THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Schlesinger and New Left Dear Sirs: Arthur Schlesinger's article, "The New Liberal Coalition," in the April issue has the blind spots and emptiness of his liberalism. "A...
...Who has written tributes to the young idealists now serving prison terms at hard labor rather than participating in genocide...
...You have seen pictures of the burned children...
...But what degree of protest did they raise against the Syngman Rhees, Chiang Kai-sheks, Somozas, and Latin dictators on "our side...
...Supreme Court probably will have ruled all such laws to be unconstitutional...
...The New Deal coalition which "produced the revolutionary changes of the 1930's," he tells us, was composed of "the Democratic Party city machines, the trade unions, the ethnic minorities, the family farmers, and the intellectuals...
...Johnson's Secret Weapon," in your March issue...
...Frank Duino Index, Washington...
...But I did learn in Utah that she is an astute and articulate liberal...
...Government faces many problems in wartime...
...Arlington, Virginia Mind-Body Unity Dear Sirs: I enjoyed Selig Greenberg's article, "Frontiers Beyond Freud," in your March issue...
...You know its possibilities...
...Charles W. Cobb Jr...
...Thanks to Mr...
...That half—or at least its articulate segment—wants nothing to do with anti-Communism...
...Who mentions Bertrand Russell's War Crimes Tribunal...
...Margaret T. Simkin Los Angeles, California Dow Chemical Company Midland, Michigan Gentlemen: We in the Southern California Region of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom are aware that a corporation which accepts contracts from the U.S...
...It is the kind of sharp, interpretive analysis that distinguishes The Progressive from its contemporaries...
...I write as one who was in China as a Methodist missionary for nine months before the coming of the Communists, who kept us there for fifteen months...
...to share affluence and power with the poor without obliterating cultural alternatives...
...America will have a new coalition, but it will not be Schlesinger's vital center...
...The liberals...
...Johnson's Secret Weapon," represent political journalism in the finest tradition of The Progressive...
...noting only isolated "problems," they cannot see that this America can best "advance the welfare of a diverse and suffering humanity" by keeping out of the way...
...There would certainly not have been a CIO without Communist leadership of the key sitdown strikes...
...And the new radical movements are not mere symptoms, but this country's main hope...
...E. L. Farmer Brookline, Massachusetts Dear Sirs: Congratulations to James A. Wechsler and The Progressive for the brilliant analysis under the title, "Mr...
...In view of the widespread snooping, brainwashing, witch hunting, governmental controls over travel and other personal liberties, it seems that reference to "freedom" is "doublethink...
...Now, he says, there are the new issues "of civil rights, of civil liberties, of education, of urban planning, of the state of the arts, and the beauty of the environment...
...Robert V. Apple Ukiah, California Serwer's 'Tangy Dish' Dear Sirs: So Uriah Heep has found a job at last —as reported by Arnold Serwer in his article, "The Two Lyndons," in the April issue...
...Gary E. Miller, M.D...
...According to a story in Newsweek of March 14, 1966, Special Forces officers have reported that victims of the 1000-lb...
...Dickens would be pleased that his protege is still using his unique talents for our bemusement...
...For democrats, radical democrats if you will, the major tasks are not the ones Schlesinger outlines, but these: to restore not just the form but the substance of initiative to ordinary people...
...To read the Communists out of history has become a habit with the former Socialists and Schlesinger-type liberals...
...though it does a remarkable job assuaging middle-class guilt...
...Many question the inequities of the draft, but who questions the barbaric custom of conscripting young men, robotizing them, and sending them like cattle to the slaughterhouse...
...They fail to grasp the consolidation of economic royalists and big government...
...They have seen the older generation vote for the "lesser evil" for two decades, and now we are involved in the third largest external war in our history and close to the brink of a war of international annihilation...
...Several of our members who owned stock in your company have sold it, unwilling to receive a profit from such a product...
...Mrs...
...Perhaps in this brief space it suffices to say that the central differences are not those between unreason and reason, between politics as catharsis and as action, between hysteria and balance...
...Minister Wesley Methodist Church Framingham, Massachusetts Lauds Betty Furness Dear Sirs: I was rather disturbed to see the comment on Betty Furness in "The Word From Washington" in your April issue...
...The Progressive is the only magazine I read from cover to cover...
...Advocates of psycho-physical identity would state that psychological events are physiological events rather than, as Greenberg puts it, that "there is a reciprocal relationship between psychological events and physiological functions...
...Nor could the coalition have functioned smoothly, if at all, if the Communists had not climbed aboard the New Deal to assure relative class peace in the United States...
...Sidney Lens Chicago, Illinois Half Truths and Doublethink Dear Sirs: C. W. Griffin's article-review, "George Orwell's Alarm," in the March issue of The Progressive presents the most terrifying truths I have read recently...
...I thought he was all but forgotten by the present generation— but I guess genius will always have a message as well as a medium...
...He perceptively points to the mind-body problem as the issue which underlies much of the current confusion in psychiatric theory and methodology...
...Although you may disclaim responsibility for the use of napalm, we are sure that you cannot be happy about this product of your factory...
...Todd Gitlin Chicago, Illinois The Schlesinger Liberals Dear Sirs: Reading Arthur Schlesinger's plaintive call for a new liberal coalition in your April issue, I am reminded of Napoleon's dictum that history is a "lie agreed upon...
...firebomb, dropped from fast speeding planes, are "ten civilians for every V.C...
...Sally Bronson Stanford, California Dear Sirs: Thank you for the article in the February issue, "Lyndon Johnson in Trouble," by James A. Wechsler...
...Or Britain's and France's continued colonialism in Asia and Africa...
...We do not think so...
...Free elections" are a choice between two evils promoted by political machines—not always, perhaps, but too often...
...And I may be the only person in the United States who never saw her open a refrigerator door...
...Who was it who sent 22,000 "advisers" to Vietnam...
...The liberal coalition, whatever else it might accomplish, will not root up the causes of the "deep and alarming disquietude" of the young and the poor...
...They were the left cover to the outrages of the cold war—the arms budgets, the building of the hydrogen bomb, the Bay of Pigs (which Schlesinger personally opposed but would not denounce openly,) the invasion of Lebanon and the Congo, the war in Vietnam...
...Milton Mayer Deerfield, Massachusetts Plea to Dow on Napalm Dear Sirs: Mounting horror and deepening concern over the barbarity of the war in Vietnam, which includes the cruel burning of countless children, have led the Southern California Region of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to send the following letter to the Dow Chemical Company...
...Signed) Margaret Williams President, Southern California Region Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Taylor on China Dear Sirs: I have read scores of articles attempting to explain what has been happening in China, but none equals in clarity and perception your magnificent article, "The Death of Maoism," by Charles Taylor...
...The Greek revolution to them was no revolution because it was led by Communists...
...Our civil rights, civil liberties, education, urban planning, and all the rest are jeopardized by a false foreign policy to which the Schlesinger-liberals contributed heavily...
...With amazing myopia, yesterday as today, they see in Communism the cause of our troubles rather than the effect of our refusal to join the revolution of rising expectations...
...I know nothing of her qualifications in the consumer movement...
...Since the truth is terrifying and hideous, The Progressive could be even more constructive if it avoided all "doublethink" doubletalk and called a spade a spade...
...John Kenneth Galbraith Department of Economics Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts Repeal in Maryland Dear Sirs: Your readers will be glad to know that the Maryland legislature has repealed their old anti-miscegenation law...
...You know, only too well, what napalm does to human flesh...
...Half of our population is under twenty-five...
...I know it is not considered respectable these days to refer to the Communists, but what about their role in this old coalition...
...No present-day coalition will bypass the New Left, precisely because it is the New Left and not the liberals which pinpoints the real issues and which has thrown off the terrible virus of anti-Communism...
...He forgets the role he and his type of liberal played in destroying the old coalition...
...Certainly, "the free world" has little relation to truth...
...It was only yesterday, after many of us had been writing our Congressmen and marching in the streets for years...
...In recoiling from Communism the main body of liberalism not only lost most of its previous fervor in fighting imperialism and joined the cold war, but retreated gracelessly in the face of McCarthyism...
...For two decades the liberals have operated on a double standard, mitigating the crimes on our side, exaggerating those on the other side...
...It was one of the few fair and rational treatments on this man that I have seen in a long time...
...Foreign policy was also a central issue twenty-two years ago when World War II ended...
...The Republican death-wish is still a dominant factor in American politics...
...Although he recognizes the "essential unity of mind and body," Greenberg demonstrates throughout his article one of the greatest difficulties in constructing a unitary mind-body hypothesis—the linguistic problem...
...You know too, from American news correspondents in Vietnam, that the majority of its victims are civilians...
...The solution, of course: one postcard to you for both of them and you pay the postage...
...It was then and is now the overriding issue...
...The League hopes and believes that many of your readers, feeling a sense of responsibility for what our country is doing, will want to express their shame and revulsion in a similar, direct fashion...
...It was conservatives like Senator Harry Cain and lawyer Zechariah Chafee who challenged McCarthy, while Paul Douglas remained silent and Hubert Humphrey introduced anti-Communist legislation so horrendous that it made some of the Mc-Carthyists blanch...
...For a historian, Schlesinger shows a strange predilection to amnesia...
...I think the watershed is rather of this simple sort: Do we understand how power is deployed, and do we believe, nonetheless, in self-government...
...And we appeal to you—human beings to human beings—to refuse to produce this inhuman product...
...During the campaign of 1964 my path crossed that of Betty Furness in Utah where she was contributing, very effectively, to the reelection of Senator Frank E. Moss...
...Liberalism is in crisis not only because its coalition fell apart, but because its ideas have proved more bankrupt with each bomb dropped on the Vietnamese...
...to protect the world's people from American power...
...This view of mind and body welded together and interacting with each other is intriguing and meaningful to most people, but cogent arguments have been raised by Herbert Feigl and others for what is truly a unitary view, the identity theory of mind and body...
...And all of our members, as American citizens, feel shame and sorrow that our country has pioneered in a weapon of torture unique in history...
...The new coalition will be made up of those liberals who have broken with the insanities of anti-Communism as well as the young people of the New Left who understand that it has always been a hoax...
...Now we should all redouble our efforts to get similar action from the legislatures of Delaware, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia...
...I don't always agree, but I appreciate the thought-provoking articles...
...It laughs at the Communists for being too moderate...
...The "humane" perspective of Clark Kerr was laid bare with the billy-clubs of Berkeley cops...
...The "original coalition" died, Schlesinger insists, because it achieved its purposes— "partly because of the very success of the New Deal policies...
...The new generation will not be beguiled by such dictums as politics being the "art of the possible...
...Can you then, who make napalm, really avoid responsibility for its use...
...But it is angry with the liberals for having promoted the cold war...
...The enlightened propaganda of counter-insurgency reveals itself in the throttling of revolutionary movements around the world, in the vulgar meddling of Americans where Americans have no business (though plenty of Business...
...The differences between the New Left and Schlesinger's liberalism could occupy many volumes...
...Half truths contribute as much as doublethink to the formation of "1984...
...The legislature of Kentucky will not be in session until next year, and by then the U.S...
...The war on poverty, with some exceptions, simply binds the poor more tightly into the power relationships that underlie their poverty...
...The Schlesinger-liberals endorsed the Truman Doctrine, but never spoke up for the Greek revolution against which it was first promulgated...
...If we do, we take steps to get the necessary resources—economic and intellectual—with (not for) the people now frustrated by powerless-ness...
...Serwer for serving us a tangy dish at a time when we are surfeited by such grim and heavy meals...
...And when was it that some of these same liberals finally found a tepid voice to condemn the war—not in moral or principled terms, but only as a strategical failure...
...to arrange institutions to liberate, not discipline, their clients...
...How vigorously did they attack the CIA when it overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, when it promoted the revolt of the colonels in Sumatra, Indonesia, and when it financed the rightist Phoumi Nosavan in Laos...
...That is all true, up to a point...
...to link intelligence to justice...
...We shall not cease to bear this sense of our responsibility as long as napalm is used on human beings, military or civilian...
...Oscar A. Guinn, Jr...
...Director Harlingen State Adult Mental Health Clinic Harlingen, Texas Wechsler's Sharp Analysis Dear Sirs: James A. Wechsler's February and March articles, "Lyndon Johnson in Trouble" and "Mr...
...And, in addition, foreign policy . . . has now become a central issue in our politics and lives...
...We are urging our members throughout the United States not to buy the products of your company, such as Saran Wrap, Handi-Wrap, Dow Oven Cleaner, Dow Bathroom Cleaner, and Dowpon...
...If we don't, we appoint leaders, hire planners, and solve some problems...
...There is much reason to question the term, "a democratic society," and the standard presentation of our history leaves much to be desired...
...Schlesinger begins with a significant sin of omission...
...The liberals berated the dictators on "the other side...
...The March issue was especially good, and Taylor's article was a special treat, Thomas Logan Brooklyn, New York Dear Sirs: Charles Taylor's "The Death of Maoism" is the best article I have read on China in years...
...However, doublethink or doubletalk is no more destructive to truth than the failure to think or talk, at all, when the subject is extremely delicate...
...A recognition that the world is forever changing" is of course essential, but slippery in the absence of clear ways of judging those changes, measuring them against overriding values...
...Lee Dresh Mesquite, Texas Economical Praise Dear Sirs: I have broken my head trying to figure out how to tell Representative Robert Kastenmeier and Senator Gaylord Nelson, both in The Progressive's home state, I love them for their courageous stand against the war in Vietnam, without having to spend eight cents for postcards instead of four cents...
...A belief that the application of reason to human and social problems can enlarge the dignity and freedom of man" begs the question of the uses of reason...
...The leaders of Schlesinger's coalition, however "free, cool, and brave," have their minds elsewhere...
...The vital center is finished because it not only failed to provide leadership against the cold war but was a major factor in sustaining it...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
