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NEW
YORH, SATURDAY, JUNE 16 1956
VOLUME 182 NUMBER 24
’
T h e Shape
o f ,
Things
’
m st
in
T h e
Nutioh’s
pre-convention Presidential
p
erenceballot printed
on
the back cover of his iss
As indicated , ballots must be mailed before uly 3
be counted. If the ballot is somewhat long, it
is
nev
theless easy to
mark
and the results
should
m w
be
The
Pause
That Refreshes
Along with everycine eke,
we
were in tensely r e l i e d
to learn hat he President’scondition has been pro-
-nounced “most satisfactory’’ and tha t lie will soon
be
able to leave the hospital. Wi th the rest
of
the world,
we join in wishing him an early a nd complete recovery.
All the same, the general reaction to the news of his
m a t recent illness provides another striking evidence
of the potency
of
“the cult of Ike‘” (see page
504)
and
of’
he ruthlessness of those who fbster thecult he
better to exploit it. In remarkable contrast to the way
in which the press handled the
news
of his heart attack
last September, this 1atest.blow o his health was almost
instantly ransformed in toan assurance o good
for-
tune and long life. Almost before the public knew that
the President had undergone surgery, unofficial Wh ite
.House spokesmen were Ieeding he press “private bu t
firm” assurances thathewould ru n again.And the
sponges had hard ly been removed before his medical
‘advisors were telling
us
that he could stand lor reelec-
tionand hat his hfe expectancy ha d actually been
enhanced:
1)
because the operation corrected a condi-
tion thatmight haveendangered his healt h;and
(2)
because it “proved th at his heart is healed and strong.”
This remarkable transformationof the “bad news” of
the ape rati on into the “good news” that all the Presi-
de nt needed to be as fit as a fiddle was to spend two
hours on the operating table was made possible hy the
ardent cooperatlon ol press, ,radio and television. With
each illness of thePresident, Mr.Hagerty becomes,
more skilied in the art
of
reassuring the public. Tru e,
the
press
did quote Dr. Burrill
Crolln
to the effect that
the disease
oi
ileitis recurs in abou t
30
to
35 per
cent
of
the cases, but this statement somehow got lost in the
jolly news that the market had rallied. T h e resohrceful
Mr.
Nagerty “competentandclear”)withan assist
from MaJor e n e r a 1 Leonard Heaton (“cool and clear”)
managed to get the working press
so
absorbed in the
detads
of
the operation-always a fascinating subject-
that the larger Issue of the President’s fitness was for-
gotten.Like the
-good
Dr. White of Boston,
Major
General Heaton is
a
clever man at a press conference;
he ,even managed to soun d less professional in his com-
ments than the reporters did
with
their questions. The
press seemed more interested in ten inches of th6 Pres-
ident’s ntestine han
in
the future of the Presidency.
The events of the
last weekend
‘should
stimulate iu
I
special intet-est.
T h e Awful TrwtL
The troublewithPresiden t Eisenhower’s statem
-at the Natio nal Citizens for Eisenhower rally in Wa
ington-that American prestige
since
the last world
w
”has never been as high as it is this dag,” is not t
i t is false but thatj unfortunately, it is probably tru
W ha t a commentary this
is
on American leadership
view of the low esteem in which we are currently re
garded nearly everywhere in the world. If Americ
prestige is higher today thanat any time since 19
i t
is only because we hale,
to
a degree, ceased rattl
bombs and, half-heartedly, s’tarted to wave the ol
branch, If this is’the ex planation, it shou ld beelativ
easy for us to rise from even our present exalted
po
rion were
we
to
launch
a
dram atic peace offensive.
The Renunciation of Infallibility
T h e reaction
af
the American press to Khrushche
speech has been uniformly banal‘andunimaginative
T h e points most frequently made are these: (1) Khru
ev and his colleagues are using Stalin’s ghost a
scapegoat for their own crimes and misdemeanors;
T h e speech, a typical piece of Soviet trickely design
to throw
u s
off-guard, is not ,to be taken seriously;
AllpatrioticAmericanorganizationsshouldcontinue
to blackball the bounder Khrushchev who has not co
clean and told us why he faded to assassinate Stalin
i f hedid, why he waited
s o
long;
4)
T h e spee
Yproves” that the Soviet regime is
a
brutal dictatorsh
(surprise ) and that poIice torture will often produc
false confessions (surprise ); (5) I n any case, Khru
chev’s indlctme nt of Stalm should no t give rise to ev
an inference that the Soviet regime
has
changed
or th
anything worth noting has happene d there.
T h e Soviet leaders may be blackguards and rasca
bu t they are not fools. They know that there is a lo
in words. They know,
too
that the indictment canno
be rescinded any more than those
who
read it can
told to forget it. T he sweep and vigor
of
the attack c
hard ly fail to shake the convictions of “hard core”
wthodox Communists the world over. Therefore
m w t have k n zmnded.asa piece of major ideologi
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mrgery:
nothing l ss would justify the risks involved.
Wha t the Soviets have renounced is the principle
of
Soviet infallibility in Soviet-satellite relationships an d
in the relationships between the Soviet bloc and Social-
ist states. T h e renunciation wasnecessary no t merely
to pave the way for better, stronger, more durable rela-
tions with he satellite and Socialist nations bu t to
rationalizea policy of coexistence. I t is a dangerous
policy from the Soviet leaders’ p i n t
of
view, because i t
implies some relaxation
of
domestic controls. The ulti-
mate heresy that he leaders
of
any orthodoxy an
commit is
to
renounce, even in a limited fashion and
or a special purpose, the principle of infallibility. But
in this case the gamble is worthwhile, and the conse-
quences,
in
the long run, couldprove tobe revolu-
tionary.
By acting as thoughhe only meaning of
Khrushchev’s speech was that the State Department had
finaIly managed to score apropagandacoup on the
Soviets b y releasing it, we are in danger once again of
bein g left alone at the station as kenin’s locomotive of
iswry
goes
racing toward the future.
On
Shaking
Hands
Now that
the
grotesquely over-billed Floridaand
California primaries are at a n end, the year’s one pre-
convention political debate may be assessed. T h e only
issue o n which the debaters did n ot see eye to eye was
civil rights an d on this issue their differences were more
a matter of rhetoric and emphasis than of-princ iple.
A real clash on civil rights between rival candidates for
the Democratic nomination might, this year, have car-
riedat least an echo of agreathistoricdebate. But
Kefauver-Stevenson, 1956, will hardly rank in the his-
tory texts with Lincoln-Douglas, 1858. T h e only way to
have debated the civil-rights issue would have been for
one of the debaters to take the position that the Dixie-
crats should be ousted from the Democratic Party.
But
since neither was prepared o take this position, the
debates failed to conceal the rivals’ basic agreement on
even the one
issue
that mattered. T h e debate thus be-
came
a
personality contest or, moTe accurately, a grim
contest o see which candidate could shake the most
hands
End
of
a
Dream
Wh en Formosa an d heUnited States wrecked an
eighteen-naticm
U.
N. package-membership deal last
December, providing the
USSR
with an opportunity to
stage a pectacular “rescue ope ratio n” hatbrought
sixteen new nations into the organization, T h e Nutmn
(December 24, 1955) warned th at the Chinese Nation-
alists had endangered their own membership. The in-
flexibility displayed by Taipeiand Washington on
every questionrelated to Chinaand Formosa is now
beginning to bear bitter ruit.
Egypt
has recognized
Peking, and a Cairo paper reports that the Afro-Asian
bloc plans to take
up the m tter of China’s
U.
N. r e p
502
resentation
promptly after the General ssembly meets
in November.
Twenty-six states have now recognized Peking
and Egypt’s action seems to foreshadow recognition
by
other members of th e Arab bloc. T h e world
is
becom-
ing increasingly disaffected
wich
theUS.-Formosa
policy of unqualifiedhostility toward China .Other
thanWash ingtan, only South Korea - continues to
pander to Chiang Rai-shek‘s fading dream of empire.
India and Canada have criticized American si’ege tactics
against China (a iege which i n additionobeing
wrong in principle, is proving ineffective in practice).
London has informed Washington that it was proceed
ing o n its’ow n esponsibility to make exceptions to the
existing restrictions on shipment of strategic goods to
China.
Now Austra lian Prime Ministe r Nlenzies announces
that China and Formosa will be a major topic at the
Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference in Lo nd o
nextmonth. In thebackground
is
the act that he
Afro-Asian nations that me t at Ban dung in Apr il, 195
”with
Indi a and Ceylon
of
the Commonwealth playing
imp ortant roles-unanimously prono unced themselve
in favor
of unzversal
U. N. membership.
T h e indications are that the sands are running out
for the Nationalists in the
U.
N.-and for this country’s
Formosa policy.
Herman Wouk Under Glass
A hearty welcome to Herman Wouk, a distinguished
recruit o he dwindling ranks of non-conformists. I n
presenting his originalmanuscripts,ncluding The
Came
utzny
and
Marlone
Mornzngstar
to he Co
lumbia University Libraries, Mr. Wouk observed tha
the ntellectual n heUnited States
has
always been
the kind of person who goes about “challenging, argu
ing, asking questions, breaking familiar molds,” as i n
the case of Hen ry David Thorea u who “went to live in
the
woods for thirty cents a day, sustaining his life wit
his two bare hands, to make a protest against the
com
placency he saw.” As with Thoreau, so with Wouk. For
as he sees it, Mr. Wouk has been “questioning the un
spoken complacencies” by exhibiting
a
serious concern
with“familiar religious concepts.” It is a bit odd o
think
of
the uph olde rs of religious values and insti tu-
tions as non-conformists in the Thore au tradition
but
the hgg estio n, perhaps, falls under the headin gof wha
Mr. Wouk has elsewhere referred to as “the twist” on
the stereotype. Although it is “still not quite intellectu
ally respectable even to consider
a
relig-lous position ,”
Mr.
Wou k finds that he could “in honesty make his
report” to the late Irwin Edman, who taught him phi
losophy at Columbia, were he alive today:
“I
have tried
to remain unblinded, Irwin, y the fashionable
formula
of the clever ones. I have tried to see life as candidly a
I could.
I
have not conformed so far as I know in my
writing, in my thinking,
or
in
my
living, to the pat
terns o f the hour.”
h NATIQ
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Babies nd International Relations
The mass
of
small new facts published e+ery day
tends to
bury
the few great, key facts on which events
really wheel. One
such,
which France successfully for-
got
for
twenty years, was the exhaustion
of
the Gmnde
A,rm e’sreserves i n 1917 and the fact that no mat ter
who was to
win
the first World
War,
France had lost
it. It finally lost i t officially in 1940. A similar fact about
Russia has now come half-way to the surface: the price
for Stalin’s managemen t i n
1939-45
is given in he
coming classes of sixteen-year-old Russian boys. They
will shortly drop from three and a half million a year
EO under a million in
1960”an
item which may g o
long way towards explaining Russia’s reduction of mil-
itary
personnel.
In this situation, Russia
must
lmk for near and
effective friends, not easily found overnight. Russia has
to remember that
a
strong China, for example, could
become very bad news indeed. Wha t Moscow wants in
t+e Western Pacific
is
a strong navy, not ’ trong land
force; the United States wants just the opposite, and
has
got
it-thanks
to
Rheeand Chiang. Considering
the eat complementary situation, it k perhaps
a
good
time
to reflect tha history has produced greater
ironies than a Russia
suing for
the friendship
of
e
United States.
Federal
~
esponsibility
n
Education
B y
Horace
M.
KaIlen
T H E FREE, tax-supported sp.stem Df public education,
reaching from kindergarten to university and beyond,
is today as absolute
a
part of the American way of life
as our system of government and our elections. No true
and sincere believer in American democracy now doub ts
that
its
growth and improvement depend on the con-
tinuouseducatio n of the American people. T h e
edu-
cation
of
the adult is of kven~ reater importance tha n
the education of youth. In the new atomic age which
we have entered,adequateeducation is the first and
last insurance
of our
continuing m live and
to
grow
as a
free society. More than ever before in history,
knowledge is power while the greatest danger to the
peace a nd freedom of, the world is the monopoly of
this power
by
a privileged few.
This
i s
why there has been, over the years, a steady
if littlenoticed increase of federalcooperationwith
the states in meeting their educational responsibilities.
Th is began with the land-grant colleges. I n 1590 it was
extended b y separate grants:in-aid for the improvement
HORACE M . KALLEN
no t e
educator is author of
T h e Education of Free Men
and
o t hm boc k on OUT
schools.
of
tcder-traininng.
In
914
trainhg
n i t @ c ~ b
home economics were added. In 1917 Congress ma
vocational educa tion a federal concern and, of cou
various departments
of
the government and the Of
of
Education regularly provided information
and
ot
services. Whenhereat depression came, fede
agencies, PWA, WPA.,
NYA,
saved educational a
lishments in various states
from
complete collapse
bui lding nd epairing schools, employing teach
making
possible
the
part-time employment
of
nea
500 000 students of all ranks a nd conditions and e
cating nearly 2,000,800 more American youth throu
the Civilian Conservation Corps.
T he coming of World War I1 further extended
diversified the ederal, share in education. Selec
service found hat 1,000,000 of our youthhad ne
been to school and millions more had never finis
ekmentary
school.
T h e armed farces found functio
illiteracy a nd physical defects that no young Americ
should have suffered from, given proper aid by th
local communities
or
states.
WHY
DID
Ehese communities
fail
their youth? Th
were communitieswith he largest families and
smallest incomes, located in the agricultural Southe
which still by comparison has ittle ndustry and
cities. But
th
wealth
of
the nation concentrates in
cities, and the popu lation goes with hewealth.Our
manufacturing Northeastholds twenty-one times
wealth o t h e Southeast but rears
only
two times
children; an d is rearing proportionateIy fewer child
each year. Our Northeast spends three or four times
much per child for schools and teachers as Qur Sou
yet proportionately the South has spent a higher sha
of
its
income and
gets
far less
for
its money. It han
caps itself, of course, by its un-American raciali
which givesso much houg ht and energy to keep
the Negro down that ittle is left
for
lifting anyb
up . In fact, the whites cannot anywhere grow in wea
and freedom unless the Negroes do.
Other parts of the country also suffer in health a
education because of the centrahzing t r e r
of
the
tional economy. This trend is a condition of ou r p
perity, -bu t has dangerous consequences
for
democra
It
creates differences in educational opportunity wh
penalize health and educatien
in
areas where child
are most numerous. As the record i n the Sou th es
lishes,
t
thereby
turns
free public education
into
force that supports scarcity, caste and privilege.
I n order to safeguard democratic ideals and to k
the democratic process secure, the federal governme
must
willy-nilly either cooperate more and more w
states and ‘localitiesin providing equal educational
portunities an equal terms for. all the children of
the people, or else must replace them. Just as the nat
purportedIy undertakes to treat all our youth equa
in preparing them for war,
so
it must in fact treat
youth equally in preparing them for peace. Only
federalgovernment is in a position to establish
e q u a k y
w h - e t does
not obtain.
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