Notes in the News
'Last Tick for Tokenism' Throughout 1966 the Deep South fought against integration of its school systems with every possible weapon— with subterfuge and the law's delays, with political pressure at...
...But difficult as the problem is, it should be thoroughly explored by Congress, the Administration, and educators...
...immigration restrictions...
...The priests who supported the dictatorship should not be identified with the Church...
...Patriotism is not a cloak for the blanket and blind acceptance of all decisions made by the United States...
...But when he holds up honest critics to public scorn and hatred, he demeans himself and his high office and undermines the Constitutional guarantee of free speech...
...These are some of the principal ingredients of a new U.S...
...Southern racists in Congress, unopposed by Northern colleagues apprehensive of the white backlash in their home districts, launched a series of vitriolic attacks against guidelines established by the U.S...
...Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, had deliberately limited his role prior to the FCC's decision to raising questions with the Commission concerning matters of public interest, because, he said later, he was "confident that the FCC would then fairly and completely consider these questions in accordance with its long established procedures...
...The occasion of this shocking smear of those Americans who do not believe that Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy is the best policy for America's self-interest or security, or the cause of world peace, or even the containment of Communism was the President's award of a Medal of Honor to a young Marine, Robert O'Malley, for valor in fighting the Vietcong...
...they asked...
...Privileged Sanctuary Once again the Central Intelligence Agency has demonstrated that it is a privileged sanctuary above and beyond the reach of the laws that govern the rest of us...
...It is high time that the United States faced up to the reality of Cuba by taking the initiative to resume communication with our tiny neighbor next door...
...An encouraging development on a smaller scale was the appointment by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of Rochester, New York, of a young priest to be his special vicar to work on problems of housing, education, social justice, and equality...
...Fifth Circuit Court now has demonstrated, will...
...A study at the University of Iowa disclosed that of 905 foreign students on the campus there in the 1950-60 decade, 490 remained in the United States...
...It strikes us that the national security is in greater danger from the CIA's subversion of elementary Constitutional rights than from any revelations that an obscure Estonian emigre would be likely to make in court...
...One of the most significant proposals in the UAW document stressed "the need to develop stronger ties with labor's historic and essential allies in the liberal intellectual and academic community and among America's young people...
...The Southern Regional Council, a highly-regarded private research agency, in a year-end report that was justifiably caustic about the glacial pace of school integration in the Deep South, cited the supporting figures and declared: "This poor performance of the South in the second year of enforcement of Title VI for school desegregation remains the strongest rebuttal of the Southern complaint that the Office of Education has been overzealous in the matter...
...It also points up the need for criteria in judging the 'news' reported by immigrants to this country and published indiscriminately...
...Last Tick for Tokenism' Throughout 1966 the Deep South fought against integration of its school systems with every possible weapon— with subterfuge and the law's delays, with political pressure at the national, state, and local levels, and with economic intimidation and sometimes violence directed against Negroes who sought to enroll their children in white public schools...
...This summit meeting offers an excellent opportunity for President Johnson to propose an accelerated program of Latin American development including greatly increased support for the Alliance for Progress and other U.S...
...Yet the FCC held only two days of hearings, with only representatives of the two companies testifying...
...He would serve his country and himself better if he would read and take to heart the splendid words of Cardinal Cushing...
...foreign aid in the form" of outright grants and low-interest loans...
...In response to a question whether, before the revolution, "the Cuban clergy publicly declared itself to be on the side of the dictator Batista," Monsignor Zacchi replied: "Yes, it is true that many priests forgot their obligation to the people...
...They behaved badly...
...As we have said before in these "What do you mean, 'not so fasf...
...The willingness and ability of the FCC to consider the public interest in such cases have been thrown open to serious question...
...And there should be...
...This comment was a direct attack aimed at George Meany and his foreign affairs adviser, Jay Lovestone, who, with the approval of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, have guided American labor's overseas programs and policies along the sterile, wholly anti-Communist lines that delight the CIA and the conservatives in the State Department and give blind support to the Administration's prosecution of the war in Vietnam...
...hospitals, more than 11,000 are from foreign medical schools, the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates reports...
...He should make it clear that Washington will, without intervention, support the expansion of reform and democracy...
...Jose Camacho, a minister at Colombia's embassy in Washington, claimed that his country's serious shortage of doctors, dentists, and nurses results in part from the failure of many Colombians to return home after they receive advanced training here...
...One wonders what the American people would think if they really knew what their government is doing—and what kind of lives it is perpetuating —in the Guatemalas of the world...
...In April, President Johnson will meet with the heads of state of the other nations of the hemisphere...
...Still another cloud hanging over the merger is the spate of accusations and denials of solicitations among ITT executives of political contributions to the Lyndon Johnson Vice Presidential cause in 1960...
...As long as any of our brothers and sisters in Christ suffer injustice and indignity in our midst," Archbishop Cody wrote in his letter to all parishes, "we are involved, and we must become involved...
...The problem, correspondent Geyer emphasized, is that in Guatemala as in Cuba eight years ago and Santo Domingo two years ago, "if we have any policy at all, it is simply to support any regime that can provide momentary stability...
...The court has ticked the last tick for tokenism and delay in the name of 'deliberate speed...
...At the same time, Archbishop John P. Cody called upon the two million Roman Catholics in 459 Chicago area parishes to take part in study and action programs designed to improve education, housing, and employment opportunities for Negroes...
...Ways must be found for the countries of origin to recoup some of their talent losses...
...We shall not permit the courts [under local court plans] to destroy or dilute the effectiveness of the Congressional policy in Title VI...
...One-Way Passage Year after year the underdeveloped countries send their bright young men and women to the United States for advanced study...
...The parishes were asked to work with Protestant and Jewish congregations in these fields of concern...
...To prove he means it he should instruct the Pentagon to stop the flow of arms to Latin American military oligarchs...
...What does Reuther want...
...In the past five years it has spent $2.3 billion—the approximate cost of the Vietnam war for one month—to help build housing, hospitals, schools, roads, and sanitary systems, and to train teachers in Latin America...
...Then the "action" phase begins...
...It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' " The Committed Churches One of the most hopeful developments of the 1960s has been the growing involvement of religious leaders— Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—in actions which breathe new life into the concept of brotherhood...
...If The need for stronger labor involvement in the war on poverty and the struggle for equal rights and equal opportunity, and in the rebuilding of our cities and rural areas...
...This growing social concern of the churches was demonstrated most recently by the Presbytery and the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago...
...Albert A. Raby, who is co-leader, with Dr...
...They need political and social reform as well, which the United States discourages by providing arms to the Latin American military cliques which use the armaments to seize and hold power against the forces of reform...
...In spite of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision holding that race discrimination in public schools is unconstitutional, "The record of many Southern school and public officials and the publics they serve has been one of avoiding and evading this clear-cut dictum of the basic law of the nation," the Council said...
...These losses of educated young people, said James A. Perkins, the president of Cornell University and chairman of President Johnson's advisory committee on foreign assistance programs, "may be quietly making hash of our best efforts abroad" to assist have-not countries to develop their economies and institutions to provide their people with a better life...
...Ave Maria, a Catholic weekly published by the priests of the Congregation of Holy Cross at Notre Dame, and which was our source of the Mon-signor's remarks, commented: "This information raises serious questions about the news that is relayed to the American people about the actual situation in Cuba...
...In what might be viewed as a rebuke to those laymen and a dwindling number of clergymen who hold that churches are for "preaching only," the Bishop said, "Stained glass windows are apt to becloud our vision of poverty and distress...
...If Congress is too timid to defend the guidelines designed to open the door of the white schoolhouse wider so that every Negro child can have equality of educational opportunity, then the Federal Courts, as the U.S...
...When asked to comment on the veracity of news stories about Cuba generally, the papal representative answered: "Incredible things are being said about Cuba...
...The Castro revolution is now entering its ninth year, and there are no indications that it will collapse or blow away...
...Commissioner Nicholas Johnson angrily labeled the proceedings "a mockery of the public responsibility of a regulatory commission that is perhaps unparalleled in the history of American administrative process...
...Of even greater concern to us is the Federal judge's ruling upholding the CIA...
...We believe that the UAW's charges against the AFL-CIO top leadership should have been issued six months or a year earlier when it was apparent that the labor movement needed to be jolted awake to the realities of a widening war in Asia and a critical election at home last fall...
...The only protection against such influence was elicited by the FCC in the form of verbal promises by the companies' executives, and then for only a three-year period...
...We have felt," said the UAW officials, "that the attitude of the AFL-CIO on most foreign policy questions has been narrow and negative and has not strengthened but rather weakened the free world's efforts to resist Communism and all forms of tyranny...
...But at ten o'clock the following morning the Commission rammed through the merger by a four-to-three vote, with all three dissenters taking the unusual position of protesting not only the decision itself but the procedures that led to it...
...In Guatemala, every democratically-elected regime in the last fifteen years has been overthrown by the military, usually with our help...
...The CIA refused to allow its paid accuser to testify on the ground that this would imperil the national security...
...The merger is the largest ever to come before the FCC...
...One ray of hope, which has grown dimmer in recent years, has been the Alliance for Progress...
...It would require a miracle for the Administration to employ them, but it will take just such a miracle to rescue Latin America—with its sluggish economic growth rate and soaring population—from a future even worse than its unhappy present...
...Senator Morse had especially raised the question of ITT's influence on ABC's news coverage stemming from the former's worldwide interests, many of them involving foreign governments...
...Whether he paid for his education himself or his homeland contributed, whether he was aided under U.S...
...Eleven thousand of 94,000 surveyed last year by the Institute for International Education, a private body, said they intend to remain here after they complete their studies...
...radio-television networks and a huge conglomerate corporation with a wide variety of enterprises in this and 118 foreign countries...
...Today the AFL-CIO, which long ago lost the crusading spirit of the CIO, neither wants nor attracts many liberals on or off the campus...
...The church," said the Catholic bishop, "must be where problems are, where hunger is, where rooms are cold and where difficult decisions have to be made...
...The UAW leaders went on to say that "the AFL-CIO—as the parent body of the American labor movement—suffers from a sense of complacency and adherence to the status quo...
...This is not patriotism...
...The State Department—which in some respects has yet to perceive the Twentieth Century—and its ally in backwardness, the Pentagon, must begin to recognize that it is only when popular government and reform march onto the Latin American stage that the threat of Communist take-over will fade...
...If The need for labor to join citizen groups in promoting programs to conserve natural resources and overcome the problems of air and water pollution...
...Even such "progress," according to figures of the Office of Education, raised the percentage of Negroes in school with whites during 1966 to only 2.4 in Alabama, 3.2 in Mississippi, 6.6 in Georgia, 4.9 in South Carolina, and 3.6 in Louisiana...
...Both the CIA and the court, by arbitrarily denying simple justice to an individual, have denigrated the democratic process...
...But in too many cases the foreign student does not return and his country is the loser...
...Critical thinkers and thinking critics constitute the life-blood of any society...
...They seem not to have searched their souls to determine whether or not the charges of the UAW president and his executive board against the Labor Establishment are justified—which is the real issue— but merely wondered whether Reuth-er's goal was higher office in the AFL-CIO...
...The FCC Under Fire The merger of International Telephone and Telegraph with the American Broadcasting Corporation was approved late in December by the Federal Communications Commission, but it seems certain that there will be a Congressional investigation of the Commission's decision and the procedure followed in arriving at it...
...an all-out organizational crusade to extend the benefits and protection of organization to the millions of unorganized among industrial, construction, office, technical, and professional workers...
...Battle Cry Cardinal Spellman's recent declaration that anything less than victory in Vietnam would be inconceivable had the ring of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and was in dreary contrast to the many efforts of Pope Paul VI urging a negotiated peace...
...The bishop named the Reverend P. David Finks, a priest in a predominantly Negro ward who was on the advisory council of a militant Negro group...
...A more proper question might be whether it has been diligent enough...
...Thus: Iranian officials say that about sixty per cent of students from Iran decide to stay in the United States...
...The Council's indictment of this flouting of the law of the land might stir the conscience of other citizens, but of itself could not shake the resistance of the segregationists...
...My country, right or wrong,'" Chesterton wrote, "is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case...
...There is no bonus for foot dragging...
...The Presbytery, governing body for some 90,000 church members in that area, announced a program to help carry out the terms of the open housing agreement reached last year by city leaders and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Four days after the President had portrayed dissenters as cowards who let other men fight their battles against Communism, Richard Cardinal Cush-ing of Boston defended the right of dissent in a pastoral letter...
...Now comes a denial, and from a seemingly unimpeachable source...
...columns, it has been the Federal judiciary rather than Congress which has been the prime mover in the advancement of civil rights...
...The need to commit adequate financial and staff resources for a massive effort to win economic and social justice for America's exploited farm and migratory workers and the millions of working poor who are the have-not citizens of America...
...Each parish is expected to set up a layman's committee...
...Such mistreatment of the legal system by these 'best' people has been far more a national disgrace and scandal than the notorious lawlessness of violent racist gangs comprised of the 'worst' people of the area...
...Several members of Congress, notably Senator Wayne Morse, Oregon Democrat, had protested against the haste with which the FCC moved on this highly significant merger, and its ruthless disregard of the public interests involved...
...We believe that anti-Communism in and of itself is not enough...
...It can be, instead, the road to national disintegration...
...He expressed himself as "equally pleased" with the action of the Presbyterian church...
...Federal programs or by private foundations, if he takes up permanent residence here he becomes one more example of "the brain drain" suffered by nations in desperate need of talent...
...It is not surprising that there is an underlying current of frustration in this country and, among many, a belief that democratic change no longer is possible...
...The Reuther Challenge It is symbolic of the stodginess of most of labor's top leaders that they reacted to the attack by Walter Reuth-er's United Auto Workers on the AFL-CIO for its basic failures of policy and performance with a small-minded question...
...Now a Federal judge has upheld the agency's decision and has thus denied the hapless victim his day in court...
...policy that is urgently needed for Latin America...
...Their native lands hope they will return home later to employ the skills and learning acquired in American universities, technical institutes, and hospitals...
...It involves one of the three U.S...
...King, of the Chicago Freedom Movement, said, "We are overwhelmed by the comprehensive nature of the Archbishop's program...
...For the first four months, Catholic pastors and laymen are to study racial problems in housing, education, and employment...
...He cited the recent widely-published story that Cuban political prisoners were shot so their blood could be sent to North Vietnam...
...There has been no persecution of any sort against the priests, nor have any churches been closed or religious services interrupted...
...1} Among interns and residents now training in U.S...
...A more equitable distribution of skills among the nations, with special attention paid to the needs of have-not countries, would be a major contribution to world-wide economic progress and international amity...
...The proportion that actually stays may be much higher, as some other surveys indicate...
...The Council estimates that twenty to twenty-five per cent of these foreign doctors will remain here after completing their training...
...That news" said the Monsignor, "somehow got into the wire services . . . as fact...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service indicate that thirty per cent of Asians who come here on temporary student visas later apply for permanent visas...
...The Assistant Attorney General in charge of anti-trust proceedings delivered to the Commission, at six p.m...
...After a statement in which he declared that the cause of defending the South Vietnamese deserves the bravery of soldiers and "the patience and fortitude of all of our citizens," he added this remark to his released text: "It far outweighs the reluctance of men who exercise so well the right of dissent but let others fight to protect them from those whose very philosophy is to do away with the right to dissent...
...Following the FCC decision, Nelson said, "I was shocked to read the charges leveled at the FCC by some of its own members...
...When I read it, I was furious...
...President and Cardinal President Johnson's bitterness toward those who oppose the escalation of our war effort in Vietnam recently took the form of a verbal blow below the belt...
...The Church in Cuba All through the eight years since Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries seized power in Cuba, there have been many reports that the Catholic Church there was being persecuted and the practice of religion discouraged or suppressed...
...No doubt, the Cuban people are as sadly misinformed about the American way of life...
...The committees are expected to visit all realtors in their areas to discuss open occupancy, visit lending institutions to urge non-discriminatory lending policies, meet with school and PTA officials in their neighborhoods to "discuss the achievement of quality integrated education," and talk with officers of business firms about the need for fair employment practices...
...The extent of the drain is illustrated by these facts and figures: There are 100,000 foreign students now in the United States, two-thirds of whom are from underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—a figure that speaks eloquently of the huge "knowledge gap" these nations seek to overcome...
...However, we would like to note that the Cardinal has been fond of saying, "My country, right or wrong," a militant pronouncement which years ago another noted Catholic, G. K. Chesterton, put in proper perspective...
...Judge Wisdom upheld the Office of Education's guidelines in this crucial test case brought by the Department of Justice...
...While we spend more than $2 billion a month carrying on a war that each day frees more Vietnamese from the danger of Communism by freeing them from life itself, many of the 240 million people of the twenty Latin American nations struggle desperately to survive under frightful conditions of poverty, disease, and oppression...
...In a recent interview, first published in Mexico and reprinted in part in some of the Catholic press in this country, Monsignor Cesare Zacchi, personal representative of Pope Paul in Havana, declared: "The current relations between Church and state in Cuba are very cordial...
...The Alliance, which President Kennedy envisioned as remaking a continent, has grown feeble during the Johnson Administration because of lack of funds and Washington's failure to support basic economic and social reforms in Latin America...
...Citing an example of our antiquated and dangerous policy, Georgie Anne Geyer, the sharply perceptive correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, wrote recently: "The United States has helped drive Guatemala to a position where Communist guerrillas are flourishing...
...What did jar them to the eyeteeth was the recent decision of the Fifth (Federal) Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans...
...Morse announced he would call for a Congressional investigation, and Nelson said that if no other Senate committee undertook an inquiry, his Small Business Subcommittee on Monopoly would consider it...
...This new surge of church leadership supporting actions against racial discrimination and poverty holds out the hope that these ancient evils may yet be dealt with decisively in the United States in our time...
...It did this over the last fifteen years by helping close all the democratic options for change...
...Today, the AFL-CIO represents a smaller proportion of the American labor force than at the time of merger in December, 1955...
...It may have been pure coincidence, but these words from the Cardinal's letter strike us as a stunning rebuke to the President: "Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason, self-examination is not disloyalty...
...financial and technical commitments to our southern neighbors...
...Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota has suggested incentives to foreign students to return home after their training is over, combined with possible U.S...
...Some of the challenges which the AFL-CIO should be meeting, and which the UAW contends it is not, include: Tl "The need [for...
...The other dissenting commissioners expressed similar sentiments...
...The need for the labor movement" to become "more deeply involved" in efforts to improve the quality of education for every American child and youth, to provide greater security for the aged, and to establish a system of national health insurance...
...What most of the countries of that part of the world require is a greatly accelerated rate of economic growth, financed, in part, by increased U.S...
...escalation of the war in Vietnam...
...He issued a stern warning to the Southern resistance: "Now after twelve years of snail's pace progress toward school desegregation, the courts are entering a new era...
...It will be extremely difficult to check these losses to the Old World, and the poorer nations elsewhere, because of the powerful attraction that the American standard of living has for foreign students and professional personnel...
...Figures prepared by the U.S...
...It is by so wide a margin that AFL-CIO President George Meany and his AFL-CIO Executive Council misunderstand both Reuther and the true significance of the administrative letter sent by the UAW chiefs to the leaders of 1,500 auto workers' local unions...
...December 20, a five-page single-spaced opinion which raised questions of "possibilities of adverse effects" on competition...
...Office of Education to advance school desegregation under the en-forcement powers of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...
...Even more important, it shows the need for the governments of the United States and Cuba to seek again to open channels of communication so that the press will be able to report the news accurately to the public...
...This time the case involved an Estonian emigre who was persuaded by the CIA, for reasons best known to itself, to ruin the reputation of a fellow emigre by accusing him of being a Communist and an agent for the Soviets...
...The plot succeeded, and the victim brought a slander suit against his accuser...
...Sometimes the lack of freedom at home (Iran and Taiwan are two examples of countries whose students sometimes fail to return for political reasons) is an important factor in the brain drain...
...Reuther and UAW vice presidents Emil Mazey, Pat Greathouse, and Leonard Woodcock, who comprise the international's executive board that signed the letter, asserted that "the most effective way to fight Communism is to make democracy work...
...campuses...
...White supremacists exercised so much control over the pace of school desegregation in the Deep South that overall progress in such states as Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana was barely visible, with integration increasing only five per cent in the case of the best performer, Georgia, in a year...
...Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts has proposed that the United States call an international conference to explore the whole problem of "brain drain" which includes not only students but the siphoning off to America of European scientists, engineers, doctors, and other professional talent...
...there are now some 4,000 Iranian students on U.S...
...In fact, it repels many of them by the reactionary character of its foreign policy positions and its attacks upon those who oppose U.S...
...Clergymen of all faiths have gone South to advance civil rights, to their city halls and state capitals to plead for open housing legislation, and to Congress with appeals for passage of programs to combat racial discrimination and poverty...
...This is far short of encouraging democratic regimes needed to correct the underlying [economic and social] problems...
...Thirty years ago a whole generation of such liberal allies, on campus and off, supported—and often directly engaged in—the organizing efforts of the newly-founded CIO, which produced huge union membership gains...
...The Congressional investigation should explore these charges as well as the highly irregular procedures of the FCC—to say nothing of the substantive question of whether this merger is in the best interests of the country...
...But we are encouraged that Walter Reuther and the UAW now have challenged the closed and conservative corporation which the AFL-CIO has become...
...The President, of course, has the right to disagree with his critics and seek to prove them wrong if he can...
...Enough has been written about the Cardinal's trumpet call to make extended comment here superfluous...
...If George Meany does not wish to become the caretaker of a labor movement suffering even greater declines in national influence in the years to come, he must now open up the AFLCIO to new voices and new ideas before it is too late...
...The Castro government has been very conscientious in that respect...
...Judge Minor Wisdom, with Judge Homer Thornberry assenting, and the notoriously racist Judge Harold Cox dissenting, ordered seven Louisiana and Alabama school systems to desegregate classrooms, facilities, faculties, and staffs by the 1967-68 school year...
...The AFL-CIO lacks the social vision, the dynamic thrust, the crusading spirit that should characterize the progressive, modern labor movement which it can and must be if it is to be equal to the new challenges and the new opportunities of our Twentieth Century technological society...
...Had such a dialogue begun ten years ago," he said, "we might easily have avoided many of the serious problems of the last few years...
...Where Hope Decays On any logical scale of values our Latin American neighbors, and not Vietnam across the vast Pacific, would command triple-A priority among the foreign policy concerns of the United States...
...but this] did not mean that the Church itself was on the oppressor's side...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
