...I do not know whether these packaged editorials appear because a harried editor needs to fill space, because of pressure from his county medical association, or because he is genuinely swayed by the arguments...
...Its methods consisted chiefly of first hearing testimony of FBI spies and then calling witnesses who refused to testify under the protection of the Fifth Amendment or other constitutional safeguards...
...Press charges a client $175 to distribute each "message" to 1,199 weeklies and 150 dailies...
...Six years ago," observed its chairman, Senator Williams, "our first task was simply to begin...
...After further checking he discovered one such editorial used by eleven widely-scattered papers, and another anti-Medicare effusion repeated in ten papers...
...The malady of which HUAC is a symptom, Father Grant said, is fear which has developed into "a national paranoia" and "has corrupted debate in these United States so that men have given over reasoned discourse for slogans and shibboleths...
...Improvement in the application of child labor and compulsory education laws...
...Hall walked out after Jenner failed to obtain Committee approval of executive sessions for the taking of testimony, as well as the right of cross examination...
...The Potomac Institute, a non-profit human relations research organization in Washington, D.C., recently compiled a wealth of examples of fair employment experiences, some under state and local laws, some voluntary, and concluded that "the principle of the laws has been generally accepted far more smoothly than opponents predicted...
...Empty Open Doorways The fair employment section of the Civil Rights Act goes into effect this month in a national climate which holds considerable promise that the law will work effectively, with a minimum of discord...
...Even in the South, where fair employment of Negroes "presents a highly erratic pattern," according to a New York Times survey, Negroes are turning up in sales jobs in department stores, at bank tellers' windows, and in other positions from which they have been traditionally barred...
...of the rights of freedom of speech, press, assembly, privacy, to remain silent, and of association...
...He has also served as a member of the Federal Loyalty Review Board...
...This is an unduly modest estimate for, as Senator Metcalf informed his colleagues, INR mailed twelve or thirteen editorials each week during 1964 to about 11,000 editors...
...The Supreme Court decision came at a time when communities in some states were launching birth control programs in conjunction with the Federal drive to reduce poverty, and a small band of Senators and Congressmen headed by Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Joseph Tydings of Maryland were pressing for legislation to develop Federal policies and programs in support of birth control...
...Stamler to sign a statement, tantamount to a loyalty oath, in which Dr...
...Among non-white couples the proportion is forty-three per cent...
...Each week "one editorial glorified the drug industry, the oil industry, the railroad industry, and the chamber of commerce taxpayer groups," said the Senator, and "two of the editorials sang the praises" of the private utilities...
...The editors of those newspapers with at least a modicum of self-respect throw such material in the wastebasket...
...The most encouraging sign of all was the dramatic challenging of HUAC by Albert E. Jenner, Jr., a prominent Republican, a former Illinois State Bar Association president, and a powerful figure in the American Bar Association, who came on stage as Dr...
...For precisely that reason, efforts to persuade Congress to adopt a strong migrant labor program should be redoubled...
...Among the recommendations for legislative action by Congress are these: ^1 Extension of the Migrant Health Act, which provides for various types of health projects and clinics, and expansion of the Act to include hospital care...
...Press Association, he said, has listed such clients as the American Bankers Association, the NAM, the National Right-to-Work Committee, General Electric Corporation, and the National Association of Electric Companies...
...No family should be fated through poverty or ignor-norance to have children they do not want and cannot properly care for...
...Any names mentioned, no matter how loosely or unfairly, are forever damned in the eyes of the public as having been "cited"—the term used when the script was written at the time of HUAC's creation in 1946...
...He did not ask for abolition of the Committee, but, considering the nature of his district, his statement further suggests that HUAC is slipping...
...Press Association of McLean, Virginia, and similar conveyors of "canned opinion...
...A major breakthrough came last year with the termination of the bracero program...
...The Parrot Press Private interests or organizations that would like their views pumped into the stream of public opinion can—for a fee—get their pitch into the news and editorial columns of hundreds of weekly papers and some dailies...
...But the clients, their public relations men, and their lobbyists treasure each editorial clipping that reflects or is a replica of the canned editorial...
...The same secret hearings that characterized the Inquisition of the past, the same unsupported testimony, the same refusal to allow the accused to face his accuser or to have counsel have stained the good reputation of Congress...
...Stamler and Mrs...
...Jenner has received many honors and can claim a number of impressive professional achievements, not the least of which was his role as senior counsel for the Warren Commission...
...In arguing his case, Jenner placed heavy reliance on a recent U.S...
...As Upton Sinclair wrote in his classic indictment of the press and propaganda, The Brass Check, published in 1919, "the perversion and the betrayal of public opinion is no haphazard and accidental thing...
...Stamler, in an effort to abolish the Committee...
...Stamler put his career on the line: He is an eminent heart disease specialist and director of the Chicago Board of Health's division of adult health and aging and of its heart disease control program...
...We have no illusions that Congress will buy the whole package of migrant labor legislation...
...This was amply demonstrated during the Committee's recent three-day hearing in Chicago...
...In the United States," the Committee said, "as in other countries, poverty, ignorance, and a high birth rate are closely related...
...Fair employment laws are an important first step, and we especially welcome the new national law...
...f Enactment of a national agricultural minimum wage...
...The report of the National Academy of Sciences urged increased research in fertility control methods, expansion of family planning services, better preparation of doctors in assuming a share of responsibility for population control, and asked the government to appoint someone "at a high level" to give some overall direction to the control programs...
...Catholic spokesmen approved the Supreme Court's action as a legal decision which in effect removes government from enforcing compliance with that church's moral view of contraception, but they said that the church's ban on the use of contraceptive devices remains in force for Catholics...
...a similar survey at the University of Illinois in Urbana counted an estimated 400 Negroes, in a state with twelve times the Negro population of Wisconsin...
...This is encouraging progress, but as Senator Williams has pointed out, in a foreword to his Subcommittee's recent annual report, "Congress may have acted directly against some forms of misery and disadvantage that afflict the migrant, but it has not yet attacked the basic causes of chronic deprivation...
...The payments are made to the Industrial News Review of Portland, Oregon, the U.S...
...The burden of excess fertility, the Academy report asserted, "falls in overwhelming disproportion on the underprivileged, especially the uneducated...
...In the six years of its existence the Subcommittee has doggedly pushed through Congress, against powerful opposition, a number of positive, if modest, measures designed to improve the wretched living conditions and working terms suffered by the migrant farm laborer, whose annual income averages considerably less than one thousand dollars...
...Father Grant's words were like a fresh breeze of reason and sanity— something Chicago badly needed to clear the air of the poisonous smog left by the Committee...
...This is the way to change the atmosphere of "hate" out of which HUAC "has grown and which it represents...
...1 Inclusion of migrant workers under unemployment insurance, or the creation of some alternative income security measure...
...These witnesses were asked, for the record, questions that were in reality accusations about themselves and others...
...In an economy increasingly geared to more schooling, there is such a lag in Negro educational achievement that Professor Leonard Beach of Vanderbilt University estimates that only about 100 Negroes will have received doctorate degrees in the period 1963-66...
...The case lost in its first court test and is now on appeal...
...Forbidding the use of contraceptives by law, Justice Douglas held, invades the intimacy of the marital relationship...
...H Improvement of migrant housing by expanding the low-rent housing program, and by providing a tax benefit for the construction of farm labor housing...
...But should he not owe it to his readers to tell them he is doing so...
...It would be bad enough to anticipate continuation of this same kind of thing, but now it seems a further attempt is to be made to extend to the whole civil rights movement the smear of un-Americanism...
...Population," our birth rate represents a serious obstacle to many desirable goals of our society...
...In some cases these "subscriptions to a prepackaged propaganda machine" are included as operating expenses "paid for in full by the customers through higher utility rates...
...In the immediate wake of the hearings, U.S...
...The point is that the practice does exist—and it is deceitful...
...It was as if the scientists and the Supreme Court Justices were speaking with one voice, telling us that even in the affluent American sector of the overburdened planet there is not much time left to curb the population explosion...
...But the climate of opinion has gradually changed, in no small measure because of the diligent work of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor...
...The burdens of such human fertility are far from being as severe in the United States as they are in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America but, as the Population Committee of the National Academy of Sciences warned in its recent report, "The Growth of U.S...
...Generations of segregation and deprivation have left the Negro largely unprepared for the opportunities now modestly available to him for the first time...
...Negroes in the North "have a fertility little different from that of the white population...
...They come in handy when community groups and Congressmen need persuasion to fall in line behind the clients' views...
...Stamler's lawyer...
...Some weeklies and dailies run the canned editorials frequently, some insert them sporadically...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
