THE CRISIS AT HOME

...The study, it seems evident, will take a long time and the costs will prove, as we are always told, prohibitive...

...They don't need a battle plan...

...Its principal provision, the lowering of racial barriers in seventy-five per cent of U.S...

...In his momentous address to the nation on March 31, the President indicated that he wants to pursue the possibilities of peace without being subject to the pressures of a political campaign...

...And perhaps the President could ask them if it isn't a fact that they never had it so good...

...They might reply, "We've always had it bad, but in a way we've had it better...

...Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield reflected dominant sentiment in the do-nothing Congress...

...And so the President's bland assurance that "you never had it so good" turned out to be not so much a crude piece of campaign oratory as an unconscionable betrayal of the stated aims of his Administration...

...But as a program for Government action it has been dismissed, denounced, or damned with faint praise by principal spokesmen of the Administration...

...An exception is Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, who told the National Civil Liberties Clearing House: "The inactionaries—to soften an older phrase a little without actually changing it—have immediately and unequivocally taken their position regarding the Report...

...We heard you talking a few years back about a Great Society for all, and we had hope...

...Lying on his desk—at least we hope it is lying on his desk—is the massive report of his own National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which honestly described the grimness of the ghettos and proposed a modest but meaningful program of Federal remedial action...

...He has complimented the Commission members, observed that they spent a lot of money compiling their report, complained that they failed to take note of his Administration's accomplishments, and directed the agencies of the Government to "study" and "cost out" the recommendations...

...housing over the next three years, represents a significant step forward...

...Secretary of Housing Robert Weaver is saying NO...

...They are against it—united against it...

...I'm not saying you never had it so good," said the President, "but that is a fact, isn't it...

...where children stay home from school because they lack clothes and shoes...

...Perhaps Secretary Cohen could tell the black citizens of that county about bootstraps...

...Johnson was not a candidate at all, and he and his closest associates insisted that the decision not to seek another term had been made many months ago...

...Well, President Johnson is saying NO...

...President Johnson was momentarily moved to act...

...Martin Luther King, Jr., brought only shocking neglect on the part of the Executive and Congress during the past month...

...But its gradual impact will be felt largely by middle-class Negroes...

...Most distressingly, the new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Wilbur J. Cohen, is saying NO...

...He called for "caution" and warned against "impetuous action"—a hundred years after the Civil War...

...The same Department, as Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat, pointed out last month, has virtually ignored a Congressional request for a study of starvation and malnutrition in America...

...Secretary Cohen brings to his post a distinguished record as a principal architect of public welfare legislation...

...As a commercially published paperback book, the report has sold about a million copies and set off a nationwide discussion that is long overdue...

...If the Department ever gets around to that study, it may find the Mississippi county recently described in The New York Times, where fifty-one of every thousand Negro babies die in infancy...

...Johnson is crusading for a tax increase and seems ready to obtain it by making further cuts in domestic welfare programs that have already been drastically curtailed...

...He believes that by condemning white racism the Commission came "dangerously close to a doctrine of group guilt...

...Indicative of the Administration's mood in the domestic crisis was a recent appearance by the President before officers of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO...

...It not only indicts the status quo with unprecedented sharpness, but charges the offense primarily to the 'pillars of society.' And it demands action—massive action—now...

...It has not occurred to him, apparently, that he is equally free to pursue the cause of racial and economic justice—free to crusade, as Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy are, in effect, crusading, for the Great Society he abandoned long ago...

...Vice President Hubert Humphrey is saying NO...

...It may be true that members of the segregationist construction crafts never had it so good...

...But it transpired only a few days later that Mr...

...Instead, Mr...

...His audience broke into lusty cheers and staged a "spontaneous" demonstration complete with placards printed up for the occasion...

...In the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, bootstrap lifting is being encouraged by asking Congress for only a fraction of the school aid funds it has already authorized...

...where those who survive are permanently deformed by malnutrition...

...The facts the President ignored in his exuberant talk to the construction trade unionists are close at hand...

...The House, to be sure, passed the civil rights bill...

...It was a deplorable but understandable political performance...

...But he changed his mind, canceled his appeal to Congress, and talked vaguely of proposals now pending in Congress—proposals which, as The Progressive documented last month, fall far short of the minimum urgent recommendations of the Kerner Commission...

...Doses of demagoguery must be expected from a candidate engaged in a fierce contest, and an incumbent is not likely to denigrate the record of his own Administration...

...There is nothing in the newly enacted law to hold out a pinch of immediate relief or hope for the millions of unemployed or underemployed blacks imprisoned in urban and rural ghettos...

...He has assured committees on both sides of Congress that the housing program urgently advocated by the Commission is impossible to execute...

...The report's solemn warning that the nation is moving toward two warring societies is "only part of the picture, and I do not believe it is the main part," says the Vice President...

...But, although he later altered his stand, he chose, at his first news conference following his appointment to the Cabinet, to attack the Commission for failing to tell the poor how to "lift themselves up by their own bootstraps...

...He announced he would appear before an extraordinary joint session of Congress to propose recommendations "for action—constructive action instead of destructive action— in this hour of national need...

...So all the forces of inaction—or reaction—are united instantly and automatically against it— the forces of false pride and false economy, of bigotry, of ignorance, of egotism, of selfishness, of fear...

...But millions of their fellow citizens have it very bad, and desperately need to have it better soon...

...All who say NO, regardless of their persons, are at once effective allies...