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University Daily Kansan Thursday, April 12, 1962
Ravings From the Right
"I was a scapegoat of an unwritten policy of collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy."
Thus did General Edwin A. Walker explain his Army resignation last November and join the bandwagon of political irresponsibility.
Testifying before the Special Senate Preparedness Subcommittee last week, he attacked the "traitors" who are "selling out" the Constitutional form of government.
He charged there exists in America a "control apparatus" that "will not tolerate militant anti-Communist leadership by a division commander."
BEFORE HIS resignation from the Army in November, Walker was a division commander in Germany. While there, he was officially "admonished" for engaging in partisan political activity in his troop indoctrination program. He is presently a candidate for the governor of Texas on the Democratic ticket.
When Walker made his "control apparatus" charges, he was asked to name the people he thought were traitors and who were ready to let this country go over to the enemies. Walker replied:
"I cannot identify those that are completely in control of the apparatus... I question the following people with respect to our Constitutional system, our sovereignty, our security, our independence:..."
At this point, Walker named Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Walter Rostow, a special
assistant to President Kennedy in the Policy Planning Council in the State Department.
In previous testimony, Walker had criticized President Kennedy, former President Eisenhower, Secretary of Defense McNamara and others.
AT THE END of last week's testimony, Chairman John Stennis of the Senate group called Walker's testimony "quite general in nature without revealing anything specific or definite justifying further inquiry."
The reasoning behind Walker's charges is hard to figure. He possibly is making a move to take over the leadership of the far right, or to strike back at the people who helped him on his way out of the army. His sincerity is probably above reproach, but his overgeneralized accusations, unsupported by pertinent data, put him in the class of the John Birchers.
His charges, and others of the same type, hurt anti-communism rather than aid it. A man who screams "traitor" charges at public officials of unquestionable loyalty will certainly not gain the following of any thinking American, although Walker and others of his type appear to feel differently.
Their efforts constitute a sad commentary on American politics. Their demise depends on the American people looking for responsibility in their government.
From the Magazine Rack
A Union Man on the YAF
(Editor's note: The meeting this article refers to has already taken place, but the content of this article still retains its value.)
A rally of conservatives in Madison Square Garden March 7 is having a hard time. First, General Walker was dropped from the program, at Senator Goldwater's insistence. Then, Senator Dodd sent his regrets. Finally, the brightest star, Moise Tshombe, won't be there because he has been denied a visa; anyway, his presence might have been embarrassing. Only last week, Mr. Tshombe repeated his charge that the United Nations has intervened in Katanga "for the profit of the United States capitalists."
BUT THE absence that interests us most is that of Sal B. Hoffmann, International President of the Upholsterers International Union. When the Young Americans for Freedom, Inc., appealed to him to support their rally, Mr. Hoffmann declined with an explanation worth quoting at length:
"I am certainly interested in the fight for freedom. . . For some 80 years my International Union, and for some 42 years I, as an individual union officer in every type of post, paid and unpaid, have battled for freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from tyranny of arbitrary authority. . . on behalf of the least educated, the lowest paid, the most lowly born of our population, the thousands of industrial workers following my own and my father's trade. For 40 of those years, since their first appearance on the American scene, my Union, like the AFL as a whole, and I, have been notable for our recognition and continuous resistance, both in our Union and public life, and now internationally, to the Communists, who, though they frequently speak to us falsely in the name of various freedoms, are freedom's bitterest foes.
"WHILE SOME of your officers and, presumably, your members also, are too young to have borne any part in this battle against Communism or to even have firsthand experience with this struggle or with fighting off the real article, I have no doubt that your education and advantages in today's America have ensured that you are arrayed with us against these obvious foes of freedom. (But) when I read your program, I find some doubt as to whether your political education has taught you all of the real history of the unfolding of freedom in these United States.
With all of the certainty of youth, you assert the superiority, in accord with the genius of the Constitution, of state power as against federal powers. I seem to remember that a hundred years ago it was state powers which guarded and perpetuated the institution of chattel slavery, and that it was federal power alone that destroyed this institution of complete denial of freedom. And, I also remember that federal power alone was able to wipe off the books of the most vociferous of the states now asserting the sacredness of state power, such infamous laws as the Black Codes, which even in 1865, after four years of costly Civil War, still made it a capital offense to teach a black man to read and write.
"As I read my country's history, every major subsequent advance made since the legal extinction of slavery by federal enactment, and aimed to remove its odious remnants in law and practice, has required the use of federal power.
"As a trades unionist, I certainly know that every major advance in my lifetime, in freedom from want and economic oppression of the people who earn their bread with their daily labor, has been by the exercise of federal power, frequently not only at the expense of, but, as in the case of slavery, over the bitter opposition of state powers.
"BEFORE YOU or most of your members were born, I lived and worked in this country when there was no protection against the arbitrary will of an employer or his foreman, whose power over the economic life of the workmen was so great Chief Justice Taft once declared that the very one of voice, independent of the words used by the master to his workmen, could constitute intimidation. It was federal power superseding state power that ended virtual industrial serfdom in big industry...
"I am certain that your two listed keynote sneakers, Senators Goldwater and Tower, do not understand the whole and indivisible nature of the freedom you assert. I have listened and heard them speak only for that portion of freedom which is useful for the already rich, well born, well educated, powerful and comfortable. . . All of this brings me to inspect your more elderly advisers. At least two of them spent long years forwarding the Communist cause in literature, in teaching and in labor,
while organized elements, like my Union and myself, were fighting that Communist offensive, including their part in it. These are high grade intellects and they are properly welcomed back to freedom's side. But they, in all proper humility, might well refrain from lecturing organized labor in such patronizing tones, as John Dos Passos and Dr. Bella Dodd have unpardonably done, to those who only a few years ago were holding the line against the Communists, while Dos Passos and Dr. Dodd, in Communism's era of much greater domestic strength than now, were passing up the ammunition to our Communist foe.
"CAPTAIN EDDIE Rickenbacker is also on your list. I remember that in the days of the great illusion about Soviet co-belligerency on the part of almost every large section of America, except organized labor, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker came back from a visit to the Soviet Union, with its state-controlled slave trade unions, and publicly praised to the skies the "no-nonsense" treatment of labor in the territory of our "great" Soviet ally as compared with the presumably lily fingered softness to organized labor back here in the USA. I have never heard Mr. Rickenbacker repudiate that wartime nonsense and may be forgiven for doubting if he has ever understood the nature of freedom here, except an anarchic, selfish individual part of it, which is no guide for you and me, any better than he understood what he saw in Soviet Russia in wartime...
"I will not send you money, since the men you sponsor as speakers and their supporters didn't seem to need it the last time I looked. I do send you much more valuable advice, and the cost of time, brain sweat and effort to a boy merely educated in tax-supported Philadelphia public schools and the hard college of the labor movement, is so considerable, that I feel like a very generous man."
Short Ones
(From the Feb. 26, 1962 New Republic)
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him—Voltaire
You know who the critics are?
The men who have failed in literature and art-Benjamin Disraeli
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"WELL, LIKE YOU SAID WHEN YA FLUNKED ME OUT OF SCHOOL! WE CANT ALL BORN WITH A HIGH IQ—I JUST LUCKY I GUESS."
the took world
By Stuart H. Barger
Harrisonville, Mo., senior
THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL, edited by Marshall Cohen, The Modern Library, New York, 1961: 530 pp. $1.95.
This book contains eight selections from the works of John Stuart Mill, covering his ethical, political, and religious philosophy. The selections include essays on Bentham, Coleridge and de Tocqueville, "On Liberty" and "Utilitarianism" in complete texts, and parts of "Considerations on Representative Government," "An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy" and the "Three Essays on Religion."
The introduction contains interesting material and a fresh viewpoint for the student of philosophy, but to the general reader, it is, in Bentham's phrase, "nonsense on stilts." Cohen's selections, however, are excellent. They are among Mill's more famous pieces of writing, and yet they give a complete understanding of the varied facets of Mill's philosophy. An excellent bibliography is included for those who wish to pursue their study further.
THE INTRODUCTION (38 pages) by Marshall Cohen is an incoherent combination of biographical and philosophical comment. Cohen is a learned writer on his subject, but a succinct statement, necessary to a better understanding of Mill, would be more apropos. The clarity and simplicity of Mill's prose, possibly unequaled in philosophical writings, makes many of Cohen's comments on sometimes insignificant points unnecessary.
COHEN REFERS to Mill as the last philosopher of any nationality to cover the whole range of philosophical problems with comparable distinction. His writing provides not only an opportunity for self-examination, but it offers a reflection on many basic principles upon which our society is founded. "On Liberty," for example, is an appeal for the relaxation of the middle class moral pressures which constitute the main threat to freedom in the contemporary democratic society.
In relation to the present world situation, this book arrives at perhaps an appropriate time. Although somewhat plagued by fallacies of logic incurred by the advancement of socio-economical theory, the basic principles discussed still maintain their value today. This book is recommended by the reviewer to those seeking a restatement of the principles of democratic society.
T C
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