NOTES IN THE NEWS
Notes in the News Vietnam Voices In the welter of conflicting opinion on Vietnam we seldom hear the voices of the Vietnamese themselves, with the exception of the military dictatorship the United...
...At about the same time the priests' peace plea was published, the Catholic Archbishop of Saigon condemned "the political vacuum" in South Vietnam...
...otherwise we'll get nowhere on anything...
...From the standpoint that should be most important to automobile purchasers and their families—how much reliable transportation and safety are built into a car per dollar of selling price—there is not nearly enough competition in the automobile industry...
...King's colleagues in Chicago...
...But it is a myth that dies hard...
...In the 1965 session of Congress, the nullification drive fell only seven votes short of the two-thirds required for Senate adoption of the amendment...
...The initial results of King's invasion of Chicago's slums were so impressive The Chicago Sun-Times was prompted to say editorially that the solution to the city's slum problem was just to have Dr...
...Senator McGee said that extremist groups should not be abolished by legislation: "You can't legislate against an idea—you beat an idea by coming up with a better idea...
...She is victimized by every device these firms can think of to deceive her, including partly empty boxes, deceptive illustrations on packages, hard-to-figure weight designations printed in lilliputian type, and such booby trap descriptions as "large" and "giant" size and the often meaningless "cents off" promise on the package...
...America It has long been known that the American housewife has no more chance of getting an even break from the food and household goods companies than she has of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo...
...In a National Educational Television interview, Reston disclosed the substance of a hitherto confidential conversation with the late President John F. Kennedy following the President's meetings with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in the spring of 1961...
...With GM's sales volume up twenty-two per cent over the previous year to a record high of $20.7 billion, its net profit after taxes up twenty-three per cent to $2.1 billion, an all-time record for any U.S...
...Senator Dirksen claims to have picked up one vote and to need only six more to win Senate approval of a revised version of his amendment...
...They organized the high-powered attack on "socialized medicine"—their widely-publicized, though inaccurate, label for President Truman's health insurance proposals— which they helped their client, the American Medical Association, defeat in the late Forties...
...The Reverend Gilbert A. Philips of the First Unitarian Church, across the street from Welch's offices, preached a sermon in which he said he was "ashamed of the reputation given the community by the John Birch Society...
...If the clergy of Belmont could command the fortitude to beard Birchism in its den, citizens of more remote communities might well take heart from that "profile in courage" to defend their schools, libraries, churches, and other institutions against extremist falsehoods...
...Loss of reputation and job quickly follow as the latest House Committee on Un-American Activities trial is fed to the press...
...Only thirteen bills were referred to HUAC last year out of a total of nearly 12,000 bills introduced in the House, and as against an average of 593 bill referrals per committee...
...King, upon observing a typist pool that was eighty per cent Negro, could chide the police superintendent that perhaps he was not being entirely fair to the whites...
...Harassing the Schools Self-appointed book censors—most notably those on the far right—are twice as successful now as they were a few years ago in their campaigns to remove books which they oppose from school libraries...
...But it stubbornly survives, and there are few Americans who have not given it some degree of credence at some time—except Negroes, especially those who have bought or rented homes in white neighborhoods at inflated prices...
...He endorsed a proposal by Yates that Congress enact a code of procedure to protect witnesses appearing before any Congressional committee...
...Supreme Court opinions in past test cases involving HUAC, the Congressman said...
...Notes in the News Vietnam Voices In the welter of conflicting opinion on Vietnam we seldom hear the voices of the Vietnamese themselves, with the exception of the military dictatorship the United States is supporting in Saigon...
...The President's response, Reston reported, was that our power "must be made credible [to the Soviets...
...These tactics of intimidation were described by a leading HUAC opponent, Representative Don Edwards of California: "The Committee over and over calls witnesses and subjects them to publicity and exposure...
...If Congress approved the amendment, and the necessary three-fourths of the state legislatures ratified it for incorporation in the Constitution, not only could equality of voting be set back or even denied in many states, but the legislative election systems would face an endless snarl of legal challenges arising from the Dirksen ambiguities...
...Even other landlords in the neighborhood stirred themselves from habitual apathy and began to spruce up their buildings, too...
...They were asked to perform one seemingly simple task: to buy the most economical package of each of the twenty products, that is, to get the largest quantity for the lowest price...
...Last month he made a long-planned foray into Chicago to head up an "end the slums" campaign, rented an apartment in one of the scrubbier neighborhoods, and immediately, by his presence, effected a voluntary cleanup, repair, and decorating project of the entire rundown apartment building...
...Thus, the path of history, obscured at the time, five years ago, began to follow a tangled course from the Bay of Pigs to Vienna to Washington and on to Vietnam, and our proper policy in Vietnam was thrown off the track by seemingly unrelated events in Cuba, a tough-talking Soviet premier in Vienna, and a young President in Washington sensitive to Khrushchev's evaluation of the new Administration as timid and immature...
...The sad fact is that by seeking to avoid controversy, the teacher also avoids his responsibility as a citizen in a democracy...
...Orlando Wilson and Martin Luther King are a well-matched pair...
...The Nullifiers Attack All the public relations that money can buy has been directed at Congress, and particularly the Senate, in the third campaign to secure the adoption of Senator Everett Dirksen's proposed "rotten borough" Constitutional amendment, designed to restore to each of the states the right to apportion one of its legislative houses on the basis of factors other than population...
...King move from flat to flat...
...Street demonstrations, sit-ins, and other now-familiar devices are planned to further the Negroes' goals in this first large-scale transfer of Dr...
...Charles Nicodemus of The Chicago Daily News reported from Washington that Whitaker and Baxter have "organized a number of unpublicized fund-raising dinners around the country to which wealthy and influential persons have been invited to hear arguments on behalf of Dirksen's proposal...
...Senator Proxmire predicted a "synthetic" deluge of pro-amendment letters and telegrams to Congress...
...In effect it convicts them of associations or ideas which are not crimes but which the Committee feels are punishable regardless...
...The Ross survey is the first to measure all possible tracts in a large number of cities, and it is by far the largest study made, from impartial U.S...
...company, the vast enterprise is by far the world's largest and most powerful industrial corporation...
...Martin Luther King responded, and the harmony was such that on a courtesy tour of police headquarters afterwards Dr...
...And that I think is where we began to get off the track...
...One of the suppressed phrases was a complaint about "the presence of foreign soldiers...
...King's civil rights campaign to Northern cities...
...They have a tendency to hope that if they just sit tight, things will get better and evil will go away...
...We would demur to this extent: More teachers would face up to controversy, and so would more school principals, superintendents, and school boards (and some do), if the citizens of more communities had the courage to stand up against the extremists...
...in areas in the process of changing from all white to all Negro occupancy the increase in value was forty-two per cent...
...automobiles over the years, how safe or unsafe cars are to be, what price the public is to pay for automobiles, and how they are to be styled...
...every shopping day provides ample evidence that the food and household goods companies will not reform themselves but must be reformed through Federal legislation...
...These findings, based on the response to a questionnaire distributed to nearly 15,000 teachers and other educators, confirm a trend frequently pointed out by The Progressive—that the far right constitutes an increasing threat to democratic institutions...
...He told the educators that "teachers are among those who have betrayed their public trust...
...Out of the 660 buying decisions these women made, forty-three per cent were wrong...
...The priests' plea for peace was published in Saigon newspapers, but with certain telling passages deleted by the official censors...
...he sent the Rainbow Division to Germany, and, most important, he escalated in Vietnam, not because the situation on the ground demanded it in Vietnam, but he wanted the 12,000 men in Vietnam at that time because he wanted to prove a diplomatic point, not a military point...
...Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, and the rural-ist and racist coalition so long in control of many state legislatures, this current campaign is even more massive than the two previous efforts that failed to persuade the Senate to approve the attempt to nullify the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" decisions...
...Because of their historic meeting, Chicago may never be the same...
...GM—Too Big for Safety Last year General Motors Corporation built fifty-three per cent of the automobiles produced in the United States—a figure that we find far more significant and disturbing than any other part of the recently issued statement on the corporation's massive progress in 1965...
...Census of 1950 and 1960 data concerning 1,323,762 homes in 1,810 census tracts in forty-seven major cities...
...In his State of the Union message President Johnson asked Congress to "act to prevent the deception of the American consumer, requiring all packages to state clearly and truthfully their contents...
...cars...
...Happy though General Motors may be over turning out more than half the cars in the United States in 1965, we believe that "Wilson's law" is more fallacious now than it was on the day a decade ago that he was so unwise as to utter it...
...The real HUAC objective is to intimidate dissenters, liberals, or indeed anyone who does not reflect the HUAC view of things...
...Peterson, "were given a list of twenty common items to buy at a supermarket...
...One Congressman who voted for the new funds, Roman Pucinski, Chicago Democrat, said there was no doubt in his mind that the Committee had "trampled on the rights of witnesses" at the May hearing...
...And it was at this time," Reston continued, "in order to make this power credible that [the President...
...Back in 1953, GM President Charles E. Wilson was named Secretary of Defense by President Eisenhower...
...Census data, on the relation between race and home values...
...If the purpose was "solely that of exposure," the Committee "had exceeded its authority" according to U.S...
...It is a body that remains incurably hostile to civil liberties and due process—and as richly deserving of abolition as ever...
...Their statement, published in the United States by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the voice of the American bishops, invited "men of good will" in both North and South Vietnam "to take all appropriate measures to put an end to this fratricidal war immediately...
...HUAC-watchers have long known that the Committee's real purposes are neither to conduct hearings for guidance in drafting legislation, nor even to counter Communism effectively...
...Now a new study has come along that provides solid evidence that Negroes not only do not depress property values, but on the contrary, their presence almost invariably results in substantially higher values for the neighborhood...
...We agree with Ross that his findings "should kill the myth" of declining property values and spare the anguish of so many people who innocently believe it...
...The NEA's annual conference on the "Critics and the Schools," which heard , the commission report, also heard Senator Gale W. McGee, Wyoming Democrat, explain the objective of the extremist drive, "both left and right," against the schools: "If you can shape minds when they are young, you will have receptive minds for your plans later on...
...The Marylander based his contention on a highly critical analysis of the new Dirksen version made by the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress...
...Such courage was displayed in full measure recently, right at the foun-tainhead of Birchism—Belmont, Massachusetts, the national headquarters of Robert Welch and his Society...
...race relations holds that property values decline when Negroes move into a white neighborhood...
...Twelve Protestant ministers, four Catholic priests, and a rabbi signed.an advertisement which said that they "view with alarm the forces at work in our community, which are creating division, promoting hysteria and fear, and seeking to arouse group against group by fostering suspician...
...Since early fall, the public relations firm has been providing organizational help behind the scenes to the NAM, the Farm Bureau, the U.S...
...I think this should kill the myth," Ross commented, "that home values fall when Negroes move in...
...In 1948, 1960, and 1962, the same public relations firm played a major role in defeating referendum proposals to redistrict the California legislature so that each senator and assemblyman would represent equal populations...
...The commission reported that public schools and their libraries have been subjected to increasing harassment by extremists, and that an astounding ninety per cent of complaints about Red-baiting and book censorship came from the three states of California, Michigan, and Ohio...
...Letters to Senators urging them to vote against the Dirksen amendment can do much to counter and defeat this latest assault against the "one man, one vote" principle by the Republican minority leader, his rural and Dixie racist allies, and the lavish Whitaker and Baxter campaign now being financed by business interests which have a stake in promoting the control of state legislatures by reactionary political leaders...
...integrated neighborhoods showed a forty-five per cent rise...
...When asked if Mr...
...A decade or so ago, forecasts that GM might produce forty-five per cent of all American-built cars were considered exaggerated...
...Peterson urged passage of the fair packaging bill introduced by Senator Philip Hart, Michigan Democrat, and still pending in committee after four years in Congress...
...HUAC Chairman Edwin E. Willis, Louisiana Democrat, exploited to the fullest the Committee's hearings on Ku Klux Klan activities...
...But one of the most significant developments, and one in which King was all but upstaged with finesse, was the invitation issued to King by Chicago's Police Superintendent Orlando W. Wilson to explain his program to a closed meeting of the police department's (integrated) top command...
...Of considerable significance, then, is the recent statement of eleven South Vietnamese Roman Catholic priests, who represent a substantial, and solidly anti-Communist, segment of the population...
...Esther Peterson, consumer counsel in President Johnson's Administration...
...She made the telling point that while organized labor properly seeks better wages and benefits, "what is won at the bargaining table can easily be lost at the bargain counter...
...He has sorted out the districts by racial composition and compared housing values over the ten-year span...
...A Congressman who had voted for HUAC funds in the past, Representative Sidney Yates of Chicago, protested against the Committee's hearing held in that city last May as a purported inquiry into Communism...
...In that period "the industry has done little to restore fair packaging," she said...
...The House voted this amount to HUAC by 298 to 24 with six absent Congressmen paired against the appropriation...
...The hearings were a rehash in public of information the Committee knew in private...
...Masterminded by the San Francisco public relations firm of Whitaker and Baxter, and supported by the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S...
...But we agree with Representative Ryan that the HUAG investigation of the Klan, which should be confined to unlawful acts rather than extend to beliefs of members, is not enough to redeem HUAC...
...Democratic Senators Paul Douglas of Illinois, Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland, and William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who led last year's successful effort to block the Dirksen amendment in the Senate, have warned that it may require a hard fight and an "educational debate" to offset Dirksen's press agentry...
...Getting Off the Track A significant slice of history was revealed recently by James Reston, the distinguished associate editor and political analyst of The New York Times —a slice that sheds some light on the nagging question of how the United States became so deeply involved in Vietnam...
...In a manifest effort to achieve amity, King told the police, "Here we must make our movement more massive than in the South...
...The government," stated the Archbishop, "is still unable to create a firm legal foundation or obtain the support of the people...
...On the average, the women spent eleven cents more out of each shopping dollar than they needed to...
...Whitaker and Baxter are specialists in creating "spontaneous grassroots" campaigns...
...A third deletion credited both Communists and anti-Communists with "the same sincere love of country, the same determination to devote themselves to a great cause, the same thirst for peace...
...Representative William Ryan of New York, who with a handful of other Democrats spoke and voted against HUAC as a menace to civil liberties, emphasized the point during floor debate that such important committees of the House as Judiciary, and Education and Labor, which produce major legislation of lasting significance, were requesting only $300,000 and $400,000 respectively...
...This claim has been refuted most devastatingly in an experiment conducted by East Michigan University among housewives with above average education, and recently cited by Mrs...
...One of Wilson's most memorable subsequent remarks was, "What is good for General Motors is good for the country...
...Negroes and Property Values A seemingly indestructible myth in U.S...
...in 1962 their record of success was fifteen per cent...
...King told reporters he sensed "a great feeling of understanding" at the session, and that Wilson had given him the first opportunity in any city for such a "dialogue in good faith...
...In another the priests spoke of "our brothers in the North as in the South subjected to the ravages of bombardments and oppression by ideologies...
...HUAC—Richer Than Ever The House Un-American Activities Committee has been granted a record-breaking appropriation of $425,000 to continue on its traditional course of undermining constitutional liberties and lowering the prestige of Congress...
...A special commission of the National Education Association has found that in 1965 the book-banners achieved the removal from schools of twenty-nine per cent of those books they attacked...
...According to Reston, the President interpreted Khrushchev's "bullying" tactics in their talks as a reaction to the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
...Chamber of Commerce, and other groups as well as to Dirksen himself, to prepare them for the campaign kickoff and what Nicodemus called "a blizzard-like educational campaign" that "will peak sometime in March...
...King launched his campaign with open "hearings" at which Negroes unburdened themselves of complaints about rats, filth, broken plumbing, and inadequate heat and other services...
...This is a most serious obstacle in the path to peace...
...When one corporation possesses the huge advantage which GM has come to have over its competitors because of its tremendous resources of capital, plants, sales and service outlets, and advertising and publicity budgets, it is clear that the nation's private transportation over the highways faces the danger of becoming dependent upon a monopoly or near-monopoly...
...What these Vietnamese priests are saying is what has been almost forgotten: that this is fundamentally a civil war, that the North and South Vietnamese are in truth brothers, and that "the presence of foreign soldiers" is not universally welcomed...
...The inquiry into Klan violence—which would have been assigned to the House Judiciary Committee where it properly belongs if the Administration had not helped divert it to HUAC—has improved the public image of the Willis' committee...
...No white homeowner in America need lose a dollar on his house...
...If this extra expenditure were extended over the course of a year, it would mean that the budgets of these women would be increased nine per cent...
...King accepted the statesmanlike offer, and, in what was by all accounts a harmonious meeting (overheard by newsmen through an airvent), promised the police he would keep them informed of his group's activities, even those that might involve civil disobedience and result in arrests...
...The New York Times felt buoyant enough about the extraordinary confrontation to headline it Dr...
...In twenty-seven years, said Ryan, HUAC and its predecessor Dies subcommittee produced just four pieces of legislation...
...Ross' research revealed that in Negro districts homes soared sixty-one per cent in value over the decade...
...Chicago Style No American leader, in or out of the civil rights movement, pursues his goals with more style than does Martin Luther King Jr...
...Yates then voted against the 1966 appropriation...
...The President's consumer counsel said that concerned as Americans are over the recent rise in the cost-of-living index, the increase "is insignificant compared to the savings that appear possible through more rational packaging...
...Let there be no seeking in military victory of a guarantee for negotiations . . . and let the aim of implanting or suppressing an ideology by acts of subversion and bombardments be abandoned...
...King to Help Police in Chicago, an interpretation we doubt was shared by the Chicago officers...
...But by the end of 1965 the country's largest corporation could report it was turning out fifty-three out of every 100 U.S...
...Kennedy felt Khrushchev had decided "that anybody who was stupid enough to get involved in that situation was immature and anybody who didn't see it all the way through was timid and therefore could be bullied...
...When the Committee left Chicago its purpose was still wrapped in mystery," said Yates...
...The Archbishop is saying that the very government the United States created and shores up in Saigon is itself "a serious obstacle" to peace because it lacks both legality and popular support...
...The most ironic finding is that in white communities that remained white, property values rose only about thirty-five per cent...
...Senator Tydings has charged that the Dirksen amendment as revised "takes the prize for ambiguity...
...Kennedy's advisers concurred in the President's judgment on Vietnam, Reston replied: "No . . . one of his advisers said, don't go down that track . . . and one of his other advisers said, if you go that way it may take 300,000 men...
...When charged with such shabby practices, spokesmen for the companies and their associations profess to be surprised that anyone could possibly fool the average American housewife: "She is much too smart...
...Fooling Mrs...
...We must understand that in the North we are not aided by brutality as we are in the South"—a blanket judgment undoubtedly received with reservations by some of Dr...
...Mrs...
...But the civil rights leader obviously felt the police commissioner had been eminently fair to him...
...The Hart bill is long overdue legislation...
...It is a myth that has been shot down scores of times by university studies, in books based on scholarly surveys, and by the researches of supporters of open housing...
...increased the military budget by six billion dollars...
...Sherwood Ross, a Washington writer and urban sociologist, has painstakingly pieced together from the U.S...
...Public schools and libraries are particularly vulnerable to extremist assaults on a local level, especially in communities where citizens are too timid to defend school and library personnel against a barrage of smears...
...The NEA commission cited the Birch Society as "clearly in first place as a trouble-making agency...
...Then the hat is passed...
...Is it in the public interest for any corporation to achieve so huge a share of the nation's total output of cars...
...Is anybody listening...
...Thirty-three college-educated wives," said Mrs...
...White homeowners talked into selling short by crooked real estate swindlers and panic-peddlers would find their homes rising steadily in value if they would only hold on to them...
...Orlando Wilson, the erudite police academician who has raised Chicago's police standards to an unprecedentedly high level, had struck a new note in the relationship between civil rights activists and the police...
...We think not...
...King is aiming at organizing Chicago's Negroes—who number almost a million, more than in some Southern states—to gain better housing, more and better jobs, and improved educational opportunities...
...The report noted that in contrast to five years ago when most criticism of books in schools came from teachers who were dissatisfied with outdated texts, today most of the criticism comes from right wing organizations, such as the John Birch Society, and from religious groups...
...Indeed, there is some ground for the belief that GM's growing domination of the automobile industry gives it far too much power over matters of vital public concern, including what engineering features will be built into most U.S...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
