Notes in the news
Notes in the news Power of the Ballot One of the most encouraging but least noticed trends in the 1970 election was the triumph of a record number of black candidates in many states, North and...
...The sum seems paltry when compared to the massive sums allocated to the arms and space races, but it represents at least a beginning of official awareness that the population bomb must be defused...
...The Embassy has been stonily silent on that point, too...
...The U.S...
...Government has been making a charnel house of much of Vietnam for years...
...For the first time in modern history there will be blacks in the South Carolina and Alabama legislatures...
...The guarantee of liberty, it was held, includes the liberty not to say and teach a pledge in prescribed language that is not true...
...official spokesman in a generation...
...More than a year later, the Pentagon's stockpiles remain intact and the President's pledge stands as another empty exercise in public relations...
...Rules Chairman William M . Colmer of Mississippi explained, mysteriously, that he felt consumer protection would have an inflationary effect on the economy...
...During much of this century, over-heated patriots have seen to it that the pledge is exacted, willingly or otherwise, from as many children and adults as possible and as often as possible...
...The statement added, however, that the United States will persist in its "firm opposition" to any attempt to deprive the Nationalist Chinese regime of its U.N...
...Today and in the future it would be wise for consumer and environmental groups—and their friends in Congress —to keep a watchful eye on IRS...
...A thorough Congressional inquiry into the CBW program is long past due...
...Former Representative Richard D. McCarthy, the New York Democrat who was instrumental in bringing the CBW program to public notice, recently reported that "no steps have been taken to eliminate the vast stockpiles of toxins and agents which cause tularemia, Q fever, anthrax, and Venezuelan encephalitis, and which continue to be stored at Pine Bluff, Arkansas...
...Good News along Sesame St...
...seat...
...She based her objection on the fact that the pledge declares this is a nation "with liberty and justice for all," an ideal that is sought but not, as the pledge proclaims, already achieved...
...the issue was taken to court and a Federal judge ordered her reinstated...
...But Georgia Pacific and other lumber companies were able to deduct, as business expenses, the cost of advertisements promoting their side of the Redwoods controversy...
...The second year's programming of Sesame Street will reach major ethnic groups through such means as teaching English vocabulary to Spanish-speaking children, and once again materials reflecting black life-styles will be included...
...Although later defeated by the Republican nominee, "Young drew support from all segments of the predominantly white Congressional district," VEP reported, "and his campaign held forth the promise of new kinds of electoral alliances in the future for Southern black candidates...
...There was every reason to believe that the consumer protection bill would be overwhelmingly approved when it reached the House floor—but it never did...
...HEW officials heatedly denied the charges, while acknowledging that some "mistakes" may have been made in the haste of setting up the ESAP program...
...He was right, of course...
...Since the triumph of Mao Tse-tung's revolution in 1949, the United States has insisted on pretending that Communist China is a momentary aberration— an error of history to be rectified any day now by the triumphant return to the mainland of our Chinese...
...We know better now...
...It is time for Washington to face the reality that there is only one China, that its government is in Peking, and that it is rightfully entitled to its place in the community of nations...
...Concerned that such repressive action against Luce might be the start of a campaign against all foreign newsmen, the Association of Foreign Correspondents in Saigon protested to the government...
...But as a number of surveys have revealed, many Americans know so little about these magnificent documents in which their liberties are rooted that when they are presented with petitions for approval of the basic principles of the Declaration or the Constitution, the common reaction is one of suspicion and rejection...
...Under Federal law, contributions to a nonprofit organization are tax deductible if the organization devotes "no substantial part of its activities to carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation...
...It hasn't worked out that way...
...Sesame Street reminds us how good television can be when freed of commercial pressures...
...Three years ago the Sierra Club lost its taxexempt status for sponsoring advertisements supporting the Redwoods National Park bill, an IRS ruling that set back many conservation and consumer groups...
...One hundred and five are in Alabama, second in the nation only to Michigan with 110...
...Whatever the appeal of the "two Chinas" approach as a face-saver for American diplomacy, it is equally obnoxious to Mao's government and Chiang's...
...Over the years there have been some partially successful challenges in the lower Federal courts to the requirement by school boards and other governing bodies for compulsory recital of the pledge of allegiance...
...IRS should define and interpret its tax deductibility rulings clearly and equitably so that corporate enterprise and its trade groups are not favored over public interest organizations...
...The Allen version, with his added language in italics, follows: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and dedicate myself to the principle that the republic for which it stands shall be in truth one nation, under God, indivisi- ble, dedicated to [instead of 'with'] liberty and justice for all...
...Even in his dereliction of duty, therefore, Boiling demonstrated the validity of a charge he has often made —that a single member, strategically placed, can thwart the will of the overwhelming majority of Congress...
...These provisions will be of direct benefit to all Americans, regardless of income level or family status, for all have a stake in keeping the population projections from coming true...
...Therefore, she contended, she could not lead her children in the recitation of a "lie...
...We believe that so long as the Nationalist regime maintains its sovereignty on Taiwan, it is entitled—as we believe all governments are entitled— to representation in the United Nations for the island nation it governs...
...No amount of bureaucratic confusion, however, can account for some of the bizarre cases cited in the six organizations' report: f In its application for an ESAP grant, Madison county, Mississippi, described the "sanitation and personal hygiene" of students as its "most pressing problem brought about by courtordered desegregation...
...representation in the name of China...
...It should encompass not only the dangerous stockpiles maintained in the United States, but the scandalous use of defoliants, gases, and other CBW agents against the people and terrain of Vietnam...
...The schools of Berrien County, Georgia, applied for ESAP grants to install electric fans, on grounds that a cooling system "should make students of all races more at ease in the classroom...
...With a minimum of dissent, both houses of Congress passed the nation's first comprehensive family planning measure—and it enjoyed the full support of President Nixon...
...Saigon Strikes Back One of the few Americans who is warmly regarded by the people of South Vietnam is Don Luce, who has spent most of the past twelve years trying to help them...
...Keeping an Eye on IRS In October, the Internal Revenue Service announced it was considering the withdrawal of tax-exempt status from public interest law firms, those gadfly operations that have sprung up across the country to bring suits in the public interest against corporate polluters and other enterprises that overcharge or cheat the consumer or imperil his health...
...In November, the IRS backed away—the result of a storm of protests from Senators Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Walter Mondale of Minnesota and an array of consumer and environmental spokesmen in and out of the Government...
...The U.S...
...As some have said, "I don't go for that Commie junk...
...This means that by the year 2000, or shortly thereafter, there will be more than 300 million Americans...
...The new legislation, a compromise between a more generous Senate version and a more austere House bill, authorizes Federal expenditures of $387 million for family planning over the next three years...
...The 1970 election boosted this to an estimated 800...
...The survey found "widespread misuse of ESAP funds and discrimination against black children...
...Subsidizing Segregation In a special message to Congress last spring, President Nixon proposed an Emergency School Assistance Program (ESAPJ "addressed both to helping overcome the adverse effects of racial isolation and to helping^ attain the positive benefits of integrated education...
...A year's experience with the new program should suffice to persuade Congress of the need for additional funds...
...In Congress, you've just got survival...
...they will now be legislators in thirty-seven states...
...f In the eleven states of the old Confederacy, where black voter registration reached 3.3 million—not nearly so high as it should be but nevertheless more than twice what it was in 1960—there were 370 black candidates for office this November and 110 of them won, the Voter Education Project (VEP) in Atlanta reported...
...Meanwhile, pending the creation of Congressional investigative machinery —and, given the character of Congress these days, there is, of course, a considerable " i f as well as "when" involved— it is not a moment too early to mobilize public opinion to exert pressure for action against both the President and Congress...
...Four Alabama counties will have black sheriffs compared to one previously...
...The school system explained that "for students to accept close association with the opposite race, a very close watch must be kept on the cleanliness of all aspects of the operation of the school...
...ESAP funds, they noted, have gone to "projects which are racist in their conception" or "which will resegregate black students within integrated schools...
...There were ninety-four "clear cases" of pupil segregation, sixty-two "clear cases" of disproportionately black or white faculties, and thirteen "clear cases" of public assistance to private, segregated schools...
...We wish we were four years old again so that we could stay home to watch it...
...We strongly commend the producers and distributors of this splendid program and the Federal and private foundation sources that fund it...
...Congress ought, in fact, to write such principles of equity into the tax law itself...
...It is particularly so in one designed to bring an end to discrimination and promote equality of educational opportunity...
...Negroes sat in the legislatures of twenty-three states...
...The Workshop produced 145 hourlong shows for the first series, carried over 250 stations...
...Then, this past fall, Nguyen Ngoc Huyen, director of the Vietnamese press center, told Luce that his press card will not be renewed...
...Fortunately, there were also signs that public—and governmental—attitudes toward family planning have changed...
...For this and other exposures of the Thieu-Ky regime's cruelty and incompetence, Saigon and the U.S...
...In one of the most significant Dixie campaigns, the Reverend Andrew J. Young won the Democratic nomination for Congress in Atlanta's fifth district to become the first Southern black since 1870 to win a major party nomination for a House seat...
...Office of Education's recently announced grant of $2 million to help pay for a second season of Sesame Street could not have happened to a better program...
...We are talking about the U.S...
...It should be conducted openly, to inform the public about what McCarthy calls "these living horrors...
...The private interests still get the tax breaks and the public interest organizations still live in uneasy apprehension that the IRS may swoop down on them if they are suspected of lobbying...
...Congress heard testimony last year that at least five million women now fall into this category, and their needs surely will not be met by the amount authorized so far...
...McCarthy added: "While Congress is seeking to transfer the major research and development sites to civilian agencies, the Administration evidently sits back quietly, requesting the same amount of funds, stockpiling the same lethal germs, repeating the same vague assurances that the arsenal will be destroyed 'in the near future.5 . . . Meanwhile, funds totaling over $21 million are allocated for biological warfare, to be used in ways that not even most Administration officials know of or understand...
...Luce left Vietnam while a half million U.S...
...The Administration's bad faith in following through on Mr...
...With a step-up in voter education and registration, North as well as South, black voters could add millions to their present nationwide registration of 8,000,000...
...The Luce case is not only an issue involving press freedom, but a symbol of all that is wrong with our policy in Southeast Asia...
...This is especially true with females...
...there are twelve in the new House...
...Only One China One of the more durable fantasies of the Twentieth Century is the illusion, carefully nurtured in Washington these last two decades, that China is governed not from its capital in Peking but from the island of Taiwan...
...House of Representatives...
...Now it is the partner in a plan to expel one of the few Americans who have truly befriended the Vietnamese while doing their utmost to arouse the conscience of the American people over the destruction of Indochina...
...Instead, the House Rules Committee, exercising its life-and-death power over the legislative calendar, killed the bill on a seven-to-seven tie vote...
...She was fired...
...The importance of electing blacks as sheriffs, mayors, coroners, and other local officials cannot be overestimated, particularly in the South, where some whites have used local offices to deprive blacks of their most elementary rights and sometimes of life itself...
...When the results of the latest decennial census were announced last month, they showed an increase of twenty-four million Americans since 1960...
...The Progressive has maintained for many years that America's pretend-itdoesn't- exist policy toward China was a major detriment to the cause of peace and to the effectiveness of the United Nations...
...What they do know because they have recited it as children in the earliest school grades and at scores, if not hundreds, of public meetings and organizational gatherings since, is the pledge of allegiance...
...The prospect of unrestrained population growth was once viewed with equanimity, if not enthusiasm, as a sign of "progress" and "prosperity...
...Nearly half of them won, producing these notable changes: % The last Congress had nine black House members...
...ROBERT W. PACKWOOD, Republican of Oregon rules...
...In any event, the IRS's November reversal, as The New York Times pointed out editorially, "has done nothing to strike a true balance in the tax field between powerful private interests and organizations trying to defend the public interest...
...Commissioner of Education, that he prepare a new version of the pledge...
...Produced by Children's Television Workshop and carried mainly on educational television stations—although some commercial stations do run it—Sesame Street is designed to help preschool children...
...Despite President Nixon's December 10 press conference statement that "we have no plans to change our policy" on the admission of Communist China, Washington seems to be belatedly groping toward a "two Chinas" policy that would recognize both Peking and Taiwan as entitled to U.N...
...Embassy there have done all they could to strike back at Luce in his journalistic endeavors...
...Even now their voting strength is a decisive factor in some cities and states of the North, and is becoming increasingly so in the South...
...Writing of his experiences for The Progressive in February of that year ("The Making of a D o v e " ) , he quoted a Vietnamese friend: "The problem is, the people we want to stay, leave, and the ones we want to leave, stay...
...A comparable measure had been approved in the Senate by the rather comfortable margin of seventy-four votes to four...
...The IRS reversal was a most welcome victory for public opinion, but it will be even more meaningful if it represents merely the first step in a campaign to achieve even-handed tax justice for public and private interests...
...It was designed as a flag, buddy-not as a blindfold" The Milwaukee Journal, editorially commending the Allen version as "no less proud and idealistic" than the original but "acceptably true," asked: "Isn't the flag better honored as a symbol of the nation's ceaseless quest of liberty and justice for all, instead of repeating that there is, in effect, nothing more to be done...
...CBW: Business as Usual On November 25, 1969, under the pressure of growing public and Congressional awareness of—and revulsion against—this nation's stockpile of chemical and bacteriological weapons, President Nixon publicly renounced the use of germ warfare by the United States and ordered the Department of Defense to destroy its massive stores of biological agents...
...it decides this on a case-by-case basis...
...The program, Mr...
...The law makes the IRS the judge of what "substantial" means...
...Any self-respecting legislature would move at once to strip the Rules Committee of its inordinate power over the House—or at least to strip Chairman Colmer of his inordinate power over the Rules Committee...
...The Educational Testing Service reports that among poor children who have been watching it there has been a sharp rise in cognitive skills...
...When the General Assembly opened its China debate November 12, the American representative acknowledged that Communist China is "a reality that cannot be ignored"—perhaps the six most sensible words about China uttered by any U.S...
...But the political road to ending racial and other forms of injustice is a surer, shorter road than any other...
...Embassy...
...majority will scrap the two-thirds rule next fall, and end the exclusion of Communist China...
...In Alabama, Governor George Wallace's home area will be represented by two blacks, Thomas Reed and Fred Gray...
...troops, whom many Vietnamese wanted to leave the country, stayed on...
...One of Luce's many considerable efforts on behalf of the people of Vietnam took place last summer when he led Representatives William Anderson of Tennessee and Augustus Hawkins of California, along with Congressional aide Thomas Harkin, to the tiger cages at Con Son prison (see "The Congressional Jury that Convicted Itself," by Thomas R. Harkin, The Progressive, October 1970...
...In 1917, after three centuries of steady increase, the population of the United States passed 100 million...
...Luce issued a public appeal to the U.S...
...A year ago a Connecticut schoolteacher refused to comply with a school board rule that ordered her to lead her class in daily recitations of the pledge...
...It was the first time the yes votes had outnumbered the noes, and only the requirement of a two-thirds majority—devised by the United States some years ago as a hedge against the admission of China—kept the doors barred to Peking...
...Disorderly House The sorry state of affairs in the House of Representatives, detailed elsewhere in this issue by Erwin Knoll, The Progressive's Washington Editor ("The House Afire," Page 13), was never more aptly illustrated than in the way the House last month disposed of the bill that would have created an independent consumer protection agency in the Federal Government...
...It still might take some action that would threaten the tax deductibility of contributions to public interest law firms...
...In a devastatingly detailed analysis of the initial $75 million phase of the projected $1.5 billion ESAP effort, six major civil rights organizations recently reported that the program is "yet another broken promise by the Federal Government...
...Among the 295 school systems mon- itored by the civil rights groups, only twenty-nine—less than ten per cent— were found to be devoid of practices which would raise questions about their eligibility to participate in the program...
...policy in Indochina, he resigned his post as director of the International Voluntary Services in Vietnam, a private organization considered the prototype of the Peace Corps...
...SEN...
...This forty-oneword oath of fealty, thought up and published by The Youth's Companion magazine in 1892 to stir up patriotic feeling, was made official by Congress in 1948...
...In addition to these individual services, the new legislation provides Fed eral aid for birth control research and establishes a new Office of Population Affairs within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which has in the past been rather timid about venturing into the birth control field...
...Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and other fanciful creatures will be back to delight and teach America's preschoolers...
...In Lowndes county, where there were bitter civil rights struggles during the early 1960s and where, as VEP pointed out, "there was not a single black citizen registered to vote as late as the summer of 1965," a black sheriff was elected this fall...
...Madison county received ESAP funds to hire four female hygienists...
...It is a formula that might have made sense many years ago, but that now constitutes merely a perpetuation of America's illusory policy...
...This constitutes, as the civil rights groups charged, "a fraud upon Congress," which provided ESAP funds for the purposes specified by the President...
...The resulting expose of the brutality inflicted by the Saigon government on the political prisoners at Con Son made headlines around the world...
...It is also another fraud upon the black children whom America has been defrauding for 400 years...
...The six groups—the American Friends Service Committee, the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc., and the Washington Research Project—reached their conclusion after careful study of 295 Southern school districts receiving ESAP assistance...
...In a nation already acutely afflicted by problems of crowding, pollution, and reckless exploitation of natural resources, the projection of a fifty per cent population increase by the end of the century can hardly^ be regarded with complacency...
...Most Americans seemed to agree...
...But more important, he fears that his Vietnamese residence visa will not be renewed when it expires in February...
...f In Troy, Alabama, the school district "complied" with a court desegregation order by renaming its all-black high school, firing the black principal and replacing him with a white, and leaving all the black students there...
...Of course, no pledge, not even an honest one, should be compulsory, and the sooner we abandon such rituals of nationalism the better...
...As we went to press there was no sign that the Embassy would do anything to see that its favored client, the Saigon government, renewed Luce's press credentials...
...If Boiling had not been absent on a Caribbean vacation, his vote in the Rules Committee would have broken the tie and the bill would have reached the House floor for a vote...
...Nixon recently reminded Congress, "the third hundred million persons will be added in roughly a thirty-year period...
...f About 600 blacks previously held elected office in the South...
...In similar fashion, automobile and other trade associations lobby in Washington against pollution control regulations or laws, and the lobbying costs remain deductible for tax purposes as a business expense...
...Combining fantasy with inner city scenes, it has proved to be a remarkably effective teacher, especially of disadvantaged children...
...Such an investigation probably would have been mounted by now, had it not been for the President's announcement in November, 1969...
...There is a strong likelihood that a U.N...
...Look magazine suggested to James Allen, former U.S...
...This is unconscionable in any Federal program," the six organizations declared...
...But we are not talking about a selfrespecting legislature...
...When the U.N...
...He proved an excellent choice...
...Nixon said, would be "concerned not with the long-range, broad-gauge needs of the educational system as a whole, but rather with these special and immediate needs...
...What blacks, often working with whites, accomplished with their votes this fall bears witness to that fact...
...Security Council for the representative of Chiang Kai-shek's senescent government-in-exile...
...For nearly a decade he worked with peasants on the land, teaching them improved agricultural methods...
...Across the nation there were 648 black candidates for local, state, and national offices in the November 3 election...
...Dedication to the achievement of social justice for men everywhere is the highest form of allegiance—allegiance to the human race...
...Luce said loss of his credentials would make his journalistic work more difficult, but not impossible...
...Ironically, the man directly responsible for killing the consumer bill was Representative Richard Boiling, the Missouri Democrat who has campaigned relentlessly for reform of the House's archaic and undemocratic Just Survival • . . "At least in the law of the jungle, you've got survival of the fittest...
...No sane purpose is served, however, by maintaining the fiction that this is the government—or even one of the governments— of China...
...Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal, the New York Democrat who was the principal sponsor of the consumer protection bill, denounced the Rules Committee action as "a desecration of the legislative process...
...Among the absurd manifestations of this peculiar policy has been America's determination to keep Communist China out of the United Nations and to preserve China's permanent seat on the U.N...
...The House bill was reported on July 31 by the Government Operations Committee, which endorsed it thirty-one to four...
...Notes in the news Power of the Ballot One of the most encouraging but least noticed trends in the 1970 election was the triumph of a record number of black candidates in many states, North and South...
...We are witnessing," said John Lewis, executive director of VEP, "particularly with the 1970 elections, the power of the ballot...
...It took only fifty years after that to pass the 200 million mark, and if the present rate of growth continues, as Mr...
...At last, the fantasy seems to be coming unglued...
...After the General Assembly ballots were counted on November 20, an American statement noted: "We will, of course, examine all the implications of this new situation in consultation with our friends and allies...
...Troy received a $28,300 desegregation grant...
...Later he returned to Vietnam as an American journalist...
...The power of the black vote developed through the hard work of voter education and registration by VEP and other organizations lacks the drama as well as the delusional appeal of revolutionary change offered by apostles of violence, black or white...
...Then in 1968, in protest against U.S...
...Finally, even Washington seems to be trying to come to terms with the inevitable...
...ESAP grants, as administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, are not only missing their stated purpose, but in some instances are subsidizing the very evil they were intended to help root out...
...General Assembly voted late in November—for the twentieth time—on the question of seating the Peking government, fifty-one members were in favor, fortynine were opposed, and twenty-five abstained...
...Defusing the Bomb A decade ago, when the population of the United States stood at 180 million, President Eisenhower told his countrymen that their Government had no business getting involved in so controversial a matter as birth control...
...The IRS decided it would resume granting tax deductible status for contributions made to the public interest law firms...
...Nixon's pledge is ample reason for making an inquiry into CBW a high-priority item on the agenda of the new Congress...
...Rewriting the Pledge Our two great charters as a nation are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...
...The new family planning measure will provide funds, first of all, for contraceptive devices, consultations, examinations, and instruction for women who want these services but are now unable to afford them...
Vol. 35 • January 1971 • No. 1
